Videoblogging, Citizen Journalism, and Credibility

Today, I wanted to show off the latest in the series of short documentaries on media production which we are producing through Project nml, a project funded by the MacArthur Foundation to foster new media literacies. Regular readers of this blog will recall that we are producing a series of short digital documentaries on various aspects of the new media landscape -- ranging from independent comics to graffiti -- which are designed to get students to reflect more deeply about their own potential roles as media makers and to think about the place of media in their own lives. We have been delighted so far by reports that these videos are starting to be used in schools around the country and we would like to encourage other educators to send us reports of how you might be making use of these materials. Our latest release deals with the growing phenomenon of video-blogging (and as such, compliments the segments we produced last year in which Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow offered his advice to would-be bloggers.) The video was produced under the supervision of research manager Margaret Weigel and our recently hired production coordinator Anna Van Someren (who came to us from the Boston Based Youth Voice Collaborative); the primary author of the video was one of the CMS graduate students, Steve Schultze, who was also not coincidentally one of the key organizers of last week's Beyond Broadcast event. Among those featured on this video are Steve Garfield, who has been widely credited as the father of the videoblogging movement; John Barth from Public Radio Exchange; Ravi Jain, another former student of mine who has gone on to fame if not fortune as the host of Drive Time; Jason Crowe from Cambridge Community Television; and Susan Buice and Arin Crumley, the producers of Four Eyed Monsters.

One of the high points of the series comes in Segment 2 where we get into the issue of citizen journalism and how it relates to professional reporting:

John Barth: On the Internet, you have this great possibility to compare and contrast among a variety of vetted sources of news.

Steve Garfield: Videoblogging is news. Of course it is. The cool thing about it is that people will all be telling stories, let's say, from an event. So something happens and you'll get five, ten, who knows... right now if you go to an event and you have fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, a hundred bloggers blogging about an event... if you read a number of them you'll get a good sense of what actually happened.

John Barth: So can you trust what you see in a videoblog? How do you know that that's true or accurate?

Steve Garfield: Or if you read a blogger frequently, you know what their biases are and you know where they're coming from. So they become a trusted source for you. With video blogging it's the same thing. Video bloggers will become a trusted source for people of news, and if you have a number of videobloggers out covering the same event, seeing their different perspective on the same event, when you look at all those different videos then I think you'll get the story.

John Barth: You know this whole notion of, "all of us as smarter than some of us", is true. Except, not all of us are videoblogging and not all of us are blogging and not all of us are doing what you're doing. So, all of us don't have the benefit of being equal participants in trying to determine what the story is, or being able to see your videoblog and compare it against someone else's....

John Barth: So what would be so bad if videobloggers rule and mainstream media goes away because they just can't stay in business. Well here's what I think would happen: right now most investigative reporting, for better or worse, is being done by mainstream media. You have really good reporters at newspapers, at major networks like ABC news, and they are really developing their sources and getting to stories that frankly I don't think you and I could with a handheld video camera. We don't have the time, we don't have the money, and we don't know where to go.

Steve Garfield: The cool thing is that videoblogging is not TV. That's what's so cool about it. You don't have to have an intro, a voiceover... you don't have to get both sides of the story. You don't have to do anything. You can do it however you want to do it.

John Barth: Trust is what you're trying to get to. You're trying to get to credibility. So, if you work in a traditional news organization, there are dozens, hundreds of people and they all have points of view - they all have biases. The thing that's supposed to weed out all of that so that all you have is accurate information and good storytelling is that you do have editors and competitors and other reporters who help frame a story and get it out there every day. If you're a videoblogger, it's maybe you and maybe one or two other people and that's all. So, how do people know that what you've put out is accurate? How do you develop that trust? Well, there are some real basic things to understand. If you're going to pursue certain stories, you don't have your conclusion before you begin. That's why you're asking questions. So, a lot of times we get interested in a topic because we're passionately interested in it, but you need to have enough self-control and self-discipline to distance yourself from the outcome and also what you're hearing from different points of view....I think in terms of training people to be good videobloggers, I would argue they should spend some time with traditional journalists and get a sense about how much time it takes to beyond just putting up home movies to really tell a story well and really check some things out.

For those of you who enjoyed my post about Four Eyed Monsters last week, there's a very good segment (Chapter Five) in which the filmmakers discuss the ways they have tapped audience participation to shape the distribution of their independent film.

Susan Brice: Making a film is a very one-directional thing because you make it and it goes out to the world and they watch it and who knows what they really think. But making the video podcast was a really dynamic part of the project because you put it up and immediately people are commenting. Some people are making video comments back. The feedback is instantaneous and it affects the next video. It affects everything really. It affects our whole process.

Throughout the film places a strong emphasis upon the communal dimensions of production and circulation in the videoblogging world, resulting in a strong explanation of the kinds of social networks that operate in the realm of participatory culture.

Steve Garfield: Big media looks at videoblogging as a way to distribute content. The cool and fun and interesting part about videoblogging is this part about community and connection and conversation.

Jason Crowe (Chapter 7) situates videoblogging within a larger history of citizen media in America:

Jason Crowe: The history of citizen media in the United States starts with Thomas Paine, and he handed out pamphlets. So, similarly, people today are able to have their own videoblog and kind-of hand out their own pamphlets. So the tradition of independent voices needing an outlet has always been there, but this is just a new way to do it....

When the telegraph was invented, people thought that with the world being totally connected via these wires, and now that people from disparate parts of the world could talk to each other, that we would create world peace. Well, similarly with the Internet connected all different cultures and people... and you can put your media out, we've seen people say, "Oh well this is going to revolutionize the way that people create media and distribute it." I don't think that's necessarily true. I think it's a wonderful way to get your message out, but I don't necessarily think it's going to be the beginning of world peace.

Our hope is that this series of documentary segments will allow educators to generate valuable conversations with their students around some of the core skills we identified in our white paper for MacArthur: among them, collective intelligence, networking, and Judgment. In the coming weeks we will be rolling out the next generation of exemplar videos on topics such as "Big Games," DJ culture, Wikipedia, Cosplay, Documentary Production, and Animation. Our team will also be showcasing this work at a range of conferences focused on education and media literacy, including at a special event we are hosting during the Media in Transition conference which our program is hosting in April.

Awkward Conversations About Uncomfortable Laughter

Dear reader, please welcome me to the age of enlightenment. A few weeks ago, the MIT dorms, where I live, finally started to receive Comedy Central and I am now able to enjoy a daily dose of John Stewart and Steven Colbert rather than hoping that the hotels where I stay get the channel and that I can remember when they are on. (Of course, the MIT dorms, razzle frazzle, are no longer getting HBO or BBC America so it continues to be one step forward, two steps back). I am receiving Comedy Central just in time to see the early episodes of Sarah Silverman's new television series. So far, the series has not lived up to my hopes or expectations. It feels more like a female remake of Curve Your Enthusiasm about a woman whose self-centeredness becomes the basis of anti-social and politically incorrect conduct on a recurring basis (not that there's anything wrong with that from most people's point of view but I have never quite connected with Curve.) But the show is drawing very strong ratings so people out there seem to be liking what they are seeing.

I have been long interested in Silverman's work and wrote something about her film, Jesus is Magic, for Flow a few years ago. While I am reproducing my essay here, you may want to follow this link back because the essay generated a pretty rich and far reaching response when it first appeared. Silverman's film uses comedy to ask questions about how we are dealing with issues of race in America today, questions which may only be asked by pushing hard on the borders between jokes and insults. She has, as a consequence, found herself the center of controversies about inappropriate jokes.

I wish that were the problem with the new Comedy Central series which seems pretty tame compared to her earlier standup work. There were some moments which made me wince in an episode in which her character believes she's gotten AIDS and manages to turn efforts to combat the disease into a totally self-serving exercise, sending up the ways that celebrities gain status through attaching themselves to various causes or when she gets into a conversation with a zombie about the insensative ways that her people are portrayed in the media. But, in the end, the series falls back into safer sitcom territory rather than using comedy to probe our hot button issues as a society.

What follows is the essay I wrote for Flow:

In her book, Implicit Meanings, the anthropologist Mary Douglas explores the roles jokes play in mapping points of tension or transition within a culture. Only a thin line separates jokes and insults. The joke gives expressive form to an emergent perspective within a culture -- something which is widely felt but rarely said. When a joke expresses a view already widely accepted, it becomes banal and unfunny. When a joke says something the culture is not ready to hear, it gets read as an insult or an obscenity. The job of the clown is thus to continually map the borders between what can and can not be said. This is why a good comedy routine is accompanied as often by gasps as by laughter.

I was reminded of Douglas's perspective on jokes when I recently participated in a screening and discussion of Sarah Silverman's new film, Jesus is Magic. For those of you who have not heard of her yet, Silverman is a former Saturday Night Live writer who sparked national controversy in 2001 when she told a joke about "chinks" on Conan and when she defended the joke on Bill Mahr's Politically Incorrect. The Silverman controversy has resurfaced in recent months both because of a rather memorable appearance in The Aristocrats and because of the release of a film documenting her standup comedy show. She has recently been profiled in The New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly and is currently shooting a pilot for her own series on Comedy Central.

To understand the controversy, we have to return to the now infamous joke she told on Conan in 2001. She was explaining that her various efforts to escape jury duty and her friend's suggestion that she could try to come across as prejudiced on the questionnaire by writing "I hate chinks." Silverman pauses, suggesting that she would consider being embarrassed to make such a comment, even in jest, and so instead she wrote, "I LOOOVE Chinks -- and who wouldn't."

Greg Aoki, the president of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, argued that the network showed a double standard in allowing the word, "chink," to air when it would almost certainly have bleeped "nigger." The network and host later apologized for the decision to air the joke but Silverman refused to apologize, contending "It's not a racist joke. It's a joke about racism." The controversy is one which looks differently depending on whether our focus is on the words used (Aoki rightly sees "chink" as a word deeply entwined in the history of racism in America) or the meaning behind them (Silverman is right that her comedy ultimately raises uncomfortable questions about how white people "play the race card.")

Writing in Asian Week, columnist Emil Guillermo argues that rather than seeing Silverman's joke as "fighting words," Asian-Americans should use it as "talking words," as the starting point for discussing the current state of American racism. This is not what Aoki experienced when he tried to challenge the appropriateness of Silverman's joke during their mutual appearance on Politically Incorrect, where the host and guests questioned his sincerity, made fun of his name, called him names, and cut him off when he tried to link the jokes to recent incidents of racial violence. And it is not what Silverman experienced when her critics simply label her a "racist" without exploring what she was trying to say.

How can we distinguish between racist jokes and jokes about racism, especially with the deadpan irony that is Silverman's hallmark? Most of us have no trouble thinking of cases where jokes have been directed against minorities as a racist exercise of power. Yet we should also keep in mind the many different ways that comedy has been used to challenge racism -- think about the first generation of African-American comics who went into black, white, and multiracial clubs and confronted their audiences with words and concepts that were designed to create discomfort; think about the ways that underground comics like R. Crumb sought to "exorcise" the history of racial stereotypes in his medium by pushing them to their outer limits; think about shows like All in the Family which exposed the ways that previous generations of sitcoms had remained silent about the bigotry which was often at the heart of American domestic life. And then there are jokes which are funny simply because they are "politically incorrect," that is, because they thumb their nose at anyone who would set any limits on speech whatsoever. Perhaps most strikingly, there are jokes which deny the reality of both race and racism simply by refusing to talk about it at all. When was the last time that you heard a joke on a late-night talk show (Okay -- outside The Daily Show) that you remembered the next morning, let alone one which provoked debate four years later.

Critics have read Silverman's comedy as simply "politically incorrect." There are plenty of times when Silverman's jokes are, to use Douglas's definition of obscenity, "gratuitous intrusions." Yet, at its best, her comedy reflects on the problems of living in a culture where old racial logics are breaking down and new relationships have not yet taken any kind of definitive shape and where there seems to be no established language for speaking to each other across racial lines. Her most consistent target is a white America which is so busy trying to watch its step that it falls on its own face. Several deal with the challenges of negotiating mixed race or multi-ethnic relationships. For example, she gets upset when her half black boyfriend objects to her "innocent compliment" that he would have made "an expensive slave" because he has

"self-esteem issues," smugly insisting, "He has to learn to love himself before I can stop hating his people." This is after she has suggested it would be more "optimistic" to say that he was "half white" rather than "half black."  At another point, she describes a particular audience as "black," then corrects herself to say that it was "African-American," then decides it was "half and half." Or again, she talks about how she and her Christian boyfriend will explain their religious beliefs to any future offspring: "Mother is one of the chosen people and Dad believes Jesus is magic."

Silverman's jokes do not in any simple or direct way represent her personal views; rather, she has adopted a comic persona (perhaps multiple personas) through which she reflects confusions and contradictions in the ways that white America thinks about race and racism, much the way some hip hop performers have argued that the views about race, criminality, and sexual violence they express through their songs are attempts to make visible some of the issues confronting their community. In both cases, critics have tended to read such personas literally. There are no words to describe whiteness which have the same sting as "chink" or "nigger" and so she has to perform whiteness, against a backdrop of other racial identities, so that it can recognize itself in all of its insensitivity and self-centeredness.

Consider, for example, a Silverman routine about her lust for a jewel which is formed by de-boning and grinding down the spines of starving Ethiopian babies. There is a level to the joke which is simply funny because of the cruel and insensitive way she is speaking about human suffering; there is another level, however, which works not unlike the way that Jonathon Swift's similarly-themed, "A Modest Proposal," works, exposing the infinite flexibility with which we can rationalize and justify the exploitation of the third world. Silverman delivers the joke with what New Yorker writer Dana Goodyear calls "quiet depravity." The expression that lingers on her face is usually one of tentative confusion or chipper self-satisfaction, as if she had finished her homework and cleaned up her room, and were waiting for a gold star. She doesn't smirk; she honestly thinks she has no real prejudice or animosity even as she bases her everyday decisions on gross stereotypes. Hers is the face of what cultural critics have called "enlightened racism," the smug satisfaction with which white Americans excuse ourselves for our own lapses in taste and judgment as long as they do not become too overt or openly confrontational. As she describes this jewel, she hits a moment of conscience, realizing that they probably exploit the "unions" which mine the babies' spines, but then concedes, "you have to pick your battles."

Early in the jewel routine, she describes her acquisitiveness as a "JAP," then pausing to explain that she doesn't mean "Jewish American Princess" (a stereotype which she has self-consciously embodied throughout the routine) but rather "Japanese." Instantly, she moves from a stereotype which is more socially acceptable (if only because she would be making fun of her own group) and into one which is totally unacceptable (and the joke only works if we recognize the offensiveness of the word). Indeed, she plays often on the ambiguities of her own status as white and Jewish -- sometimes speaking as a member of an oppressed minority, other times blending into a white majority, and often making this desire of Jews to escape their minority status a central theme in her work. It crops up for example when she makes bitter comments about contemporary Jews who drive German-made cars or when she tells a joke about Jews who want to escape racist charges of having killed Christ by blaming the Romans (and then pushing this historical scapegoating one step further by suggesting that personally she blames the blacks.)

Silverman's comedy depends upon the instability created as we move from thinking of race in black and white terms towards a multi-racial and multi-cultural society. A previous generation of comics would not have made jokes about Asian-Americans or Hispanics because they simply were not part of the way they envisioned America. Much contemporary race theory has sought ways to move us beyond simple black/white binaries in the ways we think about racial diversity. As recent demographic trends suggest, America is rapidly moving towards a time when Caucasians will be in the minority but they are not being replaced by a new majority culture: rather, America will be more ethnically diverse -- some would say fragmented, balkanized, or disunified -- than ever before and there has been few successful attempts to build coalitions across those diverse populations.

A musical number in Jesus is Magic self-consciously maps the fault lines in this new cultural diversity: dressed like a refugee from an Up With People concert, strumming a guitar, looking her most wide-eyed and innocent, she wanders from space to space, gleefully singing about how much Jews love money, how little blacks like to tip, how well Asians do at math, and ends with a particularly choice lyric about blacks calling each other "niggers." Then, the little white woman looks over and sees two angry looking black men who glare at her for a long period of silence; then they start to laugh and she tries laughing with them; then they stop laughing and glare at her even more intensely and for an agonizingly long period of time. It is hard to imagine a comedian who is more reflexive about the nature of their own comic practices or more insistent that the audience stop laughing and think about the politics of their own laughter.

Much of the Silverman controversy centers around what anthropologists often call joking relations: in any given culture, there are rules, sometimes implicit, often explicit, about which people can joke with each other, about what content is appropriate for joking in specific contents. During times of social anxiety, these rules are closely policed and transgressions of these boundaries are severely punished. Yet, in times of greater security, cultures may suspend or extend the rules to broaden the community which is allowed inside a particular set of joking relationships. But who determines which jokes are safe and permissible? She openly courts such questions by appearing on The Jimmy Kimmel Show, doing verbatim versions of Dave Chappel skits. Can a white woman make the same jokes as a black man or does changing the race of the performer change everything?

Comedy in the 1990s seemed often about securing boundaries as comedians emerged who could articulate the self perceptions and frustrations of different identity politics groups: Asians made Asian jokes, Blacks made black jokes (and sometimes about white people), Jews made Jewish jokes, and white comedians mostly avoided the topic of race altogether. This places an enormous burden on minority performers not simply to speak on behalf of their race but to bear the weight of any discussion about racism. And of course, when black comedians made jokes about black people, they often did so in front of white or mixed audiences. Just as white comedians were uncertain whether they could joke about race and under what circumstances, white audiences were uncertain whether they could laugh about race and under what circumstances. Silverman has thrust herself out there, saying it is time for white comics to joke about race, and has faced the inevitable push-back for trying to change the rules of discourse.

Contemporary cultural theorists have been urging a move away from identity politics towards one based on coalition building: race will not go away simply because we refuse to talk about it and we cannot meaningfully change how we think about race as a society by remaining within our own enclaves. Consider, for example, Frank H. Wu's Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White. Wu is an Asian-American professor who has chosen to teach at Howard University Law School, a historically black institution, because he wanted to create a context where Asian-Americans and African-Americans can learn to communicate across their racial and ethnic differences. Wu argues that for such coalitions to work, one has to put everything on the table, confront past stereotypes, examine historic misunderstandings, give expression to fears and anxieties. We can't work through the things that separate us until we feel comfortable discussing them together. This isn't simply something that has to take place between different minority groups: there has to be a way where whites can express their own uncertainties about the future without being prejudged.

Jokes may fuel such social transformations because they force us to confront the contradictions in our own thinking. They are valuable precisely because the same joke will be heard differently in different contexts and thus can help us to talk through our different experiences of being raced. As Wu writes, "Race is meaningless in the abstract; it acquires its meanings as it operates on its surroundings. With race, the truism is all the more apt that the same words can take on different meanings depending on the speaker, the audience, the tone, the intention and the usage." Mary Douglas similarly suggests that the reason our culture has such trouble drawing a fixed line between jokes and obscenity is that unlike traditional cultures, we do not occupy "a single moral order" and there are no agreed-upon boundaries.

And that brings us back to Guillermo's appeal that Silverman's "chink" joke might be used as "talking words." From my perspective as a white southern-born male, Silverman is raising important questions about race and racism which white audiences need to hear if they are going to come to grips with a multicultural society. From Aoki's perspective, the same joke evokes a painful history, using words that many Asian-Americans hear too often. At the risk of sounding naive and idealistic, maybe that's something we should be talking about, however awkward the conversation is apt to be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nuff said.

So what's the meaning of the title Ragmop?

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

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

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

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

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

Tell us about the publishing history of Ragmop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which came first, the philosophy or the story?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Escasy of Influence and the Power of Networks

Today, I want to call to your attention two recent articles which speak to themes that have been recurring interests in this blog since we launched last June -- the first deals with the relationship of intellectual property and creative expression, the second deals with web comics as a site of experimentation and innovation. Both warrant closer looks. Jonathon Lethem , an author whose fiction consistently plays around with themes of fandom and popular culture, has published a provocative essay, "The Ecstasy of Influence," in the most recent issue of Harpers, which explores the ways that copyright has operated to constrain and plagiarism and appropriation to expand the richness of our culture. Lethem's statement is impossible to summarize here because it expresses its ideas as much through its form (composed of remixing a range of writers who have dealt with the contemporary debates about copyright, including Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Richard Posner, Lewis Hyde, David Foster Wallace, and Henry Jenkins).

Something of the piece's argument can be determined by its opening quote from John Donne:

"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated."

For those who are curious, Lethem mashes up a passage from Textual Poachers with the Michel DeCerteau's The Practice of Everyday Life, the book which provided me with my theoretical underpinnings:

Active reading is an impertinent raid on the literary preserve. Readers are like nomads, poaching their way across fields they do not own--artists are no more able to control the imaginations of their audiences than the culture industry is able to control second uses of its artifacts. In the children's classic The Velveteen Rabbit, the old Skin Horse offers the Rabbit a lecture on the practice of textual poaching. The value of a new toy lies not it its material qualities (not "having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle"), the Skin Horse explains, but rather in how the toy is used. "Real isn't how you are made. . . . It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real." The Rabbit is fearful, recognizing that consumer goods don't become "real" without being actively reworked: "Does it hurt?" Reassuring him, the Skin Horse says: "It doesn't happen all at once. . . . You become. It takes a long time. . . . Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby." Seen from the perspective of the toymaker, the Velveteen Rabbit's loose joints and missing eyes represent vandalism, signs of misuse and rough treatment; for others, these are marks of its loving use.

As a fan of Lethem's fiction (The Fortress of Solitude), I am tickled pink to see my own writing included in this context. Every so often, journalists, who see me as an advocate of very loose copyright protection, ask me how I would feel if someone took and used my work without my permission as if it were a kind of gotcha question. In reality, I am delighted to see people engage with my ideas; I give much of my own intellectual property away on a daily basis -- here in the blog and elsewhere -- because I care much more about having an impact on the debates that impact our culture and in providing resources for my readers than I am interested in regulating what they do with my text. Of course, it is nice when they acknowledge that I wrote the material, as Lethem does here, but I also understand as the quote from Donne suggests that new works get built on the shucks of old works and that to be part of the conversation is to become the raw materials out of which new texts get generated or perhaps simply the compost that allows them to grow.

This blog has periodically touched upon the artistic innovation which has occurred in and around web comics in recent years as well as the various scenarios which might support their future development. I wanted to flag for readers a very interesting overview of the space of web comics today which was developed by Joshua Pantalleresco over at the ComicBloc. Again, this is apt to seem self-serving since I was one of the people he interviewed for the story but Pantalleresco's article is most interesting for the comments he was able to gather from the web comics artists themselves, talking about what they see as the benefits of working in this medium. What follows are just a few of the better quotes from the article:

"I think the biggest advantage is also, ironically, the biggest disadvantage: distribution... The glory of online comics is that readers don't have to go to a comic book shop to read them and can instead read them at home, at work, the library or anywhere there's a computer with a high-speed Internet connection." -- Dirk Manning, creator and writer of both Nightmare World and Tales Of Mr. Rhee

"Really the sky is the limit at this point for self publishing. If you really have the will to put your stuff out there, the tools are all available...There's nothing to stop you except maybe fear. Fear of rejection, fear of taking risks, fear of failure.... Creators can get there work out there without the constraint of publishing or distribution companies. Sure, there will be more books out there that probably never should have existed, but the good books, the really good books will rise to the top.--Tom Stillwell, creator and writer of Honor Brigade

"You MUST have a website that looks professional and is user friendly...Blog on this site, post images, give free previews ...provide as much information about you and your books as possible. You also MUST make sure people can find this site. If you build it, they won't come. They won't know it exists. You need to bring them there. You get people there by self promotion. You aren't just selling the book. You are selling you as a creator."-- Stillwell

If you want to read what I had to say, you need to actually read the article.

What struck me about the two articles is that they both emphasize some of the skills we have been discussing through our work for the MacArthur Foundation. The first makes the argument that artists learn and grow through a process of appropriation and transformation of existing materials, the second that networking constitutes an important aspect of contemporary authorship. These are core insights we should be making available to our students, especially those who aspire to enter the creative industries.

And, oh, while I have your attention, MIT World recently posted a webcast of a very interesting lecture by John Seeley Brown, the former Director of Xerox-PARC and a key thinker on the social life of information. I was in the audience when Brown delivered these remarks which speaks about collective intelligence, participatory culture, and digital education. I recommend this webcast to anyone who regularly reads and enjoys this blog. Here's part of the summary that MIT World posted:

We learn through our interactions with others and the world, he says, and there's no more perfect medium for enabling this than an increasingly open and organized World Wide Web.

In a digitally connected, rapidly evolving world, we must transcend the traditional Cartesian models of learning that prescribe "pouring knowledge into somebody's head," says

John Seely Brown. We learn through our interactions with others and the world, he says, and there's no more perfect medium for enabling this than an increasingly open and organized World Wide Web.

While the wired world may be flat, it now also features "spikes," interactive communities organized around a wealth of subjects. For kids growing up in a digital world, these unique web resources are becoming central to popular culture, notes Brown. Now, educators must begin to incorporate the features of mash-ups and remixes in learning, to stimulate "creative tinkering and the play of imagination."

With the avid participation of online users, the distinction between producers and consumers blurs. In the same way, says Brown, knowledge 'production' must flow more from 'amateurs' - the students, life-long learners, and professionals learning new skills. Brown describes amateur astronomers who observe the sky 24/7, supplementing the work of professionals in critical ways. A website devoted to Boccaccio's Decameron welcomes both scholars and students, opening up the world of professional humanities research to all.

The challenge of 21st century education will be leveraging the abundant resources of the web - this very long tail of interests - into a "circle of knowledge-building and sharing." Perhaps, Brown proposes, the formal curriculum of schools will encompass both a minimal core "that gets at the essence of critical thinking," paired with "passion-based learning," where kids connect to niche communities on the web, deeply exploring certain subjects. Brown envisions education becoming "an act of re-creation and productive inquiry," that will form the basis for a new culture of learning.

Singapore-MIT Games Innovation Lab in the News

Chris Kohler ran a story in Wired last week about new academic programs in game studies and design, in which the new Singapore-MIT GAMBIT games innovation lab figured prominently, alongside the new Serious Games masters program being launched by Carrie Heeter at Michigan State University and the new bachelor's degree program in game art and design recently launched by the Expression College for Digital Arts in Emeryville, California. These are to be sure only a few of a much broader array of colleges and universities which currently offer degrees or research opportunities in the area of game studies and design, each with their own strengths and emphasis. Certainly I would want to acknowledge here the pioneering work in this area at the University of Southern California, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Carnegie Mellon University, to cite simply the American institutions. Kohler bases his representation of our efforts primarily on an interview he conducted with core participants some months ago. He recently reprinted the full transcript of the exchange via his blog and I am crossposting it here with his permission in hopes that it will give my regular readers a clearer picture of what we are trying to accomplish.

Kohler was flattering in his representation of "Prof. Jenkins" (that guy again!) as the key figure behind the project but in fairness, I should stress the degree to which CMS co-director William Uricchio has been the primary player in our negotiation to create the lab and that the day to day operations of the lab are being capably overseen at this point by CMS alum Philip Tan, who has been seconded to our team from the Singapore Media Development Authority. Both Tan and Uricchio play a prominent role in the interview which follows.

We got some thorough ribbing in the fall when we announced that the Lab would be called SMIGIL (Singapore International Games Innovation Lab) and I joked at Serious Games that we were going to change our name to GOLLUM (Games -- Online Learning, Large, Utterly Massive). In the end, we have settled for GAMBIT (Gamers, Aesthetics, Mechanics, Business, Innovation, and Technology). While we are still negotiating some final details of the arrangement, we remain optimistic that the lab will launch this summer with our first crop of games prototypes starting to surface in the fall. My trip to Singapore in January was partially focused on identifying collaborators at leading Singaporean institutions who would be working with us on the first round of research.

Chris Kohler: You've been on the front lines of research into video games for quite a long time, but if I understand correctly this is the first big push for CMS into actual work in video game design. Why get into this area of education?

Henry Jenkins: That's a bit of a simplification. I have long been a strong advocate of innovation, creativity, and diversity of games as well as a strong supporter of the serious and independent games movements. That's probably the part of my work which has been most visible beyond the MIT campus. But, we have been taking steady steps over the past eight or nine years through the Comparative Media Studies Program to move decisively towards games production. The Comparative Media Studies has embraced an ethos of applied humanities.

Some years ago, CMS collaborated with Bing Gordon to develop a Creative Leaders Program for Electronic Arts: our faculty and students sat down to brainstorm with key EA designers, including Will Wright, Neil Young, and Danny Bilson, about the future of the games medium. For the past seven years, we have run a week-long intensive games design workshop every January in collaboration with people in the training program at Sony Imageworks and with a range of local Boston area games companies. Our students conceptualize and pitch games in the course of the week and receive feedback from industry insiders (representing companies such as Harmonix, Mad Doc, and Turbine). We have gradually built on that foundation by having games-related courses taught on campus by games industry insiders, such as Christopher Weaver (Bethesda Softworks), Ian Lane Davis (Mad Doc), Eric Zimmerman (GameLab) and Frank Espinoza (Warner Brothers). We have a long tradition of bringing games industry professionals to MIT to mentor and advise students on their class projects. We have long brought game designers of all kinds to campus to interact with our students

and share with them front line perspectives on industry trends. We have had a steady stream of students who have sought to combine computer science and comparative media studies and have gone on to do internships and get jobs as game designers.

We have now six years of track record doing conceptual and playable prototypes for educational games -- starting with the Games to Teach project which was funded by Microsoft Research and then the Education Arcade, which has hosted major events on games and learning at E3. This group has experimented with the use of game mods as a platform for developing educational games, transforming Neverwinter Nights into Revolution, a game set in Colonial Williamsburg. We recently hired Scot Osterweil (The Zoombini's Logical Adventure) to head up a team of our students working with Maryland Public Television and Fablevision to develop Labyrinth, a multiplatform experience designed to help kids develop literacy and math skills. It will be, we hope, the first CMS developed game to find its way into distribution. Eric Klopfer, another colleague, has been a leading researcher working on Augmented Reality Games and Beth Coleman, yet another colleague, is doing important work on the use of machinema for artistic expression.

All of this is the focus on the work we are doing through the Comparative Media studies Program. But what's great about this initiative is that within MIT, we are partnering with some key faculty in the Computer Science Program who has been doing groundbreaking work in computer graphics, artificial intelligence, and voice recognition.

And beyond that, we will be working with leading researchers from a range of Singaporean institutions with a broad range of production, animation, and programming skills.

Chris: How did the collaboration with the Singapore government come about? Had you

worked together on any other initiatives prior to this?

Philip Tan: Late last year, Singapore announced that the country was embarking on a major effort to grow R&D spending to 3% of its GDP. This is a crucial direction for preparing the Singapore economy for the next couple of decades. They've been focusing on biotech for a good few years and they've had compelling domestic reasons to build up their environmental and water technologies. However, the government also announced a big commitment to Interactive and Digital Media as a research space that is simply too important to ignore.

[Added later: I mixed up some statistics in the paragraph quoted (above). The National Research Foundation of Singapore announced that they would allocate S$500 million over the next five years for a strategic research program to increase the value-added contribution from the interactive & digital media (IDM) sector from S$3.8 billion in 2003 to S$10 billion, and to create about 10,000 new jobs by 2015.

The Media21 blueprint of MDA, which was announced in 2003, aims to double the GDP contribution of the entire media industry to 3%, and to increase the number of media industry jobs.

Thanks for the opportunity to clarify this detail.]

Given Singapore's technological base, excellent education system, cosmopolitan influences, and constraints in population and geographical size, the country has already been investing heavily in its digital media industries. This announcement is important as it encourages a bigger push towards addressing the concerns of the Singapore industry through R&D, which necessitates an attitude of risk-taking and creativity. They're building on that strong IT base that they've developed over the past 25 years, but they also recognize that digital media has significant creative challenges in addition to technological complexity. This effort invites exploration into new business models, cultural explorations, and aesthetics, which now becomes an integral part of the R&D effort for Interactive and Digital Media.

For the past 8 years, MIT and Singapore have had an ongoing collaboration called the "Singapore-MIT Alliance." The trust and understanding between MIT and Singapore institutes of higher learning has grown during that time, which has made it easier for researchers and educators to build collaborations. Within this context, CMS has been looking for an opportunity to work with Singapore in various media-related initiatives, and CMS is still examining other potential collaborations, particularly in education. However, just as the rapid growth of the Singapore industry is beginning to uncover challenges and opportunities for research, CMS has been gradually expanding its game curriculum offerings and research endeavors, so the International Game Lab is just the right project at the right time for all the collaborators.

Chris: What exactly is the involvement with Singapore -- will they be sending a certain number of students to MIT every year? Undergrad or graduate or both? How will you be involving working game industry professionals in the Lab? Have you signed up any specific individuals who you could name?

Philip Tan: Singapore and MIT faculty, post-doc, and graduate students will be collaborating on research across a range of different game-related topics. We want to make sure that this is completely collaborative; the research thrusts need to make sense both all the researchers, drawing on strengths and interests of both Singapore and MIT collaborators. Without that complementary benefit, we would end up compromising the full effectiveness of the initiative. There will naturally be a lot of communication, researcher exchanges, and joint presentations, and we should expect to see simultaneous increases in research activity in MIT and in Singapore institutions.

Undergraduate and polytechnic students in Singapore already have access to pretty strong technical and creative curricula to prepare them for game careers, so we want to bring 30 to 40 a year to MIT and challenge them to take the results of the ongoing research efforts and translate those ideas and applications into playable games. We'll also help build up further opportunities for more industry-bound students to grapple with the research while they are in Singapore. Not only does this expose students to game technologies, practices, and concepts that are a little different from the standard development pipelines, it allows the initiative to assess the relevance of the research. If we can't even figure out how to apply our own research to our own games, then some reevaluation is in order.

We'll also have Singapore and US industry professionals attached and visiting the work occurring in Singapore and MIT to make sure that the research stays relevant and accessible to the industry. We're still interviewing and discussing possible means of collaboration, so we can't name names at this stage. In Singapore, the local IGDA chapter makes it a priority to collect input and speak for the concerns of the industry, so we will frequently be consulting with them to identify areas of research that might be beneficial for the industry but might potentially be too risky for the industry to undertake.

Chris: More generally, how will this affect MIT's student body? Say I'm an undergraduate at MIT with a strong interest in game design or game research -- how could I get involved in this program?

William Uricchio: The Lab provides us with an opportunity to redouble our efforts in the classroom, research lab, and outreach programs. Each of these venues offers our students ways of sharing in the benefits of the program. In the classroom, the presence of the Lab will not only allow us to increase our game-related course offerings, but should facilitate greater interaction among CMS students and those from other parts of the Institute such as Course 6

(Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) and Sloan. There will be plenty of games-related research opportunities throughout the year in direct support of the Lab. MIT has a strong tradition of involving undergraduates as active participants in applied research through its many labs -- a program called the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program or UROP. And our already active engagement of key figures in the games field, whether from the industry, or the journalistic or academic worlds, will intensify. The MIT community can look forward to more opportunities to interact with these 'key figures' through our weekly colloquia and occasional conferences, and even through our visiting scholars program. It goes without saying that we very much look forward to drawing upon the experiences and cultural perspectives of visiting Singapore students, using this as an opportunity to challenge some of our assumptions

about game play and the cultural specificities of the medium.

Chris: You talked about earlier and the press release mentions the "development of publicly distributable games". I'm especially interested in the idea that game publishers might be able to work with you to actually get the rights to the prototypes produced by the lab and work them into full games. Can you talk more about this?

Philip Tan: The game industry isn't particularly fond of reading research papers from academia, for a variety of reasons. They're dry, they're overly general, they don't necessarily consider market pressures, and they either discuss concepts that require technology that's still five or ten years from mass-market adoption or obsess over game play and ideas that are considered to be already dated and thoroughly explored by the industry.

Even if the International Game Lab puts out relevant, useful research, or reexamines old ideas to address new audiences, it needs to be communicated to the industry in a way that emphasizes its relevance and applicability. Naturally, the industry pays attention to games. A small, obscure game with a good idea can easily get noticed, highlighted in forums and industry press, played, and critiqued. That kind of close attention expands further if the game is available for online download, and we can then get direct feedback about how good the game and the idea really is. As a side effect, we'll also have to keep in mind the kinds of issues that game developers face every day: platform limitations, tight deadlines, player demographics, and bug patches.

We're challenging ourselves to actually make games that will be designed around the core ideas of the research from the initiative. And by taking them to publishers, we want to raise the bar of how game projects from academia will be judged. Some of them won't get picked up, so we'll just make them publicly downloadable as experiments. But if we can get them into retail channels, we now have a real metric to assess how successful the idea is, and we will have real pressure to work on ideas that actually make better games. For a student, being part of the Game Lab means you has an additional opportunity to graduate with a commercial product in your portfolio.

We're not under the illusion that we're going to be able to compete against triple-A, commercial off-the-shelf games. However, in the online digital distribution space, there appears to be a real market for the small, niche title with a good idea. We also want to be producing a lot of games, somewhere between 5 and 10 games each year. You can't really guarantee a hit in this industry; certainly not with our budgets. You can have all the production values and ideas, but the market can just choose to look the other way sometimes.

Chris: What do you feel needs fixing about the video game design process in general? In other words, what will the Lab do that the video game industry is currently failing to? I feel like truly innovative and groundbreaking great game ideas get squashed often because the powers that be are just looking for things that are marketable -- am I on the right track, or missing the point?

Henry Jenkins: The games industry emerged from the entrepreneurial energies of garage-based designers who were driven by their passions and who created, in a relatively short time, a powerfully expressive medium. We have now seen that initial entrepreneurial stage give way to a much more standardized, studio-based mode of production, based on bottom line calculations and reliable returns of investments, and pushed more and more towards franchise-based entertainment. Studio-based production, across all media, has had two effects: insuring a relatively high standard of production and capping opportunities for innovation and individual expression. As the costs of games get pushed higher and higher, many wonder where fresh new ideas will come from. Some have said that the games industry has become so risk adverse that only a Miyamoto or a Wright can break through the formulas and generate truly original approaches to game design. Many observers have said we need to step outside of that system and provide some place where interesting new game prototypes can be incubated.

We see university-based game labs as one model for how we can foster greater innovation. Much as university-based film production programs have been the place where fresh new filmmakers acquire their skills and do work that stretches the medium(helping to fuel the independent film movement), university-based games programs can be the place where the next generation of game designers stretch the medium (helping to fuel the emerging independent games movement). We see the lab as a space where we can move swiftly from pure research into compelling applications and then partner with the games industry to bring the best ideas to emerge to market.

Chris: What would be an example of a typical research project that the Lab might work on?

Philip Tan: We have six research categories and we expect many projects would

straddle multiple categories: technology, business, genres, culture, aesthetics, and mechanics. For instance, a culture project may examine several demographics and identify an underserved, potential audience, but reaching that audience may involve the creation of a new game genre, a drastically different aesthetic from current offerings, or altering game play mechanics to keep them engaging and accessible. You also need to figure out how to get that game into the hands of that audience, and possibly alter your pipeline to bring the cost of development under the projected returns from that audience. Finally, we build that game, scaled within our capabilities, and we test it all out for real.

Chris: Is the intent here mostly to work with established MIT researchers to produce papers and game designs, or are you hoping to get students involved at the undergrad or graduate levels who want to go into the game industry? If the latter is a part of the effort, how would you compare the Lab to other game design programs?

William Uricchio: The short answer is yes! yes! We certainly want to make the most of the established research talent that we have in house, and to intensify our research and creative collaborations with leading figures in the field. But doing so also implies that we continue to do what we do best: drawing on our extremely able student body in a collaborative research process. Their game experience is formidable, their ability to think outside the box well proven, and I can't think of a better educational strategy than working together to develop the future of the medium. We have had a steady stream of graduate and undergraduate students leave MIT and succeed in the industry, and see no reason to stop now! But we also hope that this initiative leads to innovations that, while game-centric, offer students opportunities to work with the medium in unexpected ways, ways that go beyond today's established industry.

Chris: Continuing that thread, what do you think is wrong with the current state of game design education? There is no shortage of colleges and universities that offer bachelor's or even master's degrees in game design, but... are they on the right track to continue innovation in the medium, or are they just churning out worker bees?

Henry Jenkins: I am not sure I think anything is wrong with the current state of game design education. We aren't doing this because other university programs are failing. Each of the existing programs fills a specific niche: some emphasize technical innovation, others character design and world building; some move fairly swiftly into games industry positions while others emphasize the development of an independent games aesthetic or are more closely aligned

with the serious games movement. We hope to add several things to the mix:

first, we want to get our students working in an international production context, fostering greater collaboration between the American and Asian games industries. More and more games are a global medium with many new countries developing games industry. As they are doing so, we are seeing more and more culturally distinctive games enter the marketplace. At one time, games seemed to have a global style, which sought to erase local cultural differences. Now, we are seeing different cultures explore different game genres, themes, and

styles. We think the next generation of game designers will need to be able to communicate in a global context and be able to appreciate and value the cultural diversity that characterizes current game production.

Second, we see real value in pushing forward games as a medium through a combination of cutting-edge research and imaginative applications. In that regard, strength of our program is that we teach students to think across media -- sometimes becoming more aware of commonalities and relationships between multiple media traditions, sometimes drilling down to what is distinctive about a particular medium. We are a program in Comparative Media Studies and not one that specializes exclusively in Games Studies or Game Design per se. This perspective has sometimes been misunderstood as the field gets bogged down in pointless debates about narratologists vs. ludologists. We see narratives and game play both as traditions that cut across multiple media channels and seek to help students develop a more integrated approach to thinking about the social and cultural potentials of each medium. With this project, we are bringing together researchers who understand games from a social and cultural perspective with those who are doing groundbreaking research on new media technologies. We see games as an important medium of expression for the 21st century: we are not just preparing young people to enter the games industry; we are challenging the games industry to think about their medium in new ways; we are daring people to imagine games that do things they have never thought of before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, back to the interview...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Piracy Becomes Promotion Revisted...

Last fall, Reason magazine reprinted the "When Piracy Becomes Promotion" section from Convergence Culture, foregrounding the ways that the arguably illegal practices of fan subbing have helped to build the American market for anime. More recently, I received a tip from reader David Mankins about the ways that the commercial marketing for the anime series, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, sought to explicitly tap into the fansubbing circuit. Haruhi had been a huge success in Japan and had generated growing interest in the American Otaku community through its circulation in fansubbed versions. Wikipedia offers this history of the international reception of the series:

DVD sales in Japan have been strong with 70,000 and 90,000 units sold of the first two DVDs respectively as of August 2006. A 2006 online poll of Japan's top 100 favourite animated television series of all time, conducted by TV Asahi, placed the series in fourth place. The series has also become somewhat of an internet phenomenon in both Japan and English-speaking countries thanks to the distribution of English language fansubs, and over 2000 clips of the series and user-created parodies and homages were posted to video sharing websites such as YouTube. The popularity of these clips (and those of other popular Japanese series) lead the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) to request that YouTube remove clips protected under copyright.

Rather than ignore this history, the company releasing the anime series officially in the United States openly courted anime fans, urging those who have loved the fan sub version to support the commercial releases.

Here's an account of the campaign published last December on The Anime Almanac:

Buzz was generating through out all off last week as a mysterious website popped onto the internets with promises of the popular anime series, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, being licensed in the US. The website only claimed that "The World as we know it will end" that Friday. But for those looking around, one could find hidden messages to decrypt written in the website's source code. The popular website AnimeOnDVD.com also played along with the highlight of the letters SOS written on their news posts. The hype was big, and many started to speculate who was behind the mystery....

Bandai's idea behind the ASOS Brigade is to reach out to everyone who has already become fans of the series through watching the fansubs. They have created their own amateur-style home movies and are posting them on the internet. They have also created a Myspace page and encourage fans.

The movie is done "for fans by fans" style, and they really know their target audience. The movie interlaces Japanese and English dialog with a Korean-Americain, former Pink Ranger Patricia Ja Lee, playing the lead role, and two Japanese actresses playing her sidekicks. Lee even admits in the film that the Japanese actresses are only meant to appeal to the otaku fanboys. This is a very suitable attitude for the character she portrays, and is even more entertaining when we, the otaku-fanboy audience, realize how true it is.

But the video also dives into other aspects of the online anime community that we weren't expecting from a company like Bandai. Internet catch-phrases like "O Rly?" and "No Wai!" are used through out the video, which are only used by visitors of such otaku-influenced websites like 4chan.org and ytmnd.com. Also, after fans complained over Lee's choice to translate a word to "psychic" over the word "esper", a new subtitled version of the video included the fan-prefered word written under the original recording...

Many people feel that Haruhi will never sell well in the US because most of the fans have already seen the show through illegal methods. This campaign is an attempt to target the fansub community into actually supporting the series financially when the opportunity is available to them. The movie ends with special thanks to "All fansubs lovers who buy the official DVDs and who help support more creative works," and specifically gives no thanks to "downloaders/bootlegers who never buy the official DVDs." This is a very bold statement, but I completely understand where they are coming from.

This case suggest just how central the fan network is to the release strategies of anime publishers. Rather than trying to shut down the fans, the company is recognizing the ways that fans have appreciated the value of the series, helping to familiarize at least American otaku to the content, and encouraging them to put their money behind a cultural product that they have already enjoyed in an underground form. I will be curious to see how this turns out and would welcome any insights from readers of this blog who are more involved in anime than I am.

For anime and manga fans in the Boston area, I wanted to share details of the forthcoming Cool Japan conference being hosted by Ian Condry, a faculty member in the Foreign Languages and Literature section at MIT and an active contributor to the Comparative Media Studies Program. Here are some of the highlights of the event (taken from the press release). Events will be split between MIT and Harvard, reflecting the joint affiliation of the "Cool Japan" Project:

Wednesday, February 28

Anime Screening & Director's Talk: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

7pm, MIT Room 32-123 (enter at 32 Vassar St.)

Anime director Mamoru Hosoda will screen and discuss his feature film The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (Toki o kakeru shôjo, 2006, Kadokawa/ Madhouse), which was awarded Best Animation by the Media Arts Festival 2007.

Thursday, March 1

Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization Book Launch and Dialogue with Author Ian Condry. 4-5:30pm, MIT Room 4-237 (enter at 77 Massachusetts Ave.)

MIT Associate Professor Ian Condry will discuss his recently published book with comments from local hip-hop scholars Thomas DeFrantz (MIT Associate Professor) and Murray Forman (Northeastern) and dialogue with audience.

Miss Monday in Concert. Tokyo hip-hop artist and local hip-hop sensations Akrobatik and Danielle Scott. Tickets: $8 Adv./$10 Door (18+). 9pm (doors open at 8:30pm), The Middle East, Upstairs (472 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge).

Friday, March 2

Scholars Panel Discussions. "Love and War in Japanese Pop Culture." Harvard CGIS (South, Room 020 Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge).

"Visual" with Susan Napier (Tufts/ U Texas), author of Anime: From Akira to Howl's Moving Castle; Roland Kelts (U Tokyo), author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Invaded the US; and Adam Kern (Harvard), author of Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and Kibyoshi in Edo Japan. 1pm.

"Design" with Marcos Novac (University of California, Santa Barbara), artist, transarchitect, and designer; Kostas Terzidis (Harvard), author of Algorhithmic Architecture; and Larry Kubota (GLOCOM), filmmaker, Black Current Productions. 3pm.

Afro Samurai Screening and Discussion with Manga Artist Takashi Okazaki. Screening of one 25-minute episode from the new five-part animated series produced in Japan and starring Samuel L. Jackson. Discussion follows with Afro Samurai manga artist Takashi Okazaki, who drew the original cult comic that launched the project. 7pm, Gund

Hall Piper Auditorium (Harvard, 48 Quincy St., Cambridge). WARNING:

Mature content, not suitable for children.

Saturday, March 3

Scholars Panel Discussions. "Love and War in Japanese Pop Culture." MIT Stata Center Room 32-124 (32 Vassar St.).

"Culture" with Laura Miller (Loyola), author of Beauty Up: Exploring Japanese Beauty Aesthetics; Christine Yano (U Hawaii), author of Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and Nation in Japanese Popular Song; Ian Condry (MIT/Harvard), author of Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and Paths of Cultural Globalization. 1pm.

"Politics" with David Leheny (U Wisconsin), author of Think Global Fear Local: Sex, Violence, Anxiety in Contemporary Japan; Theodore J. Gilman (Harvard), author of No Miracles Here: Fighting Urban Decline in Japan and US; and Ueno Toshiya (Wako U), author of Urban Tribal Studies: A Sociology of Club and Party Cultures. 3pm.

For those of you who are not in the neighborhood, you may have to make due with Anime Pulse's extensive coverage of the previous Cool Japan conference. Here's hoping they provide a similar record of this event.

Four Eyed Monsters and Collaborative Curation

Attend the tale of plucky young independent filmmakers Susan Buice and Arin Crumley who have tapped every device available to them in the era of participatory culture to get their feature film, Four Eyed Monsters in front of an audience. Rather than waiting for the film to come out on DVD to offer director's extras, Buice and Crumley shot a compelling series of videos about the film's production and released them via iTunes, MySpace, and YouTube, where as of August 2006 they had been downloaded more than 600,000 times. As audience interest in the property grew, the team used their own blog/website to solicit support from their fans, promising that they would insure that the film got shown in any city where there were more than 150 requests. Indeed, they were able to use the online interest expressed in the film to court local exhibitors and convince them that there was an audience for Four Eyed Monsters in their community.

As Crumley explained in an interview with Indiewire:

Most theaters would normally avoid a project like ours because we don't have a distributor who would be marketing the film and getting people to show up. But because the audience of our video podcast is so enthusiastic about the project and because we have numbers and emails and zip codes for all of these people, we've been able to instill enough confidence in theaters to get the film booked.

As of today, the site has received more than 8000 requests from screenings. Fans can use their website to monitor requests and to help them to identify other potential viewers in their neighborhood. As Crumley explained,

We've learned that it's almost impossible to distribute your film to theaters the way the current system works, but their are loop holes, and they are building your own audience and then proving to theater owners you have that audience and that they are willing to show up to pay money to see your film that's something distributors don't have to do, but theaters would really benefit if they did.

The film and the web campaign behind it has drawn interest from the Sundance Channel which plans to broadcast it down the line but who used it to launch a series of screenings of independent films in Second Life, where once again it played to packed houses.

Based on their experiences, the filmmakers have started talking about what they call "collective curation" of content: a scenario where independent producers court audiences via the web, creating interest through clips and previews, and identifying where they have a strong enough following to justify the expense of renting theater space and shipping prints. They believe that such an approach will help other directors get their work before enthusiastic paying customers.

Seeking to support other filmmakers who want to follow in their footsteps, the Four Eyed Monsters team has posted a list of more than 600 movie theaters around the country which they think might be receptive to independent films and encouraging others to fill in relevant details.

The filmmakers will be sharing some of their experiences and perspectives to those attending the Beyond Broadcast conference this Saturday. As reported here earlier, this conference is being co-hosted by the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet Law, and Yale's Information Society Project.

The Four Eyed Monsters team also play a prominent role in the newly released documentary on videoblogging which CMS graduate student (and Beyond Broadcasting organizer) Steve Schultz has helped to produce for the Project nml Exemplar Library. As I have mentioned here before, we are producing a series of web-based documentaries for use by schools and after school programs interested in getting young people involved in media production projects. I will be featuring more information about this documentary down the line but I wanted to call it to your attention in advance of the Beyond Broadcast conference since it provides such a useful overview of the implications of citizen-based media. This is the first of the documentaries produced under the supervision of our newly hired production coordinator, the talented Anna Van Someren.

From YouTube to YouNiversity

I wrote the following article for Chronicle of Higher Education and it seems to be stimulating some discussion out there. Since at some point it will be taken off the Chronicle's site, I figured I would exercise my rights as an author to republish it here. My one regret is that the Chronicle removed a reference to William Uricchio who is my co-director of the CMS program and whose contributions are key to the program's success. Consider these developments: At the end of last year, Time named "You" its Person of the Year "for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game." Earlier in the year, Newsweek described such sites as Flickr, MySpace, Craigslist, Digg, and YouTube as "putting the 'We' in the Web." The business "thought leader" Tim O'Reilly has termed these new social-network sites "Web 2.0," suggesting that they represent the next phase in the digital revolution -- no longer about the technologies per se but about the communities that have grown up around them. Some are even describing immersive online game worlds such as Second Life as the beginnings of Web 3.0. All of this talk reflects changes that cut across culture and commerce, technology and social organization.

Over the past few years, we have also seen a series of books (both journalistic and academic) that analyze and interpret these new configurations of media power. In his recent book The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler describes the reconfiguration of power and knowledge that occurs from the ever more complex interplay between commercial, public, educational, nonprofit, and amateur media producers. Grant McCracken's Plenitude talks about the "generativeness" of this cultural churn. Chris Anderson (The Long Tail) shows how these shifts are giving rise to niche media markets, and Thomas W. Malone (The Future of Work) analyzes how such changes are reshaping the management of major companies. My own book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, describes a world where every story, image, sound, brand, and relationship plays itself out across the widest possible array of media platforms, and where the flow of media content is shaped as much by decisions made in teenagers' bedrooms as it is by decisions made in corporate boardrooms.

These writers come from very different disciplinary perspectives -- business, law, anthropology, and cultural studies -- and they write in very different styles. We can't really call this work an intellectual movement: Most of us didn't know of one another's existence until our books started to hit the shelves. Yet taken together, these books can be read as a paradigm shift in our understanding of media, culture, and society. This work embodies an ecological perspective on media, one that refuses to concentrate on only one medium at a time but insists that we take it all in at once and try to understand how different layers of media production affect one another. As such, these books represent a new route around the ideological and methodological impasses between political economy (with its focus on media concentration) and cultural studies (with its focus on resistant audiences). And these books represent a new way of thinking about how power operates within an informational economy, describing how media shifts are changing education, politics, religion, business, and the press.

Many of these books share the insight that a networked culture is enabling a new form of bottom-up power, as diverse groups of dispersed people pool their expertise and confront problems that are much more complex than they could handle individually. They are able to do so because of the ways that new media platforms support the emergence of temporary social networks that exist only as long as they are needed to face specific challenges or respond to the immediate needs of their members. Witness, for example, the coalition of diverse ideological interests that came together last year to fight for the principle of network neutrality on the Web.

The science-fiction writer and Internet activist Cory Doctorow has called such groups "adhocracies." An adhocracy is a form of social and political organization with few fixed structures or established relationships between players and with minimum hierarchy and maximum diversity. In other words, an adhocracy is more or less the polar opposite of the contemporary university (which preserves often rigid borders between disciplines and departments and even constructs a series of legal obstacles that make it difficult to collaborate even within the same organization). Now try to imagine what would happen if academic departments operated more like YouTube or Wikipedia, allowing for the rapid deployment of scattered expertise and the dynamic reconfiguration of fields. Let's call this new form of academic unit a "YouNiversity."

How might media studies, the field most committed to mapping these changes as they affect modern life, be taught in a YouNiversity?

First, media studies needs to become comparative, teaching critics to think across multiple media systems and teaching media makers to produce across multiple media systems. The modern university has inherited a set of fields and disciplines structured around individual media -- photography, cinema, digital culture, literature, theater, and painting are studied in different departments using different disciplinary perspectives. Programs have taken shape through an additive logic (with members of each new generation fighting for the right to study the new medium that affects their lives the most). For a long time, my institution, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had a program in film and media studies, a redundant term that strikes me as the rough equivalent of calling the English department the books-and-literature department. For a long time at MIT, books about film were in the architecture library, and those on television were in the humanities library -- unless they were about gender, in which case they were in the women's-studies library, or they took a Marxist perspective, in which case they were in the economics library. Such fragmentation does a disservice to students, so that when we ask journalism students to decide whether they want to go into print or broadcasting, or when we ask business students to choose between marketing, advertising, or public relations, we don't reflect the integrated contexts within which media are produced, marketed, and consumed.

A conceptual shift took place eight years ago at MIT when the program in film and media studies recast itself as the program in comparative media studies -- inspired in part by the models of comparative literature and comparative religion. The word "comparative" serves multiple functions for the program, encouraging faculty members to think and teach across different media, historical periods, national borders, and disciplinary boundaries, and to bridge the divide between theory and practice as well as that separating academic life from other institutions also confronting profound media change.

This comparative approach has allowed the program to respond more fully to the needs of students with different career goals, disciplinary backgrounds, and professional experiences. By design, about a third of our master's students will go into Ph.D. programs and pursue careers in higher education; the rest will take jobs as advertising executives, game designers, educational-technology specialists, policy makers, museum curators, and journalists. Many are returning to graduate school after the first phases of their careers, coming with a new urgency and determination to master the "big picture" issues shaping the spaces where they have worked.

To educate such students, we don't so much need a faculty as we need an intellectual network. The program has a large pool of loosely affiliated faculty members who participate in an ad hoc manner depending on the needs and interests of individual students: Sometimes they may contribute nothing to the program for several years and then get drawn into a research or thesis project that requires their particular expertise. Our students' thesis advisers come not only from other universities around the world but also from industry; they include Bollywood choreographers, game designers, soap-opera writers, and journalists. We encourage our students to network broadly and draw on the best thinking about their topic, wherever they can find it.

Second, media studies needs to reflect the ways that the contemporary media landscape is blurring the lines between media consumption and production, between making media and thinking about media. A recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 57 percent of teens online have created their own media content. As our culture becomes more participatory, these young people are creating their own blogs and podcasts; they are recording their lives on LiveJournal and developing their own profiles on MySpace; they are producing their own YouTube videos and Flickr photos; they are writing and posting fan fiction or contributing to Wikipedia; they are mashing up music and modding games. Much as engineering students learn by taking apart machines and putting them back together, many of these teens learned how media work by taking their culture apart and remixing it.

In such a world, the structural and historical schisms separating media production and critical-studies classes no longer seem relevant. Students around the country are pushing to translate their analytic insights about media into some form of media production. And they are correctly arguing that you cannot really understand how these new media work if you don't use them yourself. Integrating theory and practice won't be simple. Some students in the entering classes in the program in comparative media studies have had little or no access to digital tools, and others have been designing their own computer games since elementary school. Even among those who have media-production experience, they have worked with very different production tools or produced very different forms of media content in very different contexts.

Responding to these wildly divergent backgrounds and expectations requires us to constantly redesign and renegotiate course expectations as we try to give students what they need to push themselves to the next level of personal and professional development. We have encouraged faculty members to incorporate production opportunities in their courses so that students in a children's-media class, for example, are asked to apply the theories they have learned to the design of an artifact for a child (medium unspecified), then write a paper explaining the assumptions behind their design choices. We may have students composing their own children's books, building and programming their own interactive toys, shooting photo essays, producing pilots for children's shows, or designing simple video games or Web sites.

Before we started our master's program, I went on the road to talk with representatives of more than 50 companies and organizations. They told me that they value the flexibility, creativity, and social and cultural insights liberal-arts majors bring to their operations. They also shared a devastating list of concerns -- liberal-arts students fall behind other majors in terms of teamwork, leadership, project completion, and problem solving. In other words, they were describing the gap between academic fields focused on fostering autonomous learners and professional contexts demanding continuing collaborations. Those desired skills were regularly fostered in other disciplines that have laboratory-based cultures that test new theories and research findings through real-world applications. At a university with strong traditions of applied physics or applied mathematics, we needed to embrace the ideal of applied humanities. And as a result, we have created a context where our students put their social and cultural knowledge to work through real-world applications such as designing educational games, developing media-literacy materials, or consulting with media companies about consumer relations.

Third, media studies needs to respond to the enormous hunger for public knowledge about our present moment of profound and persistent media change. Given this context, it is nothing short of criminal that so much of contemporary media theory and analysis remains locked away in an academic ghetto, cut off from larger conversations. Media scholars have much to contribute to -- and much to learn from -- the discussions occurring among designers, industry leaders, policy makers, artists, activists, journalists, and educators about the direction of our culture.

At such a moment, we need to move beyond preparing our students for future roles as media scholars, wrapped up in their own disciplinary discourses, and instead encourage them to acquire skills and experiences as public intellectuals, sharing their insights with a larger public from wherever they happen to be situated. They need to be taught how to translate the often challenging formulations of academic theory into a more public discourse.

Academic programs are only starting to explore how they might deploy these new media platforms -- blogs and podcasts especially -- to expand the visibility of their research and scholarship. Consider, for example, the case of Flow, an online journal edited at the University of Texas at Austin. Flow brings together leading media scholars from around the world to write short, accessible, and timely responses to contemporary media developments: In contrast with the increasingly sluggish timetable of academic publishing, which makes any meaningful response to the changing media environment almost impossible, a new issue of Flow appears every two weeks.

Blogs represent a powerful tool for engaging in these larger public conversations. At my university, we noticed that a growing number of students were developing blogs focused on their thesis research. Many of them were making valuable professional contacts; some had developed real visibility while working on their master's degrees; and a few received high-level job offers based on the professional connections they made on their blogs. Blogging has also deepened their research, providing feedback on their arguments, connecting them to previously unknown authorities, and pushing them forward in ways that no thesis committee could match. Now all of our research teams are blogging not only about their own work but also about key developments in their fields. We have redesigned the program's home page, allowing feeds from these blogs to regularly update our content and capture more of the continuing conversations in and around our program. We have also started offering regular podcasts of our departmental colloquia and are experimenting with various forms of remote access to our conferences and other events.

We make a mistake, though, if we understand such efforts purely in terms of distance learning or community outreach, as if all expertise resides within universities and needs simply to be transmitted to the world. Rather, we should see these efforts as opportunities for us to learn from other sectors equally committed to mapping and mastering the current media change.

Each media-studies program will need to reinvent itself to reflect the specifics of its institutional setting and existing resources, and what works today will need to be rethought tomorrow as we deal with further shifts in the information landscape. That's the whole point of an adhocracy: It's built to tap current opportunities, but, like ice sculpture, it isn't made to last. The modern university should work not by defining fields of study but by removing obstacles so that knowledge can circulate and be reconfigured in new ways. For media studies, that means taking down walls that separate the study of different media, that block off full collaboration between students, that make it difficult to combine theory and practice, and that isolate academic research from the larger public conversations about media change.

Until we make these changes, the best thinking (whether evaluated in terms of process or outcome) is likely to take place outside academic institutions -- through the informal social organizations that are emerging on the Web. We may or may not see the emergence of YouNiversities, but YouTube already exists. And its participants are learning plenty about how media power operates in a networked society.

The Only Thing We Have to Fear...

The other day, I had a discussion of the politics of fear with Doug Thomas (USC), Carrie James (Harvard), and Larry Johnson (The New Media Consortium) as part of a gathering of MacArthur foundation grantees working on their Youth and Digital Learning Initiative. I was pretty happy with some of the ideas that emerged from that conversation so I thought I would share them with my readers. Let's start with an example of how the politics of fear works. Consider, for example, the case of a recently proposed piece of legislation here in Massachusetts which would regulate violent video games as in effect a form of pornography. Here's how GamePolitics describes the legislation:

The proposed legislation, which does not yet have a primary sponsor, would block underage buyers from purchasing any game which:

* depicts violence in a manner patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community, so as to appeal predominantly to the morbid interest in violence of minors

* is patently contrary to prevailing standards of adults in the county where the offense was committed as to suitable material for such minors

* and lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value for minors.

The bill in question was written by Jack Thompson, who has sought similarly legislation around the country and has consistently been overturned by court decisions. Interestingly enough, the most outspoken backer of this law is none other than Boston Mayor Thomas Menino -- who is, incidentally, the same local politician who is responsible for the city's gross over-reaction to the Aqua Hunger Force signs the other week. I find myself pondering why we can't just tell people that Menino is someone who has demonstrated already that he is so out of touch with popular culture that he can't tell the difference between a cartoon character and a bomb and that he is someone who is afraid of his own shadow (or more accurately, who understands the political advantages to be gained by fostering a climate of fear). Given the current logic of the way our fear-based politics functions, we might expect them to ban cartoon characters on airplanes and have our children line up to be searched for coloring books and stuffed toys before they can pass through security!

Or consider the case of the late and unlamented Deleting Online Predators Act which would have prohibited school and public libraries which receive federal funds from allowing patrons to access social network and blogging software. Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) has introduced a new piece of legislation, the so-called Protecting Children in the 21st Century act, which would incorporate and expand upon many of the more noxious features of the original DOPA. I am sure we will be talking about this more in the months ahead. It would seem to one of the clear hallmarks of the politics of fear is the use of the term, "protection" or "protecting" in the name of the legislation.

In both cases, these bills, which are based on a fundamentally wrong-headed understanding of the issues they are designed to address, attracted or are likely to attract significant levels of bipartisan support. Indeed, in a highly partisan political climate, these kind of bills may be the only pieces of legislation which pass with little or no debate and with overwhelming support.

Why? Well, consider what it would mean to be opposed to a bill which promised to protect young people from online predators. And indeed, even if you decided to oppose such a bill, you either would have to deny that the problem existed (which would leave you to be labeled as hopelessly out of touch with the darker side of reality since these bills usually feed on at least some high profile tragedies or some sensationalized news report) or you would have to suggest the problem is not as bad as has been claimed (in which case your acknowledgment of the problem will be used as evidence of how wide spread the concern being addressed really is.) So, the politics of fear works because the costs of opposing the child protection acts are simply too high, especially in an era where political leaders are permanently raising money and campaigning for re-election.

The politics of fear also works because the benefits of a fear-based politics are so high. Basically, such legislation enjoys bipartisan support because it allows culturally conservative Republicans to appeal to their base and liberal Democrats to show their independence from theirs. Why do Joseph Lieberman and Hillary Clinton line up behind pretty much any piece of legislation which would restrict free expression in the name of protecting young people? Because it allows them to adopt positions which make them see "moderate" and appeal to so-called "security moms" without really crossing any core constituency. There would be costs in, say, opposing abortion but there is no real cost in trying to regulate youth access to digital technology.

The politics of fear works because it serves the interest of the news media in two ways: First, the mass media are feeling the erosion of their consumer base to digital media. If they can convince parents that it is unsafe to allow their sons and daughters to go online or play video games, they may slow the erosion. They have little to fear from alienating those young viewers further since they are already defecting in great numbers and essentially mass media news speaks to an older consumer base. Second, fear-based coverage leaves us glued to the set, seeking out more information. We are doomed to go from one crisis to another, to have Anna Nicole Smith's death and custody battle push Barack Obama's announcement for the presidency off the lead slot on CNN, because fear and outrage trumps hope everytime.

Justine Cassell and I have been talking some recently about the gender dimensions of this fear based politics. Specifically, the ways that there have been recurring efforts throughout modern history to capitalized on the perceived sexual threat young women face from any new media and on the perceived threat of violence and aggression which surround young men's relations to any emerging technology. In other words, we are consistently being taught to fear for our daughters and to be afraid of our sons. This fear based politics plays an important role in normalizing and regulating gender relations.

So what do we do about it?

We need to stigmatize the politics of fear. We need to call it what it is -- not protection but fear mongering. We need to construct a counter-narrative in which fear-based politics is itself a threat to our families because it locks our young people out of access to knowledge, skills, and experience which they need to learn and grow and in many cases, because it prevents those kids who are most at risk from access to information that they need to pursue good jobs and educational opportunities in the future. Such bills are dangerous both because they undercut core constitutional rights and because they distract us from locating real solutions to the "problems" that they are allegedly designed to combat. DOPA and its sequel will do nothing about actual child molestation other than to leave children even more vulnerable because they have to access these social networking sites outside of schools and public libraries. The legislation that goes after violent video games will do nothing to address the actual causes of violence in the lives of American teens.

Right now, we are tending to go after the politics of fear with facts. Indeed, we do need facts, not to mention a more reasoned perspective (and that is going to be one of the real values of the work the MacArthur foundation is doing in the area of youth and digital learning) but as a range of recent progressive writers (George Lakov, Steve Duncombe, Tom Frank) have suggested, we also need to think about how we frame the issues, the kinds of stories we deploy to explain those facts, the kind of language we use to define the debate, and the kinds of fantasies we mobilize on the part of our supporters.

We need to define the issues in ways that appeal across party lines. The politics of fear is not an ideological issue -- at least not one which can be defined along Liberal/Conservative lines. Just as many "Liberal" Democrats line up to support attempts to regulate free expression and association or restrict privacy in the name of combating fear, there are libertarians on both the left and the right who would oppose those regulatory efforts and who would be willing to stand up against the moral blackmail which underlies them. In a context where some Liberal Democrats back such legislation, any campaign which assumes conservatives are the bad guys and progressives the righteous ones is doomed to fail, simply fracturing the Left without mobilizing potential supporters on the right.

We need to be able to translate our insights and information, our alternative perspective, into concrete advice which can help parents and teachers to address the concerns that are currently being addressed only by those who are advancing the moral panic. Right now, most writing about media for parents starts from assumption that media is a social problem and that the best form of parenting is to limit if not prohibit outright any and all access to media. We need to develop alternative approaches to parenting that translate our understanding of the value of digital media for children and youth into specific principles and actions which allow parents to maximize benefits and minimize risks and which address the kinds of fears that lead them open to regulatory solutions.

Might we see this anti-fear politics as something like the Take Back the Night movement on American college campuses? Yes and No. In some ways, Take Back the Night is an empowerment movement: participants refuse to live in fear; they seek to reclaim the streets by collectively confronting the risks and by learning skills that might allow them to feel greater control over their own situation. In some ways, the Take Back the Night movement depends on the cultivation of fear -- creating a sense of victimization which can fuel the protest in the first place. We need to learn the right lessons here.

A key element of the campaign against fear would be the need to create a space where young people could speak about their own experiences with digital media and be taken seriously on their own terms. This is going to be hard to pull off because even well meaning groups have a tendency to patronize or suppress aspects of youth expression. In Convergence Culture, I raised the question of whether free speech advocates in the Muggles for Harry Potter campaign may have promoted the right of young people to read J.K. Rowling's books at the expense of forcing them to recant their fantasy lives. Young person after young person posted messages explaining that they knew that the world of Hogwarts was purely fantasy and that it had no meaningful connection to their everyday lives. Something similar happens when gamers try to defend their relationship to violent video games: they end up arguing that Grand Theft Auto is "only a game" and that it doesn't have any influence on their everyday lives. Surely, there needs to be a space for meaningful fantasy in our discourse about the right of people to participate in their culture.

One of the ways that a politics of fear works is by convincing us that we have to act because everyone is afraid. Yet, many of us are not quite as frightened as the political leaders want us to believe. Perhaps one way forward would be to produce a fear index that functioned more or less in the opposite way that the terror index currently works. The terror index amplifies the perception of risk in order to justify government regulation. A fear index might demonstrate that there is less fear in our culture and thus allow us to rally behind the idea of less government regulation over our lives.

At the end of the day, we need to convince more Americans that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

The Future of Television (Circa 1999)

Bill Densmore of Clickshare recently shared with me the text of an e-mail I had sent him in May 1999 describing what I saw as one scenario for the future of digital culture. I decided I wanted to share it with you to spark a conversation about how far we have gone towards realizing some of the key elements of this scenario as well as how far we have yet to go on other fronts. (the reference points to The X-Files and My So-Called Life give you some sense of the time when this was written.) I was responding to an essay he had written about micropayments and the struggle to insure the diversity of digital culture. Everything from here is part of the original text:

My own research has centrally concerned the ways that popular audiences consume and create value from the resources provided them by the mass media. As I suggested yesterday, I don't find the lowest common denominator model helpful for thinking about the success of most popular entertainment. Rather, I see the popular audience composed of a coalition of different

audience interests who may share certain programs, films, stories in common but who get fundamentally different things from them and who interact with them in different ways. The most creative producers understand this now, while the broadcasting paradigm helps to mask the degree of diversity and fragmentation of the contemporary media audience. It is clearer when we go on line and survey the range of web sites constructed around a particular series or parse through the flame wars on fan discussion lists which occur when radically different reading publics are brought together.

A second focus of my research concerns what I call "cultural convergence," which refers to the social and cultural changes in how we relate to media content in our everyday life that help prepare the way and establish the market viability of technological convergence. When we try to understand what is happening in our culture, we see two things: a growing desire to participate

more fully in our media culture -- not just as passive consumers but active transformers of media content -- and a growing tendency to tighten corporate control over intellectual property law. This is resulting in a crackdown on fan web sites, MP3 files, etc. and thus a closing off of the cultural participation encouraged by the web.

Now, here's what I imagine occurring when we add something like your clickshare to the mix -- along with dramatic improvements in the delivery technology for digital media:

1)All television content becomes available via some form of webtv, including past episodes. If I want to join a series midprogress, I can go back and watch earlier episodes for a reasonable rate with micropayments as the means of exchange between me and the television producers.

2)Television series will be annotated to link back to relevant back story information. If I am watching X FILES and there is reference made to Muldar's sister and her disappearance, I can be offered the chance to see those earlier scenes, again at a modest price. This will enable even more elaborate form of serialization and backstories in American television, a tendency that has grown in the two decades since the introduction of the VCR.

3) Fan websites will play an important role in the cultural economy, if they are allowed to function not unlike the Amazon Associates program. Fan sites will comment on or annotate the aired episodes, thus establishing reasons why various kinds of viewers might want to see them for the first time or watch them again. They can link back to the producer's sites where the

episodes can be downloaded for a viewing fee and the producers will in turn provide an incentive to the fans for creating sites which essentially help market their products. At the same time, fans should be allowed freedom to discuss, comment, and appropriate the material in any way they want since doing so helps to establish niche market value for the content.

4)Certain series may debut on network and then move rather rapidly to the web where their continued support will come from viewers paying to watch them. This will be attractive in cases -- such as MY SO-CALLED LIFE -- where a series attracts an intense following in a definable demographic group but does not register a broad-enough viewership to be powerful according to the Nelson Ratings measurement. The ability to collect payments on a per view basis for a broad audience will enable continued production of such series assuming price scale can be resolved.

5)New networks may emerge which reflect under-served segments of the population that are geographically dispersed and therefore couldn't be addressed by existing broadcast and cable structures. Examples might include various language groups that constitute immigrant populations or the gay and lesbian community. Here, original programming is produced and made available for a modest pay-per-view fee.

6)International circulation of media product is facilitated. We can imagine viewer-supported networks emerging for British/Australian comedy or Japanese Anime for example, which will enable these products fair access to the American market. It will be possible to access television without regard to its original point of origin. Again, this depends on some structure that allows us to pay for what we watch at a modest enough scale to make this attractive to the average viewer on a regular basis.

The micropayment structure would seem to offer the best basis for this model, which leads us step by step towards a more diverse media culture that more fully reflects the range of viewer taste and interest. It will create new basis for profits for the entertainment industry while also enabling more popular access to media content. What is needed is a structure which can lower the per unit cost (and thus broaden the potential base of viewership), can be collected quickly and efficiently, and can be distributed to a range of different media producers as opposed to create narrow gateway companies that will once again determine what we can and cannot see based on broadcast models of the mass audience.

Second Life (Round Three) -- 'Nuff Said

By now, you know the drill. Clay Shirkey, Beth Coleman, and I are going around and around about Second Life. Round One Henry Beth Clay

Round Two Henry Beth on Clay Beth on Henry Clay on Henry Clay on Beth

Round Three Henry Beth Clay

For some other smart and thoughtful responses to the debate, check out:

Irving Wladawsky-Berger,

Grant McCracken,

Sam Ford,

Ron Burnett,

Mark Wallace,

Jesse Walker,

Intellagirl.

All of this is going to make much more sense if you've already read the earlier rounds of the conversation.

Mapping the Debate

Clay began his most recent post with the following:

We agree about many of the basic facts, and that most of our variance is about their relative importance. So as to prevent the softness of false consensus from settling over some sharp but interesting disagreements, let me start with a list of assertions I think we could both agree with. If I succeed, we can concentrate on our smaller but more interesting set of differences.

I think you and I agree that:

1. Linden has embraced participatory culture, including, inter alia, providing user tools, using CC licenses, and open sourcing the client.

2. Users of Second Life have created interesting effects by taking advantage of those opportunities.

and also

3. Most people who try Second Life do not like it. As a result, SL is is not going to be a mass movement in any meaningful sense of the term, to use your phrase.

4. Reporters and marketers ought not discuss Second Life using phony numbers.

The core difference between our respective views of the current situation is that you place more emphasis on the first two items on that list, and I on the second two.

Yes, that about sums it up except that for me, there's another issue on the table here: whether purely quantitative measures are adequate to the task of meaningfully evaluating an emerging media experience.

Let's suppose all of Clay's numerical claims were true, then would they negate the cultural importance or likely influence of the cultural experiment we are calling Second Life? I have been trying across my posts to suggest other levels on which Second Life is culturally meaningful and influential other than those which depend entirely on its head count.

Clearly, there is a need for reliable data points about the scale, composition, and levels of engagement witnessed by various online environments. I share Beth's call for further refinements of such tools. I am simply rejecting the idea that this issue can be reduced to a single data point and I am certainly rejecting the idea -- widespread in the business community -- that the only thing that counts is what can be counted.

Relying purely on quantitative data is especially dangerous at a time when things are in flux and when we do not yet have an adequate framework in place to interpret the data that we are collecting. These numbers may answer some of the questions we want to answer but only if we understand how to read them meaningfully.

"Approximately Insane"

Clay writes:

You compare Second Life with the Renaissance and the Age of Reason. This is approximately insane, and your disclaimer that Second Life may not reach this rarefied plateau doesn't do much to make it less insane.

It says something about how vested Clay is about quantitative language that even insanity requires an approximation. (Yes, I know he was joking -- so am I).

So, let me first of all concede that the metaphor in this case has gotten in the way of the point I was trying to make. It would be excessive to draw comparisons between Second Life as a specific platform and something as epoch-changing as the Renaissance. I withdraw the analogy. I don't know if it is insane but it was dumb.

All I was saying is that quantitative measurements would not be adequate to evaluate the importance of the Renaissance. Imagine what a small, small, small percentage of the people living in Europe, let alone living in the world, during that period were in any direct way participating in the events we now call the Renaissance. By any purely numerical standard, the Renaissance involved earlier adapters and adopters of several then emerging technologies -- the most important of which was movable type. Any numerical count of who participated in the Renaissance would be "approximately insane" if it was applied without an understanding of the cultural contexts within which the Renaissance occurred, including things like the class structure and literacy rate of the period, or if it was to use the limited take up of Renaissance ideas and experiences at the time as a means of dismissing their long-term cultural impact.

Clay writes:

Participatory culture is one of the essential movements of our age. It creates many different kinds of artifacts, however, and it is possible to be skeptical about Second Life as an artifact without being skeptical of participatory culture generally. Let me re-write the sentiment you reacted to, to make that distinction clear: Second Life, a piece of software developed by Linden Labs, is unlikely to become widely adopted in the future, because it is not now and has never been widely adopted, measured either in retention of new users or in the number of current return users.

On this point, we do agree, though again, my argument has never rested on whether SL or even multiverses are "widely adopted," only that they are now sites where important experiments and innovations occur and that they are likely to play even more central roles in the not too distant future.

Mulching Kittens?

Clay writes:

Giving a pass to laudatory Second Life stories that use false numbers, simply because they are "keeping alive" an idea you like, risks bootstrapping Second Life's failure to retain users into unwarranted skepticism about peer production generally. More importantly, though, lowering your scrutiny of people using bogus Linden numbers, just because they are on your team, is a bad idea.

Clay misreads what I was saying here. I was not saying that we should ignore distortions of the data just because they come from people who share my position. That would be the worst kind of intellectual dishonesty. I have said it before and I will say it again: Clay does us a service by asking hard questions about the numbers here.

So, suppose for the sake of argument, Clay's critique of the numbers turns out to be essentially correct, then what do we do about it? Clay seems to be adopting a "gotcha" posture, trying to use the data to debunk Second Life, to damage the credibility of Linden Labs, and to dismiss the viability of "virtual worlds" altogether. For Clay, everyone involved is either "a schlemiel or a schuyster" and that his role in all of this is that of the one truly honest man rooting out "corruption." Hmm, from where I sit, that is "approximately insane," assuming that egomaniacal paranoia (the idea that everyone around you is either stupider than you are or simply out to get you) constitutes a form of insanity in Brooklyn.

By contrast, we might use that same data set to try to identify more precisely what factors might be resulting in a dissatisfaction or defection of potential members and offer some advice on how we might improve Second Life, seeing it as a worthy experiment in creating a more participatory cultural community. This is precisely the difference between constructive criticism and criticism intended to inflict damage.

To play upon one of Clay's metaphors, it matters to me that Linden Labs isn't trying to mulch kittens but rather they are trying to figure out how to construct a space whose residents get to design and build their own world, that they have invested a fair amount of effort into community building and educational outreach, that they have reasonably enlightened views about intellectual property and so forth. Given that, I am prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt, assume they want to improve user experience and customer satisfaction, and roll up our sleeves and figure out how to fix the problems you have identified. That's what I meant when I said Second Life was worth fighting for.

Are They Coming or Going?

One of the problems with purely quantitative analysis of cultural phenomenon is that sooner or later, the numbers fail you and you end making a leap of faith. (And this is almost always where the underlying biases and assumptions behind the research emerge.) In Clay's case, he seems to want to move from the data point that there is a low retention rate for SL visitors to a conclusion about why people are leaving. He has a pet theory that he thinks explains why people leave Second Life and remain in World of Warcraft. It is a reasonable hypothesis but his number play gives it the aura of scientific veracity which it hasn't earned. Readers here have already suggested a range of other hypothesis to account for this same data, having to do more with technical difficulties in the specific applications associated with SL than with a rejection of the idea of a multiverse altogether. If, as Clay suggests, Second Life is simply a single product/platform/service, then why would it follow that not liking SL demonstrates that they were not going to like other 3d immersive environments in the future?

What if we turned this around and consider the opposite question: if people are only interested in game worlds, why are they trying out Second Life in the first place? Are they simply confused about what they are getting themselves into or are they seeking something like a multiverse and being frustrated that this particular one doesn't live up to their expectations?

Before I can evaluate whether Clay is right or wrong about why people are leaving Second Life, I would need to know what they were expecting when they got there, what role they hoped it would play in their lives, and in what ways they were disappointed in the gap between the motivating fantasy and whatever they experienced after they got there. To my mind, this is an ethnographic question and not purely a quantitative one.

So, let me invite those who read this blog to post their own answers to the following questions:

If you visited Second Life but chose not to remain involved, what turned you off?

If you visited Second Life and chose to remain actively engaged, what captured your imagination?

In either case, what drew you to Second Life in the first place?

And if you have heard about SL and haven't tried it, is there a reason you haven't been motivated to explore it yet?

(That should cover pretty much all of our bases there.)

Bad for Business?

Both Beth and Clay at various points imply that it would be bad for business -- (or to use Beth's terms, bad for "shopping") if it were demonstrated that SL's population were significantly smaller than the numbers currently being claimed in the most inflated news stories. Maybe but keep in mind that companies are embracing Second Life for a range of reasons, some of them good, some bad, and only some of them rest on the issue of how many members are drawn to Second Life. We might consider some of the other functions:

Many companies are using Second Life as a site of corporate training, allowing their own members to congregate together across multiple geographic locations, to hear a speaker, engage in discussion, or simply get to know each other better. Such activities take advantages of the affordances of 3d worlds to create a kind of shared presence.

Many companies are using their elaborately constructed and beautifully designed worlds as a kind of prestige showcase -- a place they go to show clients and demonstrate their own mastery of the emerging language of geek chic. Indeed, this function might be served just as well if there was something exclusive about Second Life than if it was a mass phenomenon.

Some companies are using Second Life as a site of niche marketing to reach the very kinds of early adapters and adopters who are coming and staying. In that sense, Second Life functions the way PBS or Sunday Morning News Shows function for certain corporate advertisers -- because it reaches a very specific niche of consumers whose tastes and experiences set them off from the general population.

Some companies, as Ilya Vedrashko has noted, use Second Life to test market new products or campaigns, recognizing that they can do so with limited exposure and low risk in Second Life compared to what it would take to launch a full scale national broadcast campaign. In this case, the value of Second Life depends on whether they recognize the specific quality of its population or confuse it for a cross-section of the population at large.

Some companies are using Second Life to encourage employees to break with their normal ways of doing business, to explore an alternative realm which is more fluid and flexible, and thus to encourage thought experiments and to create a climate which supports innovation.

And yes, some of them imagine that Second Life will allow them to reach hard to reach consumers -- the teenaged males who are defecting from television. Frankly, if that's their goal, they would do better trying to target WOW!

Niches Vs. Elites

A reader, Nick, wrote into the comments section:

If, as you say "it has always been the case that the playgrounds of the rich and the powerful take on a cultural significance that far outstrips the realm of our own everyday lives" Second Life represents the historical continuation of something we are seeking to avoid in an era of networks and relative freedom. Let me put that into less conceptual terms: it sounds as if Second Life is being lauded for having rather elitist principals - if you're not a programmer then there is little there for you, bar what other people choose to give or sell. When I first heard about it I imagined Second Life to be rather like the 'Lego' of software - simple tools made available to all that could be used to build whatever users' imaginations were capable of.

The reader's comment mixes together two sets of claims I was trying to make about why SL might matter beyond the population figures:

1. Second Life represents an important testbed for ideas about participatory culture. We have a company here which has adopted a collaborative attitude towards its consumers, empowering them to actively participate in the design of their own world.

2, Second Life is attracting a growing number of powerful institutions (corporate, governmental, educational, nonprofit) who are using it as a site to experiment with how they might adopt a more collaborative and participatory relationship with their consumers/constituents/students/what-have-you.

Given the kinds of people currently using SL, these two claims are certainly related but they are not the same.

Is SL a niche or an elite? Is it a specific demographic, a self-selecting community of those who share a common interest in the experience of building and inhabiting a multiverse, a particular constellation of early adapters and adopters -- i.e. a Niche? Or is it a group defined around the exclusion of other potential participants -- i.e. an elite?

I will continue to ponder this one.

A Betting Man?

Clay begins and ends his post by asking whether I am a betting man. I think he is trying to call me out. Leave it to Clay to find one of the few statements in my argument which would seem to rest on a quantitative claim (never mind that it comes as an aside) and try to push me to quantify it even further. It's a pretty good rhetorical tactic because if I agree to a bet, then I have ceded that in the end, it all does boil down to the numbers and if I refuse the bet, then he can claim that I am unwilling to get more specific about what I am claiming will be the future of virtual worlds.

I have been struggling all week to figure out how to respond - not because I am opposed to betting but because I do not think, as I have said throughout, that the quantitative issues are the most interesting ones to be thinking about vis-à-vis SL and the other multiverses which will follow in its footsteps.

Here's the statement he wants me to put my money behind:

Most of us will find uses for virtual worlds one of these days; most of us will not "live" there nor will we conduct most of our business there.

So, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, it all depends on how you define "us." For starters, most people on the planet have not ever made a telephone call, let alone used a computer, let alone gone on the web, let alone visited an immersive 3d environment. I suppose at the time I made the statement, I was imagining something like most of the people who are currently online regularly.

Then, we would have to specify what we mean by "use." I suppose what I had in mind was something like the following: given how many companies are using SL (and are likely to use other such sites) for corporate training and community building and given how many educational institutions are beginning to experiment with SL (and other such sites) as a form of distance learning, a significant portion of people are apt to have had at least some exposure to these worlds. (Indeed, it would be interesting to know what percentage of people who visit SL and don't return came for a special event of this kind. They were, in effect, tourists rather than settlers.)

As Beth notes, the text based world of e-mail is already being augmented by a range of other forms of audiovisual communications (including Flickr, Skype, YouTube, and Google Maps to cite only a few) which are being adapted to a range of different uses. It is not a big stretch of the imagination to assume that there will be occasions when our communication needs are best served by interfaces which allow participants interacting over distances to have a more embodied experience of telepresence or that there may be times and places when 3d modeling is more effective to communicate an idea or to collaborate in the production of a project than either text or audiovideo. So, I do think these kinds of environments -- whatever we want to call them -- will become more pervasive in our society over time. But we may no more inhabit such worlds than we inhabit Google Maps. We may simply consult or deploy them as needed to serve specific tasks. It may be more of a resource than a lifestyle.

Our current experience of membership or affiliation with a multiverse may reflect the particular needs of early adapters and may or may not be a model which will carry over to subsequent generations of users. We might compare it to the difference between belonging to a discussion group online and using e-mail. Lots of us belong to discussion groups and mailing lists, to be sure, but much of the time we are simply using e-mail to connect to people we know from our face to face interactions in the real world. We use it because it has certain affordances we need. Few of us would self identify as "people who use e-mail."

Let's pause a moment to think about terminology: I share Clay's conclusion that it is not productive to lump together WOW and SL into the same conceptual category. So rather than talking about virtual worlds, let's adopt Stephenson's term, multiverse, to refer to 3d environments which are not games and which facilitate social interactions. I am certainly not unique in using the word in this manner.

In the short run, I think Shirkey is right that games will prove more attractive to more people than multiverses will. Yet, we use play to acquire skills that we later deploy to more serious purposes. I think our play experiences with game worlds may accustom us to navigating through digital space and occupying avatars and interacting socially with people we may never meet face to face and all of these constitute the building blocks necessary to pave the way for broader use of multiverses as tools for social interactions and research collaborations. And in that sense, I think Beth is right that SL may turn out to have been an important early prototype for subsequent forms of social interactions online -- even if the numbers never come together there as its promoters might have hoped.

I am not sure how we are going to be able to quantify that and I have no idea how long it is going to take for this prediction to come true. I simply don't think any of us know enough yet about how these worlds work, about what people are seeking when they visit SL and the other multiverses, about which of these applications will reap rewards and which ones will fail.

So, in that sense, I am not a betting man. I am not willing to reduce this prediction to the kinds of data points that could meaningfully serve as the basis for a bet. Clay argues:

I do not believe the portmanteau category of virtual worlds will reach anything like half of internet users (or even half of broadband users) in any predictable time.

The key word here is predictable and I can't bet Clay because I don't think the rate of growth, given our current body of knowledge, is meaningfully predictable. And for me, that's part of the fun. I don't think there's anything inevitable about technological development. The future of the web is what we collectively make of it.

But if I were to make a prediction now, based on current conditions, I would bet that some significant portion of the people who are currently using the web will have used some form of 3d environment for purposes other than playing games within the next decade.

In any case, I don't really think Clay needs me to buy him dinner. And I'm eating pretty well myself these days, thank you. So, instead, let me suggest that in the short run, we invest some of the energy and resources that we are currently deploying to talk about virtual real estate to help those who lack a roof over their heads in the real world. I am happy to send a check for the price of a meal in a decent Boston restaurant to the homeless shelter of Clay's choice in Brooklyn.

In Defense of Crud

"Ninety percent of everything is crud" -- Theodore Sturgeon

I have found myself thinking a lot lately about the issue of quality as it relates to the emergence of participatory culture. Several things have raised the issue in my mind:

The first was reading a very interesting essay written by Cathy Young, a regular columnist for Reason magazine, debating the merits of fan fiction. In fact, Young outs herself as someone who has written and published fan fiction set in the universe of Xena: Warrior Princess. She is in turn responding to a diatribe against fan fiction by fantasy writer Robin Hobbs. She writes:

Hobb's indictment made the standard charges against fan fiction, from intellectual theft to intellectual laziness. Deriding the idea of fanfic as good training for writers, Hobb wrote, "Fan fiction allows the writer to pretend to be creating a story, while using someone else's world, characters, and plot....The first step to becoming a writer is to have your own idea. Not to take someone else's idea, put a dent in it, and claim it as your own."

Young works through some of the standard defenses of fan fiction (I won't go into all of them here, since I've delivered most of them in the past myself and am a little tired of the arguments.) But she ends with the following:

So is the growth of Internet-based fan fiction a cultural development to be wholeheartedly applauded? Not quite. The good news about the Internet is that, in a world without gatekeepers, anyone can get published. The bad news, of course, is the same. Much fanfic is hosted on sites such as fanfiction.net, where authors can get their work online in minutes--which means that professional-quality stories coexist with barely literate fluff, and reader reviews will sometimes congratulate an author on good grammar and spelling. Even sites that prescreen fanfic and encourage authors to use beta readers and a spell checker tend to be quite lax with quality control, and only a few fan fiction archives are genuinely selective.

For the more sophisticated fanfic lovers, the high crap-to-quality ratio can mean a frustrating search for readable stories. The real problem, though, is that less experienced readers may develop seriously skewed standards of what constitutes a readable story. It is frankly disturbing to encounter teenagers and young adults whose recreational reading is limited to fanfic based on their favorite shows, and there have been moments when I have felt like telling some of my own readers to put down the fanfic and pick up a book. It is even more troubling, as far as educational experiences go, that a teenager can wantonly butcher the English language at fanfiction.net and get complimented on a "well-written story."

Golubchik thinks that such concerns are exaggerated. "If anything," she says, "I think that fanfic teaches kids to be more discerning. The quality stuff does tend to percolate to the top; it gets recommended and popularized." Indeed, while the worst of fan fiction can make a Harlequin romance look like Charlotte Bronte, the popular stories are at least no worse in quality--and sometimes far better--than, say, The Da Vinci Code.

The mainstreaming of fan fiction is likely to raise standards further, bringing more educated people into the arena and perhaps encouraging some voluntary gatekeeping, such as contests with input from professional writers or editors...

Perhaps, as with other cultural products often dismissed as intellectual junk food, the answer to bad fanfic is simply better fanfic.

The second was reading a debate between Andrew Keen, the author of a forthcoming book, The Cult of the Amateur (which I am sure to be saying more about down the line) and Chris Anderson, the promoter of the concept of the "Long Tail."

Here's some of what Keen had to say:

Much of the euphoria and optimism about this latest wave of technology is suggesting that we, through these new technologies, are creating better culture. Better movies and music, for instance.

I am not convinced of that. Perhaps I am a reactionary here, defending an anachronistic culture, but my sense is that this latest, democratized culture, this user-generated content, is actually undermining many of our most valuable institutions, including movie studios, music labels, newspapers and publishing....I still think that the wisdom that I value -- the scarcity, to put it in economic terms -- is not in the crowd, but in people with talent and experience, whether they exist in political life, in economic life or cultural life. Rather than fetishizing this idealized crowd -- it seems tremendously abstract -- one can pick up so many examples from history where the crowd has not behaved in a very wise or gentlemanly way. I would rather focus on the value of expertise and the wisdom of people who are trained.

Keen's overtly and unapologetically elitist comments, frankly, get under my skin -- but that's not necessarily a bad thing if it forces those of us who believe in participatory culture to question and defend our own assumptions at a moment when the world seems to be moving more decisively in our directions. So, I find myself thinking a bit more about the vexing issue of quality. So let me offer a range of different responses to the issue:

1.We should not reduce the value of participatory culture to its products rather than its process. Consider, for a moment, all of the arts and creative writing classes being offered at schools around the world. Consider, for example, all of the school children being taught to produce pots. We don't do this because we anticipate that very many of them are going to grow up to be professional potters. In fact, most of them are going to produce pots that look like lopsided lumps of clay only a mother could love (though it does say something about how we value culture that many of them do get cherished for decades). We do so because we see a value in the process of creating something, of learning to work with clay as a material, or what have you. There is a value in creating, in other words, quite apart from the value attached to what we create. And from that perspective, the expansion of who gets to create and share what they create with others is important even if none of us produces anything beyond the literary equivalent of a lopsided lump of clay that will be cherished by the intended recipient (whether Mom or the fan community) and nobody else.

2. All forms of art require a place where beginning artists can be bad, learn from their mistakes, and get better. A world of totally professionalized expression masks the apprenticeship process all artists need to undergo if they are going to achieve their full potential. A world where amateur artists can share their work is a world where learning can take place. If the only films you see are multimillion dollar productions by Steven Spielberg, then most of us will assume that we have nothing meaningful to contribute to the culture and give up. If we see films with a range of quality, including some that are, in Sturgeon's terms, "crud," then it becomes possible to imagine ourselves as potentially becoming artists. Bad art inspires more new artists than good art does for this reason: I can do better than that!

3. A world where there is a lot of bad art in circulation lowers the risks of experimentation and innovation. In such a world, one doesn't have to worry about hitting the marks or even making a fool out of oneself. One can take risks, try challenging things, push in new directions because the cost of failure is relatively low. That is why a participatory culture is potentially so generative. Right now, innovation occurs most often at the grassroots level and only subsequently gets amplified by mass media. Professional media is afraid to take risks.

4. Bad art inspires responses which push the culture to improve upon it over time. I have argued elsewhere that fandom is inspired by a mixture of fascination and frustration. If the show didn't fascinate us, we would not keep returning to it. If it fully satisfied us, we would not feel compelled to remake it. Many of the shows that have inspired the most fan fiction are not the best shows but rather they are shows with real potential -- the literary equivalent of the "fixer-upper" that real estate agents always talk about. Over time, bad art may become an irritant, like sand in the oyster, which becomes a pearl when it gets worked over by many different imaginations. Good art may simply close off conversations.

5. Good and Bad, as artistic standards, are context specific. Good for what purposes? Good by what standards? Good for what audiences? In some ways, one can argue that professionally published fiction about popular television shows is superior to at least most fan fiction -- in terms of a certain professional polish in the writing style, in terms of its copy editing, in terms of perhaps its construction of plots. But it is not going to be as good as fan fiction on other levels -- in terms of its insight into the characters and their relationship, in terms of its match with the shared fantasies of the fan community, in terms of its freedom to push beyond certain constraints of the genre.

6. Standards of good and bad are hard to define when the forms of expression being discussed are new and still evolving. This would apply to many of the forms of participatory culture which are growing up around digital media. The forms are too new to have well established standards or fixed cannons.

7. This is not a zero-sum game. It is not clear that the growth of participatory culture does, in fact, damage to professional media making. One could argue that so far most popular work by amateur media makers has been reactive to stories, characters, and ideas generated by mass culture. The two may exist in dialogue with each other. This is certainly true of the kinds of fan culture that Cathy Young is discussing.

We should be less concerned with the presence of "bad art" in participatory culture than with the need to develop mechanisms for feedback which allow artists to learn and grow, the need to develop aesthetic criteria which allow us to meaningful evaluate new and emerging forms of expression or which reflect the particular needs of specific contexts of cultural production, and the need to develop mechanisms which help each consumer to locate forms of cultural expression which they regard to be good.

All of this brings us back to Sturgeon's Revelation: If 90 percent of everything is crud, then we are playing the law of averages. If you increase the number of people producing culture, you increase the amount of good art even if you don't increase the percentage of good art to bad. This is debatable, I suppose, but what is not debatable is that you also increase the diversity of the culture. Many many groups of people have felt excluded by a system of professionalized art and storytelling that might have vital contributions to make to our culture. To embrace what they produce doesn't require us to "lower" our standards but it may require us to broaden them to appreciate new forms of expression that do not fit comfortably within existing aesthetic categories.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Culture of Citizenship: A Conversation With Zephyr Teachout

On February 24th, MIT Comparative Media Studies will host a conference in collaboration with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. The one-day event will be held at MIT, and is entitled "Beyond Broadcast: From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy." It will bring together industry experts, academic leaders, public media professionals, and political activists for panel discussions and focused working groups. Beyond Broadcast 2007 builds on the overwhelming success of last year's sold-out event, "Beyond Broadcast 2006: Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture" held at Harvard Law School. Over 350 people took part in-person and online through the virtual world Second Life. Attendees used several unique online tools, including a web-based "question tool" to probe panelists, a collaborative wiki, live blogging, flickr photo sharing, del.icio.us tagging, and YouTube video production. These tools enabled the conference to practice what it preached, turning the event into a two-way participatory interaction in contrast with many conferences. The tools have been expanded upon this year, already spurring an active conversation on

the conference web site, weeks before the event.

I will give the Keynote Address, followed by panel discussions from media makers and policy commentators. Details of these panels are being updated on the conference web site

In the second-half of the day, the conference turns its focus to working groups that attendees will help organize. Building on themes coming from the plenary sessions, participants will target specific issues or questions and join efforts with the diverse crowd of others. In the past, these groups have been facilitated by thought leaders in technology, policy, and academia. Many attendees last year expressed their appreciation for this hybrid conference approach in

which they had a chance to "do something before heading home."

There will also be an evening reception, called "Demos and Drinks," showcasing groups that are doing exciting work related to conference themes.

Registration is only $50 (before February 9), and includes lunch and the evening reception. There is also a special 50% discount for students. The conference follows the 2007 Public Media Conference taking place in Boston February 20-23.

As we lead into the conference, I am running a series of features on the blog which foreground the relationship between participatory culture and participatory democracy. In today's post, I offer an interview with another of the conference's speakers, Zephyr Teachout. The Director of Internet Organizing for Howard Dean's presidential campaign, Teachout has emerged as a leading thinker about the role of new media in fostering what she describes here as a "culture of citizenship." After the presidential campaign ended, she worked at America Coming Together and Current TV and was a fellow at the Berkman Center. In 2006, Teachout became the national director of the Sunlight Foundation as the group's national director. According to Wikipedia, "The Sunlight Foundation was founded in January 2006 with the goal of using the revolutionary power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy. At the core of all of the Foundation's work is a focus on the power of technology and the Internet to transform the relationship between citizen's and their government."

In the conversation that follows, Teachout shares her perspective on politics and popular culture, Second Life and Wikipedia, all focused on helping us to better understand what elements in the new media landscape might be deployed to intensify civic engagement and insure a more transparent government.

Let's start with the core conference theme. Many media reformers have attacked the "bread and circus" aspects of popular culture as distracting voters from serious aspects of politics. Yet, this conference's theme, "From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy" invites us to imagine a different relationship between popular culture and grassroots politics. What do you see as the relationship between the two?

Both of these seem right to me -- the possibility and the threat. In the last four years, I've met thousands of people whose political creativity, public thinking, and public activity has vastly increased directly because of the internet. I've met people who I think you can fairly say have switched from never thinking of being a citizen as one of their central roles, to thinking of citizenship as being an integral part of their identity, the way being a mother or employee or sister or cousin is part of an identity. The internet has enabled that switch -- for some, its been a gradual shift, from reading arguments on blogs to contributing to arguments on blogs to joining groups making political statements to holding community fora. For others, its been an instant jump -- a Meetup-enabled political meeting has led to a leadership role. For still others (and here I'm thinking mostly of geeks and internet artists), a habit of creativity and responsibility in one arena has led to taking the same attitude in a political arena.

There are millions who have participated in political life because of the internet, first by ventriloquism (an email along the lines of "hey, I thought this political article was interesting") then by speaking (an email along the lines of "hey, I thought this article is interesting because x, but they got it wrong because...") who then become more comfortable in their other communications, on and offline, in speaking about political issues.

And then there are those extraordinary people, like those we've seen at the Sunlight Foundation, who take citizenship to a whole new level. Simply by being asked, "help us investigate this question about earmarks," a handful of people not only responded to that question but have becomes intrepid, creative citizen watchdogs, digging up information about our politics and sharing it broadly, all on their own time.

There are still more who have participated in a one-dimensional way, the way one "participates" in the coca cola industry by drinking coke (and an increasing greed on the part of candidates to increase this kind of participation -- big lists, assigned tasks), where neither personal responsibility nor creativity are engaged. But even this flat kind of participation leads a handful to taking the role of citizen seriously.

The internet breaks down some barriers to creativity, to public expression, to information, to public conversation, and to collective action.

That said, our human hunger for humor, connection, games, entertainment, gossip, is nearly limitless, and when the supply is nearly limitless it is hard to avoid. When I go to the airport, I can't tear my eyes away from celebrity gossip magazines, even though there is no barrier to my reading the Economist -- when I'm online, the celebrity gossip, the games, and the political gossip constantly beckon. There is now no barrier to instant dopamine hits from playing games, from reading gossip, from emailing and instant messaging friends. I can't generalize from my experience, but I know I'm not completely alone when I say that the internet has diminished many of my other experiences -- I cook less, read fewer books, plan fewer parties, and wander the streets aimlessly less frequently because I can always trust in some small comfort online when I would have to risk much more by taking on the streets. As applied to politics, its an open question -- will we, as a culture, choose the limitless entertainment because its there, and will our civic culture continue to decline (with a small percentage the exception?). Or will the new possibilities lead to a new culture of citizenship?

I happen to think the culture of citizenship is possible, but it will take real vigilance, care, cultivation, and a collective choice to make it a priority. It may also take some serious thinking about whether we want something like the fairness doctrine for the internet -- whether, looking at ourselves in the mirror, we decide we want some structural supports for our civic selves -- it will take a choice. The internet -- no matter all the joyful possibilities of political engagement it enables -- will not make us citizens, we will have to do that ourselves.

You were The Director of Internet Organizing for the Howard Dean campaign in 2004. Given those experiences, what advice would you offer the current crop of Democratic candidates about the potential use of new media in the forthcoming campaign? Do you have any predictions about which campaigns seem to best understand this current era of web 2.0?

I am far more interested in who will make the best President than in who uses the best tools, and a clumsy use of email, youtube, and blogs wouldn't dissuade me from supporting a candidate who I largely support. The only way they really relate is that part of any support for me is necessarily a commitment to citizenship and to transparent government.

If you were advising a candidate in this election cycle, would you recommend that they adopt an avatar and go into Second Life?

Yes, I would have a full time staffer, with three interns at least, who were

responsible for gaming outreach.

For the past 40 years or so, there have been basically three ways a citizen can reliably interact with a Presidential candidate:

1) She can join a group (like a labor union) and engage in that group's decision-making, which is then communicated to the candidate through an intermediary.

2) She can watch the candidate on TV in a debate, on a news story, or in an ad

3) She can live in New Hampshire or be lucky.

Other forms of interaction were possible, but there were not that many, and they were not scalable. Suddenly there is Second Life, listservs, email, games that a candidate can play with and against others, a dizzy mess of kinds of interactions that are possible. The only real limitations on these new kinds of interactions are scale, creativity, and political will.

I once saw an interesting talk by a Microsoft sociologist, in which he talked about the kinds of characters that show up in list-servs. Its easy to be inauthentic in one forum, one time or a few times, he said, but over time, its pretty clear who isn't acting like a human - there are certain personality types we all recognize (including the trolls) and those that don't quite seem right we shy away from, picking up subtle signals that suggest that "this person is sort of lying." This is finally a positive conclusion for internet communities - it sugests that guerrilla marketers may be able to strike once, but astroturf will reveal itself in the end. Language, used unrelentingly over weeks and months, will out the shill.

This thesis is also interesting when reflecting on the efforts candidates make to engage people in completely new forms of interaction - a chat room, say, or in Second Life. While candidates won't necessarily lie, inasmuch as they do not sound like humans sound and bring prefabricated phrases, or phrases of others, it can undermine their credibility - and certainly undermine their interest. (The cookie cutter emails that so many campaigns now send have growing lists but idle members, who do not believe that the emails carry any authentic connection to them.) Likewise, even if thousands of people show up to watch candidate y "chat" or "blog", the interest will only remain so long as there is some reason to think they are getting something more than a press release or scripted notes. And the fashionable time-delayed "chat" in which questions are submitted before hand is not a new form - is similar to having a guest on talk radio, except leaves the candidate more control.

But back to your question -- a real time chat, or a conversation in Second Life, is a new form. That, as it develops, will be fascinating for politicians, who have so much more on the line in every word than the reporters who regularly do this. Would I recommend it? Yes. Presidential

candidates should be outreaching in gaming forums, including game-of-life forums, actively. But it will take some innovation and looseness to work well.

We had some very fruitful real time chats during the Dean campaign, when they were used for policy experts from the staff to answer basic policy questions by chatters. It was a narrow enough context that policy experts were quite forthcoming, and the discussions were fruitful from both sides - the chats we had with Dean involved were more chaotic and less likely to be fruitful. In both cases, much of the interesting conversations that I had were the side-chats, carried on in groups of two and three who pinged me, seeing the name of a staffer. In Second Life, with new dimensions added (and the possibility for visual demonstrations), I can imagine these lecture-like moments being even more valuable - a candidate could have a forum on net neutrality, for example, in which he presents not only himself but his policy experts, creating a new kind of conversation, but one more likely to inform a citizen both about the issues and about the way in which a candidate makes decisions.

Second Life, chat rooms, and social networking tools makes it easier to both create groups and be creative -- so instead of having to speak to a candidate through a large community years in the making, 30,000 people with shared interests can get together and ask for a town-hall meeting from each of the candidates, and invite tough questioners to attend.

The forms and format of the meetings can go beyond the classic candidate forum, because of the low cost of bringing people together - and it may be that in these liminal forms we learn more than we thought possible, even if the candidate does not step on his tongue.

What lessons do you think political leaders should take from the Wikipedia movement?

I think there are two key lessons:

1) Small groups of people who feel responsible are highly competent to manage difficult and boring and very important tasks. I think this is one of the most under-told stories, especially in politics -- politicians are eager for mass numbers, big email lists, big readerships, big donations, and thousands of people door-knocking for them. This is all fine -- but to truly be a democrat (small d) they must also believe that citizens are competent at decision-making and governing, and express that belief through their campaign structures and their governing structures. Any politician you ask will gush about the possibility of the internet to enable citizens to give her good ideas, but most are wary of actually distributing roles, not tasks, to groups of people that are not on the payroll. Wikipedia should help change that story -- self-governance is possible.

2) Millions of people want to engage as creative, intelligent adults in political life. Wikipedia, for all its neutral point of view, is a profoundly political project, and evidences, along with hundreds of other examples, the hunger of people to be meaningful contributors to political society.

What connection do you see between the ideals of citizen journalism and the kinds of voter participation and government reform efforts being promoted by the Sunlight Foundation?

Sunlight Foundation is committed to using technology to strengthen the relationship between citizens and Congress. Our grants support people who are making amazing transparency tools, and other parts of our work is more explicitly political, lobbying (with facebook groups and an open, distributed attititude) for Congress to open up its processes and join the 21st century. We beleive that a transparent budgetary process, once impossible, is now possible because of the internet, and the more citizens engage in that process, the closer we are to achieving ideals of self-governance.

I don't personally have an ideal of citizen journalism, but an ideal of citizenship -- which is to say that people actually take responsibility for their government. They can discharge that responsibility in infinite ways -- much as one can discharge the responsibility of motherhood or owning a pet in infinite ways. But we all know the difference between someone who owns a pet and takes responsibility for it, and one who does not -- what I seek is a culture in which most of us take responsibility. One of those ways is to research and write and mashup and make videos and generally engage others in Congress, and we are working to enable those (a quickly growing community) that are interested in this. There are some amazing people who work with Congresspedia and our Senior Researcher, Bill Allison, doing the hard investigative work it takes to actually understand how Congress works, and they are doing all of us an extraordinary service.

Can you give us a preview of your remarks at the Beyond Broadcasting conference?

Nope! Because I don't know what they are yet...

More Second Thoughts on Second Life

A week ago, Clay Shirkey, Beth Coleman, and I launched a three-way conversation across our blogs which was designed to spark a greater public conversation about the value of Second Life. We have been extremely pleased by the range of other responses to our posts which have cropped up on other blogs. By agreement, we are each returning today to respond to each other's posts and offer some concluding thoughts on the issues which have emerged through the conversations so far. Beth's post can be found here. Clay's post can be found here.

As some readers have noted, the disagreements here may be more apparent than real. Clay, Beth and I agree that Second Life is probably being over hyped if our criteria of significance is defined statistically but that it may still be an important site of cultural innovation and deeply meaningful to the people who spend their time there if we adopt more qualitative measures.

The "debate", if you can call it that, circles around competing criteria by which we might measure the importance of Second Life. Shirkey's original post sparked such heated response in part because it seemed to be pushing statistical and commercial criteria forward at the expense of other ways of evaluating the importance of what is going on there.

Shirkey says as much:

Concerning popularity, I predict that Second Life will remain a niche application, which is to say an application that will be of considerable interest to a small percentage of the people who try it. Such niches can be profitable (an argument I made in the Meganiche article), but they won't, by definition, appeal to a broad cross-section of users.

Beth believes that Second Life may well push well beyond niche status by providing a compelling model for how we might live in a virtual world that captures the public imagination and paves the way for subsequent developments in the design and deployment of virtual worlds. Second Life, she suggests, represents one step further along a century long evolution of human communications capacity:

What virtual worlds promise is an augmentation of human-to-human communication. We seem to yearn for synchronous connectivity and virtual worlds promise to deliver exactly that. Looking at the 150-year build out of telecommunications capabilities, what we find with many of the current platforms from text message to instant messaging to virtual worlds are designs for simultaneous connectivity. Putting a human face to things is a lot of what this is about, even if that human face is a codebot. These platforms are not simply to facilitate shopping but to develop further (or perhaps more massively) the ways in which virtual and "portable" spaces can be inhabited as a home.

Shirkey, by contrast, believes that "virtual worlds" is not a meaningful category:

Put another way, I believe that the group of things lumped together as virtual worlds have such variable implementations and user adoption rates that they are not well described as a single conceptual group...Pointcast's management claimed that email, the Web, and Pointcast all were about delivering content, and that the future looked bright for content delivery platforms. And indeed it did, except for Pointcast. The successes of email and of the Web were better explained by their particular utilities than by their membership in a broad class of "content delivery." Pointcast tried to shift attention from those particularities to a generic label in order to create a club in which it would automatically be included.

I believe a similar thing happens whenever Second Life is lumped with Everquest, World of Warcraft, et al., into a category called virtual worlds. If we accept the validity of this category, then multi-player games provide an existence proof of millions-strong virtual worlds, and the only remaining question is simply when we arrive at wider adoption of more general-purpose versions

Ironically, of course, many bloggers have responded to Shirkey by arguing that he is comparing apples and oranges by lumping Second Life together with these other gaming platforms. Second Life, they argue, is not a game. And in doing so, they are making his point for him: Second Life, he argues, can not be meaningfully lumped in with these other forms of virtual worlds because it is not a game and read on its own terms, it does not demonstrate there is a robust or widespread public demand for this kind of online experience. Again, though, this is to revert back to a set of statistical criteria for evaluating the cultural significance of Second Life.

Let me repeat for the third time the statement which may best sum up my own position: "Second Life isn't interesting to me because of how many people go there; it's interesting because of what they do when they get there."

Here, we can imagine a range of other ways of evaluating the importance of what happens in Second Life:

1. on the basis of which groups or institutions are conducting business there. As I have suggested, Second Life embodies a mixed media ecology in which business, government, educational, civic, nonprofit, and amateur media makers co-exist, each using Second Life as a test bed for innovation. It has always been the case that the playgrounds of the rich and the powerful take on a cultural significance that far outstrips the realm of our own everyday lives.

2. on the basis of the quality of civic engagement which emerges there. In a forthcoming book, Peter Ludlow, the editor of the Second Life Herald and the former editor of the Alphaville Herald (based in The Sims Online), has described what has happened as players move from one "virtual world" to another. Ludlow argues that there are a number of people who were "griefers" in The Sims Online who have begun to make meaningful contributions to the community on Second Life. His implications is that there is something in the mechanisms through which community life is conducted in Second Life which fosters a greater sense of civic engagement and personal responsibility -- in part perhaps because people are constructing their own reality and making their own rules there. (By the way, watch for an interview with Ludlow about Second Life on my blog later this week).

3. On the basis of the specific kinds of outcomes which emerge from our social experimentation in Second Life. We may need to wait longer to evaluate impact on this level but Second Life will matter if it teaches us new things about what it is like to live in a virtual environment or if, for that matter, we take innovations and insights from Second Life back with us to reshape our real world institutions and practices.

4. On the basis of the ways that Second Life incites the public imagination and thus becomes part of the general cultural understanding of what it might mean to inhabit a virtual world. In that sense, Second Life might occupy a space closer to Snow Crash or Diamond Age -- that is, as a fragment of the popular imagination rather than as a real space. In a literal sense, if Second Life didn't exist, we would have to invent it because it plays such a vital role in contemporary discussions of participatory culture, user-generated content, and online worlds. One could argue, in fact, that the public imagination of virtual reality is so far in advance of the current state of the technology that we may never have the patience to actually take the baby steps needed to get from where we are to where as a cultural we want to be. There's a danger that the public imagination of Second Life is so much more vivid than the reality that this contributes to the phenomenon of people trying it out and abandoning it.

Perhaps we can identify many more ways that Second Life might matter culturally without necessarily mattering statistically.

As we look more closely at Shirkey's arguments, he seems to hold onto a very specific set of criteria by which we might evaluate the quality of experience visitors have in Second Life -- criteria which start from the assumption that Second Life is designed to be a "simulacra" of reality, that it is judged according to its fidelity to the real world. Consider this passage from Shirkey's post

Games are not just special, they are special in a way that relieves designers of the pursuit of maximal realism. There is still a premium on good design and playability, but the magic circle, acceptance of arbitrary difficulties, and goal-directed visual filtering give designers ways to contextualize or bury at least some platform limitations. These are not options available to designers of non-game environments; asking users to accept such worlds as even passable simulacra subjects those environments to withering scrutiny.

All of this makes sense if you assume the goal of Second Life is "maximal realism." In my last post, I argued for a different understanding of what it might mean to have a Second Life -- based on the classic notion of carnival. By this criteria, Second Life is a place we go to escape the constraints on our everyday life, to explore new possibilities through our imagination which would be hard to realize in the realm of our First Lives. It doesn't mean everything goes: in fact, much of the literature on carnival implies that it re-enforced existing rules and norms precisely by inviting people to imagine what would happen if they were overturn.

Second Life can be immersive without in any way convincing us that it is a thorough model of the real world. After all, Second Life is a place where people routinely embrace identities -- say, a panda in a ninja costume -- which would have no basis in the realm of our real world experience, where people may casually swap avatars as they move from one space to another, where they may just as readily copy the space ship from Firefly as duplicate the architecture of Tokyo. Hell, it's a world where there are giant flying penises!

None of this has anything to do with "maximal reality" and everything to do with the "consensual fantasy" William Gibson saw as the defining characteristic of cyberspace. I am certain there are people and institutions that strive relentlessly for "maximal realism" but that's only one potential goal people might embrace as they enter this realm. Second Life is what we as participants make of it.

Shirkey himself demonstrates that games, because of their structures, may create immersiveness without achieving anything near "maximal realism" or even "passable simulacras." Who is to say that Second Life may not be generating altogether different mechanisms for achieving immersiveness -- having to do with our own shared participation in the design of the world -- without depending on perfectly mimicking the realm of our everyday experience? The problem is that if the "immersiveness" of Second Life is a product of our own participation then it may not be immediately communicated to the casual visitor who doesn't contribute directly to the production of this consensual fantasy but simply goes there expecting to consume it much as they consume an amusement park or a multiplayer game. This would surely account for the difference in how casual visitors and immersed participants experience the quality of experience created within this world.

The Beatles Win the IAP Games Competition

A few weeks ago, I shared with readers of this blog some of the thinking behind our annual workshop on translating traditional media content into interactive entertainment experiences. This is a workshop we have done for the past seven years in collaboration with Sande Scordes from Sony Imageworks. Students with different skills and backgrounds are put onto teams together and asked to select an existing media property that they think would form the basis for a compelling game experience. In the course of the week, these teams think through issues of narrative structure, character development, graphic presentation, interactivity, audio design, market potentials, and business models to come up with a 20 minute "pitch" for how and why they think such a game might succeed. The students worked long, long, long hours trying to pull together their presentations and on Friday, they gave their pitches and got feedback from our panel of judges (which combine industry and academic expertise). Every year, we get blown away by the quality of the presentations and this year was no exception.

The winning team this year, led by CMS graduate student Neal Grigsby and including Cabell Gathman, Ben Decker, Sarah Sperry and Laura Boylan, imagined a unique partnership between Apple Music (which owns the rights to the Beatles's songs and likenesses) and the Nintendo Wii (which offers an exciting platform for a new kind of games/music experience). The presentation opened with a montage of clips designed to display the unique sense of humor and comradary that one associates with the classic Beatles movies, the game like potential of some of the sequences from Help and A Hard Day's Night, and the ways that the Beatles themselves had experimented with the construction of animated avatars through the Yellow Submarine and other projects. Their high concept -- "Grand Theft Auto meets the Fab Four" -- a "sandbox" game experience which allows players to take on the role of the Beatle of their choice. As they explained, people have strong feelings about which Beatle they want to be and might not take kindly to starting out the game as Ringo and working their way "up" to John or Paul. They might also have strong feelings about which period of the Beatles' lives they wanted to inhabit or preferences about which of the many imaginative realms introduced through their songs they might want to visit first.

The Wii would allow novel play mechanics which might range from trying to "net" the Blue Meanies or deliver flowers to "all of the lonely people" to performing as a band -- they even imagined a level which might be called "Sitar Hero" which reflects a particular memorable moment in the group's development. Periodically, the player might be besieged by mobs of screaming fans that rip off their clothes and delay their movement through the levels. As they successfully complete a level, they would get to perform another hit song from the group's repertoire and they might be able to enter a more surreal, psychedelic realm such as the Octopus's Garden or Lucy in the Sky with Gardens. Each level starts with a muted palette designed to mimic the black and white of their classic films but as the Beatles master the challenges and spread love through their music, they color our world.

The group's witty presentation was peppered with a range of compelling slogans -- "All YOU need is Love. Wii provide the rest" or "Let it Wii." They even were able to offer some convincing arguments that this project might not be as far fetched as it might seem, given Apple's recent venture in allowing Cirque du Soleil to repurpose and remix classic Beatles cuts for their new performance piece.

And if anyone wondered what the Fab Four would look like as game characters, they ended with a series of Beatles Mii (see above) that drew their inspiration from their previous embodiments in animation.

Another team, headed by CMS graduate student Orit Kuritsky, tackled the challenge of converting the classic television series, The Twilight Zone, into a new kind of psychologically inflected Survival Horror title, partnering with Buena Vista Games. Disney has made a good deal of money off of the Twilight Zone attraction at their various amusement parks worldwide, while the rights to the Rod Sterling series belong to CBS. The game would include the figure of the narrator, modeled in Sterling's likeness, who provides unreliable and sometimes wickedly witty guidance to the player by stepping outside the action and providing comments on his/her fate. The game tried to capture the film noir look and feel of the classic series while taking advantage of the potential of digital media to create distorting and disorienting representations of architectural space. Like the classic series, which drew heavily on classic short stories and original works by top flight genre writers, the episodic content of the game would be developed by contemporary masters of fantasy, suspense, horror, and science fiction, including Michael Resnick and Carol Emshwiller, while music would be provided by Masami Ueda, the composer behind the Resident Evil and Okami games.

The doors (famous from the opening credits) would provide portals into different game worlds where situations would mix elements familiar from the original series with new elements that reflect the extension of Sterling's social commentary into such contemporary issues as cloning or terrorism. Many elements of the world will be familiar to those who are fans of the series: one can rejuvenate by kicking a can, for example, or one might look outside the window and see a monster on the wing of your airplane, suggesting the creator's affection towards the original, yet new generations of gamers will anticipate twists and surprises around every corner and Disney would expect tie-ins to its ride.

Another team, headed by CMS undergraduate students Chris Casiano and Kenny Peng, asked us to imagine what would happen to the Harry franchise once J. K. Rowling had published the last book in the series. Rowling has hinted that she might not be opposed to further fleshing out the world around Hogwarts even if she doesn't plan to write any more stories about Harry himself and has expressed some disappointment in the quality of the Electronic Arts games based on the films. So, what if they could get J.K. herself to help flesh out the back-story of James Potter and the Marauder's Map -- that is, the story of Harry's father and his classmates. As they noted, the Marauders have been central figures in the fan fiction which has grown up around the Potterverse and the books have provided just enough information to interest even more casual readers in their adventures. In that regard, Harry Potter would not be the first fictional world to use games to broaden the scope of its narrative: they pointed to the success of the Knights of the Old Republic titles in the Star Wars franchise.

Like the Beatle's team, they were drawn to the Wii as a platform which could allow for an immersive player interaction and they offered a spectacular and playful demonstration of how the controller might support the casting of spells, wizard battles, and quiddich matches. They envisioned a cooperative multiplayer game similar in style to the Zelda Twilight Princess game that is already offered for the Wii but based on elements from the Potter books and associated materials (such as the Fantastic Beasts book which Rowling did as a side project). While we all felt fans would have competing ideas at this point about the story of Harry's father and mother, we agreed that Rowling was probably the only person who could flesh out those plot elements in a game and have it maintain a high level of credibility with fans. They imagined if the game was successful it could be the springboard for further sequels which took the Potter family into its fateful confrontation with Voldemort and his legions.

The fourth team, led by CMS graduate student Andres Lombana, proposed a heist game set in a virtual Las Vegas and modeled after the Ocean's 11 movie franchise. They pitched Ubisoft on what they envisioned as a "thinking man's multiplayer game" which built on lessons learned from the Splinter Cell titles about how to create a breaking and entering play mechanic and which might redeploy some of the assets developed for the company's recent Rainbow Six Las Vegas title. Players could be either the thieves trying to rob a major casino or the guards assigned to prevent the robbery from taking place. Guards might have capacities such as the ability to use trained dogs to sniff out identifying residue or lie detectors to determine what statements are false. The movie already provided a range of different character types, each of whom offered their own skills and introduced new play mechanics into the series: the pickpocket, the card shark, the acrobat, the pyrotechnic, the weapons expert, the hacker, and so forth. The thieves have to keep an eye on their suspicion meter let it tip off the guards prematurely; they might be able to diminish suspicion through the use of disguises or by spending more time at the gaming tables (involved in various minigames). The game would preserve the smooth style and bantering dialogue of the original franchise, hopefully drawing in George Clooney and the other members of his brat pack to provide original voice acting for the title. Barring that, they envisioned a lower cost alternative where Julia Roberts led a team of original female characters who were trying to beat the boys at their own game. (Robert is noted to be a hardcore Halo fan, according to some interviews, so the speculation is that she might like to be the protagonist of a game series.)