Designing the Future of Journalism: An Interview with USC's Nonny de la Pena (Part One)

My Journalism colleagues at USC's Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism are on the cutting edge of national and international conversations about the Future of Journalism. Our school is a site of experimentation and deliberation, sketching and testing new models, which see the emerging media environment not simply as a challenge to traditional forms of news but also as an opportunity to expand resources available to reporters. The School has the right mix of vision and pragmatism -- trying to imagine new possibilities, trying to test them against current realities. Or as Annenberg's dean Ernest Wilson likes to put it, the school is a place where "cool stuff happens." (Well, sometimes he puts it in a bit more colorful language.)

This past week, one of my Annenberg colleagues, Nonny De La Pena, received a Knight News Challenge grant to support the work she is doing around Stroome, a web platform which provides tools and communities to support the collaborative production and remixing of news content.

I had known De La Pena for some yearss and was delighted to find her here when I moved to the west coast. She's constantly probing, trying to imagine new affordances for presenting information to publics in compelling ways, and she's got the hacker instinct to prototype and test her ideas as soon into the process as possible. She has long sought to promote and map the space of immersive journalism. Don't know what that is? You will soon.

The following interview was conducted about a month ago, when Stroome had first launched, and it lays out some of her key research initiatives -- from Gone Gitmo, which uses Second Life to explore human rights issues, to Stroome, which provides citizen journalists new tools for collaboration.

What do you mean by "immersive journalism"? What are some examples of work which falls under this description?

Immersive journalism is a novel way to utilize gaming platforms and virtual environments to convey news, documentary and non-fiction stories. These stories can be set in online virtual worlds such as Second Life or produced using a head-tracked head-mounted display system that puts the individual into a virtual body or with a body-tracking Cave. Capitalizing on the sense of presence that comes with well-made virtual reality scenarios, these platforms provide an immersive experience that can offer unprecedented access to the sights and sounds, and possibly feelings and emotions that accompany the news.

Participants move through the story as a digital representation of themselves or as one of the subjects about which the story is being told. Visual and audio primary source material from the physical world reinforce the concept that participants are experiencing a nonfiction story, with the video, sounds or photographs acting on the narrative. For example, video that triggers at key points in the virtual landscape remind a participant that the computer generated environment is grounded in the physical world. Scripted events that create a first person interaction with the reportage can also help create a feeling of "being there." Also, participants can query or interact with the elements around them to learn more about the details or context of the news story.

In collaboration with digital media artist Peggy Weil, we have built several prototypes. Gone Gitmo, a virtual Guantanamo Bay prison built in Second Life, allows participants to explore a place that is inaccessible to the average American citizen and press. (In fact, the Pentagon just kicked out four reporters who have been covering the prison for years.) Gone Gitmo includes an experience on what it might be like to be detained, hooded and then imprisoned in Camp X-Ray. It also examines the ramifications of losing habeas corpus rights. Another prototype using Second Life, Cap & Trade, is a news report on the carbon market that sends people on a journey to follow the money in order to try to better understand the complexities and human consequences of trading carbon credits.

A third prototype is based on the interrogation logs of Detainee 063, Mohammed Al Qahtani, who had been declared tortured by the Bush. Built at the Event Lab in Barcelona with Mel Slater and his team, we used head mounted display (HMD) technology to put participants into the virtual body of a detainee who is held in what is referred to as a "stress position." When the participants look around, they see a virtual mirror and the figure in that mirror, a digital avatar who looks like a detainee, moves in unison with the participant. Participants also wear a breathing strap that programs their avatars to breathe at the same time, further enhancing the sense of virtual body ownership. Throughout, the sounds of the Al Qahtani interrogation plays as if it is coming from the next room. While research data was not collected on this particular prototype, every participant anecdotally reported that their body was hunched over in a stress position when in fact they were sitting upright.

What relationship exists if any between "immersive journalism" and "news gaming"?

News games embrace gaming protocols. The player undertakes a task or pursues a goal, voluntarily constrained by agreed upon rules, and must take action to advance position. Progress is often measured by indicators such as levels or points. In contrast, a participant in immersive journalism isn't playing a game but is put into an experience where she is participating and affected by events but may or may not have agency to change a situation. Immersive journalism also parallels a news narrative playing out in the physical world much like a piece in a newspaper or segment on television and while one might experience the story from different starting points, the story itself should not shift. Of course, that makes immersive journalism less available for irony or political commentary that news games like Gonzalo Frasco's September 12 achieve so successfully. In that game, you try to shoot terrorists on a crowded street, which means bystanders are always at risk. Moreover, whenever you launch a missle, the game spawns multiple replacements until the screen is overrun with terrorists.

How do we overcome the association which often exists between virtual worlds and play/fantasy? Given these associations, will people seek out virtual experiences which are potentially unpleasant or emotionally disturbing? Will they enter into these experiences with the "wrong" mental attitude?

It is exactly because of these issues that we recognized we would have to deal sensitively with questionable interrogation practices in Gone Gitmo -- we do not torture your avatar. We knew that there were many ways torture could become trivialized. However, as these environments become as ubiquitous as the 2D internet is today, I believe these spaces will become a natural environment for experiencing both fiction and non-fiction. Already children are growing up using avatars in populated virtual worlds like Club Penguin and Pixie Hollow. Our web, which uses Google or other 2D spaces as a point of entry, is quite lonely for them -- nobody is there.

Nonny de la Peña is a Senior Research Fellow exploring Immersive Journalism, a novel way to utilize gaming platforms and virtual environments to convey news, documentary and non-fiction stories. Her recent projects include, "Gone Gitmo," a virtual Guantanamo Bay Prison in Second Life, which was prototyped with funding from the MacArthur Foundation and employs first person experience and spatial narrative. Another project, "IPSRESS", is a collaboration with the Event Lab in London and Barcelona which investigates the use of head mounted display technology to evoke feelings of presence in reportage. A former correspondent for Newsweek Magazine, de la Peña has written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Time Magazine, Hispanic and others. She has also directed and produced a number of feature documentary films that have been screened on national television and at theaters, festivals, and special events in more than 50 cities around the globe.

Choose Your Fictions Well

By now, hopefully, you have read Peter Ludlow's account of recent events in Second Life and perhaps have also followed along with the comments and disputes that have surrounded this post. By now, hopefully, you've started to form your own opinion about what happened, why it happened, what it all means, and perhaps, what constitutes the borders between griefing and anti-griefing in this context. The following set of comments were crafted between Ludlow and myself as we reflected on these events and what they may tell us about the interplay between fantasy and politics in virtual worlds. We hope it will provide a springboard for further discussion both on this blog and elsewhere. Choose your fictions well.

by Henry Jenkins and Peter Ludlow

In 2004, the two of us spent a lot of time reflecting on the Alphaville elections in The Sims Online. Those elections culminated in a contest between the self-declared incumbent Mr-President and Ashley Richardson, an avatar guided by a 14 year old girl from Palm Beach Florida. Initially, both of us marveled over the intensity of political activity surrounding the campaign, including a debate on national radio, and then, the aftermath of those elections, when it was discovered that the voting system had been rigged on Mr-President's behalf by notorious Alphaville mafioso, JC Soprano.

Coming so shortly after the 2000 elections, there was a sense that even in play, American democracy was broken. That was our first thought. But as we looked more closely, we discovered that the two candidates were playing very different games, understanding their investments in this online game world in very different terms -- one earnestly seeking to represent the interests of her constituency as if this were a student government election being played out on a much larger scale, the other playing a game where his transgressive fantasies of being a corrupt politico in a world controlled by organized crime could be more fully explored.

The problem was that the open-ended structure of The Sims Online, which both was and was not a game, and which supports, like James Paul Gee suggests, multiple sets of goals and multiple paths to success, did not force players to actively negotiate between competing perceptions of what was going on. Both could play their own games, explore their own fantasies, and it became an issue because their actions impinged on each other's experience and impacted a much larger community of players. In other words, at least two different games collided in that moment.

As we flash forward to this new set of entanglements involving the Justice League in Second Life, we are struggling to figure out if we've made any real progress - in terms of making more explicit the competing frames of play which shape our experiences of online worlds, in having conceptual models which help us to figure out how seriously to take player's actions within virtual worlds, or even in terms of making real any hopes we have that virtual worlds can allow us to experiment with alternative models of what democracy looks like. Clearly, Second Life is if anything even more open ended than Sims Online in terms of its capacity to support participants with very different orientations and interests. It is perhaps the best embodiment of what Yochai Benkler talks about in The Wealth of Networks -- a place where differentially motivated groups and individuals co-exist within a mixed media ecology or a shared virtual world. Clearly, both the Alphaville elections and the recent JLU incident in Second Life reflect this feature of virtual worlds --different goals and narratives can coexist -- but apparently they cannot coexist peacefully indefinitely. Eventually the diverse goals and narratives collide.

Colliding narratives are a matter of routine in large virtual sandboxes like Second Life. Furries collide with Goreans, and both collide with military roleplay groups. In one famous case reported in the Alphaville Herald, a group of refugees from World War II Online colonized Second Life and soon came into conflict with a virtual gangster known as One Song and his plans to build a megamall next to their WWII roleplay sim (a conflict which led to One Song torching their headquarters -- a scale model of the Reichschtag -- which in turn led the WWII Onliners to dress as jihaddists and attack One Song's cybersex brothel, eventually taking it offline for a while). Even the military roleplay groups can come into conflict, as when one roleplay army attacked a space age Second Life army using only muskets.

Of course whether the goals and narratives are in collision, it is fair to say that not all of them are created equal. Some are praiseworthy and some demand reflection and critique.

Consider the praiseworthy first. We are interested in the ways that participatory culture can pave the way for greater civic participation and political engagement. The point of interest is the trajectory which takes a young person from being engaged creatively and expressively with a popular culture phenomenon to being courted as a potential activist whose actions matter in the "real world." For example, consider how the members of the Harry Potter Alliance have sought to make real the fantasy identities constructed around "Dumbledore's Army" in the J.K. Rowling books -- seeking to model their real world efforts at social change on the representations of activist identities constructed across the Harry Potter franchise, including organizing public interventions in the guise of "House competitions."

Or we might point to the ways that indigenous groups and environmental activists in many parts of the world (China, Brazil, the Middle East) have adopted the identity of the Na'Vi from James Cameron's Avatar as a mask through which to engage in real world interventions. Doing so gives them an empowering fantasy which can shape their own behavior and doing so can deploy a shared vocabulary of images which may generate much greater media attention. There is of course a long history of adopting the mask of the "other," or even fictional identities, in the name of social change. Isn't there a similarity to be drawn between painting yourself blue as a Na'Vi and painting yourself red for the original Boston Tea Party? Utilizing the trappings of fictional narratives can empower us to do things in the real world that perhaps we otherwise could not.

It is easy to see that the JLU incident in Second Life began with a similar sort of motives; clearly being a superhero in Second Life was an empowering fantasy for the participants. It allowed them a model of what meaningful intervention might look like and they were able to map that model onto the politics of Second Life in ways that made them feel heroic and larger than life, which empowered them to take action on behalf of their communities. Yet, at the same time, what we see is that it matters what fantasy provides your starting point.

As a long time comics fans, we can't help but note that the Justice League offers a problematic set of fantasy identities -- certainly a different set of utopian visions of political transformation, than say the characters within the Marvel Universe. The problem is that there is a kind of moral certainty which runs through the DC universe -- a sense that good guys can do no wrong, a troubling alignment of their interests with those of the state ("truth, justice, and the American way"), and a representation of pure evil in the form of the bad guys, all of which attract people with a certain way of seeing the world.

Reflecting on the consolidation of data in the JLU wiki and the violations of expectations about privacy, we cannot help but think of the ways the recent Dark Knight movie dealt with precisely the same issues: Batman can solve crimes more quickly if he can deploy surveillance equipment to spy on the citizens of Gotham City yet he faces an ethical debate about whether it is the right thing to do. The film ends up allowing him to spy on the public this one time, not to mention to take such actions as kidnapping business leaders, yet he pays a price in terms of moving back into the shadows, falling out of the good graces of the public.

It is worth pondering whether such fantasies entered into the mind of Kalel Venkman, as he pushed his campaign against griefers further and further. And we wonder what would have happened if the popular culture which inspired his particular kind of role play had adopted a different set of ethical and political values. We might ask "Who Watches the Watchmen?" though we are also reminded of Spider-man's "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility." Both Watchmen and Spider-Man offer more complex representations of what motivates superheroes to act and what factors can or should offer a check on their relentless war against the bad guys? The problem with Superman, oddly enough, was diagnosed by Lex Luthor himself (in the recent movie), in a passage that Haruhi Thespian quoted when he informed the JLU that he was working for their enemies at Woodbury University: "Gods are selfish beings who fly around in little red capes and don't share their power with mankind. No, I don't want to be a god. I just want to bring fire to the people. And... I want my cut."

Many of the revisionist superhero fantasies which came out of the 1980s -- including those by Frank Miller and Alan Moore -- raised the question of whether superheroes helped to create the villains they battled or at least attracted them to particular geographic locations. Think about the Batman/Joker relationship: "You created me and I created you," Tim Burton told us. Would there be costumed bad guys if there were no costumed good guys?

The Superhero's battle against evil becomes meaningless if there is no more evil to be battled. And so this revisionist argument goes, the Superhero starts to manufacture villains for his or her rogues gallery to fight, or perhaps, in the more fascistic versions of the superhero genre, starts to project evil onto innocent bystanders. Would the Woodbury campus on Second Life even exist without Kalel Venkman as an enemy? Woodbury leader Tizzers Foxchase has confided that he uses Kalel to keep the Woodbury kids engaged and to prevent their virtual campus from turning into the ghost town that most virtual campuses have become.

So, again, we can see what happened here as an outgrowth of a particular kind of fantasy being played out in the virtual world. Maybe Kalel Venkman even took a certain pleasure in "crossing lines," moving from the pure virtue of the classic DC superheroes towards a darker vision of the dark knight working from the shadows, doing what constitutionally regulated authorities could not do, in order to redeem a world which is otherwise beyond hope.

That said, we can only speculate on what sort of civic fantasies are at play here -- for example, what fantasies motivate the various griefer groups (the W-Hats, the channers etc) as they seek to get their LOLs by engaging in what they surely know is anti-social behavior? There is often a sense that virtual worlds allow us to enact transgressive fantasies freed of their real world consequences and if anyone objects, they are just taking things too seriously. This takes us all the way back to Julian Dibbel's "A Rape in Cyberspace" and the debate about Mr. Bungle the Clown and whether his actions are simply a form of nasty-minded play or whether they can be understood as "rape" by those most invested in their characters and the integrity of their virtual community.

On the other hand, perhaps the greifer memes about "serious business" do offer an important counterpoint to the corporate take-over of the internet. Maybe someone should take issue with the corporatist narrative about the purpose of the world wide web by offering that it ought also to be a place for play and silliness. Whether or not such lines of defense are exculpatory, they are certainly taken on by griefers, as interview after interview with griefers in the Herald has shown.

For that matter, what kinds of civic fantasies have governed the Woodbury group, with their sense of rightous indignation at being falsely accused, with their efforts to plant spies in Kalel's headquarters and thus flirt with risk? Or for that matter, what about the Alphaville Herald's conception of itself as a muckraking publication trying to rip the masks off the members of the Justice League? Are they all playing different games here or does each contribute something to the game which the others need in order to work through their fantasies, a warped version of Richard Bartle's ecology of player types?

Our point is not that these competing narratives are wrong or disingenuous, it is rather that they need to be investigated and critiqued, for these are the narratives and strategies for play that are weaving the foundations not just for virtual worlds but for our future online lives. And of course, as cases like the Harry Potter Alliance show, they also motivate our "real life" actions and attitudes.

No doubt by this point some readers are thinking that all of these people have too much time on their hands, that they are taking events in virtual worlds too seriously. This criticism actually packs two criticisms within it. First, there is the assumption that the virtual world itself is of little interest. Second there is the assumption that only the confused would use fictional narratives and trappings guide their real lives. On this latter point, no one who is using Harry Potter or the Na'vi to inspire their real life actions is confused into thinking they are wizzards or very tall blue extraterrestrial beings. Similarly, Kaleel Venkman presumably does not believe he has superman powers. These features of fictional characters do not transfer into the real world. Clearly. But what does transfer are the norms, attitudes, virtues and vices of these characters. We cannot jump over tall buildings with a single bound, but we can adopt Superman's ideas of what is right and his sense of self-certainty. The question, of course, is whether we *ought* to adopt such norms and attitudes.

As for the first question -- whether what transpires in virtual worlds matters -- this is a question that could have been intelligibly raised several years ago, but not today. Virtual worlds are rapidly becoming important platforms for work, socializing, education, and play, and given the amount of time that our children will spend in such worlds it is important to reflect on the norms that are being uploaded into those worlds today.

Clearly for virtual worlds to work they have to be open to play and experimentation, which requires suspending some of the rules that govern real world civic life. Yet, at the same time, some forms of political play fray the social contract which holds the world together, disrupting the experience of others, and destroying the infrastructure they all need in order to have meaningful experiences there. The story of the JLU invites us to ask the question -- at what point did the campaign against griefers become itself a kind of griefing, which did more to damage than to defend the integrity of other participant's virtual lives? Or to put it another way, the sandbox can allow many forms of roleplay and many competing narratives, but when the game becomes too big it impinges on the play and narratives of others. Playing well together is something we were supposed to have learned in kindergarten, but as this story shows, doing so is not as easy as it seems.

Watching the Watchers: Power and Politics in Second Life (Part One)

In early 2007, I ran an interview on this blog with Peter Ludlow, who teaches in the Philosophy Department at Northwestern University, and who has emerged as a key observer of how people are interacting within virtual worlds, such as The Sims Online and Second Life. Ludlow, along with his coauthor, Mark Wallace, wrote a book for MIT Press, The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid Which Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse, which I am planning to teach as part of a course I am developing this fall for the USC Journalism school on civic media. Ludlow emailed me recently with news of some fascinating new developments in Second Life. It was a story which raised such fascinating issues about fantasy and play, about the shifting borders between pro-social and anti-social behavior, about rights and responsibilities, and about the governance of virtual worlds that I felt like I had to share it now. Over the next two installments, I will be sharing Ludlow's account of what's been happening in Second Life, an account which places it in the context of the larger history of virtual worlds. Afterwords, I will share a joint statement which emerged from our conversations together about what this all means.

Watching the Watchers

By Peter Ludlow

Dept. of Philosophy

Northwestern University

People who have spent time inside virtual worlds are familiar with griefers - game players (stereoptypically adolescent males) who engage in transgressive online gameplay to disrupt the online experience for others. The transgressive behavior might range from profanity, scatological behavior and racism to the writing of programs (scripts) that tax the servers of the virtual world to the point where it goes offline.

If you are familiar with griefers, then you are probably also familiar with user created virtual security operations that have emerged to counter griefers. For example, Ludlow and Wallace (2008) describe a case inside of (the now defunct) virtual world The Sims Online. Fed up with the behavior of a handful of griefers, a group of players formed a virtual paramilitary organization called "The Sim Shadow Government" (SSG). Organized into an executive branch, an intel branch, and a "war department", the SSG monitored the movement of griefers inside of The Sims Online, followed them in the game, warned other users about them by using negative reputational tags, and often filed "abuse reports" with the game company (for example, reporting players for violations of the terms of service of the game company).

SSG Intelligence Branch, organizational chart.

Some players inside of The Sims Online felt that the SSG went too far in their operations. Members of the SSG were quite capable of hounding people out of the game without benefit of fair hearing or trial, and they were also very close to the game monitors of the game company, yielding charges of favoritism. Protest organizations with names like "Freedom Gameplay" and "The Lightsavers" (dedicated to casting out the shadows) emerged and pushed back with anti-SSG propaganda and with griefing attacks against the SSG itself.

Freedom Gameplay organizes against the SSG

This might seem like an odd and fleeting phenomenon, but in fact it is replicated many times over in virtual worlds. Trouble makers enter the world, and antibodies form to fight the trouble makers, apparently as a completely emergent phenomenon. The only difference is that as virtual worlds become more important and visually rich the intensity of the battles has risen dramatically. A recent episode from Second Life illustrates just how dramatically.

Second Life, of course, is a virtual world in which the developers provide users with robust tools to build and "script" objects, ranging from clothing and homes to vehicles and weapons. The result is that there is much user created content - some of it very edifying, some of it junk, and some of it obscene. For example, a Second Life griefer group known as the W-Hats had a property featuring giant penises, swastikas, and a "build" with a Death Star blasting the World Trade Center.

The W-Hat "build"

Another griefer group, called the Patriotic Nigras (PN) routinely engaged in racist and transgressive behavior, targeting clubs inside of Second Life and took credit for griefing the Second Life political campaign headquarters for John Edwards (The W-Hats also took credit. The Edwards campaign blamed Second Life Republicans).

John Edwards' virtual campaign headquarters griefed. PN take credit.

The PN in turn had been spawned by an infamous internet web site known as 4chan - an online site famous for its adolescent hijinxs that included spamming their enemies with famous scatological internet content like "Tub Girl" and "Goatsee". More specifically, the PN had been organized on /b/, a section of the 4chan site dedicated to transgressive behavior.

The PN actually came into existence in 2005, when members of 4chan ("channers") decided to raid Habbo Hotel, a virtual world aimed at younger children. The channers created black presenting avatars with afros, and surrounded Habbo's virtual swimming pool warning the children that "the pool is closed because of aids." Thus were born the PN, and their slogan (still used) "Pool's Closed". A griefer organization like that with a permanent presence inside of Second Life was bound to be the virus from which a virtual vigilante group emerged.

Pool is closed: 4chan invades Habbo Hotel, 2005

Channers get transgressive.

The PN comes to SL and attacks the Gay Yiffing Club (GYC) with self-replicating Marios

In 2006, a Second Life avatar by the name of Kalel Venkman decided to create a vigilante group to fight the likes of the PN, and he decided it would be fun to do it in the guise of comic book superheroes. He donned a Superman skin, and he named his group the "Justice League Unlimited." Other familiar superheroes soon followed, including The Green Lantern, Batman, Wonder Woman, and others.

A New Sheriff in town: the JLU

JLU Members in happier times.

In real life, Kaleel was a late middle aged technical writer living in Simi California. He apparently had flex time, and he also appeared to have sufficient charm and gravitas to attract members to the Justice League and to keep them well organized and on mission. Their Justice League headquarters had a marvelous NASA quality control room, with monitors that displayed constant updates coming in from sensors all over the Second Life grid. The updates also informed the League members what representatives from the game company were online. As with the SSG, the Justice League had close contacts with employees of the game company (Linden Lab), and utilized those relationships in filing abuse reports against other players.

What perhaps began as a fun exercise in roleplay soon began to go awry. Overzealous Justice League members began abuse reporting heavily, and also began picking fights with unlikely groups within Second Life. For example, the Justice League was banned from Furnation (an area inside Second Life dedicated to players that like to don anthropomorphized animal costumes), because of their excessive vigilantism.

The JLU of course clashed with the PN, but the problem became determining who was really a member of the PN and who was simply in the orbit of the PN. Matters took on fractal complexity when some students of Woodbury University (a real life University with a virtual campus inside Second Life) became associated with 4chan and the PN. In what seemed like a bizarre case of guilt by association, the members of the Justice League took on the students of Woodbury University, at one point successfully getting Linden Lab to shut down Woodbury Island (the virtual campus). Naturally matters quickly escalated.

Someone (presumably from the Justice League) contacted the administration at Woodbury University to complain about the faculty supervisor of Woodbury and to argue (in effect) that he was corrupting innocent youth and inspiring them to griefer ways. In turn, the students, led by the avatar Tizzers Foxchase (Jordan Belino in real life) turned up the heat on Kalel, to the point where a number of Woodbury students went trick or treating at Kalel's house on Halloween. Kalel wasn't home, so the students told his wife to tell him that Woodbury had been there. Kalel naturally flipped out.

Tizzers Foxchase

Tizzers herself was not a member of the PN; she seemed to have not much more of an agenda than to fight the Justice League and defend Woodbury. For Kalel, however, the Woodbury claims of innocence were nothing more than Eddie Haskelling ("lovely hair Mrs. Cleaver"). Tizzers was a griefer in spite of her nice young lady rap, and that was that. The problem was that more and more people were starting to look like griefers to Kalel, including people who were his competition in the virtual world security business - or at least this was the claim of Intlibber Brautigan, a Second Life real estate mogul, famous for posting libertarian manifestos on the forums. If Intlibber was to be believed, the harassment from the Justice League had been financially motivated and astoundingly heavy handed.

"How about the meanness of the JLU in getting countless innocents permabanned from SL for the mere act of being a black avatar, or saying an internet meme in chat, or being falsely abuse reported with impossible charges (like "copybotting a megaprim owned by Michael Linden"), or participating in public protests.

Yes, these people deserve a lot more than "a little meanness". Lets get it straight, they are snitches, rats, stool pigeons, LIARS, defamers, collaborators, trespassers, and instigators. Siobahn McCallen, who resided in my sims with her girlfriends yet worked with JLU in defaming me and encouraging my residents to leave. These sort of people don't deserve niceness."

Intlibber also complained that the tactics of the JLU worked to get innocent gamers banned:

"Anybody who teleports into a monitored sim within 5 minutes before a sim crashes gets logged to their db as a suspect, and given a score. The number of times this happens jacks up your score. Your score is further handicapped by how young your avatar is and what your payment status is (helps to catch throwaway alts quickly)."

Any account that scores too highly on this system gets automatically abuse reported by a bot to Linden Lab, no further investigation done by human hands.

The JLU contended that IntLibber had hired the PN to grief his enemies in the virtual real estate business, but no evidence was brought forward.

It wasn't just their competitors that were marked as griefers; the Alphaville Herald, which had been reporting on griefers in virtual worlds since 2003, was a griefer media organ in Kalels eyes. The Herald's editor, an avatar Pixeleen Mistral was therefore also a griefer. Kalel came to falsely believe that Pixeleen was identical with me, and so I must be a griefer too. There were griefers everywhere, it seemed.

(More to Come. Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel)

"A Kind of Vast Game": An Interview with Ethan Gilsdorf (Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks) (Part Two)

Throughout the book, you hint at a mainstreaming of geek culture, which is also evoked in the quotation above. How close are we to seeing this happen? What is gained or lost for the communities you studied if geek goes mainstream?

I think the mainstreaming has happened already. Once you see the term "geek" being co-opted and used by other subcultures --- wine geek, film geek, fixed gear bicycle geek --- you know the word, at least in its pejorative sense, has passed. And films like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Twilight, Spider-Man and Batman have made the previously cloistered worlds of comic books, superheroes, horror, fantasy, science fiction and fandom a palatable experience, at least in a superficial way. There's an entire generation of kids --- millions --- who have now grown up either reading Harry Potter or having it read to them. Jocks and dweebs equally play Xbox and Playstation games. That guarantees (I think) that these kids aren't going to be ostracized for having geekly hobbies.

To be "cool" is to like things because everyone else does. To be a "geek" is the opposite: to have a passion, to care about the details of a thing, to care about getting it right, to go deep into a subject matter --- and not care what people think. Geeks are the keepers of that secret flame for something long before it's cool, or long after the fad has passed, whether or not the thing they loved was ever in fashion or not. The downside of the mainstreaming of geek culture is that a lot of geeks have forged their identities as being counter to the mainstream --- i.e. we are weird and therefore special, and you all are boring and mainstream. Now that traditional geek areas have gone mainstream, I suspect that those who want to remain "geeks" will need to find new areas to colonize. The fringe will have to move further to the edge.

In many ways, your book can be seen as an argument for the value -- no, values -- of escapism. How would you define escapism and to what degree is it a positive force in the lives of the people you interviewed?

I struggled with using the terms "escapism" and "escapist" because of the negative associations with them (both mine and the culture's) and also because I wanted to discover how fantasy and gaming had real meaning, not just as mindless distraction. But aside from the "healthy" aspects of gaming and fantasy that I mention above (that these activities provide community, rites of passage, ethics and values, personality development through role-playing, etc), I do think that "escapism" --- defined as a release, as mental downtime --- is essential. In that regard, it doesn't really matter what you escape into, as long as it isn't taken to the extreme. America's obsession with watching TV is a perfect, and totally acceptable way to escape. No one really thinks it's weird to watch 4 hours of TV reality programming or basketball playoffs each day. But if you play 4 hours of WoW, then many think you're anti-social.

Of course, anything can be taken too far. Sex, drugs, gambling, pornography, eating, shopping, the Internet --- all of these activities, when taken to the extreme, can be dangerous. They can be used to blot out the self. No one, in their right mind, should use any one experience, like a movie or game or book, to find meaning and attribute so much meaning to it that it looms large to the exclusion of other influences, or is a substitute for intimate human relationships. We all need balanced lives.

What bothers me with the "escapist" label for fantasy in particular is that many who don't get it accuse Tolkien, for example, of being frivolous. But Lord of the Rings is full of fully-realized characters who grapple with tough moral choices, endure great hardship, and make mistakes. Gollum is a great example of this: psychologically complex, twisted, haunted, damaged. Nothing "escapist" about that!

You end with this call: "so, my fellow freaks and geeks, if we must escape, let us escape for a reason." What kinds of reasons did you discover amongst the people you spoke with?

Fantasy escapism can be a way to retreat from the world --- not to avoid the world, but to take pause, and recharge our psychic batteries. In my book I went to New Zealand to play out my own obsessive Lord of the Rings movie location quest. When I was in Wellington, I interviewed Erica Challis, a blogger for the Tolkien movie fan site TheOneRing.net , which she co-founded as a way to report on news about the Rings movies shoot. She told me something about fantasy and escapism I had never considered: for people in oppressive societies who read Tolkien, the books gave them hope in hopeless times. "Fantasy is a genre people can read and retreat [to] and gather strength to face the real world," she said. Likewise, I think we need downtime to escape, but also to work out problems and issues and roles. Imaginary worlds offer solutions to problems --- they're a testing ground for ideas, a place to imagine other possibilities, other futures, other ways to live, to govern, to be. Then, with our D&D manuals put away and our Xbox consoles turned off, we can return to real life, rejuvenated to kick ass.

As you note, the stereotype of fantasy fans and gamers is that they are socially isolated. How central are the social dimensions of the play experiences you describe? How strong were the communities and relationships you observed in your travels?

The social aspects of gaming can't be underestimated. For many, like me, who never found their community in high school or college, gaming is huge. Same for the disabled, who can find a world of liberation in gaming that's free from judgment. Specifically with online games, where one's identity is masked, no one knows if you're in a wheelchair; you're judged based on how you play the game, not what you look like. Similarly, the social dynamics of gaming guilds can reinforce values; guilds are often founded on ethical codes and ideals the players share (even religious values - there are Christian groups who go on raids together in WoW!). Many gaming and live-action role-playing groups like the Society for Creative Anachronism are involved in public service and charity work. Conventions like DragonCon and Gen Con organize blood drives and donate to food banks. In a fantasy setting, the games end up creating shared values, which is something we all crave, and a re-entry point to connect with the real world.

The need to hang out and do things together, to participate in shared interests, I think is hardwired into our DNA. But we can't all be on the football team. For me, a misfit boy, I needed things to do with my peers. I craved the camaraderie and fellowship that team sports denied me, minus the perils of a testosterone-charged locker room. Dungeons & Dragons was that collaborative refuge, outlet, and playing field. This desire is the same for many others. And I think the various geek communities we encounter in Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks are among the most welcoming of all subcultures. They are accepting, kind, generous, because they know what it's like to sit alone at the cafeteria table, to not have friends. And I think we geeks carry that memory of loneliness through our lives, and reach out to those who need a safe haven of their own.

There's a wonderful organization called The Game Loft in Belfast, Maine that I found out about (alas!) after I wrote my book. The Game Loft is run similar to a traditional youth development-oriented organization like the Boy or Girl Scouts, except that it uses role-playing and table-top strategy games to teach kids (in a sort of underground, indirect way) how to be social, make friendships, take risks, form bonds with mentors, become assertive, become leaders and become involved in their communities. They have a safe and supervised space for kids to interact and test out these "roles" so they can be functioning adults in society. It's a wonderful example of turning the "gaming is anti-social" stereotype on its head.

One of the closing images of the book is of you burying your Lord of the Ring collectibles in the soil of New Zealand and walking away. Are you really ready to walk away from the fantasy and play you describe in the book? What aspects of this culture will you carry with you?

Spoiler alert! Just kidding. I think that moment in the book was impulsive, but also a kind of rite of passage for me. But rather than see that as leaving those plastic figurines behind, and fantasy behind, I see that moment as leaving a part of ME behind in New Zealand. I wanted to be part of that movie experience, but couldn't. Leaving part of me there was the next best thing. It was my homage to my fandom. I still have all my old D&D gear, and I still have other trophies from my quest. I'm not willing to walk away. My quest put me in touch with so many people who felt no shame about their geekly passions. They embraced their inner geek. And they gave me courage to "out" myself as a geek. I'm back.

"A Kind of Vast Game": An Interview with Ethan Gilsdorf (Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks)

My book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture begins with a critique of the stereotypical construction of the fan as someone who suffers from arrested development, has limited social life, is driven by consumption, and is incapable of separating fantasy from reality. This stereotype has had an unbearably long shelf life. It would have been recognizable to Cervantes when he wrote about Don Q., the man who confuses windmills for giants, and it still persists to the present day, despite two plus decades of fan studies research, significant shifts in the social visibility and economic centrality of fans, and of course, the emergence of what some have called "geek chic." So, what are we going to do about these stereotypes? The question comes to mind as I sit down this week with Ethan Gilsdorf, the author of a fascinating book, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, which tackles some of popular assumptions about fans and gamers head on. Some have been troubled with the ways that the book reproduces common stereotypes and anxieties about those of us who engage with the materials of popular fantasy even as it also seeks to challenge them. The author is the first to note that he went into this project with a fair amount of emotional baggage and he tries to describe the process of working through those squicks through the book. The book itself does depict fans and gamers in a sympathetic light, exploring the complex cultural practices they have developed, explaining the ways that their fantasy lives become interconnected with their social lives and personal identity, and ultimately constructing a positive account of the value of "escapism" and popular entertainment. Glisdorf is an engaging and thoughtful writer.

That said, there were passages in the book which made me wince. So, I decided in this interview to confront him about some of those passages and draw him out further about what he now believes about the communities he studied. He responded with frankness and generosity. I am sharing this interview with an understanding that there are going to be differences of opinion among aca-fen about whether or not he dealt appropriately with these issues in the book and am hoping that this interview can start rather than close a dialogue around these issues of popular representations of fans and gamers.

It's safe to say that you had a conflicted relationship with your subject matter. While you draw on your own youthful experiences with D&D and your ongoing interest in Tolkien, you also seemed to carry with you many preconceptions and stereotypes about what adult "fantasy" and gamer fans would be like. How did these stereotypes color what you experienced while researching the book?

Conflicted indeed! Twenty-five years had passed since I last read Tolkien and played Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) in high school, since I had been conversant in all things geek. As I discuss in my book, I was that shy, introverted, social awkward, bookish kid --- and an obsessed D&Der clinging to an "alternative" identity and fantasy life. D&D also coincided with a tough personal time for me as a teenager: my mother had become severely disabled when I was 12, and gaming helped me escape and not "deal" with the real world. Instead, I focused on adventures and quests in imaginary worlds where I had some control and mastery. Because of my adolescence, fantasy had negative connotations for me. When I reached adulthood, I tried to leave that version of myself behind. I wanted to remake myself as cool and popular, not geeky and invisible.

Yet I also knew, even before embarking on my quest in Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, that fantasy fandom and gaming had changed. It had become mainstream and largely more acceptable: Harry Potter, console gaming, World of Warcraft and other MMOs, Lord of the Rings, etc. I figured that old image of the horned-rimmed glasses and slide-rule in the breast pocket nerd was no longer relevant. At the same time, I knew the crude stereotypes that we all think about when we imagine a typical "gamer," "computer science nerd," or "science fiction reader" probably still existed in some primordially form, and had not entirely disappeared.

I also suspected that geeks themselves had become more savvy, more self-aware, more able to poke fun at themselves. I had picked up on this from messages that filtered down from pop culture: Think the Comic Book Guy in The Simpsons or the Steve Carrell character in The 40 Year Old Virgin. The geek community has largely embraced these negative stereotypes --- the image of guys who are introverted and without girlfriends, obese, snooty, fast-talking, unaware of social cues, super-smart but a bit "off," wear Tshirts with slogans, work in dead end jobs, and not particularly concerned with their physical appearance, etc. --- as a way to reclaim the terms of their own persecution, just like other marginalized subcultures and groups have done.

All of these stereotypes colored what I experienced while researching the book. They gave me a worst-case scenario as a baseline. When I hit the road for my quest, I hoped that my clunky and psychologically-convenient stereotypes would be smashed to smithereens. At the same time, in the back of my mind, I still worried that modern gamers, geeks or fanboys/girls I'd encounter in my 21st century travels might still adhere to that image of myself in high school.

Ultimately, the stereotypes made me more aware of the tough job I was facing. They kept me on my guard, and helped me question my assumptions, but also I felt compelled to be more sympathetic, more generous. I wanted to be fair, but being a once-and-future geek, I didn't want to make fun of anyone. I wanted to tell positive stories ---not the negative ones about gamers and geeks. Most of the folks I encountered understood their oddballness, and celebrated it. The men and women I interviewed who represented the various subcultures that I explore in Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks didn't apologize or hide their geekly hobbies. That was liberating for me.

I now see, in retrospect, that over those intervening years, that those not terribly positive images of gamers and fantasy fans I carried around in my head were superficial and unfair. These ideas and stereotypes were somewhat extreme, antiquated and largely (and ironically) imaginary. But I think, the negative stereotyping was understandable --- they functioned as a distancing device, as a way to keep me away from what I knew, in my heart, I loved --- fantasy and gaming. My desire to turn away from fantasy and gaming gave birth to those harsher stereotypes in my mind. But it took me 25 years to figure that out, to come back into the fold.

Besides, "revenge of the nerds" type scenarios always play well.

You note that J.R.R. Tolkien, himself, had some conflicted feelings about the place of fantasy in contemporary culture. To what degree did his ambivalence help you to understand the sources of your own misgivings?

I think the ambivalence he expressed about his fantasy novels and the world he created, Middle-earth, helped me enormously. For him to admit that his novels were some "vast game" that in had gotten out of control --- the full quote, which I cite early in the book, is "I am not now at all sure that the tendency to treat the whole thing as a kind of vast game is really good, cert. not for me, who find that kind of thing only too fatally attractive" --- was a relief for me to read. Here was a guy, a well-respected "serious" scholar and philologist and Anglo-Saxon expert ribbed by his colleagues at Oxford; "How is your hobbit?" they'd tease him. Here was a high-brow academic "wasting his time" writing children's literature, fairy stories. Here was a man saw the dangers of falling down the his own self-made rabbit hole. He even had misgivings about the info-craving, geeky fandom he had unwittingly created, what he regrettably once called "my deplorable cultus." To see that a man like Tolkien had endured ridicule and himself questioned that he'd spent most of his life in a fantasy world was invaluable in me understanding and accepting my own misgivings.

I think all this put him on the defense --- and the offense. In a way, his essay "On Fairy-Stories" was his retort, his argument for the need for fantasy and fairy and heroic myth in the modern world. And in a way, Tolkien was the original obsessive fantasy geek, spending decades building his world, inventing languages, drawing maps, devising "rules" for his imaginary realm. And he did it all way, way before any of this was remotely cool. I think once his books really took off in the 1960s, people (and publishing, Hollywood, etc) began to see the genre as a lucrative one with a potential for a huge fan base. Tolkien truly helped legitimize and revitalize entire genre. Of course, Tolkien did not invent fantasy and swords and sorcery. But, in reviving its rules, he tapped into a hidden need in the culture. No one could have predicted how well his heroic, romantic, high fantasy would catch on.

Many of the people who read my blogs are fans and gamers of the kind you discuss throughout the book. What will they learn about themselves and their practices by looking at this world through your eyes?

I hope that they will come to reflect on the reasons that they are drawn to fantasy and games. During my dozens of interviews, I'd ask folks, "So why do you love Harry Potter?" or "Why do you spend so much time playing World of Warcraft?" The immediate answer was often "Because it's fun" or "because I like doing things with my friends." But I would probe deeper. And the answers were surprising: some told me that role-playing games and fantasy let them try out other selves, as a way to explore others suppressed sides of themselves. Others said that gaming let them behave bravely and boldly, and later import that into their real lives. Still others enjoyed play-acting a dastardly and malicious character, but in a safe setting, to work out negative and unresolved feelings. Some craved the combat, the competition and the physicality of it, as if a test, a rite of passage. Others found in gaming a way to defeat crushing isolation, to find fellowship, belonging, and their tribe. For those who role-played or wrote fanfic, they were drawn to fantasy because it gave permission to tell stories, to participate in a world where they are the heroes (rather than passively absorbing a narrative about someone else, as in the experience of reading a book or watching a movie). Moreover, fantasy inspired them. In those worlds, heroes do things we can't do in real life. They fight the good fight, and slay the evil orcs and evil dragons. They remind us again, as the cliché goes, "what is worth fighting for." Perhaps in reading my book, your readers might think, "Hey, that guy is a lot like me." I hope they'll recognize familiar stories and see themselves in my book. Or see new selves.

Your book concludes, "It seems as a culture, we have two options: We can be terrified of fantasy games, books, and movies and continue to marginalize them and their players. Or we can understand them, and see that fantasy in all its stripes has a proper place alongside other amusements." Where does the "terror" come from? What do people find threatening about the kinds of cultural identities and experiences you describe in your book?

I think the terror is this sense that a game world (WoW) or novel (Harry Potter) or movie (Avatar) is going to have a greater cultural influence on us than traditional institutions like parenting, school, religion, government. What if some other force is able to shape public opinion or show the public some potentially radical and mind-altering way of life? That threatens to usurp the power of traditional institutions which have the job of making meaning and creating structure in our society. Not surprisingly, when Avatar became such a big hit, and drew repeat viewers to theaters to its immersive 3D world, media stories popped up about "Avatar addicts" --- the fear being that a single experience like a movie can warp a mind into thinking "real life" is hardly worth our effort.

These fears naturally are coinciding at a time when traditional institutions are failing and losing their cultural relevance. These institutions feel threatened, and rightly so. But haven't we seen this fear expressed every generation? Think of how the establishment thought comic books, rock and roll, rap music, heavy metal music, etc (you name it) were the end of civilization as we know it. Concerns in the 1980s that D&D was going to corrupt the minds of teenagers or turn them into Satan worshippers (remember Jack Chick and Dark Dungeons? ... Mazes and Monsters</em>? --- it all now seem quaint today. But tomorrow, it's going to be the next thing. There's always the demon of the new.

Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the travel memoir-pop culture investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms.

After playing Dungeons & Dragons religiously in the 1970s and 1980s, Ethan Gilsdorf went on to become a poet, teacher, and journalist. In the U.S. and in Paris, he's worked as a freelance correspondent, guidebook writer, and film, book and restaurant reviewer. Now based in Somerville, Massachusetts, he publishes travel, arts, and pop culture stories regularly in the New York Times, Boston Globe, and Christian Science Monitor, and has been published in other magazines and newspapers including National Geographic Traveler, Psychology Today, and the Washington Post. His blog "Geek Pride" is seen regularly on PsychologyToday.com, and he also blogs for Boston.com's Globetrotting, Tor.com and TheOneRing.net. Gilsdorf has also been a guest as a fantasy and escapism expert on radio programs such as Air America's Inside Story and NPR's "Around And About." Follow Ethan's adventures.

Don't Miss Transmedia, Hollywood Conference March 16

Transmedia, Hollywood: S/Telling the Story is a one-day public symposium exploring the role of transmedia franchises in today's entertainment industries. Transmedia, Hollywood turns the spotlight on media creators, producers and executives and places them in critical dialogue with top researchers from across a wide spectrum of film, media and cultural studies to provide an interdisciplinary summit for the free interchange of insights about how transmedia works and what it means. Co-hosted by Denise Mann and Henry Jenkins, from UCLA and USC, two of the most prominent film schools and research centers in Los Angeles, Transmedia, Hollywood will take place Tuesday, March 16, 2010, on the eve of the annual Society of Cinema & Media Studies conference, the field's most distinguished gathering of film and media scholars and academics (March 17--21, 2010) in Los Angeles.

By coinciding with SCMS, Transmedia, Hollywood hopes to reach the widest possible scholarly audience and thus create a lasting impact in the field. It will give cinema and media scholars from around the world unprecedented access to top industry professionals and insight into their thinking and practices.

Mission

Transmedia, Hollywood: S/Telling the Story

As audiences followed stories as diverse as Heroes, Lost, Harry Potter, and Matrix, from one format to another--from traditional television series or films into comics, the Web, alternate reality or video games, toys and other merchandise--Hollywood quickly adopted the academic term "transmedia" and began plastering it above office doors to describe this latest cultural phenomenon. This is not to say that convergent culture and transmedia storytelling are new concepts; instead, the emergence of convergence can be traced to the 19th century when a Barnum and Bailey-style mode of entertainment first took hold, maturing in the mid-1950s with Walt Disney's visionary multi-platform, cross-promotional, merchandising extravaganza known as Disneyland.

Since then, Hollywood has created countless new transmedia titles, everything from Batman to Star Wars - an evolution only accelerated by the advent of digital convergence. While transmedia, in one way, vindicates the logic of the integrated media conglomerate and activates the synergies long hoped for by the captains of industry in charge of Hollywood's six big media groups, it may also prove to be more than they bargained for. Engaged, "lean-forward" consumers--coveted by advertisers and entertainers alike--are not content simply to watch traditional media but rather, they produce their own videos, remix other people's work, seek out those who share their interests, forging concordances and wiki's, fan fiction, and various forms of interactivity that are still in their infancy and that corporate Hollywood is just beginning to explore. Copyright law, guild rules, and the conventions of audience quantification are frequently operating at cross-purposes with these new, expansive sets of cultural-industrial practices. As the demise of the music industry shows, active audiences and technological advances can create an explosive combination, powerful enough to bring down an entire industry. The entertainment industry wants to embrace this new, active consumer while ensuring its own survival by seeking to recreate familiar rules of what is considered "valuable" and "entertainment" within traditional business models.

Transmedia, Hollywood turns the spotlight on media creators, producers and executives and places them in critical dialogue with top researchers from across a wide spectrum of film, media and cultural studies to provide an interdisciplinary summit for the free interchange of insights about how transmedia works and what it means.

Schedule

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

9:15--9:45 am

Registration

9:45--10:00 am

Welcome and Opening Remarks

Denise Mann, Associate Professor, Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television

Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, Annenberg School of Communication, USC

10:00--11:50 AM

Panel 1: "Reconfiguring Entertainment"

This panel brings together visionaries, people who think deeply about our experiences of play, fun, and entertainment, people whose expertise is rooted in a range of media (games, comics, film, television) to think about the future of entertainment as a concept. Transmedia designers often use the term, "mythologies," to describe the kinds of information rich environment they seek to build up around media franchise and deploy the term, "Bibles," to describe the accumulated plans for the unfolding of that serial narrative. Both of these terms link contemporary entertainment back to a much older tradition. So, are we simply talking about a largely timeless practice of storytelling as it gets relayed through new channels and platforms? Or are we seeing the emergence of new modes of expression, new kinds of experiences, which are only possible within a converged media landscape? What does it mean to have "fun" in the early 21st century and will this concept mean something different a decade from now? In what ways will the desire to produce and consume such experiences reconfigure the entertainment industry or conversely, how will the consolidation of media ownership generate or constrain new forms of popular culture? What models of media production, distribution, and consumption are implied by these future visions of entertainment?

Moderator: Henry Jenkins

Panelists: Mimi Ito, Associate Researcher, University of California Humanities Research Institute (Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children's Software; Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning With New Media; Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life)

Diane Nelson, President, DC Entertainment

Nils Peyron, Executive Vice President and Managing Partner, Blind Winks Productions

Richard Lemarchand, Lead Designer, Naughty Dog Software (Uncharted: Drake's Fortune; Uncharted 2: Among Thieves)

Jonathan Taplin, Professor, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California; CEO, Intertainer.

John Underkoffler, Oblong, G-Speak (Technical Advisor for Iron Man, Aeon Flux, Hulk, Taken, and Minority Report)

12:00--1:50 PM

Panel 2: "ARG: This is Not a Game.... But is it Always a Promotion?"

Using a collective intelligence model disguised as play, Alternate reality games, or ARGs, give any individual with a computer a means of problem-solving anything from global warming to the true meaning of the Dharma Institute conspiracy. ARGs also give instant "geek cred" to marketers from stuffy firms like Microsoft and McDonalds tasked with selling consumer goods to the Millennials. Are these elaborate scavenger hunts, which send players down an endless series of rabbit-holes in search of clues, teaching them how to think collectively or are they simply the latest in a long series of promotional tools designed to sell products to tech-savvy consumers? Unlike regular computer games, ARGS engage a multitude of players using a multitude of new technologies and social media formats--sending clues via Web sites, email, or just as likely, by means of an old-fashioned phone booth in some dusty, small town in Texas. For ARG creators, the new entertainment format represents rich, new storytelling opportunities, according to Joe DiNunzio, CEO of 42 Entertainment (AI, Halo 2, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest). However, for the big six media groups, the primary purpose of ARGs is promotional--a new-fangled way of selling Spielberg's AI (The Beast), WB's Dark Knight, Microsoft's Halo 2 (ilovebee's), or ABC's Lost (The Lost Experience). In other words, are ARGs simply a novel new way for the big six media groups to prompt several million avid fans to start beating the promotional drum on behalf of their favorite movie, TV series, or computer game or do they represent a new way of harnessing revolutionary thinking? In this panel, ARG creators, entertainment think-tank consultants, and media scholars will debate the social vs. commercial utilities associated with this latest form of social engagement.

Moderator: Denise Mann

Panelists: Ivan Askwith, Director of Strategy, Big Spaceship (clients include NBC, A&E, HBO, EPIX, Second Life, and Wrigley)

Will Brooker, Associate Professor, Kingston University, UK (Star Wars; Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture; The Bladerunner Experience; Using the Force; Batman Unmasked)

Steve Peters and Maureen McHugh, Founding Partners, No Mimes Media (Watchmen, The Dark Knight, Nine Inch Nails, Pirates of the Caribbean II)

Jordan Weisman, Founder, Smith & Tinker (The Beast, I Love Bees, Year Zero)

2:00--3:00 PM

Lunch Break

3:00--4:50 PM

Panel 3: "Designing Transmedia Worlds"

Transmedia entertainment relies as much on world-building as it does on traditional storytelling. Transmedia practices use the audience's fascination with exploring its richly detailed world (and its attendant mythology) to motivate their activities as they seek out and engage with content which has been dispersed across the media landscape. Recent projects, such as Cloverfield, True Blood, and District 9, have relied on transmedia strategies to generate audience interest in previously unknown fictional universes, often combining promotional and expositional functions. Derek Johnson has argued that these fictional worlds are "over-designed," involving much greater details in their conceptual phase than can be exploited through a single film or television series. This "overdesign" emergences through new kinds of collaborations between artists working both for the "mother ship," the primary franchise, and those working on media extensions, whether games, websites, "viral" videos, even park benches. In this new system, art directors and script writers end up working together in new ways as they build up credible worlds and manage complex continuities of information. What does it mean to talk about fictional worlds? How has this altered the processes behind conceptualizing, producing, and promoting media texts? What new skills are emerging as production people learn to introduce, refine, and expand these worlds through each installment of serial media texts? And how do they manage audience expectations that they will continue to learn something more about the world in each new text they consume? What does each media platform contribute to the exploration and elaboration of such worlds?

Moderator: Henry Jenkins

Panelists: David Bisbin, Art Director/Production Designer (Twilight, New Moon, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Drug Store Cowboy)

Danny Bilson, THQ (The Rocketeer, Medal of Honor, The Flash, The Sentinel)

Derek Johnson, Assistant Professor, University of North Texas

R. Eric Lieb, Partner in BlackLight Media; Former Editor-in-Chief, Atomic Comics; Former Director of Development, Fox Atomic (Jennifer's Body; I Love You Beth Cooper; 28 Weeks Later)

Laeta Kalogridis, Screenwriter (Shutter Island, Night Watch, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Battle Angel); Executive Producer (Birds of Prey, Bionic Woman)

Marti Noxon, Executive Producer/Writer (Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Prison Break; Grey's Anatomy; Mad Men)

Louisa Stein, Head of TV/Film Critical Studies Program, San Diego State University (Limits: New Media, Genre and Fan Texts; Watching Teen TV: Text and Culture)

5:00--6:50 PM

Panel 4: "Who Let the Fans In?: 'Next-Gen Digi-Marketing'"

Most Hollywood marketing campaigns remain overly reliant on expensive broadcast television commercials to reach a large cross-section of the audience despite growing evidence that avid fans are capable of generating powerful word of mouth. In the decade since The Blair Witch Project's website became a model for engaging a core audience by creating awareness online, a new generation of marketing executives has emerged, challenging the effectiveness of top-down strategies and advocating "bottom-up," social media marketing. By fusing storytelling and marketing--ranging from ABC's low-tech, user-generated aesthetic in "Lost Untangled" to Crispin, Porter + Bogusky's polished, eye-candy approach to selling Sprite in its "sublymonal advertising" campaign--this next generation of web marketers has upended previous notions about where content ends and the ad begins. Having grown up reading Watchman comics, playing Sims, and surfing the Web for like-minded members of their consumer tribe, these new media professionals come armed with the knowledge of what it means to be a fan; as a result, they are refashioning the processes and structures that inform the relationship between audience members and the culture industry--forcing today's media conglomerates to adapt to the new realities of the cultural-industrial complex while also ensuring their own survival. Gen-Y consumers' sophisticated understanding of, but less contentious relationship with brand marketing, invites today's media marketers to embrace a revolutionary mode of selling that may impact copyright law, guild agreements, professional standards, and the global labor market. What is the future of entertainment? Will the Internet be run by top-down mid-media corporate owners or bottom-up Web-bloggers or some yet to be realized combination of both?

Moderator: Denise Mann

Panelists: Emmanuelle Borde, Senior Vice-President, Digital Marketing, Sony Imageworks Interactive (digital campaigns for Spiderman, 2012, Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon)

John Caldwell, Professor, UCLA Department of Film, TV, Digital Media (Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Film/Television Work Worlds; Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film/Television; New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality; Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television)

Alan Friel, Partner, Wildman, Harrold, Allen & Dixon LLP

John Hegeman, Chief Marketing Office, New Regency Productions (marketing campaigns for Saw 1 & 2, Crash at Lionsgate; The Blair Witch Project at Artisan)

Roberta Pearson, Professor, University of Nottingham (Reading Lost; Cult Television; The Many Lives of Batman: Critical Approaches)

Steve Wax, Co-founder and Managing Partner, Campfire (HBO's True Blood, Audi's The Art of the Heist; Discovery Channel's Shark Week marketing adventure, Frenzied Waters).

7:00 PM

Reception

Lobby, USC Cinematic Arts Complex

Location

Ray Stark Family Theatre, SCA 108, USC Cinematic Arts Complex, Los Angeles http://cinema.usc.edu/assets/047/10153.pdf

Registration

Faculty/Students:

Event is free for faculty and students of accredited institutions. Registration includes conference badge and continental breakfast. Valid university I.D. is required for admission.

General Public:

Tickets for the general public are $25. Registration includes conference badge and continental breakfast.

To register and for more information, please go to: www.tft.ucla.edu/transmedia-conference

How Do You Sell an Artsy Board Game?

Part of the pleasure of relocating to the University of Southern California has been the chance to meet a whole new cast of characters, to discover just how intellectually diverse and interesting the students are here -- especially when you factor in that my classes attract students from across the two schools, Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism and the School of Cinematic Art --- where I have an appointment. It has always been my pleasure to help introduce some of my students to my readers and give you a glimpse of the kind of conversations that take place in my classroom. A few weeks ago, James Taylor, a student in my Transmedia Entertainment class, booked time during my office hours and came in bearing a beautifully crafted box, proceeded to unpack a game board and pieces, and asked if I wanted to play. We had a great conversation about his project -- The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands -- and the thinking behind his design. What I got a glimpse into was someone who was turning the oft-neglected and modest craft of designing board games into an expressive artform. The game was one which encouraged us to reflect on the nature of play, of representation, and of gender. It was a delightful and engaging provocation, and I wanted to share it with you now. I got even more interested when I asked him what he planned to do with his game and he described the process by which he was putting the game onto the market via a microfinancing website. I thought even those of you who are not into games might enjoy learning more about the new kinds of entrepreneurship which are emerging within a networked culture.

Microfinance and the Market for Independent Board Games

by James Taylor

The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands is a fantastical board game with a rich history, an unusual narrative, and surreal Victorian-style artwork. It is a board game that sits comfortably at the intersection of art, logic and literature. It pushes boundaries and opens critical discussions in each of these realms: the board art needs to stand on it's own, but also remain subservient to the game play; the story provokes questions of gender, desire, master-servant relationships, reliable narration, and the permutations of the game over a questionable 200 year history; and the game itself has a rule set that structures a peculiar mode of courtship.

Yet, can a small, provocative game ever make it in the (somewhat stalled) American board game industry? Is there a market for small, art-house board games?

How the Game Works -

"The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands (TGSSI) is an absurd logic puzzle about crossing bridges. The bridges determine how many people can cross. The gentlemen are each trying to strain the group in order to converse with Lady Ashley alone."

It is worth noting that the game is based on an old riddle. In the riddle, a farmer is trying to cross a river in a canoe with a fox, a chicken and a sack of corn. He can only take one at a time so he has to carefully plan his trips back and forth, without ever leaving the fox with the chicken, or the chicken with the sack of corn. TGSSI is a two-player game with a similar feel. Each of the gentlemen characters is trying to speak with the lady Ashley alone, and must use the bridges to constantly separate and recombine the group. A mathematician friend of ours calculated about 300,000 possible arrangements for the pieces on the board.

Matters of Academic Interest -

Art & the Dilemma of Perspective -

After refining the rules for several months, I met with the board artist, Dan Gray. We knew we wanted a top-down view of the islands, because that's what's best for the game-play. But we quickly found that a matter-of-fact, top-down view of the islands wasn't visually interesting - we were losing a lot of the detail and character of the locations by only showing them from above. After some thought, we decided it would be best to take a lesson from the cubists, and crack the perspective in order to accommodate the top-down play-view, while also managing to include the buildings, monuments, and ruins of the islands at mixed angles. The scale of the locations is also mixed. (For example, the octopus is bigger than the cathedral and the boat is larger than the volcano.) The result is a gameboard with a rather warped perspective. It is a top-down vantage point of the islands as though seen through a piece of wavy, distorted glass, and this distortion for the board would later serve as the inspiration for the themes of distortion that run throughout the narrative.

Making the Game British -

There were two reasons for making the game British. Looking back, it now seems like an obvious choice because of the high level of politeness built into the rule structure (the group typically moves together as a matter of decorum because it would be impolite for a character to walk off in a different direction), but there was another reason as well that had more to do with the objective. The core mechanic of the game is about stepping aside with a lady - and this is an objective that can be read the wrong way, to say the least. In light of this complication, we insisted on the word "Gentlemen" in the title, to squash any accusations of underhanded intentions. Given the high-level of social decorum, and the word "Gentlemen" in the title, the game just seemed British, so we decided to run with it.

Questions of Gender and the Focus of Desire -

At first glance, the game appears to be a simple, perhaps ridiculous, love story in which two men are competing for the attentions of Lady Ashley. Simple enough. But questions of sexism are distributed, alleviated and then further compounded throughout all of the materials of the game. The representations of gender are contradictory because these questions are mixed with questions of the reliability of the character descriptions and the permutations of the game over it's 200 year history. Whether the game is played in a male-centric universe is a fertile ground for debate.

Soon after opening the box, a player will discover that no one controls the female characters. The rules state: "the Ladies move on their own turn and move independently of the group." The phrasing (deliberately) implies that the girls are aloof and disinterested, that they do not care about this and have other places to be. But the problem of gender is unavoidable: if no one controls the Lady characters, then they do not have creative agency. Instead, they move along a set path. The question of gender in the rules sends the players outwards to explore the character booklet.

According to the narrative materials of the game, it was invented by two wealthy (and perhaps mildly insane) gentlemen living on an island. They devised the rule set. This means that we are not looking at the "official rules" of a courtship, by any means, but rather we are looking at what two gentlemen, in their paired delusion, imagined those rules to be. The gentlemen characters are ridiculous enough that it's hard to take them seriously. If they weren't getting gender right, then, well, nor were they very adept at anything else. Jules is a manufacturer of distorted glass and Hodge's "maps might find their best place in a childrens' coloring book." Again, the theme of distortion (originating with the game board art) runs deep throughout the narrative and the game.

A more nuanced look at gender and desire reveals even more. At the end of the character booklet, Jules suggests to Hodge that they should save themselves the "legwork" of chasing after her. He suggests that Hodge "draw up a map of these islands" so that they may resume in the "cool shade of representation." The implication here is that Hodge (the cartographer) drew up a map to serve as the game board, and that Jules (the manufacturer of distorted glass) provided the melted marbles for the pieces. The final image in the character booklet shows them playing the board game. At this stage, Lady Ashley is nowhere to be found. She has been pushed out of the frame and nearly out of the scope of the game. In the image, it is as if the two gentlemen are content to compete with each other over her as an imagined trophy and this might have been the case all along. Is Lady Ashley simply a cipher in order for the 2 gentlemen to keep score with each other? Or rather, is she a canvas on which to paint their affections for one another? Once they reach the stage of playing out the courtship as a board game, one gets the sense that the game is less and less about her.

To determine if the game is in fact sexist - if the world is in fact a male-centric universe - we can find more information in the descriptions of the characters. As we know, Lady Ashley is described as an absent-minded wanderer. This is not a particularly empowering, or redemptive view of the female character, but it's hard to say whether the narrator's description is at all reliable. On a page of direct quotations, Lady Ashley states: "I simply find it odd, that not one person on these islands has asked me even a single question ... Yet clearly I am in the middle of something..." So if we can trust this quotation, and if no one has asked her a single question, then how can we possibly believe the narrator's three-paragraph description? Especially when there is evidence that contradicts even his basic description. A publisher's footnote from a 1925 version of the game reads:

According to the partial memoirs of J.T. Trotwood, there was indeed a Lady Ashley who briefly visited these isles. In reality she was a naturalist commissioned by the British Royal Society to collect flower specimens.

This is a more empowering view of her, but without a firm grounding in truth, one can simply not say who (between the narrator and the gentlemen and the multiple editors) is providing trustworthy information. If in fact there was a Lady Ashley to visit these islands, her true identity might be lost forever under a history of unreliable male narration. While gender remains an issue, perhaps it is easiest to allay the concerns of sexism by discounting the men. The epitaph introducing the game seems to speak on Lady Ashley's behalf. It reads,

"When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools."

The Layers of Story -

Owing to the loose "facts" of the game, it is quite difficult to determine the exact history, or even to count the number of diegetic layers. However, a rough estimate turns up between six and eight layers of story. We start with the original competition on these islands that was played (on foot ) by crossing bridges to speak with the lady. Because it is hard to say if there was ever a woman on these islands, the second diegetic layer is possibly what Jules and Hodge imagined in order to occupy their time. We know that at some point, the gentlemen decided to sit down and create a representation of the game, at which point Hodge drew up a map of the islands and Jules provided the pieces. Later on, the game and several historical documents from these islands were discovered, and the game was brought back to England and published by Edward B. Tickert. 100 years later I myself played a beat-up, depleted copy of the game in a pub in England and decided to seek out more information (which makes me perhaps the 4th or 5th diegetic layer.) Long-story short, I acquired the rights to republish the game. The players who buy the game are acting out the roles of Jules and Hodge as they play, well, the characters Jules and Hodge in the game. Finally, if I pass the game to a larger publisher, they will create yet a seventh layer of editorial commentary; and if we include essays and comments about the game to be included in the box...then the public discourse becomes yet another layer.

The game's history relies on an elaborate, interlocking web of historical documentation surrounding different episodes in the game's discovery and development. The layers of the game create the following epistemological paradox: one can only sort through the facts of the game's history by referring to other questionable facts of the game's history.

Much like Freud's dreams, every element followed will lead to another significant element in a vast web of significance.

Going Transmedia -

There is a nice array of transmedia elements surrounding the game. Perhaps most noteworthy is the upcoming documentary, in which several historians and professors discuss the origins of the game and it's 200 year history. We wanted to build up a rich environment of critical discourse surrounding the game. We wanted to tease out the details of this absurd British colony in the midst of which the game was created. In essence, we wanted to take a simple game and discuss it not only as a historical artifact, but also as a game based on a real events. The fun in the short documentary is in taking a fantastical game and discussing it as a very real representation of an antiquated courtship. It's an anthropological approach to a strange, fictional culture.

The documentary about the islands gestures toward the game, while the game raises questions that demand further exploration in the documentary. Both of them point to other media properties. Kim Moses (co-producer of The Ghost-Whisperer TV series on CBS) describes this type of cross-referencing media as an Infinity Loop.

Marketing, Micro-funding & KickStarter.com -

Basically, on our financial budget, it doesn't make sense to print 500 copies of the game unless we know we have 500 buyers.

We have chosen to assess the level of public and investor interest in The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands by posting it to a microfunding site called Kickstarter.com. On this site, people can preorder the game, or become benefactors. If there is enough interest in the game from the public, then we will move forward and print the first 500 copies.

According to the website, "Kickstarter is a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers..." They advertise their website as a way for project creators to "pool" their social networks and turn them into an micro-investment community. It is highly encouraged on the site to offer incentives for different levels of investment.

Another unique aspect of kickstarter is that it is all or nothing. People who post projects set a funding goal for the project. If the goal is met in the two-month time period, everyone who contributed is charged the amount that they pledged. But f the goal is not met, no one is charged, and the project receives no money to move forward. The website offers three reasons for it's sink or swim approach:

1. It's less risk for everyone this way. If you need $5,000, it can suck to have $2,000 and a bunch of people who expect you to be able to complete a $5,000 project.

2. It allows people to test concepts (or conditionally sell stuff) without risk. If you don't receive the support you want, you're not compelled to follow through.

3. It motivates. If you want to see a project come to life, it helps to spread the word.

The site encourages creative marketing, and necessitates spreading the link to the site as far as possible. Here are the things they encourage potential project creators to consider:

1. How will you tell people about your project? The key to a successful project is asking your networks, audience, friends and family for help. Kickstarter is a tool that can turn your networks into your patrons; it is not a source of funding on its own.

2. Rewards are very important. Offer something of real value for a fair price. And more experiential rewards, things that loop backers into the story, are incredibly powerful. Most of the successful projects include them -- take a look around the site and you'll see some great examples. PS: Three or four reasonably priced rewards seems to work quite well (think of it as S, M, L, XL).

3. Include a video. It's more personal.

4. Be clear and specific about your project's goal.

5. And finally, when it comes to your funding goal, raise as little as you'll need to move forward. Projects can raise more, but never less.

In order to preserve the integrity (and strangeness) of The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands (TGSSI), we have found this micro-investment site to be the best approach. We are selling a fantastical board game with a deep, rich story across multiple platforms. Moreover we are selling it in a country that has slim-to-no independent market for board games.

It seems that the game could find it's home in high-school or college classrooms, but one can't help but notice that studying games is not a common practice in our education system. But why is that? Perhaps this last question is better left to someone more qualified to answer it.

James Taylor is graduate student in Interactive Media at USC's School of Cinematic Arts. Resisting the current of digital media, he has chosen to work primarily with board games. You can order the game here.

He's BA-A-A-ACK!

My blog, begun at MIT some years ago, has now successfully relocated onto USC servers. And so I am now going to return to my normal blogging activities. As I do so, I wanted to use this first post to play catch up on a number of recent developments around projects that I am involved with, so today will feel like a series of announcements (many of which you already know if you are following me on Twitter).

New Media Literacies Conference

Project New Media Literacies is collaborating once again with the fine folks at Home Inc. to put together a conference, back at MIT, on new media literacy as a "21st century skill" on Oct. 24 2009. The key note speaker will be Alan November.

Here's his bio:

November is an international leader in education technology. He began his career as an oceanography teacher and dorm counselor at an island reform school for boys in Boston Harbor. He has been director of an alternative high school, computer coordinator, technology consultant, and university lecturer. He has helped schools, governments and industry leaders improve the quality of education through technology and was named one of the nation's fifteen most influential thinkers of the decade by Classroom Computer Learning Magazine. In 2001, he was listed as one of eight educators to provide leadership into the future by the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse. In 2007 he was selected to speak at the Cisco Public Services Summit during the Nobel Prize Festivities in Stockholm, Sweden. His writing includes numerous articles and best-selling book, "Empowering Students with Technology". Alan was co-founder of the Stanford Institute for Educational Leadership Through Technology and is most proud of being selected as one of the original five national Christa McAuliffe Educators.

November will be speaking about "Digital Nation - Education in Transition to 21st Century Learning." Other participants will include Erin Reilly, the Research Director for Project New Media Literacies; Jenna McWilliams, formerly the curriculum development specialist on our team, now at Indiana University's Learning Sciences Program; Chris Sperry from Project Look Sharp; Home Inc's Alan Michel; Wheelock College's Susan Owusu and Bill Densmore from the Media Giraffe Project. I wish I was going to be there, since I've very much enjoyed participating in other events in this series, but I am committed elsewhere over those dates. Here's where you can go to register.

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Futures of Entertainment 4 Conference

The Convergence Culture Consortium is really kicking into high gear as it is getting ready for our Fourth Futures of Entertainment Conference, which is going to be held at MIT on November 20-21 2009. I am going to be the opening speaker of the first day which centers on issues of transmedia entertainment. Speakers already booked include:

* DAVID BAUSOLA - Co-founder of Ag8

* NANCY BAYM- University of Kansas

* BRIAN CLARK - Partner and CEO, GMD Studios

* STEPEHN DUNCOMBE - NYU

* DAN GOLDMAN - Illustrator of Shooting War (Grand Central Publishing [US] and Weidenfeld & Nicolson [UK])

* NOESSA HIGA - Visionaire Media

* JENNIFER HOLT - UC Santa Barbara

* VICTORIA JAYE - Acting Head of Fiction & Entertainment Multiplatform Commissioning, BBC

* HENRY JENKINS-USC

* DEREK JOHNSON - University of North Texas

* BRIAN LARKIN - Milbank Barnard College

* JUYOUNG LEE - Co-Founder & Chief Scientist, ACE Metrix

* TRAPPER MARKELZ- VP Products, GamerDNA

* JASON MITTELL- Middlebury College

* AVNER RONEN - CEO & Co-founder, Boxee

* FRANK ROSE - Contributing Editor,Wired

* LORRAINE SAMMY - Racebending

* ANDREW SLACK - The Harry Potter Alliance

* DAVID SPITZ -Director of Business Development, WPP

* LOUISA STEIN - San Diego State University

* JORDAN WEISMAN - CEO and Founder, Smith & Tinker

* MARK ZAGORSKI- Chief Revenue Officer, eXelate Media

I am particularly excited about moderating a session on Transmedia Activism, which grows out of some current work I am doing on the ways we might bridge between participatory culture and public/civic participation. I hope to write more about this session and its underlying framework as we get closer to the event.

If you have come to our events in the past, you know how exciting Futures of Entertainment can be. If you have not, all of our previous sessions are now available as webcasts. Here, for example, is a conversation I had at FOE 3 with Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks.

We see the conference as a vital meeting ground between people working in the media industry and academics, both of whom are doing cutting edge thinking about current trends impacting the realms of entertainment. So, register now and help us spread the word.

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Diversifying Participation

I am also working with the MacArthur Foundation to help organize the "Diversifying Participation" conference which will be held Feb. 18-20 2010 at the University of California, San Diego. We've just announced our keynote speakers, both of whom will be well known to regular readers of this blog -- Sonia Livingstone (London School of Economics), author of Children and the Internet: Great Expectations and Challenging Realities, and S. Craig Watkins (University of Texas-Austin), author of The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future. You can read my interview with Livingstone here and my interview with Watkins here. The conference is accepting proposals for panels (in all kinds of formats) through October 30 here.

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GAMBIT "Game of the Week"

GAMBIT, the MIT-Singapore Games Lab, is continuing to run a series of blog posts, showcasing the games which were produced during their summer program this summer. Each week, they showcase one game, including artwork, design materials, and comments from team members. If you have not had a chance to play this year's titles, you really should check them out. Several of them have already started to generate buzz across the games blogosphere and like previous titles, are certain to be competitive where-ever independent games are being shown. I had a chance to sit down with the Gambit team during a recent visit back to MIT and was as always impressed by their output, which is consistently breaking the mold in terms of the design of play mechanics, visuals, and sound. Their mandate is to stretch the limits of our understanding of what games can do. Each game serves a larger research question, but Philip Tan, the Lab's director, makes sure that the most important thing created on his watch is FUN!

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Understanding Superheroes

I will be speaking this coming Saturday (Oct. 24) at the University of Oregon as part of a conference and art exhibition they have organized around "Understanding Superheroes." It sounds funny to say that I am keynoting a superheroes conference -- like Aquaman couldn't make it! My topic will be "'Man Without Fear': David Mack and the Formal Limits of the Superhero Comic." While I have been writing and speaking about comics for a while, this will be the first time I've really dug deep into the formal conventions of superhero comics. My primary focus will be, as the title suggests, the work which Mack has done within the mainstream continuity of Marvel's Daredevil Franchise though more generally I will be exploring what happens when experimental and mainstream comics intersect each other. Other speakers at the conference include creative artists such as Danny Fingeroth, Kurt Busiek, Matt Fraction, and Gail Simone as well as scholars and critics such as Douglas Wolk, Charles Hatfield, Corey Creekmur, Jonathon Grey, and Matt Yockey. The conference was organized and the exhibit curated by Ben Saunders. I will be sharing my impressions of this event on my blog next week.

From Cinema to Games: Some Fascinating Data

I received correspondence recently from a French games scholar, Alexis Blanchet, sharing some really fascinating data that has emerged from his research into the flow of intellectual property between the games and film industries. Since I am finding this data useful in teaching my transmedia class, I wanted to pass it along to others who are interested in understanding the convergence of these two key sectors of the entertainment industry. First, a little background on Blanchet. According to his blog: "I'm teaching and doing research in film studies in Paris (Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense). Formerly associated with the French National Library, member of the Observatoire des Mondes Numériques en Sciences Humaines (Omnsh), I'm currently studying the cultural, economical and technical synergies between cinema and the video game."

Blanchet has identified 469 games based around film properties released between 1975 and 2008. His research encompassed more than 40 different platforms, but did not include mobile phones, which he notes results in some undercounting of games based on Bollywood films which tend to appear primarily on cell phone technologies. He also excluded browser based games, which he felt tended to be more oriented towards branding than entertainment experiences.

For most of the platforms, movie-connected games represented roughly 10 percent of their total output. But for some platforms, they represented a much larger percentage of the total product. They were 22 percent of the titles produced for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance (2001-2006), 20 percent of the Nintendo Wii (2006-2007) and 27 percent of the Nintendo Game Boy Color (1999-2003). He ascribes the centrality of tie-in games to handheld technologies to their greater targeting at younger consumers.

As this graph suggests, there has been a dramatic shift over time from games released only after the film has been successfully released towards simultaneous release. It is now taken for granted within a range of genres that there may be a market for the game even if the film itself does not do well. This situation is especially ripe for transmedia storytelling, since it lends itself well to a co-creation rather than licensing model, allowing for the game and the film to be developed side by side and for their release to be coordinated more fully than would have been the case a decade ago.

Not surprisingly, Hollywood dominates the movie tie-in space representing 73 percent of the total, yet there are also European (8 percent) and Asian (4) movie tie-in games. And as already mentioned, the Asian numbers would have climbed considerably if mobile games were included in the count.

80 percent of the 134 international films which have made more than 100 million dollars upon release between 1991 and 2008 were adopted into games and of the top 20 money earners during this period, 95 percent were made into games: the holdouts were Titanic and The Dark Knight. And a Dark Knight game is finally on the way.

Franchises which extended across more than one film were especially strongly represented in his sample (and of course are also strongly represented in the list of top money earners during this period.) Of the 469 movie-based games, 231 of them were based on a franchise which had produced 2 or more films Almost all CGI animated films produced by Pixar, Disney/Pixar, Dreamworks Animation, 20th Century Fox Animation and others were adopted into games.

The most likely genres to make the transition from screen to games are: Action (236), Adventure (222), comedy (169) and Thriller (152). Those genres least likely to be made into games include documentary (2), Western (9), War (11), and Musical (23). It's worth noting that these also represent genres which are less likely to be made into films in the first place and that there are few non-film based games on the market in these genres.

Blanchet, a loyal follower of this blog, wanted to give Aca-Fan readers some exclusive content. He shared with me this graph which looks at film to game translations based around their original ratings.

For a closer look at some of the data, check out his website which includes an English language summary of his research as well as more extensive writings in French.

Blanchet should be congratulated and thanked for the hard work which went into this project. It's a real gift to our field.

"The Pickford Paradox": Between Silent Film and New Media

For some years, I've used clips from silent films in getting students to think about the visual vocabulary of contemporary video games. Silent films construct situations posing many of the same creative problems that level designers face and do so in a language which is primarily pictorial. For example, consider the classic sequence from Harold Lloyd's film, Safety Last, which might be described as a vertical scroller -- as Lloyd has to make his way up the side of the building, past a range of different obstacles. In teaching games, we often talk about "verbing," based on the remarks of Shigeru Miyamoto that he likes to add a new verb to the vocabulary of games with each new title he releases. So, the question to ask the students is what verbs, what capacities for action, would be required in order to enable game designers to capture the essence of this scene. In the discussion, I may also get students to reflect on why it is difficult for games to produce laughter as compared to the rich comic experiences offered by silent film comedies. And from there, I also get them to think about what difference it makes that this scene is played by a live actor rather than a virtual character in terms of how we react to the risks depicted here.

Here's another clip I've often used in classroom discussions -- this time from D.W. Griffith's Way Down East. The highly codified emotional language of early 20th century melodrama would be relatively easy to capture in the pre-programmed behavior of game characters and the situation here -- trying to navigate across ice floes before reaching a waterfall -- has strong resemblances, again, to the kinds of situations encountered in classic scrolling games like Super Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog. Generally students find it much easier to imagine converting this sequence to a game than adapting the Lloyd sequence, but again, part of the power of the scenes comes from seeing real people in real spaces.

The point of the activity is not to bash games for not being able to achieve what cinema can do but rather to get students to think about the nature of the different media, the language that media makers draw on in producing their emotional effects, and the unrealized potentials which emerge when we look comparatively across media.

I was reminded of this classroom exercise when I heard last week from Manuel Garin Boronat, a researcher in Spain, who has produced a series of remarkable videos which juxtapose sequences from early films and early video games. I asked him to share with you the impulses behind this project and several of the short pieces he has produced. You can see more examples of his work at his website, GamePlayGag. These videos encourage us to look backwards and forwards in time, making comparisons across media, in ways that I find both liberating and illuminating.

Between silent film and new media

by Manuel Garin Boronat

Once upon a time, in the west, Mary Pickford said: "It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkie instead of the other way around". In this direct statement, an early Hollywood actress -not a director, not a critic- touched an essential aesthetic problem that not only relates to a specific process of film history but also opens a potential path to question media evolution. Would it be possible to look backwards, to silent visual forms, as a privileged platform for comparative media analysis? Isn't the study of early film, through its intense and varied visuality, a powerful resource to better understand today's changes in videogame and new media languages?

By picking the word "logical" Pickford throws us into the limits of a paradox. Beneath her phrase lies the possibility of conceiving silent cinema as a door towards abstraction, given its concentration on visuals that escape the restrictions of dialogue-centered narration... Pickford envisions silent films as a reaction against the constraints of sound cinema, as an attempt to open more space for visual imagination (silence, motion, tempo) and less for the impression of realism. But what if we applied the "Pickford Paradox" to think about the evolution of new media, looking backwards to move forward in terms of developing an expressive language for games.

Nowadays, realistic graphics, dense dramatized plots and constant dialogue seem to be the self-imposed goal for the videogame industry (or for a big part of it). In a way, the visual freedom of the first computer games and arcades, which opened the possibility of a certain abstract-motion expression -concerned with gameplay visuality and not necessarily sacrificed to verbal storytelling-, is being constrained by a high-tech race towards anthropocentric realism. The so-called "cinematic sequences" inserted throughout the narration, as well as a number of allegedly film-realistic procedures, make games look more and more like talkies (but not necessarily like films). Is history repeating itself? Could Mary Pickford's claim be adapted to contemporary videogame design? Of course better and worse games will always be made independently from its talkie/silent orientation, but are we simply facing a matter of technological and programming improvements or could we affirm that a certain aesthetic possibility is at stake?

Perhaps engaging a true comparison between silent film forms and early interactive games, through concrete sequences and examples, may be a good way to put into crisis our personal notion of media evolution. With a bit of luck, looking back to the origins of film history might help us to value the amazing discoveries and possible creative paths -yet to be developed- of early videogames and new media. Under that perspective, Mary Pickford's husband may be resurrected as the ultimate silent version of Megaman, and the sight gags of Buster Keaton could maybe teach us a trick or two about Super Mario's love affair with gravity... Perhaps it all boils down to jump, chase and pie-in-the-face.

Keaton Mario Scroll

Among the masters of slapstick, from Chaplin and Lloyd to Semon and Chase, Buster Keaton was probably the one who brought his obsession with motion, interfaces and Goldberg machines to a higher degree of visual lucidity. Sight gags, based on the creation, repetition and variation of a kinetic pattern (as in a three time musical structure), unveiled a world of infinite gameplay. As in the Super Mario games, the trace of the character's action -jump, chase, pie in the face- and its physical developments -platform, rotor, slide, cliff, pendulum, pulley, seesaw, zip-line, lever...- define a screen trajectory while opening the question of gameplay laughter. Maybe, as Gilles Deleuze instinctively prophesized, Buster was secretly developing the first videogame (avant-garde) machine: "...the dream of Keaton, to take the biggest machine in the world and make it work with tiny little elements, transforming it into something that anyone can use, to make from it a thing for everyone".

Fairbanks action arcade

As Will Rogers showed with his parodies of Douglas Fairbanks' action routines, the Jump can constitute a mode of narration by itself. The silent cinematic hero, although being engaged in certain love requirements, was essentially a proteic pixel running, jumping and fighting across the screen. As in early arcade and action-platform games, the power of physics, motion and timing thrilled the audiences in a constant push "beyond what's possible". Prince of Persia, who now seems to be re-shooting the marvelous visuals of Raoul Walsh's masterpiece The Thief of Bagdad.

Pathé magic puzzle

Visually enclosed by what Noel Burch called the "autarchy of tableau," silent fantasy reels shared with early games an aesthetic awareness of the frame. Within that determined, magical space, a path was open for visually stunning effects and changes in shape, form and motion. In this segment, humans become geometrical figures, game pieces, whose movements and combinations resemble the legendary gameplay of Tetris, helping us to see in this classic video game traces of the cinema attraction.

Chomón arcade

Early mischief gags and pickpocket reels soon started to work around chases, jumps and visual transformations. As in certain arcade and scroll games, the relation between the main character, his antagonists and the surrounding space constructs a system of vertical and horizontal relations inside the frame. Stairs, connecting floors, holes, diagonals and magic bikes engaged a certain development in early film montage, much as these same devices became key motifs in early video games. The secret of Pathe silent films was a fascination with transformation which invites the viewer to play along with the characters.

Manuel Garin Boronat is a graduate in Humanities and Audiovisual Communication at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. He works as a research scholar at the Department of Communication in the same university, and teaches as assistant lecturer in the Area of Ideation and Script. In 2008 he defended, within the Ph.D. Programme in Film Theory, Analysis and Documentation, the first part of his doctoral thesis: The visual gag: form, character, game-play. He is currently finishing his thesis on the relations between audiovisual language and game forms, after a research stay in Tokyo University of The Arts (Graduate School of Film and New Media). His main research interests focus on media hermeneutics, sound analysis, videogame theory and forms of serial fiction.

Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment -- A Syllabus

Given the interest out there in transmedia or cross-media entertainment, I thought I would share the syllabus for the course I am teaching this fall at the University of Southern California. I am still shifting some details, as I deal with the scheduling of guest speakers, but all of the speakers listed have agreed to come. The readings are a good starter set for people wanting to do more thinking on this emerging area of research. I will be sharing reflections about the course material here throughout the fall, since I'm sure working through these readings in a class context is going to spark me to do some fresh thinking on the topic. I'd love to hear from others out there teaching transmedia or cross-media topics. If you know someone at USC who you think might want to take this class, let them know. I still have room for more students.

Course Description and Outcomes:

We now live at a moment where every story, image, brand, relationship plays itself out across the maximum number of media platforms, shaped top down by decisions made in corporate boardrooms and bottom up by decisions made in teenager's bedrooms. The concentrated ownership of media conglomerates increases the desirability of properties that can exploit "synergies" between different parts of the medium system and "maximize touch-points" with different niches of consumers. The result has been the push towards franchise-building in general and transmedia entertainment in particular.

A transmedia story represents the integration of entertainment experiences across a range of different media platforms. A story like Heroes or Lost might spread from television into comics, the web, computer or alternate reality games, toys and other commodities, and so forth, picking up new consumers as it goes and allowing the most dedicated fans to drill deeper. The fans, in turn, may translate their interests in the franchise into concordances and wikipedia entries, fan fiction, vids, fan films, cosplay, game mods, and a range of other participatory practices that further extend the story world in new directions. Both the commercial and grassroots expansion of narrative universes contribute to a new mode of storytelling, one which is based on an encyclopedic expanse of information which gets put together differently by each individual consumer as well as processed collectively by social networks and online knowledge communities.

The course is broken down into five basic units: "Foundations" offers an overview of the current movement towards transmedia or cross-platform entertainment; "Narrative Structures" introduces the basic toolkit available to contemporary storytellers, digging deeply into issues around seriality, and examining what it might mean to think of a story as a structure of information; "World Building" deals with what it means to think of contemporary media franchises in terms of "worlds" or "universes" which unfold across many different media systems; "Audience Matters" links transmedia storytelling to issues of audience engagement and in the process, considers how fans might contribute unofficial extensions to favorite media texts; and "Tracing the History of Transmedia" pulls back to consider key moments in the evolution of transmedia entertainment, moving from the late 19th century to the present.

In this course, we will be exploring the phenomenon of transmedia storytelling through:

• Critically examining commercial and grassroots texts which contribute to larger media franchises (mobisodes and webisodes, comics, games).

• Developing a theoretical framework for understanding how storytelling works in this new environment with a particular emphasis upon issues of world building, cultural attractors, and cultural activators.

• Tracing the historical context from which modern transmedia practices emerged, including consideration of the contributions of such key figures as P.T. Barnum, L. Frank Baum, Feuillade, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Cordwainer Smith, Walt Disney, George Lucas, DC and Marvel Comics, and Joss Whedon.

• Exploring what transmedia approaches contribute to such key genres as science fiction, fantasy, horror, superhero, suspense, soap opera, teen and reality television.

• Listening to cutting-edge thinkers from the media industry talk about the challenges and opportunities which transmedia entertainment offers, walking through cases of contemporary projects that have deployed cross-platform strategies.

• Putting these ideas into action through working with a team of fellow students to develop and pitch transmedia strategies around an existing media property.

Required Books:

Pat Harrington and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 636 pages.

Kim Deitch, Alias the Cat (New York: Pantheon, 2007), 136 pages.

Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, Marvels (Marvel Comics, 2003), 216 pages.

Kevin J. Anderson (ed.), Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina (New York: Spectra, 1995),

416 pages.

Joss Whedon, The Long Way Home (New York: Dark Horse, 2007), 136 pages.

All additional readings will be provided through the Blackboard site for the class.

Grading and Assignments:

Commercial Extension Paper 20 percent

Grassroots Extension Paper 20 percent

Final Project - Franchise Development Project 40 percent

Class Forums 20 percent

In order to fully understand how transmedia entertainment works, students will be expected to immerse themselves into at least one major media franchise for the duration of the term. You should consume as many different instantiations (official and unofficial) of this franchise as you can and try to get an understanding of what each part contributes to the series as a whole.

COMMERCIAL EXTENSION PAPER: For the first paper, you will be asked to write a 5-7 page essay examining one commercially produced media extension (comic, website, game, mobisode, amusement park attraction, etc.). You should try to address such issues as its relationship to the story world, its strategies for expanding the narrative, its deployment of the distinctive properties of its platform, its targeted audience, and its cultural attractors/activators. (Due Sept. 23)(20 Percent)

GRASSROOTS EXTENSION PAPER: For the second paper, you will be asked to write a 5-7 page essay examining a fan-made extension (fan fiction, discussion list, video, etc.) and try to understand where the audience has sought to attach themselves to the franchise, what they add to the story world, how they respond to or route around the invitational strategies of the series, and how they reshape our understanding of the characters, plot or world of the original franchise. (Due Nov. 18) (20 Percent)

FINAL PROJECT - FRANCHISE DEVELOPMENT PROJECT: Students will be organized into teams, which for the purpose of this exercise will function as transmedia companies. You should select a media property (a film, television series, comic book, novel, etc.) that you feel has the potential to become a successful transmedia franchise. In most cases, you will be looking for a property that has not yet added media extensions, though you could also look at a property that you feel has been mishandled in the past. By the end of the term, your team will be "pitching" this property. The pitch should include a briefing book that describes:

1) the core defining properties of the property

2) a description of the intended audience(s)

3) a discussion of the specific plans for each media platform you are going to deploy

4) an overall description for how you will seek to integrate the different media platforms to create a coherent world

5) a business plan which includes likely costs and revenue and the time table for rolling out the various media elements

6) parallel examples of other properties which have deployed the strategies being described

The pitch itself will be a 20 minute group presentation, followed by 10 minutes of questioning. The presentation should give us a "taste" of what the property is like as well as to lay out some of the key elements that are identified in the briefing book. For an example of what these pitches might look like, watch the materials assembled at http://www.educationarcade.org/SiDA/videos, which shows how a similar activity was conducted at MIT. Each member of the team will be expected to develop expertise around a specific media platform as well as to contribute to the over-all strategies for spreading the property across media systems. The group will select its own team leader who will be responsible for contacts with the instructor and will coordinate the presentation. The team leader will be asked to provide feedback on what each team member contributed to the effort, while team members will be asked to provide an evaluation of how the team leader performed. Team Members will check in with the instructor on Week Ten and Week Fourteen to review their progress on the assignment. Presentation (Dec.7, 9) Briefing Book (Dec. 14) (40 Percent)

CLASS FORUM: For each class session, students will be asked to contribute a substantive question or comments via the class forum on BlackBoard. Comments should reflect an understanding of the readings for that day as well as an attempt to formulate an issue that we can explore through class discussions or with the visiting speakers. (20 Percent)

Class Schedule:

*Guest Speakers are tentative, subject to availability. Shifts in speakers and thus topics and readings may occur after the semester starts.

Part One: Foundations

Week 1

August 24: Transmedia Storytelling 101

Henry Jenkins, "Transmedia Storytelling 101" Confessions of an Aca-Fan, http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html

Henry Jenkins, "Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmeda Storytelling," Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), pp. 93-130.

Geoff Long, "What Is Transmedia Storytelling", Transmedia Storytelling: Business, Aesthetics and Production at the Jim Henson Company, pp. 13-69.

August 26 Intertextual Commodities?

P. David Marshall, "The New Intertextual Commodity" in Dan Harries (ed.) The New Media Book (London: BFI, 2002), pp. 69-81.

Derek Johnson, "Intelligent Design or Godless Universe? The Creative Challenges of World Building and Franchise Development," Franchising Media Worlds: Content Networks and The Collaborative Production of Culture, PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2009. pp.170-279.

Watch:

Battlestar Galactica: The Face of the Enemy

Week 2

August 31: Media Mix in Japan

Anne Allison, "Pokemon: Getting Monsters and Communicating Capitalism," Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 192-233.

David Buckingham and Julian Sefton-Green, "Structure, Agency and Pedagogy in Children's Media Culture" In Joseph Tobin (ed.) Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 12-33.

Mizuko Ito, "Gender Dynamics of the Japanese Media Mix," Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming (Cambridge, MIT, 2008), pp. 97-110.

September 2: Toys and Tales

Jeff Gomez, "Creating Blockbuster Worlds" (unpublished)

Henry Jenkins, "Talking Transmedia: An Interview with Starlight Runner's Jeff Gomez," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, http://www.henryjenkins.org/2008/05/an_interview_with_starlight_ru.html

Mark Federman, "What is the Meaning of the Medium is the Message," http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/article_mediumisthemessage.htm

Guest Speakers:

Jeff Gomez, Starlight Runner

Jordan Greenhill, DivX

Week 3

September 7 is the Labor Day holiday

September 9: Transmedia Branding

Faris Yacob, "I Believe Children are the Future," http://www.slideshare.net/NigelG/ipa-thesis-i-believe-the-children-are-our-future

Henry Jenkins, "How Transmedia Storytelling Begat Transmedia Planning...", Confessions of an Aca-Fan, http://henryjenkins.org/2006/12/how_transmedia_storytelling_be.html

http://henryjenkins.org/2006/12/how_transmedia_storytelling_be_1.html

Guest Speaker: Faris Yacob, McCann Erickson New York

Week 4

September 14 Heroes and Alchemists: The New Storytelling

The 9th Wonders, Chapters 1-9 http://www.nbc.com/Heroes/novels/novels_library.shtml?novel=9

Henry Jenkins, "We Had So Many Stories to Tell': The Heroes Comics as Transmedia Storytelling," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, http://henryjenkins.org/2007/12/we_had_so_many_stories_to_tell.html

Carolyn Handler Miller, Digital Storytelling: A Creator's Guide to Interactive Entertainment (Amsterdam: Focal Press, 2006), "Using a Transmedia Approach", pp. 149-164 (Rec.)

Guest Speakers: Mauricio Mota, Mark Warshaw, Here Come the Alchemists

Part Two: Narrative Structures

September 16: Seriality

Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), "Polycentrism and Seriality: (Neo-)Baroque Narrative Formation," pp. 31-70.

Jason Mittell, "All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling and Procedural Logic" (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin, pp. 429-438.

Watch:

The Wire

http://www.amazon.com/Wire-Complete-Fourth-Season/dp/B000QXDJLI/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1197321529&sr=8-1

"Young Prop Joe"

"Bunk and McNulty"

"Young Omar"

Jennifer Haywood, Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (University of Kentucky Press, 1997), "Mutual Friends: The Development of the Mass Serial," pp. 21-51. (rec)

Week 5

September 21: Soaps Go Transmedia

Sharon Marie Ross, "Managing Millennials: Teen Expectations of Tele-Participation," Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet (London: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 124-172.

Sam Ford, "From Oakdale Confidential to L.A. Diaries: Transmedia Storytelling for ATWT," As the World Turns in a Convergence Culture (Master's Thesis), pp. 141-162.

Louisa Stein, "Playing Dress Up: Digital Fashion and Game Extensions of Televisual Experience in Gossip Girl's Second Life," Cinema Journal, pp. 116-122.

Watch:

Gossip Girl: Tales From the Upper East Side

http://www.cwtv.com/thecw/gossip-girl-tales-from-the-upper-east-side

LA Diaries

http://www.cbs.com/daytime/specials/la_diaries/episodes.php

September 23: Creating Alternate Realities

Christy Dena, "Emerging Participatory Culture Practices: Player-Created Tiers in Alternate Reality Games," Convergence, February 2008, pp. 41-58.

Jane McGonigal, Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming." Ecologies of Play. Ed. Katie Salen. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 199-228. http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/dmal.9780262693646.199

Dave Szulborski, "Puppetmastering: Creating a Game" and "Puppetmastering: Running a Game,"This Is Not A Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming (New York: New Fiction, 2005), pp. 207-284.

Guest Speaker: Evan Jones, Stitch Media

COMMERCIAL EXTENSION PROJECT DUE

Week 6

September 28: Speaking of Serials

Kim Deitch, Alias the Cat (New York: Pantheon, 2007) (Required Book)

David Kalat, "The Long Arm of Fantomas" (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 211-225.

September 30: The Unfolding Text

Neil Perryman, "Doctor Who and the Convergence of Media: A Case Study in Transmedia Storytelling," Convergence, February 2008, pp. 21-40.

Lance Perkin,"Truths Universally Acknowledged: How the 'Rules' of Doctor Who Affect the Writing," (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 13-24.

Matt Hills, "Absent Epic, Implied Story Arcs, and Variations on a Narrative Theme: Doctor Who (2005) as Cult/Mainstream TV," (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 333-343.

Part Three: World-Building

Week 7

October 5: Migratory Characters

William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson, "I'm Not Fooled By That Cheap Disguise," in Roberta E. Pearson, The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to A Superhero and His Media (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 182-213.

Will Brooker, "Establishing the Brand: Year One," Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon (London: Continuium, 2001), pp. 36-67.

Bob Kane, "The Legend of the Batman" (1938) and Bob Kane, "The Origins of the Batman," (1948) in Dennis O'Neil (ed.) The Secret Origins of the DC Superheroes (New York: DC, 1976), pp. 36-50.

Bob Kane, "The First Batman" (1956) and Dennis O'Neil, "There Is No Hope in Crime Alley," (1978) The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told (New York: DC, 1988).

Guest Speaker: Geoffrey Long, GAMBIT

October 7: World Building in Comics

Matthew J. Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999), pp. 129-133.

Jason Bainbridge, "Worlds Within Worlds: The Role of Superheroes in the Marvel and DC Universe," Angela Ndalianis (ed.), The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (New York: Routledge, 2008) pp. 64-85.

Sam Ford and Henry Jenkins, "Managing Multiplicity in Superhero Comics," (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 303-313.

Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, Marvels (New York: Marvel Comics, 1993) (Required Book)

Alec Austin, "Hybrid Expectations, Expectations Across Media, CMS Thesis, pp. 97-127.

Week 8

October 12: Who Watches the Watchman?

Stuart Moulthrop, "See the Strings: Watchmen and the Under-Language of Media" (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 287-303.

Watch:

NBS Nightly News With Ted Philips http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd5cInmK6LQ&playnext_from=PL&feature=PlayList&p=878F6464EEBE32F9&index=10

The Keene Act and YOU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkWGZ1G7TAE&playnext_from=PL&feature=PlayList&p=878F6464EEBE32

Saturday Morning Watchmen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDDHHrt6l4w

Guest Speaker: Alex McDowell, Production Designer, Watchmen

October 14: World Building in Science Fiction

Walter Jon Williams, "In What Universe?" (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 25-32.

George R.R. Martin, "On the Wild Cards Novels," in Pat Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin (eds.) Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).

Cordwainer Smith, "The Dead Lady of Clown Town," and "The Ballad of Lost C'mell," J. J. Pierce (ed.) The Best of Cordwainer Smith (New York: Del Rey, 1975), pp. 124-209, pp. 315-337.

Week 9

October 19: Launching a New World

David Lavery, "Lost and Long-Form Television Narrative" (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin),

pp. 313-323.

Guest Speaker: Jesse Alexander, Executive Producer, Year One

October 21: Transmedia and Social Change

TBA

Guest Speaker: Bram Pitoyo, Wild Alchemy

Part Four: Audiences

Week 10

October 26: The Logic of Engagement

Ivan Askwith, "The Expanded Television Text, "Five Logics of Engagement,"; "Lost at Televisions' Crossroads," Television 2.0: Reconceptualizing TV as an Engagement Medium, CMS thesis, pp. 51-150.

Guest Speaker: Ivan Askwith, Big Space Ship

October 28: Expanding the Audience

Kim Moses and Ian Sander, selections from Ghost Whisperer: The Spirit Guide (New York: Titan Books, 2008).

Guest Speaker: Kim Moses, Executive Producer, The Ghost Whisperer

Week 11

November 2: Fan Productivity

Jesse Walker, "Remixing Television: Francesca Coppa on the Vidding Underground," Reason, August/September 2008, http://www.reason.com/news/show/127432.html

Francesca Coppa, "Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding," Transformative Works and Cultures (2008), http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/44/64

Bud Caddell, "Becoming a Mad-Man," http://drop.io/becomingamadman

November 4: The Encyclopedic Impulse

Janet Murray, "Digital Environments are Encyclopedic," Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 83-90.

Bob Rehak, "That Which Survives: Star Trek's Design Network in Fandom and Franchise" (Unpublished), pp. 2-79.

Robert V. Kozinets, "Inno-Tribes: Star Trek as Wikimedia" Consumer Tribes (London: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2007), pp. 194-209.

Watch:

Star Trek: Phase II "In Harms Way"

http://www.startreknewvoyages.com/episodes.html

Week 12

November 9: The Power of Details

Kristin Thompson, "Not Your Father's Tolkien" and "Interactive Middle Earth," The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp.53-74, p. 224-256

C.S. Lewis, "On Stories," Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (New York: Harvest, 2002), pp. 3-21.

November 11: Ephemeral Fascinations

Michael Bonesteel, "Henry Darger's Search for the Grail in the Guise of a Celesttial Child" (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 253-267.

Amelie Hastie, "The Collector: Material Histories, Colleen Moore's Dollhouse, and Ephemeral Recollection," Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection, and Film History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 19-72.

Week 13

November 16 Independent Horrors

James Castonguay, "The Political Economy of the Indie Blockbuster: Fandom, Intermediality, and The Blair Witch Project," in Sarah L. Higley and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (eds.) Nothing That Is: Milllennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies (Detroit: Wayne State University, 2004), pp. 65-86.

The Blair Witch Project Website http://www.blairwitch.com/

Head Trauma Website http://www.headtraumamovie.com/

Guest Speaker: Lance Weiller, Head Trauma

Part Five: Tracing the History of Transmedia

November 18: Before the Rainbow

Neil Harris, "The Operational Aesthetic," Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 59-90.

Mark Evan Swartz, "A Novel Enchantment," Before the Rainbow: L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz on Stage and Screen to 1939 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 161-172.

Week 14

November 23: What Uncle Walt Taught Us

J.P. Telotte, Disney TV (Detroit: Wayne State, 2004), pp. 1-91.

Karal Ann Marling, "Imagineering the Disney Theme Parks," in Karal Ann Marling (ed.) Designing Disney's Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance (Montreal: Centre Canadian d'Architecture, 1997), pp. 29-178. (Rec.)

November 25: Franchises and Attractions

Henry Jenkins, "The Pleasure of Pirates And What It Tells Us About World Building in Branded Entertainment", Confessions of an Aca-Fan, http://henryjenkins.org/2007/06/forced_simplicity_and_the_crit.html

Don Carson, "Environmental Storytelling: Creating Immersive 3D Worlds Using Lessons Learned from the Theme Park industry," Gamasutra, http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20000301/carson_pfv.htm

Week 15

November 30: Lessons From Lucas

Jonathon Gray, "Learning to Use the Force: Star Wars Toys and Their Films," Show Sold Separately (Forthcoming), pp. 232-247.

Will Brooker, Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans (New York: Continuum, 2002), "The Fan Betrayed," pp. 79-99, "Canon," pp. 101-114.

Kevin J. Anderson (ed.), Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina (New York: Spectra, 1995) (Required Book)

December 2: Across the Whedonverse

Tanya Krzywinska, "Arachne Challenges Minerva: The Spinning Out of Long Narrative in World of Warcraft and Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 385-399.

Joss Whedon, The Long Way Home (New York: Dark Horse, 2007) (Required Book)

Watch:

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

http://www.hulu.com/watch/28343/dr-horribles-sing-along-blog

December 7 Student Presentations

December 9 Student Presentations

Calling Young Gamers. Share your AHa! Moment!

My friends, Alex Chisholm and Andrew Blanco from the Learning Games Network asked me if I could use this blog to help them spread the word of some exciting new activities designed to engage young gamers/media makers and to encourage reflection on the value of games for education. Both are causes close to my own heart, as regular readers will know. Here's what Blanco has to say about the initiative: Lights. Camera. Action! Tell us what you think a learning game looks like. Share a story about a connection you made between something you did in a game and something you had to learn in school.

From the Learning Games Network (LGN) comes an interesting inspiration for user-generated content. A recently established 501(c) (3) non-profit organization, established by former MIT CMS Director of Special Projects Alex Chisholm, the MIT Education Arcade's Eric Klopfer and Scot Osterweil, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Kurt Squire, LGN was formed to spark innovation in the design and use of video games for learning. In addition to bringing together an integrated network of educators, designers, media producers, and academic researchers who all have a hand in creating and distributing games for learning, they're also bringing forth opportunities for youth to contribute to conversations, research, and development. It's a no brainer for today's students to share their perspectives in a more participatory role as the future of education is shaped.

The first of two efforts is a video contest, notable in its invitation to students to help inform educators and designers with their own thoughts on video games as tools for learning. Requiring entrants to create their own two-to-three minute YouTube videos, the contest offers two themes from which students can choose.

(1) The first challenge asks them to describe an "aha moment" they've personally encountered: "If you've experienced that spark of realization, that moment of epiphany between an idea from a game and something you learned -- at school, at home, or anywhere else -- tell us about it in your video."

(2) The second puts students in the role of teacher or coach, asking them to describe an

idea for a learning game they would employ to help others learn: "What kind of game would it be? What would it help players learn? Why would your video game be a better way to learn something? In your video, tell us what challenges players would face and how they would learn from them."

Contest rules can be found at http://www.aha-moment.org. Students must be 13 years old and above to enter; there are separate categories for middle school, high school, and post-secondary students. Thanks to sponsorship by AMD, the first place prize for each category is a 16-inch HP Pavilion dv6 series notebook, powered by an AMD Turionâ„¢ X2 Ultra Dual-Core Mobile Processor. Deadline for submissions is midnight on July 31, 2009.

A second, longer term initiative is LGN's Design Squad. With game design and production requiring many rounds of iteration during which details are play-tested,tuned, and enhanced, Design Squad members will learn about the development process and the integration of gaming into both formal and informal learning settings, as well as serve as a pool of rapid-reaction testers and reviewers during the creation of learning games by LGN and other organizations that are part of its network. This is a great opportunity for students to play an important role in creating innovative new learning games, enabling them to contribute to design discussions, play testing, production reviews, and early marketing concepts. LGN aims to amplify the voices of today's students among the companies, writers, and designers that are trying to better understand how games are both a powerful media for education and a challenge to develop if one doesn't understand what makes an engaging and rewarding experience.

LGN is looking for highly motivated, creative, and articulate middle school, high school, and undergraduate students to (a) participate in exclusive workshops and online sessions with leading learning game designers, producers, marketers, and researchers;(b) regularly review and test learning games that are in development; and, (c) work both locally and virtually with LGN member organizations across the U.S. Design Squad members in the Boston area will work with the LGN team in its newly established Cambridge studio, a stone's throw from the MIT campus. Interested students between the ages of 13 and 20 can send a note to designsquad at learninggamesnetwork dot org. Or, if you're a teacher or parent who would like to nominate a student, please contact LGN.

LGN plans to review inquiries and send applications to interested or nominated students

through the end of July before announcing the LGN DS 2009-2010 team in time for back-to-school.

Questions about the Learning Games Network can be directed to Andy Blanco, Director of Program and Business Development, andy.blanco at learninggamesnetwork dot org.

Communal Growing Pains: Fandom and the Evolution of Street Fighter

This is another in a series of essays by my CMS graduate students exploring what personal narrative might contribute to the development of media theory. In this case, Begy blurs the line between games research and fan studies to talk about how he reads the Street Fighter games. Communal Growing Pains: Fandom and the Evolution of Street Fighter

By Jason Begy

Invasion

In mid October 2007, Japanese game developer Capcom announced what many fans, myself included, thought they never would: the fourth series in the long-running Street Fighter franchise. It had been some eight years since the release of the last official installment, Street Fighter III: Third Strike, and the declining popularity of 2D fighting games made another entry seem unlikely. The announcement of the new game generated enormous buzz within the community: for years whenever Capcom mentioned "unannounced projects" our collective heart skipped a beat, only to be disappointed. This time our wishes were granted, but we were ill-prepared for the full ramifications.

The online focal point of the Street Fighter community is the forum at Shoryuken.com. Here fans gather to discuss strategy (for Street Fighter and countless other fighting games), organize local meet-ups and online matches, share fan fiction and fan art, buy and sell all manner of goods, and generally hang out. The forums are known to be somewhat rough: new members are expected to quickly figure things out on their own. This is partially because many of the members are expert players and they come to interact with each other, not guide beginners through the basics. The community is at once tightly-knit and tightly-wound, which makes gaining acceptance extremely difficult yet extremely rewarding.

When Street Fighter IV was released on February 17, 2009 in the United States, all of the gaming press pointed to Shoryuken.com as the place to go for information, strategies, and tips, and the forums were literally and figuratively crippled. Literally because the servers could not handle the traffic, causing the site to continuously crash for several weeks; figuratively because many of the new members created severe social disruption. The best way to illustrate this is probably an analogy: imagine a thousand people spontaneously showing up at Gary Kasparov's house demanding to know how the pawn moves and you are not far off. The publicity also drew in countless trolls simply looking to cause trouble. This influx lead to the phrase "09er," which is derogatory slang for members who joined in 2009. It generally means someone who is disruptive, ignorant, and a fair-weather fan. This is not to say that all new members exhibited such behavior, but a great many did.

External tensions aside, the new members have created conflicting emotions in myself and other older fans. On the one hand, our genre of choice has been declining for nearly fifteen years, so a major new release and public approval is a nice affirmation of our tastes. Furthermore, fighting games are fundamentally social. Playing against other people is the only way to experience these games to their fullest, so a large group of new, eager players is certainly a welcome sight. On the other hand, these new members are quick to say that they have "always" been fans, which usually means they played Street Fighter II (the most popular game in the series) and not the eleven or so games between then and now, which begs the question of whether they will jump ship again when they get bored.

While it sounds strange, I find such statements deeply troubling: to leap from one entry to another while maintaining that you have "always" been a fan is to completely disregard what makes Street Fighter special. But even worse they cast a shadow of doubt over my own status as a "fan."

Origin

The source of these feelings is rooted in my own long history with the Street Fighter franchise. I first encountered Street Fighter II sometime in early elementary school and was immediately mesmerized. It was like nothing I had experienced before: two characters face off in one-on-one martial arts combat, first to win two rounds wins the match. The game could be played against a computer-controlled opponent or against another person. To control their character each player had an eight-way joystick and six attack buttons, corresponding to three punches and three kicks of different speed and strength.

In addition to their basic punches and kicks, each of the eight characters had a variety of "special moves" that were activated via special sequences of directional inputs and button presses. The inputs for these special moves were not given to the players, who were left to discover them for themselves. Each character also had a variety of "combos." A combo is a sequence of normal and special moves that is uninterruptible and usually requires a higher degree of skill to execute. These too were different for each character and left to the players to discover.

I am not sure what it was exactly that I found so compelling. I certainly found the game fun, but there was something else. The Street Fighter characters themselves were unique: each was full of personality, hailing from different countries and having different fighting styles. Each character's punches, kicks, combos and special moves were different, often drastically so. (Well mostly different anyway, back then Ken and Ryu were practically identical, but I will return to their divergent evolution later.) This meant that the experience of playing the game was dependent on the character used, leading to a great deal of variability.

As time wore on, my interest in the game waned; I became focused on other games and activities, and the series carried on without me. While I was peripherally aware of the new games and spin-offs, I was not particularly interested. Then during my sophomore year of college some friends introduced me to Street Fighter Alpha 3. This was the first Street Fighter game I had played in at least five years. In many ways Alpha 3 is far beyond Street Fighter II: the graphics and sound are far superior, there are many more characters, and the combat system is much deeper. My introduction to this game brought two significant realizations. The first was that I still loved playing Street Fighter, and the second was that I had missed out on a lot.

While I was ignoring Street Fighter, Capcom had been quite prolific in the genre. In total five Street Fighter II games were released, followed by four Street Fighter Alpha games, and three Street Fighter III games. There were also two spinoff series: Marvel vs Capcom and Capcom vs SNK. The former series saw four releases, and pitted characters from Street Fighter and other Capcom franchises against characters from the Marvel universe. These games were preceded by two Marvel-only fighting games. The latter series saw two releases, and included characters from Street Fighter and various SNK-developed fighting games (SNK is another Japanese game developer famous for their 2D fighting games). The games were not released in the order I have listed them here, rather multiple series were simultaneously "current." For example, Street Fighter Alpha 3 was released after the first Street Fighter III game. Needless to say this was an enormous amount of content, and since my initial exposure to Alpha 3 I have invested a lot of time, money and effort locating, acquiring and playing all of these games.

Reflection

I recognize that the story of my own "return" to Street Fighter is not unlike those I labeled "invaders" into the community. To be fair, to dedicate oneself to a single genre for fifteen years is to severely limit one's gaming experiences, and one can hardly be blamed for wanting to play other games. For me personally, as I aspire to be a scholar of the medium, devoting large amounts of time to a single genre becomes counter-productive. So am I not in some ways also a fair-weather fan, devoting time and attention when I can, or is convenient? I have not played seriously for almost two years now, and have never played in a tournament setting. These are troubling questions: who am I to say who is or is not a fan when I myself ignored Street Fighter for so many years? When I no longer have the time to dedicate to the game? Do I have a right to call myself a fan, and if so, to distinguish between established fans and newcomers? Something of an answer, I hope, lies in what I have learned by exploring the series' development.

In playing all of the old games, I discovered that just as the series as a whole has a history, so do the game's characters, some of whom have been included in every entry. In each game every character has his or her own story, which changes from game to game. Ryu's story in Street Fighter II is not the same as in Street Fighter III; it is not even consistent between the various entries in each series. A character's story in a game is presented at the end of the single-player mode, after the player has defeated his or her final opponent. As such a given game will contain many contradictory stories, resulting in the continual question of what is or is not canon. However, these ongoing narratives are far less significant than the formal history of the characters.

In a long-running, multi-branched series like Street Fighter there is a constant tension between providing new content and maintaining the brand. For 2D fighters in particular there is also the question of character balance: in an ideal world all characters are equally powerful and viable, yet provide unique play experiences. This is of course impossible, and the games are constantly being adjusted to improve game balance. Characters are added and removed with each release; those that stick around never play exactly the same way twice. Moves and combos are added, removed, and altered. Each character thus has two stories: the traditional story shown when the game is beaten, and the history of their mechanics. The fun of finding and learning long-forgotten Street Fighter games is tracing this history of form, which tells the story of the characters' development in a much more direct and immediate way than a traditional narrative. By looking at these games in sequence one can literally watch a character grow and evolve, learning new techniques, altering the old, removing the ineffective.

Sometimes this mode of storytelling is more intentional than others. The characters Ken and Ryu are perfect examples. In Street Fighter I these two are the only selectable characters; in terms of mechanics they are identical. In Street Fighter II there were eight selectable characters, but Ken and Ryu were still identical: they had the same attacks and special moves, and were distinguishable only by minor differences in appearance. As the Street Fighter II series progressed, Ken and Ryu slowly drifted apart. Ken became weaker and faster, while Ryu became slower and stronger. While these changes were originally intended to create greater variability in the gameplay, they began to become incorporated in the backstory as well. Ken became the hot-headed American, Ryu the stoic Japanese warrior.

While this evolution is interesting, it creates an inherent contradiction. As discussed above, Ken and Ryu were mechanically identical in the first two Street Fighter games. Later on the Street Fighter Alpha series was released, and Ken and Ryu's differences are fully realized. Yet, according to the diegetic narrative, the Alpha series occurs between Street Fighter I and Street Fighter II. Furthermore, games in the spinoff Marvel vs Capcom and Capcom vs SNK series were released alongside the main Street Fighter games, but are not part of the official chronology. So while characters were evolving throughout those games as well, their stories in them do not count in the larger narrative. As a result, the characters exist in two separate timelines: the formal timeline, which tracks the evolution of fighting game design, and the narrative timeline, which is the character's diegetic history. Consequently, players unfamiliar with the formal history miss the enormous amount of meaning being transmitted through the game's mechanics. There is much more meaning and information here than in the diegetic history because most of the latter is deemed non-canon.

This dualistic history then gives rise to the possibility of different "interpretive strategies," to borrow a phrase from Stanley Fish (168). Fish was interested in how readers make sense of texts, so in an application to video games it is worth noting that players make sense of both the fiction and mechanics of the game. In the case of Street Fighter, a player "interprets" both who the character is and how he or she functions in the game. For example, consider an experienced player sitting down to a new Street Fighter game. This player's interpretive strategy will likely be to apply franchise knowledge to this new game. The player may recognize the character Ken and interpret him as the "same" Ken from other games. When playing as Ken he or she will naturally look for special moves and combos that exist in other games and have carried over into the new game. The experienced player thus sees the characters are dynamic and evolving, an impression that becomes stronger as more games in the series are played.

A player new to the series, however, is more likely to see the characters as static, or will at least be unaware of any change. In the games themselves references to formal changes are very rare, almost nonexistent, hence new players can only interpret the character within the context of the one game. This is a conscious design choice: if Capcom required players to be familiar with prior games many potential new players would be alienated. As such in any given game the characters must seem complete enough to provide a satisfying experience and not confuse the player.

In Fish's terms one could say these two types of players belong to different "interpretive communities:"

Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions. In other words, these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around

(Fish 171).

The two interpretive communities to which fans of Street Fighter belong can generally be described as those who base their understanding of a game on other Street Fighter games, and those who do not; or to put it a different way, those who see the characters as dynamic and those who see them as static.

As with readers of a text, players of a game will likely assign intentions to the author (the developer), in this case Capcom, and here we can see the difference between the two communities. The characters-are-dynamic community will assign intentionality based on formal changes from game to game. For example, if a combo is made harder to execute from one game to the next, this community assumes Capcom thought it was too powerful before, while the removal of a character indicates Capcom thought they were unpopular. As Fish says, such strategies exist prior to reading, or playing, because the player is already aware that some aspects of the game will be different (even if that assumption is based solely on the title it will almost certainly be correct). On the other hand, those who see the characters as static will likely assign intentionality differently because for them there is no prior context. As such each community "writes" their own version of a new Street Fighter game.

However, unlike the processes of interpreting literature that Fish was writing about, within the overall Street Fighter fan community there is a fairly consistent flow from one community to the other. Currently there are many people playing Street Fighter IV who are not familiar with any other game in the franchise, but as soon as they play a second Street Fighter game they will look for familiar characters and try similar strategies, thus beginning movement to the other community. In this instance Fish's model breaks down because the characters-as-constant interpretation can be definitively disproven, whereas Fish was interested in how people can effectively maintain and defend drastically different interpretations of the same text. Even if there is disagreement within the Street Fighter community over the reasons for the change, the fact that the characters do change is fairly apparent. One could argue that Ken in Street Fighter II is not the same character as Ken in Street Fighter III, and hence there are two separate, constant characters named Ken, but this debate seems unlikely to arise amongst the fan community. Regardless it is clear that Capcom wants us to regard them as the same.

Conclusions

While I find these ideas fascinating, the question remains: am I a fan? Can one distinguish between a fan and someone who is merely interested? I may have just demonstrated a relatively large body of esoteric knowledge, but it is entirely possible to come to the same conclusions while despising these games. I think that, at the very least, I can say that the effort expended here qualifies me as fan of Street Fighter, even if not in the traditional sense. (This is sort of a Cartesian approach: I write obsessively, therefore I am.) This idea shows how fandom is a spectrum where the rewards gained are proportional to the investments made. By investing in the series as a whole one gains access to the multiple layers of meaning present in each game and acquires new interpretive strategies. However, different people will invest differently and should not be criticized for making different choices.

In the Street Fighter community new players are essential. They bring new challenges, new opportunities, and give Capcom more reason to keep Street Fighter alive. Right now there is a great fear that new and returning fans will eventually get bored and stop playing, just like they did after Street Fighter II. If they do it will prove to Capcom that there is no market for 2D fighting games anymore, and then there might never be another Street Fighter game. To prevent that the best thing is to be patient with newcomers and make them feel welcome, regardless of where they fall on the spectrum. Hopefully with time their investment in the series will grow and they will decide to stick around.

References

Fish, Stanley. Is There A Text In This Class? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Jason Begy graduated from Canisius College in Buffalo where he earned a BA in English (2004) and spent much of his time working for Canisius' Department of Information Technology Services. Begy's undergraduate thesis argued that the rules and mechanics of chess and go were a reflection of the religious traditions of Catholicism and Buddhism, respectively. In 2008, Begy completed an MS in Technical Communication at Northeastern University in Boston, where his coursework focused on information design for the Web and information architecture for internal corporate and university networks. When it comes to game studies, Begy would describe himself as a ludologist and as such believes that the best way to study games is through their rules and mechanics. Begy is part of the research team supporting the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT games lab.

Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives: An Interview with Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Part Two)

A reader asked me whether the book included a discussion of soap opera, which would seem to meet many criteria of vast narrative, but doesn't fall as squarely in the geek tradition as science fiction series like Doctor Who or superhero comics like Watchmen. Pat does include a brief note about his own experience watching soaps with his grandmother. What do you see as the relationship between "vast narratives" and the serial tradition more generally?

Soap opera is definitely a missed opportunity for us. We had intended to have at least one essay on the subject, but it fell by the wayside as our contributors came aboard and our word count ballooned. We had also intended to have more essays on more purely literary topics; as it stands, Bill McDonald's essay on Thomas Mann seems a little lonely in the middle of all that television. We had wanted at least an essay on Faulkner, probably one on Dickens, and some others. But it's exactly there that Third Person would have started to tip over into more traditional areas of literary history, theory, and narratology. We think one of the strengths of the series is the unexpected juxtaposition of very different fields and genres. So in the end, we opted more for the digital.

The serial tradition seems to us to be a huge and maybe indispensible part of most "vast narratives." Comic books and television especially follow very naturally from the serial tradition exemplified by Dickens. In all cases, the story unfolds in the public eye, as it were: David Copperfield appeared in monthly installments, as do most modern comic books; TV serials are generally weekly. In all cases there's ample opportunity for the public to respond to plot developments and offer feedback.

In David Copperfield, for instance, you have the strange character Miss Mowcher, who appears first as a rather sinister and repulsive figure, but when she reappears is pixie-ish, friendly, and plays a role in helping David. What had happened in the meantime is that the real-world analogue of Miss Mowcher (Catherine Dickens's foot doctor) had recognized herself in the installment and threatened to sue. And as we understand it, the characters of Ben on Lost and Helo on the new Battlestar Galactica were both intended to be short-term minor characters, but proved so popular with viewers that they were promoted to central recurring positions.

There are plenty of artistic problems that arise from serialized storytelling, one of the most serious of which is the potential for unbalancing the narrative. Writing an unserialized novel allows you to edit, revise and generally overhaul the story before the public sees it. To serialize a story forces you to go with your thoughts of the moment, which may change before you finish the story, whether because of new artistic ideas of your own or because of outside forces (TV cast changes, editorial shifts in direction, Miss Mowchers, etc.). The Wire is one of the strongest televised serials ever aired--arguably it's simply the best--and that show was blessed with a strong writing staff with long-term narrative plans, substantial freedom from editorial direction, and as far as we're aware, very few unplanned cast changes. David Simon and the other creators like to talk about Dickens in reference to the show, but The Wire is in fact much more narratively balanced and formal in structure than most of Dickens's novels.

At the same time, a lot of exciting art happens in exactly the improvisational space that seriality provides. The writing staff on David Milch's Deadwood seems to have, on a daily basis and under Milch's direction, group-improvised nearly all of the Deadwood scripts. The end result is a constantly surprising story that still somehow appears as a tightly-structured drama, even down to following, more often than not, the Aristotelian unities of time and place. (And we'd be remiss if we didn't mention that Sean O'Sullivan does great work discussing seriality both in his Third Person essay, and in his essay in David Lavery's collection Reading Deadwood.)

First Person experimented with placing a significant number of its essays on line and encouraging greater dialogue between the contributing authors. What did you learn from that experiment?

One thing we learned is that putting a book's contents online, which previously had mostly been done with monographs, could also work with edited collections. MIT Press was happy enough with the results that we followed this practice with Second Person and will do it again with Third Person. We'd like to see this practice expand in the world of academic publishing, since we now have some evidence that it doesn't make the economic model collapse (it's other things that are doing that, unfortunately, to some areas of academic publishing).

Another thing we learned is that, while blogs were already rising in prominence by the time we started working with Electronic Book Review on this portion of the project, the kind of conversation encouraged by something like EBR isn't obviated by the blogosphere. In general, blog conversation is pretty short-term. People tend to comment on the most recent post, or one that's still on the front page, and this is only in part because blog authors often turn off commenting for older posts, as an anti-spam measure. EBR, on the other hand, solicits and actively edits its "riposte" contributions (returning them to authors for expansion and revision, for example) and ends up fostering a kind of conversation that still moves more quickly than the letters section of a print journal, but with some greater deliberation and extension in time than generally happens on blogs. These different forms of online academic conversation end up complementing each other nicely.

As you note, comics have had a long history of managing complex narrative worlds. What lessons might comics have to offer the new digital entertainment media?

Digital media has already absorbed a lot of helpful lessons. In Third Person this can be seen in Matt Miller's chapter on City of Heroes and City of Villains, which goes into depth on how Cryptic translated comics tropes into workable MMO content.

The place to speculate might actually be the reverse of the question: what comics could take from contemporary digital media. We don't have any idea what a Comics Industry 2.0 would look like, but we suppose it's possible that DC and Marvel could take some of the pressure off themselves by integrating user-generated content of some sort; overseeing, funding and formalizing fan web sites, or who knows.

Every so often the industry does try something like this: back when we were growing up, there was a comic series called Dial "H" for Hero, in which a couple of kids had some sort of magic amulets that would turn them into different random superheroes when activated. The twist was that all of the names, costumes and powers of the heroes were reader-generated. Readers would send in letters with drawings and descriptions of superheroes they'd invented, and then those heroes would be integrated, with the appropriate credit, into later issues. This sounds extremely childish, and it was. There were no opportunities for readers to affect anything except the most replaceable elements of the story. (Although we do give DC credit for making it a boy-girl team, so that one of each pair of superheroes created would be female. Trying to build female readership is an ongoing problem for the big companies.) Later in the '80s, DC did give readers the opportunity to alter the narrative, when they ran the "A Death in Family" storyline in Batman. In this case, the Joker attacks, beats and blows up Jason Todd, the unlikeable second Robin, and DC established a 1-900 number which readers could call to vote on whether Todd lived or died. Well, they voted for him to die, and so he did, but the whole thing is regarded, rightly, as pretty distasteful, and they never bothered with anything like it again.

So the impulse toward interactivity exists in the industry, though it's never really gone anywhere. We suspect that some type of formalized interactivity will be a part of the comics industry going forward. What it will look like, we don't know.

More to Come

Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives: An Interview with Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Part One)

One of the first classes I will teach through my new position at USC will be Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment. I've already started lining up an amazing slate of guest speakers and have put together a tentative syllabus in the class. The primary textbook will be Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, which was edited by Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Many of you who have been working with games studies classes may already know the first two volumes in the MIT Press series which Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin have edited. I've been lucky enough to be included in two of the three books in the series: my essay "Game Design as Narrative Architecture" was included in First Person and my student, Sam Ford, interviewed me about continuity and multiplicity in contemporary superhero comics for Third Person. So, I am certainly biased, but I have found this series to be consistently outstanding.

A real strength is its inclusiveness. By that I mean, both that the editors reach out far and wide to bring together an eclectic mix of contributors, including journalists, academics, and creative artists working across a range of media, and I also mean that they have a much broader span of topics and perspectives represented than in any other games studies collection I know. They clearly understand contemporary games as contributing something important to a much broader set of changes in the ways our culture creates entertainment and tells stories.

For my money, Third Person is the richest of the three books to date and a very valuable contribution to the growing body of critical perspectives we have on what I call "Transmedia Entertainment", Christy Dena calls "Cross-Platform Entertainment", Frank Rose calls "Deep Media," and they call "vast narratives." Each of us is referring to a different part of the elephant but we are all pointing to an inter-related set of trends which are profoundly impacting how stories get told and circulated in the contemporary media landscape. I found myself reading through this collection in huge gulps, scarcely coming up for air, excited to be able to incorporate some of these materials into my class, and certain they will be informing my own future writing in this space.

And I immediately reached out to Pat and Noah about being interviewed for this blog. In the exchange that follows, the two editors speak in a single voice, much as they do in the introduction to the books, but they also signal some of their own differing backgrounds and interests around this topic. The interview is intended to place the new book in the context of the series as a whole, as well as to foreground some of the key discoveries that emerge through their creative and imaginative juxtapositions of different examples of "vast narratives."

Can you explain the relationship between the three books in the series? How has your conception of digital storytelling shifted over the series?

First Person was originally conceived as an attempt to reflect and influence the direction of the field, at a particular moment, while also trying to do some work toward broadening interdisciplinary conversation (in the vein of Noah and Nick Montfort's historically-focused New Media Reader). As such, most of the essays grew out of papers and panel discussions from conferences, especially Digital Arts and Culture and SIGGRAPH. This is also why we used the multi-threaded structure--in order to preserve some of the back-and-forth of ideas characteristic of any emerging field. Unfortunately the book didn't come out as quickly as we hoped, and we were a little worried that it would become more of a history. But it turned out that many of the issues the field was concerned with at the time (e.g., the ludology/narratology stuff) remained, and still remain, things that people entering the field have to think through--so readers still find the book useful today.

That said, we learned an important lesson about the potential for delay, and about thinking of the long-term relevance of a project, so for Second Person we very consciously tried to commission a book that we didn't conceive of as trying to influence the conversation of a particular moment. Pat was working at Fantasy Flight Games when 1P was released, and had been thinking a lot about the relationship of stories to games, especially board games and tabletop RPGs. We both thought it would be an interesting area to explore, especially considering that there wasn't much out there, to our knowledge, that covered similar ground. So the idea was to explicitly draw connections between hobby games, digital media, and other similar performance structures (like improvisational theater) and meaning-making systems (like artificial intelligence research). It was much less "of the moment" than 1P and to our minds, that's when the series really started to take its shape.

Third Person wound up being something of a hybrid of the first two books. Like 2P, it addresses some underserved areas of game design and experience--such as Matt Kirschenbaum's essay on tabletop wargames--but again we're trying a bit to change the terms of the discussion, arguing for a broader conception of our topics. While 2P may have been one of the first books to integrate real discussion of tabletop and live performance games with computer games, its concept is one that goes down easily with most people in the field (we even got reviewed in Game Developer magazine). 3P is a bit of a challenge to digitally-oriented people who think about their field as "new"--or exclusively concerned with issues related to computational systems--because we believe people making digital work have something to learn from people doing television, comic books, novels and the other forms discussed in the book. And we also believe there's something to be learned in the opposite direction as well, and from continuing to connect projects from "high art" and commercial sources. We're very curious to see what the reception turns out to be for this volume, which we view as completing a kind of trilogy.

One striking feature of this series has been the intermingling of perspectives from creative artists and scholars. What do you think each brings to our understanding of these topics? Why do you think it is important to create a dialogue between theory and practice?

Broadly speaking, our scholarly essays often provide a big-picture view of a subject, providing context and analysis, and our artists' essays provide a more detail-oriented, granular view, usually of just a single work or small number of works. Inevitably these distinctions become pretty blurry; for example, we intended John Tynes's 2P essay to be strictly about the Delta Green design process, but he wound up providing a wide-ranging, highly analytical piece about game design philosophy--which is wonderful! Later, in 3P, we gave Delta Green co-creator Adam Scott Glancy the same mandate, and got something of the same result, with a history of the Delta Green property mixed in with wider ideas of narrative strategy.

This is one of the benefits of getting all these contributors side by side in the same series of books; you can see ideas from one person reflected in very different contexts, or, in the case of Delta Green, how the somewhat different design philosophies of two of the three Delta Green creators combined to create the property. This is then situated in the larger context created by the contributions of other creators and scholars, working in a variety of forms related to our themes, resulting in something far richer than one author could deliver.

Incidentally, one notable thing we've found about hobby games designers, is that they're very willing to talk about what goes into their design process, but they're seldom asked! That's a result of the anemic academic attention paid to the field. For literary critics, a novelist's or poet's design process, philosophy, and narrative strategies are all legitimate areas of study (even if "author studies" is now rather out of fashion). Even video game designers are getting some respect these days. But the hobby games industry is too small, it seems, to have merited much attention. This despite the fact that many current video game designers started in the hobby games field: Tynes, Greg Costikyan, Ken Rolston, Eric Goldberg, etc.

While a central focus of the books has been on digital media, especially games, you have always sought to define the topics broadly enough to be able to include work on other kinds of media. In the case of Third Person, these include science fiction novels, comic books, and television series. What do we learn by reading the digital in relation to these other storytelling tradition?

When we talk about "digital media" or "computational media," we're talking about something that is both media and part of a computational system (usually software). As we see it, the lessons digital projects can learn from non-digital projects are both in their aspects that are akin to traditional media (for example, how they handle stories and universes constructed by multiple authors) and in their systems (how they function--and how these operations shape audience experience). The articulation between the two, of course, is key.

We're certainly not the first people to note this. For example, it's been suggested (Noah remembers hearing it first from Australian media scholar Adrian Miles) that digital media creators often fret about a problem well known to soap opera authors: What to do with an audience who may miss unpredictable parts of the experience? Obviously the problem isn't exactly the same, because one case is organized around time (audiences may miss episodes or portions of episodes) and the other is organized by more varied interaction (e.g., selective navigation around a larger space). But there is a common authorial move that can be made in both instances: Finding ways to present any major narrative information in different ways in multiple contexts, so that the result isn't boring for those who see things encyclopedically and doesn't make those with less complete experiences feel they've lost the thread.

Of course, what the above formulation leaves out is that this problem doesn't have to be solved purely on the media authoring side, and perhaps isn't best solved there. Another approach is to design the computational system to ensure that the necessary narrative experiences are had, as appropriate for the path taken by any particular audience. This requires thinking through the authorial problem ("How do we present this in many different contexts?"). But ideally it also involves moving that authoring problem to the system level ("How can we design a component of this system that will appropriately deliver this narrative information in many different contexts, rather than having to write each permutation by hand?"). And, if successful, you don't have to solve the difficult authoring problem of keeping your audience from being bored because they're getting variations on the same narrative information over and over. Then you can use the attention they're giving you to present something more.

Obviously, this isn't easy to do. Computationally-driven forms of vast narrative are still rapidly evolving (at least on the research end of things). But the basic issues are ones that non-digital media have addressed in a rich variety of ways. Even the question of what kinds of experiences one might create in this "vast" space is one that we need to think about broadly--it's a mistake to think we already know the answer--and looking at non-digital work broadly is a part of that.

You write, "Today we are in the process of discovering what narrative potentials are opened by computation's vastness." Is that what gives urgency to this focus on "authoring and exploring vast narratives"?

Personally, that's an important part of our interest. But it's certainly not the only source of urgency. As the variety of chapters in the book chronicles, in part, we're currently seeing exciting creativity in many forms of vast narrative. One might argue that something enabled by computers--digital distribution--is part of the reason for this (e.g., television audiences and producers are perhaps more willing to invest in vast narrative projects when "missing an episode" is less of a concern). But we think of this as distinct from things enabled by computation (permutation, interaction, etc.), especially because some systems (such as tabletop games) carry out their computation through human effort, rather than electronically.

How are you defining "vast narratives"? What relationship do you see between this concept and what others are calling "transmedia storytelling," "deep media," or "crossplatform entertainment"?

Definition isn't a major focus of our project, but there are certain elements of vast narrative that especially attract our attention.

First, we're interested in what we call "narrative extent," which we think of as works that exceed the normal narrative patterns for works of a particular sort. So, for example, The Wire doesn't have that many episodes as police procedurals go (CSI has many more), but it attains unusual narrative extent by making the season--or arguably the entire run of five seasons--rather than the episode, the meaningful boundary.

Second, vast narrative is interesting to us in the many projects that confront issues of world and character continuity. Often this connects to practices of collaborative authorship--including those in which the authors work in a manner separated in time and space, and in many cases with unequal power (e.g., licensor and licensee).

Third, and connected to the previous, we're interested in large cross-media narrative projects, especially those in which one media form is not privileged over the others. So, for example, the universe of Doctor Who is canonically expanded by television, of course, but also by novels and audio plays. On the other end of the spectrum, Richard Grossman's Breeze Avenue project includes a 3-million-word, 4,000 volume novel, as well as forms as different as a website and a performance with an instrument constructed from 13 automobiles--all conceived as one project.

Fourth, the types of computational possibilities we've discussed a bit already, which are present not only in games (we have essays from prominent designers and interpreters of both computer and tabletop games) but also in electronic literature projects and the simulated spaces of virtual reality and virtual worlds.

Fifth, multiplayer/audience interaction is a way of expanding narrative experiences to vast dimensions that we've included in all three books--including alternate-reality, massively-multiplayer, and tabletop role-playing games. Here the possibilities for collaborative construction and performance are connected to those enabled by computational systems (game structures are fundamentally computational) but exceed them in a variety of ways.

Given all of this, it's probably fair to say that our interests are a superset of some of the other concepts you mention. For example, your writing on transmedia storytelling certainly informs our thinking about vast narrative--but something like a tabletop RPG campaign is "vast" for us without being "transmedia" for you.

Patrick Harrigan is a Minneapolis-based writer and editor. He has worked on new media projects with Improv Technologies, Weatherwood Company, and Wrecking Ball Productions, and as Marketing Director and Creative Developer for Fantasy Flight Games. He is the co-editor of The Art of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos (2006, with Brian Wood), and the MIT Press volumes Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (2009), Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007), and First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game (2004), all with Noah Wardrip-Fruin. He has also written a novel, Lost Clusters (2005).

Noah Wardrip-Fruin works as a digital media creator, critic, and technology researcher with a particular interest in fiction and playability. His projects have been presented by conferences, galleries, arts festivals, and the Whitney and Guggenheim museums. He is author of the forthcoming Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies(2009) and has edited four books, including Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007), with Pat Harrigan, and The New Media Reader (2003), with Nick Montfort. He is currently an Assistant Professor with the Expressive Intelligence Studio in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

"Geeking Out" For Democracy (Part Two)

A close look at the recent presidential election shows that young people are more politically engaged now than at any point since the end of the Vietnam War era. 54.5 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 voted last November, constituting a larger proportion of the total electorate -- 18 percent -- then Putnam's bowlers, people 65-years-and-older (16 percent). The youth vote was a decisive factor in Obama's victories in several states, including Indiana, North Carolina, and possibly Florida. John Della Volpe, director of polling for the Harvard Institute of Politics, told U.S. News and World Reports that the desire to make the world a better place was "baked into the millennials' DNA" but "they just didn't believe they could do that by voting." Political scientist Lance Bennett has argued that unlike Putnam's bowlers, this generation's civic identities are not necessarily defined through notions of "duty" or through once-every-four-years rituals like voting; rather, he argues, they are drawn towards "consumerism, community volunteering, or transnational activism" as mechanisms through which to impact the larger society. The Obama campaign was able to create an ongoing relationship with these new voters, connecting across every available media platform. Log onto YouTube and Obama was there in political advertisements, news clips, comedy sketches, and music videos, some created by the campaign, some generated by his supporters. Pick up your mobile phone and Obama was there with text messages updating young voters daily. Go to Facebook and Obama was there, creating multiple ways for voters to affiliate with the campaign and each other. Pick up a video game controller and Obama was there, taking out advertisement space inside several popular games. Turn on your Tivo to watch a late night comedy news show and Obama and his people are there, recognizing that The Daily Show or Colbert are the places where young people go to learn more about current events. This new approach to politics came naturally to a candidate who has fought to be able to use his Blackberry and text-messaging as he enters the White House, who regularly listens to his iPod, who knows how to give a Vulcan salute, brags about reading Harry Potter books to his daughters, and who casually talks about catching up on news online. The Obama campaign asked young people to participate, gave them chances to express themselves, enabled them to connect with each other, and allowed them to feel some sense of emotional ownership over the political process.

What has all of this to do with schools? Alas, frequently, very little.

Let's imagine a learning ecology in which the youth acquires new information through all available channels and through every social encounter. The child learns through schools and after school programs; the child learns on their own through the home and family and through their social interactions with their peers. They learn through face to face encounters and through online communities. They learn through work and they learn through play. The skills they acquire through one space helps them master core content in another. Through the New Media Literacy project, we have been developing resources which can be deployed in the classroom, in afterschool programs, and in the home for self-learning, seeking a more integrated perspective on what it means to learn in a networked society. Yet, right now, most of our schools are closing their gates to those cultural practices and forms of informal learning that young people value outside the classroom and in the process, they may be abdicating their historic roles in fostering civic engagement.

In a 2003 report, CIRCLE and the Carnegie Corporation of New York sought to document and analyze "the civic mission of schools." Historically, schools had been a key institution in fostering a sense of civic engagement. While their parents were bowling, their children were getting involved in student governments, editing the student newspaper, and discussing public affairs in their civics classes. The Civic Mission of Schools reports: "Long term studies of Americans show that those who participate in extracurricular activities in high school remain more civically engaged than their contemporaries even decades later.... A long tradition of research suggests that giving students more opportunities to participate in the management of their own classrooms and schools builds their civic skills and attitudes.....Recent evidence indicates that simulations of voting, trials, legislative deliberation, and diplomacy in schools can lead to heightened political knowledge and interest." Yet, the committee that authored the report ended up sharply divided about how realistic it was to imagine schools, as they are currently constituted, giving young people greater opportunities to participate in school governance or freedom to share their values and beliefs with each other. Student journalism programs are being defunded and in many cases, the content of the student newspaper is more tightly regulated than ever before. Schools no longer offer opportunities for students to actively debate public affairs out of fear of a push-back from politically sensitive parents.

In reality, young people have much greater opportunities to learn these civic skills outside school, as they "hang out," "mess around," and "geek out" online. This may be why so many of them use social network sites as resources to expand their contact with their friends at school or why they feel such a greater sense of investment in their game guilds than in their student governments, or why they see YouTube as a better place to express themselves than the school literature magazine. Meanwhile, our schools are making it harder for teachers and students to integrate these materials into the classroom. Federal law has imposed mandatory filters on networked computers in schools and public libraries. There have been a series of attempts to pass legislation banning access to social network sites and blogging tools. Many teachers have told Project New Media Literacies that they can't access YouTube or other web 2.0 sites on their school computers. And the Student Press Law Center reports that a growing number of schools have taken disciplinary action against students because of things they've written on blogs published outside school hours, off school grounds, and through their own computers.

In other words, rather than promoting the skills and ethical responsibilities that will enable more meaningful participation in future civic life, many schools have sought to close down opportunities to engage with these new technologies and cultural practices. Of course, many young people, as the Digital Youth Project discovered, work around these restrictions (and in the process, find one more reason to disobey the adults in their lives). Yet, many other young people have no opportunities to engage with these virtual worlds, to enter these social networks, on their own. These school policies have amplified the already serious participation gap that separates information-haves and have-nots. Those students who have the richest online lives are being stripped of their best modes of learning as they pass into the schoolhouse and those who have limited experiences outside of classroom hours are being left further behind. And all of them are being told two things: that what they do in their online lives has nothing to do with the things they are learning in school; and that what they are learning in school has little or nothing of value to contribute to who they are once the bell rings.

One of the goals of Project New Media Literacies has been to bring this participatory culture into the classroom as a key first step towards fostering a more participatory democracy . This isn't a matter of making school more "entertaining" or dealing with wavering student attention. It has to do with modeling powerful new forms of civic life and learning, of helping young people acquire skills that they are going to need to enter the workplace, to participate in public policy debates, to express themselves creatively, and to change the world. As we are doing this work, we are bumping up, again and again, against constraints which make it impossible for even the most determined, dedicated, and informed teachers to bring many of these technologies and cultural practices into their classrooms. It isn't simply that young people know more about Facebook than their teachers; it is that for the past decade, schools have sought to insulate themselves from these sites of potential disruption and transformation, hermetically sealing themselves off from these social networks and from the mechanisms of participatory culture. The first we can overcome through better teacher training, but the second is going to require us to rethink basic school policies if schools are going to pursue their traditional civic missions in ways that enhance these new forms of citizenly engagement.

This article was written for Threshold Magazine's special issue on "Learning in a Participatory Culture." Read more about Project New Media Literacies here.

"Geeking Out" For Democracy (Part One)

On the eve of our conference at MIT on "Learning in a Participatory Culture," Cable in the Classroom has joined forces with Project New Media Literacies to edit a special issue of Threshold which centers on the work we've been doing and the vision behind it. Among the features are a wonderful graphic showing the new learning environment and how informal, individual, and school based learning can work together to reinforce the core social skills and cultural competencies we've been discussing; a transcribed conversation with Benjamin Stokes, Daniel T. Hickey, Barry Joseph, John Palfrey, and myself about the challenges and opportunities surrounding bringing new media into the classroom; James Bosco adopting a school reform perspective on these issues; and a range of pieces by the core researchers on our team describing what happened when we introduced some of our materials into schools or after school programs. If you wanted to attend the conference but just couldn't make it to Cambridge, you can follow along through the live webcasts of the event. Check here for details.

Over the next few weeks, I am going to be showcasing the work of Project New Media Literacies and introducing you to some of our curricular materials which are just now going public. Along the way, you will get a chance to read several pieces from the Threshold magazine, including one from our award-winning research director Erin Reilly, get some reflections from some of our students about how they learned about and through popular culture, and learn about how spreadability may impact education. Today and next time, I will be running the essay which I wrote for the magazine, which maps the ways I am starting to think about the relationship between participatory culture and participatory democracy.

And if that's not enough New Media Literacies thinking for you, check out this great podcast put together by Barry Joseph and others at Global Kids, one of our research partners, which includes a conversation between Mimi Ito and myself and an interview with Constance Steinkuehler.

"Geeking Out" For Democracy

by Henry Jenkins

In his book, Bowling Alone, sociologist Robert Putnam suggests that many members of the post-WWII generation discovered civic engagement at the local bowling alley. The bowling alley was a place where people gathered regularly not simply to play together, but talk about the personal and collective interests of the community, to form social ties and identify common interests. In a classic narrative of cultural decline, Putnam blames television for eroding these strong social ties, resulting in a world where people spent more time isolated in their homes and less time participating in shared activities with the larger community.

But what does civic engagement look like in the age of Facebook, YouTube, and World of Warcraft? All of these new platforms are reconnecting home-based media with larger communities, bridging between our public and private lives. All offer us a way to move from media consumption towards cultural participation.

During a recent visit in Santiago, I sat down with Chilean national Senator Fernando Flores Labra who believes that the guild structure in the massively multiplayer video game, World of Warcraft, offers an important training ground for the next generation of business and political leaders. (Guilds are affiliations of players who work together towards a common cause, such as battling the monsters or overcoming other enemies in the sword-and-sorcery realm depicted in the game.) The middle aged Labra, with his slicked back hair, his paunchy midsection, and his well-pressed suits, is probably not what you expect a World of Warcraft player to look like. Yet, he's someone who has spent, by his own estimate, "thousands of hours playing these games, with hundreds of people, of all ages, all over the world."

Labra recently invited leading business and political leaders to come together and learn more about such games, explaining: "I am convinced that these technologies can be excellent laboratories for learning the practices, skills and ethics required to succeed in today's global environment, where people are increasingly required to interact with people all over the world, but still have a hard time working with their colleagues in the office next door, never mind with their new colleagues, whom they have never met, on the other side of the world. If an organization is to survive and thrive in today's era of globalization, its leaders must ensure that members of their organization become experts in operational coordination among geographically and culturally diverse groups; build and cultivate trust among their various stakeholders, including their employees, their customers and their investors, all of whom may be culturally and geographically diverse; cultivate people that are able to act with leadership in an era of rapid and constant change."

Playing World of Warcraft requires the mobilization of a large number of participants and the coordination of efforts across a range of different skill groups. Experienced players find themselves logging into the game not simply because they want to play but because they feel an obligation to the other players. Participants often network outside the game space to coordinate their efforts and soon find themselves discussing a much broader range of topics (much like Putnam's bowlers). Participants develop and deploy tools which allow them to manage complex data sets and monitor their own performances. And the guild leadership, many of whom are still in their teens, learn to deal with their team member's complex motivations and sometimes conflicting personalities.

Whatever these folks are doing, they are not "bowling alone." If Putnam's correct, bowling was more than a game for post-war citizens, and World of Warcraft is more than a game for many students in your classrooms.

But let's take it a step further. Game guilds and other kinds of social networks are as central to what we mean by civic engagement in the 21st century as civic organizations were to the community life of the 20th century. If bowling helped connect citizens at the geographically local level, these new kinds of communities bring people together from diverse backgrounds, including adults and youths, and across geographically dispersed communities. Such dispersed social ties are valuable in a world where the average American moves once every four or five years, often across regions, and where many of us find ourselves needing to interact with colleagues around the planet.

I use the term "participatory culture" to describe the new kinds of social and creative activities which have emerged in a networked society. A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement.

The work we are doing through the MacArthur Foundation's emerging Digital Media and Learning Initiative, a network of scholars, educators, and activists , starts from the premise that these new media platforms represent important sites of informal learning. The time young people spend, outside the classroom, engaging with these new forms of cultural experience foster real benefits in terms of their mastering of core social skills and cultural competencies (the New Media Literacies) they are going to be deploying for years to come. While much has been said about why 21st century skills are essential for the contemporary workplace, they are also valuable in preparing young people for future roles in the arts, politics, and community life. Learning how to navigate social networks or produce media may result in a sense of greater personal empowerment across all aspects of youth's lives.

In a recent report, documenting a multi-year, multi-site ethnographic study of young people's lives on and off line, the Digital Youth Project suggests three potential modes of engagement which shape young people's participation in these online communities. First, many young people go on line to "hang out" with friends they already know from schools and their neighborhoods. Second, they may "mess around" with programs, tools, and platforms, just to see what they can do. And third, they may "geek out" as fans, bloggers, and gamers, digging deep into an area of intense interest to them, moving beyond their local community to connect with others who share their passions. The Digital Youth Project argues that each of these modes encourages young people to master core technical competencies, yet they may also do some of the things that Putnam ascribed to the bowling leagues of the 1950s -- they strengthen social bonds, they create shared experiences, they encourage conversations, and they provide a starting point for other civic activities.

For the past few decades, we've increasingly talked about those people who have been most invested in public policy as "wonks," a term implying that our civic and political life has increasingly been left to the experts, something to be discussed in specialized language. When a policy wonk speaks, most of us come away very impressed by how much the wonk knows but also a little bit depressed about how little we know. It's a language which encourages us to entrust more control over our lives to Big Brother and Sister, but which has turned many of us off to the idea of getting involved. But what if more of us had the chance to "geek out" about politics? What if we could create points of entry where young people saw the affairs of government as vitally linked to the practices of their everyday lives? "Geeking out" is empowering; it motivates our participation and in a world of social networks, pushes us to find others who share our passions. If being a "wonk" is about what you know, being a "geek" involves an ongoing process of sharing information and working through problems with others. Being a political "geek" involves taking on greater responsibility for solving your own problems, working as a member of a larger community, whether one defined in geographic terms or through shared interests.

Maybe "geeking out" about politics is key to fostering a more participatory democracy, one whose success is measured not simply by increases in voting (which we've started to see over the past few election cycles) but also increased volunteerism (which shows up in survey after survey of younger Americans), increased awareness of current events, increased responsibility for each other, and increased participation in public debates about the directions our society is taking. "Geeking out" might mean we think about civic engagement as a life style rather than as a special event.

We still have a lot to learn about how someone moves from involvement in participatory culture towards greater engagement with participatory democracy. But so far, there are some promising results when organizations seek to mobilize our emerging roles as fans, bloggers, and gamers. Consider, for example, the case of the HP Alliance, an organization created by Andrew Slack, a 20-something activist and stand up comic, who saw the Harry Potter books as potential resources for mobilizing young people to make a difference in the world. Slack argues that J.K. Rowling's novels have taught a generation to read and write (through fan fiction) and now it has the potential to help many of those young people cross-over into participation in the public sphere. Creating what he describes as "Dumbledore's Army" for the real world, the HP Alliance uses the story of a young man who questioned authority, organized his classmates, and battled evil to get young people connected with a range of human rights organization. Slack works closely with Wizard Rock bands, who perform at fan conventions, record their music as mp3s, and distribute it via social network sites and podcasts. He works with the people who run Harry Potter fan websites and blogs to help spread the word to the larger fan community. So far, the HP Alliance has moved more than 100,000 people, many of them teens, to contribute to the struggles against genocide in Darfur or the battles for worker's rights at Wal-Mart or the campaign against Proposition 8 in California.

Many parents and educators grumble about this generation's lack of motivation or commitment, describing them as too busy playing computer games to get involved in their communities. For some teens, this may be sadly true. But, Global Kids, a New York organization, has been using Second Life to bring together youth leaders from around the world and to give them a playground through which they can imagine and stage solutions to real world problems. Global Kids, for example, used machinima -- a practice by which game engines are deployed to create real time digital animation -- to document the story of a child soldier in Uganda and circulate it via YouTube and other platforms to call attention to the plight of youth in the developing world. Much like the HP Alliance, Global Kids is modeling ways we can bridge between participatory culture and participatory democracy.

A New "Platform" for Games Research?: An Interview with Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort (Part Two)

Henry: Does Platform Studies necessarily limit the field to writers who can combine technological and cultural expertise, a rare mix given the long-standing separation between C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures"? Or should we imagine future books as emerging through collaborations between writers with different kinds of expertise?

Nick: We definitely will encourage collaborations of this sort, and we know that collaborators will need all the encouragement they can get. It's unusual and difficult for humanists to collaborate. When the technical and cultural analysis that you need to do is demanding, though, as it is in a platform study, it's great to have a partner working with you.

Personally, I prefer for my literary and research collaborations to be with similar "cross-cultural" people, such as Ian; I don't go looking for a collaborator to balance me by knowing about all of the technical matters or all of the cultural and humanistic ones. It is possible for collaborators on one side to cross the divide and find others, though. Single-authored books are fine as well, and it's okay with me if the single author leans toward one "culture" or the other, or even if the author isn't an academic.

Ian: I also think that this two culture problem is resolving itself to some extent. When I look at my students, I see a very different cohort than were my colleagues in graduate school. I see a fluency in matters of technology and culture that defies the expectations of individual fields. So in some ways, I see the Platform Studies series as an opportunity for this next generation of scholars as much as it is for the current one, perhaps even more so.

When you think about it, popular culture in general is also getting over the two culture problem. There are millions of people out there who know something about programming computers. As I've watched the press and the public react to Racing the Beam, it's clear to me that discussions of hardware design and game programming are actually quite welcome among a general readership.

Henry: What relationship do you see between "platform studies" and the "science, technology and society" field?

Nick: A productive one. We're very much hoping that people in STS will be interested in doing platform studies and in writing books in the series. Books in the series could, of course, make important contributions in STS as well as in digital media.

Ian: Indeed, STS already tends strongly toward the study of how science and technology underlies things. Platform studies has something in common with STS in this regard. But STS tends to focus on science's impact on politics and human culture rather than human creativity. This latter area has typically been the domain of the humanities and liberal arts. One way to understand platform studies is as a kind of membrane between computing, STS, and the humanities. We think there's plenty of productive work to be done when these fields come together.

Henry: Why did you decide to focus on the Atari Video Computer System as the central case study for this book?

Ian: We love the Atari VCS. It's a platform we remember playing games on and still do. In fact, the very idea for platform studies came out of conversations Nick and I had about the Atari. We found ourselves realizing that a programmer's negotiation between platform and creativity takes place in every kind of creative computing application.

Nick: Another factor was historical. While contributing to the cultural understanding of video games a great deal, game studies hasn't looked to its roots enough. A console as influential as the Atari VCS deserved scholarly and popular attention beyond mere retro nostalgia. We wanted to bring that sort of analysis to bear.

Ian: Finally, I've been using the Atari VCS for several years now in my classes, both as an example and as an exercise. I have my Introduction to Computational Media class program small games on the system as an exercise in constraint. I also taught a graduate seminar entirely devoted to the system. Moreover, I often make new games for the system, some of which I'll be releasing this spring. So overall, the Atari VCS is a system that has been and remains at the forefront of both of our creative and critical interests.

In fact, I've continued to do platform studies research on the Atari VCS beyond the book. A group of computer science capstone students under my direction just completed a wonderful update to the "Stella" Atari VCS emulator, adding effects to simulate the CRT television. These include color bleed, screen texture, afterimage -- all matters we discuss in the book. I have a webpage describing the project at http://www.bogost.com/games/a_television_simulator.shtml.

Henry: You focus the book around case studies of a number of specific Atari titles from Adventure and Pac-Man to Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Can you say more about how these examples allowed you to map out the cultural impact and technical capacities of the Atari system?

Nick: The specific examples gave us the opportunity do what you can do with close readings: drill down into particular elements and see how they relate to a game, a platform and a culture. But we wouldn't have found the same insights if we had just picked a game, or six games from different platforms, and got to work. We used these games to see how programmers' understanding of the platform developed and how the situation of computer gaming changed, how people challenged and expanded the 1977 idea of gaming that was frozen into the Atari VCS when they put this wonderful machine together.

Ian: We also chose to focus on a specific period, the early years of the Atari VCS, so to speak, from 1977 to 1983. These games in particular allowed us to characterize that period, as programmers moved from their original understanding of this system -- one based on porting a few popular coin-op games -- to totally different and surprising ways of making games on it.

Henry: Platform Studies seems to align closely with other formalist approaches to games. Can it also be linked to cultural interpretation?

Nick: Formalist? Really? We were indeed very concerned with form and function in Racing the Beam, so I won't shun the label, but we tried to be equally attentive to the material situation of the Atari VCS and the cartridges and arcade games we discussed. For instance, we included an image of the Shark Jaws cabinet art so that the reader could look at the typography and decide whether Atari was attempting to refer to Speilberg's movie. We discuss the ramifications of using a cheaper cartridge interface in the VCS design, one that was missing a wire.

Ian: We should also remember the technical creativity that went into designing a system like the Atari VCS, or into programming games for it. The design of the graphics chip, for example, was motivated by a particular understanding of what it meant to play a game: two human players, side by side, each controlling a character on one side of the screen or another.

By the time David Crane created Pitfall! many years later, those understandings had changed. Pitfall! is a one-player game with a twenty minute clock. But it's also a wonderful mash-up of cultural influences: Tarzan, Indiana Jones, Heckle and Jeckle.

Nick: I'll admit that ours is a detailed analysis that focused on specifics (formal, material, technical) rather than being based around broad cultural questions: it's bottom-up rather than top-down. We're still trying to connect the specifics of the Atari VCS (and other platforms) to culture, though. The project is not only linked with, but part of, cultural interpretation.

Ian: I'd go even further; there's nothing particularly formalist about a platform studies approach, if formalism means a preference of material and structure over cultural reception and meaning. If anything, I think our approach offers a fusion of many influences, rather than an obstinate grip on a single one.

Henry: There is still a retro-gaming community which is deeply invested in some of these games. Why do you think these early titles still command such affection and nostalgia?

Ian: Some of the appeal is related to fond memories and retro-nostalgia, certainly. Millions of people had Ataris and enjoyed playing them. Just as the case with the Apple ][ or the Commodore 64 may have introduced someone to computing, so the Atari VCS might have introduced him or her to videogaming. So part of the appeal of returning to these games is one of returning to the roots of a pleasurable pastime.

Nick: That said, we resist appeals to nostalgia in the book and our discussions about it, not because nostalgia and retro aesthetics are bad, but because it would be a shame if people thought you could only look back at video games to be nostalgic. There are reasons for retro-gaming that go beyond nostalgia, too. It's driven, in part, by the appeal of elegance, by a desire to explore the contours of computing history with an awareness of what games are like now, and by the ability of systems like the Atari VCS to just be beautiful and produce really aesthetically powerful images and compelling gameplay.

Ian: It's also worth noting that there is a thriving community interested in new Atari games, many of whom congregate on the forums at AtariAge.com. For these fans and hobbyist creators, the Atari is a living platform, one that still has secrets left to reveal. So the machine can offer interest beyond retro-gaming as well.

Henry: What factors contributed to the decline of the Atari empire? How did that decline impact the future of the games industry and of game technology?

Nick: I think it takes a whole book on the complex corporate history of Atari to even start answering this question. Our book is focused on the platform rather than the company. Scott Cohen's Zap!: The Rise and Fall of Atari is a book about the company, and my feeling is that even that one doesn't really answer that question entirely. We're hoping that there will be more books on Atari overall before too long.

Ian: There are some reasons for Atari's decline that are connected specifically to the Atari VCS platform, though. It turned out to be incredibly flexible and productive, to support more types of game experience than its creators ever could have imagined. No doubt, Atari never imagined that third-party companies such as Activision would come along and make literally hundreds of games for the system by 1983, cutting in on their business model right at the most profitable point. But the system was flexible enough for that to happen, too.

Nick: That's why Nintendo did everything they could, by license and through technical means, to lock down the NES and to prevent this sort of thing from happening with it. The industry has been like that ever since.

Ian: As we point out in the book, this was a bittersweet solution. Nintendo cauterized the wound of retailer reticence, but it also introduced a walled garden. Nintendo (and later Sony and Microsoft) would get to decide what types of games were "valid" for distribution. Before 1983, the variety of games on the market was astounding. So, on the one hand, we're still trying to recover from the setback that was first-party licensing. But on the other hand, we might not have a games industry if it wasn't for Nintendo's adoption of that strategy.

Henry: Can you give us a sense of the future of the Platform Studies project? What other writers and topics can we expect to see? Are you still looking for contributors?

Nick: Yes, we're definitely looking for contributors, although we're pleased with the response we've had so far. We expect a variety of platforms to be covered -- not only game systems, but famous early individual computers, home computers from the 1980s, and software platforms such as Java. Some families of platforms will be discussed in books, for instance, arcade system boards. And although every book will focus on the platform level, we anticipate a wide variety of different methods and approaches to platforms. While getting into the specifics of a platform and how it works, people may use many different methodologies: sociological, psychoanalytic, ethnographic, or economic, for example.

Ian: In terms of specific projects, we have a number of proposals in various stages of completeness and review. It's probably a bit early to talk about them specifically, but I can say that all of the types of platforms Nick just mentioned are represented.

There are a few different types of book series; some offer another venue for work that is already being done, while others invite and maybe even encourage a new type of work to be done. I suspect that Platform Studies is of the latter sort, and we're gratified to see authors thinking of new projects they didn't even realize they wanted to pursue.

Henry: You both teach games studies within humanities studies in major technical institutions. How do the contexts in which you are working impact the approach you are taking here?

Ian: Certainly both Georgia Tech and MIT make positive assumptions about the importance of matters technical. Humanities and social science scholarship at our institutions thus often take up science and technology without having to justify the idea that such topics are valid objects of study.

Nick: I have to agree -- it's very nice that I don't have to go around MIT explaining why it's legitimate to study a computing system or that video games and digital creativity are an important part of culture.

Ian: Additionally, at Georgia Tech we have strong relationships between the college of liberal arts, the college of engineering, and the college of computing. I have many colleagues in these fields with whom I speak regularly. I have cross-listed my courses in their departments. We even have an undergraduate degree that is co-administered by liberal arts and computing. So there's already an ecosystem that cultures the technical pursuit of the humanities, and vice versa.

I also think technical institutes tend to favor intellectual experimentation in general. We often hear cliches about the "entrepreneurial" environment at technical institutes, a reference to their tendency to encourage the commercial realization of research. But that spirit also extends to the world of ideas, and scholars at a place like Georgia Tech are perhaps less likely to be criticized, ostracized, or denied tenure for pursuing unusual if forward-thinking research.

Dr. Ian Bogost is a videogame designer, critic, and researcher. He is Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC. His research and writing considers videogames as an expressive medium, and his creative practice focuses on games about social and political issues. Bogost is author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (MIT Press 2006), of Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT Press 2007), and co-author (with Nick Montfort) of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press 2009). Bogost's videogames about social and political issues cover topics as varied as airport security, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, and tort reform. His games have been played by millions of people and exhibited internationally.

Nick Montfort is assistant professor of digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Montfort has collaborated on the blog Grand Text Auto, the sticker novel Implementation, and 2002: A Palindrome Story. He writes poems, text generators, and interactive fiction such as Book and Volume and Ad Verbum. Most recently, he and Ian Bogost wrote Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2009). Montfort also wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003) and co-edited The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 (ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader (MIT Press, 2003).

A New "Platform" for Games Research?: An Interview with Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort (Part One)

Any time two of the leading video and computer game scholars -- Ian Bogost (Georgia Tech) and Nick Montfort (MIT) -- join forces to write a book, that's a significant event in my book. When the two of them lay down what amounts to a new paradigm for game studies as a field -- what they are calling "Platform Studies" -- and apply it systematically -- in this case, to the Atari system -- this is something which demands close attention to anyone interested in digital media. So, let me urge you to check out Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, released earlier this spring by MIT Press. In the interview that follows you will get a good sense of what the fuss is all about as the dynamic duo lay out their ideas for the future of games studies, essentially further raising the ante for anyone who wants to do serious work in the field. As someone who would fall far short of their ambitious bar for the ideal games scholar, I read this discussion with profoudly mixed feelings. I can't argue with their core claim that the field will benefit from the arrival of a generation of games scholars who know the underlying technologies -- the game systems -- as well as they know the games. I certainly believe that the opening up of a new paradigm in games studies will only benefit those of us who work with a range of other related methodologies. If I worry, it is because games studies as a field has moved forward through a series of all-or-nothing propositions: either you do this or you aren't really doing game studies. And my own sense is that fields of research grow best when they are expansive, sucking in everything in their path, and sorting out the pieces later.

That said, I have no reservations about what the authors accomplish in this rigorous, engaging, and ground-breaking book. However you think of games studies as an area of research, there will be things in this book which will provoke you and where Bogost and Montfort are concerned, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Henry: Racing the Beam represents the launch of a new publishing series based on what you are calling "Platform Studies." What is platform studies and why do you think it is an important new direction for games research?

Nick: Platform studies is an invitation to look at the lowest level of digital media -- the computing systems on which many sorts of programs run, including games. And specifically, it's an invitation to consider how those computing systems function in technical detail, how they constrain and enable creative production, and how they relate to culture.

Ian: It's important to note that platform studies isn't a particular approach; you can be more formalist or materialist, more anthropological or more of a computer scientist, in terms of how you consider a platform. No matter the case, you'll still be doing platform studies, as long as you consider the platform deeply. And, while platform studies is of great relevance to the study of video games, these studies can also be used to better understand digital art, electronic literature, and other sorts of computational cultural production that happens on the computer.

Nick: In games research in particular, the platform seems to have a much lower profile as we approach 2010 than it did in the late 1970s and 1980s. Games are developed for both PC and Xbox 360 fairly easily, and few scholars even bother to specify which version of a such game they're writing about, despite differences in interface, in how these games are burdened with DRM, and in the contexts of play (to name just a few factors). At the same time, there are these recent platforms that feature unusual interfaces and limited computational power, relative to the big iron consoles: Nintendo's Wii and DS and Apple's iPhone.

Ian: And let's not forget that games are being made in Flash and for other mobile phones. Now, developers are very acutely aware of what these platforms can do and of how important it is to consider the platform level. But their implicit understanding doesn't always make it into wider discussions, and that understanding doesn't always connect to cultural concerns and to the history of gaming and digital media.

Nick: So, we think that by looking thoroughly at platforms, we will, first, understand more about game consoles and other game platforms, and will be able to both make better use of the ones we have (by creating games that work well with platforms) and also develop better ones. Beyond that, we should be able to work toward a better understanding of the creative process and the contexts of creativity in gaming and digital media.

Henry: What do you think has been lost in game studies as a result of a lack of attention to the core underlying technologies behind different game systems?

Nick: For one thing, there are particular things about how games function, about the interfaces they present, and about how they appear visually and how they sound which make no sense (or which can be attributed to causes that aren't really plausible) unless you make the connection to platform. You can see these in every chapter of Racing the Beam and probably in every interesting Atari VCS game.

Ian: And more simply put, video games are computational media. They are played on computers, often very weird computers designed only to play video games. Isn't it reasonable to think that observing something about these computers, and the relationship between each of them and the games that they hosted, would lead to insights into the structure, meaning, or cultural significance of such works?

Here's an example from the book: the graphical adventure genre, represented by games like The Legend of Zelda, emerged from Warren Robinett's attempts to translate the text-based adventure game Colossal Cave onto the Atari VCS. The machine couldn't display text, of course, so Robinett chose to condense the many actions one can express with language into a few verbs that could be represented by movement and collision detection. The result laid the groundwork for a popular genre of games, and it was inspired largely by the way one person negotiated the native abilities of two very different computers.

Nick: More generally, the platform is a frozen concept of what gaming should be like: Should it come in a fake wood-grain box that looks like a stereo cabinet and fits in the living room along stereo components? Should it have two different pairs of controllers and difficulty switches so that younger and older siblings can play together with a handicap? Only if we look at the platform can we understand these concepts, and then go on to understand how the course of game development and specific games negotiate with the platform's concept.

Henry: Early on, there were debates about whether one needed to be a "gamer" to be able to contribute to games studies. Are we now facing a debate about whether you can study games if you can't read code or understand the technical schematics of a game system?

Nick: All sorts of people using all sorts of methods can make and have made contributions to game studies, and that includes non-ethnographers, non-lawyers, non-narratologists, and those without film studies backgrounds as well as people who can't read code or understand schematics. Games are a tremendous phenomenon, and it would be impossible for someone to have every skill and bit of background relevant to studying them. We're lucky that many different sorts of people are looking at games from so many perspectives.

That said, whether one identifies as a "gamer" is a rather different sort of issue than whether one understands how computational systems work. If your concern is for people's experience of the game -- how they play it, what meaning they assign to it, and how the experience relates to other game experiences -- then the methods that are most important to you will be the ones related to understanding players or interpreting the game yourself. But if you care about how games are made or how they work, it makes a lot of sense to know how to program (and how to understand programs) and to have learned at least the bare outlines of computer architecture.

Ian: Even if you want to thoroughly study something non-interactive, like cutscenes, won't you have to understand both codecs and the specifics of 3D graphics (ray tracing, texture mapping, etc.) to understand why certain choices were made in creating a cutscene? How can you really understand Geometry Wars without getting into the fact that vector graphics display hardware used to exist, and that the game is an attempt to recreate the appearance of those graphics on today's flat-panel raster displays? How could you begin to talk about the difference between two radically different and culturally relevant chess programs, Video Chess for the Atari VCS (which fit in 4K) and the world-dominating Deep Blue, without considering their underlying technical differences -- and going beyond noticing that one is enormously powerful and other minimal?

Nick: I certainly don't want to ban anyone from the field for not knowing about computing systems, but I also think it would be a disservice to give out game studies or digital media degrees at this point and not have this sort of essential technical background be part of the curriculum.

Dr. Ian Bogost is a videogame designer, critic, and researcher. He is Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC. His research and writing considers videogames as an expressive medium, and his creative practice focuses on games about social and political issues. Bogost is author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (MIT Press 2006), of Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT Press 2007), and co-author (with Nick Montfort) of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press 2009). Bogost's videogames about social and political issues cover topics as varied as airport security, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, and tort reform. His games have been played by millions of people and exhibited internationally.

Nick Montfort is assistant professor of digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Montfort has collaborated on the blog Grand Text Auto, the sticker novel Implementation, and 2002: A Palindrome Story. He writes poems, text generators, and interactive fiction such as Book and Volume and Ad Verbum. Most recently, he and Ian Bogost wrote Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2009). Montfort also wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003) and co-edited The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 (ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader (MIT Press, 2003).

Getting Philosophical about Legend of Zelda: An Interview with Kristina Drzaic and Peter Rauch

Are video games philosophical texts? They certainly encourage players to make choices and explore what their consequences may be and in mapping those consequences, they can help us to see the world through certain moral and ethical lenses. The challenge, of course, is to encourage players to reflect on the logic shaping their actions and the game's responses, to move from playing the game to examining themselves and their decisions. A recent book, Luke Cuddy's The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy, sought to apply a range of philosophical concepts and debates to the long-standing Zelda video game series. A pair of my former students, Peter Rauch and Kristina Drzaic, both from our graduate class of 2007, contributed to the book and agreed to share some of their perspectives on the blog. I've had the pleasure to watch both of them grow as game theorists -- and in Kristina's case, as a designer who now works in the Australian games industry. Both of them did thesis projects for our program which centered around games: Kristina's dealt with game secrets and included a Zelda case study while Peter's dealt with the application of moral philosophy to game design. Their piece for the book, "Slave Morality and Master Swords", showed what happened when they mashed up their two projects -- not unlike combining chocolate and peanut butter to produce a new great taste sensation!

Here's what they had to say about the experience.

Why might Legend of Zelda be singled out for philosophical exploration? Is this book an acknowledgement of its long-standing commercial success or do you think it is a particularly "philosophical" game?

PR: I thought it was a bit strange, honestly. In working with Kristina to develop our ideas, though, I began to get a sense that the Zelda series is more than just the sum total of the individual games that make it up. It's also the Zelda brand, and the fan culture, the connections between the games, and the way they fit together in the minds of players. The fact that it's commercially successful is very important in the sense that commercial success ensures both the production of a large number of source texts and the gathering of a large fanbase that responds emotionally to the idea of a Zelda game. At a purely textual, narrative level, Zelda's built from some pretty standard genre conventions, and while they might not be original, they are pretty easily amenable to this kind of examination. Stories about heroes just seem to help people think about the nature of their world.

KD: That is an odd thing about exploring the Philosophy of Zelda. Peter and I both agree that the game series of Zelda is not, narratively speaking, a morass of intriguing philosophical questions. Every Zelda game has the same plot and In the Zelda world morality is fully black and white, good and evil. While replaying the same plot might sound boring, it isn't. Each game looks different, feels different, and behaves differently. Players keep coming back because the play itself is the attraction.

The act of play is where the philosophical questions become interesting. As you work your way through the game world you can subvert the seriousness, the story, and the philosophy itself through your play. In this way, Zelda is a good case study for how philosophical questions can function within a videogame; our book explores the experience of the player vs. the reality of the game.

The contributions to this book have branched out in many different directions. While Peter and I looked at how players of a game can subvert an intended game design and message, other contributors explored death, identity, time, art, utopia and so on.

In the essay, you describe some of your own pleasures in the game, yet I assume you both have separate and distinct personal histories as Zelda players. What can you tell us about your relationship to this game?

KD: As a kid I had an Apple computer for gaming, not a Nintendo console and so I missed out on the early Zelda games. My sole exposure to Zelda was through the Zelda television show.

If I remember correctly, I thought that if a game warranted its own TV show that game must be absolutely, positively the best game ever. Oh yes, if it is forbidden it must be better.

A few years later I tasted the forbidden fruit; My family got an N64 and I finally finally played the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The game reached far beyond any imagined expectations, (and happily it was far better than the completely cheesy tv show I loved at age 7.) This game is special: it revolutionized game storytelling and had a sense of world depth that games today still struggle to match. At the time of its release I played the game three times in a row, felt moved to create a Zelda fansite and spread legends about secrets within the game itself. No game before or after has ever been this amazing to me.

Most importantly this game shapes how I play and design games today. When you explore a Zelda world you find the world rewards you for being curious. What could be better than a game that encourages the participant to question and explore the world that surrounds them?

PR: I was five and my brother was seven when the NES launched in the states, so I kinda grew up with the Nintendo brand. We got Zelda for Christmas, and played it to death--I actually discovered the "second quest" cheat before the magazines made it famous, but none of my friends ever believed me. Bastards.

Anyway, Zelda was pretty much the only thing in its genre for years, and each successive game seemed to get better. I fell out of contact with the series when I started undergrad, but I'm getting caught up now. It's a weird feeling revisiting a series that kept improving while you weren't playing it. Somewhere between coming home, and coming home to find that your house has been remodeled.

Your essay begins with a discussion of a gliche in the programming of Ocarina of Time which allows the character to defy the laws of physics in this fictional world. How can we understand the pleasure players take in exploiting this cheat in the system? How do we relate this pleasure to traditional understandings of what it means to identify with a character?

KD: Defying the laws of a game is an illicit pleasure. In the case of flying, the glitch play meant being able to explore the space in a new way and see incomplete construction and the game world's edge. The experience of flying in Zelda was like gaining access to the Disneyland Magic Kingdom underbelly or peeking behind the stage of a play. In flying through the air and playing with glitches you get to see things that are not meant for your eyes. It destroys the fiction but it also gives you, as a player, great freedom and mastery over the space.

Glitches of course, never help players "win" a game. They are deterimental, they might end in a game crash, but it is always intriguing to see a game break and wonder what rule is broken and how it changes the space you inhabit.

PR: Playing with glitches is something I generally don't try to do; my whole approach to games is about "reading" the rules and looking for that one

optimal path they point to. One of the fun things about working with Kristina is that we take such different things from the same games. That's kind of the essay in microcosm, actually.

You evoke Roger Callois's classic distinction between Ludus and Paidia here to explain the experience of playing this video game. Can you explain what you mean by these two terms and describe the different modes of game play experience they evoke for you?

PR: I know videogame studies (or whatever we're calling it this week) is a relatively new field, and I can't make a universal generalization analogous to how lit students feel when they have to read Important Canonical Text X for the first time. Still, in talking about Callois with classmates and friends, it always seems to devolve into a nitpicky discussion about whether or not it makes sense to completely separate improvisation and freedom from rules and restrictions in terms of play. In practice, it's hard to identify any actual case which has only one, and it'd be pretty silly to try to

derive some sort of ludus/paidia ratio from a given text. Gonzalo Frasca helped out by suggesting a cleaner distinction in which ludus games pointed the player toward a desired end condition and paidia games did not, and even though game designers are busily trying to break down that distinction, it's still pretty useful for describing games on a case-by-case basis.

Conveniently, Frasca's distinction also works well for looking at different play styles within a given text, which is pretty much where Kristina and I ended up going.

You close the essay with some speculations about Nietsche's Beyond Good and Evil as a way to understand the different constraints and demands games place on gamers. How do you get from Zelda to the ramblings of "mad anti-semitic Germans"?

PR: First of all, if there are Nietzscheans reading this who are upset by the term "mad anti-semitic Germans"--or mad anti-semitic Germans who resent being lumped in with Nietzsche--I sincerely apologize, and hope you'll still buy the book. That said, two things academic gamers, at least those in my neck of the woods, can't seem to stop talking about are narrative/fiction and vague ideas of "meaningful" play. I've always operated under the assumption that, to the extent a game can deal with meaning, moral or otherwise, it does so primarily at a narrative level. Granted, non-narrative games don't exist, so it might be a bit of a straw man.

Still, while rule systems can be used to refer to or play with ideas about morality, the ideas cannot be spontaneously generated from the rule system. What I found in thinking about Zelda that led me to apply Nietzsche was that when you stripped out all the "musts" and "shoulds" the player faces in trying to play a game "correctly," i.e. to its completion, all you have left is "can." At that point, the player can either put down the controller and do something more meaningful with his or her life -- not something I'd generally recommend -- or start generating their own "shoulds."

The hell with what Link wants to do, I want to throw explosives at chickens for half an hour. In Zelda, it's not possible to do traditionally "good" or "bad" things without interacting with the authorial narrative, because the narrative gives those actions their moral meaning. When that's out, it becomes a game about taking this avatar with an extremely limited set of actions and trying to make him do things the designers didn't want him to do.

How did you come to write this essay together? How does it merge ideas you've been working on separately for your thesis projects in Comparative Media Studies?

KD: Oddly it was not nearly as daunting a task as Peter and I first envisioned. My thesis, Oh No I'm Toast! Mastering Videogame Secrets explored the pleasure of playing a game the wrong way, and this kind of subversion means for a player. I'd even used Zelda as an example.

Peter's thesis, Playing with Good and Evil: Videogames and Moral Philosophy, provided the other half of our analysis; how does the act of player subversion complicate the relationship between player and avatar? We decided to keep things simple: start out explaining how players might play a game in a variety of ways, for the game, against the game, and breaking the game. Then we used Peter's framework to explore what this meant philosophically in terms of a player/avatar relationship. Even though Peter wrote from Boston and I from Australia the essay wove itself together like magic. Google Docs helped.

One might say it all came together as a kind of symbiotic beast.

PR: I think of it as more of a chimera, myself, but I suppose "symbiotic beast" works well. I think I've got a black spider-suit somewhere in the back of my closet.

Kristina Drzaic is a game writer, game designer, a filmmaker and a contributor to The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy: I Link Therefore I Am. Kristina earned her Masters Degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT where she designed games with the Education Arcade and the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. She also holds a BA from the Unversity of Notre Dame. Kristina currently lives in the Land of Oz designing an secret game with 2K Games Australia. You can follow Kristina on twitter at http://twitter.com/poniesponies

Peter Rauch is a graduate of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, where he studied the intersection of videogames, narrative, and moral philosophy. "Slave Morality and Master Swords" is his first print publication. He is currently at work on a number of projects in and out of academia.