Centre for Internet and Society

Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism

nishant — 2015-05-14T12:14:04Z

In this peer reviewed research paper, Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south. It suggests that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency. The paper was published in Democracy & Society, a publication of the Center for Democracy and Civil Society, Volume 8, Issue 2, Summer 2011.

Introduction

The first decade of the 21st century has witnessed the simultaneous growth of the Internet and digital technologies on the one hand and political protests and mobilization on the other. As a result, some stakeholders attribute magical powers of social change and political transformation to these technologies.

In the post-Wikileaks world, governments try to censor the use of and access to information technologies in order to maintain the status quo (Domscheit-Berg 2011). With the expansion of markets, technology multinationals and service providers are trying to strike a delicate balance between ethics and pro6ts. Civil society organizations for their part, are seeking to counterbalance censorship and exploitation of the citizens’ rights. Within discourse and practice, there remains a dialectic between hope and despair: Hope that these technologies will change the world, and despair that we do not have any sustainable replicable models of technology-driven transformation despite four decades of intervention in the 6eld of information and communication technology (ICT).

This paper suggests that this dialectic is fruitless and results from too strong of a concentration on the functional role of technology. The lack of vocabulary to map and articulate the transitions that digital technologies bring to our earlier understanding of the state-market-citizen relationship, as well as our failure to understand technology as a paradigm that defines the domains of life, labour, and language, amplify this knowledge gap.

This paper draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south (Shah 2009). We suggest that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency.

Context

It is appropriate, perhaps, to begin a paper on digital activism, with a discussion of analogue activism[1] (Morozov 2010). In the recent revolutions and protests from Tunisia to Egypt and Iran to Kryzygystan, much attention has been given to the role of new media in organizing, orchestrating, performing, and shaping the larger public psyche and the new horizons of progressive governments. Global media has dubbed several of them as ‘Twitter Revolutions” and “Facebook Protests” because these technologies played an important role in the production of :ash-mobs, which, because of their visibility and numbers, became the face of the political protests in di)erent countries. Political scientists as well as technology experts have been trying to figure out what the role of Twitter and Facebook was in these processes of social transformation. Activists are trying to determine whether it is possible to produce replicable upscalable models that can be transplanted to other geo-political contexts to achieve similar results,[2] as well as how the realm of political action now needs to accommodate these developments.

Cyber-utopians have heralded this particular phenomenon of digital activists mobilizing in almost unprecedented numbers as a hopeful sign that resonates the early 20th century rhetoric of a Socialist Revolution (West and Raman 2009). (ey see this as a symptom of the power that ordinary citizens wield and the ways in which their voices can be ampli6ed, augmented, and consolidated using the pervasive computing environments in which we now live.

In a celebratory tone, without examining either the complex assemblages of media and government practices and policies that are implicated in these processes, they naively attribute these protests to digital technologies.

Cyber-cynics, conversely, insist that these technologies are just means and tools that give voice to the seething anger, hurt, and grief that these communities have harboured for many years under tyrannical governments and authoritarian regimes. They insist that digital technologies played no role in these events — they would have occurred anyway, given the right catalysts — and that this overemphasis on technology detracts from greater historical legacies, movements, and the courage and efforts of the people involved.

While these debates continue to ensue between zealots on conflicting sides, there are some things that remain constant in both positions: presumptions of what it means to be political, a narrow imagination of human-technology relationships, and a historically deterministic view of socio-political movements. While the objects and processes under scrutiny are new and unprecedented, the vocabulary, conceptual tools, knowledge frameworks, and critical perspectives remain unaltered. They attempt to articulate a rapidly changing world in a manner that accommodates these changes. Traditional approaches that produce a simplified triangulation of the state, market and civil society, with historically specified roles, inform these discourses, “where the state is the rule-maker, civil society the do-gooder and watchdog, and the private sector the enemy or hero depending on one’s ideological stand” (Knorringa 2008, 8).

Within the more diffuse world realities, where the roles for each sector are not only blurred but also often shared, things work differently. Especially when we introduce technology, we realize that the centralized structural entities operate in and are better understood through a distributed, multiple avatar model. For example, within public-private partnerships, which are new units of governance in emerging post-capitalist societies, the market often takes up protostatist qualities, while the state works as the beneficiary rather than the arbitrator of public delivery systems. In technology-state conflicts, like the well-known case of Google’s conflict with China (Drummond 2010), technology service providers and companies have actually emerged as the vanguards of citizens’ rights against states that seek to curb them.

Similarly, civil society and citizens are divided around the question of access to technology. The techno-publics are often exclusive and make certain analogue forms of citizenships obsolete. While there is a euphoria about the emergence of a multitude of voices online from otherwise closed societies, it is important to remember that these voices are mediated by the market and the state, and often have to negotiate with strong capillaries of power in order to gain the visibility and legitimacy for themselves. Additionally, the recalibration in the state-market-citizen triad means that there is certain disconnect from history which makes interventions and systemic social change that much more difficult.

Snapshots

We draw from our observations in the “Digital Natives with a Cause?”[3] research program, which brought together over 65 young people working with digital technologies towards social change, and around 40 multi-sector stakeholders in the field to decode practices in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between technology and politics.

The first case study is from Taiwan, where the traditionally accepted uni-linear idea of senders-intermediaries-passive receivers is challenged by adopting a digital information architecture model for a physical campaign.[4] The story not only provides insight into these blurred boundaries and roles, but also offers an understanding of the new realm of political intervention and processes of social transformation.

As YiPing Tsou (2010) from the Soft Revolt project in Taipei explains, "I have realised how the Web has not only virtually reprogrammed the way we think, talk, act and interact with the work but also reformatted our understanding of everyday life surrounded by all sorts of digital technologies."

Tsou’s own work stemmed from her critical doubt of the dominant institutions and structures in her immediate surroundings. Fighting the hyper-territorial rhetoric of the Internet, she deployed digital technologies to engage with her geo-political contexts. Along with two team members, she started the project to question and critique the rampant consumerism, which has emerged as the state and market in Taiwan collude to build more pervasive marketing infrastructure instead of investing in better public delivery systems. The project adopted a gaming aesthetic where the team produced barcodes, which when applied to existing products in malls and super markets, produced random pieces of poetry at the check-out counters instead of the price details that are expected. The project challenged the universal language of barcodes and mobilized large groups of people to spread these barcodes and create spaces of confusion, transient data doubles, and alternative ways of reading within globalized capitalist consumption spaces. The project also demonstrates how access to new forms of technology also leads to new information roles, creating novel forms of participation leading to interventions towards social transformation.

Nonkululeko Godana (2010) from South Africa does not think of herself as an activist in any traditional form. She calls herself a storyteller and talks of how technologies can amplify and shape the ability to tell stories. Drawing from her own context, she narrates the story of a horrific rape that happened to a young victim in a school campus and how the local and national population mobilized itself to seek justice for her. For Godana, the most spectacular thing that digital technologies of information and communication offer is the ability for these stories to travel in unexpected ways. Indeed, these stories grow as they are told. They morph, distort, transmute, and take new avatars, changing with each telling, but managing to help the message leap across borders, boundaries, and life-styles. She looks at storytelling as something that is innate to human beings who are creatures of information, and suggests that what causes revolution, what brings people together, what allows people to unify in the face of strife and struggle is the need to tell a story, the enchantment of hearing one, and the passion to spread it further so that even when the technologies die, the signal still lives, the message keeps on passing. As Clay Shirky, in his analysis of the first recorded political :ash-mob in Phillipines in 2001, suggests, "social media’s real potential lies in supporting civil society and the public sphere — which will produce change over years and decades, not weeks or months."

Propositions

These two stories are just a taste of many such narratives that abound the field of technology based social transformation and activism. In most cases, traditional lenses will not recognize these processes, which are transient and short-lived as having political consequence. When transformative value is ascribed to them, they are brought to bear the immense pressure of sustainability and scalability which might not be in the nature of the intervention. Moreover, as we have seen in these two cases, as well as in numerous others, the younger generation — these new groups of people using social media for political change, often called digital natives, slacktivists, or digital activists — renounce the earlier legacy of political action. They prefer to stay in this emergent undefined zone where they would not want an identity as a political person but would still make interventions and engage with questions of justice, equity, democracy, and access, using the new tools at their disposal to negotiate with their immediate socio-cultural and geo-political contexts.

In their everyday lives, Digital Natives are in different sectors of employment and sections of society. They can be students, activists, government officials, professionals, artists, or regular citizens who spend their time online often in circuits of leisure, entertainment and self-gratification. However, it is their intimate relationship with these processes, which is often deemed as ‘frivolous’ that enables them, in times of crises, to mobilize huge human and infrastructural resources to make immediate interventions.

It is our proposition that it is time to start thinking about digital activism as a tenuous process, which might often hide itself in capillaries of non-cause related actions but can be materialized through the use of digital networks and platforms when it is needed. Similarly, a digital activist does not necessarily have to be a full-time ideology spouting zealot, but can be a person who, because of intimate relationships with technologized forms of communication, interaction, networking, and mobilization, is able to transform him/ herself as an agent of change and attain a central position (which is also transitory and not eternal) in processes of social movement. Such a lens allows us to revisit our existing ideas of what it means to be political, what the new landscapes of political action are, how we account for processes of social change, and who the people are that emerge as agents of change in our rapidly digitizing world.

About the Authors

NISHANT SHAH is Director-Research at the Bangalore based Centre for Internet and Society. He is one of the lead researchers for the “Digital Natives with a Cause?” knowledge programme and has interests in questions of digital identity, inclusion and social change.

FIEKE JANSEN is based at the Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation (Hivos). She is the knowledge officer for the Digital Natives with a Cause? knowledge programme and her areas of interest are the role of digital technologies in social change processes.

References

Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. 2011. Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website. New York: Crown Publishers.

Drummond, David. 2010. “A New Approach to China.” Available at: http:// googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html.

Godana, Nonkululeko. 2011. “Change is Yelling: Are you Listening?” Digital Natives Position Papers. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/content/download/ 40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Knorringa, Peter. 2010. A Balancing Act — Private Actors in Development, Inaugural Lecture ISS. Available at: http://www.iss.nl/News/Inaugural-Lecture-Professor-Peter-Knorringa. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: Public Affairs.

Shirky, Clay. 2011. “The Political power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.” Foreign Affairs 90, (1); p. 28-41.

Shah, Nishant and Sunil Abraham. 2009. “Digital Natives with a Cause.” Hivos Knowledge Programme. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://cis-india.org/research/dn-report. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Tsou, YiPing. 2010. “(Re)formatting Social Transformation in the Age of Digital Representation: On the Relationship of Technologies and Social Transformation”, Digital Natives Position Papers. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/ content/download/40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

West, Harry and Parvathi Raman. 2009. Enduring Socialism: Exploration of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation. London: Berghahn Books.

End Notes

[1]Morozov looks at how ‘Digital Activism’ often feeds the very structures against we protest, with information that can prove to be counter productive to the efforts. The digital is still not ‘public’ in its ownership and a complex assemblage of service providers, media houses and governments often lead to a betrayal of sensitive information which was earlier protected in the use of analogue technologies of resistance.

[2]Following the revolutions in Egypt, China, worried that the model might be appropriated by its own citizens against China’s authoritarian regimes, decided to block “Jan25” and mentions of Egypt from Twitter like websites. More can be read here: http://yro.slashdot.org/ story/11/01/29/2110227/China-Blocks-Egypt-On-Twitter-Like-Site.

[3]More information about the programme can be found at http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/ Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause.

[4]Models of digital communication and networking have always imagined that the models would be valid only for the digital environments. Hence, the physical world still engages only with the one-to-many broadcast model, where the central authorities produce knowledge which is disseminated to the passive receivers who operate only as receptacles of information rather than bearers of knowledge. To challenge this requires a re-orientation of existing models and developing ways of translating the peer-to-peer structure in the physical world.

Cross-posted from Democracy & Society, read the original here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/stirrup-and-the-ground

Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism

nishant — 2015-10-25T05:58:59Z

Cross-posted from Democracy and Society.

Introduction

In the post-Wikileaks world, governments try to censor the use of and access to information technologies in order to maintain the status quo (Domscheit-Berg 2011). With the expansion of markets, technology multinationals and service providers are trying to strike a delicate balance between ethics and profits. Civil Society Organizations for their part, are seeking to counterbalance censorship and exploitation of the citizens’ rights. Within discourse and practice, there remains a dialectic between hope and despair: Hope that these technologies will change the world, and despair that we do not have any sustainable replicable models of technology-driven transformation despite four decades of intervention in the 6eld of information and communication technology (ICT).

Context

Snapshots

Propositions

About the Authors

References

Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. 2011. Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website. New York: Crown Publishers.

Drummond, David. 2010. “A New Approach to China.” Available at: http:// googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html.

Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: Public Affairs.

Shirky, Clay. 2011. “The Political power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.” Foreign Affairs 90, (1); p. 28-41.

West, Harry and Parvathi Raman. 2009. Enduring Socialism: Exploration of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation. London: Berghahn Books.

End Notes

[1] Morozov looks at how ‘Digital Activism’ often feeds the very structures against we protest, with information that can prove to be counter productive to the efforts. The digital is still not ‘public’ in its ownership and a complex assemblage of service providers, media houses and governments often lead to a betrayal of sensitive information which was earlier protected in the use of analogue technologies of resistance.

[2] Following the revolutions in Egypt, China, worried that the model might be appropriated by its own citizens against China’s authoritarian regimes, decided to block “Jan25” and mentions of Egypt from Twitter like websites. More can be read here: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/01/29/2110227/China-Blocks-Egypt-On-Twitter-Like-Site.

[3] More information about the programme can be found here.

[4] Models of digital communication and networking have always imagined that the models would be valid only for the digital environments. Hence, the physical world still engages only with the one-to-many broadcast model, where the central authorities produce knowledge which is disseminated to the passive receivers who operate only as receptacles of information rather than bearers of knowledge. To challenge this requires a re-orientation of existing models and developing ways of translating the peer-to-peer structure in the physical world.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/between-the-stirrup-and-the-ground-relocating-digital-activism

Who the Hack?

praskrishna — 2015-05-14T12:16:59Z

A hacker is not an evil spirit, instead he can outwit digital systems to bring about social change, writes Nishant Shah in this column published in the Indian Express on April 24, 2011.

One of the most sullied words that have pervaded public discourse, with the rise of the internet, is “hacker”. The word conjures up images of a silent, menacing, technology-savvy young man, who, with his almost magical control over the digital realm, manipulates systems, changes the laws, rewrites the rules and takes complete control. We hear stories about criminals hacking often enough — people who break into national security systems and retrieve sensitive information, teenagers who crash servers by spamming them with unnecessary traffic, users who commit credit fraud by phishing or breaking into bank accounts, or shutting down entire systems by erasing all the code.

Hackers v/s Crackers

As many of us know, the term hacker has a different origin and meaning than its abused application. In fact, people who perform maleficent activities using their technological prowess are called “crackers” — these are people who use their ability to interact with a system in order to make personal gains or to harass others. A hacker is a person who has extraordinary technology skills and is able to manipulate digital systems and makes them perform tasks which were not a part of their original design. Which means that a geek who can hack into a server and uses the free space to host a free website, aimed for public good, or a techie who writes a programme that can use the idle computing time of your machines to run peer-to-peer networks, or a teenager who can break the constraints of an existing software to integrate it with other programmes, are all hackers. A hacker is defined by his ability to play around with the basic elements of a system (not necessarily digital and internet-based) and perform actions, sometimes for social good, but often, for fun and to explore the digital world’s frontiers. They are not the evil spirits that we often imagine them to be.

Hackers can be suffused with a spirit of civic good and of social beneficence. Around the world, hackers have used their technology skills to make public interventions to resolve a crisis in their environments. From the now notorious Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks platform to more positive efforts like Ipaidabribe.com, a civic hackers have emerged as our new heroes. Ipaidabribe.com is a civic hacking website, which allows users to use digital storytelling as a method by which they can start discussions on corruption and what we can do to change the systems.

Many digital natives are civic hackers. Aditya Kulkarni, one of our earliest participants with the “Digital Natives with a Cause” programme, is a digital native civic hacker. Like many young people in India, Aditya, from Mumbai, found the field of electoral politics opaque. He found it difficult to understand why good people voted for bad leaders and why large sections of the society shirk their responsibility to vote, thus leading to flawed governments. He, with his friends, started VoteIndia.in, a website where they collected information from public domain sources about electoral candidates in their local constituencies, so that voters could make informed decisions. The website was an instance of civic hacktivism.

I talk about hacking because I want to draw your attention to the phenomenon that started with Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption stance and the series of public interventions that surrounded it. Hazare has emerged as a hero for many. He has been trending on Twitter, there are pages dedicated to him on Facebook, Tumblr blogs have been spreading his word, text messages have urged people to come out in support. While there is much speculation about Hazare’s politics and the media spectacle that it has created, little attention has been given to Hazare’s almost exclusively off-line campaign and the way in which social media tools have been able to capture his momentum and turn it into a series of civic hacktivist interventions.

Flashmobs with people bearing candles and chanting against corruption emerged in cities. Public consultations organised by young people saw critical engagement with questions of corruption. The interwebz have been abuzz with people expressing opinions and calling for public mobilisation. Anti-corruption convictions have found resonance with people who, otherwise, despite having access to these technologies, would not necessarily have engaged in these kinds of civic hacktivities. This, for me, is not only a sign of hope but also a moment of understanding that digital activism is not always restricted to the digital domain.

As in the case of Aditya, and that of Hazare, the germ of an idea is often offline. The processes of protest and demonstration towards social change travel across the physical and the digital world. The idea of a digital native as a civic hacktivist reminds us that the young person behind the computer, in a virtual reality, is not dissociated from the embedded contexts of everyday life. Their skills with the computer often help them make critical interventions to mobilise social change.

See the original article published by the Indian Express here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/who-the-hack

Lives suspended in the Web

praskrishna — 2011-04-01T15:45:39Z

When 14-year-old Manish sits behind his laptop, punching away at keys, his facial expressions reflecting his various online interactions, his parents stand in the doorway, watching curiously. Their son is physically at home, but to all purposes, lost in the limbo of the Internet. By all standards, Manish is a good, responsible young adult but his parents worry because they don’t seem to have any control over Manish’s online life. They find it difficult to understand the digital realms that he seamlessly integrates into his life.

As young people across the country are creating these new hybrid physical-digital spaces of work, leisure and lifestyle, the “analogue generations” remain outside, concerned about how they can ensure that their children are safe online, and not abusing the power of this largely unregulated space.

Their paranoia is amplified by the stories of uncontrolled access to pornography, of children falling prey to sexual predators, fears of intellectual property theft, and subversive and violent mobilisations that the young orchestrate through these online networks. The need to regulate, control and design this digital environment that so many of these young people inhabit is countered by their own ignorance and lack of control over these spaces. Technological solutions, like cyber-nannies and filtering software that prevent access to websites that can have questionable content, have eventually proven to be futile preventatives.

Attempts at technology-based censorship are useless because these young people, digital natives, find ways to circumvent the attempts at controlling their access. It is clear that the solutions are outside of technology, and not very different from ways in which parents have always dealt with these questions.

Here are the top five ways to do so, which do not require a parent to become a netizen overnight, but can get them involved and make sure young users of technology remain responsible, safe and canny in their interactions online.

Monitored access: Instead of figuring out censorship software, parents need to learn that as with the TV, monitored access for younger users of the Internet is completely valid. Web 2.0 rhetoric promotes a strong sense of individualism and privacy and parents often feel like they are intruding on a child’s “private” time online. However, it is completely valid for parents to be in the same room and keeping an eye on what their child is up to while surfing.

Limited time: Instead of trying to control the content, try and help the young person to efficiently manage time and digital resources. We live in a world where the impulse to stay constantly connected is very strong. However, there is no reason why the young user has to be online in all their free time. If they are given a specified number of hours a week to spend online, they learn to use their time more efficiently. Password-protect the computers, take limited expenditure accounts for their mobile phones and have strict rules (which everybody in the family has to follow) about interface access during family time.

Shared computers: As computing becomes more personal, young users access the Internet from many computing devices like cellphones, personal laptops, etc. Studies have shown that young users who use shared machines kept in common areas of the house are less prone to accessing undesirable material online. Do not keep the computing devices in bedrooms. Use shared studies or quiet corners of the living room.

Get digital and involved: One of the reasons why young people often do not communicate with parents about their technological forays is because the older generation professes a digital disconnect. Take this opportunity to initiate a two-way learning. Get your children to teach you on how to use certain platforms and websites, and in conversations, you might be able to educate them about responsible behaviour online. This peer-to-peer connection helps establish trust and a safe space to discuss problematic areas. Parents of teenagers who join social networks like Facebook and Tumblr, and get to be a part of the child’s life, often find new channels of communication opening up for them.

Storytelling: Digital storytelling has huge potential for voicing concerns and problems. For these young people, the spaces provided online are safe spaces. They write freely, tell stories, create digital content, providing a gateway into what is happening in their lives. Recognise the creative potential of young users, appreciate their ability to tell these stories — through blogs, micro-blogs, audio and video podcasts, commentary on other content, etc. Getting them to tell stories and sharing your own with them makes for greater insight. Many cross-generational storytelling projects, where younger children tell the stories of the older people in the house, or write a combined blog have proven to be quite successful online.

At the end of the day, it is good to remember that the problems that new technologies throw up are not necessarily new. The solutions need to be found in our everyday interactions and practices, and dependence on technological application is often counter-productive. Technology can only be a way by which solutions are implemented.

The article by Nishant Shah was published in the Indian Express on March 11, 2011. The original can be read here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/suspended-in-web

A Talk by Charlotte Lapsansky

praskrishna — 2011-04-22T07:41:20Z

Charlotte Lapsansky will give a lecture on the "Mobile Voices project" at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore on Thursday, 16 September 2010.

Mobile Voices is an academic-community partnership to research and design a platform for low-wage immigrants in LA to publish stories about their lives and their communities directly from their mobile phones. This low-cost, open source, customizable, and easy to deploy multimedia mobile storytelling platform will be designed in collaboration with its users, and will help recent immigrants who lack computer access gain greater participation in the digital public sphere.

In this talk, Charlotte will describe the Mobile Voices project and discuss key themes that have arisen for the Mobile Voices project team, including participatory technology design, community digital storytelling, and digital inclusion through mobile-phone based platforms. She will then describe the key technological and social issues that have arisen in the process of adapting Mobile Voices for India and the opportunities and challenges this presents.

About Charlotte Lapsansky

Charlotte Lapsansky is a PhD Candidate and American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Charlotte has a background in development communication and mass media campaigns addressing gender and health in India. At Annenberg, her research interests include communication for social change, participatory development communications, community mobilization and strategic campaign planning. For the past two years, she has been a team member for Mobile Voices, a participatory project which has created a Drupal-based digital storytelling platform for first-generation, low-wage migrant workers in Los Angeles, allowing them to create and publish stories about their communities directly from their mobile phones. Currently, Charlotte is collaborating with organizations in India to customize and adapt the mobile voices platform social endeavours in India.

VIDEOS

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/events/charlotte-lapsansky-talk

India Game Developer Summit Bangalore 2010

arun — 2010-03-09T16:55:33Z

The India Game Developer Conference held at Nimhans Convention Centre on the 27th of February, 2010 was attended by Arun Menon who is working on The Gaming and Gold Project at The Centre for Internet and Society. The Developer forum brought together game developers from different sectors of the Game Production Cycle, with hardware manufacturers like Nvidia demonstrating their latest 3d technology and Software developers like Crytek and Adobe demonstrating the latest in developer tools for creating and editing games on multiple platforms.

The India Game Developer Summit Lite was sufficiently provocative in showcasing the developer community in India and the latest advancements made by the corporate sponsors. The presentations did not appropriately address creative development and management except for a few made by Keita Iida, Carl Jones, and possibly Varun Nair which stood out for the specific focus on creativity. The overall focus was on PC gaming with inroads into Web, mobile, and a smattering of social games. Console Gaming was present in a few statistics presented but did not figure elsewhere at the conference.

On Presentations

One key feature found in the presentations made by Carl Jones, Keita Iida, and Varun Nair at IGDS was the focus on creating immersive environments and naturally all the three took different approaches suiting their areas of specialization. The other presentations bordered on marketing and sales pitches, promoting the presenters' products, and were not sufficiently detailed other than pushing the presenter’s products and services. These three presentations stand out for their focus on creativity in game development, design, and research with data pertaining to the industry and not limited to their products or companies.

Carl Jones – Envision, Enable, Achieve.

Carl Jones from Crytek made an excellent keynote speech with a focus on their latest advancement; the CRYENGINE 3.0. A demonstration video showcased synchronous editing capabilities for multiple platforms as well as real time 'edit and play' functionality. What you see is [truly] what you get. Their engine is currently not set for a public release but can handle textures and fluid rendering with amazing ease on a standard 500$ machine. The detailed and fluid real-time editing cuts development time from weeks to a matter of days, not a possibility a few months earlier. The technology targets low end machines and has a higher market but both Nvidia and Crytek made it clear that their focus for development is going to be high end devices and technology for high end machines.

Crytek’s entire focus is on the development and sustainability of creativity, so that new technology could provide better rendering at better speeds and visuals. Cryengine 3.0’s capabilities in developing a truly interactive, immersive, and realistic environment were demonstrated at the keynote speech. The destructive environments and fluid/texture rendering made designing and editing seem as simple as using a brush (convinced of its capabilities as an engine but still skeptic about its simplicity in user interactivity). The dynamic lighting, downward light shafts, ocean rendering, view distance, soft shadows and particle rendering (fog, etc) and its real-time synchronous editing capabilities left no doubt as to Cryengine 3.0’s superiority in the competitive game developer market.

The keynote speech recognized one main deficiency in game development, there is a problem incorporating graphics and realistic physics. Jones showcased how at Crytek, the motto ‘the difficult takes a day and impossible takes a week’ works. Looking at the developer tools demonstrated at the summit that motto is quite realistic. Crytek’s focus is to make everything interactive and the CryEngine 3.0 demonstrates that focus. As a matter of fact Crytek has incorporated Star Data from NASA into their games. Star navigation based on the digitally (re)created skies in their games is possibility. The elements they bring in to build in realism to gaming will be interesting to follow, since realism often meant higher graphics requirements.

Keita Iida – Technology and Market Trends in the PC game Industry

The focused session by Keita Iida of Nvidia placed the growth of Indian markets in perspective including online markets (and digital releases) and offline growth plotted through hardware sales. The numbers and statistics presented showcased the strength of the growing gaming market particularly in Asia. The revenues of the Asia segment in the entire MMOG revenues is 76.6 percent globally, the United States and the West is lagging in terms of revenue generation in the MMOG segment but their recent growth is set to shoot up to 1.3-1.5 billion USD by 2013. Similar numbers in the social gaming segment was also reiterated by Sumit Gupta (the CEO and founder of BitRhymes). What they both articulated differently was that there was tremendous money in gaming both online and offline and India had sufficient infrastructure to capitalize on the gaming markets for online as well as offline products and releases.

Keita Iida argued that the online gaming market in India was in excess of 60 million USD assuming that these games were serviced locally. This still leaves out contribution from the Indian segment globally, such figures are also hard to plot out. Some of the numbers that Nvidia made available were from their own sales and marketing statistics. The DX10 capable computers globally were 171 Million as of 2009 and DX9 capable machines around 102million, which had a Geforce installed base. Keita Iida's statistics pointed to one thing - the Asian markets were far ahead of the other markets both in online and offline releases. Nvidia as an organization and developer would provide an ideal space for game developers to reach out to a larger global market provided they were Nvidia technology compatible. Keita Iida made an effective marketing pitch for Nvidia and provided enough data and statistics globally and locally as well as company specific data that made the presentation more accessible. This presentation was one of the few that involved industry movements and statistics with a focus on creative development.

Varun Nair - Quality Asset Creation & Sound as a Storyteller

The most creative presentation was perhaps the one made by Varun Nair on 'Sound as Storytelling and Quality Asset creation'. We had interacted prior to the conference as well as during the presentation and he provided a lot of information on the pre- and post-production cycles where sound design and incorporation was most effective. His presentation was remarkably different and stood out from the others largely because his focus was not on pushing his own projects or company agenda, rather he attempted to place the relevance of the sound design industry in the creative processes of the game’s design stages.

The session focused on the relevance of sound and visuals and the effective placement and modulation of sound to the visuals to communicate the desired effect. The main example used was an FPS where the ambient sounds and the player sounds had to be placed in perspective with the enemy sounds to create an immersive environment. This translates into sounds being modulated and dynamic as gameplay progresses to effectively create immersive structures. The lack of this immersive effect will create confusion and destroy the effect even if the visuals are designed effectively. This is interesting largely because if you hear gunfire not represented in your visuals - as a character - you’re able to react effectively to the enemy based on sound alone. Quite a few games use this strategy to provide and create an immersive structure. There was a good emphasis on the development of sound particularly since it enables a certain human emotional response to that sound and developers of successful AAA games have used this strategy to create emotional engagement of the player with the game narratives. Varun Nair also pointed out the relevance of sound in making connections and here he mentioned using real world sounds and digitally created and re-engineered sounds. The effects he demonstrated with a training exercise, where he played out real world sounds and enhanced sounds to create a suitable environment. On making connections with the ‘experiential residual narrative’ as the Videogame theorist Henry Jenkins would put it, Varun Nair pointed out how sound design is created effectively to cater to certain specific feelings encountered before. Artificial sounds are specifically created to suit the artificiality of an environment and here he used the example of ‘Transformers’, the movie to explain artificial sound effects as well as information overload. The focus of designed sounds is largely towards creating an environment in which the main focus is to reiterate the environments artificiality largely used in Sci-Fi media and gaming.

Most sound designers only receive images and they have to create sounds often from scratch to suit the environment. In his demonstrations he showcased the kind of creativity that sound designers and engineers are capable of in designing the environments we hear and interact with in gaming simulations. Varun Nair also focused on Information Overload and how the effective blend of sound and visuals would form an ideal blend to counter this overload. He went has far as saying that at certain points an underload was preferred since there was less player fatigue due to overload. The design structures have to be suitably different particularly for non linear media such as gaming. Varun Nair mentioned the cocktail party effect where the human mind is able to focus on a few important sounds and tune out the rest as well as the 2.5 theme rule. The 2.5 theme rule emphasizes the perfect Balance between Visuals, Audio, and Sound effects. Among others were quality asset creation and the involvement of the sound designer in the early stages of the game to capitalize on creative development.

Sumit Gupta from BitRhymes and Hemant Sharma from Adobe

The presentation by Sumit Gupta was very detailed, with a focus on audience interactivity. The data Sumit used was excellent and placed the entire scenario in perspective; perhaps the overwhelming response to his presentation may have overwhelmed him a little. The data on social gaming in India and the lack of monetization in the current market scenario and the possibilities of monetization was explored in detail. The problem if any was in setting up these structures and infrastructure backing in India which was lacking. Payment systems and methodologies would ensure the creation and transaction of virtual goods. The data on the Chinese and Japanese markets and the Asian and World trends was extremely detailed, so much so that some of these statistics were scary. Most social gamers do not realize that data is being collected on them as they play and this was demonstrated in some of the internal statistics that Sumit presented. The information presented included age groups of the users, their purchasing power, spending power, and the relationship between the users who trade is almost totalitarian in terms of information collection. Privacy laws allow that generic data are collected but the presentation of these data and statistics reminds the viewer on just how much information is accessible to these developers. Hemant Sharma’s presentation later was highly technical and demonstrated the development of games for mobile devices on Adobe Flash CS5 which is currently only out on a beta release. The presentation there also talked about the ways in which a mobile app could gain access to the OS features to run better. Most of these features give undue access to the app developer to geolocationary movement information. Along with access to other apps which may store generic information which is user specific. This talk shed light on the amount of access that a mobile app developer has to the geolocationary and personal data stored on the phone. Although the perspective was to showcase the functionality of Flash Professional CS5, currently released as a beta version, details emerged on the kind of easy access a developer has to change mobile app settings to gather data. The possibilities that a malicious use of the data would compromise user security emerges strongly when reflecting on this presentation.

DSKs Presentation – Sell your Game, Adopt a Game Designer!

DSK Supinfogame had a booth at the India Game Developer Summit along with AIGA the Asian Institute of Gaming and Animation. DSK’s presentation was to be held by Philippe Vachey but a change in schedule had another member from DSK make the presentation. Their focus rested on Gamespot reviews and game journal rankings to showcase the problems that arise due to the lack of relevant design in games that would otherwise have been AAA releases. They had some really important points to make. A 30million USD project is not going to have developers and designers with one year experience and without a cohesive unit centered on design aspects a game may as well not make an AAA rating let alone an A or a B rating.

Networking @ IGDS

Networking at the India Game Developer Summit was one of the main benefits of the summit. The presentations, other than the few mentioned here in detail, were largely oriented towards marketing their own companies and products or sales pitches to this effect. I had already talked to Varun Nair (from bluefrog presenting Sound as Storyteller and Quality Asset Creation) prior to meeting him at the conference and discussed mutual interests in gaming and narrative communication in gaming. Before his presentation I had the opportunity to get a preview of his presentation and its main focus on presenting the relevance of sound design and its ideal placement to create an immersive environment which can be effective or confusing depending on how the visuals and sounds interact with each other to create an ideal immersive environment rather than information underload or worse overload and player fatigue. The discussion also revolved around my current research project and research interests in the Indian Gaming scene. Varun Nair is based in Bombay and works for Bluefrog, a company which specialises in sound creation for games.

Prior to the conference, Rev Lebaredian and Simon Green from Nvidia Corporation were available at the Nvidia booth and right after trying out Batman Arkham Asylum in 3D (with the Geforce 3D stereoscopic vision kit); Varun Nair joined us and we discussed my research interests as well as my project at the Centre for Internet and Society and its requirements. Rev and Simon were very accessible (not mobbed yet) and gave me a lot of details on their partnership programs and their products and upcoming releases. Being engineers they had very little data on the Indian market both virtual and offline, and the approximate industry revenues. Rev and Simon offered details on who might have access to the information I needed and told me some information pertaining to Nvidia might be shared but large part is internal and not for public access.

The interaction with Kiran was the most productive and engaging we discussed games of mutual interest and the goldfarming activities on his own server (one of the highest bids on eBay for an account on his server was above 566 pounds [GBP]) he also focused on goldfarming in India and how that is very little documentation of any sort on these activities. His own research is on improving design in online games to provide better retention, higher virality, and immersive environments.

Post the key note session, the opportunity to speak to Philippe Segard and Lionel Chaze from ‘DSK supinfogame’ presented itself. They were designers engaged with game design training and also had modules that addressed the online gaming segment. On hearing about my project they assumed that I was adopting a critical theory approach to a single game and its content and examining only that (which is also something I am doing as a part of my research read more on my blog). I explained some of my research interests and those of the project in examining the gaming ecosystem in India both virtually and offline, this was more appealing to both Philippe and Lionel who agreed to give feedback on the project as it proceeds. Robin Alter from Kreeda Games was available after his presentation and spoke to me about the future for the Indian markets and the growth they were expecting in the online as well as offline game segments, as publishers most of their focus was on offline products. Robin also spoke about Gold farming in India and how most of it is undocumented and has very little studies conducted on them particularly in the Indian context. Gold farming itself is prevalent in India and is not as minor as thought earlier looking at the responses by Online Server statistics only in India. Playdom’s Business operations manager Nagabhushan Rao also reiterated that there are cases of gold farming on their servers and few cases are logged in India as well. However, as developers they have very few mechanisms to control this activity, largely since their user base is approximately around 2.5 million (aggregate). He also happened to mention how Zynga could afford to proactively target such practices since their large user base would sustain these mitigating blocks. Playdom is developing a few mechanisms to track such usage and abusage of their credit but as of early 2010 they have very few mechanisms that would ban player activity for these practices.

The next Game Developer Conference is expected around the latter part of this year or early next year.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/gaming-and-gold/india-game-developer-summit-in-bangalore-2010

Narrative and Gameplay in Role Playing Games

praskrishna — 2012-03-13T10:43:48Z

Not all games tell stories but narratives, gameplay, and their relational attributes are a relevant shift observed in the gaming scene, Arun Menon finds out.

This article, the second in a three-part series, examines the elements of role playing games (RPGs), the narrative versus gaming, and the questions of centrality of narratives in RPGs. It focuses and reviews the debates surrounding narratives and gameplay in RPGs.

The section looks at:

Narrative versus gameplay and games as the antithesis of narrative, interactivity and gameplay. The debates of the ludologists and the narratologists; and
Interactivity and narrative, the mechanics of the game not independent to the narrative.

Narrative versus Gameplay

The narrative vs. gameplay debate has been raging for a few years in media scholarship particularly relating to the (video) gaming industry. Where once the narrative was considered the antithesis of gameplay, there is a noticeable shift towards the former. Developers across genres are incorporating the narrative as an essential element of their products, so much so that a few of them brand themselves as the developer with a difference.

The extremely relevant shift, since the incorporation is not limited to RPGs alone, and a merger or hybridization of different genres. Academicians as well as gamers have called for a diversification of genres so that a gamer may be exposed to a broad possibility of experiences. The movement, although, seems to be in the opposite direction with hybridization of genres but without losing out on possibilities of creating multiple experiences. The Ludologists and the Narratologists differ on gaming, storytelling, and narrative structures and its working within these spaces.

Narrative: The Antithesis of Gameplay

Jesper Juul argues that computer games are not narratives and rather narratives in computer games isolates the ‘computer game-ness’. (I interpret Juul’s computer game-ness as gameplay, can also be read as the mechanics of the game). Juul’s comments are similar to many Ludologists who argue for a focus on the mechanics of gameplay rather than the study of games as media for storytelling as is done by the Narratologists. The focus on the mechanics of the game is derived from the argument that the experience of the game does not solely rest with the experience of the story. Often the narrative limits gameplay and character progression (which includes quest progression where applicable). Reading whole games as entire narratives may be problematic. Narratives may be present in minimal quantities localized within the game. Narrative structures are altogether another medium used to deliver the story. As Jenkins notes:

"Game designers don't simply tell stories. They design worlds and sculpt spaces. It is no accident, for example, that game design documents have historically been more interested in issues of level design than plotting or character motivation."

The delivery of the story through interactive game worlds create a certain process for the narrative to play out. Readings of the narrative alone without the mechanics of gameplay and its contribution would be incomplete. Henry Jenkins seems to term designers more in terms of narrative architects rather than just storytellers. Narratives within games do not conform to the classical modes of narratives, which are used when reading/interpreting games. Such a reading becomes problematic because of the heavy handed import of theory without proper application. A certain amount of incorporation of theory without sufficient examination of the process (or the architecture in Jenkins words) through which the story is told.

Interactivity and Narrative

Interactivity is the process where the game’s world responds to the player and the choices made by the player. The structure is so set up that in addition to the narrative, interactivity allows a certain response/consequence. The consequence or response of the game world does two things: a) increase the potential for an immersive environment where the gamer emotionally engages with the game and b) there are separate plot lines depending entirely on choices made by the player. For example in an epic fantasy RPG, I can ally with the good hero or the bad hero and have different choices and content that follows dependent on this and the following moral decisions. Interactivity is determined by contribution of the player (engagement with the game world, and the subsequent choices in character development/progression) and the narrative is often construed as the one set by the developer and therefore, has credible authorship (questions of authorship of the developer and the co-authorship of the player) and as such both (interactivity and narrative) are different from each other.

As noted by Henry Jenkins in his article Game Design as Narrative Architecture there is a need to acknowledge a few basic points when talking about narratives and storytelling in games. Often when talking about narratives the discussion tends to meander into irrelevant areas locating a narrative in every game where most probably none exists, narrative and storytelling are not intrinsic to the game and not all games tell stories. In one where A throws a ball to B (either can be the player or the NPC [NPC stands for non-player character(s), often found within the game, and does not necessarily have to be graphically coded in text based games. An example of this would be Eternal Duel]), the ball is not expected to bounce up and down, narrating its history and its present predicament, pleading the players character to venture out on a righteous quest [Inspired by Markku Eskelinen “… if I throw a ball at you, I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories”]. It is then important to see that these aspects are limited to specific instances and specific products which in this case would be RPGs. To quote Jenkins:

"You say narrative to the average gamer and what they are apt to imagine is something on the order of a choose-your-own adventure book, a form noted for its lifelessness and mechanical exposition rather than enthralling entertainment, thematic sophistication, or character complexity."

The conceptualization of what a narrative is and how it operates within games need to be rethought since classical influences still dictate theorizations of what narratives (in games) are. The application of film theory to videogames has no doubt led to game studies being influenced particularly in areas of immersive structures and storytelling through comparison to other media.

However, such is its literal interpretation that often ‘the lenses’ used to examine a phenomenon irrevocably colours the reading. The study of a narrative does not mean that storytelling is featured above other aspects of gameplay and the experience of the playthrough is not limited to the experience of the story alone. Immersiveness necessarily does not depend only on the story but also on the fact that a story plays a relevant part in the immersiveness experienced in a role playing game. The operation of narratives in a role playing game would be far more extensive than in any of the other genres.

The ‘role-play’ in RPG involves stories on the character and its present predicament with snapshots of the past which fall into place through progression. Such a model may be observed in Bioshock. The epic fantasy genres allow more freedom largely because the central narrative, if there is one at all, is a loose structure that allows progression any one way. Progression here may be linked to moral choices that the reader makes and the characterization that the reader creates. For instance in Dragon Age: Origins a point comes when the character meets an NPC ‘Sten’ [An NPC character, who murdered an entire family including the children] who agrees to join the group and battle Darkspawn. There are points in the dialogue when Sten argues that death is his redemption and the character depending on how the player has created and visualized the character has to make a choice to either kill Sten for his crime, allow him to join the party, or just leave him caged to be a bait for Darkspawn attacks. This opportunity of making moral choices also affects gameplay and content. Including or excluding Sten in the party means access to different content.

This is where the relational aspects of interactivity and narrative play a part. Two gamers making similar choices will have different experiences based largely on those choices. Dialogue choices, character choices, events in different orders and so forth make up for different playthrough experiences for different individuals even if convergent plotlines are encountered.

Most games do have narrative aspirations. Jenkins argues that game narratives seek to tap into the emotional residues of narrative experiences in other mediums. As such there is an effort to create immersive environments (Immersive environments denote the emotional engagement/investment of the reader/gamer in the game world). Often it is not sufficiently translated into experience. All narratives would be, in this framework, a set of attempts to link with other narratives even as a baser residual or experiential form. Residual narratives are the memories of alternate predecessor narratives engaged by the gamer in the same or other mediums. For example, The Tales of Middle Earth (T.O.M.E) would be more accessible for a gamer, who has read Tolkein and watched the movies. This can also be seen in RPG formats. On a careful examination, most plotlines have some similarity with Dungeons and Dragons, one of the first and successful RPGs. There is a possibility of multiple narratives operating in the same game, experienced through an interactive mode. This is noticed in some of the new releases such as Neocore [The developers of ‘King Arthur: The Role Playing Wargame] and Bioware.

Bioware is the developer of Mass Effect and Mass Effect2, both modern RPGs with revolutionary design. Revolutionary in terms of ability to carry over a narrative into the second release by importing a saved game and observing the consequences of actions taken in the previous game, as well as cater to new players by allowing creation of new characters and entirely new interactive, responsive narratives. The same company also designed Dragon Age: Origins, which is a more traditional RPG in terms of storyline and characterizations. The Traditional RPGs follow the set models that have similarities to J. R. R. Tolkeins fictionalized world and the RPG precursor dungeons and dragons. As mentioned earlier this translates into multiple/different experiences with consecutive engagement with the same game. Since, the possibility of multiple narratives operating within the same game, through interactivity, is noticed in new releases by developers such as Neocore and to an extent in Bioware.

To conclude, narratives in games have been conceptualized and read through different perspectives. An emphasis on the mechanics of the game is relevant with any approach to the narrative in the game. Since, the narrative is not independent of the architecture that delivers it, it is important to acknowledge that narratives in games require completely different approaches.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/gaming-and-gold/narrative-and-gameplay

The Elements of Role Playing Games

arun — 2011-08-02T05:58:06Z

This article, the first in a three part series addresses the definitions of role-playing games (RPGs) and their elements, the integration of elements from other genres facilitating to what might lead to the hybridization of genres and the relation between online and offline games as well as solo gaming with respect to the ‘Alone Together’ phenomenon.

What are RPGs?

RPGs include a broad family of games where a player assumes the role of a character who interacts with the game(s) world (often imaginary) in some manner. It is to be noted that even an empire building game, which technically belongs to another genre has mild elements of role play where the player is a ruler and certain elements of characterization that follows are noticeable in the Caesar series designed by Sierra. The in-game character from generation (character generation is prominent among most RPGs, particularly fantasy based, and this marks the beginning of a particular route or path that a player wishes to take) to growth and development along various pathways and strands in multi-pathed RPGs would be an interesting read and is duly examined in the third and final part of this series. Role-playing games examined here are not table top games or board games but simulations, which sufficiently justify the basic RPG elements as well as the incorporation of other generic elements from turn based gaming, real time strategy, and simulation.

The ideal examples used are ‘Dragon Age: Origins’ (DA: O) and ‘King Arthur: The Role-playing Wargame’ (KA).

What are some of the key elements of RPGs?

Interviews given by Chris Beleszinski from Epic Games and Ray Mayzuka from Bioware echo similar statements on the future of shooters (both first person{FP} and third person{TP} shooters), on the lifting of the pillars of RPGs, and the merging of genres, which may inevitably lead to some form of hybridization of genres. The key features among many of RPGs are (also described as the three key pillars, with the fourth pillar being a new addition/merger):

Combat/Conflict: Some of the new RPGs such as Mass Effect, DA: O and KA have options of combat centred on the choices that are made. In KA allies and enemies and such other categorizations depend on the ability of the character. All RPGs have some form of conflict which may present itself in the third person form in DA: O or in the slightly merged Real Time Strategy (RTS) form in KA.
Progression: Progression is hard to define since there are different levels of progression often simultaneously operating in RPGs. It may be based on Quest/Plot progression without which the game (most if not all) do not progress (for example, finding Dr. Young is imperative in Batman: Arkham Asylum. This quest cannot be overridden or bypassed as is possible in others with a more flexible quest progression system, such as DA: O or KA). Progression may also include character progression in terms of statistics such as health, agility, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, and mana/magic. They are the six main attributes that defer among character classes. Depending on the fantasy game there are considerable differences or overlaps in their attributes (refer the RPG terminologies listed earlier). Progression could also mean levelling in a war game where there are no identifiable characters but cities/towns or some similar collective.
Exploration: Another main feature of any RPG almost always present in a shooter (FP/TP) also reiterated by developers such as Bioware and Epic Games in their RPG shooters is Exploration! This is most notably found in Dungeon Crawlers (with non-persistent characteristics being the best example), which contributes to replayability. Exploration often contributes to the immersiveness of the game environment in conjunction with storytelling. Exploration is also linked to quest and character progression in that the game does not sufficiently progress without a minimum amount of exploration meanwhile some content/areas are always hidden and accessible only through certain quests and characters. For example - in T.O.M.E, an ASCII based game which follows Tolkien’s fictionalized world of LOTR, it is nearly impossible to locate ‘Sauron the Sorcerer’ in the dungeons of ‘Angband’ level 99 without first finding/defeating ‘The Necromancer of Dol Guldur’ in the dungeons of ‘Dol Guldur’. In the LOTR world ‘The Necromancer’ is the disguise Sauron uses to conceal his presence from Middle Earth. In fact Greg Zeschuka developer (and co-founder) from Bioware, mentions ‘developing of vast parts of content that an ordinary player might never see in an interview to Gamasutra. Almost 30 per cent of the content including sub-quests and related content are available but generally not explored by a casual gamer (the distinctions between casual gamers and hardcore gamers is problematic, but in this case suffices to say that the casual gamer would be an ordinary player who spends a few hours a week gaming compared to the hardcore gamer).
The Story (The Narrative) as the fourth pillar of RPG: Releases such as Mass Effect 2 and DA: O are by the developers own definition catering to a new RPG (shooter) and a more traditional RPG (in terms of classical role-play). The narrative is one of the elements of an RPG that has in recent releases strengthened enough to be termed as a key pillar particularly by prominent developers such as Epic Games and Bioware whose efforts are to create immersive game worlds, which respond to a player’s actions and characterizations.
Another feature important to gameplay but which do not possess such commonalities is social interaction. Although focus is given to social interaction in RPGs, there is no identification of social interaction as a relevant feature. This may manifest in two phases, one is the ‘alone together’ phenomenon and the second is the emulation of social interaction through choice (moral) in games such as DA: O.

The Playing ‘Alone Together’ Phenomenon

The ‘Alone Together’ phenomenon refers to gaming on and off MMOs in either solo play or in small manageable teams. These phenomena are noticed in MMO Games and multi-player games. ‘Alone Together’ elements are also imported into the offline gaming scene. This is not a new phenomena, rather it is something which has gained more prominence with MMO releases and offline/LAN games trying to incorporate these elements for better gameplay. DA: O has a specific in-game function where you can login and post screenshots/character profiles and achievements online through the game. This is also noticeable in newer releases of T.O.M.E (v2.35 and 3.00 alpha 19 release). Fan content and MODs were usually put up on the Games official website or fans sites, a few games incorporate these modifications as custom maps and thus incorporating fan content into the game. The incorporation of this element in DA: O suggests the merging or the blurring of lines between genres, explored in the following sections.

Unification and/or Merger of Genres

Ray Mayzuka and Chris Beleszinski echo similar sentiments. Genres are ‘almost a vestige of the past’, says Mayzuka, and Beleszinski echoes this as he says that the future of shooters is lodged with RPG. Mayzuka stretches this to predict a future, which may no longer subscribe to traditional classifications and have borrowed elements from multiple genres. The rising importance given to story and narrative technique by game developers such as Epic Games and Bioware are telling, since generically opposite developers (Epic works on shooters, while Bioware is renowned for its RPG) are working towards similar goals—goals which focus on creating games which are more realistic and require the addition of elements that traditionally remains the exclusive domain of one genre. Traditionally, Shooters and RPGs have been simulating the same experience (fighting) from two different perspectives, the former focuses on the action and combat, and the latter focuses on development and story behind warfare. The inclusion of the story in shooters enhances its immersiveness. Beleszinski states that the content is there for a purpose just like a script and as such the feedback by the in-game character contributes to the immersive environment for the player/reader. Feedback becomes one aspect of the immersive environment, one that responds and reacts to the player as and when the game is played. The player creates the game as it is played and takes part in the process of authorship of that playthrough. This element of authorship gives an amount of independence and moral choice that allows the player to create the narrative as the game progresses and this among many elements contributes to the immersiveness of the game environment (by environment I mean the game world including all its design aspects as well as the programming aspects which create this world).

The second part will review the debates around narratives and gameplay and focuses on the 'Demands of the story' and the 'Demands of the Game' derived from Greg Costikyan’s ‘Where Stories End and Games Begin’.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/gaming-and-gold/the-elements-of-role-playing-games

Digital Natives with a Cause? A Report

radha — 2012-03-13T10:43:09Z

Youth are often seen as potential agents of change for reshaping their own societies. By 2010, the global youth population is expected reach almost 1.2 billion of which 85% reside in developing countries. Unleashing the potential of even a part of this group in developing countries promises a substantially impact on societies. Especially now when youths thriving on digital technologies flood universities, work forces, and governments and could facilitate radical restructuring of the world we live in. So, it’s time we start listening to them.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/dnrep.pdf

Storytelling and Technology - Sartaj Anand

denisse — 2014-03-12T11:43:19Z

This post outlines the general characteristics of storytelling. The second section is an interview with Sartaj Anand, the founder of EgoMonk and BIllion Strong, who talks about storytelling as a strategy to build trust at the intersections of business and technology. This is the first of a series of installments exploring the potential of storytelling for social change.

CHANGE-MAKER: Sartaj Anand

ORGANIZATION: EgoMonk & Billion Strong

STRATEGY OF CHANGE: Leverage technology by focusing on the relationship between people and technology, and build trust by localizing and personalizing communication

METHOD OF CHANGE: Storytelling

“We all have something to say. Question is: will anyone listen?”

Understanding Comics
Scott McCloud, 1994

Today, everybody seems to be talking about ‘storytelling’. From activists to corporates; they are all jumping on this nostalgic bandwagon and embracing once again an enthralling habit of yesteryear: the ability to tell good stories. The practice has taken an identity of its own. It's distancing itself from its roots in oral tradition, and morphing into a state-of-the-art communication strategy. This is no selfless trend, though. Behind the hype, lies their thirst for (your) attention, and the belief that they do not only have a story to tell, but that it is a story that matters. In the context of “making change” particularly, when political and social crises emerge, the public space is flooded by a series of narratives and discourses as told by different actors. This explosion of stories culminates in an overload of information that could end up saturating its intended audience. This is not only undesirable, but dangerous when underneath the noise lies a message important for human dignity and survival. So, what is it about a story that will make it worthy of your attention? And how can this seemingly simple, yet complex tactic culminate in further engagement?

To explain storytelling as a method to create change, I will focus on how this practice can be utilized to enhance visibility and effectiveness of advocacy practices, as outlined in the research overview. I will start by unpacking ‘storytelling’: focusing on its purpose and functions. I will also look at the the relationship between the storyteller and the audience, and also at how storytelling redefines ‘the public space’. Although I will be putting my best effort to explain the workings behind his method, I will rely on the storytellers themselves to learn about the power of well-crafted and well-delivered stories to make change. This opportunity’s change-actors: Sartaj Anand, The Ugly Indian, Blank Noise, come from different fields and will show very different perspectives of how the narratives of change utilized in their stories, re-articulates how users/citizens/customers interact and experience content.

Telling Stories

So, what is storytelling? And what makes it so different from other forms of narration? I consulted the work of German philosophers Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt to unpack the nature of this practice and its ability to transmit knowledge.

“the storyteller takes what he tells from the experience and he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening”

W. Benjamin, 1977

In Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” (1955) he laments the demise of storytelling: “less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly [as if] the ability to exchange experiences [had been taken away from us]”. Having its origins in oral tradition, storytelling for the most part consists of taking experiences worth sharing and disseminating them in the community with a specific, and according to Benjamin, a useful purpose in mind. It could be a moral, a maxim or a practical advice (1977), but at the end of the day, the audience takes away a new piece of information it did not have at the beginning of the story. This lesson may be related to the past of the storyteller or one of his characters, but its value lies in how it can now be extrapolated to the audience’s future.

Ann Rippin's rendition to The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin. Visit her wordpress here.

Hannah Arendt, German-American philosopher from the early 20th century also had a lot to say about storytelling and ‘narratives’. She understood it as a framework, backed up by a strong tradition of its own, and a structure that embodies how our mind works: “the mind doesn’t simply re-create sequences of events as they occur, but it creates new sequences and integrates events into appropriate existing sequences; the mind is constantly forming narratives” (Kieslich, 2013.). This understanding of the practice goes beyond Benjamin’s proposition that we become part of the narration as it occurs. Arendt posits that our mind is already manufactured to construct sequences and connections in the same way in which we build stories -as opposed to the way we structure our essays, novels or tweets- before we tell them. Being such an embedded cognitive process, it feels familiar, comfortable and natural, which derives into a “critical appreciation” for the events of the story, and leads you to make deeper connections on how they relate to your life (Oni, 2012).

(Read more on Arendt and storytelling here: The Story of Reconciliation – Hannah Arendt Center)

However, both Benjamin and Arendt’s analysis is still very focused on the oral vs. prose question. Entering the 21st century we face the question of the role of digital technology and our highly visual culture in facilitating, amplifying or limiting the process of storytelling. On this point, I jumped to the end of the 20th century and looked at one of the many forms of storytelling: the comic. Scott McCloud’s “Understanding the Comic” (1994) takes you through the whole process of creating a coherent interplay of words and pictures that “convey information” and/or produce an “aesthetic response in the viewer”. Why are aesthetics important? , Because, according to McCloud, the inclusion of art is both the rejection and affirmation of our human condition. On one hand, art (or how we respond to it) is a rejection to our basic instincts, allowing us to express needs beyond survival and reproduction. On the other hand, it is a vehicle through which we assert our identities as individuals and pursue a “higher purpose and truth” (1994). Digital storytelling is imbued with visual stimuli: pictures, videos, graphics, that enhance the sensory experience, and as we explored in the Information Design posts (Find Part 1:Information Activism, and Part 2: Information Design) create new (and deeper) channels to approach and understand the message delivered by these stories.

Excerpts of Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

From these three perspectives we understand the following about storytelling. It is:

A practice rooted in the tradition of sharing experiences

Participatory and interactive: the experience of the storyteller becomes the experience of the audience.

The purpose of storytelling is to pass on a message, moral guidance or practical advice to the audience, through its content.

The form or structure of narratives is determined by sequences of facts and events, which is the same way we build stories in our minds.

The experiential and familiar nature of storytelling makes it easier to engage with and relate to.

The inclusion of images, art and media produces an aesthetic response in the viewer, providing the audience an opportunity for self-expression and freedom.

Translating these characteristics to the theme of the Methods for Social Change project (how to build a sense of citizenship and civicness through technology-mediated practices. More here): storytelling (re)emerges as a promising vehicle for political change, especially when in par with the “technological possibilities” of our times (Benjamin, 1977). If we choose to entertain this thought, we find how its roots in community traditions make stories an excellent meeting point to form solidarity networks and stronger offline communities to sustain activism. The logical and sequential format of stories are interesting mediums, not only to transmit new ideas on citizenship and engagement; but make them relevant and appealing. Finally, 'the moral of the stories' are seeds for introspection and reflection, that may shape how we understand our role in society as a whole. At the end of the day though, it is storytellers who will lead this journey and meeting them is the first step to gauge how the theory of storytelling unfolds in the practice.

In the next section, we will meet some of the actors utilizing this method in different fields - and there are plenty of storytellers out there, gifted in skill and practice conveying an array of messages to an equally diverse public- but before moving on I will close with an excerpt from Lisa Disch’s essay that brings all these points together:

“[Storytelling] is more adequate than arguments to depict ambiguities of a multidimensional social reality”

In other words, it is a practice that strips narratives from all ornaments, displaying the complexities of humanity in its most intuitive and experiential form.

(Story)Tellers

Great storytellers: creators who devote their resources in controlling

this medium to convey their messages effectively”

Understanding Comics
Scott McCloud (1993)

Our first storyteller is Sartaj Anand; an India-based entrepreneur, founder of the innovation and strategy consulting firm: EgoMonk and active member of TED, Ashoka, Sandbox, Kairos Society and the Pearson Foundation networks (More about his work in his Social Good profile). His self-described “unreasonable dream” is to impact one billion people with his work and create “life-changing experiences”. He strives to do this by a) leveraging the relationship between people and technology and b) through his recently launched non-profit Billion Strong. Also, as opposed to other change-makers we’ve interviewed in the project, he comes from an engineering and business background; bringing a for-profit perspective into our melange of multi-stakeholder approaches to change.

The following interview touches on digital storytelling as one of the ways Anand is using to leverage technology. His vision highlights how you cannot disconnect people from the processes you are utilizing to impact their lives. Incorporating a more humane focus in the way we use technology, and in how we construct stories, is according to his experience, the best way to have practices resonate to and be appropriate for the public.

Sartaj Anand,

Founder of EgoMonk and Billion Strong

Tell us about your background and the intersections of your work with technology.

I started with an engineering background and my thesis was on language processing; figuring out how people talk and how that needs construction data. Fundamentally at some point, I figured out that technology is not the problem, people are; so that’s how I moved into my current focus in business: which is innovation strategic consulting. I frequently rely on technology to enable or actualize change but I don’t necessarily create it. The challenge is how we leverage the technology we have [...] and that’s where I can add the most value.

How do you leverage technology in the context of making change then?

I leverage technology in terms of using it but focusing on the ‘people’ side of it”: the relationship between people and technology. That’s the main intersection point. [...] This is what I mean when I talk about technology, innovation, social structures and change.

Ideas for Change from Sartaj Anand

Economically, business models have to replicate and service society. If businesses serve their people, they capture maximum value and gain efficiency over ten, twenty years (and this is appealing to all the capitalists in industrial businesses). However, towards the course of these years a lot of things can change and you progressively become more and more outdated. When you have this premonition, that's the point when you need to step in and cannibalize your own business model.

For example, for seven years, music labels sold cds only. Then Apple came in with iPods and digital music downloads. After milking this for 10 years, what it should have done is fortify it and start streaming music to capture maximum value, like Spotify did. [...] This is a model EgoMonk works with and we try to communicate these things to our clients. They have the power to execute it, but they have to internally feel confident with all their stakeholders, whether it is for-profits with their board; or non-profits with donors and program partners. This is a choice we need to commit to. A lot of the problem in the change process (technology enabled or otherwise) is trust building. At the end of the day you are working with people, and this is a challenge.

In order to build this trust you must be aiming for a deeper and personal communication with your clients. How are you including this in your business model?

We focus a lot on communication and that’s something we rely on increasingly; and I found it has to have a Why-What-How model -borrowing from Simon Sinek's gold circles. In that order.

Storytelling 101 from Sartaj Anand

People don’t buy the 'what' of it, without the 'why' you do it. For example, Apple is great because it works to improve your life, to inspire you, amuse you: make your life better. What they do comes second: Apple is an electronics company, an application company. Last is the how: It makes the iPhone. We apply a similar model and this is something I apply in my storytelling also. I’m a believer that every story has to have an end or a moral: something that is more hopeful and optimistic. Rely on that but decide that also, I’m not the only one around: stories are increasingly personal and local.

Given the personal and experiential nature of storytelling, I assume it is a challenge to mainstream it in your services. Tell us more about the practices you are using to implement it and how they break from more traditional communication practices in the past.

EgoMonk

EgoMonk is an Innovation and Strategic Management Consultancy (More about EgoMonk here). Particularly this means that:

a) We start with the hypothesis that we don't know everything. With that in mind, we borrow amazing frameworks from amazing institutions. For example, Holacracy; (a “purposeful organization” technology that changes how the organization is structured, how decisions are made and how power is distributed); 'How will you win' philosophy from traditional large companies,, where they equate every decision to a couple of questions like what's your winning aspiration?, where will you plan?, how will you win?, what capability systems/processes need to exist to make this a sustainable practice that outlives you? This approach gets us halfway there, [especially] working with people who haven't had access to this before.

EgoMonk's services

b) We localize it. We work with high impact entrepreneurs and turn their life goals into a four week plan. We frame it: What happens if after four weeks, you die. If these are four weeks you have to live: what really matters to you? What do you want to accomplish professionally and personally? Once you go through that exercise we say: What can continue sustainable during your life? What can you take away? We focus on timing and what you have to do. Once you put that concept of mortality into every day's existence, you start behaving differently.

c) We work with gamification. For example, we worked in a factory and completely changed the incentivization for their workers into something that is more fun. The challenge was: how do you improve the process of well-being in an industrial environment. How do we make working enjoyable for them? This model consists of short-term rewards: if you work really hard over this much time, you get 10 points and this gets you a (reward) with your family. This has never happened before.

Billion Strong

Billion Strong is a platform. We want to impact a billion people and mobilize a billion dollars every year. The concept behind it is that the future is completely decoupled from our reality. It is highly utopian and right now we are not there and my hypothesis is that we'll never get there because our perspectives and assumptions keep evolving. This non-profit aims to accelerate the future in our lifetime so we can at least enjoy some of its benefits. It focuses on six things: culture, mobility, technology, art, nutrition and divinity. Each of these will be used as levers to impact a billion people. In the case of Billion Strong, user adoption is the most frequent challenge you face in the non-profit space. I will explain this using our first two projects:

a) Project 1 - Divinity:
We want to take religion, God and spirituality as a lever to impact people. A manifestation of this is the release of an open source tool kit to convert religious institutions into co-working spaces.

Centers of religion are:

Everywhere and permanent

Well known by the community

Community centers

Safe

Non-profit and non-taxable

Underutilized 99% of the time

Disconnected from youth

Centers of religion have always been centers of education and community oriented, but within the last generation they've become prayer halls, and I think this is the wrong way of using this infrastructure. There are a couple of narratives being negotiated here (See box to the left).

In this case [the open source tool-kit] has a framework, and it is dynamic to the point where your choices in real time will influence the policies of this place and their physical manifestation. So you ask questions in a flow chart: Do you want men and women to work together or not?; Do you have the ability to buy new furniture or you want to use the existing furniture?; when you ask these questions you navigate a flow chart, depending on your choices. They will lead to a different output and when they see that, it is immediately empowering. This is storytelling, and this what will help us navigate the adoption issues. It's essentially us saying you own it; you know exactly what is good for your own community. In terms of the narrative, each copy will be different and adapted to its language. It has to be made for this community and everything has to be localized for that story you are telling. The religious and cultural narrative needs to be blended into it.

b) Project 2 - Nutrition:
Meat consumption is a huge challenge and highly unsustainable. We will use kick-start mechanics in a mobile app to trigger and enable change in food habits. We are obviously very digitally inclined right now. It's easy to capitalize on that, but instead of giving them money, we will ask them to skip a meal, go vegetarian for today or for the week and we are going to support that.

Adoption is a huge challenge, so we'll ask them: Where do you stay? They'll say: Amsterdam [for example], and it will provide them with a template. If you are vegetarian for today, for the week, or the month, this is your meal plan and all you need. Users will find meals close to them and won't have to worry about it anymore. And we will map their impact in real time through info-graphics and data visualization. They will be constructing and visualizing their own story in real time and we’ll present it through different narratives.

We are also looking at multi-stakeholderism in this project. Both EgoMonk and Billion Strong seem to be a combination of business, technology and communication strategies. Why multi-stakeholderism?

Three reasons:

a) The future is multi-domain. You will never understand the whole picture if you say: I’m only going to solve water, but what about the pipes, the roads, the environment, infrastructure, cultural issue. One domain is no longer good enough. You will never be a complete expert of the complete ecosystem.

b) Adoption models will always be a challenge and right now it’s a compromised formula. Now it's a zero-sum game. We literally need to escape that and make it future-oriented; make it 1+1 through partnerships.

c) Storytelling is also getting more mainstreamed into change management and multi-stakeholderism. At the end of it, if you tell a good enough story, you can sell and get people to believe in your projects. This inherently builds partnership models. There is something that is permission marketing: all sales in the future are relationship based and indirect sales.(E.g. Red Bull is all about the experience) That’s how we have to be when we talk about multi-stakeholderism. Everything needs to be built in.

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** Next installment will look at how storytelling enhances visibility and accessibility, and how it is being used by Urban Governance groups in Bangalore.**

Sources:

Arendt, Hannah (1994) Essays in Understanding Edited with an Introduction by Jerome Kohn. The literary Trust of Hannah Arendt Bluecher.p.308
Benjamin, Walter. (1977): "The storyteller."89.
Disch,Lisa Jane (1994) Hannah Arendt and the limits of Philosophy. Cornell University Press. p.172-173
Kieslich, Ingo. (2013) "Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt: Storytelling in and as theoretical writing." PhD diss., Vanderbilt University,
McCloud, Scott. (1994)."Understanding comics: The invisible art." Northampton, Mass
Oni, Peter (2012). "The Cognitive Power of Storytelling: Re-reading Hannah Arendt in a Postmodernist/Africanist Context."

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/storytelling-sartaj-anand

Book 4: To Connect : Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

nishant — 2011-09-15T14:47:04Z

In Book 4, To Connect of the Digital (Alter)Natives with a Cause? series, we try to understand digital natives through their environment. Digital natives do not operate in a vacuum, their actions are shaped by the fast changing geo-political landscape, interaction with other actors and the global architecture of technology. In our Digital Natives with a Cause? research, it has become clear that at the heart of all digital natives discourse lies the question of power. Along with power, questions of race, class, gender and socio-economic situation cannot be ignored when talking about digital natives. We found that on one hand digital natives are destabilising existing power structures and challenging the status quo. On the other, the geo-political context in which digital natives live, affect their activities, beliefs and opinions. Then there are actors that can destroy, influence or support digital native activity which give rise to questions of control that resonate within this new generation

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook4

Book 3: To Act : Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

nishant — 2011-09-15T14:40:51Z

In Book 3 of the Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? collective, we enter into dialogue with some of the severest and most heated debates around digital natives and their ability to effect change. To Act collides with the discourse on young people’s ability and role in technology mediated processes of change, heads-on. It deliberates on some very dense questions about how digital natives execute their visions of change using new forms of mobilisation of resources and sharing/production of information.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook3

Book 2: To Think: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

nishant — 2011-09-15T14:35:43Z

We started the Digital Natives with a Cause? Knowledge programme, with a series of questions, which were drawn from popular discourse, research, practice, policy and experiences of people engaging with questions of youth, technology and change. Our ambition was to consolidate existing knowledge and to look at knowledge gaps which can be addressed in order to build new frameworks to understand the role that digital natives see themselves playing in their own understanding and vision of change. This Book 2 To Think, takes up the challenge of constructing new approaches and each essay in this book, through case-studies, analyses and divergent perspectives, offers a novel way of understanding processes of technology mediated citizen-driven change.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook2