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.

]

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. 🙂