Off to Games Learning Society in Madison, WI!

After spending a week at home, recovering from jet lag, playing some games, going to a couple of parties, and working, I’m off to another conference. This one is focused specifically on games and education and is hosted by the Games Learning Society group at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Basically, it’s the Constance and Kurt crew, plus some other profs (formerly Jim Gee) and their students, afaik.

One thing that’s cool is that a bunch of Terror Nova, the World of Warcraft guild run by the Terra Nova blog peeps, will be there and we’re planning a LAN party on Thursday night at a bar with terrace seating. πŸ™‚

I met a bunch of them last year, but I was relatively new to the guild. While I haven’t played much this past year, recently I did start raiding with them (Kara100 was fun!), and it’d be great to strengthen my link of faces to the screen names.

Another cool thing is that I’m presenting the same expertise topic at GLS as I did at ICLS just last week in Utrecht, The Netherlands. This time, however, instead of a poster, it’s a roundtable session (with a bunch of concurrent roundtables featuring WoW research going on. I’m bummed I won’t see everyone else’s stuff, but I’m excited with what I’ll be doing.

I worked for the last two or three days on paper figures of a raid group in the Ragnaros fight. Photos are on my camera at home, and I forgot to upload them last night, so you’ll have to wait til after my session for cool photos of the diorama. But to give you and idea, below is a low-quality jpeg of one of the sheets that I printed out. While Robin and I were cutting them out last night we already learned a couple of tips to make them better. Alas, no time, but I’ll touch up the sheets with the modifications and post them here so you can make them if you want. πŸ™‚

Anyway, I’ll be blogging updates about the conference over the next few days. Then I’m off to San Jose for a month!



OMG, look at what I missed by a day!

Medieval Dutch city of Utrecht to host world game festival

I arrived in Utrecht on the 23rd. The Festival of Games ended on the 22nd! πŸ™

Greenland from the air

First issue of Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is out!

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research

There’s huge momentum for VW and online games research right now, I’m having problems deciding which to submit to, whereas just a few years ago, I was having problems finding something appropriate to submit to… I suppose that’s a good problem to have.

Participant list for In the Game workshop!

Announcing the participants!
via VKS Ethnography

One of them is me!

This is for a workshop on ethnography and games happening in conjunction with IR 9, the annual conference for the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR or AIR depending on who you ask).

Technorati Tags:

forum posts of the future!

Abyss & Apex : Fourth Quarter 2007: Wikihistory

This is hilarious! Usenet posts from the future regarding time travel and netiquette.

via Chris, who I will be gaming with for a month very, very soon. πŸ™‚

Sunday in Amsterdam

So, I got lots of sleep last night. About 12 hours!

Got up to find that I missed breakfast and the cool pastry shop nearby was closed on Sundays! πŸ™

Went across the street down a ways to a cafe and had a Dutch pancake with apple and a coffee. Quite nice, actually.



Thought of these while eating/waiting for the check:

  • The Netherlands will start to ban smoking in cafes and bars starting July 1… that’s like two days from now! I wonder what the people will do while waiting for their checks. It takes forever to get your check here. No more smoking… they’ll have to order more coffee…
  • The Dutch probably have really well-conditioned butts since they sit on bicycle saddles all the time.
  • The prostitutes and owners of the booths they rent could do a much better job at marketing their wares (whares?). For example, instead of plain tile, why not do some fancy mosaics in those booths? What about themed booths of some sort? Catholic school girl booth, nurse booth, etc. How about a free Dutch pancake with each trick?

See what you can come up with if you have lots of free time to let the mind wander while waiting for your bill?




Then went shopping in the museum plaza. Horrible photo above of the plaza. I’m trying to get copies of photos from others here who actually have their cameras with them and why there are so few photos of buildings so far.Β  Cool tulip vases at the Museum Shop.



Latest update from The Netherlands

On Friday I went to a couple of the morning sessions at ICLS.



It seemed odd to me that there was a lot of experimental or quantitative designs being presented. Or small comparison studies using quantitative measures to compare the two cases, I guess I mean. For example, one was comparing the use of computer mediated tools versus non-digital tools in a set of classrooms, studied using test scores as measures of success. Does that seem right to you? Not entirely to me.

(more on ICLS and photos of Utrecht/Amsterdam after the jump)

Continue reading Latest update from The Netherlands

Some photos from Thursday in Amsterdam

As I said in the last post, I went with ESTG (the Everyday Science and Technology Group–Phil Bell’s group pretty much) to Amsterdam. We broke up into three parties after visiting Puccini, a chocolate store (apparently, quite famous), and the Bloemenmarkt (flower market) together.







Some people went off the Anne Frank house, some to the Van Gogh Museum, and others who had been to those places before checked out the Red Light District. Then we all met back at the central plaza at 6:30. Turns out the Anne Frank house was closed for some special reason that day, and the Van Gogh folk decided to shop instead since there was so little time before the museum closed (and since we found a cool shop called Hanazuki apparently run by an artists’ collective by the same name). πŸ™‚

Then Giovanna and I stayed to try to find a cool shop we found on Tuesday and catch dinner in Amsterdam. The rest of them went back to Utrecht and got dinner over there.

The shop we found was open! Lots of cool little figurines and action figures designed by (street, urban, hip-hop, manga, skater culture) artists. Not sure how to describe it, but they’re pretty popular in magazines like Giant Robot.







Afterwards, Giovanna and I ate a hole-in-the-wall Chinese place, called Wing Kee, that was really quite good! [Edit: Looking it up on the web (now that I’m back in the States), one reviewer claims it’s the best Chinese restaurant in Amsterdam!]

OMG lots of stuff

but I’ll have to write about it in more detail later. Here’s a real quick summary:

  • I went with another student to Amsterdam on Tuesday while pre-conference workshops were going on. We mostly walked around the shopping district and downtown. We ended with the Red Light District and an Irish pub. It was pretty fun. The Red Light District was underwhelming, imho, but I think we went too early to see anything and it was broad daylight.
  • On Wed, attended the conference and then skipped out of the late afternoon stuff to sleep. Damn that jetlag. Went to dinner with a bunch of CoE folk including a few alums.
  • On Thursday, I was part of a presentation/poster session on expertise development in everyday contexts. I think it went well and I got lots of helpful feedback on my poster and ideas. Here’s a copy of the poster I used. Later, I’ll make a page on this site detailing the drafts and the eventual paper I’m writing based off the poster.

Chen Leet Noobs poster


  • Then the ESTG group went to Amsterdam again. πŸ™‚

sporadic ramblings of a gamer in academia