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David Martin

Sociology in Fantasia - Reason.com - 0 views

reason.com/...sociology-in-fantasia

sociology online communities gaming gender racism digital digital culture

shared by David Martin on 10 May 14 - No Cached
  • Players tend to reproduce many offline behaviors online, no matter how fantastic, imaginative, and unearthly the game world might be. Sometimes the results are pretty bleak. "Instead of an escape from the drudgeries of the physical world," Yee writes, "many online gamers describe their gameplay as an unpaid second job."
  • Some put in extensive hours at often unrewarding work ("grinding" being the well-suited in-game descriptor of choice), submitting themselves to "increasing amounts of centralized command, discipline, and obedience," Yee notes in a chapter with the sad title of "The Labor of Fun." While individual players may explore in a leisurely, ludic way, an MMO's complexity, challenges, and rewards elicit demanding practices from those who would take the game more seriously.
  • Racism is another grim import from the real world. Online gaming has seen the rise of "gold farming," whereby users rapidly play a game to a successful level in order to sell the results to other players not willing to invest the time. In short, players outsource the grinding. A skilled gold farmer can simultaneously take a game character to a very high level on one computer while churning out valuable magic items on another. Proteus Paradox doesn't dwell on the economics of gold farming, but notes that most gold farmers are Chinese-and also that other players tend to dislike them. Anti-Chinese racism surfaces in hostile in-game interactions and in YouTube rants.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • And then there are the ever-elusive lady gamers. Proteus outlines how male players denigrate, harass, and drive off female players.
  • But Yee offers two twists to this sadly familiar story. First, women report wanting to play for many of the same reasons men do-achievement, social interaction, and immersion-going against essentialist expectations of gender behavior difference. And second, MMOs offer a pedagogical benefit of sorts to male gamers who play under female avatars.
  • David Martin on 10 May 14
     
    For those interesting in online communities, gaming or otherwise, you may find this article and the related book interesting.
Jolene Fisher

anne frances wysocki * work - 2 views

pantherfile.uwm.edu/...work.html

multimedia writing flash platforms accessibility

shared by Jolene Fisher on 09 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Jolene Fisher on 09 Apr 14
     
    I was looking back at this (really interesting) multimedia writing work by Anne Wysocki and noticed how many of the pieces required special players and ample download time/space - Flash Player, Shockwave Player, 1.5 MB of download space - which got me thinking about platform/storage restrictions and digital accessibility. In many instances, a researcher may need not only specific digital skills/knowledge, but also specific platforms, players, software, memory space, etc. to conduct her work. And as players, platforms, software, etc. are upgraded, older digital texts may become less accessible. On that note, I have been taking screen shots of all of the scenes in the Facebook game I'm currently studying. Why? One reason is so I can put these screen shots into a presentation, but the more pressing reason is that another game I'm really interested in looking at (Food Force, a social media game from 2005 - so ancient, right?) is no longer accessible. In its place is a Facebook page with a big bandaged thumb and a "Sorry! This page has been removed." message. An ethnography conducted in a digital space, it seems, requires just as much "recording" as one in an offline space.
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Jenny Dean on 10 Apr 14
     
    I think it is a great question to ask where will all the digital information go once it becomes out of date> I was working with a program called Scalar last term (a very useful tool) which allows you to show information in different ways. It was built for use in the Digital Humanities. One of its fatal flaws, in my opinion, is that it relies primarily on links to information, images, and video out in cyber space. If you build a project around this, there is no guarantee that the information will be available for any length of time and then what do you do? I think this is an issue more and more as new software updates and the old information can either not be found or is no longer accessible.
  • Erin Zysett on 10 Apr 14
     
    The life and preservation of the digital world is a huge question, and one that I don't think enough people are considering. I see more and more of my friends taking all their photos with smartphones and loading them to Instagram or Facebook, or worse never moving them beyond their phones. I wonder what photos will have survived in 20 years when their children are looking to make wedding or anniversary slide shows, or simply becoming interested in their own pasts. There are no hard copies of these images, and while hard copies are vulnerable, so are digital copies for a number of reasons.
  • John Fenn on 10 Apr 14
     
    great points in this discussion, especially around issues of "access"...which range from having the "right" tech to get into a site to ADA regulations/requirements. Also, preservation is a complicated facet of access and one worth discussing seriously in this course as we think about digital data.
Kelly Heckman

Periscopic Play: re-positioning "the field" in MMO studies - 9 views

I agree the argument has overtones of the emic/etic perspectives I believe in this instance there is a difference. When one leaves to study a culture in Cameroon, one can become "awed" by the cultu...

methods research MMO games ethnography read this week7 week8 article PDF

started by Kelly Heckman on 13 Apr 12 2 follow-ups, last by Kelly Heckman on 16 Apr 12
younsong lee

T L Taylor talks about "Ethnography as Play" - 2 views

www.digital.hss.ed.ac.uk/...t-l-taylor

shared by younsong lee on 20 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • azmorrison on 20 Apr 14
     
    This is a video of one of Taylor's discussions on her research regarding the computer game Everquest. I thought this might be useful to anybody who found our discussion on "lurkers", ethics, and the gaming world interesting. TL Taylor is a world-renowned video game researcher, who spends a majority of her investigations viewing the interactions within a digital world. She researches topics like: how players choose to represent themselves in contrast to their physical appearance in reality, and even going so far as to see how and why relationships occur in a video game setting that are strong enough to get players to marry each other without ever meeting in person.
Staci Tucker

The Accidental Carjack: Ethnography, Gameworld Tourism, and Grand Theft Auto - 0 views

http://gamestudies.org/0801/articles/miller

games ethnography single player research

started by Staci Tucker on 04 Jun 12 no follow-up yet
Julianne Meyer

Transcription Software. Foot Pedal Software Player - 1 views

www.nch.com.au/index.html

tools research audio software transcription transcribing

shared by Julianne Meyer on 01 May 14 - Cached
  • Julianne Meyer on 01 May 14
     
    Just another transcription tool to look at!
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