2018: A year in review

I thought I would join all of the reflection from streamers, bloggers, vloggers, pundits, and journalists. While I wish I could hand out a Game of the Year award, (or at least a list of the best games from 2018), I don’t think I’ve played a single game that came out this year. My backlog is growing with each day… I also wish I had a list of influencers to recommend, but I feel like I don’t follow enough to really give a solid list of recommendations.

Instead, I thought I would just have a brief reflection on what this year has meant to me academically as well as from video games. Here are a few milestones I accomplished in somewhat chronological order:

• Collected data and finished my MA thesis, which ended up being a two-part experimental study. In the end, I had over 240 participants in the actual experiment (playing manipulated versions of A Link to the Past to measure the influence of gender roles).
• Graduated from BYU (again), this time as a MA student. This was a serious headache, I joked about how the bureaucracy of formatting and submitting my thesis for approval was harder than the actual writing of it.
• Published my first casual-academic book (The Symbolism of Zelda: A Textual Analysis of The Wind Waker). Started my second book, and have almost finished the first draft of it.
• Conducted a minor study (which was used for the second part of my MA experiment) where I surveyed 256 people online for their opinions on the humor level of sexist jokes. You can read the full study in this blog post.
• Had my first paper published: One does not simply meme about organizations. This was a class project I worked on with my classmates, alongside two professors. It was a lot of work! Like, a lot of back-and-forths. It was my first experience as a co-author collaborating on a paper that got published. I’ve since worked on other papers that are in various stages of completion, but none have been accepted yet. I hope that moving forward my papers are easier to write and collaborate.
• Completed my first term as a Ph.D. student at the University of Oregon. I love my new school, the department, and who I’ve been working with. I’ve been so blessed to have great mentors already. I also was the TA for two lab sections, which was a lot of work. I’m doing that again this upcoming term.
• Presented at my first conference! While I technically attended CHI-PLAY 2017, I didn’t present the paper I submitted to the pre-conference. It was a workshop, so I instead participated in a discussion on user research. Anyways, this presentation was for my PSO paper, and I think attending NCA was a great experience, and worth it for me academically.
• Played 5ish games. Not quite as many as I hoped, but it is more than the year before. Perhaps the biggest game though that I played was Breath of the Wild, which took over my life for a few months. I’ve put it on the back burner for now, as I’ve got other games I need to play for research projects and books and what now. If I did pick the best game that I played for this year, it would be BotW.
• Reviewed 9 books. While I didn’t keep a physical log of all the books I read this year (like I have in previous years), I still feel like I was on top of my growing list of things to read. It was mostly non-fiction, academic stuff, which makes it hard when people like my mom ask for book recommendations. But one book that especially stood out to me this year (and not part of my 9, which were my blog post reviews) was Maus. This haunting book is one of the best I’ve ever read, and an example of probably the best graphic novel story I’ve ever read.
• I also bought two game systems this year. I bought a Wii U to play BoTW on, which was originally going to be my dissertation (using a BotW mod pack for Linkle). This is still an idea I have, but not my major focus right now. I also bought a 2DS so that I could catch up on my Zelda games on my plane rides this year. So I went from owning 0 consoles (unless you count my laptop) to 2 this year. I hope to one day have a Switch as well, but that’ll have to wait, especially since I am a very broke student.
• I also received 5 paper rejections (4 for publication, one for ICA). But these were for three studies, who got rejected about twice apiece (one paper I shelved after a desk reject). While not a good piece of news, I hope that I learn from these rejections and eventually get these papers in the public.
• I also reviewed two papers for ICA, which was a growing/learning experience.

Now that I’ve put it all on paper, it looks like I have had a super busy year! Here’s to hoping that my upcoming years are just as eventful, productive, and good for me. I’ve picked up new habits for my self-care (such as yoga and knitting), so I hope to keep afloat of the strain and stresses of Ph.D. school.

Review: The Warcraft Civilization

I recently read The Warcraft Civilization by William Sims Bainbridge. It was an interesting book and foundational in its approach to social science within virtual worlds. I feel that it had a lot to say, probably because Bainbridge logged 2300 hours of ethnographic research (gameplay) in two years. This left me wondering how this tangent was relevant in the chapter, or why he would discuss so much, and so many topics.

However, this weakness was also a strength at times. I think that sometimes as a game studies researcher it can be easy to lose your way. To be unsure of where to go, what to study, or where to start. So having a large compilation of random research insights from World of Warcraft can be a starting point in a way for young researchers like myself. This cross-disciplinal intersection of various insights is good at times so that academics don’t get too pigeon-holed in their niche.

And one more element of this book that I didn’t like (but other readers probably will) was Bainbridge’s frequent roleplaying. Each chapter would include stories from the perspective of his game avatars, outlining various events that were relevant to the chapter. I skipped these honestly, I didn’t need to read a 5-page story about how your Undead character learned about his condition, or how your Blood Elf character thought she was an outsider. Whatever dude, these stories were too long and took me out of the pressing matter: discussing the game at an academic level.

I think these two approaches to video games are fine. People like Bainbridge can continue to write fiction about their characters, but people like me will ignore it. I think the perfect example of our separate paradigms for video games comes from a comment that Bainbridge made about character names. He was flabbergasted that in World of Warcraft, a fantasy game in a similar vein as Lord of the Rings, that people would name their characters something ridiculous (like Monkeyfart) instead of something world appropriate (like Aragorn). Me on the other hand, I have no problem with avatars being named “Yolo McSwaggle” because that is my humor, and it is a part of me to create a character who doesn’t take himself serious.

For it’s insights, as well as its meandering tangents, and the in-character stories I skipped, I give The Warcraft Civilization 3 out of 5 hearts.

Another #Zeldamonth come and gone

You’d think as a Zelda-themed academic blog I would have blown up this month with Zelda content. However, my celebrations were much more personal, and I didn’t really find any content to share here.

I played a lot of Majora’s Mask 3D during my trip to NCA. Over the course of my trip, I completed 3/4 dungeons, which I thought was pretty impressive. Granted, my battery died and I lost the majority of my progress. I had been working off the Sleep state to keep my progression in the game, but when my battery died it forgot my saves (both the 1st day resets, as well as my Owl Statues) and sent me back to the Snowhead Temple. Which I found irritating, to say the least. However, since I have no capture card for recording these play sessions, I just thought I would keep them to myself.

Then I tried recording a play session on my PJ64 Majora’s Mask save file (yeah I’m simultaneously playing it on both platforms). I captured the play session, but with my screen capture software, I couldn’t record my mic as well as my game music. So I tried to simultaneously capture my mic in a separate software while recording my screen and mashing them together in post. However, somewhere in the process of importing my footage into my free video editing software speeds it up to 3x speed. I have no idea why this software takes my 75-minute footage and turns it into a 22-minute speedrun, but that seriously messes with my audio commentary. And while I could figure it out (perhaps with new software or something), that friction is just too much right now. I just wanted to play my game and show it off. Maybe next time I should just stream it live on Twitch or YouTube.

And those Zelda t-shirts I ordered at the beginning of the month still haven’t come. I guess it has something to do with the flood of orders or something. I dunno. I did a lot of writing for my Majora’s Mask book, the second in my Symbolism of Zelda series, but still haven’t finished my first draft of my manuscript. Maybe next year?