Category Archives: Games Research

Found a quick bullet review I did for Dungeons and Dragons Online

I posted this back in Feb on my guild’s forums… found it while I was looking for what I wrote about WoW and lack of moral choices a la single player RPGs… thought this DDO beta review might be interesting too. Yes, beta… but I did play the final release, too, and getting to the next district and level 6 didn’t really change my mind:

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The lameness of World of Warcraft—and what to do about it.

The lameness of World of Warcraft—and what to do about it. – By Chris Dahlen – Slate Magazine

Nice article… here’s a quote:

Warcraft also limits your choices when it comes to gameplay. The citizens of Warcraft are like migrant workers—they get their marching orders, and they follow them to the letter. Players never face moral quandaries and never get to choose between an upstanding act and an evil one. Instead of just barging through every problem with a sword and a club, Warcraft should let players negotiate their way through conflicts. If someone pays you to run an errand, do you follow through honestly or steal their money? Should you betray one faction to win favor with another—and what happens if you pick the wrong side? Other commercial role-playing games, like the best-selling Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, are full of these types of decisions. It’s time Warcraft gets with the program. (Chris Dahlen, Nov 14, 2006)

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Upcoming review of Play Between Worlds by me!

I wrote a book review of T. L. Taylor‘s Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture a few weeks ago for the Resource Center for Cybercultural Studies run by David Silver.  He and I have been emailing drafts to each other and the final version is slated to be published in January!

Basically, Taylor looks at players of EverQuest and makes the case that gaming culture is complex and emergent and not so easily separated from off-screen culture.

WOW guild banned – PC News at GameSpot

WOW guild banned – PC News at GameSpot

TL Taylor talks about how high-end guilds tend to encourage pushing the boundaries of game mechanics to learn to play the game most efficiently in EQ.  This story about how a WoW guild was banned for implementing a cheat to get to AQ40’s end boss by skipping the rest of the instance’s content reminds me that for a lot of players the end-game really is about the loot.  But the players’ practice emerged out of a response to what could be argued as excessively overbearing, time-consuming trash mobs.  The particular guild had the instance on farm status already, but just wanted to skip to the only boss that actually dropped anything useful for them.  Not sure how I feel about this but I completely understand the desire to fight the MMOG grind/time-sink.  Maybe if WoW went away from the subscription model?  Maybe if the trash’s loot table had a bit of randomness to it?  I dunno…

Revised World of Warcraft paper

The revised version of my paper Communication, Coordination, and Camaraderie in World of Warcraft was what I used for my Research and Inquiry paper and presentation.   Woot!  I left up my old draft on this blog so people can compare the two if they feel so inclined…  make the process transparent and all… yeah.

how to get a PhD at UW CoE step-by-step

So, the process to get a PhD here in the College of Ed at UW follows a bunch of steps. They say these steps are in the student manual, but the manual was vague as to a timeline… It was rewritten over the summer but I haven’t looked at it yet…
But anyway, here’s the deal for all you newbies! (may want to see the various forms you can download and the student manual…)

Continue reading how to get a PhD at UW CoE step-by-step

Over the summer my raid imploded

I’m not going to write much about it here, as I’m still trying to digest what happened, but let’s just say that over the summer the raid group I was a part of imploded in a huge drama fest.  Additionally, on several occassions, talk between Harsh Winter officers and elders became heated.  These two cases make an interesting comparison, where how the drama from one was handled eventually led to its demise while the other is still alive… though hardly satisfactory to some of the affected parties.  Okay, this post is vague…. sorry.  I’ll post more about it after all the crap for school is over.  For now, there is a good read on guild trust and goals over at Terra Nova.

Limits to friendship

Over the past few weeks the Horde faction on my server in World of Warcraft has suffered a couple of major blows. [This is a weird sentence for me to say… I’m basically using the language that some of the people I used to raid with used when describing these occurrences. I mean, I don’t really think of the Horde faction as a unified body which can take blows… but I think they really do feel at opposition with the Alliance and that raiding and end-game PvP really is about competition.]

The first is that one raiding guild imploded. About 9 or 10 of my guildmates went with them to Molten Core and Blackwing Lair, so it changed very dramatically the availability of several level 60 guildies during certain times of the week. What happened was that the guild leaders and officers decided to ditch their guild (with like 12 hour notice) and migrate to a different server where they felt that they could advance their characters at a faster pace and basically get more opportunities to get farther in the higher-end instances, probably including tackling Naxx and AQ40, currently the two highest-end instances. [I find this very sad in that it is another blow to the image of uber guild and how there really is no allegiance or loyalty beyond what can be generated from a hierarchical, loot-oriented organization. Something here acts as a counterpoint to TL Taylor’s portrait of power gamers in her recent book Play Between Worlds, where power gamers are very socially oriented and loyal to their guilds…

The other thing that happened was that the guild which ran the raid group (composed of many allied guilds) that I ran with (the one in my paper on camaraderie), ironically, also imploded. This was something in the works through the whole summer, I believe. It started with some key healers leaving due to how loot was handled, which is completely contrary to the behavior one would expect from players who confess to value friendship and hanging out over loot. Then other people started leaving for various reasons. Communication started failing. I think it was because our group wasn’t stable, with a lot of new members to fill in the void of those who left over the loot drama or simply due to having a different summer schedule. Whatever the case, a heated discussion started happening on the lead guild’s forums, and it was pretty clear that some people from non-lead guilds were feeling underappreciated and that some people from the lead guild were also feeling underappreciated in the wake of being abandoned by the people who had left for more serious raiding guilds. One person in particular expressed the feeling that he was tanking for us and that it was our privilege to have him perform this service for us. He then went on to basically insult everyone not in his guild. Later he explained that his tirade was misunderstood due to a typo and that his anger wasn’t directed at all OOGers (out of guilders) but just to the original person who started the thread. But it was too late. By then all of my guildmates who were part of their raid decided to leave. I left for solidarity, but I was going to leave due to a different Fall school schedule anyway. The funny thing is, even if we had known he had made a typo… well, our main beef wasn’t actually against his insult but more his attitude that he had that the world revolves around him. That part wasn’t a typo and is consistent with how some of us felt about him for some time now. I am not sure how this raid is doing anymore as I no longer go, but I assume it is still going and that they are still working on Rags and Vael.

Anyway, these few weeks obviously have been pretty emotional for me in terms of game life and Ushki and school about to start, etc. But what worries me the most, I think, is that I am not exactly sure what this says about my paper that I wrote in June. I mean, do I have to retract what I wrote? Is it that the raid doesn’t value friendship and camaraderie as much as I had thought?
My thought is this:

People joined my ex-raid group to hang out with friends, primarily, but loot and character advancement should not be glossed over so readily. Different people value loot differently, with great variability, and different people view fairness and loot distribution differently. When the loot rules did not accomodate their expectations they bailed. Months before, perhaps they wouldn’t have bailed, but they did over the summer.

I think that, as with pretty much anything, tolerance is not a binary. People’s tolerance of things vary over time. I know that with “real-life” friends, I can only hang out with them for an afternoon, maybe half a day, or maybe three days, before I start to tire of them. I think it depends heavily on our personalities and what we are doing, but at some point I need some downtime. Well, think about this… This raid group has been going to Molten Core and Onyxia for almost a whole year now, three days a week for about 5 or 6 hours a day. That. is. a. lot. of. time.

At different times, different people had to come and go, and I bet some of them left because they got tired of the rest of us. It’s not that they hated us or couldn’t get along… It’s just tiring, you know? The core group emerged as the people who basically stayed the longest, I guess. We somehow maintained our friendship through the tough times (and the often really good times). When we started getting tired of each other… well, what kept us there if not the camaraderie? For me, it was a sense of loyalty and also the chance of winning loot. Once drama started happening, loyalty died due to the type of drama, and well… loot ain’t enough. By the time the drama started happening, the “fun” factor was already gone or so diminished that it just wasn’t enough to hold us together.

Anyway, that’s my take on things. People get tired of each other. All raid groups are destined to break apart. Some last longer than others because of the friendships. Ours was still an awesome group and I still believe the best 40-man raid group on the server. But we needed a break. Or at least some of us did.

Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education: New Atlantis grapples with gaming and flops

Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education: New Atlantis grapples with gaming and flops

Wow…  Here’s a criticism of an article in the New Atlantis.  It’s not super-recent (I’m cleaning out my old bookmarks today and stumbled upon it), but it is definitely worth a read.

AERA conference

So, I’ve been sending my paper on cooperation in WoW to various people. I was also thinking of submitting it to AERA, the annual big conference for educational researchers, but I figured… I can’t afford going and they probably wouldn’t accept the submission anyway. The deadline was August 1.

On the morning of August 1, Constance Steinkuehler emails me and asks if I want to be part of a panel on virtual worlds in a SIG at AERA! The other panelists would be her, Lisa Galarneau, and Thomas Malaby, with Kurt Squire as the discussant. hahah… Of course! The networking alone is totally worth it. Luckily for us the deadline for submission to SIGs was August 2.

So I spent the next two days writing an abstract and sending it to her and then revising after she revised.

Anyway, we submitted it fine, but it turns out that Constance cites my abstract in her abstract… Only she says “Chan” rather than “Chen.” I hope it isn’t too late to fix. Ah well… I find it funny that *she* has the hard to spell name and *my* name is the one that gets misspelled.

Now we wait to see if it gets accepted. I assume if it does, we’ll have a chance to update the abstracts at that point.