It’s more than a little embarrassing to note that my most recent post before this one was the second part of a three-part series begun in early August. There is a reason, of course: I started the series in the window of time between turning in my dissertation to my committee and going to defend it in Philadelphia.

On August 12th, I defended my dissertation, Geek Cultures: Media and Identity in the Digital Age, and passed with only a few minor requests for revisions. I’m currently looking into options for publication, but in the meantime, feel free to email me directly (jason @ this domain) if you’d like a copy.

So, finishing the dissertation probably means I’ve had plenty of time to blog, right? Well, not so much, but I aim to remedy that now. Shortly after the defense, I started my new job as an assistant professor in the Communication department at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts (not too far from where I grew up, in Newton Upper Falls).

It turns out that designing and teaching three entirely new classes (plus committees and advising) is something of a handful, though certainly an improvement on the Morlock lifestyle that dissertation writing encourages. Now, in November, I’m finally getting to know the ins and outs of the new campus, figuring out what motivates and interests my students best, and carving out some time to do things other than course prep.

My new (academic) year’s resolution, then, is to get back to blogging. I’ll soon finish that three-part series, and I’m going to try to get back into the blogging routine at least once a week. I may not be doing new research on geekdom itself for the time being, but I suspect I’ll still have things to share for a while. Plus, I think you’ll find that my other research interests are plenty geeky in their own right. After all, someone has to babble on about the theories and usage of video games, web design, and science-fiction. I wouldn’t want there to be a shortage of voices opining on these topics in the blogosphere, so I now solemnly return to perform my duties.

There should be a term for the first time you play a story-focused game, before you really get the hang of how to decimate all your enemies, before you know what’s going to happen in the plot, before you fiddle with the “moral choice” mechanics just to laugh at how big a jerk the protagonist can be, or before you find out that the choices you make don’t even really matter at all. This experience relies on a blend of story-oriented and mastery-oriented appeals, where the challenge of the game heightens the sense of drama and tension in the story, and vice versa.

I don’t know what the term for this type of play should be. Personally, I’d like to see it become more the norm for games with narrative pretensions, but it’s tough to pull off. Even story-oriented games seem to have a hard time pulling it off. And, notably, it’s usually absent in replaying a game. I’m not sure it has to be, though.

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Over at Above 49, one of my favorite gaming blogs, game developer Nels Anderson discusses how social and environmental context are sometimes a better predictor of human behavior than underlying personality variables. This, of course, has pretty relevant implications for how we discuss game design and how we study game play. Before I start mangling this post to serve my own ends, I suggest reading it in full, as it’s pretty insightful.

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Over at Wired, Steven Leckart redoes the Food Pyramid for a “media diet” totaling nine hours daily. Click through for the full-size image. (Link via Dan.)

The proportions between different types of media were foreign to me (I guess I free up relatively more time for gaming by skipping Facebook), but the sum total kind of blew my mind. Perhaps the combination of research, writing, and teaching has thrown off my notions of how much free time normal people have. Do people—or even just the kind of geeks who’d be reading Wired—really spend that long consuming media for pleasure every day?

I wanted to share a quick link from the Chronicle of Higher Education about a professor who encourages students to use Twitter during class (found via Twitter, of course—thanks @zandperl!). The course, originally taught for grad students, is called “Disruptive Technologies in Teaching and Learning,” and features a live Twitter feed projected in the background so students can offer outside links and shyly-yet-publicly consider comments that may derail the discussion.

I think it sounds neat—and, much to my surprise, so do most of those offering comments on Chronicle, it seems. A former student of the class also chimed in to offer some positive reflections and a link to her course blog, which links to other students’ blogs. That should give a sense of the conversations that these technologies encouraged.

In unrelated news, I have about a dozen drafts for new posts that I am dying to complete and post, but they’re going to have to remain drafts until I push through some of my real (i.e., deadline-bound) work. Blogging is my own personal “disruptive technology,” I suppose (but usually in a good way). I expect to be posting a lot come August, the month I defend.

My dissertation occasionally presents me with some odd dilemmas resulting in strange turns of phrase. This is largely an artifact of working with an in-text citation style (APA), which blends a somewhat scientistic air with sometimes quite … let’s say, colorful names and language. No matter how many times I read this sentence, for instance, it looks strange to me, though there’s nothing objectively wrong with it:

Sexist, racist, and homophobic sentiments may be amplified by the somewhat anonymous and depersonalized format of internet venues – an “online disinhibition effect” (Suler, 2004) in psychological terms, though well known to geeks under such terms as “the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory” (Kruhulik & Holkins, 2004).

The phrase is indeed well known, and I offer an endnote to expound upon that a bit. But it still looks like a weird sentence. (And yes, the lowercase “I” in “internet” is intentional.)

My dilemma today is how to cite an article by Iroquois Pliskin. Citing people by handle/screen name is usually no big deal for me. Because I’m quoting heavily from comments on blogs and publicly viewable forums, I already have plenty of citations like “(CmdrTaco, 2007).” This gets trickier when citing someone using a screen name that takes the form of a pen name. If I’m to treat this like a screen name, I’d cite it as “(Iroquois Pliskin, 2009).” On the other hand, this has a first and last name, so should it be “(Pliskin, 2009)”? “Mark Twain” was just a pen name for Samuel Clemens, but I think you’d still cite him as “(Twain, 1876).” And I haven’t even addressed how I decided to cite the Penny Arcade strip noted in the quote above as “(Krahulik and Holkins, 2004)” rather than “(Gabe and Tycho, 2004)”; citing when you have a screen name and a real name associated with a work presents its own challenges as well.

I’m not going to let something so silly hold me up right now, so I’m just going with citing as a screen name for consistency with the other online sources I’m using in cases when no real name is given on the work itself. Perhaps I’ll revise after defending if need be.

Several people have made note of this to me today, so I figure I might as well post it. A Slashdot reader asks the community how to meet people, especially of the opposite sex.

I have a question for my fellow Slashdotters, and yes, I realize I am entering the lion’s den covered in tasty meat-flavored sauce. I have never been a very social person, preferring to throw myself into technology; therefore, I’ve been spectacularly unsuccessful in developing any meaningful interpersonal relationships. Lately I have begun to feel that this situation is not tenable, and I would like to fix it. But I really don’t know how and haven’t the faintest idea where to start. I know that I am in the minority and that there are many different kinds of Slashdot readers, most of whom have more experience in this realm than I do. So please tell me: how, and more importantly, where do you meet fellow geeks — preferably including some of the opposite gender — in meatspace?

The asker acknowledges that s/he is going to get flamed (and eaten), which seems exacerbated by wording that seems to have been interpreted as genuinely detached rather than playfully self-mocking (e.g., using terms like “meatspace” and analytically concluding that having no friends “is not tenable”). I’m not sure which I find more interesting: the frankness of the asker in trying to find a solution to this dilemma, which is presumed to result in meeting one of our own kind (so to speak); or the variety of answers that Slashdotters offer, ranging from specific things to try to get geeky and non-geeky women alike. (Everyone assumes that the person posting is male, though I’m not sure that was ever stated outright which was eventually revealed later but omitted from the original post so as to be more useful for a wider range of future readers.)

I’m too far into the dissertation to really be incorporating new data, but this seems interesting enough to at least warrant a footnote. Maybe I’ll come back to this if I ever get around to writing a paper on the role of dating in shaping geek culture and identity, as has occurred to me repeatedly as I write this. And in that case, I’d like to also note that this post has directed me to Sex Tips for Geeks, and has reminded me of an Escapist article titled “My Big Fat Geek Marriage” and a potentially relevant xkcd cartoon.

And as for the original Slashdot post: As easy as it is to mock someone for asking this question, you’ve got to give this person credit for recognizing solitude as untenable, and taking the first step toward finding an alternative.

Kotaku has a post up about G4 television personality Olivia Munn’s recent Playboy shoot. Apparently Munn had agreed in advance that it would not be a nude shoot, but was pressured otherwise at the shoot itself. She did stick to her guns, though, and complete a clothed shoot as planned. Said Munn, “It ended with my publicist and the stylist screaming at each other.”

I was particularly interested in writing up a quick post about this piece because of the last few paragraphs:

Munn’s knows that part of why Playboy came calling, and was cool with her not doing nudity, is she has a fan base that’s highly coveted by advertisers. Gamers are easily separated from their dough, after all. But the positive response she’s gotten for not taking it off tells her that her fans do care. “They’re not going to say, ‘Oh, titty! Oh, that’s Olivia’s vagina, let’s go buy it!’” she said. “They’re supportive, not just because it gets them off.”

But she doesn’t worry about being typecast for the geek demographic. To the contrary, it gets her plenty of work. She’s just finished up a role in Iron Man II, and got an offer for another from producers who said they wanted someone who isn’t the kind of pedestalized-hot that Megan Fox represents.

“I love this world I am in,” Munn said. “If I could stay in this world forever, the nerd world, I’d be happy. I’ve been here for three years, and I can confidently say this is a world I feel comfortable and welcomed in.”

I thought it was really nice that she describes her fans as supportive and welcoming. Predictably, Kotaku’s comments on the article include many crude responses, though I was interested to see several people commenting that this makes them respect Munn even more. I’ll leave further commentary aside for now (must focus on more pressing writing tasks), but I thought this might be of interest to some readers here.

I was talking to a friend the other night about how many (ostensibly) narrative games often do things that entirely defy logic and ruin a sense of immersive storytelling. The most obvious such convention may be the character’s repeated death and rebirth, but that one presents a particularly difficult question: How do you get around this convention without undermining the whole point of the game, which is to fight and escape death? That convention doesn’t have an easy answer, though, and not everyone is buying the kind of answers that have been offered to date.

Some other tropes, however, remain quite common and entirely possible to address if you’re really interested in prioritizing storytelling aspects. I thought it might be fun to point out a few such annoyances and suggest how they could be (or even have been) approached in more coherent ways. (And yes, when you’re writing a multi-hundred-page dissertation, thinking and writing about anything else in the world for a few minutes a day definitely counts as “fun.”) I invite you, too, to respond to these or come up with some more of your own in the comments.

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I have a few blog posts on deck that I’ve started but keep putting off. (Such is the nature of dissertation writing, I suppose.) I beg your forgiveness again, then, for posts few and far between, on happenings that may seem like yesterday’s news. Today’s late-to-the-game post is on Heavy Rain, one of the few games that makes me want a Playstation 3 (along with The Last Guardian, Team Ico’s upcoming game).

I’ve been seeing some fascinating interviews lately with David Cage, director of Heavy Rain and head of the development studio behind that game and its predecessor Indigo Prophecy (a.k.a. Fahrenheit). As you might have been hearing, one of the big points of buzz around Heavy Rain is that when characters die, they stay dead, so as to tell a more seamless and less frustrating story—a mechanic discussed elsewhere on this blog and in one of my articles. I’ve been fascinated to see that some gamers reacted with skepticism (or even hostility) to this idea when I first published on the topic, but it looks like some might be warming up to it—albeit with some reservations—now that it’s actually being implemented in a promising fashion.

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