Patrick Jagoda

Reinvigorating adolescent sexuality education through alternate reality games: the case of The Source

Abstract This paper presents findings from a focus group study conducted to evaluate The Source, an alternate reality game (ARG). ARGs are a relatively new genre of interactive digital games that use a variety of media to engage game players. We developed modules on sexual health, sexual orientation, and homophobia in a game that was delivered to 133 predominantly African-American and Latino US youth. Ten focus groups were conducted with 43 young people aged 13–18 who played The Source to understand feasibility and acceptability issues and the impact of the game on young people’s attitudes, knowledge, and behaviours. Data were transcribed and analysed for common themes by two independent coders. Four primary themes were identified: (1) the feasibility and acceptability of using an ARG for sexual education; (2) the acceptability of The Source’s specific sexual health content; (3) the game’s influence on sexual health-related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours; and (4) the impact of the game on young people’s thoughts and responses to sexual orientation and homophobia. Study findings indicate that an ARG is an exciting and interactive way to educate young people on sensitive topics in sexuality education, but that attention to narrative authenticity and effective messaging are important issues to address.

Speculation: Financial Games and Derivative Worlding in a Transmedia Era

ion of market forces and global networks that its advocates make it out to be. Even financial transactions have concrete foundations and consequences—a materiality that Speculation attempted to foreground at every turn. At the start of the game, we did so through the distribution of repurposed and massively devalued Zimbabwe currency purchased on eBay—a consequence of hyperinflation generated by global financial markets that had its most devastating impact on the poor (fig. 10).67 At a similar moment, we distributed business cards for the game’s protagonist with the GPS coordinates of an enormous server warehouse in New Jersey (a facility the size of three football fields) that serves as the grounding infrastructure for those allegedly immaterial and hyper rapid algorithmic trades that have enabled Wall Street’s success. Later in the game, we emphasized the material reality of the global presence of investment banks of J. P. Morgan through text adventure games set in the empty offices that these banks purchase to produce an illusion of totality. Perhaps most pointedly, the second run of Speculation told the story of Eva: an impoverished laborer who works for MetaCorp through virtual telecommuting from outside of the US. Eva’s story gradually made players aware of circuits of capital that connect coltan mines in the Congo and the violent conflicts surrounding this precious substance to the electronic and mobile devices that contain tantalum capacitors and fuel the games of the overdeveloped world. Speculation comments on all of these material contexts and undercuts the fantasy of infinite exchangeability maintained by finance. After months of intense and daily gameplay, in each of its two runs, Speculation itself reached its material limits. But through this process of engaged speculation, the game mobilized players as cocreators of something that sometimes seems impossible in this present: a future not already used up in advance by debt and derivative contracts but rather one that encompasses the possibility of a more open, sustainable, and just world. 67. The Zimbabwe dollar failed because the government printed out absurd quantities of the currency with nothing to secure it. The hardest hit, of course, were the poor and those who saved as opposed to investing in the market. A fifty trillion dollar note now sells on eBay for under two US dollars. One Speculation document that explored this situation was a memo revealing a plot by MetaCorp to stimulate the failure of cash through similar hyperinflation, forcing everyone to convert to electronic currency, which is easier to track and surveil. This content downloaded from 169.231.142.58 on Sat, 11 Apr 2015 17:40:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

“Because if we don’t talk about it, how are we going to prevent it?”: Lucidity, a narrative-based digital game about sexual violence

Abstract This paper describes the development and evaluation of an interactive, narrative-based, multimedia game to promote learning and communication about sexual violence and health topics. High school-aged participants created the game concept in a three-week workshop, after which assets were assembled and refined by a university-based game design lab. The outcome, Lucidity, was a multimedia game with a nonlinear narrative that led to two different outcomes based on player decisions. The narrative followed the life of one character, an African American woman named Zaria who remembers and grapples with a sexual assault from her past. The player discovers parts of the story by reading comics, watching videos, navigating interactive websites and playing short videogames. The final evaluation consisted of gameplay, a post-game focus group and follow-up interviews. Twenty-four young people participated in three focus group discussions (n = 9, n = 5, n = 10); 23 participated in the follow-up interviews. Salient themes identified in the focus group discussions included: overall approval of the game, the acquisition of new knowledge and minimal past exposure to conversations or education about sexual violence. At follow-up, almost all (n = 22) had initiated a conversation about sexual violence with a parent, peer and/or teacher. Lucidity succeeded in engaging young people and facilitating communication with adults and peers regarding sexual violence and other sexual health topics. Ultimately, a game-based intervention such as this represents a feasible approach for introducing issues of sexual violence, with potential for future implementation in educational settings.

InFection Four: Development of a Youth-Informed Sexual Health Card Game

Games may be useful tools for learning and communicating about sexual and reproductive health. This article discusses the collaborative design and subsequent evaluation of a narrative-based card game. This game was created in a workshop based on positive youth development, which allowed youth to be involved as game designers and game players. Human-centered design informed the workshop and gave the youth opportunities to have meaningful roles, learn skills, and focus on an issue that affects their peers. The intervention was constructed to teach about sexual and reproductive health and also to provide skills to address the medical, social, and emotional aspects of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). During the evaluation of the resultant game, student players were critical of the game but admitted to learning essential facts about STIs. This study demonstrates the feasibility of collaboratively designing a game with youth for youth resulting in a playable and educational tool.

Fabulously Procedural: Braid, Historical Processing, and the Videogame Sensorium

In recent years, the growing field of game studies has contributed to the ongoing cultural debate about what it means for videogames to be an art form that both selectively draws and dramatically departs from earlier forms such as the novel, theater, and cinema. To achieve a sense of videogames as a unique art form requires a more intimate understanding of the new sensorium that they open up-that is, the specific experience of spatiality, temporality, speed, graphics, audio, and procedural activity that they make available. To explore that sensorium, this essay analyzes Jonathan Blows independently produced hit American videogame Braid (2008). For all of the ways that Braid stands apart from contemporary videogames, it does so less to dismiss them than to contemplate, historicize, and produce a reading of the videogame form. Moreover, this game uses media-specific techniques to make accessible the material effects of the American military-industrial-media-entertainment network on historical consciousness. Braid adopts the affordances of game form to develop a formally experimental analytic of processing-one that is aesthetic, affective, and interactively experiential as opposed to purely cognitive. The game uses its formal blends and its play mechanics to complicate how history is typically thought and to imagine how it might be engaged or processed differently. Ultimately, Braid interrogates the impulses that drive videogames and the historical subjects that they produce.

Special Issue: Comics & Media

Why does it make sense for a professor who specializes in what we might think of as the “old” media form of comics (with its instantiation, in the US, in newsprint) and one who specializes in new media studies (with an emphasis on digital forms) to collaborate on a special issue of Critical Inquiry? Although seemingly at opposite ends—at least judging by the different materiality of the objects that generate our research—of a spectrum in literary studies and in the humanities generally, we have found numerous opportunities to collaborate. (We have worked together since we began teaching, each at slightly obverse angles to the English department, at the University of Chicago in 2010.) It is not only that the medium of comics, like new media texts from electronic literature to video games, includes both words and images or that both smack of newfound respectability, at least in the context of academia. It is rather that comics and new media so often enable an intense focus on how complexly woven stories unfold across time and space and, particularly, how these involve the reader (or viewer, or player) to generate meaning through interacting with, or themselves shaping, spatiotemporal form. Across all of the different kinds of work, scholarly and artistic, included in this issue, we see attention to the ludic engagement produced by a range of forms both “old” and “new.” The included pieces also attend to embodied activity, not only the work of the hand of the creator, but also the embodied activity of reading, looking, and playing, whether in relation to the printed page, the stage, or the screen—and the spaces among them. The “Comics & Media” special issue is inspired by the May 2012 “Comics: Philosophy and Practice” conference at the University of Chicago, which here provides a springboard for an exploration of media histories with their numerous continuities—and divergences. Organized by Hillary Chute (under the auspices of the Mellon Residential Program for Arts Practice and Scholarship at the University of Chicago’s Richard & Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry), the conference offered three days of public conversations, talks, and panels featuring seventeen of today’s most acclaimed cartoonists: Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel, Ivan Brunetti, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, Robert Crumb, Phoebe Gloeckner, Justin Green, Ben Katchor, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Françoise Mouly, Gary Panter, Joe Sacco, Seth, Art Spiegelman, Carol Tyler, and Chris Ware.1 This special issue archives the events of that historic gathering of cartoonists and also takes them as a starting point to amplify—through critical essays, transcripts, and original artwork from conference participants—issues that the conference highlighted about producing and consuming media as an embodied activity, about time, space, play, print culture, and also what we might think of as the reemergence of the handwritten form of comics in today’s media landscape. As its title indicates, the conference aimed to create generative exchange between arts practice and critical and theoretical practice. The original artwork and the critical essays themselves produce a cross-media conversation in this issue. And just as the cartoonists at the conference expressed, again and again, meticulous attention to the materiality comics instantiates, “Comics & Media” expresses its own commitment to the physical object by pubSpecial Issue: Comics & Media

On Difficulty in Video Games: Mechanics, Interpretation, Affect

In a 1978 essay, George Steiner observes that “the subject of difficulty in poetry, in art” became a major aspect of aesthetic experience in the late nineteenth century. By the twentieth century, this aspect extended to new forms of visual and aural expression. At the same time, Steiner concludes, “Neither aesthetic theory nor general public feeling have coped with it satisfactorily.” Critics grapple with aesthetic difficulty most often in analyses of literary texts and avant-garde art. In the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries, however, the media landscape changed considerably, introducing digital media that have further complicated discussions about difficulty. Most notably, this period saw the emergence of a medium that

Introduction: Conceptual Games, or the Language of Video Games

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari contend that “philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts.” For them, concepts are not discovered within a long-standing practice or unpacked from a tradition of thought. Instead of operating as models or descriptions of the world as it already exists, concepts are constructed assemblages: acts of thinking that address problems, resist the present, and create the world anew. In one passage of What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari describe the process of inventing concepts as “a throw of the dice.” This analogy between concept creation and a game of chance, however, is not as simple as it may appear. As they clarify, “this is a very complex game, because throwing involves infinite movements that are reversible and folded within each other so that the consequences can only be produced at infinite speed by creating finite forms corresponding to the intensive ordinates of these movements: every concept is a combination that did not exist before.” Even as Deleuze and Guattari use gameplay to evoke concept construction, they insist that not all games are created equal. For instance, logic—insofar as it converts concepts into functions, offering propositions and reductions that are detached from psychology or context—“is less like a game of chess, or a language game, than a television quiz game” (WP, p. 139).

Embedded Game Design as a Method for Addressing Social Determinants of Health

ABSTRACT This paper, describes the design, development, and evaluation of The Test, a theory-based mobile game prototype designed to promote HIV testing by providing information and influencing motivations, and behavioral intentions among YMSM. The Test was designed using embedded design, first described by Kaufman & Flanagan (2015), which diverges from traditional “educational game” design strategies by mixing on-message content with nonfocal content, in an attempt to make the overall experience more approachable and engaging. One challenge of embedded design is that it targets attitudes and actions that are not always proximate to a particular behavior. Games with embedded content forgo explicit takeaways, and their possible distal effects present a challenge to traditional tests of efficacy. The benefit of embedded design, however, is that its holistic or ecological design approach (which considers feelings, emotions, affects, social relations, and connections to broader communities) stands in close alignment with the social-ecological model.