Category Archives: Academia

Academia, Games Research

Internet Researchers 10: Gaming 2

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I presented at 8 this morning (it went well, thanks!). Didn’t take notes in the next panel after mine. Skipped the first afternoon one. Here’s the only one I took notes for. 🙂

Friday 5:00-6:30

Gaming 2

Gran Turismo B.C. and A.D.: The pre-history of racing games
Charlie Breindahl

first driving games 1974! Gran Trak 10
but actually.. 1924! Motor Racing Game (with electric shock)

so, what is a game?
just looking at form, Motor Racing Game is first one, but hardware matters…

Are we in the post-ludology era of game studies?

computerized games move towards simulations such that they can be games for pleasure as well as games for training.

“The voices in my head are idiots” Rethinking Barriers for Female Gamers & the Importance of Online Communities
Tracy Kennedy

a look at GamerChix online forums and personal emails about women console gamers and their experiences, mostly sexual harassment but also some really good community building with other women.
GamerChix supports women to know how to deal with negative experiences.

Alone Together: Mixed-Mode Communication at Computer Gaming Events
Bryan-Mitchell Young

not presenting what he proposed… how ethical is that?
actually presenting on Quake 2 – Quake 4 and cyborgs and LAN parties and players as cyborgs
white male LAN goers resist or push at the idea of cyborgs (from Harraway)

With Friends Like These: Participation and Protest in Six Facebook Games
Elizabeth Losh

politeness is inherently political

fb games are political, need some socialness, and push at politeness norms
they push at politeness norms because of the way fb itself focuses on networks
network proliferation > politeness norms
and like with scrabulous, network proliferation can include using available online resources (nonhuman actors) in addition to proliferation of human actors… its the new norm. it isnt cheating

Academia, Games Research

Internet Researchers 10: Game Communities

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I suppose these notes are more for myself to remember what happened. I may fill in thoughts about each session later once I get back to Seattle…

*A lot* of stuff is happening in the irc backchannel which has sort of supplanted the todaysmeet one. If you want to join and don’t have an irc client, you can go to http://java.freenode.net and join the #aoir-general channel.

Thursday, 3:30-5:30

Video Game Communities panel

Wii are Familii
Shira Chess

a look at Mii creation and how it builds family togetherness
no hands really puts control in hands of players

the way that the Wii is targeted and advertised reifies feminine stereotypes about food is love -> play is love -> play as emotional labor

Wii and Empathii
Amanda Rotondo

Miis are persistent and created by player – these build empathy… also other Miis are in the background and that keeps them in players’ minds.

Covered some theoretical thoughts on empathy and then how the Wii/Mii embodies that.

Could Miis be used to teach empathy? How does self-resembling Miis matter to empathy?

Closing the Door and Opening the Hood on the PS3
Roger Altizer

Sony is marketing the PS3 as the everything box, but because they need control over pirates and other stuff, they’ve actually constrained what the box can do.
They are actually marketing obedient consumption. and it’s actually a corporate computer, not a personal computer.

Opening the XBox
David Bello

Using Racing the Beam chart of Levels of Abstraction and applying it to the Xbox and XBMC Media Center.

Open and Closed Platforms and Emotional Labor
Casey O’Donnell

Why did Bob really want to develop on the GBA and DS?
Homebrew is not the same as modding. Not sanctioned necessarily.

platform irreverent play/work

Homebrewers embody the whole idea of market driving development and the whole idea of generating / embracing game culture. Yet, console manufacturers continue to oppress / suppress / control them.

Academia, Games Research

Internet Researchers 10: Game session 10:30-12:30

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All papers can be found online (though I think some of them aren’t the final versions like the one Sarah and I wrote): http://docs.google.com/View?id=ddzgskkg_33gfjbg39z

I created a backchannel for the conf at http://todaysmeet.com/ir10

twitter tag is #ir10

Thursday, October 8, 2009
10:30-12:30
Games, Industry, and Design

The Online Gaming Industry of South Korea
Peichi Chung

financial crisis examined thru globalization
lit from global media industry, existing theories:
-media imperialism
-national media vs. transnational media

New discussion: creative industry and cultural industry

Existing models that she looked at didn’t account for the Asian context well…
Tried to create a new model that borrows from a state market dynamics model

some background on South Korea
cool map of reach into other Asian countries by SK game companies

see photo for conclusions

Game Design Communities As Critical Spaces for Learning and Literacy
Sean Duncan

How are tools provided and how do communities form?
Move beyond “production” to negotiation, iteration, etc.

coding posts in game forums. Discursive codes, design codes, and content codes.
trying to get at “affinithy space” from Gee

looking specifically at Kongregate today
moving people from players to designers with Kongregate Labs (production tools)

Kongregate Labs forums focused mostly on programming issues, not design problems
novice programmers engaged in contest

affinity spaces need more consideration as commercial spaces. learning shaped by design constraints

Digital Distribution
Ryan Thames

overview of digital distribution and how it is diff than trad distribution

Are Wikipedians Really Gamers?
Brian Keegan – Northwestern

why did Nupedia fail but Wikipedia succeed?
how do existing motivational theories fall short?
can games inform design?

Nupedia was tightly controled: 9 articles after 9 months
Wikipedia: 600 articles in 2 weeks

interesting slide on motivational theories
[how does enlightened self interest fit?]

elaboration on ludic theory and how Nupedia and Wikipedia compare there
and then look at Ludemes and how Nupedia and Wikipedia compare there too.

Design principles:
promote curiosity, support intrinsic motivations, maintain openness, provide feedback, allow safe failure

Academia, Games Research

Discussion on mature games and moral ambiguity/development

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I met Sande Chen, one of the English writers for The Witcher, at this year’s State of Play conference last month. She runs the blog Game Design Aspect of the Month where different industry folks, academics, etc. write about games and features of games, etc.

Anyway, this month is on mature games, and Sande was able to convince me to submit something, which was helped by the post before mine where Nels Anderson wrote about Kohlberg’s stages of moral development.

Given that I wrote about moral ambiguity and mentioned Kohlberg in my review of The Witcher for E-Learning last year, it made sense to bounce off of Nels’ post with a follow-up. 🙂

Academia, Games Research, Life

New York last week

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So I was at the State of Play conference last week, which put me in New York City!

Stayed with cousin Lee-kai on the west side. It was brilliant except that our busy schedules meant that we only actually hung out for like 3 hours total: a game of Race for the Galaxy when I arrived on Tuesday and lunch at Crema with Jafe (friend from high school and husband of Crema owner, Julieta) the next day. Lee-kai and his friends know RftG really, really well and basically kicked my ass even though just the week before I won a game at home. In my defense, I guess, I had some really crappy cards throughout the game and waffled on which specialization I should take. I don’t think that game is about diversifying at all, and I paid for it.

Crema was as fantastic as the last time I was in New York back in April 2008. Mmmmm. Other restaurants I got to try out were Big Nick’s (got a guacamole burger), Penang (got sizzling tofu which was good but had that weird slimy coating that I sometimes see on tofu; what is that stuff? Also, Krista-Lee thinks she got sick on the curry chicken… 🙁 ), Buona Notte (“the best” claimed the street hawkers), the cafe above Fairway on Broadway, Golden Unicorn (full on Chinese banquet, ftw!), and Katz’s (hot pastrami sandwich, yum). Pretty much great food all around.

Katz's pastrami sandwich
Katz's pastrami sandwich



Since I think the conference sessions were summarized pretty well by others (Raph, Tim, Bart, Sara, Greg L at Terra Nova, twitter hashtag #sop09), I’ll stick to the people I met. Anyway, I place more importance on the connections made and individual and collective collisions of people and ideas than I do on the sessions, so it’s pretty appropriate to list the fine folks I met.

Continue reading New York last week →

Academia, Games Research

reposting of Raph’s aggregation of State of Play reports

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http://www.raphkoster.com/2009/06/21/state-of-play-reports/

I’ll post some of my thoughts (mostly not focused on the panels but the events and people I met) later this week.

Academia, Games Research

Magic Circle for #sop09

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In case anyone was interested, I created a flash thing about the magic circle last summer.

Magic Circle (Flash)

Academia, Games Research

Foundations of Digital Games 09 recap

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Ok, lessee…

At the end of April I went to Foundations of Digital Games. A lot of the sessions were on AI and procedural programming for computer and video games, which isn’t entirely related to what I study, so I went swimming, hot-tubbing, sailing, etc. instead. But the sessions on game studies (Jose Zagal, Mia Consalvo, Jesper Juul, moderated by TL Taylor) was good.

Jose (who I’ve cited for his, Rick, and Hsi’s look at cooperation in the Lord of the Rings boardgame, and who worked with a couple of other students including Amanda Ladd [careful, my virus protection program claims there’s a trojan associated with her site… no idea if that is true] who was also at the conference (as an undergrad!)) did a paper on the current qualities of game reviews, breaking out the moves and arguments they make into 9 or so different categories. The problem is that they only chose IGN and Gamespot to look at, which means they were missing out on a whole slew of alternative review sites such as Adventure Gamers as well as missing print publications. Maybe there’s no difference in terms of what reviews do, but maybe there is.

Mia presented a study on the online community around the hidden object games Mystery Case Files, specifically Return to Ravenhearst, describing how the kinds of talk on their forums is just as rich and varied as the kinds of talk on MMOG forums.

Jesper (along with Marleigh Norton at MIT) took a deeper look at difficulty in games, showing how difficulty can come from both the game and with the game interface and that these are actually very blurred. There’s a difference between bad interface design and an interface that is meant to be difficult to master. In fact, such games as Wario Ware are actually all about figuring out the interface. So, the assumption that good UI is always an intuitive or invisible UI isn’t always a good assumption to make.

There were other sessions on creating a game development department or bridging industry with academia, and those were pretty good. The take away message I got, though it wasn’t necessarily explicit, was from Magy Seif El-Nasr and Kurt Squire who said they’ve been going to GDC for several years, first as a grad student. GDC is expensive, but the point I got was that you have to be visible, that building a relationship with industry folks takes time. That’s pretty much the reason why I’ve been trying to go to as many varied conferences as possible, though I’ve been limiting mine to ones that don’t cost a fortune. I wonder if I should start going to GDC, though…

Constance Steinkuehler and Yasmin Kafai were both at the conference, too, so there definitely was some representation from the Learning Sciences. One grad student I met, Al Yang pointed out, however, that it seemed like the different disciplines and/or schools, despite being stuck on a boat together, were relatively cliquish.

Other notables I met were Chris Lewis (who sneered at my Strongbow), Jack Stockholm and Veronica Zammito, both from Vancouver and guildies from Terror Nova! What sucks is that I didn’t meet them all until the last day, so we hardly talked at all. 🙁 Being stuck on a boat isn’t really as limiting as one would think…

I also met a bunch of people (Bob and his family, Mark, Gene) from Utah who work with Roger Altizer, my cabinmate, who I met at the Internet Researchers conference in Vancouver a couple of years back.

Cy from Microsoft, Brian from EA, Noah from UCSC (who edited First Person and is part of Grand Text Auto)… many more.

All in all, really fun conference. Bolt is a good movie.

Academia, Games, Games Research, Life

The long rambly update… April 09 edition!

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A lot has happened in the last few weeks:

A Comparison of Collaboration across Two Game Contexts: Lord of the Rings Online and World of Warcraft

To better understand the nature of virtual collaboration, we present analyses of high-stakes team activities, known as “raids,” in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). These situations are hotbeds of collaboration, which is increasingly recognized as a valuable twenty-first century skill (Karoly & Panis, 2004). Raids usually involve a great amount of communication and coordination of actions, interdependence of teammates, leadership, and execution of strategy, similar to elements of collaboration in other settings, such as business (Reeves, Malone & O’Driscoll, 2008), surgical teams (Edmondson, 2003), the military (Salas, Bower & Cannon-Bowers, 1995), control room teams (Patrick, et. al., 2006), sports teams (Eccles & Tenenbaum, 2004), and educational settings (Mercier, Goldman & Booker, 2006). These raid events often span hours at a time and are often repeated over several months before the raid zone is cleared, i.e. when the team is able to successfully defeat all of the enemies. Existing studies of learning in MMOGs include gaming as a constellation of literacy practices (Steinkuehler, 2007, 2008), scientific argumentation in web forums around game strategies (Steinkuehler & Duncan, 2008), and learning game ethos, strategy, and fact-finding with peers via chat (Nardi, 2007). Yet other research has looked at the development of social skills (Ducheneaut & Moore, 2005) and the build-up and leveraging of social and cultural capital to succeed in game activities (Jakobsson & Taylor, 2003, Malaby, 2006). Previous work on raiding has included a focus on providing an ethnographic account of in-game activity and the realignment work needed after moments of failure (Chen, 2009). Without cross-setting comparisons, however, it is difficult to uncover which aspects of gaming are specific to the game world and which can be thought of as enduring qualities of expert collaborative group practice.

To make cross-setting comparisons, we analyze gameplay video, audio conversations, and text chat data from two popular MMOGs, The Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) and World of Warcraft (WoW). Using a participant-observation approach, we examine two semi-stable teams of players who spent several weeks learning to be successful in a raid. In particular, we examine collaborative behavior and communication for two raid battles in each game: one successful battle, and one unsuccessful. The four cases were coded based on adaptations to work team behavior frameworks (Rousseau, et al., 2006), situation awareness measures (Patrick, et al., 2006), and a coding system used in examining differences between problem-solving youth groups (Baron, 2003). Informed by theories on the relational networks of human and nonhuman actors (Latour, 1988, 2005), which includes considering the distribution of cognitive work within ecological settings (Hutchins, 1995a, 1995b), and the assemblage of such systems as applied to games (Taylor, forthcoming), our analyses focus on one aspect of practice, the communication of expert players. This communication includes voice and text chat, and the patterns that emerge when looking across game sessions. By comparing two games with different designs (e.g. team size, player abilities, and scripting of battles) and cultures (e.g. roles, expectations, preferred mode of communication, and use of external tools), we can discover what is common about these collaborative activities, giving us an insight into what is common about teamwork and collaboration in virtual tasks that require a high degree of technical skill and coordinated effort. Themes emerge concerning situational awareness, psychological safety (Edmonson, 1999, 2003), problem solving (Barron, 2003; Roschelle, 1992), and critical communicative practices necessary for success. Results are discussed in relation to collaboration research in other non-virtual settings.

  • Yay! Submitted something to the Digital Games Research Association conference (DiGRA, London, September 1-4). I’ll hear on June 1 whether it is accepted. I can’t post what I submitted yet… Blind review and all…
  • Yay! I’m in a reading group this quarter that focuses on actor-network theory and activity theory. Right now we’re reading Latour’s Reassembling the Social. Read the above abstract to get a really, really brief summary, though I realize it isn’t written for non-academics…
  • Yay! I’m taking Isaac Gottesman‘s Educators as Intellectuals class (again, but this one is different than the one two years ago). We are reading biographical, philosophical, and ethnographic accounts of what it means to be an intellectual/activist/educator and writing our own historical, situated accounts… There’s some crazy connections being made between this and the sociotechnical stuff I’ve been reading… Gross, for example, argues that Rorty was shaped by his relationships with others and that social and cultural capital played a huge part in his development, more so than any inherent agentive trait. Here’s the full list of what we’re reading:
  • Yay! I’m going on the Microsoft, EA, and GarageGames sponsored Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) conference next week, which takes place on the Disney cruise ship, sailing the Bahamas. 🙂 Cabining with Roger Altizer! We’re going to hit up Disney World first. Hopefully, while he screams like a little school girl, I’ll just be giggling (like a little school girl).
  • Boo! Robin is sick this week. I was sick for like a day, but her’s is lasting a week so far…
  • Boo! Ushki also got sick this week. She was constipated something fierce.
  • Boo! Our water heater exploded on Thursday. Apparently, it’s a power vent heater, costing about $1000 more than a regular water heater ($1500). But, on top of that, the contractors who built our townhouse cut some corners and did some really strange things with their install of the water heater, snuggling it in a really tight space in the garage that is too small for modern water heaters. Furthermore, our heating system uses the hot water system, complicating matters a little, as the dudes from Fast Water Heater Co. install a new water heater in a new space. We originally got a quote from O’Neill Plumbing that seemed high, but I was at the office and Robin was stuffy headed so we didn’t quite understand the complexity of the situation. When we got a second quote from the Home Depot referred Fast Water Heater Co., the prices were actually about the same: $2700!! Boo, indeed. We went with Fast since Jason took the time to explain the situation very carefully (three times! me, Robin, my mom).
  • Yay (and Boo)! I’m going to go to State of Play (SoP, NYC, June 18-20), and Dan Hunter, the guy organizing it (and fellow guildie) is offering graduate students free conference registration and either free room and board or some money for airfare! There was talk about folks who were going to be at Games Learning Society (GLS, Madison, June 12-14) carpooling over to NYC. That sounded like fun but I’m having problems getting a confirmation that that is actually happening. Given that I now need to pay for this new water heater somehow, I fear I might be skipping GLS this year… 🙁 If I get into DiGRA, I hope Phil remembers his conversation with me about getting LIFE to pay for it…

Also:

  • I’m ramping up video analysis of a specific kid and his video game practices for ESTG’s ethnographic study.
  • I’m an officer for Educators for Social Justice (ESJ) this year, and this quarter we’re organizing a panel on teacher education and social justice issues.
  • I’m helping the Associated Students of the College of Ed (ASCE) set up a website next week.
  • The IT Crowd is pretty good.
  • The Red Dwarf final episodes finally were aired. Odd Blade Runner references. I think the third part (of three) fell flat.
  • I just finished playing Drakensang. Very linear. No narrative decision points to speak of. Very detailed combat system. German. Felt kind of like Drakensang : The Witcher = Icewind Dale : Baldur’s Gate (or maybe even Planescape).
Academia, Games Research

Social dimensions of expertise published!

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at Transformative Works and Cultures!

It’s an odd piece, but I’ll write about it later…  right now I gotta go hang out with SG. 🙂