Slides summarizing my doctoral design and research practice. Presented at “iMAPpening,” a group show featuring my colleagues in Media Arts and Practice at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

This post is a part of a series covering my qualifying exam research areas. Scroll to the bottom of this post for links to each area, or click here for a general description of the process.

Description

As devices and platforms multiply, so too does the amount of metadata produced by individuals in the course of daily life. This metadata, generated and collected via disparate sources such as social networking profiles, web usage analytics, and physical sensor systems embedded in mobile devices and the built environment, provides interaction designers with rich real-time information flows that model and visualize user behavior.

Understanding how to create responsive and context-aware interactivity based on these dynamic data flows is an imperative for designers working in the field of social media and pervasive computing interaction design. Equally important is an investigation of how participatory activities and games – from social games to ambient alternate reality games to locative artworks to collaborative production games and more – can leverage social media and pervasive computing to exist “inside the flow” of their users’ lives, rather than as cordoned-off activities that necessitate a pause or “stepping out” from behavioral norms in order to access. Key readings draw from game design, particularly discussions around so-called “casual” asynchronous play systems (Fullerton, Juul, Salen and Zimmerman); mobile and locative interaction design (Böhlen and Frei, Ermi, Montola, Schell, Vinge); information architecture, pervasive computing, and the internet of things (Benford, Berners-Lee, Bleecker, Kay, Krueger, Montola, Nieuwdorp, Shirky, Sterling); and human-computer interaction design (Csikszentmihalyi, Kuniavsky, Thackara, Ramsey, Simon).

Bibliography

Benford, Steve et al. “Bridging the physical and the digital in pervasive gaming,” Communications of the ACM, 48 (3), 54-57, 2005.

Berners-Lee, Tim. “Linked Data – Design Issues.” http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html

Bleecker, Julian, and Nicolas Nova. “A synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing.” Situated Technologies. http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/?q=node/102

Bogost, Ian. “Asynchronous Multiplay: Futures for Casual Multiplayer Experience.” http://www.bogost.com/writing/asynchronous_multiplay_futures.shtml

______. “Cow Clicker.” http://www.bogost.com/blog/cow_clicker_1.shtml

Böhlen, Marc, and Hans Frei. “MicroPublicPlaces.” Situated Technologies. http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/?q=node/104

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. 1st ed. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008.

Dourish, Paul. “Embodied Interaction: Exploring the Foundations of a New Approach to HCI.” Xerox PARC, 1999. http://www.dourish.com/embodied/embodied99.pdf

______. Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. MIT Press, 2001.

Ermi, Laura and Mayra, Frans. “Player-Centered Game Design: Experiences in Using Scenario Study to Inform Mobile Game Design.” Game Design Research Symposium, IT-University, 2004. http://www.gamestudies.org/0501/ermi_mayra/

Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop, Second Edition: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games. 2nd ed. Morgan Kaufman, 2008.

IGDA Casual Games SIG. 2008-2009 Casual Games White Paper. International Game Developers Association, 2009. http://archives.igda.org/casual/IGDA_Casual_Games_White_Paper_2008.pdf

Juul, Jesper. A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players. The MIT Press, 2009.

Kay, Alan and Goldberg, Adele. “Personal Dynamic Media,” The New Media Reader. MIT Press, 2003.

Korhonen, Hannu, Hannamari Saarenpää, and Janne Paavilainen. “Pervasive Mobile Games — A New Mindset for Players and Developers.” In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Fun and Games, 21-32. Eindhoven, The Netherlands: Springer-Verlag, 2008.

Krueger, Myron W. “Responsive Environments,” in Wardrip-Fruin, Noah and Montfort, Nick (ed.) The New Media Reader. MIT Press, 2003.

Kuniavsky, Mike. Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research. 1st ed. Morgan Kaufmann, 2003.

Montola, Markus, Jaakko Stenros, and Annika Waern. Pervasive Games: Theory and Design. Morgan Kaufmann, 2009.

Nieuwdorp, Eva. “The Pervasive Interface: Tracing the Magic Circle,” Proceedings of DiGRA Conference: Changing Views–Worlds in Play, 2005.

Ramsey, Jim. “Designing For Flow.” A List Apart, December 4, 2007. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/designingforflow/

Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Illustrated edition. The MIT Press, 2003.

Schell, Jesse. DICE 2010: Design Outside the Box, 2010. http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-box-presentation/

Shirky, Clay. Letter. “Situated Software,” March 30, 2004. http://www.shirky.com/writings/situated_software.html

Simon, Nina. “Going Analog: Translating Virtual Learnings into Real Institutional Change.” In Archives & Museum Informatics: Museums and the Web 2009. Indianapolis, Indiana, USA, 2009.

Stein, Jennifer, Fisher, Scott, and Otto, Greg. “Connecting and Animating the Built Environment with the Internet of Things.” Internet of Things Workshop, 2010.

Sterling, Bruce. Shaping Things. The MIT Press, 2005.

Thackara, John, ed. Design After Modernism: Beyond the object. Gloucester: Thames and Hudson, 1988.

______. In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2005.

Vinge, Vernor. Rainbows End. Tor Books, 2007.

This post is a part of a series covering my qualifying exam research areas. Scroll to the bottom of this post for links to each area, or click here for a general description of the process.

Description

The increasingly “device agnostic” Web constitutes a vast and rapidly evolving multi-modal metaplatform for collaboration, performance, and community-building. The radical reconfiguration of spatial, institutional, and social boundaries that has accompanied and guided the emergence of network technology and social media has brought with it an irreversible decentralization of the production and dissemination of knowledge and culture (Benkler, Von Hippel). The effects of these shifts are only beginning to be felt, with policy makers, educators, cultural theorists, and corporations scrambling to adjust to/capitalize on a broad class of new participatory media practices. But while the breadth and scope of media participation have been vastly increased by the core affordances of new media objects and the dawning ubiquity of network technologies, the defining practices of participatory culture have been with us since long before the birth of YouTube and Web 2.0 (Jenkins). From the amateur operators of the early days of radio (Douglas), to the feminist “vidding” subcultures of the 1970s and 80s (Coppa), our engagement with media has always been just that: engagement, and not pure consumption. Until recently, personal and academic uses of popular culture artifacts — remixing, fan fiction, filesharing — have been largely invisible to the corporate apparatus underwriting their original production; but as amateur creators and remixers have flooded to the Web to share and discuss their works, hitherto “private” practices have become public, much to the chagrin of those with a vested interest in upholding the kinds of scarcity and centralized authority required for the maintenance of the status quo (Lessig).

The present moment is a crucial one in this regard. A failure by policy makers to imaginatively engage with the affordances of the Web could restrict or roll back the transformative potentials promised by the advocates of openness, transparency, and collective intelligence (Levy, O’Reilly). To steer clear of this kind of disaster, it falls to the makers of media — from on- and offline amateurs to corporate department heads — to identify the ways in which new arrangements of cultural authority and economic power, particularly in the realms of intellectual property and knowledge production, might emerge in the context of distributed and procedural authorship. Toward this end, it is essential to develop an understanding of the motivations, pleasures, requirements, effects, and potentials of participation across a variety of domains.

Three closely-related fields of study inform this understanding. Readings from Fan Studies provide insights into the role of participatory culture in the articulation of identity and resistance, with particular focus on the ways in which fans and producers negotiate, co-create, and contest meanings within the hybrid spaces of canon and taste (Coppa, Fiske, Jenkins). Seminal ethnographic and critical perspectives from cultural studies and social science (De Certeau, Foucault, Goffman) extend these insights beyond fandom and into broader conversations concerning performativity and the uncertain ontological status of the author/viewer divide. Within this context, investigations of the shifting logics of cultural production, circulation, and reputation help to establish frameworks for understanding how new technologies — from amateur printing presses to Web 2.0 — can disrupt existing legal and industrial structures as they give rise to new modes of engagement (Benkler, Berners-Lee, Bruns, Douglas, Green, McPherson, Lessig). Finally, a traversal of the history of avant-garde participatory art practice reveals a range of theories, aesthetic systems, and process-oriented artworks whose legacy constitutes a deep and wide working-through of the myriad theoretical and practical challenges facing contemporary media makers invested in notions of the participatory (Bishop, Boal, Bourriaud, Kaprow, Knabb, Kester, O’Donnell, Ranciere).

Bibliography

Anderson, Steve. “Aporias of the Digital Avant Garde,” Digital Humanities Quarterly, Summer, 2007. http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/1/2/000011/000011.html

Baym, Nancy K. and Burnett, Robert. “Amateur Experts: International Fan Labor in Swedish Independent Music,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 12(5): 1-17.

Benkler, Yochai. The wealth of networks : how social production transforms markets and freedom. Yale University Press, 2007.

Berners-Lee, Tim. “Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality.” Scientific American. December, 2010.

Bishop, Claire. Participation. The MIT Press, 2006.

Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed. Pluto Press, 2008.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Les Presse du Reel, 1998.

boyd, danah. “Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace.” American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2006.

Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. Peter Lang Publishing, 2008.

Coppa, Francesca. “Women, ‘Star Trek’ and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding,” Transformative Works and Cultures 1, 2008.

Darnton, Robert. “Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensibility,” The Great Cat Massacre And Other Episodes in French Cultural History. Basic Books, 2009.

Dena, Christy. “Emerging Participatory Culture Practices: Player-Created Tiers in Alternate Reality Games,” Convergence, February 2008. 41-58.

Diamond, Sara. “Participation, Flow, and the Redistribution of Authorship: The Challenges of Collaborative Exchange and New Media Curatorial Practice,” Museums and the Web. Banff Institute, 2005.

Douglas, Susan J. “Popular Culture and Populist Technology: The Amateur Operators, 1906-1912,” Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

Fiske, John. “The Cultural Economy of Fandom,” in Lewis, Lisa A. (ed.) The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. Routledge, 1992.

Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” in Lodge, D. (ed) Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Longman, 1988.

Galloway, Alexander and Thacker, Eugene. The Exploit. University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor Books, 1959.
Green, Joshua and Burgess, Jean. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Polity, 2009.

Higgins, Dick. “Dick Higgins on Intermedia,” Something Else Newsletter #1. Something Else Press, 1965. http://www.ubu.com/papers/higgins_intermedia.html

Jenkins, Henry, Puroshotma, Ravi, Clinton, Katherine, Weigel, Margaret & Robison, Alice J. (2005). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, available at http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/files/working/NMLWhitePaper.pdf. Retrieved on 1/22/2009.

______. “Nine Propositions Towards a Theory of YouTube,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, 2006.

______. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Media Consumers in a Digital Age. NYU Press, 2006.

Kaprow, Allan. “’Happenings’ in the New York Scene,” in Wardrip-Fruin, Noah and Montfort, Nick (ed.) The New Media Reader. MIT Press, 2003.

Kester, Grant. Conversation Pieces. University of California Press, 2004.

Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Penguin Press HC, The, 2008.

McGonigal, Jane. “Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming,” Ecologies of Play. Ed. Katie Salen. MIT Press, 2008. 199-228. http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/dmal.9780262693646.199

McPherson, Tara, ed. Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected. MIT Press, 2007.

O’Donnell, Darren. Social Acupuncture. Coach House, 2006.

Ranciere, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Verso, 2009.

[This post is a part of a series covering my qualifying exam research areas. Scroll to the bottom of this post for links to each area, or click here for a general description of the process.]

Description

Phenomenologically speaking, our engagement with new media objects is predominantly spatial. Linearity naturally emerges out of this engagement as we sequence one experience after another, but we begin and transition by “navigating,” “searching,” “scanning,” “browsing,” “downloading,” “visiting,” and any number of other verbs that imply movements across, through, to, from, and around. Further, the increasingly tenuous boundaries between new media objects — where does Google end, and where does the information it indexes begin? — imply a kind of limitless and endlessly reconfigurable hyperspace, one that extends well beyond the confines of the screen and into the hybrid digital/physical spaces that constitute our lived environment. As this mode of engagement becomes dominant, what kinds of changes are we seeing in epistemology, representation, identity, and narrativity? What is newly possible, and what is foreclosed — and for whom? And finally, what are the poetic affordances of this spatiality?

Coming to terms with the many valences of “space” in this context requires a multi-threaded interdisciplinary investigation. The first thread of this investigation looks at space through the lens of twentieth century critical theory and cultural studies (Bachelard, Benjamin, Foucault, Lefebvre, De Certeau). These texts inform an understanding of how space is used as a means of (re-)inscribing and resisting economic and cultural hegemonies; how this use co-constructs, renews, and reshapes meaning; and how these meanings reflect and feed back on the social and economic orders that circumscribe our experience of place. Lurking in the background here are several related spheres of discourse, including intersubjective systems theory; notions of mutualism, multiplicity, and nomadism; and theories of emergence and utopia. The second thread draws on several relatively recent texts examining theories around the phenomenology and epistemology of the spatial modalities inherent in our engagement with new media objects (Aarseth, Hayles, Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin, Manovich, McPherson, Vesna). The central metaphors of navigation and database found in these works provide crucial context for the final thread of this research focus, which examines a variety of media artifacts and theories that operate within spatialized engagement modalities, beginning with postwar and late twentieth century critical interventions and theories of play (Nieuwenhuys, Debord, Huizinga), following through the ascendance and praxis of transmedia storytelling and distributed narratives (Bleecker, Jenkins, Walker), and concluding with spatial new media story/play systems such as alternate reality games (Dena, Hon, McGonigal, Szulborski), pervasive games (Montoya, de Souza e Silva and Sutko), site-specific art movements (Kwon), and social media games.

Bibliography

Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press, 1994.

Batchen, Geoffrey. “Spectres of Cyberspace,” in Mirzoeff, Nicholas (ed.) The Visual Culture Reader. Routledge, 2002.

Benjamin, Walter. “Paris — Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Selected Writings, vol 3, 1935-1938. Harvard University Press, 2006.

Bleecker, Julian, Jake Dunagan, Sascha Pohflepp, Stuart Candy, Jennifer Leonard, and Bruce Sterling. “Design Fiction: Props, Prototypes, Predicaments Communicating New Ideas.” Mp3. SXSW 2010. http://my.sxsw.com/events/event/465

Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think” in Wardrip-Fruin, Noah and Montfort, Nick (ed.) The New Media Reader. MIT Press, 2003.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 2002.

Dena, Christy. Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World across Distinct Media and Environments. Doctoral Dissertation, 2009.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Thousand Plateaus. Athlone Press, 2000.

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics, Spring 1986. 22-27.

Harrigan, Pat and Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives. MIT Press, 2009.

Harvey, David. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53, October, 2008. http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2740

Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. University of Notre Dame, 2008.

Hon, Dan. “Everything you know about ARGs is WRONG.” http://www.sixtostart.com/onetoread/2008/everything-you-know-about-args-is-wrong/

Huizinga, J. Homo Ludens. Routledge, 2008.

Jenkins, Henry. “Transmedia Storytelling 101,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, 2007. http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html

Knabb, Ken. Situationist International Anthology. Bureau of Public Secrets, 2007.

Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. MIT Press, 2004.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Wiley-Blackwell, 1992.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. MIT Press, 2001.

McGonigal, Jane. “This Is Not a Game: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play,” Proceedings: Digital Arts and Culture 2003, edited by A. Miles. RMIT University, 2003. http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/McGonigal.pdf

McPherson, Tara. “Reload,” in Mirzoeff, Nicholas (ed.) The Visual Culture Reader. Routledge, 2002.

Souza e Silva, Adriana de and Sutko, Daniel M. Digital Cityscapes: Merging Digital and Urban Playspaces. Peter Lang Publishing, 2009.

Szulborski, Dave. This Is Not A Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming. New Fiction, 2005.

Vesna, Victoria, ed. Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow. University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Walker, Jill. “Distributed Narrative: Telling Stories Across Networks,” AoIR 5.0, September 21, 2004. http://jilltxt.net/txt/Walker-AoIR-3500words.pdf

Wardrip-Fruin, Noah and Montfort, Nick. The New Media Reader. MIT Press, 2003.

This post is a part of a series covering my qualifying exam research areas. Scroll to the bottom of this post for links to each area, or click here for a general description of the process.

“It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.” Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Much of the early part of my qualifying exam preparation process was consumed with trying to come up with flexible-yet-precise titles for my exam areas. Since all knowledge is interconnected, this is always going to be a big challenge; but in the context of interdisciplinary new media theory and practice, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it’s extra-super-hard to establish and maintain boundaries. Distinguishing between productive overlap (e.g. “History and Theories of Participatory Culture and Art Practice” is a powerful complement to “Interaction Design for Social Media and Pervasive Computing”) and outright redundancy (e.g. “The Poetics of Collaboration” would work as a subset of “History and Theories of Participatory Culture and Art Practice,” but would double-up on a lot of material if it were conceived of as a separate exam area) requires a whole lot of iteration and reshuffling. Some texts that began in one exam area are now comfortably in the middle of another. Because of the inherent either/or nature of the exam area structure (“text A is either in research area X, or it isn’t”), I found that some texts that were relevant to two or three of my research areas were being arbitrarily forced to exist in just one. What I really longed for was a non-hierarchical relational database that would provide an interface to my research alongside the more traditional “three exam areas” approach. Such a database would evolve as my own thoughts evolve. Like the impermanent, always-ahead-of-us dream space proposed by Bachelard, such an information architecture’s dynamism and impermanence would have the capacity to energize and liberate the imagination through serendipitous connection and unexpected emergence.

This website (http://remotedevice.net) is an effort to model what something like that might look like. Using WordPress, I’ve set up custom taxonomies for each of my three research areas into which I can place “research artifacts” — reading notes and summaries, quotes, links to resources and RSS feeds from relevant sources, blog posts, tweets, etc. These artifacts can then be tagged with keywords, categorized, and discovered through sitewide searches, allowing them to be accessed from vectors beyond the tight ontological constraints provided by the exam areas alone. The goal is that this will make visible and usable (to me and to anyone curious about my work) the connections between materials across the totality of my research.

As of right now, I’ve got a pretty substantial backlog of stuff to integrate into this system (doing so is the main work ahead of me as I review and collate and reflect upon the material I’ve generated over the past few months), but curious readers can peruse my exam area archives as they evolve by clicking on the “blog archives” links below.

[TL;DR: it’s been a whole lot of reading. Skip down to Qualifying Exam Areas for a description of exactly what it is that I’m reading about.]

In just under three weeks, I write my qualifying examination. Preparing for this ritual hoop-jumping has occupied most of my time over the past few months. It’s been an arduous and eye-opening process of discovering exactly how much I don’t know (or, at least, didn’t know when I started), and of teasing out the boundaries and relationships that define my research specializations and situate my dissertation project.

At iMAP, we’re following the exams schema set out by the School of Cinematic Arts’ Critical Studies program (with the addition of a “portfolio review” of creative work, which will take place in January). According to this schema, doctoral students need to identify three distinct areas of inquiry or specialization. Reading lists and descriptive statements outlining these research areas are submitted to the student’s committee in advance (I submitted the first draft of mine back in March of 2010), and the scope of the questions on the exams is limited to the material covered in the reading lists.

The exams themselves consist of five days of non-stop writing in response to three questions the student chooses from a pool created by their committee members. The answers to these questions take the form of imaginary dissertation chapters — which, hopefully, can become early drafts of actual dissertation chapters.

The official rule with this process is that the student should submit a reading list, then stick to it. While this rule undoubtedly has many good and practical reasons for existing, it’s a constraint I’ve had a bit of trouble observing. As I’ve read through the texts on my original list, I’ve learned more about exactly what it is that I’m investigating. References to other writers, projects, movements, and theories demand to be followed up on, and some of these tangents have ultimately become foundational to my research.

The big questions underwriting my work — questions around the poetic, social, and cultural implications of pervasive computing and social media — have functioned as a kind of razor here, shaving off truly irrelevant material and preventing the process from turning into a random walk. But my reading list now — and the ways in which I frame it — has evolved rather massively since last March. I expect it to continue to do so right up until I start writing on lucky December 13th.

With all this in mind, I present the following descriptions of my research areas, along with bibliographies for each.

This resource contains links to blog posts, conference papers, journal articles, and other texts related to alternate reality gaming.

Defining ARG

• WTF is an ARG? (Andrea Phillips, 2009) “Why can’t we reach a consensus on what an ARG is, and what an ARG isn’t? Why do we return home, like swallows to Capistrano, to that question: What IS an ARG? This is my attempt to wrestle with this knotty topic, and offer up a few opinions.”
• Undefining ARG (Sean Stacey, 2006) “I have a way to define alternate reality gaming in such a fashion as to prove to you that I cannot in fact define it at all. While the previous statement may seem nonsensical, I encourage you to bear with me. The following is written with the assumption that the reader has some passing familiarity with the history, mechanics, and gameplay of ARGs.”
• Alternate Reality Games (Sean Stewart, 2006) “Building an ARG is like running a role-playing game in your kitchen for 2 million of your closest friends. Like a role-playing game, we get players to actually enter the world of our story and interact with it, both online and in the real world.”

Design approaches and philosophies

• Everything you know about ARGs is wrong (Dan Hon, 2008) “There are, it seems to me, a number of differing interpretations as to what an ARG is, exactly, and that makes them quite easy to attack. If you don’t know what something is, it’s quite easy for it not to have lived up to your expectations.”
• ARGFest 2007 Keynote (Elan Lee, Sean Stewart, 2007) “Delivering a keynote address to this audience is really difficult. What can we talk about? We can’t talk about anything we’ve done in the past because you were all there experiencing it. We can’t talk about anything we’re working on right now because that would ruin the fun and the mystery of the experience. We can’t talk about anything we have planned for the future because frankly, you are the competition. All that’s left is self-deprecation and the elephant in the room…trust.” (summary here)

See also: Part 2

Poetics, formal analyses, and surveys

• Storytelling in New Media: The Case of Alternate Reality Games, 2001-2009 (Jeffrey Kim, Elan Lee, Timothy Thomas, and Caroline Dombrowski, 2009) “New media allows previously passive consumers to tell and shape stories together. Yet most information is still disseminated in a top–down fashion, without taking advantage of the features enabled by new media. This paper presents five Alternate Reality Game (ARG) case studies which reveal common features and mechanisms used to attract and retain diverse players, to create task–focused communities and to solve problems collectively. Voluntary, collective problem solving is an intriguing phenomenon wherein disparate individuals work together asynchronously to solve problems together. ARGs also take advantage of the unique features of new media to craft stories that could not be told using other media.”
• Emerging Participatory Culture Practices: Player-Created Tiers in Alternate Reality Games (Christy Dena, 2008) “This paper introduces an emerging form of participatory culture, one that is not a modification or elaboration of a primary producer’s content. Instead, this paper details how the artifacts created to ‘play’ a primary producer’s content has become the primary work for massive global audiences. This phenomenon is observed in the genre of alternate reality games (ARGs) and is illustrated through a theory of ‘tiering’. Tiers provide separate content to different audiences. ARG designers tier their projects, targeting different players with different content. ARG player-production then creates another tier for non-playing audiences. To explicate this point, the features that provoke player-production — producer-tiering, ARG aesthetics and transmedia fragmentation — are interrogated, alongside the character of the subsequent player-production. Finally, I explore the aspects of the player-created tiers that attract massive audiences, and then posit what these observations may indicate about contemporary artforms and society in general.” See also: Christy’s online augmentation for this paper.
• Towards a Poetics of Multi-Channel Storytelling (Christy Dena, 2004) “As yet no poetics to address transmedia, alternate reality gaming, cross- or multi-platform and cross-media of content have been proposed in academia; in addition no poetics has been invented for multi-channel single-story creation (that is: one story told over multiple media). This paper provides an overview of the poetics being developed for multi-channel storytelling. It is a narrative schema intended for instructional use in story creation and literary criticism.”
• IGDA ARG SIG Whitepaper (IGDA, 2006) “Although new to many people, Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are still far short of achieving their full potential, each new wave of games bringing major new innovations and increased understanding of what works and what doesn’t. We hope you find both inspiration and real practical help in this paper, and look forwards to playing the next wave of ARGs you come up with.”
• ‘This is Not a Game’: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play (Jane McGonigal, 2003) “The increasing convergence and mobility of digital network technologies have given rise to new, massively-scaled modes of social interaction where the physical and virtual worlds meet. This paper explores one product of these extreme networks, the emergent genre of immersive entertainment, as a potential tool for harnessing collective action. Through an analysis of the structure and rhetoric of immersive games, I explore how immersive aesthetics can generate a new sense of social agency in game players, and how collaborative play techniques can instruct real-world problem-solving.”

Theoretical context

• ARGs and Academia (IGDA ARG SIG Wiki, 2007) “For many academics, ARGs are the manifestation of theories they have been exploring for a long time. ARGs provide, therefore, the unique opportunity to see many theories in action. Popular topics of interest have been the notion of fictionality, the notion of a game space, interactive narrative, commerciality and player dynamics. They have entered the realm of ARGs informed by particular key ideas which are exemplified in the following texts…”
• Participation (Claire Bishop, ed, 2006) “Participation begins with writings that provide a theoretical framework for relational art, with essays by Umberto Eco, Bertolt Brecht, Roland Barthes, Peter Bürger, Jen-Luc Nancy, Edoaurd Glissant, and Félix Guattari, as well as the first translation into English of Jacques Rancière’s influential ‘Problems and Transformations in Critical Art.’ The book also includes central writings by such artists as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, Joseph Beuys, Augusto Boal, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. And it features recent critical and curatorial debates, with discussions by Lars Bang Larsen, Nicolas Bourriaud, Hal Foster, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist.”
• Relational Aesthetics (Nicolas Bourriaud, 1998) “Where does our current obsession for interactivity stem from? After the consumer society and the communication era, does art still contribute to the emergence of a rational society? Bourriaud attempts to renew our approach toward contemporary art by getting as close as possible to the artists works, and by revealing the principles that structure their thoughts: an aesthetic of the inter-human, of the encounter; of proximity, of resisting social formatting.”
• The Open Work (Umberto Eco, 1962) “The Open Work remains significant for its powerful concept of “openness”–the artist’s decision to leave arrangements of some constituents of a work to the public or to chance–and for its striking anticipation of two major themes of contemporary literary theory: the element of multiplicity and plurality in art, and the insistence on literary response as an interactive process between reader and text. The questions Umberto Eco raises, and the answers he suggests, are intertwined in the continuing debate on literature, art, and culture in general.”

Case studies and ethnographies

• ‘I am Trying to Believe’: Dystopia as Utopia in the Year Zero Alternate Reality Game (Alexander Charles Oliver Hall, 2009) “Year Zero, an ARG that includes a recent studio release by the “industrial” rock band Nine Inch Nails, is a dystopian narrative that is unfolding in the ARG tradition. As a dystopian narrative game, Year Zero is able to harness the cautionary element of the game for social awareness and quite possibly social action. Technology’s ability to resurrect its utopian energy by offering new ways of telling dystopian (and yet utopian) stories such as via the ARG is indeed ironic, but it is doubly important to finding utopian energy in postmodern culture and facilitating political action through gaming.”
• Fictional Press Releases and Fake Artifacts: How the Smithsonian American Art Museum is Letting Game Players Redefine the Rules (Georgina Bath Goodlander, 2009) “In the fall of 2008, the Smithsonian American Art Museum hosted an Alternate Reality Game titled ‘Ghosts of a Chance.’ We did this with three goals in mind: to broaden our audience, to do a bit of self-promotion, and, most importantly, to encourage discovery around our collections in a new, very interactive way. This paper will discuss the challenges that the museum faced, evaluate the successes and failures of each part of the game, and make recommendations for other museums interested in trying something similar.”
• Tracking the emergent properties of the collaborative online story “Deus City” for testing the standard model of alternate reality games (Adam Brackin, 2008) “This study explores the possibilities for better collaborative storytelling through Alternate Reality Games by investigating their origins as well as their definably unique qualities and characteristics; by critically analyzing the recent Alternate Reality Game “Deus City” which was specifically designed for the study to test new forms and delivery methods within the context of the genre; and by outlining areas of change which indicate where the future of Interactive fiction may be very soon.”
• Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming (Jane McGonigal, 2007) “This essay describes the design and successful deployment of a series of massively collaborative game missions in I Love Bees, the alternate reality game. Alternate reality games (ARGs) are massively multiplayer puzzle adventures that combine online interactive content with real-world game events. McGonigal proposes ‘stimulating ambiguity’ as the central design philosophy of ARGs. She explores how ambiguous game content stimulates massively collaborative game play that allows for a greater share of leadership and meaningful participation in large-scale player groups. She also outlines how the open-ended puzzles of ARGs inspire multiple, creative interpretations that allow for diverse problem-solving strategies to flourish in a single player community. The essay is grounded in a close reading of player-produced content and their interpretations of the core puzzle of the I Love Bees game: a series of several hundred GPS coordinates, dates, and times that were listed on the central game Web site.” (.pdf here)
• See also: ARGs in institutions

Interviews with designers, researchers, and players

• Interview with Cathy’s Book Co-Author Sean Stewart (Michael Anderson, Sean Stewart, 2010) “[You] could argue that storytelling has only gone through five big revolutions: campfire stories, the invention of theater, the invention of the printing press and rise of the novel, the motion picture camera and cinema, and THIS, whatever the hell you want to call it. The multi-platform many-to-many art that the internet enables. I am incredibly aware of my stupendous good fortune in lucking into a ground floor suite in Revolution #5. It would seem ungrateful to turn my back on it just now.”
• Events, not ARGs: Interview with the founders of 4th Wall (Elan Lee, Jim Stewartson, Sean Stewart, 2009) Interview on Variety’s Technotainment blog. “Our new company — 18 months old now — the basic idea is to take the rock concert and figure out, ‘What’s the album? What’s the content version of that so you can have these experiences any time, so they don’t go away on the date of a future release?’ They can ultimately be monetized. So, we think of the format and what we’re building as a genuine new entertainment format, one that sits between moves and video games.”
• Producing Transmedia Experiences: Participation & Play (Frank Rose, Jordan Weisman, Ken Eklund, Louisa Stein, Mia Consalvo, 2009) Panel discussion from Futures of Entertainment 4. Moderated by Ivan Askwith. “One of the most overt forms of transmedia storytelling, the Alternate Reality Game (ARG), often makes participation a central and defining aspect of transmedia experiences, and creates opportunities to engage participants in play, performance and game-like systems. How can these interactive and participatory experiences be planned for? What is their function in the larger transmedia experience, and how do we understand the relative roles of the “author” and the “audience” in creating transmedia experiences?”

• An Interview with JC Hutchins: Personal Effects (JC Hutchins, 2008) Michael Andersen’s interview on ARGN. “[We] all know that most ARGs require what I call ‘bunches of brains’ … lots of players … to unlock puzzles and push the story forward. Dark Art is different in that we’re aiming to allure folks who’ve never heard the word ‘ARG’ to participate in this awesome breed of storytelling.” See also: Lance Weiler’s interview with JC on the Workbook Project.
• Storytelling 2.0: Alternate Reality Games (Elan Lee, Sean Stewart, 2008) TOC’s Liza Daly conducts the interview. “I wanted to know if ARGs are a viable form of commercial storytelling, if they can be packaged up after the experience has ended, and if they can engage with a wider audience beyond hard-core gamers.”
• Elan Lee’s Alternate Reality (Elan Lee, 2006) “I consider the first ARG The Beatles’ “Sergeant Pepper” album. Of course, it depends how you define an ARG. My definition is very loose. An alternate reality game is anything that takes your life and converts it into an entertainment space. If you look at a typical video game, it’s really about turning you into a hero; a super hero, a secret agent. It’s your ability to step outside your life and be someone else. An ARG takes those same sensibilities and applies them to your actual life. It says, what if you actually were a super hero, what if you actually were a secret agent? Instead of living in the box that’s your television or your computer, why not use your actual life as a storytelling delivery platform?”
• The Story Doesn’t Care: An Interview with Sean Stewart (Sean Stewart, 2006) “I honestly believe that the gods in their infinite mercy looked down and gave me a chance —miraculously and wholly unlooked for—to be at Kitty Hawk, to be in motion pictures in 1905, to be at a place and a moment in time where something extraordinarily exciting was just getting off the ground. As much as I’d like to think it had much to do with my merit, mostly it’s this huge stroke of timing and good luck to be in the right place at the right time, working with the right people, to have a chance to be in on something at an extraordinary cultural moment.”

Research resources and references

• ARGology.org “ARGology is a group effort by a bunch of great people from the IGDA ARG SIG. It is a site which hopes to aggregate much needed information about alternate reality games for developers, journalists, researchers and players.”
• ARGN “Simply put, ARGNet is the place to be when news breaks about new ARGs, as it offers insightful, investigative reporting from dedicated, knowledgeable volunteers through articles, interviews and netcasts.”
• ARG Stats and ARGs Around the World Super-comprehensive list of ARGs, including information about uptake, impact, and awards. Compiled by Christy Dena (whose site also hosts many other great resources like this and this and this).
• is this ARG? Real-time social media and news feeds about Alternate Reality Gaming and more.
• Google Scholar keyword search
• Wikipedia: Alternate Reality Game
• Wonder Weasels Game guides and player information for a variety of recent ARGs.
• Zotero Group: ARG Research Zach Whalen has set up a Zotero group “for building a bibliography related to Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), Transmedia Storytelling, Immersive Gaming and whatever other synonyms and related forms you can think of.” Most of the links found in this resource have been cross-posted there. If you are a Zotero user, please help the group to expand its bibliography!

Looking for a more traditional bibliography? Click here to view this list using the Chicago Manual of Style.

As always, any comments are much appreciated!

There are real risks in reading the present moment into historical accounts, but I couldn’t help doing just that as I read “The Amateur Operators” by Susan Douglas (one of this week’s recommended readings for Henry Jenkins’ class, Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0).

For those who haven’t read the piece, the gist of it is that the period of 1906-1912 saw an explosion in amateur wireless telegraphy, with boys and young men across an increasingly urbanized America “[reclaiming] a sense of mastery, indeed masculinity itself, through the control of technology.” (191) Wireless kits and how-to guides (some published by the “founder of science fiction” himself, Hugo Gernsback) sold like hotcakes, and in just a few years there were several hundred thousand amateur wireless operators spread out across the country.

This hobbyist culture, at once intensely social — as it inherently involved communication — and potentially isolating — as it required technical skills that could only be acquired outside of the flow of ordinary life — bears a striking resemblence to the tinkering subcultures that have attended the rise of home computing, network culture, and social media. Like the initial “boy wonder” practitioners of homebrew wireless telegraphy, early adopters of computational and network technology have been characterized in the popular discourse as heroes of the arcane, the possessors of secret knowledge, and even potential messiahs. But, as was the case with amateur radio operators, the culture has a tendency to swing in the opposite direction as the technologies and practices in question become more widely embraced and therefore subject to greater scrutiny (and acts of mischief). In many cases this scrutiny has led to calls — rightly or wrongly — for regulation founded on anxieties about safety, morality, and legality (compare, for example, the heirarchically-minded US Navy’s half-pragmatic, half self-righteous outrage at the “leveling effect” of amateurs sharing the airwaves with professionals to academia’s worries over the loss of control over canon or the RIAA’s efforts to distinguish “professional” content from amateur production via vehicles such as tonight’s awkward and remarkably irrelevant Grammy awards ceremony).

Inspired by Douglas, I looked up the 1907 New York Times article that she references in her text, and found in it many parallels to early descriptions of Internet enthusiasts (among many other possible analogies — for example, such fascinated exaltations of the “boy-inventor” now can be found in press coverage of Augmented Reality designers, physical computing tinkerers, Y Combinator whiz kids or certain social networking platform CEOs). Have a look for yourself — the article is here. Then have a look at this gem from the Canadian Broadcasting Company, circa 1993:

Young Peter Mansbridge’s awkward yet strangely fascinating decision to not use the word “the” in front of “Internet” notwithstanding, a final parallel with wireless telegraphy occurs to me as I write these notes. According to Douglas’ account, the wireless boom peaked quickly and came to an end as the airwaves became so crowded as to be unusable. The US Navy, among others, fought and won a battle with the amateurs, despite the latter’s claims that “the ether was neither the rightful province of the military nor a resource a private firm could appropriate and monopolize,” and that “their enthusiasm and technical spadework entitled them to a sizable portion of the territory.” (214) In the end, none of these objections mattered: the airwaves were either militarized or sold off to corporate interests, and amateur radio was relegated to shortwave only (a limitation that caused an estimated 88% drop in the number of hobbyists in the United States). In light of this, could we consider the emergence of “boy inventor” and techno-messiah characters in popular culture as harbingers of public resource conflicts to come?

• Gunther Kress, Literacy in the New Media Age (New York: Routledge), Chapter 4 “Literacy and Multimodality: A Theoretical Framework“
• Mimi Ito, “Technologies of the Childhood Imagination: Yugioh, Media Mixes, and Everyday Cultural Production”
• David Buckingham and Julian Sefton-Green, “Structure, Agency and Pedagogy in Children’s Media Culture,” in Joseph Tobin (ed.), Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon (Durham: Duke University press, 2004)

Ito’s succinct article makes the case most directly: “technologies of the imagination populate even the most mundane corners of our lives,” (34) and, contrary to the fears of those who worry that new media threatens to compartmentalize and disembody, the media mix is in practice productive of a culture that is “extroverted and hypersocial, sociality augmented by a dense set of technologies, signifiers, and systems of exchange.” (32) Buckingham and Sefton-Green hammer the point home: skeptics ought to consider examples like the “striking contrast between the high levels of [multimodal reading, sociality and production] activity that characterize the Pokemon phenomenon and the passivity that increasingly suffuses our children’s schooling” (30); and who could disagree that banning such phenomena from the school yard would do anything other than increase their “forbidden appeal” and “prevent schools from building on the enthusiasms children possess”? (31)

Of course, we have a long way to go before these kinds of messages can establish a critical mass in institutional and creative practice. Last week, I attended an experimental literature conference and found that while many of the assembled authors and scholars were keen on experimenting with new media, few if any of them were open to a wholesale redefinition of what literature is/can be. (( …and here I’m thinking not in either/or terms but in both/and: the novel will always be around and will always be the best at doing those things that novels do best. But there are other kinds of literature lurking in the shadows, and that’s what I’m interested in here. )) The works presented would inevitably employ language — spoken or written — as their core expressive resource (unsurprising for a conference largely run and constituted by poets and English professors), which they would then back up with video, flash animations, sound effects, etc. The effect of this was to reduce any image, sound, interactive or procedural elements present in the works to subordinate “supporting” status, lending credence to the commonly-expressed concern that the use of new media “in” literature amounts to little more than gimmickry. As Kress argues, we need to not only shift our definition of text to include “any instance of communication in any mode or in any combination of modes, whether recorded or not,” (48), but also our concept of the role design plays in both reading and writing. “Design does not ask, ‘what was done before, how, for whom, with what?” Kress writes. Rather, Design asks, “What is needed now, in this one situation, with this configuration of purposes, aims, audience, and with these resources, and given my interests in this situation?” (49)

The easy analogy here is that of the early cinema, wherein fiction films were shot using the conventions of the proscenium drawn from the theatre. It was only after a thorough interrogation of the affordances of the camera and the film splicer that the cinema began to reveal itself as a space for artistic endeavor. That is, once filmmakers let go of the notion that the cinema should attempt to create the same experiences as earlier forms of narrative art, they found themselves liberated to discover the unique way of “speaking” that film affords. What complicates this analogy is that we now confront a dynamic multiplicity of media modes. Like Gardner’s multiply-intelligent children, not all authors are going to be able to work well across all media. But in an age of expanding definitions of words like “text,” “author,” and “reading,” creators of literature, as educators and thought leaders, need to ask themselves the questions Kress’s personified Design asks: “What is needed now…with these resources, and given my interests?” Intelligently using new media is not about adding bells and whistles or referencing the Web — rather, it’s about selecting the right mode (or modes) to express what it is you have to say.

All this is to say that the whole argument in “The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic ‘Presence’” is a bit of a straw-man kind of thing. Yes, definitely — “an insubstantial electronic presence can ignore [all the] ills the flesh is heir to outside the image and the datascape,” and that would suck, but are we really moving deeper into the screen and disembodiment, full stop, end of story? Sobchack says yes, and I can understand how she got there.

At the time of her writing, the notion that we (or at least those of us who will be able to afford it) are all going to live our futures through our brainstems in an all-encompassing, “jacked-in” Virtual Reality was at its zenith, particularly in popular culture. The fear was that people would become so wrapped up in their disembodied virtual existences (foisted upon them by their robot overlords) that they would fail to notice that the were, phenomenologically speaking, sitting in a tub of goo far away from the site of their action. But while the Matrix films provided the culture with an outlet for various anxieties about technology, identity and control, they were, at bottom, kind of vacant, semi-obvious entertainments that recycled ideas and story figures that have been around since the 50s. Their cause was putatively a noble one, but the films themselves were little more than the pop finales to the initial gasps of fear and anxiety that accompanied the birth of “the electronic.”

I would argue that our future can’t be plotted on a phenomenological continuum that has “embodied” at one end and “disembodied” at the other. Blade Runner and the Matrix trilogy tell us more about the fears and conceits of the early 1980s and late 1990s than they do about the future we are actually confronting in the here and now. And yes, I know — sure, there’s something to be harvested there about the “techno-logic” of late capitalism and of course, yes, it’s all valuable, all of it. But Sobchack spends a lot of intellectual capital worrying about the phenomenological effects of a theoretical reality that increasingly bears little resemblence to what’s actually happening on the ground. No one outside of the most moronic and outmoded subcultures of misguided paranoid technoenthusiasm uses the words “meat” or “wetware” to refer to their bodies. Indeed, highly embodied cultural manifestations like DIY, networked public play and mobility are arguably emerging as the dominant paradigms. While screens continue to proliferate, they are arguably becoming less central to our “lifeworld” (while computation nonetheless continues its ascent behind the scenes). The once easily-drawn line between the Virtual and the Real is now revealed to be a grand fallacy, a product of the very fears and ignorances that produced Sobchack’s essay in the first place.

Put away Neuromancer and pick up Pattern Recognition or Spook Country. Blade Runner and La Jetee are great — so is Denno Coil.

Jansen’s Strandbeests are the product of an iterative programming process that completely collapses the supposed boundary between materiality and code. The intricate interlocking wooden components of these lumbering giants constitute simple circuits, storage devices and if/then statements that govern the way the “animals” move and respond to their environment; like a traditional software designer, the Strandbeests’ “programmer” deploys certain arrangments of form, sees what works and what doesn’t (beta testing), then “re-codes” to make the animals more likely to survive and prosper. Jansen himself considers his Strandbeests a kind of ALife project wherein new forms are “evolved” and the “winning codes multiply.” Physical computing projects like this (and this is clearly one of the most radical of its kind, given that the Strandbeests use no electronics whatsoever) are provocative examples of Drucker’s contention that “form is constitutive of information, not its transparent presentation.” (139)

Leaving magical Strandbeest beach aside for the moment, I wonder how other non-electronic digital systems complicate or compliment some of the thinking we’ve been doing this week about code and protocol. In particular, I’m curious to see if moving around or beyond our contemporary notion of what constitutes computation might address some of the ambiguities Mei identified regarding commonly-held definitions of the digital and the virtual. Charles Babbage’s famous Difference Engine (a programmable mechanical computer from 1847), Leibniz’s Stepped Reckoner, clockwork astrolabes like the incredible Antikythera Mechanism or the lesser-known but perhaps coolest-of-all pocket-sized Curta Calculator each exhibit very different kinds of graphesis (or maybe we should coin a new word here: antikemenesis?) — where is the “code” when it cannot be separated from the mechanical processes that articulate it?

Of course, there’s plenty of reason for pessimism. Even the most fundamental threats to our existence as a species go unchallenged. Still, I like to hold out hope that we’ll come up with ways to deal with the converging crises that confront us. I’m willing to run with the idea that the incredible affordances of the Internet and ubiquitous computing, while they are undeniably the fruits of a neoliberal elite hell-bent on solidifying their grip on the mechanisms of power through whatever means necessary, actually will have an empowering and emancipatory and ultimately positive effect, an emergent effect with assymmetric consequences unanticipated by the forces of Capital — a kind of upbeat blowback…

To uberpessimist David Golumbia, such thinking is wrong on two counts: first, the world is fucked, full stop. There’s no hope, just pack it in and roll over. Capital will inexorably leverage the immense communication and participation potential of the Internet and social media to its own advantage, using that power organize, mobilize and enslave. Eventually we’ll all end up with chips in our brains, consuming the products of the cannibalistic corporations to which we have subsumed our souls. We as critics must identify this problem and write about it — for which we will score points in the afterlife.

Second, trying to do anything about it will only make it worse. Golumbia might argue that even just calling the Internet the Internet reveals the depth of one’s imbrication in the “feeling and fact of mastery” that technology provides. Put another way, computationalism does not belong to us; rather, we belong to it. Any enthusiasm about technology’s promise is self-deceived nonsense that only serves to strengthen the hand of capitalism:

Among the oddest but most telling of the cultural changes accompanying the computer revolution is the one that emerges out of the late I960s social movements, in which a significant segment of youthful intelligentsia embraced the computer as a revolutionary technology that might transform the world along some of the same lines suggested by the counterculture in general (see Turner 2006 for an especially pointed history). In retrospect we can see that this has to be one of the most successful instances of co-optation in the history of social movements; for despite their appearance of transformative power, it is the ability of the computer to expand the feeling and fact of mastery that is most compelling about it. Much like their extended experiments with the profoundly capitalist medium of rock music and profoundly self-gratifying mind-altering substances-visible especially as the supposedly cognitively liberating psychedelic substances gave way to destructive and strongly isolating substances like alcohol, cocaine, and heroin-the counterculture was unable to escape the capitalist and hierarchical strand of dominant American culture it thought itself to be resisting. In the end, this revolution became about exactly the individualistic power it said it was resisting, in no small part via the embracing of a technology that wears its individualist expansionism on its sleeve. (153)

This text is super-depressing and seems to leave no room for optimism about a future that, like it or not, is going to have a lot to do with computational systems and network culture. While Golumbia does a good job of dishing out some straight talk about the horrific mobility and insidious reach of “individualist expansionism” and the vectors along which the computationalist worldview transmits itself, something really important seems to be missing here. Maybe it’s just that Golumbia’s overall vision seems a little angsty-adolescent. I mean, the world is a fucking mess, yes, absolutely — but come on, David, don’t give up!

Since its release in the early 1960s, Acquire has inspired generations of game designers and enthusiasts with its elegant and replayable design. Many game designers, including Ticket to Ride designer Alan R. Moon, cite Acquire as a seminal work in the evoution of tabletop gaming. This post provides designer-centric coverage of the game. Other useful starting points for people interested in learning more about Acquire can be found at webnoir.com and gamereport.com, among many others.

Overview

Acquire is a resource management strategy game in which players compete to earn money through the establishment and merger of corporations. By founding, merging and investing in corporations, players earn cash and stock. The game is won by the player who generates the most personal wealth by the time all the game tiles are either used or rendered unplayable.

Players

Acquire is designed to be played by 2 to 6 players. Larger groups are possible, but each additional player in excess of the recommended six compromises the pacing and balance of the system, primarily due to the limited number of tile spaces on the game board. The game requires that one player play the role of the banker, managing stock and cash transactions. This player must complete additional tasks to fulfill her responsibilities as banker, but her experience of the game is otherwise identical to the other players. Play unfolds in a turn-based manner, with the order of play being determined by random draw and seating position. Perceived imbalances caused by the differential between the players’ initial turn ranks are mitigated by the chance involved in tile selection and the random seeding of the board that precedes commencement of play.

Acquire has a unique and engaging hybrid interaction pattern. This pattern can be broken down into two overlapping parts: multilateral competition for resources and cash, and uni-/bi-/multi-lateral cooperation to build, expand and merge corporations. The multilateral competition pattern is easy to identify: by tactically placing tiles and trading stocks, each player attempts to outplay the others in order to earn the most cash. The uni-/bi-/multi-lateral cooperation pattern is a little more subtle. This kind of interaction occurs dynamically at various times throughout the game as players find themselves involved in de facto cartels and trading blocs. For example, two players might work together to pump up the value of a corporation’s stock in anticipation of a merger if they both have a substantial amount of stock in that corporation. This dynamic generates a relationship between the board and the players that does not exist in more familiar multilateral competition tabletop games. Risk, for example, visually maps individual player success via the state of the board — a quick glance at a game-in-progress tells you all you need to know about who’s powerful and well-positioned and who’s not. Similarly, Monopoly ties houses and hotels to properties which are in turn tied to individual players. This player “ownership” of sections of the board does not exist in Acquire, which is ultimately as much about the players’ collective speculation on a dynamically co-created imaginary market as it is about the rise and fall of their individual fortunes.

A typical game of Acquire takes about 30-60 minutes, depending on the speed of the players and the player-controlled “banker.” Beyond the core game mechanics, players spend a lot of time storytelling about the rise and fall of the various corporations on the board — ooh, Sackson’s expanding like the Blob. I knew it! — or the fortunes and actions of the individual players — heads up, Jeff’s getting serious about Quantum. The game tends to freeze up a bit toward the end, excluding trailing players and leading to a somewhat anti-climactic finale. That said, the inherent dynamism and complexity of the system makes the potential for victory seem within reach for most players until the late mid-game.

Objective

Simply put, the objective of Acquire is to make money by founding, building and merging corporations, and selling stock. These ends are achieved through the strategic placement of tiles and the expenditure of cash from the players’ reserves. The game is typically won by the player who holds the majority of shares in the surviving “safe” corporations, although occasional victories can be had by players who buy and sell in high volume in the early game.

Procedures

Players of Acquire participate in two central procedures, Setup and Turns. Setup occurs at the outset of the game and seeds the board with a random selection of tiles, ensuring different starting conditions for every game. The core game play then takes place as players take their Turns.

Setup

Game setup consists of a resource randomization phase, an initial resource allocation, a random seeding phase, and a secondary resource allocation:

• Resource randomization — In Acquire, players place numbered tiles onto their corresponding game board squares to expand and merge corporations. Each player has a “hand” of six tiles and plays one tile per turn. At the end of each turn, a new tile is drawn, replenishing the hand. To enforce randomness onto the allocation of these key resources, the first physical setup procedure in the game is to dump all 108 tiles onto the table and arrange them into a face-down cluster.
• Resource allocation 1 — In the initial resource allocation phase, one player is chosen to be the banker. This player will manage the exchange of cash and stocks for the remainder of the game. The banker provides each player with $6,000 in game money, divided into four $1000, three $500 and five $100 bills. With this range of denominations, players can make initial stock purchases without needing to involve the banker in making change. Given our play testing experience, players rarely need to actively “break” their larger bills. Players who run out of $100 bills will usually pick up a few in change each turn, guaranteeing an easy flow cash transactions.
• Random seeding — The random seeding phase of the setup is one of the most crucial moments in the game, as it determines the initial conditions of the stock market into which the players will be investing. The game board consists of a 12 x 9 grid of squares identified horizontally by number and vertically by letter (e.g. the square in the upper left corner is marked 1a, while the square in the lower right corner is marked 12i). After receiving their cash resources, each player randomly draws a tile from the face-down cluster and places it on the corresponding square on the game board. This procedure elegantly serves two purposes. First, it settles the question of turn order, as the player who draws the “lowest” tile (i.e. the one closest to 1a) goes first. Second, it “seeds” the board with a random selection of tiles. The result of this seeding is reminiscent of Conway’s Game of Life: complex, unpredictable patterns emerge through the combination of these initial tile placements with the other procedures called for by Acquire’s simple rule set. The result is a dynamic game board landscape that evolves to a different end-state with each replaying.
• Resource allocation 2 — Setup concludes with the players each gathering six tiles from the face-down cluster. These tiles comprise the players’ “hands,” and are kept secret. While the designers have given the players options when it comes to the secrecy of other resources — the stock cards, for example, can be left open to public view without seriously damaging the game — it is important to note that they have set firm guidelines for the tiles. If players were to know which tiles one another had, the game’s strategic complexity would multiply beyond reasonable bounds as players would be forced to consider both the strategic placement of their own tiles and those of their opponents. Such computations would seriously compromise the game’s capacity to enable intergenerational/intercompetency play experiences.

Turns

A player turn involves four steps: placing a tile on the game board, processing the consequences of the placed tile, buying stocks and drawing a new tile from the face-down cluster:

• Placing tiles — Players select one of their six secretly-held tiles to place on the board. To make this selection, players need to evaluate the consequences of placing a given tile onto its corresponding square. Tiles placed adjacent to other tiles, for example, will create, expand or merge a corporation. In the early game, the ratio of the number of empty squares on the board (depending on the number of players, this varies between 102 and 106) to the six tiles in each player’s hand is 17- or 18-to-1, meaning that the range of available moves might not contain a placement that is adjacent to another tile. This means that some players will find themselves unable to place a tile that will create, expand or merge a corporation. However, as play proceeds and the game board fills up, the ratio of squares-to-tiles decreases, ramping up the frequency of corporate foundings, expansions and mergers. Finally, the number of tiles in each players’ hand exceeds the number of playable squares on the game board. The game ends shortly after this state is reached.
• Processing consequences — After placing a tile onto the game board, players must make the appropriate adjustments to both their own resources and to shared game tokens. For example, suppose a player places a tile next to an “unincorporated” tile, thereby creating a corporation (so long as fewer than 7 corporations are on the board). In this case, the player must first select a corporation token from the remaining tokens contained in the banker’s box, then place that token on top of one of the tiles in the newly-formed corporation. Finally, the player will collect a single stock card for the corporation that they founded. These resource and token manipulations take place almost every turn during the mid-game, when most moves will create, expand or merge a corporation.
• Buying stocks — Players must decide which new stocks (if any) they will purchase by analyzing the projected fortunes of corporations (as represented by the tiles and tokens on the game board) and investors (as represented by the “stock portfolios” and piles of money that sit in front of the players at the table). A common strategy in this regard is to identify smaller corporations likely to be consumed by “safe” corporations (corporations with more than 11 tiles), and then to buy stock in them. This stock can then be sold or exchanged (at a markup of 2 to 1) for stock in the larger corporation when a merger occurs. Players are slowed from achieving unshakably dominant majority shareholder positions by a rule that limits the purchase of stocks to a maximum of three per turn.
• Drawing a new tile — Players replenish their hand at the end of their turn. As the game approaches its conclusion, some players will find that they have tiles in their hand that cannot be played due to the safe corporation rule. The safe corporation rule states that two corporations that have 11 or more tiles cannot merge, and no tile that would otherwise cause them to merge can be placed on the board. Players who have such tiles in their possession may trade them in for another randomly-picked tile at the end of their turn. This procedure ensures that players who are stymied by the arrangement of safe corporations on the game board can remain engaged and hopeful that they will receive a better tile on the exchange. Crucially, however, this exchange is limited to one tile per turn, which prevents players from quickly cycling through the available playable tiles during the endgame. This rule effectively injects another element of chance into the increasingly deterministic final stages of the game.

Rules

Acquire‘s compact rule set generates entertaining, social and multi-layered play experiences. It is a minimalist blend of Go and Monopoly. Unlike economic simulation games that generate complexity and nuance through the proliferation of objectives and constraints, Acquire creates rich interactions via a set of simple mechanics. The rule set generates lively multiplayer-Go-like board play through a few simple rules concerning the placement of tiles and the consequences thereof. It generates an active card-and-cash market by simply constraining how and when stocks may be bought. Most importantly, it links these two play activities — board play and card/cash game — so tightly that the one could not exist without the other. ((This essential interdependence of rules, boundaries and game resources does not preclude looseness or “give” in the system. The 1999 Hasbro rulebook, for example, leaves it up to the players to “decide as a group whether the money and stocks they acquire will be openly displayed.” Numerous modifications and editions discussed online suggest that the system can tolerate a lot of bend-and-tweak before it breaks. And yes, I just said, “bend-and-tweak.”))

Resources

Acquire has three key game resources: tiles, stocks and cash.

• Tiles — Having playable, strategically-relevant tiles can make all the difference, especially in the early game. Unlike stocks and cash, a player’s collection of tiles is determined through random draws. As noted above, injections of randomness such as this help to offset the potentially deterministic outcomes generated by board play mechanics alone.
• Stocks — Stocks accrue value as their issuing corporations expand. Corporations that grow beyond 11 tiles in size become “safe corporations,” meaning that they can not be consumed as the consequence of a merger (and that they cannot engage in a merger with another safe corporation). Players will attempt to corner the market in stocks for the most valuable safe corporations (i.e. not all stocks are made the same), while quickly flipping the lower-valued stocks of minor corporations through mergers and acquisitions. ((Obviously, the safe corporation rule also has key design implications when it comes to the evolution of the board play aspect of the game. I haven’t done the math on this, but I would guess that to allow two corporations of more than 11 tiles to merge would create a monopoly situation at around the same time turn-wise of the actual rule set’s mid-game. As the end-game draws near, this key constraint accelerates the pace at which the number of playable squares decrease, bottle-necking the players into an increasingly small array of possibilities with — at least for some — an increasingly large potential payoff.))
• Cash — Cash is necessary evil — albeit a highly-appropriate one, given the subject-matter of Acquire. As a game resource, it tracks the results of the players’ stock market activities. Cash may not be traded among the players, and aside from the up-front money given to them during the setup of the game, the only way players can earn money is through buying and selling stocks, or earning bonuses. Extra cash bonuses are given to the majority and minority stockholders when a corporation goes defunct following a merger. Tracking and processing cash transactions and stock values sometimes threatens the quick pace of the game, but the designers have done their best to mitigate this problem by providing simple charts specifying the going rates for stocks, majority and minority bonuses, and so forth.

Boundaries

Acquire’s boundaries are pretty standard: play is constrained to the tabletop, with the board as the central focus. In so-called “open display” games, the players’ money and stocks are a second circle of interest. In all versions of the game, the players’ personalities and knowledge of one another — both of which have roots that often go well beyond the shallow temporal constraints of a 45-minute board-gaming session — are also circumscribed by the magic circle.

Outcome

Winning Acquire depends on a combination of strategy and luck. A good draw of tiles properly played will put any player into potential victory position. Nevertheless, sudden shifts in fortune can occur well into the late game, leading to upset victories and close seconds. This randomness is essential to the game’s design as it confounds the deterministic tendencies inherent in small-grid proximal-square set-making board games (or SGPSSMBGs™ for short).

1999 Hasbro Ruleset

Formal element breakdown schema: Tracy Fullerton, Game Design Workshop.
Scans: thanks, E.

If you own the copyright to any of the materials presented in this post and want me to remove them from public view, please let me know via email and I will do so.

What’s less obvious is understanding how ubiquitous computing and social media affect the ways new readers interact with novels and other long-form texts. Does the shifting vernacular of online discourse degrade general literacy? Is the Web somehow to blame for shortening attention spans? Does social media threaten to eliminate common cultural touchstones by fragmenting readers into ultra-personalized affinity groups?

The debate is passionate and charged. Articulate advocates abound, from technologists who cite social justice and political engagement as urgent reasons for integrating new media literacies into school curricula, to traditionalists who argue that instantaneous access to information and the casual, fragmented and unfocused nature of online writing present mortal threats to book culture. There are rejoinders to every argument, and there isn’t anywhere near enough room in this space to begin to cover it all. Nevertheless, like a lot of arguments, much of what is interesting here has less to do with particular advocacy positions than it does with coming to an understanding as to the origin, meaning and trajectory of the debate itself.

Using Motoko Rich’s concise 2008 NYT article, Online, R U Really Reading? as a launching point, I would like to suggest that what’s really going on here is in fact less a matter of ideological dispute than a linguistic discord brought about by category confusion — a semantic landslide shaken into being by instabilities in the definitions of the words online and reading. Furthermore, I argue that as the dust settles, the definitions for these words will expand and overlap one another as they stretch to take into account the dynamism and reach of the erupting technoculture; as a result, the distinction between so-called “media literacy” and traditional capital-L Literacy will all but disappear.

Communications technology and culture produce and consume one another in a strange co-evolutionary symbiosis. Chicken-and-egg problems confront analysis at every turn. Did the Web create Web culture, or did Web culture create the Web? While these kinds of questions might have had more ready answers in the early days of the web, the relationship between tech development and online culture has become increasingly tangled and recursive. The era of pervasive social media is upon us, and this is changing the way we must think about online communications, shifting away from a purely instrumental static linked documents view to the new and radically-unfamiliar-to-print-culture Web 2.0 perspective of dynamically linked concepts and actors. Cyberspace turned out to be much broader and deeper than even its most prescient early advocates had predicted — broad, because the Web is more than just an information space to be navigated through, but is also (most crucially) a multipurpose, multi-faceted hyperspace of conversation, socialization and collaboration; and deep because the Web’s tangle of dendrites now extend well beyond computer screens and into our embodied existences via the mobile devices and other near-ubiquitous network portals that proliferate in our lives.

This deep intermixing of social activity and technology requires us to re-examine what we mean when we speak of being “online.” What does it mean to say I am “online” when I am effectively always online? Where is the border between the Real and the Virtual when one exists in both places at once? Much of my own research involves exploring ways that mobile and ubiquitous computing can add layers of story, interaction and play to physical environments. Thinking of network technology/network culture in this manner — as a pervasive, spatially- and temporally-distributed non-platform-specific layer instead of a constrained single-platform activity — effectively expands the definition of the word online to include a vast array of mediated communicative acts.

Such an expansion problematizes critiques of new media culture that seek to cast online activities as being somehow in opposition to, or competition with, older modes of learning, play and communication. Rich cites Nicholas Carr’s 2008 Atlantic Monthly article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, as an example of this kind of us-versus-the-machine characterization. And while Carr certainly makes some valid points about all the bad, bad things the Internet can do, he largely comes off as a finger-wagging grump. Carr’s confession that he “now [finds] it difficult to read long books” is particularly telling. Why does the author feel so down on himself for discovering that he is more interested and engaged by online conversation than he is by books? Maybe the reality is that Mr. Carr is in fact more fully in the world than ever before and simply doesn’t have the time or motivation to read books the way he once did, choosing instead to expend his imaginative capital meticulously researching and crafting angry, hyperbolic attacks on Web 2.0.

Mr. Carr’s argument is typical of critics who cleave to restrictive definitions of what it means to read and be online. Dana Gioia of the National Endowment for the Arts repeats a popular sentiment when he writes “electronic media…provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading.” The basic argument here is that books engender crucial linear reading and thinking skills that simply are not called upon in ephemeral and fragmented online reading contexts. This, to me, is something of a tautology (e.g., wood-chopping skills can only be acquired with an axe in hand; but that doesn’t necessarily put the kindling pile in conflict with the Kindle). Assumptions in both directions seem unexamined: anyone who’s taken a decent undergraduate English course knows that novels aren’t actually linear; that they engage with the world around them; and that reading them depends on an active imaginative collaboration between the author and the reader. Similarly, reading online is, like everything else in our temporality, productive of fundamentally linear texts. Even the most random walk through the Web assembles ideas and data feeds into a linear sequence — chapter one, I click on this, I read that; chapter two, I write this, I click on that, I read this…

Despite these and other debates about the putative advantages and disadvantages of certain kinds of literacy, it’s pretty clear that the process of collapsing the boundaries between online and offline reading is well underway. Like Nicholas Carr, I too have experienced a decrease in the number of novels and long-form texts that I read, a decrease that has been inversely proportional to the amount and range of my online reading practices. One could take Mr. Carr’s bait and argue that, because of this change, I actually read much more widely, am exposed to an exponentially larger array of texts via recommendation engines and social networking applications, and that my ability to discover and discuss literature is much greater now than it ever was previously. But doing so would simply invite another salvo of replies — that I am an educated academic with critical skills that enable me to leverage technology better than “amateur” readers, that I am proselytizing for a set of practices that I have vested interest in justifying, or that the non-heirarchical setup of the Web puts Orwell’s 1984 on the same level as bttf4444′s Down With Big Brother!, a crossover fan fiction mixing Orwell’s original with characters and themes drawn from the Back to the Future series. I would, of course, disagree with all these contentions; the ball would bounce back into Carr’s court, and we’d continue ad infinitum.

Such PvP arguments typify much of public life in this country; I’d rather look for solutions and opportunities to be found in the notion that reading is an expanding category which now takes into account a multiplicity of practices. Conceived of in this light, literacy education becomes the site of overlap between many interrelated practices. Learning how to tell the difference between fact and speculation, good sources and suspect ones, poetry and drivel, bttf4444 and Orwell — and how to properly appreciate, contextualize and interact with them all — has always been the work of the active reader, and a part of this work has been to find ways to adapt to changes in the technological and social landscape. Dealing with the new layers of literacy demanded by network culture is just the latest stage in this ongoing evolution.

Let me put this plainly: Blackboard is an impediment to scholarship, and the sooner universities stop using it, the better. Let’s leave aside for the moment the clunky UI and bothersome content-framing that makes efficiently using Blackboard materials alongside other web content almost impossible. Let’s just pretend that it’s not a scandalous waste of university resources to pay for a substandard set of collaboration tools when better and more well-supported products exist in the free and open source community. And let’s not worry about the fact that the company behind the software has attempted to patent basic functions like posting course materials and grades online. Even if these issues didn’t exist, the system would still be deeply and fundamentally wrong-headed.

Why do I have such a hate-on for Blackboard? Because Blackboard is a walled garden. Or, put another way, it doesn’t play well with the Web. Which is a pretty serious problem for a product that is supposed to “intertwine easily with the other technologies” learners rely on. Take Blackboard’s RSS support, for example — or, rather, its lack thereof. Getting a feed to display in Blackboard takes a lot more work than it does in, say, a completely free blogging and collaboration system like WordPress. And getting feeds out of Blackboard? Forget about it.

Of course, closed-off, login-required systems like Blackboard are useful for restricting access to private information like grades, internal planning documents and direct email-like communications between professors and students (though why email itself isn’t good enough for this function, I don’t exactly understand). But Blackboard also seals off from public view useful materials like course syllabi, readings, web links and — most importantly — crucial knowledge-production activities like class discussion-board activity and blogs. Hiding this kind of content from public view is destructive and wasteful. I submit that if students and professors are engaging in scholarly discourse in online forums, sharing resources and collaborating on the development of new ideas, it is in the best interest of the students themselves, the Academy at large and — yes — human civilization for this information to be universally accessible, remixable and spreadable. Blackboard works directly against this imperative by locking down the productive activities of the classroom in the name of archaic intellectual property laws and nonsensical bugaboos about privacy, cutting students off from the massive intellectual cross-pollination potential of what James Paul Gee calls “affinity spaces.”

According to Gee, affinity spaces are discursive learning spaces defined not by membership in a particular community or group, but rather by a common endeavor or interest. Enabling these kinds of spaces is arguably the most significant and transformative affordance of the Web. Sure, it’s great that we can link documents together, send information to one another and cheaply produce one-to-many communications. Even walled gardens have their use. But the true power of a global information network is only realized when ideas are linked together and communication begins to occur on a many-to-many scale. This is precisely what happens in an affinity space, which functions as a kind of lens, focusing energy and enthusiasm from a dispersed array of sources onto a particular topic or semantic domain. Knowledge is generated, portals are opened and connections are established. Gee cites AoM Heaven, a player-community resource site for the (now somewhat long-in-the-tooth) RTS game, Age of Mythology, as an example of an affinity space, but it’s easy to think of dozens more. Yelp’s section on Pizza in Los Angeles, the Wikipedia page on micronations, the ThinkWiki Linux Thinkpad users site and the Delicious tag archive for ‘henryjenkins’ are all affinity spaces to a greater or lesser degree. Each is a portal to/generator of content co-created by a distributed group of individuals, expert and novice alike, assembled around a common endeavor.

Blackboard subtracts the efforts of students and professors alike from the pool of sources from which affinity spaces draw their power, interrupting rather than fostering the formation of productive educational bonds. By keeping online discussions, blogs and other discursive engagements under lock and key, Blackboard ensures that no one else on the Web will be able to look at, cite, aggregate, argue with, agree with, blog about or otherwise use any of the content generated or portals opened by the work of the class. This seems like a terrible waste to me — for the students, the professors, and the public at large.

Put another way, affinity spaces know few boundaries and take all comers, and that’s a big part of why they work and how they have become so ubiquitous in network learning practices (indeed, I would argue that affinity spaces are in fact synonymous with network learning practices); Blackboard, on the other hand, reifies an older order of property, unitary authority and isolated community — an order that makes little sense in the context of a broader learning environment governed by sharing, networking and openness.

By eliminating or limiting the role of affinity spaces in classwork, pedagogical approaches that lean heavily on Blackboard not only fail to educate students in crucial digital literacies, but also threaten to alienate them from “traditional” education itself. As administrators consider renewing their expensive contracts with Blackboard, Inc, they would be well-advised to consider the warning that concludes Gee’s paper:

. . . people today are confronted with and enter more and more affinity spaces. They see a different and arguably more powerful vision of learning, affiliation, and identity when they do so. Learning becomes both a personal and unique trajectory through a complex space of opportunities (Le., a person’s own unique movement through various affinity spaces over time) and a social journey as one shares aspects of that trajectory with others (who may be very different from oneself and inhabit otherwise quite different spaces) for a shorter or longer time before moving on. What . . . young people see in school may pale by comparison. It may seem to lack the imagination that infuses the non-school aspects of their lives (Gee 2003). At the very least, they may demand an argument for “Why school?” (103)

However one tries to justify the walled garden, be it proprietary protectionism, safety, careerism or institutional vanity, it’s difficult to claim that this cloistering of discussion, debate and ideation is better for scholarship than its alternative — that is, embracing digital literacy as a crucial pedagogical objective and developing a new praxis for education that brings affinity spaces into the center of the classroom. As for Blackboard itself, perhaps the best we can hope for is that students will find ways to hack it into something better…

As far as I can remember, Jonas Marshall was the local ringleader when it came to pen-and-paper role-playing and strategy games. It was in his basement on Third Street in southwest Calgary where I saw my first set of polyhedral dice. Jonas’s younger brother, Paul, was my age; we, along with the avuncular Ryan Sullivan and a couple of other semi-interchangable bright-eyed and dirty-fingernailed boys, constituted the Rideau/Roxboro geek cohort of our time. Most of us were already into games of various sorts — from video games we typed into our computers from BASIC programs printed in magazines, to simpler fantasy and board games like Crossbows and Catapults or Risk. If the games we played used dice, they used six-sided dice only. Jonas, on the other hand, three years older than the rest of us, had games that used the full set of Platonic solids and more: the near-spherical d20, the better-than-rolling-two-regular-dice d12, the percentile-generating d10, the sturdy-rolling outlier d8 and the dangerous-to-tread-upon d4.

The subject-matter of the games Jonas played (fantasy, science fiction, espionage, etc.) was almost certainly the main driver of my interest in playing them; that said, the fact that these games used an array of esoteric dice foreign to my eyes and completely alien to those of my parents and teachers was undeniably an attraction. Unlike the by-then over-familiar six-sided dice that generated random numbers for the bulk of the games I played in my childhood, a set of polyhedral dice was something otherworldly and almost magical. It became de rigeur for each of us to own at least one complete set — often bought one at a time with the money left over from allowances spent on comic books and game manuals — and to keep this set in an well-considered game-appropriate pouch or box. I had a velvety purple Crown Royal bag that resonated nicely with my magic-user alter ego; had I been able to afford one, I would have probably upgraded to leather.

In addition to their stochastic function within the games we played, polyhedral dice — the way they were carried, handled and regarded — played an almost ritual role in our gaming activities. Gaming sessions would begin as we arrived in the Marshall brothers’ basement (after first pausing to eat ravioli and drink milk graciously served by the tireless Mrs. Marshall), took our seats on the tight carpet and poured our dice onto the floor as if emptying our pouches of coins or magic tokens. A red and translucent d4, a solid black d20, a light blue d8 with orange numbers grease-penciled in: each die had a certain power, a look, a kind of meaning-rich resonance in my young mind. Each was supposed to be a ‘good roller,’ and it was not unheard of to discard a die that consistently rolled against one’s desires. Jealousies existed. My black d20 was reknowned for its power.

In the early days, the older — indeed, seemingly wizened and grey though let’s face it, he was just a twelve or thirteen year-old — Jonas Marshall would function as Dungeon Master (or game master, or whatever the moderator/admin/storyteller was called in the game we were playing), and while he set up the cardboard screens that contained saving throw charts and random event lists, the rest of us would get our character sheets together and test-roll our dice and maybe even line them up in ascending or descending order. But this was more than just a readying of the tools necessary to play a game. The reality was, we each had our own special dice and those dice were laden with personal meanings related to the pivotal function they would play in the ongoing co-creation of story and incident that emerged from and constituted our gaming activity. This wasn’t Monopoly; even though storytelling was certainly a key component of any Monopoly session, the narrative component, like the dice-rolling itself, was simple and repetitive and predictable: someone gets rich, everyone else goes broke. In Dungeons and Dragons or Top Secret or Traveller (my personal favorite), absolutely anything could happen, there was no end to the game (only the conclusion of chapters or ‘modules’), and the role that dice and random numbers played was richer and more nuanced by orders of magnitude.

This nuanced relationship between randomness, storytelling and play was probably my favorite thing about [insert RPG here], and while the dice we used initially seemed weird and possibly even merely arbitrary and decorative, it quickly became apparent that the depth and sophistication of the RPG experience — at least one wherein randomness has a hand in everything from how much coinage is found on a dead kobold to the duration and effects of drunkenness on a female half-elf cleric who is unwittingly carrying a cursed morning star — utterly depended on going beyond the traditional xd6 system for random number generation used in typical board games.

Role-playing games use polyhedral dice because of the many different kinds of randomness they can generate. Six-sided dice generate even odds when when you roll one die at a time and are looking for a number between one and six; but when you start needing more numbers, which happens very quickly when you’re designing a game system that tracks a large amount of variables across multiple domains, simply adding dice messes with the odds and removes pure randomness from certain parts of the system. For example, any kid knows that the seven is the most likely number to roll when you toss two six-sided dice because there are more possible combinations of the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 that add up to seven (1+6, 2+5, 3+4, 4+3, 5+2, 6+1) than there are for any other number between 2 and 12. A 12-sided die (d12) changes all that. You’re just as likely to roll a 7 on a d12 as you are a 1 (which you can’t even roll at all on 2d6). This “pure” randomness frees designers from having to take into account the imbalances in the probabilities of combined dice rolls, opening the doors to new uses for randomness that incorporate regular result distributions within larger numerical ranges (and, of course, the many irregular distributions produced by combinations of multiple dice).

By using polyhedral dice, RPG designers enabled a wide variety of new uses for dice rolls, from simply randomly selecting one item from a list of 20 using a d20, to managing a sliding scale of modifiers within a die-specific range or on bell curves created by multiple dice. This flexibility made possible the richly detailed game mechanics of classic RPGs, and set the stage conceptually for the computationally-managed RPG combat and experience engines under the hood of games like World of Warcraft.

I know I’m not alone in appreciating the deep formal, epistemological and sentimental connections between polyhedral dice, the story/game systems of my childhood, and the exciting possiblities of interactive and generative computational art. The playful interplay of randomness and rulesets that I discovered in the Marshalls’ basement led me down a path toward my present interests in the relationships between play, story and procedural authority; remembering how the dice made me feel reminds me that emotional engagement always wins the day, particularly when it comes to calling audiences to action and engagement, and that speaking to and from the heart is, at the end, what we’re all really after.

This presentation explores the evolution and trajectory of ubiquitous computing technologies that enable designers to embed media artifacts and computational systems in physical space. By placing custom bar code glyphs, GPS/Google Earth markers, sensor systems or other smart-phone-readable triggers in physical locations, designers can create hyperlinks connecting real-world objects or places with a wide variety of media — from video, audio and text content to dynamic data feeds and opportunities for interactions with both human and non-human agencies. Crucially, however, this layering practice does not stop at the level of the hyperlink or the traditional notion of Augmented Reality. Rather, designers are beginning to perceive opportunities for embedding responsive computational power in physical space, enabling environments to track, profile and communicate with their inhabitants, providing customized, adaptive and anticipatory user experiences.

(see also: USC IMD)

Click here to view the blog or here to go straight to the “writing” tool.

The application was built with Processing/RiTA and blosxom. The source code can be viewed here.

Created December, 2008 for Anne Balsamo‘s Seminar in Media and Design Studies (CNTV-601).

Hard-copy available upon request.

Download the .pdf here.

UPDATE: Those interested in quick gloss of this document can now read the “Six Points” of the Manifesto below.

The Six Points

1. Everything is Triage

This is an emergency. How did we get here? Where are we going? None of us can pretend to know. Time and being are incomprehensible. No matter how fine-grained our imaging systems may become, the great mysteries of our existence will always elude us. This is the baseline of anxiety for all humans. Even in the absence of environmental, economic and social stressors, living this life requires an enormous amount of courage. And for most of us, contemplating these fundamental questions about our origins and fate are viewed as “luxuries.” Bills need to be paid, friends and family need to be cared for, complex social arrangements must be navigated, and so on–

Every car on the highway is occupied. Every building in the city is densely packed with fear, desire, grief and joy. If all of that was gone and there were only two or three of us left, trapped, say, on some alien planet, would we not huddle together and work for our mutual survival? How does the line get drawn, then? Is it merely numbers that turn families into clans and clans into factions and so on down the line, separating us not only from each other but also from the basic facts of our existence? Perhaps this division is only transitory, the effect of competing stories told to while away the time and wash away the terror in a flood of certainty. Let it be our task to do the work to identify and break down these divisions and increase the potential for collective action in the spirit of mutual aid.

2. Technology is a deal with the devil and we are already in Hell

Consider the orangutan, or the dolphin, or the rat. There is no humanity without technology. Our most basic of tools, symbolic communication, is an emergent property of our being. Even feral children draw and sing spontaneously. We did not make this deal with the devil, the one that says we will trade the innocence of the Animal for a shot at immortality and omnipotence via technic; that particular agreement predates us. We may not be Nature’s final impulse in this direction, but it cannot be forgotten that it is the aspiration of all life to survive, and survival means expansion, diversification, adaptation and transformation. Our instinctive tool-making and symbol-weaving practices are as much an expression of Life as Old Man’s Beard or the Yellow-Beaked Cuckoo.

And yet — and herein lies the challenge — while there is no humanity without technology, technology itself is not human. By building, we change our world and force new realities upon ourselves. We must not see ourselves as being in conflict with our creations; and yet conflict arises nonetheless. Technological systems take on energies of their own and seek their propogation. The earth does not care who it is that carries its flag into the Beyond; if robots work best, then robots it will be.

The paradox of our provenance is that, to survive and prosper as technological beings, to bring-into-existence an extrasolar destiny on behalf of Life itself,  we have also needed to be distinctly communal in nature and generous in spirit. Despite all our wars and horrors, we could not have made it out of whatever Origin it is we emerged from without deeply caring for one another. The human conscience is no accident. Fealty is an ancient thing; love even older. No one stands up for the humans but the humans themselves.

Perhaps it is this very tension that drives us forward and motivates “innovation.” Having inherited a restrictive, potentially self-defeating contract from our genetic forebearers, we seek to find workarounds and loopholes. Generations pass as these loopholes open and close. The leaders among us seek technological answers to technological problems. We spiral through recursivity, for the devil with whom we have struck this deal lies within us.

3. The future is non-profit

Where will you be in five hundred years? Let us not get bogged down in an impossible-to-resolve discussion about the relative merits of cooperation and competition, welfare states and free markets, the tragedy of the commons, the invisible hand and the rest of it. That battle of inches is for another playing field. It’s an argument between rival ice-making factions at the dawn of refrigeration: you sad, sad, people — let go of it, your time has passed. Scoring points in a debate about how best to structure an economy or galvanize a populace might make you feel better about yourself and advance you in this or that econo-sexual realm, but how does the Old Push and Pull really play out in your community in the Long Run?

(And never mind the unfolding collapse of the global economy, the revelation that we have all been party to a gigantic, murderous Ponzi scheme. This should not be a surprise to anyone. The greatest evils are the ones that escape identification.)

No, the notion that the Future is non-profit is not a political one. Let’s call it scientific instead. Pragmatic. Honest. What outcomes can humanity really expect in the centuries to come? This author proposes two scenarios. In the first, we see an increasingly fuedal arrangement, with food and fuel gathering around centers of wealth protected by military power. On the periphery, mass starvation, murder and disease predominate. Geopolitics becomes defined by resource wars and factionalism. We already seem well on our way to this destination. But it is not my belief that this is where we will ultimately arrive.

Rather, I propose a second possibility. In this scenario, neofuedalism continues to emerge in the manner suggested above, but finds that it is incompatible with the fruits of its own endeavor. Militarism made the Internet, and the Prodigal disapproves of the Parent. The great instrument of power, namely the withholding and transfer of Capital, has always depended on its lieutenant, the Minister of Information. And loose lips sink ships. In this new age, lies are easier to tell, but secrets harder to keep. The mendacious will be exposed. Calumny will fold back upon itself. And as the crowds huddling around the castles dwindle in number — some slipping out and into the Wastes beyond, others losing life and limb to incursions from without — the blame will fall squarely on the Center.

This is the Long View, and we must recognize that it is not in our nature to act in the interests of descendents ten generations hence. Let it be said that, despite his own interests in Extreme Posterity and Vavilovian Seed Banks and Millenium Clocks, this author is not advocating a multi-century strategy-of-living. Indeed, quite the opposite. We are tactical beings. We work best when we work provisionally (see “Point the Fourth”). It will be a while yet before this cycle of Exploitation, Privation, Revelation and Revolution (EPRR) radiates through the totality of our experience. But right now, we can observe it playing out in the Inner Circles. And we can Act, and in our action, maybe, just maybe, lay the groundwork for generations to come.

4. Provisional living provides best

The larger the plan, the more replete it is with errors. Telescope through time. Imagine the weather in a week, a month. Consider the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns (for what discussion of strategy and tactics would be complete without a reference to D.R.?). It is our tendency to personalize things, and therefore unsurprising that we should ascribe the shifts in fortune of nations and corporations and crime syndicates to the careful planning of their overlords. But, as any historian will tell you, the story of warfare or capital or conspiracy is less about the grand plans that succeed than it is about those that fail. Whatever may be said about the victors of History and the way that it has been written, it is always the Opportunists that win the day.Hubris is one of our oldest themes. Words lose their meaning the more you try to use them to bend the world to your will. Envision the best future possible, but do not worship it or it will destroy you. This is the true meaning of the old admonishment against idolotry. As soon as an objective ceases to be provisional, it becomes dangerous. Have your aims and see them through, but keep your wits about you.

5. Story encompasses all

Story is the most potent technology in existence. Stories move fast and weigh nothing. But beware: they can shred rainforests. For a story is what an army tells itself as it sharpens its machetes.

“This is what we’re going to do. This is why. This is what will happen.”

Stories motivate. All kinds of darkness and light.

6. Art is a light

You know it’s true.

More: download the .pdf