A Response to Ian Bogost (Part One)

Ian Bogost wins the award for being first to market with a thorough, thoughtful critique of my new book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. The review is worth reading in its entirity because it really does set a high bar for debate and discussion around this book. Bogost does all of us a great service in taking on this task: the review is helpful to me in identifying some of the battlegrounds that are apt to emerge around this book. As I wrote to him, there are some points of real disagreement here, some points where we place different emphasis, and some points where we agree more than his summary of the book suggests. Some of his criticisms made me wince; some left me scratching my head. I wish I had read some of them before the book went to press.

It seems the most constructive thing one can do at this point is to respond to some of his questions publically in the hopes of getting a larger conversation going around the issues he raises. Because I wanted to respond fully to a range of interesting questions Bogost raised, I am going to be running my response over my next three posts.

I Can't Belive It's Margarine!

Bogost's review begins promisingly enough from my perspective with the following lines:

The book is a short, smart, buttery read on a hot topic, and it is sure to draw both popular and academic interest.

I cite this passage here -- other than my amusement over the buttery metaphor -- just to show that he really does seem to like the book. (Bless you, Ian, for calling the book "short." It has to be the first time in human history I haven't been accused of being long winded.) Hinceforth, I am going to generally ignore the many nice things he says about the book in order to address points of disagreement. I am not trying to pick a fight with Bogost, who I admire, simply trying to respond to the issues that seem most urgent here and I have told Bogost I am planning to do this. My hope is that I can coax him to respond to my response and keep the exchange going.

Reality and Fiction

The discussion of collective intelligence in the Survivor community offers a welcome counterpoint to prevailing ideas that "puzzling" over apparently complex mass-media offers cognitive and cultural value in and of itself, such as those recently advanced by Steven Johnson; the Survivor spoilers are solving a real problem, rather than becoming drawn in to the elusive, unplanned web of J.J. Abrams telescripts gone awry.

This is one of the passages that left me scratching my head. Yes, I think it matters on all kinds of levels that the Survivor fans are exploring something that occured in the real world rather than a work of fiction. They can pool money and send representatives to the Amazon or Pearl Island and interview real people. The fans of Lost really don't have a chance to crawl down into that hatch and see what they can get from looking around. There's something fascinating about the experiences of Mario Lanza, the fan fiction writer who corresponds with and gets advice from his characters because they are real people. But I bristle a little at the hierarchy between reality and fiction implicit in this argument.

Perhaps Bogost doesn't like Lost as much as I and many of my students do. But a key assumption running through my book is that we can use fiction as a vehicle to talk through core concerns and that the activity of making sense of fiction may teach us skills that can be put to a broader array of other purposes. It may be true to Abrams and company are making up what's happening on Lost as they go -- in part in response to the speculations of the fan community. This doesn't devalue it as art -- after all, we know Dickens did more or less the same with the serial publications of his novels. People are still talking about real issues when they talk about Lost, whether they are discussing the spiritual conflicts faced by the characters or the show's representation of the politics of Iraq, Korea, and Africa. They are also learning how to work within a knowledge community and working through the ethics of collaborative information production and knowledge sharing in ways that have larger applications.

Similarly, I think we can use Survivor to ask some fundamental questions about group dynamics, sexuality, gender, race, and so forth, and as I suggest in the book, I think reality television poses a series of ethical questions that are designed to become the stuff of gossip within the fan community. It's ability to do so may have less to do with its factual status (especially given how contrived the situation is in the first place) and more to do with its rhetorical and dare I say, narrative construction. But the most important thing in both cases is they provide shared reference points around which conversations cane emerge. In the book's terms, they act as cultural attractors bringing like minded individuals together to form a reception community and as cultural activators giving the community something to do which exploits the resources of a collective intelligence.

Affective Economics

In particular, economic changes like the decreasing value of the 30-second television spot are forcing mass media into cultural convergence. Survivor and American Idol represent instances of what Jenkins calls affective economics, a marketing technique that appeals to consumers' emotional vicissitudes. I found it curious that Jenkins chose to invent this somewhat awkward term for a concept that has many names in contemporary marketing theory, including associative advertising and lifestyle marketing. One might assume that Jenkins knows about these concepts, but chooses not to mention them in order that he can reconnect the same underlying concept to cultural studies and fan communities. Yet, he also argues that affective economics is "on the fringes" in the media industry, suggesting that he may have a greater distinction in mind.

The problem of terminology is a vexing one in a book like Convergence Culture. Because the space involves imput from many different sectors, because the phenomenon discussed is evolving, and because there are almost always competing paradigms present to account for any observed phenomenon, there are always multiple terms you could use to describe a particular set of practices. Bogost has identified several places here where I had to drive a stake in the ground and I went with what seemed to me to be the best term to describe what I was talking about.

Frankly, I am less invested in these terminological questions than Bogost is. I see the varied terms as different ways of describing the same phenomenon. Each term helps us see some aspects more clearly and makes others harder to see. For that reason, there's an argument to be made for keeping multiple terms in play rather than trying to figure out which one is best. If my words are useful, use them. If not, dump them.

He's right that part of what I was trying to do in this chapter was to show the match between what academics in cultural and media studies had said about fans and an emerging discourse about the role of emotional investments within the brand space. I intended the phrase, affective economics, to be a tad oxymoronic. We tend to think of economics as a cold rational field quite removed from emotion. I wanted to suggest the various ways that people are trying to attach value to emotion in the new media economy. I was interested in several things: the talk about "lovemarks" or "emotional capital" which was shaping the strategies of brand managers and advertising executives; the degree to which research inside the industry was demonstrating in economic terms the value of fan commitments to programs; the work by Robert Kozinets and others about brand communities and the ways they parallel fan communities; and the ways that product placements sought to connect the emotions associate with entertainment onto products embedded within that story.

Some aspects of what I am calling affective economics are deeply embedded in current advertising practice, referred to by the various terms Bogost identifies ("lifestyle marketing," "associative advertising," "relationship marketing," etc.) while others are still emerging -- such as the focus on "favorite viewers" as opposed to demographic or ratings to measure the success of a program.

I am convinced that this shift represents the best means we have of getting media producers to reassess their relationship to their consumers and that seems to be key to the long term viability of participatory culture. In the book, I cite Grant McCracken's observations that companies will have a legal right for the foreseeable future to tightly control their intellectual property and shut down most forms of fan participation but they will have an economic interest in opening themselves up to greater participation from their consumers. One of the reasons for this is that they are discovering, perhaps some would say rediscovering, the value of committed consumers.

When I talk to executives at advertising companies or media companies, I get two key messages right now: one, they are terrified about losing control of their brands or products; they fear what the consumer can do to them through online communications. Second, they want very much to build a strong brand community that will help support their brands and products. And for the short term, this makes it possible to rewrite our contracts with the media company.

Part of what I wanted to stress in the book was Robert Kozinet's argument that brand communities can both promote and police the behavoir of media companies -- can help them reach new consumers, can hold them accountable for bad decisions. This happens because we are no longer talking about isolated consumers; we are talking about groups that pool knowledge, deliberate together, and take collective action. At one point, I refer to these new brand communities as collective bargaining units.

I was intrigued by Jenkins's willing adoption of lifestyle marketing practices, mostly since I have been such a vocal critic of this type of advertising, both here (1, 2) and, in considerably more detail, in my forthcoming book Persuasive Games: Videogames and Procedural Rhetoric. Essentially, my argument is that lifestyle marketing does not address consumers' actual lifestyles, but fashions lifestyles as constructs that marketers manipulate consumers to adopt.

This point of disagreement probably deserves a whole blog post in and of itself. To make short work of it, I think Bogost is right that lifestyle marketing can be an empty gesture, a desire to herd us into fixed demographic categories that may have little or nothing to do with how we actually live and think. I suspect, though, that this form of lifestyle marketing is apt to become less and less effective as we are able to get together with like-minded individuals and share insights on the web. Bloggers are pretty aggressive at unmasking and debunking lifestyle pitches that seem inauthentic or run counter to the established practices and beliefs of particular communities. Most of the brand communities I am describing emerge bottom up from the grassroots, though companies may step in to facilitate their activities more fully. These communities emerge because we have authentic investments in the goods that constitute our everyday life and because brands express meanings that we draw upon to express our identities.

The fact that brands serve a range of other functions for the companies that produce and market them doesn't take away from the fact that we also make use of those brands for our own expressive purposes. For example, having grown up in Atlanta as part of a certain generation, I feel a strong emotional bond to Coca Cola. Its international success as a company becomes an extension of my pride in my home town. This was especially powerful when I was a boy and Atlanta was first fighting to become a global city. It was astonishingly important to me that I knew that Coke was a product produced in Atlanta and consumed around the world. I still feel that aura around Coca Cola even though I have an allergic reaction to carbonation that means I don't actually drink Coke. In that sense, my emotional investment in the brand is totally divorced from the reality of the product and does not even translate directly into my role as a consumer. It is up to Coca Cola's advertising executives to figure out how to transform my warm feelings towards the company into purchasing decisions. And in my case, I am a hard sell because it makes me sick to drink the stuff. While I think advertising plays with powerful emotions, those emotions do not necessarily over-ride our rational judgements about how the actual product will operate in the context of our own lives.

Again, I am interested in what happens when the top-down efforts of companies to sell products meet bottom-up forces from consumers who are asserting their identity through their relationship to products. I avoid the classic cultural studies term, resistence, in describing this because it paints too simple a picture of what's going on. Sometimes, these interests are alligned, sometimes they are opposed. In most cases, some kind of negotiation has to occur to reconcile them. Most of them time they are "impure" in that they represent some complex blending of subcultural and commercial motives. The emergence of brand communities interest me because they are both an expansion of corporate reach and an expansion of consumer power.

I tried my best to honor Jenkins's request for readers to "bracket their anxieties about consumerism," but I never felt that he returned to the problem in earnest. Hopeful appeals to future potential are nice, but I expected more vision and leadership on this topic. It's possible that advertising just doesn't bother Jenkins very much; it is, after all, the primary fuel of popular culture.

I recognized that the American Idol chapter was going to be one of the most controversial in the book -- especially for academic readers. Let's face it: the academic world has sought to distance itself from the commercial sector for a long, long time. I think in doing so though we have lost the ability to frame meaningful critiques or engage in dialogue with some core forces within our society. We act as if there was something obscene about money or as if advertising was right next to child pornography on the ethical scale. As long as we start from this premise, we will not be able to meaningfully engage in the conversations that are shaping our culture. We will not be able to talk to people in the business world and have any chance of having them take our ideas seriously.

In other parts of the world (Canada, UK, Australia), media and cultural studies have been very actively involved in policy work, connecting on a regular basis with key government leaders, consulting in the formation of key policies that impact their society. In the United States, we have been largely locked out of those conversations. We don't have a seat at the table. Our government listens to social scientists about cultural matters but not those of us in the Humanities. In these other countries, though, it isn't as if the academics fully agree with the policymakers or totally support their agendas. But they have agreed to suspend disagreements on some levels in order to engage productively on others. In this country, our culture is shaped more by corporate decisions than government policies (though I would argue our desire to turn every conversation into a struggle against the entire economic system doesn't make us effective in either sector).

So, yes, it is probably true that I am less worried by the commercial aspects of our culture, including advertising, than Bogost is. I personally enjoy many products -- cultural and otherwise -- produced by American industry and do not think that commercialization per se corrupts the artistic process. It can but it doesn't have to. All art is produced in an economic context which shapes to some degree what gets produced. I would say the track record for popular entertainment under capitalism is pretty good.

Right now, I am choosing to engage in other kinds of conversations with industry, conversations designed to increase media company's responsiveness to their consumers. Perhaps it might be best to think of what I am calling for in the book is a consumer rights movement for consumers of popular culture -- a fan politics as it were.

In that regard, sweeping critiques of consumer capitalism seem less productive than more focused discussions of specific policies and practices. I think it can be productive to be critical of specific industry practices that may improve or diminish the quality of our lives. I think most consumers have made some kind of peace with the commercial impulses that surround them, have learned to read through them much of the time, have resigned themselves to accept them as a necessary evil if the result is getting access to entertainment or products they want. I see consumers increasingly savy about the economic interests that shape the culture they consume and more and more willing to make trade-offs which serve their interests.

I saw my book as addressed as much at the media industries as at consumers and was trying to provide a space where both sides could understand the other's perspectives a bit more clearly. Swatting your readers with a newspaper is hardly the best way to open up a dialogue. I fully expect the information provided in that chapter to be deployed in a range of different arguments about whether this new model of consumption is a good thing or a bad thing. I may even engage in some of those arguments from time to time. But what I was trying to do there was describe, as accurately as I could, how this new style of affective economics works by looking more closely at a specific advertiser, Coca Cola, and at a specific franchise, American Idol.

With luck, this book will push debates about consumerism to another level, allowing for more nuanced discussions of what is going on right now. Too often, critics of consumerism act as if nothing has changed in the ways brands operate since the 1950s. Bogost is a much more nuanced thinker on this subject: his critiques here of lifestyle marketing suggest a real engagement with contemporary industry discourse; he has also worked himself extensively in and around advertising so he has some front line perspective on this. I expect to learn a lot from his book. It's just apt to be a very different kind of book than the one I set out to write.

I do think I am offering both vision and leadership in trying to find the basis for reaproachment between academics and industry. I don't think the only way to show leadership is to go in with guns blazing. I As I suggest in the book's conclusion, the fight for the quality of our culture is one which needs to be fought on different levels.

In Part Two, I will take up Bogost's critique of my concept of transmedia storytelling and some of my arguments about fan culture. Since issues of commercialization run through his argument, they will resurface throughout this response.

E3: End of an Era?

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

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

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

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

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

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

They Cancelled What?

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

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

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

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

Why E3 Hurt Games

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

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

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

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

platform was ready to ship.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where Do We Go From Here?

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

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

ComicCon & The Power of the Devoted Niche

This is the third guest post written by Comparative Media Studies graduate student and media analyst Ivan Askwith about his observations at Comicon. Askwith is beginning work now on a thesis which centers around transmedia and participatory aspects of Lost and Veronica Mars. In my second dispatch from ComicCon, I tried to illustrate how the studios and networks are already beginning to understand the importance of fan support in the era of convergence culture. And while some executives have a better grasp on the core principles than others, it's fair to say that the entertainment industry are starting to think more seriously about how fans power new business models.

Savvy executives, however, will also realize that ComicCon still has a lot to teach them about the significance of fan support, particularly in economic terms.

While recent entries both here and in the C3 Weblog tempt me to describe what I saw at ComicCon as a living illustration of Chris Anderson's Long Tail. After all, the merchandise selections available at ComicCon range from the super-mainstream to the ultra-obscure, which suggests that there is a market for even the most esoteric and specialized collectibles. If the exhibitors at the Con have chosen to use some of their floor space to offer less mainstream product, should we assume that they've embraced the "we can sell less-of-more" ideology? Most of these sellers have been attending the Con for years, which gives me ample reason to believe that if they didn't think they could sell off their more obscure inventory, they wouldn't bother bringing it.

For all of its strengths, however, I don't think the Long Tail is designed to explain the lesson that I would encourage the entertainment industry to take away from their time at ComicCon: that a small audience of super-committed fans can be worth more, in economic terms, than a massive audience of casual viewers and readers.

This isn't an entirely new observation, of course. Recent literature suggests that viewer involvement has a direct correlation to awareness and retention of advertising messages, and more networks are starting to see the merit of offering niche product through on-demand services.

At ComicCon, however, there is ample evidence to suggest that the industry still hasn't realized just how valuable these niche audiences can be. This became particularly clear during a brief conversation that I had with Allan Caplan, the founder of InkWorks, a company specializing in the creation of trading cards and collectibles tied to popular cult television programs. Their current lineup includes Lost, Veronica Mars, The 4400, and Naruto, as well as such discontinued shows as Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Charmed, Firefly, Alias and The X-Files. InkWorks might not be operating on Anderson's Long Tail, but they benefit from a similar principle: that small audiences still have big purchasing power if you cater to their interests.

Case in point: InkWorks is preparing to release their seventh line of collectible cards for Buffy The Vampire Slayer, a show that has ended three years ago. One visitor, walking past the stand, asked: "How could there possibly still be a market for new content about a cancelled series?"

(In retrospect, this is an especially odd question to ask in a room where fans are ready and willing to pay well in excess of $1000 for an original out-of-print comic featuring their favorite character.)

Caplan's answer? That every line of Buffy cards InkWorks makes has sold out rapidly, and fans continue to ask them for more. The same is true of other cancelled series, especially Joss Whedon's post-Buffy endeavor, Firefly. Caplan told me that even he had been hesitant to invest in the development of Firefly-affiliated merchandise, until he saw that fans were willing to pay -- and pay well -- for anything connected to the show.

While trading cards aren't an especially new niche business, Inkworks has demonstrated a particularly keen understanding of the fan/collector mentality: in addition to the basic set of cards in each line, there are a number of "bonus cards" distributed at random through the line. The specific content of these cards varies from show to show, but generally includes "Autograph Cards," with actual signatures from cast members and "Pieceworks Cards," which contain tiny pieces of actual costumes worn on-screen during the show. (Other interesting show-specific offerings include invisible ink messages on select cards tied into the spy-fi show Alias, which can only be seen when the card is placed under a black light.)

For reference, a single pack of 6 trading cards costs $2.50.

While I didn't have the presence of mind to record my conversation with Caplan, it was clear to me that he understood (a) the power of creating limited quantities, and (b) that a small, engaged audience can be far more lucrative, especially to niche marketers, than a massive casual audience. After all, as he pointed out to me, there's no market for CSI: Miami trading cards, even if it is the number one show in the world.

One question worth considering: can collectible product lines like this be used as a barometer for the relative popularity of various franchises?

(At some point in the future, I'll be interviewing Caplan, and will post any interesting results that come from that discussion either here or in the C3 Weblog.)

Building Popular Buzz: What To Do, What Not To Do

This is the second of a series of guest blogs written by Comparative Media Studies graduate student and media analyst Ivan Askwith about his observations at this year's Comicon. Based on the evidence from this year's ComicCon, the entertainment industry is slowly starting to understand just how important a vocal fandom can be in the success of a new brand or franchise. As I indicated at the end of my last post, this growing comprehension is most evident in the largest "panel events" -- on the ComicCon schedule, this generally means those events held in Ballroom 20, Hall 6CDEF, and Hall H, which can seat anywhere from 2000-6500 spectators. Or, as the industry is learning to think of them, potential advertisers and advocates. Some presentations were more overt than others, but almost all of the largest scheduled events were closer in tone to a high-powered sales pitch than an intimate discussion between fans and creators.

That said, some presenters seem to have a more nuanced understanding of fan behavior than others. As Henry has already discussed on this blog, no one is currently cultivating fan participation more effectively, or respectfully, than New Line Cinema, in promotion for Snakes on a Plane. The panel for SoaP came at the end of a longer presentation from New Line, which featured previews of the Final Destination 3 DVD -- interesting insofar as it leverages the rarely-used interactive capabilities of DVD systems to let viewers determine the course of events at pivotal moments -- and the forthcoming Jack Black film, Tenacious D in 'The Pick of Destiny'. But the audience and presenters both knew that these were diversions from the main attraction: as the discussion about Tenacious D wrapped up, the energy in the crowd became palpable, and when panel host Kenan Thompson finally spoke the words -- "Snakes On A Plane" -- the audience erupted with enthusiasm and applause.

The entire presentation that followed demonstrated the same respectful appreciation of the internet fandom that has characterized the film's marketing campaign over the last several months. The presentation began with a video which flashed the words "Thanks to you.... Snakes on a Plane.... is already the summer's most talked about movie.... and it's not even out yet." This was followed with a several-minute montage collecting some of the best fan-generated content (spoofs, advertisements, posters, images, viral memes, etc), and used the winning entry from a fan-generated-soundtrack contest as the musical track. The video ended with another sequence of titles, which declared "Thanks to you, Snakes on a Plane is one of the most anticipated movies.... ever."

Based on the audience reaction, this isn't too far from the mark: the 6,500 seat Hall H was packed, with plenty of people standing in the back and even more turned away at the door, and the crowd responded enthusiastically to pretty much everything that was shown, said, or asked. Most of the audience "questions" consisted of variations on a theme -- the theme, in this case, being what a bad-ass motherfucker Samuel L. Jackson is.

In fact, one audience member straight out asked:

"What's it like, always being such a bad-ass mother fucker?"

To which Jackson replied:

"It's great to be able to live that out on screen, but, you know, I don't walk around every day thinkin' I'm a bad ass mother fucker. I'm just trying to make it through the day, most days, but I thank you for feelin' that way about it... You're a bad mother fucker, man, thank you. Thank you, thank you."

This was more or less the tone for the entire panel. However, one audience member did ask an interesting, albeit predictable question:

"Do you think that this movie will have a lasting effect on the way that the industry looks at internet hype?"

To which Jackson replied:

I hope that people in studios are looking and paying attention and trying to figure out how and why this phenomenon took place. I hope that there's some young filmmaker somewhere that knows, that understands that now they could put a premise on the internet -- 'my premise for this film is... boom... who has a scene?' -- and people will start writing the first scene for that particular film, and then they'll choose that scene. Somebody'll write the next scene, and they'll choose that particular scene, until they end up with a whole film, and then somebody will say, 'Who do you think should be in this film?', and then they go through that, and they come up with a whole cast list of people, and if everybody sends a dollar in, we can hire these particular people and shoot this particular film, and we'll have a film that's all-inclusive, that's something that a lot of people came together on, and had a collaborative passion about. And I think that would be kind of a wonderful thing to see happen. And hopefully that will be somewhere down the line... [audience applauds]

And while Jackson's scenario might be a little utopian for the near future, it suggests that he (and I suspect this carries over to many of the individuals working on this film) is beginning to recognize and respect the changing role of the audience, and the relatively awe-inspiring possibilities that emerge from the collective intelligence and energy of online fan communities. A collaborative online movie might still be some way off, but as to the more immediate question that was posed, it seems clear that this movie has already had a significant effect on how the industry looks at internet hype. Will it have a lasting effect? My guess is "Yes", in that it represents a substantial advance on the learning curve, as studios start to realize that there are right and wrong ways to engage with fan cultures.

Speaking of "wrong ways," I feel obligated to report that some presentations demonstrated far less tact in their attempts to engage would-be fans. During the World Premiere of NBC's forthcoming serial drama Heroes, which Henry has also discussed on this blog, Executive Producer Jeph Loeb (a comics legend in his own right for his work on Batman and Superman) instructed the audience that their job was to go home after the screening, get on the internet, and talk to everyone they know, as much and as often as they could, about how much they loved the show. While there's some room to encourage fans to be vocal in responding to a new show, I think it's a dangerous -- and potentially offensive -- move to instruct them to talk about how great a show is, especially before they've even seen it. (Of course, Loeb repeated the instructions at least twice more during the post-screening discussion, and closed with them as well.) But the guy sitting next to me gave a low, dismissive whistle during Loeb's first round of encouragement, muttering "Bad move", and (personal opinions of Heroes aside) I think he was absolutely right.

The fact is that studios don't need, and perhaps can't, instruct fans to be fans, you just need to be responsive and encouraging once they express appreciation for your work. If fans like what they see, they're going to talk about it -- it's part of the pleasure of being a fan. And if they don't like what they see, odds are they're still going to talk about it, but you're better off if they don't.

Comic Book Foreign Policy? Part Four

This is the final installment (at least for the time being) of a series I have been doing about how the comic book world has responded to September 11 and the politics of Homeland Security. I wrote it in response to several recent essays that have offered somewhat stereotypical versions of how comic book superheroes relate to the current policies of the Bush administration. I wanted to show that comic books have, in general, avoided jingoism in favor of a more thoughtful engagement with the ways what happen at the World Trade Center have changed the society we live in. In Part Three, I discussed three contemporary comic books -- DMZ (published by DC's Vertigo imprint), Ex Machina (published by Wildstorm) and Squadron Supreme (published by Marvel) -- which suggest the lasting impact of September 11 on comics culture. The three books take somewhat different strategies for dealing with the current political landscape-- DMZ is speculative fiction about a future American Civil War that results in part from over-extending U.S. military presence overseas; Ex Machina offers us a political drama where the Mayor of New York City happens to be a superhero; and Squadron Supreme represents a team of superheroes whose pursuit of American foreign policy objectives pose a series of ethical concerns.

What these three books have in common is a refusal to offer easy answers or paint black and white pictures. All three suggest that there are multiple sides for any issue and try to constantly force readers to rethink our own assumptions. These books are hard to classify in left or right terms -- they are certainly critical of many aspects of current policies, especially those that involve violations of civil liberties, but then, only about 30 something percent of the American public might be described as enthusiastic about those policies on any given week. A large number of libertarians and traditional conservatives are raising serious concern about our current Homeland Security policies along similar lines. Each of these books tap the genre conventions of popular culture but use them to focus attention on crucial social and political concerns.

Near the end of Convergence Culture, I speculate that popular culture may provide a common ground for us to explore important policy issue precisely because we are often willing to suspend fixed ideological categories in order to explore its fantasies; because we don't define our relationship to popular culture exclusively or primarily in partisan terms; because it offers a shared set of metaphors to talk about things that matter to us; and because it brings together a community that cuts across party lines. As Barrack Obama might have said, we watch West Wing in the red states and we watch 24 in the blue states, and if we can talk together as fans, maybe we can rebuild a basis for communications on other levels. In this context, popular culture has a vital role to play as civic media. As a comics fan, I am proud to see the comics industry rise to the occasion perhaps better than any other entertainment medium (well, excluding the fine work going on over at Comedy Central.)

That's why I am so excited about Marvel's Civil War project this summer.

Civil War

For one thing, the comics I discussed above, though released by major publishers who have good distribution, still represent relative niche products. They don't involve any of the major franchises at DC or Marvel that account for the overwhelming majority of sales of American published comics in this country (I phrase it this way to separate out the huge success of manga which is a separate story for another day.) Civil War, by contrast, involves Spiderman, Iron Man, Captain America, The Fantastic Four, and every major figure in the Marvel universe. And it is an epic story that is going to occupy much of the Marvel universe for the better part of six months.

Here's how the core premise of the series gets described in a recent recap:

After Stamford, Connecticut is destroyed during a televised fight between the New Warriors and a group of dangerous villains, public sentiment turns against super heroes. Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, is attacked outside a nightclub and beaten into a coma. Advocates call for reform and a Superhuman Registration Act is debated, which would require all those possessing paranormal abilities to register with the government, divulge their true identities to the authorities and submit to training and sanctioning in the manner of federal agents. One week later, the Act is passed. Any person with superhuman powers who refuses to register is now a criminal. Some heroes, such as Iron Man, see this as a natural evolution of the role of superheroes in society, and a reasonable request. Others view the Act as an assault on their civil liberties. After being called upon to hunt down heroes in defiance of the Registration Act, Captain America goes underground and begins to form a resistance movement.

Across the Marvel Universe

Normally, I am skeptical about these large scale events that cut across the entire universe of a particularly publishing company which often represent a better marketing strategy than they do storytelling practice. The goal is to get readers buying more books in a given month by dribbling out bits of the story across as many different titles as possible. Yet, Civil War demonstrates to me the power of this mode of expanded storytelling. For one thing, the issues raised by this book are big and they demand a large amount of development if they are not going to be dismissed with some simplistic swat of the hand (this could still happen before everything is over with). But seeing them unfold across close to a hundred issues allows them to be explored with a depth and scope that few other media systems could accommodate.

For another, Civil War exploits this transmedia system's ability to show the same events from multiple characters' points of view and thus to invite us to reread it from conflicting (and self-conflicted) political perspectives. In one book, we may see what an incident means for those, such as Iron Man or Spider-Man or Mr. Fantastic, who are supporting the registration act. In another, we may see it from the perspective of Captain America and the others who are resisting it. in another we may see it from the perspective of the X-Men who are trying to remain neutral or the Thing who seems to be really struggling to do the right thing without any strongly developed political sense. New titles such as Civil War and Frontline have been created to bring together the conflicting perspectives within a single issue. Frontline shows the story from the perspective of two reporters -- Ben Ulrich whose editor wants him to improve their readership by stirring up anger against unregistered superheroes and Sally Floyd whose publisher sees the act as the latest intrusion of the state into the lives of its citizens and who thus has special access to the underground resistance movement. This storyline suggests the degree to which news agencies are shaped by the agendas of their editors and construct different representations of the news -- starting from whom they talk to, what questions they ask, and what ends up getting into print. Marvel has even published a special newsprint edition of the Daily Bugle that shows us how these events play themselves out across all of the different beats in a major newspaper.

This ability to spread the story across all of these different vantage points also increases the likelihood that for at least some readers, their favorite hero ends up on an ideological side different from their own, opening them to listening more closely to the arguments being formed out of sympathy for a character they have invested in for years and years. Finally, given the ways comics publishing works with different books appearing each week, this strategy insures that we live with the Civil War storyline every week for months on end, where-as if it were contained in only one series, we would reconnect with it once a month. (DC has solved this problem with 52, a series that comes out every week but this is regarded as a special event in its own right.) All of this uses the potential of a publisher-wide event to intensify debate and discussion about core issues, such as liberty, privacy, civil disobedience, and the power of the state, that could not be timelier in our current political context.

Comic Books Meet Political Reality

Of course, comic book superheroes, per necessity, deal with these issues at one level removed from our actual political reality -- so much the better if it breaks us out of fixed and partisan categories of analysis and opens us to explore these issues from new points of view. Keep in mind though that Marvel uses many real world references to anchor the stories in our reality so Jonas Jameson is seen getting ready for an appearance on O'Reilly where he will speak out in support of the law and Luke Cage compares the threat of political violence directed against superheroes to what happen to blacks in Mississippi during the civil rights era. Each issue of Civil War ends with a short segment that introduces readers to one or another political debate from world history that offers some parallels to the concerns being discussed -- including one discussion of the relocation of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

And, as reader Tama Leaver notes at his bog, there are strong parallels drawn between what happens to Speedball, one of the young superheroes most centrally involved in the incident, as "an unregistered combatant" and the various prisoners at Gitmo, who have neither been accused of crimes nor treated as war prisoners:

Speedball's experiences have marked similarities with the experiences of 'enemy combatants' (as opposed to prisoners of war) held (illegally) in the US "facilities" in Guantanamo. As Robert Baldwin is carted off to jail, he's told that a purpose-built prison is being constructed to indefinitely hold superhumans who refuse to register and follow government directives, a plot point echoing the 2002 construction of the Camp Delta detainment facility in Guantanamo Bay. While the Civil War story isn't completely black and white--Peter Parker's own deliberations certainly give the pro-registration side a humane voice--the critique of many aspects of the current War on Terror and the illegal detention and torture of untried 'enemy combatants' is bold and blatant on the part of Marvel's storytellers. Personally, I'm heartened by Marvel's stance and hope empathy with their comic book heroes will give readers a moment to think further about politics in the wider world.

Of course, comic book superheroes deal with these issues in somewhat broad strokes -- often through fisticuffs -- and after all, this series, which pits superhero against superhero on every page, is an adolescent fan's wet dream. Comic books have long sought pretexts which allow us to find out (or usually leave unresolved) whether the Thing or the Hulk is stronger. And this series has had some amazing showdowns between Captain America and long-time allies such as Iron Man or Spider-Man. But, the heart of the series has not been about physical violence but about political debates that the characters have had with each other and with themselves. The slugfests include not the usual quips or monologues but an open debate about public policy issues in between hurling the mighty shield or spraying spider gunk. The various members of the Fantastic Four, for example, have been split asunder by these issues -- all the more so since Johnny Storm was a victim of anti-cape violence while Reed Richards has ended up using his simulation models to build the case for the registration act. As Sue Storm Richards protests, this act will mean jail time for "half of our Christmas card list" and creates a series of ethical challenges that make the McCarthy era seem like child's play as the protagonists not only decide whether to reveal their own identities but also whether to name names of their associates and even whether to use force -- even deadly force -- to bring them to jail when they resist the controversial law.

Complicating Our Positions

The book's refusal to offer simple feel-good perspectives on these issues is suggested by these comments by Mark Millar, one of the author's involved, during an interview at Comic Book Resources:

Some readers might be incorrectly try to frame the ideological split in Civil War as Conservative versus Liberal. It's really lazy writing to make everything black and white. I'm a politics buff and I really hate seeing America divided into red and blue states because I know people in red states who have blue opinions. And we're all very complex. No one person can really even be described as a liberal or a conservative. I'm a liberal but I totally believe in the death penalty on occasions. People are more complex than you think and I wanted to do the same thing with superheroes....

The most obvious thing to do would have been to have Captain America as a lap dog of the government. So, I've played around with everyone's personalities a little and really just tried to get in under their skin and have them feeling very confused about it, too. Some of them actually end up changing their minds and crossing sides because it's a very complex issue.

So, to polarize it in terms of Conservative and Liberal would have been a big mistake. And I think you don't want to think of your superheroes as being Liberal or Conservative. I think those guys should be above that. What I've done is made everyone sympathetic, but everyone pretty passionate about what they believe in.

As Millar continues, he makes clear that it would be too neat to read Captain America and his allies as either freedom fighters or terrorists. There is enough moral ambiguity to go around (and we see even some of the most partisan characters -- Spiderman for example -- anguish over the choices they are being forced to make.)

They will be a combination of both reactive and proactive. I didn't want to just have these guys in, say, like a terrorist cell or anything because fundamentally Cap's guys are superheroes. So, the rationale for the Marvel Universe shouldn't be that they're just underground guys who are constantly fighting the forces of the status quo. They've got to be superheroes. They've got to go out and actually fight super villains and, unfortunately, SHIELD and the other superheroes are after them when they're doing so. It's an added tension to the whole thing.

At the end of the day, the book isn't so much taking positions as raising questions that we as a society need to be debating. There has been a tendency in recent years to depict questioning government authorities as somehow unpatriotic or assuming that questions lead inevitably towards one or another partisan conclusion. But I think we are well served when our popular culture asks hard questions and I rejoice when it forces me to rethink my own political investments.

There's so much more that one could say about this series. I had planned to run a whole lot of examples of the political reflections of various partisans here to suggest the range of perspectives we encounter -- including the use of non-American characters like Black Panther or Namor to give us some sense of how the world sees America's political turmoil. But at the end of the day, the power of these speeches lies in their contexts. They mean more if you've read these characters for years, know their personalities and backstories, and can anticipate what some of this means for the future of their series. They mean more if you see them on the pages of a comic book coming out of the mouths of brightly colored superhero characters and realize what a statement it is for Marvel to be telling this particular story in the Summer of 2006.

Comic Book Foreign Policy? Part Three

Sorry for the wait, oh loyal readers of this here blog. But today, I am finally able to sit down and plow out the third installment of my series about how the comic book world has responded to 9/11 and the on-going War on Terror. Some of you will know that this was inspired by Michael Dean's "The New Patriotism" which was serialized in recent issues of Comics Journal and argued that comics were "circling the wagons" in response to the perceived threat to national security. As Dean puts it, "Now, some 60 years after the height of WWII and some 30 years after the end of the Vietnam War, mainstream comics seem to be making tentative gestures toward recreating the glory days of the wartime propaganda comic."

His primary exhibits are Freedom Time Three and Cobb (both from minor publishers), Marvel's Combat Zone: True Tales of GIs in Iraq, and reports that Frank Miller may be doing a Batman vs. Bin Laden book. What Dean has to say about the politics behind these particular projects is fascinating, including some interesting quotes by Cobb's Beau Smith about the politics of comics publishing today:

Like film and TV most think that since it [comics] is a creative community and business that it favors a liberal stance. Creativity has always been closely tied to a liberal base...even taken for granted. That's a mistake. That is what has kept comics in this sales slump for so many years. Most publishers in comics, like movie studios, haven't really cared or taken the time to find out who their consumers really are....I think the less liberal factor is the big silent majority of the comic-book-reading public. I think they are well aware of what is going on in the world and in Iraq. I think they would love to have an escape area where there are solid good guys defeating bad guys. I think people want that outlet to release the steam that has built up since 9/11.

But, I question whether these particular projects -- most of which are published by marginal presses and will never get into most American comics shops -- are somehow representative of a general ideological perspective within the comics industry. In fact, I have been surprised at how few comics have shown us superheroes bopping terrorists and how many of them have encouraged a deep reflection on the nature and ethics of power in the world post-911.

Over the past two installments, I traced the immediate aftermath of September 11 and the varied ways that comics took up the challenge of responding to these events. Today, I want to bring this discussion into the present moment by looking at four books I have been reading this summer (well, really, four storylines) that speak directly to the political upheaval in this country surrounding the Iraq War and issues of Homeland Security: DMZ, Ex Machina, Supreme Squadron, and Marvel's Civil War storyline.

In focusing on these books, I skip over a broader array of representations of the current debates that also might seem very relevant to this discussion, such as Rick Veith's Can't Get No (which I haven't gotten any of yet), Joe Sacco's various projects in using comics to report on life in the middle east, Ted Rall's book on his trip to Afghanistan, cultural theorist Douglas Rushkoff's strange fusion of politics and religion in Testament or Art Spigelman's In the Shadows of No Towers which used imagery for early comic strips to reflect on his own conflicting feelings at 9/11.

Part of what I want to suggest here is that individually, comic book writers and artists -- both mainstream and niche -- have used their work to encourage their readers to ask hard questions about contemporary society and that collectively, they have provided a more diverse range of perspectives on these issues than can be found within the mainstream media.

DMZ

DMZ, published by Vertigo, is the work of writer Brain Wood and artist Riccardo Burchelli. Regular readers of this blog will note that this is the third shout out to Wood in the past month -- reflecting on three very different projects, his superhero series (Demo), his reflections on local culture (Local) and now his book depicting a domestic civil war (DMZ). Frankly, I regard Wood to be one of the best writers working in comics today -- someone who has found a way to infuse popular narratives with alternative narrative and political perspectives. DMZ drops a young reporter in training from Liberty Network behind the lines in a war-torn Manhattan. As Wood explains in a Comic Book Resource interview:

Middle America, literally, has risen up out of frustration, anger, and poverty to challenge the government's position of preemptive war and police action throughout the world. It's left America neglected and unattended, and also unprotected, at least from a major threat within its own borders. Then isolationist and religious militias get involved and arm the people, and then it's suddenly the Second American Civil War. They push to the coasts where they're stopped, creating a no-man's-land in Manhattan, with the 'Free Armies' in Jersey facing off against the US Army in Brooklyn....The politics of such a conflict are a little weird," Wood continued. "Initial reactions to the news of this book have made attempts to paint it as a 'liberal ranting against the conservatives,' but that's not actually possible in this scenario. Democrats can be and are every bit as hawkish as Republicans in times of war, and anyway, the two warring groups in 'DMZ' are just extremists fighting extremists. Homegrown insurgents fighting an extremist government regime, and it's the sane, normal people of all political affiliations that are caught in the middle.

Matty, a young journalist in training --raised in sheltered Long Island in a wealthy family, interned with Liberty Networks -- finds himself stranded in the demilitarized zone where he has access to partisans and insurgents of all stripes and becomes their only means of communicating their perspectives to the country at large. The result is a classic story of political awakening. At first, he clings to the simplified version of the war that has been communicated through the national news media but increasingly, what he sees and experiences forces him to rethink the propaganda machine which has shaped public understanding of the conflict.

Wood has described the world he is traveling through as equal parts Escape From New York, Falluja, and New Orleans right after Katrina." He adds:

Manhattan is a city largely abandoned and the people that have stayed are the very poor who had no hope of fleeing on their own or being part of anyone's evacuation plan. A lot of snipers and insurgents have moved in and there are AWOL military who are hiding out. Add to that a whole mess of kooks and crazies and holdouts.

The current storyline, "Body of a Journalist," which has been running for the past few months, is clearly informed by the kidnapping and hostaging of journalists, such as Daniel Pearl, during the current military conflict as Matty becomes a pawn for both sides and ultimately finds himself a target from government forces who want to silence his broadcasts before he becomes too much of an icon of the opposition. Wood has finally taken us deeply into the backstory of the conflict:

The wars were a million miles away. We had troops on the ground in four separate conflicts on three continents. There was never a draft so no one I knew went...I remember when the Free Armies formed a government in Helena. And spread out from there. No one could grasp how it could happen...There was just no one to stop them. The national guard, the ones that were still here, just took off their uniforms and got out of the way....All these guard bases, flush with Homeland Security funding, were pit stops for the Free Armies....Pilots weren't about to bomb small-town America. It all happened so fast that the Pentagon didn't have time to whip up a propaganda campaign to paint the Free Armies as traitors.

As described by Wood, the Free Army resembles some of the forces that have got America is confronting elsewhere in the world "The Free States are an idea, not a geographic entity. The same asymmetrical, insurgent warfare that bogged down the U.S. military oversees is happening here."

His description of what happens to a besieged Manhattan owes a lot to recent experiences in New Orleans. As a survivor tells Matty:

We were supposed to have M.T.A. workers running the subways, Metro-North, L.I.R.R. and the busses to get everyone out, but they all just took off on their own. If you had a car, you were good. If you had money or friends in the right places, you were set. If you were poor, you were fucked. The Army shut the bridges and tunnels down after only four hours. Tough luck. Some people tried to swim or sneak past the roadblocks. They probably didn't make it...I bet you didn't see many refugees in your town, did you?

Wood takes advantage of the power of speculative fiction to transform current events an\d let us look at them with fresh eyes: we are perhaps more open to understanding the motives of an insurgent in a fictional conflict or to question a fictional government authority's motives than we are to ask such hard questions about the actual war. As he noted above, I don't see this book as fitting comfortably within a red state/blue state political structure. If anything, it is about what happens when American politics becomes too polarized and the public becomes too apathetic, allowing extremists of all ideological colors to take over the political debate.

Ex Machina

Imagine this: Mitchell Hundred (also known as the superhero Great Machine) saves thousands of lives during the collapse of the World Trade Center and helps to prevent another terrorist assault on the Brooklyn Bridge. In the aftermath, he emerges as a political symbol and decides to abandon his mask and cape and run for elective office. Campaigning as an independent candidate, he gets elected the Mayor of New York City. Ex Machina moves back and forth between flashbacks that show something of his crime-fighting past and more contemporary scenes which show his struggles to govern a city as complex and politically charged as New York. The Wikipedia entry on the series provides a pretty good summary of the key themes here:

Thematically, Ex Machina can be seen as perhaps an anti-Spider-Man. Spider-Man is a character with super-powers who feels a responsibility to work alone and to use his powers for the good of society while trying to maintain his personal private life separately from his super-hero life. On the other hand, Mayor Hundred has publicly declared that was in fact a super-hero, The Great Machine, and despite pressure from some to return to being a super-hero, he feels that he could do more to aid society as a whole (and his city in particular) if he works from within the system as a public servant rather than outside it as a lone vigilante. While it may be Mayor Hundred's preference that he not have to employ his super-powers in his day-to-day work as the Mayor, he has been shown to be more than willing to use those powers as needed in the course of his duties (and when he gets into various scrapes).

Created by Brian K. Vaughan (known for Y: The Last Man and Runaways, two other favorites on my current pull list), Ex Machina has the feel of a good Aaron Sorkin television drama -- The West Wing in particular -- in its mixture of character drama, political debate, and witty dialogue. Across the run of the series, Hundred has confronted a range of contemporary urban policy issues -- including public funding for the arts, gay marriage, and racial profiling.

A recent storyline, "March to War" depicts what happens when someone releases the toxic chemical Ricin during a march protesting the war in Iraq and Hundred's administration has to deal with the aftermath. In the course of four tautly drawn issues, Vaughan takes us through a range of political perspectives on Homeland Security, including a recurring focus on the need to balance a public hunger for security against our long-standing traditions of civil liberty. The story goes to some lengths to explore how Post-911 politics both complicates and is complicated by the multiracial composition of urban America. Vaughn shows us, for example, a hate crime directed against a Sikh taxi driver by white extremists who were themselves victims of the attacks on the World Trade Center; he shows a heated meeting where various religious leaders gather, including a Rabi who demands that his house of worship get the same police protection as the local Mosques.

Vaughan's characters challenge the idea that national governments are better able to protect citizens during terrorist attacks than local police forces. At one point, his police commissioner explains:

The last time we trusted our defense to the Feds, somebody flew a goddamn plane into one of our buildings...Fuck the Bureau! The entire outfit is half the size of the NYPF. I've got more officers who speak Arabic in one precinct than you guys have in the entire D.O.D. You boys are welcome to finally give us the cash you've been funneling into new hummers for sheriffs in bumfuck, Idaho but I'm not relinquishing jurisdiction to Washington probies who don't know uptown from their....

The Mayor gets into a knock-down drag out with his deputy mayor about the rationale for subway searches and faces an ethical dilemma because his secret powers might allow him to identify the cause of the incident but might result in any evidence he produced being thrown out of court. And there's a really uncomfortable sequence where a man flees the cops at the subway station and gets shot -- not because he was smuggling weapons but because he was carrying a stash of drugs.

Every page pulls us in a slightly different direction, complicates our feelings towards the issue of Homeland Security, as Vaughan introduces yet another perspective or raises another argument and in the process, pulls in most of the established characters and introduces some vividly drawn secondary figures. In Part Two, I suggested that the exploration of 9/11 in comics would ultimately inform how other media dealt with these events: in that light, it is interesting that NewLine has announced plans to turn Ex Machina into a film.

Squadron Supreme

Squadron Supreme was a long-ago comic book series published by Marvel and essentially modeled/plagiarized from DC's Justice League characters: it's not very hard to identify which of these characters is based on Batman, Superman, the Flash, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, etc. J. Michael Stracynzki (best known for Babylon 5) relaunched this franchise several years ago with the 18-issue Supreme Power series, much of which can now be read retrospectively as character buildup for the newly launched Squadron Supreme series.

If DC's Justice League books have always been marked by a cheery optimism and a great deal of respect for governmental authorities, Stracyznski's Squadron Supreme is marked by a deep distrust of the motives and honesty of the American government. It depicts a world where governments tell truth to their citizens only as a last recourse and where they conspire with major news agencies to spin any information that slips through their tight controls. By the end of the first issue, we see the Squadron Supreme characters with a president who looks remarkably like George W. Here's how the series gets described in the opening text of the latest issue:

The Squadron Supreme is just that. Enlisted by the United States government to protect America's interests at home and abroad, this team of super-powered individuals has been trained to operate with extraordinary force and unified military precision. No quarter given, none asked. Secretly, however, it is comprised of a diverse group of individuals with separate -- sometimes sinister -- agendas.

Straczynski, long noted for his thoughtful genre fiction, has turned a super hero team book, which could have been of the most generic kind, into an ongoing debate about the responsibilities of America as a superpower within a global society. This comic comes as close as any of the examples I'm going to discuss here to scenarios where superheroes battle terrorists but as it does so, it complicates any easy black and white interpretation of what is at stake in those conflicts.

The team's first real mission was to deal with the genocidal General John M'Butu, the dictator of the African province of Salawe, a man possessed by super powers of persuasion who uses them to save his own hide and to manipulate his citizens into keeping him in power. Having dispelled the threat posed by this evil monster, the team members are then confronted by a group of African superheroes who force them to think about their own roles in the conditions faced by the region. They learn that:

It was the Americans who armed M'Butu to rule Uganda, gave him money, told him they would turn a blind eye to any of the unfortunate necessities of war. It profits American interests to see Africa destabilized, lurching from one conflict to another, always fighting among ourselves. You see all of your I.T. work going to India. Nations trading in Chinese currency instead of dollars, Ireland as the new silicon valley, America cannot afford a peaceful, united Africa with a growing economy. But then your people discovered that M'Butu was special, that he had the power to do what they feared -- he could win. To win defeats the notion of continued strife. He could become a power that would rise to challenge you.

They tell the superheroes that they have been yet another pawn in an international struggle and that they could have done nothing constructive in Africa since they are implicated in the systems and practices that continue to destabilize that part of the world. It is a perspective on America's role in the developing world that is rarely shown anywhere in our media -- let alone in a Marvel comic book.

Their second mission takes this critique of American foreign policy even further: the team is sent to dispatch insurgents in an unspecified middle eastern country and here, we see American superheroes literally wipe the desert with Arab military men. Emil Burbank, perhaps the most brutal and amoral member of the team, commits atrocities, slaughtering men who have already surrendered in violation of the Geneva Accords and frags his own attaché when he questions his actions. What follows is a thoughtful debate about what happens when one country becomes so powerful that it faces no meaningful resistance from its enemies. Blur, the African-American counterpart of the Flash, has serious questions about what has happened: "Doesn't what we're doing here bother anybody other than me? I mean, those guys we're fighting don't even have a chance. Does that seem right to anybody?" And Burbank sneers back:

If you want to give them a chance to kill you, all you have to do is slow down. War is always predicated upon who has the best toys. Did the native Americans have a chance against the greater technology the settlers brought with them from the old world....War is the implementation of policy by other means. We are that means...We can cut a swath across any country, same as we're doing right here.

Burbank, however, has little interest in simply submitting to any governmental authority -- including the agency which employs him -- speculating on what would stop such super powers from dominating the world. The others are horrified by this blunt assertion of their power -- power which is unrestrained by any greater civic responsibility. Yet it is pretty clear that Straczynski intends Burbank to stand in for the unilateralism in our current national policy. While the book stops short of pure agitprop, it does seem to be using superheroes to invite us to think about what it means for America to be a superpower that inserts itself into world-wide conflicts and demonstrates a power unrivaled by any other country.

I will be back soon with what I expect will be the final installment of this series, dealing with the current Civil War plotline, which is reshaping the Marvel universe this summer and reflecting on the shared themes across all four of these books.

Four Ways to Kill MySpace....

It's been a bad week -- make that, a really really bad few weeks -- for MySpace, for supporters of participatory culture, indeed for anyone who cares about civil liberties. MySpace is being hit on all sides and it remains to be seen which -- if any -- of these blows do lasting damage to its status as an important social networking site. 1. The Dopes in Washington:

By now, most of you who read this blog will have heard that the U.S. House of Representatives has passed Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) by an overwhelming 410-15 majority last week and the aptly named law now moves to the U.S. Senate, where it is also expected to pass. A growing number of Library and civil liberty organizations have come out in opposition to the law. Here's what the President of the American Library Association Leslie Burger had to say about the legislation:

This unnecessary and overly broad legislation will hinder students' ability to engage in distance learning and block library computer users from accessing a wide array of essential Internet applications including instant messaging, email, wikis and blogs....Under DOPA, people who use library and school computers as their primary conduits to the Internet will be unfairly blocked from accessing some of the web's most powerful emerging technologies and learning applications. As libraries are already required to block content that is "harmful to minors" under the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), DOPA is redundant and unnecessary legislation."

danah boyd and I co-authored a public statement describing some of the reasons why we think this is a really bad piece of legislation earlier this summer. It's hard to know what more I can tell you now that I didn't say then. So if you haven't read our statement, take time to read it. Go ahead -- we'll wait for you to catch up.

Keep in mind that I believe the following: Statistically speaking, children are more at risk from sexual predators at a church picnic or Boy Scout camping trip than they are when they go onto MySpace. The greatest risk of sexual abuse comes from people the kid already knows -- a family member or someone who the family knows and trusts and not from a total stranger. Social network sites are important vehicles for youth community life -- offering a way for kids at risk, kids who are socially isolated, to connect with a larger community which shares their same interests.

MySpace has emerged as an important site for youth activisim -- having played an important role in rallying young people during recent protests about immigration issues, for example.

Or consider the following. Social networking skills are key competencies which are going to be increasingly central to the professional life of adults. We want to make sure that every kid in America acquires these skills. The DOPA would have two consequences: it would actively discourage teachers from incorporating such software and the skills related to them into their pedagogy (even though a growing number of educators are using such tools in meaningful and responsible ways) and it would lock out low income kids from whom schools and public libraries are their only point of access to the online world, further exaggerating the gap between the digital haves and have nots.

But, ignore all of that. Let's for the moment imagine that we think MySpace is a really dangerous place where kids are at risk. Wouldn't you think young people would be safer if teachers and librarians taught them about the responsible use of this technology and offered them some minimal supervision and advice rather than locking the door and leaving kids to confront social network sites on their own. I ask you: Is this really about "protecting" kids from risk or is there something else at stake here for the promoters of this bill?

Of course, all of this assumes that the legislators who passed this bill have a clue what a social networking site is or how it is used other than having heard from some sensationalistic news report that blocking MySpace will look like they are doing something to protect young people from sexual predators.

This isn't a liberal/conservative, red-state/blue-state kind of issue, people. What's at stake here is a fundamental question of free association and expression which should concern every American citizen. For this bill to have passed by such a large margin of votes, it has to have had the support of a significant number of Liberal Democrats who want to take the Joseph Lieberman-Hillary Clinton route -- trying to appease their social and cultural conservative constituents by going after what they see as low hanging fruit. They can take away the rights of young people to assemble in cyberspace because young people aren't likely to vote in the next election.

All I can say is that on an average day, this site gets well over a thousand readers. If each of you who lived in the United States took ten minutes to e-mail your Senators and tell them that you vote and you care about DOPA, it could make a difference.

2. Preying on the Young: Remember several years ago when the U.S. Military announced that it was going to pour a good deal of money into the development of America's Army at about the same time that the Senate Commerce Committee was listening to former West Point instructor David Grossman tell them that playing video games was teaching young people to kill? Well, it's happening again. Congress, in its wisdom, seeks to protect young people from online predators who might violate their innocence, we learn that there is a concerted effort by military recruiters to use MySpace to coax young people into signing up for military service. Here's how the Associated Press reported the story:

Teens looking to hook up with a friend on the popular Web community MySpace may bump into an unexpected buddy: the U.S. Marine Corps.

So far, over 12,000 Web surfers have signed on as friends of the Corps in response to the latest military recruiting tactic. Other military branches may follow....

The Marine Corps MySpace profile - featuring streaming video of barking drill sergeants, fresh recruits enduring boot camp and Marines storming beaches - underscores the growing importance of the Internet to advertisers as a medium for reaching America's youth.

"That's definitely the new wave," said Gunnery Sgt. Brian Lancioni at a Hawaii recruiting event. "Everything's technical with these kids, and the Internet is a great way to show what the Marine Corps has to offer."...

It is where prospects are," said Louise Eaton, media and Web chief for the U.S. Army Accession Command. "We go to where they are to try to inform them of the opportunities we offer."...

Steve Morse with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors is critical of recruiters using MySpace profiles. But Morse said they don't surprise him because the Iraq war has forced the military to search "under every bush" for recruits.

"It's kind of obnoxious of them to be using something that's sort of like a youth domain, to kind of come in and really sucker youth into something they're not really explaining fully," Morse said.

Of course, if DOPA is passed, then this will cut large number of low income students from participating in MySpace. Given that military recruiters have historically targeted low income youth, the government may be working at cross purposes here. Just a thought...

Before people come flaming me: I do realize that many people sign up for military service out of a deep sense of patriotism and public service. I have nothing but praise for anyone who chooses to serve their country in this fashion. However, it is also pretty clear that some military recruiters exploit economic desperation to try to sign up low income kids who might otherwise not have chosen to join the armed services. And that's where my concern about their use of MySpace enters the picture.

3. Boring From Within: Earlier this summer, Wired reported on the following incident:

After hearing Sen. Ted Stevens' now infamous description of the internet as a "series of tubes," Andrew Raff sang the senator's words over a folksy ditty and anonymously posted it to MySpace.com, where about 2,500 people listened to the tune, thanks to a link from one of the net's top blogs.

On Tuesday, MySpace canceled the TedStevensFanClub account, telling Raff that the social-networking site, now owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., had received a "credible complaint of your violation of the MySpace Terms of Services."

(Editor's note: MySpace reinstated Raff's account Thursday afternoon following publication of this story. The company says Raff's account was deleted in error.)

The cancellation e-mail referenced a number of prohibited activities, including trademark and copyright violations. MySpace also reserves the right to remove any profile for any reason.

But Raff, a recent graduate from law school, didn't violate any copyright laws in using the Alaskan senator's words, since government works cannot be protected by copyright. And Raff composed the music himself.

Raff doesn't contest MySpace's right to enforce its terms of service, but he sees a political lesson in the takedown -- a foreshadowing of the kind of repression of speech that could become commonplace if phone companies prevail in their efforts to create a two-tiered internet. In an e-mail interview, he also questioned MySpace's motives in removing his political commentary from the site.

"I'm not at all upset about MySpace taking the page down -- just curious as to why," he wrote. "I have yet to receive a reply to my inquiry as to why this account was deleted.... I am very curious about the reasons why they took this down -- if it is a case of extreme caution with regards to copyright or whether it is the result of some

other influence (perhaps even good taste)."

Art Brodsky, communications director for Public Knowledge, questioned the timing of the takedown, noting that News Corp. has interests in the telecommunications bill put forth by the Senate Commerce Committee that Stevens heads, and that some in Congress are looking to regulate MySpace over concerns about pedophiles.

"Of all the God-knows-how-many separate postings on MySpace, this one was singled out," Brodsky said. "You can't fill out an online form to get something deleted; somebody had to make a specific call on that specific song. Given all that has been happening with Stevens -- he was on The Daily Show last night and all the writing we have been doing -- I just have a very skeptical view of coincidence."

So, at the very moment that civil libertarians, myself among them, are rallying to protect MySpace from unwarranted government regulation and censorship, the folks who run MySpace may be exercising political censorship on one of their participants. Keep in mind that participatory culture can be destroyed from within just as readily as it can be destroyed from without. It is worth keeping in mind that while sites like MySpace do share some attributes of the public sphere (in that they allow like-minded individuals to identify themselves, form communities, and circulate ideas), they also are more like shopping malls (where owners can restrict political activities) than they are like public commons (which theoretically respect our rights to assemble and speak.)

4. Whatever...

It used to be said that by the time a cultural phenomenon has reached Time, Newsweek or USA Today, it is no longer cool. By the time one of these publications report that you are no longer cool, your life is pretty much over. The following was in USA Today earlier this week and probably represents the final nail in MySpace's coffin:

Is MySpace losing its cool? Margaret Marks, 17, thinks so.

The Birmingham, Ala., high school senior was an avid user of the No. 1 social networking website for two years.

"But I never use it anymore, because most people my age now use Facebook," she says. "I can talk to people I haven't spoken to in years, and you can join college networks and meet people. MySpace is good for looking at bands and music, but for your own website, Facebook is much better."

USA Today reports that there are more than 200 different social network sites, all grabbing for a segment of MySpace's market, with many of them serving more niche subsets of the larger teen population. That said, the newspaper acknowledges that MySpace can lose an awful lot of customers before it loses dominance in this space: it currently attracts 81 percent of those people who use social networking sites. (Of course, all of those other social network sites will also be effected if DOPA becomes law.)

USA Today can't resist jumping on the DOPA bandwagon though, tossing off in the middle of an article otherwise concerned with youth engagement with social networking the following:

To deter predators, the House late Monday overwhelmingly passed a bill that would keep libraries and schools from allowing children to access social networking sites, as well as chat rooms. It now goes to the Senate.

Let's see if this statement might even remotely make sense if we rephrased it in response to another medium:

To prevent false advertising, the House late Monday overwhelmingly passed a bill that would keep libraries and schools from allowing Americans to read magazines and newspapers.

Nope, I didn't think so.

How about this one:

To deter pornographers, the House late Monday overwhelmingly passed a bill that would keep libraries and schools from providing books, magazines, and other printed matter to their patrons.

Hmm. Funny, that one doesn't make a lot of sense either.

National Politics within Virtual Game Worlds: The Case of China

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

NetEase and FWJ

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

The Incident

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

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

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

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

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

Link

The Rising Sun?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link

The Protest March

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

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

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

Games in China

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

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

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

The Digital Generation in China

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regulating Game Play

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

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

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

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

Link

Transforming Game Culture in China

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Protest in Game Worlds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ivan Went to Comicon and All I Got Was This Lousy Photograph of T-Shirts

The title says it all. I've been wanting to go to Comicon for years now but once again, I didn't get to go. I sent Comparative Media Studies graduate student Ivan Askwith to be my eyes and ears at this event. This is the first of an unspecified number of blog posts he's writing about his experiences there.

Here's what he had to report:

Since this was the first year that I've been able to attend ComicCon, I have no strong basis of comparison to describe how the event has changed over time.

From the "Copy Points" briefing I was given at the press registration table, I can tell you that:

- This year marked the 37th annual ComicCon

- ComicCon is the largest comic book and pop culture event in North America

- ComicCon 2006 featured over 600 hours of programming and discussion panels.

- The first ComicCon drew together 300 attendees in the basement of a San Diego hotel.

- The 2005 ComicCon drew about 104,000 attendees.

- The largest presentation hall is a converted exhibit hall which seats 6,500 people.

Since I was attending on Henry's behalf, however, I was interested in seeing how ComicCon might illustrate some of the themes and trends addressed in the forthcoming Convergence Culture. As anyone who has been to ComicCon could tell you, I wasn't disappointed: over three days, I spent more than 40 hours talking with fans, attending panel discussions and content previews, browsing a massive hall packed with more collectible merchandise than I could have imagined, and chatting with reps from some of the most popular exhibition booths.

Trade press estimates suggest that more than 140,000 people attended this year's Con.

So after three exhausting days, and almost a week to reflect and recuperate, let me share a few of my most significant observations and conclusions from attending the San Diego ComicCon.

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As I've already mentioned, this was my first time at ComicCon, so I'm not in the best position to describe how the event has changed, in tone or content, since it began in 1970.

If I were going to speculate, however, I'd guess that ComicCon began as a fan-centric event, an annual cult gathering where fans could engage and interact with other fans from around the world who shared their particular passion, while meeting some of the artists or creative minds responsible for their objects of appreciation.

Thirty-seven years later, it has turned into something quite different: above all, ComicCon struck me as a perfect setting for Hollywood cool hunters seeking "the next big [marketable] thing," and for entertainment marketers trying to create the diehard fan base needed to make their products the next big thing. More on this in a moment.

Watching people move around the floor in the Convention Center, it was relatively easy to break the attendees into a few distinct (but by no means comprehensive or exclusive) categories:

Most obvious are the spectators, most of them presumably from the San Diego area, who attend for the pure spectacle of the event, but don't demonstrate a strong affiliation with any of the properties or franchises present. For spectators, the panels and exhibitors are fun, but the real draw of the event seems to be the general craziness of the most committed fans and attendees. Spectators don't tend to seek out any particular booth or scheduled event; instead, they mostly wander the floor -- often with children or significant others in tow -- stopping to stand in line only if there's a hot piece of free swag waiting at the front of it.

Then there are the casual enthusiasts, fans who are familiar with (and vocally appreciative of) several shows, comics, or characters. Enthusiasts might wear clothes with affiliation logos on them, but they won't be in full costume -- which is to say that enthusiasts are fans who demonstrate a socially acceptable level of enthusiasm about the objects of their fandom. They might have all of the issues of a particular comic, or own all of the DVDs for a particular show, and their friends might even roll their eyes when they advocate on behalf of their fandom, but by and large, enthusiasts still consider themselves "normal."

And then, of course, there are the hardcore fans. These are the fans who have an obsessive level of knowledge about their active fandoms; who immediately recognize the usually anonymous producers, writers, colorists and illustrators responsible for their favorite shows or comics; who dress up in elaborate handmade costumes, often in small clans; who will get in line at 4 AM to secure front-row seats to an hour-long panel held at 2 PM; who are often extremely vocal in their appreciation or enthusiasm , and so knowledgeable in arcane details that the creators of their obsessions sometimes seem alarmed.

At their most extreme, these are the fans that William Shatner was thinking of when he told an audience member at a Star Trek Convention that he should "get a life" -- but as many marketers have started to learn, the hardcore fan minority can also be the difference between the success and failure of new properties.

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This brings us back to the Convention itself, and my initial suspicion that there has been a discernible shift in ComicCon's function over the last several years.

The most obvious manifestation of this shift is in the event schedule itself: while many of the smaller panel discussions still feature independent artists, fan-favorite illustrators, and small time cult creators, the largest sessions -- held in auditoriums with capacities ranging from 2000-6500 -- are now showcase sales pitches from the major film studios, comics distributors, publishers and television networks.

The traditional notion of ComicCon as a gathering for pale-skinned geeks and science-fiction nerds seems to be crumbling, giving way to a new notion of ComicCon as a giant pitch session, where marketers and celebrities court the often-skeptical fan market in an attempt to win their approval and support.

Or, to place this in the larger context of Henry's work on convergence: culture producers have finally started to grasp the vital role of fans as a central engine in the new entertainment economy.

Getting Serious About Games...

Hi, guys. You were probably expecting the third installment of my comic book foreign policy series. Sorry. I've fallen behind this weekend and it's going to take me a few more days to pull that together. I decided it was better to do it right than to do it quick. Part of what has me distracted is that Convergence Culture is finally out. And trust me, a new book provides its own distractions. If you are one of the people who've bought the book already, thanks. I look forward to hearing your reactions. If you have questions you'd like to explore, send them to me at henry3@mit.edu and I wil try to cluster them and address them through the blog.

Today, I am sharing with you some thoughts about Serious Games that I wrote Morph, the Media Center Blog late last week. I figure few of you would have seen it there.

I wanted to take this opportunity to respond to Clive Thompson's recent article from the New York Time's art section focused on the serious game movement.

Why Now?

Why are serious games happening now? When I spoke with Clive for the story, I identified a range of factors that were all contributing to the emergence of serious games:

1. The generation that grew up playing computer games in the 1980s are now entering adult responsibilities. They are the ones who are taking on roles as parents, teachers, workers for nonprofits and foundations, and so forth. They have a real appreciation of what has captivated them about this medium; they want to find a way to connect with it through their jobs; and they want to use its power to deliver their messages.

2. There has been a growing body of research suggesting that games may indeed represent a powerful instructional medium; there is also clear signs that the ability to interpret and manipulate simulations is going to be a central skill across a range of academic disciplines.

3. There has been a growth of games studies programs at colleges and universities that are seeking ways to give their students real-world experience conceptualizing, designing, making, and testing games. Historically, university based research explores the roads not taken, taking risks on projects that would not thrive within a commercial environment. So, they are turning their attention towards the development of games that serve pro-social purposes or that document aspects of the real world.

4. A small number of games publishers dominate the entertainment market. Small start up companies realize that they can't compete directly with the Electronic Arts of the world and they have to direct their energies elsewhere. At the moment, their best routes forward come from casual games, mobile games, or serious games.

5. As I suggested in my blog recently, there has also been a political debate about whether games constitute a meaningful form of expression and are therefore protected under the First Amendment. Many of us who work in Serious Games have been looking for ways to expand the rhetorical capacity of the medium in response to moral reformers and judges who have dismissed the concept that games might be a vehicle for exploring ideas.

The serious games movement lies at the intersection of these five factors and often takes shape through collaborations amongst the various groups identified above -- educators, policy makers, nonprofits, foundations, educational reformers, university based training programs, and political activists. Working separately and together, they have begun to develop games that demonstrate some of the far-reaching potential of this medium and working together they have begun to bring those games -- in some cases, simply playable prototypes -- to the attention of the larger public. The serious games movement reflects the idea that a medium can serve many functions and that restricting games to purely an entertainment medium seriously undersells its potential.

An Oxymoron?

The term, serious games, may strike some as an oxymoron. Others worry that in turning real world issues into games, one somehow trivializes the subject matter. Both are somewhat misleading. We accept that films, which are most often an entertainment form, may also serve raise awareness of serious social issues. Games are no different -- though we have to shed our somewhat narrow assumptions about what the medium can do. Part of the problem is that we associate games with fun and in a culture still shaped by its puritan past, fun is seen as the opposite of work or of education.

Instead, serious games advocates prefer to use the concept of engagement. After all, much of the time when we are playing a challenging game, we aren't exactly having fun. It can sometimes be a lot of hard or boring work to push ourselves to the next level. (The same, after all, would be true for other recreational activities, such as playing on a sports team). What makes people continue past the pain or boredom is the fact that they are engaged in a compelling and well defined task. I can be engaged by my work as a professional. I was engaged by my work as a student. Most of us wish our work was more engaging. Games simply transform the process of mastering knowledge or interpreting data into a more engaging activity in part by establishing clearly defined goals and roles.

Roles and Goals

As one of the founders of the MIT Education Arcade, a group that over the past five plus years has been focused on prototyping games for learning, we discovered early on that when we wanted to transform a textbook subject into a game, the first question we had to ask experts in that area was what the information allowed you do. This is a question that rarely gets asked in most traditional education. It's considered bad manners to ask an instructor about the use value of what they are teaching you within most academic disciplines. Yet, games take knowledge which is inert on the page and encourage us to act upon it, to do something with it.

As David Schaffer, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has suggested, it is by acting on that knowledge that we learn certain epistemologies -- certain ways of thinking that are specific to the applied versions of the disciplines we learn in school. We learn to think like a historian, a city planner, or a conflict negotiator. We learn to tackle problems of political redistricting or resource management. By taking on those roles, working with complex simulation and visualization tools, solving problems, confronting challenges, and testing one's ideas through action, one refines one's mental models of the world. This is part of what excites us about the idea of games as a pedagogical medium.

Games may teach us by inviting us to step outside the world and manipulate it like a god -- as is the case with the large number of simulation games, the genre most widely represented within the serious games movement. But games may also invite us inside the characters -- as the old expression goes, we get to walk a mile in their moccasins -- as happens with various role-playing games. One of our primary projects at the Education Arcade was a modestly multiplayer game world, Revolution, where participants assumed the roles of townspeople in Colonial Williamsburg in 1775. They went about their work and family life but they also struggled with some the events and dates that paved the way for rebellion against the crown. Testing this game with players, we asked them to write journals describing their experiences from their character's point of view. What we found was that the students produced a synthesis of information gained through previous history lessons, their own introspections about what it would be to occupy a particular role in society, and their observations of what happened during the game. In some cases, they made powerful discoveries about themselves and the world. One girl, for example, was playing a Loyalist character and went to a political rally where redcoats opened fire on the crowd; her character was killed and this, more than anything else, brought home the nature of political violence -- the sense that there are no bystanders at a riot or a massacre and that once the shooting starts, it may no longer matter what side you were on.

Evaluating Our Work

Clive Thompson introduced a note of skepticism from me and other serious games advocates in the story so it is worth taking a moment to clarify what I was saying. I am fully convinced of the educational value of games. I think many kids already have powerful learning experiences working with existing commercial games. I think we can harness that power to produce even more effective resources for teaching and learning if we bring together expertise on pedagogy with the artistic craft of good game design. These games need to be measured in part by the same criteria we would use to measure any documentary or art film -- do they make people think? do they make expressive use of the media? do they deal with the world with all of its complexity and nuance? Or are they simple minded, pedantic, and propagandistic? These are aesthetic judgments. But the reality is that the people who are pouring money into serious games want results. The educational system demands assessment data. Governments and foundations demand proof that they have made valuable investments and not throw away their money. And if we are not able to produce some concrete results that can be traced back to games-based learning, then some of that funding is going to dry up. At the same time, the small games companies need to show proof to school systems if they are going to adopt their products or to parents if they are going to bring them into their homes. And if they can't convince people to try their products, those companies will not be around tomorrow. My comments were not intended as skepticism about the concept of serious games per se. They were intended to describe the reality that we are all working in as we try to make the case that games can be made to serve serious purposes.

Some people have questioned whether games can adequately represent the complexity of human experience. That's a legitimate question. Let's keep in mind that games are representations. They necessarily distort somethings even as they make other things much clearer to the learner. The same is true of all other systems of representations, including those that we take for granted as part of the educational process -- such as maps, charts, diagrams, dioramas, and the like. The difference is that schools put some time into teaching children to read maps -- less than would be ideal but they at least give lip service to doing so. We should not be using games in schools if we are not prepared to teach children to understand how games represent the reality and how to evaluate the credibility of a game's simulation. Some of the most interesting work right now isn't going to develop serious games; it is going into teaching children how to design and develop their own games or into developing tool kits that will put robust simulation tools into the hands of everyday people. This is where the work on serious games starts to intersect our larger conversation about participatory culture.

As more and more people learn how to make games, games will emerge as yet another form of grassroots media. People will use them to explore a broad range of perspectives on a broad range of issues. And we will see political debates staged not simply within games but between different games that have different biases and positions

Comic Book Foreign Policy? Part Two

Responding to recent essays in The American Prospect and Comics Journal which link comic books to the Bush Administration's foreign policy, I have been running some segments from an essay I published in the recent book, Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11. about the ways the comics industry responded to 9/11. A central theme here is to suggest that the representation of the War on Terror in American mainstream comics has been more ambivalent and complicated than most people who don't read comics might have imagined. While there have been some images of superheroes bopping terrorists, there have been fewer of these images that you might imagine. Yesterday, I walked through the tribute books produced immediately after the attack on the World Trade Center and the ways that Spider-man, Superman, and Captain America were used as vehicles to ask some hard questions about the costs of war. Today, I want to pick up where I left off with some reflections on the shift in the conception of the heroic in comics during the immediate post-9/11 period.

Rethinking the Hero After 9/11

Building on public interest in emergency workers, Marvel launched three new titles - The Precinct about cops, The Brotherhood about firemen, and the Wagon about an ambulance driver - which collectively formed the Call of Duty series. Lest anyone miss the point, "911" was embedded in their logos. Of these new series, The Brotherhood was the most fully grounded in ethnographic detail -- the tools of the trade, the hazards of putting out blazes, and the comradery of the firehouse. The opening issue makes vivid use of reds, oranges, and yellows, bringing us into the perspective of a firefighter making his way through a burning building in search of survivors. The stories construct these characters with surprising nuance and realism, dealing with their frazzled finances, their estranged relationships, their professional disillusionment, and their depression after watching so many friends die at the WTC. The interweaving of the characters and plots across the three series proved an effective means of examining the collaboration between police, fire, and medical workers. Yet, Marvel never fully trusted itself to build reader interest in ordinary heroes, adding supernatural and science fiction elements to the mix. The characters confront the ghostly figure of a young girl who has been sent back in time by her grieving father to warn of a forthcoming terrorist attack on the Statue of Liberty that had claimed the lives of his wife and sons. They also must deal with a strange cult that distributes what one character calls "cellular napalm," turning junkies into human bombs that can be detonated on demand.

Searching for a different kind of hero, Paul Chadwick's "Sacrifice" documents what we know about the uprising on the Pennsylvania flight. Chadwick takes us behind the scenes showing us images that couldn't be seen on television, but could only be reconstructed after the fact. We watch the passengers compile information from their cell phone conversations, hatched a plan, and give their lives trying to insure that the plane never reached its target. Chadwick shows us knife blades slashing through the seat cushions the passengers use as shields and the struggle in the cockpit as they overpower the highjackers. Chadwick often uses his self-published comics, which deal with a self-doubting superhero, Concrete, as vehicles for exploring what communities can accomplish when they work towards a common cause. One of Chadwick's earlier Concrete stories had offered a painfully complex account of environmental terrorism, questioning the human costs of spiking trees but ultimately not rejecting such tactics. Here, he celebrates the passengers' willingness to sacrifice their own lives rather than allow innocents to suffer, a trait that distinguishes them from the terrorists they defeat.

What Chadwick takes several pages to do, Marvel's Igor Kordey accomplishes in a single image. Kordey was born in Croatia and fought in the Balkan wars, before moving to Canada with his wife and children, hoping to escape the destruction he had seen around him. Kordey was the only artist in Heroes who directly depicts the terrorists and he chose to do so in a morally complex fashion. As Quesada explained, "He knows what it's like to live in war, and he doesn't want to sweep anything under the carpet." The image is framed over the shoulders of the panic-striking terrorists who are clustered together as passengers come storming up the aisles. It is a haunting image because Kordey invites us to see the events from the terrorist's perspectives and encourages us to dwell for a moment on their vulnerability and humanity.

Why Comics Matter...

Utopian rhetoric can seem, on first blush, naïve, yet what it establishes is a set of ideals or standards against which the limits of the present moment can be mapped and a set of blueprints through which a future political culture might be constructed. In this process, the comics are perhaps little more than a relay system, communicating messages from one community to another, taking ideas out of the counterculture and transmitting them into the mainstream. We can see this process occurring in several stages - first, the movement of ideas from counterculture into comics-culture (itself fringe, but defined around patterns of consumption rather than political ideologies). Here, the fusion of alternative and mainstream publishers meant ideas that once circulated among the most politically committed now reach readers who would not otherwise have encountered them. As such, these comics do important cultural work, translating the abstract categories of political debate and cultural theory into vivid and emotionally compelling images.

As the market responds to these ideas, they become more deeply embedded within the genres that constitute the bulk of contemporary comics publishing. Much as the depression, the Second War II, and Vietnam left lasting imprints on the superhero genres, giving rise to new characters, plots, and themes which were mined by subsequent generations, September 11 shows signs of altering the way the genre operates. As I am writing this essay (Late 2002), the tribute books have just now moved into the remainder bins at my local comics shop and every month seems to bring new projects which in one way or another have been shaped by the political climate of Post-9/11 America. The comics industry still seems to be engaged in an extended process of self-examination, still questioning their longstanding genre traditions, pondering the nature of the heroic and of evil, reinventing their hero's missions for a new political landscape, and trying to figure out how to absorb the realism and topicality of alternative comics into mainstream entertainment. Some titles, like Captain America, are permanently altered. Cassaday and Reiber are still circling around issues of guilt and responsibility. A new miniseries, Truth, uses Captain America to re-examine the racism that shaped the experience of American GIs during World War II, suggesting eerie parallels between the "super soldier" serum tests that created Captain America and the experiments at Tuskegee Institute; and includes the astonishing image of the American army systematically slaughtering hundreds of African-Americans in order to protect their secrets. Other books have gone back to business as usual. In The Ultimates, Captain America, Giant Man, Wasp Woman, and Thor smash half of Manhattan, demolishing Grand Central Station, all because Bruce Banner turns into the Hulk when he gets jealous that his girlfriend was going out with Freddie Prince Jr. One would describe the book as totally untouched by 9/11 if the artist didn't draw so heavily on what we had learned about what happens when real world skyscrapers come crashing down. These shifts do not need to be uniformly felt across all comics to make a difference. Not all superhero comics -- not even all mainstream titles -- embrace the same ideologies, tell the same stories, and represent the world in the same terms. But, enough creative artists from enough different sectors of the industry have been impacted by September 11 that these influences will be felt across a range of different titles for some time to come.

The long-term impact of September 11 can also be seen in the emergence of new comic book series that celebrate the heroism of average citizens. For example, Warren Ellis's Global Frequency, which Wildstorm, a smaller independent press, launched in Fall 2002, depicts a multiracial, multinational organization of ordinary people who contribute their services on an ad hoc basis. Ellis rejects the mighty demigods and elite groups of the superhero tradition and instead depicts the twenty-first century equivalent of a volunteer fire department. Ellis has stated that the series grew out of his frustration with the hunger for paternalism expressed by superhero fans in the wake of September 11, his pride in the civilian resistance aboard the Pensylvania-bound aircraft, and his fascination with the emerging concept of the "smart mob" - a self-organized group who use the resources of information technology to coordinate their decentralized actions. As Ellis explains, "Global Frequency is about us saving ourselves." Each issue focuses on a different set of characters in a different location, examining what it means for Global Frequency members personally and professionally to contribute their labor to a cause larger than themselves. Once they are called into action, most of the key decisions get made on site as the volunteers act on localized knowledge. Most of the challenges come, appropriately enough, from the debris left behind by the collapse of the military-industrial complex and the end of the cold war--"The bad mad things in the dark that the public never found out about." In other words, the citizen solders use distributed knowledge to overcome the dangers of government secrecy.

The next step is what happens if and when these changes get absorbed into the mainstream of the entertainment industry. Comics function today as a testing ground for new themes and stories for the rest of mass media. Hollywood or network television are not likely to absorb the specific stories which emerged in the immediate aftermath of September 11, but in so far as those changes get felt in the underlying logic through which the comic book industry operates, in so far as those changes get institutionalized within the conventions of the superhero genre, then they will likely have an influence on the films and television series that emerge over the next few years. One could, for example, compare this reassessment of the heroic in comics to the revision of the superhero genre which took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s, resulting in a darker, more angsty, more psychologically complex, more physically vulnerable conception of the hero. This rethinking of the superhero impacted not only future comic books but can be seen at work, albeit in a somewhat watered down form, in the big screen adaptations of Batman, Spiderman, and Daredevil. There, the influence is apt to be more implicit than explicit, a shift in tone or the "structure of feeling" as much or more than a shift in ideology.

Let's be clear, though, that superheroes don't have to conquer the world for the political expressions we've discussed here to make a difference. What they do in their own space, in their own communities, matters. Popular culture is the space of dreams, fantasies, and emotions. In that space, it matters enormously whether Captain America stands for fascism or democracy, whether Wonder Woman represents the strong arm of American cultural imperialism or whether she respects and understands third world critiques of her mission, whether Superman is more important than the average men and women who are accidental casualties of his power struggles, or whether everyday people have the power to solve their problems without turning to superheroes for help. It is important to remember, from time to time, that popular culture is not univocal; that it remains a space of contestation and debate; that it often expresses messages which run counter to dominant sentiment within the culture; and that it often opens up space for imagining alternatives to the prevailing political realities. It is also worth remembering that people working within the cultural industries exert an active agency in shaping the ideas which circulate within popular culture and that on occasion, they may act out of political ideals rather than economic agendas.

Coming Soon: How current comics are dealing with the War on Terror

Comic Book Foreign Policy? Part One

The online edition of The American Prospect published an article comparing the Bush administration's current policy in the Middle East to comic books -- specifically, to the Green Lantern Corps. Here's what they had to say:

The trouble is that a broad swathe of hawkish opinion, taking in most conservatives and a tragically large number of liberals, have bought into a comic book view of how international relations works.

I refer, of course, to the Green Lantern Corps, DC Comics' interstellar police force assembled by the Guardians of Oa. Here's how the Corps works: Each member is equipped with a power ring, the ultimate weapon in the universe. The ring makes green stuff -- energy blasts, force fields, protective bubbles, giant hammers, elephants, chairs, cute rabbits, whatever -- under the control of the bearer. When it's fully charged, the only limits to the ring's power (besides the proviso that the stuff must be green) are the user's will and imagination. Historically, the rings couldn't affect yellow objects, but in recent years it's been revealed that this was the "parallax fear anomaly" (don't ask) and that the problem could be overcome by overcoming fear -- which is to say, with more willpower.

This is an OK premise for a comic book. Sadly, it's a piss-poor premise for a foreign policy.

Without getting into the specifics of Bush's current foreign policy (or for that matter, the current run of Green Lantern), this statement seems grossly unfair -- to comic books. I understand why Bush's world view full of its talk about capturing "evil-Doers" who are hell-bent on destroying the "American way of life" reminds some people of comic book superheroes -- it is colorful, broadly drawn, larger than life, and sometimes a little punch-drunk. But the reality is that contemporary comic books have offered a much more nuanced depiction of our current political realities and have adopted a pretty consistently progressive framing of these events than The American Prospect and its readers might imagine.

The American Prospect is not the only publication that has recently taken on comic books as a site for current foreign policy debates. Comics Journal (a publication which has never missed an opportunity to express criticism of mainstream comics) has been running a two part series by Michael Dean about the ways comics responded to 9/11 and its aftermath. You can see a small sample of what they have to say here:

The first part of this report noted a developing trend toward comics with a "superpatriotic" theme, setting square-jawed American heroes and superheroes on the trail of Osama bin Laden and other terrorists -- most notably Frank Miller's much-publicized plans for a Batman-versus-bin Laden showdown. Miller told the press that there was once again a need for the archetypal satisfactions of the classic 1940s wartime propaganda comic. The cover of Tightlip Entertainment's May-shipping comic, Freedom Three #1, is a recreation of the Captain America #1 cover showing the red-white-and-blue hero punching Hitler with Captain America replaced by one of the Freedom Three and bin Laden substituting for Hitler as the punchee. Fantasy tableaux of superheroic vengeance directed against demonic terrorist icons clearly offer a degree of gratification to comics readers today.

Dean does some interesting reporting here, arguing that ideas from conservative think tanks are finding their ways into some contemporary comics though his focus is on a small handful of examples that may not be representative of current industry practice as a whole. It is true, for example, that Marvel worked with former embedded journalist Karl Zinsmeister to produce Combat Zone: True Tales of GIs in Iraq, but that same publisher also launched a new 411 series which first hit the shelf in April 2003 even as American troops were marching into Baghdad. Taking its name from an old telecommunications code for information, the series expresses a belief that it is important to inform the public about alternatives to war and violence. As Marvel President Bill Jemas explained, "411 is about peacemakers: people who make sacrifices in the name of humanity. These are people willing to die to keep all of us - on all sides - alive... But the theme of sacrifice for the sake of peace, for the sake of all of humanity, is hard for many Americans to accept right now, with the hearts and minds of the body politics rising in a patriotic furor... These stories are neither anti-American nor anti-Iraqi, not anti-French, nor anti-Israeli. 411 is pro-human." Opening with an essay on "Understanding the Culture of Nonviolence" written by Mahanda Gandhi's grandson, the series included contributions by Tony Kushner (Angels in America), longtime anti-nuke activist Helen Caldicott and political cartoonist David Rees. Marvel's overt engagement with the antiwar movement was certainly rare among American corporations. How do we decide which book is more representative of Marvel's response to the War on Terror?

So, I think Dean may oversimplify a much more complex history of the ways that the comics industry has responded to American foreign policy since 9/11. As it happens, I recently published an essay on this topic, "Captain America Sheds His Mighty Tears," which can be found in the book, Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11. Here, I am going to lay out some of my key arguments from that essay. I will be back soon with an update suggesting how some more recent comics -- mainstream and midstream -- have tackled the long-term consequences of the war on terrorism upon American society.

Comics and War: A Brief History

The first thing that should strike anyone who has been reading mainstream comics over the past few years is how few of the kind of images Dean is describing we have actually seen. Witness the fact that he has to go to a bargain row publisher --Tightlip Entertainment -- to find an example extreme enough to illustrate his point.

Of course, we have to keep in mind that these images of superheros tackling the enemy were most common during World War II. Today, it is easy to read such images as simply hawkish and blood thirsty but read Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay book (one of my all time favorite novels), and you get a better sense of the cultural context in which those first wave of images were produced. Chabon suggests that the superheroes were, in a term which Joseph McCarthy would use against progressive, "prematurely antifascist." That is to say, they were battling Nazis before an isolationist country was ready to join the fight. And their early anti-Nazi stance reflected the significant number of Jewish writers, artists, and editors working in the comics book industry during that period.

Comics have shown a great deal more ambivalence towards other armed conflicts. One need only cite for example the dark and gloomy images of the Korean War found in Harvey Kurtzman's Two Fisted Tails or the thorough critique of American culture in the midst of the Vietnam War found in Neal Adam and Denny O'Neil's Green Lantern/Green Arrow series. It may be true that the most aggressive anti-war sentiments emerged through the underground comics of the 1960s which had split from the mainstream precisely so that they could be more outspoken in their critique of American society but we have seen in recent years a growing reintegration between mainstream and indie impulses in American comics, an integration that came to a head in the wake of 9/11. What follows are some excerpts from my published essay on this topic.

The Tribute Books

Post September 11, there were some remarkable collaborations between mainstream and alternative publishers which were only possible, because the artists, writers, and publishers knew each other, have worked together in the past, and had discovered compelling reasons to pool their efforts. Artists who have spent their lifetime producing superhero stories found themselves, for the first time in some cases, exploring autobiographical or real world themes, much as alternative comics creators were introducing new themes into the superhero genre.

We really cannot understand how American media responded to September 11 from an institutional perspective alone. This was deeply personal.

Manhattan has historically been the base of operations for the mainstream publishers. The corporate headquarters of DC and Marvel are within a few miles of ground zero. Some of their employees lost friends and family. Some found themselves, for whatever reason, in the general vicinity of the WTC as the towers collapsed. Marvel felt especially implicated since its stories had always been set in New York City, not some imaginary Metropolis. Captain America, Spiderman, Daredevil, The Fantastic Four live in brownstones or sky-rise apartments; they take the subway; they watch games at Yankee Stadium; they swing past the World Trade Center (or at least, they used to do so); they help out Mayor Giuliani.

These companies saw publishing comic books to raise money for the relief effort as "our way of lifting bricks and mortar" - using their skills and labor to make a difference. Marvel published a series of September 11 themed books, including Heroes, which billed itself "The World's Greatest Superhero Creators Honor the World's Greatest Heroes," and Moment of Silence, which featured more or less wordless stories depicting the real life experiences of people who gave their lives or miraculously survived the events of September 11. DC, joined forces with Dark Horse, Image, Chaos!, Oni, Top Shelf, and several other smaller presses to produce two volumes, 9-11: The World's Finest Comic Book Writers & Artists Tell Stories to Remember and the more modestly titled 9-11: Artists Respond.

Many of the alternative or independent comic artists also lived in or around Manhattan, participating in the New York underground arts scene. The Small Press Expo, one of the major showcases for alternative comics and a central source of their income, was being held in Bethesda and thus got caught up in the panic that hit Washington, DC following the Pentagon attack. Jeff Mason, publisher of Alternative Comics, organized a benefit project, 9-11: Emergency Relief, which brought together some of the top independent and underground comics artists. In all of these projects, the artists donated their time and labor; the printers donated ink and paper; the distributors waived their usual fees; and the publisher contributed their proceeds to groups like the Red Cross. Many comic shops and patrons saw purchasing these books as their way to show their support. Several New York galleries displayed and sold artwork from these projects. These projects drew tremendous interest from readers. On the chart of 2002 best-selling graphic novels, the 9-11 tribute books held first and second place, Emergency Relief held 20th position, and Marvel's Moment of Silence ranked 15th in the list of top-selling single issues for the year.

Comparing the goals editors set for these various projects suggests the very different ideological climates shaping mainstream and alternative comics. Here's Alternative Comics publisher Jeff Mason: "I am really shocked and dismayed by some of the rhetoric and behavior I've seen from some in the guise of patriotism and I think that a book that promotes an alternative to xenophobia and antagonism would be a good thing." And here's DC Publisher Paul Levitz: "We aspire to use comics to reach people; to tell tales of heroism and the ability of the human spirit to triumph over adversity; to extol the unique virtues of the American dream, and its inclusive way of life; to recall that the price of liberty is high." Levitz reaffirms what he sees as the American spirit, Mason critiques prevailing values and assumptions.

To some degree, those different political agendas are reflected in the books themselves, but less than one might imagine, since mainstream and alternative creators contributed to both projects and since most of the contents could be loosely described as progressive. A few of the submitted pieces are out and out reactionary: one of the Heroes posters depicts the Hulk, his green muscles bulging, waving an American flag as fighter jets fly overhead, bound for Afghanistan, with the slogan, "Strongest One There Is." Adopting a similar theme, Beau Smith imagines the thoughts of a Reservist, helping emergency workers today, off to fight tomorrow: "This isn't my grandfather's war. This is a war of rats. There's only one way to hunt rats that bite and then scurry off into dark holes. You send rat terriers into those holes after them, and they don't come out until all of the rats are dead. We are those rat terriers." Yet, these militaristic images might exist, side by side, with something like Pat Moriarity's caricature of Uncle Sam, praying on bent knee, "Dear God, Allah, supreme spaceman, great pumpkin, whoever you are - please stop the cycle of hatred!" One would be hard pressed to see such ideological diversity anywhere else in an increasingly polarized and partisan American media.

A Job For Superman?

Time's Andrew D. Arnold summarized concerns that dogged the various projects: "For some this will come across as a gross commodification and trivialization of an awesome, unspeakable tragedy. These characters are arguably more corporate icons than meaningful characters - like seeing Ronald McDonald and the Keebler Elves giving succor to victim's families." Often, Superman or Spiderman function as brand icons circulating with little or no narrative context, deployed in cross-promotions with fast food restaurants, amusement parks, soft drinks, and breakfast cereals. For those only peripherally aware of comics, this may be all they are. Yet, for regular readers, these characters have greater depth and resonance than almost any other figures in American popular culture. The most successful comic book franchises have been in more or less continuous publication since the 1930s and 1940s; their protagonists have become both vivid personalities with complex histories and powerful symbols with heavily encrusted meanings.

For some, superhero comics hark back to simpler times and get consumed as comfort food. Yet, several decades of revisionist comics have questioned and rethought the superhero myth and its underlying assumptions. Shortly after 9/11, Silver Age artist Jim Steranko offered a blistering rebuke of revisionist superhero creators, calling them "cultural terrorists" who had chipped away at national monuments until nothing of substance was left. The result was a flame war that almost ripped the comics community apart. Nobody ever made that same kind of emotional investment in the Keebler Elves.

As comic book artists and writers re-examined these familiar characters in the wake of September 11, they became powerful vehicles for re-examining America's place in the world. When, for example, Frank Miller depicts Captain America's shattered shield, which we once naively believed to be indestructible, he provides a powerful image of the ways the attacks had demolished America's sense of invincibility. When J. Michael Straczynski and John Romita Jr. depict Spiderman clutching a young boy who has just seen his father's body carried away from the WTC wreckage, they evoke Spiderman's own origins (where his unresolved guilt over the murder of his Uncle Ben motivates his endless war against crime). But he does more than that. It seems to be one of the great unwritten rules of comics that superheroes are orphans and that the moment of truth that makes or breaks them is the moment when their innocence is first violated. Most comic characters - good guys and villains - go through a crucible of pain and suffering; what matters is what they make of themselves in the face of adversity. Read through these genre conventions, the suffering child embodies the choices the nation must make as it works through its grief process and defines its mission for the future. When Straczynski and Romita depict Doc Octopus, Doctor Doom, or the Kingpin, lending their resources to the relief effort, they evoke real world political realignments and moral reawakening: "Even those we thought our enemies are here because some things surpass rivalries and borders." When Straczynski and Romita depict a perplexed Spiderman looking upon the pain-stricken Captain America, they connect the events of September 11 with a much larger history of struggles against fascism and terror. The two characters embody the perspectives of two different generations - Captain America, the product of the Second World War, Spiderman, a product of the early 1960s (though portrayed here as a contemporary teen and thus made to embody the current generation of youth).

Comic book artists rejected fisticuffs or vigilante justice in favor of depicting the superheroes as nurturers and healers. They are more likely to be standing tall against domestic racial violence than punching out terrorists. In a Static Shock story, Dwayne McDuffie depicts the African-American superhero and his girl friend sitting in a coffee shop, discussing when and where military response to the attacks might be justifiable. If he knew who was responsible, Static Shock says he might use his superpowers to "take the bastards out myself," but should one attack a nation for the actions of a few individuals. Using criminal mastermind Lex Luthor as an example, he asks, "What if to get Luthor I had to kill some of his family? Or some of the people who live nearby? Or not so near? There's a line there. I'm not sure where to draw it." Virgil doesn't trust himself to do the right thing and he trusts the government even less. The philosophical debate gets disrupted by flag-waving, baseball-bat yielding youth who smash through the shop's window and threaten its Arab-American owner: "Pearl Harbor yesterdays, Kristallnacht today." In a rhetorical move that mirrors the Popular Front's attempts to link Fascism abroad with struggles against segregation in the States, Static Shock learns that his fight isn't overseas but in his own community.

Geoff John's "A Burning Hate" uses superhero comics to defuse the tensions between native-born and immigrant school kids, reminding readers that DC's Justice League of America is full of "foreigners" - Superman from Metropolis, the Martian Manhunter, Wonder Woman from Paradise Island, and Aquaman from Atlantis. The superhero mythos was defined, in large part, by the sons of immigrants working through conflicting investments in assimilation and ethnic pride. DC Superheroes almost always come from elsewhere but they have chosen to be defenders of the American dream; sometimes they blend in, trying to pass as mild-mannered reporters, sometimes they stand out, wearing their colors on their chest.

Comic book artists, from Jack Kirby to Todd McFarland, love to draw splash-pages or whole books full of nothing but bone-crushing, muscle-stretching, building-shattering, fist-flying, slobber-knocking action. Troubled by that legacy, Superman: Day of Doom returns to one of the most controversial chapters in the genre's history - the much hyped death and resurrection of Superman following a world-shattering battle with Doomsday. In November 1992, DC had announced the death of Superman, only to bring him back from the dead some months later. Following September 11, DC asked its original author, Dan Jurgens, to revisit this landmark event in the Superman franchise. In the earlier story, the civilian populations had been simply extras in an epic battle between two superpowers. The Post-9/11 Day of Doom made their loss, fear, and suffering its focal point. Paralleling Jurgens's own reassessment of the earlier series, Daily Planet reporter Ty Duffy is assigned the task to write a report re-examining those traumatic events some years later. Publisher Perry White evokes the wide-spread assertion that September 11 took away the perception of America's indestructibility as he summarizes what Superman's death meant to Metropolis: "Superman had done so much. Conquered so many dangers... that we took him for granted. So long as he was around, I think we considered ourselves invincible. When he died, we all lost something precious...If a superman could die, how could any of us feel safe?" As the story continues, Duffy shifts his investigation away from the Man of Steel and onto the civilians who got caught in the crossfire. Clark Kent scans through old microfilms with tears in his eyes, realizing for the first time how many people died when Superman wasn't there. Yet, Kent is sobered up by a new threat that is terrorizing Metropolis - the "Remnant." A kind of crazed victims rights advocate or perhaps an embodiment of Kent's survivor guilt, The Remnant challenges Superman to justify his own existence when so many others have died: "I am the memory of what you did. A ghost of tragedies past. A remnant of the chaos you heaped upon the world... The drifting wind that hears the moans of the forgotten. I do this for them." Superman, like his readers, must confront the consequences of mass destruction and wrestle with the complex range of emotion it provokes.

What Would Captain America Do?

Captain America was probably the superhero title most directly impacted by 9/11. John Cassaday, the book's primary artist, was on the pier just blocks from his upper west side apartment when the towers fell: "The streets were gray, all covered in dust. So were the people. Gray like ghosts." These impressions inspired the comic book's style and imagery. The first pages of his post-9/11 story are sparse in text and drained of color. The opening image shows the shadow of an airplane flying across the clouds, then rows of passengers inside, and finally an extreme close-up of a box cutter blade: "It doesn't matter where you thought you were going today. You're part of the bomb now." The Cap first appears several pages later, a blurry figure making his way across a colorless wasteland. Cassaday under-saturates his costume as if we were looking at it through a cloud of dust. Only in the book's final moments, when Cap resolves to take his fight to the enemy, do we see anything like his familiar red, white, and blue. Cassaday does the entire comic in shades of gray and tan.

His collaborator, John Ney Rieber, almost pulled out of the project after September 11, wanting no part of jingoistic militarism. He agreed to continue only if he could use the book to ask some hard questions about America's culpability in bloodshed around the world: "I don't know how you could write Captain America if you weren't interested in writing about America. I feel very strongly that Cap should be about the rough questions.... If it weren't controversial, if it were only fulfilling people's expectations or making them comfortable - I'd feel as though I'd let Cap Down. I'd be ashamed." The resulting series sets up a strong contrast between its retro-style covers strongly influenced by World War II recruitment posters and the stories inside which interrogate such patriotic rhetoric. When his commander, Nick Fury, orders him to head for Kandahar he refuses, saying that he has responsibilities at home helping the relief effort and battling hate crimes. Captain America was, in effect, created by the U.S. military during the Second World War. Military research developed a super serum that turned a somewhat weakly recruit into a mighty fighting machine. As Cap explains, he's "military technology." He has spent his career following orders and fighting wars. Now, he refuses to go into the trenches until he has answers to the questions that haunt him. Fury urges him not to pursue his investigation, but Cap refuses: "I'm here to protect the people and the dream, not your secrets."

By the time the series gives the Cap someone he can fight, terrorists have taken command of a small town some 200 miles into the American heartland, strewing landmines in the streets and holding hostages in a church. Centerville is far from an innocent community; the factories where the men work make landmines and cluster bombs or as one man insists in the face of his wife's moral scrutiny, "component parts." Every attempt to draw a clear distinction between America's global mission and terrorism proves futile. When the Cap tells the terrorist leader that America doesn't make war on children, Al-Tarq points to the men under his command, "Tell our children, then, American, who sowed death in their fields and left it for the innocent to harvest? Who took their hands? Their feet?"

After recapturing Centerville, the Cap discovers that the terrorists are wearing a high tech identification system being implemented by S.H.I.E.L.D., the American special ops force. Echoing the real world relations between Bin Laden and the U.S. intelligence community, the American government may be more involved with these terrorists than it wants to admit. Clues force him to retrace his own steps, returning to Dresden where he had fought some of his first battles. As he wanders among what remains of the old section of the city, Cap ponders the firebombing that occurred here half a century earlier: "You didn't understand what we'd done here until September 11...These people weren't soldiers. They huddled in the dark. Trapped. While the fire raged above them." Rieber never allows him to escape his personal responsibility and political culpability for the horrific acts his government had executed. He has been their tool and their apologist; now, he must face the truth. The terrorist leader offers to turn himself over if he can answer a simple question: "Guerrillas gunned my father down while he was at work in the fields. With American bullets. American weapons. Where am I from? ...My mother was interrogated and shot. Our home was burned....You know your history, Captain America. Tell your monster where he's from." And it is clear from the Cap's pained expression that he recognizes that this story could be told over and over in countless parts of the world. He protests that these were the actions of a government that acted outside public knowledge and without democratic authorization. But, how could he be fighting to make the world safe for Democracy and defend a government that was hiding the truth from its own people? In the end, Captain America murders his antagonist in cold blood, recognizing as he does so that there is no way to wash his hands clean of his past actions.

MORE TO COME

Can One Be A Fan of High Art?

A Tale of Two Checkovs Some years ago, I co-authored a book called Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek with a British cultural studies researcher John Tulloch. We had interviewed different groups of consumers about their responses to Star Trek: The Next Generation and Doctor Who. In my own work on Star Trek fans, I focused on three core groups: the members of the mostly female fanzine writing community, a mostly male and highly technologically focused group of MIT students, and the members of the Gaylaxians, a group of Gay-Les-Bi-Trans fans who were interested in the show's social politics. Tulloch's work went back across several decades of interviews conducted on multiple continents and found a range of different thoughts and reflections on the series.

Then, Tulloch went on to another project that involved interviewing theatre goers at productions of Chekhov plays (the Russian playwright, not the classic Trek character). In our work on science fiction audiences, we found enormous variability in the ways that fans talked about their favorite series. For example, asked about the characters one by one, most of the MIT students defined them as autonomous problem-solvers, whereas most of the female fans read them as part of a social network with the other characters.

When Tulloch applied these same methods to talk to theatre patrons, however, he found much less variation in the ways they talked about the work they had just seen. Most of them fell back on a handful of things they had learned about the playwright in school or the kinds of insights that are most often to be found in the Cliff Notes style study guides to classic literature.

It is hard to say precisely why the range of interpretations of Chekhov were so restrictive -- was it because people are intimidated to talk about high culture and so they repeat things they know to be true even if they also see them as boring and unoriginal? Did they see the interview as a chance to impress the researcher with how well they had mastered their lessons? Were they less likely to appropriate from or speculate about the plots and characters and so had a less intimate relationship with them? Was this a product of contemplative distance and the aura of high art?

If high art is supposed to be so enriching and intellectually engaging, why do we respond to it in such predictable and predetermined ways? And if popular culture is supposed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, why does it generate such a broad array of different responses?

The Pleasures of Imperfection

IItalian critic Umberto Eco suggests that cult movies are rarely perfectly constructed nor are they treated with respect: "In order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship to the whole." Most cult films fall apart in our hands and we have to work hard to make them cohere. It tis their incoherence that makes such works rich resources for reworking.

I have similarly suggested that fan culture is born of a mixture of fascination and frustration. The work has to fascinate us to inspire fan-like responses but if the work fully satisfied all of our desires, we would have no need to rework it in our imaginations. If you look at the most productive sites within any given fan culture, they often grow up around the very things that frustrate fans the most about the original source material. The author introduces a character and never realizes her full potential. We get a tantalizing bit of back-story and then it gets abandoned, never fully developed or integrated into the narrative. The character acts in a way that seems to contradict everything we previously believed about them. And so forth.

Yet, if great works of art are great because they represent the accomplishment of perfection or near perfection within a particular tradition, then perhaps they don't have the kinds of loose edges that we want to keep playing with. I suspect this is not really the case -- there are, for example, a fair number of fan stories about the characters and situations of Jane Austin for example, and critics, directors, and actors have struggled to make sense of some of Shakespeare's characters for centuries. Rather, I think we are taught to think about high culture as untouchable. We appreciate it. We may even love it. But we rarely approach it as a fan.

In his book, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America , Lawrence Levine describes the process by which Shakespeare's plays moved from being a living part of the culture of 19th century America -- where they were freely appropriated and performed by a wide array of different groups -- and became a sacred and untouchable aspect of our culture in the 20th century. Shakespeare was once thought to be emotionally accessible to all; increasingly, Shakespeare has become something we have to be taught how to appreciate, rather than something we instinctively love.

The Wondering Minstrels

These questions have come back to me in recent week as I have been reviewing a thesis currently being completed by one of the Comparative Media Studies graduate students Amulya Gopalakrishnan. Gopalakrishnan has been applying ideas from fan studies and work on online communities to explore the activities of the Wondering Minstrels:

The Wondering Minstrels is a poem-a-day mailing list of over four thousand people, the majority of whom have a South-Asian connection, but includes members from all over the English-speaking world. The group was formed in 1999 by a couple of Indian engineering students who felt the need for a 'more everyday experience of poetry' and to demystify the appreciation of it, and gradually drew in their friends and acquaintances, until it grew to its current dimensions. The poems are archived and open to commentary and discussion at any time. While the people who run it handle much of the regular poem submissions, those sent in by other members ('guest poems') reflect the heterogeneity and energy of the group. The accompanying comments pay attention to form and

technique, as well as biography and shaping context, but the guiding principle is individual connection with the poem, and some personal comment on why a contributor considers it significant or memorable....

For those who did not get a headstart at home, a community like Minstrels broaches poetry on its terms: as an everyday medium that speaks of ordinary lives and moments in an extraordinary way, one that simply draws attention to the world by drawing attention to language. Sending in a poem, or reacting to someone else's comments about a poem may be a way of tentatively dipping your toe in the vast ocean of notions built around literary works. Just like other fan communities, through conversation and correspondence, they can inaugurate a space that may prove more humane and democratic than the everyday world. The feeling-oriented, middlebrow aesthetic of The Wondering Minstrels is a conversation and counterpractice that challenges conventional classroom

approaches to canonical poetry.

In other words, Wondering Minstrels is a fan community which has grown up around the exchange of poems -- mostly works that are part of the Canon of western literature, though also including a broader range of materials -- poems from other parts of the world (including a fair number from the South Asian Diaspora), song lyrics, rap songs, and so forth. Part of what fascinates Gopalakrishnan about the group is precisely the ways that it cuts across traditional high and low splits -- treating Eminem alongside Elizabeth Browning.

Getting Emotional About It

If Tulloch's Chekhov patrons were surprisingly inarticulate about their actual emotional responses to the plays, these fans of poetry emote, gush, share their memories of childhood, suggest personal associations,

speculate about the motives, and generally talk a lot about the poems that are being transmitted within the community. Participants respect these poems but they do not hold them at a critical distance. These poems are part of their lives; they are tied to their earliest memories of schooling and home life; they are treasures they take with them as they move from one part of the world to another; they are things they want to share with others as part of the ongoing life of this thriving virtual community.

Gopalakrishnan was motivated to explore this group for two reasons, one intellectual, the other personal: first, she was concerned by arguments that pit digital media against literary culture (such as those advanced by Sven

Birkerts), seeing ways that digital culture can enliven and expand our experience of literature, and second, she had herself been a long-time participant within this community (like many of my other friends who write about popular culture texts, she is a fan writing about her own fandom.)

Here's how she describes her own early experience within the group:

when I joined Minstrels, the first poem I sent in was a poem I'd read in the Times Literary Supplement, by a Welsh poet named Sheenagh Pugh. I'd never heard of Pugh before, and indeed, she was relatively unknown at the time. When I sent in the poem along with my English-major attempt at analysis, I received an email from Pugh herself commenting on my comments, adding to them, mildly disagreeing, but eager to carry on the conversation. She later became a Minstrels member herself, and wryly responding to the disproportionate success of her own poem, 'Sometimes', admitted that she 'mistyped "sorrow" for "snow" and then decided I liked that better. I believe in letting the keyboard join in the creative process now and then. Anyway, here's the text, and if you like it, I'm pleased for you, but I'd be more pleased if you liked something else better!'

The Web makes interactions like that possible, and the juxtaposition of Pugh's comments and mine both framing her poem, neither of which claims ultimate authority, invites other readers to participate in the mystique of the poem's

artistry. Rather than destroying the aura of literature, this surrounding conversation only adds to it.

The Wondering Minstrels also suggests something important about the globalization of culture. On the one hand, the group draws heavily upon British poems which were transmitted around the world as part of the colonialist

educational project. In fact, since western schools have often moved away from these works, these poems may be more familiar to people in South Asian or other former Commonwealth nations than they are to people in the United Kingdom or the United States. It is the shared (if imposed) literary heritage that allows people around the world to participate in this forum. The same kind of infrastructure may, ironically enough, be provided by American popular culture, which circulates to countries worldwide, often driving out local media production, but providing a shared framework of meanings and memories that allows communications within a global network of fans. The same is certainly true as well of the "soft goods" -- anime, manga, and games -- produced and circulated by Japan and across parts of the work, the works of the Bollywood film industry may play this role. For a global community to operate, members have to have something in common to talk about. It almost doesn't matter whether the core material is high culture, low culture, or middlebrow culture as long as it allows everyone to participate from a more or less equal footing and as long as it provides an opportunity for each member to contribute a unique perspective to the conversation.

There is notthing about high culture texts that discourages this kind of intimacy and participation. Many of them were part of popular culture at the time they were created. Many of them can be pulled back into popular culture when read in the right contexts. Rather, their untouchable quality has to do with the contexts within which we are introduced to these texts and the stained glass attitudes that too often surround them. Gopalakrishnan has taught me that you can indeed be a fan of high culture.

Behind the Scenes: Spoiling Survivor: Cook Islands

Welcome Survivor fans. Many of you might be interested in seeing some of my other posts about reality telvision, including this one about the racial politics around Cook Islands and this one about the behind the scenes politicing that shaped Big Brother: All-Stars. Now back to the original post:

Most of you probably don't have a clue where the next Survivor series is going to be set (answer: Cook Islands). Yet, there is a hardcore group of fans which has already pieced together detailed information about the location, including photographs of the Tribal Council site and the location of the first challenge. From these pictures, the Survivor fan community will be able to piece together a great deal about the forthcoming series. Even as we speak, other members of that community will be trying to ferret out the names and identities of the contestants (well before they are announced by the network) and others still will be trying to extract information from people on the ground in the Cook Islands who might have seen something or overheard something during the production. They call themselves spoilers.

Mark Burnett acknowledges this contest between producer and fans is part of what creates Survivor's mystique: "With so much of our show shrouded in secrecy until it's broadcast, it makes complete sense that many individuals consider it a challenge to try to gain information before it's officially revealed - sort of like a code they are determined to crack. While it's my job to keep our fans on their toes and stay one step ahead, it is fascinating to hear some of the lengths these individuals are willing to go." From the beginning, the producers have run misinformation campaigns to throw fans off their tracks. There is a widespread rumor within the fan community that the producers now offer bonuses to cast and craw for every boot or event in the series which doesn't get "spoiled" by the fans. If true, this policy reflects the reality of a world where fans pool money and send reporters to snoop around the location, pumping hotel clerks and maids for anything they can learn.

I devote a chapter to "Spoiling Survivor" in my book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. The chapter takes you deep inside this fan community, showing some of their techniques for getting information, and discussing some of the debates that erupted when a guy who went by the user name "ChillOne" claimed to have known the outcomes of a Survivor season before it even reached the air. The ChillOne story, which structures this chapter, focuses attention on the issue of whether spoiling is a goal (that is, find out what you can how ever you can) or a process (put your heads together with lots of other people and solve a puzzle). Some have argued that ChillOne broke the game -- making it a contest to see which individual can access information rather than an issue of how a collective intelligence community can solve complex problems through collaboration and information sharing.

Wezzie and Dan Bollinger run a site called Survivor Maps, which is primary focused on the locations where the series takes place. But their maps become important resources for all kinds of other spoiling activities. Here's a little of what I say about them in the chapter:

"Wezzie" is one of the most respected members of the Survivor spoiling community. She and her partner, Dan Bollinger, have specialized in location spoiling. Offline, Wezzie is a substitute teacher, an arboretum docent, a travel agent, and a free lance writer. Dan is an industrial designer who runs a factory which makes refrigerator magnets. They live half way across the country from each other but they work as a team to try to identify and document the Survivor location --- what Mark Burnett calls "the seventeenth character" -- and to learn as much as they can about the area. As a team, Wezzie and Dan have been able to pinpoint the series location with astonishing accuracy. The process may start with a throwaway comment from Mark Burnett or a tip from "somebody who knows somebody, who knows somebody, who works for CBS or a tourist company." Wezzie and Dan have built up contacts with travel agencies, government officials, film bureaus, tourism directors and resort operators. As Dan notes, "Word gets around the tourism industry very quickly about a large project that will be bringing in millions of American dollars."

From there, they start narrowing things down by looking at the demands of the production. Wezzie describes the process, "We look at latitude, climate, political stability, population density, road system, ports, accommodations, attractions, culture, predominant religion, and proximity to past Survivor locations." Dan notes, "In Africa I overlayed demographic maps of population, agricultural areas, national reserves, tourism destinations and even city lights seen from satellites at night. Sometimes knowing where Survivor can't be is important. That's how I found Shaba Reserve." Wezzie is the people person: she works their network to pull together as much data as she can.

"Then Dan works his magic!" Dan has developed contact with the Denver-based Space Imaging Company, owner of IKONOS, a high resolution commercial remote sensing satellite. Eager to show off what their satellite can do, IKONOS took snapshots of the location for Survivor: Africa Dan had identified from 423 miles in space, and upon closer scrutiny, they could decipher specific buildings in the production compound including the temporary production buildings, the tribal council site, and a row of Massai style huts where the contestants would live, eat, and sleep. They take the snapshots from space because the security-conscious Burnett negotiates a "no fly zone" policy over the location.

Dan uses the comsat images and sophisticated topographical maps to refine his understanding of the core locations. Meanwhile, Wezzie researches the ecosystem and culture: "[On Survivor: Marquesas] I spent approximately 3 hours every day, 7 days a week on the computer or studying maps and travel guides.... I studied a topographical map of the island to familiarize myself with the roads, horse paths, rivers, waterfalls, bays, beaches, reefs, settlements, mountains and hills....I researched the marine life, diving spots, water temperature, tradewinds, windward and leeward sides of the island, the effect that goats have had on the island, the local artisans and businesses, local sports clubs, Marquesan dance, tattoo, rock art, tiki, tapa, cannibalism, ancient sports and games, eatable plants, flora and fauna, local government, studied the Polynesian voyages, learned about copra, monoi oil, and nono's, and followed the route of the tramp steamer, Aranui. I kept a dictionary of terms, e.g., "meae", "tohua", "heva", "paepae", "tahuna", "mana", and "tapu". All that I learned I shared on Survivor Maps and other internet websites." Such information helps viewers to develop a deeper appreciation of what the contestants are going through and what kinds of resources they might draw upon.

And, after all of that, they still sometimes get it wrong. For example, they focused a lot of energy on a location in Mexico, only to learn that the new series was going to be filmed in the Pearl Islands near Panama. They weren't totally wrong, though--they had identified the location for a production company filming another reality television series.

This weekend, I caught back up with Wezzie and Dan Bollanger, to learn about what is going on as fans gear up for yet another installment of CBS's still highly successful reality television series.

What are we looking at when we see these new images you have posted on your site? What can you tell us about where these images came from?

Dan: Most of the images we post are taken by locals and tourists visiting the location. If we are lucky, we get a few people who like a challenge of taking photos of the excitement in their neighborhood.

What kind of response have you gotten from the fan community?

Dan: For the most part, we get rave reviews. Spoiling the location is something that generally ocurrs between airings, so there isn't much going on in the online forums. And, people get excited learning about the new location and theme. At the same time, there is some competition between the various websites since each wants to be the first to uncover some new information and claim the credit. Despite what others may say, the spoiler websites guard their sources well.

What kinds of information have people been able to gather from these photographs?

Dan: You name it, they find it. I'm often amazed at what people read into a blurry photograph. This time around we've learned what Tribal Council and Exile Island will look like, which reveals the theme. And, from the photo of an early challenge, it appears that it begins with four tribes, since there are four 'masts' each in a different color.

What will be the next steps for you in tracking down additional information about the Survivor location?

Dan: Right now, we have called it quits for S13. We have done what we set out to do. Find the location, get the maps, find the camp locations, and get the first photos of Tribal Council. We'll be gearing up for S14 in a few months. The summer is Survivor duldrums for Survivor Maps.

The book describes the way spoiling operated during Survivor:Amazon. What changes have taking place in the spoiling world since that season?

Dan: I don't see changes happening in a Darwinian sense. It is not like spoiling is evolving and refining. Rather, at least for Survivor Maps, we work with what resources and leads present themselves and do the best we can. For instance, contacting tourism officials for information may work one time and not another. Topo maps may be available online for free, as was the case for Cook Islands where I obtained the map in a matter of minutes,

while for Marquesas I had to wait for four months and could only pay with Francs.

Wezzie: Something interesting happened during and after Survivor Palau. A newcomer named mersaydeez posted every detail of the show (who won rewards, where they went , what they ate, who got booted, etc) week after week. Many fans enjoyed reading her posts, particularly those who were playing the fantasy games. Other fans were not as pleased.

While mersaydeez was treated respectfully, in the months following, a number of fans complained that they didn't like having spoilers handed to them on a platter. They'd enjoyed being part of the spoiling (guessing) process, and mersaydeez's posts had made the process obsolete. Spoiling Survivor Palau was not collective intelligence gathering. Many left the community. Others formed private boards to discuss the show with a few friends vs on the public board, Survivor Sucks.

I left the Spoilers section of SurvivorSucks and joined The MESS Hall Tribal Council, where the motto is, "May we always be a little bit wrong.". MESS, as it's called, does old-style spoiling, e.g., vid cap analysis. Despite what has been posted on other boards, MESS members take pride in the fact that they come to their own conclusions. They collaborate, discuss, research and share. MESS is an intelligent and cooperative community that is gaining in popularity.

Thanks to Wezzie, Dan, and Henry for their help in pulling together this post.

Catching Up: The Future of Television

Today, I am just going to highlight a few things that have caught my eye recently. We picked up the July 17 issue of Newsweek, belatedly, and read an interesting article discussing what current network media consumption. The opening paragraphs, though, really annoyed me:

A guy--let's call him Brad--longed for the company of his wife, so he took his iPod to bed. Confiding in an NBC researcher, Brad tells how he inserted his earplugs, nestled down beside his bride and got lost in an episode of "The Office" or another of his favorite TV shows downloaded from the iTunes store. His wife, meanwhile, was riveted by her favorite show playing on the bedroom TV. Yet another intimacy-challenged couple dialed up the heat on their relationship during the college basketball playoffs, say researchers for Verizon, the cellular-service giant. No fan of hoops, the wife snuggled up to her basketball-craving husband on the living-room couch, unfolded her cell phone and watched video clips streaming from Verizon's VCast service while he tuned in the game on CBS. "She thought it would be a good way to spend time together," says Ryan Hughes, Verizon's chief media programmer.

There's a kind of outrage here that people might be sitting side by side in bed and consuming different media content. Now, substitute books or magazines for television content and see if you feel this same level of shock and awe. I think we'd think it a little odd if the couple always coordinated the books they took to bed with them. As my wife points out, in the old days, the wife would have been banished from the room while her husband watched the big game, so, yes, there is some element of togetherness, snuggling down physically together, even if you are in different mental spaces. In any case, other research on television suggests that while homes may have multiple televisions, only one set is on during prime time in most households because we still prefer to watch television content socially rather than individually and the shows that do best are those that give us content we can talk about with others.

Discussion of the future of television continues over at our Convergence Culture Consortium blog.

A while back, I flagged an article about the Lost Experience ARG which Jason Mittell had published in Flow. We are all following this ARG with great interest and so we were pleased that he has written some further commentary about it for our blog:

The first part of TLE was all about setting a stage, a fairly static picture of an institution (The Hanso Foundation), its supporters (Thomas Mittlewerk and Hugh McIntyre), and its detractors (Persephone and DJ Dan). Each clue revealed another layer of deception & hypocrisy within Hanso, but offered little narrative thrust developing the conflict or relationships that it portrayed. Jensen suggests this act was designed for the hardcore Lost fans, but I'd suggest it was more for dedicated ARG players whose paranoid panoramic perception searches for clues within the meta-fictional landscape. As a dedicated Lost-head (but only a lurker in previous ARGs), I found Act I's lack of narrative drive too frustrating to completely justify the time it took to parse out the clues, and I shifted to mostly an observational role of the clue-gathering work of my fellow players.

Act II is more for fans like me--interested enough in ARGs to follow them, but in it more for the story and its relationship to Lost than gameplay. The shift in Act II is both in storytelling form and medium--this portion of TLE moves away from the now-defunct Hanso website and reveals the hacker behind the pseudonym of Persephone to be Rachel Blake. In charting Blake's attempt to discover the truth behind Hanso, we follow her across Europe via her blog. This direct communication from the character is much more narratively engaging than her hacks to Hanso's website, allowing for an illusion of interaction between players and characters, as conversations between Blake and other characters within the blog's comments add to the story significantly. Additionally, most of her blog postings link to videos scattered around the web--presenting Blake's exploits in video form seems more in keeping with the storytelling strategies that most appeal to fans of serialized television.

And in another entry, Mittell writes about what he is calling "Television 2.0", citing the example of The Sci-Fi Channel's digital deployment of the pilot of The Amazing Screw-On Head (which comics fans will recognize as adapted from a Mike Mignolia (Hellboy) graphic novel):

Head is quite a delight - based on a cult comic by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, the show parodies the steampunk genre of sci-fi set in the 19th Century. The hero works at the pleasure of President Lincoln fighting threats to America (and to quote the show, "and by America, I mean the world") from undead zombies and ancient demon technology; for some as-yet-unspecified reason, he is a screw-on head. The animation is vivid and unique in its visual style, and features strong voice acting by established stars like Paul Giamatti and David Hyde Pierce. It's a show that could easily gain a dedicated audience in sufficient numbers for a cable channel - it most reminds me of the classic 1990s cartoon The Tick, which is high praise in my animation canon.

But Sci-Fi recognizes that it will take some doing to build its audience. Fans of Mignola are vocal and passionate, but far too small in number to guarantee success. So they've put the pilot online two weeks before its TV debut. But more importantly, they have attached a viewer survey to the pilot to gauge reactions and help judge the potential for extending the pilot into a series. This design takes advantages of two great opportunities of online video - the video can go viral through blogging and reviews much more quickly and legitimately than other "official" online videos, and instant feedback gives frustrated fans a way to feel like their voices matter.

And finally, Sam Ford weighs in on the news that NBC will be distributing the pilot episodes of Kidnapped and Studio 60 on Sunset Strip (perhaps the most eagerly awaited program of the fall season) on dvd this summer to Netflix subscribers, yet another way of building up audience interests before the shows hit the air:

Will many viewers be enticed to use one of their Netflix rentals for these sample episodes and assorted trailers? My guess is that they will and that, if these shows are good, the company will get a substantial award in positive support. Of course, that support does hinge on the show's quality and--again--these types of distribution deals only work well if there is a product worth discussing. Of course, using an Aaron Sorkin show and a suspense thriller is probably a smart move on the network's part, as they are two shows that NBC already feel strongly about and are building around for the fall lineup. Once the initiative launches in August, it will be interesting to track rental numbers, but my guess is that this could further popularize these types of campaigns to gain support for shows before they ever hit broadcast television.

These three stories from the C3 blog point to new strategies that television executives are deploying to get television fans talking about their series during the traditional down months of summer. Let's face it: a growing percentage of us spend the summer watching series we missed or old favorite on dvd. Once the new fall season starts, there are going to be so many shows competing for our attention that most of them never get watched a first time. But if they can get new content or new experiences out there now, they get a leg up on their competition, can start to generate buzz, and build viewer loyalty before the season even starts.

So What Happened to Star Wars Galaxies?

Earlier this week, Next Generation published a short excerpt from my much longer discussion of Star Wars Gallaxies and user-generated content in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. The publication seems to have prompted game designer and theorist Raph Koster to blog about what he learned by adopting a more collaborationist approach to his fans. Here's some of what he had to say:

Some have since decided that it was listening to the players too much that caused some of the design problems with SWG. I am not sure I agree. If anything, I think that many subsequent problems came from not listening enough, or not asking questions in advance of changes. Walking a mile in the players' shoes is a difficult trick to pull off even if you have the best of intentions.

The tensest and most difficult moments in SWG's development -- and they came often -- were when we had to remove something that players really liked. Usually, it was against our own wishes, because of time constraints or (rarely) orders from on high. But we couldn't tell the players the real reasons sometimes. That sucked, frankly, because the open relationship really did matter. As often as we could, we laid everything bare.

These days, it's accepted wisdom that you don't reveal a feature until it's done, so as to guarantee that you never let the players down. Of course, even finished features sometimes fall out for one reason or another...

In any case, I think I don't agree with that philosophy. I'd rather have prospective players on a journey with the team, than have them be a passive group marketed to. Yes, they will suffer the ups and downs, and see the making of the sausage... but these days, that's getting to be an accepted thing in creative fields. There's not much to gain, to my mind, in having the creators sitting off on a pedestal somewhere -- people fall from pedestals, and pedestals certainly will not survive contact with Live operation of a virtual world. Instead, I'd rather the customers know the creators as people who make mistakes, so that when one happens, they are more likely to be forgiven or understood.

One of the challenges of academic publishing is that the world can move out from under year in that long, long period of time between when you finish a book and when it hits the shelves. In the case of Convergence Culture, one of the biggest shifts was the meltdown which has occured in the relations between the players and creators of Star Wars Galaxies, much of which really hit the fan last December. I still think what the book says about Star Wars Galaxies -- Raph Koster, as the comments above suggest, remains a leading advocate for a more collaborationist relationship between producers and consumers; his approach does contrast with at least some of the policies that Lucas has applied elsewhere in dealing with other aspects of Star Wars fandom and so Star Wars represents a rich case study of the uncertain and unstable relations between media franchises and their consumers. If anything, these contrasts are even easier to see when we see how shifts in company leadership impacted the community around this particular game.

I have not been on the inside of that meltdown. Most of what I know came from a close reading of news reports about what happened and conversations with other games researchers, such as USC's Doug Thomas or UW's Kurt Squire. I am sure there are readers who could tell us more about what happened than I can and I would welcome them to share their experiences here. I prepared some reflections about what happened for our Convergence Culture Consortium partners newsletter last January.

THE COLLAPSE OF AN EMPIRE: STAR WARS GALAXIES SHOWS US RIGHT AND WRONG WAYS TO COURT FANS

Shortly after Christmas, a friend and fellow researcher Doug Thomas sent me a link to a fascinating and moving fan-made video by Javier -- marking his decision to leave the massively multiplayer game world, Star Wars Galaxies, and commenting on the mass migration of hard core fans and players from this space.

Some background is needed to be able to appreciate this video and what it might suggest about the nature of fan investments in MMPORGS. In keeping with the cantina sequences which have been a favorite aspect of the Star Wars film series, the game provides opportunities for players to select the entertainer class as a possible role within its world. Javier helped to organize the Entertainer class players to create an extraordinary series of Cantina Musicals -- elaborate Busby Berkeley style musical numbers which required the participation and cooperation of a cast of hundreds of players.

As you watch the video, keep in mind that each character is controlled by an individual player, hitting buttons in a choreographed manner,who may be separated from the other participants by thousands of miles

of real world geography. The potential for such videos is built into the game -- through the capacity to move characters in certain ways,for players to share common spaces and experiences, and for players to

record their own game play activities -- but no one in the game company imagined that the fans would have used them to create Lawrence Welk-inflected Christmas specials or to protest company policies. In

short, the video expresses the power of the fan community both in terms of how it was made and in terms of what it has to say about the experience of playing the game....

Raph Koster saw the Star Wars fans as co-designers in the development of the game: actively courting them from the project's conception, sharing design docs and getting their feedback at every step of the way, designing a game which was highly dependent on fan creativity to provide much of its content and fan performance to create mutually rewarding experiences within the game.

Here are some of the things Koster did right in courting Star Wars fans:

1. He respected their expertise and emotional investments in the series.

2. He opened a channel of communications with fans early in the process.

3. He actively solicited advice from fans about design decisions and followed that advice where-ever possible.

4. He created resources which sustained multiple sets of interests in the series.

5. He designed forms of game play which allowed fans to play diverse roles which were mutually reinforcing.

Here's some of what he had to say about the importance of fans to the franchise's success:

"There's no denying it - the fans know Star Wars better than the developers do. They live and breathe it. They know it in an intimate way. On the other hand, with something as large and broad as the Star Wars universe, there's ample scope for divergent opinions about things. These are the things that lead to religious wars among fans and all of a sudden you have to take a side because you are going to be etablishing how it works in this game."

That said, the policies Koster created were eroded over time, leading to increased player frustration and distrust. In another video, Javier traces a history of grievances and conflicts between the "Powers That Be" within the game company and the Entertainer class of characters. Some casual players felt the game was too dependent on player-generated content, while the more creative players felt that upgrades actually restricted their ability to express themselves through the game and marginalized the Entertainer class from the overall experience. At the same time, the game failed to meet the company's own revenue expectations, especially in the face of competition from the enormously successful World of Warcraft, a game which adopted a very different design philosophy.

Late last year, the company announced plans to radically revamp the game's rules and content, a decision that has led to the wholesale alienation of the existing player base and massive defections. It remains to be seen if the plans will draw in new consumers; it is clear that they have significantly destroyed the existing fan culture. Javier is not alone in seeing these decisions as the end of the road for his community.

The statements made by Nancy MacIntyre, the game's senior director, at LucasArts to the New York Times illustrates the huge shift in thinking from Koster's original philosophy to this "retooled" franchise:

We really just needed to make the game a lot more accessible to a much broader player base. There was lots of reading, much too much, in the game. There was a lot of wandering around learning about different abilities. We really needed to give people the experience of being Han Solo or Luke Skywalker rather than being Uncle Owen, the moisture farmer. We wanted more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat. We needed to give people more of an opportunity to be a part of what they have seen in the movies rather than something they had created themselves.

MacIntyre's comments represent a classic set of mistakes in thinking about how to build a fan community around a property:

1. Don't confuse "accessibility" with simplicity. As Steve Johnson notes in his best-selling book, Everything Bad is Good For You or educator James Paul Gee argues in his new book, Video Games Are Good For the Soul, contemporary media audiences are searching for complexity, not simplicity. The video games that succeed in the market are the ones that demand the most of their players -- not those that require the least. The key to successful games is not dumb content, but complexity that is organized and managed so that users can handle it.

2. Don't underestimate the intelligence of your consumers. Gamers are not illiterate. They are not necessarily simply kids. Industry statistics suggest that the average gamer is in his/her late 20s or early 30s and all signs are that the game market is expanding as the initial generation of gamers ages. Star Wars Galaxies consumers skewed older and as such, they wanted something different from the game play experience than younger Star Wars fans. And if you do think your consumers are idiots, it is not bright to say so to New York Times reporters. The fans do read newspapers and as members of a collective intelligence community, they have an enormous network for circulating information that matters to the group. These comments have come back to haunt the corporate executives many times over and probably did as much as anything else in creating a mass exodus from the game.

3. In an age of transmedia storytelling, don't assume fans want the same experience from every installment of the same franchise. There are many films, books, comics, and games out there which focus on the experience of the central protagonists of the series. Koster wisely recognized that while individual players might want to BE Luke Skywalker or Hans Solo, a world where everyone was a Jedi would be boring for all involved. Instead, he created a game world where there were many different classes of players (including the Entertainer class) and where each of those roles interacted in a complicated ecology of experience.

4. Don't underestimate the diversity of fan cultures. Contrary to what is often claimed, successful media properties do not appeal to the lowest common denominator. Rather, they draw together a coalition of micro-publics, each with their own interests in the material, each expressing their emotional bonds with the content in their own ways. Accordingly, Star Wars has a large, diverse audience interested in everything from the flora and fauna to interrelationships among characters. Given such diversity, why would you assume that the core market only wants to blow things up? The real sweet spot would be to /tap into/ these diverse audiences and sell even more copies. Why, given the richness of fan creative expression around Star Wars, would you assume that Luke Skywalker is the only role people care about? The goal should have been to expand the range of experiences available in the game rather than dismantle what appealed to one audience in hopes of attracting another.

5. Don't underestimate the value of fan creative contributions to the success of contemporary media franchises. Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, the most successful game franchise of all time, has suggested that his success can be traced directly back to player contributions:

We see such benefit from interacting with our fans. They are not just people who buy our stuff. In a very real sense, they are people who helped to create our stuff...We are competing with other properties for these creative individuals. All of these different games are competing for communities, which in the long run are what will drive our sales.... Whichever game attracts the best community will enjoy the most success. What you can do to make the game more successful is not to make the game better but to make the community better.

Conversely, when you alienate your most active and creative fans -- folks like Javier -- then you severely damage the franchise as a whole. These people play valuable roles as grassroots intermediaries helping to build up interest in your property and as performers helping to shape the experience of other players.

6. Don't Sacrifice your existing fan base in search of a totally different market. The kind of robust and creative fan cultures Wright and Koster describe in their comments above are hard to build and even harder to rebuild. To some degree, fans have to find media properties which meets their needs, even though companies can adopt policies of fan relations which will make them more receptive to fans and can help to sustain such communities once they emerge. Koster worked hard to win over Star War fans who were skeptical about his efforts given the history of fairly simplistic action-oriented solo-player titles within the Star Wars franchises. Koster, himself, was fully aware that you could not institute large scale changes in such a game world without damaging the kind of trust he had helped to establish. Here's what he told me when I interviewed him for my book: "Just like it is not a good idea for a government to make radical legal changes without a period of public comment, it is often not wise for an operator of an online world to do the same."

I have just scratched the surface here. I suspect the rise and fall of Star Wars Galaxies will be studied for years to come as a textbook example of good and bad ways to deal with fan communities. Certainly our member companies should draw on it as a reference in framing and evaluating their own fan relations policies.

Pink Pigs and Other Local Knowledge

My references earlier this week to Brian Wood's Demo inspired me to reread something I wrote in January about his new project, Local. This is excerpted from an essay that will run in a forthcoming issue of Cultural Anthropology. It was written as part of a tribute to the great American Studies scholar George Lipsitz. So often, cultural critics accuse digital media of undercutting our relations to the local, cutting us off from the world around us. So often, cyberspace advocates have constructed the digital through their own fantasies of dislocation, seeing it as a space where one is liberated from parochial constraints rather than authenticated through local cultures. Consider, for example, John Perry Barlow's famous formulation in "A Declaration of Independence in Cyberspace": "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather .... Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live." Here, Barlow renounces all claims upon the local while insisting that the local renounce all claims on him. So it is refreshing to learn about a project where the web is being used to heighten our awareness of local cultures.

A case in point: Brian Wood's Local. Brian Wood is an alternative comics writer whose work has the feel of an independent movie -- complex and compelling characters, rich attention to detail, a slight political edge, and narratives that resemble well-crafted short stories. I was unimpressed by some of his early work but he took off a few years back with Demo, a series that used the superhero metaphor to talk about everyday people in everyday situations. Now, he has three very different series running -- Supermarket, which is a political action thriller; DMZ, which deals with an embedded journalist in Manhattan in the midst of a war on terror that has cut the city off from the rest of America; and Local.

As Brian Wood, Local's author, explains:

People use the place of their birth as an identifier, they wear it as a badge of honor. It's shorthand to explain huge chunks of their personality. Some people stay in their hometown for a lifetime, while others can't leave quickly enough, only to feel it pull them back.

Each issue of Local takes place in an American city or town (such as Richmond, Portland, Burlington, Halifax, Madison, or Minneapolis), cities that are rarely depicted in our popular culture but have a strong sense of location. Wood solicited photographs of these communities from people who lived there, collecting local landmarks that can help ground his stories, and includes guides to these cities written by local authors in the back of many issues.

To publicize the series, Wood has constructed a website where people can submit accounts of their own local communities, pitching them as locations for future storylines. Others can come and vicariously consume their sense of the local with either a specific nostalgia for a place they no longer live or with a generalized appreciation of the imagined authenticity of local experience.

I am intrigued by the idea that cyberspace may be a place where authentic locals can be produced, shared, traded, and consumed. These local memories are becoming more and more precious in a world where the average American moves once every five years and often across regions. This sense of the local speaks to me as a southern ex-pat living in the North who is watching many of my ties back to Atlanta, my home town, breakdown as my mother and father pass away and we sell off family property.

The Truth About The Pink Pig

So I was very interested to find on the Local site a poster describing a landmark that was very much part of my own experience of growing up in Atlanta:

The Pink Pig rollercoaster sits on top of Lenox Mall. It's one of those wacky, only-in-America local traditions by which I'm both embarrassed and mystified. The ride goes up sometime in November every year--it marks the holiday shopping season. It sits on top of Macy's, in a tent bursting with pink pig merchandise, nostalgic pictures of pink pigs from the past, pink carpet, a Christmas tree decorated with pigs....To me, it seems silly and indulgent and another one of those weird effects of rampant consumerism. But then again, it's only a dollar to ride. And everybody's got to have some local holiday tradition.

Of course, as a native Atlantan of long-ago, I remember when the store was called Rich's and was locally owned and operated (Indeed, one of my great aunts spent her entire life working for this Atlanta-based department store). Rich's was deeply enmeshed in the history of Atlanta going back to a dry good store created by Hungarian immigrant Morris Rich on Whitehall Street in 1867. The downtown department store, established in 1924, remained a center of the local culture, politics, and economy into the 1970s. The store was long noted for its liberal exchange and credit policy which allowed many poor Atlantans to buy into consumer culture for the first time. (There are so many classic stories about poor people bringing goods that were purchased decades before and trading them in for cash at Richs. This was in an era where the customer was always right and where the store cared what happened to the people in their local community.) Martin Luther King got arrested during a sit-in at Rich's Magnolia room in 1960.

Federated Department Stores acquired Richs in 1975 and merged it with R.H. Macy and Company in 1994. In a prime example of corporate insensitivity to local traditions, the chain renamed all of the remaining outlets Macy's in 2005. Given the rapid turnover in a city like Atlanta, few local residents may remember that there ever was a store called Richs or that it worked so hard to maintain its ties with its local customers.

So, I bristled at an account that describes the Pink Pig as a Macy's tradition. I also recall that the Pink Pig once ran along the top of the downtown flagship store of the Rich's chain -- at a time when the ride allowed you to see the city's skyline and circle the Great Tree. The lighting of the Great Tree on Thanksgiving night long represented the start of the Christmas season in Atlanta. When the flagship department store closed in the mid-1970s, it was widely read as the final sign of white flight from downtown. The Pink Pig was relocated to the suburbs where it ran along the third story rooftop of a suburban cluster mall.

And of course, because of the erasure of history here, the poster misses the final irony: the Pink Pig became the Christmas tradition of an immigrant merchant (widely whispered to be Jewish) operating within a Bible Belt society, a final wink at the very process of assimilation. Today, it is just another brand icon -- no more or less ironic than the white polar bears which Coca Cola has decided we should associate with the holiday season and its own locally produced brand of sugar and soda. It is probably the last thing that distinguishes the Atlanta Macy's from the chain stores elsewhere around the country. What one woman sees as emblematic of the preservation of local culture was experienced by me - an Atlantan of a different generation -- as equally emblematic of the ways local cultures are being displaced and destroyed.

The Limits of Local Knowledge

Ironically, of course, this desire to produce a multitude of local experiences means that neither the writer Brian Wood (who was born in Vermont) nor the artist Ryan Kelly (who lives in Minneapolis) have personal ties to most of the places they are depicting and in some cases, they have never been there at all. Moreover, the central protagonist, whose travels and experiences provide the glue which links the various local stories together, must be continually dislocated, can live no place because she has to go everyplace. One recent issue set in Nova Scotia seemingly parodied this sense of dislocation: she comes into town and starts work at the Oxford Cinema, a local retro house; she picks up stray name badges from the drawer in the ticket booth and tries to assume those various identities, making up back stories to go with the names, until her various lies catches up with her.

So, the stories are mapped onto the local but do not originate there; the protagonist, like the reader, passes through the local but never resides there. As Woods explains:

The Local stories will be universal, whether you live in Portland, the Pacific Northwest, America, or the rest of the world. But, for the locals, the stories will contain landmarks and references that'll be instantly recognizable.

The series, in short, encourages a fascination with the "local" as a kind of authenticity but it may not be able to produce the kind of local knowledge it is seeking -- not in a world so much subject to flux and change. The local may exist for us now simply as an object of nostalgia -- but not as a real place you can go back and visit from time to time. Susan Stewart taught us that nostalgia represents a desire to return to a world that never really existed.

My family roots go back at least six generations in Georgia, probably more: my grandfather moved from the country to the city after World War I; my father lived in Atlanta his entire life; I have lived in four different cities; my son has lived in eight. Of course, if we had stayed for another generation in Atlanta, we would not have slowed down the process of change: the joke is that Atlanta's skyline looks different every time you drive into work in the morning. Cultural historians and anthropologists understand the local as always in flux and transition, a place where traditions are constantly being invented and reinvented. Indeed, some research suggests that those who remain behind may embrace change, where-as those who left seem to adopt a much more conservative perspective - wanting to be able to return home whenever they want to a world that looks just like it did when they left. We hold onto the idea of deeply rooted local cultures as a way of speaking about what we feel lacking in our own everyday lives. In such a world, the local represents where we are from and not necessarily where we live. We festishize the local because we can never really possess it.

Prohibitionists and Collaborationists: Two Approaches to Participatory Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sneak Preview: NBC's Heroes

If a superhero can be such a powerful and effective metaphor for male adolescence, then what else can you do with them? Could you build a superhero story around a metaphor for female adolescence? Around midlife crisis? Around the changes adults go through when they become parents? Sure, why not? And if a superhero can exemplify America's self image at the dawn of World War II, could a superhero exemplify America's self image during the less-confident 1970s? How about the emerging national identity of a newly-independent African nation? Or a nontraditional culture, like the drug culture, or the 'greed is good' business culture of the go-go Eighties. Of course. If it can do one, it can do the others.

- Kurt Busiek, introduction to Astro City: Life in the Fast Lane

The San Diego Comicon has become one of the landmark events in the world of branded entertainment. Begun as a fan convention, Comicon has become much much more. While comics readers remain a small, tight-knit, niche market, the influence of comics extends outward to shape all other entertainment media. As longtime DC editor Denny O'Neil told the Comparative Media Studies colloquium several years ago, comics now constitute the "R&D" sector of the American media - comics don't make much money themselves but they test strategies, model content, and experiment with new relationships to their readers, which will later be deployed across film, television, and video games.

In such a context, the country's biggest comics convention has also become a test market for a range of new entertainment franchises. Take a look at the list of new films and television shows which will be previewed before the Comicon crowd this weekend. Producers, directors, network executives, and cast are waiting anxiously to see how the Comicon crowd will respond to their brainchildren.

One of the shows which will get its first public airing at San Diego this year is NBC's new superhero drama, Heroes. I was lucky enough to get my own advanced look at the series (don't ask how...) and wanted to offer my own thoughts on how it is apt to be received within comics fan culture. There will be a fair amount of spoiler information in this piece, but you are going to have to click to the continuation page to see it. If you just want some broad evaluative comments and background, you can keep reading this top level and then skip to the very end.

Unlike most previous stabs at superhero television, Heroes is not adopted from an existing comics franchise; it was created specifically for television, though its creative team includes several who have solid comics pedigrees - notably Jeph Loeb (best known at the moment for the Batman: Hush series). So far, searching the web, it would seem that the series has only started to register on the radar of most superhero fans, who are still nursing disappointment that two other highly publicized pilots - the adaptation of the Luna Brother's Ultra miniseries (imagine the Ben and JLo story told in a world where superheroes replace movie stars as the favorite topic for celebrity gossip) and Mercy Reef, (a Smallville-style version of the Aquaman mythos) - were not picked up for the fall schedule. What little online discussion I've found suggested that its premise, which bears a superficial relationship to X-Men, led to it being perceived as similar in spirit to Mutant X, a short-lived series which borrowed heavily from (i.e. "ripped off") the established Marvel franchise. If fans are imagining a rapid-paced, larger-than-life and somewhat campy superhero romp, they are in for a surprise.

This show owes more to indie and alternative comics than it does to the DC and Marvel universes: its tone comes closest to Brian Woods' remarkable Demo series of last year (more on this later) or perhaps the kinds of stories one is apt to find at publishers such as Vertigo, Dark Horse, Image, or Oni. I call such publishers mid-stream: that is, not quite mainstream and not quite alternative. They tend to build on conventions of established genres, but pull them in innovative new directions. Their stories tend to be quirky and personal, somewhat dark, intellectually challenging, socially subversive, and aimed at more mature comics readers. These are my favorite kinds of comic books, ones that seem to fall through the cracks between the two main comics news magazines, Wizard (whose editors never met a mainstream superhero they didn't like) and Comics Journal (whose editors never met a mainstream superhero comic they did like), but often attract enthusiastic interest for online fan publications, such as The Sequential Tart. Hopefully, if you are a comics fans, these reference points can help you calibrate your expectations.

If you are television fan, it might be helpful to describe this as "must see TV," that is, a quality drama with an ensemble cast and well orchestrated story arcs, focused more on its character's inner struggles than on external struggles (so far, the only character to wear anything remotely resembling a traditional superhero costume is wearing a cheerleader uniform.) I would place it roughly in the tradition of The X-Files, Lost, and Prison Break in both its emotional tone and its intellectual demands on the viewer.

The series opens with the following text, which more or less sets up its core premise:

In recent days, a seemingly random group of individuals has emerged with what can only be described as 'special' abilities. Although unaware of it now, those individuals will not only save the world, but change it forever. This transformation from ordinary to extraordinary will not occur overnight. Every story has a beginning. Volume one of their epic tale begins here.

Casual comics readers will certainly associate this idea of random everyday people acquiring special abilities and confronting its impact on their lives with the X-Men franchise, but similar premises run through a range of other texts, including George R. R. Martin's Wild Cards books or J. Michael Straczynski's Rising Stars series, both of which come closer to the spirit of this particular narrative.

Spoiler Warnings Start Here

Those who read my earlier post about Krrish will be interested to know that the series opens in Madras, India, where a young professor is lecturing a class on his groundbreaking work in genetic engineering and we soon learn that his father, another professor, has left India to come to New York in search of clues about what he thinks may be some world-altering shift in the human genome.

Professor Mohinder Suresh is one of two Asian protagonists in the series: the other being Hiro Makamua, a otaku-turned-salary-man who is the most pop culture oriented figure in the series. If Prof. Suresh speaks about the events through a mixture of scientific and spiritual analogies, Hiro makes sense of the changes he is experiencing via references to Star Trek, manga, and specific issues of X-men comics. As he explains "every ten year old wishes they had super powers and I got them." His more down to earth friend dares him to teleport into the women's restroom and dismissing his buddy's claims of superior abilities by asking whether they can help him get laid.

The aptly named Hiro is nothing short of exuberant about the discovery that he can manipulate time and space, running shouting through the maze of cubicles in his workplace and laughing giddily when he teleports from a bullet train into the heart of Times Square. For him, having super powers is one big lark, something that makes him exceptional, after being a perpetual loser who was the last in his class and the last picked for any sports team. We can see these two figures as reflecting the further globalization of American television - adding to the ranks of Iraqi, African, and Korean characters on Lost and paying tribute to Japan and India as two central comics producing and consuming countries.

Hiro's fanboy ramblings are simply one of a number of suggestions here that the creators know and love comic conventions even as they are choosing to warp and stretch them for this version of the story. Pay attention, for example, to the role music plays here - several times sending up conventional superhero scores even as it settles into a soundtrack that feels more like a Wes Anderson film than a big screen blockbuster.

Earlier I mentioned Brian Wood's Demo as a point of comparison. For those who don't know the series, Wood is a hot young alternative comics writer whose recent work has taken on new maturity - in part from his ability to play off the tensions between genre borrowings and a much more realistic/pessimistic representation of the world. Demo was a series of short stories about everyday people who suddenly acquire super powers; none of his characters save or transform the world; they are still struggling to get some control over their own lives. The super powers are often incidental to the events of the stories and in some cases, you have to look closely to see them at all. The stories capture a kind of longing and frustration that in Wood's works seems to be the common human experience, something like the quiet desperation that Thoreau wrote about. His characters include working stiffs trapped in nowhere jobs, runaway teens trying to escape domineering parents, angry young men who have never fully accepted traumatic childhood experiences, and a serviceman who has the ability to hit anything who he shoots at but is saddled with a growing conscience about the human consequences of war. In each case, the super power either becomes a metaphoric extension of their emotional conflicts or simply one more complication in an already troubled situation. And Wood avoids altogether the capes, masks, secret identities, transforming rings, and other gewgaws we associate with Golden and Silver Age comics.

Similarly, Heroes takes the superhero genre in some of the directions suggested by my opening quotation from Kurt Buseik - seeing the superhero as a powerful metaphor that can be used to explore a broader range of human issues. Take for example Claire, a cheerleader growing up in a small Texas town in what looks to be a stifling family situation who discovers that she is nigh on indestructible and spends the first episode testing the limits of her remarkable healing powers - flinging herself off buildings so she can push her dislocated bones back into place, sticking her hand down a garbage disposal in what seems as much an act of bored desperation as anything else, and in one of the few moments which looks like a traditional superhero story, rushing into a burning building (except the act of saving a trapped victim is incidental to her desire to see how well her body holds up under extreme heat). If Busiek suggested that the superhero might shed new light on the adolescent female experience, this is an interesting experiment - one where superpowers are linked more to "cutting" or eating disorders than to notions of power and social responsibility.

Or consider the case of the agonizing artist Isaac who seems, under chemical influences, to be able to paint stylized representations of events which have not yet taken place but who is pushed by the end of the first episode into self mutilation because he is so horrified by his clairvoyance. Or there's a young single mother, struggling to keep her child protégée son in an elite private school by stripping but in the process, over-extending her credit with a local loan shark: she is haunted by a "second self," an image in the mirror which may have the power to intervene on her behalf. And then there's Peter, the much-dismissed younger brother of an ambitious politician; Peter believes that he may have the power to fly but still can't get any attention for his sibling.

These characters embody forms of longing and desperation that one rarely sees on television - if for no other reason than that the problems they face are unlikely to be solved by a bite from a radioactive spider or a burst of Gamma rays, let alone by mouthwash or toothpaste. And there are moments here which remind me of films like Crash or Grand Canyon, where people from very different backgrounds cross through each others lives and sometimes have unintended consequences. As the series proceeds, I have no doubt that these lives, seeming so separate at the outset, will become more and more intertwined. In the short term, though, viewers can enjoy looking for subtle -- and not so subtle -- hints of connections between them.

Its somewhat bitter aftertaste links the series more closely with Brian Woods' Demo than to most mainstream superhero comics. The characters here seem drawn earthward - more like suicidal jumpers - rather than skyward. None of them yet knows how to leap over tall buildings with a single bound and we are left with the sense that they are going to have to struggle to bring their emerging powers under their control and to make sense of their impact on their self perceptions. As with Demo, these characters aren't going to run right out and buy fancy new superhero duds anytime soon and it is not yet clear that any of them is ready to take on great responsibilities when they are barely able to solve their own inner demons.

Around the edges, there are hints of dark secrets, perhaps a government conspiracy, perhaps bad guys who are going to track down those with powers and force them to make a choice about where they stands, but the first episode allows the protagonists to wallow in their various emotional responses to the discovery that they are not like mortal men. This is a series which will provide lots of fodder for internet speculation and decipherment within the fan communities that it is apt to inspire.

Spoiler Warnings End Here

All of this makes Heroes a worthy if risky experiment - so far, there's been much more room to experiment with the superhero genre through comics where the line between mainstream and alternative seems to be blurring more and more. (Witness, for example, the recent Project Superior and Bizarro books that have allowed a range of alternative comics folks to experiment both formally and thematically with the genre's core building blocks) Film has been perhaps the most conservative in its use of the superhero (where Ang Lee took some hits for making his version of the Hulk too brainy) while television has shown the greatest pull towards melodrama (Smallville) or romantic comedy (Lois and Clark). It is not clear how this alternative version of the superhero will play with younger comics fans who tend to make theirs Marvel these days or to those who know the superhero only through other media. I think more mature comics fans, especially those who toss something by Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, or Chris Ware into their pull bin, will really get into this darker than typical vision of the genre if they give it half a chance. And my sense is this may appeal to a large number of viewers who are looking for something different but who have not warmed to the colorful outfits one associates with most superhero television. This is certainly a series I plan to set my tivo for when the fall season rolls around.

One More Rec

While I've got your attention on revisionist superheroes, let me put in a plug here for John Ridley and Georges Jeanty's The American Way, a miniseries coming out this summer from Wildstorm,. This book seems to just get better and better with each issue. Set in the early 1960s against the backdrop of the New Frontier rhetoric and the beginnings of the Civil Rights era, the book depicts superheroes as embodying the social and political debates of the time. The core storyline deals with America's first "colored" superhero who the government has floated as a trial balloon, trying to build public sympathy for a hooded crusader (and only gradually revealing that he is black) but circumstances blow his cover and suddenly the issue of race becomes a central source of division and friction within the superhero community. Predictably, many of the southern superheroes are reluctant to fight alongside him and some resort to race-baiting, but the author is careful to show the complex and contradictory range of attitudes towards race that divided the south during this transitional moment. I've seen little buzz or fanfare about this book in the comics press but it is a provocative reworking of the superhero genre. The series is in its 5th of 8 issues so you either need to go to a store where you can buy back issues easily or hope that they put it out as a graphic novel when the current run is over.

Are Housewives Desperate For Games?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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