2.06 // Week 6 // Everything is a Remix
Hey there!
This is a late edition, not an early one. I spent the last week facilitating an intense five day module around game design and its use in the development of participatory tools for research and engagement at a fellowship program in Ahmedabad. I worked with about 20 students over the course of the week, reintroducing them to games, putting on an analytical lens while playing, and then led them through some game design exercises before throwing them into the deep end in trying to apply the lessons they'd learned in 2ish days on their community engagement projects. Reflecting now, a few days after, it must've been tough, especially because most of them took the work quite seriously, working late in the evenings. There's a few things that came up in the course of the week, that I wanted to share with you here, that stayed with me.
Everything is a Remix
This was a series of videos that went viral about 7 - 8 years ago. I remember following the series on vimeo with great interest while I was working at Quicksand. The series begins by using Start Wars styled titles to tell you that to 'Remix' is defined as 'to combine or edit existing materials to produce something new'. This module was one I had experienced back at Aalto in 2016 when I was a student. Over there it was simply an 'Intro to Game Design' course meant primarily for folks who were going to be majoring in Game Design, but it had gained popularity among the other New media students as well. So I was lucky to be able to take the course, and I am glad that I could. The focus in the week long course was to get us used to the process of play testing and iterating immediately, and over the course of the week we designed four games. What started as a casual conversation in 2018 with a friend, had led to her inviting me to run a similar course to introduce a new set of tools and mental models to the last batch of fellows. So I set about using the module I'd experienced and figuring how I could use the logic of it for what we wanted this group to experience. Adding elements around playing existing games, some improvisational theatre, with a focus on their community engagement/intervention projects gave us a contextualised version of the course I'd been in. Anyways, back to the video series, in it Ferguson, takes us (in parts) through a series of examples and the history of remix starting with song in the first part, movies in the second, and the process of creativity (and the role of remixing in it). It's a well produced and edited series, and well worth the 30ish minutes it takes to watch it all.
Input and Output
Austin Kleon's daily blog posts are ones that I look forward to in my RSS feed every time I launch it. One of the themes that he explores over the course of his posts is the idea that problems of output, are actually problems of input. This was something that I tried bringing home to the students in the class. While I was delighted they were reading, the books seemed to be heavy classics or the like, Aurelius, Dostoevsky.. and the rest were glued to algorithmic feeds, the instas and what have you (I know I sound like a grumpy old man). As we went through the module, we built enough of a rapport and trust (I'd like to think), that they were sharing how they were getting stuck, or everybody was relying too heavily on what I was exposing them to. This is when we began talking about input and output. Nurturing and feeding a healthy curiousity about the world is essential, and given that everything is a remix, I reckon your output is going to be only as good as your input. For me a lot of my input is now through reading (which I've written about before), and a curated set of newsletters, RSS feeds and podcasts.
John Hunter on Teachers
To expose the students to just what a huge role games might potentially play in helping 'players' understand deep, interconnected issues, we watched a TED Talk by a schoolteacher in the US, John Hunter. Now the talk itself is largely about the 'World Peace Game' that Hunter has used as a teaching aid over the last 40 something years. In the game students (young ones at that), use a game to play out a world crisis situation by taking on characters that are running four countries. While that was the reason I was showing them the video, what really hit home for me is how he sets things up. To make the point that he is standing on the shoulders of giants, he talks briefly of his teachers, and how in watching the documentary about his game, he could see his teachers in gestures he'd picked up. A proud smile, a stern look, a wave of the hand. Sitting there, watching that, I got quite emotional thinking about my own journey getting started with this sort of formal facilitation (the word teaching makes me uncomfortable), and while I don't have videos to see who I'm emulating, I know I'm channeling my parents, and my closest friends the most. The odd turn of phrase or gesture from old teachers, I'll probably need to see video or hear audio to understand. But I guess, somewhere the point for me was that we ourselves are remixes.
It promises to be a hectic week this one, and I'm up at 6:45ish AM writing this up, and it feels like it's going to be a good one.
Cheers,
Akshay
What I'm Reading: Solo by Rana Dasgupta
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