Gaming. The Battle for our future. (Cue dramatice thunder)

I'm torn.  I've watched Jane McGonagal's lecture on how Gaming can save our future, on how it can make us better people, and I've seen Seth Priebatsch's lecture on the way we'll be creating a level of gaming directly on top of our culture over the next few years.  I really love this idea, because, you know, reality is kind of boring as hell.  Gaming has the potential to create an augmented reality, a hypereality lumped on top of our own that can, and indeed is, exciting and may make us better human beings.

Pictured:  Reality.

The problem I have is this, and it shows in Priebatsch's lecture a little, but it is completely ignored in McGonagal's: that games are a great way to make money.  Off of you.  While you're playing.  It costs 15 bucks a month to keep a WoW account, and in 2008 they had 10 Million subscribers.   10 million people they have to keep playing.  10 Million people they need to keep playing in order to continue to sleep on pillows made of money.  Money they can use to buy cocaine, and possibly hookers.  So in to fund their hypothetical cocaine addictions, they turn to sneaky, underhanded ways to keep you playing.

All businesses, once they get to be too big and profitable, will eventually start using less than reputable techniques to control your money, but if this business is going to be built on top of the very fabric of reality, then they will, in effect, control your entire life.

As Spike Lee once said, "if you can control the media, you control the country" (or something very much to that effect--google it), so if this new media will be our entire reality, what kind of ethics can we expect from the companies controlling our interactive media?

The Media Narrative and Culture

This isn't a new Idea.  I personally like to hear people who are funnier than I am talk about it.  The idea is that media, any media, controls us by presenting news as a story, and that story is all we're going to hear about.  Ever.  Oh, yeah, and this.

I think I can present this argument in the study of a single person, namely, John Singleton.

This dude.  As seen in an expertly taken picture by Bobak Ha'Eri.

John Singleton is a director.  And he's a pretty good one, or he was, I guess.  The point is that he made two movies in the early nineties called Boyz n the Hood and Higher Learning.  I submit that these movies as evidence for the danger of the single story.

Boyz is an awesome movie.  Singleton takes time to create characters and give each of them specific desires and motives, and each is different (Except for in the first half, when he's just doing Stand by Me).  The point is that I come away from that movie not feeling like I understand the culture of urban LA because its so complex.  This complexity is a mixture of poverty, social pressures, and competing personalities.  It seems real because Its taken from life, and is subtle and honestly crafted after Singleton's own experiences.

However, when Singleton tried to reclaim that same feeling with Higher Learning a few years later. Here Singleton actively drafted from stereotypes and crammed them together like a toddler playing with brown Scultpty clay and cat poop.  All the white people are Nazis, or Lesbians.  Last time I checked, I really didn't identify with either.  He's got THE Black athlete and THE Black stoner, so kudos for simplifying your own race, John.

No cowboys?  huh.  What about a pirate?  Where's their representation?

The movie, then comes up short.  Its not believable.  I don't know if its because of the blatant mixing of bad characters or the blatant mixing of stupid stereotypes of different ethnicities, but it didn't work.

Why, God? Why?

I think its because we, as culturally biased people, don't understand one another.  I know, I know, its simplistic, but I think its true.  Worst of all, we think we do.

Maybe someday we can all back up, look at the world, and collectively shrug.  And then the golden age of World peace can begin.



Cowboy Photo by Matthew Trump copyright 2004.  For funnier raging at the media visit Fatboy Roberts' Blog here.

Creativity and School

I recently watched Tim Brown's Lecture on creativity in children at play, as well as Sir Ken Robinson's Lecture on the idea of schools killing creativity.  Both of these short presentations left me with a slight sinking feeling in my gut, which I quickly dismissed as general crippling fear of the future (Due to my unwarranted and unearned crotchetiness), but it led me down a a very honest sort of thought process.

Me, circa 1995.  Was anyone ever so young and naive?   (Photo by M@rg.  I was surprised to see me on Wikimedia Commons, too.)

 A lot of the criticism in this area (and I hear a whole lot of it, being an education student), comes from bashing the very idea of curriculum.  And also teachers.  Theorists really hate teachers.

And so, presumably, do cartoonists.

Now I understand why people hate both of these ideas.  My parish priest once told me that when he was in college, those who couldn't hack it in the major programs would default into an education program.  I've had some apathetic teachers, sure, but for every terrible teacher, I had at least one (maybe one point five) teachers who were caring, and even encouraging.  Maybe I was lucky, but I'm not ready to write off America's Teachers just yet.
So is it Curriculum that's to blame?  I'm not ready to say that yet either.  Our standards are their to prepare students.  These are good standards, they make good, or at least proficient humans.  So if we have good teachers and good curriculum, what's the problem?

I think it's fear of failure.

And I think that because we want our students to be creative, but when they try something original, and it doesn't conform to the rubric or grading scale or whatever schools use, then those students get Bs.  If they do it well.  Or they fail.  We don't grade on creativity.  We're involuntarily discouraging it.