As I continued to play Clan Lord last year, I became a regular fixture on hunts arranged by perhaps the strongest player in the game, Mujin Kun. She had been playing almost since the inception, and could usually be found somewhere in the lands for at least eight hours a day, if not more. That devotion and consequent strength allowed her to lead groups into the hardest areas, which in turn allowed both the fighters and healers she brought along to advance quite quickly themselves. The person behind Mujin was able to maintain this intense focus on the game because he worked at business run by his family, in a position that allowed him to play during working hours, on top of the time he took outside of work.

In late August though, we learned that Mujin would be retiring, because her clicker’s family was selling the business, and the clicker behind Mujin would be obliged to find a new job. Since starting his that job, Mujin has rarely appeared, except in off hours, very briefly.

This posed a challenge for those who had hunted with her. Some areas became, if not impossible to visit, at least impossible to visit within the two-hour hunt Mujin ran. Without her strength, group had to move much more slowly. There were several other fighters who had grown strong under Mujin’s command, and if they all came, we could still get to those areas, at least sometimes. Howvever, Mujin’s retirement had a wider impact than just on our hunting group. Because Mujin was in-game so constantly, there were always some fighters and healers around as well. People checking to see who was online, would always find someone, which would make them more inclined to sign in and see about organizing something. Without Mujin, the population will far more often drop to one or two, and that rarely attracts others in to play.

On top of these effects, people miss her. Mujin had blunt sense of humor, was self-serving, but sometimes surprisingly kind. She often took pains to make sure i could join the group, even when my character was tiresomely weak, and she would have to wait and wait as I tried to hit some creature that was so strong, my only hope was mere luck. Her absence has cast a pall over the community, though people don’t often speak of it. No one wants to suggest that her loss may prove fatal, because that can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but there is quite worry.

Obviously I did not manage to keep up momentum, since I last wrote in February. The last year proved extraordinarily difficult on the personal front, for a number of reasons I’ll not discuss here.

During that time I was completely unable to write, and barely able to read anything that required even a little mental effort. It was rather strange, because starting in the spring, there were a number of material improvements to my circumstances, and in fact during the summer I did accomplish a certain amount in non-academic areas. However, I discovered some things about my own working habits, in particular, my need for solitude, for any sustained or focused thinking/writing. Unfortunately, solitude has been in very short supply.

My current goal is simply to figure out a workspace that has free wifi and free solitude. That is to say, I can’t afford to rent some additional space. Like never before, Woolf’s talk of the need for a room of one’s own makes sense to me.

In the mean time, I have a few posts that having buzzing around my brain for awhile, and I’ll try to wrestle them onto the screen.

I finally feel like reading and writing again.  After the stresses of last year, I was seriously burnt out, and ever since have shied away from my research, at least from reading and writing.  I’ve been very absorbed in Clan Lord and some other games, and that’s not without benefit (researchwise) but I was feeling a bit worried about my lack of motivation toward academic production.

Happily, the game studies books I got for Christmas motivated me to read and that is motivating me to write. I do feel that my perspective is much richer now that I’ve been playing CL for almost two years.  Plus my character has become pretty well-respected, which certainly helps my research as well, when it comes to interviewing other players.  And my kids have started playing–2 girls aged 8 and 8.5.  They are really enjoying themselves, and other players are spoiling them rotten sometimes.  🙂  I find playing with them fun, but also frustrating, because they still don’t really listen very well!  But I look forward to how it will all develop.

Now… more reading.

I’m not interrupting much at the moment as I’ve been taking a break.  But still… I oppose SOPA and will blackout my site tomorrow to show it.

And then school ended, and the kids were home! writing went out the window…

I spent the summer visting with friends, relations, and other loved ones, and playing Clan Lord.  I’m still collecting information on that, and learning more and more about both the community and the game itself.

Tomorrow not only is everyone back in school, but we won’t have house guests either.  Maybe I’ll finally be able to put some ideas down in words that mostly make sense!

There are many reasons I use blogs for teaching and encourage others to use them as well. I’ll elaborate further soon, but here is a prezi I’m using for a talk tomorrow:

I have two conferences in the next few weeks, the RSA Security conference, in San Francisco, and CCCC, in Louisville, KY.  I’m not actually going in person to CCCC, because again, can’t afford to travel…no travel funding from my school for anyone this year…  Ideally I’ll video-skype in and talk over my slides that I’ll have sent ahead, but if that won’t work, then the panel organizer, Pam Chisum, will give my talk.  She’s a former MA student of mine and now is just starting her dissertation work up at Washington State University.

That talk will be about Twitter, and is a slightly more developed version of the talk I ended up not giving at MiT06 last spring (lousy economy!), about Ethereal Archives.  I’ll be adding a bit about the impact of some recent changes to Twitter, and of the more sophisticated Twitter clients.

The RSA panel is a little different (and apparently it’s “hot!”).  We are putting on two skits about the foolishness of trying to bar employees from social networking sites in order to preclude time-wasting.  It’s foolish for two reasons: first, many people who are even a little tech savvy can figure out how to get around whatever firewall or other barriers, which can create security risks. Second, as has been demonstrated by any number of PEW internet studies, and more formally argued by Clay Shirky, tapping our social networks and/or “the crowd” actually increases productivity and efficiency.  Hopefully there will be time to introduce some of that evidence because it’s not clear to me how much industry folk are aware of this research that might be highly relevant for them.