How Learners Can Be On Top of Their Game: An Interview with James Paul Gee (Part Two)

Your most recent book, Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning, moves us from a focus on the kinds of learning which occurs inside the game as we play towards the kinds of learning which takes place around the game as people build upon it through the mechanisms of what you would call affinity spaces or what I call Participatory Culture. You describe this as "gaming beyond gaming." What has motivated this shift of emphasis?

Women and Gaming is no longer our most recent book. Language and Learning in the Digital Age has just appeared (another book I did with Betty). My focus of late on passionate affinity spaces was caused by the influences of my son Sam (who claims correctly to have taught me everything I know about games), Betty's wonderful work on her tech-savvy girls clubs, and, of course, you.

The first thing I ever wrote on passionate affinity spaces was motivated by a request that I write a paper about my take on "communities of practice", a notion that has become very popular in a great many areas. In my view, this powerful notion has become attached to so many different things that it is in danger of losing any real meaning. When talking about such notions I think it is necessary to name what you mean very specifically and name it in such a way that it clearly indicates what you value. This is what you have done with "participatory culture" and what I did with passionate affinity spaces.

So why did I choose that term? First I wanted to argue that "interest" gets someone in the door but not out the door to any deep place unless it leads to lots and lots of practice and persistence past failure. To get such practice and persistence past failure an interest has to be kindled into a passion and an affinity space needs to be organized to help people to do this.

I use "space" rather than "community" because the word "community" carries a rather romantic connotation which it should not have. I also use the word "space" because the notion of "membership" is very complex in modern Internet spaces. People are "in" the space even if they are just lurking, but what makes them "members" is a much harder and, in some cases (though not all), a more flexible and fungible notion.

Passionate affinity spaces tend to follow the Pareto Principle (20% of the people produce 80% of the outcomes, 80% produce 20% of the outcomes), while school classrooms tend to follow (enforced) bell curves. I want to stress not just multiple forms and routes to participation, leadership, and mentorship in passionate affinity spaces, but also the opportunity for all people in the space to become producers, designers, and creators, as well as mentors to others.

All passionate affinity spaces are organized first and foremost around a specific passion that is not necessarily shared by everyone (some only have an interest), but is the "attractor" in the space around which norms, values, and behaviors are set. The book Women and Gaming is about different forms passionate affinity spaces can take and some forms we applaud. The form we applaud most is not age-graded (young and old are together); allows newbies and experts to be together; and engages in supportive interactions because people in the space accept a theory of learning that says that expertise is not in a person but in the affinity space and that no matter how good you are there is always something more to learn and someone else from whom to get help and mentoring.

Tell us more about the Tech Savvy Girls Clubs. What were the goals behind this initiative? How did these experiences inform Women and Gaming?

The following is from Elizabeth Hayes:

TSG grew out of my interest in differences among how girls and boys engage with gaming more broadly. Not only do girls and boys tend to play different sorts of games, they also do different things with games. In particular, boys are much more likely to mod games, to create content for games, and otherwise to engage with games and other gamers in ways that support their development of technical skills and identities as content creators. The Sims is one of few games in which girls and women actually predominate as content creators and modders.

I wanted to give girls who otherwise would not participate in such practices greater access, social support and encouragement to participate. We started TSG, though, with a pretty limited understanding of the learning that takes place through fan communities, or affinity spaces. We initially saw fan sites as sources of information (i.e., tutorials, examples of content) rather than as spaces where the girls could develop identities, interact with other players, and be mentored (as well as mentor others).

A crucial turning point in our perspective was conducting interviews with adult women content creators, described in Chapter 5 of the book. These women kept pointing back to the Sims player community as crucial to their interest in content creation and modding, as well as to their mastery of technical skills. Talking to these women made me realize that I had started TSG with a deficit perspective towards women's gaming practices. That is, I'd assumed that we needed to help girls engage in modding practices similar to what boys are doing, rather than starting with an appreciation for what women were already doing.

This change in perspective led us to further investigations of the fan practices already taking place around The Sims, and this research became a very important component of our work. One of my research assistants is just completing her dissertation on The Sims Writers' Hangout, a site where players post and discuss Sims stories, a form of multimodal storytelling that requires composing images in the game and combining them with often lengthy narrative texts. Another student is investigating the learning of specialist language that takes place in Mod The Sims, another fan site devoted to game modding.

This is why discussion of the social spaces around The Sims is so central to Women and Gaming. We wanted to help others see that what women are doing with games is already exciting and important, and also to shift the lens a bit, in order to encourage people to look at male-dominated game spaces in new ways.

A key theme running through the book is the importance of becoming a designer rather than simply being a player of games. What accounts for the growing emphasis on design literacies in the 21st century?

I think that the importance of design, design thinking, and design literacies today follows from the shape of the world. We live amidst complex systems of all sorts, systems which are risky and dangerous and which interact with each other to create yet more risk. Furthermore, such systems are rarely now just "natural" or just "human made".

I live in Sedona, Arizona. Sedona is a dessert. Like desserts from time immemorial, Sedona is cold at night even if it is hot in the day time. This is not so for Phoenix, which is also a dessert. It is hot at night when it is hot in the day time. This is so because of a heat-island effect. The massive amounts of concrete in Phoenix absorb the heat all day and radiate it out all night. So the temperature in Phoenix is a joint venture of "Mother Nature" and humans.

Solutions to problems involving complex systems demand multiple sorts of pooled expertise, including even the wisdom of crowds. Single minded, single focused experts are dangerous, since they undervalue what they do not know and their actions can and do create massive unintended consequences when they intervene in complex systems (as we found out in the 2008 worldwide recession and as Alan Greenspan pretty much admitted in front of Congress).

So people--citizens--need to learn to think of systems as designed or as things that act like they are designed. They need to know how themselves to produce designs as "models" to think with (and model-based thinking is the core of science).

The United States today is politically polarized and comes at all problems as if they are political or ideological, when in fact most of our problems are complex, the solutions to them are going to be compromises with tradeoffs, and we need to continuously question our expertise, values, and goals. We are so polarized today that a core goal of schooling, in my view, ought to be teaching kids to see arguments as designed and as inherently connected to evidence and perspectives and not just ideology, self-interest, and desire.

Of course, the focus on design has also come about because so many digital tools--and other tech tools--developed by and for professionals can be used today by "everyday people" to design, build, and create for themselves. There has always been the danger with any technology--most certainly including books--that people will get divided into two classes: "priests" who are experts and know the deep secrets inside the technology (or make them up) and the "laity" who consume the technology, but do not understand it enough to transform it. The potential of much digital learning today--as well as many passionate affinity spaces--is to allow more and more people to be priests. But this sort of potential has always in human history been opposed and resisted by elites, who ever seek to constrain and tame it.

James Paul Gee is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Education. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990, Third Edition 2007) was one of the founding documents in the formation of the "New Literacy Studies", an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language, learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts. His book An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1999, Second Edition 2005, Third Edition 2011) brings together his work on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings, an approach that has been widely influential over the last two decades. His most recent books both deal with video games, language, and learning. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003, Second Edition 2007) argues that good video games are designed to enhance learning through effective learning principles supported by research in the Learning Sciences. Situated Language and Learning (2004) places video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy and shows how they can help us in thinking about the reform of schools. His most recent books are Good Video Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays (2007); Woman as Gamers: The Sims and 21st Century Learning (2010) and Language and Learning in the Digital World (2011), both written with Elizabeth Hayes. Prof. Gee has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education.

How Learners Can Be On Top of Their Game: An Interview with James Paul Gee (Part One)

James Paul Gee from New Learning Institute on Vimeo.

On April 4, I will be respondent for the Pullias Lecture, being hosted by the Rossier School of Education here at the University of Southern California. The primary speaker is James Paul Gee, who is going to address "Games, Learning, and the Looming Crisis of Higher Education." For those in the Los Angeles area, the talk is being held in the Davidson Conference Center at USC, 4-6 PM.

I was delighted to be asked to participate in this exchange, both because I was recently given an honorary appointment in the Rossier School and because I have such affection and respect for Gee. We've known each other for the better part of a decade now. We've appeared together many times, often in informal conversational settings, I like to call "The Jim and Henry Show," where we talk about our shared interests in participatory culture, games and learning, and the new media literacies. Gee has been one of the key thinkers about the kinds of new pedogogical models represented by computer and video games, seeing them as illustrating alternative forms of learning to those represented by our current schooling practices. Gee has been one of the core contributors to the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning initiative, helping to inspire a whole new generation of educational researchers, who are doing serious work not only on games but also modding, machinema, fan fiction, virtual worlds, and a range of other new media platforms and practices.

This semester, I have ended up teaching Gee's recent book, Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning, in my New Media Literacies class. I was delighted when I first saw the book to see Gee expand upon his thinking about "affinity spaces" to think more deeply about what he and his co-author Elizabeth Hayes call "gaming beyond gaming." The term refers to the broad range of productive and social practices which have grown up around games, practices which strongly parallel what I've found in my own research on fan cultures. The book's focus on The Sims signals the importance of this game both as a breakthrough title which expanded female interest in the medium and as a model for all subsequent games which have encouraged players to build and share content with each other. Gee and Hayes are interested in the ways this game has become the jumping off place for lifelong learning processes for a range of women, young and old. It is a delightful mixture of compelling storytelling and thoughtful analysis, one which can easily be assigned to undergraduate students but which is profound enough to capture the imagination of advanced students and researchers.

As I was anticipating our mutual participation in the Pullias Lecture event, it occurred to me that I had never interviewed Gee for my blog, despite all of our other interactions through the years. What follows includes his reflections on the current state of games-based learning research, the state of American education, and the value of participatory culture. Gee was generous with his thoughts and so I am going to be running this meaty exchange over three installments this week.

We've both been involved in thinking about games and learning for the better part of a decade. What do you see as the most significant breakthroughs which have occurred over this time?

The breakthroughs have been slower in coming than I had hoped. Like many new ideas, the idea of games for learning (better, "games as learning") has been often co-opted by entrenched paradigms and interests, rather than truly transforming them. We see now a great many skill-and-drill games, games that do in a more entertaining fashion what we already do in school. We see games being recruited in workplaces--and lots of other instances of "gamification"--simply to make the current structures of exploitation and traditional relationships of power more palatable. We will see the data mining capacities of games and digital media in general recruited for supervision, rather than development. The purpose of games as learning (and other game-like forms of learning) should be to make every learner a proactive, collaborative, reflective, critical, creative and innovative problem solver; a producer with technology and not just a consumer; and a fully engaged participant and not just a spectator in civic life and the public sphere.

In general there are two "great divides" in the games and learning arena. The two divides are based on the learning theories underlying proposals about games for learning. The first divide is this: On the one hand, there are games based on a "break everything into bits and practice each bit in its proper sequence" theory of learning, a theory long popular in instructional technology. Let's call this the "drill and practice theory". On the other hand, there are games based on a "practice the bits inside larger and motivating goal-based activities of which they are integral parts" theory. Let's call this the "problem-and-goals-centered theory". I espouse one version of this theory, but, unfortunately, there are two versions of it. And this is the second divide: On the one hand, there is a "mindless progressive theory" that says just turn learners loose to immerse themselves in rich activities under the steam of their own goals. This version of progressivism (and progressivism in Dewey's hands was not "mindless") has been around a great many years and is popular among "mindless" educational liberals. On the other hand, the other version of the "problem-and-goals-centered theory" claims that deep learning is achieved when learners are focused on well designed, well ordered, and well mentored problem solving with shared goals, that is, goals shared with mentors and a learning community.

Like so many other areas of our lives today, the conservative version (drill and practice) and the liberal version (mindless progressivism) are both wrong. The real solution does not lie in the middle, but outside the space carved up by political debates.

What do you think remain the biggest misunderstandings or disagreements in this space?

Much of what I discussed above is really not about misunderstandings, but about disagreements and different beliefs and value systems, or, in some cases, different political, economic, or cultural vested interests. The biggest misunderstanding in the case of my own work has been people saying that my work espouses games for learning. It does not and never has. It espouses "situated embodied learning", that is learning by participation in well designed and well mentored experiences with clear goals; lots of formative feedback; performance before competence; language and texts "just in time" and "on demand"; and lots of talk and interaction around strategies, critique, planning, and production within a "passionate affinity space" (a type of interest-driven group) built to sustain and extend the game or other curriculum. Games are one good way to do this. There are many others.

The biggest misunderstanding in general is that technologies (like games, television, movies, and books) are good or bad. They are neither. They are good, bad, or indifferent based on how they are used in the contexts in which they are used. By themselves they are inert, though they do have certain affordances. Games for learning work pretty much the same way as books for learning. Kids learn with books or games (or television or computers or movies or pencils) when they are engaged in well designed and good interactions with adults and more advanced peers, interactions that lead to problem solving, meta-critical reflection, and connections to the world and other texts and tools. They learn much less in other circumstances. But we must humbly admit that humans have never yet found a technology more powerful than print. The number of people who have killed others or aided them in the name of a book (the Bible, the Koran, the Turner Diaries, Silent Spring) is vastly larger than those who have killed or helped in the name of a game, movie, or television show. Of course, this may change, but it does little good, in the interim, to pretend books are benign, but games are inherently perilous.

From the start, you were less interested in designing games for teaching than in using principles of game design that are grounded in educational research to reimagine the pedagogical process? To what degree do you think recent projects such as Quest to Learn have embodied those insights?

I see game design and learning design (what a good professional teacher does) as inherently similar activities. The principles of "good games" and of "good learning" are the same, by and large. This is so, of course, because games are just well designed problem-solving spaces with feedback and clear outcomes and that is the most essential thing for real, deep, and consequential learning. These principles include (among others): making clear what identity the learning requires; making clear why anyone would want to do such learning; making clear how the learning will function to lead to problem solving and mastery; making the standards of achievement high and clear, but reachable with persistence; early successes; a low cost of failure that encourages exploration, risk taking, and trying out new styles; lots of practice of basic skills inside larger goal-based and motivating activities; creating and then challenging routine mastery at different levels to move learners upwards; using information and texts "just in time" and "on demand"; performance before competence (doing as a way of learning and being); getting learners to think like designers and to be able themselves to design; encouraging collaboration and affiliation with what is being learned as part of an identity and passion one shares with others; good mentoring by other people, as well as smart tools and technologies.

These principles can be realized in many ways, not one. Chibi-Robo, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Quest to Learn all realize them, though Quest to Learn faces the vast stupidity of our current accountability regime and Chibi-Robo and Yu-Gi-Oh do not.

James Paul Gee is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Education. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990, Third Edition 2007) was one of the founding documents in the formation of the "New Literacy Studies", an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language, learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts. His book An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1999, Second Edition 2005, Third Edition 2011) brings together his work on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings, an approach that has been widely influential over the last two decades. His most recent books both deal with video games, language, and learning. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003, Second Edition 2007) argues that good video games are designed to enhance learning through effective learning principles supported by research in the Learning Sciences. Situated Language and Learning (2004) places video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy and shows how they can help us in thinking about the reform of schools. His most recent books are Good Video Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays (2007); Woman as Gamers: The Sims and 21st Century Learning (2010) and Language and Learning in the Digital World (2011), both written with Elizabeth Hayes. Prof. Gee has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education.

Akoha-- A Direct Action Game?

For those of you interested in the work I've been discussing over the past week or so on civics and participatory culture, let me strongly recommend checking out the blog which is being run by the graduate students associated with our CivicPaths research group. Recent discussions there have included considerations of zombies as potential political metaphors, reflections on the nature of "engaged scholarship," thoughts on what we can learn from the Tea Party movement, and information about playful forms of civic education around economic literacy. Each of these pieces reflects the work of a particular PhD candidate, mostly from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, though some come from the School of Cinematic Arts or elsewhere at USC. The students post about once a week and are doing a good job of reflecting the kinds of conversations we are having with guest speakers, interview subjects, and amongst ourselves as we try to make sense of the intersection of youth, new media, and political participation.

Today, I am re-posting one of the recent blog entries -- some thoughts about how serious gaming might foster greater civic participation by Benjamin Stokes. Stokes has been deeply committed to the concept of games for change for over a decade, first as part of the leadership of the organization with the same name, then as a foundation officer at MacArthur working with Connie Yowell on the Digital Media and Learning Initiative, and now as a PhD candidate at USC. I have been lucky to have chances to work with him in each of these contexts. He's deeply earnest and serious-minded about how the world of play might influence our civic and social lives. He models what I admire most about my new USC cohort -- the ability to merge theoretical rigor with practices designed to have an impact in the world beyond the academy.

Akoha - a Direct Action Game?

by Benjamin Stokes

How can we make everyday civic participation more compelling? There is a new kind of game on the horizon, one that experiments with real-world action. I call these "direct action games," because they restructure acts like volunteering, activist training, and charitable giving. One prototype is Akoha, which started as a card game, then reinvented itself online, and last year launched a mobile app -- largely off the radar of traditional civics organizations.

At first glance, Akoha looks like a media hub for some do-it-yourself Boy Scouts. Their website reveals thousands of participants, many reporting success with real-world "missions," from going vegetarian for a day, to debating the "I Have a Dream" speech. The actual missions often take place offline, but are only rewarded if documented with photos and stories posted online or via iPhone.

I think Akoha deserves real attention as a working example -- despite some prominent flaws. We desperately need concrete projects if we want to actually rethink civic life. The use of games to help "fix reality" has been a hot topic these past few weeks, thanks to the great traction of Jane McGonigal's new book. Yet the missions of Akoha are more straightforward than most of Jane's "alternate reality games," which tend to have futuristic narratives, puppet masters behind the scenes, and a preference for crowd-sourcing. Thus I propose we look to Akoha and its more raw building blocks to think about direct action games.

Participants in Akoha are mostly adults, but the ages vary widely. The experience is deeply social, as friends create missions for each other, and share their stories. More formal recognition for participation comes as players earn badge-like awards -- such as "multi-talented" for those who complete one mission in every possible category.

Most of Akoha does not look or sound civic. Only one of the mission categories explicitly addresses "social causes." The other nine concern self-actualization in various forms, from "health and well-being" to family time, engaging with popular culture, and the discovery of travel. Is this breadth an upside or downside? That depends on your civic goals, which might include:

1. Fostering citizen journalism, as participants report on civic themes in their communities

2. Informal civic learning, as participants reflect on their civic experiences in new ways through stories and pictures

3. Building social capital, as participants create new ties across traditional social groups

These civic goals may be structurally possible with Akoha, but they are rhetorically hidden. Even as Akoha's missions bring people into the real world, they avoid the "we are purely civic" framing that occurs on many activist and volunteering websites. For the Akoha community, it's OK to admit that you are mainly there to have fun, or are trying to improve yourself (and not simply sacrificing for others). Consider this screenshot from the social cause mission "I Am Not an Island":

Participation begins with the usual click of a button, yet the specific language of "Play Now" differs sharply from the tool focus of civic action websites (e.g., "Take Action Now;" or "Sign the Petition"). But what exactly does it mean to 'play' Akoha? Is it a game?

Certainly Akoha is recreational, and like all games, there are rules. In particular, participants must describe what they did to complete a mission, and thus must certify that they have met the terms set forth by the original mission author. Points and profiles track progress across the Akoha system. All players' profiles feature their picture, personal statement, and a quantitative scoreboard -- including their "player level," number of missions completed, and awards. For a sense of what this looks like, here is one particularly high-achieving player, chosen from among the more than 10,000-plus who have registered:

This public profile has evolved much as the community has coalesced. Just a few months prior, the player described himself in much more formal terms, emphasizing his offline profession -- a "freelance Air conditioning and Refrigeration engineer by qualification and profession," his belief in God, and how he found the site via Reader's Digest. Now, in this recent screenshot, the player has removed his backstory, and describes instead how his Akoha playing strategy is driven by his personality. His refined self-presentation aligns with the pragmatics of the Akoha community, which focuses on choosing missions and writing stories -- both depending more on personality than professional accomplishments outside the community.

Akoha is a designed system, and so I recently interviewed Alex Eberts, co-founder of Akoha and an influential force behind its design. He spoke of his desire to find "psychological drivers that are common to the real-world, and to game play." His designs were informed by self-determination theory, which Eberts first came across in a session at the Game Developers Conference. (Academics, pay heed - these are not the usual dissemination channels for civic theory.)

Self-determination theory describes how human motivation is driven by basic human needs, including competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Altruism is not on the list of needs, just as it is not central to Akoha's rhetoric. Pushing beyond traditional altruism in civic life is a theme that cuts across many of the projects we are tracking in Henry Jenkins' Civic Paths research group -- from the pop pleasure of Harry Potter, to the joy of diamonds as a precursor to political talk. Repositioning altruism is a battle, with fault lines between traditional civic organizations that have failed to engage youth, and new civic organizations that have failed to connect to politics. (See, for example, Bennett's content analysis (pdf) of youth civic websites.)

Connecting games with the real-world necessitates a basic immediacy. This immediacy also distinguishes Akoha from most civic games, which focus on education for future civic life or future civic action. Here, the action and education are both in the present tense, which increases authenticity and the satisfaction of impact. The iPhone app for Akoha, released this past summer, underscores their immediacy -- here is a set of screen shots they provide:

Using the mobile interface, Akoha missions can be documented on a bus in real-time, or browsed from a neighborhood park. Their mobile tech is fairly basic, consisting mainly of reskinning their existing website, with little use of GPS or other mobile sensor data. As a result, Akoha's mobile interface is only minimally aware of the user's location.

Place matters, especially in civics. (The neighborhood of our birth strongly predetermines a host of life opportunities, from income to education and governance.) This is an area for Akoha to grow. By improving their mobile support for place, its implications for civic activity would be more immediate and profound. In particular, Akoha might offer support for filtering missions for one's own neighborhood, or connecting with players who are geographically nearby for joint missions, or simply allowing missions to release new clues when players arrive at specific locations.

Games are still discussed as individual indulgences. Yet increasingly, games are recognized as social forces. This is especially true for Akoha, where the social construction of value emerges over time, as a participant's "friends" share stories about their missions and accomplishments. Different communities are likely to form over time. It is not yet clear whether Akoha is dominated by preexisting networks of offline friends, or by more interest-driven networks of people who gather around a shared passion. (This difference matters - see the ethnography of Ito et al.) Yet if Akoha can introduce strangers based on activity interests, the platform might transcend the left/right regression of civic talk that is so feared online by Sunstein.

Reimagining place is important civic work, just like the reimagining of societal values, tax policy, and even collective heroes. The value of games is to restructure this civic work around different rules - intrinsic motivations of the game, aligned with the desires of everyday people. Sometimes people want an excuse to be more civic. In my interview with Eberts, he confessed that one of the big surprises for his team was how much everyday people wanted Akoha to be even more civic. He hinted that future Akoha versions might well expand toward the civic.

Even as mobile has reshaped the everyday experiences of place and time, so too we may see game-like activities begin to restructure the experience of public participation. Yet Akoha remains an "edge phenomenon" to both the civic and gaming communities. In the first case, nonprofits are still trying to understand games for training, let alone for direct action; in the second, the independent gaming community is struggling to understand games for art, let alone games that improve the real world. Akoha is likely to be seen as a risky investment for funders in either community. Thus the evolving Akoha business model may be as crucial as its innovations in civic participation. For example, Eberts hints that corporate engagement may be an area of growth for such games.

Beyond Akoha, it might be useful to define a framework for direct action games. In a panel I organized last year at the Games for Change Festival, we explored the concept, and its historic manifestations; fellow panelists were game designer Tracy Fullerton and activist/scholar Stephen Duncombe (see embed below for video of the panel).

As we seek to define new templates for civic games, cases like Akoha help us prioritize research questions, including:

1. Can direct action games help us re-imagine civic activity under a different set of rules, solution frames, and feedback loops for engagement? (McGonigal's aforementioned book nicely explores several of these philosophical questions.)

2. If only a portion of the activity is strictly civic, how do we compare to more traditional and pure civic engagement?

3. When is it appropriate to teach citizens how to "game the system" of democracy, to "win" in Akoha, or to rewrite the rules of local politics?

These issues will only become more important in coming months, as civic action goes digital and game culture grows. By examining cases like Akoha, we can develop frameworks for "direct action games" that better structure our civic designs.

"Deep Media," Transmedia, What's the Difference?: An Interview with Frank Rose (Part One)

Wired contributing editor Frank Rose is releasing a new book this month which will be of interest to many of my regular readers -- The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the Way We Tell Stories. It is a highly readable, deeply engaging account of shifts in the entertainment industry which have paved to way for more expansive, immersive, interactive forms of fun. He's talked to key players -- from Will Wright and Jeff Gomez to James Cameron and George Lucas -- and brings back their thinking about the changing media landscape. As he wrote me, "at various points in my career I've focused on technology and at other times on entertainment, but when I joined Wired in 1999 I started writing about both together." Rose has been exploring some of the key concepts from the book through his blog as he's been working through the project. I suspect when I teach my transmedia storytelling class again at the USC Cinema School next fall, this book will be on the syllabus, since it manages to condense down many of the key conversations being held around these much discussed topic into language which is accessible and urgent.

When I first heard of his concept of "deep media," during a talk Rose gave at South by Southwest, I was intrigued by its relationship with what I've called transmedia entertainment. And in fact, I've been asked about the relationship many times and didn't really know what to say. So, naturally, given a chance to interview Rose for the blog, that's where I started. It sounds like his own thoughts on the relationship have evolved over time and in interesting ways. As the interview continues, we talk about world-building, the relationship between games and stories, the interweaving of marketing and storytelling, and the impact of 9/11 on interactive entertainment.

You write in the book about what you call "deep media." What do you see as the core characteristics of deep media? How do you see your concept relating to others being deployed right now such as transmedia or crossmedia?

To me it's mainly a question of emphasis. Are we focusing on the process or the goal? Transmedia, or crossmedia, puts the emphasis on a new process of storytelling: How do you tell a story across a variety of different media? Deep media puts the focus on the goal: To enable members of the audience (for want of a better term) to delve into a story at any level of depth they like, to immerse themselves in it. Not that this was fully thought out when I started--the term was suggested by a friend in late 2008 as a name for my blog, and when I looked it up online I saw that it had been used by people like Nigel Hollis, the chief analyst at Millward Brown, so I adopted it.

That said, I think the terms are more or less interchangeable. I certainly subscribe to the seven core concepts of transmedia as you've laid them out. I also think we're at an incredibly transitional point in our culture, and terms like "deep media" and "transmedia" are needed to describe a still-evolving way of telling stories. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if both terms disappeared in 15-20 years as this form of storytelling becomes ubiquitous and ultimately taken for granted.

Throughout the book, it seems you see these creative changes towards a more immersive and expansive entertainment form being fueled by the emergence of games. Why do you think computer and video games have been such a "disruptive" influence on traditional practice in other entertainment sectors?

Because they engage the audience so directly, and because they've been around long enough to have a big influence on other art forms. Movies like Inception, as you've observed, are constructed very much like a game, with level upon level upon level and a demanding, puzzle-box approach to narrative. If you're a gamer, you know intuitively how to approach this. If you're not, well, good luck.

One of the reasons I started this book was that I'd begun to meet screenwriters who'd gone from TV to games and back again, and when they came back it was with a different approach to narrative--moving across multiple levels, thrusting you directly into the story and letting you figure it out for yourself, that kind of thing. But at first I just had this vague sense that games and stories were blurring into each other--that in some way that I didn't fully understand, games were becoming stories and stories were becoming games. I got obsessed with trying to understand the relationship between the two. I spoke with a lot of game designers, but it wasn't until I got to Will Wright that I found someone who could really answer my question.

We all know that games are in some sense a rehearsal for life--a simulation that models the real world. That's why kids who never play games tend not to pick up the skills they need to navigate adult existence. Wright said that at bottom, stories are an abstraction of life too--an abstraction we share with one another so we can all make sense of the world. This took on added depth for me when I stumbled across, in a neuroscience paper of all places, an 1884 exchange between Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson on the nature of fiction. James described it as an "impression of life." Stevenson countered that life is "monstrous, infinite, illogical" while art is "neat, finite, self-contained"--a model, in other words. Steven Pinker took this a step further a century or so later when he described fiction as "a kind of thought experiment." Jane Austen novels? Rehearsals for womanhood in Regency England. All those Hollywood disaster movies? Rehearsals for the apocalypse. And so on.

So stories and games are intimately connected because they're two sides of the same impulse. Stories give rise to play, and play gives rise to stories. Think of Star Wars, and all those action figures, and the fan fiction that came out of it--story transmuted to play and then to story again.

The big question now is, will games and stories actually merge? Will we ever have the experience of being at the center of a carefully constructed dramatic narrative? That's certainly the way things seem to be headed, but I'm not convinced that anybody in the business today will achieve it. Probably there's a nerdy freshman at Harvard or USC who will. My advice would be, watch out for the Winklevosses.

Another key idea running through the book is the idea that entertainment is now designed to be engaged by collectives, often of the kinds that form in and through social network sites. What are some of the consequences of perceiving audiences as collectives of people who interact with each other and with the producers rather than as aggregates of isolated eyeballs?

I'm not entirely sure, and I don't think anybody else knows either. It's too new, it's too different from anything we've ever experienced before. It's not that we haven't had participatory entertainment--we've had game shows on TV ever since the late '40s, and on radio before that. But the idea of people working together to "solve" or interpret a story at any scale beyond the water cooler is unprecedented, simply because no technology has enabled it before. Will it change storytelling? It already has. Inception, Lost--because its narrative was so convoluted, Lost implicitly demanded that people connect online to figure it out. No one ever dared do that on TV before. Does this herald some emerging facet of connected existence? Definitely. How will it change us as a society? Too early to say.

Frank Rose is the author of The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Genera-tion is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories, to be published in February 2011 by W.W. Norton, and a contributing editor at Wired, where he has written extensively about media and entertainment. Before joining Wired in 1999, he worked as a contributing writer at Fortune and as a contributing editor at Esquire and at Travel + Leisure. He is also the author of The Agency, an unauthorized history of the oldest and at one time most successful talent agency in Hollywood, and West of Eden, a 1989 best-seller about the ouster of Steve Jobs from Apple, now available in an updated edition.

DIY Media 2010: Video and Gaming Culture (Part Three)

This is the fifth in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following is an interview with Matteo Bittanti, a Social Science Research Associate at Stanford Humanities Lab. Your curator's statement sets up the opposition between the way game videos might be seen in the traditional art world and the ways they are perceived in the fan world. Yet, one could argue that the Machinima community in particular has been developing its own art world -- including festivals, exhibitions, critical authorities, and canons. What can you tell us about how this alternative art world functions and what role it plays in shaping the aesthetic evaluation of the videos you are sharing with us?

As artworlds, Machinima and Game Art have had different gestation periods. The former is actually younger - the first examples can be found in the mid-Nineties, but artists have been experimenting with games - at various levels - since the Eighties. Nevertheless, machinima - as an artworld - has reached a fascinating level of complexity. Although the vast majority of machinima productions are still self-referential - therefore primarily intended for the gaming community, i.e. the connoisseurs who possess the necessary gaming capital to recognize and appreciate the intertextual connections between the game and its visual commentary - there's also a significant production of machinima intended for different crowds and contexts - art galleries, new media arts festivals and even film festivals (mainly because for long time, film people thought of games as "interactive cinema" - an oxymoron, obviously, a contradiction in terms, a classic example of the "rearview mirror" syndrome, that is, they could only understand/relate to those elements of games that resembled film, which became the trademarks of the medium itself - a major strengths but also its Achille's heel (I'm just trivializing what Espen Aarseth said, much more convincingly, here).

Machinima thus represented a good trade-off since what we are dealing with here is basically (non-interactive) digital animation. If machinima is "an animated cartoon" then it can be featured - read: tolerated - alongside film festivals, media art events, retrospectives etc. That second order of machinima, the machinima that flirts with the Contemporary Art World rather than the Videogame world, includes artists like Frenchmen Benjamin Nuel and Yann Bauquesne.

Performance in Counter Strike from Foke on Vimeo.

The latter is the author of a series of performances in Counter-Strike that I find absolutely brilliant but most fans of the game would dismiss with an irreverent "Huh?/WTF?". Incidentally, Bauquesne is the same artist who created Violent Waste (2010), a sculpture of Super Mario entirely made of cartridges - pun intended.

Not too long ago, Salman Rushdie said that the best way to free Iran is to drop gameboys and bigmacs", basically comparing videogames and junk food to weapons of mass distraction/destruction. In this sense, Bauquesne's scultpures acquires another layer of meaning, both literal and allegorical. Anyway...

Again, the context is everything: it's interesting to see how the 'same" artwork is received, for example, by the readers of Kotaku and by the readers of Flash Art/Artforum etc...

To answer your question, Henry: I am afraid that if we over-emphasize the text over the con-text and the pre-text) we risk of losing sight of the real importance of machinima. That is, although the essence of a medium cannot be considered independently of its technical aspects, the question concerning technology is not exclusively technological. I'm more interested in understanding the ways people use, think and talk about a medium.

Example. When John Hillcoat, the director of The Road (2009) created Red Dead Redemption. The Man from Blackwater, a machinima based on Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar Games, 2009) he was basically legitimizing the medium (machinima) in a broader context while simultaneaously promoting the game.

There was a time when several machinima practitioners believed that machinima was going to revolutionize digital filmmaking. It was around the time Tom Pallotta directed a video for Zero 7 in machinima-form, "In The Waiting Line". That scenario has not materialized (yet) and perhaps it does not really matter.

What matters is that right now there are many ideas of what machinima is and what machinima does - machinima as an artform per se, machinima as an inexpensive yet versatile alternative to digital filmaking, machinima as video commentary about gaming culture for gamers etc. All these ideas are competing with each other right now, but in the future one or possibly two may become dominant and redefine the perceived meaning of machinima. A Kuhnian paradigm shift, if you will.

In just a few months, MIT Press will release The Machinima Reader, edited by two scholars who have written extensively on this topic: Henry Lowood and Michael Nitsche. I believe this collection of essays will simultaneously answers many questions about the nature of the medium and raise new ones.

Given these two parallel art worlds, is it possible to define an "avant garde" and "popular aesthetic" for thinking about the videos which have been produced through and about games?

I love to repeat myself, so I would simply say that the context matters more than the text. That is, the same artifact could be perceived as "avant-garde" or "popular aesthetics" depending on factors like "where", "how", "who", "why" etc. Think of Cory Arcangel's entire ouevre...

Moreover, a video distributed via YouTube prompts a certain response and attracts a certain crowd (also, for an artist to choose vimeo over YouTube as a channel of distribution has political rather than simply technical/design implications). But if I take the same exact video and show it in a physical art gallery, it will attract a vastly different feedback. Plus, cultural and social biases play a significant role as well in defining the nature of what we consume.

I'll give you an example. A friend of mine, let's call her D., recently told me about her experience at Leonard Cohen's concert in Oakland. D. was born in Poland but lived in the US most of her life. Nevertheless, she still has strong ties with her home country. Once Polish always Polish, so to speak. Anyway, the Canadian singer was playing at the Oracle Arena. His first concert in NorCal after a long hiatus. He's 77 - in great shape - but still, 77. Now, D., who practically worships Cohen, at one point took out her cellphone to take a picture of the living legend performing on stage. The man seated next to hear - yes, the audience was seated - yes, at a rock concert - tapped on her shoulder to tell her that she was "Being obnoxious and should be "Ashamed of herself". She also got the stink eye from many other attendees around her (average age: 50-60+) and felt mortified.

When she went home, the first thing she did was opening the browser to check out the videos from previous gigs - Cohen played in Poland as well. The European Eastern crowd (which ranged from twenty-somethings to fifty-somethings) was dancing like crazy, and everybody was taking pictures and recording videos that eventually found their way on YouTube. Thus one act that was considered "disrespectful" and "blasphemous" in one context, was perceived as a heartfelt manifestation of appreciation in another: the more videos and pictures the crowd captures of a performer, the higher the level of appreciation.

The point that I am trying to make is that although Cohen performed the same songs, the reaction from the crowds, the locale, the written/unwritten rules of conduct changed the very nature of the performance. In Oakland, the concert was a religious experience, in Poland a Dionysian party.

Another example. Last Saturday I attended the screening of Mahler on the Couch (Felix Adlon, Percy Adlon, 2010), a film about the life of the famous composer. The most interesting aspect of an otherwise forgettable/predictable story of love and betrayal is a somehow minor episode, that takes place at the very end [MINOR SPOILER AHEAD], when Mahler is fired after a ten-year tenure as the director of the Vienna Opera House. The crowd is outraged by the fact that the new director immediately changed the rules of attendance, forbidding the audience to clap and chat. "Opera used to be fun," one of the enraged spectator says, "Now it's only art".

One of the reasons why the new rules of conduct were imposed so abruptly has more to do with the changing media landscape of the early 20th century than with personal politics. Opera - which used to be a popular form of entertainment - was being challenged by film - a medium still in infancy, still perceived as a technical novelty, a childish, somehow juvenile pastime (Gunning's "Cinema of attractions"), deemed "artistically" inferior to theater by the intelligentsia of the day (Pastrone's Cabiria and Griffith's Birth of the Nation were still a few years away).

So in order to distinguish itself from the increasingly popular new medium, opera "changed" with the introduction of new rules of engagement, new behaviors, new codes of conduct. It became "only art". The ways we interact - or are expected to interact - with a text change the nature of the text.

Let me give you one last example: Second Life. Second Life looked like a videogame, behaved like a videogame, and yet it was not a videogame. You know why? Because gamers hated it. They found it pointless, cumbersome, boring. They checked out for about ten minutes and then left. This is exactly why the art community found it intriguing and exciting. Finally they had a playspace they could tinker with. Heck, even Chris Marker became a believer. And they did a lot of interesting things. Yet, in many cases, the kind of artists' performances/practices in Second Life were not essentially different from gamers' performances/practices in game-spaces. Example. Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101's "Synthetic Performances" (2007-) is a series of re-enactments of famous art performances (e.g. Marina Abramovic's Imponderabilia, Vito Acconci's Seedbed, Chris Burden's Shoot) in Second Life. How do they differ - conceptually - from gamers' remakes in LittleBigPlanet? I'm talking about Duckhunt, Pitfall and a million of others? Yes, it's a rhetorical question.

You seem drawn towards the expressive or performative dimensions of games-related videos rather than the narrative. There has been a long debate in game studies between approaches focused on narratives and approaches focused on game play. Can we see the aesthetic distinction you are making here as reflecting this larger debate about the nature of games as a medium?

I followed that debate from its inception which means that I am very old. It was a clever strategy to put game studies on the academic radar, a perfect example of agenda-setting. It worked well: the Ivory Tower discovered digital gaming, which means we could talk about games without feeling ashamed as long as we - the game scholars, another oxymoron, a lovely one - made the "right" connections with Deleuze, Guattari, Eco, Baudrillard and company. And we could also explore, and map, and colonize the new "virgin" territory, which is always fun.

And we laughed and cried and sat on the edge of our seats for years while the Scandinavian school of Ludologists fought its battles against the US Army of Digital Narratologists. I loved those conversations. (For some reason, I'm thinking of Bryan Ferry's "More than This: "It was fun for a while/There was no way of knowing/Like a dream in the night/Who can say where we're going?"). And we all cheered when the armistice was declared.

Although we now pretend to be looking at other issues, that seminal diatribe never really disappeared, like all major diatribes (e.g. "iconoclasts vs. iconolaters"). Mutatis mutantis.

Having said that, what I find exciting is that what we are seeing right now is the emergence of new game aesthetics, brought on by a new generation of designers and artists that use games as a form of expression, as raw material. Young, talented individuals that attended art/design schools and universities that have strong programs in digital media (both theory and practice). "Hands-on" students who read Roland Barthes alongside Judith Butler, Bill Moggridge & Andre Bazin, Michel de Certeau & Erwin Panofsky, Slavoj Zizek and Janet Murray.

Nobody is really surprised by the fact that several influential game critics awarded a tiny, independent production called Limbo, created by a Danish studio called PlayDead, as their favorite game of the year. On the surface, Limbo is a simple side-scroller action/platform game. Deep down, it is a reflection on the human condition, delivered with a black & white, sepia tone aesthetics, minimal soundtrack, etc. etc.

Equally interesting, but on the game criticism side, is the impressive work done by an art student from Washington State, Cory Schmitz, who was able to turn his school projects in some of the most exciting paper-based game/art criticism I've seen in a long while - EXP and The Controller. While everybody is hyping the iPad - tablets and e-reader - here we are, celebrating a cellulose-based lascivious fanzine about gaming! Ha! So, to make a long story short, the gaming as a medium is changing dramatically and it's not really about rules vs. stories anymore. Or maybe it is. Who knows. We are just beginning a new journey into gaming. "A journey which along the way will bring to you new colour, new dimension, new value."

Grassroots video making around games has, as your selection illustrates, been profoundly shaped by specific gaming platforms -- from Quake to Spore and LittleBigPlanet. What can you tell us about how the videomakers represented here work within or against the constraints of those platforms?

Today more than ever, the constraints are more political than technical. That is, while the PC is (still) a (relatively) open platform, consoles (PS3, Xbox 360, Wii) are (still, relatively) closed systems, tightly controlled by the respective manufacturers, which can considerably influence/limit the creative efforts of the game community. The history of the PlayStation 3, for instance, is marked by the continuous struggle between the hackers - that jail-braking the console on a weekly basis - and the Japanese company, which is doing all it can to suppress such "illicit" operations (when the users get tough, the users get sued).

This perfectly exemplifies the dynamics between tactics and strategies described by de Certeau. And the struggles between the producers and the users, the way a company reacts to such creative/disruptive efforts, defines the very nature of that technology - the way you talk, or not talk, about a technology, a feature, etc. So, a hacker who tinkers with the Microsoft Kinect is a creative genius because Microsoft tolerates or even encourages such tinkering (within limits). A hacker who unlocks the PlayStation 3 is "a pirate" and a criminal. "Terrorists" vs. "Freedom fighters": reality is always defined by who gets to call the shots.

It's obvious that if I want to create something using LittleBigPlanet as my plaftorm/canvas I need to be aware that my creation could be erased overnight without any warning, that I might be censored by Sony for "copyright infringement", "offensive content" etc etc. whereas if I mod/hack a PC game, I can have multiple outlets for displaying my creations. I can do interesting and potentially controversial things like a first-person shooter starring Jesus Christ or simulate the battle in Waco, Texas and play a deathmatch game at the MoMa and elsewhere. Nevertheless, there are several levels of LittleBigPlanet that really pushed the boundaries - from the Little Big Cremaster cycle to the re-enactment of 9/11 - that are just waiting to be "discovered" by the Artworld.

Much of the early Machiniema content was focused specifically on the concerns of the gaming community. Yet, many of your examples here connect games-based videoing to larger internet "memes". What does this suggest about the relative porousness of the cultural communities represented here? What points of contact exists between these games-based video-makers and other kinds of grassroots cultural production in the era of YouTube?

There is a high degree of porousness between mainstream pop culture and the gaming community because today (almost) everything is one click away, instantly accessible 24/7, and content migrates easily from one platform to another, from one screen to the next. In the age of television flow, channel hopping, "500-channels and nothing to watch" etc., writers and artists invented cut-ups and similar techniques. Today such production is not limited to niches anymore.

In the era of convergence, media literacy has expanded considerably. Finally, thanks to Windows and Facebook geeks became powerful and respected within our society - their fashion, language, and idiosyncrasies/inferiority complexes migrated to the mainstream. Steve Jobs is a rockstar. Julian Assange is the man of the year...

To quote Jen from the I.T. Crowd (S01, e01), "Ideas are coming, things are happening here". To answer your question, we could certainly come up with a taxonomy of memes - scholars fetishize taxonomies - or a series of case studies - economists love case studies - to get a sense on how digital gaming is influencing other grassroots cultural productions.

Example:

Case one. All Your Base Are Belong to Us (1998). A game-based video that becomes an internet meme. By game-based I mean that its "materiality", i.e. the phrase "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" and game footage used came from a videogame, namely the the 1989 side-scrolling arcade shooter Zero Wing, itself rather niche within the game community dare I say.

Case two. The Downfall/Hitler Meme (2006). In this case, a Spanish game player appropriates a sequence of a film, namely Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004), to express his disappointment about a videogame, Flight Simulator X by Microsoft. The video spreads first within the game community - spawning other game-related spoofs/parodies/responses (my favorite, "Hitler Gets Banned from Xbox Live"), then goes "global", and, bingo!, next thing you know is that The New York Times is writing about it.

Case three. The Fail meme (2003?). Like "All Your Base Are Belong to Us", here's an example of a game-based term, "fail" (from the Engrish line "YOU FAIL IT" from the 1998 Neo Geo video game Blazing Star -also very niche) which was used - right from the inception - to illustrate, visually, examples of failures - failures tout court, not necessarily game-based.

...But we should also remember that there are memes in the Game Art world as well, but they are not necessarily called memes, but "homages". One recurrent theme among Game Artists to is to recreate a gallery or a museum in a game space with the explicit goal of destroying a) the space itself, b) the artworks it contains, c) eventually, the artists/curators/spectators. The origin of this meme, pardon, theme, can be traced back to ArsDoom (1995), Created in 1995 by Orhan Kipcak and Reini Urban, ArsDoom was shown at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz the same year. Using the Doom II engine and Autodesk' AutoCAD software, Kipcak and Urban created a virtual copy of the Brucknerhaus' exhibition hall and invited artists to create or submit virtual artworks that could be displayed in the new map. Armed with a shooting cross, a chainsaw or a brush the player could kill the artists and destroy all the artworks on display.

Others point to Palle Torsson and Tobias Bernstrup's Museum Meltdown (1996) as the main culprit. These two enfants terribles - at that time art students in Scandinavia - created a mod of Duke Nuke'm 3D that allowed the "player" to destroy everything that moved - and did not move, like paintings - on the screen. This idea spread like fire in the Game Art community, and became an almost required practice. A playful subversion the rules of the Artworld by using videogames became a rite of passage among art students... Among the others: Chris Reilly's Everything I Do is Art, But Nothing I Do Makes Any Difference, Part II Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gallery(2006), Michiel Van Der Zanden's Museum Killer (2008) and Christopher Wyant's Team Fortress 2 Ceramics (2011).

In short, endless fun.

Matteo Bittanti is an Adjunct Professor in the Visual Studies Program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland. He writes about technology, film, games, and popular culture for various publications (WIRED, Rolling Stone, LINK, Duellanti). His online projects include GameScenes, a blog about game-based art.

DIY Media 2010: Video and Gaming Culture (Part Two)

This is the fifth in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following selection of videos was curated by Matteo Bittanti, a Social Science Research Associate at Stanford Humanities Lab.

LittleBigRevenge

Seakitten Collective (Belgium)

2009

genre: the video uses a blend of real footage and in-game footage

keywords: LittleBigPlanet, fandom, comedy

LittleBigRevenge uses a blend of real footage and in-game footage of Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet in a creative and engaging way The video, starring the game avatars Sackboy and Sackgirl, asks the viewers "what would happen if a diplomatic mistake causes [sackboys] to take revenge on humanity? A Belgian couple finds out right in their living room..."

"MTBig Planet"

DanteNeverDies (Spain)

2009

genre: machinima music video

keywords: Music video, Montage, parody

An irresistible spoof of famous dance music videos created with Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet. PlayList: Flatbeat - Mr Oizo; Sing it Back - Moloko; Satisfaction - Benny Bennasi; Destination Calabria - Alex Gaudino; Right Here Right Now - FatboySlim; Who's Your Daddy - Benny Bennassi; Starlight - Supermen Lovers; DANCE - Justice; My Boobs are Ok - Lene Alexandre; Hey Boy; Hey Girl - The Chemical Brothers; Call on me - Eric Prydz; Invaders Must Die - The Prodigy; One More Time - Daft Punk.

"LittleDaftPunk"

DanteNeverDies (Spain)

2009

genre: machinima music video

keywords: Music video, Montage, parody

A visual medley of Draft Punk's most celebrated songs recreated with Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet by DanteNeverDies.

"I'm On a Boat"

Matthew Gallant (Canada)

2009

genre: machinima music video

keywords: Machinima Music Video, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (Nintendo), Saturday Night Live

Matthew Gallant mixes Saturday Night Live with Zelda and creates the (explicit) Wind Waker version of I'm On a Boat. In his own words: "Like all stupid ideas, it began on the Internet"

"Half-Life2: All sounds replaced with my voice"

-Trase- aKa Patcher aKa Tr45e (Ukraine)

2009

genre: Gameplay footage

keywords: BHuman beat Box, Mod,

The author replaced 1327 sound files with his voice ("I did not edit any of them, its fresh from the microphone"). The result is incredibly funny and started a new meme on the internt. (He left untouched: "Ambient noises like wind; some zombie voices; character voices (it would sound dumb); maybe i missed some minor physics like a trap door hidden somewhere in ravenholm and no one ever opens it").

"Infinite Mario AI -Long Level"

Robin Baumgarten (United Kingdom)

2009

genre: Gameplay footage, speedrun

keywords: speedrun, skill, AI, music

This incredible video won the Super Mario Competition in September 2009 which invited players to submit their game performances. Robin Baumgarten, a PhD student at Imperial College, London, produced an enhanced run which pulls off a major coup halfway through when it walljumps out of a pit. In his own words: In this version of Mario, when you're jumping while sliding on a wall, you jump backwards and upwards away from it").

"Project Blackjack: Trials HD - Stunt Video"

BLKJ Son (United States)

2009

genre: Gameplay footage with Music (Bonnie Tayler's "I Need a Hero")

keywords: Skill, Trials HD, montage

Videos stunts performed in Trials HD, a motorbike game available on Xbox Live arcade. The author - BLKJ Son - presumably filmed his television screen and edited the video adding a rock soundtrack (the screams and wows from the player can be heard as well). BLKJ Son's description: " Trials HD is the sickest game ever. You know how we get down ... BLKJ Son". I law the "raw footage" nature of this video.

"What A Wonderful L4D"

James McVinnie (originally from the UK, living in Canada)

2009

genre Edited gameplay Footage with soundtrack

keywords: Gameplay, montage, music

This video creates a powerful cognitive dissonance by juxtaposing scenes from the ultra-violent horror game Left 4 Dead (Valve) and Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World". The effect is similar to Microsoft's famous TV ad for "Gears of Wars" featuring Gary Jule's "Mad World".

In his own words: "I play Left 4 Dead waaaay too much. It deserves a vid. Please ignore the lag spikes and such, i rushed this out over 2 days and didn't really have time to fix up all the bugs. The reason Louis doesnt make much of an appearance is the fact that i'm always Louis, so he was doing all the camera work."

What a Wonderful Left 4 Dead (Machinima) from James McVinnie on Vimeo.

"The Adventures of Ledo and iX"

Emil Carmichael (US)

2009

genre Game-Inspired Animation

keywords: Homage, 16-bit aesthetics, lo-fi

The Adventures of Ledo & Ix online is a low-fi (but conceptually rich) five minute faux-16-bit short by Emily 'Kid Can Drive' Carmichael.

In His Own Words: "In many ways, Ledo and Ix are just like us. Sleeping under the stars makes them philosophical. Sometimes they wonder if they should have chosen different careers. They avoid dens of monsters when possible. But in one crucial way, they're different--they're fantasy adventurers in an extremely small-scale video game epic. What exactly do video game characters do when we're not around? What if they chat and bicker like we do, wonder and dream like we do, feel boredom and dread like we do, despite being 48 pixels tall? A sort of eight-bit tribute to Waiting for Godot, The Adventures of Ledo and Ix uses the visual vocabulary of retro video games to explore the human fear of both the unknown and the known."

"Creepy Mario 64"

LightningWolf3 (US)

2009

genre Manipulated Game Footage of Super Mario 64 (Nintendo)

keywords: Gameplay Footage

A manipulated version of Super Mario 64 that evokes David Lynch's cinematic nightmares.

Matteo Bittanti is an Adjunct Professor in the Visual Studies Program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland. He writes about technology, film, games, and popular culture for various publications (WIRED, Rolling Stone, LINK, Duellanti). His online projects include GameScenes, a blog about game-based art.

DIY Media 2010: Video and Gaming Culture (Part One)

This is the fifth in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following is the curator's statement from Matteo Bittanti, a Social Science Research Associate at Stanford Humanities Lab.
I have always been fascinated by the tension between different forms of cultural productions, by the ongoing diatribe between the artistic nature of gaming, which to me has much more to do with the notion of gaming as a set of practices rather than gaming as a specific set of artifacts. That is: I am more interested in understanding the broad range of gaming performances by different social players than defining/defending a canon. A key assumption is that there is nothing intrinsically artistic about the medium of the videogame - or any medium/artform for that matter, although one could argue that "interactivity" is the special ingredient that does the magic for digital games. Whatever. It all comes down to rhetoric. As for art, well, it is simply a label, a socially constructed definition that serves a political, ideological, and economic agenda.

My selection for the DIY festival juxtaposed two forms of game-related productions that are simultaneously close - in terms of aesthetics - and distant - in relation to their cultural positioning. There are several fan-made productions -e.g. the LittleBigPlanet music videos - that have limited "artistic" appeal, that is, are extremely popular and well received among gamers but ignored/dismissed in the "official" artworld - that is, the marketplace that values sharks in formaldehyde and museum sit-ins performances. And there are a few "artistic" productions that are highly regarded among art practitioners, but unknown/dismissed or even derided by "gamers". There are two set of mutually exclusive forms of capital at play in two different factions/subculture: the "gaming capital" of gamers celebrating skill-based performances (e.g. speedruns, stunts, replays, machinima that expand/reflect upon/joke about the narrative world of the games they are based on, and so on) and the "cultural capital" of the artworld - that rewards marketable ideas and intents (e.g. illustrating, via a specific installation to be installed in a specific context - an art gallery - the 'essence of the gaming medium', 'its effects on human psyche', 'the commodification of leisure', 'the game of identity', 'the blurring between the so-called real and the so-called 'virtual'', 'hacking/modding as a political subversion' etc. etc.).

While they both use digital games a platform/canvas//raw material for creative expression, their nature as fan-art objects or artistic artifacts is not specifically defined by technical craft, but by a dispositif/apparatus that is both cultural (thus social =>human-based) and technical (machine-based). A network that comprises both human beings in various contexts (intellectual production/criticism/consumption) and automated delivery systems (e.g. Youtube, vimeo, flickr etc). Just to clarify: I am not suggesting that a speedrun is not artistic. The matter to me is almost irrelevant. I am just saying that until an influential art critic demonstrates that a speedrun is "artistic" by placing it in a socially recognized artistic context (e.g. a museum, an art gallery, a prestigious film festival), a speedrun will remain confined to a fan-only context. The context is everything. If I can have my speedrun on display at the Gagosian, Saatchi, or at the MoMa, I can sell it in the market place for $$$ - if that's my goal. Clearly, in order to sell my speedrun for $$$, I need the aforementioned influential art critic(s) that will justify the market value of my piece with a convincing critical assessment that will explain/justify/make up its cultural relevance to a broader public, a public unfamiliar with - and likely uninterested in - the conventions/language/aesthetics of the medium.

This also applies to those videogame-based artworks that have acquired weight (= market value) in the "official" artworld - I'm thinking about works by artists such as Cory Arcangel, Miltos Manetas, Joseph Delappe, Feng Mengbo and more (but not many more). For instance, I consider Miltos Manetas the first machinima-maker not because he was the first one to make machinima - today being "first" only matters if you're writing comments online, and especially if you are a troll - but because he was the first one to have his game-based videos recognized as a significant, groundbreaking artistic achievements by a critic who matters (Nicolas Bourriaud), in a NY gallery that matters, in the mid-Nineties, while the Ill Clan was creating the first Quake movies. Obviously, if one's goal is to gain reputation, admiration and status within the gaming community by being the greatest player in the world, the most skilled performer, the greatest e-athlete, the funniest commentator, then she/he will not give a toss about "Art". Or pretend not to: dismissing the artworld as "irrelevant" in today's society is instrumental in acquiring/increasing/solidifying street cred in other contexts.

This eclectic selection features a variety of video-game videos ranging from gameplay footage to game music videos. The main criterion behind this extravagant assortment is the urgent need to redefine the very notion of machinima in order to include the most enthralling audiovisual experiments produced, shared, and discussed by and within the game community. It also represents an explicit criticism toward the narrative-based machinima: the vast majority of the videos included steer clear of a traditional, conventional, linear form of narration. The success of DIY/Sandbox games like Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet and the proliferation of movie editing tools have spawned a new generation of creators that transcend the confines of game culture. This is a small sample is by no means an adequate reflection of the ginormous (sic) production of game videos currently floating in the seven seas of the electronets. Nonetheless, I hope you'll find them interesting. Expect the unexpected.

Street Fighter Deconstructed

Dylan Hayes (US)

2009

genre: gameplay videos

keywords: abstract, deconstructionism; glitch art

Dylan Hayes is literally tearing down Capcom's Street Fighter to its constituent parts in order to bring in the foreground the true essence of this seminal beat'em up game. The result is a series of mesmerizing experiments in ludic abstractionism and glitch art that nostalgically evoke an 8-bit past that never was. We begin with "Palette Change Test" (described by the author as "palette change tests on SFII. almost 8-bit, i kinda dig it"), we continue with "Shapes" only to end with "Block Test 01", where the original game is so deconstructed that it becomes almost unrecognizable.

Palette Change Test from Dylan Hayes on Vimeo.

Shapes 02 from Dylan Hayes on Vimeo.

Block Tests 01 from Dylan Hayes on Vimeo.

DM Spectrum

Matthew Bradley (UK)

2009

genre: gameplay video and teaser of a computer mod

keywords: teaser, gameplay video, music, abstract

DM-Spectrum is a custom UT3 deathmatch level developed by Matthew Bradley. The video selection includes a teaser and a gameplay video.

DM-Spectrum from Matthew Bradley on Vimeo.

DM_Spectrum Gameplay from Matthew Bradley on Vimeo.

Matteo Bittanti is an Adjunct Professor in the Visual Studies Program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland. He writes about technology, film, games, and popular culture for various publications (WIRED, Rolling Stone, LINK, Duellanti). His online projects include GameScenes, a blog about game-based art.

Digital Media and Learning: New Video Series

Last spring, I expressed my dismay over what I saw as the failure of PBS's Digital Nation documentary to adequately express the work being done as part of MacArthur's Digital Media and Learning Initiative, a project which has brought together some of the smartest contemporary thinkers about formal and informal learning in the digital age. I was not the only one disappointed in the documentary and so I was delighted to be working with folks from the Pearson Foundation who were producing an alternative account, which is scheduled to be aired on PBS stations around the country next spring. Their project will be called Digital Media, New Learners of the 21st Century. In advance of the broadcast, they have started to release a series of video profiles of leading thinkers about media and learning via a temporary Vimeo site. They have said that there are more profiles coming and that they are in the process of building a spiffier website to showcase the material. But I wanted to take advantage of my inside knowledge to give you a sneak peak at the forthcoming project.

Here is the profile they constructed about my work. It was shot in and around my new digs at the Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism at the University of Southern California.

Henry Jenkins from New Learning Institute on Vimeo.

One of the things I really admire about this series of videos is their attempt to situate each "thinker" in their real world context -- to show where we live and/or work and to suggest some of the factors in our surroundings which shape our thoughts. This next one focused on John Seeley Brown does a beautiful job of showing the natural environment that surrounds his home in Hawaii and how he draws insight from the surfing culture there that shapes how he thinks about the learning process. (I am not sure what to make of the focus on athletics in their depiction of me -- trust me, I'm no jock, though I do enjoy an office which backs up to the field where the USC Marching Band practices.) The profile of James Paul Gee, which you can find at their site, also situates the educator taking a walk in a beautiful natural setting, again refusing to construct images which pit the digital (or the life of the mind) against the natural.

John Seely Brown from New Learning Institute on Vimeo.

This profile of Katie Salen offers us some intriguing glimpses into the Quest to Learn School, an innovative charter school in New York City which uses game design principles to encourage young people to develop systems thinking. You might contrast the respectful way that the school is depicted here with the disorientating representation the project received in the Digital Nation documentary. Here, we have a sense of what young people are doing, why they find it engaging, and how it relates to traditional curricular standards.

Katie Salen from New Learning Institute on Vimeo.

Check out their Vimeo site to see the other profiles of James Paul Gee, Mimi Ito, Nicole Pinkard, and Diana Rhoten. Each makes important and inspiring contributions to our understanding of digital media and learning.

Games By Day, Ska by Night: An Interview with Generoso Fierro (Part Two)

Apart from your work at GAMBIT, you have been gaining visibility as a documentary filmmaker who has specialized in exploring the history of Jamaican music. Where does your interest in this topic come from?

I became interested in Jamaican music in the early 1980s during a reggae concert that a friend's older brother took me to in Philadelphia. The show was held in all of all places, a horse racing track that would sometime have the occasional concert back in the day. Setting excluded, I felt instantly connected to the music and shortly thereafter began to obsessively collect original recordings from the era of Jamaican music I adored the most.. Mento releases in the mid 1950s, through ska and rocksteady in the 1960s to the earliest sounds from reggae in the early 1970s.

In the mid-1990s I began to produce/DJ a show at WMBR 88.1FM in Cambridge called Generoso's Bovine Ska and Rocksteady, the title taken from an animal that would best exemplify the physical union of the black and white motif commonly associated with ska from the 1970s. Over the last 14 years I have focused in on the aforementioned era of Jamaican music by not only programming the songs but providing background for all of the tracks provided.

In the early part of the last decade I began producing music for some of the local reggae bands which led to collaboration with Eli Kessler, a musician from New England Conservatory. Eli and I had a great admiration for Trinidadian born reggae guitarist Nearlin "Lynn" Taitt, who besides playing on thousands of essential recordings from 1962-1968 was also responsible for the creation of rocksteady, the precursor to reggae in 1966. Eli with a few other musicians from the area who also respected Taitt wrote and performed pieces with Lynn for what would be my first documentary, Lynn Taitt: Rocksteady. Appearing in the documentary is legendary musician Ran Blake, a senior faculty member of NEC, who donated a piece that he had written which he performs with Taitt in the film. Sadly, Lynn passed away in January of 2010.

Clip from Lynn Taitt: Rocksteady

Part of what emerges from your films is an attention to Jamaica as a crossroads for many different cultural traditions. For example, your current project centers on the historical exchange between Jamaica and China, which is an unexpected cross-current. What have you discovered so far about the cultural interplay between these two traditions?

The Chinese came to Jamaica in the mid 1800s as indentured servants to work mostly in the fields. After their contracts were up many of these workers began to fulfill a desperately needed role on the island, that of shopkeeper. In the late 1940s a hardware shop owner, named Tom Wong (later to be known Tom "The Great" Sebastian) had a sound system built for him by a former RAF engineer named Headly Jones. Tom used his new sound system to attract people to his store but soon the sound's popularity grew till eventually this led his spinning records at clubs and thus the sound system culture was born. Soon after, Ivan Chin, a shopkeeper who owned a radio repair service began recording local artists and releasing mento (known as Jamaican calypso) records which were very popular on the island. Leslie Kong, who operated an ice cream shop was the first to record a young Bob Marley, Desmond Dekker and Jimmy Cliff. Kong was one of the most creative and successful producers in the 1960s.

It was this merging of the musical traditions of African Jamaican and the shopkeeper tradition which the Chinese brought from their homeland that helped propel Jamaican music to the international stage. Though they were only a small percentage of the island's total population, they had a huge impact.

Going into the project I was aware of their role in Jamaican music history but many people have also erroneously perceived their motive for participating in the music industry as entirely commercial based on the history as mercantilists. Through the many interviews I conducted along with my Associate Producer, Christina Xu and Editor, Garrett Beazley, we see that the Chinese Jamaicans possess a genuine love for the music they helped create and promote throughout the world. This assertion is quantified but not only the Chinese Jamaicans themselves but also through interviews with many of the prominent African Jamaican artists who have worked with them. The documentary is entitled Always Together and we hope to be submitting it to festivals in early October.

You've worked on portraits of two other leading Jamaica-based performers -- Lynn Taitt and Derrick Morgan. Why did you choose these particular artists and what does each teach us about how music is produced and consumed in Jamaica?

As in the early work with the GAMBIT lab, I am forever interested in the creative process. The final product is fine to watch but its the moments observing the formation of that final product that made me want to make documentaries. In both of the Jamaican documentaries I have previously produced, we do see the final product but most of the time you are given a rare access into the process, the arguments and the successes.

With Lynn Taitt, it was a combination of his sound, which as one of the interviews in the doc states best, " When you hear Lynn, you automatically know it's him and that is one of the best things you can say about a musician you love". The tone of Lynn playing is so absolutely beautiful and I wanted to know what went into his method and instrumentation. Also it was the sheer volume of tracks he arranged and played on which from 1962-1968 was roughly 2,000 songs. Some are of course average cuts but many are amongst the most beloved and repeated rhythms in Jamaican music.

Derrick Morgan was dubbed "The King of Ska" early in his career as he was the first superstar in Jamaica. On one occasion in the early 1960s Derrick occupied the top seven spots on the Jamaican top ten, a feat that has not been repeated since. I have always admired his voice, a voice that is both powerful and at times sentimental. He wrote, sang and produced an epic number of hits through ska, rocksteady and reggae. Always impeccably dressed and possessing a stage persona of that is so rare these days.

After bringing him to Boston for a concert in 2002, I had for years wanted to do a documentary on him and in 2008 I brought him back to Boston to film, Derrick Morgan: I Am The Ruler, the title coming from a track Morgan penned during the rocksteady era. During the island's heyday in the 1960s it is said that between 200-300 singles were produced per month, which is incredible for a country that is roughly the size of Indiana. Though the purchase of music on the island has decreased over the last ten years as it has worldwide, the production of that music remains a constant from that era. As one of the major exports of Jamaica, reggae is an essential part of the island's cultural identity and for many the only chance of rising above the crippling poverty that exists there.

These films are deeply respectful of the integrity of the musical performances, yet it would be wrong to describe them as concert films. They attempt to put the music into a cultural context. Can you tell us something of how you see your work relating to previous attempts to capture musical performances on film?

Thank you Henry. The environment that an artist creates in is crucial in understanding their process. The lyrics are usually reflective of their surroundings and without some cultural context added into the mix you are left with a partial idea of their work. Director Julien Temple did quite a sensational job with the Sex Pistols documentary The Filth and The Fury as far as putting you in that time period by using archival footage of the political climate during the formation and career of the band. That footage combined with the past and present interviews and a significant amount of live music helped the audience fully understand how something like punk would've manifested and why The Sex Pistols were the band the media latched onto at that time.

Amazingly, Temple's next film about Clash frontman, Joe Strummer The Future Is Unwritten failed miserably as Temple chose to showcase meaningless celebrity testimonials (Johnny Depp, John Cusack?) , a meager amount of Strummer's music and the stylistic choice of not titling any of Strummer's acquaintances over adding any content that would've created an accurate picture of that artist. Strummer had passed before the film had been produced but there is a large amount of existing interview and live footage of him that could've been used.

As there isn't much in the way of musical footage from 1960s Jamaica I was left with the situation of having to bring the artists to perform and record so that we can see their unique style when they create. During the course of these interviews I draw heavily from articles from Jamaican publications from the day and rely on the artist themselves to comment on well known events from their lives. In the case of the Derrick Morgan documentary I produced, I relied almost entirely on Morgan to create the narrative of the film and I insisted on having no other talking heads in the film to tell his story, except for one, that of Prince Buster, a rival musician whom Morgan feuded with in the early 1960s. I felt that it would've been unethical to not hear his side of the story. Morgan's interview, coupled with Pathe newsreel footage and Jamaican Gleaner articles and the music, were arranged in the film in chronological order. Understanding the changing face of the island's politics, especially during a key rise in violence after Jamaica's independence in 1962, was key in how Morgan's music changed over time, not just in the rhythm but in lyrical content.

Clip from Derrick Morgan: I Am The Rule

The GAMBIT films are created to be consumed on the web, while your own documentaries are created to be watched on larger screens. What have you learned about the differences in producing work for these two different viewing contexts?

Oddly what I feel is the main difference is in sound. Though a web video needs to be of good audio quality, films for the screen need sound that captivates an audience. On the Morgan and Taitt docs I spent almost as much time and effort on post production sound editing as with the editing of the film as a whole. For that reason I have yet to put those documentaries on the web as most of the dynamics of the sound would be lost due to the rate of compression on the predominance of video hosting sites. The videos I create for GAMBIT are specifically edited for an m4v file that is easily downloadable to smart phones but are actually quite good in keeping color and sound at a high enough level that the information comes through in an entertaining manner.

Generoso Fierro is the Outreach Coordinator for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, where he organizes press initatives, creates video content for the website such as the recently produced ten part series,Making a GAMBIT Game which chronicles the step by step construction of the GAMBIT 2010 summer game elude. Currently, Generoso is at WMBR radio, 88.1FM in Cambridge, where he is the longtime DJ of a program Generoso's Bovine Ska and Rocksteady. The show concentrates on the music of Jamaica prior to reggae (mento, ska and rocksteady) and has been on the air since 1997. A film maker and avid film fan, "Gene" has directed and produced two feature documentaries, Lynn Taitt: Rocksteady about the Trinidadian born guitarist who invented the rocksteady rhythm and Derrick Morgan: I Am The Rule, featuring the titled legendary "King of Ska" from Jamaica.

Games By Day, Ska By Night: An Interview with Generoso Fierro (Part One)

During a visit back to MIT in August, I had a chance to pay a visit to my old friends at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and get a sense of the progress of this summer's workshop. Each summer, the group brings about 50 Singaporean students to MIT to work with Cambridge-based students in an intensive process to develop, test, and post games which are designed to stretch the limits of our current understanding of that medium. The Lab has enjoyed remarkable success both as a training program for future game designers, with many of its alums helping to fuel the growth of the Singapore games industry, and as an incubator for new game titles, many of which are becoming competitive in independent games competitions around the world, and some of which have been springboards for professional game development. The project has assembled a great group of highly dedicated researchers who embrace the interesting challenges of training the students, doing core games research, and inspiring creative development. You can sample this summer's games on the GAMBIT website. This was the first summer I had not been able to participate in the design process -- at least on the level of helping critique the student work -- and I was very pleased to see the growing sophistication of the games in terms of the visual design (which looks and feels unlike anything you are apt to see from current commercial games), the sound design (which is always expressive and innovative in its own right), and the play patterns and game mechanics (which often embrace alternative interfaces or explore functions of the medium which fall outside the mandates of most game companies.)

One of the things that pleased me the most was the way the Lab was opening up its design process by sharing webcasts of key research presentations -- part of the larger mandate the Comparative Media Studies Program had accepted to help expand access to its core research and public outreach activities. I learned that Generoso Fierro, a key member of the GAMBIT team, had launched an ambitious project to document the design process behind one of this year's more provocative titles, elude, which is intended to be a game which explores issues of clinical depression and hoped to be a resource for patients and their families. The series is now running in installments through the GAMBIT website and is worth checking out, especially for those who are involved or would like to be involved in the game design process.

If Fierro spends 9-5 focusing on how to document and publicize the work of the GAMBIT lab (not to mention helping to stage key events that emerge from the lab's process), he has on his own time been an important Cambridge-area DJ and documentary producer (who is gaining growing visibility on the film festival circuit) for his fascinating work on the Jamacian music scene. Fierro's films manage to capture the process by which these musicians work, mixing together rehearsals and behind the scenes moments with the finished works in concerts, but they also have deep insights to offer into the cultural and historical contexts within which these artists work.

Fierro is, as this interview suggests, deeply protective of the integrity of his finished films -- especially of their soundtracks -- so it is a real privilege to be able to share some short clips from these productions here on this blog. In the first segment of this interview, I am focusing on his games-related work (his day job) and in the second part, his music-related documentaries (his night work).

The MIT-Singapore GAMBIT games lab has been producing a steady stream of interesting podcasts and webvideos. What has been the driving goal behind these projects?

Whenever it's brought up that I work for the game research lab at MIT, people usually follow that up with "So, does that mean you play games all day?" And although their assumption isn't totally incorrect, it lead me to believe that the general public and even some of those who are involved in the games industry are still a bit unclear as to the nature of game research.

In the fall of 2009, the bulk of GAMBIT's outreach initiatives were in the form of blog posts and events that mostly highlighted the final research, achievements and games of the lab but I felt that there needed to be more focus on the day to day creation of these efforts. In December of 2009 I began filming the weekly research meeting which is organized by our post-doctoral researcher, Clara Fernandez-Vara. These weekly meetings are a chance for the staff of GAMBIT to get feedback on current papers and research initiatives. Individual meetings were condensed on video resulting in the monthly GAMBIT Research Video Podcast Series. So far the subjects have ranged from a discussion of a paper by our Audio Director, Abe Stein (Episode 3) based on the flawed adaption of the game Dante's Inferno (Episode 3) to the original research initiative that became the summer 2010 GAMBIT game, elude (Episode 5). The creation of that game, from its initial research, through the day to day creation of the final prototype over nine weeks during this past summer's program became the ten part weekly series I produced entitled "Making A GAMBIT Game" .

Clip from GAMBIT Research Video Podcast Episode Five

Your most recent series focuses on the development of elude, a game about depression. What drew you to focus on this particular game? What did you discover about the game design process through following this title from conception through completion?

GAMBIT has handled some challenging research ideas over the last four years but the thought of a game which would aid the families and friends of people who suffer from depression was too intriguing for me not to document. My earliest thoughts centered around the team itself who are charged with making the final prototype and the myriad of issues they would encounter along the way. Our games are created every summer by teams made up of Singaporean interns, US interns from Berklee College of Music and Rhode Island School of Design and interns from M.I.T. Every GAMBIT team usually has to overcome the brevity of their time together, the usual cultural and subtle language issues and working within the particular game development system here.

With the elude project I immediately wondered how the team would deal with the challenge of making a game that had some fairly rigid goals for it to be successful. Specifically, a game that had to maintain a level of gameplay that would be interesting for a ten year old who plays games regularly to an adult who may have never played a game but are hoping to gain deeper insight into a loved ones depression. I was first stunned at the turnaround time of the team and their strong grasp of the task before them by their output of three early prototypes after only 8 days in the lab (two of them fairly involved digital prototypes, one paper). Early on I was impressed with the ease of the interns communication with the product owner Doris Rusch, the game's director, Rik Eberhardt and the research consultant for the project, T. Atilla Ceranoglu, M.D from Mass General Hospital, who were on site to assist and comment on the game's progression. The interns took direction extremely well but were not shy about offering their own opinions on the project. In fact the level of interpretation that the students had on the final prototype was more than I would've ever imagined.

"Making a GAMBIT Game" Episode Five Clip

This is a bit of a cliche as a question, but I am interested in this particular case. How do you think the presence of the camera impacted the design and training process these films depict?

To start off, I must say that the interns were extremely welcoming whenever I came into the lab and the game director and product owner were also key in letting me know when a meeting or milestone was about to happen that was outside of my normal shooting schedule. I found that early on I may have stifled some discussion within the team's meetings where the product owner/game director were not in attendance as they did tense up a bit when I was in the room. For the record, I would always assure them that A) If something was said that you did not want to be included in the final video, I would not include it and B) These videos were to be released long after the team had disbanded so they wouldn't have the episodes airing as a distraction from the creative process.

That said, I was never asked to remove something that was said by the interns during the entire shoot which leads us to episode five (week four of the US lab experience) A very frank discussion where the interns begin to have some serious issues with the progress of the games development. During that particular discussion I wholeheartedly felt as though my presence was not felt in the room and the freedom of what was said completely candid. There was at times a small amount of direct talking to the camera but mostly I felt outside of the games development process.

There are relatively few films to date which document the process of making a game. What do you think game design students might learn from following this series?

Most of the interns had never worked on a game start to finish prior to coming to GAMBIT. I think the series really benefits those who are considering an education in games. Unlike the game industry there is a unique challenge at GAMBIT where the client is also your supervisor and the concerns that arise from that situation. The elude project is a success, but still there are many moments in which the team had issues not understanding certain facets of the game and the supervisors failed in communicating the resolutions back to them in a way team could understand. This is not uncommon in this type of setting and seeing this might help a student who feels the same level of frustration while in a team like this at their game program.

Generoso Fierro is the Outreach Coordinator for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, where he organizes press initatives, creates video content for the website such as the recently produced ten part series,Making a GAMBIT Game which chronicles the step by step construction of the GAMBIT 2010 summer game elude. Currently, Generoso is at WMBR radio, 88.1FM in Cambridge, where he is the longtime DJ of a program Generoso's Bovine Ska and Rocksteady. The show concentrates on the music of Jamaica prior to reggae (mento, ska and rocksteady) and has been on the air since 1997. A film maker and avid film fan, "Gene" has directed and produced two feature documentaries, Lynn Taitt: Rocksteady about the Trinidadian born guitarist who invented the rocksteady rhythm and Derrick Morgan: I Am The Rule, featuring the titled legendary "King of Ska" from Jamaica.

Games, New Media and Learning in Argentina: An Interview with Ines Dussel (Part Three)

You've drawn heavily on the work of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning initiatve. What do you see as the most significant continuities and differences between their approach and what you are finding in Argentina?

I've been reading all the work done by the initiative, and for me it stands out as the most encompassing and organized effort to understand what is going on. I think I provided some of our keys for reading this work already, but let me try and summarize them.

One is the idea of a public culture. That there is something such as a common public sphere that has to be reconceptualized beyond Habermas' notion of the argumentative skills and rhetorical plays but that still includes some notion that there is something to be done together and for everybody, is an uncommon approach in most studies of new technologies. I think we share an engagement with an idea of public culture that remains open and subject to debate, and does not get captured by the state, the market, or the isolated individual.

The second has to do with the kind of learning that young people are doing with and in new media, trying to approach in an honest, more open way these new practices. We liked very much the notion of "genres of participation," as they help organize what we are seeing in our research. And what I liked particularly is that schools are not left out of the map, but are considered as part of this media ecology. I support the idea that schools can be helpful in organizing interesting and relevant experiences for young children which are not immediately accesible to everyone, and which bear other issues in mind than merely the audiences' tastes. Of course, this means changing the ways in which schools are working with new media, which, as said before, have been focused around issues of safety and potentials threats to children's integrity, when they have not been totally derogatory on the value, ethics, or productivity of young people's activities in and with new media.

We also agree with the general search for a balance between the celebration of new, creative, and democratic forces that are mobilizing the digital culture, and the skepticism about some trends that we do not see as democratic and that tend to extend and reshape current social divisions and inequalities. [When I use "democratic," I am pointing to some discussions in contemporary political philosophy that show how evanescent this term might be, but that still hold to an impulse towards more justice and equality (for me, Jacques Rancière or Bill Connolly are good referents of this kind of view).]

Finally, it is difficult for me to point to a difference, but I would say that we bring to our study different concerns that have to do with different "localities" and cultures, as I was saying in the last question. Lately, with the team at Flacso we've been reading more about changes in authorship, in the balance between the emotional and the rational in terms of learning, in our notions of a common culture, archive or memory (and memory is a cherished thing in Argentina, where it immediately refers to the last dictatorship and to a quest for human rights and justice), and also the need to maintain the differences between simulation and "real life" (I've been reading with great pleasure Sherry Turkle's discussions on this). I would say they are more politically- and ethically-oriented issues. These topics are not directly addressed by the MacArthur papers, but there are none the less many links to their approaches.

As you do so, you seem to be very aware of the existing visual culture of schools. For example, you told me about research which suggests students are sometimes overwhelmed by films they see in the classroom and do not always remember what they were supposed to teach. How can designers of educational games sidestep those problems?

In the research we are doing on the visual culture of schools, many students referred to their memories of remarkable activities organized by teachers using fiction films or documentaries, or asking them to bring pictures about social issues. Students liked them a lot, and valued them as great learning experiences. But when we asked about what they thought they had learned with those activities, they could not refer to any specific content. For example, a student said that her Biology teacher showed the class an image of the cell and that it caught her attention, and that she learned like in a fingers' snap, but she could not name any concept nor "title" for that image. The same happened in social studies or history lessons: students had vague memories about the activities, but all remembered the intensity of the feelings provoked by the viewing.

This is something that interests me a lot, and that I put along a series of readings I've been doing on visual studies, attention and learning. Historically, pedagogy has thought that there is an equivalence, a direct relationship, between seeing and knowing, but psychology and our own historical experience shows that that is not the case. We need to "know" something to be able to "see" it (I am aware that these are complex terms and there are deep philosophical debates around each one but let's keep it simple for the sake of the argument). What are children learning when they "see" something in the classroom? Are they learning what we want them to learn, or something completely different?

The examples mentioned above relate, for me, to something that you've referred to in previous works: the "wow" effect, the emotional impact of media on people. When using images in classrooms, we might get that "wow" feeling, as when the first student says, "wow, the teacher caught my attention," but from that we cannot deduce that she learnt the structure of the cell or anything in that neighborhood.

How to sidestep this problem is a difficult question. The first thing I would say is not to take learning for granted. We have to be aware that the intensity of stimuli and the excitement of the game might provoke them to learn something altogether different from what we wanted them to learn with these activities.

And the second thing I would say is that this doesn't imply that we have to become more explicit of our message or the "content" we want to convey. On the contrary, my reading of these examples is that form and content are divorced in some pedagogical activities, and that "forms" are compelling and complex while "content" is straightforward and unidimensional, and so young people's attention is caught by the more complex and interesting stimuli and do not attend to the content. So, I would say we should struggle to produce better materials that are more consistent in their forms and contents.

You also told me about research you have been doing about the image banks which teachers draw upon in thinking about the world and how these may differ from those which their students bring into their classes. Can you share some of this research with my readers?

Yes, of course. I wrote an essay on teachers' visual culture, based on the findings of an activity I've done in online courses with teachers. I ask them to post a powerful image of our culture. The idea of "powerful image" draws on visual studies and refers to images that impact us for any reason, that have a lasting effect not only personally but also socially.

In this activity, it struck me that most of the teachers chose shocking images that come from photojournalism: the Biafra child, Kevin Carter's Pullitzer picture of a little girl in a Sudanese village, anonymous pictures of children in famine, in war refuges, or hurt or killed by political violence. They endorse a "hyperrealism" that, while it aligns itself with a progressive rhetoric, might have troubling effects as a visual discourse on the social. Most pictures were of children, and children were almost always depicted among ruins. No "happy," meaning no optimistic, narrative was to be found in most pictures (and when it appeared, it was in the line of the Benetton-multiculturalism: black child with white child taking hands and smiling to each other). Also, it was surprising that the Argentinean teachers spoke a "Global visual Esperanto," as Nick Mirzoeff calls it: the images were from Albania, Africa, Palestina, New York, Central America, Brazil, and not many depicted Argentina's landscapes or events. The pictures are all serious, and engage in the performance of denunciation. There is almost no ironic image, nor images that refer to advertising or cultural industries. My guess is that, if the same question was posed to young people, the number of advertising images, and of images of their own production, would be much more significant than in the teachers' selections.

My interest in this essay is with global visual imaginaries, and the visual culture of teachers. There is much more I could say on this, but let's refer the reader to the essay that has been published in a book edited by the National Society for the Study of Education, whose title is Globalization and the Study of Education, and edited by Fazal Rizvi and Tom Popkewitz.

You have been involved in a number of games and learning initiatives. Can you describe some of the work you are doing and explain what kinds of pedagogical and design principles are informing this work?

With my research team at Flacso, we started doing educational documentaries in 2002. We produced eight 30-minutes videos that developed a program to address issues of discrimination and inclusiveness in middle and secondary schools. We tried to build complex and subtle plots, to present the stories always in a dignified way, and never construct people as passive victims. We were always thinking of how and when the teacher would be using these materials, so time constraints and also pedagogical problems of what to show and how to show it were present from the beginning (and we made pilot tests with teachers to make room for that).

But seen from today, I think that at the beginning we were more aware of the conceptual and political dimensions of our work than about the aesthetic aspects of it. And it was a great experience, because we learned a lot about the tensions between content and form. As soon as we started to work with teachers and students, we realized that there were many unexpected things in their reactions to our videos, and that they had to do with the context in which they were seen, with their prior experiences with these type of videos, and with our own pedagogy. And most of all we had to learn to work through and with the emotions elicited by the documentaries.

This drove us to media studies and also to visual studies, and this intersection is still very interesting to me. The question of which type of knowledge is produced by an image, as posed by the French historian Georges Didi-Huberman, remains a potent, even a burning issue, as he says. Sometimes images touch us at a sensitive level, without being able to put it into words, and yet they do produce important effects on us. Could these effects be called a learning or be considered as knowledge?

I am not interested in measuring it, but on understanding what is it that they do to us. Will it last? Will it be attached in our memory to some meanings? Will we, as the students I found in our recent research, just remember the intense emotion we felt without being able to conceptualize or rationalize anything about it? Maybe this is not a bad thing, but we should be aware of which kind of learning or effects some images produce on us.

We then moved to do an animation piece on global warming which was also very exciting, and since 2007 I've been engaged in a team run by Analía Segal, a colleague and friend of mine, that produces videogames. Analía had extensive experience on simulations and games in social studies, and some years ago she decided to experiment with new media, and I joined her. We wanted to explore the potentialities of videogames for learning: they can offer complex narratives, they use a visual language that is closer to young people's visual culture than the schools', they promote learning through immersion in a given situation and mobilize intuitive, bodily language that is scarcely mobilized by traditional schooling, among many other possibilities. The team includes people from different disciplines in the social sciences and young game designers who are key to the project. We know that educational materials are not magical solutions to anything, but believe that they can contribute to make classroom more interesting and more challenging. This might be a poor goal for an educational reformer but it is good enough for us as development team.

One of our principles was to produce materials that were not offered by the cultural industries, neither by their topics nor by their aesthetics. We did research on alternative groups that are working on serious games, and decided to focus on sustainable development and produced three or four games on this subject. The first one is called "Urgent, Message" and is about a messenger in the near future who has to deliver different things to different places, always considering time, cost, and environmental impact.

The second one is called "Villa Girondo" and is a multi-player game. We wanted to explore a different game structure. This one deals with the relocation of a village due to the planned construction of a water dam. Players are asked to assume different roles in the community and decide whether the village will be relocated or not. The tension between progress and sustainability is explored, as well as the centrality and complexity of citizens' involvement in environmental issues.

In the development of the videogames, we included a working group with teachers with whom we discuss and test the games at different stages. And we are doing research on the first developed prototypes to understand how they interact with the real dynamic of classrooms. The questions that interest us are both related to the design of the game and to the pedagogical skills needed to use it in classrooms. Which kind of interactions are promoted by the rules of the game? How important and effective are teachers' interventions? What kind of strategies do young people use when playing the game? Are there constraints by playing the game at school? Which reflections are opened up by the game? Which ones are picked up by the teachers and which ones are left aside, and why? These are some of the questions we are investigating in schools these days.

I was impressed by the distinctive look and feel of the games you shared with me. To what degree is the goal to create games which reflect the national culture of Argentina as opposed to following the "neutral" or "odorless" design practices that shape many commercial video games? Why might it be important for students in your country to see games which look and feel like the culture around them?

Well, I like your comment and take it as a compliment. As I said before there is a relation between form and content. We believe that it is important to provide students with different aesthetics, less standardized and more related to their daily life. But it doesn't mean that one has to close down aesthetic diversity. So while we don't want to follow mainstream games in their options, we do not support any kind of localism that tends to isolate cultural productions. On the other hand, this would be impossible as we are all visual subjects in a global culture.

We hope our games can be played by any child or young person who is interested in these topics. For example, the relocation of villages has been a common problem in Latin America. We include some excerpts from documentaries that give more information and context about real life situations. We believe it is important that schools pick up these debates and provide interesting and challenging opportunities to unfold the complexities involved. In that respect, videogames can be really helpful.

Inés Dussel graduated from the University of Buenos Aires in Educational Sciences and got her Ph.D. at the Dept of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a Principal Researcher at Flacso/Argentina, a centre for research and graduate teaching in the social sciences, and Educational Director of Sangari Argentina. She's currently interested in the intersections between schooling, new media, and visual culture, and is doing research and producing materials for classroom teaching.

Games, New Media and Learning in Argentina: An Interview with Inés Dussel

Earlier this summer, I shared with you some of my experiences in Buenos Aires where I was a speaker at the VI For Latinoamericano de Educacion, hosted by the Fundacion Santilla, an event attended by education ministers and educational researchers/policy makers from many of the Latin American countries. My host for the event was educator and public intellectual Inés Dussel who is one of the co-authors with Luis Alberto Quevedo of a new white paper exploring the impact of new media on education in Latin America, Educacion y nuevas technologias: los desafios pedagogicos ante el mundo digital. I was deeply impressed by Dussel and her colleagues: she is highly engaged with the work we've been doing through the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning initiative, as well as the debates taking place in South America around these same topics. I wanted to be able to share more of her perspectives with English-language researchers and educators in hopes of brokering more conversations between educators in the North and the South who are confronting the ways that rapid media change is reshaping the lives and interests of their students.

While I was in Argentina, you released a significant report which sought to explore the impact of new media on educational practices in Latin America. What were your major goals for this project?

The report was commissioned by the Organization of IberoAmerican States (OEI) and the Foundation Santillana, which is affiliated to a major publishing house in the Spanish-speaking world. They organize annual conferences that bring together Ministers of Education from throughout the Southern Cone, educators, and media people. It is an important venue for public policy and debate in education.

The 2010 Forum, on which you were the guest speaker, was devoted to the pedagogical challenges of IT technologies in the region. Luis Alberto Quevedo and myself were asked to write the discussion paper, which actually turned into a 60+-pages report. Both Luis Alberto and myself have been working on these issues for a number of years, and run together an online course on education, visual culture and media designed primarily for educators. Above all, we share an active engagement with public debate in and around media, both in public and commercial media, although Luis Alberto has a more sociological take on this and I bring a pedagogical concern with what people learn from their experiences with the media.

Our goal with the report was to provide a broad frame that helps organize a discussion around the different alternatives that are being explored either by public policies or by the schools themselves in the introduction of IT. We talk about four major strategies: a) organizing computer labs in schools, b) getting one laptop to every child (1-to-1) either by joining the OLPC initiative or through major commercial firms, c) having portable carriages with laptops for planned, alternate usage in classrooms, and d) introducing electronic boards in each classroom. Each strategy has different assumptions about the extent to which IT should permeate the daily life of schools and of course imply different costs and mobilization of resources.

In the report, we were also interested in taking a look at the production of content, especially the work done by teachers with the use of blogs or video production for educational purposes, and by the Argentinean Ministry of Education, which has done an interesting TV series for rural schools called Horizontes (Horizons) whose impact on school practices we want to investigate. These schools usually have only one teacher with multi-grade classrooms, so IT technologies can be a great help in supporting teachers who usually exhaust themselves in their daily work.

We could only get a glimpse at content issues and DIY media production in the report but it seems promising, and we are currently doing research to get a better understanding of what is going on. And finally, we made a review on the changes on teacher training, looking in particular at changes in curricular contents, and discussing whether there are new teaching figures appearing in the landscape of schools (IT specialists or audiovidual assistants, among others). So, as you can see, the scope was broad and it calls for more research and more writing, which is the step in which we are currently engaged.

Which models have gotten the greatest traction in Latin America and why?

So far, the most extended strategy in the region is to equip computer labs, but research shows that, while it was helpful in the 1990s to get at least some teachers interested in IT, today it tends to confine the novelty to a marginal place in the curriculum and does not contribute to a deeper discussion on the big changes brought about by digital culture in the production and circulation of knowledge in our societies. Also, it has been noted that computer labs usually get trapped in the micro-politics of schools, with power games around who's got the key or privileged access to the lab (the same can be said about any innovation in schools, of course, but the concentration of computers in one space contributes to a more centralized struggle around access and control).

There is also a particular Argentinean context that has to do with the scarcity of resources: the first reaction of school principals and teachers when they get computers or even books is to lock them off so that they are not lost or ruined by usage. This sounds absurd, but it has to do with an entrenched learning that in schools you don't get good things too many often, so you better preserve them, even though this might mean not using them at all...

So, as we all know but tend to forget, innovations and new technologies in schools have to negotiate with multiple levels of adaptation and with different school dynamics that produce unexpected effects. Sometimes they are able to mobilize creative, wonderful energies and forces in the schools, and sometimes these effects are undesirable. When involved in the innovations, we tend to forget about the latter.

The second alternative, which is actually becoming the most common nowadays, is the 1-to-1 strategy of equipping every child with a netbook. In Uruguay the Plan Ceibal, effective since 2007 and based on OLPC, has been very successful in doing that with all elementary school children in public schools (around 320,000 students, ages 6 to 11). Uruguay is a relatively small country, with a flat land, and is one of the most socially egalitarian in the region, so in many respects it has not gone through the challenges of connectivity that other countries are undergoing right now, especially when there are high mountains with blind spots for telecommunication, lots of isolated villages, or heavily marginalized groups with a predictable feeling of resentment towards State policies (which might derive in high levels of theft or destruction of equipment), challenges that countries such as Argentina, Chile, or Perú are facing. Argentina's government has recently started a program called ConectarIgualdad (ConnectEquality) that will provide 3,000,000 secondary school students in public schools with netbooks, manufactured by commercial firms. It is probably the largest single investment in the region, and we are all eager to see how it will work.

The third and fourth alternatives (portable carriages with laptops and smart boards) are being implemented in small scale, and more research is needed to understand their effects. Both seem interesting ways of making a smoother transition into the digital culture than the 1-to-1 strategy, because they are closer to the way in which classrooms are organized today. But apparently the 1-to-1 option is the route that the educational systems are taking in our region. It might be interesting, though, to keep these other possibilities in mind, as we don't know yet how effectively the 1-to-1 strategy is going to work, and also because we don't think this should be an "either/or" option: school systems are large conglommerates of people and institutions and they should be able to incorporate new media through many different strategies that might be useful for different purposes.

What are the goals of Latin American governments in seeking to expand access to new media?

Our reading of initiatives like the 1-to-1 option is that they are great strategies for digital inclusion, and the main effects are not only to be seen on children's lives but on their families'. In Uruguay and Argentina, the fact that the netbooks are going to public school children means that they are helping to bridge the digital gap in terms of access (middle and upper classes have fled to private schools some decades ago).

There's an ad from the Plan Ceibal in Uruguay that is rich in images about the social progress that rural children will make with their laptops. The song is performed by Jorge Drexler (Oscar winner with the film The Motorcycle Diaries, about Che Guevara's youthful journey across South America) and says something like this: "I want to be a sailor/ on the Austral sky/ without getting away from my haven/ under the shadow of my ceibal" (which is a common tree in the pampas). The symbolic aspect of having an opportunity for growth and development without being forced to migrate to a big city or to a foreign country is something that is really strong in the Latin American context, and points to a transformation in the economy and the politics of our societies. I want to stress the complexity of the symbolism that is being mobilized: it is conceived as part of the rights of every citizen; it also has overtones of deep quests for social justice in Latin America and it implies an affirmation of local development not in a nostalgic mood but with hope for the future. This is a major change, and, from my point of view, quite an interesting and promising one.

Surrounding these initiatives there is, however, a significant lack of discussion about what it will mean for schools and classrooms to have children connected to individual screens, presumably moving at their own pace in a rich environment with multiple alternatives and pathways to be followed. This sounds fantastic on one level, but it is also terrifying for most teachers who have no clue about how to handle these new situations.

A person who is doing research in Uruguay told me some days ago (two or more years after they started) about the kind of problems teachers get when some students are not able to connect, which sometimes can happen to almost 50% of the class. The netbooks might have software or hardware problems, and at any rate teachers are not prepared to deal with them and do not have a technical aid at hand. Thus, the classroom sequence they prepared most likely starts to sink. When you encounter this kind of problems, you cannot simply tell the students with failing equipment to shut up and let other children work (in fact you can, but this won't make things any better!). There are things to be done in these situations, but what I mean is that teachers should have a repertoire of alternatives that they don't have yet.

The training they are receiving is on software and, as far as I know, there is no organized training or discussion about the pedagogical situations they are facing. This is something that could be dealt with if there were more concerns about pedagogical issues and about the skills and practices that are needed to implement these changes.

There is also not much reflection on the demand for new content and sequences for teaching that this change will place on teachers and school administrators, and unfortunately there has been no significant investment so far to put up to this challenge. In educational journals and in mainstream media there are lots of apologetic talks on the "School 2.0," most of the times in de-politicized terms, that propose an ideal of a direct (un-mediated) access to information and knowledge and that assume the model of the business websites for participation. In this view, with the Internet 2.0 children will (finally!) be free from the domination of the teacher and the institution of schooling, and the rhetoric promises that, instead of having ill-trained teachers, young people will be able to access any site and get all the expert advice that they want from top scientists and thinkers.

The mainstream rhetoric is no different, at least from what I've read, from what you hear in the U.S. or in Europe. I have many problems with these arguments, among them, the derogatory view they have of actual schools and teachers and the uncritical privileging of expert knowledge, but probably the largest difference lies in the assumption that there is an access to knowledge that is un-mediated by existing social knowledge or institutions.

Let me give just one example of this difference, referred to the type of production children and young people do with digital media. As Sonia Livingstone, Mimi Ito and Julian Sefton-Green have shown in their work, tyoung people's uses of digital technologies are not necessarily creative, but tend to be shaped by their own culturally-mediated practices with existing media. For instance, some years ago the Ministry of Education developed an interesting program on short-film making with digital media (camcorders, simple editing programs, a notebook) in low-income schools in the northern provinces of Argentina -the ones with the highest levels of exclusion and poverty, and lower performance rates in schools. The program was led by a great team that included popular educators and young filmmakers (interestingly, Argentinean film industry is booming and the film schools are producing many graduates who have trouble finding a job, so teaching is actually an option for many of them, and while this is bad for the young graduates, this is a great opportunity for schools to involve people from the creative industries).

During its first year, the program was very open about the kind of topics and styles that students could use, and the short films that young people produced were all in the line of TV reality shows, with topics such as drug addiction, juvenile crime, teenage pregnancy, etc. The aesthetics was mimicking that of the TV shows such as Cops or alike. Most of these young people lived in small villages with different problems than the ones narrated by these sensationalist shows, but the students, when left on their own, had a hard time imagining other narratives or alternative aesthetics than the ones they learned from the TV shows (Julian Sefton-Green and David Buckingham's work in the UK show the same thing). So, after discussing this development, the second year of the program the organizers decided to ask the students to produce short films based on their dreams and with a surrealistic approach. The range of genres and of topics was much more interesting this second time, when actually the framing was more clearly defined in a top-down manner.

For me, this example speaks about the inescapable connections between the kind of productions and uses that young people do with new media and the cultural industries. When I say this, I do not intend to demonize cultural industries; but being naïve about the kind of constraints that are at play is no good either. I like very much Mimi Ito's Engineering Play, because it shows all the nuances of media production in the case of videogames, the different genres, but also all the range of practices in media use or consumption by young people. What I want to stress is that the most likely outcome of this "non-mediated" (which in fact means non-mediated by schools or teachers) access will be in fact mediated by young people's experience with the media outside schools, which is far from being pure or uncontaminated by social class, cultural habitus, etc..

Inés Dussel graduated from the University of Buenos Aires in Educational Sciences and got her Ph.D. at the Dept of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a Principal Researcher at Flacso/Argentina, a centre for research and graduate teaching in the social sciences, and Educational Director of Sangari Argentina. She's currently interested in the intersections between schooling, new media, and visual culture, and is doing research and producing materials for classroom teaching.

ARGS, Fandom, and the Digi-Gratis Economy: An Interview with Paul Booth (Part One)

This week marks the official release date for a new book, Digital Fandom: New Media Studies, which makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of a range of topics which run through this blog. It's author, Paul Booth, has consented to give me an interview where we talk together about the ways that he thinks Alternate Reality Games can shed light on the practices of online fandom, about how we might push beyond the opposition between producer and consumer, about how we might better understand the interplay of the commercial and gift economy as it effects fandom, and about new forms of expression which have emerged as fans work together through social networking sites.

His responses here only sample the richness of this particular book, which draws heavily on digital and literary theory, to encourage us to rethink some of the classic paradigms in fan studies. The work is cutting edge both conceptually and in terms of its range of examples (which include various forms of crowd-sourced and wiki-based forms of fan collaboration that have received limited attention elsewhere.)

The central metaphor for understanding digital fan culture comes from the world of Alternate Reality Games. What can ARGs teach us about new media platforms and processes? What do you see as the similarities and differences between fans and gamers?

To me, Alternate Reality Games are an incredible synthesis of media texts, platforms and outlets. Constructed through a variety of technologies, ARGs are paradoxical: they seem to be ubiquitous and yet they are also fleeting and ethereal. As such, it's very difficult to point to a particular space and say "this is an ARG." They seem to exist in a sort of "space between" media; that is, they are only visible through the contrast with what they are not. They seem to thrive through media camouflage. I'm reminded of the David Fincher film The Game (1997), where Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) is caught up in a game that he can't tell from reality. Events that occur in the narrative may or may not be authentic interactions, and he is never sure whether he's playing a game or actually caught up in a series of dangerous adventures.

By viewing the ARG in this liminal state, we can begin to see connections to the way new media platforms and processes function in a converged media environment. That is, ARGs, like new media texts, function precisely because they exist as transmedia entities. Similarly, we're beginning to see media texts that transmediate: shows like Lost and Heroes, which tell much of their stories outside of the television; Webkinz, which takes real-world plush toys and lets children play with them in a web environment; or YA book series like The 39 Clues, which ask participants to read the book and investigate clues online.

These examples, of course, bring up another similarity between ARGs and contemporary media: the economics of them. Many ARGs exist to promote or advertise a product, as "ilovebees" promoted Halo and "The Beast" promoted the film A.I. As we embark upon a more mediatized culture, so too do we find ourselves immersed in a more commercialized culture as well.

It is this connection to contemporary digital media that provides a link between ARGs and fan culture as well. I don't mean to suggest that only fans play ARGs, or that only ARGs cater to a fan base; rather, the connection is more symbolic. Fans of contemporary media and players of ARGs both interact with their requisite text in similar fashions. Fans make explicit the implicit active reading we all do when we pick up a book, watch a television show, or experience some form of media. Similarly, ARG players have to actively participate in the construction of the game itself, often uncovering hidden facets of the game, or participating in the development of narrative elements. Both for fans and for players of ARGs, the contemporary transmedia environment facilitates and encourages playfulness and engagement with many different media.

You are trying to push back on metaphors based on "market or commodity economics." What do you see as the key limits of such metaphors and how does your focus on ARGs seek to transform them?

So much of our discussion about media is based on these metaphors that we often forget that they are, indeed metaphors at all. For example, when we talk about "consumers" and "producers" of media, we're engaging in a discourse that uses gastronomic language to describe commodity economics. In other words, we talk about media in the same way that we talk about food. And the natural end result of this metaphor certainly portrays fans (and other active audiences) in a rather negative light: if media companies "produce" and audiences "consume," then what fans create through rewriting or remixing is "garbage" (or worse: a very nasty metaphor indeed). I think this metaphor ultimately limits the conversation, so even if one talks about "productive consumption," one still remains mired in this commodity mindset.

I think that while there is value in seeing media companies as "producers" and audiences as "consumers," a great deal of excellent work has also recently problematized this conception. I'm thinking of your work in Convergence Culture, Axel Bruns' research in Blogs, Wikipedia, Second life, and Beyond, and Lawrence Lessig's excellent Remix. What these books have done, and what I've tried to do in my book, is to look at the metaphors we use to describe media creation and media reception in different ways.

One of the main paths I follow in the book to re-look at these metaphors is to see how a different economic model - the gift economy - could work to establish a new way of describing fandom in the digital age. Both Lewis Hyde's The Gift and your blog post about the gift economy were quite influential to my thinking in this respect. In contrast to a traditional commodity economy, a gift economy values the social relationships the exchange of gifts brings. I think that if we re-examine the media creation process from a gift economy point of view, what we find is that the categories of "producer" and "consumer" simply don't function in the same way anymore. Instead of media "products" being made for "consumers," content "gifts" are exchanged between both creators and receivers. The media text is a gift, which the receiver can reciprocate through attention, feedback, fandom, or even purchasing advertised products. A gift economy metaphor implies a stronger relationship between content creators and content receivers, with more potent feedback implied between the groups. There is also a greater collaborative potential between audiences and creators, and a more fluid dynamic between the two. I certainly don't deny the economic imperative behind media consumption in general, but I think that in concert with a commodity economy metaphor, the gift economy helps create a more complete picture.

To me, ARGs represent an amalgam of the gift and the commodity economies. I've already mentioned that ARGs are often marketing campaigns, which is a strongly commoditized cultural activity. But I think it's crucial to mention that participants in ARGs can devote hours and hours of time and energy to completing the ARG without ever once purchasing the product or watching the media text the ARG advertises. When I mention I study ARGs, the most common question I receive is, "why would someone invest so much time, for free, on a game"? And I think that's a commodity way of looking at ARGs. Instead, if we look at them as gifts, we can argue that players and participants are using their time and energy to respond to the pleasures they experience in the game. The gift and the commodity economies are not enemies; but rather mutually react with each other. This union of the gift and the commodity is what I call the Digi-Gratis economy.

You discuss the emergence of a "Digi-gratis" culture which operates as a "mashup" between market and gift economies. Explain. How is this different from the hybrid economy Lawrence Lessig has discussed in some of his work?

The "Digi-Gratis" economy is a term that I use to describe the mutually beneficial relationship between the gift and the market economies within contemporary media and culture. As I was saying above, it is difficult to see either the commodity metaphor or the gift metaphor as the ultimate metaphor for understanding the relationship between media audiences and media creators. But through a lens which ties both metaphors together, we can more fully appreciate the extent of contemporary content creation.

The term "mashup" is particularly instructive here, because it implies that neither metaphor dominates the relationship. We typically think of a mashup as a sample from one text remixed with a sample from another text to form a third text. Importantly, a mashup relies on the knowledge of both requisite texts that the audience brings with it: for example, in Mark Vidler's "Carpenter's Wonderwall," the music of The Carpenters is remixed with the music of Oasis to form a unique entity, the power of which comes from that particular interaction. We have to know The Carpenters' and Oasis' original songs in order to fully appreciate Vidler's masterful mashup.

I believe that the concept of the mashup can be instructive for understanding more than media issues, and in fact can describe cultural concerns as well. The "Digi-Gratis" economy is one such mashup. As the name implies, it becomes most relevant in observing the way audiences and creators interact in digital environments. The "Digi-Gratis" economy thrives because neither the gift nor the commodity economy outweighs the other. Instead, through mutual reciprocity, their mashup forms a third type of encounter - the "Digi-Gratis." In many ways, it is similar to Lessig's conception of the hybrid economy, insofar as it does describe an interaction between two different economic styles, and that this interaction blossoms through digital technology.

But one crucial difference between the hybrid and the "Digi-Gratis" economies is that issue of the mashup metaphor. For Lessig, the hybrid emerges in spaces where one economy must dominate over the other. In turn, this dominance implies a focus on one end of the production/consumption dynamic. As Lessig says in Remix, the hybrid economy "is either a commercial entity that aims to leverage value from a sharing economy, or it is a sharing economy that builds a commercial entity to better support its sharing aims" (177). One always dominates.

Alternately, the "Digi-Gratis" implies a mutual relationship between the two economies, and places no emphasis between production and consumption: both are weighted equally. To give a recent example, Old Spice's use of viewer questions and the Old Spice man's (Isaiah Mustafa) answers has been a web hit on YouTube, Reddit, Twitter and other social media. To look at the interaction solely through a commodity metaphor limits the range of complex meanings available to the audience/viewers/responders. Audiences have had a powerful role to play not just in the creation of content, but in the focus of their attention as well. The "Digi-Gratis" metaphor offers a chance to view these interactions as meaningful in and of themselves, while not ignoring the complex interactions between commodities and gifts.

Biography

Paul Booth, Assistant Professor of new media and technology at DePaul University, is a passionate follower of new technological trends, memes, the viral nature of communication on the web, and popular culture (especially film, television and new media). He studies the interaction between traditional media and new media and the participation of fans with media texts. He received his Ph.D. in Communication and Rhetoric from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Paul teaches classes in communication and technology, popular culture, science fiction, fandom, new media, and the history of technology. His book Digital Fandom: New Media Studies investigates how fans are using "web 2.0" participation technology to create new texts online, and how their works fits into our contemporary media culture. He has also published articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication, New Media and Culture, Narrative Inquiry, The Journal of Narrative Theory, American Communication Journal, and in the book Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy. He explores topics in video games, science fiction, social media, politics, philosophy and narrative theory. He is currently enjoying a cup of coffee.

No, You Do Not Have to Be A Gamer to Like Inception!

Last week, Patrick Goldstein of The Los Angeles Times ran a provocative blog post about the mixed reception surrounding the film, Inception, in which yours truly was quoted heavily. Here is what he quoted me as saying:

If Inception plays especially strongly with a young audience, it's probably because they instinctively grasp its narrative density best, having grown up playing video games. "When it comes to understanding 'Inception,' you've got a real advantage if you're a gamer," says Henry Jenkins, who's a professor of communications, journalism and cinematic arts at USC. " Inception is first and foremost a movie about worlds and levels, which is very much the way video games are structured. Games create a sense that we're a part of the action. Stories aren't just told to us. We experience them."

Even though the density of Inception can be off-putting to older moviegoers, it's a delicious challenge for gamers. "With Inception, if you blink or if your mind wanders, you miss it," says Jenkins. "You're not sitting passively and sucking it all in. You have to experience it like a puzzle box. It's designed for us to talk about, to share clues and discuss online, instead of having everything explained to us. Part of the pleasure of the movie is figuring out things that don't come easily, which is definitely part of the video game culture."

Goldstein did a good job of compressing almost half an hour of conversation about critical response to the film into a few substantive paragraphs. In no sense do I feel misquoted there -- indeed, he drew on my conversation as background to frame other parts of his discussion as well.

I have, however, been bemused by the ways that my claims here have traveled through cyberspace and gotten a bit more distorted by each new contributor. So, Entertainment Weekly's blog picked up on Goldstein's story and shifted the ground just a bit. It's headline reads "Inception -- Only Good if You are Young?" And on Twitter, several people rephrased the claim, " Do you have to be a gamer to like #Inception?" By the end of the week, when someone tweeted that they only "partially agreed" with my claims about the film, I wrote back to say that I only "partially agreed" with them too since people were responding to a partial representation of what I had to say in the first place!

So, let me take a step back and sketch out what I thought I was arguing. I start from the assumption that differing responses to the film are at least partially shaped by differing interpretive strategies. I discussed this concept back in my book, Textual Poachers, in relation to arguments made by reader-response critic Peter J. Rabinowitz about how genre impacts reading.

Peter J. Rabinowitz has suggested that genre study might productively shift its focus away from properties of fictional narratives and onto the 'strategies that readers use to process texts," seeing genres as 'bundles of operations,' conventions, and expectations that readers draw upon in the process of making meanings. As Rabinowitz puts it, 'reading' is always 'reading' as."...Different genres evoke different questions readers want to ask and provide alternative rules for assigning significance and structure to textual content. Rabinowitz distinguishes between four basic types of interpretive strategies: (1) 'rules of notice' which give priority to particular aspects of narratives as potentially interesting and significant while assigning others to the margins; (2)'rules of signification' which help to determine what meanings or implications can be ascribed to particular textual features; (3)'rules of configuration' which shape the reader's expectations about likely plot developments and allow the reader to recognize what would constitute a satisfactory resolution of that plot; (4) "rules of coherence" which shape the extrapulations readers make from textual details, the speculations they make about information not explicitly present within the story. The reader's experience, he suggests, thus requires an initial decision about what genre(s) will be most appropriately applied to a given narrative and then the systematic applications of those genre rules to the process of comprehending the textually provided information.

Of course, the ability to mobilize the interpretive strategies associated with a genre rest on having access to and familiarity with that genre in the first place as those of us who teach freshman film classes discover when we try to expose students to westerns or musicals or any other genre which has not been part of their repertoire of consumption. That's the sense in which gamers have an "advantage" -- they have a set of skills, literacies, competencies, expectations, call them what you want, that they bring with them to the theater and which shapes the range of strategies they have available to them which helps them to make sense of a film like Inception.

So, this brings us back to my claim about games and Inception. I am not saying that it would be impossible for a non-gamer to enjoy the movie. It doesn't represent, after all, such a dramatic break with other films which have come before it. In the interview, I drew analogy to the way D.W. Griffith cross-cut between four different historical periods, intensifying the movements between them as we neared the climax, in his silent classic, Intolerance. I would also agree with Entertainment Weekly's Darren Franich that it is less complicated than many art films or even, in his example, some classic film noirs. Yet, it interests me that the discussions around Inception are the kinds of discussions we might once have had around an art film in the 1960s or even an indie film like Nolan's own Memento, yet they are occuring around a summer blockbuster. The genre elements are part of what makes the film popular, part of what makes it fun and pleasurable to play the game that Inception offers us.

David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson have offered a brilliant analysis over at their Observations on Film Art blog about the role that exposition plays in maintaining clarity as we move between the different levels of the film. Indeed, they suggest that the presence of exposition across the film replaces character development in many cases, insuring that we can in fact follow the different levels or layers at work here.

I would also argue that at the start of the film, the audience is required to make a leap of faith, entering into a world whose rules are not immediately clear (especially in the opening sequence) and which are still being laid out to us in the final segment. This is very much like the experience of a gamer jumping into the game without always knowing the rules or properties, trying out new ideas and bumping into walls, until they learn how it works. Bordwell's discussion of the film's opening segment (which he calls a "training exercise") suggests that it may function as a "tutorial" or "sandbox" level -- such as we see in games where our first level of play allows us to test our capacities and rehearses skills we will need later in the game. So, at the most basic level, I would say that gamers have a predisposition to embrace certain kinds of open-ended experiences, figuring out what's going on as they go, which is different from the notion of clear expositional foundations we would association in classical Hollywood narratives. Indeed, gamers may have an expectation, as I suggested, that the film not lay everything out for us at the start but expects us to make an effort to figure out the pieces as we go. This is part of what makes an experience like this more intense and immersive. I couldn't believe it when I realized how long I had been in the theater, not having glanced at my watch during the duration, indeed, not having breathed very much while watching Inception.

This is not to say that the film abandons us altogether to our own devices. Genre plays an important role here in terms of helping us to map what's going on and understanding what matters in the film. We can read it as a straight forward action film or as a science fiction film -- think Total Recall. But there is also the possibility of making sense of it in terms of the conceptual vocabulary that games provide us -- so that we can understand the final sequence as moving between "levels" or "layers," each with a well defined task or "mission", each with a visually distinctive environment (not unlike the fire or ice levels in classic Nintendo scrollers like Mario Brothers or Mega Man), each requiring a different set of skills to master and a different set of obstacles to overcome. I am leaving aside claims that the film may pay tribute to specific games in its visual references: Bordwell cites Assassin's Creed II, Meigakure, and Shadow of Destiny. And Kristin Thompson closely examines a claim that the film was inspired in part by an episode from The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Companion.

Entertainment Weekly asks, "Is Inception the first great video game movie? Not based on one specific game, but rather, on the whole stylistic structure of video game storytelling?" Well, not the first certainly, since I think there's a strong argument, say, that Run Lola Run builds on a different set of properties from games, and the same could be said for The Matrix movies, but it does mean that cinema may be learning things from games which come through more interestingly when it is not trying to directly adapt games to the screen but is simply trying to produce movies that speak to a generation of movie goers who have grown up gaming. One reader asked why not just make an Inception game in the first place. I'd argue that these films deploy a language borrowed from games precisely to explore experiences which would be difficult to achieve in a game. I think thinking of Run Lola Run as a game helps us to explore the theme of choice and consequence which runs through the film, yet the filmmaker has the capacity to make every choice offered a meaningful one while in games, many choices are necessarily arbitrary and uninteresting.

Thinking about Inception as a game or at least a film for gamers might also speak to the ongoing critical discussion of its lack of development at least in terms of its secondary characters. Kristin Thompson writes,

"The characters' goals, apart from Cobb's, arise from the premises of the dream-sharing technology. Of course, they want to get paid, but that's assumed. Their actions all arise from the need to keep doing what they must to sustain the dreams and later from the need to improvise solutions to unforeseen problems that seem to violate the rules they have previously known. Why they need the money, whom they go home to when off-duty, how they got into this business, and all the other conventions of Hollywood characterization, are simply ignored."

This is consistent with an argument which Mary Fuller and I made about games in 1995. The very nature of an interactive narrative serves to strip characters of psychological depth -- game characters are often glorified cursers, vehicles we use to move through the game worlds, rather than characters into whom we project sophisticated motives or anticipate character development. Their goals are assigned from the beginning. They are defined through their capacity for action and their missions. The need for an open-ended structure means that we do not expect them to learn through their experiences nor do we expect their actions to be motivated through psychological realism. Choices become relatively arbitrary, having more to do with resources and capacities, than drives or needs. I don't think this lets Inception off the hook in terms of character issues, but it is interesting to think of this shift in the function and nature of characters as an extension of the game-like logic I am describing.

Bill, a reader, sent me an email with an interesting question about my argument:

"I agree with you in the LATimes article where you say gaming experience may have a lot to do with someone's appreciation of the movie Inception. However, I'd like to propose another possibility. I'm not sure many members of past generations understand or accept the film's premise. As DiCaprio's character describes it, conscious experience is not a literal transcript of the world, but an ongoing process of virtual construction by the mind. Although this premise has scientific merit, it is not widely known or embraced by the majority of tradition-bound Americans."

Here's my response:

"I would agree totally with you that the film's perspective on reality and perception also has a generational slant. It's interesting though that the films and television shows which take on some of this philosophical/spiritual argument are often associated with games and other digital media -- so I would see The Matrix, the final episode of Lost, and Inception, as all part of the same conversation about our relationship with the real world. We may as a culture be more open to such ideas because of our experience of the digital, just as people in the industrial age were more apt to think of a clockmaker god, or people in the early 20th century started to understand repetition compulsion in terms of a phonograph record in their heads. As Sherry Turkle suggests, we use technologies as tools to think with and a key question we use them to consider is the nature of consciousness."

This exchange would suggest that the game analogy extends from the formal structure of the film to the spiritual or metaphysical level on which it also tries to operate.

Now, coming back to Goldstein's original blog, he takes my discussion of gamers and maps it onto what he sees as generational differences in people's response to the film. I would point out, however, that the age span of active gaming expands with each passing year: more younger players are entering the game market, more older players are continuing to play into adulthood, and more seniors are trying games through multiplayer worlds and the Wii controller, let aside casual games. So, let's be careful about assuming there's a correlation between being young and being a gamer. After all, I'm over fifty and I still play games.

I hope this at least clarifies what I meant. I have only seen the film once and I have a feeling that I would need to see it many more times before I could offer anywhere near an adequate analysis, so take these as provisional observations about a work which I am sure many of us will continue to debate for a long time. It's exciting to have a summer film which sparks this kind of discussion!

Ethics and Game Design: A Conversation (Part Two)

One goal of the book is to help identify design principles that encourage game designers and players to reflect more deeply on their ethical choices. What would a designer learn from studying the contents of this book?

COLLEEN: You ask the question I'm super invested in and excited about! On one hand, I think we have to be careful about what we mean by ethical choices in the context of designing and playing. Both design and play are inherently transgressive (if they are any good). They push against the boundaries of rules and norms to create new experiences. At least, this is what many of us (designers and players) aspire to. I think what's really exciting about the collection of essays in the book is how each author defines ethics on their own terms, but also in complementary ways. I think the book gives designers the freedom to consider ethics not just as a property of games (to shoot or not to shoot?), but as an active engagement with players, context, and culture. Considering ethical choices as a way of thinking about game design and where and how games take form expands the boundaries of what we think about when we consider a game. The playing field extends beyond the game itself to the social context and the rhetorical perspectives (intentional or otherwise) of its creators (to borrow from Ian Bogost's model of persuasive games).

Do ethical concerns emerge differently in single-player and multi-player games? If so, how are the social dimensions of games being harnessed to encourage greater ethical reflection?

MIGUEL: Even though much of my work is focused on single-player games (as I understand them being the singularity that allows us a deeper understanding of games as ethical systems), I think the right answer to this questions is to say that we, scholars and sometimes developers, don't often think about ethics and multiplayer, and how to harness the social for creating this kind of meaningful play. I mean, the social is always moral (and political), so I guess we are taking it for granted, and focusing much more on this solitary experience (clearly influenced by other media that some could understand operate this way, even though careful reading of say Brecht shows that even epic theatre understood the audience as a social body, even though the experience of the play was individual - but I digress). In other words: we tend to forget multiplayer, and social dynamics, when thinking about the design of ethical gameplay, and we focus too much on either single player, or how the rules/mechanics of a system will affect a single player, even in a multiplayer game.

I think there is much work to be done regarding multiplayer ethical gameplay design. I feel that games like Diplomacy, or Defcon, or even RPGs (specially the swedish school of "jeepen games") have understood how to design particular multiplayer mechanics that generate ethical gameplay. Of course, backstabbing is one: but how does it work? Does it always generate ethical gameplay? How about harnessing empathy, solidarity, other values that are at play in multiplayer contexts? This question you're asking points us, I think, in the right direction: how to include the social, that which cannot be proceduralized, into the design of ethical gameplay?

My answer? By understanding how does a game system operate when creating ethical experiences (high abstract order), and then trying to think about mechanics that translate that into player-to-player behavior. I think the "Fragile Alliance" multiplayer mode in Kane and Lynch does this very well, for example: being a traitor is fun, but it's also a moral decision, one that is recognized so by both the game system and the game players, both reacting to a particular ethical choice.

COLLEEN: Adding another real person into the equation certainly changes the game. Interacting with unpredictable real people demands dynamic ethical choice-making from the start. You can't really grief an NPC! I think, however, it's more difficult to for designers to harness ethical choice-making in these social situations. In MMORPGs to grief or not to grief is really a player choice - like bluffing in human-human poker - these are not "designed" ethical choice moments. They are emergent aspects of play which designers don't always anticipate. This unpredictability is the magic of games and I think it's also where ethical play is more complicated and interesting. The complexity of emergent play - particularly in social play - can't always be harnessed, but it can be sought after. I think the flip-side to this fairly optimistic view of social and ethical dimensions is where we see social games designed around behaviorist concepts to

generate responses like addictive play, social coercion, and perhaps the worst evil of all, spam. I think there are definitely some ethics to consider here. Do we need a game design code of ethics?

Several of the writers note that all games are in some sense "ethical systems." Yet, certain games recur across many of the essays, suggesting that there may already be a canon of "ethical" games within this new field. What are these games doing which makes them such rich examples for research?

MIGUEL: Well, what the games I tend to analyze do right is to think about ethical gameplay beyond the basic consequentialist dilemma posing in a black-and-white moral universe. When we think about ethical gameplay, we immediately fall prey of the binary dilemmas, of the clashes between right or wrong, or between greater and lesser evils. Which I think it's often both too ethically coarse and a waste of time. Games can contribute to fostering our moral values, but they can only do so inasmuch as they first address us, players, as moral beings, then challenging our values and forcing us to reflect about our very notion of morality.

Binary dilemmas just help us corroborate our values - we don't need to challenge them, we act by them. The canon of "good" ethical games presents us with challenges beyond choices, a way in which we can use play to learn, develop and evaluate our own morality, both as players and as citizens. The games I find the most interesting are those in

which either there are no choices (Shadow of the Colossus) or the choices have effects I cannot easily predict by trying to understand the algorithms behind the game, therefore effectively making me develop ethical, and not instrumental strategies (Fallout 3).

KAREN: There are quite a few games that were mentioned regularly throughout the book collection and across multiple authors--games that could be considered part of a growing canon. These were typically games that attempted to include some type of ethical components or questions, or game play that ascribed some type of morality points to how you behave in the game. Some of these games, such as Mass Effect, Red Dead Redemption, and Fallout 3, incorporated a system (which varied from being transparent to opaque), where depending on your choices (e.g., actions in the game, or your dialogue selections), your avatar would be placed on a scale that was related to his or her ever-changing honor, ethics or morality. As a result, different options or interactions would open up due to your avatar's status on this scale. Other games did not use an ethical lever as part of describing your avatar, but offered an ethical choice that had certain direct outcomes, such as in Bioshock I/II. There are also some games that bring up specific ethical issues or concerns through their game content, narrative or other mechanics, such as Super Columbine

Massacre RPG or the Grand Theft Auto series. Thus, many of the authors in this collection analyzed the extent to which these games truly support ethical thinking, and provide the ability to experiment with one's own ethics and values, as well as which types of principles might better support this. I am personally interested in the moments in games when players have difficulty deciding what is right or appropriate to do, and how they think through those decisions.

On the other hand, I believe that all games (and any type of artistic expression) to some extent embody and express values--from everything through their modes of production and distribution, their mechanics and rules, to their cultural touch points and the ways subcultures form around them. For example, how a game is staffed or advertised may

have ethical implications, and there are values embedded in the way a particular game's world is designed. Again, while many games mentioned in the books more directly present ethical content and mechanics around ethics, potentially any game could be a site of interest because of the ways they were used, written about, or played with other people. For example, what is the function of using cheat codes in games?; how do players negotiate with each other in a given game, particularly ones that require social interaction?; and what are the rules around play? Any game can be a beneficial site for exploring ethical issues.

Interestingly, I've noticed that in the past few years, many games, particularly RPGs, have had more direct ethical components and have been quite popular. I believe this may be because games enable you to experience a new perspective--a new role--and one's ethical identity is an important part of this perspective. Being able to access diverse

ethical perspectives is perhaps even necessary for fully appreciating humanity. Through play, we are able to access new ways to experience the world, understand humankind, reflect on our identities, our destinies, our pasts and our mysteries. We may never fully answer these questions, but hopefully games can help us approach them.

Other essays describe so-called "serious" or "educational" games which are created specifically to foster ethical reflection. What are these games doing that's different from those already on the market?

COLLEEN: I'm not sure these games are doing anything different on a formal level, but they are certainly coming out of different development contexts from AAA titles, or "mainstream" videogames. Many of the games referenced in the book are the result of a different economic model: research funding and university/not-for-profit labs. In the last 5-10 years some exciting models have taken form in New York (I have heard it referred to as "The New York School") where there's lots of cross-pollination between academia and industry, enabling lots of low-risk experimentation and new funding possibilities/models. Out there in Cali you guys have some very exciting things happening as well, particularly at your institution, Henry! I think in order to build games that take risks with content and gameplay, there needs to be these kinds of alternative spaces and collaborations to experiment and learn.

The market is definitely changing and diversifying as well. Over the last month console sales dropped and mobile game sales skyrocketed. More distribution platforms for all kinds of games will definitely also help "serious" and "educational" games reach wider audiences, and exist across different platforms and in different contexts.

Games encourage what James Paul Gee describes as "projective identification." How is this concept linked to notions of "empathy"? What role does "empathy" play in fostering ethical reflection through play?

MIGUEL: As a Virtue Ethicist, I would argue that empathy is one of the core virtues that needs to be fostered in order to achieve the good life. However, in games, empathy presents itself in a different way. Let me start with a question - what or who do we feel empathy for in games? In the case of multiplayer games, the answer is easy: other players. Therefore, any game that includes some kind of systemic reward for behaviors that are empathetic will foster that value, and hence maybe not provoke ethical reflection, but have an ethical outcome.

In single player games, though, what is the object of empathy? AI researchers aspire to create empathy for artificial agents, but I am not certain we are there yet. We do feel empathy though for characters and locations, that is, not for the way a particular agent behaves, but for the role a particular agent plays in the game narrative or fiction. So using this instinctive care for the plot (if you wish to call it so - there is no story requirement, and open-world games also foster care for the place), developers can create engaging ethical

experiences based on one of the values that are cardinal to fulfilling the good life. Play, then, becomes valuable.

COLLEEN: I love how you connect empathy to Gee's concept, because in many ways I think Gee has developed a more nuanced - and realistic - model for empathy in games. The role of empathy is key to ethical thinking, since ethical possibilities are always in flux and specific to the situation and people/entities involved. Gee's concept of projective identification goes beyond just trying to understand another person through reflection or thought, it's a verb - learning how to think like someone else by playing them - and by practicing them. That said, I think bridging these experiences between the game and the real world is where the reflection is potentially more potent. The game is a practice space, but it is inherently limited. In many cases, players are not just identifying with the roles they are playing, they are trying to understand what the game - or the game's designers - will reward and they'll play accordingly. In "trw" (the real world) there

are many more possibilities and while stuff learned in the game can be tried out, it will likely produce very different results.

KAREN: This question is of particular interest to me, as I am currently

writing my dissertation on the relationship among play, empathy and ethical thinking! It was also an integral part of the game I co-designed, called Mission U.S.: For Crown or Colony? I outlined the design process for this game in one of the chapters in the book, called, "Using Mission U.S. For Crown or Colony? to Develop Historical Empathy and Nurture Ethical Thinking." Mission U.S. is developed by Channel 13/WNET, Electric Funstuff, historians from CUNY and researchers from EDC. It is an adventure game that teaches historical thinking skills to Middle School students. The game, which centers around the Revolutionary War and Boston Massacre, invites the player to explore 1770 Boston as printer's apprentice, Nat. We argue that through playing the game, the player and avatar form a new avatar-self relationship that embodies both the social conventions of 1770 Boston and the modern-day knowledge of the player. In a sense, we can argue, the player projects his or her identity onto this avatar, thereby

strengthening the ability to see through the eyes of Nat, and empathizing with Nat's 1770 context.

So, although I'm still thinking through this complicated question, my hypothesis (and gut reaction) is that empathy plays a strong role in fostering ethical reflection and reasoning (in games and outside games), because it enables a person to take on a new role, project

one's self into that role, and to perceive the world through those new eyes and from within a new ethical system. Similarly, empathizing with another person in any context allows one to think through their perspective, and start to consider other's points of view, which is

helpful when deciding what is right and wrong in a given situation. In the practice of argumentation, for example, it's one thing to tell your side, but it's a stronger argument if you know what the other side is thinking, and how to incorporate that into your thesis. People are really good at stating their opinion, but not as good as considering other's opinions and building an argument that predicts and addresses contrary opinions. Yet, as citizens in a democracy, it is absolutely necessary to be able to empathize with others so we can judge ethical issues more holistically, argue our opinions more substantially, and decide the best solution to complex issues. From my experience with Mission U.S. and beyond, I think that games have the potential for helping support "projective identification" and empathy,which in turn can help people become better ethical thinkers--and more

engaged citizens.

Karen, the American Revolution was the subject of both your thesis project at MIT and your new initiative, described in the book. What lessons did you learn from your student work that has informed your new project? Why do you think the American Revolution is especially rich as a context for exploring the kinds of historical questioning that have been at the center of these projects?

KAREN:Yes! How lucky was I to work on two interesting history-focused

projects?! Working on my MIT Comparative Media Studies masters thesis project, Reliving the Revolution, was definitely a strong impetus for developing this book collection. It also helped me to shape the game design for Mission U.S, a game that teaches kids historical and ethical thinking skills. Reliving the Revolution is a location-based GPS-enabled game that lets players to step into the shoes of historic figures involved in the Battle of Lexington, and relive the events leading up to and after the battle, so they can figure out together who fired the first shot. To do this, the players explore present-day real-world Lexington, MA, and also interact with virtual historic figures and objects accessed through a mobile device. The purpose of my project was, in part, to help students start to realize that historic moments are interpretable, and that there were many perspectives on what happened during this specific moment. Likewise, I believe all moments--both past, present, and future--are interpretable. I believe that being able to critically analyze these moments, and consider other's perspectives, helps us be better at deciding what is right or wrong in a given context.

History is a great way to practice interpretation, analysis, multiple perspectives and empathy--all important components of understanding complex social and ethical issues. Some may balk, but historical thinking and ethical thinking are, to me, not very different. History just adds another dimension to a moment--time--which affects how you

analyze a particular context. To be a good historian, you need to embody a historical time period, and its unique values, morals and norms. I would argue that historians could (and do) readily apply their skills to current and future moments. When playtesting Reliving the Revolution with Middle School students, I was pleased to see how

naturally the students translated their skills to thinking about current events, and wondering how, for example, the War in Iraq would be written about differently in textbooks there versus here.

Fortunately, I had the opportunity to apply my experience to a new game, Mission U.S.: For Crown or Colony, which was developed as part of a Corporation for Public Broadcasting grant, and as I mentioned earlier, designed by Channel 13/WNET, Electric Funstuff, historians at CUNY, and EDC. The climax of Mission U.S. is the Boston Massacre, which the player, in the role of a printer's apprentice named Nat,

experiences first-hand. Yet instead of showing one version of the event, we built the game so that each student in a class could potentially see totally different versions of what happened. To do this, we created eight different vignettes about the Massacre, some

that displayed the Loyalist/British take on what happened, and some that leaned more to the Patriot perspective. The choice of vignettes that are presented are randomized for each player. After playing the Boston Massacre module of the game, the students then have the opportunity to discuss with their peers why there were multiple interpretations and perspectives on the event. Later, they also have the ability in the game to participate in a deposition where they could tell an officer what they think happened at the event--their testimony even has consequences on their game play. I know it sounds

crazy, but even just the idea that there can be other points of view on the past--and that kids can be active arbiters of historic moments--is an epiphany for many young students. Most students just get fed history facts from a textbook! But being critical thinkers of past

and present moments is necessary for developing engaged citizens in a democracy and a globally interconnected world. No one opinion or interpretation is enough, so we all need to be responsible for considering many points of view and appropriately expressing our own.

I hope this collection will inspire everyone to find ways--perhaps through games and play--to teach these important skills to young people (and adults, too!).

Colleen Macklin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Design and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City and Director of PETLab (Prototyping Evaluation, Teaching and Learning lab), a lab focused on developing new games, simulations, and play experiences for experimental learning and social issues. Projects range from a curriculum in game design for the Boys and Girls Club, a card game for the Red Cross Climate Centre, and big games such as Re:Activism and the sport Budgetball. In addition to work in social games and interactive media, her research focuses on the social aspects of the design and prototyping process. In this vein, she is working with the Social Science Research Council on a prototyping approach to creating innovative mobile learning spaces with youth, public schools and cultural institutions, with funding through the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Member of the game design collectives Local No. 12 (see backchattergame.com) and The Leisure Society. India China Institute Fellow (2006-2007). Interactive work shown at Come Out and Play, SoundLab, The Whitney Museum for American Art and Creative Time. BFA, Media Arts Pratt Institute, graduate studies in Computer Science, CUNY and International Affairs, The New School.

Miguel Sicart is Assistant Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, where he teaches game design. He received his Ph.D. in game studies 2006; taking a multidisciplinary approach to ethics and computer games, he studied issues of game design, violence and videogames and the role of age-regulation codes. His book, The Ethics of Computer Games, which is based on his doctoral work, was published by MIT Press in the spring of 2009. He is currently working on developing a design framework for implementing ethical gameplay in digital games.

Karen Schrier is a doctoral student at Columbia University, where she is finishing her dissertation on ethics and games. She also currently works full-time as the Director of Interactive Media at ESI Design, an experience design firm in New York City. Her first co-edited book, Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values through Play, was published last March by IGI Global; the next book in the collection will be published in early 2011. Previously, she worked as a portfolio manager and executive producer at Scholastic, where she spearheaded digital initiatives for the Corporate and International divisions. She has also worked at Nickelodeon, BrainPOP and Barnes & Noble's SparkNotes. Karen was the Games Program co-chair of the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference in 2008 and 2009, currently serves on the advisory boards of the Computer Game Education Review (CGER), and is an adjunct professor at Parsons The New School. Karen has spoken on games and learning at numerous conferences, including GDC, SIGGRAPH, AERA, Games for Change, NECC, and SITE. She also helped develop numerous games and digital properties, such as Mission U.S.: For Crown or Colony?; Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge, and Scholastic.com; and Nickelodeon's ParentsConnect. Her digital and non-digital games have been featured in festivals such as Come Out and Play. Karen holds a master's degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and a bachelor's degree from Amherst College.

Ethics and Game Design: A Conversation (Part One)

A year or so ago, Karen Shrier, an alumna from the MIT Comparative Media Studies program, asked me to contribute a forward to a book she was co-editing on Ethics and Games with David Gibson. The opening of the piece I wrote for her book gives some sense of how I personally think about these issues:

What a videogame does at heart is teach you how, in the midst of utter chaos, to know what is important, what is not and act on that" -- Colonel Casey Wardynski

"I'm reviewing the situation. Can a fellow be a villain all his life?" or so asks Fagin, the scheming and ruthless mastermind of an army of thieving young boys, at a key moment in Oliver!, the musical based on Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist. Fagin's "situation" may be an odd place to start in thinking about the potential role of games in providing ethical and moral instruction--after all, Dickens used Fagin to embody the negative influences which besieged young men when society turned their backs on them--but bear with me.

In Oliver!, through the song, "Reviewing the Situation," we have a character digging deep into his own goals, values, and place in the world, and openly proclaiming that his experiences as a "villain" make him ill-suited to most of the trappings of a "normal life." Fagin's self-reflection leads him to construct and test a series of scenarios (marrying, joining respectable society, getting a job, living alone, freeing the young men in his employee, reaching old age), each embodying an alternative version of himself. Fagin plays out their consequences as a series of thought experiments, before pulling back and deciding to "think it out again." In the course of "Reviewing the Situation," Fagin engages in a range of different cognitive processes--projecting alternative versions of himself, and speculating about possible choices and anticipating their consequences--all in a particular kind of mental space that has no immediate consequences for his current social situation, though it has the potential to reshape the way he sees himself and his place in the world. Here, for example, he explores what it would be like to work for a living: "Is it such a humiliation for a robber to perform an honest job? So a job I'm getting, possibly, I wonder who my boss'll be? I wonder if he'll take to me...? What bonuses he'll make to me...? I'll start at eight and finish late, At normal rate, and all..but wait! ...I think I'd better think it out again."

Now consider a typical adolescent, seated in front of her computer screen, beginning to construct a character for a role playing game, and facing the same range of questions about her potential identities and goals. Should she join the dark horde, embrace a life as a villain, commit atrocities on other players, and in the process, begin to experiment with and potentially exorcise the darker side of her own personality? Or, should she become one of the good ones, going out to do heroic deeds, sharing the loot with others in her party, rescuing those in distress and helping newbies learn to play, and developing a sense of responsibility and accountability to others in her guild? Should she design an avatar that reflects the way she sees herself or should she embrace a fantasy radically different from her real world personality or situation and in so doing, see what it might be like to walk in a different set of moccasins?

Like Fagin, she can try on different personas, test different scenarios, and imagine alternative moral codes through which she might navigate the challenges of her day-to-day existence. She has the option of taking risks, dying, rebooting, and exploring another course of action: "I think I'd better think it out again." While young people have often found it difficult to anticipate the future consequences of their current actions, the game offers her a powerful tool through which to accelerate life processes and thus play out in the course of an afternoon several different scenarios and their consequences. And through in-game cameras that allow players to record and replay their actions, she can literally review the situation, going back to key choice points and retrospectively evaluate where she went wrong and how bad decisions led to negative consequences. Seen in this way, the computer game constitutes an incredible resource for self-reflection and personal exploration, one with rich potentials for moral and ethical education. No other current art form allows such an intense focus on choices and their consequences; no other art form allows us this same degree of agency to make our own decisions and then live through their outcomes.

Over time, Karen's project expanded into two edited collections, the first of which is already out in the market, the second of which will appear late this year or in early 2011. If you want to buy the first book, Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play, Karen's publisher is generously offering readers a chance to buy a copy at half price if they follow this link. You can see the table of contents for the collection here. The second book will be called Designing Games for Ethics: Models, Techniques, and Frameworks.

Taken together, the two books bring together an impressive array of game designers, theorists, and critics, representing a mix of people working on mainstream commercial and alternative "serious" games production, a global community of people trying to think through the core issues implied by the books' titles. I read the first volume with great interest (and no small amount of pride at seeing my former student at the center of such an effort): the topic is one which deserves more attention than it has and the book offers us some important ways to complicate the typical arguments around games and media effects. These books are important not only to those deeply invested in games but to the growing community of people invested in new media literacies and education, given the centrality of games to the cultural lives of young people and the importance of encouraging self reflection and ethical skills.

In the hopes of calling more attention to this project, I asked Karen if she would do an interview for this blog. The interview has grown into a conversation between Karen and two of her contributors, Miguel Sicart (IT University of Copenhagen) and Colleen Macklin (Parsons The New School), which explores games (in many forms) as ethical systems and as vehicles for shaping the empathy and identification of their players.

As the book's preface suggests, ethics and games is an "emerging field of study." What role do you see this collection playing in generating interest and awareness around this topic?

Karen: A major goal of my co-edited collection, Ethics and Game Design:Teaching Values through Play is to bring together the diverse and growing community of voices and begin to define the field of ethics and games, identify its primary challenges and questions, and establish the current state of the discipline. To start to unpack this, I brought together experts from a variety of perspectives--such as computer science, art history, education, philosophy, law, game design, management, media studies, and psychology. These designers, practitioners, educators and researchers wrote almost 40 chapters on everything from the ethics of Farmville's game mechanics; to a case study on designing Train, a non-digital game about the Holocaust; to the types of ethical play styles of teenagers. Our goal is to encourage game designers to think through and address ethical questions and issues in their designs; to motivate educators to seek new ways to support ethical thinking and reflection through play; and to inspire researchers to develop relevant frameworks and methodologies, design principles and theories for understanding this complex field. Attention to this field is essential for developing citizens who can think deeply about ethics; fully engage with complex issues; reflect on their values; and decide what is right for them, their families, their societies and the world.

My hope is that the collection will provide the foundation to start an engaged, rigorous dialogue around games, play, and ethics. The book collection, however, is just the first step in building a larger community of researchers, policy makers, journalists, educators, game players, and designers who are interested in moving the question beyond whether games are inherently good or bad, to how games and play can support ethics and citizenship skills.

And wow, it was a lot of work putting this collection together, but it was totally worth it.

Games and play are fundamental to all human societies and have historically been used explicitly and implicitly to teach values. What lessons can we learn from thinking about pre-digital games as "ethical systems"?''

MIGUEL: First of all, I am not sure we should make a pre-digital/digital divide without mentioning what makes digital games so unique. It may be possible to argue that in fact, there is nothing unique to digital games, and therefore what we learn from thinking about non-digital games is also valid for digital games.

In the case of ethics and games, I'd argue that there are at least two unique elements in digital games that differentiate it from the past: one, the possibility of single player games, and more importantly, of solitary play. Digital games have afforded single player games that make players engage alone with the game system. Two, the black-box effect (rules are invisible to players and have to deduct them from play - and they are not discussable/easily modifiable) is stronger in games. Of course, there are mod communities and hackers, but still, the access to rules and their configuration is much more complicated than in non-digital games.

In terms of thinking about morality, this implies that there are significant differences with the non-digital world. Essentially, I'd claim that morally interesting non-digital games make it complicated to claim that games can be understood as ethical systems, since the role of the social (which is, in my opinion, always bringing in the political and the moral) is deeply intertwined with the systems design. In other words: how much of the ethical analysis of a non-digital game can argue for the morality embedded in the system, and how much can it refer to the moral social play? With digital games, specially with single-player games, we can have an optimal sample: from the rules, through the player, we can deduct the values, and given the black-boxing of the system, we can claim that those values are inscripted there by designers.

So, after this digression (apologies!), what I want to say is that maybe we can learn from digital games how to look at non-digital games as ethical systems, without the role of the social. And therefore, what we can learn from pre-digital games is that multiplayer is always ethically interesting, and that negotiation of rules, sportsmanship and player-to-player behavior, that is, many of those elements external to a systems-centric understanding of games, are fundamental for the ethics of play. Because what pre-digital games tell us is precisely that: play is moral (regardless of Huizinga's claims), not only because there are many players, but also because the systems are of ethical interest.

I guess I haven't much answered the question as rephrased it and answered what I actually wanted to answer. I'll give a shot at a short answer then: pre-digital games can help us trace the history of play as a moral activity, as one used to teach, educate and promote a number of values in our society by means of systems designed to embody

and foster a number of values.

COLLEEN:I think we can learn a lot. From a cultural perspective, looking at

the historic trajectory of games engaging with social and political issues is pretty exciting. I am thinking here of Situationist Games, The New Games Movement, Buckminster Fuller's World Game and the recent surge of "big games" fostered by festivals like Come Out and Play and (for the first time this year) IndieCade. In fact, many big games bridge pre and post digital games, gaming in and with the real world, which might happen to include and use computers (i.e. mobile devices). These kinds of games take place out in the streets actively blurring the edges of the magic circle and raising all kinds of interesting questions about what happens when public space and game space, game rules and social norms collide. If an ethics is a dynamic negotiation between people and/or entities, I think this kind of negotiation between spaces - inside and outside the game, digital and nondigital - is a productive place to start thinking about "ethical systems."

In the chapter I contributed, I talk about the design of a big game called Re:Activism, which so happens to have "serious" content, but that's not the part that is so interesting to me on an ethical level. What I think is interesting are the complex relationships between the designer, the player and the publics that encountered the game.

Much of the debate about video game violence would assume that games as a rule exert a negative moral and ethical influence on players. How might the essays in this book complicate such an understanding of their impact on players?

MIGUEL: Even though this is something Karen should answer, since she's the editor, let me chip in: I think this collection helps describing why players are moral beings, arguing strongly against the implicit discourse of the computer game player as a moral zombie that is so ubiquitous in popular press and anti-videogame literature. Players are ethical agents, and they have moral fail-safe systems that help them engage with the ethical complexities of computer game play.

KAREN: Again, the purpose of this book is to move the conversation away from simply demonizing games as violent or inappropriate, to really understanding why games are so controversial, and determining the potential (and limits) of games to help us think about and reflect on ethical issues and complex social dynamics. Building on what [one Ethics and Games collection contributor] Nick Fortugno said at a talk a few years ago, there are books that embody what many would consider negative ethics (e.g., Mein Kampf) and books that embody positive values (e.g., The Bible), but we should not deem books themselves as evil or good as a result. As we have seen throughout history, the introduction of each new medium incites fear that it will negatively affect our youth. This happened even during the movement from orality to the written word, where educators were worried that writing things down, rather than memorizing all texts by rote, would destroy young minds. We need to be open about what games can do, rather than focusing on some specific content in a few particular games. Or, at least let's talk about why certain violent content bugs us, or let's reflect on what types of cultural dynamics are at work when some people strive to ban all games.

Thus, many of the authors in this book start to complicate ethics surrounding games, and investigate the nuances of the player and game relationship. For example, Erin Hoffman takes a philosophical approach to understanding the purpose of death in games, and how violence and death may serve to help us contemplate the human experience. J. Alison Bryant and Jordana Drell take a more educational approach and investigate how families play video games together to see how to better foster dialogue about values through group play. Just like ethics themselves, no one feels these issues are black or white, but something to be discussed and deliberated.

Moreover, I want to make it clear that in editing this collection, or designing games, I personally do not seek to decide for someone else what is right or wrong, morally appropriate, or socially acceptable. Rather, I believe there is a need to equip young citizens with the ability to reflect on their values, consider other perspectives, make

complex arguments, and decide what is right in a given context. After all, values are constantly shifting from offline to online, transnationally, and across peer groups and social contexts. How you act at work is different from how you would act on an online parenting discussion group. What is appropriate in one country may not be relevant in another, and what you on the playground may be interpreted differently than in the boardroom. The way we individually and collectively vote on issues today may be different to how we cast our ballot in twenty years. We need to be our own arbiters of right and wrong during complex moments and shifting contexts.

I do feel that games provide a unique opportunity to practice these types of skills.

Colleen Macklin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Design and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City and Director of PETLab (Prototyping Evaluation, Teaching and Learning lab), a lab focused on developing new games, simulations, and play experiences for experimental learning and social issues. Projects range from a curriculum in game design for the Boys and Girls Club, a card game for the Red Cross Climate Centre, and big games such as Re:Activism and the sport Budgetball. In addition to work in social games and interactive media, her research focuses on the social aspects of the design and prototyping process. In this vein, she is working with the Social Science Research Council on a prototyping approach to creating innovative mobile learning spaces with youth, public schools and cultural institutions, with funding through the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Member of the game design collectives Local No. 12 (see backchattergame.com) and The Leisure Society. India China Institute Fellow (2006-2007). Interactive work shown at Come Out and Play, SoundLab, The Whitney Museum for American Art and Creative Time. BFA, Media Arts Pratt Institute, graduate studies in Computer Science, CUNY and International Affairs, The New School.

Miguel Sicart is Assistant Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, where he teaches game design. He received his Ph.D. in game studies 2006; taking a multidisciplinary approach to ethics and computer games, he studied issues of game design, violence and videogames and the role of age-regulation codes. His book, The Ethics of Computer Games, which is based on his doctoral work, was published by MIT Press in the spring of 2009. He is currently working on developing a design framework for implementing ethical gameplay in digital games.

Karen Schrier is a doctoral student at Columbia University, where she is finishing her dissertation on ethics and games. She also currently works full-time as the Director of Interactive Media at ESI Design, an experience design firm in New York City. Her first co-edited book, Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values through Play, was published last March by IGI Global; the next book in the collection will be published in early 2011. Previously, she worked as a portfolio manager and executive producer at Scholastic, where she spearheaded digital initiatives for the Corporate and International divisions. She has also worked at Nickelodeon, BrainPOP and Barnes & Noble's SparkNotes. Karen was the Games Program co-chair of the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference in 2008 and 2009, currently serves on the advisory boards of the Computer Game Education Review (CGER), and is an adjunct professor at Parsons The New School. Karen has spoken on games and learning at numerous conferences, including GDC, SIGGRAPH, AERA, Games for Change, NECC, and SITE. She also helped develop numerous games and digital properties, such as Mission U.S.: For Crown or Colony?; Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge, and Scholastic.com; and Nickelodeon's ParentsConnect. Her digital and non-digital games have been featured in festivals such as Come Out and Play. Karen holds a master's degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and a bachelor's degree from Amherst College.

Girls, Gaming, and Gender: An Interview with Game Designer and Researcher Jennifer Jenson (Part Two)

Below is the second installment of my interview with York University's Jennifer Jenson, a designer who has been doing significant research on gender and children's play with video games. You can find more about the 3G summit she is participating in here and here, including information about sponsorship. You suggest that much research on gender and games seeks to identify static "preferences" while gender is being "performed" in specific contexts. Yet the search for preferences seems calculated to identify design principles which seek to mediate inequalities in production and access to games. How might the more performance or actor-centered approach you are advocating lead to design principles that might address these concerns?

The inequalities in production and access to games are much more complex than a pink-colored bandaid can hope to cover, so by understanding first and foremost that preferences are a moving target that games companies and others can't hope to tackle, then certain other structural inequities become illuminated.

First, that it is very common for girls and women to have access to games through their male partners and relations -- sisters play on their brothers' and fathers' xboxes, but rarely have primary access. So this means that they aren't necessarily making decisions about what to purchase, and when to purchase. I think here, Nintendo has been incredibly successful in reaching some of this audience in their Wii advertising, and in the games that have been developed, simply because they have directly addressed a family audience in their marketing and advertising. This of course is still not directly addressing girls -- and maybe that is just fine, but women don't always equate to family. When it is the case that everywhere one turns, the subject of address is a male gamer it makes sense to me at least on some level that women do not feel like they are part of the gamer audience, and to get a sense of how this still works, you need only open a game magazine. The first point would then be: in order to cultivate a gamer audience that is female, it would make sense to begin to actually address them---which isn't the same thing as addressing them as mothers or as the pink people, something that should go without saying, but still doesn't.

Second, while it has been pointed out a number of times over the years that the repertoire of available avatar choices if a player wants to play as something that is marked as a female character is not only far less, but also tends to be hyper-feminized, it remains the case that design choices are consistently being made to reinforce this. One easy 'fix' here seems to me: design games with choice, and choices driven by players' active production and play--ironic, satirical, smart and 'savvy' -- with character avatars.

And finally, it has been the case for nearly 30 years now that women have not chosen to enter computer science and engineering fields, that they have stayed away from programming courses and careers in computer-based industries, and the fact that so few women are a part of the games industry means that the above two issues persist. This inequity falls on the shoulders, I think, of educators and educational institutions who have (with a few exceptions) not been able to turn the tide of so few women participating in the kinds of secondary and higher education that might lead them to career paths as game designers, and here I don't mean by assuming that that inequality will be made up through the 'art production' side of things. We in education need to examine how it is we teach those subjects and who we encourage and at times actively discourage from those related areas, as well as actively promote programs of the kind that we are participating in like the 3G Summit, as at the very least, for a short period of time, it puts girls roles chances are they might not have experience before.

Should we be focused on redesigning the contexts where play takes place rather than redesigning the games themselves?

I like this question -- I think that redesigning the context of play certainly helps. In our work, we have talked about it as "unfettered, hands-on access" to, in this case, playing games. Once we do that, we find that girls play, much like the boys.

Is it possible to use game design in ways which encourages players to perform gender differently? What assumptions are we making about the relationship here between the impact of game design and the impact of social norms?

I think the main assumption in terms of social norms is that the only two available genders are male and female -- by not allowing for a range of 'other' choices, we are automatically black boxing gender -- reducing it to binary sex-based characteristics that in some very real sense do not allow for a lot of 'play'.

The question of how to design games differently to encourage players to perform gender differently is to open up choice, giving players more freedom of movement -- whether or not they choose that would be an interesting question, but allowing for greater choice will at the very least mean that there is more opportunity for that kind of play to happen.

Can you tell us more about your own work as a game designer? In what ways has the theoretical and ethnographic work you've done on gender and games informed the games you are making and vice-versa?

Luckily, the work I have done as a game designer has been, first and foremost, playfully engaging with a fabulous colleague and a team of amazing student programmers, artists, researchers, and play testers, and most of that has been focused on how best to design games that have some educational value, use and impact.

Over the years we have figured a lot out about what that means, and I won't go into that so much here, but I will say that one thing we have figured out is that designing games for education is not about trying to make games that "teach" them something, instead it is about making games that provide opportunities for play and engagement in ways that aren't possible through textbooks or even making a film.

For example, last year we completed a game whose (unlikely!) content is Baroque music, and when we have watched students at all age levels play with that game, we have seen active engagement with a form of music that none of them have ever listened to before or ever experienced. On leaving the game, what is so interesting is that we often find students humming the tunes that they had been playing with -- and that means what we were able to create is a rich experience of Baroque music that they probably never would have had, and just might be interested in finding out more.

How the work on gender and gameplay is inflected in this work is very much in attempting to design for player choice and agency but to interrupt the usual kinds of choices that might be available, for example, in an early game we designed on contagious disease, players customized their avatars with colour choices that did not include skin tones, and we worked very long and hard with artists to draw different kinds of avatars that were not hyper-masculinized or feminized.

You have argued that some progress might be made in these debates if we split apart concepts of sex and gender. Can you describe a bit more what this distinction might contribute to research in this area?

As you probably realize, this is a rather dodgy question, and rather than delve into that certainly perilous territory, from a PR perspective anyway, I'd just refer to people like Donna Haraway's still cutting edge analysis of the distinctions at stake here, and how and why they matter. If only people would read that work, they could surely figure out the rest of themselves. Instead, it seems that bad ideology continues to trump good analysis and the question keeps getting obscured.

As you note, male experience and preferences have been taken for granted in much of this research. What would we gain if more time was spent exploring the construction of/performance of masculinity in relation to games?

What we do not have to date is a careful exploration of masculinities at/in play in games, and I think what such a perspective might offer is nuance and identities that are masked by the blanket presumption that all men play games and they play them a certain way. This of course is not the case, but the fact is we do not have many accounts of boys and men's play, and it would be worth knowing something about the group of men who have played console games together since they were 10, and continue that play into adulthood, or about those who play xbox live sports games at certain times every weekend, or even about the young man labeled "addicted" to videogames -- what about their stories? And then again, what about the men who play bejewelled and not much more and love it?

Studying men/boys might also reveal the complexities of identities and play, and might also reflect something back on the subject positions of women and girls in those relations. One way of being able to cling to stereotypes about women is to not pay attention to men either, so the presumptions don't get challenged from the hegemonic side of things, and obviously won't get challenged from the subordinate one either.

Dr. Jennifer Jenson is Associate Professor of Pedagogy and Technology in the Faculty of Education, York University, Toronto, Canada. She has published on gender, technology and digital games and games and education, among other topics. She also, with a team of folks, including Suzanne de Castell, designs games for education -- recent titles include: Contagion, Tafelmusik: The Quest for Arundo Donax, and Epidemic: Self Care for Crisis. In addition to a strong penchant for Victorian fiction, her favorite game at the moment is Wario Ware DIY.

Girls, Gaming, and Gender: An Interview with Game Designer and Researcher Jennifer Jenson (Part One)

A few weeks ago, I received an email from Mindy Faber, the co-organizer of The 3G Summit: The Future of Girls, Gaming and Gender which she described to me as "a visionary 4-day initiative that brings 50 urban teenage girls together with five leading women game designers and scholars for intensive dialogue, inquiry, game-play, and mentorship. It is organized by Open Youth Networks, Interactive Arts and Media and The Institute for Study of Women and Gender in Arts and Media at Columbia College." The designers involved with the event look like a who's who of women who have been doing cutting edge thinking about gender and games and who have also been demonstrating the potentials for developing alternative models of game and play (including two associated with the University of Southern California):

• Mary Flanagan (artist and scholar, author of Critical Play)
• Tracy Fullerton (game designer, educator and writer; Cloud; "flOW; "The Night Journey"
• Jennifer Jenson (scholar of gender and technology, York University)
• Susana Ruiz (independent game designer Darfur is Dying and Finding Zoe)
• Erin Robinson, Indie Game Designer PuzzleBots and Nanobots

As Faber explained:

Because the five women use such different approaches to game design, there is no uniform curriculum or pedagogy. Each of the five teams, consisting of ten girls, one near peer and another woman game facilitator will undoubtedly produce some surprising and intriguing game concepts that are likely to challenge many assumptions we have about what girls like to play. Important to the process is that we do not impose on the girls what types of games they should make or on what platform. Rather we want to remove obstacles that say "you can't do this "or "only this is a real game" and release their imaginations.

I am proud to have made an early contribution to the research in this area through From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, which I co-edited with Justine Cassell, now at Northwestern University. More recently, the MIT Press has published a follow up book, Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming. I interviewed the editors of that book, Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, and Jill Denner here on the blog when it was first published. The shift from "games" in the original collection to "gaming" in the follow up volume says a lot about the shift from a focus on games as programs to the focus on the process and contexts through which play takes place in and around games.

It was exciting for me to see this project, not only exploring these questions, but applying our emerging understanding of gender and games to help make a difference for a group of young women. There is still such a burning need for women in the games industry and in computer science more generally.

I had a chance to interview York University's Jennifer Jenson, one of the designers participating in the 3G Summit, both about the event and her perspective on gender and games. Both on her own and through her collaborations with Suzanne de Castell, Jenson has been doing some of the most theoretically sophisticated and conceptually advanced research in this space -- especially through introducing perspectives from performance theory to challenge some of the first generation of researchers' and the industry's assumptions about how gender impacted children's play with computer and video games. The interview will appear in this post and a follow-up piece later this week.

Tell us about this forthcoming workshop which you and other female/feminist designers are conducting. What do you hope to achieve? What kinds of researchers do you hope to work with?

One of the primary goals of the workshop is to put the tools for game design development and production in the hands of girls, with near peer and other structured support in an effort to encourage them to see themselves potentially in those roles in future. It continues to be the case that the numbers of women in the games industry compared to men is shockingly low (somewhere around 10%) with most of those positions being in human resources. Not only are women under-represented in the games industry, but they are also underrepresented, and have been for nearly 25 years in fields like computer science and engineering. So a workshop like 3G Summit is an invaluable opportunity for girls at this age to begin to imagine that they might want to do something like this in the future.

Is the goal of this boot camp to impact games research, game design, or both?

My understanding of the boot camp is that it is meant to both impact game design and game research. And as an educator and someone who has worked with girls and women to support their enjoying the pleasures as well as the uses of new technologies since my PhD work, which is now getting on to be nearly 2 decades, and it has also meant, I hope, to impact on the girls themselves. In fact, for me, that would be the number one goal! On the first point, it is a high concentration of girls working with 5 mentors and other near peer mentors to construct games that are meaningful to them, and that can't help but make ripples in terms of game design. I am thinking of it in terms of having a mini-incubator of concentrated talent and raw enthusiasm that can't help but produce very interesting results. In terms of a research agenda, I think this will contribute to growing body of work that examines young people's production of digital games, which has been around for quite a while now -- many have been working for example, for sometime now with kids and game production, work that started to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990's, which saw very early on the positive critical thinking and learning skills that could be developed when young people see their roles as producers, not just consumers of games. In this changed landscape of production, of as you have written, a 'participatory culture' in which individual consumers can take up productive roles in the creation of media, including games, it is critical that girls see themselves in these roles, and especially in relation and in this case, girls seeing themselves as producers of games. And as people who can make a real difference in the kinds of games being made -- which really do need some new inputs, new value bases, and new ideas to get beyond the persistently profit-driven design choices that commercial game companies (no surprise, of course) have made and continue to make. Games can do a LOT more, and do it a lot better than what we have so far seen, not just for girls, but for everyone.

As you've noted, researchers have been examining gender and games since at least the early 1980s. What has shifted over this time in terms of actual women's relationship to games and how have these shifts been reflected in the research being produced?

With this question I'd like to start with the fact that most often when people write, think, and do research on "gender and games" what they are really talking about is girls/women and games -- what we don't have so much to date is a notion of how things might have shifted for boys/men. Recently, Lawrence Katz, a labor economist, speculated that one reason the crime rate in the U.S. might have so significantly dropped, despite the economic recession was that video games had been keeping "the young and idle" busy, and I think that is a provocative starting point for a current study of players in this case, primarily male, as women commit violent crimes at rates much lower than men. The reason why I began here is that much of 'gender and gameplay' research has indeed focused on women and girls and gameplay, and we know a bit more about their play and how things have changed over the last 30 years. We know, for example, that at least in terms of self-reporting more women and girls are playing games than they once did in the past -- the Entertainment Software Review Board, for example. Of course we also know that the kinds of games being played by women, how frequently and how long they play for matters enormously, yet the ESRB and other studies seem disinclined to pay much attention to this -- what we call "raising gender only in order to dismiss it as a problem".

In your writing, you suggest that much current work on gender and games falls into a series of "gender traps," which replicate hegemonic assumptions about gender rather than critique them. What are some of these "gender traps" and what advice would you offer to researchers who want to think around them?

Hmmm..., I'd say again these two things: Trap #1 Gender = Sex further means just women/girls and Trap #2 raising the 'issue' of gender simply in order to dismiss it as any kind of serious challenge or problem.

You have challenged the common claim that girls do not like competition and prefer cooperation within their game play. On what grounds?

On the BASIS of 6 years of grounded, video-based ethnographic fieldwork with games in which we have observed girls and boys and their gameplay over at least a year, and sometimes two or three years on a weekly basis. In that work, we have seen girls perform and enact what can only be called "competition" -- and this ranges from friendly barbs like "you're going to die" to much more aggressive enactments, including bumping of controllers to throw another gamer off course, active 'trash talking', intense pleasure demonstrated when someone wins, and so on. When we compare these kinds of play to the play of boys from the same community and the same place, we see the same kinds of competition. The important thing here to note is that all too often in studies of girls playing games, past research has not systematically looked at the difference between novice and expert play. This has resulted in mistaking "facts about how girls play" with facts about how novices play. In our work (I work quite closely with Suzanne de Castell at Simon Fraser University) we have been able to show that once we 'level up' the girls and they become more expert their play looks very much like the boys: engaged, competitive, and mainly just having fun.

Dr. Jennifer Jenson is Associate Professor of Pedagogy and Technology in the Faculty of Education, York University, Toronto, Canada. She has published on gender, technology and digital games and games and education, among other topics. She also, with a team of folks, including Suzanne de Castell, designs games for education -- recent titles include: Contagion, Tafelmusik: The Quest for Arundo Donax, and Epidemic: Self Care for Crisis. In addition to a strong penchant for Victorian fiction, her favorite game at the moment is Wario Ware DIY.

ARG 2.0 (Part Two)

V. New Directions

[Studio] execs are mired in next-quarter earnings, and ARGs and other transmedia extensions require time to take root and build active, invested communities. It is decidedly a long-term investment, the fruits of which [may] not be fully realized until a significant period of time post-launch. As such, most studios aren't willing to make the investment needed to bake those components in from the beginning or allocate the funds/resource necessary to ensure their ongoing success (Gennefer Snowfield, Transmedia LA 2010).

Perhaps if ARGs weren't so demanding on marketing budgets, studio executives would be more willing to "bake them in from the beginning" and hang onto them for the long term. One way around this problem is to develop replayable, ongoing ARGs that engage fans in practices rather than the mere consumption of additional layers of a property via interactions with puzzles and in-game characters. Unlike the labor-intensive PM-centric traditional ARG model, such solutions have the capacity to produce the bulk of their content and interactivity through the emergent effects of a ruleset. These kinds of ARGs might not be the future of storytelling; but perhaps they are the future of story facilitating.

Over the past few years, several major ARG projects have attempted to engage fans in the co-creation of narrative content by using a ruleset to structure and guide participation. One of the most well-known of these projects is World Without Oil (Ken Eklund et al, 2007), a collaborative production game that invited players to speculate about what their lives would be like in the event of a sudden oil shock. While this game retained many of the characteristics of the traditional ARG, including an event-driven and time-sensitive structure, it shifted the emphasis away from the collective solving of puzzles and toward the production of content.

In this manner, it effectively turned the tables on the players - instead of in-game events alerting participants to the existence of new PM-created content to decode and analyze, the fictional events that structured the overarching narrative of World Without Oil signaled the players to imaginatively engage with the story world and create - and share - their own content. Unlike previous efforts at "user-submitted content," which often merely offered players a chance to upload their own media artifacts as a kind of bonus activity, in World Without Oil, the players had no other option - collaborative production was the game, full stop.

Further, the content the players submitted would feed back into the game system and in turn was incorporated into the evolving narrative, minimally as an entry on the individual player's profile page, and maximally as a curated or "featured" item on the game's home page. A simple and flexible set of rules governed the players' participation: they could create one of several types of media artifacts; they could work within the bounds of the fictional world or strike out on their own; they could choose to build on the work of other players or make reference only to their own imaginings; and so on. In short, the players were given enough structure such that they knew generally what they were supposed to do, but enough freedom to approach things in a manner that best suited their own interests and competencies.

In his seminal essay on Linux, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (2000), Eric Raymond noted that "[it] may well turn out that one of the most important effects of open source's success will be to teach us that play is the most economically efficient mode of creative work." But by providing players with a sandbox within which they can meaningfully engage with the world of a media franchise or institutional cause, game designers do more than just streamline the production process. They also win hearts and minds. As veteran ARG writer and player Andrea Phillips told me in a recent interview, "once you've given your audience official permission to collaborate with you in any meaningful sense, they're yours forever, hook, line, and sinker" (Watson 2010).

World Without Oil and other early collaborative production ARGs such as the Playtime Anti-Boredom Society's SFZero (2005) were among the first of a wave of games to articulate simple rulesets via social networking platforms in order to structure participation. Games like Top Secret Dance Off (2008), Superstruct (2008), and Evoke (2010), all designed by World Without Oil collaborator Jane McGonigal; Must Love Robots (2008), designed by Jim Babb and Tanner Ringerud; and, Austin Hill and Alex Eberts' Akoha (2010), further iterate the design of online collaborative production games, adding in new elements such as achievement badges, unlocks, leaderboards, and other player profiling and progress-tracking systems. In some cases, these games, such as SFZero, Top Secret Dance Off, and Akoha, limit or eliminate their structural dependence on time-sensitive events, resulting in ongoing game activities that further lower the bar to entry by doing away with the need for "Story so Far"-style summaries.

These kinds of games draw heavily from casual game design, and reflect an awareness of the powerful affordances of social networking platforms to construct asynchronous and persistent play activities. Further, since the challenges in these games are individual rather than collective, players can effectively customize how and when they participate according to their own desires, available time, and range of skills - an impossibility in traditional ARGs designed to be played by a "hive mind." And since the experience is also inherently social - the point of these games, after all, is to share content and co-create narratives - powerful collective intelligence effects emerge nonetheless, as metadata-rich knowledge archives are produced from the aggregate of the players' contributions and interactions (Institute for the Future 2009; Shirky 2008).

Many similar games and activities have appeared over the past few years that do not operate under the aegis of ARGs or pervasive games, but are nonetheless good illustrations of this kind of participation design. Kongregate, for example, is a website for independent video game designers that is itself a game, awarding players points, badges, and collectible Magic-like game cards in exchange for playing other players' games, having their own games played or rated, and accumulating friends on the network. By adding these layers of game play to what otherwise would be yet another banal social networking hub for Flash programmers, Kongregate not only motivates additional acts of collaboration and production, but creates valuable brand identity and allegiance that extends across the entire range of player-produced games hosted on its servers. This kind of productive social metagaming promises to explode over the next couple of years as Facebook's Open Graph and other (perhaps more legitimately "open") social media standards take hold (Messina 2009; Schell 2010).

Of course, studios and other large media companies aren't always well-received when they attempt to enter domains of independent or fannish production. In such gift economies, to paraphrase Lessig, the studios' money is poison. And while "corporately endorsed produsage or the commercial harboring of produsage communities may enable a wider variety of remixing and mashup activities to take place" (Bruns 2008, 324) within a studio-friendly intellectual property framework, one doesn't have to look too hard to find examples of industry-sanctioned fan production sites that have failed.

Fortunately, then, collaborative production is not the only way of getting around the accessibility, replayability, and scalability problems inherent in traditional ARG design. Experience designers like Jeff Hull build ambient location-based narratives that retain much of alternate reality gaming's tried-and-true transmedia storytelling componentry, but drop its dependence on time-sensitive events and collective problem-solving. Hull's The Jejune Institute (2009) is literally embedded into the fabric of the Bay Area, narrating the evolution of a strange New Age self-help cult through diverse physical and virtual artifacts, including websites, guerilla poster art, a low-powered radio broadcast station, and a physical "headquarters" space on an upper floor of a downtown office tower. The goal, Hull writes, "[is] to present . . . interactions everywhere across the civic realm, so that trap doors and side hatches exist all around you, all the time, [fused] into the urban landscape" (Watson 2010). Players who tumble into The Jejune Institute's trap doors discover a world waiting there for them to explore - a kind of off-kilter transmedia theme park that is meant to be visited and experienced rather than analyzed or "solved."

Finally, it's important to note that, for some use cases, there is good reason to make ARGs less accessible, less replayable, and less scalable. Massive player populations are not always a good thing. As we have seen, such mega-games are not only expensive to run and maintain, but often have to make critical creative compromises in order to broaden their appeal. In cases where the aim is to create or mobilize an elite core of players who can then go on to evangelize for a brand or cause, difficult-to-access once-in-a-lifetime events that cater to small crowds of self-identified "lead users" can actually have much more impact than campaigns designed to attract hundreds of thousands of participants. As Dena (2008b) notes, in many cases "[designers] could improve the 'accessibility' of ARGs but to do so would remove important triggers to hard-core player production and enjoyment." The trick, of course, is to continue to find ways to appeal to a hard-core population that is extremely savvy about storytelling and game design. In this respect, the elite or hard-core ARG must by necessity remain an elusive and dynamic form.

VI. Conclusions

By moving away from the time-sensitive and event-driven structure of traditional ARGs, designers can create more open-ended games that work better as engines for asynchronous participation and community building. Doing so ultimately means replacing a text-centric storytelling mentality with a systems-centric story facilitating approach. This kind of approach is not an abdication of authorship or aesthetic responsibility; rather, it is a shift from the domain of literal content creation to that of procedural content creation. Such a shift has the potential to break the designerly logjams that have afflicted ARGs since the early 2000s, moving mass-audience iterations of the form toward more accessible, replayable, and scalable designs.

VII. Works Cited

Aarseth, Espen J., Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

Bogost, Ian, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (The MIT Press, 2007).

DARPA, DARPA Network Challenge Project Report, 16 February 2010.

Dena, Christy, 'ARG Stats', 2008 [accessed 9 May 2010].

---, 'Discover Manoa!: Second Life RPG & the problem with ARGs', 2007 [accessed 8 May 2010].

---, 'Emerging Participatory Culture Practices: Player-Created Tiers in Alternate Reality Games', Convergence Journal: International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 14 (2008), 41-57.

Down, Kerry Ann, 'Alternate reality games for orientation, socialisation & induction', 2008 [accessed 9 February 2010].

Gee, James Paul, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Second Edition: Revised and Updated Edition, 2nd edn (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Gibson, William, Pattern Recognition (Berkley, 2005).

Goodlander, Georgina, 'Fictional Press Releases and Fake Artifacts: How the Smithsonian American Art Museum is Letting Game Players Redefine the Rules' [accessed 19 January 2010].

IGDA ARG SIG, 'Alternate Reality Games SIG/Whitepaper - IGDAwiki', 2006 [accessed 21 February 2010].

Institute for the Future, Superstruct, 2009 [accessed 10 May 2010].

Jenkins, Henry, 'Chasing Bees, Without the Hive Mind', Technology Review [accessed 8 May 2010].

---, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Revised (NYU Press, 2008).

Levy, Pierre, Collective Intelligence, 1st edn (Basic Books, 1997).

McGonigal, Jane, ''This is Not a Game': Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play', in MelbourneDAC (presented at the Melbourne DAC, Melbourne, 2003).

---, 'Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming', The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, - (2007), 199-227 .

---, 'This Might Be a Game: Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century', 2006 [accessed 21 April 2010].

Messina, Chris, and Jyri Engstrom, 'The Web at a New Crossroads', FactoryCity, 2009 [accessed 24 April 2010].

Montola, Markus, Jaakko Stenros, and Annika Waern, Pervasive Games: Theory and Design (Morgan Kaufmann, 2009).

Morris, Chris, Sean Stewart, Elan Lee, and Jim Stewartson, 'Events, not ARGs: Interview with the founders of 4th Wall', 2009 [accessed 21 February 2010].

Nieuwenhuys, Constant, 'A Different City for a Different Life', Internationale situationniste, 3 (1959), 37-40.

Phillips, Andrea, 'ARGs and Women: Moving Beyond the Hot Brunette' (SXSWi, 2010) [accessed 10 May 2010].

Raymond, Eric Steven, 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' [accessed 8 May 2010].

Schell, Jesse, DICE 2010: Design Outside the Box, 2010 [accessed 22 April 2010].

Shirky, Clay, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Penguin Press HC, The, 2008).

Stewart, Sean, 'Alternate Reality Games', 2004 [accessed 21 February 2010].

Szulborski, Dave, This Is Not A Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming (Lulu.com, 2005).

Terdiman, Daniel, ''Last Call Poker' celebrates cemeteries', 2005 [accessed 9 May 2010].

The Cloudmakers, 'Puppetmaster FAQ' [accessed 8 May 2010].

The Dot Eaters, 'Coin-op Video Game History', 2007 [accessed 10 May 2010].

Various, 'Transmedia LA Google Group', 2010 [accessed 10 May 2010].

Vinge, Vernor, Rainbows End (Tor Books, 2007).

Walker, Jill, 'Distributed Narrative: Telling Stories Across Networks', in (presented at the AoIR 5.0, Brighton, UK, 2004).

---, 'How I was played by Online Caroline', 2002 [accessed 9 May 2010].

Watson, Jeff. 'Interviews', 2010.

Jeff Watson is an interdisciplinary media practitioner with a background in screenwriting, filmmaking, and game design. His doctoral research in Media arts and Practice at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts focuses on investigating how ubiquitous computing and social media can enable new forms of storytelling and civic engagement.For more insights from Jeff Watson, you can check out his website or follow his Twitter flow.

ARG 2.0 (Part One)

The Alternate Reality Game (ARG) remains a topic of great interest to me and to my students at MIT and USC. Through the years, we've discovered that the ARG falls at the intersection between our recurring interests in participatory culture, collective intelligence, new media literacies, transmedia entertainment, and civic engagement. In my Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0 graduate seminar last spring, Jeff Watson wrote a provocative essay which reviewed and challenged the current state of ARG theory and design, proposing some of the limits of this still emerging genres, as well as identifying some experiments that stretch the ARG in new directions. I immediately knew that I wanted to share this essay with my readers, who have a range of different investments in this space, in hopes that it might serve as a catalyst for enlarging the conversation around ARGS and might give him useful feedback as he hopes to prepare this essay for publication. Watson comes at this topic as a student in the USC's Cinema School's innovative iMAP program, which is designed to bring together students who are interested in both media design and theory. I am going to be teaching a seminar through the program this fall on Medium Specificity, and will be sharing the syllabus here shortly. Each of the students I have met through this program have impressed me with their creative insights and their willingness to test their ideas through experimental practice. The Cinema School as a whole is exploring how to break down the silos between theory and production and between the different craft specializations within production, because the media maker of the future will need to think and create across media platforms. This is yet another of the many reasons I am excited about being at USC right now.

ARG 2.0

by Jeff Watson

I. Abstract

As marketing instruments, alternate reality games (ARGs) are powerful tools for generating buzz and fostering audience engagement. Their capacity to initiate and maintain playful and creative dialogue between producers and fans signals the immanence of interactive and participatory transmedia entertainment. However, the established structure of the ARG as a time-sensitive and event-driven experience managed by the behind-the-scenes machinations of "puppet masters" (PMs) forecloses a number of important design possibilities. Consequently, ARGs often lack the qualities of accessibility, replayability, and scalability that are so crucial to the adoption and impact of other kinds of socially-articulated interactive systems. In instances where the objective is to create or engage an elite class of "in the know" participants, such a lack may in fact be a strength; but for other use cases, accessibility, replayability, and scalability are critical. This paper outlines the significance of the absence of these characteristics from many "first generation" ARGs, and points toward an emerging "2.0" iteration of the form through reference to recent projects and practices in both industrial and institutional contexts.

II. Terminology

In contrast to more capacious terms such as "pervasive game" or "big game," the term, "alternate reality game," refers to a very specific and well-defined form of interactive transmedia storytelling that "[takes] the substance of everyday life and [weaves] it into narratives that layer additional meaning, depth, and interaction upon the real world" (IGDA ARG SIG 2006). In an ARG, players discover the game through an encounter with one or more access points embedded in real world contexts. These access points, known in the parlance of ARGs as "rabbit holes," lead players into a dynamic matrix of story components distributed across various kinds of digital and physical media.

By exploring these components, players discover puzzles and challenges that serve both as impetus to connect with other players, and as time- and context-sensitive content bottlenecks. In order to advance the narrative, players typically work together, first assembling into affinity groups via both official (i.e., game-sanctioned) and unofficial (i.e., player-created) social media structures; then tackling puzzles and challenges collectively, leveraging the range of competencies, geographies, and biographies inherent in a large and distributed player base. As puzzles are solved, the game's content producers, or "puppet masters," release successive cycles of story and interactivity, tweaking their approach along the way based on the observed behavior and emerging collective intelligence capabilities of the players.

This process repeats itself until the narrative concludes, typically with the launch of a product or service. At this point, official support for the player community is usually terminated, primary online game assets are deleted or otherwise rendered inactive, and the game ends.

III. Introduction

Early participants and producers of ARGs compared their emergence to watershed moments in pop music (Phillips 2010) and cinema, with some going so far as to suggest that the ARG is effectively the defining narrative mode of our present communications epoch (Stewart 2004). Indeed, especially in the context of the early 2000s, ARGs represented a uniquely transmedial mode of interactive storytelling, and as such were seen as being natural and inevitable outgrowths of the burgeoning network culture. When playing an ARG, fans consume story in a variety of modes, via a range of devices, channels, settings, and practices. This platform-independent nonlinearity and fragmentary or distributed consumption-participation pattern was seen as a logical outcome of millennial shifts in media habits, and was referenced by various futurists as a model for how stories and games could be designed in the coming era of ubiquitous computing and social media (Gibson 2005; Vinge 2006).

Other observers, invested in visions of participatory and collaborative storytelling, noted that, unlike typical consumers of cinema, television and other few-to-many media forms, the players of ARGs are always already necessary and constitutive elements of the work. That is, in an ARG, audience participation is not a byproduct, but rather an essential and formative component of the text. To practitioners and theorists with a stake in participatory culture, the notion of an interactive storytelling form conceived from the ground up as a means of facilitating the collaborative production of media artifacts provided a "perfect illustration of all of the principles . . . shaping the media landscape at the present time" (Jenkins 2006).

Further, ARGs were viewed as fitting into a long tradition of spatially- and temporally-distributed narrative forms, and for some, their emergence indicated the arrival into the mainstream of practices that had hitherto been relegated to fan subcultures and marginal art movements. Like the critical interventions of Situationism, which sought to reconfigure public space as a "new arena for creation" wherein "unforeseen games will become possible through the inventive use of material conditions" (Nieuwenhuys, 1959), the ambiguously-bounded play of ARGs has the ability to produce dramatic shifts in subjectivity that "[sensitize] participants to affordances, real or imagined," "[make] all data seem connected, or at least plausibly connected," and "make surfaces less convincing" (McGonigal 2003, 43-44). Similarly, ARGs promised to do to mainstream storytelling what "distributed narratives"- experimental narratives spread out across "time, space, and the network" (Walker 2004, 1) - had done to avant garde and electronic literature:

Distributed narratives break down the aesthetics of unity we have followed for millennia. They take this disunity a step further than the bricolage of postmodernism, by collapsing the unity of form as well as that of content and concept. Yet perhaps they also point to a new kind of unity: a unity where the time and space of the narrative are in sync with the time and space of the reader. (Walker 2004, 11)

Finally, by bringing together once disparate practices such as game design, performance art, and cinematic narrative, ARGs were seen as being on the cutting edge of interdisciplinary new media thinking. Great things were forecasted, including the use of ARGs in establishing and leveraging collective intelligences in order to solve real-world problems (McGonigal 2003; Jenkins 2004).

IV. ARGs in Practice: 2001-2010

While ARGs have proven that they have the potential to mobilize elite groups of "lead users" who can co-create content and evangelize for a brand or cause (McGonigal 2003; Szulborski 2005; IGDA ARG SIG 2006; Dena 2008a) - and that they can quickly generate alarmingly efficient collective intelligences (McGonigal 2007; see also DARPA 2010) - they have, perhaps understandably, failed to live up to some of the high expectations set at the turn of the century. ARGs have not seen the kinds of growth in popularity that other forms of gaming and storytelling have seen over the past decade (Schell 2010; compare with Dena 2008a); they have not proven to be a particularly effective way of building lasting communities or collaborative practices, especially when compared to more systems-oriented approaches to organizing and maintaining collective action (see Shirky 2008); and they have failed to maintain the same kind of relevance to contemporary media habits and technologies that they arguably held in the early 2000s, ceding this territory to other kinds of pervasive interactivity such as mobile and social media games, casual games, and collaborative production games (see Montola, et al 2009).

The specific reasons for these shortfalls vary from context to context. In the media industry, for example, ARGs have largely been considered marketing tools, and as such have often not been sufficiently integrated into the development and production processes of the properties they promote, leading to disconnects between fans of the source material, ARG player communities, PMs, and producers. As writer Rich Silverman of the Transmedia LA message board (2010) puts it, "[it's] been my experience that an ARG component of a film or TV property comes to the game too late to be really effective . . . we need to start seeing these things baked into the development process of any show or film they're supporting." In educational and institutional contexts, ARGs are similarly marginalized, typically employed as orientation tools (Down 2008) or experimental promotions (Goodlander 2009), but rarely meshed with the core operations or mandates of their hosts.

It is unclear whether the persistent design problems that constrain or preclude the accessibility, replayability, and scalability of ARGs are the cause or the result of this marginalization. Nevertheless, making such a determination is probably less important than identifying what those core design problems are, and suggesting ways in which the form can evolve or adapt in order to correct them. In general, these problems center on three overlapping and relatively unchallenged aspects of traditional ARG design, namely: 1) that, despite the decidedly playful and improvisatory character of the relationship between puppet masters and players, ARGs are ultimately not game systems but rather vehicles for delivering story; 2) that ARGs treat their core audiences as monadic "collective detectives" rather than groups of living, breathing individuals; and, 3) that ARGs are linear, event-driven experiences.

Indeed, many of the problems associated with ARGs can be traced back to their status as temporally-bounded and sequentially-unfolding experiences. As Jim Stewartson of Fourth Wall Studios puts it, "[ARGs have historically been] essentially rock concerts. Very large, real-time, elaborate experiences that were really cool and really fun for the people who were involved with them" (Morris, et al 2009). This event-like design clearly eliminates any potential for replayability, and it exacts almost equally dire consequences on accessibility and scalability. In a typical ARG, players who don't have the time at the right time to dive into the game can find their experience spoiled by those who do. Even players with high levels of interest in the material and a strong desire to participate in the game's challenges can be reduced to lurking on message boards or merely following along with puppet master- or player-created story summaries if they don't have the time required to keep up with the more hard-core players. Consequently, the vast majority of the players of traditional ARGs aren't "players" at all, but are rather more like spectators, albeit very multi-modal ones:

Of the millions of people who 'experience' an ARG only tens of thousands actually play them, the rest read the texts created by players. Now, as I have stated many times before, this is a very interesting model of audience tiering and shows a preference for player-created narratives above producer-created ones (indeed, the desire for a linear narrative above a fragmented one)...but the large numbers often claimed . . . are not indicative of the people who actually play these forms. They are hardcore games that only a (relatively) small amount of players can actually play directly (due to skill, time and access obstacles). I don't see how a form with such accessibility issues is the ultimate form. (Dena 2007)

Dena (2008b), Montola (2009), and others have pointed out that this "pyramid of participation" enables transmedial designs wherein "different play modes contribute to each other and support an experience that is larger than its parts" (Montola, et al 2009, 121). In such an arrangement, spectators co-exist with variously-engaged players, with the hard-core participants effectively acting as "stars" of the game's narrative ; puppet masters and serious players document the actions of the hard core in real- or near-real-time; and the rest of the player base consumes this documentation serially. This kind of structure has been experimented with to varying degrees of success.

However, since this and other kinds of "tiering" (Dena 2008b) demand the production and management of numerous additional layers of game assets, they also represent some of the most expensive and labor-intensive solutions to the accessibility problem.

Another aspect of the accessibility problem emerges from of the manner in which ARG designers traditionally address their players. As Sean Stewart notes in an interview with members of The Cloudmakers (2001), "[the] premise from Day One was that the entire Internet should be considered as a single player; that we could put an ad in a newspaper in Osaka in the morning and have some kid in Iowa using that information by supper time."

That is, while individual players in an ARG are free to privately interact with characters or artifacts from the game, the puzzles and challenges are designed with such complexity that any information gathered from these interactions needs to be shared with and processed by a collective in order to be properly contextualized and rendered sensible in a timely fashion. While this design encourages the formation of collective intelligences, in the context of a time-based, event-driven, closed information system such as an ARG, it also somewhat counter-intuitively results in an increasing diminishment of the degree to which new players can easily access and enter into the activity.

That is, once a functioning "collective detective" (Cloudmakers 2001) has been established, it will tackle the challenges presented by the puppet masters with a self-refining efficiency that will largely discount the need for new members. Knowledge production structures populated by elite players with available time, an appropriate range of competencies, and relevant social capital will gather, process, and analyze data faster and more thoroughly than a non-integrated outsider ever could. Further, as the game progresses, prospective members without adequate reputation within the player community and in-depth knowledge of "the story so far" (see Dena 2008b, 41) will naturally find it increasingly difficult to find a role within the collective.

To illustrate this problem, consider the recent DARPA Network Challenge crowdsourcing experiment (2009). In this experiment, ten red weather balloons were placed in visible locations around the United States, and the public was challenged to find the balloons using any legal means whatsoever. Nine hours after the event commenced, all ten balloons had been found by a team from MIT (http://balloon.mit.edu/). In this instance, the team, which had conscripted around 5,400 balloon spotters via social media and various public entreaties (DARPA 2010), served its purpose and was quickly dissolved; but what if the DARPA Network Challenge had been only the first of many challenges in a long-term game - that is, if it was merely the opening puzzle of a three month long ARG. How would this emerging collective intelligence have evolved? Would it have become more broad-based like Wikipedia, exploring the diverse interests and passions of its user base, or would it have gravitated toward greater efficiencies, tighter working groups, task-oriented committees, and editorial sub-teams?

According to fieldwork conducted by McGonigal (2007), the latter is more likely: rather than becoming more inclusive or expansive, the group might in fact become increasingly specialized along particular "threads of investigation" tied to the core problems with which it was presented. After all, the puzzles in ARGs are ultimately very specific: unlike Wikipedia, which is almost completely open-ended, the knowledge production demanded by an ARG is focused on a particular story world and an associated set of puzzles with clearly-defined solutions - much like the narrow-but-complex balloon-finding task of the DARPA experiment. Further, since the puzzles in ARGs are often cumulative and informed by the solutions to earlier puzzles, those who were on board for the first discoveries - in this case, those who understood the methodology by which the original 5,400 balloon spotters were coordinated and the information they provided was processed - would arguably be more valuable and acceptable assets to the team than newcomers unaware of those practices and procedures. Somewhat ironically, then, this kind of collective intelligence design, when applied to closed information systems such as ARGs, has steeply diminishing returns when it comes to inclusivity and accessibility.

What all of these problems have in common is an origin in the "non-gameness" of ARGs. ARGs, despite their name, are not, in fact, games; rather, they are ergodic (Aarseth 1997) transmedia texts that, structurally speaking, are much more akin to scavenger hunts or group puzzle-solving activities like the annual MIT Mystery Hunt. Rarely in ARG design do we see the generativity, rulesets, and procedural rhetoric (Bogost 2007) that characterize games.

This is fine; not everything has to be a game. But for an activity which so often aspires to take place on a massive scale, both in terms of content and participation, to not use game mechanics as a means of generating and managing interactivity is arguably a recipe for disaster. Indeed, much of ARG design is reminiscent of early experiments in electronic literature and interactive filmmaking which sought to create vast narratives via branching story trees: very quickly, artists who took this approach discovered that to do so meant writing or shooting orders of magnitude more material than the reader or viewer would ever see.

An interactive movie-game like Dragon's Lair (1983), for example, needed a total of 27 minutes of animation stored on custom-made laserdiscs to provide an interactive experience that lasted for a maximum of 6 minutes (The Dot Eaters 2007) - and even then, the gameplay consisted of little more than making a handful of left-or-right decisions about which direction the protagonist should move. Compare this outcome to an even older video game, Rogue (1980), a procedurally-generated dungeon-crawler that remains popular to this day. In Rogue, the virtual world is generated on the fly at runtime via an algorithm. Instead of devoting limited computational resources to storing and displaying pre-rendered content (as in Dragon's Lair), Rogue's programmers used a compact ruleset to create their gameworld, producing an expansive and endlessly replayable realm of fantasy adventure and tabletop RPG-style interactivity that would have been technically impossible to produce using pre-made dungeon scenarios given the limited storage resources of early 1980s home computers. Despite being made for free by hobbyist programmers, Rogue's parsimonious use of algorithms rather than branching content trees resulted in much more interactivity and depth than was presented three years later by Dragon's Lair's spectacular but simplistic left-or-right decision making interface. This is the real power of games: to create dynamic interactive experiences through rules rather than archives of pre-made content. As we shall see below, approaching ARG design from this perspective opens a range of new possibilities for producers.

Finally, because ARGs are so expensive and labor-intensive to maintain, media companies and institutions overwhelmingly abandon the communities they create once the putative purpose for their creation has been satisfied (McGonigal 2003; IGDA ARG SIG 2006). While this instrumental view of community may have short-term benefits to brands and creatives, and while many media companies are likely comfortable with the risk of "blowback" from disaffected ARG fans (especially since said fans will have long since served their purpose by the time their complaints come to the fore), in the long term, such a view effectively undermines one of alternate reality gaming's most important potentials for generating value: the creation and maintenance of strong, persistent communities.

Jeff Watson is an interdisciplinary media practitioner with a background in screenwriting, filmmaking, and game design. His doctoral research in Media arts and Practice at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts focuses on investigating how ubiquitous computing and social media can enable new forms of storytelling and civic engagement. For more insights from Jeff Watson, you can check out his website or follow his Twitter flow.