Spring Break....

This is just a notice to my regular readers that I am now officially on Spring break and will return to regular blogging duties in another week's time. It's painful to log off now as I have lots of cool ideas planned for this space but my wife and staff are both insisting that I take some down time. Something about all work and no play makes Henry a very dull boy.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:07 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Transmedia Storytelling 101

I designed this handout on transmedia storytelling to distribute to my students. More recently, I passed it out at a teaching workshop at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. I thought it might be of value to more of you out there in the community. Much of it builds on the discussion of that concept in Convergence Culture, though I have updated it to reflect some more recent developments in that space.

For those who want to dig deeper still into this concept, check out the webcast version of the Transmedia Entertainment panel from the Futures of Entertainment Conference.

Transmedia Storytelling 101

1. Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story. So, for example, in The Matrix franchise, key bits of information are conveyed through three live action films, a series of animated shorts, two collections of comic book stories, and several video games. There is no one single source or ur-text where one can turn to gain all of the information needed to comprehend the Matrix universe.

2. Transmedia storytelling reflects the economics of media consolidation or what industry observers call "synergy." Modern media companies are horizontally integrated - that is, they hold interests across a range of what were once distinct media industries. A media conglomerate has an incentive to spread its brand or expand its franchises across as many different media platforms as possible. Consider, for example, the comic books published in advance of the release of such films as Batman Begins and Superman Returns by DC ( owned by Warner Brothers, the studio that released these films). These comics provided back-story which enhanced the viewer's experience of the film even as they also help to publicize the forthcoming release (thus blurring the line between marketing and entertainment). The current configuration of the entertainment industry makes transmedia expansion an economic imperative, yet the most gifted transmedia artists also surf these marketplace pressures to create a more expansive and immersive story than would have been possible otherwise.

3. Most often, transmedia stories are based not on individual characters or specific plots but rather complex fictional worlds which can sustain multiple interrelated characters and their stories. This process of world-building encourages an encyclopedic impulse in both readers and writers. We are drawn to master what can be known about a world which always expands beyond our grasp. This is a very different pleasure than we associate with the closure found in most classically constructed narratives, where we expect to leave the theatre knowing everything that is required to make sense of a particular story.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Bring Me the Head of Henry Jenkins... (Part Two)

Yesterday, I began the strange saga of how a prosthesis of my head ended up in a glass case in an art gallery in New York City. If you missed that post, you probably want to go back and read it, since the rest of this will make even less sense than usual otherwise.

Some months later, I was sent several pictures of the people on the set of the movie, interacting with my decapitated head, including filling it with blood and guts needed for the gross out elements of the film. I have to say that there's something uncanny about seeing your head oozing blood onto the asphalt, even if, as many people have pointed out, there isn't that strong a resemblance to me in the end.

Once they were done making the movie, the head found its way into the art exhibition and it has been touring galleries in both Europe and North America. I still haven't seen it myself but I have talked to a number of people who have. And I have started to encounter some of the other "body parts" as I travel around the conference circuit. So far, I have met an arm and a leg.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Bring Me the Head of Henry Jenkins.... (Part One)

Coming soon to an art gallery near you: My decapitated head. Don't worry if you don't live in a major cultural center -- my head will also be rolling around in a pool of blood in a straight to video horror movie that you can rent at your local Blockbuster. Well, this is another fine mess I've gotten myself into.

In this entry, I will be sharing some images of the process by which the experimental artist Christian Jankowski transformed my head into an art object as part of a work known as "The Violence of Theory."

For me, this all began when I was asked by the folks at MIT's List Gallery to give a talk about the intersection between popular culture and high art. (I have for a number of years served as part of the advisory group for the gallery, though I have been relatively inactive lately.) I decided to present a talk based on my essay about Matthew Barney's relationship to the horror film, an essay which appears in my new anthology, The Wow Climax. In the course of the talk, I moved pretty fluidly from clips and images from Barney's Cremaster series to clips and quotes from such popular horror artists as David Cronenberg, Wes Craven, and Clive Barker. This paragraph cuts to the heart of my argument:

The modern horror genre was born in the context of romanticism (with authors seeking within the monster and his creator powerful metaphors for their own uneasy relationship with bourgeois culture) and the horror film originated in the context of German expressionism (with the studios demanding that madness or the supernatural be put forth as a justification for the powerful feelings generated by that new aesthetic sensibility.) The popular aesthetic's demand for affective intensity and novelty requires that popular artists constantly renew their formal vocabulary. Representing the monstrous gives popular artists a chance to move beyond conventional modes of representation, to imagine alternative forms of sensuality and perception, and to invert or transform dominant ideological assumptions. Historically, horror filmmakers have drawn on the "shock of the new" associated with cutting edge art movements to throw us off guard and open us up to new sensations.

From the start, horror films have required a complex balancing between the destabilization represented by those avant garde techniques and the restabilization represented by the reassertion of traditional moral categories and aesthetic norms in the films' final moments. There is always the danger that these new devices will prove so fascinating in their own right that they will swamp any moral framing or narrative positioning. For many horror fans, the genre becomes most compelling and interesting where narrative breaks down and erotic spectacle and visual excess takes over.

If the horror film has a moment of original sin, it came when the producers of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari inserted, at the last moment, a frame story that recontextualized the film's expressionist mise-en-scene as the distorted vision of a mad man. Through this compromise, they created a permanent space for modern art sensibilities within popular culture but only at the price of them no longer being taken seriously as art.

Among those people in the audience for the talk was Christian Jankowski, then in residence at MIT, as he was setting up an exhibition, "Everything Fell Together," in the gallery. Some months later, Jankowski contacted me again, this time to talk about his newest project, a series of artistic explorations of the culture around the contemporary horror film. Jankowiski had found a low budget horror film production which was willing to work with him to create a parallel work: he wanted to interview some of the leading theorists of the horror genre and incorporate their insights into the dialogue of the film. And while he was at it, he wanted to take "impressions" of us and transform them into prosthetic body parts, which would be deployed in gorey ways in the film and then displayed under glass in the installation.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 10:12 PM | Permalink

Just Men in Tights (Part Three)

Today, I offer up to readers the third and final installment of my essay in progress on the superhero genre. In this installment, I continue friday's discussion of the different strategies adopted by three recent graphic novels -- JLA: Year One, The Final Frontier, and Unstable Molecules -- in trying to encourage a revisionist perspective on the Silver Age of American comics, the period that more than any other defined the American superhero tradition.

For those of you who are not comic buffs, the Wikipedia offers this definition of the Silver Age:

The Silver Age of Comic Books is an informal name for the period of artistic advancement and commercial success in mainstream American comic books, predominantly in the superhero genre, that lasted roughly from the late 1950s/early 1960s to the early 1970s. It is preceded by the Golden Age of Comic Books.

During the Silver Age, the character make-up of superheroes evolved. Writers injected science fiction concepts into the origins and adventures of superheroes. More importantly, superheroes became more human and troubled, and since the Silver Age, character development and personal conflict have been almost as important to a superhero's mythos as super powers and epic adventures.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Just Men in Tights? (Part Two)

Today, I am running part two of the serialized version of my essay, "Just Men in Tights?" This segment takes us on a historical survey of how the superhero tradition emerged, suggesting that the characters we know today emerged through borrowings from a range of pulp genres, including swashbuckler, science fiction, and hardboiled detective traditions. Again and again as we study the history of American comics, superhero writers and artists have returned to their roots in these various pulp traditions -- not to mention melodrama, courtroom drama, newspaper stories, fantasy, gangster crime fiction, horror, and political drama, to cite only a few of the other influences. Near the end of this installment, I discuss the first of three recent graphic novels which have sought to re-examine the Silver Age of the superhero genre in relation to the history of the 1950s and 1960s.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Just Men in Capes? (Part One)

The following essay is being serialized here in part in response to a request from my friends, Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman, fantasy writers and key players in the Interstitial Arts movement. They heard me give a talk based on this research at Vericon, the Harvard University science fiction, fantasy, comics, and games event last year. They had shared their notes with the readers at their site and have wanted ever since to a way to link to it since it seems so relevent to their ongoing discussion of forms of popular fiction which straddle genre categories.

I am going to be running this essay, which remains, as they say, a "work in progress" in the blog in three installments. Basically, in the passage that follows, I will see what happens when we apply genre theory to the challenges of understanding superhero comics. What's the problem? Most often, we use genre theory to define and chart differences between genres (as in the case of literary, film, and television studies) but as I argue here, the superhero genre has so dominated the output of American comics in recent years that we need to develop a form of genre analysis that speaks to difference within the genre. Those who don't read comics might imagine that all superhero comics are more or less the same. But in fact, there is a continual need to generate diversity within the superhero genre to retain the interest of long-standing readers and to capture the interest of new ones.

In this first section, I suggest that there has been a shift in recent years in how the comics industry looks at the superhero genre -- a shift away from focusing primarily on building up continuity within the fictional universe and towards the development of multiple and contradictory versions of the same characters functioning as it were in parallel universes. In effect, the most interesting work here could be described as commercially produced fan fiction -- that is to say, it involves the continual rewriting and reimagining of the established protagonists. One can find here parallels to many of the kinds of fan rewriting practices I discussed in Textual Poachers, although in this case, this rewriting operates within the commercially produced content. Producers often claim that fans disrupt the coherence of the narrative because they generate multiple and contradictory versions of the same characters and events. The case of comics suggest, however, that readers are interested in consuming alternative visions of the series mythos.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:39 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

An Interview with Comics Journalist Joe Sacco (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part interview with comics journalist Joe Sacco (Palestine) as conducted by CMS Masters student Huma Yosef (herself a former professional journalist from Pakistan). Today, I continue this interview. It occurred to me as I was putting this together that it represents a fascinating contrast to the interview I ran a week or so back with comics Creator Rob Walton (Ragmop). Both artists are very interested in using comics to explore political issues but they approach these issues from very different vantage points: Sacco creates realist comics that document the everyday lives of people from war-torn countries while Walton uses fantasy and comedy to encourage us to reflect on the American political process. Between them, they suggest some of the ways that comics may function as civic media.

I now turn you over to Huma for the rest of her interview.

In what ways is your method of working akin to that of a journalist?

I conduct lots of rigorous, sit-down interviews, one after the other. Lots of things happen that aren't part of the interview process, and I'm often in situations where I can't take notes. In those instances, I duck behind a wall and frantically take as many notes as I can. In the evenings, I translate all my notes into a journal.

I also take photographs whenever I can. I'm currently doing a book about the Gaza Strip for which, after interviewing someone, I'd take his or her photograph. If someone refused to have a picture taken, then I'd try to quickly draw an image of the person in the margin of my notebook. Sometimes, there are things I realize I need to draw only after I start working. In that case, I visually research places later on. When I was working on Palestine, I wasn't aware of a lot of things and had to draw a lot from memory. With Safe Area Gorazde, my process has evolved. Now, if anything, I take too many pictures.

On the job in Palestine, I also started following stories as they unfolded. Like any reporter who has a little freedom, you follow your nose and try to cover the stories that you don't think anyone else will tell. For example, Gorazde opened up while I was there - I didn't know I would write about it until I arrived in Bosnia. Once I identified my subject, I conducted preliminary interviews about what happened, then broke it down into component parts. No doubt, the second time around was a more methodical process as I was a little more self-conscious about what I was doing.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink

If You Attended Our Session at South By Southwest...

On Monday, danah boyd and I had a conversation in front of a packed room at South By Southwest in Austin about youth, participatory culture, the politics of fear, wikipedia, Second Life, YouTube, and a range of other topics which will be familiar to those of you who regularly read this blog. Since we are seeing an influx of first time readers about now, I figured I would provide a key to some of the blog posts which touch on issues that cropped up during the session -- a kind of one stop shopping to the best of Henry Jenkins (or at least some of the better posts I've made since this blog launched last June.)

On YouTube and User-generated Content
YouTube and the Vaudeville Aesthetic

Taking the You Out of YouTube?

How to Watch a Fan-Vid

Astroturf, Humbugs and Lonely Girls

Oreos, "Wal-Mart Time" and User-Generated Advertising

On Second Life
The Great Jenkins/Sharky/Coleman Debate Pre Round 1 Round 2 Round 3 Aftermath

Should I Cornrow My Beard? (About my appearance with Global Kids)

On New Media and Democracy

From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy Part One Part Two

Democracy Big Brother Style

National Politics in Game Worlds: The Case of China

On the Future of Education
From YouTube to YouNiversity

on New Media Literacies

White Paper for MacArthur Initiative

on DOPA and the Politics of Fear

The Only Thing We Have to Fear...

What DOPA Means For Education

Four Ways to Kill MySpace

MySpace and the Participation Gap

Joint Interview with danah boyd

on Fans and Intellectual Property

The Magic of Back Story: The Mainstreaming of Fan Culture

In Yoyogi Park (on fans and globalization)

Fan Fiction as Critical Commentary

My Secret Life as a Slasher

Fan Activism in a Networked Culture

In Defense of Crud

Getting Lost

Can One Be a Fan of High Art?

So What Happened to Star Wars Galaxies?

On Wikipedia and Collective Intelligence
Collective Intelligence vs. The Wisdom of Crowds

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:58 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

An Interview with Comics Journalist Joe Sacco (Part One)

Every year, I ask students in my graduate proseminar on Media Theory and Methods to apply what we are learning in the class and do an interview with a media maker. The goal is to pull to the surface their "theory" of the medium in which they operate -- the often unarticulated, sometimes well considered, assumptions they make about their audience, their creative context, their techniques, their technology, their cultural status, and so forth. I will be getting a chance this week to see what my students have produced.

Everything from here comes from Huma's account of the interview:

Working as a reporter in Karachi, Pakistan, I was often frustrated by the limitations imposed on my work by the parameters of traditional journalism. When I filed an interview with the Police Surgeon of Karachi, the man who oversees all forensic evidence gathering and related medico-legal issues in the city, I hated that I couldn't describe the homophobic graffiti that had been scratched onto the surface of his desk and filing cabinet, the best indication of the kind of pressure under which his team operated. While reporting on a horrific rape case, I would have given anything to describe the self-satisfied way in which the police official I interviewed scratched his crotch using a fly swatter throughout our conversation. That one crude yet probably unconscious gesture said more about the sense of physical entitlement that Pakistani men enjoy than anything I ever wrote. Similarly, if I could have admitted in print that I found myself throwing up in a back alley after visiting the sewage-ridden tin shacks of hundreds of homeless Karachiites, perhaps more people would have been outraged by a government scam that denied access to low-income housing.

I wasted many evenings arguing with my editor about the value of first-person narrative journalism and the shortcomings of objectivity. Unfortunately, neither of us could conjure a reporting template that would be considered appropriate within the standards set by the mainstream media, yet simultaneously capture everything that was raw and repulsive about the reality I was documenting.

Enter Joe Sacco. At the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism in Boston last fall, soon after my arrival in the US, I happened upon Palestine, Sacco's comic journalism tour de force. Although conference participants had spent the weekend brainstorming ways in which to make journalism more textured, insightful, and human, no one had come close to suggesting a technique that could rival the satirical, brutally honest, and profoundly immersive experience that is Sacco's work.

Often compared to Art Spiegelman's Maus, Sacco's award-winning Palestine: In the Gaza Strip (1996) has been hailed for setting new standards in the genre of non-fiction graphic novels, or, as Sacco terms it, comic journalism. With his follow-up effort Safe Area Gorazde: The War In Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995, Sacco established himself as a journalist to be reckoned with. He has since covered all manner of "compelling" events from Ingushetia to Iraq, from rock bands on the road to raids in Ramallah. Each comic is reportage at its best, daring to go behind-the-scenes of journalistic objectivity, using alternating visual chaos and clarity to render a reporter's all-encompassing experience of a situation. Even better, Sacco's frames are replete with the adrenaline and anxiety, humor and humanity that are never granted any column inches.

While it would be inappropriate for me to compare Pakistan to Palestine, I do believe that there are some realities so absurd that they demand new ways of telling. Sacco's work serves as a reminder to all journalists that they should strive to recount the reality that drives their investigations by whatever means necessary. Sacco is currently working on another comic on the Gaza Strip. Until that hits bookstores, we can content ourselves with some thoughts from the cartoonist:

You've been described as a pioneer in the field of comic journalism, yet one could argue that your work is part of a long tradition, an evolution of the political cartoon. How do you contextualize your work?

I primarily think of myself as a cartoonist, but also as someone who is interested in political matters and what's going on in the world. I know there's a long tradition of illustrators dating back to the London Illustrated and Harper's coverage of the Civil War as well as another tradition of artists who deal with political matters, political cartoons, and editorializing news through pictures. In the end, though, my interests have just come together. I wanted to be a journalist and then fell back on an intense hobby to make a living. I don't think too much about where I place myself and I never really had a theory about what I was doing. People keep asking me about my work, so I'm coming up with something to say post-fact. But the truth is, it's quite accidental. If you've done something for 15 years, you need to build some theory around it, but I wasn't aware of what I was doing when I started doing it

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

How Second Life Impacts Our First Life...

After having written so much about Second Life during my recent exchanges with Beth Coleman and Clay Shirky, I swore to myself that I would not write about this virtual world for a bit and let reality catch up with some of my theories. No such luck. I recently heard from digital theorist
Trebor Scholtz suggesting that there had been some interesting responses to the Shirkey-Coleman-Jenkins exchanges over at the iDC (Institute for Distributed Creativity) mailing list. Scholtz asked politely if I might weigh in on some of their arguments (always a dangerous thing since I am not on the list and not fully following their conversations) and clarify my position. I asked if I could cross-post my response here on the blog.

The question which Scholtz posed to me was deceptively simple:

My main question to Jenkins and all of you concerns the relationship between this virtual world and "first life." Do these virtual worlds merely provide an inconvenient youth with a
valve to live their fantasies of social change (elsewhere), or do they, in some measurable way, fertilize politics in the world beyond the screen?

The last several decades of observation of the digital world teaches us that the digital world is never totally disconnected from the real world. Even when we go onto the digital world to "escape" reality, we end up engaging with symbolic representations which we read in relation to reality. We learn things about our first lives by stepping into a Second or parallel life which allows us to suspend certain rules, break out of certain roles, and see the world from a fresh perspective. More often, though, there are a complex set of social ties, economic practices, political debates, etc. which almost always connects what's taking place online to what's going on in our lives off line.

Here, for example, is a link to the webcast of a session of the 2005 Games, Learning, and Society conference at Madison, Wisconsin. (Check out the session called Brace for Impact: How User Creation Changes Everything). It was one of the first places that I heard extensively about the kinds of educational uses of Second Life. One of the stories there which caught my imagination dealt with the ways people were using this environment to help sufferers of autism and Asperger's syndrome to rehearse social skills and overcome anxieties that can be crippling in real world social interactions. (They call their island, Brigadoon). Those who are undergoing therapy in Brigadoon are able to interact through Second Life for several reasons, as I understand it: first, because it creates a buffer between the people lowering the stress of social interaction; second, because it reduces the range of social signals through the cartoonishness of the avatar, helping them to learn to watch for certain signs and filter out others. Ideally, participants then return with these new social skills and apply them to their interactions in their First Lives. But even if that is not possible for all of those involved, they have had a chance to interact meaningfully with other human beings -- even if through a mediating representation.

For me, Brigadoon offers both a demonstration of the value of having a Second Life that operates in parallel to your First Life and as a metaphor to think about the ways we can try things out, learn to think and act in new ways in virtual worlds of all kinds, and then carry those skills back with us to our everyday reality.

In some cases, the Second Life opens up experiences that would not be possible within the constraints of the real world. My former student and friend, John Campbell, wrote a book, Getting It On Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Identity, and Embodied Identity . His research primarily centered on much earlier forms of chatroom technologies rather than Second Life per se, but much of what he found there is still very relevant to our present conversation. One of the things I took away from Campbell's book was the idea that these chartrooms played important functions for queers who lived in small towns or in conservative regions of the country where there were little or no chances to socialize with others who shared their sexual preferences. Entering into a virtual world (even one as simple as the early chat rooms) allowed them to begin to explore aspects of their sexual identity that they could not yet act upon in their First Lives. Through this process, they developed the self confidence necessary to come out to their friends and family, they felt some connection to the realm of queer activism, and they made a range of other life-changing choices. I wanted to bring this into the conversation because I see from time to time academic theorists who want to dismiss the kinds of sexual experimentation that occurs in Second Life as interactive porn. Such language shows a limited understanding of what such spaces can and often do mean to the people who participate in these sexual subcultures in virtual worlds.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

GDC 2007 Coverage (Part Four of Four)

This is the last installment of Eitan Glinert's account of the Games Development Conference. Glinert is a graduate student working for GAMBIT.

Friday

For the past four days I've brought you coverage of GDC and tried to focus on different aspects of the conference, starting with serious games, then independent game development, followed by coverage of the "big" companies out there including Sony and Nintendo, and then women in gaming. Today, on my last day, I'm going to get into news related to my own research in game accessibility. But what is "Game Accessibility"? It seems to be one of those terms getting thrown around a lot in the industry, especially over the past week. Simply put, there are a huge number of disabled people out there; according to the 2000 American census, 19% of individuals aged 16 - 64 had some form of disability, be it physical or mental. Accessibility refers to games that are designed with this large group in mind, so that they can play along with everyone.

Actually creating accessible games is a task easier said than done, though. There are many forms of disabilities, ranging from sensory impairments (i.e. blind), to physical disabilities, to mental disabilities such as dyslexia, to medical conditions like arthritis. So how can you make a game that is accessible to all of these people? That's a great question that Dr. Dimitris Grammenos would like to try to answer. Grammenos has created Game Over!, the most frustrating, hilarious, and thought-provoking game I have seen in quite some time. Game Over! has 20+ levels, each of which displays a different accessibility deficiency that makes the game impossible to play. That's right - you can't win this game. Play advances when you either die, or self destruct, three times in any given level. Lighthearted enough to keep you from breaking your computer in frustration, playing through really gets you thinking about how the "bugs" that prevent you from winning could have been avoided. If you are developing software, I *strongly* suggest checking it out.

There are some games, though, that do a great job of being accessible. One notable example is Terraformers, winner of the innovation in audio award at the 2003 independent games festival. Terraformers features a rich world in which you need to make an alien planet habitable for humans (hence the name.) What's really impressive about the game, though, is that you don't need to be able to see to play the game. Through the novel use of 3D sound and a handy futuristic sonar system, players can navigate and interact with the world without ever seeing a thing. If the concept sounds interesting but you think you want something more action packed, you might want to check out AudioGames.net, a website devoted entirely to games for the visually impaired. Two of the more interesting offerings on the site (in my opinion) are Drive and Shades of Doom, though the list of some 200 games available should give you plenty to choose from.

Also present at GDC were games that took pains to provide useful closed captioning, to allow the user to adjust the speed and difficulty level of the system and a meaningful way, and a wide array of controllers that would allow users with one hand, or even paraplegics, to play games. The latter controller, which was controlled through a set of three puff straws, was truly an impressive feat, though I don't know of any plans to mass produce such items. If anyone does know of where to get such a device, it would have to be Game Accessibility, the best site around for what's new in the accessibility field. Along with links to dozens of games (some of which can be downloaded on the site) there are many useful tools for developers such as papers and testimonials on how to make these types of games.

That about wraps up my coverage of the Game Developer's Conference. Before I go though, a plug: check out The Education Arcade, a lab here at MIT that focuses on the creation of new engaging educational games, like Labyrinth. There's lots of great stuff on the site, including some particularly enlightening blogs. Ok, so mine aren't all that enlightening, but the other ones are. Check it out!

Have comments on Eitan's coverage of GDC? Feel free to contact him at glinert-at-mit-dot-edu and tell him what you really thought of his posts

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:43 AM | Permalink

GDC 2007 Coverage (Part Three of Four)

Thursday

If I had to sum up Playstation's GDC message in one sentance, it would be: "The PS3 really is super awesome, check out all this cool stuff we have in the pipeline!" If you asked me to do the same for Nintendo, though, it would probably be "We're friends - let's talk about our design philosophy so you can learn from it." Personally, I find the latter message a bit more appealing as it is more tangible, and, quite frankly, the Wii has more credibility in my book at the time being (though I do want the PS3 to succeed on the same level as it's predecessor.)

That said, it wouldn't have killed Nintendo to make a *few* more announcements. With the exception of a multiplayer playable demo of the new Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, I didn't see or hear anything truly exciting. As for Phantom, while the single player game certainly looks like a fun DS version of the Wind Waker, the multiplayer part wasn't terribly impressive. At it's core a fun "hide-and-seek" concept, it is strictly one on one, and damningly has NO ELEMENT OF ZELDA GAMEPLAY. There are no swords, no boomerangs, and no dive-rolls with a pleasurable "HAA!" In fact, you could replace link and all the other objects in the game with kittens and dogs, the game would look the same. As a result, the functionality seems tacked on, and makes me wonder why they didn't take more time to really get that Zelda feel that we fans love so much.

Nintendo's biggest newsmaker of the day was the keynote delivered by the company's creative director Shigeru Miyamoto. Miyamoto, the mastermind behind Mario, Zelda, and Donkey Kong, talked somewhat informally about the design principles of Nintendo, and then his own personal take on game creation. The keynote was not nearly as announcement heavy as the previous day's; indeed, only a brief video was shown of the upcoming Super Mario Galaxy, which was not very different than the one shown last year. In my opinion, though, Miyamoto more than made up for this with interesting anecdotes and an engaging narrative that followed through his career from a non-gamer point of view. Specifically, through a dynamic wife-o-meter, which showed his wife's (growing) interest in games as time went on and technology and game design improved.

I personally felt this wife-o-meter was an apt analogy, as it touched on the important issue of the growing female demographic. More and more, women are playing and buying video games, and are shattering the notion that women are only "casual" gamers. As I sat in various conference halls, I noticed (anecdotal evidence alert!) that there were more women playing with their DS's than men! And they weren't just playing "fluffy" games like Nintendogs either, but "hardcore" ones like Final Fantasy 3 and Mario Kart.

This shift is reflected in the changes being seen in industry. Development teams, typically mostly or entirely male, are beginning to realize that they can't just make games for themselves anymore, but have to design games that appeal more to a broader user base (which is always a good design practice in general.) Likewise, as women dive into gaming more than they have historically, more women get jobs in the field, which then in turn helps the design process and pushes innovation, something desperately needed in an industry dominated by sequels.

Tomorrow I'll conclude my coverage of GDC with a segment on the often overlooked area of game accessibility. In the mean time, how did my friend Kristina fare on her mission? Well, she tried everything; flattery, intimidation, humor, threats, and bribery, but unfortunately walked away without the Miyamoto-signed DS she had her heart set on. Will there be happy ending to her story?

No, probably not.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:18 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

GDC 2007 Coverage (Part Two of Four)

The following is the second of a four part series of observations on the Game Developers Conference by graduate student Eitan Glinert. I am flying to Chicago today to attend the Society for Cinema Studies conference.

Wednesday

GDC proper kicked off today, with all the commotion and fanfare you'd expect from some ten thousand plus obsessed gamers. Phil Harrison, the president of Sony Worldwide Studios, started the show with a memorable keynote on what's next for the currently ailing PS3. Not just a preview of some cool games, Phil announced a company shift to focus on user-centric entertainment in the vein of YouTube, Second Life, or MySpace. But how does Sony hope to get people involved?

The first way is through the addition of a new service to the PS3 Xross Media Bar called Home. Similar to Second Life in many ways, users control a customizable avatar in a world where they interact with other players (no word yet on whether you can play as a furry.) You also own an apartment which you can decorate to your liking as in The Sims. Don't like the wallpaper? Change it. Don't like the selection of wallpapers you can use? Buy premium wallpapers from the Sony store. In fact, that seems to be the crux of the service; the free stuff is nice, but if you want the *really* cool stuff, you're gonna have to pay.

So what's cool in this world? Well, you can hang out with others in common spaces and play games, ranging from pool to old-school arcade games. You can watch trailers for upcoming movies in Hi Def - though I do have to wonder how they will manage to play them without either requiring long download times or terrible buffering. But perhaps most compelling is your personal trophy room, which displays badges of honor you earn in games by accomplishing certain goals in PS3 games. Kill 10,000 zombies? That's a trophy! Get 5 stars on Jordan in expert mode? Trophy! Figure out what the ending of Metal Gear Solid 2 Means? Trophy!

While a nice feature and a welcome addition, Home doesn't seem to be the killer app that Sony is looking for. But LittleBigPlanet just might be it. Where Home fails to allow for user generated content, LittleBigPlanet (which I will call LBP from now on because it sounds cooler) shines. Less a game than a toolbox, LBP allows users to create their 2D platformer with 3D objects in a simple and straightforward way. Once created users can play through the levels they've made, and invite their friends along for the ride.

So why is LBP so impressive? Well, for one thing, the game looks beautiful. The textures in the game are vivid and lifelike, and evoke a "realistic" feeling. Furthermore, the user interface seems pretty clean - scroll through nested lists to select what you want to create, then place them in the world using a lasso. But what is most impressive, in my opinion, is what Harrison focused on the least: The game has realistic, working soft body physics! In other words, users no longer have to settle for unsquishable bowling balls, they can now make nerf balls. It's unclear to me why this point wasn't stressed more. I hope it was a matter of the subject matter not fitting the audience, rather than the demo being a Wizard of Oz type "man-behind-a-curtain" thing, where the soft body physics are faked, and don't really work like in the demo.

If a game is going to center on user content, you'd better believe there's going to be a way to upload your creations and download other people's creations. LBP does it with a slick interface that allows people to search, post comments, and rate their favorites. Sure, it's a YouTube knockoff, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

In addition to the PS3 announcements, there were excellent talks on two other games that I am greatly looking forward to. The first is Valve's upcoming game Portal, one of the more original twists to come out of the puzzle genre in a while. Based on the Half-Life 2 engine, Portal features a wormhole generating gun that allows you to connect two points in space and then pass easily from one to the other. Don't get it? Take a look and you will.

The other game I was excited to see was Sega's Crush. Players alternate through a traditional 3D platform landscape, which they can "crush" (flatten) at any point into a 2D variant based on camera angle. This redefinition allows the user to traverse obstacles that would normally be impossible to get past. Sound cool? It is.

Kristina found a sharpie and has her Pink DS ready. Will she succeed in getting Miyamoto's coveted John Hancock? Tomorrow we'll find out.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 6:13 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

GDC 2007 Coverage (Part One of Four)

This week, a large group of CMS students and faculty/researchers are spending time in San Francisco at the Games Developer's Conference. I was unable to attend this year due to other speaking commitments. In the next week, I will be speaking at the University of Minnesota, at the Society for Cinema Studies conference in Chicago, and at South By Southwest in Austin. I asked one of the students who is attending the Game Developer's Conference, Eitan Glinert, to share with my readers some of his impressions. Glinert recently arrived at MIT as a graduate student in Computer Science having worked with the Federation of American Scientists on the development of games for learning. We quickly snatched him up to contribute to the launch of GAMBIT, the Singapore-MIT Games Innovation Lab, and he has just as quickly become a familiar face at our community gatherings. What follows is some of his impressions of the first two days of the conference.

Day One

For five days, Game Developer's Conference is a zoo of exciting discussion, innovative ideas, and social networking that becomes the focal point of many gamer's lives, including my own. I'm Eitan Glinert, and for the next week I'll be covering the conference from warm, sunny San Francisco.

Most people at such conferences might focus on a genre or a platform, be it first person shooters or the Wii, but today we're going to focus on an entire field of gaming, Serious Games. It's the market segment that involves all the games that your education obsessed aunt bought for you when you were little; the ones that made you roll your eyes and think "Great, another one of those games." The area runs the gamut from "Carmen Sandiego" and "Flight Simulator" to Captain Novolin. The trait that all these games share, though, is a desire to teach the user or elicit some sort of behavioral change through game play.

Who's making Serious Games? A growing number of people from myriad institutions - there's military instructors who want training simulators for their troops, educational companies trying to bring new learning technologies into the classroom, and non-profits that want to bring about social change and political activism. These games are fine, but (with the exception of government funded military simulators) they are generally smaller games on smaller budgets, and aren't aimed at or aren't successful with the mainstream market. This reputation is what causes most gaming companies to avoid serious gaming like the plague - they make games for the general public, and they're a guaranteed money loss. Right?

Wrong. Serious games are beginning to become serious money. In the past year, 5 of the top 20 games for the Nintendo DS in Japan have been serious games, including two variations of Brain Age, and English teaching game, and the ever popular "Cooking Navigation." And some companies are beginning to take notice. Last year, Square Enix (of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest fame) announced the opening of a new offshoot called SGlab , created to capitalize on this newly discovered market. The company plans to work with both game developers and Japanese schools and libraries to deliver educational gaming products - however, as of yet, I have seen no news about upcoming releases.

This year, Ichiro Otobe, Chief Strategist of Square Enix, delivered the keynote at the Serious Games Summit section of GDC and spoke about some of the new projects they were working on. While it still remains unclear what, if anything, will come out of SGlab, it is more than apparent that the parent company is dedicated to making games in the field, as was seen during the demonstration of a new game unceremoniously code named "Project GB." Running on the DS, it displayed some very impressive game capabilities: design, create, and play your own sprite based 2D games. The bottom screen serves as an editor in which the user "codes" the various objects that will comprise his game; meanwhile, the objects are displayed on the top screen and behave according to the proscribed rules. The demo featured a user-created version of Galaga, and displayed how easy it was to create new objects and change settings. I must say, it was rather enticing; I know I certainly wouldn't mind recreating a newer, better Marble Madness and then passing it around to my friends to try.

If the model works (and I hope it does) then I suspect these games, and more importantly their profit margins, will open the flood gates and we'll see many, many more serious games in the near future. The Wii and DS seem especially suited to such offerings, as the platforms are, at their heart, designed to draw in users that might be interesting in non-standard gaming options. After all, wouldn't you pay $50 to learn algebra from Mario?

Day Two

Making video games isn''t easy. Well, that's not entirely true; if you''re EA or Microsoft, and you have a huge number of developers and producers, and you have a money vault filled with gold coins you can swim through a la "Ducktales," then it's actually not that difficult. But for the rest of us, for the "Indie" developers out there, making games is a Herculean task. Frequently, independents have to work with a minimal or non-existent budget, a team that is too small and too inexperienced for the task, and usually have to take time off from development to spend time on other distractions, like classes or a job.

Here at GDC, these developers are getting a voice, and for good reason, as they are responsible for the majority of the games out there (even if many of them you haven''t heard of.) A small number of the games, like Second Life, manage to take hold and become a phenomenon. More of them graduate to "casual" online games, and if they''re lucky get linked to by a portal website and make a modest return on a few hundred/thousand downloads. The majority, though, never see the light of day. That''s why the conference has such as focus on making sure that the independents out there can learn what they need to know to at least help their chances of success.

So what advice was given? Innovate! Or, don''t innovate, but make a small change to something that exists and do a good job with that! Or do tons of self promotion, and make sure that you have a good market strategy! Get help from professionals in the field! Better yet, do all of the above, and then come and give advice at the following year's conference!

The truth of the matter is, there''s lots of good advice that can be given, and different things have worked for different people, though most agree that being "at the right place, at the right time, with the right idea" certainly helps. One of the more interesting teams to come out of the independent game field in the past two years is thatgamecompany, a company started by several USC graduates including Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago, both of whom I had the pleasure of talking to at the conference. We discussed their new games Cloud and flOw (both of which are available for download through the = company website), and the thinking behind their creation. Instead of simply trying to design a game based on that one "good idea", they tried to identify an area that games were ignoring - in this case, they felt there weren''t enough games out there that promote feelings of relaxation and tranquility. Both games, especially Cloud, are designed around promoting these emotions, and the results are spectacular. When was the last time you played a game and the word "Zen" came to mind?

Certainly, their philosophy seems to work for them. But that''s only one way for independents to make games. Another great way is through contests, and here's one you might be interested in if you are a college student looking to get into game development. It's called Hidden Agenda, and at stake is $25,000 for the best educational game that is exciting and engaging, and teaches something on the side. But maybe educational games aren''t your thing, and you are interested in more basic, "fun" games? Consider making a game for One Laptop per Child, a new nonprofit trying to get cheap, durable laptops to children in third world countries. They''re really looking for talented, dedicated people to help them make games, and it will likely be a great way to get your name out there.

Tomorrow GDC proper starts, and we'll see if my friend Kristina is successful in her lifelong dream of getting Miyamoto''s signature on her DS.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink

From Participatatory Culture to Participatory Democracy (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of the text of my keynote address to the Beyond Broadcast conference. I conclude the text in today's installment.

Vote Naked
An advertisement for the Webby Awards, given in recognition for outstanding contributions to digital culture, depicts a pair of feminine bare feet with what would seem to be a blurry bed in the background. Its slogan was "vote naked." Ever since I first saw that advertisement, I have been intrigued by what it might mean to "vote naked." Might this be what democracy looks like? The advertisement suggests that the computer now allows us to conduct the most public of actions within the privacy of our own home in whatever state of dress or undress we desire. More than that, the image and slogan invites us to imagine a time when we are as comfortable in our roles as citizens as we are within our own skins, when politics may be a familiar, everyday, and intimate aspect of our daily lives much the way popular culture is today. We watch television in our underwear; we dress up to vote. All of this is to say that we too often treat American Democracy as a special event (organizing around elections, bemoaning the outcome, and then crawling back into our holes for another four years) rather than as a lifestyle. Redrawing the lines between participatory culture and participatory democracy might give us a way to revitalize citizenship, making it a meaningful aspect of our everyday lives, rather than as something we try to ignore as long as possible. This is an idea that I flesh out more fully (no pun intended) in the final chapters of Convergence Culture.

Here are a few other key concepts that we might draw from Convergence Culture into the current discussion of Democracy:

1. Convergence is a cultural rather than a technological process. We now live in a world where every story, image, sound, idea, brand, and relationship will play itself out across all possible media platforms. As such, the system creates many points where it is vulnerable to intervention, appropriation, repurposing, and recontextualizing its contents towards political purposes.

2. In a networked society, people are increasingly forming knowledge communities to pool information and work together to solve problems they could not confront individually. We call that collective intelligence. The political potential of collective intelligence might be recognized through a closer examination of the Wikipedia movement. Wikipedia has developed strong ethical standards that enable people with wildly divergent beliefs to work together towards a common project; they focus on the shared infrastructure that they all need in order to achieve their aims rather than on the individual points of disagreement; the Wikipedia movement provides them with meaningful mechanisms that allow for the reconciliation between competing truth claims and the co-existence of differing perspectives.

3. We are seeing the emergence of a new form of participatory culture (a contemporary version of folk culture) as consumers take media in their own hands, reworking its content to serve their personal and collective interests. It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I consider Second Life to be one of the most powerful embodiments of this new participatory culture -- a whole world that is being constructed bottom up through the collective and individual efforts of participants.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

From Participatatory Culture to Participatory Democracy (Part One)

The following is my attempt to provide a written record of the remarks that I presented at the Beyond Broadcast conference that we hosted at MIT the other week. I would strongly recommend watching the webcast version of the talk to achieve the full effect since the talk depended very heavily on the visuals and I am not going to be able to reproduce very many of them here. You might also want to check out the interview I did for Thoughtcast in advance of the event. This post is intended, however, to provide links to all of the examples I presented during the talk.

Getting Too Close to Reality
Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, my recent book, opens with the curious story of Bert and Bin Laden:

Dino Ignacio, a Filipino-American high school student created a Photoshop collage of Sesame Street's Bert interacting with terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden as part of a series of "Bert is Evil" images he posted on his homepage. Others depicted Bert as a Klansman, cavorting with Adolph Hitler, dressed as the Unabomber or having sex with Pamela Anderson. It was all in good fun.

In the wake of September 11, a Bangladesh-based publisher scanned the web for Bin Laden images to print on anti-American signs, posters, and T-shirts. Sesame Street is available in Pakistan in a localized format; the Arab world, thus, had no exposure to Bert and Ernie, but were very aware of a blue chicken who serves as one of the series mascots in Arabic-speaking nations. The printer thus didn't recognize Bert, but he must have thought the image was a good likeness of the al-Qaeda leader. The image ended up in a collage of similar images that was printed on thousands of posters and distributed across the Middle East.

CNN reporters recorded the unlikely sight of a mob of angry protestors marching through the streets chanting anti-American slogans and waving signs depicting Bert and Bin Laden. Representatives from Children's Television Workshop spotted the CNN footage and threatened to take legal action: "We're outraged that our characters would be used in this unfortunate and distasteful manner. The people responsible for this should be ashamed of themselves. We're exploring every legal option to stop this abuse and any similar abuses in the future." It was not altogether clear who they planned to sic their intellectual property attorneys on - the young man who had initially appropriated their images or the terrorist supporters who deployed them. Coming full circle, amused fans produced a number of new sites, linking various Sesame Street characters with terrorists.

From his bedroom, Dino sparked an international controversy. His images crisscrossed the world, sometimes on the backs of commercial media, sometimes via grassroots media. And, in the end, he inspired his own cult following. Ignacio became more concerned and ultimately decided to dismantle his site: "I feel this has gotten too close to reality.... "Bert Is Evil" and its following has always been contained and distanced from big media. This issue throws it out in the open."

In the context of the book, I am interested in the ways that this story illustrates the ways that contemporary media culture is being reshaped by the intersection of top-down corporate media and bottom-up grassroots media. Here, though, I want to invite us to reconsider what it might mean for citizens in a participatory culture to get "too close to reality" and whether this is a new kind of political power that we could deploy to transform society.

This is What Democracy Looks Like
One place to starting addressing this question would be to consider the case of This is What Democracy Looks Like, a feature length documentary that emerged from the Indie Media Movement in the wake of the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. 100 media activists were issued camcorders and dispersed across the protest, each recording their own perspective on the action. The finished documentary shows us the experience in the street by pooling together the best of their footage into a 72 minute film, which was in turn intended to be a rallying point for further community building and activism. We might see the project as an example of the kinds of politically committed grassroots media production that was showcased throughout the Beyond Broadcast event.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 6:28 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Videoblogging, Citizen Journalism, and Credibility

Today, I wanted to show off the latest in the series of short documentaries on media production which we are producing through Project nml, a project funded by the MacArthur Foundation to foster new media literacies. Regular readers of this blog will recall that we are producing a series of short digital documentaries on various aspects of the new media landscape -- ranging from independent comics to graffiti -- which are designed to get students to reflect more deeply about their own potential roles as media makers and to think about the place of media in their own lives. We have been delighted so far by reports that these videos are starting to be used in schools around the country and we would like to encourage other educators to send us reports of how you might be making use of these materials.

Our latest release deals with the growing phenomenon of video-blogging (and as such, compliments the segments we produced last year in which Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow offered his advice to would-be bloggers.) The video was produced under the supervision of research manager Margaret Weigel and our recently hired production coordinator Anna Van Someren (who came to us from the Boston Based Youth Voice Collaborative); the primary author of the video was one of the CMS graduate students, Steve Schultze, who was also not coincidentally one of the key organizers of last week's Beyond Broadcast event. Among those featured on this video are Steve Garfield, who has been widely credited as the father of the videoblogging movement; John Barth from Public Radio Exchange; Ravi Jain, another former student of mine who has gone on to fame if not fortune as the host of Drive Time; Jason Crowe from Cambridge Community Television; and Susan Buice and Arin Crumley, the producers of Four Eyed Monsters.

One of the high points of the series comes in Segment 2 where we get into the issue of citizen journalism and how it relates to professional reporting:

John Barth: On the Internet, you have this great possibility to compare and contrast among a variety of vetted sources of news.

Steve Garfield: Videoblogging is news. Of course it is. The cool thing about it is that people will all be telling stories, let's say, from an event. So something happens and you'll get five, ten, who knows... right now if you go to an event and you have fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, a hundred bloggers blogging about an event... if you read a number of them you'll get a good sense of what actually happened.

John Barth: So can you trust what you see in a videoblog? How do you know that that's true or accurate?

Steve Garfield: Or if you read a blogger frequently, you know what their biases are and you know where they're coming from. So they become a trusted source for you. With video blogging it's the same thing. Video bloggers will become a trusted source for people of news, and if you have a number of videobloggers out covering the same event, seeing their different perspective on the same event, when you look at all those different videos then I think you'll get the story.

John Barth: You know this whole notion of, "all of us as smarter than some of us", is true. Except, not all of us are videoblogging and not all of us are blogging and not all of us are doing what you're doing. So, all of us don't have the benefit of being equal participants in trying to determine what the story is, or being able to see your videoblog and compare it against someone else's....

John Barth: So what would be so bad if videobloggers rule and mainstream media goes away because they just can't stay in business. Well here's what I think would happen: right now most investigative reporting, for better or worse, is being done by mainstream media. You have really good reporters at newspapers, at major networks like ABC news, and they are really developing their sources and getting to stories that frankly I don't think you and I could with a handheld video camera. We don't have the time, we don't have the money, and we don't know where to go.

Steve Garfield: The cool thing is that videoblogging is not TV. That's what's so cool about it. You don't have to have an intro, a voiceover... you don't have to get both sides of the story. You don't have to do anything. You can do it however you want to do it.

John Barth: Trust is what you're trying to get to. You're trying to get to credibility. So, if you work in a traditional news organization, there are dozens, hundreds of people and they all have points of view - they all have biases. The thing that's supposed to weed out all of that so that all you have is accurate information and good storytelling is that you do have editors and competitors and other reporters who help frame a story and get it out there every day. If you're a videoblogger, it's maybe you and maybe one or two other people and that's all. So, how do people know that what you've put out is accurate? How do you develop that trust? Well, there are some real basic things to understand. If you're going to pursue certain stories, you don't have your conclusion before you begin. That's why you're asking questions. So, a lot of times we get interested in a topic because we're passionately interested in it, but you need to have enough self-control and self-discipline to distance yourself from the outcome and also what you're hearing from different points of view....I think in terms of training people to be good videobloggers, I would argue they should spend some time with traditional journalists and get a sense about how much time it takes to beyond just putting up home movies to really tell a story well and really check some things out.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Awkward Conversations About Uncomfortable Laughter

Dear reader, please welcome me to the age of enlightenment. A few weeks ago, the MIT dorms, where I live, finally started to receive Comedy Central and I am now able to enjoy a daily dose of John Stewart and Steven Colbert rather than hoping that the hotels where I stay get the channel and that I can remember when they are on. (Of course, the MIT dorms, razzle frazzle, are no longer getting HBO or BBC America so it continues to be one step forward, two steps back).

I am receiving Comedy Central just in time to see the early episodes of Sarah Silverman's new television series. So far, the series has not lived up to my hopes or expectations. It feels more like a female remake of Curve Your Enthusiasm about a woman whose self-centeredness becomes the basis of anti-social and politically incorrect conduct on a recurring basis (not that there's anything wrong with that from most people's point of view but I have never quite connected with Curve.) But the show is drawing very strong ratings so people out there seem to be liking what they are seeing.

I have been long interested in Silverman's work and wrote something about her film, Jesus is Magic, for Flow a few years ago. While I am reproducing my essay here, you may want to follow this link back because the essay generated a pretty rich and far reaching response when it first appeared. Silverman's film uses comedy to ask questions about how we are dealing with issues of race in America today, questions which may only be asked by pushing hard on the borders between jokes and insults. She has, as a consequence, found herself the center of controversies about inappropriate jokes.

I wish that were the problem with the new Comedy Central series which seems pretty tame compared to her earlier standup work. There were some moments which made me wince in an episode in which her character believes she's gotten AIDS and manages to turn efforts to combat the disease into a totally self-serving exercise, sending up the ways that celebrities gain status through attaching themselves to various causes or when she gets into a conversation with a zombie about the insensative ways that her people are portrayed in the media. But, in the end, the series falls back into safer sitcom territory rather than using comedy to probe our hot button issues as a society.

What follows is the essay I wrote for Flow:

In her book, Implicit Meanings, the anthropologist Mary Douglas explores the roles jokes play in mapping points of tension or transition within a culture. Only a thin line separates jokes and insults. The joke gives expressive form to an emergent perspective within a culture -- something which is widely felt but rarely said. When a joke expresses a view already widely accepted, it becomes banal and unfunny. When a joke says something the culture is not ready to hear, it gets read as an insult or an obscenity. The job of the clown is thus to continually map the borders between what can and can not be said. This is why a good comedy routine is accompanied as often by gasps as by laughter.

I was reminded of Douglas's perspective on jokes when I recently participated in a screening and discussion of Sarah Silverman's new film, Jesus is Magic. For those of you who have not heard of her yet, Silverman is a former Saturday Night Live writer who sparked national controversy in 2001 when she told a joke about "chinks" on Conan and when she defended the joke on Bill Mahr's Politically Incorrect. The Silverman controversy has resurfaced in recent months both because of a rather memorable appearance in The Aristocrats and because of the release of a film documenting her standup comedy show. She has recently been profiled in The New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly and is currently shooting a pilot for her own series on Comedy Central.

To understand the controversy, we have to return to the now infamous joke she told on Conan in 2001. She was explaining that her various efforts to escape jury duty and her friend's suggestion that she could try to come across as prejudiced on the questionnaire by writing "I hate chinks." Silverman pauses, suggesting that she would consider being embarrassed to make such a comment, even in jest, and so instead she wrote, "I LOOOVE Chinks -- and who wouldn't."

Greg Aoki, the president of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, argued that the network showed a double standard in allowing the word, "chink," to air when it would almost certainly have bleeped "nigger." The network and host later apologized for the decision to air the joke but Silverman refused to apologize, contending "It's not a racist joke. It's a joke about racism." The controversy is one which looks differently depending on whether our focus is on the words used (Aoki rightly sees "chink" as a word deeply entwined in the history of racism in America) or the meaning behind them (Silverman is right that her comedy ultimately raises uncomfortable questions about how white people "play the race card.")

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ()