Akoha – a Direct Action Game?

December 30, 2010 by 2 Comments

How can we make everyday civic participation more compelling? There is a new kind of game on the horizon, one that experiments with real-world action. I call them “direct action games,” because they restructure acts like volunteering, activist training, and charitable giving. One early prototype is Akoha, which launched last year, quite off the radar of traditional civics activities.

At first glance, Akoha looks like a media hub for a do-it-yourself Boy Scouts. Their website and iPhone app reveal thousands of participants, many reporting on success with real-world “missions,” from going vegetarian for a day, to debating the “I Have a Dream” speech.  The actual missions often take place offline, but are only acknowledged when documented with photos and stories for the online community.

Participants are mostly adults, but the ages vary widely. The experience is deeply social, as friends create missions for each other, and share their stories.  More formal recognition for participation comes as players earn badge-like awards — such as “multi-talented” for those who complete one mission in every possible category.

Yet most of Akoha does not look or sound civic. Only one of the mission categories explicitly addresses “social causes.”  The other nine concern self-actualization in various forms, from “health and well-being” to family time, engaging with popular culture, and the discovery of travel.  Is this breadth an upside or downside?   That depends on your civic goals, which might include:

  1. Fostering citizen journalism, as participants report on civic themes in their communities
  2. Informal civic learning, as participants reflect on their civic experiences in new ways through stories and pictures
  3. Building social capital, as participants create new ties across traditional social groups

These civic goals may be structurally possible with Akoha, but they are rhetorically hidden.  Even as Akoha’s missions bring people into the real world, they avoid the “we are purely civic” framing that occurs on many activist and volunteering websites.  For the Akoha community, it’s OK to admit that you are mainly there to have fun, or are trying to improve yourself (and not simply sacrificing for others).  Consider this screenshot from the social cause mission “I Am Not an Island”:

Akoha screenshot -- mission -- not an island

Participation begins with the usual click of a button, yet the specific language of “Play Now” differs sharply from the tool focus of civic action websites (e.g., “Take Action Now;” or “Sign the Petition”).   But what exactly does it mean to ‘play’ Akoha?  Is it a game?
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sharing readings (reflection)

August 2, 2010 by Leave a Comment

This post is part of our research group’s regular effort to share readings.

Before offering an actual reading, I wanted to reflect briefly on how we might coordinate group readings.  For our group, this is still a bit premature, since our initial mode is deliberately open and exploratory.  But it’s easy to anticipate a day when we might want to push hard for cohesion, both conceptually and operationally in terms of specific bodies of literature to alternately support and oppose.  Of course, our constituent researchers already have too much to read — and always have too much to read.  So perhaps it would help to classify our suggestions.

Here’s one way to differentiate suggested readings: (a) core articles that define central concepts, as well as histories to differentiate our research from others; (b) branch leads that clarify our distinct research branches within our group; (c) provocation articles that raise new ideas, introduce uncertainty, or push for a change; and (d) FYI, for articles that are worth skimming the title and author, but otherwise are not required just yet.  This still leaves open the decision of whether it is most appropriate to send the entire article, a marked-up version, an excerpt, or a summary/reflection — and whether we’re comfortable sharing our priorities on this blog (grin).

I do know several constituencies that might appreciate some kind of classification scheme: newcomers, partners and outsiders.  Partners and researchers join the group annually (if not more often), and catching up to a shifting collective knowledge base is notoriously difficult.  And of course, it might just help the rest of us too.
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Interfaces — e.g., Introducing Youth to DIY Punk Activism

August 1, 2010 by 3 Comments

Earlier this week, I checked out an unusual intersection: two punk-hardcore activists were lecturing to 75+ teenagers at a Los Angeles university.   But this wasn’t music camp.  Rather, this was the last day of a college prep summer program, hosted at USC for low-income and first-generation youth.  Amazingly, the message stayed clear of “stay in school,” and focused instead on do-it-yourself (DIY) passion and activism.  There are implications for our research group.

Perhaps most importantly, the occasion underscored the “intersection dilemma”: how do learning institutions interface with civic sub-cultures (from punk activists, to the Harry Potter Alliance and Invisible Children)?  For me, this intersection is a goldmine – a space of real drama, where subcultures put on a public face, and where institutions give uncertain attention to these emerging civic modes.

Of course, the actual people matter enormously.  Justin Pearson and Jose Palafox (see above) are not your typical punk figures.  While Pearson never graduated college, he and Palafox have been key players in DIY hardcore-punk since the mid 90s.  They have been in countless bands – see, for example, this Swing Kids video with Pearson singing, and with Palafox on drums.

The activism of Pearson and Palafox is DIY, set against the punk subculture.  As friends and independently, their bands have supported organizations ranging from Planned Parenthood, to PETA and the Black Panther Party.  Palafox has made documentaries of the U.S.-Mexico border.  Pearson just released his autobiography, and was on Jerry Springer with a hoax involving bisexuality.

Very briefly, I want to examine Pearson and Palafox as a kind of baseline for our research.  Their example is valuable for its simplicity: compared to our current case studies, they do not have a fantasy content world (e.g., as compared to the Harry Potter fans); and second, the pair presented as individuals — without an organizational apparatus (such as the Harry Potter Alliance).

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