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

Community, nerdfighters, and games

Recently I've been watching the vlogbrothers, and by "watching" I mean I started with their first videos in 2007, have been going through their playlists, and now I'm almost done with 2011. Now, theres allot of interesting things in that many videos, but the one to talk about first is the nerdfighters themselves.



French the llama, nerdfighters are awesome!
(This pic is from the tumblr of A Film to Decrease Worldsuck)

Sorry, for those who just got confused, nerdfighters are a community that sprang up around the vlogbrothers' videos (and John's books and Hank's songs) and while they are fans, it seems inaccurate to just call them fans. They are, but they're not just getting together and geeking out about a shared interest; they're also raising money for charities, and doing other projects, and having meaningful discussion about many varied topics.

But that's actually what I wanted to talk about: what communities do once they do come together for whatever reason. What really impresses me about Nerdfighteria (the community of nerdfighters) is not just the great things they've done and continue to do, but the values they advocate and the support they provide. Its something my archive binge really highlighted, because in the early videos you can watch the role John and Hank have in shaping that.



Cunning masterminds that they are.

Nerdfighter history, oversimplified
Their channel started as Brotherhood 2.0, where they corresponded through daily vlog posts, and from the beginning there was engagement with commenters, responding to them and making spaces for them. It progressed to creating the "Foundation to Decrease Suck Levels Worldwide" (opening it up) and discussing what a nerdfighter identity meant. Eventually they started supporting these conversations with forums (named "My Pants" for great puns, then later "Your Pants" when it was remade), challenging the community to do things (which they did...and then more significantly), and then  realizing its capability, working with that community to try to make the world better.

So now, they have the events  like the annual Project for Awesome to raise money for charity, Esther-day and the This Star Won't Go Out Foundation (in honor of the nerdfighter Esther, who they lost to cancer). And John and Hank themselves keep making videos that keep people engaged, explain important issues entertainingly, and reinforce the values of the community. Values including empathy and inclusiveness and enthusiasm and initiative and critically thinking about issues or thinking about them complexly, ie not being a jerk, doing awesome things and being excited about them, and geeking out in ways that help understand the world and/or help solve problems. And yes, I'm including understanding yourself as part of the world.

And yes, I'm a big fan of those values, in case that wasn't clear.
(Side note:  this may be the first original image I've made for a post)

 

Too much awesome for one community
But ok, so the nerdfighters self-describedly made of awesome, but what about other communities? Well that brings me to Harry Potter. So lots of nerdfighters are Harry Potter fans (especially Hank), and after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, nerdfighteria teamed up with the Harry Potter Alliance (which reminds me of the Hypothalamo-Pituitary-Adrenal axis every time I abbreviate it HPA, because I've TA'd too many neuro courses) to send relief and supplies. And the HPA has ongoing efforts to increase worldwide literacy.
So that's a fan group that's doing great stuff, too.

So that got me thinking about communities, and that great Wil Wheaton quote that "It doesn't matter what you love, it matters how you love it", and how much benefit people can get and provide from communities, even if its only marginally related to why they originally came together.

And how, particularly with video games, some communities are such positive spaces and some are so toxic.

"Nice to meet you, too"

Now, if you're a game designer, you probably have your own vision for the game you're creating. But if there is any concern for its impact on the world, it seems like the kind of community its likely to attract and support should be considered. I touched on this a bit in the Minecraft post,; how the game itself is going to attract certain people and influence others in certain ways. Minecraft is such a creative space, its probably both attracting creative people who want to make things and make new tools to make things, and perhaps at the same time introducing that kind of mindset to people who hadn't encountered it much before. And you get a community sharing resources to create new things, and plethora of mods and how-to guides.

On the other side of the coin, you look at some of the more infamously "toxic" communities. To reuse some language, from a soulless business perspective these are bad for your game because it scares away new players, new paying customers, and with a soul its even worse for just being a stressful, negative space in people's lives. If the important question is "how are these people are loving these things" the answer is "in a bad way".

But the important questions I have are 1) are there video game communities that are even trying to have the kind of  positive impact nerdfighters are, and 2) how do you make games that  would attract/develop/facilitate/support such communities?

Ok, yes, technically that game has such a community,
but that's not what I meant.

 Let me know what you think in the comments.

photo credit:  gamasutra, Carnegie hall

P.S. in case anyone was concerned about my "nerd credentials", 1) I'd say stop trying to exclude people, 2) I'd point out the bit where Harry Potter reminds me of neuroscience. On my blog thats largely critical and design analysis of video games. That I write as a break from working on my dissertation, in which I'm designing and testing a video game that teaches evolutionary biology. So yeah . . . =P