One thing I was disappointed about was that I had to get rid of a bunch of color images from Leet Noobs when I rewrote it as a more general audience book.
I have no idea why it took so long for me to think of this, but I’ve collected the images from my original dissertation and put them all in one PDF. Here you go: Leet Noobs images!
The book has the cover illustration, though, so maybe it’s all a wash.
Leet Noobs can be found on Amazon and Barnes&Noble, but I have an extra and am offering it to someone who can’t afford it but really wants to read it in return for a review.
John Carter McKnight reviewed it already on his blog, btw. It’s glowing! And kind of amazing how he can distill some things that I I should have made more explicit. AND amazing how well he can interleave reflections on his own work into the review.
Two weeks ago, my book came out on Amazon!
Leet Noobs: The Life and Death of an Expert Player Group in World of Warcraft
Actually, I got it a while back; signed the contract some time in April I think. The draft was due to Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, the series editors, on August 1. Colin just emailed me and a Peter Lang Publishers person that they think it’s good to go!
I just need to reformat, edit it a bit for informal/formal consistency, move footnotes to endnotes, etc. (It comes from my dissertation but is different in some significant ways.)
Working with Colin and Michele has been a total joy. (very smooth and similar experience to publishing something in their journal E-Learning)
After the whole process is over, I’ll do a write-up of it here. Just as with getting a PhD, how to get a book published is completely opaque to people who’ve never done it before, yet everyone who’s done it doesn’t seem to realize that at all…
Here’s the PDF (4MB) of my dissertation:, submitted to the graduate school on September 2, 2010:
Now to make it into a book…
In case you want to check out the slides I’ll be using tomorrow:
I’ll be recording the presentation to be uploaded later and a version with my voice will be uploaded to slideshare later. Sorry, no live streaming! 🙁
Just added this to the Leet Noobs page to reflect my change in emphasis:
[Edit Feb 13, 2009:
I’ve moved slightly away from thinking about WoW as a two phase (two stage) process. I mean, it is helpful and maybe ethnographically correct–as in some players see it that way–but the line between the stages is very blurred, especially for anyone leveling up a character after their first one.
I wrote a paper that started out as me describing these two stages more. I intended to include things such as chat data and video analysis to illustrate the stages better, but I didn’t have time to do that kind of analysis for the deadline, so instead I turned it into a “how did ethnography help me” kind of paper, which seemed to make sense since it was for a special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures on ethnography and games.
Well, the reviewers, editor, and I eventually agreed that I should reframe what I submitted into a description of the social dimensions of expertise found in both stage one and stage two of character development. It’s a much better paper now after the review process than it started out as, but I’m afraid it reads a little hacked together (because it *was* a little hacked together!). Yet, I’m happy to say that it will, in fact, be appearing in TWC this Spring! 🙂
As for “Leet Noobs,” I am considering using it as the title for my dissertation, which, at this point, looks like it will be recasting the various publications I have through the lens of Actor-Network Theory/Distributed Cognition (maybe some Activity Theory thrown in, to boot) and be done by December 2009.
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Also, NSF was here last Friday and Saturday for a visit to the LIFE Center while “us kids” were doing our grad student inter-SLC conference. One of the NSF folks really digged my poster and requested it be sent to him. We ended up sending him the charts one instead since it has more data on it. 🙂
