Easily Distracted

Passages to Meritocracy

Posted on July 21, 2009 by Timothy Burke

If nothing else, Sunday’s New York Times story on pricey consultancies helping well-heeled students get into the selective university or college of their choice was memorable for the juxtaposition of a quote from Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania, who describes admissions consultancies as snake-oil salesman, followed several paragraphs later by the former dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania talking about his admissions consultancy.

The story makes most of the consultants look bad before there’s any need to consider the nature of their business, with their ridiculously high fees, shaky salesmanship and questionable credentials. Some of them, according to the Times story, at least imply that they can place clients through pulling strings and trading on personal connections. Given what we’ve heard about some public university systems in the last few months, that’s not a totally absurd thing to imply, but from what I know, selective private institutions don’t exactly work that way. The money and fame of an applicant’s family may influence the decision at some institutions and most places treat legacies as a privileged category as well, but for the most part that’s all done indirectly. A consultant who rang up an admissions staffer would probably come off as terribly vulgar and Not-Done in most cases.

Still, I think Amy Gutmann and her peers at other selective institutions might want to own up to their own responsibility for creating a market niche for snake oil.

A colleague of mine once suggested that we should just make admission to Swarthmore a pure lottery for any candidates who met high minimum threshold criteria for admissions. In his view, trying to build a class that is somehow perfectly engineered in terms of a mix of temperments, talents, life experiences, intellectual dispositions and the like is not just a Rube-Goldbergesque nightmare, but also involves a whole range of shifting, ad hoc and quite specific value judgments about merit and potential that get made in a very non-transparent way within the black box of the admissions process.

I didn’t like that idea when he suggested it, because I have some continuing investment in the machinery of selective admissions on the basis of various congruent and sometimes clashing ideas about merit. Giving up on the idea that we can evaluate the relative merit and particular suitability of an applicant pool for a given college or university feels to me like giving up on meritocratic advancement as a whole. Which I suspect is my colleague’s view as well, that meritocracy is a bogus veneer papering over the embedded power of social class.

Against that, I can only say that there are some jobs which are genuinely important beyond just paying a salary to the person doing them, and some people do those jobs far better than other people. Equally, there are students who flourish in higher education in ways that benefit their institutions as well as themselves. It may be that there is no best-practices process that can reliably predict who those people are, nothing that can beat a random selection. I’m not prepared to give up on the idea that we can do better just yet.

However, it’s important not to do worse, to so mystify the process of trying to identify merit that you spew collateral cultural and social damage out on the wider society. The admissions consultancies may be a symptomatic sign of that kind of damage stemming from the opacity of selective admissions.

A prospective applicant to a highly selective university or college can fairly readily “chance” themselves in terms of test scores, grade-point averages and preparation. Applicants who are well within the typical qualifications then often know what kinds of straightforward additional criteria might give their application greater weight: from underrepresented regions, from underrepresented identity groups, distinctive athletic experience, unusual degree of specific academic preparation.

Where it gets sticky, at which point some admissions consultants move in with their snake-oil, is that further distinctions of merit that may be used to admit one qualified candidate and reject another come to rest on an applicant’s life experiences, expressions and evidence of inner character, subtle evidence of suitability for a particular institution’s expressed culture, creativity of an essay and so on. Something that gives an admissions officer a “feel” for the individuality of a particular candidate.

All of that kind of evaluation is the devil’s playground. I really have met people who have a form of emotional intelligence that lets them size up another person pretty quickly and predict how much they’ll contribute to a project or team. I’ve met people who are really bad at doing that, and quite a few of the latter either don’t know that they’re bad at it or are never made accountable for being bad at it because it takes four or six or ten years to discover just how bad they are. Most of us, I think, are in between those poles: we guess right sometimes and wrong other times, and sometimes when we’re right, we’re right for the wrong reasons, and vice-versa.

It’s easier to talk about the visible effects that being judged on subtle signs of character and potential have on an incoming group of students. For one, it forces 18-year olds to pretend to be finished, accomplished adults, to narrate a life for themselves which is already full of accomplishment, already garnished with epiphanies. Which, if not an active lie, is usually at least an exaggeration.

For the applicants who know that this self they’re describing is an invention, the only damage is contributing to their cynicism about process. For the applicants who really come to believe in this presentation of self, the consequences can be more damaging. What do they have left to learn now that they’ve arrived at college? They’re already intellectually complete. What surprises does experience have in store for them that they’ve not already experienced? I see this sometimes especially with students who have a political or social project outside the classroom that they’d like to accomplish: they don’t approach that work as an open-ended exploration with uncertain ends because they’re still locked into a rhetoric that describes those commitments as already finished and known, already rooted in an orthodox style, where all consequences and processes are always already anticipated.

I think that kind of attitude is essentially taught by the selective admissions process, by trying to match up to the mysterious judgments about merit that circulate at its hidden core. I’d like to say that we should say instead that we’re looking for evidence of curiosity, humility, openness to exploration, maybe even a certain kind of ordinariness. But given the nature of the process, all that would produce is a wave of 18-year olds obediently producing an account of themselves as more curious, more humble, more open and more ordinary than other applicants, in a few cases with the help of expensive consultants skilled in advising applicants about the social semiotics of teenage humility.

So maybe my colleague is right: there’s no way to transparently or secretly match up our real institutional values and aspirations with applicants who are really going to flourish in terms of those values and aspirations.

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | 8 Comments

Other People’s Money

Posted on July 16, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Some interesting fallout from the light sentence given to Pennsylvania state senator Vincent Fumo for his conviction on corruption charges, a sentence that the judge in the case justified as recognition of Fumo’s many good deeds. (The 55-month sentence is less than the plea deal Fumo was originally offered.)

Said good deeds were documented by a long parade of prominent character witnesses who sent letters to the judge. The letter that sticks in my craw most is from the current Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell.

Rendell does a bit of damning-with-faint-praise in his letter, which I mostly took to be an effort to build in a firewall between himself and whatever the sentence to Fumo ended up being. The thrust of his letter, however, is that Fumo worked hard on the behalf of less-fortunate Pennsylvanians, including people not in his own district, and that these good works should be considered as mitigating his illegal conduct.

What bugs me about this is that it frames the kind of corruption that Fumo engaged in as a kind of personal misconduct that has no political or social implications in its own right. I’d actually buy that argument if Fumo had been convicted of assault or of breaking into his neighbor’s house to steal something. There can be a big disconnect between good works in the world and individual crime or immorality.

Fumo, however, was systematically making the plight of less-fortunate Pennsylvanians more rather than less dire. Rendell gets it exactly wrong. Fumo was stealing “other people’s money” and redirecting it to his personal use. He was using the protected concept of a non-profit institution to carry out this activity. Fumo, like much of the Pennsylvania legislature, had no meaningful conception of the public interest beyond the reproduction of a self-aggrandizing network of people and resources.

I don’t think this is just Ed Rendell being Ed Rendell. I think this is a blindspot that crops up across the ideological spectrum in American (and arguably global) politics, but that is especially annoying when it comes from liberal Democrats. If someone’s delivered some votes here and there in support of progressive legislation, that means almost nothing if they’re constantly draining off resources that might be used to progressive ends in favor of keeping the wheels greased for a small elite of people centered on the politician himself or herself. Whatever goes out the door with those votes gets smuggled back in through phony non-profits, wink-wink nod-nod kickbacks, under-the-radar earmarks and the like. Lauding someone like Fumo for helping poor people is like praising water for being dry or sunlight for being dark. And yet, Rendell isn’t the only one to look the other way when stories like this break, to downplay the consequences.

If some punk off the streets breaks into a house and rips off some jewelry, maybe I’d be willing to find mitigation in the fact that he also volunteers at the local soup kitchen, is nice to children, has a little dog named Smookums and was abandoned by his father when he was six. Theft from the public by a public official, whatever his character, is of a graver category of offense than one person stealing from another person, and nothing should mitigate its gravity. We’ve been falling all over ourselves for three decades in the United States to get tough on crime, make mandatory sentences more and more extreme, and yet somehow official misconduct never seems to be crime in the same sense. Maybe it’s not: it’s worse.

Posted in Politics | Comments Off

Obama in Ghana

Posted on July 14, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I joined in a conversation in Second Life about Obama’s speech in Ghana over the weekend. Due to some technical snafus, I had trouble participating in the panel early on, so one of the basic reactions I had to the speech didn’t really come into play. Ta-Nehisi Coates expresses a good deal of what I was thinking at his blog, though.

It was a fine speech, delivered with Obama’s typically crisp and efficient demeanor. Aside from the historic dimension of the speech being delivered by an African-American President of the United States to an African audience, however, the content was pretty much a tour of contemporary middle-of-the-road orthodoxy concerning African politics and African economic development. I teach a class every three or four years where one of the major themes is African-American encounters with and visions of Africa. Obama’s speech struck me as being pretty far down the list of emotionally and politically momentous episodes in that history, almost a coda rather than a milestone.

Some of that has to do with the content of the speech, which aside from Obama’s discussion of his personal connections to Africa could largely have been delivered by George Bush. I don’t mean that as a critique, I just mean that it was very much a shared governmental perspective steeped in of-the-moment policy initiatives, the Washington Consensus 2.0. Obama didn’t even really take a strong side between some of the contending factions within development circles, instead making little grace gestures towards various pet projects or arguments.

Ta-Nehisi suggests that some of the commentary on the speech saw Obama as more able to scold Africans for their failures in the same way that some prominent African-American spokesmen are allowed to critically address black fatherhood or other issues. Maybe, but the basic message that in the 21st Century, the structural consequences of the colonial era or Cold War geopolitics are less consequential than the internal dynamics of African societies is something you’ll hear from Western politicians across a pretty wide political spectrum. It’s heard as having a different significance, or a different authority, when it’s seen as coming from a racial insider.

I also think, however, that Obama demonstrated that younger political leaders in the African diaspora have less and less of a sense of having travelled through the same historical trials that African leaders of the same generation have experienced. The older generation still has some of the cadences of a pan-African nationalism rolling around in their heads. That imagined sense of a shared project is what produced so many misrecognitions between Africans and African-Americans from the 1960s to the 1980s, but even confusion creates a connection. Even given his personal history, you can feel a distance between the historical evolution of Obama’s political moment in the U.S. and the diverse political moments that many Africans of his generation are experiencing in different nations. Even his father’s involvement in Kenyan nationalism recedes into a prologue to Obama’s journey into an American identity. Which is, again, fine: that’s an ur-narrative of American immigration, which often kicks over the traces and contexts of the political and social histories of the immigrant generation, turning them into heritage rather than ongoing experience.

The upshot, though, is that Obama’s speech struck me as a standard address by a Western leader to Africa that happened to have a big footnote. As far as truly unusual Presidential speeches in Africa go, Bill Clinton’s apology for slavery (to a somewhat bemused audience of Ugandans, a country with little historic connection to the Atlantic slave trade) was more notable.

Posted in Africa, Politics | Comments Off

The Weedy Garden of Familyhood

Posted on July 13, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Before the blog went haywire last week, I meant to comment on Michael Chabon’s essay “The Wilderness of Childhood” in the New York Review of Books.

The basic thrust of Chabon’s commentary is spot-on. It’s certainly one of the most complicated, mysterious transformations of the way childhood and family life feel that I’m aware of in my own life. My childhood was like his childhood in the sense of his essay. In fourth grade, living in southern California, friends and I would ride our bicycles around a fairly extensive area on our own. We had a racket where we collected golf balls in a ravine near a course and sell them back to golfers: the ravine was rocky and on a few occasions, we saw rattlesnakes coiled under rocks there. We moved when I was in fifth and sixth grade, near a creek that ran through a quiet suburban neighborhood that was surrounded by less-quiet areas. I routinely used to tell my mother that I was going to go hike up the creek, and then off I went for hours at a time. Once I went almost all the way to the beach, probably a four or five-mile round trip, and similarly far up the creek. There was a municipal park nearby, and I’d go there and meet friends on my own.

I knew the backyards and byways of my neighborhoods in a way that I think my daughter and her friends will never know. A bit of that is a difference between the roads around my current house and some of the places I grew up: there’s a couple of busy, badly designed roads that bisect some of the likely walks she might take. Mostly, it’s a comprehensive shift in how children, parents and space relate.

Chabon settles on the common default explanation for this change, namely, the extent to which fears about children being molested by predatory strangers has led American parents to hold their children closer to them. I think he’s right that this is a big part of the change, and he’s not the first to point out that the fear is wildly out of step with the reality. It’s also not a new danger. As an adult thinking back, I can think of at least two times when there was a probable pedophile somewhere near to my own childhood travels: an older brother of a neighborhood kid at one point, and the sketchy young adult “friend” of a kid I knew when I was in sixth grade. If you follow Chabon’s metaphor (and a memorable Matt Groening cartoon that he cites as well), every wilderness has, by necessity, its ogres and perils. In sixth grade, I knew where the house with the dangerous dogs was, I knew about the kid who was supposed to be a dealer, I knew (along with all my friends) about the old sycamore tree in the park where some unknown person had stashed some mildewed porn. I knew where the neighborhood with the tough kids was and how to skirt around it. I knew where there was a pool with tadpoles in the creek, that you could eat the watercress growing on the banks, and I knew where going any further down meant you’d have a hell of a climb back up a concrete and rock tumble.

Like Chabon, I think it’s too bad that we’ve swung away from that kind of childhood experience. On the other hand, I think he’s missing something new about contemporary middle-class childhood. Sometimes, yes, it’s about ferrying the kids between contained, safe experiences. But also, I think that a lot of middle-class family life is now about the simultaneous adventures of children and adults, that children and adults are sharing far more of their experiences.

I recently watched the Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life”, based on the Jerome Bixby short story. For those who haven’t seen it, the basic premise is that there’s a rural Ohio town that has been removed from the world by the god-like mental powers of a six-year old boy who then terrorizes the population of the town. One of the subtler aspects of the story, alongside the overtly horrific consequences of the boy’s powers, is the way that the adults are forced to anxiously guess at what a child prefers while suppressing their own adult cultural habits in his presence. The two worlds were alien to one another, and now they’re drawn together under the worst of cirucmstances.

The wilderness of childhood that Chabon describes in the 1960s and 1970s was maintained in large part by the strong separation of adult leisure and children’s leisure. Saturday Morning TV was partly defined by that sense of isolation, kids off watching cartoons by themselves, cartoons which the adults knew little about, like the rest of the things their kids did or said. Adults had their own places and activities within which children were only occasional, peripheral presences. All the stories we saw reflected this distance: adults were Charlie Brown voices, they didn’t come into Narnia, they were left behind in Kansas.

It seems to me now that in many families, children and adults have far more shared cultural moments and touchstones. A lot of children’s media is cross-over entertainment that adults also watch and enjoy, or in the case of video games, play alongside their children. I feel like I’m far more likely to see parents and kids hiking together or exploring around the landscape. Last weekend, I took my daughter to see an odd ruin in the woods near here, and there was a mother and her two sons coming out of the woods as we went down the overgrown path to it.

We haven’t really figured out yet how to tell stories that reflect this shared world, which is why a lot of children’s media still banish adults at the outset of the action, so that the kids in the story have to make their own decisions. But I could easily see that we could have a new wave of stories where adults and children deal with adventure together without the grown-ups making all the choices.

I think rather than lamenting the lost past, Chabon might be better off looking for where adventure and exploration take on new and distinctive forms in the present.

Posted in Domestic Life | 1 Comment

Blog Troubles

Posted on July 13, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I think we have everything fixed now here. Let me know if comments are still broken or links to entries here aren’t working.

Posted in Blogging, Swarthmore | Comments Off

The Implausibility of Liberal Revolution

Posted on June 30, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I’ve been struck in the past week at some of the similarities between Iran and Zimbabwe. Yes, there are vast differences in geopolitical status, economic health, histories of 20th Century statehood, religious and social ideology and much else besides.

But in both places in the last few years, you’ve had some similar kinds of reformist movements that looked to elections as a possible window of opportunity for changing or eroding the power of an authoritarian state elite. Similar in the kinds of claims and strategies they’ve employed, similar in being forced to rely on a figurehead opposition figure whose future commitment to liberal political values is at the least ambiguous. Similar in the social composition of the strongest underlying constituencies pushing for reform: urban populations, educated elites, aspirant cosmopolitans.

And the consequence of both reform campaigns has been broadly similar: to reveal that the state they critique is even less ideological than it appears and that the chief authoritarian or his closest associates is only partially in charge of a state apparatus that has largely been taken over by a silent coup d’etat of securocrats who have connections to paramilitary or irregular forces which draw from different social foundations than the reformers do. And that the securocrats are determined to stay in power regardless, and have the means, lack of scruples and competency to do so, perhaps indefinitely.

Some critics charge that liberals or the left are silent about Iran (or Zimbabwe) because they have a double standard, or even because they have a kind of bizarre sympathetic view of nationalist autocracy in developing nations. I’ve agreed that there’s something to this charge when it comes to Zimbabwe. I don’t feel competent to say the same about Iran. But the substance to this critique strikes me as complicated.

More importantly, there’s another layer of silence that comes from feeling an echo of the same futility and despair that’s clearly affecting reformist actors in Iran or has affected them in Zimbabwe. Beyond saying for the umpteenth time that the upper echelons of state power and securocrat authority in both states are morally contemptible, destructively short-sighted, grotesque, and so on, what’s left to hope for or advocate? Every avenue of international or local action seems played out. The people in control of both states don’t appear likely to allow themselves to be tricked into letting a process of change develop so far that they can’t stop it. They don’t seem to have any interest in the long-term sustainability of their economic or social policies. They seem to have a strong enough internal organization of the state’s capacity for violence that they can’t be challenged effectively by militant or violent action from within. We’ve already seen where most kinds of external intervention lead; even strong diplomatic suasion arguably has a rebound or self-defeating effect in some cases.

Many postcolonial regimes which have organically collapsed from within have done so in many cases because they commanded states with little internal coherence or capacity for directed force, not because they were challenged by strong local social movements, international pressure, or more competent rivals intent on reorganizing and reforming the government. I can think of some important exceptions, but even a few of those seem to me to have given way over time to a recurrence of the same kinds of regimes that they originally displaced.

This is where Iran is a really different kind of case: not contemporary Iran but the beginnings of the current regime. Depressingly similar as it might appear now in its resistance to some kind of liberalization or democratic reform, the current government was the consequence of a pretty genuine bottom-up revolution which gained important traction from international pressures against the Shah’s regime. What I’m struck by, though, is how impossible that kind of successful bottom-up social upheaval against an oppressive state feels to me now, if it is limited to an alliance between urban populations and educated elites. (Which, importantly, the Iranian Revolution was not, though it incorporated those constituencies.) All around the world, it seems to me that states dominated by military or police power have learned how to resist, frustrate, suppress and isolate that kind of transformational pressure from loosely “liberal” constituencies pretty much indefinitely. The only real threat to most regimes are illiberal social and political movements: national or ethnic resistance or religious fundamentalism primarily.

I think a lot of the starry-eyed fetishization of Twitter and other new media in the case of Iran is simply about a hope that a magic technology will come along and make liberal revolution or transformation plausible where social organization has not. As we’ve seen, the technology for organizing smart mobs works for as long as a securocrat state will tolerate it working, and no further. If shutting it off and violently crushing public dissent costs such a state some kind of economic opportunity in the global system, that’s clearly a cost that these states are prepared to pay.

So all of this thinking is also why there’s silence of a kind. Getting up with a bullhorn and declaring one’s outrage slides pretty quickly into self-parody, into a public confession of impotence. Knowing that, what is there to say? I suppose one could get busy with the five-point plans and communiques and various inventories of miniscule carrots and eeny-weeny sticks, but it seems all rather futile. Or, as a lot of blogspheric hot air producers seem to prefer, one could just recycle ire and outrage into wholly domestic attempts to gain miniscule political advantage over local opponents.

Posted in Africa, Politics | 2 Comments

Gaming Roundup

Posted on June 30, 2009 by Timothy Burke

So I’m catching up after a week of household projects and hiking with family. First, some miscellaneous thoughts about digital games and virtual worlds after State of Play.

1. The theme for State of Play was “Plateau” and unlike most such conference themes, it seemed pretty descriptive of where academics, policy-makers and developers are with virtual worlds at the moment.

On one hand, they’re undeniably established as subjects of study, areas of interest for policy and law, and as a media form which some companies will continue to produce, operate and profit from.

On the other hand, all the utopians who expected virtual worlds to have a transformative impact on culture and sociality, to be the transcendent media form of the 21st Century, or to be the perfected experimental instrument that would at last permit social scientists to generate knowledge comparable to the natural sciences have mostly moved on to the next technology of desire or have tempered their expectations. Academic work on them is unmistakeably segmenting into more disciplinary or focused kinds of questions, which I think is largely a good thing and a sign of intellectual maturation.

This sense of a flattening out of expectations did sometimes manifest as a kind of gloom or resignation. When the occasional panglossian voice piped up about how exciting their organization’s presence in Second Life was going to be, there was often a kind of bemused ripple in the audience, that someone hadn’t gotten the message that they were trying to peddle yesterday’s news. It’s hard to come down to earth and just deal with virtual worlds as merely a form of entertainment, only a form of communication, another interesting flash (but no more than a flash) of particular insight into human sociality and culture in the 21st Century. It’s maybe especially hard if you’re trying to pull down some money either to develop a virtual world project or to support major research into virtual worlds. I have no such ambitions so I can kind of afford to sit back with a bemused grin as others try to refine old turns of seductive phrasing, or to cop a superior pose at the frustrations expressed by people whose genuine artistic ambitions and life’s work are heavily invested in MMOs as a form.

This is a bit of what I was getting at with my remark that the developers’ panel seemed to be “chasing their own tails”. It seems to me that a few existing virtual worlds are meaningful commercial and cultural successes within their own terms, and that’s a good enough starting place. I’m the first to complain that the form is capable of so much more even within its areas of strength, but I don’t really expect a persistent-environment MMO with 3d avatars to have the dissemination of a popular Facebook or iPhone app or the commercial success of a Top-Ten television show. Especially not in a fragmented cultural marketplace which may never again have products which are truly dominating mass-market experiences shared by most or all of the North American audience.

I have a lot of the same wish list (or hate list) as the developers, but I think it might be time to stop and ask some questions about those ambitions without sidelong glances at World of Warcraft or recapitulations of the history from MUD to now as a kind of trauma. Why don’t we have dynamic or sandbox worlds? Is it all the bad money men who don’t get it? Are we talking about the same thing when we invoke those words and ideas? If there was an unlimited budget for development, what else would cap or frustrate those ambitions: absent or embryonic technologies, limitations of existing infrastructure, expectations of players, the organization and sociology of game design itself? Or maybe there’s some conceptual flaw that’s deeper still, I dunno.

The nice thing about getting to a plateau is that it might be a good time to rest, have a picnic lunch and enjoy the scenery and reconsider whether to try and climb the cliff looming above the current plateau or to climb back down and look for another mountain.

———

On the other hand, I really enjoyed the recent issue of The Escapist that focused on frustration. This is not unique to virtual worlds, really. I keep being struck that no matter how much I like digital games of all kinds, they are just rife with pleasure-killing features and designs that really seem wholly unnecessary, that aren’t part of the challenge of a game or even just a case of “filler”. Contrary to the editor’s note for the issue, though, I wouldn’t say that these experiences are what make it all “worth it”. Instead, I think they’re a real limit condition for digital games: a limit to their audiences, a limit to their success in their own terms as a cultural form, a limit to their success as products. More than a few experiences of dropping $60.00 on a bad, aggravating cultural experience is a pretty serious disincentive to keep going. I know, books, films, and TV can also be frustrating. But digital games have turned the unnecessary assault on the audience’s patience and sanity into a nearly standard feature.

————–

By the way, last week was also a big week for industry mergers. What does it all mean? Hell if I know, but Electronic Arts is certainly an interesting company to study if you want to try and understand how the drive to consolidate, absorb and monopolize a given industry is ultimately even against the interest of the consolidating company. EA clearly has executives who understand that the company’s size and structure actively impedes it from consistently producing the best products it can or even from making consistent marketplace successes. But this is sort of old news for cultural industries in general.

It’s hard not to see changes in the management at Mythic as a sign that Warhammer Online is recognized within the company as coming up short against benchmarks for minimal acceptable success that Mark Jacobs himself announced prerelease. I wonder a bit if WAR is actually going to survive more than another year or so.

This makes me note also that elsewhere, SOE has become a curious niche with MMOs, a kind of elephant’s graveyard where wounded, underperforming or neglected games end up. Which, if they’re all making some kind of profit, makes some degree of business sense.

Going back to my first point in this post, though, you’d think this would all make it a bit easier to drive the point home with the money people in these firms that the last thing anyone needs is a clone of World of Warcraft. You can’t possibly out-WoW at release at this point, and so you’ll inevitably suffer by comparison, no matter how bored people are with WoW. When I read about something like the new Star Trek MMO and get the vague, possibly inaccurate, impression that there are going to be tank ships, healer ships, dps ships, or that the game-mechanical questions around cloaking are going to be imagined in roughly the same terms that rogue stealthing in WoW are imagined, it really depresses me. Most attractive IPs aren’t necessarily suited to be MMOs at all, and very very few are suited to just be a reskinned WoW. A Star Trek MMO might work, but only if the basic structure of the entire project is reconsidered from soup to nuts.

——-

Moderating a panel on methdology and the study of virtual worlds at State of Play, I was suddenly struck that even though I’m more inclined to the methodological practices of my anthropologist colleagues who were on that panel, the foundation of my own methodological approach to the form is really quite different, and ultimately very much unlike my work on African history. Basically, I think I’m a memoirist at heart when it comes to games and virtual worlds, more like Julian Dibbell or Jim Rossignol. I think this is also a legitimate methodological approach within academic contexts as well as outside of them, and an approach that has a kind of tense, uneasy and sometimes rivalrous relationship with ethnography. I think I might try to work up a more formal commentary on this for Terra Nova.

Posted in Games and Gaming, Popular Culture | Comments Off

The Tournament of Lunches Begins!

Posted on June 25, 2009 by Timothy Burke

We have some summer family projects: learning to ride a bike and such. One of the projects is to find some good lunches to take to school next year. So I designed a bracket-based Tournament of Lunches for this summer–I’ll try to post the tournament diagram and some photos early next week, when we have a summer-camp-dictated interruption. The competition in each bracket is decided on three eight-point rankings: “How I Feel About This Being In My Lunchbox”, “How I Feel When I Actually See It” and “How It Actually Tastes”. Rankings in the last category are worth double. (The scale was originally a seven-point one set up like the pain rankings in doctors’ offices, with frowny faces and happy faces, but my daughter insisted it needed a SUPER-HAPPY face as an imbalanced eighth ranking, just in case something was incomparably awesome.)

My seeding was totally random, e.g., as I thought of easy-to-make lunches, most of them using Trader Joe’s precooked or precut foods, I put them into brackets, though I did try to avoid doubling-up things that were too similar.

Unfortunately my daughter is already gaming things, not so much to favor things she really likes (which is the point of the whole exercise) but because she’s too tender-hearted to see something lose and because she wants to show her loyalty to what she’s learned about healthy eating when The Man aka Dad appears to be recording her preferences. I just barely bought that lentil salad defeated a salami-and-cheese medley in the first match-up yesterday, because the lentil salad was pretty good. But today rice salad tied with a pepperoni-and-cheese medley and the rice salad was decent but not really a kid’s thing. (Trader Joe’s precooked brown rice + a bit of sausage and chicken + roasted red bell pepper + fresh green beans from garden + lime vinagrette.) Unfortunately I hadn’t figured on a tie. I’m thinking a secret judge’s ranking that’s based on “how much of each lunch was actually eaten”, in which case today’s pepperoni medley won pretty handily.

Posted in Domestic Life, Food | 1 Comment

Liveblogging State of Play, Day 2, Lunch Session

Posted on June 20, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Talking about new media reporting and games.

Julian Dibbell: the hook of these stories is maybe completely done in the terms that we’ve seen so far (e.g., “this is the future! there are people with stores in Second Life!!!!” but thinks there is still a tremendous amount of fascinating stuff to say; that imagination and simulation are really important still.

Bernhard Drax, reporting from within a virtual world

Ta-Nehisi Coates. normalizing gaming, normalizing virtual worlds. Talks about how he was comfortable blogging about Michelle Obama, music groups, politics, and so on, and then he decided to add blogging about World of Warcraft–was curious and anxious about what would happen when he did. Surprised at the positive and substantive responses. Is attracted to stories that tell him something about himself, so why not talk about being a gamer, too? Great quote: “I used to wonder if when I died, I would want people to say, ‘Hey, he was a great frost mage’, but now I’m thinking that would be ok, it would be ok.” On joining a guild of academics and writers in WoW: “The prospect of not having a 14-year old tell me I was so ghey was so enticing”. The journalism question for him is this: what is it that makes the social part of virtual worlds satisfying to him?

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Posted in Games and Gaming, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | Comments Off

Liveblogging at State of Play, Day 2, Session 2

Posted on June 20, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Session on kid and tween worlds.

Joost van Dreunen. Stepping away idea of designer as author, moving towards the idea of supplying tools to players or participants. Video games as meaning-making experiences. Interested in how kid worlds/tween worlds actually make money. [ME: I think this is a really good question where there are likely to be inaccurate or misleading assumptions.] In his view, this is partly about how you extend a commercial or consumerist presence into the home if you’re a media producer or consumer-products manufacturer. Question the designers have to solve is how to give children agency over spending decisions without violating legal restrictions or antagonizing parents; prepaid cards as major technique. Movement of toymakers into this space is a really significant development, online components to offline play. Sees power law; very small number of players keep the world going, draw other players in.

Angela Tiffin, representing Children’s Advertising Review Unit, self-regulation group, trying to control advertising to children online. Early on created guidelines for gathering personal information from children, which informed later legal regulation. Issues that are key remain: gathering information, controlling disclosure by children in chat, etc. A lot of concern now rising about the kind of information used for behavioral marketing.

Betsy Book, talking about There. Q: how to manage an unplanned shift in the demographics of the game in which younger teens/tweens started appearing more and more in the game. Older and younger users tend to feel rivalrous, how to deal with that. Also problem with use of credit card instruments by children that draws adults in with some degree of alarm. But also lots of positive interactions, mentoring that spontaneously forms. Refers back to discussion of Whyville yesterday; says that There really doesn’t see itself as teaching citizenship to children, but about enforcing content standards. More concern really about branding–do you really want tweens if that drives older players away, how do you keep the space culturally mainstream?

Erin Hoffman, game designer. Lengthy resume–GoPets, Dragonrealms, Shadowbane

Designing for kids is harder than designing for adults. Columbia University project to teach nutrition to kids through massive participation game. Trying to give a game for parents to run alongside, so parents can understand more of what’s going on.

Doug Thomas. Research question: what are kids actually doing in these worlds? we don’t really know as much as we could or should. Problem: it’s very hard to study kids. Hard institutionally in particular, enormous IRB issues. Asks: how serious is it actually for kids to give out phone numbers and so on online? What are the actual risks that kids are incurring? The probabilities of risk? The power of fear in controlling what can be done in design of kid worlds, do we want to push back on fear, and how?

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