Henry Jenkins has posted the fifth installment of "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century." A series of posts based on his white paper on youth and participatory culture for the MacArthur Foundation (1., 2., 3., 4.). Worth the read, worth the visit. A few scribbles follow...
A participatory culture Henry establishes early on as one:
1. With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
2. With strong support for creating and sharing one's creations with others
3. With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices
4. Where members believe that their contributions matter
5. Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).
How participatory are MMOGs, especially in light of this quote from Sonia Livingstone?
While to adults the Internet primarily means the world wide web, for children it means email, chat, games-- and here they are already content producers.
Participation = contribution. What have you contributed to your MMOG today? Sheer personality only, is that enough? More, less?
Today's post (part 5) also included discussion on a topic we've sliced here many ways before but whose words seemed fresh today. It is on the interconnectedness that forms online player experiences (or in Henry's words, "distributed cognition") :
To plan appropriately, players may not need to know what other participants know, but they do need to know what it is those participants are likely to do. Moreover, in playing the games, one may need to flip through a range of different representations of the state of the game world and of the actions that are occurring within it. Learning to play involves learning to navigate this information environment, understanding the value of each representational technology, knowing when to consult each and how to deploy this knowledge to reshape what is occurring. Instead of thinking as an autonomous problem-solver, the player becomes part of a social and technological system that is generating and deploying information at a rapid pace.
I thought of John Gage's dictim, recast: the network is the game.
This is tricky in at least one regard. November's ACM features a special section on "Entertainment Networking." The story is an old one. How does one manage the user experience in a distributed environment. I claimed once the game as network as a place built only for optimists!
Have a good night. I'll be covering the ACM material in greater depth later. Be sure to read Henry Jenkin's posts. In close I'll poke again, what have you contributed today to your MMOG?
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Update 10/27, Part 6.
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