Big shout out to Kelly Bergstrom (probably the *coolest* friend I have, @kellybergstrom) and Florence Chee (grats on Loyola, Flo!, @cheeflo) for inviting me to be on a panel with them, Chris Paul (no, not the bball player, @real_chris_paul), and Thorsten Busch (no one pronounces his name right, @digitalethics) for the Canadian Communication Association and the Canadian Game Studies Association (which I’m having a surprisingly difficult time finding a current url for…) about current issues in game studies. (How many links can I embed in a sentence?) It was a supreme honor to be on a panel with such luminaries, and I hope attendees got out of it as much as I got out of it.
These two conferences were back-to-back during Canada’s annual Congress, which is sort of a massive gathering of all Canadian humanities and social science associations to simultaneously hold their annual meetings at the same place. It was crazy awesome. The dorm room at University of Victoria really sucked, though.
Anyway, below’s my portion of the panel for CCA, a presentation called Death by Chocolate-Covered Broccoli: A Case Where Gamification Killed Gaming Practice, on how rating fight performance, adding guild achievements for raid progression, gearscore, etc. — IE, rewarding particular activities (IE, gamification in its worst form) — led to the destruction of my WoW raid group. I basically gave the same talk at CGSA (but delivered and covering slightly different things since the audience were gamers), titled Massive Meltdown, but I’m not including the slides here, since they’re almost identical…