Leeroy Jenkins Meets the CCCC Program (CCCC 2006 Chicago — Day 1)

The wireless internet access at the Palmer House Hilton charges an hourly rate, so I’ll batch-post my notes to my blog when I get back to my hotel. As is always the case with live blogging (or near-live blogging), these will be rough notes that I took during the speaker’s presentations. These notes will be colored by my own subjective opinions of what is blogworthy.

Looking through the program for this year’s 4Cs in Chicago, I’m annoyed to see that Clancy Ratliff’s talk on “Coalition-Building on Weblogs” and Stephen Krause’s talk on “Using Podcasts to Build Community and Connections” are scheduled at the same time.

But I won’t be going to either of them, because instead I’m going to “Technology, Play and Pedagogy: Video Gaming and New Literacies.”

Not only have these three sessions been scheduled at the same time, they’re listed one after the other in the program.

But wait – that’s not all. At the same time there’s a “Computer Connection” session on “Usability and Remediation,” and the same session also includes, “Leeroy Jenkins! Gaming and Visual Argumentation.”

Leeroy Jenkins is a character in a machinima video taken from within the MMO World of Warcraft. The video shows an over-eager gamer completely ruin the meticulous plans that his guild formulates while he was not paying attention. It’s pretty clear to me that the whole thing was staged, but it’s still hysterical.

Here in the lobby of the Hilton, people are gathering in small groups, looking through the conference program. We’re managing our resources, planning our strategy, and networking.

But I don’t want to have to plan. I don’t want to have to choose. At least, not at 3:15 on Thursday, when, in order to bring home all the treasure I really want, I’d have to run around checking out four different sessions at the same time, waving my PDA stylus and threatening everyone with my digital camera, firing off questions, perhaps screaming like Leeroy Jenkins himself.

Oh, well. At least I have chicken.