Gender and Fan Studies (Round Two, Part Two): Louisa Stein and Robert Jones

MEDIUM DIFFERENCES--ACTIVE PLAY OR PASSIVE SPECTATORSHIP? RJ: I don't want to say that machinima is better, but I do want to say that it certainly places more power over the medium in the fan's hands than television. Essentially it comes down to tool sets. All these communities converge together on their need to tell stories, I'm not questioning that whatsoever. I'm simply suggesting that machinima requires a reexamination based on its tool sets that are made available to consumers exceeding previous media forms.

As to the transformative play of fan vids, I would absolutely agree that is what's going on. Because at its basic level, transformative play is about playing by your own set of rules, thus permeating the magic circle. If we understand the traditional role of the viewer as one of passive consumption, fan communities flip that on its head and actively play with the medium (the whole poaching thing). I guess my point about the fundamental difference between video games and film/TV was that the nature of these two are quite different. I can easily see how machinima manifests out of video game culture because it is one rooted in the interactive playing with the text. In that sense, machinima is just a continuation of play, reconfiguring the the magic circle. Fan vids on the other hand, have no direct connection to the relationship to the medium. We were supposed to JUST watch and enjoy. The people in Hollywood didn't foresee us really going beyond that, which is so very different from game design.

LS: On the point of film/TV as a passive medium I would definitely differ. Film and TV has had a long and bumpy road of imagining a spectator who is sometimes passive, sometimes active. To draw on Tom Gunning, the cinema of attractions certainly encouraged an active viewer, and while the development of the narrative code may have sent that active stance underground to some degree, it has never left cinema entirely--it has remained in the notion of engaging in the act of cinema going and the community of the audience, or in the confrontation of alternative cinema, or in the spectacle of big budget special effects films. This is even more so the case with TV; throughout its history people have been heralding the coming of interactive television, and images or sounds of studio audiences always highlighted audience engagement as somewhere in between passively watching and actively participating. Yes, how one could participate was limited, and perhaps doesn't compare to video games (I certainly don't mean to argue that the two are the same.)

This is just a long winded way of saying that film and television audiences have never been posited as strictly passive. But the active television viewer is now a highly contested subject, sought by some producers/networks and avoided by others, it seems. However the increasing cooptation of fannish culture (as we can see in shows on NBC, FX, Nickelodeon/The N, and The CW in the current moment, to name a few) suggests that TV producers and networks are not only soliciting active viewership but offering opportunities to supposedly influence the official source text itself. But, as Kristina Busse has discussed, this desire to go "pro" is not something that fan communities necessarily share equally, and is itself a contested and gendered issue.

RJ: I find this part particularly fascinating because I can fully see how this all plays out like a game for fans. I would just be cautious to clearify what we're talking about. The explanation of the video game as an interactive medium versus TV as a more passive medium was based solely on the medium, which has a prescribed way to engage it. What you're getting at here is what people do with that medium. In this instance, I would define that as a form of play, utilizing the TV medium. So the medium itself in this case does not take on the interactive or active qualities I want to reserve for games. However, that may be an unnecessary point to squabble over. The more important point to take from this, and a possible place where these two come together, is that there exists this need to "tinker" across gender.

LS: Yes, absolutely--but is the tinkering with the same purpose and to the same effect? I think that would be a fascinating question to explore more closely, looking at a comparison of machinima and vidding processes and texts.

RJ: I've always claimed that the engaging power of video games lies in the control it offers its audience. Fan vids represent a similar appetite for control over the narrative. Perhaps eagerly anticipating the next episode of a show only so that you can then take that content and use it as part of your own storytelling is no different than awaiting the next game engine to see what you can do with it. Both would constitute active engagements of play, the latter just happens to adhere to the relationship established from the outset by the medium. This is why the legal issues that often plague fan vids in the realm of IP suits has yet to really manifest in the machinima communities. Whereas TV and Film industries still cling to the need to control their properties, game developers have recognized the tremendous marketing potential that machinima offers (as indicated by the inclusion of machinima tool sets and filmmaking competitions just in the The Sims 2). The fact that they have not gone so far outside of the role that medium traditionally plays could be part of the explanation for this.

LS: I can see how the role imagined by the medium for the player/viewer might determine acceptable levels of interactivity, and how this separates TV/Film from video games--up to a point. But when TV and Film producers start to actively court fan involvement and fan authorship (which granted happens only marginally now but it does happen) this dichotomy gets muddier.

GENDER AND SCHOLARSHIP

RJ: Just trying to step back from all this, I can see that we both seem to come at this from a place that is close to us. Part of my argument seems to be privileging technology because I grew up as a technophile, playing games my whole life. And with your background in cinema I can see where your emphasis on narrative regardless of tool sets comes from.

LS: I wouldn't say I would emphasize narrative regardless of tools--I think understanding rather than ignoring the role of technology and interface is absolutely crucial--but I do think it's equally vital to understand the impact of those tools within the context of their cultural and social use.

RJ:So is the answer to this whole endeavor Jenkins is putting together just that simple? Men will continue researching video games because they spend more time there? And women will stick to fan vids and fan fiction based on TV because that's where they spend their time?

LS: I think that gendered spaces and familiarity may definitely be a significant part of this divide we're all noticing, combined with the gendered academic priorities that have shaped and continue to shape fan studies, as Jason and Karen discussed in their conversation this past week.

RJ: The shifting numbers I cite in my piece on the growing numbers of female gamers hopefully points towards a sea change that will take place. The Wii and the explosion of the casual gamer market are certainly good indications. This is where I can't help but think that Jenkins was onto something about gendered play spaces. Even in 2007 women spend more time online, yet still pursue computer science degrees in far less numbers. This is certainly part of the master narrative young women are given as to their roles in technology. Some of the fan communities that you and Kristina write about point towards a change in direction in that, but there's still a long way to go I think.

LS: Yes, but there are histories of women actively engaging with technologies that need to be written also... It's not just all in the future. From the evolving history of vidding to the female modding and authorship surround The Sims 1 (pre- the more accessible storytelling tools). Yes, there are changes in the works, but the same gendered discourses that may overall shape how women perceive their own relationship with technology also shape what fan histories get told, recorded, and listened to.

WRAPPING UP ON INTERFACE, PRODUCTION VALUE, PLAY, AND ENGAGEMENT

RJ: To return to your earlier comments on interface: this is one of the areas that I feel really helps to understand machinima. One thing I have not mentioned about machinima as an area of fandom is that in many cases it does not function the same way I understand other fandoms. When the guys at Roosterteeth decided to use Halo and create the Red vs. Blue, that was clearly a traditional fannish endeavor because they spent all their time previously playing the game. However, as trained filmmakers the ability to make films from games seemed to supersede their love of Halo- because they proceeded to migrate to other games like The Sims 2 and F.E.A.R. I don't want to say that they were not fans of these games, but I would say that for them and many other machinimators, the choice of game engine often depends on the power of that engine and what it can do.

LS: This notion of choosing a game engine depending on what the engine can do actually doesn't sound that different from much of fan authorship practice. Once they are already paricipants in fandom, fans often seek out texts that will give them the elements to create a fantext of the sort that gives them pleasure/matches values already circulating within the fan community. Within the larger fan communities, you can see shifts as individuals and groups realize that a certain program or film has the elements they would look for--that reflect the values and goals of their fan engagement. And so we see large growth in fandoms like Supernatural which match well with fannish focus on masculinity, seriality, and the familial. Granted I'm talking about thematic content and narrative form (not to mention aesthetic quality as fans--and especially vidders--choose programs that offer rich visuals). This type of choosing of source text may be somewhat different from a machinima author choosing a game engine based on what it can do, but I'm not sure that difference is a radical one.

RJ: The Sims 2 offers a powerful 3D engine, but manipulation of that engine is limited due to the way the interface makes it so accessible (similar to how Mac makes useful interfaces that don't really allow you to "get under the hood"). One of the residual effects of that has been the development of software tools used to work with TS2 to allow more control over design. I checked out one of the main sites for these tools and had trouble identifying many women as the creators of these tools.

There are many women participating in these sites, creating meshes and skins to customize their Sims, but the tools to do these things still seem to be something men are creating, which is part of the problem that I see with all this. Values are such an integral part of any design, and as long as men continue to design most games and most tools, they will continue to privilege those male values. I don't want to discount Sadie Plant's warning that we should not overlook that the history of technology DOES have women in key roles throughout its history; however, I would much rather see them in greater number both now and in the future. The hurdle that seems to stand tall against that, in my opinion, is the cultural discourses that engender a certain relationship to technology. For as many women how have tried creating machinima in TS2 and said "these tools are really limiting, I'm going to hack the code and create my own" I have to say they are far fewer than the many who felt the same way but did a google search to find a tool that does something similar to what they want to do.

This has nothing to do with intelligence or aptitude, but instead with power and permission. Modding breaks the rules, just as hacking. And by extension, so does machinima. Through a myriad of patriarchal structures, men/boys have been given greater liberties to play than women/girls. And since our relationship to technology has always been one of playing and tinkering, it makes sense why the power in that field would be so slanted toward males. The growing presence of women in machinima hopefully points this in the right direction, but until that presence manifests in the design side of the tools used to construct machinima there will always exist a substantive imbalance.

LS: Yes, there may be less women modding or hacking than men, and yes, this likely has to do with the gendered cultures that encourage or discourage technological expertise of different sorts. And of course it's a necessary goal to change these patterns--to see more women getting advanced degrees in technology related fields and shaping the values that then emerge.

However, we can't simply dismiss the female authorship that is occurring now because it's not modding or hacking, nor can we devalue it because it doesn't change larger official (commercial) systems. I would argue that fan investment and authorship is precisely about working within, through, and against external official structures. Media fan pleasure--at least of the female community sort --derives from an interplay with already existing realities. A fan wouldn't want to change the original source text, but rather to render it in her own image and the image of her community through other tools which may offer their on sets of restrictions to creativity. Many fans argue that this type of creativity within restriction (for example the exploration of an already existing character rather than an original character) is more challenging (and thus for the fan more pleasurable) than starting with a blank canvas. I feel like you're holding up a set of values to fannish authorship that doesn't match up neatly with the goals, values, and investments of those creative communities.

RJ: Going back to production values, I wonder now if there may be a gender divide along those lines as well. When you talked about the use of Final Fantasy to simply tell a love story in contrast to producing a high production value work, I thought of the number of Sims videos I watched when doing that content analysis of the Sims movies sites. So many of them were completely unapologetic about not being perfect in editing and/or sound, which sounds like what you are getting at. In contrast, a site like machinima.com has such a greater number of men producing machinima and it has a similar feel to gaming forums where the hyper-competitive nature that derives from games sometimes manifests in talking about each others work. Can you think of a similar occurrence outside of machinima? In any of the communities you participate in. There could be something to that.

LS: There are some communities that indeed have a different set of production values and goals, and thus we can't measure them against more "professional" (again I am hesitant to simply equate this with masculine) aesthetic systems. However--and perhaps I didn't make this clear enough--there are also vidding communities which are very invested in what we would recognize as "high quality" production values--that is values rooted in professional/official aesthetic and editing codes (and we might or might not want to call these out as masculine codes...) What I'm trying to stress, then, is that there are multiple, shifting vidding communities with differing value systems, and these value systems are always in process and often influence each other.

For example, in the vidding-centered fan community, in which vidding itself is the object as well as the product of fandom, one could argue that vidders assess a vid's success based at least partially on production values that we might associate with "professional" skill--detailed attention to rhythmic editing, matching motion with aural track, to name two central values that have emerged in vidding fandom over the past decade or more.

In contrast, other vidders with different aesthetic value sets are currently becoming more visible. Some of these vidders use elements of available interface in ways which may seem unorthodox in comparison to recognized vid aesthetics. However, these vids are becoming more and more visible and the aesthetics they offer do indeed seem to be gaining wider recognition within a range of vidding communities. I've gotten permission to link to a vid that, in its exploration of fan investment in the media text, offers a different vision of what a vid can be--or at least different than that outlined and familiar to media scholars from Textual Poachers. It's absolutely worth checking out: Us.

While I personally love this vid and everything it achieves, I don't mean to hold it up as a "good" vid as opposed to the romantic machinima slash vids I mentioned before or in comparison to the vid aesthetic that predominates in the vidding-centered fan community. These different vids all emerge out of different fan and authorship communities with different sets of aesthetic and thematic concerns and contexts. I would link to examples of all three, but the issue of bringing publicity to vids and vidding is still a highly contested one (and certainly we could talk about issues of gender here as well), and I don't want to bring exposure to vidding communities or artists that may not want that type of attention.

LOOKING FORWARD

RJ: The more we talk about this, I wonder how far apart the endeavors of machinima and vidding really are. The divide seems to fall along the relationship to the source text. Your point about the fans seeing the source text as a starting point for a multi-layered fan text across media seems to relate to the thing I said earlier about how machinimators understand their relationship to the source text. Often it is based on the engine's power and usability, not a previous affinity for the story or characters. Or it can be something as simple as I want do a drama and don't want people laughing because my protagonist is dwarf or a robot. So I choose TS2, not because I love the game, but because that tool allows me to do things other tools do not. In this instance, the notion of a multi-layer build off a source text collapses into an entirely new text that is only aesthetically derivative. And when you look at the work of Friedrick Kirschner and how he takes a powerful game engine like Unreal Tournament 2004 and completely strips away any semblance of the previous game, the notion of fandom for the game no longer applies.

LS: Not only does the notion of fandom for the game cease to apply--but what about the question of play? When fans create texts--be they fic, vids, Sims still-image and text storytelling, or fannish machinima--they offer their creations as part of the larger, ongoing play with the source text. So I'm actually finding myself wanting to flip on its head your initial framework that suggests that videogame machinima authorship is more active than media fan authorship; media fan authorship is simultaneously invested in the creation of and circulation of aesthetic texts and in the ongoing and ever-evolving group play of the fan community experience, perhaps (dare I say) more so than the mostly-male-authored machinima texts you're describing.

RJ: Though the fandom for the game may be stripped away in Kirshner's work, the element of play is very much alive. It simply lies within playing with the technology and what it can do rather than the narrative. He has subsequently developed a toolset that aims at making the creation of machinima with the Unreal engine more user friendly. And I'm not sure I ever claimed that machinima authorship is more active than media fan authorship (in fact I thought I suggested they were both forms of transformative play). Machinima offers more control to fans over the medium than Film or TV, which could lead to more control over the preexisting narratives or as in the case of Kirshner greater control over completely original storytelling. Again, the divide seems to fall along narrative and technology.

LS: I find myself frustrated that we seem to be trapped in this (gendered) world of dichotomization, where we're seeking to differentiate rather than understand the complex gradations that make up media engagement. Of course gender shapes technological comfort-levels, media engagement, and all realms of our experience. There's no escaping that--but I feel that one tangible way to change it would be to fully explore worlds outside of our sandboxes without necessarily labeling them as "similar" or "different" right off the bat. I feel this is something that we as media scholars can do. And ironically, maybe such a goal is somewhat impeded by our fan investments--our strong feelings, as you point out--but I think it's something very worth striving for.

Louisa Ellen Stein is an assistant professor of Television, Film, and New Media at San

Diego State University. Her research explores viewer and participant engagement with

contemporary media culture, including film, television, the Internet and videogames. She

is co-editor of the forthcoming collection Watching Teen TV: Text and Subtext, and is also co-authoring a study of fan textual creativity in new media, with the working title

New Media and Fan Artifacts.

Robert Jones is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Culture & Communication,

NYU. His PhD work focuses on machinima and mods as instances of transformative play

within video game culture. He is also interested in digital cinema as participatory

culture, Hollywood's convergence with the gaming industry, and the social and political

implications of video games.

Happy (Belated) Henry Day

Yesterday (June 4) was my birthday. I'm not telling how old I am. But I figured the world would excuse me under the circumstances if a)I didn't write a lot for today's post (which was actually put together last night) and b)I was a tad self-centered. So today seems like the best time to share a few things that have come in my mail over the past week. The first are some doctored (as in "improved") images of me that are making the rounds of the internet. Several people had called to my attention a shift from the phenomenon of LOL cat pictures to LOL theorist pictures. There's even a site where people regularly post pictures of theorists, such as Foucault, Brecht, Jung, even Dewey (of the decimal fame) with pithy comments. And to my astonishment, yours truly has become a favorite target in this new academic pass-time. My students have long considered my face an icon upon which they can test their emerging mash-up and remixing skills so I am delighted to see these practices extended into the culture at large. Anything which will further the cause of participatory culture.

So here are two examples of the theory in action.

Most of the rest of the objects of these tributes are not around to respond, let alone post them to their blog so I should say thank you on behalf of Barthes, McLuhan, and Eisenstein, who I have channeled in my lectures often enough to know would have enjoyed these tributes every bit as much as I do. Thanks to Nancy Baym and Selki for sharing these links with me.

On other fronts, I wanted to pass along a link to the podcast of the slash panel from Phoenix Rising, "Shipping the Velvet: Slash Fandom, Convergence, and Why You Should Care About Harry Potter Mpreg," which Spellcast is making available to the world. Participants in this session included Aja, Erica George, Henry Jenkins, Mathilde Madden and Catherine Tonsenberger. I will confess to being a tad intimidated about participating in the session since I had not read very much Harry Potter slash and most of my work on the genre was done more than a decade ago. But Erica and Aja organized a really fun session and I learned so much from the other participants. Don't let the title of the session throw you -- there's not that much about "Mpreg" (a genre of fan fiction depicting men getting pregnant and having babies together for those of you who are uninitiated) though I do stir up a little controversy by suggesting that Mary Shelly's Frankenstein might be considered as an early contribution to the genre. There's even less explicitly about convergence, so the title may be a tad misleading. :-) But a good time was had by all. By the way, this panel got specific, though less than fully supportive, mention in Salon's recent article about the con.

Finally, let me at last acknowledge that reader Angela Thomas wrote me a while back to say that she has given me a Thinking Blogger Award. Thanks for the recognition, Angela, and all I can say is that the end of the term left me less thoughtful than usual so it has taken me a while to get around to acknowledging the recognition here. I promise to pass along the honors to someone else soon.

So, for now, Happy (Belated) Henry Day!

A Few Thoughts on Media Violence...

The news of last week's tragic shooting at Virginia Tech has brought the usual range of media reformers and culture warriors (never camera shy) scurrying back into the public eye to make their case that "media violence" must be contained, if not censored, if we are to prevent such bloodshed from occurring again. Almost immediately, longtime video game opponents Jack Thompson and Dr. Phil McGraw started appearing on television talk shows, predicting that the shooter would turn out to be a hardcore video game player. (The odds are certainly with them since a study released several years ago of frosh at 20 American colleges and universities found that a hundred percent of them had played games before going off to college and that on average college students spend more time each week playing games that reading recreationally, watching television, or going to the movies.) In fact, when the police searched the killer's dorm room, they found not a single game nor any signs of a game system. The focus then quickly shifted with the news arguing first that the shooter was a heavy viewer of television "including television wrestling" and then linking some of the photographs he sent to NBC with images from Asian cult cinema -- most notably with the Korean film, Old Boy. An op-ed piece in the Washington Post asserted that Old Boy "must feature prominently in the discussion" of Mr. Cho's possible motivations, "even if no one has yet confirmed that Cho saw it" and then later, claims that Cho "was shooting a John Woo movie in his head" as he entered the engineering building.

And then, of course, there was that damning evidence that he had construct violent and aggressive fantasies during his creative writing classes. Time magazine even pathologizes the fact that he was a college student who didn't have a Facebook page! Talk about damned if you do and damned if you don't!

None of this should surprise us given the cycle of media coverage that has surrounded previous instances of school shootings. An initial period of shock is quickly followed by an effort to round up the usual suspects and hold them accountable -- this is part of the classic psychology of a moral panic. In an era of 24 hour news, the networks already have experts on media violence in their speed dial, ready for them to arrive on the scene and make the same old arguments. As a media scholar, I find these comments predictable but disappointing: disappointing because they block us from having a deeper conversation about the place of violence in American culture.

I want to outline here another set of perspectives on the issue of media violence, ones that are grounded not in the literature of media effects but rather in the literature of cultural studies. I have plenty of criticisms of the media effects approach, which I outlined in my recent book, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, but for the most part, my focus here is more on what cultural studies might tell us about media violence than it is in critiquing that body of "research."

So, let me start with an intentionally provocative statement. There is no such thing as media violence -- at least not in the ways that we are used to talking about it -- as something which can be easily identified, counted, and studied in the laboratory. Media violence is not something that exists outside of a specific cultural and social context. It is not one thing which we can simply eliminate from art and popular culture. It's not a problem we can make go away. Our culture tells lots of different stories about violence for lots of different reasons for lots of different audiences in lots of different contexts. We need to stop talking about media violence in the abstract and start talking about it in much more particularized terms.

Otherwise, we end up looking pretty silly. So, for example, a study endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics reported that 100 percent of feature length cartoons released in America between 1937 and 1999 contained images of violence. Here, we see the tendency to quantify media violence taken to its logical extreme. For this statement to be true, violence has to be defined here so broadly that it would include everything from the poison apple in Snow White to the hunter who shoots Bambi's mother, from Captain Hook's hook to the cobra that threatens to crush Mowgali in The Jungle Book and that's just to stick with the Disney canon. The definition must include not only physical violence but threats of violence, implied violence, and psychological/emotional violence. Indeed, if we start from a definition that broad, we would need to eliminate conflict from our drama altogether in order to shut down the flow of media violence into our culture. Perhaps this is reason enough not to put pediatricians in charge of our national cultural policy anytime soon. Certainly few of us would imagined our culture improved if these films were stripped of their "violent" content or barred from exhibition.

Almost no one operates on a definition of violence that broad. Most of us make value judgments about the kinds of violence that worries us, judgments based on the meanings attached to the violence in specific representations, so church groups don't think twice about sending young kids to watch Jesus get beaten in The Passion of the Christ, and games reformers go after first person shooters but not World War II simulation games (which coat their violence in patriotism and historical authenticity) even though this genre is now consistently outselling more anti-social titles in the video game marketplace.

Why is violence so persistent in our popular culture? Because violence has been persistent as a theme across storytelling media of all kinds. A thorough account of violence in media would include: fairy tales such as Hansel and Gretel, oral epics such as Homer's The Iliad, the staged violence of Shakespeare's plays, fine art paintings of the Rape of the Sabine Women, and stain glass window representations of Saints being crucified or pumped full of arrows, or for that matter, talk show conversations about the causes of school shootings. If we were to start going after media violence, then, we would need to throw out much of the literary cannon and close down all of our art museums. Violence is fundamental to these various media because aggression and conflict is a core aspect of human experience. We need our art to help us make sense of the senselessness of violence in the real world, to provide some moral order, to help us sort through our feelings, to provoke us to move beyond easy answers and ask hard questions.

Again, nobody really means that we should get rid of all media violence, even if that's what they say often enough: we are all drawing lines and making distinctions, but all of those distinctions fly out the window when we read statistics that count the number of incidents of violence in an hour of television or when we read research that tells us how subjecting human lab rats to media violence may make them more or less aggressive.

In practice, it is hard to sustain the case that our culture is becoming more violent -- not when we read it within the broader sweep of human history. Take a look at Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre which describes how workers in early modern Europe got their kicks by setting cats on fire and running them through the streets. Consider the role of public hangings in 19th century America. Or think about the popularity of cock fights and bear baiting in Shakespeare's London. We have, for the most part, moved from an era where humans sought entertainment through actual violence and into a period when we are amused through symbolic violence. Indeed, where people confront real violence on a regular basis, parents are often heartened to see their children playing violent videogames -- if for no other reason than they keep them off the streets and out of harm's way. (This is borne out by studies done in American ghettos or along the West Bank.)

Nor can we argue that America is unique in its fascination with violent entertainment. I recently took a trip to Singapore and visited Haw Paw Villa, a cherished institution, where tourists can go into the mouth of hell and see grisly images of doomed souls being ground up, decapitated and dismembered, and impaled, drenched with buckets of red paint. For generations, Singaporeans have taken their children to this attraction for moral instruction, showing their young and impressionable ones what befalls those who lie to their parents or cheat on their examinations.

Our current framing of media violence assumes that it most often attracts us, that it inspires imitation, where-as throughout much of human history, representations of violence were seen as morally instructive, as making it less likely we are going to transgress various social prohibitions. When we read the lives of Saints, for example, we are invited to identify with the one suffering the violence and not the one committing it.

Media violence is not a uniquely American trend, though school shootings, by and large, are. Media violence is a global phenomenon. Indeed, the process of globalization is arguably increasing the vividness with which violence is represented not only in American media but in every major media producing country. The physicality of violent representations is easily conveyed visually, allowing it to be understood and appreciated by people who might miss the nuances of spoken dialogue, who might not understand the language in which the film was produced or be able to read the subtitles. For that reason, action stars are often the most popular performers in the global market. As the United States, Japan, China, India, Korea, and a host of other film-producing countries compete for dominance in the global market place, we are seeing an escalation in the intensity of representations of violence. And American media often seems mild when compared with the kinds of things that can be found on screens in Asia or Latin America.

Part of the problem with the initial response to the news of the Virginia Tech shootings was the assumption that the young man involved would turn out to be a fan of American media violence. In fact, the evidence so far suggests that he was much more interested in Asian cinema, which should hardly be a surprise given that he came to the United States from Korea. Indeed, the news media has more recently noted similarities between his two handed shooting techniques and the style made famous by Hong Kong action director John Woo; they have also identified one of the images -- where he waves a hammer -- with a publicity still for the Korea film, Old Boy.

A news story in the New York Times describes Old Boy as an obscure cult film which appeals primarily to those who are interested in excessive violence. In fact, Old Boy has emerged as one of the most important films in the recent Korean film revival, one which has won awards from film festivals and has been playing in art houses across the country. While the film includes some of the most disturbing violence I've seen on screen in some time, that's precisely the point: the violence is meant to be disturbing. We watch the main character's slow descent into his own personal hell and then as he seeks to right wrongs that have been committed against him, we see him pushed into more and more violence himself. The filmmaker doesn't glorify the violence: he's horrified by it; he's using it to push past our own reserves and to get us to engage in issues of oppression and social aggression from a fresh perspective. I have always been struck by the fact that moral reformers rarely take aim at mundane and banal representations of violence though formulaic violence is pervasive in our culture. Almost always, they go after works that are acclaimed elsewhere as art -- the works of Martin Scorsese or Quintin Tarantino, say -- precisely because these works manage to get under their skin. For some of us, this provocation gets us thinking more deeply about the moral consequences of violence where-as others condemn the works themselves, unable to process the idea that a work might provoke us to reflect about the violence that it represents.

There's a kind of deadening literal mindedness about such criticisms: to represent something is to advocate it and to advocate it is to cause it. To watch this film and decide to imitate the protagonist is a misreading on the order of reading Frankenstein and deciding to construct a creature from the parts of dead bodies or watching A Clockwork Orange and deciding it is fun to rape and terrorize senior citizens. It is certainly possible for someone who already is mentally disturbed to read these images out of context and ascribe to them meanings which are not part of the original but then again, that's part of the point.

If we take most of the existing research on media effects at face value, almost nothing would suggest that consuming media violence would turn an otherwise normal kid into a psychokiller. In practice, the research implies that consuming media violence can be one risk factor among many, that most incidents of real world violence can not be traced back to a single cause, and that real world experiences (mental illness, drug abuse, histories of domestic violence, exposure to gangs, etc.) represents a much more immediate cause of most violent crime. Some research has shown that people in jail for violent crimes, in fact, consume less media violence than the general population, in part because they have not been able to afford consistent access to media technologies.

Understanding media violence as a risk factor -- rather than as the cause of real world violence -- is consistent with some of the other things we know or think we know about media's influence. At the risk of reducing this to a simple formula, media is most powerful when it reaffirms our existing beliefs and behaviors, least powerful when it seeks to change them. We tend to read media representations against our perceptions of the real world and discard them if they deviate too dramatically from what we believe to be true.

In fact, children at a pretty young age -- certainly by the time they reach elementary school -- are capable of making at least crude distinctions between more or less realistic representations of violence. They can be fooled by media which offers ambiguous cues but they generally read media that seems realistic very differently than media that seems cartoonish or larger than life. For that reason, they are often much more emotionally disturbed by documentaries that depict predators and prey, war, or crime, than they are by the kinds of hyperbolic representations we most often are talking about when we refer to media violence.

None of this is to suggest that the media we consume has no effect. Clearly, those kids who already live in a culture of violence are often draw most insistently to violent entertainment. They may seek to use it to release their pent up anger and frustration; they may use its images to try to make sense of what they see as aggression and injustice around them; they may draw on its iconography to give some shape to their own inchoate feelings, and that's part of the way I would understand those disturbing photographs of Cho Seung-Hui striking poses from Asian action movies. We can't argue that these films had nothing to do with the horrors he committed on teachers and students at Virginia Tech. I think it does matter that he had access to some images of violence and not others and that he read those representations of violence through a set of emotional and psychological filters which distorted and amplified their messages.

Where does this leave us? It is meaningless as I have suggested to talk about regulating "media violence," as if all representations of violence were harmful. We need to get beyond rhetoric that treats media violence as a carcinogen, a poison or a pollutant. Rather, we should be asking ourselves what kinds of stories our culture tells about violence and how we are making sense of those representations in the context of our everyday lives. The problem is not media violence per se. If there is a problem, it is that so many of our contemporary works banalize violence through reliance on simple minded formulas. What we need is more meaningful violence -- representations of violence which incite and provoke us to think more deeply about the nature of aggression, trauma, and loss, representations which get under our skin and make it hard for us to simply sit back and relax in front of the screen. And we need to be having intelligent conversations about these media constructions of violence rather than trying to push such works away from us.

How to Become a Compulsive Workaholic With No Life... Or The Secrets Behind My Success

Nancy Baym from Online Fandom has tagged me with the "Simply Successful Secrets" meme. I am supposed to tell you some of the secrets behind my success. I was tempted to say that one of the secrets is that I never respond to blog memes, chain letters, pyramid schemes, letters from Africans who want to promise me a portion of their national treasury, and venture capitalists who think that I might have a strong interest in their next project if I only set aside an hour or two to consult with them for free. By riding my life of such things, I discover I have many more hours in the day than most of my friends.

But then I took a niceness pill and decided that it was only fair that Nancy tagged me since I tagged her a few months ago in response to the Five Things You Don't Know About Me meme.

I also figure that this is an aspect of the communal and informal nature of the blogosphere that people stop what they are doing, suspend the normal topics of their blogs, and write personal things because someone essentially dared them to do so. It's hard to imagine anything would happen if at the end of this post I tagged Dan Rather, John Stewart, Bill O'Reilly, or Simon Cowell. None of these people have sufficient control over their own output to be able to put the social obligations represented by such memes ahead of institutional expectations.

So, you want to know how I succeed at doing the broad range of things I write about here. Well, let me give you a clue. These are the things I wanted to do this weekend:

Go to see Grindhouse at the Boston Common Theater.

Watch the opening episode of The Sopranos' final season

Keep plowing through the new Robin Hood series from the UK.

Watch the 5th season dvds of The Shield that just arrived from Amazon

Read the growing pile of comics and graphic novels next to my bed.

Finally get a running start on the Second Season of Supernatural.

Etc., etc., etc.

Keep in mind the myth that I get paid to watch movies and television, read comics, and play video games. I could in theory count any of the above as work but it is all less pressing than the things I ended up spending the weekend doing.

Instead, these are some of the things that I did do this weekend (from a list of more than 47 items):

Write the welcome letter to those attending the Media in Transition 5 conference.

Review and make notes on the rough cuts of the next round of Project nml Exemplars.

Read and comment on draft chapters for four different thesis

grade a pile of undergraduate essays

prepare for next week's classes

develop a description for a revision of the Comparative Media Studies undergraduate curriculum

Prepare powerpoints for a series of talks I am giving over the next few weeks.

write blog entries

You know you work too hard when you think the best thing about weekends is that you don't have any meetings and so you can really get work done.

In other words, if you want to know the secret of my success, talk to Doctor Faustus.

So, you can follow the advice below if you wish but keep in mind that, as the title of this post suggests, doing so will probably suck the blood out of your body and turn you into a compulsive workaholic. Read the following at your own risk.

Follow the Path of Least Resistance. One reason why I do so many different things in once -- like publish three books back to back -- is that it allows me to stay in constant motion. If you do only one thing and you hit a roadblock, all you can do is stop until you can route around it. If you multitask, then you just shift lanes, do something else for a while, and come back to the original task hopefully with a fresh perspective. So, the key to getting lots of things done is to have lots of things to do in the first place and to keep doing at least some of them all the time.

Make Lists. It is easy to get lost when you have a few hundred different balls flying at you from all directions. So, periodically, you need to stop for ten minutes and make a list of all of the things you have to do. The list helps you to set priorities and figure out what you want to do. It allows you to be proactive rather than reactive. It provides the pleasure of crossing off items on the list which can itself be a strong motivator to keep working.

Exploit Electronic Media. I could not do what I do if I did not have e-mail and other electronic media. I would accomplish far less if I was stuck in a postal or telephone based information economy. With e-mail, I can fire off e-mail when I think of it, in the middle of the night, and not have to worry about reaching the person on the other end of the phone. I may fire off thirty or forty pieces of e-mail in an hour. E-mail also allows me to keep a record of what I've said and what the other person said in response. So I use e-mail even with my assistant who sits in the outer office.

Network. As will be clear by now to regular readers of this blog, I know a lot of people and I know who to go to for help, advice, etc. This means I also try to be there for these people. I try to respond to every piece of e-mail I get and to do as many favors for as many people as I can. (That's partially because I am an Eagle Scout and so doing a good deed everyday has become second nature, but it is also the case that avoiding conflicts lowers friction in my life and having lots of friendly contacts insures that I can count on people when I need them.) Favors cost time in the short run, save time in the long run. Annoying people costs you every time.

If You Want to Write, Write. Robert Benchley published a classic essay in the 1930s called "How to Get Things Done" (or some such) in which he said the first step in doing everything you have been procrastinating about is to sit down to write. Most of us would rather do anything -- even those chores we've been putting off -- rather than write. As a former journalist, I am not afraid of writing. I also know that with constant deadline pressure I can't afford to be a perfectionist. Procrastination is an indulgence for those people who have time for it. I don't and so I don't put things off that I can do right now. And writing is key among them. And following my core logic of the path of least resistance, if I start to feel blocked as a writer, I often will change the format or tools that I am using for writing. So, I will write parts of my essays as e-mail (since most of us are more comfortable writing an e-mail to a friend than writing an essay for class) or powerpoint (since it allows me to shuffle the pieces and reorganize my mouths as many times as needed.)

Exercise and Work at the Same Time. My doctor wanted me to exercise. I knew I would never do it since it would take time away from work. So I decided to integrate it into my professional life. I now have walking office hours. I will take a student or colleague with me on the two mile walk around the Charles I take most days, weather permitting. It both insures that I get my exercise and that I get to know the people I work with better. Of course, you can push this principle too far. I once half jokingly asked a friend who wanted me to take up Yoga whether I could do it and watch television at the same time. She was not amused.

Break Big Tasks into Smaller Tasks. This is something I've learned from being an MIT. You can't deal with a complex system without taking it apart, working through each part, and then putting it back together again. Besides, most of us feel overwhelmed by big projects but can deal with small items of our list without much worry. So, break it down into whatever granularity you need to focus on and complete the task at hand.

Get a Great Staff. All of the above might sound totally egotistical since it implies that I am in any way the author of my own success. The reality is that Henry Jenkins can do all of these things because Henry Jenkins isn't a person. He's a brand. There's a large team of really great people working in the CMS program who either enable me to do things or take away obstacles so I can focus my time and energy on the tasks that do require my attention. My father taught me years ago to treat your staff well and they will help you; treat them badly and you are in big, big trouble. I am always astonished by how few academics understand this basic principle.

Reword Yourself for Success. This is the one that I honor in the abstract rather than in reality but it is key. If you exhaust yourself, you can't work effectively. Just as you should treat your staff well, you should treat yourself well. So, I probably should have done at least one of those things that I wanted to do this weekend just so I can keep moving forward in the week ahead. But even as I am writing this, I know I am probably not going to listen to myself. And if I don't follow my own advice, why should you?

so, the final message here is don't try this at home, kids!

Spring Break....

This is just a notice to my regular readers that I am now officially on Spring break and will return to regular blogging duties in another week's time. It's painful to log off now as I have lots of cool ideas planned for this space but my wife and staff are both insisting that I take some down time. Something about all work and no play makes Henry a very dull boy.

GDC 2007 Coverage (Part Four of Four)

This is the last installment of Eitan Glinert's account of the Games Development Conference. Glinert is a graduate student working for GAMBIT.

Friday

For the past four days I've brought you coverage of GDC and tried to focus on different aspects of the conference, starting with serious games, then independent game development, followed by coverage of the "big" companies out there including Sony and Nintendo, and then women in gaming. Today, on my last day, I'm going to get into news related to my own research in game accessibility. But what is "Game Accessibility"? It seems to be one of those terms getting thrown around a lot in the industry, especially over the past week. Simply put, there are a huge number of disabled people out there; according to the 2000 American census, 19% of individuals aged 16 - 64 had some form of disability, be it physical or mental. Accessibility refers to games that are designed with this large group in mind, so that they can play along with everyone.

Actually creating accessible games is a task easier said than done, though. There are many forms of disabilities, ranging from sensory impairments (i.e. blind), to physical disabilities, to mental disabilities such as dyslexia, to medical conditions like arthritis. So how can you make a game that is accessible to all of these people? That's a great question that Dr. Dimitris Grammenos would like to try to answer. Grammenos has created Game Over!, the most frustrating, hilarious, and thought-provoking game I have seen in quite some time. Game Over! has 20+ levels, each of which displays a different accessibility deficiency that makes the game impossible to play. That's right - you can't win this game. Play advances when you either die, or self destruct, three times in any given level. Lighthearted enough to keep you from breaking your computer in frustration, playing through really gets you thinking about how the "bugs" that prevent you from winning could have been avoided. If you are developing software, I *strongly* suggest checking it out.

There are some games, though, that do a great job of being accessible. One notable example is Terraformers, winner of the innovation in audio award at the 2003 independent games festival. Terraformers features a rich world in which you need to make an alien planet habitable for humans (hence the name.) What's really impressive about the game, though, is that you don't need to be able to see to play the game. Through the novel use of 3D sound and a handy futuristic sonar system, players can navigate and interact with the world without ever seeing a thing. If the concept sounds interesting but you think you want something more action packed, you might want to check out AudioGames.net, a website devoted entirely to games for the visually impaired. Two of the more interesting offerings on the site (in my opinion) are Drive and Shades of Doom, though the list of some 200 games available should give you plenty to choose from.

Also present at GDC were games that took pains to provide useful closed captioning, to allow the user to adjust the speed and difficulty level of the system and a meaningful way, and a wide array of controllers that would allow users with one hand, or even paraplegics, to play games. The latter controller, which was controlled through a set of three puff straws, was truly an impressive feat, though I don't know of any plans to mass produce such items. If anyone does know of where to get such a device, it would have to be Game Accessibility, the best site around for what's new in the accessibility field. Along with links to dozens of games (some of which can be downloaded on the site) there are many useful tools for developers such as papers and testimonials on how to make these types of games.

That about wraps up my coverage of the Game Developer's Conference. Before I go though, a plug: check out The Education Arcade, a lab here at MIT that focuses on the creation of new engaging educational games, like Labyrinth. There's lots of great stuff on the site, including some particularly enlightening blogs. Ok, so mine aren't all that enlightening, but the other ones are. Check it out!

Have comments on Eitan's coverage of GDC? Feel free to contact him at glinert-at-mit-dot-edu and tell him what you really thought of his posts

GDC 2007 Coverage (Part Two of Four)

The following is the second of a four part series of observations on the Game Developers Conference by graduate student Eitan Glinert. I am flying to Chicago today to attend the Society for Cinema Studies conference.

Wednesday

GDC proper kicked off today, with all the commotion and fanfare you'd expect from some ten thousand plus obsessed gamers. Phil Harrison, the president of Sony Worldwide Studios, started the show with a memorable keynote on what's next for the currently ailing PS3. Not just a preview of some cool games, Phil announced a company shift to focus on user-centric entertainment in the vein of YouTube, Second Life, or MySpace. But how does Sony hope to get people involved?

The first way is through the addition of a new service to the PS3 Xross Media Bar called Home. Similar to Second Life in many ways, users control a customizable avatar in a world where they interact with other players (no word yet on whether you can play as a furry.) You also own an apartment which you can decorate to your liking as in The Sims. Don't like the wallpaper? Change it. Don't like the selection of wallpapers you can use? Buy premium wallpapers from the Sony store. In fact, that seems to be the crux of the service; the free stuff is nice, but if you want the *really* cool stuff, you're gonna have to pay.

So what's cool in this world? Well, you can hang out with others in common spaces and play games, ranging from pool to old-school arcade games. You can watch trailers for upcoming movies in Hi Def - though I do have to wonder how they will manage to play them without either requiring long download times or terrible buffering. But perhaps most compelling is your personal trophy room, which displays badges of honor you earn in games by accomplishing certain goals in PS3 games. Kill 10,000 zombies? That's a trophy! Get 5 stars on Jordan in expert mode? Trophy! Figure out what the ending of Metal Gear Solid 2 Means? Trophy!

While a nice feature and a welcome addition, Home doesn't seem to be the killer app that Sony is looking for. But LittleBigPlanet just might be it. Where Home fails to allow for user generated content, LittleBigPlanet (which I will call LBP from now on because it sounds cooler) shines. Less a game than a toolbox, LBP allows users to create their 2D platformer with 3D objects in a simple and straightforward way. Once created users can play through the levels they've made, and invite their friends along for the ride.

So why is LBP so impressive? Well, for one thing, the game looks beautiful. The textures in the game are vivid and lifelike, and evoke a "realistic" feeling. Furthermore, the user interface seems pretty clean - scroll through nested lists to select what you want to create, then place them in the world using a lasso. But what is most impressive, in my opinion, is what Harrison focused on the least: The game has realistic, working soft body physics! In other words, users no longer have to settle for unsquishable bowling balls, they can now make nerf balls. It's unclear to me why this point wasn't stressed more. I hope it was a matter of the subject matter not fitting the audience, rather than the demo being a Wizard of Oz type "man-behind-a-curtain" thing, where the soft body physics are faked, and don't really work like in the demo.

If a game is going to center on user content, you'd better believe there's going to be a way to upload your creations and download other people's creations. LBP does it with a slick interface that allows people to search, post comments, and rate their favorites. Sure, it's a YouTube knockoff, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

In addition to the PS3 announcements, there were excellent talks on two other games that I am greatly looking forward to. The first is Valve's upcoming game Portal, one of the more original twists to come out of the puzzle genre in a while. Based on the Half-Life 2 engine, Portal features a wormhole generating gun that allows you to connect two points in space and then pass easily from one to the other. Don't get it? Take a look and you will.

The other game I was excited to see was Sega's Crush. Players alternate through a traditional 3D platform landscape, which they can "crush" (flatten) at any point into a 2D variant based on camera angle. This redefinition allows the user to traverse obstacles that would normally be impossible to get past. Sound cool? It is.

Kristina found a sharpie and has her Pink DS ready. Will she succeed in getting Miyamoto's coveted John Hancock? Tomorrow we'll find out.

GDC 2007 Coverage (Part One of Four)

This week, a large group of CMS students and faculty/researchers are spending time in San Francisco at the Games Developer's Conference. I was unable to attend this year due to other speaking commitments. In the next week, I will be speaking at the University of Minnesota, at the Society for Cinema Studies conference in Chicago, and at South By Southwest in Austin. I asked one of the students who is attending the Game Developer's Conference, Eitan Glinert, to share with my readers some of his impressions. Glinert recently arrived at MIT as a graduate student in Computer Science having worked with the Federation of American Scientists on the development of games for learning. We quickly snatched him up to contribute to the launch of GAMBIT, the Singapore-MIT Games Innovation Lab, and he has just as quickly become a familiar face at our community gatherings. What follows is some of his impressions of the first two days of the conference. Day One

For five days, Game Developer's Conference is a zoo of exciting discussion, innovative ideas, and social networking that becomes the focal point of many gamer's lives, including my own. I'm Eitan Glinert, and for the next week I'll be covering the conference from warm, sunny San Francisco.

Most people at such conferences might focus on a genre or a platform, be it first person shooters or the Wii, but today we're going to focus on an entire field of gaming, Serious Games. It's the market segment that involves all the games that your education obsessed aunt bought for you when you were little; the ones that made you roll your eyes and think "Great, another one of those games." The area runs the gamut from "Carmen Sandiego" and "Flight Simulator" to Captain Novolin. The trait that all these games share, though, is a desire to teach the user or elicit some sort of behavioral change through game play.

Who's making Serious Games? A growing number of people from myriad institutions - there's military instructors who want training simulators for their troops, educational companies trying to bring new learning technologies into the classroom, and non-profits that want to bring about social change and political activism. These games are fine, but (with the exception of government funded military simulators) they are generally smaller games on smaller budgets, and aren't aimed at or aren't successful with the mainstream market. This reputation is what causes most gaming companies to avoid serious gaming like the plague - they make games for the general public, and they're a guaranteed money loss. Right?

Wrong. Serious games are beginning to become serious money. In the past year, 5 of the top 20 games for the Nintendo DS in Japan have been serious games, including two variations of Brain Age, and English teaching game, and the ever popular "Cooking Navigation." And some companies are beginning to take notice. Last year, Square Enix (of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest fame) announced the opening of a new offshoot called SGlab , created to capitalize on this newly discovered market. The company plans to work with both game developers and Japanese schools and libraries to deliver educational gaming products - however, as of yet, I have seen no news about upcoming releases.

This year, Ichiro Otobe, Chief Strategist of Square Enix, delivered the keynote at the Serious Games Summit section of GDC and spoke about some of the new projects they were working on. While it still remains unclear what, if anything, will come out of SGlab, it is more than apparent that the parent company is dedicated to making games in the field, as was seen during the demonstration of a new game unceremoniously code named "Project GB." Running on the DS, it displayed some very impressive game capabilities: design, create, and play your own sprite based 2D games. The bottom screen serves as an editor in which the user "codes" the various objects that will comprise his game; meanwhile, the objects are displayed on the top screen and behave according to the proscribed rules. The demo featured a user-created version of Galaga, and displayed how easy it was to create new objects and change settings. I must say, it was rather enticing; I know I certainly wouldn't mind recreating a newer, better Marble Madness and then passing it around to my friends to try.

If the model works (and I hope it does) then I suspect these games, and more importantly their profit margins, will open the flood gates and we'll see many, many more serious games in the near future. The Wii and DS seem especially suited to such offerings, as the platforms are, at their heart, designed to draw in users that might be interesting in non-standard gaming options. After all, wouldn't you pay $50 to learn algebra from Mario?

Day Two

Making video games isn''t easy. Well, that's not entirely true; if you''re EA or Microsoft, and you have a huge number of developers and producers, and you have a money vault filled with gold coins you can swim through a la "Ducktales," then it's actually not that difficult. But for the rest of us, for the "Indie" developers out there, making games is a Herculean task. Frequently, independents have to work with a minimal or non-existent budget, a team that is too small and too inexperienced for the task, and usually have to take time off from development to spend time on other distractions, like classes or a job.

Here at GDC, these developers are getting a voice, and for good reason, as they are responsible for the majority of the games out there (even if many of them you haven''t heard of.) A small number of the games, like Second Life, manage to take hold and become a phenomenon. More of them graduate to "casual" online games, and if they''re lucky get linked to by a portal website and make a modest return on a few hundred/thousand downloads. The majority, though, never see the light of day. That''s why the conference has such as focus on making sure that the independents out there can learn what they need to know to at least help their chances of success.

So what advice was given? Innovate! Or, don''t innovate, but make a small change to something that exists and do a good job with that! Or do tons of self promotion, and make sure that you have a good market strategy! Get help from professionals in the field! Better yet, do all of the above, and then come and give advice at the following year's conference!

The truth of the matter is, there''s lots of good advice that can be given, and different things have worked for different people, though most agree that being "at the right place, at the right time, with the right idea" certainly helps. One of the more interesting teams to come out of the independent game field in the past two years is thatgamecompany, a company started by several USC graduates including Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago, both of whom I had the pleasure of talking to at the conference. We discussed their new games Cloud and flOw (both of which are available for download through the = company website), and the thinking behind their creation. Instead of simply trying to design a game based on that one "good idea", they tried to identify an area that games were ignoring - in this case, they felt there weren''t enough games out there that promote feelings of relaxation and tranquility. Both games, especially Cloud, are designed around promoting these emotions, and the results are spectacular. When was the last time you played a game and the word "Zen" came to mind?

Certainly, their philosophy seems to work for them. But that''s only one way for independents to make games. Another great way is through contests, and here's one you might be interested in if you are a college student looking to get into game development. It's called Hidden Agenda, and at stake is $25,000 for the best educational game that is exciting and engaging, and teaches something on the side. But maybe educational games aren''t your thing, and you are interested in more basic, "fun" games? Consider making a game for One Laptop per Child, a new nonprofit trying to get cheap, durable laptops to children in third world countries. They''re really looking for talented, dedicated people to help them make games, and it will likely be a great way to get your name out there.

Tomorrow GDC proper starts, and we'll see if my friend Kristina is successful in her lifelong dream of getting Miyamoto''s signature on her DS.

From Participatatory Culture to Participatory Democracy (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of the text of my keynote address to the Beyond Broadcast conference. I conclude the text in today's installment.

Vote Naked

An advertisement for the Webby Awards, given in recognition for outstanding contributions to digital culture, depicts a pair of feminine bare feet with what would seem to be a blurry bed in the background. Its slogan was "vote naked." Ever since I first saw that advertisement, I have been intrigued by what it might mean to "vote naked." Might this be what democracy looks like? The advertisement suggests that the computer now allows us to conduct the most public of actions within the privacy of our own home in whatever state of dress or undress we desire. More than that, the image and slogan invites us to imagine a time when we are as comfortable in our roles as citizens as we are within our own skins, when politics may be a familiar, everyday, and intimate aspect of our daily lives much the way popular culture is today. We watch television in our underwear; we dress up to vote. All of this is to say that we too often treat American Democracy as a special event (organizing around elections, bemoaning the outcome, and then crawling back into our holes for another four years) rather than as a lifestyle. Redrawing the lines between participatory culture and participatory democracy might give us a way to revitalize citizenship, making it a meaningful aspect of our everyday lives, rather than as something we try to ignore as long as possible. This is an idea that I flesh out more fully (no pun intended) in the final chapters of Convergence Culture.

Here are a few other key concepts that we might draw from Convergence Culture into the current discussion of Democracy:

1. Convergence is a cultural rather than a technological process. We now live in a world where every story, image, sound, idea, brand, and relationship will play itself out across all possible media platforms. As such, the system creates many points where it is vulnerable to intervention, appropriation, repurposing, and recontextualizing its contents towards political purposes.

2. In a networked society, people are increasingly forming knowledge communities to pool information and work together to solve problems they could not confront individually. We call that collective intelligence. The political potential of collective intelligence might be recognized through a closer examination of the Wikipedia movement. Wikipedia has developed strong ethical standards that enable people with wildly divergent beliefs to work together towards a common project; they focus on the shared infrastructure that they all need in order to achieve their aims rather than on the individual points of disagreement; the Wikipedia movement provides them with meaningful mechanisms that allow for the reconciliation between competing truth claims and the co-existence of differing perspectives.

3. We are seeing the emergence of a new form of participatory culture (a contemporary version of folk culture) as consumers take media in their own hands, reworking its content to serve their personal and collective interests. It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I consider Second Life to be one of the most powerful embodiments of this new participatory culture -- a whole world that is being constructed bottom up through the collective and individual efforts of participants.

In the white paper we wrote for MacArthur, I offer the following definition of a Participatory Culture:

1. there are relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement

2. there is strong support for creating and sharing what you create with others

3. there is some kind of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced gets passed along to newbies and novices

4. members feel that their contributions matter

5. members feel some degree of social connection with each other at least to the degree to which they care what other people think about what they have created.

Not every member needs to contribute but all need to feel that they are free to contribute when they are ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued if they do.

In such a world, many will only dabble; some will dig deeper; and still others will master the skills that are most valued within the community. But the community itself provides strong incentives for creative expression and active participation.

In the white paper, my focus was primarily on various communities of fans, gamers, and bloggers, many of whom are involved in creative expression, yet this description might also apply to various projects that are designed to promote real world civic engagement.

Don't let anyone tell you that participatory culture is new or that it has not made earlier contributions to the evolution of American democracy. We know, for example, that teenagers were using toy printing presses to produce what we might now call zines during the Civil War period, using them as vehicles to debate abolitionism and secession in publications that they circulated through an Amateur Press Association. We might similarly point to the various kinds of civic activities that young people were engaged with during the early history of American radio at a time when it was expected that there might be as many transmitters as receivers. Youth groups, such as the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, embraced amateur radio as a site of community service and civic engagement. The Radio Merit Badge was one of the very first created and was once central to what it meant to be a Scout. When the Federal Communications Commission sought to shift radio towards a medium of corporate broadcasting, they did so by vilifying the "boys in short pants," suggesting that young people had misused the public airwaves and that the experiment with participatory media had failed. Today, both of these earlier experiments in participatory culture have been written out of the history of American politics but they offer us valid historical antecedents for today's blogs, podcasts, and video-blogs. (For a useful history of the amateur radio movement, check out Susan Douglas's Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922.)

4. We are acquiring skills now through our play, which we will later apply towards more serious ends. Indeed, we are again and again seeing examples of entertainment technologies being repurposed for more citizenly ends. So, no sooner did the game, The Movies, hit the market with its promise of allowing players to create their own cinema than it was picked up by student activists in Paris and used to explain to the world their particular vision of French Democracy. Moveon's "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest took its model from the reality television series, Project Greenlight, and took advantage of the skills that young people had developed through the years putting together fan or skateboarder videos. Meetup was created as a vehicle for trading beanie babies and is today deployed by all kinds of interest groups, but it has also become a staple of political campaigns and was a hallmark of the Howard Dean effort in 2004.

YouTube may be the distribution channel for Lonelygirl15 and for college kids around the world who want to lip-sync with boy band songs, but it has also been a system by which amateur news footage of incidents like the tasering of the UCLA student by the campus police may gain much greater visibility and circulation. Indeed, we are just beginning to see the kinds of grassroots documentary work that can emerge in a world where almost everyone has both a camera and a video recorder built into their mobile phones and thus carries media production equipment with them where-ever they go. We can already point to the ways that these mobile cameras have changed public perceptions of the Bush administration's handling of Katrina. Early news reports were largely favorable since reporters were embedded in the teams of rescue workers but a different image of the events emerged as refuges started to tell their stories and upload amateur images of the same events. Others used Flickr and other photosharing sites to deconstruct and critique news media coverage of the incident, showing for example the different kinds of language used to describe the same actions taken by white ("finding bread and soda") and black refuges ("looting a grocery store.") These new communication platforms taught many of us to read past the official accounts and led to a significant decline in Bush's public support.

The Downsides of Participation

Of course, we should also look critically at some of the ways that these emerging models of participatory culture are being used in ways that are destructive to civic engagement. In many ways, as I discuss in the book, the candidates lost control of their own campaigns in 2004 to "truth squads" and bloggers who were often willing to be more negative than the official party spokesperson were willing to go. The result was an increasingly brutal campaign process, marked by partisan divisions that are very difficult for us to resolve once it comes time to actually govern this country. If participatory culture offers us a sense of empowerment as citizens take media in their own hands, there are also risks that it will prove more divisive as everyday people get sucked into the most negative aspects of the campaign.

An interesting case in point might be the use of photoshop collages as a form of political satire. We might see such transparently manipulated images as a kind of modern equivalent of editorial cartoons, translating political events into vivid, compelling, and amusing images which insure their wider circulation. In a high number of cases, these cartoons deploy images from popular culture to help the public understand the stakes of the political process. Already we are seeing images start to emerge of the candidates for the next campaign. A strikingly high percentage of them appeal to sexism (in dealing with Hillary Clinton) and racism, not to mention Xenophobia, (in dealing with Barack Obama). Some of these images are too offensive to be circulated in the mainstream media (though I wouldn't bet on it: the new Fox comedy news show had a skit about "B.O. [Barack Obama] Magazine" as part of its sample reel!) but they appeal to the urge towards politically incorrect speech that shapes so much of the participatory culture online. We will benefit as a society by broadening the range of perspectives on political life through tapping this new participatory culture but only if, at the same time, we foster civility and mutual respect as a cornerstone of our political discourse.

What We Should Fight For...

In the aftermath of the last presidential campaign, one widely circulated cartoon depicted America as divided -- more or less permanently -- between "Jesusland" and "The United States of Canada." At some point, we need to move beyond the cultural divide between Red and Blue States and try to provide some shared framework of values, some common social contract upon which democracy can function. I have personally found inspiration in the widely circulated image of the results of the 2004 elections not in terms of red and blue states but rather as a series of different shades of purple and maroon that reflect the mix of Republican and Democratic voters state by state.

Ideally, a participatory democracy supports the formation of coalitions across parties and across political categories, allowing people to work together to support those things which are absolutely essential if Democracy is going to thrive. We need, in other words, to work together to insure for the survival of participatory culture itself. (There will, of course, being other debates that are more divisive, debates which deploy the tools offered by participatory culture to try to sway voters in opposing directions, and this too is at the heart of a democratic culture.)

If privacy was in many ways the central political struggle of the late 20th century, manifested in a range of different political debates (from Gay Rights to Abortion), then participation may be the core battle of the early 21st century. Our right to participate in our own culture is being held hostage both by big government and by big industry and we need to adopt a multiple front strategy that will allow us to hold open a space for participation. The current media reform movement is focused on empowering the government to regulate media concentration but has had much less to say about the ways that the government itself encroaches into our rights to participate. This struggle manifests itself in a variety of different debates. On the one hand, we might point to struggles over the regulation of youth access to digital media in the face of regulatory efforts, such as the Deleting Online Predators Act or its revamping as The Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act. We might point to struggles to redefine copyright law in terms which enable us to comment upon and debate core aspects of our contemporary culture. We might point to the debates around Net Neutrality as centering around preserving the technical infrastructure necessary for allowing all perspectives to be heard and the ongoing struggle against the Digital Divide (understood in terms of technical access) and the Participation Gap (understood in terms of access to core social skills and cultural competencies) as one which allows all citizens to fully participate in the new media landscape.

As we do so, we need to challenge the culture war discourse and the politics of fear which disempowers many from political participation by dismissing core aspects of their cultural identities. For many of us, popular culture offers us the most meaningful language for talking about our political identities and it may offer us a space for conversations across ideological and cultural differences in part because these conversations don't come precoded in partisan terms. To paraphrase Obama, we watch 24 in the Blue States and The Daily Show in the Red States and by discussing these programs together, we may start to identify common values and frames of references out of which we might achieve important political compromises. So, for example, we might deploy Survivor as the focus for a conversation about race in America or 24 to talk about the ethics and effectiveness of torture in the war on terror. Some activist groups have already seen such cultural events as key rallying points for political activism as when the environmental movement used the release of The Day After Tomorrow to educate people about global warming. We have seen a range of voter registration votes, such as MTV's Rock the Vote or the World Wrestling Entertainment' s Smack Down Your Vote, prove effective at getting young people registered and engaged with electoral politics. We are seeing the emergence of a range of other groups, such as Games for Change, The Entertainment Consumers Association, and The Video Game Voters Network, tap our identities as gamers to mobilize us for political action.

As we do so, we need to recognize the value of fantasy for empowering political action. In my book, I discuss Muggles for Harry Potter, a free speech organization that emerged to rally opposition to the censorship of the Harry Potter books in schools and public libraries. I also suggested, however, the irony of this effort, given how many of the young people involved felt compelled to recant their fantasies as "meaningless" in order to demonstrate that the books had no "effect" on them. Instead, we need to value fantasy as part of the process of political transformation and respect the kinds of cultural politics which emerge from the fan community. Consider, for example, the ways that Sequential Tart, an organization of female comics readers, has helped to impact both comics production and retailing practice by providing a space where women regularly discuss what they like and dislike about the comics they read.

There is real political power in this new participatory culture. We know this because of the emergence of Astroturf, fake grassroots media, created by major political groups or advertisers but circulated through bottom-up media channels. A classic example of this was the attempt of Al Gore's Penguin Army to debunk An Inconvenient Truth: the video tried to pass itself off as coming from amateurs when it was in fact produced by a major advertising firm which regularly worked for major oil companies and the GOP party. The story teaches us two things:

1) a decade ago, these groups would have taken advantage of their greater access to the channels of broadcast media to reach every American with a common message. Today, they are recognizing that many of us put greater trust in grassroots media than in mainstream media and so they feel the need to pass themselves off as powerless.

2) in an era of collective intelligence, citizens are becoming more effective at seeing through these Astroturf strategies, alerting the larger public to these frauds. And the public is becoming increasingly outraged by such efforts seeing Astroturf as morally akin to spam, an abuse of the participatory channels of communications.

Ask a Ninja?

If I was asked to identify a group which had been the most imaginative at seizing the potentials of politics in the age of participatory culture, it would be the movement to promote the concept of Net Neutrality. For starters, this effort attracted supporters from a range of different political traditions and encouraged them to suspend their disagreements long enough to work together to achieve a common cause -- that is, to protect the diversity of the internet. The Save The Internet organization provided a space for video makers, both commercial and amateur, to generate new works that helped to educate the public about these core debates. Many of these videos mobilized images from popular culture to help people to understand the stakes in this policy discussion and to capture the sense of the little guys banding together to battle major corporate interests. These videos move us beyond the policy wonk language that has frequently surrounded media regulation discussions and instead embraced a playful discourse that encouraged more widespread participation. We get some sense of what this politics looks like by examining some of the videos that were produced behind these efforts by groups such as Ask a Ninja and Rocketboom. I suspect we will be studying these efforts for some years to come as we try to imagine new relationships between participatory culture and participatory democracy.

Want to know what democracy looks like in the 21st Century? Ask a Ninja!

Follow the Yellow Arrows: An Interview with Michael Counts (Part Two)

Well, in the midst of running this interview with Michael Counts about environmental advertising and spatial storytelling, it turns out that a major controversy has been brewing in Boston over the past two days about environmental advertising. To be specific, The Cartoon Network had placed a series of flashing light displays promoting Aqua Hunger Force at various locations around major cities, including apparently under some bridges in Boston. You can see what the displays looked like in this image produced by CMS alum Rekha Murthy and distributed via Flickr.

Here's what happened next according to one news report:

A television network's marketing campaign went badly awry on Wednesday, causing a day-long security scare in Boston that closed bridges, shut major roads and put hundreds of police on alert.

Apologising for Boston's biggest security alert since the September 11 attacks more than five years ago, Turner Broadcasting said it had placed electronic devices at bridges and other spots to promote an animated cartoon.

Police mistook the small, battery-powered electronic billboards as possible improvised bombs.

The discovery of the first one on a bridge led police to stop morning rush-hour traffic on an interstate highway just north of Boston, halt a busy train line, cordon off the area and deploy a bomb squad, which blew it up.

By afternoon, at least nine more of the "suspicious" devices were found. Authorities mobilised emergency crews, federal agents, bomb squads, hundreds of police officers and the US Coast Guard as traffic froze in parts of the city....

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino said he was prepared to sue.

"It is outrageous, in a post 9/11 world, that a company would use this type of marketing scheme," he said. "I am prepared to take any and all legal action against Turner Broadcasting and its affiliates for any and all expenses incurred during the response to today's incidents."

The alarm prompted the Coast Guard to close the Charles River that runs through the city and caused authorities to shut down major bridges along with several roads.

"This has taken a significant toll on our resources," Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis told reporters.

Sam Ford offers a much more detailed analysis and the incident over at the Convergence Culture Consortium blog than I can provide at the present time. It has clearly proven to be a hot button issue for lots of people, sparking a debate which circles around contemporary advertising practices, the "liberal bias" of the media, the breakdown of communications, and the hair trigger response of governments to any perceived threats in a "post-9/11" society. Lots for us to dissect here for some time to come.

I should note, as Ford does, that Turner is a sponsor of the Consortium and that we were not consulted in any ways about what they planned and executed in this case.

Meanwhile, let's return to our regularly scheduled interview with Michael Counts in which he discusses the Yellow Arrow project and its relationship to his background in popular theater. For more background on Yellow Arrow and Counts, check out yesterday's post.

Many critics see media as distracting us from the world around us, yet your projects seem to be using media to force us to look at the real world from a different perspective. Is that a fair summary of your focus?

Yes. A different perspective and one that celebrates each individual's unique perspective. As so many aspects of our culture are doing right now -- from myspace to youtube -- we have been interested in the value and significance of the subjective and commonplace. So many things today seem to be driving towards the idea that the "ordinary" is in fact quite extraordinary if you can find the right vantage point.

Your work tends to blur the lines between art and advertising. Many of your early projects are treated as independent theatrical productions yet your current website seems to be pitching many of these same techniques and practices to potential corporate clients. Can you say something about the ways you walk the lines between these two worlds? Why might a commercial client today be drawn to techniques that might have seemed experimental and out there even a few years ago?*

If Yellow Arrow is an effort to help people find things in all categories that they might be looking for out in the "real world" by allowing others to publish their thoughts, ideas, histories and the like, there is no reason in my mind that products or brands shouldn't be a part of that. One of my favorite stories that I heard about Yellow Arrow being applied successfully involved someone who had posted an arrow pointing out a cool coffee place in San Francisco at which the owner made one outstanding coffee at a time and paid great attention to detail -- that the experience of being there and talking with the owner was quite memorable. The original post was found by another guy who was going to San Francisco and looking for interesting things to do -- not the everyday tourist stuff. He followed the original post, went to the coffee shop, experienced what the original poster had described and used the "comment" feature of YA which sent a text to the original poster at that moment - meanwhile, he was back in Australia. This created a link between the two guys and a sort of reward for the guy who originally found and "mapped" this spot - others had followed in his path and enjoyed his recommendation. In truth, the coffee guy is a brand and his establishment commercial. People are looking for all sorts of things and YA and projects like it should simply help people find them -- brands too. The problem, I think, emerges when brands (or individuals for that matter) lie or try to get people to engage with them at all costs like so much modern advertising has done. To me that type of business practice will increasingly be a thing of the past. If the guy who posted the original anecdote about the excellent coffee was the coffee guy himself and his coffee sucked, few would follow the advice after one or a few people caught on. Hopefully this type of blogging, be it on-line or using text messaging, will keep us honest and help good things and interesting and hidden histories find those who are looking for them.

Tell us more about your roots in experimental theatre. Reading through your portfolio, it sounds like from the very beginning you were attracted to the idea of mobile art -- moving the theatre patron through space rather than having them sit in a fixed position inside a theatre -- and urban projections-- such as projecting faces onto clocktowers or setting up screens in unexpected locations.

My interest in theatre was less about "theatre" really and more about creating unique and compelling experiences for people - I simply found that theatre had the best tools. The type of theatre I made didn't sit the audience outside of the action but instead included the audience -- in effect, my productions cast the audience in the show. The best example was a fairly large production of Dante's Divine Comedy ("So Long Ago I Can't Remember", 2001) set in 13 installations in a 40,000 square foot warehouse that took 100 people or so at time on an actual journey. Instead of telling the audience the story of The Divine Comedy this production cast the audience in the role of Dante and offered a similar type of experience. For 10 years or so I was making this type of show and then began to read stuff like Pine and Gilmore's Experience Economy and John Beck's Got Game and, of course, your book Convergence Culture. To me immersive entertainment, travel, culture, what-have-you, is where everything is going. To paraphrase John Beck, the audience today needs to be at the center of the action, the hero of the story, because that has been their primary relationship to the dominant media experience shaping their world view - video games and the like.

What drives this interest in mobility and urban space?

A desire to enrich our (and by "our" I mean everyone's) experience of the world. Though a little heady, John Cage once said, "structure without life is dead, life without structure is unseen." I think things like Yellow Arrow and the growing number of projects and ideas that are pointing in a similar direction are about providing that "structure" and, of course, connecting people.

Follow the Yellow Arrows: An Interview with Michael Counts

From the launch of the Comparative Media Studies Program, we have had a steady stream of students who have been interested in the role which media plays in urban spaces. In part, this is because there is a strong crossover between our program and the MIT tradition of work in architecture and urban studies. We've had students do thesis projects which center around how we conceptualize and map urban environments; we've had interesting projects in the space of augmented reality -- projects which use handheld and gps enabled technologies to create an interesting overlay of digital and physical space, allowing people to annotate the world around them. I've mentioned here before the project Rekha Murthy did examining the flow of official and unofficial communications media in the Central Square area just off the MIT campus. In the course of this research, she started stumbling onto yellow arrow stickers that were posted on lampposts and walls through her study area, which led her to learn more about the Yellow Arrow project. Based on her contacts, we developed an MIT Communications Forum event on Branding the Urban Landscape, which featured Jesse Shapins of the Yellow Arrow Project, as well as Thomas V. Ryan, senior vice president of mobile and digital development for EMI Music North America, and Jon Cropper, then creative content channel strategist at Young & Rubicam Brands. Today and tomorrow, I am featuring an interview with Michael Counts, the head of Counts Media, which organized and deployed the Yellow Arrows as an innovative effort to try to get people in cities around the world to look at their environments in a different way. Yellow Arrow, which Counts describes below, is a fascinating example of participatory culture and viral marketing. If you don't know about Yellow Arrow, you may be interested to check out their home page.

I asked Counts to share with me some basic biographical information. Here's what he sent:

Michael Counts is an artist and entrepreneur who has been a pioneer in experimental theatre, art and entertainment for over a decade. As co-founder and artistic director of Gale Gates et. al. he was instrumental in the development of DUMBO, Brooklyn and

served as primary architect of the creative identity of this now vibrant cultural

district.

In 2002, Michael started The Ride New York LLC. which later grew to become Counts Media Inc. Backed by some of Broadway's major producers, this new company has allowed Michael to further expand into international entertainment and continue the pursuit of large-scale environmental productions and installations. Some of the initial Counts Media investors include the founders of Blue Man Group; Vivek Tiwary of Starpolish and Tiwary Entertainment Group; Robyn Goodman, producer of Avenue Q and founder of Second Stage Theatre; and Charlie Flateman, former President/CEO of Gray Line New York. Counts Media's projects over the past years have drawn the attention of major media globally, including The New York Times, CNN, NBC, Wired Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Miami Herald, The London Times, Liberation, Politiken, the Sydney Morning Heraldand the Discovery Channel among countless others. As Chief Creative Officer and Chairman, Michael drives the creative vision and organizational culture of the company, defining his team's unique entertainment products and properties that bridge all media.

Michael grew up in New York City and studied at Skidmore college under Gautam Dasgupta, author, critic and founding editor of Performing Arts Journal. He continues to reside in DUMBO, Brooklyn

.

Counts is a fascinating mixture of theorist, entrepreneur, and artist, someone who is helping to change the ways residents think about the cities around them. I am pleased to share with you some of his thinking.

How would you describe Yellow Arrow?

Since Yellow Arrow began, we have defined it several different ways. Initially we called it a M.A.A.P (Massively Authored Artistic Project), that then became M.A.A.P (Massively Authored Artistic Publication), which finally became M.A.P (Massively Authored Publication) as we determined that its use could extend beyond the creative or artistic aspects of the project. For example, we learned a great deal as we began to work with Lonely Planet and their community as they were primarily interested in the "travel" aspects of Yellow Arrow. We ultimately found that what we were really creating was a new and subjective map of the world. I became particularly interested in the idea that there should really be as many maps of the world as there are individuals or perspectives - for instance, your map of New York, based upon your interests would likely be very different than my map, based upon my interests in New York. The patent application actually calls it a "deep map." We have also been very interested in the idea that each object or location has a really compelling history if only it can be unlocked or revealed - for instance, the corner of 38th and 8th in New York, consider how many events have occurred there and how those events and histories might relate to each other and how interesting it would be to access that invisible reality. I think that Yellow Arrow and the growing number of projects and ideas like it, both on-line and in the "real" world, can help us navigate increasing complexity and reveal the patterns in apparent chaos.

What are its goals and how successful do you think you have been in achieving these goals?

Based on the varied definitions and intentions outlined above, I think that Yellow Arrow has had a successful beginning. In a short time, we've had arrows placed in hundreds of cities in over 30 countries around the world. The book we did with Lonely Planet, Experimental Travel, distributed hundreds of thousands of arrows to potential users and on yellowarrow.net there is a growing library of content. We also experimented with different uses and ended up with two projects or applications that I think hold the most promise. The first, the "Capitol of Punk", was created with the founders of Discord Records in Washington, D.C., which was an epicenter for the early Punk scene in America. The project linked Yellow Arrows and created a tour of several areas of the city that anyone could navigate. On-line there were video interviews and a ton of content that really delivered on the idea of Yellow Arrow as a new type of publication. The second project, which is very similar to the Capitol of Punk, is a series of "text-tours" of New York, called "cityTXT", that one would begin at any of 18 subway stops along the NR subway line. Once initiated, a user would be lead on a 45 min tour of the area. Jesse Shapins who is a tremendously bright and insightful urban explorer and one of the founding creative team, developed the tours in a way that really reveals hidden and deeply compelling aspects of the city

How do you see YellowArrow as changing people's relations to urban space? What parallels or differences do you see between similar efforts to expand the information environment around our cities -- such as geocaching, alternative and augmented reality games, and the Big Urban Games movement?

The ultimate vision for Yellow Arrow, I suppose, would be an infinitely large publication about public spaces -- cities -- that would allow one to access all of the information and mostly subjective information in a way that helped a user find "their city" within the greater city that they were looking for. Yellow Arrow is an attempt to make the invisible city visible. The publication aspect of YA makes it different than these other projects or movements and the depth of the YA site makes it more practical. That said, I love the projects you've mentioned and have been deeply fascinated with them all. As I said above, we are interested in all aspects of how media and technology are changing, the consequent opportunities that are emerging and most importantly how the interests and values of the "game generation," that John C. Beck discusses in his book Got Game, are different from past generations or demographic segments.

Five Things You Don't Know About Me...

Normally I avoid chain letters like the plague. Don't send them to me if you don't want me to break the chain and bring down the curse upon all of mankind or cost that little cancer-ridden girl her miracle cure or win a million dollars from Microsoft or whatever else good, bad, or indifferent you imagine will happen if you don't imediately pester your friends with some stupid task. But this past week, I got "tagged" by David Edery (Game Tycoon) in a vast game which is making its way across the blogosphere. Bloggers are being dared to tell their readers five things about themselves that they probably don't already know and then to pass the tag along to someone else.

I figured it was probably worth one blog post to share with you guys some behind the scenes information about yours truly, though given my tendency for openness about things like being a slash writer or an Eagle Scout, I found this more challenging than it might have seemed at first. Besides, if I have to tell you stuff that David Edery doesn't know about me, that narrows the field even more since David and I have spent many hours in each other's company as we traveled together trying to raise money for the Comparative Media Studies Program. So here goes my best stab.

The first book I ever wrote was a guidebook to the Atlanta Zoo. My CV lists me as the editor and/or author of 12 books. I lie. There's a book I wrote which doesn't appear on any of my resumes. I wrote it shortly after I graduated from Georgia State University. At the time, I was working as the public relations director for the Atlanta Zoological Society. Most of the job consisted of drafting press releases, editing a newsletter, and going out and giving talks to school groups. But the task which most captured my imagination was rewriting the guidebook, which I did with probably a bit too much personality, since the project got abandoned after I left the organization to go off to graduate school. What I wrote was never actually published.

My favorite portrait of my mother depicts her as a clown. It is a portrait painted by a longtime family friend, Glen LaRue. My mother used to love to make people laugh. It went all the way back to her high school days in the Gilbert and Sullivan club. She would periodically dress up as a clown and go to entertain people at local orphanages or old folks homes. When I was a boy, I would sometimes dress up in clown clothes and go with her. I suspect it is my mother's love of laughter that was her greatest gift to me - and as someone who grew up as a mother's boy, that's saying a lot. I am sure this love of comedy led to my dissertation topic - on the influence of vaudeville on American film comedy during the early sound period. Years later, when I got ambushed on Donahue, my mother's only comment was that I forget to make them laugh. It is a mistake I've tried hard not to make again. My students know that my mind runs on bad jokes. I seem to compulsively take words and concepts, twist them around looking for puns or comic structures. Sometimes, the results can be painful. Sometimes, they can break up a bad meeting. Often, they can result in a creative insight which pushes me to the next level in my thinking

My nickname is Mountain Man. The phrase came from an early newspaper article which described me as "looking like a mountain man who happens to be a genius." My wife immediately picked up on the first part of the statement, seeing it as an indictment of how shabby my beard and hair get when I try to push too long between trips to the barbers. I always have to remind her about the second, much more significant part of the statement. The name stuck when I ended up spending my sabbatical a few years ago living by myself in a cabin in the North Georgia mountains. In fact, the cabin was located not far from where they found Eric Rudolph, the Atlanta Olympic bomber, during that same time period. News reports suggested that he had stayed alive by eating acorns and lizards. So I started to make jokes in my e-mail correspondence back to the office suggesting that I was staying alive on acorns and lizards. I also joked that it was like living on Walden pond if Thoreau had a crappy dialup connection. Ironically, the year I spent at the cabin, using a really slow land line, was the year that I wrote Convergence Culture. This probably isn't up there with the revelation that William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a manual typewriter. :-)

I played Elwood P. Dowd in my high school's production of Harvey. My mother's clowning probably gave me the acting bug. I loved to perform in church plays and scout skits. I performed a comedy routine in our seventh grade talent show as an eccentric professor who was obsessed with the problem of violence in children's literature (a reversal of the role I ended up playing before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee some decades later). When I was in high school, I acted in two plays and in both cases, I got cast as the leads - as Dorian Gray in a heavily sanitized version of the Portrait of Dorian Gray and as the eccentric but lovable Elwood (he who sees the invisible 7 foot tall rabbit) in Harvey. I also won an acting award for my appearance in a super 8 movie spoofing James Bond which had me roller skating in a trenchcoat down Peachtree Street but that was another story altogether. Some years later, I did some amateur standup comedy and used to do comic guest slots on a local Atlanta radio program, King of Schlock. All of this seems like an appropriate preparation for my current public speaking responsibilities.

When I was in late elementary school, I found a dolphin's skull washed up ashore on a beach. When I was a boy, I had a small museum in my basement of oddities of natural history. It started I think when a country cousin gave me the stuff carcus of a Red Fox and when my grandmother bought me a stuffed baby caiman at a roadside stand during a trip to Florida. Along the way, we purchased cobra skins which were advertised in the back pages of Boy's Life magazine and I had a black bat preserved in a jar of formaldahide. But the prize possession was the skull of a dolphin which I found while walking on Tybee Beach when I was in 6th or 7th grade. It was encrusted with barnacles and had been lodged underneath the peer. I recognized it because we had seen one in a museum earlier in the day. We bleached it and left it out in the sun to dry.

I am not sure how much any of this taught you about media change or participatory culture or education or any of the other main themes of the blogs. At best this is a digression from my usual content but I hope I at least managed to be entertaining.

Now, it is my turn. I will tag five other bloggers who are regular readers here - Jason Mittell, Derek Kompare, Mark Deuze, Ilya Vedrashko, and Nancy Baym. Tell us something we don't know about you. (Sorry, friends.)

My Adventures in Poland (Part Three)

On the second day of my trip, I went over and spoke at a conference on internet research hosted by the Warsaw School of Social Psychology, built inside an old factory, in what was described to me as the "dodgy" side of the Vistula River. The river divides the city into two parts: historically more working class people lived on the west bank. This area, however, is now undergoing gentrification and the university itself was a modern, inviting facility. I will have less to share about this conference because it was mostly conducted in Polish without translation facilities and so I was not able to really engage with the other presenters as much as at the Kultura 2.0 event. I did hear a really interesting presentation on a phenomenon called Couchsurfing, where people use social networking tools to arrange to stay in people's homes as they travel around the world. The presenter discussed it in terms of the interplay of virtual and physical spaces and the different kinds of sociality that each enables. Later that night, we ended up going out with a group of students to a typically European drinking hole, Sklad Butelek. I spent much of the evening talking with Alek

Tarkowski, who is the primary person in Poland organizing and promoting the Creative Commons movement.

The Polish Reggae Scene?

One of the most interesting aspect of his conversation, however, centered around the emergence of a Reggae movement in Poland. Keep in mind: There are almost no Jamaicans living in Poland. This is not a case of emigrant populations porting music to another part of the world. Poland is an incredibly homogeneous country with very limited immigrant populations and clearly, there are no cultural reasons for Jamaicans to want to relocate to this part of the world. Reggae emerged here because it served Polish interests and reflected Polish tastes and thus it has taken some distinctly Polish shapes.

I shared some of the music I brought back with Generoso Fierro, who works in the CMS offices. For more than a decade, he has hosted Generoso's Bovine Ska and Rocksteady which airs every Tuesday from midnight to 2AM (EST) on 88.1FM WMBR Cambridge and can be found online. His show focuses on the beginnings of Jamaica's music

industry (1955-1970) from the earliest recordings of mento (sometimes referred to as

Jamaican calypso) through Jamaican R & B,ska, rocksteady and the rise of reggae. Here's his insights into the Polish reggae phenomenon:

I have found that Jamaican music truly appeals to any culture that is in a dire economic position. In the case of England there was the effect of children of post WW2 Jamaican immigrants who were brought to England due to the labor shortage, living in depressed neighborhoods with white London youth turning them onto Jamaican rhythms during the Mod and Skinhead movements of the late 1960s..The whole merger of punk and reggae (i.e The Clash covering Jamaican music) happened due to a London DJ named Don Letts who, due to the small amount of punk records available at the time, would spin reggae before live punk rocks shows. But in the case of Mexico, which has a huge Jamaican music community, this seemed to have spawned from radio broadcasts from California during the Jamaican revival in the early 1990s. Several of the revival bands that formed in Mexico told me in interviews that California radio really turned them onto the sound.

A group called Izrael was the first to introduce the sound into Poland in 193. Some members of Izrael heard a few songs and were so fascinated that they started to produce music in this style (at least as they understood it). I gather there's a good deal of reinvention going on here given how limited their initial exposure to the music was. The name created confusion in Poland with some people assuming this was a Christian Rock group. Indeed, my hosts shared with me stories of older people storming out of the concert, confused and angry, having hoped for a more conventional religious experience.

Generoso added, having heard some of this music:

Rastafarianism which is what alot of the Izrael record expounds (based on titles of songs and style) really wouldn't mix with Polish Catholicism so I understand their confusion. There are American "Jamaican" bands like "The Israelites" that actually are born-again Christian. They keep the Jamaican patois accents but side-step the mentioning of Hellie Selassie or Rastafari. The Izrael record is quite sincere in it's production and sound. On the compilation disc you gave me what I find great is the variance in style from what is dancehall to dub to modern ska sounding tracks. During one barrage of Polish dancehall toasting (singing over the rhythm) the occasional Jamaican patois word like "Samfi" or "Ganja" that get's thrown in which is almost too bizarre to the ear.

Much of the growth of the community has taken place online. There is apparently one store in Warsaw which sells only Reggae and its variations. Many Polish groups send their masters to the west Indies in order to get them cut onto Vinyl by Jamaican recording companies and then shipped back so they have the particular sound they want.

As the sound was introduced into Poland, and as Polish youth started to respond to its cultural politics, Reggae spread. There emerged at least one store in Warsaw devoted entirely to the sell of Reggae albums, which has become the headquarters of the local culture. And there is a very active internet community which helps direct fans to clubs where various groups are performing and educate them about the music. A recent album, Polski Ogien, showcased the younger artists who have emerged in Izrael's wake, and included a surprising array of different sounds and rhythms.

What had attracted my interest in the club had been a song I heard on the radio which was collaboration between Twinkle Brothers (a Reggae roots group well known in the west) with Trebunie Tutki (a traditional Polish highlands group): they had discovered a similar rhythm pattern in their music. This was an amazing cut and I am told the rest of the album is this good, but I couldn't find it in the two record shops I was able to visit.

This was one of the major signs I saw of the ways globalization was impacting Polish culture -- a fascinating story of cultural appropriation and transmission. (Where is George Lipsitz when you need him?)

Here's another: a Chinese restaurant has opened in the old section of Warsaw.

When I spoke to people there about the internet, it was clear that the local political leadership and news media has stirred up some anxiety about the erosion of the distinctive qualities of Polish culture in the face of the globalizing force of the World Wide Web. It was a question I asked about often as I spoke to people there. And it is certainly the case that they have extensive exposure to American and British television, films, and comics. Yet, it is also the case that there was probably more local content for sale in the comics shops (more on this tomorrow) than I see traveling in most other parts of the world.

The Global Marketplace

Another site of globalization is the vast flee market which has sprung up along the outskirts of what was once the national Soccer Stadium. I have frankly never seen anything like it in terms of scale -- it spreads out below you in all directions.

The merchants came here from across the old Soviet empire -- Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusian, Latvians, and Lithuanians -- and from parts of Asia -- especially from Vietnam. Most of what we saw were knockoffs of goods which we could buy for only slightly more in the western world -- there was just lots and lots of it. I, however, purchased good quality Russian fur hats for my son and myself. Growing up in the cold war era, I had a fascination for those hats which were a central icon of my imagination of what Communists look like.

And I am told if you wander deeply enough in there you can buy anything you want -- legal or illegal -- if you just know where to look. There were certainly plenty of signs there of the illegal trade in pirated dvds, cds, and software and only the thinnest efforts to cover it over, often with totally transparent sheets of plastic and a few stray items, whenever word goes out that the police may be paying them a visit.

Trying to head off the spread of piracy, Polish media importers have struck deals with local magazine publishers so that one can buy cheap legal copies of many recent releases bundled in with the periodical, much the way our magazines used to come with AOL discs (clearly a less desirable trinket) stuffed inside. My hosts suggested that this practice has become so widespread that Poles would be reluctant to buy a magazine which didn't come bundled with some media content. These legal dvds circulate without any of the extras -- to get these, you have to buy the full package.

A Walk Through Oldtown

We also walked through the restored Oldtown section of Warsaw, which, on this particular afternoon, was full of street performers of all kinds. I was particularly taken by this traditionally dressed organ grinder who was playing Polish folk songs -- in part because of my fascination with pre-20th century forms of popular culture.

And of course, as the holiday season approaches, Christmas decorations were everywhere -- some traditional

some a bit more eye catching like this scene of Santa Clause trying to break into the second floor of a shop.

(I was struck by how widespread the American iconography of Santa was here -- which is, as most of you know, really an invention of the advertising firm handling the Coca Cola account in the 1920s and 1930s rather than the Gwiadorz or Star Carriers, wandering mummers, who were once a central part of Polish Christmas traditions). As a western observer, I would note ways, however, that the iconography of Santa was a little off, as in this display in front of a department store, where Santa's bag bears Red Stars (Is this a nod to the Communist past, the star carriers, or just a confusion about cultural iconography?)

Sorry, Bruce, There Are No Dead Media...

On my last morning in Warsaw, I was waiting for my wife to extract some cash from the bank machine and looked up to see a sign for what looks to be a fascinating attraction. There seems to be a fully functioning Fotoplastikon.

Unfortunately, this being a Catholic country, it was exactly open on a Sunday morning, so I suspect I will have to catch it on my next trip. But a little Google-searching got me to the English language of the establishment's web site which explains:

The viewer for three-dimensional pictures, known as the Photo­plasticon, was invented in Germany in the second half of the 19th century. The new invention soon became popular, enabling everyone to visit the most distant parts of the world, at a reasonable cost, without having to undertake an expensive and risky journey. The three-dimensional pictures produced by a special dual-lens camera provided an amazing illusion of reality. Thus, the Age of Steam, offered the average citizen the possibility of enjoying virtual tourism without the usual restrictions of time and space. Photo­plasticons (known as Kaiser­panorama in Germany) appeared in every corner of the world. By the turn of the century they already numbered about 250 in the whole of Europe. However in time, the Brothers Lumière in Paris introduced their cinema of „living pictures" -- an appealing invention which soon displaced the Photo­plasticons. Gradually, the strange, impractical Photo­plasticon drums were forgotten

.

I am posting this here so that others who share my fascination with what Bruce Sterling calls "Dead Media" might learn about this site and visit it should they ever find themselves in Warsaw.

Next Time: Polish Comics

Webcasts of Futures of Entertainment Conference Now Online

Many of you have asked over the past month whether we were going to be webcasting the Futures of Entertainment conference panels. We had hoped to be able to stream these live through Second Life and ran into surprising legal obstacles in doing so. We have had to strong with the technical challenges of mixing this footage -- shot on multiple cameras, digitize it, and index it so that you could get much easier access to the material you want to hear. Keep in mind that we ran two and a half hour long sessions at the conference. Keep in mind as well that getting this material up required permission from each of the companies represented on the program. Special thanks goes to Rik Eberhardt, CMS's resourceful and hardworking technologist in residence, and to Joshua Green, the research manager for the Convergence Culture Consortium for their herculian efforts to make sure you guys had access to this content. We also want to thank the sponsors of the Convergence Culture Consortium for their continued support of our efforts to understand the changes that are occuring in our media landscape and to bring that understanding to a larger public -- MTV Networks, Turner Broadcasting, GSD&M, Fidelity, and Yahoo.

Posted so far are:

My opening remarks on the first day

The panel on Television Futures.

The panel on User-Generated Content.

The panel on Transmedia Storytelling

Josh Green's opening comments on the second day of the conference.

The panel on Fan Cultures

The panel on virtual worlds

I am going to be updating these links over the next few days as the material becomes available so book mark this post for your one-stop shopping needs.

There's so much material here that might be relevent to regular readers of this blog that it is hard to know where to start. Our students produced some very good summaries of key ideas from each session, more or less in real time, during the event:

Opening Comments by Henry Jenkins (that's me!)

Television Futures

User-Generated Content

Transmedia Properties

Joshua Green's Opening Remarks for Day 2

Fan Cultures

Not the Real World Anymore

Given our recent discussions here, I would especially flag for you:

the discussions of transmedia storytelling which involved DC comics Paul Levitz, Big Spaceship's Michael Lebowitz, and [ICE]3 Studios's Alex Chisholm. There was lots here about Lost, Heroes, and superhero comics, all popular topics here.

the discussion of fan culture which involved Warner Brothers' Diane Nelson (who plays a prominant role in the Harry Potter chapter of Convergence Culture), Cartoon Network's Molly Chase, and social network research danah boyd.

But you won't want to miss Flickr's Caterina Flake's views on user-generated content, Ji Lee on the controversial Bubble Project, a lively discussion of virtual worlds with representatives from Second Life, Multiverse, and MTV's Lagoona Beach project, and some challenging comments from C3 advisor Josh Green on the metaphors driving the marketing of mobile technologies. And much much more.

For a list of blogger responses to the conference, check here.

Jesse Walker covered the event in depth in an article published in Reason magazine's online edition.

Spellcast offered special coverage of the event, including behind the scenes interviews with some of the folks who attended.

And here's the coverage of the event which was issued by the MIT News Office.

People keep asking me whether there will be a Futures of Entertainment 2 conference -- and the answer is we don't know for sure but we are definitely considering it given the enormous success of this event. If we do decide, readers of this blog will be among the very first to know.

The Magic of Back-Story: Further Reflections on the Mainstreaming of Fan Culture

The airing last Monday of the Heroes episode, "Six Months Ago," seems an appropriate occasion to reflect upon the centrality of back story in fan friendly television -- and by extension to explore a bit more fully some of the gender dimensions of the mainstreaming of fan culture. I first wrote about Heroes last summer when I got a chance to watch an advanced copy of the series pilot and I fell hard. Heroes has turned out to be one of the most successful new television series to debut this year and is, if the comments posted here on Pimp My Show, certainly a favorite among readers of the blog. For those not watching the series, "Six Months Ago" takes place, as the title indicates, six months before the events in the pilot episode. Hiro, salary man by day, Otaku by night, "Superhiro" in his spare time, travels back in time six months to try to stop the death of the woman fans have been calling "Google Girl," a hash house waitress with a phenomenal capacity to absorb and deploy information. Time travel plots are cool enough -- I've always been a sucker for them -- but in this case, the series used turning back the clock to dump a massive amount of really interesting, character-focused back-story on the viewers. Half way through the episode, I turned to my wife and mumbled, "the magic of back story."

SPOILER WARNING FOR THOSE WHO AREN'T CAUGHT UP ON HEROES

Just setting a story six months earlier already opens up all kinds of great insights into the characters. We find out, for example, a great deal about Nikki, her relationship with her apparently abusive father, the death of her sister, and through this, for the first time, we get some real clues into what is motivating the doppelganger which emerges and takes possession of her body during moments of key stress. We learn a great deal about the accident that crippled Nathan's wife and the context in which it occurred, including more information about the death of Nathan and Peter's mob-tied father, the rise of Nathan's political career, the reasons why he is being blackmailed, and the circumstances under which he first discovered his capacity to fly. In the case of Claire, we learned a great deal more about her relations with her father and how she discovered her capacity for instant regeneration. Along the way, we finally met Skylar; we encounter Chandra Suresh, Mohinder's father, and learn more about his work in New York City, and much much more.

END OF SPOILERS

It is hard to imagine an episode offering more "answers" to the character enigmas that had been introduced across the series to date or opening up more new questions in such a short period of time. At the same time, it was clear that the series had been structured from the pilot forward to prepare us for the information rush that comes of having all of this back-story dumped on us in such a short period of time.

How simple the device is! Let's turn back the clock six months and show you how everyone got into their current situations. In theory, we could keep turning back the clock again and again and find out even more about what made these characters into the people they are today. Yet, the series is structured so this is the crucial time period for so many of these characters. I am reminded of the thrill I felt as a gamer the first time I encountered a game which allowed one to move right to left as well as left to right across the scroll: in effect, all the game had done was start us in the middle screen, but suddenly, one had the feeling of a more immersive world, of the ability to travel in any direction. The lesson here is obvious: start your story in the middle and work in both directions at once.

Heroes is not the first television series to try this trick: there's a great episode at the start of the third season of The Shield which took us back only a few days before the pilot episode of the series but again, showed how a memorable chain of events started and gave us new insights into the relationships between the core characters.

Back-story is a key aspect of the storyteller's toolkit in any medium but television until very recently was reluctant to play around too much with back-story because it was assumed that audiences would not carry much information about the characters around with them. Episodes needed to be self contained. It had to be possible to watch them in any order. The episode as a result had to end more or less in the same place where it began. It could deploy very little in terms of outside knowledge or program history less it confuse, frustrate, or leave behind more casual viewers.

Yet, fans, as a community, set themselves up as the protectors and promoters of back story. They wanted to pull together every scrap of information they could find about these characters and where they came from -- every long lost friend who showed up for one episode, every passing reference to former girl friends or what happened when they were at the Academy or... Indeed, this was a primary function of fan fiction from its earliest days -- fleshing out the implicit back story of these characters, filling in the "missing scenes".

Serialization was also part of the fan aesthetic from before the beginning. In Textual Poachers, I describe Star Trek fans as turning space opera into soap opera -- by which I meant both a focus on the emotional lives of characters (still unusual in many forms of science fiction) and a desire to create a serial structure even around series that were composed of relatively self contained and isolated episodes. But men and women were assumed early on to have a different relationship to serialization and to have different degrees of investment in back story.

Here, for example, is a passage from an essay I wrote about Twin Peaks fans in the late 1980s at a time when internet fandom was perceived as primarily a masculine space:

The female Star Trek fans focus their interest on the elaboration of paradigmatic relationships, reading plot actions as shedding light on character psychology and motivations. The largely male fans in the Twin Peaks computer group essentially reversed this process, focusing on moments of character interaction as clues that might help to resolve plot questions. The male fans' fascination with solving the mystery justified their intense scrutiny and speculation about father-daughter relations, sexual scandals, psychological and emotional problems, and romantic entanglements. Sherry Turkle suggests that the Hacker culture's focus on technological complexity and formal virtuosity stands in stark contrast to the group's discomfort regarding the ambiguities and unpredictability of personal relations. Here, Twin Peaks complex mixture of soap opera and mystery provided the alt.tv.twinpeaks participants a space to examine the confusions of human interactions by translating them into technical problems requiring decoding.

In Textual Poachers, written a decade and a half ago, I discussed the ways that networks regarded women as "surplus viewers" of action-adventure series that were primarily targeted at men and suggested that women had to work harder, had to write around the edges of the episodes, because most of what interested them was marginalized in the actual unfolding of these series. Looking at Heroes suggests just how much progress has been made to transform television into a more fan friendly medium. Minimally, one has to say that Heroes is one of a growing number of action-adventure series which factor in the tastes and interests of its female fan following from its conception. Like Smallville and Lois and Clark, two previous favorites among female television fans, the series uses the superhero genre as a starting point but remains far more interested in character reactions and motivations than in plot actions. Male fans have sometimes expressed frustration with the slow unfolding of plot which has characterized Heroes so far, yet its rhythms owes a lot to the soap opera tradition: we are watching these characters discover their powers and trying to make sense of how they impact their lives rather than watching them deploy their powers in defense of truth, justice, and the American way. We are examining how possessing special abilities impacts their marriages, their friendships, their relations with siblings, their personal turmoil, their unresolved feelings towards their parents, and their popularity in high school, all classic issues in more melodramatic forms of television and all basic building blocks of fan fiction.

We can read this one of two ways: the series is giving fans that much more to play around with when they sit down to write or the series is generating its own fan fiction foreclosing space that was once part of the fan imagination. How we respond to this depends very much on whether we are invested in fandom as a taste culture which wants to reshape the content of American television (in which case fans today are getting more of the kind of television they have historically wanted to watch) or as a subversive activity (in which case the willingness of the companies to give us more of what we want is potentially co-opting, encouraging us to work within rather than outside its systems of production and distribution). I fear sometimes that a decade plus of cultural studies writing about audience resistance may lead us astray, making us forget that resistance is a survival mechanism while the real goal is surely to transform the contents of our culture.

If we understand fandom as a taste culture, we can see plenty of signs that female fan tastes are reshaping popular television. To continue with the idea of back-story, consider a highly successful series like Lost. Lost, as I have suggested here before, would seem to offer a range of different kinds of viewing pleasures -- some focused backwards in terms of fleshing out character back-story (a central concern of every episode), some focused forward in terms of watching the unfolding relations between these characters on the island (still well within the territory of melodrama), and some focused on solving the various puzzles (which may be the most classically masculine aspect of its content, though keep in mind how many women like to solve puzzles or read mystery novels and you will be hard press to dismiss this simply as aimed at fanboys.) So, Lost balances devices once thought to appeal primarily to female viewers with those once classically assumed to appeal to men. You can read Lost against the earlier quote about how Twin Peaks allowed male fans to show an issue in character relations by turning them into clues towards a puzzle they wanted to solve. Or consider how much more central relationships (and the companion's role) are on the new Doctor Who compared to where that series was a decade ago.

And of course, all of this is to hold onto a gender division of fan interpretive practices as it was understood more than a decade ago rather than to revise it to reflect some pretty significant shifts in audience behavior over that period of time. Television isn't the only thing that is changing. As these once marginal aspects of action adventure series are making it onto the screen more and more, then male viewers of these series are discovering that they like them and are themselves demanding more of this kind of thing. There are dramatic increases in the number of women playing computer games or reading comics. And the online world is bringing together once separate fan communities and creating a common space where they sometimes fight like demons and sometimes pool knowledge, combining their different interests and reading practices for a common cause.

Laura wants to argue that gender is as present in Convergence Culture as it was in Textual Poachers but remains unmarked because the masculine is the norm in our culture. I've spent a fair chunk of time pondering this argument over the weekend. To some degree, I buy that, but on other levels, I don't. Working through the book, women are very central to the Survivor spoiling community which depends heavily upon skills at social networking (and curiously, much of the fan fiction there has been written by men including Mario Lanza who figures strongly in that chapter) and which values the different expertise that different kinds of people bring to the table; the culture around American Idol is probably disproportionately female and women are clearly a primary target audience for that series; the culture around The Matrix is probably classically masculine but does include some women; the Star Wars chapter talks explicitly about the gender divide between male filmmakers and female vidders but it says less about the fact that Star Wars Galaxies attracted a higher than average number of women into a multiplayer game world; and of course, the Harry Potter chapter is very much about the traditional world of female fan writing, although one hat now includes a higher number of male participants than a decade ago. Each of these chapters, then, represents an interesting case study of the different kinds of gender balances which emerge within different kinds of fan communities and activities. I don't think we can reduce this simply to women having to adopt masculine norms in order to participate in these more public fan cultures, though I wouldn't argue that some of this does occur. So, as aca-fen, we probably need to spend more time thinking about which spaces within fan culture do remain gender segregated at the present time and why or for that matter, what has allowed some forms of fan activity to achieve a greater degree of gender balance.

And, yes, as we suggested last week, we need to closely examine what television is providing us as fans and whether its fantasies really do align with our own. We need to be attentive to those aspects of fan culture which prove challenging for the media producers to assimilate. Slash usually gets cited as a prime example here, but keep in mind that Joss Whedon found a way to introduce a queer relationship for Willow within Buffy, that Xena was able to include more and more "subtext" scenes which winked at their slash viewers, or that a growing number of American television series do now include explicitly gay characters, so I don't think it is impossible to imagine slash being incorporated even more into the explicit content of the series.

We can argue that commercial producers are adopting the wrong premises or deploying the wrong models as they court female consumers, but we have to read such projects as the new games focused on Desperate Housewives or the virtual world for Laguna Beach as projects which were explicitly launched with the goal of extending the experience of female fans. We also might read projects, such as blogs and journals in character (from Dawson's Desktop to Hiro's blog) or the comics produced around Heroes, to be attempts to expand back-story and character motivations, precisely the kinds of changes in narrative structures that female fans would have been begging for a decade plus ago.

Let's be clear: I am not arguing that there aren't gender issues to be studied in and between fan cultures, simply that we need to adopt more complicated terms for talking about them than the tools we had when fan studies first emerged. I am hoping that the current generation of fan theorists (inside and outside the academy) can lead the way towards a more sophisticated account of the role gender plays in the mainstreaming of fan culture. I am sure we will all be talking about this issue more here in the future.

Games as National Culture: An Interview with Chris Kohler (Part One)

"Games are popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture. [They]...are extensions of social man and the body politic...As extensions of the popular response to the workday stress, games become faithful models of a culture. They incorporate both the action and the reaction of whole populations in a single dynamic image.... The games of a people reveal a great deal about them." -- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

This qoute from McLuhan has so far served as the opening passage of two books on games. The first was David Sheff's 1993 Game Over which dealt primarily with the entrance of Nintendo into the video game market. The second was Chris Kohler's 2004 Power Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life. Kohler notes that Sheff's use of the McLuhan qoute was used almost entirely to talk about video game's place in American culture where-as Kohler was interested in understanding both what Japanese games meant in a Japanese context (including some rich interviews with Japanese game designers and a vivid portrait of Akihabara, the district in Tokyo most associated with gamers and fans) and why those games have been so readily embraced within the American marketplace.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the degree to which games might be regarded as a reflection of national culture. I suppose it started when CMS played host last November to a delegation of French game designers who were touring the United States through the agency of the French Consultat and the French Ministry of Culture. It is no secret that European governments have started to embrace games as part of their policies to promote creative industries, yet in most cases, they are read simply in terms of their relationship to larger digital industries rather than as having cultural value in their own rights. The French designers and the consultat were making a somewhat different claim: that games were an increasingly important aspect of French national culture and that there was something distinctly French about the approach these designers took to their craft. In many ways, they were arguing that games in the United States were an extension of Hollywood models of entertainment and games in France were an outgrowth of the European art cinema. For anyone interested, there is both a summary of the event and some video highlights on the web.

From there, I have watched -- and discussed here -- the politics surrounding multiplayer games in China, have become involved working with Singapore in the development of a games innovation lab, and have started to see signs that the tech sector in India were moving towards producing games which would be part of a larger assertion of South Asian cultural identity.

Each of these steps represent a move away from what Japanese cultural critic Koichi Iwabuchi (Recentering Globalization) has described as a policy of "deodorization" which has long shaped the games industry. Basically, games were striped of distinguishing national characteristics in order to be shipped to markets around the world. Indeed, the assumption was that a game which felt "too Japanese" would not do well in American markets -- an assumption made both by Japanese game designers who sought a more "universal" style for their export products and by American games publishers who sought to filter out elements they found too alien for our market. Over time, however, Americans have developed a taste for the distinctly Japanese qualities of Japanese games and these other countries are betting that we may also welcome other forms of cultural diversity in games content.

So, when Chris Kohler gave me a copy of his book, Power-Up, during a recent trip to San Francisco, I read it with enormous interest. Kohler, who is now the editor of Wired's games blog Game|Life, is extremely knowledgible about games culture in Japan. He brings to the book a solid background in the graphics arts traditions of Japan, making valuable links between the aesthetics of games, manga, anime, and Japanese filmmaking more generally. He was able to interview many of the leading Japanese game designers, including some amazing insights into the career of Shigeru Miyamoto (Super Mario Brothers, Zelda), Yuji Horii (Dragon Quest), Yasundra Mitsuda (Chrono Cross),Masaya Matsuura (Parappa the Rapper) and many others. The book takes us from the origins of Nintendo as a card manufacuring company through early games such as Pac-Man all the way to the international succes of Pokemon. The writing is lively and engaging, offering insights that will valuable to game designers and players alike.

What follows is an interview with Chris Kohler which both develops some of the core ideas from the book and updates them to reflect current trends impacting the games industry.

A core premise of the book seems to be that games are a powerful reflection of national culture. You draw this idea in part from an opening qoute from Marshall McLuhan. Yet, as you note, there has been a tendency among Japanese media producers to design content for the global market as much as for the local market. And many Americans seemed unaware for a long time that the games they were playing originated in Japan. What can you tell us about the tension between the nationally specific and transnational aspects of games?

Well, this is a whopper of an opening question. To start off, I want to present a miniature case study of a game called "Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan." Literally, it translates to "Hey! Fight! Cheer Squad." It's a music-action game for Nintendo DS that was released in Japan in the summer of 2005, designed by Keiichi Yano's company iNiS, which is profiled in Power-Up.

The game's story revolved around a traditional group of Japanese cheerleaders -- who are male, deadly serious, dressed in school uniforms, and full of fiery energy which they express in booming, crowd-inspiring yells. In the game, they go to the aid of people in trouble -- a noodle shop owner whose business is failing, a kid who needs to score well on his college entrance exams. They cheer him on to the beat of popular Japanese music tracks, and the better you do playing the songs, the better they cheer.

When the game was released, the Nintendo DS hadn't yet hit it big in Japan. So it came out with a decent amount of fanfare, but didn't light up the sales charts. But since the Nintendo DS is region-free (meaning Japanese games can be played on an American DS system and vice versa), a few fans of iNiS' previous game Gitaroo-Man, including me, imported the game from Japan and found it to be simply amazing, maybe the best game in the admittedly small genre.

So we embarked on a quest to get as many people as possible to buy it, but it's tough to convince people to import a game from Japan due to the extra expense and worry that you might not be able to play it. So we also made sure to clamor for Nintendo of America to release it in the States.

Although we knew we wanted to see it here -- and here's where the tension comes in -- although the gameplay was universally fun, there were several elements to the game design that wouldn't work for an American release. The setting was in Japan, with specifically Japanese character archetypes, locations, and scenarios. The fifteen musical tracks were all in Japanese, and what's more they were licensed songs, meaning there were royalty fees to consider and possible issues with using the songs outside of Japan.

So until the E3 expo in May 2006, Nintendo was silent on the subject. At the show, they revealed what they'd done. All of iNiS had been devoted to the creation of "Elite Beat Agents", which took the Ouendan gameplay and swapped out the characters, scenarios, and songs for American ones. The main characters became sort of a cross between the Blues Brothers and the Men in Black. Songs like "September" by Earth, Wind, and Fire and "Sk8r Boi" by Avril Lavigne replaced the J-pop.

What's interesting to note is that although certain Ouendan fans were angry that Nintendo was "Americanizing" the game, that's not really what happened. Yes, iNiS went back and re-tooled the game for Western audiences, but if you look at the final product it's still very much a crazy, manga-styled presentation that's going to appeal most strongly to the kind of gamer who reads manga, plays Katamari Damacy, etc. It's only "Westernized" enough to remove the sort of "cultural odor" that would prevent it from doing well in the US, not the things that made it appealing in the first place.

That's something I also get into in Power-Up as it pertains to Donkey Kong. The breakout Japanese video game (at least in the context that I explored in the book, that of the development of games as a storytelling medium) was designed for America. Miyamoto was told that the US branch of Nintendo was in trouble, and could he please make a game that would succeed in America. Who knows what kind of story and characters he would have come up with if his primary intent was to appeal to his fellow Japanese?

I'm actually going to keep answering this same question for just a bit longer, because I want to point out that what constitutes a "nationally specific" element versus a "transnational" element is constantly changing. When the Nintendo Entertainment System first debuted, role-playing games like Dragon Quest would have been considered too focused on the Japanese market to succeed here. This is no longer the case. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to find that some RPGs were actually grossing more in the US than in Japan, these days.

To what degree can we say that there is a distinctly Japanese aesthetic of game

design and how would we characterize it? How might we link this aesthetic to

earlier traditions of visual representation in Japan?

This is a tough question. The easy, cop-out answer would be for me to point to the overly cartoonish manga style that is so pervasive in Japan and note that this to a large extent informs the design qualities of many of the video games produced there. Which in fact, it does. But then, can I really look at Shadow of the Colossus and Katamari Damacy, then sum up so blithely the design aesthetic of a country whose designers produced such dramatically different visual styles?

Certainly I don't want to downplay the importance of standard manga style. If you read some of the literature on the subject you start to realize that it's more than just big eyes and misshapen heads; there's an almost codified literary shorthand at work that helps the reader blaze through manga, getting what you might call a cinematic experience. Of course that had a huge effect on game development because, as I talk about in the book, game design from its earliest moments was an extension of this national love for visual storytelling.

That said, I don't want it to seem as if there are no American designers that aren't doing similarly unique work. The major difference would seem to be that the Japanese game market supports a wider variety of design aesthetics. An American developer certainly could have come up with Katamari Damacy, but they would have had a very hard time selling it to a publisher, who'd be looking for the next gritty urban crime simulator.

If there's anything that Japanese designers tend to shy away from, it's the sort of ultra-realistic depictions of real-life violence that are so common in Western games. In fact, Japanese consumers seem to be more wary even than American ones about realistic violence. Most anyone who looks at the body of manga and anime available to kids in Japan notes how violent they are. And this is totally acceptable as long as it's done in a cartoonish style. But as soon as the same subject matter, the same stories, are rendered in realistic graphics that look and feel like real life, it's looked upon as being highly inappropriate.

Early in the book, you contrast Breakout and Gunfight, suggesting that it was the Japanese who were first drawn to games as a storytelling or cinematic medium. What role do you see Japanese designers playing in pushing games

towards narrative?

This is where I have to say to your readers: "Read the book!" It is explained in exhaustive detail with lots of diagrams and figures and circles and arrows.

If there's one broad criticism of the book that I've had to deal with ever since it was published, it's the idea that I'm completely wrong because of the fact that text adventures like Adventure or Zork were telling interactive stories long before Donkey Kong came around. And they were. But quite frankly I think we're dealing with two entirely different media. Video games, as their name implies, are a visual medium. Interactive fiction is entirely bereft of visuals.

If I may analogize, comics and books are both printed on paper, and there are works that blur the line between the two just as graphical adventure games like King's Quest pulled some of their play mechanics from IF. But play mechanics are only part of the equation when you look at what makes a video game a video game, just as the words in balloons are only part of comics. What Japanese designers -- most prominently Shigeru Miyamoto with Donkey Kong and Hironobu Sakaguchi with Final Fantasy -- did was to pioneer techniques of storytelling in this particular visual (and aural!) medium.

To look at their impact on modern-day video games, it's clear which model was the basis for all that we have today. If you look at Resistance: Fall of Man, the flagship game for PlayStation 3, and strip away 25 years of technological advancements you are dealing with something very similar in structure to Donkey Kong.

(Note that at no point in the above paragraphs did I slander interactive fiction! I love IF! It's great! It's just not video games.)

From the start, Japanese designers seemed interested in broadening the game market to include women. How successful have they been in doing so? Why do you think they sought out the female market while American companies seemed content to target only hardcore male players?

Yes -- Pac-Man, which at one point was far and away the most successful video game in the world, was designed with the intent of bringing in a female audience. Japan has generally been better at selling games to women, historically speaking. Certainly they're doing a much better job of it these days with the Nintendo DS. Actually, just today the latest Japanese sales chart was released, and the country's best-selling game right now is a Nintendo DS game called Love and Berry that's based on a franchise popular with preteen girls. They sold nearly half a million copies of this game just this week.

Add that to games with huge penetration into the girl-gamer market like Nintendogs, Animal Crossing, and Brain Age and it's clear that Japan is getting to the point where there's no longer going to be a gender divide in video games within a few years. I stress that they were really primed for this, though, as it's been totally socially acceptable for trendy popular high school and college-aged women to have a game system in their room for as long as there have been game consoles. The hardcore game nerds are still predominantly men, but there's a big difference between "otaku" and "fan."

Was America ever "content" to just go after the guys? I don't think they were -- if you look back, you'll always see attempts to go after the female market. On the game consoles it was mostly taking games for boys and replacing the space marines with Barbie and the alien base with a shopping mall and the aliens with designer purses. Why the purses were attacking Barbie, nobody really knew.

This is a drastic oversimplification, but girls were looking for something other than shooters and football games. Problem was, the Super Nintendo's input mechanism and display capabilities were pretty much only good for games with simple mechanics. So it kept feeding back on itself -- the hardware was best suited for games that appealed to boys, so they made those kinds of games, so more boys bought it, so they had to make more games for them... And the next thing you know, a piece of hardware -- a neutral piece of machinery with no pre-loaded content -- was seen as a specifically male-oriented toy. No girl would say they didn't want a VCR because all it did was play action movies for boys, but for video games the medium became the message.

And when more complex games with things girls wanted (stories, characters, beautiful graphics, exploration, slow pacing, a gentle learning curve with early rewards) started to show up -- like role-playing games -- they were ignored mostly because girls who would have liked them were locked into the mindset that all video games were for boys. The fact that the boys generally also thought this to be true didn't much help.

Of course, if you look at the "casual games" market in the US right now, women make up quite a bit (I think even the majority) of this segment. I think a lot of that has to do with ease of use. These are games that you can play just by clicking a mouse. That's the idea behind Nintendo DS; if you look at games like Nintendogs, they're controlled entirely with the touch pen. No need to learn extensive button configurations. Put simply, women aren't willing to put up with as much frustration as guys are. We see it as a challenge, they see it as being told it's not for them.

I'm not saying that Japan had a unique understanding of this, just that the cultural conditions there (half of every manga store is devoted to girls' comics) made for a better incubator.

Naturally, your book spends a great deal of time focused on Shigeru Miyamoto, who many regard as the most consistently innovative and imaginative artist to ever work in the medium. What do you see as Miyamoto's major contributions to the art of game design? Is it possible to imagine the success of Nintendo in the western market without Miyamoto? To what degree were our expectations about Japanese games defined by this one artist? What other Japanese game designers do you see as key influencers of contemporary game culture?

Is it possible to imagine the success of Nintendo without Miyamoto? I imagine it depends on your definition of "success"; other Japanese developers who don't have a Miyamoto (that is, all of them) have done well for themselves on a worldwide scale. Not to mention the fact that, as I try to make clear in the book, I think the conditions in Japan were as responsible for Miyamoto's success as was his own personal genius. That is, had Miyamoto been born in America he might have found himself designing telephones (remember, he was an industrial design student) or drawing comic books for a living. In the early eighties in America, computer programmers designed games, not art students.

This is all to say that without Miyamoto, I still think it would have been Japanese designers who pushed the envelope. But we have Miyamoto, whose major contribution was his very first project. Donkey Kong (as explained in detail you-know-where) was groundbreaking in its use of the medium to tell a story. And I define that rigidly, talking about the elements of narrative and how Donkey Kong incorporates all of them while only using one word ("Help!"). It set the stage for everything that was to come.

Now, it's not as if Miyamoto disappeared after Donkey Kong. Quite to the contrary, he helmed (and continues to head up) one masterpiece of gaming after another at Nintendo. But, ironically, after making this breakthrough, he essentially changed directions and concentrated almost entirely on improving other areas of game design. From a storytelling perspective, Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda are major steps back from Donkey Kong, because they don't have any sort of expository scenes. There's no equivalent in Zelda of Donkey Kong climbing up the girders, girl in tow.

Instead, Miyamoto worked hard to give his games tight, responsive play control; give the player-character as much freedom of movement and as many interesting abilities as possible; and fill his game worlds with hidden secrets and complex environments. I'm certainly not saying this was a bad thing! Just that his focus switched pretty much permanently. But this turned out to be his real genius.

And Nintendo realized it. From early on, they spread Miyamoto out so that he was involved in a variety of different games at once (I think at one point in his career he told me that he was involved, on some level, in 40 projects). This is so the designers can deal with all the minutiae and Miyamoto can come in to make brilliant insights about how they can make the games more fun. Yes, this often results in major catastrophes when a team realizes that they'll have to work on the game an extra six months to implement Miyamoto's imperatives. (Those who've worked with him call it the moment when Miyamoto "knocks over the table.")

Nowadays I think that there are plenty of Japanese designers who are doing groundbreaking work that'll be significantly influential on their peers worldwide. There's Keita Takahashi, who designed Katamari Damacy (although depending on how much you believe the rumors, he is sick of video games and might never make another one). Fumito Ueda's Shadow of the Colossus turned out to be even more impressive than ICO. Tetsuya Mizuguchi's stylish Lumines is like playing Tetris at a rave.

Happy Turkey Day

I am taking the day off to spend time with my family and the students in my dorm. My posts will return on Friday. Have a great holiday.

Game Theorist Jesper Juul to Speak at MIT

Half-Real: A Video Game in the Hands of a Player November 28, 2006 | 5:00 PM | Location: 1-136

What happens when a player picks up video game, learns to play it, masters it, and leaves it? Using concepts from my book on video games, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, I will argue that video game players are neither rational solvers of abstract problems, nor daydreamers in fictional worlds, but both of these things with shifting emphasis. The unique quality of video games is to be located in their intricate interplay of rules and fictions, which I will examine across genres, from casual games to massively multiplayer games.

Jesper Juul is a video game theorist and assistant professor in video game theory and design at the Centre for Computer Game Research Copenhagen where he also earned his Ph.D. His book Half-Real on video game theory was published by MIT Press in 2005. Additionally, he works as a multi-user chat systems and casual game developer. He is currently a visiting scholar at Parsons School of Design in New York.

This lecture is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Comparative Media Studies Program and the New Media Literacies Project.

From Serious Games to Serious Gaming

Last week, I presented a keynote address at the Serious Games Summit held in Washington DC. The event drew together participants from all of the groups which constitute the serious games movement -- educators, activists, entrepreneurs, government officials, military, emergency workers, scientists, therapists, nonprofits, foundations, and doctors. As such the serious games movement is a powerful illustration of what Yochai Benkler has taught us about networked culture -- the ways that it creates new and unexpected points of contact between commercial, amateur, nonprofit, educational, and governmental forces which are shaping the contemporary communications landscape. As I told the group there, it is unlikely that there was very many other circumstances which might result in a military leader, a corporate HR person, and a political activist sitting down to break bread together, yet at the Serious Games Summit, these groups were all trying to see what they could learn from each other. If these folks do their jobs well, there will not be such a gathering in a few years time because each of the subfields they represent will have expanded until they can support their own convening. And indeed, we are already seeing more specialized meetings for those involved in games for health, games for education, and so forth.

If you want to see my presentation itself, check out this webcast of the talk (1). Much of what I had to say in the first part of the talk was already stated in an earlier post on my blog, Getting Serious About Serious Games. A primary goal of this talk was to suggest how the ideas from Convergence Culture might inform the work of those of us who are trying to produce games for learning. You might see this talk, in part, as a response to some criticisms that Ian Bogost raised about my book -- that it was too invested in commercial culture and didn't have enough to say about noncommercial uses of media. I see these remarks as pointing to ways that the serious games movement might benefit from a greater understanding of concepts like collective intelligence, participatory culture, and transmedia storytelling.

Today, I want to pick up on an important theme which ran through the talk -- my goal was to shift the discussion from talking about serious games (as in a product) towards talking about serious gaming (as a process). .

Learning as a Process, Not a Product

Several years ago, I was approached by a Christian organization which wanted to construct an arcade where all of the games would promote prosocial values. They had believed the stories that suggested that violent games "programmed" young people to become school shootists and they wanted to design games which "programmed" young people to become saints instead of sinners. Often, when I talk to reporters, they act as if we could just plant kids in front of a black box and have them "learn" as if learning required nothing more than absorbing content. And teachers worry that they will be replaced by a computer terminal which will be more fun, more efficient, and more cost effective than the human labor involved in current pedagogical practices.

These comments suggest a core misunderstanding about the role games may play in the educational process. We see games not so much as programmes with content that must be delivered but rather as spaces for exploration, experimentation, and problem solving. We do not simply want to tap games as a substitute for the textbook; we want to harness the metagaming, the active discussion and speculation which takes place around game play, as a catalyst for a broader range of other learning activities.

Games as Interdisciplinary Spaces

Speaking at the Education Arcade conference which we hosted at E3 several years ago, Will Wright offered his vision of the relationship of games to education. It's a long quote but worth reading slowly and carefully:

"Our whole idea of schooling is based around this industrial model: here's the stuff that you're going to study; we'll fill you up with that knowledge. Before education was quite so structured, people wandered a little more freely across the landscape of learning. We keep trying to think about how we can use games to make people learn something. How do we use them to communicate content? Whereas, the most effective uses I've seen of games are actually more on the motivational side. It really strikes me how much kids can get motivated by playing a game and then all of a sudden they discover that the subject they always thought was going to be boring is actually totally interesting....I can imagine some kind of technology where game makers could very cheaply mark up the game with little tabs, you know, that kids could click and they would bring them to external resources, maybe on the web. It could be even like Slashdot with all kinds of people adding annotations. If you're interested in longboats, click here and you get the top links for longboats. The game remains an entertainment experience, but it's really motivating you. It's not like, you like chemistry; here's a game for chemistry. Basically here's the entertaining experience that covers a lot of ground;; it's very interdisciplinary. Typically teachers look at the interdisciplinary pockets in these games and say, 'you know, let's do a game about chemistry,' or about this or that. That's a very hard game design problem....The best games will probably be very interdisciplinary and cross all these boundaries. The chemistry teacher will like a little segment of it or the history teacher will like a little segment, and the kid going through there will be motivated by the different aspects. It's very hard to package a really compelling experience into one disciplinary boundary."

The learning which games foster, in Wright's model, is "undisciplined" in the best sense of the world -- the child is encouraged to pursue their interests where-ever they lead without regard to the way schools divide up content or time. And different kids might pursue different interests side by side within the same game learning from each other. We can read Wright as arguing for multipurpose game environments which are not restricted by the configurations of knowledge we find in school syllabi or textbooks. Second Life looks something like the world Wright is describing -- a space where many different groups are conducting educational experiments of all kinds and where those educational experiences take place alongside a variety of other kinds of experiments in social, political, or economic interactions. We can also see something of the multidisciplinary approach to games and education through the work of Whyville, an online game world set up to get young girls interested in science but which introduced an in game economic system to reward points for participation in the various science activities. The Whyville team has discovered that the economic transactions -- and the production of stuff for trade -- does not simply motivate the other learning activities; they become important sites of learning in their own right, helping girls conceptualize themselves as entrepreneurs as well as scientists.

Wright's notion that we might simply annotate a traditional game, providing a series of links to other sources of information which might enhance the game play experience, represents another way of thinking about gaming as a process which is not contained within the game itself. I recall Kurt Squire describing the work he has done with the use of Civilization in high school world history classes; he suggested that he would sometimes catch students coming into class early and "cheating" by scanning through their textbooks for information which might help them perform better in the game. In that sense, the best games encourage us to look for information beyond their borders as we try to solve the problems they contain.

Serious Games and Participatory Culture

Educators might also benefit from tapping the participatory impulses within games culture -- especially by harnessing gamers interest in modding and machinema. I have already discussed in this blog the ways that projects such as MyPopStudio or our Cantina Improv exercises have encouraged young people to learn how culture works by taking media texts apart and remixing the pieces. The Education Arcade at MIT is one of a number of academic research groups which has found modding to be an effective approach to quickly generating educational games. For example, we took the fantasy role play game, Neverwinter Nights, and transformed it step by step into Colonial Williamsburg on the eve of the American Revolution for a game which could be used to teach American History.

This approach allows us to get a game produced quickly and cheaply by building on the existing framework and programming Bioware had provided. We were even able to reprogram the game in significant ways, such as creating a system for interaction with the nonplayer characters that acknowledged the role of class, gender, race, and political divides in colonial society. Yet, there were other constraints on what we could get the game engine to do which meant that the commercial game left some imprint on the finished title. And we faced more difficulty than we might have imagined getting this game into schools because schools had to buy the existing commercial game before they could play our mods and there was resistance given the "dark arts" themes running through Neverwinter Nights. Ironically, at the present time, most of the games most open for modification almost all have contents which will be objectionable in school settings.

Russell Francis, an Oxford University researcher who was working with us on Revolution, pushed this notion of modding one step further -- having students translate their game play experiences into short machinema films which functioned as a kind of in character diary to recount their impressions of what has taken place. We have found this practice extremely valuable in helping students to pull together information from multiple sources to express what they have experienced and learned through their game play. It has also proven very helpful for the design team as we try to understand what features of the game encourage or get in the way of individualized learning.

A group of my students, Dan Roy and Ravi Purushotma, have been experimenting with modding some basic platform games -- The Sims 2 and Grim Fandango -- in order to turn them into resources for language learning. The games which are produced for the global market already contain multiple languages inside them: all it takes is the flip of a switch to localized them for different markets. Dan and Ravi have explored the benefits of reprograming these games to allow players to play with them in a foreign language or even mixing and matching English and Spanish language features to provide scaffolding as they are mastering the second language.

Some educators have begun to see the game design process itself as a catalyst for learning as can be seen in recent projects by OnRampArts in Los Angeles, Urban Games Academy in Baltimore and Atlanta, or GlobalKidz in New York City. In each of these cases, the educational payoff comes not from playing the game but rather from working through the process of identifying how to transform a body of knowledge into a game play experience for someone else. Katie Salens, Eric Zimmerman, and James Paul Gee are currently collaborating on a new project, Game Designer, being produced for the MacArthur foundation to give young people basic literacy in game design. Here, again, it is the process of game design and not the product of a finished game that facilitates engagement and learning.

Reality -- Augmented, Alternate, and Otherwise

The serious games movement might also learn from the concept of transmedia entertainment -- thinking about how to shape a flow of information that extends beyond a single platform. One clear example of this kind of serious gaming would be the kinds of alternative reality games that Jane McGonigal has discussed. Right now, alternate reality gaming is primary used as a promotional platform -- see The Beast (A.I.), I Love Bees (Halo 2), The Lost Experience, or The Art of the Heist for examples. Yet, there is a compelling case for the kinds of research and collaborative problem solving which has been sparked by the effort to solve these complex multimedia puzzles. The games encourage a movement from digital space back to the real world and value the ability of social networks to pool knowledge and trade information as they work together to beat the game. The kinds of augmented reality games being developed by Eric Klopfer at MIT might represent another way of integrating information from the game back into real world spaces. David William Schaffer has used the term, epistemic games, to refer to a style of educational gaming where players are asked to deploy the tools and knowledge which might be used by professionals as they confront real world problems. So, he develops games where kids learn geography by working as urban planners or composition by playing at being journalists. These games encourage kids to trace information across multiple sources and media platforms, mixing things they have learned through digital and mobile media with things they have learned through direct observation of the real world.

Mapping Labrynth

I closed the talk with a preview of Labrynth, a Education Arcade project which will develop a multiplatform game designed to help middle school children develop some basic math and literacy competencies. Scot Osterweill is the head designer on the project, working with a team of CMS graduate students that includes Kristina Drzaic (whose storyboards for the game are featured here), Dan Roy, and Evan Wendell. CMS alum Ravi Purushotma has been hired as a technical advisor.

At the start of the game, the player spends some time designing and customizing their pet and then, the pet runs away, disappearing into a drainage pipe. Pursuing the pet, the player finds herself in an underground world full of threat and mystery. Along the way, they begin to suspect that the ambiguous meat products on sell may come from harvesting pets, creating a strong goal of rescuing not only one's own beloved pet but also freeing all of the other captured creature.

Each of the game's puzzles encourages new modes of thought and problem solving which can eventually be named and explained in the classroom but which seem simply part of the process of working through the game level. Here's how Drzaic described some of the thinking which has gone into the design of puzzles for the game:

When we first pitched our vision of what would constitute a good educational game to

middle school math teachers we were met with some skepticism as to how this model of

video game learning would help them meet the stringent information goals of NCLB [No Child Left Behind]. There was a dominant idea that the best kind of educational game is the kind that has overtly demonstrable math value along the tones of Math Blaster. While many educational games do subscribe to the Math Blaster flash-card based model, that was not the type of learning we were going for. We want to make the kind of thinking that sticks with you, not rote memorization.

As you might expect from a puzzle game, we have a mathematical basis for each puzzle

that requires mathematical-based reasoning to solve and, in keeping with NCLB, we had to

cover certain math topics. As such groups of our puzzles target different areas of the

math curriculum but, in keeping with the idea of an experience that sticks with you we

provide a wide range of modes to think about similar types of mathematical problems. For

instance, four of our puzzles deal with proportion in entirely different ways:

Puzzle 1: proportion as numerical value - feeding monsters proportionally related

ambiguous meat products

Puzzle 2: proportion as movement over time - different proportioned movement of boinging

robots

Puzzle 3: proportion as visual measurement - outfitting singing monsters who are dancing

at different distances

Puzzle 4: proportion as a rate - using gears to help a canning assembly line function

smoothly

I love that our game allows you to approach a topic through a variety of ways and does

not involve memorization in the least!

Literacy is encouraged through the game in two ways: first, the back-story for the world unfolds through a series of comic books which appear at the completion of each level and function more or less like cut scenes. Second, the players are encouraged to participate in an online forum where they trade advice and insights with other players on your team; this forum contributes directly into the game's reputation system.

The games are designed to be persistent so that the player can log in from multiple locations -- from the computer in the school library, through a handheld device, or through their home computers, integrating game play and problem solving across the day.

The game involves a partnership between Maryland Public Television, the MIT-based Education Arcade, the federal Star Schools program, and Fablevision, a commercial game developer which will take our student's designs and turn them into a finished game which will be distributed to the public. One of the most vexing challenges facing academic game developers has been the last mile problem -- how to move from prototypes to products which get into the hands of teachers, parents, and students. With this project, we think we have a plan which will translate our conceptual prototypes into a reality.

The game taps many aspects of contemporary gaming culture -- the customization of characters, the use of forums to share advice about mastering games, the process of experimentation and puzzle solving -- as central features of its pedagogical process. For Scot and his team, this is not about designing a serious game so much as it is about creating something which will encourage serious gaming.

Update 19/05/23:

(1) Source for talk no longer available. For a review of keynote see Forbes and to know more about the cessation of blip.tv, click here.

Adding to the Quilt: An Interview with Brad Meltzer

As a longtime comics fan, it's hard to remember a time when there were so many really astonishingly good writers generate content for the major companies at the same time -- Brian Bendis, Greg Rucka, Robert Kirkman, Ed Brubaker, Warren Ellis, Brian K. Vaughan, Geoff Johns...

There are several reasons why writing in comics is so good right now but one of them is what DC President Paul Levitz described to me in an interview as the "permeable membrane" that exists between comics and other media sectors in the midst of an increasingly transmedia culture. Some of the most exciting writers in comics today come from other media -- look at Joss Whedon over at Astonishing X-Men or J. Michael Straczinski or the occassional forrays of Kevin Smith into comics writing. It's in that category that I place Brad Meltzer.

Meltzer first came to my attention when he took over control of the Green Arrow series from Kevin Smith. Smith had literally brought Oliver Queen back from the dead and demonstrated the continuing appeal of this character that many of us associated with the late 1960s. When Smith left, there was a wide spread expectation that the character might sink back into obscurity but crime novelist Meltzer stepped in and keep the momentum going. From there, Meltzer created Identity Crisis, one of the most controversial and talked about miniseries to hit mainstream comics in some time. I have to admit that the death of Sue Dibney, the wife of the Elongated Man, brought tears to my eyes, even though I had only limited familiarity and interest in the character previously. And the ethical issues explored through the series cut deeper than most superhero comics on the market today. Some feel that he has permanently damaged the relations among the core DC characters, but he argues below that he has simply paved the way for the redefinition of their relationship that is starting to unfold as he has taken over control of Justice League. And, oh, by the way, when Meltzer isn't writing novels or comics, he helped to create the television series, Jack and Bobby.

Meltzer was nice enough to respond to some of my questions about his experiences of moving between media and about the particular experience of writing within a mainstream superhero franchise.

You would seem to be part of a new generation of storytellers who move fluidly across different media platforms, having work in comics, novels, and television. What factors have shaped or hindered your ability to work across so many different media?

With the world running on Internet time, I think there's been a huge shift in the fluidity between mediums in just the past five years, thanks in large part to people like Kevin Smith. Once that happened, the walls really came down. Especially, in Hollywood, where the Emperor's New Clothes rules, and where so many people need to have someone else say it before they'll say it themselves. For example, when I first said that I'd like to try television, I was told, "Well, you're a novelist..." But the moment CBS said they were interested in one of my novels, suddenly I was a TV creator. That's how Jack & Bobby was born. Today, the movement seems obvious -- a good story is a good story. But that's only a recent development.

You have worked as a novelist constructing your own characters and you have worked for DC developing new storylines for characters such as Superman or Batman which have been around since the 1930s. What do you see as the benefits and challenges of working with pre-established characters?

They force you to work different muscles in your brain. With Superman or Batman, I can't just make up any character trait. I have to work twice as hard to find something in them that a reader has never seen before. But that's the thrill.

The Elongated Man mourning the death of his wife Sue Dibny has quickly emerged as one of the iconic moments in contemporary comics, reappearing across a range of other books as we play out the implications of this moment for the entire DC universe. What do you think it is about this moment that has had such a great impact?

I think so much of it belongs to Rags Morales's stunning visual. In the script, I wanted this shot to be just like that shot in The Shawshank Redemption, with Tim Robbins looking up at the sky, the rain falling down around him -- but instead of joy, I wanted a moment of horror. I wanted to be looking straight down at Ralph and Sue. Rags called me up and said "I really want to do it at a little bit of angle." I said "No, no, no, you have to trust me on this." He said, "I'll do it my way and if you don't like it, I'll do it your way." I sat at the fax machine waiting for it to come through and when he sent me the sketch, I called him and said "Your way."

Some critics have argued that superheroes are governed more by ethics than by politics. Clearly, the events of Identity Crisis reveal very different ethical codes at the hearts of the different superhero characters. Can you help us to map the different ethical compasses which govern their decisions?

I think the mistake is to assume that the superhero "ethical code" is limited to only truth and justice. If these characters are us, or at least ideals for us -- as I think every great hero must be -- then they should also be filled with our flaws. Embarrassment, revenge, regret, anger, and selfishness are hardly the things we think of when we think "superhero." But they are real emotional components of all of us. That's not my way of dancing around the map question -- it's my way of saying that I think there is no one map. No one moral compass. The range is what makes it interesting. Otherwise, everyone is Superman.

The DC universe has historically been known for the strong feeling of "comrades in arms," yet Identity Crisis really shattered the alliances that held the Justice League together. What do you see as the long-term implications of that loss of trust? How do you plan to deal with it as you move into writing Justice League?

It's odd -- I designed Identity Crisis to be a full return to that "comrades in arms." That's what I thought was lost all the years prior to it. It's what I thought Batman had lost being turned into such an ass (in some warped way of "honoring Miller"). Identity Crisis shows you the break-up -- but in doing so, it reaffirms why the "marriage" (and I mean that for all the characters) was so important. At the end, we once again realize why those comrades need to mend the family again. SO long-term...well, that's what you're seeing now in Justice League.

You have described yourself as a comics fan. In what ways can we see your work within the comics industry as a form of fan fiction? To what degree are you playing out fantasies you had as a reader of comics? What changes as you get the power to shape the official mythology?

It's all fanfic until the copyright owners pay you to do it. And that may seem a small distinction, but it's not. As for playing out fantasies, I sure hope it's not just that. The stories I tell aren't what -I- -want- to happen. They're what I find most interesting. Again, a subtle distinction that gives headaches as you contemplate it. But what does change when you shape the mythology officially is, well...I think you add this x-factor of seriousness that you just don't get when you're standing in front of the mirror singing into your hairbrush. When you're on the stage and the lights are on you and the crowd is waiting for you to open your mouth...only a fool or a corpse doesn't treat it differently.

The superhero genre is constantly shaped by borrowings from other genres. I wonder what you bring to writing comics from your work in other genres -- crime fiction, political drama? What changes as you play with these conventions within the superhero comic?

The odd part is, I think my novels are more influenced by my comic work. The commitment to character in the comics forces me to make the novels more character-driven. I owe comics for that. As for my effect on comics, that's for others to decide...

You are now writing Justice League. I am really not looking here for spoilers about the series, but I wonder if you could give us some sense of the philosophy which will shape these stories? What do you want to add to their saga that differs from the ways they have been treated by previous writers?

I hope I always bring an exploration of the characters that's true to each character -- and fascinating for us in that it explores some part of the human condition. Certainly, The Tornado's Path, the first arc, tackles that issue from page one. As for what I add that differs from others before, I don't need or want to change the past. All I want is to add a new section to the quilt.