Growing Ripples

I don't have much to say, except that I'm absolutely thrilled to know that there are people out in the world that I went to high school with, some that I would have never considered close friends by any means, who have donated to the UN project. And others that have found connections to share the story of the project with. It's truly heartwarming to watch those ripples of awareness and support grow and spread. I can only hope that they continue to do so until we have reached our goal of $250,000.

Don't let the ripples die off before it happens!

Many Hands Make the Load Lighter

Just after the crisis in Haiti, I bought a t-shirt from Threadless to donate to the cause. The slogan of the shirt was "Men anpil chay pa lou," which translates to "Many hands make the load lighter." I didn't think much about the phrase at the time, aside from admiring the beauty of such an idea. That idea feels a wee bit more pertinent to me now.

Last week, I almost lost my job. Sort of. Without going into detail, I'll sum up by saying that the project I've given my heart to for almost two full years now may not see the light of day without some serious fundraising. We're talking about $250k of seriousness. That's a big number, but it could come down quickly.

If you're reading this, you probably know me at least a little. Maybe we're not friends that give gifts to each other, and maybe we haven't seen each other in years. But if I bumped into you on the street and asked if you could spare five bucks, would you give it to me? What about just one dollar? Well, I'm bumping into you on a metaphorical street right now. And if you have one, five, ten, whatever dollars to spare, I'd ask you to donate it to my project. Make my project into our project.

You may not have seen the same faces of young boys that I've seen, and you may never have wondered what those boys are being taught by their peers and elders about how to treat a girl and how to love someone. But I hope that you at least believe me when I tell you that they're out there, and that the project I'm working on could give them a chance to question the things they hear, see, adopt, and someday might practice.

If you can't spare that few dollars, or even if you can, perhaps you can instead spare a few minutes. Tell someone else about this project, forward my message, or just share the donation link. It would quite literally mean the world to me.

You can read about the project here, or jump straight to the donation page. Many thanks in advance for your small acts that can make this enormous but powerful load a little lighter.

Schoolwork, Internship, Apprenticeship, or Ownership

I've just been introduced to an interesting thought regarding my workplace that had never occurred to me before. For anyone reading that is not familiar with the Emergent Media Center's project structure, we hire students for pay to work on projects under the supervision of staff and faculty advisors.

I've always been aware of the fact that this is very different from a classroom experience. In a classroom, the teacher challenges the learner to exercise gains in knowledge through activities that mean little beyond the educational realm; your homework does not profit the teacher in any immediate sense.

This is also different than an internship; while an internship is provided to a learner by a teacher in order to acquire profits and sustain a pool of employees, interns are notoriously buried in menial tasks that are not worth the time and effort of a more skilled worker. This makes for a very long process of gaining knowledge and transforming learner to teacher. Someday, that intern may be the skilled worker laying tedious assignments out onto new interns, but that ladder may be a tall one to climb.

The closest comparison I could come up with is apprenticeships of old; someone would take in a successor to their profession and teach them the craft. This process also allows the teacher a degree of profit based on the learner's progress, and the knowledge gain is steeper. There are no intermediate positions, just a transition from learner to fellow teacher. Still potentially a long process, but more focused on the topic of knowledge gain from the start.

Even this does not suffice to explain the model here at the EMC. Here, teacher and learner both strive for the exact same goals, and may indeed be doing the exact same task. Given how much responsibility for the product is laid in the hands of the learners, one can even argue that the learner's progress, product, and profits become more important than the teacher's. This is not to say that the presence of the teacher is unnecessary or insignificant, but the fruits of the teacher's labor are minimal and sometimes nonexistent.

Having reflected upon this, it truly is fascinating how similar and yet different the dynamics are from classroom to EMC: similar in feeling, but different in realization. While we can only hope that there are never any tremendous failures on the part of our learners, the rewards or consequences of good or bad work have so much more impact than one letter of the alphabet stamped on a paper or inserted into an email. And I think perhaps the teacher's interpretation of the learner's progress is far different. In this space, a major failure can still be an "A moment" if the conclusions and resolutions that come out of that failure express true learning. Here, the process to reach the final product is just as important as what you "turn in" at the end of your time on a project.

The evaluation of a learner's growth is so interdisciplinary here too. Sure, maybe you're a writer, and if this were a classroom environment we would grade you on the script you turn in. But even though you're a writer, we still see and appreciate your communication style and behavior management. You may not be an artist, but we find value in those stick figure storyboards you used to get yourself to the end goal. You didn't have to talk to the programmers, but we admire your choice to learn how your script will be programmed into a game. Teachers don't have the time to observe every moment of work on an assignment in order to grade the process, but aside from it sounding a little creepy, I think our world would see better learners, and ultimately better teachers too, if the entire journey were under examination for praise or critique.

I've digressed a little, but my main point is that I like where I work for all the whos, hows, and whats involved. The process is just as awesomely emergent as all of the products it generates.

Pausing the Game

Yes, it's been a year since I last wrote on my blog. What's happened in my life since then? I'll allow those reading this to guess at what level of change in my life would leave me no time to write about it, though reflection time abounds on my walks to and from the bus stop on Cherry Street every weekday. Here are a few hints. Work. Apartment. Exercise. Sunshine. Friends. Family. Cooking. Cleaning. Spontaneity. Reading. Email. EMAIL.

I am yet again on my way to GDC in a week, but that is not my impetus to write. I feel compelled to write because of a little game that just came out on the Playstation 3 called Heavy Rain. There are a dozen fan-girlish things I could say about the game that thousands of other people would say too. I will take a moment to lay praise on the game for merging cinema with gameplay. From the moment one watches the opening credits, included the "Written and Directed by" line that everyone looks for in a movie and no one ever looks for in a game, the experience read "movie" without reading passive. There were passive elements to it, of course - the cinematic cuts and choices made by unplayable characters, but those elements were so cleverly paralleled with interactive content that I truly felt engaged throughout.

There, praise laid. The point that I want to get to is how this game made me think about the work that I am doing right now with games and attitudinal or behavior change. I am quite certain that Heavy Rain is the closest I've ever come to seeing games evoke an emotional response from the player that is strong enough to drive a change in attitude or behavior. I'm not saying that (SPOILERS!) I've decided I'll never kill a man to save my son or that I'm not going to trust private investigators without doing a thorough background check (END SPOILERS), because the content of the decisions I made are of no interest here. What really struck me was the process of decision making.

Keep in mind that this game took about 10 hours to play through, and there was no traditional game UI or mechanical systems such as scoring, time huds, health points, or levels (there were levels, but they felt much more like scenes in a movie). You step into the shoes of four different characters throughout the course of the game, and it's possible for any and all of those characters to die before you finish; these deaths do not end the game, presumably until the fourth character dies and you no longer have someone to control in the storyline.

Although all four characters are trying to accomplish the same thing - catching a killer and saving a little boy - each has a different "flavor" of conflict. The private investigator gets into "wrong place, wrong time" types of trouble that are loosely tied to his mission but entirely coincidental. The FBI guy stands as the voice of reason pitted against a partner in analysis willing to bend the law (though sometimes FBI guy can bend the law too). The reporter faces survival conflict; similar but different to the PI, her brand of struggle is entirely directed at her and serves as a result of her own actions. And last and most important of all, the father faces desperate moral conflict in which he must make choices that will ostensibly impact whether or not his son lives or dies - imagine Saw crossed with John Q.

Now to the meat of the matter: the transition made in my decision making process. When I played as these characters, I felt very strongly connected to their existence, and I knew that these characters could die. This was powerful knowledge. I also knew that time in the game progressed without me. Combine these two thoughts, and snap decisions become abundant. Add to that equation the fact that you may make choices that allow you to survive but also come with a heavy level of regret or remorse for other characters. Now we have one tough decision making process to master.

Most games are about the survival of your character, this is nothing new. But few point out that your survival can be at the cost of another's. Some make you feel regret that you must harm others to continue, but it doesn't usually stop you. Jason Rohrer's Idealism does this in a very abstract way, but it gives you no alternative: create hostility or fail. Heavy rain paved the road to regret by allowing you to fail at surviving, succeed at surviving at another's cost, or succeed at surviving without pushing others down to the ground. It's more compelling because it's more like real life; by making it more like real life, the game is more likely to also elicit real emotion.

At the start of the game, I found myself making a lot of bad decisions. I hurt someone that appeared to be a danger to my life yet turned out to be totally harmless. Why? Because I knew I had to make a decision, and that this person I was playing didn't have much time to do it. What surprises me, and what I can't truly explain, is that it never occurred to me to pause the game. I don't think I ever would have if a friend hadn't prompted me to when we were making an incredibly important decision. From that moment on, the game felt totally different to me. It also reminded me of something I'd discussed recently about the potential of games to create behavior change.

In a passive medium, the audience needs time to reflect on the decisions that the characters have made. This reflection time often takes place after the choice because you need to know what the character decided to do in order to analyze why they did it and why certain consequences fell into line. In a game, that reflection time takes place before the decision because you're the one making it. Heavy Rain made me feel so much like I was part of a movie that I forgot about some of my game player "super powers," like the option to pause time and consider my options. In some ways, it felt like a cheat. When the game wasn't paused, time passed, and that passage of time sometimes took control of the story away from me; choosing not to make a decision was a choice of its own. By pausing the game, I was eliminating that choice.

I think the game could have easily been done without an ability to pause; it would only be one step closer to real life, to have to make decisions with the situation staring you in the face, never looking away from the TV screen to confer with a friend while the menu hovered over the content, blurring out the details. But by adding that menu, I think this game (unintentionally or otherwise) made a statement that decisions you make from moment to moment are important, so you better think hard about what you do. If this game were meant to teach behavior change, it would provide for the player a unique balance between understanding the pressures you feel when making such behavioral decisions and the amount of thought that needs to go into those decisions. If it were a longer game, I'd bet it could even teach you to make the right moral decision without needing to pause.

One last observation and then I'm done. I love the treatment of morality, a subject that has been played with in games to date in such a light-hearted, explicit, game-y way. Here, you don't get good and evil points for what you did. Here, your character won't grow horns or halos. The closest you'll come to receiving quantitative feedback is through trophies, which you earn for making good or bad decisions alike. All that confronts the player is the situations and the story. But, I would also have to admit that beyond the content, I think it takes a very mature gamer to appreciate a game like that. I hope I'm wrong on that part, but I can't really prove or disprove myself unless I abduct one of my non-gaming friends and sit them down to my PS3 for an hour or ten.

Long story short: play Heavy Rain if you think games can't cause the player to question their behavior, their life values, and their decision-making processes.

A Living Cycle

I feel like I'm the only one who hasn't blogged about this yet, but whew, UN orientation...some definite highs and lows, scary and otherwise. I'm excited about the group as a whole, though sad to see that all the familiar faces I've worked with before were drawn away from me. It's not that I don't like new groups by any means. It's simply that every new group has so many quirks, goals, ambitions, motivators, outside influences on behavior, and so on. I often love learning these nuances of people, perhaps as part of the human frequencies I wrote about before, but it is admittedly draining. After having taken all summer to finally crack the last few members of my Info Lit team, it feels like it may take just as long to do the same with this new group, although there are only about half as many students. I think as far as managing other people and driving them towards both productivity and enjoyment of their work, this summer's project has been the most taxing by far. But I feel like it's something I should be comfortable doing, which I am. That said, the school year promises to be one of my most challenging yet, I think.

Now that I've accidentally written part of an assignment for the project, I'll move on to something else that I've been contemplating: the role of women in video games. It's easy to say that they're unrealistic, made to be either objects of male possession or quippy, foxy heroines. Much the same level of fantasy is achieved in most male roles in video games as well. But what about the women that have no names and well-defined parts in games? How often do they come up? How many shooting games have females thrown into the NPC (non-player character) population? Does it change the way you play if there are any?

Most instances of female filler characters I can think of are civilians: random women walking down the street in the Grand Theft Auto series, women carrying pots on their heads in Assassin's Creed. Sometimes there are entire throngs of women without any men, as in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's Gerudo Valley. But how often do we really see men and women stacked up against the hero of a game? Why is it that nothing springs to my mind?

There may be several reasons for this, one being that I do not play the plethora of games that other kids my age do. Another reason may be that if you're only going to make one model with slight variations to populate a game, males are to be expected and are also easier to model. That aside, I'm now quite curious to know whether or not making a more balanced population in games, let alone one that might accurately represent the 60-40 distribution of women vs. men on this planet, would have any impact on the players. Would the players even notice? Would they have the sense of something being different without being able to place their fingers on it? Would they pick up on it right away? Would they treat the women computer characters any differently than the male counterparts? Too many questions, no way to study them at this point in time.

This whole idea is just one that I'm not sure has been taken into consideration yet for this project. Yes, video games are popular among young men. But the role of women in these games is often one of low or disrespectful status. As in society, is that what the target demographic will expect in any video game? Is that going to be a difficult hurdle to overcome? My answer is yes, but I also see many ways in which it could be done. The most prevalent in my mind at the moment is only half baked, but I have this overwhelming feeling that if we want to convince these boys that things are not as nice the way they are as they might believe, we must first present them with what they expect to see in a game, and then turn it completely on its head, in steps that are gradual enough that they would not confuse the player or make them lose interest.

Just some things kicking around my head on this first weekend after our commencement of the project. Developing this strategy any further, or developing any strategy for design at all, is still far in the future. However, I cannot stop these thoughts from being a dominant part of my mindset when going into the research. Hopefully that will prove to be a good thing.

Thoughts on a Year

This is rather belated, but I can't help thinking about everything that's happened in this past year, emotionally and mentally. In some ways, it was a terrible year. I started getting scared of graduation. I questioned what I was going to do with my life. I was worked to my breaking point. I had my heart broken. Three times in a row. And my cat died. But looking at the other side of the coin...WOW!

I mean really, let's sum things up. Last summer, I first started working with Ann and the EMC as an RA for GIVIT. As the school year started, the promise of jobs with the EMC emerged. I applied and was told that I was desperately wanted for the Info Lit project (all because of my love for librarians over the previous two years), and I was offered the chance to go to Learning 2007 in Orlando. A week or so after getting back from Florida, I got to go to the CIMIT Innovation Congress in Boston. Just after that, I participated in a summit for the local aquarium, ECHO. I continued to work on the Info Lit project throughout, and also began work at the end of my fall semester on the Game Tomorrow project with IBM Fellow John Cohn. Somewhere in there, I also attended a dinner for BYOBiz kids to present their work to the college trustees.

Second semester shot off like a rocket, with the Info Lit project turning over completely (and my concept getting the thumbs up to move forward), work on the IBM project grinding along, and preparations for the trip to MPI's Meet Different conference in Houston. IBM concluded in the weeks following the Texas trip, and EMC work-study time started to feel like a vacation for a few months. I was interviewed twice, with accompanying photo-shoots, and participated in a mini-challenge with my peers to apply for a Team Excellence award given out by the college. We still haven't used our gift certificate for that!

I can't remember much of anything else happening in the month of March, but the school year definitely closed beautifully. I received three awards, including the Team Excellence Award, at the annual CCM Division Academic Excellence Dinner. The other two awards were an award in undergraduate Game Design and an EMC Interstellar Award, complete with photo album and laser-cut wooden plaque. If anything could have made me cry, that was it. And if anything could have made me squeal with delight, it was the trip that started the day finals ended. Wes and I went to another conference in Orlando, where we got to "relax" and simply take part in the discussions going on. We still made an impression, I think, as to what Champlain College students can do, and then we actually got to spend a day in Epcot. I restrained myself from completely raiding the Japan store, but we closed the night off with a dinner in the Japanese restaurant, watching musically synchronized fireworks over the water. Just perfect.

The year came full circle with another round of GIVIT this past June, during which I also gave my first speech! As part of the 50 years on the Hill celebration of Champlain, I attended a dinner with 150 trustees, honorary trustees, alumni from Champlain's first year on the hill, and other honored guests. I spoke about at least a few of the things I've done, and it felt great to sing Ann's praises for once to people who should really hear it. I also got to announce a few things to come. Learning 2008 is just around the corner, as is the next CIMIT Innovation Congress; but the best and brightest news for me is that I'll be lead designer on a team funded by the UN to create a game addressing violence against women in South Africa. Again...WOW.

My fingers are crossed to have a good team right now - I've never had my stomach do so many flips on account of someone else's uncertain position on a project. Once the teams are settled, I'm sure time will start to fly by again. We'll be coming back from South Africa just in time for the year to start. I'll be starting up other work as a peer advisor and a Japanese Writing Lab assistant, and I'm already bubbling with anticipation for my senior project with Wes. He's already got concept art in Maya that looks better than anything I would have hoped for...cuz he's that good. =)

I guess the thing that's been sitting in my mind a lot lately is the fact that my life is just getting started, and it rocks. I used to think about the distant future and hope it would rush towards me without hesitation. But lately, I want to slow time down as much as possible and enjoy every hectic, unexpected moment of my year, week, and day. Life after college is still pretty scary, but only because life in college is turning out to be so amazing.

Whew.

Tonight, I return to my poorly attended blog after many events and emotional shifts. I've just completed my stint as RA for GIVIT, which turned out to be quite different from the experience last year. This time around, the kids were much better behaved, and they all seemed more positive about being there as a whole. The projects were much more polished, and I am proud to say that the girls I supervised at the end of the week had the most concise presentation.

One thing that threw me for a loop though was having to shift out of that role mid-week. I had been asked by Hope Martin and Shelley Richardson from the Office of Development to give a speech at the 50 Years on the Hill dinner for trustees, honorary trustees, and other honored guests. Turns out the past two presidents of the college were there as well as alumni from the college and other contributors from the past. Being a student that hopes to graduate in 2009, it was really cool to sit next to a couple that graduated from Champlain in 1959 and talk about all the things that have changed and what it was like when they were here. It was significantly less cool to have people come up to me and listen to me talk about the EMC for a little while and then suddenly say, "Oh, I recognize you from the alumni magazine, I knew you looked familiar!"

But anyway, speeching. I was under the impression that there would be a series of mini-speeches given by various students doing different things for the college at present. Dave Finney came up to me during dinner and asked to clarify his intro tidbits about me, and I was all set to go up after Professor Gary Scudder. I'd been practicing my speech all afternoon, nearly to the point of running my voice hoarse, and I was quite nervous about the fact that I was going to be the first student speaking...and that my three- to five-minute speech was looking more like ten to fifteen. I became even more nervous when Ann called me and told me she was going to be stopping in on the dinner to hear me, but when it came down to it, I did my thing. Or as much of my thing as can be applied to a speech, which felt a heck of a lot different than any presentation or question and answer session I've participated in with a mic clasped in my hands.

All in all, nerves aside, it was a huge success. The provost of the college started a standing ovation for me as I scurried along the wall and gave Ann a big hug. And apparently there was no string of student speakers; it was just me. Ann says she wishes that she'd gotten it on tape and every other person on campus keeps telling me what a great job I did, but I'm glad to have it in the past, just another check on the list of things I never thought I'd be doing when I first got to college. Next is going to South Africa to do research for the UN!

To move on to other matters, I'm taking careful notice of the fact that summer is officially half over. I feel like I've done a great deal and yet very little at the same time. I'm certain that I've spent too much money, and well aware that I've made little to no progress on plans for the upcoming school year. I just finished watching a somewhat abstract and highly philosophical movie called The Fountain, and it's shot my mind even farther into the future, blurring my view of things that are immediately before me and heavily require my attention. The only positive aspect of this far-flung pondering is that I've come to a sure realization: I'm still acting like a kid in far more realms of my life than I should be, no matter how well certain areas are developing. I gotta get my motor going on the parts of real life that I have yet to acknowledge.

But it's a little late to start tonight. So, I'll probably fall asleep thinking about bank accounts, passports, and driver licenses while wondering what purpose they will serve me in my life to come, and who else may join me on the way. Life is amazing. I can't wait for it to gather speed and take flight. I'm gonna be scared to the core of my being, but the best parts of life are those that aren't a sure thing.

Enough philosophizing for me. And probably for anyone else reading this. Hopefully I'll change it up a little whenever I write again.

Ho Hum

Another work week off to a slow start, and it's already half over!

I feel like I accomplished quite a bit today. Read a 60 page design document, gave my Info Lit team members an assignment to complete by the end of the week, and started a massive art asset list. Unpacked 283 books, took pictures of 75 or so, and started processing around 50. Attempted to diffuse a concern one of my team members has about another team member. Still at work until 10 doing the processing bit. This is my break for the day; when I go home, I only plan on reading a little before I succumb to the blankets.

I haven't been feeling very philosophical lately, but one thing that has begun to stick with me is a strange sense of comfort when I'm around other people, with little matter who they are. I've always imagined the people I know as having rope twined into my heart; those that know me better have thick ropes that twist deep to hold tight, while some ropes have been chopped off completely, leaving behind only the stump of a past friendship. Lately, I feel as if so many forces are anchored to me that I've somehow begun to lie suspended between all of them in a happy social stasis.

On the opposite side, one thing that seems to bring my feet back to the ground is the idea of a meaningless moment. With so many parts of my life feeling right and purposeful, those that I spend doing something mindless are painful; worst of all are the moments when I can't muster the brainpower to think of something good to do. It feels something like clawing at the sides of a deep hole and making the hole even more difficult to get out of in the process. Fortunately, those moments don't strike too often.

And on a completely random note unrelated to any of this, I miss listening to music. I used to exercise my creativity by listening to my music collection on random and adding the songs to playlists that were named as imaginitively and elaborately as possible; things like "Looking Up at Skyscrapers with Neon Signs at Sunset" or "Rowing a Boat Past Grassy Hills on a Painfully Bright Day." I rarely got more than one song onto a playlist, but it was absolutely delightful to me to be able to look at one of those descriptions at a later time and feel that exact feeling again on cue. Memories tied to music are powerful in a way that I don't understand, but it never stops me from completely adoring it and allowing it to carry me away.

Keep Moving Forward

It's only Thursday, and I feel as if the week has already run itself dry. I missed a meeting about an event I'm not sure I have the time or sanity to attend anymore, and I have a huge team meeting tomorrow during which I've no idea what will happen. I didn't even get as much done at the library as I expected to, and I have to head downtown around 4 tomorrow to cash a check and take my boyfriend out to dinner. Sigh.

But I've just finished watching Meet the Robinsons, and I loved that a motto in the movie, "Keep Moving Forward," was taken from a longer quote by Walt Disney:

"Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. We're always exploring and experimenting."

I love this quote because it could apply to virtually any situation in life, at least in the sense that it is an ideal to strive for and a great philosophy to stand by. Oddly, I also have the song from the ending credits of Prince Caspian, a new Disney spin on an classic British novel, stuck in my head. I looked at some of the lyrics, and these are the ones that stood out to me the most:

"Just because everything's changing
doesn't mean it's never
been this way before.

All you can do is try to know
who your friends are
as you head off to the war."

It's strange that everything lately seems to come back to other people in my mind. Every once in a while, I get a great idea that excites me to the core of my existence. But that kind of feeling never lasts as long as the ones that are encouraged and cherished by others too. In light of this, I've just made my first addition to the photo album that Ann gave me with the EMC award.
I was opening my desk drawer and sorting through the knick-knacks to pick up my motivational monster when I noticed something else that didn't mean much at the time that I got it, but that nevertheless showed thought on someone's part. Just now, however, it sparked a greater feeling that someone out there believes in me. Whether this is true or not, it warmed me a little inside, and I immediately set about placing it in my book, next to the last picture and below the words "Follow Your Dream." Whatever my dream is, it is fueled by those around me. I hope that as time goes by, I will gather more mementos to fill that page.