Today, tomorrow, and Sunday, there is a conference on virtual worlds research being held in World of Warcraft (noon Eastern Time, Earthen Ring, US, Horde side, Science guild). If you can’t join, you can watch the live feed each day at World2Worlds.

I’ll write-up full comments after this weekend when Gray and Song Gong (house guests who need someone to play boardgames with!) leave.

I have to say, though, that the panelists and moderators and that whole format worked a lot more in WoW than what I’ve seen similarly attempted in Second Life, but part of it was that I knew exactly how to manipulate WoW’s interface so that I could easily follow the chat. I also was able to /chatlog it all and Frapsed it all as a half-size movie to my HD. Now I have to compress the videos for storage (my HD is FULL!).

1. expertise in World of Warcraft poster and paper – I’m presenting a poster at this year’s International Conference for the Learning Sciences as part of a bigger poster session on expertise. Basically, trying to argue that experts who get into the end-game of WoW have to relearn and adapt their expertise for the new endeavor of raiding. Must read more distributed cognition and adaptive expertise literature… After ICLS, which is in The Netherlands late June, I go to Madison, Wisconsin again for Games Learning Society and hopefully present the paper that the poster is based on. er… will be based on. the supposed paper that the supposed poster will be based on… Anyway, I posted the abstract for “Leet Noobs” a while back, so you can read that at least. :p
2. game review of either The Witcher or the Ace Attorney series of games – Michele Knobel mailed me via Facebook if I would be interested in submitting a game review to eLearning! She and co-conspirator Colin Lankshear are bigwigs in the new literacies line of research. Check out a book they edited called A New Literacies Sampler (the full text is available for download free!) featuring a chapter by my former advisor Jen Stone! I’m either going to do a review of The Witcher and how morally ambiguous most of the situations in the game are, which is great and what I think games need more, and contrast that with other RPGs and link it to Gee’s projected identities idea from What Video Games Have to Teach Us… OR I could write about the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney line of games (which now includes Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney) and link it to literacy and narrative. My plan is to write an outline for each of these and compare the two… maybe write and submit both eventually. The reason why this’ll take a while, I think, is that I want to link it to academic literature.. not just a game review, in other words. Aaron Chia-Yuan Hung sent me one of his that he did on Bully, and I was floored by how he linked Rockstar’s game with academic stuff on bullying and school cliques. So now I have to step it up, too…
3. some papers for a class I’m taking called Poetics of Play in Digital Role-Playing Games – This includes a summary/presentation on a book outside of the readings. Since most of the readings cover games theory from a textual or player-game perspective, I’ll either highlight TL Taylor’s Play Between Worlds or one of the case studies in Gaming Lives in the 21st Century.
4. and uh.. my dissertation proposal
5. oh and I need to finish up that engagement paper finally.