Category Archives: Games Research

IR9, day 1, 11am: Multiplayer gaming

On the 15th I went to the In the Game workshop and then dinner party afterwards. I’ll skip that and go straight to the conference which started on the 16th, but here’s a photo of my breakfast spread. 🙂

From Copenhagen, Oct 15

Celia Pearce
Identity as place: Trans-ludic identities in mediated play communities-The case of the Uru diaspora

themes:

  • fictive ethnicity attached to virtual place
  • diasporic discourses of displacement
  • imaginary community v. imagined community

method includes:

  • feminist eth, etc. but also
  • ethnography as game (Denzen)

Refugees of Uru would evaluate different VWs and games as possible places to migrate to.
They used the same identities from place to place incl. clothing/avatar appearance.
They also recreated architectural artifacts (like the fountain, the common hub for the game Uru) to keep cultural artifacts and continuity in space/place.

It was the loss of Uru that led to the creation the identity/community.

Celia mentioned briefly a conference happening at Georgia Tech.

More info on Celia and her research can be found at http://cpandfriends.com/

Emily Hannan
Virtual worlds: Forming relationships online and offline within gaming communities

Unfortunately, Emily was a no show.

Luca Rossi
MMORPG guilds as online communities: Power, space, and time in virtual worlds

Not in so many words, but essentially, I think Luca is saying that shared goals are sometimes in conflict with individual goals, which is something I’ve been thinking a lot about as I write my expertise and socialization paper.

Luca claims that guilds are not fluid and getting in and out is difficult.

[Mark]
I don’t think that is true for all guilds… not true for many guilds in fact, or maybe just on my server?
Also, he conflates guilds with raiding! Why do people still do this? Did I have a completely abnormal server?
In my experience, people might have to go through some sort of application process but to leave a guild (breaking up friendships, aside) is actually quite easy.

[/Mark]

Luca then the use of tools to manage time and to lower downtime such as calendars, etc.

How conflicts are resolved: Hirschman voice/exit concept -> when conflict happens you talk and then /gkick as last resort.

gkick is a form of power

[Mark]
He didn’t cover conflict management in detail but just 3 ways to leave guilds.
It would be more interesting to talk about the tension between personal and group goals. Then also talk about specific motivations for leaving or staying. What is compelling about staying that people put up with drama? Do some players recognize that management and work is needed for the labor of fun?

Also, he didn’t show us anything from outside of the game. Isn’t there a whole social economy that affects power dynamics and reputations?

I thought what he covered is basically was very superficial, but maybe it’s a language barrier…
[/Mark]

Mia Consalvo
Where’s my montage? The performance of hard work and its reward in film, tv, and MMOGs
Mia and her students were in a seminar that did an exploration of what a Unit Operation is (from Bogost).
A “unit” is a building block, and each medium uses a different procedural rhetoric to express them.

[Mark]
I see units as genre conventions that have certain qualities and attributes that can be expressed across media.
[/Mark]

They used the “hard work is rewarded” unit and tried to see how it is expressed differently in different media.

montage in films = (bypassing) grinding in games, etc.
montage is done by cutting/pasting in films, cheating in games

Rettberg’s corporate ideology (Yee says this too)
puritan work ethic, myth of american dream

[Mark]
Roger (who was sitting next to me) makes a good point in that there’s a performative act while playing games that is different than in other media. Does that make comparing texts harder to do even if a common unit can be found? In other words, the expression depends on the actions of the player, not just the author… and different players might do different things such that the unit is fungy.

Also, what operations are happening between units that are making unique or maybe not unique meanings to players? I thought Ian’s emphasis was not the unit but the various combinations and connections and networks they created and related to each other.

For a static text, units operate with each other and create a narrative meaning. For games, it seems like it is much more emergent and that specific units might not surface for all players.

Most of the questions about Mia’s talk came from niggling about the the content of the unit (grinding and montage) and not the concept of the unit. Ah well…

Total aside, wouldn’t it be great if Blizzard announced to everyone that we’d all be moving to a different, better game without all this crap grind?
[/Mark]

Wired: How videogames blind us with science

Constance is in Wired! 🙂

Games Without Frontiers: How Videogames Blind Us With Science

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 Branon 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 WolfensteinMoses 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 HalversonRich 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

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 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

Edd Schneider

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… :/