I wrote a book review of T. L. Taylor‘s Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture a few weeks ago for the Resource Center for Cybercultural Studies run by David Silver. He and I have been emailing drafts to each other and the final version is slated to be published in January!
Basically, Taylor looks at players of EverQuest and makes the case that gaming culture is complex and emergent and not so easily separated from off-screen culture.
A guildie and I went to the monthly boardgame fest a WotC person and a former WotC person run out of their house last Sunday. A guy named Phil (who works at Paizo) brought a bunch of German games he bought from Essen 2006. So we got to play some new games!
Nacht der Magier – a neat push pieces around an elevated game board to get somewhere while others are pushing against you on their turns game…
Los Mampfos – a memory based donkey pooping game. yep. I’m not sure how long the novelty would last and I don’t really like memory games much…
Haste Bock – a fun sheep herding game with some crazy antics. The German version is played on a grid rather than just on a table like the American version… I think I wouldn’t like the free-form version. Anyway, each players has a deck of cards with moves they can do each turn, and they all compete for placement of their two sheep within the herd of sheep. Good game with some strategy.
Quelf – a zany game with loose resemblance to Cranium, only each player takes control of a specific character (like Mr. Lugnut or Super Ninja Monkey) and the questions are often trick questions and the things you have to perform are often totally off-the-wall. This is a great game and could be really fun with “normal” folk but would require a level of comfortableness with the other players and a willingness to do stuff. For example, one stunt requires you to play leap-frog with an opponent, which would be kinda awkward (as it was) with strangers who you don’t know how out-going they are…
also played:
Acquire – played the old 1971 version. It was good and bad. There was a lot of down-time between turns since we had 6 players. I think it would be best with about 4 players. An abstract game representing company take-overs and purchasing and selling of stock in those companies.
Universalis – a story-telling game. Unfortunately, it was presented to me as a game where we make up the rules of the game… That really isn’t the case as there are no game-mechanics or game-design elements to this game… It really is about sitting around a table and telling a story like Once Upon a Time but instead of playing cards to introduce story elements, you have to purchase the elements with tokens from a preset number that each player starts with. I’m not much a fan of story-telling games.
Last night I was surfing the web (mostly Letstalk.com) for a new cell phone plan since ours is due to expire in Dec. I’ve been thinking of getting a plan that features more web browsing or Java apps than our current one (and of course new phones to go with). This is mostly due to the fact that I’ve switched everything over to gmail, google calendar, google everything… and I saw a week or so ago that gmail now has a mobile phone app one could download so long as they have a supported phone and carrier…
Anyway…. been looking at Verizon and the Motorola Q and the Motorola Krzr. Only problem is that Verizon isn’t supported by google’s gmail app! But I would still be able to just browse to the simplified version thru the web… So, if I wanted the app to work, I think I would stick with our current Cingular plan but add data features and get a new phone… not sure which phone to get though. And, of course, not even sure I would use the features THAT much since I’ll be getting Opera for my DS Lite in Jan and will be able to get my google stuff anywhere there’s wifi.
But back to why I posted… ironically, maybe subconsciously, I lost my phone on the bus this morning. Realized it while I was walking through Red Square and then ran across campus to a later bus stop for the 44 and caught up with it, and, lo an behold, the driver gave me my phone after playing 20 questions. Whew! I still have 2 months on this sucker!
WOW guild banned – PC News at GameSpot
TL Taylor talks about how high-end guilds tend to encourage pushing the boundaries of game mechanics to learn to play the game most efficiently in EQ. This story about how a WoW guild was banned for implementing a cheat to get to AQ40’s end boss by skipping the rest of the instance’s content reminds me that for a lot of players the end-game really is about the loot. But the players’ practice emerged out of a response to what could be argued as excessively overbearing, time-consuming trash mobs. The particular guild had the instance on farm status already, but just wanted to skip to the only boss that actually dropped anything useful for them. Not sure how I feel about this but I completely understand the desire to fight the MMOG grind/time-sink. Maybe if WoW went away from the subscription model? Maybe if the trash’s loot table had a bit of randomness to it? I dunno…
The revised version of my paper Communication, Coordination, and Camaraderie in World of Warcraft was what I used for my Research and Inquiry paper and presentation. Woot! I left up my old draft on this blog so people can compare the two if they feel so inclined… make the process transparent and all… yeah.
So, the process to get a PhD here in the College of Ed at UW follows a bunch of steps. They say these steps are in the student manual, but the manual was vague as to a timeline… It was rewritten over the summer but I haven’t looked at it yet…
But anyway, here’s the deal for all you newbies! (may want to see the various forms you can download and the student manual…)
http://shadowdane.shackspace.com/cats.htm
Check out this game!
See, this is why I haven’t looked too closely at web games. Who has time??
I’m not going to write much about it here, as I’m still trying to digest what happened, but let’s just say that over the summer the raid group I was a part of imploded in a huge drama fest. Additionally, on several occassions, talk between Harsh Winter officers and elders became heated. These two cases make an interesting comparison, where how the drama from one was handled eventually led to its demise while the other is still alive… though hardly satisfactory to some of the affected parties. Okay, this post is vague…. sorry. I’ll post more about it after all the crap for school is over. For now, there is a good read on guild trust and goals over at Terra Nova.
So, I haven’t been posting much lately. I’ve been really busy with the start of the school year because I procrastinated all summer on writing a book review (for T. L. Taylor’s Play Between Worlds which is a very good read, btw) and revising my paper on my World of Warcraft raid’s practices in Molten Core in time for a presentation I am doing as one of the sessions in a mini-conference of presentations that a ton of other College of Ed PhD students are also a part of on Oct 27. We have to do this to progress to PhD candidacy which lets us take our general exams and work on our dissertations.
The more I think about it, the more I think I should write more about navigating academia. But damn, it is just so tiring…