All posts by markdangerchen

Mark Chen is an independent researcher of gaming culture and spare-time game designer. He is the author of Leet Noobs: The Life and Death of an Expert Player Group in World of Warcraft. Currently, he is looking into experimental and artistic games to promote exploration of moral dilemmas and human nature, researching DIY subcultures of Board Game Geek users, and generally investigating esoteric gaming practices. Mark also holds appointments at Pepperdine University, University of Washington, and University of Ontario Institute of Technology, teaching a variety of online and offline courses on game studies, game design, and games for learning. He earned a PhD in Learning Sciences/Educational Technology from the University of Washington and a BA in Studio Art from Reed College.

Coffee and Comics

Found a great cafe that has a nice comics reading library which are for sale right near campus. Went there with Amit to study… after walking around FOREVER trying to find a place that had an outlet we could use since my laptop battery died. I think I’ll try to go there lots… but a huge problem is there is no restroom! 🙁

Decided to skip…

The logistics of getting to campus and then walking to the off-campus location of my next meeting WITH food seemed like too much a pain. Also, of course, I just woke up and by the time I got there, I’d have to leave in 30 min.

I don’t fit in sometimes…

A couple of guys from MS are coming as guests to a GaSworks meeting. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t really feel comfortable in the GaSworks group. The problem is that my view of the world is very different than theirs. I feel like there’s no room for me there. And even if they say my opinions are valued, what does that give me? Are they really valued? Truly? All I usually get are blank stares. I don’t think there’s comprehension. (This whole thing reeks of the general feelings some minorities in our college feel, and the futility of trying to explain what that feeling is…)

That along with the fact that I have a conflicting overlapping meeting on the same day led me to tell the organizer that I couldn’t make it. She’s good at guilt-tripping though and cajoled me into going for the first bit of the meeting at least. Is it just me or is it crazy to expect gamers to meet at 8:30 in the morning? (Something about gaming culture vs. engineering culture maybe can go here… which is pretty much the problem.. that they are so focused on creating educational systems. I’m just not convinced they can speak to gamers instead of just emulating game-like things… similar analogy here between ethnography and mimicking ethnographic methods?) But maybe the guys at MS who are coming DO get where I’m coming from, so I should probably go.

Part of my reluctance is the other meeting I have is the last one for the TEP TAs this year which is basically the last time I will see a lot of new friends I made this year.

On top of that, it is off-campus. You know the concept of “white privilege?” Well, in the US, an analogy could probably be made to “car privilege.” I’ve also stated before that to get ahead in academia requires a good amount of money so you can attend conferences. It is soooo against introverts and the disabled. And the poor… which unfortunately in the US also means ethnic minorities and women. but now I’m just rambling.

Funny!

Forwarded to me earlier today… a very funny video!

NSFW.  <- Not safe for work. 

Games for Change Conference. June 27th and 28th, 2006. New York, NY

Games for Change Conference. June 27th and 28th, 2006. New York, NY

Wow.. I wish I had money.

I feel dirty…

I just shotgunned friend requests on myspace to a bunch of people in COE… Some of them prob have no idea who the request is from.

Game Research

Game Research

Ok… gotta check this out later… running off to a party right now 😛

Anyway, Jonas Smith, who I met at DIGRA 2005 has a cool blog (linked to in my blogroll Distant Sound of Trumpets) and I saw that he’s revamping a CMS site for games research. Cool.

Dr. Mike’s Blog » Blog Archive » FAQ for Uploading a Picture to Your WP.com Space and Adding it to a Post

Dr. Mike’s Blog » Blog Archive » FAQ for Uploading a Picture to Your WP.com Space and Adding it to a Post

Handy…

miasma

yep… miasma

I’ve been staring at the same Word document for 4 days now with little inspiration to write… bleh.

David Silver again!?

Wow, I gotta say… the bus definitely has its moments. Today, David Silver and I happened to meet up on the bus again! this time on the way home.

Here’s something cool. My initial inclination was to say that the conversation was one-sided, in that all we seemed to talk about was my current research, but you know what? David is a terrific person to talk to and bounce ideas off of… Normally when I find myself talking about what I’m doing, I’m doing most of the talking, but this time there was so much back and forth with David continually pressing me to clarify… it was great! So, we did sort of just talk about my research but the dialog was so very organic that it didn’t feel one-sided.
Anyway, I just also have to say that it is totally awesome to talk to someone who actually finds what you do interesting. How validating!