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CMS News Archives
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Chris Crawford (original founder of the GDC), Prof. Henry Jenkins (MIT), and Prof. James Paul Gee (University of Wisconsin-Madison) are all confirmed speakers for the upcoming Games for Change NYC conference, to be held June 3 and 4.
Games for Change is a conference about using video games and game technology for altruistic purposes.
Read the entire article here.
Project iCue, a collaboration between the Education Arcade and NBC News, was featured in the Dave's Download blog on the US News & World Report website.
Read article
Education Arcade website
iCue website
Following a successful five-year experiment, MIT faculty voted unanimously to make Comparative Media Studies a permanent SB program at their meeting on April 16, 2008.
Read article in The Tech.
Read press release from MIT News Office.
CMS co-director Henry Jenkins is the subject of an extensive profile in the latest issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. The piece begins:
If this profile of Henry Jenkins III were a YouTube video, it would begin with footage of the influential scholar mud-wrestling his wife at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. If it were a podcast, the introduction would note that Jenkins has been called the Marshall McLuhan of the 21st century. And if this were an interactive graphic, it would trace the millions of dollars in research grants he has won from foundations, companies, and the government of Singapore.
The online version includes links to all of these things before diving into Jenkins' testimonial before Congress following the Columbine incident, his history with and ongoing engagement in fandom, the reception of his books in industry as well as academia, insight into his family life, the 'origin story' of his academic career and some possible clues as to where that career might be headed.
The piece can currently be publicly accessed here; the print version can be found on page B20 of The Chronicle of Higher Education Volume 54, Issue 3.
CMS and the MIT Media Lab were awarded $5 million to fund a Center for Future Civic Media where researchers will experiment with new technologies to empower community news. Read the Boston Globe story.
Our recent American Pro Wrestling class, taught by CMS grad student Sam Ford, and our series of Wrestling Colloquia have been in the news recently.
The Boston Globe, in "At MIT, students are credited with Smackdown," describes the class and our colloquium from March featuring Jim Ross of the WWE.
Students examine how technology has transformed wrestling into a multimedia business, and how the styles and storytelling methods have changed over the years.
...
Why study wrestling? Ford hopes students "use the class to learn more about how to critically analyze, discuss, and write about the popular culture they consume." And he's not the only one who sees the academic value of it.
MIT's student paper, The Tech, also recently posted a summary of our last colloquium featuring WWE wrestler and bestselling writer Mick Foley.
The Mick Foley colloquium is now available online as part of the CMS Colloquia Podcast.
Inside WWE, the official news site for World Wrestling Entertainment, reports that Jim Ross, announcer for WWE's Monday Night Raw, is "excited" about his chance to guest lecture at MIT for our students.
“I’m really interested and excited to see what questions these very bright men and women are going to have after having studied sports-entertainment all semester,” said JR. “You’re looking at some of the most elite college students in America and the world going to MIT.”
Read the full article.
"Good Ol' JR" Jim Ross is visiting MIT for two days and will give a public lecture as part of the CMS Colloquia Series, entitled: "This One's Gonna Be a Slobberknocker". This is also part of a series of wrestling events brought to us by CMS graduate student and lecturer Sam Ford as part of his Topics in CMS course, American Pro Wrestling.
Other public events in this series include the colloquium, The Real World’s Faker than Wrestling: Former WWE Champion and Best-Selling Author Mick Foley to take place April 12th and What's Live Got To Do With It? with Sharon Mazer (author of Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle) on April 26th.
As always, audio recordings of these colloquia will be distributed as part of the CMS Podcast.
BBC News online recently posted a summary of CMS Director Henry Jenkins' keynote speech at this year's Beyond Broadcast conference held last week at MIT and co-hosted by Comparative Media Studies (along with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Yale Information Society).
In his keynote, Jenkins utilzed examples of participatory democracy online (a key theme of the event), such as the popular Ask a Ninja series of online videos. The article summarizes Jenkins' speech:
Even in a US primary election season, where would-be presidential contenders raced to announce their candidacy in online videos, Mr Jenkins' keynote speech was an eye-opener.
The point, set out more fully in his book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, is essentially this - that politicians should not ignore the fun, frivolous side of the net because the web enthusiasms of the young: games, online video, machinima and mash-ups are the new online-tools that sooner or later will be used for political purposes.
Read the full article at BBC News.
Our Research Fair this past February 22nd was a great success! Thanks to all that came and all that participated!
Our hard work was noticed by the MIT News Office, which wrote:
CMS fetes digital games, cultural research
The students, staff and faculty of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program showed they could walk the walk and talk the talk of transformative media technology when they turned the Stata Center lobby into an attention-grabbing interior landscape on Feb. 22.
...
[O]n hand to chat and answer questions were representatives of the Convergence Culture Consortium, New Media Literacies, the Educational Arcade, Hyper Studio and other programs within CMS, itself part of MIT's literature section.
Read the full article (and view their photos). Or download the February 28, 2007 edition of MIT Tech Talk.
Our own photos of the event, plus an online version of our presentation will be featured on this site shortly.
CMS Director Henry Jenkins and Singapore-MIT International Game Lab Executive Director Philip Tan recently talked to Wired's Chris Kohler about the Game Lab and the games industry.
Jenkins on creativity in the games industry:
"Studio-based production, across all media, has had two effects: ensuring a relatively high standard of production and capping opportunities for innovation and individual expression," Jenkins says. "As the costs of games get pushed higher and higher, many wonder where fresh new ideas will come from."
Jenkins and Tan about the industry's reception of outside input from academia:
"The game industry isn't particularly fond of reading research papers from academia," but its leaders do pay attention to games, says Tan.
Jenkins says the university connection will foster greater innovation: "We see the lab as a space where we can move swiftly from pure research into compelling applications, and then partner with the games industry to bring the best ideas to market."
Read the full article.
In this recent interview with Forbes writer David Ewalt, CMS Director Henry Jenkins talks about gaming culture and its participatory nature.
Game culture, whether it's Machinima or skins or online tips, creates strong incentives for people to become active participants in the community, to create something and to give something back. Games are a beautiful illustration of where we are as a society. A participatory culture is one where there are incentives for people to participate and create, and to share with others--and where there is strong social support for each person taking their first steps into becoming a creative artist.
Read the full interview
CMS Director Henry Jenkins recently sat down for an in-depth interview with Gamasutra. Topics ranged from the public's perception of video games as art, to the recently announced Singapore MIT International Game Lab. The interview also explored the benefits of using video games as teaching tools, and the concept of media convergence. Jenkins evens hints at which games he enjoys, and why.
Read the full interview
The Futures of Entertainment Conference, (held November 17th and 18th) drew network executives, game designers, academics, and the general public, and the MIT News Office was there to cover the event. The conference was sponsored by the Comparative Media Studies Program and the Convergence Culture Consortium. Read on to find out more about what industry experts had to say about the future of televison, transmedia storytelling, and other forms of media we consume today.
Read the full atricle
In Mediasnackers podcast number 54, Jenkins discusses such topics as the current youth media climate, the growing divide between young people and educators, (or people who work with the young) his latest book, and the future of media. The podcast is approximately twelve minutes in length.
Listen to the Podcast
Business Week writes about the MacArthur Foundation's "five-year initiative to study online culture and media literacy, and its impact on modern youth" and our role within it.
The participation gap. In 2005, Henry Jenkins, the director of the Comparative Media Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received $500,000 for research that was published to coincide with the launch of the new initiative. His paper, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, examines what Jenkins calls the "participation gap."
While educators used to worry about the "digital divide"--whether all students had equal access to computers and technology--they should now consider the "participation gap", or whether students who can only use computers in the school library have enough time to develop the same media literacy and skills as peers who spend hours designing, communicating, editing, networking, and learning on their home computers.
Based on the results of his research, Jenkins' Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT will receive a further $1,800,000 to develop a media-literacy curriculum in conjunction with the Center for Urban School Improvement in Chicago.
Curriculum products will include a library of day-in-the-life videos of people who have excelled in digital media and a Remixing Melville project, in collaboration with the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Students will use video, sound, and other multimedia tools and techniques to re-imagine Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick in the context of their own lives--an innovative way to introduce classic literature.
Read the full article
CMS Director Henry Jenkins was recently profiled in the Living Arts section of the Boston Globe by staff writer Joseph Kahn. The story touches upon recent issues such as his new book, and current research as well as providing an overview of his life and career thus far.
Read the full story
CMS Director Henry Jenkins delivered the keynote speech at the Serious Games Summit on Monday October 30th, and David Ewalt of Forbes covered the event. Jenkins spoke on such topics as convergence culture, The Education Arcade and their project "Revolution," and the ramifications of the "Super Mario Brothers Generation" coming of age. Ewalt's article discusses more about the goings on at the summit, and includes excerpts from Jenkins's speech.
Read the full article
Beth Coleman, assistant professor in Comparative Media Studies and the Writing Program has assembled a group of student researchers to look at Machinima, (the art of using 3D gaming engines to produce original cinematic pieces). The MIT News Office has been following their progress.
Read the full story
The John D. and Catherine T. Mac Arthur Foundation launched it's five-year, $50 million initiative yesterday to determine how digital technologies are affecting the way our youth learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life. The launch was held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and attended by CMS Director Henry Jenkins who published the white paper; Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century . To find out more you can read about the event as reported on by Business Wire, or check out the Mac Arthur Foundation's new Digital Media and Learning site to read the paper by Jenkins.
Read the article
Mac Arthur's Digital Media and Learning Site
Director William Uricchio is quoted in this post by Stephanie Olsen on CNET's Media Blog. Also quoted is Michael Yap of the Singapore Media Development Authority, regarding the exchange of talent;
"Over the next five years, we expect some 300 of our best talents from the industry and academia to take advantage of this unique opportunity to work closely with the best research minds at MIT."
Read both the post, and the comments thus far here.
CMS Director Henry Jenkins discusses Convergence Culture, the phenomena and the book in this interview with Wisconsin Public Radio. Here, Jenkins tells Jim Fleming that "The Matrix" is a good example of what we can expect from a convergence culture - a story that is told in more than one medium. Listen in on the interview here. The Jenkins portion of the interview begins at the 22:00 mark.
MIT and the (Comparative) Media Studies program have been the subject of Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury for the past week. Director Henry Jenkins has noticed this and recently posted commentary on his blog, Confessions of an Aca/Fan
I can say that we in the Comparative Media Studies program are delighted that Ms. Doonesbury is so enthusiastic about wanting to get into our classes. We hope she makes it one of these days. We'd love to see her become a major. A growing number of frosh are arriving at MIT wanting to major in our program. We are now the largest Humanities major at MIT.
Read the full entry here.
CMS Director Henry Jenkins Blog mentioned on Slashdot.org. This post is in regards to Professor Jenkins recent post of an interview with Todd Allen entitled "Comics and Micropayments."
MIT on Comics and Micropayments
Posted by Zonk on Friday September 22, @09:27AM
from the micro-comic-entertainments dept.
Snotty Pippen writes "Henry Jenkins, Chair of MIT's Comparative Media Department, has posted 'Comics and Micropayments: An Interview with Todd Allen.' Todd Allen is a professor/consultant with a book on the business of comics. The two discuss a number of online business models and web comics, ranging from the print-to-web migrants like Girl Genius and Finder to the print-to-web download of Flying Friar; the long tail as a driving source for reprints & back-issues; and PayPal's effect on micropayments. All-in-all, a fairly comprehensive round-up of the industry."
read the article
The New York Times reports on MTV's latest online venture, Virtual Laguna Beach, "an online service in which fans of the program can immerse themselves -- or at least can immerse digitized, three-dimensional characters, called avatars, that they control -- in virtual versions of the show's familiar seaside hangouts." They turn to Henry Jenkins for context:
To design Virtual Laguna Beach and the other forthcoming 3-D online communities, MTV enlisted Makena Technologies, the creator of There.com. Henry Jenkins, a professor at M.I.T. and the author of "Convergence Culture," said such virtual communities were a natural next step for mainstream media companies seeking to deepen their connections to fans.
He said "Laguna Beach" was an interesting choice for the first venture because it had a heavily female audience and because the show itself was such a blur of real, unreal and sort of real. "It's just layer upon layer of reality and fiction," Mr. Jenkins said.
"A decade ago, published fan fiction mostly came from women in their 20s, 30s and beyond," he writes. "Today, these older writers have been joined by a generation of new contributors, who found fan fiction (while) surfing the Internet and decided to see what they could produce."
Read the article
An article in The EyeOpener Online turns to Henry Jenkins for background and context in an article on the growing realization that women constitute a significant percentage of the video-game-playing market:
Henry Jenkins, sociology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the industry has always been populated by men.
"The video game industry has always been overwhelmingly populated by men, and there is a dwindling number of women who are actually involved," he says.
"The video game industry is based on intuitive design space, which means that the game designers will come up with games, develop games that they are interested in playing. This means that since men are dominating the development field regarding video games, the games that are put on the market will cater towards mainly men," he says.
Jenkins says having more women in the industry will lead to a shift towards the conceptualization of gender-neutral games such as The Sims, rather than igniting a second boom in "girl games" of the '90s, such as Barbie's Dream World.
"The more women who are involved in the making of games, the more say and influence women will have in shaping the flow of thought and the flow of ideas for developing new games ... Electronic Arts and Maxis (maker of The Sims) are very dominant, and are improving." Jenkins says.
Read the article.
In today's New York Times, Professor Henry Jenkins weighs in on the topic of pop cosmopolitanism as it relates to the rising global popularity of Korean pop music:
Inevitably, non-Asian Americans are discovering such easily accessible foreign culture, too. Because of the "multidirectional flow of cultural goods around the world," there is a "new pop cosmopolitanism," according to Henry Jenkins, professor of comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In an essay in "Globalization" (University of California Press, 2004), Jenkins writes that "younger Americans are distinguishing themselves from their parents' culture through their consumption of Japanese anime and manga, Bollywood films and bhangra, and Hong Kong action movies."
Read the article.
In an article on the disappearing line between real and virtual (MMORPG) economies, The Boston Globe turns to Professor Henry Jenkins for a quick perspective:
As the Xbox generation spends more time online, immersed in multiplayer online games with thousands of other people, the value of their characters increases. So something that one can't touch -- a cute elf, a powerful warrior, or a butt-kicking ogre -- accumulates real-world value. Call it the world of Dungeons & Dragons and Dollars -- or, as one professor calls it, an ''illusionary economy."
''For the players, these characters are not without value," says Henry Jenkins, director of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. His upcoming book, ''Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide," touches on this virtual commerce among online game players. He compares this underground character trade to buying your way into any coveted group.
'You are buying the power to participate," he says. ''The game world is kind of like a social or country club. So it's somewhat similar to buying access to some sort of entertainment or some membership to participate instead of building it from the ground up. For the people who participate, it's not just about the fantasy of slaying dragons but about the reality of forming strong bonds with other people around the world, and that's what gives real economic value to buying these characters."
Read the article.
An editorial by Amit Khanna, chairman of Reliance Entertainment, references the public work of CMS's Convergence Culture Consortium (C3) to support his argument that "Digital Convergence is Finally Getting the Recognition It Deserves":
The past few years have seen the emergence of multiple platforms like satellite TV, broadband cable, and wireless, which are delivering all kinds of content to a plethora of devices. Convergence is no longer about what content you access through which device but how long do you engage with that content.
The Convergence Culture Consortium (C3) at the famous MIT sums it up succinctly, "There are three core concepts that are central to the way that we at C3 think about the current media landscape. Transmedia entertainment, participatory culture, and brand extension describe the same process as experienced by the creative artist, the media consumer, and the marketer."
Find out more about the Convergence Culture Consortium.
Via gamingblog.org, a reference to a now-restricted article in The Harvard Business Review where Professor Jenkins offers a few interesting quotes:
Gamers become very good at making rapid decisions based on limited information. Online games make constant demands on your attention; there are multiple problems emerging at the same time, and players get very good at making reasonable predictions and charting actions based on information as it comes in...
Collaborative play is quickly becoming dominant in this medium. Most people who play alone are just rehearsing the skills they need to participate in group activities. Users of multiplayer or alternative-reality games learn to work with other people over distance, to share knowledge, to resolve disputes quickly, and to stay on task.
Read the article.
An article on Knight-Ridder tackles the omnipresent games-and-violence debate, and looks at the possible social benefits of video gaming. Accordingly, there's an obligatory mention of CMS's Education Arcade, and a soundbite from Professor Henry Jenkins:
Video gaming, like television a half-century ago, has taken a permanent seat in the house of kid culture, especially for boys. The question no longer is whether games are worthwhile -- they're here -- but how to harness their awesome appeal to benefit coming generations.
"You've got a technology that clearly captures the attention of American young people," said Henry Jenkins, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, academics are building video games that classrooms can use to teach principles of magnetism and the history of colonial America.
Read the article.
Article from the New York Times, December 4, 2005.
(Link no longer available, but you should be able to find the article by searching at the NYT website.)
An article on SyFy Portal picks up on Professor Henry Jenkins' recent article for FLOW ("I Want My Geek TV!"), and more or less reiterates each point of the article as a quote attributed to Henry. Still... nice to get the word out!
Read the article.
Professor Henry Jenkins is among the academics quoted in The Los Angeles Times' article "At Work at PlayStations, addressing the increased prevalence of academic programs training students for positions in the video game industry:
"If you look at the games sector, what you see historically is they've hired two groups of people: programmers and graphic artists. But games are becoming a storytelling and entertainment medium. Neither of those groups have the vocabulary to talk to each other very well because they come from much different worlds," says Henry Jenkins, director of comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a program that doesn't have a formal game-design component but frequently places graduates in the industry. "We're training technologists to think like entertainers."
Jenkins is one of many university professors who draw the comparison between today's emerging interactive entertainment curriculum and the film schools that emerged in the '70s.
"The Spielbergs and Lucases, what was different about them coming through film school rather than the ranks … is they understood every part of the film production process. They weren't technical skill people but they had a conceptual framework that allowed them to bring all the pieces together.
"In the same way film schools changed Hollywood," Jenkins adds, "game studies will change the games industry."
Read the article.
The Baltimore Business Journal mentions The Education Arcade in a short article about the "Learning Games To Go" project being completed in collaboration with Maryland Public Television.
Edited (Dec 2, 2005): Another mention in The Baltimore Daily Record: read the article. They do love us in Maryland... or maybe it has something to do with the involvement of Maryland Public Television. Probably us, though.
Maryland Public Television (MPT) has announced that CMS's Education Arcade is among the key partners in their new collaborative initiative, "Learning Games To Go":
Joining MPT in this initiative are the Center for Technology in Education (CTE) and the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University, The Education Arcade at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), several Maryland school districts, cutting-edge technology developers and education experts. The group will apply the latest research and practice to "serious games," content that is entertaining but has educational goals, in order to reach today's media-savvy youth and improve the low performing levels of middle school students in math and literacy skills.
Read the press release.
Find out more about The Education Arcade.
The LA Times runs an article about machinima technology with comments from CMS's own Beth Coleman. (Requires login)
The Village Voice has an article entitled "Wrestling With The Margins."
Professor Henry Jenkins was recently the guest speaker in an Electronic Arts workshop designed to encourage and foster creative thinking within the company. Fast Company reports:
This past September, the guest speaker was Henry Jenkins, a director of the comparative media-studies program at MIT and a passionate gamer. Imagine the motion-picture industry in its infancy, when it had been around for only 25 years, he told the group. "That's where you are now," said Jenkins. "Video games will be the most important American art form for the 21st century."
The challenge for EA's game creators is figuring out how to build an industry and how to create lasting art. In a previous workshop, Jenkins talked about narrative structure, character development, and memorable moments in Homer, Shakespeare, Dickens, and Poe. "What can you put in a game that will endure?" he asked.
Over two days at the Vancouver studio, EA's creative leaders pondered these and other issues. The nature of fandom. The propensity of rule breaking and how designers might encourage this to enhance a game. And the importance of leaving space in a game for imagination, or the "meta game." Meaning that the game continues in the player's mind even when the console is switched off.
Read the full article.
"MIT Hosts Conference on Cultural Significance of Games"
By Dan Teven
The Computer and Video Games Come of Age conference opened today, giving Massachusetts Institute of Technology students the chance to hear an impressive list of guest speakers. Although the conference is free and open to the public, it was not widely publicized. About half of the approximately 450 attendees seemed to be from MIT, with a minority contingent from Boston-area game development houses like Looking Glass, Turbine, GameFX, Stainless Steel Studios, and Harmonix.
The conference is co-sponsored by the Interactive Digital Software Association and MIT’s Program in Comparative Media Studies, a first-year department that’s not to be confused with the famous Media Lab. There were no holographic game interfaces or wearable computers to be found. In fact, it felt more like a "GDC Lite", with an overly long keynote by 3DO’s Trip Hawkins but without the technical sessions or the hangover.
Trip’s big theme? Computers need to become more natural to use – and they will.
For both content and style, the speakers from academia acquitted themselves better than those from our industry. However, many respected developers have yet to speak, such as Hal Barwood, Peter Molyneux, Gabe Newell, David Perry, Bruce Shelley and Warren Spector.
The best session of the day belonged to Geoffrey Goldstein, a psychologist from the University of Utrecht. After debunking the notion that games are addictive, Goldstein explained the difference between aggression and mere aggressive play. Boys running around and yelling on the playground are engaged in aggressive play, because they don’t really mean to hurt each other. On the other hand, girls who say “let’s have a party on Friday night and not invite her” are actually the aggressive ones!
Doug Lowenstein of the IDSA talked about demographics, revenues, and piracy. Lowenstein’s best moment was his story about walking into a software store in Singapore, realizing that everything around him was pirated, and noticing a “Shoplifters will be prosecuted” sign by the register.
MIT’s Henry Jenkins introduced the conference by citing Gilbert Seldes. In the 1924 book, "The Seven Lively Arts,” Seldes argued that comics, jazz, and cinema should be taken as seriously as ballet or opera. Jenkins drew many parallels between video games and these forms of expression, and in particular, between games and cinema. (We’ve all heard the movie comparisons before, but I suppose we should be grateful, because Seldes also tagged vaudeville and musical revues as “lively arts”.)
The conference concludes today, with sessions on the Aesthetics of Game Design, Games and Education, Games as Popular Culture, Games as Interactive Storytelling, and The Future of Games.
More information and proceedings from the event can be found at http://web.mit.edu/cms/games
(With thanks to Dan Teven and Gamasutra for the article.)
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