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February 28, 2006

Two Moments in Harlem

The dressing room in the wake of the African dance classes I take in Harlem continues to be an interesting zone to negotiate. I'm usually one of two white women there. With my Puritan heritage, dressing rooms have never been particularly comfortable spaces for me, and even though the class's body-positive attitude is the main reason I keep coming back, I can't help but feel I stick out.

Today, following a particularly vigorous rehearsal for our Thursday performance, a little girl who couldn't be more than five years old marched up to me, more boldly than the kids in the class usually do. Right as I was struggling out of my tank top.

"I remember you!" she declared, brightly. Her tone smacked of class reunion greetings. I looked down at her, trying to ignore the fact that this meant sighting over the point of my sweaty, naked boob.

"I remember you too," I replied. She is actually memorable -- she stood out among the tiniest members of the kids' section for an energetic, accurate solo. Her mama dresses her in a bright, well-ironed mudcloth two-piece, and she's a positively cherubic kid, round face, huge eyes. These were attentively tuned in to mine. "You did a really good job out there today," I told her, making polite conversation as I reoriented my bra.

"She's got a great memory," chimed in a woman behind me. "Better than mine; I always forget my moves." And she remembered me. Remembered what? Had I triggered some memory of previous sightings of my unusually pale nipples? Or was it just the usual way I stuck out? Kids say the dangedest...

* * *

Heading back up towards the subway, I noticed someone sprawled on the ground by the curb kitty-corner for me. The guy had a cane thrust out in front of him. It looked as if he'd fallen and was having trouble standing up. Mindful of that episode of Michael Moore's TV show where he had posted a "dead guy" on the subway to see if passerby would demonstrate any concern whatsoever, I headed over as soon as traffic cleared. I offered my arm. The man took it and pulled himself up. When he lifted his face to me, it was not as old as I'd expected, but it was deeply troubled. His nose was streaming clear snot down over his chin.

"Are you going to be all right?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said. "Can you spare a quarter for coffee?" I searched my pockets and said no. He headed to the other side of the street. "Take care of yourself," I called after him. I'm pretty sure there's a crackhouse down the street from the gym where we dance, but I've never seen anyone so hard up before.

Posted by me at 11:43 PM | Comments (0)

February 26, 2006

Live in Prescott, but not so long it makes you hard; live in Enfield, but not so long it makes you soft

Roger sent me a blast from the past at Hampshire: advice on how to survive the place. Collected by one of my exes and by the future Drag King of Philadelphia, it summarizes much of the folk wisdom about the place at the time. It rings true well beyond the boundaries of the school, in part as a measure of a college experience spent in the proximity of hippies ("Cute boys are often big stoners. Beware."), in part as unusually sage general undergraduate advice even without the pot ("keep a perspective on how unnatural it is to live with all people between the ages of 18-23 yrs."), but, unsurprisingly for those of us who have travelled further down this path, it also comprises pitch-perfect advice for grad school in places ("The terms of your education are 100% negotiated with faculty. NO requirements otherwise.")

And I know one or two of these comments must have been written by my friends or by me. "CAFFIENE!!!!!!!!!" was Evan; that's his misspelling and the same enthusiasm which led to a brief period of blindness after a marathon four-day-coding-consuming-nothing-but-Mountain-Dew session. "Mod Bootie is Bad Bootie" is Evan's misspelling of Peter's timeless dictum (confidential to him: ZOMG PJO CUTE BEBBEZZ THEY LOOK EXACTLY LIKE YOU! Who knew that naming your kids Romulus and Remus could instantly confer such gravitas.) Many of the quotes on doing projects and not taking classes might have been me, though if it was "Boys don't make passes at girls who take classes" should have been on there. So I'm guessing it was "Do what you want to do! Not what the "invisible" structure of Hampshire wants. You are being flushed down the toilet: Do you swim or spin?" Then again, that might have been Nat; it bears the marks of his hyperbole.

Posted by me at 10:08 PM | Comments (0)

February 25, 2006

You know you've been working too hard

on your game design homework when you have a dream that you've been assigned to create a game for class. About comparing your teeth to someone else's teeth. And you're actually going over, in your dream, the ways that idea might actually support a game mechanic. Would it be about counting? About shape? About cavities? Would someone get bonuses for having gold teeth?

On the plus side, the dream also included a fantastic sequence in which I was looking out the window of the fifth-story classroom where we were working and seeing a small thunderstorm roll in and roll past us at a supernatural speed, then watch the clouds ebb and flow around as if they moved as rapidly as ocean waves. That was really cool. I remember being really worried about the woman who emerged on a roof deck slightly below the classroom and seemed intent on sitting in a deck chair during all this, though.

Posted by me at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)

February 24, 2006

Flickrastination

Highly recommended for Dana, Michelle, Sarah, Ulises, and anyone else studying social software -- Webmonkey has published a list entitled Ten Best Flickr Mashups. I highly recommend not playing Flickrball if you hope to get any work done.

Posted by me at 10:23 PM | Comments (0)

February 16, 2006

Australia!

It appears I may be headed to Australia for spring break, somewhere between March 9 and March 19. It's either going to be Perth or Melbourne (yeah, I know, not near each other, but Bakon is not being more specific as to where she'll be). I am so excited! Not only did Australia hold my interest throughout childhood (something about Bunyips), but I think I might like to do a postdoc there as well, so it will be great to scope out the culture and landscape. Mary, Jon, Katina -- will anyone who's in the country let me know if you might be reachable in those areas around that time? I would love to see you!

Oh, and because I am a glutton for punishment, I will be headed to San Jose for the Game Developers Conference in the week following spring break. [excised] Is there anyone in SJ or somewhere along the CalTrain line I can stay with? Jamie, I plan to come see you in Oakland for sure!

Google Earth has become my preferred means of figuring out where exactly it is that I'm going. Somehow, the sight of Melbourne resulted in a spontaneous chorus of "The Swamps of Home", a song I was sure I'd forgotten. Probably because it's very grey and brown around there from the satellite image... much reminiscent of Los Angeles.

Posted by me at 12:02 AM | Comments (3)

February 12, 2006

Media Activism?

Today for the first time in years I returned to a gathering of New York independent media producers -- the Grassroots Media Conference down at the New School. I left work in the city's media nonprofits in roughly 2002 feeling alienated, as if I'd made no good friends, and frustrated with some of the trends I saw in the orgs' thinking. But today I saw my former boss Abby, who no longer has concrete cause to be peeved with me as she is no longer at the IPA; and I saw Arun and Ana and John T. from my IMC days -- and I guess I missed out on talking to Eileen, who I used to do legal video with -- and Prometheus Radio people, and a small handful of Hampshire alumns along with a few folks from my current school, and it did feel like a homecoming. I guess the friendship-building process isn't over yet.

Which is good, because one of the big beefs I have with the activism I saw around that time was that sense of alienation, which I attributed to the agendas set by the small group of organizers who ran all over the globe to be at the center of starting things. I always felt that the relatively demanding and austere culture of activism they seemed to be establishing was bound to close people out. But after a little mental digging today, I began to feel that it wasn't just the organizer jet-setting and the culture of activism which was so alienating.

At one point a guy speaks up in a discussion and says, Whenever I help youth make media, they bring all these archetypes from mainstream media, and I can't get them to give them up.

This kind of attitude is the reason I'm helping start a media literacy organization at Teachers College. There's so much literature out there which suggests that students already understand, and sometimes like to subvert, these archetypes, that I think it's a real shame that any educator making use of media would categorically suggest his students should give up their affinity to the mainstream media products they're so fond of. Not to mention David Buckingham's work, which suggests that working-class students feel media literacy is yet another cultural shibboleth used against them by middle-class teachers. I want to see TC students have a more nuanced perspective on media education.

But then people kept speaking up, talking about the messages they wanted to "get out" to "these communities" (the latter term was duly problematized), and a more fundamental educational issue presented itself to me. If we're just trying to "get messages out" to people, aren't we acting just like lecturers? Probably I'm just being ignorant, and there's already plenty of media organizations out there which couple their television, film, radio, and print publications with live discussion at the time of transmission. But if we want to be constructivist media educators, and really change people's minds, transmitting messages should really never happen without some kind of dialogue.

Ostensibly, forums and other web media which allow for comments should be more constructivist than mass broadcast media. But then, a comment forum is generally too unstructured to, well... change someone's mind, on purpose. Which is what activists want to do, even if they'll deny it (don't say "false consciousness" around me and then pretend you don't care what other people believe), and it's what teachers are paid to do. And I'm beginning to think the mediatedness of any medium -- the fact that you generally aren't there in time or space to adjust the impact the things you're trying to say to change someone's mind -- is going to foil any attempt to make mediated change.

wait, hold on, Everett Rogers would disagree. But then, Bruno Latour disagrees with Everett Rogers...

at least I was thinking that earlier today, though it was at a moment when the panel I was in was kinda wigging me out. and now it's late and I'm not sure I've captured it.

I can't seem to go to bed before 2 a.m. lately. Past few days I've been lucky if I've made it before 3.

Posted by me at 1:18 AM | Comments (1)

February 6, 2006

Also: What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Killing Time

A few more concerns about the potential of games as educational tools arose in my game design course today. The subject today was MDA (mechanic-dynamic-aesthetic) analysis of games. The somewhat green and nervous second instructor in the course gave a provisional list of the types of "fun" which could be had in a game -- that's the "aesthetic" element which is built from the mechanics and the dynamics which arise from the mechanics.

These include (apparently stolen from Marc Leblanc):

The instructor admonished us not to be too slavish to this list and find our own types of fun (my Warcraft-obsessed group rapidly did -- "cheating" is not on there, aside from perhaps as a subset of "puzzle," which is a subset of "challenge"); he acknowledged the list was incomplete. I'd also say it's frustrating; a whole slew of theorists have already developed more comprehensive lists which take into account findings about play across different cultures (see Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play) and thus are not as limited by the games industry's various blind spots.

Any aspersions cast aside, it is still a mostly functional toolset. My hand is currently drawn to the last tool on that rack: Submission. Not a clear term, but what Leblanc and our instructor meant by it is the enjoyment of giving yourself up to the game. This is not a type of play which is really discussed much by theorists of play, to my knowledge, unless you consider it part of Sutton-Smith's "play as security," or Beach's "surplus energy release" or "diversion."

This is the kind of play which has been worrying and nagging at me ever since I signed the papers. Those of us who have played this way also call it "addiction." I'm not sure if the APA has declared that a clinical definition yet. It is an exceedingly popular form of gaming. Check the Pew Internet Project's statistics on why and how college students, among others, play games. "Killing time" is a popular reason given. The one advertising-related panel at DiGRA last year featured a number of presenters explaining to the assembled academics that advertisers, increasingly baffled by the breakup of formerly guaranteed attention-getters like television, magazines, and radio, were keen to make or get their ads into games because games are -- their term -- "addictive."

Educators claim to want to harness the motivating elements of digital games to teach. But what if certain players are most motivated by submission? How does the fun of submission fit into our pedagogy? Does it fit better with constructivist pedagogy, or traditional drill-and-skill pedagogy? Is it really something to which we want to subject students?

If they are most engaged by submission games, will they find educational games -- which I've already stated will need to be harder than other games -- to be fun at all?

And if you've seen me walking around lately looking grim, you should know that the question on my mind is, Can I ethically lead other people into gaming environments when I personally feel that the time I spend gaming is becoming compulsive and taking away from other aspects of my life? It doesn't sit well with me. It doesn't sit well with wanting to encourage people to make their lives better.

Posted by me at 9:56 PM | Comments (4)

February 2, 2006

Count me in for the big muddle

I used to keep tabs on the more insidious forms of white supremacy, but it completely slipped my attention that Time Warner's Teen People website briefly ran a loving article on white supremacist Olsen Twins look-alike music group Prussian Blue (not safe for work -- there's Nazzies in them thar websites).

I can't believe that the words "white pride" triggered not a smidgeon of concern on the part of the editors. Tells you a thing or two about Teen People's editorial board -- so much for the media being controlled by ravening liberals.

Much has been made about one particular statement the blonde duo has made, which I quote:

"We're proud of being white, we want to keep being white," said Lynx. "We want our people to stay white … we don't want to just be, you know, a big muddle. We just want to preserve our race."

As Kwaku notes, you just have to imagine what they've learned at home to reason this way. ZOMG a black person! I shouldn't get near him/her because I might get TEH BLACKNESS!

As for me, count me in for the Big Muddle. I figure the only way to preserve the human race is to mix until racism is impossible. I present for further reading a longer article on ABCNews and a fan blog -- note in the latter references to Rudyard Kipling and the idea of the tabula rasa, which they reject. You gotta go pretty far back in the development of human knowledge to try to untangle and dispose of that particular belief...

Posted by me at 12:25 PM | Comments (3)

February 1, 2006

What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Faking the Funk: or, Why Some Games Won't Be Educational

I never finished writing up my summary of last year's DiGRA conference to post, but never mind; some of the major threads keep coming up anyway.

One prominent theme was that academics and game industry folks don't usually mix well. At the lone industry panel, both sides made noises of disdain abut each other (OK, I admit, I myself was among those who led the hissing when the panelists patted themselves on the back for achieving 25% female hiring rates); academics asked why industry members didn't read our publications more, to which the panelists responded that if they saw another damn article on player practices, they'd hurl.

Regarding educational games, one or two panelists were scornful. The panel consensus was that it wasn't existing companies' job to produce educational games; besides, everyone knows educational games suck. The former claim is likely a good thing, but as for the latter, I keep wanting to believe the suckiness could be overcome by good educational developers. Even though while I play Katamari Damacy, DDR, World of Warcraft, Nintendogs, and Vib Ribbon, there's some nagging doubt in my head that we can ever transcend the suck. Certainly Jim Gee has given us tomes full of reasons why games teach better than schools often do; I'd like to believe them.

But this semester I'm taking a class with a developer from Atari, and today he said some things which I couldn't ignore about how an engaging game is made. Many of them go counter to what educators seek to accomplish; some of them even contradict some of Jim Gee's claims.

I'm not about to make an argument that we scrap doing research on digital games in education; for motivational reasons alone, I'm still pretty sure it's worthwhile. But we need to go into game development without illusions about the forms of gaming players are used to, being clear that it may be very difficult to get them engaged in educational games -- which should be very, very different in structure from commercial games.

Warning 1: "Just because it's realistic doesn't mean it's fun."
One of the supposed benefits of gamelike education, according to Jim Gee, is that it is situated in a believable, immersive world where players can learn through hands-on practice. However, our teacher emphasized that realism must often be watered-down in order to be any fun at all.

Specifically, he noted that artificial intelligence which resembles real-world situations too closely can be a real drag in games. If you're a covert agent sneaking into an enemy camp and you encounter a guard, the guard is likely to shoot to kill. But such a quick game-over is a real buzzkill in play. So AI in games is programmed to shout a warning, fire shots calculated to miss, be a little slow on the uptake and forget about you quickly if you go out of range.

"You don't want to make players do real work," our teacher summed it up, "but you want to give them a sense of accomplishment." If we make games which are really educational, in which kids do real mental heavy lifting -- think about SimLife, which had a very realistic model of ecologies, but which a peer of mine lamented was so accurate as to be no fun at all -- will we be able to retain the much-touted motivational element of video games? If the prospect of losing their attention yet again doesn't sober you up, imagine explaining "We didn't want the kids to do real work" to the people who are already all het up about standards and want to eliminate social promotion.

Warning 2: Watch it, you're standing in the Magic Circle
Having established that realism can be problematic, the teacher later suggested in passing, as we tried to collectively define the word "game," that game activity involves goals which do not fulfill the lower levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of human needs. He later withdrew the reference to basic needs, but I don't feel he needed to, particularly in the case of digital games. Games are generally bounded by a "magic circle;" they are fun expressly because they do not have an impact on your "real" life. If they did, they might be uncomfortable, if not dangerous.

I'm still enough of an optimist to believe most educators mean to have a positive impact on students' real lives. Thus a transfer question arises: if students see games as outside their mundane affairs, would they even use the things they learn outside of the game environment?

Warning 3: Games only teach games.
It was along these lines that the teacher himself directly confronted and dismissed the possibility of educational games. At one point he put up a list of things which he thinks games teach. This included:

These are, of course, things Jim Gee also suggested games could do. But the teacher warned that players are learning to win the game, so gaming to learn is a tricky problem.

It's one which we've confronted in trying to develop a study about the effects of games in our lab. We've been looking at the game Insaniquarium, in which you manage a fishtank. A few of us younger lab hotshots think it could be used to teach abstract principles about economics or ecology, but teachers we've run the game by don't see that in it. They get hung up on how fast they have to move to feed fish and protect them from predators. And maybe they're right. What if all the player is experiencing is the speed of the game or some other part of its mechanic? Well, I suppose we could slow the game down. But even then, will they learn skills and content, or will they just press buttons?

Warning 4: Winning is all that counts.
The teacher also warned our class of prospective designers that no matter how cool we thought our game features were, players would not play them if they did not directly contribute to winning. If there were multiple ways to win, players would still concentrate on the optimal one. And even if it decreased their enjoyment of the game, they would cheat if they really wanted to win. He gave numerous examples of this goal-orientation from game development cases.

This is what's been bugging me about WoW. Despite all the side activities, the beautiful landscapes, the storyline, the opportunities for socialization, the one way to be successful and see all of the game is to level to 60. Despite all the academic literature on player styles and social interaction, the norm in game playing is to WIN.

And should we hand kids an educational game and say, "Here, play this," do you think they'll pause to mull the complexities of a historical situation or an idea? That's not what most of them do outside of class. If there are kids who want to play otherwise (as most of the girls I've surveyed for my masters' thesis seem to), they're likely to be marginalized while people who are actually "gamers" set the rules for success. Anyone else doesn't really play games.

* * *

I don't mean to imply our teacher said nothing to bring hope to the prospect of educational games. He did tickle my perennial interest in the teaching potential of "breaking" games, a childhood practice remembered fondly by the computer programmers I interviewed for my undergraduate thesis; players inevitably exploit bugs, and he urged us as designers to be prepared for this contingency. Sometimes I wonder whether educational game designers shouldn't be developing the brokenest games possible, in order to encourage players to pick them to pieces and learn how they work.

Like I said, I don't think we should scrap the project of researching games in education. But I do think it's important to listen to the working knowledge of industry professionals like my teacher. They see how games get used; they make the mechanics which make them run. And mind you, the games he was talking about weren't bad games. He was advising us how to make good games which keep people engaged for a long, long time -- some of them the very same games Gee mentions in his book. If, as educational game developers and theorists, we continue to treat games as monolithic and ignore the finer points of mechanic which could be teased out and analyzed, we set ourselves up for failure. We may not always like what industry professionals have to say, but we'll have to deal with it when our games make it to the classroom.

Posted by me at 10:23 PM | Comments (0)