The iPhone Ocarina: Link Never Would Have Allowed This
I am not “in” with the phones. My phone takes low-res pictures and just a few days ago I got unlimited texting. I’m a little behind. This makes me want to get an iPhone, though.
Smule has come out with an app that lets you play the ocarina on the phone. The “iPhone as instrument.” I am speechless. And I want it.
Unbeknownst to me (until last night), there is a fantastic short YouTube series out there that deals with a group of people who are in a guild in a game not unlike World of Warcraft. I suppose it could be Guild Wars as well, but I don’t recall anyone talking about raids in GW. But perhaps I don’t know enough people who play it.
My friends (who are not self-proclaimed gamers) were saying how they love the Guild. And upon hearing that I have never heard of it, proclaimed that I have FAILED in internet culture. And after seeing some episodes, yes, I agree with them, I have.
The Guild is a series of 3-6 minute episodes about a group of gamers and it follows them IRL (in real life) and how the in-game dynamics have overstepped the virtual boundary. Anyone who’s ever played WoW will enjoy it. So far, my only beef with the series is that there is no guild member who is a student.
Other people think its cool, too.
I’m sure this has been around for quite some time now, but I’m just discovering it.
YouTube videos with a lego creation program that shows you how to create 8-bit characters. So on honor of 8-bit, Legos and Final Fantasy, I present to you:
How to make a Lego White Mage.
And also for those who were fortunate enough to experience Final Fantasy 1, I present to you the comic that immortalizes it:
Prof. Bonnie Nardi, a World of Warcraft player, hopes to study the differences between American WoW players and Chinese WoW players. Her research focus:
Why American players go to greater lengths to mod the popular MMO than do Chinese WoW players.
The article at GamePolitics.com puts sarcastic spin on it and wasn’t all that informative, but I’ve done a little more internet searching…
Looking at Prof. Nardi’s faculty page, we see she is a faculty member in informatics and technology. Some of her previous research papers have titles such as ,”Learning Conversations in World of Warcraft,” and “Strangers and Friends: Collaborative Play in World of Warcraft.” Other interests in research include Activity Theory, Society and Technology, Interaction Design and Computer-mediated Communication. She has written or co-authored 4 books and numerous publications. Bonnie’s Blog was last updated on January 22, 2007, but does contain information about her interest and research with WoW.
My few cents:
I think that in order to dodge some of the political fire and up-in-arms feel that some Americans will react with, perhaps a topic with a more obvious broader application should have been used. (if one cares about political perception and possible pre-defense of thesis). I, for one, am not completely sure what implications of Americans mod-ing out a computer game more than Chinese players mod-ing out a game have in the bigger picture. Isn’t research supposed to lend itself to greater ideas?
Since I am fully aware of her ideas and implications for study, I cannot critique them too harshly based on a few sentences.
Aside from the political bit… I am surprised and impressed that she was able to garnish a grant for her research. Perhaps I will drop her a line about our research and offer my assistance in her study, if she should so like help. 
National Science Foundation
Proposal title: Creative Collaboration in an Online Game
Abstract:
This exploratory study will analyze and understand the ways in which players of World of Warcraft, a popular multiplayer game, engage in creative collaboration. World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role playing game with ten million players worldwide. The proposed research is novel in locating creativity in the context of collaboration in a distributed online space. Most creativity research is laboratory based. It takes the individual as the unit of analysis. This research will examine creativity as a collaborative act, and will investigate creativity in a distributed online context. The research will focus on modding - the creation and distribution of player-created software modifications that extend the game - as an act of creative collaboration. What is the effect of collaboration on creativity? What motivates players to maintain engagement? How does the game software itself support or hinder collaboration? What interaction tools do players use to undertake creative collaboration? What can be learned from creative collaboration in games about mediated collaboration in general? Can these principles be translated to other environments such as work, or does the very context of “play” have inherent qualities that cannot be easily translated? The increasing confluence of work and play in games and virtual worlds is a topic of growing interest in industry and the military. The practices of millions of young people are being shaped by participation in multiplayer games. Players will take these practices into the workplace and military service. Investigating how creativity is enabled by collaborative online practices is vital to our understanding of how work and military service can be reshaped to encourage and sustain creative activity in these arenas.
Glossary:
mod: Short for “modification.” There are small programs that can take information from the game and display it on your screen in a way that is easier to see and understand. Examples of WoW mods include: Tracking of items you are selling in the autcion house and Cartographer, which gives you coordinates of where you are in the world.
WoW: an abbreviated version of World of Warcraft
Other related News articles:
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Wired Campus, “Professor Given $100,000 to Study World of Warcraft” September 16, 2008
Game Daily “National Science Foundation to Fund World of WarCraft Study” September 14, 2008
Kotaku “UC Irvine Gets Grant to Study WoW” September 13, 2008
It was about this time last year where I seriously began playing to collect the weekly badges. I do not know how many I had then, but last night I reached a milestone. Last night’s Hexic game earned me the Hexcellent badge, my 700th.
What is odd about the name of this badge is that it is Hexcellent and I just earned it last night. There is a Hexcellent II badge in my album that I earned at some other point. The animation for this badge is the little hex doing a dive and getting all tens and the star medal. To earn the badge, you need to accumulate 10,000 points between midnight PST on September 16, 2008 through midnight PST on September 23, 2008.
Hexic the game is a match 3, but one that I enjoy playing because you’re not playing in a row and column interface. As the name and picture implies, the objects are six-sided. You can rotate a cluster of three at a time to match colors and earn points for matching. When you get six of the same colored hex to make a circle, the one in the middle turns into a star. The star, when clicked on, will rotate all six hexes around it.
Some strategy: This game requires attentiveness. When attempting to make a star, you must be very conscious of the other pieces surrounding it and the direction in which you clusters are rotating. Many, many many many many times I’ve messed up my star making by making a cluster I wasn’t intending to. To earn Mastery Level 10 badge, you need to create a star with three black pearls. I don’t think I will ever be able to do that. Here is why:
In order to make a star, you need a circle of 6 hexes.
In order to make a black pearl, you need a circle of stars.
Stars, like hexes, can be matched in groups of 3 and disappear.
Throughout the game, you need to create 36+ stars to get Mastery Level 10. This requires the proper placement of over 216 hexes.
The stars are all golden colored. I can see how the next version of Hexic could have colored stars and add another step to the black pearl-making process, if they so chose.
I would really like to go to this. Unfortunately, the cost seems a bit too much for me to justify it, even though it is close enough to Madison that I could feasibly attend without incurring much in travel costs. The nonmember fee is $350 and the member fee is $300
I have seen some libraries in the past few years that are hosting gaming times for LANs (Local Area Network) and MMOs (Massive MultiPlayer Online) games. The ALA symposium has its own wiki (ALA Gaming Symposium wiki). I’ve thought that this was a great idea. I, myself, am a gamer and I think a lot in terms of “how can we get more people into the libraries,” even though I am an archives student, I’m a great cheerleader for libraries and how we can get more 10-18 years in them and using resources.
In the fall semester of 2007, I worked with 2 other students on a research project for a class title “Use and Users,” where we were to select a user group and obtain data on how these users found the information they wanted. Our group chose World of Warcraft players. We gathered quite a significant amount of data (300 usable responses out of 500 total) and were able to make some interesting conclusions. I think we could publish our findings, but my groupmates seem ambivalent.
After this, the application of gaming in libraries seems a very likely way to draw in patrons. Some of the speakers at the symposium include the authors of:
Gamers…in the Library?! Eli Neiburger
Don’t Bother Me, Mom. I’m Learning Marc Prensky
and Grand Theft Childhood Dr. Lawrence Kutner
as well as other speakers.
[originally posted in The Novice Archivist]
I was able to create a nicer looking, more accurate chart. Unfortunately some things (like column headings) I had to add manually and its not sortable, but it looks a lot nicer.
Check it out.
The Awww, Yeah trophy requires you to defeat 240 black puddings. But wait, I’ve never encountered a black pudding while adventuring, where are they? Black pudding fights occur when you go to eat them. They occur randomly and there is no telling how many black pudding fights you will get in one day. Some days I’ve gotten 0. Other days I’ve gotten 7.
How to obtain:
Black pudding is found sometimes when you use (from you Miscellaneous menu) a black picnic basket.
Which you get from a black widow spider.
Which you can find in the Black Forest.
Which is found in the Distant Woods.
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The Awww, Yeah trophy requires you to fight and DEFEAT 240 black puddings. This is a trophy that requires dedication, much like the Bouquet of Hippies trophy. And where do you see all the monsters you’ve fought/lost to and/or defeated? You don’t. There isn’t a player interface for those stats. I use an Xcel file that looks like this:
As you can see, I’ve also used it for other trophies (and have not yet earned to Bouquet of Hippies.) The ones about food or drink (such as how many herb brownies or Around the Worlds) you can see when you click on your character. How many butterflies you’ve used, times you’ve run away or monsters you’ve defeated requires manual tracking.
I’m not quite halfway to earning Awww, Yeah, but I hope to be more diligent in my Kingdom of Loathing playing and get it by the start of 2010.
The best way to explore underwater: When you’re dead.
When you are in spirit form, you don’t have to worry about aggro-ing enemies or watch your breath meter, because there are no consequences for exploring. The unfortunate bit is that your progress isn’t saved to your map.
Just a little tidbit with some fun images.
Spirit form of Stashsavor walks on water.
Yup, he’s swimming with the fishes.
I got my internet up again!
Autumn Bejeweled is (surprise!) just like regular Bejeweled 1, but with a leaf-and-nut theme.
The best part about playing the themed Bejeweled(s) is that the points you earn go towards your Bejeweled 1 lifetime points. Hooray!
And I think my favorite season has changed from “summer” to “fall.” Or “autumn” if you’re from Europe.