Reading the UpFronts: A Conversation with Media Analysts Stacey Lynn Schulman and Alex Chisholm

Last week, I previewed a CMS course description for the fall 2007 semester, Quantitative Research: Case Studies in the fall 2007 Television Ecosystem. As a follow-up, Alex Chisholm and Stacey Lynn Schulman, the course instructors, started a dialog around some of the dominant issues in the television marketplace as they create the syllabus. Much of the discussion here follows upon the recent upfronts, an annual event during which each of the networks announce their plans for the coming television season. Their perspectives illustrate both the urgency of change and the breadth of historical perspective these two will bring to students at MIT this fall. Characterizing the State of Primetime Television Performance

AC: This year's television season was, at best, lackluster. Despite some really great promise, especially with the arrival of many new and expanded extension strategies, there wasn't much to get excited about. Viewers either tuned in or didn't show up at all -- there didn't seem to be much of other networks catching the "run off" when a proven or presumed hit didn't deliver. Even juggernaut hit American Idol ended the season down in year-to-year ratings despite a strong early showing. Ratings that used to guarantee a show would be cancelled (anywhere between 4.0 and 6.0) are now regarded as highly respectable (the CW seems to be sustaining a business with shows averaging 0.5-2.0). At face value it seems that the sky is falling...

Meanwhile, with DVRs, online extensions, iTunes downloads, and advertiser-supported streaming video at network sites, we're seeing a significant shift in how people consume television content. While actual numbers aren't available because they're proprietary,

I believe that during the Tuesday and Wednesday following the broadcast of the Heroes series finale, NBC set a network record for the total number of page hits and video streams it served. Heroes was arguably the biggest new hit of the season.

SLS: The current season's performance is actually part trend, part business-as-usual. Keep in mind that new season successes are few and far between -- very few shows make it past the 4th quarter (October - December) and even fewer are picked up for the next season. Each year around this time I present the new season to advertisers and make the same point -- networks are in first place this year with ratings that would have left

them in third place just a year before ... and what constitutes a "hit" is relative to the network (i.e. CW). This trend is unavoidable in a fragmented entertainment market where the average home receives 102 channels. So, these observations have been fairly standard in TV analysis over the past 15 years. In the past, the industry has blamed cable as both thief and benefactor of disenfranchised network TV viewers. What is different about this past season, as Alex correctly points out, are new challenges facing programmers in a universe of time- shifting and on-demand viewership. Nielsen reported in April that DVR penetration had reached nearly 18% of the TV population and networks began full-force efforts to provide multiple viewing windows on air (in repeats) or online (on demand) throughout the season. Subsequently, the "live" TV audience for many established hits appear to be waning - and new shows are being

sampled, but in totally new ways. Unfortunately, without good cross-media metrics, we still can't tell whether the online (or alternative view) audience is the same or different from the TV audience ... and if their viewing once or multiple times. Here the question of actual audience size comes down to an old metric of reach and frequency ... how much of your audience is unique or unduplicated? And which environment is better for advertising - one in which you CAN skip the ads or one in which you CAN'T?

Look at how HBO's long-awaited final season of The Sopranos has declined every week from its premiere. The network wants to explain it away by the multiple windows they're

providing throughout the week to catch the show (on air)... but one has to wonder whether the bloom is far off the rose when there is significant audience erosion on the first original airing each week -- clearly not a water- cooler event!

Programming and Scheduling Strategies in a New Media World

AC: Last year was my first chance to attend all of the network upfronts. As a "newbie," I found the whole experience to be fairly entertaining and very much like what I've seen at other "pitch fests" such as the old E3Expo, the Consumer Electronics Show, and Macworld. It was a challenge to focus on what was "new" and what was "business as usual" (or "business in crisis"). I remember being excited by the amount of time NBC had spent on their digital strategies and then was disappointed to see that presentation slammed so badly in various media and financial reports through the rest of the week. What did I know? Given the way that last year's television upfront presentations were pitched -- new shows, mid-season replacements, lots of promos that started as early as last May -- and the reality of what happened during the year, I started to seriously question how much longer the traditional "season" of September to May is going to endure.

Two years ago, Prison Break was introduced in the late summer and has gone on to do very well. Last summer, The Closer became the highest premiering cable show ever in June. This year, ABC didn't premiere one of its midseason replacements, The Traveler until May. NBC pulled the plug on several shows within three weeks of premiere this year, while ABC was criticized by angry fans of both Desperate Housewives and Lost for the long periods between the airing of original shows, which were held to artificially inflate sweeps periods. Even Heroes, which has been a breakout, still could not give NBC a full victory on Monday nights when Nielsen data was analyzed; it helped NBC win the night during the fall and early winter, but it's not been able to bolster the network's programming through the spring, where it repeatedly lost the night to ABC (Dancing With the Stars) and Fox (24 and Prison Break).

SLS: In Gail Berman's last year as the head of entertainment for FOX television, she unveiled a progressive plan to move out of the traditional season and develop year-round

programming. That year, the FOX presentation stood out among others as the most confusing and complicated schedule ever presented. Not only was the industry confused, but so was the audience. The experiment failed miserably and Gail left to helm Paramount before the season was completed. Regardless, I applauded the effort, having proven through audience research that cable gained significantly in periods where the broadcast networks aired more repeats of established series. Sweeps stunts have been diminishing over the years - and this is an issue we will cover at some length in the course. The existence of sweeps is largely to gauge and set ad rates for individual stations in markets where there is not continuous measurement. Complicated network affiliate agreements that involve station compensation by the networks are at risk - and one might argue that digital viewing windows for content strain the relationship even further. While stations - owned or affiliated - pour millions into upgraded station equipment for HD transmission, their back-end is less and less secure...

The issue here is thus a good economic exploration of the business on multiple fronts. It costs a lot of money to produce television series, particularly fictional (although non-fiction costs are significant for series like, Survivor). It's not possible to produce the same quality of content every week of the year.. and networks depend on repeat windows to actually break-even on the cost of producing shows. When the FCC repealed the Financial Interest in Syndication Rules in the early 90's (which led to the expansion of the FOX network and the launch of the WB and UPN networks among other things), most believed that networks would take financial interest in the series they picked up for the schedule - and would thus benefit financially in the lucrative syndication marketplace. While we do have a much greater portion of the schedule owned by the networks (an increase from 20 - 60+% over the past 15 years), the declining trend of success and new digital distribution streams have significantly limited the syndication windfall. Three years ago, John Wells pre-empted the network in canceling his own series after only a handful of episodes, knowing full well that the cost of production would never be re-gained because the network would soon shut them down and there would be no pot of gold in syndication. And while the promise of digital distribution is tempting, no one has figured out how to properly monetize it and keep digital rights issues in check at the same time.

AC: My sense is that the traditional "tent-pole" programming strategies of creating an entire evening for a particular audience or demographic target have eroded dramatically in the past few years. It's hard to sit down and commit to one network's slate of shows. During the research we did around American Idol a few years ago, when I observed a single family week after week during the winter and spring, it was interesting to note that the minute the show ended, the kids were chased from the family room so the parents could settle in for 24, which was then in its second season, I think. The parents didn't necessarily watch American Idol with the kids, but rather entered the room 15 minutes before the transition to prepare the kids for the "chase." During our regular "design squad" research groups with about 65 teens for a "news for education" project this winter and spring, only a handful reported that they watched any television at all -- most surfed for entertainment content online, especially YouTube.

SLS: The bonds created by good audience flow are definitely diminishing, and yet, when we look at audience viewing clusters, we typically find that the shows which hold

together the strongest are those which fall on the same night on the same network. These bonds confound our common sense further because their linkages are stronger than linkages of genre. So there is a significant population of couch potatoes out there who settle into a night of TV, on basically the same channel. I believe that this is a phenomenon that may be explained by both generational and lifestyle gaps. A frequent urge in the media community is to want to study the habits of teenagers and young adults in order to forecast the eventual behavior of the population. While I agree that younger folks grow up in different circumstances and bring new expectations to experiences with technology (how long do I have to wait for x?), the life factors - children, job pressures, physical exhaustion, etc... provide a balancing factor (of how much we don't know) to the technological glee of earlier behaviors. Also, one of the hardest things to do in evaluating programming is to remove yourself from the audience and consider the overall complexion of the nation ... it may not be appealing to you the analyst, but it really plays in Peoria... It's the same with new technologies ... rapid adoption in some sectors doesn't always balance out laggard adoption rates in others...

On Changing TV Business Models...

AC: This year's upfront presentations were reportedly lean and mean, suggesting that all networks learned some lessons after last year's bloated and extended pitch fests. I didn't attend any but followed events and announcements on blogs and through popular and

industry media while I was traveling. Both TV Week and Variety reported that many in the industry thought the length and pitches were just right, a good compromise between total glitz and eliminating the upfront presentations altogether. The general observation is that television executives, long considered immune to criticism of excessive glitz in the business world, are now having to tighten their belts and be held more accountable for the businesses they steward; it seems the message that television executives need to respond to shareholders not just studio and network chiefs, has gotten through (General Electric, for example, constantly needs to "qualify" earnings per share limits given NBC Universal's performance; and, last year saw Viacom split CBS from its cable operations).

SLS: While certainly longer than this year's pitches, last year's bloated pitch-fests were actually shorter than years past... when I first began in the business each network presented for three-four hours a piece... and some of them were still doing that as of

last year. The debate around the upfront presentations is actually just the easiest target to hit first. What the industry really wants to debate is whether there should be an upfront marketplace AT ALL. Some marketers like J&J have taken strong positions to step out of the market, opting instead to negotiate throughout the year in the scatter market. Others are tried and true believers in the power of television. What becomes interesting is how we define "television" and whether marketers are best served with upfront dollar commitments to take advantage of new bells and whistles ... or not...

AC: The ouster of Kevin Reilly as head of NBC Entertainment over the Memorial Day weekend is perhaps the most immediate sign of how turbulent things have become at the "longtime-first-place-now-fourth- place" network as executives scramble to optimize development and business models. Reilly was released less than two weeks after the upfronts at a time when he should be one of the biggest champions of the new season's schedule and potential. Ben Silverman, owner of the company that produces The Office and The Biggest Loser for NBC, will replace Reilly, a sign that NBC is committed to following through on a strategy to create slates of reality programming across the board for the 8:00-9:00 p.m. and focus on high- quality dramatic/comedy program for 9:00-11:00 p.m. - Jeff Zucker outlined this strategy in October 2006, even before he rose to CEO. This strategy is having a ripple effect across the networks.

Indeed, only Fox touted a new comedy this year as a big chip in its line up ( Back toYou with Kelsey Grammar and Patricia Heaton); the rest of the networks buried anything new as replacement fare and actually cancelled most of the 30-minute sitcoms that

premiered and failed to impress this past season. What implications do business realities have on the development of new creative content? I'd love to do some case studies on how economics have long been part of the "culture machine," from Shakespeare's work at The Globe to Dickens's publication of stories in serial form in Victorian papers. I want to show that this business influence doesn't so much create a crisis of creativity but forces artists to, well, be more "creative," that it's not simply a matter of producing "art for art's sake" in many instances.

SLS: The ups and downs of entertainment executives is just part of the cycle... most don't last more than than 2-3 years (better than CMOs of late, but not by much). Ben's

appointment is interesting having grown up out of the talent agency business in London and making his mark by successfully importing formats to the US. This is a 33 1/3 proposition -- sometimes it really works (American/Pop Idol), sometimes it works marginally (The Office / Ugly Betty - critically acclaimed, but not a MASS audience

vehicle or time-period winner) and other times it disappoints (Big Brother - never as big as European success, Coupling -- ugh, remember that?). It will be interesting to see Ben in a true development role that isn't about harvesting success across the pond, but

is steeped in real scheduling and programming needs... Zucker's strategy wasn't exactly played out in the schedule that was announced, either... The creativity case studies are an excellent idea on Alex's part .. particularly in recent times relative to the FinSyn Repeal and the jockeying for schedule slots among Independent and Established producers. As networks demanded financial interest in order to get picked up, more independent voices emerged because established ones wouldn't play. Only the most celebrated producers and show-runners could make demands over the last 15 years creating a marketplace of hi and lo- end talent exposure with very little middle...

On Capitalizing on Fan Forums

AC: Finally, another interesting development this year was the acquisition of Television Without Pity by Bravo, an NBC Universal cable network. It will be interesting to see if the neutrality and honesty -- the brutality we've come to know and love -- of the site will be retained as NBC "absorbs" it into the machine. I'm concerned, especially since we've seen other really cool sites wither as they are consumed by their conglomerate owners. Still, it will be great to see what the Aggregated Television Fan Site 2.0 looks like when the next "buzz" site pops up as the answer to what TWOP used to be.

SLS: Totally agree. Lame way for Bravo to capitalize on the fan movement without putting the work in to create it organically for themselves... but a great asset if NBC leaves it alone and mines it for insight, but I doubt they'll go that route...

Our Course

AC: Stacey and I have worked together, along with Henry and others at MIT and in New

York and Los Angeles, to explore new ways to evaluate audience engagement with media content. It's been a great partnership because we bring some very complementary perspectives to bear on both the quantitative and qualitative research methods needed to better analyze what's happening in the market. We're creating a course syllabus and lab experience that will, we hope, immerse students in the fall 2007 television season in a unique way, celebrating the great new content to come to market, critically evaluating what's not working, and exploring the business issues of the successes and failures as they emerge in real time. Hope to see some folks in the fall. If you're not able to take the course at MIT, we may open our Facebook group to a larger set of networks for people to engage in our online conversations. As they say, please stay tuned!

SLS: Having spent so many years in the television business, it's hard to take a step back and have an "outsider looking in" perspective. The only way to do that is to explore the landscape with great thinkers like Alex and Henry -- or get out of your market altogether and observe how other cultures do it. This course is going to give a strong foundation in the metrics and processes that make the US TV market work today while simultaneously inviting students to challenge what has developed as business-as-usual - all with the tapestry of the network TV fall season to draw from. We hope you'll be a part of it!

If you have comments on the above dialogue or questions for Stacey or Alex, you can

e-mail them directly to or .

==========================================================

Stacey Lynn Schulman is CEO, Chief Insight Officer of Hi: Human Insight, a media consultancy practice that specializes in unearthing insights that drive better connections between consumers and content. A recognized expert in fan culture behavior, Ms. Schulman was the president of The Interpublic Group of Co.'s fully-dedicated Consumer Experience Practice through January 2007. The practice advised marketers on how to effectively connect with consumers in the evolving media landscape, conducting proprietary research across the wide array of business sectors that reflected Interpublic's client roster. Insights led marketers to better understand the essence of the consumer experience in three distinct areas - brands, media technologies and content. Clients benefited from insight on emerging trends as well as customized advice on how to communicate with the consumer of the future.

Prior to her appointment at Interpublic, Stacey served as executive vice president, director of global research integration for Initiative, a media agency within the Interpublic family. Stacey was a key member of the global research team and applied her broad research skills to a wide array of critical research issues, with an emphasis on understanding consumer media behavior. She joined Initiative in August 2001 when TN Media merged with Initiative. Stacey played an integral role in Initiative's exclusive research partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which resulted in breakthrough research on a number of key industry issues, including consumer behavior, interactivity and media convergence.

Before joining TN Media in 1997, Stacey conducted television and print research for D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles (DMB&B) while concurrently earning her master's in media studies from New York University. Stacey began her career at Katz Communications after completing her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University. At Katz, she conducted programming and local market research before moving on to spend several years at CBS.

Stacey is a former president of the Radio and Television Research Council (RTRC) and is a member of the Media Rating Council (MRC). Widely respected in the industry, she is routinely quoted in trade and consumer media outlets, and regularly appears on CNN, CNBC and FOX News Channel to discuss media trends. Stacey was honored in 2005 as a "Wonder Woman" in the cable industry by Multichannel News, one of the cable industry's most prestigious awards. In 2005 and 2003 she was named the most quoted executive in the industry by Advertising Age in the publication's annual "Media Talk" survey. In 2004, she was inducted into the American Advertising Federation (AAF) Advertising Hall of Achievement, the industry's premier award for outstanding advertising professionals under age 40. Stacey was the first research professional to be inducted into the Hall of Achievement in the AAF's history. Also in 2004, Stacey was named "Media All Star" in the research category by Mediaweek. In 2003, she was honored as a "Media Maven" by Advertising Age. In that same year, Stacey was profiled in Crain's New York Business as part of the prestigious "40 Under 40 - New York's Rising Stars" feature.

Stacey maintains an alternate career as a studio vocalist lending her voice to various projects in the New York City area. She resides in Harlem.

Alex Chisholm is founder of [ICE]^3 Studios, a media research and development consultancy that creates transmedia entertainment and educational properties, and is currently developing several projects with NBC News, NBC Olympics-Beijing 2008, and The Children's Hospital Trust. As Co-Director of the Education Arcade at MIT, Chisholm manages a variety of "games in education" projects, coordinates university-industry partnerships, and produces MIT's Games in Education conferences.

Previously, he organized the NBC Olympics Presents the Visa Championships-Torino 2006,

an "Olympics for the rest of us" experience that ran alongside NBC's coverage from Italy. As part of his ongoing work with MIT Comparative Media Studies and as a contributor to The Expression Lab, a research partnership with Interpublic Group's Consumer Experience Practice, Chisholm co- authored the third in a series of papers on the "expression," a new research model to better define consumer engagement with content across today's multiple media channels; this work was presented in Shanghai at ESOMAR's Wordwide Multi-Media Measurement Conference and was awarded Best Paper honors (June 2006).

Over the past seven years, he has collaborated on research, product, and program development with Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Interpublic Group, LeapFrog, NBC Universal, Children's Hospital Boston, and the MacArthur Foundation. While Director of External Relations and Special Projects for MIT Comparative Media Studies between 1999-2003, Chisholm oversaw creative development efforts and research with the Royal Shakespeare Company, producing a computer game concept inspired by The Tempest, and managed research with Initiative Media around American Idol; as part of this work, he co-authored the first two papers on the "expression," which were presented at the ESOMAR/ARF Audience Measurement Conferences in 2002 (Cannes, France) and 2003 (Los Angeles, California).

Chisholm is the author and producer of Earthen Vessels, an independent storytelling project that emerges from a novel, film, and web site. He is currently working with

Sarah Smith, author of Chasing Shakespeares, to adapt her novel to the stage. Chisholm earned his B.S. in General Studies from Cornell University.

Notes from a New World: An Interview with Wagner James Au (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part interview with Wagner James Au, a longtime reporter on games and games culture, who is currently finishing up a book about his experiences as an "embedded journalist" in Second Life, New World Notes. Yesterday,he shared some of his thoughts about the nature of Second Life and about how he came to become some involved in this story. Today, I have asked him to respond to some of the issues which have surfaced in recent debates about the "value" of virtual worlds in general and Second Life in particular. I first met Au some years ago when he was writing a engaging little fantasy spoofing the news that Julia Roberts was a closet gamer (a fan of Halo, in fact). He had decided that "Professor Jenkins," the mild mannered protagonist who appears in accounts of my testimony before the U..S. Senate Commerce Committee and my savaging on Donahue (see Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers for the sordid details), might be an ideal figure to make an appearance inside the story and help account for Julia's fixation on violent entertainment. In his original draft, he even included a brief sexual encounter between Prof. Jenkins and America's Sweetheart (well, he had her plant a loving kiss on the top of my bald head, to be more precise) which got "censored" from the version of the story that finally appeared in Salon. All that was left was a reference to my surely uncontroversial claim that Julia Roberts is a "hotie," something I would never say, of course, but which does reflect my long-standing fascination with her screen career.

As it happens, he had come to the right place, since one of my first claims to fame was that I was a student teacher for American History at Campbell High School in Smyrna, Georgia and that Julia Roberts, then a young drama geek, was a student in my class. If memory serves me correctly, I sent Julia to the principal's office for talking during class and barely missed out on the chance to see her in a high school production. So, when he heard the news, Au asked me to write my own version -- still tongue in cheek -- about the truth behind the story of Ms. Robert's fixation on Halo:

Can we blame her if she slips home at night ... and blasts evil minions to hell and back -- something else she never gets to do in her movies? Shouldn't we feel bad for the way our culture exploits her grace, charm and beauty in vehicles which amount to little more than shameless and gratuitous displays of niceness and appeals to our prurient interest in innocence and levity ... Mr. and Mrs. America, don't let your daughters give themselves over to the light side ... the best thing to cure them of all that pent-up purity may be a really bloodthirsty video game...

I have served as a source off and on for other, more weighty stories that Au has covered in the games space and we were lucky enough to have him speak about his perspectives on multiplayer games and learning during one of the Education Arcade conferences, which we hosted as part of E3. I consistently find him one of the most informed reporters covering games today and so I am delighted to get a chance to share this interview with you.

You have, of course, been following the ongoing debate about the "value" of Second Life. How much weight -- positively or negatively-- should we place on the issue of subscriber numbers in terms of evaluating what is going on in Second Life? Are there other measures or criteria we should be using?

The numbers do matter. The growth of Second Life will determine whether it becomes an important but relatively niche platform, or evolves, as some (including myself) have suggested, into an essential part of the Net's next generation.

The question to ask is what happens to Second Life if it continues to expand at its

existing growth rate of 23% monthly

--.what Clay Shirky himself (rather conservatively) calls "healthy growth". At the current velocity, the number of active SL Residents will easily be over a million by the end of 2007. ("Active" defined as a unique user who logs into the world at least once a week, 3 months after account creation.)

Even assuming that Second Life growth somehow stalls toward the end of 2007, it will still wind up a moderately successful niche MMO of some one million active users. (See this graph, by my blog's demographics expert, Tateru Nino.)

Given the world's current activity, the number of companies and institutions investing in it, growth of EU users (who now outstrip Americans), imminent localization to the the Asian markets, continued expansion of broadband, this outcome is actually the *least* plausible scenario. However, it's worth contemplating for awhile, at least for the sake of skeptics who insist Second Life is not a phenomenon worthy of heightened attention. For even then, we will still be talking about an online world that has been fostered and sustained entirely through user-created content, comprised of a million regular participants from around the world, existing in a diverse ecology of commerce, art, entertainment, technological, educational and scientific pursuits, most of them homegrown, some of them financed by corporate and non-profit concerns from around the globe. I fail to see how this would not be a unique and important Internet phenomenon, and how it would not remain an important contributor to Net culture.

And recall again that this is the *pessimistic* scenario. The far more plausible scenario is that the existing growth rates will continue into 2008, meaning we'll then begin to approach active user numbers in the several millions. Most likely, the network effect will continue this growth, especially as the open source initiative shows progress in improving Second Life's interface and user experience (the main culprit for its poor retention numbers) and as the servers themselves are open sourced (more on that down the way), making it feasible to talk about user numbers in the tens of millions. And beyond.

The conclusion of your book deals with the future of Second Life -- which might be seen as a core concern of the debate. How would you respond to Shirkey's argument that World of Warcraft represents a much more viable model for online experience than Second Life?

The important thing to keep in mind is that Clay has little or no first-hand experience with Second Life (unless that's changed since last December, when he acknowledged as much to me) and therefore, it's important to separate out his entirely valid comments about uncritical press coverage of total user-signups, and any of his speculations about the Second Life experience which are either second hand, or depend on inferences which don't map to Second Life as it's actually experienced.

Take the argument that a traditional role-playing game is more compelling than a social game. In regards to Second Life, again, this is where Clay's *a priori* kung fu fails him. With Second Life, it's not an either-or proposition. There are numerous user-created roleplaying games *within* Second Life, actually, many with substantial followings. The first, Dark Life, an old school mini-MMO in the World of Warcraft mode, was created by a professional game developer back in 2003, and still has a following. In the last few weeks alone, my games correspondent has covered several-- here , here and

here . I'd estimate that 25% or so of Second Life's active users regularly play one or more of the world's mini-MMOs, or engage in other RPG/gamer activity. The quality of these games have gone up tremendously, in recent months, so I expect those numbers to grow.

The other question is, "Viable how?" If by viable we mean "popular", that distinction probably belongs to CyWorld of South Korea, not World of Warcraft. With a reported 20 million unique users in 2005, CyWorld's nearly 3 times as popular than WoW. And CyWorld is not an RPG, but a social/chat space for avatars. It's also worth mentioning Habbo Hotel , the European social world with a reported 7 million unique regular users last December, roughly equivalent to WoW at the time.

By "viable", do we mean experientially? Because World of Warcraft actually runs through thousands of shards (i.e. separate copies of the same world) largely divided by global region, with Europeans shunted to their own servers, Asians to theirs, etc. As a combat-oriented genre game with few outlets for pure socialization, it attracts far less women than Second Life. (In Nick Yee's demographic analysis, 16% of WoW players are female; by contrast, in Second Life, about 40% of Residents are women.) And, of course, WoW is a leading revenue source for its parent corporation, Vivendi. So I guess

my question is this: how exactly is a male-dominated fantasy violence simulator which effectively segregates its players by national origin and is part and parcel owned by one of the world's largest multinational media conglomerates supposed to be the most "viable model" of the online world experience? (Except, of course, for Vivendi shareholders.) I'm just not seeing it.

There is right now one web with many participants, yet there are competing worlds in the multiverse space and there are apt to be even more competitors. Doesn't this fragmentation of worlds pose a challenge to those who might imagine something like Second Life as a future for the web?

Yes, this threatens to lead to a fork in the metaverse, where user base for online worlds remains divided into numerous, incompatible worlds according to interest/preference:

Google Earth, Multiverse, Croquet, Areae, traditional MMOs, revamped Asian online worlds,

and the recently announced worlds from Sony and MTV. The one which succeeds most, I suspect, will be the one that's most like the Web, with open standards and interoperability. SL is heading in that direction, as is Areae and Croquet. Most likely, there will be portals between several of these open- sourced worlds, suggesting a kind of multi-metaverse where individuals maintain several avatars and a universal substrate identity.

Notes from a New World: Interview with Wagner James Au (Part One)

I have been using this blog, off and on, across the past few months, to focus attention and generate debate about Second Life as a particularly rich example of participatory culture. Those who have followed this blog over time will have read my response to Clay Shirkey's critique of Second Life, my conversation with Peter Ludlow, the editor of the Second Life Herald and the co-Author of a new book on virtual worlds, and my response to questions about the relationship between Second Life and real world politics. Today, I want to continue this consideration of Second Life with an interview with Wagner James Au, the author of a forthcoming book, New World Notes, which describes his experiences as an "embedded journalist" covering the early days of Second Life. Au had contacted me in response to some of my earlier posts on this topic and I asked if he'd be willing to share some of his thoughts to my readers. Here's what his online biography says:

Wagner James Au is the author of New World Notes, and is also a game designer and screenwriter. He reviews computer games for Wired and has covered gaming as an artistic and cultural force for Salon. He has written on these subjects for the Los Angeles Times, Lingua Franca, Smart Business, Feed, Stim, Game Slice, Computer Gaming World, and Game Developer, among others. He's spoken about his work at South by Southwest, Education Arcade, and State of Play II. He is now developing New World Notes into a book.

Today, we open the interview with some discussion of his experiences covering Second Life and his general perspective about the mix of factors which is pushing this particular corner of the multiverse into the center of discussions about virtual worlds. Tomorrow, he will weigh in more directly on the three way debate between Jenkins, Shirkey, and Beth Coleman. For those who'd like to read more of his thoughts on Second Life, I'd recommend checking out "Taking New World Notes" which appeared in First Monday.

Can you tell us about how you came to become an "embedded journalist" in Second Life?

In the spring of 2003, Linden Lab gave me a demo of SL, then in early Beta. They brought me in, I think, because I'd recently written for Salon about the potential of user-created content in the "mod" culture of games, and Will Wright's emphasis on that (subsequently discarded) feature for The Sims Online. But during the demo, Linden Vice President Robin Harper suggested something else. What if I wrote *for* them, within the world, as a journalist-- an embedded journalist, as it were? (I had full editorial

control on the stories I pursued and wrote about, I should add, with the only prior restraints asked of me that I be scrupulously fair when reporting on disputes between Residents.) In early 2006, I left to write my book about Second Life for HarperCollins, and continue my reporting on my own independent blog, New World Notes .

Can you give us some sense of the shape of your forthcoming book? What are the

key questions you try to address?

It'll track the develop of Second Life both as a world and a Web 2.0 phenomenon, weaving a lot of the stories I've written for New World Notes into a broader and expanded narrative.

Why do you think Second Life has generated such interest (some would say Hype) in recent months? How does this hype distort the actual nature of the experience? Is there any aspect of Second Life that you think has been underhyped and under reported?

Right now there are two conversations about Second Life going on. The first involves all the numerous real world companies setting up shop in SL, coupled to mainstream news reports about the world that are, of course, introductory, and focus fairly consistently on the money-making opportunities. This is almost entirely the source of the backlash and hype in the pejorative sense. It's also the surface narrative which, while part of the SL phenomenon, does more to occlude the deeper activity going on. The second conversation, by contrast, involves all the grassroots user-created content which is merging the world with the broader web, creating a more robust world in a roleplaying sense, while also evolving it into a platform for real world applications. That's the main story, in my opinion, the one I try to tell on New Worlds Notes, and the one which accounts for Second Life's consistent, steady growth. It's not a function of media and corporate interest. The Sims Online was featured on the cover of Newsweek, was a spinoff to the most popular computer game franchises of all time, and attracted several major corporations who wanted to promote their brands within it, but without Second Life's user-created content or IP rights policy or robust virtual-to-real economy, growth stagnated months after launch.

Is there a tension between the corporate colonization of Second Life and the "gift economy" which underlies a vision of the space as a new kind of participatory culture?

For the most part, there is no tension, because the native participatory culture hardly knows the corporations are even there, or care all that much that they are. Residents have scant or limited interest in their "colonization", which is a strong word for what's really going on: big name brands on dozens of private islands that few visit for any extended period of time. Consistently, grassroots, user-created events and sites are far more popular.

What do you see as the long term implications of Linden Lab's decision to open

up the source code of Second Life?

The decision is monumental. Recently, for example, CBS committed $7 million so a metaverse development company could make worlds like Second Life more accessible to mainstream users. Much of this development will almost certainly take advantage of the open source initiative. The decision, I should add, applied only to Second Life's viewer software. However, just last week, Linden's Technology Development VP announced that the company will open-source the back end so servers can run anywhere on any machine . "SL cannot truly succeed," Joe Miller told an audience of executives, "as long as one company controls the Grid." Again, this is a vision of a world that is not a niche product, but the Web in 3D.

Bring Me the Head of Henry Jenkins.... (Part One)

Coming soon to an art gallery near you: My decapitated head. Don't worry if you don't live in a major cultural center -- my head will also be rolling around in a pool of blood in a straight to video horror movie that you can rent at your local Blockbuster. Well, this is another fine mess I've gotten myself into. In this entry, I will be sharing some images of the process by which the experimental artist Christian Jankowski transformed my head into an art object as part of a work known as "The Violence of Theory."

For me, this all began when I was asked by the folks at MIT's List Gallery to give a talk about the intersection between popular culture and high art. (I have for a number of years served as part of the advisory group for the gallery, though I have been relatively inactive lately.) I decided to present a talk based on my essay about Matthew Barney's relationship to the horror film, an essay which appears in my new anthology, The Wow Climax. In the course of the talk, I moved pretty fluidly from clips and images from Barney's Cremaster series to clips and quotes from such popular horror artists as David Cronenberg, Wes Craven, and Clive Barker. This paragraph cuts to the heart of my argument:

The modern horror genre was born in the context of romanticism (with authors seeking within the monster and his creator powerful metaphors for their own uneasy relationship with bourgeois culture) and the horror film originated in the context of German expressionism (with the studios demanding that madness or the supernatural be put forth as a justification for the powerful feelings generated by that new aesthetic sensibility.) The popular aesthetic's demand for affective intensity and novelty requires that popular artists constantly renew their formal vocabulary. Representing the monstrous gives popular artists a chance to move beyond conventional modes of representation, to imagine alternative forms of sensuality and perception, and to invert or transform dominant ideological assumptions. Historically, horror filmmakers have drawn on the "shock of the new" associated with cutting edge art movements to throw us off guard and open us up to new sensations.

From the start, horror films have required a complex balancing between the destabilization represented by those avant garde techniques and the restabilization represented by the reassertion of traditional moral categories and aesthetic norms in the films' final moments. There is always the danger that these new devices will prove so fascinating in their own right that they will swamp any moral framing or narrative positioning. For many horror fans, the genre becomes most compelling and interesting where narrative breaks down and erotic spectacle and visual excess takes over.

If the horror film has a moment of original sin, it came when the producers of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari inserted, at the last moment, a frame story that recontextualized the film's expressionist mise-en-scene as the distorted vision of a mad man. Through this compromise, they created a permanent space for modern art sensibilities within popular culture but only at the price of them no longer being taken seriously as art.

Among those people in the audience for the talk was Christian Jankowski, then in residence at MIT, as he was setting up an exhibition, "Everything Fell Together," in the gallery. Some months later, Jankowski contacted me again, this time to talk about his newest project, a series of artistic explorations of the culture around the contemporary horror film. Jankowiski had found a low budget horror film production which was willing to work with him to create a parallel work: he wanted to interview some of the leading theorists of the horror genre and incorporate their insights into the dialogue of the film. And while he was at it, he wanted to take "impressions" of us and transform them into prosthetic body parts, which would be deployed in gorey ways in the film and then displayed under glass in the installation.

Little did he know that he was tapping one of my boyhood fantasies. I was a horror film fan from the crib. I received a subscription to Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine for my thirteen birthday and spent hours flipping through the pages. My favorite bits were when they showed us the process which transformed Lon Chaney into the Wolfman or Boris Karloff into Frankenstein. I had clipped articles from Life magazine about the aging of Dustan Hoffman for Little Big Man and about the process that transformed Hal Holbrook into Mark Twain for his famous television special. At one time, I could have told you what Lon Chaney had in his make-up kit and how long it took them to turn Roddy McDowell into a chimp for Planet of the Apes. My mother had given me a make up kit and book when I was in my tween years and I spent horrors dribbling fake blood from my mouth or making synthetic scars using mortuary wax. So, it didn't take much to convince me to sit in the chair and have professional horror film makeup artists take an impression of my head.

My mother always told me to leave a good impression. My father always said that I should have my head examined. As it turns out, they both got their wish.

They started by wraping my upper body with a plastic garbage bag and then making a skull cap. They proceeded by coating my beard and my hair with vasaline which is supposed to prevent the rubber from sticking to my folicules. Then, they coated the area around my nose with an hideous orange goop, clearing out an area around the nostrels into which they inserted straws so that I would be able to breathe throughout the rest of the process. From there, they proceeded to coat my entire face with this orange substance. As it starts to dry, it becomes more like rubber but at first, it felt a bit like dunking your face in a vat of cold oatmeal. To hold the rubbery stuff in place as it dries, they wraped my head with bandages and finally covered the whole with plaster. For me, the biggest surprise was how much weight all of this placed on my shoulder and chest.

I had been warned that many people experience claustrophobia while undergoing this process: I went into a kind of hybernation and found the whole thing very relaxing up until the final few moments. For some reason, as we were approaching the end of the process, I suddenly found myself starting to sweet and felt some mild forms of panic. It was an enormous relief when the whole thing was removed -- not the least because I was finally able to speak again. I had so many puns and one-liners built up that they just exploded out of me once I got a chance to talk again. The whole process took about two hours -- and we did it in the main lobby of the CMS headquarters -- so you can imagine the startled looks of people walking in to pick up forms or what not.

The dried rubbery mask came off surprisingly easily and the technicians carried away with them a mold which perfectly captured the contours of my face. They said it would take about two weeks worth of work to transform it into a full reproduction of my head. While they were there, they took an extensive series of photographs of my face with various expressions, including asking me to imitate the lax jaw expression which we associate with death.

Capitalism and Cartoons: An Interview with Ragmop's Rob Walton (Part Two)

Yesterday, I began the first of a two part interview with Rob Walton, creator of the recently completed graphic novel, Ragmop. Greg Smith, whose research interest extend from cognitive theory of emotion to the translation of The Maxx for television, conducted this interview. Smith is the author of a great forthcoming book on Ally McBeal and the aesthetics of serial television, which is coming out later this year. Yesterday, Smith and Walton took us deep into the political and economic theories behind the book. Today, they explore some of the influences -- from Samuel Beckett to Jack Kirby -- that shaped this idiosyncratic story. Many of you, of course, live in areas where the comic book shops are sub par and don't stock Walton's Ragmop. I should note that the book is of course also available from Amazon and other online bookdealers.

Lest people think that Ragmop is an economic treatise, we should point out that it's incredibly funny too. The rhythm of the jokes feels a lot like the jokes in classic animation. What did you learn about joke structure from animation?

Drawing storyboards for ten years definitely helped refine my comic timing as well as what I absorbed as a kid watching Monty Python, Bugs Bunny, the Marx Brothers, and reading MAD Magazine. Animation also taught me how to use "beats". Those are moments of silence when a character suddenly clues into something, like when the Tetragrammaton realizes that there are dinosaurs in Heaven (page 241) or Alice's spit-take on page 178 (you don't see too many spit-takes in comics, do you?). Ragmop appropriates all of this material, which originates for our purposes with Vaudeville and Silent Film comedy. It was amazing to be able to distill eighty years of comedy culture in a comic like Ragmop. I don't think it could have been done any other way. It was a cartoon comedy or nothing. I was dealing with such grand themes and extreme viewpoints that it never once occurred to me that this would be anything other than a comedy.

Aside from animation I did read up on the history of comedy going back to the Greeks. I was happy to learn that what I was doing in Ragmop was nothing more than what was done at the original festivals, where ancient comedians would parody and lampoon the figures of establishment in their day. That's where comedy seemed to begin. It's also why it has always been reviled and suppressed over the centuries by the various targets of its humor.

I'd like to hear you pick an influence and talk to me about how you worked that through your comic.

I suppose I could talk about two influences, one from stage--Peter Barnes--and one from television--Monty Python. I don't think it's surprising that they're both British. British stage and comedy had an enormous influence on me as a teenager. Plays like Marat/Sade and The Ruling Class blew my mind, man, as they tackled subjects that seemed to me to be reserved for university lecture halls. Even Waiting for Godot and Endgame by little Sammy Beckett showed that comedy could convey big ideas and do so in a way drama could not touch. Monty Python showed me that comedy could be equally intelligent and downright silly at the same time. The Life of Brian exposes the absurdities of both religious institutions and revolutionary movements while making us laugh hysterically.

Barnes' The Ruling Class is a savage black comedy that says that given the choice society would choose hate and fear over love and compassion by choosing Jack the Ripper rather than Jesus Christ to rule us. His play Red Noses is a heartbreaking comedy about bringing comfort to people's lives through laughter in a world beset by war and plague and religious extremism. Meanwhile Chuck Jones had made cartoons about bullfighting, Opera, and transvestism. Bob Clampett had made his cartoon masterpiece Beanie & Cecil, and Jay Ward had brought new literary madness and a beat sensibility to my youthful generation with Rocky & Bullwinkle. MAD Magazine would tackle anything. MAD's influence is keenly felt throughout Ragmop from the front cover aping Jack Davis to the musical numbers that parody The Music Man. So is it any wonder that when I came to start drawing Ragmop it all came pouring out of me?

I'll make a shameful confession: I've never liked Jack Kirby. I grew up as a DC guy, and so when I finally read the great Kirby arcs as an adult, it all seems so overblown, the mythic stuff seems silly to me. And yet I like the Kirby stuff in Ragmop for some reason. Can you help me like Kirby?

I didn't start reading Kirby myself until his return to DC in 1970 or so. My primary reading focus was Spider-man, and I didn't start reading Kirby's Fantastic Four until it was reprinted in World's Greatest. I also caught up on Spidey through the reprints in Marvel Tales. Included in Marvel Tales was Kirby's Thor. I loved Thor. It was pure science fiction. It was totally groovy, especially inked by Chic Stone. The first Kirby Fantastic Four I read in reprint was "The Gentleman's Name is Gorgan" (FF #44). I was knocked off my socks. FF's # 55, 57, and 63 remain some of my favorite single issues of all time. I never tire of re-reading them.

The thing about Kirby (no pun intended) is that there were no limits to his imagination. Literally. If Marvel Comics is the House of Ideas, then it was the house that Jack built on the foundation of his ideas. The High Evolutionary, The Negative Zone, Galactus, the Silver Surfer: these were characters and concepts that inspired a generation of new creators. Jack's mind was so beyond anyone else's that few creators have been able to continue his creations with any satisfactory success. Both DC and Marvel have failed in my opinion to cope with the themes raised in The New Gods and The Eternals respectively. The New Gods in particular was Jack's attempt to use comics to achieve literary greatness. Unfortunately his writing skills were never equal to his ability to conceptualize, and his work is constantly marred by cornball dialogue.

Even so, Jack had something serious to say about religion (Judaism), technology, war, and totalitarianism. "The Pact" (New Gods #7) and "Himon" (Mister Miracle #9) were exceptions. In these two issues Kirby found his muse and wrote movingly about war, the freedom of the individual, and parentage. Only the writing of Alan Moore has equaled Jack's accomplishment on these two books as far as I'm concerned. For me, these are the two greatest single mainstream comics ever produced.

It wasn't to last, of course, but that was all right. There was plenty of Kirby to go around. Kamandi, the Demon, OMAC, The Losers, The Eternals, and even Devil Dinosaur proved that Kirby could take even the lamest of concepts and turn them into pure entertainment while lacing them with ideas that are still fueling comics to this very day. It's ironic that Kirby's OMAC ("Are you ready for the world that's coming?") is far more prevalent for us today than DC's current re-imagining of the character.

Captain Victory was one of the last books Kirby produced. Although his art was deteriorating by this time, his mind wasn't. Captain Victory harkened back to the themes of The New Gods and in a way brought them to some resolution. His trilogy of "Big Ugly" "The Lost Ranger" and "Gangs of Space" (issues 11- 13) proved that when it came to themes of war and sacrifice Kirby still had it in him to surprise, shock, and move this university educated reader. I proudly own the page where Captain Victory discovers the corpse of Alaria on the battlefield in issue 13. I find it profoundly moving as the last scene in the long drama that concludes his origin story, turning the boy into a man, and the soldier into a leader: "Triumph and loss too elusive to measure--and the burden of the strong."

Kirby showed me that all of time and space were open to me as a cartoonist, and I took that to heart in Ragmop. I never would have had my characters enter what I call "the Punyverse" had Kirby not first shown me worlds within worlds. The O-ring is sister to Kirby's Cosmic Cube. Kirby's kickboxing Devil Dinosaur is ancestor to my own trio of knuckle-headed dinos. Would I be waging a war in Heaven had I not read the mighty Thor? 'Fraid not.

Kirby saw it all first. Kirby paved the way and opened every door for every future writer and artist of comics. I can appreciate that Kirby is of his time and not to everyone's taste, given how the medium has evolved since the advent of Frank Miller, Chris Claremont, and Alan Moore in the early 1980's. But on the other hand, his time was so far ahead of us it could be decades still before we catch up to, let alone fully comprehend and appreciate, his massive perspective.

Nuff said.

So what's the meaning of the title Ragmop?

Why Ragmop? At the time I was developing the story, I had no title. That was the last thing that came to me. This was in 1993-94. Seth was publishing Palookaville, Chester Brown, Yummy Fur and Joe Matt, Peep Show. I liked those titles because they conveyed the artists' personalities while providing them with broad canvas to do a variety of stories. My wife Lucy and friend Mark Askwith and I all brainstormed on a title that could encompass the breadth of the comedy I was attempting to do. At the eleventh hour I remembered Beanie & Cecil. It probably happened accidentally as I was humming "Ragmop" to myself. Eureka! That became the title. It was jazzy. It was about animation and kooky, smart humor. It conveyed my personality. It was a title that said: "Anything goes."

Capitalism and Cartoons: An Interview with Ragmop's Rob Walton (Part One)

Today's interview with comics creator Rob Walton was conducted by my good friend, Greg M. Smith, who teaches media studies at my undergraduate home, Georgia State University. Whenever I come to Atlanta to visit my family, I make a point to get together with Greg, who takes me to the local comic shops and shows me what I have been missing all of these years. He's introduced me to a broad range of books that had otherwise slipped my grasp but one of the best was Ragmop. When Smith learned that the long unfinished Ragmop was going to be completed and reprinted as a graphic novel, he asked if I'd be willing to let him interview Rob Walton for my blog. What could I say? Wild Horses couldn't stop him and in any case, I was as excited as he was at helping to introduce my readers to this fascinating book. Everything from here is Greg's. Ragmop was one of the great unfinished comic stories until recently, when creator Rob Walton completed and published his 450 page graphic novel. Picture the love child of comic book great Jack Kirby and economist Adam Smith, all done as a Looney Tunes cartoon. Or maybe the best story of an interstellar conspiracy ever done by ALL the Marx brothers (Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Zeppo, AND Karl).

Ragmop is the story of the chaotic pursuit of the "O-Ring," an emblem of power that keeps the current pretender to divinity named Tetragrammaton (you know him as "God") in heaven. Everyone wants the O-Ring: the American government (where an idiotic president is under the sway of the evil Mr. Black), insane lobotomizing psychologists, former Nazis, beatnik poet/physicists, the Pope and his cabal of assassin cardinals, an alien race known as the Draco (based on real life aliens!), and even Uncle Walt (yes, THAT Walt). Most importantly, our heroine Alice Hawkings (after her unsuccessful career as the super-villain Thrill Kitten) and her three dinosaur sidekicks (Darwin, Einstein, and Huxley) are also in pursuit, with the fate of the world in the balance.

Ragmop mixes pratfalls and economic theory in a way that is utterly distinctive to comics. Rob Walton can be reached at robwaltoon@sympatico.ca, or at his blog. Ragmop can be purchased at finer comic shops everywhere.

Tell us about the publishing history of Ragmop.

Ragmop began as a serialized comic back in June of 1995 published by my own imprint Planet Lucy Press. That lasted ten issues before moving over to Image Comics for two issues. The second issue could not carry the sales needed for it to remain with Image, so I published a final issue before abandoning the series to return to animation full time sometime in 1998.

Over the years people kept asking me when I would finish the book. I told them I had no plans to return to the material, especially since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Too much had changed on the political scene, and I felt the story would have to be completely updated to reflect the new realities of the War on Terror. Then came a bout of underemployment in 2004-2005. To fill the gap I began to pick away at Ragmop trying to find a new way back into the story.

I had reread the published issues and had a good idea of what worked and what didn't. I knew I needed a new opening, something that would plunge the reader right into the action. I also wanted to introduce the political angle immediately as a way of being honest and upfront with the reader. I also knew I wanted to incorporate and expand upon the "Plunder Blunder" backup story from issue six that told us a little of Alice's past criminal activity as a way of better establishing her as the main character of the story. This process alone took four to six months to resolve. My first pass at this material was modeled on the narrative structure of Rocky & Bullwinkle with a lot of stops and starts in the story as well as having a "voice over" narrator. Those who read that first version didn't like it at all. Thankfully they were right and that I had the good sense to trust their judgment. I excised the Rocky & Bullwinkle shtik and found myself off to the races.

Updating the script turned out to be a fun exercise and gave me a chance to correct a lot of the art and story. It took me a further year to complete the final edits and new pages required to bring the story to its soul-shattering conclusion. Having it complete in one volume I can finally appreciate the accomplishment. I think I did exactly what I wanted to do even if it falls short of some people's expectations. I'm personally proud of the book.

One of the main themes in Ragmop is how capitalism collaborates with democracy, how American democracy makes American imperialism possible. For those who haven't read the book yet, can you summarize the argument? How did your thoughts originate on these matters?

Alice actually does a good job summing up the argument on page 376 of the novel: "Capitalism alienates the human psyche while democracy is the toothless servant of authoritarianism." I should point out that the type of democracy we're talking about here is what's known as a "market-based democracy"; that is, the equating of democracy with the market where the function of democracy is not participatory politics but the management of economies for private profit. Now hopefully this should strike most readers as odd. Our common reaction should be, "Wait a second, that doesn't sound right." And it isn't. After making her summation Alice goes on to describe the Greek ideal of democracy: one in which we have a say in how our governments rule and make decisions on our behalf.

This was something I only began to research after I returned to the story a second time. Back in issue two of the Image run a character describes democracy as a form of social control (page 275 of the graphic novel). At the time I wrote that it was only an intuition based on some historical reading I was doing. Something wasn't right with democracy. What exactly, I couldn't fully tell. If democracy was such a good thing, then why were democratic reforms constantly paid for in blood? Think of the fight for the five-day workweek or the eight-hour day or the women's vote. Those weren't things that were bestowed upon us by benevolent governments after peaceful referendums had been held. These were concessions made to us only after men and women had won the rights with their lives.

Another thing that bothered me was that after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet-style communism; capitalists quickly fixed their sights squarely on their own Western democratic governments as if democracy was the next thing to go. And as it turned out it was. Through their elected representatives they began stripping governments of any democratic power that would impede upon the growth of the new global market. This plan of action was followed by Democrats and Republicans alike. It quickly became obvious that democracy, while good for people (in theory), was bad for business.

I began to better understand what was going on when I read up on the 1930s. Back then Fascism was quite popular. After all, they were beating up the communists. They were also busting unions, depressing wages, shutting up the opposition, and partnering governments with business. During the early 1930s everyone was falling over themselves to invest in Germany. In 1932 a group of Wall Streeters planned and nearly executed a coup to oust Roosevelt in favor of their own Hitler-inspired American dictator. The plot failed thanks to General Smedley Butler, but no one was arrested because what was left of the American economy would have completely collapsed. It was then that I began to realize that Fascism is the true political partner of Capitalism. Which is why Mr. Black is so nostalgic about fascism in the book. If only Hitler hadn't given it a bad name! So where did that leave democracy?

My answers were found in several books published between 1998 and 2005. As it turned out, democracy was the most reviled political system of the last two thousand years. It was considered to be the politics of dictators and mobs. Remember, America was founded as a Republic (Rule of Law), not a Democracy (Rule of Masses). Then around 1905 democracy was given a total and deliberate makeover. "Democratic" elections allowed the business community to maintain control of their governments to further their globalizing markets.

The first wave of globalization actually took place in the 1880s when American production began to outgrow American consumerism. The basic idea is that to control worker revolts you give them some participation in decision making through an election. Unfortunately, candidates for election almost always come from business boardrooms or are fronted by business interests, and it is those interests that they end up representing in governments. It just goes on from there. We elect governments that increasingly use power carte blanche, as we have witnessed most notably with the current Bush administration. This aids Imperialism because we then start spreading "democracy" around the world. Originally Imperialism was about goods, labor and resources. It still is, but you can't say that. You can't say we're invading Iraq for their oil and cheap labor. You have to say we're bringing "democracy" to the uncouth masses when what we are bringing is in fact capitalism.

Which came first, the philosophy or the story?

People may be disappointed to learn that the story came before the philosophy. Since writing Ragmop I've earned the reputation of being something of a leftist-whatever, but I didn't start out that way. The evolution of the ideas came from the story itself and not from my political views at the time.

The original concept for Ragmop had to do with man's desire to control nature; not just the weather but of all physics itself. I began thinking about this the day the space shuttle Challenger exploded. Then Richard Feynman dropped the O-ring into a glass of water to show how the cold would cause the hinge to break and lead to the recent disaster. It was a simple and dramatic demonstration typical of Feynman. It was then both he and the O-ring became central to my developing story.

With that in place along with Alice (I don't remember where the dinosaurs came from) I began to think of a villain. Once I decided that the villains were going to be in government, I began researching their point of view. I also had to give Alice an opposing point of view, which is where the ideas or philosophy began to develop from. Now to be honest I did and do have a natural leaning toward the rights of my fellow brothers and sisters, so taking the side of the Global Justice movement was an obvious direction for me to follow and one that grew out of my own concerns for the common misery and exploitation of the majority of humankind. Now that Ragmop is done I feel as if I've said what needed to be said, so I can move on and let others follow up on the concerns that I've raised.

How do you lay out the structure for a 450 page graphic novel?

How do I do it? I'm not sure I want to say. I did work off a general outline but the comic series was very undisciplined and went off on a lot of tangents. It was both a strength and weakness of the book. When I returned to it I really had to reel it in and imposed a strict structure on the story. I treated the original material like raw film footage and edited it as I would a film. I was ruthless with the cutting to make sure the pacing was always brisk--except for those moments of exposition, which was always problematic, but I did the best I could. I also scripted everything before I drew it, something I don't think I always did with the original series which I wrote and drew on the fly to give it a sense of cartoon anarchy.

I read and reread the story as I went along rewriting and redrawing as needed. The biggest change was that I had a better ending for the book than the comic. Once I had read about the Draco that gave me the ending I needed. It was the perfect vehicle to present my thoughts on capitalism and democracy in the form of a master plan by an invading alien horde to take over the earth. Structuring and writing the ending became very easy after that. All I had to do was stick to the story. Some of my favorite material was cut for the sake of the story.

The epilogue to the book was the original epilogue to the comic that set up the second storyline. I left it in because it's playful and I liked the idea of an open ending. The graphic novel doesn't have a big resolution because there is no resolution. Where we go from here is up to us. That part of the story remains to be written.

Millenial Monsters: An Interview with Anne Allison (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of an interview with Duke professor Anne Allison talking about her recent book, Millenial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Today, I continue that interview. I mentioned last time that I spoke on a panel with Allison at Duke and thought I'd share a few more aspects of my interest in this area.

For one thing, the New Media Literacies project is currently working on a documentary about the cosplay community: our team went to Ohayocon this January to do interviews with anime fans and the costuming community. I wasn't able to share that footage at Duke but I was able to share some footage that a recent CMS alum, Vanessa Bertozzi, had produced of a young woman named Chloe who described the ways that cosplay and her fascination with JPop and anime motivated her to learn more about the Japanese culture and language:

"I have been really interested in Japanese culture since I was in sixth grade. When I was in the seventh grade, I started studying Japanese on my own. When I got into high school, I started taking Japanese courses at Smith College. I got into costuming through anime which is actually how I got interested in Japanese. And I taught myself how to sew. ...I'm a stage hog. I like to get attention and recognition. I love acting and theater. The biggest payoff of cosplay is to go to the conventions where there are other people who know who you are dressed as and can appreciate your effort. At the first convention I ever went to, I must have had fifty people take my picture and at least ten of them came up and hugged me. It's almost like whoever you dress up as, you become that person for a day....People put the pictures up on their websites after the con. So after a con, you can search for pictures of yourself and if you are lucky, you will find five or ten. "

Chloe is representative of what I have called "pop cosmopolitanism." I have mentioned this concept in the blog before and wrote about it extensively in an essay that is found in Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers. She has attached herself to Japanese popular culture as a way to escape the paroachialism of contemporary American culture -- to find a world outside or beyond the American borders. And in doing so, she has moved from a fantasy version of Japanese culture towards closer engagement with Japanese fans via the internet and with Japanese language and culture through her courses at Smith College.

I also shared with the group some sense of the ways that the American comics industry has started to absorb influences from manga in the hopes of combatting a trend which finds Japanese comics outselling American comics by as much as four to one in the U.S. market, perhaps the only internationally produced media content that outsells its domestic counterpart in this country. I showed how companies like Marvel and DC had sought to absorb elements of the themes and style of Manga while attaching them to their flagship superhero characters with the greatest emphasis occuring in works that target female consumers. See for example the romance comic, Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, for a comic that deals with classic Marvel superhero themes in a manga style. Indeed, this turn towards manga style in both mainstream and indie comics is starting to open up a space for female writers and artists as well. A curiosity in this case is the link between manga and female readers/writers given that the Japanese comics being imitated here are not always or even primarily those aimed at female readers in Japan. Lots more here to reflect upon in the future, that's for sure.

I also suggested that this was an international phenomenon, citing as an example The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga , a British anthology that I picked up in Singapore. The editors struggled in their introduction to justify the use of "manga" to characterize a collection of works by a global set of contributors, including some very interesting work Asia Alfasi (Libyan by birth, Scottish by residence), who uses a manga style to tell the story of a hijab-wearing Arab Muslim girl living in the United Kingdom. The book represents one of a number of recent efforts to strip the term, "manga," of its specific reference to Japan and argue that "manga" refers to a specific set of styles and genres in comics that travel freely across national borders in an increasingly global marketplace of ideas and influences. On the one hand, this book suggests the world-wide influence of Japanese media and at the same time, it suggest ways that media producers in other countries are learning to attach themselves to this phenomenon to open up the western market to their own cultural products. A core question at the present time is whether "Cool Japan" is an unique phenomenon or whether we will see more and more national cultures attract their own passionate groups of young fans in the west.

Now, back to the interview...

In the book, you draw on the concept of de-odorization to talk about the ways cultural materials are stripped of their local specificity as they enter the local markets. Yet at this point, Japanese culture carries enough cache that it's styles and themes are actively being imitated by American companies. Do you see this as a shift in the strategies by which Japanese cultural goods are being marketed?

Yes, and it represents a change coming from both Japan and the US. Until about the early 1990s, cultural products from Japan that bore the trace of their cultural roots too strongly simply didn't sell very well abroad. Given this, companies like Sony purposely tried to make "global" versus "Japanese" products (Sony itself was a name chosen for its global-cachet and its electronics were colored gray with an aesthetic style meant to be modern and international rather than Japanese per se). For the past decade or even a bit longer, however, there has been a global fad for Japanese products that has now come to value, even fetishize, their "Japaneseness." A Saban executive told me that when Power Rangers came out in 1993, the show had to be Americanized and its Japanese roots heavily censored. However, by 2002 (when I was talking with him), showing Japanese script, riceballs, or temples in a Japanese cartoon was an added attraction and not only was it not airbrushed out, such signs of Asianness were now being actively solicited.

In your book, you write, "the quest is not so much for the authentic Japan but for what 'made-in-Japan' authenticates -- a leading brand name of coolness these days." Explain. What qualities do you think American young people associate with Japan? What fantasies are served by their quest of Japanese cultural goods?

What I think Japan authenticates in the minds, fantasies, and tastes of US fans of J-cool is not so much Japan as a real place as mush as a particular aesthetic. I characterize this aesthetic in my book by the qualities of polymorphous perversity ( a continual moving of borders,constant transformation, repetitive change and accretion of powers, body-parts, and mecha) and techno-animism ( a world that gets animated by technology and human bodies that, in this animation, also become cyborgs). Godzilla embodied these two qualities and arose in Japan at a moment of historical disrupture and postwar reconstruction. My argument is that--in part because of Japan's wartime and postwar history--it bred a fantasy culture more dependent on polymorphous perversity and techno-animism than was American pop culture at the time. Now, the US is less stable, complacent, and economically secure than it was in the 1950s and itself is experiencing some of the social and political tensions Japan was in the 1950s. Also this is a moment of heightened flux, migration, change, and mobility around the world; these social conditions breed and embrace the cultural tropes so rampant in J-cool and this is what the "Japan" of J-cool represents for American fans, I argue.

What developments in Japanese media content have occurred since you finished writing the book that you wish you had been able to touch upon?

Technology has developed ever further on cell-phones and in the kinds of story-telling and digital communication being conducted on various e-waves. There is also new trends in youth culture and in the kind of virtual companionship I dealt with in my chapter on tamagotchi. What is happening to the way "human" is getting constructed and "sociality" getting negotiated are questions I'd like to expand upon further in the future.

How important are the digital dimensions of the franchises you discuss? Chris Kohler has argued in an interview in my blog a while back that it was games which opened western markets for Japanese cultural goods. Do you agree or disagree with this claim?

I think games were a big factor in opening up western markets to Japanese goods but I think cartoons, manga, action toys (like transformers), morphing fantasies like Power Rangers, and media-mix complexes like Pokemon were as important.

Thinking of Power Rangers, for example; this was a live action show that incorporated morphing at the heart of the fantasy. This was hardly a brand-new idea in American popular culture, of course, but what made it so popular was, in part, the lines of action figures that accompanied it (and helped spread the fantasy) and also the fact that it was targeted to young kids who grew up socialized into what we could call a Japanese aesthetic. Consumers and fans of genre like anime and manga often point to how young they were when they became interested in this fare and how what drew them in was the very distinct aesthetic, explicitly different from what they understood to be an American aesthetic. In the wake of the popularity of Power Rangers (broadcast on Fox Network started in 1993 and is still going on today, 14 years later), a host of Japanese cartoons, live action shows and other youth-targeted cultural products flooded the US market (not all acquiring success, however--Masked Rider, another live-action morphing show, was a bust, for example). While some of these programs/products were not overtly identified as Japanese, consumer kids picked up on and acquired a taste for their aesthetics and, by now, at a later age, are more than happy to accept anime, manga, and video games that come from Japan (and are explicitly packaged as such).

I do agree with Chris Kohler, however, that what constitutes what he calls a "nationally specific" element versus a "transnational" element in a product like a video game or manga is constantly changing. Today, there are many "manga" produced outside of Japan and by non-Japanese. So is the aesthetic at work here "Japanese" or not? Difficult questions and tricky operations of national/transnational.

Millennial Monsters: An Interview with Anne Allison (Part One)

In January, as part of my three week lecture tour, I stopped off in Durham, North Carolina where Duke University was hosting a special event designed to discuss the issues being raised by Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination, which was written by one of their faculty members, Anne Allison. I was one of several outside researchers who shared their insights into the issues the book raised. I had a great time interacting with the students and faculty there both through this event and a seminar session the following day. I have long been an admirer of Anne Allison's work which touches in complex ways on issues of globalization, cultural identity, fan cultures, sexuality, and popular culture. For me, one of the real values of her work is that she has read deeply into what Japanese cultural critics have had to say about some of the materials that have made their way over to this country. Given how little of this writing has been translated into English, this is an especially valuable service to those of us interested in this topic. The book offers a richly detailed series of case studies of the interplay of Japanese and American popular culture, going back to the tin toys produced during the American occupation, Godzilla and Astro Boy, and other early texts which made it into the western marketplace. The core of the book describes the emergence of an ethos of "coolness" around Japanese cultural imports -- moving from a time when the industry sought to erase markers of cultural difference to the present moment when many western consumers are embracing these products (toys, anime, manga, games) because of their Japaneseness.

Today and tomorrow, I will be sharing with you an interview with Anne Allison about her latest project. Here's her official biography which will provide some background about who she is and how this project fits into the larger trajectory of her career:

Anne Allison is a cultural anthropologist currently working on the globalization of Japanese pop culture in entertainment goods like Pokemon. Her recent book, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (University of California Press, 2006) looks at the global marketplace, capitalist logic, and fantasy construction of Japanese toys through the lens of Japan-US relations. Allison has published two previous books. The first, Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (University of Chicago Press 1994) is a study of the Japanese corporate practice of entertaining white collar, male workers in the sexualized atmosphere of hostess clubs. Her second book, Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (Westview-HarperCollins 1996, re-released by University of California Press 2000) examines the intersection of motherhood, productivity, and mass-produced fantasies in contemporary Japan through essays on lunch-boxes, comics, censorship, and stories of mother-son incest. Anne Allison is Chair and Robert O. Keohane Professor of the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.

Let's start where your book ends. You write, "Finally, of course, there is the significance and signification of Japan in the creation of a global imagination no longer dominated (or at least not so completely) by the United States. The attractive power at work here may be less for a real place than for the sense of displacement enjoined by the postindustrial condition of travel, nomadicism, and flux generated and signified here by somewhere "not-the-United-states" but within the orbit of the globally familiar. Still, American hegemony is being challenged in the symbolic virtual medium of fantasy making. And in this a see a positive contribution to the cultural politics of global imaginings in millennial monsters and Japanese toys." Explain. In what sense is it more important that this is not American popular culture than that it is culture from Japan? Or conversely, why does it matter that American youth are consuming culture produced elsewhere? What do you see as the political, cultural, and economic implications of this shift?

It's always struck me that Americans are very insular; we tend to see America as the center of the world, American culture as the global standard and norm, and the American lifestyle as the best in the world. Much of this is unconscious and comes from, among other things, a popular culture so dominated by US-produced fare. So, to disturb this sense of American-centeredness and to open up Americans to understanding and recognizing cultural difference is good, I'd say. Of course the question then is: does the popularization of J-cool amongst American youth really signal an opening up of consciousness and sensitivity to cultures and a cultural way of life that is different? I would say - to a degree, yes. But what matters here is not that fans of J-cool necessarily understand the complexity of "Japan" as the origins of this different popular culture. Rather, what is important here is more the disruption of the dominance of American culture. This is the cultural implication of a shift in pop culture in the US.

But you also ask about the political and economic implications and this is a harder question to answer. Economically, Japan is as much a postindustrial, neoliberal economy as the US so I'm not sure there is a radical shift here in the wave of J-cool spreading across the US. Politically, we could say there is more possible significance: the acceptance of soft power from somewhere else implies a challenge (well, a "soft" challenge)to the unilateralism of the US empire and the way the US nation-state is imposing its will and policies on the global stage (invasion of Iraq) without consulting or cooperating with others.

What led you to write this book? How does it emerge from the earlier books you have done on Japan?

All my earlier work has examined the relationship between fantasy and what I call material relations (of work, school, and home) in various spheres: hostess clubs, home life, pornographic comic books, and the lunch-boxes mothers make for their children. Here too I look at the relationship between fantasy and the material production of youth goods in Japan though extend this into the global sphere of fan traffic and consumption. What triggered my original interest in this was my younger son's fascination with transformer superheroes which he watched with avid interest the year we spent there when he was 2. Not only would he watch these shows, but he also became a consumer of all the action figures and paraphernalia to wear and adorn his own body with (helmets, swords, blaster guns). My son was always a gentle child: sweet, calm, and non-violent. So I was intrigued by his own transformation into this fantasy world and became interested in studying the phenomenon further.

You begin the book with a discussion of the relations between American and Japanese popular culture following the end of World War II. How would you characterize the core shift that has occurred since that time? What factors led to this shift? Do you see this as occurring because of a push by Japanese companies into western markets or because of a pull by American fans demanding more access to Japanese cultural goods?

Great questions and the relationship between US and Japanese popular culture is complex. The two countries and, more importantly, the popular cultures of these two countries have long pollinated one another though the influences Japanese pop culture has had on

American are rarely recognized or acknowledged. It is said that Tezuka Osamu, the creator

of Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy)and other popular manga and anime was heavily influenced by Disney as he started up in the late 40s and 50s. But he, in turn, influenced Disney; Kimba the Lion is said to have been the inspiration for The Lion King. But Japanese influence and imprint on the American imaginary has vastly increased in recent years and the first reason why this is so is due to marketing and entrepreneurship on both sides. Haim Saban, the CEO of Saban Entertainment in the US, was the one who tried for 8 years to get US television networks to air what eventually came out as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. He did this for strictly economic reasons; the footage was relatively cheap and he thought it would be a big hit (and would therefore make him money). And, once this hit in 1993, it opened the floodgates for more Japanese programming to come into the US, peddled by both Japanese and American marketers. Once enough of a market was established though, I think the demand of fans became significant in that they kept pushing for more and more J-cool products to enter the States (and also, as Henry Jenkins and Ian Condry have shown in their own work, the fact that these fans were adept at dubbing and translating helped push the market as well).

The Japanese were once reluctant to imagine many of these goods as being of interest outside of Japan. What changed their minds?

I don't think it was so much that Japanese changed their minds on this as much as Americans changed their minds. Once Americans started approaching Japanese and soliciting deals to broker their products, relations opened up more. This is not to say, however, that the business relations between Americans and Japanese are always smooth in negotiating the sale and transmission of Japanese products to the US.

As I understand it, these deals are often difficult, full of cross-cultural misunderstandings. What US marketers have said is that, if Japanese are going to do global sales, they need to understand how the logic of this market operates--i.e. not cling on to products or storylines that won't sell. What Japanese marketers have told me is that it's all business on the US side but, for them, they care about these products/characters/games as if they were their own children and they're not always willing to change or abandon something simply on economic grounds. There is also the interest of American fans who, because they understand and appreciate Japanese-fare and are also willing to add translations and dubbings, the market for i.e. anime has grown in the U.S. Japanese marketers would not have predicted this and figured, for a long time, that a Japanese aesthetic was simply something few non-Japanese would ever get or even take to. This was true in the case of Pokemon which, designed for a Japanese audience, was never intended or imagined to go global. It had an "odor" and "taste" thought to be appealing only to Japanese or perhaps other Asians. When it hit in places like the US, its Japanese marketers and designers were astounded. With such successes, however, they also became attuned to producing for this wider audience: not making their products "global" per se but designing them with a Japaneseness that could travel.

The News From Second Life: An Interview With Peter Ludlow (Part Two)

Yesterday, I introduced readers to Peter Ludlow -- philosophy professor, editor of the Second Life's town newspaper, someone who thinks deeply about what civic engagement means in the context of a virtual world. Today, I continue that interview with some of Ludlow's thoughts about the recent debate sparked by Clay Shirkey's critiques of Second Life and continuing into some of his insights about the challenges of governing online communities. I am hoping this interview whets your interest in the book he is writing with Mark Wallace. Wallace and Ludlow are lively writers and provocative thinkers who are raising questions we need to consider if we are indeed moving towards the era of Web 3.0. An Aside

Okay, let's get back to this matter of Web 3.0. Of all of the things I said about Second Life in the exchanges with Shirkey and Coleman, I've taken the most heat for my dismissal of the concept that virtual worlds might represent Web 3.0. (Well, maybe my historical analogies but I will get back to those in another post.) Ludlow comes back to this matter here and takes a few whacks at me himself and perhaps justly so. But let me at least explain what I was responding to. I was talking about some of the hype and misrepresentations that have emerged from journalistic coverage of Second Life. I suggested that this reframing of virtual worlds as Web 3.0 might not be the most helpful way of understanding what is going on. There does seem to be a lot of confusion out there about what exactly is meant by the phrase, Web 3.0 -- whether it describes what comes after web 2.0 or whether it describes the enhancement and augmentation of the existing communications system. I suspect very few thoughtful people who are really engaged in online worlds imagine that they will displace the existing web altogether, though I have talked to some journalists who seem to imagine this is some kind of a realistic possibility.

Many of the popular representations of the evolution of the web offer a sloppy way of modeling the transition from one state of the web to the next. Consider this widely circulated image. It shows some moments of overlap between web 1.0 and web 2.0 but also seems to depict a moment where web 2.0 replaces Web 1.0 altogether and the same seems to be occuring here as web 2.0 gives way to web 3.0. I don't see any other way of reading what is being depicted on this particular chart.

But as I suggest in Convergence Culture, there are no dead media (though there may be some dead delivery technologies). Old media do not go away; they become part of a much more complex layering of different communications options within the media landscape. The web doesn't replace television or newspapers; virtual worlds won't displace social networks; they all will be available as possible ways to communicate. The emergence of a new medium may create a crisis for the old medium, requiring standard practices to shift, forcing us to rethink its social status or functions, redirecting patterns of production and consumption, but in the end, the old medium will survive in some form. This is what Ludlow says below. It's also what I was trying to say about the affordances of virtual worlds. Tell me that virtual worlds will be more central to our culture in the future and I won't argue with you. Tell me as some journalists -- and as the above chart seems to suggest -- that web 3.0 will displace earlier models of the online world and I am going to be skeptical.

OK, enough self justification. Now onto the interview...

I wanted to give you a chance to respond to Clay Shirky's recent critique of the hype surrounding SL. Do you agree or disagree with his concerns about how the mainstream media has been 'duped' about the population of SL? What has the response to this story been like within SL?

The exchange between Clay and the community hasn'’t been very productive. Clay came along with some true, but very obvious and not so interesting observations about the “Second Life residents” number, and then people on Terra Nova started genuflecting and saying what a genius Clay was. This was infuriating for a lot of us, because we have been calling out those numbers as bogus for over a year. For example, in the Herald we called a foul on the residency stats when they crossed 100 thousand, but more than that, we also pointed out that the “US Dollars Spent” numbers were bogus.

Clay took us to be saying that if insiders knew about the bogus number, then it was enough – the major media didn’t need to know. But of course that wasn’'t our point at all – it was more frustration with the mainstream business media and the eggheads on Terra Nova for only reading a very narrow bandwidth of sources (of which Clay is one). Apart from pointing out the obvious meaninglessness of the “residents” number, Clay's contribution was weak, for reasons that you pointed out: The interest of Second Life has nothing to do with the number of eyeballs it is delivering, and everything to do with the quality of the people that are in world and the kinds of activities they are engaged in, how those are going to influence future iterations of the web, and the long tail their activities are going to have.

IÂ’'ve seen lots of virtual communities, ranging from the WELL, to Mindvox, to the Italian PeaceLink network of the 90s. The WELL was not important because of how many people were there, but who was there and what they were doing. I made so many amazing contacts there, ranging from people like Mike Godwin and John Perry Barlow, to Josh Quitner, Howard Rheingold, Bruce Sterling, Jon Lebkowsky, R.U. Sirius, and the list could go on and on. The contacts IÂ’'m making and the things I am learning in Second Life are even more amazing, perhaps by an order of magnitude.

There was something retro about Clay’'s critique, and that something is this: it assumes the value and success of Second Life is tied to the number of eyeballs that are converging there. That is, the critique is assuming a push media model of value. But push media is in trouble, and that is the reason that SL is crawling with marketing and PR people -- they are trying to come to grips with “life after the 30 Second Spot” (to steal a line from the title of a book by Second Life resident Joseph Jaffe. Second Life isn’'t about counting eyeballs, it is about establishing relationships with quality technical, social, and artistic contacts that have a high impact and will continue to do so, learn from them, and then try to engage them in your own projects.

I also have a bone to pick with you regarding something you said in your response to Clay. It is certainly true that Second Life is being hailed as an example of Web 3.0, but no one is claiming that Web 3.0 replaces or even dominates the future of the internet. If you think of Web 1.0 as the commerce web and Web 2.0 as the social web, no one would argue that 2.0 replaces 1.0. This is a point that Giff Constable of the Electric Sheep Company made in response to you and Clay. No one thinks Web 3.0 is going to replace asynchronous communication. It is just something else that is being added to the mix, and it is going to contribute to the commercial and social aspects of the web, but it will also be its own weird thing. The interest of Web 3.0 at the moment is that the people who are there are younger early adopters and social trend setters (IÂ’'m thinking of my 11 year old daughter and her friends as a case in point.) Asynchronous communication is useful, but real time in-world meetings are very effective for some social and commercial applications.

In your forthcoming book, you and your co-author write that SL is a great world but a poor country. Explain. What issues do you have with the governance of SL?

The problem with governance in Second Life is basically this: the governance model is one where the Lindens are Greek gods up on Mount Olympus. They don'Â’t have the time and inclination to deal with the problems of us mortals, but they will dabble from time to time depending upon the whim of the particular god, the kind of day he or she is having, and whether they favor the mortal that petitions them or is involved in some sort of interplayer dispute. That model of governance makes for wonderful Greek tragedies (and comedies!) but itÂ’'s no way to run a country.

Some people argue that if a company produces a game, they should be able to set the rules that govern it. You have drawn an analogy to the way U.S. courts have historically addressed the problem of company towns to show that there may still be some constraints on the regulations they impose on their users. What rights do you think users should have in virtual worlds?

People often reason as follows: The company owns it, so they can do whatever they want with it. The problem is that there are many things that you can own and not be entitled to damage. If you buy a horse, you are not entitled to torture it, and if you buy an historic home you are not entitled to damage or deface it. Sometimes ownership entails responsibility and stewardship. Typically this is the case when the property or thing owned is important to the broader community. Platforms like Second Life have owners, but the existence of the communities that grow up in those spaces mean the platform owners have responsibilities to care for those communities and see that they are not harmed.

In Second Life, the responsibility is more acute because their advertising campaign has been beating the drum that you can make money in Second Life and that you own the property and assets and intellectual property you acquire and produce there. Given that, there is at a minimum a responsibility to make good on that promise, even if you have fine print in your terms of service agreement that says you donÂ’t really mean it.

In your book, you offer a number of examples of where companies under-respond or over-respond to "crimes" or transgressions within game worlds. Why do you think companies have had such difficult finding a balanced approach to online conduct?

The companies have a difficult time because the people they place in charge of policing the spaces are typically either people with an engineering background or unpaid volunteers with little to no formal training. Dispute resolution is hard, and dealing with troubled adolescents and troubled adults is hard. It can be done, but the people that game companies throw at these social problems rarely if ever have any training in the area. The net result is that game moderators seldom act in a unified and impartial way, and when they do act they often end up throwing gasoline on the fire.

In a way we can understand this. Social problems are very labor intensive. On the other hand, if you are running a MMORPG you are in the business of providing a product that is fundamentally social. It isn't a game in a box where all the parameters are fixed. There are thousands of content contributors making for a very dynamic and unpredictable social environment. Electronic Arts never did figure this out. Linden Lab seems to understand the problem, but for some reason has been unable or unwilling to act to solve the problem.

The News From Second Life: An Interview with Peter Ludlow (Part One)

I first became aware of Peter Ludlow and his work for the Alphaville Herald when NPR called me up and asked me to be a pundit commenting on a nationally broadcast debate between the candidates for the leadership of the largest town in The Sims Online -- a debate between a 14 year old girl from Palm Beach and a 20-something airline employee from Virginia. I watched with a mixture of fascination and horror as the mechanisms surrounding the election broke down, some voters were denied the right to cast their ballots, the election technology was manipulated, and charges of corruption and poor sportsmanship flew right and left. The Alphaville elections, in other words, were the game world counterpart to what happened in Florida in the 2000 elections. Ludlow, who was far more deeply emershed in this world than I was, became my expert guide through this whole process. I wrote about these events for Technology Review and later revisited them for a section of my book, Convergence Culture. I lost contact with Ludlow for a while but recently he wrote me to see if I might give him some advice about his own new book project -- his account of his time as the editor first of the Alphaville Herald and then of The Second Life Herald, co-authored with Mark Wallace. Their book recounts a fascinating saga of mobsters and griefers, of civic boosters and would be socialites, and of the challenge of governing virtual worlds. The book will be coming out some months from now from the MIT Press but in the meantime, what Ludlow had to say was so timely, especially given my recent exchanges with Clay Shirkey and Beth Coleman about the value of Second Life and given our forthcoming Beyond Broadcasting conference that I wanted to share some of his reflections with you much sooner than that. When he is not playing the part of a muckraking journalist in Second Life, Ludlow is a professor in the department of Philosophy and Linquistics at the University of Michigan.

In the conversation that follows, he explores more systematically what it means to construct civic media in Second Life and discusses his contributions to the life of this emerging online community. Tomorrow, he will share his reflections on the Second Life Debate as well as his thoughts about the challenges of governing online worlds. Together, these two installments represent a fascinating inside perspective on the nature of civic engagement in Second Life.

Axel Springer announced the other day that they would establish a full time newspaper in Second Life. What do you see as the significance of this announcement? What does it mean to the existing local newspapers which are indigenous to SL?

The Axel Springer virtual newspaper, called The Avastar, launched a few weeks ago, and they have had, suffice it to say, a rough start trying to find their way around Second Life. One problem is that Second Life is a very complex and hard to understand cluster of social spaces, and the Avastar managers don''t seem to understand the world very well. I also don''t think they have had great success in lining up knowledgeable and articulate writers, and if they think people are going to *pay* to read their paper (or, for that matter, advertise in it) they are badly mistaken.

The fundamental problem with their project, however, is their idea that there is some sort of value added by virtue having their newspaper in a PDF format, rather than a blog-like format. PDF doesn't integrate into the Second Life infosphere in the appropriate way (they can't link to other stories, we can't link to them, people can't comment, the stories are stale by the time they appear, etc).

If you think about it, their project is somewhat reactionary. They had an opportunity to come to this strange and fantastic new place where all the rules can be rewritten, and the only thing they could think of doing was coming up with a product that mimics meat space newspapers as much as possible. Far from offering us a new way to think about news and entertainment and how it should be presented, they are effectively trying to make a last stand for static push media by using PDF instead of a blog or some sort of social software.

From the outside, I''m sure they look all bleeding edgy ("oh look, a newspaper in a virtual world!") but from inside they look reactionary in concept, and clumsy in execution.

You've been involved with local newspapers in two virtual worlds now -- SL and Sims Online. What do you see as the importance of civic journalism in imaginary space? How important is it that the perspective be "local" -- coming from the player community itself?

Civic journalism in virtual worlds is very important, and it has grown up a lot over the three+ years I have been involved with The Alphaville Herald, and now the Second Life Herald. When we started in October of 2003 there were lots of fan sites for online games, but the concept of blogs/journals that covered in game events and player/owner conflicts with a critical eye was foreign. People reacted to the Herald like it had come from outer space. I can''t speak for other virtual worlds, but today in Second Life there is a very rich community of dozens of bloggers - many of which are self-labeled as newspapers. It makes for a very interesting media ecology for Second Life.

Some of the sites are merely fan sites, and some are personal journals of some form or other, but there are some that take a serious and critical look at the world and Linden Lab policies from time to time. All of them play an important role in recording and commenting on various aspects of this very rich and complex space.

This sort of journalism is important, and the way I think of it, there are three audiences: the internal audience, the external audience, and the audience that isn''t born yet.

The internal audience involves other players, and the flow of information can be crucial to maintaining a fair playing field. Just as an example, we ran a story about a memo the Lindens had sent to some key land owners, informing them that prices for private islands would be going up shortly and that if they acted now they could grab islands at the current price. That story embarrassed the Lindens into opening the offer to everyone and extending the buy-in period for land at then-current prices. There are lots of instances of this sort - policies and actions have serious economic consequences and virtual journalism can be a watchdog.

For the external audience, we provide a window onto the world that hopefully accurately reflects what is going on there, so that people will come join for the right reasons and not the wrong reasons. Also, if you have thousands of people in a given space interacting, it is important that people on the outside know what is going on. If this isn''t clear, consider the case of The Sims Online, which is a space that is supposedly suitable for children as young as 13. Well, I think it is important that parents and policy makers be informed about what is going on in that space. I''m not going to tell them what to do about it, but I do think there is a kind of civic responsibility to point out some of the adult activities that are taking place.

The future audience: a hundred years from now people will want to know what was happening in the rapidly evolving social web of our era, and these journals provide important records. Sometimes when I write for the Herald I even imagine that I am writing for an audience that won''t come along for a hundred years. (Usually though, I''m just banging something out as fast as possible.)

Some of your critics have argued that your coverage of the issues facing the communities in game world could be used to spur on reform and regulation efforts by outside government authorities. How do you balance your responsibility to the community within the game world (to expose problems so they can be addressed) with what they perceive as your responsibility beyond the community (to not stir up public controversy which could bring outside attention)?

It certainly can''t be my responsibility to cover up in-world problems. I understand that people view critical commentary and exposure of outrageous in-world behavior to be an attack on the community, but of course it is nothing of the kind. The problem is that sites which constantly spin the world in a positive light have no credibility when an outside critic comes along. For example, when Clay Shirky launched his recent attack on Second Life, it was easy for him to dismiss the defenders of SL as a bunch of breathless logrolling fanboiz. He can''t do that with the Herald however, and we are, I think, positioned to slap him down good and hard when we have the time to get around to it.

I should also add that over time people do come to understand that we are not attacking the community, and some of the Herald''s harshest critics have gone on to be good friends and contributors to the Herald. If you stick around, that shows people that you are committed to the community, and that is what really counts the most.

Some people have made fun of your efforts suggesting that these virtual worlds are "only games" and that you are taking them "too seriously." How do you respond to this criticism?

The ""only a game"" meme is of course not merely leveled at the Herald, but at anyone who participates in online worlds (and participatory culture more broadly - it is a species of the "get a life" meme that you have discussed in Textual Poachers and elsewhere). The first thing that has to be said is that as applied to Second Life it is badly mistaken, since Second Life is barely a game at all --- it is a completely open platform the content of which is provided by participants (that is they build, texture, and script whatever they want). The platform can be used for many purposes, but developing and playing what might be called games has never really been a big part of Second Life.

Beyond that, I tend to think that not much in life is *only* a game. Even spaces like World of Warcraft that are pretty clearly designed to be games are also spaces where people socialize, exchange real world information, work on projects together etc.

The more interesting question is why people keep repeating ""only a game"" so much. If you google ""only a game"" and "Second Life" together, you get nearly 12,000 hits. It is like a mantra that people keep repeating to keep some thought or idea at bay - and I think the dangerous idea that Second Life shoves in your face every day is this: our wealth is virtual, our property is transient, and our social lives are mediated by technology, nomadic, and often fleeting. I think that when people keep saying "it''s only a game" they are really saying "the rest of my world isn''t like this: my wealth is tangible and permanent, my friendships are unmediated and also permanent." Saying "it''s only a game" is like saying "this isn''t how things really are, this is just a bad dream." People need to pinch themselves, because this ain''t no dream. This is reality; deal with it.

At various times, you have seemed to struggle with whether you are playing a reporter in a game and taking seriously your responsibilities as a journalist covering real people in a real community. To what degree does the "magic circle" give players --- including yourself -- license to shed real world responsibilities in virtual world? Where should we draw the limits?

I don''t think we struggle with whether we are in or out of the magic circle so much as we intentionally play at the circumference. Sometimes, when I think we are getting too serious, I will post a silly story, and when we are starting to get too silly I will put together a serious interview or offer a polished essay or piece of serious journalism. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable; they want to know if we are serious journalists or just playing at being journalists. But the answer is we don''t respect the distinction and we are constantly trying to flout it.

Playing (sometimes even being) seedy tabloid journalists has helped us to learn the role that tabloid journalism plays in the media ecology of Second Life and the internet more broadly. I''m fascinated by this topic. If you think of media as a kind of eco-system them you see that tabloid journalism plays an important role - churning up stuff that publications with bigger budgets and more time can sift through and investigate.

What is frightening, however, is seeing the number of so-called serious media outlets that pick up our stories (and other blog flotsam) and just reprint them as though it was the word of Gopod. More frightening than that, however, has been the many instances we have seen where major news organizations research their own stories and end up with great big piles of steaming crap. So I am in this strange position of thinking both that (i) people should not be reprinting our stuff without doing their Serious Journalism thing with it and (ii) the content we generate is on the whole more reliable and informative than what they come up with when they do that Serious Journalism thing.

The net effect of this has been that it has made me very pessimistic about the state of journalism in the business and technology sector; it seems to be mostly about recycling press releases without reflection. And it's even worse than that. The *real* problem is that too many people now equate Serious Journalism with the recycling of press releases. Critical journalism is so foreign to people (except maybe on the sports page) that they recoil against it. Well, let me modify that statement. People in the US have this problem. Readers from other countries (Germany, Italy, etc.) find the critical stance of the Herald altogether natural and they are baffled by the Americans who complain about it. So maybe this is just a problem with the American media consumers - they have forgotten what a genuinely critical media looks like.

How Computer Games Help Children to Learn: An Interview with David Williamson Shaffer (Part Two)

Yesterday, I introduced blog readers to my former student, David Williamson Shaffer, and his new book, How Computer Games Help Children to Learn. This book is a must read for anyone who is invested in the concept of Serious Games or anyone who wants to have a better understanding of what games might contribute to the reform of the educational process. In yesterday's post, he walked us through his roots in Seymore Papert's notion of hard fun and his concept of epistemic games. Here's a bit more background on David taken from his blog:

Before coming to the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Shaffer taught grades 4-12 in the United States and abroad, including two years working with the Asian Development Bank and US Peace Corps in Nepal. His M.S. and Ph.D. are from the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he taught in the Technology and Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is a founding member of the GAPPS research group for games, learning, and society. The group recently received a $1.8 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation to study games and media literacy in the digital age. Dr. Shaffer has a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his work on Alternate Routes to Technology and Science and was the recipient of a Spencer Foundation National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Dr. Shaffer studies how new technologies change the way people think and learn. His particular area of interest is in the development of epistemic games: computer and video games in which players become professionals to develop innovative and creative ways of thinking.

Today, I asked Shaffer some of the hard questions which all of us who are promoting games and education are facing. He offers some candid and compelling responses.

You describe powerful activities which certainly require students to deploy a rich array of school content. But by classical definitions, not all of the activities you describe are games. And many teachers remain resistant to the concept of games in school. So what value do you see in referring to these experiences as games?

This is a great question, and I'm glad you asked it. Part of the problem with the word "game" is that there isn't a single agreed-upon definition. The definition I use in the book is closer to some than others--and as you know, I talk about this very issue and how my use of the term compares to others in the book.

A major point of the book is that digital technologies force us to reexamine and rethink a number of concepts whose original definitions come from an age of print literacy: things like games, learning, thinking, innovation, professionalism, school, and so on. It is an argument that I know you are quite familiar with, since you similarly argue that new media force us to reconceptualize the nature of concepts like production and consumption, genre and medium, and so on.

The argument I make in the book is that in the digital age there is a new set of relations between games and school--and school and learning, professional practices and academic disciplines, innovation and education--and this reorganization of how we think about thinking and learning, play and education, creativity and rigor is an essential step in thinking about the future of learning.

Some skeptics have argued that the serious games movement is imposing a utilitarian logic on play (making it into something serious) when in fact, the value of play as a form of mental recreation may come from the fact that it invites us to suspend real world consequences and constraints. How would you respond to this argument?

I've heard that argument, of course, but honestly I think it is a bit of a straw man. First of all, no one (that I know) is arguing that *all* play should be "serious" in the sense you describe here--that is, devoted to some larger purpose. Second, for all the reasons that Seymour and others (and I) have talked about, there is such a thing as "hard fun"--that is, the fun of doing something difficult but worthwhile. It is an important and legitimate part of fun, and of learning, and of being a well-adjusted and happy person. Finally, and perhaps most important, serious games do suspend some real world consequences and constraints. Any game imposes some constraints and relaxes some, abates some consequences and introduces others. Different games have a different balance, and serve different functions. But I don't think there is some form of pure or idealized play (except as a theoretician's fancy) which games that serve some larger purpose somehow "pollute." Any game is played in some social context, and therefore serves some larger purpose.

Other critics of the serious games movement have argued that we are moving too quickly from ethnographic evidence that some kids learn well through games to larger claims that all youth can/should learn through game play. How would you respond to this argument?

Well, not all the evidence is ethnographic. My work is based on experimental studies: we design a game based on a specific set of hypotheses about what players will learn and how they will learn it; then we study the experiences of players to see whether that's what happens. Others in the field have done similar studies, some at quite large scales.

No one would deny that there has been a lot of enthusiasm in recent months and years about the potential of games, and some claims have no doubt been inflated, or premature, or speculative. But that doesn't mean that all claims are suspect: it depends on the claim and the evidence.

I will say that this form of argument (games for learning are all hype) is a little ironic, in the sense that the other major criticism of games is that they will teach kids the wrong thing: that playing violent games will make them violent, and so forth. We seem to think it is easier to learn bad things than good--which is, at the very least, a very Hobbsian view of the human condition.

I do think that an important part of any game is the context in which it is played. So you can take a good simulation and make it part of a game that leads to the development of useful skills, knowledge, values, and identity in service of a useful way of thinking about the world. You can also set up the conditions of play in such a way that the outcomes are quite different.

So I am skeptical of any claims about what "games" in general do or don't do for kids. That's why my book is titled "HOW computer games help children learn" and not "DO computer games help children learn?" We know that children learn from all of their experiences. The question is whether and how we can design experiences that will help them learn things we think will help them become better citizens, happier individuals, and more productive members of society.

You end your book with some speculations on the future of education. How would schools change -- for the better or for the worse -- if various kinds of game-like activities were to displace some of the activities that currently constitute the "game" of schooling?

I don't know what the ultimate shape of schools will be in the digital age. It took decades to design the modern industrial schools we have now, and they look very different from their predecessors. Schools right now focus on standardized tests of basic facts and skills for a paper and pencil world. They need to become more about learning to use sophisticated technologies to find creative and innovative solutions to real problems. I think well-designed computer games can, should, and ultimately will play a large role in that process. But to get there will mean redesigning almost everything about schools in the long run: the architecture of the buildings, the content of the curriculum, the schedule, and perhaps most important, the means of assessment.

This is going to be a big change, and a big task. But as I argue in the book, wise, well-educated, and affluent parents are already using new technologies to help their kids prepare for life in a complex world. If schools don't keep up, they risk becoming at best a footnote in the real process of education in the digital age, and in the worst case, a road to failure and an impediment to educational opportunity for those who can't afford access to the tools and pedagogies for success in a world of global competition.

Some have argued that we necessarily distort the real world phenomenon we are representing when we reduce them to the structures of a game. Do you agree with this concern? If so, how might educational game designers address it?

As Don Norman points out in his wonderful book Things That Make Us Smart any representation of reality is a simplification, leaving out details that are not relevant to solving a particular problem or accomplishing a particular task. Moreover, all of our thinking takes place through representations--whether external representations like diagrams, pictures, or spreadsheets, or internal ones, such as memories, words, or images.

So all thinking is a deliberate distortion of reality in this sense.

The power of epistemic games is that they are based on a specific theory of how you determine what it is safe to leave out in designing a game that models professional training as a way of teaching innovative thinking. The book describes that process in more detail, but the specifics aside, the point is that epistemic games are based on a specific pedagogical theory--a theory about what is worth learning and how people learn it.

There are other theories one might use, of course. But in the end, I think that any good educational game has to be based on a corresponding theory of how learning takes place. The theory might work or not--which is why we test the games we build. But it is that theory that tells you which simplifications you have to make (and which ones you can not make) in re-presenting real world phenomena in game form.

How Computer Games Help Children Learn: An Interview with David Williamson Shafffer (Part One)

I've known David Williamson Shaffer for more than a decade. I was lucky enough to have him as a student in my media theory and methods proseminar back when he was finishing up his PhD at the MIT Media Lab. where he was doing work with Seymor Papert. I've reconnected in recent years with Shaffer through his work on games and education. Shaffer has come out this month with a very important book, How Computer Games Help Children Learn. A colleague of James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, and Constance Steinkuehler at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Shaffer has long contributed to our conversations about the pedagogical potentials of computer and video games.

He has especially promoted the idea of epistemic games, which he discusses at some length, in the interview that follows. He is interested in the ways that we can use computer-based games (including games that involve interacting with real people in real spaces) to introduce children to the basic conceptual frameworks that govern various professional practices. For him, this is the most powerful aspect of games-based learning.

His new book makes a powerful case for this mode of teaching, including detailed case studies of games he has developed to cover a range of different professional contexts and academic disciplines and drawing parallels to commercial games already on the market. The writing is accessible and engaging, driven by his own experiences as a classroom teacher and his own passion for helping to reinvent American education.

Over the next two days, I am going to be running this interview with Shaffer. In the first part, he lays out the book's core premises and in the second, he addresses the debates around serious games more generally.

Your biography in the back of the book lists one of your titles as "game scientist." So, I suspect the readers might be interested to know what a game scientist does and how you train for such a position. The cynic in me wants to know what the implications are of using scientific language to describe what is essentially a position in the humanities.

There are a few different ways of explaining where the title "Game Scientist" comes from. The most superficial answer is that as we were founding the GAPPS (Games and Professional Practice Simulations) Group here at the University of Wisconsin Advanced Academic Distributed Learning CoLaboratory, we needed to decide what members of the group would be called. The title "Research Scientist" is often used for appointments in research labs that do not grant tenure, so given that we were all studying games someone (I think it might have been me) suggested that Game Scientist would be an appropriate title.

So originally the term was something of an historical artifact.

But I do think that there is some value in referring to the work I do as game science. Games are, as you point out, a forum of human expression, like books, movies, and other things that are studied as "humanities." But it is also possible to ask scientific questions about books: to study, for example, how people read, or to study the social, economic or psychological impact of a particular kind of book. So we can ask scientific questions about games and peoples' experiences with them.

In using the term "scientific" here, of course, I am making a statement about research methods, not values. By "scientific" I only mean asking questions that can be answered with empirical data, which can be quantitative data (surveys, brain scans, and the like) or qualitative data (like interviews and observations).

In truth, though, I am not sure that drawing explicit distinctions between the sciences and the humanities is actually all that productive. Nelson Goodman made a strong case decades ago that the similarities between the two are more striking than the differences on a philosophical level: both try to warrant claims about phenomena in the world. This is a point I have made in some of my own writings as well.

All of that having been said, I am a game scientist because the work that I do uses methods of the field of psychology, which is a form of social science.

As a graduate student, you worked with Seymor Papert, among others, at the Media Lab. Papert has written about "hard fun." In what ways is your new work a theory or application of this concept of "hard fun?"

There are a lot of connections between Seymour's work and my own. The concept of "hard fun" is one that I talk about in the book, but there are others as well.

Hard fun is, of course, the idea that we take pleasure in accomplishing something difficult: the joy in meeting and mastering a challenge. As a result, when someone is doing something that it hard fun, moment by moment it looks more like "work" than "fun," but the net effect is pleasurable overall.

The concept is certainly one that applies to almost any good game--not just the games I work with, or games for learning in general. I make this point in my book, and Steven Johnson talks about it in Everything Bad is Good for You as well. Jim Gee talks about the games that work have to be pleasantly frustrating. Good games require a lot of work.

What makes hard fun valuable from an educational point of view is when the challenge you face is worthwhile in some context beyond the game itself. In Seymour's work, kids who used Logo had to solve problems in differential geometry and computer science to build things they thought were interesting and exciting.

In my work, the challenges are the kinds of problems that professionals face in the real world: engineering design, graphic design, mediation, urban planning, and so on. The games are hard because the problems are hard. But they are fun because it is fun to solve difficult problems that matter, that have no right answer, and that give you a chance to see what it would be like to run the world--or at least some part of it.

So, let's get to the heart of the matter. What are epistemic games and what value do you think they bring to education?

Simply put: Epistemic games recreate in game form the things that people do in the real world to learn to think in innovative and creative ways about problems that matter.

They are, in other words, role-playing games where players take on the role of being a professional in training--where "professional" in this sense refers not to so-called white collar professions, but to any kind of work in a complex domain that requires the exercise of autonomy and judgment.

Professional training is based, for the most part, on professional practica: times and places where professionals-in-training do supervised work, and then talk with their peers and mentors about what they did and why. Think about internship and residency for doctors, moot court for lawyers, the design studio for architects, capstone courses for engineers and journalists, and so on.

These repeated cycles of action and reflection create a particular kind of professional thinking that Donald Schon (also at MIT, as you know, before he passed away some years ago) characterized as "reflection-in-action": literally the ability to think and to work at the same time, and thus to do work that requires constant evaluation of the situation and adjustment of the work plan in order to solve non-routine problems.

So epistemic games give players a chance to work on simulations of real problems, and to think about what they are doing--to debrief, if you will--the way professionals do when learning to solve those problems.

The games are "epistemic" because any professional practice has a particular epistemology: a way of justifying actions and warranting claims. To be a professional of some kind means you solve problems in a particular way, and you accept some kinds of solutions as legitimate and not others. The way a doctor argues that removing a patient's spleen is the "right" thing to do is different than the way a lawyer argues about it. If you're in the hospital, you probably want to go with the doctor's way of thinking. If you're in the courtroom, stick with the lawyer--assuming, of course, that you have both a good doctor and a good lawyer.

Put another way, practica are where new professionals learn the epistemology of their chosen profession--along with the skills, knowledge, and values they need to put that epistemology into practice. Epistemic games recreate those practica in game form so players can learn to think like professionals who solve non-routine problems.

The point, as I emphasize in the book, is not for players to become professionals, but rather to have innovative and creative ways of thinking about real problems as part of their intellectual toolkit.

You discuss a number of these epistemic games in the book. Can you pick one of them and describe how it might contrast to existing school practices in this area?

As you know, the book has two chapters that look at this very question. One chapter looking at history and what it means to think about history--in school, as a real historian, and in a game called The Debating Game. Another chapter looks at mathematics as it is learned in school and in a game called Escher's World.

I think the history example is an interesting one because the differences are so clear. Sam Wineberg at Stanford University did a lovely study comparing how graduate students in history and high school history students evaluated a collection of historical documents.

What Wineberg found (and here I'm summarizing from my book, which summarizes Wineberg's study) is that what distinguished the high school students from the historians was not the number of facts that they knew about the American Revolution. Instead, the difference was in their understanding of what it means to think historically. For the students, history is what is written in the textbook, where "facts" are presented free of bias. For the historians, historical inquiry is a system for determining the validity of historical claims based on corroboration of sources in conversation with one another rather than an appeal to a unitary source of truth--it is a way of knowing based on using specific evidence to support claims rather than trying to establish a set of facts that exist without bias.

In the same chapter, I describe a game--The Debating Game--that asks players to think about historical evidence the way historians do... or at least more like the way historians do. The game is described in more detail in the book, but basically in the game players compete in a debate over whether the actions taken by some historical actor or actors were good or bad, selfish or public-spirited, constructive or destructive.

To win the debate, they have to convince the judges of the debate that their interpretation is better than their opponents' interpretation. To do that, they have to find specific pieces of the historical record to support their position: they have to argue, as Wineberg suggests professional historians do, for the validity of historical claims based on corroboration of sources in conversation with one another rather than an appeal to a unitary source of truth.

The kinds of things that players of the game do are very different than what happens in most high school history classes. (The game has been played by middle school students as well, and there the contrast is even more striking.) Players in the game (debaters and judges) have to write essays where they defend a point of view, rather than take tests where they remember facts or recite received interpretations of events. They work with primary and secondary sources with conflicting viewpoints, rather than a text with one point of view. They make their own interpretations and judgments about arguments and evidence, rather than trying to decode and remember some canonical interpretation. And so on.

So the differences are quite striking: the game is about learning to use the "toolkit" of historical analysis to think for yourself; the class is about learning to give the right answers for a test. Thus the game is more realistic, in a sense, than class is.

A recurring emphasis in your discussion is on the movement from abstract school subjects towards school subjects framed around specific real world professions -- the difference between studying math, say, and studying accounting. What's the case for the use of these professional categories for secondary school education?

As I point out in the book, school is organized around a set of things that are supposedly fundamental ways of knowing--the building blocks of all thinking if you will--which in the case of school are the traditional academic disciplines.

This is a very old view of thinking, going back to ancient Greece. The disciplines were organized a little differently then, but the basic idea was the same: education is about learning some basic ways of thinking out of which all more advanced thinking is formed.

The problem is that a century of study in the psychology of learning suggests that this just isn't how it works. Complex thinking of the kind that characterizes expertise isn't simply lots of basic pieces put together. You can't teach a bunch of facts and skills and then expect that people will reassemble them as needed.

Expertise--indeed anything beyond rudimentary skill--is based on experience working with real problems, and usually quite a lot of experience. So if we want people to learn to think about problems in the real world, they need experience learning how experts solve those problems.

I should add that there isn't anything wrong, in principle, with having school focus on learning to think like historians or mathematicians, if we decide that these are the kinds of problems kids will really face later in life. But if that's what we want to do, then we should build games (and by extension design curricula) where players meet simulations of real historical and mathematical problems the way historians and mathematicians do--which is a far cry from what they are doing now.

I'd also want to see the argument made that teaching everyone to be 5 or 6 different flavors of academic is really more useful than learning to think as professionals. What, for example, would our health care system look like if everyone who went to a doctor's office understood the kinds of questions that the doctor should ask, and the kinds of answers that she or he would use to make decisions? What would our body politic look like if everyone who read a newspaper or listened to talk radio understood how a journalist thinks about stories--and thus what makes it into the news and what doesn't, and why stories get reported the way they do? How would that kind of education compare to what we have today--or to doing a better job of teaching students to think like biologists or historians?

The Independent Games Movement (Part Five): Interview with Eric Zimmerman

A while back, I ran a series of interviews with Manifesto Games's Greg Costikyan (Part One, Part Two) and Indiecade's Stephanie Barish (Part One, Part Two) talking about the current efforts to spark an independent games movement. Both of them offered some unique perspectives about what independent games are, why they matter, how they fit within the current games culture, and what steps need to be taken to promote more experimentation and innovation in game design. I plan to continue this series from time to time with other interviews which showcase innovators, experimentors, and entrepreneurs who are helping to build the independent games movement. Eric Zimmerman was the person who introduced me to the concept of an independent game some years ago and his work for GameLab consistently embodies for me the experimental mindset I associate with this particular category of cultural production. I run into Zimmerman four or five times a year at various conferences and consistently find him an engaging personality and a lively thinker. As long as I have known him, Zimmerman is someone who has consistently pushed us to broaden our definition of what games can do and who has proceeded to prototype, build, and market games that expand our conception of this still emerging medium. Eric Zimmerman would rank high on anyone's list of the top game theorists -- Rules of Play remains probably the best book written to date about game design and is rapidly emerging as perhaps the most widely taught text in the emerging field of games studies. What gives his ideas about game design such credability is the ways he has put them into action, working with his smart team of fellow designers, through projects like Arcadia, Diner Dash, Loop, Blix, and Sisyfight 2000, among other Game Lab titles. Every Gamelab game has a point -- as we discuss here -- an underlying theoretical question which drives the design process. Each one contributes something vital to our understanding of the medium as well as illustrating that there are a whole lot more different kinds of play and fun that the marketing department of Electronic Arts might care to imagine. The GameLab titles are the best case I can imagine for the value of producing and distributing games outside of the major studios. I will be running this interview over the next two days. The first part deals mostly with the issue of independent games and with the ways GameLab approaches its business. The second part digs deeper into the Game Designer project which Zimmerman is developing with Katie Salen and James Paul Gee -- which promises to be a significant part of the new Digital Learning and Youth project recently launched by the McArthur Foundation.

You have been a longtime advocate of the independent games movement. How do you

define independent games and what do they bring to games culture?

The idea of "independent games" is a slippery but important concept. I think there are a number of ways to consider what they are - I like to use the notion of independent film as a way of thinking through what indie games might be.

On the one hand, it's possible to think about independent film as something which is small-scale in terms of scope of production - a homemade film project on a shoestring budget, as opposed to a major studio release. Related to this is another definition of independent film, which refers to the ways that a movie is funded and distributed - perhaps funded through an arts grant, and distributed via festivals, instead of more mainstream means. Lastly, an independent film might be seen as something which questions the conventions of mainstream cinema through its form or content - from avant-garde experiments to political documentary.

There are other ways of conceiving of independent cinema as well, but these three (production, business, & design) help describe some of the challenges of creating independent games. The game industry is a cultural field that is currently dominated by large-scale games that cost $10 to $20 million or more to create, games that are funded by large corporations, distributed through the bottlenecks of retail, and are largely genre-generic titles. At Gamelab (a company I founded in 2000 with Peter Lee), we try and address these questions, making small-scale experimental games that are still commercially viable.

To me it is less important to define exactly what independent games are and instead figure out how to create innovative games that expand the boundaries of digital games, a form of culture that is only a few decades old and still has vast spaces for experimentation and invention.

What do you see as the major factors enabling or hindering the emergence of the

independent games movement at the present time?

We are more or less stuck in the middle.

It is certainly possible to create new kinds of games through traditional big-money funding and major studio production - Will Wright and his very large team at Maxis are doing some fantastic work along those lines. On the other hand, there are plenty of players and amateur designers creating levels and mods, and games as a form are great at engendering this kind of productive fan culture.

But at my company Gamelab we've chosen a middle route. For our purposes, as a studio with a staff of 35, we need to figure out how to make independent games that are in the middle between huge retail titles and freeware fan culture and still be commercially viable. To solve this problem, we've been attacking it from all the angles I mentioned in my response to the first question - how to keep games small but something that will still generate revenue; how to get these games funded and distributed; and how to explore new kinds of content, aesthetics, and gameplay.

There aren't any easy answers. For example, some look to the business model of downloadable games. [Sometimes called "casual games" - although I personally despise that term, as what musician would say that she creates "casual music"?!] The model of downloadable games seems promising - at first. It allows smaller games to be distributed to a very large audience over the internet. However, the major game portals are surprisingly conservative about what they will put up on their sites. And as a whole, downloadable games are generally quite generic and often shameless clones of other games - hardly a burgeoning sector full of gameplay innovation and cultural insight. Right now there aren't any perfect contexts for independent games.

On your website, you suggest that project-based funding may be a key economic

model for the independent games movement. Explain. What does this mean and how

does it change the way games get made?

Well, at least it sounds good on paper!

Generally, a game development company like Gamelab does not have the money to pay for its own games to be created. The most traditional route for finding this money would be for us to work with a publisher, who funds our games, and then also markets and distributes them. Because of the nature of most game publishing contracts, it is difficult for developers to earn healthy royalties from this kind of deal, even if a game is successful.

Another possibility would be getting venture capital investment, in which individuals or organizations invest in the company, and then own a piece of it. The hope of the investors is that the company will go public (which is unlikely for a game developer) or be purchased by a large publisher or other company (somewhat more likely). We have resisted this scenario so far because our independence is important to us - becoming the kept studio of a large publisher would curtail the kind of experiments we want to explore.

So working with Ruth Charny, an independent film producer, we cooked up a third option, which is project-based financing, a funding model borrowed from the film industry. In project-based financing, investors invest only in one project, or possibly a slate of projects, rather than in Gamelab as a whole. They earn back their money (and hopefully some profits) directly from the revenue the games generate. Gamelab in this scenario is acting like the publisher, marketing and distributing the games.

We have gotten three downloadable games funded in this manner, each with a different partner. We are working with NYC-based animation studio Curious Pictures to create Out of Your Mind, a game about little creatures inside everyone's heads; an individual investor funded a game called Work, a parody of office life; and we partnered with LEGO to create an original, somewhat psychedelic game called LEGO Fever.

Luckily, the process of distributing downloadable games is much easier than distributing them through retail, so it is something that Gamelab can manage on its own - although we will also be working with partners to get the games on cell phones and in retail boxes. It has been difficult to find project-based investors, however. My feeling is that in 10 or 15 years, when there are enough wealthy people that believe games are an important cultural form, we'll see a boom in independent games. Right now, however, the people that invest in independent film aren't gamers and don't see the glamour or importance of games.

We recently participated in an online forum discussing whether games are art.

You offered an interesting response, distinguishing between design and art.

What do you see as the value of understanding games as a field of design? Why

do you resist the concept that games might be considered art?

Henry, Henry, Henry...! I don't resist the concept that games might be considered art. I resist the naïve way that most game developers themselves conceive of the concept of "Art." I recently attended a think tank-style weekend gathering that included many amazing game developers. As we discussed the future of game design, a common note in the conversations was a lamentation of the eternal, oppositional relationship between art and commerce.

Even a little study of art history reveals that for the past 500 years (at least!), the creation of culture has been intimately intertwined with economics. Although today's game developers work with cutting-edge technologies, they cling to a pre-Modern, Romantic idea of cultural production, one that I believe hampers the creation of games that are more relevant to our contemporary times. Games don't have to be self-contained Renaissance windows into coherent narrative universes. In fact, play is always already self-referential and metacommunicative (referencing Gregory Bateson).

For me "design" (instead of "Art") is a way of thinking about game creation that sidesteps these thorny issues. Design in my mind is associated with problem solving rather than with the expression of the artist's inner life. It is also a mode of cultural production that acknowledges the importance of integrated research and an iterative, playtesting-based process. The naïve version of "Art" too often implies a solitary visionary being internally inspired, something at odds with a healthy game development process.

But ultimately the distinction between art and design is more of a tactical one for me than a definitional one. I want to see game developers creating games that can speak to our times, and I don't think that will happen as easily when they are operating from outmoded cultural models.

Most of your games seem to emerge, in part, from your group's interest in experimenting with the basic building blocks of games. Walk us through some of the thinking behind your most recent games --Plantasia and Egg vs. Chicken. What ideas drove this design process?

I'll do even better and talk about a couple of games that we are about to launch - Arcadia Remix and Out of Your Mind (a game I mentioned earlier). You are definitely right that often our design focus at Gamelab has to do with investigating the "core mechanic" of a game - the repeated action that forms the heart of the interactivity. That's in part due to the fact that because of the downloadable business model, we make small-scale games that need to "hook" players with an addictive play mechanic.

Arcadia Remix , published by VH-1, is a redesign of a small game we did a few years ago, Arcadia. (Henry, I believe you've actually written about Arcadia.) Arcadia Remix is made up a series of tiny, very simple games that are all played at the same time. The mini-games are incredibly straightforward - actually bordering on boring - but playing several of them simultaneously becomes quickly challenging. The play emerges as the player manages her own attention to the different games, with strange, syncopated rhythms evolving from the overlapping play patterns. It's also an interesting game because the mini-games are all parodies of classic Atari-era games, and so we're appropriating our own history as the cultural and formal building blocks for the experience.

Out of Your Mind is a somewhat perverse and silly game in which the player works in a brain spa, removing nasty little creatures called Nega-Tics that live in our minds and cause bad behavior. In this case, the gameplay involves drawing lines with the mouse to spear the creatures and remove "brain gunk" by looping around sections of the playfield. The interaction consists of making quick and elegant gestures with the mouse, as the player's cursor swoops and loops through the space. Again, this kind of play pattern is something we haven't seen in other games.

There are many ways to innovate on the level of game experience. Often, game developers try to create new kinds of stories, content, and aesthetics for their games. In addition to these vectors for innovation, we try at Gamelab to invent new ways to play, which means focusing on new kinds of play mechanics, game logics, and interactions. Both of the games I mentioned will be available for play by the end of January.

Hollywood Mogul 3

Today, I am turning over the bloging duties to my son, Henry Jenkins IV, who wanted to share with you an interview with game designer Carey DeVuono about Hollywood Mogul 3.

In Computer Gaming World's 20th Anniversary issue journalist Robert Coffey wrote an article about the three strategy games "that have insinuated themselves most deeply into [his] life," a list one might anticipate would include established classics like Civilization, Age of Empires, Warcraft, Railroad Tycoon and The Sims. What's interesting is that "the best fantasy game [he] ever played" was one a high percentage of the readers wouldn't have heard of, one produced exclusively for the Internet by a single programmer for a fraction of the cost of those other games.

In Hollywood Mogul gamers create a movie studio and produce a full slate of films, from hiring the screenwriters and developing the scripts to casting the actors and setting the budgets. Along the way they have to deal with the problems that crop up in the production of the film - tension on the set, budget overruns. Once a cut of the film is completed you can test screen it and then tinker with later versions in order to get it right. The ultimate goal is to make more money than the competing studios and win more awards.

Hollywood Mogul is the game I wanted when I bought Peter Molyneux's holiday blockbuster The Movies, or at least something closer to it. This game, too, is flawed. As much as I enjoy spending hours coming up with interesting ideas for movies - What if you made an alternative version of The Sopranos set in the 1930s of Al Capone and John Dillinger? What if you cast Bill Murray and Robert DeNiro as the rival coaches of the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees? - there's no way for the game to measure the creativity of your story or the charisma of your casting decisions. Ultimately it has to make decisions according to objective criteria. Can you get enough star power for a low enough casting budget? Did you take the months necessary to perfect the script or did you rush it? Did you invest enough in truly special, state of the art special effects to really bring people to the theaters or just enough to waste a lot of money?

Initially the game faced further limitations for obvious reasons - no actual writers, actors or directors could be used by name. But a surprising thing happened. A thriving fan community sprung up on the game's message board and gamers spent months programming their own additions. Suddenly you could download databases of carefully devised talent profiles for any decade. Even when a period of several years stretched on between new officially released versions of the game, fans continued to share their insights and experiences with the game on a daily basis, maintaining the energy surrounding the game.

This fall Hollywood Mogul 3 was released with a whole new set of improvements and features. Carey DeVuono, the game's independent creator, whose work was placed alongside Will Wright's The Sims, talked with me about his creative process, his Internet community and the role of independent game developers in a commercial marketplace.

Could you start by telling us a little about yourself?

I'm a writer. A storyteller. My goal with Hollywood Mogul 3 was to create a place for movie-lovers to play. It's a sandbox.

What was the thought process that led you to create Hollywood Mogul?

This is so embarrassing. In 1991 I had written a screenplay about two computer companies that go to war using remote controlled airplanes, fireworks, golf-cart tanks ... basically a men-are-boys story. It was a blast, a great script, great characters, a lot of fun. My agent sent the script into the system at Fox. They passed. The following year a director friend of mine decided he wanted to direct it, so we went back to Fox. They passed again. The third year we happened upon a producer with a housekeeping deal at Fox ... so the three of us went back to Fox again. They passed. And I thought to myself, insanely, "if I only had a computer program that could run the numbers for them!" And then I thought, "Hey, that might be fun anyway."

Hollywood Mogul was born from that. So I taught myself to program a computer and wrote the original DOS version back in 1994. Over the years, I've done many other creative projects (some screenplay adaptations of novels, some movie trailers, I've also titled a movie or two!). But I always came back to Hollywood Mogul. I had released a Windows version of the game, and it had a loyal fan base. Then in 2001 I started a Message Board and the idea of maybe doing one more version of the game seemed like a good idea. Some of this had come from something in Computer Gaming World Magazine ... their 20th anniversary issue, in which the Strategy Game Editor, Robert Coffey cited Hollywood Mogul as one of the top three strategy games of all time. That made me think seriously about taking on all the things that I could NOT do in the original. Remember, when I wrote the DOS version, the average computer had 8 MB of RAM. My shoes have more than that now.

What are the major features of the game?

I don't even know where to begin to answer this question. Hollywood Mogul 3 is a top-to-bottom rewrite of my original game. This is what the original game could not be because of the memory restrictions in "the old days" (640K, if you recall). In this version of Hollywood Mogul I added everything I wanted in the game. Every single thing. There are 13 source material categories. So your studio can purchase a Comic Book, or a TV Show, or an Original Screenplay. When I wrote the original, I knew that players would probably change the source records, add real novels, or real screenplays. What I didn't realize is that they would SHARE them among other players of the game. So I built into HM3 the ability to import ANY source database you want. So you could use Bob Smith's Comic Book database, and Bill Jones's definitive TV Show database, and someone else's Graphic Novel database in your game, simply by importing them during the setup. In addition, then you can randomize the attributes of those databases, or choose NOT to.

The same goes for the Talent Databases. Hollywood Mogul 3 was pre-released to those loyal Message Board members of mine, and within days an actor and actress talent database mods were created, complete with talent images of real life movie stars. If you go the Hollywood Mogul Message Board you can download all those files for free, and easily import them into your games.

In addition, this version of Hollywood Mogul allows for up to 10 players to hotseat a game. This came from a number of Game Clubs around the country who played the original Hollywood Mogul as ONE studio ... each making specific movies and then comparing their box office results. In HM3 they can each run their OWN studio. Also, HM3 has computer AI studios competing against you, with all of you pulling from the same source and talent pools. This adds a whole new dimension to Hollywood Mogul.

And this is just the beginning. I said, I don't know where to begin answering this question, there are so many features. You can make Production Deals with talent, you can contract them for sequels at specific terms, you can audition talent, hire them, fire them, you can choose a marketing focus ... and believe me ... a $100 million action movie with the wrong marketing focus can turn into a box office bomb. Almost everything in HM3 is customizable, from the Studio Logos that fade up just before the Opening Credits of your movie display, to the background images, office images, talent files and images. You can use a talent database with real movie stars and their pictures, or you can make your Aunt Milly the top star in town. Hollywood Mogul 3 is a sandbox. Get in there and play.

Did you explore the possibility of designing the game for a largercommercial software company? Are there possibilities that releasing thegame yourself has allowed you to explore that wouldn't have beenavailable to you if you'd worked for a larger company?

A few companies have approached me over the years, especially after the word went out that there would be an HM3. But none of the conversations ever got very serious. I think I just wanted to to it alone, to be honest. I enjoy the work. I don't know that I'm much of a programmer, but I love the process. I don't know if there are possibilities allowed me as an independent company, except for the most obvious: Hollywood Mogul will sell for years. If this was released by a large company it would just be another SKU to them, and in a few months it would be off the shelf or into the Price Reduced bin. So this allows me to keep Hollywood Mogul 3 out there forever, maybe. And I can fuss with it. I might add this or that to it over the years. That's what I like about it, that I can tinker with it whenever I get the urge.

How do you view the role of independent software providers such asyourself in the games culture and who are some of the other exemplarsyou'd point to?

I don't really have a view. I'm just here doing my thing. I'm a writer. Programming is just another use of language, as far as I am concerned, so Hollywood Mogul is something that I WROTE. That's how I think of it. I don't know that I have ANY place in the games culture. Hollywood Mogul is a strategy game in an age when real-time play with 3-D on-the-fly graphics is vogue. I'm just a guy with some ideas, plugging away. As far as exemplars ... I would say that Scotty and Elisa over at HPS Simulations are doing a great job.

What did you see as the initial strengths and flaws of each of thefirst two versions of the game and how did that guide you in developing the sequels?

As I've already stated, the original version came out when the average computer had 8 MB of RAM. The original Windows version, and its major version release (2.5e) was still BUILT on that basic DOS design. Hollywood Mogul 3 was a re-thinking of the GUI while completely recreating all of the foundation structures of the game. Take the talent record, for instance. Each individual talent record had around 25 fields in HM2 ... in HM3 it approaches 100. EVERYTHING has been expanded in Hollywood Mogul 3. In HM2 the screenplay had attributes ... in HM3 that continues, but now every ROLE in the screenplay has attributes. Hollywood Mogul 3 is a HUGE game. There are so many variables and so many permeatations that you should be able to play for years and never really duplicate your experience (unless you want to).

You seem to have sustained quite a following during the recesses between each version. Could you talk a little bit about the messageboard community that's developed surrounding the game?

I don't know that I have anything to do with that, other than CREATE the Message Board. The members just found it. I never advertised it anywhere, they just showed up. It was THEIR game, they led the way, I just listened. And after I had decided to make Hollywood Mogul 3, I had completed the design, I was ready to get started, and I asked the members in a forum called The HM3 Wish List what they wanted in the next version. The result was 36 pages of suggestions (I still have it). More than 90% of the things they suggested were ALREADY in the design. A few things were just not plausible to me, or not "game-able," in my opinion. And there were a few things that I DID add from that document they created.

The Hollywood Mogul Message Board community is a family of sorts, with members all over the world. They share files, and studio success stories, information, and knowledge. They're a great group and I think they get a kick out of being able to talk to me directly (through their posts) and sometimes berate me or praise me. I think they feel CONNECTED to Hollywood Mogul more because I'm active on the board. But I don't know that for sure. I'm sure they would be there even if I wasn't there. They like Hollywood Mogul and they like talking about the game with each other. It's been my privilege to be at their service.

Some of the users there developed patches that inserted the names andability points of actual entertainers into the game. Did you initiallywant to do that or did you always conceive of the game as centeringaround a fictional universe of talents? What legal challenges areinvolved there?

I knew that I could NOT use real life movie star names. I don't know if it's illegal, I'm assuming it is, but I felt it was unethical ... and the reason is ... that they are RANKED based on salary. And me using real movie star names and then ranking their "talent" made me uncomfortable. So I built into the game the ability for YOU to do whatever you want to do with the talent files. As I said earlier, what I didn't know was that they would SHARE those files with each other.

How did you come up with all of the names for the individuals in the game? How about the movie scripts?

The default installation talent names are created on the fly when you first create the talent databases for Hollywood Mogul 3. The names are pulled from a file of 2400 last names, and five hundred or so male and female names.

The original version of Hollywood Mogul had as its source material database 300 Original Screenplays, 300 Novels, and 300 Stage Plays. I sat out by the pool one very long day, and wrote those 900 titles and storylines. With Hollywood Mogul 3 I had built much more randomization capabilities into the Game Set Up. You can, of course, turn those randomizations off, or even pick and choose among the dozens of them, but I knew that most people would probably WANT the randomization at Set Up because it gives a unique game each time you play.

I had noticed with the original versions that when the GENRE was randomized the storyline sometimes didn't make sense. And with HM3, the ability to randomize all of the role attributes made a storyline unworkable. Suppose there is an Original Screenplay you want to buy called "Girls Night Out" and it has 7 women in ensemble roles, all around age 20. In HM3 the Game Set Up randomization could turn that screenplay into a piece that now has 5 MALE roles, all in their late 60's. As I said, you CAN turn off those randomizations (by choosing Player-Defined = True), but the storylines just didn't seem to work into my vision of what HM3 should be.

And of course ... the original had 900 titles. Hollywood Mogul 3 has 5,000 Original Screenplay records, and there are an additional 4,500 records in the other 12 source database types. That's 9500 titles I wrote! This time I didn't sit out at the pool, though. I worked on them an hour at a time over many months. The challenge, and the fun, to be honest, was to come up with titles that would work no matter what GENRE was randomized. I did a fairly good job, I think. By the way, I THINK the very last title I wrote ... title number 9,500 is either called "Number 9,500" or "The Last Title." I can't remember, but it's something like that.

What did you think of The Movies? How is your game different?

I have not played The Movies. I purposely did not play it or even pay much attention to its release publicity because I was still coding Hollywood Mogul 3 and I didn't want any type of outside influence.

Do you expect to do a Hollywood Mogul 4? What would you add or do differently?

Hollywood Mogul 4? Are you trying to kill me? There will NOT be a Hollywood Mogul 4. I'm fairly sure about that. Almost positive. I think.

Where is the game available? How would someone buy it?

Hollywood Mogul 3 is available online as a 67 MB download. I'm looking at making partnership deals with some big retailers who would essentially "give the game away" on CD-ROM and then take a percentage of any resulting sales. But that may take months to put together. If your readers want to try Hollywood Mogul 3 free for ten days they can download it. You can play HM3 for free, that installation file is the full, complete game. After ten days, though, if you still want to play, you have to buy it. Which you can do easily online if you have a credit card or PayPal account. Just follow the directions on the game's start up menu.

And PLEASE go to the Hollywood Mogul Message Board (www.hollywood-mogul.com) and download the talent files and talent image files that have been created already. There's all kinds of things that have been MOD'ed by the HM3 community. They're having a blast already. Please come and join the worldwide community of Hollywood Moguls.

The Independent Games Movement (Part Three): Behind the Scenes at Indiecade

>Independent gamemakers, like their counterparts in film, make products that can be a lifelong passion, that rely upon the creative inspiration of innumerable collaborators, and that often deplete a life savings or run up credit card debt to create. Like independent filmmakers, they compete for support, publicity, and distribution against established producers and productions that can cost millions of dollars... But the game industry, unlike cinema, has no comprehensive, public venue to introduce, explore, and celebrate groundbreaking independent work. Worthy independent games, prospective funders, and players hungry for new experiences rarely find one another. Imagine an annual global crossroads and marketplace, open to the general public - a yearly celebration of this community's new voices and their trailblazing work. Imagine thousands of independent creators, developers, thinkers, players, and fans, traveling from across the world to be at the same place at the same time....

--Indiecade website.

This is the second of a series of interviews I plan to run over the next month or so with key movers and shakers in the independent games movement. I am running this series out of a belief that we may be at a vital crossroads in the history of computer and video games as a series of announcements and developments this year may pave the way for greater innovation, diversity, and experimentation in game design. For a long time, the games industry seemed in danger of being completely swallowed whole by Electronic Arts and a few other major publishers. Suddenly a number of institutions are emerging which will enable distribute and critical engagement with works by smaller games developers or will encourage amateurs to produce and distribute games. Like many of my readers, I love many mainstream games but I also believe that there need to be an alternative games culture if we are going to avoid standardization and stagnation.

A little over a week ago, I featured a two part conversation with Greg Costikyan about Manifesto Games, its support for creator rights, and his critique of the mainstream game publishers.

Today and tomorrow, I will be talking with Stephanie Barish, Founder and President of Creative Media Collaborative, the group which is organizing Indiecade, which they hope will function for the independent games industry the way Sundance has functioned for the independent films movement -- a gathering place, a training ground, a focus for critical attention, and a showcase for the best new work from around the world. Full disclosure dictates that I acknowledge that Barish asked me some time ago to serve on the board of advisors for the festival and through telephone conversations and e-mail correspondence, I have watched her and her team grapple with some of the challenges of building the infrastructure and identifying the sponsors needed to pull off a pretty ambitious plan. The first Indiecade is going to be held in Santa Monica, California in the fall of 2007.

I first met Barish when she was working as the producer and director of multimedia publications at Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation and then later as the executive Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center. Barish comes not from the heart of the games industry but rather from the world of independent media production and multimedia literacy education. She brings an alternative sensibility and perspective to the effort to promote independent games.

Here, Barish suggests the ways that the Indiecade has emerged from a particular analysis of what's working -- and what isn't -- in contemporary games culture and explores some of the ways that a games festival might contribute to greater public awareness of the independent games movement. Along the way, she speaks to the question of games criticism, which was a central focus of discussion across the blogosphere earlier this year. Tomorrow, she will speak more fully about what it means to create a festival around games and how games might be understood as reflecting differences between different national cultures.

Barish has asked me to acknowledge the contributions of other members on the Indiecade team who helped her think through how to address some of these questions: Scott Chamberlin (Partner) , Janine Fron (Conference Chair), Sam Gustman (CMC V.P., Partner), Kirsten Paul (IndieCade Program Manager), and Celia Pearce (IndieCade Festival Chair).

How are you defining an independent game?

It is funny that there is not a standard answer to this question. For the festival we are using a simple determinant: an independent game is one that is created without the umbrella of a deal with a major publisher. This also excludes games funded by the majors or their subsidiaries, using the industry standard, as others have before us, to define these majors as the 30 companies on the ESA board -- those included in the new E3.

We have had a lot of very interesting conversations about the definition of independent in this community, and the particulars can obscure the real issue, which boils down to an independent game being one in which the creative decisions are not made down the hall at Marketing. Obviously, there are gray areas, but independence can be found at the other side of that spectrum, where inspiration is the motivation.

Some have argued that the conservativeness of the games industry (tending to make franchise titles or games that fall into familiar genres) is simply a reflection of the conservativism of the hardcore gamer market (which tends to judge new titles against prior play experiences.) Do you agree or disagree with this claim? What can independent games designers do to encourage the public to experiment more with alternative forms of gaming?

First the industry finds itself having to cater to the appetite of hardcore gamers for increasingly impressive and sophisticated graphics and technologies. Given the financial premium of all this innovation, it's no wonder the industry then takes safe harbor in marketing decisions they know will appeal just enough to what is in fact a very dedicated following. We should not expect the industry to eschew proven formulas, but need to encourage parallel development streams that meet a known taste for altogether-new flavors and ultimately drive the industry forward. This is not even to say that there are not some beautiful and highly original games created by the industry, like the newly released Okami for the PS2. But the state of the industry is such that as one of our advisors, a lead game designer, recently pointed out the irony that he could get millions of dollars for the design of another licensed title, but could not get a few hundred thousand dollars to do something new and creative.

No doubt it is a challenge for independent game designers to compete with the kind of graphic and technical expectations and experiences regularly offered by the big players. But we don't expect the latest special-effect blockbuster to render all previous films and future non-technical films obsolete, and we have to start painting game design and marketing with a subtler brush. There are more kinds of play experiences than those repeatedly offered by the majors, and not all audiences are interested only in those particular types of experiences and narratives. IndieCade Festival Chair Celia Pearce, an Associate Professor at Georgia Tech, conducted a study on Baby Boomer gamers and found they were much less demanding in terms of graphics technology, but far more interested in artistry. "The people I studied prefer games with story, classic point-and-click adventure games ... a genre that big publishers simply abandoned in the late 1990s." Just think about industry precedent, the enormous underserved audience that emerged to play The Sims. Or look at casual games, which tend to be minimized by the big companies in the industry, despite games like gameLab's Diner Dash, which have garnered remarkable followings. It is not insignificant that the major audience for these games are women, who have a markedly different set of expectations and requirements than those supposedly demanded by the hardcore gamer. Mods are also a case in point, as for instance Counter-Strike has more copies in circulation than the original game it was based on. As the audience for these independent so called niche games expands, it reveals a tremendous desire for diversity of play experience and a large audience underserved by the current mainstream industry.

Independent game designers don't need to figure out how to serve specific public needs; they simply need opportunities for voice. For every independent game that is a phenomenon a dozen never get seen except at the odd industry showcase. If they don't get picked up by short-sighted publishers, how are they going to have the chance to even FIND an audience? Right now the biggest marketing channel for independent games is word of mouth, but public forums and the Internet are really lowering the hurdles for distribution. Such outlets as Valve's steam system and the newly launched Manifesto are helping to propel independent game distribution forward. IndieCade, by bringing the independents together in a community and a marketplace, will also serve as a catalyst by uniting the community and throwing a spotlight on a lot of those user experiences that are not necessarily technical wonders. We believe the audience will expand in response to the exposure to this innovation and diversity.

Film festivals benefit enormously from the role of film critics who use them to preview smaller and international titles before they open in their markets. Can

one have the same impact as Sundance with an independent games event without

serious participation from games critics who are prepared to educate the public

about experimental and innovative titles?

We think this is a really big problem with the game industry, and we are glad you pointed it out. Since most of the game writers fall into the hardcore gamer category, the perspectives are not particularly diverse. (Most of the game magazines panned The Sims when it came out.) First, I think we should point out that there is a generation of gamers, fans, and critics, who are students of people like you, Henry, and are interested in better and more critical game writing. As a juried festival, IndieCade jurors will facilitate this discussion by writing reviews of all of the featured games in our catalogue -- there are many small steps we need to make as a community to begin to open this dialogue to the greater public.

But to more directly answer your question, we are optimistic about movement in different areas. Blogs and other online forums are becoming crucial points of reference across culture, and in our field some fantastic game culture blogs, fan blogs, and independent discussion forums are beginning to emerge. At the festival, we expect prominent game bloggers and other "netroots" gamers -- already accustomed to imparting and consuming information on laptops, PDAs, telephones -- to generate the kind of buzz and attention you're talking about. They will play the critic role in more ways than one, and they will do so with more immediacy, more energy, and more drama.

This is more appropriate to the medium. The use of participants' phones and laptops are integrated into the design of the festival itself, so they will already be wired and inclined to beam news of the latest works to remote lands. As the years go by and the media channels for independents crystallize and mature, a central annual event will create the same sense of anticipation and discovery that film festivals nurture so carefully through traditional media.

Given how totally commercial interests have dominated games culture, many wonder whether there are enough interesting independent games out there to provide content for a large scale event every year. Where are you finding the games you will feature at your event? What steps are you taking to identify new content for the initial festival?

Submissions are a hot topic for us. We honestly don't think that we will have any trouble finding high quality independent work, not this year or any other. There is a lot of independent work with phenomenal promise out there. We have a large international jury and we are being extremely aggressive about submissions. We have a system of chairs who will be responsible for evangelizing in their categories. We also have a category for works-in-progress, which will allow independent developers lacking the resources to take a great idea to fruition, to compete and get the attention of those who do. We will draw submissions from around the world, and we can expect to see some interesting submissions from students. We expect to launch our initial website just after the winter holidays, and will open our submissions by February, 2007 at http://www.indiecade.com.

As years go by, we are not going to settle into familiar forms and comfortable media. Of all people, we have to have a very expansive sense of the types of games and play experiences to be included in the festival. We want games that are pushing the envelope and are interested in displaying hybrids of all forms, not merely the purely digital. At the festival itself, we want to put the practitioners, industry specialists, players, fans, and spectators together into a dynamic environment: we'll have round-robin tournaments, LAN parties, social game activities integrated throughout the festival; as well as both a "Big Game" that will take place across the city of Los Angeles and an international ARG game which is being designed specifically for the festival. Each year we expect these activities to grow and transform along with the festival and the industry.

The Independent Games Movement (Part Two): An Interview with Manifesto Game's Greg Costikyan

We will develop for open platforms, not proprietary consoles. We will work in the white-hot ferment of our own imaginations, striving to produce games of enduring merit, games so fine that generations to come will point to them and say, this, this was important in the creation of the great artistic form we know as games.

We will strive for innovation over imitation, originality over the tried and true.

We will explore the enormous plasticity of what is "the game," the fantastic flexibility of code, seeking new game styles and new approaches to the form.

We will create games we know gamers will want to play, because we ARE gamers, not MBAs or assholes from Hollywood or marketing dweebs whose last gig was selling Tide.

We will work in small, committed teams, sharing a unified vision, striving to perfect that vision without fear, favor, or interference.

We will find our market not by bribing retailers to stock our product, but on the public Internet, reaching our audience through the excellence of our own product, through guerilla marketing and rabble-rousing manifestoes, by nurturing a community of people passionate about and committed to games.

We will create, through sheer force of will, an independent games revolution, an audience and market and body of work that will ultimately redound to the benefit of the whole field, providing a venue for creative work, as independent cinema does for film, as independent labels do for music.

We will turn this industry on its head.

-- Designer X, The Scratchware Manifesto

Designer X (better known as Greg Costikyan) doesn't mince words. He says what other designers are thinking but are afraid to say -- though they weren't afraid to give him a standing ovation at the Games Developers Conference in 2005 when he denounced the contemporary mainstream games industry and vowed to create an alternative model for how games can be produced and distributed.

Manifesto Games, the company he created with Johnny Wilson, a long time trade press reporter and games critic. Both Costikyan and Wilson are tired of talking about what's wrong with the games industry. We heard some of their analysis of the problems here last time. They are working to change the infrastructure to make it easier for creative game designers to work outside of the major games publishers, do innovative work, and get it into the marketplace and also to allow discriminating, engaged consumers to find the best work to emerge from the indie games movement. Something of the mixture of ideological and business motivations behind the venture can be seen at Manifesto's home page, which combines what they see as a utopian vision statement with a more pragmatic description of their business plan. They hope to exploit the current moment of digital distribution of games content and web 2.0 strategies to expand the public's access to innovative game content. All of this is spelled out in Manifesto's, er, manifesto.

Go to their website and you can already seen a broad range of independent games content as well as space for critical commentary and for community members to share their own impressions of what works and doesn't work about individual titles. The group is taking on itself some of the challenges of educating the public about the diversity that is emerging from independent game designers as well as to provide a portal which allows interested designers and curious consumers to interact.

I am sure there will be plenty written down the line about what works or doesn't work in this approach. For the moment, I simply want to let people here Costikyan's arguments for themselves and decide whether this represents one potential direction for the future of games culture.

What factors have led you to step out of the world of major games publishers and create Manifesto?

I don't know that this is an accurate characterisation--almost everything I've done has been in one niche market or another: tabletop, online (mostly pre-Internet, and certainly before EQ proved the market), and mobile... Rather, I think that, as with online and mobile, I've identified an emerging market that has great potential. The difference is that I'm doing it this time as a distributor instead of a developer--but I think that's where we can make the most difference at present.

You describe Manifesto Games as a "Long Tail play." Can you explain how this effort has been informed by the "Long Tail" theory? Companies like EA clearly aim for the mass market end of the tail. What evidence do we have that niche game products might succeed?

Back in the late-80s and early 90s, companies like Talonsoft were profitable on the basis of 15,000 unit sales. Companies like Codemasters were happy with 25,000 unit sales.

The problem is that today, you just will not get retail distribution if that's all you can project. Thousands of games are published every year, a typical game store has maybe 200 facings, and if your game doesn't sell well within the first two weeks, they take it off the shelf to make room for a new release that might.

Why shouldn't it be possible to recreate, online, a retail environment that recreates the conditions of the game market overall in the late 80s and early 90s? There are vastly more gamers now--and their seems to be a palpable feeling of ennui with the prevailing industry's attachment to franchise and licensed titles.

What evidence is there that niche product can succeed? Well, Stardock has sold over 100,000 copies of Galactic Civilizations. Garage Games has sold over a million copies of Marble Blast (which, admittedly, by my definition is "casual" rather than truly indie). Those are outliers, but they imply the promise.

You seem to associate a kind of entrepreneurial or artisan based mode of production with a range of aesthetic virtues, including innovation and diversity. What makes you think an entrepreneur is more likely to embrace these virtues than a larger studio?

Well, it may be a romantic failing on my part. However, I'll point out, the single thing you can point to as an example of dramatic creativity on the part of the larger industry today is Spore, which is largely the product of the vision of a single creator, who happens to be one of the very few people in the field with the track-record and clout to force his vision through. Novels and symphonies are not written by committees, and while other media, such as film, involve the participation of many talents, we still generally ascribe the artistic success of movies to one or a handful of people.

Still, film demonstrates that "larger studios" can succeed in creating interesting and innovative work; but film, unlike games, has also embraced the "cult of celebrity" (for better or worse), with the consequence that some individuals in Hollywood can force their vision through. In games, you can count the people with that kind of clout on the fingers of one hand, and the hand of a toon at that: Will Wright, Shigero Miyamota, Peter Molyneux.

In other words, I don't think the critical factor in supporting innovation is necessarily the size of the operation, but in the ability of creative people to control the process. Development at internal studios is marketing-driven rather than driven by creators; and while independent studios operating in the conventional market theoretically have a bit more freedom, the need to pass through the (broken) green-light process drastically diminishes that freedom.

Part of the interest of independent cinema is that the film express alternative perspectives -- political, cultural, sexual, what have you -- which would not otherwise gain broader circulation. Is the same likely to be true for independent games? Would this require a greater focus on what the game is about rather than simply the play mechanics? What relationship are you positing between indie games and art games or serious games?

I hope so, albeit we have relatively few examples to hold up at present. Although I'll note that one of our best-sellers at present is The Shivah, an old-school graphic adventure about a Rabbi having a crisis of faith. I'd love to have more games that strike off in odd directions--from a crass commercial perspective, The Shivah is far more promotable for us, far easier to interest people in than another shmup or third-person shooter.

To date, most games that do "express alternative perspectives" (e.g., Escape from Woomera, the Columbine game, Disaffected!) have been freeware--perhaps because the creators don't really see a path to market. If we can demonstrate a market, however....

Your focus on creator-controlled games seems to parallel the creator-owned comics movement of the past few decades. What, if any, inspiration have you taken from this? What will you learn from the successes or limits of that movement?

Hm... Well, there's a risk in trying to hew too closely to independent comics model--e.g., there's a feeling on the part of many independent comic creators that doing anything other than self-publishing and distributing yourself is selling out. Part of the reason this is feasible in comics is that there are a handful of important distributors, and it's quite feasible for an independent creator to contact them all, and get distribution. We are dealing in a different retail environment here--online is a different beast...

But in general, I think independent comics really is a good example of how, if you create an environment where independent creators can find an audience and live an adequate middle-class living, you open the floodgates of creativity--and help to reinvigorate the mainstream. Remember that not too long ago, both Marvel and DC viewed themselves as primarily licensing companies, with the merits of the actual content they published hardly considered by management. I think that's less so today...

Do you see the primary goal as to publicize existing indie games or to provide incentive for their production?

I don't think there's a contradiction between the two goals. I believe there are many excellent indie games today that haven't gotten the exposure they deserve, and to the degree that we can expose them to a new audience, that's great.

Contrariwise, I know there are a great many highly creative people in this field who feel constrained and unhappy by the circumstances of market reality--and I know that if we can prove that independent games can achieve adequate distribution and sales, and reach an adequate market, I'm positive that the floodgates will open, and we'll see a dramatic florescence of creativity.

As an example, consider Eric Zimmerman. He's found a viable niche doing casual games, and his company, GameLab, does some excellent ones. But Eric is a -gamer- at heart, and while I imagine he's happy enough developing games for an audience (middle-aged women) that prizes games of types very different from those he himself loves, I'm sure he'd much prefer to be developing games of greater cultural significance and intellectual merit. In other words, if he could make as much money doing a game that appeals to people who have a passion for games, rather than for those who view them as light entertainment, I'm sure he'd be happy to. But he also has a payroll to make, and there's demonstrable money in casual games, and indie games are pretty much unproven as a market.

How is the digital distribution of games going to change the ability of indie publishers to get their content in front of the general public? Clearly part of what you hope will work here is a web-based model for the delivery of content and a web 2.0 model for users assessing and evaluating the content which is offered.

Well, we're back into "long tail" theory here. The problem with brick-and-mortar retail is that you're either on the shelf, or not. And if you're on the shelf for an extended time, you can sell in huge quantity--but if you're not, you've got nothing. In a web environment, at least in theory, things are different; you might not have huge sales velocity out of the gate, but word-of-mouth might lead you to substantial sales over time.

In essence, the conventional market leads to a sales curve the looks like a parabola until it reaches some point and suddenly declines to zero. But online, there's no shelf space, and games can continue to be stocked, and instead of a precipitous decline to zero, you can have a slow gradual decline, or even an increase if the game gets good word of mouth. And games in that long tail can still be profitable, if they are developed for less than the conventional market demands.

But making that works means recognizing the differences between conventional retail and online retail, too; it astonishes me that most of the conventional portals use the best-sellers list as the main, in some cases only, view into content. They make it actively hard to find a game that the herd may not like, but you might. Amazon, by contrast, doesn't push best-sellers in your face; rather, it pushes books your previous interests suggest you might like. We need to get away from recreating the constraints of the conventional market in an online environment, and learning from ecommerce best practice.

What criteria should we use to measure the success of Manifesto games?

Heh. Well, survival for a start. But ultimately, my goal is to establish 'indie games' as a category that people talk about in the same way they talk about mobile and casual games today: as a large, emerging market with lots of opportunity. In some ways, I'll view it as a victory when we attract real competition, because that means the indie market is being taken seriously.

The Independent Games Movement (Part One): An Interview with Manifesto Game's Greg Costikyan

This is intended to be the first of a series of interviews with some key thinkers in the independent games movement which I will be running in this blog over the next few weeks. Many of us have long wondered when and how a strong independent games culture might emerge. Across most other media, we have seen in recent years the resurgence or emergence of strong indie and niche media production: the rising visibility of documentary films; the growing respectability of graphic novels; the fragmentation of the music marketplace, the proliferation of ever more specialized periodicals, and so forth. This is what Chris Anderson is talking about when he describes the Long Tail effect. Yet, during this same period, there have been strong barriers of entry into the platform market and companies like Electronic Arts have been gobbling up more and more so-called boutique studios resulting in a consolidation of games publishing. In such a world, what incentive is there for diversity and creativity in games design? How might we support distinctive and visionary work in games? How do we broaden which publics get addressed by the games industry or expand the range of acceptable game genres?

Over the past year or so, though, we've seen signs of the kinds of support systems that might be needed to sustain a substantial Indie games movement. Through this series, I will be looking at the fledgling efforts in this direction and talking to some of the key players in the indie games space.

I begin that series with this two-part interview with Greg Costikyan, the CEO of Manifesto Games. Costikyan has designed more than 30 commercially published board, role-playing, online, computer, and mobile games. His games have won five Origins Awards, a Gamer's Choice Award, and have been selected on more than a dozen occasions for Games Magazine's Games 100, their annual round-up of the best games in print. Greg began his career when he was 14, assembling and shipping games for Simulations Publications, Inc., for whom he designed 6 games before he graduated from college. Over the years, he has also served as Director of R&D for West End Games, a house husband, lead designer for Crossover Technologies, Chief Design Officer for Unplugged Games (a mobile games start-up he co-founded in 2000), a game industry consultant, and a games researcher for Nokia. As a consultant, his clients have included Viacom, Mattel, France Telecom, Sarnoff Corporation, IBM, Intel, Nokia, the Themis Group, and Roland Berger & Partner. He left Nokia in 2005 to found Manifesto Games. He is the author of four published novels and a number of short stories.

Most of the above comes from his official biography. But anyone who has been observing games culture in recent years knows that he is one of the smartest and most outspoken thinkers about the medium -- a real maverick who overturns apple carts and chases the money changers out of the temple (to mix metaphors). You can get some sense of why Greg (AKA Designer X) is such a breath of fresh air by reading what his website describes as "My GDC Rant on the iniquities of the game industry, which seems to have established me as the industry's voice of cynicism and despair :)." Here's part of what he had to say:

Games GROW through innovation. Innovation creates new game styles. Innovation grows the audience. Innovation extends the palette of the possible in games. The story of the last twenty years hasn't been, as you've been sold, the story of increasing processing power and increasing graphics; it's been the story of a startling burst of creativity and innovation. That's what created this industry. And that's why we love games.

But it's over now.

As recently as 1992, the average budget for a PC game was $200,000. Today, a typical budget for an A-level title is $5m. And with the next generation, it will be more like $20m. As the cost ratchets upward, publishers becoming increasingly conservative, and decreasingly willing to take a chance on anything other than the tired and true. So we get Driver 69. Grand Theft Auto San Infinitum. And licensed drivel after licensed drivel. Today, you CANNOT get an innovative title published, unless your last name is Wright, or Miyamoto....

EA could have chosen to concentrate on innovation, rather than continually raising the graphic bar to squeeze out less well capitalized competitors, but they did not. Sony could have chosen to create a Miramax of the game industry, funding dozens of sub-million titles in a process of planned innovation to establish new world-beating game styles, but they declined. Nintendo could make dev kits cheaply available to small firms, with the promise of funding and publication to to the most interesting titles, but they prefer to rely on the creativity of one aging designer.

You have choices, too. You can take the blue pill, or the red pill. You can go work for the machine, work mandatory eighty hour weeks in a massive sweatshop publisher-owned studio with hundreds of other drones, laboring to build the new, compelling photorealistic driving game-- with the same basic gameplay as Pole Position.

Or you can defy the machine.

Costikyan's remarks might be seen as the prelude for the launch of the aptly named Manifesto Games, which is already becoming a key center promoting the cause of independent games in all of their many shapes and sizes. The first installment sets the stage by laying out Costikyan's vision for what a thriving indie games culture would look like and his critique of creativity in the current games industry. Next time, we will look more closely at what he is trying to accomplish through Manifesto Games.

Manifesto Games has some bold ambitions. I'd like to walk readers through them. First, you want to promote independent games, drawing an analogy to independent cinema. In the Independent cinema model, films are independent if they are made outside of the Hollywood studios, though this quickly got blurred by the emergence of studio owned boutiques aimed at niche consumers. Today, it is not clear whether an independent film is one made outside of the studio system, one made for a niche public, one made with an "indie" aesthetic, one made outside of traditional genres, or what have you. Will we get into this same problem in thinking about independent games as a movement? Can we agree on a definition of what an independent game is?

Actually, not really. Here's the IGF's [Independent Game Federation] definition: "An independent game is any game that is not published by a member of the ESA. [Electronic Software Association]"

That's kind of a ridiculous definition; if I recall correctly, Eidos (being British) is not a member of the ESA, but they are a substantial publisher. I'd have a hard time considering games produced by their internal studios to be "independent." But of course the IGF needs a definition, so they can distinguish between eligible and ineligible games, and it's the one they've chosen.

Traditionally, "independent developer" has meant any developer that is not owned by a publisher; but by that definition, Doom 3 is an "independent game," since id is privately owned. Surely, though, any game that high profile is a mainstream title.

I'm not at all sure it's helpful to nail down the definition of an "independent game" too narrowly. Some would define it as "any game released without a publisher," but from my perspective, games published by, say, Matrix or Stardock or Strategy First are adequately "indie", since they don't achieve much exposure to the conventional retail market, and what they publish are clearly of interest primarily to a niche rather than a mass audience. Certainly none are ESA members, but also, all are moving increasingly to direct sale online, rather than via conventional retail.

In other words, we have a spectrum, from "true indie" developers like, say, Digital Eel or Dan Marshall or Dave Gilbert, through operations like Three Rings that pretty much operate independently but occasionally distribute through conventional publishers (there was an Atari version of Puzzle Pirates), through companies that think of themselves as conventional publishers but are forced to find alternative distribution paths for their product, like Matrix et al.

I'm not even entirely sure I'd want to exclude id from the definition of "indie"; after all, even though they produce best-sellers and get retail distribution, they operate without the need for publisher financing, and forge their own path.

I also tend to exclude as "independent games" some that others would think are definitely contained within the definition; from my perspective, "casual games'" are a separate, parellel, and pretty much distinct market. But they're selling to a very different audience from the "indie" movement.

I note that the definition of "indie" for other markets is equally nebulous. Miramax is a leader of "independent film"--but it's a Disney subsidiary. New Line is a studio for "independent film," but it's a Time Warner subsidiary. Vertigo publishes "independent comics," but it's a DC imprint.

I don't think a clear definition of "independent game" is particularly necessary or useful, although I think "independent games" do have certain characteristics. They are created by developers that are not owned by publishers, who retain ownership of IP, and are typically distributed primarily in channels other than conventional retail.

I'm reminded of an interview I read sometime ago with Samuel R. Delaney, who decried the impulse to try to define science fiction precisely as "Stalinist." (I'd provide a link, but Google is not my friend at the moment). Indie is something you know when you see it.

Are significant numbers of independent games being made now? If so, by what entities?

Yes, at least the way I look at things, significant numbers of independent games are being made now. We have more than a hundred in our catalog at present, and I fully expect 1000 or more by this time next year.

But again, a lot depends on how you define indie.

First: Offbeat, innovative, creative games created independently of the conventional publishers; we love these, but they are limited in number. Dozens, perhaps.

Second: Games of styles that still have enthusiastic fans, but that the major publishers no longer find worth supporting--adventure games, wargames, shmups, third-person shooters, turn-based fantasy, et al. Hundreds, possibly thousands.

Third: European games that don't get distribution here because they are viewed as too odd for the mass American audience: dozens, perhaps hundreds.

Fourth: Japanese dojin games that achieve conventional distribution neither at home nor here but have an otaku fan base: dozens or hundreds.

Fifth: Niche MMOs that will probably never attract more than a few thousand or tens of thousands of players but are often among the most creative of their field. Dozens at best.

Sixth: Games out of the 'serious games', art games, or educational game movements that are primarily aimed at a non-commercial market but that may well be of interest to gamers....

When you start looking around, there's just an amazing amount of stuff out here.

Your press release offers some pretty harsh criticism of the existing games industry, within which you have worked for a number of years. You write, "Ever-spiraling budgets and ever more risk-adverse publishers have turned what was once the most creative art form on the planet into a morass of stultifying drudgery and sterile imitation." What factors within the current market model have led to "sterile imitation" and in what ways might the model represented by Manifesto Games alter those conditions?

It's quite simple. In 1998, a typical budget for an A-level title was $1.5m, and you could creep into profitability at 100,000 unit sales. Today, a typical budget is $15m, and you need 1m+ unit sales. At those kinds of budgets, and with that need to reach a mass market, publishers are forced to be conservative, to reduce their perceived development risk however they can. Thus number 3 in a series the first two of which sold well will gets funded; something based on a big-budget Hollywood movie, where they can piggyback on the huge studio market spend will also get funded. Occasionally, "original IP," meaning a backstory for a game that hasn't been seen before, will get funded, but only if the game itself slots into an established marketing category and genre that the publisher knows can succeed.

The rise in budgets is a direct corallary of Moore's Law; as processors increase in power, they become capable of displaying better graphics, and therefore, if you want to achieve shelf-space in a market where shelf-space is highly restrictive, you need to provide the better graphics that newer machines can provide. If you don't, your competitors will, and your product will be viewed as dowdy by comparison. Thus budgets ratchet up year by year--and while sales have increased, they have not increased anywhere near to the same degree.

The result is that the offbeat, quirky, and innovative cannot get funded; that genres that can't produce 1m unit sales drop away; and that market considerations, rather than imagination, become paramount.

What we're trying to do--and we're not alone; Steam, Garage Games, and Stardock are all fellow travellers, all trying to break the iron logic of the conventional market in their own ways--is to say that this is absurd, and that there has to be a better way. The drive for ever better selling product is typical of a pre-Internet era; the move to "long tail" markets where niche product can find a home is typical of the modern (or post-modern, if you prefer) era. Even though games are digital in nature, music and books have gotten there before us, but it has to be possible to create a similar dynamic for games.

Do the announcements this summer around the Microsoft 360 give you any optomism

that indie games will thrive on the platforms as well as on the web?

Yes, and no. Clearly, Xbox Live Arena has proven a boon to some developers--I find it both astonishing and heartening that a game like Geometry Wars--a classic shmup, a genre that hasn't been commercially successful for more than a decade--can become commercial successes.

However, there's also a big danger in the way that Microsoft (and Sony and Nintendo) are running their portals. They are, in essence, disintermediating both the retailer and the publisher--but they are the ones in control. If you project the Arena model into the future, and assume that all games are ultimately distributed digitally, then on each platform there is one, single, monopolistic provider that controls the distribution chain wholly: the console manufacturer.

And while Arena is offering a very attractive share of the consumer dollar at present, it's also very clear who holds the market power there: Microsoft. And just as the casual game portals have slowly demanded a larger and larger share of the consumer dollar, I'd expect Microsoft to do so in future as well.

In other words, this distribution channel offers developers short-term opportunities--but in the long term, it offers the opportunity to be screwed by Microsoft rather than EA.

Peachy.

Portrait of a Transmedia Designer: Interview with Kevin McLeod (Part Two)

Yesterday, I introduced my readers to transmedia designer Kevin McLeod, whose career has moved from film to alternative reality gaming to magazine publishing. Everything he has done has been informed by a unique analysis of our current media landscape -- He refuses to make distinctions between high and low, old and new; He has tremendous respect for the intelligence (collective or otherwise) of the media consumer; His work reflects his fascination with the intersections between different media and the opportunities for creative expression which stand at the borders between different modes;His work displays a fascination with stretching the limits of visual intelligence and challenging us to look at the familiar through fresh perspectives.

When I first got my hands on Mstrmnd, I have to admit that I had no idea what to make of it. I couldn't even tell what kind of magazine it was supposed to be. Mstrmnd was a seemingly random assortment of stuff -- old etchings from 19th century books, essays on popular cinema, eye-catching charts, graphs, and photographs, mock advertisements, and long stretches of comics.

It was the kind of magazine that you notice on the coffee table at the home of your most pretentious friends. When they leave the room, you pick it up furtively, flip through it nervously, twist your lips skeptically, and then shove it back on the table, hoping nobody noticed you moved it. You don't understand and you don't ask. I will admit that I have a low threshold for avant garde experimentation in all forms. I am a fan boy at heart and I like my reading pulpy not pretentious. But then the more I looked at the publication, the more I started to see elements there that spoke to me on a different level. It was clear that McLeod was interested in many of the same works that I was. Indeed, many of the works which are repurposed and remixed in Convergence Culture make their appearance in this magazine -- suggesting someone who has been thinking along parallel tracks. And that's what compelled me to reach out and interview him for this blog.

You write, "Mstrmnd is not an art or a design magazine but it is often mistaken for one." Explain. It is clear lots of thought has gone into the visual design of this publication. Behind the design choices, I see an interest in visual literacy -- in communicating as ideas as much through pictures as through words. Does this approach grow out of a particular understanding of how people are living and relating to information at the present time?

There is a ghetto of magazines that deal with art and design. Generally they're limited by aesthetics without complexity which are fashion, or they support a very primitive idea about art that is single creator in a primitively limited audience. The gallery-collector-museum relationship. Neither of these genres really wants to reach a mass audience but instead cater to a privileged group of users. There's an academic tone to many of these magazines, reaching brains that have been designed in colleges, where information has a pedigree that may not assist in consciousness but instead are there to reinforce the power modalities of education. And the idea of the critic, the individual critic gains power over an artist by illumination through obscurity. The defeat of images by text. Academia's manner in codifying a fluidly composed art form like film is to write text about it, it doesn't invent a new medium or genre to evolve it, it becomes a scribe system with many illusory chambers. The point of mstrmnd is to allow the images supremacy and let the audience do the perceiving. Lure, dare, induce. If we avoid text or use it in an unstable manner, then we can evolve with language rather than let those who command it lead. There's a whole arena where I say question the notion of structuralism, English is far from a great language, if left to its own democratic/academic growth, it's a slow cancer that will keep growing.

Well, yes, you hit the nail. The images and text and their progressions are provocations in visual literacy. We live in an age of vast literalness in mass media yet our censorship is innate, self-created, not the product of any conspiracy. Just look at captioning and the variations through magazine/news. One image can have three basic states of captions: the newspaper, the sly news journal (like The Economist), or the parody (The Onion). If you deform in any direction just this idea, the caption, you can reinvent a facet. What if a caption were hidden?

You make extensive use of found or borrowed materials which you have appropriated and recontextualized. How does it relate to earlier efforts by the avant garde to deploy "cutups" or "ready mades"?

I am not a visual artist by training or historian, so my knowledge of the backstory is limited, but I am retroactively aware of Max Ersnt's collages, and actively the work of the painter Vuillard who was a master of patterns, as well as Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York which was a new form of literature with images. I mention these three only because they are in the foreground for the moment and seem to illustrate what you are suggesting.

You create some pretty interesting juxtapositions between contemporary and much older materials. What status do these older images play in your work? How do the older materials fit within your call to readers to investigate "mythologies", a concept you seem to be taking from Roland Barthes, I take it?

I have only read fragments of Barthes and found him bland, like a self-parody. I look more at myth through sociobiology or sociology. Like Dorfman's 'How to Read Donald Duck' which is a manual more than it is a piece of academic research. Older images are essential in exhibiting how the visual cortex is evolving, devolving or maintaining status quo. Images reveal much more about the state of humanity than text, which can be endlessly translated, interpreted, converted into rhetoric. H.M. Stanley's ground glass images from 'Through the Dark Continent', which we caption with subtlety, relate uniquely to the first issue's content in a myriad of ways and also to some synonyms in the second issue like the 1936 Olympic images. That they have current parallels and antonyms is entirely up to your perception. In effect the magazine is half finished, you complete the relationship unknowingly by being aware of the interweaving. Now in terms of mythology I would borrow Cassirer and use his perception that the Nazis were the first synthetic myth and you have a subliminal non-linear history lesson you were probably unaware of. That we duplicate this synthetic state without thinking now is rather incredible, but wholly understandable since the medium of television is designed for this.

You seem to be very interested in popular art forms such as comics and advertising but you also make use of avant garde photography and graphics techniques. What do you see the value of juxtaposing high and low forms of expression in the same publication?

I guess I see no difference in that valuation or scale, or maybe just the danger in applying it. The contrast you exhibit is a border that restricts perception. To eliminate these 'class' distinctions is to evolve media and perhaps cognition and consciousness. A magazine ad for Tron suggests a depth provided by seeing the film, playing the coin-op or intellivision game, even logged onto a fansite, experiences stored or to be stored, whereas a reproduction of Church's 'Cotapaxi' (a vast canvas landscape of a massive Ecuadorian volcano), with its numerous light effects, optic distortion and message illuminates us to Church's eye opening experience of witnessing it. In which of these does an audience participate more? Ads in magazines are also in an unnecessarily conservative state of being, how many times will you see bizarre redundancy, a magazine editorially showcases a product or a person who also appears in an ad for a film in release or a product that is being launched. Another part of the Paradox puzzle. Ads are necessary for magazines but advertisers need to comprehend the next stage of ads requires their active conscious participation in a community, not their blank dictation of brand. That is the notoriety of the 20th century: a dictation of image. Also, are art forms like the 'Black Nationalist' sketch by Richard Pryor, "Back Orifice" the hack of Windows 98 by the cDc, or "Formulary for a New Urbanism" by Ivan Chtcheglov, a luminous but crude manifesto, are they high or low, as new genres appear or are discovered retroactively, doesn't this line blur? Comics are a stage above this ad business, the nuances are insanely dynamic, the name of the first serialized graphic novel in mstrmnd is called Wooden Mirror, a play on the material of paper and the first complex narrative offshoot, one of three in process for serialization in future issues.

You seem very interested in films -- especially films which are part of larger franchises or works that fit within what I have described as transmedia entertainment (such as The Matrix and Star Wars). How have you carried over this interest in media franchises into your thinking about MSTRMND? In what sense do you see such works as, in your terms, "large-scale mythologies?"

These films are part of a new level of superart coded for children to sense, feel, maybe even read. Adults are necessarily left behind in experiencing the complexity of these series' if only because of a literalness in western education that relies on text and math as primary statuses in intelligence. While children explore text and math in school (and regulated forms of art and code), they are enveloped alternately by mass media that relies only invariably on text or math. Visuals connect ideas to ideas in film, TV, games and in certain browser environments. Key to this era's awareness in context: Star Wars and The Matrix are both vast illustrations of Paradox, not irony. A religion in which men fight and kill to become fathers while denying themselves the ability to procreate. A simulation designed to both find a messiah of change and then make a deal with him or her to neutralize their ability. One need only to look at these films and see they are complex mirrors we cannot recognize because we hide the same properties from ourselves. Films like Kill Bill, Cache, Primer, A History of Violence, The Aviator, Ghost in the Shell are all deeply coded consciousness playgrounds, tempting audiences to comprehend their inner meanings and this playground is malleable into other media, it can locate tools to perceive and leave them for others to use. To me most of these films, despite their philosophical challenges, are still resolutely primitive and the allure is to evolve these ideals into 21st century simulas with even wilder nuances and optics and heroes and villains, and mstrmnd is a growth medium for this. How you converge the narratives and symbols in mstrmnd depends on both the editorial and the audience working in a commonality. How this evolves will depend heavily on user awareness and participation.

In our correspondence, you have discussed the complexity of contemporary cinema, even the complexity of very popular films. You seem to be picking up on Steven Johnson's arguments about the cognitive challenges posed by contemporary popular culture and the ways that it can be complex and still accessible. How does this interest shape the forms of complexity you are building into your publication?

While I agree with Steven Johnson on certain level, I am uneasy with his perceptive buckshot. When he claims media is evolving because certain films have extensive casts to absorb, forcing desire for cognition and repeated viewings, I shudder slightly. Perceptions must come into play. I see the Lord of the Rings as a terminally conservative text, with evil that is character-less (an all seeing eye), with a desire to wage wars that are good and defeat the loneliest of metaphors: darkness. Now this is a fear filled narrative that is strangely uncomplex, with a violent unease with a metaphorical east of exotic skins and animals. Although it is complex on a number of design and graphic levels, it is anti-evolutionary since it isn't self-aware of faults in its message, it hasn't been updated since its WWI origins, a film as wooden as Spartacus has more nuance than LOTR. I think Johnson has the right idea, he just recognizes the surfaces of the media he evaluates, not the underlying symbolic structures, a skill arguably necessary for future minds faced with our messy behavior both interspecies and intra-biome and soon, interplanetary.

You make use of a lot of subtle visual echoes between the first two issues of your publication. You seem to be daring readers to find the patterns on their own. What assumptions are you making about how people will read between the issues rather than simply reading each issue individually?

Yes I'm glad you put it that way, there is a dare involved that is about patterns and beyond. The challenge is on a few levels just a weird form of fun. Inside one bound object is a story, between them is their power of channeling multiple overlaps. The way a mad-lib book was or a choose-your-own-adventure is bound temporally by staples or glue. Then step outside that boundary, what are the possibilities? I make no assumptions but hope that the user will observe all this on some cognizant level. The mag develops its aura by the reader sensing these similarities. The reader sees them slowly, connects multiple patterns, colors, etc, grows a lexicon visually, utilizes this to discern other hidden narratives, even flaws in other media. This is obviously meant to be consciousness inducing in stages. In example: The 2 yuan note in the first issue is related to both the US 10 dollar note in the 2nd issue as well as the satirical Tibetan Gum (as well as a few others). Scale matters, as well as shape.

In many ways, you seem to be constructing what Convergence Culture calls a cultural activator -- that is, a work which sets a collective intelligence community into motion. Yet, is it possible to be a cultural activator without being a cultural attractor. In other words, Lost or The Matrix work by creating a large scale audience and providing them with things they can do together. How does this work with a smaller scale project like your magazine?

A great question. Stanley Kubrick, whose films are composed of incredibly secret plots inside what appear to be very strange, stilted major studio releases, never explained them, though this lack of awareness on a mass scale doesn't diminish their powerful hold on users, in fact, The Shining finds a larger audience today than the summer of 1980 when it was released to a maximum theater count of 600 screens. The relative scale of the initial audience seems puny now (though certainly they experienced it more intensely, projected in a communal darkness). What draws new viewers to The Shining? What draws them to repeatedly view it? What is hidden, are they aware of it on a level they are not entirely conscious of? Someone, a cinematographer, recently explained to me why watching it numerous times was so riveting: he could never remember certain details or the order of the story. Why is a visual thinker forgetting details in a film he's watched many times? This model, the activator, perhaps can take many forms and start at unusually small scales, increasing its usability and longevity, and it can evolve with its audience until it approaches the level of attractor. And key is the cost effectiveness of beginning at a selective level in a medium that has a built in audience searching for new formats. The magazine is the perfect medium to develop a set of users in the age of the internet.

Portrait of a Transmedia Designer: Interview with Kevin McLeod (Part One)

Some years ago, Kevin McLeod produced a documentary called The Cruise about a New York City eccentric who takes tourists on his own idiosyncratic tour of the city. Anyone who has seen that film will recall the breathless, stream of consciousness monologues which offer us a window into the subject's distinctive view of the world. At first, it makes no sense, but then, you start to get into his groove.

Kevin McLeod's writing and design work has that same breathless quality -- full of sentence fragments and snarled syntax which never-the-less works itself out into fascinating juxtapositions. Sometimes, thoughts seem half finished but then the ellipsis provokes us to dig deeper and come away with a deeper understanding of what he is trying to say.

This makes sense when you think about what McLeod has done through his work. He is someone who has moved fluidly across different media platforms -- producing an acclaimed documentary film, collaborating on "the Beast," which helped to launch the Alternate Reality Games movement, and editing the perplexing and yet somehow engaging Mstrmnd magazine.

His argument also moves fluidly across media -- making unexpected and interesting juxtapositions between different sites of cultural production. He makes demands on us as viewers, players, and readers that grow out of deep respect for and trust in the potentials of participatory culture.

Over the next two installments, I will share a recent interview I did with Kevin McLeod. In this segment, we discuss his background and how he came to be involved as editor of Mstrmnd. Next time, we are going to dig more deeply into Mstrmnd and the ways he is trying to reinvent the magazine as a medium.

Take us through the steps of your career. What can you tell us about the path you took to your current project?

My career has moved through media, and I have been associated with some good work at various levels. I was a special production assistant for Silence of the Lambs, a role both microscopic and at rare times macro, like adding details, spotting errors, a great director like Demme is many minds in one. I worked in music video and animation production for a time, watching and assisting some pretty dynamic minds. This was pre After Effects and the oxberry was still king.

From there I was a journeyman producer, was a coproducer of the documentary The Cruise, the first DV film to gain a major distributor. Cocreated a documentary pilot called Eden, it was designed to make directors out of anyone with a daring story, hand them a cameraperson and let them explore its details. Eden was financed by the same man who financed Vice Magazine's expansion. Ultimately it was as unrealistic as its name. You Tube has converted many models like this, from commercial to consumer, and the realm can only improve in sophistication.

In 2000-2001 I traveled a great deal, India, South America, Africa, Honduras. When I returned a proposal I had written to no one in particular convinced a friend I should join a project called 'The Beast,' a non-linear narrative web-based sequel to the film A.I. Despite having no prior experience in web design or writing, I was offered one of two positions end-developing some of the sites, about a 1/3. The project was a success. In 2003 I was invited by Phoebe Elefante to contribute to a magazine called Mastermind, then became its director.

I was very interested to learn that you were part of the team that put together

the Beast. Tell me something of your role in that process. What can you tell us about the thinking which went into your design for this project?

For many readers of your blog who have never heard of it, the Beast may be difficult to comprehend. In brief imagine a film, a linear narrative, is broken up into many websites that 'tell' the story non-linearly. Each site becomes a facet through puzzlement that additively creates a complete story and the act of searching for the existence of these sites is an element in the storytelling. In effect a merging of film and hacking. The framework, the invention, the story and the conceptual was developed before I was hired.

These three innovators, Weisman, Stewart and Lee developed on paper and in motion media and in sound all the pieces of a vast narrative puzzle, still in my mind a phantasmal risk. I was asked to put their site descriptions and concepts into working web environments (context). In most cases what sounded interesting on paper seemed too logical for web design. They sometimes saw the web as a literal and logical series of tropes, the color pallets, puzzle doors, even red herring backgrounds seemed at times too pointed, almost blunt.

My role was to add the illogical, the possibility that the world this came from was living and breathing and dynamic in its time. I worked with three brilliant flash brains and we used the web content as starting points for deeper visual narratives. The lead character's company site included a brief four image 'history' of structure conceptuals that ended with a Dogon 'Mask' House that suggested a metaphorical source of the company's purpose, the creation of sentient houses. This and many other details, functions, codes were added in the websites' creation.

We distorted key environments even coded colors in ulterior narratives that added to the general search for a coherency inside a storyline that was unusually unstable. It's somewhat like adding Mario Bava touches to genre films. And the effect was immediate, soon they were adapting storylines with some of our visual pushes, minutely of course but the potential became obvious.

The project was a revelation for me. The three as well as Bob Fagan were cool short-term mentors, and as a result I became conscious of an audience you could call the first generation of media hackers. A kind of explosion of the hacker group cDc's mental state into unconscious local cells, searching for media to reconfigure, dismember, reinterpret. To glue the pieces of our fragmented data together to reveal our flaws collectively by people who are not authors per se, unconscious or not, is a new stage in media.

How did these experiences lead to the development of MSTRMND? What are your goals for this publication?

Mmm. Convergence. Ideas: My great friend Allan Maca is an anthropologist consistently recommending text and ideas in brain cognizance, perhaps I reached a melting point with his prodding.

And Movies: In 2003 I was amazed by the intelligentsia's poor reaction to The Matrix Reloaded, it was after all both satire and reconfiguration, a reverse of The Matrix's glee (no more 'whoa's). A process Lucas incorporates in his latest trilogy that they boldly affected inter-trilogy. And Reloaded is probably the first feature length film that had to be seen in Imax to be fully understood. Optically a masterpiece. The internet sped these reactions to me and made me want to respond.

A lecture I was to give on gaming suddenly was a defense of the film. My amazement led me to make a slideshow with text and puzzling image overlays in flash that described what I saw in Reloaded and I distributed this weird explanation to friends and players of the game anonymously.

This incredibly long analysis was invited to be included in a magazine named Mastermind and one thing led to another and I was asked to become editor. They sat me down and asked what content I thought would work and rattled off some jarring ideas floating in my head, a transcript of role-playing in progress, a subway map of merged lines, a Slavery Museum for Washington DC, a videogame script involving terrorism countdowning, a day by day study of the post 9/11 anthrax narrative, a comic book called Wooden Mirror.

Now the magazine is made up of many with myself in the role as puppetmaster, and content is touched, fleshed or created by other incredibly unique personas to make a finished product. The initiator of the business and the board members and I continue a dialogue together that is about testing the limits of this medium. I discovered a process while I worked. Friends and participants began pointing out relationships, then strangers; consistencies across genres within. Issue one is the most obscure, and basic version of mstrmnd, each issue becomes clearer as they progress.

The magazine is a medium frozen in time, look at The New Yorker, a text that compliments the intelligence of the baby boomer generation, a cover that betrays a political leaning, advertisements that are more subliminal than its content, especially in graphic ways, and text, the linear inner voice of 8-10 writers, skewing each piece into an opinion, however subliminal. The magazine is only one medium of many awaiting an upgrade, but the mag is a necessary place to start. Look at the model: masthead, briefs, letters, features, endnote, a formula seemingly from the age of the movie palace, still coding information through journalism, a 20th century profession unable to interpret our age, our innovations. Look at other models, National Geographic, Time, Wired, all are contained in highly rigorously designed genres.

The goal is to bring the innovations of other media to the magazine, introduce new non-fiction genres, finally take the comic-graphic novel to its place in a pantheonic context, and display all this without a full explanation. No one can be prepared for the next step. Update the magazine as an object of longevity like a great DVD. Ultimately mstrmnd should provoke questions the way journalism used to, it should make us question choices in perception and symbolism the way hackers of the 1990's questioned hierarchy and representation. Can myths be hacked? Can religions be hacked? The past is fertile ground to explore, and the past is both 6000 years ago and four seconds ago whether we like it or not.

David Pescovitz wrote, "Mastermind is an immersive experiment on paper. You don't really read it, but rather open it up and just drown in its surrealism." What kind of relationship do you hope to create with your readers?

Mstrmnd should advance openly with an audience that wants to explore the lack of limitation in curiosity. I mean our species is ripe with self-deception, our addiction to branded symmetry (like the cult of the model), the father figure, borders, it becomes more and more obvious we have the power to solve humanity's disturbances with open minds, distortion like allegiances to ideology, the use of texts that are centuries old to decide scientific research, human paradox is a constant deformity in innovation. We use entertainment to defeat these things in fictional environments, how easy will it be to comprehend these things are here, in reality, where are the tools? They're here. Who can unleash them? Anyone can but the visual cortex needs help. Or maybe unlearning.

Did you know Bunuel broke with the surrealists and continued making surreal films, but correctly realized his withdrawal and denial gave him the right to continue its experiment. His search magnified without this unnecessary label and returned power to an audience that could approach his work more objectively.

How Slapshot Inspired a Cultural Revolution (Part Two): An Interview with the Wu Ming Foundation

Last time, I introduced readers to the Luther Blissett movement and to two of its principle architects, Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 2. Across the interview, they described how the group drew inspiration from Slapshot and Star Trek, not to mention Raymond Carver, Joseph Campbell and Jorge Luis Borges, They discussed a range of creative and expressive activities which included the writing of novels and manifestos as well as the staging of elaborate pranks designed to quell some of the moral panics being sparked by local media. They offered a perspective on culture which is one part avant garde theory and one part fan politics, categories which only rarely mix in the American context. Today, we continue this interview with some more reflections on the ways Luther Blissett related to the emergence of digital culture, how they interacted with their readers, and how this emerged from their appreciation of popular culture.

The Luther Blissett movement has transmogified into the Wu Ming Foundation and the group has been publishing a range of genre-busting, collaboratively-authored novels, which are compared by critics who like them to the work of Umberto Eco and called by those who don't, "novels for multitaskers." To give you some taste of their work, here's part of what Publisher's Weekly has to say about 54:

The midlife crisis of Cary Grant, the founding of the KGB and the Neapolitan years of mafioso Lucky Luciano are just three of the plot lines woven into this dense, playful and always surprising literary behemoth set mostly in the year of the book's title, at the height of the Cold War. Anchoring the tale with a relatively conventional narrative is a young Bolognese man named Robespierre (Pierre), who embarks on a transcontinental odyssey to find his father, Vittorio Capponi, a former Mussolini loyalist who left the Italian army to join the Communists in Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, Britain's spy agency MI6 approaches Cary Grant (who's in a career slump) with a bizarre proposal: the role of Yugoslavian leader Marshal Tito in a propaganda biopic. It seems impossible that the multitudinous names and story threads could converge, but, deliciously, they do--in Yugoslavia, where Grant meets Tito, Pierre finds his father, and Luciano's driver Steve "Cement" Zollo tangles with the KGB, which is about to pull off a big hit. The latest joint effort (after the novel Q) from Wu Ming--a collective of five Italian intellectuals who named themselves "anonymous" in Mandarin--offers political commentary-cum-complicated escapism for the brainiac reader.

In some ways, the Luther Blissett movement and the Wu Ming Foundation novels might be seen as working in parallel with what critic Mark America has called "Avant-Pop," a new aesthetic sensability which refuses to remain firmly within any given category of cultural production, choosing to play with the contents of popular culture in ways that reflect an avant garde sensibility. America writes:

The artists who create Avant-Pop art are the Children of Mass Media (even more than being the children of their parents who have much less influence over them)....Avant-Pop artists have had to resist the avant-garde sensibility that stubbornly denies the existence of a popular media culture and its dominant influence over the way we use our imaginations to process experience. At the same time, A-P artists have had to work hard at not becoming so enamored of the false consciousness of the Mass Media itself that they lose sight of their creative directives. The single most important creative directive of the new wave of Avant-Pop artists is to enter the mainstream culture as a parasite would sucking out all the bad blood that lies between the mainstream and the margin. By sucking on the contaminated bosom of mainstream culture, Avant-Pop artists are turning into Mutant Fictioneers, it's true, but our goal is and always has been to face up to our monster deformation and to find wild and adventurous ways to love it for what it is....Our collective mission is to radically alter the Pop Culture's focus by channeling a more popularized kind of dark, sexy, surreal, and subtly ironic gesturing that grows out of the work of many 20th century artists like Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Lenny Bruce, Raymond Federman, William Burroughs, William Gibson, Ronald Sukenick, Kathy Acker, the two Davids (Cronenberg and Lynch), art movements like Fluxus, Situationism, Lettrism and Neo-Hoodooism, and scores of rock bands including the Sex Pistols, Pere Ubu, Bongwater, Tackhead, The Breeders, Pussy Galore, Frank Zappa, Sonic Youth, Ministry, Jane's Addiction, Tuxedo Moon and The Residents.

In what follows Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 2 offer their own perspective on the ways their project intersects both the historic avant garde and popular culture. I fully confess that I am much more a creature of popular culture than of the avant garde, yet I find myself really connecting with a lot of what they have to say about their poetics and politics here.

HJ3: You wrote, "A vast, transnational community of people surrounds us and interacts with our books in a creative way, we encourage all kinds of sharing, reappropriation, derivative works etc." What can you tell me about your relationship to your readers and the forms of appropriative works they produce?

WM2. Since the beginning of our career as professional storytellers we have exhorted our readers to get in touch with us and become a sort of collective "sixth member", in constant osmosis with the original group. To be part of the Wu Ming's "democratic republic of readers" does not mean to have a seat in the front row or a privileged access to our output. It means to take part, in a more or less direct manner, to a process of collective intelligence and creation that we usually compare with the relationship between community and storyteller in old folk culture.

It must be said that this co-operation does not take place only on the Internet, there are also many face-to-face moments, there's warm physical participation, which we deem as absolutely necessary. We're "on line" but we're also "on the road".

The Internet allowed us to skip intermediates such as the publishers' press office and PR department, our presentation tours are completely self-organized. Being a group of five people, Wu Ming is almost ubiquitous, two or three delegations can discuss our work in different places simultaneously, hundreds of miles apart from each other. We go to places that are usually snubbed by mainstream authors, such as tiny bookshops, public libraries in small villages, squats, sometimes even private apartments - we literally deliver the presentation at home, if there's a group of friends willing to get together one night and listen to what we have to say.

There's constant interaction between us and the readers, they send us comments, suggestion, and criticism. The female characters in our novels have had a positive evolution thanks to the harsh critiques expressed by some female readers. Our newsletter, titled after general Vo Nguyen Giap, has about 10,000 subscribers and regularly features the readers' feedback: reviews, comments, and pieces on various subjects. We don't rely on any open forum or blog -- we tried, but it took too much time to get rid of trolls. We prefer to receive a lot of stuff via e-mail, and make a quality selection.

Having said this, I think that the most explicit invitation to appropriate our work is the "copyleft notice" included in all our books, which can be copied, xeroxed, or downloaded straight from our website. We encourage people to use our works. Our novel Q was deconstructed and rewritten as a very original theatrical drama. 54 became the inspiration for an album by folk-rock band Yo Yo Mundi...

WM1... not to mention the use of our characters in role play games. I'll say a few things about this later.

WM2. Even more explicitly, we have launched several collective writing projects. The first one was "I Shall Call You Russell", and it bordered on the commonplace: we wrote the first chapter of a sci-fi novel, and anyone could write and send the following ones. The selection of chapters took place in public, on a temporary blog run by us. A jury selected the three best versions of any chapter, and people could vote their favorite one, which became the next chapter in the "official" (i.e. collectively approved) sequence, though all the other versions remained available as sources of inspiration, creating a web of plot "bifurcations" and "dead end streets". There was no "official" last chapter, all the versions were published ex aequo.

The most important result of this experiment was the birth of another collective of novelists, Kai Zen (Japanese for "Constant improvement"). Kai Zen themselves have launched more and more projects like that, and their debut novel will be published in a few weeks by the biggest Italian publisher.

The second project was an experiment in "open source literature", as in "open source software". The main difference between storytelling and software programming is that almost everybody can work on the sourcecode of a story. The sourcecode of a story is the story itself. We wrote a short story titled "The Ballad of Corazza" and we put it on line. We asked readers to work on it, be it to change an adjective or rewrite a whole paragraph, or insert a new character. We received alternative versions of the story, do the revision accordingly, and make the result available.

After a couple of months, we released "The Ballad of Corazza 2.0", which was a consistent synthesis of all suggested modifications. This version was also edited collectively until we had the (potentially) definitive text. The more open nature of this second project managed to stir creativity with greater effectiveness, as "The Ballad of Corazza" has become a graphic novel, a theatrical act (based upon one of the alternative versions), a two different reading performances, one of which with live musical accompaniment, and the score was the result of a similar "open source" process.

Last but absolutely not least, there's the kind of interaction generated by the novels or short stories written by our readers, with no direct connection to our work. Back when we started, we publicly stated that we were willing to read unpublished stuff. Call it "talent scouting" if you like. Well, we received so much stuff (poetry, fiction, scripts, whatever) that we had to wave the white flag. We couldn't possibly read all those novels and short stories, no way.

Our community's collective wisdom solved the problem for us: fifteen Giap subscribers responded and volunteered for reading anything submitted by other readers. These people formed a collective on their own, iQuindici [TheFifteen, even if they are about thirty people now]. They have their own website and their own e-zine (Inciquid), they organize public readings of the best stuff they receive and select, and promote the adoption of open licenses (creative commons,copyleft, you-name-it) in the Italian publishing industry. Several new authors were "discovered" by publishers thanks to iQuindici.

HJ3: More recently you drew a comparison between your projects and ARGS. What similarities do you see? What might ARG designers and players learn by studying what you did a decade ago?

WM1 What you had was a huge number of people from different backgrounds and geographical areas, all interacting with each other in order to introduce ever new elements into a legend they were constructing in real time and telling all together. It is important to point out that these people didn't know each other personally, some of them never met, never talked or wrote to each other, not even on the phone, not even via e-mail, for the whole duration of the project. I never met the majority of people who operated under the Luther Blissett pseudonym in other cities, not to mention people calling themselves Luther Blissett in other countries. Since the beginning, the Bolognese collective (which was more tight-knit than other informal groups springing out all over Italy) labeled itself "the only central committee whose aim is to lose control of the party".

Yes, there was some sort of coordination between the different local groups, and a few things were explicitly prohibited: the Luther Blissett could not be used to spread racist, sexist or fascist material, and no Luther Blissett material could have a copyright. That's all the "organization" we had.

Most of the time we ended up taking each other by surprise, we heard the news about a prank pulled by Blissett in Southern Italy and immediately claimed co-responsibility by playing a similar one or by giving a completely different motive for the prank! We enjoyed leaving clues for other Blissetts, and give wild interpretations of the clues left by them. In several cases the same hoaxes or actions were given different interpretations by different Blissett "coopeting" with each other. It was all grist to the mill, or as we say in Italy, "tutto fa brodo", everything adds to the soup.

And it was transmedia storytelling taken to its extreme, clues were left on BBSs, websites, fanzines and other DIY media, pieces of mail art sent all around, restroom walls, Hertzian waves, and even classified ads on local newspapers. Sometimes we used Luther Blissett stickers in order to leave clues and give hints on how to take part in a hoax.

I think there are many similarities between what we did, RPGs, ARGs, and other storytelling games, in spite of the fact that our experience was and is very peculiar. These similarities were acknowledged many times by the communities playing RPGs in Italy. When our novel Q was published in 1999, some of the characters were immediately introduced into ongoing RPGs. More recently, in Pescara (Central Italy) dozens of people played an RPG inspired by one of our novels called Free Karma Food. It seems that our fiction is so multi-layered and "centrifugal" that it incites continuation on other platforms.

I really don't know what the ARG community might learn by studying what we did. Certainly they might have fun reading about it.

HJ3: Typically avant garde work frames itself in opposition to popular culture. Yet it is clear that you are in some senses a fan of popular culture. How would you descrive your relationship to the entertainment texts which you draw upon in your work?

WM1. I grew up reading sci-fi pulp books, my room was choke-full of tons of Marvel and DC comics, as well as Italian comics which you probably never heard of. I spent days watching soccer matches, spaghetti westerns, Bruce Lee movies (or even worse/better, "Bruce Li" movies and other crap cashing in on Bruce Lee's death), Star Trek (every afternoon on a local tv station), British series like Space 1999, and funky detective series like Baretta and Starsky & Hutch. I was a raving fan of Japanese anime, like every other kid I knew. In the late Seventies UFO Robot Grendizer, Great Mazinger and Steel Jeeg took Italian television by storm, episodes were watched by millions of kids. I always listened to all genres of popular music from Italian singer-songwriters to Frank Zappa to LA punk acts like the Germs of Black Flag, through to Tony Bennett and Brazilian Hip Hop. I used to play soccer games on my Commodore 64. I went to the movies as often as I could. I played table games like Monopoly and Scrabble.

In short, I started to expose my brain and body to all kinds of popular culture at a time when the Internet didn't exist. I've always been in love with pop culture. All the other members of Wu Ming have similar backgrounds: sci-fi, comics, martial arts, rock'n'roll - two of them played in punk rock bands, one of which was fairly famous in the Italian underground. I think that if you don't know pop culture, you don't know your culture, thereby you don't know the world around you. If you don't know shit about pop culture, how can you be on the cutting edge of anything? If you don't soil your hands with pop culture, if you snub and sneer at today's participatory culture, you can't be "avantgarde", no matter how hard you try.

By the way, what does "avantgarde" mean? "Avantgarde" is French for "vanguard", it is a military connoted term. "Avantgarde" means being at the front point of the battle. Too often, the avantgarde turn around and find out there's no rearguard, nobody's following them. That's because they marched too fast, or in the wrong direction. This is the common problem of artistic and political vanguards. It didn't happen to Luther Blissett because Luther Blissett was about spreading a disease, plus there was an "educational" aspect. Once a prank had been played successfully, we claimed responsibility and explained it in detail. Explain: that's what the avantgarde never do, indeed, they enjoy being obscure, they mistake obscure for radical, they don't want to give the people access to their work. They are enemies of the people. We never acted like that: the more people understand what we're doing, the happier we are. From that point of view, we're not exactly "avantgarde".