Constance is in Wired! 🙂
Games Without Frontiers: How Videogames Blind Us With Science
Category Archives: Academia
Update
I sent off the revised Witcher review plus a draft of a Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword review off to e-Learning yesterday, and just now I posted the French version of Dangerous Decibels for review… If you want to check it out, go for it, but keep in mind it still needs to be reviewed by the peeps who did the translation. 🙂
Back in Seattle. Can’t blog. Writing papers.
So, I got back to Seattle (on the 12th) after my brother and Nancy’s wedding celebration in Berkeley (on the 10th), capping the end of a month-long trip to the Bay Area for me and a short weekend trip for Robin.
I have an ass-ton of stuff to post here but I haven’t due to lack of time. I’ll try to keep this short, and I might have to add links and photos later.
1. Last week I was busy learning Illustrator and then using it to make some pretty title graphics for a French translation to the Dangerous Decibels Virtual Exhibit.
2. This past weekend, Robin’s high-school friend Liz and her boyfriend Rob were visiting. They went to a wedding on Saturday while Robin and I did some house chores and caught up on some movie watching.
3. Last night Michele Knobel emailed me comments to The Witcher review I’m working on. Unsurprisingly, I need to beef up the academic literature part. 🙂 She was kind enough to send me ideas with regards to moral development models and such from Kohlberg and Gilligan as well as some other ideas for how to talk about moral education and stuff in my review. Due at end of this week if I want to make the issue deadline. Otherwise it’ll wait til the December issue.
4. I’m also writing a review for Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword for the DS, also for Michele’s e-Learning journal. She sent me a review copy of the game, after all… I suppose I have a moral obligation to write something. :p Seriously though, I think it’ll be a short but good overview of how badly I suck at action games and the various causes of failures in games (poor game ui design, poor player cognitive ability, poor player physical ability, and lack of motivation) and what this means for educators/teachers who are thinking about incorporating games in the classroom. What if not everyone can/will play them?? Due date ditto above.
5. I need to add a bit more in my paper on ethical dilemmas while being a guild leader in WoW that I’m using for the In the Game Workshop in October. Due Sep 1.
6. I have only an outline for another paper that I’m writing about expertise development in World of Warcraft for the new journal Transformative Works and Cultures. I figure a solid week should be enough time to write what I need to. It might suck at first but I think I just need a rough draft at this point. Due Sep 1, also.
Games Learning Society 4.0 webcasts available
This is probably like a week old… but I just checked and the videos of the various presentations are up.
Two very good ones to check out are Jullian Dibbel’s presentation on griefers and their benefits to society and Lisa Nakamura’s talk on how race-but-not-race matters with our hate on gold farmers.
Check out all the videos at http://hosted.mediasite.com/hosted4/Catalog/?cid=b8aa7b8a-fac1-4e7b-80cb-9551d26a414c
Blogs that covered Games Learning Society 4.0 (GLS 2008)
David Gagnon’s blog
I met David while sitting in a session and noticed he was live-blogging. He’s a student at Madison. He showed me the augmented reality game they created for the conference where people can use their phones to do a walking tour of Madison, looking for clues, etc. Unfortunately, by the time I was ready to try it out, it started pouring rain… like really, really pouring rain with thunder and shit. 8o
edurealms.com – Lucas Gillispie
Good coverage of the sessions he went to. I met Lucas (and a ton of others) at the airport on the way out from Madison (I guess I should be thankful that my original flight was canceled). He’s a Dark Age of Camelot veteran and it was cool hearing about his experiences going back to that game after getting burned out with WoW. 🙂
Easily Distracted – Tim Burke
A fellow guildie who I met during the LAN party. Turns out he had to take off early due to a family medical emergency. Everything is good now, thankfully. Go check out his blog. He’s smart.
The Education Business Blog – Lee Wilson
Lee’s cool and plays WoW! 🙂
Also, check out some flickr photos tagged with gls2008
And finally, if you know of others I’ve missed, email me or leave a comment!
GLS 2008 Day 2 Session 4: Leadership and Games
Leadership & Games & Games for School Leadership
Rich Halverson, Moses Wolfenstein, Andy Phelps, Rovy Branon, Rick Blunt
Andy Phelps (though he didn’t look like Andy to me during the presentation–I arrived late and maybe it was a diff guy?) links guild leadership with academic and company leadership.
One interesting thing is he hasn’t seen a belligerent guild leader last more than 2 months.
I got in late, and missed half his talk, which he had to make short since he had to bug out early. 🙁
Rovy works at the Academic Co-Lab in Madison. He described how he had a really brutal guild leader who was able to move the guild through the game very quickly. He knew his stuff but he lacked serious social skills. When a new leader took over, the guild progress went down quite a bit. Finally a balanced guy took over.
Important to get things done but also important to be able to manage people without being a jerk.
The old model of one person making all the decisions and then telling others exactly what they needed to do couldn’t work with WoW. You still need leaders but informally and everyone needs to be sort of a mini-leader. WoW is a great example of small teams breaking off with spontaneous leadership being taken on in a more micro level.
Rick Blunt then talked about a few military sims:
- DARWARS, a PC-based multiplayer training simulator. Take on the role of the convoy lead dealing with an ambush.
- Virtual Battle Simulator 1 and 2
- quick talk about some strategic level games, too
He then compared the PS3 controller (40 inputs) to an F16 joystick and throttle (28 inputs) and how kids can master the controller already. I’d argue that mastering the PS3 controller depends on the game a lot.
Moses talked about school leadership and games. Introduced scales of human interaction.
As an aside, I find it funny that not everyone remembers to put their cell phones on vibrate. 🙂
Anyway, Moses showed us 4 games and linked them to small, medium, large, and massive human-game scale. SimCity is a single-player game. Rock Band is a medium scale in that you can have up to 4 players simultaneously. Then Team Fortress 2 and finally World of Warcraft.
One thing to note with massive games is that you lose a bit of control as a trade-off for scale.
Framework for leaderships:
- Leithwood: setting directions, redesigning org, developing people
- Bolman and Deal: structural, hr, political, and cultural
- Spillane: distributed leadership
You get a lot more mileage out of distributed leadership when looking at games and schools. If we’re trying to figure out what’s happening in games, d-leadership helps more. This ties in really well with the stuff Andy was talking about.
Where does leadership come from?
How can we parse generic and specialized skills?
Can we leverage COTS games for leadership?
Where are we headed?
Rich then talked about games for school leadership some more. Games, cell phones, Facebook, etc. are banned from schools in a lot of cases because there’s such a lack of knowledge about technology with administrators. They view new techs as threats rather than opportunities. What if we make games for existing leaders?
This is stuff along the lines of Virtual U.
Borrowing epistemic frames (from David Shaffer). What are the tasks that matter? Define exactly what activities need to be done rather than have some sort of ethereal view of leadership. Whoever does the tasks are the leaders. Functional definition.
I could probably use this definition to look at my WoW raid groups and track spontaneous or emergent leadership in raids.
Rich then showed us a screenshot of the Teacher Evaluation Game that he and Moses worked on. Unfortunately, they ran out of funding to continue the project.
Then we saw some tips for making games for professional learning. Cut the graphics since you have a captive audience. Make the content compelling instead. Make them authentic. Teach for adaptive expertise and emergent situations.
Design templates so that the specific contents can be tweaked for different settings. Task specific modules. Low-fi. Messy ill-defined solutions.
Semantic Templates fit between too abstract and too concrete.
GLS 2008 Day 2 Session 3: Games & Incivility
Sympathy for the Griefer: MOOrape, Lulz Cubes, & Other Lessons From the First 2 Decades of Online Sociopathy
Jullian Dibbell
Jullian Dibbel gave a warning that his talk about griefers is NSFW. But he did say that he toned it down right before the presentation. “Griefer” goes back to “spoil-sport,” someone who shatters the “magic circle” (AKA the bounded game world), whereas a cheater is someone who is still within the magic circle.
He then described Mr._Bungles in LambdaMOO, moving on to organized griefing in Habbo Hotel, Second Life, etc. that are anti-furry or whatever. Watch his videos when available… really hard to explain by text. LULZ.
There an insanely hyper-developed culture of memes on sites like Something Awful, 4chan, 7chan, and Encyclopedia Dramatica. Embedded in these memes is a kind of ideology which a sociopath doesn’t have, so calling griefers sociopaths is slightly wrong. They do it for the LULZ and to remind us that the Internet is not all serious business.
The magic circle is porous and ever-changing and can’t really be drawn to exclude griefers since they deliberately play with the magic circle.
But are griefers always bad? Actually, they can do some really important work, like go after the Scientologists or generally keep society in check.
Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft
Lisa Nakamura
Lisa (a Reedie!) first played a clip from the WoW South Park episode. In it they denigrate Koreans. Koreans don’t count as people to socialize with. So, WoW is a transnational game but not really a transnational game.
She then described how racial profiling happens in WoW, where players figure out whether other players are Chinese gold farmers from broken English or repetitive killing of mobs.
Lisa then played for us the Ni Hao video.
Holy crap. There is so much stuff in Lisa’s talk. Players are discriminating against others who “act” Chinese, not people who actually are Chinese. Those people are those who haven’t properly assimilated to WoW culture. It’s ironic that selling gold, acting Chinese, is bad, but being American–many, many of whom buy gold–is perfectly fine. (and of course, neo-liberal stances hide behind cultural non-assimilation arguments to say they aren’t racist)
While it is possible to hide your offscreen race while playing WoW, lots of effort goes into outing Chinese farmers.
Avatarial capital. More research needs to be done with avatarial capital. Avatars are much more than a few bytes of data. But most research focuses on leisure players, not farmers who may not value their avatars the same way.
Part of the problem with player-workers is that they are not allowed to possess their own avatars.
If we’re going to argue that MMOs are important; we have to be accountable for the bad stuff, too–the racialization and profiling that can occur (that will occur in any medium).
The Temptation of Virtual Misanthropy: User Exploration in Virtual Environments
Edd Schneider, D. Hu
What if you put someone in GTA 3 and told them that they were a police officer or a medic or something. How long could a player be in the GTA 3 environment (without the idea that they are meant to be bad) before going down the path of evil?
Technical difficulties…. 🙂
Do you let people just play with a new world or do you give them some instruction first?
Edd described a study where they put users in GTA 3 for the first time, calling it a fire fighting game.
They recorded first vehicular homicides, first murders with a hand weapon, etc. How long it took before players started doing these transgressive acts. Whether they actually fought fires, etc.
Awesome graphs. People who read instructions tended to not kill very much, whereas those who don’t read instructions couldn’t go a minute without shooting someone. Men killed more than women, were not on task. Gamers killed more and were also not on task.
Takeaway: know your audience. Allow people the option to follow tutorials.
GLS 2008 Day 2 Session 2: the WoW roundtables!
I was part of the World of Warcraft roundtable session this morning. It went really well, and the paper figures were a hit.
I caught up with Adam Hyland who used to be an engineer and managing engineer on a NAVY boat, and it was really cool hearing about how much parallel he saw with WoW raiding and the way a NAVY boat works. We talked a bit about Hutchins and it was great to hear that the description in Cognition in the Wild is pretty close to Adam’s experiences.
Here’s the info for my session:
World of Warcraft: Modeling the Ladder to Success in the Classroom
Paul Bielema
The Complexity of Dialogues in Interactive Role-Playing Videogames
Ellen Bielema
Leet Noobs: Expert World of Warcraft Players Relearning & Adapting Expertise in New Contexts
Mark Chen
World of Warcraft Lessons Learned & Applied: Models & Professions
Kenneth Hay
Women & “Passing” in Online Games
Shawna Kelly
Finding Governance in Synthetic Worlds
Krista-Lee Malone
“N00b” Rhetorics, Learning, & Identity in Online Gaming
Lee Sherlock
A Topology of Literacy Practices in World of Warcraft
Constance Steinkuehler
Much like I would with a poster session, I lament the fact that we didn’t get to go around and talk to each other. It seems ironic since we would’ve benefited the most. (I just had a quick chat with Lee and Shawna who feel the same way.)
Here’s a photo of my papercraft. 🙂
GLS 2008 Day 2: late start…
I just woke up about 30 min ago and am waiting in my hotel lobby for a shuttle to Monona Terrace. The first session starts right now, so it looks like I’m missing it… Was going to go to the session on ethics and politics:
Moral Economies of Play: Learning and Citizenship in MMO Games
Doug Thomas
Power From the People: How Videogames Foster Participatory Democracy
Lisa Galarneau
Ethics at Play: Youth Perspectives on the Ethical Dimensions of Gaming
Sam Gilbert
Since Lisa’s one of the people, maybe I can just ask her how it went… :/
GLS 2008: Dinner for reals and LAN party!
Okay, turns out we just waited 30 minutes and then all bussed over to Tenney Park. The rain did a pretty number on the park, though, and we were pretty much standing in a watery lawn the whole time.
But it was pretty cool. I talked with Debbie Fields about our respective research. I met someone working on a project for native american youth in Washington. I talked with Shawna Kelly and Lisa Galarneau (ironic 🙂 ) a bit. Met up with Brett Shelton (who was also at ICLS).
Dinner was catered by a local taco place. It was pretty good. The queso was good, as was the fish taco and tamale. I thought the beans and rice tasted funny but it was probably some spice I’m not used to. Seemed middle-eastern a bit, though…
After dinner we wished Kurt Squire a happy birthday with cake!
Then there was a karaoke band but I had to take off on the first bus with a bunch of TrN folk to meet up with Thomas Malaby, and Eric Ellis and Linda Polin (from Pepperdine). They were our rides over to the Union Building (not sure that’s the right url for it) for hella fun LAN raiding. We went to AQ20 and blasted through those bosses like they were queso succumbing to our crunchy tortilla chips.
