The WoW Librarian

Reading about gaming & World of Warcraft

Catherine — Tue, 17 May 2011 14:33:20 +0000

I’ve been doing some interesting reading lately. I’m listening to Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal (@avantgame), and I’m reading My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft, by Bonnie Nardi. Both are fascinating. I could insert a rant here about the differences between listening to a book and reading a book… but I’ll desist (for now). I might mention that I listened to Dan Tapscott’s book, Wikinomics, last year, and The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman.

I have been playing more in large part to McGonigal’s book. Things IRL haven’t been golden lately, and oddly enough, I stopped playing WoW. After listening to Reality is Broken, I realized that perhaps not playing was not the best strategy. Interesting. So I made an effort to begin playing more frequently, and I’ve found it really does make a difference to me. It’s at this point that I find I really wish I had a hard copy of McGonigal’s book at hand. I’ll get back to this in another post.

Nardi’s My Life as a Night Elf Priest is also fascinating. One of the more attractive features is that this book is not a collection of essays, but an ethnographic exploration of World of Warcraft. I’m only in chapter 3, so I won’t talk about this book any further.

Last year I read Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft® Reader, edited by Corneliussen and Rettberg (@jilltxt). This is a book of essays by people who actually play WoW. I would like to be in their guild!

I promise all of this is building up to something; it’s still incubating, but I guarantee some sort of paper will result. In the meantime, Atzilut is level 84, and that’s something to enjoy.

(Edited and reposted from The WoW Librarian.)

Atzilut hits 80!

Catherine — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 05:12:38 +0000

Yes! I have a level 80 night elf druid! Just moments before I earned the 1500 Completed Quests achievement. I leveled when I turned in The Broken Front quest.

I am so very happy. <– Gee, I ought to be able to write some code there…

Signing off… May the stars guide and watch over you!

New website platform

Catherine — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 21:11:53 +0000

After a bit of deliberation, I’ve decided to move my website (wowlibrarian.com) to a new platform. It’s been in Joomla! for a while; now it’s in WordPress. I’ve often used my website to test Joomla! updates and plugins; my website at times suffered for this. (Yeah, that’s a “duh” statement.) I learned about an online sandbox for testing software packages at LITA last year. Now if I can find my notes…I’ll be testing from there instead.

I’ve just downloaded a plugin for WordPress called CrossPress. This plugin should allow me to “post once, publish many”. I guess we’ll see in a minute. If you read this on wowlibrarian.blogspot.com, you’ll know it worked.

Atzilut is at level 78.5! I’ve been playing more regularly lately, and it’s done wonders for me. Looks like I’ll get to 80 before Cataclysm is released.