Pre-Halloween Slacking

This was gonna be brief, because I've been working on a Halloween costume, so haven't had much time for writing this week.

So I'm just gonna quickly direct you to what I found on Cracked friday, because ohmygods, everything in this article. I mean I know the point of the article is to plug their new book, which barely addresses the points raised in the article, but at least it has a good mindset.  Like, between pointing out the gaping flaws in the system, and the infuriation at making a process that should be wonderful, beautiful and empowering into a process that sucks the life out of students, its all kinds of good. Its so nice to see other people being riled up about  this kind of thing too, so I can't not share.

Anyway, I'll try to have something more substantial next week.

Have a Happy Halloween!

The ....Adventures of Walter Mitty?

Lets get literary for a this week (and a bit cinematic). Recently I saw the trailer for the new film adaptation of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" and want to talk about it. Now if you haven't heard of the original work, its a very prominent and influential short story about a unimpressive man doing errands for a nagging wife, but imagining himself as a dramatic hero in various ways. It was first published in 1939 and, perhaps closer to home, its clearly influenced things from Doug to Calvin and Hobbes to Scrubs.



Sort of the ur-escapist, daydreaming slacker.
(Pic is from the first movie version in 1947)

You can find the full text here (its only 2000 words, has aged well, and it'll only take a few minutes to read).

Actually I first heard of it years ago as a reference to Doug, which I was a big fan of growing up, when someone said he was "a young Walter Mitty" but I only finally read the actual Walter Mitty this year. I was impressed by how it very quickly and clearly painted the characters and Mitty's behavior, the transitions between fantasy and reality, and the variety of fantasies. Outside of the story though, its amazing how well it holds up today, and just how much its influenced things. In addition to the three listed, it has so many references (and feel free to point out more in comments)  and "mittyesque" is even in the dictionary.

Now why is that? What has this story touched on for years that still makes it relevant and relatable? This is an average guy, doing average things, feeling set upon by the world, but using fantasy to feel important, and even help with doing those mundane tasks (it does help him remember the puppy biscuits after all, even if he gets teased for it).

Importantly, he isn't the usual wish-fulfillment protagonist; its us wishing we were them.

That's a situation pretty much everyone has been in at some point, and arguably the mindset some people live in. Heck, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out more recent discussions of how much video games fall back on wish-fulfillment/power fantasies, for better or worse. I'm sure if were set today, Mitty could picture himself as a space marine.

I have no words.

So this is a really cool story from a themes and execution perspective. And actually its a great opportunity for a movie, because one of the tensions in making a movie is between having exciting, high stakes, over-the-top action, and having an intimate, small relatable human drama, right? Like one reason people said they liked the Avengers, was that you had big epic fights, but also small moments between characters. It tends to be hard to do both those things well, as many, many movies will tell you.



So allot focus on one or the other...

But Walter Mitty is tailormade for this. The whole point of the story is that he is an average guy dealing with mundane tasks, but in his mind hes doing big showy dramatic things that film loves, from air battles to court cases to doctoring (ok, maybe tv loves doctoring more than movies, but still).

This is a premise and hook designed  to let you tell a story of small, mundane triumphs and setbacks in a way that is big and showy and eyecatching: its easy-mode for making a drama accessible and pulling in people who don't normally care for them. Now, it is a short story, so you have to draw it out somehow, maybe a bit more plot and a bit more character development. But you have to be careful how you do it.

"Have you met us?"

Ok, so with all that  lead up, lets look at the trailer I saw. Lots of people are saying this is a great or stunning trailer and they're right. The visuals are amazing, and the current trend of telling almost the whole story of the movie in the trailer is in full force, showing his dull life, call to adventure, and shift from dreaming about the world to going out and living in it. And that is a compelling message and story.

But I think its a waste of potential.

Oh come on! We didn't give him a gun or anything!

Ok, yes, I'm sure it will be good, and the message is good and the way is plays up the wonder of nature and power to change yourself are great. One of the contenders for my favorite film is American Beauty, because I am really into stories about reflecting on your life and trying to be who you want to be, so I'm into that. And getting out of your head and out doing things is a good message, too. But not everyone can go climb the Himalayas...which makes me feel like Mitty shouldn't either. Not in real life.

Here's where I see the wasted potential: Walter Mitty's whole story, originally, is about him using fantasy to escape his kinda depressing life. He clearly wanted to be bigger and more important than being nagged by his wife, running errands, buying puppy biscuits, and generally looked down on. The movie, as shown in this trailer, is taking that as a staring point of his life, and making the story of him stopping dreaming a going out and living it. They even have allusions to him having been  an exciting photographer (or partnered with someone who became one), and now is in a boring spot (or choose to be boring while his buddy went out "to live life!").

Hollywood loves that kind of story, but they've done that story before and they could've done something much rarer here. They could've taken Mitty on a journey, but reduced the scale of his real life triumphs and setbacks, of what he turns around to something much more common and less remarkable, but still made it feel epic, and still kept him dreaming. Rather than sending the message that you should get out of your head and living life, which is not bad, but has been done before, you could have the message that fantasy is fine, but you can use those fantasies to actually be better. You, sitting there right now. There's even a kernel of this in the original story; like I said, it helps him remember the puppy biscuits. So what would it look like if we developed that to expand the story?



I know adding space battles is the obvious choice, but I'm going somewhere with this.

Ok, so new story: even if we leave out a job, and focus on home life, taking away some common dramatic stakes, and putting it squarely outside what action audiences generally care about, there is still so much you can do, and with humor and action and relatability. You can even start directly from the story, where they're going on errands, hes completely disengaged with his wife, and hes bored and made fun of. Even at that low point of his arc, with the fast paced action and shifting perspective, you can take that boring trip and  make it exciting and funny (particularly with the transitions). 

But from there you can go to a different end point; we're not aiming for Mitty not having dreams and going to the greatest places on Earth, where few can ever go, but  to him having them less, and using them to help him stay in engaged in his life, and be a better person in normal day-to-day life. We can even take the same regular errands form that first scene, and revisit it later, but redo the fantasies:

• Driving is an ambulance, rather than a plane, and hes trying to go fast while not harming the patient.
• The gloves prompt him to be a spy, readying himself while carefully driving past sentries and blending in, obeying the foreign signs to not give himself away.
• Again, the courtroom could actually be later in the same case from the court fantasy in the first scene, and again he could use it to remember something
• During his bored stretch we could either show him more engaged and less resigned, such as actually talking to people, maybe talking to people pretending to be a schmoozing millionaire at a fancy party, or if not being social, maybe hes a brilliant general planning movements while in real life planning his day or work for later. Or it could show a closer connection to his wife, painting him as lover about to be reunited.
• And this time when his wife forgets something he could've gotten it while he was waiting, and they go.

See, that way you can have a character doing mundane crap that people do everyday, (doing it twice even), and not only would it be engaging and exciting and entertaining both times, but it would even show character development and possibly be instructive. You'd of course want the real life people to react to Mitty differently too, to emphasize how hes changed; different body language responses, not making fun of him, his wife praising how better he is about little things, etc. But the point is you could take a very small scale story of personal improvement and make it a spectacle to draw in audiences; you can have the types of changes most people could actually make in their lives, and portray them in a very engaging way. In fact, portray them in the way they're used to getting all kinds of less helpful or realistic messages.



"You seem upset about something..."

Now, I'm not a film critic or literature buff, so why do I care so much about this adaptation?
Well, what I am is more of an educational designer, someone who tries to figure out how to make media or interactive systems that are fun and change the user for the better, through teaching skills or facts or mindsets. And that's why this adaptation  gets me: the version I outlined, contrasting the one they're going with, actually has  research to suggest just how helpful it can be in life.

Let me tell you about the Marshmallow Test.



Mmm, ok a film based on research almost lost me, but I'm back

The marshmallow test is a simple experiment that you may have heard of because it also produced some of the cutest videos of children to grace youtube. The way the original test works is this: you place a child in a room with a marshmallow on a plate. You tell them you're going to leave, and they can choose to eat the marshmallow, but if  they can wait until you come back without eating it, they can have 2 marshmallows. Those videos are adorable as you watch kids try everything they can to not eat that marshmallow.  But what exciting to a developmentalist is how performance on this test correlates to life success.

Bwah?

At its core, this is a task about delayed gratification; can you give up benefits now for greater benefits later.  Followups to the original marshmallow tests at Stanford found that kids who couldn't wait had lower SAT scores, higher BMI, more problems with drugs, and trouble paying attention. This makes perfect sense; If a kid has difficulty delaying gratification, or choosing long term benefits over short terms pleasure, you would expect them to have trouble doing unpleasant things (like studying) or inhibiting desires (like doing drugs). It also makes this a really exciting task to developmentalists, because its an early assessment of something that can impact so many areas over a person's life. (Which is why its also been covered by The New Yorker, Time, and Smithsonian). It even points to the importance of teaching children self control.

And that brings us back to Walter Mitty, because despite the state hes in in the short story, he might've been excellent at the marshmallow test. Let me explain: If you do versions of the test with different  time limits, or unending ones and see how long kids last, you can identify which kids are best at this task; which kids can really hold back and control themselves. You would think these kids have some kind of  "inner discipline" or "strong willpower" but when you ask them what kinds of strategies they used to not eat the marshmallow, to delay gratification, its appears something different is happening. You don't get things like "I tried really hard", you get responses like "I tried to pretend it wasn't there", "I told myself it was poison". What you get is kids using their imagination to make the task easier. Reframing the situation so its less demanding to delay gratification, to inhibit a response, to not eat the tasty, tasty marshmallow.

These kids are trying to use their imaginations, their fantasy worlds to help them achieve their real world goals. And research says the kids who are doing this, at least at this age, are fairing better later in life than those who aren't.

That is the kind of skill would be amazing to teach people, because of the potential benefits.
Conveying that kind of concept, in an engaging entertaining way, tends to be a monumental task.
But Walter Mitty, our man, seems tailormade for it.

He's just as surprised as you are.

And that's why it pains me to see him lumped in with all the "follow your dreams" stuff out there, rather than pioneering a new "use your dreams to achieve them" kind of message. Because when I say it seems like a waste, I'm not just saying I think this story and/or message would be more entertaining or unique take on the material; I'm saying I think there's a chance to try to make a piece of rich entertainment and artistry AND  maybe teach people something that could actually improve their lives.

And they're not doing that.

"What was that? I couldn't hear you over all this money and praise"

So what do you think:
Am I being too hard on Ben Stiller's new vehicle?
Is this message really needed or is there an even more interesting one I didn't think of?
Are you interested in hearing more about the marshmallow test?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

photo credit: Wikipedia, gratuitous space battles
(PS there is another marshmallow test, where teams of children tend to do better than teams of MBAs, so I hope I didn't confuse anyone, and maybe we can talk about that one another time)

I < 3 Valve

So last week I talked about the transition from identifying as a passive consumer, to a critical consumer or even creator of content, and specifically about communities supporting this shift; about how communities often improve themselves and those making this transition. Picking up from there, lets talk about what it looks like when company, a more formal, business oriented group directs its resources to encouraging that.

"Gentlemen, how do we help our customers? Yes, Johnson?"
"I don't understand sir."

If you want to see what it looks like for a company to value that transition (or something very close to it) you want to look at Valve. You know, the company behind Steam, the platform that does ~51% of the digital distribution of PC games (according to 2011 numbers)? Every time I watch a talk  by Gabe Newell, it makes me feel better about the company, its views,  and the directions its going.

Now, I said "something very close to it" earlier because Gabe is generally talking about content creation from more of an economic perspective, as a opposed to the sort cultural and intrapersonal perspectives the vlogbrothers and Jim Gee were coming from. While they talk about how it benefits someone to feel included and productive, and develop their ideas and abilities or how society benefits from more perspectives and new ideas, Gabe tends to talk about connecting creators to markets, or providing monetary incentives to become a creator to people who previously had none (for this type of work).

Its a different way of looking at the at the situation, but it makes perfect sense when you're talking from a business standpoint. It also shows why Valve is encouraging this type of capability growth; by setting itself up so it profits from market activity, its incentivized to help as many creators as possible reach as large a possible audience as possible. As opposed to the way most people think of a simplified model of a business where its incentivized to get as many people to give it as much money for its product.



"Ok, that part I understood"
"Johnson, stop being such a strawman and try to keep up."

So this sort of demonstrates how a system can be set up to where a company is monetarily encouraged to support these community effects that can be so positive, directly benefitting from them rather than it just being a nice bonus that marginally helps your specific game, product, or service.

The really interesting part of considering Valve though is considering how it got to this place and what its continued trajectory looks like, based on that past. Steam may have started as a way for Valve to distribute and verify its own games, but it grew into a convenient way to affordably buy games, lowering the barriers both in terms of availability and cost. Its one of the things Gabe talked about: connecting producers with markets they didn't have access to and making games easily widely available, regardless of what was physically available in your region.

And then there was the step of not just lowering barriers for consumers, but for creators;
making indie games more visible and available. Offering software to make games on Steam. Adding the workshop, so people can make and share pieces of games, and develop their skills.

Without even using training montages.

To the rage of Half-Life fans everywhere, now they seem more concerned with providing interesting tools and spaces for other people to make stuff than making stuff themselves. But the way they moved there from producing, and clearly have people who are still very focused on how to incentivize and influence behavior and who are interested in "creating markets" and enabling creators is what really makes them interesting to watch.

I said Gabe Newell makes me feel good about the company when he talks, but everytime they rollout something new picking apart its design and purpose is what really drives it home . If you don't think they want more creators, look at the workshop, and if you don't think they're still just as sharp on how to manipulate users, look at the trading cards and badges system. There's allot of amusing snark and/or ranting about companies doing one thing and saying another, but this post is about Valve because what they're doing and saying lines up, and what they're doing is very interesting compared to what most everyone else is doing.

Oh, another action/adventure/shooter game as a white male protagonist 
now with microtransactions? Cool, cool.
 Yeah we'll just be over here lowering barriers to entry
and enabling innovative new ideas at lower risk.

Of course if I'm going to talk about them now, I probably should address the Steam universe and Steam box. But its just continuing this trend, albeit very ambitiously. Putting steam in the living room opens up a larger audience to participate in playing games, and even contributing to them from there. But that's not the really ambitious part. Competing with consoles is kind of ambitious, creating an open platform, to enable the hardware competition and peripheral variety PCs have, is pretty ambitious, but again, not what I see as their biggest challenge.

If Valve is in the living room, with this track record, unless they screw it up first, they have to be eventually aiming to reduce barriers for other media: movies, tv, music, whatever. Eventually it'll be competing with (or working with) Youtube and Netflix and iTunes and whatever other media they can.

Yea, he shall be the lord of media distribution,
and this shall be his crown.

Now that much content under one banner is terrifying, for any group to have that much power over communications. But we have massive media empires right now, and I will be very interested to see, if Valve can get to that level, what it'll look like to have one with this creator focused, barrier breaking model driving it.



Ok, I may have gone off the rails at the end, but what do you think of Valve? Am I giving them too  much credit or vastly misreading they're direction? Can you think of are other companies that support a transition to a critical consumer or creator?
Let me know what you think in comments.

photo credit: ign

Creating creators and critics

Originally, this was going to be the Part 2 of the community post; last week's post was originally longer, but I couldn't figure out how to articulate everything by my self-imposed deadline so I split it up. A significant chunk of the followup was going to be talking about Jim Gee's thoughts on 'affinity groups'.

...but then I saw this this video (as part of my continuing effort to watch every vlogbrothers video in the archive) and now this post is going to be about Gee's more recent thoughts and how they're related.


Uh...yay?

 Ok, in order to get there, lets start off talking about "consumers" and specifically about consuming media, be that TV, movies, music, video games, comics books, book books, newspapers, what-have-you. Except for video games, people generally think of "consuming media" as a passive experience; you're reading or watching something others have made. You're really not participating or interacting with it, but just kind of absorbing it.

or at least advertisers hope you are.

This kind of view is really clear  in the language; vegging out in front of the boobtube, or the idiot box, zoning out. All this imagery of being super passive.

However, this is not the only way of 'consuming media'; you can also consume it reflectively, considering the deeper levels of meaning or context in the media. What does this symbol mean? What is the creator trying to say and how? How does this relate to other similar pieces of media?



What does this dick joke say about the environment?

Gee calls this 'being a critical consumer', and the vlogbrothers call it thinking complexly, and its a parallel theme that's very important to both of them. For the vlogbrothers, its how you start to make sense of the world, and they extend this into science, too. To them this idea is about finding some way of more deeply understanding the world, be it through literary analysis or scientific quantifying and statistics, and using it.  To find some way to help yourself better understand the world you are in, meaningfully discuss it with others, increase that understanding, and act based on it.

And that's where we come back to Gee.
If you're not familiar with James Paul Gee,
he's a professor who was trained as a linguist, then became focused the potential of video games as a medium, then started really looking at how video games teach and engage, and how people interact with them and each other around them, then wrote a book about it...

That I'm a fan of.

...and has been an influential thinker in the academic space around games since. (If that phrasing seemed odd, I'm using "academic space around games" to go general and avoid the whole serious games/educational/games for impact/games for good etc. naming issue.)

Now, that's the revised edition, because he wrote it years ago. More recently, Gee's been talking more about critical consumption and a "modding attitude". So critical consumption is similar to what we were just discussing, but from there things go slightly differently. See for Gee its not just about being able to discuss creations meaningfully, but about discussing things in the manner of a creator and from there creating things yourself as part of  larger discussions.

For example, in literature, this could look like someone reading Fahrenheit 451, discussing in classes or online the themes of how man relates to technology, and how they're expressed in the book and whether they agree or not, and eventually writing something themselves, to express their feelings and thoughts on that same topic. Or other topics that became more important to them during that journey.



Like how awesome and terrifying robot hounds can be.

Gee refers to this shift to identifying as a creator as a "modding attitude" because he was focused on games, and there you can plot a nice pregression of person who plays games, to "gamer", to modder, and perhaps from there to game creator.

Though, to be clear, modding is creating something new, the same way a short video , or essay, or parody of a song is creating something new and contributing something to larger cultural discussions of issues. You don't have to be making  full movies or games, or books to be contributing.



A single image can be enough.

And this is where I think the vlogbrothers and Gee's feelings converge; its important to be able to reflectively consume media, because if you can't do that you won't really be able to engage with the issues within or behind those media or meaningfully contribute to larger discussions. And having more people meaningfully contributing makes those discussions richer, bringing new perspectives or ideas that others hadn't thought of. And when someone engages with those discussions its also usually good for them, helping them feel capable, feel like they belong to something, and helping them be better able to deal with their lives in some way.

This was one of the things I was groping for a way to express in the community post, and cut; one of the things good communities do is support this transition. They welcoming novices,  help them develop skills of critical analysis, provide aspirational and instructive examples of higher level discourse, and create safe areas to try out new ideas and ways of expressing them. These communities enrich themselves, and enrich the people involved in them.

If in the last post I had asked "How do you make games that spawn good communities?" rather than focusing on 'positive impact', this would have been part of the definition of "good".



Not taking yourself too seriously all the time would likely have been another part.

Gee highlights facilitating this transition as something the education system needs to be doing and is currently bad at. The vlogbrothers highlight this as a reason they like youtube: because the weak barrier between creators and consumers allows for more interaction and (and this part may be more implicit) a very easy transition from one to the other.

So what do you think about the importance of shifting your identity from the audience of a message to a participant in a discourse?  Is it important? Why?
How about its importance in terms of the media we're bombarded with everyday, and being able process and contextualize it all rather than being buffeted about?

Leave your thoughts in the comments,
or if you have a story of making this kind of transition in some area, whether its how you went from watching films to making them or how it felt doing a young authors contest or science fair, leave that too. It seems that these can be some of the most interesting experiences to share or to hear about.

photo credits: yaelol.wordpress.com, hhhuuuhhh125 on deviantart, , sophiedaveyphoto.wordpress.com, semi-rad.com