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).

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If You Live in Boston...

The What: CMS has agreed to act as the local organizer for a street-game called Cruel 2 B Kind, which will be held on Halloween night -- that's October 31 -- from 6:30-8:30 PM near Harvard Square.

Cruel 2 B Kind was created by Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost (both sometimes readers and responders to this blog).

Here's what their website says about the game:

Cruel 2 B Kind is a game of benevolent assassination.

At the beginning of the game, you and a partner-in-crime are assigned a secret weapon. To onlookers, it will seem like a random act of kindness. But to a select group of other players, the seemingly benevolent gesture is a deadly maneuver that will bring them to their knees.

Some players will be slain by a serenade. Others will be killed by a compliment. You and your partner might be taken down by an innocent group cheer.

You will be given no information about your targets. No name, no photo, nothing but the guarantee that they will remain within the outdoor game boundaries during the designated playing time. Anyone you encounter could be your target. The only way to find out is to attack them with your secret weapon.

Watch out: The hunter is also the hunted. At the beginning of the game, you and your partner will also be assigned your own secret weakness. Other pairs of players have been given your secret weakness as their secret weapon, and they're coming to get you. Anything out of the ordinary you do to assassinate YOUR targets may reveal your own secret identity to the other players who want you dead.

As targets are successfully assassinated, the dead players join forces with their killers to continue stalking the surviving players. The teams grow bigger and bigger until two final mobs of benevolent assassins descend upon each other for a spectacular, climactic kill.

Will innocents be caught in the cross-fire? Oh, yes. But when your secret weapon is a random act of kindness, it's only cruel to be kind to other players...

Not sure you're cruel enough to play as an assassin? Don't worry - you can still experience killer kindness. Just show up to any game site at the right time. You can hang out, watch the game, and play along as an "innocent bystander"!

Sorry for the last minute notice -- I've been traveling and have just now gotten my hands on the relevent information.

You can sign up to play in game here.
http://www.cruelgame.com/signup/

All you need to play is a partner (the game starts off in pairs), and a cell phone that can receive text messages (to get instructions and updates during the game).

Hope to see some of you there.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Part Seven)

This is the last installment of my series on the white paper which we wrote for the MacArthur Foundation on participatory culture and media literacy. If you want to read the whole paper, check it out here. If you want to learn more about the work that the MacArthur Foundation is doing on youth and digital learning, you can follow their blog -- which regularly features comments from some of the country's leading educators and experts on youth media.

This last installment concludes with some general thoughts about what all of this means for parents, schools, and after school based programs. Project nml will now be turning its attention to developing a range of curricular materials and activities based on this framework, which we will be rolling out through this blog, among many other places.

Thanks for taking the time to read through this material. Do let us know what you think and do share this with others you think would be interesting.

Once again let me acknowledge the contributions of Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katherine Clinton, and Alice J. Robison without whom it would have been impossible to pull this report together.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Announcing: Media in Transition Conference

I wanted to direct my reader's attention to an event our program will be hosting in April 2007 -- our 5th Media in Transition Conference. We try to use these events to bring together scholars from across a range of different disciplines and from around the world to talk about underlying issues that cut across media platforms and across historical periods. We also very much encourage participation from artists, community leaders, and industry people who also might want to share their perspectives on these issues. This year's topic should be of particular interest to many of the different groups represented among regular readers of this blog, including fans, media literacy educators, and others.

media in transition 5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age

April 27-29, 2007
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

CALL FOR PAPERS (submission deadline: Jan. 5, 2007)

Our understanding of the technical and social processes by which culture is made and reproduced is being challenged and enlarged by digital technologies. An emerging generation of media producers is sampling and remixing existing materials as core ingredients in their own work. Networked culture is enabling both small and large collaborations among artists who may never encounter each other face to face. Readers are actively reshaping media content as they personalize it for their own use or customize it for the needs of grassroots and online communities. Bloggers are appropriating and recontextualizing news stories; fans are rewriting stories from popular culture; and rappers and techno artists are sampling and remixing sounds.

These and related cultural practices have generated heated contention and debate. What constitutes fair use of another's intellectual property? What ethical issues are posed when sounds, images, and stories move from one culture or subculture to another? Or when materials created by a community or religious or ethnic tradition are appropriated by technologically powerful outsiders? What constitutes creativity and originality in expressive formats based on sampling and remixing? What obligations do artists owe to those who have inspired and informed their work and how much creative freedom should they exercise over their borrowed or shared materials?

One source of answers to such questions lies in the past - in the ways in which traditional printed texts - and films and TV shows as well - invoke, allude to and define themselves against their rivals and ancestors; and - perhaps even more saliently - in the ways in which folk and popular cultures may nourish and reward not originality in our modern sense, but familiarity, repetition, borrowing, collaboration.

This fifth Media in Transition conference, then, aims to generate a conversation that compares historical forms of cultural expression with contemporary media practices. We hope this event will appeal widely across disciplines and scholarly and professional boundaries. For example, we hope this conference will bring together such figures as:

* anthropologists of oral and folk cultures
* historians of the book and reading publics
* political scientists and legal scholars interested in alternative approaches to intellectual property
* media educators who aim to help students think about their ethical responsibilities in this new participatory culture
* artists ready to discuss appropriation and collaboration in their own work
* economists and business leaders interested in the new relationships that are emerging between media producers and consumers
* activists and netizens interested in the ways new technologies democratize who has the right to be an author

Among topics the conference might explore:

* history of authorship and copyright
* folk practices in traditional and contemporary society
* appropriating materials from other cultures: political and ethical dilemmas
* poetics and politics of fan culture
* blogging, podcasting, and collective intelligence
* media literacy and the ethics of participatory culture
* artistic collaboration and cultural production, past and present
* fair use and intellectual property
* sampling and remixing in popular music
* cultural production in traditional and developing societies
* Web 2.0 and the "architecture of participation"
* creative industries and user-generated content
* parody, spoofs, and mash-ups as critical commentary
* game mods and machinima
* the workings of genre in different media systems
* law and technological change

Short abstracts of no more than 200 words for papers or panels should be sent via email to Brad Seawell at seawell@mit.edu no later than January 5, 2007. Brad can be reached by phone at 617-253-3521. Email submissions are preferred, but abstracts can be mailed to:

Brad Seawell
14N-430
MIT
Cambridge , MA 02139

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:23 PM | Permalink

Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Part Six)

Today's post wraps up my list of the eleven social skills and cultural competencies which I argue we should be incorporating into our educational practices with transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation. Next time, I will wrap up with some recommendations about what this might all mean for parents, schools, and after school programs. We haven't received many responses here from readers but I am very pleased to see localized discussions of some of these issues start to spring up on a number of other blogs. Do let me know what you think about some of the issues raised here?

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Part Five)

Today, I continue our serialization of the white paper written for the MacArthur Foundation. Today's excerpt outlines three more of the social skills and cultural competencies we think young people need to develop if they are going to be able to fully participate in the new media landscape: Distributed Cognition, Collective Intelligence, and Judgment.

Distributed Cognition-- the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand our mental capacities.

Challenging the traditional view that intelligence is an attribute of individuals, the distributed cognition perspective holds that intelligence is distributed across "brain, body, and world", looping through an extended technological and sociocultural environment. Explaining this idea, Pea notes,

"When I say that intelligence is distributed, I mean that the resources that shape and enable activity are distributed in configurations across people, environments, and situations. In other words, intelligence is accomplished rather than possessed"

Teachers have long encouraged students to bring scratch paper with them into math examinations, realizing that the ability to construct representations and record processes was vital in solving complex problems. If, as Clark notes, technologies are inextricably interwoven with thinking, it makes no sense to "factor out" what the human brain is doing as the "real" part of thinking, and to view what the technology is doing as a "cheat" or "crutch." Rather, we can understand cognitive activity as shared among a number of people and artifacts, and cognitive acts as learning to think with other people and artifacts. Following this theory, students need to know how to think with and through their tools as much as they need to record information in their heads.

Gamers may be acquiring some of these distributed cognition skills through their participation in squadron-based video games. Gee suggests that in playing such games, one must form a mental map of what player and nonplayer characters are doing (nonplayer characters are characters controlled by the A.I of the game). To plan appropriately, players may not need to know what other participants know, but they do need to know what it is those participants are likely to do. Moreover, in playing the games, one may need to flip through a range of different representations of the state of the game world and of the actions that are occurring within it. Learning to play involves learning to navigate this information environment, understanding the value of each representational technology, knowing when to consult each and how to deploy this knowledge to reshape what is occurring. Instead of thinking as an autonomous problem-solver, the player becomes part of a social and technological system that is generating and deploying information at a rapid pace. Humans are able to play much more complex games (and to solve much more complex problems) in a world in which keeping track of key data and enacting well-understood computational processes can be trusted to the processing power of the computer, and they can thus focus more attention on strategic decision making.

Distributed cognition is not simply about technologies; it is also about tapping social institutions and practices or remote experts whose knowledge may be useful in solving a particular problem. According to this understanding, expertise comes in many shapes and sizes (both human and non-human). Experts can be expert practitioners, who can be consulted through such technologies as video conferencing, instant messaging, or email; some knowledge can emerge from technologies such as calculators, spread sheets, and expert systems; new insights can originate from the teacher or students or both. The key is having expertise somewhere within the distributed learning environment and making sure students understand how to access and deploy it.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Part Four)

I have been serializing in this blog the white paper I wrote for the MacArthur Foundation on youth, learning, and participatory culture. If you want to read the whole report, you can find it here.

My collaborators on this report were Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katherine Clinton, and Alice J. Robison.

Yesterday, I began to identify some of the core social skills and cultural competencies that we think should be embedded in contemporary educational practices. These skills reflect the best contemporary research on the informal learning which is taking place as young people assume roles as fans, gamers, and bloggers. Yesterday, we spoke about Play and Simulation; today, we will discuss Performance, Appropriation, and Multitasking.

I am hoping that if you are enjoying reading this discussion, you will bring it to the attention of parents, teachers, church leaders, librarians, and others who regularly interact with young people. We would very much like to use this report to open up discussions about the place of media in young people's lives. Yet, we want to have a discussion which is not led by our fears and anxieties about what media is doing to our children but rather one that reflects our best research into what our children are doing with media.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Part Three)

The following is the third installment of the white paper on youth and participatory culture which I developed for the MacArthur Foundation. You can read the whole paper here. This blog offers more information about the larger Digital Learning and Youth initiative. For the full cites of the materials referenced, please check the white paper.

I was assisted in preparing this report by Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katherine Clinton, and Alice J. Robison.

Today's installment digs deeper into the relationship between what we are calling the new media literacies and things schools have traditionally taught, and then it starts to lay out the frameworks of social skills and cultural competencies which we think are emerging through youth involvement in participatory culture. Today, I am dealing with the first two of eleven such skills we identify in the report.

These skills are things we think young people need to acquire if they are going to be ready for full participation in the new media cultures. These skills emerge from the existing research on youth, media, and informal learning. We have tried to anchor each skill with a range of examples of existing practices from schools and after school programs which suggest just some of the ways that these skills could be linked to instructional activity. We know many educators are already trying to incorporate these skills and competencies into their pedagogy. We see this white paper as offering them support as well as hopefully more insights that can further inform their efforts.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Part Two)

What follows is a second excerpt from the white paper which I authored, along with Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katherine Clinton, and Alice J. Robison, for the MacArthur Foundation. The report is intended to offer a provocation for educators at all levels to think about how our pedagogical practices need to shift to reflect the demands of a more participatory culture. In Part One, I outlined some of the changes that are taking place in the media landscape and the ways they impacted young people. In Part Two, I make the case for why adult intervention is needed and why youth will not be able to make these adjustments all on their own.

My hope is that the release of this report will stimulate reflection and discussion among educators, parents, and students about the ways media education is or is not being taught through school and after-school programs. I hope this discussion will also be of interest to the many other groups who read this blog -- many of whom are helping to shape the participatory culture we are discussing here and thus have some responsibility for thinking about how we insure that every youth is given a chance to participate.

As always, I welcome questions and comments. I am going to try to respond to any questions I receive once I have rolled out all of the parts of this report via the blog. While I have excluded sources from the blog version to insure ease of reading, you can see a full bibliography in the downloaded document.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Part One)

I spent Thursday in New York speaking on a panel with the University of Chicago's Nicole Pinkard and the University of Southern California's Mimi Ito as part of the public launch of the MacArthur Foundation's exciting slate of new initiatives in the area of youth, learning, and digital media. People interested in understanding the full context of this initiative should keep an eye on the Foundation's new blog. The event was simulcast on Second Life and on Teen Second Life.

This is the context in which we have been pursuing our own Project nml (New Media Literacies) initiatives which I have been discussing from time to time in this blog. The New York City press event was the launching point for a white paper which I wrote for MacArthur identifying what we see as the key social skills and cultural competencies which young people need to be full participants in convergence culture. In Convergence Culture, I devote one chapter to thinking about the impact of participatory culture on our current understandings of education. Here I -- and my collaborators Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katherine Clinton, and Alice J. Robison -- have been able to dig much deeper into the pedagogical implications of the world I discuss in the book as well as to lay out some of the key insights from contemporary research on informal learning, games-based pedagogy, online communities, and participatory culture.

My hope is that this white paper will spark conversations among educators at all levels -- in schools and in after school programs, in public institutions, and in churches and other community centers -- about how we need to change our practices to reflect the new ways that young people are engaging with the world around them.

In hopes of sparking such a conversation, I am publishing the white paper in installments through my blog. This first installment sets the stage, describing some of the challenges and opportunities participatory culture represents in the lives of our young people.

For those of you who are impatient and want to read the whole report at once, you can download it here.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

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.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink

"The Only Medium That Can Make You Blush in the Dark": Learning About Radio

"There are things about not being able to see someone who is talking that somehow gives you a much more direct link to that person than if you see their face. There's an awful lot of emotion conveyed in their voice and there's an awful lot of their personality conveyed in their voice. There's the obvious thing that you are able to create your own pictures in your head. It's also a lot more intimate. It's like someone is whispering to you in the dark. There was a guy at this radio festival I go to every year called the Third Coast International Audio Festival. One thing he said was radio was the only medium that can make you blush in the dark. You have to think about it for a moment but yeah, you can't read in the dark, you can't watch TV in the dark because it's emitting its own light, and it's true. It's like being at a slumber party all the time. It's really wonderful."

-- NPR reporter Sean Cole

Sean Cole is an award winning radio reporter, working out of WBUR in Boston, and producing content for such shows as Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Marketplace, and This American Life. He is also the subject of one of the exemplars we have produced as part of the MacArthur-funded Project NML. Previous entries here have described some of our goals for this project -- to expose young people to the choices that get made in the production of various forms of media, to provide them with role-models of what it might be like to create and distribute work in those media, to provide educators -- in school and out -- with a vocabulary for talking about and assessing student work within those media.

This profile of Sean Cole was produced by Comparative Media Studies graduate student Orit Kuritsky with assistance from CMS graduate student Amulya Gopalakrishnan. Kuritsky, herself, is an experienced media producer, having worked developing new formats, scripting and editing for children's television in her native Israel and in radio production here in the United States, She moved from intern into a producer position on The Connectiona syndicated talk show that aired from WBUR Boston before returning to graduate school. She has also been part of a team of our graduate students which has been working with the Terrascope Program in the Earth Sciences department at MIT to help scientist learn to communicate their ideas through radio. The students focused their energies this year on the earthquake and tsunami that hit the coast of Chile in 1960 – the largest one ever documented. The students went to Chile during spring break to do interviews and collect sounds which would eventually be edited into a 23 minute piece dealing, as they put it, with “ecological, cultural and personal survival during a devastating earthquake and tsunami”. The piece aired on WMBR and is also available on the public radio exchange

In a recent e-mail, Kuritsky explained to me some of the factors that went into her choice of Cole as an exemplar subject:

I love to listen to him on the radio. His quirkiness, combined with genuine curiosity and wit, generate great radio pieces. And I'm not alone. He is regarded as one of the most interesting and unique voices in the world of public radio. He is a very warm, attitude-less person. When I was new at the station, besides simply being nice, he kept telling me that he also started as an intern, and that it took time for him to get a permanent position, all things I needed to hear at the time. I think this unassuming attitude, combined with willingness to give advice, translates well on the screen. Sean is technically savvy. Many highly regarded public radio reporters still send interview, narration and ambiance clips to their respective headquarters, where professional editors/engineers lace their pieces together. Sean insists on doing it himself. He is also active in online communities of radio enthusiasts (like transom and prx, commenting on othersÂ’ works and offering advice). In these regards, Sean represents where public radio is heading, or at least one among contradicting directions; younger, more personal, more participatory, more diverse.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:10 AM | Permalink

When Transmedia Goes Wrong: Studio 60 and DeFaker

Through the work of our Convergence Culture Consortium, CMS faculty and students have been monitoring ongoing experiments in transmedia storytelling, trying to help our client companies to better understand when entertainment producers are creating something valuable for their consumers and when they are antagonizing them. In a recent newsletter, CMS student Ivan Askwith wrote about Studio 60 on Sunset Strip's failed attempt to build a fictional blog set in the world of the series -- an experiment which was shut down in only a few days time. I asked Ivan if I could share this post with the readers of my blog.

I am reminded here of the long-standing complaint from fans that official websites are often less satisfying than fan-generated sites: for one thing, they tend to be relatively static, built once and rarely updated, even on shows that have fairly dynamic character development or elaborate and unfolding story arcs. Kurt Lancaster made some of these points contrasting the official and fan websites for Babylon 5 in his book about the series, for example. For another, those who produce official content often do not pay attention to the details which matter most to fans. Janet Murray and I wrote an essay some years ago (published in Greg Smith's On a Silver Platter) which compared the kinds of details included in the early cd-roms about Star Trek with those which cropped up most often in fanzine stories. We found that the official materials supported some kinds of fan interests (those of male technologically inclined fans) and not others (those of women fanzine writers interested in the relationships between the characters.)

Those official sites which have broken out of this trap -- such as Dawson's Desktop, which I discuss in Convergence Culture -- have been real labors of love, often created by tapping the fan community for potential collaborators in their production.

Of course, those of us who have regularly watched Aaron Sorkin's series through the year know that his characters wage a running battle against online fan communities: Josh Lyman ran into trouble with a discussion list on The West Wing and we've already heard the characters opine negatively about bloggers on Studio 60. So, the conflict Askwith describes here seems almost inevitable.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Singapore-MIT Collaborate on Games Innovation Lab

I am going to be writing a great deal about this project in the months ahead. I am not able to tell you much more yet than is found in this news article which was released by MIT News Office this morning. But suffice it to say that all of us in the Comparative Media Studies Program are extremely excited about these developments, which have been under negotiation since January. As you will read below, William Uricchio and I will have a central role in this project, which is designed to spur innovation, diversity, and creativity in games design.

Singapore - MIT collaboration aims to spur gaming sector

October 9, 2006

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Singapore Media Development Authority have announced an agreement to establish the Singapore-MIT International Game Lab (SMIGL). The pioneering collaboration aims to further digital game research globally, develop world-class academic programs in game technology, and establish Singapore as a vital node in the international game industry.

The directors of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program (CMS) -- Henry Jenkins, DeFlorez Professor of Humanities, and William Uricchio, professor of comparative media studies -- will co-direct SMIGL, which will have offices both in Singapore and at MIT. Jenkins and Uricchio will serve as the leading principal investigators in the collaboration.

In announcing the SMIGL collaboration, Uricchio, a specialist in trans-national media distribution and reception, said, "We are excited by this collaboration with colleagues in Singapore and the opportunity to push game research and the industry in new directions, and we very much look forward to initiating an international dialogue among leading scholars, designers, students and gamers."

Uricchio described SMIGL as a "unique chance to reflect on games and to push them in new and unexpected directions, whether in terms of emerging technologies and interfaces, diverse cultural vocabularies, or important niches that have simply been neglected in the rush to seize the largest market share."

Jenkins researches media and the way people incorporate it into their lives. "The Singapore-MIT International Game Lab collaboration will provide a strong catalyst for innovation by bringing together students, industry leaders and faculty from very different cultures and backgrounds to work together and to conduct research that could have a great impact on the international game industry," he said.

The SMIGL initiative will enable students and researchers from Singapore to collaborate with MIT researchers and game industry professionals in international research projects. Beyond technology development, SMIGL will also conduct research on the artistic, creative, business and social aspects of games. The new initiative will also provide Singapore game researchers and professionals with access to cutting-edge technologies, the latest conceptual developments and links to international game development and research communities.

Michael Yap, executive director of the Interactive & Digital Media R&D Programme Office, said, "Over the next five years, we expect some 300 of our best talents from the industry and academia to take advantage of this unique opportunity to work closely with the best research minds at MIT.

"We are delighted to collaborate with MIT, one of the world's leading technology and research institutes. The Singapore-MIT International Game Lab will initiate and produce groundbreaking research in games, which is rapidly emerging as a global research focus. At the same time, the collaboration will further equip our industry-bound students to make a significant impact on the local game industry," Yap said.

Outcomes planned for SMIGL's initial period include development of both an academic and a high-impact research program, publication of peer-reviewed research papers and production of publicly distributable digital games.

The research resulting from the SMIGL collaboration will expand the ways in which the Singapore game industry can build and develop future products, and will aim to identify unique genres and aesthetics that are relevant to the Singapore game industry. In addition, according to the Media Development Authority, it will enhance the country's competitive advantage in areas such as education and tourism.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Student Press Law Center and the Future of the First Amendment

Some of my most formative experiences involved working as a student journalist -- first in high school and then in college. As someone who took seriously my responsibilities to my community, I found myself on multiple occasions in battles over the censorship of the student press.

Most memorably, when I was an undergraduate at Georgia State University, we tried to do a special issue of the paper focused on the adult entertainment sector in Atlanta. There were a large number of strip clubs, porn theaters, and other such operations not far from campus which students drove past on their way to school and we decided to provide some insight into what went on there. Inquiring minds wanted to know and all of that. When the issue hit the stands, the administration was all over our backs and the editor of the paper quickly capitulated, pulling the paper from distribution. A bunch of my friends went around collecting the papers before they could be destroyed and then we organized a group of students to distribute them in brown paper bags as a protest of the pressures put on the paper by the administration. We later ended up defending our choices as journalist before a hearing conducted by the Student Government, which had been stung by criticisms of its policies and campaign tactics and saw this issue as a chance for pay back.

Several years later, I got involved in advising a high school newspaper editor who decided to stand up to the principal and the school board who wanted to stop him from reporting news about controversies going on in his school: he took the school board into court and won what was then a fairly groundbreaking case in student press law.

All of these experiences have left me with enormous respect for the work of the Student Press Law Center, a watchdog group that monitors struggles over censorship of student produced media and provides resources for editors who want to assert their First Amendment rights. A recent visit to their site showed a range of information which seems relevant to readers of this blog.

The website reports on a recently released study on the Future of the First Amendment, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which looked into young people's attitudes towards free expression. Among the studies findings was evidence that there has been a significant increase in the percentage of students who have studied the First Amendment in their classes (up 14 percent since 2004), that 64 percent of students favored the right of student journalists to publish what they want without prior restraint (up from 58 percent two years earlier), and that 45 percent of students (compared to 35 percent just two years ago) believe that the First Amendment "goes too far" in protecting the rights of the media. We can see this last statistic perhaps as evidence of the climate that has shaped this culture since 9/11 -- where criticism of the government's position gets read by a significant percentage of Americans as unpatriotic or "going too far."

The site provides interesting coverage of the ways that the Deleting Online Predators Act might impact student expression, focusing on the uses of MySpace and other social networking sites for political activism:

David Smith, executive director and founder of Mobilizing America's Youth, the Washington, D.C., based group that operates Mobilize.org, said that many students ...are finding that social networking sites can be "a great tool for social activism."

He said this was demonstrated particularly with the rallies that took place in the spring against congressional anti-illegal immigration legislation. In March, thousands of high school students across the country, including an estimated 40,000 in Southern California, walked out of school in protests, many of which were organized in part on MySpace.

"There was so much conversation, at least within the Beltway, saying 'Where did this come from? This issue, we didn't realize it was so hot out there, so how could you mobilize tens of thousands of young people?'" Smith said. "It seemed like it came out of nowhere, when if these people were actually on these various sites and had been able to be privy to these different conversations, they would have realized that these conversations had been happening for a long time, and because of the way social networking sites are designed, it's easy to activate people and get them to do stuff offline as well."

And although Mobilizing America's Youth was not directly involved with the immigration protests, Smith said the organization uses MySpace and several other social networking sites to inform students about political issues and motivate them to get involved in the group's campaigns. One of these causes is the Save Our Social Networks campaign against DOPA.

"There are very few members of Congress that have a MySpace account, I don't think any of them have Facebook accounts," Smith said. "So they have no personal connection to these networks that millions upon millions use. They have no concept of how these sites are used positively."

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

From Viewers for Quality Television to Television Without Pity

Another in a series of outtakes from Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, this sidebar takes a look at two very different mechanisms by which audience members expressed their feelings about television programs -- Viewers for Quality Television and Television Without Pity. Each emerged, in part, in response to shifts in the ways the television networks conceptualized their viewership -- TQT reflected a new focus on demographics (and the recognition that middle class consumers were highly desired by advertisers) and TWP reflects a new focus on expressions, that is, on the emotional investments audience members make in the programs they watch. This originally appeared in Chapter Three of the book.

The shift in the ways networks and advertisers think about consumers is reflected in the differences between the two audience forums which can be seen to characterize their respective eras - Viewers for Quality Television (in the 1980s and 1990s) and Television Without Pity (in the early 21st century). As Sue Brower notes, Viewers For Quality Television (VQT) was a product of a specific historic juncture, where Nielsen first began to provide information about audience demographics and media producers sought to exploit this information to sustain shows which had low ratings but attracted highly valued niche audiences. Shows, such as Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey, and St. Elsewhere, touted themselves as "quality television" because they attracted "quality audiences" and their producers formed alliances with fan groups to construct a case for keeping these series on the air.

Viewers for Quality Television emerged from these grassroots, but corporately supported, efforts to sustain programs that appealed to college educated and upper middle class consumers. The group regularly polled their membership to identify not only what shows they liked but who they were and what products they purchased. Evaluations of quality emerged through consensus within the readership of VQT monthly newsletter, though the group's founder and spokesperson Dorothy Swanson offered this definition: "A quality show is something we anticipate before and savor after. It focuses more on relationships than situations; it explores character, it enlightens, challenges, involves and confronts the viewer; it provokes thought and is remembered tomorrow. A quality show colors life in shades of grey."

While the group supported a range of shows, including sitcoms such as Frank's Place, Designing Women, or Brooklyn Bridge, VQT was most closely associated with hour long ensemble-cast serialized dramas, such as ER, Murder One or NYPD Blue. VQT held an annual convention where they announced their list of recognized shows for the year. Their rankings were widely monitored by industry leaders and media observers, who saw them as giving a boost, no matter how small, to deserving series.

If VQT embraced the ensemble cast drama, TWP has become central to building up and sustaining audiences for science fiction, fantasy, reality, and other cult programs. In the summer of 2004, featured series included 24, Alias, Joan of Arcadia, Gilmore Girls, Smallville and The Sopranos, not to mention Survivor and American Idol. Most of these series define their quality more in terms of their contributions to popular genres than in terms of the concept of "novelistic" television Swanson promoted.

If VQT became emblematic for the shift towards "high demographic" programming, TWP may become emblematic for this search for a more interactive, attentive, and committed consumer. The site offers recaps and discussion forums for 25 shows, most which fall into those genres which attract the highest viewer commitments, according to Initiative's research. While VQT asserted itself as an earnest and aesthetically-minded tastemaking community, TWP is an altogether more playful group as suggested by its motto, "Spare the snark and spoil the network." Swanson argued that the most active segments of the television audience were drawn towards quality and that fans of lesser shows wouldn't put the effort into sustaining such collective efforts. Yet, TWP demonstrates that shows which no one would call high quality may provoke strong emotional reactions and generate net chatter.

VQT sought the ear of network leaders and program producers; these same people are increasingly monitoring TWP as a window into their illusive younger consumers. If the networks had to wait a year to learn how VQT ranked their shows, TWP responds instantly and in a much more nuanced fashion: its professional recappers post a detailed and often scathing critique of each episode within days and sometimes hours after it aired; these reviews in turn generate extensive discussion among the site's readers. As the site's FAQ explains, "Our mandate is, more or less, to give people a place to revel in their guilty televisual pleasures. In most cases, we have a complex love/hate relationship with the show, and this site is a way for us to work through those feelings. If we plain hated a show, we wouldn't pay it any attention at all."

While VQT was about quality, TWP is about passion. Many production companies will assign an intern to monitor the TWP lists to see how the audience reacts to various plot twists and character revelations, though many producers, at least those with thick skins, have been known to lurk there themselves. According to Sep, one of the site's resident experts, "It's certainly a tool for networks to see direct and immediate fan reaction that is far more specific than the Nielsen system."

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

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.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:00 PM | Permalink

For Those in the San Francisco Area...

I will be staying in Palo Alto this weekend and will have some time on my hands on Sunday. Several friends suggested that I might organize a meetup of readers of this blog who live in the Bay area. I wondered if there were people out there who might want to meet each other and join me for a Sunday brunch. I am thinking of 11 am or thereabouts at some place in Palo Alto. If you are interested, send me e-mail at henry3@mit.edu and once I get there, I will try to scout out a location.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:42 PM | Permalink

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

About a month ago, I received an empassioned e-mail, a fan letter of sorts, about Convergence Culture from someone calling himself Wu Ming 1. Being named Henry Jenkins III and having a son named Henry Jenkins IV, I wasn't thrown by the whole name and number thing, but I was fascinated by his description of the commonalities between the world I described in the book and "the things we've been doing and theorizing for more than twelve years, albeit with a more radical/activist edge (multitudinous authorship, crossmedia storytelling, world making, identity games, RPG guerrilla warfare, old/new media collision, copyleft-oriented practices, media hoaxes and so on)."

It turns out that Wu Ming 1 was one of the leaders of the Luther Blissett movement and now was part of a writing collective that has published such collaboratively authored novels as
Q and 54.

The more I have dug into the Luther Blissett movement and the Wu Ming Foundation, the more fascinating it has all become. They have been experimenting with various forms of grassroots convergence for political and artistic purposes for some time now and have apparently had a much greater impact across Europe than they have so far had in the United States. Here's part of what Wikipedia has to tell us about the movement:

Luther Blissett is a multi-use name, an "open reputation" informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and social activists all over Europe since Summer 1994....For reasons that remain unknown, the name was borrowed from a 1980's British soccer player of Afro-Caribbean origins. In Italy, between 1994 and 1999, the so-called Luther Blissett Project (an organized network within the open community sharing the "Luther Blissett" identity) became an extremely popular phenomenon, managing to create a legend, the reputation of a folk hero. This Robin Hood of the information age waged a guerrilla warfare on the cultural industry, ran unorthodox solidarity campaigns for victims of censorship and repression and - above all - played elaborate media pranks as a form of art, always claiming responsibility and explaining what bugs they had exploited to plant a fake story. Blissett was active also in other countries, especially in Spain and Germany. December 1999 marked the end of the LBP's Five Year Plan. All the "veterans" committed a symbolic Seppuku. The end of the LBP did not entail the end of the name, which keeps re-emerging in the cultural debate and is still a popular byline on the web.

Wu Ming 1 shared with me the following Youtube link which includes some discussion of their movement and its relationship to the British footballer. It includes an apperance from the "real" Luther Blissett, i.e. the soccer player who was the first black man to score a goal for a British team., who reads some rather experimental prose taken from one of the group's novels.

And here's the group's official website.

Fascinated by our ongoing correspondence about such topics as fan fiction and ARGS, all suggesting that this European avant garde movement was also deeply immersed in popular culture, I asked Wu1 (we are now on first name and number basis) if he would answer some questions for my readers. I am going to run the extensive interview with Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 2 in two installments.

HJ3: You talked about the Luther Blissett movement as "grassroots mythmaking," comparing it with fan fiction and contrasting it with the Culture Jamming movement. What do you see as the value of grassroots mythmaking?

WM1. While there's a tendency to use "myths" as a fancy synonym of "lies", I'd like to stick to a more precise definition. To put it very simply, myths are stories that keep communities alive and together. We couldn't interact with each other without the bonds we create by swapping stories, and myths are stories with the strongest symbolic value, stories that hint at the mysteries of how we all came to be here, how we're managing to get along in some way, and what the future looks like.

Myths are not weird stuff from an ancient past, they keep changing shape and context, and they always belong to the present day, they tell us about us here & now. Even the most rational of people recognize the power of myths in their life. As Joseph Campbell once pointed out, if you look at any professor at play in a bowling alley, and "watch him twist and turn after the ball has left his hand, to bring it over to the standing pins", you'll see that he's trying to summon supernatural powers, the same we find in myths and folk tales populated by demons, witches, magicians, gods etc.

Moreover, myths have a very important function: they can incite abused people into fighting back, as stories of injustice and rebellion, repression and resistance, are handed down from one generation to the next. For example, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X are both historical and mythical figures, they're the beloved martyrs, the guys who dared to stand up and tell the truth and payed dearly for this. On the other hand, myths persuade suffering people to endure their situation and hope for a settling of scores, as in the myth of the Final Judgment, when the last shall be first, or the myth of revolution, when the poor shall take over and eat the rich.

In the early/mid Nineties the "Luther Blissett" collective identity was created and adopted by an informal network of people (artists, hackers, and activists) interested in using the power of myths, and moving beyond agit-prop "counter-information". In Bologna, my circle of friends shared an obsession with the eternal return of such archetypal figures as folk heroes and tricksters. We spent our days exploring pop culture, studying the language of the Mexican Zapatistas, collecting stories of media hoaxes and communication guerrilla warfare since the 1920's (Berlin Dada stuff, futuristic soirées etc.), obsessively re-watching one particular movie, Slapshot by George Roy Hill, starring Paul Newman as hockey player Reggie Dunlop. We liked Reggie Dunlop very much, he was the perfect trickster, the Anansi of African legends, the Coyote of Native American legends, Ulysses manipulating the cyclop's mind.

What if we could build our own "Reggie Dunlop", a "trickster with a thousand faces", a golem made of the clay of three rivers -- the agit-prop tradition, folk mythology, and pop culture? What if we started a completely new role play game, using all the media platforms available at the time to spread the legend of a new folk hero, a hero fueled-up by collective intelligence? (BTW, we'd read Pierre Lévy's books, WM4's father ran a small publishing house and had just published a translation of Les Technologies de l'intelligence, he was Lévy's first Italian publisher, and we met the guy in Bologna a couple of times).

We were in touch with many people in Italy and abroad -- thanks to BBS networks like FidoNet, the mail art network, and the national scene of occupied social centers. We spread the word and it all happened very quickly. In a few months, hundreds of people were using the "Luther Blissett" name and the new golem was getting a lot of coverage by baffled journalists.

Yes, there was a disruptive element, a confrontational stance, something that made us cousins of "culture jammers", "subvertisers", or theorists like the Critical Art Ensemble etc., but there was an important difference. Adbusters-type disturbance was all right, screwing up corporate propaganda is probably a necessary phase to go through: make parodies of advertisements, criticize consumerism, those are certainly good deeds... However, Luther Blissett also had a more positive attitude, the main purpose was to create a community around Blissett's myth. Pranks, media stunts, and culture jamming were more the means to spread the myth than the ends of the project. The most important aspect of our activities was not sabotage, but the way sabotage increased Blissett's mythical status.

It was an amazing upheaval, so many people writing, acting, performing under the same pseudonym, coordinating their efforts in some way without the need to know each other, by sending each other messages in bottles. It was an open, informal community. Fake news and media hoaxes served the purpose of making our very presence on the media landscape legendary, so that ever more people joined us and adopted the name. "Culture jamming" was just a subordinate part of the project: the practical exploration of a grassroots, interactive mythology was the most important thing.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink

From a "Must Culture" to a "Can Culture": Legos and Lead Users

Joel Greenberg from the Austin-based GSD&M advertising firm is one of the fascinating people I am collaborating with on the Convergence Culture Consortium. Greenberg is a true believer in the collaborationist model I describe in my book and discussed here a while back. He's been putting together a series of podcasts called Friends Talking which interview some of the key thinkers in and out of industry on topics such as viral marketing, user-generated content, and community-based innovation. Greenberg brings in guests like The Long Tail's Chris Anderson, Got Game's John Beck, Linden Lab's Philip Rosendale, and others, sits down with them for a substantive conversation about cutting edge issues, and then runs the entire conversation via his podcast .

In the most recent installment, Greenberg focuses attention on the concept of lead users and applies it to examine the development of the new Lego Mindstorms NXT product which is being released in time for Christmas. Lead user innovation is a term most closely associated with my MIT colleague, Eric Von Hippel, who wrote a book, Democratizing Innovation, which should be better known among media scholars than it has been. Von Hippel's focus is innovation in manufacturing -- how companies are tapping insights from their consumers to produce more effective products -- but what he says has many implications for the kinds of fan communities that emerge around popular culture. Indeed, I learned of Von Hippel's work -- not through hallway conversations at MIT but because Robert Kozinets combined Von Hippel's work in management science and my work in fan studies to talk about consumerism around Star Trek in his dissertation.

Basically, Von Hippel is arguing that companies need to identify what he is calling Lead Users -- these are both early adopters (in the sense that they are quick to purchase new products) and early adapters (in the sense that they often hack the products to retrofit them for their specialized needs.) By dealing with these communities and understanding how they appropriate and remake products, these companies can accelerate the design process, anticipating uses and desired features before the product even hits the mass market.

Inspired by an article in Wired, Greenberg sought out contact with some of the executives at Lego who are working on the new Mindstorms products. (Many will recall that the original insights that generated the Mindstorm series came from MIT Media Lab professor Seymour Papert, though adapted to the needs of the mass market. These tool kits which allow kids to do simple programming and build and control their own robots have been embraced in schools around the world.) When it came time to create the next product in the Mindstorm series, Lego pulled together some of the most innovative users of its products and incorporated them fully in the design process.

Attending a national conference and robotics competition in Austin, Greenberg was able to interview Soren Lund, the man Lego put in charge of the initiative and Ray Almgren, one of National Instruments' VP's who had worked closely with Lego to adapt their Labview software as the programming environment for Mindstorms. Lund speaks about the value of linking the "must culture" of a major corporation with the "can culture" which is emerging from the hobbyist and lead users within the networked community surrounding their products:

In a company, and this goes for pretty much every company, you have a must culture. That means, if I am your boss, I can tell you I want you to do this and that and maybe you are not really into it or maybe you have other priorities but as your boss, I can say you must do this. And if you say No, you're fired, right? Any company culture is a must culture, a must organization. You must do what I tell you to do. You can put it in a nicer way but that's how it works. With a community, it is a can organization. They can decide to do something. They can decide not to. You can't say to the guys in the community -- now you must help us in doing this and now you must.. Guess what, I'm out of here. I can't fire you because you are not part of the company. So, that is what is so valuable because they can keep pushing. They don't come up with what they think the average user needs or wants. They say as a member of the community what they want. I want it to do this. I want it to do that. I don't care about the rest. It's me. So you get honest and candid feedback from these guys focused only on what they are looking for and how it can be the best tool they can ever have. And they keep pushing. We've had interviews where we say thank you for the input on that topic but we must move on and the community has said no. We want this and they keep pushing....

For these guys, it has nothing to do with money. Their passion is building Mindstorms robots out of Lego bricks, programming them, hacking them, all of that stuff. so this is their favorite Hobby. For them, it doesn't get any better. Suddenly I can influence the product I like to work with. I may have my little fingers there on some of the development....then of course afterwards there is recognition among peers in the community.

What Lund has to say about Lego echoes what I report in Convergence Culture about the games industries. Will Wright, for example, told me that the game companies are now essentially competing to see which one can attract and sustain the most creative community since user-based innovation is the key to keeping a games franchise fresh and interesting over the long haul.

This is still so different from the relationship most television production units have with their fans, yet if they had more regular contact with their fans, they might learn to anticipate audience tastes and interests, producing episodes which better reflected the themes and characters that drive the community's passions towards a particular series. For example, in the mid-1980s, my work on fan cultures was showing me that fans were pushing hard for a more serialized approach to television narrative: they were reading even the most episodic series in terms of story arcs and program history. My work on Twin Peaks fans was showing that online communities would support much greater narrative complexity than current television was offering. And my work on fan video producers was showing that people wanted simple tools which would allow them to sample and remix television content as well as platforms by which they could share what they produced with the general public. It has taken a while for the rest of the viewing audience to catch up with where the fan community was at more than fifteen years ago but fan culture in the late 1980s looks very much like the television culture of today. What we are now calling Web 2.0 is simply fan culture without the stigma.

That said, the interview keeps circling back around what is the real sticking point in the conversation about lead user innovation: if consumers are helping to generate the intellectual property and helping to market the product, shouldn't they receive some economic return on their participation? Lund says No -- that this would fundamentally change their relationship to the company, turning everything back to work for hire and returning it to the "must culture" that shapes corporate life. Yet, skeptics might note that user-generated content taken to its logical extreme would result in cutbacks in the creative labor market as experienced professionals are displaced by grassroots volunteers. Lund is correct to depict lead users as having a strong desire to influence the decisions made by the companies that make the products they use and admire -- whether physical products like programmable bricks or cultural products like television shows. At the moment, they are grateful that people will simply listen to them and take their ideas seriously, especially given the history of not just neglect but open hostility to these grassroots communities. Yet, at what point, does this collaboration become exploitation? This is a core question all of us need to think through as we move towards a more collaborative and participatory culture.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Announcing: The Futures of Entertainment Conference

The Comparative Media Studies Program is proud to announce an exciting forthcoming conference, The Futures of Entertainment, to be held at MIT on Nov. 17 and 18. The event is designed to bring together leading thinkers from across the entertainment industry to speak about core issues around media convergence, transmedia storytelling, user-generated content, and participatory culture. Speakers confirmed so far include The Long Tail's Chris Anderson, Flickr's Caterina Fake, DC Comic's Paul Levitz, Warner Brother's Diane Nelson, Big Spaceship's Michael Lebowitz, social networking researcher danah boyd, television scholar Jason Mittell, and many others, including representatives from MTV, Cartoon Network, Bioware, and other leading companies in this space. The event is free and open to the public but we ask that you preregister since seating will be limited. The event is being hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium.

Here's a more detailed description of the themes for the scheduled panels:

Television Futures

New distribution methods, new revenue strategies and changing modes of audience engagement are transforming how television works. Off- and post-broadcast markets make 'old' television valuable as a continuing source of income and suggest new ways to reach viewers. Digital video recorders threaten the 30-second commercial but offer the possibility of more detailed information about audience members. Some television producers may reach out to consumers directly rather than going through the networks and networks are using online distribution to generate buzz about new shows before they reach the air. Creative responses to these challenges are re-writing how we understand what was once just the box in the corner.

User-Generated Content

Media culture is becoming more participatory, rewriting the relations between media producers and consumers. New tools and distribution platforms, a changing cultural ethos, and innovative corporate approaches to user-generated content are turning viewers into active participants. Innovation may occur at the grassroots level yet influence decisions made within corporate media. Yet, are media companies ready for the grassroots creativity they are unleashing? What challenges does greater user-participation pose to both producers and audiences? What corporate policies enable or retard the growth of user-generated content?

Transmedia Properties

The cultural logic of convergence lends itself to a flow of narratives, characters, and worlds across media platforms. Moving beyond older models based on liscensed ancillary products, transmedia extensions are now seen as expanding the opportunities for storytelling, enabling new kinds of entertainment experiences, building up secondary characters or backstory. Transmedia extension may also create alternative openings for different market segments and enable more extensive contact with brands. The great potential of transmediation is to deepen audience engagement, but this requires greater awareness of the specific benefits of working within different platforms. How are media companies organizing the development of transmedia properties? How are storytellers taking advantage of the "expanded canvas" such an approach offers? How do transmedia strategies impact the new integration between brands and entertainment properties? What new expectations do transmedia properties place on consumers?

Fan Cultures

Once seen as marginal or niche consumers, Fan communities look more 'mainstream' than ever before. Some have argued that the practices of web 2.0 are really those of fan culture without the stigma. Courted, encouraged, engaged and acknowledged, fans are more and more frequently being recognized as trendsetters, viral marketers, and grassroots intermediaries. Fan affinity is being seized as a form of grassroots marketing, representing the bleeding edge of brand and property commitment. The sophistication of fan-created products rivals the professional products they honor, sometimes keeping defunct properties alive long after their shelf life might otherwise have expired. How is the increasing importance of fan behavior re-writing the media landscape? What kinds of accountability should media companies have to their most committed consumers? What kinds of value do fans create through their activities? What are the sources of tension that still exist between media producers, advertisers, and fans?

Not the Real World Anymore

Virtual spaces are more than sites for emulating the real world. They are becoming platforms for thought experiments -- some of which involve fantasies we would not like to enact in the real world, others involve possibilities that we may want to test market before putting into practice. Much more than simulacra of Real Life or a 3D version of text-based Internet communities, online worlds represent new sites for considering questions of community and connectivity. Marked by user- creativity, online worlds balance, sometimes precariously, the rights of users with the rights of sponsoring organizations. As we move closer to the cyberpunk vision of a wholly parallel 'metaverse', questions of power, community, and property are coming to the fore.

More information is forthcoming but for some provisional information and to register for the event, check out this website. I hope to see many readers of the blog at this event which promises a front line perspective on many of the trends I discuss in the books.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

God Things and Small Sizes: Convergence and Ganpati

As we have stressed here before, the changes described in Convergence Culture are occurring on a global scale, though the rate of change differs from country to country. Everywhere, we are seeing convergence as working on top of existing layers within the culture -- old practices continue, old media survives, yet both are transformed by the emergence of new media technologies and new sets of cultural practices. Convergence is marked both by continuity and transformation.

I was reminded of this play between old and new recently when I received the following e-mail from Parmesh Shahani, a CMS alum who recently returned to his native India after spending three years in the United States. Shahani had been a key player in the development of our Convergence Culture Consortium and continues to be involved in our activities -- offering us a view from Asia on the trends in consumer culture we are monitoring.

This essay describes some of his impressions of the ways that new media technology is transforming Ganpati, one of the key religious and cultural festivals in Bombay. Western observers might want to compare it with the ways that new media has or has not been embraced by various religious groups in our own countries. I asked Shahani if I could share the following field notes with you.

God Things and Small Sizes
By: Parmesh Shahani

God is Everywhere
Greetings from Bombay, India. I have come back here right in the middle of the Ganpati (Lord Ganesh) festival fervor - a ten-day spectacle that begins with millions of people in the city bringing statues of the elephant god to their homes and community pandals (lavishly decorated statue stages, erected on almost every street corner in the city) - and culminates in the immersion of these statues into the ocean, accompanied by street processions, fire crackers, color, and noise, noise and more noise.

It is the final day of the event, and I am walking to Chowpatty beach near my home, the biggest immersion site in the city. It's been several years since I've been in India during Ganpati time and one of the changes I notice is that each pandal I pass is 'sponsored'. The one on the street corner near my house sports banners from Silver House (a local jewelry shop in the adjoining market) as well as ICICI bank and Britannia Tiger biscuits (huge pan-Indian brands). Just then my cell phone beeps; it's a text message from my cell phone service provider (Hutch) about Ganpati ringtones and wallpapers that I might wish to download. This is again something I hadn't experienced before.

Flashback to one week ago. I am on a 6 am flight to Calcutta, and each TV screen in the Mumbai airport departure lounge is tuned in to Star News (Murdoch's Indian news channel), beaming the early morning Ganpati aarti (ceremonial ritual based on the lighting of oil lamps) live from the city's Siddhi Vinayak temple. I visit the temple website and am quite impressed. They have a live darshan (viewing of the aarti) webcast, online booking of pujas (prayer rituals) and prasad (sweets consumed by devotees after first being offered to the deity) delivery both within India and abroad (via FedEx or other courier services). There are several ways that patrons can make donations to the temple: Union Bank of India, IndusInd Bank, BillDesk, ICICI Bank NRI Services, Remit2India, Itz Cash, Wallet 365... There is also a service to process donations and prasad requests via SMS, or text messaging. The temple has tie-ups with most of the major cellphone companies in the country for SMS alerts of prayers and aartis, downloads of Lord Ganesh wallpapers, ring tones, logos, e-cards, and so on.

Siddhivinayak is by no means the only temple to provide such extensive and intensive digital devotion possibilities - different versions of the above model are being adopted by other temples in the country (for eg: Tirumalai in south India). And it's proving to be immensely popular. Siddhivinayak's online darshan, for instance, has 4 million hits per month. In contemporary India, it seems God is not just in the details, but in the detailed choices that one has to access him with.

My mother is surprised that I want to walk all the way to the beach to see the immersion. It's so much better on TV, she urges. And she is probably right - almost every TV channel - local or national, cable or terrestrial (over 500 in the country now, and still counting) is beaming out assorted Ganpati images. Sahara News has a 4 way split screen, - showing live immersion-casts from 4 major immersion points in Maharashtra state (of which Bombay is the capital), other channels have reports from other parts of the country or abroad; there are celebrity pujas, interviews, talk shows, Ganpati teleshopping and Ganpati dance contests... I switch to MTV hoping for some variety, only to see Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan vigorously shaking his hips to the Ganpati song from his forthcoming film - Don, just as my cellphone beeps and offers me the very same music video download for 9 rupees.

I enjoy my walk, feeling the cool monsoon sea breeze on my face. In a few days, the city will become boiling hot once more as the rain season subsides. Several processions pass me by: small handcarts with baby Ganpati statues on them, being guided by 10 or 12 family members, and large trucks, with 50 and 60 foot tall statues surrounded by their giant entourages, security guards and private videographers.

Just opposite the large Times of India billboards at Chowpatty beach, (featuring humongous images of Ganpati, what else?) there is a VIP entrance where special guests can view the beach proceedings from a raised platform, and on plush sofas, while sipping on delectable non alcoholic beverages. Alas, I don't have an invitation. Instead, I am squashed and squeezed with the general population (and we're talking hundreds of thousands here) as the crowd inches its way to the beach, and chants of Ganpati Bappa Morya (Lord Ganpati, come back again) fill the air. It is claustrophobic and stinky but there is electricity in the air and beaming smiles all around and I realize that despite my discomfort, I am smiling too.

No, Bombay's devotion for Ganpati has not changed in the few years that I have been away. (It might have even become stronger... and the presence of such a huge mass of people, just two months after terrible bomb blasts have ripped through the city's trains, must surely be read as an act of defiance as well as devotion.) But what has certainly changed is the experience of Ganpati.

The array of choices made possible by media in the Bombay of today has enabled a qualitatively different experience of the spirit of Ganpati: a transmedia experience that is more complex, more extensive and more intensive than ever before. Secondly, all these different levels or touch points at which the Ganpati narrative can be experienced by individuals merge in and out of and influence and are influenced by what was essentially conceived as a communal spiritual experience by Indian freedom fighter Lokmanya Tilak about a century ago. The experience is thereby transformed into something that more personal, more portable and more pedestrian (in both senses of the term), to borrow language from Mimi Ito. This personalization of the communal is what I find especially exciting, more so in the light of our existing C3 research, where we are studying the reverse phenomenon - the communalization of the personal - through our work on college dorm culture. In both instances, I reckon, we will find that what Grant Mcracken calls multiplicity, is taking place. People are able to experience something personally as well as communally at the same time. It is never a case of either/or; always a case of bothness, or rather, severalness.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink

For Those Who Live in Boston...

MIT COMMUNICATIONS FORUM

Why Newspapers Matter

Thursday, October 5, 5-7 pm, Bartos Theater, MIT Media Lab

Jerome Armstrong (Crashing the Gate), Pablo Boczkowski (Digitizing the News), Danta
Chinni (Project for Excellence in Journalism), David Thorburn, (MIT)

Working journalists, media critics and digital visionaries discuss the ongoing transformation and apparent decline of American newspapers. Topics to be addressed: the aging of the newspaper reader, the emergence of citizens' media and the blogosphere, the fate of local news and the local newspaper, news and information in the networked future.

This is the third in a series of forums that asks Will Newspapers Survive? Also in the
series: The Emergence of Citizens' Media (Sept. 19), News, Information and the Wealth of Networks (Sept. 21).

Series co-sponsor: Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation

Forums are free and open to the public.

More information: http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum

A reception in the lower atrium of the Media Lab follows the forum.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 2:59 PM | Permalink

Making Comics: Nick Bertozzi as Exemplar

Several weeks ago, I wrote here about the New Media Exemplar Library -- a digital filmmaking project that is being funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of our larger project to develop curricular materials and activities to support the teaching of new media literacies. The Exemplar Library will consist of a series of short films showing media makers discussing the core choices they make -- both craft decisions and ethical dilemmas -- as they create their work. Our goal is to produce films that educators can use in classes and after school programs and that young people who are enthusiastic about media production might seek out on their own via the web. The first one I introduced to my readers centered on blogger, science fiction writer, and digital activist Cory Doctorow.

Today, I wanted to share a second exemplar -- this one focused on independent comics creator Nick Bertozzi as he shows us the process by which he created a single page of his forthcoming graphic novel, The Salon The Salon centers around the circle of friends who helped generate the cubist movement and includes vivid portrayals of Gertrude Stein, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Alice B. Toklas, Erik Satie, and Guillaume Apollinaire. The Salon was not created as a kids comic and indeed, much of the content deals with mature themes, but it's melding of fact and fiction makes it a rich text for us to examine in the context of a project on new media literacies.

Having gotten to know Bertozzi through the years, one can't help but wonder if his fascination with this circle might have something to do with the tight circle of comic book artists in Brooklyn with whom he hangs out and sometimes collaborate, a circle which includes Jessica Abel, Paul Pope, Dean Haspiel, and Matt Madden, among others. Several years ago, these friends piled into a car and drove to MIT to visit Nick's sister, Vanessa Bertozzi, a Comparative Media Studies Masters Student, and to talk at our colloquium series. Various combinations of that circle have passed through the program in the years that have followed and this exemplar grew out of those conversations. In the interview, Bertozzi talks about why cartoonists and other artists need to work within creative communities:

You need a community of other artists of other cartoonists who understand, because nobody else will understand the insanity that you go through. And they're people who don't bug you too much because they're doing the same thing you're doing and they want to be left alone a lot of the time. But we do need to come together, because we are human after all believe it or not.

His former roommate Dean Haspiel described what he got out of working side by side with a fellow artist:

What was really good about when Nick lived with me, was we were really able to share that space and maximize the energy of that room. And turn what a lot of what we were doing separately into this combined force of this infectious, vibrant kind of brain trust. It was a really good time. I really miss those days of when I could look over my shoulder and see Nick drawing when I didn't feel like drawing and that would just inspire me to keep trudging on when I was struggling, facing that blank page and not knowing what to do next.

The video was produced and filmed by Vanessa which allowed her to achieve real trust and intimacy with her interview subject. Bertozzi turns out to be extremely good at explaining his creative process in language that is broadly accessible and there's a real fascination in watching this page take shape step by step across the videos. He takes us from the scripted concept, through the research into the historical period that insures the accuracy of his details, through penciling, inking, coloring (which occurs on the computer), and the final proofs. Bertozzi's comfort in explaining the creative process reflects his own experiences teaching and mentoring young would-be comic book artists in Brooklyn. The video also features his fellow comics artist and former roommate Dean Haspiel and one of his former students sharing their impressions of his work and creative process.

Here's how one of Bertozzi's students described the first day of class:

I was sitting in a class with all these kids who were interested in Spiderman comics, and Thor and Green Lantern. and in walks this guy, Nick. He said, the other guy who was supposed to teach this class, he's not teaching it anymore and I'm the replacement. And he comes in with this book On Directing by David Mamet and this other book called Story by Robert McKee. The first things he writes on the board are "ARCHETYPE! STEREOTYPE!" So he was talking about story structure in comics and saying that linear comicbook narrative structure has been done many, many times. And he said that what we're going for is something more, something more experimental. And I remember the first day of class he brought in a pile of superhero comics and he passed one out to everyone. And some of these students were like, "Oh, these are great, I have these in my own collection." And he said, "Now pick up the comic book and TEAR IT TO PIECES!" He said, "We're going to destroy these old idols and we're going to make new!"

One of the themes which will run across the series is an emphasis on how contemporary artists build upon the past, sampling and remixing pre-existing work as a source of inspiration for new expression. We hope to help teachers and students understand the difference between plagiarism and creative appropriation, providing a context for thinking about the ethics of what we do with other people's creative content. Comics fans will be relieved to see Bertozzi has a large library of classic comics to which he returns for inspiration whenever he confronts creative problems . Teachers will probably be gratified by the degree to which Bertozzi stresses throughout the project the importance of doing research. As he explains:

A good cartoonist has to have a lot of reference materials because you're going to be drawing a ton of things. And it's a lot easier to draw it from reference than it is to make it up out of your head.

I was taking an art history class and I was learning about Cubism, which is an art movement that was started by Pablo Picasso and George Braque. And I'll be honest, I paid attention in class but I never really understood what cubism was. So I always wanted to do a story that was about cubism so I could do the research and so I could spend a lot of time figuring out why cubism was so important.

Another fascinating part of the interview has to do with Bertozzi's choices to draw and ink the comics panels by hands but then to scan them and digitize them for the coloring process. As he explains, "You don't have to do the coloring on a computer, but I do because it saves me a lot of time." As a project, we are placing a lot of stress on the ways artists choose which tools to use and are especially interested in the hybrid nature of contemporary production practices, where some things are done physically and others digitally.

Bertozzi is not the only member of that circle who is strongly committed to introducing comics to young readers and artists. We have spent a good deal of time on Project NML discussing Matt Madden's recent book, 99 Ways to Tell A Story: Exercises in Style, which we think would be an outstanding tool for teaching storytelling techniques in any medium. Madden took a very basic situation and restaged it using different narrative devices, reading it through different points of view, accepting different artistic restrictions, and fitting it within a range of different genres. His focus clearly is on how a fairly simple set of building blocks can be used creatively to generate new stories simply by tweaking different variables in their presentation. This book teaches us how to see the choices which storytellers make in producing their work while inspiring us to think of other variations that he has not yet considered.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)