From Serious Games to Serious Gaming (Part Three): Backflow

This is part Three in a multipart series showcasing the serious games work being done by the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. Today, we focus onBackflow, one of the games developed this summer as part of our newly launched Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Lab. Under the guidance of Eric Klopfer, Judy Perry, and Marleigh Norton, Backflow was developed by Zulfiki bin Mohamed Salleh, Neal Grigsby, Chen Renhao, Nguyen Hoai Anh, Wang Xun, Fabian Teo, Brendan Callahan, Guo Yuan, and Hoo "Fezz" Shuyi from the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. To download Backflow, visit the GAMBIT homepage. Backflow

By Neal Grigsby, Philip Tan, and Teo Chor Guan

The GAMBIT Summer Program

The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab was established in 2006 between MIT's program in Comparative Media Studies and Singapore's Media Development Authority as a five year project to sponsor new research about video games, to development new and innovative games, and to train students from Singapore's tertiary education institutions, its universities and polytechnics, in preparation for entering the games industry. The GAMBIT name refers to the many axes along which the project aims to generate research: Gamers, Aesthetics, Mechanics, Business, Innovation, and Technology.

The project adheres to the ethos of "applied humanism," which is the conceptual core of the Comparative Media Studies program. All CMS research projects share the goal of putting theoretical research into practical application, of testing theoretical precepts in contexts outside of the academy, for example in the realm of childhood education (the project for New Media Literacies), the media industry (the Convergence Culture Consortium), and journalism (the Center for Future Civic Media). For GAMBIT, this philosophy demands not only the generation of writing about games, but also the development of games themselves in support of research goals.

In 2007, GAMBIT research managers prepared for their first summer of game development. They selected over 30 students from Singapore based on the strength of their academic records, portfolios, and their demonstrated passion for video games. Successful applicants were flown to MIT to participate in the equivalent of a professional internship, the GAMBIT summer program. Over a short 9 week period, they worked closely with MIT students and faculty to develop 6 new games, each designed to answer a specific research question.

Most of the research questions and initial game concepts came out of a semester-long process of investigation, preliminary research, collaboration between academic departments, and, finally, the selection of brief written proposals. They were chosen based on mutual interest from faculty at MIT and Singaporean institutions, and the viability of projects for such a short development cycle. For each game, the faculty member in charge of the research would meet with the development teams at the beginning to outline the project requirements and help in brainstorming game ideas, and then reconnect systematically throughout the cycle to ensure ongoing compliance and provide help when needed.

In addition to the specific research goals of individual teams, there were also some shared goals. Games should be innovative but should not ignore the lessons of thirty years of gaming history, that is, they should retain what is interesting and successful about current games. The teams should strive to meet the academic research goals, but also aspire to a professional level of polish. Most importantly, the development of the games should contribute to the education of the team members, to expand their intellectual and professional horizons. To this effect, the first week of the 9 week program was spent in orientation, with faculty and staff lecturing students on game design, usability, animation, and related topics. In addition, local game industry professionals provided insider perspectives on design challenges and careers. This week-long orientation served as a tool-kit to help prepare the students for the intense 8 weeks of software development that followed.

With such a short development cycle, and a demanding variety of projects to complete, the organization and management of teams was considered of highest importance. Teams were kept small in the context of software development, with just 7 members each, but taken together exceeded the threshold for effective centralized control. Therefore, they needed to be relatively self-sufficient and able to respond to challenges with speed and independence. Each team consisted of students from a variety of backgrounds and specialties: two programmers, two artists, a test lead, a game designer, and a project manager. In addition, a wildcard 2-person team of musicians provided audio services to all of the game teams.

Programmers were, of course, responsible for writing the software itself, and artists for the generation of art assets such as character designs, backgrounds, menu screens, etc. The day-to-day tasks of the test lead would change often throughout the cycle, but always with the intention of placing him or her in a position to represent the interests of the end user. In the early design phase, the tester would assist in design tasks, but while the researcher and designer might come up with innovative, "blue sky" possibilities for their games, the tester was to help keep their feet on the ground, to remind them of their responsibilities to the player. Later, the tester would be responsible to systematically evaluate each new iteration of the game.

The designer was responsible for translating the educational goals of the project into a game concept and play mechanics. However, GAMBIT designers were encouraged to put their egos aside and serve more as facilitators of the design, as design leaders rather than authoritative authors. Each team member needed to feel a sense of ownership over the design if they were to successfully complete the project requirements. After all, the project would be their full time job over the next two months. The team could not afford to have even one of its members feeling disengaged, or believing that their ideas had not been taken seriously by the rest. In addition, while it was thought that the Singaporean students would be very technically adept, GAMBIT hoped to engage the students on a much more creative level than had previously been demanded of them. Therefore the concept for the game should come from the team itself and should be selected by consensus, with the designer stepping in as tie breaker when necessary.

Finally, the project manager would keep the team on track to finishing their project. A flavor of agile project management called "Scrum" offered a reasonable fit with the demands of the project. For the purposes of Scrum, those working on the project are divided into three categories: the product owner, the Scrummaster, and the team. The team consists of everyone who works closely on the project, those fully committed to doing the work that will turn ideas into reality. The product owner represents the long-term view of the project, often advocating for the software end-user or the requirements of the larger organization. The Scrummaster makes sure that participants adhere to the rules of Scrum, which calls for short daily check-in meetings (the daily scrum), the management of development cycles called "sprints," and other details of the process. The role of Scrummaster tracks fairly closely with the role of "project manager" in other paradigms, and indeed GAMBIT project managers became Scrummasters.

In the GAMBIT summer program, the researchers were assigned to the role of product owner. He or she would work with the team to set and prioritize the goals of the project, but would not need to dictate exactly how those priorities were met. The work would be divided into four two-week sprints. At the beginning of each sprint, the product owner would collaborate with the team to prioritize a list of product features called the "product backlog." The team would select the amount of product backlog they believed they could achieve, which would become the "sprint backlog," and define for themselves the best way to realize these features. At the end of each sprint, the team would be called upon to demonstrate new functionality to the product owner in a "sprint review" meeting. Each cycle also offered an opportunity to discuss and refine the rules of Scrum itself to better serve the personalities of the project and the team. Running the teams this way demands that team members have to produce not just work from individuals (code, concept art, music, design documents) but also an integrated, testable and ever-improving game every other week. By adhering to this program of "iterative development," teams would have a better chance of actually producing a finished product after eight weeks of development.

The use of Scrum project management was both an adaptation to the stringent requirements of the project and an experiment in its own right. As many of the professional visitors who lectured GAMBIT students would attest, most game companies operate with a development cycle that perpetually concludes with "crunch time," or a period of company-wide overtime. One of the goals of Scrum is to eliminate crunch time by making sure management decisions are not based on unrealistic expectations. The team estimates the development time for each feature and management is forced to accept the team's estimates or make an explicit decision to scale back the project. Even in companies that have adopted the Scrum management system, however, crunch time is often unavoidable due to the demands of the commercial marketplace. As a fully funded educational research project, GAMBIT enjoyed relative independence from these demands, even as it aspired to a professional product. The managers of the project discouraged overtime as much as possible to engender a more healthy workplace environment and create a model of "sustainable development."

Backflow: The Game

Existing mobile participatory simulations such as Palmagotchi use the peer-to-peer connective capabilities of Palm and Windows Mobile handheld computers to embed a group of players inside a simulation. While each individual device is inexpensive, purchasing enough devices for an entire classroom can be a prohibitive expense for many schools. To address this, researchers from MIT Teacher Education Program worked with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab to develop a game for a platform more popular among teachers and students: the mobile phone. Mobile phones are a challenging game development platform in comparison to dedicated gaming consoles or the PC, with relatively tiny screens, low system memory, and low-powered microprocessors. However, every mobile phone is a communications device, incorporating networking technologies that are well suited for participatory simulations.

To that end, a team of students from the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab were given a number of new mobile phones from a variety of manufacturers, and set to the task of developing a game that would run reliably across at least two of the devices. The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab was established in 2006 between the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT and the Media Development Authority of Singapore as a five-year project to sponsor new research about video games, to develop new and innovative games, and to train students from Singapore's tertiary education institutions in preparation for entering the game industry. In 2007, over 30 Singaporean students were flown to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to participate in the equivalent of a professional internship. Over a short 9-week period, they worked closely with MIT students and faculty to develop 6 new games, each designed to tackle a specific research challenge head-on.

Working with the MIT Teacher Education Program, the team chose to address environmental issues in their simulation. The original concept had the player directing the flow of sewage through a series of pipes using switches, with the option of shunting the waste to his or her neighbor, helping to clear the game screen but potentially inviting retaliation. The game would simulate a system of environmental exchange and the interdependencies of environmental actors. The basic mechanic also offered the possibility to support a fun, casual-style single-player game themed around recycling, in which the player's frantic button mashing would direct recyclables in the waste stream to the correct recycling bins.

Other than the title of the game, Backflow, everything else in the original design had to change in order to accommodate testing feedback and hardware realities. A game in which players flushed waste to each other in real time required the mobile phones to be constantly connected to the Internet and maintain synchronization between all players. Network latency limitations and subscription costs made such a system very difficult to realize. Furthermore, game testing suggested that a multiplayer game based on "tragedy of the commons" would not be very fun to play.

The basic single-player mechanic of sorting garbage by flipping switches on pipes remained, but the multiplayer aspect was scaled back to work asynchronously, with interactions between players recast as an exchange of resources in a stock market-like system. Instead of dumping garbage on each other willy-nilly, players would negotiate to share waste capacity. The game designer hoped to use this waste market to simulate the process of "cap and trade" emissions credit trading, a strategy that has been used successfully in the real world to limit greenhouse gas emissions in a free market.

The final game is best described as a hybrid of several genres: a casual puzzle game, a city simulation, and a resource trading and management game. The player begins by registering a new account and creating a new city. New cities start at 45,000 residents, a value that will change with the success or failure of the player's ability to properly recycle. A maze of pipes extends from the city at the top of the screen to several recycling bins and a sewer near the bottom. The player uses the keys on the mobile phone number pad to direct items to the right place: glass to the glass recycling, organic waste to the sewer, and so on. If the player sends a recyclable item to the correct bin, the game rewards some raw materials of that type. These materials can be used to build efficiency upgrades for the player's system. But if the player makes a mistake and sends waste to the wrong bin, the pollution level for the city rises.

At the end of a round, the game calculates the city's pollution level, and adds or subtracts residents accordingly (based on the assumption that clean cities are more attractive living spaces than polluted ones). Also between rounds, the player may decide to buy system upgrades or trade resources. Players soon realize that they can easily build up a scarcity of one type of material and a surplus of another, making trading necessary for advancement. Urban growth increases the complexity of the pipe system and the speed of the waste stream. "Winning" the game means finding a balance of population and waste processing ability that a player can manage.

Despite the challenges of a new and constrained platform, the students successfully created an online mobile phone game in 9 weeks. Much of the success of Backflow is a testament to the team's adaptability: they faced the limitations of the technology and the feedback from real players and adjusted the game design and development plan to make a functional, playable, and engaging game faithful to the spirit of the MIT Teacher Education Program.

Philip Tan is the executive director for the Cambridge operations of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, a multi-year game innovation initiative hosted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is concurrently a project manager for the Media Development Authority (MDA) of Singapore and a member of the steering committee of the Singapore chapter of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA).

Prior to his current position, he worked closely with Singapore game developers to launch industry-wide initiatives and administer content development grants as an assistant manager in the Animation & Games Industry Development section of MDA. He has produced and designed PC online games at The Education Arcade, a research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that studied and created educational games. He complements a Master's degree in Comparative Media Studies with work in Boston's School of Museum of Fine Arts, the MIT Media Lab, WMBR 88.1FM and the MIT Assassins' Guild, the latter awarding him the title of "Master Assassin" for his live-action roleplaying game designs. He also founded a live DJ crew at MIT.

Teo Chor Guan has more than 14 years of experience in systems engineering for computer graphics and games. Her wide range of experience spans from 3-D graphics research at the Institute of Systems Science in Singapore to building air traffic control systems for MacDonald Dettwiler & Associates in Canada. She has also worked as a software developer at Electronic Arts (EA) Canada for over six years. She holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical and

Electronics) from the National University of Singapore and a Masters in Computer Science from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. In Singapore, she had worked in the Games Development Group at the School of Design at Nanyang Polytechnic. She was also the Software Engineering Manager in Lucasfilm Animation Singapore before joining Media Development Authority (MDA) as the Program Director for GAMBIT.

Before coming to MIT, Neal Grigsby worked at LookSmart.com in San Francisco for seven years, wearing a variety of hats including editor, ontologist, and content producer. He joined the Comparative Media Studies program in 2005, where he wrote his master's thesis on narratives of adolescence, including a look at representation of youth in video games. He got his feet wet in game design at the annual Storytelling and Games in the Digital Age Workshop, where he led the winning team in 2007. While a student at CMS he worked on the Project for New Media Literacies, producing educational video and curricula about media production for an audience of teens and young adults. Neal earned his bachelor's degree in film studies from UC Berkeley, which was also where he met his wife, artist Rebecca Bird Grigsby.

From Serious Games to Serious Gaming (Part Two): Handheld Projects

This is part two of a multipart series showcasing the serious games projects associated with the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. Today, we focus on the work which Eric Klopfer and colleagues have done through the MIT Teachers Education Program using handheld games. Palmagotchi was built by the Teacher Education Program with the help of lead developers, including Victor Costan and Kyle Fritz. Development of the Handheld Augmented Reality Games is largely supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education StarSchools initiative, in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin and Harvard University. Lead Developers on the Augmented Reality project include Ben Schmeckpeper, Tiffany Wang, Kirupa Chinnathambi, RJ Silk, and Lisa Stump.

Thinking Outside the Classroom: Two Mobile Simulation Approaches to Enhance Student Learning

By Eric Klopfer and Judy Perry

As mobile devices become more accessible and affordable, more and more students are carrying mobile technologies such as personal digital assistants, cell phones, portable gaming systems, iPods, and iPhones in their backpacks. What will learning look like when these powerful handheld computers are as ubiquitous as calculators? Here we describe two software applications designed by the MIT Teacher Education Program for handheld computers: Palmagotchi, a networked evolutionary biology simulation, and Handheld Augmented Reality Games, a toolkit for creating location-based role-playing simulations.

Simulation games, in particular, can leverage the anywhere/anytime nature of mobile computing, extending student engagement with content beyond face-to-face classroom time and asking learners to synthesize digital information with real-world observations.

Our synthesis of the constructivist and situated learning paradigms leads us to design activities that are social, authentic and meaningful, connected to the real world, open-ended and containing multiple pathways, intrinsically motivating, and filled with feedback. While many technologies can foster some of these design elements, mobile learning games are particularly well suited to supporting them all.

Guiding principles that informed our designs include:

Fostering deep personal engagement through role-playing immersion: Each student plays an integral part in a larger system (a fruit fly in a population, a potential carrier in a viral disease model). Many commercial off-the-shelf games are designed around extrinsic rewards - points or award structures that are easy to measure. In role-playing games this could be wealth, as well as the level of your character. In our games, personal investment provides an intrinsic motivator to explore and master game strategies, and therefore better understand scientific models and curricular content.

Engaging students in highly social settings that encourage multi-player collaborative problem solving: Students using our games interact with their classmates in real time, discussing observations and negotiating interactions through both open and moderated discussion. Students typically spend only a fraction of their time actually looking at the screen of the PDA. In one study, which analyzed student behaviors using our handheld simulation games, "looking at the screen" was not one of the top five most common behaviors. Instead, students were talking, writing notes, interacting with other students, analyzing data, and walking around. This approach engages a wider range of students, including those who are not typically engaged by the individualistic structure of traditional coursework and homework.

Encouraging active participation and knowledge-building: During game play, students are active, often walking around and/or moving from player to player to observe and compare data. Game actions require both digital and face-to-face interaction.

Providing teachers with a flexible model of implementation: The overly structured materials of science kits or packaged software do not typically allow teachers to express their creativity and use the skills that led many into the profession. On the other hand, giving teachers a tabula rasa is unworkable. The majority of teachers do not have the time or expertise to design entire lessons. Our game designs provide teachers without software programming backgrounds with well-formed and easily customizable activities. Teachers can feel a sense of ownership over materials that match their specific instructional needs.

Enabling cognitive "Flow": In these games, the reward is Flow (Csikszentmihalyi 1990), "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake." Flow is marked by extreme concentration, pleasure, focus, reward, and even exhaustion. Activities that lead to Flow display clear goals, high concentration, feedback, appropriate challenge, personal control, and intrinsic reward.

Palmagotchi

"Casual games" are the fastest growing and perhaps largest genre of video games. Casual games can be played a few minutes at a time, typically during down time (waiting for the bus, for a few minutes over lunch, etc.). Casual games are often played on PDAs (handheld computers like the Palm or Pocket PC), the Nintendo DS, Sony PSP, and increasingly on Smartphones (e.g. Windows Mobile phones and iPhones) and cell phones. The Tamagotchi, a game involving virtual pets, offers one powerful model for the educational use of these platforms. Tamagotchi's simple design, along with the emotional bond between player and pet, results in a game that is simple to learn, allows for increased mastery, can be played casually a few minutes at a time, and yet sustains interest and interaction. Such an approach doesn't interrupt or impede the "business" of the school day.

Palmagotchi, a ubiquitous multiplayer handheld game, is based on a flexible networked platform called myWorld, and builds off of past work developing mobile peer-to-peer participatory simulations, such as The Virus Game. Palmagotchi allows students to become part of a dynamic biological process referred to as co-evolution. Palmagotchi's underlying model is loosely derived from Darwin's observations of finches in the Galapagos Islands. The "virtual pets" in Palmagotchi are birds and flowers that live within a larger simulated ecology that also includes predators and changing climate patterns. Students gain a deeper understanding of fundamental ecological, genetic, and co-evolutionary processes as they nurture their creatures.

The player's goal is to keep the lineage of his or her birds alive within the larger ecosystem, mating with other birds to produce and raise independent offspring before the parent bird dies. Each participant's handheld computer (a Windows Mobile device) starts with a small number of birds and flowers. Each bird has its own unique set of genetically determined traits (e.g., beak length, metabolism, ability to flee from predators, survival during cold weather, etc.). Ultimately, individual flowers' and birds' survival demonstrate their interdependence within the ecosystem. An accelerated "game time" allows students to observe and analyze general trends across multiple generations.

The game doesn't just convey specific information; playing the game allows students to conduct thoughtful, collaborative scientific inquiry. Initial implementations show that students (and teachers) are highly engaged in the process of maintaining their virtual pets over days or even weeks of play, learning the underlying science to improve their performance. They regularly find time outside of class to engage deeply in the game. Class time has been used effectively to discuss data and related biological processes, meeting the content standards required of students and teachers while maintaining high engagement and interest by all. The platform upon which Palmagotchi is based is being used to develop other new games for the science curriculum.

Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) devices superimpose a virtual overlay of data and experiences onto a real-world context. Augmented Reality can employ a variety of technologies, ranging from head-mounted displays to simple mobile devices. We have focused our research and development on "lightly" augmented realities, which require a small amount of virtual information and can be performed on handheld computers, and more recently on cell phones. These technologies support explorations and learning in the students' natural context, their own community and surroundings.

For example, Charles River City, loosely based on Chris Dede's MUVE "River City," was one of our early Augmented Reality games. In this game, students follow an outbreak of illness coinciding with a topically relevant event in the Boston Metro Area. One of the first runs started out like this:

The July 1st, 2004 headline of the Boston Globe reads "26 More Fall to Mysterious Illness as DNC Looms". A rash of disease has swept through Boston; and - with the Democratic National Convention coming to the city in a few weeks - citizens, politicians and health officials are all concerned. What is the source of the illness? Is this an act of bioterrorism or a naturally occurring event?

Players are told that a team of 20 experts is brought in to investigate the problem, including epidemiologists, physicians, public health experts, laboratory scientists, biologists, computer scientists, and environmental specialists. This group must work together to evaluate case reports and available surveillance data, investigate the cause and source of the outbreak, assess risk, communicate with the professional and public communities and identify and implement effective remedies. The teams collect and analyze environmental samples, hospital records, patient histories, clinical samples, and testimony from community members. The team must determine its findings and propose actions very quickly in order to assess the risk, diminish societal fears, and solve the problem. Our initial research on AR simulations (Klopfer, Squire, and Jenkins 2003; Klopfer and Squire 2004) demonstrates that this technology can effectively engage students (notably, female students have responded very well) in critical thinking about authentic scientifically based scenarios and enhance their interest in IT.

In order to scale our research and enable AR games to reach a wider audience, we have developed an AR Toolkit that allows designers, teachers, and even students to develop their own games. Using this toolkit, we have already built AR simulations in many content areas over the last few years. Games have been implemented in such diverse areas as environmental science, colonial American history, epidemiology, math, and English. These activities also support students' development of critical 21st-century IT skills including computer-mediated collaboration and information sharing, managing uncertainty, and analyzing complex systems.

The power in AR lies in truly augmenting the physical landscape, creating digital content closely tied to real-world locations, and thus supporting direct observation as well as data analysis. To extend these learning opportunities, we are enhancing our software and experimenting with new classroom practices to make it easier for teachers to localize and customize their games. This will enable educators to focus their efforts on meaty "curricular" tasks of narrative, data analysis, and even game design, with minimal effort spent on the technological aspects. This nearly invisible technology embodies the principle of technology adapting to the classroom, though in this case, the classroom is the entire world.

The Future of Educational Handheld Games

A user-centered - and thus "teacher-centered" - design approach greatly enhances the likelihood that teachers (on whom the success of these experiences ultimately lies) will be able to successfully integrate these technologies into the classroom. Educational software designs, like Palmagotchi, leverage the portability of mobile devices to integrate learning across students' everyday lives, allowing teachers to tap game-based learning without losing valuable classroom time. Similarly, our AR toolkits allow teachers to customize games to local conditions, setting their own pedagogical goals and moving learning beyond the school walls. Such games engage students in multi-sensory, kinesthetic, collaborative experiences. Such games offer students engaging and motivating experiences, while enabling students and teachers to investigate important ideas.

Eric Klopfer is Associate Professor and Director of the Scheller MIT Teacher Education Program. The Teacher Education Program prepares MIT undergraduates to become math and science teachers. Klopfer's research focuses on the development and use of computer games and simulations for building understanding of science and complex systems. His research explores simulations and games on desktop computers as well as handhelds. He is the creator of StarLogo TNG, a new platform for helping kids create 3D simulations and games using a graphical programming language. On handhelds, Klopfer's work includes Participatory Simulations, which embed users inside of complex systems, and Augmented Reality simulations, which create a hybrid virtual/real space for exploring intricate scenarios in real time. He is the co-director of The Education Arcade, which is advancing the development and use of games in K-12 education. Klopfer's work combines the construction of new software tools with research and development of new pedagogical supports that support the use of these tools in the classroom. He is the co-author of the book, Adventures in Modeling: Exploring Complex, Dynamic Systems with StarLogo, and author of a forthcoming book on mobile games and learning from MIT Press.

Judy Perry is Research Manager of the MIT Teacher Education Program. She currently oversees design, development and research for several projects involving games and simulations for handheld devices, including location-based Augmented Reality projects, and Participatory

Simulations including Palmagotchi. Prior to becoming a researcher at MIT, her work included television and web production, and content development for educational toys. She holds a B.A. in American Studies from Yale University, and an Ed. M. in Technology in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

From Serious Games to Serious Gaming (Part One): Revolution

This is the first installment of a five part series showcasing the evolution of The Comparative Media Studies Program's thinking about Serious Games. Each installment will focus on a different games-related project, while a conclusion will describe the commonalities in how we think about games and learning. I am starting this series this week to reflect the fact that we are hosting a Communications Forum event today focused on Games and Civic Engagement. The idea for Revolution emerged as part of the Games to Teach Project, funded by a Microsoft iCampus grant, and later became the flagship project for the Education Arcade. It was a complicated project spanning five semesters, starting in Fall 2002 and extending through Fall 2004. It was designed by a team of graduate and undergraduate students, working part time while taking classes. Participants included Philip Tan (Producer), Matthew Weise (Game Designer), Brett Camper (Lead Programmer), David Lee (3D modeling), Giovanni Mendoza (Art), Cassie Huang (Character Design), James Tolbert (Animation), Nicholas Hunter (Programmer), and Bertha Tang (Art).

In a spelling bee, a kid is challenged to memorize a lot of words, there's a fair amount of pressure, and it's kind of grim. If they get a word wrong, the buzzer goes off, they're told they got it wrong, and they are out. There's never a discussion about why they got it wrong, how they could have reasoned about the word to get it right. There's never really much of a discussion about how that word could be used in speech. In fact, the goal for a spelling bee is to learn all sorts of words that you will never use in common speech.

Compare that with a game of Scrabble where kids sit with the letters in front of them and are moving them around, thinking endlessly about all of the different combinations of words and which ones are real. They try to play one and there's a discussion about whether that's a real word or whether that's a real form of the word. Through that process, kids are engaging deeply not just in spelling but in word usage and they're having fun while they are doing it.

-Scot Osterweil

Popular accounts of the Serious Games movement have often fallen back on the image of the computer as a "teaching machine" that "programs" its users - for better or for worse. The fantasy is that one can just plant kids in front of a black box and have them "learn" as if learning involved nothing more than absorbing content. Those who fear that games may turn normal youth into psycho killers similarly hope that games might transform them into historians, scientists, engineers, and tycoons. At the same time, teachers express anxiety that their pedagogical labor will be displaced by the game console.

Putting the emphasis on the program to deliver content has often led to highly rigid and pre-structured play experiences, carefully regulated to conform to various state and national curricular blueprints, with little chance for emergent play or creative expression by the players. In other words, most commercial edutainment titles look much more like spelling bees than Scrabble.

For the better part of a decade, researchers associated with the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program (through Games to Teach, The Education Arcade, and The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab) have been researching the pedagogical potentials of computer and video games. We have adopted a range of different models for what an educational game might look like - from mods of existing entertainment titles to augmented reality games, from role-playing games to collectible cards - and how they might be produced - including several recent collaborations with commercial media producers and professional game designers. Our games straddle academic fields, including History (Revolution) and Current Events (iCue), Math and Literacy Skills (Labyrinth), Science (Palmagotchi), even Waste Management (Backflow). What links these various projects together has been a design philosophy that focuses less on serious games and more on serious gaming. We see games not so much as vehicles for delivering curricular content as we do spaces for exploration, experimentation, and problem solving.

We do not simply want to tap games as a substitute for the textbook; we want to harness the metagaming, the active discussion and speculation that take place around the game, to inform other learning activities. Researchers have documented not only the ways that conversations around recreational game play reshape the player's perceptions of violence and the social bonds being expressed through play (Wright, 2002), but also the informal learning communities that have grown up around game, such as Civilization 3 (Squire and Giovanetto, Forthcoming), enabling participants to learn world history even as they improve their game performance. Many of our games rely on the mechanics of meta-gaming to get students to articulate what they have learned from the play experience.

This is hardly a new idea: consider the Model United Nations as a well-established pedagogical practice in American social sciences. Essentially, the Model United Nations is a role-play activity where students are assigned to represent delegates from different countries and work through current policy debates. Students don't show up and start playing: the role-play motivates library and classroom activities leading up to the formal event. They don't just stop playing: a good teacher builds on the role play by having students report back on what they learned through presentations, classroom discussions, or written assignments. A hallmark of our serious games projects is that we factor the context and process of play into our game design, insisting that much of the learning takes place outside the box as the experience of gaming gets reflected upon by teachers and learners in the context of their everyday lives.

In this series of posts, we look back on some key milestones in our program's exploration of serious gaming. In each case, we will explore how our understanding of instructional activities rather than curricular content shaped our design choices. Each project represents a different model for how a pedagogical game might work in relation to current educational practices; each also reflects a shared vision that sees play as a key component of learning.

Revolution: A Historical Simulation of Colonial America

By Brett Camper and Matt Weise

Revolution was a total conversion mod of the popular PC game Neverwinter Nights modeled on Colonial Williamsburg. In this classroom-based multiplayer experience, each student would take on the role of a different resident on a single day in the spring of 1775. Students would adopt a variety of classes, races, genders, and political perspectives as they relived the debates surrounding the American Revolution.

The starting idea was broad: to create an online historical simulation for classroom use. We knew we wanted the game to be online, allowing students to learn together socially. And we knew we wanted to base the game on Colonial Williamsburg, which has a long tradition of historical learning through role-play. We felt such a game would be great opportunity to apply our values of learning as exploration and expression rather than rote memorization.

From the outset, Revolution was meant to be an educational game designed by people who were gamers first and educators second: if your game isn't fun, its educational goals don't matter. We wanted to leverage design principles that we knew worked, or at least could work, from successful commercial games. If we could create a game that looked and sounded on par with store-bought games, and that used familiar interface and game-play concepts, we could create an experience that escaped the negative image of "edutainment" while leveraging new media literacies for pedagogical ends.

Initially, one of our biggest challenges was to design for the time constraints of the typical classroom period. Public school teachers typically have an hour or less to get the students settled down, introduce the game, teach the students how to play, have the students play the game, get the students to stop playing, and have a coherent discussion afterward. So how might we design a complete and compelling game play experience under these constraints? We were intrigued by commercial games that use fixed time limits to shape player experience, compressing complex processes into finite units of game time. The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, for example, is about helping people as they go about their daily lives in a single town over the course of a fixed time period. The time limit focuses the player on the social space of the game, since Link only has a short time to affect events that will happen with or without him. Inspired, we focused Revolution's time frame into a single day. This day in our virtual Williamsburg would equal 40 minutes of class time, and would represent a key turning point in the Revolution. We wanted players to log into the game and find themselves in a living, functioning simulation of colonial America. The simulation would function with or without player intervention. Players could explore the era's social and political norms by trying to shape events, or they could simply sit back and observe.

Students would learn about history just by mastering the rules of the game, because the rules were abstracted from historical research. We wanted to get away from the drill-and-test model of public education and to challenge the master narrative of history. Instead, we wanted to focus on the choices historical agents made and the conditions under which they made them.

Realities of Development

Our aspirations for Revolution were quite high. Not all of them could have been achieved even with a full-time development staff with years of experience. As with any game project, we had to cut many features and completely redesign others. As we realized we could only implement a fraction of our original design, we tried to preserve our core design goal - to create a genuinely emergent historical simulation.

Our first decision was to forego coding Revolution from scratch and make it as a mod of an existing game. Using an existing engine enabled rapid prototyping and design. Using an existing engine also improved production quality - graphics and sound would already be at a level students would associate with professional games. Since many game companies offer modification tools to consumers for sharing new content, we wanted to explore the advantages of modding for developing serious games.

After much consideration, we settled on the Neverwinter Nights toolset. Neverwinter Nights is an RPG series for the PC that was specifically designed by its makers, Bioware Corp., to support modding projects. There was already a very robust culture of player-made NWN mods, which we could tap for inspiration and experience. We wanted to create a socially dynamic world where students would interact with both player-controlled and non-player-controlled characters, and NWN was built for character conversation, a feature we felt was crucial to the social world we wanted to model.

Technology Wrangling

Game scholar Ian Bogost identifies what he calls "procedural rhetoric" - the notion that a game system's design imparts an ideology. We wanted students to learn how a colonial society worked by interacting with a system, a system designed to embody the ideas we intended. Yet we didn't want the conventions of the NWN toolset (shaped by the commercial role-playing game genre) to transform our historical content in undesired ways. It was not always easy to leverage NWN's existing design limitations in ways that helped, not hurt, our pedagogical goals.

Accurate historical dress, for example, was challenging. In Colonial Williamsburg, men would remove their hats when entering a house. However, in the NWN toolset, hat models are not separate from head models. We could not effectively remove a hat without removing the character's entire head. So we were stuck with characters that either wore hats or were perpetually hatless. We decided to have hats on at all times. This was not 100% historically accurate, but it was less inaccurate than the alternative.

We also had a great deal of difficulty managing violence in NWN. Leaving violence out of a revolutionary setting would not convey the proper historical content. On the other hand, we'd have a disaster if we let students fight whomever they wanted at any time. Our solution was to allow students to be violent, but to have consequences. If one character punches another, they will be briefly arrested and released. While the law in 1775 was not nearly this forgiving or swift, this solution at least kept the students in the simulation and engaged with the historical setting.

Given that there was so much of NWN we could not change, we wanted to at least ensure that the conversation system would enhance the fidelity of our historical simulation. Luckily, it turned out to work better than we ever imagined.

Modeling the Social Dynamics of 1775

Revolution's conversation system evolved from a critique of how knowledge transfer typically occurs within the RPG genre. In many RPGs, information passes between characters as if by magic with no focus on the mechanisms of human communications. One of our development team members described a situation in The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind in which he killed a man, who claimed with his dying breath that his son would avenge him. When the player walked immediately to the son's house, he was promptly attacked. We understood what the designers of Morrowind were getting at: actions have social consequences. But these consequences simply flipped on and off like a light switch. We wanted students to focus on how information flowed through a colonial society and what factors blocked information from passing between different social circles.

NWN's conversation system was well equipped to produce this desired effect. We started by making computer-controlled characters remember what they were told. Then, when they were within a specific range of another character, they would go over to them and share the knowledge they had previously received. A player could pass one piece of information to a non-player character and then watch the news spread virally across town. Once we realized that we could make such a "gossip" system work, we saw all sorts of new pedagogical possibilities. While we originally envisioned a game focused around trades and jobs, much like a visit to Colonial Williamsburg, we began to re-center Revolution around the social and informational mechanisms of the era. In effect, we made Revolution a game about the oral culture of late 18th-century America. Students would need to understand how this oral culture was shaped by the social, political, racial, and gender strata of the time in order to play Revolution effectively.

A player's reputation, for example, could be adversely impacted by gossip surrounding her beliefs or actions, increasing the stakes of political choices. Revolutionaries could pass word to their supporters without information falling into the hands of the Redcoats or their Loyalist supporters. Because information would not pass certain social barriers easily, players had to figure out how to inform everybody about a local rally. If the player's avatar had an upper-class status, the information would spread more easily among the upper class. Gender and race would have similar effects. In this way, different players could work together or against each other in trying to manipulate the flow of information.

Other affordances of NWN allowed us to build in opportunities for students to reflect back on their experiences. Russell Francis, a researcher from Oxford University, asked Revolution players to write diaries or construct machinima movies recounting the events from the perspective of their fictional characters. This process allowed them to share their very different experiences in the game with classmates and gave researchers insights into what they learned and how they learned through their role-play. Francis found that players often combined things they learned in the game with insights from their own lives or things they had read in other accounts of the period. For example, one student, who played the part of a house slave, described feelings of isolation or tension with field slaves as a result of her privileged access to the master. This sense of alienation emerged as much from what she brought to the game as from anything we had programmed into the simulation. Such accounts helped us to better appreciate the ways that the mechanics of role-play enabled students to consolidate what they had learned about the period and communicate it with others.

Matthew Weise is equal parts gamer and cinephile, having attended film school before segueing into game studies and then game development. Matt is a producer for GAMBIT and a full-time gamer, which means he not only plays games on a variety of systems but he also completes (most of) them. Matthew did his undergrad at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where he studied film production before going rogue to design his own degree. He graduated in 2001 with a degree in Digital Arts, which included videogames (this was before Game Studies was a field). He continued his research at MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, where he worked on Revolution with The Education Arcade. After leaving MIT in 2004 Matt worked in mobile game development for a few years, occassionally doing some consultancy work, before returning to work at GAMBIT.

Brett Camper is an independent game developer and writer. He received a master's

degree from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, where he was a designer and

technical lead on The Education Arcade's Colonial Williamsburg: Revolution

project. He subsequently acted as The Education Arcade's research manager, and

has also worked in digital media as a program manager at RealNetworks. He is

currently a senior product manager at eMusic, the leading digital subscription

service for independent music.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twenty Two, Part Two): Eden Lee Lackner and Jes Battis

NEGOTIATING SUBCULTURAL VALUES ELL: And now I find myself thinking of the fact that many people approach fandom as if it is a monolithic counterculture, very much invested in subverting mainstream notions -- which certain parts are, of course -- but each part operates very much as a series of small subcultural groups, thus not rejecting the larger cultural norms, but rather creating rules and modes of behaviour that fit within the larger culture. Right now, a number of fiction/art exchanges, patterned on the "Secret Santa" model, are gearing up or in progress, and it reminds me of the discussions around whether fanfic/art itself is the gift and feedback a thank-you, or the flipside of that, where feedback is the gift. Obviously within the fic exchange, there are hard and fast rules not only around participation but also in terms of how a recipient must respond (positively, since the fic/art is a gift), but in the larger community, outside of the exchange, the relation between constructive criticism and positive-only feedback is one fraught with tension and a reoccurring discussion. Despite the fact that a more formalized type of fen mentoring appears to have fallen away, the amount of time spent by active fans in discussing etiquette, values and "correct" behaviour certainly argues for a subculture that is continually negotiating its own set of norms to allow it to more easily fit in with the reigning culture.

Actually, I'm not sure if you're familiar with Fandom_Wank, a long-standing community of close to five thousand fans who exist, by their own mandate, to mock the absurdities and less-than-rational behaviour in fandom. They're widely known past their own membership, and while they discourage trolling, as a member of fandom I know I'm potentially inviting "wank" by bringing them up in any sort of critical way, much as one expects a throat-slashing after calling for Bloody Mary. And yet despite situating themselves as extra-fandom -- i.e. only there to mock, not participate -- their very existence acts as a type of watchdog to enforce specific behaviours. There's much debate over whether or not they're a "good" or "bad" influence, whether they're the "mean girls" (and yet I can't help but note a top-heavy masculine moderation team) or if those that dislike them are the "nice girls," but all issues of quality aside, there's a clear sense within related fandom circles that one must avoid "wank" or wanking publically, lest one ends up reported on Fandom_Wank.

TEXTUAL BODIES

ELL: You mentioned your interest in CSI fic, which I think is fascinating. Given that it's a more episodic show than many fan-favourites, do you find that there are certain issues that exist within the community that differ from those in closed-text fandoms? Or do you note any issues around writing both het and slash within one story, given that het, gen and slash communities often have rather clear boundaries between each? What are the challenges in straddling the divide between fan writer and author, especially in light of how fanfic is often charged as good for practise, but not "real" writing?

JB: My response from different fan communities has been mixed. When I was writing the OC paper, I contacted a few fic writers for permission to include their work, and often they didn't want it published at all. They drew very clear boundaries between their professional lives and their fanfic writing. I tend to be really non-discriminating about the different genres that I write in, and I don't mind if people come to my writing through a novel, an academic essay, or a slash-fic CSI story, just as long as they're reading! But part of that comes from the privilege of being a middle-class white fag working in progressive cultural-studies institutions.

I like writing CSI fic because the show is so patently unsexy, at least from the standpoint of bodies colliding in bed. All of the sexuality is traced through the forensic analyses, and cadavers themselves become erotic objects (think of all the scenes where Doc Robins is gently washing and debriding a body on his autopsy table). All of the erotic subtext between Gil and Sarah (well, until a few weeks ago) was/is communicated through glances, gestures, and science. So it's perfect for slash, since you literally have to use chemistry and science to make queer sexuality happen. Most of the CSI fic circulating is hetfic, but several authors have explored the Greg/Nick relationship, which just fascinates me.

ELL: There's a perennial argument that goes on in the LiveJournal circles about the preponderance of slash vs. het and gen, and an odd sense that there's far more slash in any one fandom than het and/or gen, so it's interesting to see the flipside of it. Strangely enough, most of my interaction with CSI fanfic has been with Greg/Nick writers (apart from the one time I tried my hand at Grissom/Nick for a friend, that is), so I'd always had the skewed sense of it as a large area of CSI fanfic.

I love the idea of CSI as furthering the work of body as text, as after all, the fan writer is already inscribing on the canon body, or dissecting and reassembling it in a more pleasing manner. It's curious that the body through which one explores the erotic/queer in CSI is so often deceased; a closed text, if you will, in a still-open canon.

MARGINALIZATION

JB: As some who's always used academia to explore marginalized genres--queer writing, fantasy/sf, disability studies, children's and adolescent lit--I feel drawn to fanfiction because it straddles so many cultural and professional divides. The thought of a tenured-prof writing mpreg or really hot slash is just so kickass to me, I love it. I want my students to read the slash that I write. I'm teaching a class on Cult TV in the spring, and one of the assignments is to write an essay on fanfiction, to see fanfic as critical theory, and hopefully I can encourage them to write their own fanfic as well.

I'm just reading Judith Butler's new book with Gayatri Spivak, Who Sings the Nation State? wherein they exchange ideas about what makes the nation. It's produced as a dialogue between the two, and it makes me wonder what a dialogue between two expert fanfic critics--like Constance Penley and Camille Bacon-Smith--might look like. The book itself is quite small and artfully made by Seagull Press, in contradistinction to the edited volumes on fanfic currently available. But its size also reminds me of Penley's Nasa/Trek, which was also a slim and very pretty volume, as if its aesthetic was meant to disguise that it would seriously be talking about fan communities. It makes me think of how a lot of fanfic critics tend to do more mainstream work that's published with university presses, and their essays on fan culture pop up in unexpected collections and online journals.

ELL: As someone who continues to struggle to find a place to do "serious" work on fan culture, I'd absolutely concur. It's such a marginalized area that a lot of institutions simply don't know what to do with it just yet. Hopefully with the rise in cross-discipline research in Fan and Media Studies and discussions such as these, this will stop being a hurdle, or something that almost has to be published on the sly.

JB: I was originally going to write my dissertation on Buffy. I knew that Michele Byers had done it at the University of Toronto, so there was a precedent. But I was still nervous about devoting 4-5 years on a Buffyology treatise. The only person who didn't worry about it was my supervisor. He basically said, "I think it's hot, you should do it if that's what you're drawn to, and I'll support you." That was so valuable. I ended up writing Blood Relations a lot earlier instead as a monograph, and then did something much broader for my dissertation, but to know that I could have done it was great. Not every supervisor is willing to give that kind of unconditional support. I was very lucky, because I developed relationships with several amazing people at SFU, and they all supported my engagements with pop culture and queer studies rather than telling me to become a Victorianist. I was originally doing an MA thesis on, of all things, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I loved the text, but hated the criticism. My then-supervisor, a medievalist, answered a frantic email from me one evening--holy fuck, I don't think I can do this project, I'm freaking out--by telling me gently that if I wasn't in love with the work, I needed to do something else. He even recommended someone else to work with. That's real pedagogy. So I started getting more and more involved with pop culture scholarship, until I suddenly realized one day that I was "doing" pop culture and television studies. How had that happened?

Things are getting better for interdisciplinary studies, but there's still a frustrating emphasis on literary canon and film studies in the humanities that makes it nearly impossible for pop culture scholars to get jobs teaching what they actually want to. Camille Paglia is up in arms because Buffy is being taught in undergraduate film seminars, and Jamieson's new book on SF Utopias contains almost no discussion of popular SF television, comics, manga, or fan cultures. Then again, Paglia is still getting over the shock that Judith Butler is popular among grad students. We need to do away with all this bullshit about gender performativity and just do close readings again. Like that's a viable answer. Conservative scholars see work on popular culture--work not based wholly on participatory analysis and endorsed by the stamp of Cultural Studies--as a violent movement in the wrong direction, but it's really a lateral movement. And those are the same arguments used to enforce ironclad class boundaries. Television isn't culture. Television promises too much access, both at the transnational and the inter-city level, and if we call it culture then we have to give it more grants, and if we do that we risk not giving money to the canonical research that actually keeps English and Film departments afloat. It's a bad situation. So fan-culture and TV specialists end up taking jobs explaining film aesthetics, because film aesthetics is Cultural Studies and television is really just poor culture.

I've always been pretty open about doing pop culture scholarship. I've got two books out that focus on television shows, but they were hard to publish, especially when I was still a graduate student. I enjoyed sending proposals to big journals and university presses just to see what they'd say. Everyone should email Duke UP with a crazy proposal just to see if they answer. I managed to write an essay on queer hobbits having sex for Modern Fiction Studies, which still probably counts as my name-brand publication, along with small pieces I did for Canadian Literature. But a lot of my work on science fiction and fan cultures has come out in online journals like Refractory, Slayage, Jump Cut, The Looking Glass. These are great journals who publish new and exciting scholarship, but they aren't getting indexed by MLA or HSSI because they're not Postmodern Culture. The hierarchy of these databases just infuriates me, especially because a lot of hiring committees embrace an ethic of: "If it's not indexed, it's not a real publication." Fuck that. Cynthia Fuchs has been publishing online for years. Which reminds me, I find it a little odd that Duke has suddenly decided to publish a volume of essays on Buffy, something like 8 years after scholarship on the show was being pioneered by critics like David Lavery and Rhonda Wilcox. I'm happy that Fuchs got them agree to the project, but confused by its pertinence. And why doesn't it feature the work of critics who wrote about Buffy in Slayage and Refractory? What about grad student essays? You can't tell me that presses like Duke, Minnesota, and Routledge haven't gotten endless proposals for books on Buffy and Angel over the years. Why did this particular book get produced?

There's still a resistance to work on fan cultures because academics can't figure out if it's sociological, psychoanalytic, literary, or what. Every university press is back-logged with proposals, and most of the time they have to choose clearly definable work that's guaranteed to sell and get good press. That's not shitty of them, it's just survival. But as a result they end up passing on interdisciplinary work that blurs academic categories. If I write a book about television, for instance, is it a fan study, a literary analysis, a film analysis, or a piece of critical theory? If I include the work of online fan writers without going through the standard ethical reviews necessary for sociological analyses--since they aren't being interviewed, but their feelings, their affective orientations, their passions are being marshaled and invoked--what kind of "study" is that? If I use Of Grammatology to talk about CSI fanfic, what "novel" am I deconstructing? It gets confusing. And, given that a lot of acafans like us produce fanfic as well, there's a potential for scholarly incest--writing positively and uncritically about the same literature that we produce. When, in fact, most scholars are able to write critically (but not dispassionately) about texts that they love, and texts that they themselves might silently or publicly emulate. So it's really the same thing, but acafans are more open about it, so they get targeted.

I think that fanfiction provides a crucial and even redemptive inventory of terms, energies, and affects for writers and viewers. The ability to embroider a text and make it your own, to develop a charged relationship with the characters while simultaneously producing new possibilities, new pairings--to offer up those pairings to other fans and writers, who might adhere to them, possibilities that they never foresaw or never even knew they wanted--that's critical theory.

ELL: You make some excellent points. The interdisciplinary nature of Fan Studies and Popular Culture is a real barrier to "fitting in" with the more conservative aspects of academia, yet it provides a whole new frontier to explore in a myriad of really creative ways. I would hate to see pop culture relegated to one discipline, as I'm certain it would hobble it in ways that research more fixed in historical, social or political spheres is not. That's why I think that debates like the one hosted here are so important. The more conservatively-oriented realms certainly aren't going to go out of their way to make space for people interested in these areas, not even when they intersect with their own interests -- and here I note that I straddle traditional and non-traditional English Literature Studies in the fact that I chose to become a Victorianist and continue to nurture those interests in tandem with Fan Studies, especially as the Nineteenth Century paves the way for modern notions of popular culture and fan behaviour -- so it's fairly important that we make an effort to take note of what we're all up to, as well as sharing knowledge and working together to clear spaces for ourselves. Interdisciplinary projects, journals, conferences, collections, etc. are of paramount importance not just to get our names out there, but to create a solid base on which Fan/Media/Popular Culture Studies can rest and from which it can grow.

Furthermore, just as I think a lot of us are feeling our imperfect way to how to properly interact with the texts and people we study (who, after all, are often people we know personally and/or on a fannish level), it's important that non-acafen work with us as well. It's impossible for fandom to exist as a hidden subculture anymore, not with the globalization of the internet, and not even if all acafen stopped writing about fandom tomorrow. We're our own best friends; anti-academic sentiment gets us about as far as anti-fan opinion does, as it just sets up more barriers to understanding and allows for more othering by the dominant culture. One of the best things, I think, about the second wave of fan culture studies is that it has become more acceptable, at least within the field, to openly declare one's positioning as both fan and academic. Participatory studies can often bring more insight than the outsider looking in, as long as the critical eye is still in play, and as you said, most scholars are more than capable of remaining critical, even when dealing with something we love. It's a shame that in order to remain "legitimate" in the eyes of more traditional disciplinary work, one must remain somewhat closeted. (It's especially a shame in that I used to play a game with my officemates in which I'd make them name a text they enjoyed, and I'd find slash written in that particular universe in five minutes or less. Lots of fun, but harder to do when you're supposed to present yourself as a serious scholar.)

I think your assessment of fanfic as a type of critical theory is an important one, and something that would benefit from more explication in surrounding research. The fact that so much of fanfic exists in a legal grey area that does not recognize it as a critical engagement with a preexisting text is perhaps one of the sources of anxiety around the threat of Cease & Desist letters and DMCA notices. If fanfic is critique, it takes on a whole new legal standing, as I understand it.

There's a movement afoot to set up an umbrella organization under which fan fiction is recognized and defended as both transformative and creatively legitimate that I have been watching with great interest (The Organization for Transformative Works; news and updates on project process available at otw_news). I wish the organization all the success in the world. I hope it also heralds more acceptance by fans of the acafen in fandom's ranks; one day any one of us could find ourselves in a position to help bolster up fan fiction's claim to legitimacy, and working together, fan and acafan, can only help pave the way to wider acceptance.

Thank you, Jes, for an interesting and thought-provoking discussion.

Editor's Note: This is the last entry in the Gender and Fan Culture discussion series. Next week, I will run closing reflections from many of the participants in this conversation and will invite you to share your own reflections about what you have learned about Fan Studies through this series and how and where this conversation should be continued.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twenty Two, Part One): Eden Lee Lackner and Jes Battis

INTRODUCTIONS ELL: My name is Eden Lee Lackner. I'm currently an Independent Scholar, and I have a Master of Arts in English Literature with a focus in Victorian Literature from The University of Calgary (Calgary, Alberta, Canada). While my Masters was particularly concerned with the sanctification of execution in Nineteenth Century novels (an interesting, if ghoulish topic), a lot of the narratives and theories I encountered helped elucidate some of my thoughts on the body as text, and further into the erotics of that written-upon body, which then links up quite beautifully with the erotics of fans writing upon a textual body with and for other fans.

To that end, I recently collaborated on an article titled "Cunning Linguists: The Bisexual Erotics of Words/Silence/Flesh" with Barbara Lucas and Robin Reid, which is currently available in Busse and Hellekson's Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. We discuss, in detail, this erotic exchange between writer, co-writer and reader, with an eye to complicating earlier, more homogeneous notions of "fan" as well as the straight/gay binary of the slash writer/reader. I'm particularly interested in the oversimplification of such binaries, especially as present in Fan/Media Studies and related areas. One of the assumptions that seems to remain largely unchallenged to date is the representation of internet-based fans as almost exclusively culturally American (a label which carries more problematic homogeneity, of course), when in fact the internet allows for cross- and multi-cultural contact, often without explicitly drawn/acknowledged boundaries. In line with these notions of boundaries, more recently I've been considering how gatekeeping works within both academia and fandom, and how in many cases the behaviours performed in the process of blocking/restricting access in either realm mirror each another.

For going on six years now, I've presented papers, as well as moderated and participated in panels and theory roundtables dealing with Fan Studies at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, held annually in Florida (and still accepting proposals in a variety of disciplines for the upcoming year). I was actually (one of) the first to present on fan texts at the conference, which was a pleasure and a privilege, as the conference has begun to attract quite a number of academics interested in the area in the years following.

On a more personal level, I come from a family of fans. My mother, a hard-core science fiction fan (and an academic), introduced me to the world of speculative fiction at a very early age; in fact, Star Wars: A New Hope was the very first movie I ever saw in theatres. Granted, I was not quite two and it was a Drive-In, but nevertheless... She and I have a long history of shared fantasy worlds, and she encouraged me to devour those universes without apology. My father, on the other hand, is a dedicated golfer, and can very easily discuss and debate professional stats, amateur up-and-comers, and potential career-impacting issues for hours on end, preferably while on the greens himself. Thus fannishness has always been normative behaviour for me, and it's often a bit unsettling to interact with people who claim no fan status of any kind.

When I was eleven I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time (after a few years of repeated annual readings of The Hobbit), and was hopelessly and forever lost as, for lack of a better term, I found my "home fandom." I continued on for years as a feral fan, consuming all sorts of fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery texts on my own, until I encountered an anime club that was just starting up at my university during the first years of my Masters. From there I became much more involved in communal fannish activities, including taking part in a number of shared creative endeavours and organization of Province-wide events. Although I was already peripherally aware of the existence of fan fiction, it was around this time that I was introduced to shounen-ai/yaoi/shoujo-ai/yuri, and very shortly after, in 1999 (once I had seen Qui-Gon's death scene in The Phantom Menace and teased out the homoerotic subtext underneath), I became interested in slash fiction as a reader and writer. In 2001, with the release of The Fellowship of the Ring, I returned to my home fandom as a more active participant, where I continue to participate in the surrounding fiction-writing community today.

JB: I did my PhD at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, focusing on melancholy within LGBT fantasy texts. I covered a lot of writers who had never been given academic attention before, including Mercedes Lackey, Tanya Huff, Fiona Patton, Lynn Flewelling, and Chaz Brenchley. While I was writing the diss, I actually got in touch with Lynn and Chaz, and they offered me lots of great advice and encouraged me with fiction writing. Earlier this year, I got a contract from Ace for my first novel, Night Child , as well as a sequel. The first will be out in Spring/08, and the second will be released the following year.

So, I'm one of those weird hybrids: an academic-fan who also writes fantasy fiction. I got to meet Samuel Delany for the first time a few weeks ago! He was giving a talk at CUNY, and I (terrified) introduced myself in a mousey little voice and told (stuttered) him about my first novel. He said it sounded great, and offered to take a look at it. Now I fantasize about him smoking a pipe, surrounded by books in his massive office in Philadelphia, turning the pages of my manuscript. To me, that's hot.

I started reading fantasy early, although it took me till I was 20 to get through LoTR. I couldn't really appreciate it when I was younger, since I had such a short attention span. I'm still not good with Victorian novels, although I love Charlotte Bronte (especially Villette), and have a sort of affection for Dickens because he just describes things so fucking well. His desks and drawers seem more real than my characters sometimes. I decided to write the great (Canadian) fantasy novel when I was 11, and I would force all of my friends to read these bad, bad pages printed off on our old dot matrix printer. I still remember the screee--whrrrrr--screee sound of the printer as somehow being the most exciting sound in the world for me, at 11.

I came late to the fanfiction scene. A friend got me hooked on CSI, and convinced me to read some GSR fanfiction. It took me a while to get into it, but then I discovered a lot of slash devoted to Seth/Ryan in The OC, and I was a goner. I was watching The OC at the time, and reading the slash gave me so many ideas (some academic, some dirty, dirty), so I wrote an essay on incest and slash fiction with The OC as the focal point. The essay got rejected by some major journals, which is nothing new for me. It might get picked up by an edited volume, but the writing was so fun that I almost don't care if it ever gets published. Almost.

After writing the essay, I started experimenting with writing CSI slash, but containing elements of GSR as well. Basically, I enjoyed writing about Grissom and Sarah observing a fledgling relationship developing between Greg and Nick, kind of an older foster-couple giving advice to young foundlings. I want to keep at it, but once I moved to New York, things got really busy really fast. So hopefully I'll get the chance to return to it soon.

I started blogging as a way to talk about my anxiety around moving away from Canada, and that kind of morphed into a forum for talking about everything else. Recently, my little blog received some unexpected international attention when a reported from the National Post in Canada targeted my research on pop culture as "pointless" and "a drain on tax dollars." He tried to use my blog to discredit me, but just ended up giving my research more publicity and actually making me sound pretty cool.

CULTURAL HOMOGENIZATION

ELL: I must admit to being rather pleased to be paired up with another Canuck, especially since I've been itching to discuss how the globalization the internet affords affects fan exchange and assumptions. Perhaps your experiences have been different than mine, but I've found that when operating in multicultural spaces, whether as an academic, a fan, or an acafan (or, really, all three, because who can separate out the distinct strands completely?), there's a very strange positioning that goes on as a Canadian, living so close to the US (or in your case, in the US itself) and having such easy access to the same (or similar) streams of entertainment and popular culture. Since we often speak the same language, and have shared knowledge of trends, I've often run into the assumption on the part of other scholars or fen that "Canadian" is indistinguishable from "American," which has made me hyperaware of some of the (cultural/gendered/ethnic/linguistic/etc.) homogenization that goes on in fan spaces and the corresponding research. Of course, it's impossible to not make some generalizations when discussing any topic, but I think cultural assumptions are largely overlooked in Fan Studies at the present time. I note that there are some studies emerging that discuss non-English speaking fan groups, such as Finnish or Russian fans -- Irma Hirsjärvi's work springs to mind most immediately with regard to the former -- and their activities within spaces bound by language, but less consideration given to fans participating in fandom via a shared language yet coming from varied cultural backgrounds.

In fact, speaking from an experiential point of view, I've met more than one fan who has used fandom as a (fairly successful) way to learn English -- a close Italian friend of mine is fond of joking that when people ask her how she's acquired such impressive English skills she barely manages to suppress the urge to say, "from reading gay porn on the internet" -- or who has made a conscious decision to participate in fandom using a second or third language instead of her first.

In this debate series we've touched on many complicating spheres, including gender, race, and sexuality, and I think it's a worthwhile proposition to push for one more factor that perhaps requires a little more attention. Since you mention experiencing anxiety at moving into another culture, I wonder if you have some insight into how cultural assumptions work within academic and fan communities, or if you've seen any of this at work.

JB: As a "legal alien" living in New York, I definitely feel a cultural divide. My American colleagues tend to stress Canadian difference, however, rather than emphasizing sameness. This usually takes the form of: "Do you have this in Canada? Is this book distributed? Can you watch this show?" Suggestions that Canada has its own national programming are usually met with blank stares or polite astonishment. Also, I never get to talk about Degrassi Jr High to my students, which is traumatic.

ELL: I can imagine that's traumatic! (And, oh no, now I've got the theme song stuck in my head.)

It's interesting that you've found the cultural differences are emphasized. I wonder if that has to do with the difference between the anonymity the internet affords, and in person and/or communication that comes with background information already provided. I imagine one of the more difficult aspects of considering the diversity of the internet is that just like a myriad of other dimensions, nationality needs to be self-reported, and is often an aspect that is dropped from or left out of research into fanworks, or is simply not reported.

Oddly enough, in my encounters with scholars at international conferences, I've found that I need to state my nationality or display it prominently in my own discourse in order to achieve that same level of recognition or risk being folded in with other North Americans. It's a strange balance, though, isn't it, finding comfortable ground between being singled out as a stand in for a larger culture or being erroneously decoded?

I think that perhaps this is an issue that extends to cultures that mirror each other in Seymour Martin Lipset's sense of the concept. I've run across some of these same identity issues in conversation with New Zealanders, for instance, who are often folded in with Australians by outsiders despite having a distinctly different sense of themselves. I really do think that just like gender and sexuality, national identity, especially in concert with the global nature of internet fandom, adds an interesting complication to concepts of what "fandom" is.

GATEKEEPING AND GENDER

ELL: I'm absolutely fascinated by the encounter you had with the National Post! Not knowing the whole story, I can't help but wonder how much that particular reporter's story was an attempt to gatekeep; one of the perennial issues facing academia in North America seems to be a push towards "practical, hands-on" training over more esoteric pursuits, and of course Fan Studies itself seems to exist in a marginalized area of a larger marginalized specialization. (I'm thinking of Fan Studies as part of Popular Culture or even Speculative Fiction research, here, but of course there are a number of other flagships it often sails under.) It's interesting how throughout this debate we've been discussing potential othering and privileging of one gender over another while at the same time many of us are part of a larger othered discipline.

And here I must note that while I certainly believe that gender often plays a role in status and whose voices are heard -- the lack of interest by Chris Williams of FanLib in engaging with the largely female audience that opposed him and his decision to speak to a male academic being a relatively recent and high-profile example -- I do believe it's much more complicated than a simple binary of male vs. female, blue vs. pink would have us believe. Gatekeeping is certainly prevalent in fandom, academia and acafandom, and oftentimes it doesn't cross gender lines. There are a variety of fannish communities on LiveJournal, for instance, that require certain conditions be met before a fan is allowed to become part of the collective (Resistance is Futile!); often these conditions are some subjectively perceived level of quality or trustworthiness. Some, such as the "stamping" communities, which sort you into Hogwarts' houses or assign you a specific Star Wars character, go so far as to require others to vouch for you, and/or fill out complicated applications which are reviewed by part or all of the membership before the fan is granted access. And of course some of the most strident gatekeepers I've encountered in my own academic pursuits have had no regard for gender, but have, much like your National Post reporter, applied arbitrary standards that have little or nothing to do with "quality" or "worth" and have far more to do with perpetuating a system of (sometimes fairly petty) personal beliefs. I certainly can't discount the possibility that the intragender gatekeeping has extragender roots; very much a "don't embarrass me in front of the boys" impulse, of course, which I imagine loops right back around to issues of gender marginalization.

Now, granted, while to a certain extent gatekeeping is required in any group lest chaos reign, the more that control rests in the hands of a single person or small like-minded group, the more it seems to shuffle towards the absurd. I do wonder how much gatekeepers have replaced mentors as the first introduction to fan-writing communities with the increased access the internet allows.

Comics as Civic Media and Other Matters...

The blog which we launched for the new Center for Future Civic Media has started to generate some real momentum. The site was created not simply to announce or report events hosted by the center but also as a space where the students and faculty of the two affiliated programs -- the MIT Media Lab and the Comparative Media Studies program -- can share their thoughts about the nature of civic media. I am blessed this year with a team of four veteran journalists working in the Comparative Media Studies Program, each of whom is bringing their reporting skills to the task of identifying compelling examples of civic media practices around the world. For example, incoming CMS Masters student Abhimanyu Das, a veteran culture reporter from India, wrote a compelling account of the work being done by the Comics Defense Fund, an organization fighting to defend the First Amendment rights of comic book creators and consumers:

What is significant about the organization is the way in which it connects comic book writers, publishers, retailers and readers and taps their common admiration for the art form in order to defend its stake in the cultural landscape. The key factor here is their shared enthusiasm for comics, the sort of collective energy cited by Beth Noveck at the first forum for the Center as being an essential component of civic engagement. While it might not be immediately obvious to the outsider what this enthusiasm is directed against, the fact remains that there exists a serious ongoing problem with attacks directed at the comic book industry, their targets ranging from the products of large publishers like DC Comics to the work of small independent artists. Libraries are being forced to take legitimate artistic works off their shelves, artists are being sued for parodying corporate entities and retailers selling comics with mature content are being charged with distributing obscene materials. A prevailing myth is that comics are meant exclusively for children and that any depictions of adult content or themes (however artistically relevant) are inappropriate or illegal. It is a major threat to a vibrant artistic tradition and one that the CBLDF is currently attempting to combat...

he CBLDF has spearheaded defenses or otherwise assisted individuals and organizations in myriad First Amendment cases on local levels across the United States. A particularly good example of how the CBLDF works on a local level is its influence upon a recent case in Marshall, MO. In October 2006, a local resident formally requested that two graphic novels-Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and Blankets by Craig Thompson-be removed from the shelves of the town's public library because of their allegedly obscene content. Both works have considerable artistic merit (Fun Home was one of Time magazine's "10 Best Books of 2006″) and earned widespread critical acclaim for their frank portrayal of troubled adolescence. Once the CBLDF was brought in, its involvement was not so much in the realm of legal aid or fundraising but, rather, geared more towards community engagement. The CBLDF, in conjunction with the National Coalition against Censorship, drafted a much publicized letter to the library's board of trustees. This letter served as a useful document in terms of articulating why the graphic novels could hardly be termed obscene and the pitfalls of a censorship policy.

However, it played a more important role in the way it served as a rallying point for those in the Marshall community that opposed the removal of the books. The document raised awareness of the issue and allowed local comic book fans and First Amendment advocates to find each other and build an opposition to the group calling for the ban. In addition, the national scrutiny that the letter brought with it forced the Marshall library to open up the process by which the ban request was being considered and facilitated the efforts of the opposition group. This led to every subsequent open hearing on the case being well attended by those community members that put forward an organized defense of the graphic novels. The CBLDF's campaigning also led to an elevation of the level of local discourse surrounding the case as it formed a public counter-point to the 'pornography' claims and led to the books being read by considerably more people in the area than they otherwise would have been. Therefore, as a result of local efforts that built up much of its steam around the CBLDF's support, the library drafted a new materials selection policy in March 2007 and decided to return the two books to their shelves without any segregation of the books by a 'prejudicial system.'

For more information on the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, check out their website

Other groups spotlighted so far on the blog include:

The BBC Action Network.

Advancement Through Interactive Radio

The Online News Association

Shareideas.org

Healthline

Wikinews

NEWz

If you haven't check out the site yet, give it a look.

Now for Your Moment of Zen...

While we are on the subject of civic media, I have to pass along a story which was shared with me by Axel Bruns from the Queensland University of Technology's Creative Industries crew. It concerns The Chaser's War on Everything, a popular satire program produced by the Australian Broadcasting Company, and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Conference, which Wikipedia describes as "a forum for a group of 21 Pacific Rim countries that represent about 60% of the world's economy to discuss the regional economy, cooperation, trade and investment." In September, the group held a meeting in Sydney which George W. Bush attended. Much publicity surrounded the security for this event -- this being a "post-9/11" world and all that. So, The Chasers got the bright idea to see if they could test the security structures, which they did with extraordinary effectiveness, by pretending to be the Canadian delegation. They pulled up at the gate in a black limo with a Maple Leaf flag and a "security detail" of guys in suits running alongside it and got flagged through. They managed to get extraordinarily close to Bush's quarters before they started to get really anxious and turned the car around. As one final prank, though, they had a guy who was dress as Bin Laden pop out of the car. Then and only then did the security detail click into action. Now, the comedy show stars and producers are facing legal sanctions for their actions, so the least we can do is watch the farce unfold at YouTube. The story was widely reported in Australia and Canada where there were predictable mixtures of hysterical laughter and wounded dignity. But perhaps adding insult to injury, I haven't meet anyone in the United States who has heard the story through our national media.

Calling All Aca-Fen!

Mark Deuze (Indiana University) asked me to pass along to readers this call for submissions to a special issue of the International Journal of Cultural Studies which he is co-editing with John Banks (Queensland University of Technology) focused on co-creation and cultural labor issues.

Here's what you need to know:

Scholarship on the production side of new or converging media industries is scarce, but growing as the prominence of cultural production in a worldwide 'experience economy' increases, next to global concerns about the changing nature of work and labour in the media and creative industries specifically, and creative labor in general. Media professions as varied as public relations, marketing communications, advertising, digital game development, fashion, movie and television production have only rarely been studied at the level of work and labor relations. Post-disciplinary research and debates are now emerging about the nature, characteristics and practices of work and labor relations in the context of networked and global media industries.

Consumers increasingly participate in media production as co-creators of content and experiences. Transformations in the relations among media producers and consumers, as well as between professionals and amateurs may indicate a profound shift in which our frameworks and categories of analysis (such as the traditional labor theory of value) that worked well in the context of an industrial media economy are less helpful than before. Does recent work grounded in neo-Marxian theories of immaterial labor, affective labor, free labor, and precarious labor for example help us to analyze and unpack the changing conditions and definitions of work? What are the implications of a potentially radical unsettling of the assumed division of labour between professional, expert media producers and amateurs, volunteers, or citizen-consumer collectives?

These transformations may be understood as part of a shift from a closed expert system towards more collective innovation networks, across which expertise becomes distributed. How are these labor relations between professionals and amateurs negotiated? Are emerging consumer co-creation relations a threat to the livelihoods, professional identity, and working conditions of professional creative workers? Can this phenomenon be explained as the exploitative extraction of surplus value from the work of media consumers, or is something else potentially more profound and challenging playing out here? Indeed, are these emerging phenomena best understood as a form of labor?

For this special issue we hope to bring together research from a variety of disciplines and perspectives that ambitiously aims to come to grips with the conditions and opportunities of consumer co-creative practices. Co-creative media production practice is perhaps a disruptive agent of change that sits uncomfortably with our current understandings and theories of work and labor.

We thus invite papers that describe, explain, interrogate, contextualize and thus further our understanding of the changing nature of media work in the context of co-creative media production practice.

Call for Papers

This special issue on Co-Creative Labor strives to bring together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, addressing general or particular concerns about the conditions and changing nature of (new) media work and co-creative labor in different areas of the creative industries. The issue calls for papers that focus on rich empirical and/or theoretical work in or across three key domains of research on co-creative labor and cultural production:

# New Media, Cultural Production, and Work

A first domain of research would focus on historical contexts and critical discussions of the role of media work in contemporary society. Key concepts used in the field-new media, digital culture, work, culture and creative industries, media professions-should be highlighted and clearly articulated with co-creative practices old and new.

# Media Professions

In a second domain we are looking for investigations of key media professions - journalism, game development, television and motion picture production, advertising, public relations and marketing communications, popular music, fashion -in terms of the changing nature of work in these professions, focusing on the convergence of the roles of professionals and amateurs and the implications for professional and/or organizational identity, and the management of creativity in a context of the signaled shift towards co-creative labor.

# Convergence Culture and Free Labor

A third area of research would focuses more explicitly on what industry observers coin as "user-generated content", "consumer co-creation" or "citizen media", and by the academy as "commons-based peer production" (Benkler), "free labor" (Terranova) and "convergence culture" (Jenkins).

We are specifically looking for submissions of original research including, but not limited to:

- Case studies of media companies adopting co-creative labor practices;

- Case studies of specific co-creative communities and their relationships with media producers;

- Content analyses of co-creative labor in the production of culture;

- Mapping of ethical, political, economical and cultural changes and challenges of co-creative labor;

- Quantitative and/or qualitative empirical work on the production, content, and/or consumption of co-created media messages;

- Research focusing on co-creative labor in the context of specific media industries;

- International comparative work on co-creative labor in media production.

Of course, this call is not exclusive, and we very much look forward to working with any authors on paper proposals or extended abstracts on related issues. We particularly want to encourage graduate students to submit work in progress.

Timetable

The special issue will appear as 12(2) of 2009. The deadline for all full paper submissions is: 30 August 2008. All submissions will be anonymously reviewed by at least two referees. Deadline for revised manuscripts is 7 November 2008. Final editorial decisions will be made by late November 2008. Submitted manuscripts should not exceed 7,500 words (including main text, abstract and keywords, plus references and endnotes).

Contact

Please submit papers, extended abstracts, or expressions of interest to Mark Deuze (mdeuze at indiana.edu).

A Plethora of Podcasts...

Whew! I have been totally pulled into administrivia for the past few weeks and have had very little time to focus on the blog, but I am starting to dig my way back out and have lots of cool stuff planned for the next few weeks. While I have been focused elsewhere, there have been a surge of new podcasts of CMS colloquium events or of my talks around the country which might be of interest to my regular readers. I figured I would take a day out just to catch up with these and make sure they got to the attention of anyone who might be interested. For those of you interested in our work on creative industries, Forrester Research has posted highlights of their Consumer Forum 2007, including some short segments from my conversation with Josh Bernoff, but also some very interesting segments involving Playboy's Christie Heffner, MTV's Christina Norman, Microsoft's Robert J. Bach, Brightcove's Jeremy Allaire, and Ze Frank, among others. It's a good place to go if you want to get in the mood for our Futures of Entertainment 2 conference which is coming up in just a few weeks.

I participated several weeks ago in a really outstanding conference at the University of Utah. It's theme was "Frontiers of New Media: Historical and Cultural Explorations of Region, Identity, and Power in the Development of New Communications Technologies" and it featured some outstanding papers by a range of folks from Media Studies, Technology Studies, and history, dealing with everything from the introduction of the telegraph and the telephone to contemporary digital practices. I was honored to be asked to give the keynote address at this event and spoke about some of the contradictions in the "moral economy of 'web 2.0'." This talk was based on an essay which Joshua Green and I authored for a forthcoming collection on creative industries and is essentially the same presentation as I made a week or so ago at the Association of Internet Researchers in Vancouver. You can listen to the podcast of the Utah version here. While you are visiting the site, check out some of the other sessions. This was a consistently strong conference and offers you some glimpses into some of the best contemporary work in media history.

Bill Densmore was nice enough to record and post the audio from my recent keynote address at the recent conference, "Creating and Learning in a Media Saturated Culture," which was organized by Home Inc. and hosted at MIT by our program. Here, I was trying to explain some of the governing ideas behind our New Media Literacies initiative, having things to say about Soulja Boy, Herman Melville, Digital Natives, and Cosplay, among other topics.

Meanwhile, the Program has played host to a range of interesting guests and as always, we are posting podcasts of these events as soon as possible. Here's some you might have missed:

Andrew Slack of the Harry Potter Alliance talked to our students about the ways his organization fuses fandom and activism. We are hoping to feature an interview here on the blog with Slack about his work before much longer.

Industry and cultural analyst B. Joseph Pine II shared some of his most recent thinking about "Technology and Media in the Experience Economy."

The Communication Forum and the Center for Future Civic Media hosted an event around the key question, "What is Civic Media?"

Media Strategist Lee Hunt shared with us his perspectives on the "best practices" in contemporary branded entertainment.

The MIT Communications Forum hosted a discussion on the nature of "Collective Intelligence" with Thomas Malone (The Future of Work) and others associated with his new Center on Collective Intelligence.

Coming Soon: Katie Salens on games and education.

"Meet me at my crib . . .": Reading the official "Crank That" video

Yesterday, I shared the first of two blog post which Xiaochang Li, a CMS masters student, wrote about Soulja Boy for our Convergence Culture Consortium blog. Today, I run part two which centers around the official version of the "Crank Dat" video, which, like the many fan remakes, circulates via YouTube -- in this case with the active support of Soulja Boy himself. I can't decide what fascinates me the most about this story: the fact that this teenager broke into the front ranks of the entertainment industry by using tools and processes which in theory are accessible to every other person of his generation or the fact that he has recognized intuitively the value in spreading his content and engaging his audience as an active part of his promotional process. As Xiaochang notes here, it's really intriguing that his video lays out his own analysis of the relations between the old media power of the labels and the new media power that brought him to fame in the first place. She recently shared with me another fascinating clip -- Soulja Boy at BET hip hop music awards-- and notes that his vision of participatory culture extends to getting everyone else to do the Crank Dat dance while making only the most minimal gestures towards performing it himself.

"Meet Me at My Crib...": Reading the Official "Crank Dat" Video

by Xiaochang Li

Yesterday, I brought up the phenomenon surrounding Soulja Boy and the "Crank Dat" dance craze that propelled him to success and touched upon a few of the things that drew my attention to this particular case. Today I thought I'd dig in a little further, and try to tease out some of the things that Soulja Boy really embodies for me (as a concept more than as a musician or performer) through a closer examination of his official music video, which touches upon a lot of these themes of production, participation, and distribution in the age of convergence.

Before I can talk about the content of the video, though, I have to talk a little bit about the context in which I'm watching it. I have to admit, I watch television almost exclusively on my computer, so I can't say for certain whether or not this video is getting airtime on MTV. What I do know is that it is on YouTube, uploaded by Soulja Boy himself, and has been viewed there over 15 million times, framed by the thousands of comments and hundreds of response videos. Rather than repurposing the track for (re)distribution within a traditional broadcast model, here we are given Crank That in its natural habitat -- not a discreet media product, but one video within a network of thousands of others that make up the phenomenon.

The video itself is a retelling of Soulja Boy's rise to fame in three acts: Collipark's discovery of Soulja Boy, Collipark's ride to Soulja Boy's house to sign him, and then the signing. In the process of reenactiment, it then dramatizes many of the themes central to the Soulja Boy phenomenon, presenting at the center a dichotomy between the established music industry and its trappings and the ground-up, digitally mediated methods of production, promotion, and distribution that Soulja Boy employes.

In the opening sequence in the video, before the song even starts, Collipark plays the part of the ignorant executive, asking a couple of kids dancing in his office " "Who's Soulja Boy, and what in the heck is that dance?" to which they they respond by reasking the question, incredulous, to each other, as if Collipark's ignorance of Soulja Boy isolates him to the extent that he can no longer be part of the same discourse.

As an answer to the question, the video cuts to a following shot of Soulja Boy, a webcam passing conspicuously in the foreground as he pulls his chair up to a computer and the song begins. But instead of getting up to dance and sing, Soulja Boy instead focuses on his computer screen, where we see images of streaming video of people doing the dance, surrounded by enthusiastic user comments. This is crosscut with shots of Collipark gazing at his own computer screen, and culminates in a shot of a chat client window:

CP: This is Mr. Collipark, I want to sign you to a record deal.

Soulja Boy: Meet me at my crib . . .

The emphasis on cribs, or home turfs, is interesting here, considering the way Soulja Boy's space is populated with devices of digital production and distribution, and Collipark's office is burdened with the structures and divisions of industry -- assistants, paperwork, gold records on the wall, and a huge desk separating him from the kids who are in the know. The video also starts out in letterbox, opening to full-screen only once the song begins, to further delineate the two spaces. And Collipark finally meets Soulja Boy on his own turf in yet another way, by contacting him through a chat client instead of by phone or mail.

The second act, in which Collipark makes good on this request, we see shots of him in the darkened back of a limo as he drives through the streets crosscut with various groups of people -- girls in the park, boys on a bridge, two old men with canes, a man in a superman costume, a traffic cop -- all either watching the video on mobile devices or starting up the dance or some combination thereof. It is only once Collipark finishes watching the video on his own mobile device that he looks out his window, gaping at all the Soulja Boy performances taking place all around him.

The whole sequence comes across like an ad for media convergence. The video and dance is shown spreading through numerous devices and, more importantly, generating discussion, sharing, and participation, quickly establishing itself as a social practice instead of just a media property spread over numerous technologies.

And here again we see the contrast of the record exec isolated in what is visual shorthand for entertainment industry success (riding in the back of a limo in near-darkness), but instead of presenting an image of success, it shows how sealed off he is from what's happening in the world around him, literally kept in the dark about what young people are doing everywhere outside his car. What's interesting here is not only the depiction of the seclusion the record industry versus the mobilization of the audience, but that the internet is repeated collapsed into the physical world. What happens on the videos is what's happening outside, and the internet phenomenon is translated into a real-world phenomenon.

What's more, there are a number of disparate groups represented across gender, age, and location, all of them reinterpreting the dance through their own communities, and linked through their ability to watch the videos across various devices, emphasizing at once a sense of connectivity, but also an urge to represent local communities and groups. In short, Soulja Boy as a phenomenon presents itself as more of a mode than a community, a practice that allows existing communities based on characteristics that are generally thought to be "disappeared" in the digital space (gender, age, race etc.) to foreground themselves.

Then finally, after several performance sequences, we have the culmination of the video, where Soulja Boy gets signed (and here again we see the interjection of digital mediation and online discussion). As I mentioned before, the signing takes place at his house, suggesting that the industry has to come to him. Morever, it is done through the passing of bling, a gesture that's more symbolic than official. The necklace bears a strong resemblance to a medal, and he receives it more like an award than an opportunity. In other words, the record signing is not the start of his career, but rather simply the recognition for the work he's already done and will continue doing.

Furthermore, he puts on his sunglasses before the look is complete, suggesting a persona that was crafted prior to industry involvement. And all of this is again framed within networking technologies, with the crucial moment in which Collipark passes the necklace show on a computer screen show only as a streaming video clip, with a chat discussion between two people commenting on the events, suggesting once again the pivotal role of fan participation in the entire ordeal.

An interesting question was brought up by Henry Jenkins regarding some of what has been discussed here: would our reactions to Soulja Boy be the same if we were to find out, some time down the line, that Soulja Boy wasn't real, but rather the next iteration of something like LonelyGirl15?

The answer is yes, and no. Yes, in the sense that we may feel duped, but no in the sense that, in a lot of ways, Soulja Boy already is Lonelygirl15. He has never been shy about his intentions -- from the beginning, he was clear that his goal was to sign a major record deal. There were never pretensions about Youtube and Myspace as merely expressive platforms. For Soulja Boy, it was about promotion from the start, in an effort not to eschew the record industry altogether, but to enter it in untraditional ways. And any discover of disingenuousness of Soulja Boy as an individual would not wholly detract from Soulja Boy as a phenomenon, because what has grown up around him has also grown past him and while he was the beginning, he is no longer the central to what has happened. In other words, we no longer need Soulja Boy in order to Crank That.

Xiaochang Li completed a N.A. at New York University in 2006, where she wrote an undergraduate thesis on narrative structure in Proust's In Search of Lost Time while also exploring various aspects of media production through internships in film production, publishing, and web design and advertising. She then spent the interim year in Germany on fellowship through the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange, where she spent her time working with independent film production firms in Berlin and Saarbrucken and going 220 km per hour on the Autobahn. She entered the Masters program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT this fall. Her current researhc interests include the emergence of narrative forms in the digital landscape that shift our understanding of, and interaction with, the structure of texts and the relationships of gender and sexual performativity between Eastern and Western media through the lens of fan-generated content. She is part of the Convergence Culture Consortium research team.

Hustling 2.0: Soulja Boy and the Crank Dat Phenomenon

Sometimes a class project takes on a life of its own. I asked the students in the CMS graduate proseminar on Media Theory and Methods to work on teams and report on a contemporary media phenomenon, reading it against some of the theories about media change we have been studying so far this term. A team of our incoming graduate students -- Kevin Driscoll, Xiaochang Li, Lauren Silberman, and Whitney Trettien -- decided to focus their energy on examining the ways that Soulja Boy, a teenage hip hop phenomenon, used a mixture of social network sites and YouTube to push his way up into the top music charts.

A key to his success turns out to be his active encouragement of fans to sample, remix, mashup, and perform his "Crank Dat" song through whatever media channels they want. Our Convergence Culture Consortium is focusing this year on understanding what we call "spreadable media," arguing that the era when value was created by "stickiness" is giving way to one where media gains new value through grassroots circulation. If it doesn't spread, it's dead! And the best way to insure the spread of media is to give over greater control to the audience, to increase their emotional stakes in your success.

As the students discovered the vast array of different people out there who were performing "Crank Dat," they wanted to get into the act. And so they got a camera, borrowed some lab coats, used their social network accounts to draw people together, and staged their own music video, which now circulates via YouTube.

As it happened, I stumbled by between meetings, just in time to watch them lining up to dance on the dot. I stayed for a bit trying to master the for-me very challenging dance steps. I always seemed to be zooming like superman when I was supposed to be doing the pony walk. Unfortunately, the real Professor Jenkins doesn't have any of the moves that my avatar enjoys in Second Life. But, I enjoyed watching my students gamble and shake a leg.

To my pride, they showed their budding skills as public intellectuals, having managed to get the Boston Phoenix out to cover the story. Here's some of what the Phoenix reported on the unfolding scene:

In the summer of 2006, DeAndre Way, then 16, combated summer boredom in Batesville, Mississippi, by writing songs with Fruity Loops digital-audio software. He borrowed a cousin's video camera and filmed dances to accompany the music. Thanks to YouTube, Way's choreography quickly turned into a Southern dance craze -- particularly centered around a steel-pan-drum-fueled number called "Crank That (Soulja Boy)."...

This past Wednesday, a day after the release of Soulja Boy's debut album, Souljaboytellem.com, a dozen or so MIT grad students and professors gathered on a circular lawn beside Building 54 at 5:30 pm, blasting "Crank That" from a small gray CD player set on repeat. Some of the group were clad in lab coats and thick glasses as they repeated (and videotaped) the dance -- a crisscrossed jump in place, followed by a few shakes and stomps, a breast stroke-like arm spread, and four jumps to the left and right. "This will single-handedly transform the coolness factor for MIT," commented Henry Jenkins, co-founder of MIT's Comparative Media Studies (CMS) program, as he observed nearby.

The meeting of Soulja enthusiasts was organized by students -- including Kevin Driscoll, a/k/a Lone Wolf, a local DJ and former computer-science teacher -- from a CMS graduate course in media theory. Driscoll's lawn-dance party was more than just a way to add a video to the vast library of "Crank That" tributes. He hypothesizes that "Crank That" is a unique bullet point on the dance-craze timeline, symbolic of a shift in dances' virility and how they spread.

"It's by the power of the dance craze that [Soulja Boy] was picked up by a major label," says Driscoll. "It demonstrates how resources like YouTube and MySpace can be these enabling technologies, even for kids, really." The MIT Soulja Boy videos are now on YouTube (and up to about 400 views each, at press time) making them perpetuators of the very trend the participants are studying. At least it's not the Macarena.

Ever since, I've been talking up Soulja Boy as perhaps the most powerful success story we have so far of someone who taped the power of grassroots convergence to break into the commercial mainstream. Check out for example some of my comments about the phenomenon during my keynote address at our recent media literacy conference, organized by Home Inc., which were posted by Bill Densmore

One of the students on the project --xiaochang li-- wrote up her perspectives on "Crank Dat" and what she calls "Hustling 2.0" for the Convergence Culture Consortium blog and I wanted to pass this along to my readers. Next time, I will share her thoughts about how Soulja Boy's most recent music video might be seen as a textbook illustration for how convergence culture works.

Hustling 2.0: Soulja Boy and the Crank Dat Phenomenon

xiaochang li

A little while back, Kevin, one of my colleagues here at MIT, brought the Soulja Boy YouTube phenomenon to my attention while we were discussing an upcoming project.

Fast forward to October: Soulja Boy is fending off Britney Spears and Kanye West on the Billboard Top 100, and you can now watch a rag-tag team of MIT grad students, researchers, affiliates, and Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project and the Free Software Movement, crank that. (CMS program director Henry Jenkins even joined in the learn the dance, but sadly had to run off to something undoubtedly important before the video was shot.)

A little bit of context for those who have somehow managed to miss this craze: Soulja Boy produced his own tracks and uploaded videos of himself performing the dance onto MySpace and YouTube. People everywhere started doing their own versions and putting up their own videos, and the whole thing snowballed until people like Beyonce started incorporating the dance into her stage show. By that point, everyone from underground rap magazines to The Atlantic was talking about Soulja Boy.

Beyond the novelty of seeing everyone from Winnie the Pooh to a bunch of vaguely coordinated MIT students doing the "Crank That" dance, the rise of Soulja boy is an interesting exploration of self-promotion in the digital landscape.

Many groups have taken to social networks and video sharing as a means to self-promote, but, as anyone who has ignored dozens of friends requests from bands on myspace.com knows, the effectiveness of all these efforts is inconsistent, at best.

Part of the problem is that there isn't a significant shift in the way in which the

content is presented. Bands produce the same types of videos and promotional materials, except now they're accessible through YouTube instead of MTV. There's little consideration of the unique expectations and practices within these spaces.

In that way, Soulja Boy, who has described computer access as the turning point in the

development of his career, was far better equipped to handle his own online promotion

than any major label executive. In a move that was described on Artist Direct as "Hustling 2.0," Soulja took advantage of the fact that people were already downloading material from other artists, renaming his files as popular songs in order to spread his content. He also has a number of videos which use the particular video blogging aesthetic of YouTube to help brand him as a personality.

This gap in understanding between major media and cultural practices of user-generated content channels is mirrored in the official music video for "Crank That," wherein rap impresario Collipark good- naturedly mocks his own ignorance of the flourishing Web 2.0 phenomenon around Soulja Boy. The whole video, in fact, runs almost like an advertisement for the age of convergence culture, as the dance propagates over multiple channels of distribution, morphing and evolving from streaming video to mobile devices and ultimately ending up in the "real," physical world, and Soulja Boy steps away from his Webcam and chat windows to accept his record deal.

As Kevin pointed out in his blog, he takes the sign of major label recognition more like an award instead of an opportunity, payment for a job already well-done. On that note, it's interesting how the spelling varies between "Crank Dat" on many of the fan produced videos and some of the marketing on Souljaboytellem.com and "Crank That" on the official record, like a linguistic marker to differentiate the D-I-Y phenomenon from the standardization of the song and its incorporation into the established entertainment industry.

Check out the range of videos in the Soulja Boy

universe:

Soulja Boy's YouTube

channel, where you can see the original dance video, the official video, and the

instructional video, in addition to a number of fan videos and clips of celebrities

doing their own versions of "Crank That."

A fairly comprehensive collection of all the audio variations on the song that have appeared. My favorite might be the Folgers Coffee version.

A blog devoted solely to videos of the many, many versions of the dance. Note how the spellings vary from video to video.

When Xiaochang's post appeared on the C3 blog, she generated some interesting responses from the hip hop blogosphere. Check out:

ttp://www.ohword.com/blog/852/crank-dat-white-girl-the-soulja-boy-lesson-plan

http://www.prohiphop.com/2007/10/to-understand-s.html?cid=87651522

Growing Up in the 1930s: How Media Changes Our Relations to the Past

I like to tell people that I grew up in the 1930s and 1940s. Stop! Before you update my Wikipedia entry, please note that I am speaking metaphorically and not literally. Despite my gray beard and despite how I feel on some Monday mornings, I'm not really that old! I was born in 1958! But a number of things happened in my mid-childhood which utterly fixated my fantasy life on the mid-20th century.

For one thing, when my grandmother died, I was helping my parents go through her old house and we found a trunk in her basement crammed with 1940s Life magazines (along with a range of other publications of the era). As a kid, I would spend hours going through the magazines, looking with fascination at pictures of Jitterbug contests, reading articles about the Blitzkrieg, or most interestingly, looking at old advertisements and wondering what archaic candybars had tasted like. The magazine covered everything -- from the most important political and military events of the era to the most mundane aspects of everyday life and taught me to see social and cultural history as the essential backdrop against which to make sense of the big events that dominate our history classes. I would grill everyone older than myself about the world of their childhood, trying to find out what it was really like to live in the past.

Second, I was nearsighted and we didn't know it until I was deep into elementary school and for that reason, I didn't really enjoy contemporary movies very much. They were just a big blur for me. I'd get lost in big movie theaters. My mother would send me out to go to the bathroom by myself or to get popcorn and I'd be unable to find my way back to her, wandering through the theater staring at the faces of people and not recognizing anyone. But I loved to watch movies on television, sitting close to the screen, and would from an early age beg to stay up and watch Academy Award Theater to see vintage movies.

Adding to this, there was a children's show in Atlanta in those days called Tubby and Lester; it's hosts modeled themselves on Laurel and Hardy; and instead of cartoons, they would show Our Gang, Three Stooges, and silent slapstick comedies, all of which I became passionate about and just as importantly, I developed a mastery over, tracking down every book I could get on old movies, and play acting their adventures in my backyard. In the afternoons, I would race home from school to catch the afternoon creep show screenings of old Universal horror films, read Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, and practice my monster walks. I got in a knock down fight with my best friend that sent us both to see the Principal over my preference for Bela Lugosi's Dracula over the then heart-throb Barnabas Collins (Dark Shadows).

My Seventh Grade term paper tried to retell the entire history of the Hollywood movie industry in 10 pages. My father, to his dying day, accused me of having rewritten the same term paper ever since. It became the way he understood what it meant for me to be a media scholar.

Then, there was music. I would beg my parents to play their old 78 records of swing music -- especially those of Danny Kaye and the Andrew Sisters -- and much preferred these sounds to anything my contemporaries were listening to. I recall with horror when I accidentally cracked a vintage recording of Vaughn Monroe and his Orchestra doing "Ghost Riders in the Sky."

And last but certainly not least, there was radio. I was lucky that an Atlanta radio station for a few years experimented with doing classic radio all day, all the time. I'd listen to early soaps in the morning before going to school, listen to children's shows and adventure serials in the afternoon when I got home, and laugh over classic comedy in the evenings when my friends were watching prime time television. On Sundays, there was the Lux Radio Theater and Mercury Theater and other great drama series. I listened to anything and everything, intrigued by the old stories and in love with the crackle of the old recordings and what they did to what Roland Barthes calls "the grain of the voice."

All of this made me exceedingly odd to my classmates, who could not understand my interests in any of this, and probably contributed to making me a social pariah in my adolescent years, but all of it also made me who I am today. When I first started dating the woman who would become my wife, my future father inlaw would grill me about trivia of the period. I think I won his approval by linking a particular line back to The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance. After a while, we would talk passionately together about the culture of the depression and the Second World War as if we were there, as if this had been a shared experience.

It was no accident that my undergraduate thesis dealt with films of the depression or that my PhD dissertation centered on vaudeville and early sound comedy. The popular culture of this era was my early love and still spills over into some of my current projects -- see my posts on Vaudeville and YouTube, on Charlotte Greenwood, on Retrofuturism and the 1939 World's Fair -- and look forward to an essay I'm currently developing on the so-called "vulgar modernists" of the post-war period (with a particular emphasis on Harvey Kurtzman, Spike Jones, Hellzapoppin, and Tex Avery).

The fact that I read the period across all of these media platforms, probably contributes to my current interest in adopting comparative approaches to media studies. I was able from the start to draw connections between magazines, films, radio shows, and music of the period in a way which was not yet locked within the medium specific disciplines which structure how formal education talks about such matters. I was, as I said in the first sentence, able to "live" in the 1930s and 1940s because I was able to re-experience such a complex web of media representations from the era, all at the same time, and trace connections between them. I knew what the period looked like; I knew what it sounded like; I knew how it thought; I knew what made it laugh; the only thing I couldn't do was taste those candy bars and other products I saw in its advertisements or heard discussed on radio commercials.

Why am I telling you this? After all, most of you are here for my posts about contemporary cultural matters, about digital media and transmedia storytelling, about web 2.0. and I almost never get any comments on those posts that deal with older media materials. More's the pity. I tell my students that we really can't understand where media is going without knowing where it's been and there are many clues to understanding the complex cultural grid constructed by modern media by making it strange, by visiting the media systems of other cultures (whether around the world or in our own past.)

Today, I am writing about this because I wanted to share my excitement over discovering the Old Time Radio Catalog website. OTR was a company I remember from my youth. My mom and dad used to give me a treat by buying LPs of vintage radio shows from this company via mail order as birthday or Christmas presents. But at the time, they sold a single episode for the price of an album. Well, today, thanks to new technologies and new ways of clustering our experience of media, the company now offers full or near full runs of classic series in Mp3 format for the absurdly low price of 5 dollars per disc. (Longer series require multiple discs, but many series fit within a single disc.)

Several things are coming together here to reshape our access to and experience of Old Time Radio. First, there is the MP3 format itself, which makes it possible to fit so much content on a small disc, which can be cheaply reproduced and shipped by mail. It makes it possible to sell radio in bulk.

Second, there is the modern phenomenon of the boxed dvd set of television series, which shapes our expectations to be able to watch (or in this case, listen to) the complete run of a series in order and thus fuels our expectations for encyclopedic mastery and plentitude. Why would I want to listen to a single isolated episode when it is possible to own it all, consume it all. Suddenly I am back in Atlanta in the mid-1970s when it was possible to listen to an episode a week of Fibber Mcgee and Molly or follow along in the serialized adventures of Lum and Abner or I Love a Mystery. Old Time Radio, like television, was a long form medium and you can only really appreciate it by living with its characters over time and watch them grow across episodes.

Third, there is the web itself. In my earlier discussion of retrofuturism, I talked about the ways that the web was making it possible for fans of vintage media (just like all other kinds of niches) to find each other, for people to assemble and share archives (like the wonderful folks who are making early sound comedy and musical numbers available via YouTube), and which are allowing us to pool our knowledge about past popular culture in one spot (as in the rich entries in Wikipedia on some of these classic media texts.)

The Old Time Radio site takes full advantages of the web, most spectacularly by offering samples -- full length episodes -- of most of the shows which it sells. Each day, they showcase a particular program from the collection, often an episode which aired on that date originally, so you can enjoy holiday themed episodes on the right days. You could spend countless hours just rummaging through the catalog, listening to one or another of their vintage broadcasts. The first thing you would discover is that they have everything there -- the wartime lectures of Bertram Russell, the sermons of Father Coughlin, full broadcasts of key baseball games, the FDR fireside chats, a fascinating collection of movie advertisements from the radio era, old game shows -- and not just the comedies, dramas, and science fiction shows which most often characterize the collector culture around vintage radio. There are two fascinating recordings which capture a full day's broadcasts on a particular station -- one showing how America got the news about D-Day and the other showing the progression of a much more typical broadcast day -- which allow us to experience the flow of programs and place individual genres within their larger programming context. There are also sets organized around particular performers -- Will Rogers, the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Robert Benchley, Orson Welles -- which allow us to trace their movement across programs. There's a smattering of programming from other countries, particularly British and South African radio. And there are sets which bring together the innovative broadcasts of particular radio auteurs, such as Norman Corwin or Arch Obler, who represented some of the key innovators in the medium. But at the heart of it, there are the classic series -- 116 episodes of Henry Aldrich, 274 episodes of Burns and Allen, 939 episodes of Jack Benny -- which suggest just how long lived some of the great shows really were and how they captured and responded to such a large period of the history of the 20th century.

I have spent several hundred dollars so far buying up some of these collections. I haven't listened to everything I've bought yet. My life hasn't allowed me to give myself over so fully to my passions. But everything I have listened to so far has been of surprisingly good quality. In some cases, I am re-engaging with old favorites. In others, I am making new discoveries or listening to shows that have long fascinated me but have been impossible to access before. I compare it to that moment when TNT first went on the air and the network was indiscriminately dumping anything and everything from its vast archives on at wee hours in the morning, not sure what would connect with contemporary viewers.

For me, as for many consumers decades older than me, it is a return to the world of my childhood and I had to share the experience with my readers.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twenty One, Part One): Barbara Lucas and Avi D. Santo

INTRODUCTIONS ADS: I am an assistant professor at Old Dominion University. This is my second year out of graduate school. I graduated in 2006 from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Radio-Television-Film. My dissertation focused on corporate authorship practices in managing transmedia brands prior to conglomeration. Basically, I analyzed how cultural icons like Superman, the Lone Ranger and Little Orphan Annie were licensed across media and merchandising sites and how their inter-textual meanings were managed. I also looked at how authorship rights were articulated by corporations over properties whose economic success rested on their seeming authorless and iconic. At ODU, I teach classes on critical race theory and media, international media systems, superheroes and US culture, and authorship and discourse. I am a co-founder of the e-journal Flow (http://www.flowtv.org) and current co-coordinating editor of MediaCommons (http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org).

Outside of academics, the first job I ever wanted was to be a soap opera writer (apologies for not using the term "daytime melodrama", but they were just soap operas when I was a teenager; a term that likely contributed to my eventual embarrassment over truly persuing this vocation). I watched Another World obsessively throughout my teens. I am a huge comic book dork. I primarily read revisionist superhero narratives that play at established conventions of the genre, but my pull list ranges from Fablesto Y The Last Man. Favorite TV of the moment: Battlestar Galactica, The Boondocks, My Name is Earl, Friday Night Lights, Project Runway.

BL: I have an MA in English from Case Western Reserve University with a concentration on British Renaissance literature and am a member of the adjunct faculty and Lakeland Community College. However, I've been a fantasy, horror, and (to a lesser extent) science fiction reader since I was a child. It wasn't until I was an adult that I returned to my passions as a field of study as well as one of pleasure. I have been a regular presenter at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (www.iafa.org), and I'm the Division Head for the new Community and Culture in the Fantastic Division that focuses on fan fiction and culture, video game theory, hypertexts, viral marketing, RPG's, ARG's, folkloric and sociological approaches to the fantastic. Basically, my division deals with new and emergent texts, texts that are non-traditional in nature. The deadline for this year's conference, held in March 2008 is close, and I am still accepting papers. I have calls up at the UPenn website. They can also be accessed at http://community.livejournal.com/ccfantastic/.

Outside of academic and corporate lives, though intersecting with my academic interests, I write fantasy fiction and poetry. I am interested in comics and graphic fiction and tend to be an eclectic reader who can bounce between Sandman (Gaiman's version),Preacher, Age of Bronze, Gloom Cookie, and A Distant Soil with no problem. The one genre I tend to avoid is "mainstream" superhero comics. I am the sort of gamer geek that feels like she is cheating on her Playstation when she is playing games on her Xbox. My television watch list includes Heroes, Pushing Daisies, 24, Project Runway, Top Chef, Lost, and Dexter (though my hectic schedule often results in my falling behind and catching up once I get the DVD's).

My primary scholarly focus the last five years or so has been on fan culture and fan fiction, especially slash fiction. My work primarily involves complicating early monolithic assumptions about slash fiction and slash fans, assumptions that have seen it as another sort of romance writing. While that notion does fit a lot of the work that is being produced, it works less well when considering fringe writing such as dark fiction or BDSM fiction, which shatters or explodes traditionally romantic (a la romance novels) notions. Like many aca-fans who work in the fan studies area, I practice what I study. I co-moderate a The Lord of the Rings fan fiction community and write fan fiction myself. My article (co-written with Robin Reid and Eden Lackner) "Cunning Linguists: The Bisexual Erotics of Words/Silence/Flesh," which appeared in Busse and Hellekson's Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, looks at the erotics of writer/reader and writer/writer interaction during the composition and circulation of collaboratively written erotic slash fiction. Perhaps we can talk a bit about collaboration processes?

EROTICS OF COLLABORATION

ADS: I'd love to hear more about your findings here. What are the relationships of the authors to the text they are slashing versus one another? Are the characters/stories being reworked the object of erotic fascination or is it the sharing process?

BL: It is a combination of the two. Not all slash stories are erotic in nature, by that I mean the level of graphic description of the relationships depicted in them; however, writers tend to focus on characters and actors (in media fandoms) that they themselves find attractive or arousing. This explains the tendency for writers to follow characters across films or series, adding new fandoms as their objects of fannish interest add to their resumes.

Fans do play with sexuality through slash and het fiction, expressing their own desires, which they perhaps show more frankly because of the distance they achieve through filtering them through fiction, fiction that is (at least on the surface) about male characters.

There is even a further distancing in that the fictions are not entirely theirs; they are borrowed. I don't mean to suggest that there is a simple correspondence between the desires expressed in fics and those of the fans. Certainly, some fics reflect nightmares (e.g., rape fics and dark fics) and others simply explore modes of desire the fan may be curious about but would not ordinarily want to engage in. If horror fiction provides its audience with ways to confront fears and terrors while remaining safe and sheltered from them, erotic fiction does the same with desire, and many fans use it as a means of playing with desire in that way.

The sharing process itself is also erotic, something that we talk about in the "Cunning Linguists" article. The more erotic content, sensuality and/or sexuality, a story contains, the more likely the writer is to get feedback that is flirty, passionate, and erotic in nature from her readers. However, I do not believe this is a hallmark of slash fiction so much as it is of erotic fiction. I am on several lists with professional writers of romantic erotica, and the commentary from their fans tends to be similar in nature. They are also similar in that romantic erotica featuring male/male relationships is very popular with female readers. Romance publishers like EllorasCave and Samhain Press, to name a few, have male/male fiction title lines. These are, for the most part, communities that are by and for women.

ADS: Is there less slash fiction written about female characters, or is the erotic relationship between writers and readers different? In the past, I've frequented a CSI fan-fic site that featured a lot of different romantic pairings, including lesbian pairings like Sarah-Catherine. These stories ranged from BDSM narratives that either punished one or both characters for their "frigidness" or celebrated their non-traditional femininities to stories that softened one or both characters in ways that conform to very traditional constructions of femininity.

BL: There is going to be a much higher percentage in Xena fandom than there is in Buffy and more in Buffy than in The Lord of the Rings. Within more mainstream publishers of professional romance/erotica, the same trend applies. In fact, while they welcome male/male stories, they specifically state that they are not interested in female/female stories. Again, these are spaces where the creators and audience trend female. While this tendency has been criticized as straight women fetishizing gay men, that reading is far too simplistic.

The percentage of femslash in fandoms definitely varies according to fandom, and the sorts of themes particular to it does as well. Most of the femslash I have read (and I will confess to not having read great quantities of it) tends to focus on friendships between women that deepen as an erotic component is introduced to them, which is, in essence, the most classic and traditional pattern for slash fiction. The feedback I have read on femslash stories tends to follow the same pattern as that for male/male slash, and the works I am familiar with tend to be single-authored rather than collaborative.

Overall, the collaborative writing process tends to be erotic in nature. Not all collaboration is erotic, but long-term collaborations between writers, as many are, that focus on producing erotic texts tends to knit levels intimacy between the writers as those same forces work on their characters.

In the parts of fandom I move in and study, fandom wife relationships develop between two women who are writing fic, especially erotic fic, collaboratively. The women really become "partners," a perspective that applies to their own relationship and how it is seen from the outside by other fans. While fandom wives can simply be good and fast friends, there are dynamics to the relationship that are not unlike those in a romantic relationship. A certain sense of possessiveness develops between the partners, and jealousies often arise if one partner wants to go on to write with someone outside the relationship. From what I've observed, a goodly percentage of fandom wives go on to other fandom wifely relationships when/if their current one ends.

The endings to such relationships tend to be messy and to be played out in front of the rest of fandom. I have been witness to several spectacular fandom wife marriages and divorces. In one, one partner lived on the East Coast, the other on the West Coast. The East Coast partner actually moved across the country to move in with her fandom wife, and their fandom divorce (spurred on by one's complaints that the other did not spend enough time with her and spent too much time online) ended up splitting many of their online friends between them.

ADS: This fandom wife dynamic you describe is fascinating, partly because of the gendered terminology fans use (are there no fandom husbands or fandom life-partners?), but also because it sounds so normative, even as it so clearly challenges assumptions about coupling.

BL: I agree. In fact, when it comes to tensions in fandom, some of the more fascinating ones exist between subversion and normativity, between exploding or reinforcing the status quo. Male pregnancy fictions are a good example of this. On one hand, they completely disregard the limitations of biological gender and are in a unique position to question and critique heteronormative assumptions about family. However, few fics actually do this. Instead, they reinforce many of the most pervasive, traditional, and heteronormative ideals, including ones that insist that jointly producing a child is the ultimate validations of a loving relationship.

ADS: My assessment is likely influenced by my own position within the academy, but I tend to read fan collaborations/the building and sharing of community as simultaneously desirable and fraught with tensions. This seems especially true when dealing with particular fan practices like collaboratively writing and sharing slash fiction, especially the more "taboo" kinds like BDSM or dark fiction, which not only refocus attention on particular relationships within media texts but also subvert power hierarchies (or call attention to them in new ways). The subject matter is often sexual and the sharing of fantasies that stretch the boundaries of what the official corporate authors of the text would find permissible (its amazing how lax many corporations are about fan-fiction until it "crosses a line" that has more to do with taste than profits - though these are often conflated in corporate rhetoric) seems to meld with the thrill of challenging cultural assumptions about "good taste".

For me, I see the conflation of breaking both legal and moral laws as part of the erotics here. Intellectual property law certainly cheats by trying to delimit how the public uses their cultural icons, so there is a thrill in ignoring these rules. Authorship is still largely imagined in official discourses as either a solitary act of creation or a corporate practice (Joss Whedon may be a genius, but we all know he didn't write every episode of Buffy. He had a writing team that was subject to some sort of rational assembly-line type production practice). Thus, fan collaboration seems to break down those dichotomies as well, making creation a shared experience that obfuscates the production process in favor of focusing on the content being shared. Finally, since cultural icons are often popular heroes in the Bennett and Woolacott sense that they are ever changing figures that embody (and neutralize) shifting cultural anxieties, the ability to play with these figures and tease out one aspect of their personas both unravels their function of preserving the status quo and actively engages the larger meanings of the icon, effectively shifting the tensions they are intended to manage. This seems simultaneously empowering and subversive, even as it confirms the middlebrow pleasures these icons/texts normally prescribe as desirable. The more I write here, the less I feel I know about the erotics of fandom, since I seem to have reduced this down to an instructional manual.

BL: The tensions between desirability and frustration apply to any collaborative endeavor. They are particularly acute for writers because our work is such a solitary labor. Collaboration adds a social element that can be a source of energy or vitality and a source of drama and anger. Naturally, building a community, fannish or otherwise, is also a collaborative venture.

I do not quite agree with your point that more taboo forms of expression necessarily represent tension points in fannish communities. In slash fandom, readers and writers tend to cluster around specific character pairings and specific kinks. For example, there are many slash fans who enjoy male pregnancy (MPREG) fictions. This is an acquired taste, one that has a loyal fanbase. Fans who do not share the same fascination avoid such fictions. Unless they are like me and decide to write papers on them. One of the icons I have on my LiveJournal says, "You have your kinks, and I have mine," which is often the prevailing attitude among fans. This is not to say that eruptions over personal kinks never happen, but they are not common in my corners of fandom. While we can talk about "slash fandom" as it was a monolithic entity, a more accurate way of looking at it would be as more discrete groups who crystallize around different discourses of desire.

ADS: I agree with you about the acceptance/celebration of different kinks that goes on in fan communities. I was thinking more of tensions that arise in relation to normative ideals. One's choice of kink is always in some way informed by knowledge of the social rules and the pleasures/ consequences of breaking them.

BL: Those tensions are actually playing out right now around a holiday fic exchange called Yuletide. The exchange cuts across fandoms, and this year includes over 1,200 participants. The first day of signups happened at the end of the Jewish high holidays, and one fan complained about this (even though signups lasted two weeks and there is no incentive for signing up early). The argument spiraled out into a debate about how fans will often organize events on Saturdays and resist the same on Sundays. The same sorts of complaints are voiced over these normative ideals, which tend to see slash fandom as female, heterosexual, white, and American.

ADS: As for how these ideas seem to connect with academic practices for me, the tenure process has made it very clear to me that single authorship is valued over collaboration. The denial of the community except as rational audience sitting in judgment transforms collaboration into a fetish for me, where new modes of academic publishing can reinvigorate community and focus on the processes of creation rather than the final product. Though a stretch, perhaps, I can definitely see these practices as erotic because they are both taboo and because they place emphasis on the act itself (no longer either masturbatory or a peep show where I show my body [of work] to an audience that I cannot see but I know is looking and judging me) rather than the final product (the money/tenure shot). The work I've done on MediaCommons and Flow are both informed by a deep sense that current academic publishing practices are limiting, but also that there is a liberating freedom that comes from sharing. Do I imagine fan community practices like slash fiction writing as similar? Somewhat. As media scholars, we typically seek to alter/challenge/tease out a text's meanings/underlying ideological assumptions/ institutional logics and constraints. Many fans do this as well, but they get to do this in forms that seem more like play (even though a lot of work often goes in to these creations) and sharing. Of course, part of this is the projection of my desires onto fan communities.

I'd imagine this works quite differently for non-tenure track faculty and as these discussions have clearly shown, there is a gendered component to these categories, with more women found in non-tenure track positions. I also know from working in a Comm department where half my colleagues are social sciency types who regularly co-author works that they find nothing erotic or exciting about collaboration. At best it is functional, at worst frustrating. They tend to fetishize the solo authoring process as much as I worship at the alter of community-building.

BL: I agree with the social science folks: collaboration on academic work is, well, it's work. It lacks the element of play and fun that is so much a part of fannish experience. Fandom can be serious play, but a portion of it, the part that poaches from and tests the canonical source texts, is playful. The relationships and intimacy between community members is often not, and tensions between fans who consider their experience all play and those who take their community and interactions more seriously do crop up.

I think attitudes about academic communication and community are shifting, like all things in academia, they will move slowly. I credit the Internet with this. As more scholars interact online in listservs and blogs and email, the more their interactions include personal and professional discussion and the more we become invested in each other as individuals. We move beyond being collections of ideas and methodologies. I have a personal blog (which is badly in need of updating) linked to my ICFA division blog. When I met one of my presenters on video game theory at the conference last spring, he immediately asked how my mother (who had been having health concerns, something I wrote about in my blog) was faring. It took me aback until I worked through to, "Oh, you read my blog." At that moment, our sense of community was built on more than our shared ideas, interests, and work.

ADS: This is very encouraging. I hope you are right.

STRETCHING THE CANON VERSUS CANONICAL FIDELITY

ADS: As you can probably tell, I am not a fan scholar per se. My interests are in the collective authoring practices and authoring constraints that accompany popular icons like superheroes. Within this lens, I tend to focus on how contemporary IP companies like Marvel Comics engage with fans and negotiate the various fan iterations of popular heroes in fan fiction, fan art, and various other collective knowledge initiatives. I also look at the ways that fans police the boundaries of authorship as often as they challenge them. I have studied the ways that superhero fan communities will often reject unauthorized stories as unprofessional, non-canonic, and out of continuity, while embracing certain professional writers and artists as part of the fan community (even as these individuals work for the very institutions seeking to police the meanings of popular heroes)

BL: Your experiences with the superhero communities and fan practices is very interesting to me, because there isn't quite the same sort of border policing in slash fandom. Perhaps it is because slash fans realize they are teasing very submerged meaning that is usually not intended out of the source text. That is, we accept we are going to be stretching canon, which makes it easier to accept some other distortions to or challenges of the source texts. However, there is a constant tension that exists between official canon and fan-defined canon/fanon. This permission to play with canon has its limits, and fans are not usually going to respond well to texts that totally shatter major canonical expectations, unless the work is clearly parody or crackfic.

At the same time, as texts grow more complex, defining what is canonical gets more problematic. In real-person fiction, for example, when the canonical source text is a person's like and persona, what defines canon? Some would say there is no such thing. I am not one of them. Canon tends to be an amalgamation of facts about an actor (or musician or sports figure), interviews with actors, commentary by colleagues, reading public persona and presentation, and a dose of the persona of fictional characters that actor has played in various roles. It is definitely something that is assembled, ordered, and prioritized by fans (and often contested by them) much more actively than canon in a fictional work is assimilated.

When we look at other texts that spill across media boundaries, the question of defining canon becomes even more complex as levels exist. Fans of Heroes, for example, can produce texts based on the canon of the television series, but they do so without having the benefit of additional information about characters that is revealed online in the Heroes digital graphic novel. If a fan wants to write about a character like Hana Gitelman, the woman who can mentally "hear"/intercept and communicate wirelessly, they have to access the digital graphic novels (soon to be released in a hardcover version), as her character is developed in cyberspace, not in the series. Hana also breaks out of the confines of the canonical television narrative by interacting directly with fans. My sister (who firmly insists she is NOT a fan) prowls the Heroes message boards and has signed up to get text messages from Hana on her cell phone.

ADS: Differences within communities over the rigidity or flexibility of the canon seems a valuable conversation. Of course, this is a question of degree, not an either/or scenario. Comic book/superhero fans definitely write fiction (general and slash) that potentially challenges the official continuity of their hero's universes, even as they also hotly debate what ought to be counted as canonical. My experience has been that many superhero fans privilege the officially produced stories over fan variations. Of course, this has a lot to do with the particularly close and incestuous relationship the comic book industry has historically cultivated with its fan base since the late 1960s. Henry Jenkins points out how over the past two decades the comic book industry has put out many elseworld-type variations of its own products, essentially creating in-house the narrative multiplicity that many fans otherwise create (with obvious limitations on certain subject matter). Partly, this can be seen as an attempt to reign in fan efforts to stretch the boundaries, but it is also partly an acknowledgement of those fan desires that many other media texts/ properties continue to deny.

Moreover, because the barriers for entry have usually been lower (and are still perceived to be) for the comic book industry, the perceived lines between creators and fans are blurred, so that many comic book writers and artists are not just fan-favorites, but marketed as fans themselves. I think this does two things: One, it reassures fans that their fantasies are being catered to because the people who create these texts are just like them (my point here is not whether this is true or not, but the way that the discourses of authorship and fandom that circulate blur the insider/outsider status so central to other fan community creative practices). Two, they encourage a detailed knowledge of the official continuity (and its official derivatives) because there is still the sense that this type of knowledge might be rewarded with a job or some similar form of cultural access. Thus, fan creations that push too far against the canonical grain are often devalued because there is a sense that this not only alienates the industry but also that there are already fan-insiders challenging that canon with an official stamp of approval. This seems similar to your assertion of the limits of fan openness to texts that shatter canon entirely without coding itself as parody or crackfic.

Of course, I am also massively oversimplifying what is often a very contentious and charged relationship between superhero fans and creators. What I wonder is, as digital authoring tools become more easily accessible, will we see this relationship shift with other media texts, as fans are both actively courted as potential creators by the industry and fan practices become increasingly integral to industry branding strategies? If television series started offering alternate variations of their plots (like those alternate universe episodes that occasionally pop up) would this change fan writing practices? And, of course, given the disparity within the industry in terms of gendered access to creative power, would there be a change along those axes?

BL: I think we are already starting to see the beginnings of a fan/creator convergence. In order to overcome the mid-season hiatus ratings slump, Heroes is set to produce 30 episodes. A number of them will be one-shots, focusing on a new hero not integral to the overall story arc of the series. Fans will get to weigh in on favorites, and the favorite will become a regular part of the cast. This very limited and restrictive sort of collaboration (where the boundaries and control is still rather firmly in the hands of the creators) is something that should fuel fan production, especially if a beloved hero is not renewed and fans want to continue his/her story.

While the new technologies offer fans more creative possibilities, I do not see creators giving much access to their power to fans in significant ways. However, I do see fans offering fellow fans more sophisticated (and competitive) alternatives to the creators' products. I'm thinking here of shows like Hidden Frontier, a Star Trek fan film series that released their episodes on the web and made the focus on the series the relationships between the characters, some of whom were gay. Of course, creators will likely take note of other popular and visible fan alternatives and popular ideas and themes may work their way into the creators' works.

Producing the CSI:NY/Second Life Crossover: An Interview with Electric Sheep's Taylor and Krueger (2 of 2)

The following is the conclusion to the interview that we published yesterday here on my blog. This full interview was featured on the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium Weblog, conducted by C3 Project Manager Sam Ford. This interview, with Damon Taylor and Daniel Krueger from Electric Sheep, looks at the CSI:NY crossover into Second Life. Sam Ford: What is Electric Sheep Company's involvement in this project?

Damon Taylor: We are the vendor working with CBS to develop this, and it all started out as a relationship between Electric Sheep and CBS, working with Anthony E. Zuiker, who has become convinced that virtual worlds provide an opportunity for television companies or entertainment companies in general to create and provide content in ways that has never been done before. This has been a six-month planning process, culminating today. Our contract with CBS is to do this for six months, so we will be operating this experience for the next half-year. With content being updated every four weeks, we will be moving this story forward, along with a second television show next year that will tie back into the whole storyline.

Sam Ford: What brings the two of you specifically to this collaboration, and what personally excites you about the opportunity to work on this unique crossover?

Daniel Krueger: I have been with Electric Sheep about a year now, nad I worked on various community projects with The L Word through Showtime, Pontiac, Ben and Jerry's, and others, and this is the ultimate in community projects on Second Life. It is super-compelling, and it is really a win-win.

Damon Taylor: I helped co-produce the NBA project we did and was asked to come in on this project along with Libby Sproat, a colleague of ours who is a co-producer on this project. Libby and I, as Dan mentioned, have helped produce this project from day one, and now I am transitioning off and Dan and Libby are moving forward with implementing this project in the future. It has been an opportunity to work with some outstanding people, through a team of 10 people who collaborated on this project.

Sam Ford: From what I understand, one of the activities involve looking further into the mystery taking place on tonight's CSI:NY show, so it's clear that there will be a connection between the television series and some of the Second Life activities. Will there be ways in which the Second Life activities feed back into the main show?

Damon Taylor: I think it's fair to say that the Second Life experience is feeding off the television show. It's unclear at this point whether or not what happens in the virtual world will feed back or influence what happens on the show in the February 2008 sequel, but that will be determined by the producers at CBS. We wanted to connect with a storyline from tonight's show for our Second Life experience, and we have three main game experiences for CSI:NY in Second LIfe. We have a mystery game, and we will release a new one about every three weeks, which involves a crime scene, a crime lab, and suspects. It will be a 20-30 minute experience, and users can go to the crime scene, pick up evidence, process it, follow leads, and then choose the suspect they they committed the murder.

The second mystery game is the Murder by Zuiker blog game. Every month, CSI Executive Producer Anthony E. Zuiker will draft a storyline. We will create that crime scene in a virtual context and invite people to visit that scene. They will thengo to a CSI:NY message board and submit a 500-word-or-less entry describing what they think happened, as we mentioned earlier. Anthony reviews them at the end of every month and then chooses the top 10 and a winner, and he will reveal what really happened in the story. There will be six of those in all, with a new one being released once a month.

The third mystery game is Finding Venus. Venus is a character from the show tonight, and we wanted to create an opportunity for a more sophisticated mystery game experience for those who want something a bit more challenging than the 20-minute games. This game will have content driven by the story in the television show and will culminate in having users try and find her secret hideout in advance of the February 2008 television show.

To reiterate, though, we are influenced by the television show, but it's yet to be determined whether or not what happens in Second Life will have impact on the show in February. For us, this is a creative opportunity to use the TV show as the context for a substantive game experience that helps connect the dots between the two television episodes in this story.

Sam Ford: Electric Sheep is using this collaboration for the launch of OnRez, your viewer of the Second Life universe. What is it about the CSI:NY/Second Life collaboration you all are producing that made this the best opportunity to launch OnRez?

Daniel Krueger: I can't speak for our software development team, but I think that it's always been something that Electric Sheep wanted to do, as far as making an easier interface for navigating Second Life. It's not traditionally a very intuitive space for new users, so we wanted to make something simple for new users to come in with. We launched it with this project because we wanted to provide the easiest way for CSI:NY viewers who have never used Second Life to be able to come into the virtual world. It's really a perfect opportunity to launch OnRez.

Damon Taylor: There are two additional facts that we should highlight that is unique about this experience's launch in the context of the OnRez viewer. Unlike other launches in the past that are in any way similar to this project, when one goes through the registration page for this experience, they are able to choose an avatar from one of 12 provided, so when they arrive in the world they will appear as the avatar of their choice. These 12 avatars were custom-made by some of our best designers. Also, we have automatically attached the CSI toolbar to the viewer, so the CSI fans will be using the OnRez viewer for their experience in Second Life. All of that is designed to make the experience as user-friendly as possible within the confines of Second Life's technology.

Sam Ford: What precedent do you hope this crossover sets for future traditional media products looking to launch a transmedia campaign into a virtual world?

Daniel Krueger: This project is just showing the possibilities of virtual worlds and the various crossovers with different media platforms. This is the biggest project that's ever been done in a virtual world. We have 420 islands launching today in Second Life, with the four islands we have crated for the CSI experience replicated 105 times to scale for all the traffic coming in. This is showing the potential of what is possible in a virtual world, and the sky's the limit.

Damon Taylor: Sibley Verbeck, the president of the company, was at the Virtual Worlds Conference a week-and-a-half ago and mentioned the considerable buzz around the project we are working on. His statement was that one thing this does is begin to demonstrate what we already believe: experiences in virtual worlds can appeal to the masses. This is not a niche industry or a niche technology. With creativity and hard work and expertise, it is possible to launch this type of crossover, and we are hoping that the CSI:NY Virtual Experience will begin to demonstrate that companies can use virtual worlds in ways that appeal to a larger audience.

Sam Ford: Do you have any closing thoughts about what you feel will make this project successful?

Damon Taylor: One of the things I was surprised with is how dedicated and committed Anthony E. Zuiker has been in promoting virtual worlds as a medium for his viewership to wrestle with the content he creates every day. I have personally been surprised with his energy and excitement and his push for us to go above and beyond. I think that will be evident if someone spends time in this virtual experience and goes through some of these activities, such as the Murdre by Zuiker blog game that he spent a considerable amount of time on.

Sam Ford: Well, I know that you've got a lot of work cut out for you today, but thanks for the talk this morning, and best of luck in launching the CSI:NY Virtual Experience.

Producing the CSI:NY/Second Life Crossover: An Interview with Electric Sheep's Taylor and Krueger (1 of 2)

This full interview was featured earlier this morning over on the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium Weblog. The portions of the interview shared here today were originally published here and here, conducted by Sam Ford, who helps manage the Consortium. For those who haven't heard, tonight is the launch of a particularly compelling transmedia experience, the first time a major television franchise has driven its viewers into a virtual world to fill in the gap of a cliffhanger mystery that will not be resolved until next February.

CSI:NY, the New York version of the Anthony E. Zuiker television franchise, will feature an episode tonight in which a murder mystery takes the crime scene investigation team deep into Linden Lab's Second Life, with the mystery not being resolved until the concluding episode next year. The activities that take place in SL will build off what happens on the show and are planned to give fans the opportunity to get acquainted with a virtual world and also to have a new place to interact with and around the television franchise.

A variety of activities are planned, one of which will provide users a chance to continue investigating aspects of the narrative for the main show. As the Electric Sheep producers of this experience emphasize in the interview that follows, the virtual world experience has been designed to build upon and further the experience from the show, but it's not yet clear whether what happens in the virtual world will feed back into the conclusion of the mystery on the television show next February, as that will happen on the CSI:NY end. From a transmedia standpoint, one can only hope that something from this experience feeds back into the main show, even if in the form of inside jokes or references for those who participate in the virtual world experience.

For those who want to catch up on this collaboration, check out Duncan Riley's piece on TechCrunch detailing the collaboration, which also includes an embedded YouTube trailer about tonight's show. He summarizes, "The episode will see Mac Taylor (Gary Sinise) entering Second Life to pursue a killer who has killed a Second Life user in a case of virtual stalking gone too far. CSI:NY fans will be encouraged to join Second Life and investigate the case by following a link on the CBS website."

Coinciding with this collaboration is the launch of OnRez, a viewer for Second Life that seeks to simplify entering the virtual world for new members of the Linden Lab universe. The viewer is commercially licensed by Linden and will be the window through which CSI:NY fans sign up for Second Life through CBS.com. Those signing up for the CSI:NY crossover will get a customized toolbar to "follow a mystery killer on the show through a series of interactive experiences in Second Life."

Electric Sheep CEO Sibley Verbeck is quoted in the press release as saying, "Our goal is to make virtual worlds easy and fun to use for the mass-market consumer. By launching a more intuitive consumer interface, we're allowing brands to maximize the appeal of their virtual world initiatives. The upcoming CSI: NY Virtual Experience is an innovative example of the opportunities for OnRez."

What follows is is an interview with two of the producers of this project for Electric Sheep, Damon Taylor and and Daniel Krueger, who worked with Anthony E. Zuiker and others to help launch this project. Considering that the project launches tonight, I thought a little detail about the background and the hopes of its creators might be of interest for those of you who, like me, are quite interested to see how much of CSI:NY's audience is interested in virtual worlds, and conversely how many Second Lifers might get interested in CSI:NY through this transmedia extension.

Sam Ford: To start off with, what do the two of you believe are some of the most compelling aspects of the CSI:NY/Second Life crossover that's taking place tonight, and what are the benefits for CBS and CSI:NY, on the one hand, and for Second Life other other?

Damon Taylor: This experience is compelling for users from two different perspectives. One of those perspectives is new users of Second Life, who are new to virtual worlds in general. The other perspective is for existing Second Life users. Potential new users who are fans of CSI:NY will care about this crossover because it will give them the opportunity to wrestle with CSI content in a way that has never been made available to them before. We have endeavored and achieved a true cross-platform experience where these fans can watch the television show, see the storyline that began on the TV show continued in-world, and then see the storyline jump back to the TV show next February when there is a sequel show that wraps up the storyline that starts tonight.

In the meantime, we give new users who have never been in a virtual world a closed universe experience where they can come into Second Life, familiarize themselves with this world and what it means to be in a virtual world, and play and interact with mystery game experiences that interest them. This crossover gives fans of CSI:NY a reason and an excuse to come into a virtual world and do something that is functional, exciting, interesting, and engaging, and that will also open their eyes to the utilities of virtual worlds as vehicles of entertainment and interaction with other people who watch this television show and may share similar interests.

Daniel Krueger: We have also come up with our new viewer for Second Life here at Electric Sheep called OnRez, which basically streamlines the somewhat confusing traditional Second Life interface with a nice, slick viewer that will make it a lot easier for new users to grasp Second Life quicker than they would have in the past.

Damon Taylor: That's a great point. What we are doing is taking a Web interface model that we are all familiar with and adopting it in the context of virtual worlds.

Daniel Krueger: What's important here is that fans of this show can now experience CSI:NY in a different medium. Usually, they sit in front of the show watching characters perform these tasks, so now fans can get to do these activities themselves and take on a role as a virtual crime scene investigator. While they aren't solving the same crimes that are happening on TV in many of these activities, they are solving fun and engaging Second Life virtual crimes. For instance, we have the Murder by Zuiker game, which will see a murder scene set up where users will go in and see what's going on and then write up, in 500 words or less, what they think has happened. They will post this onto a site linked directly to this game, and Zuiker, the executive producer of the CSI franchise, will read them all and choose the top 10 pieces. He will post those 10 responses and explain what happened in that particular crime, and each of the winners of that game will get a prize. This gives fans a different way to interact with the show.

Damon Taylor: Here you have one of the most popular franchises of all time. These shows are only seen once a week. CBS, led by Anthony E. Zuiker, the creator of the franchise, has 16 million plus viewers who watch CSI:NY, and now they get the opportunity to interact with the franchise every day if they feel like it. For CSI:NY, this gives them the opportunity to put the franchise in front of the fans as much as the fans want. For Second Life and Linden Labs, these 16 million viewers of CSI:NY can be used as a vehicle to to bring new users to Second Life and give them the opportunity to understand and grapple with the benefits and value of playing and living and doing business in virtual worlds.

Daniel Krueger: If you think about it, if there are 16 million viewers of this show and only 1 percent of them decide to come into Seocnd Life, that's a lot of new users.

The rest of this interview will be shared here on this blog tomorrow and are available at the C3 blog here and here.

Why Grand Theft Auto Should Be Taught in Schools?: An Interview With David Hutchison (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of an interview with David Hutchison, author of Playing to Learn: Video Games in the Classroom. In the first part, he discussed his ideas about the place of games in education and about the value of teaching young people to think critically about the games they play. Today, he takes up the question of the place of game design activities in school and addresses some of the criticisms about the pedagogical uses of existing game titles. This part of the discussion is timely since Katie Salens, a major advocate for teaching young people how to think like game designers, will be speaking as part of the CMS colloquium series this week. Watch this blog for information about the podcast of this event. Some of your exercises are designed to get students to tackle design problems and to begin to make their own games. This is very much along the lines of the kinds of design literacy which Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salens have been advocating. What do you see as the value of teaching students to think like designers?

I would say that several of the activities can be used as exercises that aim to get students to think like game designers, but it is the Afterword that highlights the important role that game design can play in schools, if only in a cursory way, given that game design is not the main focus of the book.

I like to think of students as moving from being consumers of media, to being critics of it, and then creators of it, so game design is the natural next step once a number of the investigative activities in the book have been completed.

The value comes from seeing students as something more than "students" in schools. What I mean here is that teachers should consider casting students in a variety of creative roles, such as "authors" and "scientists" as they study language arts and science for example. A sixth grade student who writes a story is an author and he or she should be honored as such, perhaps by having their story published, illustrated, bound, and placed in the school library for other students to borrow.

It is a similar process for video games. By seeing themselves as a team of game designers, a group of tenth grade students can work through the very same game development stages that professional designers go through: brainstorming a story idea, pitching that idea to others, writing a story, scenario, and dialog, collecting and designing assets, programming the gameplay, and testing and distributing the game.

The above process certainly sounds daunting and of course it takes a great deal of time and commitment to produce a video game, but the good news is that are now a number of terrific educational game engines that students and educators can choose to use. Several of them streamline the game development process, so that students can focus on creative learning activities, rather than the minutia of programming their game in a professional C+ game engine.

Many educators might agree that games can be powerful motivators of learning but they also may communicate a great deal of misinformation about the world, especially given the fact that most commercial games are built for entertainment rather than educational purposes. How would you respond to this critique?

Even misinformation provides teachers with an opportune teachable moment in my view, if only to correct that misinformation and investigate how it came to be.

Consider the example of Battlefield 2142, the multiplayer first-person shooter which is set in a post-apocalyptic world, in which the effects of global warming have reduced the habitable landmass on Earth to a fraction of what it is at present. The battle for control over what little habitable landmass remains is the basic premise that underlies the battles the player fights in the game.

Environmentalists and teachers may wish to take issue with the science that underlies the premise of this game, but the game itself provides teachers with a hook for getting students to consider the implications of dramatic climate change. Although there is now general agreement among scientists that climate change is occurring today and that humans are (at least in part) responsible for causing it, there are competing views among researchers as to the long-term effects of climate change on the planet - some of the changes may even be positive from a certain perspective.

What is represented in Battlefield 2142 may be an extreme view, but there are other dire predictions from climatology experts that teachers can reference as they talk about the issue of global warming with students.

Teachers can also reference the game as they discuss the ways in which the popular media represents scientific research more generally, as well as alarmist views of the future. A key question here may be the role that games, such as Battlefield 2142, potentially play in undermining serious research on climate change. My view is that the game highlights one of the most important social consequences of dramatic environmental change - the competition over increasingly scarce resources - which some environmental and military analysts - I think of Thomas Homer Dixon in particular - argue will lead to more wars in the coming years.

That's the premise of the game and it is represented, at least in a general way, in some of the futuristic military scenarios that see environmental change as a national security issue.

David Hutchison, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Brock University (Ontario, Canada) where he teaches courses in educational foundations (history of education) and social studies.

David is the author of two books in the fields of environmental education and the philosophy of place. Growing Up Green: Education for Ecological Renewal was published in 1998. A Natural History of Place in Education was released in the spring of 2004.

For more information, check out his website at www.playingtolearn.org

Why Grand Theft Auto Should Be Taught in Schools?: An Interview With David Hutchison (Part One)

One of the many pleasures of running this blog is being able to introduce my readers to people who are doing cutting edge thinking about the many topics -- from fandom to serious games, from media literacy to civic media, from early sound comedy to transmedia storytelling -- that matter to me. Today, I want to introduce you to David Hutchison, the author of a recently released book, Playing to Learn: Video Games in the Classroom. Hutchison's book promises over 100 game activities appropriate for classroom use, a selection that spans across academic subjects (language arts, mathematics, science, social studies, history, geography, health & physical education, drama, music, visual arts, computers, and business) and grade levels (including both elementary and high school). Writers like James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, xx and David Shaffer, have made the conceptual argument for the pedagogical value of games; our own Education Arcade has been one of a number of academic research projects focused on designing, prototyping, and field testing games for instructional purposes; Hutchinson's focus is on what we can do in our schools right now, using projects already on the market, to tap student and teacher interests in games. In the course of the collection, the models many different conceptual approaches for thinking about games -- including many designed to foster core media literacy skills. The result is a book which will be valuable to classroom teachers or for that matter, parents who want to engage their children in meaningful conversations about the place of games in their lives and about how games structure the way we see the world.

I recently had a chance to interview Hutchison about his goals for this project and wanted to share his responses with you. In explaining the value of games for schools, I often say that "nobody is advocating bringing Grand Theft Auto into the classroom" and go on to point to a broader range of other titles which do seem more appropriate for school use. But Hutchinson makes a fairly compelling argument for why schools should be addressing Grand Theft Auto in the comments which follow. His arguments here is consistent with his perspective that just as traditional media literacy involves learning to think critically about mass media, games literacy has to include asking hard questions of this still emerging medium, questions concerning representations, ideology, and of course, commercial motives.

What motivated you to write this book? Why do you think teachers should be incorporating games more fully into their classroom activities?

I wrote this book in part because I enjoy playing video games myself and I am always looking for synergies between my play time and my work time as a teacher educator and university professor. So too, I was fairly surprised to see that a book like this hadn't yet been written given the long history of video games in American culture. I also couldn't find many video game-centered lesson plans on the Web which also surprised me.

I believe that video games should be referenced in the K-12 classroom for a variety of reasons. First, video games can provide teachers with an effective instructional "hook" since so many students are gamers in their out-of-school lives. Second, many (younger) teachers are also gamers. Through gaming, they have cultivated a knowledge base which can serve them well as part of their pedagogical toolset.

Despite this, most of the teacher-gamers I have spoken with over the last two years see a disconnect between their in-school teaching jobs and their out-of-school gaming activities. It strikes me as nonsensical that so many students and their teachers may be going home at night to play the same games, but then returning to the school the next day with no intention of ever sharing their mutual passion for video games.

I would also say that from a cultural point of view, I see some video games as harbingers of the future. They play with the "world" - past, present, and future - in ways that are impractical (sometimes impossible) in the real world. Some games purposefully bend the laws of physics in exploring new virtual gameplay ideas. Multiplayer video games (and the Internet more generally) experiment with new forms of social organization that go beyond our everyday ways of living.

All of this strikes me as pedagogically interesting and worth studying in K-12 schools.

Some previous books have focused on teaching about games, others on teaching through games, but your book seems to encompass both. What do you see as the advantages of each?

I would say that most of my book treats the "video game" as a cultural artifact that has a history, was created, is used in various ways, and is sometimes discarded for various reasons.

In this sense, I would say that the activities in the book are more focused on teaching using games. I have heard from a few video-games-in-education researchers who see the activities in this book as a good beginning point, but not necessarily the end point of where we need to go in integrating video games into education. To a certain extent, I would agree with this view.

For example, except for a couple of activities, the book does not focus on living life in a virtual community, such as Second Life or World of Warcraft. Educating students in Second Life strikes me as teaching through games. But so does learning about military tactics by playing America's Army. James Paul Gee's work gets to heart of how playing video games can transform the learning experience and even supplant traditional ways of teaching and learning in schools.

I would say that my book is more focused on traditional teaching and learning techniques in which the video game is studied as a cultural artifact, rather than "lived through" as an embodied pedagogical experience. Activities which ask students to write a video game review or analyze the leaderboard statistics for a driving game in math class, for example, are fairly approachable by most teachers. They essentially treat the video game as a manipulative that can be utilized as a pedagogical tool by teachers in a wide variety of subject areas.

Your introduction suggests that you see schools as "one of the last remaining formal institutions that can mediate popular culture by examining it closely, holding it to account, and even transforming it at times." What is it about schools which enable them to play this role? What about the argument that schools have historically declared war on popular culture and thus have shown themselves to be anything but objective arbiters of its merits?

This is a phrase that I have also used elsewhere, including my previous book which explores the history of the idea of "place" in education.

I am on purpose expressing something of a idealistic sentiment here that harkens back to the early 20th century promise of a democratic system of public schooling, as articulated most famously by John Dewey and, even earlier, Horace Mann. The basic notion here is that the public school is responsible to the state (which in turn represents the citizenry) and that one of the important roles of the public school is to balance out the decentralized and largely unregulated influence of other social institutions, such as the family, church, private sector, and popular culture. Dewey argued that through purposeful social inquiry guided by the principles of the scientific method, schools could foster in students a democratic impulse that strengthened the social and democratic commons - hence the notion of the "common school."

Today, public schools are bureaucratic institutions that are generally underfunded, used for political fodder by both the right and left, and tasked with an overwhelmingly complex job. Yet schools still remain the last bastion of mandated community involvement in child socialization. As parents and citizens, we count on this bastion to mediate, counter, and offset the unchecked influence of other less formal institutions, such as the peer group, family, and popular culture, by providing a corrective or compensatory measure to a student's education. This role is fraught with difficulty and it is often contested - which is appropriate in a democratic society.

Such corrective or compensatory measures may only sporadically be successful, indeed, sometimes they fail miserably, but I would say that the idealism that schools can continue to play this role is still in place in the eyes of many adults - why else would so many battles continue to be fought over the role and purpose of public schools in American society?

Many teachers might want to "protect" children from exposure to media violence, yet some of your activities ask students to pay close attention to controversial titles, such as Bully or Grand Theft Auto. What do you see as the value of teaching youth to adopt a critical perspective on such games? And what do you say to those who might argue that you are putting them at risk by asking them to engage with these works?

In writing the book, I set it as a goal for myself to incorporate the Grand Theft Auto series into at least one activity. (The "Hot Coffee" controversy was brewing around me as I began writing the book :) The GTA activity I chose tasks students with creating their own kid-friendly open-world game that doesn't include all the adult content we normally associate with games in this franchise.

I also wanted to encourage teachers to deal with controversial ideas related to video games. There are contributed discussion articles in the book that address debates related to video games and violence, video game addiction, gender bias in video games, and health and video games.

My sense is that the book could have been roundly criticized - and rightly so - if I had chosen not to deal with the many criticisms made of video games - for example, that they produce obese layabouts with no social contacts in the real world who are prone to violence and live in a fantasy world 

Discussing the above stereotypes in class is worthwhile in my view. Studying these stereotypes by having students conduct research to test their veracity is even better. There are also activities in the book that aim to help students effect personal lifestyle changes related to their video game playing habits, such as paying close attention to their posture and reducing the amount of time they spend playing video games each week.

It seems to me that there is disconnect between gamers and those critics - Jack Thompson is a popular strawman here - who look at games from outside and see little of value worth highlighting. Since many students are gamers when out-of-school, it makes sense that turning a critical eye toward video games and especially social, medical, and legal commentaries on video games are appropriate topics for study in schools.

David Hutchison, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Brock University (Ontario, Canada) where he teaches courses in educational foundations (history of education) and social studies.

David is the author of two books in the fields of environmental education and the philosophy of place. Growing Up Green: Education for Ecological Renewal was published in 1998. A Natural History of Place in Education was released in the spring of 2004.

Want to know more about CMS?

Trying to expand our communications with prospective international students (or for that matter, anyone else who would find it difficult to make it to campus to learn more about our program), CMS holds on-line information sessions a few times a semester. The first such session, timed to facilitate Asian participants, will be held this tuesday, October 23, 8 to 10 am.

The second session, timed to facilitate European participants, will be held Monday, December 3, 2 to 4pm.

We've tried for time slots that facilitate international contact but anyone who wants to participate in either session is more than welcome.

Visit the appropriate info session page on the day of the scheduled session to log into our webchat.

Gender and Fan Culture ( Round Twenty , Part Two): James Nadeau and Alicia "Kestrell" Verlager

James:This leads me to the next point: the relationship between the female protagonist and the monster. The monster both represents the repression and is a doorway to allowing the female figure to escape the social boundaries placed upon her. I am thinking here of Mel Brooks Young Frankenstein. Madeline Khan's character is the frigid girlfriend of the doctor who is transformed by her "relations" with the monster. It is an interesting exposure of the relationship trope. By making it humorous Brooks is actually revealing another aspect of the monster. By being "other" the monster also allows those possibly inclined to be different to join in being different. The monster is the gate way to deviance. And this is what I find fascinating because it makes the monster a transformative figure. Simply by being exposed to the monster one can gain access to monstrous attributes or become monsters. I think this is why the monster figure resonates with both queer and disability communities. It is the irrational fear that one will be transformed by interacting with a queer or disabled person. The idea that one's difference is contagious. This is what the monster does. It acts upon the erotic nature of the other that destabilizes normalcy, be it physical or sexual. Like you said it unleashes the repressed. Think about the alien monster in John W. Campbell, Jr's Who Goes there? (1938) which is the source for John Carpenter's well known film The Thing (1982) as well as two other films The Thing From Another World (1951) and Horror Express (1973). Here the monster itself is the transformer. It is an amorphous "thing" that replaces and consumes the human characters. Each molecule of the alien transforms and consumes. It is a literal metaphor for fear. The thing represents what each generation finds terrifying. It is a tabula rasa with which the viewer can project their fears onto. It operates as tool for them to confront or identify with whatever socio-cultural fears are present. In Carpenter's film the thing is an amorphous blob that undulates and shifts constantly. It is in a state of transformation until it becomes something it can hide within. It plays upon the fear of the passing deviant. The Thing is the one that looks like us but isn't. And once again, like with the vampire, it is the blood that tells. The blood is alive and sentient, it infects. And then there is the fact that the story is female free. So the film also comments on the mutability of identity in the face of single sex environments and the anxieties that that can provoke. This ultimately leads to testing the blood in order to identify who is human and therefore normal.

Kes:

The same is true of that other great contagion movie, Aliens, which had been released a few years after Carpenter's The Thing. One of the things I love about both these movies--and maybe it's something that as a blind fan I am just particularly focused on--is the way the space these characters move through becomes an extension of their inner psyches. Carpenter takes the cold isolation of this snowbound military base and Cameron takes the inhuman darkness of the space station but both spaces end up being very gothic threatening spaces. The viewer isn't just given a text or dialogue, but sound, motion, a sense of the process of moving through these intensely felt spaces. It's something that a purely textual or psychoanalytical interpretation of these horror movies can't really address--their sense of virtuality. This is where Deleuzian theory comes in and gives horror media such a radical spin: because horror media is often very focused on conveying that sense of the experience as a process, as something transformative in itself.

Yet that element of horror manifesting the inner space as external space is not limited to horror films. I watched Aliens with my husband, who is a game designer, a number of months back and he commented on how much that movie influenced the look of game interfaces. It's not just the look though: it's the sound, from the sound effects to the music to the use of voices. Horror media is still very much influenced by its roots in old radio shows, with a strong focus on creating a sense that the audience is actually occupying this other space with the monster. And I think that is one thing which, as this Wired article "Gore Is Less: Videogames Make Better Horror Than Hollywood" points out, links the horror film to video games.

James:

Definitely. Space plays a large role in the construction of horror and science fiction cinema. One way to look at this is in terms of Deleuze's theory of the any-space-whatever. For Delueze this moment arises in cinematic scenes where the viewer is destabilized and unsure of where he or she stands in space within the sphere of the film. The consistent use of close-up shots in the absence of expansive wide angle establishing shots serve to isolate the actor/character in the narrative creating a claustrophobic feeling in the viewer. Aliens is a perfect example of this. You can probably count on one hand the number of establishing shots that occur in this film and when they do they are noticeable in the way they pull you out of the taunt, tense feeling of the film. These shots are actually jarring in that they both establish a setting for the viewer and at the same time eliminate some of the effectiveness of the close-ups. To jump back to The Thing - the whiteness of the environment adds to the sense of the isolation of the camp. It is literally a blank space - indefinable. This works in concert with the anamorphic state of the thing. Neither of them is solid or identifiable. This destabilizes the viewer. They are in any space whatever.

Kes:

And I think it is that sense of destabilization which draws so many horror fans. Horror as a genre is more about ambiguity rather than certainty, and that leaves a lot of room for fans to bring personal interpretations to bear in thinking of how such narratives relate to their own identity. In particular, horror seems to be fascinated with complicating subjectivity, and this seems to connect it not only with the monster-woman/queer alignment we mentioned before but with those virtual or Deleuzan spaces we were just talking about.

In her book Deleuze and Horror (Edinburgh University Press, 2005) Anna Powell discusses how the subject-object binary is blurred in horror films by using sensation and affect to subsume the subject and show it melding with the external world. Some of the most vivid horror--and here I am thinking of Cronenberg's Videodrome and Moore's graphic novel From Hell--show humans being penetrated by their technology and/or their technological spaces. This kind of surreal technogothic is an entire subgenre in itself, and I think one of the reasons it emerged as such a powerful theme late in the 20th century was that our technologies, which in the 1950s had been framed as such an uncomplicated salvation for the human race, called into question our traditional definitions of both technology and the body, and the questions which arose proved to be particularly relevant to disabled and queer individuals. Previously there was this assumption that the perfect body was one which was whole, completely self-reliant, free of technological prosthetics, and at the peak of its intellectual and physical abilities; in other words, a definition many would read as masculine. How many of us fit that description now? From contacts to prescription drugs to pacemakers, many of us are wearing technology beneath our skin, and we're all a little nervous when we consider how it might change us both individually and as a species. It has already radicalized our definitions of what is an "able" body and what is a gendered body.

James:

I believe that has also changed the face of contemporary horror. Much of today's horror films are centered on the destruction of the body: Saw versions 1though 3, Hostel and the like. These are films that use the threat of physical destruction in numerous ways under the rubric of horror. Of course now these are considered their own genre within the horror genre; they are snuff horror films. So in light of the extreme technological evolution we see a return to fears about the body. The destabilization and dismemberment of the body has remerged as a means of striking fear in the audience. I say re-emerged because some of the horror films of the early seventies also played with this genre albeit not to the extent we see today.

Kes:

We can trace those dismemberment stories back to the science fiction of Maurice Renard, who wrote the story The Hands of Orlac in 1920, which would become the basis for the 1926 film by the same name and also the 1935 remake Mad Love which starred Peter Lorre. Again, there is an entire subgenre of horror narratives involving dismembered/possessed body parts, but my favorite is Clive Barker's The Body Politic (I think that was published in 1984), in which a man feels that his hands are somehow working against him, as if they aren't sure they want to be part of him any longer, and this becomes a metaphor for how people are encouraged to think of themselves as body parts, with media images focusing on specific areas--breasts for women, muscles for men--as if the part can define the whole. Of course the surgeries which Renard focused on in his story have now become an entire technology for reshaping and redefining the human body and the technology of medical augmentation meets the technology of media until we all feel a bit disassociated from our own body parts, to a degree that shows like Nip/Tuck basically pick up the monster theme by promising us that ultimate monstrous wish: to swap one's monster parts for somebody else's.

But let me move to a more positive aspect of media technologies, one which brings us back to those definitions of genre with which we began this discussion, namely, how new media has opened up production and distribution channels for fans. Not only can artists distribute their own radical visions through the technologies of the Internet and new media, but fans can locate and access all sorts of media that not so long ago was completely out of reach. From classic movies to indie shorts, from new fiction to fan sites, female and queer artists are finding encouragement, inspiration, and their own fans.

As a closing thought, I just want to point out that this is in turn calling into question traditional methods for data collection, such as assuming that there are no female slasher fans because the researcher didn't see many at a movie premiere. Female and queer fans are meeting up online, or at indie film festivals, or just waiting until the DVD comes out on Amazon, and I think this is another way in which new media appeals strongly to fans who previously may, like female and queer comics fans, have felt pushed out of the more public forms of media consumption and fan events.

Gender and Fan Culture ( Round Twenty , Part One): James Nadeau and Alicia "Kestrell" Verlager

Kes: I'm Alicia "Kestrell" Verlager, a 2006 graduate of the Comparative Media Studies master's program at MIT. I am a relative newcomer to fan studies, though I have been a lifelong fan of genre media, particularly SF and horror. My writing often explores the intersections of non-normative bodies and identity, with an emphasis on interpretations informed by both disability and queer studies (an intersection often referred to as crip studies). My thesis was on images of disability and technology in science fiction media, and I have also written about the theme of disability in Harry Potter fan fiction. I write about media, disability, and technology at my blog http://kestrell.livejournal.com.

James and I were grad students together in the CMS program at MIT, but since graduating, we continue to get together and discuss both theory and our favorite media, so our post here will probably convey that sense of this being an ongoing conversation between us.

James: I am James Nadeau, also a 2006 graduate of CMS. My own work is centered in visual art and technological evolution, specifically video and related technologies. My background is in critical studies, psychoanalytic and queer theory with a focus on Queer Cinema. I curate a monthly queer film and performance series at the Brattle Theatre here in Cambridge. On top of that I am a longtime comic book collector and science fiction fan. I am particularly interested in British post-apocalyptic graphic novels, mainly Judge Dredd, as well as Marvel produced superhero comics (pretty much why I landed at CMS). Like Kestrell I am fascinated by the possibilities that looking at horror and science fiction through the lens of queer and disability studies provides. Our conversations have centered on the similarities that both queerness and disability have when placed within the genre of horror and extreme science fiction. By extreme I mean the type of science fiction that operates as both horror and science fiction, be it from a gore or Lovecraft-ian "horror beyond the worlds" nature.

Kes:

I would like to open the conversation by exploring how genre becomes intertwined with gender through the process of defining what horror is. As a fan and a scholar, I have become increasingly intrigued by the representations of female and queer fans in horror fandom. Specifically, I am curious about what role gender plays in defining the horror genre itself and how deeply gender influences interpretations of horror, its purposes and its effects.

These questions were prompted by a pattern I noticed in how discussions of horror are often framed: In either an online or real-time discussion of horror, a panel of male writers and critics open the discussion by seeking to define "real" horror. One of the first things mentioned, usually with a laugh, is the dismissal of paranormal romance. Aside from the fact that paranormal romance is not a new genre (it can be traced at least as far back as the TV. shows Beauty and the Beast and Dark Shadows, both of which suffered from critical and marketing attitudes which devalued their female audiences), this dismissal is usually followed by adding more subgenres to the list of what isn't horror, with subgenres like gothics, ghost stories and even new horror such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Scream, etc. (refer to the work of Mark Jancovich

http://www.baas.ac.uk/resources/pamphlets/pamphdets.asp?id=28 ).

This disavowal of specific subgenres and their female fans isn't limited to books or film, either: in horror comics fandom, the stereotype of a female fan is that of the gothy Sandman fan. No slight to Neil, but the linking of goth fashion and being female is another way in which I see female fans being portrayed as romantic and/or ridiculous, which comes close to reflecting the way the overly-sexualize and ridiculously romanticized has come to be associated with camp, another disavowed form of horror. There are films that are labeled camp which I am not even clear on why they are labeled camp: Bride of Frankenstein, for instance, which a number of horror producers such as Clive Barker, have listed as their favorite horror classic: why is that classified as camp? If,

as one definition of camp claims, camp is equated with being "effeminately homosexual," then I think we are seeing media being disparaged and disavowed not for its content, but for its audience, and that disparaged audience is identified as female and queer.

I can't help but feel that these attempts to restrict the definition of "real" horror are prompted, at least in part, by an inclination to define who the ideal reader/viewer is, and, for a lot of male

critics and scholars, that ideal reader/viewer is someone a lot like him. And yet you have artists like Alan Moore, Clive Barker, Angela Carter, and their works include elements of not just horror, but also fantasy, surrealism, the gothic, and yes, romance.

James:

I'd like to tackle a few of these points. First I think that you are correct in that camp is most often associated with queer culture. However, it is mainly thought of in terms of exaggerated behaviour verging on the ludicrous. To quote John Waters, camp is "the tragically ludicrous and the ludicrously tragic." It has been used on pop culture artifacts in this manner since Susan Sontag published her essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964. For Sontag camp was liberating. It is noteworthy for being both naïve (completely unaware of one's camp-ness is a requirement) but also it's extravagance. Bride of Frankenstein is thought of as camp because it is so over the top. One look at Elsa Lanchester's hairdo as the bride and you know there is something not quite right. As Sontag notes "Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is "too much." I think that what we need to establish here is that for Clive Barker (for example), a gay man, having this as his favourite film is motivated by forces other than those that seek to feminize or demean. I would also say that Bride of Frankenstein is pretty commonly thought of as an example of camp even by those only marginally aware of what camp really is. But I think this is a good starting point to discuss the viewer. For the queer viewer of horror films where does camp fit in or does it even need to? There is a lot of classic (the twenties right through the sixties) Hollywood horror films that could be seen as campy by queer audiences. There is something decidedly fey in Max Schreck's performance in Murnau's Nosferatu. And do we even need to mention the homosocial Lost Boys or the lesbians in The Hunger? The vampire character itself has come to be known for outside normal sexual boundaries. And I agree with you that the vampire character is recognized as a romantic figure and it is consistently associated with the feminine. Is it this "feyness" or implied deviance that pushes it outside of the patriarchy and into deviance? I think that romanticism in horror and science fiction offers up an interesting opportunity to think about alternative identities within these narratives and how they relate to what audiences feel and desire outside of heteronormative paradigms. These films open our eyes to the possibilities that exist outside the hegemony of "the normal."

Kes:

I think your final sentence is very telling, and there seems to be a lot of evidence to support it around this time of year, when we seem to see a lot of these alternate identities, from the romanticized to the queer and campy, being literally tried on during the Halloween season. It's interesting that the mainstream seems to focus so much on the campy aspects of Halloween, from Elvira costumes to Dracula to drag: if camp is a combination of the overly-sexualized

and the naive, then it's okay to play with identity at Halloween as long as you maintain that element of camp, of emphasizing that it's all pretend, *really*.

Yet these exaggerated campy figures also seem to be a way of shedding the old worn out images of horror and replacing them with something that's still emotionally powerful and socially transgressive. Vampire fashions, or how the vampire is fashioned, may change, but each change seems to say something about the culture at that historical moment. Anne Rice's vampires may have come to be associated with the cliché of the overly romanticized erotic vampire, to such a degree that her stories have become *the* source for the stereotype of the Byronic emo boy which was often parodied in Joss Whedon's "new" vampire mythology of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, but looking back there was a lot more going on in Rice's story, such as a preoccupation with the metaphysical, the transcendental, and the historical. There also emerges this theme of families and communities that are based on blood but are oppositional to the nuclear family. At times the erotic seems as much a means for making emotional connections as it is reflective of the strictly sexual.

Perhaps what Rice's vampires did most explicitly, however, and I think this is something which Clive Barker's horror and fantasy has always done very explicitly, is allow the monster a voice. Once upon a time Robin Wood could write the following prohibition:

"...Dracula must never be allowed a voice, a discourse, a point of view: he must remain the unknowable, whom the narrative is about, but of whom it simultaneously

disowns all intimate knowledge..."

That kind of vampire, however, is kind of the old school vampire, and it began to lose its potency at the same time that the women's movement and the gay movement began to really be heard. Unfortunately, a lot of what female and queer artists wanted and needed to express was still considered taboo, is still considered taboo, by many of the critics and gate keepers who get to officially define art and fiction.

Helene Cixous managed to link this feminist and queer art with a kind of monstrous mythmaking in her essay "The Laugh of the Medusa," in which she said

"Where is the...woman who...hasn't been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a ... divine composure), hasn't accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn't thought she was sick?"

What horror of the '70s and '80s did--and I am going to return to my favorite trio of Clive Barker, Alan Moore, and Angela Carter-- what made it so transgressive, was it reclaimed that idea of the non-conforming body as a point of identity. It blurred the subjectivity between the female or male protagonist and the monster and it questioned how authority was physically located in the idea of the "perfect" most masculine, most normal, body. And from Carter's re-imagined Red Riding Hood to Moore's Swamp Thing to Barker's Nightbreed, identity as it related to gender, sexuality, and subjectivity intersected at the nexus of sexual relationships between women and monsters.

James:

There are a few things I want to respond to. To continue with the vampire exposition I agree that there is much more going on in Rice's books than a simple horror romance. She also touches upon the idea of creating a family as opposed to being born into one. This is a metaphor that resonates within the queer community. The notion of choosing one's family based not upon blood but upon social and physical difference in complete opposition to that nuclear family is something that the queer community has always done - out of a need for close social ties that have to replace those severed by identity. And of course the transformation can also be read as a coming out narrative - one that involves the severing of ties with one's former life (something unfortunately that is extremely common). I think these are some of the reasons that her books resonated with the queer community. Not to mention the transformative nature of the bloodletting and drinking. The fact that the vampiric traits are transmitted through the exchange of blood added another layer as her books gained popularity at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the US. I think that you are right as well in that the underlying erotic current of these relationships adds to their romantic nature. It also complicates it further with the inclusion of the "incest" or family taboo to these already "outsider" relationships.

Welcome to Idea Lab

Today, PBS and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced te launch of MediaShift Idea Lab Blog, a group blog featuring 36 wide-ranging innovators reinventing community news for the digital age. Each Idea Lab blogger won a grant in the Knight News Challenge to help fund a startup idea or to blog on a topic related to reshaping community news. The writers will use the Idea Lab to explain their projects, share intelligence and interact with the online community.

Here are some samples from the first round of posts on the blog:

From MTV's Ian V. Rowe:

More than any time in human history, young people have more tools at their avail to consume - and create - information on the issues that are most relevant to them. So to figure out exactly what MTV's approach would be to truly engage young people aged 18-30 during this Presidential election cycle in this new, Wild West era of self-publishing and self-organization, we first had to listen to what young people themselves said they wanted.

The results were simultaneously disheartening and hopeful, in the way only young people can express themselves about their future. The MTV/CBS News/New York Times Poll revealed that younger Americans have a bleak view about their own future and the direction the country is heading: 70 percent said the country was on the wrong track, while 48 percent said they feared that their generation would be worse off than their parents'. But the survey also found that this generation knows their power: 77 percent said they thought their votes would have a great bearing on who became the next president.

By any measure, the poll suggests that young Americans are anything but apathetic about the Presidential election. Fifty-eight percent said they were paying attention to the campaign. By contrast, at this point in the 2004 presidential campaign, only 35 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds said they were paying a lot or some attention to the campaign. And these projected 2008 numbers followed actual record youth voter turnout: In 2006, 10 million 18-29 year-olds voted than in 2002 midterms (2 MM+ increase - largest youth turnout in at least 20 years in congressional elections.)

So clearly young people are ready to participate because they know how important the stakes are. Elections are no longer an abstract concept. Whatever their position on the decisions of the current Administration over the last seven years, it has become crystal clear to young people that who is elected as President matters and has consequences.

From Dori J. Maynard (Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education):

First, the Jena 6 story lived on the Internet. Bloggers, many of them black, members of list serves such as the National Association of Black Journalists and members of social networks like Facebook, used the Internet to spread the story before it took off with mainstream news organizations like CNN, The Washington Post, and NPR.

The fact that the "afro-sphere" has largely received credit for driving this story is important to keep in mind when we think about what is going on in cyberspace.

At a time when "the digital divide" is still code for "people-of-color-don't-have-access-or-know-

how-to-use-the-Internet," Jena 6 reminds us of the fallacy of that premise. African Americans used the web and alerted the world to what was going on in a small town and in a largely overlooked state.

True, there are still some significant hurdles for entry into a fully wired world. However, they are largely socio-economic. I once asked someone how many white homes in Appalachia have Internet access. Turned out not a lot. The digital divide is real. It's class, not race, that makes the difference.

The Jena 6 story also reminds us that while the Web may be a place where anyone with access and an idea can voice his or her opinion, it does not mean that every opinion gets the same amount of attention. Think of how quickly word spread about "Memo Gate" and how long it took the outside world to pay attention to Jena 6.

From Jay Rosen (New York University):

Not knowing what the model is, we go on. We go on with newspapers. We go on with Internet journalism, and the practice of reporting what happened. We go on with the ordeal of verification. We go on with the eyewitness account, and with the essential task of getting and talking about the news.

Reasons for my uncertainty about the newspaper in the combination we know it now were well stated recently by Doc Searls of the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, who also writes about the Internet and keeps his own blog.

For metropolitian newspapers, whose problems I know best, it's not just the forced march to the Web and the decline in revenues from the printed product. It's not only that free content seems to be the standard online.

"The larger trend to watch over time is the inevitable decline in advertising support for journalistic work," Searls writes, "and the growing need to find means for replacing that funding -- or to face the fact that journalism will become largely an amateur calling, and to make the most of it."

So (class) why does Searls say that the advertising model may be broken too? Isn't there advertising to be won on the Web? There is, and it is coming on. But underneath that something else is going on. "Harder to see..."

While rivers of advertising money flow away from old media and toward new ones, both the old and the new media crowds continue to assume that advertising money will flow forever. This is a mistake. Advertising remains an extremely inefficient and wasteful way for sellers to find buyers. I'm not saying advertising isn't effective, by the way; just that massive inefficiency and waste have always been involved, and that this fact constitutes a problem we've long been waiting to solve, whether we know it or not.

The inefficencies that created modern advertising are themselves under pressure from the Internet. That is what Searls argues, and I think we need to consider it. "The holy grail for advertisers isn't advertising at all," he writes, "because it's not about sellers hunting down buyers. In fact it's the reverse: buyers hunting for sellers. It's also for customers who remain customers because they enjoy meaningful and productive relationships with sellers -- on customers' terms and not just on vendors' alone."

Searls thinks sellers and buyers can increasingly get into information alignment without advertising and its miserable kill ratios in the battle to break through the noise and reach the few who are actually in the market.

From Gail Robinson (Gothan Gazette):

The staff of Gotham Gazette is counting down to the day later this fall when our first online game goes up on our site. It's been an interesting process getting us this far.

First, of course, we needed a concept. In some respects, this was the easy part as brainstorming sessions over the summer produced literally dozens of ideas. We'd like to do them all -- and we will do some of them in the next two years -- but we decided to do the first one on garbage. What to do with tons and tons of garbage has long been a thorny issue in New York City, one that never seems quite resolved. It's something New Yorkers care a lot about and it provides policy options that can be clearly presented in a game format.

Our game will have two parts. In the first, players will be residents deciding how to sort their trash.Should it all just go in the garbage can (or, since this is New York, into a big black plastic bag). Or should some be recycled. Maybe you're willing to put your empty water bottle aside for recycling, but what about an apple core? And can you do anything with a soiled diaper?

Once the player sorts his/her trash, they move to the next portion and play policymaker. What would you do with the city's garbage. Send it to a city landfill,ship it acorss state lines, convert it to energy? And what about the recyclables?

At the end of the game, players will learn how much money they have spent, how much room they have taken up in a landfill and other costs. And they will send us their plans so we can convey their ideas to City Hall.

Now we just have to make this idea a reality -- a process we are in the thick of now. More on that in another posting.

These represent only four of the many voices represented on this new blog. Civic media and citizen journalism takes many different forms and the community of researchers which the Knight Foundation is assembling are tackling the issue of civic engagement from many different angles. What they have in common is a belief that we can deploy the affordances of new media in ways that strengthen bonds within geographically local communities.

Exploiting Feminism: An Interview with Stephanie Rothman (Part Two)

Yesterday, I shared the first part of an interview I did with feminist/exploitation filmmaker Stephanie Rothman. Today, I conclude the interview. But before I do, I wanted to share a few passages from my essay on Rothman which can be found in The Wow Climax. It sets up some of the issues we discuss below.

"I think films are a compromised and corrupted art form, a combination of business and art. And I think filmmakers who treat it completely as a business fail. A business-oriented film is too blatant. It must have something more. To me, films that succeed are those that are slightly corrupted, that attempt to be both business and art, knowing they can never be a full work of art and should never be a full work of business."

-- Roger Corman

Two women -- one white and blonde, the other black and wearing an Afro -- are harnessed to a plow, struggling to move forward through thick muck. Glistening sweat slides through their exposed cleavage and down their taunt, muscular thighs. Their expression is at once determined and humbled. They are dressed in tight cut-off jeans, halter tops tied off at the midriff, no bras and no shoes. Behind them, a man snarls, driving his human "cows."

This disturbing image is the core icon on the advertisements for Terminal Island. In the same ad, we see a stereotypical image of the black "buck," his broad chest bare, crushing a black woman's head into the dirt with his foot, "Welcome to Terminal Island, Baby!" The promotional campaign for an exploitation film characteristically reduces the movie to its most sensationalistic images, images that make its desired audience want to see more. Terminal Island is being "exploited" as a film where one can see beautiful women "put in their place" by powerful men.

Another image circulates around Terminal Island -- the only photograph I have been able to find of its director, Stephanie Rothman. Rothman, an attractive young woman with flowing black hair, is directing an early scene set in a television studio control-room. Her look is passionate, her expressive hands stretch wide, as she is delivering instructions to the actress who plays a documentary film maker in the movie. The actress bears more than a passing resemblance to Rothman herself. As a result, the image takes on a reflexive quality -- the woman director as artist producing an image of the woman director. The caption alongside this Omni magazine article reads: "Terminal Island is consistent with her other films in that it is about several men and women who unite, then live together as friends and lovers without sexual distinctions being made, or infighting and petty jealousies developing. Her ideal world is one of equality and harmony."

Omni identifies the elements in Terminal Island and the other Rothman films, such as Group Marriage (1972), The Velvet Vampire (1971) and The Working Girls (1973), which attracted feminist interest.

Omni's juxtaposition of these two images leaves unreconciled two contradictory accounts of the film's politics and its audience appeals. Images of women as chattel compete with images of women as artists. Appeals to fantasies of male control compete with appeals to fantasies of "equality and harmony." Any film which negotiates between these two competing discourses warrants closer consideration. Such films may help us to better understand the ideological fault-lines within the popular cinema.

As Christine Gledhill suggests, the political commitments of filmmakers often have to get "negotiated" through generic traditions for constructing stories and marketing appeals which sell those stories to demographically desirable audiences. Such "negotiations" produce ideological contradictions within the texts being sold, contradictions which, in turn, get "negotiated" by viewers seeking certain kinds of pleasures from going to the movies. In Rothman's case, a further series of "negotiations" occurred amongst feminist critics: after an initial flurry of articles advancing her case as a feminist filmmaker, references to Rothman all but disappeared. A generation of critics schooled in Screen theory and in Laura Mulvey's assault on "visual pleasure" found it difficult to resolve the ideological contradictions surrounding a feminist exploitation filmmaker. They stopped looking for signs of feminist resistance in such an unlikely place and recoiled with puritanical discomfort over her eroticized images. Rothman's Terminal Island suggests the complexity of the "negotiations" which occur between feminist politics and popular entertainment within the marginal commercial space of the exploitation cinema.

As more recent feminist critics have sought a more complex account of the pleasures of popular culture, a reconsideration of Rothman seems in order. Re-examining Rothman in the 1990s seems of critical importance, since the issues she poses are closely related to those raised by a whole range of contemporary Hollywood films which similarly seek to insert feminist politics into commercial genres (Aliens, Blue Steel, Silence of the Lambs, Thelma and Louise, A League of Their Own). Many of these films were either directed by veterans of the exploitation cinema or were strongly influenced by its legacy. To fully understand the complex ideological negotiations within these equally "corrupted" works, we need to reclaim both the progressive generic traditions upon which they build and the critical tools by which an earlier generation of feminist critics sought to interpret and evaluate those traditions. This essay examines what may be at stake for feminism in the exploitation cinema, using Rothman and Terminal Island as a point of entry. Rothman "exploits" the progressive potential already embedded within the exploitation genres to get her liberal feminist messages to a larger viewing public; Roger Corman's New World Pictures "exploits" the topicality of feminism in the early 1970s and the volatile emotions which surround it to attract an audience of men and women filmgoers. Emerging in this context of negotiation and exploitation, Terminal Island will be analyzed as a "partially corrupted" film, one which resists placement in a simple ideological category but which never-the-less shows the possibility of expressing resistant politics within mainstream genres...

Now the interview:

Your works were embraced by feminist film scholars such as Claire Johnson and Pam Cook. Were you aware of their celebration of your work and if so, how did it impact the ways you thought about your films.

I was unaware of their interest in my films until fairly recently. I met Pam Cook for the first time about seven years ago and it was only then that I read what she had written about me. It was around then I also learned that my films were initially in favor and then later fell out of favor with some feminist film scholars and critics. For this reason,I am very grateful to scholars like Pam Cook in the English speaking nations and Verena Mund in the German-speaking ones for taking a serious continuing interest in my work.

I am happy that people have observed the thread of feminism that runs through my films. When I was making them, the main thrust of the women's movement was to establish equality in the workplace and the family, through law and custom. Since then, a more far-reaching body of thought has developed, some of whose concerns my films don't address.

Feminist critic Pam Cook argued that one of the most progressive aspects of your films is the way you play with and encourage our awareness of the stereotypes which were the basic building blocks of the exploitation cinema. For example, the key characters in Terminal Island are introduced through a discussion of the casting of a documentary. How did you reconcile the exploitation genre's reliance on broad stereotypes with your apparent interest to provide a more complex understanding of women's experiences.

First, let me say that I wanted to provide a more complex understanding of the experiences of both women and men. Men are also stereotyped in some exploitation films. While there is a feminist viewpoint in my films, it was not intended to be the only one. I viewed this initial stereotyping of both sexes as an opportunity, a starting place, from which to surprise and intrigue the audience, as the characters behavior upended the audience's expectations.

The introduction of the characters in Terminal Island with their prisoner identification pictures, or mug shots, and a brief summary of their crimes, was deliberately done for another reason besides stereotyping: It was as an efficient narrative device for introducing a large number of characters, so that the audience would recognize them when the story switches to Terminal Island itself.

Perhaps the one stereotypical element in the film that I have never been comfortable with is some of the costuming and makeup of the women prisoners. One of the exploitation rules I had to follow strictly was that the women must always look very attractive and "sexy," which meant they couldn't look the way women really would as prisoners on an island with harsh living conditions. I have watched Terminal Island several times in recent years with audiences who have an interest in seeing revivals programs. When they first see the women prisoners on the island, there is sometimes laughter at their unrealistic appearance. I don't take any offense at this, because it just validates my own uneasiness with the message sent by the way the women look.

When you left Corman and started your own production company, Dimension Pictures, you continued to produce exploitation films, even though you had much greater creative control over your work. Can you share some of the economic, creative, perhaps even political factors that went into that choice?

I stopped working for Roger Corman because he did not pay me a living wage. In his opinion he didn't need to pay one to his directors, since he was giving them the chance to have their work seen widely, which might lead to more and better paid work, maybe even with a major studio. And for a very few, it did. For most, it did not. My work was seen, and I received a few offers, but only to make more exploitation films.

Dimension Pictures was a new company, partly financed by the same regional film distributors who distributed my earlier films. My husband and I were offered a minority share in the company and a living wage. In return, we were expected to make exploitation films that we co-wrote, he produced and I directed. But we did not have final approval over the subjects, advertising, or distribution plans for them. In no sense, did I have greater creative control over my own work while I was working there.

Exploitation cinema no longer exists today--except perhaps in terms of direct to video production. Yet many of the genres which dominated the exploitation cinema have become a part of the commercial mainstream. What do you see as the consequences of this loss of the b-film mode of production?

I say let the commercial mainstream have the exploitation genres. Today, I don't think filmmakers need to start the way I did, working within the restrictions of exploitation films, because the same financial and work place limitations no longer exist. I can't speak about other nations, but in America the following changes have occurred.

Due to new laws, motion picture and television unions have had to open up their apprenticeship programs; they can no longer discriminate by race, ethnicity, or sex. Today more attention is paid to the work of outstanding student filmmakers by artists' agents and film and television studios, and some of these students even find work as writers and directors soon after graduation.

Then there are the film festivals that have multiplied worldwide, and that are open to exhibiting unusual and adventurous independent films. Sources of financing and distribution can be found at these gatherings that were either nonexistent or difficult to find in my time.

Arguably the most revolutionary changes are the new advances in technology, which among other things have brought increasingly cheaper camera equipment and computer programs for editing and special effects. This benefits everyone, including filmmakers who work independently, by choice or necessity, outside the system.

Finally, there is also the future potential of the internet itself as a method of distribution, not just for major production and distribution companies, but for self distribution.

With all the options that exist today, if I were beginning my career as a filmmaker, I would not choose to make exploitation films.