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Peak oil game designer: “Make people happier”
Kit Eaton, Fast Company
Gaming Great Jane McGonigal Challenges the Industry: Make People Happier
Along with the usual news and excitement of the Game Developers Conference, going on this week in San Francisco, a speech by gaming guru Jane McGonigal stands out for one reason: She challenged game designers to actually make gamers happier.
McGonigal, the self-described “game designer, a games researcher, a future forecaster, and a very playful human being” and one of the 20 Most Important Women in Gaming, planted the seeds for GDC speech on her blog Avant Game. “Reality is broken. Why aren’t game designers trying to fix it?” But if you think the argument is just another run-of-the-mill criticism of the violence, tension and attendant gore that pervades most videogames, then you’re going to be sadly disappointed.
Instead, McGonigal has a set out a sequence of design challenges to future gamemakers run to the heart of what a game could be about: entertainment, boosting human happiness, and having real-world impact.
She explains that games can “fix” broken reality by making artificial reality “happier, smarter, more engaging, and more resilient.” Given that some of McGonigal’s previous projects have involved “World Without Oil”–a simulation intended to brainstorm and thus potentially avert a future post-peak oil crisis–McGonigal also foresees that over the next decade, game designers will become the “architects of extreme-scale collaboration” In particular, it’s an important part of future games design to create “diverse massively-multiplayer communities [that] tackle real-world, open-ended problems.” It’d be nice to think we could game our way to a solution to the world’s issues, wouldn’t it?
(25 March 2009)
Leaders and Champions of Alternative Media
Ed Griffin-Nolan, Syracuse New Times (N.Y.)
With the rash of newspaper closings and the gobbling up of news outlets by corporate interests, it might appear to be a good time for graduating college students to select “corrupt politician” as their career choice.
It’s enough to make one wonder who will be minding the store if the papers that make it their business to poke into the dark corners of government and commerce find themselves turning out the lights.
But according to an Ithaca-based expert on alternative media, the much advertised decline in print publications is being offset by the rise of a robust muckraking alternative. Jeff Cohen, a longtime media watchdog and director of Ithaca College’s Park Center for Independent Media, believes that the alternative media has grown up to the point when it needs to officially recognize its leaders and champions.
The newly founded Park Center has announced the winners of its first annual Izzy Award, named for the iconoclastic muckraking journalist I.F. Stone, who died in 1989 after six decades of afflicting the comfortable with his prescient questioning and vivid prose. This year’s winners are Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, and Glenn Greenwald, an independent blogger whose work appears at Salon.com.
The Park Center studies media outlets “that create and distribute content outside traditional corporate systems and news organizations.” According to Cohen, the center’s founding director, “Our purpose is to bring attention to the growing sector of independent media. Independent media is breaking stories, and bringing down corrupt officials around the country. We needed an award and we couldn’t think of anyone better to name it after than a guy who, in the depth of the anti-communist frenzy of the 1950s, started his own weekly newsletter.”
The award is named for Isidor Feinstein “Izzy” Stone, who belonged to the era before the term “media” was canned and learned the craft without the benefit of journalism school. He called himself a newspaperman and relished the role of outside critic of the powers that be. His credo was simple: “All governments are run by liars” and his list of subscribers (the weekly accepted no ads) grew to 22,000, including the likes of Albert Einstein. …
(26 March 2009)
Also posted at Common Dreams.
The Sphere of Deviance
Christopher Smith, Buffalo Geek
The row that developed around the Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer tête-à-tête was sadly misguided. Mainly pushed by media outlets who don’t understand the whole point of The Daily Show and the subversive reality of the show’s irony. The Daily Show succeeds because it is the only show on which views from outside the sphere of legitimate debate can be aired and find an audience. It’s comedic basis disarms the critics.
The people who regularly watch The Daily Show treat it as an end of the day metafilter for the news coverage they just consumed. Whether the views aired on The Daily Show are about shoddy financial reporting, corporate media complicity in governmental shenanigans or lazy journalism; the show serves as a cultural touchstone for people who know the whole media spectacle is a sham. Stewart has the only show on which there is even a mild analysis of those who deign to keep the “news” centrally controlled. The fact that he does it in an entertaining manner and that it airs after repeats of Crank Yankers are beside the point.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I refer to the “sphere of legitimate debate”, I point you to Daniel C. Hallin’s book ‘The Uncensored War’, in which he defined the range and biases of journalism in the American media establishment. This is a topic that is central to several intelligent criticisms of the media establishment, most recently put forward by Jay Rosen of NYU’s Pressthink.org.
1.) The sphere of legitimate debate is the one journalists recognize as real, normal, everyday terrain. They think of their work as taking place almost exclusively within this space. (It doesn’t, but they think so.) Hallin: “This is the region of electoral contests and legislative debates, of issues recognized as such by the major established actors of the American political process.”
Here the two-party system reigns, and the news agenda is what the people in power are likely to have on their agenda. Perhaps the purest expression of this sphere is Washington Week on PBS, where journalists discuss what the two-party system defines as “the issues.” Objectivity and balance are “the supreme journalistic virtues” for the panelists on Washington Week because when there is legitimate debate it’s hard to know where the truth lies. There are risks in saying that truth lies with one faction in the debate, as against another— even when it does. He said, she said journalism is like the bad seed of this sphere, but also a logical outcome of it.
3.) In the sphere of deviance we find “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.” As in the sphere of consensus, neutrality isn’t the watchword here; journalists maintain order by either keeping the deviant out of the news entirely or identifying it within the news frame as unacceptable, radical, or just plain impossible. The press “plays the role of exposing, condemning, or excluding from the public agenda” the deviant view, says Hallin. It “marks out and defends the limits of acceptable political conduct.”
Anyone whose views lie within the sphere of deviance—as defined by journalists—will experience the press as an opponent in the struggle for recognition. If you don’t think separation of church and state is such a good idea; if you do think a single payer system is the way to go; if you dissent from the “lockstep behavior of both major American political parties when it comes to Israel” (Glenn Greenwald) chances are you will never find your views reflected in the news. It’s not that there’s a one-sided debate; there’s no debate.
The Sphere of Legitimate Debate is where reporters like John King, David Gregory, and Carl Cameron operate. They have also allowed entrance to new media reporters who serve as court jesters like Ana Marie Cox.
The Sphere of Deviance is where Amy Goodman of Democracy Now operates. Jay Rosen, Bill Moyers and Glenn Greenwald discuss why an Amy Goodman and those like her are not taken seriously.
(18 March 2009)
Suggested by Big Gav at Peak Energy.
