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Palimpsest: shifting the culture of computing
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Palimpsest: shifting the culture of computing
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Content
PALIMPSEST:
SHIFTING THE CULTURE OF COMPUTING
by
Atley Loughridge
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTERS OF FINE ARTS
(INTERACTIVE MEDIA AND GAMES DIVISION)
USC Expected Graduation Date: Dec 2018
Dec 2018
Copyright 2018 Atley Loughridge
1
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 4
List of Figures 5
Abstract 7
Keywords 8
Chapter 1: Introduction 9
1.1 About This Document 16
1.2 Defining The Problem 17
1.3 Hypothesis 17
1.4 Terms 18
Chapter 2: VR Game Overview 19
2.1 Walkthrough 20
2.2 Methodology 23
2.3 Designing For A Novice To VR 28
2.4 Origins 29
2.5 Target Behavior Change 32
2.6 Usability Testing 33
2.7 Accessibility 34
2.8 Difficulty Settings 35
2.9 Feedback 36
2.10 Avoiding Motion Sickness 37
2.11 Testing Frame Rate 38
2
2.12 Illustration 39
2.13 Audio 40
2.14 Diversifying Media And Technological Bias 40
Chapter 3: Curriculum Overview 43
3.1 Institutional Review Board Approval 43
3.2 Critical Roles For Ethical Community Service 46
3.3 Research Goal And Methodology 47
3.4 Research Tools 53
3.5 Walkthrough Of The Palimpsest Program Launch 54
3.6 Feedback On The Palimpsest Program Launch 56
3.7 Walkthrough Of A Typical Session 61
3.8 Feedback On A Typical Session 64
Chapter 4: Integrating My Takeaways Within Myself 71
4.1 Burning The Candle At Both Ends 72
4.2 Shifting Priorities With A Shifting Context 78
4.3 Protect Stories 86
4.4 Limits And Revelations 88
4.5 Where Playtesters Fall Short 89
4.6 Branding And Framing 90
4.7 The Future Of The Palimpsest Program 91
Bibliography 93
3
Appendices 95
Appendix A: RITE Analysis Of Palimpsest VR game 95
Appendix B: Internal Review Board Application 96
Appendix C: Internal Review Board Application Approval 103
Appendix D: Curriculum Youth Assent Parental Permission 104
Appendix E: Curriculum Mid Assessment Questions 108
Appendix F: Curriculum Mid Assessment Form Results 110
Appendix G: Field Notes For March 7 Launch 113
Appendix H: Programming Curriculum Overview 115
Appendix I: Curriculum Vocabulary 120
Appendix J: Programming Curriculum Lecture, “3D Space” 123
Appendix K: Programming Curriculum Exercise, “3D Space” 129
4
Acknowledgements
Karen McMullen made the curriculum palatable and interactive. Karen Tsai worked at
all hours to bring our abstract ideas to life. Marientina Gotsis guided us through the creation of a
pilot curriculum program. Her experience as a researcher and academic grounded our work in
realistic goals and informed points of view. Matthew Whiting gave code reviews to assist
optimization and readability. Tyler Hurd advised on the animation. Grace Almodóvar had the
vision of creating a lab with and for the students of the high school in which we worked. She has
been an invaluable educational artist and student advocate within the process of entering a new
community and trying new curriculum for the first time. Both Richard Lemarchand and
Marientina Gotsis helped me design and teach Code Camp — an early step towards this thesis.
They encouraged my experiments in virtual reality both as a designer and engineer. Richard was
especially helpful in breaking down tasks into manageable steps, and encouraging me all along
the way.
Allison Comrie, my creative director and partner, was the unwavering creative and moral
compass for this project. She exercised a tremendous flexibility for change so that problems
could quickly transform into solutions. Her leadership attracted and retained our incredible team
that made this vast and various project happen.
Finally, I would like the acknowledge the tireless support of my family. Dad and
Michele, Mom and Valerie, Deirdre and Conor, Meghan, Mike, Gavin and Catherine, Chris and
Tori, thank you! My dear boyfriend Jacob, thank you.
5
List of Figures
Figure 1: Lenna 9
Figure 2: Code Camp students 12
Figure 3: Percentage of bachelor’s degrees to women 14
Figure 4: Screenshots of the VR game 21
Figure 5: Screenshots of the VR game 23
Figure 6: Poster of game (left) and image of student playing game (right) 24
Figure 7: Concept art for how the Sentients were inspired by transistors 26
Figure 8: Concept art for how the Capacitor Fish are inspired by capacitors 27
Figure 9: Concept art for restrained figure (left) and liberated figure (right) 28
Figure 10: Screenshots of the VR game 36
Figure 11: Concept art and poster 39
Figure 12: Concept art of protagonist (left) and 3D art of protagonist (right) 41
Figure 13: Lecture slide 49
Figure 14: Lab partners 51
Figure 15: Workbooks 55
Figure 16: Class overview slide 59
Figure 17: Workshop and vocabulary 60
Figure 18: Curriculum github repository 62
Figure 19: “Big Bang” lab and exercise 64
Figure 20: Student teaching piecemeal graph 68
Figure 21: Curriculum intro slides A and B 68
6
Figure 22: Photo by student for their game (left), student remixing assets for game (right) 69
Figure 23: Students 69
Figure 24: Student showcase in library 71
Figure 25: Student playing VR game (left) and coding their own game (right) 73
7
Abstract
To better understand how to diversify computer science, we need to examine the multiple
factors that shape identity and power in computer science culture. Axes of identity might include
gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. The concept of intersectionality addresses how
combinations of these axes can affect how an individual experiences power and oppression
differently in different contexts. “Kyriarchy is a theory of power that describes the power
structures intersectionality produces” (Osborne, 1). Kyriarchy is the Greek word for
“sovereignty” in English. This document describes the creation of two cultural interventions
designed to empower women of color and nonbinary people of color in computer science: a
virtual reality (VR) game and a high school enrichment computer science curriculum. Both
artifacts were developed at the Interactive Media & Games Division of the School of Cinematic
Arts at the University of Southern California during the 2017-2018 school year with fellow
classmate Allison Comrie for our MFA joint thesis project.
In evaluating the successes and failures of our creations, I must acknowledge how my
own identity as a white cisgender woman engineer struggling with post traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD) from sexual assault (SA) has contributed to both positive and negative feedback loops
throughout the design and development process. Within the context of a South Central Los
Angeles High School, I could very easily, unintentionally, occupy the role of an oppressor who
triggers feelings of fear in my students. As a SA-survivor in a computer science classroom
mainly populated by cisgender men, feelings of fear could be triggered in me (unintentionally, I
believe) by predominantly male classmates, teachers, and TA’s.
8
Proof of efficacy of the curriculum and VR game we created is beyond the scope of this
document. What I intend to illustrate is the value of clearly and truthfully defining the problem
in the myriad of asynchronous interactions that occur while engaging in cultural change. In
order to gain control over not only our own actions, but how those actions operate in an evolving
culture of shifting power dynamics, we must strive to be honest with ourselves about how we
participate — intentionally or not — in patterns of oppression, often alternately as the oppressor
and the oppressed depending on our actual and perceived environment. I have come to believe
that the bulk of the “oppressors” in the culture of computer science actually perceive themselves
as the oppressed, and thereby avoid, ignore, deny, or justify their own acts of oppression.
Through interviews, research, project documentation and my own experience, I will define a first
step towards reforming the deeply imbalanced culture of computer science via defining the
problem within a personal context, and addressing one’s own fears therein.
Keywords
Intersectionality, kyriarchy, computer science, games, education, interaction design, virtual
reality, post traumatic stress disorder, sexual assault.
9
Chapter 1: Introduction
Computer science is a young field. “The first computer degree program in the United
States was formed at Purdue University in 1962” (Purdue Computer Science & Purdue
University). It is likely that many of my computer science teachers did not have teachers of their
own. In the absence of a long history, cultural references of the present and recent history play a
unique role in forming bonds of trust amongst computer scientists.
Take the case of Lenna. Lenna is the face of Playboy model Lena Söderberg , cropped
from her 1973 Playboy Centerfold image and scanned into a Hewlett Packard 2100
minicomputer by University of Southern California assistant professor Alexander Sawchuk as
the subject of studying image dithering. “Lenna” is widely used in computer science courses and
publications as the test image for image processing (Lenna 2018).
Figure 1: Lenna. Source: Wikipedia.
I first encountered Lenna four years ago in a Mathematics for Computer Science
Applications graduate course as part of a non-degree program at NYU. My professor was an
older Russian man. Initially, I empathised with him as he strove to appeal to the youthful,
mainly male classroom with the titillating story of Lenna and her photo. At the same time, I felt
10
confused and distant. Scanning the classroom for disapproval and finding rapt students (several
years younger than I), alienation set in.
Weeks later, the same professor used the O.J. Simpson trial to explain Bayes Theorem. I
remember my teacher explaining that “the number of women killed by men was not that much
compared to the number of women killed by abusive husbands.” In class, I argued with his
choice of words. Through hot tears, I attempted to articulate that any women killed by men or
their abusive husbands is too many . He replied that the O.J. Simpson trial was the “textbook
example” for explaining Bayes Theorem, and that O.J. might have been found guilty if the jury
had understood this theorem. And he was right.
I returned home in a fog. I remember staring into dull glitter concrete in wan winter light
wondering when I’d last had a coherent thought. For days I did not study. I considered dropping
out of this class and the pursuit of learning computer science in general. Lenna’s photo and
Nicole Simpson’s murder are “textbook” applications of computer science designed by and for a
culture dominated by cisgender men. From my seat in the classroom, I interpreted this message:
beautiful, naked, sometimes murdered women are exciting to us. This is probably the opposite
message of the one my professor consciously intended to communicate. But it is the one I took
away. My interpretation triggered feelings of fear, sadness, and isolation. In the next four years
of studying computer science, emotional challenges within the culture would trump intellectual
challenges with the material, by far.
During the summer between my first and second years at USC, I created a program called
Code Camp to promote diversity in computer science. Once a week, I invited people to come to
the MxR Studio on the 3rd floor of IMGD to study coding. The initial ages ranged from thirteen
11
to forty three. I ran the program for ten weeks, inviting guest lecturers, designing hands-on
curriculum, and nurturing student projects. At the end, participants invited friends and family to
play our class’ collaborative final project.
12
Figure 2: Code Camp students. Source: Atley Loughridge
Over the next year, I iterated on Code Camp. I began visiting schools instead of requiring
students visit USC in order to increase reach. I modified exercises for whatever computers and
software the schools wanted to use. I recruited new teachers to run sessions in parallel with
various age groups: elementary school, middle school, and high school. I remember a five year
old student sounding out words in order to read the error messages in their console. One thing I
learned was that anyone, any age and background, could learn the material I wanted to teach.
But students participated more in classrooms where their age group, gender expression, and race
represented the majority of the room. I began to wonder why I’d not yet succeeded in attracting
a woman of color majority to one of our Code Camp classrooms.
In book Stuck In The Shallow End , author Jane Margolis reports the findings of a Los
Angeles study investigating why so few African and Latino/a high school students are learning
computer science. Zweben (qtd. In Margolis) states that “a recent survey showed that at the
nation’s PhD-granting departments of computer science and engineering, just 8 percent of the
bachelor’s degrees and 4 percent of the master’s degrees in computer science are awarded to
African Americans and Latino/as” (Margolis 6). California Department of Education and
13
College Entrance Examination Board (qtd. In Margolis) notes that “in California, where
underrepresented students of color make up a combined 49 percent of the high school student
population, they account for only 9 percent of the AP computer science test takers” (Margolis 6).
Margolis introduces her book with a comparison between computer science and the sport of
swimming. “The two endeavors share many qualities, from powerful historical legacies to
inequitable trends rooted in false assumptions and beliefs” (Margolis 23). Margolis reports on
how high school computer science curriculum, spaces, normalized racial divides, counselors,
teachers, course structure, and students access to a computer at home can coalesce to deter
students who don’t fit the stereotypical computer science white or asian “boy wonder” from
enrolling in computer science courses.
Researching potential solutions, I came across "Why Are Some STEM Fields More
Gender Balanced Than Others?" by Sapna Cheryan and Sianna A. Ziegler of the University of
Washington. While the participation of women in the science, technology, engineering and math
(STEM) fields of the biological sciences, chemistry and math has been consistent or on the rise
in the last quarter century, the participation of women in computer science, physics and
engineering has failed to increase or has actually decreased.
14
Figure 3: Percentage of bachelor’s degrees to women. Source: National Science Foundation, National
Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, Integrated Science and Engineering Resources Data
System (qtd. in Cheryan et al..)
The researchers state: “To close gender gaps in participation in computer science,
engineering, and physics, cultures of these fields should signal equally to women and men that
they belong and can achieve success in them." Their study relied on data that unfortunately
defined gender as a binary of men and women. We do not subscribe to binary thinking, but this
data did inform Allison and my decision to focus on transgender and cisgender women of color
and nonbinary individuals of color in high school. Our mission was for computer science to
signal belonging to this group in a project called Palimpsest .
The word “palimpsest” originates from the Greek roots palin ‘again’ + psēstos ‘rubbed
smooth.’ The word describes an object that contains traces of prior versions that have been
effaced to make room for new versions. It is often applied to writing materials such as pieces of
parchment or stone, but could also be applied to new architecture built atop the old, or layers of
society. My favorite definition of palimpsest is by Daily Beast editor Jill Bialosky, who writes
15
that, “in a figurative way, palimpsest refers to an object or place that reflects its own history”
(Bialosky 2013).
To me, “palimpsest” held a number of meanings depending on the context. Within the
context of identity, palimpsest referred to the transformational process through which we all
decide to make room for new drafts of self. This view of palimpsest filled me with calm in the
sense that it acknowledged the limits of our time, access, resources, and mental capacities; we
cannot be all things. Pursuing a dream meant tough choices and stark compromises. Letting go
of prior versions of self was a highly intimate, personal process, and one I would have to revisit
repeatedly in order to continue pursuing a place for myself in the field of engineering.
I view code as Greek philosopher Heraclitus’ river, which one cannot dip one’s foot into
the same place twice. Code is constantly evolving in an intensely collaborative way over the
internet. Before coming up against the firm (and necessary) safeguards against cheating in
university computer science courses, I wanted our high school students to freely borrow, break,
remix, and edit source code. We attempted to emulate this by having our students remix our VR
game’s code as part of their curriculum. The changing source code is another form of
palimpsest.
The goal of our MFA thesis project Palimpsest was to create an educational intervention,
using a high school class and a VR game, that would allow women of color and nonbinary
people of color to gain or reclaim access to early positive experiences with computer science.
Our VR game stars a woman of color who uses technology to transcend challenges. In our high
school engineering class, students remix our game’s code and assets to create their own pieces of
expression. Through this constant edition process, we, the participants and creators, collectively
16
write ourselves into the field of computer science, and thereby signal our own belonging and
potential for success to each other.
1.1 About This Document
This document is intended to reflect upon an ambitious, imperfect project Palimpsest
within the context of the ambitious, imperfect field of computer science. Aided by perspective
afforded to me by the time between my implementation of thesis and this current reflection, I
would like to candidly outline what did and did not work, and why.
Many people design media with the goal of social change. While I describe the design
processes for our game and curriculum, I will circle back to the theme that one’s motivations for
“social good” can also mask blind spots. Inequality is bred by the choices and considerations
humans make when designing and engineering technology; our intentions are limited by each of
our individual abilities to face our own truth. I will take the design process as the set or situation,
motivated by world events, to hone in on specific interpersonal conflicts, which illuminated the
challenges and stakes involved in this effort. I will argue that any reader of this paper could and
should find a way to support diversity in computer science.
Chapter 1 will detail the origins, goals, structure, and terminology of this document.
Chapter 2 will outline the VR game Palimpsest within the context of our MFA thesis.
While capturing the narrative, gameplay, art and musical elements, I will assess how each did
and did not succeed in attaining our player experience goals. I will also describe the design and
technical challenges involved in designing for a newcomer to VR.
17
Chapter 3 will detail the high school curriculum component of Palimpsest within the
context of our MFA thesis. This chapter will discuss the various stages of designing,
implementing, and receiving feedback on a pilot enrichment education program for high school
students.
In chapter 4, I will examine my takeaways from Palimpsest and the potential futures for
this varied project. I will explain the intersectional and cross platform challenges and benefits
that emerged while implementing Palimpsest . Most noteworthy are the positive and negative
feedback loops that developed within the two contexts of USC and our classroom in a South
Central high school.
1.2 Defining The Problem
From the mid-2000's to now, about twenty percent of computer science bachelor's
degrees in the United States are awarded to women (National Science Foundation). One reason
for this is that men are disproportionately exposed to learning experiences with computer science
before college. Such experiences are often opt-in based on the student's preference. Students
opt-in based on their sense of belonging to the culture signalled to them by the learning
experience. The culture of computer science learning experiences currently mainly signals
belonging to cisgender men (Cheryan, S., Ziegler).
1.3 Hypothesis
Our hypothesis is that nonbinary people of color and trans/cis women of color will study
computer science if the culture signals to them that they belong in that culture. Due to scope and
18
interest, we have identified two elements of "culture" through which to signal belonging. The
primary element is a twelve session pilot program of computer science curriculum for women of
color and nonbinary people of color highschool - our primary audience. The second element is a
VR game for our students and industry professionals - our secondary audience. We believe that
the interaction of these two elements, both in their content and their audiences, provides an
opportunity for us to study the impact of cultural signals on the academic preferences of our
students.
We aim to interrellate our cultural elements in as far as crossover proves effective.
Meaning, the curriculum and game are not necessarily interdependent. This is not a transmedia
project. Our macro design provides complementary experiences to multiple people within a
culture rather than a cohesive experience for one person.
Within the scope of this thesis, we were not able to test these hypotheses. We are able to
create the material that we deem is worth piloting in an environment that includes control group
data. This document with examine positive and negative feedback loops in our collaborative
development process.
1.4 Terms
Palimpsest is a reaction to our perceived dominance of white cisgender men in computer
science departments of secondary schools in the United States. In defining a target audience, the
layers of identity we aim to address include sexuality, race, and gender presentation. Some of the
layers of identity we do not address include sex, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.
19
“Sex” is often assigned based on genitalia at birth and might include male, female, or
intersex ( Understanding Gender ). We do not define a target audience based on sex.
“Sexuality” refers to who a person is attracted to. This could refer to lesbian, gay,
bisexual, or queer ( LGBT 2018). We do not define a target audience based on sexuality.
“Gender” refers to the gender a person presents as, if any ( Understanding Gender ).
Terms denoting gender include nonbinary people, men, and women. “Transgender” describes
people whose “sense of of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth sex”
( Transgender ). “Cisgender” describes people whose sense of identity and gender does
correspond with the sex they were assigned at birth. Therefore, any term denoting gender
includes transgender people, e.g. transgender nonbinary, transgender man, and transgender
woman. Palimpsest views gender expression as a fundamental right, and aims to welcome all
people of color who identify as women or nonbinary individuals. For those who identify as
transgender or cisgender men, Palimpsest adopts a stance that is not oppressive.
“People of color” refers to anyone who identifies as a race that is not white ( People of
Color ).
Chapter 2: VR Game Overview
The VR game is a five to seven minute rhythm action experience in a surreal
environment. The player is cast as a woman of color who is tasked with freeing a mountainous
figure lodged in earth. The core mechanic is timing when to reach out with an open hand and
when to punch with a closed fist. Our design goal was to use an abstract context to teach players
to alternate between self defense and reaching out for support in order to achieve a colossal task.
20
During our MFA thesis year, we created two prototypes. The first was narrative-driven,
with voiceover triggered by touching objects in the main character’s home. We scrapped this in
December as a result of disappointing playtests. We felt we did not have the special effects
support to create a user interface that could effectively guide players through a narrative.
Reading text, a common fallback for PC and console games, was not a viable option in VR.
After watching fifteen of our classmates struggle to simply traverse our narrative, let alone
process it, we opted to ditch the narrative altogether and focus on the core gameplay.
At the same time, we taught a semester-long engineering course once a week after school
for sixteen students at a Los Angeles South Central high school. Our students identified as
transgender or cisgender women of color or nonbinary individuals of color; they were our target
audience. Our primary goal for the VR game prototype was to create a five to seven min
experience that our students enjoyed and could win. We wanted to capture their interest from the
beginning to the end of the game, in one session, without them becoming frustrated. This goal
dictated much of what this chapter describes.
2.1 Walkthrough
Please find a playthrough video of our VR game shown at the MFA thesis show here:
https://vimeo.com/269604390 .
21
The player begins by putting on a VR headset and holding two controllers, one in each
hand. Each controller has several buttons, but we only used the triggers. Here is a summary of
what the player experiences upon launching the game:
The lights fade up on the form of a giantess lodged in the ground, her torso stuck in earth,
hair cascading into a rippling mountain. Circuitous veins flicker with fading health along her
arms, torso, and visage. Clenching your fists, you see your own veins merge with technical
gloves that appear over your fists. These are your two main choices as a player: connect with an
open hand or with a closed fist. Light pulses through your veins, indicating high health. You are
not dissimilar to the temple-like figure before you. Perhaps she is a sister, or an alternate version
of yourself.
Figure 4: Screenshots of the VR game. Source: Atley Loughridge
With a thunderous crack, the sky unfolds a veil of falling dark matter, which accumulates
on the mountainous creature like snow. From the accumulation, Cordyceps-like parasites emerge
from her limbs, sapping her vascular system of whatever light it had left, pinning her down.
(Cordyceps is a fungi that is fatally parasitic, mainly to insects.) The giant continues to struggle
in a slow motion battle to free herself from the confining growths. The organ of her heart,
22
exposed to the air through a fault line running down her sternum, beats defiantly. From this
beating emits a far-off wail of music.
Slowly approaching is a Sentient — a circular, semi-intelligent enemy that will seek and
damage the player if the player doesn’t hit it first. The Sentient contains a transistor with circuits
lodging it in a protective shell that expands and contracts to the beat. Punching it offbeat
damages you, but punching it on beat makes the recoiling sentient a tool with which to errode the
crystalline parasites locking the giantess down.
Sentients approach in patterns of ones, twos, and threes. With each punch, ranks of
“Codycrystals” (cordycep-like crystals) shrivel. If enough time passes, they regrow. A velocity
of hits kills the first level of them off for good. Light fills the circuits piping into the giantess'
heart. Her newly healed arm cracks free and lifts you to the remaining congregation of parasitic
growths around her upper extremities.
23
Figure 5: Screenshots of the VR game. Source: Atley Loughridge
Her lips part and blow out a long fish-like creature, which swims toward you. Hollow, it
pulses with charge, similar to a capacitor. Touching this creature with a clenched fist yields
nothing, but opening your naked hand to the beast allows its power to transfer and restore your
health. Like playing a theremin or reaching your hand into a rushing river, your depth of contact
changes the pitch of the creature's data: a song from the giantess.
A school of these Capacitor Fish passes. Your fists glow mightily. The giantess looks at
you eerily. The boss battle ensues, combining both the Sentients and the Capacitor Fish so that
you must alternately punch with a clenched fist and reach out for reserves with an exposed palm.
Upon eradicating the parasites, the giantess lights up with energy flowing through her veins.
Circuits spread from her roots through the vague darkness beyond, passing through root systems
of foliage previously unseen. A long silence breaks with the tentative chirps of birds welcoming
the break of dawn.
2.2 Methodology
Our design goal was to signal to women of color and nonbinary people of color that they
belong in technology. One method to positively align technology and our target audience was to
24
use the exciting technology of VR to create a game that stars a woman of color. Even without
playing the game, the marketing and platform of the game conveys our message.
Figure 6: Poster of game (left) and image of student playing game (right). Source: Atley Loughridge
Within the VR game, we tried to communicate as much of our message as possible
through the characters, creatures, and environment, without text or voiceover. Our thinking was
that, if we took this route first, we could always retrofit a narrative to supplement what players
were missing later.
The VR game embodies our core assertion: the player can transform their reality via
technology. The game begins with a large figure who is stuck and struggling. The game ends
with the player healing and freeing that figure. We did not explicitly tell the player who this
character was, because that narrative system was out of scope for our thesis year. And to a
certain extent, we wanted to see how far multiple interpretations would feel acceptable to us. We
wanted to discover what various players would discern from the art and mechanics and world we
created. Largely, the results were acceptable for the thesis year prototype. Most of our target
audience interpreted the figure as a reflection of themselves, a goddess, or the life force of their
25
environment, and all or these interpretations generally map to “positive transformation of my
experience.”
Players who did not fit our target audience were more likely to take the headset off and
say, “that was really cool, but what did it mean?” While it is important to us to eventually reach
this secondary audience, we decided that reaching them would require more robust narrative
tools for voiceover and animation, which were outside of scope for our thesis year.
Our core assertion was that, even while the technosphere signals unbelonging to
minorities, minorities can use technology itself to remedy their experience; it is not the
computers and code, but how we use them, that sends a message. Technology itself can be a
haven and a resource for everyone. Even if white men intentionally or not signal ownership over
the technosphere, resist that errant message of ownership, but still use the technology. Use
technology as a tool for resistance.
We intended to convey this by having the creatures in our game inspired by technology.
We wove our target behaviors into the creatures such that the player must use the
techno-creatures in order to progress.
The Sentients are inspired by transistors. The transistor is the basic building block of
how computers make decisions. On a computer chip, a transistor switches between the binary
states of zero and one. Packing ever smaller microchips with evermore transistors enables
computer processors to compute more calculations faster. By morphing the shape of a transistor
into a Sentient creature, we wanted to convey to the player that the basic building blocks of
computing might work against or for the player, depending on the player’s actions. Sentients
begin by propelling towards the player. If they hit the player without the player punching them
26
first, the player will take damage. However, if the player hits the Sentients to the beat, when the
they are open and vulnerable to change, the Sentients transform into a tool that frees the giant
figure by shattering her Cordycrystal restraints. This rhythmic mechanic shifts the question from
whether or not to fight back to when and how.
Figure 7: Concept art for how the Sentients were inspired by transistors. Source: illustrator Karen Tsai
The Capacitor Fish are inspired by capacitors. The capacitor is the basic building block
of how computer store data in memory. Like the transistor, the capacitor also has binary states of
0 and 1. If the capacitor holds a charge, it is a 1. No charge means 0. In concert, the states of
many capacitors add up to blocks of data. We took the shape of the capacitor and morphed it into
a fish-like creature. If the player pets the Capacitor Fish with an open palm, it will slow and
restore the player’s health. If the player pets the Capacitor Fish with a closed fist, it will turn red
and quickly swim away without restoring the player’s health, but without causing damage either.
The Capacitor Fish are a second way we are attempting to convey that the player can use
technology to help themselves — or not.
27
Figure 8: Capacitors (left) and concept art of the Capacitor Fish (right). Source: illustrator Karen Tsai
While admittedly complex, it’s important to note that the villain or opponent in the game
is the Cordycrystals restraining the figure. The Cordycrystals — their negative presence — is
what we intend for the player to map to signals of unbelonging in technological spaces. The
techno-creatures are what we intend for the players to map to the technological tools of that
environment, which the player can weild to their benefit or not, depending on their action and
timing. Player choice is centered on when and how they make contact with the other creatures in
the game. These mechanics are intended to develop the player's skill in discerning when to
punch versus when to reach out, and switching between these actions quickly.
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Figure 9: Concept art for the figure restrained by Cordycrystals (left) and the liberated figure flush with
energy (right). Source: illustrator Karen Tsai
2.3 Designing For A Novice To VR
Several design choices resulted from the goal of making our game playable to a novice in
VR. Each area of interest is oriented straight ahead of the player's starting direction. This
eliminates the possibility that the player will turn around and get lost, dizzy, and frustrated.
The game is designed to be easy enough for a novice to beat in under seven minutes. We
wanted our game to be completed in one session. VR headsets are not yet light and comfortable
enough for long-term wear. Often, a novice will be playing our game in a public setting such as
a school or expo using a headset shared by many. The headset may not be adjusted correctly for
the player. The lenses may not be the correct distance apart. All of these risks contribute to the
player's potential discomfort in VR, and our decision to make our game as short as possible.
Brevity demanded we implement the "haiku" version of our original design.
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A newcomer in VR is learning how to perceive and interact with a digital space for the
first time. As babies, we learned to connect depth perception with physical movement to grab an
object. The biggest indicator of a novice in VR is that they have trouble determining how "far"
away an object is in virtual space in order to collide their hand with the object. Therefore, we
designed our player actions in VR to require the dexterity of a toddler in the real world. Our
interactive objects are comparable to the size of the player themselves. The environment is
sparse, dark, and static so that bright, animated interactive objects are obvious. While hitting on
beat is required, the margin for error is large enough to accept imprecise timing. While hitting a
target is required to progress, targets cover the player's field of view so that imprecise aim may
still reap rewards.
The triggers on the Oculus or Vive controllers are intuitive and visceral for players to
grab. The only controls in our game are the player's movement in space and the trigger controls.
Using fewer controls means that more of the player's brain can be dedicated to depth perception,
moving through space, and timing.
2.4 Origins
We began with the common sentiment that thriving as a minority in technology required
the skills of reaching out for support and defending oneself from oppressive forces.
In real life, everyone is simultaneously participating to some degree in supportive and
oppressive forces. Creative Director Allison Comrie and I agreed that a minority student
studying computer science in college was apt to encounter some of the same challenging and
even triggering experiences that we had encountered in settings like engineering classrooms and
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mixed media labs. The danger was getting stuck on either side of the spectrum of trust: being
trusting to a degree that makes you vulnerable to attacks, and/or isolating oneself to a degree that
maims your education. The trick to survival, in our experience, was learning to be dexterous and
even playful with our trust. An example of this is asking a professor for support on a homework
assignment while, in the same conversation, drawing a boundary when the professor expresses
surprise that you haven’t yet dropped the class since the material is so hard for you.
In my personal experience, more than half of my computer science professors (all men)
encouraged me to drop their course and take something easier or “closer to my interests” at the
start of the semester, when homework assignments are designed to weed students out. Margolis
expands on the phenomenon of computer science teachers dissuading minority students from
taking their courses within the context of race:
Teachers are also in incredible positions of power when it comes to influencing the ways
that students see themselves. Our interview with Janet, the only African American female
who was enrolled in AP computer science during the course of our study, illustrates the
power of teachers’ attitudes and comments, and the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that
they can impact students’ lives. Janet enrolled in AP computer science because she
thought it would be interesting and enjoyable. The curriculum was different from what
she had expected, and as a result, she struggled with the material. Nevertheless, Janet felt
she had to persist: “I think it was mainly because we [African American females] were so
limited in the world, you know, and just being able to be in a class where I can represent
who I am and my culture, I think, was really important to me. And so I think that was
really the main thing that kept me there.”
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Janet noted that despite the fact that many of the students were experiencing
difficulty with the concepts (and eventually, about half the class dropped the course), she
was the only one who was approached by the teacher, Carter, about how she was faring in
the class. Carter, who later told us that she was worried about how the class would affect
Janet’s overall GPA, pulled her aside and in a quiet but public conversation during class,
suggested to Janet that she drop AP computer science, adding that she should not feel bad
because some people just do not have “the aptitude” for this kind of study.
Admittedly, the concepts in the course were difficult and new to Janet, but just as
crucial, the hard drive in her home computer had broken and this led her to have
problems completing the assignments. Despite the teacher’s intention to help her, and
despite Janet’s own knowledge that there were extenuating circumstances, what she
ingested from the conversation was the impression that her teacher felt she did not have
the necessary talent and was not smart enough to handle the work. Moreover, she felt
humiliated in front of her peers.
One of the more painful lessons we learned through this project was just how,
well, painful it can be for students of color to be isolated on the accelerated track. The
decision to enroll in these courses, when no other students of color are enrolled, requires
an enormous amount of psychological risk. It is therefore easy to see why some students
choose to stay in “regular” classes, where they have more friendship groups and support
networks. (Margolis 90-91)
Every computer science course I’ve taken has been markedly more difficult than the last, and just
as essential to my grip on the field. While I often began in the bottom quarter of the class, I
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finished in the top quarter. I cannot imagine what would have happened had I listened to my
dissuading professors, who bragged that the other (almost entirely male) students in the course
“ate code for breakfast” or that their course covered “a galaxy” of material compared to the
“solar system” that my last course covered. Our galaxy is 4.12 septillion times the volume of our
solar system, and the comments of my professors (who I came to trust and admire) were
obviously made in jest. When asking a male coder if his professors ever dissuaded him from
taking a course, he said, “I never asked.” It’s possible that, different from Janet’s experience
above, my voluntary inquiry raised flags of concern in my professors. But that does not change
my stance that professors should think critically before dissuading their students from taking
their courses. If that student is a minority in the class, it is all the more important (in my view)
that they tangle with that material. Rather than attempting to influence professor behavior, I am
attempting to influence student behavior. In order for our target audience overcome the unjust
and uninformed discouragement from the powers at be, they must not only correct their
professor’s underestimation of their ability, but also assert their right to the professor’s tutelage
on assignments. In essence, the student must alternate between self-defense and reaching out for
support within a brief conversation. This is the type of scenario that Palimpsest is designed to
prepare our player for.
2.5 Target Behavior Change
A core design question is, what is the best way to teach our player to alternate between
self-defense and reaching out for support? We could have made Palimpsest a text-based “choose
your own adventure” story on a computer. Why make a surreal, rhythm-action VR game?
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Allison Comrie and I felt that targeting behavior change on the muscular level would be
more effective than the cognitive. We felt that we logically understood that we deserved a safe
and supportive place to learn coding, but that when tech environments challenged us, our barrier
to reacting in kind with our cognitive beliefs was a physical disconnect between our brains and
our bodies. My personal experience was of paralysis and dissociation. Framing our target
behavior change as a physical accomplishment felt true to the nature of the beast.
That said, we did not want to risk traumatising or re-traumatising our players with
realistic scenarios of oppression (such as the classroom experiences described above). We did
not want to unnecessarily incite feelings of fear in our students for the road that lay ahead. We
simply wanted to ingrain in their bodies the skill of quickly alternating between defensive and
connective actions in hopes that this skill would prove useful someday. Because of this, we
chose a surreal representation of overcoming oppressive forces for the environment of
Palimpsest .
In kind, the physical actions of punching and reaching are intended as metaphors. We
wanted the player to interpret how to apply these skills to their lives outside of our VR game.
Whether or not our intended semiotics came across to the player required independent evaluation
to determine.
2.6 Usability Testing
In the weeks leading up to our thesis showcase, we used the Rapid Iterative Testing and
Evaluation (RITE Method) to prioritize usability of the game while debugging. (Please see
Appendix A for a version of our RITE Method table containing a list of bugs, player feedback,
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and our progress in resolving these bugs.) This method enabled us to fix several usability bugs
with a few number of playtests. By our thesis showcase in early May of 2018, more than half of
our players could finish the game without assistance.
Notably, we did not formally test for comprehension. Lacking the time to fully flesh out
the VR game’s narrative within the scope of our thesis years, we prioritized usability. Our
knowledge of player comprehension is based on informal interviews with playtesters following
their playtest of the game. Player answers to comprehension questions seemed to vary greatly
depending on their identification with the main character and any context they had as to our
design goals prior to playing the game. I will explore player comprehension of the VR game’s
message and target behavior change in chapter four section three entitled, “Protect Stories.”
2.7 Accessibility
The largest barrier to accessibility is the price point, marketing, and design of VR
hardware itself.
The roughly $400 price tag on an Oculus Touch in 2017 obscures the need for a $2000
computer to run VR experiences at frame rates that will not make the player ill. $2400 for a
personal gaming console is out of range for most of our target audience. Hardware providers
could offer subsidised rates to schools, but they seem to be prioritizing gamers over educational
communities.
Lastly, the straps on the Oculus and Vive have clearly not been designed with the
hairstyles of people of color in mind. The straps are not large enough for many of our students to
comfortably fit the headset over their hair. This oversight is a clear example of how homogenous
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tech spaces yield technology designed for the few — a reality that underscores the need for
programs like Palimpsest .
2.8 Difficulty Settings
We support the difficulty settings of Speedthrough, Easy, Normal, and Hard. Greater
difficulty increases the number of opponents and the time they remain dormant before growing
back.
That said, most players seem to have the best experience on the Speedthrough setting.
This is because some players still experience difficulty in hitting opponents to the beat. We were
surprised to observe that many players experience difficulty responding to our definition of what
was on beat versus offbeat. Rhythm is up to interpretation to some extent. We experienced some
technical difficulty with anticipating the beat so that collisions occurring slightly ahead of or
after the beat were just as likely to be deemed “on beat.” Lastly, we had difficulty getting our
system to effectively dynamically respond to where the player chose to stand. Therefore, a
player who happened to be standing with an offset from the opponent’s target, and who did not
consider moving their body in addition to their hands, would be consistently less likely to hit on
beat. Ultimately, we opted to automate the Speedthrough setting to force the player to the next
level regardless of their performance. Defaulting to Speedthrough has enabled us to share the
game more broadly for the time being.
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2.9 Feedback
Balancing visual feedback is the main area where our game must improve. Players in VR
are already re-learning depth perception. Their visual, spatial, and auditory senses are
overloaded. We quickly learned that we could not use text or voiceover to guide players.
Balancing visual, auditory, and haptic feedback loops was essential to guiding a player through
the game. These effects also comprised a significant portion of our development time.
Getting a player’s attention required animating an object in their field of view (forwards
and slightly downwards). Moving objects towards the player was effective in motivating the
player to act.
Large, in-world visual effects were much more effective than smaller, on-body fx. No
matter how flashy and detailed we made the players’ gloves, players examined their
surroundings before their person. Placing the player’s health bar on their gloves largely failed.
What players did attend to was a large blue/red band that swept the sky when they hit/missed an
opponent.
Figure 10: Screenshots of the VR game. Source: Atley Loughridge
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While we resisted some common color coding (e.g. dark = bad and light = good), we
committed to blue indicating health/ally and red indicating harm/foe. Even so, many players
requested more creature sound fx and animation to indicate the creature’s mood and intentions.
2.10 Avoiding Motion Sickness
VR triggers motion sickness when the player’s visual feedback regarding movement
contrasts with their physical experience. This poses a strong challenge for traversing a
three-dimensional world. We leaned into theatrical techniques to bring the action to the player
rather than requiring them to move.
The culminating narrative sequence for each level included the giant figure lifting the
player closer to its gaze. These sequences were the scariest for me as a designer, but they turned
out to be favorites for players. We were successful because we moved the player for a short
amount of time at a constant speed in a linear upwards/forwards direction. Additionally, the
slight effect of butterflies in the player’s stomach seemed to align with the narrative progression
that they were experiencing.
A low frame rate will also cause nausea as a result of the player’s eye no longer being
able to integrate the stereoscopic images into a three dimensional image. My target frame rate
was ninety fps on a medium specification machine such as my desktop’s GTX 1070 graphics
card. Part of the reason we discarded our first narrative prototype from the fall was because the
asset package we mistakenly used had thousands of large, unique textures, resulting in several
thousand draw calls to the renderer each frame, which greatly lowered our frame rate.
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To avoid dips in frame rate due to mid-game garbage collection, we avoided dynamically
allocating memory on the heap (e.g. using "new") during the game. Instead, we attempted to
instantiate the entire game at startup and cycle through game objects by turning them on and off
as needed.
2.11 Testing Frame Rate
Our frame rate analysis in Unity happened at three levels: in the game view stats, in the
profiler, and in development builds. Hindrances to an accurate read are that having the scene and
game views open while in VR will significantly lower the frame rate. Similarly, the profiler
itself takes a toll on the frame rate. The profiler only points to the method that is costing
processing time, not the statement (line of code). To read the profiler, you must break your code
into informative methods or code which lines you specifically want the profiler to sample.
To speak on some of the best practices we learned, developing on a minimum
specification machine is a good idea. Know the performance jump from minimum, medium, and
maximum specification machine. Have your program sense what it's running on and adjust the
quality settings accordingly.
Expect art to bring the frame rate down. We tried to keep major characters to under 6k
polycounts. We only had two major characters per scene. We did not render anything outside of
the main camera’s view, such as the player’s face. We used mirrors sparingly and only during
lulls in the gameplay. Plan to have your game run at around twice your target frame rate before
you bring art into the game.
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From the beginning, we wanted volumetric light. This effect is expensive because
instead of 2D pixels, the graphics card is processing 3D voxels that overlap along the camera's
local Z-axis to imply depth. We integrated this affect early on to pressure other features to be
comparatively inexpensive.
2.12 Illustration
I was surprised to realise that our illustrator, Karen Tsai, would play as much of a role in
shaping the storyworld and gameplay of Palimpsest as any other team member. Illustration is the
step at which much of the logic of the characters, world, and game logic is sorted out. Lastly,
visuals are the most powerful element in drawing players into the game. Everything from our
main character’s hair, jewelry, attire, body type, and skin tone was designed to signal belonging
to our target audience.
Figure 11: Concept art and poster. Source: Illustrator Karen Tsai
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2.13 Audio
If illustration draws the player into the game world, then audio keeps them there. Sound
design and music are a powerful way to feed contextual and emotional cues to the player.
Sometimes to the detriment of the pacing and narrative, music trumped sound design in
our MFA thesis showing of Palimpsest . Our design challenge was to make the music sound
good while ceding control to the player. Our solution was two fold: overlapping music stems
and triggering music clips.
In level one, players punch to the rhythm to trigger song-amplifying music clips. We
each streak of hits, the background stem progresses to a more intense loop of the song.
In level two, players reach out and pet swimming creatures to trigger musical stems that
layer onto the base track.
In level three, both of these systems play out simultaneously, layering the more rhythmic
music of level one onto the melodic vocals of level two. The result is a full expression of a song
whose dynamics emulate our core mechanics of progress via alternating defensive and
connective actions.
2.14 Diversifying Media And Technological Bias
Attempting to represent a character not often seen in games can bring to the fore
interesting technical challenges. For example, in creating our protagonist’s hair, we ruled out
twists or dreads early on due to how difficult and programmatically expensive it would be. It
was easier for her hair to be static, with simpler shapes. From the concept art to the 3D art, you
can see how that decision contributed to a certain rigidity in the character.
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Figure 12: Concept art of protagonist (left) and 3D art of protagonist (right). Source: Illustrator Karen Tsai
and Allison Comrie
Attempting a lesser represented body type was also challenging. The easiest 3D shapes
are simple, rigid shapes like cubes. Human bodies have curves. Muscle, fat, and skin all move
differently on the body. It is difficult to create the flexing of a muscular back, and more difficult
still to create the jiggle of a soft tummy. I cannot even imagine how I would attempt to create the
way my own underarm skin folds when I cross my arms. I realized that characters in video
games are not just fit because the media idolizes fitness, they are fit because static muscular
builds are easier to technologically create.
With our protagonist, we had two primary concerns with implementing the concept art.
First, we were concerned that our static model limitation would show more on a body that should
have more bounce to it. Secondly, we were concerned about how the player’s hands and arms
were crashing into their legs. For computer graphics animators, “crashing” describes when one
model is erroneously passing through another. We worried that this would disrupt the player’s
sense of immersion in their new avatar.
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We tried to fix the problem of the player’s avatar limbs crashing through each other. To
animate the player’s avatar, we used the plugin Final IK Puppet Master. This enabled us to map
the player’s head and hand movement to a rig that puppeted the in-game avatar to move in a
human fashion. If the player seemed to pass a controller through their body, this plugin would
attempt to solve that action in the game by rapidly moving the arm from one side of the body to
another in as human a way as possible. However, this type of solving — the plugin attempting to
match the player — was constrained by a potential range of animation, not by colliders
throughout the avatars body. The more girth we gave to the avatar’s body, the more we had to
limit the avatar’s range of motion to prevent their virtual hands from crashing through their
virtual body. This was a risky choice for a rhythm action game, which depends on alignment
between the player’s avatar and the player’s body.
A second solution was to integrate a “ragdoll physics” collider system, which would
specifically guard against the avatar’s body crashing through itself. “Ragdoll physics” got its
name because it prevents the limbs of a ragdoll from colliding with each other while the ragdoll
is tossed about. But my tests with ragdoll physics introduced strange bugs that were more
worrisome than the crashing. Rather than an aesthetic bug, the new bugs were affecting the
physics of the game.
In the end, we opted to slim our protagonist down to the body type that Final IK
Puppetmaster’s range of motion constraints expected and was designed for — a slim, muscular
build… basically, the body of a male soldier. These are the types of technical challenges which,
I believe, would be given more attention by the games community if their engineers were more
diverse.
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Chapter 3: Curriculum Overview
The Palimpsest Program was an after school program dedicated to increasing the
motivation in high school nonbinary individuals of color and cis and trans women of color to
study computer science in college. We taught three-hour sessions after school on Wednesdays at
a South Central Los Angeles high school for twelve weeks. Our classroom was comprised of
sixteen students ranging from 9th to 12th grades, although most of our students were in 10th
grade.
Our goal was to design a flexible curriculum that could be tailored to the students. We
prepared lectures, exercises, labs, and individual creative projects that the students could choose
from.
3.1 Institutional Review Board Approval
The Palimpsest Program was a pilot designed to determine teaching methodologies that
would be worth testing in a future research project. We applied to the Institutional Review Board
(IRB) for protocol. (Please refer to Appendix B for our IRB application and Appendix C for our
IRB application approval). “ The mandate of the NIEHS Institutional Review Board (IRB) is to
provide ethical and regulatory oversight of research that involves human subjects ” (Institutional
Review Board). The IRB deemed that the Palimpsest Project was not a research project and
approved it for exception, category 1:
Research conducted in established or commonly accepted educational settings, involving
normal educational practices, such as: (i) research on regular and special education
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instructional strategies, or (ii) research on the effectiveness of or the comparison among
instructional techniques, curricula, or classroom management methods. (Institutional
Review Board)
I welcomed the IRB review and valued the training modules and tests required to apply
and gain approval. Five years prior, I co-founded two new media startups, Reboot Stories and
Connected Sparks, both of which aimed the create media to serve “at risk” communities. There,
I got a front row seat in seeing how well-intentioned artists can undermine the communities they
claim to serve. The work my thoughts are in reaction to are well documented by Ele Jansen Phd
dissertation, “ Creativity Unbound – An Analysis of Open Collaboration between Experience
Design and Poietic Practice.” While out of scope for this document, what I would add to her
analysis would be that many of the dangers of “social good art” are stifled by a cultish aversion
to critical thought, broadcast from the true beneficiary of this confidence trick — the
self-proclaimed “Creator.” Below is my analysis of some of the ways this confidence trick is
performed by the “Creator” of artistic projects that use pseudo science, vulnerable communities,
and unpaid/underpaid and uncredited/undercredited collaborators to con social good investment
dollars into amplifying the creator’s portfolio:
1. The artist assumes that if their intentions seem good to them, their impact is also good.
2. The artist does not apply critical thought and procedural data collection to understanding
the community or the community’s needs.
3. The artist places the community at risk by pressuring them to divulge sensitive
information outside of scientific data collection procedure and the ethical standards that
accompany human testing.
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4. The artist places the community at risk by documenting them without their consent and
framing them in a narrative that they did not write.
5. The artist uses documentation of the community to frame the community as “in need”
and the artist as the “benefactor” to benefit the artist in the form of financing, marketing,
and otherwise amplifying the artist’s portfolio.
6. The artist acquires resources — mainly money and the time of collaborators who are
often working pro bono — that could be put to better use.
7. The artist appropriates the community’s culture.
8. The artist searches for a problem that fits the artist’s solution rather than serving the
community.
9. Amongst peers, the artist promotes a dangerous culture of self-aggrandizing, unethical,
damaging social experimentation.
10. The artist uses sensational images to actively mislead financiers into thinking their money
is having a positive impact on the world, relieving them of the social pressure to apply
their resources more effectively to better the world.
11. Like a virus equipped with a self righteous belief in their own power to do no harm, the
artist reinforces systemic oppression in ever more disturbing and inventive ways.
These were some of my reasons for leaving my prior startups for graduate school. Having seen
the bulk of our financial resources go to outside coding support, I decided to study computer
science initially at NYU, and then computer science within the context of interactive media
design at USC.
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My personal goal with the Palimpsest Program was to intervene in the systemic
exclusion of minorities in computer science and to do so with ethical integrity.
From this vantage point, the name “Palimpsest” takes on new meaning. By its nature, the
implementation of ethical principles is a moving target. To be a person of integrity in a
constantly shifting context is to forever call my ethics into question. My aim is not to win at
ethics, or to get and “A” in ethics, but rather to design my environment so that I am ever more
quickly hearing and responding to feedback from the community I claim to serve.
3.2 Critical Roles For Ethical Community Service
Ethical service is easier said than done, and checks and balances were necessary for the
Palimpsest Program . Being a white woman from a privileged background, on many levels I can
never fully understand the perspective of our students and target audience. Two roles were
critical to checking my influence over the Palimpsest Program :
1. Creative Director and my MFA Thesis partner Allison Comrie
2. Experiential Learning Designer and Community Advocate Grace Almodóvar
Allison Comrie is a black woman who grew up in South Central Los Angeles. As a partner, she
had equal power to mine over all aspects of our project — the VR game and the high school
curriculum. As the partner who could identify with our students and target audience, Allison had
final say over all aspects of the project.
Our Experiential Learning Designer, who I am referring to by the pseudonym of Grace
Almodóvar, led our interactions with the high school. Grace developed a slate of experiential
learning initiates in her lab at the high school, of which Palimpsest was only one module. Grace
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had been present on a daily basis at the high school for several months before the Palimpsest
Program launched. She knew many students by name, as well as their passions and their
families. She served not only as a producer and designer of the high school program, but also as
a community advocate for her students. Without someone like her serving the students directly
on academic, cultural, and interpersonal levels, the Palimpsest Program would not have been
able to receive the feedback we needed in order to serve our students.
3.3 Research Goal And Methodology
The Palimpsest Program was not deemed to be human subjects research by the IRB
because we did not aim to obtain data that was aimed at generalization about our target audience.
Our evaluation was meant to pilot the course material to determine what would be worth testing
in a future research project. For the pilot, we developed several teaching strategies that could be
tailored to the needs of our students. The purpose of these teaching strategies is to motivate our
students to consider pursuing computer science after high school. In researching motivational
teaching strategies, we delved into Ryan and Deci’s Self-Determination Theory (SDT):
SDT is an approach to human motivation and personality that uses traditional empirical
methods while employing an organismic metatheory that highlights the importance of
humans' evolved inner resources for personality development and behavioral
self-regulation. Thus, its arena is the investigation of people's inherent growth tendencies
and innate psychological needs that are the basis for their self-motivation and personality
integration, as well as for the conditions that foster those positive processes. Inductively,
using the empirical process, we have identified three such needs— the needs for
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competence, relatedness, and autonomy— that appear to be essential for facilitating
optimal functioning of the natural propensities for growth and integration, as well as for
constructive social development and personal wellbeing. (Ryan 68)
SDT outlines three components of motivation: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. In order
to want to pursue computer science, our students needed to feel that they had freedom of choice,
the ability to succeed, and meaningful connections to their identity and lives.
We integrated autonomy into the curriculum by giving students the chance to shape the
content, pace, and direction of the curriculum. We designed labs, lectures, exercises, and open
creative time for them to choose from. We built in feedback loops to attempt to hear how our
students wanted to spend their time.
During open creative time, students worked on self-directed projects of their own design.
This tier of the curriculum was most geared towards autonomy.
Competency dealt not only with the students’ comfort with the material, but also their
perception of how well they were doing in the course. To convey competency, we designed
each class to have roadmaps and check-ins. The roadmap would describe what we were going to
do. Then we would do it. Then we would review what we did and discuss how it went.
Competency also related to Grace Almodóvar’ approach of culturally responsive
teaching. Grace argued that we should attempt to use aspects of our students’ culture as
metaphors for concepts in computer science. For example, using hopscotch to teach
programming loops. Grace believed that the students’ comfort with hopscotch would translate to
greater comfort with programming loops. Having experienced how the use of Lenna’s photo
translated to less comfort with image dithering for myself, I agreed the inverse experience would
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be true as well.
Grace also suggested multi-sensory learning experiences to reach students with affinities
for different learning styles. Hopscotch is a physical activity, which might make a deeper and
longer lasting impression on students who respond positively to movement. Other ideas included
using tactile objects like beads and fuzzy pipe cleaners, or using a meal like cooking tamales, to
teach concepts such as storing data in data structures. Not only might these experiences be more
memorable, but they also might signal belonging to our students. We aimed to instigate thoughts
like, “If I can play hopscotch, I can learn to code.” Although we were a long way from testing
this, we hoped that the neurons that fire with the mention of “hopscotch” would start to fire with
the mention of “code.”
We tackled relatedness from a variety of directions. Our first and most direct strategy
was to program a VR game starring a protagonist who resonated with our target audience. We
then filtered images of the character throughout the course material. (See Appendix J for a
sample lecture.)
Figure 13: Lecture slide. Source: Karen McMullan
We also aimed to put our students in touch with relatable role models. One strategy was
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to represent women of color and nonbinary people of color at the head of the classroom. But
research has shown that a teacher simply matching a student’s gender or race does not mean that
that teacher has a significant impact on the student’s sense of belonging to the teacher’s field of
study. “Relatable role models are those with whom students feel a sense of connection,
similarity, and identification. Gender-matching may be one component that increases relatability,
but there are other characteristics as well” (Cheryan 14). To communicate belonging, the teacher
must also be relatable to the student.
What makes a potential role model “relatable?” Therapist Laura Garcia suggested that
relatability could come through admission of our own humanity. For example, rather than
striving to appear as though we, the teachers, know all the answers, admit the limits of our
knowledge and understanding in the classroom. This approach dovetailed into our goal of
autonomy. In letting the students explore self-directed prompts and self-defined projects, we
were increasing the likelihood that students would develop questions that we did not know the
answer to. However, in embracing the mantra of, “I do not know, let’s find out,” this uncertainty
could be channeled into a collaborative journey that nurtured relatedness between the student and
teacher.
A third approach to relatability was encouraging friendships, partnerships,
communication, and play. At the university level, computer science departments must be careful
about cheating. They use automated harnesses and teacher’s assistants to evaluate student work
and catch similarities that indicate collaboration on homework assignments. Talking is generally
discouraged in class. Tests are silent. Students are asked to cite any sources of help on their
work, including websites, classmates, and teachers. While understandable, such an environment
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can be isolating for a student who may not feel comfortable going to their teacher for help.
Gratefully exempt from the confines of academia, as enrichment learning experience, the
Palimpsest Program could embrace collaborative learning openly. Our goal was to have the
treble notes of friendship fire along with the bass notes of a challenging computer science lab.
We felt that both the bond of friendship and the courage that yields would make it more likely for
our students to stick with the course material.
Figure 14: Lab partners. Source: Grace Almodóvar
Lastly, we integrated resilience skill-building activities such as mindfulness into each
class. The exercises we followed were from Marsha Linehan’s development of Dialectical
Behavioral Therapy (DBT), and the modules we focused on were Mindfulness and Interpersonal
Effectiveness. This strategy was intended to support all aspects of motivation. Our intent was to
start each class with clarifying our minds, our intention, and uniting ourselves as humans beings
sharing a common space. We aimed to develop our awareness of how the curriculum was
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impacting ourselves and each other, and to develop communication skills for how to effectively
respond with changes to the curriculum.
In summary, the responsive teaching strategies we sought to develop in the Palimpsest
Program pilot were:
1. Teaching approaches based on psychological theory of motivation
2. Resilience skill-building activities, e.g. mindfulness
3. Visuals/metaphors/objects that disrupt current computer science stereotypes
4. Nurturing relatability between student and teacher
Rather than adopting linear structure to our curriculum and pilot development, we found
hyperbolic forms to better suit our needs. We strove to tell the entire story of our goals and tools
as often as possible. The story of code could be told in a myriad of simple, single phrases. For
example, the story of code is:
● Data and functions
● Machines that read patterns of 0’s (no charge) and 1’s (a charge)
● A 50-yr-old field replete with human error and potential for your improvements
● Senior programmers adopting access modifiers to protect or “encapsulate” their
code from interns who might mess it up
● Getting machines to serve our needs
By continually revisiting and revising the basic building blocks of why we are joined together in
this classroom studying computer science, we are able to strengthen each student’s foundation in
the field. Over and over again, we would learn that a solid foundation trumped a shaky structure.
Trust and communication between student and teacher preceded any possibility of learning. It
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was better for us to aspire to be kindly grandmothers weaving a secure basket of space for
computer science in our students’ lives: regularly returning to the macro, circling back over
material, and progressing on several teaching strategies simultaneously. In a hyperbolic
structure, students of varying levels graduate to more influential roles with each pass on the
material.
To reinforce trust, one ground rule we began with was, “Do not touch the students or their
computers without gaining verbal consent first.” This rule was one pillar of a safe space. This
rule also guarded against anxious teachers going in and doing the student’s exercise for them for
the sake of speed. Developing muscle memory to operate computer inputs (keyboard, mouse,
controllers) and autonomy in technical problem solving is critical to increasing the student’s
comfort with their computer.
3.4 Research Tools
Our pilot study methodology used a community-based, participatory approach. Our tools
for documenting the Palimpsest Program included ethnographic field notes, written surveys, and
filmed student interviews.
During classes, we sought verbal feedback on what the students preferred to study and
how the material was landing for them. In response to feedback, we modified curriculum in real
time. Our field notes documented changes to the curriculum, why we made those changes, and
what we observed following the changes. Grace Almodóvar also served to give us verbal
feedback during and following lessons. (Please see Appendix G for an example of our field
notes.)
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Written surveys documented student feedback on our teaching strategies. Our written
surveys comprised of a mid-course check-in, which we distributed halfway through the program.
The mid-course check-in was used to determine how we could improve the program to better
serve our students. (Please see Appendix D for our mid-course check-in survey.)
We filmed and photographed lessons and student interviews for the purpose of
recruitment to future iterations of the program.
In addition to this manuscript, there are two outputs of the documentation of this pilot
study:
1. A document that describes the interactive curriculum we developed for use by
teachers, which can be found at https://palimpsestvr.com/ .
2. A short film documentary that may be used as recruitment for the next phase of
research, which can be found at
https://vimeo.com/user5271511/review/303847755/de3f584cbd .
3.5 Walkthrough Of The Palimpsest Program Launch
The Palimpsest Program launched with a tour of the University of Southern California’s
School of Cinematic Arts Interactive Media & Games Division. We showed students the Mixed
Reality Lab, the Game Innovation Lab, the Creative Media and Behavioral Health Center, and
the Mobile and Environmental Media Lab. We browsed a hallway installation on how VR
devices have changed over time, and discussed some of the benefits and challenges of VR. At
the end of the tour, we hosted presentations and workshops in the common area, affectionately
named the “Fish Bowl.”
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There, we handed out workbooks for each student. Each workbook contained a journal,
exercises, pen and pencil, and a color printed cover of the protagonist from our VR game leaping
through the air. We explained that this is where students could organize their thoughts and
coursework, and we would continue to hand out printed worksheets at each class as we shaped
the curriculum together.
Figure 15: Workbooks. Source: Atley Loughridge
Allison presented on the history of gender and racial stereotypes in games. She argued
that this was a result of the homogenous culture that was making the games; we needed people
like the students of the Palimpsest Program to shape the media landscape, and that our program
was designed to prepare them to do just that. Allison then guided an exercise where the students
imagined a game they wanted to make with the sky as the limit.
I led a discussion about some of the vocabulary we were using to describe our goals for
the course. I also led a hands-on workshop about 3D space. Sitting in a circle on the carpet, we
used pipe cleaners to shape a 0-dimensional point, a 1-dimensional line, a 2-dimensional plane,
and a 3-dimensional space. We positioned beads on the coordinate system we’d built, and
brainstormed various ways to move, rotate and scale these objects in space.
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3.6 Feedback On The Palimpsest Program Launch
I had a slide presentation for this material, but skipped it due to time constraints. I
prioritized the hands-on workshop. Days later, Grace delivered feedback that I had alienated the
students by diving into an abstract exploration of 3D space without first presenting the key ideas
and vocabulary in a slide. She said that many of the students were confused by my workshop,
and that they were nervous to tell me so because of the intrinsic power dynamics of them visiting
a big-name university from a local high school. I had a hard time hearing this feedback, and I
will explain why.
At the time, I was viewing myself as the minority woman in my 90%-male engineering
courses. I was recovering from experiences of being inappropriately touched by computer
science classmates who had said they would help tutor me. I invested in Palimpsest in order to
tackle this issue, and I had not yet considered how I, as a white privileged woman with glasses at
the University of Southern California, could quite understandably be interpreted as intimidating
and even threatening to our students. My seriousness about the subject also might have signaled
an authoritarian personality. One thing I had to learn was how to soften my presentation and
show my authentic self. Another thing I had to learn was to be transparent all the information I
had around a concept and let the students choose how they wanted to process what.
Before designing the abstract 3D space workshop, I had had the privilege to learn about
vector spaces in traditional college courses. I’d bought the books, learned the universally
accepted vocabulary, and passed the tests. All the while, I resented that nearly all of the course
material was written by and taught by men. In “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,”
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Thomas Kuhn describes how scientific breakthroughs are largely the result of the social canvas
being primed for experimentation to yield certain results:
When … an anomaly comes to seem more than just another puzzle of normal science, the
transition to crisis and to extraordinary science has begun. The anomaly itself now
comes to be more generally recognized as such by the profession. More and more
attention is devoted to it by more and more of the field’s most eminent men. (Kuhn 82)
Kuhn goes on to note a pattern amongst breakthroughs like Newton’s second law of motion,
Maxwell’s theory, Galileo and the Copernican revolution, Thomas Young’s first accounts of the
wave theory of light, and Einstein’s quantum mechanics:
Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm
have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change. And
perhaps that point need not have been made explicit, for obviously these are the men
who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science,
are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to
conceive another set that can replace them. (Kuhn 90)
Not only were these breakthroughs made by minds who were open and supple enough to
discover them, but they were also made by minds who had the time, food, shelter, safety,
education, money, freedom, network, workspace, guidance, and all forms of social support
necessary to dedicate oneself to scientific study: white male minds.
I didn’t want racism and sexism of the past to come in between the minds of our students
and the universal language of math. I didn’t want the white-male-written-vocabulary of math
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and computer science to subconsciously convey that white men have more power in this domain
because they were the ones who were privileged enough to put their names on it first.
Interestingly, what I was actually doing was withholding information from the students.
Unlike me, they did not read the phrase “vector space” first and then decide to rewrite it. Their
experience was more like playing charades, trying to guess what I — the white woman — was
thinking, with their only clues being beads, pipe cleaners, and my verbal array of abstract
questions.
While there is something to be said for letting the student make their own discoveries,
this instance of the 3D Space hands-on workshop was a failure. Rather than being in a safe
space, the students were in a public common area of a big university. Rather than being able to
take their time and ask questions, I rushed into too much material with too little time to cover it.
Rather than being given options for how to process the material — e.g. via slides and/or a
workshop — I had prioritised the workshop because of my own biases.
And it was my own biases, and the emotion I attached to them, that interfered with my
ability to read the expressions of confusion on the students’ faces and respond to their needs.
The launching of any educational program should be all about getting to know each other,
building trust, and the students and teachers developing feedback loops so that the teachers can
tailor the program to the students’ needs. USC Creative Media & Behavioral Health Center
Director Marientina Gotsis says:
Humor and warmth are important factors for teachers… The only hope for liberation is
being your best self for your students and explaining your affect when you can’t (cranky,
tired, serious, etc.) It may seem burdensome, but when you teach younger people, they
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are reading your raw signals with a lot of critique and their empathy is less developed.
(Gotsis)
Success in the classroom might not relate to the teacher’s personal experiences or motivations at
all. Removing my ego from the equation of what is working in the classroom was a task I
returned to repeatedly over the development of the Palimpsest Program .
The feedback that was initially so difficult for me to hear was straightforward to
implement. Grace had specific requests for our course:
1. Begin and end with a roadmap.
2. Integrate “Checking For Understanding” as we go.
3. Make a vocabulary list that defines important terms or jargon.
USC Information Technology Program lecturer Karen McMullan had teamed up with me on the
computer science curriculum, and had spearheaded amendments based on Grace’ feedback.
Karen created a roadmap slide that summarized the flow of the class. Everytime we transitioned
from one module to the next, we brought up this slide as a visual aid to review what we did and
what we were going to do next.
Figure 16: Class overview slide. Source: Karen McMullan
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For each lecture, Karen created related exercises for us to check in with the students on
their comprehension of the material. (Please see Appendix J for a complete sample lecture and
Appendix K for the complementary exercises.) Karen also created a vocabulary list with
definitions. At the second class, we handed out printouts of the vocabulary for students to place
in their binders. Each class, we added new terms to the end of the list as they came up during the
lesson. In this way, we complimented our more abstract, tactile exercises with concrete
definitions. (Please see Appendix H for our full vocabulary list.)
Figure 17: Workshop and vocabulary. Source: Atley Loughridge
Notably, Karen McMullan’s ability to incorporate Grace’ feedback was essential to our
progress. I will speak more on Karen’s leadership at this pivotal moment in chapter four section
two entitled, “Shifting Priorities With A Shifting Context.” What I learned from Grace and
Karen on that day, and what I hope I never forget, is that the goal is to hear and incorporate
feedback as quickly as possible. Feedback is not personal. While I may have created the
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Palimpsest Program in part to heal my own feelings of loneliness and isolation in computer
science, successfully implementing the program hinged on my ability to compartmentalise my
own needs from the needs of my students and the community I had signed up to serve. This is
not to say that I ignored my own needs. To the contrary, I took up the work of addressing my
needs more effectively outside of the classroom with renewed focus.
3.7 Walkthrough Of A Typical Session
Per our goal of developing a curriculum that could be tailored to the needs of our
students, our class evolved from week to week. Karen McMullan had shown me several quick
and exciting labs she had created to introduce students to programming. I thought her work was
more accessible than my relatively dry exercises. Karen and I teamed up to shape the class
around a computer science/design lab built in Unity, a 3D game engine.
We posted six labs to a public repository on Github, and each student downloaded that
repository onto their school laptop. (Refer to Appendix H for the full overview of programming
curriculum labs and lectures.) We hypothesized that if we got the students interested in solving a
problem first, the lecture material might feel more relevant.
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Figure 18: Palimpsest Curriculum github repository. Source: Atley Loughridge
Initially, we had broken up the curriculum so that Allison Comrie and Grace Almodóvar
taught the design classes and Karen McMullan and I taught the programming classes. At that
point, a typical programming class went like so:
1. Intro (15 min: 2:00-2:15 pm)
a. Each student brings their folder to class. Instructors pass out new worksheets.
b. Instructors introduce the plan for the day.
c. Mindfulness reading material and exercise(s). Mindfulness may include capturing
inspiration for today’s lesson.
2. Lab (15 min: 2:15-2:30 pm)
a. Students observe a working version and a broken version of the lab.
b. Students map causal relationships and form questions about the broken lab.
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3. Mini Lecture and Exercises (30 min: 2:30-3:00 pm)
a. Teacher answers the questions formed during the lab.
4. Lab (30 min: 3:00-3:30 pm)
a. Students attempt to define the problem with the broken lab.
b. Students code, hypothesize, implement, and test solutions to make the lab work.
c. At end, instructors walk the class through one solution.
5. Break (15 min: 3:30-3:45 pm)
6. Lab (30 min: 4:15-4:45 pm)
a. Students code, hypothesize, implement, and test solutions.
b. At end, instructors walk the class through one solution.
7. Outro (15 min: 4:45-5:00 pm)
a. Instructors review what we set out to do and what we did.
b. Instructors facilitate a class discussion about observations and outcomes.
c. Students save their work and review class materials folder.
i. Lectures and worksheets
ii. Walkthrough of the lab
iii. Online programming tools
Figure nineteen shows our students exploring one lab entitled, “The Big Bang.” The way the lab
worked was that, when a student used the WASD keys to guide their player into a pink box, the
box instantiated tons of blue spheres. Depending on when the spheres were programmed to
self-destruct, they might collect on the floor, fall through the floor, or almost immediately
disappear. In the supporting lecture and exercise (Appendix J and K), we discussed object
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movement in 3D space. Many of the students had studied 2D algebra, but not 3D. So we
improvised a game to explore object movement in 3D space.
Figure 19: “Big Bang” lab and exercise. Source: Grace Almodóvar
In the right hand image above, the seated student is pretending to be a vector space. Her
right arm is the y-axis, her left arm the x-axis, and her left leg is the z-axis. The standing student
is pretending to hold a blue sphere, which is falling downwards in space. I am asking the class to
shout out points along the y-axis when the sphere should self-destruct. When the standing
student’s sphere falls past that point, the class yells for the sphere to destruct. This is one
example of how are planned curriculum might change depending on the interests and questions
of the students.
3.8 Feedback On A Typical Session
Five weeks into the program, we handed out mid curriculum assessment forms
(Appendix E). The results (Appendix F) were only from half of the class (eight out of sixteen
students) and reflected some miscommunication about how to respond. Nonetheless, a few
results were illuminating.
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One question asked, “How comfortable do you generally feel asking a question in class?”
On a scale of 1 (uncomfortable) to 5 (very comfortable), the results were: 2, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5.
Three of the eight respondents gave their comfort level with asking questions in class a two out
of five. While the mean of the responses was 3.375 — closer to “very comfortable” than
“uncomfortable,” the three responses of “2” were worrisome.
Another question asked, “Have you ever looked at a programmer and thought, “Hey, that
could be me!” Three respondents said, “Yes,” and five respondents said, “No.” All of the
students who replied with a “2” for their comfort level asking questions also replied with a “No”
to envisioning themselves as a programmer. Of these three students, one of them described a con
of the program as, “If you don’t understand a concept, it’ll be hard to understand everything.”
The other two simply stated their con for the program as, “Confusing.”
I interpreted the responses of these three students to mean that more than a third of the
class was spending a significant amount of class time feeling confused and uncomfortable with
asking questions. The fact that I was the main programming teacher, and five out of the eight
respondents said they had not seen a programmer and thought, “that could be me,” gave me the
feeling that the majority of the class was not finding me relatable.
Another question asked, “ What do you hope to get out of this program?” (Rate the
following from 1 to 5):
A: [ ] New friends
B: [ ] A cool project
C: [ ] Knowledge of how to program
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D: [ ] Knowledge of how to make art with technology
E: [ ] A mentor who I can relate to
Five out of the eight respondents gave a rating of 5 to option D: Knowledge of how to make art
with technology. The remaining three respondents did not use numbers, and marked three
options with an “x.” All three placed an “x” beside option D. My interpretation of this result
was that the majority of the class hoped to make art with technology in the Palimpsest Program .
My core takeaway from the survey was that we needed more class time allocated to
creative personal projects, and more class time dedicated to Allison’s design and games-focused
curriculum. That said, we wanted to make changes to the curriculum in explicit collaboration
with the students. The following week, we presented the results of the survey to the class and
brainstormed ideas for how to modify the curriculum accordingly.
With respect to increased comfort asking questions in class, students verbalized that
many of their questions arose during lectures that felt rushed and resistant to stopping for
questions. Many students verbalized an aversion for the lectures. Trying to conceive of a new
structure for the course, I listed the four core course activities on the board and had students rate
them from most important to least important by a show of hands. The highest rated activities
below got the most votes:
1. Personal Projects
2. Labs
3. Meditation
4. Lectures
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Even though the lectures had taken us the most time to prepare, they were the least motivating to
the students. As a result of this class discussion, we deprioritized lectures by implementing a
15-min time limit, truncating them, and removing wordy slides. However, we also decided to
keep lectures in the curriculum for a specific purpose: exposure to new ideas. Many students
played volleyball. I likened lectures to setting up a volleyball and creativity to spiking it. As a
class, we agreed that both had some value.
Allison and I also made personal statements about the importance of asking questions.
We stated that research showed that, perhaps unintuitively, people interpret the person asking
questions as being smart. We stated that our primary intention was to serve them: if they were
lost, we were losing. We also spent some time role playing asking questions, and discussing
some of the barriers to asking questions and how to overcome those. Lastly, I attempted to build
more verbalization into class exercises. When learning about passing parameters into methods, I
acted out a personality while students shouted out traits: “high-pitched voice!” “superficial!”
“heartbroken!” they shouted. The students were delighted to watch me devolve into a blithering
mess while they puppeteered my improv. This exercise gave the students reason to speak and put
them in the driver’s seat within a fun context where I was the one being goofy and ridiculous.
Personal creative projects were designed to give students autonomy, and that activity was
clearly the class favorite. We brainstormed ways to increase student autonomy in other aspects
of the class. One idea was to make a list of what students wanted to cover at the beginning of
each class. That way, teachers could steer the material into more relevant areas of the student’s
life. If the teacher could not address the area, we asked if another student could. In this way, we
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developed time for students to teach each other. In figure 20, an older student teaches a younger
student how to make a piecemeal graph.
Figure 20: Student teaching piecemeal graph. Source: Atley Loughridge
Another idea was to use meditation time to go outside and capture inspiring material for
personal projects. This was a great amendment to the start of each class. It took more time to go
outside, but the outdoor creative activity added focus to our remaining time together. Figure 21
shows how our roadmap slide changed after the mid curriculum assessment feedback. Figure 22
(left) shows a photo that one student took during an observational meditation outside. The
student then used this photo in their personal project as a texture.
Figure 21: Curriculum Intro slides A and B. Source: Karen McMullan
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Figure 22: Photo taken by student for their game (left), student game using remixed assets from
Palimpsest the VR game (right). Source: Students
Following the mid curriculum assessment feedback, the class took on a much more
creative and collaborative tone. Rather than separating programming and design curriculum,
Allison and I made more of an effort to seamlessly integrate them. Rather than labs taking the
entire class, the second half of the class was reserved for freely directed creative time. We had
always planned to make our VR game assets available for students to remix in their personal
projects. This was a core tenant of “palimpsest” as a theme: students overwriting our work. But
Allison added new exercises around students making, finding and integrating their own creative
assets into their projects.
Figure 23: Students. Source: Grace Almodóvar
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Grace had the idea to fold student personal projects into a festival of games at the end of
the year. Her announcement was heard with a combination of nervousness and excitement. We
extended the curriculum from eight to twelve weeks in order to support student projects for the
festival. While we did not force students to participate, and we were careful not to pressure them
to show work before they were ready, working towards a possible showcase for classmates,
teachers, friends, and family was a fantastic way to focus the second half of the Palimpsest
Program .
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Figure 24: Student Showcase In Library. Source: Atley Loughridge
Chapter 4: Integrating My Takeaways Within Myself
Within the scope of our thesis year, for me, Palimpsest embodied two primary
integrations. The first was integrating the development cycle of a VR game with that of a
highschool curriculum. To some degree, the entire development team experienced that strain.
The second integration was specific to my experience. I had to integrate my motivations for
beginning the project with what was needed from me in order to complete it. I had to inch my
way out of my perspective into that of my target audience.
When assessing what appears to be progress or a setback, what I am most interested in
are positive and negative feedback loops. Progress is not linear. Many confusing days may pass
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before they yield evidence of progress. Differently, positive and negative feedback loops are
omnipresent. The barometer is not the success of the project, but the team member's power to
continue work on the project. At any given time, I can ask myself, “Am I in my wise mind? Am
I ready to make a wise decision? Is my work coming from the right place?” If the answers are
yes, then why? Tracking the events that yield positive and negative responses to these types of
questions can help reveal the positive and negative feedback loops that are either sustaining or
eroding my ability to do good work on a project over time.
An exciting element of this way of thinking is that, with every interpersonal interaction,
one can contribute to the positive or negative feedback loops in another person’s experience.
4.1 Burning The Candle At Both Ends
Many professors dissuaded Allison and I from doing both a VR game and a highschool
curriculum for our thesis project. We both loved VR, and we essentially felt it was unfair that we
could not reach our target audience with VR simply because our target audience did not have
access to VR headsets. Both Allison and I had encountered VR for the first time at an academic
lab. We felt that making a high school engineering curriculum was the best way to reach our
target audience with the project we wanted to make. If there were challenges in carving this path
from VR to our audience, we wanted to understand them, even if that meant failing at producing
a cohesive, polished thesis by our academic deadlines.
The primary positive feedback loop to marrying the VR game and the high school
curriculum was that the game inspired our students to code, and the students inspired us to
create. One student, who I’ll refer to by the fictional name of Alyssa, exemplifies this pattern
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well. Early on in the program, Alyssa could be found in our classroom either giggling with her
classmate (who I’ll call Kat) or with her head laid in her forearm on the desk. “She’s
introverted,” Kat explained. For Alyssa’s game exercise, she proposed a platformer about trying
to reach the bathroom through their fortress-like highschool. She fought a smile as she described
locked doors, long hallways, five stories of steps, tempting water fountains, and potential
outcomes of relief or devastation. As a teacher, it can be intimidating to attempt to reach a mind
with such clarity of vision and convince them to that your material is actually worth their time.
Figure 25: Student playing VR game (left) and coding their own game (right). Source: Allison Comrie
Around the third class, we brought the VR game of Palimpsest into the classroom and
asked the students to playtest it and give us feedback. Alyssa wanted to try it. Kat set Alyssa up
in the headset, ran the game, and intermittently tickled Alyssa as she adapted to her virtual
surroundings. When the Sentients approached, Alyssa punched. (Kat ducked.) When the
giantess picked Alyssa up, Alyssa screamed. When the Capacitor-Fish approached, Alyssa
reached as far as her body could stretch. I’d never noticed how tall she was.
When Alyssa took off the headset, her behavior as a student changed. I wouldn’t argue
that she was paying better attention, because I well know how much easier it can be for me to
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listen with my eyes closed and cheek laid on a cool desk. I know how much easier it is to attend
a class with a friendly face to look forward to. I would argue that I felt more connected to Alyssa
after she played our game. Instead of her hair poking out of her hoodie, I saw her eyes. Instead
of responding to code exercises with phrases like, “I can’t do it,” I saw her pressing on with
whatever parts of the Unity game engine that interested her. Once she figured out how to bring a
humanoid figure into the scene, she was hooked. Alyssa was motivated to create. In my view,
the VR game was evidence that code could lead to creating cool stuff, and that Allison and I
knew the way. Alyssa stayed in our program for the full twelve weeks and showed her final
project at the highschool showcase. Amidst the crowds of students, teachers and parents who
attended, Kat drew in playtesters with enticing descriptions of Alyssa’s work while Alyssa
watched… and smiled.
A candle burning at both ends is a candle over twice as bright. The stick held parallel to
the ground forces the flames to burn perpendicular to the wick. Melted wax drips automatically
to the ground, and there’s nothing to stop the flames from burning as quickly as they can.
Simultaneously implementing two projects with wildly different needs feels like going from
putting out one fire to another. Neither Allison or I knew how to code when we began our MFA
program. In a way, that was our bond. I cannot speak for Allison, but I spent my years in
graduate school feeling considerably less skilled than my classmates. Presentation days only
underscored how far behind the curve I was. The curse of being unskilled is that it is so hard to
scope. You don’t know enough to know what your options are, or why one route will take
twenty times more time than another. Being behind the curve of your group skill-wise is not a
negative feedback loop in of itself. To complete the loop, you also have to be isolated from help.
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Isolation from a resource depends on two forces: movement away from dependencies and
movement towards dependents. In this case, the resource is someone who could have helped me
solve or avoid technical problems with the VR game and high school curriculum. I avoided
resources because, by my third year, I essentially interpreted them as threats. I will explain this
more deeply in a later chapter. Let me suffice to say that getting help programming entails
sitting near to someone while you share a computer. I’d enough experiences with that resource
demeaning, assaulting, or otherwise sapping my lifeforce to know that I could not afford a
negative experience in my thesis year. I could not afford the shock, the days of fog, the night of
tears, the spiral of hopelessness, the adjusting to new meds, the sleeping through morning
classes, or the resurgence of fear. I had students half my age depending on me. I chose to tackle
technical bugs late into the night at our thesis space (I couldn’t afford a separate VR setup at
home — another vulnerability) when I could feel safe, and focus, alone. Working out technical
bugs alone is slow work. What computer science teachers don’t tell you is that most of the job is
experience. You become a stronger programmer with exposure to new types of problems.
Having ten people to ping with a question means you are ten times more likely to transcend an
impasse in twenty minutes rather than two weeks. Technology is a team sport. Isolating myself
from help was a great disadvantage for the project. I was the technical director. But at the time,
it seemed the lesser of two evils.
The opposing force necessary to lock in this negative loop is to commit your time to
dependents. This part has to do with caring. Being isolated from a supportive community makes
you care more about the project. The project becomes your main source of self worth. Rather
than asking your loved ones to love you, you’re asking your players to. Rather than devoting
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your energy to restorative activities like cooking and exercise, you devote all of your energy to a
computer. Playtesting projects like this is more like putting your soul on trial than playing a
game. The people who stick around to support you don’t do so because it’s fun or successful.
They do so because they care about what you care about. Many of our (unpaid) teammates were
women who had, like Allison and I, missed out on early high school learning experiences with
technology. I was the most experienced programmer on the team, and that made everything
harder. Because I cared, I was also spending half of my time on the high school program. I was
trying to fix the problem that had produced my situation at the same time that I was trying to
claw my way out of it. Because I cared, I could not hear the advice from anyone who could have
helped me. It was much too easy for me to rationalize that they didn’t understand me, or my
project, because I could not imagine them caring even ten percent as much as I did. Because I
cared way too much.
And the world is unjust. And that injustice stokes the caring. During the eight years I
spent as an actor, waitress, bartender, bike taxi, busker, production assistant, and camera
operator, I worked with black people everyday. Allison is the second black person to graduate
from the Interactive Media & Games Division MFA program in thirteen years of graduates. At
the time of our thesis, there was one black person on the faculty of our department. I didn’t need
statistics to motivate me to spend half my time developing the high school curriculum. All I had
to do was set foot on campus.
That said, I was barely a strong enough programmer to pull off the thesis that I did. The
situation was a feedback loop — a negative one. Feeling isolated at USC motivated me to try to
be a better resource to my highschool students. Seeing the obvious potential of my students
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made me even more frustrated with the lack of diversity amongst the strongest programmers at
USC. But going from positioning myself as a resource at the highschool and scorning my
potential resources at USC burned my energy from both ends.
I’m not saying we should have chosen between the VR game and the high school
curriculum. I’m saying that “Scope down” is the beginning of the conversation. The rest of the
conversation is about debunking the mental myths about why scoping down is not an option: “I
can do it alone, you just don’t believe in me,” “the world needs this project more than it needs
me,” “no one can understand my goals, so there’s no point in discussing why I cannot scope
down,” “polish is for people who don’t care enough to reach for more,” etc.
The sad truth is that your work will go nowhere without polish. There is no getting
around that. Independent games is a rough industry. If your work does not ooze ease and
elegance in some form, if it does not hang neatly at the center of a simple contextualizing frame,
if it’s not surrounded with air for your player to breath, if it smells of blood and sweat and tears
when it arrives in a stranger’s inbox, you will not get a response. It’s not because they don’t
care. It’s because the market is so rough that they cannot afford to take a chance on something
that smells desperate and feels less than fully baked. Making games is brutal. You need 50% of
the development cycle for polish just to clean up the stink. If you’re trying to make something
your care for desperately, make that 75% of what you envision the development cycle to be.
This isn’t music or film. There’s no Jackson Pollock of games. Players need to do something
correctly in order to eat your food. Serving medicine in a file on the internet, without you there
in person to sell it, requires battlesque strategies.
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To new game designers, I recommend being committed at the finish and non committal in
the beginning. Don’t bother touching code until you have a sense of your release strategy. Don’t
let yourself get attached until the project is running on its own. It shouldn’t just feel inevitable, it
should feel easy. Even then, especially with projects you care about, you have to stay detached
and cold enough to be strategic. You have to be able to set boundaries with the dependents
you’re bringing on and make demands of your dependencies. You have to override your
impulses to give and isolate with the knowledge that doing so spells failure. If you get too
impassioned, if you start crying in front of people, go home, go to bed, read a book made of ink
and paper and don’t come back to school until you’ve set up a ninety minute meeting with an
experienced advisor who you trust to pave you a pathway out. Then do what they say. Pack half
of your project up and put it on the shelf for another year. You’ll make other projects, so long as
you’re there to make them, and they’ll be better than this one. Remember that the candle is you.
4.2 Shifting Priorities With A Shifting Context
The most difficult day for me on Palimpsest was March 14, 2017. Karen, Grace and I
regrouped at the high school for our first class following the launch at USC. As described in
chapter three section six, Grace had given me straightforward feedback to include a roadmap,
check-ins for understanding, and a vocabulary sheet with definitions. I had (wrongly) resisted
her feedback. At our meeting preceding our first class at the high school, Grace suggested that I
and the curriculum we’d planned take a back seat until we integrated her feedback. I actually
rolled my eyes. That eye roll nearly spelled the end of the Palimpsest Program . Grace was the
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student advocate. She recruited the students for the program. She had discussed their hopes and
fears with the students, and I’d disrespected her.
Grace barred me from teaching that class until I changed my attitude. At the time, I was
stunned. Karen began teaching the second class instead of me while I watched. And I learned
something. I learned that my inability to swallow my pride and be effective in that moment was
my problem.
My reasons for wanting more nonbinary people of color and trans/cis women of color in
computer science were personal. I felt like a lone woman in CS courses at NYU and USC. If
there were other women in the course, they did not seem to want to associate with me. Although
I was a good student on paper, in computer science courses I struggled. When called on during
class or while taking tests, I experienced terror. My voice and hands shook so much that I would
cry with frustration at my inability to speak clearly or write legibly. After several years of this, I
was eventually diagnosed with Complex PTSD as a result of Sexual Assault (SA). It had been
many years since my traumatic experiences. Sitting in classrooms packed with men was
triggering to me.
Interestingly, PTSD has only been a diagnosis for twenty five years. Dr. Van Der Kolk
describes working at the Veterans Administration before the existence of PTSD as a diagnosis:
In those early days at the VA, we labeled our veterans with all sorts of
diagnoses—alcoholism, substance abuse, depression, mood disorder, even
schizophrenia—and we tried every treatment in our textbooks. But for all our efforts it
became clear that we were actually accomplishing very little. The powerful drugs we
prescribed often left the men in such a fog that they could barely function. When we
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encouraged them to talk about the precise details of a traumatic event, we often
inadvertently triggered a full-blown flashback, rather than helping them resolve the issue.
Many of them dropped out of treatment because we were not only failing to help but also
sometimes making things worse. (Kolk 20)
Reaching a wall in trying to get the VA to recognize PTSD, Dr. Kolk took a position at the
Massachusetts Mental Health Center, a Harvard teaching hospital. There he recognized what
would be the impetus for developing Complex PTSD as a diagnosis. Of psychiatry’s
understanding of incest in 1982, Dr. Van Der Kolk writes:
I was particularly struck by how many female patients spoke of being sexually abused as
children. This was puzzling, as the standard textbook of psychiatry at the time stated that
incest was extremely rare in the United States, occurring about once in every million
women. Given that there were then only about one hundred million women living in the
United States, I wondered how forty seven, almost half of them, had found their way to
my office in the basement of the hospital. (Kolk 19)
Dr. Kolk goes on to describe the extent of trauma in the United States at the time of writing his
book in 2015:
While about a quarter of the soldiers who serve in war zones are expected to develop
serious posttraumatic problems, the majority of Americans experience a violent crime at
some time during their lives, and more accurate reporting has revealed that twelve million
women in the United States have been victims of rape. More than half of all rapes occur
in girls below age fifteen. For many people the war begins at home: Each year about
three million children in the United States are reported as victims of child abuse and
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neglect. One million of these cases are serious and credible enough to force local child
protective services or the courts to take action. In other words, for every soldier who
serves in a war zone abroad, there are ten children who are endangered in their own
homes. This is particularly tragic, since it is very difficult for growing children to recover
when the source of terror and pain is not enemy combatants but their own caretakers.
(Kolk 20)
Reading this, it is unsurprising that I or anyone might be triggered by a computer science
classroom packed with men watching pictures of pornstars on the blackboard in order to
understand image dithering. It is also unsurprising that this environment would provide
opportunity for me to live out repeats of my trauma.
Research has shown that a victim of trauma’s pattern reflects their survival options at the
original traumatic event. Human responses to trauma include fight, flight, or freeze. If a victim
was restrained during their traumatic event and unable to move, then they may have dissociated
and frozen up in order to protect themselves from the event. That victim would then be more
likely to respond to triggers with a freeze response later on. Sadly, research shows that the
victim is more likely to experience trauma in the future due to desensitized fear responses, belief
that the trauma was their fault, and a host of other reasons that are beyond the scope of this paper.
What I want to describe is the vulnerable population in CS courses — the population I squarely
belong to — and my prospects of success in the field.
My point can best be made with an example. Late one Saturday night during my first
term at USC, I was working on programming an assignment for one of my core classes for my
MFA. I had been programming for a year already, but it was clear that I was one of the worst
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coders in my cohort of fifteen classmates. I desperately wanted to progress and prove my worth
on a team. I was working through a triple four loop at about 11:30 pm in the MxR Studio when a
classmate appeared at the door. I needed the studio to look at my work in VR, and I worked
there on the weekends when the headsets were free. I was reluctant to let my classmate in. I had
a key to the lab and he did not. But I had been struggling for several hours, and he promised to
help me. I had an inkling that something else might be going on, but I had also become slightly
desensitized to men in computer science being awkward around me. Not only was I a woman
and older than most classmates, but I wasn’t good at computer science initially. I wasn’t a star
example of female empowerment. I was struggling and scared. If I needed help on a computer
science problem, I had to ask the one person I was essentially wired to fear — a man. Hoping to
overcome this fear and improve as a coder, I let this young man into the lab to help me.
He sat behind and slightly to the side of me as I worked. After some time, he began
feeling my ribs, kissing my shoulders, smelling my neck, and otherwise fondling my body. I
froze up and continued coding. This went on for about forty five minutes. After I’d finished my
work, I whispered, “Why are you doing this?” I packed up my things and left him alone in the
lab. I later learned that he was angry with me for being “a tease.” Our interpretations of that
night could not have been more different. This event was preceded and followed by other
instances of computer science classmates pretending to help or tutor me when in fact they ended
up making a pass at me. I’ve been sent graphic messages and images and called disgusting
names. These experiences, combined with the constant questioning of my capability as a coder
by teachers and mentors, lead to my survival tactic of isolating myself from any potential
resource which I perceived to be a potential threat.
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My long term plan was to teach computer science to more diverse groups of youth in
order to make the field itself more livable for me. I began teaching Code Camp, a once-a-week
after-school program for whomever wanted to attend. After six sessions of Code Camp among
various age groups, I realized that the group I most wanted to reach was women of color. Code
Camp had taught me that any age group could learn to code, but that the most effective
classrooms held students of similar ages. Because of this, and our desire to impact student
choice of a major in college, Palimpsest focused on high schoolers.
Upon entering our Palimpsest Program as a teacher, my mindset was that of a woman
who had remained in this field long enough to teach by a narrow margin. In developing the
Palimpsest Program , I was pursuing a safe space for myself . However backwards that sounds,
that was my starting mindset. I had to go from there to realizing that, within the context of our
classroom, I was the person who could most easily slip into the role of the oppressor.
In order to effectively hear and integrate Grace’ feedback, I had to accept that, regardless
of how I saw myself, the only thing that mattered in this classroom was how my students and
collaborators saw me. As the teacher of a curriculum I helped design, I held the power.
Consequently, I am the one who needs to seek consent from the students to go on this
educational journey with me. In order to receive consent, I need to recognize the signs of
non-consensual classroom experiences: furrowed brows, quiet voices, and concerned student
advocates like Grace. Essentially, I had to shift my focus from myself to them.
In order to shift my focus, I redoubled my efforts to meet my needs outside of the
classroom so that I could attempt to meet the needs of my students in the classroom. Meeting my
needs meant getting more sleep, eating more nutritious food, taking a day off a week, and
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committing myself to therapy at Cognitive Behavioral Therapy California. If I completed less
lesson preparation for the high school class, but walked into the classroom with an authentically
warm attitude that was ready to greet the students and hear them, then that was the right tradeoff.
Marientina Gotsis has helped me understand this process as “mindful integration.”
This was only dawning on me as I sat in that first class at the high school watching Karen
teach. From the outside looking in, one might conclude that I was too weighed down with my
own “issues” or “baggage” to serve a community that I know little about. I don’t want you to
make that conclusion. Trying to figure out how you can be useful to a community you don’t
belong to is illuminating. Grace told me, “Learn from them. They know things that you don’t.”
In releasing my grip on the knowledge that I’d fought so hard to acquire, I opened my heart to
new relationships and new perspectives of the world. At the start of one class I asked them what
they wanted to change about the world, and if learning to code could help. Their concerns were
about the environment, equal opportunity, and beauty. We had to acknowledge that maybe
coding couldn’t help. Maybe what I was putting forth with the 1’s and 0’s was irrelevant to their
paths in life. But maybe not. In my view, this was one of the best discussions I lead with the
class.
Personal motivations to attempt something are important. They are the flame beneath the
pot of water. Motivation can carry one’s commitment to a task over long stretches of time and
difficult transformations of self. Motivations arise from our vulnerabilities, and if handled well,
they can strengthen us and the communities around us. Our vulnerability in one context can be
our strength in another. The challenge is to shift your priorities with your context.
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CBT has taught me that my priorities fall into three buckets: objectives, relationship, and
self-respect. As an aspiring programmer at USC, my priority was usually maintaining my
self-respect. My second priority was doing a good job, and my third priority was maintaining
positive relationships with computer science classmates and teachers. Within the context of
being the oppressed, my default stance was drawing boundaries: don’t touch me, don’t insult me,
don’t talk down to me, don’t underestimate me. I prioritized my self-respect because that is what
the context called for.
As a teacher in a South Central LA high school, my priorities had to change. In order to
avoid being oppressive, I had to prioritize my relationship with the students. If I lost their
consent and trust, I’d lost everything I came there to do. Meanwhile, I’d based our curriculum
on half the content of a college level computer science 101 course. I did this to prepare them for
success in the field and to help them avoid the feelings of fear that paralyzed me. I pushed
Allison and Grace and Karen to create four times the amount of curriculum content that we could
possibly cover in the time we had. Essentially, I was too hard on the students. That was evident
in their mid curriculum assessment form results (Appendix F), in which more than a third of the
students reported feeling uncomfortable asking questions in class. I’d recreated the power
dynamics that I was trying to undo.
In order to prioritize my relationship with my students, I had to demote my external
objective of getting through all of the curriculum to second place. In order to make myself
available to the students’ feedback, I had to stop trying to defend my self-respect. That was a
habit I’d picked up at NYU and USC that was no longer useful to me in the high school
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classroom. After I made this shift in priorities halfway through the course, the Palimpsest
Program improved.
“That’s the juice,” Grace told me. She was describing to me how a student had been
arguing with her. “If they’re quiet and compliant, you’re failing. If they’re asking questions,
you’re doing ok. Shouting questions is better. But arguing with me, in my class? That’s the
juice.” Her eyes lit up as she smiled, delighting in the memory of her student’s defiance for the
sake of clarity and understanding.
4.3 Protect Stories
There is still little narrative in the VR game of Palimpsest , but Allison and I have been
writing and rewriting the narrative for this past year and a half. The story we initially connected
on was that of an overprotective mother inflicting her fears onto her daughter in order to teach
her to survive life’s challenges. In this case, the player was the daughter and the giantess was the
mother. Both Allison and I deeply connected to this narrative.
When we began teaching the high school program though, we were inspired by how our
students worked together to write about the main character and giantess as sisters. When the
students broke off to make their own personal projects, we wrote the story as a dialogue between
the main character and her inner self. When Allison got a job and I attempted to finish
Palimpsest on my own, I wrote the story as a programmer who was being assaulted while coding,
and dissociating. I wrote about the main character freezing up and projecting her spirit into the
world of Palimpsest —- her coding project — in order to work out how to escape her real life
assault.
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There is a tradeoff when the story is vague. So long as they can see themselves in the
main character’s role, playtesters and the game designers alike can more easily project their
meaning into a more vague story architecture. But those who cannot see themselves in the main
character’s role are lost. While Allison and I regularly play games starring cisgender white men,
cisgender white men are not as used to playing characters that do not match their identity.
Additionally, this group of playtesters tended to become anxious about resolving the uncertainty
they felt. One cisgender white man playtester took off the headset and asked me, “What does it
mean?” I explained that the game was currently up to his interpretation. He asked again, “Yeah
I know, but just tell me what I am supposed to think. What does it mean? Who is the girl?”
“Which girl?” I asked. “The girl, the one in the costume.” “The main character?” I asked.
“Yeah her.” I said, “She’s you.” And then I wondered about that.
She’s not him. And she’s not me, either. She’s not a blank, lovable, gender neutral
cartoon designed for as many people as possible to identify with. She’s a black teen woman.
She does have a story, but it’s not mine. I’ve come to believe that it would be unethical for me to
inject my story into Palimpsest . Palimpsest — both the VR game and the high school program
— is about the personal transformation of a black woman using technology to thrive in a
challenging technological environment. Not only am I not black, and not from Los Angeles, but
my experience with personal transformation is indelibly tied to trauma caused by sexual
violence. While I have experienced my technological environment as sexually violent, injecting
that narrative into Palimpsest would be destructive to our design goals. My experience could
actually needlessly frighten young women of color from studying computer science.
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Palimpsest is Allison’s story. My only current goal for the narrative of our VR game is to
be the midwife for her vision. Our primary challenge is scheduling, as we are both working full
time and our efforts on Palimpsest as yet do not translate to food or rent or, in my case, even a
steady job.
4.4 Limits And Revelations
I will underscore that the antagonist to story in games is scope. Ten years ago, I’d
dropped out of a film program in Southeast Asia to teach middle schooler students in Manila
how to make films on their cell phones. The program was open to all, but only girls stayed in the
course. The week the girls wrote the stories they wanted to film, they shared with me multi page
manuscripts handwritten in small print on single spaced lined paper. We then began the painful
work of reading them in full and choosing the single paragraph that they would choose to film.
With games, I would shrink that buffer to a sentence. If the story of your game can be
told in the title, you’re in the right zone. The curse of being of a less supported minority in the
games industry is you have more to say and less skill to say it. Writing is editing. Design by
omission. For the impassioned minority newcomer to games, I advise taking an hour each
morning to write the song of your heart, to code the fragments of your dreams, and carefully
catalogue these snippets for a later date. When it comes to coding something that you hope the
games community will understand, tackle one word: a feeling.
For us, “palimpsest” began as the feeling of making difficult choices within known
constraints. Limited resources required people to etch out the writing on a tablet in order to
inscribe something new in its place. For me, this resourcefulness mirrored the feeling of having
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this one mind, and only twenty four hours in each day, within this one life, to live. To write
something new, you must first make space. You must try to erase what was there before. Let it
go. The more space you make, the more centrally it’s located in your life, the more people will
see your focus. The duelling counter thought is that the past cannot be changed. Nothing can be
entirely erased. Nothing is lost. We are a shifting focus. “Palimpsest” is this shifting feeling of
attachment and detachment, of reaching out and letting go. It is a power struggle. It’s an ethical
struggle. On what will you spend your precious time on Earth? True to form, Allison and I
chose a difficult word to express in a game. In the event that we never finish it, I’m relieved to
have unloaded my thoughts here.
4.5 Where Playtesters Fall Short
Playtesters will tell you if you’ve expressed what you intended to express. They will not
tell you what to express. For that, you need a coven: a close-knit group of individuals who, for
whatever reason, have invested in you and all of your flaws and beauty. These are the people
who can read the whole story on your face. They require little explanation. They are proficient
in their own craft, you trust them, and they can effectively convey to you the things you do not
want to hear. These are the people with whom you share all your shelved experiments, your
flash in the pan ideas, your deepest design fears and desires. These people are trustworthy with
your secrets. Process media with your coven. Play games together, watch playthroughs, share
articles, and surgically decide what to focus on. Building your coven takes time. Members need
to earn your trust. This is a great place to practice building healthy trusting relationships.
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4.6 Branding And Framing
Our students so clearly map to our protagonist that they do not need her to have a fully
fleshed out story in the VR game. For our students, the core narrative is the trajectory of their
lives. Each class they attend is marked by tangling with technology in order to thrive. Our VR
game does not have to be good, finished, or even existent for it to effectively function as
branding for the curriculum. Branding serves to recruit program participants and communicate
the program tenants.
Initially, I’d thought we would remix code from the VR game to flesh out the high school
curriculum, but this idea did not work at all. Our game’s source code was too complex for us to
debug, let alone our students. What we ended up doing is remixing the art assets from the VR
game and sprinkling those throughout the curriculum. Concept art of our protagonist punctuates
our slides. Music from our score and characters from our cast make delightful appearances in
our curriculum exercises and labs. The poster for Palimpsest is the face of student binders. It's
possible these artifacts carry more meaning within the context of student effort to learn computer
science than they do within the game itself. Currently, the VR game serves as a container for our
goal: students using technology to thrive. It is like a mascot or mantra. The VR game is a
powerful suggestion.
Branding also serves to attract potential supporters. I prefer branding the Palimpsest
Program with illustrations of a fictional character created by the program’s founders rather than
photos of real students, or work made by real students.
Work that attempts to benefit a community poses the risk of framing that community as
being in need of said benefit. Taking pictures of our students coding might imply to the viewer
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that the subject needed our service in order to code at a computer, which is not true. An alternate
approach might be to showcase what the student created with code. But this puts undue pressure
on the student to process new material and perform at the same time - pressure that is counter to
learning, and often results in experts propping up student projects behind the scenes for the sake
of a photo opportunity.
External-facing marketing material not for the viewer who "gets it," but the one who
doesn't: the busy investor who needs a bright shiny object to appeal to social good tech blogs as
evidence of corporate social responsibility. Instead of serving up our students as the unwitting
subject of disenfranchised framing, we are serving up the fruits of our own labor. Allison and I
have taken years to process digital art and coding course material and now we are ready to
perform. Our protagonist is designed to represent our students as we see them: the hero who the
viewer needs to heal our broader technological culture. Activist Lila Watson credits these words
and meaning to Aboriginal activists group in Queensland in the 1970’s:
If you have come to help me, don’t waste your time. But if you have come because your
liberation is bound up with mine, let us work together. (Lilla Watson 2018)
Our students — their mere occupation of technological spaces — is in of itself a heroic resource
for the future of our increasingly digital existence. When VR game imagery is used to market
our high school program, that is what I intend for it to say.
4.7 The Future Of The Palimpsest Program
The VR game aside, there are a number of directions the Palimpsest Program could go
from here. Our curriculum is composed of traditional computer science course materials
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(lectures, labs, exercises) within a teaching framework for tailoring the classroom experience to
the students. During the pilot program within our thesis year, we developed the course materials
and framework. The next step would be to use our learnings to iterate on these elements. We
could design a formal research study to test our teaching strategies. We could release a
curriculum package online for teachers. We could license our framework and take a fee to run
workshops or programming. Or we could simply use what we have to try to develop an online
hub for aspiring developers who fit our target audience. A great example of this is Daniel
Shiffman’s processing.org, which hosts a visual programming language. Visitors can download
the coding environment as a free app. The online site holds numerous tutorials labelled with
their difficulty level. Tutorials are a concise text post with code, pictures, video, and example
where relevant. The site also has an examples section where community members post their
creations and code. Palimpsest could pursue making a storified version of this online hub for
making games in Unity.
Going from a face to face interaction to an interaction online is difficult. An in-person
guide can clarify so much confusion. Making our curriculum usable for teachers and students
finding it online will take a sustained effort. Due to the inaccessibility of VR, we should redo the
curriculum for a pc experience. Coding in C# for Unity has a markedly steeper learning curve
than coding in processing. For the online route, it may be better to redo our work for
GameMaker Studio or Construct, which are more friendly to new game designers.
Whatever the direction of our development, you can find it by visiting
https://palimpsestvr.com/ .
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Appendices
Appendix A: RITE Analysis of Palimpsest VR game
96
Appendix B1: Internal Review Board Application
97
Appendix B2: Internal Review Board Application
98
Appendix B3: Internal Review Board Application
99
Appendix B4: Internal Review Board Application
100
Appendix B5: Internal Review Board Application
101
Appendix B6: Internal Review Board Application
102
Appendix B7: Internal Review Board Application
103
Appendix C: Internal Review Board Application Approval
104
Appendix D1: Curriculum Youth Assent Parental Permission
105
Appendix D2: Curriculum Youth Assent Parental Permission
106
Appendix D3: Curriculum Youth Assent Parental Permission
107
Appendix D4: Curriculum Youth Assent Parental Permission
108
Appendix E1: Mid Curriculum Assessment Questions
109
Appendix E2: Mid Curriculum Assessment Questions
110
Appendix F1: Mid Curriculum Assessment Form Results
111
Appendix F2: Mid Curriculum Assessment Form Results
112
Appendix F3: Mid Curriculum Assessment Form Results
113
Appendix G1: Field Notes for March 7 Launch
114
Appendix G2: Field Notes for March 7 Launch
115
Appendix H1: Programming Curriculum Overview
116
Appendix H2: Programming Curriculum Overview
117
Appendix H3: Programming Curriculum Overview
118
Appendix H4: Programming Curriculum Overview
119
Appendix H5: Programming Curriculum Overview
120
Appendix I1: Curriculum Vocabulary
121
Appendix I2: Curriculum Vocabulary
122
Appendix I3: Curriculum Vocabulary
123
Appendix J1: Programming Curriculum Lecture, “3D Space”
124
Appendix J2: Programming Curriculum Lecture, “3D Space”
125
Appendix J3: Programming Curriculum Lecture, “3D Space”
126
Appendix J4: Programming Curriculum Lecture, “3D Space”
127
Appendix J5: Programming Curriculum Lecture, “3D Space”
128
Appendix J6: Programming Curriculum Lecture, “3D Space”
129
Appendix K1: Programming Curriculum Exercise, “3D Space”
130
Appendix K2: Programming Curriculum Exercise, “3D Space”
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Loughridge, Atley S.
(author)
Core Title
Palimpsest: shifting the culture of computing
School
School of Cinematic Arts
Degree
Master of Fine Arts
Degree Program
Interactive Media
Publication Date
12/07/2018
Defense Date
12/06/2018
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
Computer Science,education,Games,interaction design,intersectionality,kyriarchy,OAI-PMH Harvest,post traumatic stress disorder,Sexual assault,virtual reality
Format
application/pdf
(imt)
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Gotsis, Marientina (
committee chair
), Lemarchand, Richard (
committee member
), Watson, Jeff (
committee member
), Wixon, Dennis (
committee member
)
Creator Email
atleyl@gmail.com
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-111374
Unique identifier
UC11675691
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etd-Loughridge-7001.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-111374 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-Loughridge-7001.pdf
Dmrecord
111374
Document Type
Thesis
Format
application/pdf (imt)
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Loughridge, Atley S.
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
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The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
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Repository Location
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Tags
education
interaction design
intersectionality
kyriarchy
post traumatic stress disorder
virtual reality