Deus Ex Machinatio

Racebending

I've talked about gender issues here before, but really, all elements of social justice are important to me. Gender, gender identity, sexuality, and of course good old-fashioned race exist in a dazzling variety of combinations, and they all deserve respectful representation in media. This is something I learned how to do at the knee of Naomi Alderman, and I hope to continue it as long as I work (which will probably be as long as there is breath in my body). Perplex City was a place where men and women existed in equal numbers in authority roles; where gay relationships -- and, yes, marriages -- were celebrated as much as hetero; where skins and faces and hair came in all colors, textures, and configurations, and not much was made of it. Not bad for a quietly but profoundly xenophobic city-state, don't you think?

Around my house, we're all big fans of the cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender. (Bear with me, I'll tie it all together in a minute.) We watched every episode, bought the video games, evangelized to our friends, and in general were the kind of consumers that any IP property longs to have. When we found out there was going to be a live-action film, we were cautious but excited; when we found out M. Night Shyamalan was on board to direct, we were frankly a bit skeptical, but still willing to give it a shot out of sheer loyalty to the franchise.  

Why did we love this show so much? It's hard to say. The writing was tight, surprisingly deep and sophisticated for a children's cartoon. Avatar actually examines the themes of good and evil at some length, and there is a whole season establishing that the people living in a nation with aggressive leadership are still just regular (and sympathetic) people. We loved the research that went into it -- four distinct styles of martial arts for the four types of 'bending.' We loved the original and heavily Asian-inspired world and aesthetic. I particularly loved that there are girls in active roles, both as heroes and villains. The show was like a breath of fresh air, even/especially to withered cynics like me who despair of getting my girls out of the pink ghetto of consumerism and incredibly strict gender roles. Last year, my daughter chose karate over ballet, and I'm sure Avatar influenced her decision.

But the news out of The Last Airbender film is bad, and it keeps getting worse. The problem? Casting.

See, in Avatar-the-cartoon, there simply isn't a white face on the show. It's all shades of brown and yellow. You see thinly-veiled renderings of Inuit and Chinese cultures, very specifically, with the people from them colored to match. I loved this to pieces (I was shocked to find this show was made in America, and not an import). The world is a big place, my friends, and I'd like my children to grow up knowing that not everybody looks like them, and that's OK. More important, I'd like all of those children in the world who are brown and yellow (and black and red, too) to get to see people on the screen like themselves, who are good people doing great things. And then the film announced who it had cast for the leading roles. And by now you see where this is going: They were white, every one of 'em. Nary even a suntan in the bunch. That's standard-op Hollywood racism right there; it happened with Earthsea, too.

Now, this was pretty awful, and people were justifiably upset about it, so the powers that be behind the film decided on a change of course and recast a role to a minority actor -- one. You know who he plays? Zuko, the bad guy. So suddenly a show that was all about the strength and beauty of Asian cultures and the interplay between them has turned into a movie where three white folks are battling a brown menace. I'm sure I don't need to draw you a diagram to explain why I find this problematic. This is just as awful as if they had kept the all-white casting -- and arguably it's a lot worse.

Fortunately, there are actions you can take to try to get the studio's head on straight. For a more thorough explanation of the problem here, including some historical information on screen shots, please see Racebending. They have a fantastic list of resources on things you can do to protest, from signing a petition and joining a Facebook group to writing to Paramount Pictures to contacting local media. 

Let's make some noise over this, people, and see if we can get it fixed. I'd really hate to have to skip the movie over this, but if nothing changes, me and a lot of other people will be staying home when it comes out.

Some Things I've Learned About ARG Design

In no particular order. Design goals, best practices, aesthetic principles. Some things I find myself striving toward, talking about, doing. It's categorically untrue that I always do all of these things, of course. But maybe you can see what I'm reaching toward.

Feel free to add, elaborate, or dispute in comments.

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Content is a reward. Make sure the content you provide is worth the effort you're rewarding. Even an autoresponder should be worth the time it takes to read it. 

Never, never let effort go unrewarded, even if the effort isn't what you expected or wanted. 

That said, don't excessively reward players heading in the wrong direction -- the volume with which you respond is an indication as to whether they're barking up the wrong tree. 

Each discrete piece of your game should be independently entertaining in its own right, even if the player never sees another piece of it. 

If you want to make a game for a mass audience, there should be something for every level of involvement, if possible, and for as many kinds of players as you can manage: explorers, achievers, socializers, killers; more than just spectators, speculators and solvers. Read up on Dr. Bartle. 

Try to make an experience that would make sense even to a single player who is too shy or otherwise unmotivated to find or join a community. 

Be aware of trolls. Consider interactive elements of your design from the perspective of somebody who has the most fun when defecating into somebody else's swimming pool. 

Reference new content streams from within a known-in-game source as soon after discovery as possible. Once firmly established, this habit both supports the players' effort by acknowledging it and helps to prevent gamejacking. 

Again, for a large-scale game, whenever possible, keep all communication in the open. Do as little as possible through private IM and email. This scales much better and will save you time and headaches. 

Consider structure. Completely open-ended games can lose players who miss a road sign and get lost. Structure can mean a guide through the experience (often a cute brunette girl). It can mean a central website acting as a story clearinghouse. Just make sure players know where to look, and when, rather than guessing.

Make sure it's obvious to your players what their current goal is. Uncertainty isn't that much fun. 

Use your structure to provide clear calls to action from time to time. It's helpful to get everybody on the same page now and again. 

Provide rolling recaps. This serves two purposes: It allows existing players to attend to an urgency (vacation, term paper, conference) without risk of losing the thread of the story. It also allows new players a simple way to jump in, even late in the game. 

Value your players' time and attention as much as they do. Don't release a lot of content solely for the sake of having a lot of content; don't create a lot of puzzles solely for the sake of having a lot of puzzles. It's surprisingly easy to overwhelm players with more information than they can process at once. 

Manage expectations carefully. Don't commit yourself to a volume of content you can't realistically do, like live IM around the clock, or fifteen updates every single day. 

The players will generally care less about plausibility than you do. Still, you need to put in the footwork on the motivations and actions of your cast. Make sure you understand how all of the parts of your game fit together, or the gears will grind instead of spinning. 

Never let realism get in the way of fun.

Binary Thinking

Y'all should hop on over to see what Christ Dena has to say about the pervasive binary thinking we're seeing online with increasing frequency of late. 

It's an excellent point. I know everything I've ever done, no matter how good or how bad, is an aggregate of much smaller successes and failures. But the problem is even bigger than just assessing creative work; it's endemic to political discourse, too, to the detriment of... well... pretty much everybody. 

Anyway, click on over and give Christy some love. She's earned it.

WTF is an ARG? 2009 Edition

It's about that time again, boys and girls. The seasonal "What is an ARG?" discussion has flared up on the ARG SIG mailing list. This is the variant strain: What was the first ARG? Which of course leads to a lot of semantic acrobatics as people try to work out what it is we're describing when we say A-R-G, and then work out whether it's the same thing anybody else is talking about. 

  There's a lot of sense in these discussions, if not a lot of consensus; and there have been some really excellent and perceptive comments in the thread. I'd do some more specific sharing and attribution, but I'm reluctant to cite quotes from a semi-private space; so please, if I'm parroting an idea you said first, forgive me. (And if you'd like to be privy to these conversations in which very many erudite and clever people say very many erudite and clever things, then please, join the list.)

But if all of these clever people can agree so broadly on so many things, why does the topic keep coming up at all? 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.

Once Upon A Time...

...I was but an innocent lass, and I thought I knew what an ARG was. See that beautiful triangle where story, gameplay, and community overlap? That's an ARG, right there.

But there are other things that offer story, gameplay, and community. MMOs and MUDs do (or can, anyway). LARPs do. If you squint your eyes just a little bit, American Idol fits the bill, and so does a fan site for Bioshock. Hmm. That can't possibly be right, can it?

The Plot Thickens

The semantics only get murkier from here.

Let's ignore the problem of other, non-ARG stuff sharing the center for a while.

There are some other works that primarily and by design fall into the intersection of only two of those three circles. Some people would call some of them ARGs, and some people... wouldn't. Is Cathy's Book an ARG? I'd say yes, but I know others would disagree with me. What about Lonelygirl15? Yeah, it's been called an ARG, and I'd agree. (For my purposes I'm excluding LG15 from the gameplay circle based on the initial experience offered; I believe the series incorporated more gameplay elements as time went on.)

Then there are community play experiences like Jane McGonigal's fun new thing, The Secret Dance Off. It's awesome, and interesting, but I'm pretty sure nobody, least of all Jane herself, will be calling that an ARG. So why do some things feel ARG-like to some people when they meet two out of these three criteria, while many others don't?

The conclusion I reach is that these criteria are fundamentally flawed. We're looking for a name for all of the cool stuff that falls into that white circle in the center, which seem to ring our bells in a lot of the same ways. That white circle... that's what I'm interested in making. It's definitely bigger and more diffuse than that classic-ARG triangle, story + gameplay + community. I've been guilty of trying to expand 'ARG' to mean all of that stuff, but that's ultimately a bad idea, because people think they know what an ARG is... and it isn't that, not quite. 

Lately I'm reduced to calling it "Cool stuff on the internet." And that's why we keep going in circles about what an ARG is. We sort of know -- it's the stuff in the very center, but not all of the stuff in the center -- but we don't yet have a good name for whatever ARGs are a subset of. Digital culture? Guided pervasive experiences? It may be, in the fullness of time, that we need several names to accurately describe what the heck we mean.

My New Theory

So here's my new operating theory on what an ARG is... sort of. An ARG is something that rings all of these bells:

Let me offer up a few definitions.

Story Archaeology: The audience assembles a working model of the story based on multiple sources and fragmented pieces of narrative.

Real Time: Story/experience timeline and real-world timeline are the same

Real World: Using physical objects or venues that actually exist.

Interactive Cast and/or World: You can reach out to the story world and get a reaction (often via real-world communication methods such as email, phone, IM).

Audience Volition: The audience are an active participant in the experience and have some power over the outcome.

If you find something that hits every single one of these criteria, odds are there's not going to be a lot of argument that it's an ARG. You can take away one or two of them, and still find consensus that yeah, that there thing is an ARG. When you get to four or fewer of these elements, you start to see less and less consensus. A lot of this is very personal, and relies on what an individual sees as the Platonic ideal of an ARG. There are some people who will insist that if there are no puzzles, it can't be an ARG. There will be people who insist that if it is single-player, it can't be an ARG. I'll stick with this: any five or all six of these is definitely an ARG; four or fewer is a close cousin. 

Some of us are actively working on stripping out some of these elements to see where it leads us, as we search for the Promised Land where we have recurring revenue. There's a lot of interest particularly in removing the real-time and multiplayer elements.

The First ARG

Let's turn our attention back to the things that only jangle a few of these bells.

Just as intense as the "What is an ARG?" debate is the "What was the ur-ARG?" debate. You see a lot of the same few things offered up as 'first ARGs.' Some of them are most like puzzle hunts, like Masquerade or Publius Enigma, which both lacked elements of story archaeology and an interactive story world. Some of them are just-plain-games, like LARPs. You see Blair Witch Project cited -- I've cited it myself -- which didn't really offer audience volition or puzzles. 

There are lots of things that are quite a lot like ARGs in one fashion or another, some going back hundreds of years. More than I could possibly hope to catalog, even if I were to base an academic career around it. Were they ARGs? Well... they were cool, anyway. They fit into that white circle of stuff-we-want-to-be-talking-about. Blair Withc and Publius Enigma were definitely cool-things-on-the-internet. Who cares if they were an ARG?

They might not have been classic Beast-style ARGs, not quite the same kind of experience that launched Unfiction. Very definitely ancestors; very definitely inspiring what came after. But the thing that the Beast gave us was this: It taught us that we needed a name so we could start having a conversation. So we started using a name. Hey, we had to start somewhere, didn't we?

But we also say Christopher Columbus discovered America -- which is named after Amerigo Vespucci -- and when Leif Ericson came to North America, it was already populated. So who discovered America? What does discovering America really mean, in this context? Should we be lobbying to change Columbus Day? Should we be lobbying to change the continents to North and South Ericsonia? Wouldn't that be justice?

It's a noble ideal to give credit where credit is due. But we have that name, for good or ill, and we have a canonical first example, no matter how many close relatives there may be.

On Wankery

At the end of the day, the only reason achieving a consensus definition is relevant is to help us signal to potentially interested parties, "Hey, there's something here you might want to pay attention to." Nobody is going to come around and write you up if you call your experimental-lit project an ARG. Nobody is going to slap you in handcuffs for calling a scavenger hunt with a little role-play an ARG. Nobody is going to cry foul and blacklist you because you're sending txt messages from the characters of your TV show and calling that an ARG. (OK, maybe somebody will... but it won't be me.)

Do you need permission? Fine! Email me, I'll make you a certificate. But -- psst -- you don't need anybody's endorsement.

I've spent hours of my life working out how I feel about all of this. I'm not even that sure that I'll still agree with myself when I wake up in the morning, and who knows? I might get the thrill of waking up to a bee's nest of angry commenters. But there is one thing I feel, passionately, deeply, truly.

All of this is just wanking.

I don't care whether any given experience is an ARG or not. I care about whether it's fun.

I don't care whether anything I make is an ARG or not. I care about whether it's awesome (and fun for somebody else.)

So please... can we talk more about making cool stuff on the internet now? And stop arguing about what an ARG is and isn't? Every second we spend talking about it is one less second we can get on with making cool stuff.

Thank you, and good night.

Movies vs. Video Games

In part 3 of my series on ARGs and the Economy, I had a throwaway comment about finding the differences between movies and video games, and what that means for ARGs. I actually wrote quite a bit of this at the time, but cut it out so I could focus on the main point (it’s the money, honey). And so here’s my take on why video games are growing like gangbusters and movies aren’t. 

For starters, there's a basic difference in the value proposition you get from buying, say, Left 4 Dead, and going to see The Dark Knight. It's easy to speculate that it comes down to dollars per hour of entertainment. We could generously say TDK at $8 a ticket and a 3-hour run time is $2.60 per hour for one person, and conservatively Left 4 Dead at $60 for a 30-hour player experience is about $2.00 per hour for as many people frequent your living room. (TDK isn't quite as long as all that, though, and the play time for Left 4 Dead is theoretically much higher.)

But that's not how people decide how to have fun in the real world. The more important differences have to do with the qualitative nature of the experience being delivered. 

Video games are active. This is the difference most people get stuck on; they think people want an active experience and not a passive one. I'm actually not so certain this is true; from time to time, I loves me a good passive experience. Read any good books lately? I think it comes down to personal preference, and even the same person doesn't always prefer the same kind of experience. Still, consumers are getting more and more accustomed to having some control over their leisure experiences, and it would be ridiculous to ignore that. Even TV has bent to this, the result being American Idol-style shows where viewers vote for a winner at the shallow end, all the way to the Heroes and Lost extended immersive experiences at the other end of that scale. 

Video games are social. Whether it's rocking out with the whole family in Rock Band, running a high-level raid with your best guild buds in World of Warcraft, or making fun of your sister who can't get the bomb to the right spot in Super Mario Galaxy, games are at their best when you're playing with somebody else. Whispered comments aside, we're strictly socialized not to socialize at the movies. When people are hanging out with their friends, they don’t just want to interact with the experience; they want to interact with each other, too. 

Video games are convenient. This point doesn't get nearly as much airplay as it deserves. When you go to a movie, you're stuck with the movies they're showing, the times they're showing them, and whatever seat you can find. If you get a text message mid-film telling you a flaming meteor just destroyed downtown and you hurry to see the spectacle with your own eyes, you're not going to be able to complete your cinematic experience without laying out another eight smackeroos and starting over from the beginning. A video game is there when you want to play it. You don't need to go out in inclement weather, you don't need to worry about being late and not getting a seat, you won't be sitting through twenty minutes of previews and commercials, and you can pause the game if you need to go look at the meteor-devastated downtown. Or, you know, have to go to the bathroom. 

So there are some basic and very instructional differences between what the movie offers and what a game does. I've said before that ARGs are active, social, and convenient by nature; but that's not entirely true. Actually, ARGs fall down quite a bit on the "convenience" metric, for several reasons. Which I will address in... a future post!

Email Rabbitholes: Please Make Them Stop

After many years in which I happily heard about ARGs through word of mouth and community excitement, I suddenly find myself getting a steady but growing trickle of unsolicited emails announcing ARGs. Some of them are cryptic, some of them amount to press releases, but they all have one thing in common: They piss me right the hell off.

Why would they do that, Andrea? Isn't email a great tool for getting your name out there? And don't YOU of all people want to hear about my great new ARG?

My answer: No, and really, really no.

I sympathize with the difficulty in getting a game out there in front of an audience. It's hard work, folks. We're living in an attention economy, and getting your piece of the pie gets harder by the hour. And on the surface of it, sure, sending out that cryptic email to everyone in your address book might seem like a good way to grab a little attention.

But no matter how awesome your game is, no matter how innovative the thing you plan to do, however pure your motivations, it's SPAM. It's cheap, sure. It's easy, absolutely. But that's why the guys trying to sell you Russian brides and various cheap, effective methods for increasing your sexual stamina use it, too. And do you want to be associated in anyone's mind with these things?

Let me be straight with you. If you've sent me an email about your ARG, I guarantee I won't look at it, won't write about it, and won't talk about it. You've already made it clear that you don't respect my personal boundaries, and this bodes very poorly for your respecting me as a player. And you've already proven to me you aren't willing to go the extra mile to provide a great player experience, so honestly, what's in it for me?

It's true that I do receive emails from a few ARG campaigns that I look forward to: My Young Bond Shadow War emails bring me joy when they pop up, and so do my Heroes messages. But that's because I've explicitly opted into these. I was given a choice.

Oh, but what's a poor, honest grassroots ARG developer to do without spam, Andrea? Wherever shall we go? Whatever shall we do? Well, look, this is a problem with a solution as individual as your game. Maybe you could send out a targeted postcard. Maybe you could put something interesting on Craigslist or YouTube or eBay. Maybe you could -- gasp -- tell a few friends about your rabbithole, and encourage them to blog about it and tell their friends to do the same, and see how it spreads via word of mouth. Maybe you could put up flyers and walk around town with a sandwich board. What I'm saying is, there are many, many creative ways to tackle this problem. If you aren't up for finding one, what does that tell me about your capacity to run the rest of a game?

So please, stop with the spam. I know you can all do better than this. I know it's hard. But if it's worth doing at all, it's worth doing right.

Chrome's EULA: Pretty Much Just Evil

All the cool kids are excited over the release of Chrome, Google's new web browser. I expressed some dubious concern over allowing Google that kind of access to my digital habits and information.

Turns out I had reason to be concerned. Look at this gem in the Chrome EULA:

1

1. Content license from you

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

To deconstruct this a little, if I'd written this post, or any blog post, or Voices, via Chrome... Google would have a perpetual copyright to it. Riiiiiiigggght.

Don't be evil, Google, remember? Your own motto?

The Shredded Curtain

I like to make a joke about ARG developers being descended from underpants gnomes. This is a joke that works on two levels, and one of them is on my mind a lot lately, so please bear with me while I deconstruct it and render it completely unfunny.

The first level is pretty easy. For those of you who run ARG studios, the business model of the South Park underpants gnome may seem uncannily familiar:

1: Collect underpants
2: ???
3: Profit!

And sometimes that's exactly what it feels like we're doing, right? We're building awesome things and hoping that eventually, we'll work out how to make a living that way.

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But the other thing underpants gnomes and ARG developers share, and the thing I'm here to talk about today, is secrecy. More specifically, that idea of puppetmasters hiding behind a curtain.

Secrecy has been a constant companion since the giddy days of the Cloudmakers, when we didn't know what the heck was going on, didn't know who was doing it, and loved every delicious minute of that uncertainty. Part of the fun for us was trying to catch the people behind this game-that-wasn't-a-game!

But this had a lot of pretty terrible side effects, from the actor at a live event who was followed into his off-duty life, clear to the internal strife over whether looking at packing slips for a return address was in the bounds and the spirit of the game... or not. It was exciting, I'll give you that. It was mysterious.

But it has to stop.

As alternate reality gaming reaches an increasing level of maturity and sophistication, not to mention pop-culture notoriety, there are a few incredibly compelling reasons that the habit and tradition of secrecy, of hiding the development team behind a curtain, is no longer sustainable. I'll even go further: That tradition has reached a point where it actively works against the interests of the genre, not to mention against the interests of any specific game.

Here's a prime example. There's a familiar song I see in comment threads about ARGs on places like io9 or BoingBoing, or in private chats, or in emails from friends. "I'd love to play an ARG," the lyrics go, "but I've got no idea how to find one."

It should go without saying that finding an audience is one of the top goals of an ARG. If you don't have an audience... well, you're just spitting into the wind, aren't you? So why has the convention persisted of not actually telling a potential audience that you're going to make something awesome and hey, you might want to pay attention, y'all?

Because it breaks the curtain? Because it's alien to our viral-marketing heritage? Because it admits there's a game? Shh... I have a secret for you. They already know it's a game. There aren't legions of wide-eyed innocents out there who think they're really finding kidnapping victims, infiltrating secret societies, or collaring insane artificial intelligences. No, really! There have even been games -- sequels and serials like Chasing and Catching the Wish and the Eldritch Errors series spring to mind -- where the players already know who's behind the game, and it doesn't seem to have hurt anything.

And here's another consideration, too, for those of us who are trying to build reputations, careers, and if I may be so bold, fan followings. If somebody is dying to see your next work, absolutely slobbering over the chance to participate in your next creative act -- go on, tell them what it is. You don't get bonus points for hewing to some pure ideal about rabbit holes and organic discovery of the experience. You just get a smaller audience to start with, and you risk the chance that a lot of people who'd love to play your game -- if only they knew it was your game -- are going to miss out.

There's one more consideration, too. If you can be open about who you are and what your work is, when catastrophe strikes (as it always does), you can open a channel of communication to deal with it. You can provide technical support for a Flash interface that isn't performing as well as it tested. You can apologize because your ISP was struck by lightning and you're having to rebuild three days of data. You can tell everybody that the live event scheduled for tomorrow is going to have to be pushed back a week because, sorry guys, but I have to go to my grandma's funeral, and anyway the actor you were going to meet, that you've seen on video fifty times already, has broken both legs and is in traction for the foreseeable future.

It's more elegant to write these things into the game. That should always be the first tactic. But some things really just won't work in the context of the story you're trying to tell... and that's totally OK. My experience is that your audience is going to be a lot easier on you than you ever will be on yourself. So cut yourself a break.

Am I saying that everything about an ARG has to be broadcast far and wide before play begins? No, of course not. That's ridiculous. Movie studios keep production details under lock and key, even while promoting the names of the stars, the directors, the screenwriters. Video games announce release dates far in advance, allowing the players to budget their purchasing decisions (and for some dedicated gamers, time off work). There's not a lot of reason for ARGs to have a different standard, and a lot of reason not to.

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The good news, of course, is that secrecy in ARGs is increasingly going out of fashion, anyway. I'm making a big show of calling out the practice, but the battle's already been won -- so much so, in fact, that I can easily name several instances where the cat's been out of the bag during the run, or even before, from the last few weeks alone. Obviously Six to Start announced The Shadow War ahead of time. True Blood had an article outing them in the New York Times. Luce's Lover's Eye, mere days after its ARGfest trailhead, was profiled by ABC News as being an effort by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Alpha Agency is experimenting with blogging about the run, during the run.

Now we just have to overcome that underpants-gnome-like business model...

In Defense of Hannah Montana for the DS

Via Wonderland, I found my way to a few stats about girl gamers this morning.

Lots of good observation here, though I find myself strangely compelled to defend the Hannah Montana video game and its ilk. I'm not sure why; maybe just because I'm argumentative and haven't had any caffeine yet today?

Let's face it, Hannah Montana is popular; skinning games with popular entertainment tie-ins is an old practice. Pretty much every major entertainment franchise has its games, from the Matrix to Star Wars to Avatar: The Last Airbender to X-Men to Ben 10 to Kim Possible... you get the picture. It keeps happening because it moves games off the shelves.

And here's where I get to the part that's bothering me. (Note that I'm extrapolating from what the author of my linked post said -- I haven't actually played either one of these games, and I don't know if she has either. So I'm arguing against myself, here, and not against her.) The suggestion that a Hannah Montana game (and in the past, Mary Kate and Ashley games) is an inferior game on the grounds that it's skinned with a theme popular with the tween-girl demographic is a pretty big assumption. And it's an unfair, sexist assumption, too.

First, even if you just don't buy into the popular franchise the game ties into, that doesn't mean the game is bad. Maybe it's just not your cup of tea. And even for a phenomenal franchise, if the underlying structure of the game is flawed, the game still sucks (E.T., anyone?).

Worse, the idea that a game built upon a wildly popular girls' franchise must be a pretty weak game? That's exactly the sort of thinking that creates that "oh, but girls don't play games" construct in the first place. Girls DO like Hannah Montana. If you make a Hannah Montana game, some girls will play it, and bing! you have some more girl gamers. Isn't that the whole idea? Why do we have to provide girls, not just with games that appeal to them, but games that have some sort of moral authority, too? The game is selling, so it does actually have that appeal. What's wrong with that? Why is it OK for a boy to want to play Spider-Man and it's not OK for a girl to want to play Hannah Montana?

I'm not saying the Hannah Montana game is objectively fantastic, mind you, or that game developers can't or shouldn't do better. Franchise games often feel like they're phoned in, whether they're aimed at girls or no. And Hannah Montana does have the token girl-game element where you can design outfits and unlock Hannah's wardrobe... but it's not a game revolving entirely around shopping and fashion, which is the real problem with the games-for-girls space.

Oh, and... if any of you have played the Hannah Montana game... let me know what you think, 'k?

O Marshall, Where Art Thou?

I recently discovered that my Aunt Jill was, in her own words, "a lowly Philosophy/Anthropology student" who "had the good fortune to be at St. Mike's when McLuhan taught in the English Dept. there. He cast a very long shadow and we all benefited greatly from his imagination, vision and eccentricity."

I asked her what he was like, and what she thought good old Mr. McLuhan would have made of YouTube, and she responded first:

Um... er... he was a pontificating old fart. I say that with the utmost respect, I want you to know haha. He was deep into his "Catholic years" so everything was about his faith-- which is why he was at St. Michael's rather than a more "accessible" college at the University of Toronto. He refused to teach at any institution that wasn't Catholic. I was there because they accepted me. Oh well.

He was about a hundred and eight at the time-- a venerable teacher still, but he wasn't all that "with it" any more.

That said, he was a remarkable teacher, had the most amazing mind. U of T was just full of forward-thinking creative-thinking types at the time and McLuhan was Yoda so everything was electric from a thought perspective. And absolutely ever-y-thing was processed through the McLuhan filter.

Youtube? Well, I bet he'd say: "Toldya so..." or "The plan progresses as expected" or something like that. He warned us.

And then, a couple of days later, followed herself up in three posts:

Hi, well I've been thinking about my flip "old fart" comment re: McLuhan & feeling kind of crappy because he was amazing. By the time I got to U of T he was pretty disillusioned. He felt disrespected by his colleagues and felt that nobody was paying attention. It was at that time that he talked a lot about the "unconsciousness" of the public.

He hadn't exactly given up but was certainly not as enthusiastic as he'd been. I think the brain tumour thingy must have changed him substantially as well.

I have come to understand that most of my perception about communication and social progress has been shaped by McLuhan, however. Not that I don't have my own ideas, but I really see now that I was a Marshall Sponge.

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I also wanted to address your question about Youtube because it actually is a serious question. I think he would have been horrified on one level. I remember he said that when you're on TV you're no longer a real person-- you become, in effect, a disembodied image. He asked this question: how is one to establish identity when one is a disembodied image"?

McLuhan saw a huge spiritual disconnect that was fostered by consumerism & technology dependence. Two things he said: "You start out a consumer & you end up consumed" and (in the context of machines being tools) "How will your tool reverse on you when it's pushed to its outer limit?"

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Okay, final post (you got me started on one of my favourite subjects-- communication): The thing for McLuhan was degree. He believed that we have never really controlled technology-- that it has always controlled/driven/directed us.

He said: "A pervasive medium is always beyond reception". He felt that electronic media actually prevent the absorption of information. I think he might have liked (& possibly agreed with) "The Matrix" as a poetic representation of current reality.

He believed that all things are connected & that that is the "evil" inherent in pervasive technology-- once we plug in to it we become disconnected.

I think he might have found Youtube yet another means to distract us from actually exercising liberty by providing the illusion of it. We are not awake, we merely think we are (and are soooo encouraged to believe that).

I thought this all bore redistributing to all of you net-native folks, in no small part because I really, really want to talk about this stuff. These issues are pretty well the deep existential questions of our day. Is a friend on the internet a friend in a real, meaningful, human sense? People you have on IM? Blog commenters? People you watch on YouTube? Where's the overlap between real, human community and internet community... and where isn't there an overlap? Does the internet encourage shallow, untethered interactions? Does it encourage investment in distant/nonthreatening/idealized relationships as a method of escape from geopresent stresses? ...Is all of that good or bad?

What does it mean to be human anymore, anyway? Does anyone besides me get the idea that we're in the process of reinventing ourselves as a species?

But here's the thing that makes me shake my head and wonder if any of us knows what the heck we're talking about. My Aunt Jill is an amazing, warm person, she's brilliant, and I'm absolutely thrilled to have her in my life. But my uncle (the guy who makes Aunt Jill related to me) passed away when I was small, we've never lived in the same place, never spent holidays together, and have in general been strangers to one another -- until fairly recently, when we became friends on FaceBook. This entire deep, thinky topic came into existence there, on my wall, on FaceBook. There's a great personal connection and a meaningful conversation that likely would never have come about any other way. So is McLuhan wrong?

And at the same time, I've been taking up Internet shabbats on the weekends. Why? To feel more connected to my immediate life and family, because my attention and my connections have become so very diffuse. And I hate that. So... McLuhan is right then... right?

Damn. I remember studying McLuhan in my Journalism courses in college; I think I wasn't ready for him yet.

One more thing; when I asked if I could repost this stuff (naturally including attribution), my aunt very modestly insisted, "The ideas are all pure McLuhan." Then she directed me to a source she got a couple of these quotes from: "a 2002 National Film Board of Canada documentary called McLuhan's Wake that has so much incredible archival film footage it's mind-boggling! All the stuff I grew up with-- local Toronto TV talk shows & interviews, which really do reflect what I remember of his talks & lectures. He was a typically single-minded genius guru."

So, yeah, if you're looking for me, you know where to find me.