My Writings. My Thoughts.

Hulk Smash!

// July 3rd, 2010 // No Comments » // Fluff

I responded to Massively’s post on the upcoming Hulkageddon event in Eve Online. Where player corps give our prizes for ganking miners around the game. My reply as follows.

I don’t really feel passionate about this one way or another, which is ironic since I’m a miner. Eve is a sandbox game and players do what they want, fair enough. I do think this highlights some very poor game design elements on CCPs part however and conceptually it’s never good when players shut down an aspect of the game by bullying other players.

The biggest problem is really that this just highlights what a joke mining is in Eve as a profession. I make way more ISK doing other things than mining, I get most of my rare ore from reprocessing salvage and things like can flipping seems to be at an all time high. Mining ships are among the least interesting, least versatile and least useful in the whole game.

Wouldn’t it be more interesting and there be more combat options in the game that were designed for combat ships to be hanging out in space for length of time instead of shut up in stations? That’s not the design in Eve though as combat and all other high value ships are shut away and resources horded inside of stations while the least defensible ships are designed to be the only ones sitting out there in space.

Given the reality of the game then why not Hulkageddon? It’s not new news that CCP doesn’t give a fig about miners, why should the players?

GWL: Gaming as Transmedia Studies

// June 21st, 2010 // No Comments » // Fluff

Henry Jenkins posted another in an ongoing series of media studies on the topic of transmedia studies. I think gaming in a complex online world like Eve Online is one of the best examples of the use of transmedia studies in a community. Gamers in Eve regularly leverage information from forums, video tutorials, wikis, podcasts, in game voice chat and a number of media sources to learn and coordinate their gaming activities. I think it’s for this reason that deep community driven games like Eve Online can contribute a set of skills to the gamer that can possible enhance their experience in education. Gamers of this kind naturally gravitate toward multiple media outlets for information and routinely engages in actions that either enforce the quality of learning from that information or proves it’s lack of quality and sends them into another cycle of investigation and study.

I think Henry’s article is a good read and food for thought for everyone. Big thanks to Sarah Toton for passing it on.

Transmedia Education: the 7 Principles Revisited
…
In a transmedia presentation, students need to actively seek out content through a hunting and gathering process which leads them across multiple media platforms. Students have to decide whether what they find belongs to the same story and world as other elements. They have to weigh the reliability of information that emerges in different contexts. No two people will find the same content and so they end up needing to compare notes and pool knowledge with others. That’s why our skill is transmedia navigation – the capacity to seek out, evaluate, and integrate information conveyed across multiple media.
…

Gaming with Librarians: Creating Community Sites

// June 21st, 2010 // No Comments » // Library Gaming

I wanted to setup a small corporation homepage for the gaming group involved in Gaming with Librarians and speficially wanted to use it as an opportunity to see what the state of free site or hosting set-ups were. It really seems like WordPress are the only folks out there who are doing something useful.

I started by trying to setup a site under Google, hoping to take advantage of things like Google Docs and other things to coordinate the group and ease play. The sites and google apps section are geared mostly toward business and pay customers and in the end I just thought the features offered for publish use were a big old fail. So I took a trip on over to WordPress, registered a new ID for the Eve Corp and got a small site up and running in about an hour.

Thus the Archival Quality LLC site was born, not bad at all for about an hours work graphic included.

Another big benefit I see from going with wordpress is that not only can you choose from several reasonable themes but by default they supply you with a mobile skin for the site. I fired it up on my iPhone today it was fantastic. So with a minimum of effort I have a corp site complete with mobile integration. We have come a long way in just a few short years as a profession.

Gaming with Librarians: Corp Formed!

// June 18th, 2010 // No Comments » // Library Gaming

I setup a player Corporation in Eve Online last night for the Gaming With Librarians project and settled on the name ‘Archival Quality LLC’

I’m banging out a group description below for use in forums and such.

Archival Quality LLC

CEO: Aynder
Location: Sinq Liason: Auberulle V – TransStellar Shipping Storage (Gallente Space)

A player run corporation in Eve Online for Librarians, Academics, Educators and Scholars interested in participating in an online gaming community. We’re a casual friendly corporation and friendly to new players who enjoy exploring, discussing and working together.

In Game

We have a fluid structure centered on fun and working together primarily through Mining, Missioning and Marketing. As a new corporation we’re focused on establishing early goals and working toward achieving them. Our current goals are to purchase a set of blueprints for basic ships to supply our members and gather the resources needed to produce them in enough supply to keep everyone flying comfortably.

As an organization of learners we encourage all members to explore and educate themselves in any role and will be providing opportunities to try out different positions within the corporation. We also intend to pursue a range of activities to give a high level of exposure to a variety of skills to all our members and help them uncover the most enjoyable and rewarding experiences out there.

As a community focused group we strive to be a good members of the galaxy and ask that all members maintain a positive status with Concord and are able to travel to 1.0 system. We do not discourage pvp at all but ask that members refrain from pirating, attacking the defenseless or innocent and otherwise refrain from random and wanton attacks.

Out of Game

As lifelong learners this corporation is there to provide people with similar interests an opportunity to experience one of the deepest online gaming experiences available. We encourage members to share and discuss their experiences, talk about it’s application for universities, libraries and schools and discuss what kind of impact we see from gaming on the players.

Gaming With Librarians: What’s in a name

// June 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // Fluff

Preparing to move ahead with an Eve Online Corp for the Gaming With Librarians project once I hear anyone has done the tutorial, thinks the game is for them and wants to go ahead with it. On that note I’m tossing around potential Corp Names to use.

Among the ideas right now are:

  • The Archives
  • Archival Quality Inc.
  • Librarians of Eve
  • Curriculum Vitae LLC

Just some ideas so far. Anyone have suggestions?

Writers Atrophy

// June 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // Fluff

I’m socked at just how much my writing skills have waned with my break in blogging.

There was a time where writing even blog entries came naturally and easy to me. Long time readers may recall the days where I posted frequently and prolifically and I recall in those heady days, how easy writing came to me. I don’t just mean blogging or the occasional internet quip either, but reports, reviews as well as documentation and such. Having made an active effort to write again I now realize just how difficult writing inertia is to overcome.

It’s not that I don’t write of course, a look at the blog at work will quickly show I’m the most active poster there but this has all been in a dry “no style at all” form to summaries or quickly explain something. I used to consider myself a bit of an extrovert but don’t consider that true now at all, if it ever was.

In particular I notice the difficulties I’m having trying to blog through this ‘Gaming with Librarians‘ thing I started a few days back. It’s hard not to notice the difficulties I have extending a piece of writing past the length of a Tweet or bullet list and I feel something is missing in my life because of it. There’s a freedom in being able to just sit down and write, I’ll leave it up to you as to weather I ever did it well, but just the ability to put an idea down in a way you’re happy with it is amazingly powerful and therapeutic. I look forward to relating my experiences with the GiL group in the weeks ahead but don’t envy myself the long road to recovery I’m on to regain some measure of literary expression.

Stay tuned and lets see where this goes.

Gaming with Librarians, First Missed Lesson

// June 16th, 2010 // No Comments » // Library Gaming

Received a reply in the key of sweet irony to my suggestion of forming a Librarian and Academics based Eve Corp already.

A quick reply came across from someone of the I-better-than-that-and-do-far-superior-things-with-my-time persuasion and couldn’t help reveling on the sweet irony of it for a moment.

One of the reasons gaming communities and particularly online gaming communities are so prolific and productive is that it inherently filters toward a “community of the involved”. It’s a subculture of participation, which I think can be in contrast to the subcultures in some libraries where it’s more about them participating with you than you participating with them. Many things follow on from this participating, it’s also a meritocracy and not a hierarchy, it’s a culture of cooperation and not regulation but all those things come after simply finding people willing to participate and get involved.

In my opinion Libraries are at their best when involved with users as a community, when they embark on an intellectual endeavor together and not when trying to lead (or force) people through one.

Other than that there have been a few feelers back on the topic that were positive, some great pointers and a bit of interesting discussion as well from various corners of the Library Gaming community. First step is for folks to try the game out and see if it’s for them and we’ll go from there. I’ll keep blogging about it as things develop.

Gaming with Librarians

// June 15th, 2010 // No Comments » // Library Gaming

With so much being discussed about Academics and Librarians getting into the gaming space I thought I’d try to open the door and posted the following in the LibGaming Google Group and at my local library. If this starts to get any traction I’ll be blogging about the experiences a bit and waxing philosophic about it. We’ll see where it goes.

As an avid gamer I often listen to discussions about the benefits of gaming directed by non-gaming presenters and the seeming desire to explore what can be learned from gaming at contrast with the level of participation from librarians and academics.

I thought I’d explore if there was any interest in forming an Online Gaming Guild for librarian, academics and basically anyone fitting the list on the front of [the LibGaming] Google group. The idea would be to give an environment to experience online gaming with a group of people there to explore as well, to have an opportunity to try out the activities you hear so much about and have a discussion about the skills being
learned and leveraged, community interactions and so forth while doing it.

So I wanted to check to see if there was any interest in forming an Eve Online Corporation (http://www.eveonline.com/) with the groups audience as the target audience? Eve provides a wide variety of experiences and game-play as deep as a player wants to go without insisting they get incredibly deep if they don’t want to. Having played Eve Online myself for years and been in several corporations I’m always impressed at a 20 something who runs a Player corporation and leverages advanced Sig Sigma techniques without even knowing they do.

Indeed my gaming experience and experience running or participating in various in game guilds has shaped my own management skills significantly.

Anyway is there any interest in something like this?

Self Education and The Big Bang

// May 3rd, 2010 // No Comments » // Fluff

I made this reply to a friend who commented on Amelia Beamer’s thoughts on LOST as Hyperlinked Storytelling and I thought it was worth posting here as well:

It’s really the entrance of the technique in storytelling that is the important part. Back in the mid 90′s “The Clue Train Manifesto” talked about the fundamental shift of our culture to a Hyperlinked culture. Most folks agree with it but it’s arrival as a means of information exchange so natural that people didn’t give it a second thought really highlights it as a fundamental shift.

This is where I think Academia is not just stumbling but falling down. People grow their knowledge in a less linear way now, choosing different safe starting points based on their particular interests and individual knowledge and grow out from there. In a strange way this is more modeled after the actual Big Bang in that space appeared all at once rather than a linear expansion from a single point. I think the biggest reason Universities risk becoming irrelevant isn’t so much that it isn’t a job training program, as if often cited, but because it’s methods are becoming increasingly seen as inefficient and self serving toward it’s survival as an industry.

iphone 007

// March 24th, 2010 // No Comments » // Fluff



iphone 007

Originally uploaded by Streamweaver


Gotta love this out your front door at 3:30. Sleep is overrated anyway I guess.

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