http://www.mattfalk.academ-x.com Synthetic Words, Player Behavior and Games Research: Digested, Digitized and Distributed Mon, 06 Apr 2009 13:23:41 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en A few weeks ago I was approached by fellow IU Telecom Student Nick Cassidy about the the idea of a new podcast related to WoW. We've put together a pilot and a few episodes now, and I thought I'd post the link incase you want to check it out. OOMCast, as ... http://www.mattfalk.academ-x.com/?p=9 Everyone remembers the Corrupted Blood incident in World of Warcraft (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood) in which players would purposely bring a disease from a raid mob back into cities to kill people off. In one of the new Sunwell encounters, players fight Brutallus, a pit-boss style mob who occasionally casts a "burn" debuff ... http://www.mattfalk.academ-x.com/?p=8 Recently comments similar to "except I'm old so i don't know how to play games like you" or "But you younger people just know how to play games, and I won't be able to understand them" have saturated the classrooms I've been in. The disconnect between professors speaking on the ... http://www.mattfalk.academ-x.com/?p=7 Fellow PhD student Travis Ross got to do a guest blog on Virtual Cultures today about Tacit Knowledge! Click here and check it out. http://www.mattfalk.academ-x.com/?p=5 Mark Bell today proposed an idea to me which I'm going to try to persue in a more in depth sense for an upcoming panel discussion. We talked about World of Warcraft and its ability to train management skills through normal game play. Though here I will use the terms ... http://www.mattfalk.academ-x.com/?p=4 Recently a fellow student at IU, Phoebe Elefante, made a statement that got me thinking. She said, quite simply: "I am my avatar." This made me consider the implications of avatar creation, and how choices we make every day are much like avatar creation in games. As an example of ... http://www.mattfalk.academ-x.com/?p=3