Media: November 2005 Archive Page

Blogs are the latest form of electronic information that law enforcement is examining as part of investigations, and experts predict they'll become even more relevant as their popularity grows.

"We have to look at that as a new medium to solve crimes," said Cmdr. Christopher Vicino of the Pasadena, Calif., police department. "We would be able to use them, not so much as evidence, but more for investigative leads." --Catherine Donaldson-Evans --Today's Gumshoes Dust for Fingerprints, Then Read Blogs (Fox News)

Suggested by Megan Ritter.

Don't write the sentence "There has been very little research done on games" in any more papers or articles or theses and essays UNLESS you also have a full bibliography that cites those few existing works. I don't care how many authorities you cite who may have written those words quite recently. Because yes, gamestudies is a new field, and therefore does not have entire library shelves to themselves, like literary studies. However, if the amount of articles and books you have to read to be able to understand the width of the field is so small, it is pretty lazy scholarly work - sloppy craft, simply - not to have read them all. --Torill Mortensen --Please, PLEASE stop (Thinking with my fingers)

Just trying to send a little link love Torill's way.

In a matter of minutes Thursday morning, while they were in Herald Square hosting NBC's coverage of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, a balloon crashed in Times Square, injuring an 11-year-old girl and her disabled older sister.

Lauer and Couric didn't mention the mishap.

[...]

Couric and Lauer spent the last 10 minutes of the coverage reading from the sappy script, although they did note viewers at home were seeing last year's footage of the M&M's balloon, which depicts the candies in distress.

"Now, because of today's windy conditions, these characters are on video, and if we told you they were not in a panic, we'd be full of hot air," Couric joked.

Sure, you can make an argument why they shouldn't have mentioned the crash. But the fact that someone was injured in a similar incident in 1997 was enough to make the crash worthy of mention on-air.

If it was possible for NBC's cable network, MSNBC, to report the accident - before NBC's own parade coverage ended - then someone should have gotten a word to Lauer and Couric. --Richard Huff --NBC leaves Matt & Katie to twist in wind (NY Daily News)

How does it taste when your credibility melts in your mouth, not in your hands?

Awopbopaloobop, alopbamboom! --Roger Ebert --Just Friends (Roger Ebert.com)

Ebert can't seem to stay on the subject of reviewing the movie Just Friends. Pretty funny. (Via MetaFilter.)

It's become cool to dismiss movies as awful. Wherever I go, teenagers say, with chillingly casual adolescent contempt, that movies suck and cost too much ? the same stance they took about CDs when the music business went into free fall.

[...]

What's really driving the studio folks crazy is that a huge chunk of their core constituency ? young moviegoers ? has evaporated. Poof! They've scattered to the winds. Young males aren't just AWOL from movie theaters, they're also not seeing the studio's TV ads ? either because they've stopped watching TV altogether, or because they've got the TV, iPod and IM all going at the same time ? not exactly a situation in which an ad leaves much of an imprint.

[...]

Even worse, the people who run studios are living in such cocoons that they've become wildly out of touch with reality....The ultimate perk of being a studio chief is having your own screening room, which puts only more distance between you and the rabble ? ahem, your customers ? who spend $75 to take the family to a movie. --Patrick Goldstein --In a losing race with the zeitgeist (LA Times (will expire))

All of which, as it turns out, has led us to make a change for the better. We are re-assuming our identity as Pajamas Media. (Just give us a few days to sort the technical issues out.) In short, the whole experience of being caught with our pajamas down has been a bit embarrassing, but in the end, when we realized we could get our beloved name back, we were overjoyed. So a warm, hearty thanks to all of you who expressed your displeasure with our phony identity. --Charles Johnson & Roger L. Simon --Excuse us while we change back into our pajamas (OSM.org)

I've been watching this one unfold from a distance.

A company called Pajamas Media (a reference to CNN president Jonathan Klein's dismissal of the typical blogger as "a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas") to Open Source Media. Bloggers noted that this name conflicts with the name of Christopher Lyndon's "Open Source" radio show, and began tracking changes to Open Source Media's version of the name-change story.

Johnson and Simon have rightly pointed out the problems with Dan Rather's arrogant response to bloggers who pointed out flaws in the CBS coverage of Memogate, so it was rather surprising to see that it took some time for Open Source Media to admit that the company made a big mistake. (See Lyndon's description of the name problem.)

The Pajamas Media website, however, still contains material dismissing "Pajamas Media" as a temporary name that they will soon shed.

Why We'll Be Changing Our Name

When the bloggers who started this company first came together it was almost natural we would call ourselves Pajamas Media. It was a playful tip of the hat to that moment when bloggers exposed the misreporting of CBS anchor Dan Rather. At that time, an ex-executive for CBS tried to dismiss us as riffraff in "pajamas." But the bloggers were right, CBS was wrong, Rather retired (without apologizing) and the rest is history.

But as we have gone forward putting together this company, it has become clear to us that we do not wish to be defined merely as gadflies in opposition to mainstream media. We owe our readers and our colleagues something bigger, an alternative to the structures we have lived with all our lives. It's not enough to criticize. We also have to build something new. To do that, we needed a name that would allow us to grow. And that name we are in the process of deciding.

What a PR fiasco. It wasn't as if the people involved suddenly decided to change their name and picked one at random. They planned this, but didn't plan well enough.

While they responded slowly in terms of the blogging cycle, they still cleared it all up within a week, which is not so bad, in the grand scheme of things.

The most subtle and cogent analysis by a rhetorician of how The Times or CNN frames its stories has all the pertinence to a reporter or editor that a spectrographic analysis of jalapeno powder would to someone cooking chili.

This is not a function of journalistic anti-intellectualism, though there?s certainly enough of that to go around. No, it comes down to a knowledge gap ?- one in which academic media critics are often at a serious disadvantage. I mean tacit knowledge. There are, for example, things one learns from the experience of interviewing people who are clearly lying to you (or otherwise trying to make you a pawn in whatever game they are playing) that cannot be reduced to either formal propositions or methodological rules.--Scott McLemee

--Meet the Press (Inside Higher Ed)

As Riya learns who's in your pictures, it begins to auto-tag the snaps itself, quickly scanning the rest of your photos and identifying each person it recognizes. Riya also uses text recognition to read street signs and other text in photos. --Riya Eases Pain of Pile of Pix  (Wired)

From Tammany Hall, robber barons and the sinking of The Maine to Vietnam, Watergate and the Lewinsky scandal, editorial cartoonists have exalted, lambasted, praised and skewered the rich, the powerful and the foolish.

Since the history of newspapers, cartooning has been a rich and vital contribution to American political commentary.

With the advent of news on the web and new design technologies, who will carry on that tradition?

Washingtonpost.com is looking for the next star of cartoon satire - a "Herblock" for the digital age.

We're proud to announce the 2005 Washingtonpost.com "Editorial Shorts" Digital Animation Competition.

Can you use the emerging tools of digital animation to be the new voice of American satire? --Editorial Shorts: Digital Animation Competition (Washington Post)

--David Jump! (David Denninger)

A student of mine posted a clever little video that includes some simple but very cool effects.

Not much in the way of narrative or character development, but the whole thing made me smile.

See David Jump!.

Still, when asked what art forms speak the most to us, games don't rank at the top. Ranked 1 to 6, where 1 is the most emotional, the order was: movies, music, books, video/PC games, paintings/artwork, and last cars. (OK, so I have a thing for cars?)

Heavy gamers have more of a feeling for movies. Lighter and younger gamers are more moved by music.

For genres, I thought MMOs would top the list, but RPGs are the runaway winner ? by far the most emotional genre of videogames. --Hugh Bowen --Can Videogames Make You Cry? (bowenresearch.com)

This is a teaser article, advertising a full-length report. While I'm very interested in the subject, journalists should be careful of how they use this kind of study.

Was the study peer-reviewed? What was the methodology? What is the author's purpose in publishing it (and selling copies on his eponymous website)?

I'll have to look into the death of Aeries from Final Fantasy VII. Interactive fiction fans seem to place the fate of Floyd the robot (from Infocom's 1983 Planetfall) in the same category.

Teenagers are ten times more likely to use non-standard English in written exams than in 1980, using colloquial words, informal phrases and text-messaging shorthand — such as m8 for ‘mate’, 2 instead of ‘too’ and u for ‘you’.

Despite this, the two-year study found that today’s teenagers are using far more complex sentence structures, a wider vocabulary and a more accurate use of capital letters, punctuation and spelling. --Adam Fresco --Texting teenagers are proving 'more literate than ever before' (Times Online)

gr8 2 c

Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2Paul Marino: Machinima: Using Games to Change Filmmaking and Instructional Video (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Executive Director, Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences
Author of The Art of Machinima

The presentation was a brief introduction to a demonsration of clips, many of which I've seen, so it wasn't as immediately informative as I had initially expected. Still, a useful focal point for many different issues. Marino began by defining machinima as “the intersection of filmmaking, animation and interactive/game technologies,” ended by calling it “the democratization of animated filmmaking/storytelling.”

What follows are my hastily typed notes. I kind of shut my brain off and just watched the clips, so this entry will be a little thin.

Capturing live action, even if it takes place in a virtual world, is a kind of filmmaking.

Cinema + Moore’s Law = Machinima

Quake Movies – The Rangers – created “Diary of a Camper,” a silent film with text-chatting dialogue, created by capturing the actions of players in the multi-player environment. The term “Quake movie” persisted for a while, but since it was being created within different games, a new term was needed.

Term coined in 1998 by Hugh Hancock and Anthony Bailey. (Machine + cinema, with the misspelled ending being part of an e-mail communication.)

Clive Thompson, NYT, noted that machinima is not just about creating an animated movie, but also permits game players “to comment directly on the pop culture they so devotedly consume.”

Machinima Clip Screening

“Apartment Huntin’”
“Warthog Jump”
”My Trip to Liberty City” -- “Almost a travelogue, in a Woody Allen kind of way.”
(Played the clip from the beginning to the joke about not really playing baseball.) (The same author also created a great short film on a text adventure theme.)

Visionary Machinima

“Anna” – lifecycle of a wildflower.
“The Journey” -- abstract, arthouse film, medium of expression.

Dance Videos: Keep of Movin’

“Let’s Get Started”
”Shut up and Dance”

Episodic Machinima
“Popular, and to a certain extent profitable.”
Red vs. Blue – five-person team that supports themselves, a million downloads per episode, over three years.
“Strangerhood Studios,” based on Sims 2.
“Cyborg Altar Boy”

New Building Blocks: Machinima Gets Crafty

In machinima it’s hard to do drama, easy to do comedy (the reverse of Hollywood)
Half-life 2’s Faceposer.

Marino’s clip… Presented the G-man singing in a music video.
“Robes”
“A Few Good G-Men”

(As soon as I get the chance, I’ll add links to sources for all these clips.)

Marino noted that Pixar films take two or three minutes per frame to reander, but today’s machinima creators are taking advantage of the real-time rendering tools that their computers and consoles possess. We’re reaching the point where creating these films don’t take nearly as much time as it used to take. Are we in the “Age of Ubiquitous Creativity”?

The talk really didn't have much to say at all about instructional filmmaking, even though that was part of the title. Overall, I'd say the audience was impressed; a crowd of about 20 people were around the speaker at the end of the presentation -- that's generally a good sign.

Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2Sande Chen and David Michael: Roundtable -- Beyond Q & A: Assessment Methods for the Next Generation of Serious Games (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

These are my very rough notes. Some of the speakers didn't give their names, sometimes I couldn't hear their names, and sometimes they gave their names while I was furiously typing something else.

The moderators are authors of Serious Games: Games that Educate, Train, and Inform

Presenters began this roundtable by noting an opposition between “Abigail McGillicuddy,” the traditional teacher, where the buck stops, and “HAL.”

Microsoft employee: emphasized the fuzziness of knowledge as the future, as opposed to a prescriptive system that records a single correct answer. In games, knowledge is treated as binary – right and wrong. Teachers, on the other hand, recognize few absolutes, emphasizing contextualization.

Human has to be there for the time being, but technology will

Richard Carey, Pearson Education. Pre-assessment to level a student into the gameworld; in an educational context you want to place the student right away into the proper level, rather than starting them out too easy. Getting the “picky teacher” to use the software.

Does “test” and “assessment” mean the same thing to everyone here?

John Fairfield, Rosetta Stone. Think of placement rather than assessment.

I noted that testing is just one method of assessing; that assessment can be done without any kind of test.

Eric Lauber, IUP – noted that the simulation “looks more real” but that we don’t have much evidence of transferability of what’s learned in one context to a different context.

Technical consultant – “What I care about is what is this information used to sell these games,” that is, convince people that they want to use it (even if it’s given away for free). A technical consultant needs better data, “more backend.” Won’t be able to convince medical clients to use those games unless he can provide longitudinal study data that shows improvement.

David Gibson – designing simulation that helps teachers deal with kids; wants to be able to represent the intellectual growth of simulated students. Noted that Vermont went to a portfolio method for assessment. Noted Ron Stevens’ work on transference in case-based learning, doing neural network analysis on problem solving, making early predictions of the strategies students are going to use. Also referred to research on the automated SAT, so that you don’t have to keep asking them the same kind of question once you’ve determined what the student knows.

Susan McLister, editor-in-chief of a technology magazine. Noted a major challenge in education is to convince teachers that games are not evil, that there is a direct tie-in between tames and what teachers are expected to do. Embedded in a game should be measurements for higher-order learning skills.

Military speaker – one of the longer histories of using games for training. Wants to know when to use a training game, now that they have games that they believe are training. Wants confirmation that they are doing what they think they are doing, what the ROI is versus traditional methods? Improved skill level, improved long-term retention?

Owen: Referred to the “happy path” and “adaptive thinking,” noted the need to create models around not just models and skills, but also confidence.

Completion assessment vs. process assessment.

Margaret Corbit, Cornell: Games are missing a piece in which students showcase and present what they learned in their own ways. Games don’t include a way for students to express what they learned.

Pat Youngblood, Stanford: [Was distracted… missed her point.]

Kids learning in cyberspace all the time… President of the U of Washington complained that media has not filled its mission of educating the masses. The spirit of games does not involve rigid assessment… (at least not about what educators value)

Designer: Can’t find off-the-shelf products that help him do what he needs to do, and assessment is typically one of the problems. Pressure from teachers who want games tied to state curricular expectations.

Mike Gibson: Beyond the learning within the games, how is it affecting the user’s ability in the real world. (A selling point.)

Another speaker – be sensitive to demographics of the audience. Want to be thinking about what you want to assess – a skill, knowledge, cognitive ability. Simulators typically do very badly in training people. Referred to data that says simulators have negative transfer training.

Microsoft: When it comes to assessment, be careful not to think that what we define as valuable data will be adopted by the education community. Embrace whatever the standars are that the education community accepts – pointed to “No Child Left Behind” (“love it or hate it”). While teachers prefer the qualitative model, there’s a need for quantitative methods. Instead of testing against content, assess the individual user’s strategic abilities – are the individual learners improving over time. Did they use the same strategy over and over in new situations that kept leading to failure, or did they adapt their strategies based on what they learned? Useful information for the teacher to determine where a particular student is falling behind.

Cynthia Phelps, School of Information Science in Houston. Are we missing the difference between assessing our learners, and assessing the learning environment (that is, the game). Instead of just assessing how it applies to the learner, how can the game design itself be iteratively improved.

Kip Carr, Lockheed Marketing. Asked how many in the audience play videogames (plenty of hands) more than three hours a week (about a quarter of the room). Noted that gamers are being assessed all the time without knowing it.

[I then asked how many don’t play – about a quarter raised their hands, but others looked uncomfortable. A quarter is probably a low number.]

Jake Troy, doing foreign language games. Games reach people who wouldn’t ordinarily do the training, when they have the choice of watching TV or doing something else.

Robert ? Health care. About games assessing the player – what kinds of methodologies are game developers using.

Chen referred to a Gamasutra article on how games assess players, and noted that a history of cheat codes and walkthroughs.

Karen from Ideas dismissed the idea that cheating is a problem. Teachers want their students to learn, they aren’t really interested in what they do to learn.

I spoke out in favor of the idea that game that can be “cheated” – such that the learner can get around the learning task and get the goal without having learned -- isn’t a well-designed game. A game that rewards unethical behavior is a simulation to train people how not to get caught, that’s bad, but if the game is designed with reference material, and the game gives the student a motivation to consult the reference material, that harnesses the student desire to “cheat” when bored with gameplay.

Game “cheat books” – the new textbook.

Microsoft noted that learners cheat when bored. [That info could be used to spruce up boring areas of a game, or to collect information on whether the student has really internalized the concept.]

Marine Corps: Game is a tool to be used by an instructor. In a training exercise where the instructor notices a leaner is using a cheat sheet, the instructor can “lovingly tell him” not to cheat during the exercise.

I noted that the whole concept of a game is a kind of cheating, in that you get to save and reload and try again. If the point system is closely aligned with the pedagogical goals, there’s little benefit to be gained from “cheating” (in the sense of bringing a cheat sheet that says what the “right” answer is). But if a student in a game has to keep turning to a particular page, whether on a cheat sheet or in an in-game reference tool, in order to get information that the other students have internalized, then that “cheating” won’t help the leaner complete the game objectives.

A speaker from Finland noted that she designs collaborative games, in which she doesn’t consider working together to be cheating.

I noted that the whole concept of a game is a kind of cheating, in that you get to save and reload and try again. If the point system is closely aligned with the pedagogical goals, there’s little benefit to be gained from “cheating” (in the sense of bringing a cheat sheet that says what the “right” answer is). But if a student in a game has to keep turning to a particular page, whether on a cheat sheet or in an in-game reference tool, in order to get information that the other students have internalized, then that “cheating” won’t help the leaner complete the game objectives.

A series of comments on collecting data from multi-user online games. These games can generate so much data that it can be prohibitive.

Microsoft Howard: Designers should talk to teachers about what precisely they want to measure, munging the data stream and delivering information that is meaningful to teachers.

Owen: Find the “happy path” of the assessor, rather than focusing on what the learner learns. Build the assessor’s needs into the system.

Multiplayer games are good at collecting and storing data. That computer can do pre-analysis.

(Continuing...)

Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day II (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

(See also Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 1)

Keynote: David Warner
Riding the Cutting Edge of Distributed Intelligence

Sande Chen and David Michael
Beyond Q & A: Assessment Methods for the Next Generation of Serious Games

Derek Wischusen
Expanding Teachable Moments in Serious Games using AI

Paul Marinio
Machinima: Using Games to Change Filmmaking and Instructional Video

Jan Cannon-Bowers, Perry McDowell and Mark Prensky
The Role of Pedagogy and Educational Design in Serious Games