Global Kids' Digital Media Initiative

A few years ago I walked into my local hotdog joint and watched a twelve-year-old play Grand Theft Auto. No one who followed the news could miss the controversy fueled by this game. Debates about its level of violence were frequently discussed and debated. I was intrigued finally to watch someone play it.

Imagine my surprise when I observed that the only thing the teen did in the game was to drive a taxi. It turned out there were multiple ways to play the game, and this young man's preference happened to be driving around the streets of Liberty City.

He had, however, developed an unusual method for being a cabbie. Rather than slowing
down before picking up a fare, he would often run a person over, wait for him or her to
get back up (as if nothing had happened) and climb into his cab, then drive away. I could just imagine how this might appear in a newspaper: "Teen Learns Violent Acts Have No Repercussions."

"Would you ever get in a taxi that ran you over?" I asked. Without breaking contact
with the game the boy responded, "The A.I. is dumb," referring to the code controlling the behavior of his passengers.

This was my first of many "aha" moments as I delved into the world of games and learning. The teen was not learning to be violent. Rather, he was learning how to analyze the rules of a system and leverage its flaws.

As Ian Bogost has written elsewhere in this volume, when we play video games, "We
explore the possibility space its rules afford by manipulating the symbolic systems the game provides."7 By exploring Grand Theft Auto, this boy had discovered possibilities its designers most likely had never intended, and he was manipulating the system to his own advantage. More to the point, he very well knew it.

How to Visit Liberty City in a Public School

This past summer I ran into a Global Kids youth leader right before the start of the school year while checking out the computers at a Brooklyn High School for a possible program. I ran into him in the library at the handful of computer available, when they are working, in 20-minute intervals during their lunchtimes.

The previous year, in our online dialogue program, Newz Crew, he often began the program bringing up a graphics program and sketching away. He was rather shy, having recently immigrated from a war-torn African nation and still unsure of his voice. This time, however, I found him to be outgoing and, at the same time, nervous, as he tried to prevent me from seeing what was on his screen.

It turned out I had caught him Playing the PC version of GTA, in his school library. GK trainers are not the same as teachers so he was unsure how I might react. But he knew how frustrated I was with computer access throughout the school system - the only way to access a computer at his school was to miss lunch and for what? A measly 20-minutes with no way to store your work?!! I recently visited a different Brooklyn school to find that the right-click had been disabled on student accounts. The right-click! Why not disconnect the entire keyboard, if students are such a threat?

So this student knew I didn't view students as threats to the school's technology, didn't mind when students shared with others ways to access blocked sites like YouTube when needed in our programs, knew that I was fascinated by the information networks on the DL that emerge amongst students to make the best of a system more often designed keep them out.

Still, I was stunned. How did he ever manage to get this, the most reviled of all computer games, to run on the school system? In exchange for not turning him in, he detailed it for me:

First, to download the PC version of the game, he had to get through the fire wall preventing access to gaming sites. All who access blocked sites know how to use site anonymizers that block or mask the originating computer's identity. The sites are inevitably blocked by the DOE once they are identified, but by then a new one has emerged and been passed around like the latest joke.

Second, he had to register the game to play it, as he didn't want to pay for it. Searching the web for "crack codes" he found one to fool the game into thinking it was properly registered.

Third, he had to configure the computer to allow him, as a student, to install new software. That privilege is reserved for teachers and admin. Teacher usernames and passwords are unique, so I presume he used the admin password, which is the same for nearly every school I have worked in, making it as vulnerable and easy to access as the day's weather, if one knows where to look.

Fourth, he had to learn the schedules of the librarians to track those who will bust him if he turns the screen away from their desk. I happened to run into him when the librarian who wants to see his screen was out to launch.

I loved that he was forced to learn so much as a result of the very restrictions I despise - the school's closed system motivate him to figure out how to participate in a specialized knowledge network amongst his peers, how to search the web for valuable and hard to find information, and how to identify and exploit weaknesses in a system, both mechanical and social. Yet, as frustrated as I am by the lack of Internet available to the students, I am hesitant to romanticize him as some Neo to the DOE's Matrix, to say that the DOE should continue to have such restrictions, to encourage learning through the motivation to rebel.

Global Kids' work is built on the beliefs that a) youth like this should have the option to see themselves as central, and not on the margins, in their efforts to affect change, b) the sort of catch-as-catch-can informal learning that was going on would better serve this youth if it occurred within a formalized setting in which the learning could be guided by a thoughtful adult, along a civic engagement scaffolding, that can develop an awareness of what is being learned, and how, and c) all youth require digital media literacy to survive in the globalized workplace, especially low-income youth of color, not just those with the gumption to break the rules.

How GK Games the System

Flash to six months later. Global Kids continues to work within the public schools to offer what I just described - a formal way to engage youth around the informal learning connected with both playing and creating games. After our experience with last year's school, we only agreed to start the program at Canarsie High School last September if the principal agreed to submit the necessary paperwork to ask the DOE to unblock gaming sites required for our program. She agreed.

In October we began to run into a problem with blocked gaming sites. Nothing new there. We began to make a list of sites, fifteen in all, and began the formal request process. I could go into great detail about the Sisyphean process that nearly guarantees that the person making the request will eventually give up, but I fear the details would be as torturous to read as they were for us to experience.

I will share, however, my favorite moment: we eventually convinced the DOE to go beyond the limitations of their form and accept a letter from the school's principal. The letter was submitted and two weeks later we saw no change. Upon contacting the DOE we learned that the person who received the request had determined that only "educational games" would be unblocked and since none appeared to be educational none were unblocked. There was no request to learn more about the purpose of unblocking the game nor what "educational" might mean in the context of a game design program (even a "bad" game is educational if presented as such).

Here's the good news. While there was tremendous resistance to instituting this request, the principal of the school never wavered. As she received emails of increasing hysterics, she calmly reiterated time and again her initial request. Equally important, there are seeds of change within the DOE, specifically within the office of the Chief Information Officer for the NYC Department of Education. From the very beginning they helped us navigate the system, connected us with the right people and advised us on how to get what we needed for our after school program. Without them, there is no doubt we would have been helplessly lost within the system.

The office of the CIO is clearly taking on the entrenched mentalities of the more archaic aspects of their system. And we were happy to give them an opportunity to strike a blow for a more rational student-centered policy. A week before the holidays we received word that the gaming sites were all unblocked. That very week, incidentally, the students selected the topic of the game they want to build this year: the war on Iraq's impact on the U.S. response to Hurricane Katrina.

Working together, the DOE, the school administration, and Global Kids were able to work through the system and move forward a 21st Century Skills-based curriculum to empower youth through game design. My hope is that these recent efforts help ease the travel and pave the way for those who wish to follow, creating more opportunities for youth than ones they have to create themselves by learning to game the system.