Untitled and Undecided

A (former) colleague of mine, noting what I write on my bio, asked me the following question:

“In three sentences of less – ‘Why is collaborative media production for kids important?’”

My response:

I think it’s important for kids to have opportunities to learn to produce media, beyond film and text, because it provides another outlet for creative expression and a hook into participating in various communities outside of their classrooms. Not only might they learn technical skills that prove useful down the road, they learn how to learn, and potentially engage in a deep committed learning. Doing all of this with other people, kids or adults, provides three additional benefits: a) some research in learning argues that people learn better when working with others; b) it provides a social experience that may be increase motivation and desire to participate; and c) perhaps most importantly, I think that working with others help spark some who are not the “solo genius type” to be more creative and actually produce better quality work (not to mention other benefits of just learning how to work with others and experience a chance to understand diverse view points).

One of the my fondest memories of playing games as a kid has to do with having the chance to design for them. After battling through dozens of Lode Runner levels on an Apple IIe, a friend gave my dad a floppy disk that let us not just play the game, but let us design new levels (aside: if you haven’t had a chance to play Super Serif Brothers, I highly recommend it. The ability to design new levels for others to play is just nostalgia-inducingly great.)

“Modding” PC-based games–creating new levels, maps, characters, or even new games out of existing ones–has been around for quite a while. And, while I’m sure that there are people out there who have discovered all kinds of ways to hack into console games (anyone want to send me links?), creating games for consoles has generally been something that is not possible for amateur game developers.

Microsoft is trying to change all that. This past week, Gamasutra ran a story about XNA, Microsoft’s new platform for developing games for both the PC and the XBox 360. The software itself is free, and for a subscription fee of $99 a year, game designers will be able to join a community of designers and be able to produce and share games to other subscribers.

I think that this is a big deal.

I can think of lots of reasons why this is a great business idea for Microsoft and why people may see this as just another part of the company’s plot to take over home entertainment. But, I also see this as waking up people to the idea that game consoles, like PCs, can be platforms for an incredible amount of creativity.

I won’t claim that consoles are “ubiquitous,” but studies have shown that people of all socio-economic backgrounds in the U.S. have game consoles; in fact, a 2002 Markle Foundation report indicates that at that time low-income households were more likely than high-income ones to have came consoles. And, it’s not shocking to think that a couple-hundred dollar console would be more prevalent amongst lower-income families then PCs with the memory and graphics capable of running the latest and greatest games. So, the idea that people (still using PCs) can develop and share games for consoles is really appealing.

Hopefully Microsoft’s initiative is a step towards leveling the–er–”designing field” when it comes to practices like game modding (of course, “modding” games would require toolsets provided with games for the console, but I see this is a distinct possibility). In the current vision, the console will be a distribution platform for content made on a PC, but who knows what tools could eventually be developed for the console itself (or some hybrid platform?).

In the XNA FAQ, Microsoft pushes the utopian rhetoric:

“Eventually, you’ll be able to distribute that code to other Xbox 360s, opening up a unique publishing avenue which will democratize game development on consoles.”

One day we’ll stop talking about “democratizing” everything. As it stands now, this initiative will not “democratize game development on consoles.” It will allow people who know or are willing to use a Microsoft language (C#) to make games for Windows PCs and XBox’s. Of course, if this effort is what it takes for the other players to step up or, better yet, to pave the way for some kind of open-source game console to hit the market, than maybe Microsoft is, in its usual way (read: causing panic), helping the cause.

I hope that Sony and Nintendo follow suit. Fast. Because, in Microsoft’s initiative I have a vision of all sorts of possibilities for motivated people of all ages making games for each other to play. I like where this is heading, but I don’t want it to be controlled by Microsoft, and I hope that in the future, the technical and economic barriers to creating console games will be significantly lower.

Update:
There have been many interesting discussions about this on the web, and some updates from Microsoft. This post on the Wired blog talks about Microsoft’s upcoming camp for kids aged 10-16 to develop XBox games.

In the ensuing discussion, one person mentioned that he’d rather build for the PS3, because “the tools don’t cost money and are mainly based around open source libraries.” It also looks like I have some more reading to do.

Last summer, I had a chance to watch a group of teenagers use MySpace during their breaks while attending a summer program. I wondered what sorts of technical skills they were getting hooked into in the process of figuring out how to customize their pages using HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). I wanted to know how this process of profile creation and maintenance could be seen as some new form of literacy (if at all).

Over the past six months, I have pursued this while learning a lot about different perspectives of what “literacy” even means to different people. Surprising in some ways, not surprising in others, the whole notion of “literacy” is highly contested. To some, it’s about the technical skills you learn in the process of consuming or producing media (a broader way of looking at reading and writing text). To others, literacy is a social process that has more to do with how people come to learn the language, tools, and conventions of engaging with particular communities. “Literacy,” then is not singular. There are many different literacies to learn.

I have just finished a paper in which I explore the production of a MySpace profile by using a model of literacy that tries to reconcile the social perspectives and the technical ones (see Andrea diSessa’s Changing Minds: Computers, Learning, and Literacy).

In the paper, I argue that:

• The appearance of a MySpace profile can be attributed to both social and technical factors that are difficult to disentangle.
• It might be the case that learning to use HTML and CSS is an important technical skill to learn as part of participating in communities on the web. But, even though MySpace provides a hook into this world, the way in which they have implemented the site makes me believe that it’s not an environment where learning these languages can thrive.
• However, a more important technical skill required to participate in various communities is the ability to copy and paste links to media of all different forms. These media links have a critical role to play in how a profile looks visually, how people project themselves, and how people communicate with each other (including links in comments). Most importantly in terms of thinking about literacy, just because copying and pasting is a relatively “simpler” skill than coding, doesn’t mean it should be considered a less significant practice. Sometimes, its the simple, almost unnoticeable, actions that are the ones that spread quickly.
• A consequence of this perspective of the importance of copying and pasting of links, is that it throws up a theoretical challenge to notions of “reading” and “writing,” “consuming” and “producing.” I argue that we need some new terms to help us think about practices like copying and pasting which seem to be neither media consumption nor media production, neither reading nor writing.

Luckily for us, some pretty smart people like Mimi Ito, Henry Jenkins, their predecessors, and contemporaries have already been talking about this for quite a while. They have used terms like “participation” and “remix” that help us see the value of the production of MySpace profiles in a way that theories of literacy have not quite grasped yet.

I will be presenting the paper at a conference on informal learning and digital media in Denmark in September. In the meantime, here is a copy for your reading enjoyment. If you have any feedback, comment away. I’d love the input.