When are video games mimetic?

My son plays on Massively Minecraft, a wonderful Minecraft server for kids. And recently they banned TNT. I’m relieved. Minecraft is a great constructionist learning environment, and I’m happy to let him play it.  But his fascination with blowing stuff up was getting a bit too intense. They disabled TNT on the server because someone (not my son) blew up someone else’s creation.  My son would never do anything like that.  But I still would rather see him building a castle than piling up explosives to see how big a hole he can make.

People often ask the question “Are video games mimetic?” I was at a conference on games at Georgia Tech a few years ago, and one of the speakers at one moment was waxing poetic about what kids can learn from games.  They’re having fun, and look at all the things they can learn! And then moments later, the same speaker dismissed claims that violent games can make kids violent, because kids don’t transfer things from games to the real world–they know it’s just a game!  My friend Liz Losh and I had to hold our breath to avoid laughing out loud, the speaker’s self contradiction was so comic.  She whispered in my ear, “Either video games are mimetic, or they’re not. He can’t have it both ways!”

I’ve read a bunch of studies on this topic that have contradictory findings. I’d love to see a good literature review or definitive large-scale study. But I would rephrase the question somewhat. We shouldn’t ask whether games are mimetic, but under what conditions.  Can kids learn things from games? Of course! Do they magically absorb all that great content? Nah, not most of it.  Do kids become serial killers after playing violent video games? Of course not! But could they sometimes internalize some degree of insensitivity to violence through playing violent games? I’d be very surprised if that wasn’t true.  So the question for the research community is: What specific design features of a game or aspects of the context in which it is played lead to more or less transfer to the real beliefs and behaviors? How can we deliberately engineer games to support more transfer of learning content, and less of things like violence and obsessive consumerism that pervade many games?

There’s a lot of important research to do in this area. But in the meantime, I’m glad my son plays Minecraft. And I’m glad the kids’ server disabled TNT.

Social Translucence and Internet Parenting

Part of what makes putting the computer in the family room work well is that it has a degree of “social translucence.”  Tom Erickson and Wendy Kellogg write:

We begin by asking what properties of the physical world support graceful human-human communication in face-to-face situations, and argue that it is possible to design digital systems that support coherent behavior by making participants and their activities visible to one another. We call such systems “socially translucent systems” and suggest that they have three characteristics—visibility, awareness, and accountability—which enable people to draw upon their experience and expertise to structure their interactions with one another.

When I walk through the dining room where our computer is located, I can’t see what my son is typing unless I come uncomfortably close. And that would feel rude, so I generally don’t. But if he’s looking at images or videos, I can see them at a distance. The physical properties of the space afford greater privacy for text than for other media.  No one planned it that way, but it’s a pretty strategic setup when you think about it. I can quickly get a sense of the general sort of thing he’s doing but the details typically remain more private.

It works the other way around too–I use the same computer, and my kids are aware of what I’m doing on it too. If the one who is old enough to read is watching, I intuitively know when he’s close enough to actually read the words on my screen and when he’s not.  It’s quite striking how detailed these affordances are–what they allow and what they don’t allow is complicated.  The use of the physical properties of the space to maintain a mixture of privacy and mutual awareness is social translucence.

I got some interesting responses to my last post. People definitely are comfortable at different positions on the spectrum from trusting kids to monitoring them.  Kids and teens are continually facing new challenges, and at any given time there are some they are ready for and some they are not.  Parents need to let them experiment and make mistakes–but not mistakes with tragic or irreversible consequences.  It’s a delicate balance. But wherever you are on the spectrum from “protect them” to “let them learn from their mistakes,” I think there’s one thing we all can agree on: we need more socially translucent solutions to Internet parenting.

For me, I want to know if my kid is online at 4 am. I want to know if he’s being bullied, or bullying others.  I want to know that he’s using good judgement in the kind of content he accesses.  I want to know if there’s something else I should be worried about–is there something parents should watch out for that I don’t even know about?  But beyond all that, I don’t need to see the details of exactly what he’s saying to his friends or doing online.  The interesting question is: could a tool be designed to help?  What would a socially translucent tool for parenting your kids’ Internet use look like?  It’s a tremendously hard design problem–particularly if you hope to create mutual awareness among people rather than an algorithm that tries to operationalize values (a task which Internet filters attempt, and largely fail). But if such a design was successful, it would be a win for both kids’ privacy and effective parenting.

(For more on this topic, see Social and Technical Challenges in Parenting Teens’ Social Media Use by Sarita Yardi.)

Kids & Internet Safety: Put the Computer in a Public Room

Since I do research on kids and the Internet, folks often ask me about Internet safety for kids. My student Sarita Yardi is studying how parents cope, and finding that they are struggling. There aren’t simple rules.  Parents are legitimate gatekeepers for what sorts of things kids and teens are exposed to, and the Internet can often take the parent out of the loop.

The Internet has lots to offer kids, and you can’t just take it away. They need it for school, they’ll need it for their careers, and they need parental guidance to learn how to use it responsibly. Even the most involved parents can’t watch what their kids are doing every moment. You need to talk with your kids about responsible Internet use, and create a culture of accountability in the home.  Parenting Internet use is a microcosm of parenting in general, with the difficulty level turned to 11.  While there are no easy answers, there is one golden rule:

Put the computer in a public room in the house.

You have to learn to trust your kids–no doubt about it. You won’t always be there, and what matters is what happens when you’re not watching. But while their judgement is maturing, a little deterrence can go a long way. OK, you’re busy in the kitchen–but you just might walk through the family room and look over their shoulder. They shouldn’t be doing anything they wouldn’t want you to see.

Laptops are a terrible idea for kids. We will be getting our sons laptops as high-school graduation presents.  And in the meantime, our computer will remain in the dining room.  This doesn’t solve all problems–we did find a certain small boy using the computer once in the middle of the night. But he lost all computer use for two weeks for that escapade, and he won’t be making that mistake again.  Accountability is the first step towards independent responsibility. And visibility of behavior supports the growth of accountability and good judgement.

At the end of fall semester….

At the end of fall semester, my Institute gave to me:

12 Hours of grading
11 Recommendation letters
10 Student excuses
9 Screens of email
8 People coughing
7 Committee meetings
6 Thesis chapters
5 Papers to review
4 Holiday parties
3 CHI rebuttals
2 NSF proposals, and
A case of academic dis-honesty!

 

(Happy winter break everyone!)

It’s All About the Money, Stupid (Economically Less Advantaged Youth Want a Credible Path to Economic Empowerment)

NB: This post is about my education research.

I feel so stupid–I should’ve seen it all along. It’s all about the money.  About searching for a better life. In a way that is believable. In the context of a system where adults and institutions are regarded with suspicion.

When my PhD student Betsy Disalvo started Glitch Game Testers, she first tried the activity with kids of different ages.  In Glitch, economically less advantaged African American youth work testing  pre-release games from real game companies. Their work game testing is integrated with intro CS education. Almost all of our students have chosen to go to college and study CS or related disciplines as their major.  When Betsy did preliminary workshops with 14 and 15 year-olds, they seemed not quite mature enough for the activity. For that reason, we decided to focus on 16 and 17 year-olds. And then it occurred to us that those teenagers are old enough to hold part-time and summer jobs. Kids from poor backgrounds needs to earn money if they can. How could they have time for school, a job, and Glitch? It didn’t all add up. So we decided to make Glitch a paying job.  Our original grant from the National Science Foundation didn’t plan for that–we just had budgeted for a small honorarium for our participants. So we took some of the money meant for my summer salary and got permission to give it to our teens. We raised more money for their salaries from the Arthur M. Blank Foundation. We made it work.

Our initial reasons were  practical–a detail.  But as we’ve worked with our teens for the last couple years, it became clear that this was a central factor in why the program was such a success.  What we’ve learned is so astoundingly obvious and simple. It was there all the time and we never saw it. Kids from less advantaged backgrounds want a secure future. Adults and school officials know that education is the path to that better future. But kids don’t believe them.  And why should they? They often don’t have role models who have gone to college and found success.  It doesn’t seem real as a possibility.  The role models for success they have are prominent African Americans in the sports and entertainment industries.  The documentary film Hoop Dreams does a great job of documenting these young men’s dreams. The kids in Hoop Dreams want a better life, and basketball is the path they can imagine.

They imagine themselves as basketball or football stars, but those dreams are unlikely to come true. How do we help them to imagine themselves as high-tech workers?  The role models exist, but are rare compared to those from the entertainment and sports industries. What we discovered in Glitch is that one way to encourage them to dream of being high tech workers is to make them legitimate high tech workers. Our Glitch students work for real game companies. They realize they can work in the game industry because they already are doing so.  And that higher education is the path to making this real.

And now that I realize this was key, I see it everywhere. For example, the Computer Clubhouse Network creates drop-in computer centers in economically less advantaged neighborhoods to encourage these youth to get interested in computer science. My students and I have volunteered at clubhouses in Atlanta from time to time over the years, and we consistently observe one thing: each clubhouse has a computer music suite, and making your own electronic music/rap is by far the most successful clubhouse activity.  The clubhouse kids will tell you that they are hoping to become rap stars.  They work hard on their music–incredibly hard.  Because there’s a dream behind it. The creators of the clubhouse network were hoping the kids would work hard on learning real computing skills, and dream of being part of the computer industry. And that does happen–but much more rarely.

The research questions then becomes, how do we help kids from less advantaged backgrounds to embrace dreams with a higher chance of success? The Glitch model embodies a core concept from educational theory: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP).  People can learn to be part of a community of practice by starting to do simpler tasks that meaningfully contribute to real work. It’s important that as they do their work, they have a chance to observe the work of more senior members of the community on a day-to-day basis.Over time, they can take on more and more important roles in the community. So here’s my pitch: we should create more opportunities for teenagers to do paid internships with real businesses.

I do work on encouraging kids to get interested in computing, because I’m a computer science professor. And because we have a shortage of computing professionals and a lack of  diversity in the computing industry which both hurt the industry. But honestly I don’t care whether  teens go into computing or engineering or teaching or finance…. What I hope for the kids and for our society is economic mobility. That whoever you are, if you work hard and stay in school you can build a better life for yourself and your family.  It seems to me that LPP is the way to make this happen. Every 16-year-old should have the opportunity to do an internship with a real company.  To try out real work, contributing to a real business in a meaningful way. To develop friendships with adult workers who can guide them on realistic career paths. To realize that they can be part of the industry of their choice and contribute meaningfully–because they already are.

NB2: Glitch Game Testers is the creation of Betsy Disalvo. Who you should hire for a faculty position, because she’s brilliant and all this is her work.

The Role of Academic Blogging

My colleague Mark Guzdial has a popular blog on computing education.  I commented to him last week that I was impressed with how often he’s able to come up with thoughtful posts. He posts several per week, and they’re all great.  He laughed and said “well, I usually just find an article I like and write a few lines before a quote from it. It’s not much really.”  Some of his posts are long, thoughtful essays, but a lot are as he describes–a pointer to something new that just came out with some framing comments.

I smiled and nodded and shook my head–I could never post that often on Next Bison. But it took me a few days to realize why. If you want a pointer to what’s going on in social media, you can read TechCrunch or Mashable or many others. There are a host of folks who make a living blogging about social media.  Y’all don’t need me.  Well, you might need me once in a while for a longer commentary on something thorny. But you don’t need me to do the more news-like, regular updates. Other folks have that covered.

Computer science education is  more important to our society than social media.  I have three half sisters, and they have degrees in anthropology, theater, and international studies. And as of last week they are all working on web design, development, and marketing.  Why aren’t we educating people for the jobs that are actually available?  Why aren’t there more computer science teachers? CS isn’t even offered at most schools.  Raise your hand if you have a friend  with a humanities degree who is now working in web design or management of information systems.  We all do.  Our education system is broken. Every kid should learn to program at age 12 at the latest, and have a full offering of different kinds of CS classes through high school.  CS education is important. There should be a Mashable for CS Ed, but there isn’t.

This brings me back to the role of academic blogging. Academic bloggers like Mark play a really important role.  Whether they’re writing insightful essays or just short posts drawing attention to what’s happening in their field. Going forwards,  I believe blogging is a central part of what academics have to offer the world.  It’s about taking all our hard-earned knowledge and sharing it with broader circles than journal readers and conference attendees.  What could be more important than that?

Program Committee Meetings Considered Harmful

The organizers of CSCW 2012 have started an intriguing experiment this year: a review process with an extra revise and resubmit phase. The goal is to try to find reasons to accept papers, rather than find reasons to reject them. Over all, I would say the experiment is a huge success. The quality of papers is just as good, and a lot of good work got saved.  Though it does have some unpredictable consequences, for example how will promotion and tenure committees view the conference now that the total acceptance rate is higher?  The quality of the work is just as good, but does everyone know that?

With the two-round review process, in fact most decisions on papers were already made before the face-to-face program committee (PC) meeting, which I’m at right now. We had only 27 papers to discuss here, of  388 submissions.  This raises the question: do we even need to hold a face-to-face PC meeting?  It costs a lot of money and a lot of carbon to bring everyone here.  If it’s not necessary, we shouldn’t have it for pragmatic reasons.  I want to argue, though, that the reasons to not have the PC meeting are more than pragmatic: it will actually improve the quality of the conference.

Before the conference, some number of reviewers and associate chairs (ACs) read the paper carefully and give their reviews.  Then they can discuss the paper via a discussion board for that paper, which retains the anonymity of the reviewers to one another.  At the PC meeting, a room full of associate chairs meet to discuss the paper. And here’s where something odd happens: people who haven’t read the paper offer their opinions.  So for example, yesterday one presenter said “this paper has interesting qualitative findings, but is somewhat under-theorized.  It’s about an interesting user population, but is mainly just descriptive.”  And then a long discussion ensued about whether to accept this kind of paper.  But most of the people in the discussion hadn’t read the paper. To me the discussion should turn on the quality of the actual paper.  I don’t think we can answer this question in the abstract. Giving serious weight to comments by people who haven’t read the paper is bizarre. I believe this leads to poorer quality decisions.

So what do you do if reviewers can’t reach agreement on a paper? I suspect that many of these cases can be resolved by adding an additional reviewer, and continuing to discuss it online. A synchronous conference call could possibly be arranged where needed. But we would make better decisions if ultimately the people participating in the conversation all had read the paper.  One downside of this approach is that PC meetings serve to calibrate expectations for how high the bar is.  But I think there are other creative approaches to helping people calibrate, including providing reviewers with a visualization.  This could include making visible how harsh or generous each reviewer is on average, compared to other reviewers of the same papers.

PC meetings do serve an important function for community building, helping junior peers become more central members of the community, and reflecting on where the field is going as a whole. These functions could be filled with a special meeting and dinner for ACs at the conference event which helps plan for future years.

I genuinely enjoy face-to-face PC meetings. I get to see such terrific people at them. But I think it’s time we question whether they are good idea. We may make better quality decisions without them.

Over Sharing

I might play a quick game of Bejeweled Blitz right now, but my friends would see my score. I’m kinda bad at it. It shows your high score for the week to all your friends.  I like the game because it takes one minute to play, and a couple one-minute games is all I have time for most days. But it takes me five or six games at least to get a non-embarrassing score.  Mid-week, I’ll stop in and play one game. At the start of a new week, I know I need 15 to 20 minutes to achieve something approaching dignity in the score my friends see.  And lately I just haven’t had 15 minutes, so I’ve stopped playing altogether.  There’s no way to tell it “don’t share my score.”

More and more social computing apps are over-sharing.  Especially Facebook. On Facebook yesterday in the new  scrolling timeline feature that shows what your friends are doing, I saw a work colleague say something… something edgy to a male friend of his I don’t know.  He would never say anything like that at work. I wanted to cover my eyes–I didn’t need to see that.  I can’t un-see it.

If Facebook’s increased visibility causes problems for work/personal life boundaries, I can only imagine what issues it causes for people who are in a dating phase of life. I am having nightmarish visions of the drama that ensues with people watching their beloved post an innocent comment on a friend’s page and agonizing over whether there is flirting taking place.  This inadvertently happened to me in prehistory (the mid 1990s). Our sysadmin had accidentally left our UNIX history files (the record of commands you’ve typed) readable to others on the system by default, and a fellow grad student I’d gone on a few dates with jealously demanded an explanation for why I was fingering (looking up the online status of) my friend Brian so much.  Um, Brian and I were working on a class project together?

I don’t know why I care whether my friends see my Bejeweled score.  I don’t really–I don’t have any problem blogging about my Bejeweled ineptitude. But it’s just enough disincentive for me to stop playing that game. Going forwards, I imagine sites in general will land on different spots on the “how much to share” spectrum, and people will pick sites to use that are comfortable for their style. But as site designers we still need to understand more deeply how much sharing is too much.

Artifacts Have Politics. Now What?

I’ve read Langdon Winner‘s essay “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” a dozen or more times. I first read it in grad school in the 1990s, and now I assign it in… well, almost ever class I teach.  Winner shows that some artifacts have deliberate politics. The highway overpasses around New York City were deliberately designed to keep poor people (especially non-whites) away from the beaches.  We know this because their designer, Robert Moses, said so.  Other artifacts (like nuclear versus solar power)  are not necessarily intentionally political, but lend themselves to certain kinds of power arrangements.

I once attended a lecture Winner gave, and during the question period asked him: “OK, I’m an engineer and I accept everything you say. What would you like my peers and I to do differently?” He didn’t really have an answer. I guess it’s kind of a hard question.  And I’m still pondering it myself.  I suppose “be mindful” is one straightforward answer, but the details matter–and the details in practice aren’t obvious.

When I teach the paper, I often use face recognition technology as a discussion topic. If you could invent perfect face recognition, would you?  If for example you could set up a camera at every convenience store and gas station in the nation that would reliably identify bomber Eric Rudolph while he was on the loose, would you? Are the implications different if, as is inevitable, the technology has an error rate? This leads to a discussion of the checks and balances we have in US law and whether we really trust the government to honor them in practice. If we err on deciding that we will trust the government and work within the system to make sure the limits are respected, that leads to a scarier question: What about use of this technology by totalitarian regimes in other nations?  If you invented it, wouldn’t they eventually get access too?  Is the inventor responsible for all of a technology’s eventual uses?  Knowing this, would you want to be the inventor or not?  It’s reasonable to say you’ll invent it and try to stay involved in the broader sociopolitical context of its use in practice–maybe that’s really all you can do. But you also need to recognize that you will sometimes lose control of what happens next.  Which raises the question, is there any technology that, given that you will likely eventually lose control of its uses, that you would decline to invent?  It’s easy to come up with an absurd example where the answer is yes (Marvin the Martian’s “destroy earth” button comes to mind). It’s harder to come up with heuristics for when something less extreme might fit that description.

I’ve had this discussion with classes over and over. It’s a great conversation–it gets students thinking.  And the discussion time and time again has followed the same path–until yesterday.  In my “Intro to Human-Centered Computing” class yesterday, master’s  student Vincent Martin commented, “I need face recognition technology. I would love to be able to recognize my friends and family again.”  Vincent is blind.  I’m surprised that obvious application doesn’t come up in conversation every time we discuss this issue.  I’ll make sure it comes up in the future.  If you were at all leaning towards refraining from developing face rccognition technology, I hope this would change your mind.  For every basic technology we develop, how many hidden surprise–uses for both good and ill that we can’t anticipate–are there?

OK, artifacts have politics. What does this mean for us as designers and engineers? Beyond high-level platitudes like “be mindful,” what should we do differently? I’m still wondering.

Separation Between Work and Home, from 2001 to 2011

Ten years ago yesterday, I did a remarkable thing: I went to work. I was having breakfast at the kitchen table, and turned on CNN around 8:40 am. It was on when the newscasters first reported  that “a small plane” had hit the World Trade Center.  I called my mother in New York City–”Mom, turn on your television!”  We watched together for a few minutes.  Before the second plane hit, I went to work.  I had a CHI paper to work on, and the deadline was approaching.

By the time I got to work, it was apparent that something more serious than a freak accident was happening.  My PhD student, Jason Elliott, called the lab–should he still come in today?  I remember  telling him yes, get your sorry posterior in here!  We have a paper to work on! And what is the possible benefit in wallowing in mind-numbing disaster news coverage all day?  The longer we wait to look at the news, the more we’ll get the real story and avoid all the confused false rumors and speculations.  It’s all too terrible to contemplate, so let’s just get some real work done, OK?

Looking back, what strikes me is that in 2001, there was less news at work.  At home, I had television and radio. At work, I didn’t. Sure there were websites with news–but they presented text and still pictures–and much less quickly updated than is the norm today. Video and audio online were rare.  By going to work, I could focus on my work.

On December 25th, 1992 I wrote an essay called Christmas Unplugged about the way the Internet is reducing the separation between work and home.  I tried to publish it in time for Christmas 1993, but no one was interested.  A year later, I sent it out again, and got an immediate positive response. It appeared in Technology Review in January 1995.  Since then, the interconnectedness of work and home via the Internet has slowly increased. Yesterday was a fascinating point of comparison.  In 2001, work was still a somewhat separate realm. In 2011, if something momentous happens, I don’t think going to work could help you block it out. The news is in my Twitter stream. In fact, today news arrives  faster when I’m at work than at home!

The ability to avoid distractions and focus on news is just one of many consequences of this connectedness.  Another is the ability to work at home. Which is both good and bad.  When I was a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, people were in the building at all hours of the night.  Sometimes we were working late, and sometimes we were playing Diablo.  Two or three nights a week, my graduate advisor, Mitchel Resnick, was nice enough to offer me a ride home–typically around 11 pm.  When I was back to visit recently, I asked if people still kept crazy hours there. The answer I got was: people still work just as hard, but they do it from home.  Whether this is a net gain or loss for either productivity, sociability, or work/life balance I can’t say.

People have always had to make choices about work/life balance.  The difference today is that geography is no longer a tool we can use to help.  Work life, home life, and the greater world around us are with us at all times on our desktops and our phones, all mixed together. We still need to make those choices, but we can’t implicitly make them by choosing to be at the office or not at a given time.  Maybe we need new tools to help.