Not an ARG but great fun anyway!

So the mystery has now been solved.

An Ebay seller from Guam who specializes in replica Indiana Jones Props mailed this journal to a buyer in Italy. But the smaller package fell out!

Not knowing this, the USPS inserted the correct zip code, for the package's apparent destination in Chicago. (Let me add here that the handwritten zip code was one of the things noticed as an oddity by the ever vigilant ARG enthusiasts at the Unfiction Forum).

The Uchicago College Admissions page posted an image of the letter from the United States Postal Service, explaining that the smaller package, that had fallen out, turned up in their lost and found in Honolulu. From here they sent it on to our dear Henry Walton Jones, Jr (better known as Indy).

This created all this marvelous international hooha, wonder and excitement, as mentioned in this article on Redeye News.

The Ebay seller from Guam has allowed the University of Chicago to keep the journal, which will be archived or put on display.

Even though it wasn't the beginning of a great new ARG I still must say; What an awesome thing to have happened! The United States Postal Service apologized for the inconvenience.

The Indiana Jones journal mystery... ARG?

Today I saw Alternate Reality Gaming, a private obsession of mine, mentioned for the first time in a Danish newspaper. And it might not even be an ARG. In fact it probably isn't... unless further clues turn up.

It's certainly quite the mystery. University of Chicago received an odd package, addressed to a Henry Walton Jones, Jr. Check out this video about it. On the Uchicago College Admissions webpage, they describe it as such:


The package contained an incredibly detailed replica of “University of Chicago Professor” Abner Ravenwood’s journal from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

This caused much puzzlement and of course, the big question in the minds of anyone who gets all excited and giddy over that sort of thing is, IS THIS THE BEGINNING OF AN AWESOME NEW ARG?


(picture borrowed from Uchicago)

On the face of it, the answer seems, no. Lucasfilm informed the university that this is not part of some viral marketing scheme. So maybe it is not. But what the heck is going on then?

I instantly turned to the prime source of all ARG knowledge, the argnet. They usually keep tabs on all new and exciting ARG occurrences, but I find nothing there concerning the journal mystery. Then I dived into the uncharted and murky depths of unfiction forum, where ARG enthusiast huddle in dark corners and share clues and rumors of all things ARG. There was one short discussion on the subject, including musings about how the package was sent exactly and the website which some of the text was taken from. ARG enthusiast are thorough! It seems to terminate thus however:

The best guess so far seems to be, that the package is connected to an Indy journal which has been put up for sale on Ebay. Still, it is very very odd... if it is indeed an ARG, more clues are bound to rise to the surface.. if not, well then, what a totally odd thing to happen!

New literacies for the Transmedia Generation

In my last blog post I made light of the notion that we will be able to teach the generation of digital natives anything about social media and Internet use. On a more serious note though, there are important things to be said on the subject, which has resulted in this terribly lengthy blog post. It is highly interesting stuff though, so hang in there!

Many of these important things are being said very eloquently by Henry Jenkins. Henry Jenkins is an American media scholar and much can be read about him on Wikipedia. He deals with such thrilling issues as the use and combination of different media sources, and this media convergence understood as a cultural process, rather than a technological end-point. He also does a lot of work with games, interactivity and learning and so, naturally, I find him a riveting fellow!

One of the things he talks about is the Transmedia Generation. This term really seems a lot more useful now, than the idea of digital natives versus digital immigrants. We may now be such hybrids that the digital is indeed as an extended nervous system, but the participatory culture, engagement and media production has a flow that spans more than the digital, which it generally may not make sense to focus on as an entity in and of itself anymore. Jenkins points out that all of this cultural production and consumption taking place is through any media necessary, and THIS is the mark of the transmedia generation. Interesting isn't it?

And there are certainly a lot of new things that the transmedia generation must learn about themselves and the participatory media culture they are part of. Jenkins has, with the aid of a few others, written a brilliant paper on this, that I highly recommend.

To summarize what the paper mainly explores, I've included these descriptions from the paper below:

Some key elements of participatory culture:


Affiliations — memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centered around various forms of media, such as Friendster, Facebook, message boards, metagaming, game clans, or MySpace).
Expressions — producing new creative forms, such as digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups).
Collaborative Problem-solving — working together in teams, formal and informal, to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming, spoiling).
Circulations — Shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging).

And more importantly, the issues that we can and should focus on when teaching the transmedia generation:


The Participation Gap — the unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and knowledge that will prepare youth for full participation in the world of tomorrow.
The Transparency Problem — The challenges young people face in learning to see clearly the ways that media shape perceptions of the world.
The Ethics Challenge — The breakdown of traditional forms of professional training and socialization that might prepare young people for their increasingly public roles as media makers and community participants.

What especially struck me as interesting is the transparency problem. This largely deals with the issue that although the kid that is able to navigate an iPad from age 1 will have great proficiency with new media, it may not have the ability to examine and understand this media critically. 

This is where the social anthropologist inside me is lured out of its cave to sniff at an alluring phenomenological breeze. Reality emerges at the intersection of all things. Jenkins writes in his paper:

"It matters what tools are available to a culture, but it matters more what that culture chooses to do with those tools. Culture shapes technology use, technology shapes use."

Here I would say simply: We shape technology and technology shapes us. Some anthropologists feel that we have really been hybrids, or cyborgs if you will, since we picked up a stone and used it for a tool for the very first time. As we develop tools, our perception of ourselves and the world are changed as our agency in the world is changed. We experience the world as a taskscape, navigating in it and understanding as we give it meaning according to the interactions that are available to us within it. Thus the reality we experience continuously emerges as we act and perceive, not only the reality we are surrounded by, but the reality of ourselves. And so really, technology is part of us, part of what we are.

...now this is all a bit hairy, but if you feel the inexplicable urge to delve deeper and, if freakishly, the thought: "Oh but this is ever so fascinating and I must know more about this phenomenology/technology stuff!" pops into your mind, then I shamelessly recommend my masters thesis where much geekery on this subject is to be endured. Link can be found in the right side of this blog.

But now, back to the 1 year old with the iPad. 

The iPad is part of what the kid is. Growing up thus, the kid may not be able to really see the iPad and the content it gives access to as something to be analyzed in and of itself. That is basically what Jenkins names, the transparency problem. Part of this is to be critical of information and its sources. One of the core concerns is the ability to distinguish commercial content from noncommercial content and knowing how commercial interests shape what we see. Games, quizzes, contests and entertainment are permeated with stealthy branding and marketing, but kids might not notice this, growing up with these platforms as a naturalized environment. 

This, and also the Ethics issue brought up by Jenkins, concerning how to behave and what to share and how in the social media culture are obviously important. So what we can and should teach the transmedia generation is perhaps the ability to take a step back and see the media as something apart, something that needs a critical eye and a detached awareness, which will require a different level of abstraction for them than it would for the slightly older generation, being so deeply embedded within it.

This is all part of what we call the New Literacies. The things that must be learned in order to navigate the world of new media. Jenkins lists these as the central skills required:


Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation
and discovery
Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world
processes
Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient
details.
Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand
mental capacities
Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with 
others toward a common goal
Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information
sources
Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information
across multiple modalities
Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting
multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

His general comments on the new literacies is this:


"Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement.The new literacies almost all involve social skills developed through collaboration and networking.These skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom."

Now lets look at an example of such things actually being taught right now. At Stanford University a course on social media literacies is being taught in the winter quarter of 2013 by another completely interesting fellow, Howard Rheingold, who's homepage by the way, is very much worth a look.

These are the course aims he has written for the students of this class:

• Cultivate an ability to discern, analyze, and exert control over the way they deploy their attention.

• Learn to use social media tools for collaborative work. 

• Understand the need for critical consumption of information.

• Hone their ability to find the answer to any question with the right kind of search.

• Train their thinking to assess the accuracy of the answers they find online. 

• Learn the modes, consequences, some of the responsibilities and dangers of different kinds of digital participation, from curation to blogging.

• Distinguish the characteristics and methods, advantages and pitfalls, of virtual communities, smart mobs, collective intelligence, crowdsourcing, social production, collaborative consumption and wiki collaboration.

• Recognize the ways the structure and dynamics of networks affect the behaviors of populations, the elements of applying of social network analysis to online culture, the steps necessary to cultivate personal learning networks.

• Become familiar with competing perspectives on social media practices and their effects; learn how to make analytic arguments regarding key debates around the use of social media.

Having read Jenkins' excellent paper I think Rheingold's 2013 course is a pretty good example of what the new media literacies are and what it really is we can and should teach the transmedia generation. So basically, my last blog post on how we can't teach them anything was plain silly and you really shouldn't listen to me. Although if you've actually reached the end of this blog post it would seem that you do. 

Teaching students about social media - teaching your grandmother to knit?

Glancing through my morning twitter feeds I came across Saturdays featured article from the education forum edudemic. The article lists "6 Things To Teach Students About Social Media" and these things are indeed something I have also pondered and found relevant social media concerns over these last 10 years. Things like;

Be careful about your online reputation,
Control whats private and whats public,
Build a good strong network,
Express your expertise and develop your interests online
Know how to buy stuff online

and so on...

This is all quite sensible yes, and the article states that, in this day and age, these things should be as important a subject in school as algebra. It does however set off a somewhat doubtful whirlwind in my head... mostly centered on the thought, who are we to teach the new students ANYTHING about social matters in the digital world, in which they are natives and  someone like me (born in 1980) is still an immigrant, albeit a deeply integrated one.

The boundary between public and private has been shifting rapidly since the very start of social media and naturally it will continue to do so. The norms and expectations regarding the use and the discourse of social media is also constantly shifting. My mother is baffled by the way my brother and I use and express ourselves on Facebook. I am baffled by the way my 14 year old nephew uses and expresses himself on Facebook. And in his case we are talking about the kind of digital native, who cannot remember the first time he used the Internet. Who probably never really thought of the Internet as an entity apart from himself, that was not just a natural part of his own extended nervous system. Seriously, these kids are Hybrids and Cyborgs!

Of course kids need to learn how to navigate social media just as they need to learn how to navigate the playground and the classroom, and in the beginning, in some ways, we can point out the pitfalls.But the world of social media is a rapidly changing cosmos and they are the ones who will be giving it shape, not us. So we might say things like "future bosses will examine your online stuff so be careful about whats out there!" like mentioned in the edudemic article. But I cant help thinking, 6 or so years from now, when my nephew is trying to enter the workforce in his field of choice, how much will the general expectations of public narrative have shifted? The entire face of social media might even have changed and I am certain, that unless I keep my ears firmly and continuously pressed against the touch pad to catch every little rumbling of the digital ground, he will have a much better grasp on it than I.

I mean look at this kid. Observing this one-year old navigating a tablet and then becoming frustrated when the extended nervous system fails when dealing with a paper magazine, sends a little tremor through me, at the sheer pace in which everything is changing. And what do you really think you or I will be able to teach this soon-to-be young person about navigating social media?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXV-yaFmQNk

Alternate Reality Gaming

So, at the moment I'm working on the most exciting project imaginable! I am, with the aid of the group of geeks and creatives I've put together, developing an Alternate Reality Gaming campaign for the publisher Fahrenheit.

You might now wonder, what is this ARG stuff? I'll start by remarking that Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG) is completely awesome.

It's exciting transmedia storytelling, creating great and sometimes very complex collective experiences for anyone who plunges into it. Participants actively help each other patch together the story line from a myriad of clues, which can be gleaned from all kinds of sources both online and offline. So, it's sort of like a scavenger hunt were fragments of the story line is what you are hunting, using websites, social media networks, phones, newspaper articles, props, real live events and pretty much anything the Puppet Masters (that would be me and the gang) can come up with as sources and clues.

Here is an excellent explanation of how the concept works. A good example of an ARG game could be the first big mainstream one made, as a promotion for the Movie AI, a game better known as The Beast. Here's a description of how it was made and how it worked.

Now ARGs are sometimes made for fun, but often they serve a purpose. This purpose is typically drawing attention and interest to something... ARGS have been made to promote films (as in the case of the Beast), computer games and bands for example. Our current project is linked to the Danish release of a comic book series... but I shall say no more of this presently.

I shall blog endlessly on this subject, but for now ARGS ARE AWESOME! If one is very interested in ARGs I highly recommend the most informative forum www.argn.com and also these 3 books

"Reality is Broken" by our hero Jane McGonical
"This Is Not A Game: A guide to Alternate Reality Gaming" by  Dave Szulborski
"A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling" by Andrea Phillips

Enjoy!

What games feel like

So, while looking into this whole gamification area, I'm coming across a lot of excitement but also a lot of critique. A lot of the gamification effort out there have been focused on making things gamelike, or make them somehow look like a game. Adding game structure like levels, points and badges as rewards to marketing or education does not necessarily produce the desired effect of blissful productivity and engagement that Jane Mcgonical mentiones as a key factor in gaming.

Pondering these things I ran into this paper by M.P. Jacob Habgood and Shaaron E. Ainsworth called Motivating children to learn effectively: exploring the value of intrinsic integration in educational games. The main point in this paper is the distinction between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation in games. Basically, if rewards gained through game achievements have no relevance in the game itself, they are extrinsic. This might for example be badges that you earn for completing an educational game. Its nice to get them, but they don't effect the gameplay itself. Now intrinsic motivation or in the game context intrinsic integration, the rewards are relevant in the game, enables you to go further or be more within the game context. The game experiment discussed in this paper was zombie math game for kids. In one version of the game, the learning content, the math, was integrated in the actual gameplay. Slay the zombie with MATH! In the extrinsic version the math content was interjected in little pop quizzes with no direct integration with the game. In the intrinsic version, the learning content was made part of the most exciting parts of the game without breaking the flow of the game. The results of the test showed much better learning results from the intrinsic game version.

So we're really looking at the difference between making learning an integrated part of the game and just wrapping the learning content in a game like structure. I think this is an important point when trying to create really effective and fun gamification!

On this note, lets look at the very important destinction between making something look like a game and making it FEEL like a game. This is a great point made by Jane Mcgonical, who terms it the difference between something being gamelike og gameful. In her talk at the 2011 Gamification Summit she explores what makes something actually feel like a game. One of the points I noticed especially is the voluntary tackling of unnecessary obstacles. In golf, we could just pick up the little white ball and go dump it in the hole. But its all the difficulty and the obstacles that make it a fun game. To create positive stress, the feeling that make us enjoy the challenges, the game needs to be difficult, not easy.

So what do these things suggest if we, lets say, want to gamify learning. The learning content should be completely integrated into the most exciting game actions and it shouldn't make it easier. It should make it harder in a silly way, and give us the feeling; "Wow, I cant believe I actually managed to do that! Awesome!"

Gamification and eLearning

So, recently my fascination with gaming has propelled me into a new field of geekdom. Gaming and its uses in learning, often referred to as gamification, a term also used for applying game-like elements to marketing and branding.

My interest was initially caught be the brilliant and awesome Jane Mcgonical and her views on using gaming and gamers to save the world, explained in this TED talk which I strongly recommend to everyone!

Now there seems to be wide agreement that gaming does indeed have vast potential as a learning tool and game theory elements are being used to engage and motivate. A good overview article on this could be Why Game Designers Are Better Motivators Than Your Boss.

One of the points that caught my attention was a reference to Dan Pink’s studies on performance and motivation and his 3 fundamentals of motivation; Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose, also termed M.A.P.

Achieving mastery at something that matters is greatly satisfying. The experience of getting better at something initially difficult when faced with, what Jane Mcgonical would call, an epic story of some sort is a great motivation. This leads us to purpose, the epic meaning, the important and enthralling goal. This is typically where good story telling and context comes in.

Drawing on the example of the Super Mario this point is expressed quite well in the above mentioned article: Is your work having you save any “princesses”, or are you smashing your head against bricks for nothing?

That leaves the the importance of autonomy, and this is an interesting and challenging issue in gamification. While I studied, I also worked for an eLearning company. The challenge of enabling sufficient levels of autonomy when creating eLearning is a significant one. The reason why autonomy is important, is that a crucial part of gaming is the freedom of choice. You choose which tasks to solve and to some extend, how to solve them.

As also mentioned in the article above, game designers are well aware that people game for different reasons, are driven by different motivations and enjoy different kinds of gameplay. In my own work with World of Warcraft I also found that my informants had completely different goals, motivations and ways of playing and experiencing the game. They all agreed that the game's ability to accommodate such different styles of gaming was one of its main assets.

So how can we best facilitate this when creating eLearning? Both the story and the autonomy are apparently important in order to create that oh so effective game-feel. But when does it become too complicated when compared to the learning purpose? An employee being subjected to eLearning in order to learn how to use a new piece of software or a new way of handling a specific situation is likely to get mightily annoyed by lengthy cartoon introductions and an initially confusing myriad of learning options. A person at work, who just needs the information to progress might not really need to spend time on being involved in an epic company-storyline.

So how to strike the balance? A wonderful guideline for any kind of online initiative now is to keep it simple, social and scalable. The level of game-elements, that invoke the three M.A.P fundamentals, must be scaled to the learning objective at hand. Creating a learning platform that facilitates autonomous learning without overpowering with too much "noise", where both the sender of the information and the recipient can scale the information to their own needs and preferences, might be the answer. If we provide a maleable and social platform, game elements might emerge on their own, as people help each other along to achieve their learning goals. After all, we all love playing games.