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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

earlier traditions of visual representation in Japan?

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

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

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

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

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

towards narrative?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Fandom Goes Mainstream...

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

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

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

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

And that's part of what concerns Busse:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Busse writes:

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

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

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

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

A Few Links of Interest to Aca/Fan Readers

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

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

A Bit of Metablogging...

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Tale of Three Quilts

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

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

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

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

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

Hollywood Mogul 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could you start by telling us a little about yourself?

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

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

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

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

What are the major features of the game?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collective Intelligence vs. The Wisdom of Crowds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Koster extends this key point in a subsequent blog post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grafitti as an Exemplary Practice?: Tats Cru

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Turkey Day

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

Catching Up: Mostly on Media Literacy

The New and Improved Henry Jenkins

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

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

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

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

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

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

Media Snackers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning Games to Go!

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

Game Theorist Jesper Juul to Speak at MIT

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

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

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

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

Broadband and the Public Interest

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

Broadband and the Public Interest

by Stephen J. Schultze

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Youtube and the Vaudeville Aesthetic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pimp My Show!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fan Friendly Programs:

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

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

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

-- Intelligent characters who use their brains to solve problems

-- Outside characters or characters with strong internal conflicts.

--Strong, competent, and active female characters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Blogs, Lost, and Jag Studies...

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

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

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

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

Another Aca/Fan Takes Up Blogging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Developing a Taste for JAG

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fun and Games with Copyright

This seems to be a week for confessions in the blog: I have already come out as a slash writer, one who tampers with the high cannon no less; I should also confess that I am an Eagle Scout. This is not exactly the most common combination of backgrounds and identities. (I use the present tense because officially, once you earn Eagle, it is something you carry with you the rest of your life, even though I haven't really done anything with Scouting in several decades now.) Scouting was a value part of my life: I taught for the first time when I was asked to lead classes for various merit badges for my troop, including classes in photography (which ended up centering on cinema) and in Theater (which allowed me to script and direct plays.) I can still recite the scout oath and still try to follow much of its standards. I have had more difficulty in recent years by the way the organization has gone to court to try to block membership to gay scoutmasters and scouts. I also lost some more respect for the organization when I read recently about a project conducted by the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles in association with the Motion Picture Association of America which seems designed to indoctrinate the youth into a particular ideological perspective on copyright and intellectual property.

My MIT colleague David Thorburn has shared with me the following excerpt from a recent story in the New York Times:

The 52,000 Boy Scouts in Los Angeles have a new virtue to strive for: respect for copyrights. In return for learning about the harms of downloading pirated movies and music, they will be awarded an activity patch showing a film reel, a music CD and the international copyright symbol, a "C" enclosed in a circle, The Associated Press reported. By means of a curriculum devised by the movie industry, the Scouts will be instructed in basic copyright law and learn to identify five types of copyrighted works and three ways that copyrighted materials may be stolen. In addition, they must choose an activity from a list that includes visiting a movie studio to see how many people may be harmed by film piracy, and creating public services announcements urging others not to steal music or movies. "Working with the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles, we have a real opportunity to educate a new generation about how movies are made, why they are valuable and hopefully change attitudes about intellectual property.

A little research found the actual curriculum on the web and not surprisingly, it makes no mention of the role of fair use as a balance for the more extreme assertions of intellectual property control being promoted by the film industry. Here are some excerpts:

Intellectual property is no different than physical property. Stealing intellectual property that is copyrighted is against the law and can have serious consequences. Movies, music, games, and software are forms of intellectual property that are usually copyrighted to protect the people who make them.

Some of the required activities include:

Demonstrate your knowledge of the following:

a. What is copyright?

b.Why do copyrights matter?

c.Identify five different types of copyrighted works (two of which may be your own). For each, give the author/creator and the date the work was copyrighted.

d. name three ways copyrighted works may be taken.

Visit a video sharing network or peer to peer website and identify which materials are copyrighted and which aren't.

Go to a movie and stay through all the credits. Tell you counselor/or scout leader who you think, in addition to the main actors and actresses, would be hurt if the film was stolen?

Keep in mind, of course, that the Boy Scouts of America does not yet offer a Media Literacy merit badge -- though the Girl Scouts do. There is a Communications badge which is required for Eagle but it's emphasis is on interpersonal communications and public speaking. And there is an optional Cinematography merit badge which focuses entirely on the filmmaking technology and process.

The scouts who were asked to participate in this program, then, are given no instruction which might speak to the structure of the American entertainment industry, the corporate interests which shape the media we consume, the role of participatory culture in contemporary society, or the forms of appropriation and parody which might be protected under Fair Use provisions.

Of course, when I was in the Scouts, there was a specific provision which prohibited you from engaging in partisan political activities while wearing the uniform. Boy Scouts were encouraged to promote citizenship in the abstract sense, including helping to get people to vote, but they were not to take sides on public policies while acting as Scouts. I have been trying to find this policy on the web but so far, have not had much success. Since the activities described above clearly take the side of the media industry on an important public policy debate, it seems curious to me that Scouts were not only encouraged to do these activities while in uniform but that they resulted in a badge which could be sewed onto the uniform.

My Secret Life as a Slasher

So, my dirty little secret is finally out in the open. A few weeks ago, I did a podcast interview for Emma Grant at Slashcast about slash fan fiction and spoke openly about the fact that I have one published story out there in a relatively obscure little zine called Not What You Think. As a gift to all of my readers out there in LJ-Land, I figured, now that the cat is out of the bag, that I would share some excerpts from the story itself and for the rest of you, I figured I might use this to offer some reflections on the nature of slash as a form of critical commentary, an issue which I raised here in the blog a few weeks ago. The story is called "Golden Idol." It was published, if you can call it that, in 1998 and promptly disappeared into obscurity. Here's how the story starts:

'Another Idol has displaced me,' the fair young girl in the mourning dress exclaimed, her eyes misted with tears. 'If it can cheer and comfort you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grief.'

He gasped, stung by her sudden revelation. She knew! Nancy had found out the secret that he hadn't uttered aloud even in private, and if she knew, who else might know? Did he? He trembled at the thought and then tried to mask his discomfort with a half-felt denial.

'What idol has displaced you?'

He wanted to probe, hungered for an answer, and yet feared to find out how much she knew. He was certain in any case that she would not be able to put what she knew into words. His secret, as he had always known, was unspeakable and so her language was circumspect. She hinted at things without saying them directly.

But how could she know? He had always acted the part of the perfect gentleman with her, since that day long ago when they first spoke of marriage and began to imagine a future together. He had taken her to dances and let her show off her new beau to her blushing friends. He had brought her flowers and had dinner at her house. As time passed, they had moved from speculations of marriage to treating it as something that would happen someday, then soon, then in a matter of months, whenever he got his affairs in order, whenever he was sure he would be able to support them. He was eager to believe that things could work out between them, that they were in love, even if he often had trouble finding those feelings inside himself, even if his emotions towards her lacked the intensity with which romantic love was described in books or songs.

He danced the dance -- did it matter so much that he didn't really quite hear the music? He held her hand, on occasions when it was deemed appropriate, and stroked it softly, admiring her slender digits, running his fingers ever so gently along her wrist. He kissed her playfully on the ear when that was appropriate, uncertain if this was too much of an advance for someone in their position or not enough of one. He always played the part, always aware of an audience that included her but also many others. He tried to convince her (not to mention himself) that all of this came naturally, spontaneously, grew from honest emotions (which he was increasingly doubtful that anyone in his position really felt.)

Note: Not What You Expect is now back in circulation if you wish to order it and read the entire story, you can do so here.

Yet somehow he knew he was lying, and more to the point, somehow she knew he was lying. That much was certain. The sham was unveiled, and with its demise had ended his hopes of settling comfortably, easily, respectably, into married life. Perhaps she had known even before he had known himself. But that only increased his guilt since this meant that perhaps she knew him better than anyone else and had come to understand his emotions, his thoughts -- even his desires? -- from the inside out.

The seconds seemed to linger in the air, and she was not responding to his question. She looked at him with hurt, perhaps a little anger, though less than he would have expected under the circumstances. Did he imagine a little pity in her eyes, or was it dread? He waited and she waited and then he asked again, "What idol has displaced you?"...

"A golden one," she said, again speaking ambiguously, telling only what was necessary to extract both of them from their painful circumstances, moving forward with a dignity that was mixed with more than a little denial.

A golden one. How tangled that one remark seemed to him at that moment, for there were two economies at stake in this discussion. There was the economy of business, of profits and loss, of red ink and black ink, of ledgers and columns; and there was the economy of desire, of things saved and spent, of things consumed and yet remained to be consumed. There was the gold, silver and copper that he could hold in his hands and count, and there was the gold, silver, and copper that he desired and yet could never touch -- the gold of Jacob's wild shock of hair pulled up in a tail, the silver of his eyes so keen and shrewd, and the copper of his glistening skin flushed with sweat. And there was the gold that passed between them, the coins that had touched the skin he dared not touch and that passed into his own hands still warm from Jacob's body.

He tried to pretend that they were speaking only of crowns and shillings and so protested that the world was unjust in issuing almost as much reproach to those who worked hard for their money, who labored and earned and saved and counted and stored away their money, as they did to the poor and worthless, lazy and lame. Perhaps she was, after all, simply protesting the many hours he spent at his work, the hours he neglected her to earn money. Yet he knew he could not extract himself that simply.

The time he spent earning money was not only time he had not spent with her; it was time he had spent with Jacob. He always found excuses to prolong it. They worked side by side in silence, often for hours on end, so close to each other that he could feel his partner's breath on the back of his neck. He would lose count, counting instead the ebb and flow of his partner's breathing, straining to hear the sound of his heart beating, to be aware of his body, until Jacob would speak, jarring him back to consciousness, pulling him back to the world of bargains and investments. Jacob never rebuked him for his dreaminess, for his inattention to the hard facts of the matter at hand but laughed softly, a gleam in his eyes.

If the hour was late and the day's work had been sufficiently profitable, they would close the big leather books and walk out into the streets together, stopping at their private club for a few drinks. Those who knew them rarely saw one without the other, and after a while, many of them had trouble remembering which was which. They had been partners in business for a little over a year at that point. Still he had trouble remembering when it had started since those arrangements had become so comfortable that it was harder and harder to imagine when they had not been together. He had already forgotten what it was like to be alone -- to be without a partner, to be without a fiancée, to be working for old Fezziweg as a clerk, to be away from the warm glow of Jacob Marley.

Part of the pleasure of publishing the story for the first time in the context of a multimedia zine was to let people slowly discover for themselves who this story was about. I got the idea for writing a Scrooge/Marley slash story while listening to a tape of Patrick Stewart's one man show version of the Christmas Carol. Suddenly, for the first time, the scene when Scrooge breaks up with his finance Nancy had popped out at me. It was one of the few times in the entire novel that we hear from someone who can see inside Scrooge and really understands what he is thinking. Normally what characters say about Scrooge is projected onto him from a more distanced perspective. I was intrigued by this phrase, "a Golden Idol," and the way that she presents this "idol" as if it were a flesh and blood rival for his affections. She most likely is referring to his workaholic tendencies and to his greed, those traits we most associate with Scrooge, yet what if she wasn't? What if there really were a secret rival who stood between Scrooge and his intended bride?

Every line in this scene comes directly from the novel. What I was doing here was recontextualizing Dicken's original language to offer up an alternative interpretation of what the characters might have been thinking -- this integration of original dialogue and internal monologue is a common literary device in fan fiction. I was rewriting it for the purpose of critical commentary and in the process, I was trying to include as many elements from the original novel as possible while offering explanations for the character issues which have long concerned literary critics writing about the book. Even the idea that the partnership between Scrooge and Marley might have a homosocial/homoerotic undertone would not seem radical in the era of queer literary criticism. (For more on this point, see the slash chapter in Textual Poachers). But from an academic perspective, the fact that I used a fictional form rather than an analytic essay to construct this argument might have seen nonconventional.

The Victorians had been very interested in using economic vocabularies to talk about the expenditure of bodily fluids that took place through sexual encounters and so I played with this to describe the relations between the two men.

Let me continue further with the scene we started:

He had met Marley years before when they had been schoolboys, he an upperclassman who tried hard to teach the young Jacob his proper place but instead had been charmed by the lad, captivated by his quick wit and warm smile, fascinated by the workings of his mind, and stirred by his developing body. They had enjoyed a closeness then that no adult could know, become intimates in every sense of the word, sharing everything, withholding nothing, until the whole school was atalk about their crush, until the threat of scandal had loomed large on the horizon and begun to play upon even Scrooge's mind. Then his father, perhaps hearing gossip, perhaps getting a report from the schoolmaster, withdrew him from that school, took him home and 'made him a man.' His father was harsh and unloving, knowing little of matters of the heart. His mother had died when he was young, so there was little to bring joy into that house. His young sister, sweet little Fan, had done her best to reconcile the two of them, not really ever understanding the differences that kept them apart. Inevitably, voices were raised, harsh words were uttered and neither man could find reconciliation. When he had been younger, after his mother died, the old man had beaten him, punching him in the ribs, slapping him in the face, until he ran away and hid. Yet when he had returned home to find a father who no longer drank and who had discovered religion and so had learned to contain his violent rage, Scrooge found that some things hurt even more than fists. His father prayed for him every night and made certain that he knew that he knew that he had fallen far short of the old man's sense of what was proper, normal, respectable. His father's harsh whispers, not able to confront the problem directly, not able to forget it either, bruised him with their intensity. His eyes, stone hard, merciless, unforgiving, cut into his flesh.

At last Scrooge left, seeking his fortune elsewhere, looking for some place where he could escape his forbidden feelings for Jacob and avoid his father's wrath and judgment. He had gone to work at Fezziweg's, starting as a young apprentice and gradually gaining more responsibilities. Scrooge found in the red-faced, round and jolly man a second father, one as kind-hearted and generous as his own father was bitter and brutal. Fezziweg trust him and through his trust, Scrooge had learned to trust himself again and had opened himself up to friendship, this time with a young man named Dick Wilkens....

Dicken's novel includes surprisingly few elements, tell us relatively little about Scrooge. We are expected to see him from the outside -- as a cranky old man -- and not from the inside -- as someone who is described as deeply lonely, even as a boy. I wanted to use this story to examine that loneliness and to use that loneliness to explain what happened between Scrooge and Marley.

Part of what interested me was the doubling that occurs in the book as we see Scrooge as an old man watching himself within scenes that occurred when he was a much younger man and the sense of powerlessness he must have felt reliving those moments without being able to change them. And this led me deeper and deeper into thoughts about being haunted by memories, about wanting to say things that had gone unsaid or do things that hadn't been done. As I thought about what kind of slash story I could construct about Scrooge and Marley, I realized it needed not to be a love story per se but about the story of a romance that almost happened and that Scrooge, so much concerned by the judgment of the world, had backed away from. It became a story about how one internalizes homophobia and how it blocks one from the experience of one's desires.

Scrooge, no an old man, his face hardened into a caricature of itself, had trouble remembering times in his life when he had not been alone, cut off from the others around him. As a young boy, crying in the school house rather than return home to his father, he watched through the window as a parade of mummers passed, bursting with Yuletide spirits. As a young man, having at last found his one true friend, he was forcefully removed from the boarding school by his father and isolated once again, this time in a suffocating realm of Bible verses and condemnations. As a young clerk working for Fezziweg, trying to play the part of the respectable adult, he learned that the illusion of friendship and community could be maintained only if one didn't inspect it too closely or demand from it more than it was prepared to give. As a young suitor, he fumbled to convince the world that he was very much in love; as a young businessman sitting at night in the club by himself, he pretended not to care that no one invited him to join him for a drink.

My story contains very little sex in the end -- this is unusual for slash but not unheard of. What interested me was the emotional life of the characters and that is certainly the driving force behind most slash. I have them make love one time in a burst of enthusiasm on Christmas eve and then have Scrooge, alone in the dark, feel shame and crawl away, never to speak of the experience again. The closeness they feel is shattered by their efforts to consummate their relationship sexually (the reverse of what happens in most slash). And this prepares us for the last phases of their life together.

In his later years, after that fateful night when everything had come apart for them, Scrooge and Marley became simply a business concern. The two old men worked side by side yet scarcely spoke as they pored over their books. Marley came to communicate with him only through his clerk, Bob Cratchet. In the years since Marley's death, there was no more hope for them, no possibility of changing what had been said or finishing what had gone unsaid. Marley had died, and he had gone on living, though he had by that point become so paralyzed that he could scarcely be called alive. He went through life snarling at those who demanded form him what was no longer his to give, angry at those who enjoyed the happiness and good fellowship that he was denied, and harsh towards those who wanted what he had without being prepared to pay the brutal price.

I was fascinated that Marley returns from the dead to communicate with Scrooge and then shows him nothing of their life together, even though on other levels Dickens hints that this must have been the most defining relationship of Scrooge's life. One reason why people initially struggle to imagine a Scrooge/Marley story is that we never see Marley in his prime, as a young man, and have only the image of the rotting corpse with the slack jaw and the chains. So, in the story, I have Scrooge trying to read through the lines, looking for the scenes that Marley doesn't show him, and in the end, this is the level on which they communicate with each other.

He was confused. What was the meaning of any of these scenes that the Ghost had brought him to witness? Why these scenes, not others? What pattern was being slowly but surely developed form these fragments of time, bits of old memories, many of which he had long ago forgotten? It seemed to him that these choices missed the point somehow, did not fit within the narrative had had constructed to make sense of his own life, seemed to point consistently to a life he had not lived and the lies that he had tried to tell the world. But where was the truth? Perhaps some outside observer might look upon these as turning points in his life, but surely Marley, of all people, knew better.

Marley had returned from the dead -- for that was certain, Marley was dead, dead as a doornail, dead as a coffin nail, dead. Yet he had come back to him, at no small cost he was certain. To what purpose, what end?

Marley had sought to warn him about the cost of denying the world its due, about the price he had paid for hardening his heart and shutting out his feelings. He was prepared to learn that lesson as best he could and act upon it insofar as was appropriate.

But these were the wrong moments. Removed from context, they made little or no sense. He could witness the actions, hear the words, but he could not feel the emotions. The people around him meant even less to him than they had the first time. Could the truth of anyone's life be summed up in a few scattered moments without looking at what had come before and after? Were the words that had been said so many years before adequate to the occasion when he was powerless, as a mere witness, to rewrite them, to modify them, to speak them again but try to convey their meaning more fully? What mattered ultimately, he feared, was not what he had said and done but what hadn't happened, the silences rather than the utterances. What mattered were the gaps which fell between the scenes that the world chose to remember. That had always been the problem....

The Ghost had not offered him the chance, which he would gladly have taken, to relive that moment when he saw Jacob again at his club, that firm embrace, that happy reunion, or the time when they agreed to become partners, or those heady first days as a company when the two together gained the success that had been denied them both separately and they felt as if the world were out there waiting for them to pluck it like a bauble. The Ghost didn't let him hear Marley's laughter again or see his smile or watch the sparkle in his eyes. Instead he was forced to watch himself pretend a love he did not feel and try to accept the release Nancy was offering him with appropriate grace and appropriate regret.

None of that mattered. At that moment all that mattered was Marley and the time they had spent together and the scenes the Ghost was omitting from this journey down memory's crooked pathways. It was as if Marley had never existed, had not been part of his life -- the best part, the most important part, the only true and meaningful part. It was as if Marley was shoving him away with all of his might towards the life that might have been his if he had simply forsaken his unnatural love and conformed to what was normal and expected of him.

Everything in the next passage is there in Dicken's novel. There's a lot that seems psychologically odd about Scrooge's relationship to Marley if we read the novel closely yet these are the passages that get skipped over in the dramatization of the story. This is a good example of how slash writing requires the marshalling of evidence, the presentation of data, which supports the slash interpretation -- again, like other forms of critical commentary. The actions I describe are in the book; the motives I ascribe to them come from my analysis of the book through the slash interpretation.

Scrooge could not bring himself to paint out Marley's name on their sign, so he still went by Scrooge and Marley some seven years later, and people still came there looking for Marley and settling for Scrooge. He could not bring himself to fire Cratchet, even though his very presence was painful to him, since it reminded him of the times when he and his partner were unwilling or unable to speak to each other. He snarled at Cratchet and he punished Cratchet because he needed to strike out at someone and Cratchet was at his mercy. He wanted Cratchet to go away and take the memories of Marley with him, but he could not fire him, no matter how much he grumbled about giving him a day off at Christmas or using too much coal to light the wood stove. He couldn't fire Cratchet because, for all of the sad memories he provoked, Marley had hired him, had trusted him, had valued his friendship, and he could not undo what Marley had done. Scrooge moved into Marley's house to be close to him, to feel the presence of his spirit in the things the man had accumulated, and Scrooge slept, when he was able to do so, in Marley's bed, the bed curtains still hanging there as they had that night. He grew to hate Christmas as he did no other day of the year because it had brought him nothing but misery and stood as a reminder of how out of favor he was with the world's expectations.

In the end, I am impressed by the healing which Marley offers Scrooge in returning from the dead and offering him back memories of his life while it is still possible to change. Several writers have theorized that slash is a genre about nurturance, about men trying to heal each other of the pains caused by their repressed sexual and emotional lives, often in the forms of nursing each other back to physical or mental health. Seen through this lens, Marley's return to Scrooge is a great romantic gesture -- certainly embodying the idealized notion of romantic male friendship that many writers have found in slash.

Marley had come back from the dead to speak with him again, after all those years of silence, those years when the office had been like a tomb and those years when Marley had been buried in his tomb, as if it mattered, in the end, whether the silence between them was shared with a body that was living or dead. What must Marley have gone through to win that right denied so many other doomed souls, to return for even a moment to the world of the living, to intervene in the affairs of men and set them right again, to try to heal Scrooge before it was too late. But then Marley had always been a gifted negotiator and a good man for a bargain.

Marley had, miracle of miracles, come back for him, to him, still cared about him, still loved him above all men, still cared about what he did and what he felt and what fate befell him, still remembered the days and hours of his life and still lamented the times that they had not spent together or that, spent together, had come to nothing but painful silence.

So there you have it - a slashed up Christmas Carol, just in time for the holidays. I would offer the whole story but I no longer have it in an electronic form, only in hard copy. But I wanted to at least retype these bits to give you some sense of what the story was like and what it taught me about the nature of slash.

The Craft of Science Fiction

Those of you in the Boston vicinity may want to make your way to the MIT Media Lab's Bartos Theatre this Thursday for what promises to be a fascinating event -- "The Craft of Science Fiction" -- which will feature of a reading by Four time Nebula Award winning writer Joe Haldeman (The Forever War) and a discussion of his work. I will be moderating the event which is being hosted by the MIT Communications Forum from 5-7 pm. Those who can't make the event can catch the streaming audio version which will go up on the Communications Forum website several days later. Something of the tone of the discussion may be suggested by some comments about science fiction's place in contemporary culture which Haldeman penned for the CMS newsletter:

Whatever its shortcomings, actual science fiction (as opposed to fantasy tricked out with space ships and ray guns) is a bastion of rationalism. The universe works by rules, even if those rules are imperfectly understood. Problems are solved not by wishing things were otherwise but by trying to understand what is actually wrong and taking action to change it. We live in a world where wishful thinking and magical thinking prevail at the highest levels of leadership. Our own government thinks it can control reality by denying scientific evidence. We're in a war that at least one side justifies by ferocious religious dogma. More Americans believe in ghosts than in evolution. For that matter, more than half believe the story of Creation in the Bible are literally true and are waiting for the Rapture. Belief in oddball ideas like faith healing, extrasensory perception, communication with the dead and haunted houses have

all been on the increase in the past decade. These people don't read science fiction, or at least they don't read it well. But they may read books that are shelved in the science fiction section, or go to movies that call themselves sci-fi....

Basically, Haldeman, a hard sf guy to the Nth degree, is drawing a distinction between science fiction which he sees as a fundamentally rationalist mode of literature (and thus as a tool to teach scientific reasoning) and sci-fi which he thinks is increasingly faith based and mired in fantasy. For Haldeman, science fiction is both a mode of popular science education and a form of social commentary. And as such, he feels it does increasingly important work in the face of what he sees as anti-science attitudes at large in the country today. As I said, lot's here to talk about.

Almost a decade ago, Joe Haldeman and I organized a science fiction reading series at MIT which brought to campus such writers as Octavia Butler, Bruce Sterling, Orson Scott Card, Frederick Pohl, Neil Gaiman, and many others. We paired national figures with local authors from the greater Boston area such as Ellen Kushner, James Patrick Kelly, Allen Steele, and Alexander Jablakov. Buried deep on the Communications Forum website are a series of essays I wrote about the science fiction writers we featured as well as transcripts of the public conversations we hosted. What follows is an excerpt from the essay I wrote at the time about Haldeman's work -- particularly about how his experiences during the Vietnam War shaped the themes of his science fiction writing. It should offer good background reading for anyone planning to attend this event. You can also read the transcript of a conversation between Haldeman and fellow hard science fiction writer Gregory Benford.

Joe Haldeman (1943- )

"Life begins in a bloody mess and sometimes it ends the same way, and only odd people seek out blood between those times, maybe crazy people."

-- Joe Haldeman

Joe Haldeman's vision of the universe was profoundly shaped by the Vietnam War. Vietnam surfaces as a theme, a backdrop, or a reference point in many of his stories. Born in Oklahoma and raised in Puerto Rico, New Orleans, Washington D.C. and Alaska, Haldeman was drafted in 1967. He fought in the Central Highlands of Vietnam as a combat engineer with the 4th Division. He received a Purple Heart for severe wounds he suffered during the war.

Haldeman's wrenching personal experiences enable him to write about war with a rare, brutal honesty. What's intriguing is that while many of his obsessions are with the past, his favorite way of exploring those issues is through representations of the future.

His first novel, War Year (1972) was a realistic account of the war. His second, The Forever War (1975) read the conflict through the filter of "space opera," and in turn, radically rewrote the conventions of that subgenre. Bran Aldiss has described the core Space Opera formula:

"Ideally the Earth must be in peril, there must be a quest and a man to watch the mighty hour. That man must confront aliens and exotic creatures. Space must flow past the ports like wine from a pitcher. Blood must run down the palace steps, and ships launch out into the louring deep. There must be a woman fairer than the skies and a villain darker than the Black Hole. And all must come right in the end."

This formula shaped science fiction's representation of war -- from the lusty pulp sagas of E.E. "Doc" Smith to Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers and George Lucas's Star Wars trilogy. The "Space Opera" subgenre depended upon a peculiarly American conception of war, grounded in idealism, optimism, technological power and a simple black-and-white morality. But, the Vietnam experience changed how Americans understood the nature of war, and Haldeman's Forever War demonstrates how absurd many of the old cliches look to someone who had seen real combat duty.

His writing is blunt, earthy, and anti-heroic. His battle sequences are as technically detailed and vivid as any in science fiction. But, his war is anything but a glorious adventure. Haldeman depicts war as the pathetic slaughter of an enemy incapable of defending itself. More of his characters die in accidents training for battle (or of shock when they must confront the horror of their own actions) than in their initial military action against the Taurans. Much of their time is spent waiting and only a fraction is spent ducking and covering, trying to stay alive in the face of enemy attack.

The causes of the "forever war" are murky; his protagonists are fighting against an enemy they can not comprehend. No one really knows what started the war or why the stakes are so high.

The book's anti-hero never has any real sense of what he is fighting to protect. Private William Mandella is a draftee, chosen because of his superior intellect and education. (Of course, during the Vietnam era, college boys were exempted from the draft!) He feels himself to be fundamentally unsuited for military life, yet the military gives him few options except to re-enlist, blacklisting him from all other employment.

Using ships that travel faster than light, the fighting takes him light years from earth. The campaigns take a subjective time of months, but span centuries in human history back home. Mandella is one of the few who survives nearly 1,200 years of war. He has no family, few friends and those few can be killed or transferred at any moment. As the war progresses, he has little or no chance to understand the men placed under his command, since they are products of Earth cultures about which he knows nothing. Late in the book, Mandella poignantly calculates whom he might save in an emergency:

"The thought did dip into my conscience that I could gather up eleven people and board the fighter we had hidden safe behind the stasis field....I even went to the extreme of making a mental list of the eleven, trying to think of eleven people who meant more to me than the rest. Turned out I'd be picking six at random."

Under such circumstances, war becomes meaningless, a situation no one controls, as the protagonist learns as he moves from raw recruit to commanding officer without ever getting a firm grasp on the events around him.

Truth is, of course, the first casualty of war. In The Forever War, Haldeman gives us several intriguing glimpses of how public opinion is artificially shaped to build and maintain support for the prolonged fighting. In the war's early years, soldiers are pumped with hypnotic suggestions to insure that they conceptualize the war and the enemy in propagandistic terms, images which are triggered by a centralized command just as the troops move into combat:

My mind reeled under the strong pseudo-memories: Shaggy hulks that were Taurans (not at all what we now knew they looked like) boarding a colonists' vessel, eating babies while mothers watched in screaming terror (The colonists never took babies; they wouldn't stand the acceleration), then raping the women to death with huge veined purple members (ridiculous that they would feel desire for humans), holding the men down while they plucked flesh from their living bodies and gobbled it (as if they could assimilate the alien protein)....A hundred grisly details as sharply remembered as the events of a minute ago, ridiculously overdone and logically absurd. But while my conscious mind was rejecting the silliness, somewhere much deeper, down in that sleeping animal where we keep our real motives and morals, something was thirsting for alien blood, secure in the conviction that the noblest thing a man could do would be to die killing one of those horrible monsters. I knew it was all purest soyashit, and I hated the men who had taken such obscene liberties with my mind, but I could even hear my teeth grinding, feel my cheeks frozen in a spastic grin, blood-lust.

These images mirror common themes in wartime propaganda, including those promulgated by publications like Reader's Digest throughout the Vietnam War.

Those back home receive no more reliable information. When he returns home after his first hitch, Mandella tries to correct misperceptions about the war, but finds his words re-edited or fabricated by the news media: "He had kept me talking and talking in order to get a wide spectrum of sounds, from which he could synthesize any kind of nonsense." If Mandella is not exactly the hero we anticipate from a space opera, the news media transforms him into one for the purposes of shaping popular opinion.

Worlds, the first of a major trilogy, offers Haldeman's take on the student "revolutions" of the 1960s. His protagonist, Marianne O'Hara, comes to NYU from an off-world colony to major in American Studies and finds herself pulled deeper and deeper into political conspiracies. What begins as a "research project" in comparative political and economic cultures ends up being a matter of life and death. She is never sure whether she is working for or against the overthrow of the government, struggling to find the truth despite constant manipulations of information from all parties. Haldeman places no more faith in revolutions than he does in war.

The problem of communication between alien cultures runs through his work, often with good intentions ending badly for all involved, as in the slaughter that ensues as a result of an ill-considered and ill-informed ethnographic expedition in "Seasons." As a Xeologist in "Seasons" explains:

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, old style, there were dozens of isolated cultures still existing without metals or writing or even, in some cases, agriculture or social organization beyond the family. None of them survived more than a couple of generations beyond their contact with civilization.... The records are fascinating not only for the information about the primitives, but also for what they reveal of the investigating culture's unconscious prejudices. My own specialties were the Maori and Eskimo tribe and (by necessary association) the European and American cultures that investigated and more or less benignly destroyed them.

"A Tangled Web" offers a more comic (and somewhat more optimistic) take on what happens when businessmen confuse mastery over a language with understanding of an alien culture. The message seems to be that if we could so badly misunderstood our enemy in Vietnam, we are ill-equipped to deal with even more alien cultures who come to us from other worlds.

"Ghosts," memories of the war, haunt Haldeman's writing. A recurring theme in his fiction is the image of characters circling through the same traumatic event, again and again, trying either to achieve some moment of clarity or to avert fate. In "The Cure," the protagonist restages the same disturbing dream many times, trying to find an ending free of bloodshed. Images of brutal violence -- a rotting body in the jungle, the smell of burning flesh, the gurgle of blood -- surface in many Haldeman stories, appearing, often with startling intensity, when we least expect them. The war's impact on Haldeman's fiction can be seen in his titles, such as Planet of Judgement, All My Sins Remembered, Study War No More, Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds, and 1968.

Haldeman writes across many different genres, ranging from supernatural horror to hard science fiction, from psychodrama to broad satire, from spy thrillers to Star Trek novelizations. Yet underlying most of his stories is a sense of discomfort and dread. "The Cure" opens with a virtuoso passage, evoking almost all of the major genres of popular fiction, yet in each the protagonist seems doomed to an all-but-certain death.

His protagonists must often struggle with wounds (both psychological and physical) frequently linked to their wartime experiences. In "The Hemingway Hoax," a series of time paradoxes allows the protagonists to shift consciousness from body to body across a string of parallel universes. Each of his bodies was wounded in a different place during the same wartime incident. An inch higher or lower marks the dramatic difference between sexual potency and life-long pain. "Images" describes a healing erotic encounter between a man and a woman, each badly scarred, each so self-conscious about their bodies that they have cut themselves off from all sexual outlets except voyeurism.

Many of these shattering experiences result in profound alienation from the body. The protagonists in The Forever War become estranged from their own flesh, when new limbs are grown to replace amputated parts; no one else can tell that their bodies have been altered, yet they still have difficulty bonding with their "prosthesis." A doctor warns two lovers, both amputee patients, that "you're going to constantly trigger memories of pain and loss for each other." "More Than the Sum of the Parts" pushes this theme further, showing how the cybernetic replacement of human flesh results in a gradual loss of all ties to the human body.

From Serious Games to Serious Gaming

Last week, I presented a keynote address at the Serious Games Summit held in Washington DC. The event drew together participants from all of the groups which constitute the serious games movement -- educators, activists, entrepreneurs, government officials, military, emergency workers, scientists, therapists, nonprofits, foundations, and doctors. As such the serious games movement is a powerful illustration of what Yochai Benkler has taught us about networked culture -- the ways that it creates new and unexpected points of contact between commercial, amateur, nonprofit, educational, and governmental forces which are shaping the contemporary communications landscape. As I told the group there, it is unlikely that there was very many other circumstances which might result in a military leader, a corporate HR person, and a political activist sitting down to break bread together, yet at the Serious Games Summit, these groups were all trying to see what they could learn from each other. If these folks do their jobs well, there will not be such a gathering in a few years time because each of the subfields they represent will have expanded until they can support their own convening. And indeed, we are already seeing more specialized meetings for those involved in games for health, games for education, and so forth.

If you want to see my presentation itself, check out this webcast of the talk (1). Much of what I had to say in the first part of the talk was already stated in an earlier post on my blog, Getting Serious About Serious Games. A primary goal of this talk was to suggest how the ideas from Convergence Culture might inform the work of those of us who are trying to produce games for learning. You might see this talk, in part, as a response to some criticisms that Ian Bogost raised about my book -- that it was too invested in commercial culture and didn't have enough to say about noncommercial uses of media. I see these remarks as pointing to ways that the serious games movement might benefit from a greater understanding of concepts like collective intelligence, participatory culture, and transmedia storytelling.

Today, I want to pick up on an important theme which ran through the talk -- my goal was to shift the discussion from talking about serious games (as in a product) towards talking about serious gaming (as a process). .

Learning as a Process, Not a Product

Several years ago, I was approached by a Christian organization which wanted to construct an arcade where all of the games would promote prosocial values. They had believed the stories that suggested that violent games "programmed" young people to become school shootists and they wanted to design games which "programmed" young people to become saints instead of sinners. Often, when I talk to reporters, they act as if we could just plant kids in front of a black box and have them "learn" as if learning required nothing more than absorbing content. And teachers worry that they will be replaced by a computer terminal which will be more fun, more efficient, and more cost effective than the human labor involved in current pedagogical practices.

These comments suggest a core misunderstanding about the role games may play in the educational process. We see games not so much as programmes with content that must be delivered but rather as 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 which takes place around game play, as a catalyst for a broader range of other learning activities.

Games as Interdisciplinary Spaces

Speaking at the Education Arcade conference which we hosted at E3 several years ago, Will Wright offered his vision of the relationship of games to education. It's a long quote but worth reading slowly and carefully:

"Our whole idea of schooling is based around this industrial model: here's the stuff that you're going to study; we'll fill you up with that knowledge. Before education was quite so structured, people wandered a little more freely across the landscape of learning. We keep trying to think about how we can use games to make people learn something. How do we use them to communicate content? Whereas, the most effective uses I've seen of games are actually more on the motivational side. It really strikes me how much kids can get motivated by playing a game and then all of a sudden they discover that the subject they always thought was going to be boring is actually totally interesting....I can imagine some kind of technology where game makers could very cheaply mark up the game with little tabs, you know, that kids could click and they would bring them to external resources, maybe on the web. It could be even like Slashdot with all kinds of people adding annotations. If you're interested in longboats, click here and you get the top links for longboats. The game remains an entertainment experience, but it's really motivating you. It's not like, you like chemistry; here's a game for chemistry. Basically here's the entertaining experience that covers a lot of ground;; it's very interdisciplinary. Typically teachers look at the interdisciplinary pockets in these games and say, 'you know, let's do a game about chemistry,' or about this or that. That's a very hard game design problem....The best games will probably be very interdisciplinary and cross all these boundaries. The chemistry teacher will like a little segment of it or the history teacher will like a little segment, and the kid going through there will be motivated by the different aspects. It's very hard to package a really compelling experience into one disciplinary boundary."

The learning which games foster, in Wright's model, is "undisciplined" in the best sense of the world -- the child is encouraged to pursue their interests where-ever they lead without regard to the way schools divide up content or time. And different kids might pursue different interests side by side within the same game learning from each other. We can read Wright as arguing for multipurpose game environments which are not restricted by the configurations of knowledge we find in school syllabi or textbooks. Second Life looks something like the world Wright is describing -- a space where many different groups are conducting educational experiments of all kinds and where those educational experiences take place alongside a variety of other kinds of experiments in social, political, or economic interactions. We can also see something of the multidisciplinary approach to games and education through the work of Whyville, an online game world set up to get young girls interested in science but which introduced an in game economic system to reward points for participation in the various science activities. The Whyville team has discovered that the economic transactions -- and the production of stuff for trade -- does not simply motivate the other learning activities; they become important sites of learning in their own right, helping girls conceptualize themselves as entrepreneurs as well as scientists.

Wright's notion that we might simply annotate a traditional game, providing a series of links to other sources of information which might enhance the game play experience, represents another way of thinking about gaming as a process which is not contained within the game itself. I recall Kurt Squire describing the work he has done with the use of Civilization in high school world history classes; he suggested that he would sometimes catch students coming into class early and "cheating" by scanning through their textbooks for information which might help them perform better in the game. In that sense, the best games encourage us to look for information beyond their borders as we try to solve the problems they contain.

Serious Games and Participatory Culture

Educators might also benefit from tapping the participatory impulses within games culture -- especially by harnessing gamers interest in modding and machinema. I have already discussed in this blog the ways that projects such as MyPopStudio or our Cantina Improv exercises have encouraged young people to learn how culture works by taking media texts apart and remixing the pieces. The Education Arcade at MIT is one of a number of academic research groups which has found modding to be an effective approach to quickly generating educational games. For example, we took the fantasy role play game, Neverwinter Nights, and transformed it step by step into Colonial Williamsburg on the eve of the American Revolution for a game which could be used to teach American History.

This approach allows us to get a game produced quickly and cheaply by building on the existing framework and programming Bioware had provided. We were even able to reprogram the game in significant ways, such as creating a system for interaction with the nonplayer characters that acknowledged the role of class, gender, race, and political divides in colonial society. Yet, there were other constraints on what we could get the game engine to do which meant that the commercial game left some imprint on the finished title. And we faced more difficulty than we might have imagined getting this game into schools because schools had to buy the existing commercial game before they could play our mods and there was resistance given the "dark arts" themes running through Neverwinter Nights. Ironically, at the present time, most of the games most open for modification almost all have contents which will be objectionable in school settings.

Russell Francis, an Oxford University researcher who was working with us on Revolution, pushed this notion of modding one step further -- having students translate their game play experiences into short machinema films which functioned as a kind of in character diary to recount their impressions of what has taken place. We have found this practice extremely valuable in helping students to pull together information from multiple sources to express what they have experienced and learned through their game play. It has also proven very helpful for the design team as we try to understand what features of the game encourage or get in the way of individualized learning.

A group of my students, Dan Roy and Ravi Purushotma, have been experimenting with modding some basic platform games -- The Sims 2 and Grim Fandango -- in order to turn them into resources for language learning. The games which are produced for the global market already contain multiple languages inside them: all it takes is the flip of a switch to localized them for different markets. Dan and Ravi have explored the benefits of reprograming these games to allow players to play with them in a foreign language or even mixing and matching English and Spanish language features to provide scaffolding as they are mastering the second language.

Some educators have begun to see the game design process itself as a catalyst for learning as can be seen in recent projects by OnRampArts in Los Angeles, Urban Games Academy in Baltimore and Atlanta, or GlobalKidz in New York City. In each of these cases, the educational payoff comes not from playing the game but rather from working through the process of identifying how to transform a body of knowledge into a game play experience for someone else. Katie Salens, Eric Zimmerman, and James Paul Gee are currently collaborating on a new project, Game Designer, being produced for the MacArthur foundation to give young people basic literacy in game design. Here, again, it is the process of game design and not the product of a finished game that facilitates engagement and learning.

Reality -- Augmented, Alternate, and Otherwise

The serious games movement might also learn from the concept of transmedia entertainment -- thinking about how to shape a flow of information that extends beyond a single platform. One clear example of this kind of serious gaming would be the kinds of alternative reality games that Jane McGonigal has discussed. Right now, alternate reality gaming is primary used as a promotional platform -- see The Beast (A.I.), I Love Bees (Halo 2), The Lost Experience, or The Art of the Heist for examples. Yet, there is a compelling case for the kinds of research and collaborative problem solving which has been sparked by the effort to solve these complex multimedia puzzles. The games encourage a movement from digital space back to the real world and value the ability of social networks to pool knowledge and trade information as they work together to beat the game. The kinds of augmented reality games being developed by Eric Klopfer at MIT might represent another way of integrating information from the game back into real world spaces. David William Schaffer has used the term, epistemic games, to refer to a style of educational gaming where players are asked to deploy the tools and knowledge which might be used by professionals as they confront real world problems. So, he develops games where kids learn geography by working as urban planners or composition by playing at being journalists. These games encourage kids to trace information across multiple sources and media platforms, mixing things they have learned through digital and mobile media with things they have learned through direct observation of the real world.

Mapping Labrynth

I closed the talk with a preview of Labrynth, a Education Arcade project which will develop a multiplatform game designed to help middle school children develop some basic math and literacy competencies. Scot Osterweill is the head designer on the project, working with a team of CMS graduate students that includes Kristina Drzaic (whose storyboards for the game are featured here), Dan Roy, and Evan Wendell. CMS alum Ravi Purushotma has been hired as a technical advisor.

At the start of the game, the player spends some time designing and customizing their pet and then, the pet runs away, disappearing into a drainage pipe. Pursuing the pet, the player finds herself in an underground world full of threat and mystery. Along the way, they begin to suspect that the ambiguous meat products on sell may come from harvesting pets, creating a strong goal of rescuing not only one's own beloved pet but also freeing all of the other captured creature.

Each of the game's puzzles encourages new modes of thought and problem solving which can eventually be named and explained in the classroom but which seem simply part of the process of working through the game level. Here's how Drzaic described some of the thinking which has gone into the design of puzzles for the game:

When we first pitched our vision of what would constitute a good educational game to

middle school math teachers we were met with some skepticism as to how this model of

video game learning would help them meet the stringent information goals of NCLB [No Child Left Behind]. There was a dominant idea that the best kind of educational game is the kind that has overtly demonstrable math value along the tones of Math Blaster. While many educational games do subscribe to the Math Blaster flash-card based model, that was not the type of learning we were going for. We want to make the kind of thinking that sticks with you, not rote memorization.

As you might expect from a puzzle game, we have a mathematical basis for each puzzle

that requires mathematical-based reasoning to solve and, in keeping with NCLB, we had to

cover certain math topics. As such groups of our puzzles target different areas of the

math curriculum but, in keeping with the idea of an experience that sticks with you we

provide a wide range of modes to think about similar types of mathematical problems. For

instance, four of our puzzles deal with proportion in entirely different ways:

Puzzle 1: proportion as numerical value - feeding monsters proportionally related

ambiguous meat products

Puzzle 2: proportion as movement over time - different proportioned movement of boinging

robots

Puzzle 3: proportion as visual measurement - outfitting singing monsters who are dancing

at different distances

Puzzle 4: proportion as a rate - using gears to help a canning assembly line function

smoothly

I love that our game allows you to approach a topic through a variety of ways and does

not involve memorization in the least!

Literacy is encouraged through the game in two ways: first, the back-story for the world unfolds through a series of comic books which appear at the completion of each level and function more or less like cut scenes. Second, the players are encouraged to participate in an online forum where they trade advice and insights with other players on your team; this forum contributes directly into the game's reputation system.

The games are designed to be persistent so that the player can log in from multiple locations -- from the computer in the school library, through a handheld device, or through their home computers, integrating game play and problem solving across the day.

The game involves a partnership between Maryland Public Television, the MIT-based Education Arcade, the federal Star Schools program, and Fablevision, a commercial game developer which will take our student's designs and turn them into a finished game which will be distributed to the public. One of the most vexing challenges facing academic game developers has been the last mile problem -- how to move from prototypes to products which get into the hands of teachers, parents, and students. With this project, we think we have a plan which will translate our conceptual prototypes into a reality.

The game taps many aspects of contemporary gaming culture -- the customization of characters, the use of forums to share advice about mastering games, the process of experimentation and puzzle solving -- as central features of its pedagogical process. For Scot and his team, this is not about designing a serious game so much as it is about creating something which will encourage serious gaming.

Update 19/05/23:

(1) Source for talk no longer available. For a review of keynote see Forbes and to know more about the cessation of blip.tv, click here.

Political Reality

Another in a series of outtakes from Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, this passage explores ways that reality television might become a vehicle for political education. The section was inspired in part by this passage from Joe Trippi's book, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, The Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything:

"When Americans get the choice...they constantly surprise the producers and the celebrity judges. They go for gospel singers and torch singers and big band singers. They vote for fat people and geeky people and ugly people. They go for people like themselves....This is the most important thing that any business can learn from the first wave of this revolution and its impact on entertainment. We want the power to choose....In every industry, in every segment of our economy, the power is shifting over to us."

In one telling passage from his campaign memoirs, Howard Dean's campaign manager Joe Trippi imagines what would happen if the presidental campaign had presented itself through the lens of reality television: "

Send a camera out with the candidate every day to film the rallies and debates, everything going on behind the scenes and on stage. No secrets, no background dealings - open up the campaign and let the people see inside it, a running journal of a campaign, an all-access video blog. This is the opposite way that political campaigns generally function, of course. Most campaigns do everything in their power to control every element of the candidate's image and message, from the clothes he wears to each word out of his mouth.

"

Trippi's vision of "Dean TV" was something akin to Big Brother, where people, individually and collectively, would monitor the candidate's every word and gesture, comparing notes on the internet, bringing transparency to the political process. In the end, the campaign budget supported a much more modest effort, where supporters and staffers were given digital camcorders and produced a limited amount of behind the scenes footage for web distribution.

Documentary filmmaker R. J. Cutler (The War Room) also saw reality television as the ideal vehicle for turning viewers into voters. In August 2004, Showtime debuted a Cutler-produced series, The American Candidate, modeled loosely after the similarly named American Idol. Cutler explained, "Reality television has borrowed so much from the world of politics, whether it's alliances or voting or the kind of strategizing that's done."

So why not turn the lens around and use reality television to teach politics? Average (or not so average) citizens would emerge through a elimination process, acquire skills in political organizing, take their views to the American public, and gain public visibility for their issues. Host Montel Williams summarized the core concept: "What if you didn't have to spend millions of dollars to get elected? What if you didn't have to go to the right schools? What if your gender or the person you love or the color of your skin didn't matter at all?"

On the one hand, the series producers hoped to educate the public about how the political process actually worked. On the other hand, they wanted to encourage fantasies of reform which might broaden the range of candidates and expand the level of public participation. Noel Holston, a critic for Chicago Tribune, clearly read the series in those terms: "The most fascinating thing about these folks is that, like most of us, they can't be neatly categorized... The candidates' discussions among themselves repeatedly remind us how pigeonholed and polarized the debate we see on TV typically is."

As with other reality programs, the public was encouraged to turn these real people into the objects of their gossip and to evaluate their performances and ethics. In this case, they were being taught a new perspective on the political process. The candidates were coached and the public were educated by political consultants drawn from both parties, including Carter Eskew, Joe Trippi, Frank Luntz, Ed Rollins, Rich Bond, Bay Buchanan. As Cutler explained,

"We're going to draw the curtain back and show how the process really works. We're going to show just how challenging it is to run for president. We're going to show the difficult decisions that have to be made between your convictions and what is politically expedient. We're going to show how polling works. We're going to show how opposition research works."

Much as American Idol helped educate Americans about the criteria music producers used to assess new talent, American Candidate proposed to teach the public new criteria for assessing political candidates.

Cutler's original plan had been to film the series in real time and have the public vote on who remained on the ballot, similar to the way American Idol works. When the series shifted to Showtime from the USA Network, its public visibility was diminished and the decision was made to complete the series production before the first episode was aired. In the end, the program failed to make a dent in the ratings and drew very little media coverage.

Adding to the Quilt: An Interview with Brad Meltzer

As a longtime comics fan, it's hard to remember a time when there were so many really astonishingly good writers generate content for the major companies at the same time -- Brian Bendis, Greg Rucka, Robert Kirkman, Ed Brubaker, Warren Ellis, Brian K. Vaughan, Geoff Johns...

There are several reasons why writing in comics is so good right now but one of them is what DC President Paul Levitz described to me in an interview as the "permeable membrane" that exists between comics and other media sectors in the midst of an increasingly transmedia culture. Some of the most exciting writers in comics today come from other media -- look at Joss Whedon over at Astonishing X-Men or J. Michael Straczinski or the occassional forrays of Kevin Smith into comics writing. It's in that category that I place Brad Meltzer.

Meltzer first came to my attention when he took over control of the Green Arrow series from Kevin Smith. Smith had literally brought Oliver Queen back from the dead and demonstrated the continuing appeal of this character that many of us associated with the late 1960s. When Smith left, there was a wide spread expectation that the character might sink back into obscurity but crime novelist Meltzer stepped in and keep the momentum going. From there, Meltzer created Identity Crisis, one of the most controversial and talked about miniseries to hit mainstream comics in some time. I have to admit that the death of Sue Dibney, the wife of the Elongated Man, brought tears to my eyes, even though I had only limited familiarity and interest in the character previously. And the ethical issues explored through the series cut deeper than most superhero comics on the market today. Some feel that he has permanently damaged the relations among the core DC characters, but he argues below that he has simply paved the way for the redefinition of their relationship that is starting to unfold as he has taken over control of Justice League. And, oh, by the way, when Meltzer isn't writing novels or comics, he helped to create the television series, Jack and Bobby.

Meltzer was nice enough to respond to some of my questions about his experiences of moving between media and about the particular experience of writing within a mainstream superhero franchise.

You would seem to be part of a new generation of storytellers who move fluidly across different media platforms, having work in comics, novels, and television. What factors have shaped or hindered your ability to work across so many different media?

With the world running on Internet time, I think there's been a huge shift in the fluidity between mediums in just the past five years, thanks in large part to people like Kevin Smith. Once that happened, the walls really came down. Especially, in Hollywood, where the Emperor's New Clothes rules, and where so many people need to have someone else say it before they'll say it themselves. For example, when I first said that I'd like to try television, I was told, "Well, you're a novelist..." But the moment CBS said they were interested in one of my novels, suddenly I was a TV creator. That's how Jack & Bobby was born. Today, the movement seems obvious -- a good story is a good story. But that's only a recent development.

You have worked as a novelist constructing your own characters and you have worked for DC developing new storylines for characters such as Superman or Batman which have been around since the 1930s. What do you see as the benefits and challenges of working with pre-established characters?

They force you to work different muscles in your brain. With Superman or Batman, I can't just make up any character trait. I have to work twice as hard to find something in them that a reader has never seen before. But that's the thrill.

The Elongated Man mourning the death of his wife Sue Dibny has quickly emerged as one of the iconic moments in contemporary comics, reappearing across a range of other books as we play out the implications of this moment for the entire DC universe. What do you think it is about this moment that has had such a great impact?

I think so much of it belongs to Rags Morales's stunning visual. In the script, I wanted this shot to be just like that shot in The Shawshank Redemption, with Tim Robbins looking up at the sky, the rain falling down around him -- but instead of joy, I wanted a moment of horror. I wanted to be looking straight down at Ralph and Sue. Rags called me up and said "I really want to do it at a little bit of angle." I said "No, no, no, you have to trust me on this." He said, "I'll do it my way and if you don't like it, I'll do it your way." I sat at the fax machine waiting for it to come through and when he sent me the sketch, I called him and said "Your way."

Some critics have argued that superheroes are governed more by ethics than by politics. Clearly, the events of Identity Crisis reveal very different ethical codes at the hearts of the different superhero characters. Can you help us to map the different ethical compasses which govern their decisions?

I think the mistake is to assume that the superhero "ethical code" is limited to only truth and justice. If these characters are us, or at least ideals for us -- as I think every great hero must be -- then they should also be filled with our flaws. Embarrassment, revenge, regret, anger, and selfishness are hardly the things we think of when we think "superhero." But they are real emotional components of all of us. That's not my way of dancing around the map question -- it's my way of saying that I think there is no one map. No one moral compass. The range is what makes it interesting. Otherwise, everyone is Superman.

The DC universe has historically been known for the strong feeling of "comrades in arms," yet Identity Crisis really shattered the alliances that held the Justice League together. What do you see as the long-term implications of that loss of trust? How do you plan to deal with it as you move into writing Justice League?

It's odd -- I designed Identity Crisis to be a full return to that "comrades in arms." That's what I thought was lost all the years prior to it. It's what I thought Batman had lost being turned into such an ass (in some warped way of "honoring Miller"). Identity Crisis shows you the break-up -- but in doing so, it reaffirms why the "marriage" (and I mean that for all the characters) was so important. At the end, we once again realize why those comrades need to mend the family again. SO long-term...well, that's what you're seeing now in Justice League.

You have described yourself as a comics fan. In what ways can we see your work within the comics industry as a form of fan fiction? To what degree are you playing out fantasies you had as a reader of comics? What changes as you get the power to shape the official mythology?

It's all fanfic until the copyright owners pay you to do it. And that may seem a small distinction, but it's not. As for playing out fantasies, I sure hope it's not just that. The stories I tell aren't what -I- -want- to happen. They're what I find most interesting. Again, a subtle distinction that gives headaches as you contemplate it. But what does change when you shape the mythology officially is, well...I think you add this x-factor of seriousness that you just don't get when you're standing in front of the mirror singing into your hairbrush. When you're on the stage and the lights are on you and the crowd is waiting for you to open your mouth...only a fool or a corpse doesn't treat it differently.

The superhero genre is constantly shaped by borrowings from other genres. I wonder what you bring to writing comics from your work in other genres -- crime fiction, political drama? What changes as you play with these conventions within the superhero comic?

The odd part is, I think my novels are more influenced by my comic work. The commitment to character in the comics forces me to make the novels more character-driven. I owe comics for that. As for my effect on comics, that's for others to decide...

You are now writing Justice League. I am really not looking here for spoilers about the series, but I wonder if you could give us some sense of the philosophy which will shape these stories? What do you want to add to their saga that differs from the ways they have been treated by previous writers?

I hope I always bring an exploration of the characters that's true to each character -- and fascinating for us in that it explores some part of the human condition. Certainly, The Tornado's Path, the first arc, tackles that issue from page one. As for what I add that differs from others before, I don't need or want to change the past. All I want is to add a new section to the quilt.