The Getty Museum is currently hosting “California Video,” a survey of 40 years of video art made in California. To complement this show, the IML’s Anne Bray has curated a stellar program of cutting edge videos from 1980 forward called “Hotbed: Video Cultivation Beside the Getty Gardens“; it will feature 20 videos projected outside on the walls of the Getty in a spectacular display this Friday, May 9 (7:00 - 9:00 p.m.) and Saturday, May 10 (7:00 - 10:00 p.m.).

The videos center on the nature/culture divide, asking what constitutes the natural and the cultural - is gender natural or cultural? What about race? Videos include East/West, by Su-Chen Hung, which is about the challenges of uniting different cultural heritages in a single self, illustrated deftly with the image of a divided mouth (seen above). Howie Cherman’s Flying I (below) takes us into the impossible through the digital, exploring the ineffable permutations of time, perpetual motion and the body within the image. Flying like this, vibrating in an impossible moment of suspension, can only happen through an image constructed via digital manipulation; and yet that manipulation aligns so closely with real experiences of time and the body in the urgent pace of contemporary culture.

This expansive show offers a rare chance to see powerful, volatile, courageous work produced at a moment when the culture wars demanded a response, not just in terms of giving voice to disparate communities and points of views, but in formal terms as a radical message demanded radical form.

It’s also a chance to see what Anne does outside of the IML! The event is free; parking is $8.

The IML is pleased to announce a workshop for faculty and graduate students to create multimedia projects with Sophie, an easy-to-use free software application developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book and presented by USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. Sophie allows users to design interactive texts that incorporate images, video and sound, and it deploys creative formats for analysis, annotation and citation.

Participants will engage in a hands-on workshop May 27 – 30, 2008, with the goal of creating a scholarly project; they will then be free to use the IML labs with support staff during the summer to continue work on the project; and they will be invited to present their completed projects at a showcase event in August. Participants will receive an honorarium of $1,000 for their participation in the workshop.

Sophie is described by the Institute for the Future of the Book as “software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment.” Sophie’s goal is to encourage multimedia authoring and, in the process, “to redefine the notion of a book or ‘academic paper’ to include both rich media and mechanisms for reader feedback and conversation in dynamic margins.”

Successful proposals will be based on an existing paper or body of research; they will articulate how media elements will enhance or transform the paper; and they will indicate a desire to dedicate a full week to the project during the workshop.

Those interested are invited to submit a proposal that includes the following:
1. Name and affiliation
2. Paper/project title and brief description
3. Sophie project description: what do you imagine doing with Sophie?
4. Why is this an interesting project to translate into an interactive, media-rich, extensible and/or networked format?
5. What assets (images, video, sound) do you have ready to use?

Please submit proposals and questions by email to Holly Willis, Director of Academic Programs, Institute for Multimedia Literacy < hwillis AT cinema.usc.edu >

Deadline for proposals is 5:00 p.m., Monday, May 12, 2008. Participants will be notified on Friday, May 16, 2008.

The IML will participate in this year’s Teaching With Technology conference at USC’s Davidson Center on May 6, starting at 7:30 a.m. (!). The theme this year is mobile teaching and learning, and the opening session features Francois Bar, Manuel Castells and Emma Kiselyova and will be moderated by Otto Khera.

Later on, look for Steve Anderson and Bjorn Littlefield-Palmer’s presentation, which examines the educational and pedagogical possibilities of a Second Life space designed not to replicate physical classrooms but to take full advantage of the affordances of a virtual world. This presentation reviews the creation of the IML’s SL island funded by a Provost’s Technology Enhanced Learning Seed Grant. This presentation will be in Davidson from 11:15 - 12:30.

Then, from 1:45 - 3:00 over in the Taper Labs in the basement of Taper Hall, Tara Waugh, Matt Williams and Holly Willis will present “Digital Documentaries,” which is a hands-on workshop showing faculty members how to use video cameras to enhance their research and/or teaching. Using the Sony SR100 camera, we’ll walk through the basics of a video production.

Register here for the conference, which is free and open to all USC faculty and staff members.

Though slightly out of order, this is the final group post that describes our senior multimedia thesis projects. We are quite proud of the work of these pioneers; come see the projects for yourself Friday, April 18, 5-8 pm. For details, click the link to the left.

In her new book Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work, Anne Balsamo, the IML’s Director from 2004 to 2007, evangelizes honing the “technological imagination,” an approach to innovation used by the “technohumanist.” Balsamo argues that the divide often experienced by the hard sciences and the humanities is fatal in an ever more technologically sophisticated world. And indeed, at the IML we practice an integrated approach to tools and concepts, for we believe that while technologists can imagine what can be, humanists can reminds us what should be.

[from left: Sonia, Cameron, Jessica]

Marrying neuroscience with the tenets of mediation and yoga in her Web site entitled Change Your Mind, Cynthia LeFevre shows the brain to be an “adaptable ever-changing organ” that can be positively shaped by the focus that comes from practicing the sort of mindfulness that counters the deleterious effects of stress on both mind and body.

Sonia Seetharaman takes this connection to another level by investigating the dualities apparent in science and religion in To Be or Not To Be, a Flash-based environment that leads viewers through screens with image and text, each of which explains a concept from physics before showing its corresponding concept in religious theory. Revealing the scientific dualities and their counterpoints in religious myth, Seetharaman not only indicates the numerous overlaps between the two fields, but also suggests the human impulse toward binaries – a very fitting project to find its way into computer code.

Jessica Janner investigates the ways in which teens get news of the world around them. Using extensive statistics gleaned from online surveys of high school students, interviews with high school journalism classes, as well as video footage of scholars, Janner presents her findings in the various places youth visit – YouTube, Facebook and her own Web site. Janner presents her project, My News, as a broadcast news story updated for the 21st century. In this way, she hopes to spark discussion between traditional newsmakers and the next generation of (cyber) citizens.
[from left: Cynthia & Tiffany]
Tiffany Ikeda combines economics and social psychology, creating virtual experiments that gauge self-reported levels of happiness as well as informing users about cutting edge research in this area. HAPPINE$$ adapts traditional experiments from each field into an interactive site where users can try these experiments themselves before receiving a thorough explanation of the significance of the test, along with statistical information about its results. Ikeda highlights the “discrepancies between anticipated and experienced utility” in order to help users gain appreciation for such work but perhaps more profoundly, to help them “foster more knowledgeable personal decision-making.”

Cameron Parkins interrogates the hype surrounding the potential of digital media to provide an egalitarian space that eliminates the socio-political inequities of life in the real world. With the rise of virtual worlds such as Second Life, a space in which people log in and interact from around the globe, Parkins finds it crucial to see if the promises of “digital utopianism” are anywhere close to being realized. Informed by both International Relations and Digital Communications theory, Walden III “attempts to understand whether virtual worlds can overcome the confines of cultural imperialism, providing global citizens a new arena for identity creation and cultural exchange, or fall into the same trappings of traditional Westernization.”

We might think of Leonardo da Vinci as the epitome of this techno-humanist approach. From working on cadavers to oil painting to helicopter design, da Vinci reminds us that humans are very flexible and resourceful, and there is much to be learned from crossing disciplines in pursuit of innovative thinking. The projects in this group are likewise cross-disciplinary, investigating knowledge bases from seemingly disparate fields.

Yet another in our postings on senior multimedia thesis projects. See them all this Friday, 5-8 pm at the IML! (click the Gala link to the left for details).

February 24, 2004 – just a month into the second semester of the existence of IML Honors Program – is now known as Grey Tuesday. Over 100,000 copies of DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album were downloaded from hundreds of sites across the Internet. An estimated million copies of this celebrated remix, which creatively combined the Beatles’ White Album with Jay-Z’s Black Album, were traded over peer-to-peer networks within 24 hours. This was a symbolic gesture perhaps, but the electronic civil disobedience of Grey Tuesday eloquently spoke to both consumer frustrations with increasingly restrictive copyright laws and the growing power of peer networks to subvert their enforcement. And it spoke to a generation of university students ready to test the potential of remix, along with a host of other so-called amateur media practices, within the confines of the university. It should come as no surprise, then, that several of the Honors Program Thesis projects reflect these cultural practices, which have been “hacked” to function within an academic setting.

[from left: Matt Lee, Matt Jung, Freddie Wong; pictured below: Anastasia; not pictured: Patrick]

Perhaps the most direct reflection of this ethos is Matt Jung’s interactive game Mashupoly, which he says parallels the music mashup in which two songs are combined in order to create a new and different song. “Mashupoly combines elements from the board game Monopoly with information about the progression of the mashup artform into a fast-growing, independent and yet still illegal genre,” he writes. Within the game, different squares represent different songs, or, as Jung points out, different intellectual properties. These properties are in turn organized along a timeline, which demonstrates the evolution of musical appropriation across several decades, going back to early jazz and moving forward. The game nicely illustrates the ways in which this kind of borrowing is codified differently relative to historical context, and coyly references the frustrated efforts of the Recording Industry Association of America, which seeks to punish college students for illegal downloads. The association figures in the game directly in that players must carefully orchestrate their listening habits by listening to as many intellectual properties as possible before incurring the RIAA’s legal wrath.

If deploying pop cultural media tools was the only criteria for graduation, Freddie Wong would have moved on to grad school months ago. With several million viewers to his credit, Wong is a YouTube sensation, and that was precisely his goal. Titled The 10⁶ Project, Wong’s thesis tackles a deceptively simple question: What does it take for a video to become viral? Through the analysis of other successful viral videos on YouTube, Wong isolated the key characteristics, created a series of projects that included those characteristics, and watched as his videos spread like wildfire across the Web, with the numbers of viewers skyrocketing. His project charts his various experiments, inviting users to consider the strange viewing predilections of the world.

Second Life, the multi-user virtual environment that has grown increasingly popular over the last four years for everything from gambling to art to even education, is home to Matthew Lee’s Rivenscryr, a space that allows users to explore a particular aspect of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Lee argues that the invisible character Sycorax plays a key role, despite the fact that his most important actions take place prior to the play’s start. Lee takes us back to those actions, “allowing users to travel through a remnant of the island, encountering fragments of the past.” While many have considered creative uses of Second Life, Lee takes full advantage of the virtual environment’s immersive features, crafting an entire world rich with texture and detail.

If 2004 brought us one of the most popular instances of remix culture, 2005 formally introduced another key moment when Henry Jenkins wrote, “Welcome to convergence culture” in an essay about the growing array of media platforms. He was describing the “flow of media content across delivery channels to expand revenue,” as well as the ways in which increasingly active consumers demand more options in ways to enjoy media. “Convergence is both a top down corporate-driven process and a bottom up consumer-driven process,” Jenkins wrote, but Patrick Skelly shows how convergence affects narrative itself. His project, media://hack, is an interactive examination of Project.hack, a Japanese multimedia franchise that moves across several media platforms, including anime, manga, novels and video games. Skelly dissects the ways in which the different media elements converge and diverge, allowing the story to mutate in different directions depending on the affordances of various storytelling devices.

Anastasia Shepherd delves into another pop cultural phenomenon – the cinematic remake – with her project Face to Face: A Blind Remake. Noting the prevalence of remakes in contemporary cinema, Shepherd ponders the elements that make a particular story worth revisiting, and notes that she’s less interested in what stays the same as works get remade than in what’s different. To explore ideas of the remake, Shepherd gave herself an assignment: she read Ingmar Bergman’s screenplay for Face to Face, and without having seen the film, selected two scenes to remake. Her interactive project compares Bergman’s project and her own version, and in the process, becomes a sly commentary on several key themes both in contemporary pop cultural media practices and those that take place in academia, namely authorship and authority, as well as on notions of originality and “the original.”

Perhaps one of the strongest shifts that occurred during the four years of the Honors Program’s first cohort was a movement from a Web 1.0 ethos in which users encountered relatively static Web sites, to a Web 2.0 paradigm in which sites became platforms encouraging user creativity. The IML’s Honors students cheerfully seized these tools and the corresponding mentality, and their projects reflect their ability to merge academic goals with participatory media.

This is another post in the ongoing theme of senior thesis project descriptions which are being posted all week until our gala event: Come and see the work on Friday, 4/18 from 5-8 p.m. at the IML!

Although increasing attention is paid to the differences between virtuality and reality, the virtual is the real in more senses than are immediately apparent. For instance, recent scientific research discovered mirror neurons, those that fire in the prefrontal lobes of the human brain when one acts as well as when one only sees the act. Under certain circumstances, the brain cannot distinguish the experiential from the imaginary. Given the highly visual and visually-mediated nature of life brought on by high performance computing, the design, articulation (via visualization) and construction of life becomes a crucial consideration. Recalling that vision itself is mediated, we must also remember that a physical object is a medium as much as a digital one.

                                                                                   [from left: Rachel, Leanne, Matt, Isomi]

With his project Enlightening Engineering, Matt Gerhardt demonstrates the ways in which theories of engineering operate in our everyday lives, using a Rube Goldberg machine combined with digital media to explain natural occurrences such as kinematics and fluid dynamics. The device is a large, complicated machine that uses multiple, semi-arbitrary steps to accomplish an exceedingly simple task, such as switching on a light bulb. As the actual machine churns through its tasks, Gerhardt uses digital media to explain the complex theories that account for each process before the user is forced to use the knowledge gained to keep the machine “operating.”

Rachel Kerry uses multimedia effects to enhance the dramatic structure of her original play Seven Fragments, a “dark” love story that illuminates the ravages of matters of the heart. Poetic text, story and character, mask performance, live music, and digital media animations integrate on stage to create a uniquely unified multimedia production. Kerry contends that emergent technologies “reshape today’s notions of theatre,” such that “the artist’s voice evolves.” She directs her actors to challenge traditional models of performance by using story as well as innovative interpretation of the visual media she has created for their interaction. Aided by a grant from the USC School of Theatre and IML technology, Kerry’s play ran at the Village Gate Theatre for several performances during the first week of April. The multiple screens of her project document those shows, as well as the making of the performative materials. The “virtual” and the “real” inform each other throughout this thesis project.

Isomi Miake-Lye created her project in two main parts: one mimics the physicality of a medical waiting room and the other is a Web site whose interface is modeled on the 1950’s Game of Life, updating it with video clips from research projects and links to further information. Getting Ahead Later in Life: Insight Into Older Adult Lifestyles and Their Implications for Health Care examines the very pressing issue of the swelling population of older adults in America and the health care issues they present. Miake-Lye argues that these “drastic demographic changes at present dictate a vital shift in our traditional health and wellbeing paradigm: the United States cannot afford to continue our costly present track.” Thus, she hopes to educate viewers about the ways in which healthy living choices can impact the quality of their own “game of life.”

Leanne Joyce offers a nuanced view of the relationship between garments and their cultural articulations from an economic standpoint. Her project is a company called Whitees and includes a faux storefront complete with blank tee shirts and bar code scanner. Scanning shirts reveals information beyond the typical prices. Indeed, ad copy for the project notes, “When customers scan the barcode on a tee from Whitees, articles of clothing become articles of fact.” Joyce recently won the Interdisciplinary Award in the Arts Category in USC’s Undergraduate Symposium for Scholarly and Creative Work sponsored by the Office of Undergraduate Programs!

In Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy, Gregory Ulmer contends that the computer is a prosthesis of the human brain. Thus, at the IML we frequently ask what emergent technologies allow us to do that we could not do otherwise. Given our provenance in the School of Cinematic Arts and at the intersection of critical studies, production and interactive media, we ask students to think through the technologies they use: How do digital technologies and the knowledge they generate (as well as acting as a vehicle to) impact our intellect and our lives? How doe we harness them to enhance the human experience? How do they help us to understand our motivations and behaviors? This group of projects explores the relationship between innovations in science and technology with the quality of human life.

Thursday, April 17, 12.00-1.30 p.m.
Kerkhoff Living Room
734 West Adams Boulevard

The Institute for Multimedia Literacy is pleased to present Elizabeth Losh, whose talk is titled “What Could Go Wrong?”: The Baked Professor, the Runaway Résumé, and Other Cautionary Tales from the Digital Campus.

What are the ethical responsibilities of universities to educate their students in and keep up with the norms of social media conventions? When the informal digital practices of undergraduates have become so divorced from their academic work, what kinds of interventions are appropriate from the standpoint of values like privacy and personal freedom? To what extent are administrators and curricular planners equipped to make rules about digital content-creation on behalf of other stakeholders?

In his 1959 essay “The Two Cultures,” C.P. Snow described the “intellectual life of the whole of western society” as divided between “two polar groups”: those of the sciences and those of the humanities. Now it is possible that institutions of intellectual inquiry will eventually be divided into two even more incompatible communities of scholarly association: the culture of knowledge and the culture of information. This presentation is intended to extend discussion beyond media literacies to examine media ideologies, particularly when traditional institutions of knowledge attempt to stimulate, manage, and regulate often seemingly subversive cultures of information.

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Elizabeth Losh is currently the Writing Director of the Humanities Core Course at U.C. Irvine and teaches courses in digital rhetoric and persuasive games. She studies public communication, persuasive videogames, social marketing, public diplomacy, risk communication, and institutional branding. She writes about the discourses of “virtual state,” the media literacy of policy makers and authority figures, and the rhetoric surrounded regulatory attempts to limit everyday digital practices.

Her first book, Virtualpolitik, will be coming out from MIT Press in 2009. Her daily online column by the same name won the John Lovas Award for best academic weblog in 2007, and she is a regular contributor to Siva Vaidhyanathan’s weblog about free culture and intellectual property, Sivacracy, and to the international blog about social advertising and non-profit campaigns Osocio. She has published articles about videogames for the military and emergency first-responders, government websites, national digital libraries, political blogging, new genres of online satire, congressional hearings about the Internet, and state-funded online learning efforts.

RSVP: imlrsvp@cinema.usc.edu

Lunch will be provided.

As we celebrate the class of 2008 and the first cohort of students to earn Honors in multimedia scholarship, we also take time to reflect with these students, using the insights acquired to benefit our next class. This group of “preview” projects hints at what is in store for the class of 2009’s show. These projects, created by students who wanted a head-start, are well on their way to becoming solid theses in the world of Web 3.0. From showing the Internet as a platform for civic dis/engagement and political activism, to emerging forms of Web entertainment or “webisodes,” to the sort of 3-D animations that can be created to narrativize virtual worlds and their inhabitants, these projects collectively point the way toward the new generation of mediated life. [from left: John, Adam, Paul]

Adam Church explores the rather seamy world of Anonymous, the Internet-organized subversive group originally thought to be nothing more than a set of vandals playing with people’s lives. However, In LULLZ We Trust finds Church suggesting that groups like Anonymous, having come of age, are now more politically active and socially responsible, targeting the powerful Church of Scientology for instance, as they leave the desktops and come out to picket in the world. In this light, their anonymity is as much a survival tactic as a vandalistic impulse.

John Visclosky writes, directs and often appears in his webisode, which he will deploy at carefully chosen intervals with releases in weekly installments on YouTube. The Reunion is an innovative – but light-hearted – new Web-based series that aims to combine narrative, stylistic, technical and marketing commonalities shared by pre-existing Web serials, such as Red Vs. Blue or Getting Away With Murder. The segments will be supplemented by an accompanying blog detailing every facet of each episode’s creation. Visclosky envisions that project as a “multi-disciplinary exercise that will combine elements of technically sound filmmaking, creative storytelling, and shrewd, innovative marketing.”

The purpose of Paul Gee’s thesis, You Can Get There From Here: Design Differentials in 3-D Animation, is to examine several production pipelines for 3-D animation in order to document and evaluate their efficacy. Gee does this by creating multiple versions of the same project and evaluating each on its speed, facility and the quality of the final result. Using an original children’s story about a duck and his less confident chicken companion, Gee is able to concentrate on issues of lighting, movement and texture. Digital literacy includes the most effective means to an end, and we look forward to being illuminated by this project.

IML Honors Program students begin their four-year introduction to the history and theory of scholarly multimedia with a class titled “The Languages of New Media I,” which borrows from Lev Manovich’s seminal book The Language of New Media, published in 2002. Manovich covers a lot of ground in his text, but one of his key insights concerns the role of the database, which becomes a fundamental component in contemporary media practices and marks a shift away from a culture dominated by linear structures – such as traditional narratives – toward those that call attention to the processes of selection and combination, the two activities that are key to structuring any kind of story. Filmmakers often experiment with database structures – remember Memento and its emphasis on the film’s backwards structure? – but as a medium, film remains linear. New media allows us to play with the database structure in new ways, a fact argued at length by Professor Steve Anderson in the first iteration of IML 101, which culminated with the exploration of the Korsakow System, an application invented by Florian Thalhofer that facilitates the creation of interactive database projects. Several Honors Program students conjoined critical analysis with interactive structures that call attention to the database, if not as a central component in their projects then at least as a mode of thinking that responds to the database structure. [top, from left: Mike, Casey; bottom from left Katie, Ashley, Olivia]

Welcome to the Hong Kong Express: The Relationship Between Local and Transnational in Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express by Ashley Hsieh dissects the beautiful cult film by offering users a way to move through several spaces in which they encounter close textual readings of the film’s major scenes. The film is, in a sense, mapped across several screen spaces, paralleling the film itself, which too traverses a city, as well as the rift between old and new, and, according to Hseih, between local and transnational.

Katie Berenbom pursues a similar form of analysis in Do the Right Thing: Examining a Thoughtful Representation of Race in Film, which looks at Spike Lee’s 1989 classic independent film about racial violence. Berenbom highlights the fact that the film arrived when racial tension in the U.S. in general, and in New York in particular, was extremely high, especially with regard to issues of police brutality and racial profiling. Indeed, many pundits accused Lee of inciting racial violence with Do the Right Thing. In her Web-based interactive analysis, Berenbom invites users to move through seven scenes in which she demonstrates links between actual events and Lee’s narrative, in the end allowing users to consider the slippery boundary between fact and fiction.

A similar kind of scrutiny takes place in Michael Allison’s project Reverse Obfuscation of Radiohead’s Everything in its Right Place: An Interactive Breakdown of a Song from One of Music’s Most Sonically Obscure Albums a Web-based close textual analysis of a song from the 2000 album Kid A. However, the analysis is staged within an unusual interface, which, in Allison’s words, lets users enter “the site by virtually deconstructing visual (as well as aural) noise to reach the information behind it – a metaphor for the thesis itself.” He adds that the “project intends to demystify music technology for the average listener and promote critical listening” and incorporates not only a historical approach to music technology, but an informative approach which “tutors” users in the act of critical music analysis.

“Like Totally Eww”: A Bodacious Adventure in Deciphering Textual and Cultural Implications of the 1980s Teen Science Fiction and Fantasy Genre While Charting the Evolution of Camp Films from ‘B’ Billing to Blockbuster by Olivia Everett tackles an entire film genre, namely that of the teen science fiction B-movie from the 1980s. Everett not only claims these critically neglected films as legitimate objects of academic study, but reveals how they inform the modern blockbuster. Everett fittingly uses vlogging (video blogging) to make her case, as well as linking, creating a critical site rich with annotations while also allowing for the incorporation of user feedback. Indeed, if the audience for these films is hardcore fans, it will be these same fans that make the site smarter with use.

Casey Levental brings together the histories of art and cinema in Cubism and Cinema: Paralleled Explorations of the Old “New Media,” arguing that cinema played a powerful role in the formation of cubism at the turn of the last century. Noting that the group known as “La Bande Picasso” was comprised of both artists and film enthusiasts, Levental traces the significance of motion, mechanization and composition on these painters, insisting that “it is no coincidence that the ‘moving picture’ had played a role in the development of these movements’ ambitions.”

Manovich argues that the database has become a symbolic form, one that privileges collections of materials and encourages users to view, navigate and search. Each of these projects in some way conducts a form of critical analysis through the tools of the database structure, giving users access to an array of materials through which they can navigate, developing an understanding of the maker’s argument along the way.

This is the second of the seven groups of Honors in Multimedia Scholarship program’s senior thesis projects.

[from left: Erik, Pierson, Evan, Sara]

In their 2006 essay “The Play of Imagination: Extending the Literary Mind,” USC Associate Professor Douglas Thomas and Annenberg Visiting Scholar John Seely Brown use the term “conceptual blending” to describe the ways in which players of massively multiplayer online games are able to take into account multiple worlds simultaneously, and in so doing, find “new and unusual opportunities for learning.” One key to the success of these games, the authors argue, is that they are eminently social, but perhaps more importantly, the rich social fabric of the games “blurs many of the boundaries that we tend to expect, such as the distinction between the physical and the virtual, the difference between player and avatar, and the distinction between work and play.” The essay is part of a growing body of work that highlights the potential of games for learning and educational practices, a project undertaken by several Honors Program students who use interactive game structures in order to encourage an engaged response to serious issues.

Pierson Clair’s Regulating National Security allows users to test the national security of the United States by asking, “Can you rearrange the budgets to create a better security structure that keeps the United States as is or more secure?” Clair notes that the project maps “over 400 points of national security, including major cities, ports, airports, defense installations and other key points of interest” and allows users to shift finances among 16 divisions within five federal departments. Using the Google Maps API, Clair has created a fascinating interactive experience that demonstrates some of the challenges in crafting a national security system.

Sara Epperson considers consumerism in her interactive game Dream Wedding! In this case, users move through a series of scenarios typical of contemporary wedding planning, and they quickly become immersed in the need to buy the best. It’s your wedding, after all! At the end of the game, users get the bill. Epperson stays well within the realm of non-fiction here, but the results are startling, and prompt users to consider the ways in which the game of spending aligns with the reality of spending. “Because of their involvement with the game, users are implicated in the practice of consumerism,” Epperson explains.

While some students have used games to immerse users in complex ideas, others use games reflexively, as a means to interrogate the very structure of the gaming experience. Such is the case with Erik Gieszelmann’s Sliding Agency: A Study of the Balance Between System and Agency in Game Design. The project is a game simulation that demonstrates how game designers must negotiate a delicate balance between player and system agency: too little agency for the player and the game doesn’t encourage his or her creative exploration and interaction. Too much agency, and play bogs down. But if a designer can find the right balance between the two, then the game will be satisfying. Rather than merely tell us this, or make a convincing argument that proves his point, Gieszelmann lets us experience this process directly as users become, for a little while anyway, game designers deciding on how to find that perfect balance.

Evan Bregman also interrogates video games, in this case examining the relationship between the pleasures of storytelling and those of interactivity; the two, Bregman points out, would seem to be at odds. Immersive Flow: Narrative Through Interactivity considers how games incorporate elements of cinematic narrative along with game play that has some impact on the narrative, allowing players to experience a sense of agency within the story itself. Bregman takes this idea a step farther by creating the project as an interactive book that, in Bregman’s words, “uses text, video and interaction to position its creator as a sympathetic protagonist in a narrative argument.” Bregman created his project in the Institute for the Future of the Book’s new application Sophie, which Bob Stein, Institute for the Future of the Book founder (and frequent denizen of the IML) describes as a tool that allows for the creation of entities that exist somewhere between the book and the movie. Sophie easily brings together text, audio, video and more, and accommodates time-based actions within text-based projects. Bregman takes full advantage of these possibilities, and his project nicely enacts his thesis argument.