Today is the deadline for panel submissions, and last night I sent in three presentations that will hopefully make it onto the schedule in a few months. Check them out below!

1) Memes, Microcultures, and 2D Chicks: Our Future in the Otaku Gamer

A singing idol who doesn’t exist. Perverted text adventures boasting dozens of female prizes. And a popular, anime-tized evolution of the classic Space Invaders shooter that has spawned a global fandom. Japan’s subcultural players are obsessed with games that, well, aren’t actually about the gaming. Alex Leavitt (Comparative Media Studies, MIT) explains how a new generation of entertainment is succeeding in a market which chooses to de-emphasize the games in favor of the characters. And as the Japanese fans influence the industry through their own amateur initiatives, what will the future of American gaming hold when online fandoms adopt similar appetites?

2) Exploring International Geek Cultures Through Games

Even in the era of Internet forums and online gaming communities, our understanding of how and why geeks come together through games is pretty pathetic. From Europe to Asia to America, this panel takes a look at the technological environment in which gamers grew up and the transnational space in which geeks play today. Join Alex Leavitt (Comparative Media Studies, MIT) as he moderates a discussion between Philip Tan (Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab), Prof. Mia Consalvo (Visiting Professor, MIT), and Dr. Clara Fernández-Vara (GAMBIT) on the modern convergence and recurrent differences of the national geek factions that make up the global gaming ecosystem.

3) Trolling the Tubes: Culture Hacking Through Online Gaming

Thousands of Internet users cultivate pixelated gardens in Farmville, raise cyber-chickens in Second Life, and earn livings on Mechanical Turk without realizing that they are changing the face of online culture. From FreeRice to OKCupid, from gold miners in China to 4chan-ers in America, Alex Leavitt (Comparative Media Studies, MIT) takes a look at how online communities are redefining our friends, reorganizing our lives, and restructuring our society into a gaming culture. What will the future of the Internet look like when social networking might mean a social battleground of bots, trolls, and colorful flamewars?

While I took notes, though, I posted a couple of tweets, and then mostly hung out in the IRC channel. I’ve only used IRC a couple times before Berkman, so I had all the tools necessary to automatically jump into the channel and start chatting with everyone present in the virtual environment. But, seriously, and I [mis]quote Tim Hwang (with whom I shared a “Food for Thought” dinner): there were some haters in there. Harsh criticism from those who decided to speak their mind (I’m especially looking at you, Dave Winer).

Besides the negative critique from the IRC audience members, I actually used IRC a lot, beyond mere chatter. Kudos to everyone in the channel for actually paying attention to the speakers, because I used you guys as an educational tool. Some people in the chatroom seemed a bit out of the loop, so others would explain concepts or post links to biographies of the speakers and even those who stood up to ask questions. IRC provided an excellent source of information, and a quick one at that. I lost the discussion a few times in my attempts to multitask, and IRC got me back on track, but the best implementation of IRC turned out to be the opportunity to gain more information about what was being said. Hypertext proves useful, once again.

Considering its practicality today, I want to introduce the IRC medium to a class at school sometime. It’d be a good experiment in networking during a seminar discussion, but it would also prove that students can collaborate to further educate each other, or also to stay ahead of the dialogue in the direct teacher-pupil relationship. I might easily predict that more “hating” would occur in a classroom setting: students complaining that they’re bored, pointing out that the teacher is wrong, declaring that they found a video on YouTube of a cat flushing a toilet. Ultimately, though, IRC would create a hyperdiscussion, one that exceeded the hierarchy of the teacher-student partnership, a grassroots educational system of sorts. I know that if my Sociology of Education (SO444.A1) class had established an IRC node during our weekly seminars, we easily could have used it to find relevant information online, particularly at the beginning of the class when my professor would ask us if we had found anything of relevance in the news at the time. Well, IRC: log on, talk to my classmates, share links with one another. Hypertext moves beyond unilinear writing constricted to paper. IRC moves beyond the linear narrative discussion. In fact, if you want to be savvy, you could even call it metaconversation. But an IRC channel in a classroom, in a lecture, in a seminar could do wonders (though I don’t obscure the potential for chaos) for education in a university setting.