Terra Nova

A dissertation distilled into a single blog post /cry

Hello, and thank you for the opportunity to share my research with you. Hopefully, this post isn’t a tl;dr moment for you.

I recently defended my dissertation at the University of Washington College of Education, and, as you can guess from this post on Terra Nova, it was on learning in MMOGs. Specifically, I looked at the change in raiding practice of a group of World of Warcraft players as I played alongside them for 10 months. Of particular note, my data is from the early days of WoW, spanning the life and death of a Molten Core (and later BWL and AQ40) group that came together out of a multi-guild alliance. We were on a role-play server, which I think is important to note, given the group’s shared values and goals of hanging out and having fun over and beyond itemization and progression. That said, eventually, some players did become more loot focused over time, and the fragmentation of individual motivations and group values definitely contributed to its eventual dissolution. Also of particular note, when my raid group started, theorycrafting was still a budding practice, and we did not have access to threat meters and other popular third-party add-ons that today’s WoW raiding relies on. In fact, a major section of my dissertation chronicles the change in the various material and other resources that were assembled for raiding once the first threat meter came out in Spring 2006.

Please Welcome Guest Author Dr. Mark 'Danger' Chen!

Mark and I have collaborated on a number of things these last few years, and now that he has finished his doctoral work (woot!), I invited him to guest author and summarize his work for us.  Mark is another virtual worlds researcher who relies on traditional anthropological methods to understand social dynamics and learning.  He's a great researcher and an extremely passionate gamer.

Using ethnographic methods, Mark Chen focuses on teamwork, communication, and expertise development in situated gaming cultures. Currently, Mark is a post-doctoral scholar at the UW Institute for Science and Mathematics Education, working with computer science folks to study player learning through science and math games that take advantage of massive amounts of computational and human power. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington, College of Education, looking at the practices of a group of gamers in the online game World of Warcraft. Prior to doctoral work, Mark was the webmaster and a web game developer for the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland, OR. He holds a B.A. in Studio Art from Reed College and grew up in the Bay Area as a child of the 80s. You can read more about Mark on his blog...

Facebook is taking over the global economy

Well, not quite. But Facebook has 500m users and its virtual currency, the Facebook Credit, is soaking into real-world markets like syrup into a pancake. Pretty soon it will be everywhere and we won't see it any more. But we'll taste it, yes we will.

PS I am heading to Germany for a 10-day trip so, unless others get itchy fingers, the blog may doze a bit.

Shocking, Interesting, True.

The other day, a reporter asked me whether video games are art, and thus the waves of Roger Ebert's lately weakly retracted opinion to the contrary crash lap upon our shores. If Roger Ebert can offer a strong opinion just for the heck of it, so can we! So let's dive in.

Here's my take: Good art is shocking, interesting and true.

Shocking: It takes you out of your normal mode of thinking. It forces consideration and reflection. 

Interesting: It draws you in. You find yourself unable or unwilling to ignore it.

True: It accords with a proper understanding of the human condition. It pierces the shell of your biases and immaturities, allowing you to come upon thoughts that are neither lies nor myths but rather subtle and profound insights. 

Are video games capable of being shocking, interesting, and true?

Re-rolling Terra Nova

  I have recently taken over shipwright duties (with greglas' help), re-skinned TN, and added some social media bling.  You should expect to see some more changes in the next day or two.  Perhaps more widgets (like a library, links to papers, conference calendar, etc. etc. etc.)

As TN lives on Typepad, this is really only a superficial change of template and layout.  If you have any comments/suggestions/feedback, please post below!

Flipping the switch to the new design now!

(image is a Wordle of our RSS feed)