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. 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.

Yes, I just said that all the evils of the world are there because of poorly thought-out design. And no, I’m not going to qualify that statement with any provisos or back away from it in any way. For the purposes of this text, you, the reader, can assume that I am going to keep on believing this theory until I’m old and grey and in need of the medical care that I’m probably not going to have. So settle in and run with it for a while — at the very least, it’ll be worth a chin-stroking laugh or two.

The theory goes like this. Back in the day when it was just caves and fires and ochre painting, “design” as we know it had a fairly minimal impact on human life in comparison to, say, saber-toothed tigers, disease, interspecies warfare, starvation and so on. At some point in our very early pre-human history, we made a kind of genetic deal with the devil. This deal stipulated that, in exchange for mitigating and even overcoming the often nightmarish realities of animal life on planet Earth via the use of larger forebrains and therefore tools and language and metaphor, we would spend eternity struggling (recursively(ad(infinitum))) to understand and mitigate and overcome the emergent anti-human effects of our technic. What we didn’t and couldn’t know was that we were and are and always will be a part of something larger, and that the dividends of peace and longevity and health we stood to receive as a result of our embrace of toolmaking were a pittance in comparison to the benefit that would be reaped by the tools themselves — namely that they came to exist at all and that their existence demanded the coming-into-being of more tools. Such is the material destiny of the Earth, the machine and the post-human. This is our inheritance. And this is why design is so fucking important.

Our present situation is one wherein we find ourselves at the mercy of a very different kind of ecosystem than the one our forebearers encountered when they descended from the trees. For us — and I mean all of us, not just the West or the “technologically-advanced” countries — we must contend daily with the emergent properties of a designed world that are just as mercurial and deadly as the snakes, tigers and disease of the “natural” world. That is: good intentions pave the road to hell. The aggregate of our design decisions, imbricated in time and space, give rise to all manner of horrors. Consider the canonical example of Christianity (and yes, I know this is broad and something of a cliche, but still–). Here we find many different designed systems interacting and overlapping: words designed to heal and comfort get repurposed and redesigned by agents who believe that order and control are moral imperatives in a world teetering on the brink of chaos; this repurposing — both by design and by accident — divides and antagonizes people along ethnic and religious lines; conflicts emerge wherein both sides feel they have the moral upper hand; and who among us well-meaning beings wants to stop a fight if we know that what we’re fighting for is right? Out of this feedback loop emerges Crusades and Inquisitions and witch-burnings and the vast unknowable network of misunderstandings and confusions and inherited ignorances that, within our increasingly elaborate design ecosystem, serve as the powder for so many terrible explosions.

Which brings me back to grade school. In places where such things exist, we must confront once again the fundamental paradox of our existence as designers: designing a curriculum enables us to mitigate some of the problems we face today (most of which are the result of earlier design decisions) by equipping children with the conceptual and practical tools they will need to prosper in the world; but in so doing, we will by necessity be creating new design artifacts — texts, systems of thought, problem-solving approaches, visions of the world — which will inevitably interact with the larger design ecosystem in unpredictable ways and will (equally inevitably) produce fresh and potentially more complex problem sets which we will have to face tomorrow. Hence my earlier suggestion that technology is a deal with the devil and we are already in Hell. So, what to do?

Let it be said that I’m not capable of answering this question. I don’t think anybody is. It’s turtles all the way down. But it’s not in my (or our) nature to give up (and what the hell else are we supposed to do anyway in our short time on this isolated outpost?). What I’m good at is reframing things, creating thought-games and provoking inquiry. I’ve tried to do that here, but it feels like it’s not enough. I need something tangible — a lattice on which to hang all this optimistic pessimism. So I’ve gone to the source. I’ve spoken to a child.

Lila is a bright, thoughtful and frankly hilarious 8 year-old attending Pine Hill Public School in Toronto. She’s also my god-daughter, meaning I think she’s none other than the smartest, coolest and most fun kid in the world. That said, I think Lila is having a pretty normal childhood for a girl of her generation, class and geographic provenance. Pine Hill is a typical urban school. Class size is large — Lila says that there are 32 kids in her class, making for a chaotic and often impersonal learning environment — and funding is limited. When I spoke to Lila last week, I asked her questions about her learning experiences at school and at home. I wanted to know about how different types of design affected her growth as a human being. In particular, I wanted to understand the roles various forms of technology — computers, interactive media, social media, and so on — play in her childhood. What I learned surprised me. I expected to find that Lila was living in a very different educational environment than the one I lived in during my childhood; instead, I discovered a few strong differences and a whole lot of similarities. After conducting the interview, I walked away realizing that school systems — even ones in supposedly progressive districts like Pine Hill — are still only at the very beginning of redesigning the way they work to adjust to the changes in the broader communications and technology landscape. This reinforces the sense of risk/opportunity that pervades much of the literature on this subject, and raises a few key questions that I will try to articulate below.

“This is great, I can get out of homework,” was Lila’s initial response when I asked her if she would be willing to answer a few questions about computers, school and games (ironically, the discussion we were about to have was homework, my homework, for Henry Jenkins’ New Media Literacies graduate seminar at USC). The first question I asked was about how Lila uses computers at school. Here’s what she said:

The only time we use computers at school is when we have computer class. We learn about how computers are made and, like, how to work computers, like how to turn it on and off, searching, Google. But it’s a bit boring because I already know about all this stuff. So we’ve haven’t really learned anything new. But we get to play games sometimes, so it’s okay.

I suppose it’s only natural that schools continue in their 80s/90s mentality of separate-classes-for-separate-activities, but the notion that schools still have a cordoned-off “Computers” class came as a surprise. As I hinted above, Lila is a smart kid; I would not hesistate to describe her as an exceptionally fast learner. That said, she is far from privileged. She is the only child of a working single parent, and while she definitely gets enough to eat and is lucky enough to have access to a computer at home, she can hardly be described as well-off. In the context of Pine Hill, a relatively affluent area in Toronto, Lila’s mom is probably at the low end of the scale when it comes to wages. If basic computer usage is a familiar thing to someone like Lila, I would suggest that most of the other kids in her class have also been exposed to the fundamentals of Google searching and turning computers on and off. Indeed, when I asked Lila about this, she said “everyone knows how to use computers already.”

Of course, Lila’s got a great mom who spends a lot of time with her teaching her how to safely and wisely use the Web. Not all kids are so lucky. After a certain point, money doesn’t matter nearly as much as attention. At home, Lila’s experience of computers is much different than what she encounters at school. Under the supervision of her mother, Lila gets to do a variety of things online. “I mostly like to go on Google Images and search for panda bears and cute little dogs,” she told me. “Sometimes if a friend comes over we’ll play a two-player game or look at things on YouTube.” But, significantly, it’s not a free-for-all: “My mom won’t let me use Facebook, and I can only watch things on YouTube if they’re appropriate.” (I asked her what she meant by appropriate and she said that “my mom decides what that is.”) Clearly (and much to my satisfaction as a godfather), this is an engaged parent. Equally as clearly, the contrast between Lila’s at-home computer usage and her school Computers class couldn’t be stronger.

When I asked Lila what she thought computers were good for, I got another little nugget of insight into how she navigates between the design ecologies of home and school. While the school-based “official” computer learning is very focused on the computers themselves — teaching technical info like how they work and how to make them do things — there is a lot of lateral/unintentionally-situated computer use in Lila’s educational experience that occurs as a kind of emergent property of her traditional classes.

[Computers] are really good for homework — if you have to search something, it’s like, easy. It tells you lots of facts and clues. Like my mom showed me Wikipedia and I once had this assignment about Ireland, and it gave me all these facts about potatoes and everything… And then I found some videos on YouTube to show. [The Web] really made it easy to do the research and make my project.

Here we see an exemplar of one of the reasons why many educators espouse an inter-/trans-/post-disciplinary approach to integrating new media literacies into school curricula. Lila’s Social Studies class assignment — to research a country and prepare a short report and poster about that country for presentation to the class — was something she probably could have done with books found in her school library. But because her mother had taken the time to show her how to use, reshape and, as it happens, critically evaluate the materials on Wikipedia, Lila developed/expanded some essential new media literacies such as appropriation (meaningfully sampling and remixing media content), transmedia navigation (the ability to follow stories/information across multiple modalities), and distributed cognition (the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities).

In Lila’s case, we see a student who is developing new media literacies through the tandem (but not necessarily coordinated) efforts of a school on the one hand and a parent on the other. Sadly, without the solid parenting that Lila is receiving, these literacies would probably remain underdeveloped, at least as far as the Third Grade goes. At Pine Hill, computers are kept off to the side rather than integrated in a meaningful way as augmentations to existing learning structures. Funding shortfalls, the limitations of teacher expertise and Toronto’s massive population probably account for a lot of this structural problem. As Lila herself notes:

Usually i’m frustrated because there’s like 32 kids in my class. I do better doing my work at home because my mom helps me a lot and we have the computer. It’s hard to get the teacher’s attention. I never get time to finish my work at school. I think i actually would get more work done even if my mom didn’t help me. There are less distractions, less talking, I can actually concentrate. It’s mental at school…

That said, I have trouble laying all the blame here on the economic and political situation within which Pine Hill Public School operates. I asked Lila if her teachers in Social Studies or Math or Science ever used computers in class. She said that they did, but that it was mostly to “show us stuff, like diagrams and things,” much like teachers in my day would use an overhead projector. She told me that there was little to no advice given about how to, say, use the Web to learn more about a science issue or evaluate the veracity of a Wikipedia article about Ireland. The fact that, according to Lila, not very much of that kind of teaching was taking place, suggests to me a fundamental design flaw in the curriculum at Pine Hill — and perhaps in the Greater Toronto Area school system in general. Not every kid has a generous and capable mom like Lila does. A system that relies on such moms does so at its own peril.

Without an integrated approach to new media literacies, schools run the risk of exacerbating the “participation gap” as certain students excel thanks to their parents’ efforts to instill in them basic new media literacies, while others fall behind and aside, lacking the tools necessary to function in the present technological ecosystem. Once again, we find ourselves in a moment where the design decisions of today contain the potential for both enormous reward and extreme danger. We must accept that whatever solutions we find to the perplexing and paradoxical question of “what to do?”, particular with regard to education, will always be provisional. But perhaps this is the larger message implicit in these kinds of discussions — ours is a dynamic self-reflexive world, one wherein everything we create in turn creates us; to resist this dynamism is to deny a fundamental fact of our existence — and denial, as we have seen time and again, has no place in the teaching of the young.

What if there was a hidden world layered atop visible reality that could only be seen by certain people? What if you were one of those people?

Viz is a casual augmented reality game that enables players to discover and embed virtual objects — or “vobjects” — in physical space by looking through the camera viewfinders of their mobile phones.

By discovering and embedding vobjects, players earn points, advancing their positions on local, national and international leaderboards. These points also allow players to unlock special add-ons, tricks and bonuses for their vobjects (see “Variations and Extensions,” below).

Pervasive & Persistent Social Gaming

Players who install the Viz application on their phone can expect an ambient “always on” play experience that exists within the flow of their everyday lives. Players engage with Viz when they have spare moments in public spaces. The application icon, which sits inobtrusively in the notification area of the player’s phone (see figures below), works in the background and changes in appearance depending on the proximity of vobjects (i.e., a quick glance at your phone’s desktop tells you all you need to know). If the player wants to score points by locating these objects, they can view GPS information and activate the “scanner” tool by simply clicking on the application icon. The game is meant to accompany players as they move through space, providing active and mobile individuals with a persistent low-intensity creative social gaming outlet.

Players

Because of its dependency on user-created content, Viz requires a sizable player base in the areas where it will be played. Like a certain social networking service or other open-ended collaborative production games such as SF0, Viz will begin in specific neighborhoods and cities before expanding to national or international distribution. The game will be released in limited numbers to geographically-constrained player groups, beginning with student beta-testers at urban post-secondary educational institutions. The targeted distribution of the game will expand from there, first to tech subcultures in relevant urban centers, then to various segments of early adopters and tastemakers across the Web. These initial user groups will “seed” the environments of their respective urban areas, ensuring that secondary waves of users have no trouble discovering and interacting with active vobjects.

Objective

The objective of the game is to accumulate points by a) discovering vobjects other players have embedded in the physical world; and, b) having vobjects that you have embedded discovered by others.

Setup/Interface

Viz has two main “active” modes: scanning and embedding. Players toggle between these modes via a simple button interface. The game also has a persistent “passive” mode. This mode informs players of nearby vobjects via inobtrusive notification bar icons on their phone’s desktop. A “library” mode gives the player access to game statistics and other information.

The following illustrations show how Viz looks on the Android operating system.

Figure 1: Passive mode

Subtle alerts, similar to those used to denote wi-fi range/signal strength, appear in the notification bar when players are within 500 yards of a vobject (see icon in upper right corner). By clicking on the alert, players can activate the Viz interface.

• The application can also be launched by clicking on its icon in the applications drawer.
• The rest of the user’s phone works the same as always: the game tries hard not to be intrusive.

Figure 2: Viz Main Screen

Viz’s main screen changes in various ways according to the location and context of the player.

• If the player is outdoors (pictured), a simple compass-like feature will point in the direction of the nearest vobject.
• If the player is indoors and within range of one or more vobjects, the main screen will provide the player with additional information about the number and nature of any vobjects in the immediate area.
• The tabs at the bottom of the main screen toggle between modes and settings.
• Hardware controls enable the user to exit the app at any time.

Figure 3: Map mode

Viz’s map mode shows the location of nearby vobjects (red pins) relative to the player (blue pin). By consulting this map, players can move to within scanning range of a vobject.

• Clicking on a vobject causes a text balloon to pop up indicating whether it has been captured by the player. If the player has already captured the vobject (vobjects can only be captured once — see “Rules,” below), they will be able to click on the balloon and view relevant comments and statistics. If the player has yet to capture the vobject, the balloon will merely say, “Unknown.”
• Players can opt-in to share their location with other players. Map mode will display any participating players as yellow pins.
• Players can zoom in and out and pan the map as in other applications.

Figure 4: Scan mode

Once players have reached the vobject’s GPS location, they can scan the immediate area for the vobject itself by switching Viz into scanning mode. Scanning mode uses the phone’s built-in camera functionality to turn the screen into a kind of window through which the player can look. The player finds the vobject by panning the camera around, examining visual features of their surroundings until they find the feature that contains the vobject. This feature is an image stored in the Viz database and streamed to the phone based on the player’s present location. Viz “locks on” to features by comparing the original embedded image to the image currently visible through the player’s phone. This effect is achieved through the use of image recognition and orientation systems like those recently developed by Nokia or Microsoft. Once players have locked on to a vobject, they can press the “Capture” button (the only button on the scanning screen) to add it to their library and collect points.

• Vibration feedback and various visual cues let the player know when they pan past a vobject.
• Image ghosting helps players to lock in the image.
• A standard dialog box pops up when the player successfully captures a vobject, informing them about how many points they have scored. Players can click on “more” to view a separate info screen containing statistics and comments about the vobject. This screen also contains a submission form enabling players to add their own comments. Once a player has captured a vobject, this info screen is accessible from their Library (see below).
• The “Capture” button appears grayed-out until the image is framed within the approximate boundaries of the original (embedded) image.

Figure 5: Embed mode

Once players have accumulated enough points to embed a vobject, they may do so by switching Viz into embed mode. In this mode, players can point their phone’s camera at an object in the physical world to which they wish to attach a vobject. By pressing the “Embed” button, players will expend points and attach a vobject linked to their profile to the physical object, building or landscape they see in their viewfinder. This vobject now becomes something for other players to find (and therefore a new way for the embedding player to earn points).

• Embedding a vobject is a simple point-and-shoot operation.
• Players can consult an “Image Legibility” reading while in embed mode to make sure that the vobject they are embedding will be easily capturable by anyone who finds it.
• The embed screen is only available to players who have enough points to embed a vobject. If a player attempts to switch into embed mode when they do not have enough points to embed a vobject, an alert box (not pictured) will inform them that they need to earn more points before they can complete this action.
• If a player has purchased or unlocked a power-up — for example, a bonus modifier of 10 points/scan — they will be asked if they would like to use this power-up on the vobject they are embedding. This process is discussed below in both “Rules” and “Variations and Extensions.”

Figure 6: The Library

Library mode enables players to view lists of the vobjects they have captured, the vobjects they have embedded, and the points the have earned. The screen also contains a button that launches a Settings window (not pictured) wherein players can adjust profile information.

• Two simple buttons allow players to toggle between lists of vobjects they have captured and vobjects they have embedded.
• Clicking on an individual vobject in a list opens a dialog containing additional information about that vobject, including how many times it has been scanned, when and where it was embedded, and who embedded it.
• Profile information can be modified in the “Settings” screen (not pictured).
• All lists are scrollable to conserve screen space.

Procedures/Controls

Read Map To locate vobjects, players will activate the GPS map function of Viz to help them get within range.

Capture Vobject Once players are near a vobject, they will scan the area using Viz’s camera function until they “see” the vobject superimposed over real space. They will then press the “Capture” button to collect the vobject and score points.

Embed Vobject To embed vobjects, players must first accumulate enough points to do so. Once they have the requisite points, players can activate Viz’s embedding tool. This tool enables players to embed a vobject in a particular location by pointing their phone’s camera at a real-world object, building or landscape. Once the player has selected the view to which they want to attach their object, they will press the “embed” button. Doing so subtracts points from the player’s account.

Check stats Players can read statistics about their own usage, how many points they have, and how many points they earn from embedded vobjects by switching to library mode.

Review Vobjects Library mode also enables players to view lists of the vobjects they have captured or embedded; by clicking on the vobject identifiers (GPS coordinates or city/postal code designators), players can view additional information about each vobject.

Unlock Power-ups Players can use points to unlock power-ups which modify the way the vobjects they embed tally scores and affect other players. The power-ups button in library mode accesses a list (not pictured) of power-ups, organized by price. Power-ups that players have purchased are displayed in this list with a star next to them.

Use Power-ups Players can attach a power-up to a vobject as they embed it in a physical place. If a player has any power-ups to use, they will be given the option to use them at the time of embedding.

Modify profile settings Players can change their username, home location and other information in a standard profile/settings dialog. This profile can also be modified via an online web interface.

Flow/Game States

See attached flow chart (pictured below).

Rules

Beyond the rules implied and specified above, readers should be aware of the following scoring rules and constraints:

• Whenever a vobject is discovered, points are awarded to both the discoverer and the embedder.
• Objects that are discovered on a regular basis score fewer points than objects that are only viewed occasionally. Players can thus adopt a variety of strategies for accumulating points: for example, player A might embed objects in obvious public spaces (e.g. tourist sites, popular cafes, etc) in order to get a large volume of low-value discoveries, while player B might embed fewer objects in more hard-to-find locations in order to get a small volume of high-value discoveries.
• Any objects that are not found within a period of thirty days will disappear. This constraint prevents players from embedding objects in overly obscure locations and adds an element of gambling to certain placement strategies — e.g. players must balance the risk of their object not being found at all against the potential gain of it being found only once or twice.
• Embedding vobjects (and unlocking extra functionality) “costs” points, motivating players to earn as much as possible.
• Vobjects may only be scanned once. Players may not scan their own Vobjects.

Variations

Power-ups

When embedding, players can opt to attach “power-ups” to their vobjects. These power-ups have a variety of effects on scoring and gameplay. Below are two proposed power-ups and their effects:

• Trap The Trap power-up causes the player who scans the vobject to lose 500 points. The embedder of the vobject receives these points in addition to those they collect for the vobject being scanned.
• Trade When a vobject imbued with the Trade power-up is scanned, the player who scans it becomes the owner. In exchange, the former owner of the vobject receives one of the scanning player’s vobjects (selected at random). If the scanning player has no embedded vobjects in play, the Trade power-up is lost.

Other

Finding and Leaving Traces

Viz is an inherently social game. Players get to experience the thrill of discovering secret objects left behind by other people, often in scenic or humorous locations. Interacting with these objects reveals additional layers of sociality: for example, upon discovering a vobject, players may choose to attach a voice or text “comment” to the item, which can be then read (and responded to) by the vobject’s embedder and any subsequent discoverers. Importantly, however, players don’t need to comment on vobjects in order to experience the social dimension of Viz — even if players ignore all but the most basic affordances of the game, they will engage in the fundamentally social activity of finding and leaving traces of passage. In this sense, embedded vobjects are reminiscent of the Inuit inuksuks (or inuksuit) found in the far North:

An inuksuk… is a man-made stone landmark or cairn, used by the Inuit, Inupiat, Kalaallit, Yupik, and other peoples of the Arctic region of North America, from Alaska to Greenland…

The inuksuk may have been used for navigation, as a point of reference, a marker for hunting grounds, or as a food cache. The word inuksuk means “something which acts for or performs the function of a person.” The word comes from the morphemes inuk (“person”) and -suk (“ersatz” or “substitute”)… (Wikipedia: Inuksuk)

Inspiration

This idea sprung from two sources. First, a whiteboard session with my colleagues Amanda Tasse and Lauren Fenton got me thinking about the issues involved in making an augmented reality game with a social dimension (our original idea was a kind of “truth or dare” casual mobile app wherein players could discover other players in proximate space via GPS or other location/context-sensing technologies and challenge them to do humiliating and/or dangerous things). This brainstorming session raised a few intriguing questions: What kinds of ambient AR gaming experiences would players reasonably want to layer atop their “real” lives? What motivation would they have to participate? And, crucially, what kinds of game mechanics can we create with AR that simply can’t be created any other way (ie, how can we avoid simply using AR as a gimmick)?

The second source of inspiration is largely a consequence of the first. In an effort to answer some of the questions raised during the whiteboard session with Amanda and Lauren, I started looking around the web for existing AR games and apps. I found plenty of cool examples. But the most thought-provoking discovery occurred when I came across Denno- Coil, a recent Japanese science fiction series about kids living in a world wherein AR has been seemlessly integrated into everyone’s lives via special eyeglasses and visors. The story and setting conceits of Denno Coil are a goldmine for AR developers. Here are a few notes I clipped from the Wikipedia article on the series [Accessed 20 September 2009] as I was developing my own game concept:

• [Users] access the virtual world through Internet-connected visors called denno- eyeglasses. This allows them to see virtual reality superimposed on objective reality. To visually confirm something as virtual, the children often lift their glasses from their eyes. The visors also work in conjunction with futuristic ear monitors placed behind the ear, which allows them to hear sounds from the virtual environment.
• Software tools are visually represented as tactile tools (e.g. a fishing rod) which occupy 3D virtual space and must be manipulated by hand. Metatags, which can be used to damage or enhance virtual objects with certain properties, are visually represented as o-fuda.
• Virtual objects such as pets cannot be recalled or reset; when a pet runs away, it must be chased and caught in 3D space. Virtual objects and pets are also susceptible to a form of “death” by data corruption or deletion.
• Fumie Hashimoto handles a software spray can loaded with so-called “black bug spray”.
• A virus on the run…leaves behind a (virtually) tangible, evaporating black trail of raw “denno- substance”.

See also: Serial Experiments Lain

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.

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.
• 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.

If a building could talk, what would it say? How would it “feel” about the comings and goings of the people who use it every day? Would it be affected by their moods and desires? What kind of relationship would it have with its occupants if it could communicate with them somehow, and how would they respond? Perhaps most importantly, would such a feeling-and-talking building even be desirable?

In attempting to answer these whimsical questions, the Mobile and Environmental Media Lab (MEML) at the University of Southern California conceived of Million Story Building, an experimental design project exploring how location-specific mobile technology can add playful, imaginative and practical new layers to the relationship between a structure and its inhabitants.

Using the newly-constructed School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) Building as a test bed, the MEML team has designed a location-sensitive iPhone application (see video) that enables students and faculty to engage with their workplace in a variety of exciting new ways, from scanning Quick Response (QR) code glyphs mounted next to posters in the hallways in order to access and tag video clips from a central database, to leaving virtual messages for others to read in an Augmented Reality view of the building’s central courtyard.

Functions such as these, working together with networks of sensors, interactive plasma screens and web-based social media profiles, made it possible for iPhone-carrying building occupants to learn about SCA history, discover events and activities, share stories and updates of their own, enrich the school’s media archive, and participate in an Alternate Reality Game.

Furthermore, and crucially, users could come to expect increasingly customized communications, behaviors and interaction opportunities as a profile concerning their preferences, habits and interests was generated based on their usage of the system. The end result was a prototype for a personalized and self-renewing “ambient story” experience co-constructed by the collaboration between the occupants of a building and the building itself.

Background

At its heart, Million Story Building is an effort to mobilize a range of storytelling and interaction tactics such that the occupants of the SCA building can experience a deeper and richer connection with their workspace and co-workers. Such an effort is not unique in the history of design; indeed, the practice of embedding story and play in physical space is almost as old as civilization itself – one recalls the Catholic Via dolorosa (Stations of the Cross), the Shingon Buddhist pilgrimage of Shikoku or the transit to the Temple of the Sun at Teotihuacan.

More recently, what Jill Walker-Rettberg calls “distributed narratives” have manifested themselves in public and institutional space through sticker art, coordinated graffiti campaigns, flash mobs and other interventions. Million Story Building emerges at the nexus of these practices and the new potentialities unleashed by the recent blossoming of mobile and ubiquitous computational technologies.

More Information

The Million Story Building series archive is an effort to gather together, enframe and contextualize key planning documents from the first phase of the project’s development. By browsing proposals, demo descriptions, annotated meeting notes and other development documents, readers can get a sense of the key concerns from which the project arose and the various components of the prototype application, both implemented and imagined.

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.

In an effort to bring together our disparate postings from various corners of the Web, I created the IMAPgregator, a content-aggregation system that collates everything iMAP students, researchers and faculty submit to blogs, social networking sites and social media sites anywhere and everywhere. The IMAPgregator, located on the IMAP home page, displays all this material in real-time by tapping into the XML/RSS feeds created by the sites and services that students and faculty use to share thoughts, links and media. These feeds are then rendered as a chronological list of entries.

Why do this?

We decided that we wanted visitors to our site to be able to see what we were up to at a glance, rather than forcing them to hop around various external sites to get a sense of who we are. We also thought it would be a good way for everyone associated with the program itself to cross-pollinate sources of inspiration and knowledge. It’s how we’re grappling with the issue of distributed online identities — by “de-distributing” all the bits and pieces of our online existences and presenting them here in a linear flow.

Additional Information

The IMAPgregator is powered by the Wordpress plugin, Lifestream. Sorting functionality and dynamic display of feeds is enabled in part by the Custom Field Template plugin.

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.

Code & Notes

The Processing code is actually very simple. The program reads range data from the Arduino via the serial port, then triggers samples and visualizer elements according to the distances reported. Any set of samples could be used (for this version, I’m using 16 different short sound textures generated with Reason), and it’s easy to imagine how the code could be modified to send MIDI signals instead of triggering samples.

// SONAR TONEBANK

// 1.0
// Jeff Watson
// 27 April 2009

import processing.serial.*;
import ddf.minim.*;

// arduino variables

Serial myPort; // The serial port

// video variables

// minim variables

Minim minim;

AudioSample bell;
AudioSample bell2;
AudioSample bell3;
AudioSample bell4;
AudioSample bell5;
AudioSample bell6;
AudioSample bell7;
AudioSample bell8;
AudioSample bell9;
AudioSample bell10;
AudioSample bell11;
AudioSample bell12;
AudioSample bell13;
AudioSample bell14;
AudioSample bell15;
AudioSample bell16;

// visualizer variables

void setup () {

size(640, 480, P2D);
background(0);
noStroke();

minim = new Minim(this);
bell = minim.loadSample(“F#3.wav”, 2048);
bell2 = minim.loadSample(“G#3.wav”, 2048);
bell3 = minim.loadSample(“A#3.wav”, 2048);
bell4 = minim.loadSample(“C#4.wav”, 2048);
bell5 = minim.loadSample(“D#4.wav”, 2048);
bell6 = minim.loadSample(“F#4.wav”, 2048);
bell7 = minim.loadSample(“G#4.wav”, 2048);
bell8 = minim.loadSample(“A#4.wav”, 2048);
bell9 = minim.loadSample(“C#5.wav”, 2048);
bell10 = minim.loadSample(“D#5.wav”, 2048);
bell11 = minim.loadSample(“F#5.wav”, 2048);
bell12 = minim.loadSample(“G#5.wav”, 2048);
bell13 = minim.loadSample(“A#5.wav”, 2048);
bell14 = minim.loadSample(“C#6.wav”, 2048);
bell15 = minim.loadSample(“D#6.wav”, 2048);
bell16 = minim.loadSample(“F#6.wav”, 2048);

// List all the available serial ports
println(Serial.list());
// Open whatever port is the one you’re using.
myPort = new Serial(this, Serial.list()[1], 9600);
// don’t generate a serialEvent() unless you get a newline character:
myPort.bufferUntil(‘\n’);
}

void draw () {
// everything happens in the serialEvent()
}

void serialEvent (Serial myPort) {
// get the ASCII string:
String inString = myPort.readStringUntil(‘\n’);

if (inString != null) {
// trim off any whitespace:
inString = trim(inString);
// convert to an int and map to the screen height:
float inByte = float(inString);
int VideoMod = int(inString);

println(VideoMod);

// 1st Octave

if ( VideoMod < 5 )
{
bell.trigger();
delay(33);
fill(0,0,255);
rect(1,0,128,480);
}

else if ( VideoMod < 8 )
{
bell2.trigger();
delay(33);
fill(13,82,122);
rect(129,0,128,480);
}

else if ( VideoMod < 11 )
{
bell3.trigger();
delay(33);
fill(0,0,255);
rect(257,0,128,480);
}

else if ( VideoMod < 14 )
{
bell4.trigger();
delay(33);
fill(13,82,122);
rect(385,0,128,480);
}

else if ( VideoMod < 17 )
{
bell5.trigger();
delay(33);
fill(0,0,255);
rect(513,0,128,480);
}

// 2nd Octave

else if ( VideoMod < 20 )
{
bell6.trigger();
delay(33);
fill(0,0,0);
rect(0,0,640,480);
fill(0,0,255,191);
rect(1,0,128,480);
}

else if ( VideoMod < 23 )
{
bell7.trigger();
delay(33);
fill(0,0,0);
rect(0,0,640,480);
fill(13,82,122,191);
rect(129,0,128,480);
}

else if ( VideoMod < 26 )
{
bell8.trigger();
delay(33);
fill(0,0,0);
rect(0,0,640,480);
fill(0,0,255,191);
rect(257,0,128,480);
}

else if ( VideoMod < 29 )
{
bell9.trigger();
delay(33);
fill(0,0,0);
rect(0,0,640,480);
fill(13,82,122,191);
rect(385,0,128,480);
}

else if ( VideoMod < 32 )
{
bell10.trigger();
delay(33);
fill(0,0,0);
rect(0,0,640,480);
fill(0,0,255,191);
rect(513,0,128,480);
}

// 3rd Octave

else if ( VideoMod < 35 )
{
bell11.trigger();
delay(33);
fill(0,0,0);
rect(0,100,640,380);
fill(0,0,255,127);
rect(1,0,128,480);
}

else if ( VideoMod < 38 )
{
bell12.trigger();
delay(33);
fill(0,0,0);
rect(0,100,640,380);
fill(13,82,122,191);
rect(129,0,128,480);
}

else if ( VideoMod < 41 )
{
bell13.trigger();
delay(33);
fill(0,0,0);
rect(0,100,640,380);
fill(0,0,255,191);
rect(257,0,128,480);
}

else if ( VideoMod < 44 )
{
bell14.trigger();
delay(33);
fill(0,0,0);
rect(0,100,640,380);
fill(13,82,122,191);
rect(385,0,128,480);
}

else if ( VideoMod < 47 )
{
bell15.trigger();
delay(33);
fill(0,0,0);
rect(0,100,640,380);
fill(0,0,255,191);
rect(513,0,128,480);
}

// Extra note clears screen

else if ( VideoMod < 50 )
{
bell16.trigger();
delay(33);
background(0);
}

else if ( VideoMod > 50 )
{
}

}
}

See also: Arduino-Graph

The Arduino code is also pretty straight-forward. All it does is translate the raw PING sonar data into easier-to-handle Imperial and metric measurements, which are then sent out the serial port to Processing.

int pingPin = 7;

void setup()
{
Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop()
{
long duration, inches, cm;

// The PING))) is triggered by a HIGH pulse of 2 or more microseconds.
// We give a short LOW pulse beforehand to ensure a clean HIGH pulse.
pinMode(pingPin, OUTPUT);
digitalWrite(pingPin, LOW);
delayMicroseconds(2);
digitalWrite(pingPin, HIGH);
delayMicroseconds(5);
digitalWrite(pingPin, LOW);

// The same pin is used to read the signal from the PING))): a HIGH
// pulse whose duration is the time (in microseconds) from the sending
// of the ping to the reception of its echo off of an object.
pinMode(pingPin, INPUT);
duration = pulseIn(pingPin, HIGH);

// convert the time into a distance
inches = microsecondsToInches(duration);
cm = microsecondsToCentimeters(duration);

Serial.println(inches);

delay(100);
}

long microsecondsToInches(long microseconds)
{
// According to Parallax’s datasheet for the PING))), there are
// 73.746 microseconds per inch (i.e. sound travels at 1130 feet per
// second). This gives the distance travelled by the ping, outbound
// and return, so we divide by 2 to get the distance of the obstacle.
// See: http://www.parallax.com/dl/docs/prod/acc/28015-PING-v1.3.pdf
return microseconds / 74 / 2;
}

long microsecondsToCentimeters(long microseconds)
{
// The speed of sound is 340 m/s or 29 microseconds per centimeter.
// The ping travels out and back, so to find the distance of the
// object we take half of the distance travelled.
return microseconds / 29 / 2;
}

See also: Arduino-Ping

During the early prototyping phase, I also made a simple Theremin using the PING sensor, based on Alberto Bietti’s excellent documentation. The piezo speaker and button on the current version of the project are remnants of this prototype; I’ve left them on there for now for demoing purposes.

This project was created as an exercise for Perry Hoberman’s graduate seminar, Experiments in Interactivity II.

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.

presentation notes

UBICOMP/PERVASIVE COMP

-distributed at all scales
-interoperable
-commonplace

evolution :: command line –> menu –> gui –> invisitech

Manuel Castells- Rise of Network Society
-”…experimental programs seem to indicate that molecular electronics is a possible avenue to overcoming the limits of increasing density in silicon chips, while ushering in an era of computers 100 billion times as fast as a Pentium microprocessor; this would make it possible to pack the computing power of a hundred 1999 computer workstations into a space the size of a grain of salt. Based on these technologies, computer scientists envisage the possibility of computing environments where billions of microscopic information-processing devices will be spread everywhere ‘like pigment in the wall paint.’ If so, then computer networks will be, materially speaking, the fabric of our lives.”

– emergent —

– standards –

-SEMANTIC WEB
-roman choice of dec 25 as christmas ==> date of birth of internet
-tim berners-lee, inventor of the web
-”I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”
-structured data, rss, xml, OWL, etc
–> URI
–> XML

-transition from linked DOCUMENTS to linked DATA: TBL intro: video 3.20 to 7.43

– example of how linking data can enable discovery: 11.30 – 13.17

-weights and measures

– standards –

– emergent –

- computers, documents, data, THINGS

INTERNET OF THINGS

-extension of Semantic Web concept into the real world; just as words in web pages are becoming metadata linking them to related concepts (e.g. the name of a town ostensibly connects through to people who live in that town, businesses in that town, historical documents about that town, etc), individual objects will find themselves in the midst of this kind of matrix of information, making them smarter in ways that are almost impossible to numerate.

–> early examples:
-backstory stuff
-product tracking
-qr code stuff

– emergent –

– standards –

–> IPv6
-supermega address space (128 bit vs 32 bit for ipv4)

–> recent examples:
-visual search
-energy management
-household appliances linked to utility companies
-pachube.com

show bit of sterling vid –> 2:20 – 7:00

SPIMES

plannable
trackable
findable
recyclable
uniquely identified
generates digital histories

LOCATIVE MEDIA

- virtual grafitti

RESPONSIVE ENVIRONMENTS

Rich Gold — “Can an intelligent house fall in love with the house next door,” asks Gold. “Can they have baby houses? Is an architect a trained “womb” for houses, or more crudely, is an architect how a house makes another house? Does an architect feel like she/he is violating fundamental forces of evolution if she/he does not include the latest new technology in the house she/he next gives birth to? Do you believe in progress? Is a suburban house of today better than a terrace house in London in 1850 which was better than a thatched country cottage in 1700 which was better than the tepees and mud huts that Columbus found in the New World? Is the house that Donald Trump lives in better than the house you live in? If you were an architect and you designed an intelligent house, would the house’s own happiness matter to you? If the couple that bought the house you designed got a divorce, do you think you should be libel for damages?”

– orchestrating your surroundings by Pau Giner, Carlos Cetina, Joan Fons and Vicente Pelechano
- dungeon and dungeon master
- privacy issues
- magic circle, helpful building

– contrast: emergent vs. architected –

– emergent ? –

– standards ? –

FUTURE VISIONS

(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.

STEALTH OBJECTIVE

A collaborative storytelling project. An increasingly baroque fictional system develops around a newly-constructed building on a university campus.

Public interventions ==> Oddities on iPhones ==> Web intrigue ==> Dark Art Portal

Now, what could I mean by “Dark Art Portal”? Admittedly, it sounds a little ridiculous. Let’s just say it’s a place holder for now. The idea is this: readers spiral into the Web intrigue via a variety of rabbit holes. Once there, they encounter password and player-to-game-communications puzzles. Solving these puzzles leads to additional text and layers of story. Active readers/participants (for web forums will be crucial components of this project) will eventually be contacted by the puppetmasters and asked to continue the story. This request will come in the form of a formal invitation.

This activity is a kind of anti-journalism ocurring in reverse.

==

-quote

-location (Steve Hanson)

-QR Code #

-gallery w/thumbnails
-use images as separate meta entries

-film title
-director
-date
-length
-country
-actors

-film ID – use IMDB numerical imdb

external content

-movietagger data

-proximity grab bag