Future of Gaming and Digital Scholarship

“The Most Dangerous Gamer”

“Never mind that they’re now among the most lucrative forms of entertainment in America, video games are juvenile, silly, and intellectually lazy. At least that’s what Jonathan Blow thinks. But the game industry’s harshest critic is also its most cerebral developer, a maverick bent on changing the way we think about games and storytelling. With his next release, The Witness, Blow may cement his legacy—or end his career. In a multibillion-dollar industry addicted to laser guns and carnivorous aliens, can true art finally flourish.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/the-most-dangerous-gamer/8928/?single_page=true

“I think the mainstream game industry is a &%$&-up den of mediocrity,” he told me. “There are some smart people wallowing in there, but the environment discourages creativity and strength and rigor, so what you get is mostly atrophy.”

Myself – I’m into museum studies, digital curation, digital archiving, physical archives….and to a lesser extent gaming. But I was once very hooked.  It’s the storytelling, participation and interaction, problem-solving, exploration, information organizing and collecting…all those drives are powerful not just for learning – but for collaborative learning and knowledge-production.

While there is a brilliant but lonely genius to the games of Jonathan Blow…there is something different at play with the studio – http://www.secondstory.com/ – something that connects to and inspires cognitive activity beyond solitary puzzle-solving…

When I think of what is stored in archival repositories like the Harry Ransom Center – and so many other museums – I think about the possibilities of bridging the power of interactive ‘gaming’ with the exploration of Art and Archives. When I recall powerful museum exhibits that transformed me… I think, what can be done to carry gaming further? I am certain that we are only at the beginning, the first steps of realizing what these techological ‘toys’ and digitization methods can ‘do’ for our creative records. We are in an age where there is a simultaneous need to preserve and to integrate knowledge so that we can solve so many of humanity’s problems. The evolution of gaming may hold the key.

 

Techno-diversity: toward an ecology of (social) networks

In debating the brewing “war” between Facebook, Twitter and GooglePlus it dawned on me that these services are really rather different. It would make greater sense for them to focus on and develop their strengths rather than race to homogenize themselves into identically mediocre platforms.

Twitter does something very unique and the kind of data dynamic that results from Twitters model, the way in which data flows in its network, is very different than that of Facebook because Facebook has primarily been a “walled garden.”  With the advent of groups, news pages, fan/business/institutional pages, this has become less so…but the interaction model is still very different than that of Twitter.  Facebook offers its non-person content files a different sense of “place” – something more static that can more easily collect threads of user content.  Twitter is “faster” and far more impermanent. This is not a better or a worse thing, just different.

Google Plus looks to offer a potentially unique blending of the two. Perhaps this is part of what Facebook is upset about….but one of GooglePlus’ strongest draws so far is its superior social filtering features – the intuitive and usable “Circles.”  See, users liked the ability to post within a walled garden…but we wanted to create rooms.  Facebook’s “lists” (among many other privacy features) were labryinthian nightmares.  But Facebook still has a world of content on there that it should develop ways to respect and protect (enabling searchability, the ability to tag and archive content) rather than trying to run after other services going “Me too!” and cursing the ingenuity of others. If Facebook doesn’t want to go the way of Yahoo’s mistreatment of Flickr or Delicious….it should pull its CEOs out of the parties and think hard about the Information Curation questions from the point of view of its Users (not its commercial sponsors).

I think there could be lots to learn from other network models that had advantages, but suffered executive hubris and neglect.  MySpace was a great site for small businesses and musicians.  Why? Let’s think about this…what could they do on MySpace that they could not do on Facebook?  I’ll touch on some of this later in this post, but feel free to chime in.

Tribe.net…..There is a great amount of content on Tribe.net.  What were the drawbacks in terms of Information Architecture….how did Tribe.net not succeed?  I am not talking about funding or policies..I’m talking primary about Information Architectural models. What was it about Tribe.net that made it “free-er” seeming than Facebook? What was off-putting?

And then there’s Livejournal. I could devote an entire post at least to the lessons we can learn from LJ.  There are many great features it has.  There are surely drawbacks as well.

My primary point however is that all of these need not try to be identical to each other. Yes, they could learn a lot from each other…but it is also good to have choice.  I enjoy Twitter in a different way than Facebook or GooglePlus.  If the latter two could evolve to pick up some of the archiving/search/usability features of LiveJournal….or allow for content promotion (while respecting artists’ content-ownership rights) like MySpace or Flickr….or allow for deep levels of cultural content like Tribe.net….We could really enrich the online cultural environment in ways that 1) in two months or two years content won’t be lost and 2) users could retain ownership of (or at least more easily control) their content rather than be merely providing free consumer research and promotional images and copy.

Facebook/Google+ Wish list

I’m enjoying the migration of personal/professional contacts over to GooglePlus this week and will soon document my thoughts regarding its difference from Facebook, but for now, there are features both networks glaringly do not offer.

I wish that Facebook or GooglePlus had social-bookmarking buttons to delicious.com or diigo.com for example, like published news sites offer.  It would be especially helpful if one is checking one’s feed during a time when one does not have the liberty to read an article, but wishes to flag it for later reading.

I also wish that there was a mechanism like the  ‘memories’ function in Livejournal to save (and tag!) memorable posts. That Facebook has been popular for the past 4 years and one still cannot tag, archive, search or export posts like Livejournal is pretty sad. I don’t know how much Google+ will offer in this regard.  I suspect that between these technical limitations and their ‘we own your content’  TOS,  there might be an uptick in people writing in blogs and using Twitter/FB/G+ for merely social chat and link-sharing.

But yes, there is no digital archiving function in these social networks (at least not personal archiving), nor can one backup one’s content. The lack of any real search or backup for all the other kinds of non-person content (fan pages, groups, institutional and business pages) seems a great risk for content management and data preservation. The librarian in me is bothered by this considerably.  Twitter is (in theory) searchable and is also currently backed up by the Library of Congress. So far the only ones we know is crawling and saving data from Facebook is the NSA.  Google? I have greater expectations for you. Don’t go the Farmville route.

Interactive Narratives for Digital Humanities Gaming

As I witness my 6 year old’s engagement in games like Zombie Farm, with its complex rules and scenarios, I reflect on the tremendous cultural holdings of libraries, museums and archives and wonder how can we engage the next generation in this material? How can we make learning using archives and collections something that can meaningfully compete with traditional gaming narratives stemming from fantasy, horror and science fiction? What are the constructive elements that take content that is scientific, relates to premodern folklore or modern day fears…and translates it to an engaging game?  For decades the gaming industry has rested upon the work done by the pioneers of table-top gaming (D&D, etc.) and arcade games.  In the meantime, educational interactive gaming has not caught up, reamaining trapped in tired metaphors of flash-cards and treasure hunts.

A number of creative and analytical things are on my mind right now….I am in the initially messy stage of compiling issues, factors, observations, possibilities and visions. I am spurred on first by the amazing work of Game Researcher Jane McGonigal who persevered through recovery from a brain injury by creating a game out of it…a game that could prove useful for anyone dealing with recovery (from quitting smoking to perhaps behavioral plans for children with special needs): http://blog.avantgame.com/2010/07/superbetter-ignite-talk-and-kickstarter.html

I am additionally moved by Ali Carr-Chellman’s TED talk about how to re-engage boys in learning through interactive gaming:
http://www.ted.com/talks/ali_carr_chellman_gaming_to_re_engage_boys_in_learning.html

It then occurs to me…the metaphors in video games are similar to sports, scouts and to martial arts. They are about ‘leveling up’ (belts, badges, etc.), having ‘allies’, defeating opponents, working with teams, engaging in strategic thinking.

The narrative archs as stated before deal primarily with mythos from European-folklore based fantasy, East Asian folklore, space operas and martial-arts based dramas, Lovecraftian horror, Vampire fiction, Zombie fiction and military scenarios.

Contemporary app. games are gradually deviating from these, but they still in part stem from the original objectives set up in the age of table-top gaming development: mystery-solving, puzzle-solving, collaborative problem-solving with teams.

These are all things that are not found in our school system or museum and archive exhibits.

How can we successfully carry these over to games involving content in historical or cultural archives? How can we make such games familiar in template, engaging and meaningful?

Lastly, because the following videos struck a cord in me that I have yet to completely process in terms of its relevance and application:  The following 4th grade male teacher in Japan uses team and literacy activities to develop social and emotional empathy among children: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=armP8TfS9Is

Can we develop games that encourage use and understanding of the materials of cultural heritage while also developing social and emotional literacy? Can we do this through games and activities?

Lots to chew on.

Digital archives, e-reading and what is lost?

Sitting down with a pile of recent New Yorker magazines given to me by a neighbor, eating a bowl of homemade soup, I marveled at how it felt to become engrossed in a medium that did not electronically glow or hum at me. Neither did it tempt with boosts of social-media-induced oxytocin when my interest in the author’s narrative began to waver. My mind felt calm as I fell into the developing piece. I fell happily into a zone unlike the frenetic zipping around on Twitter, or the  emotional juxtapositions on Facebook.

We have studied the brain activity of those online, those watching TV, those playing videogames….we are learning so much regarding how internet and computer use is creating changes in mental pathways. Have we studied the difference between MRIs of print-media readers vs. e-book/ blog/RSS/social a readers?

There is a perceived convenience in compiling, scanning, processing large amounts of citations and PDFs for research….but there is an experiential difference in going through printed articles, piles, folders, and books. I would argue that this experiential, emotional and intuitive difference informs and allows for differently motivated discoveries, reflections and insights.

How much is romantic projection and how much is neurologically accurate? And is there really a difference between those two? Is it a matter of platform? Would I feel differently if the manner in which I interact with the digital archive resembled that of shuffling through piles and pages? Would it be different sitting in a cafe versus sitting in front of my computer like a TV? Would it be different if I were using a touch-screen to move files into bibiliographic software? There are various impediments to my answering that question – limitations having to do with the cost of new equipment, my familiarity with certain software.

Still, is there some loss of serendipity?  Some level of intuitive control and mastery that years of working with paper publications has developed that the comparatively fickle and everchanging technologies of databases and metadata/retrieval systems has made too difficult for many to accomplish? Just when one develops a system of organization do frameworks and schema change and the world is captivated by promising new novelties. Akin to an office changing email platforms every two years, each model claiming improved usability and access…..the most productive professors may still swear by hotmail, Eudora or Pine.  The busiest administrators may still print up every email and file everything in paper stacks. Why? Because if too much went electronic, they know they would lose information. What they have and have done works, because their brain is busy with what else they have mastered.

What does this have to do with electronic reading and archives? Something occurred to me recently while organizing and backing up my files from my classes. I have electronic folders filled with PDFs. I have a delicious.com account swimming in tags. Viewing these files, double-clicking to open them does not invoke the same emotional revelry that relaxed flipping through old readers or paper files does. Is this actual or merely personal?  Is this generational? As a teenager in the late 80’s and early 90’s I would go to Telegraph Ave., equipped with all the latest free weeklies (SF and East Bay Weekly, East Bay Express), the latest Sandman comic books, some article of local poetry from Zeitgeist Press, a used book or two of modern literature or philosophy. Armed with these and a notebook I would order a cappuccino at the Caffe Med, walk upstairs and I would tune out for several hour listening to post-punk on my cassette walkman.

In this manner, I would browse these printed volumes, writing down quotes, book titles, zine publishers, artists names. It was this research activity into literary, cultural and creative works that fueled my acquisition choices as a book buyer in the mid-late 90’s (before corporate culture had me packing off to graduate school).  Gen-X bohemia aside, my important point is…I did not spent the majority of that time trying to figure out how to flip my cassette over, or how to access an article in the back of a magazine or newspaper, or fretting over why I couldn’t find certain comic book issues in my bag or pile on the table. The connection and interaction with information access and recording seemed as smooth and natural as one’s own synaptic flow.   Perhaps those younger than me, the ‘digital natives’ are silently scoffing at my concerns. But I am still curious – how similar or different are these two methods of content discovery?

Fast-forward a couple years – shortly after these early 90’s, outside of library/university records the “social/research web” was limited to usenet groups. I scoured dozens, printing FAQ sheets, discographies, with some vague idea of preservation.  Fifteen years later I realize this kind of activity is what amazes me about current digital archiving practices.  But as I now find articles in printed newspapers and journals and waver between cutting them out to collect yet  “more paper” vs. the time it would take to go online to that journal to seek out the electronic copy of the piece and save the citation in delicious.com (hoping that in future I could retrieve it with compatible metadata or even hope that the url still worked! )…there’s a strong chance things could become lost. I have file drawers of printed pieces from newspapers and magazines from 20-15 years ago, many of which are inaccessible online and out of print.  I am glad that I can peruse and discover articles I did not remember possessing. I also have boxes of notebooks that I wrote things down in. Obviously beside the differences in recording and retrieval there is a dramatic difference in public access. Who else beside myself can access these files or these notes?

I do not have easy answers for these inquiries other than an acknowledgment that these are challenges for both the processing of digital and traditional archives as well as challenges to cross-generational acceptance and standardization of ever changing technological methods of publishing, experiencing and preserving information.

Returning to the notion of measuring qualities of brain activity – is the activity conducted on the early days of the web, usenet groups, similar to that of surfing newsfeeds and engaging in social networking? Is there a difference between this kind of mental activity and that of reading printed material? Is zipping around a printed newspaper or magazine different than that of becoming engrossed in a novel? How is a graphic novel different? Or a video game? What does the MRI of someone reading Dostoevsky or Proust look like?

If human brain pathways are evolving – could we be losing “earlier versions” of our brains? Like languages, dialects and accents are lost…are we losing earlier pathways and structures?  Many studies argue that we are re-mapping our brains through our use of the digital.  What if these lost parts correlate with improved stress reduction or focus or things that we currently try to medicate for? Are there activities that also use these same neural zones? Painting, gardening, yoga?  Do we want to substitute a reading experience that feels like yoga or gardening with a reading experience that feels like navigating a busy freeway? Perhaps for those who enjoy the taste of adrenaline, that has its place…but before we completely switch over our means of informational input (a transition as dramatic as the printing press or discovery of electricity) it might do our mind and creative processes good to fully understand what we are gaining and what we might be sacrificing.

Google Swirl

I am consistently excited by new developments in visual browsing and searching on the web. Google’s new development to come out of Google Labs, Google Image Swirl is very provocative and is very close to something that I have been imagining. It would be fascinating it the application could be employed on pre-curated collections of images (ie. to “Google Swirl” a collection of visual art, such as ARTstor). But first, what is Google Swirl?

As a bridging of Picasa Face Recognition and Similar Images, search results depend upon both image metadata and computer vision research. There are comparisons to Google’s Wonder Wheel (which displays search results graphically) and Visual Thesaurus. One enters a search term and 12 groupings of images appear visualized as photo stacks. One chooses a particular image and the Flash experimental interface “swirls” to display your image and branches to numerous other images with varying degrees of relationship to that image.

Spezify

[cross-posted from the Digital Curation blog]

I have died and gone to heaven. Spezify “is a search tool that presents textual, graphic, and photographic results in a visual format. Blogs, videos, microblogs and images, couple with web-based versions of more traditional print media to give comprehensive search results.”

For a visual thinker that loves to scour everything from Twitter to YouTube to blogs in search of the latest from galleries, artists, conferences, scholars, designers…Spezify pools and presents information in a visual collage format. It also shows you related search terms (which may or may not be relevant – i.e. an important interntational conference for Contemporary Asian Art is going on right now – so the current search of that term brought up “hotel” as a related term.)

Like Twitter, it also shows you recent “hot” search terms. Spezify displays the information in a giant visual wall that you can scroll in all dimensions. Via Twitter, Cooliris told me that there is a way that I can d/l their program even though I have a PowerPC Mac mini. This weekend I will do so and see if Spezify’s search results can be navigated on the visual wall of Cooliris. This would make for faster and improved scanning functionality.

Cooliris

imported post from Digital Curation blog
Cooliris, is a 3-D image wall that allows you to visually browse images, whether they be in Google Image, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Picassa, images in one’s harddrive and recent versions of the photo database program Adobe Lightroom.

I was sad to discover that I could not download this program to my own Mac Mini as it features Mac OX 10.4, Power PC, and apparently I cannot upgrade to the necessary Leopard version that supports Cooliris. Update: Previous versions (tho unsupported) are available.

You can share your 3-D image wall through a url, as well as bookmark and save it. It allows one to “jump freely” through Flickr image pools and sets – though not sure how that differs from the current way we maneuver from image pools to sets – does “jump freely” = “move fluidly?” Not sure.

It claims usability with hundreds of sites due to its being built around Media RSS format. It advertises its ability to be used to view numerous television and movie episodes on Hulu, etc. Its slideshow feature allows one to double click and launch slide shows that one can pause and rewind. It claims to have the fastest way online to search images with its’ style of “zipping” through the 3-D image wall.

Again this makes me think back to the Visible Archive from Australia – and its archival metadata visualization. If there was a way to integrate these technologies and allow one to browse visualizations of data – the future could be very exciting.