If you’re new to my blog, I’m an assistant professor at Miami University, the Armstrong Professor in the School of Education, Health, and Society and the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies. I’m co-director of our new Games Center, I’m one of the core faculty for our Digital Game Studies program, and I run a small, mixed undergrad/graduate research lab. Feel free to poke around the rest of this site to read more about what I do — some of it is a bit out of date, though! I’ll try to weed it soon.

Miami University‘s in southwestern Ohio (no, not Florida), and has a two hundred year old tradition of excellent undergraduate education. As part of the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies (or IMS), we get a wide range of students in our games courses, ranging from computer science majors who want to enter the games industry to psychology students who are interested in better understanding games and learning. This semester, one of my students is an architecture major who is starting his own game company as an undergrad, and I advise an anthropology major who is working toward entering his Flixel-based games into the next IGF. My goal is to infuse the liberal arts at a place like Miami with a renewed focus on games, helping students connect their interests to interactive media no matter what their career goals are.

We try to tailor our courses to be useful for students who want to learn how to make games, as well as students who want to better understand what games and gaming mean for understanding culture and society. So, IMS211 is the analysis-heavy Game Studies course (here’s this semester’s syllabus), and we offer a design-heavy Design of Play course (IMS212, taught by Lindsay Grace). My PhD is in Curriculum & Instruction, so I often focus on games and learning — one of my goals is to get students to think about how games foster learning and literacy, regardless if we’re talking about Darfur Is Dying or Pokémon Black Version.

All of this is just preamble before describing the last few days’ fun and humbling Twitter experiences, which went went a little like this — On Tuesday morning, my IMS211 class was in the middle of a seminar discussion about how gaming fans, developers, and journalists connect online. The conversation was a good one, but I think the students were getting a little tired of just talking, so I decided to try to shake things up a little. As one student raised that the internet has served to level the playing field, bringing “everyday” gamers into contact with developers and journalists, I took out my phone and sneakily decided to tweet up a little experiment:

At the time, I had around 750 followers on Twitter, with a small cluster of game developers, educators, scholars, and journalists following me. I figured we’d get maybe 10-20 tweets back at us, just saying “yo.” Then, I assumed, the class would get my point that Twitter is a simple and amiable way to connect with a variety of folks interested in games. What I didn’t expect was that my tweet would get retweeted as widely as it did — thanks to a number of folks (Darius Kazemi, Jason McIntosh, Ben Abraham, among others) for getting the ball rolling. That ball kept on picking up speed, and I think entered orbit sometime mid-afternoon on Tuesday.

As I write this, the number of tweets on the hashtag is nearing 3000 tweets. That’s just nuts. Do a live search on the hashtag to see what people are discussing right now, or check out the Twapperkeeper archive (thanks, Ben!) to read the hashtag from the beginning. I love the variety of tweets, from simple “hi!” tweets at my class, to unsolicited advice for my students (“make something every day”), all the way to announcing job opportunities. The number of late “what is #ims211?” tweets shows how it spread well beyond my initial group of followers. This has been blogged up on The Lazy Geek as well as Systemlink Alt.

Though activity on the hashtag has calmed down quite a bit, it’s still going, well beyond my wildest dreams. The community of folks on Twitter that make games, work in the games industry, research/study games, and write about games are a wonderful, generous, supportive, and friendly bunch. There really is a staggering variety of tweets on #ims211 — folks from every company or studio imaginable (Harmonix, BioWare, Rockstar, Lionhead, Insomniac, Zynga, Treyarch, Double Fine, Maxis, Crytek, Epic, PopCap, just to name a few), from every stripe of developer (XNA, Unity, Flash, iOS, Android, Facebook, PC, XBLA, PSN), from all over the world (Brazil, California, London, Austin, Germany, Argentina, Taiwan). Not to mention all of the amazing educators, academics, journalists, community managers, marketers, and recruiters that popped into the hashtag. No slight intended if I didn’t mention you in this paragraph or tweet at you in the past few days — it’s all been a bit overwhelming and a bit hard to keep track of everything that was tweeted!

You might be wondering what the students think of all of this (that’s them right up there) — some have jumped into the hashtag, and are excited to connect with whomever might want to contact them. Feel free to follow any of us on Twitter, we’d love to stay in touch. I’m @scd, and some of my students are @b_amf, @DenverCoulson, @Amanda_M_Smith, @Quirky_Dude, @kickinapouch, @loco_moses, @alvisjiang, @wjPossum, @elevanwhite, @hodgesmr, @OGDubs24, @andy_jackman, and @la417. [Check back later; if more students decide they'd like to get on Twitter, I'll update this list!] Suffice it to say, when presented with an opportunity like this, many are very excited to get to know folks in the industry — I’m suggesting that they read Darius’s excellent notes on effective networking in the game industry. If you haven’t read them, you should, too!

Regardless, the hashtag now has its own life, and we’re excited to see where it goes from here. We saw that Twitter user @giftinteractive set up a website at ims211.com. We’re not sure what’s in store for that, and it’s not something we have a hand in, but I remain hopeful something useful might grow there. On top of that, now there’s an #ims211 shirt:

… and, potentially, mug based off of one of the tagdef.com definitions:

Like I said, this is nuts. I’m not sure I’ll ever wear the shirt anywhere other than when I teach IMS211 again or perhaps at GDC, if people remember this hashtag that long, or if it’s oddly self-serving to drink tea out of a mug that has my name on it. But note that the organizer of the spreadshirt page and “designer” of the shirt, @DBHGamer, is using the this opportunity to raise money to donate to charity-to-be-determined. If you’re interested in following the shirt saga as it unfolds, please check out a new hashtag created for it: #charityshirt!

So, I guess this is just to say that #ims211 is obviously not about our little class anymore, and that’s one of the wonderful things about Twitter hashtags — we can’t control it, it’s whatever you all make of it. So far, what you’ve made has been a wonderful, supportive community. To quote the esteemed 2011 IGF Chairman, Mr. Brandon Boyer:

Yep. At the very least, my faith in the world of games is back at full strength. Thank you all for making my — and my students’ — week.

One last thought: If #ims211 helps even a single one of my students make a meaningful connection in the industry, with the world of games blogging/journalism, with an indie designer, or in some way further their academic careers, all of this has been worth it. Feel free to post in the comments if you have ideas of ways we can make this happen for my students, as well as for students elsewhere who want to better use Twitter to connect with the world of games.

Art and sound assets were put into the games, games were playtested (as much as they could be in the little time remaining), and levels were tweaked.

After lunch, Johnny Wilson (who had been around to talk with the Global Game Jam attendees all weekend) gave his thoughts on the usefulness of these kinds of events and his impressions of where game design is going to go in the upcoming years — encouraging participants to think of themselves as the future of game design.

(By the way, my inclusion of this slide of Wilson’s doesn’t mean I condone all of the sentiments on it; take a look at the rest of my site to see that I think the “quibbling about unimportant details” that gamers do online is much more important and significant than Wilson apparently does. But that’s a debate for a different time).

So, this brings us to the games. Every team completed something they could show the Miami group as well as upload to Global Game Jam games gallery. This alone is impressive, but the polish on some of these games was, frankly, stunning. Here’s a bit on each of the games created during our Global Game Jam, as well as links to the games if you’d like to try them out.

Remember — as we were in the Eastern time zone, each of the groups was tasked with making a game that fit the theme of “Deception” while also incorporating as many of the three time-zone specific constraints (“Rain,” “Plain,” “Spain”) as possible. On top of that, each of the groups seemed excited by the chance to try to fit various “Achievements” offered up by the GGJ organizers, involving adding tweaks (e.g., creating a tutorial as part of the game, implementing an alternate control scheme to the game, etc.).

Spaniard in Space!

This won our “Best in Show” for all of the five games developed over the weekend, and is essentially a side-scroller in which you play a robot sent to Pluto by the Spanish government to claim the planet for Spain. I won’t spoil how “deception” is worked into this game (and I’m not totally thrilled with this part of the game), but this game has such polish, such humor, and such a good use of an in-game tutorial, that all of the judges agreed it was clearly one of our site’s top games. Beautifully rendered 3D backgrounds for a sidescroller and some clever level design, incorporating Spain (the origin of the robot), Rain (a rain gun wielded by the robot), and a few of the achievements. Very nicely done game, developed in GameMaker.

A link to: Spaniard in Space.

Project Boondoggle

This group was probably the most ambitious of the set, attempting to incorporate “deception” into a real-time strategy game/god game mix. Players are essentially a capricious god that manipulate two sides (the “Skullys” and the “Leafys”) in a hopefully eternal struggle — like, say, a Tetris type game, the goal isn’t for one side to win, but for the player to last as long as possible in keeping the two sides fighting one another. An interesting idea, although “deception” got a little lost along the way: I suspect their plan was for you, as the capricious god, to be deceiving both sides into thinking the other is the enemy, rather than you, the player who is actually controlling their fate. It didn’t quite come together (they had difficulties getting it to work in the final presentation of games), but wow, what a great concept, and they have the beginnings of a very interesting, innovative game, also put together in GameMaker (which none of the group had ever used before Friday).

A link to: Project Boondoggle.

Alien Seduction

In this game, the player controls a kid whose school is being invaded by aliens. The kid quickly realizes that a special megaphone he has will lure the aliens toward him, which he uses to deceive and lure the aliens to their doom in specific areas of the map. But, if the aliens get too close to the kid, they’ll pounce and kill him. This game had my favorite control scheme of all the games, by far — using the keyboard to move and the computer’s microphone to control the megaphone. They designed it so that amplitude from the mic would control the radius of the megaphone’s impact, and thus made a great start at some novel game mechanics, implemented using Processing.

A link to: Alien Seduction.

Ellobro

In terms of implementation, I’m still a bit astounded at the technical task these participants took on … and succeeded. The game is essentially a stealth game (hence deception) in which the player needs to evade the Spanish Inquisition (therefore, Spain) through a number of levels without being noticed and caught. Implementing it in C# and XNA, they showed how much can be done using sophisticated dev tools in just a short weekend — this could be, potentially, exported out to run on an Xbox 360, something none of the other groups accomplished. Nice job!

A link to: Ellobro.

Dino-Quixote

First, an apology that I didn’t manage to get a picture of Dino-Quixote as they were presenting it. But, in some ways, this was my favorite implementation of the theme of “deception” as a core game mechanic — in this game, the player controls a robot sent to a planet of dinosaurs and needs to traverse the map, exploring the planet. However, dinosaurs block his way and through the use of a DNA replicating device, the robot can take on the appearance (hence, deception) of any of the different dinosaurs. What’s great about this is that deception becomes something you need to learn how to do in order to solve the puzzles of each level — some spaces are only traversable with a smaller dinosaur, some small dinosaurs are only avoidable if you’re pretending to be a bigger, scarier dinosaur, etc. Wonderful attention spent on level design and making deception a key thing that you need to learn how to do at specific times in the game, also implemented in GameMaker.

A link to: Dino-Quixote.

…

We all had a fantastic time and will definitely be doing this again at Miami, bigger and better next time! The support of the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and other parts of the University have been phenomenal. This is going to be a regular event at Miami, and if you stumble upon this blog post and are interested in finding out more about Miami’s Global Game Jam efforts or our Game Studies program, please feel free to post a comment, email me, look me up on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Finally, I leave you with the opening keynote by Ste Curran for the Global Game Jam, which was put up by the GGJ organizers on YouTube. It’s a great introduction to why the Global Game Jam is a great thing, and why all of you who didn’t participate this year should give it a shot next time.

I showed up at a beautiful and cold Benton Hall just before breakfast arrived.

It seemed many of the teams had been working straight through the night; a few were asleep off in a corner while others quietly worked, with the remnants of more protyping on nearby tables.

I was impressed that most of the groups had, overnight, fleshed out a working skeleton for their games. Three of the games were being implemented in GameMaker, one in XNA, and one in Processing. The Processing game had a few particularly ambitious elements, including a control scheme based off of the computer’s microphone — overnight, they’d hashed out a basic structure for the gameplay and by yesterday morning, were working hard on implementing the audio control scheme as well as designing and applying sprites to flesh out the abstract design of the game.

At the same time, one of the groups went to town on GameMaker and, using the free set of sprites provided by the School of Fine Arts, had already begun designing levels for their game. Involving dinosaurs, robots, and DNA-theft to impersonate other dinosaurs, their game was the most developed by morning.

That is, of course, not to say they weren’t still very hard at work, using Maya to design 3D characters to turn into the playable sprites atop the 2D map of the game.

In the second day, most of the teams had started devoting a great amount of time to fleshing out the look and feel of their games — some of which began to look quite sophisticated. One team was 3D rendering the background of their sidescroller, while the team working on the real time strategy/god game began putting cute faces on the abstract units the game would contain.

Finally, by mid-afternoon, a number of the teams had playable levels for us to check out. We explored a bit of the robots/dinosaurs game, and gave some critiques for refining and shaping the game’s level design. But, not a whole lot! Some of these teams seemed like they were well underway and just needed to start working on polish.

I left for a few hours and came back in the evening to see if I could help out/playtest/offer any useful comments, but most all of the teams had their noses down in work. Time’s running out and the teams realize it — another all-nighter, perhaps, but one in which most of the teams were moving from working frameworks to incorporating all the visual and audio assets. I’m about to head into school and see where everyone’s at.

Our groups are going to submit their games to the Global Game Jam site by noon, Eastern (we hope). So, just a few more hours!

(By the way, this is my blog’s 100th post. Wow, that took a while, huh?)

We’ve got 24 people participating from around the state — a cluster of students drove down from Columbus College of Art and Design, a number of local area high school students signed up, a good chunk of Miami students (and Interactive Media Studies in particular), and one Miami faculty member is participating. Their five teams so far have run the gamut in terms of game style, implementation, and goals — this year’s theme is “deception,” and all participants need to make a game that somehow addresses this theme. We’ve got a real-time strategy/”god game” combo that’s in the works, a side-scroller in which players have to attempt to deceive nearby opponents, a game that’s using sound (via microphones) as one of the primary means of interaction, and a couple others that I haven’t talked to lately so who knows what awesome ideas they’ve come up with in the past few hours?

Our Game Jam started off yesterday evening with an opening chat with Johnny Wilson, of DePaul University’s College of Computing and Digital Media and former editor of Computer Gaming World. Soon after, we split the crowd into clusters according to expertise (programmers, artists, and designers), and let them mill about for a while until they found a team they thought they could work with.

This quickly led to five groups being formed, and then the fun, crazy, sometimes contentious task of coming up with a game design began — for some groups, this came together quickly (far too quickly, which we tried to pull people back from. A group or two bounced around ideas for a good six or so hours before settling on something, which we prodded them into further developing. This led to some great ideas, some lousy ideas, and a number in-between being worked on through the night.

I just showed back up here about a half hour ago, and most of the groups seem to have something basic coded and playable — basic game mechanics have been settled on (at least a first pass), some basic sprites are being designed, some rendering of more complex game art is underway. Most of the Miami students seem to have gone home to sleep, with a number of the CCAD students pulling all-nighters, and a couple of the high school kids asleep in one of the classrooms. We have the entire first floor of Benton Hall and in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences to use, with computers out the wazoo and dev tools ranging from XNA to Unity to Maya and GameMaker.

All the while, we’ve been trying to pay attention to other GGJ sites and see what they’ve been up to — most of the sites have been broadcasting streaming video, which we’ve had up on an HDTV screen in one of our classrooms.

And, of course, we’ve contributed with our own live stream of the same room — which, for a while last night, turned into a testament to caffeine consumption.

It looks like my pals at Games+Learning+Society in Madison have their own Global Game Jam site, and have had a couple of teams working late into the night (they also have a live stream, too, though it’s gone black at the moment). It’s great to check out what people around the world are doing as they’re doing it; the variety of people, places, and tools used in this game jam is phenomenal. Things like this highlight that gaming — and game design — are truly international and global activities. Glad we get to help put Miami on that map.

We’ve got a busy second day ahead of us, with a couple of visiting speakers and the students from Miami’s Video Game Design Club stopping in to help out, then hopefully some playtesting before the final push. I’ll update more as we move along here in Day Two!

[Click on the image to see a larger version]

Unsurprisingly, the word “design” dominates my dissertation — I’m scared to do a search and see exactly how many times it appears within the dissertation, but as understanding the informal design practices that players/fans of games enact online is the central focus of the diss, well, yeah, it’s not a surprise. Taking a skim over the rest, you’ll see a number of my other interests and obsessions represented: games, learning, narrative, affinity, communities, science, practices, knowledge, and, of course, Zelda, Warcraft, and Kongregate. Not to mention some specific individuals that make it into the wordle, such as Schön, Ghostcrawler and GAMEFAN (a pseudonym for one of the players I studied).

Anyway, I’m running toward the home stretch now, so this kind of thing helps me to step back and think about “what it all means.” Just a few weeks to go; wish me luck!

So, I’m going to cast the course as a “Narrative in Digital Media” course more than a “Technology,” course, emphasizing narrative across a number of digital, interactive media. One of the major projects I’ll have students do is develop an interactive fiction (IF) game using Inform. I’ve posted about interactive fiction before, so I’ll spare you a lengthy definition right now, other than to say these are essentially the classic genre of “text adventure games” (think Colossal Cave and Infocom‘s games) which have, in the past 15 years, spun off into their own, fascinating independent game design community. (If you’re interested in the roots of the genre, please check out Dennis Jerz’s excellent history of Colossal Cave, another shoo-in for an assigned reading in my course this spring).

I’m still working through a readings list, but will definitely feature a “playings list” of good, interesting interactive fiction games. So, it turns out Nick Montfort has impeccable timing and has recently posted an updated list of recommended interactive fiction games for Fall, 2009. If you’re unfamiliar with Montfort, he’s the author of the interesting interactive fiction history Twisty Little Passages, as well as the co-author of the recent Racing The Beam with Ian Bogost, a fantastic analysis of the Atari 2600 through several key games for the platform.

Here’s a snippet from Montfort’s post, describing his thoughts on how he shaped this list of recommendations:

A good introduction to interactive fiction does not have to be easy or simple. A game that you have to restart several times, and that you can only scratch the surface of after a few hours of effort, may show you, by being intricate and compelling, why it’s really worthwhile to try to meet the challenges of IF. It seems most important to me that a piece of IF quickly gives a sense of the powerful, interesting play of simulation and language. Such a game might happen to be hard or easy. On the other hand, some good games rely on a player knowing about IF conventions and even particular earlier games, characters, or puzzles. These often aren’t good places for someone just starting. There are many good commercial games from the 1980s and some from more recent times, but in my main list, I’ve limited myself to games that authors have made available for free download.

I’ve played a number of these, and find the list to be generally a great, varied list of recent games for both novices and experts. But, some were still new to me; for instance, I was unaware that Dan Schmidt — one of the key designers at Harmonix responsible for Guitar Hero and the Rock Band games — had started off writing IF. So, lots here to play with.

But, if you want the bleeding edge of text-based adventuring, the games in contention for the 15th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition is also now up and ready to download! I haven’t played any of these, but this is the premier short-form interactive fiction competition, and if recent years are any indication, there will be a few excellent gems in the bunch. Looking forward to giving a few a spin in the coming week or two.

It’s amazing to me that this game genre is still alive and well, over three decades since the first text adventure was written. Here’s to IF’s continued success.

So, a major thrust of my work is investigating just this: How do these communities work? How can they support and challenge our assumptions of what learning is and what learning could be? How do we better understand the new digital media literacies that are arising with these technologies? As Armstrong Professor, I hope to have conversations on these topics with Miami faculty, students, and community members, and further understand how interactive media, design thinking, and online communities are intertwined in 21st century media spaces. Expect posts from me on this blog covering topics such as learning with “new media,” games and literacy, and the productive nature of online communities.

I’ll be posting there every few weeks on many of the same topics I post about here, albeit probably a little less informally. Feel free to add the AIMS blog to your Google Reader (or whatever you happen to use)!

A few themes emerged over the different meetings, however, which I found heartening, given that they appear to sync up well with the directions that I want to take my work. First, at both G4C and GLS, Jim Gee gave impassioned keynotes on how the focus should shift from the game artifact to the productive “affinity spaces” around them, consisting of gamers enacting all sorts of sophisticated literacies and learning practices. I made essentially the same point in the G4C panel, trying to further some of Jim’s ideas by honing in on the idea of “design” as a way to better specify what it is that happens when players move from being simple consumers of games to being engaged in larger communities that can tie to specific social issues (the concern of many at G4C).

Even though I’ve been a graduate student working to help run the GLS conference the past three years, I’m still somewhat amazed at how well everything came off this year. There was a great variety of talks and voices at the conference, ranging from commercial game designers to high school administrators to theoretical linguists. The session I was in gelled in ways I don’t think anyone really expected — Ben Aslinger‘s talk on using Kongregate to introduce his college students to different forms of gaming was a great testament to the utility of Flash game sites to encourage discussions about games that are, frankly, harder for most people to have over, say, Far Cry 2 or Madworld. Similarly, Idit Caperton and Shannon Sullivan presented some fascinating work on their Globaloria program, geared toward helping rural West Virginia kids develop game design literacies, game design skills, and, specifically, Flash competencies. It’s one of the first sessions I’ve ever participated in where it was clear that the other people I’d been scheduled with would make great future collaborators, and I’d love to develop my work with online Flash communities such as Kongregate with both Ben and Idit/Shannon.

Finally, while I’ve found complex, 3D virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft to be terribly interesting and engaging (and clearly I’m not the only one), I’ve felt a bit out of place doing virtual worlds work. The work I’ve done with Constance in the past three years has been centered on World of Warcraft but, largely, in the communities that either emerge through play or are constructed around play. That’s really where my interests are at, and it was great to me to see that so many of the up-and-coming virtual worlds researchers are focusing on similar matters. In particular, it was especially great to meet Nathan Dutton (a PhD student at Ohio University, working with Mia Consalvo). His work on how Lord of the Rings Online players attempt to negotiate gender in the game (both through in-game actions, discussions in the community and with the game’s designers) is similar in spirit to the kinds of negotiations I’m looking at in World of Warcraft. While it’s different content, tackling how the designed nature of the game butts up against the fan activities and vice versa is, to my mind, one of the most productive areas of research for virtual worlds and I was happy to see the younger SoP attendees increasingly looking at this.

So, I saw several themes of how researchers of games are converging on trying to better grok the productive communities that arise around games, as well as looking at how these conflict with, operate in parallel to, or sometimes support the design of these games/virtual worlds. That is, the “affinity spaces” around games are impossible to dismiss as just simple fan activity (as if something like that even existed) — understanding how and why affinity spaces operate is key to creating games for change, for delving into the learning practices afforded by games, and better situating virtual worlds in larger, asynchronous communities of practice.

Maybe all this is just wishful thinking on my part or my perspective is clouded by being so deep into my dissertation right now, but sure feels good to see these fields increasingly focusing on those areas that I think need most focusing on.

Okay, I normally don’t make these kinds of posts to my blog, and I feel like I should preface this by form of apology. People (us nerds especially) tend to get very bent out of shape when someone decries or criticizes their favorite media franchises, and I’ll do that here — um, the criticizing, not the bending out of shape. I note that Andrew O’Hehir (and others, I’m sure), have recently referred to The Dark Knight as a “teenage boy’s idea of a serious film,” and have received plenty of ire (including creepy threats) from the rabid fanboy/fangirl contingent. So, sorry if this post offends, but I’ll be working through why the new film Watchmen — and its incessant hype — has been bugging me the last few days. (Oh, for the record, I liked Dark Knight just fine, but even as a long-time DC Comics fan, I have to admit that Iron Man was by far the better cinematic superhero experience in ’08).

Watchmen’s hype is, alas, long-standing; it is now regularly afforded the title of “best comic ever” in the same lazy way people give Citizen Kane the “best movie ever” crown. I read Watchmen for the first time back in 1985, when the comic was first released — I was a teenager, and bought each issue on the day it came out, devoured it, and waited (sometimes for months and months) for the next installment. I had been a fan of Alan Moore’s work on Swamp Thing and Marvelman, so I loved Watchmen; it was a genuinely revolutionary superhero book and one which, along with Frank Miller, Dave Mazzuchelli, and Lynn Varley’s The Dark Knight Returns marks a particularly innovative moment in mainstream comics history that’s undeniably significant.

Yet, it’s been the intervening years (and subsequent readings) which have given me pause in canonizing this particular book as the “best comic book ever.” During the early days of the comic’s inception, it was initially conceived as a way to re-use a number of characters that DC had acquired when it bought out the old Charlton Comics line, many of which have now been incorporated into the DC Universe.

But, since then-editor Dick Giordano was really enamored with some of these characters, Blue Bettle, Captain Atom, Nightshade, The Question, the Peacemaker and Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt were all morphed into similar analogs (Night Owl, Dr. Manhattan, Silk Spectre, Rorschach, the Question, the Comedian, and Ozymandias, respectively). Moore took the basics of these characters (down to making multiple Night Owls, etc.), tweaked them into darker versions of the characters, and ran with it, inventing an alternate 1980s America where Nixon was still president, where superheroes were creepy fetishists more than moral paragons, and where “heroism” was relative.

It’s a great comic, one of the best superhero comic books ever. Moore’s writing was perfectly complemented by Dave Gibbons’s gritty art, and the unique (at least at that time) mix of comic book storyline, comic-within-a-comic (Tales of the Black Freighter), and prose (the text appendices at the end of each issue, e.g. Hollis Mason’s Behind the Mask) all combine to make it a work unlike any other seen to that point. I personally think other comics hang together better than this or are generally more interesting (in Moore’s work alone, I enjoy his run on Supreme quite a bit, and think From Hell is the greatest long-form comic to date), but I acknowledge that Watchmen was certainly great for its time.

One thing which shaped my enjoyment was the specific activity of reading this comic. As each issue was published, I’d talk about it with my friends, trade issues, and when we had access to it, we’d hop on the nascent internet of the era — basically, USENET newsgroups, such as rec.arts.comics — where other fans picked it apart, trying to understand the symbolism Moore and Gibbons were dropping, as well as the larger configurations of this alternate world. On USENET, the collaborative work of smarter dudes than me figured out who Rorschach was two or three issues ahead of the big reveal, discovered significant foreshadowing in the backgrounds of various panels, and made the practice of reading a wholly different sort than reading a “graphic novel” version is typically like today.

It’s this sort of social, knowledge-building activity that, to me, is what made Watchmen really fantastic as a comic book reading experience. Making sense of all the different kinds of storytelling in the book was a lot of fun — looking at the inclusion of the Black Freighter comic was evocative and served as a great counterpoint (and sometimes foreshadowing for!) what was going on in the main story, the details presented in all the prose work (Behind the Mask) were integral for understanding the larger story of the Minutemen and their legacy, etc. Piecing together a serial storyline with a bunch of other people, reading and rereading each panel, going online and trying to suss out various theories (and their justifications) — this is similar to the kind of joy I get out of watching (and trying to understand) Lost these days.

But, back to the present. There’s no way the film can mimic this kind of reading experience, so what’s this movie actually going to be? While as a teenager I thought the comic’s ostensible storyline — “whoa, superheroes might be kinda fallible and sometimes mentally unstable!” — was mindblowing, that holds basically no resonance with me as an adult. I’m perplexed; who really cares about the superhero storyline in this any longer? Isn’t it much, much more interesting the way that Moore and Gibbons use comics to tell us a story and what it tells us about reading comics?

Rather than mimic the reading experience, it seems that Zack Snyder has tried to be quite faithful to the comic’s look and plot, essentially using the original work as a storyboard for making the film. I suppose I can understand this as a pragmatic means of making a movie that will be under this degree of scrutiny (visual accuracy certainly won’t upset the fanboys and fangirls), but is also a fundamental misapplication of the art of comics — Moore (as seen most pointedly in works like The Killing Joke and From Hell) is a master of interesting visual juxtapositions that work best in static, discrete media. Take this scene transition from The Killing Joke, for example:

It’s evocative of the Joker’s mindset, clearly sexually creepy (note the “coin slot” location), and all intended by Moore — though Brian Bolland was the artist, Moore’s scripts are always spelled out in excruciating detail. There’s something about the language of comics can get lost when translated to a film, and I think it’s completely reasonable for Moore to distance himself from any cinematic interpretation of his work. Will these kinds of subtleties be captured in the film? And, if so, how does the switch to a motion picture change the effect of this? I’m not decrying the idea of attempting to adapt his work, just skeptical that the so-called “visionary director of 300” will be creative enough to handle it.

It’s also not encouraging that, because of time considerations and studio pressure, Snyder’s been forced to cut out the Black Freighter comic (though he’s releasing it as a separate DVD), there’s really no way to include Behind the Mask as anything but exposition within the film, the ending is significantly different in content if not in theme, and, in the silliest change, Laurie Juspeczyk no longer smokes (because the studio head hates smoking). I don’t much care about how the movie deviates from the comic except insofar as this movie seems structurally incapable of conveying a rich, multimodal mix of comics and other text that the initial work featured. We’re left with a movie that, rather than reference other superhero movies is, from all accounts, rather slavishly re-enacting Watchmen’s uninteresting plot about how superheroes are fallible, etc. Well, okay, great, if you’ve somehow made it to the 21st century without ever thinking about how silly the concept of superheroes is, I wish you an enjoyable experience, but I’ve been there, done that.

What was valuable about Watchmen for me was its use of comics (and prose) form in support of these themes, plus the way its serialized nature encouraged us teenagers to engage with the text of the comic, talk to each other about it, and puzzle-solve. Basically, we “gamed” Watchmen — an activity that this movie is, frankly, not set up to afford. I’m not saying that comics cannot or should not be made into good films. Rather, I’m arguing that the very point of Watchmen is really about comics form and creating new activities of comics reading, not about superheroes. It’s just a bad fit unless liberties are taken with the source material and it is rejiggered to somehow be about film form and film viewership. Everything indicates that Snyder has done the opposite of what he should have done, and made a film which attempts to lift an innovative comic directly into a medium it was never meant to be in.

The new Watchmen film will be “dancing about architecture” at best, or just another dumb big budget shit-blows-up film at worst. Either way, it’s a rental.

In the work I’ve been engrossed in these last few weeks, I’ve been writing about the weird and woolly world of internet discussion forums — how to best study them, how they may support “new literacy” practices, etc. — all in support of my PhD dissertation research. It’s probably old hat by now that online discussion forums feature some of the most complex (and, yes, sometimes the most distasteful) of discourse out there, but I’m currently most curious how much Internet media are really beginning to supplant traditional forms of media in the lives of everyday folks.

Dennis Jerz recently linked to an IFC/Zogby poll on the role of the internet in the world of news, especially during this last election cycle:

Results indicate that the Internet is the most trusted news source among all age groups, and overall, more trusted than newspapers and television news combined. FOX News is the most trusted news source on television and The New York Times is the most trusted national newspaper outlet. Three out of four people feel that news coverage is biased, and that media coverage influenced the outcome of the Presidential election.

(Here’s a link to a PDF of the poll’s press release).

Breaking this down further according to party affiliation, they stated that “94.2% of Republicans surveyed and 55.6% of Democrats surveyed believe media coverage influenced the Presidential election,” and, interestingly, “[m]ore than 90% of Republicans and 55.6% of Democrats do not feel the media is giving a true representation of what is going on in Iraq.”

This a Zogby poll, and there have certainly been issues with some of their polling choices and methods in the recent past. However, taking these results at face value, we see an enormous skepticism toward traditional media, yet it seems to be coming from an overwhelmingly politically conservative skepticism. Is this simply an entrenching of the same “conservative blog effect” that was so predominant in 2004, or something new? Is it too early to tell?

Obama’s made improving the US’s broadband adoption (we’re currently 15th in the world) a part of his jobs plan, and now that the iPhone is the best-selling mobile phone/internet device in the US, we’ll be faced with new questions of how and why people engage with these media in all sorts of contexts.

Spending my days and nights on the internet is such a part of my life that I have a hard time knowing how one “goes back.” I’m not really complaining — pulling out the iPhone at dinner to see what movies are playing down the street is certainly a convenient, useful means of looking up information for the particular kind of privileged, middle class lifestyle that I lead. But, what about more important issues — for instance, how is knowledge shaped by use of the internet? How are political positions going to be shaped by a President who uses YouTube for his addresses? How will the conservative movement change if it begins to take seriously the tools of the internet? How will I ever get my work done if I’m constantly drawn back to reading about this stuff on blogs, message boards, and the like?

So, yeah, this is more work procrastination couched in the form of a speculative blog post. It’s just all of this feels particularly salient to me lately, and I felt like I had to jot it down — any of us hoping to further careers studying internet culture in any capacity have to be both excited and perhaps a little unmoored by the rapid changes that the next few years might bring.

It should be pretty obvious what my political leanings are if you’ve more than skimmed the surface of this blog in the past few months. I’ve tried to keep it from taking over the site, as (1) I’m not sure I have a lot to add to the public political discourse that other, more amazing people (like, say, Al Giordano, Nate Silver, Rachel Maddow, Ta-Nehisi Coates, etc.) haven’t already said; and (2) The speed at which things have been happening the last few weeks (months?) has been so breakneck, it’s hard to keep up. But, if you’ve noticed the cute little banner in the upper-right hand corner of every page on this site, yeah, you can tell who I was rooting for. And, if you’ve read my Tweets, you can probably get a sense of my elation at the conclusion of the first stage of this process on Tuesday night.

It is, of course, quite exciting to see this new stage begin — the other day, the President-Elect’s transition team unveiled change.gov, a website to track and chronicle the incoming administration’s choices, solicit feedback from the public, and generally attempt to be much more transparent than any other Presidential transition team in history. I take this site with grain of salt — like with anything officially branded by a campaign, it’s a public relations tool as much as anything — but isn’t this exactly the kind of public relations we need? That is, not “public relations” as euphemism for “pulling the wool over your eyes,” but “public relations” in the sense of… relating to the public? Though I’m not naive enough to believe that the incoming administration will be truly transparent with all the people who got them to this position (nor do I necessarily want this to be the case), I am heartened to see some steps in this direction.

What has me so excited by this are the steps towards making government finally a two-way street — the Internet has been, of course, a great resource for the Obama campaign to reach voters, take their donations, and help people organize. But, how will all of these innovative uses of the Internet scale up to the realm of actual governance? Change.gov seems to indicate that this President, unlike every single one before him, will at least carry through with the appearance of transparency during the transition to office. What needs to happen is that these official sites become simply the beginning, and we hold him accountable to increased transparency of the executive branch, and further development of digital ways to get involved with the future of governance in the United States. For the first time in my lifetime, being involved with political action from within the governing body of the country seems appealing and productive.

But, this is not to say it has to stop with the Halls of Government — I’m encouraged by calls to continued action from various voices on the Left, the networks built up during Obama’s run who are now aching for more to do. Both the Field Hand readers of Al Giordano’s blog and Nader supporters (via November5.org) actively plan to continue holding this new administration’s feet to the fire. I’m undecided on how exactly I want to be involved with these sorts of groups personally, but hope the genie’s out of the bottle: It’s about time the Internet was used by those in power and those who put them there in ways that actually leverage what the Internet is in 2008 — a communication/networking space, not simply an online replacement for direct mailing (the approach which so dominated the Right’s use of blogging in 2004).

The Internet has never been a simple delivery device for content, and it’s about time we had a government — and populace — which understands this. I’m certainly looking forward to the next few months, and am cautiously hopeful about the next four years.

(P. S., Thank you, Ohio. I miss you, and knew you wouldn’t let us down.)

Yay! My author copies of The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy arrived today. I’ve mentioned this a bunch of times on the blog lately, so I apologize for spamming the blog with it — I’m just real excited to have this book chapter finally see print. I started working on this nearly two years ago (right around the time Twilight Princess came out and I discovered for the first time the weird and hairy world of Zelda timeline arguments). In our chapter, Jim Gee and I try to cast the fan debates around the chronologies of the Zelda games in philosophic terms, making a few references to the reasoning and argumentation present in these fan communities, and what that tells us about the social construction of knowledge (a la Latour). It was a pretty fun chapter to write, and I’m glad to see it finally hit print — and, soon, a Barnes & Noble (or Borders, or Books-A-Million, or whatever) near you! (Or, just pre-order it from Amazon).

And, since I’ve already linked (get it, Linked?!) to a picture from my Flickr feed here, I might as well offer one more:

My dear Lizzie has suggested that I get a cartoon-Link tattoo on my right forearm, and a few months ago, I tried Photoshopping a number of options. The one above was my favorite, but I’m still too chicken to get it done. Whaddya think?

So how will today’s brutal economic climate change the Web 2.0 “free” economy? It will result in the rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with cash; it will mean the success of Knol over Wikipedia, Mahalo over Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), TheAtlantic.com over the HuffingtonPost.com, iTunes over MySpace, Hulu over YouTube Inc. , Playboy.com over Voyeurweb.com, TechCrunch over the blogosphere, CNN’s professional journalism over CNN’s iReporter citizen-journalism… The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some “back end” revenue. “Free” doesn’t fill anyone’s belly; it doesn’t warm anyone up.

Where to begin, huh? Let’s look past the typical criticism that this guy appears to be singularly resentful of anything that isn’t clearly monetized on the Internet (while he has worked for a series of unspectactular dot-com busts). Apparently, for Keen, people are interested in participating on the Web — writing blog posts, posting videos to YouTube, making games for Kongregate — because they’re looking for cash. What utter horseshit.

If there’s anything that this year’s Obama campaign has successfully shown, it’s that these Web 2.0 strategies aren’t solely driven by monetary gain, and these tools have the capacity to provide more than just entertainment (though, I’d argue, most of what we consider “just entertainment” has valuable learning and literacy practices embedded within them). Twitter, text messaging, YouTube, blogging, Facebook, etc. — all of these have been successfully used by Obama to build political support, give everyday people a chance to participate in his Presidential campaign and, yes, send a ridiculous amount of money Obama’s way. The ultimate goal from Obama’s side was to develop an infrastructure to both develop public opinion as well as fill the campaign coffers, but would anyone seriously suggest that Obama supporters are motivated by personal financial gain?

I’m not saying that, if the crisis widens, people won’t be forced to look for gainful employment in whatever way they have to (which, I suppose, is a gracious read of Keen’s point). I’m saying that the Web has never simply been about money — the public’s use of it began as a hobbyist space for graduate students to play with (and develop such ubiquitous tools as, um, “email”). I see no reason to believe that this won’t continue… Keen’s argument is that there is a “speculative hope that they might get some ‘back end’ revenue” motivating everyday folks to use the Internet, and I see no evidence that this is the case. A 2007 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project showed that 28% of online teens were blogging by the end of 2006, and that 55% of online teens had profiles on social networking sites (Myspace, Facebook). My retired father and stepmother are now on Facebook — anecdotally speaking, it seems that these activities are only increasing, and increasing across age ranges.

Obama’s campaign is not exactly the most prosaic example, I know; it’s not like we’ve ever seen a campaign do anything remotely like this in the past (though, of course, Howard Dean set the stage in 2004 and behind the scenes with the DNC in the past several years). The Web is no longer just some pie-in-the-sky potential revolutionary technology, it’s a part of everyday life for millions — Keen’s mistake is in viewing the Web via the wrong metaphor, as publishing instead of personal networking. Online personal networking, surprise, can also lead to a job and aid productivity in jobs! Keen’s hopelessly dated view of the Internet as a publishing venue misses the point entirely of why “Web 2.0″ sites exist in the first place.

I usually don’t bother posting this kind of angry reaction to a crackpot’s stupid claims, but it seems like Keen appears to have missed the biggest Internet story of the year. What a shame.

I’ve been a fan of Kongregate for a while now, and was pleasantly surprised to see the rollout of their newest feature — Kongregate Labs. If you’re unfamiliar with Kongregate, it’s probably most easily described as a “YouTube for Flash games,” though with added achievements (a la the Xbox 360 and Blizzard’s games), a leveling system (which seems to translate mainly into fun bragging rights), and social networking functions (chatrooms, player/designer profiles, discussion forums, etc.). I’ve long been interested in Kongregate as the potential next step of online game design community, but with Kongregate Labs, they’re beginning to show that the next step is already here.

Kongregate Labs adds a number of interesting new features to the site — Flash tutorials (okay, “shootorials”), game customization tools, and game design contests (with cash money rewards, woo). Simultaneously providing “scaffolding” for new designers to learn how to make Flash games, as well as providing tools to implement new tweaks to games and means to earn revenue from game design, I know of nothing quite like this on the web currently. Kongregate is a fascinating community, bridging the world of “Web 2.0″ sites with game design.

Interestingly enough, this is exactly the realm I’m trying to better understand in my dissertation research. The predominance of Flash games makes it a worthwhile area to study in and of itself, but the ways that Kongreagate in particular adds community tools is stellar. What kinds of lessons can we learn about how to teach design skills, and what kinds of implications do sites like this have for everything from learning how to program through learning how to be an online entrepreneur?

Check out Kongregate Labs!

(By the way, does anyone have any advice on how to incorporate the Google shared stuff, including my comments into an existing blog template? There’s an RSS for those shared items, but not one which includes my comments that I can find. And, well, I think people should have to hear my amazing insights on other people’s posts about videogames to SNL to bathroom tiling. That’s what the Internet’s for, right?)

Anyway, one thing I stumbled across on Google Reader this morning was a recent post by Scott Westerfeld (author of the excellent So Yesterday that I posted about recently, as well as the Uglies/Pretties/Specials/Extras books that Liz is currently reading). A few months ago, people were going nuts over wordle.net (a Java app which does word counts for any block of text and visualizes them), and I missed it. Scott decided to take the list of artists from his entire iTunes library, and dump it into Wordle. Pretty cool and fun, and Scott’s experiment is documented here.

I followed his instructions, however, and it turns out that simply dumping all the info from iTunes can be terribly misleading if you have a ton of stuff in your iTunes library that you never, ever listen to. I was sort of shocked that “Nintendo” was the most frequent word in my iTunes library, probably because of Super Smash Bros. Brawl and other soundtracks I’ve got in there which I rarely play. I thought of an alternative, using the music I actually listen to, and decided to Wordle my Last.fm music — basically, all of the music I’ve played via iTunes, my iPods and iPhone for the past 3 years (or however long it’s been since I started audioscrobbling). In particular, I chose to dump in the list of tracks I’ve listened to rather than just the artists (so Wordle could actually build up counts of individual artists). Like Westerfeld, I had to trim out a few words (“play,” “track,” and “full” all showed up as very common, so I did selective searches and replaces). Here’s what it turned out as (apologies for the tiny thumbnail, but that’s what Wordle gave me):

I really like how it broke up the names of multi-word artists, and it highlights that I have listened to a hell of a lot of Ennio Morricone and Yo La Tengo over the years (not to mention the soundtrack to Shaun of the Dead). I have an old dude’s musical tastes, but whatever, I’m old.

Oh, and it makes a decent desktop wallpaper, no? I decided to make a plain black and white sans-serif version for my laptop:

[Click to enlarge]

Additionally, just for kicks, I decided to throw in all the text of the book chapter that Jim Gee and I wrote — which is about to be published any day now, just checked the proofs last week! The chapter is entitled “The Hero of Timelines: Argumentation and Epistemology in Zelda Chronology Debates” and it’s going to be in The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy (Ed., Luke Cuddy) sometime this Fall. Here’s a Wordle for our chapter:

Unsurprisingly, “Zelda” is the biggest word on the map, with “game” and “games” pretty close behind. “Evidence” interestingly shows up big, as does “legendary” — we make a big deal in the chapter about the ways fans of the Zelda games use bits of narrative from the games as evidence to develop theories about the games’ overarching timelines. In particular, we pull out an example of a debate over the meaning of the term “legendary,” so this all makes sense. (If you’re interested in the paper, by the way, I have put a PDF of it on the site for anyone’s perusal).

Anyway, enough Wordling for now!

These are all hallmarks of scientific thought. Indeed, the conversations often had the precise flow of a scientific salon, or even a journal series: Someone would pose a question — like what sort of potions a high-class priest ought to carry around, or how to defeat a particular monster — and another would post a reply, offering data and facts gathered from their own observations. Others would jump into the fray, disputing the theory, refining it, offering other facts. Eventually, once everyone was convinced the theory was supported by the data, the discussion would peter out.

“It blew my mind,” Steinkuehler tells me.

And here’s the thing: The (mostly) young people engaging in these sciencelike conversations are precisely the same ones who are, more and more, tuning out of science in the classroom. Every study shows science literacy in school is plummeting, with barely one-fifth of students graduating with any sort of sense of how the scientific method works. The situation is far worse for boys than girls.

Steinkuehler thinks videogames are the way to reverse this sorry trend. She argues that schools ought to be embracing games as places to show kids the value of scientific scrutiny — the way it helps us make sense of the world.

I quibble with some of that — Thompson states it was “(mostly) young people,” but unfortunately we have no evidence to argue that point (as the forums obscure poster ages). I suspect that many of the participants actually are quite young, but would find it interesting to see if age is correlated with how one uses this particular resource. Regardless, whether or not the participants are old or young isn’t really the point, however, as I’ve discussed on Constance’s research blog in the past.

Anyway, nice to see some more, favorable press for this work. I’m currently in the stages of planning my dissertation, and am thinking of ways to develop these ideas further, especially looking at the ways that participants in the forums engage in design-like practices. The big unanswered question for this research is why are people engaging in these detailed arguments online? Is it simply for the instrumental goal of playing better? Or do some WoW players have even larger goals than that?

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.

It’s actually a pretty interesting watch for anyone currently into computer and/or videogames, just to see how little has changed in the past 23 years. Yes, little… though the technology has improved, so many of the same preconceptions, arguments, and tensions are still around.

In the post-Atari, pre-Nintendo industry cooldown, attention turned back to computer games, as well as speculation toward what the role of games would be in the industry. Taking a definite “they’re back to being complex toys for hobbyists” stance, the late Gary Kildall certainly didn’t have the long view for the eventual social and cultural significance of games (and, one could argue, he didn’t for operating systems, either).

Anyway, check out the episode in its entirety:

It starts off with demos of Sargon and Millionaire for the (then brand spanking new) Macintosh, then moves into a very awkward demo/interview segment with Lebling and David Crane, co-founder of Activision. I mean awkward in about three senses — Crane and Lebling seem uncomfortable around each other as wings of very different kinds of games (Activision leading the way with graphical games, Lebling’s Infocom still trying to compete with text-only games), Crane seems giddily happy with all the dumb, silly eye-candy around the Ghostbusters game, and, of course, it was Activision who would later buy Infocom about one year later. I don’t know how far Infocom’s talks with Activision had proceeded by the time this was filmed — or if they’d even started — but with hindsight, we can see the eventual end of Infocom right there on that table (with a bouncing ball highlighting Ray Parker, Jr. lyrics).

So, sort of depressing, I guess. Lebling argued that their games would eventually move beyond the short form to more “novel-like” games, and that clearly didn’t happen (at least in text games). Rather, it seems that the short form has exploded and flourished in the past 15 years, with the advent of Graham Nelson’s (and collaborators’) Inform, among other interactive fiction platforms.

Also be sure to check out the amusing commentary by Paul Schindler on why Candyland is superior to videogames (because, of course, videogames cause people to “lose human interaction”), not to mention the news summary at the end about the rise of 15-lb. “lap portable” computers, computerized shoe customization, and how “the end of QWERTY” was supposedly near.

So, okay, maybe a few things have changed in 23 years.

The forums present that gamers are “creating an surround in which epistolatory scientific thinking practices are state learned,” said Sean Dancer, a student intellect who worked on the “Humanity of Warcraft” informing with guide communicator Constance Steinkuehler. The stuff is set for publishing in the Leger of Science Teaching and Profession.

We are the only visitor in the domain that has been as flourishing in all the markets where we participate. We hump a spherical strain. Usually, [when fill say they screw a globose labor, they] honourable impart they deceive in Nippon. But we’ve got creation crosswise Accumulation. No separate complement has been competent to do that. We hold collective a orbicular expertise that none of our else competitors hit.

And, it continues. This has made Mr. Dancer’s day, week, and month. I’m considering starting a whole new section in my vita called “Incomprehensible Vietnamese WoW Gold-Seller Spam,” with this as the first, glorious entry.

I presented a paper called “Informal Scientific Reasoning in Online Game Forums” by Constance and myself, discussing our work studying informal science reasoning in the World of Warcraft forums. If you’re unfamiliar with this work, check out a pair of older blog posts on Constance’s research blog by Constance and by me on the topic.

Unfortunately, Constance couldn’t make the meeting, so she graciously sent me along to deliver the paper, which has received some media attention. Though the message of “Hey parents, games aren’t all bad!” is certainly not a new spin (nor a terribly interesting one anymore), it was nice to see the press jump on the APA’s press release. I’ve been having fun tracking where the AP wire piece (by Steve LeBlanc) has ended up, so here’s a partial list of site/media outlets that have picked up either the state wire report or the later revision, which went national yesterday.

• CNN
• MSNBC
• NPR
• USA Today
• Fox News
• The Guardian
• Kotaku
• SFGate
• WoWInsider [Hm, does it undercut our findings when the biggest WoW blog completely misreads the press release and combines our study with Gentile's?]
• Gamepolitics [Are those commenters named "Jack" just fakes or is the real Jack Thompson commenting on our symposium?]

… and a bunch of other newspapers, TV stations, etc., including at least one in Spain, and one in Hong Kong. Pretty nice!

Again, it was a worthwhile experience. I’m interested in further challenging the discourse among psychologists (a profession I once considered myself training for, sort of) that surface depictions of violence in media outweigh the learning practices that people get from playing with these kinds of interactive environments. It’s pretty much incontrovertible at this point, and it’s nice that the media are still finding it worthwhile to write about.

Of course, I’d still prefer a day (hopefully soon) in which the simple fact that “games involve learning” is common knowledge, and thus no longer newsworthy.

• I presented two talks and a poster at the Games+Learning+Society 4.0 conference this summer, and ended up winning one of the poster prizes (for best theoretical poster)
• We went to two weddings: Matt & Jill’s (in Ohio), and Ben & Amanda’s (in Virginia)
• I hung out in DC for a few days with Liz, got to see Georgetown and meet her friends
• Now, I’m heading to LA tomorrow to give a talk at the Sandbox Symposium, then Boston next week to give a talk (for my advisor, Constance) at the American Psychological Association meeting.

So, yeah, I’m rather busy. In the midst of that, I did physical therapy for my perpetually bad back, submitted a paper to a journal, started writing another two manuscripts, and have my prelim questions coming into shape. Progress.

A few other things to note…

• I upgraded WordPress, but the upgrade broke all the categories. I dunno what to do about that, and I’m too lazy to fix them right now — expect that to be busted for a while until I overhaul the whole site
• I’ve been Twittering much more often than blog posting lately, and the Twitter feed is on the front page of this blog now. Go there if you want to see what I’m up to in a more timely fashion
• I’ve recently added WPTouch, a new plug-in for WordPress which makes se4n.org look readable and pretty via the iPhone/iPod Touch
• However, I’ve been spending more of my time reading blogs using Google Reader lately — so much that I’ve now started a new, miniblog type thing with my shared items from Google Reader. Eventually, this will be incorporated into this weird mish-mash of a blog I have, but for now, check out the link
• Though this has nothing to do with The Cake Saga (see previous posts), I found the first panel of the latest xkcd to be a little disconcerting:
  
  [Click for a larger image]

Okay, enough for now. Gotta go to a meeting, write Keynote slides, then pack for LA!

Oh, how I love the Internet.

If you saw my last post, you know that I recently had a few seconds of Internet fame that has stretched to approximately half a minute of fame by this point. The people behind the Food Network show Ace of Cakes — a show I’ve seen a few times, thought was sort of interesting, and then promptly forgot to continue watching — made a really great original series Star Trek cake. Being a Trekkie and one who thinks obsessive Trekkies are hilarious, I made a little joke in the vein of obsessive Trekkies which was promptly misread by a bunch of people, carried over to io9, and a few other places.

I’m still a bit flabbergasted by this — how in the world did “THIS IS A DISASTER I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY PUT SCOTTY IN THE NAVIGATOR’S POSITION I CAN’T BELIEVE THESE PEOPLE ARE SO CLUELESS ABOUT THE BASICS OF STAR TREK THIS IS A DISASTER” sound at all like a serious post to these people? For the majority of people on Trekmovie.com (where the comment was posted) — including the dude who runs the blog — it was an obvious joke. But, for others, they either have impaired senses of humor, or my fake-out was entirely too close to what many schmucks think Trekkies really talk like online.

Anyway, I’m having fun cataloging where else this little thing has ended up, and will share a few with y’alls:

First of all, Trekmovie felt the need to clarify that, yes, it was a joke, and graciously linked to my previous blog post.

Next, it seems Geekologie carried the story — though they attempted to get a dig in at me personally, they couldn’t spell my name correctly, oops!

Then, a bunch of others picked it up: Horrorthon repeated the Geekologie story, Joseph Dickerson (a very serious looking guy) linked to it, as did “Grinning Skull” (I kinda like the blog name, if not the blog itself), and Tweaks the Limbs. Tim posted an apology (being that he was one of the Trekmovie posters who replied to me in that thread), and Food Network Addict had a rather funny post about it (and the pic above), notable mainly because Mary Alice (one of the Ace of Cakes peeps) chimed in.

Then there’s the LA Times blog linking to it, and, of course, it got Dugg and promptly went nowhere. Oh, and I’ve seen it linked a few times on Livejournal, but Livejournal’s a cesspool, so I barely bother reading or commenting on those, I guess, other than this one, notable because of the awesome animated series LJ icon linked here:

Anyway, it’s amusing to see that, for a few people I don’t know out there, the phrase “THIS IS A DISASTER” became something of a mini-meme on Trekmovie for a day or so. And, I’m left with the conflicting emotions that a bunch of people eager to point fingers at nerds pointed them at me, when, uh, I was trying to do the same thing! Hoist with my own petard, I suppose.

One more comment from the io9 post made me laugh a ton:

OletheaEurystheus at 12:37 PM
@Box-of-Rain:
Actually it seems like half the internet didnt get the joke. Trekmovie has had to post a story specifically TELLING the rest of the people who picked it up it was a joke by a guy with a known sense of humor. This is the problem with the internet sometimes, blogs pick up on things that are in the know to only those people who post there and spread it around the internet like its fact… Its especially problematic of blogs that try to be “hip” by making fun of everyone else. IO9 (and Gawker blogs in general) is well known to be one of those types of blogs who try to manufacture hipness..

The bolded emphasis was mine and not the original poster’s, as I’m always going to emphasize when someone out there describes me as “a guy with a known sense of humor.” No one on Trekmovie knows me, and this OletheaEurystheus person is unknown to me, too. Yet, I have a “known sense of humor!” I’ve made it! I beat the Internet!

Finally, just to remind everyone the only proper and correct reaction to nerds, I leave you with the immortal words of John Goodman:

(… and Ogre).

But, hey, I just had to post about my 15 seconds of Trekkie nerddom fame. A few days ago, Trekmovie.com posted a few cute pictures from the upcoming season of Ace of Cakes, which features an original series Star Trek cake. Check it out:

Cute, huh? Of course, there’s a redshirted dude (Scotty? Leslie? I dunno) sitting where Chekov normally sits, so I posted a comment which, to my eyes, is about as tongue-in-cheek as you can get on the Internet:

6. sean – May 25, 2008

THIS IS A DISASTER I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY PUT SCOTTY IN THE NAVIGATOR’S POSITION I CAN’T BELIEVE THESE PEOPLE ARE SO CLUELESS ABOUT THE BASICS OF STAR TREK THIS IS A DISASTER

Har har, yeah, I poked fun at obsessive Trekkies. It’s easily apparent that I’m being absurd and ridiculous. All caps and “THIS IS A DISASTER” seemed to make that pretty obvious, no?

Well, no, as a number of Trekmovie responses indicated:

14. Tim – May 25, 2008

Ugh Sean you make us look all INSANE! It’s a cake…nothing more…it’s not meant to be canon. Just relax dude. Who gives a frak if the small little cake people are not sitting in the right chair. Lords of Kobol protect us all! If anyone saw the G4 Star Trek ads they ran then we all know that Spock doesn’t have a sanctuary where Scotty DJs

Secondly, Adam, I’d rather watch a show about baking unique cakes on the FOOD NETWORK than a show about 12 women who want to find a farmer for a husband.

18. Navigator NCC 2120 USS Entente – May 25, 2008

“12. Sean – May 25, 2008

lol #6 has a point. Scotty and Uhura are not in the right spots and Chekov is nowhere to be found. Even before Chekov came onto the show Scotty didn’t sit there.”

Actually Sean, Scotty DID sit at the Navigator’s Station on the bridge at the end of the second pilot “Where No Man Has Gone Before” because Navigator Gary Mitchel was dead. There is a picture of it at http://www.trekcore.com. I tried to post the link to the picture but it did not work.

Navigator NCC-2120 USS Entente
/\

38. Gary Seven of Nine – May 26, 2008

Sean:

“Have you ever kissed a girl??!?!?!?!?!”

It’s an F-in cake. Turn-off your caps lock and and stop making trekkers look like such OCD losers.

Et cetera, et cetera. Again, fairly amusing — some of the hardcore readers of the blog thought I was being serious, no big deal, right?

Now I start getting a few anonymous, confusing emails and find that this has been picked up by the Gawker sci-fi blog io9, with even more hilarious results. A few choice comments from that blog:

joemono at 10:22 AM

THIS IS A DISASTER I think everyone should bookend all comments on this thread with that phrase THIS IS A DISASTER

Zantor at 11:44 AM

We are talking in depth about a little “Star Trek” Cake?
I remember when Trekkies were cool and fun. What’s this shit?
Set phasers for Get me the hell out of here!

victheremin at 12:42 PM

THIS IS AN ABOMINATION!
DAMN THE ACE OF CAKES!

I’ll chase him ’round the moons of Nibia and ’round the Antares Maelstrom and ’round perdition’s flames before I give him up.

The bridge crew’s arrangement notwithstanding, I’m not that impressed by their cakes. Unless the cakes are really tasty or laced with heroin for that extra “oomph”, someone in that company must have some serious connections for them to be the premiere cake supplier in their area.

Oh, this is just too hilarious. With just one off-hand jokey blog comment post, I’ve managed to annoy both the hardcore Trekkies and the people who hate them at the same time! I never thought my first time making it into a Gawker blog would be over a Star Trek cake, but you know what they say about gift horses.

Hey everyone, it’s been a while since I’ve posted — I keep meaning to redo this site so it’s less a blog and more a repository of my current research info, but I’ve been busy. I’ll try to get to that soon, but, hey, that might mean another month or so. Oh well, such is life.

Anyway, I’m flying out tomorrow for New Jersey and New York City, where I’ll be presenting a paper at the American Educational Research Assocation annual conference. My paper is entitled “Literacy Implications of Online Fan Debates” — a rather boring title for a rather fun paper. In it, I analyze the phenomenon of “timeline debates” around the The Legend of Zelda games.

If you’re unfamiliar with it, there has been a fair amount of discussion over the years as to the “correct” ordering of the stories in the Zelda series. That is, does A Link to the Past occur in the same timeline as The Wind Waker or in a different one? Does the original The Legend of Zelda occur after or before Ocarina of Time? These have been pretty esoteric fan debates, but are illustrative of how complex and “design-like” many fan debates are around games. I’m increasingly interested in how informal design practices evolve out of fan communities (around games, TV shows, etc.), and it’s looking more and more like this will be the core of my dissertation.

Anyway, here is a link to the PDF of the full paper, and here is a link to a PDF of the handout I plan on having for attendees of my talk to take with them. If you’re interested, please download and let me know what you think!

If you read this blog and will be in New York for AERA, please stop by and say hi!

P.S., I plan on going here:

If you never saw it, here’s the video:

Yeah, okay, great. Nice try, but not terribly funny, move along, right? Well, actually, no.

Turns out Barack Obama is — several months after this video’s heyday — offended and upset by the video. Huh? Here are a couple choice quotes:

“I guess it’s too much to ask, but you do wish people would think about what impact their actions have on kids and families,” Obama said during the interview, held in the den of a supporter who just had hosted a campaign stop on her front lawn attended by about 120 people.

“This is part of the process of politics that can be difficult, (that) is making sure that your kids and your wife and your family are insulated from both things like this and what I suspect will be at some point some negative campaigning,” Obama said.

What the? He’s worrying about his family being insulated from this video and negative campaigning only garners a little mention at the end? Oh, dude, you’re gonna be in for a world of hurt soon, if you fear dumb little YouTube videos as threatening the integrity of your family.

In recent weeks, I’ve questioned Obama as a candidate — I just don’t think the guy’s close to being ready — and reactions like this show a surprisingly thin skin. Bill Clinton, for all his faults, would have handled a video like this with a laugh and a joke and, okay, maybe by trying to get the “Obama girl”‘s phone number. But Obama takes the road of victimization, and that’s not something you want to do when someone is making — for free, mind you — advertisements that get people excited about your campaign.

Right now, my friend Kendra and I are looking at videos of Tay Zonday. He’s clearly one of America’s brightest young talents. To wit:

And, a response from MC Steinberg:

And, a remix of the original song to heightened emotional effect:

Chocolate rain.

For those of you who don’t know, Doctor Who is the venerable British science fiction institution, in production from 1963 through 1989 and then again since 2005. The latest version (originally starring Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper, then David Tennant and now Freema Agyeman) is a lot of fun — it’s still rather cheesy at times, but also much more witty, self-referential, and clever than most expected. There’s only one more week to go in the current series (in the UK, I don’t believe it airs in the US until late summer), and watching it has been a weekly tradition for me and my friends wherever I am (hi there, Matt and Jill and Chris and Sarah).

Anyway, since the show has come back on the air, they’ve put a “Next Time…” preview of the following week’s episode at the end of each episode. Nothing terribly fancy, nothing terribly special, just a quick-cut set of clips to tease the next week’s episode. What I’ve discovered is that there’s a small community of fans of the classic show (mainly the Tom Baker era, ’74-’81) who are now taking clips from those old shows and remixing them, impressively following the style of the new episode trailers.

First, here’s a “Next Time…” for this season’s “Daleks In Manhattan” (a mediocre episode, but decent trailer):

… and then two of the fake trailers made by YouTube user “Mulett,” who has made the best ones so far, in my opinion. Here’s “Terror of the Zygons” and “The Hand of Fear”:

A couple of other ones have caught my eye, but aren’t embeddable. They are “City of Death” and “The Five Doctors” (I like the clever use of the old logo). There are maybe another dozen of them on YouTube, but most are pretty poorly executed — only Mulett’s really stand out for me as excellent.

I’m not really in the mood to over-intellectualize this obviously media literate activity, but I will note this: This is a very different kind of fan activity than most fan fiction/fan media remixing. That is, some of the traditional interpretations of fan fiction are that they are reappropriations of the original “texts” of a TV show, movie, game, comic, etc. for the purposes of telling a new story, enacting a fantasy (often prurient) which is appealing to some subsection of fans, addressing narrative gaps in the original stories, or all of these. An example of these might be the pervasive sexualized fan fiction of, say, Star Trek or Harry Potter (you know, the tiresome Kirk/Spock or Draco/Ron slash fanfic), or the Doctor Who fanfic which tried to explain why Romana’s regeneration was so different from the Doctor’s.

These videos seem qualitatively different, don’t they? Different from other well-known fan remixes of videos (such as The Phantom Edit, which existed primarily to address and repair the perceived crappiness of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace). If the editors of these short movies are trying to do anything, it seems like they’re probably just having fun with the incongruity of the old Doctor Who series’ style shoehorned into the new Doctor Who series’ style.

And this doesn’t seem to get talked about much — what I’ve read about fan fiction and fan uses of media seems to rely heavily upon the reappropriation of text or story content, and rarely on the style of the editing. This kind of thing somewhat reminds me of the recent spate of trailer remixes (such as the heartwarming remix of The Shining and the zombie remix of West Side Story), but in those cases the creators were expicitly trying to adopt a jarringly different style, for, you know, to make the funny. In these Doctor Who videos, it just seems different to me.

By the way, only one more episode of Doctor Who series 3 is left to air in the UK. This has been one of the best and weirdest seasons yet.

To top it off, I stumbled on the Back To the Future DVD set for $11 at Half Price the other day, splurged and ordered the R2 2-disc set of Hot Fuzz when I found out the US was only getting a single-discer, plus when I saw that the Mario Bava Box V1 was only $20 from Amazon, well, you can guess what I did. Anyway, yeah, movies.

Ever since I gave up on WoW, I’ve found myself spending more time in social MOOs, and hanging out on a few that I hadn’t been on regularly since the Clinton administration. Sometime in the mid-’90s, several of us got into long, in-MOO discussions about movies and, for whatever reason, made lists of our favorite flicks. I just found mine, originally written sometime around ’98 or so, and then revised in ’01. I present it here for your perusal:

SEAN’S MOVIES
=============

2001: A Space Odyssey – Directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1968
All the President’s Men – Directed by Alan J. Pakula, 1976
L’Atalante – Directed by Jean Vigo, 1934
Citizen Kane – Directed by Orson Welles, 1941
The Decline of Western Civilization – Directed by Penelope Spheeris, 1981
The Godfather Part II – Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, 1973
Der Himmel Ueber Berlin – Directed by Wim Wenders, 1988
House of Games – Directed by David Mamet, 1987
It’s a Wonderful Life – Directed by Frank Capra, 1947
Love and Death – Directed by Woody Allen, 1975
My Dinner With Andre – Directed by Louis Malle, 1981
Network – Directed by Sidney Lumet, 1976
The Philadelphia Story – Directed by George Cukor, 1940
Point Blank – Directed by John Boorman, 1968
La Regle du jeu – Directed by Jean Renoir, 1939
Rio Bravo – Directed by Howard Hawks, 1959
Rope – Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1948
Rushmore – Directed by Wes Anderson, 1998
Shichinin no samurai – Directed by Akira Kurosawa, 1954
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan – Directed by Nicholas Meyer, 1982
The Sting – Directed by George Roy Hill, 1973
Sullivan’s Travels – Directed by Preston Sturges, 1941
The Third Man – Directed by Carol Reed, 1949
This is Spinal Tap – Directed by Rob Reiner, 1984

Ok, this list is already beginning to look dated, and rather than revise it, I’ll simply add alternates that would probably be switched in or out of the list of 24 depending on my mood.

Magnolia – Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999
The Graduate – Directed by Mike Nichols, 1967
Miller’s Crossing – Directed by Joel Coen, 1990
Paris, Texas – Directed by Wim Wenders, 1984
Down By Law – Directed by Jim Jarmusch, 1986
Once Upon a Time in the West – Directed by Sergio Leone, 1969
Before Sunrise – Directed by Richard Linklater, 1995
The Great Escape – Directed by John Sturges, 1963
The Idiots – Directed by Lars von Trier, 1998 (?)

So, I find this list pretty amusing — I haven’t watched a bunch of these movies in years and years, and don’t remember being so fond of them that I’d bother putting them down in a list like this. Of the original list, I’m a bit surprised that Wings of Desire and It’s a Wonderful Life made the list. Rope made the list primarily because of the tense staginess of the movie, but how did this make it when Vertigo or The Lady Vanishes or Rear Window didn’t?

More embarassing are the additions in 2001. I was fanatical about Magnolia (saw it three times in the theater) and now just find the movie embarassing. Similarly, Miller’s Crossing is a lot of fun, but ultimately pretty empty, Idioterne was profoundly affecting the first time I saw it, but I can’t say I revisit it that much anymore, and The Graduate and The Great Escape are classics but not films I’d likely put on a list like this today.

I guess I see my movie-watching youth in this list — I was much more entranced by big-budget and modern studio films than I remember, which has morphed into my fascination with late ’60s through mid-’70s American studio pictures (the “American New Wave”). However, I clearly felt much less comfortable with including “guilty pleasures” on the list (c.f., Star Trek II, of course). Lists like these are hallmarks of where one is in life, and what kinds of cinematic experiences resonate the most with you at that particular time, I suppose.

Just for kicks, then, I think I’ll cobble together a new list of “favorite films” — movies I either watch over and over again, or strike me right now (June, 2007) as being ones that mean something to me, presented in no particular order:

The Third Man (Reed)
Rear Window (Hitchcock)
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Altman)
Ugetsu (Mizoguchi)
F for Fake (Welles)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Meyer)
The Gleaners & I (Varda)
Paris, Texas (Wenders)
Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo)
The Conformist (Bertolucci)
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Leone)
L’Atalante (Vigo)
Blow-Up (Antonioni)
Shaun of the Dead (Wright)
The New World (Malick)
Taste of Cherry (Kiarostami)
Jazz on a Summer’s Day (Stern)
Charade (Donen)
Stolen Kisses (Truffaut)

There’s no sense in posing — I’m a rather middle-of-the-road movie connoisseur, defined by largely English-language films. But there’s this weird streak of movies made by Italians in the ’60s and ’70s that I didn’t expect — Antonioni, Leone, Pontecorvo, Bertolucci. Interesting! Maybe in a few years, I’ll revisit this list and see what I still think of it.

That said, I can see the utility in using something like Twitter as a clearinghouse for a variety of one’s regularly-updated RSS feeds. I’ve got too many of them out there (Flickr, Netflix, last.fm, Library Thing, etc.) and no simple way to let my throngs of fans follow my every Internet footprint. So, here’s where Jaiku comes in.

I initially read about Jaiku from Leo Laporte‘s blog a few weeks ago, when he bailed from Twitter. I love Leo, but didn’t understand why he found Twitter so alluring and why he was hyping it up so much — apparently, after a few weeks of the hype, everyone else wondered if it was related to his TWiT network, which it ain’t, so he jumped to Jaiku. Jaiku’s pretty much a “Twitter plus” — it allows you to document that you’re clipping your toenails at 1am if you want to, plus gives you the ability to incorporate your other RSS feeds into one “master feed.” This is why I’m on board for the next wave of trendy update websites.

Here is my Jaiku page, and here is my grand mal RSS feed (both are now linked on the front page of this weblog). It currently includes whatever I choose to put for my Jaiku status (probably not much), plus it gets updated whenever a new Flickr photo gets posted, whenever I listen to music and it gets noted by last.fm, whenever I update that I got a new book to Library Thing, whenever I add new movies to my Netflix queue, etc. Now, this is the kind of ridiculous minutiae I can get behind!

I’m only partially joking, I honestly think this makes more sense for how I interact on the Internet and what I value about it. I am not the type of person who is going to read blog after blog to see what kind of mood someone is in, but I am the kind of person who wants to know what music people are listening to, see the latest photos they’ve decided to share with the world, find good new movies to check out, and so on. Jaiku lets me do that.

Who knows how long I’ll do this, but since it mainly runs on autopilot, I’m guessing this will be an extended experiment this time. I’m going to Jaiku! And, what the hell, maybe I will start jotting down ridiculous minutiae — I’ll start with regularly listing what I eat, just to keep me on a reasonable diet via the risk of public embarrassment.

I don’t normally read xkcd very much (I frankly don’t get what’s so funny about it, Achewood and Cat & Girl are still more my speed), but I did really like this recent map of online communities. Click on the thumbnail above for the full image.

These things serve as funny equivalents of, say, the AFI’s “Top 100 Romantic Comedies Ever” lists. That is, they’re more fun to talk about than to take seriously — and given that xkcd’s a comic, well, duh. But, still, I found notable a few weirdnesses:

• I’m surprised at how many I’d never heard of before — Piczo? Broadcaster? Cyworld?
• I debate whether or not “Myspace Bands” should border the “Sea of Culture.”
• For all the work we do on MMOGs in our research group, sometimes I forget that stuff like Yahoo! Games is still out there and enormous.
• Loved the “Ocean of Subculture” and wonder if there are any “NOOOOOOO” and “Snape Killed Dumbledore” sunken islands around there.
• Speaking of sunken lands, poor USENET. I miss it so.
• The positioning of the “icy north” scares me a little, like we’re being prepared for an invasion by the barbarians of the north.

Yeah, I’m definitely overanalyzing a comic, but whatever. If I was to put myself on the map, I’d probably be somewhere just east of the Straits of Web 2.0 and west of Del.Icio.Us Island.

I might go diving for more USENET lost treasures later.

Today’s Mother’s Day, and I’m going to make a rather unusual post, combining several topics: How much I miss my mother, how tiresome I find the “Your Mom” joke, and what I think the predominance of that joke in some social settings means.

First of all, my Mom passed away over five years ago now, but there’s hardly a day that goes by that I don’t think about her. She’s the little girl on the right in the picture above (the original photo was taken on a boat in Turkey in the early 1940s; the adults are my grandparents, the other little girl is my aunt). Most people would, of course, feel a sense of loss at losing a parent, but for me, I think I lost one of the only people in the world that I could really, openly talk to. On days like today, I think a bit more about her and what she meant to me. I miss my Mom.

Also, it’s been a rather frustrating year socially, in Madison. In the groups I have run around with, I have felt pretty alienated at times — one annoyance is that many relatively normal adults use the “Your Mom!” insult, and quite freely. You know what I’m talking about; I’ll ask something relatively innocuous like “Who’s going to go play basketball this weekend?” and will get “Your Mom!” as a response from adult colleagues, over and over again. I quickly got out of the habit of using this particular joke after I was 13 and unthinkingly used it in front of a kid who had recently lost his mother — the pained look in the kid’s eyes will always stick with me and I’ve felt awful about that ever since.

Anyway, the “your Mom” joke just doesn’t make much sense to me as an adult, as it’s not terribly funny. It continues to persist around me even though everyone who uses it knows that my mother passed away a few years ago and I interpret this differently. I think it’s notable that the social sphere is predominantly white, as well, and I’m distinguishing this from the very stylized ways that “your momma” jokes play out in African-American culture.

Obviously, this kind of ridiculous trash talk isn’t intended to insult but it’s still going to strike a nerve with me that it won’t strike with other people. But, that’s exactly what I find curious about it — it’s juvenile and just not funny, so it must serve some kind of alternate purpose, right? The rise of these kinds of quasi-ironic verbal memes has always interested me, as they clearly signify something social to the speaker that people from outside the group might not be clued into. And which I’m having a hard time understanding.

My guess is that the genesis of use of “your mom” jokes in our little corner of the planet fits the concept of Border Discourses to some extent. That is, at the intersection of two kinds of disparate Discourses which are unable to communicate, participants form a third Discourse to bridge the discussion. In this case, I suspect that falling back on juvenile wordplay is one of the easiest ways to bridge between the specialized Discourses of academia and games. Since our program operates on the cusp of both the worlds of curricular design and game design, relatively academic discussions among adults occasionally get punctuated with the kind of talk you’d expect from 14 year olds as a means of deflating the foreign nature of the specialized lingo. Though there are all sorts of quasi-academic Discourses forming at that intersection (since both areas deal with kids and the kinds of competitive talk that occur around games), I assume that the “junior high speak” gets fallen back upon out of some deeper commonality — we were all 14 at some point, and nearly all found this kind of humor amusing once.

This feels like the opposite of the ways that other Internet-savvy technophiles use tiresome terms such as “mashups,” “blogosphere,” “Web 2.0″ and the like. Instead of trying to create buzzwords that alienate the uninitiated, the use of the “Your Mom” kind of humor — and “gamerspeak” such as “QQ,” “GTFO,” “ftw,” “lawl,” etc. — indicates a desire to revert to the kinds of languages used by what it is we study. There’s a desire to emulate the gamer going on here, perhaps, and the underlying assumption that to view games from the gamer’s perspective is something that we should be striving to do. Nurturing our “inner 14 year old,” perhaps?

Regardless of if I think that’s a good idea, I won’t be putting up with the “Your Mom” jokes anymore. I’m still very new to this academic field and the field of games, but I don’t find appealing using a kind of wordplay that might offend others — the gamerspeak uses of the words “retarded” and “gay” are equally problematic, and I won’t partake in that, either. I’m simply not here to be a gamer, I’m here to be an academic who studies games. It remains to be seen if that’s possible without being active in this particular kind of Discourse, however.

On Mother’s Day, it’s odd that my thoughts turn to stuff like this. I’m sure my Mom wouldn’t have really cared — no one is seriously insulting her, after all — but I care, simply because Discourses matter, and the ones I choose to actively be a part of say something about who I am and how I view the world.

If anybody remembers “Space Seed”, Khan spent quite a while
reading the library tapes of the big E. I remember Kirk
mentioning something like “You’ve been using our computer quite
extensively.”( or something like that ). He’d be bound to stumble
across some Klingon proverbs and trivia of the 23rd century.

Here’s something to think about, if old Gentleman Jim hadn’t been
so nice and polite to Khan, by letting him read all the library
files, in his first attack at the Enterprise from Reliant, Khan
wouldn’t have known “right where to hit us” and might not have
killed Scotty’s nephew, Peter Preston.

The reason I’m bringing up Peter’s death is that his death may
have affected Scotty’s repair ability. If our favorite engineer
was so greif stricken that it slowed down the speed of fixing
the warp engines, thus Spock might not have had to make the
final sacrifice, Kirk wouldn’t have had to steal the Enterprise,
David wouldn’t have died, and so on …

I realize that I’m rambling on, but thought that many things could
have been changed if Kirk hadn’t shown Khan the library files.
Hmmm, I wonder what could be changed with the Guardian of Forever,
the slingshot effect, and the sort.
Hmmmmmmm…..

Sean Duncan

final sacrifice, Kirk wouldn’t have had to s

Yes, the 14 year old me was really psychoanalyzing Scotty’s grief from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and yes, I apparently left a weird snippet at the end. Cut me some slack, I didn’t get out much.

Given the context, I suppose this is as good a time as any to announce that I’m going to bring back my ridiculously nerdy Star Trek-themed blog, fesari.us, sometime soon. I put up some new, temporary WordPress themes at the site the other day, but it will eventually be re-skinned to look more like the original, MovableType site that I took down in 2004. Every few years, I feel like blogging about a forty-year old TV show. I’m not sure I have anything left to say on the most uncool topic of uncool topics, but, what the hell, why not? Rather than an academic tone, I’ll be babbling there with a bit more self-deprecation and wit, I hope.

Finally, my brother and I are revamping our baseball blog at bloopcurve.com, which has also fallen fallow in the past year. Hopefully, we’ll be updating it with information about our fantasy baseball teams, the Red Sox, and (eventually) the Madison Mallards.

I whipped up a little banner for TerraNova today — they’re switching out their old “winter” banner for something new, and asked for submissions for a new banner image. I’m not sure that they’ll like mine, but what the hell, I have Photoshop and some pretty pictures of flowers on my hard drive, so I gave it a shot. Click on the image above to see a bigger version, if you feel like it!

In other, random news:

I found The Lost Treasures of Infocom II at the thrift store for $1 yesterday. I already have all these games in other formats, but it’s still a thrill to find something like this at the thrift.

It sounds like the season finale of Battlestar Galactica was rather ridiculous. Rather than spoil anything specific (and I haven’t even seen the second half of this past season yet, anyway), I’ll just say that the show sounds like it’s veering into DS9 territory for me — an interesting overarching story arc plagued by weird season-ending showboating. Which, of course, will eventually all be reset by the middle of next season, just like it was in seasons 2 and 3.

In terms of online writing, I’ve spent a fair amount of my time finding interesting things to post about over at Joystick101, a community blog that I have been a contributing writer for since its relaunch last month. The site is clearly still finding its legs, but check it out if you’re interested in games, gaming culture, and learning. I see myself as mainly just providing links to what other people are talking about on gaming and media blogs rather than being the kind of guy who writes a lot of long features. So, if you’re looking for shorter posts by me specifically on the topic of games and learning, you’ll find them there in my post archive. Anyone is welcome to register and submit a post — though it’s a WordPress blog, the site is transitioning into being more of a community site, and soon it should break out into having a larger reader and writer base. Look for good things here in the future.

Also, since I haven’t written voluminously on my own site yet, I’ll use this post to publically force myself to pin down what my next few blog posts will be about. My former students know that similar promises of mine in the classroom rarely worked out (e.g. “I swear, I’ll get those papers back to you next week, and, oh yeah, those other papers to you the week after that”). But, hope springs eternal, I suppose.

With that said, here are a few topics I’ve been mulling over for some longer posts:

• Will Wright! If you poke into my Joystick101 archive, you’ll see that I posted about Will Wright’s SXSW talk last week. There are a number of provocative ideas in Wright’s talk that need discussing, so I plan on taking a stab at a few of his ideas on narrative and science in games.
• Harry Potter! I just finished The Half-Blood Prince last weekend, and am finally caught up. I have a lot to say (and theorize) about how this series of books works, and will try to devote a post this week to the topic.
• Newspaper Blackout Poems! My friend (and former student) Austin Kleon is doing some amazing, awesome work which reminds me a lot of Oulipo and Oubapo experiments in constructing literature and comics.
• Fantasy baseball! It’s springtime (thankfully!), and I’m commissioner in our local Games+Learning+Society group’s fantasy baseball league. We start up next weekend with a draft, and then it’s several months of me staring at statistics to figure out how to better predict which middle relievers will be a surprisingly dominant closer when shifted into that role mid-season. Also, I’m going to be a participant for a colleague’s new study on fantasy baseball and competition, so that should provide me a few posts of baseball geekery.
• PMOG! That’s “Passively Multiplayer Online Game,” a new Justin Hall creation that a lot of people I know are playing with. It’s really buggy, superfluous, and occasionally embarassing — but, um, it’s fun. I think? I’m not sure yet, and I’ll hopefully work out my thoughts about this with a post to my weblog.
• lolcats! I am reading I Can Has Cheezburger pretty much every day, and I don’t understand why. This is another one of those “I sense something signficant is going on in a context that is ridiculous,” but I’m as yet not sure what I want to say about it.

So, hopefully some of these topics are interesting to you. If not, delete your bookmark now! Before it’s too late!

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.]