Category Archives: Games

Games, Games Research

Top 10 greatest moments in games culture of the decade

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There’s a bunch of game review websites doing their top 10 best games of either the year or the decade right now. I’m continually moved towards thinking that games that are inherently good can only be great through a combination of intrinsic qualities and external player dispositions, situations, settings, and communities. In other words, I’m inclined towards thinking about gaming moments rather than the game artifacts themselves. To take that thought further, I think what’s even more compelling are moments that stem from the culture around games. And so, here are some great moments that speak of our growing, diversifying (yet also moving towards homogeneity), deeply intricate games culture of the past decade.

I had meant to do a top 10 list, but there’s no way I can think of the best candidates in one sitting, so I’ll start with these and add as people comment (here, via Twitter, via Facebook, or via Google Reader). No particular order:

[Note Dec 18:] It seems like two categories can be made out of the list, those that are trends and those that are specific moments. I’ve tried to keep it to specific moments, but it’s blurry. Also, it’s of course subjective, and, apparently, I have short-term memory since most of these are from the past 5 years.

  1. 2007: Very touching story about a mom who sent letters to her son through Animal Crossing. The story is touching. The fact that the letters might have been auto-generated, well… it’s still a touching story. Read about it (joystiq) or watch the story (YTMND).
  2. 2004: “Bow, nigger” and New Games Journalism.
  3. 2008: Project Chanology and Anonymous. Ok, technically not exactly games specific, but its basically griefing writ large. Good summary of griefing: Julian Dibbell’s article in Wired on Patriotic Nigras and Second Life (yay, guildmate!).
  4. Terra Nova blog (speaking of guildmates). Games (virtual worlds) culture needs people to write about it. Read all about trading real-world currency for in-game gold and items, for example.
  5. 2006: Million Gnome March in World of Warcraft.
  6. 2006 and 2007: South Park episodes on WoW (info) (video) and Guitar Hero (info) (video). Good example of gaming hopping into other media. (via Jen Stone)
  7. Settlers of Catan more popular than Monopoly and taking top selling toys and games spot on Amazon. (via Chris Ferejohn)
  8. 2005: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Hot Coffee controversy. (via Sean Duncan)
  9. Pro gaming actually exists. Eg, Fatal1ty featured on MTV and owns h1s own product l1ne.
  10. MC Chris’s, Fett’s Vette in Star Wars Galaxy machinima. First, it’s an example of nerdcore hip hop (also see MC Frontalot and MC Lars). Second, it’s an example of machinima. Third, it’s an example of how all these different media are bleeding into each other.

Games, Games Research, Humorous, Life

Dragon Age plot flops and Zero Punctuation

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So, I played Dragon Age for a couple of weeks. It’s engrossing. Very engrossing. But I *was* disappointed with how little change there is to the plot or storyline with each of the six different starting conditions. Each start story was really well done, so to have the narratives from a particular one be mostly forgotten once you get to the main game… Well, on the official forums, SLPr0 wrote up a nice overview of some of the ways in which the plot could have been so much more (included after the break). Head on over to the forum thread (Literary Criticism in Regards to Flopped Plot Opportunities and the Human Noble Origin) to read the ongoing discussion.

And, of course, there’s Yahtzee’s take on Dragon Age, which is, as with all his Zero Punctuation videos, hilarious and spot on in that scathing-yet-there’s-a-bit-of-truth-there kind of way.

Continue reading Dragon Age plot flops and Zero Punctuation →

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).
Games, Games Research, Life

Bay Area

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Last week and this week I’m in the SF Bay Area, visiting family and working with some Stanford folks.

The LIFE (Learning in Informal and Formal Environments) Center is a collaboraiton between some profs at UW and Stanford and some researchers at SRI. As a student of the Center, I applied for a one week exchange thing they have for students at one uni to visit a student at the other uni.

Anyway, I’ve been working with Sarah Walter who is looking at collaboration in Lord of the Rings Online while raiding, which is basically the same thing I’m doing except that I frame mine more as activity system description and I look at World of Warcraft.

We’re pretty much dealing with the same data, though, from two different games, so it made sense to collaborate on a paper and some conference presentations. Yay!

It’s slow going, and technically, LIFE is paying for like 5 days of working but we’ve been at it off and on for a week and half now. Got a todo list now, and looking forward to get back to Seattle with new direction.

Today, my bro and I are meeting another Stanford student, Sarah Lewis, to go visit the California Academy of Science. Fun!

Later tonight, we’re going to Chris’s to play Battlestar Galactica the boardgame that Grey got. Last weekend, we met and played some boardgames, too. Ghost Stories and Cuba.

Yesterday, I met up with TL Taylor and Casey O’Donnel for lunch. That was cool. This week, GDC is happening in SF. Tomorrow, I’ll probably be meeting some guildies for dinner.

Robin was here with me last week, and our first two meals were at In-n-Out and Pizza Chicago. 🙂

Games, Humorous

Fallout 2 dialog for dumb characters

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This quarter I’m taking a class on hope in apocalyptic futures as portrayed in three media: film (Children of Men), text (The Road), and digital game (Fallout 2).

For my final project (it’s a light class), I decided to create a YouTube video showing off the humorous dialog a character with low intelligence has with various NPCs in Fallout 2. 🙂

Games

Mirror’s Edge in 2D!

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Mirror’s Edge 2D

Follows the tradition of making Flash games out of cool FPS games, like Portal: The Flash Version.

Games

Awesome fan made Half-Life 2 movie series

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Escape From City 17 – Part One

Holy moly.

Games, Life

It’s snowing!… Also, just updated WordPress…

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Hopefully nothing breaks outside my home and hopefully nothing breaks on my online home. 🙂

I also changed themes… will try this one out for a while. I never liked how my old one (Stardust) made the Google Reader widget too small to read. This new theme (Fluid Blue), however, doesn’t support tags (just the old school categories). hrm…

Games, Life

A bunch of short game reviews

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I took a week break after finishing a paper for submission to E-Learning.

(That sounds more impressive than it is, I think… Constance S. is guest editing a games issue to come out next Spring and invited me to submit something, but what I submitted was completely out of left field, focusing on data visualization and going into some detail on how one could do the same–including SQL statements and shit like that–so I have no idea if it’ll get accepted.)

Anyway, for the past week (and honestly, while writing that paper, so more like for the past 3 weeks), I’ve been playing a lot. Actually, I think there might be a relationship to my productivity and how much I play… not inverse as would be assumed… I think when I play a lot, I write a lot… maybe… I would have to start tracking it to see if that is true. Or maybe it’s that I play many games rather than sticking with one game… restlessness or something.

But, again, anyway, for the past bit I’ve played many different games, so thought I’d post real quick impressions for some of them:


  • Fallout 3 – excellent, of course, but it could have been better. As I mentioned a month ago, some of the humor is gone, as are cool random encounters, but the world is amazingly realized and depressing. The ending sucked ass. First, it heavy-handedly forced me to sacrifice myself or another human to save the wasteland, which didn’t make any sense at all given how much Rad-X and Rad-Away I had on me, not to mention that I had a Supermutant buddy with me who is immune to radiation sickness. Then after I died, the game ended with a really lame narration without any nuance (or, actually, way too subtle a nuance) instead of detailed narration of the different factions I impacted (like in Fallout 1 and Fallout 2).
  • Tomb Raider: Underworld – For some reason I liked Legend but not Anniversary. I liked Underworld, too. Maybe too much combat in Anniversary? The Crystal Dynamics version of Lara generally moves and feels spot on.


  • Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir – the second expansion is significantly different. Mask of the Betrayer had some really good writing and dialog/narrative that started to echo Planescape good. Storm of Zehir, on the other hand, is more of an old-school, wander around an overhead map type of game. That part of it was actually pretty cool and it sort of filled my desire for that kind of game that Fallout 3 didn’t have. On top of that, the ending narration and how it dynamically changed based on my impact to the world was exactly what was missing from Fallout 3.
  • Neverwinter Nights 2 user modules:
    • Harp & Crysanthemum – Amazing. Just part one is done, unfortunately, but quite well done.
    • Subtlety of Thay – Also amazing, maybe a little less so, but way, way longer, but buggy as hell with the new 1.21 version of NWN2. Wait a bit for the author to fix it. I couldn’t finish chapter 2 due to game stopping bugs. But beforehand, I was imagining this module as a TV series. It’s easily on par with any of the official campaigns.

I also just started playing Tabula Rasa, which will be free to play starting Jan 10 since they are closing the servers in Feb. 🙁 It’s pretty good so far. I like FPS combat in a MMOG. Also, I found a quest that makes you have to decide whether to be greedy/shady or lawful. Nice. A step in the right direction.

I just got Left4Dead and Wrath of the Lich King, too. Xmas break will be fun.

But I also have to finish, finally, my dissertation proposal draft, which I’m hoping will be done by the end of the month.

Games, Games Research, Life

I bought the WoW expansion

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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.