13th Annual Media Spectacle
2011-04-25 18:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York) | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
(See call for entries)

An honored tradition returns this Spring when CMS presents the thirteenth annual Media Spectacle. The event, founded by late CMS program administrator Chris Pomiecko, celebrates his love for filmmaking by showcasing the finest video projects created by MIT students, staff and faculty.
Historically, the event has received submissions of every genre from experimental to documentary to narrative works created on every conceivable platform and device. Prizes include the Chris Pomiecko Award for Best Undergraduate Entry, as well as awards for Best Non-undergraduate Entry, Animation, Experimental, Narrative, Nonfiction, and Audience Favorite. The event is judged by esteemed members of the CMS community, including Cathy Pomiecko, Chris’s sister.

The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods
2011-04-28 16:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Professor Richard Rogers, University of Amsterdam
There is an ontological distinction between the natively digital and the digitized, that is, the objects, content, devices and environments that are “born” in the new medium, as opposed to those that have “migrated” to it. Should the current methods of study change, however slightly or wholesale, given the focus on objects and content of the medium? The research program put forward here thereby engages with “virtual methods” that import standard methods from the social sciences and the humanities. That is, the distinction between the natively digital and the digitized also could apply to current research methods. What kind of Internet research may be performed with methods that have been digitized (such as online surveys and directories) vis-á-vis those that are natively digital (such as recommendation systems and folksonomy)? Second, he will propose propose that Internet research may be put to new uses, given an emphasis on natively digital methods as opposed to the digitized. Rogers will strive to shift the attention from the opportunities afforded by transforming ink into bits, and instead inquire into how research with the Internet may move beyond the study of online culture only. How to capture and analyze hyperlinks, tags, search engine results, archived Websites, and other digital objects? How may one learn from how online devices (e.g., engines and recommendation systems) make use of the objects, and how may such uses be repurposed for social and cultural research? Ultimately, he proposes a research practice that grounds claims about cultural change and societal conditions in online dynamics, introducing the term “online groundedness.” The overall aim is to rework method for Internet research, developing a novel strand of study, digital methods.
Prof. Dr. Richard Rogers holds the Chair and is full University Professor in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is Director of Govcom.org, the group responsible for the Issue Crawler and other info-political tools, and the Digital Methods Initiative, reworking method for Internet research. Among other works, Rogers is author of Information Politics on the Web (MIT Press, 2004), awarded the 2005 best book of the year by the American Society of Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T). His forthcoming book, Digital Methods, is also with MIT Press.

Race and Representation after 9/11
2011-05-11 16:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Cynthia Young
Drawing on recent U.S. television series “The Unit” and “Sleeper Cells,” Cynthia Young examines recent shifts in media representations of African American men, arguing that in the context of the “war on terror,” the image of the criminal and anti-social young black male has mutated into the image of the black patriot, at war against a new enemy of the nation, the Muslim terrorist. Exploring the figure of the black soldier, her work asks the questions: What kind of popular culture is made in the context of war? How do notions of civil rights shift in a post-Civil Rights era? And when and how are such notions mobilized in service to violent and racist conceptions of Iraqis, Arabs, and other Muslims? In his commentary, Visiting Scholar Anamik Saha will draw upon his research on popular cultural representations of South Asians and Muslims in Britain during the same period.
Cynthia Young is an Associate Professor of English and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College where she teaches courses on literature and popular culture. She received her B.A. from Columbia University and her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. Her book on U.S. Third World Leftists, Soul Power, was published by Duke University Press in 2006. She is currently working on a project that considers race, specifically blackness, after the September 11 attacks. Interrogating popular culture and political organizing sites, this project considers how the Civil Rights legacy has been hijacked by Conservatives supporting an anti-immigrant, pro-war and often white supremacist agenda.

Media in Transition 7: "Unstable Platforms: The Promise and Peril of Transition"
2011-05-13 - 2011-05-15
Call for Papers (PDF)
Has the digital age confirmed and exponentially increased the cultural instability and creative destruction that are often said to define advanced capitalism? Does living in a digital age mean we may live and die in what the novelist Thomas Pynchon has called “a ceaseless spectacle of transition? The nearly limitless range of design options and communication choices available now and in the future is both exhilarating and challenging, inciting innovation and creativity but also false starts, incompatible systems, planned obsolescence.
For this seventh Media in Transition conference we want to focus directly on our core topic – the experience of transition. Our first conference in 1999 considered this subject, of course. But that was before Facebook, iPhones, BitTorrent, IPTV and many other changes. More…

Local News in the Digital Age
2011-09-22 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Is local news a casualty of the digital age? A recent report from the Federal Communications Commission suggests that although the broad media landscape is more vibrant than ever, many state and local communities face a shortage of professional reporting, undermining journalism’s watchdog role at the local level. This Forum will assess the state of local journalism, paying special attention to the changing environment for news in New England.
Our speakers, drawn from traditional as well as online media, include Callie Crossley, host of her own talk show on WGBH; David Dahl, who oversees local news initiatives for the Boston Globe; and Adam Gaffin of the online news site Universal Hub. Dan Kennedy, a media analyst who teaches at Northeastern University, will moderate the discussion.

Graduate Program Information Session
2011-09-22 21:30, 2011-11-10 09:30 - 19:00 | CMS/W Headquarters (E15-331), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States

From Settlers to Quarriors: Breaking up the Monopoly with Modern Board Game Design
2011-09-28 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Scott Nicholson
Over the last 15 years, there has been an explosion of innovation in board game styles and mechanisms. The Settlers of Catan was the game that crossed the ocean from Germany to the U.S. in the late 1990’s and kicked off this new era in board gaming. These modern board games, or Eurogames, are more engaging experiences and based less on luck than the typical roll-and-move board game design prevalent in the 20th century.
Attendees will learn about a variety of game mechanisms through discussions of exemplar games and see how these games relate. Many of these mechanisms are appropriate for digital games as well as tabletop games, so attendees will improve their toolkit of mechanisms for their own design work.
Dr. Scott Nicholson is a visiting scholar with MIT Comparative Media Studies for the 2011-2012 academic year, working with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and The Education Arcade. He is an associate professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, where he has focused on games in libraries and game design as a pedagogical tool. He was the host of Board Games with Scott from 2005-2010 and is the designer of Tulipmania 1637, a board game published in 2009. In addition, he is the author of Everyone Plays at the Library: Creating Great Gaming Experiences for All Ages, published in 2010 by Information Today.

Marks of Materiality in Digital Bodies
2011-09-29 17:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Hye Jean Chung
Digital technology is increasingly utilized in film production to achieve the technical and imaginative compositing of live-action and computer-generated imagery. Hye Jean Chung’s talk will explore how digital effects are not only used to mediate the real but to replace or enhance human capabilities via cyborgian hybrids. When bodies become digitized into pixelated formats, does this effectively incarnate physicality in ways unforeseen? How do nationalist desires and transnational aspirations intersect in computer-generated bodies of imaginary entities? What is lost when a digital aesthetics that accentuates seamlessness, transcendence and transmutation translates into a naïve political rhetoric that elides the material practices of labor in film production pipelines? Even though computer-generated characters are often described as de-materialized because they are simulated images of digital bodies and virtual camera movements, they can also be regarded as material incarnations of visual and sonic traces that link them to corporeal bodies and territorial concerns. This talk will examine how layered traces of national bodies become re-animated and re-corporealized along the film production pipeline through the multiple bodies of actors, voice actors, stunt actors, movement coordinators, body doubles, and animators.
Hye Jean Chung is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Media Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is working on a book project that analyzes the globally dispersed and digitally networked workforce of film production pipelines, and its relation to the fictional spaces, computer-generated imagery and digital aesthetics of contemporary cinema. She received her Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her primary research interests include transnational cinema, cross-border mobility, production studies, digital visual effects and animation, and East Asian cinema. Her work has been published in journals such as Spectator and Contemporaneity, and in the anthology Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (Routledge, 2009), edited by Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker. Other essays will soon appear in forthcoming issues of Cinema Journal and The Velvet Light Trap. She has recently co-edited and contributed to a themed issue of Media Fields Journal on the intersection of media, labor, and mobility. In addition to her scholarly endeavors, Chung has worked as a journalist, and published translations of literary works from Korean into English and vice versa.

Online Information Session
2011-10-06 08:00 - 10:00, 2011-11-21 02:00 - 16:00 | cms.mit.edu

Federico Casalegno: "Designing Connections"
2011-10-06 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Federico Casalegno
By providing a critical description of existing technologies and projects related to the use of information and communication technologies to enhance social connectivity, this talk will illustrate innovative ways to design creative new media and digital interactions to foster connections between people, information, and places.
Federico Casalegno, Ph.D., is the Director of the MIT Mobile Experience Lab and Associate Director of the MIT Design Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 2008, he is the director of the Green Home Alliance between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Italy. He is adjunct full professor at IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy.
A social scientist with an interest in the impact of networked digital technologies in human behavior and society, Casalegno both teaches and leads advanced research at MIT, and design interactive media to foster connections between people, information and physical places using cutting-edge information technology.

Revision, Culture, and the Machine: How Digital Makes Us Human
2011-10-13 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
John BryantHofstra University
In revising their own texts, or other people’s texts, writers erase the past, remodel it, or reinvent it. They create versions of themselves, and those versions are recorded in the textual identities they create through revision. By studying revision, we are able to see not only how a single writer evolves but also how a culture insists upon certain evolutions, with or without the writer’s consent.
Therefore, the dynamics of revision can take us to the heart of identity formation both in its expressive and repressive strains. What compels a culture to rewrite its texts? How do we track revision in order to “see” or rather “give witness to” revisionary processes? In addressing these problems, digital scholarship can offer far more access to the fluid texts that expose the dynamics of revision and help us confront the necessity of revision in our culture.
John Bryant will draw upon examples from revision studies, adaptation, and translation in order to highlight the elements of creativity, appropriation, and cultural difference that are at stake in dealing with the ethics and editing of revision. Along the way, he will demonstrate TextLab, the Melville Electronic Library’s revision editing tool, and discuss the ethical as well as editorial dimensions of other imagined tools, such as Melville Remix and How Billy [Budd] Grew.
Bryant is Professor of English at Hofstra University and received his BA. MA, and PhD from the University of Chicago. He has written on Melville, related writers of the nineteenth-century, and textual scholarship. He is also editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. His recent book, Melville Unfolding: Sexuality, Politics, and the Versions of Typee (Michigan 2008), is based on his online fluid-text edition Herman Melville’s Typee. He is currently working on a critical biography, Herman Melville: A Half-Known Life (Wiley) and the NEH-funded Melville Electronic Library (MEL), an online critical archive and “We the People” project.

Sandra Braman: "Frames, Fractures, and Skins: Internet Design as Social Policy"
2011-10-25 12:00 - 13:30 | MIT Building E51, Room 275, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Communications Forum and the Program in Science, Technology, and Society present a lunch-time talk with MIT Press author and Information Policy book series editor Sandra Braman (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee)
Sandra Braman
Those responsible for technical design of the Internet have found they must think through a number of social policy issues along the way, from those we might expect (privacy, property rights, and security) to those that may be more surprising (environmental problems, ensuring access in rural areas, and the socio-cultural impact of network use). In doing so they make and analyze policy, develop formal decision-making processes and governance entities, and discuss political, social, and communication theory. Positions on policy issues were framed by conceptualizations of the nature of the network, goals to be served by the network, users and uses of the network, early identification of specific legal and policy problems that needed to be addressed, and the design criteria that served as policy principles as they were developed during the early years of the design process. Based on a discourse analysis of the technical document series that records the history of Internet design decision-making as it was launched by issuance of the first DARPA contract in 1969, this presentation examines such policy fundamentals as they developed during the first decade of the network process and traces the consequences of reliance upon those frames as the network continued to develop and change over time.
Bring lunch if you’d like. Coffee and drinks served.

Marina Bers, "The Design of Digital Experiences for Positive Youth Development"
2011-11-03 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Marina Bers
This talk will focus on digital spaces to support positive youth development.
As the design of our digital landscape is increasingly guided by commercial purposes and not by developmental concerns, there is a sense of urgency for developing strategies and educational programs that promote positive development by taking into consideration the children’s social, emotional, cognitive, physical, civic and spiritual needs. But we should also consider the unique design features of each technology and the practices and policies that shape different interactions in the digital landscape. Although this talk will focus on new technologies, it is inspired by an old question: “How should we live?” This talk will present an approach to help children gain the technological literacies of the 21st century while developing a sense of identity, values and purpose. Too often youth’s experiences with technology are framed in negative terms. This talk acknowledges problems and risks, and takes an interventionist perspective. Based on over a decade and a half of research, this talk provides a theoretical framework for guiding the implementation of experiences that take advantage of new technologies to support learning and personal development, as well as examples from concrete experiences. These engage children in playful learning by supporting digital content creation, creativity, choices of conduct, communication, collaboration and community building. These are the six C’s proposed by the Positive Technological Development framework. They can guide the design and the evaluation of digital experiences from early childhood to adolescence, and offer a possible path to help children out of the playpens into the playgrounds of this technological era.
Marina Umaschi Bers, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development and the Computer Science Department at Tufts University. She heads the interdisciplinary Developmental Technologies research group. Her research involves the design and study of innovative learning technologies to promote positive youth development. Dr. Bers received prestigious awards such as the 2005 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), a five year National Science Foundation Young Investigator’s Career Award and the American Educational Research Association’s Jan Hawkins Award. Over the past decade and a half, Dr. Bers has conceived, designed and evaluated diverse technological tools ranging from robotics to virtual worlds in after-school programs, museums, hospitals, and schools both in the U.S. and abroad. Dr. Bers has received several NSF grants and is active in publishing her research in academic journals. Her book Blocks to Robots: Learning with Technology in the Early Childhood Classroom was published in 2008 by Teacher’s College Press. Most recently, Dr. Bers wrote The Design of Digital Experiences for Positive Youth Development: Out of the playpen into the playground, to be published by Oxford University in early 2012. Dr. Bers is from Argentina. In 1994 she came to the U.S. and received a Master’s degree in Educational Media from Boston University and a Master of Science and Ph.D. from the MIT Media Laboratory.
More on Dr. Bers

Cities and the Future of Entertainment
2011-11-10 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
As a prologue to the Futures of Entertainment conference, this Forum will focus on the emergence of powerful new production cultures in such cities as Mumbai, Shanghai, and Rio de Janeiro. What do these developments portend for the international flow of media content? How does the nature of these cities shape the entertainment industries they are fostering? At the same time, new means of media production and circulation now permit individuals to produce content from suburban or rural areas. How do these apparently opposed trends co-exist? What is their likely impact on audiences and on the international media landscape?
Speakers include Sérgio Sá Leitão, president of RioFilme; 2005 CMS graduate Parmesh Shahani, now at the University of Pennsylvania and of Godrej India Culture Club — and who previously worked for Mahindra & Mahindra, one of India’s largest business conglomerates; and Ernest James Wilson III, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California.
The Forum will be moderated by Mauricio Mota, a co-founder and Chief Storytelling Officer of the Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Co.

Mimi Ito, "Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World"
2011-11-16 17:30 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Mimi Ito
In recent years, otaku culture has emerged as one of Japan’s major cultural exports and as a genuinely transnational phenomenon. In this talk, Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at UC Irvine, discusses how this once marginalized popular culture has come to play a major role in Japan’s identity at home and abroad. In the American context, the word otaku is best translated as “geek”—an ardent fan with highly specialized knowledge and interests. But it is associated especially with fans of specific Japan-based cultural genres, including anime, manga, and video games. Most important of all is the way otaku culture represents a newly participatory fan culture in which fans not only organize around niche interests but produce and distribute their own media content. How did this once stigmatized Japanese youth culture create its own alternative markets and cultural products such as fan fiction, comics, costumes, and remixes, becoming a major international force that can challenge the dominance of commercial media? By exploring the rich variety of otaku culture from multiple perspectives, Prof. Ito will provide fascinating insights into the present and future of cultural production and distribution in the digital age.
Her web site is at itofisher.com/mito.
Co-hosted with the MIT Cool Japan Research Project.

Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World
2011-11-16 17:30 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States

The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America
2011-12-08 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Fred Turner
In 1955, the Museum of Modern Art mounted one of the most widely seen – and widely excoriated – photography exhibitions of all time, The Family of Man. For the last forty years, critics have decried the show as a model of the psychological and political repression of cold war America. This talk from Fred Turner challenges that view. It shows how the immersive, multi-image aesthetics of the exhibition emerged not from the cold war, but from the World War II fight against fascism. It then demonstrates that The Family of Man aimed to liberate the senses of visitors and especially, to enable them to embrace racial, sexual and cultural diversity – even as it enlisted their perceptual faculties in new modes of collective self-management. For these reasons, the talk concludes, the exhibition became an influential prototype of the immersive, multi-media environments of the 1960s – and of our own multiply mediated social world today.

Creative Industries, Micro-productivity and Social Learning: A Cultural Science Approach to Cultural and Media Studies
2011-12-13 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
John Hartley
“To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.”
–Walt Whitman
This paper outlines recent developments in the field of cultural and media studies, including an account of changes in the economy, culture and technology, and consequent initiatives in educational provision for the creative industries. It goes on to outline the case for a new approach to the media and culture, based on evolutionary and complexity studies, in which the comparative media environment is recast in terms of ‘micro-productivity’ (user-created content) and ‘social learning’ (networked knowledge).
John Hartley is an educator, author, researcher and commentator on the history and cultural impact of television, journalism, popular media and creative industries.

Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work
2011-12-19 14:00 - 16:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Anne Balsamo
In her transmedia project, Designing Culture, Anne Balsamo investigates the way in which culture influences the process of technological innovation. Drawing on her experiences working as part of collaborative research-design teams that combine art/science/design/engineering, she will describe her new research on public interactives and the infrastructures of public intimacy.
Anne Balsamo’s work focuses on the relationship between the culture and technology. This focus informs her practice as a scholar, researcher, new media designer and entrepreneur. She is currently a Professor of Interactive Media in the School of Cinematic Arts, and of Communication in the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. From 2004-2007, she served as the Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy.
designingculture.org

Before Fox News: Right-Wing Broadcasting, Cold War America, and the Conservative Movement
2011-12-20 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Heather Hendershot
In the Cold War years, there was a tremendous surge in right-wing broadcasting in America. Hendershot explains how radio and TV extremists feigned a “balanced” presentation of their ideas in the 1950s; in the 60s, those same broadcasters switched to an overtly right-wing line. Ultraconservative broadcasting was eventually shut down by the IRS, citizen activists, and the FCC. The Fairness Doctrine was the most powerful tool used against the extremists, and, thus, right-wing broadcasting was reborn when Reagan suspended the doctrine in 1987, enabling the rise of Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News shortly thereafter. Hendershot’s work thus provides useful context for understanding not only the history of the conservative movement but also the contemporary landscape.
Heather Hendershot’s research centers on regulation, censorship, FCC policy, and conservative media and political movements. She is the editor of Nickelodeon Nation: The History, Politics and Economics of America’s Only TV Channel for Kids and the author of Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation before the V-Chip, Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture, and What’s Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest. She is also editor of Cinema Journal, the official publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Hacker Movies!
2012-01-16 - 2012-01-20 | MIT Building E15, Room 344, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
No enrollment limit, no advance sign up
Participants welcome at individual sessions (series)
Since the 1980’s, hackers have been a favorite subject of Hollywood and television. In this film series, we’ll be watching some classic (and not so classic) examples from the genre, looking at how the depiction of hacker characters has changed over time. After the screenings, we’ll adjourn for an informal discussion about how these different perspectives reflect changes in how hackers are viewed by mainstream society, and connections between popular culture depictions of hackers and federal computer crime statutes and prosecutions. Also featured: popcorn! A collection will be taken up for pizza when people are hungry. Come see the movies you like, and stay as long as you like.
Contact: Molly Sauter, (267) 337-3861, msauter@MIT.EDU
The Wunderkids
War Games (1983)
Hackers (1995)
Mon Jan 16, 06-10:00pm, E15-344
The Old Guard
Sneakers (1992)
Swordfish (2001)
Tue Jan 17, 06-10:00pm, E15-344
The Big Bad
Take Down (2000)
Live Free or Die Hard (2007)
Thu Jan 19, 06-10:00pm, E15-344
Not All White Dudes After All
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) (Swedish with English subtitles)
Cowboy Bebop, “Jamming with Edward” (1998) (Japanese with English subtitles)
Leverage, episode to be announced
Fri Jan 20, 06-10:00pm, E15-344

Introduction to Knitting
2012-01-17 - 2012-01-20 | MIT Building E15, Room 320, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Tue Jan 17, 02-05:00pm, E15-320
Wed Jan 18, Thu Jan 19, Fri Jan 20, 03-05:00pm, E15-320
No limit but advance sign up required (see contact below)
Participants welcome at individual sessions (series)
Start a hat and keep warm in January! The basic knitting stitches will be taught during the mandatory first session (Tuesday January 17). The other three sessions are completely optional; I will be available to help. If you already knit, feel free to join us (but please bring your own materials). Materials will be provided for the first 15 people to sign up by Dec 31.
Contact: Ayse Gursoy, agursoy@MIT.EDU

Konstantin Mitgutsch: "Purposeful Games: Research & Design"
2012-01-24 12:00 - 13:30 | Comparative Media Studies: MIT Building E15, Room 335, 20 Ames St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Konstantin Mitgutsch
In the last few years a new trend of designing video games intended to fulfill a serious purpose through impacting the players in real life contexts has emerged. These games claim to raise awareness about social and political issues such as inequity, injustice, poverty, racism, sexism, exploitation, and oppression. Their intent is to reach a specific purpose beyond pure entertainment. But what are the specific attributes of purposeful games and how can they be researched? Which game design challenges arise and how are they addressed? How do players make meaning of their game play experiences in general? And what is the future of purposeful games research?
In this talk three perspectives of Konstantin Mitgutsch’s recent research on purposeful games are outlined: To begin, insights from a recent study on meaningful experiences in players’ lives are examined and the research method of playographies is discussed. In the second part, a research-based game design project on subversive game design and recursive learning is presented and the background of the game Afterland is highlighted. Finally, the narrative of serious games and the design of purposeful games are discussed. On this basis, recent research results will be explored and future challenges for game design and purposeful games research will be outlined.
Konstantin Mitgutsch is a post-doctoral researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and a Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna. In 2010 he was a Max Kade Fellow at the Education Arcade at the Program of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. He worked at the University of Vienna for several years and published books in the field of game studies and education. Since 2007 he organizes and chairs the annual Vienna Games Conference FROG and is on the expert council of the Pan European Game Information (PEGI).

Alternate Reality Game (ARG) Creation Workshop
2012-01-30 - 2012-02-03
Mon Jan 30, 09am-01:00pm, 4-145
Tue Jan 31, Wed Feb 1, 10-11:00am, 4-145
Thu Feb 2, 10-11:00am, 4-265
Fri Feb 3, 10am-01:00pm, E14-633
Enrollment limited: advance sign up required (see contact below)
Signup by: 25-Jan-2012
Limited to 30 participants.
Participants requested to attend all sessions (non-series)
An Alternate Reality Game (ARG) is an activity where players enter a fictional world, discovering more and more of a hidden story, characters, and challenges as they move through the game. During this workshop, groups of students will develop an ARG for the MIT Libraries to use as an orientation activity. On Monday, we will talk about ARGs and present some basic ideas, and the constraints and resources for the game will be presented. Students will be working on their own throughout the week to plan out the ARG, and there will be a time each day for the class to meet and groups to present on their progress and get ideas. On Friday, each group will present their ARGs to each other, library staff, and other MIT faculty. By the end of the workshop, participants will understand what an ARG is, will have created the structure for an ARG, and will also know more about key resources in the library.
The focus in this workshop is on the game design and not the programming of game software, so no programming expertise is required. The final product will be a paper-based plan and prototype that may be accompanied by digital media as a demonstration.
Contact: Scott Nicholson (Please register at link below)
Cosponsor: MIT Libraries

Professional Play and the E-sports Industry
2012-01-30 12:00 | Comparative Media Studies: MIT Building E15, Room 335, 20 Ames St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Photo by Bryce Vickmark
The rise of e-sports signals a development in computer gaming well worth paying attention to. Not only are we witnessing the emergence and refinement of elite play in formalized competitive environments, but the growth of an industry around it — complete with team owners, league organizers, broadcasters, and corporate sponsors. Based on extensive qualitative research, this talk will explore the nature of professional computer game play as embodied, technical, and social practice. It will then situate these player performances within a broader context of various institutional actors that are also shaping how high-end competition is developing. In particular, it will look at issues around the ownership of e-sports playing fields, and the status of player action within them.
T.L. Taylor is Associate Professor in the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen. She has been working in the field of internet and multi-user studies for over fifteen years and has published on topics such as play and experience in online worlds, values in design, intellectual property, co-creative practices, game software modification, avatars and online embodiment, gender and gaming, pervasive gaming, and e-sports. As a qualitative sociologist, her research looks at the socio-cultural aspects of network life and play. Her book Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (MIT Press, 2006) presented an ethnographic study of a popular massively multiplayer online game and her new book, Raising the Stakes: E-sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming (MIT Press, forthcoming March 2012) will be the first published scholarly monograph looking extensively at the rising phenomenon of high-end competitive computer game play. She is also a co-author (along with Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi, and Celia Pearce) on the soon to be published Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method (Princeton University Press, forthcoming summer 2012). Her website (including copies of many of her articles) can be found at tltaylor.com.

Contemporary Network Television News Reporting About Latinos: Successes, Failures, and a Range of Proposals to Correct Its Limitations
2012-02-08 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Otto Santa Anna
Otto Santa Anna presents findings from his forthcoming book, Juan in a Hundred: Faces and Stories of Latinos on the Network News (Texas). In it he elaborates standard cognitive metaphor analysis (as is used for printed texts), blending cognitive science with humanist scholarship, to attempt to capture the full semiotic range of televised reporting. His review of a full year of contemporary network news stories about Latinos reveals both the high production values and journalistic limitations of network reporting. This critical semiotic analysis offers an explanation about how news viewers construct partial understandings about Latinos from the news stories they watch. At the end of this talk he offers a range of recommendations, from modest to radical, to address these limitations.
Otto Santa Ana, UCLA Associate Professor, received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from University of Pennsylvania. Santa Ana

Performing Videogame Narratives in Space: Indexical Storytelling
2012-02-10 10:30 - 11:30 | Comparative Media Studies: MIT Building E15, Room 335, 20 Ames St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Clara Fernández-Vara
Videogames are performance activities, like theatre, sports, rituals or dance. The presentation will draw comparisons and contrasts with theatre to understand how videogames can incorporate narratives as part of the performance: games give cues to the player, who has to figure out the script of the story. How can these cues contribute to the narrative of the game? Focusing on the design of the space, and how it provides opportunities for action, provides some of the answers. The novel concept of indexical storytelling describes a series of strategies that use environmental design to help the player form the narrative script of a game. The game gives indications to the player to interpret, carry out, or even react against. These strategies help understand how videogames tell stories, create narrative opportunities, and open up new avenues for innovation.
Clara Fernández-Vara is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. She is particularly interested in applying methods from textual analysis and performance studies to the study of video games and cross-media artifacts. Her work concentrates on adventure games, as well as the integration of stories in simulated environments through game play. Her goal as a researcher is to bridge disciplines – humanities and sciences, theory and practice – in order to find ways to innovate and open new ground in video games studies and design.
Clara holds a Ph.D. in Digital Media from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She earned a BA in English Studies by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and was awarded a fellowship from La Caixa Foundation to pursue a Masters in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Clara has presented her work at various international academic conferences, such as DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association), Foundations of Digital Games and Future Play. She has also been a speaker at the Game Developer’s Conference, one of the main video game industry gatherings worldwide. She teaches courses on videogame theory and game writing at MIT, and has worked on two experimental adventure games as part of her research, Rosemary (2009), Symon (2010) and Stranded in Singapore (2011).
