Category Archives: Research

Update…

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I am way behind on posting because in late summer I started a new job and moved myself and the family to a new city.  The job is interesting, challenging, and pays well, but it is 9-5ish and I am busy the whole time. Not much time for blogging.

But, now I have more incentive to resume because I’ve been accepted to a conference for next March and need to get my paper written by mid January.  🙂  And I’ve just seen a call for an online conference at which I could make a presentation on the same topic, only multimedia instead of just text.  So, yay.  🙂

The conference is Practicing Theory: Imagining, Resisting, Remembering; the annual conference of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA).

I submitted the following abstract:

Finding Balance Through Doubled Resistance: Piloting a Collaborative Ethnograpic Approach to Game Studies in the Clan Lord MMO

The tension between theory and practice is long-standing, but in recent years it has been brought into sharper relief by the work of scholars such as Henry Jenkins, who argue for study of popular culture from stance of engagement rather than distance. Jenkins resists the dismissive stance toward popular culture and fan communities that long held sway in academia and coined the term “aca-fan” to describe one working from such a position.  He has further argued for the recognition that fans themselves bring a critical eye to pop cultural texts that deserves recognition as having some scholarly value.

Jenkins has recently called for the development of “another set of critical practices which reflected different emotional and social relations to popular culture” than those of the scholar looking from a distance or an aca-fan looking only from inside. This brings us back to the question of resistance.  A scholar who is also a fan may try to study the cultural product of which she is a fan, resisting on the one hand theorizing from a distance, and on the other a perhaps over-enthusiastic engagement. Is an uneasy balance between the two the best we can hope for?  Or can these stances be in some way integrated into a more productive whole?

This case-study aims for just such a synthesis, using the community around a smaller Multi-Massive Online Game (MMO) in which the author participates to pilot a collaborative ethnographic approach.  While the author takes a traditional ethnographic approach, members of the MMO’s community are invited to add their voices, as are game theorists who stand entirely outside the MMO. The resulting poly-vocal work offers a possible model from which to develop a more balanced and integrated approach to pop cultural products and fan communities.

The MMO in question is Clan Lord, and so now I need to figure out the best way of inviting involvement of other players, GMs, etc.

When Players become the Story

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Clan Lord differs from other MMOs in many ways; one of the most basic is longevity.  The game has been running since it was released in 1999 And there are a number of players who have participated since the beginning.  This longevity suggests that there must be some unique features, and there are — but I’ll get to those later.  😉 The presence of players who have participated for so long in a game in which there are no caps to the level (ie player strength) has some interesting consequences.

One is the challenge created for game designers trying to add new content, especially in the form of an event like an invasion or monster attack.  If there are several extremely advanced and powerful fighters and healers, it is very difficult to create an event or creature that will challenge those players, yet not slaughter the lower level players. Apparently this is referred to as the “Mujin” problem, named after a particular player (or collective) that has played so assiduously for so many years, that they far exceed much of the other population. (There are of course other high level players who cause this trouble as well, but the problem is named after an extreme case).

However, I think one of the most important effects of having so many players who have played for years and become powerful is that these players start to become part of the story of the game. Sometimes this happens through explicit roleplaying.  For example, one player who goes by the name Stinkfist styles himself a pirate captain and works to organize adventures involving himself and other pirates fighting against a particular group of enemies (the Darshak) in the game.  In addition to organizing raids against these foes, Stinkfist is working on building some kind of embassy and its completion depends on the success of his raids.

Interestingly, this player has gain the help of at least one Game Master (GM) so that Darshak that attack may demand to know his whereabouts and declare there is a bounty on his head.  At different times, one player or another has been elected President of the Fen’neko race; other players gain extra experience for helping the Fen president.  These are examples of players being deliberately incorporated into the game and in a sense saves GMs work; rather than creating a non-player character to drive a quest, they instead rely on players themselves to supply the AI.

Another way players become part of the story is simply through reputation. For example, if you need armor made, see Eomer, who trained as a blacksmith.  If you are fond of spiders, keep an eye out for Gremlins, who can transform into numerous varieties, and can also befriend them, and prevent them from attacking.  If you want to learn about using the Kudzu plant in battle, speak to Geotzou, who has made a lengthy study of their strategic use. Connie Crete is known for many things, from excellent knowledge of geography to her fishing skill. D’Ead is rapidly becoming known for her love of zombie costumes, Creed for her fondness for ponies, and Natas for his fondness for chains.

Chains are used to rescue fallen players by dragging them somewhere to be healed.

In general, many players are simply known for their strength, leadership, or other characteristics (both positive and negative).  They become subjects of discussion, advice to new players, and their doings are reported outside the game by a “media network” created by players to report happenings in the game.  Some even become the subject of parody. So in essence, the adventures and interactions of the players become the real story, growing out of the story provided in the game, but far richer.  And, because even those who don’t role play express some kind of personality, they can’t help but become characters.

In this way, the game story escapes the bounds of the game itself and of the control of designers.

Next up, more on inhabiting characters.

Designing Cooperation

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I said I’d have more to say…

So here are some ways Clan Lord pretty well forces people to cooperate:

  • The display is looking down from above, rather than heads up, and you can’t “run through” other players and most objects, so coordinating movement during a fight or hunt becomes a priority and requires agreement.  For example, that one of the stronger players will go out to lure creatures into the most favorable position for others to attack, or the weakest players will stay to one side or another, depending from which direction attacks usually come.
  • Most areas spawn creatures quickly and unpredictably enough that if a player is still gaining experience points and ranks from fighting those creatures, they need to hunt them in a group, or risk having their character fall and then have to await rescue. Depending on the area where they have been adventuring, this could take a very long time.
  • A related aspect is that you cannot just log off anywhere in the game safely.  If you leave the game when your character is in a dangerous region, you may log back in to find you are overwhelmed by dangerous creatures, or you character may already be dead.  Similarly, you cannot pause and leave the computer temporarily while playing for this reason.  Thus, you must somehow get back to a safe area before logging out or pausing the game play.  In the latter case, fellow players may be relied on to protect your character while you step away from the computer, but you will also have to help them achieve a managable state of play in the game first.
  • This game has a system through which players can “share experience.” While playing, each player gains experience (and thus strength and so forth) by playing against increasingly difficult creatures, or by sharing experience with another player doing this. In fact, of the three character classes, fighter, mystic, and healer, the latter two mainly advance through this method.  Further, players gain in other ways from sharing.  If you are sharing and fall to some creature, the players you’re linked with will see that you’ve fallen and to what, which will help them locate you.  If you are linked to a mystic before falling, they will be able to pinpoint your location exactly.  Further, if you are linked to other players, they will be more likely to return the favor by helping if you are in trouble. The share system also helps maintain connections between new players and much more advanced players.

I’ll have even more to add later!  Until then, here is another picture…

One of the other experienced players reminds younger ones (Eirian and Mchl) to thank a high-ranked fighter (Geotzou) for taking us hunting.

Cyborg and Techno Anxiety

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I meet a lot of people who are very anxious about and suspicious of technology.  I was going to write a whole post about this, but I recently found a great historical survey of techno anxiety.  Right here.

The funny thing is, just as each technology has led to fear over intellectual property issues, they have also led to fears that our youth will lose the ability to think/write/communicate.  I’m thinking there is a connection.  But I don’t have time to really work it out until after the end of term.  😛

Also forgot MLA… New Media Divergence: The Problem of a Fragmented Disciplinary Discourse

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I spoke at MLA last December about what I feel is problem in current academic discourse about new media:

The impact of new media on our society, and on the humanities in particular, has been widely recognized and researched, yet many faculty in the humanities seem to resist considering formal qualities of new media texts and technologies or their impact on our culture. Computer generated imagery, data bases, graphical user interfaces, and software in general constitute current media texts and affect our lives even more profoundly as literature, cinema or Television might have. Such areas as digital art and literature, code poetry, and computational music have been studied by scholars for the last ten years (at least), and study of the computers’ cultural impact has gone on longer.  However, this knowledge has been slow to reach the larger academy in more than a superficial way.  New media texts are rarely discussed outside of meetings, journals, and programs that focus on new media.   This ghetto-ization means that the texts are only studied or accessed by specialists and are unlikely to reach the general population of scholars, which in turn keeps new media texts from reaching more scholars or students in the future. But, new media are just new texts in media culture and therefore inevitably important subjects of research for anybody dealing with texts in general.

The aesthetic components of new media have been thoroughly explored through discussions of post-humanism; historical examinations of algorithmic poetry extending from contemporary work all the way back to the Qaballah; careful charting of the evolution of terms and concepts from film theory into new media; and many other approaches to these texts.  However, most scholars, in the U.S. at least, who do not specialize in new media remain only tangentially aware not only of this work on new media, but of new approaches to “old” media spawned from the novel perspectives generated in the new media studies.  Further, though many theories have been advanced, such as those describing convergence, the wealth of networks, and virtual communities, that have celebrated the power of users to effect change and leverage collective intelligence, in the last few years a more critical, nuanced view has emerged.  Some scholars examining media ecologies explore ways that different technologies are used in specific contexts, leading to specific impacts on the user groups.  Others study how groups existing largely outside our networked society have been affected by their “paranodal” position; many take a more skeptical stance on the connection between participatory media (Web 2.0) and enhanced civic functioning; while some have suggested that Foucault’s notion of the dispositif may be combined with Actor Network Theory to better understand the complex relations between communities, technologies, and cultural meanings; and others have proposed a new category of “produsage” to describe the way users now contribute to new media production.  However, many scholars outside of new media studies remain unaware of these developments, and disciplinary discussion remains bogged down in repetition.

In this presentation then, I outline some of the most recent trends in new media scholarship, the segregation of certain approaches to certain branches of the humanities, and suggest ways that new media in general and its socio-cultural impact in particular might be better and more widely addressed, both in literature and in composition/rhetoric.

  1. First, new media means something totally different in the US than in Europe. Here it means digital or computer media, ala Lev Manovich, but in Europe TV and radio are often included in that, in fact, from a historical perspective, all media is new at some point.  As Communcations Studies departments are now also talking about “new media” and technology in a manner similar to discussions of other mass media, the term new media is not even really serving to make a distinction from mass media any more.
    • In the US, New Media also is often (though not always) far more focused on educational techologies, for example, most collegiate member links in the New Media Consortium point to the schools’ IT offices, not to academic programs.  Or it may be confined to one discipline–literature or visual arts.
    • European programs tend to be far more interdisciplinary, focused on critical theory, on cultural interpretations, and on the philosophy of science.
  2. Second, the terms medium and media are being used incorrectly throughout the field. For example, if we speak of radio, one of the earliest technologies to be discussed as a medium, then technically the medium, the carrier of radio waves, is air. This was then extended metonymically to include the waves themselves, then further expanded to include the devices themselves, the senders, and even the receivers (that is the people sending and receiving). So that the term now encompasses so much, it’s not even very useful.
  3. It seems we are talking about technologies and about cultural/literary/artistic practices.  On the one hand a new term might be useful, on the other hand, talking about culture and technology might be a simpler solution.
  4. Whatever we call it, the actual theories and texts need to be better integrated in coursework, so that students understand the extent to which technical and cultural changes have occurred and need to be considered–this points toward a notion raised several times during conference, that we are not talking just about a new genre, but a qualitative change to the entire discipline.

Slides from CCCC 2009

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I just noticed that I never posted the slides from my talk at the 2009 Conference on College Composition and Communication.  So here is a pdf version of the slides.

Here is the abstract:

Since the earliest MUDs, MOOs and networked composition classrooms of the 1990s, composition teachers and scholars have been thinking, speaking, and writing about the impact of computers and later, Internet and Communication Technologies (ICTS) on composition.  By the end of the 90s, there was little question that we must address this issue (Selfe 1999).  By fall 2005, the Kairos CoverWeb identified three waves of technology users; even one of their own editorial team was a member of the third wave of users new to writing in virtual spaces.  More than twenty years after computers first entered both writing classrooms and the disciplinary discourse, we must ask why this third wave represents people who are not just new to a particular technology, but to using computers or ICTs in the composition class in general?

The answer is both complex and simple.  On the one hand, people encounter computers and ICTs in various ways throughout their education and professional life, and some may feel they are at best a necessary evil.  Further, class, gender, age and other factors may have an impact.  This is the complex answer.  On the other hand, a quick survey of doctoral programs in composition and rhetoric around the country reveals that even now very few offer courses addressing computers and ICTs in composition and rhetoric.  Of those few programs with these courses, only a very very few require them in the degree program.

Based on a more thorough survey of graduate programs in composition and rhetoric, I present trends in course topics, readings and structures.  I further compare these trends to actual disciplinary trends to reveal how closely they are linked or not.  I then discuss revisions to graduate curricula to better integrate study of computers and ICTs in composition and rhetoric, and argue that training all of  our future faculty in these matters is crucial to both graduate and undergraduate instruction. Finally, I argue that the future of graduate pedagogy must involve more interdisciplinary awareness, particularly of scholarship about the cultural impact of computers and ICTs, and I draw connections to developments in new and comparative media studies, internet research, and technology studies that would enrich our understanding and our teaching.

Arse Elektronika 2009

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I gave a talk this year, along with my co-panelist Pepper Mint. It went very well and was I think pretty informative for the audience, though of course some said, oh, we all know this already.  –It was about how technology and the internet have been intertwined with the emergence of a polyamorous community, which represents a very interesting example of tech enabled identity formation and community creation.

Anyway, the talk was good and I had the chance to see a number of friends I see only rarely, including Pep, but also Johannes Grenzfurthner from Monochrom, Aaron Muszalski, and Susan Mernit, to name a few. The conference was spread out over four days and I saw regrettably little.  I had hoped to see more panels on Saturday, but got hung up on the BART in commuter traffic for the Lovefest.  Honestly, it could have been called “Hot Topic Fest” based on the appearance of the attendees I saw…

I’ll post links too our talk and to archival stuff when Monochrom puts it up.

Ethereal Archives: The Evolution of Information Structures from Social Networks and Their Impact on Collective and Personal Identity

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How do collective archives emerge from the individual digital memories of participants in social networks, facilitated by social software? Networks in northern California are studied and described as “ethereal archives” because they are widely distributed, linked through blogs, microblogs, and other locations in which content is always changing. Digital technology allows preservation of memories, and at the same time broadcast of those memories to the community in many formats, including text, photostreams, video collections and on social networking sites. Over time, events, objects and even people generate folksonomic tagging across platforms, and a shared understanding of the things being described.

These archives become an extension not only of personal, but of collective memory; both individual and community identities are shaped and preserved in collaborative ethereal archives, made up of numerous people’s online collections of text and other media. They are dependent for organization on social connections across the network expressed through links shared via numerous platforms, and studying an ethereal archive’s emrgence reveals that it both reflects and shapes the communities from which it arises.

I’ll be presenting a paper on the above, if I have enough money to get to Louisville for CCCC ’10.

Redesign Coming Soon

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Ok, I have now mastered just enough knowledge of the WP templates to be disatisfied with how this blog is working.  Sometime very soon I’ll be doing a major redesign, as well as expanding the content, though the latter will probably wait until summer.

My other projects have slowed down because funding at my school has really dried up.  Now I’m having to back up and redesign several of them, at least for now.

The main difference will be focusing more attention on the Bay Area in comparison to NL.  I had planned to wait another year or so before getting into this angle, but since travel abroad is tough right now, I’ll focus closer to home.  Happily for me I’ve ended up in the last nine months or so meeting a lot of artists, hackers, scholars and others who occupy a similar “space” to those I’ve been working with in the Netherlands.

More on all of this soon, but untill the end of term next month, updates will be sporadic.