This is the job talk I gave for an interview last week at the American Institutes for Research. It only took 6 hours to figure out how to record audio, edit it, upload it, and tweak it… but… now I know how to do it! Hooray, slideshare.net!
Category Archives: Academia
Brief thoughts from GLS
written from my phone during Allan Collins’s keynote…
Don’t just mobilize games. Mobilize gamers.
School reform has had minority voice for at least 100 years or so (Dewey).
What’s new isn’t games for learning / new media for learning / flat system new capitalist (Lankshear) models for learning. What’s new is this huge cultural shift and ppl in academia and k12 who not only take games seriously (and not just serious games) but also are starting to welcome participation from games and fan culture. Participatory culture (Jenkins) allows new kinds of stakeholders. Reform isn’t just griefing (cf Dibbell) anymore.
Games Learning Society 6.0 (GLS2010) and Governance in Games panel
hashtag: #gls2010
flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gls-conference/
So, I’m here at the Games Learning Society conference (probably for the last time as a graduate student). It’s about 4:45 AM on Thursday, and, in an effort to take advantage of my insomnia, I thought I’d write a blog post about the conference so far. I find this kind of odd since earlier in my career as a grad student, I tended to live blog conferences, and, in fact, the last time I was at GLS, I live blogged my experience (gls2008). Over the last two years, that practice has changed from live blogging to blog posts that recap each day (such as my summaries of IR9, IR10, or DML2010) to just using twitter to recap salient ideas. I’ve gotten tired of live blogging, though, I know every time I do, I get emails from people thanking me for it… I blame twitter… Oh, and poor connectivity at certain conferences (ahem, AERA, ahem).
Anyway, I guess all this is to say that I wasn’t planning on blogging at GLS2010 at all. (OMG!) But… well… insomnia.
It’s been great so far, actually. I got here on Tuesday, picked up by Moses Wolfenstein (finishing PhD student at Madison who looks at leadership in WoW guilds/raids and compares it with leadership in educational settings) at the airport and crashing at his place for the week. He’s got a cool housemate Rick Horton who works for Filament Games and really friendly cats named Bertie and Jeeves.
Moses and I met up with Kristine Ask (PhD student at Norwegian University of Science and Technology who does some exciting work on games and STS–note to self, cite her poster in my diss…) and Lee Sherlock (a rhetorician and PhD student at Michigan State) that night (after some meetings in the afternoon since we’re both volunteering for the conference).
Yesterday, after volunteering for the morning shift, I was asked by Constance Steinkuehler to be a discussant for a panel at the last minute since my colleague and friend Lisa Galarneau has taken ill and couldn’t make it out here. 🙁 Later, I found out that Rich Halverson had asked Reed Stevens to be the discussant, too, but, right as Reed entered the room, we cleared it up and he let me do it.
(Just a side note: writing blog post summaries of events, naming people who were part of the events, always makes me think of all the stuff I could write about all these people who I’ve had histories with, since I find the details in academic relationships / genealogy really fascinating. For example, Moses, Lee, and I are all in the same academic guild in WoW, and Reed used to be my advisor when I was a masters student.)
Governance in Games panel
Moses Wolfenstein
People Before Pixels: How Guild Leadership in World of Warcraft Speaks to Educational Leadership
Basically, a condensed version of Moses’s dissertation talk, afaik. There was a lot of rich quotes from guild and raid leaders who he had conducted interviews with. What’s really interesting is that there’s this sort of paradox or duality in what his participants stated as values for their guild vs. how their guilds were structured. Almost every person said that their guilds valued “people over pixels” and yet many of them also stated that they had to be authoritarian or hierarchical in structure.
John Carter McKnight
<The Devils Made Me Do It> – An Experiment in Teaching Collaborative Governance in World of Warcraft
I met John at the State of Play conference last year, and I know his advisor, Alice Daer nee Robison (grats Alice!) from the same WoW aca-guild. (BTW, if you follow John on twitter, you’ll soon discover that he reads *a lot* and the books he chooses to read would be a fine guide for which books you ought to read.)
John talked about a class of law students and grad students starting a guild in WoW together and the lessons learned from that experience, how the two kinds of students had to reconcile their differences and take on a common identity (through things like the “n00b dance” 🙂 ). What I found really interesting is that there needed to be this sort of shared cultural identity, even so far as to invite non-class members into the guild to create an oppositional third party, for the students to all feel like they were collaborating.
Thomas Malaby
How Are We Governed? The Rise of Computer Game Architecture and the Increasing Irrelevance of Rules and Conventions
Thomas is a veteran of the aca-guild that Moses, Lee, Alice, and I are in, BTW. I respect Thomas as a scholar very deeply, but I also recognize that his tanking and melee skillz are totally hardc0re pwnage. 🙂
Anyway, Thomas used really good examples from baseball and, specifically, how baseball fields are architected in such a way as to both constrain and afford certain types of play. The Red Sox, for example, fully take into account the Green Monster of Fenway Park, when valuing right-handed hitters. Game spaces, likewise, are designed such that certain types of play emerge from deep cultural understandings of how those spaces work. (Reed reminded me in a comment to me later that STS ways of thinking about how settings or objects configure users was apropos here. That made me think of TL Taylor when she wrote that we’re not only playing but also being played.) Thomas ended with a challenge of whether it is a human trait to become experts of mechanics, architecture, systems or whether it’s a sociohistorical trend of, for example, post-WW2 Western thought.
In all of these talks, I found the ideas of identity or positioning and cultural capital to be salient. For Moses’s, I thought that there was a duality between the mind (how guild leaders saw themselves as people friendly) vs. the body (how guilds are actually structured). But to get over that duality, the normalizing frame of “we’re not as hardcore as others” obscured the hierarchical nature of their leadership.
One person I talked to afterwards thought that it made sense. The casualness and informality was what guilds strived for, and they achieved it when everyone trusted others to know their stuff. The authoritarian leadership only came into play when necessary when someone broke that trust. That made me think of my “Communication, Coordination, and Camaraderie” paper and how in it I make the argument that trust was supremely important for the raid group I was looking to be able to work well. What I hadn’t written in the paper because it was 3.5 years ago and I hand’t yet keyed in on the idea is that the build up of social and cultural capital or, to put it another way, socialization and enculturation to particular frames and positions within the group was fundamental elements to that trust building.
So, for John’s portion, it is the framing of the joint-task as a collaborative effort and enculturation of classmates to a cohesive identity that allowed them to carry on. For Thomas, I wondered if the emergent practice out of deep understanding of game architecture is how some players display embodied cultural capital, and it’s this display that normalizes gameplay. Thus architecture has a way of indirectly normalizing gameplay. With WoW, addons, collective data, and gearscore are king these days.
SACNAS responds to Arizona immigration law SB1070
Just got the below announcement in my inbox. Good on SACNAS! Arizona is crazy. Luis Moll gave a depressing yet inspirational talk at AERA last week about Arizona: He said that Arizona is a laboratory for oppression, but that it is also a laboratory for resistance.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Judit Camacho, SACNAS Executive Director, (831) 459-0170, ext. 444
Jose Dolores Garcia, PhD, SACNAS President, (831) 459-0170
Kelli Williams, SACNAS Director of Communications, (831) 459-0170, ext. 225SACNAS eliminates Arizona as potential conference location citing likelihood of attendee harassment due to SB1070 immigration law
SANTA CRUZ, CA, May 10, 2010 – In a recent letter to Governor Jan Brewer, SACNAS formally withdrew Phoenix as a potential conference site for its 2012 national conference, stating the new Arizona immigration law virtually guarantees harassment of its conference attendees, most of whom are Hispanic. SACNAS, a national society of scientists advancing Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in science, estimates the total loss in revenue to the local economy at $3 million.
“The leadership of SACNAS strongly believes the immigration law SB1070 will make the state inhospitable to people of color, especially Hispanics,” says society president, Jose Dolores Garcia, PhD. “We have been seriously considering Phoenix as a site for our conference in 2012. However, we feel the passage of this law and the policies of Maricopa County Sheriff Arpaio will lead to racial profiling of our students and faculty.”
Each year, SACNAS holds a major annual national conference bringing together 3,000 student and professional scientists for a four-day meeting. Members of the organization are among the nation’s brightest minds in science and represent over 300 leading research facilities, colleges and universities, government agencies and corporations.
The organization’s executive director, Judit Camacho points out, “We are not only concerned for our Hispanic attendees, but also for the Native American populations we serve. The law’s potential impact on the civil liberties of all Americans cannot be underestimated. Unfortunately, the state has simply become too hostile for the safety and well-being of our members.”
If Arizona’s current punitive immigration law is repealed, SACNAS may again consider Phoenix as a possible future conference site.
SACNAS is a 37-year-old professional society of scientists dedicated to fostering the success of Chicano/Hispanic and Native American scientists-from college students to professionals-in attaining advanced degrees, careers, and positions of leadership. It has been recognized by the National Science Board as the premier organization promoting diversity in science careers and has received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring.
www.sacnas.org
My AERA options…
Some of these are notes to myself about when friends of mine from my college are presenting. The rest are aggregated from:
- Division G
- the Presidential highlights
- MCC: Media, Culture, & Cognition
- EE: Environmental Ed
- DT: Design & Technology
- TACTL: Technology as an Agent of Change for Teaching and Learning
- ARVEL: Applied Research in Virtual Environments for Learning
- OST: Computers and Internet
- LS: Learning Sciences
- Comm: Communications
infrastructures are what’s available, activity systems are the movement of objects in circulation
(this was my final post for a class I’m taking this quarter called Why So Serious?: Video Games as Persuasion, Politics, and Propaganda)
I’ve been reading a bit from infrastructure studies (Hunsinger, 2009) (which I didn’t know was a discipline until just last week) which posits that various cultural attitudes are normalized and made invisible by how our social world is structured. The basic idea is that we operate a certain way–customs, beliefs, values, etc.–because of how those ideas are supported by the infrastructures in place that let us do what we do. When people do some sort of activity, they operate in a complex system or network that is made up of a whole bunch of different things in relationship to each other (Latour, 2005). These things are invisible to us such that we live in a sort of hyperreality, a condition of modernity (Baudrillard, 1994) (okay, it’s a little more complicated than that, but pretend hyperreality is part of modernity for bit).
An example is driving where it isn’t just a person and a car, but also the road, the material of the road, the history of engines, the geopolitical forces that allowed certain people to make those engines, the way we’ve agreed on certain rules that constrain how we drive such as stop signs, how we know that speed limit signs might or might not really be the speed limit, *other* drivers, etc. These activity systems are supported by the material and social infrastructure of that particular setting. By being dependent on the infrastructure of the setting, people who have a say in how those infrastructures are set up have political power and can present outsiders with bridges or barriers to their infrastructures. But they aren’t political in the overt sense. Instead the term I’ve been reading is subpolitical (Hunsinger, 2009). Something is subpolitical when it is subtle and hidden and its power isn’t exercised through normal overt political or governed means.
Anyway, this subpolitics-of-infrastructures angle could be used to describe games and how each game is dependent on certain ways of working (game mechanics that make up the game play) and these ways of working, or infrastructures, are rooted in historical genres of games *and* historical societal norms for how our world works. This relates to Galloway’s allegory of control (2006), to me, in that games operate a certain way and by enacting or making the narratives progress, players are embodying those ideological infrastructures. An easy example is Bioshock where the Randian themes of power and super-individualism are highlighted by the way the game is relatively linear yet feels like it is open-ended (and major spoiler: the way in which it’s discovered at the end that the player really wasn’t in control at all).
When you look at social interaction in multiplayer games, the boundary between game and non-game gets dismantled completely. For example, argumentation by various people who play WoW about how loot should be distributed follows certain patterns of behavior that reinforce structural norms of proper behavior such that certain players just aren’t as able to successfully become expert players. Expertise for WoW is determined by certain groups of players (and the game devs) who value specific ways of playing (and arguing) over others.
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that, yes, all games are political, or at least subpolitical, in that they all reflect certain infrastructures that dictate how things work in those settings.
The tricky question, of course, is the one that kept coming up in class. Ok, games are political, but do they successfully convey whatever message was intended? This is kind of blown apart, though, in that many games weren’t intended to be overtly or even subtly political. Yet, the subpolitical nature of game infrastructures (of even overtly political games) means that ultimately they normalize certain ways of being or acting. Game devs operate within the bounds of their infrastructures and produce games reflecting those structures.
What does this mean, though? I mean, many of us came away from the different games having taken different messages from the games. This complicates the idea that a game has *a* message. Subjective interpretation turns the modernity associated with invisible infrastructures into post-modernity.
- Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation.
- Galloway, A. (2006). Gaming: Essays on algorithmic culture.
- Hunsinger, J. (2009). Introducing learning infrastructures: Invisibility, context, and governance. Learning Inquiry, 3(3), 111-114. http://www.springerlink.com/content/61uv3175wt2h6574/
- Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social.
submission to summer institute for the science of socio-technical systems
The Consortium for the Science of Sociotechnical Systems is holding their annual summer institute at Skamania Lodge this year. Since I’ve been leaning heavily towards actor-network theory, distributed cognition, and mangle of practice ways of looking at my data, and since it’s so close, I decided to apply. Here’s my research summary I wrote for the application:
Contributions to the Scientific Understandings of Sociotechnical Systems
I research the ecology of gaming and new media (Salen, 2008, Stevens, Satwitcz, & McCarthy, 2008). My dissertation focuses on ethnographic accounts of online gaming practice, documenting expertise development, teamwork, and collaboration in a World of Warcraft player group (Chen, 2009). Using actor-network theory (Latour, 2005) and distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995), this work treats the group as a learning network that successfully enrolled various human and nonhuman resources to thrive in a high-stakes joint-task environment (Taylor, 2009). I find using an analytical lens that recognizes the mangle of gaming (Steinkuehler, 2006, Pickering, 1993) helps to see that distinctions between subject-object or player-game don’t adequately describe in-action learning across settings and time. Rather, a player group’s expertise trajectory is always collaborative and social, always contentious, and always drawing on both micro- and macro-level sociomaterial (Orlikowski, 2007) resources in complex, messy gaming spaces. Analyses of informal learning arrangements using a socio-technical lens are important for science and technology studies, learning sciences, and new media scholars as specific examples of the distributed nature of learning that may lead to a broader conception of everyday practice and learning with new media.
I combine this object-oriented ontology (Bogost, 2009) with other interdisciplinary ways of describing learning arrangements including how people position and are positioned into specific roles and relationships (Holland & Leander, 2004) across timescales (Lemke, 2000) in interdiscursive moments (Silverstein, 2007).
I hope to continue using these ideas to describe learning across all of life’s myriad settings (NRC, 2009). As I am just finishing my dissertation this year, I feel like my options are wide open. Possible future areas of study include continued work in online and offline gaming practices in different player communities to expanded sites of study. For example, one research interest I have is to study software and media piracy networks and the learning and expertise development within those networks.
References
- Bogost, I. (2009). What is object-oriented ontology? Retrieved February 25, 2010, from: http://www.bogost.com/blog/what_is_objectoriented_ontolog.shtml
- Chen, M. (2009). Communication, coordination, and camaraderie in World of Warcraft. Games and Culture, 4(1), 47-73.
- Holland, D., & Leander, K. (2004). Ethnographic studies of positioning and subjectivity: An introduction. Ethos, 32(2), 127–139.
- Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
- Lemke, J. L. (2000). Across the scales of time: Artifacts, activities, and meanings in ecosocial systems. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 7(4), 273-290.
- National Research Council. (2009). Learning science in informal environments: People, places, and pursuits. Committee on Learning Science in Informal Environments. P. Bell, B. Lewenstein, A. W. Shouse, & M. A. Feder (Eds.). Board on Science Education, Center for Education, Division of Behavior and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
- Orlikowski, W. J. (2007). Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work. Organization Studies, 28(9), 1435-1448.
- Pickering, A. (1993). The mangle of practice: Agency and emergence in the sociology of science. American Journal of Sociology, 99(3), 559-589.
- Salen, K. (2008). Toward an ecology of gaming. In The ecology of games: Connecting youth, games, and learning (1–17). USA: The MIT Press.
- Silverstein, M. (2007). Axes of evals: Token versus type interdiscursivity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1), 6-22.
- Steinkuehler, C. A. (2006). The mangle of play. Games and Culture, 1(3), 199-213.
- Stevens, R., Satwicz, T., & McCarthy, L. (2008). In-game, in-room, in-world: Reconnecting video game play to the rest of kids’ lives. In K. Salen (Ed.), The ecology of games: Connecting youth, games, and learning (41-66). USA: The MIT Press.
- Taylor, T. L. (2009). The assemblage of play. Games and Culture, 4(4). 331-339.
Digital Media and Learning Conference resources
DML Conference session abstracts and program:
http://dmlcentral.net/conference/conference-program
Twitter hashtag: #dml2010
The conference’s etherpad (collaborative notes that some of us took–thanks Jeremy!) saved as a PDF:
dml2010 etherpad
Jenny Ryan’s ( (g)rad student at UCSD) dml2010 bookmarks: http://delicious.com/tunabananas/dml2010
Kelly Page’s (marketing prof in the UK and really cool person) blog Case Insights:
http://caseinsights.com/
Sheryl Grant’s (Director of Social Networking for the DML Competition) blog posts at HASTAC:
https://www.hastac.org/users/slgrant
Sara Grimes’s (graduating this year from SFU and co-presenter with me!) blog Gamine Expedition:
http://gamineexpedition.blogspot.com/
Kenneth Lim’s (from LSL, NIE, NTU, where I had that interview a couple of weeks ago, and we didn’t meet up! 🙁 ) blog voyeurism:
http://voyager.blogs.com/voyeurism/
Cassidy Cody’s (PhD student at Northwestern) google doc notes:
http://docs.google.com/View?id=dhs7n727_4cgcpgzfz
Digital Media and Learning Conference, day l33t
We were teh awesome!!!!!1111!!!!
We arranged the chairs haphazardly so that the audience had to sort of figure out where to sit and rearrange their space, but unfortunately, most of them ended up just picking seats that looked the most comfy (since half the seats were plastic fold-ups) and we weren’t smart enough to mix up the location of the types of chairs.
We put up signs demarcating where the magic circle of our presentation began.
The prezi worked pretty well with only a couple of “uh.. how do I get back to that previous bit?” moments, mostly because we forgot to set the pathing right for Moses’s bit. It’s not as pretty as I think it could be but there’s a mangle of collaborative presentation theme to everything we did, so whatever… 🙂
We each introduced ourselves, then I did a 5 min intro of the mangle, followed by 2 minute fire hose presentations (Ben, Moses, me, Sarah, Sara) (and we went over 2 minutes pretty consistently but that was fine since the constraint made us conscious of it so it worked), then a brief summary of common themes, and finally open room discussion that went really, really well. Forgot to add another audience constraint of having anyone who wanted to ask a question have to go through an intermediary but we didn’t need it since the conversation and participation was good. Hillary said that it was because we set the tone well from the get-go as informal and conversational. Lisa Nakamura said it was the most fun session at the conference! wooooot!
The other sessions I went to today were also great. I’ll write about them if I get a chance, but off to go eat dinner right now! Maybe the zoo or seaworld tomorrow!
Digital Media and Learning Conference, day 2
I created a proper backchannel for the conference at todaysmeet, but the site went down after a couple of hours or so. (Not sure exactly when it went down, but Debbie Fields and Moses told me it wasn’t working about two hours after I created the channel.) I tweeted about it being down (since I originally also tweeted about it being up) and @buridan replied that I should check out etherpad. Etherpad is great!
Down at the bottom right is an IM client which works like todaysmeet does. But the main portion of etherpad’s real estate is on the left showing a google doc-like collaborative writing space. Some of us have been using it to take notes and write commentary about the conference sessions.
Since we just published the url openly, we got some random person named “badass” who came in and defaced our pad, but Jeremy cleaned it up. (I kinda wonder if badass is Alice Robison who plans on using a backchannel during her session tomorrow and was asking me about etherpad…)
Go check out the pad if you want to read up on the sessions I went to today.
http://etherpad.com/eSPRnZTy9d
Or just check out this dinner:
After dinner, we met up with Sarah Walter who flew in this evening and Sara Grimes via skype, since she was at her sodo hotel, and went over our presentation that we’re giving tomorrow about the mangle of play.
Here’s our original abstract:
The mangle of play: Game challenges and player workarounds
Participants: Mark Chen (University of Washington), Ben DeVane (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Sara M. Grimes (Simon Fraser University), Sarah E. Walter (Stanford University), Moses Wolfenstein (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
Diverse forms of participation in gaming often manifest as subversive resistance to prescribed forms of play. Recent research highlighting the variety of in and out-of-game practices players employ in negotiating obstacles includes looking at modding and cheating practices (Postigo, 2008, Consalvo, 2007) to knowledge sharing in online forums (Steinkuehler & Duncan, 2008). Gaming, as exemplified by these studies, consists of acts of accommodation and resistance in a complex “mangle of play” (Steinkuehler, 2006), where players appropriate and orchestrate distributed networks of resources to accomplish their gaming goals. In this session, we will describe how particular gamers pushed at or circumvented obstacles imposed by different game spaces. We will discuss how leadership was negotiated in World of Warcraft (WoW), how a particular WoW group enrolled a mod to troubleshoot failures, the experience of newcomers to a stable gaming group in the Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), how young children overcame design limitations in Club Penguin and BarbieGirls, and how players resisted the prescribed and normative play-based activity structures in Civilization III. Following our descriptions will be a whole-room discussion on obstacles and their workarounds to gaming.
We had some crazy ideas about how we could involve the audience tomorrow and/or how we could demonstrate the resistance/accommodation dialectic that Pickering was referring to with his original “mangle of practice” idea. I think tomorrow will be great, but charades presentations would have been even awesomer. 🙂
Also, I’ve been enjoying meeting new people or people I haven’t seen in a while, like Lisa Nakamura who is great, and meeting people who I first met through Facebook and Twitter, such as Hillary @ludditeatheart, Evonne @amoration, Flourish @flourish, and Jenny @tunabananas 🙂