How Transmedia Storytelling Begat Transmedia Planning... (Part One)

Cynthia and I are just back from Poland as of tonight. I hope to share some impressions of the trip as soon as I am able. In the meantime, the following post was written for the newsletter we send to C3 partners. When you write a book, you usually have no idea which ideas will get picked up or by which communities. That's part of the fun of sending your brain children out in the world. Today, I want to explore a case in point -- the ways that the idea of transmedia narrative in my new book, Convergence Culture, has started to evolve into a concept of transmedia planning as it has been taken up by bloggers interested in branding.

Convergence Culture itself deals with transmedia storytelling as an emerging

form of entertainment but never really addresses its application to branding. The chapter on transmedia storytelling immediately follows the book's discussion of American Idol, brand communities, affective economics, and product placement so the connection of ideas was there to be found but I did not myself put all of the pieces together.

The Further Adventures of Mr. Clean

Even before the book appeared in print, though, C3 researcher Grant McCracken published a series of blog posts exploring what my approach to transmedia might contribute to current thinking about brands:

In the old world of marketing, there wasn't much transmediation to speak of. Corporations made products, and informed the advertising agency, who in turn informed the consumer... The meanings went straight down a single shute. They did not run on several tracks.

McCracken focuses primarily on one aspect of the transmedia experience -- providing backstory. He questioned whether most brands have a sufficiently detailed backstory to generate the kind of consumer interest that give rise to fan communities around entertainment franchises:

For Mr. Clean there was no back story, no alternative endings, no competing interpretation. There was in fact no narrative to speak of. I think some consumers surmised that Mr. Clean was an uncorked genie, a creature out of Shahraza released from the lamp/bottle to put his magic at the disposal of the homemaker. In this case, the brand was actually removing meaning from the icon, not supplementing or multiplying this meaning.

Yet in a subsequent post, McCracken shows how easy it would be to flesh out the backstory of a seemingly empty icon:

It's not so hard to imagine Mr. Clean in more fully realized narrative terms: child of an orphanage in a French colony in North Africa (circa 1890), early childhood spend as a runner in a souk (market), taken in as a servant by a family of French nationals who holiday in Morocco and eventually he joins the household even when it is "at home" in France. In the late spring of 1907, "Gerard" is travelling back to Morocco to help to set up the summer home when (mon dieu!) he is kidnapped by pirates. Gerard sails for some years as a pirate and this allows him to built up a small store of wealth, and to return, eventually, to the souk where he buys a stock of carpets and a stall, marries his childhood sweetheart, and begins to raise a little batch of runners all his own. It is on one of his trips to replenish his supply of carpets that...

Would such a backstory enhance the brand experience? Perhaps. Especially if people find themselves wanting to find out more about this remarkable character and his many exotic adventures, if consumers seek more touch points with the brand, if they generate their own narratives about Gerard. Personally I am waiting to see the Mr. Clean/Jolly Green Giant slash genre emerge!

There have been good examples of tapping interest in characters to prolong our engagement. I am thinking of the Folger's Coffee campaign with Anthony Head, who went on to play Giles on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Here a story unfolded across a number of commercial installments -- following a fairly simple genre -- the romantic comedy. Could you imagine extending that outward into some kind of epistelary fiction? A series of love letters between the two in print or on the web, which come complete with coffee stains? Perhaps even some kind of game where the goal is help true love win out and good coffee taste find an appreciating consumer?

Yet, there is also a danger in too much specificity. We might start by pondering whether renaming Mr. Clean Gerard increases our engagement with the character or simply closes off a range of other possible associations. The most effective use of transmedia branding so far may be the BMW campaign, "The Hire," which unfolded first on the web (in the hands of some of the world's greatest filmmakers) and more recently in the comics (in the hands of some pretty damn gifted comics creators). Despite all of the screen time he enjoys, the central protagonist -- the driver -- receives very little characterization, allowing him to move fluidly across genres and across media platforms. He is more an observer figure than a protagonist: the goals of the guest stars set the terms for each new installment. One can encounter the episodes in any order, but there may be less motivation to try to find links across them.

Transmedia vs. Media Neutral

The relationship between transmedia entertainment and branding resurfaced recently in a much discussed post by Faris Yacob from the London-based Naked Communications group. Yacob embraces transmedia branding in contrast to what he sees as the media neutral approach that shapes much current thinking about branding:

The model that has held the industry's collective imagination for the last few years has been media neutral planning. In essence, this is the belief that we should develop a single organising thought that iterates itself across any touchpoint - this was a reaction against previous models of integration that were often simply the dilution of a televisual creative idea across other channels that it wasn't necessarily suited to...The important point is that there is one idea being expressed in different ways. This is believed to be more effective as there are multiple encodings of the same idea, which reinforces the impact on the consumer.

Now then, let's think about transmedia planning. In this model, there would be an evolving non-linear brand narrative. Different channels could be used to communicate different, self-contained elements of the brand narrative that build to create an larger brand world. Consumers then pull different parts of the story together themselves. The beauty of this is that it is designed to generate brand communities, in the same way that The Matrix generates knowledge communities, as consumers come together to share elements of the narrative. It

has a word of mouth driver built in.

While McCracken's use of my transmedia concept emphasized back story, Yacob's version stresses world building and the social activity of consumers. His primary example turns out to be the alternative reality game, The Art of the Heist. It's worth recalling that I do discuss The Beast and I Love Bees in the context of my discussion of transmedia storytelling. Indeed, at the heart of my concept of transmedia is the distinction between cultural attractors -- works that draw like minded individuals together to form a community -- and cultural activators -- works that give these communities something to do. In a subsequent interview, Yacob fleshes out even more his idea about the role of the consumer in the process of transmedia branding:

I think consumers can handle more than a single core idea. In fact, I think in an age where increasingly consumers control the media the consume, and we can no longer simply interrupt, entertain for 25 seconds and then sell them something, then we have to offer them more than a core idea well told.

It's not about individuals responding to the whole world - it's about whether a community will adopt it. And groups naturally spring up around stories that have rich worlds to explore, discuss and share.

The industry seems obsessed by engagement at the moment - building / offering brand engagement. But from a person, or communities, point of view - why should they engage with brands unless there is some value in the engagement?

Consciously or unconsciously, Yacob is linkig my notion of transmedia entertainment with arguments about complexity in contemporary popular narrative made by Steven Johnson in his book, Everything Bad is Good For You, or C3 researcher Jason Mittell in his work on contemporary television narative. I see the kinds of complexity that Johnson and Mittell discuss as closely linked to the emergence of knowledge communities (or as Pierre Levy might call it, collective intelligence): a group of people, pooling their knowledge, working together, can process much greater complexity (indeed, demands much greater complexity) than an individual watching television alone in their living room. Transmedia entertainment simply pushes that search for complexity to the next level, spreading the information across multiple media platforms and thus providing an incentive for what Mimi Ito calls "hypersociality." The more people get absorbed into putting together these scattered bits of information, the more invested they are in the brand/fan narrative.

In a film franchise, what fuels this interest may be a story -- or more precisely, a fictional world rich enough to support a range of possible stories. But, one can imagine other structures of information generating similar interest -- we can't really call what motivates the Survivor spoilers I discuss earlier in Convergence Culture a story per se. One can imagine, for example, a trivia contest of some kind creating sufficient interest that people seek out information from multiple choices and pool data with others in their core community.

Building Soaps as Long-Term Brands: A Diatribe on Laura's Return on General Hospital

By: Sam Ford This is the third of a three-part series about my look at the world of soaps while Henry is in Poland this week. This builds off the piece I posted here two days ago about legacy characters in soap operas. As with the other two, this piece originally appeared on the C3 blog last night. For more of the C3 team's commentary on various aspects of "convergence culture," be sure to stop by our blog or subscribe to our RSS feed.

Back on Nov. 8, I wrote about legacy characters in soaps, basing much of my writing about the short-term reuniting of Luke and Laura on General Hospital the iconic couple of days gone by in the soaps industry, going back to a time when soaps carried many more viewers. The post raised spirited debate, even drawing in the former head writer of the top-rated American soap opera, Kay Alden, who is also an advisor on my thesis project.

My intent now is to start with the comments generated from that last post to move into examining the limited success of the Luke and Laura reuniting and what the industry can learn from it and hopefully not misinterpret. The show re-inventing the Luke and Laura wedding did a 2.9, above the usual average for the show but below what some projected might be possible to reach. And, what's worse for some people, the ratings were back down to a 2.6 average for the show, still putting it atop some of its competition but not resulting in any major sustained growth. However, the reunion did post the highest rating in the history of cable network SoapNet, and it generated quite a bit of publicity.

Kay Alden wrote about how unique thinking about using older characters/viewers to help "reinvent the soap opera viewing audience" was a fascinating way to think about audience-building that the genre had not thought about. "The idea of actively rejecting the consistent concern with more and more youth, and instead reaching out for the multigenerational audience is one that we would be wise to explore and, frankly, exploit."

Alden writes, "No one in my experience has said, let's bring back this old person as a means of drawing old viewers back to the show and getting them re-involved, because these old viewers might be the key to drawing in new viewers from their own families, and helping to re-establish the tradition of soap opera viewing as a family affair, passed down from mothers to daughters to their daughters."

To recap my original points from the first post:

Longevity. Soaps should celebrate what they have on their side, and one of those things is a deep history with a talented ensemble roster, many of whom have been around for years.

The WWE. I pointed to WWE's 24/7 On Demand product which makes episodes available for the archives and also markets historical footage through DVDs, etc., as proof that fans can often care about the pasts of their dramas and the character history of various characters.

Legacy Characters. I argue that legacy characters are a way to tie the current soaps products with the past of those shows and to draw in former viewers, envisioning a way to have familiar faces appear from time to time to show back up and pull them back in. I also point out that you don't have to have all the characters featured be the same age of the target viewers, as people are often interested in stories about characters older/younger than them as well.

Demographics. The problem with older viewers is that they aren't the target demographic. But most people only start watching soaps through a social relationship, whether it be a friend or spouse or parent or grandparent. So, while older viewers may not be beneficial in and of themselves for people who are looking too narrowly at a certain age demographic, they become increasingly important when the economic model shifts and they are considered grassroots marketers for the show.

The Prodigal viewers. I argue that soaps need to concentrate first and foremost on how to get the people watching their show now to love it so much they will spread the word to people who used to watch to come back. This takes time. I wrote, "And what's going to attract these fans back into the fold? Two things: first, familiar faces; and, second, good writing when they get there. I am not arguing at all that you don't need amazing new characters and dazzling young stars because you need something to get these viewers hooked on a new generation, but you have to use the old generation to do that. " However, "the problem is that this type of growth is slow growth...It's not a week or a month fix. And you have to have quality writing when fans get there and younger characters that are compelling and who interact with these legacy characters in ways that gets fans hooked on them as well." So my argument that the most important marketing tool of all is good, long-term, consistent storytelling.

General Hospital

Kay writes in depth about her responses from the way Luke and Laura still capture some of the power of soaps but wonders "can it bring in new, younger viewers?" She writes:

Thus, viewers who tune in again for the nostalgia value of Luke and Laura, will witness several things: they will get their nostalgia from the many flashbacks to the Luke and Laura romance that GH will undoubtedly play; viewers will also see what the characters are like now, today, 25 years later, as this story of undying love is rejuvenated; and finally, these old viewers may well find themselves drawn into the stories of the newer characters--the "children of" stories, as well as becoming involved with newer, very powerful characters like Sonny, Alexis, Carly, Jax, who have become more the mainstay of the show, but who would be new to viewers from long ago. In short, it seems to me that General Hospital has the potential to hit it out of the park with the return of Genie Francis and all that this could mean at this time.

Now that the return (and Laura) has come and gone, it appears that it caused a blip in the map, a short-term increase, but nothing major and nothing sustained. It seems that some viewer reaction was largely that it was great to see her but that viewers knew it was short-term from the start and that it was too ephemeral to have great impact. For instance, in one online commentary site--"Snark Weighs In"--the author writes, "In many ways, the situation mirrored the viewers real-life relationship with GH. Luke entered into this ludicrous situation knowing his time with Laura would be short--and so did we. [ . . . ] Luke and Laura's re-wedding, the centerpiece of ABC's promotional campaign, was nothing more than an anti-climactic attempt to ride the coattails of the most famous wedding in TV history. It was the least interesting part of Gene Francis' return." (The author is referring, by the way, to the drug that temporarily pulled Laura out of her catatonic state, much as happened recently with John Larroquette's character on House.)

Other fans weighed in over at Soap Central, debating a wide variety of reasons why fans didn't tune back in--largely talking about flaws in the current way soaps tell stories and the fact that many viewers wouldn't return because they both knew it was short-term and didn't want to see it poorly executed. The same discussions took place at the TV Guide Community. And I would propose another suggestion--that many people simply never heard about it nor was it done long-term enough for them to develop investment in returning to the show.

Inflated Expectations

Toni Fitzgerald with Media Life Magazine wrote about the power of this storyline back in October, when the first numbers came through surrounding Laura's return. She wrote, "That in a nutshell is what's been happening on ABC's "General Hospital," and it's driving big ratings increases. The return of Genie Francis, the actress who plays Laura, for the first time since 2002 helped the show regain the No. 1 slot in daytime among women 18-49 for the first time in six months" and went on to predict more of the same. The problem is not that the event wasn't successful but just that such a short-term jump in numbers was just not enough to get a significant number of people involved in the product once again.

This takes me back to August, when I wrote in response to all the critics after the opening weekend of Snakes on a Plane did $15 million. Even our own Henry Jenkins said he was eating crow at this "low" number. At the time I wrote, "The problem is that people fell prey to their own hyperbole and expected a campy B-movie to become a blockbuster, which I don't think it was ever designed to be. " And I feel the same way in this instance.

In the comments section of that original post in November, I wrote in response to Kay's comments that "the return of Laura for a limited time is one small incident. I am not predicting it will change the industry or anything of the sort, as one smart decision doesn't turn everything around. I just think that a whole lot of these types of decisions is the way to go and a change in the way the industry thinks overall." Instead, I advocated both grounding long-term and older characters more solidly in stories and create a budgeting shift that would allow for continued short-term returns from various characters from each show's history throughout the year, so that using legacy characters becomes established with fans as a long-term strategy rather than a one-time gimmick.

A History of Quick-Fixes

Soaps have been trying to fix the ratings problems for a while--say 20 years now or so. As cable channels proliferated and choices grew exponentially, soaps slowly lost viewership. The response was to try and appeal directly to the target demographic by drawing them in a variety of ways...to think about how to increase numbers by next week. And all these quick-fixes, even if they led to some momentary jumps in ratings from time-to-time over the years, have seen an overall trend of sliding numbers.

Some quick-fixes have been colorful. My favorites have been with Passions, the only show to not be around in the more "glorious" periods and that has survived by drawing in younger viewers and by parodying the genre in various ways. They've had an animated sequence and a Bollywood episode. Guiding Light surprised everyone with a comic book/superhero crossover, although readers and viewers seemed to fill it was lacking in execution Meanwhile, Days of Our Lives is seeking out interactivity by allowing viewers to name the baby of a prominent character. There have also been interesting promotional campaigns, such as the dance videos promoting As the World Turns and the ATWT/Tyson Chicken commercials. And yet another interesting project from SoapNet is a fantasy soaps competition, modeled after fantasy football.

Some of these were intended for varying degrees of short-term promotion, but the overall trajectory of the genre has been quick-fixes. This happens in storyline form as well, with natural disaster stories or plot-driven suspenseful moments that may draw new people in for a week but gives them little to want to stick around for.

I find Laura as another quick-fix, except this time they are using history. My argument about utilizing history is not about for some short-term gains but rather as a change in approach and in practices, in attitude. Bringing Laura back for a few weeks, as an isolated incident, is not an example of a long-term approach to building an audience back. That's not to criticize the storyline but rather to explain why it did not lead to this miraculous turnaround soaps seem to continue seeking. These are all placebos. There's no secret--just good storytelling. And soaps need to realize this and start building for the future before they slowly use up even more of the cultural cache they've built up. No one in the industry wants to see the End of DAYS.

The era of quick-fixes needs to end for the genre to survive, and networks and producers alike have to think about these shows as long-time brands rather than just weekly programming. The question needs to be how shows can tell good stories now that will lead to increased viewership in two years and do everything within that time to improve the storytelling, make shows more inclusive of the whole case, embrace the history, and empower grassroots marketers to draw more viewers back in. That takes a lot of time and a long-term vision, though.

Building Momentum

Let me reiterate--the problem with the long-term approach is that it takes a long time to get results. Sustainable growth, as any city planner will tell you as well, is not just adding new populations in droves. In the soaps industry, that seems to be unlikely to happen in the first place and--if it does--hotshotting only leads to a one-time bump. That's why the approach over the past 20 years may have led to momentary spikes as soaps steal audiences from each other and temporarily draw viewers back in, but a lack of long-term planning and looking at the show as a brand rather than a week-by-week product has led to a steady decline, caused largely by a number of new choices but exacerbated by this lack of long-term vision and miscalculation of the power of the audience and the material.

What soaps need to do is develop this consistent direction and then have the confidence to pull it off. Short-term returns by old characters are just another form of hot-shotting, although particularly more interesting than a slasher storyline.

Look at the pro wrestling world once again for a parallel. Fans of wrestling remember well the 5.5-year "Monday Night War" between Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Federation and Ted Turner's World Championship Wrestling, in competing shows on Monday nights. When Nitro debuted against incumbent RAW in September 1995, it quickly took over the ratings by presenting a better show. However, after eight or nine months winning the ratings in a row, WCW got complacent and stale. WWF improved its product to the point that, by mid-1997, it was clearly among hardcore fans considered the better show. It was clear that WWF had the momentum on its side.

However, even as that momentum was slowly building, WCW was still winning the ratings battle every week. In fact, it wasn't until mid-1998 that WWF broke what was, by then, an 83-week wining streak for WCW. The key was that the show had to get better almost a full year before it reflected in the ratings. If WWF had shifted its focus anytime during that year, their subsequent unparalleled popularity in the late 1990s and early part of this decade would have never happened. If they had gone for short-time fixes and hotshotting at some point along the way, they would have destroyed what they were building up.

The key was in giving time for word-of-mouth to spread. They started putting on a better show, but people were more dedicated to Nitro. Yet, word slowly started to pass that WWF was putting on the better program week-by-week. Fan advocacy are your best chance of permanently gaining new viewers, but that relationship has to build organically, needing a long-term plan rather than a quick turnaround. Soaps could learn a lot from the wrestling world's lesson (and the wrestling world could do some good at looking back at their own history).

Fans Hold the Secret to Success

Even if some researchers want to claim that watching soaps makes you stupid, fans have often proven to be more savvy than they are given credit for. Some fan forums are known for having intriguing discussions about their shows online. Look, for instance, at how fans discuss product placement in relation to the genre's future, such as here and here. (On a tangential note, see soaps' use of embedded public service announcements as an interesting aside to product placement in the genre.)

And modern technologies dictate that there is a shrinking distance from producer to consumer. This interactivity and the personalities of other fans become an important part of the viewing experience for many people, especially as they often become fans of other fans themselves. In other words, your most ardent fans who act as historians and resources and commentators and critics to the rest of the fan community have quite a following of their own, and shows would benefit most from interacting with and bolstering those activities rather than hiding from them or minimizing their importance by ignoring that rich history.

So, while some people will decry the use of history as useless for building audiences, this short-term return of a character does not mean that history has no place on shows or that my larger arguments are wrong. Just a good story and a long-term plan that allows for multigenerational storytelling, and these shows may be able to slowly build an audience from their diaspora.

Oakdale Confidential: Secrets Revealed: How the Book's Reprint Is an Even More Striking Example of Transmedia Storytelling (with a Tangent about Bad Twin at Intermission)

By: Sam Ford In the second of my three-part series on writing about how convergence culture is changing one of television's oldest genres--the soap opera--I am focusing on the printing of a transmedia book based on the soap opera As the World Turns. I originally wrote this for the C3 blog on Nov. 25. See yesterday's post for a little bit of an explanation of my background from Henry.

Oakdale Confidential has now entered its first reprinting stage, and just as the writers wove the initial printing of the book into storylines for the soap opera As the World Turns, the reprint is becoming perhaps an even greater catalyst for events happening on the show. The book--which sat at #3 on the New York Times bestseller list for two weeks in a row and made it as high as number five on Amazon's seller list--is being reprinted with the addition of a new story by author Katie Peretti, a character on the show, who reveals a major town secret in the book now that she has decided to publicly acknowledge her authorship of the book. In a chance to get revenge on her ex-husband for what she sees as ruining her current marriage, she writes what would--in the real world--be sure libel in accusing that ex-husband and his girlfriend of stealing expensive jewels, an accusation that is, in fact, true.

Following the ups and downs of this book's release, both its major success as a transmedia experiment and also its pointing at some of the troubles with creating this type of text and its subsequent instructions on future projects of this sort, has been worth following throughout 2006. Unfortunately, because of what I perceive as a bias that marginalizes certain types of content even as its popularity should rank it as mainstream, the successes of Oakdale Confidential have not been that well covered or examined. I am going to attempt to trace that history a little bit here.

Last December, I wrote about this limiting approach to marginalizing certain types of content, particularly the two types of American entertainment I study most--soap operas and pro wrestling. Both were among the earliest of television staples and both have proven to be immensely popular throughout the past several decades, yet neither are regularly understood or reported on by those supposedly covering "the entertainment industry." Wrestling and soaps are both only covered by their own press, and it is clear when the occasional feature is done on either most of the time that the "mainstream" entertainment press either have a complete lack of understanding of the genre and/or a disdain for the genre that clouds their coverage. That's largely not because there are no journalists who are fans of wrestling or soaps but rather that's the only stories that have the likelihood of getting run. (The reverse is the glowing and too positive stories in which the journalist is so surprised by discovering the popularity of one of these entertainments that they don't give a nuanced account at all.)

At the time, I wrote, "Considering many of the ideas people now celebrate as complex television came from soap opera, and considering how much of an innovator WWE has been in transmedia storytelling and many other aspects of media convergence, it just makes me wonder how many other extremely popular and profitable areas of popular culture are ignored by most mainstream journalists."

The plans for Oakdale Confidential were announced in early 2006. Back in February, I first asked what Oakdale Confidential would be. The announcement of a novel that would in some way be related to the show directed a lot of speculation from fans as to who or what would be the driving force behind this book. At the time, I wrote, "Whatever the case--this is another step in the right direction, if done well. How can a novel become a piece of transmedia? If done well, the television plot will in some way hinge on the contents of the book, so that the television show promotes the book but also requires viewers to read the book to understand the full implications of the impact the book has on the residents of Oakdale. The show has been very tight-lipped about what Oakdale Confidential is, and Amazon's page on the book has next to no information about the contents...Which makes all of the fans all the more determined to find out what's going on. There's great potential here for an interesting experiment in transmedia storytelling."

The book was a major success, as mentioned previously. In April, after the book had been released, I wrote, "What makes the book most intriguing is that viewers are looking through the text and examining shows carefully to get clues as to who authored it. There are several factual discrepancies in the book from what we have actually seen on screen that are illuminating for close watchers of ATWT, and my thoughts on the message board look into those parts of the text that stray from the 'truth' we've seen on the screen in detail to get a better sense of who might be the author and why they may have either gotten facts wrong or deliberately chosen to omit certain things in their rendering of the story."

The television writers and the book's author did not sync perfectly with each other, and it's important to realize that the book was written by someone with the company but not on the writing team of the show and that there was not substantial collaboration between the two creative forces. That hindered the quality of the project, and I would argue both that there were major factual inaccuracies that hindered the enjoyment of the book for longtime fans and also that there was not enough coordination between the book's author and the writers of the show to really make for greatly compelling television. But, because it had not been done on the show previously, this type of experiment was intriguing, and it was instructive as to what does and doesn't work for future transmedia projects and also a cautious tipping of the toes in the water that--to me, anyway--proved that there is substantial market interest in this type of project that will hopefully lead to a better coordinated and more earnest attempt the second time around.

This was my sentiments at the time as well, when I wrote, "While the experiment shows how much more coordination is needed between the real author of the book and the television writing team to really exploit all the possibilities of taking the story from one medium to the other, the one thing that Oakdale Confidential has demonstrated quite powerfully is that such an attempt at transmedia storytelling is becoming more and more profitable and that viewers are eager to join into a deep transmedia experience. I am hoping that the experiment not only shows the people at ATWT that this was a good idea but also what to do better the next time around."

I was intrigued by comments from Alina Adams, the book's actual author. She and I have corresponded on several occasions, but she also kept a blog running for a while after the book's publication about Oakdale Confidential. She wrote responses to various criticisms from the fan community of her work, explaining that "Oakdale's characters simply have too much past history for it all to be compressed into a novel. As a result, it was decided that any past events which were not relevant to the plot at hand wouldn't be included." While that makes sense, fans were not happy that it was used to change the relationship of characters in their pasts, to gloss over inaccuracies in people's families (including the complete exclusion of one of the children of a main character in the book), etc. Fans didn't buy this line of argument, but it was great to see her blog entries as a place these discussions played out. She also explained that "some of the "mistakes" in the book are deliberate," reflecting the desired world of the author rather than the reality. Again, I hope the fan response to some of these factual inaccuracies provided a blueprint to the creators for similar projects in the future, but Alina's comments are a great case study for anyone interested in transmedia, and--what's better--the comments were made publicly available for fans. (Also, see her post about the difficulties of writing about the physical attributes of characters when she is really referring to the actors.)

While I do sympathize with various fan complaints, the book was well-received as an experiment and encouraged. Yet I never saw that much about its success in the mainstream press. There were snippets here and there and a sidebar, but one would think that a show having a book that was an artifact from on-the-air storylines would be major discussion. And it was. Shortly thereafter. About Lost.

Bad Twin was not a replica experiment, as it's tie-ins to the actual show was more subtle, but it was very similar. And it got tons more publicity. Bad Twin had a better overall Amazon performance, from what I could gather, but the data I found never ranked it on the New York Times list's top 10 (I did find a reference to it making 14, and it may have made even higher). While I couldn't find direct comparisons between the two in overall numbers, suffice to say that both were a major success.

Yet, when the New York Times gave its review for Bad Twin, the ignoring of Oakdale Confidential was evident. As I mentioned, the soaps book did get a sidebar. But, despite having appeared higher on the list than Bad Twin ever did, Bad Twin was the one to get a full book review in the Times, a review that began, "Novels by unidentified authors have made the best-seller lists, as has at least one said to have been written by a soap opera character. But this may be the first time that a book by a nonexistent writer who is thought to have died in a plane crash has cracked the charts."

I'm not a betting man, but I would say that, had Bad Twin came first, if Oakdale Confidential had been mentioned at all, it would have almost been referenced as being derivative of the Lost book.

I'm very supportive of Bad Twin as well, but I wish both books had simply been more consistent stories and that both were most intricately woven into storylines from the shows. But these were experiments. And I'm hoping the success of the re-release of Oakdale Confidential will not just lead to even more ignoring of the book's success. This time around, the writers have done an even better job of weaving the release into the storylines, as Lucinda--the publisher--has hounded Katie on several fronts about getting her copy out, and the pressure of the book's release has played an important part in major decisions made by the character. Her notes about her sleeping with her ex-husband are used as pre-writing for the insert of the book in its re-release, as well as a way for her to sort through feelings about her one night stand, and her husband discovers about the affair when he's trying to print off her pages for Lucinda, who demands to have them immediately since the book needs to go to press and Katie has been dragging the deadline.

The discovery causes Mike to move out and Katie, in her frustration, to write a scathing extra chapter about her ex-husband, which she tries to stop from going to press, but too late. Since that time, we've seen characters around the mall where the book is being sold (and a couple of too obvious decisions to purchase it). On the whole, though, the promotion has been much more integrated into the show in a believable and compelling way this time around.

The press for the rerelease has had one major flaw--making some viewers think of it as a sequel rather than the same book with a few new things inserted in. That is somewhat the show's fault, as I have seen it referred to as a "sequel," although the storyline on the show and the book's description clearly indicates it is a reprinting of the original story with a few new additions.

As of today, the re-release is ranked #625 on Amazon, while the original version is still holding at #3,751. Both editions are hardcover.

Meanwhile, the hardcover edition of Bad Twin ranks #5,335, while the paperback is #6,275. And a large print hardcover edition is #1,381,487.

The point is that both are doing well in the long tail, and ATWT has had particular success in making the re-release once again part of storylines, despite being acknowledged as the same book. I'm still hoping that both will be models for the two shows to try something even more successful from a narrative perspective in the future now that the economic model is proven to have potential, and also that other shows will look at these successes when thinking of transmedia extensions in the future.

Alina has some great recent posts about how transmedia projects are implemented as well. One recent post highlights how a subtext from the book she wrote a year ago, about Katie's underlying interest in her former husband who wasn't even on the show again at the time that Alina was working on the book, has now been identified as fans as proof from back then that Katie was still in love with Simon and that this affair had been coming all along. This was serendipitous, but it demonstrates how transmedia can be deliberately programmed to provide these subtle connections for viewers.

And, as with character Luke Snyder's blog earlier this year, these types of projects allow viewers to see what characters on the show are reading and reacting to. (In Luke's case, with that "coming out" storyline, it interested me to see new fans who came to the show through that story in particular, without necessarily having a background in watching. But, what drove their viewing was a social network built around watching, through an online gay community.)

Read Alina's posts about the difficulties of trying to coordinate the release of Katie's writing on Amazon's Web site and the book to coincide with when things are done on the daily show itself.

And here are a few links to my take on transmedia projects being attempted by other shows, such as the Passions tabloid and the Guiding Light tabloid-style Web site that is worked into the show.

Also, see my previous notes about the Guiding Light podcasting process, Passions streaming on NBC's site and available on iTunes, and All My Children podcasts.

Legacy Characters and Rich History: How Soap Operas Must Capitalize on Their History (and Pay Attention to the Lessons of the WWE)

Sam Ford is the backbone of the Convergence Culture Consortium blog. Week in and week out, he pulls together some of the most important developments in the entertainment and media sector and offers his own insightful analysis of how they connect to the larger trends we have been researching for our clients. For those of you whose interests were perked by the conversations in and around the Futures of Entertainment conference, the C3 blog is a great place to go to learn more about user-generated content, fan and brand communities, transmedia storytelling, and so forth. There's much more there than I can possibly cover in this blog. I go for depth; Sam goes for breath--though, at his best, he achieves both.

Ford is a masters student in the Comparative Media Studies program who came to us with lots of experience as a small town journalist writing for his local newspaper in Western Kentucky. Ford wrote his undergraduate thesis about professional wrestling as a transmedia and fan phenomenon and is going to be teaching a class on the topic this spring. He is doing his thesis work trying to map some ways that soap operas in general and As The World Turns in particular can exploit aspects of convergence culture to broaden their market and to better satisfy the demands of their hardcore viewers. Like many of our students, he is using blogging to create some public discussion around his thesis ideas. In this case, he has posted a series of lengthy pieces on the C3 site which explore the ways soaps are going transmedia and interacting with their fan communities. I have asked Sam if we can reproduce these posts here in hopes that he may garner insights from my readers on his project.

Sam, by the way, has been nice enough to take over the management of this blog for the next few days while Cynthia and I have gone to Poland for the public debut of the Polish language edition of Convergence Culture -- my first translation. I will be speaking at a conference on the future of culture in Warsaw and will share some of my impressions when I get back.

Now, to turn it over to Sam:

By: Sam Ford

I originally wrote this piece over at the C3 blog at the beginning of November. Since that time, the episode that drove my initial writing has aired, and its success (or lack thereof) has driven a response that will be on the C3 site and will be cross-posted here on Friday. Also, Friday's post will pick up a variety of conversations that began in the comments section on the original post on the C3 blog which involved former Young and the Restless head writer Kay Alden and longtime soaps viewer and critic Lynn Liccardo, who are both serving as my thesis advisors (along with Henry and William Uricchio).

Luke and Laura have me thinking about soap operas and legacy characters and the importance of recognizing histories on shows that are fortunate enough to have a wealth of former content to draw from.

A lot of long-standing television forms have not completely grasped the idea that one of the most important selling tools they have is exactly what sets them apart from the more ephemeral primetime fare: longevity.

In this category, I'm talking about any type of program with deep archives but particularly thinking of daytime serial drama, the soap operas; professional wrestling; some long-standing news shows or features on other networks, anything that has been on the air for years, without an end in sight. These programs are special, with formats that have built within viewers the sense that, even if the program hits a down time, that its longevity and format will cause it to be around for years to come.

That's why I've made the argument with both pro wrestling programming and soap operas over the years that you can't really apply the term "jump the shark" to these shows because they have jumped the shark and back so many times over the past few decades. As the World Turns and Guiding Light have both been on the air every weekday and all year long for more than 50 years now, making PGP a brand renowned for longevity. And World Wrestling Entertainment's roots stretch back to 1963 as a regional broadcast, giving WWE a longstanding viewership history that few other primetime shows can match, other than news programs.

Yet, traditionally anyway, these shows only give a cursory glance to their history, instead relying on bragging about their history only in ambiguous terms from time-to-time.

WWE Finding the Right Direction with Legacy Content

Vince McMahon completely ignored wrestling history for a long time, and it made some degree of business sense when it came to the history of his competitors. He was trying to establish the WWE as the only wrestling history that matters. Now that he's pretty well won the game, though, now that he has established his wrestling empire as the owner of the country's primary wrestling brand, Vince has started to give more than just a passing glance at the wrestling archives.

Enter WWE 24/7 On Demand, which I've written about before. At the time, I wrote:

The point of all this? WWE has been able to draw on nostalgia in a way that appeals to a very concentrated group of fans, those who care enough about professional wrestling to throw down a few bucks a month to watch old pro wrestling programming, tape archives that were otherwise just sitting in a closet somewhere. It's an example of Chris Anderson's Long Tail, in that products like these can be profitable just by finding a fan base. Although the initial costs of digitizing and mapping out these tape libraries may put the product in the red, the long-term sustainability of this niche product should eventually turn a profit, especially considering that the footage can also be used for DVD releases, etc. (The company has found this out, especially with releasing multiple-disc sets of various wrestling personalities.)

And, the WWE has been able to pull in some fans who don't even watch the current product regularly but who love to see the wrestling of yesteryear. In fact, there are some people who are hostile against the company, who do not like Vince McMahon, but are willing to pay him for this archive, to remember wrestling from the regional era before what they see as his corrupting influence came through and changed pro wrestling.

On the other hand, soap operas don't really seem to "get it," as Vince would say. And it's not like Vince always has but rather that he has slowly come around to ways of educating current fans to care about wrestling history and then to promote that wrestling history with the 24/7 product, DVD releases, etc., in order to eventually make money off that content that was just collecting dust otherwise.

The Lesson for Soap Operas

The same needs to take place with soap operas. While every other television industry seems to make its name off target marketing and niche audiences when it comes to demographics, soap operas are the opposite. Almost everyone I know my age, male and female, who watch soaps do so because they started watching them with a relative growing up. In fact, almost everyone I know period started watching soaps this way. When the audience started falling off, soaps began to dumb down the shows' histories more and more, ignoring the past and worrying about losing viewers with such stuff. New characters with little history on the show started being the major focus, and veterans are lucky to make it on the screen a handful of times a month now on many shows.

Why? Soaps are losing their 18-49 female target demographic, and they are trying to appeal to them directly. But they don't understand the value of transgenerational marketing when it comes to soaps, and they've spent the last decade looking for a quick-fix for the target demographic when I believe they would have been better served focusing on improving creative and utilizing their history more effectively. Shows should bolster their longterm viewers' numbers and letting them act as their proselytizers for younger soap fans. In other words, if you hadn't lost grandma and mom, you would have been able to keep grandson or granddaughter.

Legacy Characters

How do you remedy that, though? Legacy characters. Acknowledging the history. Not only could soaps find more and more ways to make money off the show's archives (when you bring back a legacy character, release online content or DVDs that highlight the history of that characters, their interaction with others who are currently on the show, etc.), but they can also draw back in the prodigal sons and daughters who have drifted from the show by returning some familiar faces.

There has been a lot of talk in the soap fan communities and the industry in the past year about legacy characters and how their return can generate buzz for shows once again. A lot of these legacy characters are out of the demographic that the show is trying to reach, but...gasp...viewers seem to sometimes be interested in characters that aren't necessarily the same age as them, and--when it comes to the large families on most soap operas--these characters are woven into storylines of several generations of other characters on the show, leading to a show that is supposed to be multigenerational in its storylines in order to appeal to multiple generations of viewers.

Ed Martin with Media Village wrote about the return of Laura from the famed Luke and Laura couple on General Hospital and what it means to the show. Martin writes, "Francis' return as one of the most popular characters to ever emerge in daytime drama is worth noting because it calls attention (at a time when much attention is needed) to the enduring power not simply of daytime soap operas but to that of serialized programming overall and to broadcast television itself. Consider the enduring popularity of her character, Laura. This month marks the 25th anniversary of Laura's now-legendary wedding to Luke in a two-part 1981 episode that drew 30 million-plus viewers, still the record-holder for a daytime drama audience."

Later, he points out that this "is what a well-written, well-acted soap opera can do, a point well worth making at a time when most soap operas are fighting for their lives, the victims of repetitive writing, industry indifference, escalating competition from other media and, I am convinced, flawed audience measurement."

Martin shares an anecdote about younger viewers been involved with the storylines of older characters, saying, "Significantly, Alexis is not an ingénue. She's a middle-aged woman. And yet, young viewers remain heavily invested in her storylines. There's another industry perception smashed to bits. But that's a column for another day."

Nice to know that there's someone out there who agrees with me that soaps break the myth of niche demographics and that applying that rubric to soaps has been a driving force in diminishing the soaps audience.

Bringing Back the Prodigal Viewers

But what can shows do about it? Well...it seems fairly obvious, yet I'm afraid that it won't to most of the marketing folks. People like nostalgia. And the only way soaps are going to build their audience back up is first to get a great number of those people who have watched at some point in their lives back into the fold. And, gasp, the majority of those people need not be in the target demographic. I'm talking about getting grandmas and middle-aged mothers and fathers back into the show, so they can get back to work as your grassroots marketers to the younger generations.

And what's going to attract these fans back into the fold? Two things: first, familiar faces; and, second, good writing when they get there. I am not arguing at all that you don't need amazing new characters and dazzling young stars because you need something to get these viewers hooked on a new generation, but you have to use the old generation to do that. First, start by putting the veterans on the show more often, integrating them into storylines. A show like As the World Turns has a cast of Kim and Bob Hughes, Tom and Margo Hughes, Susan Stewart, Emma Snyder, Lucinda Walsh, etc., all characters who still have a lot to give and actors who are still able to carry scenes. I'm not saying that the shows have been completely inept at featuring them, but they haven't been great.

Don't be afraid to put Tom and Margo on the screen. Have young swindler Henry Coleman enter into an illicit affair with the older Lucinda Walsh, throwing the whole town off-balance. And so on. Bite the bullet and bring back Dr. John Dixon, a face many identified with ATWT for so many years. Sure, he's old, but that means that several generations of viewers will recognize him. Bring back some old favorites like Andy Dixon or Kirk Anderson...whatever happened to him, anyway? Dead or alive? After all, we found out that a smaller number of fans can nevertheless react very passionately when rumors start circulating that a longtime, yet neglected, character may be booted off the show--as was the case with rumors that Tom would be killed off on ATWT last year--and my post about the fan reaction generated more discussion than almost any post we've had on the C3 blog. Similarly, fans responded passionately about longtime character Hal Munson and his portrayer, Benjamin Hendrickson, after Hendrickson committed suicide earlier this year--the reaction shows both that fans care immensely about these longtime characters and felt a need to express their sympathy becuase they had grown close to the character over the years, and the actor's performances. And also look at how Ellen Dolan, who portrays Margo on ATWT, went directly to the fans to plead the case for better use of her character on the show (and her character has appeared more often in recent months, although that may just be a coincidence).

Then, by encouraging fans to promote the current storylines of these characters or one of their returns, by taking advantage and empowering the show's grassroots marketers, some of those old fans will come back into the fold. If they like what they see, they'll bring more back into the fold with them. And that leads to even more grassroots marketers. Then, they may start getting younger viewers tuning back in.

The problem is that this type of growth is slow growth...It's not a week or a month fix. And you have to have quality writing when fans get there and younger characters that are compelling and who interact with these legacy characters in ways that gets fans hooked on them as well. One of the major problems is that a lot of writers currently with shows don't even know the shows' deep histories, since soap writers switch from show to show so often, it seems. But these shows need to get it together and take advantage of their greatest asset: their own histories.

The Best Marketing: Good and Consistent Storytelling

As I said, though, shows have to get good, and stay better for a while, before they can regain an audience. Word-of-mouth takes time. This type of approach needs a long-term commitment from the production companies and the network. The problem, though, is that trying one immediate fix after another in the soap industry for more than a decade now has led to continued decline in the numbers. If they had started this process a decade ago and focused on long-term growth, we might not be in the shape that so many creative direction changes and quick fixes have led to by this point.

In the end, the best marketing for a show is good quality. Soaps have the advantage of feeling permanent, and longstanding shows are probably not going to go off-the-air anytime soon. If shows start now with a more long-term approach to growth, incorporating the idea of taking greater advantage of the archives and bringing back legacy characters and empowering proselytizing among fans and the other ideas laid out here, then there may be a turnaround in numbers. But it's going to take a big shift in thinking from the current demographic-driven, short-term thinking that has guided the industry.

For those who are interested further in these ideas, feel free to contact me directly or read some of my previous posts on the soaps industry and pro wrestling industry at the C3 site. I'm teaching a class on pro wrestling and its cultural history here at MIT next semester, and my thesis research is on the current state of the soap opera industry and how using new technologies and the new relationships with fans can transform the genre and the industry in the 21st Century.

Thanks to Todd Cunningham with MTV Networks for bringing the return of Luke and Laura to my attention.

The Magic of Back-Story: Further Reflections on the Mainstreaming of Fan Culture

The airing last Monday of the Heroes episode, "Six Months Ago," seems an appropriate occasion to reflect upon the centrality of back story in fan friendly television -- and by extension to explore a bit more fully some of the gender dimensions of the mainstreaming of fan culture. I first wrote about Heroes last summer when I got a chance to watch an advanced copy of the series pilot and I fell hard. Heroes has turned out to be one of the most successful new television series to debut this year and is, if the comments posted here on Pimp My Show, certainly a favorite among readers of the blog. For those not watching the series, "Six Months Ago" takes place, as the title indicates, six months before the events in the pilot episode. Hiro, salary man by day, Otaku by night, "Superhiro" in his spare time, travels back in time six months to try to stop the death of the woman fans have been calling "Google Girl," a hash house waitress with a phenomenal capacity to absorb and deploy information. Time travel plots are cool enough -- I've always been a sucker for them -- but in this case, the series used turning back the clock to dump a massive amount of really interesting, character-focused back-story on the viewers. Half way through the episode, I turned to my wife and mumbled, "the magic of back story."

SPOILER WARNING FOR THOSE WHO AREN'T CAUGHT UP ON HEROES

Just setting a story six months earlier already opens up all kinds of great insights into the characters. We find out, for example, a great deal about Nikki, her relationship with her apparently abusive father, the death of her sister, and through this, for the first time, we get some real clues into what is motivating the doppelganger which emerges and takes possession of her body during moments of key stress. We learn a great deal about the accident that crippled Nathan's wife and the context in which it occurred, including more information about the death of Nathan and Peter's mob-tied father, the rise of Nathan's political career, the reasons why he is being blackmailed, and the circumstances under which he first discovered his capacity to fly. In the case of Claire, we learned a great deal more about her relations with her father and how she discovered her capacity for instant regeneration. Along the way, we finally met Skylar; we encounter Chandra Suresh, Mohinder's father, and learn more about his work in New York City, and much much more.

END OF SPOILERS

It is hard to imagine an episode offering more "answers" to the character enigmas that had been introduced across the series to date or opening up more new questions in such a short period of time. At the same time, it was clear that the series had been structured from the pilot forward to prepare us for the information rush that comes of having all of this back-story dumped on us in such a short period of time.

How simple the device is! Let's turn back the clock six months and show you how everyone got into their current situations. In theory, we could keep turning back the clock again and again and find out even more about what made these characters into the people they are today. Yet, the series is structured so this is the crucial time period for so many of these characters. I am reminded of the thrill I felt as a gamer the first time I encountered a game which allowed one to move right to left as well as left to right across the scroll: in effect, all the game had done was start us in the middle screen, but suddenly, one had the feeling of a more immersive world, of the ability to travel in any direction. The lesson here is obvious: start your story in the middle and work in both directions at once.

Heroes is not the first television series to try this trick: there's a great episode at the start of the third season of The Shield which took us back only a few days before the pilot episode of the series but again, showed how a memorable chain of events started and gave us new insights into the relationships between the core characters.

Back-story is a key aspect of the storyteller's toolkit in any medium but television until very recently was reluctant to play around too much with back-story because it was assumed that audiences would not carry much information about the characters around with them. Episodes needed to be self contained. It had to be possible to watch them in any order. The episode as a result had to end more or less in the same place where it began. It could deploy very little in terms of outside knowledge or program history less it confuse, frustrate, or leave behind more casual viewers.

Yet, fans, as a community, set themselves up as the protectors and promoters of back story. They wanted to pull together every scrap of information they could find about these characters and where they came from -- every long lost friend who showed up for one episode, every passing reference to former girl friends or what happened when they were at the Academy or... Indeed, this was a primary function of fan fiction from its earliest days -- fleshing out the implicit back story of these characters, filling in the "missing scenes".

Serialization was also part of the fan aesthetic from before the beginning. In Textual Poachers, I describe Star Trek fans as turning space opera into soap opera -- by which I meant both a focus on the emotional lives of characters (still unusual in many forms of science fiction) and a desire to create a serial structure even around series that were composed of relatively self contained and isolated episodes. But men and women were assumed early on to have a different relationship to serialization and to have different degrees of investment in back story.

Here, for example, is a passage from an essay I wrote about Twin Peaks fans in the late 1980s at a time when internet fandom was perceived as primarily a masculine space:

The female Star Trek fans focus their interest on the elaboration of paradigmatic relationships, reading plot actions as shedding light on character psychology and motivations. The largely male fans in the Twin Peaks computer group essentially reversed this process, focusing on moments of character interaction as clues that might help to resolve plot questions. The male fans' fascination with solving the mystery justified their intense scrutiny and speculation about father-daughter relations, sexual scandals, psychological and emotional problems, and romantic entanglements. Sherry Turkle suggests that the Hacker culture's focus on technological complexity and formal virtuosity stands in stark contrast to the group's discomfort regarding the ambiguities and unpredictability of personal relations. Here, Twin Peaks complex mixture of soap opera and mystery provided the alt.tv.twinpeaks participants a space to examine the confusions of human interactions by translating them into technical problems requiring decoding.

In Textual Poachers, written a decade and a half ago, I discussed the ways that networks regarded women as "surplus viewers" of action-adventure series that were primarily targeted at men and suggested that women had to work harder, had to write around the edges of the episodes, because most of what interested them was marginalized in the actual unfolding of these series. Looking at Heroes suggests just how much progress has been made to transform television into a more fan friendly medium. Minimally, one has to say that Heroes is one of a growing number of action-adventure series which factor in the tastes and interests of its female fan following from its conception. Like Smallville and Lois and Clark, two previous favorites among female television fans, the series uses the superhero genre as a starting point but remains far more interested in character reactions and motivations than in plot actions. Male fans have sometimes expressed frustration with the slow unfolding of plot which has characterized Heroes so far, yet its rhythms owes a lot to the soap opera tradition: we are watching these characters discover their powers and trying to make sense of how they impact their lives rather than watching them deploy their powers in defense of truth, justice, and the American way. We are examining how possessing special abilities impacts their marriages, their friendships, their relations with siblings, their personal turmoil, their unresolved feelings towards their parents, and their popularity in high school, all classic issues in more melodramatic forms of television and all basic building blocks of fan fiction.

We can read this one of two ways: the series is giving fans that much more to play around with when they sit down to write or the series is generating its own fan fiction foreclosing space that was once part of the fan imagination. How we respond to this depends very much on whether we are invested in fandom as a taste culture which wants to reshape the content of American television (in which case fans today are getting more of the kind of television they have historically wanted to watch) or as a subversive activity (in which case the willingness of the companies to give us more of what we want is potentially co-opting, encouraging us to work within rather than outside its systems of production and distribution). I fear sometimes that a decade plus of cultural studies writing about audience resistance may lead us astray, making us forget that resistance is a survival mechanism while the real goal is surely to transform the contents of our culture.

If we understand fandom as a taste culture, we can see plenty of signs that female fan tastes are reshaping popular television. To continue with the idea of back-story, consider a highly successful series like Lost. Lost, as I have suggested here before, would seem to offer a range of different kinds of viewing pleasures -- some focused backwards in terms of fleshing out character back-story (a central concern of every episode), some focused forward in terms of watching the unfolding relations between these characters on the island (still well within the territory of melodrama), and some focused on solving the various puzzles (which may be the most classically masculine aspect of its content, though keep in mind how many women like to solve puzzles or read mystery novels and you will be hard press to dismiss this simply as aimed at fanboys.) So, Lost balances devices once thought to appeal primarily to female viewers with those once classically assumed to appeal to men. You can read Lost against the earlier quote about how Twin Peaks allowed male fans to show an issue in character relations by turning them into clues towards a puzzle they wanted to solve. Or consider how much more central relationships (and the companion's role) are on the new Doctor Who compared to where that series was a decade ago.

And of course, all of this is to hold onto a gender division of fan interpretive practices as it was understood more than a decade ago rather than to revise it to reflect some pretty significant shifts in audience behavior over that period of time. Television isn't the only thing that is changing. As these once marginal aspects of action adventure series are making it onto the screen more and more, then male viewers of these series are discovering that they like them and are themselves demanding more of this kind of thing. There are dramatic increases in the number of women playing computer games or reading comics. And the online world is bringing together once separate fan communities and creating a common space where they sometimes fight like demons and sometimes pool knowledge, combining their different interests and reading practices for a common cause.

Laura wants to argue that gender is as present in Convergence Culture as it was in Textual Poachers but remains unmarked because the masculine is the norm in our culture. I've spent a fair chunk of time pondering this argument over the weekend. To some degree, I buy that, but on other levels, I don't. Working through the book, women are very central to the Survivor spoiling community which depends heavily upon skills at social networking (and curiously, much of the fan fiction there has been written by men including Mario Lanza who figures strongly in that chapter) and which values the different expertise that different kinds of people bring to the table; the culture around American Idol is probably disproportionately female and women are clearly a primary target audience for that series; the culture around The Matrix is probably classically masculine but does include some women; the Star Wars chapter talks explicitly about the gender divide between male filmmakers and female vidders but it says less about the fact that Star Wars Galaxies attracted a higher than average number of women into a multiplayer game world; and of course, the Harry Potter chapter is very much about the traditional world of female fan writing, although one hat now includes a higher number of male participants than a decade ago. Each of these chapters, then, represents an interesting case study of the different kinds of gender balances which emerge within different kinds of fan communities and activities. I don't think we can reduce this simply to women having to adopt masculine norms in order to participate in these more public fan cultures, though I wouldn't argue that some of this does occur. So, as aca-fen, we probably need to spend more time thinking about which spaces within fan culture do remain gender segregated at the present time and why or for that matter, what has allowed some forms of fan activity to achieve a greater degree of gender balance.

And, yes, as we suggested last week, we need to closely examine what television is providing us as fans and whether its fantasies really do align with our own. We need to be attentive to those aspects of fan culture which prove challenging for the media producers to assimilate. Slash usually gets cited as a prime example here, but keep in mind that Joss Whedon found a way to introduce a queer relationship for Willow within Buffy, that Xena was able to include more and more "subtext" scenes which winked at their slash viewers, or that a growing number of American television series do now include explicitly gay characters, so I don't think it is impossible to imagine slash being incorporated even more into the explicit content of the series.

We can argue that commercial producers are adopting the wrong premises or deploying the wrong models as they court female consumers, but we have to read such projects as the new games focused on Desperate Housewives or the virtual world for Laguna Beach as projects which were explicitly launched with the goal of extending the experience of female fans. We also might read projects, such as blogs and journals in character (from Dawson's Desktop to Hiro's blog) or the comics produced around Heroes, to be attempts to expand back-story and character motivations, precisely the kinds of changes in narrative structures that female fans would have been begging for a decade plus ago.

Let's be clear: I am not arguing that there aren't gender issues to be studied in and between fan cultures, simply that we need to adopt more complicated terms for talking about them than the tools we had when fan studies first emerged. I am hoping that the current generation of fan theorists (inside and outside the academy) can lead the way towards a more sophisticated account of the role gender plays in the mainstreaming of fan culture. I am sure we will all be talking about this issue more here in the future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Games as National Culture: An Interview with Chris Kohler (Part One)

"Games are popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture. [They]...are extensions of social man and the body politic...As extensions of the popular response to the workday stress, games become faithful models of a culture. They incorporate both the action and the reaction of whole populations in a single dynamic image.... The games of a people reveal a great deal about them." -- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

This qoute from McLuhan has so far served as the opening passage of two books on games. The first was David Sheff's 1993 Game Over which dealt primarily with the entrance of Nintendo into the video game market. The second was Chris Kohler's 2004 Power Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life. Kohler notes that Sheff's use of the McLuhan qoute was used almost entirely to talk about video game's place in American culture where-as Kohler was interested in understanding both what Japanese games meant in a Japanese context (including some rich interviews with Japanese game designers and a vivid portrait of Akihabara, the district in Tokyo most associated with gamers and fans) and why those games have been so readily embraced within the American marketplace.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the degree to which games might be regarded as a reflection of national culture. I suppose it started when CMS played host last November to a delegation of French game designers who were touring the United States through the agency of the French Consultat and the French Ministry of Culture. It is no secret that European governments have started to embrace games as part of their policies to promote creative industries, yet in most cases, they are read simply in terms of their relationship to larger digital industries rather than as having cultural value in their own rights. The French designers and the consultat were making a somewhat different claim: that games were an increasingly important aspect of French national culture and that there was something distinctly French about the approach these designers took to their craft. In many ways, they were arguing that games in the United States were an extension of Hollywood models of entertainment and games in France were an outgrowth of the European art cinema. For anyone interested, there is both a summary of the event and some video highlights on the web.

From there, I have watched -- and discussed here -- the politics surrounding multiplayer games in China, have become involved working with Singapore in the development of a games innovation lab, and have started to see signs that the tech sector in India were moving towards producing games which would be part of a larger assertion of South Asian cultural identity.

Each of these steps represent a move away from what Japanese cultural critic Koichi Iwabuchi (Recentering Globalization) has described as a policy of "deodorization" which has long shaped the games industry. Basically, games were striped of distinguishing national characteristics in order to be shipped to markets around the world. Indeed, the assumption was that a game which felt "too Japanese" would not do well in American markets -- an assumption made both by Japanese game designers who sought a more "universal" style for their export products and by American games publishers who sought to filter out elements they found too alien for our market. Over time, however, Americans have developed a taste for the distinctly Japanese qualities of Japanese games and these other countries are betting that we may also welcome other forms of cultural diversity in games content.

So, when Chris Kohler gave me a copy of his book, Power-Up, during a recent trip to San Francisco, I read it with enormous interest. Kohler, who is now the editor of Wired's games blog Game|Life, is extremely knowledgible about games culture in Japan. He brings to the book a solid background in the graphics arts traditions of Japan, making valuable links between the aesthetics of games, manga, anime, and Japanese filmmaking more generally. He was able to interview many of the leading Japanese game designers, including some amazing insights into the career of Shigeru Miyamoto (Super Mario Brothers, Zelda), Yuji Horii (Dragon Quest), Yasundra Mitsuda (Chrono Cross),Masaya Matsuura (Parappa the Rapper) and many others. The book takes us from the origins of Nintendo as a card manufacuring company through early games such as Pac-Man all the way to the international succes of Pokemon. The writing is lively and engaging, offering insights that will valuable to game designers and players alike.

What follows is an interview with Chris Kohler which both develops some of the core ideas from the book and updates them to reflect current trends impacting the games industry.

A core premise of the book seems to be that games are a powerful reflection of national culture. You draw this idea in part from an opening qoute from Marshall McLuhan. Yet, as you note, there has been a tendency among Japanese media producers to design content for the global market as much as for the local market. And many Americans seemed unaware for a long time that the games they were playing originated in Japan. What can you tell us about the tension between the nationally specific and transnational aspects of games?

Well, this is a whopper of an opening question. To start off, I want to present a miniature case study of a game called "Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan." Literally, it translates to "Hey! Fight! Cheer Squad." It's a music-action game for Nintendo DS that was released in Japan in the summer of 2005, designed by Keiichi Yano's company iNiS, which is profiled in Power-Up.

The game's story revolved around a traditional group of Japanese cheerleaders -- who are male, deadly serious, dressed in school uniforms, and full of fiery energy which they express in booming, crowd-inspiring yells. In the game, they go to the aid of people in trouble -- a noodle shop owner whose business is failing, a kid who needs to score well on his college entrance exams. They cheer him on to the beat of popular Japanese music tracks, and the better you do playing the songs, the better they cheer.

When the game was released, the Nintendo DS hadn't yet hit it big in Japan. So it came out with a decent amount of fanfare, but didn't light up the sales charts. But since the Nintendo DS is region-free (meaning Japanese games can be played on an American DS system and vice versa), a few fans of iNiS' previous game Gitaroo-Man, including me, imported the game from Japan and found it to be simply amazing, maybe the best game in the admittedly small genre.

So we embarked on a quest to get as many people as possible to buy it, but it's tough to convince people to import a game from Japan due to the extra expense and worry that you might not be able to play it. So we also made sure to clamor for Nintendo of America to release it in the States.

Although we knew we wanted to see it here -- and here's where the tension comes in -- although the gameplay was universally fun, there were several elements to the game design that wouldn't work for an American release. The setting was in Japan, with specifically Japanese character archetypes, locations, and scenarios. The fifteen musical tracks were all in Japanese, and what's more they were licensed songs, meaning there were royalty fees to consider and possible issues with using the songs outside of Japan.

So until the E3 expo in May 2006, Nintendo was silent on the subject. At the show, they revealed what they'd done. All of iNiS had been devoted to the creation of "Elite Beat Agents", which took the Ouendan gameplay and swapped out the characters, scenarios, and songs for American ones. The main characters became sort of a cross between the Blues Brothers and the Men in Black. Songs like "September" by Earth, Wind, and Fire and "Sk8r Boi" by Avril Lavigne replaced the J-pop.

What's interesting to note is that although certain Ouendan fans were angry that Nintendo was "Americanizing" the game, that's not really what happened. Yes, iNiS went back and re-tooled the game for Western audiences, but if you look at the final product it's still very much a crazy, manga-styled presentation that's going to appeal most strongly to the kind of gamer who reads manga, plays Katamari Damacy, etc. It's only "Westernized" enough to remove the sort of "cultural odor" that would prevent it from doing well in the US, not the things that made it appealing in the first place.

That's something I also get into in Power-Up as it pertains to Donkey Kong. The breakout Japanese video game (at least in the context that I explored in the book, that of the development of games as a storytelling medium) was designed for America. Miyamoto was told that the US branch of Nintendo was in trouble, and could he please make a game that would succeed in America. Who knows what kind of story and characters he would have come up with if his primary intent was to appeal to his fellow Japanese?

I'm actually going to keep answering this same question for just a bit longer, because I want to point out that what constitutes a "nationally specific" element versus a "transnational" element is constantly changing. When the Nintendo Entertainment System first debuted, role-playing games like Dragon Quest would have been considered too focused on the Japanese market to succeed here. This is no longer the case. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to find that some RPGs were actually grossing more in the US than in Japan, these days.

To what degree can we say that there is a distinctly Japanese aesthetic of game

design and how would we characterize it? How might we link this aesthetic to

earlier traditions of visual representation in Japan?

This is a tough question. The easy, cop-out answer would be for me to point to the overly cartoonish manga style that is so pervasive in Japan and note that this to a large extent informs the design qualities of many of the video games produced there. Which in fact, it does. But then, can I really look at Shadow of the Colossus and Katamari Damacy, then sum up so blithely the design aesthetic of a country whose designers produced such dramatically different visual styles?

Certainly I don't want to downplay the importance of standard manga style. If you read some of the literature on the subject you start to realize that it's more than just big eyes and misshapen heads; there's an almost codified literary shorthand at work that helps the reader blaze through manga, getting what you might call a cinematic experience. Of course that had a huge effect on game development because, as I talk about in the book, game design from its earliest moments was an extension of this national love for visual storytelling.

That said, I don't want it to seem as if there are no American designers that aren't doing similarly unique work. The major difference would seem to be that the Japanese game market supports a wider variety of design aesthetics. An American developer certainly could have come up with Katamari Damacy, but they would have had a very hard time selling it to a publisher, who'd be looking for the next gritty urban crime simulator.

If there's anything that Japanese designers tend to shy away from, it's the sort of ultra-realistic depictions of real-life violence that are so common in Western games. In fact, Japanese consumers seem to be more wary even than American ones about realistic violence. Most anyone who looks at the body of manga and anime available to kids in Japan notes how violent they are. And this is totally acceptable as long as it's done in a cartoonish style. But as soon as the same subject matter, the same stories, are rendered in realistic graphics that look and feel like real life, it's looked upon as being highly inappropriate.

Early in the book, you contrast Breakout and Gunfight, suggesting that it was the Japanese who were first drawn to games as a storytelling or cinematic medium. What role do you see Japanese designers playing in pushing games

towards narrative?

This is where I have to say to your readers: "Read the book!" It is explained in exhaustive detail with lots of diagrams and figures and circles and arrows.

If there's one broad criticism of the book that I've had to deal with ever since it was published, it's the idea that I'm completely wrong because of the fact that text adventures like Adventure or Zork were telling interactive stories long before Donkey Kong came around. And they were. But quite frankly I think we're dealing with two entirely different media. Video games, as their name implies, are a visual medium. Interactive fiction is entirely bereft of visuals.

If I may analogize, comics and books are both printed on paper, and there are works that blur the line between the two just as graphical adventure games like King's Quest pulled some of their play mechanics from IF. But play mechanics are only part of the equation when you look at what makes a video game a video game, just as the words in balloons are only part of comics. What Japanese designers -- most prominently Shigeru Miyamoto with Donkey Kong and Hironobu Sakaguchi with Final Fantasy -- did was to pioneer techniques of storytelling in this particular visual (and aural!) medium.

To look at their impact on modern-day video games, it's clear which model was the basis for all that we have today. If you look at Resistance: Fall of Man, the flagship game for PlayStation 3, and strip away 25 years of technological advancements you are dealing with something very similar in structure to Donkey Kong.

(Note that at no point in the above paragraphs did I slander interactive fiction! I love IF! It's great! It's just not video games.)

From the start, Japanese designers seemed interested in broadening the game market to include women. How successful have they been in doing so? Why do you think they sought out the female market while American companies seemed content to target only hardcore male players?

Yes -- Pac-Man, which at one point was far and away the most successful video game in the world, was designed with the intent of bringing in a female audience. Japan has generally been better at selling games to women, historically speaking. Certainly they're doing a much better job of it these days with the Nintendo DS. Actually, just today the latest Japanese sales chart was released, and the country's best-selling game right now is a Nintendo DS game called Love and Berry that's based on a franchise popular with preteen girls. They sold nearly half a million copies of this game just this week.

Add that to games with huge penetration into the girl-gamer market like Nintendogs, Animal Crossing, and Brain Age and it's clear that Japan is getting to the point where there's no longer going to be a gender divide in video games within a few years. I stress that they were really primed for this, though, as it's been totally socially acceptable for trendy popular high school and college-aged women to have a game system in their room for as long as there have been game consoles. The hardcore game nerds are still predominantly men, but there's a big difference between "otaku" and "fan."

Was America ever "content" to just go after the guys? I don't think they were -- if you look back, you'll always see attempts to go after the female market. On the game consoles it was mostly taking games for boys and replacing the space marines with Barbie and the alien base with a shopping mall and the aliens with designer purses. Why the purses were attacking Barbie, nobody really knew.

This is a drastic oversimplification, but girls were looking for something other than shooters and football games. Problem was, the Super Nintendo's input mechanism and display capabilities were pretty much only good for games with simple mechanics. So it kept feeding back on itself -- the hardware was best suited for games that appealed to boys, so they made those kinds of games, so more boys bought it, so they had to make more games for them... And the next thing you know, a piece of hardware -- a neutral piece of machinery with no pre-loaded content -- was seen as a specifically male-oriented toy. No girl would say they didn't want a VCR because all it did was play action movies for boys, but for video games the medium became the message.

And when more complex games with things girls wanted (stories, characters, beautiful graphics, exploration, slow pacing, a gentle learning curve with early rewards) started to show up -- like role-playing games -- they were ignored mostly because girls who would have liked them were locked into the mindset that all video games were for boys. The fact that the boys generally also thought this to be true didn't much help.

Of course, if you look at the "casual games" market in the US right now, women make up quite a bit (I think even the majority) of this segment. I think a lot of that has to do with ease of use. These are games that you can play just by clicking a mouse. That's the idea behind Nintendo DS; if you look at games like Nintendogs, they're controlled entirely with the touch pen. No need to learn extensive button configurations. Put simply, women aren't willing to put up with as much frustration as guys are. We see it as a challenge, they see it as being told it's not for them.

I'm not saying that Japan had a unique understanding of this, just that the cultural conditions there (half of every manga store is devoted to girls' comics) made for a better incubator.

Naturally, your book spends a great deal of time focused on Shigeru Miyamoto, who many regard as the most consistently innovative and imaginative artist to ever work in the medium. What do you see as Miyamoto's major contributions to the art of game design? Is it possible to imagine the success of Nintendo in the western market without Miyamoto? To what degree were our expectations about Japanese games defined by this one artist? What other Japanese game designers do you see as key influencers of contemporary game culture?

Is it possible to imagine the success of Nintendo without Miyamoto? I imagine it depends on your definition of "success"; other Japanese developers who don't have a Miyamoto (that is, all of them) have done well for themselves on a worldwide scale. Not to mention the fact that, as I try to make clear in the book, I think the conditions in Japan were as responsible for Miyamoto's success as was his own personal genius. That is, had Miyamoto been born in America he might have found himself designing telephones (remember, he was an industrial design student) or drawing comic books for a living. In the early eighties in America, computer programmers designed games, not art students.

This is all to say that without Miyamoto, I still think it would have been Japanese designers who pushed the envelope. But we have Miyamoto, whose major contribution was his very first project. Donkey Kong (as explained in detail you-know-where) was groundbreaking in its use of the medium to tell a story. And I define that rigidly, talking about the elements of narrative and how Donkey Kong incorporates all of them while only using one word ("Help!"). It set the stage for everything that was to come.

Now, it's not as if Miyamoto disappeared after Donkey Kong. Quite to the contrary, he helmed (and continues to head up) one masterpiece of gaming after another at Nintendo. But, ironically, after making this breakthrough, he essentially changed directions and concentrated almost entirely on improving other areas of game design. From a storytelling perspective, Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda are major steps back from Donkey Kong, because they don't have any sort of expository scenes. There's no equivalent in Zelda of Donkey Kong climbing up the girders, girl in tow.

Instead, Miyamoto worked hard to give his games tight, responsive play control; give the player-character as much freedom of movement and as many interesting abilities as possible; and fill his game worlds with hidden secrets and complex environments. I'm certainly not saying this was a bad thing! Just that his focus switched pretty much permanently. But this turned out to be his real genius.

And Nintendo realized it. From early on, they spread Miyamoto out so that he was involved in a variety of different games at once (I think at one point in his career he told me that he was involved, on some level, in 40 projects). This is so the designers can deal with all the minutiae and Miyamoto can come in to make brilliant insights about how they can make the games more fun. Yes, this often results in major catastrophes when a team realizes that they'll have to work on the game an extra six months to implement Miyamoto's imperatives. (Those who've worked with him call it the moment when Miyamoto "knocks over the table.")

Nowadays I think that there are plenty of Japanese designers who are doing groundbreaking work that'll be significantly influential on their peers worldwide. There's Keita Takahashi, who designed Katamari Damacy (although depending on how much you believe the rumors, he is sick of video games and might never make another one). Fumito Ueda's Shadow of the Colossus turned out to be even more impressive than ICO. Tetsuya Mizuguchi's stylish Lumines is like playing Tetris at a rave.

When Fandom Goes Mainstream...

The most recent issue of Flow includes a range of different responses to the Flow conference, which I referenced here a few weeks ago. One of the articles would seem to be of particular interest to readers of this blog, because it refers to the panel on "Watching Television Off-Television" which I helped to organize, because it addresses the shifting nature of fan engagement with contemporary media, and because it was written by Kristina Busse (co-editor of the book, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, which was previously discussed here). Previously I have contrasted the context in which I wrote Textual Poachers (a world where fan culture was largely marginalized and hidden from view) and the context described in Convergence Culture (a world where fan participations are increasingly central to the production decisions shaping the current media landscape).

Busse's question, though, is whether we are really talking about the same fan culture in the two instances. Here's part of what she has to say:

Throughout the panel "Watching Television Off-Television," the emphasis was on how such behavior has become mainstream: casual media users now can engage with a universe that exceeds the television show via cross-media, cross-platform texts, thus creating a synergistic "overflow" experience. Thus, Jason Mittell offered the examples of Alternate Reality Games and additional online-only available footage, Will Brooker presented various fully immersive web sites that invite viewers into the shows' diegetic spaces, and Henry Jenkins commented on the current ease of streaming or downloading television shows. The mainstreaming of fannish behaviors is thus seen as advantageous even if (or maybe even because?) the industry clearly attempts to create such behavioral patterns in order to sell their products and/or supplementary materials....My central question is: How alike or different is such a commercially constructed position when compared to the space media fans have traditionally eked out for themselves?

At least some fans have gained power and influence in the context of convergence culture. As I suggested here the other week, there are more fan friendly shows on the schedule. Shows which attract strong fan interests have a somewhat stronger chance of surviving. Producers interested in engaging with fans are generating more additional material which expands the fictional universe. We are seeing a thawing of the relations between media producers and fans as the studios are reassessing their attitudes towards even some of the more controversial aspects of fan culture. (We saw some signs of this détente during the Fan Culture panel at the Future of Entertainment conference.) And fannish modes of engagement with popular texts are spreading at a dramatic rate across more and more segments of the population.

And that's part of what concerns Busse:

What ultimately separates "fans" from casual TV viewers who engage fannishly? Or, more specifically, how can we define fans without invoking a category so expansive that it includes all media audiences or one so narrow that it excludes large numbers of individualist fans? How can we create a continuum that acknowledges the more intense emotional and actual engagements of many TV viewers today without erasing the strong community structures which have developed through media fandom?

What gets lost as some of these fannish values and reading practices spread across the entire viewing public? Is there still a value in understanding fandom as a distinct subculture with its own cultural hierarchies and aesthetic norms, its own forms of social engagement, its own traditions of interpretation, its own system of genres for cultural production, and perhaps its own gender politics? Is this just another case of a subculture fearing a loss of "authenticity" as it moves into the mainstream? Or read from another angle, what happens to fan studies when it moves from the study of subcultural practices to the study of dominant or at least widespread forms of media consumption?

To some degree, fandom has already started to lose some of its distinctiveness as a subcultural community. Over the past decade, there has been a dramatic expansion in the amount of fan fiction being produced, for example, with many of the newcomers entering the space not through social interactions with other fans but rather from reading fan fiction online. In some cases, old time fans would argue, some core norms of the fan community have been shredded and old taboos have been violated as these "unsocialized" fans have pulled fan fiction in their own directions. Communities which might have been separated geographically and culturally have been brought together online, resulting in a series of flame wars and feuds over disagreements about how texts should be interpreted or rewritten in a "fannish" way. As many of these reading practices spread further, reaching fans through commercial channels who have had no real direct contact with fandom as a subculture, further changes are likely to occur.

Busse links this shift in what it means to be a fan to what seems destined to become an important conceptual debate in the field of fan studies -- between a focus on fan cultures (which runs through my own work) and the emphasis on the emotional experience of the individual fan (best embodied by Cornel Sandvoss's Fans. Sandvoss seems to want us to return to the idea of the isolated, individual fan at the moment where most of the rest of the world is discovering the power of social networks, embracing an "architecture of participation," and recognizing the importance of the kinds of knowledge communities that have always been central to the concept of a fan culture. Yet, Sandvoss is correct to argue that a great many people who call themselves "fans" have no direct engagement with the larger social community which fandom represents and our research paradigm privileges the most visible and distinctive fans over the more "causal" fans who can be difficult to locate or document. For these people, being a fan becomes a form of media consumption but not necessarily a kind of social affiliation.

This leads Busse to suggest we make some basic distinctions in our discussions of fans and fan culture:

I want to suggest that we distinguish between fan and fandom as well as acknowledge that there are different trajectories that combine into levels of fannishness. In other words, an intense emotional investment in a media text that is wholly singular may create a fan but does not make the individual part of a larger fandom, whereas a person enacting fannish behavior may not define him- or herself as a fan. It thus might be useful to consider the overlapping but not interdependent axes of investment and involvement as two factors that can define fannish engagement. Moreover, we need to consider models that can differentiate between people who are fans of a specific text, those that define themselves as fans per se, and those that are members of fandom.

This last bit seems particularly important to me. From the start, media studies has been most interested, it seems to me, in the study of fans of particular texts. My early work on fans keeps getting described as a study of Trekkers (if I am lucky) and Trekkies (if I am not), even though the idea of nomadic reading was absolutely central to Textual Poachers account of fandom. Whatever Poachers was about, it wasn't about the fans of a single series (Star Trek or otherwise), though I do spend a chapter talking about the fans of Beauty and the Beast and tracing their shifting relationship to the series. Rather, I would have said that the book was much more about a kind of cultural logic which shapes how fans read across a range of different texts and even more importantly, about a specific social and cultural community -- mostly composed of women -- which actively translates the experience of watching television into various forms of cultural production.

My second book on fans, Science Fiction Audiences (written with John Tulloch), suggested that there may be multiple fan communities with their own interpretive and creative practices which grow up around the same series. There, I am focused on Star Trek but try to show a larger context for the differences in the way the series gets read in the technologically-focused community at MIT, in the female fanzine culture, and among the members of the Gaylaxians, a queer fan organization.

Yet, still, my emphasis was on fan communities -- the shared social contexts within which fan reading and creative practices occur -- and not on fans per se. Indeed, most of fan studies has ended up being a study of fandom -- as in the practices and creations of a specific subculture of fans -- rather than the study of fans -- what we assume to be a somewhat larger, socially fragmented, group of people who feel a strong emotional investment in television content but who may never translate that attachment into the kinds of creative and social activities which we study. Sometimes, we get around this distinction by describing the most socially active group as fans and the more causal and isolated individuals as followers but this simply creates a misalignment between academic terms and popular usage.

Busse's essay, then, is dealing in part with how academics conceptualize fandom but I also think she is expressing concern over the mainstreaming of fan culture and I understand her concern. There has been a pretty long history of media producers nuzzling up to fans in the early days of a franchise when they need help attracting an audience or staying on the air and then creating more distance when the show reaches a certain level of commercial success. Fandom as a subculture seems closely associated with the idea of niche success, where-as a mainstream success may depend on a more diffused notion of what it means to be a fan.

Busse writes:

Commercially encouraged modes of engagement that employ modes of fannish identity do not create instafans; moreover, the types of engagement often vary, not only with intensity but also with creativity. In the end, I feel it is important to realize that playing a computer game or looking around a website may not be wholly the same as participating in a fannish gift exchange or contributing to a shared fictional universe.

Yes and No. In some cases, these commercial materials represent a point of entry into other, more elaborate forms of fan activity -- they represent one gateway among many into fandom and it is up to the individual participant whether they are satisfied with playing in the shallow end of the pool or whether they want a deeper immersion into fan culture. In some cases, such as the creation of immersive shared worlds around fictional programs or the deployment of alternative reality games, there may be more creativity and social engagement going on here that Busse is estimating from the vantage point of someone who comes at fan culture from a different point of entry.

There are also important gender distinctions here in terms of what activities count once fandom goes mainstream -- with the commercial industry finding it easier to absorb some of the collector or geeky aspects of male fan culture more easily than it can deal with the issues of emotion and sexuality that run through female produced fan fiction. I am struck in my own work that gender was much more central to Textual Poachers, written at a moment when fans were marginal, than in Convergence Culture, written at a moment when fan culture is more central to the ways the media ecology operates. Does this reflect a lack of segregation of interests in these newer fan cultures or the continued marginalization of interests and tastes that have historically shaped women's participation in fan culture?

We need to continually refine our categories of analysis and this essay makes a great contribution by bringing some of these questions out into the open.

A Few Links of Interest to Aca/Fan Readers

For those of you interested in science fiction...check out the webcast version of my conversation with Joe Haldeman on the Craft of Science Fiction which I publicized here a few weeks ago. I felt like it turned out very well with lots of insights from Haldeman about science fiction's place in contemporary culture and some interesting discussion of the representation of war in his own writing. One of my favorite moments came when he discussed the influence of Ernest Hemmingway on his work -- not exactly a common topic of the SF convention circuit. And he also reads from his forthcoming novel -- a time travel story set at MIT.

For those of you interested in Harry Potter... check out Episode 10 of Spellcast, a podcast created by the fine folks at Fictionalley.org. Gwen does an interview with yours truly about Convergence Culture with a particular focus on fandom and Harry Potter.

A Bit of Metablogging...

I have noted that there has been a decrease of late in the number of comments being posted to this blog despite a continuing increase in the number of people reading it. I have struggled for some time to think about the best way to address this when I spoke to a friend in Live Journal community who said there was some perception that there was no point posting comments here because they were being filtered.

Let me explain what's going on: This blog receives more than a hundred spam messages a day, most of them things that I really don't want going up on my site -- promises to expand the size of the various private bits of our variously gendered anatomies, footage of young women taking full advantage of their local menagerie, or promises of imagines of certain prominent media personalities engaged with what they would call in the world of wrestling, foreign objects. So far, even spam filter I have tried either lets significant numbers of these messages slide through or cuts out many of the most substantive posts and in most cases, both occur. I have moved away from a policy where things go up instantly on the site and then I have to take down all of the porn spam to one where everything goes into hold until I can filter through it manually.

I actually try to do this several times a day though when I travel or am running a conference or... there are days when I may only get to this task once every 24 hours. The only messages in the end, other than the unspeakable spam, that actually get filtered are those which are asking me to fix some bug on the site -- like a bad link (and there I just fix the problem) or those which clearly want to speak with me personally (and I just respond to the person directly).

Otherwise, it is my belief that every message I get is going up on the site within 24 hours of when it is posted. I know that is slower than most Live Journal entries which offer instant gratification but don't seem to face the same volume of spam. (I am told that the amount of spam is connected to the number of links to your site so the spam problem is a product of how successful we've been at generating more productive kinds of conversations. Ironic, isn't it?)

If for some reason your message doesn't go up within 24 hours, please ping me at henry3@mit.edu since I very much want to get your messages out there. We have created a really astonishing community of readers around this blog and I'd like to have you guys talking with each other more often.

I plan to continue to run periodic posts like the Pimp My Show one last week which are intended to generate a lot of traffic from readers but honestly, I'd love to get your reactions -- positive or negative -- to all of the posts here. Almost every given post seems to be generating discussion on other blogs targeted at some subset of the readership and I am grateful for all the shout outs. But it would be great, given the mix of industry folks and fans, for example, who read this blog to have more exchanges among you here. I see these posts as conversation starters, not the last word on the subject. I am not always able to respond personally to every comment but I am trying to use them to guide the content I put up here on the blog and they are extremely helpful to me.

A Tale of Three Quilts

Another in a series of outtakes from Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, this passage sets up the contrast between folk culture (as it operated in 19th century America), mass culture (as it operated in the 20th century), and the new participatory culture (as it operates in the digital age). I argue in the book that digital culture often applies processes of cultural production we associate with folk culture to content we associate with mass culture. We can understand the relations between these three phases of cultural production by considering the example of three very different kinds of quilts. The first was made for my grandmother upon the occasion of her wedding by the women in a small town in Southern Georgia. The quilt was built up from scraps which each woman had left over from previous sewing projects. The cloth was commercially produced at southern textile mills, but its value here was sentimental - a token of each woman's affection for the young bride. The women didn't have a lot of money but by combining their scraps they could share what they had and express their support. As the quilt was being created, the older women were passing along their skills and experience to younger women, some of whom perhaps had never worked on such a project before. Quilting as a process and the quilt as a product both helped to shape the social relations between the women in that small town. The result was a one of a kind object, shaped by local traditions but also customized to the tastes of its recipient.

Now, let's consider a quilt at the end of the era of mass culture. This quilt is the product of one woman who runs a quilt-making business; the cloth was purchased in bulk as raw materials for a production process. The artist is no longer working collaboratively or drawing on local traditions; the finished work is seen as reflecting her distinctive artistic vision. It is her intellectual property to be sold as she wishes. Its recipient is unknown at the time of its production - the quilt was made to be sold to the highest bidder. In short, what had been an expression of the community has become a commodity in a privatized mode of production and distribution.

To some degree, quilting never becomes fully integrated into mass culture - it remains a hand produced (or sometimes machine stitched) artifact, but what it means to do crafts is still altered by the larger economic and communications context within which this quilt is produced and circulated. Let's imagine that the woman becomes more successful and seeks to proclaim her expertise beyond the local market. She prints a catalog which allows people to order her quilts by mail; she videotapes classes to teach others how to make quilts according to her techniques. When the web appears, she develops her own dotcom selling quilts over the Internet. Quickly, more people will encounter images of her quilts than will come into contact with the physical artifact. This is what Walter Benjamin told us about the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.

Now, let's consider what a quilt might look like in an age of media convergence. Communimage is a website launched by Johannes Gees and his partner, "calc," in conjunction with Expo. 02. Some 2,000 people from more than 80 countries have uploaded a total of almost 24,000 images to the site . Some of them upload images they have created - hand drawn pictures, photographs, or digital artifacts. Some of them upload images they appropriated from other places - stills from movies or television shows, images grabbed from advertisements, news photographs. The pattern created from all of these images is emergent, a product of a series of localized choices. Any individual juxtaposition may be meaningful - as images may compliment or contradict each other, as multiple panels may form a larger image, as a new image may ironically alter how we read what came before - but nobody would have known before the process started what the finished product would look like. Communimage returns the collective, collaborative, and democratic dimensions of traditional folk culture, yet it can no longer fall back upon shared traditions, since the participants come from multiple cultural backgrounds.

While the organizers initially planned to reproduce this collage as a mural, it has by now expanded to the point where it could not be meaningfully reproduced outside of a digital context. Neither a family heirloom nor a mass produced commodity, this new quilt was designed to be shared digitally with anyone in the world who cares to access it. There no longer is a physical quilt, only the image of a quilt which is itself built up from images. Yet, the shared process of creating the quilt has become, in the end, far more important than the product itself. It says something about the contemporary context of cultural production that the textile mills would not have objected if members of a folk community appropriated scraps of their cloth, yet the media companies might well object if participants in the Communimage project appropriate scraps from their mass media productions.

Hollywood Mogul 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could you start by telling us a little about yourself?

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

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

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

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

What are the major features of the game?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collective Intelligence vs. The Wisdom of Crowds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Koster extends this key point in a subsequent blog post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grafitti as an Exemplary Practice?: Tats Cru

lloquium series featured a program about the production of Zigzag, the new video podcast which seeks to capture and convey some of the many fascinating aspects of life at MIT. This week's edition features a profile of the New Media Literacies Project. The video includes footage of several of our graduate students setting up to interview my colleague Beth Coleman for a forthcoming entry in our exemplar library project which will deal with DJs and music remixing practices. The center piece of the documentary, however, deals with the most recently added film in our collection which deals with the New York based Graffiti group, Tats Cru. This is a segment that cuts close to home for me. Indeed, many of the interview segments were shot in my living room. As some of you know, I am proud to have spent the last 12 years of my life as housemaster of an MIT dormitory known as Senior House. (Contrary to the name, the community includes a full range of undergraduates -- frosh to seniors -- and houses many of those at MIT who are interested in alternative cultures.) Tats Cru came to MIT in part at the request of our graduate resident tutors, Andrew "Zoz" Brooks who wanted help constructing a mural which would pay tribute to "Big Jimmy" Roberts, a long time night watchman who was much beloved among our residents and who passed away a few years ago. Our students have raised more than 50,000 dollars to create a scholarship in Big Jimmy's honor but they wanted an icon to help memorialize his role within the dorm. Since he worked between two dorms, the agreement was that they would paint a mural on canvas that would be portable and could spend part of the year in each location. Tats Cru came to MIT through help from the Creative Arts Council and Michelle Oshima and worked with our students to produce something that was worthy of Big Jimmy's memory. While the group was on campus, the graduate students on Project NML also filmed the production of the mural and conducted interviews to help explore graffiti as a form of creative expression.

The story of Tats Cru is a fascinating one: a group of former street artists who have become known around the world for their murals and graffiti, who work with local communities to create memory walls and who work with corporate clients to support their branding efforts. It's hard to pick any group of artists who better embody some of the contradictions which surround graffiti as a form of creative expression.

Grafitti is often discussed in terms of personal expression -- leaving one's own distinctive mark on the environment -- yet it also depends heavily on the trust and collaboration that emerges within the members of a particular Cru. Most of the exemplars so far have focused on individual artists. We very much wanted to examine here what it was like to produce art within a collective:

Nicer: Some of the things we use to do with the kids was: we'd have two guys working on the same name, and then I'll switch the papers and let them copy each other's work. And they would never get it the same. The way you do a circle is unique: it's your circle. No one else is going to copy it exactly the same. The way you create your own lettering, the way you sign your own name, even your signature or the way you write, it's so unique. It makes you an individual and you have to be proud of that.

Red: In this art form, from what I've learned, you gotta push forward. And you can't copy. I could sit there and try to copy Nicer's but it's not going to come out the same. I got to find my way and my defaults and push myself.

Nosm: Sometimes your brain is just empty, and then Nicer comes up with something: "Oh, I got this idea, I always wanted to do that." And then How comes to it and says, "yeah, we should add this and that." And then, next you see everybody's brainstorming, and we come up with a new idea for the mural.

Nicer: It's not any oil painter who can paint on the same canvas with another oil painter. And he'll paint something red and somebody else will go, "no, I want to change it blue." He'll catch some kind of fit, because he doesn't know how to work together with someone. Us, as a group, we've learned that already. And it hasn't been easy. There have been times when I've stepped back away from walls and looked and go, "wow, that red looks good." And then two guys will walk buy and one will stop and change it blue, and they'll walk away from each other. And I'll go, "uh, maybe it looks good blue." So I have to learn to trust their judgment. Because what better kind of artist can you get than a 6-headed, 12-armed monster artist?

Some of the best passages deal with the ways they seek inspiration from the culture around them:

Nicer: I grew up in a neighborhood in the '80s where there wasn't a lot of art programs. So I didn't have a lot of stuff to reference besides comic books. I would look at comic books and they would show me different colorings and outlines and characters and cartoons. And superheroes was a big thing to me. So I started young just tracing and drawing comics. As a teenager I started noticing some guys who were doing graffiti in my neighborhood, and they brought color to the walls: they would have fancy hand styles, and the lettering, the shapes, and the colors of their characters. So, I was drawn to it.

BG: It was already part of my neighborhood. That was, like, the culture. If you walked through the hallways, or walked through the streets of New York City, that's what you saw. And we took the trains, and you saw graffiti on the trains. So that was, like, the first opening of graffiti to me.

Nosm: I was born in Spain and grew up in Germany, and I've been in New York for about 7 years. Me and my brother was a little bit different because we started graffiti back in '88, '89. We saw a couple of books from New York, and we saw the movie Wild Style--it's a famous graffiti movie that is something like a documentary--and based on that, and based on our older friends who were tagging--that's like, writing your name all over the neighborhood--they were doing that and we just copied it. And after a couple of years we realized we could do more with it. Not only tags but also pieces, characters, you know, like faces and stuff like that.

Or consider this passage where Nicer talks about the ways that commercial art -- even advertising -- informs their graphic style:

Nicer: I get inspired by, like, looking at ads in magazines or just a stroll through a local supermarket. Look at the cereal boxes. Every cereal box has got funky lettering, and the coloring is bright, and it's calling the kids, "come eat me, come get me!" And if you look at the characters on these boxes, you know, like Captain Crunch and you got all these, like, Sugar Pops or... it's stylized for kids, but it's just fun. And sometimes we're looking for something fun to paint.

At the same time, they defend their work on the grounds that it introduces aesthetic experiences to people who would never feel comfortable just going inside a traditional art museum:

Nicer: I guess what we do is bring what's in galleries and what's in museums--which is art and color and technique and style--and we bring that to community walls or to neighborhoods that, you know, sometimes these kids in those neighborhoods never would have a chance to go see the MOMA or see the Louvre. So I guess, in a way, by us painting these murals in these communities is bringing a part of that art and culture into their lives.

Part of what's really exciting about these films is that they teach new ways of looking at graffiti as a meaningful form of cultural expression, providing illustrations of key terms and concepts from their world which will give students and teachers alike a vocabulary for talking about what's going on within this community.

Tats Cru doesn't engage in graffiti as a form of vandalism. Their art is authorized by the people who live in the communities being decorated. They often get invited in by the people who own the property to paint murals:

Bio: One of the big reasons that it started to gain popularity in the neighborhood was, it was a way to combat graffiti. Landlords and store owners were tired of going out on a weekly or daily basis to paint over tag signatures. But they noticed whenever we would paint a mural, it was colorful, it was attractive, but, I think, the selling point was that it would go untouched. No one would deface it or what have you. The other artists or the other graffiti artists would respect it. So they began to commission us in an effort to combat that problem.

Nicer: We sell space in communities. We find properties that are abandoned, or people are having problems keeping clean, and we make agreements with the property owners to let us use the space. And we'll keep the rest of the property clean or we'll pay rent on it. And then we'll go to these agencies and say, "listen, we have these walls." And we pick and choose what clients go on there. We're not going to go out and do tobacco or firearm companies, or big alcohol ads. We understand that, at the end of the day, we're the one's responsible for whatever images we put up there.

Yet, they also make clear that there are rules and ethical commitments even among those who produce unauthorized forms of graffiti:

Nicer: The rule is, the bigger, the more time it takes, gets the pass. So there's a pass you're given. Like if you had a throw-up, or two throw-ups and somebody did a simple style piece over it--which takes longer, there's usually like a few colors and fill it in, and an outline, and it takes more time and it's cleaner--so that stuff can go over throw-ups, because it takes more time and more skill. But if you did a throw-up over that, then you're gonna create a problem.

BG: Then you have a mural that will go over anything.

We understand graffiti to be perhaps the most controversial form of expression which we have explored through the exemplar library so far. Many see it as enhancing their community. Others see it as a form of visual clutter or as a form of vandalism. To help us better understand the controversy, we turned to a CMS alum Rekha Murthy, who did her thesis on the mediascape surrounding the Central Square area in Cambridge. Her work focused both on official media -- signage, newspapers, window displays in stores -- and unofficial media -- stickers, posters, handbills, and graffiti. We were lucky to have an expert within our own community who knew a great deal about the politics of street media. Here's some of what she had to say:

Rekha: It's illegal to poster or put stickers or graffiti in the city of Cambridge on any buildings or any surfaces without getting the approval of the city. So, obviously there's someone out there enforcing these laws. I would walk up and down the streets taking pictures for my thesis of different street media. And I would go back every couple of days or so and the whole streetscape would have changed. And I found this guy in the department of public works for the city of Cambridge, and he's actually very proud of his job.

And he said that he sees himself, actually, as helping free speech. The people who poster or who put this stuff up, you know the graffiti artists and sticker people, may just see him as someone who destroys. But he sees himself as keeping the streetscape clear so that more people can share it and more people can communicate.

There's something that I noticed in Central Square that really intrigued me. Something that I didn't go out to look for, but it kept coming back to me. And that was: people seem to respect what they like to look at. So it's not about what's legal or illegal all the time. Sometimes it's something grayer than that. You can't draw a line in it, you can't draw a box around it. It's just what people like or what the don't like, or what makes people feel OK or even happy, and what makes them feel like their neighborhood is going down the tubes.

There are people who set out to deface. There are people who really do vandalize. And they cost local business owners money. That said, there's this other group of people who want to self-express, but don't actually want to deface. And I saw in my research time and again that, some of the people that I spoke with said that they'd be perfectly happy to put art, if there were places on the streetscape that the city kind of made available. That, it didn't have to be unauthorized to be exciting or legitimate. That is just had to be in a place where people could actually see it, that implied it was being taken seriously, and that it was respected, and that there was something community about it.

We hope the documentaries will generate discussion about the borders between art and vandalism, getting people to think more deeply about what graffiti contributes to urban culture and how we might develop urban policies which support more forms of grassroots expression within our cities without necessarily bringing about property damage.

The interviews for this film were conducted by Henry Jenkins and Margaret Weigel. The documentary was edited by Neal Grigsby, a CMS graduate student, whose thesis work is focused on adolescence as a theme across many forms of contemporary media.

Happy Turkey Day

I am taking the day off to spend time with my family and the students in my dorm. My posts will return on Friday. Have a great holiday.

Catching Up: Mostly on Media Literacy

The New and Improved Henry Jenkins

I was so impressed by the experience of participating in the MacArthur Foundation's press event, which was partially held in the New York Museum of Natural History and partially held in Second Life, that I sought out Barry Joseph from Global Kids, an organization which regularly runs events through Teen Second Life, to see if there might be a way I could engage with their youth participants. My one concern, as a media scholar, had been that when we spoke in Second Life at the press event, we appeared as cinematic images and not as avatars.

So, in speaking with Joseph, we decided that I should get an avatar if I was going to relate to the Second Life youth on their own terms. Joseph was nice enough to volunteer to get some members of his group to create an avatar for me. Apparently, some of the youth had expressed a particular fascination with my beard and therefore wanted to be able to reproduce it and share it with their friends. (I wasn't sure which Henry beard they wanted since mine comes in various lengths from trim to shaggy depending on what point it is in the term and how hectic my life has been.)

This past weekend, Barry wrote to introduce me to the second Henry Jenkins. I have to say that I bonded instantly with this frisky fellow.

I have heard television puts ten pounds on you. It would appear that Second Life takes thirty or forty pounds off -- not to mention adding some of that vigor and vitality that has been worn away through many years of living the life of the jet setting academic.

Barry says they had two groups work on constructing me an avatar -- a group of adults known as The Magicians and several teens -- 1000 Carlos and Nik385 Doesberg -- and then they combined the best features of the two for the finished product. Thanks to everyone involved. It's been years since anyone has drawn a representation of me that didn't consist of a series of circles -- the bald head, the glasses, and the round little tummy. Indeed, some years ago, a whole Kindergarten class made Henry Jenkins masks by gluing string to paper plates! Even then, my beard was the subject of considerable fascination.

Barry and I are now working on the details of when and where I will be engaging with the Second Life Youth. I can't wait.

Media Snackers

Last week, I did a podcast interview with DK of the British media literacy group, Media Snackers. Here's how they describe their vision on their home page:

Remember the set menu of print, radio and television, delivered at specific times, for the masses and only in the ways the creators defined?

With the arrival of the Internet, digital TV, mobile phones, iPods, weblogs etc.--the media landscape has changed from the linear, to one of many layers, consumed by self-serving and empowered individuals.

Young people are the new 'WWW' generation--snacking whenever, wherever and whatever they like through the multi-channeled and many technological avenues available.

Creating as much as they consume--constantly hungry, always 'on' and totally self-serving!

The Media Snackers podcast series consists of ten minute conversations with leading media educators from around the world -- including, not coincidentally, one Barry Joseph from Global Kids (who always seems to be one step ahead of me!), Rob Williams, Benjamin Stokes, and a wealth of others from around the world. This is a great resource for ideas and insights into youth and new media.

There's also an excellent blog which includes some interesting discussion of major trends in this area. (I am certainly going to add it to my rss and blog list). Already, this blog has gotten me into trouble. They have a fascinating chart prepared by Gary Hays from Personalized Media, which shows the progression from Web 1.0 through to the future emergence of Web 3.0. I saw this chart the same week as The New York Times wrote an article claiming that Web 3.0 was right around the corner. Hosting a conference last weekend about the Futures of Entertainment, I couldn't resist leading our audience in a Countdown to Web 3.0 as a way of marking a transition from our own focus on social networks (web 2.0) into immersive worlds (web 3.0). I fear that this little stunt will follow me around for a while!

For the record, I am deeply suspicious of the whole Web 2.0/3.0 rhetoric. It implies dramatic breaks or ruptures in the media scene, when in fact, media change is gradual and there is a tendency for old media systems to linger even as new media systems are emerging. I do think that there are significant differences between the world of social networks and the world of immersive worlds. I have trouble imagining Second Life replacing all of the functions of the web, however, as might be applied by the Web 3.0 concept that seems to have taken root over the past few weeks. It is this idea of dramatic shifts that I was spoofing by doing a New Year's Eve style countdown to Web 3.0.

Learning Games to Go!

Finally, I wanted to share with you the latest podcasts produced for the Learning Games to Go Project -- a collaboration between the Education Arcade and Maryland Public Television. Previous podcasts have featured interviews with Scot Osterweill and the over-exposed Henry Jenkins. But, the newest one -- the first to include video content -- features Scot interacting with the CMS undergraduate and graduate students who are working on the Labyrinth game which I described here a few weeks ago. It gives you a real taste of the CMS community spirit as each of these creative individuals reflects on a toy or artifact that enabled playful learning and along the way give us a sense of what they didn't like about some of the educational games they played growing up.

Game Theorist Jesper Juul to Speak at MIT

Half-Real: A Video Game in the Hands of a Player November 28, 2006 | 5:00 PM | Location: 1-136

What happens when a player picks up video game, learns to play it, masters it, and leaves it? Using concepts from my book on video games, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, I will argue that video game players are neither rational solvers of abstract problems, nor daydreamers in fictional worlds, but both of these things with shifting emphasis. The unique quality of video games is to be located in their intricate interplay of rules and fictions, which I will examine across genres, from casual games to massively multiplayer games.

Jesper Juul is a video game theorist and assistant professor in video game theory and design at the Centre for Computer Game Research Copenhagen where he also earned his Ph.D. His book Half-Real on video game theory was published by MIT Press in 2005. Additionally, he works as a multi-user chat systems and casual game developer. He is currently a visiting scholar at Parsons School of Design in New York.

This lecture is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Comparative Media Studies Program and the New Media Literacies Project.

Broadband and the Public Interest

The Comparative Media Studies graduate students have been discussing current policy debates around "net neutrality." The phrase, "net neutrality," is in broad circulation at the moment but I suspect many people out there are not familiar with the core terms of the debate or how it impacts them. Stephen J. Schultze, a first year CMS masters student, asked if he might share some of his perspectives on this issue. Schultze holds a 2002 BA in computer science and philosophy from Calvin College (Grand Rapids, MI). Since graduation, Schultze served as a project director at the Public Radio Exchange in Cambridge, MA: "Through PRX, I've been closely involved with station consultations on issues of cross-media branding in podcasting and web strategy. I launched a project that provides stations with a customized, branded podcast interface for their listeners. We advise stations that their brand identity and relationships with listeners have become more important than ever in a multi-channel world." He has also collaborated on projects through the MIT Media Lab where he helped Carla Gomez-Monroy to build an experimental radio production system for Mexican diasporic communities in New York City. Schultze spends a lot of his time these days over at the Berkman Center at that other place up the road from us and has been involved in the organization of the Beyond Broadcasting conference (more on that later). He is currently working on a documentary about podcasting for the New Media Literacies Project. What follows are his thoughts about how the recent election returns are apt to impact the debates around net neutrality.

Broadband and the Public Interest

by Stephen J. Schultze

Telecommunications policy wasn't exactly a hot-button issue in the midterm elections, but the resulting power shift in Congress could affect the trajectory of the Internet for years to come. Most of us are fairly satisfied with our day-to-day Internet experience. Why involve the bureaucrats when things are working just fine?

The problem is that things aren't working just fine. When it comes to broadband, we are falling embarrassingly far behind much of the rest of the world. On the heels of the elections, FCC commissioner Michael Copps wrote an editorial in the Washington Post entitled "America's Internet Disconnect." He noted that according to one study of "digital opportunity," the US ranks 21st in the world, right behind Estonia. We rely on private companies operating according to their market interests to connect us, and these companies have become more consolidated and less competitive in the last several years. Unfortunately, our telecommunications policy has failed to address the market failure that has left millions of Americans with limited and expensive options for broadband access - or none at all.

In the weeks leading up to the elections, high drama unfolded in Congress as Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) attempted to capture support for a telecommunications bill that revised parts of our telecommunications law. The bill met with stiff resistance from advocates of something called "network neutrality." Net neutrality is the long-standing principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally without discriminating between who is sending it - a kind-of free speech clause for the net. A diverse group of supporters thinks that the issue is as important as the broadband access issues highlighted by Commissioner Copps. The Stevens bill, which would effectively prevent such neutrality, was barely blocked before the elections. Likewise, a merger between AT&T and Bellsouth has been stalled while FCC commissioners try to decide whether provisions like net neutrality should be imposed. Some representatives have suggested that the FCC wait to hear from the new neutrality-friendly Congress before making any decisions.

These two issues have a common lineage in the 1996 Telecommunications Act. At the time it passed, the Clinton-championed legislation was hailed as a deregulatory victory that would clear the way for technological innovation. By 1999, the Internet had taken off in unanticipated ways, and it was becoming clear that the bureaucratic intricacies of the Act were more hindrance than help. Justice Scalia noted, "It would be gross understatement to say that the 1996 Act is not a model of clarity. It is in many important respects a model of ambiguity or indeed even self-contradiction." The Act has contributed to a great deal of confusion about how to best encourage true competition that would help address commissioner Copps' concerns, and it set up the structure that allowed network neutrality to be challenged.

It is difficult these days to find praise of the 1996 Act, but Senator Stevens' bill takes a minimally reformative approach. A more radical strategy has been advocated by free-market think tanks that seek to do away with nearly all telecommunications regulation. They propose that issues be dealt with after the fact in antitrust-like fashion. This is an attractive approach to removing regulatory barriers to competition, and is seductively simple. The risk is that it trusts the market to do what is best for us. In this model, it is difficult to ensure access for poor communities, or to explain how principles of network neutrality will be upheld over the shareholders' desire to derive more revenue through discriminatory pricing. To be sure, the free-market crowd has well-considered answers to these and other challenges, but it is likely a moot point for now. The bill advocating this approach, which was championed by Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), had stalled in the 109th and is unlikely to progress in the 110th.

Instead, there are some signs that a different approach is gaining momentum. It lacks the simplicity of the free-market mantra, but appeals to an older principle in media policy. Since the Radio Act of 1927, our communications regulation has included language invoking the "public interest, convenience, and necessity." The "public interest" is a notoriously but necessarily slippery phrase. Over time, the implementation of the concept has eroded into little more than lame public service announcements and FCC indecency fines. The groundswell of support for net neutrality represents a remarkably successful invocation of the public interest in policy debate. It is particularly interesting because it draws its power from a broad-based grassroots coalition that has successfully stood up to heavily backed lobbyists and astroturf campaigns from the major telecommunications companies.

Network neutrality is not a clean-cut issue. There are legitimate quarrels with the proposals, which spur lively debate. However, the effort is remarkable example of citizens exercising their influence on media policy. They believe that neutrality is in their interest and they believe that they have the right to call for it. They are not simply consumers, as a simplistic version of the free-market approach might indicate. Instead, they have stood up for neutrality on principle and with the belief that a neutral Internet will have beneficial network effects that companies like AT&T and Comcast will not promote on their own.

Neutrality advocates are using the infrastructure of the Internet itself to build a broad base of support. They have formed partnerships that unite competitors like Google and Microsoft, and have brought together sometimes-adversaries like MoveOn and the Christian Coalition. They will have powerful allies in leadership of the 110th Congress - including incoming Speaker of the House Pelosi (D-CA) and incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), with the support of Representatives John Dingell (D-MI) and Ed Markey (D-MA) who will lead influential subcommittees.

The bigger task of developing a telecommunications regulation infrastructure that makes sense in a broadband world is considerably more difficult. The citizen-powered, public interest motivated, Internet-savvy crowd does not speak with one voice. It does not have much industry money at its disposal. It is not well versed in strategic influence. Nevertheless, it wields enormous power to the extent that it genuinely represents the citizenry. Few of those citizens would rank telecommunications policy in their top three voting priorities today, but the groundswell of support for network neutrality is a compelling model of public action. This is exciting in a moment when the upcoming changes in Congress overwhelmingly favor their cause. In short, these citizens believe that there is something special about media - and in particular the Internet - that gives the public the right to shape its direction. In this view, media is not just another private commodity. To reduce it to its instrumental market value is to risk turning into what Edward R. Murrow would call, "merely wires and lights in a box." Rather, they hold communication in common between them - whether it is public ownership of the airwaves, the wireline rights-of-way, or the discourse we co-create.

Youtube and the Vaudeville Aesthetic

My very first book, What Made Pistachio Nuts? (based on my dissertation at Wisconsin), explored the impact of American vaudeville on early sound comedy, seeing variety performance as an important influence on the films of the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Burns and Allen, Jimmy Durante, Ed Wynn, Joe E. Brown, Wheeler and Woolsey, and a spate of other clowns and comics of the early 1930s. I confess that given my current research interests, I don't get very much demand to pontificate about the particulars of early 20th century popular theater. Yet, the other day, a journalist asked me to look at this OK Go music video, currently extremely popular on YouTube, as part of a story he was doing about the ways that digital distribution of content was impacting the recording industry. And I was suddenly struck by the ways that YouTube represents for the early 21st century what Vaudeville represented in the early 20th century.

Let me see if I can sketch some of the resemblances:

As the name suggests, the variety stage was based on the principle of constant variation and diversity. It represented a grab bag of the full range of cultural interests and obsessions of an age marked by dramatic social, cultural, and technological transformations. In the course of an evening, one might watch a Shakespearean actor do a soliloquy, a trained dog act, an opera recital, a juggler or acrobatic turn, a baggy pants comedian, an escape artist or magician, a tap dance performance, and some form of stupid human tricks (such as a guy with hammers on his shoes hopping around on a giant xylophone or an act where baboons play musical instruments). Similarly, YouTube brings together an equally ecclectic mix of content drawn from all corners of our culture and lays it out as if it were of equal interest and importance, trusting the individual user to determine the relative value of each entry.

Second, vaudeville performances were short modular units -- usually less than 20 minutes in length -- and much was written about how the demands of economy -- get in, score big, and get off -- impacted the aesthetic choices made. There was no time for elaborate characterization or plot development. Every element had to pull its own weight. Nothing that wasn't necessary for the overall emotional impact could survive. Again, one of the characteristics of YouTube has been this similar push to conciseness. In theory, content can be of any length. In reality, the stuff that gets passed around the most is short and streamlined. YouTube viewers get restless if anything lingers too long. And there is thus a similar emphasis on the immediate emotional impact.

Vaudeville was an actor-centered mode of production. There was no director who could build an ensemble piece. Actors chose their own material, refined their own skills, and lived and died entirely on the basis of their ability to connect one on one with the audience. It was a form which placed a high premium on virtuosity -- on the ability of the performer to impress the spectator with their mastery. Similarly, YouTube is a space of individualized expression. This video is about nothing if it isn't about the mastery and virtuosity of these young performers. We watch breathlessly to see what they will do next and if they can pull off a high risk performance.

As vaudeville goes to film, it encourages certain stylistic choices which preserve the integrity of individual performances -- so there is a tendency towards the long take so we can see for sure that the performer actually did what is being represented on the screen. Part of what impresses me about this video is that this elaborate set of stunts is performed in a single take so that any screw up will require the performers to start over from scratch. The newsman told me that it took fifty tries to complete this video.

Filmed vaudeville performances were also performed directly to the camera with the performers actively courting the attention and approval of the viewer. Again, there is no question of the camera here being part of an invisible fourth wall unobserved by the people on screen: these guys are performing for us and working their pants off to get our approval.

In a context of constant variation, the individual performer tried above all else to be memorable, which typically meant a strong reliance on spectacle and a desire to intensify emotional effects. Similarly, the YouTube performer wants to be so spectacular that you feel compelled to pass their content along to your friends. It depends upon extreme spectacles, shocks, and stunts (the Jackass side of the platform) to produce content that will move virally across the blogosphere. The best YouTube content is content that is so unbelievable that it has to be shared.

One of the tropes of the vaudeville stage was the interrupted act: i.e. the performer would fake a series of disruptions and distractions which threatened to destroy the carefully constructed performance, thus giving a sense of spontaneity which played up the liveness of the staged experience. Similarly, though clearly different, the YouTube performer courts a sense of the amateurish which also places a high emphasis on seeming spontaneity -- many videos are carefully staged so as to look unrehearsed. There is not necessarily a push towards liveness, but there is a push towards "realness" -- towards the idea that you can't believe what you are seeing really happened -- and as we are increasingly recognizing, we are often right. The YouTube performer stages "realness" and in the process, much that is "fake" passes as real.

The vaudeville act might also strive for a pattern of theme and variation -- choosing some everyday space or activity and then playing with all different permutations of it. As a good example of the vaudeville aesthetic, consider this juggling routine by W.C. Fields made available again, ironically enough, thanks to the magic of YouTube. It is this principle that shapes the OK Go treadmill video and left me thinking about the connections back to vaudeville.

Of course, vaudeville was not simply about human performance. During an age when new technologies were being invented and diffused at a rapid rate, vaudeville was also a site of technological virtuosity. Many of the new inventions of the period were first introduced to the public on the vaudeville stage -- most famously, in this country, cinema itself. The magician was an early adopter and adapter of technologies, using the sense of wonder that surrounded new mechanisms to astonish and baffle their patrons. Not surprisingly, then, something like vaudeville is resurfacing during another moment of rapid technological development and deployment.

Some YouTube content also involves spectacular use of technology, as in this video which I received from one of my students. Here, the basic mechanics of the racing game are hacked, producing a spectacular and sublime display of movement, which very much recalls the fascination with escalating chases which was part of the early cinema. The film historian Tom Gunning has talked about cinema at the turn of the century as a "cinema of attractions" and that term seems very apt for what draws us back again and again to YouTube.

Finally, vaudeville served a particular function during a phase of colonization and immigration. It brought people and traditions from exotic parts of the world to America and it staged the cultural differences which shaped the immigrant experience. By the same token, YouTube is a product of our current moment of globalization, where we are fascinated to discovery that young men in China are lip-syncing to American boy bands or where the openings to Japanese children's programs, otherwise unknown in the American context, may fascinated removed from their original context.

In the not too distant future, social historians will want to examine the current contents of YouTube as a microcosm of contemporary culture, much as vaudeville's popular performances still yield rich insights into the culture of the last turn of the century.

Updates from the Futures of Entertainment Over at the C3 Site Throughout the Conference

Today and tomorrow is The Futures of Entertainment Conference, co-sponsored by C3 and the Comparative Media Studies Department here at MIT. Since seating is limited and registration closed almost a month in advance, the C3 team will be providing updates throughout the two days of the conference over on the C3 blog in hopes of including readers in the discussion. You can access the C3 blog's main page here. Check back throughout the day today and tomorrow over at C3's site for updates, and look through the program for the conference here.

Pimp My Show!

The title says it all. We are already a few months into the Fall 2006 television season -- some of the new series have already come and gone, others have started to develop solid fan followings. I wanted to invite my loyal readers to share with us which new shows have really caught your fancy and why. (Of course, it's always fun to hear which new shows have bored or disgusted you, too.) It's been a while since we've had a really good conversation going with the readers of this blog so I am hoping you will rise to the occasion and share with us what you think have been the most interesting new shows this season. And of course, since I've got lots of international readers, don't presume we are just talking about American shows. I'd love to hear about amazing shows out there in other countries which are generating fan interest.

To get the ball rolling, I dug out some notes I sent to the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium this summer, before any of the shows had actually reached the air. I tried to predict which new shows would be "most fan friendly." It's interesting to see how well I did.

First, let's define "fan friendly." By fan friendly, I mean programs that attract strong, committed and highly visible followings as manifested in such activities as fan fiction writing, convention discussions, and online forums. Such programs may or may not enjoy ratings success by traditional standards. So, the CSI franchise consistently ranks in the top tier of the Nielsen ratings but doesn't generate anywhere near as much interest within the fan communities as a lower rated show such as Veronica Mars. Indeed, historically, fan favorite shows enjoyed a marginal position on the schedule, having strong niche appeal but struggling to stay on the air. That's why there have been so many letter writing campaigns through the years to keep their favorite shows on the air. It is only in recent years where cult shows like Lost also happen to be ratings leaders that the line between the two has started to blur.

Yet, even if fan favorites are not top ratings earners, they serve other vital interests for networks -- as I suggest in Convergence Culture. They are "must see" TV at a time when appointment viewing is in decline. They tend to rank higher in terms of paid downloads or digital video recording than many shows that do better in the ratings. And early research suggests that people watching their favorite shows are more engaged with the advertising as well as the content. They are also more willing to seek out further information about the series, resulting in more touch points and a greater receptiveness to convergence-based strategies. And for lower ranked and cable networks, a strong niche audience may make or break a program.

For my current purposes, I am really talking about two different but sometimes interrelated fan communities: one mostly female and focused around the production and consumption of fan fiction and the second, mixed gender and focused on online speculation and discussion. Keep in mind that there are other possible fan communities - sports fans, soap fans, music fans, etc. who will have their own criteria and interests.

So, what kinds of shows are most apt to attract strong fan followings?

Fan Friendly Programs:

1. Focus heavily on characters and character relationships. In some cases, fans will pull secondary characters from the margins of a series if they are not interested in the central protagonists. In particular, they are looking for the following:

--Strong emotional bonds - especially partnership, mentorship, and romance (probably in that order if you are talking about the female fan writing community)

-- Strong focus on the formation of alternative or utopian communities (again, this is especially true with the fanzine community).

-- Intelligent characters who use their brains to solve problems

-- Outside characters or characters with strong internal conflicts.

--Strong, competent, and active female characters

We can understand each of these traits as in some ways reflecting how fans see themselves and their social network. Fans see themselves as intelligent, strong, independent, socially committed, and nonconventional and they are drawn to characters who share those characteristics. They contrast themselves to what they call "mundane" viewers. These traits also reflect the genres that have emerged in fan fiction. Given the presence of a strong fan tradition about male partners becoming lovers, for example, there is a tendency for fans to be attracted towards shows that have strong partnership themes. So, a show like House meets all or most of these criteria including intelligent protagonists, a focus on friendship, romance, and mentorship, a strong sense of community, etc.

2. Focus on genre entertainment. While many fans watch realist or quality dramas (such as The West Wing) or sitcoms, these programs rarely cross over into their activities as fans. They do not generate the same level of discussion online or at cons nor do they inspire the same amount of fan fiction. Historically, organized fandom started in response to science fiction but with each new series that fits the other criteria but does not fall into the science fiction genre, the tastes of this community has broadened. So, at the moment, fan favorites can include crime dramas (Prison Break), mystery (Veronica Mars), adventure (Lost), science fiction (Battlestar: Galactica), historical drama (Rome), westerns (Deadwood), Buddy shows (Entourage), medical shows (House), etc.

3. Provides a strong sense of continuity. Even before there were fully elaborated story arcs on television, fans were inclined to read the episodes as if they formed some larger continuity. Series which rely heavily on continuity tap the collective memory of the fan community and allow them to show the kinds of mastery that comes from systematically watching a particular series. The management of continuity in turn becomes a favorite activity in online fan discussions.

4. Contain secrets or problems to be solved. Take this back to a distinction I make in my book, Convergence Culture between attractors (that is, shows that draw together like minded individuals) and activators (shows that give the fan community something to do - some roles and goals they can pursue together in relation to the content). The power of a show like Lost is that it is continually opening up new secrets, posing new mysteries, and creating new opportunities for fans to pool knowledge (see the much-discussed example of the map this season). This also accounts for how reality television programs such as Survivor, Big Brother, or American Idol find their way into the emerging fan cannon - because they offer either plenty of room for speculation between episodes or explicit opportunities for evaluation and participation.

5. Often have strong pedigrees. Shows by creators of previous fan shows (such as Abrams or Whedon) can more or less insure that their fan bases will turn out and give a first look at any new series they produced. Since part of the challenge is to produce a series that will be an attractor, this is a huge advantage going in. Despite the focus on characters within fan aesthetics, the same has not always proven to be true for actors. While there are fans for specific actors who will follow them from series to series, fans of a character may or may not be interested in something else from the same performer.

These are traits we can judge from advanced information about a series. There are other elements that are harder to read. It is not enough that a show operate within a well defined genre; it has to respect those genre conventions and satisfy the audience demands that draw them to the genre. It is not enough that characters be compelling on paper but there's an element of chemistry that emerges as these characters are embodied by specific performers that can make or break a series.

What happens when we apply these criteria to the series announced for this fall.

First, most shows do not stand a chance of reaching this kind of committed fan viewer because they do not meet most if not all of these criteria. By my count, there are 14 shows that have the potential to be fan friendly. A surprisingly high number are explicitly comparing themselves to Lost, hoping to become mass-cult successes.

What's striking in looking at the fall lineup is that networks have gotten the idea of continuity and serialization almost too well. Many of the series are designed to last a season or even half a season. They have plots or gimmicks that are going to be compelling in short bursts but will be hard to sustain over time. Some may go the route of 24, generating a new plot for each new season. Some will be canceled before each the first story arc runs its course. And some will make the mistake of avoiding resolution and thus drawing out a plotline well past its likely audience interest. If American television operated like British television, say, where you have a firm commitment for x number of episodes going in and then a series ends, whether or not it develops strong ratings, then we would know how to calibrate expectations about these series. But, many of them are artistic time bombs which may take off strong and then blow up in the networks' faces as they move into season 2. Of course in a world where the vast majority of shows never make a second season, this may not be a total disaster....

If I had to pick the most likely fan favorite of the lot, I would go with Heroes, followed by Vanished, Six Degrees, Jericho and Runaways. Studio 60 is the wild card in all of this - It will certainly be watched by a large number of fans but will it motivate fanish activities. (Either way, Studio 60 is probably the new show that is going to be most eagerly awaited in my household.)

Of these shows, at this point, Heroes and Studio 60 are the only ones that are still on my Tivo. How about you?

On Blogs, Lost, and Jag Studies...

For those of you interested in the blogosophere (and I have to assume you are or you wouldn't be reading this blog), there are some fascinating statistics to be found on Technorati's State of the Blogosphere report. Technorati is now tracking 57 Million blogs -- with a growth of 100,000 new blogs added each day throughout the last quarter. The number of blogs doubles every five to seven months.

They publish an interesting chart which shows the peak moments in blog posting and their relationship to specific news events. On the one hand, this chart suggests how vital politics is to what motivates people to post and on the other, it suggests that the increased number of bloggers means that each major political event is likely to generate more traffic and discussion than the last. We can speculate whether all of this reaction to news is likely to be divisive as some critics have argued, leaving us more likely to read each new development through an ever narrower and more self righteous ideological frame or likely to enable real discussion and community building as others have argued because we have a greater understanding of how politics impacts the everyday lives of a diverse array of people.

Blogs remain a highly decentralized mode of expression, even though some blogs (topped by Endgadget and Boing Boing) are beginning to compete directly with the websites offered by the major media companies in terms of traffic. Only three blogs make it to the top fifty most trafficked news sites while another nine make it into the second 50 most trafficked sites.

The egotist in me was interested in their classification of blogs as influential based on the number of other blogs which link to them. By these criteria, Confessions of an Aca/Fan, which I launched in June, has already made its way into "the very high authority group," thanks no doubt to the number of "thought leaders" and fellow bloggers who read this site, since our readership numbers are a good deal lower than many of the other blogs to make it to this status. You are an elite, dear readers, and you work hard to spread the word about some of the information posted here. For this, I thank you very very much.

Another Aca/Fan Takes Up Blogging

One of these new bloggers is none other than Jason Mittell, a regular reader and commentator here, an academic friend who teaches at Middlebury College and went to my Alma madder, UW-Madison and who is one of the academic advisors to the Convergence Culture Consortium. Mittell wrote Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture and is now working on a new book on complexity of American television. Here's a link to an essay Mittell published recently which touches on many shows that are much beloved in the aca/fan community. I have added Mittell's new blog, JustTV, to my blogroll and I suspect many of you will want to add it to their rss feeds.

The blog is only a few weeks old. So far, for my money, the most interesting post has dealt with the midseason finale of Lost. It is written from the perspective of a hardcore fan of the series as well as someone who is closely examining the growing complexity of American television:

One of Lost's strengths thus far has been a mastery of final acts, both of season and episode. Throughout season 2, fans complained that many episodes were 40 minutes of boring set-up for a great final 3-minute sequence. I was always fine with that, as I recognized that those set-ups were usually needed to deliver the final moments, and they served to deepen character and plot arcs in often subtle ways. And Lost has delivered in the season finales both years, albeit in different ways. Season 1 ended with some frustrating suspense, peering down the hatch, but the capture of Walt was an immensely satisfying twist. Season 2's finale was simply perfect, answering tons of questions about Desmond & the hatch, while opening a great number of mysteries to keep us pondering all summer (cue Giant Foot).

Now Lost is going with a split-season model, delivering a 6-episode mini-season this fall before going on hiatus until February. Last night's episode, "I Do," seemed poised to deliver on wrapping up many of the issues raised this season, and creating enough momentum to sustain interest for three months. It failed at both tasks. What was wrapped up? The only thing I can see is the resolution of the Kate/Sawyer/Jack love triangle - Kate & Sawyer are the couple, as Kate doesn't do taco night (and Jack's all about taco night). For some fans, this is huge, but I'm not a "shipper," nor do I think that's the main draw for the majority of Lost viewers. We got nothing about the motivations, history, or plans of The Others (as a friend of mine says, they seem omnipotent simply for omnipotence sake), no clues into Desmond's transformation or any other insights into the Swan's implosion, and no better sense of the numerous dangling clues (giant foot, Eyepatch Man, Mrs. Klugh, Alex, Penny's listening station, DHARMA/Hanso/numbers, Walt, Libby, shall I continue?).

What about narrative momentum? The cliffhanger seemed more out of 24 than Lost (which is not praise on my blog) - Jack holding Ben's kidney hostage, Kate trying to escape from mini-island peril, Sawyer at gunpoint. None of these developments are surprising, and the suspense is pretty low as well, as we know all three characters will survive this, and probably Ben will too. Lost's strength has been not in generating "what will happen?" suspense like typical thrillers, but creating "why are things happening?" intrigue. We know why Ben wants surgery, we know why Jack wants to save himself and Kate, we know why Kate & Sawyer want to get it on in a cage. I won't spend 3 months wondering what will happen to these characters, but I'm still pondering many "whys." The only dangling mystery we were given was Locke's revelation on Eko's Jesus Stick - but it's a clue with no payoff and no immediate resonance. I'm sure it'll matter in February, but who cares until then. [Plus as an added gripe, Kate's flashback completely wasted the glorious Nathan Fillion, only making me want to watch Firefly/em> again.]

More generally, Mittell has been responding to journalistic discussions which have suggested that there may be a backlash afoot against serialization and complexity this season as reflected by the lack of audience interest in many of the new dramas. Here's some of what Mittell has to say about The Nine, a series about which I am still trying to make up my mind:

While there's much I like about the show - strong cast, high production values, engaging characters, and a clever idea - something has bothered me from the beginning of the show. For those who haven't watched it, the concept is that nine people are held hostage in a bank robbery, and the show traces the after-effects of the event on their lives and relationships. The show's storytelling gimmick is that the 52 hours of the hostage situation is not revealed directly to the audience - each episode fills in a bit more of the events at the beginning of the show, and through flashbacks that characters have throughout the rest of the episode.

This storytelling device is clearly inspired from Lost, where flashbacks reveal a character's back-story that illuminate their "current" situation on the island, as well as other programs that have used flashbacks & flash-forward (temporal manipulations called anachrony in the narratology jargon) in creative ways, like Jack & Bobby and Boomtown. But my problem with The Nine is that there is no clear motivation either for withholding the events in the bank from the audience, or the way in which they are revealed. In fact, the viewers seem to be the only ones who don't know what has happened inside the bank -- whereas in other programs using temporal complexity, a character's discovery process or the act of retelling to another character motivates narrative revelations. More than any other show using such innovative storytelling strategies, The Nine seems to use its devices only as an externally-imposed gimmick without a clear motivation emerging from the story world itself.

For my money, Mittell is one of the best writers about contemporary television, one who regularly combines astute perspectives on the industrial context as well as a solid understanding of the formal construction of individual series and specific episodes. He watches television closely and isn't afraid to tell us what he thinks matters there.

Developing a Taste for JAG

Mittell was one of the many interesting people who I got to interact with at the recent Flow conference which was hosted by the University of Texas-Austin. I often mention Flow here because I see it as an important experiment in making academic criticism of television and new media more accessible to a general audience. Many of you might be interested to check out some of the short position papers issued by the conference participants around a range of topics.

Mittell participated on a session, for example, which centers around issues of taste and opened up a far reaching discussion of the role of evaluation in contemporary television studies. One of the most provocative statements came from my long time friend, Greg Smith, who currently teaches at Georgia State University, and who is finishing up a book on Ally McBeal. Smith asked conference participants to reflect on what does and doesn't receive academic attention and how this is bound up with academia as a particular taste culture. He ended up framing what became known as the "JAG question.":

TV studies, like all subcultures, was born out of a particular set of historical relations to the larger culture, and so we emerged out of film studies (by way of cultural studies) by tending to distance ourselves from the sometimes elite interests of our "parent discipline." From this pioneering work we gained a particular understanding of the popular as potentially unruly, a Rabelaisian source of energy that propels texts/viewers across social space. While we have grown to nuance our understanding of the politics of texts, this particular understanding of the popular still colors the choices we tend to make in examining texts. The more clearly a TV text fits this concept of the popular, the more likely we are to study it. I'll pick on Buffy here (a show I love) because its rise as one of the most explored texts in academic television studies has much to do the fact that it fits this specific notion of the popular. Its irreverent play with social categories, its sense of the grotesque as populist metaphor, its ardent following among an interpretive community: all these things place Buffy squarely within the center of our notion of the popular.

We need to recognize that this particular understanding of the popular is a value of our academic subculture, one that leads us to privilege certain text/viewer relations over others. In contrast, where is the analysis of JAG, a popular show that flew under the critical radar for 10 seasons? This has something to do with JAG's creators being less visible and less adept than Joss Whedon, but I also suspect that this is because JAG does not fit our primary notion of the popular. JAG is far too square to be interesting to television studies.

And thus the blind spot that I call "hipness." I initially considered discussing this distinction in terms of a preference toward the lowbrow and against the middlebrow, but the terms lowbrow/middlebrow feel too much like properties of the text to me. I prefer the term "hip" (and its opposite, "square") because it more clearly places the interpretive community into the mix. A text is hip or square to a particular community, and what's hip to one subculture may not be hip to another. And so Star Trek may be considered unhip by broader society while being the granddaddy of hip for TV studies. But what of texts that are squarer and yet immensely popular by the standards of broad viewership? Where's the field of Raymond studies? My suspicion is that (in spite of - or perhaps because of -- the fact that everybody loves him), Raymond studies would just not be as much fun (another taste category).

About this point in the discussion, Will Brooker, a British scholar who has written books on Alice in Wonderland, Batman, and Bladerunner (themselves hip or fannish shows), stood up and jokingly accused me of being responsible of misdirecting the entire field down the Aca/fan path, suggesting that every young academic is now a fan writing about the object of their own fandom. I am not sure I am ready to take the blame or the responsibility for this redirection of the field. But if I am responsible, let me suggest that to me, being an aca/fan involves being honest about one's relationship to their object of study and not necessarily simply writing about television shows one loves. For me, you don't really begin to understand the nature of popular culture unless one can engage with the emotional impact it has on the viewer and as such, we can not write about it without examining more closely our own emotional investments.

One of my first television studies teachers said to her class that they should always study television programs they hated because that was the only way to get enough emotional distance from them to examine them critically. I have always resisted that impulse to see hate as somehow objective or objectivity as the preferred stance for writing about television. It has never been a requirement that a Shakespeare scholar hate their object of study for example in a way that it used to be routine for television scholars to express their disdain for the medium.

Part of the problem may simply be that there is so little real ideological and cultural diversity within television studies per se. I would argue that our inability as a field to write intelligently about shows like JAG has something to do with our sense of cultural isolation from those people who live in Red States. One challenge may be to broaden our object of study. An even bigger challenge may be to expand who studies television and what kinds of perspectives are welcome at our conference. Very few folks at the Flow conference rose to defend JAG as a worthy object of study. My bet though is that there are people out there reading this blog who regularly watch JAG. Indeed, it was one of my late father's favorite programs and I found watching the program with him helped me to understand how his generation saw the world.