Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

So I could wade through my criticisms of Slate’s recent article on news games, vocational training games, edutainment, and digital learning – first off, that the author conflates all of them, and second, that he spends most of the article on the downsides. But Justin Peters makes a great point – or at least, takes it from Raph Koster – that the key to a good educational game is to make it fun first, and use it to teach people second.

I was thinking about this last week while writing my next AV Club review, of the game PeaceMaker. A recent awardwinner, PeaceMaker has gotten a lot of warm, fuzzy feeling as a game that celebrates peace over war. It casts you as the leader of either Israel and Palestine, and takes you through a fairly detailed dramatization of the peace process: you have to get to a peaceful two-state solution while dealing with mililtants, bombings, and all kinds of other setbacks.

Last year, I reviewed another game about war and peace: DEFCON, a much simpler, less educational game about thermonuclear war. It’s not detailed or realistic – except in the sense that a thermonuclear war really would kill tens of millions of people – and it doesn’t teach you much about the world: the scenario is classic Cold War ’80s, and you can test out unrealistic scenarios like say, Europe fighting Latin America, or the entire continent of Africa united against – and evenly matched with – the United States and Canada. It’s not an educational game per se, so much as a kind of chilling party game with a message.

I gave DEFCON a higher grade. And while PeaceMaker is more explicitly an educational game, I think DEFCON ultimately takes a better approach to teaching through playing.

PeaceMaker reminds me of nothing so much as the first game I played at school, Lemonade Stand. If you’ve never played it, Lemonade Stand challenges you to run a lemonade stand, setting your prices and dealing with random problems (bad weather, price hikes for lemons). The idea is that through trial and error, you’ll find the sweet spot for prices and internalize the supply and demand curve that leads to success. Once you get the hang of it – once you learn the lesson the game is teaching – it’s fairly easy to beat.

And that’s not a bad way to teach something. PeaceMaker would be great for a couple class sessions, because to win, you have to figure out a sensible policy – and have the nerve to stick with it no matter what setbacks you encounter. There are a couple dozen options in any turn, but if you’re politically minded, you’ll figure out pretty quickly what works and what doesn’t. I played as both side, and each time, I screwed up my first game and then handily won the second.

(Interestingly, I’ve read other critics talk about how much trouble they had getting anywhere in the game. With so many options – diplomatic, business, construction, and of course, military – it can get confusing if you don’t have a feel for what might be a constructive policy, for example, that launching mutually beneficial economic policies and sticking with them come hell or high water is a good way to help the Palestinian state. That also means that maybe the game doesn’t do such a hot job of guiding you to the best policies.)

Okay. So I enjoyed it until I beat it, and then I found it hard to interest myself in playing it more. The game has pacing problems – once you get the first two out of four milestones, if you stick to your guns, it’s smooth sailing to the end. And sometimes it repeats content to keep you busy until you hit your marks. More fundamentally, it’s not a strategy game so much as a puzzle game – you have little control over the details, so you’re really just trying to find the right buttons and keep hitting them until you win. And I actually thought I’d become more acquainted with the geography than I am, since I’d be wrestling with a real map. But because it never gives you a choice between, say, putting more police in Jerusalem vs. Tel Aviv, or picking which settlements to shut down – I glazed over those details. Even though you have to figure it out, ultimately the game is telling you what to do than letting you teach yourself.

Compared to PeaceMaker, DEFCON is not realistic: it’s an abstraction of modern global warfare, with a handful of tools (half a dozen planes and boats, a couple installations, etc.), and a map that’s geographically realistic but politically makes no sense at all. (The whole world is broken kind of arbitrarily into six regions.) But with those simple tools, you can play through the scenario again and again. You can get caught by new tricks – like when one of my friends surfaced his subs right at the end of the game and took out my last silos, instantly reversing the game from a small win for me to a giant win for him. And of course, it’s multiplayer, so you get to fight – and learn from – live, unpredictable human beings.

So which game teaches more effectively? DEFCON makes more persuasive points. I can’t say the lessons from DEFCON – like the one about the submarines – are necessarily useful, but I learned a lot about moving quickly and planning ahead. I learned a really strong lesson about how quickly your fortunes can be reversed in giant war. And I also learned that I don’t want the world to blow up. I think that was a given, though.

But here we get to the real games vs. learning issue: all the lessons I just rattled off may sound like “skills,” but connecting them to educational standards would be a reach. Honestly, this was more like playground learning – the stuff you learn about other kids during recess will pay off throughout your adult, working life, but it still doesn’t count as “schoolwork.” By contrast, PeaceMaker makes a really good case about which policies are constructive in the Middle East, why a violent reaction to an enemy attack ultimately gets you nowhere, and why everyone who’s involved with the process is a nervous f’ing wreck. It’s contrained by its realism: to deliver content, it has to cut functionality – there’s no room for the kind of “what if I put by subs over here?” thinking that DEFCON encourages. The holy sites are where they are, and so are the walls, the settlements, and the Palestinians. So it’ll teach you a lot – until you’re done with it. With DEFCON, I wanted to keep playing.

UPDATE: My review is now up – B-.

When I was a kid and I faced a choice between the dull blue Hardy Boy mysteries and the endless, yellow-spined series of Nancy Drew, I gave them both a shot – but I ended up with Nancy. As far as I can recall, the Hardy Boys seemed dull – up-front, straight arrow lunkheads who were simple and predictable. They were boy role models, but not my role models. And while I didn’t emulate Nancy Drew, and I’ve never felt an urge to wear poodle skirts and fight crime in a vaguely sexist milieu, Nancy, at least, intrigued me.

That’s part of the reason I fell head over heels for Kelly Link’s dizzying, puzzling story “The Girl Detective,” first brought to me as a podcast read breathlessly by Alex Wilson. (Click here to get the full text.) It’s a great story, a list of questions you always wondered about Nancy mashed-up with a fable by the Brothers Grimm, and it’s told by a narrator who’s watching his own Girl Detective. We assume the narrator’s a man, and he is utterly fascinated with her. He may even be her. And through the course of the story, we understand better than anyone has explained it why someone would be so taken with the spunky, determined, but elusive Girl Detective.

“Spunky” is the key word. Since Nancy Drew, I find myself drawn to characters in this mold – persistent, deductive, inspired, and indominable, girls who inspire us but who don’t act as cheerleaders: they don’t believe that school spirit and positive thoughts can carry the day, rather, it seems like they know something. They’re onto some hunch or some secret – I’m not talking about “women’s intuition” – that will lead them, and us, to the truth. The Hardy Boys can rely on hard work and faith; we know it takes more than that.

This whole train of thought is guilty of taking on the “male gaze,” i.e., a male perspective on a female “other” that treats one woman, and by connection many women, as something different, exotic, and ultimately less than human – a puzzle instead of a person. Maybe that’s true. The spunky Girl Detective is just an arcehtype. Human beings are interesting because they rise to these qualities but, for many reasons, don’t quite meet them, and characters by their nature are incomplete, simplified, and often blank slates for our own desires.

But let’s set that aside, because the Girl Detective isn’t any less complicated than the Hardy Boys, Hollywood action heroes, or most of the people running for President. Everyone responds to character archetypes, and one of the interesting problems with the Girl Detective is that she’s so rare. For example, take any advertising campaign that features a handful of stereotypical teenage characters that look good on a bag from, say, Burger King. You’ve got the smiling leader (usually a guy), the smiling girl (usually a cheerleader), a geek, a skater/slacker, maybe a sulky goth type, and maybe a kid in a wheelchair. They’re usually optimistic – except for the goth – and multiethnic, but they usually don’t include a Girl Detective.

The character doesn’t fit on the side of a fast food bag. You need to give her a narrative or an adventure to chew on. I stumbled across an example in a kid’s book, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. It’s based on a campfire song, but it reads like a full-blown adventure. In the story, a dad, his four kids and a dog trek through the wilderness to find a bear. They go through mud, cross a river, and then stumble through a dark forest and a heavy snowstorm before finally finding the cave where the bear lurks – and once they find him, of course they freak and start running away, all the way back home.

The oldest sister of the family is a Girl Detective. Depending on the scene, it’s actually hard to tell whether she’s the oldest sister or some kind of a substitute mother. Because while the dad is the parent on the scene, the sister carries, prods or leads her siblings to their destination. She tells them she knows where she’s going.

In her story, Link nails the ambiguity of the Girl Detective’s role in our lives, specifically for male gazers. Consider the section, “Why We Love the Girl Detective”: we love her because “she reminds us of the children we wish we had”; “she reminds us of the girl we hope to marry one day”; and the kicker, “she reminds us of our mothers.” We expect her to find our car keys, go to a good school, “and occasionally meet us at the door when we come home from work, wearing nothing but a blue ribbon in her hair.” Except the trick isn’t what she does for us, but where she’s leading us.

She’s an ideal – yet at the same time, it’s hard for a character with this transformative role to maintain her spunkiness. Television shows like (obviously) Veronica Mars follow the archetype, yet on television, these characters become more believable and more three-dimensional, because they come back week after week. Buffy slayed more and more vampires, but she grew more and more dissatisfied. Reality sets in, and it’s hard to stay “spunky.”

But then you find another Girl Detective. In a media world that’s exploding and shattering, with so many new channels to cover and catch up with, it’s easy to think of our transmedia culture as dauntingly complex – too much for anyone to make sense of. Yet when you make your own way through pop culture, it’s surprising how easily one gravitates to a few simple, clear archetypes – to satisfy our fears, urges, desires, or something else that’s harder to put your finger on. Our media are full of characters with clear antecedents. We’ve got heroes and villains, wise men and tricksters, and we also – regardless of gender (hers or ours) – have Girl Detectives, the people who keep looking beyond, uncovering secrets, and leading us down a dark new path. In some ways, she’s the patron saint of transmedia storytelling. And no matter what form she takes – whether it’s in a video game or a podcast, or a MySpace profile or a hardcover book – the Girl Detective is still the Girl Detective. She’s still out there. And I still wish I knew what she knows.

Alice Taylor at Wonderland liveblogged an interview at the Hollywood & Games conference with Jesse Alexander, the Executive Producer of Alias, Lost and Heroes. Alexander talks at length about applying transmedia ideas to properties like Alias and Heroes, and especially in the case of Heroes, gives points on how to manage the team that coughs up all the content for all the extensions of the property – from the television show to the ARG to the online comics, all of them building on the story instead of feeding off it.

The net-net: “I believe television and videogames are a natural fit.”

Of course, he doesn’t talk about how deeply you can take participation. Sure, the audience gets way more Heroes content to chew through. But when does the audience get to become a (real) part of the story … ?

From my Google home page:

Half of World Population to Live
Wall Street Journal – all 117 related

I’ll bet they know which half.

15 years ago (according to IMDB) I watched a sitcom by David Lynch called On the Air. The first half was weird – real weird for a sitcom. I don’t remember anything about it except a lot of silences and strange behavior. During the ad break, the network actually told us that yeah, the first half was strange, but wait for the second – it was going to be hilarious. And sure enough, it was cataclysmically funny, just stupidly awesomely funny, enough to redeem the whole show. It was cancelled after two episodes – but you get the point.

David Lynch is a great director. The folks at John From Cincinnati are not, and that may be why the show is such a hard sell. No matter what Lynch does, no matter how strange it seems, you can’t look away from something he filmed. On the two episodes I’ve seen of John From Cincinnati, it’s not always clear what’s going on – and not always clear how strongly we should feel about it. Each episode had one great shock that kept me watching, and a lot of scenes of the goofy titular alien parroting other characters – the most annoying kind of conversation in the world, if you’ve ever hung out with a two-year-old. (And why does he look exactly like The Beyonder from Secret Wars II?)

At least one critic admitted he was panning the show after only seeing three episodes. I don’t know if Nancy Franklin’s unenlightening pan in The New Yorker was informed by any more of the show than that. I get that people don’t like it. I don’t know if I like it yet either. But I’ll cut David Milch some slack, ’cause he’s a bright dude, and hey, Deadwood was hard to take at first.

Meanwhile, if you’re willing to work with the show, check out the Inside the Episode commentary for one, two and three. They don’t contain spoilers, and they convey the idea that someone over there actually knows where the hell this is going – which can make a difference.

I was in Harrisburg, PA this weekend visiting with family, and I got some writing advice from my grandmother. 96 years old, unsteady on her feet and still sharp, funny and fascinating to talk with, my grandmother reads a lot of my articles – even though most of them have no meaning to her at all. She looked at a recent Paste column and said, “You seem hesitant. You don’t have too much ego.”

It’s a good point. I’m not an egomaniac. I veer away from being a self-important know-it-all, the kind who would ramble over everybody at a dinner party. But on the other hand, those people get published a lot, don’t they?

So a new column ran this past Friday, and it’s not bad. I wanted to comment, maybe a week or two late, about this new deal where Wilco has licensed half of their new album to Volkswagen to air over car ads. They’re hoping to get promotion off of it, and it struck me that it was bizarre to see a band on a credible label depending so much on a car company to get the word out for them. I went through several drafts of this thing – and actually, the column started even before the Wilco angle played into it – and I had mixed feelings: was Wilco making the right call? The wrong one? I honestly don’t know. The whole column basically explores the decision in hypotheticals, some more clever than others, and ends on a line that the reader is supposed to make of as they will:

“Working for the man is good enough for the rest of us. Shouldn’t it be good enough for rock stars?”

See? You’re supposed to be caught on that one, and think about it. Not bad. But you know, I’m not grabbing you by the ears and screaming in your face. (And btw, don’t think I’m throwing a pity party – I just talk more about what I do wrong than what I do right.)

Again, to focus on what’s wrong rather than what’s right (though the Glenn Kotche at Bell Labs thing is definitely “right”): this is my second column in a row that goes back to music/business/tech issues – definitely my comfort zone, but it means I’m shirking on the transmedia storytelling topics that I wanted to cover this year. It makes a good argument, but it’s a week or two past the peak of this news item, and checking over at the Wilco forums at Via Chicago, it seems everyone’s already sick of talking about this. Fair enough. It’s a decent little column that makes a decent point. I think the next two will be a lot bigger.

But here’s what I think every time I run a fine but not amazing column, and the reason I’m always bitching about myself here: this Pitchfork column is my main venue – my free-for-all work that can do rather well if I hit the mark. (A couple columns last year were huge hits, tons of links, tons of e-mail. The audience is there.) It’s a fantastic vehicle. But it’s also a constant frustration. What do I want to write about? How can I make it better?

I was listening to a Neil Gaiman story this morning, “How To Talk To Girls at Parties.” It starts well and quickly becomes excellent, and what really strikes me is that it has moments that rivet you – where he grabs you with something sublime. They’re brief and small in this case, but they catch you. (I’m talking about near the end, where he’s listening to the girl in the kitchen.) You’re suddenly half your age again and your head’s spinning.

And while a solid, well-argued opinion piece has whatever appeal, and tech is usually in the realm of the mind more than the heart, I wonder if every single piece shouldn’t reach for that – for something that informs the reader but something else that just grabs them in the gut and think about something they love or they ache for. And why would you stop until you’re doing that? Or hell, at least two or three a year right?

Was listening to the Alternative Reality Gaming Network’s podcast last week (shout-out to the amazing Jessica Price aka Phaedra), and it led me to Christy Dena, an Australian researcher who’s working in cross-media, and whose blog is a treasure-trove of case studies, ideas and great links. Since she’s crossmedia, she covers a broad spectrum, but I’ll highlight a couple recent ARG write-ups that really caught my attention:

- Novelists promote their books by blogging and even entering Second Life as their characters – a great example of how a good character can be the prime mover of a strong transmedia experiment

- Fascinating write-up of literary ARG work The Raw Shark Texts

I’m riveted by ARGs – I mean, that’s kind of the nut of the whole thing, right, to bring fiction into the real world and web 2.0 onto your doorstep and use GPS’s and Google Earth to turn the entire frickin’ world into a collective intelligence that can solve any problem, so that … um, we’ll be ready if the aliens show up? My imagination falters there, but write-ups like this thoroughly explain what’s possible. And just as key is Dena’s emphasis on the evolution of this kind of work from marketing to art.

Dena was also kind enough to link to me after I added her to my blogroll over there to the right … which is half the reason to blog in the first place. Check her out.

Sample Barack Obama’s new ringtones. Each one is humiliating in a different way. I loved the ‘04 DNC speech too, but does it need a backbeat? Who wrote this music? Who’s gonna get fired?

And you know the whole Obama staff has to use them …

Thanks to Matt for the heads up.

I could write at length about my admiration for David Sylvian and passion for his music, which I fell for when I was preparing to interview him a couple years ago and which I still find haunting, emotionally resonant, and catchy. He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever spoken with, the kind of guy you interview because you’re going to come away enriched. And sorry to use this kind of “visiting the wiseman” language about him, but hey, if you’ve heard him sing, you might get what I mean.

I could go on and on, but here’s something better: clips from his ‘93 (or thereabouts) tour with Robert Fripp.

“Riverman”

“Wave”

And this is fantastic too:

Japan, “Life in Tokyo”

The launch of a game for HBO’s Big Love caught my attention the other day, because if there’s any TV show that could use a game, it’s this one. After getting sucked in by the first season, I found myself starting cold again when year two started: I have no way to connect to these characters. They couldn’t be more alien to me if they lived on Saturn. I don’t get why we have to keep going back to the compound, why the three wives put up with each other, why the first wife got involved in a plural marriage in the first place – I just don’t understand why every character on the show doesn’t run screaming from each other. It’s a show not so much about the healthy strength of family bonds but about the ways that “family” keeps you chained to people you wish you’d never met.

So why would I want to play a game about it? Well, for the chance that a game – however briefly or trivially – would put me in the shoes of these characters. That I could take more time to live their lives, see what they see, and understand how they relate to each other. One of the great things about a game (especially in education) is that it will spend as much time with you as you need until you get the concept. A game about going grocery shopping with my sister wives would probably teach me a lot about the challenges they face, and the rewards of working together.

The actual game, however, is a dud – a Flash version of a “roll the die, move five spaces” board game, but with only one player, and all the challenges relate to trivia questions or scenarios from the television show. It ain’t a good example of “additive comprehension” – it’s just a game with stuff from the show tacked onto it. But I guess a full-blown polygamist RPG was too much to ask …