My GLS Talks

In July, I presented several times at our own Games, Learning, and Society Conference — first, a talk on expertise in Guitar Hero (based on this paper), next a poster on a taxonomy I’m working on of the different kinds of design practices that go on in online gamer forums (which won a poster award; you can check out a PDF of the poster here), then, finally, a talk about how I see studying fan design in online gamer forums — focusing on two case studies from The Legend of Zelda and World of Warcraft.

That last talk was part of a symposium entitled “Design, In and Around Games,” which also featured talks by my talented friends Alecia Magnifico, Mingfong Jan, and John Martin (check out the links — Alecia’s doing poetry with Twitter, Mingfong’s a phenomenal photographer, and John’s got a lot of info on his site). Our session is available streaming online via Sonic Foundry’s excellent Mediasite service, which allows you to follow my Keynote slides while watching me talk. The session was pretty good (other than the guy who interrupted us to find out when the bus was leaving for dinner!), and it was interesting to see how much similarity there is in the ways me, Alecia, Mingfong, and Jim approach issues of “design” in games, even though we ostensibly study very, very different kinds of things — commercial games for me, writing on social networking sites for Alecia, and augmented reality handheld games for Mingfong and John.

So, check it out if you’re interested, and I’d love to hear what people think. This stuff is, as always, work in progress, and I’d love any suggestions people have on new and interesting ways to study the kinds of “design” that fans do online around games.