engineering play

ENGINEERING PLAY:
CHILDREN’S SOFTWARE AND
THE PRODUCTIONS OF EVERYDAY LIFE
A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY
AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES
OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Mizuko Ito
December 2002
© Copyright by Mizuko Ito 2003
All Rights Reserved
ii
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it is fully
adequate, in scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy.
Carol Delaney (Principal Adviser)
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it is fully
adequate, in scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy.
Joan Fujimura
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it is fully
adequate, in scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy.
Ray McDermott
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it is fully
adequate, in scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy.
Purnima Mankekar
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it is fully
adequate, in scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy.
Sylvia Yanagisako
Approved for the University Committee on Graduate Studies:
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Abstract
This dissertation examines the production, distribution, and consumption of children’s
software as socially distributed and culturally heterogeneous processes. A diverse
and multi-sited ethnographic corpus of data is foundational to this work: fieldnotes and
videotapes of children’s play in a network of after school computer clubs, interviews
with game developers, and literature and advertising from the children’s software
industry. Drawing from this material, this study describes “learning through play” with
interactive media. What is the nature of the highly mediated communication and
interaction between software designer and child-player? What are the historical,
economic, social, and cultural conditions that created children’s software, and
conversely, how has children’s software altered the American social, cultural, and
economic landscape? What are the social distinctions and cultural categories that are
materialized in children’s software, and how do they play out in the activity of children
and adults?
Between the early eighties to the beginning of the 2000s, a new children’s
software industry was established through distributed interactions between children,
technology, designers, programmers, marketers, parents, entertainers, and
educators. These actors are all active agents within a shifting network of relationships,
analyzed as “multimedia genres,” materializations of technology, aesthetic quality,
and institutionalized relations. The genre of “edutainment” was founded by
progressive educational reformers pursuing equity in learning, but has gradually
been overtaken by more competitive and achievement idioms in its
commercialization. The genre of “entertainment” is dominated by visual culture,
produced by entertainment industries in alliance with children’s peer culture. The
genre of “authoring” grows out of a constructivist approach to learning and hacker
subcultures, and becomes a tool for children to create their own virtual worlds and
challenge the authority of adults. This dissertation describes the “micropolitics of
representation” as children mobilize technologies in relation to adults at moments of
play. In addition, these genres are related to a “cyborg habitus” of technology use,
and categories of age, class, and gender. Together the three genres define a
dynamic field of negotiation and cultural conflict that characterizes contemporary
contestations in the US over children’s culture, education, and technology.
iv
To Momoko Ito
(1939-1995)
v
Acknowledgments
The social debts behind this dissertation are immense, spanning nine years and two
doctoral degree programs. Here I seek to note the people and institutions that
were key to the work behind this dissertation, as well as my dissertation at the
Stanford School of Education that was a precursor to this document. Much of this
work grew out of the large collaborative research effort of the Fifth Dimension After
School Club program, and I must first acknowledge that this work is part of a much
broader effort in educational research and reform. Portions of chapters 2, 3, and the
Appendices appeared in my dissertation in Education.
I would like to thank the members of my dissertation and exam committee for
my degrees in both cultural and social anthropology and education: Carol Delaney,
for my first introduction into cultural study and for ongoing inspiration on how meaning
works; Ray McDermott, for teaching me about what matters in educational research;
Joan Fujimura, who introduced me to the world of science and technology studies;
Purnima Mankekar, who taught me about the social and cultural life of mass media;
Sylvia Yanagisako, for steering me through the theoretical webs of power,
capitalism, and culture; Shelley Goldman, for showing me how to make academic
work relevant; Jim Greeno, for ongoing reminders of why science is important; and
Terry Winograd, for helping interrogate the zone between the social and
computational.
My project team and colleagues in the Fifth Dimension have been an
indispensable source of intellectual, emotional, and material support throughout this
project. I would like to mention those in my immediate research team: Michael Cole,
who has not only led and sustained the project, but has also made it a treasure trove
of research opportunities for graduate students like myself; again, Ray McDermott,
Jim Greeno, and Shelley Goldman, for guiding me to this project, and giving me the
space to find my own place and voice through it; Charla Baugh, for being the heart
and soul of our local club; Don Bremme, for being the best kind of activist; Katherine
Brown, for wit, energy, and moral support; Karen Fiegener, for keeping us on track;
Gary Geating, for enthusiasm and for keeping us up to date on the latest and
greatest games; Dena Hysell, for being the reliable backbone to an often crazy
project; Ann Mathison, for her talent for disciplining unruly machines; the kids in the
Saturday Club, for just being themselves and letting me hang out with them; the
East Palo Alto Stanford Summer Academy, for their support of our local club; and all
the kids, undergraduates and staff involved in the Fifth Dimension project who have
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tolerated endless ethnographic scrutiny. The Institute for Research on Learning also
deserves special mention as the institutional home of much of this project, providing
the intellectual, administrative, and infrastructural support vital to this effort, and to my
own intellectual and professional growth. I would like to make special mention of
Vanessa Gack, my closest collaborator in the day-today fieldwork for this project.
Vanessa was central in making this all happen, a dedicated fieldworker, committed
intellectual, and most valued colleague. Due to a fatal accident, Vanessa is not with us
now and was not able to realize the fruits of many of her labors.
I am deeply appreciative of those in the technology design and children’s
software community who took time out of their busy schedules and to speak with an
interested outsider: Chris Blackwell, for a meta view of software development;
Jonathan Blossom, for an insightful view on the software industry; Donald Brenner,
for showing me how to make technology work for you; Gary Carlston, for being a
humanizing force in software development; Claire Curtin, for sharing her experience
across many years in the industry; Mike Dixon and Pavel Curtis, for welcoming me
into the halls of technology development; Larry Doyle, for revealing the intellectual
life of game programming; Marabeth Grahame, for helping me to understand the real
life of computer programming; Amy Jo Kim, for her shared interest in computer
games and community; Scott Kim, for showing me creativity embedded in simple
and elegant form; Rita Levinson, for showing me how users can inform software
design; Ann McCormick for really caring and reminding me about what matters in all
of this; Collette Michaud, for insight into the visual culture of children’s software; Bob
Mohl, for humor and wonderful kid games; Margo Nanny, for being such an active
and responsible voice in the computer game industry; Robin Raskin, for knowing the
industry so well and sharing that knowledge; Elizabeth Russell, for uncompromising
standards in the best sense; Shannon Tobin, for sharing her networks as well as key
understanding about software distribution; Will Wright, for being the best kind of
game design superstar; and Michael Wyman, for describing the inspiration of
design. I would also like to thank the parents that spoke to me to offer a different
perspective on this work: Rich Gold, Marina la Palma, Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart,
Elizabeth Slada, and Karen Van De Vanter.
Various portions of this dissertation have benefited from readings by and
conversations with many thoughtful colleagues, in addition to my official readers and
project team: Susan Newman, who deserves special mention for her close readings
and lively conversations that have sharpened and animated this document; Annette
Adler, for perspectives on the social nature of technical objects; Julian Bleecker, for
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insights on simulations, games, and technosemiotic workstations; Seth Chaiklin, for
incisive comments on what I was really trying to do with this dissertation; Lynn
Cherny, for many conversations about online environments; Marjorie Goodwin, for
showing me what an interaction analysis of game play might look like; Donna
Haraway, for my first awakenings into cyborg consciousness; Marianne Hedegaard,
for provoking thought on the nature of kids, institutions, and learning; Stefan
Helmreich, for providing a model for cultural analyses of technology; Natalie
Jeremijenko, for caring about technology, art, and culture; Jean Lave, for interrogating
the nexus of learning theory and political economy; Timothy Leary, for turning me on
to the allures of virtuality; Elizabeth Mynatt, for sharing reflections, virtual and real;
Vicki O'Day, for reminding me how people matter in the land of technology; Brian
Cantwell Smith, who helped demystify computers for me; Reed Stevens, for talking
through the relation between structure and interaction; Lucy Suchman, who inspired
my engagement with issues of human-computer interaction; Kathy Wilson, for
reflections on educational technology R&D; and the members of my dissertation
writers group, organized by Miyako Inoue—Pamela Ballinger, Genevieve Bell,
Vera Michalchik, Liliana Suarez Navaz, Sandra Razieli, Shari Seider, Nikolai SsorinChaikov, and Nancie Vargas.
This dissertation would not have been possible without the support of the
Mellon and Russell Sage Foundations, which have helped fund the Fifth Dimension
project and this research. I would especially like to thank Nancy Casey for her
interest and support. The writing for my work in education was supported by the
Spencer Foundation's dissertation fellows program. Thanks to Catherine Lacey, for
knowing how to bring people together; Lisa Lattuca, for warmth and humor; Cynthia
Bentel, for making everything work; and all the 1996-97 Spencer fellows, for being
such a great support network for getting this work done.
Special thanks is due to those nearest and dearest that lived through this
project at so many levels: Joichi Ito, for being my lifelong mentor in all things fun and
computational; and Scott S. Fisher for just about everything, but especially for
companionship on all levels, personal and professional, and an unflappable
confidence in me through all the peaks and valleys. Midway through this project I
was joined by my children, Luna Ito-Fisher and Eamon Ito-Fisher, who put
everything in perspective.
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Table of Contents
Signature Page
iii
Abstract
iv
Acknowledgments
vi
Illustrations
x
1. Introduction
1
2. The Apparatus of Knowledge Production:
Fieldsites, Fieldwork, Databases, and Data Analysis
30
3. Understanding Interactive Multimedia
Narrative, Technical, and Interactive Encodings
70
4. Creating a New Category
From Learning Software to Edutainment
103
5. The Uses of Fun:
Entertainment, Phantasmagoria, and Spectacle
168
6. Authoring Virtual Worlds:
Hacking, Self-Expression, and Technical Empowerment
236
7. Conclusions:
Multimedia Supersystems, Independent Publishing,
and Consumer Activism
287
Appendix 1: The Anatomy of a Computer Game
307
Appendix 2: Research on Game Play and Children’s Software
325
Appendix 3: Glossary of Abbreviations and Technical Terms
330
References
335
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Illustrations
2.1Picture in picture format for viewing videotape
49
3.1Screen shot from Language Explorer
88
4.1 Sreen shot from Rocky’s Boots
114
4.2 Advertisement for JumpStart 1st Grade
122
4.3 Advertisement for Math Blaster
124
4.4 Box Cover for JumpStart 2nd Grade
126
4.5 Inside the Box of Jump Start 2nd Grade
128
4.6 Back cover of box for JumpStart 2nd Grade
129
4.7 Chemical Elements Puzzle in The Island of Dr. Brain
154
4.8 Rat-Driven Elevator Problem in The Island of Dr. Brain
159
5.1 Screen shot from Countdown
179
5.2 Screen shot from Planetary Taxi
181
5.3Screen shot from Just Grandma and Me
183
5.4 Advertisement for Putt-Putt
188
5.5 Box art from Pajama Sam 2
190
5.6 Advertisements for LEGO Group products
193
5.7 Box art for The Magic School Bus Explores the Human Body
196
5.8 Screen shot from The Magic School Bus
201
5.9 Jimmy’s highway to nowhere in SimCity 2000
214
5.10 Dino Diner in DinoPark Tycoon
218
5.11 Blowing up fusion plants in SimCity 2000
229
5.12 The monster in SimCity 2000
231
6.1 Advertisements for SimCity 3000
251
6.2 Graph of zones in SimCity 2000
264
6.3 Jimmy’s mayor’s house in SimCity 2000
272
6.4 Screen shot from SimTower
274
x
1
Introduction
In the late seventies, the idea of consumer software designed for the education,
entertainment, and empowerment of children was barely a glimmer in the eye of
a few radical educators and technologists. Released in 1977, the Apple II, a tool
of hobbyists and a handful of enterprising educators, was just beginning to
demonstrate the power of personal computing and programming for the masses.
A home-brew industry of programmers had been laying the foundations for a new
consumer software industry by sending their products, floppy disks packaged in
zip-lock bags, to their networks of retailers and consumers. The video game
industry hit public consciousness with the phenomenal success of Space
Invaders in 1978, demonstrating the economic and addictive potential of a new
genre of interactive entertainment. Hand in hand with these technological
developments, small groups of educational researchers across the country were
beginning to experiment with personal computers as a tool for creating
interactive, child-driven, entertaining, and open-ended learning environments that
differed from the top-down didacticism of traditional classroom instruction. The
trend towards a more pleasure-oriented, and less hierarchical approach to
education and child-rearing found material form in these technologies that
allowed greater user control and input than traditional classroom media. Across
a set of diverse contexts in the US, educators and socially responsible
technologists were incubating a shared cultural imaginary that centered on new
learning technologies. Would it be possible to create software that combines the
hands-on, compelling engagement of interactive entertainment with enrichment
and educational goals for children?
I began my doctoral work at the Stanford School of Education some years
later, in the mid nineties, eager to explore the promise of computers to transform
education. By then, “educational multimedia” and “edutainment” were buzzwords
in the academy as well as in public culture. CD-ROM drives were becoming a
standard feature of personal computers, making it possible to deliver high-quality
graphics in an interactive format to homes and classrooms, and creating a new
industry niche. I was fortunate to find a position in an educational research and
reform project, the Fifth Dimension After-school Club Project (5thD), one of the
pioneering efforts to mobilize these new technologies in an informal learning
environment. I spent three years conducting research as part of an ethnographic
evaluation team studying the 5thD clubs and what children did in their
engagements with consumer learning software, and immersing myself in a
reformist educational philosophy that challenged many of the premises and
power dynamics of mainstream education. I wrote a dissertation for my degree
in education that focused on how children interacted with educational software
and the kinds of subjectivities they developed through these interactions (Ito
1998). This work celebrated the creativity and ingenuity of children in responding
to a malleable and interactive cultural object, while also documenting how these
technologies had the power to draw players into their suggested cultural
frameworks and subject positions.
After completing this project, I found myself still puzzling over the
consequences of children’s engagements with interactive media, and curious as
to how these engagements were tied to social and cultural processes outside of
the local context of interaction in the 5thD. The complex layers of meaning and
interactivity embodied in the software invited further questions regarding how
2
these technologies came to take the form that they did, the educational
philosophies and views of the child that animated the design of these products,
and the economic and technical constraints that structured their final shrinkwrapped form. The meaning and subjectivities that children were producing at
moments of play were in an intimate and complicated relation to software
designers, and mediated by networks of commodity capitalism. My research
goal for this dissertation in the Department of Anthropology has been to locate
children’s play within a broader set of relations defined by the links between
production, distribution and consumption, and contextualized by and informing of
US discourses about contemporary childhood. What is the nature of the highly
mediated communication and interaction between software designer and childplayer? What are the historical, economic, social, and cultural conditions that
created children’s software, and conversely, how has children’s software altered
the American social, cultural, and economic landscape? What are the social
distinctions and cultural categories that are materialized in children’s software,
and how do they play out in the activity of children and adults? With these
questions in mind, I embarked on additional fieldwork on the children’s software
industry, interviewing software developers, and gathering materials about
marketing, production, and distribution.
Based on an integration of my ethnographic material on play in the 5thD
and my material on the children’s software industry, this dissertation describes
the emergence of multimedia software for children as a new kind of cultural
commodity and a partially stabilized technosocial network. It takes a brief slice of
history, from the early eighties to the beginning of the 2000s, and examines how
a new industry and a set of production, distribution, and consumption relations
was established during this period as an effect of distributed interactions between
children, technology, designers, programmers, marketers, parents, entertainers,
and educators. All of these actors are considered as both producing and
consuming social and cultural effects, as active agents within a shifting network
of relationships. I organize these networks according to materializations of
3
technology, aesthetic quality, institutionalized relations, and discursive content
that I call multimedia genres. The three that I follow in relation to children’s
software can be labeled though not reduced to the tags of “edutainment,”
“entertainment,” and “authoring.” I analyze these genres as they emerge through
play in the 5thD, in the discourses of software design and production, in
marketing materials, and in the flow of commodities. These genres participate in
the production of distinctions based on age and class, and to a smaller extent
gender and ethnicity.1
Together these genres define a dynamic field of negotiation and cultural
conflict that characterize contemporary contestations in the US over children’s
culture, education, and technology. Different visions of education and childhood
are associated with these genres and their fortunes rise and fall together with
changes in attitudes towards children, technology, practices of play, and
commercial successes and failures. At all levels of production, marketing,
distribution, and consumption it proves challenging to promote academic learning
that is pursued for its inherent meaning and pleasure rather than for assessment
and sorting purposes. The progressive educational philosophy of “empowered
learning through play” of the early edutainment products and the philosophy of
the 5thD is constantly threatened by a growing polarity between academic
achievement and “mass” consumer culture. Despite, or perhaps in tandem with,
increasing pressure towards standardizing and measuring academic
1
My focus on the production and distribution of commodities designed for intellectual enrichment
locates class and educational status as central factors in my analysis. Gender and ethnic
categorization is somewhat muted because there is a self-conscious effort to erase them in the
cultural agenda of progressive educational media and the 5thD. Distinctions based on gender
and ethnicity are thus apparent but less visible as factors that unite levels of production,
consumption, and distribution. By contrast, across the spectrum, these media and the 5thD
context actively participate in the representation and construction of educational status and age
distinctions by focusing on the problem of learning and constructing a cultural domain that is
particular to certain age groups. Another reason for my focus is that categories of gender and
ethnicity have been examined extensively in prior related studies. One example is the relation
between technology identity and gender identity in children’s software and computer games
(Cassell and Jenkins 1998; Kafai 1999) . The issue of ethnicity and class has been studied
extensively in the context of the 5thD in relation to their efforts to serve minority populations in the
4
achievement, the entertainment genre, typified by licenses such as Barbie and
Disney, is expanding its base in children’s media. Mass entertainment is
shedding its associations with the perceived hedonism of working-class culture
and infiltrating the elite via progressive parenting ideals of childhood happiness
and self-determination. Even if an innovative product manages to integrate childdirected play and academic content, it is difficult to market in terms that are
compelling and recognizable in mainstream retail’s two-minute shopping decision
at a superstore. Given this polarization, efforts to productively integrate learning
and play are crucial cultural interventions that are more and more difficult to
sustain.
Play is structured by and productive of these cultural dynamics,
manifesting as heterogeneities in forms of play and micropolitical negotiations
between peers and between children and adults. Children orient variously
toward culturally dominant notions of status and achievement as well as the
cultural capital of commercial action entertainment dictated by the peer group,
even in the context of the 5thD that seeks to escape these cultural dynamics. As
educators try to orient children to deep understanding of academic content,
children often resist these calls for sustained engagement, quickly determining
the conditions for “beating” a game and moving on to the next level. And despite
efforts to keep the 5thD free of action entertainment idioms and related gender
distinctions, boys often find ways of smuggling in these codes through oblique or
hidden referents in the media at hand.
This does not mean that certain software titles and the 5thD are not
successful in promoting an alternative vision of learning. The 5thD clubs provide
a context where adults gently guide children in play that is both fun and
intellectually enriching, momentarily reorganizing the dominant polarity of
education and entertainment. Children’s software, too, provides opportunities for
child-driven play that unites the spectacular appeal of entertainment media and
US, particulary working-class Latino communities in California (Vasquez, Pease-Alvarez et al.
1994).
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new technologies with cognitive challenges. One challenge to the
dichotomization of entertainment and education is the authoring genre. Titles in
this genre do not rely on standard markers of academics achievement or the
more repetitive and spectacular formulas of action entertainment. Instead, this
genre of software that is tied to a constructivist educational philosophy in an
uneasy truce with a hacker subculture of technology users. It is typified by
software that enables players to create and reshape their own customized
content. Software and play in this vein can be keyed to an undisciplined and
anti-authoritarian identity rather than the acquisition of authoritative knowledge,
and thus can be a thorn in the side of both didactic agendas and controlling
ambitions of licensed entertainment content creators.
The dynamism of social and cultural contestations surrounding children’s
software is perhaps most apparent in the fickle market of the toy and consumer
software industries. In the late nineties, the children’s software industry was
going through a series of mergers and acquisitions as toy and media companies
sought to capitalize on the economic promise of consumer CD-ROMs. In 1996,
Mattel had pushed their Barbie license into new technology and new fortunes
with the commercial success of their CD-ROM Barbie Fashion Designer,
ushering in a new era in entertainment software for children tied to major toy
companies, media licenses, and the gender markings of lowbrow popular culture.
The young-adult oriented computer game industry had long outpaced the movie
industry, maintaining and expanding its lead since the mid nineties, and the hope
was that the younger children’s market would be the next big commercial
conquest. In 1998, as I was conducting my fieldwork, the contours of my fieldsite
changed by the day as corporations and new corporate divisions appeared,
merged, and just as quickly, evaporated. That winter, Mattel announced that
they were buying The Learning Company, one of the largest names in the now
well-established children’s software industry for $3.8 billion, who in turn had
purchased Broderbund earlier that year. Every toy and children’s media
6
company seemed to be jumping on the bandwagon with new interactive media
divisions, including Disney, Hasbro, Tyco, Lego, Lucas Film, and Scholastic.
Within two years, however, the market had begun to collapse. Mattel sold
off its Learning Company Division after incurring huge losses. Children were
flocking to Pokemon cards, cable television, and action games for their
recreational diversions and parents that I spoke to were skeptical that
educational games could capture their attentions. Educators in the 5thD and the
original community of children’s software developers bemoaned the lack of
products that met their educational ideals. Across the board, corporations cut
back on production budgets, with many of the new divisions and companies
closing their doors or being absorbed back into their entertainment company
homes. Today, there are very few new products on the mainstreammarket other
than those tied to movie releases and television series. Established formulas
and “classic” titles are repackaged and disseminated, with little money being
spent on developing new technology and content, the energy towards cultural
transformation dissipated after the efflorescence of the nineties. The influence of
children’s software continues now as an established and more stable feature of
the social, cultural, and economic landscape, but one that is quite different in
shape and scale from the ambitions of software industrialists and the ideals of
educational reformers, myself included.
The disappointments of educators in realizing their ideals, and the deflated
ambitions of the corporate sector are as much a part of the social and cultural
effects of children’s software as the fact that my four-year old daughter is
learning her ABCs with the aid of her computer; they give voice to the
incompleteness of this particular technological triumph, the instability and
heterogeneities that characterize the networks of production, distribution, and
consumption, and the gaps, resistances, and ongoing contestations between the
implicated parties. In a very short span of time, children’s software was
transformed from a dream of a handful of technologically oriented intellectuals to
an influential and well-defined market niche, with a set of recognizable genres.
7
Far from being a univocal story of technology transforming society, however, this
dissertation describes a multi-directional and co-constitutive field of social and
cultural dynamics. This work constructs a description of technological effects
that sees outcomes not only at the “end” of a singular trajectory, most often
occupied by the mind of the child, but in the meanderings through a multitude of
pathways leading in a variety of directions: the establishment of certain media
genres, the production of new kinds of consumer subjectivities, ongoing efforts to
stabilize industry alliances between educational and entertainment media, and
the unruly activism of children mobilizing software for their own social and
political ends. I address an interdisciplinary conversation about the cultural
politics of contemporary childhood and theoretical debates on global/local
relations and the role of new media technologies. I turn now to the theoretical
and analytic framework for the subsequent chapters.
Theoretical Framework
This dissertation integrates three different theoretical conversations in order to
arrive at an ethnographically-informed perspective on contemporary American
childhood as technologically-mediated sociocultural construct. I look to
sociocultural approaches to learning and social constructivist approaches to
childhood for a view of learning and childhood identity as historically and
culturally specific constructs, negotiated across a wide range of social, political,
and economic contexts. I look to anthropological interventions in the debates on
globa/local relations for a grounded view of cultural process within translocal
flows of commodities and media. Within this conversation, ethnographic studies
of media provide for models of media reception as a heterogeneous and
culturally contextualized enterprise, not reducible to the encounter between
person and text. Finally, I draw from science and technology studies for ways of
conceptualizing the materiality of computational media. These three theoretical
conversations lead to a set of analytic tools that guide the chapters to follow.
8
The Cultural Politics of Childhood
To investigate the cultural politics of childhood in relation to children’s software, I
draw from sociocultural learning theory and the “new paradigm” in sociological
studies of childhood. Recent articulations in activity and practice theory have
argued that learning is a fundamentally social and cultural process, that is
achieved through ongoing interactions and collusion with technologies and
people engaged in everyday activity (for reviews, see Brown et al. 1989; Greeno
et al. 1996; Lave 1993) . Rather than focusing on learning as an individual
process, this version of situated practice suggests that learning can be
understood as changing structures of participation within social and cultural
networks.2 Technologies appear in these theories as important resources that
participate in and structure the field of ongoing activity. Some of the theoretical
models that form the backdrop for this work include communities of practice
approaches (e.g., Lave and Wenger 1991; Star 1991, 1994; (Wenger 1998) , a
notion of situated cognition (e.g., Brown et al. 1989; Greeno et al. 1996; Lave
1988) , activity theoretical accounts (e.g. Cole 1994, 1995, 1997a; Engestrom
1993) , and ethnomethodological approaches to language and interaction (e.g.,
Jordon and Henderson 1993; McDermott and Tylbor 1984; Mehan 1993;
Suchman 1987; Suchman and Trigg 1991) .
Drawing from this view of learning as a social and cultural process, my
work further extends contexts of learning to media technology and commodities.
In contrast to most educational research on learning, my work does not take the
mind of the child to be the focal object of analysis. My effort is to push learning
2In
her overview of situated learning approaches, Lave (1993: 17) suggests certain underlying
assumptions to this approach: "Knowledgeability is routinely in a state of change rather than
stasis, in the medium of socially, culturally, and historically ongoing systems of activity, involving
people who are related in multiple and heterogeneous ways, whose social locations, interests,
reasons, and subjective possibilities are different, and who improvise struggles in situated ways
with each other over the value of particular definitions of the situation, in both immediate and
9
theory and the concern with children’s development and cognition “out” into the
realm of mass media and commodity relations, and to pull what are generally
conceived of as “macrosocial” and political economic concerns about commodity
capitalism and media effects “in” to the everyday contexts of consumption and
practice-based ethnographic description. To describe learning as a process that
extends beyond individual psychology, beyond interpersonal interaction, and into
the fabric of the political and economic is an act of theorizing with practical
consequences for the ways that children’s lives are perceived and regulated.
Individualized and psychologized measures such as intelligence, creativity, and
attentional deficit are reframed as social and cultural issues that we must
address at political, economic, and collective levels, not only at the levels of
individual and mind. I take as foundational the view that defining and measuring
learning is a political process that serves to sort children into different and often
hierarchically organized categories. As Herve Varenne and Raymond
McDermott (1998) have persuasively argued, success and failure are two sides
of the same cultural coin.
For example, in working to erase class distinctions that associate certain
children with high culture and academic achievement, and other children with
intellectually vacuous mass culture, it is important but not sufficient to isolate
factors and apply remedies and instruction directed at “at risk” children. The
5thD is one example of such a practical effort to provide access to technology
and empowering academic resources for children who would not otherwise have
them. As a research effort, the 5thD also seeks to locate this work within the
broader fabric of America life. Building on this research orientation, my work
interrogates the cultural distinctions between intelligence and stupidity, learning
and play, education and entertainment. I look at how these distinctions manifest
in ongoing activity in the 5thD and interact with the market segmentation of
commodity capitalism and the sorting mechanisms of educational institutions.
comprehensive terms and for whom the production of failure is as much a part of routine
collective activity as the production of average, ordinary knowledgeability."
10
The problem of low academic achievement is located in the organization of late
capitalism, the design of technology, and our cultural obsessions around
competition and achievement, as much as in the cognitive capabilities and
deficits of individual children.3 We need to consider interventions such as
designing alternative forms of media distribution, supporting independent content
development, or reconfiguring the power dynamics of home and school in
addition to providing enriching academic activities for children.
This shift from child psychology to social and cultural context goes hand in
hand with an effort to view children as competent and influential social and
cultural actors rather than “unfinished” objects of socialization and receptacles for
adult intentions (Hutchby and Moran-Ellis 1998). My work is part of a growing set
of efforts in social and cultural studies of childhood that seek to acknowledge the
agency of children and their social, cultural, and political influence.4 This
approach sees children not as “becomings,” in the process of being integrated
into adult society, but as full social actors, or “beings” (James, Jenks et al. 1998).
This perspective plays out in my work in a number of ways. One is my focus on
the productive aspects of children’s everyday activity not solely in terms of
whether or not they are conforming to adult expectations or not (i.e. “learning” in
the commonsensical sense), but examining the meaning that their acts have to
their own social negotiations and cultural standards. Study of media genres
3
For example, Raymond McDermott (1993) offers an analysis of how the category of "learning
disability" is an available and preconstituted cultural resource, in addition to describing the
particular interactions that contribute to its ongoing reproduction, citation, and repetition. He
describes how a particular child is "acquired" by the category of learning disability, looking at how
certain actions get highlighted within the classroom as opportunities for public labeling rituals.
The analysis importantly locates a child's “individual” identity in relation to large institutional
structures, as well as to the reproduction of those structures.
4 Allison James and Alan Prout, in the introduction of the edited volume that named this “new
paradigm of childhood sociology” describe four central tenets. The first is that childhood is a
social (and I would add cultural and technological) construction. The second is that childhood
can’t be separated from factors such as ethnicity, class, and gender. The third is that “childhood
and children’s social relationships and cultures are worthy of study in their own right, and not just
in respect to their social construction by adults.” Ethnography is seen as a key method for
approaching the cultures of children. Finally, they see this new paradigm as part of an
engagement with and response to “the process of reconstructing childhood in society” (James
11
marketed to children and their recreational time, in contrast to educational media
designed for adult goals, is an important counterpoint to most research on
children’s learning that focuses exclusively on academic content. For example,
play and referencing of violent images, often read by adults as antisocial and
regressive, could be read as an act of peer alliance building or resistance to
adult-child power hierarchies (Buckingham 1994).
Following on this, I seek to understand children’s sociocultural positions as
unique from that of their parents, and child-adult dynamics as an important
political site. Jens Qvortrup (1997) has argued that there are problems in
equating a child’s socioeconomic identity with that of their parents. Just as racial
and class differences inflect gender solidarity and vice versa, age identity creates
a unique set of political locations. One example of this is in a study by Gill
Valentine and Sarah Holloway (2001) regarding technophobia. Parents had
anxieties about keeping pace with new computer technology given the
association between technology, achievement, and social mobility. By contrast,
their teenage children worried that association with technology made them
downwardly mobile in the peer status economy, through association with
computer-nerd identity. In my work, I see children orienting to the competitive
logics of middle-class identity and academics, but also using identification with
low status “junk culture” in resistance to achievement anxiety in adults. Just as I
work towards a socially distributed and culturally heterogeneous view of
knowledge and intelligence, I also see class as a heterogeneous, contingent, and
socially distributed effect that can not be read transparently from family
socioeconomic status. Other studies have documented similar complexities in
how age or the category of “child” intersects with gender identity (Thorne 1999)
and ethnic and national difference (Stephens 1995; Scheper-Hughes and
Sargent 1998).
and Prout 1997). See also (Mayall 1994; Stephens 1995; James, Jenks et al. 1998; ScheperHughes and Sargent 1998; Alanen and Mayall 2001; Hutchby and Moran-Ellis 2001).
12
This difference in identity between parents and children does not
necessarily translate, however, to class transformations for rebellious children.
Penelope Eckert(1989), in her study of class distinction and the adolescent peer
categories of “jocks and burnouts,” documents how the relations between peer
and class identity are deeply conservative, and come to increasingly structure
children’s experiences as they move through the educational system. Far from
being a transparent outcome of children identifying with their parents, however,
Eckert describes how class identity emerges as an integrated outcome of the
dynamics of the adolescent peer group, the hierarchical organization of social
value in the school, as well as the polarizing dynamics of the “jocks and
burnouts” categories. The elementary-aged children in my work are under
greater surveillance than adolescents, and have less obvious avenues for selfdetermination and identity display. Yet they still exhibit a highly activist
orientation to social affiliation and political work, and categories of “smart kid”
versus “dumb kid”5 echo the adolescent categories of jocks and burnouts. My
work with technology leads to a third social category of “geek” or “hacker” which
is in a complicated and often countercultural position to the dominant logic of
success and failure. These three categories of “smart,” “stupid,” and “geeky” are
loosely correlated to my three genres of edutainment, entertainment, and
authoring.
My work on children’s software takes a particular cut on issues
surrounding contemporary childhood. Compared to the ubiquity of television, the
industry strength of video games, the high status of educational curriculum, and
the star-appeal of film, children’s software is a marginal site of cultural
production, a site of translation and negotiation between discourses of
entertainment and education, hegemonic in their respective domains. The
interest of this case is that of a border zone rather than a clearly defined territory,
5
In line with native usage, I use the term “kid” rather than “child” in my ethnographic description.
Children rarely self-identify with the term “child,” and media industries, taking their lead, generally
use the term “kid” in content that is marketed directly at children.
13
and of a protean rather than stabilized technology, providing a window into
ongoing struggles at the intersection of different social interests, cultural codes,
and technological capabilities. It is also a case study that is uncommonly
technologized and exhibits a progressive and egalitarian, but intellectually elite,
approach to childhood and education. As such, it enables a view of the
socializing and activist ambitions of liberal humanism and left-wing politics of
childhood, an increasingly influential alternative to mainstream notions of
education and child rearing.
Global/Local and Production/Consumption
Turning to the domains of media production, and distribution, I draw from an
interdisciplinary debate on global/local and production/consumption relations.
Here, my central theoretical problem is how to reformulate the relations between
“local” consumption and “global” media production, especially as this dichotomy
is complicated by the relationships, linkages, and technologies that tie together
different agents engaged with a new media form. The dichotomies of local/global
and consumption/production continue to be fruitful intellectual fodder for cultural
study attempting to theorize the state of the postindustrial global economy.6
Anthropologists, in particular, have been adapting the long-standing concept of
“the local” to account for what Arjun Appadurai has termed “global cultural flows”
(1996: 33) and what Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson have described as the
“hierarchically interconnected” nature of what has tended to be studied as
6
Since the 80s, there has been a growing recognition in the academy of the ways in which new
media and communication technologies, combined with forces of multinational capital, are
reshaping the social landscape. This recognition is generally associated with a group of theorists
of the postmodern, which include Frederic Jameson (1991), Jean Baudrillard (Poster 1988;
Baudrillard 1988 [1976]), and David Harvey (1989) as some of the most notable proponents.
These intuitions regarding global media also interact with earlier theories of the commodification
of culture, put forward by theorists such as Walter Benjamin ([1955] 1968), Max Horkheimer, and
Theodor Adorno (1982), tying together a concern with political economy into concerns regarding
the social effects of “mass culture.” Currently, a focus on translocal media, multinational capital,
and cultural production is expanding into a growing interdisciplinary conversation between
philosophers, cultural critics, sociologists, literary theorists, anthropologists, and geographers.
14
discrete localities (1992: 8). Concurrent with the call for ethnographic attention to
translocal objects, anthropologists have also argued for attention to the
particularities and diversity of meaning and practice, contributing a localizing and
grounding voice to the interdisciplinary debates. 7
My work similarly argues for new kinds of technologized and spatially
distributed anthropological objects, while also working against dominant cultural
and analytic associations tied to the global/locality dichotomy. I see the
opposition between the global and the local as a powerful organizing cultural
trope rather than as a natural effect of the technological times or transgeographic analysis. Objects and images associated with our imaginings of
globality (electronic media, multinational capital, transnational travel) provide
material for the production of small-scale community and personal meaning as
much as our imaginings of the local (grounded places, cultural diversity,
idiosyncratic consumption) travel across far-flung translocal networks. Sylvia
Yanagisako adds an additional dimension to Appadurai's question: "What is the
nature of locality as a lived experience in a globalized, deterritorialized world?'
(1991: 196) by suggesting an inverse conundrum: "What is the nature of the
global as lived experience in a localized community?" (1994). Yanagisako's
formulation argues against a scaled-up notion of "Late Capitalism," suggesting
that in addition to local consumptive practices, capitalist production must also be
understood as locally constituted. As Gupta and Ferguson have argued, taking a
7
A growing body of anthropological work has focused on global/local relations, including a recent
Association for Social Anthropology dicennial conference on the theme, resulting in five edited
volumes (Fardon 1995; James 1995; Miller 1995; Moore 1995; Strathern 1995), special issues of
Cultural Anthropology on "Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference" (Ferguson and Gupta
1992) and "Further Inflections: Toward Ethnographies of the Future" (Harding and Myers 1994),
as well as other ongoing studies of mass media (Mankekar 1993; 1993; Gupta 1995; Ang 1996;
Marcus 1996; Mankekar 1999) and capitalist relations (Appadurai 1986; Yanagisako 1991; Rofel
1992; Yanagisako 1994; Miller). These anthropological treatments have used the theorizing
about global media and translocal networks to reshape some traditional anthropological methods
and objects of study. For example, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (Gupta and Ferguson
1992) have argued against the isomorphism between space, place, and culture, foregrounding,
instead, the interconnections between places and the informational, material, and migratory flows
between them. Similarly, Arjun Appadurai (1986) has argued for anthropological attention to
15
trans-geographic perspective means accounting for reterritorialization as much
as deterritorialization (1992: 20). In a related move, Anna Tsing has argued that
we need to “stop making a distinction between ‘global’ forces and ‘local’ places.”
Instead, we might think of “cultural processes of all ‘place’ making and all ‘force’
making are both local and global, that is, socially and culturally particular and
productive of widely spreading interactions” (2000: 352).
Like Tsing, I see the relations between what we often gloss as global/local
and production/consumption as linked particularities that are simultaneously
located and imaginative, material and semiotic. While taking into account the
privileged position of those global capitalists and technology and media creators
that we tend to associate with cultural production, I see these “global” actors as
outcomes of highly distributed processes that importantly rely on media
technologies for their embodiment. Far from being disembodied and free flowing,
media content is embedded in particular technologies (personal computers,
floppy disks, CD-ROMs), and particular networking and distribution
infrastructures (distribution and retailing, telecommunications infrastructure). I
work to denaturalize and deconstruct the trope of “global production” by
describing it as a contingent effect of a set of unstable negotiations with unruly
actors, rather than an inevitable outcome of technocapitalist evolution.
Much work in cultural studies of media has similarly worked to decenter
the authority of the media text and producer and call forth the voices and agency
of consumers. My work builds on this body of work. One reference point is
Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model, which suggests a partial disjuncture
between the meanings suggested by the producers of a text at the moment of
encoding, and the meanings actually read by the audiences at the moment of
decoding. While the encoded meanings have a privileged position, they are by
no means determining (Hall 1993). This model was taken up by researchers
such as David Morley who conducted extensive interview studies of audiences of
commodity flows and consumption, and, along with Carol Breckenridge, attention to public culture
as a zone for looking at cosmopolitan cultural forms (1988).
16
particular TV programs (1992). These studies stressed the ways in which the
sociocultural contexts of particular viewing situations affected audience
interpretations in ways not wholly determined by the text. Studies of fan
communities, notably of Star Trek and Dr. Who, tended to stress even further the
active and creative ways in which audiences reshaped the meanings of mass
media texts (Penley 1991; Jenkins 1992; Tulloch and Jenkins 1995). More
recently, in the textbook of cultural studies by Paul Du Gay and his colleagues,
organized around a case study of the Sony Walkman, the encoding/decoding
model is made more complex. Now the “circuit of culture” includes
Representation, Identity, Production, Consumption and Regulation. Culture is
produced as an effect of the negotiations between these different processes and
social actors (Gay, Hall et al. 1997).
This body of work represents an improvement on a linear trajectory of
production, dissemination and consumption where the agents of technology and
media have “effects” on society and culture (out there), but there is still a
descriptive inflexibility to the model in textbook form that takes the different roles
of cultural producer and consumer as analytic givens. In theory, this circuit of
culture allows for multidirectional social and cultural outcomes and “production”
at all points in the circuit, but the reliance on textual interpretation
(advertisements, interviews, artifacts) rather than practice and ethnographic
analysis, means that texts and artifacts occupy the analytic center. The
emergence of a (contested, multivocal) cultural object or text is the outcome to
be explained rather than one of many social and cultural outcomes of a process
of sociotechnical change. When an artifact and a series of representations is the
central phenomenon to be explained, social roles get defined in relation to this
goal. (Socially and culturally contextualized) production sets the process in
motion and is responsive to audiences to the extent that it incorporates user
feedback and reception contexts. Consumption is generative to the extent that it
takes up, appropriates, and inflects centrally produced meaning. Society
17
structures, regulates and accommodates. Culture provides a shifting context of
meaning.
Ethnography has provided one way out of the dichotomy of production and
consumption that sees sites associated with “production” and those associated
with “consumption” or “reception” both as generative sites of meaning production.
A small but growing body of anthropological media studies provides more holistic
attention to sociocultural context of media, linking both consumption and
production to cross-cutting discourses in the culture. These discourses, or
sociocultural formations, are objects to be explained as much as they are the
“contexts” that shape technology and media content. For example, Purnima
Mankekar (1993) looks at interpretations of a particular episode of an Indian
soap opera from the points of view of both producers and viewers, relating these
readings to discourses of nationalism and gender. Lila Abu-Lughod (1995)
analyzes Egyptian television in light of contestations about modernity, femininity,
and relations with the West. Mankekar writes that her goal is to analyze
“television’s role in the culture wars to define the Indian nation” (1999: 5-6). In
this framing, a media genre is an actor in a broader set of social and cultural
dramas, not the cumulative result of a series of negotiations between producers
and consumers. Further, these studies stress the heterogeneities between
different “consumers” and “producers,” investigating media’s role in constructing
social distinctions as well as crossing social boundaries. It is not only the
relations between nodes of production, dissemination, and consumption that are
relevant in this framing, but categories such as class, national identity, and
gender that cross-cut these different nodes of the media network. When viewed
in this way “production” and “consumption” can both be seen as generative sites
of cultural and social production.
18
Technology and Materialization
When media technology is decentered from its role as an independent force
having an impact on culture and society, and as the singular object of production
and consumption, then we arrive at a view of technology as an embodiment of
social, cultural and material relations rather than a separate entity constructing or
constructed by the social and cultural. This view of technology has emerged
from various social constructivist, symbolic interactionist, ethnomethodological
and actor-network approaches to science and technology. These approaches
see technological orders and scientific facts emerging from the structuring and
stabilization of sociocultural relations, a contingent result of political struggle and
negotiations between people, objects, and institutions. Science and technology
studies (STS) has focused on scientific knowledge production and technological
artifacts rather than popular culture and media technologies, and some
translation is required across the sparsely populated interface between STS and
cultural studies of media. Children’s software, as a media form relying on new
technology, is a site of intersection for these different fields and approaches. I
borrow from STS a descriptive language for approaching technology, and
analytic constructs that bring a critical social and cultural theory to our
understanding of technology.
First, and most generally, is a view of technology as a materialized
relational achievement, what John Law has called, in describing actor-network
theory, “a semiotics of materiality.” “It takes the semiotic insight, that of the
relationality of entities, the notion that they are produced in relations, and applies
this ruthlessly to all materials—not simply those that are linguistic” (1999: 4).
Media technologies such as children’s software can be “read” both as cultural
texts representing certain forms of cultural content, and materializations of social
and cultural relations. Donna Haraway's cyborg is also informative in this
respect, "a hybrid of machine and organism" (1991: 129) that she uses as a
figure to describe the late twentieth century's imploding boundaries between
19
human and animal, organism and machine, and the physical and non-physical.
Communications technologies appear in this story, together with biotechnologies,
as "crucial tools for recrafting our bodies," key players in a move toward "the
translation of the world into a problem of coding" (164). Following on the third of
Haraway's imploding boundaries, this study conceptualizes the computer as a
material-semiotic technology, a site of implosion of text and lived realities. These
approaches work across the divides of technology and culture, material and
semiotic, tying together cultural, social, and material analysis. Just as cultural
theorists have found culture and politics in our ideas of what is natural and Godgiven, this approach to technology sees given material objects as not just results
of, or contextualized by, sociocultural process, but as actual materializations of
the social and cultural. Sociocultural orders and technological materializations
are achieved by tying together domains that are generally considered separate,
such as nature, science, religion, politics, technology, education, race, or gender
(Yanagisako and Delaney 1995).
Technologies are materializations that tie together different cultural
domains and a wide range of social interests and actors. I focus on the trope of
materialization to offset the dislocating effects of the term “network.” Media
technologies are of interest not only because they enable flow and travel, but
because they structure, embed, and locate. A piece of edutainment software
“represents” or materializes an educational philosophy and ideas of childhood as
well as the class identifications of achievement-oriented parents. It also
materializes children’s peer identifications and orientations to cute characters
and flashy graphics, certain late-capitalist commodity relations, and embodies
socially minded software designers’ uneasy truce between commercialism and a
sense of social mission. These relations are coded and hardwired into the
software and hardware in the form of representational content (graphics,
characters, setting), interactional possibilities (responses to user inputs),
interface design (tools the user has to interact with the machine) and technical
specifications (storage media and what platforms the software will run on). For
20
example, Reader Rabbit was originally designed by progressive educators with a
constructivist bent, who sought to make literacy accessible to disenfranchised
children. The designers embedded the practice of reading in a child-friendly set
of cute characters and entertaining scenarios to enlist the attentions of children
that might be alienated by overtly school-like idioms. As the market for children’s
software went mainstream, and was linked to higher-end graphical capabilities in
PCs, the politics materialized by the game began to shift. Utilizing the same
characters and academic content areas, this game was repackaged to appeal to
middle-class parents seeking to push literacy and academics down to younger
and younger children. Subsequent releases created a proliferating set of toddler,
preschool, and grade-based titles. Although the academic content of the
software is similar in ongoing sequels, the politics materialized shifted
substantially as it was marketed and distributed in mainstream retail. I argue that
these social relations are as much a part of the “content” materialized by the
software as the characters, narrative, and academic content.
This semiotics of materiality leads to a second set of analytic tools,
descriptive constructs that unpack some of the characteristics of technology as
particular kinds of sociocultural objects. By refusing to restrict “the sociocultural”
to the “external context” of technology, STS provides a language for describing
some of the sociocultural workings of technology that looks at the actual
technical content—how an object is designed, constructed, and reproduced
(Pinch and Bijker 1987). Most central is the insight that technologies entail a
certain stabilization and fixity of social and cultural relations. This is the sense of
technology that has been captured by Bruno Latour’s term “immutable mobile” to
describe scientific texts that can travel across and incorporate different social
worlds (1990). Similarly, Adele Clark and Joan Fujimura(1992) consider “the
right tools for the job” in constructing scientific knowledge, and Michel Callon
sees “black-boxing” as an important kind of erasure required for technological
closure (1981). These analytic constructs make visible the general concern in
the field in documenting processes of stabilization and standardization.
21
Technologies and knowledge production are always partially decentralized
and contested (Martin 1994), the black-boxes are leaky (Lynch 1985) and subject
to breakdown (Suchman 1987), and the represented actors rebellious (Callon
1986), but there is still fixity and concretization as one sociocultural effect of
technological embodiment, a kind of stubbornness and inflexibility that we
recognize by terms such as “standardized technology,” “mass-produced
commodity” or “bug-free software.” This dissertation draws in particular from
Suchman’s insight that technologies embody a certain interactional inflexibility
with which users engage in flexibly and situationally responsive ways.
Technologies are particularly stabilized black-boxes that acquire situationallyspecific meaning as producers negotiate their construction, marketers package
and spin them, distributors display them, and users engage with them.
This leads, lastly to an approach to technoscientific authority that
recognizes its power but decenters it from the agency of the scientist discovering
“natural facts” and technologists creating products that transparently reflect the
desires of their user populations. Technoscientific production achieves its
authority through political negotiation and through techniques for holding together
a relational network that produces facts and artifacts as one of its effects. As
Fujimura has argued in her study of oncogene cancer research, the power and
authority of this biological theory is achieved through the gradual construction of
a “theory-method” package rather than through certain scientists “discovering”
natural facts of life. “Resolutions can be short-lived or long-term, but they are
rarely, if ever, permanent. Even consensus requires maintenance” (1996: 14).
This approach has much in common with cultural theory that argues for the
heterogeneous, contested, and uneven nature of hegemony (Hall 1986).
Science, like commodity capitalism and other cultural hegemonies, works as an
unevenly distributed enterprise, stabilized through relational alliances that are
often technically and textually embodied.
22
Some Partial Tools for the Job
My goal is to adapt these perspectives from STS for media technologies and
popular culture, and to ground our understandings of the workings of culture in
the material forms of technology. Toward this goal, I propose three analytic
lenses that structure the ethnographic material to follow. The first is the notion
of multimedia vernaculars and genres associated with the categories of
edutainment, entertainment, and authoring that have emerged from my material.
The second, drawing from Bourdieu, is the idea of a cyborg habitus as a coupling
between human habitus and the design of machines and software. The third is a
focus on the micropolitics of representation as a lens for looking at the everyday
negotiations between adults and children.
One last theoretical debt remains to be mentioned, from which these
analytic tools are partially derived and which provides one model for this kind of
integration. This is Benedict Anderson’s celebrated analysis of the role of “printcapitalism” or “print-as-commodity” in the construction of nation. In Anderson’s
description, the technology of the printing press is inseparable from the social
and economic relations of budding capitalism, political contestations, and
representational and linguistic practices. Yet print holds a privileged place in the
analysis, by providing “unified fields of exchange and communication,” enabling a
new fixity to language, and creating certain “languages-of-power” that were
legitimized by the materialization into print (1991: 44-45). Print-capitalism is a
semiotic materialization that is intimately tied to the emergence of the politicaleconomic-discursive construction of nationhood. In my narrative, multimediacapitalism is the semiotic materialization tied to the emergence of the politicaleconomic-discursive construction of “children’s popular culture.”
Multimedia Vernaculars and Genres
While my study of children’s software has much smaller ambitions, less
sweeping scope, and more attention to everyday detail, I take from Anderson this
23
orientation toward the powerfully integrating effects of media technology as they
provide fixity and material bases for certain discourses and political-economic
ambitions. As Latour (1990) has described with scientific texts, media
technology draws together and translates divergent interests into standardized
forms, and in Anderson’s terms, produces a limited number of established
“vernaculars.” My first analytic lens is a set of multimedia vernaculars that have
been materialized through “multimedia-capitalism” in relation to children’s
software. These vernaculars are tied to certain multimedia genres. John Seely
Brown and Paul Duguid use genre as a category that cross-cuts form and
content, to invoke the often implicit social practices and understandings that
contextualize a media artifact, “the peripheral clues that crucially shape
understanding and use” (1996). I similarly see the notion of genres as a way of
analytically cutting across production and consumption, form and content.
The body of this dissertation is based on different genres of children’s
software—edutainment, entertainment, and authoring—and examines how these
genres are produced as a distributed and materially located outcome of various
actors in engaging with multimedia-capitalism. My approach departs from a more
long-standing version of genre theory that has been applied to interpretive
approaches to media such as literature, film, and television. I see similarities
with what Jane Feuer (1987) reviews as “reader-oriented ideological models” of
genre that located the production of genre within a power-laden system of media
production and consumption. Unlike most genre theory, however, I decenter the
concept of genre from textual content, and include material form (technology)
and dynamic social practice.
In taking this approach, I risk reification of these media genres, seeing
them as the outcome of the sociocultural processes I track. In fact, these genres
are very much in flux, thoroughly inform one another, and refuse to track along
the lines of particular titles, chidlren, corporations, or media developers. Their
analytic separation took much work. At the same time, I believe that tracing
divergent discursive-materializations in the form of genres enables a view of
24
media that stresses a dynamic and negotiated quality in the face of certain
material stabilizations. Even within a certain technological order, or even within a
particular text, there are multiple forms and styles of engagement. Postmodern
media forms such as contemporary children’s culture thrive on the integration of
multiple styles and genres within any given program or title (Kinder 1991).
Similarly, any given corporate agenda, designer’s approach, or child’s subjectivity
may be typified by a certain genre but embodies a pastiche of multiple forms.
These juxtapositions and mixtures do not mean that the genres are not distinctly
stylized and materialized. Rather, that they coexist and are co-constitutive.
Children’s popular culture and our notions of childhood are sites of cross-cutting
discourses, media types, and political agendas, which can not be reduced to a
singular hierarchical or hegemonic structuring. The notion of genre describes a
loose but malleable structure of material-discursive alliance that I believe
captures this sense of flexible coalescence.
Cyborg Habitus
These multimedia vernaculars and genres are in turn tied to what I am
proposing to call a still-evolving cyborg habitus, forms of socio-technical-cultural
practice that are embedded, coded into the design of artifacts and their couplings
with everyday practice. I take from Haraway (1991) that human identity and
practice are tightly coupled with various biological and informational
technologies. This is where I begin to depart from Anderson by looking at
ethnographic and practice-based material. I see this technologically contingent
habitus as cyborgified ways of reading, writing, interacting, and viewing. When
watching children engaging with machines, I see them entering different modes
of engagement, certain grooves that track along machine capabilities and
representational content. These are loosely tied to the multimedia genres, the
practice dimension of these media forms. For example, kids alternately exhibit
competitive achievement, spectacular engagement, or a hacker-like technical
mastery depending on social situation and software. This is a more practice25
oriented complement to the styles of computing that Sherry Turkle (1995) has
described as different “aesthetics” such as the hacker aesthetic, the hobbyist
aesthetic, and the tinkerer aesthetic.
Following Bourdieu (1972), I see this technological habitus as embodied
structures of acting, but I add the dimension of the technological patterns of
behavior coded into machines. When applied to machines, the conservatism of
the concept of habitus is particularly appropriate. The “durable dispositions” of
habitus are encoded and wired into machine functionality and representation.
Bourdieu describes habitus as forming through a “dialectic of objectification and
embodiment” (90) as the body moves through structured space. A machine
habitus is constructed in the objectifying and embodiment processes of design
and programming of computers and software. A cyborg habitus is the coupling
between this durable machine disposition and the flexibility of human interaction,
agency, and interpretation, a socio-technical patterning contingent on
engagement between human and computer. These are dispositions that are
momentarily durable—rendered malleable by rapid technological change and
obsolescence as well as by the maneuverings of unpredictable users. The
varieties of cyborg habitus both reproduce and challenge prior forms of habitus
associated with class and other forms of social distinction. For example, the
hacker habitus of hard technical mastery is in a complicated and often
oppositional relation to mainstream notions of intelligence, achievement,
aesthetics, and social competence, and thus has countercultural valences. At
the same time, the highly gendered dimension of this form of cyborg identity also
produces familiar gender distinctions on the ground of new technology. The
hacker is celebrated for his challenge to age and class hierarchies, but excludes
women from this empowered identity.
Micropolitics of Representation
Finally, in relation to sociological studies of childhood, and in an attempt to
capture the political dimensions of these materialized practices, I look at the
26
relation between media developers, distributors, marketers, children, parents,
educators, and technologies as a micropolitics of representation, a series of
negotiations that collectively give voice to emergent sociocultural orders.
“Consumption,” or what the kids and parents are doing, is an act of
representation as much as “production” of software. As children negotiate with
their teachers and parents about what they can or cannot do, can or cannot buy,
and as they make certain decisions about ways to engage with a piece of
software, they are creating new vernaculars, genres, and habitus. When a group
of boys huddle around a computer creating explosions out of a city planning
simulator, they form a technologically contingent collective identity and practice
that produces gender distinctions, resistance to educator’s progress orientations,
and reproduction of action entertainment idioms associated with hedonistic junk
culture. Even if they are not writing curriculum standards, programming software,
or rendering graphics—the more obvious goals of a child-centered constructionist
agenda—they are still “learning” and participating in the production of
technocultural effects. As interaction-based studies of schooling have
documented, in their everyday acts of both “succeeding” and “failing” to achieve
adult goals, children are part of the production of social order (Varenne and
McDermott 1998).
Children do not simply reproduce (or fail to reproduce) culture but
constantly participate in its construction and remaking. In this framing, domestic
consumption, consumption by the “weakest” members of society is not seen as
mystification, nor as liberative consumptive choice, nor as creative appropriation,
though these elements are not entirely absent. Rather, I see consumption or
perhaps more appropriately, media engagement, as a political act, one highly
constrained by structures of power and domination, but nonetheless a form of
action, activism even that builds alliances and strengthens certain networks of
relationships over others. I am borrowing from the insight of feminism, applied to
childhood sociology, that has demanded that we politicize the personal.
Mundane and everyday acts of domestic politics are highly consequential in the
27
larger social and cultural fabric. This insight enables us to see small acts of
resistance, confrontation, and conflict in the domestic, consumptive, and private
spheres as acts of political activism and engagement. As a growing body of work
on children’s popular culture has shown, media consumption is one arena in
which children can exercise some agency and are demonstrating growing
political economic clout (Kline 1993; Seiter 1995; Jenkins 1998; Kinder 1999).
By positing a sphere of consumptive micropolitics, I am not, however, suggesting
that these micropolitics are dichotomous with “macropolitics” of production. As
ethnographic studies of knowledge and commodity production have shown,
production is also a site of highly personal micropoliticing (Yanagisako 1991;
Fujimura 1992; Latour and Woolgar [1979]1986).
These different analytic lenses—multimedia vernaculars and genres,
cyborg habitus, and micropolitics of representation—are the organizing tropes
and constructs that structure the narrative to follow. As chronicled in the
following chapter, the fieldwork for this study is an uneven patchwork, a kind of
detective-work that cobbles together a story based on serendipity as much as
design. In many ways, the analytic framework presented is a hope for future
study as much as a blueprint for the writing and analysis. The successes of this
effort I see in suggesting these avenues of inquiry rather than in arriving at a
seamless execution. After a chapter exploring fieldwork and methods for this
study in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 looks at some of the material and interactional
particularities of children’s software, giving an overview of how genres of
children’s software, industry organization, and interactional qualities or
organized. Chapters 4-6 form the body of the ethnographic material, tracing the
three production-consumption cases along the multimedia genres of
edutainment, entertainment, and authoring. Each of these chapters examines
the development context, some of the product marketing, a software case, and
interactional dynamics of play with software. The concluding chapter describes
28
some of the more recent developments in the industry, and summarizes the
social and cultural shifts in relations between children and personal computing.
29
2
The Apparatus of Knowledge Production:
Fieldsites, Fieldwork, Databases, and Data Analysis
Anthropology has been grappling with methods for studying culture as it is
distributed across wide-ranging networks of media, migration, and commodity
capitalism. Recent calls for multi-sited ethnography (Martin 1994; Marcus 1995)
anthropological attention to objects such as the state (Gupta and Ferguson 1992;
Gupta 1995) commodities (Appadurai 1986; Miller 1997) mediascapes and
technoscapes (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1988; Appadurai 1990; Fischer
1991) online communities (Escobar 1994; Marcus 1996), or large institutions
(Nader [1969] 1972) have stressed the importance of reshaping anthropology to
address ethnographic objects that are multi-sited and technologically-mediated.
In defining my methods and area of study, I have taken the discipline’s growing
interest in translocal objects as a starting point in working towards ethnographic
engagement with social and cultural process distributed across networks of
people, technology, and capital. While thus empowered by these calls to action, I
have also struggled, in pursuing my doctoral study, in defining a series of
concrete research practices that would count as my rite of passage into the
discipline. My effort has been to construct a project that would hold onto the
ethnographic commitment to understanding located details of everyday life, while
also analyzing the production of childhood as a technologically-mediated and
socially distributed enterprise.
The data collection for this dissertation was conducted over a five-year
period of shifting ethnographic subjectivity, moving from participant observation
and videotaping of children’s play, to interviews with software developers, to
excavation of textual materials about the children’s software industry. The bulk
of the ethnographic fieldwork was conducted during a three-year period when I
was a graduate student, fieldworker, research assistant, and project manager
with the Fifth Dimension After-school Club (5thD) project, an educational reform
effort involving over 25 different community, educational, and research
institutions. The 5thD provided a set of sites where I could observe children’s
social interactions with computer software. Subsequently, I embarked on study
of the production and distribution contexts of children’s software as a doctoral
student in anthropology. I was a mostly solo anthropologist in a “fieldsite” that
was distributed across a network of retailers, software developers, and marketing
venues. I interviewed people involved in the industry, played the games,
attended conferences, and gathered a corpus of materials in the popular and
business literatures. This dissertation is based on a heterogeneous body of data
and methods, a multi-sited as well as multiply positioned apparatus of knowledge
production.
This chapter discusses issues regarding "new" multi-sited and
technologized research by describing some of the particularities of my research
processes in light of related theoretical concerns in the discipline. How can
anthropological methods grapple with translocal, technological objects of study?
What is enabling and disabling about using video and new information
technologies to mediate the fieldwork and analysis for multi-sited ethnography?
Finally, how can we understand and shape the contours of anthropological
participation in late capitalist technosocial networks and translocal flows of
31
knowledge? This chapter is not an attempt to address, in a general way,
methodological issues in technoscience, mass media , and translocal studies,
and is oriented toward the particularities of this research project. After framing
some of the current issues in the discipline around translocal, multi-sited
ethnography, this chapter describes the research process, fieldsites, and
research apparatus for the study. I trace how my “fieldsite” was actively
constructed through the definition of my project and the tracing of empirical
linkages between various parties. Further, the aspects of working in an
interdisciplinary and activist stance with large educational and commercial
institutions also reveal some of the problematics of "studying up" and doing
ethnography "at home."
Understanding New Forms of Anthropological Practice
One of the most visible proponents of anthropology's move to translocal studies
of media and commodities has been Arjun Appadurai, whose recent work has
called for anthropological (and interdisciplinary) attention to "public culture.”
Together with Carol Breckenridge, he describes public culture as a zone for
looking at cosmopolitan cultural forms (1988). A focus on public culture
foregrounds the global or translocal flow of media, commodities, information, and
peoples, how culture and social life is being increasingly mediated and
constituted by these processes in a way that deterritorializes and reterritorializes
culture and society. The claim of Appadurai and Breckenridge, along with many
others that are paying attention to translocal networks and relationality (eg.,
Harvey 1989; Anderson 1991; Jameson 1991; Clifford 1997; Gupta and
Ferguson 1997; Marcus 1998; Ong 1999), is that new media and
communications technology are reshaping how people relate to each other and
constitute culture and communities. While culture and social life has always
been an important translocal phenomenon, new media technologies, and
32
material and migratory flows, are making computationally mediated and
distributed forms of relationality increasingly salient for many populations.
Recent attention to multi-sited fieldwork has also arisen in conjunction with
these efforts to produce anthropological knowledge about objects and
phenomenon that are spatially distributed, whether they are network communities
(Mynatt, Adler et al. 1997; Markham 1998; Cherny 1999; Hine 2000; Miller and
Slater 2000), commodities (Appadurai 1986; Miller 1997) or certain tropes that
are inflected differently in different locales (Martin 1994). Discussions of
anthropological study of "new" ethnographic objects such as technology,
commodities, and mass media tend to oscillate between the two poles of
practical how-to discussions (more often than not, in informal collegial networks),
and highly theoretical discussions of ways of thinking about new kinds of
anthropological objects. The hope in this chapter is to address the gap between
these two poles, between the practical, but often personalized and theoretically
anemic how-to discussions, and the broadly programmatic statements about how
anthropology and anthropological objects should be theorized, defined, and
reshaped. While "current" forms of anthropological theory have been constantly
articulated and rearticulated through programmatic works of various kinds (eg.,
Hymes [1969] 1972), reflection on actual anthropological practice of these forms
of "cosmopolitan" ethnography is relatively sparse ( some exceptions are Martin
1994; Marcus 1998; Nader [1969] 1972). What is relatively absent is an
ethnographic view into how anthropologists working in these new areas do their
day to day work, a view that both provides practical models for how to do the
work.
In his review of "the emergence of multi-sited ethnography" in the 1995
Annual Review of Anthropology, George Marcus provides one of the few reviews
of methods for "new" multi-sited ethnography. He suggests that multi-sited
ethnography is being articulated as part of the shift in understanding global/local
relations. Rather than constructing the anthropological project as intensive
attention to a local site, contextualized by an understanding of the “world system”
33
in which the locality is embedded, multi-sited research draws different boundaries
around the object of anthropological scrutiny. Marcus proposes that multi-sited
approaches are based on "tracking" certain phenomenon across multiple sites,
rather than relying on spatial localization to define the object of study. He
describes these tracking strategies as: follow the people, follow the thing, follow
the metaphor, follow the plot, story or allegory, follow the life or biography, or
follow the conflict. He also suggests that certain "strategically situated single-site
ethnographies" might count as multi-sited ethnography depending on how they
describe and theorize the relation to the world system (Marcus 1995).
While recognizing my research in Marcus' programmatic statement,
particularly in terms of the "follow the thing" model of research, my concerns
have been more pragmatic and problem driven than driven by the theoretical
concerns around global/local (or system/lifeworld) relations. I agree with, and
this work has been crucially informed by, the sentiment and theoretical
commitment to looking at locality as a particular kind of production, rather than a
naturalized ground for anthropological research. At the same time, I feel this
theoretical position is symptomatic rather than defining of (at least some) new
models for multi-sited study. I do not believe that multi-sited study is the
necessary answer to the identity problems of the discipline, nor necessarily a
more theoretically robust way of defining an object of study. Questions such as
the relation between lifeworld and system are empirical as well as theoretical.
When trying to answer questions about how people participate in computer
networked communities or relate to commodity forms circulated to multiple,
atomized sites, research is appropriately designed according to a multi-sited
model and a theoretical frame that sees the production of locality as a complex
technosocial and capitalist achievement. On the other hand, other kinds of social
groupings, defined by spatially bounded practices and face-to-face interaction,
can certainly be (and perhaps should be) informed by a world systems
perspective, but are not necessarily best understood by a multi-sited model.
34
Graduate students being newly inducted into the practices of fieldwork and
research design, who are working in new fields of inquiry such as translocal,
technoscience, or media studies, are in a position of having to read into and
glean from broad theoretical statements how the work actually is to get done.
While programmatic statements are empowering, the focus on high theoretical
stakes rather than reflection on the particularities of practice galvanizes graduate
students for conducting new forms of ethnography, but provides few practical,
material, and institutional resources for getting this kind of work done. While the
standard graduate curriculum in anthropology does provide lessons and
practicums in such matters as research ethics, conducting interviews, or writing
fieldnotes, these methodological concerns are generally keyed toward a certain
model of anthropological research, where it is assumed that the scholar will be
working alone, at a single site somewhat distant (socially and/or spatially) from
the audience of the writing, and in face-to-face relations with research subjects.
While the celebration of new forms of ethnography has continued apace in
prominent journals in the field, this discussion is yet to be well integrated into the
more everyday institutions and practices that produce and reproduce
anthropological knowledge.
Many models for and articulations of the practical work and methods for
working in large institutions, across distributed communities, and in relation to
new technologies, have been put forth by "applied" fields that are often marginal
to theory-building in the discipline. For example, anthropologists working in
educational settings have always had to justify and articulate their methods to
make their practices intelligible and legitimate to mainstream educational
research, dominated by experimental methods and entrenched, conservative
institutions. Further, because educational research is often conducted in the
context of large collaborative research projects, the apparatus of knowledge
production is more socially distributed and more visible. Those of us working in
these contexts cannot take for granted either an audience already cognizant of
ethnographic processes, or methods that are about individual travel to a remote
35
locale. Ethnographic studies of educational institutions are one site where
anthropologists are developing methods for distributed work and the study of
cosmopolitan institutions, as well as becoming more articulate about these
methods.
One example from my own experience is the Middle School Math through
Applications project at IRL, headed by Shelley Goldman, where I interned during
my first two years of graduate school. This project, like the 5thD project, is a
multi-year, multi-million dollar project, and involved a large research team and
ethnographic study of many schools using a new mathematics curriculum
(Goldman 1996). Part of the ethnographic process in this context meant
managing the flow of fieldwork across a large number of school sites and we
often had meetings and workshops about how to manage large projects and
collaborative data collection. IRL, in collaboration with the Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center, worked to adapt ethnomethodological video analysis for use in
settings of educational reform and technology development. In these
interdisciplinary contexts where ethnographers need to persuade policy and
technology-makers, video has proven an effective tool for arguing for the
empirical validity of ethnographic observation and for making “the field” visible to
others (Suchman and Trigg 1991; Jordon and Henderson 1993). IRL was the
institutional home for many of the methods for multi-sited study that were used
for this dissertation, such as the use of video to capture human-computer
interaction, and the use of computer network and database technology to
coordinate a large research team.
Participation in projects at IRL and in industrial contexts has sensitized me
to the positioning of ethnography “at home” that is entangled with efforts for
social change, whether they are positioned as educational reform projects or
technology development. In my case, multi-sited study is motivated not by a
concern to challenge and reformulate anthropological knowledge, bur rather by a
concern about social changes in children’s social lives and media environments.
Children’s lives are being structured and influenced by forces that are beyond the
36
boundaries of face-to-face interaction and community as socialization happens
as an interaction between “local” institutions such as school and family and
“translocal” institutions such as media and commodity industries. My goal has
been to understand the nature of these linkages to and to consider interventions
that take into account not just one local site of interaction (contexts of play,
design of technology, business models), but the interaction between these
different sites. Important studies and interventions have focused on local
contexts of consumption and how teachers and parents can control and make
the most of media. I have felt, however, that it is important to address more
holistically how products are created and distributed in relation to how they are
bought and engaged with, to look systemically at how technology comes to take
the form that it does, rather than see it as a black-boxed force that “impacts” our
families from the outside. To borrow from Gupta and Ferguson, I see my political
task not as one of “’sharing’ knowledge with those who lack it, but as forging links
between different knowledges that are possible from different locations and
tracing lines of possible alliance and common purpose between them” (1997:
39).
My position also aligns with that of Gupta and Ferguson when they
describe “the self-conscious shifting of social and geographic location” as an
ethnographic strategy for acquiring new perspectives (1997: 38). I have
alternated between the subjectivity of fieldworker, parent, technology designer,
project manager, and educational reformer in the process of traveling to different
field locations. The multi-sited and translocal nature of this study has meant
negotiating access to the “subaltern other” of children as well as the worlds of
technology developers and educational reformers, worlds that I am personally
and professionally identified with. My subjectivity as an ethnographer has
revolved around linking my presence to a set of discourses not commonly
mobilized in the given context. Among kids, this meant being a grown-up that
knew something about the inner workings of games and the people that made
them. Among technology developers, this meant knowing something about what
37
kids did with their products. Among educational reformers, this meant my
unconventional interest in commodity capitalism as a factor shaping children’s
learning. The ethnographic innovation of this work is less in describing the
unfamiliar but in tracing unconventional linkages between familiar but dispersed
objects, in describing how acts of play and consumption are related to the
structure of technology development and distribution. In contrast to
contextualization in a geographic area, Marcus has argued that
within a multi-sited research imaginary, tracing and describing the
connections and relationships among sites previously thought to be
incommensurate is ethnography’s way of making arguments and
providing its own contexts of significance (1998: 14).
Marcus, in a separate paper, has described the “shared imagination”
between ethnographer and informant that applies in the traditional ethnographic
encounter as well as in settings where the ethnographer may be in a less
powerful position or studying those that she identifies with socially and culturally.
He calls this alternative to the narrative of entry and rapport “complicity,” which
“rests in the acknowledged fascination between anthropologist and informant
regarding the outside ‘world’ that the anthropologist is specifically materializing
through the travels and trajectory of her multi-sited agenda” ([1997] 1998: 122). I
don’t believe my informants and I shared fascination about an “outside world” as
much as a shared sense of fascination in “our world,” or a “new world” of
technology that is intimately connected to our everyday lives. Marcus’ statement
speaks well, however, to the emergence of shared objects of fascination that my
presence as an ethnographer invited. Children, educators, and technologists
had a shared interest in the object of “computer games” but each social group
was relatively inaccessible to one another. My involvement materialized the
presences of these other invisible parties and I experienced the sense of
translation across distance that I imagine is familiar to most cultural
anthropologists. The difference, however, is that there is no separation between
38
“my” world of the “audience back home” and the “other” world of my research
subjects, just different sites in which I found myself complicit, entangled, and at
least partially identified. This entanglement and complicity is perhaps most
evident in my involvement in the 5thD project, where I occupied dual positions of
educational reformer and ethnographer of the project itself. I would like to turn
now to a description of this project and the after-school sites where I observed
children’s play.
The Fifth Dimension Project
In the summer of 1994, the Mellon and Russell Sage Foundations began funding
a three-year project that would support the operation of the current 5thD sites,
and would also fund three research projects to evaluate the program in different
ways. I was brought in to participate as a research assistant in one of these
three evaluation efforts, a research project run out of the Institute for Research
on Learning (IRL), in collaboration with Stanford University (via professors and
my advisors Ray McDermott, James Greeno, and Shelley Goldman). Together
with collaborators at UC San Diego and Whittier College, our research charter
was to produce an ethnographic account of the operations of the 5thD clubs,
both at the level of video-based interaction analysis of the learning that happens
at the clubs, and an institutional level of analysis that documents the overall
workings of the 5thD consortium.
Our ethnographic "process evaluation" was framed in contrast to the
"cognitive outcomes" evaluation, which was based on pre-test post-test
quantitative analyses of children's learning, and the "language and culture"
evaluation that looked specifically at issues of bilingualism and ethnic and
cultural diversity at the 5thD sites (Cole 1996; 1997). My research community
has involved dozens of researchers and educators involved in this project, as
well as my immediate research team of four faculty members, two other graduate
students, researchers at IRL, a multiplicity of audio-visual and networked
39
computer equipment, and three or more undergraduate research assistants and
data collectors.8 The project involved producing ethnographic knowledge about
an aspect of American social life, as well as making visible the workings of a
particular reform effort, in order to document and assess its efficacy. It has been
a research effort that is both applied and directly entangled with the site of its
application. I have functioned not as a distant scientific observer to the 5thD
clubs, but as a concerned participant in constant interaction with the so-called
"objects" of my research, who are also my colleagues, co-conspirators,
playmates, and mentors. My dissertation research was conducted under the
auspices of this large research project, in addition to independent dissertation
support from the Spencer Foundation.
Research for our project began in the summer of 1994, but the most
concentrated period of data collection was during the 1995-96 school year. Most
of 1994-95 was spent designing the data collection apparatus, and forming
relationships and staff responsibilities that would enable work to happen across
distributed sites. During the 95-96 school year, several research assistants,
including myself, shot videotapes at three target sites in California for most days
of operation. I functioned as the nomadic ethnographer, participating in one local
site and traveling at a rate of approximately once per month between three other
target sites, as well as sites in North Carolina, videotaping, interviewing, and
participant observing. In addition to the video, interview data, and my own
observations, the project also generates daily fieldnotes by undergraduates
participating at the clubs, which they write as part of their coursework. These
fieldnotes for the past four years are digitally databanked at UCSD, along with
project archives spanning over ten years. The final project year was dedicated to
data analysis and write up.
8Team
members included: Ray McDermott, James Greeno, Michael Cole, Don Bremme, Shelley
Goldman, Katherine Brown, Vanessa Gack, Dena Hysell, Natasha Royer, Joy Yang, Raquel
Ramirez, and Alla Cherkassky, as well as many others at the Laboratory of Comparative Human
Cognition at UC San Diego, the Institute for Research on Learning, Whittier College, and
Appalachian State University.
40
The Fifth Dimension Sites
The site that was most central to this research, and is also the oldest current
5thD site, is located at a Boys' and Girls' Club in Southern California. The club is
located off a busy thoroughfare in a suburban neighborhood, and between three
and four o'clock, when I would usually arrive at the club, kids are walking in from
the school across the street, or are being driven in by parents or other
caretakers, to spend their hours between the end of school and the end of the
parental work day. The Boys' and Girls' Club is a "safe" place for kids to spend
this two or more hour gap in their day. Upon entering the club during these hours,
one is greeted by a cacophony of kids' voices as they mill about the central room
of the club, which is occupied by pool tables, a few coin-op arcade games,
fooseball, soda and candy machines, and some clusters of sofas. Adult staff
circulate among the kids, playing with them, organizing activities, and
occasionally acting as disciplinarians.
At the far end of the main room is a door to the art room, filled with art
supplies of various sorts, as well as computer parts from old Apple computers,
and PCs that kids are allowed to tinker with during special workshops. Outside,
on the other side of the building, are a basketball court and a pool. Off to one
side is the door to the library and "educational" area of the club, which includes
the room where the 5thD site is housed. One half of this educational area is
occupied by bookshelves with reference books and round tables generally
devoted to homework. On this side is also a small computer area that is not part
of the 5thD club, with a PC connected to the World Wide Web, and some Mac
Pluses for doing writing assignments. On the other side of the room, divided by a
cubicle-like partition, is the 5thD. Tables rim the 5thD space, occupied by ten or
more computers and a printer or two. One table off to the side also houses the
folders for each 5thD citizen, tracking their progress through the games and other
activities. This table also houses the maze, a wooden structure with miniature
41
rooms and doors, where kids move small objects that are called "cruddy
creatures." As they progress in the activity system and master different games,
they move their cruddy creatures through different rooms of the maze. A poster
above the maze describes the "consequences chart" which dictates what games
they can play in each room, and how to proceed from room to room. Play with
commercial educational software dominates the activities at the site, but there
are also rooms in the maze that propose playing board games, making a video,
and other activities off the computer. When they complete all rooms of the maze
they win the title of "Young Wizard's Assistant" and are able to play the high-end
games at the site and are responsible for teaching others.
When the 5thD is not in operation, a piece of posterboard closes off this
area of the club. As 3:30 approaches, the time when the 5thD opens, a small
proportion of the kids at the Boys’ and Girls’ Club begin to move from the
basketball court and pool tables and start to mill around this area, attentive to the
university undergraduates who are beginning to trickle in. The site coordinator is
also starting to turn on the machines, get the maze organized, and check in on
the undergraduates as they arrive. When the site opens, kids start pairing off
with undergraduates, grab their folders, and eventually settle at a computer,
while the site coordinator directs traffic. Things are chaotic and lively as kids and
adults jostle around the computers, try to figure out what software is available on
what machine, or who is working with whom. While some 5thD sites have a
formal sign-up sheet to manage who gets to participate each day, at this site,
participation is managed informally, and kids jostle for position at computers and
with undergraduates. Some kids might also be writing email to other 5thD sites,
or to the Wizard, the mythical entity that oversees the clubs, and sometimes also
appears on a live computer-based chat. While some of the 5thD clubs do not
allow free circulation between the 5thD and the Boys' and Girls' club at large, at
this site, both kids and undergraduates will circulate between the 5thD and the
library area, as well as other parts of the Boys' and Girls' Club. Often kids will
stop by briefly to observe or intervene in other kids' play, or will get bored at a
42
particular game and decide to go play pool, or mingle with kids at other parts of
the clubs. Kids might also decide that they would rather play a game with
another friend, and undergraduates, left with no kids to pair up with, will play with
each other, trying to learn a new game. There could be as few as three and as
many as fifteen kids at the site. On a crowded day, latecomers will have to wait
for their turn with an undergraduate and will often stand observing other kids
play.
The different 5thD sites are tied together by the use of similar
technologies, curriculum, educational philosophy, and electronic communication
between the different sites. Currently there are sites across California,
associated with the University of California campuses and other colleges, as well
as sites in North Carolina, Florida, Brazil, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark.
Among the educational reformers and researchers, those participating in the
different 5thDs are considered a "community" or at the very least a consortium of
people jointly producing certain reform efforts. The educational reformers
associated with the project communicate frequently over email, collaborate on
developing activities and curriculum, see each other a few times a year at
conferences or consortium meetings, and are generally cognizant of what is
happening at different and remote 5thD sites. From the point of view of the kids
and the undergraduates staffing the clubs, there is less communication between
different 5thD sites, but they are still participating in a shared community in the
sense that it is constructed by the distributed educational reform community and
the use of similar educational software. The sites are thus related phenomenon,
but not homogeneous; each 5thD site is shaped by the local context, and the
same software is engaged with differently by different populations of kids and
games. Some of the more salient differences across 5thD sites are whether they
are English only or bilingual English/Spanish, whether they are affiliated with a
research university or a small liberal arts college, whether the club is located at a
community center or a school, what kinds of public or private funding feed into
43
the clubs, or regional variation depending on what part of the country or world the
club is located in.
This particular club caters to mostly middle-class mostly White, some
Latino working parents that need an afterschool activity for their kids. In contrast
to some of the other 5thD sites, many of the children attending the club have
computers at home, so the site becomes an extension of home entertainment
activities, and an opportunity to engage with these activities in a peer group. A
small but highly visible group of technically-savvy older boys, aged 10-12, often
dominate the higher-end machines at the club, exchanging tips and opinions
about current games. Girls attend the club in somewhat lower numbers than
boys. The dominance of the older boys group led to the institution of a one day a
week “girls only” day for a brief period, where girls could play on the machines
that they wanted without having to negotiate with the boys. Familiar gender
dynamics are present in the male dominance of technology at the club, even as
club operators attempt to intervene to increase girls’ representation.
Less than a mile away, another site where I observed serves a
predominantly working class Latino community. The 5thD operates in a trailer
that it shares with a Head Start program, located on the property of a church. The
children that attend this 5thD site come for this purpose alone, rather than to use
other facilities as is the case at the Boys’ and Girls’ club. This site coordinator is
a mother of one of the children, who speaks Spanish and little English. During
5thD operations, there is a lively mix of languages as English-speaking university
students mingle with bilingual children and the occasional Spanish-speaking
parent or community member. All the curricular materials are available in both
English and Spanish. The space is cramped, with computers rimming each wall
and a round central table for activities such as drawing and board games. Here
there is a stronger presence of parents and families, as there are community ties
through the church, and there have been active efforts to recruit parents to help
staff the site. Older children may attend with their small siblings, and often there
are children just starting kindergarten and learning to read. With the exception of
44
a few Spanish language games, most of the software and computers are similar
to those at the Boys’ and Girls’ club, as are the curricular materials. In contrast
to the Boys’ and Girls’ club site, however, most of the children at this club do not
have access to computers at home, and their parents generally lack access to
them at their workplaces. The site became an opportunity for kids as well as
parents to engage with new technology to which they would otherwise have
limited access (Vasquez, Pease-Alvarez et al. 1994).
The third site that was the focus of my observations was one started in
Menlo Park by myself, my advisor Ray McDermott, and other IRL staff.9 Our first
session was in the fall of 1995, the second year of the project. This effort was
motivated by my desire to have research subjects that I interacted with on a more
regular basis, as well as by the spirit of community service, the hope to provide
computer access to kids who would not normally have it. In alliance with the
East Palo Alto Stanford Summer Academy (EPASSA), a summer camp run by
Stanford University, we recruited middle-school kids from East Palo Alto and
Redwood City to come to IRL on weekends and play with educational games and
Internet technologies. The EPASSA staff helped us coordinate a meeting where
the EPASSA families were invited to participate in the club, and where we
explained our research.
Of the fifteen or so families that attended the informational session, six
became regular participants and occasionally brought their friends. All
participating families were middle-class and working-class African Americans,
with the exception of one Latino family. With the exception of the Latino boy who
participated in the club, the kids did not have access to computers at home, and
had limited exposure at school. Project members, plus a number of others hired
on a temporary basis, staffed the club in lieu of the undergraduates that generally
act as tutors at 5thD sites. Since we were also dealing with an older age group
and had access to the high-end technology at IRL, we were able to experiment
9Ray
McDermott, Anne Mathison, Shelley Goldman, Dena Hysell, Charla Baugh, Gary Geating,
George Lopez, and Ingrid Seyer.
45
with more kinds of software and activities than other 5thD sites, including web
page design and digital video production. Throughout the course of the 95-96
school year, we met weekly, with between three to seven kids, and most
sessions were taped. As the year progressed, many of the kids would also
appear at IRL during the week to make use of computers for homework and for
fun. During the summer of 1996, the core members of the club ran their own
summer program at IRL, working as teachers for kids enrolled in a special
EPASSA elective. The kids from this local club are in many ways my primary
informants, although they are not necessarily the ones most heavily represented
in this dissertation. They are the kids that I not only observed through the video
record, but also interacted with on an ongoing and regular basis as informants,
interlocutors, and video gaming companions.
Data Collection at the Fifth Dimension
As project evaluators, our research team was interested in looking at activity
across multiple 5thD sites. One of the first challenges for our team was to design
ways of collecting data that enabled close analysis of activity at different sites,
none of which were geographically local to most team members. For the
implementors, the concern in looking across sites was to capture the diversity
inherent in the 5thD consortium, and the ways in which the 5thD activity system
has been adopted by different local communities. Sharing this concern, I was
also interested in documenting how the games took on different roles at different
sites, in order to understand both the commonalities and the diversities of kids'
game play. The two primary challenges for data collection and management
were first, how to document kid-computer interaction both locally and at remote
locales, and second, how to manage a data collection and analysis process that
was distributed across multiple sites.
During the first year of the project, I worked with my advisors and others in
the consortium to design the video apparatus and to position staff at the different
46
sites that would take charge of video collection. Throughout this process, the
relation between IRL and the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition
(LCHC) in San Diego was a complementary one. While the IRL team was
formally an "outside evaluator," the aims of both sites were similar: to collect
consistent and high-quality data of as many days of the 5thD and across as
many sites as possible. IRL provided the technical expertise and specialized
equipment for the project, and LCHC the knowledge about the operation of the
clubs and local staff to help with the data collection and analysis process. Our
primary focus was on three sites in Southern California, where undergraduates
and other people already involved with the project were hired to shoot video
during club operation. While we began our efforts at videotaping early in the first
year of the grant, our efforts were initially only partially successful. Project
members traveled frequently between Northern and Southern California to
coordinate and train staff on video process, but it required a great deal of
sustained work, both socially and technologically, to bridge the distance between
IRL and Southern California (McDermott, Goldman et al. 1995). It was not until
the second year of the project, when the video process was streamlined, the IRL
team had a better sense of the workings of the 5thD, and Vanessa Gack joined
the project to take charge of the Southern California video taping process, that
we able to get consistent video for most days of club operation.
The video configuration that we arrived at involved one video camera, a
tripod, two microphones, a sound mixer, a tape deck, a scan converter, many Hi8
video tapes and cables, and much patience on the part of the videotaper who
had to drive through traffic each day and set up the equipment, surrounded by a
bevy of kids eager to begin playing on the computer. Sometimes the videotaper
was myself. Mounted on a tripod and squeezed into a corner of the room behind
or on one side of a computer, the video camera recorded the activity and people
interacting with a computer. A wireless microphone, placed in front of the
monitor or clipped onto a child's shirt, recorded sound for the video camera. A
scan converter, stacked next to the computer, translated the computer monitor
47
input to NTSC video format, which was recorded by a Hi8 video deck, together
with sound from another microphone, routed and amplified by a sound mixer.
These two tapes, of the computer screen and of the interaction setting, were
eventually edited together into a picture in picture format, where the online
activity is juxtaposed with RL activity, so that the activity on and around the
screen can be viewed in tandem (figure. 2.1). The kids at the site were initially
amused by the video equipment and occasionally asked questions about it or
hammed for the camera, but after a few weeks of taping, the video
ethnographers and the equipment became an established and unremarkable part
of the dense social and technological landscape.
Midway through the project, we began to encounter difficulties in
organizing the translocal flow of research data. Videotapes needed to be copied,
edited together, and distributed to researchers in San Diego, North Carolina, Los
Angeles and Palo Alto, and collated with other forms of data such as the
fieldnotes, transcripts, and records of analysis done. Research assistant Dena
Hysell at IRL functioned as the hub for this translocal flow of data. As tapes were
shipped from different sites in Southern California, Hysell would enter them into
the database, edit them together into a picture and picture format, make content
logs and copies of the tapes, and mail them out to the various sites as needed.
We eventually devised a database which was shared over the Internet and could
be dynamically accessed and updated by all project participants. The database
recorded the whereabouts of over five hundred videotapes and their copies, as
well as the related fieldnotes, content logs, transcripts, and pointers to
supplementary materials such as permission forms, games, and curriculum.
Project members involved in data collection and analysis were given the
password to the database, to create new records when new tape is shot, or
upload and download transcripts, logs, notes, or other materials. We also made
use of a computer server at IRL that allowed project members to share files over
the Internet, as well as Internet video conferencing, constant email, and
innumerable telephone calls, both one-on-one, and in speakerphone enabled
48
group meetings. Through the course of a year, our data was gradually
disciplined by an often unwieldy social and technical network, transformed from
an unruly set of happenings at computer clubs to a standardized series of
integrations and juxtapositions in various storage media.
FIGURE 2.1
PICTURE IN PICTURE FORMAT FOR VIEWING VIDEOTAPE
SimCity 2000TM © 1993-94 Electronic Arts Inc. SimCity 2000 and SimCity are
trademarks or registered trademarks of Electronic Arts Inc. in the U.S. and/or
other countries. All rights reserved.
49
Much of my access to fieldsites and research subjects has been mediated
by the translocal flow of video and fieldnotes, and the data analysis also reflects
this fact. I worked as an ethnographer and participant observer at all of the sites,
interviewing staff, undergraduates, and students, chronicling my observations as
I traveled across the sites. Yet the data that I collected first-hand is dwarfed by
the immense data collection apparatus of the overall project. Fieldnotes are
generated by each undergraduate and staff member at every site, every day of
operation, constituting an observational record of thousands of fieldnotes from
multiple perspectives. The video record is also much more comprehensive than
one I could achieve as a lone fieldworker, and much of my "participant
observation" time involved viewing and reviewing of videotape and playing the
computer games that my research subjects play. The video record and
undergraduate fieldnotes provide me with an intimate yet voyeuristic relation to
kids and undergraduates that I may never meet in person. Often when
encountering these subjects during field visits, I am struck with a kind of media
fan mentality, finally meeting in the flesh the vivid personalities that I had known
only through a TV monitor, a silent but avid witness to their daily lives as
captured on video. My experiences of the first half of this three-year project
revolved around my multiple identities as technical support staff, project
coordinator, informal personnel manager, nomadic ethnographer, and a student
and junior member of a large research and reform team.
The analysis and write-up of this work in the final year of the project was
also a highly distributed, technologically-enhanced, and collaborative enterprise.
The database, implemented in Claris Filemaker Pro, enables searches through
the video and fieldnote records according to any database field, including site,
games played, people involved, videotaper, transcripts, content logs, fieldnotes,
and analysis completed. The collaborative aspect of the project, which involved
many researchers and research assistants viewing tape, and making logs,
transcripts, and fieldnotes, not to mention my various advisors who are also
50
project members, was immensely enabling for my analysis and writing process.
Data, insights, and data analysis were shared on an ongoing basis by project
members and the three primary graduate research assistants on the project
(Vanessa Gack, Katherine Brown, and myself) took leadership on different
pieces of the work. During the final phase of the project, we wrote monthly
reports on our analysis process, which were discussed and shared between the
evaluation team, including faculty advisors Ray McDermott, James Greeno, and
Michael Cole. Tapes were viewed collaboratively throughout the project term
and the yearly reports produced for the project involved extensive group
meetings and editing, and emailing of documents between Northern and
Southern California. The dissertation for my education degree emerged as one
product in of this broader research effort.
Studying Ourselves
The 5thD consortium is an influential reform project with a history spanning over
ten years. Michael Cole, who runs one of the sites that I studied in Southern
California, is the central organizing figure of this effort, though innumerable other
researchers have been involved in the project through the years (Nicolopolou
and Cole 1992; Engestrom 1993; Cole 1994; 1995; 1997). Since the late
seventies, the 5thD clubs have evolved from a single experimental afterschool
cooking club for kids, to the current state of the 5thD consortium as an
international educational reform effort of over twenty sites that makes use of
computers and telecommunications. The sites are funded through major grants
by foundations such as Mellon and Russell Sage, governmental funding sources,
universities, and a variety of efforts by local communities. Most recently, the
5thD clubs have spread across the University of California campuses, as a way
of connecting the university with local communities. The university professors,
graduate students, and other staff for the 5thD project hold joint identities as local
implementers in close touch with the day to day operations of clubs and
51
community relations, and as researchers with a reformist voice in the educational
research community. The 5thD clubs have become an increasingly influential
reform effort through the strong backing by the educational research community,
as well as support by the local communities in which the clubs are located.
From the outset, the 5thD effort has combined theory and practice. The
5thD is based on a strain of psychological theory informed by the works of Lev
Vygotsky (1987) and the school of Soviet psychology that he is associated with.
In this view, learning is best understood and supported as a socially and
culturally situated act of engaging with other people and artifacts rather than an
act of individual knowledge acquisition. The 5thD philosophy draws in particular
on Vygotsky’s theory of learning through the “zoped” or “’zone of proximal
development’: the place at which a child’s empirically rich but disorganized
spontaneous concepts ‘meet’ the systematicity and logic of adult reasoning”
(Kozulin 1986). The 5thD activity system has been designed to enable zopeds
where children and adults can engage in joint tasks with the computer.
Undergraduates staffing the sites are concurrently taking a course in cultural
psychology where they are exposed to sociocultural approaches to learning, and
their work in the 5thD is framed as observational fieldwork. Methodologically, the
5thD is a version of action research. Research on the project feeds back
immediately into the implementation effort, and the conduct of research itself is
an educational process for undergraduates as well as children at the club. The
5thD is a laboratory for testing the theories of cultural psychology as well as a
way of realizing them in practice.
“Cultural psychology” in the vein of Cole and his collaborators (Cole 1997)
found a common approach in anthropological approaches to learning and
education, and has been a rich contact point between the disciplines of
anthropology and developmental psychology (Lave 1988; Brown, Collins et al.
1989; Lave and Wenger 1991; Lave 1993; Cole, Engestrom et al. 1997). This
interdisciplinary intersection of “sociocultural learning theory” takes a reformist
stance toward mainstream American education’s psychologization and
52
individuation of learning and assessment, and consequent denial and exclusion
of social and cultural factors in education (Lave 1988; Lave and Wenger 1991;
Varenne and McDermott 1998). Ethnography becomes a method observing
“cognition in the wild” (Hutchins 1995), and for accounting for factors that are
systematically excluded from experimental psychology (McDermott, Gospodinoff
et al. 1978). This line of research also challenges the Piagetian tradition
dominant among many humanistic educators. While Piaget sees the engine of
learning in the organic, individualized but universal developmental readiness of a
child, sociocultural learning theory sees learning and development as a social act
that varies across different cultural contexts.
This intersection between cultural psychology and anthropology is my
intellectual home in educational research. Studying the 5thD project has been a
reflexive endeavor of examining my own theoretical and philosophical positions
and of redesigning my interventions with children in response to my findings.
The work of theory building “in the discipline” and cultural interpretation “of the
subjects” are inseparable. A term such as “learning” is both a native and a
theoretical category in my work. In our project evaluating the 5thD, our aim was
to capture the details of interaction at the sites and analyze them in relation to the
social and cultural structures of American life, and in turn to reevaluate our
theories and practice. We arrived at an understanding of the 5thD clubs as a
site of translation between different cultural codes, identities, and structuring
institutions in children’s lives. In our report for the Mellon Foundation, we
celebrated the intertwining of multiple competencies and the shifting, distributed,
and negotiated power relations that operated in the Fifth Dimension.
The 5thD mediates a social and cultural space between
entertainment and education, a persistent opposition in American
life in terms of how institutions are structured, as well as in terms of
how people think about what kids do and know. The 5thD is a
hybrid that incorporates elements of both entertainment (computer
games, recreational life) and education (school-like subject matter,
quasi-formal evaluation). At the institutional level, this is the fact of
53
the 5thD as an after-school program, occupying the space between
the school day and home life. At the level of learning processes,
this aspect manifests as the integration of play and learning. At the
level of the game, this tension can be seen in efforts to make
games both fun and skill inducing (Ito, McDermott et al. 1997).
We also characterized the Fifth Dimension as socially heterogeneous and
relatively non-hierarchical. One goal of the project is to muddy the age-based
hierarchy of knowledge, and computers become a tool toward this end.
Participants of different ages and with different competencies are encouraged to
work collaboratively on shared tasks. Kids often have greater mastery over
technology than the adults and sometimes, for bilingual children, language. They
are allowed to negotiate and set the agenda within the flexible parameters of the
activity system. Progress and assessment is internal to the system, and not
consequential, in sorting and labeling terms, for their school or home lives.
There is also a mythical entity called “The Wizard” that the children are asked to
write to via email to mediate conflicts and disputes, thus displacing some of the
disciplining work from the adults that staff the site. The undergraduates are
encouraged to occupy a position between that of researcher and child. “They are
like researchers in being ‘big people’ who come from the university. They are
like children in that they are still in school, still being graded, and still struggling
with adult authority” (Cole 1997).
The educational philosophy behind the 5thD is one that is distinctive,
resulting in a “laboratory” setting for observing children that differs from the more
common contexts of play in schools and homes. It would be a mistake, however,
to see this laboratory as cut off from mainstream social and cultural logics of
American life. The 5thD is a participant in the high-stakes cultural battles about
children’s education and socialization and the role of technology, arguing against
essentialist psychological versions of learning and advocating for education and
technology use that recognizes social, cultural, and political factors as vital
components of learning. It also grows out of the structural features of American
54
life in which the overlapping space between school and home, play and learning,
is taking an increasingly central role. The growth of certain alternative school
movements, humanistic education, and efforts such as the 5thD, reflect a critical
view of mainstream education held by a particular cut of progressive American
society. Those aligned with these educational alternatives see school as
excessively focused on standardized achievement measures, a place concerned
more with sorting and assessment than authentic and effective learning. In a
related vein, the child-centered philosophy of family, where kids are given a
degree of freedom in setting the agenda and pursuing their pleasures is a
powerful alternative voice in the discourse of child rearing.
The ideal of “authentic” and active learning, where the child is a willing and
active participant, is a child-centered approach that spans some Piagetian
developmental frameworks, sociocultural learning theory, as well as progressive
parenting. In contrast to disciplinarian and behaviorist approaches where learning
is a bitter pill to be swallowed under threat of punishment or promise of reward,
these approaches work to make the process of learning enjoyable and under the
control of the learner. This kind of child-centered approach to learning defines a
growing orthodoxy within educated middle-class America, an orthodoxy to which
I subscribe to in both my personal and professional life. While distinctive in
arguing against the biological essentialism of developmental models, the 5thD is
located within these growing sets of efforts to wed pleasure and learning, and to
challenge the traditional power hierarchy between child and adult. The software
used in the 5thD is also part of this shared social and cultural formation. The mix
of academic content and entertainment form of commercial multimedia software
has affinities with the educational philosophy of the 5thD project, and is another
site in which the move towards child-centered education is being defined. This is
one example of how the links between production and consumption happen
across a wide range of social locations that are tied together not only by the
literal circulation of commodities, but by a shared imagination and social identity.
55
As a fieldsite, the 5thD could be considered engineered and somewhat
distanced from the kinds of interactions one would find at homes or at schools.
There is a stronger peer group influence than in the home, and there is an
unconventional adult presence of undergraduate tutors and educational
researchers. The 5thD provides more access to a greater variety of software
products in the genres that I am investigating, where in the home, educational
software more commonly plays second fiddle to action gaming products and
television. The 5thD magnifies child interest in the educational genre of software,
by creating a peer status economy around play that would otherwise gravitate
towards mainstream action entertainment and television. The adult supervision
also calls out the academic content embedded in the games, making the overall
setting of the 5thD more attentive to educational concerns than most home
contexts of play. Another difference is that many of the social distinctions that
operate within unsupervised play contexts are erased. Girls are actively recruited
to engage with the technology, and at many of the sites, computer access is
given to children that don’t have computers at home.
These peculiarities are enabling of ethnographic observation by providing
a social context for play that is focused on the software at the center of my
inquiry. Opportunities to observe interaction and talk around play by diverse
populations are maximized, particularly the rare opportunity to observe children
and adults engage jointly with software. Whether the interactions in the 5thD
approximate what happens in the home is an empirical question that this work
cannot fully answer. The peculiarities of the 5thD setting are significant, and color
many of my cases. I do believe, however, that many of the interactions I
describe are representative of play at home and other contexts of play,
particularly those in which the child in the 5thD is playing independently at the
computer and engaging with more entertainment-oriented content. These are
connections and contexts to be pursued more extensively in future research.
What this dissertation does investigate is how play in the distinctive and well-
56
researched context of the 5thD is part of logics of American life that extend far
beyond the walls of the clubs.
I note the gender, ethnic, and class backgrounds of my research subjects
when they are known and relevant to the description, but these are not always
the categories that I have found to be most salient in the context of my research.
As an instance of action research that works to erase the significance of these
categories in local practice, these categories are of course present, but
somewhat muted in the actual examples of activity. For example, at the club that
I ran, teenage African-American girls emerged as technology experts even as
they found it difficult to gain access to their computer labs at school. They
described a sense of alienation towards technology in the school context related
to their identity as African-American women. Most significantly, the overall effort
of the 5thD, as well as the effort to create learning software, can be located
within the context of an academically-oriented, educated, middle-class, and
activist elite that seeks to influence other sectors of society through outreach
efforts like the 5thD, organization of alternative schooling, and production of
socially-responsible consumer software. Thus the effort of the 5thD and
children’s software development exhibits a particular politics and class identity
that is an important object of analysis in this dissertation.
In the chapters to follow, I analyze the interactions and children in the
5thD as distinctive and exemplary of certain cultural dynamics, rather than
representative of all consumers of the software in question. Varenne and
McDermott’s video-based analysis of how families dealt with homework is
instructive in this respect.
Our analysis is not based on replication. We do not ask whether
these families did exactly the same thing every night. In fact, we
are sure they did not. We ask instead how family members put
together a school literacy event in the midst of a group involved in
much else, including, that night, being videotaped (1998: 52).
57
The reflexive move is to see the engineering efforts of the 5thD as part of
the fabric of life that the reform is designed to reweave. While educationally
radical, the 5thD effort is a representative of the tensions in American life
surrounding education and our visions of childhood. It is an exemplar of an
influential countercultural but intellectually elite niche, distributed across linked
but distanced social contexts, that works to alter the power relations between
adult and child and to foster unalieanated learning experiences. The interactions
in the 5thD, where children play on a voluntary basis, but with the gentle
guidance of adults, is an ideal site for observing the social and cultural logic of
“learning through play” in action, the same cultural logic that animates the
software that this study also analyzes. As with many ethnographic endeavors,
this dissertation is about a distinctive cultural niche, but one that is defined
through an often diffuse set of linkages across various educational and
technological interventions and a long-standing discourse of social and cultural
reform. It is also one that is bracketed by hegemonic institutions of home and
school and the broader structures of American life. Rather than defining my
sample based on categories of co-location, “community,” or demographic
categories (age, race, class, gender), this dissertation uses cultural genre to
define the object of research. The cultural genres of “educative play” correlate
with educational and class distinction, but cross-cut boundaries of age and
gender, emerging as a cumulative effect of a wide range of institutions and
technologies in domestic, industrial, and educational sectors of society. This
dissertation takes one representative cut of this cultural genre, centered on the
efforts of the 5thD project and the development of the learning software for
children.
58
Making Connections
Analysis Phase One
My initial orientation in studying the 5thD phenomenon was to view it as a
networked community that communicated electronically, and my research
problem was how Internet communication happened between the sites. Early in
my participation, I made frequent and largely unsuccessful attempts at
implementing new networking technologies that would allow the researchers,
kids, and undergraduates to communicate more frequently and effectively across
the distributed sites. As my research progressed, it became clear that the
relations between sites were not only about literal communication between
people via email or any other communications technology, but also about
engagement in similar activities at different sites. The kids rarely communicated
directly with other participants at remote sites, but were still participating in a
shared form of social life. The kids are participating in a shared social formation
as kids at remote locales primarily in the sense of playing similar games and
participating in a similar activity system. In short, I began to see the factors tying
together the social group of the 5thD increasingly in terms of indirect relations
mediated by common artifacts and the consortium of educational reformers. This
recognition grew out of my growing interest in understanding the use of computer
games at the clubs as a substantive element of the kinds of cultural and
educational content that was being "taught" at the clubs. My focus began to shift
from communications technology to media commodities.
A focus on the games, as mediators and materializations of certain
cultural categories and social relationships, began to structure a research focus
that has resulted in this current study, which looks at how software commodities
are constituting related domains of experience for kids across multiple and
diverse localities. Clearly the games are not the only factors in producing or
reproducing social life in the 5thD; other salient concerns of those working in this
59
consortium include community relations, undergraduate education, general
computer literacy, bilingualism, and a host of other issues. These are all issues
that the many researchers affiliated with the 5thD have addressed in various
ways. The formal "evaluation" of the 5thD reform effort, which looks at these
other aspects of the 5thD, is documented elsewhere as a collaborative effort with
others in my research team (McDermott, Goldman et al. 1995; Ito, McDermott et
al. 1997); this dissertation is a different cut on the 5thD material, focusing on my
particular concerns in understanding the phenomenon of children’s software and
the role of media in social life.
My focus on software as an important part of the educational experience
of the 5thD grew out of a sense of disjuncture between the activity system at the
clubs designed by the educators, and the game content which is controlled by
distanced apparatuses of game development and distribution. While project
implementors are concerned with selecting good educational games for the
clubs, and spend much time designing curriculum for the games to be played for
maximum educational value, the actual content of the games is largely out of
their control due to the nature of software development and distribution
processes. Despite the fact that the games crucially define the content of the
5thD experience, they are an element of the clubs that is almost entirely defined
by those outside of the immediate 5thD community. Much of the work of the
local community is to reshape and appropriate those meanings that are coded
into the games to fit local contingencies and educational goals. As I worked to
define my research problem, this disjuncture appeared as an intriguing dynamic
that is a pervasive feature of people's experience with mass media and
commodities of various forms.
Objects like computer games make their appearance at local sites of
consumption as precoded artifacts designed by others who share some of the
goals and cultural orientations of the users, but are structured by a different set of
economic and political concerns. The production, distribution, and consumption
of these objects are both about participating in locally meaningful practice, as
60
well as about engaging with a translocal social network, a quasi-virtual
community that is constituted through the flow of commodities and translocal
networks. It is this dynamic between physically localized communities and
translocal communities mediated by mass media that began to delineate my
object of research. My dissertation written for my degree in education was the
result of a focus on how the games embed, structure, and are appropriated by
the local practices of the 5thD; my object of study was not a particular 5thD club,
nor the 5thD consortium per se, but rather the linked experiences across 5thD
clubs as they are defined by the engagement with similar forms of mass media
(Ito 1998).
In that dissertation, I analyzed different games for their structural,
technical, and content features and then looked at different interactional styles
that kids exhibited in relation to the games. Both these genres and interactional
styles partially make their way into this current dissertation as related to the
multimedia genres and vernaculars presented here. The final analytic task of
the education dissertation was to look in more detail at a particular child's
engagement with a particular game, to understand the processes through which
games were implicated in a child's learning, or in other terms, formation of
subjectivity. I developed two case studies of kids’ engagement with two games
that appear this dissertation as part of the production of multimedia genres.
Drawing More Things Together: Representing Telepresent Others
After ending my formal involvement with the 5thD research and filing my
education dissertation, I embarked on a new research direction that focused on
the relation between what I had observed at the 5thD and networks of software
production and distribution. My orientation was decentered even further from the
focus on cognitive development that characterizes most research about
children’s software. Sociocultural learning theory had given me a set of tools for
looking at cognition and learning as an act of social reproduction, a distributed
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process contingent on social relations, cultural codes, and artifacts. I wanted to
push this perspective even further to look at not only at consumption as a
translocal formation, but also at the links between production and consumption.
How were the children’s local interactions feeding back into the ways in which
software was being produced and disseminated? These were the issues that
motivated my study of the people and institutions that created and distribute
software.
For this effort, I was mostly on my own, a lone subjectivity that was jarring
after the collaborative context of my earlier work. Further, in contrast to research
among kids and my collegial network, I found myself in the position of studying
up (Nader [1969] 1972). I had to negotiate access in the power-laden field of
corporate America where I occupied a decisively low rung on the status
hierarchy, trying often unsuccessfully to market anthropological insight as a
valuable object to people busy in their professional lives, creating software and
making business deals. The overlapping networks between educational
research and educational software development worked to my advantage for my
initial set of contacts. The academic context of educational technology research
and the design and production of related consumer products are closely
interrelated, involving an overlapping set of people, institutions, intellectual
orientations, and publications. This later emerged as a key analytic dimension to
my work, but was initially a practically enabling reality for gaining access to an
elite community.
I began by tapping my personal networks of people involved in children’s
software for interviews. After getting a better grasp of this amorphous field, I
started emailing others looking for interviews. Responses were highly mixed.
People that were “complicit” in Marcus’ terms, who shared my educational or
research orientation were, almost without exception, the people that responded
favorably to my interview requests. These were people with backgrounds in
education, intellectually-active designers, and socially-minded entrepreneurs. A
small number of executives were willing to speak to me, but ended up being
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prohibitively difficult to schedule. When I did speak to them, their discourse was
so constrained by their role as corporate spokespeople, that it was a much less
fruitful ethnographic encounter compared to my other interviews where I fell into
easy rapport. I was able to speak to a few people involved in publishing and
organizing events related to children’s software, who provided a welcome metaperspective to the industry. Marketing was the arena where I completely failed to
make any inroads despite having contacts and despite repeated attempts.
Probably this is the one group that I wasn’t able to enlist into a shared set of
intellectual and political interests. I eventually arrived at nineteen formal
interviews with people involved in the industry, and a series of informal
conversations and observations conducted at trade shows and industry events.
Most of the interviews were conducted in person in the greater San Francisco
Bay Area. Four were conducted over the phone.
In addition to the interviews, I conducted a literature review on children’s
software and the industry. I looked at web sites with industry sales and
distribution statistics. The publications and statistical reports sold at these sites
were priced out of the range of a graduate student, but provided a trail of data
crumbs for information-hungry researchers and potential clients. The web was
also a source of industry PR materials and gossip in related bulletin boards. I
found all the books and sourcebooks available on the topic of computer gaming
and children’s software. In contrast to the mainstream entertainment industry of
computer gaming, there are relatively few publications that deal specifically with
the children’s genre, and much of the information I was able to find was on
targeted web sites oriented towards technologically-savvy parents and teachers.
Because I lacked access to much of the trade material, and because there were
no prior historical studies of the industry, I had to construct history out of
coverage in the popular media. The most time-consuming part of the textual
review was a search for references to the industry in the New York Times and
Wall Street Journal. With the help of two research assistants, I did a
comprehensive search for the topics of children’s software and computer games,
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and searches for all of the key corporations that I was tracking, from the
beginning of the eighties to 2001 in these two publications. Although there are
many gaps in the public record, I was able to gain an overview of the corporate
players involved. I also reviewed the magazine Family PC for advertisements of
children’s software over a period of a year and a half.
The disjuncture between production and consumption is mirrored in my
study by a methodological disjuncture between the detailed practice-oriented
data of my consumption study and the more distanced and abstracted data on
the production side. Ideally, I would have liked to have more practice-based
material on production and distribution, participant observing among software
developers and conducting observations at retailers of children’s software. The
financial and temporal limits of doctoral study as well as the corporate
boundaries of proprietary software development were, however, prohibitive for
this approach and worked against symmetry between production and
consumption. While a weakness in the study, this asymmetry is also
representative of the asymmetries that characterize production and consumption
of children’s software. The voice and influence of software developers is
embodied in the software, and in certain authoritative discourses that travel
through the mass media and official interviews with an ethnographer. Marketers’
voices appear in the ads that they create, and financial outcomes documented by
industry statistics. Unlike producers and marketers, children’s voice and
influence tends to lack representation in public culture other than as consumption
statistics. While developers do make extensive use of focus groups and product
testing to incorporate more qualitative dimensions of children’s experience in the
design process, this kind of material is never released in the public domain.
Children make their mark on the software in various ways, but there is little direct
representation of children’s voice in the process of defining products. My
consumption side work, documenting the actual voices and actions of kids, thus
works against a representational imbalance in public culture at large.
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One last group of actors needs to be mentioned. As I was completing my
interviews with software developers, the absence of parent voices and contextual
information about homes in my material emerged as a gap. While the 5thD was
immensely enabling in providing a context where I could observe informal
interactions around computers, as an afterschool care setting, the context
systematically excluded parental involvement and information about children’s
lives at home and at school. The lack of attention to parenting discourse and
practice, and lack of access to contextual features of the home have narrowed
the focus of this work to a study of certain alternatives to mainstream education
and consumption rather than a generalized statement on software consumption.
In order to get a feel for some of the missing context, I did scan parenting
newsgroups and web sites to see how parents viewed software for their children
in relation to other media types and other play activities. Web communities such
as ivillage.com and parentsoup.com provided easy access to some of these
conversations. In addition, I conducted interviews with seven parents, discussing
the issues that they grapple with in terms of software use in the home. This
aspect of my research is cursory, but did sensitize me to some of the concerns
and strategies that parents have around their children’s media and software
engagement. These interviews also provided a picture for the differences and
similarities between the home context and the 5thD that I outlined earlier in this
chapter. I am currently engaged in an entirely new fieldwork project that looks at
media consumption in the home, a site that is more broadly representative of
children’s media consumption.
Upon arriving at this heterogeneous body of material, I was left with the
task of drawing it together into a shared analytic and representational framework,
of describing links between production, distribution, and consumption that are
multi-directional and structuring of widely spreading social, cultural,
technological, and psychological effects. This was a daunting task. It is well and
good to gather a wide range of materials based on a market segment and media
genre, but it is quite another thing to document the relation between these
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materials as a theoretical and analytic effect. Unlike traditional single-site
ethnography, the interpersonal and material relationships between these different
actors needs to be demonstrated rather than assumed. This was not the “highly
overdetermined setting for the discovery of difference” that characterized the
traditional anthropological fieldsite as critiqued by Gupta and Ferguson (1997: 5).
By picking a spatially distributed field, I was grappling with a disconcertingly
underdetermined setting, where I had to construct a framework for describing
social and cultural difference in a context generally characterized by globalizing
effects and erasure of difference. How to even begin to theorize cultural change
and social negotiations when it is unclear whom and where the players are and
what the field of affiliations are?
I was looking for a description that differed from the documentation of
economic effects chronicled in the financial media and the documentation of
psychological effects chronicled in educational research, one that took a holistic
anthropological approach to psychology, culture and society, and applied it to a
spatially distributed object. The financial literature traces linkages based on the
flow of money irrespective of cultural content; in the educational literature it is the
flow of images and concepts disembodied from material relations. I was looking
for a series of linkages that were both material and semiotic, that tied together
these two domains through the specific technologies and relations of multimediacapitalism. Economic, cultural, and social outcomes are intertwined in the battles
over what kinds of content counts as educational, enjoyable, high or low status,
or worthy of spending money on. A game that teaches math becomes a
pervasive social and cultural fact because it encodes knowledge considered
culturally valuable, materializes a successful distribution model, caters to status
and achievement anxieties of parents, and contains content that enlists children
through pop cultural markers of pleasure and play. The dissertation was
eventually organized by genre, as an analytic category that united the social,
cultural, and material. I began with the categories of education, entertainment,
and hacking that emerged from my material, and followed them across the
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different institutional contexts of production, distribution and consumption. By
organizing instances of play along these categories, I arrived at the concept of
multimedia genre that united production and consumption, technology and
practice. These media genres reflect a form of symbolic cultural analysis that has
been foundational to my training as a cultural anthropologist. The cultural forms
under question are not, however, delimited by a physical locality and face-to-face
social group, but located and defined based on embodiment in media
technologies as they travel across networks of media producers, distributors and
consumers.
After scrambling, rescrambling, slicing and dicing my material innumerable
times, I saw a series of organizing themes emerging which eventually coalesced
into the threads of edutainment, entertainment, and authoring, categories which
may seem self-evident in retrospect, but were decidedly not in the midst of
analysis. These genre categories provided a representational framework for
drawing together a heterogeneous corpus of data and a theoretical framework for
looking at the relations between production and consumption, the local and
global which cut across these divides through integrated ethnographic
description. Defining my focus as a set of progressive and often reform-minded
cultural genres has clarified the structural characteristics of my focal population
and my own research identity as a particular brand of educational activist. While
the kids at the clubs and the families purchasing learning software do not
necessarily subscribe to this orientation or social position, engagements in the
5thD and play with software draw them into the purview of this educative and
activist impulse. Through a five-year research path, I found myself at last
grasping the contours of my “fieldsite” and “people,” a location and identity both
familiar and strange.
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Conclusions
At the end of my multi-sited journey through sites of play, debates on educational
practice, and offices in silicone valley, I have found myself confronting my own
assumptions about what is good for children, the role of the intellectual, and the
activist impulse. This is a reflexive recognition that has arisen less out of the
politics of representation and writing, than out of day-to-day and practical
collaboration in an interdisciplinary set of efforts to design technology and
learning environments. The contingencies of doing fieldwork in the context of
educational reform, and of gaining access to an elite set of cultural producers,
has meant that social and cultural identification and practical complicity and
collaboration were defining dimensions of this research. I have arrived at an
object of research that is centered on the efforts of people “like me” in a variety of
settings trying to both listen to what children have to say and do what is best for
them. This dissertation participates in strategic and prescriptive discourses
about childhood, working to denaturalize many mainstream versions of learning
and agency, but also creating new discourses that materialize through large
educational reform projects and technology design.
The chapters to follow do not focus on description of educational reform
and the dilemmas of concerned adults like myself, though this is a defining
backstory to the narrative. Instead, I seek to trace often invisible but important
linkages between my own subjectivity as intellectual and educator to the actions
and concerns of children and the logic of commodity capitalism. Tracing these
linkages is a process of confronting “our” often unacknowledged complicity with
domains that are experientially distant, as well as a process of defining a new
kind of translocal ethnographic object. This is not about a scaling up, a shift from
local to global or micro to macro. Rather, I see my “fieldsite” as a set of linked
particularities, a cluster of spatially distributed interactions related to each other
through shared forms of technosociality. Looking across multiple sites does not
mean that these sites somehow resolve into a vision of global or translocal
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process, but rather they point to new kinds of social boundaries and forms of
local experience that are embedded in different kinds of technosocial networks.
The kids who play computer games, game developers, and my own distributed
research network, are all implicated in materialized discourses about how we can
alter the nature of childhood, learning, and experience. This chapter is presented
as one voice in the debate on research positions and practices for a multi-sited
ethnography and the anthropological study of translocal objects, one that argues
for responsible engagement, reflexive technosocial practice, and ongoing
conversation both within the discipline and at the many sites through which
anthropologists might travel.
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3
Understanding Interactive Multimedia:
Narrative, Technical, and Interactive Encodings
In his influential essay on film and the mechanical reproduction of art, Walter
Benjamin ([1955] 1968) sketches some of the broad changes wrought in art and
representation, as a result of technologies of mechanical reproduction. He
discusses how the proliferation of copies and mass production of works of art
creates different experiences in both production and artistic experience. For
example, he notes how these new forms of media create a sense of closeness to
likenesses, the ability to possess art through its replication, while, at the same
time, losing the uniqueness or "aura" of a particular art object, its singular
location in history and space. In particular, he discusses the technical apparatus
of film as epitomizing these changes in the experience of art and media. Film,
with its multiple layers of technical mediation, coupled with an illusion of
immediacy, embodies the most spectacular features of new media, the ability to
reproduce technologized simulations of reality and distribute them widely.
Benjamin's work points out how the production of reality is being increasingly
technologized in ways that also render invisible the very apparatuses of their
production. "The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the
cameraman penetrates deeply in its web” (233).
With the advent of techniques of advanced simulation and digital
reproduction, we are encountering a situation, similar to Benjamin's half a century
ago, when the mode of production and reproduction of media is undergoing
substantial technical innovation. As new and rapidly changing media
technologies, computer games have not been subject to the depth and range of
analytic scrutiny as other forms of media. Additionally, any analysis of game
content is complicated by the hybrid anatomy of computer software, which
includes multiple forms of media, different layers of technical mediation, as well
as interactive qualities. Existing theories of mass media and narrative need to be
adapted and extended through a focus on both the technological strata and the
interactive qualities of the medium.
While non-interactive media are appropriately studied by a model of
consumption as "reception," interactive and network media tend to embody more
communicative aspects of media consumption. For example, fan communities of
TV series such as Star Trek constitute a quasi-virtual community that reshapes
the meanings of the mass media text, through fan zines, fan conventions, fan-tofan and fan-to-producer communication, Internet newsgroups and the like
(Penley 1991; Jenkins 1992). With computer gaming communities, similar
processes are at work, but players also have an opportunity to reconfigure the
actual software of the game through various plug-in features and user authoring
capabilities. The advent of networked gaming and Internet based software
distribution further compresses the distance between members of gaming
communities, and expands the flexibility of use and local appropriation. I am not
suggesting a radical break with earlier forms of media, but rather a difference in
inflection, where a notion of "reception" begins to shade into notions of "use,"
user authoring, and "community building." The interactive aspects of
computational media foreground the active, creative, and productive aspects of
media engagement. Engagement with these forms of media are defined by the
interaction between the flexible and situationally responsive human response and
the pre-programmed and relatively inflexible responses of the machine.
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Interactive media also foreground the importance of understanding the
technical and material substrate of mass media, since the technologies animating
the media content are constantly under flux, and are substantively engaged with
by consumers. Unlike books, TV, or film, the narrative content of interactive
media are not embedded into a stable material technology that is relatively
transparent to an established user. With computer games, the work to decode
and master use of the technical substrate is an important and substantive part of
the player experience. In this context, media reception needs to be theorized not
only as engagement with narrative encodings, but also with technical encodings,
machine language, and changing forms of hardware and software capabilities.
The interaction that occurs between a child and a piece of computer code
is a new kind of ethnographic object, which differs in many important ways from
interpersonal interaction and interaction with other forms of media. Not only must
ethnographic attention be trained to the particular rhythms of human-computer
interaction, it must also pay attention to the design and symbolic content of the
computer's "voice," as it is packaged and distributed through the software
commodity. Consumer software has been designed to imitate situationally
responsive aspects of human interaction, while at the same time partially
replicating other kinds of media that concretize culture in a relatively inflexible
way.10 Thus study of human-computer interaction must poach from frameworks
derived from cultural studies of media (looking at how meanings are packaged
into texts that travel) and human interaction studies (looking at how meaning is
constituted through interaction). This chapter begins by defining the technical
objects of this research. Then I look closely at one case of an adult and a child’s
play to explicate the dynamics of human-machine interaction with a computer
game. The first appendix of this dissertation provides further background material
on the anatomy of computers games in terms of their narrative, technical, and
10By
this, I am not referring to interpretive inflexibility on the part of viewers, but rather the fact
that users cannot easily reconfigure the texts themselves, or design customized pathways
through the representations.
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interactive features. The questions being asked in this chapter are: What are
interactive multimedia and children’s software? How do they differ from previous
forms of media? What kinds of interactions and engagements do they afford?
Definitions: Interactive Multimedia and Children’s Software
In the days of punch cards and batch processing, computers were not
considered “interactive” technologies. Users in the early years of computing had
to laboriously punch holes into manila cards and feed them through an enormous
machine, and then await the results. The application of the descriptor
"interactive" to computing was originally as a contrast to this kind of batch
processing computing; "interactive computing" was a term coined in the late
fifties to refer to real-time control of a computer, where the user could type in
commands and get immediate feedback (Suchman 1987: 10-11; Levy 1994: 29).
In her discussion of human-machine interaction, Lucy Suchman suggests that, in
addition to referring to real-time aspects of computing, a notion of interactivity
also points to the ways in which social and intentional descriptors are being used
to describe computational action:
A more profound basis for the relative sociability of computer-based
artifacts, however, is the fact that the means for controlling
computerized machines and the behavior that results are
increasingly linguistic, rather than mechanistic. That is to say,
machine operation becomes less a matter of pushing buttons or
pulling levers with some physical result, and more a matter of
specifying operations and assessing their effects through the use of
a common language. With or without machine intelligence, this fact
has contributed to the tendency of designers, in describing what
goes on between people and machines, to employ terms borrowed
from the description of human interaction—dialog, conversation,
and so forth: terms that carry a largely unarticulated collection of
intuitions about properties common to human communication and
the use of computer-based machines (1987: 11)
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The term "interactive media" embeds within it certain assumptions and
associations that link computers to human-like qualities such as intelligence,
responsiveness, and sentience. These issues have been explored extensively in
Sherry Turkle's book (1984), The Second Self, in her discussion of how
computers are "evocative objects" that invite reflection on the nature of human
mind. More recently, Turkle (1995) has written about people’s engagement on
the Internet and the multiplicity of identities afforded through these practices.
The computer has become a vehicle for a wide range of styles of engagement,
but foundational is this notion of "interactivity," which creates associations
between computer and interpersonal interaction and communication, and which
differentiates the capabilities of interactive computational media from other media
forms.
The term "interactive media," in contrast to "interactive computing," is of
uncertain origins, but surfaced around the mid eighties when terms such as
"multimedia" and "virtual reality" became part of American parlance. Interactive
media is a term that contrasts specifically with non-interactive or static media
such as television or books, highlighting the ways in which computation allows for
user input in an immediately responsive way. More current and more specific
than interactive computing in general, interactive media connotes computation in
the specific form of mass media commodity, spanning the range from singular
artistic pieces to World Wide Web (WWW) pages to shrink-wrapped CD-ROMs.
In theory, interactive media are not necessarily computational; some art
installations deemed "interactive" are mechanical rather than computational, but
all include the quality of real-time machine responsiveness. In common usage,
interactive media refers, then, to computationally-based mass media products.
Other terms that refer to similar objects are "new media," "multimedia," or
"digital media," foregrounding novelty, multiple forms of representation, and
computation respectively. "New media" is the term used perhaps most generally
and in a relatively non-specific way to refer to the use of computation in mass
media settings. "Multimedia" specifically refers to combinations of text, graphics,
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video and sound in computational media. The term came into popular parlance
with the advent of CD-ROM technology that enabled personal computers to
display graphics and sounds in an interactive format. Digital media, like new
media, tends to be fairly generally utilized, but is commonly applied to digital art,
particularly digital photography and computer graphics. Uses of "new media"
tend to cluster in the entertainment industry, functioning as a contrast to earlier
entertainment forms. The use of "multimedia" tends to cluster in computer
interface design circles, as a particular design direction, and "digital media" tends
to be used in artistic circles to stand in for the informatting of artistic processes, in
contrast to analog forms. In contrast to these other terms, "interactive media" or
“interactive multimedia” refers more specifically to "new" "digital" and "multi"
forms of media that allow for a high degree of user control, in a mass media form.
While computer animation, digital photography, and digital music are all forms of
new and digital media, they are not interactive media unless they are packaged
in forms that are responsive to user control or input. The term "media" serves to
distinguish between other forms of interactive software such as word processors
and spreadsheets, which are interactive and support user authoring, but do not
carry explicit narrative content. In short "interactive multimedia" is a term that
draws together mass produced content (media) and user-oriented, computer
enabled responsiveness (interaction).
Analytically, a series of characteristics can distinguish this new media form
from earlier forms such as painting, literature, film, and television. Interactive
media have a constellation of characteristics which, taken together, define and
distinguish them from other forms of media and which delineate important
analytic parameters for understanding their significance:
• First, interactive media involve real-time interaction. This is the quality that
refers to the original usage of "interactive computing" as real-time computer
response. While other forms of media are considered interactive in the sense
that one can pause a video, skim a book, or interpret any text in multiple
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ways, digital media radically expand the range of different interactional
possibilities, and customize them to more specific user inputs. A user not
only performs actions on the text, but also expects specific machine
responses to these inputs. This is the quality that invites, as Suchman has
pointed out, analogizing with human interaction, regardless of whether an
artificial intelligence is involved or not. Consumers of interactive media
become characterized as users or players rather than audiences, thus
foregrounding the active aspects of media consumption. User input and
types of interactivity can range from simple selection at forks in a branching
narrative, to substantive authoring functions which allow a player to design or
tinker with a virtual environment or their own on-screen identity.
• Another salient feature of interactive media are their non-linear narratives.
While many interactive media such as games and hypertext have narrative, in
the sense of described sequences of action, they differ from other narrative
media, such as film and literature, in that they are not designed to be
experienced in a linear sequence. Even games created with a somewhat
linear narrative logic, such as adventure games with a clear beginning and an
end, provide opportunities for exploration and backtracking not predetermined
by the game design. The narrative structure of interactive media is more
often zig-zagging, repetitive, random access, or circular as it is linear.
• Finally, interactive media, like most computational forms, are based on
multiple layers of semiotic and technical mediation, the most obvious being
distinctions between hardware, user interface and different layers of software.
This layering enables different levels of interaction and user involvement. For
example, certain games allow players to delve beyond the generic interface
and actually program different game levels, objects, and characters. The
layers of computer code thus correspond to a range of positions between
production and use; while a media producer still encodes the dominant
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content of the game, users may have opportunities not only to interact with
this content, but to reprogram it or add their own content into the game by
designing weapons, characters, or buildings. This is in contrast to traditional
forms of media that have a relatively clear binary distinction between
production and consumption. These multiple layers of mediation can also
create a certain opacity of the technical substrate, similar to what Benjamin
described in his analysis of film, where the apparatus that produces the
effects visible to the consumer is at least partially obfuscated.
Games are a particular form of interactive multimedia, defined by the following
characteristics that set them off from more informational multimedia genres such
as books, informational web sites, and encyclopedias.
• Most importantly games have a goal orientation and competitive aspects that
distinguish them from other forms of interactive media such as digital
reference books or guides. The competition may involve competing with
other players, through a score keeping system or through direct competition
in a multi-player game, or competition can be against the machine, as in an
adventure game where one solves the puzzles embedded in the game. In all
cases, games require a certain goal orientation, though it may be a fairly
open-ended one, as in a simulation game like SimCity, or a storybook-like
game.
• Another characteristic of computer games is eclecticism and borrowing in
style, content, and form. While most games attempt to provide a fairly
consistent fantasy scenario—medieval, cyberpunk, educational, etc.—all
games borrow and juxtapose style, content, and form from other games and
other media content. For example, it is common to see a similar play action
repackaged with a different theme, as in the case of a human combat game
(e.g., Street Fighter) being reinterpreted for combat between dinosaurs (e.g.,
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Primal Fear). Another common type of borrowing is between different types
of media, where successful content will be licensed from film, television, or
literature, and reinterpreted for computer gaming. While this borrowing of
content is not unique to interactive media, computer games have an
additional aspect of eclectic and multiple modalities for interacting with the
game. For example, even a fast paced first person action-game, such as
Marathon or Doom, provides informational map windows that translate the
play action into a different informational mode.
Players can often see
alternative meta-representations of their play while pausing real-time
interaction, viewing maps, statistics, and graphs.
• Games also provide an ambient environment for activity, which forms the
backdrop to and constraints for particular actions. This is the sense in which
games have been considered "microworlds," rule-governed systems that are
relatively self-contained but multi-faceted. This environment will generally
include a repetitive soundtrack, scenery that may or may not be relevant to
play-action, and a particular "physics" of the environment that defines
interactional parameters. These physics might include how objects and
interface elements jump, turn, or zoom, or how one selects and performs
actions on objects, such as typing commands, pointing and clicking, doubleclicking etc.
What I would like to call out here is the integration between media content
(narrative, characters, intertextual references) and the computational capability
for interaction, the ability for the user to influence the narrative outcome, explore
a media setting, and construct their own characters and settings. Technically
speaking, this integration is based on bringing together the computational
capability for responsive interaction that has existed since the late sixties,
speeded up with newer and faster processing units, and the expanding media
storage and memory capacity of personal computers through hard disks, CD78
ROMs, and most recently, DVDs. This fusion creates the uniquely compelling
and personalized user experience of engagement with interactive multimedia.
Children’s software is one type of interactive media that targets infants to
ten-year olds. After around ten years of age, children start being absorbed into
the mainstream adult software and media market, using adult tools such as word
processors and spreadsheets, and playing computer games that teens and
adults also play. Just as with other forms of media content, software crosses
over between the children and adult markets, but there is a clearly defined
market segment of children’s software that gets reviewed in publications like The
Children’s Software Review, and has dedicated trade shows like The Children’s
Multimedia Expo. Computer games are the dominant genre of children’s
software and interactive multimedia though there are a variety of other types of
software marketed for children, such as word processors, encyclopedias, and
Internet community sites. “Children’s software” is thus not isomorphic with
“software that children use.” Children play adult-oriented action games and
applications such as Microsoft Word and Netscape, just as they will watch the
news and quiz shows that are produced primarily for adults.
Titles in the category of children’s software are a narrow cut of products
that are designed specifically for an age-segmented market. Often this
segmentation is defined by educational goals targeting children as a population
that needs to acquire certain skills such as reading and arithmetic. Titles may be
oriented towards children’s developmental stage through simplified interfaces.
The other form of segmentation is by narrative content and genre. Puzzle and
action games designed for the adult market are often repurposed for the kids’
market by adding cute and licensed characters, perhaps timed to the release of
an animated feature. Other games such as SimCity 2000 crossed over from
being an adult genre to being taken up as a kid-friendly and school-friendly title.
These crossovers are facilitated by the production of separate teacher manuals
to accompany software, to frame use in ways appropriate to the school context.
With the exception of a small number of crossover titles of this sort, the market
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segment is a clearly defined set of software genres, providing a window into
cultural conceptions of childhood and age-appropriateness.
In the first appendix of this dissertation, I analyze the narrative, technical,
and interactive structures of computer games, drawing from approaches in
human-computer interaction that rely on J. J. Gibson’s theories of “affordances”
(Gibson 1986). Just as Gibson outlines in his theories of visual perception,
technologies have particular characteristics that users can perceive and “afford”
certain engagements. Computer games are limited in terms of traditional
narrative qualities such as plot and character development. The strengths of this
medium are in the interactive qualities that enable players to identify with a
particular viewpoint in the narrative space and design a unique trajectory through
the setting. The rest of this chapter looks specifically at the interactive qualities
of computer games through a detailed case study of one instance of play. I
begin by introducing theories of human-machine interaction in relation to studies
of interpersonal interaction.
Interaction, Collusion, and the Human-Machine Interface
Studies of the details of interpersonal interaction, including conversation,
gestures, and proxemics, have amply demonstrated the intricacies of the
alignment work that goes into the construction and instantiation of a shared set of
interpersonal understandings (eg., McDermott and Tylbor 1984; Lynch 1985;
Goodwin 1990; Kendon 1990; Duranti and Goodwin 1992; Schegloff 1992;
Garfinkel [1967] 1994). These studies have demonstrated how the structure of
language and meaning is played out and engaged with in historically specific,
context dependent, dynamic, and ongoing activity. In their essay on "the
necessity of collusion in conversation" Ray McDermott and Henry Tyblor (1984)
describe how the meaning of an utterance can only be fully understood as part of
an ongoing set of interpersonal and institutional negotiations, and that analytic
attention should be trained not to meaning sealed within the "inside" of an
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utterance, but rather meaning as it is achieved through the collusion of multiple
actors in complex social relations.
Collusion derives from a playing together (from the Latin com plua
ludere). Collusion refers to how members of any social order must
constantly help each other to posit a particular state of affairs, even
when such a state would be in no way at hand without everyone so
proceeding. Participation in social scenes requires that members
play into each other's hands, pushing and pulling each other toward
a strong sense of what is probable or possible, for a sense of what
can be hoped for and/or obscured. In such a world, the meaning of
talk is rarely contained on the "inside territory of an utterance";
proposition and reference pale before the task of alignment, before
the task of sequencing the conversation's participants into a widely
spun social structure (219).
McDermott and Tyblor thus insist on a relational view of language, not
only in the structuralist sense of relation and difference in signification (Saussure
1959), but also in the interactionist sense of meaning as a product of historical,
relational, interpersonal, practice. In line with other interaction based studies of
language use, McDermott and Tyblor describe how even the most mundane
human activities are a product of constant and subtle acts of interpretation and
alignment, which both index and utilize a wealth of structuring resources,
linguistic, material, and institutional.
Given an interactional view of meaning production, media artifacts present
particular analytic problematics. Mass media and computer games have a set of
semiotic and material relations "hardwired" into a material substrate, whether this
is a page, film, or a floppy disk, but these meanings acquire social significance
through engagement in everyday practice. An interactional view of language has
much in common, conceptually though not methodologically, with ethnographic
work on how mass media texts are interpreted at local sites of consumption
(Radway 1991; Morley 1992; Mankekar 1999). The attention, again, is on how a
text is made meaningful through its embeddedness in and indexing of the
ongoing activity of everyday life. A mass media text, as a stabilized or "encoded"
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configuration of meaning, mechanically reproduced and distributed across wide
distances, is socially meaningful only to the extent that it is rendered sensible in
particular, local, circumstances of consumption. In contrast to analytic positions
that locate meaning only in the "inside" of a text, and read a determinate set of
meanings based on the text itself, ethnographic approaches to mass media have
looked at how these artifacts are part of the ongoing flow of social life, and
acquire meaning through their location in social and historical contexts. The
same is true for games, as particular "texts," or standardized, rule-governed
systems. In her analysis of girls' play with hopscotch, Marjorie Goodwin
describes gaming as a meaningful activity, determined, not by the formal rules of
the game and the parameters of the hopscotch grid, but rather by the interplay
between these structuring resources and the embodied practices of play:
In hopscotch, a player systematically moves through a grid of
squares drawn in chalk or painted on the sidewalk, street,
playground, or other flat surface. The marks on the grid construct a
relevant visible field for action, which orients those who know how
to read it to the sequence of moves through space that must be
traversed while playing the game... the grid makes possible the
forms of action and local identities that are constitutive of the game:
for example, stepping on or outside a line count as a consequential
event, an "out" in which the hapless player loses her turn. Of
central importance to the conduct of the game are not simply
internal representations (e.g., an abstract rule set of some sort), but
rather a dynamic interplay between the player's body and visible
marks in a structured external environment (1995: 263).
Computer games, as a particular kind of text, based on a rule-driven
model of interaction, engages varied and indeterminate interactions and
relationships with the daily lives of children, institutions, and other interlocutors.
Like a game of hopscotch, a computer game embodies a stabilized set of rules
and meanings that are locally engaged with in various and flexible ways by
children, and acquires social meaning through these ongoing engagements. The
meaningfulness of a game is thus an interaction between the stabilized sets of
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meanings and rules "coded" in the game, and the active sense-making
processes of children in local situations of play. This is not to say that human
activity is governed by a set of abstractable rules, as in a game theoretical
account of behavior, but rather, on the contrary, that games, rules, and stabilized
texts are malleable resources in the production of meaningful action, and that in
turn, rules and structure are produced as a result of these ongoing practices.
Study of computational media is enabled by the ability to observe
interactions in ways not available to ethnographers of non-interactive media:
mouse clicks and keystrokes are accessible ways of observing the act of
"reception" (use) of computational media. The challenge, however, is that the
meanings of computational media are often less effectively explored outside of
the context of use (i.e., through post hoc conversation). Since there are multiple
and contradictory pathways that one can take through many of the new forms of
computer games, it is difficult to unpack the consumption-side meanings
instantiated by a game without looking at the activity context. For example, a
child might play a simulation game for weeks, treating it as a palette for drawing
blobs on a grid, without ever engaging in the game as a representation of
something in the world at large. This contrasts to, say, film, where viewers of a
given movie might reasonably be expected to have journeyed through a similar
set of images, albeit with different interpretations. While Sherry Turkle's
work(1984; 1995), looking at people's accounts of their relations with machines,
demonstrates that in-depth ethnographic interviews are an effective means of
eliciting cultural conceptions about computing and broad genres of software,
there is an absence of detail around the meanings embedded in particular pieces
of software. This contrasts to work in mass media studies that have successfully
conduct detailed interview-based studies of the meanings surrounding a
particular TV show or film (eg., Bambara 1993; Mankekar 1993) rather than
looking at conceptions of film or TV as a generalized social experience.
In the case of both people and interactive texts, language and meaning
are necessarily indexical and situated within a set of common cultural
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understandings, but the different embodiments of human and machine make for
an asymmetric inter-agentive encounter. The computer game relies on a set of
pre-programmed semiotic relations animated by a standardized and massproduced configuration of computer circuitry. The success of a piece of software
is predicated on its stability and inflexibility across situations, its ability to reliably
produce the same responses and interpretations based on standard inputs. We
want our word processors to reliably save and format our documents, and we
want our games to respond consistently when we input answers to certain
questions. For people, stable and common understandings are interactional
achievements, based on ongoing collusion between people with unique life
histories and richly embodied sensory awareness of the world. Conversation
analysts have demonstrated that even moments as simple as asking for the time
or saying a greeting are occasions for widely variable and situationally
responsive negotiations. In contrast to the interpretive inflexibility of machine
understanding, human understanding indexes a richly indeterminate set of
meanings and interpretive resources. Computer games, no matter how
sophisticated, are based on a freezing or standardization of meanings in order for
them to function translocally, as mass produced objects. By contrast, while
people certainly share a common set of cultural resources, these meanings are
constantly in flux, idiosyncratic, and situationally responsive.
The result of this asymmetry in interactional resources is that humanmachine interaction has a peculiar rhythm and structure, where the person is
continuously compensating for the inflexibility of the machine, as well as trying to
guess at the underlying structure internal to the machine. In actor-network terms,
this is the sense in which stabilized technologies enlist people into their
sociocultural network, as durable and inflexible objects in the social landscape. It
is the interaction between this stabilized sets of meanings, and the dynamic and
heterogeneous contexts of human play, that is the topic of this section. The
remainder of this chapter outlines a theoretical departure point for this work in
Lucy Suchman's analysis of human-computer interaction, and then analyzes one
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example of game play as a way of drawing from this framework and extending
into the particular domain of computational media.
The Problem of Human-Machine Communication
In her book, Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine
Communication, Lucy Suchman (1987) analyzes the interactions between people
and a function-loaded copier with a computerized, interactive interface. Drawing
from ethnomethodological frameworks and previous studies of face-to-face
interaction between people, Suchman posits a basic asymmetry in the interaction
between people and machines: "(P)eople make use of a rich array of linguistic,
nonverbal, and inferential resources in finding the intelligibility of actions and
events, in making their own actions sensible, and in managing the troubles in
understanding that inevitably arise" (180-81). By contrast, machines "rely on a
fixed array of sensory inputs, mapped to a predetermined set of internal states
and responses" (81). Through close analysis of interactional sequences of
copier use captured on videotape, Suchman demonstrates some of the
interactional outcomes of this asymmetric communication. Of particular interest
are breakdown situations, where the responses of the machine, as anticipated
and preprogrammed by systems designers, are not appropriate to the specific
needs and situations of the users, and human and machine are unable to engage
in mutually intelligible action. For example, Suchman has documented many
instances when the user and machine have been unable to orient to a task, such
as making double-sided copies of a document, because of the mutual
unintelligibility of their respective actions.
Suchman's analysis points to the differences between the semiotic and
material capabilities of a human and machine, and some of the peculiarities of
interaction and communication across this divide, the most salient of which is the
asymmetry between predetermined and situationally informed response. As with
any media, whether it is print, film, radio, or television, computer software
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ventriloquizes for its creators through the body of a material technology—a page,
a screen, a mouse, or a keyboard. As reception studies of media have amply
demonstrated, a representation acquires meaning as an effect of human
interpretation and encoding of meaning, rather than through the force of its own
internal operation. What is curious about computer software, however, is its
double layer of signification, of "internal" computer code at one layer, and visible
interface encodings at the other, only the latter of which is directly available to
and interpretable by the user of a machine or the player of a computer game.
Unlike non-interactive media, computer software embeds within its internal
operation the force of interpretation, the ability, albeit a primitive one, to associate
a set of symbolic elements, associations that are often unexpected to the user. A
computer takes user input and performs operations based on the user input, in
ways that are invisible to the user or only partially represented at the interface. It
is this sense of opacity, the distance between human and machine interpretive
stances and capabilities, which can be both a problematic and enabling feature
of interaction with computers.
Examples from Suchman's study are illuminating of this sense of mutual
opacity, of this distance between human and machine codes and interpretive
capacities. In many of her examples, users of the copier are attempting to
complete a complex task with multiple steps, such as making a set of doublesided copies from a single-sided, bound document. Through the course of a task
of this sort, the copier communicates to the user through a display that provides
instructions such as "place your original face down on the glass," or "close the
document cover." The machine is able to gain knowledge of the user's status
and activity through a limited set of sensory inputs, such as the closing of the
document cover, the selection of the number of copies, or the pushing of the start
button. Progress along a multi-step task is made through the fulfillment of if-then
conditions that speculate as to the status of user activity (e.g., if the document
cover is closed, this means that the user has placed an original on the glass,
then give the next instruction to the user). Situationally relevant information,
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such as whether the user has a bound or unbound document, or whether the
user knows what a "document cover" is, is systematically unavailable to the
copier. This opacity, however, goes both ways. The user, too, is lacking
situationally relevant information about the internal states of the copier and the
semantic relations of its encoding. While the interface provides the user with
information about each step in a preprogrammed procedure for action, the user
lacks access to the actual logic of the copier's sequential operation, the
conditions it needs to fulfill to move along the multiple steps of a complex task,
and an understanding of the machine language that drives these procedures.
When the designer has successfully anticipated a user's sequence of
action, human and machine action are mutually comprehensible, the task is
completed without incident, and the user leaves the interaction with a sense that
s/he has engaged with an "intelligent" machine. In situations of breakdown,
however, the machine is frozen into a set of preprogrammed procedures and
interpretations that are not only out of alignment with the particular situation of
the user, but whose logic is incomprehensible and inaccessible to the user.
Computer games, as a form of mass media, are a far cry from Suchman's copier,
in terms of the activity that they invite, the computational complexity of their
encodings, and the narrative meanings mobilized, but Suchman's insights on the
disjuncture between human and machine understandings still holds. The starting
point, in an analysis of interaction involving computational devices, is the
peculiarity of this communicative encounter.
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FIGURE 3.1
SCREEN SHOT FROM LANGUAGE EXPLORER
Screen shot reproduced with permission from Nordic Software, Inc.
Exploring Language with a Computer Game
One example of play with a game with a simple interface and functionality
illustrates this relationship between predetermined code and indeterminate local
meaning, and some of the texture of human-machine interaction with interactive
media. In this bit of activity, a graduate student and an eight year old are playing
together with a game called Language Explorer. The task is a simple one. The
machine presents a set of words, with blanks above them, and a set of pictures
that correspond with the words (figure 3.1). The goal of the game is to click on
and drag the pictures into the proper blanks. The pictures can be dragged to any
part of the screen, but will only stick in the blanks above the words. Once all the
pictures are placed, the computer will drop any incorrectly placed pictures back
88
down to the starting position. If the pictures are all placed correctly, they will stay
in position, and animate.
The semiotic and functional relations encoded in this game are relatively
simple, and thus provide a useful model to preface analysis of games with more
complex anatomies. The content of the game can be understood based on a
simple means-end model, where there is a starting state, an ending state, and a
limited set of interactional possibilities to move from the one to the other. The
cultural knowledge embedded in the system is one of simple signification
between word and picture, where a designer has determined that one
corresponds to the other. Interactionally, the only available form of human
communication with the machine is through the dragging of pictures into spaces.
From a starting state with blanks and pictures in a random jumble at the bottom
of the screen, the player is invited to fill in the blanks. The machine has two
possibilities for communicative response (only after all blanks have been filled):
drop some pictures back to the bottom or leave pictures in the spaces. The
responses signify, respectively, a disjuncture and a match between the semiotic
relation programmed into the machine, and the one instantiated by the player.
The desired end-state, from the point of view of the designers/educators, is
correspondence between the signification relations encoded in the machine, and
the signification relations instantiated through the activity of the player.
Although this game is simpler than the games in the chapters to follow,
similar interactional dynamics still hold. Games are resources that provide
narrative content and interactive capabilities that players can take up in flexible
ways. Despite this flexibility, however, there is a stubbornness to machine
response that encourages gradual alignment to the relations instantiated by the
machine rather than flexible interpretation of the narrative elements, particularly
when there is an adult present who orients a child in a more goal-directed way.
In other words, the technology embeds certain cultural and interactive relations
that have persuasive force, in part because of the inflexible nature of the
technology, and in part, because other users share similar cultural frameworks.
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The industrial relations that bring a piece of software to the hands of a child are a
highly mediated form of interpersonal communication that works through the
body of a machine to instantiate the vision of the designer and programmer. The
voices of software creators are privileged ones even at these distanced sites of
play because they have enlisted stubborn technologies and local adults with a
shared interest in education and play.
While the structure of the Language Explorer software is simple, and
seemingly transparent, the actual dynamics of use can be quite complex,
especially when they involve a young child who does not necessarily orient to the
suggested associations between a word and a picture. In the example to follow,
the interpretation of the game is further complicated by the participation of an
English-speaking adult, a bilingual child who is an early reader, and a Spanish
language game. Sonia is a regular participant at the one of the bilingual 5thD
sites, and is one of the younger kids at the site, known for her sassy charm. The
adult working with her is a graduate student that is involved with the 5thD project,
and makes occasional visits to Sonia’s club. While the semiotic relations
between game elements are absolutely fixed within the parameters of game
functionality and interaction, at local sites of use, the meanings of these elements
are indeterminate, and subject to a wide range of interpretive flexibility.
In the interactional sequence below, collusion with the meanings encoded
in the machine is achieved only as the result of an extended series of
negotiations, where the machine provides repetitive feedback and an adult works
to orient the child to what the machine is designed to communicate. This case is
presented in order to illustrate the dynamic between the interactional capabilities
of a game, a child and adult, when they engage in joint activity. The child begins
by flexibly interpreting the narrative elements on the screen in a playful and
open-ended way. The adult and the machine gradually orient her to the learning
task of matching words to pictures. In contrast to the inflexible responses of the
machine, the adult is able to provide nuanced and situationally responsive
interaction that eventually cements a common space of understanding and goals.
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This is a microcosm of processes of cultural reproduction through media artifacts.
The three players of child, adult, and game have aligned themselves to a set of
meanings that the game and adults sought to “teach.” Far from being a result of
transparent “decoding” at sites of play, cultural reproduction, in this example, is
about highly contingent and ongoing alignment between multiple social and
technological actors.
This first sequence of activity opens with the computer booting up the
game, and a title splash screen appearing, with the words: "Language Explorer."
S= Sonia
A = Adult
1
S: OK, You know how to play this?
2
A: No, uh-huh. What do you do?
3
S: (Picks up a picture and starts move it around the screen as she talks.) Try to find the
name, the name that says—Hmmmm. Do we put it up here? Over here? (Places first
picture in top left space.)
4
A: The name that fits with the picture?
5
S: Look we got to put it right here in the blanks, OK? (Places a second picture in space
immediately below first picture.)
6
A: OK. What's that one? (Points to screen.)
7
S: Martillo
8
A: This is ahhhh?
9
S: Nina. (Places third picture below the second, completing one column of pictures.)
10
A: What is that?
11
S: Naranja. (Places another picture at top of next column.) See what I'm doing?
(Places another picture below the previous one.) And then I take them off, and then I
do it again. OK.
12
A: Ahh.
13
S: Pajaro, pajaro. (Places another picture below the previous one, completing second
column.)
14
A: Ahhh.
15
S: Let's do this.
16
A: But...
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17
S: you see what I'm doing? (Places another picture in new column.)
18
A: Isn't the name supposed to go with the picture?
19
S: You can do it any way you want to.
When the game screen comes up, the child begins by determining the
adult's knowledge of the game: "You know how to play this?" (line 1). When the
answer is negative, she explains and exhibits her state of understanding of the
game. She begins to explain the relevance of "the name" to the game, but
interrupts her own exposition, "hmmmm," and orients toward the interactional
choice of where to put the picture: "Do we put it up here? Over here?" (line 3).
The adult, in the meantime, has decoded the game rules, and explicates them for
her in light of her seeming confusion: "The name that fits with the picture" (line 4).
Taking a contrary and didactic tone, Sonia insists, "Look, we've got to put it right
here in the blanks, okay?" (line 5). The adult again orients to the task of naming,
that is, establishing the signifying relation that ties together word and picture
(lines 6, 8). Sonia then starts to move pictures into the blanks, in sequence from
right to left, top to bottom, while calling out names (lines 7, 9, 11, 13). These
names refer to elements in the pictures—martillo (hammer), nina (girl), pajaro
(bird)—bird they are not the words that are written below the blanks. For
example, the picture that Sonia identifies as "martillo," which depicts a hammer
shattering an object, is identified by the game as "romper" (to break). As she
busily fills in the blanks, explaining, to the adult, the task at hand, the adult
protests—“But”—and finally cuts in—"Isn't the name supposed to go with the
picture?"—again trying to establish the relation between the two game elements
(lines 16, 18). She responds, "You can do it any way you want to" (line 19). In
short, Sonia is operating from knowledge about the interactional capabilities of
the game (move pictures, fill blanks, repeat) and certain narrative meanings
available at the interface (a hammer, a girl, a bird), while the adult tries to orient
her to the semiotic relations between game elements (the match between a
written word and a picture). She goes on to demonstrates her knowledge of how
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the pictures only will stick in the blanks, and not in other parts of the screen (lines
20, 22):
20
S: Look. (Drags a picture to a space between two blanks, and it drops back down to the
bottom of the screen.)
21
A: Oh, OK.
22
S: See, look. Look what happens. (Again, drags a picture to a space between two
blanks, and it drops back down to the bottom of the screen.)
23
A: So it doesn't go there.
24
S: Yeah, it goes. Yeah so we put it right here. (Places a picture.) See, and that one
goes over here. (Places a picture.)
25
A: And that fits there.
26
S: Get up here, get up here. There. (Places last picture in final blank, and most of the
pictures fall back to the bottom of the screen.)
27
A: Whoa.
28
S: You see? Magic. You see? Magic.
29
A: Magic. Yeah, pretty good.
Some transcript omitted where she continues to place pictures in spaces at random.
30
A: So what does it, what are you supposed to do? I still don't, I mean like you put the
pictures in the places, but—
31
S: And then, then some stay OK?
32
A: Some stay. OK.
A few minutes later, Sonia has filled in all the blanks, and most of the
pictures fall back down to the bottom of the screen. "You see?" She exclaims,
"Magic. You see? Magic" (line 28). She sees the pictures dropping to the
bottom of the screen as an example of a fun special effect, and an indication of
playful narrative meaning, rather than an indication of an incorrect answer. In
this sequence, Sonia displays an alternative set of meanings that can be brought
to bear on the game, which are fully "explanatory" of (i.e., make sense of) game
elements, but which mobilize a set of associations that are not coded into or
93
intended by the game design. For Sonia, a graphic representation calls forth
multiple associations—a hammer, something breaking, a bright color—and
interaction with the machine is about exploration of a space of possibility—some
things go in some places and not in others; and some things migrate while others
do not. Sonia has interpreted game responses as ad hoc rather than rationalistic
and pre-determined, game syntax as associative rather than syntagmatic, and
game narrative as whimsical rather than evaluative. Like the kids in the chapters
to follow, Sonia has a wide range of interpretive resources that enable her to take
pleasure in the visual and spectacular features of the game, even as adults try to
orient her to educational goals. She is a confident and regular participant in the
5thD and is comfortable talking back to an adult. Her interpretation of the game
is robust, and has held up through at least one other instance of her play of this
game, and holds ground for some time despite the adult's persistent though
gentle interference pattern.
In alliance with the game, the adult does eventually succeed in displacing
Sonia's interpretation of the game interface. He begins to read, in halting
Spanish, the words below the blanks. "Detras de means...?" he asks. "What?!"
Sonia responds, turning to look at him in surprise. He repeats himself, pointing
to the screen, and Sonia begins to orient rapidly to the designed goal of the
game, to match the words to the pictures. They arrive at an interactional
dynamic where he will read a word, she will translate for him, and they will work
together to figure out which picture corresponds to the word. They proceed in
this manner until all of the spaces are filled, and the computer responds by
dropping a substantial number of the pictures down to the bottom of the screen.
In contrast to her earlier delight at the "magic" of this computer response, now
Sonia is dismayed, and responds with a loud "What?!" (line 33). She then orients
immediately toward working out the correct answers with the adults help:
33
S: WHAT? OK, let's do this. Tell me what this is. (Points to blank.)
34
A: That one? (Points to blank.)
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35
S: Uh-huh.
36
A: Deba... debah.
37
S: Debajo.
38
A: Debajo de. Esto. (Points to picture.)
39
S: OK this one. (Puts picture in blank.)
This example illustrates some of the interactional and interpretive
dynamics involved in play with an interactive informational technology. The basic
asymmetry that Suchman identified is clearly exhibited here: a child with a rich
set of imaginative and interpretive resources, and a game that responds to her
activity with simple, formulaic responses, based on a narrow set of interpretive
resources. The game's responses are in marked contrast to that of the adult,
who repeatedly engages the child in multiple ways, in response to the nuances
and timing of her utterances and actions. The first characterization of this
interaction, then, follows directly from Suchman's analysis; in contrast to
interpersonal interaction, where people are constantly molding their responses in
collusion with another's, human-machine interaction is characterized by an
asymmetric relation of a person with a wide interactional range, and a machine
with a small set of interactional resources.
A related feature of this interaction is the contrast between the range of
meanings produced on either side of the human-machine interface. Sonia and
Language Explorer exchange the same limited set of tokens across the same
graphical user interface (GUI)—information about whether a picture has been
moved into one location or another. And both Sonia and the game process the
exchange of these tokens as meaningful "social" acts (i.e., acts that provide
relational information). The contrast is between the game, which interprets a
token based on conformity to a simple binary logic (a correct or incorrect match),
and a child, who is able to produce meaning out of not only the location or a
picture in or out of a grid, but of the dynamic quality of its motion, the varied
nuance of the graphical form, and the relation to other experiences (i.e., "magic").
In other words, there is a disjuncture between the semiotic logic of the software's
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interactional algorithms (if this, then that), and the semiotic logic of the narrative
elements (multiple associative networks of meaning), as represented at the user
interface. This disjuncture is exploited in game design as a way of infusing
game characters with evocative and multidimensional qualities despite the fact
that they may only have a limited set of preprogrammed responses.
The graphically rich aspect of the media form also points to some
particular features of multimedia that distinguish them from more "functional"
computational objects such as copiers, or text-based drill-and-practice exercises.
The narrative logic of the game affords multiple meaningful interpretations that
are pleasing to Sonia but not significant to the game play mechanic—the way the
pictures move and how the characters and objects are represented at the
interface. While Language Explorer has a very thin set of narrative elements,
they are still interpretable as meaningful by Sonia apart from the goal-oriented
logic of the underlying machine functionality. The animation and graphics are
experienced as “magical” special effects that elicit delight apart from any goaldirected aspect of play. Other games that will be analyzed in the chapter to
follow have even more depth and layering between narrative, technical, and
competitive aspects. The case of Sonia is a schematic microcosm of these
particular game features and aspects of kid-game interaction.
In observing this interaction across even a brief segment of time, the two
people in the interaction collude in shifting, resourceful, and complicated ways,
organized in part by the inflexible task set up by the machine. While the machine
doggedly reproduces the same sets of meanings—a set of meanings that would
not be comprehensible to a young girl with limited reading skills and an adult with
limited Spanish knowledge—the two players are able to orient quickly to both
their respective capabilities, as well as the capabilities of the software. Sonia
and the adult have thus demonstrated superior interpretive and practical
flexibility, which has enabled them to move ahead in the task, but it is the
meaning intended by the game designers, rather than Sonia's idiosyncratic
readings, that were, in the end, reproduced. This triumph of the meanings
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generated through the game production is due in part to the stubbornness of the
machine, as well as the adult's alignment with these meanings. This particular
interaction, in addition to providing an illustration of the asymmetric interactional
dynamics between human and machine, is also a microcosm of processes of
cultural reproduction, where people and artifacts engage in a complex collusional
dance, which serves to instantiate a set of meanings that are locally, and at least
momentarily, hegemonic. These hegemonies are the result of an alignment of
multiple factors such as the presence of guiding adults and peers, as well as the
design of the technology. They need to be instantiated moment by moment,
situation by situation in order to retain their hold on children’s imaginations.
This case could also be considered an instance of genre ambiguity. Sonia
initially reads the game as an entertainment title, designed for fleeting pleasures
read primarily through the idiom of children’s visual culture. Part of the adult’s
work in this interaction is to facilitate genre recognition, orienting Sonia to the fact
that the game is not only about enjoying brightly colored animations, but
progressing along a set of discrete progress-oriented tasks. One could imagine
Sonia continuing to engage with the software as an entertainment title if playing
within a peer group setting. The adult eventually orients to the software as an
educational genre. He is stubborn in his resistance to her modality of play, and
the software is stubborn in its preprogrammed responses. Both the adult and the
game display the habitus of responsible and progress-directed educators. The
5thD has succeeded in inflecting a reading of the game to align with the
educational orientation of the software creators, a small but clear shift in the
micropolitics of representation and social reproduction, a translocal handshake
across a highly mediated set of social relations.
Interface
Beginning with the recognition of an asymmetric relation between human and
machine, and complemented by a notion of multiple technical and narrative
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layers of interactive media, the human-machine interface becomes a crucial
analytic focus, the site where meanings are translated across a fundamentally
disjunctive divide. In the case of a copier, an interface is valued based on the
transparency of its translations, the ability to provide the user with relevant
information about machine functionality, and the ability to translate user
intentions into a form clearly intelligible to the machine. In the case of games,
this relation is more complex, due to their multimedia interfaces, their narrative
qualities, and their interactive range. Most significantly, games, as a form of
narrative media, rely on the production of a vivid fantasy environment, and
deliberate obfuscation of the technical substrate that produces this fiction as its
special effect.
Regardless of how transparent, the human-machine interface is a site of
mutual mystification between person and technology, a meeting point of
incommensurable regimes of value (Appadurai 1986), where one coin of the
realm is exchanged for a different currency. The interface, while still the site of
translation between human and machine understandings, is also the site of
meaningful opacity. Just as in film, where the suspension of disbelief is based on
a technical apparatus of digital special effects, artful editing, and tricks of lighting,
all of which are invisible to the spectator, the fantasy effect of multimedia is also
dependent on the (at least partial) invisibility of the technical substratum, and a
propped up illusion of a simulated environment. The complicated webs of
signification, as children navigate these different layers of narrative meaning,
interface, and game functionality, are the topic of the three chapters to follow.
In contrast to much of the common usage of the term interface, this study
suggests an interactional and socially contextualized view. Some in the software
design community have suggested that a notion of interface be expanded out
from a narrow view of buttons and windows on a screen to include the broader
social relations (i.e., technical support staff, manuals, etc.) that make software
intelligible to users. In his study of the history of the term in computer design,
Jonathan Grudin (1990; 1990) traces how the notion of computer interface grew
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out of the growing separation between production and use. Due to the esoteric
nature of early computational practice, the first computer users were almost
inevitably also programmers, and were comfortable with and relied on the
visibility of machine language in their computer use. As computers became more
widespread and more complex, designers and programmers needed to represent
machine functionality in ways accessible to non-programmers, and the notion of
interface represented these more accessible representations that were distanced
from basic machine language. Grudin's work suggests that, as computers
become embedded in more complicated social networks, designer's notions of
computer interface need to be expanded out from this narrowly technical usage.
This study, following on Grudin's as well as Suchman's work, further suggests
that interface be understood as an interactive process, constantly under
negotiation, rather than a static set of encoded relations or structural positions. It
also suggests that there are multiple interfaces and entry-points to a given piece
of software, relations that extend beyond the co-present encounter to include the
processes of coding and designing the software, engaging with particular
elements of the software, and alternative narrative and functional interpretations.
The human-machine interface is importantly the site not only of happy
mutual understanding and successful alignment between human and machine
actors, but also the site of conflict, tension, confusion, complaint, and
misunderstanding. As with face-to-face interaction, human-machine interaction
is the occasion for relationships to be instantiated, relationships that carry the
usual weight of social conflict, power relations, and institutional imperatives. In
their discussion of "macro-actors" Michel Callon and Bruno Latour (1981)
describe the particular kind of power that comes from stabilizing and fixing a set
of relations into a durable network of actors. This conglomerate, which they call
a macro-actor, is defined by its durability and translocal reach, as well as by its
ability to bend the will of others around the space that it occupies, by the sheer
force of its stubbornness and size. What Latour and Callon describe is the power
of the machine to insist on an inflexible set of meanings and demand, invite, and
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cajole human alignment. No matter how many times Sonia tries to get the
machine to see her point of view, the machine will persist in dropping pictures to
the bottom of the screen until they are exactly the way it wants them.
By contrast, interactional studies of human action describe a different
source of strength and resilience, one based on the ability to index flexibly a wide
range of meanings, and to work around the stubbornness of any particular object.
Sonia can create meaningful play out of a relatively simple toy, bending the
meanings suggested by the machine into something that is personally evocative,
a source of amusement, and an occasion to have some fun with a friendly adult.
She is also empowered by her superior ability to figure out the machine's point of
view; for all we know, Sonia could grow up to become a computer game
programmer and code her own view of the world into a machine. In the larger
scheme of things, Sonia can also get bored and walk away, unless she is called
into alignment with the machine by a greater institutional power (i.e., a teacher),
or by an undergraduate playmate. The machine enlists Sonia into a stubbornly
defined set of relations, but Sonia, in turn, enlists the machine as a peripheral
element in the overall fabric of her life. The power dynamic at the interface,
between the hegemony of a set of encoded meanings and the reinterpretation,
unraveling, and reconfiguration of those meanings through in situ play, is a
persistent theme of subsequent chapters.
The interface is also the site at which children form relationships with
machines. While certainly different, in both depth and range, from interpersonal
relationships, relationships with computer games are important factors in the
learning and identity formation of many children. Children's relation to
computers, both in terms of technical literacy, and their orientation to the broader
cultural codes embedded in computer games, is a dynamic site of identity work,
where children pit their skills and wills against the game goals and the deliberate
opacity of the interface. Much of the work of "beating" a computer game is about
decoding the peculiar nature of machine communication, and delving below the
visible clues of the interface to work out the underlying logic of machine
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semantics. Continued engagement with computer games is also importantly
about progressive alignment with the semiotic relations that are encoded into the
game, as well as the concomitant social and institutional subject positions implied
by those relations.
When looking at interactive multimedia as a particular computational form,
the interface emerges as uniquely layered based on the relations between
narrative and functional encodings. The goal of this chapter has been to lay out
a working framework for understanding some of the basic features of interacttive
multimedia and children’s engagement with this new media form, drawing on
existing theories of narrative, on one hand, and interpersonal and humanmachine interaction on the other. Through the case of Sonia and Language
Explorer, the work has been to apply these existing theories and extend them
into the domain of interactive multimedia. In contrast to most human-computer
interactional approaches which focus on computational tools or communications,
interaction analysis of computer games needs to pay more attention to narrative
meanings, goals, and competition, as they are coded into a mass media form.
Much work has been done analyzing the symbolic content of games, and
conducting interview-based analyses of people's conceptions of games and
computers (See Appendix 2). What has received less attention is study and
observation of the practice of game play in situ. I believe much of this lack is due
to the methodological difficulties of participant observing technologically
mediated and spatially atomized practices. Since much of current computer
gaming occurs in the context of the home, with solitary players, it has generally
only been through post hoc interviews, experimental laboratory studies, and
observations at game arcades that research has been conducted on game play.
Enabled by the unique context of the 5thD clubs, this project provides a rare
analysis of PC-based computer game activity. Additionally, the lively talk and
social interaction around game play at the 5thD clubs enables a socially situated
analysis of the discourse of computer gaming.
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In short, the interactive aspects of computer games demand interaction
and activity based understandings of media consumption as well as
understandings of interpretive process and narrative meaning. It has been
important not only to talk to kids about their interpretations of games, but also to
observe their game play, and what aspects of the games they actually engage
with. Since computer games embed both narrative meanings as well as
interactive qualities, their study can be productively informed by mass media
studies approaches and interactional studies. The chapters to follow take this
analysis as a starting point to look at the cultural-social-technical conglomerates
that I have called multimedia genres, merging cultural, social, and technical
analysis to look at the distributed negotiations and outcomes of the production
and consumption of children’s software.
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4
Creating a New Category:
From Learning Software to Edutainment
In an article for Byte Magazine published in 1984, Ann Piestrup describes a new
media category that she calls “graphics-based learning software.” “Only recently
are computer scientists and educators beginning to collaborate to create learning
software that can fulfill the promise of the personal computer to transform
education.” She argues that unlike text-based computer-aided instruction
approaches or entertainment titles that require little interaction on the part of the
child, “powerful learning software programs, such as learning game sets and
builders, use graphics to convey meaning, not to decorate the screen”(1984:
215). Her article reviews software titles produced at the company she founded in
1979, renamed The Learning Company in 1983.
I met with Piestrup, who now goes by Ann McCormick, many years later,
in the year 2000, at Buck’s Café in Woodside, at the heart and peak of dot com
deal-making. She reflects back on her experience in the eighties and describes
the heady sense of excitement at the time in creating a new category of media
and a new category of learning experience that differed, on one hand, from
instructional software being used in schools and on the other hand, from video
games. “We created a new category by working with an Atari game designer and
educators that were serious. We weren’t trying to mimic zooming video games
but we were mimicking real-time interactivity.” “I didn’t want to call it educational
because to me that meant schooling, dusty, institutional. That’s why I called it the
Learning Company not the Education Company.” The Learning Company (TLC)
went on to become one of the largest names in children’s software, and was sold
to Mattel in 1998 for $3.8 billion.
Despite being burned numerous times in business dealings through the
years, McCormick is still an impassioned entrepreneur and spokesperson for the
uses of computers to support learning. She shows me her new business
proposal to create new learning environments that make use of the growing
power of today’s personal computers and networking infrastructures. “I want
every child in the world to be able to get the basic skills they need to function
thoughtfully with graceful feelings as well.” A former nun, school teacher, and
educational researcher, McCormick is an irrepressible missionary for the cause
of computers in enhancing learning, particularly for disenfranchised populations.
We want to do lifelong learning for the whole world. And there is
assessment going on constantly and we make sure they move all
the way through the math, science, and readiness that they need.
We think about the beauty of the structure and thinking of those
subjects and not just the nuts and bolts.
She sees her work as a religious quest for human equality, based on “a
conviction that stems from my sense of human fairness that extends to all
children.” For McCormick, literacy is a basic human right for empowerment that
ensures a voice in the social world.
McCormick embodies the passion and dedication of the early developers
of learning software who felt that computers could enable child-centered,
egalitarian, and engaged approaches to learning. Her challenges in realizing this
vision in the commercial sector also point to the contradictions and tensions
inherent in crossing the boundaries between school and home, education and
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entertainment, nonprofit and for profit realms. This chapter explores the
negotiations between educators such as McCormick, capitalist enterprise, and
changing structures of technology in the emergence of a genre of software that
came to be called edutainment. Beginning with a discussion of historical roots,
this chapter describes the cultural context and social distinctions related to this
genre of software, and how they manifest in everyday play in the 5thD.
Animating Learning: the Historical Roots of Edutainment
Learning software for children is contextualized by discourses of childhood,
learning and play that have framed earlier media such as children’s literature and
developmental toys. As with these other forms of children’s commodity culture,
children’s software was initially conceived of as an educational tool for children
that wedded the virtues of play, learning, and literacy, drawing from a growing
twentieth-century orthodoxy within the middle-class American home that learning
should be fun to be effective. Freed from the classroom’s narrow curricular
constraints that defined early drill and practice computer-aided instruction,
commercial software was designed to be appealing and engaging for children,
and to compete with other leisure-time activities. This dynamic negotiation
between the educational demands of schools, achievement concerns of parents,
and the desires and pleasure of children is a central one in the lives of American
children at least since the late nineteenth century, defining the ways in which
children’s media and toys have been produced and consumed. McCormick and
other early innovators in children’s software occupied a shape-shifting patch of
turf in this contested terrain, a domain of children’s media that is designed to be
entertaining and engaging for children, while also appealing to parental concerns
about learning and achievement.
Educational children’s products have sustained themselves in a variety of
forms as a niche market for educationally minded families through the years.
Unlike commercial media such as radio and television that rely on advertising for
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revenue, the development of commodities such as books, comics, toys, and
software are funded directly by their consumers, and there is some relation to
supply and demand similar to classic commodities (Kline 1993: 121). Thus
books and software can thrive on relatively small consumer bases given low
production costs, low volume and an effective mode of distribution. By contrast,
mainstream broadcast media programs must attract mass audiences to sustain
advertising revenue and justify positioning on limited airwaves. Consequently,
highbrow and educational content has had a difficult fight for survival in
broadcast media without public subsidization. For these reasons, the
development of children’s software shares more similarities with books and toys
than with radio or television, though software draws content from television and
vice versa.
In book publishing, children’s content was initially characterized by highly
didactic, moralistic and religious tracts of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. The mid-nineteenth century was a turning point in the production of
media commodities directed at children, seeing the growth of fiction that was
written to delight and engage children. Titles such as Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland and Fern’s Hollow were indicative of a freeing of children’s literature
from its religious and didactic roots to a more playful and imaginative model for
children’s literature. The next hundred years saw a blossoming of children’s
fiction, the establishment of a related segment of the publication industry, and the
growth of a new genre of children’s literature in the form of the comic book (Kline
1993: 89-97). In contrast to television and radio, books are considered a vehicle
for achieving both basic and cultural literacy, and thus have always been a
preferred form of media for bourgeois sensibilities. Even without overtly didactic
content, children’s literature has occupied the privileged terrain of learning media,
marketable as a highbrow commodity to middle-class families. Describing the
current state of children’s literature, Stephen Kline writes that the children’s book
industry in Canada and the US is “a niche market, based on a narrow segment of
the population buying a lot of books: mainly the wealthy and educated book106
oriented segment of the market, people who still see books as vital tools of
socialization” (1993: 96).
Toy consumers, by contrast, have a more mixed demographic, and
learning toys are one small but resilient segment within the broader toy industry.
In his history of the American toy industry, Gary Cross describes the growth of a
toy industry infused by mass media in the 1930s with the advent of Mickey
Mouse and Shirley Temple dolls. He describes an alternative trend in toy
production, however.
Not all parents in the 1930s bought their children Mickey Mouse
hand cars and Shirley Temple dolls. While toymakers were selling
Brownies and Kewpies, psychologists and teachers were promoting
plain wooden blocks and pegboards as early learning tools (1997:
121).
Cross describes the growth of new parenting experts and manuals in the
1900s, and a rational approach to childrearing that he calls “scientific
motherhood.” Contemporary efforts to make learning enjoyable can be placed
within an established educational tradition of Jean Piaget and Friedrich Froebel
who believed in the educational potential of play.
Parents influenced by the new childrearing theories understood that
play shaped youthful character and behavior as well as learning.
As late-nineteenth century society mechanized and prosperity
increased, and as parents had less need for children to work,
reformers recognized a need to turn the child’s play time to
productive use (Cross 1997: 123-4).
Ellen Seiter analyzes advertisements in Parents magazine during this period of
growth of educational toys from the 20s to the 50s. “Parents continually repeated
the platitude that play was educationally valuable”(1995: 66). “Toys could
guarantee joy yet be instruments of hard work and achievement. What more
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could anyone ask from a commodity?” (Seiter 1995: 67). “Play had become the
‘work’ of children. And work required tools (Cross 1997: 129). Cross continues.
The educational toy did not seek to adapt the child to the group or
to the consumer culture of suburban America. Rather it aimed to
pass on to the next generation the traits of the individualist and the
innovator which had been so prized in nineteenth-century America.
Similarly, most of these child-development experts valued the
virtues of fewer rather than many toys, quality rather than
quantity… Blocks and durable dolls represented none of the throwaway mentality or faddism of the Kewpie-doll culture. They and
other educational playthings were intended to perpetuate Victorian
values by developing the child’s character and intelligence. This
was a formidable task. It required that adults take charge at a time
when parental authority was being challenged by a growing
consumer culture and mass media that beckoned children to want
novelty and fantasy worlds. To many middle-class parents that
consumer culture seemed to express the narcissism and quest for
immediate gratification that bourgeois Americans identified with the
lower class. And it threatened to engulf their children as they went
to the movies and ached for those flashy toys offered by Louis
Marx. The ideals of self-directed play, with objects of simple design
had nothing to do with the appeal of character toys. Educational
playthings represented, to middle-class parents, a bulwark against
the tide of commercialism and its threat to undermine parental
authority and Victorian values (: 134-35).
This bourgeois view of childhood play as a privileged and generative site for
developing the agency of cultural producer, or “worker,” was established in
opposition to a hedonistic, “consumptive” or “recreational” view of play that was
associated with licensed products and children’s “junk culture.” This period saw
the emergence of the contemporary cultural distinction between high and low
children’s culture and the integration of this distinction with processes of class
differentiation.
After the ascendancy of television in the fifties, these cultural and social
dynamics changed quite dramatically, and the Victorian parental orientation
toward childhood discipline and intellectual development has been
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overshadowed by the influence of a fast-paced, commercial, fantasy-based
children’s popular culture. Middle-class attitudes towards restraint and denial in
consumption have eroded in the face of television and the ubiquity of children’s
popular culture. Educational toys are marginalized in an era of novelty toys and
discount toy retailers, though they are still an important niche market, particularly
for preschoolers. The orientation towards making play a site of productive work
has been inflected differently though has not disappeared. Among a more
educationally conscious sector of the middle-class, there is continued resistance
to faddish toys in favor of educational toys developed in earlier decades.
Additionally, as boomers question the power dynamics of the Victorian
households that they grew up in, a more child-centered and permissive approach
to parenting has taken hold in the liberal arm of the white middle-class. The
more conservative idea that play should be governed by the logic of work is
recently mirrored by a complementary but more progressive view that learning
should be governed by the logic of play.
For educated families across the political spectrum of the middle-class,
there has also been a growing tide of resistance to commercial children’s culture
based on these recognitions of play as a key site of socialization. A torrent of
publications aimed at the educated middle-class argue against children’s
exposure to media and licensed commodities, ranging from conservative calls to
a return to wholesome family values, to left-wing attacks on negative gender
stereotypes in commercial media. The market niche of non-licensed and
educationally-marked children’s products, ranging from wooden train sets to
classic children’s books and Lego blocks become a source of an anti-mainstream
cultural capital that unites the anti-commercial sentiments of certain sectors of
both the conservative and progressive middle-class. This tide of resistance has
important elements of critique of mainstream culture, and is pursued for the goal
of bettering the lives of children, but it is also tied to the production of cultural
capital and class distinction in this country.
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Seiter has critiqued an ideology of “anti-commercialism” of the educated
middle-class who spend their money on expensive toys of European
manufacture. While she critiques the gender and racial distinctions that get
reproduced through children’s lowbrow popular culture, she also critiques the
middle-class view that associates this culture with the cognitive and moral
failures of the working class.
It is necessary continually to attack the smug self-satisfaction of
educated middle-class people who believe themselves to be
cleverer than those who do not attempt to monitor, mask, or deny
their own television viewing, who believe that other people’s
children are already ruined by ‘exposure’ to television (1995: 6).
Seiter points out that whether disseminated in highbrow toy boutiques or
in retail superstores, and whether made of plain wood or character-adorned
plastics, these toys are all forms of “commercial culture,” but only the latter is
marked by an unreflexive ideology of anti-consumerism. “[W]e need to accept
that contemporary parenting is always already embedded in consumerism,
although the scale, the size of the market, and the prestige associated with the
goods vary greatly from class to class” (3). Certainly most proponents of
educational toys see the best interests of their children rather than class
differentiation as the goal of their commodity choices. At the same time, Seiter’s
critique is an important reminder that even these well-meaning and progressive
intensions are part of the production of class distinction that mark certain children
and families as more successful, intelligent, and disciplined than others. In
examining children’s software, we need to interrogate its role in the production of
social hierarchies, as well as acknowledge the progressive and educational
ideals that it embodies.
The efforts of educational software designers in the early eighties were a
revival of longstanding ideas of the pleasurable pursuit of literacy and
educational play. Contrasting the computer to the mind-numbing and “passive”
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medium of the television, creators and marketers of educational software argue
that the medium merges the fast-moving appeal of computational media with
active engagement and learning. Like educational toys that originated in the 19th
century, educational software is seen as a bulwark against video games and
repetitive, hedonistic, and violent play. Software produced by companies like
TLC are played on computers rather than game consoles, the “good screens” in
contrast to the “bad screens” of television (Seiter 1999: 247). Although
mainstream commercial licenses are increasingly dominating children’s software,
companies like TLC have tended to shy away from the commercialism implied in
mass licensing, creating their own characters or linking up with PBS content such
as Blue’s Clues and Arthur.
Like books, the term “literacy” is often attached to the use of computers, a
cultural marking differentiating it as a highbrow and “difficult” media form,
structurally set off from “illiterate” and developmentally regressive forms of media
such as television and video games. In fact, like with books, technical literacy is
considered a worthy learning goal of using software regardless of content. Even
children’s software with no overt educational content, and with no reading literacy
involved, can tout technical literacy as a learning goal. For early developers such
as McCormick, their goals revolved around putting technical tools in the hands of
the disenfranchised and alleviating the oppressiveness of dominant notions of
education. But efforts toward technological empowerment can cut both ways,
particularly when they are contingent on expensive products such as computers
and software that are differentially distributed to people of different classes.
Unless reform efforts address commodification and distribution issues, technical
literacy becomes one more element of cultural and material capital that
differentiates the learned and literate from the uneducated and illiterate. This
kind of tension between agendas of intellectual development and the systemic
processes of social and material differentiation are distressingly familiar to
progressive educators and industrialists who seek to create socially-redeeming
products. As Varenne and McDermott (1998) have argued in their description of
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“successful failure,” constructions of intelligence and learning inevitably invite
constructions of failure and social distinction, often thwarting the best intensions
of educators and reformers. These are the social and cultural dynamics that
frame the development of the edutainment genre of software, as well as the 5thD
context of play.
From Education to Learning and Back Again
At the same time that McCormick was producing software titles such as
Gertrude’s Puzzles, Rocky’s Boots, and Reader Rabbit, other educational
researchers at the University of Minnesota were beginning to commercialize
products such as Oregon Trail and Number Munchers. The Minnesota
Educational Computing Corpation (MECC) was originally funded by the State of
Minnesota in 1973, and became a public corporation in 1985, riding the
successes of these software titles. Jan Davidson, a former teacher, started her
company Davidson & Associates in 1983, developing titles such as Math Blaster
which, in its various incarnations, has been the best selling piece of math
software through the years. These software titles, all originally produced for the
Apple II, became the pioneers in the new market for educational software for
home use. While growing out of school-based uses of computers, these new
products were designed for the home user and the commercial market. They
departed from strictly curricular and instructional goals of the majority of schoolbased software, incorporating visual and narrative elements from popular culture.
They took computer-based learning out of the behaviorist and school-centered
context of drill and practice software and into the era of child-centered personal
computing, where the child was given more control to author and manipulate the
content of the online world.
The late seventies and eighties saw the founding of experimental efforts
such as the 5thD, Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow (ACOT), the Vivarium project
at the Open School in Los Angeles, and programs at the Bank Street College of
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Education, which piloted these new technologies in experimental educational
settings. User communities and development communities were in close contact
in the Apple II and early multimedia era of educational software. Bank Street
developed their own software as well as operating an alternative school. Alan
Kay, one of the developers of the Macintosh, participated in launching an
educational technology program at the Open School (Kay 1991). Seymour
Papert, who developed the Logo programming language at MIT, also ran
educational programs in various schools with his technology (Papert 1980).
Apple computer had a large education division that worked with ACOT schools in
developing curriculum and providing computers. They also had research
divisions that were incubating the multimedia products that were to become the
next wave of learning software. While there were consumer products being
developed at this time, they were oriented to a small market of like-minded
educators and parents. Development costs were low enough with the minimalist
platform of the Apple II that it didn't require extensive markets to support
development. Graphics were simple, but still managed to convey basic
educational principles such as the logic of circuitry in Rocky’s Boots (fig 4.1).
Most of the early innovators in educational software had backgrounds in
formal education before turning to these commercial efforts. These early years in
the groundbreaking of the industry were characterized by a sense of optimism
and social mission. Piestrup, quoted in a report by the Harvard Business
Review, describes this sense of mission, tying together the heady promise of
personal computing that was budding in the early eighties, with the already
blossoming educational mission of promoting active, engaged, and entertaining
learning for children.
Our core values here involve our desire to prepare children for the
computer age. We want to do that with technical excellence in
computing. We want to use the very best mass market micros to
do that, to do it playfully, engage the kids, involve them, get them
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FIGURE 4.1
SCREEN SHOT FROM ROCKY’S BOOTS
Screen shot reproduced with permission from The Learning Company
excited about learning, give them an active goal so it’s not a sugarcoated pill where there’s some dinky reward or something. Its
really involving children in a way that they become totally excited
about learning and forget that it’s a task. Using TLC programs is
like building something with an erector set where you get totally lost
in the process. So our goal is to offer that kind of learning on the
computer specifically for skills that are needed in the future. No
one is quite doing that, building thinking skills, ability to analyze, to
construct, to approach things from different angles, to think flexibly,
to reason carefully, and to do that in a way that you’re building
something, not destroying it. A real explicit value is: we don't
accept software that blows things up. We don’t like blowing things
up because they are aliens. We like finding out about aliens!
There’s a lot of belief about our work being good for people and
that really drives us. It isn’t just selling soap.
Jan Davidson, in an interview with The Children’s Software Review,
echoes a similar sense of mission that was primarily educational rather than
business-oriented.
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When we started the company, I remember first having to make a
big decision—“Am I going to be a teacher or a business person?”
That was very hard… I always thought of myself as a teacher and
felt that I was betraying my goals by leaving the profession (Revue
1997).
Titles such as Math Blaster, Reader Rabbit, and Oregon Trail are all
considered classics that continue to be re-released. Many of the products that
were created for the Apple II are still considered the best titles among children’s
software today, upgraded and updated with newer graphics and sounds, but still
retaining the same content and play dynamics.
Elizabeth Russell, who was at
TLC when I interviewed her in 1998, describes how she still considers these
“evergreen” titles as some of the best.
One of the evergreen products here is the Oregon Trail. It’s one of
the oldest pieces of educational software and it’s still one of the
best. It’s 26 or 27 years old, and teachers will still talk about this as
the ideal of what a good piece of software is, because kids apply
math skills and thinking skills to real world problems. And then
they face the consequences. Those kinds of things make a
program good.
In addition to classics such as Oregon Trail, this period of innovation saw
the establishment of the basic formulas and genres of children’s software that
continue to be reproduced and repackaged today in a variety of titles. Oregon
Trail established the genre of educational travel adventure, where kids need to
calculate their rations and supplies, traveling through a simulation of a historical
journey. Similar titles such as Amazon Trail have followed in Oregon Trail’s
footsteps. Math Blaster represented a more behaviorist but entertaining drill-andpractice model where kids are given rewards for completing math problems that
they can use as bullets to play shooting games. It is a more literal hybridization
of educational (drill and practice) and entertainment (shooting games) idioms.
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Although products such as Oregon Trail continue to be popular, and other
genres like Sim games and detective games also get included in the educational
category, the learning software industry currently sustains itself on learning
adventure games. Games such as Math Blaster and TLC games such as Reader
Rabbit and Gertrude’s Puzzles embed academic problems and tasks within an
adventure game format. Kids progress through a fantasy adventure by solving
various puzzles and problems along the way. This format has proved to be the
most resilient and reproducible, and dominates current educational software. It
has the benefit of integrating an entertaining adventure storyline with a flexible
structure for sequentially presenting problems. All of the current lead products in
learning software such as the Jump Start, Blaster, and Reader Rabbit series are
based on this model. This model also makes economic sense to developers, as
they can reuse the same game engine—the underlying software for creating the
virtual world—and plug in different characters, storylines, and problems, thus
reducing overall development costs. Versions of Jump Start geared towards
different grade levels can all be produced with different stories and content, but
reusing the same game engine.
As the educational software industry has matured over the past two
decades, the ground-breaking approaches of educators such as McCormick and
Davidson have been converted into an established industry model that is more
formulaic then revolutionary. Both McCormick and Davidson have left the
companies that they helped create, and both cite differences with executives that
currently run the companies they were associated with and who have been more
focused on short-term corporate earnings. The design of games has been
systematized into a formula and established genre called “edutainment,” a label
that McCormick “abhors.” Davidson explains that she and her husband “had
differences of opinion with the new owners over matters of company goals and
values.” The interview probes further and she explains: “Companies need to be
purpose-oriented as well as profit-oriented. Many media companies that create
movies, television programming and software are saying that you just can’t run a
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business without compromising on standards, but I don’t agree” (Revue 1997).
In my interview with McCormick she is even more direct, having been forced out
of TLC early in its history.
I sold every share of stock. I wanted nothing to do with it. I sold all
my stock for a dollar a share. When it went to sixty-five, I lost thirty
million dollars making that decision. And I don’t regret it… They
made it impossible to transform education alongside making huge
profits by doing the same little programs over and over. Eventually
that led to the industry crumbling because it didn't deliver on the
promise of creating a resource that assures all children can learn
what they need. TLC didn't make any transformative products after
that, even though technology capabilities leaped forward.
McCormick’s constructivist educational philosophy and egalitarian goals of
reaching the technologically disenfranchised were converted through commodity
capitalism into a way of delivering shallow curricular content to middle-class
families. This transformation is an indicator of how media content is inseparable
from the economic conditions in which it is produced and circulates. Even when
designed towards the promise of social change, the market-responsiveness of
commodities means that they often succumb to the inertia of established cultural
categories, market segments, and social distinctions. Social change needs to
pursued at all levels of the circuit of production, distribution and consumption, a
daunting task for anyone aiming to transform the relations between technology,
social hierarchy, and learning.
In the eighties, new companies were founded by educators with high
ideals and new technology and products were distributed to a small market of
like-minded educators and computer aficionados. The nineties saw the
proliferation of PCs, the consolidation of software industries, and the emergence
of a mass market in family-oriented software. Instead of being sold at specialty
computer and hobby shops, by the nineties, most of the volume of children’s
software was being sold at superstores such as Cosco, Walmart, CompUSA,
Toys R Us and Office Depot. Career CEOs had pushed aside company
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founders, and by the end of the nineties, the children’s software industry had
largely consolidated under two conglomerates, one headed by Mattel, and the
other by media industry giant, Cendant. The 2000s saw more buying and selling
of companies such as TLC, Knowledge Adventure, and MECC between different
media and entertainment giants, but no new companies emerging to challenge
dominance in this arena. The networks of technology, people, and capital were
extended far beyond the boundaries of the original small-scale market of
progressive intellectuals and technologists in the nonprofit sector. A larger
market, mainstream retail, and more resource-intensive forms of technology have
led, ironically, to the demise of what many have felt to be quality products. The
greater production expenses associated with cutting-edge technology and
graphics also means that there are higher economic barriers to innovation,
lending more inertia to the conservative tendency.
Now most development budgets are spent upgrading graphics and sound
and developing content in established formulas rather than on developing new
models for interaction or game design. The development process has shifted
from a socially-minded orientation to transforming education, to a market-driven
focus on streamlining and generating profit in a competitive corporate climate.
One developer describes how in current titles, unlike the early TLC products, “the
impetus for these games comes from marketing. This is retail marketing, not
school marketing.” She describes how results of market surveys and shopping
mall intercepts define the initial parameters for a new product, and then the
designers are given a budget, time frame and a schedule. “The budgets have
been shrinking. The calendars have been growing shorter, so there’s a lot of
pressure to turn things out quickly.” She describes how these market pressures
limit content development. “It’s been quite honestly very frustrating to people in
this company to have smaller budgets, less time. There has been a very great
emphasis on reusing assets. Some of this makes good sense and some of it is
jut cost cutting and corner cutting.” She continues.
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I’m amazed at what our learning specialists and producers can do
with shorter time and shorter budgets. They still turn out good
products. But the market pressures are there for example for these
grade based products. Well, if you’re going to do something for fifth
grade and you’re going to cover the major content areas, you’re not
going to do any of them in any kind of depth.
The content of educational software reflected these shifts in the market
and distribution. While the look and feel of learning software has benefited from
the higher-end graphics and professional quality production of a mass market of
multimedia PCs, the content has grown increasingly systematic, and marketed
based on brand recognition and achievement anxiety rather than innovation in
design and depth in content. This is happening at a time when the technology
has the potential to support much richer forms of content than those available in
the early years. Products that have easily-represented marketing “hooks” like a
licensed character, established brand, or the claim to transmit strategic cultural
capital are easier to disseminate in the current commercial ecology than products
with more open-ended, complex, and multi-referential goals. These shifts in
orientation also reflect the quickening climate of the “new economy” of the
nineties, with the habitus of achievement, penetrating deepening levels of
subjectivity, is deemed essential for competitive success. The current crop of
products capitalizes on parental anxiety about whether their children are
“competitive” not only in terms of acquiring the cultural capital of school subjects,
but also in terms of the identity of an achiever and the habitus of competition.
An early product,Oregon Trail, placed academic knowledge in a
meaningful context of historical simulation, and removed it from the atomizing
tendencies and sorting functions of school curriculum and assessment. As
children consider how best to manage rations and supplies and proceed along a
simulated journey with real-world referents, academically relevant content is
mobilized as one relevant component of decision-making. There is no
hierarchical assessment of achievement based on realization of a singular
correct outcome. Currently dominant products, by contrast, put social distinction
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and assessment back in, and this is key to their marketing success. In efforts to
boost self-esteem and identification, children are repetitively applauded for
getting the “right answer” to academic problems that are unrelated to the fantasy
adventure scenario that is presumably the “fun” part of the activity. These
successes are framed and tallied in terms of the curricular and sorting functions
of school. In marketing materials, parents are told that these products will ensure
that their children will internalize the habitus and cultural capital necessary for
competitive, upper middle-class success. Contrary to McCormick’s efforts to
focus on learning rather than education, one sector of the industry has found that
it is achievement, in form of school success, that is the most easily marketable
package for academic learning software.
Consuming Achievement
Grade-based educational software appeals to middle-class parents’ desires for
wholesome, creative, and interactive play for their children, that also gives them
a leg up on subjects that will be covered in school. Unlike action games, which
are marketed directly at children on television and in gaming magazines,
educational software is marketed towards parents and appears in magazines
such as Family PC. One ad for Knowledge Adventure’s JumpStart software
series (figure 4.2), running in the December 2000 edition of Family PC, sets up
an unambiguous relation between the products and academic achievement. A
blond school-aged girl dressed neatly in white knee-high socks, Mary Janes, and
a red skirt, still wearing her backpack, stands with her back to you (your child
here), clutching a school worksheet. The sanitized space of the large kitchen
and the girl’s appearance code the home as White, suburban, conservative, and
middle-class. The girl faces a refrigerator already overflowing with assignments
red inked with gushing teacher notes: stars, “Good Work!” and “Excellent!” The
backpack, the school assignments, and the voice of assessment are represented
in a central role in the intimate sphere of the home. A drawing of mom, posted in
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the visually prominent area at the top left, hails the parent in charge of childrenrelated purchases. She is a smiling blond mother with curly hair and rosy
cheeks.
The ad copy describes the current concern with self-esteem and identity in
promoting academic achievement. “When kids succeed, they feel confident.
When they feel confident, they succeed. This is how JumpStart works. And why
so many parents think it’s the best learning software you can buy.” In contrast to
the other ads in this campaign, this one features a girl, and has ad copy that
specifically poses self-esteem issues. Together with the aggressive posture of
the girl with hands on her hips, looking upwards, the ad implies that the software
will address the inequities that have plagued girls in academic achievement. The
software provides a jump start for stalled children in the academic rat race,
mobilizing the metaphor of “education as a race” which dominates the culture of
competition of elite schooling in the US (Varenne, Goldman et al. 1998: 106115). The ad campaign’s tagline—“She’s a JumpStart Kid, all right—is subtly
crafted to imply a status distinction with other kids, the perpetually stalled failures
that don’t use this software. The phrase “all right” is a reassuring confirmation of
the parental conviction that their child is inherently smart and deserving of this
status. Your child, too, may be deserving of higher recognitions of success than
she is currently receiving.
These ads target increasingly younger children with their toddler and
preschool titles, as well as working to fill leisure time with the competitive logic of
academics. Another ad in this campaign features a smiling, sleeping boy in a bed
covered in books with titles like “Ships,” “Vikings,” and “The Stars.” The books
are even tucked into his bed sheets, replacing the stuffed animal so iconic of
childhood attachments and imaginings. He is presumably integrating academic
content with his dream work. Another JumpStart kid appears in an ad waking up
a bleary-eyed father at the crack of dawn, again with a backpack on and
lunchbox in hand. These kids have internalized the disciplines of schooling,
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FIGURE 4.2
ADVERTISEMENT FOR JUMP START 1ST GRADE
Reprinted with permission from Knowledge Adventure, Inc.
JumpStart is a trademark or registered trademark of Knowledge Adventure, Inc.
122
reluctant to take their backpacks off and eager to get them back on. They are
represented as deeply identifying not only with academic content but the
aggressive, forward and upward competitive habitus of upper middle-class
success.
Corporations market software as a vehicle for academic success to
parents, who in turn market academics as an entertainment activity to their kids.
Parents can mitigate their sense of being achievement-oriented with the
reassurance that their kids are having fun. Academic content gets integrated into
children’s self-identities and pleasures. The ads for the Math Blaster series
feature children in moments of ecstatic play, swimming or playing superheroes,
with thought balloons describing the mathematical significance of their play
(figure 4.3). A tiny cape crusader speculates, “If I fly 90 miles an hour and the
earth is 24,902 miles around, can I still get back home for breakfast?” “Must be
the Math Blaster®” suggests that ad copy below. “Software that gets your kids
into math. And math into them.” This is the currently dominant logic of
edutainment: The most effective forms of learning are fun. So let’s package
tasks that function to measure and sort children into something that is
pleasurable. That way, the kids will have fun, they will also get ahead in life, and
parents can feel they have fulfilled the impossible imperatives of contemporary
middle-class parenting that says they must support competitive successes and
disciplines while also keeping their children perpetually happy and entertained.
This is a “sugar-coating” philosophy that many game designers critiqued in
current game design, but which is perpetuated by the logic of the marketplace
(Bruckman 1999).
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FIGURE 4.3
ADVERTISEMENT FOR MATH BLASTER
Reprinted with permission from Knowledge Adventure, Inc.
Math Blaster is a trademark or registered trademark of Knowledge Adventure,
Inc.
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It is not sufficient for children to perform well academically; it needs to be
fun, and they need to love it. “I Love Reading!” “I Love Spelling!” trumpet the
titles of a learning series from Interactive Learning, adorned with the faces of
wide-eyed smiling children. The habitus of edutainment, of learning for pleasure,
must infuse kids out-of-school lives. As with children’s literature and educational
toys, educational software holds forth the promise of learning that is tied to
school success, yet is freed from the dusty, boring atmosphere of the school,
learning that promises joy, delight, engagement and identification. A token
African-American child graces the cover of one of these titles, surrounded by a
sea of white faces in this and other ads. The White, middle-class marking of
these ads and the hefty prices of the products and computers indicate that the
market is for families that are seeking to maintain middle-class status or are
aspiring to ruling-class status, not the racially diverse and disenfranchised
populations that are the target of McCormick’s efforts. The progressive
philosophy of “learning through play” has been transformed by a more
conservative agenda of “achievement through play,” a small change of phrase
with significant ramifications for how products are designed, marketed, and
played with.
If the parent is persuaded to pick up a software box at Cosco, Toys R Us
or Comp USA, they can learn a bit more detail about the contents of the
software. Most software boxes feature a front flap that can be opened, detailing
content domains and providing screen shots of different games screens. For
example, the Jump Start 2nd Grade box cover features the key elements: the title,
the green frog character that guides the adventure, the company name, target
age, and the tagline “There’s No Stopping a Kid with a JumpStart!” and crucially,
a seal attesting that JumpStart is #1, with over 3 million copies sold (figure 4.4).
Successful products like JumpStart push their brand as a central marketing
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vehicle. Parents are enlisted in the “JumpStart family” of products that range
from toddler titles to the upper elementary years. At the top of the box, the
company, Knowledge Adventure, is associated with the tagline, “Discover. Learn.
Excel,” tracing a three-point progression from the child-centered ideal of
FIGURE 4.4
BOX COVER FOR JUMP START 2ND GRADE
Reprinted with permission from Knowledge Adventure, Inc.
Jump Start is a trademark or registered trademark of Knowledge Adventure, Inc.
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discovery and exploration, to learning and identification, to social success. As a
visual genre, these boxes draw from the representational styles of children’s
picture books and parent-friendly animation of the nonviolent PBS variety: bright
colors, cute, wide-eyed anthropomorphized animal characters with big smiles
and big heads. Although not visually central, certain elements in the cover code
for school: the ruler notches in the title bar, numbers, a plus sign and the word
“noun” and “verb” as part of the background scene. It translates curricular content
into the aesthetically pleasing vernacular of children’s edutainment, much as we
find alphabets and numbers adorning the bedding and toys of infants.
Opening the front flap, a parent sees the claim emblazoned across the
top: “A Full Year of 2nd Grade In an Exciting Adventure!” Below that are screen
shots of each activity, describing the academic content involved (figure 4.5). For
example, “Ice Cavern Math” teaches multiplication tables and “Save our Universe
teaches about the solar system. The back of the box concludes with a list of what
“kids learn” and a checklist of “what you get,” “Over 80 Skills Taught” including
“Simple Multiplication” and “Social Sciences,” in other words, “a complete 2nd
Grade curriculum.” This “grade-based system that grows with your child”
packages learning as the ability to progress along an atomized set of tasks as
defined by the basic components of school curriculum. A small girl is pictured
sitting on the progressive steps of this “learning system.” There is also a photo of
this smiling blond child with parental testimony as to how “Amanda” is making so
much progress in her schooling. The technical features outlined on the back of
the box center on parental control and discipline in the context of a wide-ranging
set of skills and activities (figure 4.6). The game has “adjustable difficulty levels”
and a “parent’s progress report.” In contrast to other forms of technical
engagement that stress the empowerment of the child, this product highlights the
function of technology to discipline and monitor behavior.
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FIGURE 4.5
INSIDE THE BOX OF JUMP START 3RD GRADE
Reprinted with permission from Knowledge Adventure, Inc.
Jump Start is a trademark or registered trademark of Knowledge Adventure, Inc.
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FIGURE 4.6
BACK COVER OF BOX FOR JUMP START 3RD GRADE
Reprinted with permission from Knowledge Adventure, Inc.
Jump Start is a trademark or registered trademark of Knowledge Adventure, Inc.
129
The defining characteristics of this multimedia genre are that titles are
age-graded, participating in the construction of a version of childhood that is
oriented towards maturing along adult-defined measures. Cute, innocent
characters, primary colors, and content tied to school grades marks this as a
product that kids over ten years of age would not want to play. Marketing is
directed at parents who want their children to succeed at school. Conscious
efforts are made to include girls in the framing and marketing, but the racial and
class markings emerge as White and middle-class, muted somewhat by the use
of animal characters. Distribution is through mainstream mass retailing that touts
the “number one” popularity of the product. These are the characteristics that
define this genre at the level of design, marketing, and distribution. Now I would
like to turn to a specific case study of the content of one game typifying this
genre, and the way it is engaged with at 5thD clubs.
The Edutainment Genre and The Island of Dr. Brain
Edutainment games from companies like Knowledge Adventure and TLC were a
mainstay of the 5thD clubs. In the late nineties, when I was conducting my
fieldwork, the clubs still ran copies of games that McCormick had been involved
in such as Gertrude’s Puzzles on old Apple IIs, and as they upgraded their
machines to more sophisticated models, they continued to purchase and utilize
more recent titles. The grade-based systems such as JumpStart were yet to
make an appearance, but there were products that relied on a similar adventurepuzzle format. During my fieldwork, a new game, The Island of Dr. Brain, was
introduced, which was played from a CD-ROM and had more sophisticated
graphics than the earlier adventure puzzle games being used at the club such as
Gertrude’s Puzzles. At the time, the Dr. Brain series of games was published as
a kids' series of Sierra Online, a company known for its adventure games titles
for adults and kids alike. The Island of Dr. Brain is one in a series of three Dr.
Brain titles. Here I use Dr. Brain as a content case study typifying the
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edutainment genre and how it resonated with many of the orientations towards
academic play of the 5thD, but also created problems by inviting a focus on
achievement rather than deep mastery of content.
In the words of one of the undergraduates, The Island of Dr. Brain is a
"mensa-like" game, involving a series of puzzles that are reminiscent of IQ or
school tests. These puzzles are embedded in a fantasy role-playing scenario,
where the player is working as Dr. Brain's lab assistant to recover a special
battery from his secret island. The preplay sequence of the game includes an
animated movie where one is introduced to the benevolent, goofy, but
demanding patriarchal figure of Dr. Brain, a predictably white-haired, lab coated
fellow, and given a set of instructions for how to play the game. One is then
deposited at the entrance to the island, and encounters the first of a series of
puzzles and intelligence tests. All of the tasks in the game are organized around
science, math, logic, and other school-like subject matters. For example, in order
to get into the island, one has to solve a polynomial puzzle that involves placing
puzzle pieces on the door to the island. In the entrance chamber, one then clicks
on a microscope to solve an algebra problem to sort some microorganisms along
x,y axes, a number series problem to open a sarcophagus, and the Tower of
Hanoi puzzle to open the door to the chamber. The game proceeds in this
manner through different scenes with embedded puzzles: a tropical forest, a
bridge, a volcano, a village, a hut, and Dr. Brain's laboratory. At the end of the
game, the player is treated to a lengthy animation sequence, and is given a final
"report card" of how s/he did on the different problems, and is encouraged to play
again at a higher level of difficulty.
The look and feel of the game are entertainment-oriented and graphically
sophisticated, referencing wacky “mad scientist” tropes that were established in
educational television programming (MacBeth and Lynch 1997). Peripheral
elements such as humorous dialog boxes and animations mute the didactic tone
of the game. While the look and feel are designed with entertainment idioms, the
content of the game is essentially academic, trying to package “brainy” content
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as a cool and fun domain. The game follows a coherent adventure story line, but
the content of the puzzles are largely incidental to the fantasy scenario. A
spectrum analyzer puzzle may be the condition for opening a doorway, or a
synonym puzzle a way of getting a basket of apples. The fantasy scenario
furnishes a narrative coherence and goal orientation to a series of otherwise
unrelated problems. This dual structure also corresponds to different forms of
knowledge. The exploratory elements and fantasy scenario are tied to game
specific forms of knowledge, including the particular narrative meanings of The
Island of Dr. Brain as well as the features that relate to other adventure games
and entertainment media (i.e., what to click on in a given scene, the sequence of
puzzles, the "mad professor" fantasy narrative, etc.). The knowledge embedded
in the puzzles is meant to “transfer” to school contexts (i.e., math, science, and
other cultural capital). This relation between the fantasy scenario and the
puzzles parallels the distinction between entertainment look and feel and
educational content.
The Island of Dr. Brain is functionally relatively simple, but relies on
sophisticated multimedia capabilities to capture the player's attention. Both the
preplay and ending sequences involve extended animation scenes, and the
game throughout makes use of color graphics, animation, and sound that were
considered cutting-edge in the mid-nineties, when I was observing the use of the
game. Each ambient scene, in which the puzzles are embedded, are functionally
much like an animated storybook, with "hot" areas that trigger either an
animation, dialog box, or puzzle. While players can explore the storybook scenes
in an unmonitored and open-ended way, these exploratory moments are coded
as silly and functionally inconsequential, transitional “down times” between the
“real work” of solving serious academic problems. Hedonistic and regressive
functions of undirected play are domesticated and disciplined by the logic of
academic work. The narrative trajectory of the game is sequential and singletrack; although one can revisit previously solved puzzles, there is only one
pathway through the island, and getting to any given puzzle is contingent on
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solving puzzles preceding it. The puzzles are much like a standard test or
workbook, based on consideration of a limited set of answers to a problem with
clear right and wrong answers. The game allows for different levels of difficulty
and keeps track of how many puzzles are solved correctly, which corresponds to
the report card that is presented at the end of the game.
Other functions of the game include a scorecard that can be accessed at
any time, the ability to save a game and set the level of difficulty, and a way to
move back and revisit previously solved problems. Players can also click on a
“hint watch” that triggers a dialog box giving them clues on how to solve a
problem. The number of “charges” in the hint watch is limited, restricting the
amount of help that kids have access to, and framing the tasks as ideally the
work of individualized and unassisted cognition. Beyond these features, there are
no other ways for a user to engage with the technical functionality of the game.
User ability to change technical parameters is restricted to navigation,
assessment and monitoring functions. While framed in the context of play and
exploration, the structure of the game parallels features of school learning, where
students submit to the authority of the teacher (Dr. Brain) and canonical
knowledge, embedded in a series of disconnected tasks, which are thought to
build upon each other in a necessary sequential order. Accomplishment of each
task is awarded by "grades" (gold and bronze plaques), and tallied into a final
score at the end of the game. The game even provides extra credit points for
kids who solve additional problems. Unlike school, however, negative
assessments are muted in encouraging messages such as “try again!” Game
outcomes and grades are not consequential to the sorting functions of
educational institutions, and thus the game is an arena for boosting academic
self-esteem without fear of consequential failure.
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Dr. Brain in the 5thD
Despite its school-like properties, The Island of Dr. Brain has been remarkably
popular in the 5thD among Young Wizard’s Assistants and kids willing to use free
passes to play it. Overall, kids respond positively to the eye-catching graphics
and animations, and orient quickly to the linear goal structure of the game.
Puzzles at the novice level are doable with some help for all of the kids we have
observed on tape; the game skirts the edge of kid expertise, inviting productive
collaboration with adult participants. During the period that we were observing,
the game had just been introduced to the site on a trial basis and was not
included in the activity system of the site. Because of this special status, and
because of its cutting-edge graphics, it attracted the attentions of researchers,
undergraduates, and kids. The undergraduate fieldnotes describe the game as
"challenging," "impressive," "a thought-provoking game," school-like, and with
"obvious" educational value. One undergraduate also pointed to the "diversity of
tasks" as an important feature of the game in making the game interesting and
appealing to different kids. Kids' descriptive discourse about the puzzles focuses
on whether the game is "hard" or "easy." This kind of discourse contrasts to other
forms of gaming that might be described along a spectrum of "cool" versus
"boring." When playing Dr. Brain, "cool" was used only to describe elements
from the exploratory scenes and animations, never the puzzles themselves.
Initially, researchers thought that the game might provide a useful vehicle
for comparative study of engagement with similar cognitive tasks across school
and the 5thD; the game included tasks that were often encountered in school, but
were framed by an entertainment-oriented game and the unique social context of
the 5thD. Videotaping was concentrated on the game during a period of about a
month in the fall that it was introduced. The corpus of videotapes and notes
about play are larger and more consistent than most other games because of this
focused attention, and also because the game requires multiple days of
engagement to complete. Many of the simpler games have tasks that can be
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completed within one club period, or do not have a linear goal orientation, so do
not invite these kinds of sustained involvement. With Dr. Brain, we have a rare
record of a number of kids engaging across multiple sequential days with a
game. After some time evaluating the game, however, the researchers at the
site decided that it was actually a poor vehicle for evaluating the particularities of
the learning processes in the 5thD, though the game was still included at the site.
The game tasks were atomized in a way that worked against the deeper
intellectual engagements that the site encouraged, and it also fostered a
competitive orientation towards achievement that was not part of the 5thD ethos.
The game calls out the often latent tensions between the educational
philosophy of the 5thD and the educational philosophy of mainstream schooling,
particularly in terms of the difficulty of recognizing and managing dominant social
markers such as “smartness” and “success.” In the fieldnotes and videotapes of
play, three salient dynamics emerge, which are linked to these tensions
regarding the value of the game in a setting like the 5thD. One is the way in
which entertainment and education idioms are incorporated into the game as
fundamentally disjunctive forms of engagement. Another is the tension between
the orientation of kids, who want to get through the tasks in as expedient a
manner as possible, and the orientation of adult helpers, who try to get kids to
understand the nature of the problem. Thirdly, is the way in which the game
invites a competitive orientation through explicit achievement recognitions in the
game and knowledge and achievement displays by the kids. After describing
these three dynamics, the remainder of this chapter presents a case study of one
boy who performs the cyborg habitus of competitive achievement in relation to
this game, and thus exacerbates these latent tensions in the 5thD system.
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Marginalizing Entertainment
Problem solving strategies for the Island of Dr. Brain involve two different modes,
which correspond to the oscillating structure of the game. When engaged in the
click-and-explore scenes, kids will click around and solicit feedback from the
scene, eventually hitting on the right element that will trigger a puzzle to pop up.
While the animations and humorous messages that pop up when one clicks on
the "wrong" elements are amusing for a while, even relatively short periods in this
mode invite a sense of frustration in not making progress along the sequential
logic of the game. Problem solving in these scenes is based purely on guessing
and trial and error strategies, unless there is a local expert that knows where to
click on the scene. For example, in one tape, two kids are trying to figure out
what to do in a room in Dr. Brain's lab. It takes them about twenty seconds to
pick up a cartridge, but then they are stuck for about a minute, trying to find
where to put the cartridge. After clicking around in vain during this time, the kid
controlling the mouse screams, "AAAAH!" in frustration, clicking randomly all
over the screen, before being calmed down by his companion and finally figuring
out that one needs to click on a specific part of the robot to get to the
programming puzzle: "Yes, I got it!" More commonly, engagement with the
transitional scenes is an unproblematic and brief break from the puzzles. Kids
will quick randomly around the screen, and will fairly quickly hit the object that will
lead them to the next puzzle. In breakdown situations, however, when kids get
“stuck” in a particular scene, there is a great deal of frustration and a sense of
injustice at not being able to move ahead. One case involving an extended
breakdown sequence calls forth this kind of frustration.
Cathy, a twelve year old, is playing the game for the first time, and is
moving quickly through the puzzles, solving them with ease. In other words, she
has no difficulty in navigating the narrative or problem space of the game. At a
certain point, however, she runs into some difficulty. She has finished a problem
that involves manipulating some microorganisms under a microscope. When she
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exits the problem, she is presented with a slip of paper. She inserts the piece of
paper into a sarcophagus, which is also on the screen, and is presented with a
number series problem, depicted as the lock to the sarcophagus. Upon solving
the problem and exiting the puzzle, nothing happens, and she declares with
dismay, "It didn't open." She tries clicking on different parts of the sarcophagus,
but nothing happens. The undergraduate working with her suggests: "Maybe you
messed up the first one," and Cathy goes on to repeat the microscope problem.
She again solves the problem with minimal effort, exits, and nothing happens.
She does the microscope problem again. Nothing happens. She clicks on the
sarcophagus, and gets a humorous message that doesn't help her goal of getting
the lock open. She does the microscope problem again. Nothing happens, and
she tries again, declaring, "Oh! This is making me mad." She does the problem
again, trying to click on different parts of the puzzle to no avail. She does the
problem again, and again. The following exchange then ensues, involving both
the undergraduate and the site coordinator:
C = Cathy
UG = Undergraduate
SC = Site Coordinator
1
UG: Are you stuck?
2
C: I'm mad, cause I put the card in there, but then it won't do it. Watch. (Solves
microscope puzzle.)
3
UG: So if you mess up, it doesn't accept it?
4
C: But I didn't mess up. (Solves the microscope puzzle again.)
5
UG: So you have to finish this in order...hmm, for it to work? Wait, it's...
6
C: Watch, look at this. (Clicks around main screen, and gets humorous messages and
animations). I got the card, and then I put it over. (Clicks around screen and gets
various animations. Solves microscope puzzle.)
7
C: (Calls site coordinator over.) I played this game at least six times, but it won't let
me. Watch. Watch. I'll play it. (Solves Microscope puzzle.) Watch. I did that. Watch
this. I go to here, and I don't get anything.
8
SC: Yeah. Yeah. Cause you've already done this part. This is the same game, right?
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9
C: Yeah.
10
SC: Yeah, it doesn't have anything to give you, you've gone backwards.
11
C: Oh.
12
UG: So you just keep on going.
13
SC: Yeah.
14
C: So what do I do? (Clicks on door to exit the screen, but game doesn't let her exit.)
15
K: The door won't open though.
16
SC: How did you get back here? How did you get back here?
17
C: It started me all over again.
18
SC: I've never seen this happen. I don't know. See if maybe you can open the
sarcophagus. I don't know.
19
C: (Clicks on sarcophagus, and it doesn't open. Looks up at SC.) How do I get out of
it?
20
SC: (Pause) I don't know. You can just quit, but don't save it.
This is a frustrating series of events, where Cathy repeatedly solves the problem
as dictated, tries clicking on all of the resources available on the screen (lines 7,
14), and solicits help from two adults (lines 2, 7). She is getting increasingly
angry and insists that she hasn't "messed up," solving the problem yet another
time to demonstrate that she is doing things correctly (line 4). Even the site
coordinator is baffled as to why the game is not proceeding along its narrative
trajectory (line 18). Eventually, she has to start the game over from the
beginning. The hints and other feedback that the game provides are all designed
to buttress the narrative fantasy, causing objects on the screen to animate, giving
hints on how to solve the problem that she has already completed, or posting
funny messages that give no hint as to the underlying functionality of the game
that would allow the player to proceed to the next puzzle. If Cathy had clicked
just a few centimeters off in one direction, directly on the lock of the sarcophagus
as opposed to on the casing, she would have moved onto the next sequence in
the puzzle. The game, however, provided no clues that would identify a
particular part of the sarcophagus as an activation point. Finding where to click
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was not designed as a significant bit of knowledge and there were no hint or help
functions to instruct Cathy about a way out of her predicament.
Unlike this sequence, engagement with puzzles, even over extended
periods of time, are considered “productive” by both kids and undergraduates.
Kids might pursue a single problem for over ten minutes without exhibiting
comparable frustration. This difference is consistent across all the instances of
play we have in our observational record on the game. The puzzles involve
small, self-contained tasks with fairly explicit instructions and recourse to the "hint
watch" that displays a partial solution. When the puzzle first comes up, a series
of pop-up windows states the instructions for the game and the game provides
ongoing feedback on the users actions while they are working on a puzzle. For
example, a hidden figures problem gives feedback such as “you’re getting warm”
as the player clicks around the screen. There is no such feedback in the
transitional scenes such as the one that Cathy struggled with. Although this was
not in use at the 5thD, there is also an accompanying book called the
EncycloAlmanacTionaryOgraphy that provides content-based information that
would help solve puzzles. Solving puzzles is the rubric under which the game
evaluates players and provides recognitions of success like bronze and gold
plaques.
Unlike the puzzles and “serious” educational content, the fantasy scenes
are presented in decontextualized and lightweight ways, involving a pastiche of
styles and references drawing from “mad scientist” tropes, tropical island
fantasies, and jungle adventure stories. No additional information is provided on
how to navigate these scenes, and they are clearly marginal to the overall goals
of the game. The game does not keep records of where players have clicked on
the transitional scenes, and when the player clicks on the right place to move
forward, there is no explicit recognition of “success” other than the transition to a
puzzle. While undergraduates, in their fieldnotes, resist “just giving the answer” to
kids for the problems, they have no problem with the sharing of knowledge that is
specific to the fantasy scenario, such as where to click on the scene in order to
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get to the next puzzle. The transitional scenes are visually attractive and
occasionally amusing, but are functionally inconsequential for the recognitions of
achievement and the score keeping of the game and the participants. The
remainder of the chapter focuses on the problems as the central features of play
with game.
Playing the System
The awareness of game content is peripheral to awareness of the structure of the
problem domain, just as the overall fantasy scenario is incidental to the puzzles.
While all of the puzzles exhibit some kind of "brainy" content: chemistry, math, art
appreciation, etc., many can be solved tactically, based on the logical
consistency of the problem domain, rather than with recourse to extra-textual
stores of knowledge. There is almost no discussion of the topics that form the
game content (i.e., the nature of algebra problems, what a microchip does, what
a dominant and recessive gene is, etc.). In many cases, the puzzle is selfexplanatory or recognizable from other game or test situations: a hidden figures
puzzle, a matching game, a word search puzzle, a number sequence puzzle, a
jigsaw puzzle, or magic squares. In other cases, the structure of the problem
emerges after clicking on some elements of the puzzle and through trial and
error. For example, one problem asks for changes to an algebra equation to
change the lines on a set of x,y axes. After clicking the numbers in the equation
up and down, kids quickly figure out the relationship between the equation and
the line on the graph, and the problem is soon solved. In still other cases, the
structure of the problem is more opaque, and invites recourse to the hint watch or
rereading of the instructions, as well as enlistment of help from other club
participants. Regardless of the difficulty of recognizing the general nature of the
task, overall engagement time with the puzzle is almost always dominated by
trying to figure out the structure of the problem. For example, while the idea of
hidden figures is almost immediately recognizable, the details of how you select
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an answer, and what the hints, such as "you're getting warm" mean, require
subsequent explication.
Unlike competition with other people, competition with a computer is about
anticipation of fixed interactional responses. The conditions for achieving the
desired end-state may be dormant, but are already programmed into the system.
Mastery, in this form of competition, is not about responding flexibly to an
unpredictable opponent who may be indexing a wide range of possible strategies
and skills. Rather, competition with the game is about orienting to a set of
consistent and algorithmic responses (i.e., building an office unit in SimTower
increases population by x amount) or a predetermined narrative sequencing (i.e.,
if player clicks on apple tree, then progress to the next scene). Game algorithms
can be quite sophisticated, as with chess, a game particularly well-suited to the
capabilities of computation. In other forms of games, which are not reducible to
purely algorithmic terms, people are able to find innumerable ways to outwit the
machine through their incomparably richer indexical resources. For example, a
child can find game playing tricks in a magazine or on the web, work in
collaboration with knowledgeable peers, or simply restart the game when the
going gets too rough. With games based on singular goal orientations, the
interactional asymmetry between human and machine invites creative workaround and alignment with the rigid conditions set up by the game for the player
to win. The game stands in for the educational goals of the designers, but is not
able to reproduce them in a situationally responsive way. In practical terms, this
often means that kids orient to the precise inputs necessary for moving ahead in
the game, rather than to the actual content (especially if educational) that these
inputs are supposedly tied to.
In the 5thD, some of the indexical resources available to the kids are the
other people at the club. As in most explicitly educational settings, the adults,
while providing help, feel obliged to withhold actual solutions to problems in the
service of the kids' intellectual development, while the kids want the answers, in
order to win in the terms set up by the game. The interactional asymmetry at the
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interface manifests as a tension between kids, who prioritize winning, and
undergraduates, who prioritize mastery of content. In other words, for kids,
winning matters more than how you play the game, especially when playing
against a stubborn machine. Computer games don't account for or acknowledge
how the kids play the game beyond the specific inputs at the interface, and thus
can invite a focused orientation to achieving these formal conditions for winning,
at the expense of understanding or mastery of the process of play. Some
examples of play with The Island of Dr. Brain are exemplary of this orientation.
In this sequence of activity, Andy, a twelve year old, has been moving quickly
through the various puzzles, with the help of an adult. They arrive at a hidden
word puzzle, where they need to find and highlight words in a foreign language.
Andy chooses French, and they proceed in finding the words.
A = Andy
Ad = Adult
1
Ad: It's in French. Hmm?
2
A: We have to know...oh, it's au revoir... Where's "au"? Help me find it. Look for
an "a."
3
Ad: Oh, I see it (pause).
4
A: Where? Just tell me.
5
Ad: You're hot, hot, hot, hot (referring to where Alex is moving on the puzzle).
6
A: Hot?
7
Ad: No, (as Alex moves cursor). Hot. Burning. You're burning hot.
8
A: Oh, here it is.
In this sequence, Andy immediately demands help in finding the words -- "Help
me find it" (line 2). When the adult finds the word, she pauses, not pointing it out
to him, to which he responds, impatiently, "Where? Just tell me" (lines 3, 4).
She compromises by giving hints, "You're hot, hot, hot," rather than tell him the
answer directly (lines 5, 7).
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The undergraduates are working hard to apply the educational Vygotskian
educational philosophies that they are learning in class to their interactions with
the kids. They have been instructed to “provide the children with as little help as
possible, but as much help as necessary to ensure that both the students and the
children have a good time” (Cole 1997). This rule of thumb for pedagogy in the
5thD is an application of Vygotsky’s theory of the Zone of Proximal Development,
which posits that learning happens as an interaction between experts and
novices engaged in joint activity. In their fieldnotes, undergraduates describe
their interaction, and work to exhibit their application of these educational
principles. One undergraduate describes how she provided information to help
her partner move ahead in the task, but that the kid had a good basic
understanding.
The first puzzle we had to solve was matching elements to their
periodic table names. I went through the same steps he did, and
when he figured out which element he wanted to match it with, I
helped him by telling him what the Latin words were that the
periodic table names were listed under. He figured out the
abbreviations from there. He knew most of them on his own.
Another undergraduate similarly describes how she provided just enough help,
but that the kid was doing most of the work in solving the problem.
Some of the language was very complex, and I helped him by
telling him what the words meant. I would just give him the
meaning of one of the words that needed to be replaced, and if he
didn't know what the other words meant, I would give him pointers
on their general meaning, or use them in a sentence, so he could
figure them out for himself.
In contrast to this stance by adults, who feel it is important to provide the minimal
amount of help, kids seem to have no reservations about giving the answers
directly to other kids. On a subsequent day, a younger boy, Chris, is playing Dr.
Brain, and Andy shows up to dictate exactly what to input, with no explanation of
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the actual process. Chris has just begun a new problem involving programming
a robot to move through the laboratory and pick up a silver key. Andy shows up,
immediately declares his expertise, and then tells Chris what to do. The
remainder of the problem solving sequence, until they arrive at the desired end
state (to get the key), is exclusively about Andy dictating operations, while Chris
inputs them.
A = Andy
C = Chris
1
A: Allright, go in.
2
C: Here we go.
3
A: I'm very good at this.
4
C: There was the earthquake. Now what do we want to do?
5
A: Take the purple one.
6
(C picks up purple chip.)
7
A: Put it in the back of his head.
8
C: Right there? (Puts it in robot's head.)
9
A: Yeah. OK, let me do this.
10
C: We know how to...
11
A: I'm really good at this.
12
C: OK, hint watch. (Hits hint, which turns position indicator on.)
13
A: Hint watch. OK, robot position indicator.
14
C: OK we want to go --
15
A: Forward.
16
C: Forward.
17
A: Forward, left, forward, forward, forward, forward, stay, stay, stay. Pick it up.
Pick up. Now right, right, forward, forward, forward, right, forward, forward, drop.
Now run, I mean go. Do go.
18
(Inputs program as Andy dictates. Runs program, and robot gets a silver key.)
19
A: There he goes. OK.
20
C: Silver key.
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In this sequence, Andy begins by telling Chris how to activate the puzzle
(lines 5, 7), and then dictates the answers as Chris inputs them (lines 15, 17, 17).
The jointly formulated goal of the two kids is to get through the problem as
quickly as possible rather than to explicate content knowledge for Chris, who
blindly follows Andy's instructions. Both of these sequences, while based on
different priorities between kids and adults, are similarly an outcome of a linear
and singular goal orientation embedded in The Island of Dr. Brain. On a different
day, Andy takes this position with another girl playing the game for the first time.
The undergraduate working with her is upset by this, and writes an unusually
critical fieldnote that describes problems with Andy and the game, and how they
disrupt the goals of the 5thD.
She was not learning to solve these problems on her own. He
wouldn’t tell her the point of the game, or how he was figuring out
these solutions, he just commanded her. I guess he saw the goal
as getting to the next level, no matter what. It did not matter if she
understood or not.
Other kids are more amenable to the adult orientation, and after Alex leaves, the
girl and the undergraduate work together on the problems again, this time
reading the instructions and “really” solving the problems together.
The higher priority that adults give to process and understanding also
translates into a tension between an explicit instruction-driven orientation and a
trial and error, guessing orientation. The adults tent to stand in for the former
orientation and the kids for the latter, particularly when they are not working
under close adult supervision. Unless held back by an adult, kids almost always
click quickly through the instructions, and will invariably look to the hint watch for
partial answers before they will try reading the instructions for explicit directions.
One undergraduate writes glowingly about a “very smart boy,” and notes with
impressed surprise how he would “always read the instructions.” More typical
are the observations of another undergraduate working with a different boy.
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“When we would get to each new puzzle he did not bother to read all of the
directions. I was inclined to read each sentence carefully trying to remember
what it said and go through all of the directions before starting each task.”
The most striking example of this tension is in one tape with a boy and an
undergraduate, where the undergraduate, in frustration, repeatedly tells him that
she can't help him because she has not seen the instructions beforehand.
Eventually, as they continue to run into difficulty with the puzzle sequences, she
has him read the instructions out loud before proceeding with problem solving. It
is not clear, however, that explicit instruction based problem orientations are the
most successful for the game. With the addition of the hint watch, guessing is
often a much more expedient solution than following instructions. For example,
the two are unable to figure out the tip-o-meter despite reading the instructions
out loud. The undergraduate complains to the site director that the instructions
are "weird," and eventually the boy solves the problem by using his hint watch
charges. In the subsequent rat-driven-elevator problem, the boy has rejected the
instruction-based orientation and solicits help from another kid at site, who shows
him how to use the hint watch to get half the answer and then guess at the other
half, a strategy that was also developed by some other kids that I observed on
tape. While the boy was willing to test out the undergraduate's instruction-driven
strategy, eventually the hint/guess strategy won out.
Unlike simulation, strategy, and scenario games, adventure games such
as Dr. Brain require a narrowly defined set of "correct" inputs in order to proceed
through the game. There are clear right and wrong answers, and winning
conditions are assessed only based on these answers to a series of problems.
The kids express satisfaction and even glee at "outwitting" the game, while adults
try to steer them toward solving the problem without guessing. Adults at the club
do work to get children to understand the problem rather than guess or get an
answer from someone else, but there are still limits to sustained engagement
with academic content. Even these moves by the adults are oriented toward the
structure of the problem rather than content. For example, they will push kids
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toward comprehension of the instructions for solving the puzzle rather than
toward understanding, say, how circuitry works, or what the difference between a
reptile and an amphibian is. Much of this orientation is overdetermined by the
fact that puzzle completion affords immediate progression to another puzzle
rather than continued engagement with a given content domain. When a puzzle
is completed, the computer responds with a plaque of achievement, and moves
quickly to an entirely different challenge.
Competition, Achievement, and Knowledge Display
Competition is a basic feature of all game-oriented children’s software, but
games such as Dr. Brain that have clear parameters for competition, well-defined
obstacles, and unambiguous recognitions of success, invite the most dogged
orientation toward winning, often at the expense of actually mastering or making
sense of the content embedded in the game. This is the peculiarly academic
brand of competition as it is translated to a recreational domain that is not
immediately consequential for sorting or assessment performed by educational
institutions and testing. As Shelley Goldman has described in her ethnography
of an elite school (Goldman and McDermott 1987), this logic applies to
the paradoxical concerns of those who are most likely to succeed
with altogether inconsequential competitions. It is the story of …
intense work constructing competition. Continual quizzes, tests,
exams, special project, sports events, and so on produce complex
ranking that are displayed in plaques, trophies, special citations.
Individual qualities become public events (Varenne and McDermott
1998: 18).
The Island of Dr. Brain is part of this cultural construction and display of a
form of competition that is institutionally separate from schooling, but is tied to a
related discourse and habitus of achievement. The game has clear endings to
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each puzzle, where kids receive a plaque, keyed to different levels (bronze for
novice, silver for intermediate, and gold for advanced). Kids can view these
plaques on a progress chart throughout the game, and the game tallies their
overall score once they have traveled through the entire island. Game play is
punctuated by these small recognitions of achievement, which kids will point out
to their partners if they haven't noticed, or, if they are playing alone, may even
call out to others at other parts of the club. Although these are “token”
achievements that don’t serve to sort children in school or even in the context of
the 5thD, they still matter to the kids. One undergraduate writes: “Dr. Brain kept
on giving [the boy] bronze awards. [He] kept on saying that this kind of sucked.
Why couldn’t he get better than bronze, like silver or gold? He wanted better
awards.” One boy, working alone, with the site coordinator's occasional help, is
struggling with a particularly difficult problem, and finally solves it, apparently by
repeatedly guessing. He gleefully shouts, “Yes! I did it!” calling out the site
coordinator’s game. “I got it! I got it!” he continues to shout, dragging two other
kids to the computer to show them. “I did it!” Undergraduates also participate in
constructing and displaying these recognitions of success. “Upon the puzzle’s
completion, I exclaimed to Herbert, “Excellent job!’ The grinning Herbert proudly
replied, ‘Thanks.’”
Certain puzzles in Dr. Brain are specifically designed for recognitions of
levels of achievement or "beating" the game. For example, one puzzle in The
Island of Dr. Brain is timed, and will tell you if you beat the record time for
completing it. Kids will usually orient to the stopwatch in the corner, and will
gauge their success on whether they beat the record. Here Chris and an
undergraduate mutually orient to this goal as the game sets it up. Chris is
particularly attentive to the time record (lines 3, 5), and his own speed in
completing the puzzle (lines 7, 13, 15). The undergraduate encourages this
orientation toward beating the record, pointing out the stopwatch in the corner
(lines 16, 20), and asking him if he knows what the record is (line 22).
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C = Chris
UG = Undergraduate
1
C: Well, we got the tree done. Nobody can, nobody beat this yet, know that?
2
UG: Really?
3
C: Nobody's beat it in this kind of times.
4
UG: I know, you're doing it really well.
5
C: Nobody's beat it...
6
UG: You got the diving board, and the tree, and what's this...
7
C: Nobody's ever gone this fast, you know that, I've probably, I'll probably beat
the record.
8
UG: You probably will. I've never seen anyone do it this fast. That's a hard one,
you could put that one back for a while.
9
C: I think this actually goes in there.
10
UG: Oh, wait, you're right. Where do you think that one goes?
11
C: Oh, I see something.
12
UG: There you go.
13
C: I'm going really fast.
14
UG: Yep.
15
C: How fast do you think I'm going? Faster than anybody.
16
UG: It's timing you down there.
17
C: It is?
18
UG: Yeah.
19
C: Oh gee.
20
UG: Seven minutes
21
C: Then I'm beating the record. I'm beating the record.
22
UG: What's the record, do you know?
23
C: I don't know, but I'm probably going to beat the record, because it looks like it.
I've never gone, nobody's ever gone this fast.
24
UG: OK, where is that thing. What is that thing called, that little like...
25
C: No that goes right there. Yeah, this goes somewhere.
26
UG: You're almost done.
27
C: I might even beat the record. Where would this go?
28
UG: Right there.
29
C: I couldn't have done it without you, you know that?
30
UG: I didn't do much. You did most of it, and you only have one more piece left.
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31
C: (Finishes the puzzle, and gets a message that he broke the novice record.)
32
UG: Yeah, you broke it.
In another instance of play with this same puzzle, an undergraduate and Cathy
similarly cement a common recognition of “beating the record,” although they
eventually discover that there wasn’t actually much of a record to beat.
Cathy figured out what to do very quickly and was finished with the
puzzle in six minutes, which I considered a great achievement. Dr.
Brain announced that we had beaten the all time novice record. I
was pretty excited, and so was Cathy, until we found out the all
time novice record had been 99.99 minutes. But I told her that she
had done really well, and she believed I was sincere about it.
Given that The Island of Dr. Brain is a series of puzzles of this sort, that
culminate in the final "beating" of the entire game sequence, completion of the
overall island adventure is greeted with enthusiasm. The game provides a
lengthy closing animation, special thanks from Dr. Brain, and an entertaining
animation for the final credits. We only have two instances on tape when the
game was completed, but both invited enthusiastic responses. Here is one
sequence of a boy completing the game with his dad's help, showing his
enthusiasm at completing the game, and the recognitions of others at the club:
P = Paul
N = Norma
GS = Graduate Student
P: (Completes final puzzle, and game screen changes.) Oh, yeah. Cool. (Game cuts to
final animation sequence.) Oh yeah! It's a huge boat! (Turning to dad.) I beat the
whole island. (Reads final messages, and watches animation.)
(Dad gets up and leaves.)
P: (Continues to watch animation.) Oh cool man. (Points at screen.)
N: (Leaning in from neighboring machine.) What is that?
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P: Yeah, it's an old hidden ship. It's an island that looks like a boat. What the heck are
you doing ship? (Scene cuts to credits sequence and P reads messages and credits.)
GS: (Arrives on camera.) Did your dad go home?
P: Nnn-nn. He went to make a phone call.
GS: You finished! Congratulations!
P: (Continues to watch animation.) Oh yeah! I beat the game! (Raises arms and waves
them in the air.)
GS: Congratulations! What are you going to do next?
P: I don't know.
GS: How long did it take you to do it?
P: Ohhh, two weeks, maybe three.
All of these examples from Dr. Brain rely on game play in relation to clear and
stable standards, determined by the game, which channels game play toward a
well-defined goals and invites celebration and knowledge display upon achieving
those goals. As they work to build kids’ confidence in their intelligence and
abilities, undergraduates also reinforce and produce these displays of
achievement. Token awards presented by Dr. Brain become social occasions to
display achievement. High scores and records are a way of producing success in
competition with others in a way that is somewhat removed from one-on-one
competition between kids at the club, something that the 5thD philosophy would
discourage. Unlike a school exam, these practices are not about sorting children
and they do not explicitly produce failure, but they are about producing a
subjectivity as an intelligent and competent person. Within the context of the
5thD, where groups of children mingle with educationally minded adults, the
game mediates the contexts of school and play. Adults and the game perform
academic achievement in a context that is relaxed, enjoyable, and rich with peer
group interaction, strengthening kid’s identification with academic content. At the
same time, the game is also in tension with the philosophy of the 5thD that
encourages collaborative and non-competitive learning processes. These
tensions become highly visible in the case of one boy’s engagement with the
game.
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Andy and the Island of Dr. Brain
A closer look at boy, Andy, and his play with The Island of Dr. Brain illustrates
some of the achievement-oriented investments and subject formation that the
game invites. Andy has already appeared in earlier examples as a game expert
that often appears over the shoulder of other kids giving answers to the puzzles.
He has a reputation at the club as academically competent, especially in the area
of computer literacy. One undergraduate describes how he is “really good at the
game,” and another how he “really impressed me with his knowledge of the
game.” After his completion of the game, Andy becomes known at the club as an
expert at The Island of Dr. Brain, and appears frequently in subsequent tapes of
the game, helping or heckling other kids. Andy provides a good case for
observing a child who orients quickly to the achievement goals and academic
content. At the same time, he is a somewhat problematic figure at the club. In
the sequence mentioned above, the undergraduate is upset at his “commanding”
attitude toward a girl that is playing. “If she got something wrong he would tell
[her] that she was stupid, and did it wrong. If he got it right, he would say that he
was the smartest person.” On another day, he is working with two other boys on
the game. The undergraduate sitting with him writes: “I did not realize that Andy
was completely dominating the game until the two boys got up and left from lack
of interest.” This same undergraduate writes that, “I like Andy. He is a fun kid,
but working with him can make me frustrated due to his limited focus.” On
another day, two boys exclude him from their play with the game, calling him “the
problem,” and the undergraduate writes that, “I feel really bad for Andy.”
Like Ian, the boy that is a central figure in subsequent chapters, Andy is
highly visible and active presence at the club because he transgresses certain
boundaries, in the process, bringing to light some of the cultural tensions that
intersect at the site of the 5thD. While Ian is adept at smuggling in idioms from
action entertainment and hacker culture, Andy mobilizes idioms of competitive
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achievement that are problematic to the 5thD. Although other kids at the site do
not exhibit this kind of orientation to the game, Andy has a strong sense of
identification with Dr. Brain and uses the game as a resource to produce a
particular social identity at the club.
Andy’s displays of knowledge and achievement create tensions between
him and other children as well as the organization of the club. He becomes an
object of interventions by the adults at the club. On one occasion, he got into a
dispute with the organizers of the club when he claimed that he had finished the
maze and should be awarded the title of a Young Wizard’s Assistant, but the
organizers could not find documentation that he had actually completed all the
activities. On one day, both the site coordinator and site director are trying to pull
him away from Dr. Brain to deal with this issue of his status at the club. He is
busy “helping” another girl play. The undergraduate writes that his “idea of
helping was to do everything for us.” The undergraduate continues: “[the site
director and coordinator] saw what was happening and told Andy to do
something else besides play Cathy’s game for her…. In exasperation, I covered
the computer screen with my hands.” Eventually, Andy leaves with the site
director but returns again and the undergraduate writes that he “told us that he
could do this puzzle in seven moves. I told him that was nice, but we could do it
on our own. He left.” Andy is not a “typical” kid that exhibits typical responses to
the game, but rather is a participant in a social and cultural world that labels him
as “special” and at times problematic.
The video record provides more detail on how Andy engages with the
game and others at the club. The first set of examples is from the day when
Andy completes the whole game sequence of The Island of Dr. Brain during one
club period. He has played bits and pieces of the game previously with other
kids, but this is the first day in which he gets sustained time with the game, and,
with adult help, moves through puzzle after puzzle. In this first example, Andy
has just begun to work on a puzzle which involves identifying the chemical code
for elements in a set of objects, a tin cup, a zinc bar, etc. (figure 4.7). When the
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FIGURE 4.7
CHEMICAL ELEMENTS PUZZLE IN THE ISLAND OF DR. BRAIN
Screen shot reprinted with permission from Vivendi Universal Games
puzzle pops up, he reads the instructions, and then tries clicking around to
determine the nature of the task. The adults he has been working with have
been temporarily discussing other matters, but he calls them back to the task
with a question:
A = Andy
Ad = Adult
SC = Site Coordinator
1
A: What am I supposed to do? I don't get this.
2
SC: OK did you analyze it? It says: "These chemical elements..."
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3
A: (Pulls down another screen of directions and reads, moving pointer over
lines.)
4
SC: Oh, you're doing trace elements OK, here.
5
A: Ahhhh! I see. (Starts to read the description of the element to find. The
object under question is a zinc bar.)
6
Ad: Oh, do you get the hints?
7
SC: "Blank" -oxide (referring to the description, which gives a hint that the
answer is a "____ oxide").
8
A: Carbon. Blank? Blank?
9
Ad: See the blank here? (Points to screen.) They're saying fill in the blank.
10
A: Yeah, I know.
11
SC: It's like the sun block people put on their face....You know, people put it on
their nose...
12
A: Yeah what is it?
13
SC: What is it called?
14
A: SPF.
15
SC: No. There's a thing that completely blocks it out.
16
A: What? Blank?
17
SC: Zinc-oxide, maybe?
18
A: Ziiiinc...
19
SC: Have you ever heard of that?
20
A: (Nods.)
21
SC: It's the really white stuff. So you have to find that.
22
A: What's the "Z"? (Points to "Z" in table of elements.)
23
SC: Go up one. That's the zinc. See it up on top?
24
A: (Selects Z for zinc, and gets the first element identified correctly.) Allright.
25
SC: OK. Now you're doing the next one. It's two percent. It says: "These
chemicals are present only in minute amounts. The analyzer cannot trace them."
So, that's the hint you got before, which is the trace element, which means there
wasn't enough of them to pick up.
26
A: (Selects "Trace Element" and successfully completes analysis of the first
object.) Allllright. Zinc Bar...(Places zinc bar to the side, and puts tin cup in the
analyzer.) This is tin. I know it already. Tin...
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In this sequence of activity, Andy orients quickly to the suggested task
structure of the overall game for a new problem: read the directions, determine
what the problem is, get the correct answer to the problem, and display
knowledge. The hail, or call to action by the game, is thus: process procedure,
execute procedure, solve problem, record solution (fill in the blank). When Andy
falters in determining the procedure, he enlists the help of the adults: "What am I
supposed to do? I don't get this" (line 1). Andy and the site coordinator orient to
the instructions, and then, the initial recognition occurs, "Ahhh. I see" (line 5), as
he is able to decode the instructions and recognize the call for action. Both Andy
and the site coordinator then shift their orientation toward the content domain and
solving the problem: What kind of oxide is it? (lines 7-10). They need to fill in the
blank, the invitation by the game to respond to a pre-programmed structure of
meaning. The site coordinator, then, tries to get Andy to fill in the answer, by
providing some hints, though she eventually must give him the answer: zinc
(lines 11-17). Andy responds with another act of recognition: "Ziiinc," in an
extended, low tone, and nodding to the site coordinator's confirmation that he
understands the answer (lines 18, 20). He thus positions himself as the subject,
who has responded to the call for a particular answer. For the remainder of the
clip, she guides him in locating zinc on the list of elements, and he inputs the
answer: "Allright" (line 24).
This mode of interaction with the puzzles, where Andy decodes the
instructions, executes them in solving the puzzle, completes the puzzle, and
moves quickly on to the next, is typical of his engagement throughout most of the
game. As he works through a puzzle, each successfully completed step is
punctuated by an "Allright," or "Ahhh!" of recognition. In this way, he repeatedly
enacts the subjectivity and habitus of one whose knowledge and competence is
being tested and assessed. Andy's brief utterances of recognition are subtle but
repeated frequently. On other occasions, Andy makes more explicit statements
that point to his increasing subjectification in the terms of academic achievement
as suggested by the game. In the following clip, from the same day as the
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previous clip, Andy has just completed the Tower of Hanoi problem in The Island
of Dr. Brain. His adult partner has been engaged with another child while he
works on the puzzle, and he tries to draw her attention to the fact that he has
solved the puzzle, self identifying himself as a "smooth" problem solver,
displaying his competence:
A = Andy
Ad = Adult
A: Now I have it solved! (Turns to adult who is still preoccupied with other child.) I got it
solved...
Computer: Congratulations! You've earned a bronze logic sequence prize!
A: (S trying to get adult's attention) I did it...
Ad: (Turns back to Andy.) Sweet.
A: I'm smoooooth.
Ad: How many moves did you do it in?
A: Seventeen.
As described earlier in this chapter, the singular and linear goal orientation
of The Island of Dr. Brain, encourages kids to input correct answers, often at the
expense of engaging with educational content. Andy is a particularly adept
strategist in this regard. In many instances of his play, I have marveled at how
he was able to quickly identify the minimal conditions for solving a task,
delegating as much problem solving effort as possible to other helpers in the
neighborhood, and getting through the problem. This next example is from one
of the first instances of Andy's exposure to Island of Dr. Brain. Andy is working
with another kid, Herbert, and they are just beginning "the rat-driven elevator"
problem (figure 4.8). The site coordinator occasionally checks in on their play.
This is the first time for either of them to encounter this problem, and they are
exploring and trying to decode the problem space. The task is a complex one.
They are asked to determine how many spokes, on two different gears, are
required to balance a counterweight with the weight of the elevator. They spend
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quite some time keying in different answers and trying to figure out the nature of
the problem, enlisting the site coordinator's help. They try various solutions, but
the elevator continues to either fly into the ceiling or the floor, toppling the crashtest dummy inside. Eventually, they being to enjoy simply watching the dummy
crash time after time, moving from a moment away from an achievement
orientation to pleasure in this spectacle. After almost ten minutes, in which they
continue their trial and error tactics, they finally happen on the correct answer.
This excerpt is of this concluding sequence:
A= Andy
H= Herbert
SC = Site Coordinator
1
A: OK, fifty-six. fifty-one and seventeen. you have seventeen and forty-eight.
Forty-eight. OK let's try it.
2
H: Yeah.
3
A: I love doing this.
4
H: Yeah this is it. Yep. Nope. Nope.
(Elevator crashes.)
5
A: Ahhh!! I love that.
6
H: It must, it must be fifty-one. Oh, man.
7
A: This is so hard.
8
H: Eighteen teeth. Watch this, watch this, watch this.
9
A: You think this is right? No, he got tired. (Elevator crashes.) Ahh!!! (Laughs.)
I love this!!
10
H: Eight, twenty-one. Nooo!!!!
(Elevator crashes.)
11
A: I love doing this.
12
H: Thirteen. Yeah. (Elevator is lowered successfully.) Oh my gosh. We got it.
We got it!!! Yeah, [site coordinator name]. We got it.
13
SC: Allright!
14
A: And we did it by guessing too!
15
H: I know, huh!
16
A: We're so good. Yeah, we can ride it.
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17
H: Yeah.
FIGURE 4.8
RAT-DRIVEN ELEVATOR PROBLEM IN THE ISLAND OF DR. BRAIN
Screen shot reprinted with permission from Vivendi Universal Games
159
This clip records a gleeful moment, with Herbert calling out to the site
coordinator about their accomplishment, and the two boys mutually
congratulating themselves (lines 12-16). While they are still proceeding along
the sequential logic of the game, they have managed to claim a small space of
achievement for themselves, which is not tied to the procedure for action as
suggested by the explicit educational goals of the game. They are still,
provisionally, heeding the call to action: working on decoding the instructions and
getting the correct answer. Most importantly, they persevere and achieve
mastery, at least in the technical terms defined by the game, which are
exclusively about keying in the correct answer to a problem. They are particularly
happy at having “tricked the system” by getting the right answer by guessing.
Far from detracting from their sense of mastery, this accomplishment serves as a
display of achievement. “We’re so good. Yeah, we can ride it.” In a subsequent
day, Andy revisits the same problem, and mobilizes the guessing tactic that he
developed with Herbert, abandoning any attempts to decode the nature of the
problem and reproducing the guessing heuristic in another context.
A= Andy
Ad = Adult
1
A: Now I can open it. (Opens door to rat-driven elevator problem.) I LOVE this
puzzle! This is so funny. We just guess. Me and my friend did it and we just
kept guessing.
2
Ad: Oh really? It kept kicking me out.
3
A: Watch this.
4
Ad: So what you do is (pointing to screen) you divide the elevator weight into the
counterweight.
5
A: (Inputs a solution, and the elevator crashes.) Oh no!
6
Ad: Crash test dummy!
(Game states correct answer, and then resets puzzle.)
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7
A: Oh! It was twelve and twenty-four. Oh, I see. (Game has kicked him out of
the puzzle and he re-enters the puzzle.)
8
Ad: How many times does 428 go into 1284?
9
A: I have no idea. I'm just guessing. It works. He eventually did it. Yeah!
(Elevator is lowered successfully.) Am I good or what?
10
Ad: Pure luck.
In this clip, Andy begins by announcing his guessing tactic. While the
adult, in turn, repeatedly tries to get him to orient to the procedure as suggested
by the game and the subject position of problem solver: "So what you do is you
divide the elevator weight into the counterweight" (line 4). "How many times does
428 go into 1284?"(line 8). This disjuncture, between the narrow definition of
achievement called forth by the testing situation (input correct answer), and the
more demanding definition of achievement called forth by the adult (follow the
correct procedure before inputing the answer), points to a gap between the
formal measure of achievement and the process that is meant to underlie the
measure. The work by Andy to exploit this space between a formal recognition
of mastery and an actual expenditure of personal effort, is similar to other testtaking tactics that are developed by kids who learn to "play the system." When
interpellated by a testing formation, one tactic is to guess strategically. At a later
puzzle, Andy guesses correctly again and looks smugly at his partner. “I did it.
And I just guessed. I’m so good at guessing.”
A few months later, Andy is well established as the site expert on The
Island of Dr. Brain. I have already described fieldnotes with frequent references
to him checking in on other kids' play of the game, often displaying his knowledge
and giving answers. In the following clip, Andy's help is being actively solicited
by a younger child, an eight year old, Chris, who has also appeared in the
previous section. During the course of a day's play, Andy makes frequent
appearances over Chris's shoulder, giving him instructions on how to play. Chris
will often call out to Andy to come help him if he is stuck. This brief clip illustrates
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a typical sequence of interaction in this tape, where Chris encounters a puzzle,
Andy identifies himself as an expert, and Chris solicits help.
C= Chris
UG = undergraduate
A = Andy
C: Now we are here again.
UG: Oh that's hard.
A: This is hard. I'm pretty good at this though.
C: OK, I need some help.
A: Allright.
This is not an isolated instance. Throughout the course of his play with
Chris Andy repeatedly makes statements such as “I’m very good at this” or “I’m
really good at this” at almost every puzzle that appears. Other children also
display achievement when completing a task, but Andy displays a persistent
subjectivity as a game expert across instances of his own play as well as in
participation of the play of others. This is unique from the activity-specific
acknowledgements, such as “I did it!” that punctuate that ongoing game play.
Andy's sense of mastery of the game is thus documented in the video
record through the repetition of moments of interpellation, recognition, and
alignment with game codes, leading to increasingly public and open displays of
game mastery to other kids and adults at the club. I am not suggesting that this
process is linearly progressive, but rather it is a sedimentation of repeated acts of
social recognition. Andy is repeatedly hailed as a particular kind of learner by the
game and others at the club, and repeatedly recognizes the hail, and subjectifies
himself to this shared sociotechnical formation (Althusser 1969). His selfrecognition as a knowledgeable subject is part and parcel of recognition by
others of his subjectivity, a set of recognitions made possible by ongoing cycles
of interpellation and knowledge display. Andy constructs and performs a cyborg
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habitus in relation to the durable dispositions of the machine, rendered
meaningful and socially consequential in a local context that values symbolic
academic achievement. In the video record, his small but highly repetitive acts of
describing the difficulty of the game and his own mastery of it produce his
subjectivity as a smart and successful kid, as much as the identity of the software
as representing “hard” content. This subjectivity is validated by the adults that
play with Andy, but at the same time, Andy creates tensions when he constructs
a competitive situation with other kids, producing “failure” and “stupidity” in others
as an outcome of his own success. This was most apparent in his domination of
other girls at the club who were playing the game for the first time. As the
undergraduate involved writes, “Maybe he did not want [the girl] to be as good at
the game as he was. The Fifth Dimension had turned very competitive.”
Conclusions
In his discussion of “the acquisition of a child by a learning disability,” Ray
McDermott follows one boy across a variety of settings, and documents the
variety of social settings, practices, and cultural categories that acquire, label,
and subjectify him as a “special” child and differentiate him from others around
him. He makes the radical claim: *We might as well say there is no such thing as
LD [learning disability], only a social practice of displaying, noticing,
documenting, remediating, and explaining it” (1993: 272). McDermott’s critique
of American education could apply equally to the case I have presented of
achievement-oriented software. “In America, we make something of differential
rates of learning to the point that the rate of the learning rather than the learning
is the total measure of the learner” (1993: 272). The differential is what is crucial
here and also what distinguishes the 5thD from school achievement. The 5thD
was content to celebrate Andy’s achievement of game goals to the extent that it
fostered his learning and self-esteem, but not to the extent that it positioned him
in a hierarchy vis-à-vis other children. Play with Dr. Brain in the 5thD could be
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considered an example of “displaying, noticing, documenting, and remediating,”
learning but one with unique characteristics that accentuate academic
accomplishment, but seeks to downplay competition.
In this context, the content of the software does exert its uniquely stubborn
influence. The machine becomes a tool in Andy’s local micropolitics, and Andy
becomes a “consumer” of edutainment software, interpellated into a translocal
network of multimedia-capitalism. In moments of engagement, he becomes a
representative member and producer of a certain multimedia genre. Knowledge
displays are oriented to both adults and other children, but adults form the most
appreciative audience, structuring the reception context with their recognitions of
success. “Congratulations!” “I’ve never seen anyone do it so fast.” These
responses are as much part of the cyborg habitus structured by this genre as the
efforts of children to heed or resist the call to action of the game. In these
everyday practices, the edutainment title has delivered on a certain set of
promises in the subtext of the marketing of the genre. As the JumpStart ad copy
suggests: “When kids succeed, they feel confident. When they feel confident,
they succeed.” Interest in and engagement with content is secondary to the
attribution of success, positioning a child in a status hierarchy defined by
“winning” in a competitive exercise marked as academically significant. This
competitive habitus is latent in the academic priorities of the 5thD, but only
becomes a visible problem in when it is taken to its logical conclusion of
differentially labeling children. The particularities of the software design are
important to keep in mind, as are the particularities of the 5thD setting that
inflects its use. It is the collusion between very specific game features such as
score keeping functions and ways of getting hings that enables certain forms of
engagment that create tensions with the 5thD ethos of collaborative play. One
could imagine a game that had packaged similar content in slightly different
ways, manifesting substantially different forms of engagement.
The cyborg nexus between player and software represents and produces
success (and failure) as a social and cultural outcome of consumption/production
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relations, in turn embedded in the broader fabric of American life. Andy
participates in a genre of academic preparatory play that Hervé Varenne, Shelley
Goldman, and Ray McDermott have framed as typical practice in upper-middle
class schools. They describe a question and answer game called “Screw Thy
Neighbor” played at an elite middle school, where kids cover school topics,
translated to a quiz-show genre. They conclude that compared to standardized
testing, “’Screw Thy Neighbor,’” like the Balinese cockfight, does not do anything.
Functionally, it is ‘just’ deep play, and culturally, it is the stuff of life” (1998: 11213). In the words of one of the teachers: “You make it into a contest, and
suddenly everyone wants to be an expert at defining vocabulary words” (114).
Varenne and his colleagues write. “In their vocabulary, they say simply that the
competitions of everyday life are ‘fun.’ Competition transforms the boring into the
interesting” (114). Games such as Screw Thy Neighbor and The Island of Dr.
Brain are preparatory for “real” school tests and productive of a competitive
habitus of upper-middle class status. “The games may not be functional, but
they do function to affirm what the world is like: It is a world in which neighbors
screw each other within a controlled field” (114).
Edutainment software is a multimedia genre that produces a certain form
of class identity as one of its sociocultural effects, merging the traditional status
of academic content with a highbrow media form, packaged in a pop cultural
visual vernacular that can travel across the boundary of the school and into the
home and other recreational contexts. Varenne and his colleagues write that
When competition on level playing fields is upheld as a cultural
model both of the way the world is and of the way it should be,
getting unfair advantage is what makes sense for people to do.
The more fields are leveled, the more the people who race can be
seen reconstructing new obstacles for those behind them“
(Varenne, Goldman et al. 1998: 108).
Edutainment software of the currently mainstream variety can function as
one of these new obstacles, an escalation of the logic of competition. As the
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market for learning software expanded from a small, niche market of like-minded
progressives to a broader cut of the middle-class, the software has been enlisted
into the dynamics of class distinction. Software has become another site for
fanning achievement anxiety in parents, and for instilling the habitus of upwardlymobile achievement for children that seem to have been born into success.
Varenne and his colleagues have noted among “successful” families that,
They could not passively rely on the actuarial tables that predicted
career success through the background characteristics of their
parents…[T]he students were faced with the reverse possibility:
Everyone organized their world to reveal how they would fail if they
let down their guard for a minute (Varenne, Goldman et al. 1998:
114).
The efforts of progressive reformers to broaden the base of achievement
could be considered one part of the escalation of achievement anxiety for the
already successful. “Day in and day out, [students at a high-achieving school]
have to work hard at school and thus make it harder for the students of [the low
achieving school] to catch up” (Varenne, Goldman et al. 1998: 114).
The material from the 5thD demonstrates that structuring sites of reception
can substantively alter these conditions of social reproduction by downplaying
the competitive dimensions of play with this kind of software. The history of the
emergence of the genre also demonstrates that learning software could be
otherwise. The design an dmarketing of games does matter and can translate to
substantive differences in forms of engagement. In fact, just as the founders of
the industry criticize current products, many of the educators at the 5thD resist
the newer titles and have continued to support the Apple II and the early products
produced for that platform. Yet these efforts are rapidly entering technological
obsolescence as CD-ROMs and DVDs have thoroughly replaced floppy disks
and Apple IIs are becoming difficult to maintain for even the most avid hobbyist.
Just as PC user groups have shifted from a hobbyist small-scale community to a
mass market, learning software has also become a mainstream commodity,
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enlisting a different set of interests and actors as it shape-shifted from an
educational reform effort to a genre of multimedia-capitalism. Multimediacapitalism relies on visual vernaculars that require a certain level of production
value, consolidating budgets around graphical sophistication and reproducibility
rather than social and cultural innovation. It also requires that a substantial
market, distribution and retailing apparatus support this larger production budget.
A certain habitus of achievement is an unstable outcome of the alignment
between multiple, distributed actors.
The current partial hegemony, driven by the bottom-line cost analysis in a
capitalist-competitive field, established and easily packaged cultural formulas get
reproduced and recognized at sites of reception. Mainstream retail relies on
narrow channels of communication between producers and consumers, where
producers communicate through ads and software boxes, and consumers talk
back through purchases, in marketing surveys, focus groups and mall intercepts.
The complexities of academic content are in danger of reduction to coded
markers of intelligence and assessment. Parental achievement anxiety, a culture
of competition, and children’s visual culture are the elementary sociocultural
forms that get packaged into the durable disposition of software. The
commodification of learning has unique dynamics, mobilizing highbrow academic
goals as well as failure anxiety as primary marketing tropes that find resonance
in a broad cut of the middle-class facing the volatile economic conditions that
have persisted since the nineties. In the context of the 5thD we observed the
enactment of some of these logics of competition of achievement, but also efforts
to create a setting where learning was not primarily an occasion for social
differentiation. The effort of this chapter has been to describe “learning through
play” as a political, economic and technological event, produced across a
heterogeneous but linked set of social contexts. The next chapter takes a similar
approach to the production of “entertainment” as a genre structurally opposed to
that of edutainment and one that has deeper roots in an existing commodity
culture of children’s popular culture.
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5
The Uses of Fun:
Entertainment, Phantasmagoria, and Spectacle
In 1980, while Ann Piestrup was developing her first software titles for the Apple
II, Gary and Douglas Carlson were beginning a new venture from their apartment
in Eugene, Oregon, shipping zip-lock bags with floppy disks that they had copied
by hand. This homebrew company eventually became Broderbund, one of the
leading publishers of titles such as Just Grandma and Me and Myst that defined
the heydey of CD-ROM based multimedia in the mid-nineties. In 1982
Broderbund had bought the rights to publish Bank Street Writer, a word
processing program for children developed by educators at Bank Street College
of Education. This initial foray into children’s software laid the groundwork for
Broderbund to become one of the leaders in children’s CD-ROM publishing,
producing titles such as Where in the World is Carmen San Diego and the Living
Books series.
In a phone interview, Gary Carlston describes their orientation to
children’s software, one with an appreciation for childhood curiosity and wonder,
but with a primary orientation toward children’s pleasures rather than parental
educational goals.
None of us had degrees in education. We didn’t want to go out and
make all these pedagogical claims. On the other hand, we had
developed some of these products for a reason. And it was really
Bank Street Writer that gave us credibility. We hadn’t developed it,
but we quickly recognized that, hey, this is great.
…
Basically, our idea was to do products that we ourselves found
interesting. That ‘s not a real narrow niche. That’s just kind of
whatever seemed fun. And even things like Where in the World is
Carmen San Diego, weren’t done for the educators. They were
done because of our own childhood fascination with almanacs.
Where in the World is Carmen San Diego, released in 1985, represented
Broderbund’s the first major commercial success in the edutainment market. By
the mid eighties, the console video market had crashed as had the fortunes of
Atari, and Broderbund’s investors were looking for another niche. Carlston
continues:
Our investors wanted us to move away from that uncertain
world and find a niche that we could be the leader in. And
so we started to do fewer and fewer games, just straight
adult or not adult, but typical computer games and to try to
get more and more and more into the education area, where
it was thought that because of our background in games,
that we did more exciting educational products than the
more boring educators did (laugh). We had a lot more
graphic technology at our disposal at that time because we
had a little more experience with that.
In contrast to the educators that founded The Learning Company and Knowledge
Adventure, Broderbund was a video game company that expanded into the
children’s software market. And unlike the classic educational titles and genres
that were established on the Apple II platforms, Broderbund and companies such
as Voyager made their name with multimedia and CD-ROMs, and were most
well-known for ushering in a new era of graphical sophistication for interactive
media. More (self-described) hippie than missionary, Carlston gives voice to an
enlightened but boyish curiosity, humor and anti-authoritarianism that came to
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define a genre of children’s software that focused more on entertainment than
achievement. This chapter locates the efforts of software developers like
Carlston in the history and context of the children’s entertainment industry, and
then describes how related elements of visual and spectacular culture manifest in
play in the 5thD.
Discourses of Childhood Pleasure and Play
Unlike software with curricular goals, many of the software titles produced for
children in the nineties and beyond owe their inspiration more to television and
video game culture than to the culture of the classroom. In contrast to the textenhanced line drawings of floppy-disk software, CD-ROM titles utilize the
graphics capabilities of multimedia computers to compete with television for
children’s attentions. The adoption of the CD-ROM platform marked children’s
software’s entry into the logic of visual culture and idioms developed by movies,
television, and video games. Carlston’s celebration of childhood amusement and
pleasure is indicative of an orientation that identifies more with the child than with
the educator, with indulgence more than achievement. One would have to
analyze mainstream video games to examine fully the logic of children’s
interactive entertainment freed from educational goals. Within the genres of
children’s software examined here, this entertainment genre appears most often
as one element of titles aspiring to educational or developmental goals. For
example, Math Blaster incorporates a space fantasy and shooting scenes to
motivate engagement with math problems. In Dr. Brain, an island adventure
forms the visual and narrative setting for a set of cognitive tasks. It is thus
impossible to isolate elements of hedonistic play and visual culture in particular
titles and companies. The multi-layered malleability of interactive multimedia
means that multiple genres can coexist within a given software package. In
children’s software this has resulted in titles that mix conflicting genres of
entertainment and education.
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A child-centered popular culture has been growing in momentum ever
since the establishment of children’s fiction and comic books, and has expanded
into more and more genres of toys and mass media. The television was a
turning point in creating a direct marketing channel between cultural producers
and children. In his history of toys, Cross describes how through the forties,
most toys were still advertised and sold to parents, and pitched as a tool for
parent/child bonding, picturing fathers and sons together around a train set or
daughters mimicking their mother with miniature cooking sets and baby dolls. In
the 1950s this began to change. “Television took the toy beyond the worlds of
parent, trained sales people, educational experts, and, most of all, tradition. The
new medium made possible a constantly changing culture of play that appealed
directly to the imaginations of children”(1997: 162). The eighties saw the growth
of toys and characters that often offended bourgeois adult sensibilities, creating
violent fantasy worlds for boys and sexually mature and glamorous consumer
role models for girls in characters like Barbie. Cross concludes that “Once
children are old enough to enter the world of peer culture and consumerism,
educational toys have relatively little influence” (233).
Much as Thomas Frank described in The Conquest of Cool, the
counterculture of children, like the counterculture of the sixties and seventies,
has been taken up as a powerful advertising trope, marketing freedom from
everyday discipline through consumption. In his history of children’s media, Steve
Kline describes how the development of a peer-centered children’s market was
similar to the development of the youth market, but had its unique challenges.
“The points of contact between the marketplace and children were few and
unsuited to advertising. So it fell to television to open up new lines of
communication with children, making marketing to young children possible”
(1993: 165). He describes the Mickey Mouse Club as a turning point in the
development of a distinct children’s consumer culture by focusing on a children’s
subculture formed by television (166-7). Another turning point was Mattel’s
marketing of the Burp Gun in 1955 through the Mickey Mouse Club.
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Children obviously couldn’t afford to buy the Burp Guns
themselves, the toys were too expensive. They had to convince
their parents to buy them and to sympathize with the urgencies of
faddish children’s products. The Burp Gun was hard to justify on
the grounds of enhancing education and skills. Children had
effectively to lessen their parents’ concern to have only educational
toys and convey how important the special nature of this object was
to them. The success of this television promotion was enough to
convince some toy marketers that it was possible to change the
family dynamics around consumption by TV campaigns directed at
children (Kline 1993: 168).
Television created a link between adult media producers and children that has
greatly enhanced the cultural resources of children and defined a new cultural
domain, hand in hand with a rapid increase on spending on children. This childcentered cultural production initially still remained attentive to parental concerns,
and yet gave children resources for aspiring to a blossoming anti-authoritarian
youth culture and pushing back at protective and achievement oriented values of
parents.
One aspect of this child-centered orientation is resistance to adult
achievement and progress goals, and the definition of children’s culture and
pleasures as based in instant gratification and uniquely ecstatic. In Sold
Separately, Ellen Seiter describes how resistance to adult culture goes hand in
hand with hedonistic fantasy. She contrasts the educational or developmental
orientation of toy ads in Parenting magazine with the ecstatic and utopian world
of commercials aimed at children.
A separate children’s playground culture and street culture has
existed as long as children have lived in cities and gone to school:
but this was a culture produced by children and passed on from
child to child. A similar kind of culture is now produced by adults
and offered to children through the mass media from toddlerhood
onward (1995: 117).
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She describes how “Commercials seek to establish children’s snacks and
toys as belonging to a public children’s culture, by removing them from the adultdominated sphere of presenting these products as at odds with that world” (117).
“Anti-authoritarianism is translated into images of buffoonish fathers and
ridiculed, humiliated teachers. The sense of family democracy is translated into
a world where kids rule, where peer culture is all. Permissiveness becomes
instant gratification: the avid pursuit of personal pleasure, the immediate taste
thrill, the party in the bag” (117-18). This media-enhanced peer culture has
created a new rupture in the family around issues of entertainment and
consumption, giving power and voice to some elements of child-nature that
adults have worked over the years to suppress.
In his discussion of discourses about children’s play, Brian Sutton-Smith
suggests that the dominant discourse among adults is one of play as progress, or
play as fulfilling developmental and learning goals. In contrast, he sees children
as exhibiting a quite different orientation, with play used often as a form of
resistance to adult culture, and displaying a fascination with irrational fantasy that
he calls phantasmagoria, characterized by pain, gore, sexuality, and violence
that adults continuously work to suppress.
It seems that the history of the imagination in childhood is a history
of ever greater suppression and rationalization of the irrational.
Paradoxically children, who are supposed to be the players among
us, are allowed much less freedom for irrational, wild, dark, or deep
play in Western culture than are adults, who are thought not to play
at all. Studies of child fantasy are largely about the control,
domestication, and direction of childhood (1997: 152).
He suggests that rather than univocally repress, we need to pay more
attention to these more phantasmagorical narratives, the nonsensical, irrational,
satirical, and often violent workings of the childhood imagination. In a move
resonating with Freud, Sutton-Smith seeks to acknowledge and legitimize these
often repressed psychological fascinations of childhood play. Much as adults
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have sought to ignore and repress sexual dimensions of childhood relationships,
Sutton-Smith suggests that adults repress the violent, dark, and irrational
dimensions of play in children. Sutton-Smith sees contemporary children’s
culture as giving voice to these repressed elements of childhood, yet he does not
fully theorize the social consequences of allying these interests of children with a
growing visual culture industry.
Borrowing from Foucault (1978), we could consider adult efforts to
manage children’s play as less a “repressive” regime that silences these dark
fantasies, than an “incitement to discourse” that gives voice and form to
“unnatural” and regressive play in opposition to “natural,” wholesome, and
productive play. Discourses of childhood play produce the vision of “pure” and
innocent play as well a growing corpus of conversations about the regulation,
pathologization, and commercial potential of illicit and illegitimized forms of play.
This is perhaps most evident in the culture wars over violence in children’s
media. Action media producers argue for catharsis, that they are giving voice to
repressed and primal aspects of human nature, while concerned parents and
activists argue that violent media corrupt an inherently innocent childhood with
the pathologies of adult society. Entertainment industries have found an ally in
the recognitions of childhood agency associated with progressive parenting and
the move to less repressive and more pleasure-oriented approaches to child
rearing. All of these positions are co-constitutive. They are contestations over
“the natural” in childhood play and pleasure, a discursive space that has
expanded together with the growth of children’s entertainment industries.
Ironically, a larger and larger discursive, technological, and capitalist apparatus is
producing the “discovery” of “natural” and authentic children’s play and
imagination.
Ever since comic books, and culminating in video games, lowbrow and
peer-focused children’s culture has been defined as visually rather than textually
oriented, relying on fast-paced fantasy and spectacle over realism, subtlety, and
reflection. Popular culture has created and given spectacular form to a wide
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range of childhood fantasies, including much of the violent and grotesque content
of Sutton-Smith’s phantasmagoria. Critique of “trashy” children’s media has
been a persistent companion to this growth of children’s visual culture. With the
advent of CD-ROMs and high-quality graphics on personal computers, children’s
software made its entry into this world of contemporary TV-centered visual
culture, borrowing from longstanding traditions of character animation, as well as
the interactive spectacles that had been developed by video games since the
early eighties. Contemporary children’s popular culture, whether embedded in
books, movies, television, or games, is increasingly informed by the logic of
visual culture and the high-tech spectacle, the reliance on fast action and high
production value images, music and sound to create media spectacles detached
from the mundane experiences of everyday life. Budgets for children’s software
are being allocated to create more and more visually stunning products that
immerse children in compelling virtual fantasies, visual worlds that reference
other domains of popular culture more often than the everyday lives of children.
Borrowing from Guy Debord’s notion of spectacle, I focus in this chapter
on visual culture as a centrally defining element of interactive entertainment. “The
spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and
inaccessible. It says nothing more than 'that which appears is good, that which is
good appears’” (Debord 1995: section 12). Contemporary children’s media
involves the discursive construction of childhood pleasure in a uniquely
spectacular form. I believe that spectacular and visual forms are as important to
analyze as the narrative content of media. Unlike Debord, however, I see
engagement with spectacle as a materialized and relational act. Image value
and use value, or the symbolic and functional, cannot be clearly differentiated,
nor can consumption be relegated to the domain of domestic passivity and
submission. Spectacle, in my story of children’s software, is a mechanism
through which diverse actors are enlisted in a relational framework coded by pop
cultural visual vernaculars of play and hedonism, culturally set off from the
functional, responsible disciplines of work and school. This is not about
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alienation from use-value, but about symbolic practices that have concrete
material embodiments and social and political functions.
Visual culture is a mechanism for enlisting children into a peer culture
defined in opposition to adults and school, allied with a growing apparatus of
media production. Visual culture is also a site of intertextual enlistment and
translation, as different media genres reference each other in a dense web of
visual signification. Pleasure and fun, whether for adults, youth, or children, is
symbolically set off from the instrumental domains of work, discipline and
achievement, mirroring the cultural opposition between “active” production and
“passive” consumption. Media industries capitalize on the discursive regime that
produces play as a site of authentic childhood agency, in particular, mobilizing
phantasmagoria as a site of regressive, illicit and oppositional power. When
looking at children’s engagement with spectacle, there is a level at which it is
“just” entertainment, myopic and inconsequential engagement with spectacular
forms. But at another level these are politically, socially, and culturally productive
acts that create relational networks of meaning. This is not simply a matter of
giving voice to children’s inner fantasies, but of creating a new network of
relationships based on media technologies, capitalist networks, and discourses
of childhood, a celebration of childhood imagination in the hands of commerce as
much as children. The content of childhood fantasy in children’s software can
range from the wholesome and innocent to the phantasmagoric, often
incorporating this range within a single product. Initially, developers such as
Carlston defined the early years of children’s multimedia as whimsical,
wholesome, and still parent-friendly, more Mickey Mouse Club than Garbage Pail
Kids. Yet the logic of already entrenched children’s entertainment and toy
industry were soon to make their way to this new media platform.
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Children’s Software and the Dawn of Multimedia
The late eighties and early nineties saw the dawn of multimedia, enabled by the
spread of personal computers in the home and the advent of CD-ROM
technology. CD-ROMs, with their superior storage capacity and ease of use (in
contrast to having to install data from multiple floppy disks onto a hard drive),
meant that high-resolution graphic, animation, and sounds could be easily
accessed by a personal computer. Until the late eighties, Apple IIs and MSDOS computers provided the platforms for educational software. After the
release of Microsoft Windows in 1983 and the Macintosh in 1984, the tide began
to turn towards more graphically intensive personal computing, and the late
eighties and early nineties saw the emergence of the new buzzword of
multimedia.
In 1989, the Visual Almanac, a product of the Apple Multimedia Lab, was
introduced at the MacWorld tradeshow as a limited release product to be
donated to educators. Using videodisc, a Macintosh, and Hypercard, the Visual
Almanac heralded a new era of multimedia children’s software that would soon
shift from videodisc to CD-ROM. Tying together the graphical capabilities of
video and the interactive qualities of the personal computer, the Visual Almanac
was the first demonstration of the polished graphical quality in children’s software
that we have come to associate with CD-ROMs. Voyager was the company best
known for making the transition from videodisc to CD-ROM, publishing the first
commercial CD-ROM in 1989 and going on to publish children’s titles derived
from the Visual Almanac.
From its inception, multimedia was seen in a lineage of visual culture
extending from television and video games. It united this lowbrow cultural
content with the highbrow promise of the personal computer. In the early years
of personal computing, it was the interactive qualities of the machine and the
promise of active and engaged learning that played central stage in the mind of
early educational innovators. By contrast, with multimedia platforms, the focus
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was on mobilizing visual popular culture to capture the attentions of children,
tying together education and the styles and genres of contemporary commercial
entertainment. Sueann Ambron, writing in the late eighties about the promise of
multimedia in education, describes the potential to tap the attentions of the TV
generation.
Multimedia is important in education because it holds great
promise for improving the quality of education. People have been
dreaming about easy access to information that has the richness of
multiple images and sounds, and multimedia begins to deliver on
the dream.
Students who have difficulty expressing their ideas in writing
can now have a new way to communicate and a new class of
material to learn from. Children who are used to watching
television, listening to music, and playing computer games find
multimedia a more compelling learning tool than book-andchalkboard educational media of their parents’ generation. Finally,
multimedia allows the user to be an active learner, controlling
access to and manipulating vast quantities of information. (1989:
9).
Like the early years of TLC, the Apple Multimedia Lab ethos drew heavily
from educational research. This reform orientation sought to enrich children’s
learning as well as liberate it from the dry, serious, and often alienating cultural
idioms of the classroom. Children’s “natural” affinity to new technology and
visual culture became tools towards this end. Margo Nanny, a former teacher
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FIGURE 5.1
SCREEN SHOT FROM COUNTDOWN
Reprinted with permission from Aurora Media
who helped develop the Visual Almanac and was at the Apple Multimedia Lab
from 1989-1991, describes the early years of children’s multimedia. Developers
shared a research orientation and had close ties to the educational research
community.
It was a really fun group. And the thinking was so rich and deep…
The people that would come and visit us were the TERCs and the
EDCs11 and all the people doing the most interesting stuff, including
Apple Advanced Development. But now, there is nothing like that.
There’s no place that you can go for those rich conversations about
what educators would do with interactive images if they had them.
11
TERC is a nonprofit educational research and development organization founded in 1965 that
has produced software titles such as the Zoombinis series. EDC, or the Educational
Development Center, is also a nonprofit educational research organization.
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Bob Mohl, a graduate of the MIT Media Lab and a former member of the
Apple Multimedia Lab explains this liminal position between commercialism and
research.
The Apple Multimedia Lab was a very unusual situation. Here you
have a big company that’s funding all of this stuff but it’s not
bringing in really serious company accountabilities and deadlines.
You can be really into the process. And after a year you think you
are going to finish in two months. In fact, it takes another year. It’s
not very realistic.
Mohl and Nanny went on to adapt some of the content of the Visual
Almanac for CD-ROM, producing two titles, Countdown (figure 5.1) and
Planetary Taxi (figure 5.2), published by Voyager in the early nineties, among the
first in the new genre of CD-ROM based children’s multimedia. At this point,
multimedia was still a garage-shop production. Nanny explains. “Countdown
was me and Bob and fifty thousand dollars in our garage, and the programmer
lived in a tent in my backyard.” Though relying on a small budget and a small
team, these titles were still able to set the stage for the use of entertainmentquality graphics, music, and sound effects for children’s software.
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FIGURE 5.2
SCREEN SHOT FROM PLANETARY TAXI
Reprinted with permission from Aurora Media
Developing graphical expertise for the computational medium was a
process of enlisting talent and technique from other genres through the eighties
and nineties. Collette Michaud, a graphical artist who worked at The Learning
Company before moving to the LucasArts Entertainment Company to manage its
art department, describes how in the nineties artists where drawn from other
media forms as there were very few artists that had been trained to produce
computer graphics. She describes the situation in 1991.
Computer Games had just shifted over from EGA -16 colors
on screen, to VGA - 256 colors on the screen. The resolution of
325/600 was the same - pretty low. But having the extra colors
opened up a lot of new possibilities for game graphics. Suddenly,
we started to attract more artists, but it was still tough to find any
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who were interested in working on the computer in such low
resolution with so few colors.
Most of the artists I hired came from the comic book
industry. That was the best place to find artists because they were
extremely versatile. They could draw and animate without looking
at any reference. I couldn't find artists who knew how to use the
computer because there just weren't any. So I tried to find artists
who had good drawing skills. That was the most important thing.
You could always train them on the tools of the computer.
Around the same time, Broderbund was releasing its first Living Books
such as Just Grandma and Me (figure 5.3) and a CD-ROM version of Where in
the World is Carmen San Diego at a time when it was still uncertain whether CDs
would become a mainstream form of computational media. Voyager was another
pioneer in the market, making the transition from videodisc to CD-ROM in 1988
with the release of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the first consumer CD-ROM.
In 1991, they released their first children’s titles. Broderbund and Voyager’s
gamble did pay off, and the early nineties marked the beginning of the
mainstreaming of multimedia computing. In the late eighties, the New York
Times began carrying regular features reviewing children’s software. In one of
these reviews from 1992, Peter H. Lewis introduces the term in the mainstream
media: “Multimedia is a nebulous thing. Basically it involves adding sounds,
voices, animation, video and other eye-catching data types to the simple text and
graphics familiar to most computer users.” He explains that to get animation and
CD quality sound, however, a family would need to purchase a CD-ROM drive, at
the time still priced at an inaccessible $500 (Lewis 1992). While it took until the
mid nineties to become a standard feature of personal computers, by the early
nineties there was a growing shift towards graphical design as a central
component of software production.
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FIGURE 5.3
SCREEN SHOT FROM JUST GRANDMA AND ME
Reprinted with permission from The Learning Company
In my discussion with game developers, many commented on the growth
of graphic arts budgets through the nineties. Michaud describes how when she
started at LucasArts in 1991 there were 14 artists in the art department, and
when she left in 1996 there were 65. Compared to the early years, where
programming was the primary trade of computer game development, currently,
gaming products will generally have three times more artists than programmers.
Michaud describes how artists’ roles have been gradually changing from being
“just the wrists” to having a stronger and stronger voice in the design of the
products, as graphical content becomes centrally defining. For children’s titles
that are released as part of a series of products, corporations often reuse the
same underlying technology and settings, and plug in different graphics, sounds
and story lines to produce a new title. Even in a big-budget game like SimCity,
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which is currently in its fourth incarnation, you see the same concept being rereleased with more sophisticated graphics and produced by larger and larger
development teams. The original SimCity was the work of a lone programmer
while SimCity 3000 employed a cast of dozens.
In contrast to the companies incubated by educators as nonprofit ventures
in the late seventies, the multimedia ventures that were launched in the late
eighties were generally started by corporate interests, often entertainment
companies. By that time, PC-based gaming had expanded enough to be an
appealing new market for established industries. Michaud describes some of the
differences in orientation between children’s software production at The Learning
Company and Lucas Arts, where she was developing children’s titles within an
established video gaming company.
At The Learning Company it was all very politically correct. When I
created a character, it was put through rigorous executive
meetings, not focus groups. Back then,we never really tested
anything with kids. Instead the president and his executive staff
would get involved and say, ‘Well, that character can't be white, and
it can't be blond, and it can't be red, and it can't be a boy, and it
can't be a girl, because, if it is, we'll be offending all of these
groups’. So I was forced to create homogeneous characters.
Needless to say this was a bit tiresome, so I was ready to move on
to an entertainment company where it was okay to be controversial.
I could create a witch and actually make it look ugly or create a
female character and make her look sexy without anyone getting
uptight about it.
While the more educationally-oriented and minimalist platform of the Apple
II gave birth to The Learning Company and Davidson & Associates, founded by
former teachers, the nineties saw a shift towards an entertainment orientation in
children’s product. Companies such as or Microsoft and Apple were incubating
their own ventures into children’s software that had a strong research and
educational orientation, but took into account the more graphically intensive and
entertaining formats being developed in for game consoles and arcades. As a
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commercial market, these new ventures were not under the same constraints as
classroom software, and were given more freedom to develop content that
appealed directly to children. The shift was from a pedagogical perspective that
sought to elevate and change children to an entertainment orientation that sought
to give voice and shape to children’s pleasures. Gaming companies like
Broderbund were beginning to see children’s software as an area where they
could create graphically exciting and entertaining but family-friendly products.
Maxis’ SimCity became a hit product that spanned the entertainment and
education markets, although it was not originally intended as an educational title.
Edutainment was an expanding site of negotiation and struggle between the
interests of educators, entertainers, programmers, artists, and business people,
with the visual culture of entertainment gaining an increasingly strong voice.
Packaging Pleasure
As described in the former chapter, children’s software often relies on
educational claims to market to achievement-oriented parents. Yet more and
more products in the children’s software genre focus on entertainment as the
primary goal, with curriculum-based products being gradually ghettoized as
educational and by implication, not as fun as other software available on market.
Michaud comments astutely on the shift away from educational content. "A lot of
how well your product is received in the market is dependent on how well you
position it as educationally entertaining." She reflects: "Probably the biggest
change in the industry is the acceptance of parents and teachers alike that
games don't have to have that much learning content anymore." I push her on
this. "Why is that?" Michaud reflects a moment and then answers, describing the
state of the industry in 1999, when I spoke to her.
Because the kids have to actually like playing the game, otherwise
the parents feel as though they’ve wasted their money. Three years
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ago, when there wasn’t much competition in the educational
software market, content was king. Products were expected to have
a lot of learning content. And if it was fun, that was a bonus. The
fun was secondary to the child doing his three Rs. Now, with so
many different software games to choose from, kids really have to
like the software they play. Kids today are technically savvy.
They're learning to use computers and game consoles at an early
age so their standards are much higher for what they're entertained
by. I think parents are savvier too. So entertainment is more
important now. I’m amazed at products that were at the top of the
charts three years ago, compared to what's at the top of the charts
now. Three years ago it was Oregon Trail, it was Learning
Company Math - that kind of thing. Now it's Mattel's Barbie Fashion
Designer.
Her feeling is that "The trend is really towards highly entertaining software, and
educational content is becoming increasingly secondary. " She sees Humongous
Software, creators of Pajama Sam and Freddi Fish as a case in point.
Humongous when it first came out was kind of looked down upon
by teachers, because it didn't have any content in it. It was just a
fun game for kids. Now, the various Humongous product series are
accepted as legitimate learning products both in school and in the
home. Critical thinking, if that's the only content you have in your
game, is enough. What is critical thinking? It's become this obscure,
broad-based buzzword that everybody puts on their package that is
practically synonymous with the word educational.
Michaud’s commentary is reflected in the packaging and marketing of
many of the popular titles on market today. Since the late nineties, children’s
software overall has been characterized by visually polished multimedia titles that
can compete with entertainment media in terms of production value. The market
for children’s software is being polarized between curricular products that are
based on a pastiche of school-coded content, and “wholesome entertainment”
titles that are marketed as an alternative to video gaming, providing fun and
excitement, without the violent content and mind-numbing repetivity of action
games. At either of these poles, a certain level of graphical appeal is a basic
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requirement, but the two kinds of products rely on different selling points,
educational or entertainment focused.
In Great Software for Kids and Parents, a book in the Dummies Guide to
Family Computing series, Cathy Miranker and Alison Elliot describe what they
didn’t want from their family computer. “We didn’t want it to turn into a highpriced video-game player. We didn’t want it to be an electronic baby-sitter. We
didn’t want it to be a desktop TV” (1996: 2). Instead they are looking for software
that:
-
Creates inventive, hands-on opportunities for fun learning
Offers kids something special, something that takes advantage of the
computer’s unique capabilities
Encourages kids (and parents) to make connections between their
computer-inspired discoveries and real life
Fits in with our kids’ lives without eclipsing the books and toys, games
and adventures, and traditional pastimes that we value
The orientation of Miranker and Elliot describes the mainstream of
educational software at this point in the early 21st century. It needs to be fun and
engaging, different from the passive and lowbrow media of television and video
games, and hopefully though not necessarily educationally enriching from a
curricular standpoint. They review curricular products as well as entertainment
products such as Barbie Fashion Designer and SimCity.
The ads for the more entertainment-oriented titles portray children as
ecstatic and pleasure-seeking rather than reflective and brainy, and childhood as
imaginative, pure and joyous. The ethos is parent-friendly but child-centered, a
formula-established by children’s media companies ever since the Mickey Mouse
Club aired on televison. Rather than playing on achievement anxiety, ads for
these kinds of titles play on parents’ desires to indulge their children’s pleasures,
and the growing pressure on parents to be in tune with their children and keep
them happy and entertained. The happiness of a child has become as much a
marker of good parenting as achievement and effective discipline.
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FIGURE 5.4
ADVERTISEMENT FOR PUTT-PUTT
Putt-Putt® Joins the CircusTM and Pajama Sam® artwork courtesy of Infogrames
Interactive, Inc. © 2002 Humongous Entertainment, a division of Infogrames, Inc.
All Rights Reserved. Used with Permission.
188
In contrast to the generic and faceless child facing the refrigerator in the
Jump Start ad of the prior chapter, Humongous Entertainment puts the child’s
pleasure close-up and front and center. “This is the review we value most”
declares the ad copy above a large photograph of a beaming child (figure 5.4).
Humongous’ adventure game Putt-Putt Joins the Circus does not make specific
curricular claims other than promising an engaging and prosocial orientation.
They list “problem solving, kindness, teamwork, friendship” as their educational
content items. The ad mobilizes discourses from the established genre of film
reviews by describing how “critics rave” over the software title. The bottom of the
ad lists quotes from various reviews in software magazines. The last quote, from
PC Magazine is particularly telling. “Nobody understands kids like Humongous
Entertainment.” The company is positioned as a channel to your children and
their pleasures, the authentic voice of childhood.
The box for Pajama Sam, one of Humongous’ most popular titles (figure
5.5), features the adorably caped hero, Sam, and describes the software as “an
interactive animated adventure.” The back of the box does list educational
content in a small box that is visually decentered from the portions describing the
excitement and adventure that the title promises. The list of “critical thinking,
problem-solving skills, memory skills, mental mapping and spatial relations skills”
does not make any curricular claims, and stresses the “creative and flexible”
nature of the software and “the power of a child’s imagination.” “Feature-film
quality animation” and “original music” are central selling points for the title. It
can compete with television and videos for your child’s attention, and it still has
some educational value. The “natural” imaginations and creativity of children
achieve full expression through the mediation of sophisticated media
technologies and an immense apparatus of image production.
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FIGURE 5.5
BOX ART FOR PAJAMA SAM 2
Putt-Putt® Joins the CircusTM and Pajama Sam® artwork courtesy of Infogrames
Interactive, Inc. © 2002 Humongous Entertainment, a division of Infogrames, Inc.
All Rights Reserved. Used with Permission.
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FIGURE 5.5, CONTINUED
BOX ART FOR PAJAMA SAM 2
Putt-Putt® Joins the CircusTM and Pajama Sam® artwork courtesy of Infogrames
Interactive, Inc. © 2002 Humongous Entertainment, a division of Infogrames, Inc.
All Rights Reserved. Used with Permission.
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“Prepare to get blown away!!” screams the copy above a wide-eyed boy,
dangling off the edge of his PC in cliff-hanging mode. “The action in Disney’s
CD-ROM games is so awesome, your kids are gonna freak (and that’s a good
thing). So hold on tight and check out the action this holiday!” As far as wild
fantasy goes, these products are relatively tame, based on the usual Disney
formulas of fast-paced adventure with and gore-free violence. Yet the pitch is to
market the action and “freaky” aspects of the software as its primary appeal.
Although still addressing the parent, the ad copy makes use of children’s
language, hailing the hip parent, in touch with children’s culture and desires. In
contrast to the conservative dress of the JumpStart children, this boy is dressed
in baggy skate-punk shorts and trendy sneakers, and has spiked hair with blond
highlights. The children in this and the Humongous ad are white and presumably
middle-class PC-owning families, but they are not marked as educationally
conscious. In this ad, the vernaculars of children’s peer and popular cultures are
mobilized to enlist the progressive parent and position Disney as the authentic
voice of children.
The LEGO Company similarly features children’s pleasures in ad entitled
“Imaginations Powered Daily” (figure 5.6). “Let your star shine” declares their
girls’ product, Lego Friends. “His own LEGOLAND theme park!” suggests the
LEGOLAND copy below a beaming boy holding a blueprint. “Let their
imagination run totally wild as they are challenged to build the LEGOLAND of
their dreams.” “His license to thrill!” proclaims LEGO Racers, featuring a too-cool
boy in shades and car-racer garb. “Rock his world!” shouts the copy on LEGO
Rock Racers. This ad campaign promises to cut children’s imaginations free of
their everyday constraints and responsibilities, letting them run wild, in thrilling,
action packed online adventure. The LEGO Company tames adult and teenoriented video game culture into an entertainment vernacular that still preserves
a protected space of childhood innocence. Unlike mainstream video games, the
titles are still marketed to parents, and the children depicted in adorably
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FIGURE 5.6
ADVERTISEMENTS FOR LEGO GROUP PRODUCTS
LEGO, the LEGO logo and LEGOLAND are trademarks of the LEGO group: ©
1999 The LEGO Group. Images used here with permission. The LEGO Group
does not sponsor or endorse this dissertation.
oversized costumes, assuring the parent that despite these adult fantasies and
their aspirations to youth culture and action media, they are, after all, children.
These more entertainment-oriented titles use the same visual elements as
the edutainment titles described in the previous chapter. Both edutainment and
entertainment titles share the same stylistic genre, and many titles are not clearly
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categorized as one or the other. They occupy the same shelves at retailers and
are oriented to a similar demographic of middle and upper middle class families,
but keyed somewhat towards the more progressive and permissive parent. What
distinguishes entertainment as a genre is the orientation toward a more indulgent
and repetitious play-orientation in contrast to a competitive and linear progress
orientation. Edutainment titles, particularly those that make curricular claims, are
generally linear and make much of achieving certain levels and scores. By
contrast, entertainment software and elements are exploratory, often repetitive,
and generally open-ended. With this latter genre, what gets packaged and
marketed is not achievement, but fun, exploration, and imagination. These titles
are also distinguished from the action entertainment titles marketed primarily
towards teens and adults. In contrast to the darker hues and often frightening
characters adorning the boxes of these titles, entertainment software for younger
children is clearly coded as a separate market with brighter colors and smiling,
wide-eyed characters like Pajama Sam.
Software Case: The Magic School Bus Explores the Human Body
When I was completing my fieldwork at the 5thD at the end of the nineties, CDROM games and a more entertainment-oriented genre of products were making
their appearance at the clubs. Mainstream licenses such as Lego, Barbie, and
Disney were yet to arrive at the children’s software scene, so I was not able to
see titles such as these in my play settings. We were just beginning to see the
emergence of licensing arrangement and tie-ins with television and other media,
and more and more titles with CD-ROM quality production value. Broderbund’s
Living Book series, licensing popular children’s books such as those by Mercer
Mayer, represented one such tie-in. Another, which will be examined in more
detail here, is the Magic School Bus series of CD-ROMs.
The Magic School Bus series of games is an adaptation of the Living
Books format of interactive storybook, and is based on a popular children's book
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series and subsequent television series. The games were produced by an
alliance between Scholastic, the publisher of the book series, and Microsoft,
embodying the merged interests of two large corporations; the series represents
Microsoft's first major foray into educational publishing, and Scholastic's first
foray into software. The series has received much attention in the press and
favorable reviews (Ruocco and Dyson 1996). The Magic School Bus Explores
the Human Body (MSBHB) is one of the first in the series that currently includes
five titles. These titles incorporate many elements of edutainment with their
school-like content, but they are evidence of a shift towards the vernaculars of
TV-centered popular culture. The series represents a transitional moment in the
shift from edutainment to entertainment as the dominant genre in children’s
software; academic content is still a focus unlike a title like Pajama Sam that has
little overtly school-like references.
The packaging of the software exhibits the emerging orientation towards a
wackier, visual, child-centered media culture of children’s television (figure 5.7).
The cover declares a “fun-filled, fact packed science-adventure!” The back of the
box marks and separates out the appeal to children and parents, with the appeal
to kids featured more prominently. “Hey kids!” calls out one of the characters.
“There’s fun ahead. In the front, back or outside the bus! Just click and you can
see what is going on inside you.” “Hey parents!” hails another character.
“Here’s why exploring the human body in Scholastic’s The Magic School Bus is
absorbing for kids and can be a great part of their diet of activities!” The box then
lists the twelve body parts introduced in the software, and sings the praises of
multimedia. “Science facts come to life with narrative, sound, video and
animation.”
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FIGURE 5.7
BOX ART FOR THE MAGIC SCHOOL BUS EXPLORES THE HUMAN BODY
Box shots reprinted with permission from Microsoft Corporation
196
FIGURE 5.7, CONTINUED
BOX ART FOR THE MAGIC SCHOOL BUS EXPLORES THE HUMAN BODY
Box shots reprinted with permission from Microsoft Corporation
197
MSBHB is a multimedia space of exploration organized by a fantasy
scenario of traveling through the human body. The narrative logic is one of freewheeling and non-competitive exploration. The teacher, Ms. Frizzle, and her
magic bus invert the power dynamics of the traditional classroom. The
adventures depict kids escaping the disciplines of formal education, adventuring
beyond the classroom walls to embark on fantastic adventures with a slightly
crazy and out-of-control teacher and a shape-shifting school bus. The kids often
appear as the more level-headed and calmer characters, struggling to keep up
with their charismatic leader. Like the entertainment industry content creators,
Ms. Frizzle stands in for the liberated adult that is in touch with her uninhibited,
playful, inner child. Rather than being presented in the linear and progressive
logic of classroom curriculum, kids learn about subjects like the human body,
space, and geology through a chaotic and dizzying set of encounters where the
characters in the story careen from one scene to another.
The player enters the game through the classroom of Ms. Frizzle, and can
click and explore various animated objects in the classroom. For example,
clicking on a fishbowl will make the fish jump up, and clicking on a model volcano
will make it erupt. A skeleton in one corner, if clicked on, turns into a puzzle,
where the player has to reassemble the pieces of the skeleton. The main
adventure is triggered by clicking on the toy school bus in the classroom, which
launches a movie of entering one of the kid's mouth, and ending up in it with a
handful of cheese puffs. From there, the player can visit twelve other parts of the
body, such as the liver, lungs, esophagus, stomach, or intestines. In each area of
the body, one is accompanied by the cartoon characters from the series—Ms.
Frizzle and her students—and can hear them talk or report on the particular body
part. Other activities include conducting a virtual science experiment, using a
drawing application, clicking on various objects to get animations somewhat
related to the body part, or playing a video game loosely thematized around the
given part of the body.
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The dominant way of interacting with the game is "click and explore" and
is based on a relatively intuitive interface and navigation mechanic. One clicks
on road maps to move to a different part of the body, and on an object to activate
it. Most objects in the game have no functionality other than triggering an
animation or a scene change. Some exceptions are the video games embedded
within the narrative triggered by clicking on the hand held game machine that one
of the kids is playing. These games are generally very technically simple,
borrowing from existing models of early video games. For example, for the nose,
one has to put together a puzzle, and for the lungs, one plays a game of pinball.
There is also a toolbox in certain scenes that allows the player to view scenes
from different perspectives, such as x-ray vision or under a flashlight. Help is
embedded in the game through "Liz" a small green lizard that is always present
at the bottom of the screen. Liz will often give advice on navigation and other
aspects of game functionality, and will also give mini-lessons on the body.
The organization of game tasks is integrated with the fantasy scenario and
content domain. For example, "street signs" for navigation follow the layout of
the human body by moving from mouth to esophagus, to stomach, to small
intestine, etc (figure 5.8). The tasks are organized around a coherent though
fantastic story of being in a tiny school bus that is traveling through a body. The
only elements not clearly integrated into this fantasy scenario are the video
game-like portions, which are often incidental to the body theme. While the video
games break the overall narrative logic, because these games are peripheral, the
design still retains coherence between structure and fantasy scenario. In
contrast to Dr. Brain, where the puzzles and games were the primary focus for
interaction, these “game breaks” are peripheral to the fantasy scenario of
exploration.
There is no particular sequencing for clicking on different parts of the
classroom or other scenes, and once in the body, the "nervous system navigator"
allows the player random access to any other body part. There are also no right
or wrong answers, but simply information and action that is triggered by mouse
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clicks. Other than the video games, there is no way to measure achievement
according to a goal-like metric, except for when one exits the game and gets a
"passport" stamped according the areas of the body that were visited. The
passport tracks what body parts were visited, but not the activities that were
engaged with in any given area. There are no levels or scores in the main
portion of the game, just different places to travel to and explore. No evaluations
or rewards mark progress through the game other than the passport. This is
clearly an adventure, not a test.
While the user has a great deal of flexibility in determining pathways
through the scenario, s/he has little ability to input content or interact beyond a
single mouse click. The structure of the game parallels an entertainment
orientation of non-interactive media by providing content that is almost entirely
pre-programmed, and waiting to be activated by the user. One mouse click is
often followed by a long animation sequence, character dialog, or a transitional
sequence. The game relies on a position of a “spectator” more than the
personalized and interactive engagement associated with the position of a
“student.” The most technically sophisticated aspects are not the mechanics of
game play or user authoring, but rather graphic and sounds. Many of the
animation and graphics are have high production value and this is clearly the
area in which the majority of design effort was invested. The sounds have been
designed to be appealing to kids, with many sound effects and "gross" sounds in
almost every scene. In contrast to simulation games that stress user authoring,
and puzzle adventure games that assess a child’s knowledge, MSBHB is more
like an engaging and animated book that can be opened at any point, but doesn't
demand much from the user. This contrasts to the marginalization of the fantasy
and exploratory elements in Dr. Brain and grade-based products, where one
scene is a precondition for progressing to another. Other than the video game
breaks, MSBHB is non-competitive and non-evaluative, driven by a narrative and
spectacular logic rather than a game-like or achievement-oriented one.
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FIGURE 5.8
SCREEN SHOT OF
THE MAGIC SCHOOL BUS EXPLORES THE HUMAN BODY
Used by permission from Microsoft Corporation
MSBHB in the 5thD
MSBHB was popular in the 5thD in the period after its introduction. This may in
part be due to the fact that it was introduced to the club with fanfare as a gift from
the wizard, in addition to its flashy graphics and sounds that seem to catch the
attention of kids as they wander about club. In every tape, there is a substantial
revolving audience of different kids and undergraduates that check in on the
game play, especially in sequences when the game is producing particularly
gross or funny sounds. It appears also that MSBHB found a place in the 5thD
maze very quickly, and many kids played the game based on the location in the
activity system.
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While most undergraduates did not make any particular comments
regarding their impressions of the game, and some expressed confusion about
the point of it, many undergraduates were enthusiastic in describing it. The
fieldnotes describe MSBHB as "pretty cool," "amazing," "really neat" and
"fascinating." Some point to the "great" or "cool" graphics. One undergraduate
was even more enthusiastic:
I think this is the best computer game I have ever seen! It is
visually stunning and completely enthralling. The sound effects are
great, a bit on the vulgar side, but I suppose that keeps kids'
attention pretty well! It is a completely educational game—there is
no way that you cannot learn something from it!
Descriptions of the game by the kids seem split along age lines.
Younger kids describe it repeatedly as "cool" and "fun." Older kids, however,
seem to view it as a "kiddie game." As one twelve year old is playing, a group of
older boys walks by and calls it "The Magic Retard Bus." Similarly, the twelve
year old who is playing it makes sarcastic remarks about its content, calling one
of the characters "a fag," and mimicking some of the talk on the game in an
annoying and childlike voice. In a fieldnote, an undergraduate describes how a
twelve year old girl “thought that the things they told/taught you were kind of
elementary, not at her level.” The game is generally not described as "easy" or
"hard," except for the video game portions of the game.
There are a number of features of play with MSBHB that make it distinct
from the prior chapter’s case of Dr. Brain and the case of SimCity 2000 to follow.
Unlike with Dr. Brain, there was no focused period of videotaping for this game,
though it appears frequently in our video record throughout the central year of
observation. Another factor is that a game like MSBHB does not invite a focused
goal-oriented engagement, and kids tend to engage in sporadic and more
lightweight ways with the game. Since the game was part of the activity system,
many children played it, but were not necessarily invested in it the same way that
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children playing games like Dr. Brain or SimCity were. Due to this, we have
many observations of play with the game, but we do not have sequences of
particular children playing this game across multiple days. This is a consequence
of its location in the 5thD ecology as much as the design of the game. The
remainder of this chapter will range beyond examples with MSBHB to illustrate
processes of play with this genre of software, and there is no sustained case
study of a particular child’s subject formation in relation to the game. In the
previous chapter, Dr. Brain was the focal case for examining the content as well
as play with the edutainment genre. Here I describe play with the narrative
features particular to MSBHB, and then turn to aspects of play with the
entertainment genre that were evident in the 5thD across a variety of software
titles: engagement with special effects, discourses of “fun,” and narratives of
destruction and action entertainment.
Narrative and Exploration in MSBHB
MSBHB is a game which foregrounds narrative logic and visual appeal over
technical sophistication or user authoring. The dominant features of the design,
and of both kid and undergraduate engagement with the game, are around the
narrative and visual features, such as the movies, graphics, sounds, educational
information, and the Magic School Bus backstory. Elements such as the video
games, drawing program, and science experiments afford some peripheral and
more user authored forms of engagement. The user experience is designed for
engagement primarily as a reader/viewer, albeit one with more control over the
story line than with a traditional book or movie format.
At moments of play, there are ongoing negotiations between kids and
undergraduates about what narrative trajectory to take through the software, and
how to engage with the educational content. One persistent tension is between
undergraduates, who try to orient kids to the educational content of the game and
systematic exploration of all areas, and kids, who orient toward the visual effects
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and a more chaotic trajectory. In almost every fieldnote about the game,
undergraduates will describe their efforts to get kids to engage with the content
domain or to get kids to click on various aspects of a scene before zooming off to
the next body part. One undergraduate, working with a kid for the second time,
says, “I asked if maybe this time through he thought we could explore each area
in more depth. This added to the game, because instead of just visiting different
places in the body, we explored them as fully as possible.
In one instance of play, a boy, John, is working with two undergraduates,
Peggy and Elaine. John is controlling the mouse, and has been exploring
various parts of the human body. Throughout the interaction, John clicks around
the scene, as the undergraduates work to engage with him and the educational
content inherent in the game. For example, they might suggest exploring an
area further before zooming off to the next body part, or they might ask him if he
knows what an intestine is. In this excerpt from the video, they are all observing
an animation of the bus traveling through an artery, and both undergraduates
work to create a dialog on blood and blood cells, specifically invoking school
learning in the process:
P = Peggy
E = Elaine
J = John
C = Computer
1 P: What do you think these things are? (referring or disc-like flying objects) Those red
things.
2 J: Um, they're um, blood.
3 P: Yeah, blood cells.
4 E: OK now, if you click on that, I think it might tell you something about the kidney.
5 C: Many people can live with one kidney. If one of the kidneys is damaged, it can be
removed and the remaining kidney will do the work of both.
6 P: Try exploring. Click around all over the place.
7 J: [Clicks on another place, and an animation of traveling through veins starts.]
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8 P: So where do you think he's traveling in if those are little blood cells? How is he getting
from place to place? What are these tunnels? Do you know what those are?
9 J: Those are your water input right? (Gestures along throat.)
10 P: O.K. what do you have right here? (Points to J's hand.)
11 J: Veins.
12 P: Yeah, veins. And you have arteries. That's what carries the blood. Have you learned
about the human body yet? In school?
13 J: No. (Animation ends and bus cockpit appears. J starts clicking on objects outside of
windshield, and humorous animations and sounds appear.)
14 P: See they're blue blood cells.
15 J: What is that?
16 E: I think that means it needs to get oxygen.
17 J: White blood.
18 P: White blood cells?
19 E: You want to see what's kind of neat? Try clicking on the mirror.
Upon seeing the animation, which includes representations of flying red
blood cells, Peggy asks John if he knows what they are (line 1), and he responds
with a partial answer (line 2). The interaction is akin to a student-teacher
interaction. Elaine suggests clicking on an icon (line 4), which brings up an
animation and a narration describing the functions of the kidneys (line 5). After
John clicks on another icon, and they see the animation of the arteries again,
Peggy again resumes her questioning (line 8), and after one incorrect response
(line 9), gets the correct answer from John, and asks him if he has learned about
the human body in school yet (line 12). Their dialog is interrupted by a new
animation appearing on the screen, and John begins to click on different objects,
triggering more animations. For example, a white blood cell animates into an
ambulance when clicked on. Elaine suggests clicking on a different part of the
bus (line 19), which takes them to a different screen. This afternoon is described
glowingly by Elaine as a successful day of interaction with a child. John is
described as “diligent” and “polite” and she is impressed by his ability to read and
follow instructions. “He had no problems in talking to both Peggy and I, and he
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accepted our help willingly. He never specifically asked for our help but he never
refused it either”. Peggy’s fieldnote is similarly positive about the engagement.
More typical is a degree of frustration about the difficulties of getting kids
to respond to adult intervention. For example, one boy declares flatly that "I don't
want to learn," when an undergraduate tries to get him to open and read the
informational drawer. Another undergraduate describes how the site director
intervened in their play, guiding both the undergraduate helpers and the kids to
engage with questions about the human body.
He came over and tried to prompt discussion by asking questions
about what things do in the body, or what the drawing was
representing. This led to more questions. However, for the most
part, the kids did not appear interested in answering our questions.
They just wanted to play the game.
While there were a few instances where undergraduates were impressed
with kids’ interest and knowledge about the human body, there were many more
instances of frustration about kids’ unwillingness to engage beyond the
spectacular features of the game. One undergraduate describes her difficulties
working with one boy.
[We] explored many places in the body together, but it was difficult
to try to get him to focus on what we were doing, or the purpose of
it. He was much more interested in having the pieces of semidigested food in the stomach make their burping/farting noises than
what purpose the stomach actually served. Each place we went to,
I asked him what purpose it served, but he just wanted to plunge
ahead.
Another undergraduate describes how she got “really frustrated” with one
girl who would not respond to her offers to help her play and to talk about the
content of the game. “I kept trying with each different body part and she started
to answer me. But when she did, she answered that she didn’t care, and that
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became very obvious.” The transcript of this session is indicative of a tension
between the undergraduate and the kid agenda.
UG = Undergraduate
M = Mary
UG: What happens if you hit the brown thing?
(M hits the sign to the Small intestine)
M: To the small intestine.
UG: What does the small intestine do?
M: I don't know.
UG: Then we can find out, right?
M: Eww!
UG: What's that?
M: (Unintelligible) That's the lower stomach here.
UG: That's why yours does too. . All right here.
(They arrive at the small intestine)
UG: It goes all through here.
(M clicks on some of the floating things)
UG: What happens if you point at it? It disappeared. Huh, look it is fat. But you don't
know what the small intestine does yet.
(M clicks the sign to the large intestine)
M: Who cares.
UG: Don't you want to learn what your body does?
M: Oh, look, there's some Cheetos right there.
UG: Mm-hmm.
M: Eww. What is up.
UG: You're on your way to the large intestine. Do you know what the large intestine
does?
M: No
UG: Do you want to find out? You don't have to if you don't want to.
The undergraduate is struggling to get Mary to take interest in what a
small intestine is, repeatedly trying to engage her: “What does the small intestine
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do?” “But you don’t know what the small intestine does yet.” “Don’t you want to
know what your body does?” Mary responds bluntly “Who cares” and points her
to the Cheetos floating there. She is more interested in the gross visuals,
repeatedly calling attention to them with an appreciative “Eeew!”
Undergraduates experience frustration and a feeling of being out of control when
kids are unresponsive to them in this way and insist on pursuing their own
agenda of seemingly random engagement with the surface appearances of the
game.
While kids exhibit different degrees of tolerance and responsiveness
toward these attempts by the undergraduates, they always evidence an
orientation toward experiencing the graphics and special effects of the game over
the content. In the context of the 5thD, where undergraduates are instructed to
keep engagement “fun” and child-centered, kids are generally successful in
instantiating their own narrative preferences. Kids can spend excruciatingly long
minutes playing with gross farting and squirting noises, despite (or perhaps
because of) the discomfort of the undergraduates. Younger kids that are familiar
with the Magic School Bus TV series also evidence interest in the characters and
the overall Magic School Bus story.
Storybook games, like MSBHB, rely heavily on the uniquely spectacular
features of interactive multimedia to draw children into engagement with
educational content. The basic mode of play is to click on objects to see what
visual and auditory effect will result. Kids find these small animations highly
amusing, particularly if they are accompanied by a gross noise or visual. One
undergraduate describes how two girls working together wanted to click on every
animated object in the classroom. One of the girls says she likes the game
because of “the music and the weird sounds it makes and how you can go into
the human body.” The sounds often drew an appreciative audience, and
“advertised” the game to other kids at the club. One undergraduate describes
how the girl she was working with “at first only wanted to learn how to produce
those ‘cool noises.’” Although other kids were not so systematic in clicking on
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every object, they did enjoy the animations and showing off particularly cool ones
that they had discovered. In the tapes where kids are together at the game,
observers will be constantly leaning in and pointing at things to click on. In this
sequence, Peter is in control of the mouse, while Chris and Brad encourage him
to click on different things (lines 1-3, 6, 8):
C = Chris
P = Peter
B = Brad
1 C: Get that - get that thing. Get that one candy bar. Get the candy bar. Get the candy.
Get the candy bar. Get the small chocolate thing. (Leans in and points). Awww.
You should've got it. It's funny.
2 B: Get that one. (Leans in and points.) This one's funny.
3 C: Oh, get that one thing. Right here.
4 P: (Clicks on blob that turns into a hamburger with an audible yawn.)
5 B: Oh yeah. Cool.
6 C: Get that chocolate thing. Hit it.
7 P: (Hits blob that turns into a chocolate bar.)
8 B: What's that green thing?
The kids rarely tire of this mode of clicking on animated objects, and will revisit
areas to show particularly cool interactions to other kids and their undergraduate
helpers. This is more a version of show and tell then the displays of mastery that
were evident with games like Dr. Brain.
Mastery of the game is defined by knowledge of the interface and
navigation, rather than knowledge of the content domain. When children lean in
to offer suggestions and help, their comments are exclusively about such things
as what to click on to get a cool special effect, or how to get to a specific place in
the scenario. Although undergraduates view knowledge of the human body as
an important aspect of engaging with the game, it is not portrayed as central to
“knowing how to play.” Even undergraduate descriptions of their own lack of
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mastery of the game similarly revolve around not knowing what to click on rather
than knowledge of the educational content. One undergraduate describes her
sense of being lost and “not having authority” because she didn’t know where to
click to get to different scenes of the game.
In summary, play with MSBHB was dominated by the open-ended
narrative of exploration and discovery rather than a focused trajectory of
intellectual mastery. Adults made frequent attempts to orient kids toward a more
systematic and progress-oriented form of engagement, but children tended to
resist, particularly when there were multiple kids playing together and sharing
their discoveries and fascinations. Kids’ oriented instead to the visual and
auditory discovery and a more chaotic trajectory through the narrative space.
Key factors in the appeal of the game for kids were the spectacular multimedia
dimensions of this game. I turn now to a discussion of the logic of special effect
in this and other graphically sophisticated multimedia titles.
Spectacle and Special Effect
Here I present cases from my ethnographic record of play with MSBHB, SimCity
2000 and DinoPark Tycoon around engagement with visual, auditory, and
interactional special effects. These games embed multiple goal structures and
invite different forms of engagement, but are similar in that they are all CD-ROM
games with high production value and polished graphical and auditory effects.
Visual Effects
The tapes of kids' game play with graphically advanced games is continuously
punctuated by their notice of on-screen eye candy, an occasional "cool," or
"oooh," that testifies to their appreciation of visual aesthetics of one kind or
another. One undergraduate describes a boy playing SimCity 2000 for the first
time. “Every time he placed a building on the screen, he exclaimed “Cool!”
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because the graphics were very complex and vivid. With a game like MSBHB,
attention-grabbing graphics are central to the game's appeal, since the game
relies on an exploratory mode of interaction rather than one guided by a strong
narrative story line or competitive goal orientation. The animations that form the
transitions between the different parts of the body often draw appreciative
"EEEW"s from both undergraduate and kid viewers, as they watch the tiny bus
drop into a puddle of stomach goo, or fly down a sticky esophagus. "This is the
fun part. This is fun. Watch," insists one kid as he initiates the opening
animation. An undergraduate describes how a girl was “really excited” about
showing her one small animation in MSBHB. In Island of Dr. Brain, upon
completing the game, players are rewarded with a lengthy animation of the island
turning into a boat and sailing away, and kids who have gotten to this point note
how "cool" it is, and sit through to the credits screen.
The screen in which one designs a face to go on the driver's license in
MSBHB, invites many minutes scrolling through the different options for facial
features, and discussion of what is a cool or uncool feature. When multiple kids
are engaging with the game, there will invariably be extended discussion about,
and exploration of different visual features in the driver’s license. For example,
when two boys are working together on a game, they argue about each facial
feature, such as the eyes and eye wear (lines 4-7), or skin color (lines 8, 9):
C = Chris
P = Peter
UG = Undergraduate
1 C: We're going to do the same things as last time like you want. (Scrolls through
features.)
2 P: Yeah, that.
3 C: That one you did, you wanted. That was a good one.
4 UG: Change the eyes.
5 C: I will. I'm going to do the one you wanted.
6 P: Yeah, I like that one. No, put the really thick sunglasses. Go back.
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7 C: No, I like those. I like those sunglasses.
8 P: Then I get to pick. Change skin color. Do you see a difference? Maybe it just gets
it darker.
9 C: There. Like that? (Completes face.)
Features such as the driver's license, animations of things in the different
scenes, or different controls in the cockpit, provide an ongoing stream of visual
effects that are often irrelevant to the educational content of the game, but
provide eye catching distractions that keep the kids engaged with the game.
MSBHB incorporates visually spectacular features that are ends in themselves
for game consumers, regardless of the relevance for the central play action.
SimCity 2000 was another graphically advanced game at the site. Although it did
not have the same appeal to the grotesque of MSBHB, SimCity 2000 also
invited pleasure in the visually spectacular.
J = Jimmy
H = Holly
1
J: I want to do a highway (selects highway tool) How do I do a highway? Okay.
(Moves cursor around.) I'll do a highway right here.2
H: Right there? I think
you should have it... hmm.. trying to think where a good place for it...
3
J: Right here? Here? (Moves cursor around.) Here? (Looks at H.)
4
H: Sure. What is that place there, residential?
5
J: (Budget window comes up and Jimmy dismisses it.) Yeah. I'm going to
bulldoze a skyrise here. (Selects bulldozer tool and destroys building.) OK.
(Looks at H.)
Ummm! OK, wait, OK. Should I do it right here?
6
H: Sure, that might work... that way. Mmmm. You can have it...
7
J: (Builds highway around city.) I wonder if you can make them turn. (Builds
highway curving around one corner.) Yeah, okay.
8
H: You remember, you want the highway to be.... faster than just getting on
regular streets. So maybe you should have it go through some parts.
9
J: (Dismisses budget. Points to screen.) That's cool! (inaudible) I can make it
above?
10
H: Above some places, I think. I don't know if they'd let you, maybe not.
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11
J: (Moves cursor over large skyscraper.) That's so cool!
12
H: Is that a high-rise?
13
J: Yeah. I love them.
14
H: Is it constantly changing, the city? Is it like
15
J:(Builds complicated highway intersection. Looks at H.)
16
H: (Laughs.)
17
J: So cool! (Builds more highway grids in area, creating a complex overlap of four
intersections.)
18
H: My gosh, you're going to have those poor drivers going around in circles.
19
J: I'm going to erase that all. I don't like that, OK. (Bulldozes highway system
and blows up a building in process.) Ohhh...
20
H: Did you just blow up something else?
21
J: Yeah. (Laughs.)
22
H: (Laughs.)
23
J: I'm going to start a new city. I don't understand this one. I'm going to start with
highways. (Quits without saving city.)
One sequence during a child’s (Jimmy) play with an undergraduate (Holly)
is punctuated by moments of engagement with the interface as visual special
effect. At a certain point in the game, as his city grows, Jimmy attempts to build
highways. "I want to do a highway," he declares, selecting the highway tool.
"How do I do a highway?" (line 1). Moving his cursor around, he discusses with
Holly where he might put the highway, settling on an area near a commercial
district (line 3). He bulldozes to make way for the highway, and then builds it
around one edge of the city, discovering, at a certain point, that he can make it
curve around the corner if he clicks on blocks perpendicular to one another (lines
5-7). As he builds his highway in the foreground, he notices that it is elevated
above the level of the regular roadways. "That's cool!" he exclaims. "I can make
it above?" (line 9). Holly speculates on whether they can build the highway
through the city, and then Jimmy points with his cursor to a tall, blue and white
skyscraper: "That's so cool!" (line 10, 11). Holly asks, "Is that a high-rise?" (line
12). "Yeah," Jimmy answers. "I love them," he declares emphatically (line 13).
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Jimmy goes on to continue his highway, and then discovers that if he makes
overlapping segments, they result in a cloverleaf. He looks over at Holly with
delight when this happens, and she laughs. "So cool!" he exclaims, building
further overlapping segments that result in a twisted quadruple cloverleaf (lines
15-17). "My gosh," says Holly, "you're going to have those poor drivers going
around in circles" (line 18). Jimmy then bulldozes the whole cloverleaf pattern,
blowing up a large building in the process (figure 5.9), and then declares that he
is going to start a new city (line 23). He closes his city without saving it.
FIGURE 5.9
JIMMY'S HIGHWAY TO NOWHERE IN SIMCITY 2000
Screen shot reproduced with permission from Electronic Arts Inc.
© 1993-94 Electronic Arts Inc. SimCity 2000 and SimCity are trademarks or
registered trademarks of Electronic Arts Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.
All rights reserved.
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While this sequence begins with certain accountabilities to building a
transportation system, by the end, Jimmy has wasted thousands of dollars on a
highway to nowhere, blown up a building, and trashed his city. Holly draws him
back into the accountabilities of building a well-functioning city, by pointing out
that the highway cloverleaf might look cool, but is not going to work very well.
Her intervention is subtle, but it has the effect of calling him away from
spectacular engagement to the more functional accountabilities of the game.
Jimmy responds to her suggestion by trying to fix the highway, but eventually
decides to start over since he has wasted too much money on playing with the
highway as special effect. He apparently has few attachments to the city that he
has worked on for over thirty minutes, and in fact, replicates a pattern of building
up cities to a point of difficulty, and then getting rid of them, not bothering to save
or follow up on his work.
A game like SimCity 2000 provides visual rewards that are linked but not
isomorphic with the more functional rewards of building a large, financially stable,
and well-populated city. As a city grows, the player is given more and more
visually stunning buildings, such as stadiums, marinas, and space-aged
buildings. “Oh wow. Look at that!” an adult helper calls out after they finish
building and airport. “I got a helicopter! Girl, I got a helicopter,” says the girl he
is working with, calling out to her friend. Kids that are invested in the game will
develop a certain connoisseurship about the placement of visual features. This
same pair takes pains to build a series of marinas and waterfalls, positioning
them just right, so that the tiny sailboats do not fall down the waterfalls, and
destroying a prison that they felt was too close to this area. In another instance
of play, one kid has built a large pyramid-shaped structure covered in water. “I
built his by hand,” he tells his undergraduate helper with pride. The pleasure
here is in a certain personalized aesthetic, in the spectacle of the interface, not in
the instrumental goals of the game or in inhabiting an engaging virtual reality. It
is the visual special effect rendered in interactive media.
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Interactional and Auditory Special Effects
Unlike the media such as film and television that were the targets of Debord's
critique of passive consumption, interactive media are predicated on the active
engagement of the consumer. This interactivity, rather than negating the
spectacular qualities of the medium, actually serves to create a new genre of
interactive special effect, an experience of being able to control and manipulate
the production of the effect. This is clearly evident in twitch games which
demand close sensory-motor coupling with visual and auditory effects. In the
games that form the basis for this study, these interactional effects are still
present, though not as central as in action gaming. While visual effects and
animations are generally predicated on a somewhat distanced position of
spectatorship, interactive effects often foreground auditory effects over visual
ones. Most games have a soundtrack, which plays repeatedly in the background
and is rarely noted by a player, which contrasts to sound as a special effect. A
sound effect is a result of a particular action, and when initiated by the player, is
often the occasion for delight and repeated activation.
One example of engagement with an interactive special effect is with an
eleven-year old, Dan, who is building a city with an undergraduate who is an
expert at the game. As he is playing with the budget window, he discovers that
increasing taxes causes the sim-citizens to boo, and lowering them causes them
to cheer. He takes some time out from administering the city to play with this
auditory effect (line 1, 5), before he is called back to his sim-mayor subjectivity by
the undergraduate (lines 4, 6).
D = Dan
UG = undergraduate
brackets signify overlapping talk
1 D: (Starts bumping up the property tax, big grin.)
2 UG: What are you doing? No, no, no.
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3 D: No, I just [want to see..]
4 UG:
5 D:
[Now,] now --[listen].
(Bumps down the property taxes, making the citizens cheer.)
[Yeeeee]eaaah. [I just want to make them happy.]
6 UG:
[The best way to make money ]-- You want
to increase your population, right? So you lay down the green, right? So if you put
all, make all this all green, then, ahh, your population will increase and then you
could raise taxes and then you could get up to your five thousand mark.
7 D: Ohh OK. (Closes budget window.)
Dean's apparent pleasure in this interaction can be understood as a kind
of computer holding power (Turkle 1984) which is based on the logic of the
interactive special effect. It is the combination of direct interactional engagement
with the machine and a unique responsiveness that creates a brief but tight
interactional coupling between Dean and SimCity 2000. This kind of interactional
pleasure occurred numerous times during my observations of kids' play, but only
initiated by the children who were controlling the mouse. While surface readings
of the interface can invite collaborative interpersonal interpretation, as in the
sequence with Jimmy and Holly, the interactive special effect is somewhat
antisocial, relying on a tight interactional coupling with human and machine, often
at the expense of other interlocutors. As in most examples of this sort, the
undergraduate calls him back to the more functional and progress-oriented
accountabilities of game play. This undergraduate is more heavy-handed than
the previous example with Holly, insisting that the kid pay attention: “No, no, no…
now, now, listen. The best way to make money—you want to increase your
population, right?”
Another instance of play, with DinoPark Tycoon, also exhibits similar
dynamics of interactional special effects. At the "Dino Diner" the player is able to
purchase items from a menu as feed for the park's dinosaurs. One of the
features of this screen is that there is a fly that buzzes around the menu, and if it
lands on the menu, and a page is turned, the fly is crushed, emitting a squishing
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sound, and the player, upon flipping back to the page, sees a bloody smudge
(figure 5.10). In instance after instance of play with DinoPark Tycoon, kids play
repeatedly with this game feature. In this day of Ian's play, almost every time he
visits the Dino Diner, he spends time smashing flies:
I = Ian
A = Adult
1
I: (Turns a page, and squishing sound results.) Yeah, I just crunched some more.
Yeah, look at all them. They're so dead (laughing). This is rad. Oh, come on fly, I
want you to come down here. Come down here puppy. Come to papa. Crunch!
(Turns page, and laughs.)
2
A: That's nasty.
3 I: (Turns page.) Crunchie, crunchie, crunchie. (Turns page.) I crunched him! I crunched
him! (Turns page.) I'm so mean. I want to go check out my dino. (Leaves Dino
Diner.)
FIGURE 5.10
THE DINO DINER IN DINOPARK TYCOON
Screen shot reprinted with permission from The Learning Company, Inc.
218
As with the case with Dean, this interaction is relatively brief and clearly
peripheral to the primary goals of the game, which are to build and administer the
virtual theme park. Ian takes some time out to enjoy the interactional special
effect (line 1, 2), but returns fairly quickly to the task at hand, checking up on his
dinosaur (line 3).
In the prior discussion of MSBHB, I noted how the auditory effects were
one attractive aspect of the game that a number of kids specifically referred to.
One area of MSBHB, involving a simple painting program, is particularly notable
as an embodiment of the logic of the interactive special effect. Clicking on the
drawing pad of one of the characters calls forth a screen with a canvas, and
various tools, shaped like body parts, along the side. After selecting a body part,
the player can squirt, splat, or stamp blobs and shapes onto the canvas,
accompanied by appropriately gross bodily noises appropriate to the body part.
Often to the dismay of the accompanying undergraduate, kids will spend
excruciatingly long minutes repeatedly squirting juices from the stomach, or
emitting a cacophony of farting noises from the tongue tool. One undergraduate
notes, after playing with a group of girls: “Each different shape or design made
it’s own unique sound. I think the kids get a much better kick out of the sound
than anything else. And they would laugh and laugh when they found the sound
they liked best.” Here is an example of another instance of play, which was
captured in our video record.
R = Ralph
UG = Undergraduate
1
R: Look, I could pick any one of these. This one. (Selects an organ.)
2
UG: What's that stuff right there?
3
R: (Squirts juice out of an organ.) I don't know. Squeezing all the juice out of him.
4
UG: Lovely. Now what happens if you grab that one?
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5
R: Big one, the big one. Blood, brain. (Continues to select organs and make
blobs and squishing and squeaking noises.)
6
UG: Oh, you can do it on here? Oh, it does a print of what the brain looks like.
7
R: Oh man.
8
UG: You can do the mouth, you haven't done that one.
9
R: Spitting, it's spitting.
10
UG: I know there's more down this way too. Skin, oh that just changes the color
of it.
11
R: Yup. Do you want to see the nose?
12
UG: Nose. I don't know.
13
R: Gross.
14
UG: Oh, gross.
15
R: Boogers, eww.
Continues through each organ in a similar manner.
16
UG: Your tongue. Oh wow.
17
R: (Creates long drawn out farting noises.) Ewww!!! (Pushes repeatedly on a
squeaking, blapping organ.) OHHHHH!!
18
UG: Wow.
19
UG: What else is there that you could do?
20
R: Nothing.
21
UG: Is that the last one?
22
R: Yeah.
23
UG: Are you sure?
24
R: Yeah.
25
UG: How do you know that?
26
R: (Goes back to the farting noise, and hits it repeatedly.) It's my favorite. The
tongue. Watch.
27
UG: Are there any more?
28
R: Oh yeah. The finger. (Clicks repeatedly, making more gross noises.)
29
UG: Eww.
30
R: Ewww. Look.
31
UG: Are there any more after the finger? Let's see. Muscles. Whoa.
32
R: I want to go to the finger again.
33
UG: Why don't we go back and explore the body.
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34
R: Okay. I know why. I know why. Cause you didn't like the sounds.
35
UG: No, the sounds were great.
36
R: I don't want to play any more.
This extended sequence of play with interactive special effects is gleefully
engaged with by Ralph and tolerated by the undergraduate, but she eventually
suggests that they return to the main areas of the game (line 33). Ralph than
suggests that she is discouraging him from playing with gross sounds (line 34),
and then decides that he wants to stop playing rather than return to the more
educational sections of the game (line 36). The undergraduate has actually been
remarkably patient through a very extended sequence of play with each drawing
tool, suggesting on various occasions that he try one or another tool. Yet the boy
still insists that he knows why she suggests that he move on, “Cause you didn’t
like the sounds.” In this case, the boy is more active than the undergraduate in
constructing the opposition between the adult stance and kid stance with respect
to the orientation to gross special effects.
Interactional special effects are similar to the manipulations that are
possible with materials such as clay and finger paints, but mediated by a
computational artifact that uniquely amplifies and embellishes the actions of the
user. Like the visual special effects described earlier, these interactional and
auditory effects are not part of a broader game goal structure, but are rather
engaged in for momentary and aesthetic pleasure. These are not the dominant
modes of engagement in play with children’s software, but they are small,
ongoing breaks in the narrative trajectories of multimedia titles.
They are also
sites of micropolitical resistance to the progress-oriented goals and adult values
that seek to limit violent and grotesque spectacles in an educational setting like
the 5thD. I will return to this dynamic at the conclusion of this chapter.
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Mobilizing Fun: The Micropolitics of Pleasure
Engagements with special effects are not merely an atomized process of
individual engagement. They are part of the political economy of cool, a central
source of cultural capital in kids’ peer relations. Spectacle and “fun” are
mobilized as a device to enlist other kids and to demonstrate style and status, as
well as a way of demarcating a kid-centered space that is opposed to the
progress goals of adults. A search for all instances of the word “fun” in the our
video transcript record revealed many instances of “funny” but relatively few
instances of children describing something as “fun.” More often it got used in
questions by adults querying whether a child was engaged: “Are you having
fun?” “Is this a fun game?”
In undergraduate fieldnotes, “fun” most often appears as a descriptor of
play characterized by high-energy and committed engagement. “This was a fun
day. Everyone was really into the new game.” “She told me she wanted to play
more and so did I. It was a fun game.” “She found that to be something fun
because she was really excited.” “What we ended up doing was just working as
long as we could on the same game in an effort to finish it. It was easy to do this
because [he] had fun with this game in particular.” Less frequently, “fun” gets
used as a descriptor of activity that is opposed to the progress goals of the site.
For example, in one fieldnote, an undergraduate says, “Today the kids got to play
games for fun,” meaning that they did not have to play according to the activity
system of the maze that day. Sometimes undergraduates see kids’ singular
commitment to fun as a problem. Another undergraduate writes critically of one
boy who would not share the mouse. “For kids, their own fun tends to come first
before others, and helping out others may not be their idea of fun.” “I reminded
Ian that it is never any fun when one person is playing a game and everyone else
has to watch that person have all the fun”
In the small number of instances in our transcripts where children use the
term, it described activity that was spectacular in nature, and non-functional. In
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one instance of play, one girl has taken a liking to SimTown, a more childoriented version of SimCity. Another child appears and a discussion of taste and
style ensues. “I like SimCity better,” declares the boy. The girl counters by
saying the more open-ended structure and lack of instrumental logics of financial
accountability make the game more fun. ”No, this is much funner, you don't
have, you don't have a debt or anything. “ The debate does not end here. “So.
Who cares. Debts are cool,” counters the boy. He decides to test the coolness
quotient however and pushes the girl to check out if there is a disasters function
on the game. “Oh, disasters? What are the Disasters?” Like “cool” effects that
code for spectacle, in this exchange, “fun” describes playful non-instrumental
game features. The same girl describes the function where a player can trigger
cute animations in the buildings as “fun spots” in contrast to the functional roles
of buildings in structuring the town. Another instance of talk between some kids
exhibits a similar dynamic. Three kids are playing SimTown together for some
time, and the one occurrence of the term fun happens when they are trying to
squash some people riding bikes.
A: Oh, look people are coming out of their houses and riding their bikes
B: I'm going to squash them.
A: I know.
C: Oh, no.
A: This looks like a fun game.
C: I know.
“Fun” between kids is a device to enlist peers into a space of shared pleasures.
“This the fun part, look.” By contrast, when speaking to adults, fun can create a
boundary between adult goals and child pleasures. In two instances, kids
authenticated their activity by describing what they are doing as “having fun,”
appealing to adults to let them engage in activity that is not progress-oriented.
Activity that is not directed toward a particular adult’s goals are described as “just
for fun” even though that same activity might in other contexts be an
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achievement-oriented task. Children can be politically savvy about the uses of
fun, realizing that it is a legitimate form of child-identified activity that can provide
a space of self-determination. In one example, Chris is playing Dr. Brain. The
site director stops by and there is a discussion of whether this game counts in
“the maze” that structures children’s movement through the club activity system.
“Well you may never become a Wizard’s Assistant,” he warns. “I don’t care,”
Chris replies as he continues playing. “I am just going to have fun.”
In another instance, Ian is playing a game of Solitaire, and a video
ethnographer comes to set up on the machine he is playing on. The
ethnographer works to get his attention, and eventually moves to the machine to
quit the program. “I am going to exit you.” “Why? I’m having fun,” Ian protests,
but in this instance, he fails to claim a space of indulgence and is called to
participate in the sanctioned activities of the club.
I = Ian
E = Ethnographer
I: Man
E: Yo, Ian, we're taping on this machine. So get somebody to play with. Hello, are you
listening to me?
I: What?
E: I'm going to exit you.
I: Why? I'm having fun.
E: Because this is... we're spending money to video tape at this machine, and unless you
want to help somebody play a game, then get off of it.
I: I'll help them play this.
E: No. This isn't a game in the maze.
I: So? I can make it be one.
E: Who says?
( E takes mouse, and exits Solitaire)
224
These two examples are suggestive of kids’ awareness of fun as a legitimate site
of resistance to certain adults goals. The adult narratives of the 5thD also
reinforce this sense of fun as a site of authentic and natural child-like agency that
can be harnessed to promote engagement, but that can also overpower the play
setting if not channeled in a prosocial way. In the micropolitics of the 5thD, just
as in the packaging of entertainment for children, fun appears as a cultural fact
that is part of the contemporary construction of childhood, a political tool that gets
mobilized to appeal to adults to suspend their own agendas. This political role of
fun is also closely tied to the vernaculars of hedonistic, repetitive forms of play
and a child-centered visual culture.
Disobedience, Disasters, and Action Entertainment
In the 5thD, an orientation to entertainment (i.e., "fun") is actively
encouraged, but ultimately in the service of a reformist educational project.
Children mobilize fun as a way of indicating authentic engagement, and fun is
celebrated in the 5thD to the extent that it happens in the context of a prosocial
learning task. "Entertainment" is clearly not a monolithic category within mass
media forms. While some entertainment idioms are legitimized within the 5thD
project, action gaming idioms are explicitly excluded as too patently noneducational. As noted in the previous chapter, action entertainment idioms are
constantly lurking in the ambient culture that kids participate in. These cultural
elements are largely repressed in the 5thD through the selection of non-violent
games and persistent adult surveillance, but they are still present. Due to their
illegitimate status in the 5thD, they become a resource for subverting dominant
(educational) codes in this local context. The case of Ian and SimCity 2000
makes clear this relational dynamic between educational and entertainment
idioms, in ways particular to the 5thD, but which point to the pervasive fractures
in US culture between wholesome educational norms and violent entertainment
idioms. These are hints as to the pervasiveness of action entertainment in peer
225
dynamics, particularly of boys. I present these final examples of engagement
with the entertainment genre as a special case of engagement with spectacle, a
much larger topic that my work in the 5thD barely begins to address.
One day of Ian's play with SimCity 2000, captured on video, is a rare case
in which action entertainment appears as a social resource in the 5thD, and it
enables us to see the tensions around this cultural domain as it appears in an
informal learning setting if this sort. This instance of Ian’s play forms a more
focused case study in the following chapter, but here I introduce a portion of it to
illustrate the social role of violent and destructive entertainment. The scene
opens with Ian sitting in front of the computer, interacting with a well-developed
city marked by an enormous airport and waterfalls stacked in a pyramid
formation. There is another boy sitting next to him, observing his play and
making occasional suggestions, as well as an audience of other club participants,
including the videotaper, undergraduates, and other kids and adults walking in
and out of the scene. He busily makes a railroad system, water pipes, buildings,
and a power plant, and worries about such things as whether his people are
getting enough water, or whether power plants need to be replaced. Soon, the
director of the club appears, and tries to get Ian to teach others how to play (line
1), but Ian deftly deflects this accountability to the club norm of collaborative
learning, with the support of another kid (line 2):
I = Ian
M = Mark (a younger boy)
D = site director
1
D: Because you're not going to be sitting here all day just doing it by yourself. So
other people watch you. It's not fair to other people.
2
M: No, we, we, we, we're not supposed to be able to play. We're not supposed to
play.
3
D: Why aren't you supposed to play?
4
I: They're not.
5
M: If you're not a Young Wizard's you can't play this.
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6
D: But if you're a Young Wizard's Assistant and you're not teaching anybody else
the game then you can't play it either.
7
M: He's teaching me.
8
I: (Unintelligible) said I could.
9
D: OK good, allright, check it out then.
10
I: Anybody ask me any questions.
Ian's tactic is momentarily successful; he passes as a teacher, and
resumes his game play. After about twenty minutes, however, he is interrupted
by the director of the club again and asked to teach a new undergraduate how to
play the game. "I'm not kidding either," the director stresses, "her grade depends
on what you teach her, so she'd better do a good job, okay?" After a few
moments, Mark suggests, "Show her a disaster. Do an airplane crash." Ian
responds with enthusiasm, saves his city, and announces, "Ha ha ha disaster
time!!"
In this sequence of activity, Ian finds himself in the center of a series of
interventions and a great deal of social attention, positioned as an expert and
asked to teach both an undergraduate and a large audience of other kids about
the game. The videotaper and the site director have already intervened a
number of times to orient him to his community role as game expert and teacher.
His companion is the first to suggest doing a disaster, and he takes it up with a
characteristic virtuosity and anti-authoritarianism. Disaster time involves an
escalating series of special effects in which the city is first invaded by a space
alien, then flooded, set on fire and subjected to an earthquake and plane
crashes. The undergraduate remains pleasant and amused. The videotaper, a
longtime participant at the club, is the first to intervene, addressing the
undergraduate first. “So, have you figured out how to play?” And then she turns
to Ian. “Remember Ian, that Anne has to… Ian?!” The videotaper and the
undergraduate’s protests punctuate this instance of play, and though they do not
specifically deny the appeal of destruction, they are clearly trying to redirect the
activity. They are overpowered as Mark cheers Ian on and they delight in the
227
spectacles of destruction. “Do another airplane crash!” “Destroy it.” Another boy
joins the spectacle. “Please do a fire engine.” “Put more fire. Fire’s cool.” “Just
burn it all. Burn it. Burn it. Just burn it. Burn it. Burn it. You need more fire,
more fire.” The site director appears again. “Is he teaching you how to be a
constructive citizen?” he jokes. “Another five minutes, and then put Anne on and
see what she can do.” “Do riots,” the third boy continues, not responding to the
director’s comment.
After the city is in flames, Ian begins to build large buildings within burning
areas, to induce more and more spectacular explosions. He turns from blowing
up the most expensive of the possible buildings to blowing up colleges, fusion
plants, gas power plants, and microwave power plants. His final achievement is
to blow up a row of fusion plants lined up in domino formation (figure 5.11). “Ian,
time, put Anne in there,” insists the site director at the conclusion of this
performance. “He’s into mass destruction at the moment,” says Anne, worried.
The director assures her, “Yeah, but these guys know a lot about the game.”
Then he turns to Ian. “I don’t want to turn the machine off on you. Be nice to
Anne and give her a turn.” That is enough of a credible threat for Ian to start a
new city for Anne. Ian’s subsequent acts of constructing a city are the case
study of the following chapter. Here I would like to point to the role of action
entertainment idioms in enlisting an audience of other boys and the role of
computational media in enbling a virtuosity of the spectacular in the hands of a
player. The adults at the club are in the difficult position of trying to validate Ian’s
technical knowledge, but not wanting the destructive scenario to continue. Ian is
quite aware of the boundaries of participation in the 5thD, and plays to his
moment in the spotlight, until he is on the verge of disciplinary action. Far from
being a regressive and antisocial act, Ian is engaging in a process of enlisting a
large and engaged audience in a shared spectacle of technical virtuosity.
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FIGURE 5.11
BLOWING UP FUSION PLANTS IN SIMCITY 2000
Screen shot reproduced with permission from Electronic Arts Inc.
© 1993-94 Electronic Arts Inc. SimCity 2000 and SimCity are trademarks or
registered trademarks of Electronic Arts Inc. in the US and/or other countries. All
rights reserved.
Ian’s instance of play is an unusual one in the 5thD in the prominence of a
destructive scenario, but action entertainment idioms are always latent in play
with computer games. On one of my field visits to the Boys' and Girls' Club,
during the summer when the 5thD was not in session, I set up a machine with
SimCity 2000, and invited some kids to play on it. "Do you know SimCity?" I
asked a boy who I hadn't seen before, maybe seven or so. "Yeah!" he declared.
"That's the game where you blow up the cities!" Nonplused, I nonetheless asked
him if he would like to play, and whether he knew how to, and he answered yes
on both counts. As he hunted around the toolbar to perform some operation, it
became clear he knew little about how the game worked. Finally, he asked,
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agitated, "Where are the guns?!" With the help of another boy, he succeeded in
setting the city on fire, and shortly thereafter, left to play a different game. Ian’s
orientation to the action potential of the software was clearly not unique. In many
other instances of play, documented in the undergraduate fieldnotes, boys use
the disasters function to destroy their cities after they run into fiscal trouble.
In another instance of play in the 5thD, Jimmy is patiently building up his
city. One of his bridges explodes because he hasn't allocated sufficient
maintenance funds. "I broke it again! My bridge!" he exclaims in distress.
Another boy, observing, responds, "Cool. Save it and restart." "And do what?"
asks Jimmy, apparently perplexed by the suggestion. The other boy continues,
his voice rising: "I love doing that. I love just saving a city and then, just destroy
It! Every disaster!!" Another child, just checking into the scene, pipes in, "I know!
Especially the monsters. Those are cool." "The monster's different on this one,"
declares the first boy, in the know regarding the new version of SimCity 2000. "It
is?" "Yeah," he continues, "You've never seen the monster of SimCity 2000?"
(figure 5.12). The space alien is a peripheral, but unmistakable nod to fantasy
worlds continuously reinscribed in computer games ever since the hit game,
Space Invaders. In this brief interactional moment, Jimmy has been educated as
to the not so obvious citational links between SimCity 2000 and action gaming
idioms. The space alien, coded into the gaming system as a relatively peripheral
element, has been drawn out and made significant in a brief interactional
moment, which ties together such disparate cultural elements as SimCity 2000,
Space Invaders, monster movies, and "coolness."
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FIGURE 5.12
THE MONSTER IN SIMCITY 2000
Screen shot reproduced with permission from Electronic Arts, Inc.
© 1993-94 Electronic Arts Inc. SimCity 200 and SimCity are trademarks or
registered trademarks of Electronic Arts Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.
All rights reserved.
231
My observations of kids, especially boys, who are immersed in computer
gaming and action-oriented media, is that they index a wealth of cultural content
that weaves together representations in film, television, and interactive media.
As Kinder has described in Playing with Power (Kinder 1991). Games such as
Mario Brothers and Mortal Kombat have made their way into movies, and movies
such as Johnny Mnemonic and Toy Story have made their way into interactive
media. Action gaming idioms are clearly the cultural domain that has the most
extensive set of referents in interactive media, and kids will adeptly interpret,
critique and make distinctions between different aspects of the action gaming
corpus. The adolescent boys that I game with will endlessly debate and describe
the merits of certain form of weaponry, how to run, turn, fire, and evade fire, and
what kinds of moves produce the most spectacular explosions and number of
kills. Even in a context such as the 5thD, which has been designed specifically
to exclude violent media, these intertextual citations are irrepressible, an always
available source of cultural capital for kids.
Conclusions
If we resist the impulse to call the engagement with action entertainment
antisocial, then we are beginning to query the social functions of dis-functional
activity and a certain cultural paradox. While competitive achievement that
individuates learning and produces class distinction is considered prosocial and
developmentally correct, hedonistic play that creates peer solidarity in relation to
consumer culture is considered antisocial and regressive, an attention deficit to
the progress goals of certain authoritative institutions. Sutton-Smith describes
this tension in terms of private and public transcripts of childhood
The adult public transcript is to make children progress, the adult
private transcript is to deny their sexual and aggressive impulses;
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the child public transcript is to be successful as family members
and school children, and their private transcript is their play life, in
which they can express both their hidden identity and their
resentment of being a captive population (1997: 123).
But this is only the first cut on the complex sociocultural contestations that
children navigate in their everyday play, particularly in relation to an increasingly
powerful and institutionalized entertainment industry that produces and inflects
our ideas of childhood. The institution of education and the ideology of individual
merit are produced in opposition and constant negotiation with its antithesis of
“mass” accessible popular culture. Instances of children’s play have shown that
popular culture, far from being an undifferentiated field of cheaply accessible and
passive thrills, is a site of virtuosity, connoisseurship and status negotiation
among children as well as between children and adults. What constitutes an
authoritative institution is a contingent effect of local micropolitics, where pop
culture identification confers status in children’s status hierarchies and “fun” gets
mobilized vis-à-vis adults as an authenticating trope of a “natural” child-like
pleasure principal. This is not a simple story of adult repression of authentic
childhood impulses, but is a distributed social field that produces the opposition
between childhood pleasure and adult achievement norms as one cultural effect.
In a cultural climate that increasingly values childhood as a romantic and
privileged sphere, adults that discover their inner children and indulge their own
children are on the progressive parenting cutting-edge, a trend that industrialists
are quick to exploit in their marketing aimed at the parental pocketbook.
Children’s entertainment industries, new technologies, as well as the practices of
the 5thD are part of the discursive productions of these oppositions and changing
notions of childhood.
The spectacular dimensions of new media deserve special mention as a
unique semiotic-materialization of kids’ popular entertainment. The atomized
consciousness of a player engaging with a special effect is a small moment
attached to a large sociotechnical apparatus. Whether in movies or computer
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games, special effects are what drive budgets, and bring in large audiences.
This is indicative of a particular kind of industry maturation, where a growing
consumer base supports larger production budgets, but also increases investor
risk, driving the push towards sure hit products, sequels, formulaic content, and
guaranteed crowd pleasers. Special effects also weed out independent
developers who don’t have the budgets to compete in production value.
Entertainment industries participate in the production of institutionalized genres
that are packaged and stereotyped into certain formulas that kids recognize and
identify with as a liberatory and authentic kids’ culture. Just as educational
content has been commodified as curricular coverage and achievement anxiety,
entertainment genres are packaged into easily reproducible formulas,
vernaculars of children’s popular culture. In the titles I reviewed, these appeared
as gross bodily noises, explosions, hyperbole, and increasingly, established
licensed characters. This “junk culture” is a particular vernacular that cross-cuts
media and commodity types, making its way into snack foods, television, movies,
school supplies, and interactive multimedia. Just as this junk culture is a site of
opposition between adults and kids, entertainment elements in children’s
software become opportunities for kids to resist adult learning goals in the 5thD.
The idiom of children’s entertainment finds full expression in action media
such as video games, movies, and commercial children’s television, consumed in
the home among peers. My work in the 5thD has allowed me only a small
glimpse into these domains. In children’s software, and in quasi-educational
contexts like the 5thD, the entertainment genre’s hold is more partial, achieving
fleeting hegemonies as in the case of Ian’s disaster times. The cyborg habitus of
entertainment is a constant though often latent presence, punctuating game play
with appreciative exclamations of “cool,” “awesome,” “Eeeew!” and devilish
cackles of delight. These remarks and moments of play are constructed in
interaction with adult efforts to both identify with and resist these idioms tied to a
mushrooming media supersystem that embodies the growing strength of the
entertainment habitus. As the pleasure-principal becomes coded and embodied
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as the domain of an authentic and natural childhood, (boring, dry, dusty)
education gets framed as going against this human nature, an act of symbolic
and social violence. The platitude of edutainment that “learning can be fun”
reconstitutes this structural opposition between learning and play, while
simultaneously working to deconstruct it. Learning needs to be fun to be
authentic, because fun is what kids do best.
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6
Authoring Virtual Worlds:
Hacking, Self-Expression, and Technical Empowerment
Seymour Papert is probably the best-known spokesperson for the use of
computers in education, specifically the use of computer programming as an
educational tool. Although part of a shared intellectual community and discursive
tradition as McCormick and many others in the educational software community,
Papert’s position is distinctive in its promotion of programming as a key
educational and developmental goal. In contrast to the focus on content and
curriculum that characterizes most educational software, for Papert, content is
secondary to what he calls “technological fluency,” the ability to perform the new
forms of literacy enabled by computer technology. Published in 1980, Papert’s
book Mindstorms describes the LOGO programming language designed for
children, arguing against the drill-and-practice orientation of computer-based
instruction that was dominant at the time.
In most contemporary educational situations where children come
into contact with computers the computer is used to put children
through their paces, to provide feedback and to dispense
information. The computer programming the child. In the LOGO
environment the relationship is reversed: The child, even at
preschool ages, is in control: The child programs the computer
(1980: 19).
The focus of his criticism differs from the position of most advocates of
learning software. He is objecting to drill-and-practice not because it is, in
McCormick’s terms, a “dry and dusty” form of learning, but because it does not
allow the child the subject position of agency and authorship. Even in his more
recent publications, in an era when computers are becoming widely available to
children, Papert is critical of much of the edutainment software on the market.
“Disguising flash cards as a game introduces an element of deception that
undermines two fundamental educational principles. First, learning works best
when the learner is a willing and conscious participant. Second, deception and
dishonesty in a teaching process make a mockery of the idea that schools should
develop moral values as well as knowledge of math or history” (1996: 19). He
continues:
The dominant trend in educational software is following a path that
bothers me. The mildest criticism that I can make of it is that it
panders to popular prejudices about what is ‘educational.’ The
more severe criticism is that most educational software powerfully
reinforces the poorest sides of pre-computer education while losing
the opportunity to powerfully strengthen the best sides (37).
“What I see as the real contribution of digital media to education is a flexibility
that could allow every individual to find personal paths to learning” (16). Papert’s
list of recommended software strongly favors programs that lean toward user
authoring—what he calls constructionist software—rather than the adventure and
quiz type formats that are dominant in educational software. For example, he
suggests the paint program KidPix, and simulation games such as SimCity and
SimTower (209), and he has been working since the late seventies on designing,
promoting, and upgrading the LOGO programming language, now a multimedia
authoring tool called Microworlds.
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This chapter begins with the history and cultural context of authoring tools
in relation to “hard mastery” of computers associated with hacking subcultures. I
then describe how the authoring genre of children’s software is associated with
these kinds of uses of computers, and how this manifests in the title SimCity
2000. The last half of the chapter describes how SimCity 2000 and a related
title, SimTower were used in the 5thD to create personalized virtual worlds.
The Hacker Ethic of Technological Empowerment
Drawing from Piaget, Papert describes his orientation as constructivist, based on
“a model of children as builders of their own intellectual structures.” He sees the
computer as providing new sorts of materials for the “child as builder,” making
abstract mathematical concepts concrete and manipulable (1980: 7). Papert’s
metaphors of construction and building blocks puts him in the same intellectual
trajectory as those educationally-minded toymakers that brought us building
blocks and erector sets, a child-centered philosophy of learning that departs from
the behaviorist model. The orientation toward computing as an authoring tool, a
device to actualize individual agency, can also be located within an ethic of selfauthoring computer programming and use that has persisted since the earliest
days of personal computing.
In the popular history of personal computing Hackers: Heroes of the
Computer Revolution, journalist Steven Levy describes “the hacker ethic”
emerging from a group of computer enthusiasts at MIT in the early sixties around
the first interactive computers that allowed a programmer to get immediate
feedback from a computer terminal. “Access to computers—and anything which
might teach you about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total.
Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!” (1994: 40). Following from this were
the following beliefs: “All information should be free.” “Mistrust
Authority—Promote Decentralization.” “Hackers should be judged by their
hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, or position.” “You can create
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art and beauty on a computer.” “Computers can change your life for the better”
(Levy 1994: 40-45). Levy and my use of the term “hacker” should be
distinguished from the subsequent popularization of the term to refer to unlawful
activity, and instead is a more general orientation towards the computer as a tool
of empowerment and discovery. Levy goes on to chronicle how this orientation
towards computing extended beyond what he calls “the monastery” at MIT in the
sixties, as computers became widespread in the form of the “personal computer.”
In the seventies, Berkeley, California was a key site of grass-roots computing,
with Ted Nelson’s (1974) hacker cult publication, Computer Lib, and the ongoing
meetings of the Silicon Valley Homebrew Computer Club, both encouraging
users to take control of their computers. Rebelling against mainstream corporate
computing as defined by IBM, this orientation toward computing eventually led to
Stephen Wozniak’s and Steve Jobs’ development and marketing of the Apple II
in the late seventies. In the eighties, personal and hobbyist computing led to the
new fortunes made by game hackers and eventually, to the mainstreaming and
commercialization of the personal computer industry, dissipating much of the
anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist counterculturalism of the early years (Levy
1994).
In this orientation, the status of the computer as tool rather than
informational medium are central. Engaging and enlightening content is
secondary to the political positioning of mastery and self-authoring; transparent
access to and control of the technical layers of the machine are sought over
surface appearances and spectacle. In her study of internet communities, Sherry
Turkle (1995) has described how a “postmodern aesthetic of simulation,”
stressing “soft mastery” and manipulation of surface image over “hard” technical
mastery has recently come to dominate computing. This shift has happened at
the expense of the earlier orientations of the hobbyist and hacker. Yet as Turkle
also acknowledges, the hacker ethic still persists as a subculture of computing.
The Internet also supports and enables this subculture due to its distributed
architecture that allows many-to-many connectivity and small-scale technical
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production and authoring. Interactive computing, the ability for the user to shape
the medium and to get immediate feedback from it, is the quality of contemporary
computation that has delivered the hacker vision of technical empowerment. The
hacker focus on authoring and empowerment takes this quality beyond the literal
ability to act and interact in relation to the machine, toward a political position that
insists on individual control of content production. The interactive qualities of the
computer are valued not only for the ability of the machine to responsively deliver
information and feedback, but for enabling users to computationally embody their
agency: as Papert states, programming the computer rather than having the
computer program you.
One important counterpoint to a univocal celebration of hacker culture
comes from feminist analysis. A growing body of work on feminism and
technologies demonstrates the persistent and pervasive cultural bias that
equates men with technologies of power, and reduces the significance of
technologies associated with women. Concluding her feminist analysis of
technologies of work, reproduction, home, and space-making, Judy Wajcman
writes: “The enduring force of the identification between technology and
manliness, therefore, is not inherent in biological sex difference. It is rather the
result of the historical and cultural construction of gender” (1991: 137). A similar
bias operates in the domain of computer use. Although women are associated
with routine clerical uses of computing, they are not considered candidates for
the “hard mastery” and innovative uses associated with hacking, where the
person is in control of deep technical knowledge. Some even go so far as to
suggest that there is a biological reason why women aren’t good hackers. In
describing the glory years of hacking at MIT in the sixties, Levy writes that, “The
sad fact was that there never was a star-quality female hacker.” He quotes Bill
Gosper, one of his celebrated MIT hackers, as stating that “Cultural things are
strong, but not that strong.” Levy writes, “Gosper would later conclude,
attributing the phenomenon to genetic, or ‘hardware,’ differences” (1994: 84).
These early years of hacking gave rise to a resilient, though slowly changing
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stereotype of hacking as a domain of antisocial, unattractive, and unsanitary men
that could barely communicate with women much less admit one into their midst.
Turkle describes a shift in the mid-eighties away from hard mastery and
toward the dominance of “soft” and more women-friendly forms of computer use.
Writing in the mid nineties, she sees an emergent “culture of simulation” where
“the computer is still a tool but less like a hammer and more like a harpsichord”
(1995: 63). She describes how women hackers in the early years felt that they
needed to distance themselves from close identification with the computer, even
while they were attracted to it (62). In the recent turn towards more graphical
and concrete interfaces, Turkle sees hope for transformation in the relation
between women and computers. “A classical modernist vision of computer
intelligence has made room for a romantic postmodern one. At this juncture,
there is potential for a more welcoming environment for women, humanists, and
artists in the technical culture” (62). The current debate on games for girls is also
informative at this juncture. Like Turkle, most makers of “girls’ games” have
taken gender difference as a given, and worked to design content that is less
aggressive, less competitive, and oriented towards girl-friendly themes like
friendships, fashion, storytelling, and popular music (Cassell and Jenkins 1998).
By contrast, the small groups of women associated with more maleidentified uses of computers argue that women can hack too. L. Jean Camp is a
participant in the mailing list, “Systers,” an electronic forum started by Anita Borg
to link women computer science professionals. She writes, “We are geeks, and
we are not guys. Not guys, but geeks! How could that be? If it surprises you to
learn that more than fifteen hundred feminist geeks are out there, imagine the
surprise to each of us” (1996: 114). Women hackers are out there, and they
have not been deterred by either cultural biases or feminine intellectual
“hardware.” In their review of girls’ games, Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins
“boil the issues down to their essentials: do we encourage girls to beat boys at
their own game, or do we construct a girls-only space?” They describe a
dilemma: “play will always be gendered, and female play will always constitute
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the marked options. How to avoid this impasse?” They suggest “pushing at both
ends of the spectrum” and hope for a “gender neutral space in the middle” (1998:
34-36). I share a similar hope, and believe that challenging the automatic
association between men and generative uses of computers is one road to this
vision.
In fact, many domains of women-identified cultural production share
affinities with hacker creativity and anti-authoritarianism. While the hacker ethic
is something that is particular to computational media, it shares commonalities
with other kinds of media “hacking” in literature, television, and film. Studies of
fan communities, with their appropriation of mainstream narratives through fan
zines and remade video are examples of a similar orientation to other media
types, and these are domains where women have often been dominant. Media
hacking is a particular twist to the idea of active and oppositional consumption, a
resistance to the passivity associated with consumption. The broadening range
of computational media that Turkle describes should be accompanied by a
reassessment of what counts as powerful uses of computers and media across
the gender spectrum. A current hit computer game, The Sims, is a breakthrough
as an authoring title that appeals to women as much as to men. It follows on the
“Sim” tradition of providing nonviolent games that do not have a strong gender
bias, but it pushes more in the direction of women-friendly content in simulating
domestic life. A gender-neutral title, it still does not compromise on technical
virtuosity, and thus is a breakthrough in the gender dynamics surrounding
computer-based authoring. One could imagine a growing set of titles in this
space that provides technical tools for imagining and creating virtual worlds
across a gender and age spectrum.
In contrast to the negative associations between women and hacking,
children are categorically associated with a “natural” and fearless affinity to
computers. For children and youth, access to computers, and more recently, the
Internet, has opened up a space of agency that has raised the bar on public
discourse regarding media access and regulation. Children are often seen as
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particularly in tune and uniquely empowered by computers, celebrated by Don
Tapscott in describing a “Net Generation” that is master of new media,
“interactive, malleable, and distributed in control” (1998: 26). He describes how
the computer has enabled children to be authorities in a new domain, changing
the power dynamics of the family (36-38). The hacker ethic is a technocentric
twist to the cultural studies position that see children as “active players in
historically complex circumstances” rather than as passive victims and innocents
(Kinder 1999: 3-5). This sense of childhood empowerment has created a
protectionist counter-narrative, arguing for restraint in video game violence and
restrictions to children’s access to the Internet. What is relatively unexamined in
both sides of the mainstream debate is how computer technology is a political
tool for children to address their conditions of disempowerment. Rather than
assume that children have a natural and internally-driven affinity with computers,
we need to recognize the social conditions that draw particular children to
computers, including the persistence of a gender gap in children’s engagements
with computers.
Budding Hackers: Promoting Technical Literacy and Multimedia Authoring
Papert’s work with educational software from the seventies to the present can be
considered an effort to extend a version of the hacker ethic to the hands of
children, as an interface between a constructivist educational agenda and
computer programming and authoring capabilities. The LOGO programming
language, developed in the seventies, and commercialized in the eighties and
beyond, provided a simplified programming environment that allowed children to
see visual representations of their programming. A child instructs a “turtle” to
move and turn in different directions, creating drawings and music. Papert’s
argument, which has been the focus of extensive debate in the educational
community, was that these programming tasks gave children a set of materials to
engage intuitively with basic mathematical concepts.
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Unlike Oregon Trail, Math Blaster, and Reader Rabbit, LOGO and
Microworlds are not major commercial successes as consumer software, having
the strongest influence in schools. Papert’s theoretically-motivated claims that
programming leads to mathematical and other forms of coveted learning have
not been as amenable to packaging and marketing as educational claims by
software that clearly represents academic content areas. I include this line of
work here not because of these particular software efforts per se, but because of
the influence that Papert has had in giving voice to an orientation towards
children’s computing that extends to their engagements at school as well as in
the home. Papert’s more recent publications do not restrict his constructivist
agenda to programming, and extend to a general orientation towards computing
that puts the child in control of the learning experience. He recommends web
authoring projects, drawing with KidPix, and play with simulation games in
addition to his own programming and multimedia authoring software,
MicroWorlds (Papert 1996). In the broader genre of children’s authoring-oriented
software, the two types of software that have proven most commercially viable
are not programming tools but kid-oriented graphics programs such as KidPix,
and Print Artist, and simulation games, most notably SimCity.
Unlike edutainment software with its age-graded framework, and unlike
children’s entertainment coded in opposition to adult culture, authoring programs
do not posit a sharp break between the markets of adults and children. Although
there is a market of authoring software designed specifically for children, overall,
authoring software has been designed as adult-oriented tools, and adapted
downwards for children. Programs such as KidPix have simplified controls,
sound effects, and kid-oriented graphics, but they are functionally quite similar to
adult applications. In the case of SimCity, a game designed for adults was taken
up by the kids and educational market. Parents that I spoke to described to me
how their children would use business-oriented authoring tools such as
Powerpoint to design cards and pictures for their friends and family. The 5thD
used standard word processing tools such as Microsoft Word for writing tasks at
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the site. This particular genre of children’s software was not about creating a new
category, but about opening up the user demographic of an existing software
genre.
In my interview with Will Wright, the creator of the original SimCity, he
describes how he did not target children in the design and initial marketing of the
game.
I didn’t realize that people would take it that seriously. I thought it
might have some limited appeal to city planning types, but for the
most part, they didn’t play games… We tried to make a game that
we would like to play, a little more thoughtful, a little more
interesting.
His market is age-blind. “So the fact that there are seven year olds
playing SimCity, that’s great. That’s exactly the way that I would want to the kids’
market, as opposed to something with big brightly colored buttons and some cute
fuzzy character.” He distinguishes between his software and games that have
competitive goal orientations. “I like games, but I’m kind of uncomfortable with
that term for some of the stuff we do, because I think some of the stuff we do is
more of a toy than a game.” He sees SimCity as more of an open-ended tool,
linking it to a hobbyists pleasure in creating, constructing and designing
something unique and personalized. His work melds the constructivist
orientation toward tool development with the visual and interactive appeal of
computer games.
A toy I think is quite a bit more open ended. A toy you can actually
use for a lot of different games. You can come up with your own
rules. You give someone a ball, and a ball is not a game but you
can play a lot of games with a ball because it is so open-ended. In
some sense the stuff that I really enjoy doing, I would say with the
SimCity type stuff, is closer to a hobby than a game. I think of it in
those terms, again that kind of construction and creativity part. I
really like things where I can build something, design something. I
want to be able to do something in the game that nobody else has
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ever done with that game. So no two cities are alike. When you
play SimCity, they may be similar, but no two are identical. There’s
something really cool about that.
In contrast to the pedagogical stance of McCormick or Papert, Wright
argues for the value of SimCity not in conveying particular forms of content, in
“teaching” urban planning, but in providing an open-ended set of tools that allows
intellectual exploration and creative production of a simulated object. He also
does not posit a sharp break between his subjectivity as a “producer” and the
subjectivity of a player. His discourse slides back and forth between identifying
as a player and a software developer. This is not to say that content and his role
as designer does not matter to Wright; he sees software as delivering a certain
message and is a meticulous researcher in the domains that delves into. He
describes some of his more science-oriented games as having a Carl
Saganesque quality of scientific popularization, providing a dynamic model of
scientific theories such as Gaia hypothesis (SimEarth) or emergent behavior
(SimAnt). Yet his meticulous research into content domains is not an effort to
realistically represent authoritative knowledge, but rather is an exercise in
experimentation and exploration of an imagined and hypothesized space.
I think if we tried to make it realistic, we would be doing something
that we wouldn’t want to do. Many people come to us and say,
‘You should do the professional version.’ That really scares me
because I know how pathetic the simulations are, really, compared
to reality. The last thing that I want people to come away with is that
we’re on the verge of being able to simulate the way that a city
really develops, because we’re not.
Other games have followed in the footsteps of SimCity, providing various kinds of
simulation authoring capabilities. In the children’s market, these titles include
DinoPark Tycoon, or Rollerpark Tycoon or DroidWorks as well as a host of other
“sim” imitators.
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While the Sim titles and LOGO originated in the computational medium,
more recently, the multimedia authoring genre has seen tie-ins with other media
types. The MIT LOGO group has partnered with Lego in creating Lego
Mindstorms, named after Papert’s 1980 book, catapulting LOGO into mainstream
commodity capitalism. Mindstorms is a kit with which allows kids to program and
control Lego vehicles. Another major license entered this genre with Barbie
Fashion Designer. Mattel created a commercial success with this product that
allows users to design fashions and print them out onto fabrics to create Barbie
outfits. Although Barbie is an example of a gender-coded title, and perhaps
indicative of a trend in that direction, software in the authoring vein generally
exhibits a relative gender and age-blind orientation in the representation content.
This contrasts to the highly gendered nature of mainstream entertainment titles,
and the grade-based orientation of mainstream educational titles. Where the
gender bias exerts its influence is not in the explicit representational content, but
in the implicit association between technology and masculinity. Like building
blocks, train sets, pens, and paints, these tools are designed for flexibility in
expressing a range of personal styles, interests, and capabilities, and should be
able to support a wide range both in terms of age, gender, and other categorical
variables. The central appeal is self-expression and personalization, coupled
with the capability of the computer to embody and animate these creations.
Packaging Power
Barbie and Lego are particularly appropriate licenses for the authoring genre, as
they capitalize on existing forms of open-ended toy play. Other titles have had a
harder time entering this niche, as the authoring genre is more difficult to position
and market than the edutainment or entertainment gaming formulas. Compared
to the natural affinity between toys and authoring tools, it had proven more
difficult to translate narrative media such as film into an authoring genre. For
example, Lucas Learning, the children’s software arm of Lucas Film, released
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DroidWorks, Pit Droids, and The Gungan Frontier, three authoring-type titles as
their first releases. They were initially marketed and packaged as entertainment
titles, attempting to capitalize on the Star Wars license and mobilize it for the
children’s market and educational goals. Ads ran in gaming magazines as well
as Family PC. With these titles, Lucas Learning was competing with mainstream
gaming in terms of production values as well as market orientation. They utilized
expensive, customized 3D game engines and an original concept. Eventually,
though, the orientation of the company’s products as well as the box design
shifted from entertainment to the edutainment genre. The same product,
Gungan Frontier, was originally released in an adult entertainment genre of
packaging—gold fonts on a darkly ominous background with a scary frowning
character. The current updated box features the same character with a smile
rather than a frown, surrounded by bright yellow banners and cute purple
lettering. In subsequent products, they have lowered their target ages to below
ten years, and have adopted the more established children’s entertainment
genre. The titles embed quasi-educational tasks in a fantasy scenario featuring
their more kid-friendly characters such as Yoda and the young Skywalker. Their
boxes are designed for shelving in the kids’ corner rather than the gaming
section, and feature wide-eyed, cute characters that fit right in with Reader
Rabbit and Disney titles.
Jon Blossom, working with project leader Colette Michaud on Droidworks,
describes some of the difficulties that he had in positioning his product in a field
of typecast products.
Lucas Learning is really interesting in that we’re trying to straddle
that line between education and entertainment. It’s been a really
really hard line to travel because it’s not really clear how you
market that. It’s not really clear how you explain it to people.
248
He contrasts his work with the standard curricular products, the “two plus two
kinds of products that we don’t think are fun.” He describes the difficulties of
marketing learning as a genuinely attractive and fun activity for older kids.
It’s hard to convince parents that our games are educational and
it’s also generally hard to sell to a pre-teen, particularly someone
who’s ten or eleven, trying to be independent, thinks learning is
dumb, and doesn’t like going to school, and here’s this box that
says Lucas learning on it. If we market it as an educational
product, they don’t want to buy it.
He goes on to explain how the company has been feeling growing pressure to
follow in the footsteps of established successes such as the JumpStart line that
are cheaper to make and still sell well. I interviewed Blossom’s colleague,
Michael Wyman, while he was in the midst of production forPit Droids. He
explained how budgets have been shrinking in the kids’ category and this is
probably “the last show and tell. I feel like I got really really lucky to have the
chance to spend the kind of money I’m spending and doing what I think is a really
great product. Will it be profitable? I hope so, but I don’t know.” He worries that
it will take major marketing muscle to create attention to a new genre of the sort
that Droidworks and Pit Droids aspire towards. Unlike a major toy company,
Lucas Learning has worked to make quality the beacon for dissemination, rather
than a television ad campaign. As a result their products have gained critical
acclaim and have been moderate sellers, but have not achieved the major
commercial success of some of the Barbie and Lego software products.
Authoring and simulation tools thus have a different marketing tactic, and
generally package their appeal as technical empowerment, the ability to translate
authorial agency into a technologized form. “Create your own Star Wars world
with fantastic 3D creatures,” suggests the box of The Gungan Frontier. This
positing is easier to do for titles that more clearly fit the authoring genre (word
processors, drawing tools) than games like Gungan Frontier that are presenting a
new and unfamiliar concept. “Create anything imaginable in real-time 3D!”
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proclaims an ad for Disney’s Magic Artist 3D, featuring a virtual Mickey stretching
the surface of a shiny, 3D, textured Mickey logo. The claim and the appeal are to
be able to mobilize as substantial a technical apparatus as possible in the form of
full 3D animated graphics. Like SimCity 2000, titles in this genre are often not
age-specific, and cross over between adult and kids markets. “The power to
change history is in your hands” announces the ad copy for the game Call to
Power, packaged in an adult entertainment genre but advertised in Family PC.
Like SimCity 2000, titles in this genre are often not age-specific, and cross over
between adult and kids markets. Like SimCity 2000, this game is a strategic
simulation that enables a user to author a virtual world. “Call to Power lets you
create a world of your very own.” Similarly ads for SimCity 3000 that ran in PC
Gamer, stress that radically different game outcomes can result from the player’s
actions (figure 6.1). “Mr. Roger’s or Mr. Hussein?” queries the ad copy over
contrasting images of a peaceful town or a blown-out office building. “It’s a
beautiful day in the neighborhood when you’ve got the power to rule over SimCity
3000.” These titles all package their appeal on personal identification,
customization, and authoring, rather than claims that they will transmit specific
bits of knowledge or spectacular pleasures.
250
FIGURE 6.1
ADVERTISEMENTS FOR SIMCITY 3000
© 1998 Electronic Arts. SimCity 3000, SimCity, Maxis, and the Maxis logo are
trademarks or registered trademarks of Electronic Arts in the US and/or other
countries. All rights reserved.
251
FIGURE 6.1, CONTINUED
ADVERTISEMENTS FOR SIMCITY 3000
© 1998 Electronic Arts. SimCity 3000, SimCity, Maxis, and the Maxis logo are
trademarks or registered trademarks of Electronic Arts in the US and/or other
countries. All rights reserved.
252
Software Case: SimCity 2000
SimCity and the genre of simulation games that it opened up is by far the most
successful title in a child-friendly constructionist genre. The most current game
in this line, The Sims, is the best selling game software in history. As a type of
software that integrates popular culture and authoring, and as a set of titles that
was in wide use at the 5thD clubs, it provides a focus for my discussion of the
authoring genre. Maxis, the company that produces the Sim line, started as a
venture in 1987 between Will Wright and Jeff Braun to market SimCity, a game
that Wright had designed and programmed. Wright and Braun deliberately
avoided the label "educational software" for SimCity, believing that "people have
a low opinion of educational software" (Wright in Barol 1989: 64). The SimCity
2000 sourcebook bills the game as "entertainment/educational software"
(Dargahi and Bremer 1995: 4). The game spans the boundary between the
explicitly educational children's market, and the entertainment market, competing
in the category of strategy and simulations games. The SimCity games are rare
crossover hits, winning rave reviews from educators (Eisler 1991; Paul 1991;
Jacobson 1992; Tanner 1993; Peirce 1994) as well as attracting a wide following
among the computer gaming community as a whole. In 1997, Maxis was bought
by Electronic Arts, the primary producer of action and sports computer games,
and they have abandoned efforts in the children’s and educational market. But
until that time, Maxis had a division that specifically worked on children’s titles,
and on educational framing of other Maxis titles. Maxis recognized the
legitimizing aspect of the educational market, while catering to the economic
strength of the entertainment market.
Maxis released SimCity 2000 in November 1993, following a $1 million
development investment (Darlin 1994: 300). Unlike the original SimCity, SimCity
2000 was the work of a large production team, and integrated the suggestions of
hundreds of fans who wrote in asking for new features (Dargahi and Bremer
1995: 337). While SimCity broke new ground by presenting an innovative model
253
for a computer game based on world-building simulation, SimCity 2000 pushed
the envelope on complexity and multimedia. It capitalized on capabilities of new
personal computer platforms, incorporating 3D graphics and animation,
advanced music and sound effects, new public transit systems, a water system,
hospitals, schools, and a complex new economic system (Dargahi and Bremer
1995: 396). Both SimCity and SimCity 2000 were hit products in the competitive
computer game field, earning Maxis millions in revenue (Darlin 1994). The
games have spawned an active subculture, with Usenet newsgroups,
competitions, numerous publications, and even networked versions initiated by a
loyal user community. Currently, SimCity is in its fourth incarnation with SimCity
3000.
SimCity 2000, the focus of this chapter, is both authoring tool and
interactive game. It provides a responsive virtual environment equipped with
tools for users to build and administer a virtual city. The primary interface
window is a grid that can be rotated or zoomed in and out. Starting with a blank
landscape dotted with trees, water, and hills, the player chooses different tools
from a toolbar running alongside the screen, building, bulldozing, and zoning. In
addition, informational windows report on population, educational levels,
pollution, industrial growth, and city budget, among many other factors. The
basic progression of the game involves building roads, zoning districts, and
providing city services such as power, water, schools, parks and libraries. In
addition, the player must make decisions about budgeting: taxes, city ordinances,
and allocation of funds. If zoned and administered properly, "Sims" (simulated
people) will populate the grid, creating their own buildings and voicing their
opinions through the city newspaper.
The user plays the role of mayor of the city, and receives rewards for good
governance and population growth, such as a mayor's house, a statue, or a
spontaneous parade. The system promotes a model of expansion and growth
through rewards for achievement of population levels, but parallel and sub-goal
structures exist in the game, including ecological and economic balance,
254
community relations, and aesthetics. Since SimCity 2000 foregrounds userauthoring, it is less a game driven by a specific goal than a structured space of
possibility for the user to explore. Subverting linear growth scenarios are
disasters that can be turned on and off, including fires, floods, and space alien
invasions. The algorithms underlying SimCity 2000 rely on cellular automata12
techniques, creating an impression of lively growth, interactivity, and change—a
sense of the city as a living entity. Construction sites change to small buildings,
which are in turn torn down to make space for a large shopping mall or a
stunning skyscraper. As the population and transportation network of the city
grows, ant-like cars start flowing frenetically across highways and roadways, and
planes and traffic helicopters fly across the cityscape, occasionally crashing into
a tall building and maybe even starting a fire. A disaster function also creates
periodic floods, fires, earthquakes, and other calamities that spread unexpectedly
through the city. The focus of the game is to create a viable and aesthetically
pleasing simulation. Goal orientations are afforded by the rewards functions that
give players kudos for achieving population levels, as well as the persistent
possibility that your city can fail, by going bankrupt or becoming unlivable for the
Sim citizens.
The primary interface window is a grid that can be rotated or zoomed in
and out and toolbars bristling with buttons and pop-up windows. The
interactional dynamic is much like engaging with a drawing program. The player
chooses a tool, such as a zoning tool, a bulldozer, or a tool to build a specific
public building (e.g., a stadium, park, or power plant), and "draws" that element
onto the grid. Auxiliary windows such as the budget window and city ordinance
window allow the player to adjust elements of the city, such as tax rate or monies
allocated to city services, which are not represented visually on the primary
window grid. What is different from a drawing program is that the software will
12
Cellular automata are a computation method developed by John Von Neumann and Artificial
Life scientists in an attempt to mathematically model a self-reproducing automaton (Helmreich
1995: 69-71). Cells on a grid change states in cycles, in response to states in neighboring cells.
255
"interpret" a player input and perform operations on it in the form of a simulation,
such as populating a newly zoned area or having Sim citizens flock to a new
stadium. By integrating an urban planning scenario and an authoring tool, the
game produces the effect of a god-like bureaucrat, able to produce immediate
outcomes in a city by virtue of simply laying out a city plan.
In contrast to many games that are adapted from non-computational and
narrative media (e.g., animated storybooks, adventure games), Sim games tend
to functionally complex, and allow players to engage and tinker with the technical
substratum. The special effects and graphical representations at the interface
are generally tied into substantive functionality that is relevant for game
outcomes. For example, the flow of cars across a freeway is an indicator of
traffic patterns, which are tied to other game factors such as the satisfaction of
the Sim citizens, pollution levels, and population. This is in contrast to games
that rely on storyline and characters for their narrative cohesion. In these games,
graphical representations may be meaningful for the player, but not for the
underlying machine logic. Although providing a robust fantasy environment, Sim
games are characterized by the dominance of technical logic over narrative logic.
While the cellular automata algorithms are not directly available to the
player, numerous supplementary materials for the game enable the player to
delve below the interface elements and engage with the nuts and bolts of how
the city runs and grows. The manual for the game, and "sourcebooks" of many
hundreds of pages document the algorithmic relations that drive the simulation.
For example, the Sim citizens are programmed to walk only a certain number of
game squares to get to public transportation. Otherwise, they will take their cars.
Algorithmic relations of this sort, described in supporting materials, determine
many of the contingencies of the city: the life span of power plants, the relations
between transport systems and pollution, the consequences of city ordinances,
etc. Players that are even more technically savvy can purchase the SimCity
2000 Urban Renewal Kit that enables players to design their own buildings and
tinker with the algorithms that drive the city. SimCity 2000 exemplifies some of
256
the more complicated and dense layerings between narrative, interface, and
functionality possible in what was state of the art at the time it was released.
SimCity 2000 in the 5thD
SimCity 2000 is a game that has had some persistence at the 5thD, and our data
covers both the 94-95 and the 95-96 school year. It was introduced into the 5thD
in February 1995 with fanfare as a gift to the wizard for her/his birthday party, the
major celebration for the club's year. The game was a special request from Ian
who appeared in the previous chapter. Ian was a great fan of the original
SimCity, a game well established as a popular game at the site at the time of
SimCity 2000's introduction. SimCity 2000 was installed on the machine for
exclusive use by the Young Wizard’s Assistants, but soon regular 5thD citizens
were petitioning the Wizard to be able to play the game, and were using their
"free passes" to gain access. Since the game was so popular, kids began a
practice of meting out game play in thirty minute or fifteen minute turns, so that
no one kid was able to play for the entire duration of site. The game also
became a motivation for kids to achieve YWA status, and fieldnotes document
how at least a few kids were working diligently through the maze for the purpose
of gaining access to SimCity 2000. The SimCity 2000 machine was almost
always surrounded with a small group of two to five kids, usually the older boys
at site (ages ten to twelve), some of who are onlookers (both kids and
undergraduates), and others who are waiting their turn. Most observers,
especially if they have some knowledge of the game, are not shy about throwing
out suggestions to the player, and critiquing their city.
Many undergraduates, in their fieldnotes, note the "spectacular" or
"incredible" graphics and sounds, and describe it as an "every popular,"
"attractive," and "exciting" game. Kids are generally enthusiastic about the
game, evidenced by their maneuverings to get a chance to play, as well as their
descriptions of the game. Undergraduate notes document how SimCity 2000 is a
257
constant magnet for the kids. In response to one undergraduate asking if they
liked the game, one boy responded: "Are you kidding? We're Sim kind of people.
Sim City, Sim Kid, Sim Ant." "I love it, definitely," replies another kid. During the
course of game play, they often comment on a "cool" graphic or sound, and will
show off innovations in their cities to other kids and undergraduates. One boy,
insisting that he wanted to play a “non-educational game” suggested SimCity
2000 as one candidate.
Overall, kids who play SimCity 2000 have a strong sense of ownership,
and identify it as a game that caters to their, as opposed to adult, agendas.
Expertise is associated with technical expertise with the game, rather than age
and real-world experience. Undergraduates typically were attracted to the game
as a visually appealing and challenging game, but unless they were experienced
with the game, they were generally put into roles of observers. They often
describe their confusion. As one undergraduate stated after her first day with
SimCity 2000 : "Since I do not have the slightest idea as to how SimCity 2000 is
supposed to be played, I was unable to provide ... any help." Even after a
second day observing the game, she writes, similarly: "Since I don't know how to
play the game and have no suggestions or advice to offer I usually just sit back
and watch the children play." This undergraduate's experience is not unique;
when there are a group of boys playing the game the undergraduates' role is
almost always one of peripheral observer rather then helper or co-participant.
Particularly in the latter part of the school year, kids had achieved a degree of
expertise, while the undergraduate cohort was being renewed each quarter, so
the kids are almost always in the position of teaching each other as well as the
undergraduates.
When an undergraduate does appear who has some experience with the
game, they are put in the position of having to demonstrate their expertise before
kids will listen to their suggestions. One undergraduate, playing with Ian
suggests using nuclear rather the coal power, to reduce pollution. He challenges
her, “How do you know that?” When she explains that she saw it in the User
258
Manual he confirms, “Are you sure?” and she says that she is. It is only after this
confirmation that he takes her suggestion. Undergraduates may try to bring in
knowledge about the world at large to inform game play. “I suggested to Jimmy
to put in some schools as there were none in the city. I told him ‘People will stop
coming to live here if there aren’t any schools’…. He looked doubtful.”
There were other ways in which the orientation of kids and adults diverge.
Kids are more versatile in their play, engaging in goal directed play as well as
more open-ended play with aesthetic dimensions of the game. By contrast,
undergraduates generally try to get them to play towards city growth and
management. One undergraduate describes her interactions with one boy who
was using the game as an exercise in “creative design.” “I suggested he play the
game correctly to see if he could build an efficient city that worked, but he told
me he was having more fun just designing it.” Playing with disasters, described
in the previous chapter, is also part of this more exploratory mode of play of the
kids. Another undergraduate writes about how one boy “was frustrated and only
wanted to blow up a city…. We both protested and finally [another boy] came to
control the mouse and we were able to get him to begin to be rational in his
decisions as we had been doing.” When a different undergraduate suggests that
they reflect on how to make their city work better, she gets ignored. “I think they
were more interested in the plan of the city rather than the success of the city.”
The boys that she is working with focus instead on the placement of the mayor’s
house. Undergraduates also are surprised at kids’ lack of investment in their
cities. “When I looked back at the game, Kevin had DELETED the whole thing
ON PURPOSE. He had just spent like an hour building this city.” Another
undergraduate notes with dismay that how the boy she was working with “did not
want to save his city, and shut off the game.” “I would have destroyed my city
with a natural disaster like an earthquake or a hurricane,” suggests one onlooker.
Given the complexity of the game, most kids who played during the 199495 year, when the game was introduced, only scratched the surface of the
game's capabilities. Without an experienced coach, they often fail to uncover the
259
basic functionality of the game. Without recourse to the game manual or an
experienced player, it is not obvious how one begins a city and gets it populated;
the player must have roads, three kinds of city zoning, a power plant, and power
lines to even begin to populate a city. When working with an inexperienced
undergraduate, kids usually begin exploring the complex toolbar that allows
players to build city infrastructure and public buildings such as police stations,
stadiums, and hospitals, and will often begin building these parts of the city
without knowledge of the minimal conditions to attract a city population. Soon
the player runs out of money and starts a new city. Kids and undergraduates
also spend much time puzzling over the actual interface, looking for the button for
the power plant, trying to figure out how to build roads up a hill, wondering how to
connect a set of train tracks, or trying to build on on-ramp to an otherwise nonfunctional freeway. Given the constant circulation of kids around the SimCity
2000 machine, however, more often than not, other more experienced kids will
chime in and explain that a road needs to be built, or that a power line needs to
be drawn to a certain area, and most kids, by the end of their session, are able to
attract at least some Sim citizens.
After beginning to attract some citizens to the city, the next challenge is
budgeting. The game is designed so that it is easy to run out of money in the
first hour of game play, and requires careful planning and some understanding of
how to manage the city budget. The practice in the 5thD early on was for kids to
take out bonds as soon as money ran out, and to prolong play time before
bankruptcy. Eventually, however, as the bond payments increased, they would
inevitably run out of credit and money, and would start a new city, often after
destroying their bankrupt city with a series of disasters. In the first few months
after the game was introduced to the 5thD, it was only after an experienced
undergraduate instructed kids on how to manage the budget that kids were able
to move beyond the initial troubles with budget management. The strategies for
moving toward a positive balance sheet are complex, including reducing funding
for certain city services, adding or reducing certain city ordinances, taxing
260
different industries at different rates, pursuing controlled city growth, and
constant monitoring of property tax rates. The fieldnotes and video tape
document the gradual increase in expertise on the game at the club with the
advent of the undergraduate expert, combined with knowledge about the game
the kids began to bring from home. It is unclear whether kids and
undergraduates, without the help of experts of this sort, would have succeeded in
overcoming the basic problems of budget stability and population growth.
Despite the persistent difficulties that kids experienced in building and
maintaining a stable city, almost all kids continued to play and enjoy the game.
In addition to the goal structure of the game that stresses city growth, the kids
often orient toward the aesthetic and design dimensions of the game, spending
much time building elaborate waterfalls, twisted subway systems, lakes with
multiple marinas, enormous airports or seaports, islands shaped like letters, a
private mayor's retreat, and countless disasters that are only incidentally related
to the more functional goals of the game. In the fall of 1995, when the 5thD
started up for a new school term, one of the kids experienced with the game
arrived with a new bit of knowledge that furthered this tendency toward play with
the aesthetic dimensions of the game. One of his older friends had divulged to
him the secret code that gave the player unlimited funds and access to all of the
special buildings that are generally only awarded after achieving certain
population levels. In other words, the code enables the player to circumvent the
structures of the game that encourage attention to fiscal issues and population
growth. After this knowledge became disseminated at the site, kids new to the
game would struggle for a while with budget and population issues, but sooner or
later, the secret is divulged to them, and they tend to use the game more as an
elaborate authoring tool.
261
Power Users and Hard Mastery
SimCity 2000 is a game with multiple technical layers that the player can
manipulate. In contrast to educational software that seeks to convey a set
knowledge domain, often in narrative form, authoring and simulation games
require the player to master a set of technical tools to design customized
narratives and meanings. A certain amount of technical knowledge is a
requirement of play. More complex technical functionality also results in esoteric
technical mastery that is often called “power use” by experienced computer
users. The “learning narratives” about software like SimCity and SimTower are
generally around explicating technical functionality: how to place a marina or a
bridge in relation to land and water formations, how to schedule elevator routes,
how to manipulate tools to make the subway system connect, what the
relationship is between zoning and population density. There is often a sense of
accomplishment associated with learning how to use new tools and discovering
different technical functions and relations. This differs from the sense of
achievement of “beating” a game or completing a set of problems.
A few weeks after the game is introduced, an undergraduate, Bruce, a
power user of the game, appears at the site and begins to reorganize kids’ play
towards more sophisticated technical mastery. He describes how the kids had
been taking out bonds that the city would never be able to pay back, dooming the
city to eventual fiscal failure. He sits down with the YWA who had been most
involved with the game, and starts giving him detailed tips on how to balance the
city budget. He shows him the window that allocates specific amounts to
different city programs, and shows him how to fine-tune these settings to
maximize revenue. “One of the main strategies is to cut all funding to the fire
department and turn off the ‘disasters’ mode. When this mode is turned off, there
can be no fires, so fire department funding is not necessary.” Working on a
subsequent day with another boy, he writes that the boy “was a very fast learner,
and genuinely interested in the more complex aspects of the game. It’s fine to
262
put the game on ‘Autobudget’ and watch it slowly grow, but he, like me, found it
more fun to play around with the city’s budget and taxes to increase income.”
Dean worries, however, that he may have initiated a technical discourse that
would be over the head of some 5thD participants:
I can just hear him approaching and eight-year-old just learning to
play the game and saying ‘No! You have to cut the spending to the
fire department, cut spending to un-needed transportation system,
increase taxes on textiles and steel, decrease taxes on automotive,
implement sales tax and a smoking ordinance, and don’t forget
nuclear-free zones! Don’t you know how to play this game?’
One example of play of Bruce’s teaching of SimCity 2000 functionality
illustrates the sorts of interactions that I am characterizing as oriented toward
mastery of the technical logic of the game. Bruce is playing with Dean, and
observed by Ian. Bruce points out some of the more complicated features of the
game to Dean, and triggers some talk around deciphering a particular graph.
D = Dean
I = Ian
UG = Undergraduate
1
UG: You see this little graph? (Points.) You know what that means?
2
D: (Opens graphs window.)
3
I: Whoa! Go back go back (responding to window snapping shut)
4
D: (Opens window and drags to keep window open.) That's my S. That's my
something. That's my industrial. That's my residential, and that' s my commercial.
(Moves cursor down to point to different lines in the graph, labeled "S," "I," "R," and "C,"
as he refers to them.)
5
I: Commercial.
6
UG: Right. This other one right here. (Points to another item on toolbar.)
7
I: (Jumps up and points to closing window.)
8
D: (Closes graph window.)
9
I: The seaport! That's seaport! That's seaport!
263
FIGURE 6.2
GRAPH OF ZONES IN SIMCITY 2000
Screen shot reproduced with permission from Electronic Arts Inc.
© 1993-94 Electronic Arts Inc. SimCity 2000 and SimCity are trademarks or
registered trademarks of Electronic Arts Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.
All rights reserved.
In response to Bruce's question, Dan makes links between the lines on a
normally hidden graph window and the different zones in his city, industrial,
residential, and commercial (figure 6.2). He skips over the line labeled
"S,"—“That’s my something"—a move that Bruce also glosses over (line 4). Ian,
however, notices the omission, and as Dan closes the graph window, jumps up
and enthusiastically points out that "S" must refer to seaport, a special kind of
zone (line 9). The excitement is in uncovering a new symbolic relationship
between two game elements. His insight is not, however, acknowledged by the
other two, who move on to the next graph that shows population levels. Even as
264
Ian's contribution is not taken up by the others, the participants have managed to
cement a common interactional space which is focused on deciphering the
intratextual referents within the game, the meaningful space of identifications
looping tightly within the technical terms of the game. The narrative logic of
learning “about seaports” is secondary to the sense of revelation in uncovering a
representation tool. Bruce, Ian, and Dean seek to uncover the particular
instrumental logic of the game as designed by the Maxis production team. Like
film critics that might analyze a camera angle and lighting, the three forge links
with the production apparatus, making the game meaningful as a complexly
embodied technical achievement. This kind of interaction, where kids and
undergraduates work together in figuring out how the tools and interface work are
frequent in the transcripts for games like SimCity and SimTower.
As kids gain more technical expertise, they can push the technical
functions even further. In another instance of play, some months later, Ian is
playing with a different undergraduate who is not as familiar with the game. The
undergraduate describes the kind of experimentation that Ian was engaging with,
testing the parameters of the simulation.
Ian wanted to try out his SimCity experiments so he closed and
saved my city. He wanted to see how well a certain type of
arcology would survive in a series of earthquakes. He created a
number of these min-cities all over the terrain then clicked on the
Disasters menu button and proceeded to subject them to 30-40
earthquakes. I had a feeling of being witness to a scientific
experiment: I also wanted to see what would happen. I told Ian that
arcologies were a little like the city states of ancient Greece and I
explained that the ‘polis’ served as an early form of democracy
where men, not women at the time, could vote and run the city. The
arcologies we were testing did not all crumble at once. After 10
earthquakes, 2 collapsed. After 30, most of them fell.
Within a few months after the games introduction, a strong peer culture
had arisen around the game, which was dominated by the older boys, aged 1012, that frequented the site. The regular girl participants at the site also enjoyed
265
the game, but they rarely participated in the group interactions of the older boys
surrounding the game. One excerpt from a fieldnote in the second school year
after the game’s introduction describes the nature of the interaction between the
boys:
There were about five boys crowded around one terminal when I
first joined the game. Another [undergraduate] was following along
with the boys also. George was seated in front of the terminal
controlling the keyboard, but all of the boys were shouting out
suggestions and reacting to the things George was making happen
on the screen… The boys spoke loudly to each other, but they
weren’t fighting. They were more or less challenging each other’s
expertise on the game. If one of the boys told me something that
the others disagreed with, a debate would immediately take place
until it was resolved. Each of the boys was extremely informative
when I had a question. They would tell me everything that they
knew, even if it was way past what I had originally inquired about.
While undergraduates like this one often commented on kids’ willingness
to share their knowledge at length, there were also times then they felt left out by
their lack of understanding. The peer culture around SimCity 2000 quickly built
up forms of esoteric knowledge that excluded outsiders. As one undergraduate
notes: “Another child by the name of Mick stood beside me and talked a lot about
the game, most of which I couldn’t follow because they were so esoteric.”
Although I don’t have any direct evidence that girls were turned off by this “in
group” of SimCity 2000 boy players, girls’ lack of participation in these
discussions is evidence of a gender bias, where boys dominate these technical
debates. The instances of girls’ play we have on record are all in situations
where one girl is playing with an undergraduate or one other girl friend. One girl
at the site does take a keen interest in the game, and starts working diligently
towards becoming a YWA so she can gain access to the game. In contrast to
Ian’s intense and ongoing engagement, however, she gets bored of the game
soon after she becomes a YWA. An undergraduate writes: “She blew her budget
on things not really needed. She called her town exclusively La Jolla in her first
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three attempts but as she started giving up on the game she was calling her town
Dumb Town. She was giving up without really trying.” There are no records of
her playing with the game after this instance of play.
Creating My Own World: Identification and Self-Actualization
Competitive and spectacular pleasures are present in simulation kits, but differ
from the pleasures involved in creating and authoring a unique virtual world.
Authoring systems like SimCity 2000 allow players to create their own
spectacles, settings, characters and interactive possibilities, constructing user
subjectivity as a world-builder rather than world-explorer. Game play and
mastery involves uncovering the technical functionality of the building tools, and
then executing a personalized vision of a city while managing the balance
between different factors such as cash flow, population density, and aesthetics.
Just as children learn the relation between materials and physics when they
manipulate building blocks, SimCity mastery is about being able to manipulate
and combine computational building blocks into a unique structure. In contrast to
the discussions of power use, this is a domain where girls were often active
participants.
The results of these construction endeavors are often highly invested with
personal reference, style and meaning, a sense of creative accomplishment that
differs from a sense of achievement in more clearly competitive scenarios. Kids
will continuously debate what features and buildings are cool, and where they
should be placed, and then showing off their creations to one another. “My friend
had one of those big shark-looking things up o a big hill that he had made!”
“Look! Want to see my huge mountain? I made this huge mountain by hand and
I covered it in water by hand. I did this all by hand.” When playing in a group
setting, negotiating authorship is often difficult, because of the unique and
personalized nature of the choices being made. Here an undergraduate and two
boys debate whether to put in a zoo or a park in a location by the mayor’s house.
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Mark, the youngest of the group, is in control of the mouse, helping build a city
for the undergraduate.
UG = undergraduate
I = Ian
M = Mark
UG: Why don’t you put in a park?
I: Put in a zoo.
M: I want to put in a stadium. [Picks stadium]
I: Dude, what did you want?
UG: It doesn’t—let’s put in a zoo.
I: She wants a zoo.
M: I want a stadium.
I: She wants a zoo. It’s her space.
M: I want to do a stadium.
I: She wants a zoo.
M: You said I could do something.
UG: Here. You can put in a stadium. We’ll put in a zoo later, okay?
In this sequence, the undergraduate eventually compromises. “You can put in
the stadium. We’ll add put in a zoo later, okay?” Her decision is definitive as
they had started the city as “her” city. Cities include the input of others but are
experienced as personal creations.
One way that SimCity 2000 accomplishes a sense of identification is by
suturing players into identification as the mayor of the city. Advisors from various
city offices advise “you” on the state of transportation, education, and other city
services. After achieving a certain population level, you are awarded a “mayor’s
house” that can be placed at will. This moment appears frequently on tapes of
children’s play as a key moment of identification. They will general spend a great
deal of time working to placing the house in a nice location—on top of a hill,
overlooking a lake, distanced from the bustle of the city—and might add a private
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subway or park for the mayor’s residence. The player with ownership of the city
will without exception refer to the house as “my house,” and the appearance of
the house will generally initiate a sequence of imaginative projection, where
interlocutors will talk about what it would be like to live in a particular location.
“Girl you want to see it?” asks one of our teenage players to a new friend at the
club. “Watch this nigger. Watch. That’s my house girl.” “Oh!” Proclaims the
friend, impressed. “I want to build. I‘ll make mine.”
One instance of a boy (Jimmy) and an undergraduate (Holly) discussing
the mayor’s house is representative of these interactional moments. They have
been working on this city for about twenty minutes, with Jimmy in control of the
mouse the entire time. Their city has just reached a population of one thousand,
which triggers the "rewards" button to highlight, indicating that the player can
build the mayor's house. As Jimmy moves his pointer up to select a button on
the toolbar, he notices the rewards button, and the following exchange ensues:
J= Jimmy
Holly = undergraduate
brackets signify overlapping talk
1
J: I can make my house, the mayor's house (Clicks on rewards icon.) Where do I want
to make my house?
2
H: (Laughs.) You want it overlooking everything? (Laughs.) Aaa... Do you want to have
it overlooking the lake or something?
3
J: (Dismisses year end dialog box.)
4
H: Yeah, you can have like those be the really nice houses or something. Like up in
the hills?
5
J: Up here? (Moves cursor to flat area on ridge.)
6
H: Uuuu maybe over here (pointing) because this you'd be just overlooking over the
power plant. That wouldn't be very nice. Maybe over by the lake or something?
7
J: How about, right here? (Positions cursor over flat ground by the lake.)
8
H: Sure, yeah, like right on the lake?
9
J: (Builds house on lake opposite city.) Yeah, I need power, obviously because it's my
house.
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10
H: (Laughs.)
11
J: (Builds power lines to mayor's house.)
12
H: You need water I would think.
13
J: Hate water! (Selects water pipe tool.)
14
H: (Reads from status bar.) Water shortage or something. Why would there be a water
shortage? Something like a drought or something? You can't really.. mmm...
15
J: (Builds pipes to mayor's house.) There! (Water keeps running out.) Better give me
water! (The water doesn't flow to house.) I don't care though! (Dismisses budget
window.) It's so hard...
16
H: What is?
17
J: Using this... (Selects hospital tool.) Hospital? Should I put in a hospital?
18
H: Another one?
19
J: Do I already have one?
20
H: Uh-huh. You have one by the college. You have another on... do you have a free
clinic or something for the people [who can't afford it? -- ]
21
J:
[How 'bout auuummm! ] A prison.
22
H: You have a police station already, right?
23
J: Where should I have it, right here?
24
H: That's over by the hospital. You probably want it... how about over by the sewage,
like the industrial area. So it's not, cause you don't, I mean, like, no one would want to
live in that area.
25
J: (Tries to place prison on terraced ground.) I can't put it on the, like, it has to be on
flat ground. How about right here? (Positions cursor by lake.)
26
H: Don't put it right by your house! You don't want to live by the prison do you!?
(Laughs.)
27
J: (Laughs.) Right here? (Positions on opposite side of lake.)
29
H: Sure. That's right by the police station. You might as well.
30
J: More convenient.
In this segment of activity, Jimmy begins by taking up an identification, proposed
by the structure of the game, between him and the mayor: "I can make my
house. My mayor's house," and then invites Holly into the decision of where to
place it: "Where do I want to make my house?" (line 1). Holly's talk then draws in
a series of connections from her knowledge about the world: what constitutes
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desirable real estate, a good view, and signifiers of power and wealth (lines 2, 4,
6). Jimmy takes up her first suggestion, to put it overlooking a lake, by trying to
place it on a ridge overlooking an industrial area. She then offers an alternate
suggestion, to place the house by the uninhabited region by the lake. Jimmy,
with her agreement, places "his" house by the lake opposite the city (figure 6.3).
They go on to consider the placement of a prison, and Holly advises against
placing it next to the mayor's house (lines 23-25). Holly is not basing her
suggestions on any knowledge of the underlying algorithms of the game that
calculate real estate value or the "not in my back yard" (NIMBY) phenomenon,
but rather she makes the game sensible for Jimmy in terms of her sociocultural
knowledge. In fact, the placement of the mayor's house is inconsequential in
terms of game outcomes, but functions as an effective hook for locating a subject
position for the player within the game's mis en scene, and conversely, for
locating the game within a system of social distinctions. This kind of talk, where
Holly refers to social contexts at large to make sense of the game, is fairly typical
of their interaction. At other times, for example, Holly initiates discussions
around what kinds of transit systems might be desirable, or how good school
districts attract families. While the tone of the talk is decidedly playful and
peppered with laughter—it’s just a game after all—Jimmy, Holly, and SimCity
2000 have succeeded in organizing themselves around a series of identifications
that link Jimmy, the Mayor, "nice" parts of town, and a good view.
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FIGURE 6.3
SCREEN SHOT OF JIMMY'S MAYOR'S HOUSE IN SIMCITY 2000
Screen shot reproduced with permission from Electronic Arts, Inc.
© 1993-94 Electronic Arts Inc. SimCity 2000 and SimCity are trademarks or
registered trademarks of Electronic Arts Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.
All rights reserved.
On another day, two girls, Allie and Jean, are playing the game with an
undergraduate. The undergraduate fieldnote describes how they engage in a
series of imaginative projections where they build a mansion for themselves, and
then a home for their parents far from their home. They continue to build homes
for others in their lives.
There is a young man named Seth who Allie doesn’t like, and she
built him a house on the far corner of the city, and proceeded to
surround his home with dense forest, far from civilization, roads,
and water. Because neither girl likes Jean’s four-year-old sister,
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Allie built her house in a deserted valley without water or electricity,
to die in isolation. I said that it was mean, so Allie placed a teeny,
tiny lake far away from the sister’s home.
For children that engage with SimCity 2000 or SimTower over the course
of multiple days, they develop even stronger attachments to their creations. One
of the girls in our teen club developed her tower over a period of weeks. On her
first day of play with SimTower, in a dull moment while she was waiting for
income to build more of her tower, I had shown her some peripheral features of
the game. If the player clicks on particular person in the tower, they can assign
names to them. People named in this way appear in blue instead of the generic
black, and can be "found" through the "find person" command, where an arrow
on the screen will point to where they are in the building, whether they are in their
office, or having lunch, or waiting to get on an elevator. On this subsequent day,
captured on video, Brandy is displaying her tower to a visiting teenager, Kathy,
and shows her how she has named people in her tower after her mother, and her
best friend Tamika (figure 6.4).
B = Brandy
K = Kathy
1
B: See now I'm out of money, so I have to wait until all my money goes up, because I
just wasted all my money on another elevator, and I have people that I named, watch.
See who's on this floor? Nobody I know. See the people I named, they're blue. They're
look it, watch. (Clicks on the coffee shop, then on one of the blue people in the coffee
shop.)
2
B: See all the blue people? And I have to click on them, and that's [Stella], that's my
mom. She's at work, and she works on the office floor two so that'd be that floor. Look
let's find [Tamika]. Let's see if [Tamika] is at work, if she's not, she's getting fired.
Goes to find person command, and finds Tamika. Window listing named people pops
up.)
3
B: Let's see. these are all the people that I named. There's [Tamika's] name right there.
I have more people though.
273
FIGURE 6.4
SCREEN SHOT FROM SIMTOWER
Screen shot reproduced with permission from Electronic Arts, Inc.
© 1995 Electronic Arts Inc. SimTower is a trademark or registered trademark of
Electronic Arts Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. All rights reserved.
4
K: How many did you name?
5
B: All of them.
6
K: Cool.
7
B: See, [Tamika] is there. She's got to be there. I think she works on the third floor.
Yeah, oh, she's eating. So that's [Tamika] right there.
8
K: She's eating?
9
B: (Clicks on Tamika.) Yeah, she's like getting her lunch.
10
K: Cool, [Tamika], you're eating.
11
B: You're getting something, you're eating, uhm, what are you eating? [Tamika] is
eating, you're eating Japanese soba, soba, soba.
274
12
K: How do you know what she's eating. Oh my gosh.
13
B: Cause that's what the restaurant is. Let's see who this is, [Tamika]? (Tries to click on
a different person in the tower.) Catch them. Oh man.
In this sequence of activity, a peripheral element of the game
inconsequential in terms of building a smoothly operating tower, becomes a
social resource. The ability to name people in the tower enables Brandy to
translate game elements into relationships that are part of her everyday life. This
process not only links her particular relational universe (best friend and family)
(line 2) into the space of the virtual world, but links these familiar aspects of life
with more unfamiliar ones. The game becomes a vehicle to imagine what it
might be like to be creator and administrator of a skyscraper, and for a teenage
friend to work in an office, get fired, or eat Japanese noodles (soba) for lunch
(line 10). It is a source of pleasure not just in engaging with the visual and
interactional effects of the game, but in forming a personal identification and
sense of ownership of a unique creation.
Engineered Subversion
The last chapter introduced a sequence of play where Ian, a boy heavily invested
in SimCity 2000, is playing the game with some other kids, and is asked by the
site director to teach a new undergraduate how to play. The sequence of play
not only illustrates the effects of children’s peer networks in engaging with special
effects and consumer culture, but also some of the shifts in
consumption/production relations when kids are handed a flexible set of
computational authoring tools.
Ian, the eight year old who forms the basis of this case study of SimCity
2000 use, is a veteran of the 5thD, and a Young Wizard's Assistant (YWA), which
means that he has completed all the games in the maze, and has earned the
right to play the high-end games at site. It also means that he is responsible for
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teaching others. At school, Ian has been flagged as a problem child, and
diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder, and at home, he is subject
to a behavior modification schedule. At club, he is known as a game expert who
can control the attention of both other kids and adults. He is also described
frequently in undergraduate fieldnotes as exceptionally bright. “I was very
impressed with his knowledge; he seemed wise beyond his years.” Despite his
identity in the club as a game expert, undergraduate fieldnotes document how
Ian doesn't think he is a smart kid. When an undergraduate compliments him as
"smart" in relation to his game expertise, he reacts with surprise, saying that he
doesn't think he is smart because he has been held back in school. Like Andy, a
central figure in Chapter 4, Ian is an uncommon kid that appears at the center of
certain social tensions in the 5thD. He challenges the agendas of school and the
club by mobilizing technical resources in unexpected ways that don’t conform to
adult educational agendas.
Ian has a particular fascination with SimCity and SimCity 2000, and is
known for his intense engagement with the game, usually at the expense of
learning other games or working with others at the club. His letters to the 5thD
wizard and fieldnotes describe his constant negotiation, pleading, wheeling and
dealing in order to play SimCity 2000. Before becoming a YWA, Ian was largely
excluded from playing SimCity 2000 because it was a game reserved for YWAs
or kids with special permission from the wizard. During this period, Ian barrages
the wizard with special requests, and pleads with the site coordinator to be
allowed to borrow the software to play at home. Video during this period has him
lurking at machines while other kids play, tossing in suggestions, and futilely
pleading to be able to play. After becoming a YWA, largely out of motivation for
unrestricted play with SimCity 2000, the struggle is to disengage him from the
game enough so he can teach others how to play. These kinds of struggles,
where Ian emerges as a devoted and engaged member of the club, while
persistently pushing against club rules, creating trouble, and demanding attention
is typical of Ian's 5thD identity. Ian’ hacker-like expertise and obsessive
276
engagement with the game is cause for both celebration by adults, as well as
constant efforts at redirection. Even after achieving YWA status and gaining free
access to the game, adults intervene in Ian’s play by instituting a twice-a-week
rule so that he will also play with other games.
In the previous chapter, I described Ian’s “disaster time” where he subjects
his city to various floods, plane crashes, earthquakes, fires, and explosions.
After Ian is finally displaced from his burned, flooded city at the insistence of
many adults, he starts a new city for the undergraduate, and they work on it,
together with another kid, for the remaining forty minutes on tape. During this
period, Ian returns to construction mode, building buildings, power plants, the
mayor's house, a railroad, and a subway system. Significantly, however, he
begins this new city by typing in a secret code that gives the player unlimited
funds and opens access to all of the special rewards such as space-age
buildings, the mayor's house, and all of the high tech power plants. By typing in
the secret code, he can circumvent the game parameters that demand attention
to fiscal responsibility and gradual urban growth. The game is transformed from
an urban planning exercise to a palette for the free construction of any desired
elements.
Ian uses the backdoor code as a way of expanding the space for personal
agency, and he also works toward building a network of co-conspirators that will
reproduce this alternative mode of game play. In this excerpt, he has just been
working to build a subway system, but has difficulty, and needs to keep
bulldozing and reconstructing. This leads to a discussion of how much money he
has wasted, but how it doesn't matter, because of his secret code:
I = Ian
UG = undergraduate
1
I: We wasted hundreds and hundreds of dollars. I don't believe it. We just wasted
about $500,000 trying to connect it, and it was already connected.
2
UG: Whoops. Oh well.
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3
I: That was a big mistake.
4
UG: That's OK. We still have tons more money.
5
I: Yeah tell me when you want some more. More!
6
UG: Are you going to show me how? You're not going to show me the secret? Why
not?
7
I: Promise you won't tell anybody?
8
UG: I won't tell anybody.
9
I: OK. Porntipsguzzardo.
10
UG: What did you push, what did you press, redtips?
11
I: Porntipsguzzardo.
12
UG: Wait, I don't remember.
13
I: Then you keep pressing guzzardo.
14
UG: Where'd you learn that?
15
I: Somebody taught it to me.
16
UG: So you go...
17
I: Every time you type that it gives you another half million dollars. (Continues to type
"guzzardo" which continues to add money, as citizens cheer.)
18
UG: Oh, wow. I don't think I need any more. Wow, they're cheering up a storm on the
screen. Uh, look at how much we have. I don't think we need anymore.
19
I: That's not very much.
20
UG: Not very much? So it's porntips, then how do you spell the last guzz --
21
I: Guzzardo.
22
UG: Guzzardo.
23
I: Guzzardo, double Z.
24
UG: Double Z. Thanks. Now I won't be...
25
I: (Continues to type code.) Is it changing right now?
26
UG: Yeah, totally.
27
I: How much do we have?
28
UG: Here, we have enough, we're at twenty million.
29
I: That's not very much. I had twenty-eight million.
30
UG: Twenty-eight million?
31
I: (Continues to type.)
32
UG: You just hear them screaming and screaming. They're going to lose their voices
they're screaming so much.
33
I: Twenty-nine.
34
UG: That's, that's plenty. You want to just go up to thirty? That's good.
278
35
I: Good.
36
UG: We have so much money, that we won't even know what to do with it.
37
I: I know.
38
UG: That's so much money.
In this sequence, Ian has started to run out of money from building his subway
(line 1), and asks the undergraduate when she wants more money (line 5). The
undergraduate had previously noticed him typing in a secret code to get free
funds, so she takes this as an opportunity to ask him if he will show her (line 6).
While showing some resistance at first, he tells her to promise not to tell anyone
(line 7), takes a quick look at the video camera, and shows her the code (lines 9,
11, 12). He then continues to type the code until they reach thirty million dollars,
an enormous sum in the SimCity 2000 economy (line 38).
Ian's (not so) secret transmission of illicit knowledge is not restricted to this
one instance on tape. On another day, he has been asked to visit a neighboring
afterschool club to teach kids how to play SimCity 2000. His first act, upon
arriving at the club, is to teach the kids the secret code, thereby subverting the
possibility that these kids might engage with the game as an educational urban
planning simulation. He goes on to show them the coolest buildings, and they
experiment together on pushing their city to extremes—painting their initials in
land formations, seeing if their city will survive various disasters, building a prison
fortress reminiscent of Alcatraz, and building an enormous airport. He shows
them various aspects of game functionality, how to zoom in and out and rotate
the grid, how to get information on various industries, or a description of the
space age buildings. When one of the kids notices that the game has posted a
suggestion that there be a transit system, Ian informs him that he doesn't need to
worry about things like that. After all, with the secret code, there is no need to
generate revenue, and hence no need to keep one's city happy and well
populated. Other children at the club form an appreciative audience. The adults
at the club are in an uneasy position of trying to validate Ian’s technical expertise,
279
but wanting to reproduce the quasi-educational urban planning scenario and not
the action entertainment content of Ian’s destructive scenarios. They are foiled
by the content of the game that has these capabilities as a hidden interactional
resource. The result is that Ian’s subjectivity gets produced as a countercultural
one in relation to educators’ expectations, and one that enlists other kids at the
club, who also relish subversion of these expectations. Ian is a political actor that
hacks technology to enlist it into his oppositional social network.
What does it mean to consider Ian's game play in relation to the malleable
technology of SimCity 2000, and a trans-geographic production/consumption
network? Within the afterschool program, blowing up buildings is a subversive
activity, going against the educational goals of the club and the orientation of
SimCity 2000 as it has been widely marketed. Yet opportunities for destruction
have been anticipated by the designers of SimCity 2000, and coded into the
game, citing well-established idioms of action gaming. Behind the backs of the
educators, game designers have mobilized a powerful counter-narrative that
enlists computer savvy kids at site. The game and the Internet give Ian access to
subcultural but powerful adult communities who provide resources to validate a
subjectivity and practices in opposition to educational goals and the adults at the
site. Ian’s play with the alternative functionality of SimCity builds relationships
with other kids as well as fan communities and game designers with whom he
doesn’t have a direct interpersonal relation. Will Wright and other SimCity fans
are resource for Ian to produce an alternative subjectivity and social network that
can stand up to the demands of adults at the club. At one level, this case is
about familiar antagonisms and fault lines between children and their adult
opressors, as children struggle for autonomy within adult-run institutions. But in
this long-standing power struggle, a new interlocutor has entered the mix,
handing the children new resources and sources of solidarity.
One way or another, Ian was able to tap into this "oppositional" (vis-a-vis
the educational encodings of the game) knowledge, and transform the game into
a radically different space of possibility. Instead of claiming slivers of time to
280
construct, say, a frivolous freeway, before having to start over, Ian is able to
freely construct and blow up as many fusion plants and large, space age
buildings as he desires. He has wholly escaped the subjectivity of a responsible
and constructive mayor, and instead, is able to smuggle in an entertainmentbased code, while still passing as a SimCity 2000 expert at the 5thD. The codes
that Ian mobilizes are not individualistic or antisocial, but rather are part of an
alternative community of practice, one that includes other kids as well as SimCity
2000 game developers and the action gaming industry.
In addition to the different modes of “legitimate” play, SimCity 2000
embodies hidden functionality accessible by “cheat codes” that a user can type in
to change game parameters. Research on the World Wide Web reveals that
SimCity 2000, as well as many other games, have a number of what developers
call "cheats" and "easter eggs." An easter egg, in contrast to other forms of
cheats, is defined on one SimCity web page as "a pre-programmed, hidden and
undocumented feature inserted by the programmer for their own enjoyment." In
the world of computer game fandom, undocumented is clearly relative, and cheat
codes are featured on even the official Maxis web page, albeit with a disclaimer:
We do not advocate the use of cheat codes, as playing legitimately
will lead to a far more stable and enjoyable city building experience.
We are providing these cheat codes solely as a service to you. We
will not discuss these codes further on the phone. We do not
guarantee that they will work for you. We will not discuss problems
with any city in which you have used a code-- once you use a code,
all bets are off, and you're on your own! (http://www.maxis.com
1998)
Maxis capitalizes on the flexibility of computer technology in catering to
heterogeneous users and use situations. While the dominant marketing pitch is
one of a constructive and educational simulation, the designers and a wired fan
community have successfully smuggled in a myriad of alternative readings,
281
including special effects of destruction and easter eggs for localized and
customized forms of game play.
In my interview with Wright he describes the cheat codes in SimCity 2000
as a way to transform the software from a game with a goal structure, to a toy,
more like a construction kit. In other words, he consciously saw the codes as
enabling alternative forms of game play, a move that he calls “engineered
subversion,” the ability of software to encode the conditions of its own undoing.
He also described how game producers use cheat codes to generate buzz about
a game. Buzz is a marketing tool, even if it means subverting the goal
orientations and rules embedded in the game design. In other words, cheat
codes are a community building device. Cheat codes cater to fans and
technically savvy hacker communities, who remain an important audience
despite the mainstreaming of the computer gaming market. Wright describes
how in the early days of computer gaming, hackers would race to break the copy
protection of a new piece of software. A similar niche community is also involved
in cracking the cheat codes in current gaming software. “They’ll break through
the code. They’ll disassemble the program. It’s incredible. We came out with
SimCity 3000. People within a week had discovered all the cheat codes by
digging through the code.”
SimCity grows out of and enlists an extremely varied set of producer and
consumer communities, and embodies these contradictions within the design of
the game. The positioning with both educational and entertainment markets, the
use of cheat codes and easter eggs, and a double talking web page are all
indicators of this. These features of SimCity are common to any media artifact
with a large and diverse set of fan communities, but because of its status as a
digital authoring tool, SimCity is an even more flexible object. The ability to
subvert the dominant paradigm of the game is, to borrow a common mantra of
software development, “a feature, not a bug.” Players can also buy the
SimCity2000 Urban Renewal Kit (SKURK), which allows players to go behind the
scenes, designing their own buildings, scenarios, and circumventing other game
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limitations. These SKURK creations are published and distributed on hundreds
of web pages on the Internet, including Maxis’s own. Instead of only interpretive
flexibility, consumers are also handed functional flexibility and the ability to author
radically different and personalized narrative terms through their game play.
Conclusions: From Engineered Learning to Engineered Subversion
The case of authoring software exemplifies the ambivalence that adults feel
about discipline and freedom for children, the desire to support self-expression
as well as enriching knowledge acquisition. This genre of software attempts to hit
a fine balance between furthering educational developmental progress goals
within a non-competitive and open-ended structure. Just as Papert had a difficult
time demonstrating that programming led to gains in mathematical ability,
authoring software has a hard time packaging educational content as an
outcome of engagement. What is packaged in these software titles is less
particular forms of content, but the ability to influence, construct and personalize
a digital domain. This package of self-expression is amenable to parents and
educators to the extent that is promotes creativity and technical literacy, but runs
afoul of the basic premises of competitive achievement that characterizes the
sorting functions of mainstream educational institutions. The problem lies not
only in the kinds of freedoms of self-expression that we allow children, but in
marketing these tools are educational. What are the standards that assess
children’s progress in these games? Is any kind of self-expression considered
educationally productive? Technically literacy becomes the one outcome that
technologists can tout as a concrete educational outcome of this genre of
engagement The rapidly contours of technology and the extremely narrow and
software-specificity of much technical knowledge, can, however make even this a
dubious proposition.
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Authoring tools are not educational in the traditional sense of reproducing
certain cultural domains, skills, or a competitive habitus, but can perhaps be seen
as most revolutionary as a political tool that alters the conditions of cultural
production. Children’s relationships to computers changes from that of slave to
master, in the process, subverting the power hierarchy between child and adult.
This is a different kind of subversion from the kind of cultural opposition that
entertainment media make in creating a children’s culture opposed to adult
norms of discipline, health, and work. Authoring tools are practically rather than
merely symbolically anti-authoritarian, a shift in the control of cultural production,
allowing children to not only imagine a world where kids rule, but to substantively
participate in its construction. They are, to borrow Kinder’s phrase, playing with
power (Kinder 1991), embodying their interests and personalities in a powerful
new computational media. This is not the power, however, of the mainstream
competitive rat race or the status wars around consumptive style, but power
within the technical microworlds of computational media, and the social relations
that these technologies mediate. Given the political strength of certain authoring
tools and hacker subcultures, we need to interrogate the gender dynamics that
associate boys with these more generative and potentially subversive uses of
technology and girls with more docile and acquiescent forms. As more technical
content filters into software that is not explicitly boy-identified, we should
hopefully expect girls to take a keener interest. The 5thD demonstrated the
persistent dominance of boys in displaying technical mastery, but it also proved
that when given access and support, girls excel in creating virtual worlds tailored
to their own interests.
Authoring software can place children politically and socially in the same
arena as adults, particularly when children often have the upper hand in
manipulating new computational media. When a piece of technology becomes
part of a network of peer information exchange, children’s knowledge can quickly
supersede that of their parents and teachers, and they look to mixed-age hacker
and fan subcultures to extend their expertise. Children are playing with fire,
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expensive tools and fast-flowing information networks. When children engage
with software like SimCity 2000, they are no longer in the protected space of
childhood. Software like SimCity 2000 that is designed for the adult market has
adult-scale production budgets behind it, catering to a much larger and
economically powerful market segment than the children’s niche market. This
manifests as high production value as well as advanced functionality, including
the possibilities for engineered subversion. Further, unlike children’s software
that relies on the legitimizing force of commodity capitalism as a sanctioned form
of communication between adult strangers and children, mixed-age gaming
communities are border zones where children rub shoulders with adult hobbyists
and hackers. These mixed-aged learning communities could on one hand be
celebrated as age-blind and democratic sites of authentic apprentice-like
learning, or they could be attacked as a corruption of the young, a dangerous
corrosion of the boundary between children and adult worlds. Marketing through
mainstream channels is but one of the communications channels in the world of
hobbyist and Internet aficionados. Consumer level buzz and communication is
as key to a product’s positioning as advertisements and commercials. The
hacker habitus thrives on the many-to-many status-blind communication of the
Internet that allows a cacophony of voices and self-expressions, a world of web
diaries, homebrew software, and engineered subversions of commercial
software.
I close this chapter with the figure of one software engineer, Don Brenner,
that I interviewed as part of my research. He is an-demand programmer who
specializes in children’s software, particularly the most arcane technical layers of
the production process. He has a clear educational philosophy.
My big thing right now is creativity and construction… Games
where there isn’t necessarily one solution but many solutions.
That’s kind of a tough balance with having content embedded in
that, that is appropriate for what the problem is you are looking at.
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His dream is to create tools for collaborative creativity.
I want to work towards social change and how you get people to
feel like they are empowered. How do you get people to think that
they can come up with creative solutions to analyze problems and
find problems within what they are confronted with? I think that
those are real basic strategies that you can carry out to a lot of
different situations. So I don’t necessarily see the content as being
really that significant at all. I think it’s really more about the process
you go through to learn more about specific things.
But perhaps even more than his philosophical goals, Brenner’s attitude
toward his career and life is most emblematic of a cyborg habitus that prioritizes
self-expression over mainstream achievement, process over content, and a noninstitutionalized approach to learning. He is a freelancer that takes on jobs as
they come, working intensively on a project and then going “off-screen” for six
months to travel around the world. He does almost none of the professional
networking, public speaking, and conference circuits that most designers I
interviewed participate in, and engages with his peers primarily through projects
and discussion groups on the Internet where he gets help with thorny
programming puzzles. These days, he turns down jobs that require any
management responsibility, preferring to work on high-paid but bounded
programming tasks that give him the freedom to do his own projects on the side.
He explains to me how he has almost no formal education in programming, but
learns it on the fly as he engages with a new project. “Things are changing so
fast. How do you keep up?” I ask, marveling at his ability to engage with
different projects with very different technical requirements. “Well I think that’s
the whole thing. Nobody really knows what they are doing. I think some people
admit that and other people won’t. But I think what drew me to it in the first place
is that you are always creating, always making it up.”
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7
Conclusions:
Multimedia Supersystems, Independent Publishing, and
Consumer Activism
In this dissertation, I have argued for a view of children’s play as a site of intense
social, cultural, and technological engineering. Far from being an innocent,
natural, and carefree expression of childhood impulse, the meanings instantiated
through play are social, cultural and political achievements performed by a
broadening set of social, institutional, and technical actors. The ongoing
productions of children’s play are generative sites for instantiating visions of
childhood, class and status distinction, age cohort identity, gender difference,
and changing relationships to technology and media. This work is one example
of the heterogeneous social interests and agendas being brought to bear on
children’s play, invested in the unique engineering efforts of the 5thD, as well as
seeking to give voice to a broader range of implicated social actors.
One set of actors that is increasingly involved in the production of
children’s play is the growing industry of children’s media. I have traced a
sociohistory of the emergence of the children’s software industry in relation to
descriptions of play in the 5thD. I see this industry structure, software design,
and related cultural codes as an outcome of the everyday interactions and
micropolitics of a heterogeneous set of actors, including children, programmers,
designers, marketers, educators, parents, and retailers. I proposed a set of three
genres—edutainment, entertainment, and authoring—that were outcomes of this
process, a partial stabilization of technology, social relations, and cultural
structure. The state of the industry and the genres is however, far from stable,
and has been going through major upheavals even in the span of a few years
since I completed my fieldwork. After sketching some of the most current trends
in this industry and the ongoing and dynamic tensions in the field, this concluding
chapter summarizes the theoretical and practical implications of this study.
The Changing Face of Children’s Software
In 1996, Mattel released Barbie Fashion Designer and changed the face of the
children’s software industry. Despite earlier attempts at making games designed
for girls, Barbie was the first title to make corporate executives stand up and
listen to the girls’ market. G. Beato, in an article for Wired describes how
the CD-ROM industry received a wake-up call when the runaway
best-seller turned out to be Barbie Fashion Designer. In its first two
months of sales, Mattel’s digital incarnation of the oft-denigrated but
remarkably enduring role model sold more than 50,000 copies,
outstripping even popular titles such as Quake—and leaving the
rest of the industry wondering how to cash into this newfound
wellspring (1997).
The title not only brought corporate America’s attention to girls’ software,
but to licensing and marketing as a driving force in defining children’s software
success. In their analysis of the title, Subrahmanyam and Greenfield argue that
the design of the product was as important to its success as the franchise and
retailing clout of Mattel. They point out that other Barbie software titles released
at the same time did not do as well, despite having the same licensing and
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marketing apparatus (1998: 48). Undoubtedly this is true, and many designers
that I interviewed, even while exhibiting distaste about the license itself, felt that
the product concept was innovative and engaging. One thing, however, that
Subrahmanyam and Greenfield do not note is that Barbie Fashion Designer
innovated not only in it’s content, but by being the first children’s software title to
have a multi-million dollar TV-centered marketing campaign behind it, an effort
that dwarfed the development budget of the product. In the late nineties, titles
such as Barbie Fashion Designer, Lego software, and Disney software titles were
indicative of the mainstreaming of the CD-ROM industry, where good design is
necessary but not sufficient to define a title’s success. The entry of Mattel and
Barbie into the scene of children’s software marked a decisive shift away from
the previously dominant market of edutainment, advertised primarily through print
media read by parents, and to a mainstream entertainment format that used the
vehicle of television to appeal directly to children.
Children’s software and the computational medium were toppled from the
pedestal of highbrow learning commodity, and critics were scathing in their attack
of this turn to junk culture. The New York Times review of the Barbie sequel in
1998 is uncharacteristically scathing in its attack on the consumerist logic
embedded in the product. While all other NYT software reviews I have read
confine themselves to discussion of the software content and technology, this
review was the first I saw to critique the capitalist logic of a product. It is not
simply what Barbie signifies, but her tie-ins with multiple toys and media
platforms that raises the specter of capitalist domination of childhood imaginings.
From a marketing perspective… it is brilliant. Because what Barbie
Cool Looks Fashion Designer really teaches you to do is function in
a brand-saturated environment. In Barbie’s cyberworld,
everything—the characters and the clothing, the décor and the
architecture—is engineered and trademarked by Mattel. This
environment really owes more to Mickey Mouse than to Barbie.
And even in Walt Disney World, there are some things that haven’t
been imagineered: the weather, other people, things you carry with
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you. But Barbie Cool Looks Fashion Designer really is a total
environment. Every scrap of dialog has been scripted. Everything
you use has been choreographed. Like all corporate
choreography, it is designed to sell things (Herz 1998).
This review is quite clear in laying out a critique of a gendered
consumerism. Unlike the fascination with technology and heroes characteristic
of boys’ software, Herz takes a biting stab at what he describes as “stupid
software.” “Yes, girls will become digitally literate by rearranging Barbie’s coiffure
on a computer screen.” Even the educational consolation prize of technical
literacy has lost its masculine luster in the face of an ultra-fem plastic domesticity,
and the title is seen to reproduce only consumptive excess. While a title like
SimCity is celebrated as culturally generative and creative, making fashion,
particularly for Barbie, is considered purely derivative. The product actually does
enable girls to create their own designs and personalize their dolls, just as play
with Barbie is an open-ended site for engaging with a set of pop cultural
materials. We need to be attentive to the cultural biases that code male uses of
new technology as culturally dominant and more creative than uses that are
designed for girls. I believe we need to expand the genre of construction-oriented
software to include titles that are not coded as male. Will Wright’s current hit title,
The Sims, a simulator of domestic life, is an example of the authoring genre of
software crossing the gender gap, with more women playing then men.
I see the problem with Barbie Fashion Designer less in the move towards
a passive consumer culture than in the move into cultural logics of mainstream
children’s popular culture, characterized by a strong gender differentiation. With
the advent of titles based not just on the Barbie license, but Hot Wheels and
Tonka trucks, children’s software is reproducing the tried and true formulas that
have differentiated boys’ and girls’ play over many decades. In my interviews
with developers, all were unanimous in stating that it takes an established license
or market share to sell children’s software these days. “You cannot expect to
come out with a product now and be successful easily unless you have a major
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license behind it.” Characters such as Pajama Sam and Freddi the Fish, created
by Humongous Software in the mid nineties, were the last to make prime time
that were original to the computational medium. Many also pointed to a
polarization of content into formulaic tracks often released as sequels and
series—edutainment being defined by curricular content, and entertainment
being defined by established licenses from movies, toys, and television. The
overall trend, is clearly toward the entertainment genre and media supersystems
(Kinder 1991) that cross multiple media types with companies like TLC taking on
popular licenses such as Arthur, Dr. Seuss and Little Bear, still retaining a hold
on the edutainment-PBS genre, but enlisting a broader set of licensing networks.
As with public children’s television, edutainment is being ghettoized as a product
geared for upper middle-class families and children under ten years of age.
Once children start gaining the upper hand in determining their purchases,
entertainment-oriented peer culture becomes dominant. Edutainment software
has been increasingly targeting younger and younger children, including infants,
in a desperate effort to capture market share after losing the over ten set to the
entertainment market.
Many described the changes in the industry in terms of a “maturing” or
disciplining, the establishment of set roles and industry models and networks.
For example, one developer that I spoke to, Chris Blackwell, likened the current
changes to the changes in the movie industry twenty years ago, where the tasks
of publishing, marketing, and distribution became essential in a mass market.
Now the entertainment software industry, like the movie industry, is moving
towards specialization of function, where the studios that develop the products
are separate from the publishing and distribution apparatus.
I think it is becoming more understood that you’ve really got to have
a good backbone and infrastructure to be a publisher, but that a
publisher is not necessarily the right person to be producing the
product. It seems ridiculous that people haven’t realized. I mean,
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there’s a reason that that’s how books are made. There’s a reason
that that’s how movies are made, and television shows.
One developer who worked for a major entertainment studio describes a
highly disciplined six-month development cycle, timed to a movie release, and
characterized by a targeted approach to concept development, a detailed design
and technical specification, and the use of an underlying game engine that
streamlines the programming task. This development process is in sharp
contrast to the early homebrewed multimedia products that were based on
exploratory research efforts extending for many years, and characterized by a
bootstrapping process with uncertain timelines and pioneering technology. All
developers saw the stabilization of the industry in the form of systematized game
engines as a central disciplining factor, enabling companies to reduce the
uncertainty of technical development. Developing new technology in tandem
with new content has always been the black hole of software development. As
one developer put is, “It’s really hard to schedule something you have never
done before.”
The other component of this maturation is the increasingly central role that
retailers play in determining software content. While some saw the growing
strength of retailers as partially a positive force in getting developers to make
what consumers really want, others in the industry were more critical of what they
described as “the shelf space wars.” As the industry has grown and consolidated,
it has resulted in a narrowing of what the retail market can support. The shift in
retailing focus from specialty computer stores such as Egghead Software and
Sam’s Warehouse to superstores such as Best Buy and Cosco, means that there
is a smaller and smaller amount of space dedicated to software, and even less to
children’s software that gets pushed out of the shelves by the more high volume
adult gaming software. Additionally, the costs for buying retail shelf space take a
substantial bite out of development budgets. Robin Raskin, who edited Family
PC, estimates about 25% of the cost of getting an average children’s title to
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market is taken by marketing and buying retail space. For products such as
Barbie and Tonka with television ad campaigns, the marketing budget dwarfs the
development budget. Raskin continues.
Right now if you go to retail, they don't have room for classics,
because they have this hot mentality. The titles are only on the
shelves for two months. By the time the parent tells another parent,
the two months are over. The titles are gone. And they have the
wrong mentality, because they're dealing with it like a hit record,
and they don't have the shelf space to do anything different. So it's
a problem.
The strategy of superstore retailers goes hand in hand with licensing and
consumer spectacles, where products need to have shelf appeal supported by a
multimedia supersystem. After the glow of a movie has faded or after a
television ad campaign has been retired, the leftover products are throw into the
bargain bin, making room for the next round of hot titles.
The industry is characterized by a hardening of genres and brands as the
networks of production, distribution, marketing and consumption are extending
their reach. As studies of science and technology have shown, extending a
network requires a stabilization and a packaging of interests, a black-boxing that
becomes harder and harder to reverse. These are material networks built
through the bodies of machines, coded into software, institutionalized into
corporate strategy, packaged as brands and licenses, channeled through
distribution infrastructure and deals, and coupled with long-standing cultural
dispositions and social distinctions that have been enlisted into their purview.
On one hand, the market has become more egalitarian, as PCs have become
more ubiquitous and the price of software continues to drop. Yet the broadening
of the market has been accompanied by new processes of status and
educational differentiation. As licenses like Barbie have made software
accessible to lower middle-class families and girls, other consumers of children’s
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software have been snapping up titles oriented towards educational achievement
in a competitive academic environment.
Twenty years of design, marketing, branding, and play have produced
children’s software as a recognizable media type, which in turn has a number of
established genres some of which I have labeled edutainment, entertainment and
authoring. Children’s software has become an object that can translate the
interests of multiple social worlds, creating an uneasy and shifting alliance
between educational claims, market pressures, entertainment appeal, and
technological promise. As it has become more mobile, it has also become more
immutable (Latour 1990), hardening into systematic content types, software
engines, development disciplines, and industry strategies. While developers who
have been with the industry for a while see it as a corporate monster sustaining
itself on larger and larger mergers and acquisitions, for established media
industries, children’s software is still an unstable field, largely due to the rapidly
changing face of technology.
Mattel fell victim of acquisitive excess in their purchase of TLC in 1998.
Within a year of the deal, they had discovered that the companies earnings were
not what they expected, around the same time that the CD-ROM industry was
experiencing another downturn as the Internet emerged as the next technological
miracle. After the ouster of a number of key executives, TLC was sold to Irelandbased Riverdeep. Mattel was left licking its wounds and retreating to tried-andtrue entertainment formats and licenses. Another reason for Mattel’s troubles
was the bubble effect, where the industry over-inflated in the early nineties
shifting from a rate of about 68 programs being released in the late eighties to
700 programs per year in the late nineties. Similar to the crash of the video
game industry in the mid eighties, the CD-ROM crash was a result of over
inflated industry expectations and a glut of low-quality content that shook
consumer confidence. Even in the face of a revival through strong licenses such
as Barbie and Lego, the industry never fully recovered the glow and promise of
the early years and by the late nineties, the Internet stole the spotlight.
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In this climate of a larger, more distributed enterprise, strategies for
success shift from the effort to create products that will shine in a small pool of
contenders to tactics for being heard across large social distances and among a
cacophony of options. Extremely small products can survive on Internet
distribution, but titles that compete in mainstream retailing must keep cost low
and exploit an existing formula, or go for a major hit as in the case of Wright and
his Sim line. Budget allocation is polarizing between those targeting an original
mainstream hit and those that are streamlining costs and exploiting a license. For
those targeting a best seller, it is a winner-takes-all scenario. Wright explains:
If you look at the top ten games, the difference between number
one and number ten is, usually, at least an order of magnitude,
sometimes two, in terms of sales. If you go down to the twentieth
spot, that’s easily two orders of magnitude difference. So there’s
this extremely sharp rise at the very top. The top four games will
probably be fifty percent of the dollars.
Hit makers such as Wright are given free reign for technical and creative
innovation, something that is far from the norm in the industry. “Whether we
spend two million dollars on developing a title, or four million, those numbers are
irrelevant if you look at the eventual sales as being between one million dollars in
sales versus thirty million dollars in sales.”
For the children’s market, most developers are at what Wright calls “the
low noise level,” trying to keep costs down and make enough money to continue
off mediocre sales, what Wright characterizes as below a million. Blackwell
explains how the established formula now in the children’s entertainment
software genre is to create titles based on a license or a movie release, rather
than on designing a new type of game. Just as edutainment developed a model
of reusing the same software engines to create a flexible context in which to
embed a series of educational tasks, children’s entertainment software has
settled on a similar formula. A scenario based on the latest movie release,
whether it is Star Wars Episode One or the Lion King will provide the narrative
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setting for a series of amusing tasks that may or may not attempt to be
educational. The standard package includes puzzles games, coloring sheets,
and simple, non-violent action games. Describing one company that takes this
tactic, one developer at a major entertainment company comments that
nothing they’ve done has ever been a hit product, but they make
quite a lot of money because they make so many and they’ve got
good advertising that they can sell enough to keep themselves
afloat. And that unfortunately as well has been sort of [our line].
We base our titles on our characters and the fact that they sell that
way, and also our volume.
These efforts have decided not to compete with the high-stakes and high-budget
race of technological and design innovation in the adult gaming market that
designers such as Will Wright participate in, choosing rather to reproduce a
conservative set of children’s genres.
Engineering Alternatives
On the edutainment side, many of the pioneers in children’s software have been
working on smaller, leaner projects that focus on original content and alternative
distribution rather than on technical innovation, expensive licenses, 3D graphics,
and mainstream hits. For Wright and others in the mainstream gaming market,
traditional retail is the only game in town. But for many working in the area of
children’s software, the Internet held promise as a route for disseminating
products produced by smaller teams of enterprising programmers, designers,
and entrepreneurs. As I was completing my research, there were a few efforts
being launched on the Internet to support children’s content such as MaMaMedia
and JuniorNet. I spoke to Scott Kim, a puzzle designer, who was creating a set
of puzzle games for the JuniorNet site. He sees puzzles as an ideal content form
for distributing over the net, as they are compact packages of content that one
can engage with quickly, and that can be serialized as periodic site updates. His
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puzzles are created in the programming language, “lingo,” for Macromedia
Director, a “higher level” language designed specifically for multimedia
applications that brings quicker results than the languages used to program
action games. Lingo enables a relatively lean development process that enables
graphically sophisticated interactive programs, though not the lightening physics
of action gaming. It is a development environment of choice for educational
multimedia applications that are based on slower and more reflective modes of
interaction. I also spoke to two programmers involved with Kim’s project, Larry
Doyle and Marabeth Grahame. Doyle describes the puzzles as elegant
“programming haikus” that take about thirty to forty hours to complete. Kim’s
team is indicative of this more streamlined and responsive web environment. He
works with Doyle and Grahame, both freelance lingo experts, and a pair of
graphical artists in addition to the project managers who coordinate with the
overall web project. Their relationships are project-specific and indicative of the
flexible multi-tasking of the webbed world. Grahame, Doyle, and Kim all work out
of their home, balancing parenting with multiple design and programming jobs, of
which JuniorNet is just one.
The jury is still out whether these Internet ventures will be profitable over
the long term, but the overall climate seems hopeful in supporting these efforts
that sustain themselves on the public service orientation of kid-friendly designers.
Many of the designers I spoke to described a desire to work on children’s content
as a sense of social mission, and these online sites are a venue for these
energies. For example, Ann McCormick is continuing work with children’s
software in a project she calls Learning Friends, which is funded by philanthropic
grants as well as industry, and makes use of the web as a networking resource.
There are difficulties, however, for mobilizing the children’s market. Unlike the
adult shareware and free software movements that have been thriving on
networked hacker expertise and producing software such as Linux, young
children don’t have the resources and organization to create their own content.
They must rely on a community of dedicated adults to advocate for alternative
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children’s content. Further, young children’s access to media on the net and
elsewhere is generally mediated and monitored by their parents, thus requiring a
certain amount of parental activism as well. Unlike television, which
communicates directly with child-audiences, the Internet requires a level of
literacy that delays children’s entry into this more decentralized marketplace.
The shift to computational forms of media has had multiple and contradictory
effects that work both towards consolidation and democratization of market
dynamics.
What is a clearer sociotechnical outcome of the recent disciplining of the
industry is the fact that, at least for now, alternative genres and independent
content have dropped out in the mainstream market as a result of the polarizing
of titles into established genres. Titles that don’t fall into the established
categories of grade-based products or licensed entertainment products have a
hard time acquiring market share unless millions are spent on advertising. This
has worked against the support of design innovation and more open-ended
educational goals in high-end titles. Even high-end authoring titles with a major
license such as the Lucas Learning products have a hard time breaking into the
market, and after a brief foray into web publishing, Lucas Learning eventually
closed its doors. Margo Nanny, who pioneered some of the first uses of
multimedia in children’s software, describes the difficulties she has had in getting
her voice and a more constructivist orientation out in the current corporate
climate. “It’s a shame the people that have been dumped by this industry, the
talent that’s been dumped by this industry. And I’m sure that happens in every
industry. Why should we think we’re special?” Nanny organized a gathering of
forty-six children’s software designers, educators, and educational researchers at
Stanford in a meeting dubbed the “Woodstock of Educational Technologies” in
1998. Overall, the conversation was pessimistic about the state of affairs,
complaining about lack of innovation, a widening equity gap, and the
commercialization and conglomeratization of the industry (Revue 1998).
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From a related perspective, Shannon Tobin ran the Children’s Multimedia
Expo through the nineties, designed to showcase quality titles in children’s
software. She describes her aspirations for the expo to be the “Sundance of
children’s software,” a venue for supporting independent publishing and
alternative forms of distribution. “There was no place where you could get the
developers and the producers together with the kids themselves, and the
teachers who are going to use them in the classroom.” She describes the shelfspace wars and the problems in distribution as the reason for her efforts. She
estimates that seventy percent of the products in her expo could not be found on
retail shelves. She sees a lot of new, naïve, and enthusiastic talent producing
titles in the field. “I think the little guys right now see and opportunity because
they haven’t seen the last couple of years where everybody misses out on
distribution, and they keep coming in and believing that they can get through the
market place.” Just as Sundance “saved the artsy films, the documentaries, the
things that wouldn’t have gotten distribution and funding, I really think there is the
opportunity to do that for children’s ed products.” The children’s market has
proven, however, to be a difficult one to organize on a distributed model due to
children’s status as a protected population with limited resources and stifled
agency. Activism on the part of parents is as necessary as among children, the
actual consumers of the products. Mainstream retailing is an extremely narrow
but massively distributed infrastructure for communicating between producers
and consumers. Alternative distribution and community-organized efforts offers a
higher bandwidth of communication and exchange, but without public backing,
requires the distributed activism of multiple players, a proposition that is difficult
to maintain given the time-strapped nature of parents with young children.
Consumption needs to be not only re-theorized, but differently performed
in practice. Local contexts of consumption are consequential not only in being
able to reshape and locally inflect the meaning of a stabilized text, but as sites of
political activism that construct material, social, technical and symbolic worlds
across a highly distributed social field. This distributed relationality is literally
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embodied in the distributed architecture of the Internet and the promise of smallscale, alternative production and distribution. But even the relations of
mainstream commodity capitalism are a site of consumptive agency where
parents and teachers can equip themselves with knowledge and pursue a wide
range of alternatives. Just as consumption is a site of micropoliticing that inflects
the productions of everyday life, production is a highly heterogeneous,
situational, and contested field that does listen to the voice of a segmented
marketplace and consumer response. We need to celebrate and support those
voices of leadership within the field that advocates for independent cultural
content that falls through the gaps of the mainstream networks. Part of this
support also entails resistance to the logic of competitive status anxiety,
technological progress and the imperatives of spectacular innovation.
Alternatives to these easily packaged and distributed tropes have sustained
themselves in the independent movements of other forms of media, ranging from
independent film, progressive children’s literature, and alternative music, and
deserve to be sustained for children’s software as well.
Consumption is not constrained to the “local” contexts and communities,
and has highly distributed translocal effects. The attribution of a passive,
faceless, mass identity is a mystification of the heterogeneities and highly
contingent nature of market segmentation. The case of children’s software
demonstrates that even within the market of the “middle-class” there is a wide
range of views of childhood that support software ranging from narrowly
curricular products to products that celebrate chaotic and free-form exploration.
The viewpoints of children and parents feed back into the circuit of production not
only through user feedback and market research, but through participation in
shared social, material, technical, and cultural formations. This is not only about
appropriation of the “proper” and hegemonic discourses in Michel de Certeau’s
metaphor of “textual poaching,” but of actually co-constituting the structure of
multimedia capitalism (1984). Users and buyers of children’s software are
performing operations not just at a symbolic level, but at social, material, and
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technical levels as well. While acknowledging the limits of consumptive agency, I
believe that purchasing decisions and choices about genre need to be seen as
political acts rather than acts of passive reception. This is not the fetishization of
freedom through consumption that gets produced as a marketing trope, but
rather an acknowledgement of the fact that there are alternatives in ways of
buying and spending that make a political difference.
Further, in the actual engagement with a malleable piece of software,
users can exercise a great deal of control over what kinds of functions and
symbolic activity get instantiated. The 5thD is one example of a systemic
intervention in the politics of consumption. The site encourages access to new
technologies for groups that may not always engage with them, including girls
and lower income families. Further, the 5thD seeks to intervene in the processes
of engagement. Young adults are being instructed in an alternative view of childadult relations, while also encountering occasionally unruly children in the
process of play with new technology. Children are challenged to consider play
and social relations beyond their same-age peer group and the spectacles of
popular culture, and undergraduates are challenged to value the expertise and
moral competence of children. Interactive media have a unique role to play in
this equation, by providing resources for actualizing flexible, personalized, and
often amusing engagements with abstract and intellectual content. While
perhaps too much has been made of the active agency enabled by interactive
media, the hype contains a basic truth about the changing capabilities of digital
media, the multi-layered symbolic and technical functions that are embedded in
these complex new objects.
The Cultural Politics of Children’s Software
The case I have presented about children’s software describes contemporary
American children’s culture as a heterogeneous and highly contested terrain,
characterized not by a single hegemonic structure of childhood and social
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reproduction, but by multiple, co-constitutive, material, technical, social and
cultural logics. These include the dynamic negotiation between adults and kids
mobilizing the genres of education, entertainment, and authoring; the ideals of
learning, fun, and creativity; and the politics of enrichment, indulgence, and
empowerment. These three genres have been tied to different forms of social
and cultural distinction. Edutainment has become a vehicle for producing class
and educational difference. Entertainment produces age cohort identity by
creating a space of childhood pleasure in opposition to adult disciplines.
Authoring software and the habitus of the hacker provides a counter-cultural
identity and has the unfortunate outcome of participating in gender distinctions.
In all of these cases I have also tried to denaturalize the assumptions that create
these categories, describing intelligence as a socially contingent achievement,
the freedom of childhood play as an engineered discourse, and authorial agency
as something that need not be tied to male-coded technology.
Though I have advocated for the authoring genre as an alternative to
dominant logics of achievement and commodity capitalism, I have also presented
the three genres as structurally integrated. Just as Varenne and McDermott
have suggested that success cannot exist without failure (Varenne and
McDermott 1998), education can not exist without entertainment, as well as the
engineered subversions of these dominant discourses. Children navigate a
politically charged and necessarily contradictory field, structured by the
intervention and surveillance of adults. In the context of the 5thD, children are
able to negotiate with adults through the vehicle of play, a contradictory site of
agency where children are constructed as both uniquely free while also being
subject to more and more engineering efforts. In this context, kids in the 5thD
are political actors mobilizing cultural, technical, and social resources in pursuing
status negotiations and claiming agency, momentarily resisting the progress
goals of adults, smuggling in forbidden idioms of action entertainment, and using
adults to support public knowledge and status displays. As technology and
cultural trends increasingly support a malleable pastiche of styles and genres,
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these opportunities for creative mobilization are expanding for a media and
technology-savvy generation.
I have also worked toward a view of habitus that is situational, nonindividuated, and contingent on couplings with particular technologies. Acquiring
a habitus is not a bio-psychological process of internalizing the constraints of
external structure, but a process of participation with and flexible coupling with
shifting sets of local resources. Just as cultural codes are multiple and
negotiated, an individual can not be reduced to a singular set of dispositions and
can embody contradictory forms of habitus based on situation and resources at
their disposal. Technologies, too, have durable dispositions, but can be
increasingly reprogrammed, subverted, and tinkered with. Kids like Andy and Ian
may exhibit a dominant cyborg habitus of competitive achievement or hacker
virtuosity, but both of these children reproduce other genres of interaction as
well, and engage with multiple types of software. I see the identities described
here as local to the 5thD context and contingent on couplings with particular
technologies. In the micropolitics of the 5thD, the balance of power between
children, adults, and software is constantly shifting. A game like SimCity 2000
can transform from a site of gleeful destruction and male peer status display to a
contemplative site of conversation between an adult and a child about the
relation between wealth and crime. One well-timed intervention can tip the scale
toward a different genre, a different mode of engagement, a different power
dynamic. The subtleties of software design are also highly significant in these
micropolitics. Seemingly trivial design decisions such as score keeping
mechanisms or a particular cheat code can inflect play in substantive ways.
While these dynamics are in many ways unique to the social mix and agenda of
the 5thD, we can also expect that there are multiple sites of intervention that can
substantively alter children’s experience and subjectification in relation to these
new technologies.
The case has worked to contextualize a new media form within existing
cultural contexts and the resilient institutions of family, school and commercial
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entertainment. Children’s software grows out of these contexts and reproduces
many of the same tropes and relationships. At the same time, the difference in
technical embodiment and the shifting contours of late capitalism does make a
difference. Technology is not just contextualized by society and culture, nor does
it impact it as an external force. It is, importantly, a materialization of social
distinctions and cultural categories that brings together new relationships and
discourses. Multimedia is a technology that draws multiple genres and social
interests together, creating new forms of social and cultural distinction.
As is typical with new media, people have overestimated the short-term
and under estimated the long-term effects of a major shift in the material
conditions of representation and cultural production (Joichi Ito, personal
communication, November 2002). In the wake of the crash of the CD-ROM
market, and an era of deflated dot com hype, we can begin to assess some of
the durable features of the shifts to multimedia. One long-burning trend that
children’s software has decisively contributed to is the new cultural category of
edutainment. The philosophy that advocates active learning in the context of play
and making learning fun has gradually been shifting to the mainstream of
progressive parenting. Children’s software gave this cultural nexus a name and
a technical form. Has children’s software opened up new and exciting
possibilities for authentic and unalienated learning for children? To some extent,
the answer is yes. The cases of children’s play in the 5thD described a quality of
engagement that was animated and often delighted. The responsive qualities of
the interactive media coupled with the graphical sophistication and pop cultural
idioms of multimedia are a winning combination in capturing the attentions of
children. The habitus of edutainment is certainly different from the habitus of
mainstream education, in creating a cultural sphere where children feel a greater
sense of mastery and ownership.
At the same time, the platitude of “fun learning” barely begins to capture
the complexities of what is produced as an effect of children’s play with these
new technologies and the effects of large-scale engineering of pleasure. We find
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play being colonized by the competitive logics of upper-middle class status
anxiety and we find the logic of commodity capitalism reproducing the most
formulaic aspects of school content. Both these trends are occurring in tandem
with the growing strength of the genre of entertainment in children’s lives as
learning becomes more and more a site of entertainment. From the perspective
of those that founded the industry, one unintended outcome of the move towards
edutainment and visual culture is a reinforcement of the multimedia-capitalist
networks of media industries. While the children’s software industry was
originally founded as an educational reform effort, twenty years of
commercialization have turned it into an enterprise dominated by entertainment
models of culture and commodity capitalism, with education functioning more as
a legitimizing and marketing trope than an actual philosophy of software design.
Production of visual appeal captures most of the software development budget
and educational researchers find themselves out of a job. The learning moments
afforded by the current crop of edutainment titles are a far cry from what the
original educator-pioneers envisioned. The move to the visual idioms afforded by
multimedia, as well as the larger production costs that this entailed, decisively
inflected the medium in this direction and have participated in the penetration of
visual culture into more domains of children’s lives. The construction of a
multimedia supersystem continues apace as the new medium gets integrated
with other media forms through licensing arrangements and other tie-ins.
The turn to visual culture is also accompanied by the turn to a more
interactive form of media engagement, and this is where I see hope for positive
transformation. Enthusiasm about “the net generation” needs to be tempered,
however, by acknowledgement of a persistent gender and equity gap regarding
these more empowered uses of technology. The support of authorial agency
needs to happen in a context of debate about technology access and critique of
what sort of cultural codes are being authorized, particularly when technological
production is associated with a gendered agency that sees game code hacking
as a uniquely masculine intellectual endeavor, and digital fashion design as a
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trivial use of technology. Despite the fraught nature of the endeavor, efforts to
design girls’ games are one instance of these productive conversations over the
meaning of technical fluency and empowerment. Video games and interactive
software wet the suppressed appetites for self-determination of a population that
lacks control and agency in most domains of life. In the cases from the 5thD, we
found that the aspect of playing with power, the use of technology to actualize
self-expression, was a central part of children’s play experience, and one that is
uniquely enabled by computational media. In the child-centered context of the
5thD, we saw many instances of adults experiencing a sense of chaos and loss
of control, as well as times when they constructed a shared space of “fun” that
momentarily erased the dominant power hierarchy between child and adult. If I
see promise in these technical shifts, it is in the habitus of authorial
empowerment that these new media have the potential to support. Resistance to
the structuring and stabilizing effects of multimedia-capitalism is not likely to
come from commercial interests, but may emerge from the maturation of a
generation of kids that have grown up with an activist and entrepreneurial
orientation to consumption and media engagement.
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APPENDIX 1
The Anatomy of a Computer Game
A cultural analysis of computer games needs to be appropriate for the particular
characteristics of interactive media, while borrowing from existing frameworks
that have been applied to other media genres. Theoretical frameworks that
address the content of computer games, while paying attention to the particular
features and technologies of interactive multimedia, are just beginning to emerge
(Murray 1997; Manovich 2001; Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan Forthcoming). As
reviewed in the second appendix, with the exception of Turkle's (1984, 1995)
work on the psychology of computer use, current cultural analyses of computer
games tends to focus on the narrative qualities of games, that is, the symbolic
logic of their themes, settings, and characters. While narrative is a key feature of
computer gaming, it does not provide a sufficient framework for understanding
many of the key characteristics of interactive media.
Computer games hybridize aspects of traditional narrative, gaming, and
features of human-computer interaction. Some computer games, such as certain
puzzle games (e.g., Tetris), sport and flight simulations (e.g., EA Sports, Wing
Commander), or electronic versions of board and card games (e.g., Battlechess,
Monopoly, Solitaire) have minimal narrative features, and are primarily strategic
or oriented towards manipulation of on-screen objects. By contrast, many games
do contain significant narrative qualities, including well-developed characters,
setting, and plot. Children’s software, relying primarily on storybook and
adventure formats, tend to have substantial narrative qualities that can be subject
to cultural content-based analysis. Traditional narrative theory thus clearly has
much to contribute to an analysis of computer gaming, but only addresses certain
aspects of game content. In addition to plot, setting, character, ambiance,
sequencing, and other narrative features, games also have aspects peculiar to
their interactive and informatted aspects, which include play action, dynamic user
interfaces, functionality, and game utilities.
In short, the technical features of games are crucially constitutive of game
content. This is to take seriously McLuhan's (1964) insight which is now a truism
for media technology, that "the medium is the message" as much as narrative
content. For other media technologies such as literature and film, studies of
technical aspects, such as print technologies (Anderson 1991) or film production
technologies have received scholarly attention, particularly in a historical frame,
but these aspects, with some exceptions (Radway 1991; Spigel 1992; McGann
1993; Benjamin [1955] 1968), have been peripheral to an understanding of
media content, readership, and spectatorship. Earlier forms of media have not
demanded of cultural studies the same attention to technical strata, except at
moments of historical transition when a new medium was introduced. The
technical strata has been understood as an important aspect and precondition of
a given media form, but one that is a stable background in an analysis of actual
content. By contrast, with interactive media, technical strata are constantly in flux
and persistently foregrounded in the player experience. Game content and
narrative are thus inseparable from game functionality, interface, and
interactivity.
A computer game, like any other designed artifact, needs to be
understood in relation to a dynamic between its design and intended uses, on
one hand, and how it is actually engaged with at local sites of consumption, on
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the other. This relation between game design and uses can be productively
considered in light of a theory of “affordances” and technology design, pioneered
by J. J. Gibson, and taken up by technology designers (Gibson 1986; Gaver
1992; Norman 2002). That is, certain objects “afford” but do not require certain
uses. For example, a hammer is designed to pound nails, and its shape and
weight affords a certain grip and physical motion. Yet a hammer could also be
used as a paperweight, a weapon, or a decoration. In practice, a hammer is a
malleable resource, though by design, its uses are specific. A theory of
affordances, which was originally formulated for physical objects and human
sensory capabilities, can also apply to symbolic media and human-machine
interaction. The content of a game needs to be understood as a product of
multiple human intentionalities, the most important being the designers' as they
work to anticipate as well as expect to be surprised by the variety of actual play.
A description and an analysis of what certain artifacts afford is thus a way of
describing the designed potential of a game, but not the potential as realized
through the myriad contexts of play.
This appendix is an effort to lay out the affordances of computer games in
both the general and the particular as a way of developing an understanding of
the structure, content, and possibilities of a new medium and as background to
the descriptions of kids' play. The remainder of this appendix outlines the key
components of game content, which are relevant to all game genres, and then
moves on to an examination of the particular interactional dynamics involved in
engagement with interactive multimedia. The challenge, in conducting a cultural
analysis of computer games, is to scrutinize all of these dimensions of an
interactive, technically layered, and semiotic artifact. All of these aspects are
"cultural" and need to be taken into account in an analysis that looks at gaming
as meaningful action.
In his how-to manual of game design, Arnie Katz suggests certain defining
features of electronic games as a genre of software: "An electronic game is
competition involving one or more machine or human opponents, conducted
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under rules using interactive electronic technology. An electronic game must
have a goal, one or more obstacles to the attainment of that goal, and a means
by which the goal can be achieved" (Katz and Yates 1996: 63). His definition of
key aspects of a game design proposal are a useful starting point for identifying
the features of game structure and narrative. These features include: (1) The
theme, which is the basic concept of the game, such as a basketball simulation,
a cyberpunk action adventure, etc.; (2) the preplay sequence, which is the
"curtain-raiser" which sets the scenes, gives credits, and other information which
is not part of the central play action; (3) the interface, which, is a set of controls
and windows for manipulating play action; (4) the play mechanic, which specifies
the modes of interactivity and player action available; (5) sound; (6) graphics; (7)
utilities, which are the added functionality of a game, such as the ability to play
against other players or to see replays of game sequences, and (8) level of
difficulty which defines aspects such as speed, game levels, and the
characteristics of the objects represented on screen (Katz and Yates 1996: 63:
82-89).
When examined from the point of view of traditional narrative, some of
Katz's elements clearly correspond to narrative qualities. Key aspects of game
narrative are mostly included in theme, but also include the preplay sequence as
framing of the backstory, sound, and graphics. The elements of play mechanic,
interface, utilities, and difficulty are what are not represented in traditional
narrative theory. These aspects can be grouped, on one hand, into interactional
features, which include the play mechanic, certain aspects of the interface, and
difficulty of play, and, on the other, game functionality, which includes game
control mechanisms in the interface and utilities, as well as the underlying code
that animates the game. Each of these three dimensions of computer gaming
are taken up in turn. I include examples from mainstream action gaming as well
as children’s software to illustrate these dimensions of interactive multimedia.
Mainstream gaming is a crucial cultural and technical referent that informs the
design of children’s software.
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Narrative
Mary Fuller and Henry Jenkins, theorists of literary and television media, contrast
game narrative to traditional narrative in their analysis of travel narratives in
Nintendo games. To preface the discussion of narrative in computer games,
their text is worth quoting at length:
Most of the criteria by which we might judge classically constructed
narrative fall by the wayside when we look at these games as
storytelling systems. In Nintendo®'s narratives, characters play a
minimal role, displaying traits that are largely capacities for action:
fighting skills, modes of transportation, preestablished goals. The
game's dependence on the characters (Ninja Turtles, Bart
Simpson, etc.) borrowed from other media allows them to simply
evoke those characters rather than to fully develop them....
Similarly, plot is transformed into generic atmosphere—a haunted
house, a subterranean cavern, a futuristic cityscape, and icy
wilderness—that the player can explore.... Playing time unfolds in a
fixed and arbitrary fashion with no responsiveness to the
psychological time of the characters, sometimes flowing too slow to
facilitate player interest and blocking the advance of the plot action,
other times moving so fast that we can't react quickly enough to
new situations or the clock runs out before we complete our goals.
Exposition occurs primarily at the introduction and closing of
games.... But these sequences are ‘canned’: Players cannot control
or intervene in them. Often, framing stories with their often arbitrary
narrative goals play little role in the actual exploration. Although
plot structures (kidnapping and rescue, pursuit and capture, street
fighting, invasion and defense) are highly repetitive (repeated from
game to game and over and over within the game with little variety),
what never loses its interest is the promise of moving into the next
space, or mastering these worlds and making them your own
playground. So although the child's play is framed by narrative
logic, it remains largely uncontrolled by plot dictates (1995: 61-62).
Fuller and Jenkins point to some of the peculiar features of computer game
narrative: underdeveloped characters that are often borrowed from other media,
an ambient setting that stands in for a plot, sequencing that is incidental to a
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coherent story line, and exposition that seems largely irrelevant to the primary
content of the game. When judged from the point of view of traditional narrative
form, game narrative is not only mediocre, but bizarre; characters are flat, plot is
non-existent, rhythm and sequencing are haphazard, and exposition is trite.
Despite these limitations and idiosyncrasies, game content can still be informed
by some of the terms of traditional narrative. The most salient contrast with
traditional narrative forms is that the design of computer games is oriented
around a primarily synchronic rather than diachronic frame. The role of writing is
one of evoking an ambient environment and providing a space of possible action,
rather than defining a predetermined sequence of action as it unfolds through
time.
Plot and Sequencing
Plot in games tends to get subsumed into a theme or concept, since games are
designed around the user's navigation through the narrative space rather than a
preset and linear unfolding of action. The theme is the aspect of a game that
defines the narrative space—action adventure, puzzle solving, fantasy role
playing, flight simulation, etc. Theme is the synchronic counterpart of plot, a field
of navigable meaning which is played out locally at moments of consumption,
rather than sequenced at the moment of production. Plot in computer games is
reduced to a bit player in the narrative drama, making appearances as the
curtain opens on a game, in the form of a non-interactive preplay sequence, and
punctuating game play as the player achieves certain levels, beating one dire
opponent, finding a treasure, and perhaps, in the end, saving the princess. While
these elements of plot are often invoked in computer games, they never function
as crucial aspects of the narrative, because a game must be enjoyable despite
failure to move ahead or reach the end of a plot sequence, or often in the
absence of plot altogether (as in many puzzle games). Thus the general theme
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or concept of the game becomes the central organizing thread, as plot is
flattened into the most rudimentary and transparently anticipatory of elements:
save the princess, kill the enemy, solve the puzzle, build a city. The plot of the
game must be decipherable from minimal cues such as a brief two minute
preplay sequence, a page in a manual, or even a few lines of copy on a shrinkwrapped package. The beginning and ending must be immediately
comprehensible, though the skills and the sequencing to move between these
two points is what defines the complexity and the pleasure of game play.
While plot, as an organizing narrative feature, is thus displaced in game
narrative, games clearly do have a form of sequencing that is central to game
content, though not crafted in the same way that plot is crafted in traditional
narrative. In games, sequencing is oriented around levels and transition points in
the narrative space, which are timed according to player involvement and skill,
rather than through the device of plot. In action games, this generally takes the
form of progressively difficult game scenarios, marked by transitional expository
sequences or pauses for score keeping. For example, in a game like Space
Invaders or Tetris, a player will clear one "screen" at a time, before advancing to
the next, more difficult screen. Adventure games will have certain markers of
achievement that allow entry into new areas of the narrative field, for example,
finding a key that unlocks a secret portal, or piecing together the pieces of the
puzzle that reveals a new mystery. In other words, most games do have clear
beginnings, middles, and ends, both in terms of the overall game narrative, and
various sub narratives, or levels. Even simulation games, that are more about
honing one's skills with a set of technical devices rather than moving through a
narrative, inevitably have certain achievement markers, such as "stars" in a
game like SimTower, or the ability to "beat" certain scenarios in flight or driving
simulations.
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Characters and Viewpoint
Characters in computer games, as Fuller and Jenkins suggest, are evoked more
as stylistic elements rather than fully developed aspects that drive the narrative.
Game characters are prized primarily for their capacity for action, and
secondarily for their style and attitude. For example, hand-to-hand combat
games such as Street Fighter and Toshinden offer a selection of different
characters with different action possibilities, such as special spin-kicks, weapons,
and variable agility, strength, and speed. In games such as Sonic the Hedgehog
and the Mario Brothers suite of games, which are defined by signature
characters, the characters contribute to the stylistic spin of the game, as well as
action functionality—Sonic is known for impatience and speed, Mario for
perseverance, bounce, and a kind of goofy charm. In addition to the central
protagonist of a game, as with traditional narrative, many games will have other
characters that define a narrative space, the antagonist, the love interest, the
collaborator, and bit characters. For example, the Mario games have a princess
to be saved, "bosses" who are the ultimate villains to be defeated, turtles and
mushrooms that need to stomped, kicked, and thrown on an ongoing basis, and
collaborators like Yoshi the dinosaur that can carry Mario into flight.
While characters play an important role in many computer game genres,
what is more central to gaming content across genres is not the definition of
characters, but the definition of point of view, which frames user experience.
Players in games are generally literally identified within the narrative space as
controlling a particular character or as a subject controlling certain forms of
action. Characters in computer gaming are most importantly and centrally about
user identification, not about defining meaning, relationality, or plot. Players
identify with and control the game protagonist, or in the case of puzzle or
simulations games, have a third-person omniscient view on the narrative.
Games have a variety of devices to represent point of view that don't map evenly
onto the traditional categories of first person, second person, third person, and
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omniscient. Points of view in interactive multimedia are defined not by narration
or linguistic conventions such as pronoun use, but by the visual representation of
the setting and characters. These viewpoints are generally characterized as
angel point-of-view, first-person point-of-view, reader point-of-view, and "god" or
omniscient point-of-view.13
Angel point-of-view is used to describe most character-based games,
such as Mario Brothers games, where the player is identified with a protagonist,
but visually, "floats" above the character. When the character dies, the player
sees the character disappear from the scene, but the player's own view of the
setting is not blacked-out. In other words, the player's viewpoint is not visually
isomorphic with the character, but narratively, the player is in a first-person
relationship with the protagonist. Angel point-of-view is by far the most dominant
position in game narrative, used for side-scrolling games such as Mario Brothers,
as well as screen-by-screen games such as Space Invaders or Pac Man.
More recently, games described as “first person” games or particularly
“first person shooters,” are becoming increasingly popular. In these games, the
player has a viewpoint that is isomorphic with the protagonist/character, creating
the illusion of looking out of the protagonist's eyes. In 3D first person shooter
games such as Doom, Quake, or Marathon, enemies are represented as
monsters and opponents to be obliterated, but the protagonist's and player's
points of view are isomorphic; the player sees their gun or a fist on the screen, in
front of their nose, but never the actual body of the protagonist, and the scene
pans and shifts as the player runs and turns the virtual body. Similarly, many
current flight and driving simulations are first person games, in that the player
looks out of a virtual cockpit or windshield in a first person point-of-view, rather
than seeing a representation of a car or a plane moving across the scene. Both
angel and first person points of view are generally reserved for real-time action
13These
labels are extracted largely from game design jargon, and partially through my own
definitions of different game forms. While there are conventions for describing different game
viewpoints, there is no standard or consensus.
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games that demand immediate user response, and thus are not to be used in
children’s software that takes a more reflective and didactic approach.
What I am calling reader viewpoint is one where the user experience is similar to
turning pages in a book. The setting is experienced as a "paging" of scenes,
where one graphic screen is replaced by another, rather than the scrolling motion
of most action games. The story and action of the storybook adventure may, in
traditional terms, be narrated from a first person or a third person perspective.
Most adventure games are first person, but animated storybooks, such as Just
Grandma and Me, are third person. This storybook viewpoint is the closest
approximation in the computer gaming world to traditional narrative framing of
film or print media and is often used in children’s software. Most of the
adventure-type games which are the mainstream of children’s software are
based on this model, with users being able to navigate different screens and see
the characters move to these scenes, with puzzles and problems popping up as
new screens that function as interactive workbooks.
Finally, God or omniscient viewpoints are usually used for simulation
games (SimCity, SimTower), strategy war games (Command and Conquer,
WarCraft),and some sports simulations. The player is generally framed as a
powerful personage that is outside of the space of game action—a mayor,
commander, or coach—that has access to more information than any of the
people "on the ground”—the Sim citizens, the troops, or the team players.
Visually, these games are generally what is known as three-quarter view or two
and a half dimensional, which means the player is viewing the entire setting from
above and to one side, and experiences it as a self-contained scene which can
often be rotated, scrolled, or zoomed in and out of. Player identification is not
with any particular character in the narrative, but rather is of one who controls
and designs the narrative from above. These games often hybridize gamingstyle interfaces with interfaces designed for authoring tools. Framing the
representational window into the gaming world is a set of toolbars that allows the
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user to create and place buildings, troops, rooms, and other components of the
virtual world.
Setting and Backstory
While plot and character development is relatively sparse in computer
game narrative, setting and backstory is crucial in the design of many game
genres, and in some ways, is more developed than in traditional forms of
narrative. Since the setting of the game is meant to be explored in ways not
necessarily fully anticipated by the designer, this aspect of the narrative fantasy
must be robust, in order to support multiple trajectories through the narrative
space. Unlike traditional narrative, where the setting appears only as a backdrop
to the action of characters as they move through a plot line, games need to
anticipate players straying from a singular line of action. Setting design in games
is more analogous to building a full 3D model of a set, as opposed to one with
facades and scaffolding.
The ambient features of a game, such as the sound, background, and
backstory, are becoming increasingly central to game design as new personal
computers and game machines are supporting more sophisticated sound and
graphics capabilities. Game graphics and sound have been professionalized, as
game teams have expanded from a model of a producer working with a single
programmer/designer to teams of dozens.
The importance of game backstory is also evidenced by the practice of
licensing, where popular titles in other media such as Star Trek, Dungeons and
Dragons, or Star Wars are translated to a gaming idiom. Further, game sequels
cumulatively result in not only fan followings of specific characters, but also the
development of an increasingly well-developed backstory that is reiterated
through multiple versions of a game. For example, Donkey Kong, Mario
Brothers, Donkey Kong World, Super Mario World, Mario Cart, Yoshi's Island,
and 64 Bit Mario, are all part of Nintendo's signature Mario Brothers games.
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Functionality and Utility
Computer gaming occupies a unique position in the history of mass media, in
that each game needs to partially invent a technical substratum for the operation
of its narrative. While every medium has a degree of technical innovation and
variation within its parameters—a piece of clay can be shaped in coils, rolled into
slabs, cast, or thrown on a wheel, and technologies of print and film-making have
certainly changed through the years—no other medium has been marked as
profoundly by the speed of technical innovation, or the technology-intensiveness
of content as computer-based media have. Even movies, which have recently
been marked by rapid technical innovation in special effects, cinematography,
and digital animation, still rely on the relatively stable and standardized
technologies of film, film editing techniques, film projection, movie theaters, and
popcorn. While film does have special Academy awards for technical innovation,
these are clearly dwarfed by the importance of innovation in narrative content, as
evidenced by the centrality of the awards for actors, production, and direction.
By contrast, technical innovation is central to interactive multimedia. As a
commodity form, computer games are characterized not only by constant
competition in particular software content (i.e., competition between sales of
different games), but competition between platforms (i.e., PCs versus Macs, or X
Box versus Sony PlayStation and Nintendo Game Cube). Thus technical design,
both of hardware and software, are ongoing features of game development and
crucial aspects of any understanding of game content.
At the hardware layer, computer gaming has been marked by large
technological shifts that define the conditions under which certain content can be
developed. Coin-op arcade games were an important precursor to much of
current game development, and still continue to dominate the industry, earning
higher revenues from coin drop than all home-based computer game sales
combined (Isgor 1997). Much of this is due to the revenue model (pay per play),
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as well as by the low barriers to entry. In contrast to home entertainment and PC
platforms, coin-ops require only a quarter to play one's first game, rather than an
investment ranging from one hundred to over a thousand dollars for a game
machine or PC. Coin-op games are also where much of the new technical
features for home gaming get developed, due to the higher investment possible
in state of the art hardware and related software. For example, popular games
such as Pong, Mario Brothers, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat were originally
designed for coin-op and later ported to dedicated platforms for home use. Since
coin-op machines do not have to be standardized for the home consumer
market, they also have a wider range in hardware interface; while most games
rely on joysticks, keyboards, or button pads, coin-op machines also make use of
mock guns, force feedback devices, virtual reality helmets, simulated cockpits,
car seats, and even skis. One particularly spectacular interface was a life-sized
mechanical horse that players could ride. Coin-op games are designed for
instant appeal with flashy graphics, sound, and intuitive interfaces, as well as
relatively brief play sequences, in contrast to home play that can rely on a
steeper learning curve and player engagement sustained over many hours at a
time.
Dedicated platform gaming has progressed in generational leaps,
beginning with the first generation of video gaming dominated by Atari, to the 8bit machines introduced by Nintendo and Sega, to the 13-bit machines of the
Sega Saturn and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, to the 32-bit and
64-bit platforms of the Sony PlayStation, Sega Genesis, 64-bit Nintendo, and
most recently the 128-bit PlayStation 2, Nintendo Game Cube and X Box. While
the first generation platforms were based on the animation of very simple objects
on a blank background, current game platforms support full three-dimensional
graphics and texture mapped backgrounds. Graphics and action capabilities on
current generation gaming platforms are optimized to such an extent that they
exceed the real-time graphics capacities of most personal computers.
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Personal-computer based gaming has progressed under a less
discontinuous trajectory, which has followed the rapid but contiguous
development of personal computer platforms. Instead of proprietary game
cartridges, personal computing has been based on diskettes, CD-ROMS, and
most recently DVDs, and has enabled more flexibility in distribution and player
reprogramming. While platform gaming is dependent on a very simple hardware
interface—a game controller with approximately ten buttons—personal
computers, with the ability to input text, graphics, and combine software, allows
for a greater range of user input. Software on personal computers also span a
wider range than those of dedicated game platforms, ranging from authoring
tools to action gaming. This quality of personal computing, in contrast to console
and coin-op gaming, has made it more amenable to educational claims.
“Technical literacy” is commonly associated with a wide range of persona
computing uses, but not with the use of the computational technologies of
console and coin-op gaming.
Gaming on personal computing is also associated with more user-level
tinkering and exchange. Smaller developers can design their own games and
distribute them as "shareware," where software is freely distributed, and people
mail in a fee to the designer on an honor-based system if they actually use the
game. Personal computers also allow for players to "plug-in" pieces of computer
code and game design. Maxis, for example, sells an "urban renewal kit" for
SimCity 2000 fans, which provides tools for advanced players to design their own
buildings and to change some of the algorithms that define the growth of the city.
Similarly, some action games allow users to design their own game levels or
weapons, or tinker with the "physics" of a game (i.e., how explosions bounce off
walls, or the speed at which characters can move through the scene). More
recently, the advent of networked gaming, where players can play against each
other over local networks or the Internet, has expanded the possibilities of
personal computer based gaming. In short, while console gaming is based on
inexpensive hardware and more sophisticated graphics capabilities, personal
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computer based gaming enables more user flexibility and input to the game
design. Cartridge games are generally designed as proprietary systems,
minimizing user tinkering and hacking and providing a unified and stabilized
player experience. By contrast, PC games often celebrate the opportunities for
user authoring and customization.
While innovation in hardware has been a rapid series of quantum jumps,
software innovation is a constant feature of game design, particularly for the
action gaming market. A game that relied on the same technical substrate, with
new characters, sound, and graphics, would likely not count as a "new" game at
all. While some games clearly derive from similar underlying software—for
example, hand-to-hand combat games are functionally very similar, though they
have different characters and settings—no developer would produce a new game
without some innovations to the technical substratum. Even in the case of
games with very similar functionality, like combat games, each game sequel is
characterized by either new action possibilities (i.e., new types of kicks, jumps, or
spins), or technical innovation in graphics (i.e., a shift from 2D to 3D graphics, or
the addition of texture mapping to backgrounds). Game reviews spend as much
time commenting on technical features of specific games as they do on narrative
content and aesthetic features. Computer game fans avidly track the latest
innovations in such areas as chip design, game development software, graphics
capabilities, and networking protocols and services as an integral part of their
gaming experience. In children’s software, technical innovation is much less
central, but still plays an important role, particularly when it comes to graphical
sophistication and innovation. Children that are being raised with Toy Story
quality computer graphics on the movie screen expect a certain production value
with their interactive graphics as well. Children’s software makers will often
reuse the same basic designs and software engines that create the basic
properties of the game world, but work constantly to keep up with the overall
computer graphics industry in delivering high production value to children.
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Interaction
While computer games are relatively sparse in terms of key features of traditional
narrative, depth and complexity in computer game content lies in the added
dimensions of interactivity, user control and authoring, and multiple semiotic
layers. In other words, computer games are not only heteroglossic, embedding
multiple voices (Bakhtin 1981) but are also polymorphous, depending on
user/audience engagement. Computer games shape shift depending on how the
user decides to navigate the space of possibility, what pathways for action are
chosen, what tools are utilized, and how the player responds to game options.
Identification with characters and reader involvement in plot is literalized in the
case of computer games, as players identify with and manipulate on-screen
characters, or navigate the virtual world from a first-person or managerial pointof-view. Additionally, the gaming components spin the narrative of computer
gaming around mastery and attainment of goals set by the game. Marsha
Kinder has called this a process of “playing with power” a subjectivity that is
enabled by the postmodern media pastiche. She describes how this video
gaming and channel-surfing subjectivity is celebrated in children’s television
which makes use of a shifting set of subject positions and pastes together
multiple genres and styles within a particular program (Kinder 1991).
The interactive aspects of gaming create a sense of heightened
personalization, where the experience of narrative is intimately tied to a player's
actions, achievement, preference, and level of skill. The role of the author is to
code for a field of possibility rather than a coherent narrative trajectory. Not only
is the narrative dependent on player action in a particular round of game play, but
the content of the game changes through the repetition of game play, as the skill
of the player increases. Through repeated engagement, the nature of the
narrative changes, as the player's skill and mastery is honed vis-a-vis the game.
A player is thus in a position not only to interpret a text as it has been
programmed by a designer, but to enact the text in a way that is tied to the
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player's specific life experiences, capabilities, and style. Narrative is thus
constructed through a relation between the game and the player's action. In
terms of the anatomy and content of games, this relation between player and
game is what is anticipated by the designer in terms of interaction design. The
player constructs a unique pathway through the narrative space constructed by
the designer.
The most obvious feature of interaction design is the game interface,
which includes the hardware controllers and input devices, as well as software
elements, such as menu bars, ways of selecting and manipulating game
elements, tool bars, message boxes, and the like. The most salient distinctions
in interface design correspond to the differences in viewpoint described above.
Angel viewpoint and first person games tend to have action oriented interfaces
with keystrokes, joysticks, or button use that can be manipulated quickly and
reflexively, without looking down at one's hands. Storybook adventure game
interfaces are generally based on point-and-click mechanisms, which allow a
player to page from one screen to the next, and click and select on "hot" areas
on the scene. Omniscient viewpoint games tend to have more complicated
software interfaces, so players can select and manipulate a wide range of game
elements, selecting and assigning duties to troops, managing budgets, etc.
The most central aspect of the interaction design is the play mechanic,
"the actions, or series of action, the player performs to operate the game.... It is
the process of using the interface to achieve the victory conditions" (Katz and
Yates 1996: 87). The play mechanic, in other words, is what defines the nature
of player engagement with the game—what the player can control, the effects of
player action, and how the player engages with that action. The most salient
distinction in play mechanic is between real-time games, commonly known as
"twitch" or action games, and non real-time or turn-taking games. Twitch games
are primarily oriented toward honing of sensory-motor skill, and require constant
repetition to achieve game goals. By contrast, non real-time games are generally
strategic, knowledge-based, or cognitively-oriented, requiring players to solve
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puzzles, accumulate information, or devise strategies to compete or progress
along game goals. Non real-time games tend to be less repetitive, and may rely
on a relatively singular narrative trajectory. Children’s software generally falls
into the latter category, though often incorporating action gaming elements in the
form of “game breaks” within an adventure or problem-solving scenario.
The final key component of interaction design is the design of game
levels, goals, and calibration of difficulty. In action games, this is generally
determined by such factors as speed of action or number and strength of
opponents. While some action games can be "beaten" by progressing to the
final game sequence (i.e., defeating the big boss and capturing the princess in
Mario), other action games calibrate difficulty by simply speeding up action
beyond the capability of human sensory-motor capability (i.e., Tetris screens
where the pieces fall in increasingly rapid succession). In educational games,
users can often set the level of difficulty of the game (e.g., novice, intermediate,
advanced), or may find that game problems get progressively difficult as they
progress through the narrative space. In all cases, the interaction design
involves ongoing and immediate input and response mechanisms, as well as
long term goals, tied to skill development and recognitions of achievement.
The unique material and functional characteristics of interactive
multimedia place it at the intersection between interaction and spectatorship.
Game players engage with these media at a variety of levels, ranging from
observations of graphical effects to direct manipulation and authoring of online
narrative. What is distinctive throughout these user positions is some degree of
user input into the narrative content and functional outcomes of the game. In
order to understand the nature of the encounter between children and interactive
multimedia, this appendix described the basic affordances of computer games in
terms of narrative, functional, technical, and interactive dimensions.
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APPENDIX 2
Research on Game Play and Children’s Software
Since the early 80s, when personal computers and video games emerged as
enduring features of the social landscape, a growing body of research examines
the social, cultural, historical, and psychological dimensions of computer gaming.
This research falls roughly into three categories: 1) psychological and
sociological work based on surveys or experimental studies, 2) content analyses
from psychoanalytic and hermeneutic/cultural perspectives, 3) ethnographic
"reception" studies, and 4) business oriented and journalistic accounts of the
computer game industry. This section briefly reviews this research to the degree
relevant to my work.
Quantitative studies of various features of video and computer gaming
comprise a large body of literature that is beyond the scope of this study to
review in any detail. In the online bibliography of game research at www.gameculture.com, the small number of entries in media and cultural studies are
dwarfed by a mass of psychological studies. Most studies take a social
psychological perspective which examines certain key factors in light of their
relationship to video games. The most exhaustively studied are issues of
aggression and violence (eg., Dominick 1984; Silvern and Williamson 1987),
social deviance (eg., Ellis 1984; Sakamoto 1994), gender differences (eg.,
Morlock, Yando et al. 1985; Kubey and Larson 1990; Inkpen, Booth et al. 1995;
Kafai 1999), and motivation for play (eg., Malone 1980). These approaches are
relevant to this study to the extent that they examine related empirical ground
and they elucidate central objects of concern with respect to video games, but
both the methods and the questions motivating this area of research differ
fundamentally from those that motivate this dissertation. Rather than focus on
the statistical correlation of certain social factors with games or game
components, my study seeks to identify and describe, through ethnographic
detail, the ways in which interactions and cultural categories are constituted
through computer game play.
A small but growing body of literature on computer gaming draws from
mass media studies to examine the content of computer games from
psychoanalytic and cultural studies perspectives. Marsha Kinder's book, Playing
with Power (Kinder 1991), is one of the more sustained treatments of video
games from a primarily psychoanalytic frame. Examining the intertextuality of
different forms of media, she identifies how certain cultural icons such the
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Mario Brothers appear as sliding signifiers in
movies, television, and video games. Psychoanalytic categories such as the
oedipal drama, castration anxiety, and premature death are used as resources
for understanding the latent content of and the intertextual relations between
these different media. Other studies, embodying cultural studies perspectives,
have examined racial signifiers (Bleecker 1994), gender typing and violence
(Provenzo 1991), voyage narratives (Fuller and Jenkins 1995), and formal and
aesthetic dimensions (Meyers 1990; Friedman 1995) in computer games. This
body of research takes the important steps of sketching some of the cultural
categories that are being concretized through computer games, and relating
these categories to certain social structures of capitalist or postmodern life.
These studies tend to focus on the narrative and cultural content of games,
rather than technical affordances or processes of play.
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Some content-based studies have taken a more ethnographic "reception
study" approach in looking at how players interact with computer games.
Eugene Provenzo (Provenzo 1991) interviews children on their game use,
Patricia Greenfield (Greenfield 1984) draws from her own experiences playing
with children, and Kinder (Kinder 1991) incorporates a case study of her son and
analyzes a videotape of children watching a video. These studies are still
preliminary in this respect, however, and currently the only cultural studies of
computer games with extensive ethnographic grounding is Sherry Turkle's, The
Second Self (Turkle 1984) and Life on the Screen (Turkle 1995). Turkle's early
work uses interviews and Lacanian methods of analysis to understand the
structures of thought made available to people through and with computer
technologies. She likens the computer to a Rorschach test, a medium through
which different aspects of self are projected, "a mirror of the mind" (Turkle 1984:
15). As liminal objects with seemingly sentient qualities, the computer provokes,
among children, questions about the nature of consciousness and identity.
Computer games, in particular, have a certain kind of "holding power" which has
to do both with the closed and rule-governed nature of the simulated worlds, and
the active identifications enabled by the game.
In her more recent work, Turkle (1995: 20) examines current computer
technologies in relation to her work in the early 80s, suggesting a shift from "a
modernist culture of calculation to a postmodern culture of simulation." As
objects to think with, the complex simulations and opaque interfaces that
dominate current consumer computer products (i.e., the Macintosh operating
system, Microsoft Windows, computer games), evoke different sorts of
reflections, notions of life, reality and embodiment rather than consciousness,
thought and intelligence. She sees the "simulation aesthetic" as one that plays
with pluralistic notions of identity and reality, and sees virtual worlds such as the
Sim games, MUDs, and artificial life, as exhibiting these characteristics (1995).
This study targets the genre of games that Turkle identifies as exemplifying these
new "cultures of simulation," and Turkle's studies are an important departure
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point in that she describes certain discourses and psychological processes
around the technologies in question. This study adds to this conversation by
contributing both an activity-based analysis and one that considers various
institutional contexts such as game production, entertainment and educational
institutions.
Study of the computer gaming industry is dominated by business oriented
treatments, although even these are sparse and generally appear as small
sections in broader treatments of the computer or entertainment industry (eg.,
Goldberg 1983; Burstein and Klein 1995; Ferguson and Morris [1993] 1994).
Some journalists and industry insiders have written more extensively on
computer gaming, most notably, Douglas Carlston’s Sofware People (Carlston
1985), David Sheff, with Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American
Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children (Sheff 1993),
Seven Kent’s Ultimate History of Video Games (Kent 2001), and Steven Levy's
writing on the early history of computer gaming in Hackers: Heroes of the
Computer Revolution (Levy 1994). In short, while the computer gaming industry
has been heavily reported on in the popular press and from a business
standpoint, sustained academic work, and anthropological work in particular, is
still very limited. Overall, studies either focus on the psychology or the industry
of computer gaming. There are no extended studies of the children’s software
industry as a separate market segment, although there are numerous web
resources and some serial publications that review children’s software. The
Children’s Software Revue is the most comprehensive source of this nature, with
an extensive web site featuring articles, reviews and research, a magazine, and
a yearly sourcebook of all hundreds of titles on market. So while there is a
growing body of business and consumer oriented publications regarding
computer games and children’s software, very little work has been conducted
from a practice based ethnographic framework.
One exception is a growing popular and academic discourse on gender
and computer games has arisen with the growth of a “girls’ games” market in the
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late nineties, ushered into popular consciousness with the commercial success of
Mattel’s Barbie Fashion Designer. Heather Gilmour has conducted an
ethnographic study of how gender inflects computer game use at three different
schools (Gilmour 1999). Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins have edited a book
entitled From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, which
includes interviews with girl game developers as well as academic articles
(Cassell and Jenkins 1998). This body of work provides a productive window
into the dynamics between cultural contestation, commodity capitalism, and
computer games. Much as I have used children’s software as a nexus for
examining the relation between entertainment and education, these studies have
looked at how gender dynamics are being newly materialized through computer
games.
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APPENDIX 3
Glossary of Abbreviations and Technical Terms
CD-ROM
CD-ROM is the abbreviation for "compact disk read-only memory." It is a kind of
storage media that users' computers can read from, but cannot usually write to,
and is similar in form to audio compact disks.
Consoles, Game
Game consoles are computers specifically designed for video games, and which
plug into TV monitors. Some examples are the Sony PlayStation, the Nintendo
Entertainment System, the Microsoft Game Cube, and the Sega Genesis.
Cartridge, Game
A game cartridge is how most game software for console games are distributed.
Unlike floppy disks or CD-ROMs, cartridges are configured for a specific
hardware platform (a console), and are proprietary and controlled by the
company that manufactures the console.
Digital Media
Digital media generally refers to computational tools and materials used in
producing and displaying art and other mass media products. See pages 73-78
for a discussion of this term.
Force Feedback
Force Feedback refers to technologies that allow the user to get physical
feedback in response to engagement with a virtual environment. For example,
joysticks have been designed to move or resist motion depending on how the
user is moving through a virtual space or manipulating a virtual object.
Graphical User Interface (GUI)
A GUI is an approach that is used in contrast to a command line interface. It is a
type of interface that allows the user to manipulate virtual objects, such as
windows and dialog boxes, often through the use of a mouse.
Interactive Media
Interactive media generally refers to computationally based media that is
reciprocally active between the user and the machine. See pages 73-78 for a
discussion of this term.
Interface
The interface most commonly refers to the input and output mechanisms through
which the user interacts with a computer, such as keyboards, screens, on-screen
windows, etc. Some have proposed broadening the notion of interface to include
more than these literal input and output mechanisms. See pages 98-99 for a
more complete discussion.
MSBHB
My abbreviation for the game, The Magic School Bus Explores the Human Body.
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Multimedia
Multimedia refers to computational media that mixes different media forms such
as text, still images, animation, audio, and video. See pages 73-78 for a
discussion of this term.
Multi-Player Game
In the area of computer games, a multi-player game refers to a game that allows
for more than one player to access the same virtual environment. This is in
contrast to what has been the norm in computer gaming, where there is one
player playing against the machine. Multi-player games allow different players to
compete against each other in the game environment.
Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs)
MUDs are text-based virtual worlds run over the Internet, where multiple users
log onto a shared server and fantasy environment. Most MUDs rely on fantasy
adventure themes related to Dungeons and Dragons.
New Media
New media is a term that is used most often in the entertainment industry, to
refer to computer based mass media. See pages 73-78 for a discussion of this
term.
332
PC
PCs, or personal computers, can refer specifically to MS-DOS and Windows
computers, as well as consumer computers in general (including Apple
computers).
Play Mechanic
The play mechanic in a computer game is "the actions, or series of action, the
player performs to operate the game.... It is the process of using the interface to
achieve the victory conditions" (Katz and Yates 1996:87).
Plug-in
A plug-in is a piece of software that has been designed as an augmentation of an
existing piece of software. Often plug-ins are created by people or companies
other than those who created the main piece of software, and provide added
functionality that the original software did not provide.
RL
RL is shorthand for "real life," used most often by people engaged in online
activity. In this usage, it refers to non-computational activity, as in "in RL, I'm not
so outgoing."
Screen Shot
A screen shot is an image taken from an on screen display of software.
User Authoring
User authoring refers to the ability of users to produce their own media through a
piece of software. This could refer to such applications as word processors, as
well as the ability to design added features to gaming software or virtual worlds.
333
Virtual
The term virtual has come to refer to something that is computationally based or
simulated, as in "virtual world," "virtual human," "virtual pet."
Virtual Reality
Virtual reality is a term that was popularized to refer to real-time, three
dimensional, computer generated environments.
Virtual Worlds Technologies
By virtual worlds technologies, I am referring to computer technologies that
enable users to engage interactively with complex simulations, ranging from textbased adventure games to fully-immersive virtual reality systems.
Young Wizard's Assistant (YWA)
A YWA, or “Young Wizard's Assistant," is a role in the Fifth Dimension activity
system, which is reserved for kids who have completed a certain number of
games at a certain level. YWAs are often responsible for helping others, and
have the right to play special games.
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