Category Archives: Games Research

Academia, Games Research

Visualization paper draft

1 Comment

I’ve gotten a couple of requests for info about how I made those charts I was working on last month. Well, here’s a draft of the paper I am working on, Visualization of expert chat development in WoW (draft PDF). It describes how the charts were made in greater detail.

Here’s the abstract:

Abstract: This paper describes the visualization of chat log data in the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft. Charts were created to get a general sense of chat trends in a specific player group engaged in “high-end raiding,” a 40-person collaborative activity. These charts helped identify patterns in the frequency of chat over time during two specific gaming sessions. The sessions represented significant moments in the raid group’s history: the first time a particular monster, Ragnaros, was fought and one of the first times he was defeated. The visualization process, while useful, is only one analysis tool in a fuller ethnographic account of expertise development in World of Warcraft.

If you have specific questions, feel free to ask! And feedback is certainly welcome!

Games Research

MMOG play as barrier to getting a job (rather than seen as a bonus)

Leave a comment

Raph Koster (MMOG developer, author of Theory of Fun for Game Design) is relatively prolific on his blog. Today he has a post about a post from a forum where the poster says a recruiter was told to avoid WoW players:

Raph’s Website » MMOG play as a barrier to getting a job

Interesting.

Games, Games Research, Life

I bought the WoW expansion

1 Comment

Wrath of the Lich King.

Yes, that means when I quit back in Jan, it didn’t stick. Well, it stuck until Science Magazine held a conference *in* WoW on convergence culture back in May [1, 2, 3]. I resubscribed for that, but then kept the subscription and switched servers to play with some other academics who play.

Still, it’s been very off and on. I raided with them for about two months and then stopped mid-summer. I haven’t really logged in since September.

But now, when Wrath arrives at my door, I suppose I’ll be playing for another month or so. (My current subscription expires in Feb, and I’m guessing I won’t be renewing it then.)

In other words, tearful (almost) departure from WoW was followed by (slight) regret that I deposited all my gold into the guild bank only to switch servers/guilds a few months later. And that the rest of the year has been a slow, fizzling withdrawal rather than a clear-cut quit.

Maybe the unstickyness of the game for me now is in part due to being dirt poor (I *almost* had enough gold for an epic flying mount when I gave it all to my former guild). Or maybe it’s because the game was so different than what I remember… the tokens and daily quests were so demoralizing for me…. in the sense that I was left wondering wtf I had been working for during the previous 3 years of playing.

Interestingly, Nathan Dutton, one of Mia Consalvo’s students at Ohio does research on quitting texts and WoW! I’ll have to read it and see if it’ll help me understand my ambivalence about WoW.

Academia, Games Research

The website for Games Learning Society 5.0 is up

1 Comment

GLS 5.0, the annual conference on games and learning held at Madison, WI, is a fun almost-unconference. Lots of new media, games, anthropology, education, learning sciences, k12 teachers, etc. folk will be there.

This time it looks like it moved up a month: June 10-12 instead of mid-July. Also, they are moving to a bigger venue and expanding it to three days instead of two.

Pre-registration ends April 30, so there’s lots of time to think about it. Submissions aren’t being accepted yet, but they will by mid-Dec, according to their website.

I’ve gone the last two years (2007 and 2008) and always make some really good connections, the highlight being LAN partying with Terra Nova.

Games Research

Gaming is not an addiction

Leave a comment

It’s a social condition that stems from the contexts of the gamer’s life rather than a technology problem. Well… duh.

Terra Nova: It’s Not an Addiction

Also, see Rob Cover’s article on game addiction in Game Studies.

Games Research

Prelim charts of my data

3 Comments

So, I uploaded the graphs I’m currently messing around with, created with amCharts (using data from a MySQL database) and added to in Photoshop. Check out my graphs!

WoW Data Visualization
Academia, Games Research

papers

Leave a comment

I finished the revision of one paper on Monday.

Now I’m working on another paper on expertise development, but for it I want to display some graphs of participation turns over time from two different nights in Molten Core. The thing is that I found a couple of cool free web apps (amCharts and TimePlot) that do pretty graphs and such so long as the data is in the right format.

So, yesterday I spent the day converting those two nights (the first time we encountered Ragnaros and the first time we killed Ragnaros three months later) to a delimited text file so that I could import them into a sql database. I created an additional table that has attributes of the participants, such as alias, gender, class, and whether that person was an official leader.

Now I want to display a graph of activity during the fight and pre-fight times. I also want to break it down by the character attributes I listed. I want to confirm whether women participate far less than men do, etc. Or maybe it is confounded by character class or whatever.

My curent problem is that I have to relearn PHP and SQL today so that the data is formatted for the graphing software. :p

Meanwhile, my updates to this site are very irregular. Read my Twitter feed for slightly more regular updates if you so care…

Academia, Games Research

IR9, day 2, 9am: State of MMO game studies

Leave a comment

State of MMO game Studies: Identities, Participatory Culture, and Structural Forces

Roger Altizer
For a Pound of Virtual Flesh: Tales of Trade in World of Warcraft

goldfarming

(TAP while playing)

bbc and Ge Jin’s accounts different (normal gamers v. poor laborers, etc.)

Gamer Generation//Revolution documentary

Dan Burk (UCI)
Copyright and Paratext in On-Line Gaming

gaming capital (accumulating expertise, social status, etc.)
drives play but also drives cheating

[Mark]but cheating seems to attempt to bypass in-game (ludic) capital, not necessarily social capital.. actually disengaged with social capital since leveling affords the time to gain social capital (and cultural capital)[/Mark]

Developers and others should think about designs, control methods, etc. that affect what you gain by cheating… how much of total gaming capital is derived from ludic expertise? Is the expertise performative or purely appearance based?

covers a brief history of copyright and derivitive work in other media and then games and different forms of control in games

Mia Consalvo
Translating Vana’ diel: The Hybrid Culture of Japanese and Western Game Players

ffxi and japanese influence of videogames
history of western adoption of japanese art (otaku going back to impressionists)

history and lore presented in game lets those who’ve played previous games display gaming capital

hybrid place that isn’t japanese and not western but allows players to encounter the other

Cassandra Van Buren
World of Warcraft Machinima Makers

foundations: film history, emergent participatory culture but becoming commercialized

reform game space into your own narrative

study is two fold: documenting and looking at machinima as posthuman creative activity (ethnography), wants to capture the different ways its done before they become standardized or commercialized(?)

Dmitri Williams (and Tracey Kennedy and Bob Moore)
Behind the Avatar: The Patterns, Practices and Functions of Role Playing in MMOs

looking at RP in mmoRPgs

mix between quant and qual work
Dmitri did the number crunching and Tracey did the ethnography
RP high groups tend to score higher in having been diagnosed with depression, addiction, etc.

used Nick Yee’s motivations scales (immersion, achievement, social)
RPers more focused on social and immersion and not so much achievement

the people that Tracey interviewed had very specific reasons for RPing… escapism, etc.
about half of them volunteered that they were using it as an outlet for therapeutic outlet

same numbers of RPers on all servers

Academia, Games Research

IR9, day 2, 9am: Game(play)

Leave a comment
From Copenhagen, Oct 17

Nick Montfort – MIT (w. Bogost at Georgia Tech)
and the ports have names for the sea
Reimagining Games for the Atari VCS

understand platforms and their material affordances to creative works
A bunch of interesting examples from the VCS…

Shira Chess
Balancing on the Great Gender Platform

gaming platforms are rhetorical platforms

platforms are gendered
Wii and DS marketing

platforms are a site where discourse happens, thus they themselves are rhetorical in that they allow and constrain different things

From Copenhagen, Oct 17

Keith Massie
The Pla(t/y)form of L337: Difference, Differance and Differ@nce in/through L337

platform and different forms of leetspeak

Hugo Gernspeck 1911 father of sci-fi

Derrida critiques idea that thought -> speech -> writing
leetspeak reinforces Derrida
meaning is like a snow-globe, not a map. requires interability

differance -> differ and defer

Keith introduces diff@nce (differ@nce?)

Casey O’Donnell
Taking the NES’s PPU Bait: the birth and effects of the graphics processing unit

NES PPU (pixel processing unit) as example of how platforms affect collaborative practice

the ppu allowed a bunch of innovations: movable background, 8×8, 8×16 sprites, separation of screen code and game code

most games before the NES were engineer-driven games, but the separation of graphics with game code afforded the games industry to break into more specialized roles (art and programmers)

Academia, Games Research

IR9, day 1, 3:30pm: Video game cultures, innovation, and user generated content

Leave a comment
From Copenhagen, Oct 16

Hector Postigo

Background:
Fan studies/Political economy
Terranova and social factory (working for nothing)/Jenkins and participatory culture (everyone media rich)

Picking at social factory:
Are theories of post-industrial labor enough for understanding what work means to co-producers?
There is in fact agency, etc. and the actors aren’t just dupes for the cog machine.

Two examples:

  1. GI Joe mod as resistance
    idea that love of the game and creation = rights
    equate the mod with DeCSSS makes the mod no longer a game but a symbol of resistance
  2. AOL volunteering as passionate labor with intrinsic rewards
    15k people volunteering
    access to gui to create content, etc.

These larger theories can’t get at specific people’s voices nor cover what happens when work becomes not work anymore.

Olli Sotamaa
Democratizing the console environment?
www.uta.fi/hyper

Do the XNA and WiiWare actually democratize? Not really. They more just extend the oligopoly.

Modding is more democratizing.
“casual modding” includes LitteBigPlanet, etc.

MyBuzz (website or PS3? to create quiz games).

Julian Kucklich
Collusion: Mapping connections between games and users
cheating = de-lodology
Titiana Terranova

Within gamespace, some moves are possible and some impossible for specific people. This goes hand in hand with labor concept.

[Mark]
I find it funny that Julian really wants to do a roundtable chat but he is following the lecture format. He says that he doesn’t want to do slideshows and he keeps saying “we’re talking about…” but yet he still just lectures. Too much stuff to cover in too little time. 🙁
[/Mark]

Gaming capital (not cultural capital): capitalizing play, bending the structure, commodifying gamespace

distribution of risk from center of games to periphery

the logic of play is infused by the logic of gain and more and more logic of risk

Aphra Kerr – NUI Maynooth, Sociology
Outsourcing risk

Discourse: Rise of open innovation, etc.
Reality: Distributed productions and offshoring, Accumulation by disposession

Not much stuff going on in Irish gaming market. Middleware, underbidding licensed stuff, or distributed original production.

Three trends: disintermediation (online distribution), distributed production, ownership and policing of IP