D&D Online questions

Over the years, I've known many an individual who would list Dungeons and Dragons as one of their major or minor hobbies. So I have a passing familiarity with how that particular and somewhat unique style of tabletop gaming works. I have had occasion to watch weekends worth of gameplay and have noticed the social interactions that occurs fluidly throughout, as the gamers manage their game roles and outside selves seamlessly.

Now, Wizards of the Coast, the owners of the D&D franchise, are in the final stages of delivering an MMPORPG that is supposed to be true to the tabletop game. In a discussion with Kelly about this last night, I enthused that it will be an interesting study to see how it gets integrated into the habits and hobbies and affections of hardcore D&Ders who've managed until now to abstain from MMOs, even those rather blatantly based on the game. Kelly rightly brought me down to earth and pointed out that the game universe may well be doomed to failure and ultimately to strong disappointment or disapproval from tabletoppers because the game is anticipated to be one of the next big releases, causing existing online gamers to flock to it in droves, bringing along with them their blithe and open disregard for the traditions of D&D itself, looking only for an immersive gameplay experience that replicates and conforms to existing MMO conventions. We both wondered also to which market Wizards of the Coast will market - their existing rabidly loyal tabletopper base or the arguably larger online gamer base?

In thinking more about this today while reading a political science piece on the elite engineered political movements in Europe, it got me thinking about the whole concept of the "elites" as it will/would apply to D&D Online. Certainly the existing tabletop gamers, some who have played conventional D&D for as long as 30 years now, will have definite expectations too of the game and will consider themselves the "real" or "true" elite. When they meet the online gamers, many of whom come from a completely different gaming tradition completely tied to computer games, goals and values and identities will clash. Both will see themselves as the "true" elite. According to my readings, any power clash of elites will return as the winner the group that is best equipped materially and culturally to handle the power presented. But in this new MMO, that power is nebulous and still undefined. And in a digital universe, what could be considered the material or culture that is best suited to this game? With dual claims to elite status probably coming from both sides, it will be up to Wizards to manage the schism and unite the world, a daunting task.

Teens do the darndest....

File this one under S for stupidity or B for brashness...not sure which.

CNN reports two british teens are in critical condition after trying to create homemade light sabres using flourescent light tubes and "petrol". They were filming the stunt when they lit the tubes and one of them blew up.

Competition or cooperation?

While taking a break from studying Canadian constitutional politics and the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms (POLI 204 exam tomorrow worth 30% eek!) I was meandering the net, looking up info on my latest board game obsession, Settlers of Catan.

Found this editorial on the Games Journal -- it's about raising children to be gamers and thought its take on whether or not kids should play competitive games interesting. I know some of my fellow GameCODE-ers are interested in just this issue when looking at digital games.

Mobile blogging

First files, then pictures, now Blogger through its parent company Google is letting bloggers blog using mobile devices.

Nuances of the digital divide debate

While I too am occasionally guilty of going a bit binary in arguments or ideas I put forth here, generally I strive to be more thoughtful and less absolute when addressing issues of interest to me.

One such interest is the entire concept of the digital divide. The problem with the way it is normally addressed is that it is presented as a have/have-not debate, with little gray area or conceptualization of reasoned thinking.

So it was with a sigh of relief that I read this interview in the Digital Divide Network. Finally, a more careful and nuanced view.

Summer session 2005

A thrill of foreshadowing tickled the back of my neck this afternoon as I drove onto the island of Montreal and headed down the Decarie expressway towards downtown. Sun was out, spring finally felt present and I was heading to class.

Okay okay so that doesn't sound necessarily special, but to me it was. You see, I had taken the afternoon off to go to the first of my summer session classes. And they aren't night classes. I'm taking classes in the afternoon for the first time in a very very long time. I only have 4 more days of work to do before I turn into a full-time academic with no other gig to support me. But my thoughts yesterday were turned towards the idea of being in class during daylight hours, of feeling the vibes and energy that is so different on campus during the day.

As it turned out, the vibe and energy were definitely missing. Things were quieter than I had expected. Several of the on-campus concessionaires and cafes were closed up for the season and the students I saw all looked relaxed and unharried.

Still, there I was, on campus, in the middle of a weekday.

I have four classes in total during this six week summer semster, but with two of them being online courses, that leaves me to to attend in person. One is a sociology course on Social Change which looks like it will be fun and illuminating (studying Weber and Cooley and Mead - how can it be bad?) and the other is another political science course, this time an introduction to Canadian politics.

That latter course showed me once again how absolute people can be when making arguments. I heard all kinds of wild accusations and theories, which, if they had been presented as possibilities, would have been fine. But when they're presented as an absolute fact, as indisputable and self-evident, there I have problems with it. I tried to help the prof shift the debate to more nuanced areas of power and agency and the Canadian context, but the rest of the class kept dragging the discussion into a binary debate on the "goodness" or "badness" of Canadian politics and politicians vis-a- vis Quebec and the US.

When class ended around 4:00, I exited, climbed down the four flights of stairs from the Hall building to emerge into the sunlight. Wow. Sunlight. After class. What a novel concept.

Sunlight and nothing scheduled for me, other than eating dinner and reading political and social theory.

I could get used to this.

Letters from Canada

I wonder sometimes at what it would be like to study someplace that isn't Canada, in which the first language isn't English and few people speak either of my languages (the other being French).

I also wonder what others truly think of Canadians, others being non-North Americans, of course.

New culture, new ideas. The need to adapt. How does it make you grow as a person?

Canada's International Student of the Year Award submissions gave me a taste of what it would be like in reverse, if I weren't Canadian and yet had come to this huge country to study. I smiled and shed a few tears as I read the submissions.

Research process

Since I'm about to finish my last exam of the semester and start into the heavy research phase for my Alley Talk paper for HICSS, I started refreshing my memory on the research process, per what I learned in one of my classes last semester.

Seems I'm not the only one doing this - much talk about this on the AoIR list lately, which yielded this excellent overview of a good and manageable research process for the social sciences. Yes it is one person's account of how he does research, but I find it to be fairly solid.

Academic career greenlighted

April has been an odd month, full of trials and tribulations.

I will stop working for big Pharma next month and will start concentrating solely on my academic advancement and career. I've waited for this for a long time and it seems the day is fast approaching.

Also, to my shock, awe and no small amount of nervousness, my paper "Fear, Risk in the Digital Anomaly" got accepted to the Association of Internet Researcher's annual conference "Internet Research 6.0: Internet Generations" in Chicago in the fall!

Here I am in the listings and here's the abstract that I submitted.

Luckily the paper itself is already written, as I'm taking four courses in May and June so I expect to be up to my ears in writing for sociology and poli sci courses.

As I mentioned here a few weeks back, I'm also working on a paper for the HICSS annual conference in Hawaii in January 2006 - my abstract got accepted there too. Deadline for it is June 15 and my ethnography is barely started. Eeps!

The next 12 months will be very busy and hopefully rewarding.

Gaming for education

The UN has entered the gaming fray with an online Flash-based game designed to teach youth about world hunger. In this video game, hunger is the enemy and the air workers have to get food to the masses on a fictional island in order to vanguish it.

Conference submission prank

In an attempt to highlight how many conferences are setup these days in the name of money rather than furthering research and understanding, three studentsfrom MIT got together and wrote a computer program that generates a "research" paper based on random but contextual grammatical sentences. While it may sound far-fetched, they succeeded in getting a paper accepted to a supposedly academic-oriented technology conference.

Think Media program

So what about Switzerland for graduate studies? The Alps? This program and its faculty reads like a who's who of digital culture.

Digital Culture reading list

Now this is a digital culture reading list! wow!

Sociolinguistics of texting

While doing searches this evening for graduate programs in digital culture studies, I stumbled across this essay on the sociolinguistics of youth texting. As it might play into a paper I'm working on for a conference, it is useful to have around.

HICSS conference submission

I submitted an abstract to the HICSS conferencefor the Persistent Conversation minitrack and got accepted. Hawaii in January - good. Not knowing what awaits me there in terms of audience and slant- not so good. This is far from being a purely sociological audience.

I do hope I get into this AIR conference in October based on my Fear & Risk paper, so that I have at least one under my belt that is more purely digital research before doing HICSS.

Funny that I'm nervous a bit. I've done presentations weekly for the last 10 years on a whole range of topics, with large and small groups, executives and students alike. I would normally tell you that I'm just fine with public speaking, no stage fright, no maam, not me. But this one intimidates me a bit - I admit I didn't expect to get accepted.

Now I have to write the paper and it's due June 15. What's that hoary saying? Nothing hurts like success? I'm feeling the success.

Another addition to the digital fear rhetoric

Wonder what my gameCODE pals would think of this latest intiative by a big-shot US politician to reduce or eliminate violence in video games and apparently save their oh-so-impressionable youth?

Don't these politicians read the academic thinking and research on these topics? Or do they just act on their gut instincts?

I find it laughably sad. Do we hear about the violence, blood, gore and realism we see in the movies and on television? Not anymore. Video games seem to be the new favourite whipping boy of the media and politicians. More digital fear rhetoric.

Happy bunny day

To celebrate this weekend of bunnies and rabbits, pastels and baskets, chocolate eggs and brightly coloured jellybeans, here's a little hip-hopping cheer for you.

Happy Easter to you and yours!
[found via a favourite friendly mailing list]

Creating public spaces for collaboration

Some of my fellow students have been introducing me via email in the apparently ongoing debate about how much of the academic research process should be publicly accessible by any interested in the topic. The argument for the idea is that there is more to research than the finished polished product and so the actual process itself should be observable by the public.

While I agree that it can work, it usually requires the controlled space of something like the Wikipedia. When those types of social networks are absent, as they usually are in smaller scale academic research teams, disastrous results can occur. This group's public Wiki is a sad example of what happens when you attempt to put this high-minded ideal into practice.

This isn't the first time I've seen this happen. It makes me wonder what the actual benefit is to the public of areas like this. From what I've seen, they force the research group in question to play vigilant content cop and janitor, when they should be focused on thought creation and group collaboration.

Game economies get real

Were I to join Kelly's world by getting heavily into game studies as an academic career, this is one of the topics I'd look into - how does the ability to buy your way to success in the explicit goals of the game affect the tacit goals (i.e. sociability)? Microsoft seems to believe it doesn't matter if it affects those tacit ones so long as they're making money off of it.

Internet = medium?

While I don't always agree with Internet Week editor Antone Gonsalves, I do enjoy reading his takes on life in the wires. His most recent editorial nails down part of a phenomenon that people are ignoring among the blare of the trumpets heralding the wonders of the wired age. He points out that though Americans are getting more and more of their political news and information electronically, they are starting to treat the Internet more as a medium than as a place or space in which to get informed. As access to the net becomes conversely unwired through the use of Blackberries, cellphones, wireless laptops, etc, he asserts that people are using it more as a tool than ever before.

Anyone who reads this space of mine regularly knows what I think of this concept and it is becoming a prevailing one as even academics seem to be striving to continue this articulation of a binary opposition between the so-called "real" and the "virtual", between the "actual" and the "digital". I see Antone's opinion as falling into this line, because after all, his employer is all about broadcasting infromation, no matter how interactive they think they when they provide their email addresses so that readers may give feedback.

Even that term, readers, is telling. Are we readers? Something to think about.