The Sony Game Design Workshop

For those of you following my travels, I am now back in the United States (San Francisco to be precise) where I will be through tuesday. Further legs on this trip take me to Los Angeles, Atlanta, Durham, and New York City, before returning in Boston for the start of the term. For the past eight years, the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program has worked with Sony Imageworks and various local games companies to produce a workshop on Transforming Traditional Media Content into Nonlinear and Interactive Formats. The course, in the MIT context, runs intensively for five days during a week in January. I run this workshop in collaboration with Sande Scordose from Sony Imageworks. This year, we will be assisted by Ravi Purushotma, the technological advisor to the Education Arcade.

Here's the basic details:

Storytelling and Games in the Digital Age

Prof. Henry Jenkins, Sande Scoredos and Thomas Hershey, Sony Pictures Imageworks

Mon Jan 29 thru Thu Feb 1, 10am-05:00pm, 14E-310

Fri Feb 2, 10am-05:00pm, 2-105

Enrollment limited: advance sign up required (see contact below)

Signup by: 10-Jan-2007

Limited to 40 participants.

Participants requested to attend all sessions (non-series)

Prereq: None

Student teams develop story concepts for various media, including motion picture visual effects and computer games. Sponsored by MIT Comparative Media Studies (CMS) and Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI), this non-technical activity focuses on the theoretical, historical, cultural, social, and aesthetic elements of interactive narrative and game structures. Morning lectures explore linear and non-linear storytelling across media, audio-visual elements, game theory, and techniques to increase the depth of interactive console games and enhance storytelling. Afternoons run as workshops where participants collaborate in teams to design interactive story scenarios to be presented during a final session on Friday afternoon.

Held in 14E-310. Friday February 2nd will be held in 2-105.

Contact: Generoso Fierro, 14N-207, x3-5038, generoso@mit.edu

Our students include undergraduate students from MIT and Wellesley College, graduate students, visiting scholars, staff, and other members of the MIT Community. While we offer a limited amount of academic credit for participating in the program, most of our students opt to do it purely on a volunteer basis. We also would welcome outside participants though there are limits to how many people we can absorb.

The following text is taken from a teacher's guide for the workshop which currently resides on the Education Arcade website. Parts of it have previously appeared in Telemedium. We have also produced a series of reality television style short documentaries showing the process at work and displaying highlights from the final presentations. And we have notes from some of the key lectures during one year's run of the workshop. These are all designed to encourage teachers at other institutions to try their own hands at conducting this kind of workshop process.

The workshop has two basic components - a design competition where teams conceptualize and present their approaches to adopting an existing media property into a game and a series of lectures designed to provide them with the background knowledge they need to complete this task. The contest provides greater motivation for students to pay attention to the information presented through the lectures and to apply it to the specific challenges of conceptualizing their games.

Some aspects of the workshop take advantage of the unique resources of MIT, yet we believe that the basic structure of the workshop could be adopted by local teachers at the high school level. We have had several high school aged students in the past and they have done as well or better than their older counterparts. In any case, the content of the workshop has adjusted slightly each year to reflect the available faculty and their interests.

Educational Goals

This workshop emerged from a series of conversations that Henry Jenkins and Alex Chisholm had with more than 50 different companies, large and small, which might be interested in hiring Humanities-trained media studies students upon their graduation. We were consistently told that while Liberal Arts students are highly desired by employers because of their mental flexibility and breadth of background knowledge, they often lacked some core skills that would make them ideal employees. Among those things most often identified were leadership experience, teamwork, communication skills, brainstorming and problem solving skills, competitiveness, and the experience of carrying a project through to completion. So, one important thrust of the workshop was to give our own graduate and undergraduate students training and experience in these areas.

Team leaders are selected from our own graduate students or undergraduate majors. In the case of a high school, they could be selected from upperclassman and (after the first year) students who had performed well in the previous competition. These students are given some additional training in leadership, brainstorming, and communication skills so that they can insure the success of the workshop as a whole.

At the same time, the workshop was designed to expose students to the basic building blocks of computer and video games - introducing them to current industry trends, technological opportunities of the current game systems, the tools the industry uses to select and develop potential properties - storytelling, genre, character, emotion, space, game play, community building, violence and ethics, gender and generational factors, visual elements, and sound track. Students are introduced to these ideas through the lectures and then apply them to their team projects. The judging criteria for the competition are designed to insure that all of the key concepts get applied.

A third educational goal here involves encouraging students to analyze the key components of an existing media text. Students need to think deeply about what aspects of those texts are essential to defining the 'world' of the story and to insure the audience's recognition and pleasure. Any adaptation involves maintaining certain core features while changing other nonessential features to reflect the specific nature of the medium in which the work is being presented and increasingly, to offer consumers an expanded experience of the 'world' of the story. One reason why we ask students to work with existing properties is that this workshop is designed to foster the analytic skills that we introduce to students through our existing courses on film, literature, or television.

Preparing Team Leaders

The success of this process depends on having good team leaders who can be trusted to keep their groups on track and help them to cross the finish line. Over the years we have been running this process, we have had only one team totally self-destruct. Given the several dozen teams we put through this process, the intensity of the demands placed on participants, and the fact that most of the participants are working without pay or academic credit, we consider this success rate to be a major victory. In order to get teams out of the gate first, we choose a team leader prior to the start of the week. We typically select graduate students in the Comparative Media Studies program, since these are students we already work with closely and who already come into the week with some solid knowledge of media theory and production practices. In some cases, we select undergraduate students from our program who have been working on some of our games related projects or we select people who have gone through the team process once before and have been successful. In the case of a school or after school program, you should consider recruiting some older students with whom you have worked in the past to be team leaders for your first run through this process and then create a system where, if possible, participants of winning teams get asked if they will come back next year to help with the contest. In the worse case, you should select students you think have real maturity and leadership potential to head the teams. Part of what our students get out of this process is experience in managing teams and a chance to test their theoretical insights into media against the challenges of an actual production process. We have been able to recommend a significant number of our students for internships with media related companies on the basis of the leadership skills they demonstrated through their participation in this process.

One of the key things we tell our student leaders is to think of themselves as facilitators. We strongly discourage them from coming into the weeklong course with strong ideas about what kind of project they want to lead. The ideas should come from the entire team and not simply from its leaders. This is key if all participants are going to feel a sense of ownership over the finished product and if they are going to be expected to work actively to realize the group's goals. Of course, in any given group, some students will feel closer to a particular idea than others and some disagreements about goals and choices is bound to occur. But, if the leader thinks of themselves as insuring the integrity of the process and making sure that each participant has a valuable experience, then the groups are less likely to face a serious rupture on their way to the finish line. In many cases, other leaders emerge organically from the group process and may supplement or assist the selected leaders. What you want to avoid, however, is a situation where struggles over leadership blocks progress on the project. It's that reason why we want to select leaders from the start.

The group leader needs to know how to brainstorm. Brainstorming involves all participants throwing out their ideas in an non-evaluative process. The leader wants to frame open-ended questions and not dismiss any idea out of hand. Brainstorming should be seen as an iterative process in which one will not necessarily know what the final value of an idea is until it has been worked over and reconsidered several times.

At the beginning of the week, the first phase of brainstorming should involve identifying what content will serve as the basis of the game. The leader may want to get participants to throw out media properties that they think have potential and write them down on a chalkboard or on poster board so everyone can see. A good leader may start to cluster ideas that seem related as they emerge so that the participants start to see relationships between materials. Often in this first phase, it will be hard to separate out the ideas about subject matter from ideas about game play or presentation. The ultimate choice will need to be a game concept that captures people's imaginations, which allows for innovative use of the medium, and which can be presented in a lively and compelling fashion. Once you have a list of possible properties, then you want to circle back through the list again and again, thinking through the value of each nomination and winnowing out those which pose insurmountable problems or which are unknown to a larger number of people in your group. By the end of the first day, you want to have a manageable list of potentially valuable options and you want participants to spend some time researching on their own their favorite options. The second day the group leaders work to further narrow the list and to reach a consensus about what the group is doing.

The second night, group members may plan on getting together and consume the media property that has been selected, making notes, or sharing ideas about what they want to do. The third day is focused on developing the ideas which had emerged around the property throughout the first two days of brainstorming, to begin to focus on aspects of game play, audio-visual design, and marketing, which will shape the final presentation. The group leader needs to keep good notes of the lectures and to be able to insert ideas from the talks into the brainstorming process in a timely way so that participants see their application to their current design problems.

By the third day, the group leader will also have thought about a division of labor based on the skills and passions of participants. In some cases, they may put one person in charge of each aspect of their presentation and send them off to work on their own; in other cases, the group may work through each level collectively and collaborate in the completion of tasks. We have seen both approaches produce successful results in the competition. What is important is that the leader know how they are approaching the tasks and know who is responsible for completing each one. On the third day, we have a review session where group participants meet with the faculty in charge of the competition and walk through the choices which have been made so far. We recommend that the group leaders check in with the supervising faculty at the end of each day to make sure that things are on track.

On the fourth day, the group will start to shift its focus from generating new ideas towards executing those it has developed. The focus shifts more decisively onto the challenges of developing a presentation that will effectively communicate to the judges what is exciting and innovative about this particular project. Here is where the diverse skills of the team come handy with programmers helping to develop the digital embodiment of the idea, graphic artists helping to develop materials that visualize the concepts, and business students helping to develop the business plan which shows why this approach might prove commercially viable. The group leader should be prepared to work late into the night checking in with individual team members or keeping the group working together until they know they have what they need for their presentations.

The final day involves the presentations. In some cases, the group leaders may be the most effective people to communicate their ideas, though we encourage many if not all members of the team to play a role in expressing their concepts to the judges and especially in addressing questions. In other cases, the group leader may play director and stage manager, pulling out of the immediacy of the presentation in order to watch each participant and give them feedback on their performance. You want to make sure you know more or less how long each part of the presentation will take because the judges will cut students off at the end of their time whether or not they have finished their presentation. The leader needs to anticipate problematic team members and have plans about how to deal with them should they "act up" during a presentation. We have seen people try to dominate the presentation, overstepping their assigned roles, interrupting fellow panelists, or even trying to reorder PowerPoint slides mid-presentation. These are the kinds of crisis that try leader's souls, but the leader must have established enough of a relationship with each member to be able to intervene quickly and effectively to put things back on course. Other times, students develop stage fright and the leader may have to step in and fill their roles at the last moment.

The judges will have a chance to ask participants questions about their project. The leader should try to anticipate the most likely questions, develop a division of labor so that the most qualified member addresses each point and so that the group sticks by what is said even if the point is one for which no consensus has been reached. In many cases, the leader may have to be the person who addresses unanticipated questions since the leader is the one who can be expected to have the fullest sense of the project as a whole.

Throughout the process, the leader needs to maintain team spirit and morale, since the more "up" the team members feel about what they are doing, the more effectively they will communicate that enthusiasm to the judges. Morale also is what keeps someone working later in the evening or pulling out the extra stops creatively.

The Presentations

The teams have 30 minutes to present their material, 10 minutes to dress the stage, and 10 minutes to respond to the judges' questions. We keep a tight time clock to insure fairness to all involved. The teams have to be well organized in order to get themselves into position by the start of the time and to stay on schedule so that all aspects of their presentation can be heard within the allotted time. We have certainly had teams who fell behind and the team leader had to make decisions on the fly about what should/could be cut in order to get the key ideas into the time. Ideas that don't get presented aren't considered by the judges even if the judges have heard them at earlier points in the process, since the judges have no way of knowing what changes might have been made in the last minute preparations for the presentations. No matter how many times you review the projects, there are always surprising elements in the final presentations as the projects only take their final shape the night before.

The order of the presentations is chosen by drawing slips of paper the day before. Everyone comes into the day knowing when their team will present and what the ground rules are for the presentation.

All participants in the competition have to be in place at the start of the first presentation and no further work can be done once the first presentation begins. All participants hear all presentations. The other teams are pushed out of the room momentarily when the judges ask their questions. Clearly, even with this precaution, later groups have some advantage since they can absorb information into their oral presentation, even if they don't adopt it into their visual materials. But, there have really never been any complaints about unfairness here.

As the competition has continued, the quality and elaborateness of presentations has grown each year. We find consistently that showmanship counts for a great deal in terms of the relative merits of presentations. Groups have become more theatrical. For example, it is very common for participants to create and wear costumes that help to establish the characters contained within their game. These costumes range from glitter rock garb for a Making the Band project to Purple Hats and capes for Willy Wonka. Very often, they will dress the stage with elements that evoke the atmosphere of the story world. For Spirited Away, they created the look of a Japanese bathhouse. Several times, we have had teams use puppets to communicate their ideas. One memorable presentation on Princess Smartypants included both a puppet imitating the regal voice of a princess and a man dressed up like a fairy. Given the technical skills of MIT students, it will not be surprising to learn that they build power point presentations, which can contain very elaborate mock-ups done in Photoshop or flash of what the actual game might look like.

Sometimes, there are very elaborate computer animations that help communicate the core premise. A group focused on Survivor had animations of cracking fires on laptops arranged around the room. The 1984 team, which won last year, turned a video camera on the audience and projected live feed on the wall so the judges and audience had the uncomfortable experience of watching themselves watching the presentation.

More and more students provide give-aways to the judges: one year, for example, a Matrix team provided a gold box with a red and blue sugar pill, asking us to decide which one we would take. Another group, working on Homer's The Odyssey, offered us bottles of root beer with a label designed to imitate the culture of ancient Greece. Some groups mimic the advertising materials or box designs for their products, even going so far as to give us blank CDs in jewel cases mocked up to look like the finished product. For a Fugitive project, each judge was given a 'wanted' poster with his or her own image on it. The groups frequently use music to communicate the audio design of their projects - in most cases, songs sampled from existing CDs, but in a few cases, original compositions the students created for the occasion.

The judges strive to separate out flash which is simply flash from elements carefully chosen to communicate the core elements of the concept and make it come alive for the audience. If there is no serious thinking behind the performance, it can upstage rather than compliment the other elements of the presentation. Throughout the contest, the students are ask to distill down the core features which most be present in order to allow their new product to fit coherently within the existing media franchise. Here is their chance to show you how fully they have achieved that goal. Yet, students need to be aware of the importance of underlying what aspects of the performance are in the game and why. Often, students will play interesting music throughout the presentation but not talk explicitly about sound design elements in their pitch.

We now ask the groups to identify a specific audience to which they are pitching the game. This element requires the groups to do their homework on the different companies which produce games, their connections with other media companies, their existing product lines and preferences, the core market to which they are addressing the bulk of their products, and any notable successes or failures which might impact how they think about your particular product. The group working on Spirited Away, for example, chose to address the Japanese branch of Sony, opening with an extended greeting in Japanese, and drawing on what they knew about protocol and business practices in that culture. Most of the information students need to know about the business can be found on the web.

Students search for games that may be similar to what they are proposing and need to know how well they did and what markets they reached. They can find this by reviewing the large number of games-related websites produced by fans, industry insiders, or journalists. They may look up the property that they are drawing upon to conceive the game to see who produced it, how well it did at the box office, and what other connections may exist between the production company and a games-related company. They may look at other games linked to that studio's properties to see which games companies developed and released them. Those with more business interests can look for trends through industry-oriented publications, which might make the company more or less receptive to the kind of game proposed.

When we first started the competition, these business aspects took a back seat to the more aesthetic dimensions of the presentations, but in recent years, we have attracted more and more management students interested in getting into creative industries. The teacher may need to assess her or his own students to know where their strengths and weaknesses lie and decide how much emphasis to place on this aspect of the presentations. Some focus on the industry, however, seems desirable as a way to help students understand the economic contexts in which creative decisions get made (including the impact of concentration of ownership on the current media environment); this focus on factual information also gives incentive for students to work on their research skills and especially their web searching skills, since this up to the minute information is not going to be found in books.

The goal of the pitch is to put together the key elements of the game in a way that is compelling for the audience. Everything students know about presentation skills comes into play during this part of the process. Students need to think about the ordering of elements - so that the information makes sense to the audience as they are hearing it, so that the most compelling elements get the proper degree of attention, and so that the closing drives home the core elements with an extra persuasiveness. The groups need to make sure that they address each of the elements they will be judged upon while not getting bogged down in local details to such a degree that the judges do not get a clear sense of the game as a whole.

Frequently, students divide up the roles in their presentation based on their expertise and enthusiasm for different aspects of the product. Often, they also identify someone who is their best "finisher," that is, some one who has strong sales skills who can drive home the final pitch at the end of the presentation. We do not require every participant to speak, since we see the value of students who are uncomfortable in front of groups making contributions on other levels. This is, however, a philosophical question, which teachers need to consider in the context of their own programs. If the goal is to get students to really hone their presentation skills and get experience speaking in front of groups, the desire to have every student participate in the presentation is greater than if your goal is to focus on brainstorming and conceptual skills.

The presentations are a time for all team members to drop disagreements and work towards the common good. Often, team leaders instruct participants not to contradict each other during the presentation. If a team member gets hit with a question for which they are unprepared, he or she should make up an answer consistent with the overall approach they are taking and then subsequent team members will need to factor that answer into what they say about the game. One year, we had a group which totally failed to reach a consensus to the point that one group member disagreed about the order in which the PowerPoint slides should be presented and kept flicking back and forth throughout the presentation in a distracting fashion, upstaging and confusing his team mates. Needless to say, this group did badly in the competition and much anger was directed against him after they got off stage.

Judging The Presentations

We recommend having 5 or 6 judges, since each judge will see the presentations in slightly different ways and will focus on somewhat different elements. Having a broad based group of judges helps to take the pressure off any one participant and helps to even out any potential biases the judge may feel towards one group or participant. The judges are given a score sheet. We have established ten criteria of evaluation, which are known by the participants in advance. For each category, the judge gives a score from 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest score. Each judge keeps a running tally throughout the day and reserves the right to adjust scores upwards or downwards as they hear subsequent presentations. Judges often have to rethink their responses to the first few presentations, in particular, since they do not have a very clear baseline of expectations at the start of the day. Each group must be judged by every criterion, which means that they may lower their score significantly if they do not directly address one or another aspect. For some reason, students typically offer much more on game play, narrative, and visual design than they do on sound design.

The judges should set their own standards for each category. As long as they are consistent in applying those standards to each group, then their numbers will be correctly weighted in the final score. It doesn't matter if one judge is strict and another lenient since in the end, it is the total score across all of the judges which we use to weigh the teams. But those judges who are too generous in their grading need to realize that they are flattening out the distinctions between the teams.

In our process, we tally the scores to get a straw poll vote of where the judges have aligned themselves. The judges are often surprised by their own overall scores on the different projects. Subjectively, we will weigh some elements more than others in forming our overall impressions of the team. But if we weigh each element equally, we may find a team did better overall without being the best in any particular category. Once we have a set of scores, we then discuss the presentations to make sure we are fully comfortable with where the collective tally breaks. In some cases, we end up with two teams, which are only a few points apart in scoring, well within the margin of error, and we have occasionally had absolute ties on the first stage of the scoring. Talking through the presentations may help us appreciate things we missed the first time through or think more deeply about potential problems in the team's approach. We often will then recalibrate our scores and retally the results.

Another reason why you always discuss the projects among the judges is because ultimately, we see winning and losing the competition as less important than the critique we are able to provide to each team on its work. Talking it through helps us to identify high and low points on each presentation, which will be discussed as we critique their work. Often, we will give secondary awards which foreground what we see as the biggest strength of each presentation, so that each team has some kind of moral victory in the final presentation. So, for example, we may take each of the criteria and decide which team performed best on each, giving out recognition for best visual design, most faithful to the original content, or most innovative approach to narrative.

When the students come back into the room, we go through each group in order offering our critiques of their strengths and weaknesses. Obviously, one tries to be tactful in describing flaws in the presentations but we also feel it is important for all participants to have a sense of how the judges responded to each presentation. Doing the critiques first keeps students focused on what we are saying since they are looking for clues into which group may have pleased the judges the most. Usually, we have one judge designated to lead the critique of each group with the others jumping in as needed to elaborate on key points. It is important for the students to hear how a range of different judges with different types of expertise and backgrounds responded to their projects.

Typically, we spend 5-10 minutes on each group; trying to be even in the amount of time we spend on each. At the end of the process, we then announce the superlatives assigned to each group and finally, the ultimate winner of the competition. In the MIT context, because of our association with Sony, each member of the winning team receives some moderately priced electronic gadget. All participants in the process receive a certificate and many years, Sony brings a book or video tied to one of their current releases for each participant. Teachers will need to think about what kind of prize is appropriate for their students - perhaps a gift certificate from a local merchant.

Get a (Second) Life!

Clay Shirky has been a longtime pundit about digital culture: sometimes he gets it right (or at least, more accurately, sometimes I agree with what he writes) and sometimes he doesn't. For example, he was one of the first journalists to really think hard about the emergence of participatory culture as something different from the same old consumer culture; he also took what I see as the wrong side of the debate with Scott McCloud about micropayments (though the jury is still out on that one.) I always respect what the guy has to say -- even if he tends towards the cynical side and I tend to the more optimistic. He is someone who asks the right questions -- even if he doesn't always come up with the right answers -- and that's all you can ask of anyone who writes regularly and sticks his neck out about emerging trends in a still developing medium. Lots of folks are dismissing Shirky right now without knowing the range of insightful and provocative essays he has posted in the past. Check out his homepage Agree with him, disagree with him -- as I said, I've done both through the years -- Clay Shirky's no idiot.

Right before Christmas, Shirky posted a critique of the media hype around Second Life, which has been stirring up a lot of fuss among my various friends and neighbors. The piece is worth reading as a corrective to some of the more breathless prose which claims that Second Life is "Web 3.0" and will totally change the world as we know it.

Basically, Shirky's arguments boil down to the following:

1.Claims about Second Life's user base have been dramatically overstated because the focus has been on the number of people who try out the multiverse rather than on those who return regularly. As he explains, "Someone who tries a social service once and bails isn't really a user any more than someone who gets a sample spoon of ice cream and walks out is a customer."

2. He argues that the hype around Second Life simply repeats earlier waves of enthusiasm about virtual worlds, none of which have turned out to be the "next new thing" claimed for them by their most ardent supporters. He concludes, "If, in 1993, you'd studied mailing lists, or usenet, or irc, you'd have a better grasp of online community today than if you'd spent a lot of time in LambdaMOO or Cyberion City."

3. The hype about Second Life is emerging because tech reporters are young and have no sense of history, because virtual reality is easy to grasp compared to the complexities of social networks, because writing about SL still keeps the focus on content, and because so many powerful groups have a vested interest in sending out press releases about the cool project they are doing in Second Life.

Shirky concludes, "Second Life may be wrought by its more active users into something good, but right now the deck is stacked against it, because the perceptions of great user growth and great value from scarcity are mutually reinforcing but built on sand....There's nothing wrong with a service that appeals to tens of thousands of people, but in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error. If most of the people who try Second Life bail (and they do), we should adopt a considerably more skeptical attitude about proclamations that the oft-delayed Virtual Worlds revolution has now arrived."

This story has already generated some smart responses from people I know and trust. Here, for example, is my MIT colleague Beth Coleman:

Second Life may turn out to be the Friendster of the "metaverse"--the first to disseminate the signal strongly but also fast to disappear once the My Space of this format appears. Last winter there were 200,000 who visited SL. Today there are somewhere around 2 million who have at least stepped in to use the interface, to see for themselves what this is all about. WoW has already demonstrated a mass scale of technical application and popular interest for MMORPG. SL, Multiverse, and the growing numbers of virtual world platforms beg the question of future network use. It's not like real life. Not by a long shot. One is animating a proxy through multilayered terrains of information. Some of them might take the shape of cliché singles bars, but the procession toward ever more complex simulation in computing is there. Not every user can code, but certainly more users will learn to script (or edit video or stream media) as Flilckr and Youtube have made clear. It also seems incorrect not to recognize exponential user growth in regard to 3d virtual worlds. Let's not look at the U.S. for a moment but Asia, specifically the Korean Cyworld that is a 3D world massively used for social-networking in the way that My Space functions for American youth. The all-encompassing metaverse that Philip Rosedale promises Second Life will become may be a fiction of the CEO's own virtual world fantasy. The potential of 3D search engines do not trump text-based and 2D formulations. But it seems short-sited to says that 3D imaging and spatial representation do not open doors for emergent use of communications networks. At the very least, the qualities of 2D social networks are mutated, amplified, and animated by these real-time moving image worlds. VW platforms, including SL, can claim the following qualities:

1. Community building of social networks that reach on and offline

2. Communal projects that span systems designs to educational, business, and activist organization

3. Avatar proxies are not minor. Yahoo avatar, Wii's Miis, Facebook....every place where users are able to created multi-media profiles they do. The puppet show of virtual worlds speaks very strongly to a collective desire to play in this way.

We are still in the beta stage on this, a continuing beta from the 1990s I suppose, but the tipping point from niche to popular use seems to have arrived.

Here's danah boyd:

Lately, i've become very irritated by the immersive virtual questions i've been getting. In particular, "will Web3.0 be all about immersive virtual worlds?" Clay's post on Second Life reminded me of how irritated i am by this. I have to admit that i get really annoyed when techno-futurists fetishize Stephenson-esque visions of virtuality. Why is it that every 5 years or so we re-instate this fantasy as the utopian end-all be-all of technology? (Remember VRML? That was fun.)

Maybe i'm wrong, maybe i'll look back twenty years ago and be embarrassed by my lack of foresight. But honestly, i don't think we're going virtual.

There is no doubt that immersive games are on the rise and i don't think that trend is going to stop. I think that WoW is a strong indicator of one kind of play that will become part of the cultural landscape. But there's a huge difference between enjoying WoW and wanting to live virtually. There ARE people who want to go virtual and i wouldn't be surprised if there are many opportunities for sustainable virtual environments....

If you look at the rise of social tech amongst young people, it's not about divorcing the physical to live digitally. MySpace has more to do with offline structures of sociality than it has to do with virtuality. People are modeling their offline social network; the digital is complementing (and complicating) the physical. In an environment where anyone _could_ socialize with anyone, they don't. They socialize with the people who validate them in meatspace. The mobile is another example of this. People don't call up anyone in the world (like is fantasized by some wrt Skype); they call up the people that they are closest with. The mobile supports pre-existing social networks, not purely virtual ones.

GSD&M thought leader Joel Greenberg spells out what matters to him about Second Life and does some pretty interesting analysis of the same numbers Shirky has been working from:

SL has two interesting charactistics: 1) SL is a community; until you start participating with other people, you haven't really experienced it to its fullest, and 2) Linden Lab does not spend money on traditional advertising, so much of the growth can be attributed to community marketing and PR.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Shirky's column has sparked a long overdue discussion about what Second Life is and why it matters which moves us beyond the first flirtations with virtual life and gets to the heart of the matter. I've written a lot here about Second Life, including describing in some detail my own first steps into this new terrain. There's a lot about Second Life that really fascinates me -- starting with Linden Lab's enlightened views about user-generated content as well as the range of different groups that are using Second Life as a site for running what I have described here in the past as thought experiments.

For me, Second Life is a powerful embodiment of what Yochai Benkler has been talking about in The Wealth of Networks: a place where commercial, educational, nonprofit, governmental, and amateur groups co-exist and interact. It is a playground where we can try on new identities, test new products and practices, explore new ways that core institutions might operate.

Second Life is NOT web 3.0.

Second Life is NOT the future of the web.

We will NOT abandon physical reality for virtual life.

Immersive realities are NOT the primary way we will interact with information environments in the future.

But it IS important as a social experiment -- even if the user numbers were in the tens or hundreds of thousands as opposed to the millions. This isn't about statistics; it's about cultural innovation and social experimentation. If Second Life didn't exist, we -- those of us who care about grassroots creativity -- would have to invent it because it is a vivid illustration of the trends towards participatory culture which are springing up all over the place.

Second Life isn't interesting to me because of how many people go there; it's interesting because of what they do when they get there.

I got asked the other day to predict which of the current hot new websites will survive a decade from now. The answer is probably none of them will survive in anything remotely like their present form. But, if I had to make a guess, I'd guess that Second Life will outlast YouTube and MySpace even though -- or maybe precisely because -- its user base is smaller.

We have seen rapid churn with social network sites; teens don't want to hang out where their older siblings hung out and they certainly don't want to hang out where their parents hung out. So, as long as MySpace gets defined around its teen user base, it will quickly be, as Clueless put it, "so-so twenty minutes ago." Social networking as a practice will continue and grow but MySpace is toast.

YouTube is going to face an uphill battle to make money for Google on the scale anticipated and almost every choice they make to generate revenue -- from charging subscriptions to incorporating advertising or selling content -- is going to alienate large chunks of its users. Some other site will offer the same services for less money and the amateur media makers whose culture is larger than YouTube will go to whichever media sharing site offers them the best deal.

Most multiplayer games will have a life-span of four or five years: sooner or later, the producers who are generating the content will run out of creative energy, will set the wrong policy, or will simply fail to keep up with their competitors, and they will lose their marketshare to the new game in town.

But Second Life may outlive them all for several reasons: people feel a deeper investment in Second Life as a community because they have built it in their own images, because they have invested time in constructing the physical artifacts and social processes which constitute this multiverse. The core users of Second Life will be there as long as Linden Lab is there and the folks at Linden Lab seem to have a pretty realistic understanding of what it takes to support the diverse kinds of communities who are embracing this technology.

I suspect Second Life's numbers will always be lower than those of World of Warcraft or its descendents: more people want to have master entertainers construct their fantasy lives for them than want to build them from scratch. I have been surprised by how many are trying Second Life -- suggesting that there may be some hunger out there for at least testing the waters with virtual reality -- but I am also surprised how intimidated even my MIT students are of trying to build something in virtual space. So, I don't know that this will represent the tipping point in terms of multiverses -- simply that it will be an important community that has the potential to sustain itself for an extended period of time.

Shirky's column has sparked an important conversation, has caused us all to catch our breath and examine our assumptions. For that, I am personally grateful, even if this is one of those times when I think he's probably more wrong than right.

I can't say the same about some of the company he is keeping. Shirky's article appeared on a site called Valleywag, which bills itself as a "tech gossip rag." Another Valleywag reporter, no doubt inspired by Clay's critique, decided to crash a press conference being held in Second Life and act, frankly, like a wild boar. Here's the reporter's own description of what happened:

The sex is less satisfying, the money meaningless, but in one regard, at least, Second Life has matched the real world. Political events in Linden Lab's overblown virtual environment are carefully controlled, lacking in authenticity, and mind-numbingly tedious. Valleywag sent along a video reporter to the opening session of Congress, or rather an online discussion of the day's momentous events in the virtual world. The event, sponsored by marketing consultancy, Clear Ink, and has-been computer maker, Sun Microsystems, was as sparsely attended as a New Hampshire at-home with a no-hope candidate. Those attendees not from the press were Second Life publicists making sure the participants stayed in their seats. So much like the meatworld. It's uncanny. Valleywag's reporter ran into trouble with the virtual world's flacks after he floated up and spoiled the photo-op by getting into the frame. "They were really freaking out. Dude, I was laughing so hard I was crying when they finally kicked me out." Well, at least someone enjoyed themselves.

Whatever the value of your criticism of Second Life may be, acting like a jerk in a virtual world is no different than acting like a jerk in the real world. This suggests the actions of someone who imagines virtual worlds as simply a playground where individuals can do anything they want and not expect any social consequences. It suggests the actions of someone who has contempt for anyone who takes what's going on in such a space seriously and wants to show his contempt by bearing his rump to the world. Here's hoping that we can debate the issues surround virtual worlds with a bit more civility and maturity in the future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

independent games movement at the present time?

We are more or less stuck in the middle.

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

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

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

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

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

does it change the way games get made?

Well, at least it sounds good on paper!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Independent Games Movement (Part Six): An Interview with Eric Zimmerman (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first of a two part interview with Eric Zimmerman, game theorist, designer, and teacher, during which he spoke at length about his vision for the Independent Games movement and the ways that his company, Game Lab, has developed distinctive and original content. Today, I shift the focus onto some of the public service aspects of Zimmerman's work, especially in his efforts to promote games literacy. Across the term, I have been sharing with you some news about the MacArthur Foundation's 50 million dollar commitment to exploring youth and digital learning. Our own Project NML is part of this effort as was the white paper I published on the social skills and cultural competencies young people need to participate meaningfully in the new media landscape. Another dimension of this effort is the Game Designer Project, which Zimmerman is developing in collaboration with Katie Salens and James Paul Gee. I got a chance to see some early prototypes of this project at the Serious Game Summit in Washington DC earlier this term and was blown away by the wit and imagination, not to mention the pedagogical sophistication, which is informing its design. As Zimmerman discusses below, this is an attempt to use the game platform as a vehicle to teach students about the design process. The goal is not to turn young people into game designers but rather to use the design process to help them to think critically about games as a mode of experience.

In a recent interview on this blog, Greg Costikyan commented, "Consider Eric Zimmerman. He's found a viable niche doing casual games, and his company, Gamelab, does some excellent ones. But Eric is a -gamer- at heart, and while I imagine he's happy enough developing games for an audience (middle-aged women) that prizes games of types very different from those he himself loves, I'm sure he'd much prefer to be developing games of greater cultural significance and intellectual merit. In other words, if he could make as much money doing a game that appeals to people who have a passion for games, rather than for those who view them as light entertainment, I'm sure he'd be happy to. But he also has a payroll to make, and there's demonstrable money in casual games, and indie games are pretty much unproven as a market." Do you agree or disagree with that description of the context within which you work?

God bless Greg Costikyan (and I mean that in the secular, idiomatic sense).

Greg is half right. While Gamelab strives to have every game we make be in some way innovative, I believe we are just scratching the surface of the tip of the iceberg in terms of the kinds of games that could be made. So of course I would love to be doing more radically experimental and unusual work, in terms of gameplay and interaction, narrative and cultural content, contexts for play, audio and visual aesthetics, etc. In this sense, yes Greg, I'd like to be doing more than I am. But when I look around at all of the game companies out there, I'm very happy with what we are doing at Gamelab and I don't think there is another place I'd rather be.

But I certainly wouldn't frame these issues as Greg does. For example, I wouldn't describe the work I want to do as my own personal desire to make games that I want to play. As a designer, I like solving design problems, which doesn't merely mean making games that are fun for me. And even if it did, the intrinsically collaborative nature of game development means that a game is the product of many people's desires, not just those of a single author.

Greg is also certainly over-generalizing the online game audience. Online games include far more than the "middle aged woman" stereotype he invokes. I'd much rather be making games for the Internet, as the players there are vastly more diverse than for consoles and PC retail games. I can say with confidence that the two games I described in my response to the last question, Arcadia Remix and Out of Your Mind, are not designed just for middle-aged women.

Lastly, I would hesitate to set up an opposition between running a business and "creativity," something implied in Greg's quote. Part of what we are doing at Gamelab is not just engaging with design questions, but engaging with questions of funding and producing and distributing our work as well. And Greg's company Manifesto Games is certainly doing this too. The fact that there are still so many unanswered questions about games - in terms of design, culture, business, etc - is what makes it so exciting to be working in the game industry right now.

Tell us something about the Game Designer project. You hope to help young people develop an understanding of the game design process. Why? What do you see as the benefit of everyday people understanding games on this level?

Game Designer is a project funded by a MacArthur Foundation grant in partnership with Jim Gee's research group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Game Designer will let junior high and high school students learn about game design by creating and modifying simple games. However, the point of the project is not to train future game designers. It is to engender media literacy.

Our position is that there is an emerging form of media literacy that we sometimes call "Gaming Literacy." Gaming Literacy has to do with information management, understanding complex systems, social networks, a critical design process, and creativity with digital technology. Increasingly, this new form of literacy will be crucial in the workplace and in our social and civic lives. The process of game design, which combines mathematics and logic, storytelling and aesthetics, writing and communication, systems and analytic thinking, among other elements, is one of the best ways of engaging with this form of literacy.

Katie Salen here at Gamelab is leading the Game Designer project design and working directly with our academic partners, who are focusing on research, pedagogy, testing, and assessment. Game Designer is not an open-ended prototyping tool like GameMaker - it is a guided, scaffolded experience that teaches game design concepts. So it is important that the instructional components of the project are really well-tuned. Right now there is nothing like Game Designer out there - and from kids' reaction to our prototype testing, it may be a very popular application.

One obvious analogy might be to Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, which translates the theory of comics into a graphic novel format. What do you gain by exploring the mechanics of game design through a game as opposed to a book

like, say, Rules of Play?

I hadn't thought of that analogy, but I like it! Thanks for the generous comparison.

Game Designer in some ways is an extension of Rules of Play, in which Katie Salen and I tried to establish a set of concepts for the practice and theory of game design. But that textbook is really designed for a university classroom - a very different audience and a very different instructional context than Game Designer!

One of the reasons why Game Designer needs to be embodied as a game creation application, rather than just as a book, is because one of our emphases in the project is on the process of game design. Interacting with Game Designer won't be just about making games in and of themselves, but will involve sharing them online, having friends playtest your games, as well as writing critical reviews of your games and of others' games. We want to borrow some elements from the practice of game design, because this process also embodies the kind of literacy we want to teach.

You announced at the Serious Games Summit the launch of a new nonprofit entity. Explain how this group will be related to Gamelab and what its goals will be?

We're still in the process of forming the nonprofit, so I can't say too much just yet. But the organization, called The Gamelab Institute of Play, is dedicated to the idea that playing, understanding, and creating games is an important learning experience. Rather than focusing on "serious games," the Institute of Play consists of programs and experiences that turn players into designers, letting them learn about and create games both on and off the computer. A close relationship between the new organization and the commercial game studio Gamelab, will also allow for new kinds of collaborations across the for-profit and not-for-profit divide. We're pretty excited about the Institute of Play! Expect to hear more about it this Spring.

There has been a lot of debate this summer about the value of games criticism and whether the field needs strong and recognized critics who might cultivate the audience for more innovative games. What do you, as a game designer, see as the role of the game critic?

Sorry to hear I missed that debate! Where and when did it happen?

I certainly agree that there is a role for game criticism, as one piece in the puzzle of growing what games are and what they might be. Education and the scholarly study of games is another piece. As are many of the design and business issues I have mentioned here. In many ways, the role of the critic binds all of these diverse elements together. The critic needs to have some kind of scholarly background, although she isn't necessarily writing for an academic audience. The critic has an educational function, although he isn't a formal instructor. And the critic needs to understand the design and business of games, even though the critic isn't selling or creating them.

Critics serve many roles for those of us working in the industry. We're usually too busy to be reading everything out there, so critics are important sources of information about what is happening. Critics also reflect audience opinion, giving us a sense of what our fans might be thinking. They also of course help generate audience opinion, giving us a way to reach our players. At their best, critics can raise issues and concerns about what, how, and why we are making games that we in the myopic industry might not ourselves see.

Props to the critics.

My Adventures in Poland (Part Two)

The first thing you need to understand about Warsaw is that the city still has not recovered from its traumatic past. Almost every Pole I met during my visit, at one time or another, apologized to us about the state of their city. Warsaw was once one of the great cosmopolitan cities of Europe but it was devastated during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 -- a two month period during which the Poles actively resisted German occupation with the result that by some estimates 85 percent of the city was destroyed and more than 250,000 civilian lives were taken. (These estimates come from Wikipedia). The German occupation was followed by decades of Soviet dominance during which the old buildings were replaced by newer buildings in the Stalinist tradition. Only in recent decades have the Poles regained control over their city and been able to exert their own influence on its architecture again. And as a result, the Poles are often deeply apologetic about a city that they variously described as "ugly" and "dirty" and "without cultural identity." There are constant comparisons made to Krakow, which is described as an older, more sophisticated, more culturally rich city (though we never actually got out of Warsaw on this trip and found this city had its own charms and attractions.)

Some of the older sections of the city have been rebuilt -- including some of the fortifications whose origins can be traced back to the early 14th century.

The Palace of Culture Meets Kultura 2.0

My primary talk on this trip was at a conference called Kultura 2.0 which was held inside the Palace of Culture -- a gift from Joseph Stalin to the people of Poland -- which remains perhaps the most controversial buildings in the city. At 30 stories, it is also still the tallest building in the city and can be seen from almost every corner of Warsaw. Some Poles believe the building should be destroyed, seeing it as a painful reminder of the Soviet occupation of their country. Others embrace the building for its architectural distinction and the vast cultural complex of theatres, auditoriums, and museums which it houses.

There was something paradoxical about hosting a conference themed around the transformative power of new media technologies (i.e. the digital revolution) inside a building so strongly associated with the centralizing power of the Communist State, an irony noted by a number of the speakers. (I could not resist comparing Nicholas Negroponte's predictions in Being Digital that mass media as we know it would collapse under its own weight in the face of personalized media to the old Marxist rhetoric about "the withering of the State." Neither prediction has or seems likely to come to pass anytime in my lifetime.) The conference organizers had brought together a very interesting mix of key players in the Polish context (more about this in a minute) as well as some leading thinkers about digital media from across Europe and the United States (me). I found the audience tremendously hungry for new ideas and perspectives.

There was some skepticism expressed in the questions about some of my utopian ideas about where all of this may be going (as well there should be). I had spoken at some length about Second Life as an illustration of participatory culture, the collaborationist relations of producers and consumers, and the bringing together of multiple levels of media production (a la Benkler's Wealth of Networks) into one shared environment. Several people in the audience, however, were deeply concerned about the implications of a single company -- even one as benign as Linden Labs -- providing this kind of shared context for business, education, foundation, journalism, activists, sexual minorities, and artists to interact.

Wouldn't the business impose some degree of censorship and regulation on what goes on within this new multiverse? This is a legitimate concern -- though perhaps premature -- yet it is not clear that a state sponsored version of Second Life would provide any greater protection for the creative and political rights of its citizens, a point which landed perhaps more heavily than I intended speaking in the center of a monument to Stalinism. But, it seems to sum up some of the tensions which Poland itself faces as it sheds its Communist past and embraces both democracy and capitalism (the old headquarters of the Communist Party has ironically enough been transformed into the stock exchange.)

Treasuring My Translation

For me, a highlight of the first day was getting to meet my translators -- Malgorzata Bernatowicz and Miroslaw Filiciak -- and holding in my hands the very first foreign translation of my work -- Kultura Konwergencji:zderzenie starych i nowych mediow. The translators and publisher had worked incredibly hard to get the book ready for print and distribution in time for my visit to the country and participation at the conference. Indeed, their turnaround was significantly faster than the book received from its American publisher (not that I am complaining on that front).

There is something so curious about holding this text which is yours and yet not yours: I can recognize, even without reading Polish, the structure of the argument with occasional names popping off the page and thus providing me some landmarks for figuring out where we are in the text. There are surprisingly many cognates or near cognates between Polish and English (despite very different linguistic origins) which also help me to spot specific passages. And yet, it is odd to not be able to read your own book.

I also am not quite used to speaking through translation. The auditorium was equipped for multiple language real time translation and there were translators in a booth high above the stage who I could watch as I spoke trying to figure out how to turn my own mangled, fast-paced, and highly colloquial English into proper Polish. There were odd moments when those listening in English laughed and then a few seconds later there would be a somewhat more muted round of laughter from the Polish listeners. Most of the questions came in English, though some had to be translated from Polish: my sense was the translation must have been excellent because there were few real obstacles to communication at these moments of more direct interaction and the people asking questions seemed to have a good understanding of my core claims and arguments.

The Witcher: Transmedia Storytelling and Global Culture

A highlight of the morning's festivities was a rare public appearance by popular fiction writer Andrzej Sapkowski to honor the 20th anniversary of the first publication of The Witcher, which has become a landmark work in the history of modern Polish popular culture. The Witcher is already a powerful example of transmedia storytelling, existing across films, television,magazine short stories, novels, comics, and games, and is also already an international phenomenon ( translated into Czech, Slovak, German, Russian, Lithuanian, French and Spanish). The first English translation of the material does not appear until 2007.

The Witcher, as I understand it from what I heard at the conference and what I have pieced together via a Wikipedia entry, are an elite group of highly trained monster killers. The series protagonist, Geralt, is one of the most skilled of the witchers and the series deals with his various battles against the forces of evil. The witchers are sterile mutants with supernatural abilities and have learned to suppress their feelings through their training. The series is deeply immersed in traditional Polish culture and Eastern European mythology but it also includes original contributions by the highly imaginative author.

The Witcher universe was first introduced in a series of short stories primarily published in Nowa Fantastyka. As Sapkowski explained during the public conversation, Polish publishers were, at that time, reprinting fantasy works from England, including the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, which were tremendously popular in Poland, but had been resistant to the idea of original fantasy fiction by Polish authors, convinced that it would not interest their readers. Sapowski's work helped to break open the market for Polish produced fantasy and horror fiction. The short stories led to a series of five novels which are known casually as The Witcher series and officially as Blood of the Elves. These stories and novels were, in turn, adopted and expanded into a comic book series (1993-1995), a feature film (2001) and a 13 episode television serial (2002).

Sapowski was frank in the conversation about his dissatisfaction with the results of some of these adaptations, acknowledging that his decisions were shaped in part by commercial motives but suggesting that he needed to trust collaborators who knew these other media better than he did.

The series, however, is about to receive a major face-lift with the world wide release next year of a Witcher computer game, produced by a Polish company, CD Projekt RED. (There was already a live action role playing game based on the series released in 2001). The English translations of the stories are intended to coincide with the release of the game and several people at the conference commented on what it would mean that the game was the vehicle for introducing the 20-year-old stories to the English speaking world. And in Poland, a new comic book series was being prepared to build upon the revival of interest in The Witcher which the games release is likely to generate.

I had heard nothing about the game before the conference but a quick Google search on my return shows a large number of screenshots circulating in the English language media, an official homepage which offers English translations of its content, and some signs of growing fan interest in the franchise (including amateur translated versions of the television series circulating informally in the United States, at least according to Wikipedia). Their hope is that the game may open the way for other Polish popular media to gain broader circulation in Western Europe and the United States.

Critics who have seen the game so far describe it as beautifully executed with a strong sense of atmosphere. The Witcher game seems well situated to combine familiar genre elements with a fair amount of local color. Michal Madej from the company producing the game noted a number of distinctly Polish elements -- from the traditional garb and weapons associated with the Polish highlanders to the use of the old Slavic alphabet in ruins and puzzles, ruins of old Teutonic architecture and ships, and the use of demons drawn from the national mythology. As he explained, "it's own culture, our myths we are showing through this game." Many in the west already associate Eastern Europe with a strong tradition of horror narratives and this would seem to be the right genre to use to attract interest elsewhere in the world. We might add The Witcher to the growing list of projects we've discussed in this blog which seek to assert national culture through computer and video games.

Listening to Sapkowski, a surprisingly modest and down to earth fellow given his high visibility within his national context, gave me some glimpse into fan culture in Poland. As in the United States, most of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers got their start doing amateur writing -- i.e. fan fiction -- before seeking their first professional publications. Sapkowski, accordingly, welcomes fan participation within his world, describing fan fiction as a demonstration that his work has value and as a sign that it still generates interest in the marketplace. He says that he cracks down only on the commercial appropriation of his work and actively encourages fan expansions. Indeed, though I can't decipher much on his official homepage, it is clear that there's a space devoted to fan fiction about The Witcher, an acknowledgement that is not generally matched by western writers in the genre. In typically modest fashion, he moved from suggesting how proud he was to see his work generate this kind of grassroots response to the earthy comment that fan fiction was like "mushrooms" and "you know what mushrooms grow on." He expressed hope that as the Witcher franchise expands even further into the English speaking world, his fans will play important roles in offering informed criticism which will educate the new readers about its mythology and history.

We Want Capitan Zbik Back!

The morning sessions on The Witcher as a transmedia franchise culminated in a panel discussion of the state of Polish popular culture and its chances to enter the international marketplace. Though there were many specific references here which went untranslated, the core of the discussion dealt with some of the challenges of displacing the kinds of popular culture which were produced under Communism with the kinds being driven by the marketplace in the new Poland. Sapowski noted, for example, the paradox that the science fiction works of Stanislaw Lem were produced under the Socialist State and read with great interests by a public who saw them as veiled critiques of communism; these same stories have been neglected and even actively disdained in a capitalist economy. Lem (Solaris) still has some fans among the panelists but most of the younger participants had little interest in his works.

Many of the panelists expressed deep nostalgia for the classic cartoon and action-adventure series of their youth, produced under communism and therefore prohibited distribution today. The Ministry of Culture expressed concern that contemporary youth should not be exposed to the propaganda elements of these series but the panelists felt that most Poles would read past these and were simply interested in encounters with familiar characters and beloved stories which were still a vital part of their cultural memory. When you think about how central everything from Breakfast Cereal logos to old toys have been to Baby Boomers in other parts of the world, one can understand the emotional implications of this erasure of the natural popular culture legacy. The panelists were arguing that the state should license the re-release of this old content and then take the money to fund media literacy efforts.

I asked my translator, Miroslaw Filiciak, who moderated this session, to share with me some more perspectives on this issue:

Our government looks reluctantly on the communism times' popculture, still very

popular in Poland, although perceived totally funnily by the new generation, which can't

remember the times before the fall of communism. It's ironic, because we have a lot of

advertisements and new media products, i.e. comic books remakes, based on communist

brands, but some originals stay closed at the archive of Polish Television. The

situation is nonsense, because young people are not taking the vision of history in this

films as seriously as politicians do.

Another problem in our discussion was the question about government funding for

culture. In Poland - which is as you know probably the most pro American country in

Europe - many people believe the state's culture protection is the relic of the past and

we should not waste our taxes for such an uncertain investment as culture. I.e.

Sapkowski said that he (contrary to Lem) didn't need any support for his success. But

younger panelists - as Wojciech Orlinski and Mariusz Czubaj, the publicists of Polish

opinion-making press - gave examples of other European countries - especially France -

where culture is not only the element of the national pride, but also great business.

Thanks to Miroslaw Filiciak,Polskie Wydawnictwo Audiowizualne, Edwin Bendyk, and everyone else who facilitated my visit and aided in getting the translated edition of my book in front of the Polish people.

Games as National Culture: An Interview With Chris Kohler (Part Two)

On Friday, I ran the first part of a two part interview with Chris Kohler, author of Power Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life and now the editor of Wired's games blog Game|Life. I hope by now I have convinced you that this book is worth a read. Kohler has been very generous with his time and his thoughts responding to my question in the midst of an explosion of new stories about the launch of the new platforms and their impact on game culture. And his answers have been consistently illuminating about the relationship between the Japanese games industry and the American marketplace. Without further fanfare, let's get into the conversation: You quote game designer Keiichi Yano as saying "video games were the big can opener" which allowed other Japanese cultural materials to enter the American market. Explain. What connection do you see between the popularity of Japanese games and the growth of anime and manga in the American market? Why do you think Americans were receptive to Japanese games at a time when they seemed closed to other Japanese media content?

People love that quote. Yano-san is almost as good as coming up with awesome soundbites as he is at designing addictive games.

Let's look at the availability of Japanese cultural materials in the US in the early eighties. It wasn't much. Frederick Schodt had just published his book Manga! Manga!, detailing the immensity of the comics culture in Japan at the time, but if you read that book it only serves to illustrate just how little impact Japanese comics were at that point making on the American comic market -- Schodt actually had to translate and print some examples of manga at the back of his book just so his readers could actually experience what he was talking about.

In 1984, Hayao Miyazaki's first original feature film Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind hit it big at the Japanese box office, and Akira Toriyama, already known for his comedy manga Dr. Slump, started the first Dragon Ball series. Both of these men would eventually become internationally celebrated, but at the time that it was actually created, their work was completely unknown outside Japan. Of course, some hardcore comics fans followed the Japanese scene, but it wasn't mainstream. Same with film; the deeply involved fans knew of Kurosawa et al, but that was where it ended.

But by 1984, there were Japanese cultural products that had made huge inroads into worldwide markets. Space Invaders. Pac-Man. Donkey Kong. Many of the most popular, biggest-grossing arcade games of the "golden age" were from Japanese designers. This is not to say that there were not plenty of great American arcade games at the time as well. Indeed, had the video game industry gone entirely smoothly for America it is probable that things would have developed quite differently.

But what actually happened was that the bottom fell out of the American game market in 1984. Atari, under new management, scrapped all of its video game products. Most smaller game developers went out of business altogether. Retailers stopped buying games because they'd been so badly burned when the bubble burst. And that was that.

Until a year later, when Nintendo decided that the game console they were currently selling by the truckload in Japan, called Famicom, could succeed in the US if they pushed hard enough. Long story short, buoyed by games like Miyamoto's Super Mario Bros., it did. Suddenly, there was a huge demand for video games again in the US -- and practically no American game development houses ready to provide content. In came Nintendo's Japanese licensees like Konami, Capcom, and Namco, all ready to start selling their games in the US.

Thanks to the better visuals of the NES, Japanese games were beginning to look and sound (and read, in the case of story-based games) more like manga and anime. Some were even based directly off of anime and manga, even if the connection couldn't have been made clear to the US audience (a Dragon Ball game was released for the NES, called Dragon Power, long before the show hit US airwaves). And sometimes the games had a very strong resemblance to anime -- look at the detailed cinematic scenes in games like Ninja Gaiden.

Even when the games themselves didn't reflect it, millions of American kids were being exposed to Japanese cartoon styles through the peripheral material such as instruction manuals, Nintendo Power magazine, and strategy guides, most of which used the original Japanese artwork and story translations throughout. Sometimes they actually printed manga in the magazine, too, which no doubt was the first exposure to the form for literally millions of American kids.

So when manga and anime did start making their way to the US in translation beginning around the early nineties, the Nintendo generation found something familiar about the style and the stories.

Cultural critic Koichi Iwabuchi uses the term, "de-odorization" to describe the ways that distinctly Japanese qualities get filtered out as cultural goods enter the western market. Yet, in recent years, the Japanese quality of these games has been foregrounded by marketing and actively embraced by gamers. What factors have contributed to these changes?

When Power-Up was published I couldn't help feel like my timing was incredibly awful. When I started work on the thesis that would become the book, Japanese games were still unquestionably the best in the world. By the time it was published the situation was very different -- Western development houses had finally gotten their acts together, on the whole, and were producing games of unimpeachable quality. Games that were selling very strongly here in the US.

But two years later, in the fullness of time, it seems to me that... well, that my timing was still bad, but for a different reason. Because as you note we're now seeing "Japaneseness" being used to sell games. And not only games: publishers of manga don't really need to go through great lengths anymore to "Americanize" their products, in part because US retailers are becoming more "Japanized," willing and able to stock thousands of novel-sized paperback anthologies of manga, and pack their shelves to bursting with DVD box sets.

Manga readers have gotten used to reading from right to left, in the Japanese fashion, so there's not even a need to "flip" the artwork anymore. In fact, in most cases they don't even retouch the sound effects; they leave them in Japanese. What's going on here is that the consumers are so much more educated about the product and specific in what they want that the publishers no longer have to tweak the product and push it to the mainstream.

Similarly, it's no longer a surprise that there are innovative, quirky, funny games coming from Japan. In fact, there are so many gamers that expect this now that labeling your game as a quirky funny Japanese title can be an excellent marketing tactic. There's an audience out there looking for the next Japanese cult hit (a "cult" in name only at this point, comprised as it is of millions of vocal, active, obsessed fans with lots of disposable income).

Just recently, Nippon Ichi Software, a Japanese publisher of role-playing and strategy games that are drenched in manga-styled characters and outrageous, off-the-wall stories, opened an American branch. Their business plan hinges entirely on selling the "Japaneseness" of their products, and they're doing quite well at it.

At one time, the most distinctly Japanese games never made it into the American market. What can you tell us about the criteria which shape the import of Japanese games into the west? What game genres still remain outside our market?

As I mentioned earlier, these criteria are constantly changing. Generally, things are moving in a more expansive direction. At one time, role-playing games in general were considered to be almost completely unsuitable for the US market. Now, I wouldn't be surprised to find that some of them had sold more copies in the US than in Japan.

I can certainly name plenty of genres that would not currently be considered suitable for the US market. But these days, you'd probably be able to find an exception for every single case. Probably the most notorious genre would be what are usually referred to here as "dating games". In Japan the fans would call them ren'ai or "romance" games while detractors would label them "gal-get games." They're predominantly two-dimensional games where you have your pick of a selection of women and attempt to say and do the right things to fall in love with one of them.

Mostly, these are for men, but there are also some for women -- some of which feature female protagonists, and some of which are gay male romance stories. They range from innocent high school puppy love stories to the explicitly pornographic.

But if you know where to look, you can find these games in English at places like jlist.com. So it wouldn't be entirely correct to say that these games simply aren't available. It's true that they are only available for personal computers, and not for standalone TV game consoles like PlayStation 2, but I wouldn't bet money that they won't eventually be.

In fact, it is tough to put my finger on any one genre that has made zero penetration in the US. There are plenty of games in Japan that simulate horse racing. Not the experience of being a jockey. I mean the experience of betting on horse racing. And yet, Sega has one of those machines available to US arcade owners (although I'm not sure how many are biting).

Games based on pachinko machines are big sellers in Japan. Mostly this is because pachinko is essentially the closest thing the country has to legalized gambling, but because it's a game of skill, you can in fact learn to beat the machines. So these games -- and the elaborate, lifesized controllers that go along with them -- are invaluable, because they teach you to play the game without risking any money.

So maybe that's the one genre that absolutely, one hundred percent wouldn't fly here. (And now that I've said that, expect a pachinko game to be released for Nintendo DS within a year.)

I have to ask you about Katamari Damacy, a game which came out after the completion of your book. Does it represent another landmark in the history of the western world's relationship to Japanese games? What other recent Japanese games would command attention in an updated edition of your book?

Yes, I think that Katamari Damacy was a real wake-the-hell-up point for the American game industry. Especially for Namco (now Bandai Namco), the publisher. Here's my personal Katamari story. A friend of mine, a voracious import gamer, had gotten the game after its Japanese release and was so astounded by it that I was convinced to get it myself. I was in love.

So along comes the 2004 Electronics Entertainment Expo, and Namco's booth. At that point, although they were in part playing to their strengths as a Japanese publisher with games like Taiko Drum Master and the anime-styled RPG Tales of Symphonia, they were also attempting to expand out with titles developed in the US, aimed at mainstream American audiences. Most prominently, these included the shooter Dead to Rights II (terrible) and the urban racing game Street Racing Syndicate (garbage).

Meanwhile, at the back corner of their booth, hidden, unannounced, untranslated, unpromoted except for a black-and-white sign that looked as if someone had made it using a word processor earlier that morning, was Katamari Damacy. And boy howdy if there wasn't a huge line stretching out away from the tiny cluster of demo machines.

So when I went back into the conference room to discuss what I'd just seen with Namco's media relations representatives, I said, "To be honest, the best thing you guys have right now is Katamari Damacy." And they got this look of half-disbelief on their faces, and said, "Yeah... we... we think that one's going to do really well," but in a tone of voice that suggested that they were only just coming to grips with this realization. The game shipped that fall, with a bare minimum of marketing dollars, and sold out instantly. I think as a series Katamari has sold more units internationally than domestically.

What other games would merit inclusion in a revised Power-Up? Certainly I would tell the story of Ouendan and Elite Beat Agents, for the reasons described earlier and also as a lesson in making your game hardware region-free. One of the main reasons that Ouendan took off like it did in foreign markets is because any Nintendo DS system can play any game, regardless of the country in which it was released. This has not historically been the case with game systems, which are usually locked to the region in which they are sold.

In fact, I think it was a huge mistake by Nintendo to make the new Wii system region-locked. They say that they did it because television standards differ between Europe and the US, but that doesn't explain why the US and Japan -- both on NTSC standard -- aren't considered to be one "region" under that logic.

This is a mistake on their part because Wii, much like DS, will no doubt play host to a variety of unique, original, innovative Japanese games. And the best way to tell whether these games would work in the US is to allow American import game players, who are usually very vocal and influential opinion-makers, easy access to the games.

On that note, I'd probably also use a new version of the book to complain about even more ways that video games are still treated as a second-class medium -- even by the very publishers of those games! Any fan of Kurosawa would be absolutely disgusted if Criterion's re-release of Seven Samurai were only issued with an English audio track. Luckily, Criterion would never think of doing such a thing. Why, then, does Final Fantasy XII not get the same respect?

If it's the case that there's just not enough room on the DVD to hold both language tracks, then there's not much to be done about that. But PlayStation 3's Blu-Ray discs will hold up to 50 gigabytes of data; more than enough for dual language options on anything and everything that comes from Japan. So if Final Fantasy XIII is released without the original language track, gamers can raise a very legitimate complaint.

What do you see as the most important lessons the American games industry learned from its Japanese competitors? What did Japanese game companies learn from their American counterparts?

We're back to my awful timing. When I started researching the book the thought pattern among people serious about game design was that Japanese games were simply better made, on the whole, than Western ones. Certainly, the editors of the popular and authoritative magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly were on my side. In their January 2002 issue they voted for their top 100 games of all time. 93 of the games on that list were made in Japan.

But now the tide has changed. If EGM's editors were to do another Top 100 list, it would be very different. What American developers learned, on the whole, was the value of taking their time. Well, actually it wasn't the developers who learned it so much as game publishers. Miyamoto's personal genius meant a lot, but it's just as important that he was given what would have been considered a luxurious amount of time to create his games. Meanwhile, American publishers seemed on the whole to be concerned with securing a hot product license, then getting the game out the door on as short a schedule as humanly possible.

I think at this point everyone sees the benefit of giving developers the time and money that they need to really polish up a game and make it as good as it can be. Sadly, it still doesn't happen in all cases. And American publishers still seem amazingly risk-averse; if a game proposal doesn't involve something immediately marketable they don't want to hear about it, in most cases. So although America is getting much better at making quality games that Americans love, Japan is still the innovation leader.

Which is funny, as it's the reverse of what has historically been true about America and Japan in terms of technology; typically it's generalized that American pioneering spirit fosters invention whereas Japan's diligent work ethic and obsession with miniaturization leads them to be particularly skilled at improving the designs of existing things (see: radio, television, video game hardware). Whereas with video games it is sometimes the other way around. One of this holiday season's biggest games in the US is Guitar Hero. Gameplay-wise, it's nearly identical to a Japanese game called Guitar Freaks, but with a few refinements that make it more fun.

Who deserves more praise: the innovators, or the ones who put on the polish that made it more palatable? It's a question we'll continue to wrestle with as this amazing medium continues to develop.

Hollywood Mogul 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could you start by telling us a little about yourself?

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

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

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

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

What are the major features of the game?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collective Intelligence vs. The Wisdom of Crowds

David Edery, who was until recently part of the CMS staff and now works for Microsoft, has been generating some interesting discussion over on his blog, Game Tycoon, about how games might harness "the wisdom of crowds" to solve real world problems. It's an idea he's been promoting for some time but I only recently had a chance to read through all of his discussion. He starts by describing the growing academic interest that has been generated by James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds and then suggesting some of the challenges of applying these concepts in a real world context:

Despite a lasting surge in media, business, and academic interest, proven mechanisms via which to harness the wisdom of crowds remain in short supply. Idea markets have existed for many years, as have the "opinion aggregation" systems in websites (i.e. the user-generated product rankings found in Amazon.com). The chief obstacle is and always has been: how to properly incentivize the participants in a system, such that they generate meaningful, unbiased input.

There is, however, one well-known mechanism that does an amazing job of incentivizing people to think seriously and passionately about a given set of problems. A mechanism that compels people to meaningfully compete, against other people or against themselves, for no monetary benefit whatsoever. That's right -- video games.

For many years now, developers have been creating games that revolve around real-world problems such as resource development, political maneuvering, etc. One of the most famous of these is called SimCity; in it, players are taught to grapple with zoning issues, tax rates, etc. What if games that encouraged people to solve real-world problems (as a means of accomplishing larger objectives) were developed in tandem with corporate or government sponsors? Not "business games", but commercially-viable, entertaining games that consumers might not even recognize as out of the ordinary?

Imagine a SimCity-esq game in which the player is given the financial reins to a region. The game could be set in a real location (i.e. California), incorporate real world constraints (i.e you can't indulge in deficit spending forever), and could dynamically import the latest available real-world regional data via the Internet (i.e. demographic figures, current spending levels, etc). That way, when players begin a new game, they are immersed in a situation that closely resembles whatever situation California's politicians are currently grappling with. But here's the catch: once players get out of the tutorial phase, the game can begin recording their decisions and transmitting them to a central database, where they are aggregated into a form of "collective vote" on what actions to take (i.e. raise the sales tax or lower the sales tax). If the Wisdom of Crowds is correct, the collective choices of 100,000 game players in California (which would include knowledgeable people as well as many less-knowledgeable people) may very well be better than the choices of 1,000 Californian policy experts.

The idea of using games to collect the shared wisdom of thousands of players seems a compelling one -- especially if one can develop, as Edery proposes, mechanisms for linking game play mechanics with real world data sets. Indeed, Raph Koster -- another games blogger who has been exploring these ideas -- does Edery one better, pointing to a project which actually tested this concept:

What [Byron Reeves] showed was a mockup of a Star Wars Galaxies medical screen, displaying real medical imagery. Players were challenged to advance as doctors by diagnosing the cancers displayed, in an effort to capture the wisdom of crowds. The result? A typical gamer was found to be able to diagnose accurately at 60% of the rate of a trained pathologist. Pile 30 gamers on top of one another, and the averaged result is equivalent to that of a pathologist -- with a total investment of around 60-100 hours per player.

At the risk of being annoyingly pedantic, however, this debate keeps getting muddied because participants are blurring important distinctions between Surowiecki's notion of the Wisdom of Crowds and Pierre Levy's notion of Collective Intelligence. Edery uses the two terms interchangeably in his discussion (and to some degree, so does Koster), yet Surowiecki and Levy start from very different premises which would lead to very different choices in the game design process. Surowiecki's model seeks to aggregate anonymously produced data, seeing the wisdom emerging when a large number of people each enter their own calculations without influencing each other's findings. Levy's model focuses on the kinds of deliberative process that occurs in online communities as participants share information, correct and evaluate each other's findings, and arrive at a consensus understanding.

Here, for example, is how Surowiecki describes the contexts where his ideas about the wisdom of crowds apply:

There are four key qualities that make a crowd smart. It needs to be diverse, so that people are bringing different pieces of information to the table. It needs to be decentralized, so that no one at the top is dictating the crowd's answer. It needs a way of summarizing people's opinions into one collective verdict. And the people in the crowd need to be independent, so that they pay attention mostly to their own information, and not worrying about what everyone around them thinks.

Raph Koster picks up on this aspect of Surowiecki's model in his blog discussion:

The problems with this sort of approach, of course, are that people influence each other. When monolithic blocks appear within the group, you'll start to get inaccuracies. When apparently authoritative sources of information start broadcasting their impressions of reality, it'll distort the result. The results in markets are bubbles and crashes. The result, perhaps, in democracies, is ideological partisanship.

Koster extends this key point in a subsequent blog post:

Technically, Surowiecki's conception of "wisdom of crowds" is ONLY applicable to quantifiable, objective data. The very loosey-goosey way of using it to discuss any sort of collective discussion and opinion generation is a misrepresentation of the actual (and very interesting) phenomenon.

You can summarize the core phenomenon as "given a large enough and varied population offering up their best estimates of quantity or probability, the average of all responses will be more accurate than any given individual response."

But this is of very narrow application -- the examples are of things like guessing weight, market predictions, oddsmaking, and so on. The output of each individual must be in a form that can be averaged mathematically. What's more, you cannot use it in cases where one person's well-expressed opinion can sway another, as that introduces a subsequent bias into everything (which is why the wisdom of crowds doesn't always work for identifying the best product on the market, or the best art, or the like).

Using it for subjective things, such as opinions on politics, is a mistake for sure. And using it as a shorthand to describe the continuous editing and revision that appears on Wikipedia is also a mistake.

Wikipedia does not operate by wisdom of crowds. It operates by compromise and consensus, which is a very old mechanism (whereas the wisdom of crowds phenomenon is of relatively recent vintage).

The Wikipedia, as I discuss in Convergence Culture, depends on what Pierre Levy calls "collective intelligence." In the classic formulation, collective intelligence refers to a situation where nobody knows everything, everyone knows something, and what any given member knows is accessible to any other member upon request on an ad hoc basis. Levy is arguing that a networked culture gives rise to new structures of power which stem from the ability of diverse groups of people to pool knowledge, collaborate through research, debate interpretations, and through such a collaborative process, refine their understanding of the world. If Koster is suggesting that the "wisdom of crowds" works badly when confronted with the challenges of politics in a democratic society, Levy sees "collective intelligence" as a vehicle for democratization, feeling that it provides a context through which diverse groups can join forces to work through problems. As I suggest throughout Convergence Culture, there are all kinds of ethical and intellectual issues to be resolved before we can say we really inhabit the knowledge culture Levy describes.

The Wisdom of Crowds model focuses on isolated inputs: the Collective Intelligence model focuses on the process of knowledge production. The gradual refinement of the Wikipedia would be an example of collective intelligence at work.

In terms of games, think about Jane McGonigal's discussion of ARGS and the ways that a community of gamers can solve problems of enormous complexity simply by tapping expertise of individual members as needed. Here's how McGonigal defines the Alternate Reality Game:

An Alternate Reality Game is an interactive narrative or immersive drama, played out both online and in real world spaces, taking place over several weeks or months, in which hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of players come together online to real play, not role-play, forming unusually collaborative social networks, and working together to solve a mystery or problem, that would be impossible to solve alone.

McGonigal's essays and talks have identified a number of design techniques which insure that people need to collaborate in order to play the game and discuss the various mechanisms which have emerged to allow players to pool their knowledge as they work through complex challenges.

Compare this with what Edery says about tapping the wisdom of crowds through game play:

Crowd intelligence can fail (and fail spectacularly) when there's too much information passed between members of the crowd. Members start to alter their opinions based on the opinions of others, which skews the results. The online communities that build up around any popular game would seem to promote exactly this kind of skew.

In other words, one model sees the emergence of online communities as a bug which threatens the value of the game's research while the other sees online communities as a feature which enable us to process information in more complex ways than could be managed by any individual member. To tap the "wisdom of crowds", Edery has to find ways around all of those things which McGonigal and other advocates of "collective intelligence" are building into their ARGs:

* Use competition to discourage group-think. The scope of information-sharing is typically more limited when players (in any game genre) are working to best other players. Of course, blocks of information-sharing players will still form (in formal teams or otherwise) but that's not necessarily a critical problem.

* Online game communities typically form (the most persuasive) opinions about the objective aspects of a design mechanic; i.e. "you're better off using the shotgun than the pistol, except when you're fighting at a great distance." But if a challenge and its feedback mechanism both incorporate real-world data, as I suggested in my earlier article, it becomes harder for any individual (or the community as a whole) to form clear strategies around.

* Encouage population diversity to decrease the likelihood of groupthink. Distributing a game in different countries and courting players of different ages are both examples.

Both "collective intelligence" and "the wisdom of crowds" offer productive models for game design but we will get nowhere if we confuse the two. They represent very different accounts for knowledge production in the digital age and they will result in very different design choices.

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

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

--Indiecade website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How are you defining an independent game?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

about experimental and innovative titles?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What follows is a second excerpt from the white paper which I authored, along with Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katherine Clinton, and Alice J. Robison, for the MacArthur Foundation. The report is intended to offer a provocation for educators at all levels to think about how our pedagogical practices need to shift to reflect the demands of a more participatory culture. In Part One, I outlined some of the changes that are taking place in the media landscape and the ways they impacted young people. In Part Two, I make the case for why adult intervention is needed and why youth will not be able to make these adjustments all on their own. My hope is that the release of this report will stimulate reflection and discussion among educators, parents, and students about the ways media education is or is not being taught through school and after-school programs. I hope this discussion will also be of interest to the many other groups who read this blog -- many of whom are helping to shape the participatory culture we are discussing here and thus have some responsibility for thinking about how we insure that every youth is given a chance to participate.

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

Why We Should Teach Media Literacy: Three Core Problems

Some defenders of the new digital cultures have acted as though youth can simply acquire these skills on their own without adult intervention or supervision. Children and youth do know more about these new media environments than most parents and teachers. In fact, we do not need to protect them so much as engage them in critical dialogues that help them to articulate more fully their intuitive understandings of these experiences. To say that children are not victims of media is not to say that they, any more than anyone else, have fully mastered what are, after all, complex and still emerging social practices.

There are three core flaws with the laissez faire approach. The first is that it does not address the fundamental inequalities in young people's access to new media technologies and the opportunities for participation they represent (what we call the participation gap). The second is that it assumes that children are actively reflecting on their media experiences and can thus articulate what they learn from their participation (what we call the transparency problem). The third problem with the laissez faire approach is that it assumes children, on their own, can develop the ethical norms needed to cope with a complex and diverse social environment online (the ethics challenge). Any attempt to provide meaningful media education in the age of participatory culture must begin by addressing these three core concerns.

The Participation Gap

Cities around the country are providing wireless Internet access for their residents. Some cities, such as Tempe, Arizona, charge users a fee: others, such as Philadelphia, Boston, and Cambridge, plan to provide high-speed wireless Internet access free of charge. In an interview on PBS's Nightly News Hour in November 2005, Philadelphia mayor John Street spoke of the link between Internet access and educational achievement:

Philadelphia will allow low-income families, families that are on the cusp of their financial capacity, to be able to be fully and completely connected. We believe that our public school children should be--their families have to be connected or else they will fall behind, and, in many cases, never catch up.

Philadelphia's Emergency People's Shelter (EPS) is ahead of the curve; the nonprofit group's free network access serves shelter residents and the surrounding neighborhood. Gloria Guard of EPS said,

What we realized is if we can't get computers into the homes of our constituents and our neighbors and of this neighborhood, there are children in those households who will not be able to keep up in the marketplace. They won't be able to keep up with their schoolmates. They won't be able to even apply for college. We thought it was really important to get computer skills and connection to the Internet into as many homes as possible

However, simply passing out technology is not enough. Expanding access to computers will help bridge some of the gaps between digital haves and have nots, but only in a context in which free wi-fi is coupled with new educational initiatives to help youth and adults learn how to use those tools effectively.

Throughout the 1990s, the country focused enormous energy in combating the digital divide in technological access. The efforts have ensured that most American youth have at least minimal access to networked computers at school or in public libraries. However, as a 2005 report on children's online experience in the United Kingdom concluded:

No longer are children and young people only or even mainly divided by those with or without access, though 'access' is a moving target in terms of speed, location, quality and support, and inequalities in access do persist. Increasingly, children and young people are divided into those for whom the Internet is an increasingly rich, diverse, engaging and stimulating resource of growing importance in their lives and those for whom it remains a narrow, unengaging, if occasionally useful, resource of rather less significance

What a person can accomplish with an outdated machine in a public library with mandatory filtering software and no opportunity for storage or transmission pales in comparison to what person can accomplish with a home computer with unfettered Internet access, high bandwidth, and continuous connectivity. (Current legislation to block access to social networking software in schools and public libraries will further widen the participation gap.) The school system's inability to close this participation gap has negative consequences for everyone involved. On the one hand, those youth who are most advanced in media literacies are often stripped of their technologies and robbed of their best techniques for learning in an effort to ensure a uniform experience for all in the classroom. On the other hand, many youth who have had no exposure to these new kinds of participatory cultures outside school find themselves struggling to keep up with their peers.

Wartella, O'Keefe, and Scantlin reached a similar conclusion:

Closing the digital divide will depend less on technology and more on providing the skills and content that is most beneficial....Children who have access to home computers demonstrate more positive attitudes towards computers, show more enthusiasm and report more enthusiasm and ease when using computers than those who do not.

More often than not, those youth who have developed the most comfort with the online world are the ones who dominate classroom use of computers, pushing aside less technically skilled classmates. We would be wrong, however, to see this as a simple binary: youth who have technological access and those who do not. Wartella and coauthors note, for example, that game systems make their way into a growing number of working-class homes, even if laptops and personal computers do not. Working-class youth may have access to some of the benefits of play described here, but they may still lack the ability to produce and distribute their own media.

In a 2005 report prepared for the MacArthur Foundation, Lyman finds that children's experiences online are shaped by a range of social factors, including class, age, gender, race, nationality, and point of access. He notes, for example, that middle-class youth are more likely to rely on resources and assistance from peers and family within their own homes, and thus seem more autonomous at school than working-class children, who must often rely more heavily on teachers and peers to make up for a lack of experience at home. The middle-class children thus seem "naturally" superior in their use of technology, further amplifying their own self-confidence in their knowledge.

Historically, those youth who had access to books or classical recordings in their homes, whose parents took them to concerts or museums, or who engaged in dinner conversation developed, almost without conscious consideration, skills that helped them perform well in school. Those experiences, which were widespread among the middle class and rare among the working class, became a kind of class distinction, which shaped how teachers perceived students. These new forms of cultural participation may be playing a similar role. These activities shape what skills and knowledge students bring into the classroom, and in this fashion determine how teachers and peers perceive these students. Castells tells us about youth who are excluded from these experiences:

"Increasingly, as computer use is ever less a lifestyle option, ever more an everyday necessity, inability to use computers or find information on the web is a matter of stigma, of social exclusion; revealing not only changing social norms but also the growing centrality of computers to work, education and politics"

Writing on how contemporary industry values our "portfolios" as much as our knowledge, Gee suggests that what gives elite teens their head start is their capacity to:

pick up a variety of experiences (e.g., the "right" sort of summer camps, travel, and special activities), skills (not just school-based skills, but a wide variety of interactional, aesthetic, and technological skills), and achievements (honors, awards, projects) in terms of which they can help to define themselves as worthy of admission to elite educational institutions and worthy of professional success later in life".

They become adept at identifying opportunities for leadership and accomplishment; they adjust quickly to new situations, embrace new roles and goals, and interact with people of diverse backgrounds. Even if these opportunities are not formally valued by our educational institutions or listed on one's resume when applying for a job, the skills and self confidence gathered by moving across all of these online communities surely manifest themselves in other ways, offering yet another leg up to youth on one side and another disadvantage to youth on the opposite side of the participation gap.

The Transparency Problem

Although youth are becoming more adept at using media as resources (for creative expression, research, social life, etc.), they often are limited in their ability to examine the media themselves. Turkle was among the first to call attention to this transparency problem:

Games such as SimLife teach players to think in an active way about complex phenomena (some of them 'real life,' some of them not) as dynamic, evolving systems. But they also encourage people to get used to manipulating a system whose core assumptions they do not see and which may or may not be 'true'.

Not everyone agrees. In an essay on the game Sim City, Friedman contends that game players seek to identify and exploit the rules of the system in order to beat the game. The antagonistic relationship between player and game designer means that game players may be more suspicious of the rules structuring their experiences than are the consumers of many other kinds of media. Conversations about games expose flaws in games' construction, which may also lead to questions about their governing assumptions. Subsequent games have, in fact, allowed players to reprogram the core models. One might argue, however, that there is a difference between trying to master the rules of the game and recognizing the ways those rules structure our perception of reality. It may be much easier to see what is in the game than to recognize what the game leaves out.

This issue of transparency crops up regularly in the first wave of field reports on the pedagogical use of games. Shrier developed a location-specific game for teaching American history, which was played in Lexington, Massachusetts; her game was designed to encourage reflection on competing and contradictory accounts of who fired the first shot of the American Revolution. The project asked students to experience the ways historians interpret evidence and evaluate competing truths. Such debates emerged spontaneously around the game-play experience. Yet Shrier was surprised by another phenomenon, the young people took the game's representation of historical evidence at face value, acting as if all of the information in the game was authentic.

Shrier offers several possible explanations for this transparency problem, ranging from the legacy of textbook publishing, where instructional materials did not encourage users to question their structuring or their interpretation of the data, to the tendency to "suspend our disbelief" in order to have a more immersive play experience. Squire found similar patterns when he sought to integrate the commercial game, Civilization III, into world history classes. Students were adept at formulating "what if" hypotheses, which they tested through their game play. Yet, they lacked a vocabulary to critique how the game itself constructed history, and they had difficulty imagining how other games might represent the same historical processes in different terms. In both cases, students were learning how to read information from and through games, but they were not yet learning how to read games as texts, constructed with their own aesthetic norms, genre conventions, ideological biases, and codes of representation. These findings suggest the importance of coupling the pedagogical use of new media technologies with a greater focus on media literacy education.

These concerns about the transparency of games, even when used in instructional contexts, are closely related to concerns about how young people (or indeed, any of us) assess the quality of information we receive. As Hobbs has suggested, "Determining the truth value of information has become increasingly difficult in an age of increasing diversity and ease of access to information." More recent work by the Harvard Good Works Project has found that issues of format and design are often more important than issues of content in determining how much credibility young people attach to the content of a particular website. This research suggests some tendency to read "professional" sites as more credible than "amateur" produced materials, although students lack a well developed set of standards for distinguishing between the two. In her recent book, The Internet Playground, Seiter expresses concern that young people were finding it increasingly difficult to separate commercial from noncommercial content in online environments: "The Internet is more like a mall than a library; it resembles a gigantic public relations collection more than it does an archive of scholars" .

Increasingly, content comes to us already branded, already shaped through an economics of sponsorship, if not overt advertising. We do not know how much these commercial interests influence what we see and what we don't see. Commercial interests even shape the order of listings on search engines in ways that are often invisible to those who use them. Increasingly, opportunities to participate online are branded such that even when young people produce and share their own media, they do so under terms set by commercial interests. Children, Seiter found, often had trouble identifying advertising practices in the popular Neopets site, in part because the product references were so integrated into the game. The children were used to a world where commercials stood apart from the entertainment content and equated branding with banner advertisements. This is where the transparency issue becomes especially dangerous. Seiter concludes, "The World Wide Web is a more aggressive and stealthy marketeer to children than television ever was, and children need as much information about its business practices as teachers and parents can give them". Children need a safe space within which they can master the skills they need as citizens and consumers, as they learn to parse through messages from self-interested parties and separate fact from falsehood as they begin to experiment with new forms of creative expression and community participation.

The Ethics Challenge

In Making Good: How Young People Cope with Moral Dilemmas at Work, Fischman and coauthors discuss how young journalists learn the ethical norms that will define their future professional practice. These writers, they find, acquired their skills most often by writing for high school newspapers. For the most part, the authors suggest, student journalists worked in highly cohesive and insulated settings. Their work was supervised, for better or worse, by a range of adult authorities, some interested in promoting the qualities of good journalism, some concerned with protecting the reputation of the school. Their work was free of commercial constraints and sheltered from outside exposure. The ethical norms and professional practices they were acquiring were well understood by the adults around them.

Now, consider how few of those qualities might be applied to the emerging participatory cultures. In a world in which the line between consumers and producers is blurring, young people are finding themselves in situations that no one would have anticipated a decade or two ago. Their writing is much more open to the public and can have more far-reaching consequences. The young people are creating new modes of expression that are poorly understood by adults, and as a result they receive little to no guidance or supervision. The ethical implications of these emerging practices are fuzzy and ill-defined. Young people are discovering that information they put online to share with their friends can bring unwelcome attention from strangers.

In professional contexts, professional organizations are the watchdog of ethical norms. Yet in more casual settings, there is seldom a watchdog. No established set of ethical guidelines shapes the actions of bloggers and podcasters, for example. How should teens decide what they should or should not post about themselves or their friends on Live Journal or MySpace? Different online communities have their own norms about what information should remain within the group and what can be circulated more broadly, and many sites depend on self-disclosure to police whether the participants are children or adults. Yet, many young people seem willing to lie to access those communities.

Ethics become much murkier in game spaces, where identities are assumed and actions are fictive, designed to allow broader rein to explore darker fantasies. That said, unwritten and often imperfectly shared norms exist about acceptable or unacceptable conduct. Essays, such as Julian Dibbel's "A Rape in Cyberspace", Henry Jenkins's "Playing Politics in Alphaville", and Always-black's "Bow Nigger" offer reminders that participants in these worlds understand the same experiences in very different terms and follow different ethical norms as they face off against each other.

In Making Good, Fischman and coauthors found that high school journalists felt constrained by the strong social ties in their high school, unwilling to publish some articles they believed would be received negatively by their peers or that might disrupt the social dynamics of their society. What constraints, if any, apply to in online realms? Do young people feel that same level of investment in their gaming guilds or their fan communities? Or does the ability to mask one's identity or move from one community to another mean there are less immediate consequences for antisocial behavior?

One important goal of media education should be to encourage young people to become more reflective about the ethical choices they make as participants and communicators and the impact they have on others. We may, in the short run, have to accept that cyberspace's ethical norms are in flux: we are taking part in a prolonged experiment in what happens when one lowers the barriers of entry into a communication landscape. For the present moment, asking and working through questions of ethical practices may be more valuable than the answers produced because the process will help everyone to recognize and articulate the different assumptions that guide their behavior.

As we think about meaningful pedagogical intervention, we must keep in mind three core concerns:

• How do we ensure that every child has access to the skills and experiences needed to become a full participant in the social, cultural, economic, and political future of our society?

• How do we ensure that every child has the ability to articulate his or her understanding of how media shapes perceptions of the world?

• How do we ensure that every child has been socialized into the emerging ethical standards that should shape their practices as media makers and as participants in online communities?

To address these challenges, we must rethink which core skills and competencies we want our children to acquire in their learning experiences. The new participatory culture places new emphasis on familiar skills that have long been central to American education; it also requires teachers to pay greater attention to the social skills and cultural competencies that are emerging in the new media landscape. In the next sections, we provide a framework for thinking about the type of learning that should occur if we are to address the participation gap, the transparency problem, and the ethics challenges.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We will turn this industry on its head.

-- Designer X, The Scratchware Manifesto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it's over now.

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

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

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

Or you can defy the machine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peachy.

Experimenting with Brands in Second Life

In 1954, Frederick Pohl, a gifted social satirist and science fiction writer, published the short story, "The Tunnel Under the World", which should have been made into a first rate Twilight Zone episode. A man wakes up in bed next to his wife, gets up, and goes to work, and along the way, he starts to sense that there's something subtly different about his world:

He had been exposed to the captive-audience commercials so long that they hardly registered on the outer ear any more, but what was coming from the recorded program in the basement of the building caught his attention. It wasn't merely that the brands were most unfamiliar; it was a difference in pattern.

But no one else seems to have noticed that the entire adscape has changed overnight. And then it happens again, and again, and again. By the end of the story, he discovers that he is living inside a consumer research experiment:

They aren't Russians and they aren't Martians. These people are advertising men! Somehow -- heaven knows how they did it -- they've taken Tylerton over. They've got us, all of us, you and me and twenty or thirty thousand other people -- right under their thumbs. Maybe they hypnotize us and maybe it's something else; but however they do it, what happens is they let us live a day at a time. They pour advertising into us the whole damned day long. And at the end of the day they see what happened -- and then they wash the day out of our minds and start again the next day with different advertising....They test every last detail before they spend a nickle on advertising!

Pohl's short story about this microworld that allows Madison Avenue to run experiments on consumers anticipates the role that brands and advertising will play in new multiplayer game worlds such as Second Life. Second Life has been one of the hot new stories in participatory culture in recent months. Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks uses SL as a primary example of the grassroots energies being unleashed in network society. Educators are increasingly experimented with the affordances of this space with Harvard's Berkman Center teaching a course in intellectual property law this term open to Harvard students and their avitars. Psychologists are using Second Life to conduct therapy -- especially for autistic patients for whom it can represent a gradual introduction into reading and communicating cues about emotional states during social interactions. There are experiments going on that are exploring new governance structures in political science, new forms of community in sociology, and new modes of transaction in economics. Activists are using the space to increase public awareness of their concerns. And sexual minorities are finding new outlets for erotic expression amid the hidden corners of this world.

We might think of Second Life as a platform for thought experiments -- a place where we can test ideas that might not be ready for prime time, where we can experiment with new ways of being on both a personal and communal level. If you can think it, you can build it on Second Life, and so far, if you build it, they will come. Some have called Second Life the digital counterpart of Burning Man -- a place where people come to see and be seen, to build and to see what others have built, and to celebrate their power to reimagine the terms with which they conduct their everyday lives.

One of the recent graduates of the Comparative Media Studies master's program, Ilya Vedrashko, has been exploring the relationship between games and advertising. The Russian-born Vedrashko is perhaps the most unapologetic capitalist to ever pass through our program. He has found his calling in exploring the ways new media technologies can give rise to alternative approaches to brands and advertising. He has started blog on the future of advertising and a second on advertising through games. He recently posted his thesis online. Vedrashko now works at the Boston-based agency, Hiill Holliday, analyzing trends in emerging media that impact the advertising world. It is perhaps inevitable that he would turn his attention to Second Life, where players are generating their own versions of familiar advertising icons and forming their own agencies while corporations are looking for ways of making their own presences known in this ecclectic and rapidly evolving environment.

The following text is taken directly from Vedrashko's thesis.

What Is Second Life

Second Life, whose membership has tripled in the past six months (January-July of 2006) to surpass 300,000 players, has recently landed on the cover of Business Week that wrote, "It's hard to imagine a less corporate setting than the often bizarre online virtual worlds such as Second Life. But to a surprising extent, mainstream businesses are already dipping their toes into the virtual water." Second Life, whose player base was only 30,000 a year ago, is undergoing a remarkable transformation from a little-known hobby for geeks to what can now be defined as almost-the-edge-of-the-outer-fringes-of-mainstream.

Second Life is still no MySpace.com in its mass appeal, but among its residents are high-level executives, writers, journalists and the rest of the public-opinion-shaping digerati. As far as the virtual social networking applications go, it has been able to avoid many of the problems plaguing the popular online teen hangout. Second Life has corralled everyone under the age of 18 into a walled garden impermeable to adults, solving the issue of child safety before it had a chance to arise. Its business model relies on subscriptions instead of advertising for revenue -- Second Life sells what it calls land but what in effect is server space with game templates. This has allowed the Second Life makers at Linden Lab to adopt a laissez-faire approach to all marketing activity that goes on inside their game. Every player can advertise anything without having to pay the company, and becoming a resident is as easy as downloading Second Life software and installing it on a sufficiently powerful computer.

For the uninitiated, here is some background. As mentioned earlier, Second Life (SL for brevity) lacks any overarching objectives (kill the monster and save the princess) and scoring, and is technically not a game at all. Linden Lab insists on defining it as a 3-D virtual world, but a rather fitting description was offered by Wagner James Au who spent three years as SL's embedded journalist: "[I]t's just a weird cross between a 3D development platform and a chat program, AutoCAD meets the Sims." The world sprawls across hundreds of servers, called sims, that are all connected into one grid. Unlike many other massively multiplayer games, SL is not divided into parallel realities or shards, which means that all players can see each other regardless of the server on which they are located. All of the game assets, its avatars, buildings, land and everything else, are hosted on Linden Lab's servers so the only way to experience the world is through an Internet connection. The only thing that resides on the player's computer is the so-called client that visualizes the world-related information and is best thought of as a specialized 3-D web browser. The client also comes with editing and scripting tools that allow players to create, edit, color, texture and animate three-dimensional objects, and add lighting effects. This particular capability combined with the in-world economic infrastructure that facilitates trading and stimulates it by making the game's Linden dollars convertible into the real currency is what drives the players' creative and entrepreneurial genius. The introductory kit for new avatars contains some pants and shirts, a few household items and, significantly, a basic shopkeeper kit complete with a small booth, a showcase and a blank signboard.

On any single day, the value of transactions between players tops $100,000 in real-world money. Everything imaginable is for sale: cars, trucks, houses, castles and skyscrapers, clothes, avatar bodies and body parts, hair, shoes, flowers, guns that shoot watermelons, flying cows, mountains, theme parks, tornadoes, holodecks and things unmentionable in a thesis. If something isn't available, someone will design it for you. The stores are abundant and commercial activity continues outside the world's boundaries on the websites set up by entrepreneurial residents.

The supply of goods is so high and the competition is so strong that the world's economy warrants its own advertising infrastructure. SL businesspeople whose real-life careers are often lie in unrelated fields and whose knowledge of advertising practices might have been limited are quickly learning the skills of copyrighters, art directors, merchandisers and media planners all at once. For them, an in-world magazine packed with business advice was launched in August of 2006.

Design Your Own Advertising

Many SL companies have already built what can be objectively regarded as brands in the sense that their business or product names are highly recognizable, associated with a particular image and can command a price premium on perceived product value; Betsy Book in her paper profiled two such SL brands and the strategies behind them. Strong brands can be found in many different categories: from clothing to homes, from avatar design to digital interactive genitalia.

While players can advertise their wares on the SL's official classifieds listings, many more turn to the world's independent advertising industry. They can contract services of design firms or purchase hi-tech signboards that float, rotate and flash in mid-air. They can hire one of the many modeling agencies to have their in-store signage professionally decorated. (While there are still no highly recognizable super-model names in Second Life, players with a rich collection of scripted modeling poses and an outstanding avatar design command hourly fees that can easily cover a month of rent of an in-game castle.) Shopkeepers and club owners can equip their businesses with any number of automatic vendors, sales robots, greeting systems, pagers, and camping chairs that pay residents to spend time in their establishments. Many give away free merchandise along with a business card and a bookmark to their location, or hire hosts and event managers to run their promotions.

The SL advertising market is booming. A player whose in-game name is Ruthe Underthorn has created MetaAdverse, a network of billboards placed throughout the world in high-traffic areas such as malls and clubs, and its technology can rival Massive's or IGA's in technical sophistication. Property owners place MetaAdverse's signs on their land for a 70-percent cut of the revenue. Advertisers feed their messages to the billboards belonging to MetaAdverse and the amount they pay depends on how many people have faced the sign directly, for how long and from what distance. In my exploration of the world, I have discovered at least three other billboard networks competing with MetaAdverse.

As the SL's technology evolves, new media forms come to life and with them -- new advertising opportunities. Live streaming radio shows developed specifically for the game sell advertising time, and so do in-game newspapers. Potential for video advertising exists as well; many SL homes are equipped with TV sets that stream video clips and some entrepreneurs sell ad time on those as well. TV shows with their own machinima production have also started to appear as the game's creative population grows.

Like many other games that can be modified by players, Second Life is peppered with user-created objects carrying real-world logos. My own inventory includes a larger-than-life bottle of Absolut vodka, a Corona t-shirt, an entire Hooters outfit, a pack of Marlboros, a Mac laptop, a Honda motorcycle, a case of Mountain Dew, a pair of Elmo slippers. Vending machines giving away or selling Coke, Pepsi and common snacks are a common sight in SL clubs; one can be bought for about 30 American cents. Replicas of NASCAR racing cars are emblazoned with logos of their real-world sponsors. All this brand equity is built on pure enthusiasm without a dollar spent on product placement by the trademark holders.

I have once stumbled across a resident-run store that sells iPods, Shuffles and Nanos that come preloaded with a set of popular songs (I bought instead an outfit that transformed my avatar into a walking iPod silhouette ad.) On another occasion, I rented a real-world movie from a Blockbuster-looking store. The success of these businesses - the movie store was part of a large and supposedly profitable chain -- or their very existence indicates that Second Life can become a model for content distribution that is based on a curious paradox with a new twist to Nicholas Negroponte's model of bits and atoms. When viewed from the outside, all of Second Life's assets can be considered "content", and the "bona fide content" -- music and video -- even more so. Yet when viewed from within the game, this "content" acquires certain tangibility and the assets become objects with their own volume, mass, clearly defined boundaries and often a price tag. Within this new coordinate system, content distribution as perceived from within SL seizes to be the process of streaming bits and once again becomes the task of shipping atoms that can be counted, tracked, and locked up when needed. Second Life provides a theoretically unbreakable way for item creators to limit distribution and modification of their wares by marking them with any of the three flags "no copy", "no modify", and "no transfer", and in this sense the objectified music and videos are no different from shirts and coffee mugs. SL thus becomes an overarching meta-DRM system: the only way to copy a movie marked with "no copy" and "no transfer" flags is to screen-grab the entire game from the outside.

The real meets the Second Life's virtual in many other ways. The tribute to Pink Floyd takes shape of a small hut covered all over with the band's art, with a continuously running soundtrack inside. A similar monument to Grateful Dead is a dizzying complex complete with a hot tub inside a spinning psychedelic globe. There are replicas of individual famous buildings -- such as the Twin Towers -- and the whole blocks of Manhattan, San Francisco and Amsterdam. Residents are also recreating famous fictional spaces -- the Second Life blog wrote about Counter-Strike and Mario Brothers levels built in SL's construction areas, and there are many more. One island sells avatar bodies modeled and equipped after real-world movie characters including the entire cast of Harry Potter. For a modest amount of money, you can have your avatar's body custom-made to resemble any celebrity, from Lenin to Johnny Depp. A dedicated group of players regularly puts out public tribute U2 concerts where avatars closely resembling Bono, the Edge and the rest of the band are animated on stage in sync with the streaming soundtrack.

Modding Corporate Style

The world's creative flexibility coupled with the pioneering spirit of its residents makes Second Life an attractive sandbox for advertisers willing to experiment with new ideas that might be difficult or costly to try elsewhere. Some are already taking notice. The Wells Fargo bank built a private Stagecoach Island area designed to educate kids on the basics of money management (the company later moved the island to a similar environment, Active Worlds, citing technical issues). BBC runs an SL studio where it records regular shows for broadcasts in the outside world. The movie giant 20th Century Fox organized an in-game promotion of its X-Men sequel. Warner Brothers threw a release party for its artist Regina Spektor. Major League Baseball put together a simulcast of the Home Run Derby on a specially designed stadium with the real-time reenactment of the game. One day, we might see TV commercials played out in a similar theater-like manner instead of being shown on a flat screen, or bump into artificially intelligent Burger King mascots handing out whoppers at virtual sports events. In its cover story on Second Life, Business Week described many other ways in which real-world companies engage with the world. Head of technology at an underground tank testing firm uses the game as a training environment for new hires. A PR company set up SL headquarters to "provide companies a fascinating way to build new bridges to their key audiences, whether for marketing purposes, customer support or customer feedback." Residential architect Jon Brouchoud created, textured and showed a 3-D model of a real house commissioned by his clients, all in Second Life.

This, of course, is only the beginning. As the platform's technological sophistication and its links to the outside world grow -- Linden Lab is working on integrating a standard web browser into the game and sending emails into and from the world is already possible -- so does its attractiveness to outside businesses. One can imagine a travel agency building models of its destinations, from hotels and cruise ships to exotic islands. Ikea could work with the fan base to showcase its catalog in three dimensions and let players try its virtual furniture in their virtual homes. Universities, some of which are already building in-world presence, could conduct open houses to court prospective students.

If a single 3-D game-like platform emerges and gets widely adopted and if Second Life

and similar worlds are indeed precursor of the three-dimensional web to come, advertisers would be better off by exploring the opportunities and challenges these environments present while the scale is still small and mistakes are affordable.

The challenges will be many. One issue that is likely to loom big is privacy. The extreme level of detail with which games and avatars can be tracked and measured is both a goldmine and a ticking time bomb in the hands of marketers. It is a goldmine because virtual billboards will soon be able to tap into the enormous databases that have records on every single transaction, utterance and head nod of every avatar and serve individualized messages based on the customer's entire life history in all its complexity. When AOL inadvertently released a database containing results of millions of search queries submitted by more than half a million users, called it "catalog of intentions". If Paul Hemp is correct in his suggestion that the way avatars dress up, behave and socialize tells us something about their owners, then worlds such as are catalogs not only of intentions but also of fantasies, fetishes, beliefs, aspirations and repressed desires that have found their symbolic manifestations -- everything marketers today are trying to suss out with the help of focus groups.

It's a ticking time bomb because Second Life is much more Orwellian in its omniscience than anything existing on the public Internet with its decentralized structure. On the Internet, AOL may know something about the user and Amazon may know something else but the two don't share their information to create a holistic picture. Second Life, on the other hand, is a proprietary walled and self-containing garden whose infrastructure and intelligence gathering spans the entire user cycle from shopping to private instant messaging.

On the micro level, designing a commercial experience in a 3D environment is likely to be different from developing a "flat" web shop. Thinking in three dimensions of a social world endowed with physical properties will mean calculating the ceiling height, for example, to accommodate for customers who prefer flying to walking. While a popular web store may serve thousands of customers simultaneously, each of them shops from his own parallel on-screen universe with little interaction with the others. Clothing stores in Second Life, on the other hand, are more like real-world malls filled with customers sharing impressions and offering fashion advice in real time. Merchandising -- the science of displaying goods on store shelves -- will have to learn how to retain the visual appeal of the real-world racks while combining it with the effectiveness of online search and categorization. When sabotage (hacking, phishing, scamming and denial of service attacks) of online stores is a major concern, the solutions are also evident if not always feasible -- patch the hole and call in the cops. But what are shopkeepers to do if their stores are blocked by avatars protesting unfair trade practices?

Speaking of unfair trade practices, the foray of real-world businesses into Second Life has not been greeted with universal excitement, although the reasons for players' wariness are changing. If two years ago a private island where a marketing company had set up shop was picketed by SL residents because they felt the intrusion would ruin their carefully crafted escapist haven, today their concerns are more pragmatic and are not likely to go away as easily. Some fear that their budding SL family businesses will have to compete with cash-rich and marketing-savvy business empires for which Second Life is just another foreign market ripe for expansion. Others think that real businesses will upset the virtual world's entire fragile ecosystem. Today, in-game entrepreneurs make and sell their wares and services at prices that are significant in the game's context but the return on their time is way below the minimum wage when converted into dollars. Tomorrow, these entrepreneurs will be hired by the big businesses to produce the same -- but branded -- items and will be compensated for their efforts on the real-world pay scale, never to return to their original trades.

When Starwood Hotels and Resorts announced that it was bringing into the virtual world a model of its new Aloft hotel, a resident who runs a real-estate business of selling plots of land and renting out apartments in Second Life, Prokofy Neva, wrote in his comments to a blog post:

It's not about me or others in the land business. [...] I'm trying to use my experience to speak to the much larger issue going on here: big business from RL, helped by a few who were able to leverage their experience into "RL-in-SL companies", are displacing the *need* for business inworld and displacing *the transactions* of business as well as the Lindens *change the features and the client and their orientation toward these kinds of businesses, and not inworld customer-created businesses.* [...]

I wouldn't be able to see what is happening so clearly if I hadn't been able to see what happens to countries in the real world, like a Georgia or Ukraine, when the indigenous economies were able to sustain people without them leaving for guestworker status elsewhere or be drawn into sex trafficking, before the World Bank or Chevron or whatever came in and displaced their economies. This is a worldwide phenomenon, part of globalization.

SL is now globalized."

With Linden Lab actively welcoming the expansion of big businesses into its realm, perhaps it's time for Naomi Klein to revise her No Logo to include a chapter on free-trade zones and sweatshop labor of the virtual third world.

Response to Bogost (Part Two)

On Friday, I began the first of a three part response to Ian Bogost's thoughtful, engaging, and provocative review of my new book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. Bogost's discussion of the book at Water Cooler Games allows me to respond to some anticipated challenges to the book's content and approach. It also seems that many of you are relishing a good debate in the dog days of the summer so far be it for me to deny you your entertainment. All of this will make more sense if you've read both the book and the review. Last time, I mostly addressed some questions Bogost raised about the affective economics chapter of the book. Today, I take up some issues about transmedia storytelling/entertainment and about fan culture more generally.

Keep in mind two things: Bogost's review was primarily positive and I have enormous respect for Bogost's contribution to the game studies world. This is an intellectual debate, not a blood feud.

Ludology vs. Narratology

As the sonic boom of the so-called ludology vs. narratology debate dissipates, I find it interesting that Jenkins continues to insist on the terms "narrative" and "storytelling" as the principle units of cultural expression. Even though Jenkins admits that "storytelling has become the art of world building," where artists create environments and situations for a multitude of consumer intersections, he still does not reimagine such a craft separate from the particularity of narrative. Following Roger Shanck and others, Jenkins argues that "stories are basic to all human cultures, the primary means by which we structure, share, and make sense of our common experiences." Yet, the examples he cites, from the rich worlds of The Matrix, and Star Wars to transmedial experiments like Dawson's Desktop, readily elude the narrative frame, offering representations of behaviors, fragments, and environments. Michael Mateas and Gonzalo Frasca have called the privileging of narrative expression narrativism, and I have argued that narrativist gestures like Jenkins's occlude representational gestures based on logics and behaviors. Convergence Culture continues Jenkins' narrativist practice.

Given the propensity for such non-narrative interpretations of media properties, it is curious that Jenkins did not choose the more general term transmedia authorship over transmedia storytelling

My first response upon reading this was to gasp, "not again." The last thing any of us wants is to reopen the trumped up feud between the self-proclaimed ludologists and the so-called narratologists. The argument is, in my opinion, based on a false set of distinctions that are getting imposed on a hybrid medium at a highly transitional moment. (Anytime someone accuses you of "occluding" something, you know you are in trouble.) More seriously, I think the ludology/narratology debate was based on misidentifications across cultural and language differences. When Espen Aarseth and I sat down together a few years ago at the HumLab, we found that there was relatively little to debate. We were involved in disagreements in emphasis but not in a substantive dispute about the future of game studies.

I want to refer here to something I wrote at the heat of the Ludology/Narratology debate in response to Marku Eskelinin. It more or less summarizes my perspective:

Ultimately, my interest is in mapping the aesthetic norms that constitute different forms of popular culture and in almost every case, narrative exists alongside, competes against, struggles with, and is often subordinate to alternative aesthetic logics that are fundamentally anti- or non-narrative in character. Eskelinen is correct to note that games have a long history, so does magic, dance, architecture, ars erotica, and so forth, which exist alongside storytelling as important cultural activities. These various alternative traditions are never completely autonomous from each other, but come together and move apart in different ways, at different times, in different cultures. My goal is not to reduce games to narrative but to explore the unstable relationship between a range of different transmedia logics - narrative, games, spectacle, performance, spatiality, affect, etc....

The market category of "games," in fact, covers an enormous ground, including activities that ludologists would classify as play, sports, simulations, and toys, as well as traditional games. Some, but certainly not all, of these products also make bids on telling stories; storytelling is part of what they are marketing and part of what consumers think they are buying when they invest in this software.

These computer games, then, are a strange, still unstable, and still undertheorized hybrid between games and narratives. They are a border case for any study of narrative, but they are also a border case for any study of games. Computer games are a bit like duck-billed platypuses, a species which, as Harriet Ritvo has documented, confounded early naturalists; some of them denied that such a creature could exist and denounced early reports as fraud, while others sought to erase all ambiguities about its status, trivializing any problems in classifying this species - which has a duck bill, web feet, and lays eggs - as mammals. Jon McKenzie accurately summarizes my position: "games are indeed not narratives, not films, not plays - but they're also not-not-narratives, not-not-films, not-not-plays." In the end, the zoological discipline has decided that platypuses are not birds; yet, we will not really get why platypuses are such strange mammals if we don't know what a bird is.

Near the end of his comments, Eskelinen proposes a range of examples that he takes to be a reductio ad absurdum of my essay's arguments. It might be helpful to take one of his cases and break it down. Are gardens spatial stories? We can agree that they are not. Most gardens are spaces - with little or no narrative interest at all. Some of those spaces may be designed in such a way as to enable certain life events to unfold - such as hidden nooks where lovers may meet - and thus gardens have been the settings for many stories. There is a tradition of using gardens to recreate spaces from fictional stories; I am thinking about the Bible gardens which dot the roadside of my native south or the fairy gardens that are popular throughout Europe. Here, we would say that those gardens operate in relation to a larger narrative economy. In most cases, however, these gardens are simply recreating spaces or vignettes from stories. They evoke stories, but they are not stories. In the case of some Bible gardens, these vignettes are arranged in a narrative sequence designed to unfold the story of Christ's martyrdom. As they do so, they start to move towards the borders of our current understanding of narrative.

So, on the one hand, I would welcome Bogost's efforts to broaden my term, "transmedia storytelling" towards something like "transmedia entertainment" or "transmedia authorship." It is certainly the case, as the passage above suggests, that narrative is simply one of a number of transmedia logics that are all expressive of the human condition. Perhaps I should have been clearer about this point in the book. I'll take my lumps for that.

That said, I do think there's an argument to be made for the centrality of narrative for understanding the specific examples used in the book -- Star Wars, Harry Potter, and The Matrix. Just as one can argue that narrative may take a back seat to play mechanics, say, in our effort to understand how games work, most critics have argued that the American film industry has been driven from day one by the push to tell stories and that narrative imperatives dominate over all other factors in shaping the aesthetics of Hollywood entertainment. I could point you to a large body of literature which has made this point over and over. These particular worlds, then, were created for the purpose of generating stories. They may, as I have suggested, support multiple stories, they may also follow other logics and practices, but they are still part of a storytelling system.

I make clear that I don't think the games or some of the other materials attached to these franchises are primarily in the business of telling stories: I suggest that they are much more invested in allowing a more immersive experience of the fictional worlds. But there's no question that many, if not all, players read their experience of the original works onto these worlds and take information learned from these games and apply it back to their understanding of the story of the film. We can understand conflicting responses to Enter the Matrix as suggesting the contrast between people who came there looking for an extension of the story (and thus don't mind the lengthy cut scenes) and those who came there wanting a game play experience (and thus are angry over the lengthy cut scenes.)

My point is not to suggest that everything that takes place within a transmedia system is a story -- and that's why I am perfectly happy if Bogost wants to expand my concept to talk about entertainment more generally. Music, for example, is profoundly transmedia and yet only occasionally narrative-driven (in the case of ballads, say).

It might be instructive to compare Survivor and American Idol in this regard. Survivor is a game that was constructed to form the basis of a narrative; American Idol is a series of performances that sometimes incorporate stories about the participants in order to shape our emotional response. They thus both mix and match several transmedia logics but it is still possible to identify the dominant aesthetic impulse in each case.

I accept gladly the ludologist point that there are experiences that can not be adequately be described as stories but that are deeply meaningful within our culture. Some of these take the form of games, some rituals, and so forth. I accept gladly the ludologist point that we need to develop a new vocabulary to talk about the play mechanics of games and that we are badly served if they are discussed primarily or exclusively as stories. But I sometimes think that the ludologists give over to a kind of phobia about stories that is also not helpful because it denies the meaningfulness of stories to culture or the relevance of narrative for understanding some aspects of what remain hybrid entertainment experience. Even if they are right that our culture is blinded by its preoccupation with stories, we surely need to understand where that preoccupation comes from, what it means, and what impact it has on how they process the information gathered through these transmedia experiences. I make no apologies for the fact that I like stories, that much of the pleasure I take from popular culture is a narrative pleasure, that I consider stories to be a rewarding aspect of human culture. If that makes me a narrativist in his eyes, so be it. (Frankly, I am thankful that the ludologists have finally figured out that narratology is a specific school of narrative theory that has nothing to do with me and my work or indeed that of most of the other American academics they tried to label with this term.)

More interesting to me though is an implicit question raised in Bogost's comments: As these transmedia systems take on more and more of what Janet Murray has described as an encyclopedic logic, as they become more about worlds that support multiple stories and less about individual plots, then the centrality of narrative necessarily shifts. Will we reach a point where the stories exist to fit into the concordance rather than the concordance existing to illuminate the story?

Fandom and Other Cultural Traditions

But Jenkins does not adequately answer another objection, namely that a fixation on existing media properties like Harry Potter may reduce a child's interaction with the cultural, literary, and historical traditions that made such works possible in the first place. The success of Harry Potter and similar books may have duped us into the belief that reading in itself is honorable, no matter the content.

This is a very interesting point and I have struggled to know how to respond to it. I would have said that the book cites a number of examples where popular culture evokes intertexts across larger cultural, literary, and historical traditions -- see, for example, my discussion of the role of myth in The Matrix films or the debates about ethics and religion that surround Harry Potter. Indeed, one of the remarkable things about the online fan cultures that emerge around such works is the degree to which fans read intertextually and suck more and more cultural materials into their conversations. Fans don't respect the borders we like to erect around differently modes of cultural experience: everything is connected to everything else. This is part of how collective intelligence works -- everyone contributes what they know and as they do so, the conversation expands outward to include much broader traditions. Such works provide a context for kids to become interested in these older materials that are authentic in the sense that these materials help them address questions that matter to them as opposed to the forced march through the western tradition that constitutes school curriculum.

Of course, there's no guarantee that any given reader will move beyond the franchise itself in their search of meaning: these franchises can become a dead end for some people. I would think we should be trying to explore strategies that bridge between these different cultural spheres rather than trying to build walls between them. That's part of what I hope to be doing in my work around media literacy and it is part of why I am so interested by groups like Wondering Minstrels and what they are doing around poetry.

Lost in Commerce?

Perhaps more concerning than becoming lost in fantasy is becoming lost in commerce. Doesn't fandom reorient children and adults alike toward the consumption of more and more commercial products from the franchise?

I would have phrased this the other way around -- as I suggest in the Star Wars chapter of the book. I see fandom as responding to the commercialization of our culture and pulling us back towards older models of cultural production. Commercial culture has tried very hard throughout the 20th century to totally displace folk culture and it has utterly failed to do so. The desire to participate in the production and circulation of cultural materials on the grassroots or amateur level has remained extremely strong. That said, what has come out of the confrontation between commercial culture and folk culture is anything but pure. Folk culture now builds upon the materials of commercial culture and commercial culture now appropriates freely from grassroots cultural practices. Fandom represents a way of asserting grassroots concerns in the face of the commercialization of our culture. It represents a way of introducing non-market criteria into the production and circulation of media. It transforms commodities into resources for collective elaboration.

There is no evidence that fans consume more media -- or more products -- than any other segment of the population. Indeed, much evidence suggests that fans spend less hours each day watching television than nonfans. Television simply plays a different role in their lives: it fosters other social and creative activities. So they may spend more time focused thinking about and talking about a particular franchise (though often in relation to a range of other cultural works, as I suggested above) but they may not consume more overall. And much of what fans do consume comes within the context of the gift economy that grows up alongside commercial culture. Reading fanzine stories may intensify their interest in the commercial media content but it may also displace the purchase of ancillary products tied to the series that may less perfectly jell with the fan community's particular view of the series.

That said, there's no question that many of the convergence practices the book describes are motivated top down by market logic. I never deny that and indeed, try many times to try to identify what that market logic is. One of my goals for the book was describe fan culture both from the point of view of the commercial sector and from the point of view of the grassroots culture. But I don't think these practices can be reduced to market motives. These franchises mean something more to the people who work on them (as I suggest in terms of The Matrix) and the people who consume them (as I suggest throughout).

Marketing proves most ineffective at getting people to consume cultural goods. There are so many examples of expensive failures in developing media franchises, of monumental miscalculations. My experience has been that where a media product finds an audience, there is something meaningful going on within the culture and the task of the cultural critic is to try to identify what it means. We may not like what it tells us about our culture, but it's no fair trying to treat it as if it was mindless or meaningless. That's sheer laziness on the part of the cultural critic.

In the final installment, I return to issues of commercialization, apologize for some legitimate errors Bogost caught, and take up the relationship between culture and technology. Stay tune, boys and girls. See you tomorrow, same bat time, same bat channel.

E3: End of an Era?

Those of us who follow the games industry have reacted with various degrees of shock and surprise by the announcement a few weeks ago that E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the major trade show of the games industry, will no longer be held. As Next Generation has reported, several of the major companies whose support was key for funding an event on this scale had pulled their support from the event:

When I spoke to some people about E3's collapse, the general response was one of disbelief. How could something so big fall apart so quickly? Perhaps this is why so many news outlets simply refused to believe the news. The fact is that all it took were a very small number of company presidents to talk with each other, and figure out that if they all decided to pass, none of them would need to be there. Once Nintendo, Microsoft, SCEA and EA had stepped out, E3 was history. It was multilateral disarmament.

The Next Generation writer went on to identify a range of other factors that contributed to the collapse of this industry institution, including a sense that it had not achieved its goals in attracting media coverage to anything other than the violence issue or the release of new hardware as well as the degree to which other and better publicity mechanisms had emerged which made it possible for companies to maintain greater control over their messages and reach their intended audience at lower costs. The Next Generation coverage stressed the degree to which organizing for E3 had taken on a life of its own, often at the expense of other goals within the industry:

E3 isn't just measured in terms of the cost of the booth, the floor-space, the party, the hotel, the flights etc. There's also the incredible amount of effort that goes into preparing for the show. Marketing teams are focused on E3 for a good six months of the year. Developers are whipped along as they try to get games ready for what is, essentially, an artificial deadline. It could be argued that this adds focus to development as projects near their conclusion, or it could be argued that it's an unnecessary diversion and a big pain in the ass. Publishers that focus on company-specific events are not under so much pressure to compete with the rest of the market for column inches, months before the real battle of competing for consumer dollars.

In a public statement, Doug Lowenstein, the head of the Entertainment Software Association, explained:

E3Expo 2007 will not feature the large trade show environment of previous years. It is no longer necessary or efficient to have a single industry 'mega-show.' By refocusing on a highly-targeted event, we think we can do a better job serving our members and the industry as a whole, and our members are energized about creating this new E3.

They Cancelled What?

Something of the shock waves this announcement has sent through the games sector is suggested by this pithy comment from Tycho over at Penny Arcade:

There must have been a time before there was an E3, but that's not really a part of my experience. Hearing that it's cancelled, or at any rate will be altered in "format and scale" (read: cancelled) is like hearing that Australia has been cancelled, or that the weak gravitational force is being temporarily suspended.

Some have wondered how a thriving entertainment industry might survive without a high profile trade show. E3 is most often compared to ShowWest which is the place where film exhibitors learn about the new releases for the year or Comicon, which as we have been reporting, functions as the interface between the comics industry and its fans. But already to draw those comparisons in such terms suggests the difference between E3 and these other events. E3 was trying to be too many things for too many people -- a showcase for major publisher's releases, a marketplace for products hoping for distribution and for international games hoping to find a way into the American market, a press event to showcase the industry, a training ground and recruitment ground for future professionals. Other groups have started to use E3 as a base for their own work: we did two Education Arcade conferences in the LA Convention Center during E3 trying to build interest in games and education and UCLA piggybacked off E3 this year for its conference on gender and games. The one function E3 did not play was to provide an interface between the games industry and its fans.

There was always a tension, though, between the lavish spectacle and parties required to woo reps from the major retail outlets and the more sober face that the industry wanted to adopt for talking to the press (and through them, to the general public). In many ways, the collapse of E3 signals the growth of the games industry -- as something larger within our culture -- rather than its diminishment.

Why E3 Hurt Games

Some of you know that Kurt Squire and I co-author the "Applied Game Theory" column at Computer Games Magazine every month. Several years ago, we penned one describing why we thought that at least aspects of E3 culture might be bad for the games industry. I don't want to see reposting this text here now as piling onto Lowenstein and my other friends at the ESA. They do great work on behalf of the games industry and they don't get enough credit. I am sure that they are experiencing the end of E3 with profoundly mixed feelings. But I did think what we said then would help shed some light on the current issues and might help us think through together what the next incarnation of a games industry gathering might look like. (The specific titles referenced here will have dated but otherwise this would still have described the 2006 event.)

Perhaps you are at the convention now, reading this column over the thundering noise and flashing lights which turn that same showroom into something akin to the streets of Hong Kong at midnight. Scantly-clad floor babes beckon to you with promises of easy access and cheap loot. Dancers in leotards demonstrate the wonders of motion capture technology. Highly skilled game girls are challenging all comers. The noise you are hearing is the sound of a thousand computer games all being played at the same time. Most people stagger out after only a few minutes, so overwhelmed that they can no longer focus on any one screen. We've seen people passed out in the corner, their friends trying to coax them back to consciousness by upping their caffeine intake. Everyone should see E3 once to experience the adrenaline rush.

E3's economic function is well understood by anyone who has spent more than a few minutes thinking about the games industry. This is where buyers from Wal-Mart, Electronic Boutique, and the other chain stores first encounter the coming year's product. The major game companies are hyping their hottest new titles, smaller companies are trying to break into the market. Both are involved in a life and death struggle for the attention of the middlemen who

will determine how much shelf space a title will get and how long it remains there. In E3 2001 for example, the disappointing Xbox showing sent the Microsoft PR machine scrambling for months to convince retailers that

platform was ready to ship.

Yet, the consequences of E3 on the look and feel of contemporary games have been less often discussed. For starters, many game designers talk about the importance of designing memorable moments into their new releases -- features which leave vivid impressions after the bulk of what we saw on the floor has blurred together in our sleep-deprived, alcohol-addled, and sensorial-overloaded minds. Producers push designers to come up with a preview reel which grabs attention on the huge monitors which dot the display room and often, the result is an over-emphasis on cinematics over game play. The disparity between those massive screens, which would not seem out of place at your average multiplex, and the much smaller monitors on which most of us play games tells us why so many games look like bad action movies rather than exploring the interactive potentials of this medium or why game soundtracks so often emphasize noisy explosions rather than emotionally enhancing music. What would happen if every movie to be release next year got shown all at the same time in the same auditorium? Which films would stand out? Which films would get buried? For those of us who want to promote greater innovation and diversity in game design, the E3 floor may be the biggest obstacle in our path.

Smaller scale games get little or no floor space. The Sims, for example, got swallowed up by the chaos of the E3 showroom. Games like Rez or Majestic which really stretch the limits of our understanding of what the medium can do are more often displayed in private rooms off the main floor. Some of the most interesting games are literally relegated to the basement, the Kentia Hall, where foreign and independent game developers fight over the cheap space with discount distributors and peripheral manufacturers. You might find an interesting title squeezed between the new video game glove and an online Korean dating game, but these quirky titles have little chance at being heard above the marketing din upstairs.

After even a few minutes on the floor, all of the games start to look the same. Is it any wonder that distributors and retailers are drawn towards recognizable franchises in such an hyperbolic environment?

Is it any surprise that retailers make decisions based on eye candy and glitz?

There's nothing wrong with the industry throwing itself a party at an E3. Wouldn't it be great, though, if like film and music, we had other outlets as well: independent gatherings, grassroots festivals, a real awards show.

As the games industry matures, it may not be able to contain all of its economic and social functions within one or two gatherings. The Indie Games Jam at the Game Developer's Conference is one approach, we hope that other similar efforts will emerge in the upcoming years as well. Consider, by comparison, how important the Sundance Film Festival has been for creating visibility and providing economic opportunities for independent filmmakers.

Where Do We Go From Here?

One step is to separate out the various functions which E3 served and see whether they should be combined or remain separate. Clearly, the industry will need some ways to introduce its new products to retailers and there's some danger that the next step will be to fragment this process -- allowing the major companies to have their own shows (as Next Generation suggests) but leaving the smaller publishers out in the cold. I don't think that would be a very good thing for the games industry. A second key function would be to inform the public about the current state of the games industry. For example, the Penny Arcade Expo may function more like San Diego Comiccon in providing a space where industry figures communicate more directly with their fans, while there are moves underway to develop an independent games festival that functions more like Sundance does within the film industry, offering a place to showcase work by smaller publishers or games that fall further outside the commercial mainstream. We are seeing a growing number of gatherings with more specialized focuses, such as those centering on casual games, mobile games, serious games, even religious games, each of which serves a specific niche as compared to the general interest focus of E3. The Game Developers Conference may absorb more of the training and recruitment functions that were associated with E3. And so forth.

Here's the paradoxl: E3 was bad because the major developers dominated and they overwhelmed smaller producers, contributing to the loss of diversity within the games industry. But when E3 goes away, smaller publishers will have to struggle that much harder to get the attention of the marketplace and they may be the ones who have the most to lose during the transitions that are ahead.

National Politics within Virtual Game Worlds: The Case of China

Last month, what some are describing as "the largest political protest gathering in a virtual world game ever" occurred within the Chinese Massively Multiplayer Game, Fantasy Westward Journey (FWJ). Comparative Media Studies alum Zhan Li has been working with me over the past several weeks to piece together some sense of what occurred and what it means. Please keep in mind as you read this that the incident concerned the still heated relationship between Japan and China. Some of the language qouted from participants may be offensive but it is qouted to help readers understand more fully the issues at stake for participants in this debate.

NetEase and FWJ

FWJ is currently the most popular MMORPG in the People's Republic of China. The game is heavily influenced by classical Chinese literature and history. The name is a direct reference to Journey to the West or Westward Journey (perhaps best known for its famous central character, The Monkey King). FWJ has over 25mm registered player accounts and a peak concurrent user count of up to 1.3mm players during first quarter 2006 with an average concurrent user count of about 458,000 players. FWJ is operated by NetEase, one of the big three Chinese companies which represent 70% of the People's Republic of China market. NetEase founder, William Ding, is a billionaire and third wealthiest person in PRC. Of the major games companies in the country, NetEase has the strongest emphasis on developing original games with Chinese culture themes (such as FWJ) in contrast to the other big 2 companies (Shanda and The9) which are more dependent on licensing foreign - especially Korean - games. NetEase operates the two leading MMORPGs in China - FWJ and a Korean license (Westward Journey Online - similar themes to FWJ). NetEase also has the most significant in-house development capability.

The Incident

The incident started on July 4 when the game's administrators placed a high level player (level 144, only 11 levels away from maximum) with an anti-Japanese name ("Kill the little Japs") in an in-game virtual jail. They ask him to change his name as it is too politically sensitive and he refused. As he explained in a public statement:

I began playing this game two years ago. When I first applied to Netease, you did not say that my alias was unacceptable! But now you come and lock up my ID. This is obviously depriving me of my private assets. Over these two years, I have spent more than 30,000 RMB on game point cards, and I have also spent more than 10,000 RMB on equipment trading.

(10,000 RenMinBi equals US$1,250)

The following day, admins announced that the guild ("The Alliance To Resist Japan") founded by the player - with 700 members, one of the top 5 in the game - would be dissolved by July 10. Netease offered the following explanation of its actions:

Although the names of individuals, guilds, stalls, shops, pets and beasts may be chosen as you wish, Netease is running a healthy and green game. In order to maintain the purity and harmony in the game world, Netease will not permit any names that include (but this list is not restricted solely to) those that attack, insult or mislead with respect to race, nationality, national politics, national leaders, obscenity, vulgarity, libel, threat, religions and religious figures.... In changing the name of an individual player or handling the case of an individual guild, we do not want to cause any unhappiness to people. We do not want such an incident to affect the patriotism of everybody. But this is a game. When we operate this game, we follow the state's regulations on Internet administration and we are monitored by the National Internet Supervisory Bureau. People come here to experience joy, and we therefore emphasize health, relaxation and happiness and we should not bring in politically sensitive topics. The experience of history tells us that patriotism should be expressed rationally under the grand theme of protecting the interests of the nation and the people. Patriotism requires passion, but it requires rationality even more so. Passion and rationality form our correct way of expressing our patriotism.

Link

The Rising Sun?

Rumors were circulating around this time (unclear whether they start before or after the jailing/guild banning announcement) that NetEase, which runs the game in question, is being taken over by a Japanese company who are making changes to the game e.g. Chinese lion statues (a historic patriotic symbol) in the game will be turned into pigs. According to the initial reports in the Beijing Evening News, many Chinese gamers were angered by a particular "Jianye city government office" represented in the game because of an icon on one of the walls which some felt bore too close a resemblance to the Japanese "rising sun" flag.

The Beijing Evening News cites some telling comments from local gamers angered by the icon:

"To raise a 'Rising Sun flag' in a Great Tang government office is obviously a challenge and an insult!" said local game player Mr. Zeng angrily. Another game player Ms. Lu could not conceal her disappointment: "Even although everything in the game is virtual, our feelings are still genuine. This incident has seriously hurt our feelings. We find this unacceptable." According to game player Mr. Gu, many game players contacted the customer service line after the incident broke upon, but the other side only repeated: "No comment." Mr. Guo said that the word among the game players is that the "Rising Sun flag" is present in a Tang dynasty government office because some of the stock shares in this online game have been purchased by a foreign company. This explanation has not been confirmed.

On this, Peking University Department of Sociology professor Xia Xueluan said that a national flag is not an ordinary commercial product because it is the symbol of a sovereign nation. Therefore, to hand the flag of one sovereign nation at the symbolic place for another sovereign nation is a form of public challenge. Professor Xia said that the game's planning and operation department should consider the social meaning of the game instead of the mere commercial value. While entertaining the public, they ought to educate and lead people to make the proper value judgments.

The game company later explained that the rising sun motif was based on a classic Chinese painting, "Sunrise in the East," and was intended to reflect aspects of traditional Chinese culture. Philips reproduces the original painting and notes that the icon on the wall in the game was significantly altered from both the Japanese and Chinese images of the rising sun, further adding confusion to the discussion.

NetEase has denied rumors that it is being bought by a Japanese company or that the game content included pro-Japanese propaganda. The company responded to suggestions that they had turned the Lions into pigs: "This is a cartoon-style game and some images may have exaggerated shapes; that don't mean their meaning has changed," the message said. They also seemed to blame The Alliance to Resist Japan for circulating these rumors and further enflaming the situation.

Link

The Protest March

July 7 was the anniversary of the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge incident which is regarded by the Chinese as the beginning of Second Sino-Japanese War and also of the Second World War. It is a date long associated within China with anti-Japanese sentiments that still remain intense among some segments of the Chinese population. It is on this date that the mass protests begin within the game world with almost 10,000 player/protestors on the first day. The "Summer Palace" server group, where much of the protest occurred, was almost overwhelmed when 80,000 players joined the protest -- a huge increase over the 20,000 users the server normally accommodated.

The incident has been reported both in Chinese and Japanese games related blogs.

To place this incident in its proper context, it may be useful to take a few steps back and look at the current state of online gaming in China and its historic relationship to struggles over national culture.

Games in China

Some reports identify the PRC as not only having the world's largest video gaming population, but also its fastest growing. China is the fourth largest online games market in the world (U.S. is No.1) and the third largest in Asia following South Korea and Japan. (Taiwan is fourth). The PRC began to emerge as a significant games market around 2000 and has grown steadily ever since. Online games have been seen as major driver popularizing broadband internet in PRC, and they are currently the most profitable segment of the PRC internet market About 95% of Chinese (non-mobile phone) video gaming is online PC (compared with 4% console) - the most effective business model as it is relatively piracy-free (a big problem for offline PC games). The total market size (summation of operators' revenue) for PRC online games (both MMORPG and casual) is projected to grow as high as $1bn for 2006 from around $600mm in 2005. About half of this comes from MMORPGs.

Much of this gaming -- and indeed, most of Chinese digital culture more generally -- takes place in internet cafes. Recent estimates project the number of internet users in the PRC to rise from as many as 111mm in 2005 to 130mm in 2006. (Total PRC pop. estimate as of July 2006 is approx. 1,314mm). Of these internet users, as many as 33mm in 2005 were estimated to be online gamers (35mm in 2006). About 20-25mm play MMORPGs. Some estimates suggest that there are 5mm under 18 year olds who play online games.

There is also a growing market for mobile phone games, but Chinese gamers appear to have little appetite for game consoles (a recent attempt by Shanda, one of the big 3 Chinese game companies, to a launch a domestically designed and produced home entertainment system/IPTV/online/ game console platform (the "EZ" ) has been a major flop). Fantasy MMORPGs are still the most important genre, but online casual games are expected to take over in importance soon.

The Digital Generation in China

I visited China several years ago in the wake of a tragic incident where two teenagers who were refused entry to an illegal internet cafe had returned and purposefully set fire to the door of the establishment, resulting in the death of everyone inside. The illegal cafes would sell customers all night access and then lock them inside, a practice which contributed greatly to the horrors of this incident. In a column for Technology Review, I described both the government's response (using the incident as a pretext to shut down all internet cafes in the country for a prolonged period of review) and the public's response (which tended to emphasize the breakdown of traditional community life rather than media effects to explain the youth's behavior.) At the time, I read the response in contrast to the American discourse on the Columbine school shootings which had tended to push aside any focus on social causes and adopt a policy of blaming violent entertainment. Here's some of what I wrote at the time;

Most Western discussions of the Internet and China describe the rise of digital access and consumer culture as liberating forces that cultivate democratic aspirations behind the repressive government's back. MIT professor Jing Wang notes, however, that the expansion of consumerism has been actively promoted by the government throughout the last decade. Embracing a rhetoric of "one nation, two systems," the state has encouraged a shorter work week, recreational activities, entrepreneurship, and more material goods per citizen. The goal has been to facilitate economic and technological change without promoting political destabilization.

A society once characterized by limited choice now confronts a multitude of consumer options and aggressive advertising campaigns. The first billboard I saw in Beijing contained the word "dotcom." A few blocks away from Tiananmen Square, a mob of people stopped in the street and stared at a massive television screen broadcasting the World Cup punctuated by a host of consumer-electronics commercials. Red-tented Coca-Cola stands in the Forbidden City; traditional night markets flanking Starbucks-old economic and social systems are breaking down faster than new ones can emerge, resulting in a culture riddled with contradictions, a state policy characterized by mixed signals and a public charged by both anxiety and anticipation.

And China's urban youth have stood at the center of these changes. In fact, three quarters of all Internet users in China are under 30. Many urban teens don't remember a time without rampant consumerism. A few years in age between siblings translate into dramatic differences in cultural experiences. Fairly or unfairly, these urban youths embody their nation's hopes and fears about the future.

On the one hand, the government sees the high-tech sector as central to China's long term economic interests, especially since joining the World Trade Organization last year. For example, the Shanghai schools now require all nine-year-olds to learn basic Internet skills. On the other hand, anti-computer rhetoric proliferates.

In subsequent years, the Chinese government has both sought to regulate game-playing and to promote the use of computer games for cultural education -- in a sense seeing the growth of gaming in their country as both a social problem and a pedagogical opportunity.

Regulating Game Play

In mid-2005, the national government took a much more forceful stance on video game regulation, as part of a general tightening of entertainment media policy. The government's regulations included a "fatigue system" designed to limit the amount of continuous time that players could spend within game worlds. Initially, the regulations applied to all citizens but were later revised to apply only to players under the age of 16. Moreover, new Internet cafés were banned from 200m radius of schools and apartment buildings; registration of new internet cafes was suspended for time being; café curfews for under 18s introduced in July 2006

The government justified its video game regulations by citing concerns about youth addiction, corruption, and health issues related to games. Games, according to an official statement, "break the constitution, threaten national unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity will be banned. Anything which threatens state security, damaging the nation's glory, disturbing social order and infringing on other's legitimate rights will also be banned." This formalized a stance that had already banned games for politically contentious content. An example of a problematic issue would be the representation of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Tibet as independent nations

Those familiar with long-term Chinese regulation of internet access saw the policies also as a back door effort to restrict youth access and participation in cyberspace more generally. In the all night cybercafes described earlier, especially those which are not legally registered, youth would spend the night playing games, chatting with friends, reading porn, and consuming forbidden news sites. Setting limits on the amount of time that could be spent playing games would, in effect, limit these all night policies.

Players initially sought to get around such restrictions by adopting multiple accounts and using multiple aliases but the government responded in June 2006 by requiring that all online game accounts be registered with real names and ID card numbers.

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Transforming Game Culture in China

At the same time, the PRC has sought to promote "healthy" gaming practices and culturally-appropriate games content.

-- The All China Sports Federation has recognized video games as an official competitive sport

- PRC Ministry of Culture has released lists of officially approved "healthy" selected online commercial games that are already in the market place (15 games selected in Aug 05; another 10 in Jan 06)

- Ministry of Science of Technology has included online gaming in national plan to support hi-tech projects

- The National Copyright Administration of China has established a "China domestic online game publishing project" which aims to develop 100 home grown games (investment of $120-$240mm) from 2005 to 2010

- National initiative to address shortage of game developers - professional game development college established in Hong Kong, with branches planned for 20 cities and partnerships with 10 universities to offer video game degrees

- Shanda, one of the big 3 PRC game companies, announced in 2005 that it would be developing 100 patriotic online games about historic Chinese heroes for schoolchildren over the next decade in cooperation with Chinese government regulators

While some western observers have suggested that government sponsored patriotic games would likely be boring, patriotic games can embrace the latest in video gameplay. In August 2005 reports that a Chinese game company, PowerNet Technology, was developing a new MMOPRG called "Anti-Japan War Online" in cooperation with the China Communist Youth League (the main youth organization of the PRC Communist Party). Estimates put the development costs at over $6mm (in comparison with the U.S. Army's official online game, America's Army, cost around $7.7mm for its initial development). The game depicts key battles during the Second Sino-Japanese war, whilst avoiding graphic depictions of combat. While they cannot play on the Japanese side (keep in mind that everyone plays on the U.S. side in America's Army), players can choose from 17 professions on the Chinese side such as peasant, student, factory worker or soldier. The game project manager at PowerNet Technology was reported to remark, "Our game designers hate Japan so they want to make the game very provocative," while at the same time he was quick to reassure readers that "the team leaders have tried to tone down the violence."

Like many other countries around the world, China sees games as a key growth sector within the digital economy -- especially with online gaming being identified as a particularly East Asian phenomenon. But China also is serious about the cultural and political impact of games, seeing the medium as key for winning the hearts and minds of a growing generation of young citizens. Games thus become the focus of censorship and regulation, economic development, and struggles over national culture.

Protest in Game Worlds

One can understand NetEase's development of a multiplayer game based on a classic of Chinese Literature as part of this larger push towards the use of games to promote national culture (as well as define the company brand against competition from Korean and Japanese licensed games). At the same time, the player's response also reflects the internalization of these same policies -- an effort to police games of content that might run counter to the patriotic spirit the government seeks to promote. One can understand why patriotism was such a central issue for people on both sides of this debate, though patriotism here is defined on rather different grounds, especially as it relates to attitudes towards Japan, the country's former military foe and current economic rival.

Around the world, multiplayer games are emerging as new public spheres where issues of national pride get played out. There has been strong backlash within the United States, for example, against the rising phenomenon of "gold farming," that is, the development and sell of in game assets for money, a practice closely associated in American discourse with China, where it is estimated that as many as 500,000 people make at least some of their living through playing computer games. (Of course, this debate about "gold farming" also plays itself out in a context of a national debate about immigration policy and a renewed nationalism following September 11.) At the same time, there have been a variety of political gatherings within multiplayer game worlds, mostly protesting various corporate policies, and in the wake of what some saw as homophobic policies in the World of Warcraft, in support of gay rights. One could argue, though, that even the gay rights march centered as much around issues of consumer rights as around any larger political agenda. There has been a fair amount of discussion of game worlds as sites for economic and political experiments but in the west, there has not been this kind of spillover between ingame and real world politics. And there certainly has been nothing on the scale of what happened in FWJ.

Zhan Li, my former student who did a Masters Thesis on whether we could consider the U.S. government-sponsored military game, America's Army to be a public sphere for political debate, explains,

As far as I know, and can tell from my searching around on the web and on

news databases, there have been no mass-scale "real world" political protests of this kind on US MMORPGs. There have been small scale protests about in-game policies (this happens on Chinese MMORPGs too of course -

there was a in-game "mass suicide" protest against the government fatigue system on World of Warcraft for instance) such as the tax revolt on Second Life and in-game identities (LBGT rights etc. ) . As far as I can tell, the

largest incident about real-world politics within a MMORPG / virtual world was a 2003 dispute about Iraq involving an influx of WWII Online gamers onto Second Life (attracted by an IGN article about a small group of establish

WWII gamers on SL, not by intent to protest) , which perhaps involving "nearly 130" WWII Online gamers (a figure which Wired called "large") and perhaps a couple of hundred regular Second Lifers. And in that dispute, Iraq

seems to have been secondary - a backdrop which players referred to when working through their primary concerns about the WWII gamers wanting to see if they could conquer and own a piece of territory through violence, and that the new WWII gamers rivalled the largest established clan in size.

Arguably, the Chinese government's efforts to regulate game playing -- and to promote games as part of the national culture -- have transformed what might have been a mere passtime into a more politically charged environment. What's striking about the protest march in FWJ and the company's response to the protest is the degree to which all involved saw issues of national honor and patriotism as at stake in this dispute. This wasn't a struggle over an in-game asset: it was a struggle about how the game fit within larger debates about Chinese nationalism and about the country's relations to Japan.

Prohibitionists and Collaborationists: Two Approaches to Participatory Culture

Next Generation, a leading webzine focused on the games industry, ran an excerpt today from my forthcoming book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, which focuses on the very different ways media companies are responding to the desire of their consumers to participate in the production and distribution of media content. This passage cuts to the heart of my book's argument that the new media environment is forcing us to rewrite the relationships between media producers and consumers. Here's how the passage begins:

Grant McCracken, the cultural anthropologist and industry consultant, suggests that in the future, media producers must accommodate consumer demands to participate or they will run the risk of losing the most active and passionate consumers to some other media interest which is more tolerant: "Corporations must decide whether they are, literally, in or out. Will they make themselves an island or will they enter the mix? Making themselves an island may have certain short-term financial benefits, but the long-term costs can be substantial."

The media industry is increasingly dependent on active and committed consumers to spread the word about valued properties in an overcrowded media marketplace and in some cases, they are seeking ways to channel the creative output of media fans to lower their production costs. At the same time, they are terrified of what happens if this consumer power gets out of control, as they claim occurred following the introduction of Napster and other file-sharing services....

One can trace two characteristic responses of media industries to this grassroots expression: Starting with the legal battles over Napster, the media industries have increasingly adopted a scorched earth policy towards their consumers, seeking to regulate and criminalize many forms of fan participation which once fell below their radar. Let's call them the prohibitionists.

To date, the prohibitionist stance has been dominant within old media companies (film, television, the recording industry), though these groups are to varying degrees starting to re-examine some of these assumptions. So far, the prohibitionists get most of the press - with law suits directed against teens who download music or against fan webmasters getting more and more coverage in the popular media.

At the same time, on the fringes, new media companies (internet, games, and to a lesser degree, the mobile phone companies), are experimenting with new approaches which see fans as important collaborators in the production of content and as grassroots intermediaries helping to promote the franchise. We will call them the collaborationists.....

As the excerpt continues, I hold up Raph Koster, the man initially put in charge of the Star Wars Galaxies game, as a prime example of collaborationist thinking within the games industry.

Here's a few of the things Koster said when I interviewed him for the book.

Just like it is not a good idea for a government to make radical legal changes without a period of public comment, it is often not wise for an operator of an online world to do the same.

You can't possibly mandate a fictionally involving universe with thousands of other people. The best you can hope for is a world that is vibrant enough that people act in manners consistent with the fictional tenets.

Koster was an early and vocal advocate of player's rights, recognizing that an interactive medium has to construct a very different relationship with its consumers than exists around more traditional broadcast media. The game player helps to create and sustain the experience of the other players. From there, we can see the games industry embrace a vast array of different forms of user-generated content and we can also see games companies seeking advice from their consumers throughout the creative process. In the case of Star War Galaxies, Koster and his team put out design documents on the web and sought input from potential players while the game was still under development. This is radically different from the secrecy that surrounds the production of the Star Wars films. As I write in the book:

It is hard to imagine Lucas setting up a forum site to preview plot twists and character designs with his audience. If he had done so, he would never have included Jar Jar Binks or devoted so much screen time to the childhood and adolescence of Anakin Skywalker, decisions which alienated his core audience. Koster wanted Star Wars fans to feel that they had, in effect, designed their own Galaxy.

Of course, not everything turned out as Koster planned and the decline of Star Wars Galaxies is one of the major disappointments of the user-generated content movement. (But that's a subject for a future post.)

Keep in mind that the distinction between collaborationist and prohibitionist logics is a matter of degree, not a difference in kind. I use Star Wars in the book to show how the same media franchise can create radically different relationships with its fans at different moments in its history and as it moves across different media platforms. Most companies today embrace some elements of both models, resulting in profound contradictions in the ways they relate to their consumers.

Grant McCracken, the anthropologist whose comments open this passage, has suggested that in this new participatory culture, it might make sense to abandon the term consumer all together, seeing it as the product of an old economic system and an old way of thinking about how culture operates. Instead, he proposes the term, "multiplier." Here's what he has to say:

The term multipler may help marketers acknowledge more forthrightly that whether our work is a success is in fact out of our control. All we can do is to invite the multiplier to participate in the construction of the brand by putting it to work for their own purposes in their own world. When we called them "consumers" we could think of our creations as an end game and their responses as an end state. The term "multiplier" or something like it makes it clear that we depend on them to complete the work

As I was putting this post together, I got an e-mail from Mark Deuze, another researcher who is currently doing his own book on the ways companies of all kinds are tapping the creative energies and collective wisdom of their consumers. On his blog today, he posted some thoughts, inspired in part from an advanced look at Convergence Culture. He is also suggesting that user-generated content changes the institutional logic of the creative industries:

Media work tends to get caught between two oppositional structural factors in producing culture within media organizations: on the one hand, practitioners are expected to produce, edit, and publish content that has proven its value on a mass market - which pressure encourages standardized and predictable formats using accepted genre conventions, formulas and routines - while creative workers on the other hand can be expected (and tend to personally favor) to come up with innovative, novel and surprising products.....

Working in an organization using an editorial logic, media professionals tend to more or less ignore the shifting wants and needs of the audience in favor of producing content that holds up to peer review, wins trade awards (such as the Oscars in the film industry, a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, the Game Developer Choice awards, or the Golden Lion in advertising), and build prestige and acknowledgement throughout the industry. A market logic on the other hand embraces a competitive way of doing things, producing compelling content for as wide an audience as possible, and thus favoring a strictly commercial mass market approach to making decisions in the creative process.....

Considering the work by Henry Jenkins (2006) and others on the increasing role of the consumer as collaborator or co-creator of media content, I have to conclude that a possible third institutional logic is emerging next to, and in a symbiotic relationship with, editorial and market logics: a convergent culture logic. Work done following this logic includes the (intended) consumer in the process of product design and innovation, up to and including the production and marketing process. The work of authors in fields as varied as management theory, product design, journalism studies and advertising define media content in this context interchangeably as: consumer-generated, customer-controlled, or user-directed. Researchers in different disciplines have documented a distinct turn towards the consumer as 'co-developer' of the corporate product, particularly where the industry's core commodity is (mediated) information.

I like where Deuze is going with this framework. My experience is that the creative and business sides of media companies often respond differently to the idea of user generated content or participatory culture. For the creative, the fear is a corruption of their artistic integrity as they turn over greater control over the shape of their work to its future consumers. This reflects what Deuze is calling an editorial logic. For the business side, the greatest fear is the idea that consumers might take something they made and not pay them for it. That's the extension of the market logic. Both may need to rethink their position if media companies are going to benefit from the work of McCracken's multipliers, who can both appreciate the value of an intellectual property and extend its shelf life. And it is the neat fit between the Editorial and Market Logics which insures that many media companies will adopt prohibitionist rather than collaborationist approaches in the short term.

Are Housewives Desperate For Games?

A new PC-game, created by Buena Vista Games, based on the ABC television series, Desperate Housewives, was one of the titles that generated a great deal of buzz at E3 this year. The game is loosely modeled on The Sims in that it involves the simulation of domestic life within a suburban community (the world of Wisteria Lane as depicted on the series); the players adopt the role of a previously unknown housewife who awakes one day with amnesia and seeks to find out more about who she is and how she fits within the community. USA Today qoutes Mary Schuyler, the producer of the title:

As fans of the show would expect, the game is loaded with gossip, betrayal, murder and sex -- you know, all the things women like.

Every so often, a media property emerges that allows us to glimpse future directions for branded entertainment. Desperate Housewives looks like such an example: one that helps us to take inventory of core trends which are going to be shaping the media industry in the next few years. I haven't played the game. I haven't even seen the game. So this isn't an endorsement. I am just interested in what the existence of a Desperate Housewives game suggests about the current state of convergence culture.

1. The Desperate Housewives game represents another interesting experiment in transmedia storytelling.

Scott Sanford Tobis, one of the TV series' writers, wrote more than 13,000 lines of original dialogue and structured the plots for the game.

In an interview with USA Today, Tobis described the game as an "additional episode" , offering new insights into the characters and introducing new situations into the story. Danny Elfman's music from the series plays throughout and narration is provided by actress Brenda Strong (as late housewife Mary Alice Young). The game's locations are modeled precisely on the familiar neighborhood from the hit series.

As such, the game represents a continuation of a trend which I identify in my forthcoming book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide :

A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. In the ideal form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best -- so that a story might be introdced in a film, expanded through television, novels and comics; its world might be explored through game play or experienced as an amusement park attraction. Each franchise entry needs to be self contained so you don't need to have seen the film to enjoy the game, and vice-versa. Any given product is a point of entry into the franchise as a whole. Reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption. Redundancy burns up fan interest and causes franchises to fail. Offering new levels of insight and experience refreshes the franchise and sustains consumer loyalty.

We can see further evidence of this trend at play through the upfront announcements of the major networks last month: several of the networksspent as much time discussing their digital strategies as they spent talking about their broadcast strategies.

2. The Desperate Housewives game represents the latest effort by the games industry to attract more female players.

Let's face it: pretty much every male in America who has the slightest interest in games is probably already playing. All that the games industry can hope to do is to redivy up the pie when it comes to the core male demographic: it's hard to even imagine games companies succeeding in getting men to spend more hours each week playing games. All future growth has to come through either keeping players engaged with games later in life or attracting more female players. (Of course, this has been true for the better part of a decade and yet one should never underestimate the amount of resistance that exists within the games industry to broadening the "boys club" to allow the Kooties-carrying segments of the population access. If you don't think current games are produced and marketed primarily for men, ask yourself why a key piece of hardware is called the game boy and whether most of the people who own it would have purchased it if it had been called, say, the gamegirl.)

Indeed, there has been a dramatic growth in the number of women playing games over the past decade, as was marked by a conference hosted by UCLA in conjunction with E3. For two days, more than fifty leading feminist games scholars and designers met to talk about the emergence of the female games market and what it meant not simply for the economic future of the games industry but also in terms of women's access to technologies and technologically related skills. Again and again, we learned that women outnumber men in online and causal games sectors and are a growing segment of the games market overall. Women still spend less time playing games and see games as less central to their cultural lives. In other words, a relatively small number of women consider themselves to be hardcore "gamers" (a group represented at the UCLA event by a spokesperson for the Frag Dolls, among others) but a growing percentage of them do play games.

Mimi Ito, a USC anthropologist who does work on games culture in Japan, argues that a key factor in closing the gender gap among gamers there had to do with the integration of game content into larger "media mixes", such as the transmedia strategies which have emerged around hot anime and manga properties. She argues that girls in Japan embraced games as another source of content that interested them as it flowed organically from one medium to the next. In that regard, the use of the already successful Desperate Housewives brand to create a space for older female players makes perfect sense.

It also makes sense, given the appeal of casual games for women, to base the game heavily around a series of mini-games, including the integration of cooking challenges and card games as core activities within a larger

framework. This will allow the Desperate Housewives title to build a bridge from causal games that require short investments of time into longer play experiences. Several of the female players at the conference remarked that they didn't play longer titles because they didn't feel like they had the time to devote to really exploring them, yet they found themselves playing "just one more game" with their favorite casual titles and thus playing for several hours at a sitting. Such women may well be ready to move into more extended play experiences if the themes and structure of the game facilitate their interests.

That said, the women who attended the conference had pretty strong responses to the idea that cooking games and gossip were "all the things women like." They saw this push towards stereotypically feminine content as a return to some of the pink box thinking that doomed previous generations of experiments at creating "girls games." Many have argued that the key to getting more women as players is to create games that men and women want to play together and diversifying the range of genres on the market, rather than producing games which appeal exclusively to one gender or another.

3. The Desperate Housewives game represents a new effort at product integration in games.

A Partnership with Massive will result in an unprecidented amount of ingame advertising and product placement. Here's what IGN had to say about these aspects of the game:

Most of the products in the house will be real-world name brands. Thanks to a deal with Sears, washers, dryers, and vacuum cleaners will all have familiar logos on them. When your character walks out to the mailbox, coupons will arrive from time to time. Thanks to a print option, you can take these coupons to their respective store (in the real world) and use them towards a purchase.... Not only bringing ads to the table, Massive has also incorporated a system to stream ABC content onto the TVs within the game itself.

At the UCLA conference, I argued that advergaming could be an important force in expanding the female market for games. Right now, advertisers are using games to reach the young male demographic that has been abandoning television. Yet, historically, women are the key decision-makers shaping many of the most heavily advertised brands. Those brands are also going to want to deploy games to reach consumers and they are going to be searching out new kinds of game content that reflects the tastes and interests of their desired demographics. While games publishers may have an interest in continuing to tap their most hardcore consumers, advergaming will have a different incentive -- to broaden the game market to allow them to reach their most desired demographics. Witness the participation of Sears and other domestically-focused brands in the Desperate Housewives game.

4. The Desperate Housewives game represents another important step towards an episodic model for game content.

For some time, observers of the games industry have questioned whether the current models for content will serve the interests of even the core gamer market for much longer. The average gamer pushes older each year simply because people are continuing to play games later in life than anyone would have imagined. The generation that grew up playing Super Mario Brothers is now entering young adulthood. They now need to manage their game play time alongside expectations from spouses and offspring. Women often complain that the units of time demanded by most games are impossible to negotiate around the expectations they face within their families. All of this points towards the desirability of developing games which come in smaller units of playtime.

Across this same period, leading thinkers in the games industry have suggested that episodic content -- games structured more like television series -- might prove both creatively interesting and commercialy viable. My CMS associate David Edery recently entered into the industry debate about episodic content. What he has to say on this topic warrents a close read.

Details about the episodic structure of Desperate Housewives remain vague, as does the business plan that will support this content: early interviews describe the game as composed of eight smaller episodes that combine to form a larger story arc, each representing roughly two hours of game play. The most likely scenario is that these episodes will all ship as levels within a single game unit, but there has been speculation that there may be opportunities to refresh the game content over time, as occurs in many massively multiplayer games, especially given the ability to provide streaming content from ABC directly into the game world. One can imagine game content that gets updated in response to new information unveiled in the aired episodes, thus changing the game world throughout the television season. Such steps would insure not only viewer loyalty to the television series (in hopes of new content updates for the game) but also persistent engagement with the game itself (with new interest delivered with each aired installment). Such tight coordination between the television series and the game may be premature given the current infrastructure and business models, but the Desperate Housewives propery is certainly a rich space to experiment with new forms of episodic content.

More on Games As Art

Reader Hugh wrote a very thoughtful response to my original post about games as art and I want to take the time to respond to it in some depth because it cuts to the heart of the question of why it matters and what it means to describe games as art.

What Makes Games Valuable

His response begins:

I find your comments about computer games (or games in general) needing to be considered "art" for it to be demonstrated that they have "positive cultural contributions to make," interesting.

Hugh is referring to my suggestion that part of the value of treating games as art is to counter claims made by the moral reform movement that has been trying to pressure for government regulation on youth access to video games in cities across the country. If you look closely, the movement often tries to compare games to other kinds of products and commodities -- such as cigarettes -- a common reference point or to forms of expression -- such as pornography -- which do not enjoy full constitutional protection. The goal is to dismiss out of hand the idea that games can be culturally meaningful activities. As I said yesterday, making the case that game playing is a meaningful activity is one of the most important functions of games criticism.

Hugh continues:

Clearly the contribution of value to our culture is not limited to art. Football (American or otherwise) is not art - in fact, it's a game. But it is very hard to question the value that children or indeed grown people playing sport adds to our culture.

Going for a long walk isn't art, either. But it's clearly valuable. Running a popular meeting point, a bar or a cafe, isn't art, but it has considerable value to society. Hell, running a garbage disposal firm isn't art, but I'd rather Edinburgh City Council didn't close their binmen down on that basis.

Even if, say, World of Warcraft isn't art, that doesn't mean it's not of value. In fact, it's entirely possible to argue that its artistic merit is in fact entirely irrelevant to its value to society.

Again, I would agree with Hugh's general conclusion here. We can go back to the 2002 Limbaugh decision, issued by U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Sr. in response to a proposed Saint Louis regulation of youth access to games (and blissfully overturned subsequently). Limbaugh argued that games did not deserve constitutional protection from censorship because they did not represent a meaningful form of expression. He acknowledged that they probably held the same amount of social value as sports or traditional games but noted that there were no constitutional rights attached to these activities. We have freedom of speech, which belatedly was extended from political speech to artistic expression, but we do not have a right to play. More's the pity. At best, there is a vague right to "the pursuit of happiness" but I don't think you are going to find judges take you very seriously if you simply assert that playing games makes you happy.

Getting Serious About Games

Games can be valuable on many levels. Their status as art is simply one of them. Right now, we are seeing defenses of games emerging on multiple levels.

Some writers -- James Paul Gee or Kurt Squire or Steven Johnson, for example -- are making the case for games on educational or cognitive levels rather than aesthetic. Gee demonstrates that games are structured around solid pedagogical principles and that they are teaching young people new ways of processing knowledge. Johnson contends that games, like other modern forms of popular culture, have a degree of complexity (and thus pose cognitive challenges) which may be greater than most critics imagine. Squire has shown that communities emerge around games which enhance or expand the educational value of the play experience itself.

The serious games movement tackles the question of games as a form of political or social expression much more directly. They are demonstrating that games as a medium can serve a wide array of social and pedagogical purposes. Advocates like Gonzalo Frasca or Ian Bogost have made strong cases that games can be used for political speech. There are interesting experiments in the use of games for journalistic purposes. And so forth. If these efforts are successful, they will go to the heart of the legal debate -- representing the kinds of materials which are most cherished and protected under American constitutional law.

Yet this is treacherous territory since if we make too powerful a case that games can be a tool for persuasion or even education, games reformers are apt to cite it as proof that games "brainwash" or "train" the people who consume them. If a game can "teach" you world history (in the case of Civilization) or change how you think about genocide (in the case of Darfur is Dying), than can a game teach you to kill your classmates? I have tried to address this question in terms of a distinction between meanings and effects.

Here's a passage from one of my essays, "The War Between Effects and Meanings," which will be included in my forthcoming book, Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers:

Limbaugh and company see games as having social and psychological "effects" (or in some formulations, as constituting "risk factors" that increase the likelihood of violent and antisocial conduct). Their critics argue that gamers produce meanings through game play and related activities. Effects are seen as emerging more or less spontaneously, with little conscious effort, and are not accessible to self examination. Meanings emerge through an active process of interpretation; they reflect our conscious engagement; they can be articulated into words; and they can be critically examined. New meanings take shape around what we already know and what we already think, and thus, each player will come away from a game with a different experience and interpretation. Often, reformers in the "effects" tradition argue that children are particularly susceptible to confusions between fantasy and reality. A focus on meaning, on the other hand, would emphasize the knowledge and competencies possessed by game players starting with their mastery over the aesthetic conventions which distinguish games from real world experience.

Arguments for the aesthetic value of games represent a third important prong in this effort to develop an affirmative defense of video games rather than simply debunk claims made about media effects. In some ways, it is proving the most controversial in part because of conflicting assumptions about the nature of art.

The New Lively Art

And this is what Hugh gets to next in his comments:

John Carey's "What Good Are The Arts" provides a compelling dissection of the common belief that the arts are somehow inherently "improving". I wouldn't argue that the "art" in World of Warcraft is the reason that kids should be allowed to play it - I'd argue that learning team skills, discipline, perseverance, problem-solving skills and simple escapism are all reasons to play it....

One thing that's interesting here is that games are clearly a form of expression - "speech", indeed - but that doesn't necessarily translate to our conception of art, which is generally considered, at the moment, to be a one-way expression mediated by the author. As I understand it, the US constitution protects freedom of speech, not freedom of art - it is just that in the past 100 years or so, many things considered speech have also been considered art.

My own argument that games constitutes art stems not from a high culture notion of art as uplift or "improvement" but rather from Gilbert Seldes' concept of a lively art. I discuss this idea at some length in my essay, "Games, the New Lively Art," which will be reprinted in my forthcoming anthology, The Wow Climax. Here's some of what I have to say here:

Adopting what was then a controversial position, Seldes argued that America's primary contributions to artistic expression had come through emerging forms of popular culture such as jazz, the Broadway musical, Vaudeville, Hollywood cinema, the comic strip, and the vernacular humor column....Readers then were skeptical of Seldes' claims about cinema for many of the same reasons that contemporary critics dismiss games - they were suspicious of cinema's commercial motivations and technological origins, concerned about Hollywood's appeals to violence and eroticism, and insistent that cinema had not yet produced works of lasting value. Seldes, on the other hand, argued that cinema's popularity demanded that we reassess its aesthetic qualities. Cinema and other popular arts were to be celebrated, Seldes insisted, because they were so deeply imbedded in everyday life, because they were democratic arts embraced by average citizens. Through streamlined styling and syncopated rhythms, they captured the vitality of contemporary urban experience. They took the very machinery of the industrial age, which many felt dehumanizing, and found within it the resources for expressing individual visions, for reasserting basic human needs, desires, and fantasies. And these new forms were still open to experimentation and discovery. They were, in Seldes' words, "lively arts."

What I am arguing, then, is not that games should be removed from the realm of everyday life and put on a pedestal in an art museum. Rather, games are art because they represent a site of play and expression within the contexts of their everyday lives. They teach us to see the world through new eyes. They teach us new ways to interact with the computer. Art is not necessarily uplifting: it is enough that it refreshes us -- heightening our perceptual awareness, enhancing the quality of our lives. In that sense, I am arguing that play matters because it makes us happy.

Expression does not equal Narrative

Hugh continues:

It's also worth noting that whilst our culture generally considers art to be defined by passive consumption, there's plenty of precedent for art to be interactive. Theatre, for example, is highly dependent on the audience for its content, as actors "play" to the crowd. With no crowd and no crowd reaction, there is no theatre. That's even more true in improvised theatre. Architecture by definition is the crafting of an interactive artform, yet no-one doubts it is art.

The core of the problem comes from our assumption that if games are art, then the art must come through telling stories rather than creating new kinds of experiences. Improved storytelling might be one form that games as art will take. But games are not predestined to become a more interactive form of cinema. They could just as easily become about expressive movements -- like dance -- or spaces -- like architecture. For me, Shigaru Miyagawa is perhaps the consummate game artist -- not because he creates such compelling stories or psychologically deep characters but because he is so imaginative in his design of space, so open to exploring new ways of interacting with the medium, and so expressive in his use of movement and iconography. Games tap a spirit of experimentation and improvisation through our freedom to explore their spaces and interact with them in a variety of ways. So, again, I totally agree with Hugh's position here. Stories are one ways that our culture communicates meaning. Rituals are another. Games are still another. These forms may sometimes overlap but they have quite autonomous histories.

Culture and Commerce, Elites and Masses

Hugh concludes:

Possibly some of the resistance to the concept of a game as art comes from the fact that the creation of art is considered in the Western world to be a work of specialized artisans, rather than something which is part of everyday life? Once again, John Carey points out that that's an anomaly of the last few hundred years - art evolved in humankind as a form of play, and indeed several languages do not have separate words for the two activities.

Our culture, of course, has devalued play, as Pat Kane points out in "The Play Ethic". Perhaps this is part of the resistance that computer games find when they try to define themselves as art?

Again, I find myself in loud and emphatic agreement with Hugh's comments here. Games suffer two problems in terms of our modern understanding of art:

1. on the one hand, games are commercial products and there is a tendency to set art against commerce in our critical discussions. We see this even in terms of cinema where some movies get called "art movies" and others get called "popcorn movies," despite decades of criticism which has sought to identify the ways entertainment properties may nevertheless be meaningful and expressive and aesthetically compelling. I was in a debate recently with Ernest Adams, who is one of the most thoughtful commentators on the games industry and medium, but who is not convinced that games are art. His arguments hinge on this distinction between art and commerce.

2. On the other hand, games are not art because they are so accessible to the general population. Art has increasingly been seen as the property of the educated elite. Under this definition, you have to be taught to perceive and value art. Artistic appreciation becomes a form of social distinction. And there is a tendency to devalue the kinds of informal learning which surrounds our mastery of popular culture form. Trust me, none of us were born knowing how to beat a level.

Many gamers are also worried that if we discuss games as art, they will somehow stop making the kinds of games they like to play. Art is thought of as something stuffy or serious-minded, rather than something playful and engaging. I see this tied to some of the ways that modern art embraced an aesthetic of emotional and contemplative distance where-as Seldes' "Lively Arts" embraced an aesthetic that emphasized immediate emotional impact. When I promote the idea that games should be considered art, I don't mean that they should saddle themselves with some alien artistic tradition or that they should necessarily strive to be high art. I want them to remain a popular art. I want them to develop their own aesthetic principles that reflect the ways we engage with games in the course of our everyday life. Rather than strip play from games, I want us to reassert the centrality of play to artistic expression.

Hugh's comments take us a step further -- at least by implication -- in suggesting that the art of games is created not simply by the designer but also by the player. Imagine a world where players were judged not simply on the basis of their high scores but also on their expressive performances? To some degree, this tension has already surfaced around something like Dance Dance Revolution. I am happy to argue there that the best players don't necessarily rake up the highest scores; rather, they score as performers with the audience that watches them. Maybe we make art every time we pick up the joy stick. But in that sense, Hugh is right that this art becomes immediately devalued because these skills are too widespread within our culture and our modern notion of art emphasizes not simply an elite consumer but also an elite producer.

In the end, I don't think Hugh and I disagree. Hugh argues that games can be seen as meaningful without being considered art. I would argue that artistic expression is simply one of a number of different criteria by which we might identify the meaningfulness of games.

Thanks, Hugh, for such a rich response. Sorry it has taken me a while to get back to it.

More on Games Criticism

I hate to use this blog just to update on earlier posts but the debate about games criticism continues to rage across the blogosphere and there's lots of pretty smart things being said on the subject. And of course, being only human, I wanted to offer my ten cents worth on them. For anyone who missed my original post, you can find it here, complete with links to the Esquire article that kicked off this particular round of debate. Today, I am taking up the issue of games criticism. I will be back on friday with some more thoughts about games as art.

The Joy Stick Nation

Clive Thompson over at Wired is one of the smartest people writing about games and digital culture. He's offered his perspective on the state of game criticism. First, he says, there are no great games critics because their editors aren't allowing them to write about games in the same way that one might write about any other medium:

Today's mainstream editors mostly neither play games nor think about them much. When they do, they regard games either as juvenile fluff, or dangerous mind-control technology that is programming a kill-crazed generation of moral zombies. (Or, in a lovely bit of doublethink, both.) Nine times out of 10 their favorite angle is the bromidic "do games make ya violent?" crap; the reviews they commission are 400-word pellets. Worse, they force their critics to write as if games were some bizarre new fad that their shut-in readers have literally never heard of. This kills criticism.... What if the New Yorker had told Pauline Kael to write her columns under the assumption that the magazine's readers never actually watch movies?

At the same time, Thompson argues -- and I would agree -- that the most engaged, passionate, and knowledgeable writing about games comes not from professional critics writing in print publications but from grassroots writers using the web -- that is people who have to write about a particular game because it has changed their lives. This is a point which gets made again and again throughout this discussion: the best games criticism is going to come from people who grew up with this medium, who know it inside and out, who know hundreds if not thousands of games and can tell you what makes each of them interesting or innovative.

I see those kinds of students in my classrooms. I don't see them writing yet for major publications.

I have written and commented a fair amount about games through the years and I always feel vaguely inadequate in doing so because I know there's a 16 year old out there who can tell me why level 35 of this particular game was more interesting than level 12 and can offer a pretty good explanation why. And sooner or later, writers like me are going to be displaced by kids who were born with a joystick in their hands and who think games are not only art but are the highest form of art on the planet. And I will be a very happy man.

John Scalzi makes a very similar point in his discussion of the issue of games criticism:

If we grant that Kael and Bangs typify mature (or, given Bang's style, at least fully engaged) examples of criticism of their media, the reason there is currently no Kael or Bangs for video games is clear: It's awfully damn early for someone like them to arrive for the video game medium. Possibly the "Kael of video games" is the age of my daughter right now, and like her banging out rhythms on Dance Dance Revolution or getting immersed in some Mario World. Like Kael or Bangs, she'll never have known a time in which games were not fully narrative in their way, so like them she won't have to rely on metaphor or perspective that inherently views video games as a disruption (or the supplanter) of other artistic media...The hermeneutics of video games require a whole lot of button-mashing. How many critics are both able to get through a boss level and tell you what it means as a social construct? In the future, probably a lot. At the moment: Not so many.

Again, like Thompson, I am convinced that such games critics are already out there -- taking games studies classes at universities, posting their thoughts in blogs and webzines, doing their own podcasts, and probably working on a game mod or machinema project on the side.The participatory nature of this medium insures that the first wave of great games critics will be more like Sergei Eisenstein than Pauline Kael. This is one reason why I admire Eric Zimmerman so much -- because he works as a game designer to develop a critical vocabulary of game design and then he puts those insights into books (Rules of Play) so that it can be discussed and debated by others who care about this medium.

Entering the Penny Arcade

A number of the posts I've read on this topic arrived at the same conclusion: that the most powerful force for games criticism today comes not through prose writing but in the form of a comic strip, Penny Arcade. Penny Arcade consistently comments on the trends within the medium while also factoring in gamer culture, games industry practices, and social policy debates. That they do so with such wit and economy is a real tribute to these guys as critics/artists and to the richness of game culture. What Penny Arcade does is game criticism of the richest kind -- this has always been true of the strip itself and is even more true of the discussion which surrounds the strip.

I might also point you towards the work of the so-called New Games Journalists, which is perhaps best exemplified by the now famous/infamous "Bow Nigger" essay. These guys take you inside the game, describe what the player experiences from a subjective point of view, takes us through the steps of their mental process in playing the game which includes both things that emerge organically through their interactions with other players and through programmed features of the game itself. Again, it isn't quite criticism in the sense we are talking about but it is work that illuminates the aesthetics and sociology of games.

Retracing the Evolution of Film Criticism

Bill McClain offers a more detailed comparison between how film criticism evolved and the likely path towards a fuller and richer criticism of games:

After all, the earliest film criticism was internal industrial summaries of film products, what we might now call plot summaries, intended to help distributors and exhibitors chose and market their product ("users' guides" in any sense you chose to take it). Then, looking back to the earliest forms of academic/elite critical discourse to the Soviet Avant-Garde and even going as far forward as Andre Bazin we see an attempt to determine a) is film art, or merely entertainment, or perhaps even a social problem and/or tool? b) if it is art, how does it relate to other arts, what makes it unique and what makes it similar to existing forms of art and artistic discourses? c) if it is art, by what standards do we judge it, how do we describe it, how do we interpret it? d) and yes, of course, it's going to totally change the whole fucking world. Sound familiar? My concern is, as video game criticism develops, that it become, as film criticism did before it, so wrapped up in trying to figure out what the hell video games are and what essential properties (usually dependent on whether the medium in question is the savior or the Satan) they exhibit that it ignores the world that creates and uses video games. It would be nice to believe that we can learn from the mistakes of critics past, or at least that this is a sort of necessary phase in the development of a new critical enterprise that we can, with the aid of hindsight, dispense with all the sooner...but plus ca change...

Like Thompson and Scalzi, then, the argument is that the medium is too new and there hasn't been enough time for good critical practices to emerge. (This is different, by the way, from another claim about the history of the medium: that games themselves have not yet evolved to the point that they are worthy of serious criticism, that they are still learning their basic vocabulary. As far as I am concerned, while the medium still has plenty of room for growth, a game designer like Miyamoto proved games could be art a long long time ago.) First, let me suggest that the history of film criticism is more complicated than what we most often learn in film studies classes. I would note, for example, that someone like Epes Winthrop Sargent over at Moving Picture World might superficially be described as a trade press reporter offering "industrial summaries" of films for exhibitors but he also was carefully monitoring the step by step progress being made in the aesthetics of film, tracing the emergence of the close-up across a number of films, speculating on how this device might be used more effectively, articulating the rationale and standards of classical film style, etc. And the early writers who were bogged down writing about whether film were art -- Gilbert Seldes for one -- often managed to make some compelling observations about specific films and filmmakers. And there were great film critics well before Pauline Kael -- folks like Graham Green and James Agee and..., many of whom were writing by the early 1930s. It is precisely because such critics wrote with such great specificity about individual films that they are often not included in your average Introduction to Film class anymore.

What you tend to read are the generalists who mapped the field and not the specialists who applied those aesthetic standards to emerging work. But that doesn't mean that early film critics were "simply reviewers" and didn't play a very important role in shaping the evolution of film as a medium. Much as we suggested about the gamer critics above, though, the best of these writers grew up with film -- read James Agee's thinly veiled autobiographical account of going to see a Chaplin movie with his father in the opening of A Death in the Family for a wonderful account of what it was like to be a child at the moment cinema was being born. And you can see how those early childhood influences took shape into a landmark essay like "Comedy's Greatest Era." You didn't get those insights from Maxim Gorky, a literary figure who dained to write about cinema from time to time.

Technical Vs. Expressive Language

Scalzi seems to imagine that games will require a more technical vocabulary before they can generate solid criticism of the kind we are seeking:

Video games do have their auteurs -- Will Wright, John Carmack, Sid Meyer and Shigeru Miyamoto are examples -- but what they do and how they do it is frightfully opaque. Does a long discussion about Carmack's work on specular lighting or his latest game engine have the same critical accessibility as a discussion about, say, Orson Welles' directorial choices, or the making of Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" technique? Personally, I think it doesn't, save for a small, technically adept tribe.

Maybe -- I certainly have found it hard to explain to non-gamers why the technical advices represented by Grand Theft Auto enhances the art of the medium, even if its content can sometimes feel hard to justify to someone who hasn't played the game. Yet, if you go back and read someone like Kael, she certainly had access to a pretty sophisticated vocabulary of film techniques but she tends to avoid technical terms as much as possible. She isn't a formalist trying to analyze the specific techniques deployed: she left that for academics in the emerging field of film studies. She wrote in a more evocative language, trying to record her own passionate engagement, her own subjective experience of a particular film, trying to help us understand why the filmmaker was doing something fresh and original within the medium.

In my original post, I suggested we had neither the technical vocabulary to write in specifics about games techniques nor the expressive language to communicate effectively what it is like to play a game. Of the two, the second is the more important. Academic game studies is coming of age and will eventually give us the technical language needed to really dissect a game. This can be important. I would argue that it was because film studies classes were becoming more normative in American education that we were able to develop an audience for documentary or independent films over the past two decades: more and more people were open to kinds of films which had not played at their local multiplex and had some initial language for talking about what they were getting from watching such movies.

So, academic criticism has its place. We certainly need an educated consumer. But what's needed right now, more than anything, is a public voice of games criticism.

The Functions of Criticism

Such a voice has several key roles (some within the gamer community, some beyond it): they need to educate the general public about why this medium matters and that means making the big picture case for games as a form of artistic and social expression. They need to be able to deliver consumers behind innovative and interesting products so that they do not die in the marketplace and so that they empower the best game designers to push the limits of the medium. We shouldn't be seeing world class talent spent building expansion packs for top selling games. We should see them always moving onto the next frontier.

At the same time, there has be some accountability within the games industry. One reason I think it's important to start looking at games as art is because artists have responsibilities -- to their publics and to the traditions within which they operate. I don't buy the argument that the games industry has to ship product and so it can't think about the art of game design. Top Hollywood filmmakers of the 1930s might produce as many as seven feature films a year but someone like Howard Hawks or John Ford made sure each of those films mattered, each said something, each created a distinctive experience, each contributed to the evolution of the medium. And game designers need to start thinking about their craft in the same way. A good critic will push artists hard to refine their techniques and to think more deeply about what they are expressing through their work. There are so many commercial pressures exerted on game designers -- it would be nice to have some counterpressures to encourage innovation and diversity.

Yes, I agree with Clive Thompson that some such criticism is out there on the web and that blogs now function the way zines did during the Punk Scene of the 1970s and 1980s. Nobody reads what the mainstream press says about these issues. Indeed, establishment critics are all but irrelevant to the core of the games market (though the opposite may also be true. There are plenty of games which got slammed by every games critic on the internet and went on to sell a massive number of units.) This kind of insider criticism doesn't address the larger problem of the general public's perceptions of this medium. I am outraged that all the general reader hears about games is that some people think they are too violent. Imagine that we were thirty plus years into the history of cinema -- way past Great Train Robbery which demonstrated the films could tell stories, way past Birth of a Nation which demonstrated that films could be a form of political expression, way past Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Battleship Potempkin and Sherlock Junior which proved films could be art, and the only thing that anyone had written about film was that people got pies shoved in their faces. Games are facing steady and relentless public attack to no small degree because no one has made the affirmative case for this medium: we simply get bogged down in arguing that Grand Theft Auto isn't as bad as people think it is.

For this to change, we have to push for games to be regularly covered in Entertainment Weekly, for games to be criticized and debated in the New Yorker, because most of the people who are making our lives miserable right now are not reading Computer Games magazine. So, yes, Clive, it's great to see that no one whose hip looks to Esquire to tell them what games to buy -- I get that -- but then, it's not the hip people I'm worried about.

But this only takes care of the first function of the critic. The second and third functions (promoting innovation, challenging artists) is most likely to come from within the games community. And the challenge there is that a participatory culture is inherently fragmented. For this model to work, we need not simply one great games critics but hundreds of pretty good games critics who are willing to take on the responsibilities of the critic and are willing to ask hard and big questions about the medium they are writing about. There are some such people out there now -- but if this model is going to work, you need to build an army.

What I worry about are people like the reader at Scalzi's site who posted this helpful comment:

Guys don't play videogames for artistic content anymore than they rent porn for artistic content. If I want a story, I have an apartment crammed with books.

I get what he's saying. But keep in mind that there are people out there who want to regulate games precisely because they think they are like pornography -- that is, utterly without redeeming value.

Thanks to CMS graduate student Alec Austin and CMS alum Zhan Li for calling some of these pieces to my attention.