Theoreti.ca – Page 106 – Research notes taken on subjects around multimedia, electronic texts, and computer games.

JSTOR: Journal of Educational Sociology, Vol. 23, No. 4, (Dec., 1949)

In 1944 the Journal of Educational Sociology had an issue on “The Comics as an Educational Media”. The Editorial by Harvey Zorbaugh began by quoting Sterling North of the Chicago Daily News who wrote,

Virtually every child in America is reading color “comic” magazines- a poisonous mushroom growth of the last two years. …

Badly drawn, badly written and badly printed – a strain on young eyes and young nervous systems – the effect of these pulp-paper nightmares is that of a violent stimulant. (p. 193-4)

Zorbaugh and the other authors of the articles collected in this issue are, however, interested in how comics can be leveraged for learning. Zorbaugh ends his editorial with,

It is time the amazing cultural phenomenon of the growth of the comics is subjected to dispassionate scrutiny. Somewhere between vituperation and complacency must be found a road to the under- standing and use of this great new medium of communication and social influence. For the comics are here to stay.

I was struck reading this journal issue how we are going through the same motons with videogames. We have public anxiety about video games, we worry that videogames are violent stimulants, and yet we recognize they are here to stay. Someone gets the bright idea then of trying to create serious games that stimulate the mind, not violence. Academics (like me) follow. Here is the argument from one of the other articles in the issue,

In recent decades, invention and technology have developed motion pictures, the radio, and, latterly, the comic. The first two have already been harnessed to the purposes of education. It is appropriate to examine from the standpoint of educational method this most recently ar- rived entertainment device that has attracted such an extraordinary following. Any form of language that reaches one hundred million1 of our people naturally engages the attention of educationists, whose major activity is communication. (W. W. D. Sones, “The Comics and Instructional Method”, p. 232.)

What then happened to serious comics? I can’t think of any educational comics even though I collected comic books as a kid. Were serious educational comics a failure? If they were, what does that suggest for serious games? It is tempting to say that the lesson of educational comics is that serious games too will vanish as another educational fad. I suspect there are other answers:

Perhaps serious comics did work. There were, after all, educational comics like GE’s Adventures in Electricity. Perhaps they were effective educational (and promotional) tools even if never as popular with youth as action comics. Now, of course, we have a wealth of serious graphic novels like Maus by Art Spiegelman.
Perhaps textbooks learned from comic artists and began to use graphic elements where they illustrated the point. Many of the books I read my children like those by David Macaulay (Castle, City, Cathedral, and The Way Things Work) were drawn, though they didn’t use all the comic conventions. The comic may have evolved as it got serious.
Society eventually finds a way to manage new media. No one thinks comics are poisoning our children any more. Something happened and now comics are not the threat. Hence we don’t need to tame them any more … or perhaps they aren’t the threat because we tamed them?

Internet Archaeology: Whatever happened to GeoCities

Whatever happened to geocities and all those exuberant web pages? It turns out the service, which at one point was the third most popular on the web, was bought by Yahoo! in 1999 and shut down in 2009 (October 26th-7th of 2009.) GeoCities was a Web 2.0 social site before its time. Yahoo! just couldn’t figure out how to make money off it.

One of the things that has happened to GeoCities is that various projects have archived parts of it. Internet Archaeology, for example, has archived the graphic art, the gif animations (like the Welcome above) and even some of the home pages like Welcome to Avalon.

Gamification – Using game mechanics in business

Slashdot pointed me to an interesting article, Play to win: The game-based economy (CNNMoney.com, JP Mangalindan, Sept. 3, 2010) which is about how companies are using game mechanics to generate business.

Chalk it up to basic human behavior, which game makers have been trying to understand and appeal to for decades. The more effective a game resonates with users, the better its sales. The developer’s goal is to design a structure and system of rules in which players will a) enjoy the process or journey, and b) create a sense of added value. As gamers and developers have found, a fun process coupled with a system for incentives or rewards for a job well done can become downright addictive.

So it’s no surprise to some gamers — including yours truly — that the very same game-play mechanics that hook players are slowly wending their way into other parts of the economy, too.

The article lists some interesting examples like Mint.com which turns personal finance into a game or the Nike+ site and technology.

Stephenson, Subutai, The Mongoliad

Thanks to Slashdot I have been poking around a project that one of my favorite sci-fi authors is involved in, namely the serially online published project The Mongoliad.This work is being supported by a company Stephenson helped create called Subutai Corporation that has developed a platform called PULP for digital novels that have social aspects and multimedia extensions. The platform looks a lot like a structured wiki. The first materials for The Mongoliad are up and smartphone apps are supposed to be coming. I found it hard to read off the web, but I tend to like my sci-fi on pulp.

It will be interesting to see how they explore the medium for this multi-authored novel.

The New York Times has a good story on the project here.

Erector Set – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I just finished Bruce Watson’s book on A. C. Gilbert, the invetor of the Erector Set titled The Man Who Changed How Boys and Toys Were Made. The book doesn’t quite work as either biography or as social history, but it ends by asking why the Erector sets and other construction toys from Gilbert Toys failed in the late 60s. Watson suggests three changes:

From Edison to Einstein. The first shift was a shift in paradigm from science being about invention (with Edison as the hero) to science being about theory (with Einstein as paradigm.)
After the A-Bomb. The second shift was the change in how we perceive science after the Atom Bomb. Science was no longer a unquestioned good. Watson suggests that Frankenstein’s Monster (the film with Boris Karloff) also contributed to a changing in attitude towards science.
The Cool. The final nail was the emergence of teen culture in the 60s – a culture concerned with the cool. Kids who constructed things with Erector sets were seen not as boys, but as nerds.

Toys like Erector, which in its time was very successful, aimed to appeal to boys. They avoided presenting themselves as “educational” as that would be the kiss of death. Instead they were for tinkering and playing engineer. They appealed to parents as a solution to the “boy problem” of energetic boys getting into trouble (something we solve with drugs today.) With time, playing with Erector sets making bridges ceased to appeal to boys as a manly thing to do. It ceased to be cool and boys began to be seen less as a problem than as a market for which entertainment could be designed. Why solve the boy problem when you could feed the cool boys with rock and roll, television and movies. Toys are now sold in conjunction with TV shows (cartoons or other).

Watson ends the book by pointing out that the videogame industry now sells much more than the toy industry – especially the educational toy industry. Videogames are this generation’s boy toys. What will be next? I can’t help wonder if there is a return to construction with all the interest in Arduino’s, fabrication, and robotics.

Why it’s okay to wage joystick jihad – The Globe and Mail

The Globe and Mail today had a story in the Focus section titled, Why it’s okay to wage joystick jihad (Poplak, Richard, Aug. 27, 2010). The story looks at the controversy raised by the forthcoming Medal of Honor game that takes place in Afghanistan and which allows players to play a Taliban fighter. The story quotes MacKay (our minister of defense),

“The men and women of the Canadian Forces, our allies, aid workers and innocent Afghans are being shot at, and sometimes killed, by the Taliban. This is reality,” Mr. MacKay’s statement said. “I find it wrong to have anyone, children in particular, playing the role of the Taliban. I’m sure most Canadians are uncomfortable and angry about this.”

Poplak dismisses (in my mind too quickly) the argument that there is danger in imitating disreputable characters.

Speaking from the position of a frequent playground ersatz robber, I can confirm that role-playing doesn’t necessarily imply empathy and attachment. There is, after all, no appreciable evidence suggesting that children who play Indians are likely to grow up as advocates for Indians’ rights.

The argument from imitation is not that in playing Indians we would sympthize with them; it is that in repeatedly playing and practicing certain activities we would become conditioned by the activities.

What I like about the story is how it engages and quickly surveys the relationship between games and war. Games can be about all sorts of things, but an extraordinary number of them are about war and fighting. Why is it war that we want to play?

WEME: Witches in Early Modern England

I’m at the Methods Commons workshop and Kirsten Uszkalo presented the WEME project (Witches in Early Modern England.) She showed (for the first time) the Throwing Bones interface which allows one to search the database and survey results as small decks of cards. Each deck has a different set of cards depending on the features of the hit. (See an example below.) You can use these sets to explore the hits. Very neat!

Towards a Methods Commons

Well my vacation is over and I’m facilitating a retreat on text methods across disciplines. (See Towards a Methods Commons.) With support from the ITST program at SSHRC we brought together 15 linguists, philosophers, historians, and literary scholars to discuss methods in a structured way. The goal is to sketch a commons that gathers “recipes” that show people how to do research things with electronic texts. Stay tuned for a draft web site in about 6 months.

Google: Our commitment to the digital humanities

Google has announced the first projects they are funding to use Google Books and have announced a commitment to the digital humanities of nearly a million dollars. See Official Google Blog: Our commitment to the digital humanities.

we’d like to see the field blossom and take advantage of resources such as Google Books that are becoming increasingly available. We’re pleased to announce that Google has committed nearly a million dollars to support digital humanities research over the next two years.