Starting Anew

It’s a whole new year and a whole new weblog.

If you’ve been to this site before, you probably noticed some changes recently. First off, the old weblog is gone — I deleted it and all its posts, gone forevermore. It was time to put the old dog to rest and head to the pound for a fresh, squealing puppy. With this post, I’m hopefully starting something cleaner, fresher, more professional, and (paradoxically?) more fun in its place. That’s what you’re reading now. Are you having fun yet?

If you’ve never been to this site before, I suppose I should introduce myself. My name is Sean Duncan, and I’m currently a doctoral student in the Games+Learning+Society group at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, studying games, learning, and my specific spin on “society” — participatory cultures around digital media. I’m a former University instructor (in Interdisciplinary Studies), briefly worked for Microsoft doing usability, and was formerly a doctoral student in cognitive psychology before finally admitting my heart wasn’t in it. I’ve shifted my academic career to combine all of these things — working in an interdisciplinary field, studying the ways that cognition and learning manifest themselves with digital tools. This is, of course, just a fancy way of saying “popular media’s important, and I want to know why.”

My weblog will be a place for me to discuss academic interests and entertain ideas having to do with games, film, TV, comics, and the Internet. In the past, I’ve tried having a “personal blog” in which I discussed everything from my recipe for borscht to rage over American politics — that is, self-indulgent, more revealing than revelatory, and pretty stupid. Been there, done that, and now it’s time to move on to better uses of the medium.

So, I’m unabashed in admitting that I have professional ambitions and this weblog will now serve as a professional tool, first and foremost. There are burning questions I want to explore in public which include: How do existing commercial games allow us to learn things about the world that we might not expect? How do fan communities around media work as informal learning groups? Can we understand the communities around games in the same ways we understand communities around other media? If this weblog can help start discussions on these topics, or continue them from other venues, I’ll be ecstatic.

Of course, it’ll be hard for me to write solely on lofty, academic topics without boring myself (and you, reader) to death, so I’m sure I’ll take plenty of diversions to discuss the details of last night’s episode of Heroes, where I’m stuck trying to level my blood elf paladin, or what I think about Marjane Satrapi’s most recent book. My interests in diverse forms of media, the communities that form around them, and what this all of this means are tied up like one of those balls of rubber bands. Figuring out how to tease the rubber bands apart — and not put my eye out — is the trick, and that’s what I aim to do here.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll read further in the coming months. Please send along any and all suggestions, invectives, and proposals for marriage. I’ll entertain all of them, I swear.

[Photo by Joshua Whiting, and is covered by a Creative Commons license.]