A Pedagogy for Original Synners

Part of the Volume on Digital Young, Innovation, and the UnexpectedThis essay begins by speculating about the learning environment of the class of 2020. It takes place entirely in a virtual world, populated by simulated avatars, managed through the pedagogy of gaming. Based on this projected version of a future-now-in-formation, the authors consider the implications of the current paradigm shift that is happening at the edges of institutions of higher education. From the development of programs in multimedia literacy to the focus on the creation of hybrid learning spaces (that combine the use of virtual worlds, social networking applications, and classroom activities), the scene of learning as well as the subjects of education are changing. The figure of the Original Synner is a projection of the student-of-the-future whose foundational literacy is grounded in their ability to synthesize information from multiple information streams

Writing because I want to, not because I have to: Young gifted writers’ perspectives on the factors that “matter” in developing expertise

The study reported on here sought to better understand the development of writing talent from the perspectives of a group of gifted adolescent female writers. Recent shifts in how giftedness and talent are conceptualized has led to an increased focus on domain-specific abilities and the importance of understanding how specific talents can be identified and supported. Gagné’s Differentiated Model of Giftedness and Talent (DMGT) (see Gagné, 2000; 2003; 2007; 2008) distinguishes between gifts and talents. Gifts represent the potential for outstanding achievement, while talents are the manifestation of this potential. Of particular interest to teachers and parents are the conditions that are influential in gifts being realised as talents – what Gagné refers to as catalysts. The participants in this study were asked to reflect on the development of their interest and ability in writing over time. Emerging from their feedback were two categories of catalysts: the intrapersonal and the environmental. For this group of students, intrapersonal catalysts were more influential to the realisation of their writing talent than environmental catalysts. This intrinsic motivation to write, and from an early age, is consistent with studies of eminent adult writers. Parents and teachers featured as important environmental catalysts. The participants in this study valued the input and support of teachers, particularly during the early years of their schooling. However, as they moved through the school system, these students felt the nature of the curriculum, and assessment practices increasingly threatened their intrinsic motivation for writing and diminished the satisfaction gained from writing at school. An unexpected outcome of this research was the important influence of music on their current writing

An Investigation of the Digital Sublime in Video Game Production

This research project examines how video games can be programmed to generate the sense of the digital sublime. The digital sublime is a term proposed by this research to describe experiences where the combination of code and art produces games that appear boundless and autonomous. The definition of this term is arrived at by building on various texts and literature such as the work of Kant, Deleuze and Wark and on video games such as Proteus, Minecraft and Love. The research is based on the investigative practice of my work as an artist-programmer and demonstrates how games can be produced to encourage digitally sublime scenarios. In the three games developed for this thesis I employ computer code as an artistic medium, to generate games that explore permutational complexity and present experiences that walk the margins between confusion and control. The structure of this thesis begins with a reading of the Kantian sublime, which I introduce as the foundation for my definition of the digital sublime. I then combine this reading with elements of contemporary philosophy and computational theory to establish a definition applicable to the medium of digital games. This definition is used to guide my art practice in the development of three games that examine different aspects of the digital sublime such as autonomy, abstraction, complexity and permutation. The production of these games is at the core of my research methodology and their development and analysis is used to produce contributions in the following areas. 1. New models for artist-led game design. This includes methods that re-contextualise existing aesthetic forms such as futurism, synaesthesia and romantic landscape through game design and coding. It also presents techniques that merge visuals and mechanics into a format developed for artistic and philosophical enquiry. 2. The development of new procedural and generative techniques in the programming of video games. This includes the implementation of a realtime marching cubes algorithm that generates fractal noise filtered terrain. It also includes a versatile three-dimensional space packing architectural construction algorithm. 3. A new reading of the digital sublime. This reading draws from the Kantian sublime and the writings of Deleuze, Wark and De Landa in order to present an understanding of the digital sublime specific to the domain of art practice within video games. These contributions are evidenced in the writing of this thesis and in the construction of the associated portfolio of games

Creativity and Culture in Copyright Theory

Creativity is universally agreed to be a good that copyright law should seek to promote, yet copyright scholarship and policymaking have proceeded largely on the basis of assumptions about what it actually is. When asked to discuss the source of their inspiration, individual artists describe a process that is intrinsically ineffable. Rights theorists of all varieties have generally subscribed to this understanding, describing creativity in terms of an individual liberty whose form remains largely unspecified. Economic theorists of copyright work from the opposite end of the creative process, seeking to divine the optimal rules for promoting creativity by measuring its marketable byproducts. But these theorists offer no particular reason to think that marketable byproducts are either an appropriate proxy or an effective stimulus for creativity (as opposed to production), and more typically refuse to engage the question. The upshot is that the more we talk about creativity, the more it disappears from view. At the same time, the mainstream of intellectual property scholarship has persistently overlooked a broad array of social science methodologies that provide both descriptive tools for constructing ethnographies of creative processes and theoretical tools for modeling them

Player agency in interactive narrative: audience, actor & author

The question motivating this review paper is, how can computer-based interactive narrative be used as a constructivist learn- ing activity? The paper proposes that player agency can be used to link interactive narrative to learner agency in constructivist theory, and to classify approaches to interactive narrative. The traditional question driving research in interactive narrative is, ‘how can an in- teractive narrative deal with a high degree of player agency, while maintaining a coherent and well-formed narrative?’ This question derives from an Aristotelian approach to interactive narrative that, as the question shows, is inherently antagonistic to player agency. Within this approach, player agency must be restricted and manip- ulated to maintain the narrative. Two alternative approaches based on Brecht’s Epic Theatre and Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed are reviewed. If a Boalian approach to interactive narrative is taken the conflict between narrative and player agency dissolves. The question that emerges from this approach is quite different from the traditional question above, and presents a more useful approach to applying in- teractive narrative as a constructivist learning activity

Playing Games with Art: The Cultural and Aesthetic Legitimation of Digital Games

Like other popular cultural forms before them, digital games are undergoing a process of cultural and aesthetic legitimation; the question of digital games’ legitimacy as art is being raised with increasing urgency in a variety of different contexts. Mobilizing a conceptual framework derived from media studies, the sociology of art, and certain traditions in philosophical aesthetics, this dissertation proposes that art is constituted in a complex, historically-contingent assemblage made up of many diverse elements and sometimes called an “art world.” The legitimation of a cultural form as art is achieved through a process of collective action and interaction between not only art makers and art objects but also thinkers, talkers, watchers, and players, as well as ideas, organizations, places, and objects. The central question of this dissertation, therefore, is not “Are games art?” but rather “How are games being reconfigured as art, where, and by whom?” In order to understand the legitimation of games as art, it is necessary to attend to the specific social-material processes through which it is taking place in different contexts. This dissertation focuses on the historical period between 2005 and 2010, and is made up of several case studies, including the highly public debate precipitated by popular film critic Roger Ebert’s derisive comments about games as art; the cultural reception and canonization of blockbuster “prestige games” that pursue artistic status within the boundaries of the commercial industry, such as Bioshock; and at the opposite end of the spectrum, the construction of independently-produced “artgames” such as Passage as a gaming analogue to autobiographical indie music and comics. Each of these overlapping contexts represents a particular conception of games as legitimate art, mobilizing different elements and strategies in pursuit of cultural and material capital, and establishing the terms and stakes for more recent developments

Here, There and Everywhere: Glocalising Identities in Transworld Transmedia Genius Loci

The principle question discussed in this essay is essentially a philosophical or existential one: in our increasingly remediated, interconnected, physically and virtually mobile contemporary world, is it is conceivable, or feasible, for us actually to be “here, there, and everywhere” at one and the same time? Have our predominantly “local” personal, professional and collective narrative histories, and the various cultural traditions that have grown out of these, really furnished us with relational identity skills that enable us to participate positively and actively in ongoing globalisation processes and to play a constructive, active, ethical role in the global gameplay arena? Or do we need to work more with non-familiar forms of otherness if we want to develop new types of “glocal” identities, able to mediate and transcend the emotional, conceptual, cultural and other divides that may hinder the identification, management and just balancing of “global” and “local” needs, rights and interests? As a contribution to further interdisciplinary debate on this and related themes, in media studies and elsewhere, this essay intentionally seeks to provoke*, by offering some engaged, informed but clearly speculative considerations, regarding the valorisation, application and evaluation of new digital media designed to facilitate ludic transworld, transmedia cooperition at-a-distance, to develop practical strategies to engage in responsible, ethical, ecological, mutually sustainable ways, with non-copresent, non-local others and their own past, present and future actual, and possible, worlds. *“Provoke”, of course, is not meant here in any “mean” or negative way, but rather as a ludic challenge to my readers to experiment in engaging with ‘non-local’, ‘non-standard’ forms of otherness – which in the case of this essay is the actual diversity of forms, norms and practices in academic writing. This First Page Footnote also seems an appropriate place to offer my sincere thanks to two anonymous reviewers of a first draft version of this essay, both of whom, each with their own brand of provocative, stimulating and useful remarks, are hereforth anointed as contributing co-authors, of this its (hopefully) final version.The principle question discussed in this essay is essentially a philosophical or existential one: in our increasingly remediated, interconnected, physically and virtually mobile contemporary world, is it is conceivable, or feasible, for us actually to be “here, there, and everywhere” at one and the same time? Have our predominantly “local” personal, professional and collective narrative histories, and the various cultural traditions that have grown out of these, really furnished us with relational identity skills that enable us to participate positively and actively in ongoing globalisation processes and to play a constructive, active, ethical role in the global gameplay arena? Or do we need to work more with non-familiar forms of otherness if we want to develop new types of “glocal” identities, able to mediate and transcend the emotional, conceptual, cultural and other divides that may hinder the identification, management and just balancing of “global” and “local” needs, rights and interests? As a contribution to further interdisciplinary debate on this and related themes, in media studies and elsewhere, this essay intentionally seeks to provoke*, by offering some engaged, informed but clearly speculative considerations, regarding the valorisation, application and evaluation of new digital media designed to facilitate ludic transworld, transmedia cooperition at-a-distance, to develop practical strategies to engage in responsible, ethical, ecological, mutually sustainable ways, with non-copresent, non-local others and their own past, present and future actual, and possible, worlds. *“Provoke”, of course, is not meant here in any “mean” or negative way, but rather as a ludic challenge to my readers to experiment in engaging with ‘non-local’, ‘non-standard’ forms of otherness – which in the case of this essay is the actual diversity of forms, norms and practices in academic writing. This First Page Footnote also seems an appropriate place to offer my sincere thanks to two anonymous reviewers of a first draft version of this essay, both of whom, each with their own brand of provocative, stimulating and useful remarks, are hereforth anointed as contributing co-authors, of this its (hopefully) final version