Canadian Copyright Reform

I wish I had gotten around to this sooner, but alas! There are only a few hours left to have your voices heard in the Government of Canada Copyright Consultation. The hard-working people over at Fair Copyright for Canada have made submitting a response as easy as signing a form letter, so there's still time to add your name to the long (but perhaps not long enough) list of people dissatisfied with the way copyright reform in this country is headed. If you haven't done so already, hop on over to Fair Copyright's "Copyright Consultation Made Easy" page, follow their advice, and send off an email asap. They've also provided a form letter to petition elected representatives to take up the cause - which you can personalize or simply sign and send through an online form...they'll print off a hard copy and send it along to the appropriate offices this week.

There's lots of info on the Fair Copyright website explaining why this is important, including placing much needed limits on corporate-centric (and US-driven) copyright laws, protecting consumer rights and artists' rights, fostering research, innovation, creativity and education, maintaining individual control over our technologies, etc., as well as a ton of background info. You can also find out more about the consultation, analysis of the submissions and proposals at www.speakoutoncopyright.ca. Here's a really brief excerpt from the Fair Copyright site:

Last year, Canadians across the country rose up in protest when our government proposed to change copyright in ways that many found harmful and unfair. Due to mounting opposition, the proposed law (Bill C-61) was delayed and ultimately dropped. The government promises to once again introduce a new copyright law. This time we
can help them get it right. From now until September 13th, 2009, the Government of Canada will be holding a consultation on copyright. In just minutes, you can tell the government what matters most to you.

Having waited 'till the last minute myself on this, I can attest to how easy it really is to write up a quick submission. Here's a copy of the email I sent in to info@copyrightconsultation.gc.ca earlier today:

I am writing in response to the solicitation for feedback on the Government of Canada Copyright Consultations. I am a PhD candidate in communication, which involves a significant amount of media research and analysis. The quality of my research, as well as that of my teaching, relies on copyright laws that allow for fair dealing, particularly as it applies to educational purposes. Canada is already far behind other developed nations when it comes to fair dealing allowances. For instance, although Canadian academics are currently allowed exemptions to copyright for study and analysis, we do not have the same exemptions for classroom use as found in the US and in various EU countries. As a university instructor, copyright restricts the materials and analysis that I can show in class, which greatly impedes my ability to deliver to the students a thorough education in media criticism and analysis. This is particularly the case with newer copyrighted materials. As libraries everywhere struggle with diminishing budgets and rising copyright/licensing costs, their ability to secure the rights to new films, games and other media materials in a comprehensive and timely manner has been enormously reduced. My hope is that the new copyright law will include a more comprehensive and flexible articulation of fair dealing for academic and educational purposes. More flexible fair dealing could enhance education, while enabling better research on key and emerging aspects of our highly (and ever increasingly) mediated society.

Conversely, if fair dealing exemptions are not adequately protected under the new law, I worry about the detrimental impact this would have not only on academics, but also on artists, students, and everyday users of digital technologies and media. It is hugely important that we, as citizens, have access to the core components of our shared culture. This access should not merely include the right to purchase or consume the media, but the right to engage with it as well. Engagement is not passive -- it includes criticism, discussion, appropriation, and re-contextualization. We do this as part of our struggle to make meaning out of a complex, and often contradictory, global mass culture. Occasionally, engagement can lead to creative transformations, which provide invaluable stepping stones between the past and the present, the center and the periphery, the traditional and the new. While it is of course extremely important that artists and producers maintain some control over their creations, this control needs to be balanced with the audience's own right to participate in the shaping of their cultural experience. Copyright exemptions such as fair dealing for criticism, parody and transformative creativity are crucial if we are to ensure continued access to these rights. Given that copyright itself has extended so rapidly in the past few decades, a similar expansion of consumer or user rights would be most in keeping with our democratic ideal of a nation with plural but also shared cultural experiences...Not the elimination of these rights.

I'm well aware that it's far from perfect. And that a longer, more detailed (and thorough!) submission would have been great. But nonetheless, given the huge outcry last year and the momentum that the movement has gained over the past few months, I think that enough fingers pointing in the right direction just might end up being enough to send GovCan down a better path than it's barreled down so far.

Delicious Summer Leftovers, Part 1

Once again, I've allowed my blog to slowly wind down as my intended posts list has piled up out of control. Now that the new semester is imminent, and I'll once again be managing two sites, I figured the best thing to do is another one of those long summary posts that briefly hits on a good assortment of "items of interest". I have so many, I predict another similar post will be in order in the very near future. For now, however, please enjoy some leftover - but still fresh and relevant - posts from the past few weeks that slipped through the cracks of my over-scheduled calendar.



Storybird Revolutionizes Collaborative Storytelling
This post was intended to be a preview of a wonderful new online resource for kids, families, friends, artists, writers and anyone else who's always dreamed of creating their own storybook. Since Storybird actually launched (or "hatched") earlier today, however, instead you can go on over and see for yourself how beautiful and intuitive their collaborative storytelling tools really are. I have high hopes for this site - it's a wonderful idea for families, a great resource for artists, and exactly the kind of responsive, user-centered cultural outlets that media literacy types are calling for. I've been exploring the site for a couple of weeks in Beta, and love what I see so far. I haven't created a Storybird myself, but have some ideas floating around that I'll surely put into e-print soon.

Sign up and start designing your own storybooks over at Storybird, and check out their Storybird Blog for more info about the site and some sense of the founding principles behind it.




Using Strawberry to Sell Strawberries
Via Emily Claire Afan over at Kidscreen, news that earlier this week American Greetings Properties and Cookie Jar Entertainment - co-producers of the Strawberry Shortcake property - are teaming up with the "Produce for Better Health Foundation" to use their iconic red-haired good girl to promote fruits and veggies. Here's an excerpt:

It's Fruits & Veggies - More Matters month in the US and the year-long partnership will see Strawberry Shortcake and friends making healthy eating fun for kids. PBH is working with US retailers to disseminate nutritional information about fruits and vegetables that features Strawberry, including columns for in-store newsletters and magazines, ad circulars, recipe cards, signage in produce and frozen foods departments and activity booklets. There will also be a free Strawberry e-card at www.americangreetings.com [AND] PBH's websites are featuring new Strawberry images over the course of the year and Strawberry-themed kid-friendly, healthy recipes are part of the "get kids involved" section of www.fruitsandveggiesmorematters.org and www.foodchamps.org.

This might seem like such a no-brainer, but it also finally remedies something that has frustrated me about Strawberry Shortcake ever since her relaunch a couple of years ago. Here, we have a perfect little group of ambassadors for better eating - characters based on fruit-based pastries that could easily be "updated" to focus on fruit instead of baked goods, but for some reason never have been. I've never met a kid who didn't love berries (though I'm sure they exist), and am encouraged by how easy it would be to promote all kinds of wonderfully healthy foods by a simple addition of blueberries or strawberry slices. The fruits themselves are jam packed with vitamins, and set a great precedent for fruit and veggie eating of all kinds. Great move on the part of both American Greetings and Cookie Jar. Now all we have to do is drop the "Shortcake" and maybe see a few episodes that don't offer "baking delicious cakes" as the only way to save the day ;)




Sesame Street Revamp
Lots of news this week about the end of Reading Rainbow, but throughout the summer the focus has been on another PBS fave, Sesame Street. The series is entering into its 40th season with all the fanfare one would expect, including a new set of Emmys to add to their collection along with a special lifetime achievement award. The Sesame muppets are currently featured in an editorial spread in Harper's Bazaar, and everyone's all abuzz about their upcoming Mad Men parody. Much less attention has been paid to the news that the show will be changing its format - for the first time in...hmmm....ever? - to a segmentized, hosted format that sounds a tiny bit like The Muppet Show. Here's the excerpt, drawn from Joel Keller's TVSquadarticle:

Miranda Barry of the Sesame Workshop...appeared here with Dr. Rosemarie Truglio, who is in charge of the show's curriculum. They talked about the show's landmark season and what kids and their parents should expect to see. A new segmentized format, a new host, Murray Muppet, who will take kids through the various segments of the show, and a new segment featuring Abby Cadabby that's the program's first foray into CGI. The curriculum will emphasize science and nature along with the usual cornerstones this year.

Should be an interesting shift, and a move away from the "television flow" template the show has followed since its inception. It will also be interesting to see how the CGI component goes, and if/how it fits in with other Sesame CGI initiatives, for example Bert and Ernie's Great Adventures.




Treasure World: Nintendo's new DS/ARG hybrid
Via Springwise, short and sweet coverage of a game that I find totally and utterly fascinating, Aspyr Media's Treasure World for the Nintendo DS. I've actually written quite a bit about this game, but I'm saving it for a longer article on ARG/digital game hybrids and how they relate to the "free range kids" movement. Through the article, I also found out about Hidden Park, an indie game/app for the iPhone that has similarly captivating features, massive potential, and will be shortly releasing tools that will allow people to create their own real-world/digital world hybrid games. Nice. For now, here's an excerpt of the article description...see if you can figure out why I'm so enthralled:

Treasure World is a game for the Nintendo DS that converts real-world wifi signals into online treasures. The story focuses on Starsweep, a space traveller who journeys through space in his ship called Haley. In the game, however, Haley has broken down and needs more stardust to get going again. A quirky robot named Wishfinder helps players find not just stardust but also treasure during their adventure by tapping the wealth of wifi hotspots available around the world. More than 2,500 in-game items and treasures such as trees, flowers, candy and clothes can be unlocked as players access the more than 200 million wifi treasure spots worldwide that are registered within the game, and those items can be used to decorate in-game environments. Some feature musical qualities; others can be used to dress up the player's unique character. Either way, the stardust uncovered helps move the spaceship along. Only some items are available at each hotspot, however, meaning that the more kids move around, the more they'll find.

Find out more and watch the trailer at the official Club Treasure World website, and be sure to check out The Hidden Park as well. After three decades of dismantling playgrounds and effacing green spaces in our urban and suburban centers, a little digital re-enchantment might be just what we need.




Fat Princess
This summer, a well-reviewed, interesting looking, tongue-in-cheek game attracted the objections of some feminists and a bit of bad media, but for the most part the Fat Princess "controversy" (if it even DID qualify as one) seems to have died down. The capture-the-flag based game plays on the whole "Save the Princess" theme that has pervaded digital games (and films, cartoons, comics and fairytales) since the early Nintendo years ("Sorry Mario..." and all that). The game graphics are cartoony, quirky, violent, and silly...but is the theme of fattening up your princess so that the enemy will have more trouble carrying her away to kidnap her really offensive or sexist? The debate unfolded over a period of several days (preceded by a few months of negative and reactionary speculation) - which you can read all about over at Game Politics and Joystiq. Two gender-politics-inclusive reviews that I particularly appreciated took somewhat oppositional stances, though both reviews were quite tempered and overall positive. The first was posted over at Feminist Gamers and included the following analysis:

Instead of running out into the forest to find cake to fatten up the princess with, why not go out and find gold (which is a lot heavier than cake) to stuff into a treasure chest. The more gold in the chest, the heavier it would be, and the harder it would be to carry. Oh, but that’s not as “cute” as cake and fat chicks. Right.

The second, and by far my fave, was written by Winda Benedetti, official "Citizen Gamer" for MSNBC, and falls more on the side of supporting the game's originality:

"I’m a pro-woman kinda woman (Go women!) who would happily pay the dues to join Club Feminist (we do pay dues, right?) And yet, there’s not a single pro-woman bone in my body that is offended by this game. (Does this mean my membership application is going to be rejected?)

As video games go, “Fat Princess” is fun, funny and well-crafted. It’s done in a playful style and has a wicked sense of humor about almost everything. And while it does star two adorable and, yes, sometimes chubby cartoon princesses and does feature buckets of cartoon blood, I can’t say that it seems particularly hurtful or harmful to anyone."

I'll have to play through the game and think about this a little more before making a firm decision, but am currently exploring the idea that the game's themes are actually quite progressive. I mean, the fact that the princess is rotund doesn't make the armies desire her any less...and we already complain so much about the limited portrayals (+stereotypes) used in representations of women in games...I feel I'm leaning toward a Bakhtinian reading, but we'll have to see.




Shaping Youth Takes on Privacy Issues
Child advocacy maven Amy Jussel has been writing up a storm over at Shaping Youth, and has some comprehensive and thoughtful things to say on the whole kids + online privacy discourse that has re-emerged this summer (in no small part because of Maine's Act to Prevent Predatory Marketing Practices Against Minors). In particular, her two recent posts on "keeping kid safe from...marketers" includes a plethora of links and resources useful to anyone interested in helping kids and parents protect their data while protecting their rights to information and freedom of expression. I highly recommend checking out Amy's toolkit/overview in Part 1 here, and her interview with Privo Privacy Vault Executive Denise Tayloe included in Part 2 here.




Kids' Virtual Worlds Continue to Mushroom
With SOE's Free Realms claiming 5 million players, Club Penguin raging on into its 4th year of operations, and new titles announced and/or launched almost weekly, it's no surprise that market analysts have recorded some massive spikes in the popularity of virtual worlds this summer. According to an article published in Virtual Worlds News this past July (2009), vw consultant K Zero estimates that the "total number of registered accounts in the virtual worlds sector totaled 579,000,000 in the April-June quarter, 2009. That's an increase of 38.6 percent from the prior quarter when the tally was 417,000,000."

Perhaps more surprising (though not to us kids' media types) is the finding that the average age of the virtual world user is now 14. As Virtual Worlds News reports:

A breakout by age bar chart...shows the bulk of users -- 334,000,000 accounts, or nearly 60 percent of all virtual world users -- are between the ages of 10-15. The second largest group are users in the 5-10 age group [WOW!!!!], followed closely by those between the ages of 15 and 25, with a steep drop-off in the over-25 age group.

The article also gives some numbers to go with the stats, which is great (remembering that these are estimates based on averages). According to K Zero there are current 114 million vw players between the ages of 5 and 10yrs, and 334 million between the ages of 10 and 15 years. Incredible. They also provide some details about where these kids are playing, listing the sites with the biggest gains in registered users this past spring:

Nicktropolis which increased registered users by 3.1 million, Moshi Monsters' jump of 3 million registered users, Stardoll which increased registered users by 8 million, Club Penguin's additional 6 million registered users, Spineworld's more than doubling of its number of registered users -- going from 1 million last quarter to 2.8 million this quarter, and Poptropica's additional 36 million registered users, according to K Zero.

Phew! That's all for now. More to come soon, including some thoughts on Disney+Mattel and driving media literacy (and media education) through comics, some resources for studying player-generated content, and some thoughts on Treasure World.

What Movie Monsters Can Teach Us About Fair Use

Last week's edition of Ip Osgoode features an excellent blog post by Patricia Aufderheide, Professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, about a recent US ruling that's added some extra oomph to fair use. The ruling in question came out of the recent case of Warren Publishing Co. v. Spurlock. The details of the case are described most aptly by Rodney Perkins over at Film Esq., portions of which I've reproduced here:

"Warren Publishing...the company behind such classic horror magazines like Creepy, Eerie, and Famous Monsters of Filmland...was on the losing end of a copyright dispute involving covers from some of its magazines.

The artwork of Basil Gogos appeared on the cover of at least 50 issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland as well as covers of a few issues of Eerie and Creepy. David Spurlock and Vanguard Productions published a book entitled Famous Monster Movie Art of Basil Gogos that reproduced 24 of these covers, 10 of which were portrayed as covers, and 14 of which appeared without any Warren magazine text.

In response...Warren brought an action for copyright and trademark infringement. Spurlock successfully presented a fair use defense to the Warren's copyright. Of great significance was the court's reasoning ...[which related to] the purpose and character of the work. Here, the judge found that Spurlock's uses of the covers was transformative since the the Gogos book presented the images for an entirely different purpose than the Warren magazines"

In her post, Aufderheide goes into further detail about why the ruling is significant, particularly in terms of the judge's discussion of the importance of the transformative element. She writes:

"The judge emphasized, as have judges consistently in the last 15 years, the importance of the transformative element (without ruling out non-transformative fair uses), and therefore the related importance of the third factor of amount. He found the uses fully transformative; after all, the magazine was describing trends in monster movies, and the book was describing the career trajectory of an artist. He found the amount entirely appropriate. This use accords with previous U.S. decisions over the last 15 years, quite consistently. The transformative defense, allied with appropriate amount, appears to be in the “safe haven” area of fair use. This makes a huge difference to creators of all kinds, from mashup artists to documentary filmmakers to museum programmers."

My favourite part of the article is this extremely quotable line where Aufderheide specifies that: "when fair use is used, it becomes more useable"

What is perhaps most useful to those of us coming at this from outside of legal studies is that Aufderheide's post then shifts to describe some of the great work coming out of the American University's Center for Social Media, which has been working closely with both the AU Washington College of Law’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (in particular professor Peter Jaszi), as well as various creator and user groups, to produce a free, online repository of fair use best practices codes. Because fair use is such a broad and context-specific doctrine, they have adopted a context-responsive approach, creating a best practice code that is specific to each user/producer/prosumer group, detailing how they can apply the logic of fair use to specific situations. Here are some of the examples that Aufderheide describes in her post:

For instance, documentary filmmakers often capture copyrighted material incidentally in their work; their code helps them evaluate when fair use applies to the moment when the family bursts into a round of the (copyrighted) song “Happy Birthday.” Media literacy teachers often bring current advertisements into the classroom, and they also want to develop a database of such ads to draw upon over time; their code helps them apply fair use to that situation. Online video makers often combine music, photography and video to make a tribute to the Jonas Brothers or to recut “Star Trek” episodes into a gay fantasy or to make a political critique of a presidential speech. Their code helps them understand the logic of fair use governing their choices to make new work composed-often entirely-of existing work."

To date, the impact of these 'best practices' codes has been extremely positive and promising to say the least. You can check out the Center for Social Media website for a full chronicle of their successes, which include the transformation of the documentary filmmakers' code into a tool for insurers to accept fair use claims, and examples of school boards adopting media literacy teachers' codes within their own regulations.

You can access the full range of tools on the site. In particular, I recommend their resources on Fair Use Teaching Tools, Fair Use in Online Video, Recut, Reframe, Recycle, and a report on what creators of user-generated video think about copyright called The Good, Bad and Confusing.

Although I didn't see anything specific to child-generated content or how kids might understand, learn and incorporate fair use logic in their own online creations, there's certainly a lot of potential for something child-specific in the future. In addition to providing some alternative material to all the anti-copyright violation curriculum out there (which is often sponsored by the MPAA and RIAA), it would be a great asset in the advancement and practice of children's authorship rights. As Aufderheide says "when fair use is used, it becomes more useable," so no time like the present to establish some parameters and possible exceptions for a child-specific code of best practices.

**************************
Update Aug. 25, 2009: Potential Starting Points:
Fair Use Remix Institute
Remix Austin!
Shaping Youth post on Fair Use and Youth
I should note, however, that even these (great) sources mostly deal with "youth" not necessarily minors, let alone young children. A particularly notable exception, however, is Remix Austin's Kids Make TV Camp, which includes programs for kids 10yrs + and collaborations with the Girl Scouts. Neat-o!.

Radio Interview with Healthy Media Choices

Just a heads up to everyone that I will be on the air tomorrow, Tuesday August 18th, at 1pm EDT (10am PDT), being interviewed on The Healthy Media Choices Hour by Mary Rothchild. The show is associated with Healthy Media Choices, a nonprofit organization based in Vermont and New York, that aims to help "parents, caregivers and teachers of young children use their own insights to come to terms with media influence" (as per their own description on the org website). The organization's mission is to provide non-judgmental, research-based information about kids' media, kids and media, media literacy and a range of other topics, all in the hopes of building a comprehensive toolset for dealing with the growing role(s) of media in the lives of young children. Mary will be asking me about my research on kids' games and virtual worlds, regulatory opportunities, where digital play might fit into the free play debate, and various other (related) issues I'm sure. You can listen to the broadcast live on Brattleboro Community Radio WVEW-lp 107.7 fm (based in Brattleboro, Vermont), which is conveniently (and freely) available through iTunes.

Also, be sure to check out the Healthy Media Choices website and blog, and sign up for Mary's very useful #kidsmedia updates on Twitter.

Spore's Player-Generated Galactic Adventures

The quickest of quick posts today, I'm afraid, just to make sure everyone has seen these new stats on Spore Galactic Adventures. Courtesy of IGN, news that EA's recent Spore expansion has enabled and inspired over 100,000 user-created adventures in its very first month of operations. Great news for Spore fans, and a great development for UGC gaming.

Here's an excerpt from the IGN article that describes the new expansion:

Expanding on the original Spore game, the Spore Galactic Adventures expansion pack gets your creature out of its spaceship and exploring colorful and wacky new planets. Players can turn their creatures into space captains, battle epic monsters in intergalactic arenas and engage in intense planet-side races. In each mission, players earn experience to rank up their captain and earn game-changing items such as the Plasma Pulser and Swarm Magnet. In addition to the adventures in the box, players can download 10 all-new adventures created by the writers of the outrageously funny, pop-culture parody TV show, Robot Chicken.

And from the Spore Galactic Adventures website:

Get out of your starship and turn your Spore creatures into legendary Space Captains. For the first time, beam down with your allies to take on action-packed, planetside adventures. Complete quests, collect rewards, and even create and share your own missions. [...] PLAY a variety of Maxis-created missions as you explore planets all over the galaxy! LEVEL UP your Space Captain and earn more than 30 powerful new accessories! CREATE your own missions with the all-new Adventure Creator, then share them online!

You can check out some of the "adventures" over at the game's official Sporepedia, and/or follow all the latest Spore-related developments through the game's community Youtube channel and Twitter account.

Two things that interest me in particular about this (apart from the obvious UGC angle) are: 1) my staple question of whether kids are getting involved in the content creation (they sure do seem to like Spore), and 2) how does the Adventure Creator editor compare with Microsoft's Kodu?

Marvel's LittleBigPlanet - Product Placement or Player Generated Content?

I haven't really had much time to absorb let alone relay any of the barrage of information coming out of this year's Comic-Con, but I came across this little gem yesterday and just had to write up a post about it. Sony and Marvel have entered into a cross-promotional partnership that will see official Marvel costumes (available for purchase and download) introduced into Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet. As The Escapist's Andy Chalk writes:

"While we don't know what exactly to expect from this new relationship, it does open some intriguing possibilities for future crossovers. Will the release of new Marvel films result in official LittleBigPlanet crossovers? Could characters created specifically for LittleBigPlanet eventually find their way into a Marvel comic? (It's happened before, you know.) Perhaps a bit more ominously, is it possible that Sony will begin to clamp down on user-created levels that tie in, unofficially, with the Marvel Universe?"

While others have furthermore speculated that the costumes might come with special powers, Chalk's mention of the IP implications is what piqued my interest (that and the possibility of playing as and designing levels for Rogue, Mystique or She-Hulk). Historically, Marvel has not adopted the most open approach to having its characters and IP re-appropriated by gamers. The biggest example of this remains the The Marvel v. NCSoft/Cryptic Studios case back in 2005, wherein Marvel filed a lawsuit against the game developer in regards to City of Heroes, on the basis that the game made it possible for players to infringe on Marvel's IP. Yikes! Follow the slippery slope down that fuzzy line of logic, and you end up with lawsuits launched against Microsoft Word (or paint supply companies for that matter) on the basis that their software makes it possible for people to plagiarize. Anyway, the Marvel v. NCSoft case got its fair share of press back in 2005, for instance over at Terra Nova. And some excellent points about creativity and freedom of expression were made within the motions to dismiss that were filed at the time, such as:

"Kids with wandering imaginations have long decorated school notebooks with pictures of fantastic and supernatural beings of their own design. The ingenuity of individuals, as expressed through the creation of characters incorporating timeless themes of mythology, patriotism, 'good,' and 'evil,' has been a source of entertainment in the form of role-playing games for ages. In the face of technology that enables individuals to engage in such activities in a virtual, on-line context, Marvel Enterprises, Inc. and Marvel Characters, Inc. (collectively, 'Marvel') have taken the unprecedented step of attempting to appropriate for themselves the world of fantasy-based characters..."

The case was ultimately settled out of court, an outcome that caused quite a bit of debate in and of itself...did it mean that City of Heroes was in the right, or did it mean a further delay in the establishment of "fair use" within a gaming/UGC context? You can read some of that coverage here, here and here. For instance, as Greg Lastowka (assistant professor at Rutgers School of Law and Terra Nova author) noted at the time (as quoted on ZDNet):

"...[T]he terms of the settlement apparently allow the NCSoft character creation engine to stand, which is a victory for the players. [...] However, Marvel's claims of player infringement have not been formally rejected by the court, which means analogous claims might be pursued by Marvel, or a like-minded company, in the future."

The settlement was made all the more ambiguous by a subsequent announcement that Cryptic Studios (the makers of City of Heroes) and Marvel (and Mictosoft!) were teaming up to develop an MMO based on the Marvel Universe. As Alice would say, "Curiouser and curiouser!" For those of you interested in the outcome of it all, I'm not too sure what happened, except that last week Joystiq reported that the Diablo creator David Brevik had been hired on as lead in the Marvel MMO's development.

Flash forward a couple of years to yesterday's announcement, and Marvel's tune certainly appears to have changed. Or has it? As Chalk points out, the partnership and introduction of branded ($$) costumes is likely to come with some strings attached. Would Marvel allow "counterfeit" costumes to continue to compete (especially as free downloads) in the same LittleBig Market? Probably not. And seeing as their solution the last time they found an IP loophole was to become business partners with the loophole provider, it does seem pretty likely that this is not merely a promotional opportunity for the media giant, but a preemptive strike as well.

In addition, there's still that ongoing, unresolved issue of players' rights vs. IP holders' rights, which in LittleBigPlanet has unfolded in a strange back and forth, with some players' levels being deleted "without warning or explanation", while other "media-inspired" levels have continued on without hassle. For many of the players whose levels have been deleted (**not including what I can only assume must be another million removed for obscene or abusive content**), there seems to be a general feeling that copyright is the common denominator. As Kotaku's Owen Good writes:

"Traffic on the LittleBigWorkshop discussion board seems to back [this] up. "This just happened to tons of levels in what seems like a matter of minutes, including my own level 'Failure To Launch.' " Says one user. "By the trend I see from the levels I can no longer play from my recent levels on my planet, its all about copyright. Some levels I've seen now unplayable due to moderation: Pacman, Batman, and Scrubs related level."

If "Failure to Launch" was taken down because it shares a title with a romantic comedy from 2006, then this is truly out of hand. The thread is more than nine pages long now, including a claim that a level based on the PlayStation 3 was taken down. Destructoid rightly points out the absurdity of a console exclusive being unable to refer to that console."

Of course, a plethora of player-generated levels based on videogames, films and television properties remain in circulation, which begs the question of which properties/brands are "safe" to reference and why. The durability of certain media-inspired levels is probably in part the result of the vastness of LittleBigPlanet's user-generated levels catalogue (which recently reached the 1 million mark...more on that below), and in part the result of a growing realization among media producers that UGC might just be the most effective form of "web 2.0" marketing you can find (and it's free!). As Kotaku's Luke Plunkett describes, not all companies are upset by player-generated IP infringement. This sentiment is backed up by Media Molecule's co-founder Alex Evans, who in an interview with IGN describes three copyright issues that the game has faced from the outset:

"There were three issues; one was negative and two were positive. The negative one was how hard it was to get worldwide legal harmony, because different countries have different laws around copyright infringement. We knew that people would be creative, and that there would be references. It was hard getting the right balance on a worldwide angle. But then there's been these two mad positives; one was the high quality of the levels, including the infringing ones. The other point is the number of IP owners who came up to us and said please whitelist us – we'll never ever ask you to pull infringing stuff. I can't say who that is, but those two things really shocked me, I think it shocked [the IP holders], who were like, hang on, my IP's being represented and it's being represented really well. The IP holders have to have last say over the representation of their brand, and that's fair enough, so we've always got to have a method for people misusing a brand, but what's been really lovely is how well represented so many brands are."

A great example of the type of "synergy" that Evans is describing here can be seen in this recent Ghostbusters cross-over.

But when you look at all the creativity and care that's going into so many of the player-generated content, you have to wonder why all of these partnerships and product placements seem so necessary to the IP holders (as opposed to just letting the players have some fun). Will Marvel's "Spiderman" really be that much better than this homemade version? And what about the fun of re-creating your favourite heroes and characters? What will happen to players' freedom to create and recreate when their creations aren't just being monitored and regulated, but supplanted outright by branding initiatives?

It's funny, but also quite timely I think, that this issue should come up (again) now, especially with all the hope and hoopla around Sony's recent announcement that in the nine short months since the game's launch, LBP players have created and uploaded 1 million levels to the PlayStation Network. As David Radd of Industry Gamers writes:

Sony calculates that the number of levels is equal to roughly one level generated every 21 seconds since LittleBigPlanet launched. It would take any one of the 2.4 million unique players that have played LittleBigPlanet online nearly five years playing non-stop to experience every uploaded level.

There's obviously a lot of potential here for democratizing culture and cultural production. Despite the fact that most (80%) PlayStationHome users fall within the typical 18-to-35 year-old male gamer demographic, Sony sees significant promise of player diversification and a gradual bucking of established trends within that other, growing 20%. More diverse representation, more accessible tools, and growing interest in UGC all spell opportunity -- opportunity for a more diverse (obviously), more engaging, active and responsive cultural climate. If, that is, stifling copyright/IP regimes don't throttle the life out of it first.

Revamp!

After many years with the all-pink palette, I decided it was time for an aesthetic overhaul. Apart from the new "look and feel", everything should be in the same place it was (or thereabouts) before I upgraded the template, although I suspect that I may be ironing out some kinks over the next few days as I discover lost items, dead links, and so on.

The image in the banner above is cut out from one of Becky Shaefer's brilliant Lara Croft needlepoint pieces, which circulated the web a few years ago, and which I still get a huge kick out of. Hope she doesn't mind my appropriation of her work.

For you regular readers of Gamine Expedition, please feel free to let me know what you think of the revamp :)

Ridiculous Life Lessons for Silly Girls

I'm happy to see that along with the recent influx of a new (though arguably somewhat recycled) batch of "girl games" (a.k.a. pink games), the debates about girl games, girls and games and the space for girls within gaming culture are all being actively reinvigorated in a great collection of reviews, articles, discussion pieces and forums. Some of my faves so far are The Brainy Gamer's review of Majesco's Drama Queens (Nintendo DS), L.B. Jeffries' summary of the unfolding "girl games" discussion over at PopMatters, Tracey John's tongue-in-cheek Wired review of various "girl games" and the "ridiculous life lessons" that they contain (hence the first part of the title for this post), and now a great response to John's article featured in The Escapist written by Susan Arendt (called "Silly Girls" and the inspiration for the second part of my title for this post). I ended up writing quite a long response to Arendt's article in the Comments section of her article, which I figured could also serve double-duty as a blog post and give me a chance to get my two-cents in. But first, a quick recap of John and Arendt's articles to set up the context.

Tracey John's article reviews a representative selection of the huge number of "girl games" recently introduced (or soon to be) onto the market, pointing out that while parents fixate on violence in videogames as a cause for concern, there's a lot of other things to get worked up about, including gender stereotypes and the limited selection of games that make it to the "pink aisle" at the videogame store (yep, there's one there too!). As John describes, these games contain all of the same hyper-feminized and highly traditional themes and gender scripts found throughout girls' commercial culture:

A wave of new games for tween girls... [are] serving up innocuous gameplay designed to let players become perfect little princesses. Aimed at that lucrative, Hannah Montana-fueled intersection of childhood and adolescence, these games might give 8- to 12-year-olds their first experiences with fashion, make-up, popularity … even boys.

The weird thing is that you can view these "wholesome” games as being just as bad for girls as Grand Theft Auto’s random bloodshed and rampant criminality is for young, impressionable boys. And while GTA’s influence on boys has been dissected to death, what about the Nintendo DS’ upcoming avalanche of games for tween girls? What kinds of values do preteens learn from these titles? Valuable life lessons, or bad habits?

She goes on to describe the themes and "life lessons" included in EA's new Charm Girls Club, The WB's The Clique: Diss and Make Up, Majesco's The Daring Game for Girls (which gets the only truly positive review of the bunch), a new edition to Dreamcatcher Interactive's Dreamer Series: Top Model, two more Ubisoft entries Imagine: Babyz Fashion (can't wait to play at getting yelled at by the babyz' stage parents this time around) and Imagine: Detective, two new girl games by THQ - Princess in Love and My Boyfriend (which sound like basically the exact same game), two more from Ubisoft in their Style Lab series - Makeover and Jewelry Design and Nintendo's Style Savvy. Lots of make-up and fashion and social relationships, reminding me very much of the "girl games" movement of the mid-1990s, which saw similar titles emerging from both large conglomerates (like Mattel) and from a number of the independent, feminist developers attempting to establish a more clearly delineated, more popular, girls' games market by focusing storylines and themes on stuff that actual girls were understood to enjoy. Of course, this raises all the usual problems raised by essentialism...when applied to girls or gender or any group, there's always an enormous risk of stereotyping, of over-emphasizing certain elements and particular types while excluding others all together.

And this is where Susan Arendt's article comes in. Arendt basically responds to John's article by defending girls' right to play silly games with traditional themes if that's what they want, and by pointing out that as a culture we're much too quick to dismiss anything "girlie" as necessarily bad or lesser. As Arendt writes:

Ah, what's that I hear? That these games "perpetuate negative stereotypes"? Which stereotypes would these be, exactly? The ones that young girls like cute boys, looking at clothes, and gossiping about each other? Granted, it's been a few years since I was the target demographic for these games, but when I was a wee lass, I engaged in all of those activities so much that I practically had Master's Degrees in them. I somewhat doubt all that much has changed.

The simple truth is that young girls like stupid things. They like shopping and makeup and boys and ponies and glitter and The Jonas Brothers and a whole legion of other things that will make you feel like your brain is dissolving if you think about them for too long. And please, this is not your cue to protest about how you were never like that, you liked bugs and science and all the things that small girls typically don't because you're not about to be forced into some label, dammit! Get over it. If you grew up preferring dirtbikes to Barbies, that's grand, but if you didn't - if you fretted over the best color nail polish and prowled the local clothing stores like a lion on the savannah - well, that's ok, too.

[And here's my response, reproduced from The Escapist comments forum:]

I love the debate and issues that both these articles engage with. Girl games suffer from the same ostracization as most other forms of "girl culture" - whether it's princess parties and My Little Pony, or the daring girls who have the nerve to join the dirt biking team, there's always someone around just waiting to point out how "wrong" it is. Though in defense of Tracey John's article, that shouldn't mean that we can't hold them to the same standards as any other game... in terms of subjecting them to critique, analysis and discussion, as well as demanding the same levels of variety, innovation, immersion, good storylines, characters, etc. etc. as any other genre. John points out a pretty important aspect of this "new wave" of girl games - they mostly all revolve around the same three or four themes, contributing to the ongoing (though admittedly quite *sparkly*) cluttering of a market that seems to be growing despite these games rather than because of them.

My beef with this new spurt of girl games isn't that they exist - I agree with Susan that they should if there's a demand for them, but that they're taking shelf space (and development efforts) away from other genres that might do a bit better at filling the substantial gap that still exists within the girls' games market. Girls play online games WAY more than console games (90%+ vs. 28%), and I'm pretty sure that Stardoll, BarbieGirls and The Sims aren't the only titles capturing their attention (Runescape, Club Penguin, and Free Realms are all extremely popular among girl gamers as well). When it comes to console games, Guitar Hero and Wii Sports (and even Grand Theft Auto) rank way up there on girls' lists of their favourite games. I wish the industry would start looking toward girls' actual gaming habits rather than simply reproducing the same old themes that already dominate both the girls' toy aisle (a suffering market as girls now abandon their toys and dolls at younger and younger ages) AND the girls' games shelf.

If the industry is ever going to build more significant and sustainable inroads into the ever-elusive "girls market" they're going to have to add a few more tricks to their dog and pony show (hmm...dogs and ponies sounds like the premise for a new Ubisoft Imagine title). Maybe start by taking all those games that girl gamers already like and then actively market them to other, non-gamer girls? Even if it means that maybe some boys somewhere might see the game being advertised to girls? Even at the risk of associating that game with, *gasp*, girl culture? Would that really be so detrimental to sales figures? Would boys really abandon Guitar Hero just because they saw an ad during Spongebob that featured some girl players and a female voice-over?

Or maybe by finally taking a chance on "Science Mama", realizing that expanding into new markets is never risk-free, and that yet another "Princess Secret Crush" game is just as likely to tank as it is to sell? I mean, how many of these girl games have totally and utterly failed? And how many awesome and innovative girls games have been buried and left for dead by a market that emphasizes same-ness above (and to the detriment of) all else? Thomas mentions this in her blurb on The Daring Game for Girls: "Like the book, the game offers handy tips and facts as well as non-stereotypically female activities, encouraging girls to seek adventure - not boyfriends or cute clothes, for once. So, of course, no one will actually play it." Tell that to Her Interactive, makers of the extremely popular Nancy Drew games. There's so much untapped and unchanneled potential out there, yet all the industry's powerhouses (EA, Ubisoft, etc.) seem to be able to come up with is more of the same. And when a "different" game does somehow manage to get through, they fail to promote it, thereby letting the "market" "prove" there's no room for innovation.

Or maybe by realizing that girls aren't going to be drawn into gaming as a lifelong passion by themes and characters alone (although they are important). Design is so key to attracting new players...intuitive controls, rich environments and, of course, accessibility. The really sad thing about many of the girl games currently on the market - [and I know I'm going to get some negative responses from this, but here goes] - is how poorly they're designed. Clunky, buggy, overly-restrictive, with limited customizability and very low re-playability. Too much endless grinding at repetitive, mostly mindless (and buggy!) mini-games that have little or no relationship with the larger game. And this has been a shockingly pervasive feature of girl games ever since the first wave happened in the mid-1990s. There are of course a number of well designed, innovative titles as well (e.g. Super Princess Peach!!!), but these are way too few and far between. I anticipate that most of the titles in this newest batch will reproduce the norm, not the exception.

All of which really makes me wonder...who and what is this niche really for anyway?

Data Mining Kids and Teens' UGC and Social Networks

Via YPulse, and in follow up to an earlier news item the site broke last week, some coverage and discussion of Echometrix's new service PULSE, a self-described "real-time web based sentiment analytics tool that specializes exclusively on teen data (ages 7 to 21)." The service is already getting some buzz and news attention, and my immediate thoughts and concerns are no more positive now that I've read some of the initial reactions.

First off..."teen data"? Since when are 7-year-olds considered to be teenagers? What they really mean is children and teens, so COPPA should be in full effect here, but anyway. The confusion of kids and teens in Pulse's own descriptions of the service obviously makes it all the more problematic, not to mention difficult to analyze. Although it's possible that they really do distinguish between teens and kids in terms of the data they actually collect in some cases, in others (such as UGC) they are quite explicit about including data from both kids and teens. Furthermore, according to their URL and their Tween Pulse Research Blog, the company is pretty aware that they're not really limiting their research to teens...it probably just sounds more palatable that way.

The rest of the claims made in Pulse's corporate materials are downright creepy, and basically boast about mining youth-produced UGC, blogs, forums websites and chatrooms, along with any IM that "teens" engage in through the company's other product, "FamilySafe." According to Proudfoot, and as the product name would suggest, FamilySafe is an Internet security program that monitors and analyzes everything a child does online, and then alerts the child's parent of "anything alarming" through text messages. So far, FamilySafe monitors approximately 150,000 young people in the US and Canada, all under the rubric of providing parents with more "control" over their kids' online activities. Of course, it's highly doubtful that parents who have signed on to the FamilySafe were considering the larger market value of the "non-alarming" information that is also collected from their children through this service, but then again I guess you can't really be all that surprised when you discover that the market research firm you've paid to monitor your kids has a hidden agenda. Sorry to all the parents who bought FamilySafe unaware of its market research implications, but in this day and age of widespread corporate surveillance, a little research into the company's ownership and a thorough reading of the terms of service is pretty much mandatory when installing software that will track your/your kids' every online move. On the other hand, this is also a great (and possibly very devious) example of the corporate misuse (abuse?) of parents' safety concerns as a Trojan horse for market research and/or marketing.

Anyway, here's an excerpt of The Pulse product description:

Every single minute PULSE is aggregating the web’s social media outlets such as chat and chat rooms, blogs, forums, instant messaging, and web sites to extract meaningful user generated content from your target audience, the teens!

PULSE contextualizes the aggregated content and provides instantaneous customized summaries in real time of the teen market. The PULSE identifies, evaluates, and graphically displays a wide spectrum of analytic information relating to the type, tone, grade, frequency of communications, impressions, needs, desires, hopes, dreams and wants of this teen audience who live on the Web.

[...] we focus on user generated content, which is the only data source solid enough to reveal the author’s true attitude and emotion. We provide you with access to 100% unbiased, unfiltered, and user group generated content from a vast network of teen focused content sources such as forums, blogs, chats and IM conversations.

Well, as unbiased as any of us are when we post stuff online. There is certainly an element of performativity within individuals' online identity management practices that is being ignored here. But this very critique can also become a slippery slope into dismissing the importance of what Pulse and their contemporaries are doing. A good example of this is found in the article discussed in today's YPulse post about, um, PULSE. The article, written by Shannon Proudfoot for Canada.com, describes the invasive nature of the data mining service but quickly jumps to downplaying its importance by positioning the service within the context of that standard old argument of 'how little it will ultimately matter because you can't really find anything out that way, and people don't post real info about themselves online, and aren't marketers just so out of touch with the youth, etc., etc.'. Not that I recommend starting a moral panic around this or anything, but there's got to be a better way of exploring these things without it coming off as either insanely and unrealistically pessimistic or as insanely and unrealistically optimistic. Luckily anastasia is much more nuanced in her discussion of the article, outlining both the perceived weaknesses of the Pulse methodology, as well as highlighting the need for regulation "when it comes to mining data of internet users under the age of 18."

In terms of the methodology, obviously the corporate description is overly celebratory and vague. anastasia seems optimistic that the data collected won't be all that useful, as do the teen and IT expert Proudfoot interviews in her article. Granted, Proudfoot's interview with Echometrix CEO Jeffrey Greene doesn't reveal much to the contrary, as he glibly dismisses tried and tested qualitative research methods (which the market industry has really perfected over the past three decades) in favour of Pulse's own quantitative approach:

"Services like Pulse are in huge demand because they provide nearly instant feedback in a swiftly changing media environment, Greene said, and fly-on-the-wall results are much more accurate than traditional market research.

"Teens are so clever that people who attempt to do research in the teen marketplace often tell us that teens 'game the system,' " he said. "When teens participate in an online poll or a focus group, they know or think they know what answer we want to hear, so that's the answer they provide."

The company said Pulse predicted Kris Allen's surprise American Idol victory before the results were announced in May. Teens talk about iPods 13 times more than the Zune MP3 player, the program reveals, and the iPhone gets four times more buzz than the BlackBerry."

But the thing is, the data they're collecting includes a lot more than the mere number of times a particular brand name is mentioned, and we would be wise to remember that data mining technology is advancing at lightening speed before assuming that their methods are ineffective just because they're not releasing any "rich" proprietary information to the press. YPulse's anastasia describes PULSE's methodology as lacking in comparison to focus groups and surveys because the data is likely to be decontextualized and misinterpreted...an opinion also expressed by Proudfoot's teen insider. But rather than think of PULSE's market analysts as a bunch of out-of-touch suits, who "at 50-something has no idea how a teenager thinks, saying, 'This is really interesting!'", we should instead suspect that some pretty on-the-ball, tech savvy, youth culture (and behaviour) experts are much more likely to be the ones interpreting the data collected...and rather than looking at solely at frequencies, i have no doubt in the world that they will also be tracking how teens talk and when, to whom and how their opinions change over time, and applying all sorts of rich qualitative methods in their analysis (discourse analysis, trend analysis, profiling, identifying archetypes, etc.). That's the beauty of data mining...the info you can collect is vast and the connections you can make between units of data boggle the mind, and there's always the potential for rich interpretation...even if that's not what Echometrix is currently promoting (or revealing, or even doing).

Proudfoot also interviews an independent technology analyst, Jesse Hirsh, who expresses similar reservations about the efficacy of the system, stating: "Nobody ever posts an honest Facebook photo of themselves. They post the best Facebook photo of themselves, so they're not really being honest, are they?" But then again, doesn't that picture actually tell us quite a lot about what that person wants, even if it's not such an accurate picture of who they are? What they want to portray to others, how they would like to see themselves, what they think of as an ideal or appropriate or funny public display, etc.? And isn't marketing all about identifying and exploiting our wants and ideals?

Overall, what this story tells me is that even if PULSE doesn't succeed with their own attempt to data mine youth-produced UGC, the fact remains that the technology is out there and its ability to exploit kids' online contributions, thoughts and communications is being overtly and unapologetically promoted as such to the public. If there were any lingering doubts that kids' UGC requires some regulatory protection to prevent its misuse and misappropriation by (adult-led) corporations, this newest case study should finally put them to rest. It's in the public domain, but are kids' authorship rights really being fostered and adequately supported in this kind of environment? Perhaps it's time for a Creative Commons-produced terms of service, which teens and children can put on their websites, blogs and forums, explicitly and formally forbidding users of the site (human or automated, including Echometrix's webcrawlers) from appropriating content published on the site for profit without explicit permission of the author...I mean, isn't that how the public domain is actually supposed to work anyway?

On a more positive note, big props to Proudfoot for interviewing a teen as one of the experts on this clearly teen-relevant issue. Awesome!

Princess Culture Marches On

There was a great article in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago re-examining the whole girls' "Princess Culture" phenomenon, which I think strikes a particular cord right now (economic recession, the start of wedding season, etc., etc.). Written by Megan Basham, the article explores both the puffy gowns and tiaras princess culture, as well as the many luxury items and merchandise that have attached themselves to the princess phenomenon in title only (think Paris Hilton versus Cinderella, but as nodes along the same bubblegum pink continuum). As Basham writes:

Call it trickle-down narcissism. Today, even as the economic crisis continues, many middle-class parents aspire to give their daughters the best of everything, "the best" meaning the most expensive. A quick tour around suburbia will show princess-themed bedrooms (the rhinestoned-and-feathered kind, not the cartoon-character kind) and ostentatious birthday parties, as well as pedigreed dogs being toted in designer bags by 10-year-olds. Maintaining a diva daughter has become one more way to one-up the Joneses.

The article goes on to describe recent research and a new book by Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, which tracks the rising egotism among college students...particularly among young women. Twenge's research found that "college-age women are developing narcissistic traits at four times the rate of college-age men", a trend she attributes at least in part to the many ways in which the "princess phenomenon" surfaces within girls' lives. Here, she seems to be referring to a sort of "trickle down" effect of princess culture into parenting practices which Twenge says can be described as "princess parenting"...the over-indulgence of daughters who are lavished with luxury goods and "unrealistic praise. Parents not only tell girls they are the prettiest and smartest but also train them to see themselves as the center of their worlds through clothes and accessories."

It's an interesting study, though it's a bit hard to swallow when contrasted with all the research and stats showing the continued prevalence of body image issues and low self esteem among young women and girls (I suppose the phenomenon she describes involves only a very particular subset of young women). Still, the connections between princess-style narcissism and subjectivities of consumption is fascinating, by which I am referring to the bit about girls being taught that they are the "centre of the world" but also that their position as such is mediated through (or even dependent on) the consumption and display of commodity goods (clothes, accessories, etc.). This whole idea of expressing "uniqueness" and worth through the display of luxury goods certainly does seem to tie in with the whole ideology behind "princess culture", which even in its more "traditional" form of dressing up in Disney store-bought princess gowns has become deeply intertwined with conspicuous consumption.

Dan Cook talked a bit about this last year (for e.g., check out this interview with Cook in follow up to a talk he gave on the subject), and it looks like his current research might be focused on unpacking the Disney Princess phenomenon specifically. According to Cook, the rampant popularity (and $$ success) of the Disney Princesses line is still growing, and Disney Princess merchandise is now a $4 billion industry, much of it focused around “lavishness and ultra-femininity". I've written a bit about the criticisms around the hyper-feminine ideals promoted by the Disney Princesses before, which you can read more about by following the links provided in this post from last year. You should also read this excellent piece written by Shannon Prince for Racialicious, which discusses Tiana, from the upcoming The Princess and the Frog, who is both the newest addition to the Disney Princesses line and the first African-American Princess. Prince's essay provides a thoughtful, critical analysis of both Tiana and the Princesses in general, and addresses many of the issues that have been raised around the Disney Princesses by both academics and feminist activists.

OR, for a completely different perspective, check out this article from Australian news source The Age.

I like that princess culture is starting to get some good critical inquiry from the likes of Cook and Twenge. The initial reactions were, well, a bit reactionary, and seeing as the phenomenon doesn't seem to be going anywhere any time soon, some good unpacking of what it means and how it functions within girls' lives is really key. Another great example of this emerging academic trend is Miriam Forman-Brunel's (who wrote Made to Play House, a fantastic history of the commercialization of girls' doll play) recent historical overview and critical analysis of princesses in girls' culture, co-authored with Julie Eaton and entitled "The Graceful and Gritty Princess", which appeared in a recent issue of the American Journal of Play.

Other sources of interest include a "Disney Princess Watch" initiated by Parents for Ethical Marketing, through which you might want to check out this recent photo exhibit by Dina Goldstein entitled Fallen Princesses. The project, as Goldstein describes, aims to "place Fairy Tale characters in modern day scenarios. In all of the images the Princess is placed in an environment that articulates her conflict. The '...happily ever after' is replaced with a realistic outcome and addresses current issues." Her work (as you will see) is directly inspired by the Disney Princess line, and engages directly with both the imagery and themes promoted by the Disney Princess' films and associated cultural/consumer products. It pushes the envelope a bit, but that's a good thing, isn't it? Goldstein writes that in coming up with the scenarios for her photos, she "began to imagine Disney's perfect Princesses juxtaposed with real issues that were affecting women around me, such as illness, addiction and self-image issues." I find the Belle and Jasmin photos particularly memorable...at once shocking and cliche, which is a difficult mix of feelings to evoke.

Virtual Worlds Law at NYLS State of Play

I was in the midst of semi-live blogging about today's State of Play VI conference, when I noticed that Greg Lastowka is already doing a darn thorough job of it over at Terra Nova. Since there's no need to reproduce his notes, I'll just provide you with some highlights and some of my thoughts on what's gone on so far today...see comments section (below) for (possibly) more updates later on.

Biggest highlight so far has been the fact that nearly every speaker so far has mentioned kids' rights and legal/content trickiness in their talks to some degree. Raph Koster's keynote (which largely centered around his current project, Metaplace, a ugc virtual worlds building platform/community, which seems pretty neat) had a bit about kids, the problems (logistical and ethical) of restricting minors, or trying to. He also raised a pretty provocative question re: how "big" does a virtual space need to be to qualify as a world...he gave the example of The Little Prince, whose planet is tiny, but a world nonetheless...which I really liked since I've often struggled with defining (or defending) some of the kids' vw's I look at as truly qualifying as "VWs"

This morning, I also attended the session on virtual worlds law, "Current Legal Issues for Virtual Worlds". Here, Roxanne E. Christ presented a historical typology of UGC, which was a little sketchy, but I liked her categories (if not the categorizations of sites/activities that went with them) - "user-moved content" (space shifting, content shifting, customization), "user-shared content" a.k.a. peer to peer (e.g. napster, grokster, etc.), "user-mashed content" a.k.a. bricollage (YouTube, Jaydiohead, but in here she also talks about sites like Veoh, which stream and allow individuals to post and stream content, but don't actually store files or allow for download...are they protected under Safe Harbour clause of the DMCA?, etc.); and "user-created content". Included in this last category are virtual rooms (like Metaplace), machinima, "mini-me's". She says that the UGC revolution is coming - virtual goods as property, user rights in ugc, the eula as the law, and the ownership and use of player data are all current and ongoing issues of relevance here. In terms of the idea of the EULA as law, Christ says (wow...that is so strange to write in a blog post) that this is probably not realistic - there are already cracks in this system, and it raises the issue of minors contracts. (e.g. she mentions that in California, which has the "Jackie Cooley Law" passed in response to the abuse of child actors in the 1940s, minors contracts are voidable, etc. and so in the case of kids' the EULA can't be the law). She suggests that resolution to this issue might be piggybacked onto privacy laws/policies (which already delineate special rights for kids under 13 years, as well as a special set of responsibilities for sites and data brokers dealing with child users). She even listed the issue of the "capacity of minors to contract" as #1 on her list of top 5 issues that need to be resolved now in relation to UGC. Agreed!

On the same panel, Sean F. Kane (who spoke about drafting better, more comprehensible EULAs) - also addresses minors and the issue of "who is accepting it" as a huge question when dealing with minors, complications between parents and kids, age and consent. He and his panel mate should discuss the ethical and legal problems with suggesting that parents can sign for their kids and provide verifiable adult consent through, say, credit card verification. This might cover some bases, but really doesn't deal with the extra challenges presented by children's own rights of ownership and consent (or at the very least to be protected from exploitation and from adults mismanaging their rights and making decisions that may not be in their interest). Examples such as the "Jackie Cooley Law" [**need to find a link to verify spelling, etc.**) raise the huge importance of approaching children's rights and parents' rights as intertwined but also separate.

Speaking of UGC, mash-ups, etc., I finally had the opportunity to see Brett Gaylor's brilliant, fun, awesomely soundtracked, RIP: A Remix Manifesto...on the planeride here, of all places. Shout to to Air Canada (for the first time ever) for including such innovative selections in its Canadian film section. You can watch it for free online. And show it to your students. Or remix it yourself and add more/new content. very cool.

But anyway, I should get back to conferencing like a good delegate. In the meantime, check for updates on Terra Nova, as well as the NYLS State of Play website (currently down, but should be back up and running soon) for video of the keynotes and at least some of the panels.

Update: Afternoon
The afternoon panels have had quite a different tone from the morning sessions...I've attended the industry panel ("Beyond the Magic Circle", which focused on how intangible and affective digital-game based reward systems can be used as motivators for participation in various communities and/or activities...many of them corporate, it seems), and am now in the midst of the "Economies and Economics" session featuring heavy hitters Julian Dibbell (!) and Edward Castronova (!). An an entire panel on virtual economies and economics might sound dry, but what it really comes down to is property, user struggles, democratic rationalization (in some cases), in others, commercialization of play, and some higher level discussion of the blurring of play and trade. In a sense a great follow up to the discussion on Huizinga's magic circle, in particular the one that took place on the backchannels during the panel and Q&A (in fact, Dibbell states as much himself near the end of his panel intro).

First up, Stephanie Rothenberg, a mixed media artist whose work explores user experience, labour and labour issues, and most recently the academic research of Castronova and Dibbell - how cool is that! Rothenberg presented a piece she created with Jeffrey Krausse, which exhibited at last year's Sundance Film Festival, called Invisible Threads, which uses a virtual sweatshop based in Second Life within an installation piece that people could then interact with "irl". The exhibit aims to explore and represent invisible labour flows, making conceptual and tangible connections between goldfarming (which produce immaterial goods out of real labour) and material sweatshops (which produce material goods out of "hidden" or suppressed labour), as well as "playing" at being a labourer (which seems to be the experience of many of the participants who became labourers in the installation piece virtual sweatshop. (She also recommends checking out this film http://www.sleepdealer.com)

Next up, Margaret Wallace from Rebel Monkey, the game design company behind a new virtual world for tweens CampFu. Wallace's talk provided a rare inside look at the discourse, rationale and strategies behind micro-transaction model vw's aimed at kids. She talked about "monetizing engagement", and all the different ways that their company sees user engagement translating into RMT transactions (e.g. Users play together, which makes them want to buy virtual items to show off/communicate to each other; players form teams and make friends, which might make them want to buy gifts for other players, etc.). Like SO many (too many) kids' vw's these days, the game basically offers players the option of playing games or shopping, or else chatting and interacting with other players (community building, social networking, chatting, some collaborative play).

With a look and feel similar to Nicktropolis or BarbieGirls (though with more sophisticated graphics). Wallace describes the game as currently limited to a "sharded experience" environment (i.e. a series of "rooms"...cool term!), but the company plans to switch to a "scrollable world" design in a few months. Wallace reports that even among the players, much of the chat is focused on the goods themselves - avatar customization as fashion statement. Again, like most kids' games, CampFu self-describes as "free-to-play", but really what we're looking at here is a micro-transaction model, in conjunction with a velvet-rope marketing strategy (i.e. we'll let you "in" for free, but you can only access the good stuff if you pay for it). They even have a segregated "two currencies" system, which Wallace claims was designed to "offer opportunities to everyone to participate" - both those who pay and those who don't or can't. There's a currency that you pay for with real-world or "hard" money, and then there's a "tickets" system. Tickets are the rewards won by playing the mini-games, and can only be used to purchase consumable items (items that expire after a certain number of uses). Th currencies - that you pay for. The tickets are described to be aimed at increasing engagement (and time spent in the site), to "engage players whether they buy or not", as well as "introduce players to virtual currencies" and currency systems, idea of virtual items collection and shopping, in the hopes of fostering future behaviours. Velvet rope + pedagogy of consumption...yikes.

But CampFu doesn't want to miss out on other, more subtle ways of extracting exchange value out of their players. Players can also earn the "FuCash", the game's virtual currency by filling out surveys and "special offers" (not sure what those are)...so it looks like becoming uninformed participants in market research is the only way to get the FuCash required to buy avatar clothes and other coveted items, other than to buy it with real world money. Wallace showed some graphs demonstrating player participation (although not overall numbers), showing that since the site launched in Feb.09, the average session duration rose from an average of 21 minutes to over an hour (as of May 09). I wonder how their business model is working out, where kids are getting their FuCash (if any) or if they're just using the free components for a novel place to socialize...we'll see.

Andrew Schneider of RMT (Real Money Trading) says that today's black market for virtual items (for real money) has surpassed $2 billion in gross transactions worldwide.

Edward Castronova, in addition to telling us that no one has to use his term "synthetic worlds" when speaking to him about vw's, reasserted the need for some form of official, formal, hopefully democratic delineation of economic relationships within virtual worlds, one that defends user rights as well as those of corporations. It's an old argument, esp. coming from him, but one that certainly needs continued reiteration, particularly now that vw's have become so pervasive...while still using basically the same corporately-biased EULAs and IP (and governance) claims that have dominated the market since he first wrote about all this in 2002. I really liked his tempered delivery, acknowledging the importance of economic recuperation, but also reminding us that market downturn isn't justification for ignoring player rights...hinting that it's in fact further indication that EULA reform (although he doubts that EULAs can provide what they need to, he also thinks its more likely that this type of thing would happen in the market than initiated by governments) and an alternative (player-driven?) discourse for establishing/regulating vw laws and social (incl. economic) relationships is exactly what's called for given the exploitative relationships that so often emerge when corporations are left to regulate themselves. Or at least, that's what I got from it.

And then, in Q&A, Jim Bower, the founder of Whyville zinged the entire panel by championing "kids as the future" of responsible governance and democratically-articulated covenants, pointing to the large Kafai-led project on Whyville players (including this article on cheating in Whyville and "Stealing from Grandma", written by Deborah Fields and Yasmin Kafai, which is fantastic). He also admitted that Whyville is actively and purposefully "training" its players in civic responsibility, which Castronova had a really hilarious and zinging response to, though props to Bower for admitting that his vw is not some neutral, innocuous or so-called "safe" haven, but rather a very ideological and discursive system (social and technological) where players are indeed learning all kinds of rules and norms, not just from the explicitly pedagogical tools, but everything else as well (each other!). Also, funny that no one pointed out that CampFu is putting just as much effort into training its players, in how to want and believe in virtual currency systems and subjectivites of consumption.

Anyway...Awesome!

What New in the Kids' Games Market

There have been so many great games and exciting announcements pertaining to kids' gaming culture (and the kids market) lately, especially now that this year's E3 has come and gone, that the thought of trying to digest (let alone dissect) it all can be more than a little overwhelming. That's why I've put together this thematic Guide to What's New... in various segments of games culture, focusing on those projects and announcements I find most relevant to kids or that have particularly caught my eye these past few weeks. The list is by no means exhaustive, and it's likely already out of date it's taken me so long to put it together, but my hope is that it will still be useful to some of you, for catching up on new developments and flagging things for follow-up.


What's New in...Console Games
So much of the biggest big news from this year's E3 involved console games (see Buzzstudy's analysis of the Top E3 Announcements according to online buzz, and the updated version they sent to Kotaku), including a number of interesting, exciting or otherwise noteworthy announcements and developments that relate directly to kids' games/gaming cultures. Here's a quick run-down:

A new (collaborative!) 1-4 player Super Mario Brothers

A more expansive and expansion-friendly Wii Sports Resort

Super Mario Glaxy 2

Beatles Rock Band (it's rated "T" but who are we kidding...that hasn't stopped the previous Rock Band titles from spreading like wildfire among the under 13 set. It seems parents don't object as much to "mild language" in lyrics as they do to hyper violence...go figure)

But just in case they do...they're launching a new LEGO Rock Band as well...bizarre!

From Media Molecule, more news about their sequels to the award-winning LittleBigPlanet, with LittleBigPlanet 2 and (which was first way back in October) and LittleBigPlanet PSP. More on that property below.

Not ready to put the property to bed quite yet, Ubisoft will be releasing TMNT: Smash Up, based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

In addition, earlier this month Warner Brothers finally confirmed the widely-accepted-as-true rumor that it is teaming up with LEGO (once again) to collaborate on a Harry Potter tie-in (once again), this time in game form. The much anticipated LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 is expected to be released sometime in 2010.

You might also want to check out this "Top Ten Kids Games Announced at E3" List published in The Industry Standard.


What's New in...MMOGs
There's been a ton of online buzz about SOE's kid-oriented MMOG Free Realms, which launched in late April (2009). In addition to a recent article in Wired magazine, you should check out this article in the New York Times, this blog post by Izzy Neis (whose move to Twitter has left me with an empty hole in my daily blog roll that no one else could ever hope to fill), and this ongoing (?) thread started by Greg Lastowka on Terra Nova. And, you know, try it out for yourself - it's free and even has a "Quick Play" feature...possibly designed for critics and academics ;)

In other news, FusionFall just keeps on trucking. You can now follow their progress through an online Developer Diary, which is pretty useful for tracking changes and industry discourses about the evolution of the game, community, technology, etc.

And over at Disney, Pixie Hollow is continuing to impress, in no small part by generating actual profits and driving a wildly popular new Disney property. According to Virtual Worlds News, the player population has now reached the million member mark, and is the flagship of the Disney Fairies brand, which is currently worth about $2 billion (in global annual retail sales of ancillary products and media).


What's New in...Girlie Games
Same old, same old, as EA Announces the Girls Charm Club (as described in this Business Wire article), and the casual gaming market gears up for a "pink games" re-revolution (via YPulse). Always ready to throw her stylish hat in the mix, Barbie/Mattel also announced some sort of Digital Doll House project awhile back that would seem to fit well with these trends.


What's New in...Indie Games
Too much! But of particular noteworthiness is Nathan Jurevicius and TouchMyPixel's beautiful, slightly creepy, funny, kid-friendly (and free!) online game, Scarygirl. It's been attracting a lot of buzz too, as seen in this "Best of Indie Games" shout out courtesy of Tim W., and subsequent interview with Jurevicius conducted by Phill Cameron, over at Gamasutra. As Tim W. writes:

"Scarygirl is a completely free to play flash game which involves platforming, adventure, puzzle and even fighting-game style elements. The visuals are incredible and the content is absolutely expansive with over fourteen levels of gameplay to plow through."

Indeed!


What's New in...UGC Games
More Spore for Kids! Read news of upcoming, kid-targeted, Spore spin-off projects (for Nintendo Wii, plus a My Pokemon Ranch-style virtual pet-type game, Creature Keeper) over at Wired blog.

News from Kidscreen magazine that Media Molecule is looking for kids' merchandising opportunities and partnerships for its LittleBigPlanet property (centered around uber-cute Sackboy and friends).

Also, some very interesting news from Microsoft about a kid-friendly (and, one would hope, accessible) version of XNA called Kodu, which you can read about over at USA Today


What's New in...Gaming Technologies
Too much to list here, I'm afraid, what with Microsoft's Project Natal, the PS3 motion controller, and all the (seemingly) smaller Wii motion sensor upgrades. I recommend reading some of the many industry lists/summaries, etc., or to breeze through this compilation of E3 coverage and interviews, posted over at AdAge.


And as for What's New...With Me!
I'm off to NYC tomorrow to participate in the Grad Student Symposium at the State of Play Conference, hosted by New York Law School (in conjunction with the University of Southern California Network Culture Project at the Annenberg School for Communication, and with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation), and featuring multiple games scholars and designers that I'm simply dying to meet (and/or meet again). Should be an amazing and thought provoking few days, in one of my favourite big huge cities. Enormous thanks to Dan Hunter and Naomi Allen (and anyone else involved in the conference organizing team) for letting me tag along.

CFP Alert: Science Fiction in Children's Film and Television

Found this on the UPenn English CFP list, and thought it might be of interest to some - a CFP (deadline recently extended to July 15th) on scifi in kids' television and film. Very interesting idea, and it's true...there is a definite gap in the literature that this book could potentially fill quite nicely. Here are the details, reprinted from the UPenn site:

Science Fiction in Children's Film and Television (Deadline Extended to 7/15/09)
R.C. Neighbors and Sandy Rankin/University of Arkansas
contact email: childrens-scifi@hotmail.com

It has often been said that science fiction is a literature of ideas. Through the use of familiar tropes, such as spaceships, aliens, and ray guns, the genre uses the future (and sometimes the past) to comment on the present--on current social, cultural, and political ideologies. Likewise, media directed at children often focus on advocating or criticizing similar ideologies, sometimes for a didactic purpose. It is interesting, then, that so little has been said about the joining of these two genres--children's science fiction--particularly when dealing with the visual media of film and television.

Toward this end, the proposed essay anthology To Infinity and Beyond: Science Fiction in Children's Film and Television will attempt to fill this gap in scholarship. It will primarily deal with how children's visual media use science fiction to promote or discourage certain ideologies. However, essays on other issues dealing with science fiction in children's programming--such as the encoding of science fiction tropes in children's media, conversations between children's film/TV and adult science fiction, science fictional elements in other genres, and the growing popularity of science fiction in children's visual media, etc--will be considered. A publisher has already shown interest in the collection.

Topics of Particular Interest

Lilo and Stitch
Flubber
Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius
Dexter's Laboratory
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Transformers
Land of the Lost
Lost in Space
Brain (from Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain)
We have already received many excellent proposals (including several over Doctor Who and the film Wall-E) and are looking for a few more to round out the collection. If interested in contributing to the collection, please send your CV and a 300-500 word abstract to R.C. Neighbors and Sandy Rankin (childrens-scifi@hotmail.com) by July 15th. (If a draft of the essay is already completed, please send it along with the other materials.) Graduate student submissions are welcome.

So many cool opportunities, so little time. Immediate ideas include Muppets from Space, Atomic Betty, Astro Boy, Futurama (which just got "renewed"!), Zixx Level Three and some sort of reworking of my co-authored paper with Neil Narine analyzing films depicting child gamers (which included quite a few sci-fi pics, The Last Starfighter, Flight of the Navigator, etc.). I'm not sure I'll have a chance to submit something, but it is nonetheless a very compelling idea for an edited collection.