CFP: Cultures in virtual worlds

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Note: This call for papers was submitted to a few mailing lists. It might be of interest to some of you:

Cultures in Virtual Worlds
A special issue of the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia

Guest-edited by Jeremy Hunsinger and Adrienne Massanari

Virtual worlds (VW) embody cultures, their artefacts, and their praxes; these new and old spaces of imagination and transformation allow humans to interact in spatial dimensions. Within these spaces, culture manifests with the creation, representation, and circulation of meaningful experiences.  But virtual worlds are not novel in that regard, nor should we make the mistake to assume that they are novel in themselves.  Virtual experiences have been around in some respect for hundreds of years, and virtual worlds based in information technology have existed for at least 40 years.  The current generation of virtual worlds, with roots over four decades old in studies of virtual reality, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), sociology, cultural studies, and related topics, provide for rich and occasionally immersive environments where people become enculturated within the world sometimes as richly as the rest of their everyday lives.   

We seek research that encounters and investigates cultures in virtual worlds in its plurality and in its richness.   To that end, we invite papers covering the breadth of the topic of cultures in and of virtual worlds. 

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Highlights from GLS 7.0

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It's been four years since my last Games+Learning+Society (GLS) conference and it's been a thrill to return. GLS is one of the best conferences that focuses on learning and education and a great place to meet leading scholars in the field.

Although I missed a significant portion of the conference, I have some thoughts to share:

  • Hall of Failure: It's a near unanimous consent that this is a great addition to this conference, and a feature that other conferences--large or small--could benefit from. These are panels that focus specifically on "failures," however you choose to interpret it. The scholars were all refreshingly and brutally honest about why their attempts failed and it was a great opportunity for them to share their learning with the audience. As all researchers know, things can and do go wrong, but we almost never come out and admit it. Instead, we'd rather glean through all the successful moments and focus on that. Not only does that skew the results, that's a lost opportunity to learn from our mistakes. The session I attended included talks by Mark Chen, Eric Klopfer, Jason Haas, Lindsay Grace, and Carlton Reeve. If I had to pick one aspect of GLS 7.0 that I enjoyed the most, it would be this.
  • Gamification: I missed the main talk on gamification, but from what I can tell, there are mixed feelings about its merits. I still need to read more about this in order to comment intelligently on it, but I gather that one of the reason gamification "works" is that it doesn't really do any harm. In other words, it's likely that 90% of the time it does nothing for the learner, and 10% of the time it motivates those who are already motivated; but it never really causes people to learn less. So, if you only focus on the positive (as many studies do), then it would appear mildly successful. The problem, then, is not with gamification itself, but with people who think that gamification alone is enough. Anyway, I'll have to give this more thought in another post.
  • Unexplored tensions: One thing about conferences is that, sometimes, the conversation stops just when it gets interesting because your time has run out and the session is over. Maybe the speakers talk among themselves after, but you're not always privy to those conversations. In this case, I noticed that there were two groups that needed to speak directly with each other: 1) those who found out that hard way that "reality" is boring and cannot be turned into a good game and 2) those who believe that games can teach "reality" (or some aspect of it). To be sure, there's some middle ground. For example, maybe games don't have to reflect reality visually but can still embody some aspect of it, such as some underlying process; but that's a notoriously difficult balance to find. That's probably why it's relatively easier to design a game that teaches real STEM concepts because those are more straightforward to simulate than fuzzy concepts such as "historical thinking." Maybe there should be a session or two that put a practicing teacher, a game designer, a graphic designer and a content expert on the same panel and have them talk directly to each other.
  • Conference pampering: GLS is, by far, the only conference that keeps its attendees well-pampered and fed throughout. No brown bag lunches with dried wraps or you're-on-your-own-for-dinner. They treat you like royalty at GLS and it's incredible. Having been to so many conferences, I really appreciate this, and I'm sure the other attendees do as well.

Review: L.A. Noire

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It's June and L.A. Noire is the first game I've actually played this year. Would've been Dead Space 2 except a bizarre bug prevented me from getting very far, so, great jobs guys. I'll try to keep the spoilers to a minimum in this review.

I'm trying to decide whether it's possible to enjoy a game but not actually like it. Rockstar Games has put out some bestselling titles over the years, and L.A. Noire is bound to be a strong Game of the Year contender. But L.A. Noire is a bit like Avatar - you can be dazzled by the visual world you're immersed in if you can also overlook some serious issues.

L.A. Noire has a solid plot. In fact, the narrative is one of the best part of the game, weaving together several storylines in a way that works in a videogame. You play as Cole Phelps, a young detective who moves through different parts of the LAPD, from patrol to traffic, homicide, vice, and arson. Unlike the Grand Theft Auto games, you're on a different side of the law now and you're spending most of your time solving crimes. Although it's released by Rockstar, this isn't much of a car chasing game (although there are a few of those); the key game mechanic here is using your intuition to solve crimes.

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My problem with "just-in-time" learning

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"Just-in-time (JIT) learning" is the newish buzzword you hear often in association with video games and learning. It's a deceptively simple idea suggesting that learning is better when it is "on-demand." You encounter a problem, you're given the information to solve it, and you solve it then and there. No need to memorize a set of facts ahead of time that you may or may not use in the future, no need for abstract concepts that have no bearing on the immediate demands of the situation, no need for decontextualized facts and figures. As far as I know, this concept is assumed to be right and I have never seen the concept criticized before, but I'm going to go ahead and say: I have a problem with JIT learning on two levels: 1) It's overly vague and 2) It often doesn't work.

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Recommended: The Glamour of Grammar

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I came across The Glamour of Grammar by Roy Peter Clark while looking for an approachable guide to grammar for my graduate students. Grammar is something that everyone struggles with, regardless of whether you're a native speaker of English or not. Many things you've learned as a student may or may not have changed over time. Any student of language would also realize that grammatical rules evolve, so rules such as "never end your sentence with a preposition" are one of those rules that are falling out of use. (I also read this right after Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable's brilliant A History of the English Language, which went in depth into many other issues, and focused a lot more on the historical evolution of language since its beginnings, and its foreign influences over time.)

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