Glod'n'Epix

Digital Play and Identity, A World of Warcraft reader

Our book is out!

Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft® Reader: A World of "Warcraft" Reader

CFP: Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds

What: Journal, "Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds"

Deadline For Submissions:  1 May 2008

Details:

The Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds is a peer-refereed, international journal which focuses on theoretical and applied, empirical, critical, rhetorical, creative, economic and professional approaches to the study of electronic games across platforms and genres as well as ludic and serious online environments such as Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games and Second Life. The Journal aims at researchers and professionals working in and researching creative new media and entertainment software around the globe and seeks to document, harmonise, juxtapose and critically evaluate cutting-edge market trends, technological developments, as well as socio-cultural, political, economic and psychological concerns. It informs its readers about recent events such as conferences, and features long articles, short papers, poster abstracts, interviews, reports and reviews of relevant new publications, websites, virtual environments and electronic artefacts.

Contributions are invited from all fields of game studies research, design and development. We seek to provide a platform for vivid information interchange between academia and industry, between scholarship and professionalism, between theory, criticism and practice. Typical subject areas include

• Theory and criticism: e.g. narratology, ludology, philosophy, gender, race, identity, history (of and in games), rhetorical approaches, discourse analysis and semiotics, genre criticism and cultural studies
• Social and psychological concerns: e.g. (online) communities, participation, interaction, identity formation, networks, violence and addiction, emotion, children’s social behaviour, cognitive effects, e-learning and education
• Design issues: e.g. developments in 3D modelling, authenticity and realism, mimesis, screenwriting, sound effects, composition, static vs. moving image, cut scenes, background vs. foreground, multimodality, simulation and game engines
• Reception and production: e.g. ethnography, customer research, therapeutic and hazardous effects, serialisation, adaptation, franchising, commercial vs. serious games, transmediation, intermediality, artificial intelligence, and new literacy studies.

Submission deadline for publication in October 2008: 1st May 2008.

Please send your manuscript as a Word-file e-mail attachment to a.ensslin@bangor.ac.uk or e.muse@bangor.ac.uk.

Word limits:
Long articles: 4,000-6,000 words
Short articles: 3,000-4,000 words
Conference reports: 500-1,000 words
Reviews (books, websites, games and other relevant software) and interviews: 1,500-2,000 words

For questions on formatting and spelling, please consult the Intellect Style Guide: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/auth/links/StyleGuide.pdf and/or contact the Editors at a.ensslin@bangor.ac.uk.

For book reviews, please contact the Reviews Editor, Dr Matthew S.S. Johnson at matjohn@siue.edu.

Shake it...

The domain name going up in smoke coincided with a need to write insulting things about my place of work, so probably just as well. As usual, however, saved by Tom.

I have finally, finally started writing my deviance paper! It's astonishingly cathartic, and as usual has ended up being about something else. Think you are about to be hideously vilified? Think again, this paper is about how grief unintentionally occurs in games, how EULA deliberately encourage a lack of rules in this respect (no social rules excludes no-one), and how self-policing can work. I haven't got to the bit where evil players get thrown down the well - but, from the shape of this paper so far, it's unlikely to happen. Instead they get bracketed in the social harm section 'some players try to cause damage, but tribes shut them down again'.

Specifically, this paper is not about cheating, gold farming or bullying. It's about causing harm in a social context. Because this is so difficult to identify, and exists on such shifting criteria, there is very little that can be done to prevent it, and very little that exists to bar it. But, my lovely tribey players come to the rescue here, with a myriad of small social constructs, all with their own sets of invisible rules. And over that hovers the exclusion button. Fuck up, and you are /gquit and /ignore. There are very few ways back from this since it is so total in form. Time and again, I've seen players make that descision; possibly because it is easy to do. Once a player is ignored, the person doing the ignoring doesn't see the repercussions. Exclusion is total.

Key to this is also reputation. Standards of behaviour, again, are really difficult to define. Every group has different ones and part of the negotiation online is finding where you fit into these myriad structures. One person's meat is another's poison (with thou shalt/not steal herbs from under another's nose' as the prime example of how these negotiations clash). Make a mistake, even if you don't see it as one, and you can end up forever losing access to a series of groupings. I've seen this as well - reputation really does have effect. This is also one of my core arguments about behaviour. We can't see the standards of others, and there are no moral rules to the game, so very often, players grief each other absolutely without meaning to. I've got livid when one player has repeatedly yelled at me to heal them, but in battlegrounds ordering people around is totally normal;  so where is the crossover, and is the player yelling at me griefing in a social context simply because it winds me up, because their social vlaues are on a different scale to mine (it is okay to scream at healers in Bgs because everyone does it), or because they actually want to upset me enough to leave the game (surely, they want to be healed... not to piss me off...).

The most thorny issue turns out to be the 'Don't try and pull a fast one'.  I think this comes under 'players with agendas'. I don't really have time to research this, but do players with alterior social agendas do worse off than those who simply want to get along and not manipulate their fellows? My argument at present is that multiple chat channels, as well as allowing hidden text, also mean that gossip travels at the same speed as a conversation that may be in process. In some ways this both enforces and negates deviant social activity - on the one hand, people are deconstructing you as you speak. On the other, that's why it's a good idea not to. In the past I've seen players try to force other players out by using channels to disenfranchise each other - the 'oh, didn't you know we were doing this', when arrangements are clearly being made on a non visible channel. At the same time, the use of silence (also very very difficult to prove as non-verbal communication goes into a whole new ballpark online) is one of those things that is aggressively used by players. However, if the tribe finds out, this sort of thing seems to make them collectively livid, because it is seen as a threat to them all (disloyal, threatening an individual member). The three or four times I have seen this happen, with players who really are out to cause social grief, the backlash against them has been impressive.

Loc Zero Gygax

A rather belated post about Gary Gygax, who died last week. Having read his obituary here:

I'm afraid I couldn't resist my own rather poor attempt at a headline in semi-ill taste.

REF: Wow and Wowwiki

How wow wiki is the second largest wiki in the world...

Eludamos; Gender Bending in Online Games

My paper on why players like to cross-gender their avatars in MMORPGs  is out in this issue of Eludamos

Real Boys Carry Girly Epics

Runescape Protest

I've been playing Runescape recently, mainly to do with eudcational content research and 'the big term' that I presented yesterday and talks about how players learn in MMORPGs. However, this also takes me back (and around) more social behaviour questions, since the set up in Runescape is very different to other MMORPGs I've looked at recently.

Runescape is primarily a solo MMORPG; you can assist people, but it's a lot less easy than the grouping systems seen elsewhere. Experience is also gain per skill, not as an overall level; something which feeds into the educational content stuff since people are obsessed with getting the higher levels (they take pictures and download them onto forums, to show what they have done, for example. There is also permadeath - when a player dies they lose everything bar three pieces of kit (later this level can be increased) and are teleported back to where they are hearthed.

This means a couple of things. Firstly, at early levels, people help each other by donating kit a lot. As a lowbie obsessed with farming and chopping down trees, my visible level is actually not very high, and since I chose a name that is vaguely human sounding and easy to type (unlike the majority of people who have a collection of numbers and letters sowed together), so it's pretty common to be hailed with 'Apellis is a N00b', or simply 'noob'. Having said that, this term is used a lot more affectionately. 'are u a noob?' is a pretty common question which is often immediately followed by aid - usually gifting, clearing a dangerous area or offering advice; 'make arrows and sell them'. 'lvl strength' and 'don't go north yet' havebeen the most different so far.

Communication. The world is a lot younger in player attitude, and the conversations are much, much more primitive than elsewhere. A common conversation starter is 'lvls?' (What are your levels?'), with the proviso of them applying to whatever you are doing at the time. There are a lot of static points - farming patches, mines and fishing spots where conversation takes place. Usually this is pretty friendly, but it is also wildly unsafe at times. Jagex have incredibly strong censorship ('phone' and 'email' being amongst their banned words). There is a dungeon devoted entirely to answering security questions about your account, and the tutorial is almost as much about protecting your password as it is about learning to play the game.  The players however, use real names both in their characters and when talking to each other; I heard two lads discussing meeting each other at footy (and directions on how to get there!), and conversations beginning 'who here is 14?'. I wonder if this is simply the demographic (it seems to be), but even so it is a real eye opener about how unsafe kids can be, despite the massively stealthed content about staying safe. Is this because the players feel at home in Runescape? I suspect it may be, but it is incredibly worrying that they are so open about their identity.

I also wonder if the lack of channels means that people are more forthcoming. There isn't a general channel in each zone (the zones all blend into each other anyway), so commuincation is very localised. However public chat is always going on wherever characters are stationary. This is still however, pretty basic 'I need spade' 'selling rune armour' 'why so many noobs here'. Linguistically, the communication is almost incomprehenisible to outsiders and non leet speakers; it really brings home the fact that a new language is evolving (or devolving, depending on how you feel about l33t).

Today, however, I spotted a moderator, and then checked out the wiki to see if there was any information on them. It turns out that the moderator I saw has come in for some fairly serious griefing, in this case in reponse to Runescape's attempts to sort out gold selling (which they do in ways almost as inventive as their attempts to protect their users - when was the last time you saw a gold seller thwarted by modelling balloons - LMAO). There's a good history of the game's development here. I suppose one way of looking at this is the 'it's going to happen if developers have their own visible IDs in the game', but at the same time it's a really strong example of player protest of an unpleasant kind, rather than say, the Gnome Tea Party.

This of course, makes me think...

Illusory Agency...

Our paper has been published in this month's Dichtung Digital (click on English and then Current Issue).

Illusory Agency in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines

Seems so odd that it was such a while ago that we started writing what sort of turned out to be a series of papers, all of which are on the cusp of being printed or published, and of course, that this is also the foundation of Justin's thesis, which will set forth a Taxonomy of Agency and re-examine this idea through various new definitions.

I've got the biggest...

At the moment I am speed writing a paper about gender that I really should have done a year ago and levelling a hunter with what appears to be largest breasts in the guild (yes, all the avies are exactly the same shape, but she has dark skin and it makes her look more contored than the anaemic dranaei). But, I actually rather like her overt sexuality, her daftly sexy jokes; 'Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Good. Bring plenty of butter and goblin jumper cables' and the way her hips swing so far to each side when she runs that I could easily cause mass casualties with my swords if they were real.

Grind

A sufficient definition?:

‘grind’ - a gaming term signifying repeated gathering of one object or completion of a task in order to ultimately facilitate the acquisition of another.

The first use of this that I have in print is TL Taylor's book Play Between Worlds, although I think her definition is slightly different.

comments appreciated.

The year in review

A friend of mine wrote in his new years resolutions this year that his main goal was that 2007 didn't suck quite as badly as 2008. I can't agree more.

January:  A fire, a fire is burning! Burning Crusade was released, and the first incident of  fuckwittery on the blog occured. My medication for terrible periods caused almost overnight weight gain.

Feburary: A Tale in the Desert. Our first really serious encounter with griefing and adverse play in MMORPGs, both here and in WoW. One of the strangest socially motivated games ever constructed, this spawned a lot of the future 'tribe' ideas that wouldn't really take root until August/September.

March: Part of the WoW haitus, I was stressed, unhappy and ill at ease, so took myself off the game for a while. Prompted by this, a large schism in the Elders, and the ATITD incidents, I started to compile my thoughts about aggressive social play in MMORPGs. How do we put social pressure on people, and how do individuals kick or manipulate the system in social ways? The work for the forthcoming Women and Games conference also lead to the 'playing girls is normal' ideas that I am currently writing up for a Games and Culture special. 

April:  Work at SMARTlab started to kick in (although through a hiccough, my contract still hadn't appeared). The Women and Games conference was fantastic - beautiful weather, great company, a good pub, and the paper, which used a lot of work about why players choose the male/female identity that they do, and how they support this went well. I started to play Lord of the Rings Online with 'The Anvil Family'. Our tabletop campaign in the Buffy universe was both amusing and engrossing; although my character was, and still is, terminally unoriginal to play, this wasn't nessecarily a bad thing as venting about the arrogant middle classes was much needed.  Almost certainly the best month of the year.

May: Lots of work collating the new work, as well as my contract finally arriving - I think the relief at being not in the bank manager's office for once prompted a load more posts. Work became particularly keen on Second Life, and I also wrote a couple of papers about protest in virtual worlds as well as a ClubTECH article that is currently being redone. A friend with whom I had kept sporadic contact died and the second incident of blog fuckwittery occured when I was criticised for not posting about it. I was so angry about this lack of respect (and still am)  that BODITT pretty much died on its feet.

June: I was paid! and went on a much needed holiday to a beautful cottage in Devon.

July: I returned to WoW to find a welcoming, happy guild, and that with many people gone, a much more stable community had evolved. From this point on I just want to say I much I have appreciated the support and friendship of everyone in Final Chapter, who usually haven't realised what wonderful friends they have been over the following period.

August: Thank you to Tanya for allowing me to stay at her house, write like crazy, and walk every day in the local park. I drank a lot of coffee, our raiding alliance collapsed when the co-guild imploded, and JP (my co-writer) won the scholarship for his PhD.  I wrote the basis for the tribes idea and liked it a lot - most of the research periods of the next four months have been spent doing this.  Ringbearers was drafted and I put together my sections of the joint Routledge work, which had come back with serious changes needed to the direction.

September: I played Scribe for the first time - a wonderful character and very much fun to play. We put the first proposal for the LOTRO anthology together and sent it off. It was rejected on the first instance, so (see December).  DIGRA was awful, Tokyo - never ever again, and the whole thing made me seriously ill for three weeks afterwards with a lung infection.

October: Leverhulme was rejected, promising researcher was rejected, two papers were rejected. I was still ill at the event, I think, which made the energy needed to crew an event demanding we went outside every ten minutes nigh on impossible.

November: My BSG paper was accepted. SafeSPACES went in. The 'reality' bid took form but then fell over when it became clear how much planning in advance we needed. In the last weekend of the month I played Scribe on a wonderful wonderful event, as well as starting a thrid tabletop campaign with Runner - another idea that really took root with a strong group. However work was still struggling to out and this was a pretty flat month workwise overall.

December:  SafeSPACES was rejected. My war book proposal finally went in, and a notebook started to grow of subsequnet potentia additions. I wrote  approx 17 000 words in three weeks on the ClubTECH book - hence no blogging! The second LOTRO proposal went in - a lot more solid this time and with writers commited. I got involved with a big to start a UK DiGRA chapter. Terrible news from a friend and a regularly ropey festive period ended the year.

Other things:

I got randomly called a witch in a shop. My reply surprised me

My cat ran away then came back three weeks later after we had finished the process of mourning her. She was a mere shadow of her former self but is now back to her yowling self and sadly, just as annoying as before.

I was given a bonsai, which is a joy to keep.

'On this one I have no Clue'

Unfortunately, I turned on the radio this morning to catch the episode of Crossing Continents in Radio 4.

Radio with an agenda can be terribly depressing when the agenda happens to be one so radically different from your own. The continent crossed was, I think, the online one. The jovial, but of course, bemused presenter introduced us to a number of facts, including that one in four people had created an avatar of themselves last year, that 3/5 children under 5 used the internet, and so on. He then wandered into an internet cafe in Soeul - 'an underground, smoky room sourrounded by computer screens and refrigerators selling soft drinks, noodles and other fast food'. Three groups of people were interviewed:

3 young men playing a racing game as a team
The only young woman (in 'a woolly hat'), who was playing a casual game about cleaning your house as fast as you could
A young man playing (at which point the expert brought along said 'I don't recognise this one, hand on a moment'). World of Warcraft. The interveiwer asked the expert (after struggling in a faintly amused voice to say 'MMORPG') what he knew about this game because 'it's very hard to understand what's going on'. The expert said 'on this I have no clue'.

The impression we were left with was then of course - geeks playing competitive, trigger happy games, a lone girl (perhaps the only girl gamer in Korea!), quite obviously a badly dressed = socially inept one, playing a 'pink' game, and one person playing a game that was so incomprehensible and odd that it couldn't be described or recognised.

Previously, the presenter asked if the players were not getting outside - instead they were running  around in  these virtual worlds instead. The expert replied that a lack of spacein Korea draws people to  games, stressing their multitasking approach to playing, chatting and socialising, as well as the fact that the games could give 'instant gratification' over ten minutes.

I'm so glad we have such measured, up to date reports on the state of gaming.

In which there is a pause...

For most of last month I was writing a book, so hence the excuse for no blogging and no (social life, ability to say anything other than mmm0hmm, or if I was playing 'yup, I've got it now') work worth really writing about. I also put in the proposal for my own book, but haven't heard back from the publishers yet, which is frustrating because last time my mail got misplaced because it is a non acamdeic address, so I'm slightly paranoid that it's been lost again. We also wrote two large bids, one of which, after a horrible guild crisis, I am even more passionate about than I was before.

I absolutely despise the festive season so will be on holiday avoiding it again in the most beautiful holiday let I've found so far (the one in Devon might also have been a contender, but sadly the people running the place have decided not to do it anymore) looking out over the harbour mouth to the River Blyth. From the huge floor to ceiling window on one wall, you can see the tide coming in and going out through the revetments.  Apparently there is also some talk of swimming in the sea and then a pint in The Bell (presumably to add to the chance that you will keel over from shock to the system - immerse it in the North Sea, then flood it with alcohol!), which is something that the village regards as traditional. Anyway, it is a needed break, so probably not too much posting until into the New Year.   

I should never have shown you how to do this

Fern and Philip play the DS

Patrick Stewart and Julie Walters play the DS

The Ball Family play the DS

The DS... old people, daytime telly watchers and smart actors like it...why not you!?

Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I

All the BSG podcasts in one handy place

REF: Links to wargame papers

http://www.movesinstitute.org/~zyda/pubs/YerbaBuenaAABooklet2004.pdf

Theatres of War

Aieegh!

Went away for the weekend to an old favourite haunt - even got to see some relatives. Came home to find - limited internet connection, the wireless screwed and work insane! Did I miss something?

However I have a bonsai to look after now. It is very beautiful.

Come with me, sushi

100 amiga games in 10 minutes.

My arse it's 100 games - some shots are the same game on a different level, but a good video never theless. I recognise virtually all of them - but what's the one of the woman (?) stooping to pick something up whilst riding a horse?

Also, Zool in the Chupa Chups level... ^^

This is not a migraine! ARGH!

So, since I got over evil Tokyo vs lung disease vs pollutants  vs cold thing, I have had a headache every single day. I have tried:

new pillows

old pillows

new pillows in old places

old pillows in new places

water

not drinking

drinking (make it stop, make it stop!)

getting a different type of headache from the drinking, on top of the actual one

 

ignoring it

taking painkillers

not taking painkilllers

sleeping

leaving the window open

being warm

being cold

more water

fruit juice

no fruit juice (the acids)

no cheese (the dairy product vs everything argument)

neck massage

beating my neck with a stick to try and get it to loosen up

 

walking

ignoring it

suffering!

Concluding that I am STILL ill.

grrr stupid neck lock lack of water Tokyo sickness bastard!!!

I am NEVER EVER going back to that bloody place.

NEVER!

Cannons to the left...

So I finished my proposal today - get it in writing - I actually did some of my 'own' work this week! I'm not very optimistic, simply because every single proposal I have ever written has been rejected, and because there seems to be a cycle of 'don't be stupid, why would we want 'your' work?!' going on at the moment. I keep getting to the post to find more rejections in it, but these things are swings and roundabouts - last year virtually everything (mainly abstracts, not proposals) was accepted. A big funding thing that work have put me in for with the fantastic Celine is also due for its results, and I'm more optimistic on that one (other people rewrote it after me!). If that goes through I can start thinking seriously about projects rather than lumps. The whole thing is designed to build on my social interaction work as well, which needs work but I still have hope in. Anyway...

Downgrade!

I've slightly changed the account options on the weblog site - meaning a loss of bandwidth and some features. I don't think either will actually affect the blog (it doesn't use anything particualrly smart, including it's user, obviously, and it doesn't eat bandwidth, unlike it's user, who eats more than she should), but if they do, please comment below!

Good News for No 1. Evull

Finally, I am over my cold. The good news was that it helped me lose rather a lot of weight, the bad being that it took a huge amount of time to get better. I spent all of last week at work for the pHd week, listening to and giving presentations. None of my amazon books have arrived - so all my work in progress feels rather unsubstanciated at the moment (some might say, without focus or point), in fact I am waiting for about eight parcels at the moment so am rather hoping that one day soon an overladen postperson will collapse on my doorbell trying to carry everything.

My article in Anglofiles was published. there are a couple of sweeping statements that could have done with removing, but the aim was to get a point across rather than go particularly deeply into the ideas expressed (mainly from a lack of space). I was originally asked, as I discuss in the article, to discuss how games can help boys get back into learning because of their interest, so the main thrust of the first section tries to put pay to this unconsciously limiting  statement, and hopefully the asperity with which I wrote my answer isn't too visible!

Other than that, I got rejected for a couple of other things, one - a book about warfare in games, which I was extremely dissapointed about. However, it was one of the papers that said 'all war is not simply FPS games, and the gist of the book was mainly FPS centred, so I think this is mainly why the paper didn't fit.

The proposal is sort of nearly ready. I realise that what with all the other research I've been doing, this has now been on hold for about four months since I planned it out. It's very stressful having so many other things and commitments to do that you haven't done any of your own 'real' world, especially when my supervision rates are so low at the moment, and I'm not teaching. Life gets in the way.

I'm going away for a long weekend after the event, which I'm also looking forwards to greatly - a super bunch of crew and the 'old school' group of players, although it's Wroxton - at this time of year we are going to FREEZE! As usual however, this means a good sense of time over the next couple of weeks - a networking evening tomorrow, a Second Life live exhibit tonight, and fingers crossed, some writing space at home.

DiGRA

Well, my DiGRA experience was pretty mixed.  Safe to say I will never, ever voluntarily go back to Tokyo again, and that I left with a cold that has set off my lung condition, so I've been alternatively hallucinating in a fever or simply lying choking my lungs up since I got back, whaled out of my head on the strongest antibiotics the doctor could convince me to have (I refused steriods again since that's what got me hospitalised with anaphalaxis last time). Viewed through this, it is relatively hard even to see the few highlights of the conference.

- I am a dreadful networker, and this time was no exception. Additionally, the group I was with didn't stay at the conference for the full five days as we had to leave on the last day itself. Ironically, after really steeling myself to go and talk to someone whose paper I really really enjoyed, I was called away to a meeting and never managed to even find them again.

- The questioning, particularly afterwards, on each and every paper, was very harsh, enough to considerably undermine my faith in my own writing.

- The conference was of course, a collosal money drain.

Overall I think it's lessons learned. It is of course, very difficult to know if people are asking questions because they want to point score, because they genuinely want to challenge you, or because they really do think what you said was fundamentally flawed. I feel that regardless, I let myself down here, maybe in simply listening too much and taking each comment collectively rather than as something that could be built on, but also because of  not being able to respond as well as I possibly could have. Maybe I was just unlucky.

I am still ill,  and it's usual for me to think things went badly rather than well, and people keep telling me it's the sickness talking, but overall I am bitterly dissappointed by my work and my collective performance throughout the whole thing.

DiGRA

So I'm presenting three papers, and talking briefly about Hardcore in the AGM. I'm still a bit baffled about how this happened, but am too busy preparing stuff (like um...new shoes) to really stop and consider this:

From Shock and Awe to Catch the Flag - How World of Warcraft Negotiates Battle (or, 'Why using the /spit emote is a really bad idea')

Historical Controversies in Digital Games (with Justin Parsler, Brunel University) (or 'War's Never Been so Much Fun')

Light Bearers, Free Elements and Bidding Farewell to Shortex - MMORPG Social Behaviours (as part of the MMORPG discussion panel) (or 'In which the author gets Tribal and sings the Isto song with great glee')

'Ahh... Unexpected Visitors...'

Musical chairs at the table of Moroes

What Goes Around...

I get asked odd questions at networking events. This is usually because I haven't explained something properly, people think I'm a freak and are trying to be polite, or are interested and just don't know how to frame the right questions. And why would they - this is a new field where I'm looking at something odd and eccentric, in a group surrounded by people doing the most extraordinary things. Last night, for example, I saw a woman with limited bodily motion jam music using her eyes and a special screen that picks up their movement. So the fact that I 'just' work with games and virtual worlds rather pales into insignificance, really.

However last night I was asked some really interesting odd questions which helped crystalise several thoughts for me.

I was asked two variations of 'how long do you spend in these worlds?', the answer using being random commentry about how my friends live in Sweden and London and Scotland and other places where we couldn't actually meet up for the evening (and yes, I have met some).

I was asked, did these people really talk to me? The answer is yes, we use voice chat, but also, people really do talk to each other - not about games but about their thoughts and lives. I explained the anecdote about 'the home of pork' again - how a mis-said phrase which was intended to convey national pride made us laugh, but how we corrected it through humour with no harm done. And how people talk beyond that to each other, quietly and sometimes anonymously, about things they couldn't speak face to face (there is a woman on one of our videos talking about how children do this in the ClubTECH environment, so it's a good bridge. It also happens to be true). And I told them how yes, people really do talk to me, through mails and conversations and comments and suggestions, but that this is primarily confidential, and whilst it strengthens group dynamics, it is also personal and not to be passed on.

I was asked 'Do games give Karma?'.

So I was tempted to say 'Yes, and you'll get yours!'. But my answer was yes, in long term play, you do get karma. A guild that helps people stays together, a guild that vies with itself falls apart. People who don't share, eventually end up alone. Negative behaviour is noted and people are ostracised if they practise it for too long. Memories are both long and short - harm done is remembered, yet people are easily forgotten if they slip off a list, forgiveness succeeds over retribution, kindness over vindictiveness.

...does that mean you are tribal?
Yes. We have alloted roles in a game, and we perform them. We live in small groups - very territorial ones in some cases. A successful group is ruled by alpha males and females, with clear supporting roles.There is internecine fighting for these roles, with challenges made and carried out. We know each other through our defined roles. We tend to move towards a single, collective goal (with several smaller goals along the way) - this might be a raid we work towards throughout the course of a week, or a piece of kit we gather for use by all. We war with other tribes - sometimes verbally, sometimes actually. We function well when we are not overpopulated. We have to hunt for the good food and medecines, and because not everyone can do this all of the time, we share the spoils.

Non verbal communication. What do you think?
Ahhh, well there's a paper....

Statics

Xfire's list of top games, stats, MMO's, developers &tc. Not sure how this is collected though (from Xfire users?). Never the less useful.

Strafing for Charidee

The debate over reclaimation in games goes on - this was something that ATITD had endless problems with - namely rows and rows of abandoned houses full of sweat shop machines that no-one could use. For Ancient Eygpt, it sure seemed industrialised in places. At the same time, these houses were also very ugly, and their sheer size coupled with their emptiness made the place feel barren most of the time; you almost expected to see tumbleweeds blowing past as you trudged over the hill to see yet another block of buildings with no one living in them, empty serpentariums and rabbit hutches, deserted looms and glass making tables. Anyway, the same thing seems to have been a problem in Star Wars Galaxies. Of course, once you have a house and then your account lapses, that's just an empty house taking up room that someone else might want. So this happened:

The effort focused on SOE's Star Wars Galaxies MMO, and a surplus of abandoned player-created houses "condemned" and slated for demolition by swooping TIE fighters. When the SWG community was given the chance to join in this "urban renewal," earning redeemable reward points, for the number of buildings they destroyed, Austin VP of development John Blakely was surprised by the response.

"Oddly enough, it was very well received; some players that hadn't been in the game for months came back to reclaim their property, re-activate their accounts and start playing the game again," he said.

Next, SOE offered to match the number of houses demolished with a donation to Austin Habitat for Humanity. "Using the money we raised blowing-up virtual houses and buildings to help build real homes was a no-brainer for us," said Blakely. "Austin Habitat for Humanity has done incredible work in the community, helping people find good homes, and our whole studio wanted to contribute to their efforts."

Clever - you make room for new development by getting rid of the property that isn't wanted with a specific charitable purpose as the core reason. And at the same time, old users come back to renew their subscriptions so that their houses don't get destroyed.

Serious Virtual Worlds

As a prelude to The Serious Virtual Worlds Conference, I will be speaking as part of Lizbeth Goodman's keynote here this evening, mainly talking about the changed role of women/women avatars in games. Then, on Friday, off to Brunel and doing opening things/chairing things here.

(Yup, Pete, looks like you are in luck with that hardback)

Scribe

So I solved the problem of what to wear by carrying my costume with me strapped to my bag, and changing halfway through the event. I had an absolutely wonderful time, really chilled out with nice people and good roleplayers. The event was a challenge without being an insurmountable challenge, and I got to play with about seven different ways of making herbs, patch people up, translate stuff, talk with spirits, laugh a great deal, meet new people and enjoy playing my new character greatly. Most of us got horribly bitten by mossies throughout the event, and not really thinking it would work (I get usually bitten a lot!) , I prepared an infusion from the herbs I had, washed it on both days and got bitten twice. And it smelled nice.

The ten days before Tokyo are now going to be very busy indeed - suddenly it has rushed up. I have three  formal presentations to write for the conference, and one for Wednesday night. I am also editing a journal in the middle of this, as well as trying to get my own proposal out to the interested. Scribing indeed :)

threee aye em...

Anyone having hte misfortune to have talked to me so far this week will know that I've been a bit work weird - ie. unable to communicate very clearly and seemingly in a permenant state of lost abstraction or kettle 'hurry up and boil you git' banging.  I got hit by a big unexpected deadline yesterday, one which fortunately I'd already spent the week and weekend working on, so was mostly in a state of readiness. However, I forgot something totally crucial yesterday as I went into a crazy incessant state of mailing people, cajolling answers from others, and writing what I think ended up as 8 different people's bibliographies.

The thing I tend to forget, is that SMARTlab works very closely with research institutes in the US. And that people are often on the other side of the world when they send me e-mails saying 'we need this by 5pm'.

So I made the deadline just fine, because I sent everything in 7 hours early...

*boink

'Neveah Wears Tights'

Very long term readers may remember that I used to have to remind myself to take tights to any event when I played Neveah (in the manyamutu days when my bottom didn't hang directly out the bottom of a pair of hotpants, and in fact, despite the daft 'pants, I still managed to look successfully like a space-squirrel-jungle person). Anyway, this weekend I STILL can't decide whether to wear one of my two spanking new REN dresses, or go for the duffed up pair of suede trousers and the rough cloth top I knitted a long time ago . All of the different looks fit the character really well, so no choice options there. Since O wears a posh Tudor dress, I'd like to break the 'bird in a frock' thing, but both dresses are practical, one is in fact on period almost to the year, and the main part of the costume isn't anything to do with the clothes...

Argh.

CV

My CV has been updated for the bazillionth time. It turns out that I had actually written and sent off something I don't even remembering getting past the first page on, and don't tell anyone, but I've lost a copy of a major paper that went in, then appears to have vanished from my computer. Ah well - it's their turn to sent it back to me for editing.

Two articles...

Two articles I was sent today:

State of Play: The Game of Love

'Goodness, a sensible article about meeting up online. (apart from the ludicrous comments about being able to see people's underwear in WoW - yeah, that would be their shirt; pants still means trousers in the US as far as I can tell...)

Dating in the real world is all too often reminiscent of the way French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery describes in his book The Little Prince meeting adults who only care about jobs and houses and money, golf and politics and neckties.

They never ask about essential matters, he laments, and so he never discusses them with such people; no talk of boa constrictors or primeval forests or stars, of butterflies and games and rose-brick houses.

It's taken more than 50 years for games to catch up with him, but it's hard not feel that he would approve of the exploration, friendship and whimsy that they now offer.'

HBO Buys film made in Second Life

HBO has bought the Molotov Alta Machanima and wants to make what looks like a series out of it. I'm afraid, having seen about half of it (it's a gumshoe movie about a man who dissappears into Second Life), it really isn't my thing, but I can see how a bit more pace to it (then again, it's drawn out narrative is presumably part of its charm), and an episodic form might perk it up a bit.

CFP: Ringbearers

Call for Papers

      

Ring Bearers: The Lord of the Rings Online as Intertextual  Narrative. 
Edited by Tanya Krzywinska, Esther MacCallum-Stewart and Justin Parsler.

 

 

      

We invite you to submit an abstract focused on MMoRPG The Lord of the Rings Online in one of the following areas:

      

 

I.       Transmediality and Adaptation    
II.       Gameplay Aesthetic
III.       Sociality       

Final essays can be between 3,000 and 7,000 words.    

TIMESCALES

1st November 2007 – submission of abstracts (please send to tankrzy at aol dot com or neveah at gmail dot com)

By 1st December - notification of acceptance

March 2008 – workshop at Brunel University, UK

August 1^st 2008 – first draft due in

By October 31^st 2008– drafts returned for provisional editing and changes

             

                                         

 

Architecture and Space

Interesting paper on Space in WoW and LOTR: The Battle for Middle Earth 2. This expands a great deal on ideas I touched upon in the WoW anthology paper, especially the comparisons of 'good and bad' cities.  However as I argue, the WoW Alliance cities are functionally retrograde (supported by Wytch's superb observation that Ironforge has no windows, symbolising a system of introspection); in short they may look nice, but the Horde ones (built largely on nessecity) actually have a purpose. Anyway, whilst I'm very interested in the manipulation and interpretation of spaces in game by players, it's good to see that this sort of aesthetic is also being looked at in the detail it deserves.

REF: Education Futures

http://educationfutures.com

Ding!

My promotion to .5 work was confirmed today, so I am now exactly half time at SMARTlab.

In celebration of this and the fact that everyone is writing their MA dissertations and in a right state, I have decided to be properly grown up and to start writing my book. So today has been spent writing a (sensible) proposal, which I hope to have together by the end of the weekend.

This is also good news because it means I can start budgeting up the cost it might take to move out and into my own place.

I will be doing ALL the Magic.

If you thought this was evil:

Then the upgrade is far, far worse...

Born in a Storm...

A very up and down weekend.  I came home to find that our very old, senile cat had gone outside in a storm (which was completely unlike her; she was agarophobic), and not come back. Maybe she was confused, sadly her usual state even when she wasn't senile, maybe, as a good friend of mine said, she had a moment of clarity and realised it was just time to go. She's not come back, she was 19, and she had a heart murmur, so I'm hoping she found somewhere safe and dark, and that she died quietly.

This means, of course, that I am now not being woken up at 5.30 am by a crazy cat who thinks it food time, or having to listen to her howl and howl at night, then forget why she is howling and do it some more. She wasn't doddery or skinny in that old cat way, although she smelled old and she was deaf (which meant she couldn't hear the volume of her own meowing - making it VERY loud indeed), and throughout her life she was undoubtedly the most brainless cat I have ever met. We worried, periodically, if her increasing lack of awareness over the last year or so had lowered her quality of life; although most of the time she seemed fine, the meowing would make her anxious and clearly confused as to what she was doing. Despite all, she's still very much missed.

The rest of the weekend was better. Finally, I got to see the Brighton Sewers, after having to cancel the tickets twice. When I went many years ago, the sewers were still tidal, so they didn't smell too bad. This was not the case this time round, although the smell was strangely manageable after a while and a great percentage of it was detergent, since of course all water overflows into the waste system so we were seeing bathwater, washing machine water and road drainage as well as ... the otehr stuff. The areas where we walked were overflow tubes - up to 8 feet round in places, but we also got to see the ways in which sewage is naturally *broken up* (by making it go faster, in spirals, or round egg shaped sewers), as well as how Brighton copes with it's waste water. Really interesting and  recommended; the Victorians totally over-arcitechtured the place so they have never been replaced yet...

Then, shopping, and despite not going to the big costume sale in London, I found teh definitive peice of kit for my new character. I'd ha a very specific idea about colour this time - lots of muted tones, and this was perfect. Sometimes, like this time, a piece of kit can really crystalise ideas and concepts about a character, and this bit did. I also started to make something to go with it which is slightly complicated but absolutely beautiful in exactly the sort of understated colour / pattern way I wanted. Very very much looking forwards to this new character.

 

We raided on Sunday and accomplished several things that we wanted to, which was a real boost since the guild has in fact had a spree of pet related disasters, so everyone was being sympathetic to each other.  In my absence on Saturday,  (and perhaps before), everyone had conspired to make me two amazing pieces of kit for my druid - yet again another act of kindness which I really appreciated.

We've had a bit of loss recently - from a hunter losing his pet, to the real life pets, to a close member of the guild leaving, off to explore the real world. Like real life, the guild exists on a network of friendships and relations; some visible, some invisible. These events have underscored, for me, the sincerity of these ties. So in many ways I feel that this article (ta Wytch), which struggles to express why games both are and aren't social, somehow seems to miss the point. And the point is this, that digital games simply don't live in the same box anymore. It's like comparing a discussion panel to reading a book; whilst they might both be about the same thing, they aren'y actually the same in form or content. Some games are social, others deliberately not so, but most cross the borders somewhere, as this journalist points out - they become the cultural icon we talk about, whereas when we are in the game itself, we talk about multiple things.

My cat died, and despite being British about it and only telling two people, word got round and all of my friends gave me virtual gifts to cheer me up and show their appreciation. But they also shared something richer - a sense of empathy and respect, as well as a knowledge of the game (what I would like), and a sense of fun (it was wrapped in a virtual box). All of these don't simply echo the way that a community functions, they are the way that communities function. At the same time we were 'working' - raiding a dungeon where we all had to work together; giving those gifts broke up that into fun again...

Blue Days and the Town Bike.

The blasting heat ended and the rain came again, along with a drab sky. There is a fairly colourful view from this window but it's a bit exposed, meaning that leaving the window open makes things very chilly if there is even a slight breeze. I'm in a so-so mood; the writing was going fine last week but I'm tinkering with things this week to get my scrambled writing make sense, which always makes me a bit antsy. Not helping is the sleazy bloke in the corner shop and the fact that my card bounced for no reason at all, throwing me into a panic and meaning I had to spend the morning going into town, printing out my account and ascertaining what I hoped I knew - ie. there is enough money in my account to buy fruit juice when I need it!!

Yesterday, I gained a bike. The bike was lying in the road, getting in everyone's way, so I wheeled it into the drive and left it there in case it' owner were to return. 24 hours later and not only had the bike not been claimed, it had also not been nicked. So, not really knowing what to do with it, I wheeled it up the side entrance and took it into the house the dry off.

I strongly suspect that the bike has been stolen and was then dumped outside the house, but there are two problems. Firstly, I have no idea how to report it. I've had a look over it, and can't see if it's been marked 9memeoriesof obsessively getting my completely unwieldy bike stenciled with postcodes when I was much younger) Secondly, it's not my house here and there is a distinct possibility that it is in fact, a bike that belongs to the owners house; it has a familiar 'I think I've seen it before' look about it.  In which case hurrah -   my house sitting appears to have prevented a burglary. Since they are back on Friday, I've decided to hold onto it until then, and it can be reported and hopefully reunited with its owner over the weekend (or it can be put back in the shed...) ; but this makes me feel uneasy because...if it was nicked, then I have someone's else's bike in someone else's house.

Last month it was someone's phone - they dropped it on the Underground and I raced after them, grabbing the wrong guy on the elevator but fortunately finding that there was a home phone number on it. Even so, ringing someone else's house on the (now missing) phone gave me the same feeling. All I wanted to do was return it, and all I was doing was trying to return it, but it felt as if I was burning a hole in my pocket even carrying the thing around.

Anyway, if you live in High Wycombe and you have had a purple mountain bike stolen, or if you saw someone go into the shed up the garden and take it out whilst I was asleep, let me know...

The sum of a man's memories...

Nicked from Heather's site

DiGRA 2007

The programme for DiGRA has been announced. Not too bad; I'm spread over two days and might possibly have to attend the first (because I'm on the Board). The day after me is a good one workwise - on education and gaming. Unfortunately one of my papers (the joint one) is also over Doug's, which is a shame because it's his first and we won't be able to support him when he gives it. It's also a shame that our grouping seems to be a bit odd - but with so many papers, presumably that is inevitable. Otherwise there's some interesting stuff. I was right in that there was a slight mix up and the paper I submitted as part of the invited panel I am on has been treated as a full paper and allocated a slot, but this is in fact good news as a. I've ended up doing three things b. the paper is written anyway, and wouldn't have fitted very well in a discussion group and c. I've got other things to talk about in the discussion as my work has developed considerably since we put together the joint paper / I wrote the battlegrounds one. anyway, it's exciting stuff ...

Advance and ...

Retreat! Which is sort of what I am doing over the next two weeks - house-sitting for a friend and using the opportunity to write the SMARTlab book. Ghostwriting is an odd occupation - at the moment I'm chucking anything I can think of into the word count but learning by the minute about the actual contents of the book. All very odd. In its way, this book is also quite politicised - it's about the need for sustained projects implementing IT into under-unprivileged groups, rather than say, the less supported ones such as One Laptop per Child (hey here's a laptop you lucky person, how'd'ya feel,... use it? Oh, I'm sure you'll figure that out somehow. Broken? Well you got one in the first place, didn't you?). I've had a chance to voice my concerns about Serious Games and the arms race, for example. Overall however, it's someone else's work, and someone else's ideas on a notepad I'm transcribing (and then writing several thousand more words around).

I'm finding it hard to do, so the idea of 'going away and writing it' has really appealed to me. sure enough, today I whacked out 5000 words (which is, incidentally 1/8 of the total word count). And there are different trees (and gamma defying sunlight) outside the window in a house with a yellow, red and green room.

Meme: Avatars

An article by NPR about the 'cool concept' book and exhibition Alter Egos (there are a lot of SL avies in there, but it's a really good read nevertheless). the link allows you to browse some of the contents of the book and get an idea aboutwhat it looks like inside.

Shadowcloth

Thanks EVERYONE!!!!

I'm continually impressed at how Thraye always manages to look terminally dense. Here she is with her mouth open in a kind of 'bu...' sort of way

And she is of course, a woman with a very braod chin...