Arriving in late October means that I benefit from the pitfalls and tribulations of the other Fulbrighters who arrived about two months before me. Shawn Mollenhauer, a Fulbright student studying Oromo music, invited me to stay with him and his wife Jill, who is currently writing her dissertation on pre-Columbian Mexican art. The house near Bole Rd is a quiet reprieve from the bustle of the city and the stress of getting things done in an unfamiliar culture.  I’m living with satellite TV for the first time ever.  Only two of the channels are Ethiopian.  The rest are from the Middle East.  Everything is subtitled in Arabic, and all the kissing scenes are cut out.

One thing I certainly cannot complain about is the food. This plate of “fasting varieties” consists of various vegetables served with injera, a flat bread used to eat food much the same way as tortillas are.  Eating with your hands is only part of the delight.  Everything tastes awesome.  And, macchiatos are cheaper than regular coffee.

Many of you probably want an update on how things are going in Ethiopia.  That will come soon.  Let me get past the initial banalities of setting up shop.  In the mean time, some gushy hopes for education, media, and love:

The written version of Ian Bogost’s keynote for the 2008 GDA Educational Summit just moved me to tears.  I was totally convinced by his aspirations to make videogame studies more like the rich uncertainty of love and less like the “cold industrialism of interdisciplinarity.”

In addition to stoking my high hopes for videogame studies, Bogost’s speech outlines an approach to education that might make sense of my sprawling undergraduate career, if only in retrospect.  Both Bogost (and Katherine Hayles) imagine a higher education system organized around problems, rather than academic disciplines.  Students would choose a problem to work on and a mentor to assist them in pursuing an answer.  This approach would actively embrace uncertainty in educational pursuits rather than purport mastery guarded by various disciplines.  And inherent uncertainty would allow educators to bring together otherwise disparate fields with all the heartfelt and fragile potential of a “love affair between unlikely mates.”

Is there a problem I have consistently been trying to answer in studying history, photography, and design technology?  I think so.  Taking history to be a medium between us and the past, the problem I am always addressing is: “How can media facilitate identification and empathy?”

No wonder I was so moved by Bogost’s speech, what with all his analogies to dissimilar things forming loving relationships.  My question contains a hope that media can help make uncertainty just navigable enough to sustain love.

In his book Notes From the Hyena’s Belly, Nega Mezlekia recounts his grueling first two years of schooling as a child in Ethiopia where the only subject was the written Amharic language.  To make sure he stayed in school despite the drab subject matter and the curmudgeonly, abusive old teacher, Mezlekia’s mother told him a story about the King of Shewa who loved stories.  The tale made me think of the pissing match that narratologists and ludologists waged in establishing the field of game studies, a debate I learned about over the summer through reading the First Person thread on the Electronic Book Review.  Those of you familiar with this debate might see why.

The King of Shewa loved stories.  Many storytellers came to the palace to entertain the king, and it didn’t take long before he had heard all the stories in the land and all neighboring regions.

Finally, in desperation, he decided that what he needed was a storyteller who could make him cry out, “Enough! No more! I am done with stories.” If such a person existed, the King swore to make him a prince and give him a great piece of land.

Many storytellers came, and the king listened to all their stories intently.  One day a farmer offered to tell a story.  The king was skeptical about the farmer’s ability to outdo the professional storytellers, but he let him try anyway.

The farmer’s story started:

“Once there was a peasant in Axum who sowed wheat.  When the crop ripened, he mowed it, threshed it and stored it in a granary.  It was the best harvest he’d ever had.  But there was a small hole in his granary, barely large enough to pass a straw through – and that is the irony in this tale.  When all the grain was stored and the farmer went home, delighted, an ant came and entered through the hole.  He picked up a single grain, which he carried away to his anthill to eat.”

The king was engrossed with the story at this point and expected things to pick up pace.  The farmer continued on, telling of each ant coming each day into the granary and taking a single grain of wheat.  The king grew inpatient, begging the farmer to proceed with the story, to get to the plot, to get beyond these details.  The farmer always said that there was still so many ants in the story, and that the granary was still full, and the story needed to go in the right order.¹ Despite the king’s interruptions, he always proceeded:

“And the next day, another ant came, and took another grain.  And the day after that….”

Finally the king lost his temper.

“Enough, enough, you may have the land and the title of prince!”

Mezlekia’s mother told him this story to convince him that it was worth his effort to learn the fidel because working persistently little by little brings good fortune.  There’s a curious slippage here between the persistence of the farmer-storyteller and the persistence of the ants in his story, not to mention the persistent search for stories by a king and the persistent reassurance from a mother.  With all the stories nested in one another, of the ants and their grain, of the storyteller-farmer and his king, and of the boy and his mother, it is not easy to tell what story elements are working for whose story.

Mezlekia wanted to be a prince, just like the farmer-storyteller, so he persisted in school, studying the fidel.  Maybe if I wanted to be a prince, I would have learned the fidel by now.  But no; I spent my summer learning about games and stories.

As part of the mentoring benefits that come with working for cheap at a successful digital agency, Directory of Strategy Ivan Askwith and Copywriter Jessica Berta worked with me to improve my writing. I wrote two blog posts for the Big Spaceship Think Blog. The first, Everybody Alone Together Now: Social Networking and Spymaster, addresses the explosion of a Twitter based MMO and the insight that MMO gaming might have for social networking. The second, When Global Participation Is the Default, considered the negative ramifications of regional media going global over the internet as experienced by the Israeli communications company Cellcom.  An extended version of When Global Participation Is the Default can be read on my portfolio site.  (The portfolio site is still in the works and will have more content in the next few weeks.)

In my spare time between brainstorming sessions and proposal writing, I researched identification with characters in playable media (i.e, games and interactive narrative). By examining the ways that people connect with characters in different digital narrative systems, I hope to offer designers a set of guidelines for creating moving characters that suit the experiences they are out to create. I’ll post the resulting report here, hopefully by the end of next week.  Stay tuned.

I’ve been interning at Big Spaceship as a strategist since June.  Big Spaceship is a digital creative agency.  Companies and institutions that need to engage with people in digital space hire Big Spaceship to produce playful, engaging, and useful experiences that advance the client’s goals, be that to sell more products, improve on an online experience, or rework public perception of a topic or brand.  Strategists are essentially responsible for the values, content, and narrative that drive each project.  In addition to familiarizing myself with the client’s values and the interests they bring to a project, I research market trends and precedents that inform the team’s creative work.

Big Spaceship is often cited for its culture, which has been calibrated to promote creative collaboration across disciplines. All four disciplines, strategy, production, design, and development, are involved from start to finish on each project.  Big Spaceship also does an amazing job of keeping the workplace fun and personable, which manifests in odd places, like the kitchen knife rack. The interns unconsciously reproduced Big Spaceship’s collaborative culture as we put together our show and tell.  Everyone lent their strengths to planning and executing the presentation, calibrating things based on constraints and ideas as we went.

Four interests came up during our brainstorming sessions.

• riff on a company inside joke to establish ourselves in the office culture
• play a game that would help our colleagues get to know us
• present what we do and what we’ve learned
• thank everyone for the opportunity to intern at Big Spaceship

We decided to take the company joke of mashing up employee portraits to create odd hybrids to an extreme.  Tyson Damman takes each employees picture for PR and fun use.  Here are mine:

Design intern Caroline Caine struggled to make one photoshop portrait that took from each intern portrait and found that the various attempts were collectively more amusing than the final success.  The intern show and tell began with a slide of six mash ups:

Our game, Guess That Intern, folded into the presentation of what each of us was up to.  The crew had to correctly match an object and three hints to the intern it belonged to.  This was the Big Spaceship crew’s opportunity to jovially tease us about the quarks in our personalities as they attempted to match the objects to the people. Development intern Nick Hardeman threw in a wild card hint, claiming to have no toes on his left foot.  A moment of enthralled surprise among the crew quickly broke into boisterous suggestions of who it could be.  Nick eventually had to remove his shoe to prove that he did indeed have 10 toes.

After each intern was identified, they presented a slide about themselves and talked about who they are and what they are up to at Big Spaceship.  The slide presentations were later described as a variety show.  Some were funny, some were quaint.  Mine was inspirational and to the point as I let everyone know that what I’m learning here at Big Spaceship will soon be put to the service of HIV/AIDS orphans in Ethiopia.  We designed a show and tell that was fun and interactive for the crew, and let each intern play to their strengths while strutting their personality.  I was shocked to look at my watch when it was all done and realize that 2 hours had passed.  It felt like it could have been 20 minutes.

To thank the crew for being so welcoming and treating us like full members of the Big Spaceship team, production intern Toph Brown gave out coupons entitling the holder to one cup of coffee purchased and delivered cheerfully by the intern of their choice.

Nick Hardeman was immediately sent out on a coffee run, but not before he put on his personal item from the Guess That Intern game: a cow suit (photo by Jamie Kosoy).

Big Spaceship currently has internship positions open for the fall.

The first day of the orientation consisted of motivational speeches from the Fulbright Commission.  Between sessions, I had the same 7 minute conversation with every other person I bumped into.  ”Where are you going?” “What are you doing?” “Damn, that sounds awesome.”  Projects ranged from studying the rise of woman’s basketball in Senegal to interviewing second and third generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon about their legal status to producing a documentary on Indian women acting as surrogate mothers for western couples.  It was an honor to find myself among such an ambitious and creative group.

Eileen Wilson-Oyelaran, President of Kalamazoo College unceremoniously ended the rosy, congratulatory tone of the orientation with her keynote speech at the opening dinner.  She has been keynote speaker for the pre-departure orientation for several years now.  Her message consisted of four blessings for our trips.  The blessings were structured like beatitudes from the Gospel of Matthew and rang more like advice and challenges.

1. Blessed is she who embraces her mother, for she shall be the beneficiary of unimagined gifts.
2. Blessed is he who knows himself, for he will make better sense of his own responses.
3. Blessed is she who knows the difference between being a guest and a host, for she will refrain from putting her country and herself in a very bad light.
4. Blessed are those who are flexible for they will not be tied into knots.

The second blessing stood out as a series of syndromes that Wilson-Oyelaran encouraged us to be on guard for.  Not knowing oneself could produce devastating results in the form of these syndromes.  First, Missionary Syndrome imbued foreigners with a conviction that the people and the ecosystems of Africa were in need of saving through outside intervention.  Second, Curiosity Syndrome saw Africa as an exotic place with people available for scrutiny similarly to intriguing wildlife.  Those with this syndrome might find it totally acceptable  to ‘go native’.  Third, Intellectual Superiority Syndrome assumed that since the university infrastructure is not what it might be in developed countries, it’s welcome and acceptable for foreigners to tell those at the host institution how they should be running their schools.  Finally, the Homecoming Syndrome experienced by African-Americans visiting Africa leads them to believe that they will be welcomed as lost relatives.

Eileen Wilson-Oyelaran’s speech got me mentally on my toes.  I thought about what I needed to do to ward of the syndromes and how to benefit from her blessings.  Several Fulbright alumni said she gave the kind of talk they wished they had heard before they went to work on their projects.  Her full speech is available here. (I had previously liked to last year’s version.  The link has been updated at the request of the State Department.  Sorry about that! – 7/15)

The next day and a half consisted of smaller, region specific sessions, most of which were just as sobering as the keynote speech.  Former Fulbright students to Africa reminded us of the importance of being practical about what we can accomplish, pacing ourselves, and reaching out to the local community.  In the Ethiopia session, I met the other Fulbright student Shawn Mollenhauer who will be doing ethnomusicology research from the capital, and Alice Klement, Fulbright alumni who literally just got off the plane after being in Africa for over a year and a half teaching in Addis Ababa University’s Journalism and Communications program.  I picked their brains to compile a reading list and contacts.

I never doubted the need to prepare for my time in Ethiopia regardless of how much experience abroad I might have. The orientation was a well timed reminder of this.  I still have several months to implement the insight and nervous motivation I brought back from DC.  In New York, I’ve been reading blogs, warming up to the Amharic alphabet, listening to the Ethiopiques series, and scowering a few library systems.  Ethan Zuckerman and Erik Hersman’s blogs have been particularly motivating and insightful.  A polyglot friend jumped at the opportunity to help me learn the Amharic alphabet as an excuse to learn her 4th alphabet.   The Amharic fidel will only be my second alphabet.

I have an ambitious list of things to accomplish before I leave.  Wilson-Oyelaran’s fourth blessing comes to mind: “Blessed are those who are flexible for they will not be tied into knots.”  She told us that Africa taught her to treat her to-do list as a hypothesis.  I might have to start implementing that mentality now.

The New School has an amazingly inefficient bureaucracy.  Princeton Review has ranked the undergraduate school, Eugene Lang College, as 2nd in the nation for Long Lines and Red Tape.  Just booking rooms for meetings of the University Student Senate was laborious, at best.  One snarky facebook group suggests that,”This school runs like an asthmatic duck with no legs.”  The administration is working to remedy this, though until they do, I’ve learned to assume that paperwork will get lost and that instructions on administrative processes are largely inaccurate. At a party this past weekend, another recent graduate joked about the nightmares she had about new and creative ways the school could fumble formalities, preventing her from receiving her degree.  I was having similar nightmares.  Now, I can sleep soundly.

As a dual-degree student on a five-year track to earn a Bachelors of Art and a Bachelors of Fine Arts, I felt the full brunt of the bureaucratic inefficiencies. The separate administrative bodies for Eugene Lang and Parsons often disagree on what the requirements for the dual-degree program are, and no one seems empowered to reconcile them.  Indeed, of the ten or so people I know personally who started out at the New School in this program, only two others completed it.  Most students are fully aware that the course-load to complete the degrees in the five-year time frame is significant.  They tend to drop out of one degree track upon confronting inconsistent requirements and administrators powerless to help students balance the demands of two schools at once.  I thank my academic advisers, Paul Ross and Brian Maasjo, for making the extra effort to help me through.  The dual-degree program is an amazing educational opportunity to pursue the fine arts and liberal arts with equal rigor.  I’m glad I found the allies to make it work.  This has been awesome, inefficiencies aside.  Given the New School’s comittment to promote interdisciplinary education, I sincerely hope that it will find ways to make the dual-degree program more accessible and efficient.