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.

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.

Rousing Round Table

I've just come from the working lunch round tables, and although I'm not sure the round table discussion wound up being about the true topic at hand, it was fun nonetheless. I sat down to a table centered on the topic of "Delivering Resources to Developing World Users." Naturally, I was curious what the library industry was doing to address this issue - I hoped to gain insight into some possibly non-electronically based delivery methods. The table facilitator was Jaron Porciello, a librarian from Cornell University working on a project called TEEAL: The essential electronic agricultural library. Sponsored by a long list of partners, this LanTEEAL 2.0, or the Agricultural Library in a Box, works to deliver hard drives jam-packed with full-text articles to agricultural scientists in four different languages.

Two of the women at the table sat down because they saw that we were relatively lonely, and Tim joined as well (obviously because I was already there). The last contributor to the discussion was a man from the Netherlands working with learners in developing countries. He said that at least one of the foreign libraries he was working with had only one computer with a .5kbps dial-up Internet connection to service the entire campus population. The librarian also knew little to no English, and therefore could only sort the books in his library by the LC classification, having no other idea of what each book actually contained. I mentioned to him that we were using cell phones as a way to reach populations with limited computer access through the UN project, and he received a few other helpful contacts from the women at the table before taking off for another.

As seems always to be the case, the conversation diverged because there was an interest in hearing more about the projects that we were working on. One of the women at the table has a 44-year-old brother with cystic fibrosis, so she and Tim fell into a rather natural conversation, while I continued talking to Jaron about the possible entry strategies to marketing and distributing the UN game in the long run. The conversation was wonderful, fruitful, and energizing. I look forward to continuing a correspondence with her in the months to come as the UN project really getes underway with its development.

All very exciting, and it all happened in such a short amount of time. Even if my ever more frequent contemplation of what life would be like as a librarian turns out to be nothing career-altering, I'll never stop loving what the world of academic libraries has to offer me.

Expansion Two: Thoughts from South Africa

Before I delve too deeply into the emotional hurricane that was the South Africa trip, I have new and exciting news (as ever). I will be going with Information Literacy Librarian Sarah Cohen to Seattle in March for the ACRL 14th National Conference, where we will be leading a speaker session based on our proposal, "Percolating the Power of Play." 230 applications were submitted this year, and only 19% were accepted. Admittedly, I have never been so thrilled to be involved in the library space. Now I only hope that the game(s) we have to show will help us prove our points!

I am still not sure I'll be able to put into words all the wonderful, beautiful, heartbreaking things I saw and experienced in Cape Town, but I will do my best to try.

Flying over and into the country, I definitely felt like I was on my first trip overseas. What I saw below me was something so different from everything I knew...I was so excited to see more. Very quickly, the economic diversity of the country began to show, as miles of townships were painted into the foreground of the picturesque Table Mountain.

Going into Langa on our first real day there, we were greeted by throngs of smiling children. They all clambered to have their pictures taken, posing for us and grabbing our hands as we walked down the streets. Some pleaded for small things that we carried, others simply wanted to say hi.

This behavior was almost scary to us - what parents would let their children run in the street with adults from another country? But we quickly found that it was due to a strong sense of community, that every pair of eyes looking out from the houses and shops might as well be the eyes of mothers and fathers, whether they actually were or not.

The feeling of communal love is something we don't often experience in our own culture. Maybe in my backwoods hometown in New Hampshire, and maybe a little bit within the community at Champlain, but in neither of those places is it so prevalent in the atmosphere as it was in the Cape Town townships.

Despite this overpowering presence, there was still sadness tearing them apart. Many things were hurting the people of these small communities: from the half-rennovated hostels that housed as many as three families in a single bedroom,

to the all-too-common poor driving that hurt this girl and kept her at home all day.

The thing that struck me most, though, was that talking about violence, abuse, and gender inequality was not necessarily casual, but it wasn't taboo as we might have expected. It was spoken of as if these things were just a part of life, to be accepted and to submit to. There was no sense of power in the bright young individuals, and even in some of the sharp-witted adults, that we met each day. There was no feeling of empowerment, independence, strength of voice, strength of choice. These young adults were intelligent, expressive, creative, complex, and completely helpless in their own minds to change anything about the world around them.

We found some points of inspiration, some nodes of empowerment in each community. But there is not enough support for them, and there are not enough of them to change every young man and woman's life, to keep the majority of kids off the street and out of crime. It is easy to see why they perceive change as something impossible, because their numbers are so small.

But change has to start with one person, always. Someone has to be willing to speak out, no matter the consequences. They are fortunate that they have such a powerful role model as Nelson Mandela in their recent history. They have fought so much already, and I can see in their faces that they have the strength to fight onward. The only question is if they have the time...

We met so many of what we would call "broken families," without parents and with young girls and boys taking charge of households before they were even out of school themselves. We saw classrooms without teachers, we heard stories of people calling desperately for the police and receiving help hours later, if at all. And we saw the other side of the coin: rich young children, unaware of the tragedy just outside their neighborhood, ignorant of the conditions, more interested in games than even the people sitting next to them. In a word, familiar: more like us, too much like us.

Going into this trip, I expected to find answers, but I didn't expect to fall in love. There was something so simple about the beauty of Cape Town. No matter what troubles littered the city streets, it was so easy to look up to Table Mountain, to see the beauty of the world and pull it closer to your heart. But there's only so much that a pretty reminder can do for you. It's nice, but it's not enough, nowhere near enough for those wonderful, fortunate but unfortunate people. They need more, and if it's something I can give them, I'd like to try. I don't think I'll forget what I saw there for the rest of my life, for even a day or a moment. If I do, I'll spend the rest of my life trying to remember it again.

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.