Untitled and Undecided

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.

This past week at GroupTalk, an “informal, student-run, participatory forum for addressing challenges in Berkeley research projects at the intersection of people and technology” I raised the questions:

Is it possible to design for appropriation and unintended uses? If so, how? If not, why not?

In this post, my primary goal is to present the notes from that discussion. At the same time, my notes are incomplete. It was hard to capture everything and I found myself mixing up my own interpretations of what was said and what the person saying might have said. Therefore, I have decided to also go ahead an add some additional commentary. If you participated in that conversation and think that: a) I have missed something completely, b) misunderstood a point that you or someone else made, or c) have any reactions or thoughts since then, please comment below! (And, of course, to everyone who didn’t participate, feel free to weigh in however you see fit).

My motivation for raising these questions is based on my interest in investigating the design of socio-technical systems while somehow coming to an understanding of groups’ everyday practice in relation to media production.

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently there has been a lot of press about MySpace. While some of it has been about its founders or about Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp’s purchase of the site last year for over half a billion dollars, or about its rapid rise to the near the top of Internet’s page view rankings, a more recent category of articles are those that look at the darker side of the site. A San Antonio radio station’s news article reported on terror threats broadcast over the site that led to a kids skipping school en masse. The Wall Street Journal described the tension between kids and their parents with respect to privacy and spying on kids’ online activities (subscription required). The LA Times’ Calendar Live talked about kids’ “addiction” to MySpace, their use of online anonymity to experiment with questions of identity, and their supposed naivete with respect to “predators” and making information public. A colleague of mine here at SIMS, danah boyd, responds to this type of press (not necessarily these particular articles), and I’ll let her words speak for themselves. danah knows way more about MySpace than I do.

I don’t bring up this recent MySpace controversy to comment on this particular debate. What interests me is that almost lost in this discussion is MySpace’s potential value as a learning environment, and not just as a learning environment that may help with identity formation and social “development,” but learning in the sense of skills and learning how to learn.

What skills am I talking about? Technical skills. In an earlier entry, I commented on a recent article in BusinessWeek Online about kids ability to customize their MySpace environments. I am not any closer to a good understanding of what the tools are that MySpace provides to enable these kid designers, but I do know that a lot of the work involves the writing, cutting, pasting, and modifying of HTML code.

Quick, what’s the most popular search on MySpace? As of this writing, “HTML.” The same goes for a random day that I checked last month. HTML? Wow. To me this is a big deal. Of course, I don’t know if this is teenagers’ top search as there are plenty of twenty somethings on the site, but I would guess that it it’s up there. A cursory glance at the search results for “HTML” reveal tutorials created by MySpace, tutorials created by MySpace members for other MySpace users, and discussion in the various comments of tricks and techniques for getting someone’s space to truly be HisSpace or HerSpace.

This sounds like a learning environment to me! Furthermore, it sounds like something in the vein of “social constructivism,” “situated learning,” and “constructionism” to name a few of the learning theories which may be applicable to the study and analysis of this behavior. And to get away from theory, it sounds a lot like what programmers do when they need help solving a problem: consult their social networks, friends and colleagues, and look online or in a book for someone else’s solution.

Skeptics may wonder if a majority of people’s use of HTML is copying and pasting and therefore the equivalent of looking over someone’s shoulder in order to solve a math problem. I see it differently. In this case, “merely” copying and pasting code has a tangible effect (the instantaneous change of a visual or aural aspect of the page), and I would guess could lead to more in depth learning. The point here is not that learning occurs every time, but it opens the door towards potential learning,in a nice scaffolded way: the first time a teenager copies and pastes code, he or she may not learn anything, but I suspect that over time, he or she begins to understand more or more. Online tutorials for programming languages frequently instruct people to copy and paste, see what happens, and then take them through the code in depth. I know that I often learn a while creating programs this way, even if I don’t fully understand all of the code the first time through.

Of course, my description here barely scratches the surface of what is going on. But, I get excited by the prospects of millions of kids learning HTML and other design skills by a site that has recently been vilified in the media. In the case of MySpace users, I really don’t know what kind of learning happens, what the processes of learning are, or how many kids go from HTML to more complicated scripting languages, and this sounds like another area ripe for research on kids as designers of media.

A friend of mine was doing research on people and their web-cam portals and commented “I bet the best CSS developers in this country are middle school girls from Kansas.” He mentioned that many sites had quite sophisticated code (including JavaScript) that not only led to the creation of technologically complex sites, but also code that was used to hide their code from other people who may be compelled to “steal” code. I asked him if he remembered which sites in particular he was referring to and said that many don’t exist anymore. His theory? Many of those people now exclusively use MySpace.

(Incidentally, the top ten searches on MySpace, as of this writing, are: 1. HTML 2. Videos 3. My Chemical Romance 4. Downloads 5. Coldplay 6. Ringtones 7. Dates 8. Music 9. Photos 10. Friends).

Two years ago, a friend of mine told me that I’d be blown away by what his sister did to customize the desktop of her PC. He knew that I was interested in topics of kids’ design practices in their everyday lives and in issues of usability. I don’t remember the specifics, but what he described involved an onslaught of bright colors, unreadable text on contrasting backgrounds, and pictures and file icons scattered about chaotically. In short, her desktop probably violated just about every principle of visual design and was probably unusable to anyone but her. His point, though: kids’ desire to appropriate a space, to make it their own, was a key factor to consider in the design of systems intended for this audience.

To anyone who has seen a teenager’s home page on MySpace, neither the above anecdote or the insights drawn from it may be all that surprising. I recently read an article in BusinessWeek Online entitled MySpace: Design Anarchy that Works that makes the following argument: MySpace’s success can be attributed partially, if not totally, to the founder’s choice to provide people nearly unlimited customizability in the look and feel of their pages:

Regardless of its aesthetic consequences, this customizability is one of the site’s most attractive features, and the do-it-yourself sensibility of the site resonates with the audience’s desire for self-expression.

I had a chance to see this upclose while doing participant observation at a local youth program. During their free time, kids frequently logged in to MySpace and showed us their pages and some of their friends’ pages. The pages were cluttered with pictures. Embedded audio and video clips pounded my senses. And pages that required lots of horizontal scrolling were common.

One of the most interesting points that Jesse James Garrett makes in the BusinessWeek article is that the rather poor design of the default pages on MySpace encourages this practice:

If the default presentation and the common areas of MySpace had cleaner, more professional designs, users might hesitate to customize their spaces, feeling intimidated by having their amateur design work side-by-side with the professional-looking defaults. Instead, the unpolished style invites users to try things out, telling them they don’t have to be professional designers to participate.

Garrett admits that it’s a “mystery” if these decisions were intentional. But regardless, he’s on the verge of claiming that the breakdown of one part of what is thought of as a component of good interaction design, specifically the visual design aspects, is what leads to people’s enjoyable experience with the site. Of course, good visual design is only one aspect of good interaction design, so I am curious to understand how well designed the tools that enable this “design anarchy” are.

Furthermore, I am still not sure how much it matters. Academic researchers who have explored the importance of good usability for children and kids have argued that it does matter. But, I have to think that very few kids and teenagers care very much that their friends’ MySpace sites are designed poorly according to current standards of HCI. There are a lot of nice research questions to investigate here. From the perspective of kids and teenagers using MySpace, how much does usability matter? Despite the wide adoption of MySpace, what, if anything, don’t they like about the site? What, if anything, do they find frustrating in the process of design?

(thanks to Ypulse for the pointer to the BusinesWeek article).