Category Archives: Academia

IAmA This guy who did his PhD on WoW

I did an AMA on Reddit about my WoW dissertation after someone found it and posted a thread about it back in 2011, but apparently I never archived it, so here you go:

IAmA This Guy who did his PhD on World of Warcraft

(the best comment: “Do you find it odd that you are still a virgin?”)

and the original thread that found my dissertation defense videos on YouTube:

This Guy did his Ph.D. dissertation on The World of Warcraft

A statement on games and expert gaming, the tl;dr version

  • games are systems of constraints and particular goals
  • play is exploration of these systems
  • expert play is pushing at the boundaries of these systems
  • gaming is engaging in play within a larger sociocultural context of gaming culture
    • i.e., building social and cultural capital while engaging in legitimate gaming practice and participating in affinity groups
  • expert gaming is doing this well
    • i.e., it’s much more than just interacting with a game

Gee, Stevens, et al. basically said the same things at GLS conferences. Gaming takes place in *context.* Research and design should account (if not focus) on that context. It can matter more than the actual game in the story of learning and activity.

Extending the statement on games, I’ve more recently added that the true responsibility of educators in the games for learning space is to help players cultivate a gaming attitude to everyday life. Since being an expert player is pushing at the boundaries of a system, and since the world is basically made up of interrelated systems, why couldn’t game play be extended to life play? This is sort of what McGonigal is pushing at, but I think the difference I’m thinking of is in scope. She’s interested in huge global problems. I want people to be critical in all aspects of their lives, but I prob focus more on the local.

A statement on games and expert gaming

I wrote this with Theresa Horstman a while ago when we were launching AGILE (Advancing Games in Innovative Learning Environments) at UW. Sadly, we didn’t really do anything with AGILE, but I thought this statement should be salvaged.

First, some definitions:

  • Games are systems of rules/constraints that present players with goals that can best be accomplished by exploring and pushing at the limits of these rules/constraints.
    • IE. Games can be understood through systems thinking with a focus on the interrelatedness of objects rather than a focus on the objects themselves.
    • The exploration is interactional, associational, and emergent; it is not static nor inert.
    • Game experience is open to player interpretation and influenced by out-of-game context.
    • It’s self directed (and self-discovered) and problem based.
    • Exploring the associations in the system is our definition of “play.”
  • Encouraging players to push at these rules necessarily also encourages subversion and destabilization.
    • This decenters power, challenging top-down approaches to leveraging games (i.e., many gamification models).
    • Pushing at the bounds of a system is our definition of “expert play.”
  • There is little distinction between the make-believe of games and the projected identity or role taking people do in their everyday lives in settings where they imagine a future possibility. (cf. Gee, McGonigal, Sutton-Smith)
    • This realization allows us to merge pretend problems and pretend identities with authentic problems and identities and move onto the question of “so how does that affect how we design learning experiences/environments?”
  • Yes, everything is a game. More precisely, every domain/discourse can be thought of as a game world.
    • This includes both what Jim Gee calls the little g game and the big G Game (akin to Gee’s little d discourse and big D Discourse).
      • Little g: A particular domain/game has its set of rules or grammar about how objects in that domain interact with each other. Think of this as content.
      • Big G: Domains/Games also exist within a community of (literacy) practices that govern how to be within that domain. Think of this as setting, context, or ecology.
  • Participating in this broader view of games discourse is our definition of “gaming” or “gaming practice.”
    • Therefore, “expert gaming” is not just mastery of game content but also the ability to participate authentically and the possession of well-above average social and cultural capital in the broader discourse.
  • The practice within this broader discourse can be thought of as a mangle.
    • As with any culture or community of practice, what determines capital production changes over time and is in constant tension.
    • Different parties in the actor-network are constantly renegotiating what it means to “game” and the division of labor within the landscape of gaming.

And that’s the end of that chapter….

Yesterday was my last day at UW as a postdoc with the LIFE Center, the Institute for Science and Math Education, and the Center for Game Science.

I’ve decided to pursue a few research projects that I think would best be done while not distracted by a day job.

Namely, I’ll be reviewing an ass-ton of free game making tools, while also playing around with game interface design and some simple game design in the process. I’ve gathered a list of over 2 dozen free tools out there covering all sorts of game genres: adventure games, RPGs, platformers, interactive fiction, etc. My hope is to 1) get back into game design, practice art, try out some ideas, 2) produce a document/series of blog posts that is useful to a k16 educator who wants to incorporate game design into their existing courses (whether that’s English, social studies, math, or whatever) but doesn’t know which tool is appropriate for their needs, and 3) get ready to teach a course on game design in the spring at Pepperdine. What’s great about this teaching gig is that it’s primarily an online course (with face-to-face meetings bookendings), so I can stay in Seattle.

Anyway, I’m also hoping to play a ton of games, as I’ve accrued quite a backlog over the last few years. Look at my Steam profile. Most of those games I haven’t played yet.

First up: the remake/sequel to X-COM, named… XCOM!

Yes, that X-COM. The game that I used to wake up at 5 in the morning some days to play before classes while a senior at Reed College. The game that I used to stay up til the wee hours for. It was the only time in my life when I could be totally fine with 5 hours of sleep per night for weeks. The game that started my love affair with the turn-based squad-based tactics genre (Jagged Alliance capturing my heart in later years). What’s funny is that at the time, I felt like nobody knew what I was talking about when I described these games. I always wondered why the creators of the original X-COM moved onto smallish projects, thinking they were underdogs, not capturing people’s attention. (Anyone remember that email tactics game?) And now, sort of out of the blue, X-COM is getting a massive, big budget remake. Looking forward to it. I hope Julian Gollop is getting props.

Games Learning Society brief recap

The Games Learning Society conference (June 13-15, 2012, Madison) was great. Last year after AERA and GLS, I was really concerned about in-game assessment and badgification. It seems I wasn’t the only one, as this year’s three keynotes (Colleen Macklin, Reed Stevens, and Sebastian Deterding) all made arguments for considering gameplay as occurring within a larger social space and that deeper level meaning can be derived in the local interactions of all the objects within that space, implicitly or explicitly stating that assessments need to extend beyond the game-player model and that gamification needs to recognize meaningful mechanics and relationships rather than just surface level features of games’ reward system.

Played a hella fun game of Sabine Harrer’s Kyoto. “We killed 75% of all the animals on the planet!” “Yeah, but it was the scary animals, so it’s okay.”

Moses Wolfenstein did an excellent Well Suffered session with Super Meat Boy.

A bunch of heavy hitters in games studies gave their positions on the magic circle (Eric Zimmerman, Jesper Juul, Thomas Malaby, Erica Halverson, Crystle Martin, David Simkins, and Kylie Peppler, moderated by Moses).

Scott Nicholson gave a great math summary of the problem of most gamification:

game = structure + goals + play

game – play = structure + goals = gamification

Also, I learned that I met Adam Ingram-Goble in 2005 when he visited a class taught by John Bransford at UW that I was a student in! Wow!

Finally, I should probably mention that the cover illustration I did for my new book was one of the pieces in the GLS art exhibit! 🙂

A few years ago, I used to blog summaries after each day, but more recently I’ve been satisfied with other people’s coverage and just participating in the twitter stream. But anyway, here’s some good resources:

Next year, I hear they’re going to have catering provide actual chocolate-covered broccoli! And each one will have a fluorescent dye in it that will help us assess how many we’ve eaten.

evolution of a CV

So, I spent almost the whole of last weekend working on a new version of my CV in prep for the Digital Media job in the school of education at Madison that’s due at the end of this week. I figured, for a digital media position, I really should finally act on this desire to do something different, inspired by a couple of years of seeing really cool visualized resumes and such. For example, here’re my visualize.me and my What About Me? results:

     

For the CV, I’ve been told that search committees are interested in productivity over time, so I thought that a nice timeline would clearly show my rate of producing academic writing. Initially, I played around with an actual timeline with boxes highlighting different works. Here’s a first draft:

Continue reading evolution of a CV

March 2012 update

Wow, a lot has happened in a month.

Finished replaying Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords: How Many Subtitles Can We Add. I played TSL with the Restored Content Mod (1.7), and, because of it, the game was amazingly good–better than the first one, even. I played these to remind myself of the references that I’d been seeing in Star Wars: The Old Republic back in Dec/Jan, but since finishing those two games, I haven’t really had much time to hop back into SWtOR.

Instead, I went to the Digital Media and Learning conference, March 1-3 in San Francisco. It was good, but the most progressive and interesting stuff came from panel talks and hallway conversations, imho, not the keynote or plenary sessions. I think this has to do with who I am, as the main events were a lot of proselytizing to teachers and policy makers. While the conference was happening, I started a Google doc to take DML 2012 collaborative notes (like the previous two years and at other conferences I attend). This year, we got some pretty good coverage (thanks to Cathy Tran and Kat Schenke).

Hung out in San Francisco *during* Game Developers Conference, March 5-9, and, as luck would have it, someone gave me their pass on Wednesday since they were leaving early. I totally squandered it and mainly went to the expo, but I did see a really great talk by Rich Lemarchand. The energy at GDC put DML to shame, and surprisingly, the innovative game play and talks that I did go to I felt were better and more substantial than those at DML. Too bad, it costs 17 times more to go to GDC than DML.

Was introduced to Draw Something, the mobile game where you and a friend guess what each other are drawing, kind of like Pictionary. I love how it’s encouraging a lot of people who don’t normally “do art” draw and be creative. It’s pretty much taken over as my idle activity of choice, leaving my twitter feed languishing.

Played Mass Effect 3, March 11-18. (Massive) spoiler warning!!!

 

 

Spoilerz aheadz!

 

 

There’s a bit of controversy over the ending. I thought the ending took away player agency in a way that was dissatisfactory, not letting me make choices that I thought Commander Shepard would make. (The most awesome rewrite of the ending is, by contrast, very satisfactory, and I’ll pretend that’s how it ended.) The synthesis ending is completely bizarrely space magic. And when I think about the whole game, I am a little disappointed that so much of if felt like I was just hitting a button to continue to watch the cutscenes play out. In many cases, there wasn’t really a choice to make, and most of the cutscenes felt like Bioware was just dotting Is and crossing Ts, methodically tying up loose ends from the previous two games.

These activities and events have basically prevented me from attending to my inbox, and it will take me a while to go through everything I marked with a star to check out later.

 

Want a copy of my book?

Leet Noobs can be found on Amazon and Barnes&Noble, but I have an extra and am offering it to someone who can’t afford it but really wants to read it in return for a review.

John Carter McKnight reviewed it already on his blog, btw. It’s glowing! And kind of amazing how he can distill some things that I I should have made more explicit. AND amazing how well he can interleave reflections on his own work into the review.

Leet Noobs: a new book for a new year!

Two weeks ago, my book came out on Amazon!

Leet Noobs: The Life and Death of an Expert Player Group in World of Warcraft

Leet Noobs cover

Continue reading Leet Noobs: a new book for a new year!

Some video interviews of DML Summer Institute 2011 scholars

[Edit Nov 23, 2011, 11:02am] Looks like these were uploaded yesterday, so hopefully the rest (6 more) will be added soonish. 🙂

incl. me!

Continue reading Some video interviews of DML Summer Institute 2011 scholars