Life

Vegas

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So, I went to Las Vegas this past weekend for a mini-con or gathering of some of my guild members. 🙂

It was great to meet some of them for the first time. We stayed at the Excalibur (which features tons of dragon-themed paraphernalia even though I don’t remember a single dragon in the Arthurian Tales) and, of course, we checked out the Tournament of Kings show which featured armored dudes jousting and fighting each other with swords, maces, flails, and shields. DRAGON! DRAGON! Huzzah!

The rest of the time was spent eating (breakfast buffet at Mandolay Bay was pretty good), gambling (I just watched mostly, but Craps and Roulette looked fun), playing card games (San Juan and Lost Cities), watching a pilot for a TV show called Chuck (about a directionless nerd who is sent an email that imprints on his brain the totality of the CIA’s secrets and actually pretty good in how it parodies at popular culture), going to an arcade (Gameworks, where almost all the shooter games had broken guns), and hanging out at the pool (where it was 3 feet deep everywhere which makes it rather difficult to actually swim and means that the 4 lifeguards were just there to make sure the drunkards didn’t do something made only possible by being drunk).

Anyway, fun all around!

Games Research

Joystick101 » Wonderville: A Viable Model For Online Educational Games?

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Joystick101 » Wonderville: A Viable Model For Online Educational Games?

It would have been great if OMSI had money enough to take on a project like this (plus the narrative to bind it together)… I wonder where Science Alberta got the funding… or they like a government org or what?

Academia, Games Research

Game on: World of Warcraft – The Daily of the University of Washington

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Game on: World of Warcraft – The Daily of the University of Washington

Here’s another story I was quoted in regarding online games. This one is from The Daily, the UW newspaper. The previous one was the Seattle PI. 🙂

Of course, the interview lasted like one and a half hours and the little bits I’m quoted as saying only barely touch upon what the conversation was about. Things I would have liked to see expanded upon are that social worlds, whether online or off, represent different places people can spend their time in, build relationships, negotiate, learn, resolve conflicts, and generally grow as people. The article has a slight bent on looking at game addiction, but the more interesting topic, I think, is after acknowledging that, yes Virginia, people are addicted to living, what kinds of work can we do or what does this new social space allow?

Humorous

Intelligent Artifice: This is why I don’t have a Wii

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Intelligent Artifice: This is why I don’t have a Wii

Humorous video about the life of Miis.

Games Research

Two money making ideas for MMOG companies…

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Thought of these last night while trying to fall asleep…  No idea how viable they are but…

1.  You know how monsters in WoW have loot tables?  As in they have a 1% chance to drop this, a 2% to drop that, etc…  What if people could spend real world money to up their chances of certain items?  Maybe have a premium account which comes with better chances…  The people who have regular accounts or maybe even free accounts still have a chance… just not as good a chance, so people with lots of time on their hands still can compete with those with lots of money on their hands…

2.  Completely unrelated, what if those with a premium account don’t suffer durability loss from death?  How much would some raiders pay for that?

Games

LotRO

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Yep… I’ve been playing Lord of the Rings Online this past week and think it is pretty awesome.  My subscription to WoW runs out in June… not sure if I will be renewing.

Part of the reason I am finding it fun is that a couple of my WoW guildmates are playing, and I enjoy hanging out with them.  Not sure yet if our social network will sustain the game, but I pre-ordered so will be playing for at least a month.

Academia, Games Research

Well, that’s nice…

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Last week, my advisor, Jen Stone, announced she would be leaving UW…  I can still take general exams this quarter but need a new advisor come next school year.  Joy.

Here’s the third part of a great series on the history of computer role-playing games.   And commentary.

Academia, Life

Spring break in Sunnyvale

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A couple of weeks ago, Robin and I went down to Sunnyvale to visit family and high school friends. We ended up hanging out with Gray and Song Gong quite a bit. We also saw my brother Max and his new fiance Nancy, Chris and Hilary (who are getting married on Mother’s Day), Ian and Laura (already hitched), et. al. Oh, and Song Gong’s awesomest dog evah, Daphne. On Thursday, Gray and I drove over to visit Ted and Denine (got married two days ago!) since I wasn’t going to be able to make it to their wedding, while Robin visited a high school friend of hers Liz who recently got a job she likes much more than her last one (grats!). We also saw Robin’s brother Brian, sis-in-law Kelly, and their daughters Jessica and Natalie who are amazing. Okay, enough with the shout-outs… on to the stuff.

We went to a bunch of restaurants including a really good deep dish pizza place in Palo Alto, Pizz’a Chicago. I’d been there before (and they used to serve yards of hard cider) but for some reason this last time, I thought the pizza was fantastic. On the first Saturday we went to La Costena for their burritos (as featured in Sunset like… a decade ago) which wasn’t as good as we remember (from like… a decade ago). On the second Saturday we went to a Shanghai restaurant with my parents and I had a bunch of dishes I’d never had before. It was also very very good.

I bought three DS games while down there, Phoenix Wright 2, Final Fantasy III, and Hotel Dusk. I’ve been playing FF3 fanatically for the past week…

Song Gong lent us Arrested Development which we watched when we had downtime (almost done with the first season now), and Gray lent us Fullmetal Alchemist which I’ve been watching fanatically while playing FF3 (finished on Friday… not sure I like the 2nd half).

While down there, my parents had me update and do routine maintenance on their computers. Only… it hadn’t been done for like 2 years, so I ended up spending hours downloading Windows updates, getting new virus protection and ad-aware installs in place, troubleshooting various problems (each of 4 computers had a different set of problems!), and installing a web camera for my mom to use Skype with her brother in Rochester.

Oh, and last but not least, Lisa and I co-authored a book chapter, taking turns working on it via email. Heh. It’s called “Play my way: The politics of cooperation in massively multiplayer online games” and will appear in Play and politics. Douglas Thomas, Joshua Fouts and Shawna Kelly are the editors. (I wonder if that’ll bump my WoW paper up on Doug Thomas’ Games and Culture journal’s review list.) A draft version can be found on Lisa’s site.

Photos of our Sunnyvale trip coming soon!

Life

Three cool webtools

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Last year I spent quite a bit of time working with a set of php tools to create a public web page that had feeds from a bunch of different blogs. This year, it’s even easier with WebJam. For example, check out this webjam I created that shows the blogs of all my teacher ed students. Now I just have to encourage them to actually generate some content. 😛

Another cool tool I found recently is Macro.scopia. It generates graphs and other visual representations of data. One could, for example, recreate the VisualThesaurus using it or create an interactive search cloud… Takes a bit getting used to their site, though…

And finally, I must have mentioned this before, but I LOVE Google Reader. Half the reason why I don’t post as much here as I could is because I’m reading news instead.

Life

MusicTonic

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MusicTonic

A web mashup for music images and videos categorized by genre.

sporadic ramblings of a gamer in academia