From Zoey's Room to Project NML: An Interview with Erin Reilly

Yesterday, I introduced you to Matthew Weise, a producer from our GAMBIT lab, and a key figure behind our games research efforts. Today, I wanted to introduce you to another researcher who recently joined the CMS community -- Erin Reilly, Research Director of Project nml. The New Media Literacies (NML) project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, is developing a theoretical framework and curriculum for K-12 learners that integrate new media tools into broader educational, expressive and ethical contexts. NML is partnering with classrooms and after school programs around the country to test curriculum prototypes created by CMS students and program affiliates.

Before coming to MIT, Reilly was co-creator of Platform Shoes Forum's model program Zoey's Room, a national online community for 10-14 year-old girls, encouraging their creativity through science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Zoey's Room has proven results in advancing STEM and Media Literacy skills. In 2007, Erin received a national educational Leaders in Learning Award from Cable in the Classroom for her innovative approach to learning through Zoey's Room. A recognized expert in the design and development of thought-provoking and engaging educational content powered by virtual learning and new media applications, Erin has been a featured speaker, panelist and keynoter at several industry events. Erin serves on the Working Committee of Pop!Tech (http://www.poptech.org), an internationally acclaimed technology event that can be seen on PBS and the Technology Committee of the Maine Arts Commission.

Knowing how many of my readers have a strong interest in the use of new media for education, I asked Reilly to share some of her insights from working on Zoey's Room and to give us a preview of what you can expect to see from Project nml in the coming year.

Tell us about Zoey's Room. What were the goals of this project and how do you measure it success?

Zoey's Room is a safe, online educational community developed by Platform Shoes Forum to creatively engage 9- to 14-year-old girls in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

The goals of Zoey's Room are to encourage middle school girls to:

• Learn science, technology, engineering and math skills in a fun, collaborative online environment by completing online activities and offline challenges on their own or in a group.

• Behave responsibly and ethically online and to be Internet Safe

• Participate and share in an informal learning environment, and

• Be better prepared for the technological demands of a future workforce.

Fewer than a dozen Science, Technology, Math, Engineering (STEM) websites are currently available online for middle school girls right now. Of them all, Zoey's Room is the only STEM website that features a multicultural character "Zoey" who appeals to both rural and urban girls. Zoey hosts her own chat room for girls every day after school. She encourages girls to explore STEM topics through fun challenges called Tec-Treks, that expand their knowledge on a range of 21st century skills. Additionally, each month, Zoey leads informative chats with "Fab Female", women role models who have STEM professions. This unique interpersonal connection, along with the collaborative nature of the Tec-Treks, encourages girls to become more interested in STEM careers.

We measure the success of Zoey's Room not on the number of its members but on the girls' safety, progress in academic fields, and retention in the program. The extensive research behind Zoey's Room allowed us to develop a practical application, which includes an on-going assessment of each member's participation and learning. Evaluative tools include a benchmark survey taken when a girl first joins the program, annual assessment polls, and one-on-one feedback from online members and adult facilitators.

Specifically, a sample of 100 girls participated in the Zoey's Room 2006-2007 benchmark and final survey. When asked the answers to very specific STEM questions we put to them in the survey, the majority of girls got 12 out of 13 of the answers right--which proves to us that they actually learned terms and concepts and principals of certain STEM topics by doing the various Tec-Treks. But beyond statistical measures, what girls are saying about Zoey's Room matters the most.

"Math is my favorite subject - I'm (now) interested in numbers and problem solving"

"We need more ideas like Zoey's Room; being a girl is hard and we need all the support we can find since it's hard to discover that at home, with our friends, or our schools."

"I think that Zoey's Room is the best idea in the whole entire world. On Zoey's Room, a safe environment is provided where questions can be answered and girls actually have a voice."

What factors have historically limited young girl's comfort with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math? How has Zoey's Room overcome these problems?

Reports like "Shortchange Girls, Shortchange America" (1991) and "Gender Gaps" (1998) by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) were the catalyst for starting a program like Zoey's Room. Through aggregated research and internal studies, these reports uncovered the need for schools to provide equitable education for girls in the areas of STEM. AAUW found that to instill math, tech and science skills in girls; we need to educate girls to be designers, not just passive users of technology- and Zoey's Room encourages that. Given the social and collaborative nature of girls, a girls-only self-paced learning environment seemed a natural platform. The next step was to make this environment engaging and attractive to girls by including community tools.

Though girls today are more apt to be interested in technology, they are still not pursuing further as advanced courses or career aspirations. According to a more recent report," What We Know about Girls, STEM, and After-school Programs" (Cheri Fancsali, Ph.D. for Educational Equity Concepts) girls are much less likely to major in science-related fields in college; less likely to complete undergraduate and graduate with STEM degrees. Beyond that, women comprise a disproportionately low percentage of the STEM workforce, earn less, and are less likely to hold high-level positions in STEM careers. What does that mean for our society? Today, eight of the 10 fastest growing jobs in the U.S. are computer related. By 2010, jobs in the technical and mathematical fields are expected to increase by 67%. If this trend continues, not only does it seriously cripple young women's potential financial earning power, but as more jobs in the future demand technological proficiency, this trend can be a detriment to the nation's intellectual resource pool.

In the last five years, numerous studies have documented concrete methods to get girls re-engaged into learning "hard skills." Programs for girls combining hands-on activities, role models, mentoring, internships, and career exploration have improved girls' self-confidence and interest in STEM courses and careers and helped reduce sexist attitudes about STEM (Campbell and Steinbrueck, 1996; Ferreira, 2001).

The AAUW Commission also stressed the need for adult female role models to engage younger females in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math for girls to begin reshaping their own perceptions about these fields as career choices. A recent Girl Scout Research Institute (GSRI) study showed that girls tend to make career choices based on their role models rather than their academic interests.

Joseph Bernt, an Ohio University professor of journalism, and one of the authors of a nationwide study funded by the National Science Foundation about the media's influence upon middle school children found "this age group spends more time interacting with media than in school or with family, or even with their peers. This means that media has to start providing better role models for girls. Zoey's Room is our example of creating a fun, creative, positive use of media. By harnessing the media for education, we hope to inspire girls with other role models.

In a recent column, I argued that the term, "digital natives," masked lots of differences in young people's access to and participation within digital media. What kinds of differences in skills and access have you observed through your work on Zoey's Room?

I think we've grown up in a culture that we have to label everything, but by doing this we limit the truth of who people really are. Using labels like digital natives and digital immigrants is just another way of stereotyping people. Anyone who's participated in community online knows that it's these places where stereotypes are broken down. The anonymity of the web allows for the girl you'd never hang out with in school to become one of your closest allies online. It's a congregation of girls interested in a particular subject rather than hanging out on a particular social norm that sets precedence in the school cafeteria.

Children have to learn technology skills just like we adults. The only way they are going to learn the skills are by trying it out or asking for help. This metaphor makes it sound that every kid is a native to the digital environment. It doesn't take into account that kids and adults all have different experiences with digital technology. And it also doesn't take into account the guidance and supervision that happens in communities and the positive results occurring when an informal mentorship happens between an adult and a child online. It really depends on how much access they have to the technology in order to be comfortable. These skills are unevenly distributed across our population and can easily be seen in the Zoey's Room membership. We have many home-schooled girls using Zoey's Room who are much more savvy online than girls who doesn't have a computer at home and only get to use the computer when she meets with her after-school Zoey's Room club.

The chat and message boards on Zoey's Room are filled with peer-to-peer sharing of how to do something online. (See the below image for example of girls sharing how to change fonts within chats).

The message board tech tips wouldn't be filled with this information if girls came into the program knowing how to do everything digital.

I also argued that adults might have more to contribute in helping young people adjust to new technologies than the phrase "digital immigrants" implied. How did you harness adult expertise through Zoey's Room?

We harnessed adult expertise in Zoey's Room by creating a mentoring pipeline through our Friends of Zoey and Fab Female components. High school girls can apply to be "Friends of Zoey", which are junior staff members who interact online with girls and encourage them in Tec-Treksâ„¢. The FOZ began as an internship program for girls who have aged-out of Zoey's Room but still wanted to stay involved and developed into these girls being the community hosts of Zoey's Room as well as keeping content evergreen.

As I mentioned earlier, Fab Females are female role models who have professions in STEM. Past Zoey's Room "Fab Females" have included a NASA Food Technologist, Microsoft IT manager, a marine biologist, a paleontologist, and digital artist, designers and film makers. Fab Females have asked to stay involved beyond the chat session. With an increase in membership this year, we're opening up a space in the community for on-going interaction between Fab Females and the members.

Not only are our Friends of Zoey the glue to the online community, but also these girls build leadership skills by recruiting and interviewing our Fab Females to conduct online chat sessions. They also work with these Fab Females for additional Tec-Trek activities.

Online safety was a central concern of your work on Zoey's Room. Many adult fears about young people's experiences online are misguided, but some are not. What do you see as the most realistic concerns and what steps did you take to address them?

Since we work with children under the age of 13, the biggest concern is following the guidelines of COPPA, and we worked closely with the FTC to ensure our registration was COPPA compliant. However, this doesn't guarantee that a person signing up is who they say they are and we all know how easy it is to change your birth date to make you whatever age you want to be. So, how do we protect girls from encountering just anybody on our site?

We've partnered with a 3rd party verifier to ensure all adults who register a girl for an account are subject to identity verification. Before confirming a girl's membership to Zoey's Room, our process verifies the data collection of adult registrants to ensure they are who they say they are. This is a reactive approach and does not provide the answer to safety but we hope this extra step will deter folks who are joining the community for reasons other than its intended purpose.

Past the access point, Zoey's Room creates a proactive approach to safety and ethics by training Friends of Zoey how to help moderate and monitor the chat room and message boards every day for ongoing protection of its members. We also create an environment where members watch out for each other and know the guidelines they need to follow to participate in the community... and I think this is the best approach to take. I conduct adult workshops and stress to attendees how important it is to have open conversations with your kids and help educate them of proper conduct online.

Lately, we find the biggest concern is not safety but ethics. We've found that when confronted with someone prying too much, they usually quit out of the program and shut down. Their natural instincts kick in. However, it is mob mentality and bullying that causes the most damage. Zoey and Friends of Zoey provide peer-to-peer guidance in how to handle the situations and have been known on more than one occasion to be the bridge to acceptance of each other.

What did you learn from the work on Zoey's Room that will help us expand the community around Project NML?

The first thing we started with this year was defining our audience. If it's for teens, make it for teens. Don't worry about the adult. If teens like it, the adults will join in. If teens don't like it, you and the adults will always feel like its work.

"Today's American teens live in a world enveloped by communications technologies," states a 2005 Pew Internet and Life Report titled "Teens and Technology.

Whether adults are comfortable with this technological revolution or not--it's happening. According to the Pew Report more than 87% of teens and tweens between 12-17 are using the Internet and their preferred method of communication is online in the form of Instant Messaging, Chat Rooms, and Social Networking sites with older girls taking the lead nationally as the "power users" of the Internet.

In Zoey's Room, we foresaw this trend in 2002 when we created a moderated chat room for girls only with the sole purpose of appealing to girls' natural collaborative and communicative natures as a platform to introduce "stealth" education in the form of Tec-Treks and role models.

We also saw the success of having a place for members to showcase their work and get feedback. Each of the Tec-Treks is project-based and not yes or no or multiple choice answers. Tec-Trek projects are loaded for not only Zoey and her friends to give feedback but also the other mentors.

I've seen first-hand that community is the glue to learning online. If you lose community, then you might as well be reading a book on your own without ever joining the book club for discussion.

I hope to take the Zoey's Room "pipeline" community to Project NML. This approach encompasses the traits recognized in participatory culture, including:

• Low barriers for artistic expression & civic engagement

• Strong support for creating and sharing what you create with others

• Some type of formal mentorship (pass it along to newbies)

• Members contribution matters - reinforce your contribution is important

• Some degree of social connection matters

And first and foremost, I bring the knowledge of lessons learned in the field. Of having taken theories and created a successful digital learning application. Having processed what works and doesn't work will help Project NML be successful and hopefully push the digital learning community further.

What have you learned through working on Project NML so far that helps you think differently about Zoey's Room?

In your graduate proseminar on Media Theory and Methods, you ask your students to interview a media maker and to try to get a sense of the theoretical assumptions underlying their work. Zoey's Room has been a practical application but the research that we looked at to develop Zoey's Room was girls and STEM. We were media makers so we didn't look at the media theories to develop... we just did it.

Since becoming Research Manager for Project NML, I realize that we intuitively created a participatory culture for members of Zoey's Room. Even though the program was about encouraging girls in STEM, it is an example of a shift in media literacy from thinking about what media does to helping change our mindset to what choices we make as users / producers of media. This is an active way of participating in media instead of the passive way to what media we consume.

We cannot have media literacy be a separate class / add-on at the end as we've seen in the past decade. Instead it needs to be infused cross-curricular.

Reviewing the skills against Zoey's Room Tec-Treks, I see these skills come into play both in and out of the digital realm. There are connections of how kids are connecting in the digital realm to what they should be doing in the classroom. This skill set is not just about high-tech activities. This is an opportunity to help kids acquire skills on how they process knowledge so that they can participate in a new way.

We've been rethinking the goals of Project NML since you've come on board, but the impact of that rethinking has not yet been made visible to the public. What can you tell us about the Project's future plans?

This semester, we've created new approaches to working on this project that really has allowed everyone on the team to understand the goals we want to deliver.

We are currently immersed in production with a goal to re-launch Project NML's interactive website Fall 2008. The new website will allows users to create their own pathways through our exemplar library and have users create and add their own material to the exemplar library.

The exemplar library is a sampling of the participatory culture framework centered around the 4 C's ...how do we Create, Connect, Communicate and Collaborate. It is an interactive learning library that creatively encompasses a best practice video with an online activity and offline group challenge. The library is built on an extensive backend database where each piece is tagged on multiple traits including; the 11 new media literacy skills, media tools, traditional subjects, and the 5 ethical categories created by Harvard's Good Play project.

The exemplar library will also have some online activities that highlight our collaboration with Harvard's Good Play project. These activities will provide a springboard for discussion on a dilemma centered on one of the five ethical categories: identity, ownership / authorship, privacy, participation and credibility.

As community is the glue to learning online and Project NML will provide a venue for all users to answer the question, "How do YOU create, connect, communicate and collaborate?" This type of user-generated content will allow for the library to expand by the community and for new best practices to emerge, be shared and discussed.

Whereas Project NML's exemplar library is informal learning directed to the teen, the Teacher's Strategy Guide: Education in a Participatory Culture provides structure for a teacher to integrate the new media literacies into the traditional classroom. The framework includes a lesson plan, with extension link of ways to extend the 1-2 class period lesson plan into a semester or year-long project with options to tie to other class subjects as well as a side bar that provides entry points to engage the student through the Project NML exemplar library.

We currently are in development of our first guide called Moby Dick: Remixed and are currently seeking 10 high school English / Literature teachers to test our Teacher's Strategy Guide: Education in a Participatory Culture in Fall 2008. Moby Dick: Remixed help students to better understand the appropriation and transformation of pre-existing cultural materials which shaped some of the most cherished works in the western cannon. The guide provides a set of lesson plans that juxtapose Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Ricardo Pitts-Wiley's theater performance Moby-Dick: Then and Now and is a clear example of the new media literacy skill: appropriation.

Our next steps are to develop material for history / geography teachers. The next guide will be called Weaving the Threads - Social Mapping to Global Citizenship. This project will couple children's interest in cultural diversity with our own interest in the New Media Literacy skills required to process new forms of simulation and representation, producing a project which challenges participants to think about their relationship to their space in fresh new ways. Such a curriculum should enhance traditional social science education, while allowing students to become active participants in their learning rather than passive recipients, because it is in this approach that we help our children become global citizens.

Mentorship will continue with expansion into a media franchise. One of the motivating factors of the community is to develop a character based on the 4 C's. This character will be customizable per user and provide rewards for motivation within the community. This character has the potential to be the lead character in an e-zine style program targeting Tweens. With the collaborative learning community online, the strategy guides deployed to the classroom and the television series, Project NML will be a transmedia experience that helps foster the new media literacies.

If you'd like to become a test school for Project nml, please contact our outreach coordinator Jenna McWilliams at .

Want to know more about new media literacies? If you live in the Boston area, you might want to check out a forum being held at the Brattle Theater at Harvard Square on Dec. 12, 5:30 pm:

MIT Press And The MacArthur Foundation Present

Totally Wired: How Technology Is Changing Kids And Learning

Are digital media changing how young people learn and play? A public forum featuring Howard Gardner (Harvard Graduate School of Education), Henry Jenkins (MIT), and Katie Salen (Parsons School of Design), hosted by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, as part of its $50 million digital media and learning initiative. The panel will be introduced by Jonathan Fanton, MacArthur President, and moderated by Connie Yowell, MacArthur's Director of Education. Free and open to the public.

Free and open to the public

The event is designed to celebrate the launch of a new series of books being released by MacArthur and the MIT Press which share state of the art research on how kids learn and what they encounter in the new media landscape. The first six books in the series are being released this month and will be available online as of December 12.

"This Ain't Your Gramma's Embroidery!": An Interview with Jenny Hart

Every year, I ask the students in my graduate proseminar on Media Theory and Methods to interview a media maker and to try to get a sense of the theoretical assumptions underlying their work. In part, this exercise is designed to give students some experience in conducting and interpreting interviews. In part, it is intended to get them out of the classroom and testing how the ideas we've been exploring in academic terms throughout the course relate to what's happening on the ground. Every year, I am astounded by what students come up with -- especially the diversity of media represented in an average cohort in our program. And so, off and on, I am going to be sharing with you a few of the essays I received which I felt would be of particular interest to regular readers of this blog. This first deals with the relationship between art, craft, and popular culture, a recurring theme in this class, brought home by Whitney Trettien's interview with Jenny Hart, an artist who works in embroidery. Enjoy.

"This Ain't Your Gramma's Embroidery!": An Interview with Jenny Hart

by Whitney Trettien

Jenny Hart is, first and foremost, an artist. Her work has been shown in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, London; she has been featured in the magazines Spin, Rolling Stone and Bust, to name a few. Many of her pieces are in the private collections of celebrities, including Carrie Fisher, Ben Harper, Tracey Ullman, Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor.

Yet most would dismiss her medium as mere hobby-craft, a distraction for middle-aged housewives. Hart paints with embroidery thread on cloth canvasses.

"I work with embroidery in multiple ways," Hart told me; "as fine art, as illustration, as a hobby-craft." Although she dropped out of art school to study French, Hart now shows her work in galleries and frequently collaborates with contemporary artists, such as Kevin Scalzo and Jon Langford.

"Aw Nutts" by Jenny Hart and Kevin Scalzo. 2002. Hand-embroidery on satin and felt.

One of her recent pieces, "Oh Unicorn," invites the viewer to break down the arts/crafts dichotomy through its tender treatment of its subject and its "non-traditional media" - deerskin embroidered with her own hair, a process she has described as "embroidering with air".

. "Oh Unicorn." 2005. Hair embroidered on leather.

When the swatch of deerskin makes up the back of a jacket or purse, the needlework is mere embellishment; when pinned to a gallery wall, though, the delicacy of the lines illuminates the artistry in hobby-craft, and the craftwork required to make art. Says Hart, "I introduce themes in patterns that typically are not used but have an obvious (at least to me) relationship to needlearts," both underscoring and obscuring her relationship to contemporary embroidery aesthetics.

It's clear in Hart's work that her artistic predecessors are not the darlings of the modern art world, but comic artists and illustrators like Moebius and George Herriman. "I grew up reading my older brothers' stash of independent comics," Hart admits. "Zap, Weirdo, Neat Stuff, Heavy Metal, Love and Rockets, Ranzerox - I love illustration and great comics. They also are a great inspiration to me for embroidery." One of her most recent works, "Girl with Japanese Clouds," uses the iconography of manga to express quiet grief, while much of her portraiture draws upon the conventions of classic illustration.

"Girl with Japanese Clouds." 2006. Hand embroidery on denim

"I'm working on an embroidered comic series this upcoming year," Hart says, adding that she has collaborated with comic artists in the past.

Hart, though, is quick to note that unlike comics, her work is not narrative. "I see my work as having a memorializing quality," she says. "This has to do with the medium - embroidery, often used on quilts and for heirlooms - and the format, portraiture." Despite needlework's long history in both art and storytelling - the Bayeux Tapestry is a typical example - today, embroidery is seen as a decorative craft, a means of ornamenting a useful object. Hart's portraits, however, allow embroidery to stand on its own, freeing her work to play with the concept of ornamentation. She often does so by ironically "decorating" not an object, but her subject. In "Jim Goad," for instance, the notorious author's head floats above the phrase "Nolite me culpare," while flames, a dying snake and revolvers adorn the edges of the fabric.

Jim Goad." 2002. Hand-embroidery and sequins on cotton

In a more flattering portrait, Hart embroiders "Ars longa, vita brevis est" under the ruggedly handsome head of Bill Hicks. Hart admits, "I tend to idealize people in my portraits."

Bill Hicks." 2003. Hand-embroidery and sequins on cotton and satin.

Hart also shies away from describing her work as "feminist." "Well, I'm quick to explain that my work was never intended as a feminist statement, or a comment on domestic handcrafts," she tells me. "But, once I began the work I came to respect that connection, I became aware of it - the time, the care and skill that goes into embroidering is overlooked and undervalued as 'women's work.'" Although none of her work is overtly feminist, iconic and bold women, such as Dolly Parton and the burlesque dancer Irma the Body, play prominently in her portraiture.

Blue Dolly." 2003. Hand-embroidery and sequins on cotton.

If Hart has not been shy to challenge the boundary between art and craft or high art and popular art, it should come as no surprise that she has used her artistic success to venture into business. Through Sublime Stitching, Hart sells embroidery patterns which center on a single theme that is often retro or camp, such as "Roller Derby" or wrestling ("¡Lucha Libre!"). "I saw no new 'mix' happening with embroidery," Hart says. "It was either flowers, or teddy bears or traditional themes worked over and over again with no new themes being introduced." The patterns may include a phrase or font, some icons related to the theme and a few more complex designs which the buyer can then mix and remix to create her own work.

Embroidered figures from Sublime Stitching's "Roller Derby" kit

Recently, Hart has used her business as a platform to disseminate the work of artists within the d.i.y. crafts world. She says, "I have started engaging the work of well-known illustrators (Kurt Halsey, Mitch O'Connell, Julie West) to design embroidery sheets for my company, that are sold to hobbyists." Illustrator Kurt Halsey's kit, for example, features needlework-friendly iterations of his twee pop illustrations, while tattoo and comics artist Mitch O'Connell's kit includes his trademark busty "bad gals." Hart has also collaborated with artists in other media, including indie pop bands The Decemberists and The Flaming Lips. These collaborations serve to collapse the distinction not only between artist and hobbyist, but between untouchable gallery work and reproduced, commodified craft. "Never before were the works of artists or illustrators sold as the craft platform for hobbyists," Hart explains, "unless they were doing so anonymously as a commercial and financial necessity. I'm deliberately combining the two to bring their fine art to craft, and the attention of crafters to their art."

By now, it should be clear that Hart's work draws from models typically thought of in relation to "new media": transmedia storytelling, media remix and mash-ups, internet entrepreneurship, participatory culture, social networking. Yet when asked to apply these concepts to her own work, Hart hesitates. "I guess I was working in 'new media' without realizing it," she tells me. "I'm definitely aware of working with an old medium and moving forward an old handcraft with emerging technology. The internet made it possible for me to launch my company." In many ways, Hart's work invites us to see digital technology not only in the context of the new, but in the context of the old, the nostalgic, or the residual - to explore, as Will Straw puts it, "the internet's relationship to a cultural past that it reinvigorates and invests with value."

Whitney Anne Trettien is a first year Master's Student in the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. She holds a B.A. in both English and Philosophy from Hood College (2007), spent her time as an undergraduate studying early English literature, continental and post-modern philosophy, as well as Latin, Old English, and Ancient Greek. Outside the classroom, she wrote extensively for online indie rock publications, edited webzines, and designed clothing for her internet company Moonslush. Unexpected commonalities between her academic research and the online communities she was involved with sparked her ongoing interest in the relationship between early oral narratives and the so-called "secondary orality" produced in digital culture.

Trettien is also a Truman Scholar and a political activist, having worked with the Green Party, Amnesty International, Women in Black, ACORN, and the Pro-Literacy Council, among other groups. She recently edited an anthology of stories, poems, photography, and artwork from the American peace movement entitled Cost of Freedom, which was published by Howling Dog Press in 2007.

"We Had So Many Stories to Tell": The Heroes Comics as Transmedia Storytelling

"We had so many stories to tell and there was only so much room in the TV show -- so we decided that we could tell these alternative stories in the comics. The stories could be deeper, broader and reveal more secrets about our characters. It was also a way to tell stories that would be otherwise unproduceable on our show." -- Aron Eli Coleite and Joe Pokaski on the Heroes comics.

From time to time, I have used this blog to point towards key steps in the evolution of what I have been calling transmedia storytelling. For a good overview of the concept, check out my Transmedia Storytelling 101 post. Here's part of my definition:

Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story. So, for example, in The Matrix franchise, key bits of information are conveyed through three live action films, a series of animated shorts, two collections of comic book stories, and several video games. There is no one single source or ur-text where one can turn to gain all of the information needed to comprehend the Matrix universe.

This concept has been more fully developed through a series of recent CMS thesis, which you can access on line: Ivan Askwith discusses Lost as an example of how media extensions can be used to enhance audience engagement; Geoffrey Long discusses the aesthetics of transmedia entertainment with a focus on the Jim Henson corporation; Sam Ford explores how transmedia storytelling might expand the reach of contemporary soap operas; and Alec Austin develops an approach to genre conventions which helps to explain the interplay of different elements in a transmedia system.

My thoughts have returned to transmedia entertainment having recently read the graphic novel edition of the first season's comics for Heroes, which comes with a wonderful Alex Ross cover, and which includes an interesting conversation between Executive Producer Jeph Loeb and series writers Aron Eli Coleite and Joe Pkaski about the impulses which led them to use comics to build out the world of Heroes on the web. This post is also inspired by the conversation which I had with Heroes producers Jesse Alexander and Mark Warshaw at the MIT Communications Forum a few weeks ago. The webcast version of that exchange can not be found on the web and includes rich discussions of how Heroes fits within larger industry trends that stress "engagement" rather than "appointment" television.

Comics have emerged as a key vehicle for constructing transmedia narratives -- in part because they cost less to produce and are thus lower risk than developing games or filming additional material. (See my discussion of the contributions of comics to the Matrix franchise in Convergence Culture.) So, in the past year alone, we've seen Joss Whedon turn to comics to create a "8th season" of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we've seen Supernatural generate comics designed to flesh out some of the backstory of the Winchester brothers, and we've seen Battlestar Galactica use comics to fill in the gaps between seasons in the series. Of these, however, Heroes was the only series to be releasing comics on a weekly basis via the web to coincide with the rolling out of the series episodes, resulting in comics that are much more fully integrated into the flow of the series narrative. Indeed, I felt a bit at a disadvantage reading these stories in a book form without reviewing the series episodes on DVD at the same time.

Many of us feel that the Matrix franchise took the concept of transmedia storytelling too far, too fast, to achieve reasonable embrace from a mass viewership. There were gaping holes in The Matrix films which could only be filled if you had spent time with the comics, the game, and the anime. And the production company had not done an adequate job in educating the public about the integral role of these other media channels to the experience as a whole. I hear this again and again from people who read Convergence Culture: they liked the first Matrix film but were turned off by the sequels because they didn't seem to add up to anything and they had no idea that most of these others series related materials existed.

In the interview about the comics, Coleite and Pokaski took a very different tactic:

Our first rule going in was that you didn't have to read the comic to enjoy the show, but it created an enhanced experience if you did. On the other side, we wanted people who did watch the show and read the comic to feel rewarded -- that they were taking part of something larger and give them real emotional and important stories -- not just fluff or filler.

And of course, the presence of the comics are signaled within the television series itself. By the start of the second episode, we've seen Hiro reading 9th Wonders comics, which, within the fiction, is produced by Isaac Mendez, and learn that the comics may hold a key for understanding what's happening. Hiro repeatedly consults the comics to discover what he needs to do next and to make sense of his mission, much as other characters are studying Issac's paintings to foretell and hopefully escape their fates.

And of course, there's such a clear fit between comics and the content of Heroes that it would be a crying shame if they had not sought to integrate comics into the series in some way. Yet, if Heroes draws upon the superhero medium, it does not fit within the mainstream of that genre, at least as it is currently constituted within the comics marketplace. Heroes pushes into a darker, more psychologically nuanced, more "realistic" and less fantastical version of the genre which is much more likely to be published by Image or Dark Horse or Vertigo or Wildstorm than by DC and Marvel's main flagship series.Jeph Loeb (the series producer) and Tim Sale (the comics artist who creates Issac's paintings) ,u>have worked for both DC and Marvel, but in that work, they have combined their distinctive look and themes with mainstream characters like Batman, Superman, or Spider-Man. It's amusing that DC published the Heroes graphic novel when they would almost certainly have turned down Heroes as a comics series if there hadn't been a successful television series (not to mention some high powered artists and writers attached.)

While there are certainly some segments in the anthology of Heroes stories which do not rise above "fluff or filler," most of the stories do achieve some degree of emotional impact -- at least for those of us who are already invested in the characters -- and in that sense, the stories function very much like very good fan fiction -- fleshing out secondary characters, filling in back story, and providing "missing scenes" which round out the action depicted on the screen. The stories are told in what the authors call a "Haiku style" -- that is to say, "short and purposeful, every panel meaning something", offering complex stories in five page installments. Essentially, the writers broke down the pages of a monthly comic into a series of shorter chunks and rolled a chunk out every week as opposed to delivering the whole each month. In some cases, the story is completed in five pages, like the back of the book segments in a classic superhero comic, and in other cases, the stories get serialized over multiple installments. As you read through this first volume, you can see the authors experiment with the benefits of longer or shorter chunks of narrative and the center of gravity moves towards greater serialization as this volume continues.

Early on, they clearly saw the stories as providing a bit more character development given the sheer number of new characters they were introducing at the launch of an ensemble cast serial drama. For example, the first story, "Monsters," fleshes out the relationship between Mohinder and his father: disturbed by folktales about Kali, Mohinder seeks explaination from his father, who tells him "the world is an amazing place, Mohinder, but there's no such thing as monsters." And the boy comes to trust his father's scientific perspective. The man develops greater doubts as his confronts the aftermath of his father's death in the course of a story which would have offered fans their first hint of "Sylar." The artwork offers a vivid representation of the competing world views of science and religion which would be hard to convey through most other media, offering competing and yet simultaneously visible representations of the same event. The second story, "The Crane," takes us back to Japan, where we learn about Hiro's relationship to his grandfather, who had survived Hiroshima, providing a vivid link between his culture's past and the explosion which he must work all season to prevent. And the third, "Trial by Fire," shows Nathan Petrelli deploying his powers to rescue a woman from a burning building, hinting at a heroic side of a character who is consistently depicted as self-centered on the series.

There are some key scenes which overlap between the comics and the television series, enough that we can see how the parts fit together, but for the most part, the comics stories take us different places and tell us different things. Yet, the stories reflect back on what takes place in the series at a much deeper level than say, the Star Trek comics I read as a boy, which shared characters but no real plot points with the aired episodes. In the old model, the comics stories weren't allowed to change anything meaningful about the relationships in the series and thus, the stories remained relatively shallow in terms of their implications for the characters. Here, because the writing of the comics is closely coordinated with the writing of the series, the comics are much more interwoven into the unfolding of character information on the aired episodes. In some cases, they hint at things that television viewers may not discover until later in the run of the series, offering a degree of foreshadowing. In other cases, they provided deeper insights into character's motivations in key scenes, much like a flashback might function in a traditional screen narrative. In effect, the author's off-load certain aspects of narrative construction into this alternative medium, offering a richer experience to those who venture there.

Several of the stories, in true superhero comic fashion, show us how characters, such as Parkman and Isaac, discover their powers. "Hell's Angel" shows us the moment when H.R.G. first adopted Claire, rescuing her from the rubble of a burning building, constituting a classic example of the kind of "missing scene" which is so often left for fans to create on their own. It was clear from my time with Alexander and Warshaw a few weeks ago that they were both fans, who shared our communities love for back story and character development and fascination with an ever-expanding and richly-detailed fictional world.

As the series unfolds, the comics provided additional backstory, suggesting things about the older generation's pasts which have still not been fully revealed on the air, despite a growing focus on the inter-generational drama in Season 2. So, for example, Mark Warshaw's multipart "War Buddies" series shows us the first meeting between the Petrelli patriarch and Linderman during the Vietnam War. The story contributes a great deal to our understanding of these two key characters who had until that point remained largely in the shadows.

The biggest revelation to those who have only watched the series is how central the figure of Hanna Gitelman ("Wireless") is to the comics. I scarcely remember the character from the aired episodes, to be honest, but she emerges here as perhaps the most compelling character, with a good third of the comics devoted to fleshing out who she is, where she comes from, what her powers are, and how she relates to H.R.G. Gitelman's ability to access and navigate across media makes her an ideal personification for the series's own transmedia impulses and she becomes a role model for consumers who are being asked to connect together meaningful bits of information across multiple sources in order to construct a fuller picture of what's going on here. In the interview, the authors stress that they can show things in comics -- "Fire. Space. Polar Ice Caps. Jungles of Africa. Battles with Indian gods and confrontations with Australian rock formations" which would be hard to film, if not prohibitively expensive for a television series. As they exclaim, "there is no limit in this format" and so clearly they wanted a character they could totally own and do with what they wanted. Her presence on the television series might be read as a reward for the comic's readers who go into such scenes with added expertise, though the character remains marginal enough to the series that it doesn't really matter to most viewers if they don't know that her grandmother was a resistance fighter in Germany during World War II, that her mother was a fighter pilot in the Israeli military, or that Hanna was raised in an orphanage in Tel Aviv.

Within the industry discourse, such experiments in transmedia extension are still primarily understood through a language of "promotion." Indeed, this issue of what constitutes new content and what is purely promotional is at the heart of the current Writer's Strike in Hollywood. These comics make a real creative contribution to our experience of Heroes, enhancing our intitial encounters with these characters, providing core aspects of backstory throughout, and even developing characters who live more on the comics page than they do on the screen. We are still groping to find an aesthetic language to describe and evaluate these kinds of stories; this needs to be understood by all involved as an artistic experiment, an attempt to understand how storytellers can more fully exploit the potentials of convergence culture.

For more background, Gamasutra offers a good summary of the transmedia panel at Futures of Entertainment 2, which featured not only Jesse Alexander from Heroes but also Danny Bilson, producer of games, comics, films, television series, and starlets, Jeff Gomez from Starlight Runner, and Gordon Titchell from Walden Media, producer of the Narnia films.

Jason Mittell's reflections on Heroes in the aftermath of the MIT Communications Forum and Futures of Entertainment events sparked some interesting comments from Heroes creator Tim Kring.

Gender and Fan Culture (Wrapping Up, Part Four)

Cynthia Walker: This conversation series has been very enjoyable and interesting and even, at times, fascinating, and I would like to thank everyone who participated and Henry Jenkins for hosting it.

It felt very much like a virtual conference and, as with most academic conferences I attend, I came away feeling both exhilarated but also overwhelmed. Indeed, I've been spending the last few days reviewing each of the conversations and making notes so I can remember the participants and their areas of expertise for future reference.

Although the conversations were organized around the question of gender, they ranged across a wide variety of subjects including fan fiction, fan vidding, machinima, gaming, horror, graphic novels and more. Still, there were common themes running through the discussions, particularly the relationships between individual fans and fan communities, between and among academics, and between audiences and producers.

What has become clear to me is that what we're seeing in fan studies is an emerging interdisciplinary field and as such, we should be moving toward establishing our own conferences, our own forums (such as this one) and our own journals. Unlike the folks in other fields who sometimes seem to be talking just to each other, we have the opposite problem: we have to comb academic conferences just to find one another. I know I often search the programs of conferences I attend in Communication, popular culture, media literacy and media ecology, just to find panels on fan-related topics. Sometimes, there's just one. Sometimes, there are none at all. This needs to change.

Another point that struck me in reading these conversations was how much we depend upon impressions, anecdotes, and personal conversations and experiences in discussing fan identity and fan practice. Perhaps because, originally, I came into academia through Communication and media studies rather than cultural and literary studies, I think I would like to see more quantitative and qualitative research, more surveys and focus groups, exploring just how fans see themselves, what they do, how they do it, and why. In this, I have felt encouraged to pursue my own research in that direction because I would really like to get a sense of the lay of the land of fandom -- a map as it were. What exactly is this phenomenon called Fandom (with a capital F)? Does it have boundaries, and if so, what are they?

Since the relationship of media producers and fan audiences is also a subject that keeps cropping up, I would like to see more research in this area, research that is not conducted only by mainstream Communication and media studies scholars, but by those of us who also have some knowledge and acquaintance with fan communities. This is especially important because more and more of those working as media professionals either come from, or self-identify, as fans, and, particularly on the Internet, commercial and fan spaces are encroaching upon one another.

Finally, because gender apparently does influence, at least to some extent, fan identity, community, practices, interests, and interpretation, I hope these conversations will inform our work in this new field of fan studies so that certain topics, practices and approaches are not privileged over others. We have more in common than not, and as fan studies scholars, I believe it's in our collective interest to find those areas where our identities and interests overlap and pursue them.

Will Brooker:

If this was a superhero summer crossover event, I guess I was Animal Man, or the Blue Beetle, or Booster Gold& one of those third-string DC characters (barely even superheroes, more a normal guy with a bit of a gimmick) who appears for a few issues then vanishes between the frames, leaving only his most die-hard fans to wonder where he went.

My little narrative involved a team-up with Kristine Busse and Ksenia Prassolova, across a series of messy personal emails that we then group-edited down into a neater conversation. I enjoyed those emails; I felt we found some common ground, disagreed respectfully and had a few laughs. It was a positive experience for me, especially given that the last time I'd seen Kristine in real life, in the bizarre setting of the Dog and Duck English pub, Austin Texas, we had the kind of mildly-drunken debate about gender privilege that may have prompted this whole event.

My feelings about that mini-narrative entering the bigger debate of Henry's blog and the LiveJournal mirror are closely tied into my feelings about internet forums in general. I was deeply involved in maybe half a dozen discussion groups between 2001 and 2006, and while that's late in the day by some people's standards, about a third of my life seemed to be lived online during that period. So I'm familiar with the sniping, the cross-board politics, the elaborate insults, the wounded egos - the dynamics that occur when normal people meet online as larger-than-life textual persona, often with a few different codenames, a hardcore group of followers and an established reputation - maybe the closest we get in academia to a clash of superheroes. I know a handful of the participants in real life, and I often didn't recognise the way they were being constructed and responded to; sometimes it did seem as though the debate demanded a few villains to knock up against and tear down.

So I bowed out of participating in the spin-off discussions because I've had enough of internet arguments for the time being, and it looked to be going a way I've seen before. I think the anonymous, text-based nature of an online forum encourages people to see each other as cartoonish, stylised opponents, encourages the sense of a grand battle complete with allies and cheerleaders, and encourages individuals to carefully craft poisonous barbs and rhetorical missiles, and fling them at each other trying to cause maximum damage. When really, if they sat down face to face, they'd just be normal men and women with a bit of a gimmick. But I've probably been reading too many comics.

Francesca Coppa:

What's been striking to me over the course of this debate is the extent to which the gender issues reflect general problems of convergence culture--that is, the mainstreaming of fannish practice as well as the as growing respectability of "fandom studies". Fandom is a subculture well on its way to becoming culture, and while that has many benefits, it also raises the risk of re-marginalizing the groups that the subculture once represented. The Enterprising Women of 1992 are now only a small, not terribly profitable, subdivision of Fandom, Inc. The line between "fans" and "consumers," once fairly distinct, is blurring as we talk of Apple fans, Dr. Pepper fans, Hummer fans, etc.

I worry about women becoming, yet again, a minority voice in a mixed gender fannish culture in which the makers of Chad Vader get a movie deal and the makers of the K/S vid Closer flee the internet when their vids go viral. The media--especially the genre media which has been the center of so much fannish activity--has typically courted a male demographic, despite (or perhaps because of) their female-dominated audiences. And female fans have typically made lemonade from these lemons; it's no accident that so much "remix" culture happens in the context of minority communities: women, blacks, and the disabled. But in the end, my lovingly crafted fanwork is not your marketing team's "user-generated content."

I think this is why there was such a strong reaction to the gender composition of the panel audiences at MiT5: it reflected our larger cultural fears about the way media is marketed and which consumers matter. In a world where fanboys get development deals, many female fannish interests--and the scholarly works about them--can look comparatively non-mainstream; with their longstanding (and culturally determined) commitment to the local, the handmade, the non-profit, female fans can seem small time, of limited interest, insufficiently "universal." In fandom studies female-created artifacts were a priority because media fandom was so heavily female. Now, as this summer's debate proved, the field has expanded to include all sorts of new arts, practices, and communities.

This is a good thing; I think fandom studies is exciting right now because of its diversity of subject, and also because it has a lot more than its share of "public intellectuals": we're not simply nattering to ourselves, locked in our own esoteric disciplines. We're talking to media producers, legislators, teachers, public advocacy organizations, and we're making connections across fannish communities. But it's important that we keep talking to each other, too, because there's a danger that minority communities (and somehow women in a mixed-gender groups end up as "minority communities," no matter how many of us there are in the room) might be marginalized in the transition from subculture to culture.

Robin Anne Reid

Now I must admit up front that there are gaps. During the first rounds, I was in summer mode, with more time to read and comments. Later on, as we started a new term in a department with major new program and curriculum initiatives taking place, I fell back on skimming, without being able to take the time to read carefully enough to respond. I hope to spend some more time reading over the winter break (and of course I'll respond in the LJ community then!), but take what is below as based on a partial reading (and if you want to point me at great rounds I missed, feel free to do so).

I learned :

That while there are still some important issues regarding gender in the area of fan studies, one of the more serious gaps that needs to be addressed are disciplinary differences. I have a much stronger sense than before of all the current academic disciplines that fan studies is developing in, and a sense that we need to talk more. That being said, I was disappointed to

see so little representation by people trained in the social sciences [remember, point me to stuff I might have missed].

I was glad to see so much work being done along such a wide spectrum of fan productions and communities, and in fandoms such as sports, soap opera, etc. I learned a lot from reading postings by people active in those areas.

I was glad to see some sense of the international nature of fan studies, although I look forward to seeing more work in future by academics working with fan communities and cultures in other national languages.

However, I also learned:

My initial skepticism about the tendency of the majority of male academics to show little to no interest in any serious discussion about gender disparity in scholarship, status, texts, professional places, etc., was confirmed. Perhaps the existence of some women academics saying they had not faced discrimination indicates that in some academic environments things

are changing, or in some disciplines, but the lack of acknowledgment of other women's experiences was problematic.

I am concerned at the extent to which, even in discussions where feminism was identified as an important part of a field or discourse, many of the participants seemed to insist on locating sexism as individual intentional acts as opposed to acknowledging the systemic and institutionalized nature of organized and restrictive hierarchies. Being marginalized in one academic discipline because you study X subject being consistently equated with being

marginalized in the whole academic culture because of gender and field or study and perhaps sexual identity reduces the whole debate to accusations of some individuals lack of character

I learned that if it was this hard, after thirty some years of feminist discussions in mainstream culture and academia, to discuss gender disparity, that serious discussion of class and race are probably not going to happen any time soon among the aca-fen (despite happening more in fandom). I saw only one round where a participant seriously discussed race and class.

I learned that it is very rare for male academics even in this more informal forum to talk at all about how children might affect their careers in any way whatsoever. Whether there is little or no effect, or whether men are simply trained never to talk about their children in professional

spaces, or some combination of both, I am not sure. From research done about women's marginalization in the academy, I suspect that the gaps showing up between childfree women and women who choose to have children will consider to be a problem for some time.

I learned that identification of male privilege, a common concept for decades among feminists, is still perceived as an attack on individuals by some.

I learned that there are always male allies who are appreciated.

I have been glad to meet those men who I will consider from now on as part of the (numerically mostly) female networks where I prefer to spend most of my networking energies.

On the whole, however, I do not think that new and evolving disciplines are necessarily move egalitarian than existing/traditional ones, and that without careful and on-going self-evaluation, a new discipline can easily ossify into old patterns, even if there are a few more white, middle-class women active in it.

Jonathan Gray

One of my original responses to Kristina when she and I discussed fandom, fan studies, and academia's gender divides in Austin was that a lot of the divisions were "just" because of friendship groups. I've since come around to seeing many structuring divides that determine those friendship groups in the first place. And since knowing each other's work and ideas are the best "in" towards establishing better social networks, which will in turn determine more balanced panel constituency, audience constituency, collaborations, etc. in the future, I'm cautiously optimistic that the discussions that have taken place here have formed something of a community (The Fan Détente Summer Camp?) that wasn't there before, and that is now considerably more gender diverse. I know many more people's work, and I feel I know the field much better now.

That said, I don't want to make it sound like the work's done, since I think this Détente has pointed out how much work is required to try and fight the subtler forms of gendered privilege. In particular, clearly more effort is required of us guys to be feminist fan studies (or fan studies-ish) scholars than just smugly knowing we're not the overtly sexist bastards we see elsewhere, and than reading, teaching, and writing with feminist theory.

In moving forward, part of what interests me is how representative or not this group is. For instance, there've been numerous "fandom-lite" males at the Détente, but few fandom-lite females. I know they exist en masse, though, because I meet many of them at conferences, in dept corridors, etc. I'd like to hear how streamlined the experiences of the "fangirls" are with those of the "non-fangirls," as this might tell us what's unique and what's not to fan studies' gender divides. I worry somewhat that at times in this discussion the small group of scholars here, along with their fandoms and fan practices, have been asked to stand in for female or male fandom and female or male consumption more generally. So I'm keen to continue these discussions, both with the Summer Camp and with other fan and non-fan studies men and women.

All along, though, I wish we could've had this whole thing take place in a pub. With Henry buying. Nevertheless, thanks go out to Henry and Kristina for getting the ball rolling on this, and here's to some pub trips in the future.

Karen Helleckson:

Although these fan debates have been valuable, for me, they were less valuable as an explication of gender disparity than as an examination of current scholarship in a huge variety of arenas. I liked the biography parts the best: I found myself looking for others like me, like Deborah Kaplan (#16) and Kristina Busse (#7)--those of us who are unaffiliated. I read everybody's bio with interest. This situating of the self helped me construct their theoretical framework for reading their texts. These constructions of self credential, but they also illuminate. With "my published books include" laid next to "my primary fandom is," it's clear that the academic and the fan must coexist, else how to entwine the interests?

The explications of the entwining that followed ranged from practice (eg, #21, Lucas and Santo) to theory (eg, #18, Russo and Postigo). I found myself enjoying the latter just a little bit more: I have my own practice, my own ways of engagement, which seems unlikely to change anytime soon, but my mind grabs onto these theoretical elements and then begins free-associating. I read about affect and gender (#14, Coppa and Kozinets) and was seized with a desire to revisit the poetics of pleasure; or I read about Japanese cinema fandom (#19 Morimoto and Surman) and it struck me that I have not seen much Japanese cinema, and certainly that must be rectified immediately. The sheer range of interests makes me dizzy, and everywhere I look, I see potential for good, fruitful, interesting work--work that I would like to do, and in that regard, the fan debates have inspired me to begin writing again, after a long time away.

I wrote my dialogue with Jason Mittel using Google Documents, where each could go in and edit the work of the other--a collaboration I very much enjoyed and have used since then with others. I began writing down my own thoughts at my WordPress blog, a process I enjoy despite the lack of dialogue inherent in the fan debates. So the fan debates have certainly helped make me engage better, and they've drawn my attention to the work of many people I didn't know anything about--as well as taught me things about people I do know.

Instead of he said/she said, the fan debates have become we said. The dialogues, taken together, have created a kind of metadialogue. True, it doesn't come to any kind of grand conclusion. The gender-based feelings of exclusion that inspired the project are still in evidence (I witnessed much the same thing at the recent 21st annual SLSA meeting). The same notions of power and authority still apply, even as we discuss them. But the connections made, interlocutor to interlocutor, pairing to pairing, strike me as worthy things in and of themselves. I would consider e-mailing someone I don't really know to ask for advice or an opinion, rather than staying close to my own network. I spend too much time in a small group, and it's time to widen my circle of acquaintances.

Thanks for that opportunity.

Anne Kustritz:

In reviewing these past few months of blog posts, I find I'm left with tentative optimism and a few areas of future concern. I've appreciated the opportunity to speak publicly in this company, and particularly to raise the visibility of gender as an axis of oppression and a lens for analysis within fan studies. When time permitted, I greatly enjoyed reading the contributions posted here for the glimpse that they provide into such a wide range of approaches to fan studies. However, I must also recall moments of shock and dismay as the discussion repeatedly revealed the enormous amount of work yet to be done on gender issues within our field, and in the academy more generally.

Overall, I remain unconvinced that a discussion series between individual scholars adequately responds to the institutional problems which prompted this debate. The issues of sex/gender related disparities in graduate student admissions, hiring, tenure decisions, wage levels, publishing, and conference organization require broad, institutional interventions far beyond the scale of our conversations here, and I hope that the détente will inspire those larger acts of intervention.

In addition, this series of exchanges magnified some of the difficulties which always plague interdisciplinary work and communication within an interdisciplinary field. Crossing disciplinary boundaries is incredibly exciting and necessary to the study of fan activities. Yet, such hybrid methodologies also involve increased risk. As fan studies adopts the tools of many disciplines, I think that we must take a very serious look at how those tools developed, and what kind of theoretical, socio-cultural, and historical baggage they carry with them. Further, if we are committed to being able to talk with each other, the task of translation across disciplines also deserves attention as the language of fan studies moves to embrace the jargon of an ever expanding number of fields. This détente included scholars from a promising array of disciplines, theoretical backgrounds, and methodological hybridities, but that very richness demands that in the future fan studies scholars work together to understand each other's theoretical languages, and work to fully engage with the literatures associated with our interdisciplinary methodological choices.

Barbara Lucas:

While I cannot say that I have faced the same level of institutional sexism that has been discussed in (and was, in part, the impetus for) our debates, mostly because my full-time job is in management at a Fortune 100 company, I am a woman working in a male-dominated industry. My company has women managers in accounting and call center operations, human resources, and client relations, but I am the only female manager in field operations. I believe it is easier for me to compete in my corner of the corporate world than it would be in academia. In my corporate position, I can measure success in terms of goals met and results achieved. Those are the things I am judged on, and they are things that can be documented and verified. However, in academia, I am judged on my ideas, my interpretations and perceptions, and the judgments people make based on such things are definitely more subjective, more likely to be colored with their own biases.

In these debates, we have touched on what it means to be a part of an environment where judgments are made in such a fashion. We've also taken care to distance ourselves as individuals from the sort of behavior. I would have liked to have seen this issue discussed in greater detail. It seems critical when we consider that we are called on to specialize and hone a particular area of expertise, only to find that the texts or approaches that speak most strongly to us are the marginalized ones. This makes it all too easy to marginalize the scholars who work with them and the work those scholars produce.

One of the things that our shared field of study encourages and demands is a flexible, interdisciplinary approach to texts. While our critical approaches may reach across disciplines, at times, our focus and application of them can become decidedly myopic. These debates have afforded me the opportunity to see how other scholars approach their own work, and it is this unearthing of the rich veins of possibility that I might not have stumbled across on my own that I found this the most valuable part of our exchanges. I hope that we can continue the dialogues we stared in this forum.

Eden Lee Lackner:

While I think the discussion has been useful in allowing for some limited cross-discipline discussion and for bringing gender, racial and cultural issues to the fore, I do believe that it has also underlined the insidiousness of institutionalized sexism. This may be a function of individualized debates in which participants are far more focussed on person-to-person discourse than larger frameworks, as much of the gendered considerations seemed to whittle down to individual experiences that discard the context in which they take place. That is fairly disheartening as it is a block that requires work from all sides to dissolve, and I do not get the sense that that willingness is in place as of yet.

Additionally, in preparation for these debates I was once again reminded that sexism is not only intergender, but is also -- perhaps more insidiously -- intragender. Issues around providing childcare are largely ignored by many academics on either side of the gender divide, as are essential caregiver roles for those of us with elderly or ailing parents; while these may be major barriers to traditional notions of "proper" academic compliance, no quarter is given for those of us who have loved ones depending on our support. By and large, it is women who fill the caregiver role, and most often suffer the consequences of it: lack of opportunities to move up the academic ladder/participate in projects, lack of tenure, lack of recognition, lack of support. Although I saw this spectre of intragender sexism raise its head, I did not see it discussed in a frank manner within the scope of the series.

I think the reliance on binaries -- fan/academic, female/male, fangirl/fanboy, pink/blue -- is damaging, as it polarizes research and researchers, and frankly, most observations and interactions tend to fall somewhere in between regardless. By forcing our work and ourselves into neat categories, we fail to consider a multiplicity of viewpoints and the palimpsests that make up so much of active fanworks.

Regardless, I was pleased to see a number of different facets considered, from sexism to racism to ethnocentrism, and I do hope to see these discussions spin out in other arenas. And of course, while we touched on these things, we have by no means plumbed the depths of any of them. There is much work still to be done in these areas, which will prove fruitful for those who pursue them. I think we missed an all important complicator, however, in terms of class and who has access to the media we study.

In short, I think these debates were a good start. The interdisciplinary nature of them was eye-opening and fascinating, and the various approaches therein provide Fan/Media Studies with a scope that other disciplines lack. It'd be in all our best interests to continue discussing and interacting with one another, and I would hope in doing so we not only strengthen the discipline but also become more open to issues of privilege.

Robert Jones:

When I was first asked by Henry to participate in the Fangirl/Fanboy discussion, I was both honored and unsure of how I would fit in the conversation. Having published a chapter in Nina and Karen's book on fan cultures, I figured that was what had earned my invitation into the discussion. But as with that volume, I tend to find myself odd man (and I use that intentionally) out among the aca-fan crowd because my fandom extends strictly from gaming. I will always be a lover of the Star Wars sage, but would hardly count myself a fan of the ranks of so many of the other participants in this discussion. And I say this not to alienate gaming fandom from TV/Film fandom because there are certainly crossover elements that many have explored; Bob Rehak and Christian McCrea in particular have illustrated that during this process. However, so many of the aca-fans who primarily come from literary backgrounds and deal mostly with fan fiction seem to share a lack of interest in gaming as a narrative form. Add to that the fact that gaming already carries with it a huge amount of cultural baggage as an area that has so far to come in terms of gender divides, and the fit seems even more difficult. I certainly found the process rewarding and felt I have learned quite a bit about the many tensions at play within the fandom literature.

I would say that the defensive nature in which people were so quick to guard their sacred cows was somewhat surprising. Looking back at my own contribution, I even surprised myself in falling into that same trap. I hardly intended to fetishize gaming technology in regards to the fandom of machinima, but it certainly reads that way in retrospect. My intent was to instead introduce that gender divide that gaming brings with it as it pertains to the technology. Far from essentializing gender as a prescriptive way for understanding why we find so many more men participating in gaming fan culture (i.e. machinima, mods, tournaments), I wanted to suggest cultural discourses and expectations become the motivating factors that make gaming spaces more welcoming to young men. So access becomes the key issue to address here, which is why I really liked it when Robin Reid suggested we expand this to a larger discussion of race/class. Because when we talk about fanboys, we are most often talking about white males with access to these texts and free time to consume them. Unfortunately, the discussion I wound up having tried to situate gaming technology on a different plane than fan-fic and fan-vids. In retrospect, not my best move.

In regards to the split of the discussion that ultimately migrated to Live Journal, I wonder if that is just indicative of this tension/conflict (I hate even using such combative language) that this whole project aimed to overcome. As many had pointed out, the gender divide seemed to carryover into that forum as well, with the women commenting on LJ while the men commented here. Again as an outsider to traditional fan cultures, I found myself only lurking there without the courage to respond to what was certainly a more "spirited" debate than the tamer comments on Henry's site. So while this experience has been rewarding in many ways, particularly being directed to the work of Hector Postigo, I'm not sure that we get to say that "we did it." Not that there were ever any hard and fast goals set out to what this was to achieve, but I would be curious how this will ultimately impact practice. Perhaps a good question to ask everyone would be: What do you plan to do differently within your own work now that you have been a part of this ongoing dialog? To be honest, I'm not even sure how I would answer that question. I'd have to give it some more thought.

Gender and Fan Culture (Wrapping Up, Part Two)

Editor's note: The blog has been under attack from hackers in recent weeks. We have had to disable the comments function in the short run but hope to have it working again soon. I am still very interested in your comments about the Gender and Fan Culture series so send comments to me at henry3@mit.edu and I will post them as soon as we get the comments section functioning. Sorry for encouraging comments just as the whole site went down. Really bad timing! Bob Rehak:

I enjoyed reading and taking part in the summer's conversations, in part because I don't consider myself an aca-fan so much as -- if you'll forgive the neo-neologism -- a fan-aca: that is, while fandom definitely informs my research and teaching (it's what led me to graduate school in the first place), my projects tend not to center on fandom "as such." So while I engaged with the dialogues most immediately for moments of fellow-fan-recognition ("Hey, she likes Battlestar Galactica too!"), I spent more time reflecting on the strange phenomenon of acafandom: this group of exceptionally smart and articulate people positioning ourselves -- with varying degrees of forthrightness, self-critique, pride, and disavowal -- around not just the texts and objects that we love/hate, but the potent essence of love/hate itself. In short, it was interesting to watch ourselves wrestling with our own jouissance, a collective (if variegated) upwelling passion that functioned both to disrupt and drive our interactions.

But to boil it down to a few blunt, highly subjective specifics:

1. The women ruled. Not that there aren't a lot of cool guys here. But I grew impatient with the defensive, almost willful missing-the-point that snaked through the dialogues like a malingering virus, usually expressed in some version of "Gendered power may exist, but it's not germane to what we study/how we study it" or, more perniciously, "Gendered power may exist, but I myself am free of it." Again, I don't mean to totalize. Standing back from the debates, though, it seemed that "we" (the men) were first and foremost being invited to consider the idea that gender has different but valid meanings to, and significant material impact upon "them" (the women), and that, too often, we chose to counterattack rather than to listen.

Of course, it *was* a debate, and assessing the validity of arguments is one aspect of what we do professionally. I just think that if we're going to cross the troubled waters, we should start by building bridges, not standing on opposite shores tossing rocks at each other.

2. Forum matters. It's utterly intriguing to me how the debate unfurled in two distinct realms, Henry's blog and LiveJournal (with of course a halo of side discussion throughout the blogosphere). While I tended to read Henry's blog for the initial posts, I would usually bounce over to LiveJournal for the comments, which seemed more lively and dynamic, more raw and honest. My sense is that we all tried to *behave* on Henry's blog; we were guests at the dinner party (and grateful, let me add, to be invited!). By contrast, LJ was like the afterparty, where people felt free to let their hair down. Was this good or bad? Inevitable or avoidable? I dunno. But the way in which these two spaces structurally reproduced certain essentialist notions of masculinity and femininity is troubling, and I will leave its exegesis to more experienced LJers (I was but a nomad, passing through the territory).

3. We're all really smart! Really. I was astounded at the depth, range, and sophistication of the exchanges, and glad to see that, freed from classrooms, conferences, peer-reviewed publications, and other restrictively overdetermined speech environments, we remain capable of

nuanced, compelling, adventurous intellectual engagement.

4. Where next? More dialogue. More debate. More connections. More friendships. More misunderstandings on the way to enlightenment.

Kristina Busse:

After I posted publicly about unexamined gendered assumptions in play across scholarship

of fandom as well as within the community of fan scholars, Henry approached me about

launching a conversation that would bring a variety of fan academics together to discuss

and debate gender. Within my corner of fandom and among my female acafan friends, we'd

been discussing these issues repeatedly, so I was very excited that Henry's forum would

bring these concerns to broader attention. In fact, I hoped it would offer all of us the

chance to engage more constructively with it among a group of academics that would

include those who had quite different approaches and investments. I thought the series

might result in more general awareness and maybe greater recognition of the academic

contributions of the women around me, but over these recent months I have seen that and

much more: I've seen conference panels organized, co-written articles planned, and more

awareness across the gender line, of both the importance of fan artifacts as subject

matter and of particular scholars. I think everyone has made connections and gotten to

know scholars they might otherwise not have interacted with. More women have started

blogs, more men have started LiveJournals, and more scholars are talking to one another,

whether in public or private. Personally, I hope to attend SCMS with a fanboy/fangirl

panel that effectively draws from our different perspectives, and will be co-writing an

essay on fandom, hopefully offering both perspectives. I have made personal friends and

started corresponding with more scholars--male and female.

So while there remain a lot of things that are frustrating to me coming out of this

conversation, while there are exchanges and comments that still exhibit unreflected

acceptance of patriarchal culture, I think it's been a great beginning. Beyond continuing

the discussion in other venues, however, there are two things that I think we need to

focus on as we complicate the issues. One is the question of different realms of contact

in which being a woman matters. Most of the debates tried to separate academic and

fannish and personal spheres, but in my experience they are all connected. The

disproportionately amateur status of women is interwoven on the one hand with the type of

fan productions we prefer and on the other with the conditions of our offline lives. I

don't think we should focus on one area alone, because gender issues run through all

areas and mutually affect one another. As we continue to address women and gender in

fandom studies, I'd like more of us to examine these often repressed issues of how and

why women create what they do (or not), analyze what they do (or not), choose the

academic careers they do (or not), and how these are interrelated.

Also, on a larger scale, I feel we're still not reaching out enough to bridge other,

related gaps. Race has been mentioned multiple times as a conspicuous exclusion, and I

hope that we can all become more aware of what trajectories we might be leaving out even

as we're becoming more aware of the axis of gender. But the one issue I'm most interested

in, and which I believe to be closely related to gender, is academic status. We haven't

succeeded in sufficiently addressing, let alone solving, the professional/amateur divide

in academia that is also so central to fandom itself. I think the fact that all of us

have gotten connected with at least one (and quite often many more than one) scholar we

may not have known before has increased the depth of the overall fan studies world. In

particular, as fan studies is so interdisciplinary, the debate allowed us to meet across

a variety of disciplines and methodologies. I hope that going forward we can strengthen

acquaintances and friendships and reach out to new scholars. I want this debate to be the

beginning of an ongoing increased awareness of gender and the way it inflects all other

areas we need to now focus on: race, class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation,

and all the issues that have been raised as insufficiently addressed and, even more

importantly, those we haven't even begun to think about.

C. Lee Harrington:

I was very intrigued by this series of dialogues though my own area of fan studies (mainly soap opera) has not been fraught with the gender concerns/debates that launched the blog. I have been more a lurker than a participant these past 5 (6?) months, as is my nature, but I learned a lot -- about scholars whose work I was unfamiliar with, about fan studies in general (especially areas outside of my own), and most useful to me, about specific books/articles/chapters that I haven't read but should. I have compiled a large list of materials to slowly plow through. I've been intrigued by gender debates I didn't really know existed, and frustrated at times with attempts to work through complex notions of gender, feminism, privilege, and media through written (rather than spoken) dialogue. Gender is a hard topic to talk about, teach, and learn, regardless of the context or topic in question, and it was hard at times here. I was dismayed by several exchanges that seemed to devolve into personal attacks. I was impressed by most participants' seeming open-mindedness about hearing perspectives very different from their own. Participating did not change my own line of research in any way that I could articulate on the spot, but as I slowly digest both the exchanges and my to-read stack, I'm sure new ideas and ways of thinking will emerge that would not have happened otherwise.

The only real negative for me is that I'm not in the blogosphere much. It's not a preferred method of communication for me so at times participating seemed like homework rather than intrinsically motivated. I also became more and more guilty over time because I *have* been lurking rather than participating actively....I'm happy to have been invited to the table, though.

Alan McKee:

The reason I haven't sent anything in is because I'm slightly embarrassed about what I would say ...

There is nothing worse than members of a dominant group saying that they haven't noticed the importance of an identity category: 'Why do you have to go on about being gay all the time? Why do you have to talk about your sexuality? We [ie, straight folk] don't do that ...'

So I'm hesitant to say that for me the experience of taking part in this discussion was about the delight and excitement of finding a like mind (Deborah). I wasn't really aware before I started about the gendered debates in fan studies, and I didn't find that they impinged on my discussions with Deborah. But you see? Even by saying that I feel like a patriarchal oppressor.

So - I thought this was a wonderful project. Mostly I find academics tiresome - their interests and debates bore me. It is always delightful to find others who are interested in things that interest me, who value fun, and decency and delight and joy. Oh, and who are deeply informed about things that I don't know about, but care about (yes, there are a lot of them who know a lot more than I will ever know about the writings of Deleuze, but I really can't bring myself to care about that. There's something wrong with me, I suppose. I'm missing the 'caring about philosophy' gene).

Every time I read what Deborah had written, I laughed and got excited and thought about stuff, and had more that I wanted to say. In the end we were almost late with our contribution simply because it was so hard to let go - there was always just one more paragraph that I just *had* to squeeze in, inspired by something she had said.

And so - thank you so much for setting this up. I am awe of your energy, your passion, your ideas, your networks, your organisational ability. How do you find time to sleep?

Lori Morimoto:

Throughout the Gender and Fan Culture conversations, I've been continually interested in

the degree to which women comprise a much muddier field of fan commentators than do men.

It doesn't seem to be an exaggeration to say that, for the most part, participating men

have been firmly situated within mainstream academic culture - their fannish activities

notwithstanding - while many of us female participants have a more tangled relationship

to that culture. As a graduate student teetering on the edge of academic employment,

I've been encouraged by the extent to which women outside of academia have nonetheless

managed to publish and otherwise contribute to scholarly discussions about fandom; yet,

the ways in which our lack of affiliation with recognized institutions hampers our

ability to conduct and disseminate our research is dismaying. This situation seems, in

some ways, to mirror fans' relationships to the media they consume (and produce), and, in

this sense, something we might engage with more transparently as 'aca-fans'.

Vidder Luminosity Profiled in New York Magazine

A little over a month ago, an editor from New York Magazine wrote me to see if I might nominate what I saw as "the best online videos." I saw this request as an opportunity to promote the amazing work that goes on in the fan vidding community, work which is frequently not discussed when people are talking about the vernacular creativity of YouTube. After consulting with some friends in that creative community (including long time reader Laura Shapiro), and corresponding with the artist herself, we decided to nominate Luminosity, who ranks among the very best of contemporary vidders. Here's the letter I wrote nominating her:

The tradition of fan video making long predates the rise of YouTube and our current fascination with remix culture. For several decades, fans, mostly women, have re-edited footage from their favorite films and television shows, setting them to music, as a way of expressing their complex feelings towards their favorite media franchises. These women produced compelling videos when it was hard,editing on their home vrs, and now, they have achieved incredible sophistication and virtuosity now that they can use digital editing equipment. Luminosity is among the best of this current generation of fan video-makers: one need only look at a few of her works to see the range of different styles and interpretations she brings to her material. "Vogue" merges the music of Madonna and the images of the recent Hollywood blockbuster, 300, into a

compelling consideration of masculine spectacle, one which plays with our expectations about gender and sexuality. "Bite me, Frank Miller," Luminosity says, blurring the lines the original work constructs between the hypermasculine Spartans and the perverse Persians. "Women's Work" offers a feminist critique of the place of sexual violence in the CW television series,

Supernatural, while "Ecstatic Drum Trip" spins wrecklessly out of control, offering us a mad rush of images, drawn from the science fiction series, Farscape. These represent just three of the more than 30 videos which she has posted on the web so far, each transforming content from mass media into the raw materials for her own expressive activity. Much of contemporary remix culture falls back on parody but these fan videos seek to convey the emotional intensity which fan women feel towards these original

works, taking us into the heads and hearts of their favorite characters. These fan videos can be funny (as "Vogue" suggests) but they can also be deeply moving (exploring the pain and loss which surrounds some of our favorite characters.) These videos communicate more if you know the shows on which they are based but they represent on their own mood poems or character

sketches which pack a powerful punch.

(Those of you who have followed the Gender and Fan Culture conversation series this summer and fall will already know Luminosity's work which was referenced by Francesca Coppa in her discussion with Robert Kozinets.)

Well, the New York editors must have liked what they saw because Luminosity is profiled, alongside a range of other independent and amateur media artists, in a special issue which explores "the New Online Star System."

Here's how the story begins:

Luminosity is the best fan that shows like Friday Night Lights, Highlander, Farscape, and Buffy ever had--but she can't use her real name in this interview for fear that their producers will sue her. As a vidder--a director of passionate tributes and critiques of her favorite shows--Luminosity samples video in order to remix and reinterpret it, bending source material to her own purposes...We emailed with Luminosity about her meticulously crafted videos, including "Women's Work," her loving critique of violence in Supernatural, and Vogue/300, her hysterical riff on those hunky Spartans.

The interview which follows is respectful of her accomplishments and seeks to reclaim a place for women's creative work in the larger history of online video. Luminosity speaks, for example, about the politics behind "Women's Work," which remains one of her most controversial videos. Like many other fans of Supernatural, I have admired what she accomplishes here, showing how fan vids can be used for feminist critique of popular culture, but have wondered if the critique may be misplaced, given how much work the series does to make us care about its female characters, how complex the friendships which emerge between the men, especially, Sam and these women, as compared with the representations of sexual violence in many other works in the horror tradition. But Luminosity offers a thoughtful response to these concerns:

"Women's Work" is a critique of the eroticization of the violence done to women in all media, not just Supernatural. Women are sexually assaulted, murdered, and then laid out in artistic tableaux, chopped into pretty, bloody pieces. They usually further the plot, but they're hardly ever a part of the plot. We wanted to point out that in order for us to love a TV show--and we do--we have to set this horrible part of it aside. A lot. Often. Sisabet [the co-vidder of the project] and I believe that we could have made this vid using almost any show, from Heroes to CSI, but we are fans of Supernatural. We care so much about a show that we want share it, make an argument, highlight a character or situation, lampoon something, evoke a mood. I've also made four other Supernatural vids that celebrate the show, the arc, the relationship between the brothers and the genre itself.

I can appreciate the critique of the horror genre as a whole, which has historically relied heavily on the victimization of women, but I remain concerned that this video holds Supernatural accountable for what it takes from the genre but not what it adds to it. That said, I see it as a credit to the power of this particular work that people want to argue with it -- "Women's Work" makes a clear and unambiguous statement which forces us to think more deeply about the series in question and that's what I think vidding at its best can achieve.

Congrats to Luminosity for the visibility her work is starting to receive. Here's hoping that the coverage leads to greater recognition not just for her work but for other cutting edge fan media makers.

I haven't spent enough time yet working through the other articles in this special issue. There's a tremendous number of links here as a range of critics have curated what they think is the best work out there on the web. Even a quick browse through the articles New York has assembled will suggest the creative energy that has emerged as we have lowered barreers for creative artists of all kinds to get their work into circulation via the web.

This may be a good time to also alert my readers to a major event in the realm of Do-It-Yourself Media Production, which is coming up at the University of Southern California this February. I am excited to be able to participate in a plenary event along with Howard Rheingold, Yochai Benkler, John Seely Brown, Joi Ito, and Lawrence Lessig on the Future of DIY Media.

Here are the details of the event:

24/7: A DIY VIDEO SUMMIT

February 8-10, 2008 School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California

Conference web site: http://www.video24-7.org

Blog: http://diy.video24-7.org/

Spaces are limited for attendance at the academic panels and the workshops. The video

screenings are free and open to the public.

24/7: A DIY Video Summit will bring together the many communities that have evolved

around do-it-yourself (DIY) video:artists, audiences, technology providers, academics,

policy makers and industry executives. The aim is to discover common ground, and to

chart the path to a future in which grassroots and mainstream, amateur and professional,

artist and audience can all benefit as the medium continues to evolve.

This three-day summit features:

SCREENINGS OF DIY VIDEO

On February 8 and 9, there will be screenings of DIY video that are

open to the public. These will feature curated programs on design video, activist

documentary, youth media, machinima, music video, political remix and video blogging.

The video program will culminate in an evening program and reception on February 9 that

will draw from all of these video genres.

ACADEMIC PROGRAM

Registered attendees will have access to the academic program on February 8 and 9 that

features panels on The State of Research, The State of the Art, DIY Media: The

Intellectual Property Dilemma andDIY Tools and Platforms.

WORKSHOPS AND BIRDS-OF-A-FEATHER MEETINGS

On February 10, the day will be devoted to practical and hands- onworkshops for

registered attendees on topics such as intellectual property, media creation,

distribution and new-media design tools.

Attendees will also have the option of organizing their own birds-of- a-feather meetings

to connect with other attendees.

From Serious Games to Serious Gaming (Part Six): Common Threads

This is the final installment in our multi-part series showcasing the serious game projects of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. We haven't exhausted our projects but this sample gives you a taste of the range of different paradigms we have deployed. Here, I offer my own thoughts about what these projects have in common, suggesting that they collectively represent a distinctive contribution to the field of games and education. Over the past decade, researchers associated with MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program have been exploring the pedagogical potentials of computer and video games. Rather than adopt a one-size-fits-all solution, we have explored different models for what might constitute the ideal learning game. In the process, we have tested different genres and delivery platforms and mapped alternative models of collaboration between academic institutions and commercial partners.

Underlying these games have been some core principles:

1. Our games are designed to fit within specific learning contexts, addressing the real-world problems that educators confront. Each represents a different strategy for addressing such factors as the structure of the school day, limited access to technology, the teacher's unfamiliarity with games, and integration within existing curricular frameworks, all of which might prejudice teachers, parents, or principles against game-based learning. Our goal is to develop games that can be used widely across a range of schools and communities, not simply prototypes for laboratory research.

2. Our goals are never to displace the teacher but rather to provide teachers with new resources for doing what they do best. Our games are part of a sequence of learning activities, introducing new concepts or providing experiences that can become the basis for further discussions and writing exercises. Game play often occurs outside of the classroom, much as homework extends and supports schoolroom learning. For example, the Palmagotchi encourages kids to keep an eye on their evolving ecosystems at odd moments throughout the day, while teachers can work through problems from the games to explain basic principles. Increasingly, our games are designed to support customization and localization, so teachers can adopt the games to their own instructional goals.

3. We share a belief that play represents a meaningful strategy for making sense of the world around us: the best games inspire a process of exploration and experimentation. As students play games, they test hypotheses about how the world works, revising them based on their experiences; they develop new strategies for solving problems; and they make new connections between previously isolated bodies of knowledge. These games are designed to tap what students already know (as occurs when they get into character for a role-playing game like Revolution), and they help young people master complex problems that might otherwise seem insurmountable (as when they cite multimedia materials to draw connections between current and historic events in iCue or when they tap different kinds of expertise to solve the real world challenges posed by Charles River City).

4. We seek to make every element of the game design intellectually meaningful and personally rewarding: from the knowledge transfer system in Revolution to the puzzle design in Labyrinth, from the card-based interface of iCue to the exchange mechanisms in Backflow. We want to make sure that students and teachers spend more time acquiring valued skills and knowledge and less time mastering the game technology.

5. We see game play as a social rather than an individual learning opportunity. We build into these games opportunities for students to share insights with each other (through, for example, the exchange of theories within the AR simulations or of strategies in the in-game FAQ in Labyrinth), and in the process, to foster peer-to-peer learning. Students are most likely to master information when they use it to solve problems and share it with others, articulating what they have learned.

6. Last, but certainly not least, we design our games to be fun. These games were designed by gamers and we've learned what we can from existing entertainment titles. A game that fails to engage the student will fail to motivate learning, no matter how rich its intellectual content may be.

Taken as a whole, these principles shift our focus away from the design and deployment of serious games and onto the processes and resources that support serious gaming.

Sources

Jenkins, Henry with Ravi Purushotma, Katherine Clinton, Margaret Weigel, and Alice J. Robison, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century," report prepared for the MacArthur Foundation, Fall 2006. http://www.projectnml.org/files/working/NMLWhitePaper.pdf

Squire, Kurt and Levi Giovanetto (Forthcoming), "The Higher Education of Gaming," Work in Progress, presented at Games, Learning and Society Conference, Madison, Wisconsin, 2005.

Francis, Russell. "Towards a Theory of a Games Based Pedagogy," Transforming Learning Experiences Online Conference, JISC Innovating e-Learning, March 2006.

http://www.online-conference.net/jisc/content/Francis%20-%20games%20based%20pedagogy.pdf

Wright, Talmadge. "Creative Player Actions in FPS Online Video Games: Playing Counter-Strike." Game Studies Dec. 2002. http://www.gamestudies.org/0202/wright/

From Serious Games to Serious Gaming (Part Five): iCue

In part five of our series on serious game projects involving the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, we focus on iCue, a soon to be launched collaboration with NBC News. iCue emerged from conversations between the MIT Education Arcade and NBC News in early 2006. Product development is being managed by NBC News and the NBC Technology Growth Center in New York, with portions of the information architecture, technical implementation, and game engine being executed with iFactory in Boston. The MIT Education Arcade continues to work with NBC News to research user behavior and performance, supporting NBC's product and educational programming development. Project leaders include Alex Chisholm, Eric Klopfer, Scot Osterweil, and Jason Haas (MIT); Adam Jones, Nicola Soares, Laura Sammons, Michael Levin, Kathy Abbott, Soraya Gage, Mark Miano, and Beth Nissen (NBC); and Glenn Morgan, Sean Crowley, and Ruth Tannert (iFactory). iCue: Tapping Social Networks to Foster Civic Awareness

By Alex Chisholm

NBC News has been working with the MIT Education Arcade to develop iCue, a web-based educational media product that is at once a media archive, a portal for learning activities and games, and a social network connecting teachers and students around the country in shared learning activities designed to enhance their understanding of current events and American History. The project was designed to address the seismic shifts in the ways young people acquire news and information about the world around them, shifts which are having an adverse impact on the markets for network news. Gone are the early evenings when families gathered around the television to catch up on the day's events as narrated by genteel anchormen such as John Chancellor, David Brinkley, and Walter Cronkite. Today's audiences, especially young people, consume news and information through channels that are available 24/7 across the web, mobile phones, and other handheld digital media devices. One need only glance at year-to-year Nielsen ratings data to recognize the steep downward trend in viewers of the evening network news broadcasts. During the May 2007 television sweeps period, network news viewers across the "Big Three" - ABC, CBS, and NBC - totaled roughly 21 million per night or just less than 7% of the U.S. population. By contrast, Apple sold 21 million iPods during the 2006 holiday shopping season. NBC has embraced the iCue project in hopes of better understanding how this generation of news consumers will relate to their content, while providing a resource for teachers and students to enhance critical thinking and writing skills across the curricula of U.S. History, Government and Politics, and English Language and Composition.

Designed initially as a resource for students taking courses as part of the College Board's Advanced Placement (AP) Program, iCue includes video clips from the NBC News and Universal radio and film archives to support teaching and learning of core concepts, people, and places. In subsequent years, NBC plans to support additional subjects in World History, Literature, Language Learning, Science, and Mathematics across the K-12 curriculum. iCue deploys an innovative media player modeled upon a technology students have used for decades in the classroom, in the library, and at the kitchen table: the index card. NBC has designed its "CueCard," a two-side media player that plays video on its face and then "flips" onscreen to enable students to annotate, comment, share, and discuss multimedia materials as part of online discussion groups organized around their own social, or learning, networks. Students collect CueCards in their online digital portfolio for reference, cataloging them for use in their online writing exercises, activities, and games.

Games? What happens when the card "technology" is considered into the domain of gaming? First, there are the traditional card games such as Go Fish, a matching game, or Poker, a complex strategy game. Then, there are the collecting of baseball and other sports cards and the fantasy sports games that are fueled by players' performance statistics. Or, consider the global collecting, role-playing, and strategy card games such as Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh!, which have inspired a generation of kids to master and manipulate hundreds of fictional characters and their attendant powers and properties the way a NASA systems analyst might analyze complex data sets.

Each card represents a unique set of people, places, things, and ideas - embodying information students need to master for their coursework. The CueCards interface allows students not only to view and annotate media artifacts, but also to share and play with those cards to map connections among the represented concepts. In one challenge, students are asked to put into chronological order a series of CueCards that represent different events in the Civil Rights era, encouraging students to think about timelines in the U.S. History course. In another, students are challenged to match video clips and newspaper articles of Japanese internment camps of the 1940s with reports of suspected "terror" suspects at Guantanamo Bay after 2001. In yet another, students are asked to make connections between the suffrage campaign of Susan B. Anthony and the presidential campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Through our formative research, we have observed students drawing on pre-existing knowledge, new ideas presented via the CueCards, and peer-to-peer discussions to generate new conceptual maps; their "answers" draw on different kinds of evidence - video, newspaper, and primary documents - to demonstrate solutions. Students share the pathways they have found with teachers and peers, inspiring both online and classroom discussion around important events and concepts. The process shows history not as something fixed, which is often the impression after reading a traditional textbook or encyclopedia entry, but as a dynamic and evolving discipline as students draw many different links between events and agents and resolve conflicting perspectives.

We are mapping and analyzing the thinking processes that shape students use of iCue. Do they focus on one type of resource over another in solving the game's challenges? How do they integrate information from several media sources and how does this affect what they learn? How will teachers use iCue to supplement their classroom and homework assignments? How do different socio-economic levels, urban vs. rural geographies, and varied Pre-AP educational offerings affect students' iCue experience? To qualify this, we are evaluating student understanding in several ways: (1) concept mastery exercises (e.g., fill in the blanks, multiple choice questions, etc.) both within and outside of the game; (2) group discussions with students; (3) player performance, where awareness and mastery of important concepts can be measured by student advancement through game levels and scoring; and, finally, (4) natural language-based research tools that enable us to analyze forum discussions and blogs. Our aim is to tap students' interest in games, participatory culture, and collective intelligence to get them to engage more closely with history and current events.

Alex Chisholm is founder of [ICE]3 Studios, a media research and development consultancy that creates transmedia entertainment and educational properties, and is currently developing several projects with NBC Universal, including an educational media product for NBC News, fan research around NBC's Heroes (with IPG Media's The Consumer Experience Practice), educational games for NBC Weather+Plus, and online games for NBC Olympics-Beijing 2008. He is Co-Director of the Education Arcade at MIT, and over the past seven years has collaborated on research, product, and program development with Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Sony Pictures Imageworks, the American Theatre Wing, LeapFrog, NBC Universal, and the MacArthur Foundation.

From Serious Games to Serious Gaming (Part Four): Labyrinth

This is part four of a multipart series documenting the thinking behind some of the key serious games initiatives which have come out of the Comparative Media Studies Program over the past few years. Learning Games to Go was a partnership between MIT's Education Arcade, Maryland Public Television, Macro International, and Johns Hopkins University, funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The ongoing project began in early 2006. Participants in the design process included Kristina Drzaic, Dan Roy, Alec Austin, Ravi Purushotma, Elliot Pinkus, Evan Wendel, and Lan Le, under the leadership of Scot Osterweil. The game was designed and storyboarded by students and staff of the Comparative Media Studies Program, with final development handled by Fablevision, a publisher and software developer. The completed game will be distributed by Maryland Public Television, which has also taken on responsibility for teacher training. For more information about the project, check out Dan Roy's CMS Masters Thesis, "Mastery and the Mobile Future of Massively Multiplayer Games." Images here show original artist sketches by CMS students Evan Wendel and Kristina Drzaic, coupled with their final execution by Fablevision.

Labyrinth: Playing with Math and Literacy

By Scot Osterweil

Conflicting expectations place a major burden on our educational system. We expect our schools to be inclusive of all types of learners, while demanding a unitary measure of student success and a one-size-fits-all curriculum. We expect teachers to be talented professionals while paying them low salaries and even lower levels of respect. We expect schools to overcome problems of poverty, class, and race while we have no solutions for these problems in the society at large. And we demand that all our schools be above average (displaying our own failure to grasp math and statistics).

Game-based learning is similarly burdened by conflicting expectations. Educational games must be open-ended and exploratory, but they must "cover" the curriculum. They should be content-rich, but they can't cost much to produce. They should be engrossing, but shouldn't take too much time from classroom instruction. Children should enjoy them as much as commercial games, even though they address topics that students don't appear to be interested in. All of these contradictions are enough to send a game designer screaming from the room. The good news is that educators are finally paying attention to the power of games for learning; the challenge of all good design is to find solutions for competing needs.

Our mandate with the Learning Games to Go (LG2G) project was to create a game that addressed middle school math and literacy.2 The game needed to be mobile and to employ cutting-edge technology, but it also had to address the needs of underserved populations who have little to no access to mobile technology, especially of the cutting-edge variety. To make our job harder, we were determined to create a game that would make a difference in the marketplace, not just a demonstration project that would never be seen beyond its test audience. We learned a good deal by talking with middle school teachers. Needing to prepare their students for high-stakes tests, teachers were leery of committing precious class time to new technology, but they identified ideas that weren't getting through to their students and hoped we could somehow take care of them. They didn't want to introduce technologies they couldn't manage themselves, but they lacked the time to master new technologies. Teachers recognized the attraction of games to their students, but they couldn't justify games - with all the social baggage the word carries - to administrators and parents.

Labyrinth (working title) sought to resolve these competing demands - it is a puzzle adventure game in which you, the player, wander the corridors of an underground factory populated by monsters. These monsters have been kidnapping people's pets, apparently for nefarious purposes. Your job is to uncover the monsters' secret plans, free the pets, and restore order to the world. Along the way you solve a host of confounding puzzles. And along the way we hope we've solved the challenges presented to us as designers.

The Class Time Dilemma

Teachers tell us that in a high-stakes testing environment, their days are full just covering the mandated curriculum. They can't imagine spending large blocks of time on a game. Labyrinth can largely be played as homework. It is web-served, so no matter where kids play the game, teachers can log on and assess how students are progressing through the challenges.

If kids play the game on their own, they are more likely to engage with it in a spirit of discovery and experimentation. Kids need the opportunity to approach mathematical problems with the same determined inventiveness they exhibit when mastering somersaults or shooting hoops. Labyrinth players will be exposed to a host of new skills to master at their own pace and in their own fashion. When the core concepts underlying the puzzles are eventually introduced in school, kids will be "ready to learn," having achieved mastery over the same concepts through game play.

Imagine a teacher coming into a classroom and saying, "Today I'd like to introduce variables. I know I've never used the word here before, but I also know you students are already experts on the subject, because you've all mastered this puzzle." She then projects a Labyrinth puzzle and discusses how it relates to the topic. She gets the students comparing notes about how they solved the puzzle, and she helps them connect their own experience to math concepts. She uses the puzzle as a visualization tool to make textbook ideas more concrete, and perhaps this process actually fortifies her own understanding of the concept, improving her teaching along the way. Far from asking her to devote hours to the game, we've given her a way to quickly incorporate the game into the lesson she was already preparing to teach.

What About the Curriculum?

No single game can treat every subject in a given curriculum, but Labyrinth adheres to the standards developed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. We know from our work with educators that many prescribed concepts are never fully mastered by struggling math students. All but the best curricula, even those that adhere to the NCTM standards, teach math procedures without promoting real understanding of the underlying concepts. So, we focused Labyrinth around the "big ideas" of mathematics, including proportionality, variables, graphing, geometry and measure, and rational numbers. For example, students encounter a vending machine, and have a set of coins of unmarked denominations. They must develop strategies for feeding the coins into the machine so that they can figure out which coins have which values (i.e. solving for variables). While playing, they develop mental models of variables and devise strategies for solving such problems. They are building a scaffolding of ideas, models, and habits of mind that they will be able to apply to their formal schoolwork and to their lives as thinking adults.

The Literacy Component

While Labyrinth is primarily a math game, it is also designed to promote literacy. Literacy in the 21st century will not just be about reading text, but about making sense of a whole range of communications media, learning to become a producer of new media content and a participant in online communities (Jenkins et al., 2006)

Two features of the game target these new literacy skills. Labyrinth replaces cut scenes with comics, using sequential storytelling to relay back story and other information needed to navigate through the game world. Comics employ a wide variety of powerful visual devices, while still giving children the freedom to read and reflect at their own pace. Comics are the perfect bridge between watching and reading. And we wanted young people to develop better skills at understanding the interplay between words and images.

Labyrinth also promotes writing. We know that kids who otherwise don't write may spend hours posting hints and solutions to game FAQ websites. Accordingly, we've built the FAQ right into the game, and given kids the incentive to write. Students playing the game are enrolled in teams with fellow students. To improve the team's overall performance, players will aid lagging members by writing messages that help them solve the game challenges. The puzzles have different solutions every time they are played. To give effective aid to their teammates, kids can't just share answers, but need to communicate problem-solving strategies. We contend that if students read and write about their thinking, there will be benefits to their reading, their writing, and their thinking.

Meeting the Needs of Underserved Students

Disadvantaged kids don't uniformly have access to the same technologies at home. They are most likely to have video consoles, but development licenses for the Xbox and Playstation are prohibitively expensive, and are not usually granted to educational game producers. The same licensing difficulties apply to popular handheld devices like the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP, though there are signs that "thinking games" are gaining acceptance on these platforms. Cell phones are mobile, but not ubiquitous with our target audience, and the proliferation of incompatible platforms makes cell phone development extremely expensive.

Thanks to after-school programs and libraries, as well as the rapid penetration of broadband, the Internet-enabled computer seems to be the device likely to reach the most kids through more hours of the day. A web-served game can be accessed anywhere, and thus affords all players, including the underserved, maximum mobility.

A game developed in Flash can be played on almost any connected computer and won't be blocked by school or library networks, as it won't need to be downloaded. There isn't a better platform if we are serious about bridging the technology gap. A Flash game will also be stable on the widest range of devices. We are researching the potentials of playing Labyrinth on handheld computers and hope, by the end of our funding cycle, to identify and develop specifications for the specific handheld technology that has the broadest reach. In the not-too-distant future it should be possible to port Flash games to devices like the Nintendo DS, which at this moment looks like the handheld with the greatest potential penetration of the market.

Overcoming the Classroom Technology Hurdle

Labyrinth makes few demands on teachers. Once the teacher has inputted a class list, students can log on directly without teacher assistance. As with any other good electronic game, built-in tutorials let players gradually master challenges without additional instruction. Teachers can turn their kids loose on the game, and then wait a week and ask students to teach them how to play. In doing so, students will display competencies teachers don't realize they possess.

Although we hope teachers will also play and master the game, we want to respect the constraints under which they work. If teachers don't have time to learn the game, there will still be a mode in which they can play single puzzles and introduce them into class discussion.

Overcoming Resistance to Games

Finally, we hope that Labyrinth will be a game that is both entertaining and thought provoking, capturing young people's imaginations while still earning the acceptance of teachers and the approval of parents. Our approach respects all that is inventive and exploratory in play while challenging students to grow intellectually. If we succeed in these goals, we hope to offer a model for what a good learning game should be, one that resolves the contradictory demands schools place on this emerging technology.

Scot Osterweil is the project manager for the Education Arcade and is currently running "Learning Games to Go," a federally funded project designed to develop mobile games that teach math and literacy to underserved youth. Formerly the Senior Designer at TERC, a nationally known research & development center devoted to math and science education, Osterweil designed Zoombinis Island Odyssey, winner of the 2003 Bologna New Media Prize. This is the latest game in the Zoombinis line of products (Riverdeep/TLC). Scot is the creator of the Zoombinis, and with Chris Hancock he co-designed the multi-award winning Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, and its first sequel, Zoombinis Mountain Rescue. Scot is the also the designer of the TERCworks games Switchback and Yoiks!, the latter also with Chris Hancock.

Scot's other software designs include work on the educational products Tabletop II, Tabletop and Tabletop Jr., and IBM's The Nature of Science. At TERC he participated in research projects on the role of computer games in learning, and on the use of video in data collection and representation. Previously, he worked in television, on the production of Public Television's Frontline, Evening at Pops, and American Playhouse, and as an animator on a wide range of programs. He is a graduate of Yale College with a degree in Theater Studies.

From Serious Games to Serious Gaming (Part Three): Backflow

This is part Three in a multipart series showcasing the serious games work being done by the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. Today, we focus onBackflow, one of the games developed this summer as part of our newly launched Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Lab. Under the guidance of Eric Klopfer, Judy Perry, and Marleigh Norton, Backflow was developed by Zulfiki bin Mohamed Salleh, Neal Grigsby, Chen Renhao, Nguyen Hoai Anh, Wang Xun, Fabian Teo, Brendan Callahan, Guo Yuan, and Hoo "Fezz" Shuyi from the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. To download Backflow, visit the GAMBIT homepage. Backflow

By Neal Grigsby, Philip Tan, and Teo Chor Guan

The GAMBIT Summer Program

The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab was established in 2006 between MIT's program in Comparative Media Studies and Singapore's Media Development Authority as a five year project to sponsor new research about video games, to development new and innovative games, and to train students from Singapore's tertiary education institutions, its universities and polytechnics, in preparation for entering the games industry. The GAMBIT name refers to the many axes along which the project aims to generate research: Gamers, Aesthetics, Mechanics, Business, Innovation, and Technology.

The project adheres to the ethos of "applied humanism," which is the conceptual core of the Comparative Media Studies program. All CMS research projects share the goal of putting theoretical research into practical application, of testing theoretical precepts in contexts outside of the academy, for example in the realm of childhood education (the project for New Media Literacies), the media industry (the Convergence Culture Consortium), and journalism (the Center for Future Civic Media). For GAMBIT, this philosophy demands not only the generation of writing about games, but also the development of games themselves in support of research goals.

In 2007, GAMBIT research managers prepared for their first summer of game development. They selected over 30 students from Singapore based on the strength of their academic records, portfolios, and their demonstrated passion for video games. Successful applicants were flown to MIT to participate in the equivalent of a professional internship, the GAMBIT summer program. Over a short 9 week period, they worked closely with MIT students and faculty to develop 6 new games, each designed to answer a specific research question.

Most of the research questions and initial game concepts came out of a semester-long process of investigation, preliminary research, collaboration between academic departments, and, finally, the selection of brief written proposals. They were chosen based on mutual interest from faculty at MIT and Singaporean institutions, and the viability of projects for such a short development cycle. For each game, the faculty member in charge of the research would meet with the development teams at the beginning to outline the project requirements and help in brainstorming game ideas, and then reconnect systematically throughout the cycle to ensure ongoing compliance and provide help when needed.

In addition to the specific research goals of individual teams, there were also some shared goals. Games should be innovative but should not ignore the lessons of thirty years of gaming history, that is, they should retain what is interesting and successful about current games. The teams should strive to meet the academic research goals, but also aspire to a professional level of polish. Most importantly, the development of the games should contribute to the education of the team members, to expand their intellectual and professional horizons. To this effect, the first week of the 9 week program was spent in orientation, with faculty and staff lecturing students on game design, usability, animation, and related topics. In addition, local game industry professionals provided insider perspectives on design challenges and careers. This week-long orientation served as a tool-kit to help prepare the students for the intense 8 weeks of software development that followed.

With such a short development cycle, and a demanding variety of projects to complete, the organization and management of teams was considered of highest importance. Teams were kept small in the context of software development, with just 7 members each, but taken together exceeded the threshold for effective centralized control. Therefore, they needed to be relatively self-sufficient and able to respond to challenges with speed and independence. Each team consisted of students from a variety of backgrounds and specialties: two programmers, two artists, a test lead, a game designer, and a project manager. In addition, a wildcard 2-person team of musicians provided audio services to all of the game teams.

Programmers were, of course, responsible for writing the software itself, and artists for the generation of art assets such as character designs, backgrounds, menu screens, etc. The day-to-day tasks of the test lead would change often throughout the cycle, but always with the intention of placing him or her in a position to represent the interests of the end user. In the early design phase, the tester would assist in design tasks, but while the researcher and designer might come up with innovative, "blue sky" possibilities for their games, the tester was to help keep their feet on the ground, to remind them of their responsibilities to the player. Later, the tester would be responsible to systematically evaluate each new iteration of the game.

The designer was responsible for translating the educational goals of the project into a game concept and play mechanics. However, GAMBIT designers were encouraged to put their egos aside and serve more as facilitators of the design, as design leaders rather than authoritative authors. Each team member needed to feel a sense of ownership over the design if they were to successfully complete the project requirements. After all, the project would be their full time job over the next two months. The team could not afford to have even one of its members feeling disengaged, or believing that their ideas had not been taken seriously by the rest. In addition, while it was thought that the Singaporean students would be very technically adept, GAMBIT hoped to engage the students on a much more creative level than had previously been demanded of them. Therefore the concept for the game should come from the team itself and should be selected by consensus, with the designer stepping in as tie breaker when necessary.

Finally, the project manager would keep the team on track to finishing their project. A flavor of agile project management called "Scrum" offered a reasonable fit with the demands of the project. For the purposes of Scrum, those working on the project are divided into three categories: the product owner, the Scrummaster, and the team. The team consists of everyone who works closely on the project, those fully committed to doing the work that will turn ideas into reality. The product owner represents the long-term view of the project, often advocating for the software end-user or the requirements of the larger organization. The Scrummaster makes sure that participants adhere to the rules of Scrum, which calls for short daily check-in meetings (the daily scrum), the management of development cycles called "sprints," and other details of the process. The role of Scrummaster tracks fairly closely with the role of "project manager" in other paradigms, and indeed GAMBIT project managers became Scrummasters.

In the GAMBIT summer program, the researchers were assigned to the role of product owner. He or she would work with the team to set and prioritize the goals of the project, but would not need to dictate exactly how those priorities were met. The work would be divided into four two-week sprints. At the beginning of each sprint, the product owner would collaborate with the team to prioritize a list of product features called the "product backlog." The team would select the amount of product backlog they believed they could achieve, which would become the "sprint backlog," and define for themselves the best way to realize these features. At the end of each sprint, the team would be called upon to demonstrate new functionality to the product owner in a "sprint review" meeting. Each cycle also offered an opportunity to discuss and refine the rules of Scrum itself to better serve the personalities of the project and the team. Running the teams this way demands that team members have to produce not just work from individuals (code, concept art, music, design documents) but also an integrated, testable and ever-improving game every other week. By adhering to this program of "iterative development," teams would have a better chance of actually producing a finished product after eight weeks of development.

The use of Scrum project management was both an adaptation to the stringent requirements of the project and an experiment in its own right. As many of the professional visitors who lectured GAMBIT students would attest, most game companies operate with a development cycle that perpetually concludes with "crunch time," or a period of company-wide overtime. One of the goals of Scrum is to eliminate crunch time by making sure management decisions are not based on unrealistic expectations. The team estimates the development time for each feature and management is forced to accept the team's estimates or make an explicit decision to scale back the project. Even in companies that have adopted the Scrum management system, however, crunch time is often unavoidable due to the demands of the commercial marketplace. As a fully funded educational research project, GAMBIT enjoyed relative independence from these demands, even as it aspired to a professional product. The managers of the project discouraged overtime as much as possible to engender a more healthy workplace environment and create a model of "sustainable development."

Backflow: The Game

Existing mobile participatory simulations such as Palmagotchi use the peer-to-peer connective capabilities of Palm and Windows Mobile handheld computers to embed a group of players inside a simulation. While each individual device is inexpensive, purchasing enough devices for an entire classroom can be a prohibitive expense for many schools. To address this, researchers from MIT Teacher Education Program worked with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab to develop a game for a platform more popular among teachers and students: the mobile phone. Mobile phones are a challenging game development platform in comparison to dedicated gaming consoles or the PC, with relatively tiny screens, low system memory, and low-powered microprocessors. However, every mobile phone is a communications device, incorporating networking technologies that are well suited for participatory simulations.

To that end, a team of students from the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab were given a number of new mobile phones from a variety of manufacturers, and set to the task of developing a game that would run reliably across at least two of the devices. The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab was established in 2006 between the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT and the Media Development Authority of Singapore as a five-year project to sponsor new research about video games, to develop new and innovative games, and to train students from Singapore's tertiary education institutions in preparation for entering the game industry. In 2007, over 30 Singaporean students were flown to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to participate in the equivalent of a professional internship. Over a short 9-week period, they worked closely with MIT students and faculty to develop 6 new games, each designed to tackle a specific research challenge head-on.

Working with the MIT Teacher Education Program, the team chose to address environmental issues in their simulation. The original concept had the player directing the flow of sewage through a series of pipes using switches, with the option of shunting the waste to his or her neighbor, helping to clear the game screen but potentially inviting retaliation. The game would simulate a system of environmental exchange and the interdependencies of environmental actors. The basic mechanic also offered the possibility to support a fun, casual-style single-player game themed around recycling, in which the player's frantic button mashing would direct recyclables in the waste stream to the correct recycling bins.

Other than the title of the game, Backflow, everything else in the original design had to change in order to accommodate testing feedback and hardware realities. A game in which players flushed waste to each other in real time required the mobile phones to be constantly connected to the Internet and maintain synchronization between all players. Network latency limitations and subscription costs made such a system very difficult to realize. Furthermore, game testing suggested that a multiplayer game based on "tragedy of the commons" would not be very fun to play.

The basic single-player mechanic of sorting garbage by flipping switches on pipes remained, but the multiplayer aspect was scaled back to work asynchronously, with interactions between players recast as an exchange of resources in a stock market-like system. Instead of dumping garbage on each other willy-nilly, players would negotiate to share waste capacity. The game designer hoped to use this waste market to simulate the process of "cap and trade" emissions credit trading, a strategy that has been used successfully in the real world to limit greenhouse gas emissions in a free market.

The final game is best described as a hybrid of several genres: a casual puzzle game, a city simulation, and a resource trading and management game. The player begins by registering a new account and creating a new city. New cities start at 45,000 residents, a value that will change with the success or failure of the player's ability to properly recycle. A maze of pipes extends from the city at the top of the screen to several recycling bins and a sewer near the bottom. The player uses the keys on the mobile phone number pad to direct items to the right place: glass to the glass recycling, organic waste to the sewer, and so on. If the player sends a recyclable item to the correct bin, the game rewards some raw materials of that type. These materials can be used to build efficiency upgrades for the player's system. But if the player makes a mistake and sends waste to the wrong bin, the pollution level for the city rises.

At the end of a round, the game calculates the city's pollution level, and adds or subtracts residents accordingly (based on the assumption that clean cities are more attractive living spaces than polluted ones). Also between rounds, the player may decide to buy system upgrades or trade resources. Players soon realize that they can easily build up a scarcity of one type of material and a surplus of another, making trading necessary for advancement. Urban growth increases the complexity of the pipe system and the speed of the waste stream. "Winning" the game means finding a balance of population and waste processing ability that a player can manage.

Despite the challenges of a new and constrained platform, the students successfully created an online mobile phone game in 9 weeks. Much of the success of Backflow is a testament to the team's adaptability: they faced the limitations of the technology and the feedback from real players and adjusted the game design and development plan to make a functional, playable, and engaging game faithful to the spirit of the MIT Teacher Education Program.

Philip Tan is the executive director for the Cambridge operations of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, a multi-year game innovation initiative hosted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is concurrently a project manager for the Media Development Authority (MDA) of Singapore and a member of the steering committee of the Singapore chapter of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA).

Prior to his current position, he worked closely with Singapore game developers to launch industry-wide initiatives and administer content development grants as an assistant manager in the Animation & Games Industry Development section of MDA. He has produced and designed PC online games at The Education Arcade, a research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that studied and created educational games. He complements a Master's degree in Comparative Media Studies with work in Boston's School of Museum of Fine Arts, the MIT Media Lab, WMBR 88.1FM and the MIT Assassins' Guild, the latter awarding him the title of "Master Assassin" for his live-action roleplaying game designs. He also founded a live DJ crew at MIT.

Teo Chor Guan has more than 14 years of experience in systems engineering for computer graphics and games. Her wide range of experience spans from 3-D graphics research at the Institute of Systems Science in Singapore to building air traffic control systems for MacDonald Dettwiler & Associates in Canada. She has also worked as a software developer at Electronic Arts (EA) Canada for over six years. She holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical and

Electronics) from the National University of Singapore and a Masters in Computer Science from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. In Singapore, she had worked in the Games Development Group at the School of Design at Nanyang Polytechnic. She was also the Software Engineering Manager in Lucasfilm Animation Singapore before joining Media Development Authority (MDA) as the Program Director for GAMBIT.

Before coming to MIT, Neal Grigsby worked at LookSmart.com in San Francisco for seven years, wearing a variety of hats including editor, ontologist, and content producer. He joined the Comparative Media Studies program in 2005, where he wrote his master's thesis on narratives of adolescence, including a look at representation of youth in video games. He got his feet wet in game design at the annual Storytelling and Games in the Digital Age Workshop, where he led the winning team in 2007. While a student at CMS he worked on the Project for New Media Literacies, producing educational video and curricula about media production for an audience of teens and young adults. Neal earned his bachelor's degree in film studies from UC Berkeley, which was also where he met his wife, artist Rebecca Bird Grigsby.

From Serious Games to Serious Gaming (Part Two): Handheld Projects

This is part two of a multipart series showcasing the serious games projects associated with the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. Today, we focus on the work which Eric Klopfer and colleagues have done through the MIT Teachers Education Program using handheld games. Palmagotchi was built by the Teacher Education Program with the help of lead developers, including Victor Costan and Kyle Fritz. Development of the Handheld Augmented Reality Games is largely supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education StarSchools initiative, in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin and Harvard University. Lead Developers on the Augmented Reality project include Ben Schmeckpeper, Tiffany Wang, Kirupa Chinnathambi, RJ Silk, and Lisa Stump.

Thinking Outside the Classroom: Two Mobile Simulation Approaches to Enhance Student Learning

By Eric Klopfer and Judy Perry

As mobile devices become more accessible and affordable, more and more students are carrying mobile technologies such as personal digital assistants, cell phones, portable gaming systems, iPods, and iPhones in their backpacks. What will learning look like when these powerful handheld computers are as ubiquitous as calculators? Here we describe two software applications designed by the MIT Teacher Education Program for handheld computers: Palmagotchi, a networked evolutionary biology simulation, and Handheld Augmented Reality Games, a toolkit for creating location-based role-playing simulations.

Simulation games, in particular, can leverage the anywhere/anytime nature of mobile computing, extending student engagement with content beyond face-to-face classroom time and asking learners to synthesize digital information with real-world observations.

Our synthesis of the constructivist and situated learning paradigms leads us to design activities that are social, authentic and meaningful, connected to the real world, open-ended and containing multiple pathways, intrinsically motivating, and filled with feedback. While many technologies can foster some of these design elements, mobile learning games are particularly well suited to supporting them all.

Guiding principles that informed our designs include:

Fostering deep personal engagement through role-playing immersion: Each student plays an integral part in a larger system (a fruit fly in a population, a potential carrier in a viral disease model). Many commercial off-the-shelf games are designed around extrinsic rewards - points or award structures that are easy to measure. In role-playing games this could be wealth, as well as the level of your character. In our games, personal investment provides an intrinsic motivator to explore and master game strategies, and therefore better understand scientific models and curricular content.

Engaging students in highly social settings that encourage multi-player collaborative problem solving: Students using our games interact with their classmates in real time, discussing observations and negotiating interactions through both open and moderated discussion. Students typically spend only a fraction of their time actually looking at the screen of the PDA. In one study, which analyzed student behaviors using our handheld simulation games, "looking at the screen" was not one of the top five most common behaviors. Instead, students were talking, writing notes, interacting with other students, analyzing data, and walking around. This approach engages a wider range of students, including those who are not typically engaged by the individualistic structure of traditional coursework and homework.

Encouraging active participation and knowledge-building: During game play, students are active, often walking around and/or moving from player to player to observe and compare data. Game actions require both digital and face-to-face interaction.

Providing teachers with a flexible model of implementation: The overly structured materials of science kits or packaged software do not typically allow teachers to express their creativity and use the skills that led many into the profession. On the other hand, giving teachers a tabula rasa is unworkable. The majority of teachers do not have the time or expertise to design entire lessons. Our game designs provide teachers without software programming backgrounds with well-formed and easily customizable activities. Teachers can feel a sense of ownership over materials that match their specific instructional needs.

Enabling cognitive "Flow": In these games, the reward is Flow (Csikszentmihalyi 1990), "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake." Flow is marked by extreme concentration, pleasure, focus, reward, and even exhaustion. Activities that lead to Flow display clear goals, high concentration, feedback, appropriate challenge, personal control, and intrinsic reward.

Palmagotchi

"Casual games" are the fastest growing and perhaps largest genre of video games. Casual games can be played a few minutes at a time, typically during down time (waiting for the bus, for a few minutes over lunch, etc.). Casual games are often played on PDAs (handheld computers like the Palm or Pocket PC), the Nintendo DS, Sony PSP, and increasingly on Smartphones (e.g. Windows Mobile phones and iPhones) and cell phones. The Tamagotchi, a game involving virtual pets, offers one powerful model for the educational use of these platforms. Tamagotchi's simple design, along with the emotional bond between player and pet, results in a game that is simple to learn, allows for increased mastery, can be played casually a few minutes at a time, and yet sustains interest and interaction. Such an approach doesn't interrupt or impede the "business" of the school day.

Palmagotchi, a ubiquitous multiplayer handheld game, is based on a flexible networked platform called myWorld, and builds off of past work developing mobile peer-to-peer participatory simulations, such as The Virus Game. Palmagotchi allows students to become part of a dynamic biological process referred to as co-evolution. Palmagotchi's underlying model is loosely derived from Darwin's observations of finches in the Galapagos Islands. The "virtual pets" in Palmagotchi are birds and flowers that live within a larger simulated ecology that also includes predators and changing climate patterns. Students gain a deeper understanding of fundamental ecological, genetic, and co-evolutionary processes as they nurture their creatures.

The player's goal is to keep the lineage of his or her birds alive within the larger ecosystem, mating with other birds to produce and raise independent offspring before the parent bird dies. Each participant's handheld computer (a Windows Mobile device) starts with a small number of birds and flowers. Each bird has its own unique set of genetically determined traits (e.g., beak length, metabolism, ability to flee from predators, survival during cold weather, etc.). Ultimately, individual flowers' and birds' survival demonstrate their interdependence within the ecosystem. An accelerated "game time" allows students to observe and analyze general trends across multiple generations.

The game doesn't just convey specific information; playing the game allows students to conduct thoughtful, collaborative scientific inquiry. Initial implementations show that students (and teachers) are highly engaged in the process of maintaining their virtual pets over days or even weeks of play, learning the underlying science to improve their performance. They regularly find time outside of class to engage deeply in the game. Class time has been used effectively to discuss data and related biological processes, meeting the content standards required of students and teachers while maintaining high engagement and interest by all. The platform upon which Palmagotchi is based is being used to develop other new games for the science curriculum.

Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) devices superimpose a virtual overlay of data and experiences onto a real-world context. Augmented Reality can employ a variety of technologies, ranging from head-mounted displays to simple mobile devices. We have focused our research and development on "lightly" augmented realities, which require a small amount of virtual information and can be performed on handheld computers, and more recently on cell phones. These technologies support explorations and learning in the students' natural context, their own community and surroundings.

For example, Charles River City, loosely based on Chris Dede's MUVE "River City," was one of our early Augmented Reality games. In this game, students follow an outbreak of illness coinciding with a topically relevant event in the Boston Metro Area. One of the first runs started out like this:

The July 1st, 2004 headline of the Boston Globe reads "26 More Fall to Mysterious Illness as DNC Looms". A rash of disease has swept through Boston; and - with the Democratic National Convention coming to the city in a few weeks - citizens, politicians and health officials are all concerned. What is the source of the illness? Is this an act of bioterrorism or a naturally occurring event?

Players are told that a team of 20 experts is brought in to investigate the problem, including epidemiologists, physicians, public health experts, laboratory scientists, biologists, computer scientists, and environmental specialists. This group must work together to evaluate case reports and available surveillance data, investigate the cause and source of the outbreak, assess risk, communicate with the professional and public communities and identify and implement effective remedies. The teams collect and analyze environmental samples, hospital records, patient histories, clinical samples, and testimony from community members. The team must determine its findings and propose actions very quickly in order to assess the risk, diminish societal fears, and solve the problem. Our initial research on AR simulations (Klopfer, Squire, and Jenkins 2003; Klopfer and Squire 2004) demonstrates that this technology can effectively engage students (notably, female students have responded very well) in critical thinking about authentic scientifically based scenarios and enhance their interest in IT.

In order to scale our research and enable AR games to reach a wider audience, we have developed an AR Toolkit that allows designers, teachers, and even students to develop their own games. Using this toolkit, we have already built AR simulations in many content areas over the last few years. Games have been implemented in such diverse areas as environmental science, colonial American history, epidemiology, math, and English. These activities also support students' development of critical 21st-century IT skills including computer-mediated collaboration and information sharing, managing uncertainty, and analyzing complex systems.

The power in AR lies in truly augmenting the physical landscape, creating digital content closely tied to real-world locations, and thus supporting direct observation as well as data analysis. To extend these learning opportunities, we are enhancing our software and experimenting with new classroom practices to make it easier for teachers to localize and customize their games. This will enable educators to focus their efforts on meaty "curricular" tasks of narrative, data analysis, and even game design, with minimal effort spent on the technological aspects. This nearly invisible technology embodies the principle of technology adapting to the classroom, though in this case, the classroom is the entire world.

The Future of Educational Handheld Games

A user-centered - and thus "teacher-centered" - design approach greatly enhances the likelihood that teachers (on whom the success of these experiences ultimately lies) will be able to successfully integrate these technologies into the classroom. Educational software designs, like Palmagotchi, leverage the portability of mobile devices to integrate learning across students' everyday lives, allowing teachers to tap game-based learning without losing valuable classroom time. Similarly, our AR toolkits allow teachers to customize games to local conditions, setting their own pedagogical goals and moving learning beyond the school walls. Such games engage students in multi-sensory, kinesthetic, collaborative experiences. Such games offer students engaging and motivating experiences, while enabling students and teachers to investigate important ideas.

Eric Klopfer is Associate Professor and Director of the Scheller MIT Teacher Education Program. The Teacher Education Program prepares MIT undergraduates to become math and science teachers. Klopfer's research focuses on the development and use of computer games and simulations for building understanding of science and complex systems. His research explores simulations and games on desktop computers as well as handhelds. He is the creator of StarLogo TNG, a new platform for helping kids create 3D simulations and games using a graphical programming language. On handhelds, Klopfer's work includes Participatory Simulations, which embed users inside of complex systems, and Augmented Reality simulations, which create a hybrid virtual/real space for exploring intricate scenarios in real time. He is the co-director of The Education Arcade, which is advancing the development and use of games in K-12 education. Klopfer's work combines the construction of new software tools with research and development of new pedagogical supports that support the use of these tools in the classroom. He is the co-author of the book, Adventures in Modeling: Exploring Complex, Dynamic Systems with StarLogo, and author of a forthcoming book on mobile games and learning from MIT Press.

Judy Perry is Research Manager of the MIT Teacher Education Program. She currently oversees design, development and research for several projects involving games and simulations for handheld devices, including location-based Augmented Reality projects, and Participatory

Simulations including Palmagotchi. Prior to becoming a researcher at MIT, her work included television and web production, and content development for educational toys. She holds a B.A. in American Studies from Yale University, and an Ed. M. in Technology in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

From Serious Games to Serious Gaming (Part One): Revolution

This is the first installment of a five part series showcasing the evolution of The Comparative Media Studies Program's thinking about Serious Games. Each installment will focus on a different games-related project, while a conclusion will describe the commonalities in how we think about games and learning. I am starting this series this week to reflect the fact that we are hosting a Communications Forum event today focused on Games and Civic Engagement. The idea for Revolution emerged as part of the Games to Teach Project, funded by a Microsoft iCampus grant, and later became the flagship project for the Education Arcade. It was a complicated project spanning five semesters, starting in Fall 2002 and extending through Fall 2004. It was designed by a team of graduate and undergraduate students, working part time while taking classes. Participants included Philip Tan (Producer), Matthew Weise (Game Designer), Brett Camper (Lead Programmer), David Lee (3D modeling), Giovanni Mendoza (Art), Cassie Huang (Character Design), James Tolbert (Animation), Nicholas Hunter (Programmer), and Bertha Tang (Art).

In a spelling bee, a kid is challenged to memorize a lot of words, there's a fair amount of pressure, and it's kind of grim. If they get a word wrong, the buzzer goes off, they're told they got it wrong, and they are out. There's never a discussion about why they got it wrong, how they could have reasoned about the word to get it right. There's never really much of a discussion about how that word could be used in speech. In fact, the goal for a spelling bee is to learn all sorts of words that you will never use in common speech.

Compare that with a game of Scrabble where kids sit with the letters in front of them and are moving them around, thinking endlessly about all of the different combinations of words and which ones are real. They try to play one and there's a discussion about whether that's a real word or whether that's a real form of the word. Through that process, kids are engaging deeply not just in spelling but in word usage and they're having fun while they are doing it.

-Scot Osterweil

Popular accounts of the Serious Games movement have often fallen back on the image of the computer as a "teaching machine" that "programs" its users - for better or for worse. The fantasy is that one can just plant kids in front of a black box and have them "learn" as if learning involved nothing more than absorbing content. Those who fear that games may turn normal youth into psycho killers similarly hope that games might transform them into historians, scientists, engineers, and tycoons. At the same time, teachers express anxiety that their pedagogical labor will be displaced by the game console.

Putting the emphasis on the program to deliver content has often led to highly rigid and pre-structured play experiences, carefully regulated to conform to various state and national curricular blueprints, with little chance for emergent play or creative expression by the players. In other words, most commercial edutainment titles look much more like spelling bees than Scrabble.

For the better part of a decade, researchers associated with the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program (through Games to Teach, The Education Arcade, and The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab) have been researching the pedagogical potentials of computer and video games. We have adopted a range of different models for what an educational game might look like - from mods of existing entertainment titles to augmented reality games, from role-playing games to collectible cards - and how they might be produced - including several recent collaborations with commercial media producers and professional game designers. Our games straddle academic fields, including History (Revolution) and Current Events (iCue), Math and Literacy Skills (Labyrinth), Science (Palmagotchi), even Waste Management (Backflow). What links these various projects together has been a design philosophy that focuses less on serious games and more on serious gaming. We see games not so much as vehicles for delivering curricular content as we do spaces for exploration, experimentation, and problem solving.

We do not simply want to tap games as a substitute for the textbook; we want to harness the metagaming, the active discussion and speculation that take place around the game, to inform other learning activities. Researchers have documented not only the ways that conversations around recreational game play reshape the player's perceptions of violence and the social bonds being expressed through play (Wright, 2002), but also the informal learning communities that have grown up around game, such as Civilization 3 (Squire and Giovanetto, Forthcoming), enabling participants to learn world history even as they improve their game performance. Many of our games rely on the mechanics of meta-gaming to get students to articulate what they have learned from the play experience.

This is hardly a new idea: consider the Model United Nations as a well-established pedagogical practice in American social sciences. Essentially, the Model United Nations is a role-play activity where students are assigned to represent delegates from different countries and work through current policy debates. Students don't show up and start playing: the role-play motivates library and classroom activities leading up to the formal event. They don't just stop playing: a good teacher builds on the role play by having students report back on what they learned through presentations, classroom discussions, or written assignments. A hallmark of our serious games projects is that we factor the context and process of play into our game design, insisting that much of the learning takes place outside the box as the experience of gaming gets reflected upon by teachers and learners in the context of their everyday lives.

In this series of posts, we look back on some key milestones in our program's exploration of serious gaming. In each case, we will explore how our understanding of instructional activities rather than curricular content shaped our design choices. Each project represents a different model for how a pedagogical game might work in relation to current educational practices; each also reflects a shared vision that sees play as a key component of learning.

Revolution: A Historical Simulation of Colonial America

By Brett Camper and Matt Weise

Revolution was a total conversion mod of the popular PC game Neverwinter Nights modeled on Colonial Williamsburg. In this classroom-based multiplayer experience, each student would take on the role of a different resident on a single day in the spring of 1775. Students would adopt a variety of classes, races, genders, and political perspectives as they relived the debates surrounding the American Revolution.

The starting idea was broad: to create an online historical simulation for classroom use. We knew we wanted the game to be online, allowing students to learn together socially. And we knew we wanted to base the game on Colonial Williamsburg, which has a long tradition of historical learning through role-play. We felt such a game would be great opportunity to apply our values of learning as exploration and expression rather than rote memorization.

From the outset, Revolution was meant to be an educational game designed by people who were gamers first and educators second: if your game isn't fun, its educational goals don't matter. We wanted to leverage design principles that we knew worked, or at least could work, from successful commercial games. If we could create a game that looked and sounded on par with store-bought games, and that used familiar interface and game-play concepts, we could create an experience that escaped the negative image of "edutainment" while leveraging new media literacies for pedagogical ends.

Initially, one of our biggest challenges was to design for the time constraints of the typical classroom period. Public school teachers typically have an hour or less to get the students settled down, introduce the game, teach the students how to play, have the students play the game, get the students to stop playing, and have a coherent discussion afterward. So how might we design a complete and compelling game play experience under these constraints? We were intrigued by commercial games that use fixed time limits to shape player experience, compressing complex processes into finite units of game time. The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, for example, is about helping people as they go about their daily lives in a single town over the course of a fixed time period. The time limit focuses the player on the social space of the game, since Link only has a short time to affect events that will happen with or without him. Inspired, we focused Revolution's time frame into a single day. This day in our virtual Williamsburg would equal 40 minutes of class time, and would represent a key turning point in the Revolution. We wanted players to log into the game and find themselves in a living, functioning simulation of colonial America. The simulation would function with or without player intervention. Players could explore the era's social and political norms by trying to shape events, or they could simply sit back and observe.

Students would learn about history just by mastering the rules of the game, because the rules were abstracted from historical research. We wanted to get away from the drill-and-test model of public education and to challenge the master narrative of history. Instead, we wanted to focus on the choices historical agents made and the conditions under which they made them.

Realities of Development

Our aspirations for Revolution were quite high. Not all of them could have been achieved even with a full-time development staff with years of experience. As with any game project, we had to cut many features and completely redesign others. As we realized we could only implement a fraction of our original design, we tried to preserve our core design goal - to create a genuinely emergent historical simulation.

Our first decision was to forego coding Revolution from scratch and make it as a mod of an existing game. Using an existing engine enabled rapid prototyping and design. Using an existing engine also improved production quality - graphics and sound would already be at a level students would associate with professional games. Since many game companies offer modification tools to consumers for sharing new content, we wanted to explore the advantages of modding for developing serious games.

After much consideration, we settled on the Neverwinter Nights toolset. Neverwinter Nights is an RPG series for the PC that was specifically designed by its makers, Bioware Corp., to support modding projects. There was already a very robust culture of player-made NWN mods, which we could tap for inspiration and experience. We wanted to create a socially dynamic world where students would interact with both player-controlled and non-player-controlled characters, and NWN was built for character conversation, a feature we felt was crucial to the social world we wanted to model.

Technology Wrangling

Game scholar Ian Bogost identifies what he calls "procedural rhetoric" - the notion that a game system's design imparts an ideology. We wanted students to learn how a colonial society worked by interacting with a system, a system designed to embody the ideas we intended. Yet we didn't want the conventions of the NWN toolset (shaped by the commercial role-playing game genre) to transform our historical content in undesired ways. It was not always easy to leverage NWN's existing design limitations in ways that helped, not hurt, our pedagogical goals.

Accurate historical dress, for example, was challenging. In Colonial Williamsburg, men would remove their hats when entering a house. However, in the NWN toolset, hat models are not separate from head models. We could not effectively remove a hat without removing the character's entire head. So we were stuck with characters that either wore hats or were perpetually hatless. We decided to have hats on at all times. This was not 100% historically accurate, but it was less inaccurate than the alternative.

We also had a great deal of difficulty managing violence in NWN. Leaving violence out of a revolutionary setting would not convey the proper historical content. On the other hand, we'd have a disaster if we let students fight whomever they wanted at any time. Our solution was to allow students to be violent, but to have consequences. If one character punches another, they will be briefly arrested and released. While the law in 1775 was not nearly this forgiving or swift, this solution at least kept the students in the simulation and engaged with the historical setting.

Given that there was so much of NWN we could not change, we wanted to at least ensure that the conversation system would enhance the fidelity of our historical simulation. Luckily, it turned out to work better than we ever imagined.

Modeling the Social Dynamics of 1775

Revolution's conversation system evolved from a critique of how knowledge transfer typically occurs within the RPG genre. In many RPGs, information passes between characters as if by magic with no focus on the mechanisms of human communications. One of our development team members described a situation in The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind in which he killed a man, who claimed with his dying breath that his son would avenge him. When the player walked immediately to the son's house, he was promptly attacked. We understood what the designers of Morrowind were getting at: actions have social consequences. But these consequences simply flipped on and off like a light switch. We wanted students to focus on how information flowed through a colonial society and what factors blocked information from passing between different social circles.

NWN's conversation system was well equipped to produce this desired effect. We started by making computer-controlled characters remember what they were told. Then, when they were within a specific range of another character, they would go over to them and share the knowledge they had previously received. A player could pass one piece of information to a non-player character and then watch the news spread virally across town. Once we realized that we could make such a "gossip" system work, we saw all sorts of new pedagogical possibilities. While we originally envisioned a game focused around trades and jobs, much like a visit to Colonial Williamsburg, we began to re-center Revolution around the social and informational mechanisms of the era. In effect, we made Revolution a game about the oral culture of late 18th-century America. Students would need to understand how this oral culture was shaped by the social, political, racial, and gender strata of the time in order to play Revolution effectively.

A player's reputation, for example, could be adversely impacted by gossip surrounding her beliefs or actions, increasing the stakes of political choices. Revolutionaries could pass word to their supporters without information falling into the hands of the Redcoats or their Loyalist supporters. Because information would not pass certain social barriers easily, players had to figure out how to inform everybody about a local rally. If the player's avatar had an upper-class status, the information would spread more easily among the upper class. Gender and race would have similar effects. In this way, different players could work together or against each other in trying to manipulate the flow of information.

Other affordances of NWN allowed us to build in opportunities for students to reflect back on their experiences. Russell Francis, a researcher from Oxford University, asked Revolution players to write diaries or construct machinima movies recounting the events from the perspective of their fictional characters. This process allowed them to share their very different experiences in the game with classmates and gave researchers insights into what they learned and how they learned through their role-play. Francis found that players often combined things they learned in the game with insights from their own lives or things they had read in other accounts of the period. For example, one student, who played the part of a house slave, described feelings of isolation or tension with field slaves as a result of her privileged access to the master. This sense of alienation emerged as much from what she brought to the game as from anything we had programmed into the simulation. Such accounts helped us to better appreciate the ways that the mechanics of role-play enabled students to consolidate what they had learned about the period and communicate it with others.

Matthew Weise is equal parts gamer and cinephile, having attended film school before segueing into game studies and then game development. Matt is a producer for GAMBIT and a full-time gamer, which means he not only plays games on a variety of systems but he also completes (most of) them. Matthew did his undergrad at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where he studied film production before going rogue to design his own degree. He graduated in 2001 with a degree in Digital Arts, which included videogames (this was before Game Studies was a field). He continued his research at MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, where he worked on Revolution with The Education Arcade. After leaving MIT in 2004 Matt worked in mobile game development for a few years, occassionally doing some consultancy work, before returning to work at GAMBIT.

Brett Camper is an independent game developer and writer. He received a master's

degree from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, where he was a designer and

technical lead on The Education Arcade's Colonial Williamsburg: Revolution

project. He subsequently acted as The Education Arcade's research manager, and

has also worked in digital media as a program manager at RealNetworks. He is

currently a senior product manager at eMusic, the leading digital subscription

service for independent music.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twenty Two, Part Two): Eden Lee Lackner and Jes Battis

NEGOTIATING SUBCULTURAL VALUES ELL: And now I find myself thinking of the fact that many people approach fandom as if it is a monolithic counterculture, very much invested in subverting mainstream notions -- which certain parts are, of course -- but each part operates very much as a series of small subcultural groups, thus not rejecting the larger cultural norms, but rather creating rules and modes of behaviour that fit within the larger culture. Right now, a number of fiction/art exchanges, patterned on the "Secret Santa" model, are gearing up or in progress, and it reminds me of the discussions around whether fanfic/art itself is the gift and feedback a thank-you, or the flipside of that, where feedback is the gift. Obviously within the fic exchange, there are hard and fast rules not only around participation but also in terms of how a recipient must respond (positively, since the fic/art is a gift), but in the larger community, outside of the exchange, the relation between constructive criticism and positive-only feedback is one fraught with tension and a reoccurring discussion. Despite the fact that a more formalized type of fen mentoring appears to have fallen away, the amount of time spent by active fans in discussing etiquette, values and "correct" behaviour certainly argues for a subculture that is continually negotiating its own set of norms to allow it to more easily fit in with the reigning culture.

Actually, I'm not sure if you're familiar with Fandom_Wank, a long-standing community of close to five thousand fans who exist, by their own mandate, to mock the absurdities and less-than-rational behaviour in fandom. They're widely known past their own membership, and while they discourage trolling, as a member of fandom I know I'm potentially inviting "wank" by bringing them up in any sort of critical way, much as one expects a throat-slashing after calling for Bloody Mary. And yet despite situating themselves as extra-fandom -- i.e. only there to mock, not participate -- their very existence acts as a type of watchdog to enforce specific behaviours. There's much debate over whether or not they're a "good" or "bad" influence, whether they're the "mean girls" (and yet I can't help but note a top-heavy masculine moderation team) or if those that dislike them are the "nice girls," but all issues of quality aside, there's a clear sense within related fandom circles that one must avoid "wank" or wanking publically, lest one ends up reported on Fandom_Wank.

TEXTUAL BODIES

ELL: You mentioned your interest in CSI fic, which I think is fascinating. Given that it's a more episodic show than many fan-favourites, do you find that there are certain issues that exist within the community that differ from those in closed-text fandoms? Or do you note any issues around writing both het and slash within one story, given that het, gen and slash communities often have rather clear boundaries between each? What are the challenges in straddling the divide between fan writer and author, especially in light of how fanfic is often charged as good for practise, but not "real" writing?

JB: My response from different fan communities has been mixed. When I was writing the OC paper, I contacted a few fic writers for permission to include their work, and often they didn't want it published at all. They drew very clear boundaries between their professional lives and their fanfic writing. I tend to be really non-discriminating about the different genres that I write in, and I don't mind if people come to my writing through a novel, an academic essay, or a slash-fic CSI story, just as long as they're reading! But part of that comes from the privilege of being a middle-class white fag working in progressive cultural-studies institutions.

I like writing CSI fic because the show is so patently unsexy, at least from the standpoint of bodies colliding in bed. All of the sexuality is traced through the forensic analyses, and cadavers themselves become erotic objects (think of all the scenes where Doc Robins is gently washing and debriding a body on his autopsy table). All of the erotic subtext between Gil and Sarah (well, until a few weeks ago) was/is communicated through glances, gestures, and science. So it's perfect for slash, since you literally have to use chemistry and science to make queer sexuality happen. Most of the CSI fic circulating is hetfic, but several authors have explored the Greg/Nick relationship, which just fascinates me.

ELL: There's a perennial argument that goes on in the LiveJournal circles about the preponderance of slash vs. het and gen, and an odd sense that there's far more slash in any one fandom than het and/or gen, so it's interesting to see the flipside of it. Strangely enough, most of my interaction with CSI fanfic has been with Greg/Nick writers (apart from the one time I tried my hand at Grissom/Nick for a friend, that is), so I'd always had the skewed sense of it as a large area of CSI fanfic.

I love the idea of CSI as furthering the work of body as text, as after all, the fan writer is already inscribing on the canon body, or dissecting and reassembling it in a more pleasing manner. It's curious that the body through which one explores the erotic/queer in CSI is so often deceased; a closed text, if you will, in a still-open canon.

MARGINALIZATION

JB: As some who's always used academia to explore marginalized genres--queer writing, fantasy/sf, disability studies, children's and adolescent lit--I feel drawn to fanfiction because it straddles so many cultural and professional divides. The thought of a tenured-prof writing mpreg or really hot slash is just so kickass to me, I love it. I want my students to read the slash that I write. I'm teaching a class on Cult TV in the spring, and one of the assignments is to write an essay on fanfiction, to see fanfic as critical theory, and hopefully I can encourage them to write their own fanfic as well.

I'm just reading Judith Butler's new book with Gayatri Spivak, Who Sings the Nation State? wherein they exchange ideas about what makes the nation. It's produced as a dialogue between the two, and it makes me wonder what a dialogue between two expert fanfic critics--like Constance Penley and Camille Bacon-Smith--might look like. The book itself is quite small and artfully made by Seagull Press, in contradistinction to the edited volumes on fanfic currently available. But its size also reminds me of Penley's Nasa/Trek, which was also a slim and very pretty volume, as if its aesthetic was meant to disguise that it would seriously be talking about fan communities. It makes me think of how a lot of fanfic critics tend to do more mainstream work that's published with university presses, and their essays on fan culture pop up in unexpected collections and online journals.

ELL: As someone who continues to struggle to find a place to do "serious" work on fan culture, I'd absolutely concur. It's such a marginalized area that a lot of institutions simply don't know what to do with it just yet. Hopefully with the rise in cross-discipline research in Fan and Media Studies and discussions such as these, this will stop being a hurdle, or something that almost has to be published on the sly.

JB: I was originally going to write my dissertation on Buffy. I knew that Michele Byers had done it at the University of Toronto, so there was a precedent. But I was still nervous about devoting 4-5 years on a Buffyology treatise. The only person who didn't worry about it was my supervisor. He basically said, "I think it's hot, you should do it if that's what you're drawn to, and I'll support you." That was so valuable. I ended up writing Blood Relations a lot earlier instead as a monograph, and then did something much broader for my dissertation, but to know that I could have done it was great. Not every supervisor is willing to give that kind of unconditional support. I was very lucky, because I developed relationships with several amazing people at SFU, and they all supported my engagements with pop culture and queer studies rather than telling me to become a Victorianist. I was originally doing an MA thesis on, of all things, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I loved the text, but hated the criticism. My then-supervisor, a medievalist, answered a frantic email from me one evening--holy fuck, I don't think I can do this project, I'm freaking out--by telling me gently that if I wasn't in love with the work, I needed to do something else. He even recommended someone else to work with. That's real pedagogy. So I started getting more and more involved with pop culture scholarship, until I suddenly realized one day that I was "doing" pop culture and television studies. How had that happened?

Things are getting better for interdisciplinary studies, but there's still a frustrating emphasis on literary canon and film studies in the humanities that makes it nearly impossible for pop culture scholars to get jobs teaching what they actually want to. Camille Paglia is up in arms because Buffy is being taught in undergraduate film seminars, and Jamieson's new book on SF Utopias contains almost no discussion of popular SF television, comics, manga, or fan cultures. Then again, Paglia is still getting over the shock that Judith Butler is popular among grad students. We need to do away with all this bullshit about gender performativity and just do close readings again. Like that's a viable answer. Conservative scholars see work on popular culture--work not based wholly on participatory analysis and endorsed by the stamp of Cultural Studies--as a violent movement in the wrong direction, but it's really a lateral movement. And those are the same arguments used to enforce ironclad class boundaries. Television isn't culture. Television promises too much access, both at the transnational and the inter-city level, and if we call it culture then we have to give it more grants, and if we do that we risk not giving money to the canonical research that actually keeps English and Film departments afloat. It's a bad situation. So fan-culture and TV specialists end up taking jobs explaining film aesthetics, because film aesthetics is Cultural Studies and television is really just poor culture.

I've always been pretty open about doing pop culture scholarship. I've got two books out that focus on television shows, but they were hard to publish, especially when I was still a graduate student. I enjoyed sending proposals to big journals and university presses just to see what they'd say. Everyone should email Duke UP with a crazy proposal just to see if they answer. I managed to write an essay on queer hobbits having sex for Modern Fiction Studies, which still probably counts as my name-brand publication, along with small pieces I did for Canadian Literature. But a lot of my work on science fiction and fan cultures has come out in online journals like Refractory, Slayage, Jump Cut, The Looking Glass. These are great journals who publish new and exciting scholarship, but they aren't getting indexed by MLA or HSSI because they're not Postmodern Culture. The hierarchy of these databases just infuriates me, especially because a lot of hiring committees embrace an ethic of: "If it's not indexed, it's not a real publication." Fuck that. Cynthia Fuchs has been publishing online for years. Which reminds me, I find it a little odd that Duke has suddenly decided to publish a volume of essays on Buffy, something like 8 years after scholarship on the show was being pioneered by critics like David Lavery and Rhonda Wilcox. I'm happy that Fuchs got them agree to the project, but confused by its pertinence. And why doesn't it feature the work of critics who wrote about Buffy in Slayage and Refractory? What about grad student essays? You can't tell me that presses like Duke, Minnesota, and Routledge haven't gotten endless proposals for books on Buffy and Angel over the years. Why did this particular book get produced?

There's still a resistance to work on fan cultures because academics can't figure out if it's sociological, psychoanalytic, literary, or what. Every university press is back-logged with proposals, and most of the time they have to choose clearly definable work that's guaranteed to sell and get good press. That's not shitty of them, it's just survival. But as a result they end up passing on interdisciplinary work that blurs academic categories. If I write a book about television, for instance, is it a fan study, a literary analysis, a film analysis, or a piece of critical theory? If I include the work of online fan writers without going through the standard ethical reviews necessary for sociological analyses--since they aren't being interviewed, but their feelings, their affective orientations, their passions are being marshaled and invoked--what kind of "study" is that? If I use Of Grammatology to talk about CSI fanfic, what "novel" am I deconstructing? It gets confusing. And, given that a lot of acafans like us produce fanfic as well, there's a potential for scholarly incest--writing positively and uncritically about the same literature that we produce. When, in fact, most scholars are able to write critically (but not dispassionately) about texts that they love, and texts that they themselves might silently or publicly emulate. So it's really the same thing, but acafans are more open about it, so they get targeted.

I think that fanfiction provides a crucial and even redemptive inventory of terms, energies, and affects for writers and viewers. The ability to embroider a text and make it your own, to develop a charged relationship with the characters while simultaneously producing new possibilities, new pairings--to offer up those pairings to other fans and writers, who might adhere to them, possibilities that they never foresaw or never even knew they wanted--that's critical theory.

ELL: You make some excellent points. The interdisciplinary nature of Fan Studies and Popular Culture is a real barrier to "fitting in" with the more conservative aspects of academia, yet it provides a whole new frontier to explore in a myriad of really creative ways. I would hate to see pop culture relegated to one discipline, as I'm certain it would hobble it in ways that research more fixed in historical, social or political spheres is not. That's why I think that debates like the one hosted here are so important. The more conservatively-oriented realms certainly aren't going to go out of their way to make space for people interested in these areas, not even when they intersect with their own interests -- and here I note that I straddle traditional and non-traditional English Literature Studies in the fact that I chose to become a Victorianist and continue to nurture those interests in tandem with Fan Studies, especially as the Nineteenth Century paves the way for modern notions of popular culture and fan behaviour -- so it's fairly important that we make an effort to take note of what we're all up to, as well as sharing knowledge and working together to clear spaces for ourselves. Interdisciplinary projects, journals, conferences, collections, etc. are of paramount importance not just to get our names out there, but to create a solid base on which Fan/Media/Popular Culture Studies can rest and from which it can grow.

Furthermore, just as I think a lot of us are feeling our imperfect way to how to properly interact with the texts and people we study (who, after all, are often people we know personally and/or on a fannish level), it's important that non-acafen work with us as well. It's impossible for fandom to exist as a hidden subculture anymore, not with the globalization of the internet, and not even if all acafen stopped writing about fandom tomorrow. We're our own best friends; anti-academic sentiment gets us about as far as anti-fan opinion does, as it just sets up more barriers to understanding and allows for more othering by the dominant culture. One of the best things, I think, about the second wave of fan culture studies is that it has become more acceptable, at least within the field, to openly declare one's positioning as both fan and academic. Participatory studies can often bring more insight than the outsider looking in, as long as the critical eye is still in play, and as you said, most scholars are more than capable of remaining critical, even when dealing with something we love. It's a shame that in order to remain "legitimate" in the eyes of more traditional disciplinary work, one must remain somewhat closeted. (It's especially a shame in that I used to play a game with my officemates in which I'd make them name a text they enjoyed, and I'd find slash written in that particular universe in five minutes or less. Lots of fun, but harder to do when you're supposed to present yourself as a serious scholar.)

I think your assessment of fanfic as a type of critical theory is an important one, and something that would benefit from more explication in surrounding research. The fact that so much of fanfic exists in a legal grey area that does not recognize it as a critical engagement with a preexisting text is perhaps one of the sources of anxiety around the threat of Cease & Desist letters and DMCA notices. If fanfic is critique, it takes on a whole new legal standing, as I understand it.

There's a movement afoot to set up an umbrella organization under which fan fiction is recognized and defended as both transformative and creatively legitimate that I have been watching with great interest (The Organization for Transformative Works; news and updates on project process available at otw_news). I wish the organization all the success in the world. I hope it also heralds more acceptance by fans of the acafen in fandom's ranks; one day any one of us could find ourselves in a position to help bolster up fan fiction's claim to legitimacy, and working together, fan and acafan, can only help pave the way to wider acceptance.

Thank you, Jes, for an interesting and thought-provoking discussion.

Editor's Note: This is the last entry in the Gender and Fan Culture discussion series. Next week, I will run closing reflections from many of the participants in this conversation and will invite you to share your own reflections about what you have learned about Fan Studies through this series and how and where this conversation should be continued.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twenty Two, Part One): Eden Lee Lackner and Jes Battis

INTRODUCTIONS ELL: My name is Eden Lee Lackner. I'm currently an Independent Scholar, and I have a Master of Arts in English Literature with a focus in Victorian Literature from The University of Calgary (Calgary, Alberta, Canada). While my Masters was particularly concerned with the sanctification of execution in Nineteenth Century novels (an interesting, if ghoulish topic), a lot of the narratives and theories I encountered helped elucidate some of my thoughts on the body as text, and further into the erotics of that written-upon body, which then links up quite beautifully with the erotics of fans writing upon a textual body with and for other fans.

To that end, I recently collaborated on an article titled "Cunning Linguists: The Bisexual Erotics of Words/Silence/Flesh" with Barbara Lucas and Robin Reid, which is currently available in Busse and Hellekson's Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. We discuss, in detail, this erotic exchange between writer, co-writer and reader, with an eye to complicating earlier, more homogeneous notions of "fan" as well as the straight/gay binary of the slash writer/reader. I'm particularly interested in the oversimplification of such binaries, especially as present in Fan/Media Studies and related areas. One of the assumptions that seems to remain largely unchallenged to date is the representation of internet-based fans as almost exclusively culturally American (a label which carries more problematic homogeneity, of course), when in fact the internet allows for cross- and multi-cultural contact, often without explicitly drawn/acknowledged boundaries. In line with these notions of boundaries, more recently I've been considering how gatekeeping works within both academia and fandom, and how in many cases the behaviours performed in the process of blocking/restricting access in either realm mirror each another.

For going on six years now, I've presented papers, as well as moderated and participated in panels and theory roundtables dealing with Fan Studies at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, held annually in Florida (and still accepting proposals in a variety of disciplines for the upcoming year). I was actually (one of) the first to present on fan texts at the conference, which was a pleasure and a privilege, as the conference has begun to attract quite a number of academics interested in the area in the years following.

On a more personal level, I come from a family of fans. My mother, a hard-core science fiction fan (and an academic), introduced me to the world of speculative fiction at a very early age; in fact, Star Wars: A New Hope was the very first movie I ever saw in theatres. Granted, I was not quite two and it was a Drive-In, but nevertheless... She and I have a long history of shared fantasy worlds, and she encouraged me to devour those universes without apology. My father, on the other hand, is a dedicated golfer, and can very easily discuss and debate professional stats, amateur up-and-comers, and potential career-impacting issues for hours on end, preferably while on the greens himself. Thus fannishness has always been normative behaviour for me, and it's often a bit unsettling to interact with people who claim no fan status of any kind.

When I was eleven I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time (after a few years of repeated annual readings of The Hobbit), and was hopelessly and forever lost as, for lack of a better term, I found my "home fandom." I continued on for years as a feral fan, consuming all sorts of fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery texts on my own, until I encountered an anime club that was just starting up at my university during the first years of my Masters. From there I became much more involved in communal fannish activities, including taking part in a number of shared creative endeavours and organization of Province-wide events. Although I was already peripherally aware of the existence of fan fiction, it was around this time that I was introduced to shounen-ai/yaoi/shoujo-ai/yuri, and very shortly after, in 1999 (once I had seen Qui-Gon's death scene in The Phantom Menace and teased out the homoerotic subtext underneath), I became interested in slash fiction as a reader and writer. In 2001, with the release of The Fellowship of the Ring, I returned to my home fandom as a more active participant, where I continue to participate in the surrounding fiction-writing community today.

JB: I did my PhD at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, focusing on melancholy within LGBT fantasy texts. I covered a lot of writers who had never been given academic attention before, including Mercedes Lackey, Tanya Huff, Fiona Patton, Lynn Flewelling, and Chaz Brenchley. While I was writing the diss, I actually got in touch with Lynn and Chaz, and they offered me lots of great advice and encouraged me with fiction writing. Earlier this year, I got a contract from Ace for my first novel, Night Child , as well as a sequel. The first will be out in Spring/08, and the second will be released the following year.

So, I'm one of those weird hybrids: an academic-fan who also writes fantasy fiction. I got to meet Samuel Delany for the first time a few weeks ago! He was giving a talk at CUNY, and I (terrified) introduced myself in a mousey little voice and told (stuttered) him about my first novel. He said it sounded great, and offered to take a look at it. Now I fantasize about him smoking a pipe, surrounded by books in his massive office in Philadelphia, turning the pages of my manuscript. To me, that's hot.

I started reading fantasy early, although it took me till I was 20 to get through LoTR. I couldn't really appreciate it when I was younger, since I had such a short attention span. I'm still not good with Victorian novels, although I love Charlotte Bronte (especially Villette), and have a sort of affection for Dickens because he just describes things so fucking well. His desks and drawers seem more real than my characters sometimes. I decided to write the great (Canadian) fantasy novel when I was 11, and I would force all of my friends to read these bad, bad pages printed off on our old dot matrix printer. I still remember the screee--whrrrrr--screee sound of the printer as somehow being the most exciting sound in the world for me, at 11.

I came late to the fanfiction scene. A friend got me hooked on CSI, and convinced me to read some GSR fanfiction. It took me a while to get into it, but then I discovered a lot of slash devoted to Seth/Ryan in The OC, and I was a goner. I was watching The OC at the time, and reading the slash gave me so many ideas (some academic, some dirty, dirty), so I wrote an essay on incest and slash fiction with The OC as the focal point. The essay got rejected by some major journals, which is nothing new for me. It might get picked up by an edited volume, but the writing was so fun that I almost don't care if it ever gets published. Almost.

After writing the essay, I started experimenting with writing CSI slash, but containing elements of GSR as well. Basically, I enjoyed writing about Grissom and Sarah observing a fledgling relationship developing between Greg and Nick, kind of an older foster-couple giving advice to young foundlings. I want to keep at it, but once I moved to New York, things got really busy really fast. So hopefully I'll get the chance to return to it soon.

I started blogging as a way to talk about my anxiety around moving away from Canada, and that kind of morphed into a forum for talking about everything else. Recently, my little blog received some unexpected international attention when a reported from the National Post in Canada targeted my research on pop culture as "pointless" and "a drain on tax dollars." He tried to use my blog to discredit me, but just ended up giving my research more publicity and actually making me sound pretty cool.

CULTURAL HOMOGENIZATION

ELL: I must admit to being rather pleased to be paired up with another Canuck, especially since I've been itching to discuss how the globalization the internet affords affects fan exchange and assumptions. Perhaps your experiences have been different than mine, but I've found that when operating in multicultural spaces, whether as an academic, a fan, or an acafan (or, really, all three, because who can separate out the distinct strands completely?), there's a very strange positioning that goes on as a Canadian, living so close to the US (or in your case, in the US itself) and having such easy access to the same (or similar) streams of entertainment and popular culture. Since we often speak the same language, and have shared knowledge of trends, I've often run into the assumption on the part of other scholars or fen that "Canadian" is indistinguishable from "American," which has made me hyperaware of some of the (cultural/gendered/ethnic/linguistic/etc.) homogenization that goes on in fan spaces and the corresponding research. Of course, it's impossible to not make some generalizations when discussing any topic, but I think cultural assumptions are largely overlooked in Fan Studies at the present time. I note that there are some studies emerging that discuss non-English speaking fan groups, such as Finnish or Russian fans -- Irma Hirsjärvi's work springs to mind most immediately with regard to the former -- and their activities within spaces bound by language, but less consideration given to fans participating in fandom via a shared language yet coming from varied cultural backgrounds.

In fact, speaking from an experiential point of view, I've met more than one fan who has used fandom as a (fairly successful) way to learn English -- a close Italian friend of mine is fond of joking that when people ask her how she's acquired such impressive English skills she barely manages to suppress the urge to say, "from reading gay porn on the internet" -- or who has made a conscious decision to participate in fandom using a second or third language instead of her first.

In this debate series we've touched on many complicating spheres, including gender, race, and sexuality, and I think it's a worthwhile proposition to push for one more factor that perhaps requires a little more attention. Since you mention experiencing anxiety at moving into another culture, I wonder if you have some insight into how cultural assumptions work within academic and fan communities, or if you've seen any of this at work.

JB: As a "legal alien" living in New York, I definitely feel a cultural divide. My American colleagues tend to stress Canadian difference, however, rather than emphasizing sameness. This usually takes the form of: "Do you have this in Canada? Is this book distributed? Can you watch this show?" Suggestions that Canada has its own national programming are usually met with blank stares or polite astonishment. Also, I never get to talk about Degrassi Jr High to my students, which is traumatic.

ELL: I can imagine that's traumatic! (And, oh no, now I've got the theme song stuck in my head.)

It's interesting that you've found the cultural differences are emphasized. I wonder if that has to do with the difference between the anonymity the internet affords, and in person and/or communication that comes with background information already provided. I imagine one of the more difficult aspects of considering the diversity of the internet is that just like a myriad of other dimensions, nationality needs to be self-reported, and is often an aspect that is dropped from or left out of research into fanworks, or is simply not reported.

Oddly enough, in my encounters with scholars at international conferences, I've found that I need to state my nationality or display it prominently in my own discourse in order to achieve that same level of recognition or risk being folded in with other North Americans. It's a strange balance, though, isn't it, finding comfortable ground between being singled out as a stand in for a larger culture or being erroneously decoded?

I think that perhaps this is an issue that extends to cultures that mirror each other in Seymour Martin Lipset's sense of the concept. I've run across some of these same identity issues in conversation with New Zealanders, for instance, who are often folded in with Australians by outsiders despite having a distinctly different sense of themselves. I really do think that just like gender and sexuality, national identity, especially in concert with the global nature of internet fandom, adds an interesting complication to concepts of what "fandom" is.

GATEKEEPING AND GENDER

ELL: I'm absolutely fascinated by the encounter you had with the National Post! Not knowing the whole story, I can't help but wonder how much that particular reporter's story was an attempt to gatekeep; one of the perennial issues facing academia in North America seems to be a push towards "practical, hands-on" training over more esoteric pursuits, and of course Fan Studies itself seems to exist in a marginalized area of a larger marginalized specialization. (I'm thinking of Fan Studies as part of Popular Culture or even Speculative Fiction research, here, but of course there are a number of other flagships it often sails under.) It's interesting how throughout this debate we've been discussing potential othering and privileging of one gender over another while at the same time many of us are part of a larger othered discipline.

And here I must note that while I certainly believe that gender often plays a role in status and whose voices are heard -- the lack of interest by Chris Williams of FanLib in engaging with the largely female audience that opposed him and his decision to speak to a male academic being a relatively recent and high-profile example -- I do believe it's much more complicated than a simple binary of male vs. female, blue vs. pink would have us believe. Gatekeeping is certainly prevalent in fandom, academia and acafandom, and oftentimes it doesn't cross gender lines. There are a variety of fannish communities on LiveJournal, for instance, that require certain conditions be met before a fan is allowed to become part of the collective (Resistance is Futile!); often these conditions are some subjectively perceived level of quality or trustworthiness. Some, such as the "stamping" communities, which sort you into Hogwarts' houses or assign you a specific Star Wars character, go so far as to require others to vouch for you, and/or fill out complicated applications which are reviewed by part or all of the membership before the fan is granted access. And of course some of the most strident gatekeepers I've encountered in my own academic pursuits have had no regard for gender, but have, much like your National Post reporter, applied arbitrary standards that have little or nothing to do with "quality" or "worth" and have far more to do with perpetuating a system of (sometimes fairly petty) personal beliefs. I certainly can't discount the possibility that the intragender gatekeeping has extragender roots; very much a "don't embarrass me in front of the boys" impulse, of course, which I imagine loops right back around to issues of gender marginalization.

Now, granted, while to a certain extent gatekeeping is required in any group lest chaos reign, the more that control rests in the hands of a single person or small like-minded group, the more it seems to shuffle towards the absurd. I do wonder how much gatekeepers have replaced mentors as the first introduction to fan-writing communities with the increased access the internet allows.

Comics as Civic Media and Other Matters...

The blog which we launched for the new Center for Future Civic Media has started to generate some real momentum. The site was created not simply to announce or report events hosted by the center but also as a space where the students and faculty of the two affiliated programs -- the MIT Media Lab and the Comparative Media Studies program -- can share their thoughts about the nature of civic media. I am blessed this year with a team of four veteran journalists working in the Comparative Media Studies Program, each of whom is bringing their reporting skills to the task of identifying compelling examples of civic media practices around the world. For example, incoming CMS Masters student Abhimanyu Das, a veteran culture reporter from India, wrote a compelling account of the work being done by the Comics Defense Fund, an organization fighting to defend the First Amendment rights of comic book creators and consumers:

What is significant about the organization is the way in which it connects comic book writers, publishers, retailers and readers and taps their common admiration for the art form in order to defend its stake in the cultural landscape. The key factor here is their shared enthusiasm for comics, the sort of collective energy cited by Beth Noveck at the first forum for the Center as being an essential component of civic engagement. While it might not be immediately obvious to the outsider what this enthusiasm is directed against, the fact remains that there exists a serious ongoing problem with attacks directed at the comic book industry, their targets ranging from the products of large publishers like DC Comics to the work of small independent artists. Libraries are being forced to take legitimate artistic works off their shelves, artists are being sued for parodying corporate entities and retailers selling comics with mature content are being charged with distributing obscene materials. A prevailing myth is that comics are meant exclusively for children and that any depictions of adult content or themes (however artistically relevant) are inappropriate or illegal. It is a major threat to a vibrant artistic tradition and one that the CBLDF is currently attempting to combat...

he CBLDF has spearheaded defenses or otherwise assisted individuals and organizations in myriad First Amendment cases on local levels across the United States. A particularly good example of how the CBLDF works on a local level is its influence upon a recent case in Marshall, MO. In October 2006, a local resident formally requested that two graphic novels-Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and Blankets by Craig Thompson-be removed from the shelves of the town's public library because of their allegedly obscene content. Both works have considerable artistic merit (Fun Home was one of Time magazine's "10 Best Books of 2006″) and earned widespread critical acclaim for their frank portrayal of troubled adolescence. Once the CBLDF was brought in, its involvement was not so much in the realm of legal aid or fundraising but, rather, geared more towards community engagement. The CBLDF, in conjunction with the National Coalition against Censorship, drafted a much publicized letter to the library's board of trustees. This letter served as a useful document in terms of articulating why the graphic novels could hardly be termed obscene and the pitfalls of a censorship policy.

However, it played a more important role in the way it served as a rallying point for those in the Marshall community that opposed the removal of the books. The document raised awareness of the issue and allowed local comic book fans and First Amendment advocates to find each other and build an opposition to the group calling for the ban. In addition, the national scrutiny that the letter brought with it forced the Marshall library to open up the process by which the ban request was being considered and facilitated the efforts of the opposition group. This led to every subsequent open hearing on the case being well attended by those community members that put forward an organized defense of the graphic novels. The CBLDF's campaigning also led to an elevation of the level of local discourse surrounding the case as it formed a public counter-point to the 'pornography' claims and led to the books being read by considerably more people in the area than they otherwise would have been. Therefore, as a result of local efforts that built up much of its steam around the CBLDF's support, the library drafted a new materials selection policy in March 2007 and decided to return the two books to their shelves without any segregation of the books by a 'prejudicial system.'

For more information on the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, check out their website

Other groups spotlighted so far on the blog include:

The BBC Action Network.

Advancement Through Interactive Radio

The Online News Association

Shareideas.org

Healthline

Wikinews

NEWz

If you haven't check out the site yet, give it a look.

Now for Your Moment of Zen...

While we are on the subject of civic media, I have to pass along a story which was shared with me by Axel Bruns from the Queensland University of Technology's Creative Industries crew. It concerns The Chaser's War on Everything, a popular satire program produced by the Australian Broadcasting Company, and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Conference, which Wikipedia describes as "a forum for a group of 21 Pacific Rim countries that represent about 60% of the world's economy to discuss the regional economy, cooperation, trade and investment." In September, the group held a meeting in Sydney which George W. Bush attended. Much publicity surrounded the security for this event -- this being a "post-9/11" world and all that. So, The Chasers got the bright idea to see if they could test the security structures, which they did with extraordinary effectiveness, by pretending to be the Canadian delegation. They pulled up at the gate in a black limo with a Maple Leaf flag and a "security detail" of guys in suits running alongside it and got flagged through. They managed to get extraordinarily close to Bush's quarters before they started to get really anxious and turned the car around. As one final prank, though, they had a guy who was dress as Bin Laden pop out of the car. Then and only then did the security detail click into action. Now, the comedy show stars and producers are facing legal sanctions for their actions, so the least we can do is watch the farce unfold at YouTube. The story was widely reported in Australia and Canada where there were predictable mixtures of hysterical laughter and wounded dignity. But perhaps adding insult to injury, I haven't meet anyone in the United States who has heard the story through our national media.

Calling All Aca-Fen!

Mark Deuze (Indiana University) asked me to pass along to readers this call for submissions to a special issue of the International Journal of Cultural Studies which he is co-editing with John Banks (Queensland University of Technology) focused on co-creation and cultural labor issues.

Here's what you need to know:

Scholarship on the production side of new or converging media industries is scarce, but growing as the prominence of cultural production in a worldwide 'experience economy' increases, next to global concerns about the changing nature of work and labour in the media and creative industries specifically, and creative labor in general. Media professions as varied as public relations, marketing communications, advertising, digital game development, fashion, movie and television production have only rarely been studied at the level of work and labor relations. Post-disciplinary research and debates are now emerging about the nature, characteristics and practices of work and labor relations in the context of networked and global media industries.

Consumers increasingly participate in media production as co-creators of content and experiences. Transformations in the relations among media producers and consumers, as well as between professionals and amateurs may indicate a profound shift in which our frameworks and categories of analysis (such as the traditional labor theory of value) that worked well in the context of an industrial media economy are less helpful than before. Does recent work grounded in neo-Marxian theories of immaterial labor, affective labor, free labor, and precarious labor for example help us to analyze and unpack the changing conditions and definitions of work? What are the implications of a potentially radical unsettling of the assumed division of labour between professional, expert media producers and amateurs, volunteers, or citizen-consumer collectives?

These transformations may be understood as part of a shift from a closed expert system towards more collective innovation networks, across which expertise becomes distributed. How are these labor relations between professionals and amateurs negotiated? Are emerging consumer co-creation relations a threat to the livelihoods, professional identity, and working conditions of professional creative workers? Can this phenomenon be explained as the exploitative extraction of surplus value from the work of media consumers, or is something else potentially more profound and challenging playing out here? Indeed, are these emerging phenomena best understood as a form of labor?

For this special issue we hope to bring together research from a variety of disciplines and perspectives that ambitiously aims to come to grips with the conditions and opportunities of consumer co-creative practices. Co-creative media production practice is perhaps a disruptive agent of change that sits uncomfortably with our current understandings and theories of work and labor.

We thus invite papers that describe, explain, interrogate, contextualize and thus further our understanding of the changing nature of media work in the context of co-creative media production practice.

Call for Papers

This special issue on Co-Creative Labor strives to bring together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, addressing general or particular concerns about the conditions and changing nature of (new) media work and co-creative labor in different areas of the creative industries. The issue calls for papers that focus on rich empirical and/or theoretical work in or across three key domains of research on co-creative labor and cultural production:

# New Media, Cultural Production, and Work

A first domain of research would focus on historical contexts and critical discussions of the role of media work in contemporary society. Key concepts used in the field-new media, digital culture, work, culture and creative industries, media professions-should be highlighted and clearly articulated with co-creative practices old and new.

# Media Professions

In a second domain we are looking for investigations of key media professions - journalism, game development, television and motion picture production, advertising, public relations and marketing communications, popular music, fashion -in terms of the changing nature of work in these professions, focusing on the convergence of the roles of professionals and amateurs and the implications for professional and/or organizational identity, and the management of creativity in a context of the signaled shift towards co-creative labor.

# Convergence Culture and Free Labor

A third area of research would focuses more explicitly on what industry observers coin as "user-generated content", "consumer co-creation" or "citizen media", and by the academy as "commons-based peer production" (Benkler), "free labor" (Terranova) and "convergence culture" (Jenkins).

We are specifically looking for submissions of original research including, but not limited to:

- Case studies of media companies adopting co-creative labor practices;

- Case studies of specific co-creative communities and their relationships with media producers;

- Content analyses of co-creative labor in the production of culture;

- Mapping of ethical, political, economical and cultural changes and challenges of co-creative labor;

- Quantitative and/or qualitative empirical work on the production, content, and/or consumption of co-created media messages;

- Research focusing on co-creative labor in the context of specific media industries;

- International comparative work on co-creative labor in media production.

Of course, this call is not exclusive, and we very much look forward to working with any authors on paper proposals or extended abstracts on related issues. We particularly want to encourage graduate students to submit work in progress.

Timetable

The special issue will appear as 12(2) of 2009. The deadline for all full paper submissions is: 30 August 2008. All submissions will be anonymously reviewed by at least two referees. Deadline for revised manuscripts is 7 November 2008. Final editorial decisions will be made by late November 2008. Submitted manuscripts should not exceed 7,500 words (including main text, abstract and keywords, plus references and endnotes).

Contact

Please submit papers, extended abstracts, or expressions of interest to Mark Deuze (mdeuze at indiana.edu).

Hustling 2.0: Soulja Boy and the Crank Dat Phenomenon

Sometimes a class project takes on a life of its own. I asked the students in the CMS graduate proseminar on Media Theory and Methods to work on teams and report on a contemporary media phenomenon, reading it against some of the theories about media change we have been studying so far this term. A team of our incoming graduate students -- Kevin Driscoll, Xiaochang Li, Lauren Silberman, and Whitney Trettien -- decided to focus their energy on examining the ways that Soulja Boy, a teenage hip hop phenomenon, used a mixture of social network sites and YouTube to push his way up into the top music charts.

A key to his success turns out to be his active encouragement of fans to sample, remix, mashup, and perform his "Crank Dat" song through whatever media channels they want. Our Convergence Culture Consortium is focusing this year on understanding what we call "spreadable media," arguing that the era when value was created by "stickiness" is giving way to one where media gains new value through grassroots circulation. If it doesn't spread, it's dead! And the best way to insure the spread of media is to give over greater control to the audience, to increase their emotional stakes in your success.

As the students discovered the vast array of different people out there who were performing "Crank Dat," they wanted to get into the act. And so they got a camera, borrowed some lab coats, used their social network accounts to draw people together, and staged their own music video, which now circulates via YouTube.

As it happened, I stumbled by between meetings, just in time to watch them lining up to dance on the dot. I stayed for a bit trying to master the for-me very challenging dance steps. I always seemed to be zooming like superman when I was supposed to be doing the pony walk. Unfortunately, the real Professor Jenkins doesn't have any of the moves that my avatar enjoys in Second Life. But, I enjoyed watching my students gamble and shake a leg.

To my pride, they showed their budding skills as public intellectuals, having managed to get the Boston Phoenix out to cover the story. Here's some of what the Phoenix reported on the unfolding scene:

In the summer of 2006, DeAndre Way, then 16, combated summer boredom in Batesville, Mississippi, by writing songs with Fruity Loops digital-audio software. He borrowed a cousin's video camera and filmed dances to accompany the music. Thanks to YouTube, Way's choreography quickly turned into a Southern dance craze -- particularly centered around a steel-pan-drum-fueled number called "Crank That (Soulja Boy)."...

This past Wednesday, a day after the release of Soulja Boy's debut album, Souljaboytellem.com, a dozen or so MIT grad students and professors gathered on a circular lawn beside Building 54 at 5:30 pm, blasting "Crank That" from a small gray CD player set on repeat. Some of the group were clad in lab coats and thick glasses as they repeated (and videotaped) the dance -- a crisscrossed jump in place, followed by a few shakes and stomps, a breast stroke-like arm spread, and four jumps to the left and right. "This will single-handedly transform the coolness factor for MIT," commented Henry Jenkins, co-founder of MIT's Comparative Media Studies (CMS) program, as he observed nearby.

The meeting of Soulja enthusiasts was organized by students -- including Kevin Driscoll, a/k/a Lone Wolf, a local DJ and former computer-science teacher -- from a CMS graduate course in media theory. Driscoll's lawn-dance party was more than just a way to add a video to the vast library of "Crank That" tributes. He hypothesizes that "Crank That" is a unique bullet point on the dance-craze timeline, symbolic of a shift in dances' virility and how they spread.

"It's by the power of the dance craze that [Soulja Boy] was picked up by a major label," says Driscoll. "It demonstrates how resources like YouTube and MySpace can be these enabling technologies, even for kids, really." The MIT Soulja Boy videos are now on YouTube (and up to about 400 views each, at press time) making them perpetuators of the very trend the participants are studying. At least it's not the Macarena.

Ever since, I've been talking up Soulja Boy as perhaps the most powerful success story we have so far of someone who taped the power of grassroots convergence to break into the commercial mainstream. Check out for example some of my comments about the phenomenon during my keynote address at our recent media literacy conference, organized by Home Inc., which were posted by Bill Densmore

One of the students on the project --xiaochang li-- wrote up her perspectives on "Crank Dat" and what she calls "Hustling 2.0" for the Convergence Culture Consortium blog and I wanted to pass this along to my readers. Next time, I will share her thoughts about how Soulja Boy's most recent music video might be seen as a textbook illustration for how convergence culture works.

Hustling 2.0: Soulja Boy and the Crank Dat Phenomenon

xiaochang li

A little while back, Kevin, one of my colleagues here at MIT, brought the Soulja Boy YouTube phenomenon to my attention while we were discussing an upcoming project.

Fast forward to October: Soulja Boy is fending off Britney Spears and Kanye West on the Billboard Top 100, and you can now watch a rag-tag team of MIT grad students, researchers, affiliates, and Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project and the Free Software Movement, crank that. (CMS program director Henry Jenkins even joined in the learn the dance, but sadly had to run off to something undoubtedly important before the video was shot.)

A little bit of context for those who have somehow managed to miss this craze: Soulja Boy produced his own tracks and uploaded videos of himself performing the dance onto MySpace and YouTube. People everywhere started doing their own versions and putting up their own videos, and the whole thing snowballed until people like Beyonce started incorporating the dance into her stage show. By that point, everyone from underground rap magazines to The Atlantic was talking about Soulja Boy.

Beyond the novelty of seeing everyone from Winnie the Pooh to a bunch of vaguely coordinated MIT students doing the "Crank That" dance, the rise of Soulja boy is an interesting exploration of self-promotion in the digital landscape.

Many groups have taken to social networks and video sharing as a means to self-promote, but, as anyone who has ignored dozens of friends requests from bands on myspace.com knows, the effectiveness of all these efforts is inconsistent, at best.

Part of the problem is that there isn't a significant shift in the way in which the

content is presented. Bands produce the same types of videos and promotional materials, except now they're accessible through YouTube instead of MTV. There's little consideration of the unique expectations and practices within these spaces.

In that way, Soulja Boy, who has described computer access as the turning point in the

development of his career, was far better equipped to handle his own online promotion

than any major label executive. In a move that was described on Artist Direct as "Hustling 2.0," Soulja took advantage of the fact that people were already downloading material from other artists, renaming his files as popular songs in order to spread his content. He also has a number of videos which use the particular video blogging aesthetic of YouTube to help brand him as a personality.

This gap in understanding between major media and cultural practices of user-generated content channels is mirrored in the official music video for "Crank That," wherein rap impresario Collipark good- naturedly mocks his own ignorance of the flourishing Web 2.0 phenomenon around Soulja Boy. The whole video, in fact, runs almost like an advertisement for the age of convergence culture, as the dance propagates over multiple channels of distribution, morphing and evolving from streaming video to mobile devices and ultimately ending up in the "real," physical world, and Soulja Boy steps away from his Webcam and chat windows to accept his record deal.

As Kevin pointed out in his blog, he takes the sign of major label recognition more like an award instead of an opportunity, payment for a job already well-done. On that note, it's interesting how the spelling varies between "Crank Dat" on many of the fan produced videos and some of the marketing on Souljaboytellem.com and "Crank That" on the official record, like a linguistic marker to differentiate the D-I-Y phenomenon from the standardization of the song and its incorporation into the established entertainment industry.

Check out the range of videos in the Soulja Boy

universe:

Soulja Boy's YouTube

channel, where you can see the original dance video, the official video, and the

instructional video, in addition to a number of fan videos and clips of celebrities

doing their own versions of "Crank That."

A fairly comprehensive collection of all the audio variations on the song that have appeared. My favorite might be the Folgers Coffee version.

A blog devoted solely to videos of the many, many versions of the dance. Note how the spellings vary from video to video.

When Xiaochang's post appeared on the C3 blog, she generated some interesting responses from the hip hop blogosphere. Check out:

ttp://www.ohword.com/blog/852/crank-dat-white-girl-the-soulja-boy-lesson-plan

http://www.prohiphop.com/2007/10/to-understand-s.html?cid=87651522

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twenty One, Part One): Barbara Lucas and Avi D. Santo

INTRODUCTIONS ADS: I am an assistant professor at Old Dominion University. This is my second year out of graduate school. I graduated in 2006 from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Radio-Television-Film. My dissertation focused on corporate authorship practices in managing transmedia brands prior to conglomeration. Basically, I analyzed how cultural icons like Superman, the Lone Ranger and Little Orphan Annie were licensed across media and merchandising sites and how their inter-textual meanings were managed. I also looked at how authorship rights were articulated by corporations over properties whose economic success rested on their seeming authorless and iconic. At ODU, I teach classes on critical race theory and media, international media systems, superheroes and US culture, and authorship and discourse. I am a co-founder of the e-journal Flow (http://www.flowtv.org) and current co-coordinating editor of MediaCommons (http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org).

Outside of academics, the first job I ever wanted was to be a soap opera writer (apologies for not using the term "daytime melodrama", but they were just soap operas when I was a teenager; a term that likely contributed to my eventual embarrassment over truly persuing this vocation). I watched Another World obsessively throughout my teens. I am a huge comic book dork. I primarily read revisionist superhero narratives that play at established conventions of the genre, but my pull list ranges from Fablesto Y The Last Man. Favorite TV of the moment: Battlestar Galactica, The Boondocks, My Name is Earl, Friday Night Lights, Project Runway.

BL: I have an MA in English from Case Western Reserve University with a concentration on British Renaissance literature and am a member of the adjunct faculty and Lakeland Community College. However, I've been a fantasy, horror, and (to a lesser extent) science fiction reader since I was a child. It wasn't until I was an adult that I returned to my passions as a field of study as well as one of pleasure. I have been a regular presenter at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (www.iafa.org), and I'm the Division Head for the new Community and Culture in the Fantastic Division that focuses on fan fiction and culture, video game theory, hypertexts, viral marketing, RPG's, ARG's, folkloric and sociological approaches to the fantastic. Basically, my division deals with new and emergent texts, texts that are non-traditional in nature. The deadline for this year's conference, held in March 2008 is close, and I am still accepting papers. I have calls up at the UPenn website. They can also be accessed at http://community.livejournal.com/ccfantastic/.

Outside of academic and corporate lives, though intersecting with my academic interests, I write fantasy fiction and poetry. I am interested in comics and graphic fiction and tend to be an eclectic reader who can bounce between Sandman (Gaiman's version),Preacher, Age of Bronze, Gloom Cookie, and A Distant Soil with no problem. The one genre I tend to avoid is "mainstream" superhero comics. I am the sort of gamer geek that feels like she is cheating on her Playstation when she is playing games on her Xbox. My television watch list includes Heroes, Pushing Daisies, 24, Project Runway, Top Chef, Lost, and Dexter (though my hectic schedule often results in my falling behind and catching up once I get the DVD's).

My primary scholarly focus the last five years or so has been on fan culture and fan fiction, especially slash fiction. My work primarily involves complicating early monolithic assumptions about slash fiction and slash fans, assumptions that have seen it as another sort of romance writing. While that notion does fit a lot of the work that is being produced, it works less well when considering fringe writing such as dark fiction or BDSM fiction, which shatters or explodes traditionally romantic (a la romance novels) notions. Like many aca-fans who work in the fan studies area, I practice what I study. I co-moderate a The Lord of the Rings fan fiction community and write fan fiction myself. My article (co-written with Robin Reid and Eden Lackner) "Cunning Linguists: The Bisexual Erotics of Words/Silence/Flesh," which appeared in Busse and Hellekson's Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, looks at the erotics of writer/reader and writer/writer interaction during the composition and circulation of collaboratively written erotic slash fiction. Perhaps we can talk a bit about collaboration processes?

EROTICS OF COLLABORATION

ADS: I'd love to hear more about your findings here. What are the relationships of the authors to the text they are slashing versus one another? Are the characters/stories being reworked the object of erotic fascination or is it the sharing process?

BL: It is a combination of the two. Not all slash stories are erotic in nature, by that I mean the level of graphic description of the relationships depicted in them; however, writers tend to focus on characters and actors (in media fandoms) that they themselves find attractive or arousing. This explains the tendency for writers to follow characters across films or series, adding new fandoms as their objects of fannish interest add to their resumes.

Fans do play with sexuality through slash and het fiction, expressing their own desires, which they perhaps show more frankly because of the distance they achieve through filtering them through fiction, fiction that is (at least on the surface) about male characters.

There is even a further distancing in that the fictions are not entirely theirs; they are borrowed. I don't mean to suggest that there is a simple correspondence between the desires expressed in fics and those of the fans. Certainly, some fics reflect nightmares (e.g., rape fics and dark fics) and others simply explore modes of desire the fan may be curious about but would not ordinarily want to engage in. If horror fiction provides its audience with ways to confront fears and terrors while remaining safe and sheltered from them, erotic fiction does the same with desire, and many fans use it as a means of playing with desire in that way.

The sharing process itself is also erotic, something that we talk about in the "Cunning Linguists" article. The more erotic content, sensuality and/or sexuality, a story contains, the more likely the writer is to get feedback that is flirty, passionate, and erotic in nature from her readers. However, I do not believe this is a hallmark of slash fiction so much as it is of erotic fiction. I am on several lists with professional writers of romantic erotica, and the commentary from their fans tends to be similar in nature. They are also similar in that romantic erotica featuring male/male relationships is very popular with female readers. Romance publishers like EllorasCave and Samhain Press, to name a few, have male/male fiction title lines. These are, for the most part, communities that are by and for women.

ADS: Is there less slash fiction written about female characters, or is the erotic relationship between writers and readers different? In the past, I've frequented a CSI fan-fic site that featured a lot of different romantic pairings, including lesbian pairings like Sarah-Catherine. These stories ranged from BDSM narratives that either punished one or both characters for their "frigidness" or celebrated their non-traditional femininities to stories that softened one or both characters in ways that conform to very traditional constructions of femininity.

BL: There is going to be a much higher percentage in Xena fandom than there is in Buffy and more in Buffy than in The Lord of the Rings. Within more mainstream publishers of professional romance/erotica, the same trend applies. In fact, while they welcome male/male stories, they specifically state that they are not interested in female/female stories. Again, these are spaces where the creators and audience trend female. While this tendency has been criticized as straight women fetishizing gay men, that reading is far too simplistic.

The percentage of femslash in fandoms definitely varies according to fandom, and the sorts of themes particular to it does as well. Most of the femslash I have read (and I will confess to not having read great quantities of it) tends to focus on friendships between women that deepen as an erotic component is introduced to them, which is, in essence, the most classic and traditional pattern for slash fiction. The feedback I have read on femslash stories tends to follow the same pattern as that for male/male slash, and the works I am familiar with tend to be single-authored rather than collaborative.

Overall, the collaborative writing process tends to be erotic in nature. Not all collaboration is erotic, but long-term collaborations between writers, as many are, that focus on producing erotic texts tends to knit levels intimacy between the writers as those same forces work on their characters.

In the parts of fandom I move in and study, fandom wife relationships develop between two women who are writing fic, especially erotic fic, collaboratively. The women really become "partners," a perspective that applies to their own relationship and how it is seen from the outside by other fans. While fandom wives can simply be good and fast friends, there are dynamics to the relationship that are not unlike those in a romantic relationship. A certain sense of possessiveness develops between the partners, and jealousies often arise if one partner wants to go on to write with someone outside the relationship. From what I've observed, a goodly percentage of fandom wives go on to other fandom wifely relationships when/if their current one ends.

The endings to such relationships tend to be messy and to be played out in front of the rest of fandom. I have been witness to several spectacular fandom wife marriages and divorces. In one, one partner lived on the East Coast, the other on the West Coast. The East Coast partner actually moved across the country to move in with her fandom wife, and their fandom divorce (spurred on by one's complaints that the other did not spend enough time with her and spent too much time online) ended up splitting many of their online friends between them.

ADS: This fandom wife dynamic you describe is fascinating, partly because of the gendered terminology fans use (are there no fandom husbands or fandom life-partners?), but also because it sounds so normative, even as it so clearly challenges assumptions about coupling.

BL: I agree. In fact, when it comes to tensions in fandom, some of the more fascinating ones exist between subversion and normativity, between exploding or reinforcing the status quo. Male pregnancy fictions are a good example of this. On one hand, they completely disregard the limitations of biological gender and are in a unique position to question and critique heteronormative assumptions about family. However, few fics actually do this. Instead, they reinforce many of the most pervasive, traditional, and heteronormative ideals, including ones that insist that jointly producing a child is the ultimate validations of a loving relationship.

ADS: My assessment is likely influenced by my own position within the academy, but I tend to read fan collaborations/the building and sharing of community as simultaneously desirable and fraught with tensions. This seems especially true when dealing with particular fan practices like collaboratively writing and sharing slash fiction, especially the more "taboo" kinds like BDSM or dark fiction, which not only refocus attention on particular relationships within media texts but also subvert power hierarchies (or call attention to them in new ways). The subject matter is often sexual and the sharing of fantasies that stretch the boundaries of what the official corporate authors of the text would find permissible (its amazing how lax many corporations are about fan-fiction until it "crosses a line" that has more to do with taste than profits - though these are often conflated in corporate rhetoric) seems to meld with the thrill of challenging cultural assumptions about "good taste".

For me, I see the conflation of breaking both legal and moral laws as part of the erotics here. Intellectual property law certainly cheats by trying to delimit how the public uses their cultural icons, so there is a thrill in ignoring these rules. Authorship is still largely imagined in official discourses as either a solitary act of creation or a corporate practice (Joss Whedon may be a genius, but we all know he didn't write every episode of Buffy. He had a writing team that was subject to some sort of rational assembly-line type production practice). Thus, fan collaboration seems to break down those dichotomies as well, making creation a shared experience that obfuscates the production process in favor of focusing on the content being shared. Finally, since cultural icons are often popular heroes in the Bennett and Woolacott sense that they are ever changing figures that embody (and neutralize) shifting cultural anxieties, the ability to play with these figures and tease out one aspect of their personas both unravels their function of preserving the status quo and actively engages the larger meanings of the icon, effectively shifting the tensions they are intended to manage. This seems simultaneously empowering and subversive, even as it confirms the middlebrow pleasures these icons/texts normally prescribe as desirable. The more I write here, the less I feel I know about the erotics of fandom, since I seem to have reduced this down to an instructional manual.

BL: The tensions between desirability and frustration apply to any collaborative endeavor. They are particularly acute for writers because our work is such a solitary labor. Collaboration adds a social element that can be a source of energy or vitality and a source of drama and anger. Naturally, building a community, fannish or otherwise, is also a collaborative venture.

I do not quite agree with your point that more taboo forms of expression necessarily represent tension points in fannish communities. In slash fandom, readers and writers tend to cluster around specific character pairings and specific kinks. For example, there are many slash fans who enjoy male pregnancy (MPREG) fictions. This is an acquired taste, one that has a loyal fanbase. Fans who do not share the same fascination avoid such fictions. Unless they are like me and decide to write papers on them. One of the icons I have on my LiveJournal says, "You have your kinks, and I have mine," which is often the prevailing attitude among fans. This is not to say that eruptions over personal kinks never happen, but they are not common in my corners of fandom. While we can talk about "slash fandom" as it was a monolithic entity, a more accurate way of looking at it would be as more discrete groups who crystallize around different discourses of desire.

ADS: I agree with you about the acceptance/celebration of different kinks that goes on in fan communities. I was thinking more of tensions that arise in relation to normative ideals. One's choice of kink is always in some way informed by knowledge of the social rules and the pleasures/ consequences of breaking them.

BL: Those tensions are actually playing out right now around a holiday fic exchange called Yuletide. The exchange cuts across fandoms, and this year includes over 1,200 participants. The first day of signups happened at the end of the Jewish high holidays, and one fan complained about this (even though signups lasted two weeks and there is no incentive for signing up early). The argument spiraled out into a debate about how fans will often organize events on Saturdays and resist the same on Sundays. The same sorts of complaints are voiced over these normative ideals, which tend to see slash fandom as female, heterosexual, white, and American.

ADS: As for how these ideas seem to connect with academic practices for me, the tenure process has made it very clear to me that single authorship is valued over collaboration. The denial of the community except as rational audience sitting in judgment transforms collaboration into a fetish for me, where new modes of academic publishing can reinvigorate community and focus on the processes of creation rather than the final product. Though a stretch, perhaps, I can definitely see these practices as erotic because they are both taboo and because they place emphasis on the act itself (no longer either masturbatory or a peep show where I show my body [of work] to an audience that I cannot see but I know is looking and judging me) rather than the final product (the money/tenure shot). The work I've done on MediaCommons and Flow are both informed by a deep sense that current academic publishing practices are limiting, but also that there is a liberating freedom that comes from sharing. Do I imagine fan community practices like slash fiction writing as similar? Somewhat. As media scholars, we typically seek to alter/challenge/tease out a text's meanings/underlying ideological assumptions/ institutional logics and constraints. Many fans do this as well, but they get to do this in forms that seem more like play (even though a lot of work often goes in to these creations) and sharing. Of course, part of this is the projection of my desires onto fan communities.

I'd imagine this works quite differently for non-tenure track faculty and as these discussions have clearly shown, there is a gendered component to these categories, with more women found in non-tenure track positions. I also know from working in a Comm department where half my colleagues are social sciency types who regularly co-author works that they find nothing erotic or exciting about collaboration. At best it is functional, at worst frustrating. They tend to fetishize the solo authoring process as much as I worship at the alter of community-building.

BL: I agree with the social science folks: collaboration on academic work is, well, it's work. It lacks the element of play and fun that is so much a part of fannish experience. Fandom can be serious play, but a portion of it, the part that poaches from and tests the canonical source texts, is playful. The relationships and intimacy between community members is often not, and tensions between fans who consider their experience all play and those who take their community and interactions more seriously do crop up.

I think attitudes about academic communication and community are shifting, like all things in academia, they will move slowly. I credit the Internet with this. As more scholars interact online in listservs and blogs and email, the more their interactions include personal and professional discussion and the more we become invested in each other as individuals. We move beyond being collections of ideas and methodologies. I have a personal blog (which is badly in need of updating) linked to my ICFA division blog. When I met one of my presenters on video game theory at the conference last spring, he immediately asked how my mother (who had been having health concerns, something I wrote about in my blog) was faring. It took me aback until I worked through to, "Oh, you read my blog." At that moment, our sense of community was built on more than our shared ideas, interests, and work.

ADS: This is very encouraging. I hope you are right.

STRETCHING THE CANON VERSUS CANONICAL FIDELITY

ADS: As you can probably tell, I am not a fan scholar per se. My interests are in the collective authoring practices and authoring constraints that accompany popular icons like superheroes. Within this lens, I tend to focus on how contemporary IP companies like Marvel Comics engage with fans and negotiate the various fan iterations of popular heroes in fan fiction, fan art, and various other collective knowledge initiatives. I also look at the ways that fans police the boundaries of authorship as often as they challenge them. I have studied the ways that superhero fan communities will often reject unauthorized stories as unprofessional, non-canonic, and out of continuity, while embracing certain professional writers and artists as part of the fan community (even as these individuals work for the very institutions seeking to police the meanings of popular heroes)

BL: Your experiences with the superhero communities and fan practices is very interesting to me, because there isn't quite the same sort of border policing in slash fandom. Perhaps it is because slash fans realize they are teasing very submerged meaning that is usually not intended out of the source text. That is, we accept we are going to be stretching canon, which makes it easier to accept some other distortions to or challenges of the source texts. However, there is a constant tension that exists between official canon and fan-defined canon/fanon. This permission to play with canon has its limits, and fans are not usually going to respond well to texts that totally shatter major canonical expectations, unless the work is clearly parody or crackfic.

At the same time, as texts grow more complex, defining what is canonical gets more problematic. In real-person fiction, for example, when the canonical source text is a person's like and persona, what defines canon? Some would say there is no such thing. I am not one of them. Canon tends to be an amalgamation of facts about an actor (or musician or sports figure), interviews with actors, commentary by colleagues, reading public persona and presentation, and a dose of the persona of fictional characters that actor has played in various roles. It is definitely something that is assembled, ordered, and prioritized by fans (and often contested by them) much more actively than canon in a fictional work is assimilated.

When we look at other texts that spill across media boundaries, the question of defining canon becomes even more complex as levels exist. Fans of Heroes, for example, can produce texts based on the canon of the television series, but they do so without having the benefit of additional information about characters that is revealed online in the Heroes digital graphic novel. If a fan wants to write about a character like Hana Gitelman, the woman who can mentally "hear"/intercept and communicate wirelessly, they have to access the digital graphic novels (soon to be released in a hardcover version), as her character is developed in cyberspace, not in the series. Hana also breaks out of the confines of the canonical television narrative by interacting directly with fans. My sister (who firmly insists she is NOT a fan) prowls the Heroes message boards and has signed up to get text messages from Hana on her cell phone.

ADS: Differences within communities over the rigidity or flexibility of the canon seems a valuable conversation. Of course, this is a question of degree, not an either/or scenario. Comic book/superhero fans definitely write fiction (general and slash) that potentially challenges the official continuity of their hero's universes, even as they also hotly debate what ought to be counted as canonical. My experience has been that many superhero fans privilege the officially produced stories over fan variations. Of course, this has a lot to do with the particularly close and incestuous relationship the comic book industry has historically cultivated with its fan base since the late 1960s. Henry Jenkins points out how over the past two decades the comic book industry has put out many elseworld-type variations of its own products, essentially creating in-house the narrative multiplicity that many fans otherwise create (with obvious limitations on certain subject matter). Partly, this can be seen as an attempt to reign in fan efforts to stretch the boundaries, but it is also partly an acknowledgement of those fan desires that many other media texts/ properties continue to deny.

Moreover, because the barriers for entry have usually been lower (and are still perceived to be) for the comic book industry, the perceived lines between creators and fans are blurred, so that many comic book writers and artists are not just fan-favorites, but marketed as fans themselves. I think this does two things: One, it reassures fans that their fantasies are being catered to because the people who create these texts are just like them (my point here is not whether this is true or not, but the way that the discourses of authorship and fandom that circulate blur the insider/outsider status so central to other fan community creative practices). Two, they encourage a detailed knowledge of the official continuity (and its official derivatives) because there is still the sense that this type of knowledge might be rewarded with a job or some similar form of cultural access. Thus, fan creations that push too far against the canonical grain are often devalued because there is a sense that this not only alienates the industry but also that there are already fan-insiders challenging that canon with an official stamp of approval. This seems similar to your assertion of the limits of fan openness to texts that shatter canon entirely without coding itself as parody or crackfic.

Of course, I am also massively oversimplifying what is often a very contentious and charged relationship between superhero fans and creators. What I wonder is, as digital authoring tools become more easily accessible, will we see this relationship shift with other media texts, as fans are both actively courted as potential creators by the industry and fan practices become increasingly integral to industry branding strategies? If television series started offering alternate variations of their plots (like those alternate universe episodes that occasionally pop up) would this change fan writing practices? And, of course, given the disparity within the industry in terms of gendered access to creative power, would there be a change along those axes?

BL: I think we are already starting to see the beginnings of a fan/creator convergence. In order to overcome the mid-season hiatus ratings slump, Heroes is set to produce 30 episodes. A number of them will be one-shots, focusing on a new hero not integral to the overall story arc of the series. Fans will get to weigh in on favorites, and the favorite will become a regular part of the cast. This very limited and restrictive sort of collaboration (where the boundaries and control is still rather firmly in the hands of the creators) is something that should fuel fan production, especially if a beloved hero is not renewed and fans want to continue his/her story.

While the new technologies offer fans more creative possibilities, I do not see creators giving much access to their power to fans in significant ways. However, I do see fans offering fellow fans more sophisticated (and competitive) alternatives to the creators' products. I'm thinking here of shows like Hidden Frontier, a Star Trek fan film series that released their episodes on the web and made the focus on the series the relationships between the characters, some of whom were gay. Of course, creators will likely take note of other popular and visible fan alternatives and popular ideas and themes may work their way into the creators' works.

Want to know more about CMS?

Trying to expand our communications with prospective international students (or for that matter, anyone else who would find it difficult to make it to campus to learn more about our program), CMS holds on-line information sessions a few times a semester. The first such session, timed to facilitate Asian participants, will be held this tuesday, October 23, 8 to 10 am.

The second session, timed to facilitate European participants, will be held Monday, December 3, 2 to 4pm.

We've tried for time slots that facilitate international contact but anyone who wants to participate in either session is more than welcome.

Visit the appropriate info session page on the day of the scheduled session to log into our webchat.

Gender and Fan Culture ( Round Twenty , Part Two): James Nadeau and Alicia "Kestrell" Verlager

James:This leads me to the next point: the relationship between the female protagonist and the monster. The monster both represents the repression and is a doorway to allowing the female figure to escape the social boundaries placed upon her. I am thinking here of Mel Brooks Young Frankenstein. Madeline Khan's character is the frigid girlfriend of the doctor who is transformed by her "relations" with the monster. It is an interesting exposure of the relationship trope. By making it humorous Brooks is actually revealing another aspect of the monster. By being "other" the monster also allows those possibly inclined to be different to join in being different. The monster is the gate way to deviance. And this is what I find fascinating because it makes the monster a transformative figure. Simply by being exposed to the monster one can gain access to monstrous attributes or become monsters. I think this is why the monster figure resonates with both queer and disability communities. It is the irrational fear that one will be transformed by interacting with a queer or disabled person. The idea that one's difference is contagious. This is what the monster does. It acts upon the erotic nature of the other that destabilizes normalcy, be it physical or sexual. Like you said it unleashes the repressed. Think about the alien monster in John W. Campbell, Jr's Who Goes there? (1938) which is the source for John Carpenter's well known film The Thing (1982) as well as two other films The Thing From Another World (1951) and Horror Express (1973). Here the monster itself is the transformer. It is an amorphous "thing" that replaces and consumes the human characters. Each molecule of the alien transforms and consumes. It is a literal metaphor for fear. The thing represents what each generation finds terrifying. It is a tabula rasa with which the viewer can project their fears onto. It operates as tool for them to confront or identify with whatever socio-cultural fears are present. In Carpenter's film the thing is an amorphous blob that undulates and shifts constantly. It is in a state of transformation until it becomes something it can hide within. It plays upon the fear of the passing deviant. The Thing is the one that looks like us but isn't. And once again, like with the vampire, it is the blood that tells. The blood is alive and sentient, it infects. And then there is the fact that the story is female free. So the film also comments on the mutability of identity in the face of single sex environments and the anxieties that that can provoke. This ultimately leads to testing the blood in order to identify who is human and therefore normal.

Kes:

The same is true of that other great contagion movie, Aliens, which had been released a few years after Carpenter's The Thing. One of the things I love about both these movies--and maybe it's something that as a blind fan I am just particularly focused on--is the way the space these characters move through becomes an extension of their inner psyches. Carpenter takes the cold isolation of this snowbound military base and Cameron takes the inhuman darkness of the space station but both spaces end up being very gothic threatening spaces. The viewer isn't just given a text or dialogue, but sound, motion, a sense of the process of moving through these intensely felt spaces. It's something that a purely textual or psychoanalytical interpretation of these horror movies can't really address--their sense of virtuality. This is where Deleuzian theory comes in and gives horror media such a radical spin: because horror media is often very focused on conveying that sense of the experience as a process, as something transformative in itself.

Yet that element of horror manifesting the inner space as external space is not limited to horror films. I watched Aliens with my husband, who is a game designer, a number of months back and he commented on how much that movie influenced the look of game interfaces. It's not just the look though: it's the sound, from the sound effects to the music to the use of voices. Horror media is still very much influenced by its roots in old radio shows, with a strong focus on creating a sense that the audience is actually occupying this other space with the monster. And I think that is one thing which, as this Wired article "Gore Is Less: Videogames Make Better Horror Than Hollywood" points out, links the horror film to video games.

James:

Definitely. Space plays a large role in the construction of horror and science fiction cinema. One way to look at this is in terms of Deleuze's theory of the any-space-whatever. For Delueze this moment arises in cinematic scenes where the viewer is destabilized and unsure of where he or she stands in space within the sphere of the film. The consistent use of close-up shots in the absence of expansive wide angle establishing shots serve to isolate the actor/character in the narrative creating a claustrophobic feeling in the viewer. Aliens is a perfect example of this. You can probably count on one hand the number of establishing shots that occur in this film and when they do they are noticeable in the way they pull you out of the taunt, tense feeling of the film. These shots are actually jarring in that they both establish a setting for the viewer and at the same time eliminate some of the effectiveness of the close-ups. To jump back to The Thing - the whiteness of the environment adds to the sense of the isolation of the camp. It is literally a blank space - indefinable. This works in concert with the anamorphic state of the thing. Neither of them is solid or identifiable. This destabilizes the viewer. They are in any space whatever.

Kes:

And I think it is that sense of destabilization which draws so many horror fans. Horror as a genre is more about ambiguity rather than certainty, and that leaves a lot of room for fans to bring personal interpretations to bear in thinking of how such narratives relate to their own identity. In particular, horror seems to be fascinated with complicating subjectivity, and this seems to connect it not only with the monster-woman/queer alignment we mentioned before but with those virtual or Deleuzan spaces we were just talking about.

In her book Deleuze and Horror (Edinburgh University Press, 2005) Anna Powell discusses how the subject-object binary is blurred in horror films by using sensation and affect to subsume the subject and show it melding with the external world. Some of the most vivid horror--and here I am thinking of Cronenberg's Videodrome and Moore's graphic novel From Hell--show humans being penetrated by their technology and/or their technological spaces. This kind of surreal technogothic is an entire subgenre in itself, and I think one of the reasons it emerged as such a powerful theme late in the 20th century was that our technologies, which in the 1950s had been framed as such an uncomplicated salvation for the human race, called into question our traditional definitions of both technology and the body, and the questions which arose proved to be particularly relevant to disabled and queer individuals. Previously there was this assumption that the perfect body was one which was whole, completely self-reliant, free of technological prosthetics, and at the peak of its intellectual and physical abilities; in other words, a definition many would read as masculine. How many of us fit that description now? From contacts to prescription drugs to pacemakers, many of us are wearing technology beneath our skin, and we're all a little nervous when we consider how it might change us both individually and as a species. It has already radicalized our definitions of what is an "able" body and what is a gendered body.

James:

I believe that has also changed the face of contemporary horror. Much of today's horror films are centered on the destruction of the body: Saw versions 1though 3, Hostel and the like. These are films that use the threat of physical destruction in numerous ways under the rubric of horror. Of course now these are considered their own genre within the horror genre; they are snuff horror films. So in light of the extreme technological evolution we see a return to fears about the body. The destabilization and dismemberment of the body has remerged as a means of striking fear in the audience. I say re-emerged because some of the horror films of the early seventies also played with this genre albeit not to the extent we see today.

Kes:

We can trace those dismemberment stories back to the science fiction of Maurice Renard, who wrote the story The Hands of Orlac in 1920, which would become the basis for the 1926 film by the same name and also the 1935 remake Mad Love which starred Peter Lorre. Again, there is an entire subgenre of horror narratives involving dismembered/possessed body parts, but my favorite is Clive Barker's The Body Politic (I think that was published in 1984), in which a man feels that his hands are somehow working against him, as if they aren't sure they want to be part of him any longer, and this becomes a metaphor for how people are encouraged to think of themselves as body parts, with media images focusing on specific areas--breasts for women, muscles for men--as if the part can define the whole. Of course the surgeries which Renard focused on in his story have now become an entire technology for reshaping and redefining the human body and the technology of medical augmentation meets the technology of media until we all feel a bit disassociated from our own body parts, to a degree that shows like Nip/Tuck basically pick up the monster theme by promising us that ultimate monstrous wish: to swap one's monster parts for somebody else's.

But let me move to a more positive aspect of media technologies, one which brings us back to those definitions of genre with which we began this discussion, namely, how new media has opened up production and distribution channels for fans. Not only can artists distribute their own radical visions through the technologies of the Internet and new media, but fans can locate and access all sorts of media that not so long ago was completely out of reach. From classic movies to indie shorts, from new fiction to fan sites, female and queer artists are finding encouragement, inspiration, and their own fans.

As a closing thought, I just want to point out that this is in turn calling into question traditional methods for data collection, such as assuming that there are no female slasher fans because the researcher didn't see many at a movie premiere. Female and queer fans are meeting up online, or at indie film festivals, or just waiting until the DVD comes out on Amazon, and I think this is another way in which new media appeals strongly to fans who previously may, like female and queer comics fans, have felt pushed out of the more public forms of media consumption and fan events.

Gender and Fan Culture ( Round Twenty , Part One): James Nadeau and Alicia "Kestrell" Verlager

Kes: I'm Alicia "Kestrell" Verlager, a 2006 graduate of the Comparative Media Studies master's program at MIT. I am a relative newcomer to fan studies, though I have been a lifelong fan of genre media, particularly SF and horror. My writing often explores the intersections of non-normative bodies and identity, with an emphasis on interpretations informed by both disability and queer studies (an intersection often referred to as crip studies). My thesis was on images of disability and technology in science fiction media, and I have also written about the theme of disability in Harry Potter fan fiction. I write about media, disability, and technology at my blog http://kestrell.livejournal.com.

James and I were grad students together in the CMS program at MIT, but since graduating, we continue to get together and discuss both theory and our favorite media, so our post here will probably convey that sense of this being an ongoing conversation between us.

James: I am James Nadeau, also a 2006 graduate of CMS. My own work is centered in visual art and technological evolution, specifically video and related technologies. My background is in critical studies, psychoanalytic and queer theory with a focus on Queer Cinema. I curate a monthly queer film and performance series at the Brattle Theatre here in Cambridge. On top of that I am a longtime comic book collector and science fiction fan. I am particularly interested in British post-apocalyptic graphic novels, mainly Judge Dredd, as well as Marvel produced superhero comics (pretty much why I landed at CMS). Like Kestrell I am fascinated by the possibilities that looking at horror and science fiction through the lens of queer and disability studies provides. Our conversations have centered on the similarities that both queerness and disability have when placed within the genre of horror and extreme science fiction. By extreme I mean the type of science fiction that operates as both horror and science fiction, be it from a gore or Lovecraft-ian "horror beyond the worlds" nature.

Kes:

I would like to open the conversation by exploring how genre becomes intertwined with gender through the process of defining what horror is. As a fan and a scholar, I have become increasingly intrigued by the representations of female and queer fans in horror fandom. Specifically, I am curious about what role gender plays in defining the horror genre itself and how deeply gender influences interpretations of horror, its purposes and its effects.

These questions were prompted by a pattern I noticed in how discussions of horror are often framed: In either an online or real-time discussion of horror, a panel of male writers and critics open the discussion by seeking to define "real" horror. One of the first things mentioned, usually with a laugh, is the dismissal of paranormal romance. Aside from the fact that paranormal romance is not a new genre (it can be traced at least as far back as the TV. shows Beauty and the Beast and Dark Shadows, both of which suffered from critical and marketing attitudes which devalued their female audiences), this dismissal is usually followed by adding more subgenres to the list of what isn't horror, with subgenres like gothics, ghost stories and even new horror such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Scream, etc. (refer to the work of Mark Jancovich

http://www.baas.ac.uk/resources/pamphlets/pamphdets.asp?id=28 ).

This disavowal of specific subgenres and their female fans isn't limited to books or film, either: in horror comics fandom, the stereotype of a female fan is that of the gothy Sandman fan. No slight to Neil, but the linking of goth fashion and being female is another way in which I see female fans being portrayed as romantic and/or ridiculous, which comes close to reflecting the way the overly-sexualize and ridiculously romanticized has come to be associated with camp, another disavowed form of horror. There are films that are labeled camp which I am not even clear on why they are labeled camp: Bride of Frankenstein, for instance, which a number of horror producers such as Clive Barker, have listed as their favorite horror classic: why is that classified as camp? If,

as one definition of camp claims, camp is equated with being "effeminately homosexual," then I think we are seeing media being disparaged and disavowed not for its content, but for its audience, and that disparaged audience is identified as female and queer.

I can't help but feel that these attempts to restrict the definition of "real" horror are prompted, at least in part, by an inclination to define who the ideal reader/viewer is, and, for a lot of male

critics and scholars, that ideal reader/viewer is someone a lot like him. And yet you have artists like Alan Moore, Clive Barker, Angela Carter, and their works include elements of not just horror, but also fantasy, surrealism, the gothic, and yes, romance.

James:

I'd like to tackle a few of these points. First I think that you are correct in that camp is most often associated with queer culture. However, it is mainly thought of in terms of exaggerated behaviour verging on the ludicrous. To quote John Waters, camp is "the tragically ludicrous and the ludicrously tragic." It has been used on pop culture artifacts in this manner since Susan Sontag published her essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964. For Sontag camp was liberating. It is noteworthy for being both naïve (completely unaware of one's camp-ness is a requirement) but also it's extravagance. Bride of Frankenstein is thought of as camp because it is so over the top. One look at Elsa Lanchester's hairdo as the bride and you know there is something not quite right. As Sontag notes "Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is "too much." I think that what we need to establish here is that for Clive Barker (for example), a gay man, having this as his favourite film is motivated by forces other than those that seek to feminize or demean. I would also say that Bride of Frankenstein is pretty commonly thought of as an example of camp even by those only marginally aware of what camp really is. But I think this is a good starting point to discuss the viewer. For the queer viewer of horror films where does camp fit in or does it even need to? There is a lot of classic (the twenties right through the sixties) Hollywood horror films that could be seen as campy by queer audiences. There is something decidedly fey in Max Schreck's performance in Murnau's Nosferatu. And do we even need to mention the homosocial Lost Boys or the lesbians in The Hunger? The vampire character itself has come to be known for outside normal sexual boundaries. And I agree with you that the vampire character is recognized as a romantic figure and it is consistently associated with the feminine. Is it this "feyness" or implied deviance that pushes it outside of the patriarchy and into deviance? I think that romanticism in horror and science fiction offers up an interesting opportunity to think about alternative identities within these narratives and how they relate to what audiences feel and desire outside of heteronormative paradigms. These films open our eyes to the possibilities that exist outside the hegemony of "the normal."

Kes:

I think your final sentence is very telling, and there seems to be a lot of evidence to support it around this time of year, when we seem to see a lot of these alternate identities, from the romanticized to the queer and campy, being literally tried on during the Halloween season. It's interesting that the mainstream seems to focus so much on the campy aspects of Halloween, from Elvira costumes to Dracula to drag: if camp is a combination of the overly-sexualized

and the naive, then it's okay to play with identity at Halloween as long as you maintain that element of camp, of emphasizing that it's all pretend, *really*.

Yet these exaggerated campy figures also seem to be a way of shedding the old worn out images of horror and replacing them with something that's still emotionally powerful and socially transgressive. Vampire fashions, or how the vampire is fashioned, may change, but each change seems to say something about the culture at that historical moment. Anne Rice's vampires may have come to be associated with the cliché of the overly romanticized erotic vampire, to such a degree that her stories have become *the* source for the stereotype of the Byronic emo boy which was often parodied in Joss Whedon's "new" vampire mythology of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, but looking back there was a lot more going on in Rice's story, such as a preoccupation with the metaphysical, the transcendental, and the historical. There also emerges this theme of families and communities that are based on blood but are oppositional to the nuclear family. At times the erotic seems as much a means for making emotional connections as it is reflective of the strictly sexual.

Perhaps what Rice's vampires did most explicitly, however, and I think this is something which Clive Barker's horror and fantasy has always done very explicitly, is allow the monster a voice. Once upon a time Robin Wood could write the following prohibition:

"...Dracula must never be allowed a voice, a discourse, a point of view: he must remain the unknowable, whom the narrative is about, but of whom it simultaneously

disowns all intimate knowledge..."

That kind of vampire, however, is kind of the old school vampire, and it began to lose its potency at the same time that the women's movement and the gay movement began to really be heard. Unfortunately, a lot of what female and queer artists wanted and needed to express was still considered taboo, is still considered taboo, by many of the critics and gate keepers who get to officially define art and fiction.

Helene Cixous managed to link this feminist and queer art with a kind of monstrous mythmaking in her essay "The Laugh of the Medusa," in which she said

"Where is the...woman who...hasn't been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a ... divine composure), hasn't accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn't thought she was sick?"

What horror of the '70s and '80s did--and I am going to return to my favorite trio of Clive Barker, Alan Moore, and Angela Carter-- what made it so transgressive, was it reclaimed that idea of the non-conforming body as a point of identity. It blurred the subjectivity between the female or male protagonist and the monster and it questioned how authority was physically located in the idea of the "perfect" most masculine, most normal, body. And from Carter's re-imagined Red Riding Hood to Moore's Swamp Thing to Barker's Nightbreed, identity as it related to gender, sexuality, and subjectivity intersected at the nexus of sexual relationships between women and monsters.

James:

There are a few things I want to respond to. To continue with the vampire exposition I agree that there is much more going on in Rice's books than a simple horror romance. She also touches upon the idea of creating a family as opposed to being born into one. This is a metaphor that resonates within the queer community. The notion of choosing one's family based not upon blood but upon social and physical difference in complete opposition to that nuclear family is something that the queer community has always done - out of a need for close social ties that have to replace those severed by identity. And of course the transformation can also be read as a coming out narrative - one that involves the severing of ties with one's former life (something unfortunately that is extremely common). I think these are some of the reasons that her books resonated with the queer community. Not to mention the transformative nature of the bloodletting and drinking. The fact that the vampiric traits are transmitted through the exchange of blood added another layer as her books gained popularity at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the US. I think that you are right as well in that the underlying erotic current of these relationships adds to their romantic nature. It also complicates it further with the inclusion of the "incest" or family taboo to these already "outsider" relationships.