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CMS News Archives
 The Law Librarian Blog beats us to the punch, welcoming Grant McCracken's new book Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation.
Grant is a research affiliate here at our Convergence Culture Consortium. His new book shines a light into the hungry maw left largely unfed by consumer businesses: culture. From the description:
Levi-Strauss, the jeans and apparel maker, missed out on the hip-hop trend. They didn't realize that those kids in baggy jeans represented a whole new--and lucrative--market opportunity, one they could have seen coming if they had but been paying attention to the shape of American culture.
Levi Strauss isn't alone. Too many corporations outsource their understanding of culture to trend hunters, cool watchers, marketing experts, consulting firms, and, sometimes, teenage interns. The cost to Levi-Strauss was a billion dollars. The cost to the rest of corporate America is immeasurable.
The lesson? The American corporation needs a new professional. It needs a Chief Culture Officer.
Congrats to Grant on the new title. He not only supports C3 but always manages to put together stellar panels for our annual Futures of Entertainment conferences. So grab his new book today!
Amazon -- Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation
 As ICT's become available to new groups of users, notably those from the global South, new social formations of virtual labor, race, nation, and gender are being born. And if virtual world users' claims to citizenship and sovereignty within them are to be taken seriously, so too must the question of "gray collar" or semi-legal virtual laborers and their social relations and cultural identity in these spaces. Just as labor migrants around the globe struggle to access a sense of belonging in alien territories, so too do virtual laborers, many of whom are East and South Asian, confront hostility and xenophobia in popular gaming worlds and virtual "workshops" such as World of Warcraft and Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Do these users have the right to have rights? This presentation considers the affective investments and cultural identities of these workers within the virtual worlds where they labor.
Lisa Nakamura is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program, Professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media Studies Program and Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. She is the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002) and a co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000). She has published articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication, PMLA, Cinema Journal, The Women's Review of Books, Camera Obscura, and the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. She is editing a collection with Peter Chow-White entitled Digital Race: An Anthology (Routledge, forthcoming) and is working on a new monograph on Massively Multiplayer Online Role playing games, the transnational racialized labor, and avatarial capital in a "postracial" world.
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Continue reading "Podcast: Comparative Media Insights: "Race, Rights, and Virtual Worlds: Digital Games as Spaces of Labor Migration"" »
From Nintendo's first Famicom system, Japanese consoles and videogames have played a central role in the development and expansion of the digital game industry. Players globally have consumed and enjoyed Japanese games for many reasons, and in a variety of contexts. This study examines one particular subset of videogame players, for whom the consumption of Japanese videogames in particular is of great value, in addition to their related activities consuming anime and manga from Japan. Through in-depth interviews with such players, this study investigates how transnation fandom operates in the realm of videogame culture, and how a particular group of videogames players interprets their gameplay experience in terms of a global, if hybrid, industry.
Mia Consalvo is a visiting associate professor in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. She is the author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames and is co-editor of the forthcoming Blackwell Handbook of Internet Studies.
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Continue reading "Video: Comparative Media Insights: "Western Otaku: Games Crossing Cultures"" »
Many thanks to FOE4 volunteer Kevin Lim, a doctoral student in Communication at the University of Buffalo, for these video interviews with CMS's Xiaochang Li, Sheila Seles, and William Uricchio--asking the question, "What is transmedia?"
Continue reading ""What Is Transmedia?" A great vid from Futures of Entertainment volunteer" »
 How might the critical tradition in media studies respond to the wildly proliferating media phenomena of today? In this presentation, Ken Wark starts with his own experience writing Gamer Theory as a 'networked book', mediating between Plato, Wordpress, and World of Warcraft. This was an experiment in which critical media approaches were made to confront the computer game as an historically specific form, the form perhaps of our times. It was also an attempt to create online tools for a specifically critical mode of collaborative writing, at some remove from the argumentative and consensus style of the blog and wiki respectively. A third dimension to the experiment explored the relation of the gift of writing, of time, of attention, to the commodified form of the book. What can be learned from the results of this experiment? How can media studies be both in and of the emergent media forms, and yet retain a creative and critical distance from them? It is in its difference from what it studies that media studies begins to find the intellectual resources to respond adequately to the extraordinary world of media, in all its historical and anthropological depth and breadth.
McKenzie Wark is chair of Culture & Media and associate dean of Eugene Lang College, and an associate professor of critical studies at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard UP, 2004), Gamer Theory (Harvard UP, 2007) and various other things.
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Continue reading "Podcast: Comparative Media Insights: "From Gamer Theory to Critical Practice"" »
In the Fall 2007 issue of the CMS newsletter In Medias Res, we featured a note by friend of the program Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing, praising the truly remarkable thesis projects that had just been published here at cms.mit.edu.
I once spent a mind-blowing day at [the CMS] program, meeting super-smart people seriously unpicking things like pro-wrestling fandom and understanding what makes it tick. Now there's dozens of these online -- I could read this stuff for weeks.
What's particularly impressive is how past thesis work continues to guide research here and elsewhere. The 2007 batch only includes Sam Ford's thesis "As the World Turns in a Convergence Environment," which was influential on the new Convergence Culture Consortium, as well as "Transmedia Storytelling: Business, Aesthetics and Production at the Jim Henson Company" by Geoffrey Long, who now works as a researcher and Communications Director at the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab.
MIT Comparative Media Studies -- Theses
The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab is seeking research topic proposals for its Summer 2010 game development program:
The Lab seeks researchers who are interested in seeing their mature research put into practice as a game and who are able to devote a few hours a week towards this end at the MIT lab from June 7th through August 6th.
Interns from the Boston area and from Singapore collaborate on development teams each summer to create prototype games which demonstrate concepts based on accepted research topic proposals. Each team is required to create a 5-30 minute polished gameplay experience which demonstrates or explores a research topic. In addition, the game must target the production values of commercial casual games and be distributed online.
Depending on the research topic, the games created might apply some theoretical concept about design or development (e.g. new game design methods, new management methods), use a new technology that has not been used in games before, be an implementation of a specific set of innovative game mechanics (e.g. modeling a system that has not been implemented before), be an analytical tool to study players, or be an educational game to teach a topic.
Each development team will need an expert who can explain the core research and assess whether the game is effectively exploring it. Thus, research topic proposals will be required to select a researcher to participate in the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab summer program for the entire duration of June to August. The selected researcher will be required to visit Boston for at least the first two weeks of the summer program at a minimum. Selected researchers are also expected to collaborate with GAMBIT towards publication of the finished product: be it in academic venues such as conference or journal submissions, or through the professional game industry via festival submissions, commercial development or licensing opportunities.
SUBMISSIONS
Interested persons should fill out the attached questionnaire and send it to Sara Verrilli . All researchers currently receiving funding from GAMBIT should apply in this way as well.
Priority will be given to researchers funded by GAMBIT, Singaporean researchers, and researchers at MIT.
DEADLINE: 5 February 2010.
 In an economy of informational abundance, does the traditional truth-revealing role of critical media practice still have any political relevance? Or are there other, perhaps more politically potent, ways of thinking about the liberatory possibilities of media? By considering a range of examples, from Thomas More's 16th century Utopia to 21st century political art, we will explore the possibilities and pitfalls of mediated utopias as a means of revitalizing the critical practice of communications. Of particular interest are impossible utopias, "no-places" whose unrealizability is inscribed in their depiction. For it is through the encounter with their very impossibility that conditions for new critique and new imagination may be created.
Stephen Duncombe is an Associate Professor at the Gallatin School of New York University where he teaches the history and politics of media. He is the author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Underground Culture, the editor of the Cultural Resistance Reader, and co-author of The Bobbed Haired Bandit: A True Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920's New York. He also writes on the intersection of culture and politics for a range of scholarly and popular publications, from the cerebral, The Nation, to the prurient, Playboy. Duncombe is a life-long political activist, co-founding a community based advocacy group in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and working as an organizer for the NYC chapter of an international direct action group. Currently, he is a Research Associate at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York City where he co-founded and organized "The College of Tactical Culture" and is engaged in an ongoing investigation into the efficacy of political art. He is currently working on a book on the art of propaganda during the New Deal.
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Continue reading "Podcast: Comparative Media Insights: "Art of the Impossible: Utopia, Imagination, and Critical Media Practice"" »
From Nintendo's first Famicom system, Japanese consoles and videogames have played a central role in the development and expansion of the digital game industry. Players globally have consumed and enjoyed Japanese games for many reasons, and in a variety of contexts. This study examines one particular subset of videogame players, for whom the consumption of Japanese videogames in particular is of great value, in addition to their related activities consuming anime and manga from Japan. Through in-depth interviews with such players, this study investigates how transnational fandom operates in the realm of videogame culture, and how a particular group of videogame players interprets their gameplay experience in terms of a global, if hybrid, industry.
Mia Consalvo is visiting associate professor in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. She is the author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames and is co-editor of the forthcoming Blackwell Handbook of Internet Studies.
Download Here!
Continue reading "Podcast: Comparative Media Insights: "Western Otaku: Games Crossing Cultures"" »
Via Rik Eberhardt at GAMBIT:
 GAMBIT is now hiring current MIT students for a potential 16 positions for the MIT IAP session (Jan 5 through 31).
WHEN: Friday DECEMBER 11th, 4-6pm
WHERE: NE25, 3rd Floor.
I invite you all to attend a meet and greet with the researchers at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab on FRIDAY, DECEMBER 11th, from 4pm to 6pm.
Each semester of the school year, we bring in student research assistants via MIT's UROP program along with students from some of the other regional colleges to assist our researchers with their work. This can range from helping a researcher collect data or create a tool for data collection, creating a game based on existing research, enhancing a game we already have, or creating tools or middleware for use with future game development.
Here are brief descriptions of the projects we'll be working on and the number and type of positions available on each:
Physics Deformation Library
Creation of a wrapper in C# for Unity 3D for existing research, plus a tech demo/game to prove that it works.
2 Programmers. Skills: C#, Unity
Glove/Hand Tracking Library
Creation of a wrapper in C# for Unity 3D for existing research, plus a tech demo/game to prove that it works.
2 Programmers. Skills: C#, Unity
Dream Logic Modeling Game
Creation of digital prototypes based on research into game puzzle logic and existing paper prototypes created this past summer.
2-3 Programmer/Designers. Skills: One or more of Java/Processing/Flash/Unity, writing Interactive Fiction
PAX Booth Game
Creation of an analog or digital prototype of an ARG/location-based game that will be played at PAX East in Boston in March 2010.
1 Programmer/Designer, and 1 Designer. Skills: PHP/Ruby/C#, experience in iterative design of game prototypes
Windows Mobile Sensor-based Game
Creation of a tech demo/game for the Windows Mobile platform using an existing library for accelerometer-style sensors.
2 Programmers. Skills: programming for Windows Mobile
The Sophocles Project
Design for a web site and blog for an ongoing research project.
1 Artist, 1 Web Designer/Developer. Skills: HTML, PHP, Movable Type, Illustration, Web Design
Abandon 2.0
Creation of new art assets for levels we created this Fall, and integration of them into the game. The previous version of this game can be found at http://gambit.mit.edu/abandon
1 Artist, 1 Programmer. Skills: Python, Panda3D, Illustration
Molasses
Level creation for an existing game based on the Boston Molasses Disaster.
1 Programmer, 1 Level Designer. Skills: C#, TorqueX, Unity, level design
We pay the same rate as the UROP direct funding pay rate (about $9.35/hour) or credit, and are looking for people able to work 20-30 hours per week during the IAP period as well as work 10 hours/week in the Spring semester. Please still apply if you can only work during the IAP period - some of our projects will only last during this month.
PLEASE EMAIL Rik Eberhardt (gambit-request@mit.edu) with the type of position you are interested in, a brief statement of intent why you are able to fill this position, and your availability for both the IAP (Jan 5 through Jan 31) period and the Spring (Feb 1 through May 15) period.
More information about work for the Spring period will be sent later this month.
 Emerging in the mid 20th century (when Disneyland opened its doors in 1955), the theme park created the ultimate in trompe l'oeil effects by extending the fictional world of Disney animation into the social sphere. In doing so, Disney produced a networked environment that conjured wondrous spaces that both performed for the audience and which were for performing within. Over the last two decades, Las Vegas has adopted and extended this theme park logic into the urban sphere. Travelling briefly back to the era of the movie palace, this paper will consider contemporary Las Vegas as a neo-baroque mediascape that extends the theme park's delight in performativity, theatricality and sensorial engagement into the wider social realm. Drawing on Umberto Eco's concept of 'pansemiotics', it will be argued that spectacle cities like Las Vegas operate according to the logic of a giant wunderkammer -- relying on an emblematic understanding of the meaning of objects and the interrelationship between them. In particular, this paper will analyse how this city-as-monument to entertainment and leisure culture has appropriated tropes and modes of engagement taken from pre-20th Century high culture traditions of the Church and aristocracy. But whereas palaces, theatrical spectacles, churches, and piazzas stood as monuments to the grandeur of their aristocratic patrons, in our current time, these new entertainment environments stand as monuments to corporate conglomerates and the masses who inhabit these worlds.
Angela Ndalianis is currently associate professor in cinema and cultural studies at the University of Melbourne.
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Continue reading "Podcast: Comparative Media Insights: "Viva Las Vegas: a Neo-Baroque Conception of the World"" »
 The Education Arcade game "Caduceus", created in partnership with Boston-based Fablevision and Children's Hospital Boston, will be featured on Classroom 2.0, with designers Alex Chishom and Wade Munday. Caduceus transports children to a world of science and alchemy--teaching them about the challenges of modern medicine in the process.
Learn more about Caduceus at generationcures.org and about The Education Arcade's central role in its development here at cms.mit.edu.
When: Saturday, Dec 5, 12pm EST
Access at Classroom 2.0: http://live.classroom20.com/
 Google seems omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. It also claims to be benevolent. It's no surprise that we hold the company to almost deific levels of awe and respect. But what are we really gaining and losing by inviting Google to be the lens through which we view the world? This talk will describe Siva Vaidhyanathan's own apostasy and suggest ways we might live better with Google once we see it as a mere company rather than as a force for good and enlightenment in the world.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, cultural historian and media scholar, is currently associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia.
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Continue reading "Podcast: Comparative Media Insights: "The Googlization of Everything"" »
The MIT News Office, continuing its inexorable march toward even higher-quality reportage, recently introduced a "Reporter's Notebook" feature, first-person accounts by News Office staff about the cool things they come across on campus.
First up was our grad student/Gambit Game Lab researcher Jason Begy talking to News Office writer Peter Dizikes about a game Begy helped design, "Pierre: Insanity Inspired". Dizikes helps explain Begy's and "Pierre's" interest in establishing what level of challenge or frustration players of video games will put up with:
Begy surveyed the results. "We would look at that and say, 'Well, there's certainly going to be a learning curve,'" he noted. Whether that curve charts upward, or downward in the face of frequent negative feedback, is another matter. "Pierre" is considered a difficult game.
[...]
By systematically studying how games function, GAMBIT is part of an emerging field: academic gaming studies date to the late 1990s, though scholars in the field believe they are simply looking at a new expression of an ancient social activity. "Of all the cultural forms that academics study, games are among the oldest, but they get the least attention," Begy said.
Reporter's Notebook: Game Theory -- MIT News Office
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