Simulating Future Histories The NAU Solar System Simulation and Mars Settlement
Originally published in Anthropology & Education Quarterly
Spring 1995 Vol. 26(1):95-104
Copyright 1995, American Anthropological Association, Dr. Reed D.
Riner, and Jen Clodius.
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SIMULATING FUTURE HISTORIES: THE NAU SOLAR SYSTEM SIMULATION & MARS SETTLEMENT
_________________________________________________________________
by Reed D. Riner (1)
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, AZ
and Jennifer A. Clodius (2)
University of Wisconsin
Madison, WI
_________________________________________________________________
SIMULATING FUTURE HISTORIES: THE NAU SOLAR SYSTEM & MARS SETTLEMENT
The authors and their colleagues on eleven other campuses are engaged
in leading teams of students through the fifth iteration of the NAU
(Northern Arizona University) Solar System Simulation (3). This is a
classroom based role-playing simulation in which the teams of students
build working models of communities and work-sites, some situated
off-Earth, in an historically plausible future Solar System. (We will
have more to say about what constitutes 'historic plausibility' later
in this article.) The 'model- building' is done face-to-face in each
classroom, and also collaboratively among the teams of students
through the Internet. Students and faculty communicate with each other
through the Internet using a variety of communications formats,
including a Multiple-User Domain (MUD) program and E-mail.
This article describes, primarily from the location of the Mars
Settlement class at NAU, how the simulation is conducted, and what
pedagogical and anthropological premises are involved. It is our
contention that the pedagogical 'innovations', or alternatives, which
we have incorporated into the Solar System Simulation, are both
different from and complimentary to conventional instruction. The
simulation requires that students engage both halves of their brains,
using technology creatively and binding creativity to technological
feasibility.
At NAU we have been able to package a very unconventional course
within conventional administrative constraints. ANT 390 Cultural
Simulation: Mars Settlement is offered as 3cr.hr. lecture with a
1cr.hr. lab incorporated into the course which meets 14:20- 17:00 T/Th
in a spring semester that runs from mid-January through early May.
Usually EGR 390 Technological Simulation: Mars Settlement is offered
and scheduled concurrently; thus two rooms are available, so one can
be used as a break-out room. Both courses are designated 'writing
intensive' and are available for General Studies requirement and
Honors, as well as major/minor elective, credit. Students from all
undergraduate levels and from all majors may--and do--enroll. (Neville
and Riner 1993)
Northwest Passage is offered as a one-credit fieldwork adjunct to
courses in anthropology at the University of Dayton. The L-5
settlement is a one-credit addition to the Anthropology for the Future
course offered at Cabrillo College. Doug Raybeck's 14 person Halcyon
Mission to the Astroid belt met weekly as an upper-divison 3cr. hr.
anthropology elective course. The mission to the astroid Ceres was
organized within an honors course at Liberty High School, Issaquah,
Washington. On each campus the course, emulating a different site in
the future Solar System, has different pedagogical objectives,
depending on the faculty member and sponsoring department, and
different administrative constraints that need to be accommodated. On
each campus conventional packaging seems to have been easily adapted
to our unconventional course contents and collaboration.
Jim Funaro, leader of the L-5 team and founder of the annual CONTACT
Conferences where the idea for the Solar System Simulation was
conceived, argues that, "If you want to understand how something
works, build a working model of it." (Funaro 1991) If you want to
understand the workings of a socio-cultural system, build a working
model ... in which each individual site, and the supra-planetary
socio-cultural system of the future Solar System as a whole is a
plausible working model in which the builders are immersed. If you're
going to teach participant-observation and applied anthropology, have
students DO participant-observation and apply anthropology (Ericson
and Rice 1990). This, then, is one of the unique aspects of the Solar
System Simulation: rather than merely explaining how systems work by
taking them apart analytically, we ask students to actually build and,
to some extent, live in their models. Concurrently the team of faculty
members is modeling the team behaviors they expect of their students.
At the first meeting of the NAU Mars Settlement course we assemble all
of the students in a large room furnished with tables and chairs,
moveable adult-style furniture, and plenty of chalk-board and wall
space. With some ceremony, deliberately aping a rite of separation, we
close the door. We announce to the students, "You are the population
who has been selected to establish the first permanent settlement on
Mars. You are already en route in the mission ship. You will arrive in
parking orbit ready to land at the end of the fourth week of class. By
then you will have to have designed a plan for a community that will
be viable in the severe Martian environment. More than merely viable,
this must be a community that will be worth living in for you, and for
your children. You are going to have to work out scientifically and
historically plausible answers to the questions: when are you? why are
you here? who are you, and where have you come from? where are you
going to settle on Mars? and what are you going to do once you do
settle?" One student commented, "This is not a bogus problem, like the
problems are in so many other classes, with problems that are
obviously 'set-ups' and trivial."
The 'building' is not primarily the building of animated table-top
models; it is composing a plausible scenario and a set of rules to
direct the playing out of a viable and desirable community. Students
collaboratively build social structure(s), and play out the
consequences in a process of discovery. Immediately the students have
to organize themselves to analyze their common problem: how to survive
in a non-Earth environment. They must determine how to break the
problem into manageable parts and assign individual responsibilities
with commensurate authority for solving those parts, while maintaining
dialogue with other members of their community. The students must
devise a viable system of self-governance. (Graves and Graves 1987,
1985, Johnson, Johnson and Holubec 1986, Collier 1980, Johnson and
Johnson 1975) Another student has remarked on "never having
opportunity to make (to design) an organization that works; all the
student government organizations (on campus) are already organized for
us." In the longer range, this 'classroom organization' is carried
over into the Mars Settlement and played out in the model that
students describe in the text-based virtual reality, the Multiple-
User Domain (MUD) of SolSySim in the Internet.
Before making the jump to that frame of reference--into the MUD--we
want to make explicit some of the anthropology applied in our
pedagogy. Riner recalls the indelible impression left in his thinking
upon reading:
"Is it not ironical that in a planned society of controlled
workers given compulsory assignments, where religious expression
is suppressed, the press controlled, and all media communication
censored, where a puppet government is encouraged but denied any
real authority, where great attention is given to efficiency and
character reports, and attendance at cultural assemblies is
compulsory, where it is avowed that all will be administered to
each according to his abilities, and where those who flee are
tracked down, returned, and punished for trying to escape--in
short in the milieu of the typical large American secondary
school--we attempt to teach 'the democratic system'?"
(Van Norman 1968).
This comment was published when McLuhan's maxim 'the medium is the
message' was new and pervasive (McLuhan 1965). McLuhan's intent is
that actions speak louder than words, that deep-structure speaks
louder than surface structure. When the medium contradicts message,
when initiative and collaboration are exhorted in a classroom arranged
and organized in the traditional 19th century authoritarian,
industrial, instructional style, the result is not direct learning but
acute conflict (Bateson, Jackson, Haley and Weakland 1956, Bateson
1960a, 1960b, 1969). The message of the context is inculcated much
more indelibly than is the content of instruction. In contrast, the
message in our medium is that success will result from a diversity of
participants collaborating collegially and creatively in the solution
of common problems. We expect that 'work' in the future will be less
individual, competitive and convergent on a common end product, rather
that work will be more cooperative, collaborative and divergent to a
multiplicity of products (Hine, 1977). If the school experience is
intended to provide socio-cultural competency, especially future
socio-cultural competencies, then the classroom experience must model
the context in which those competencies will be employed. Therefore we
have 'deconstructed' the traditional classroom and the instructional
style curriculum in order to construct a futures-oriented pedagogical
experience.
Second, we have invited play rather than compelled work as the primary
motivating factor in this pedagogical situation (Riner 1978,
Csikszentmihalyi 1975, Bateson 1955, Huizinga 1950). The result has
been that students throw themselves into the simulation with such
energy and absorption that many have slighted, even dropped, other
classes. This is an embarrassing success.
Third, we stimulate students to think in multiple future tenses. In
each iteration the students have decided that the first permanent
settlement on Mars could feasibly be in the mid-2070's. From that date
they look back to the present and 'reconstruct' the events that led up
to their situation; this entails thinking holistically about all of
Earth's socio-cultural systems. And they look ahead at the future of
their Settlement; this entails sensitive consideration of the
continuity of past, through present, with future. Thinking
systematically about alternative, plausible futures has a strong
impact on all of one's thinking. The general character of this impact
has been written about by Polak (1961:49-50), Boulding (1956:125), and
Textor (1984:1) but has begun to be studied systematically only by
Rogers and Tough (1992) Thinking in a future context, as our students
do, adds a second tense to futures thinking, with additional general
'consciousness raising', but as yet unspecified, impacts on their
cognitive structures.
Finally, we emphasize model-building and problem solving. Some social
scientists are assessing socio-cultural systems as chaotic systems
(Riner 1991, Gleick 1987). Chaotic systems cannot be predicted, but
they can be modeled, and the models can be manipulated so the
player(s) can discover properties latent in the model. And models,
unlike societies, can be experimentally altered in search of preferred
results, problem solutions. This is important scientifically and
intellectually; it is equally important pragmatically, ethically, and
pedagogically. Ethics precludes experimentation with human
communities; human subjects legislation increasingly discourages
teaching students participant-observation by doing it. Simulation
students are immersed in a model of their own devising, and goaded by
assignments, to reflect critically on the implications which follow
from that model. Or, as another student observed, "This class isn't
really about Mars; the last thing that it's about is Mars! It's really
about organization and disorganization, and order, and apathy, and
solving problems, and how people do -and don't- work together, and
take risks, and make ethical decisions, and ...." until he ran out of
breath.
And all of the foregoing is reflected and reconstructed in the MUD
(4). The Multiple-User Domain is a kind of computer program that
enables several people to log in to a common account and chat with
each other 'on-line' by typing their utterances in turn. The unfolding
conversation scrolls up on the participant's screen looking like a
play script. In the version we use (written by a Mars alumnus),
players may partition their "cyberspace" environment into rooms,
connect the rooms with doors, write descriptions for the rooms and for
themselves, and create objects which they may then carry from room to
room. Players and objects may be assigned membership in groups, and
doors may be locked open and closed to members of specified groups.
All of these 'sets' and 'props' and selective locks are recorded in
the data base and so become more or less permanent parts of the text
environment. The syntax of players, rooms, exits, objects and groups
permits the parallel construction of very complicated models of social
systems.
The genre of MUD-type programs began as recreational environments.
We've taken a relatively low-tech, popular, "every-man's" sort of
virtual reality and turned it from recreational to pedagogical ends.
We are using it, successfully, to impact the cognitive development of
classrooms full of students. We believe that this methodology is
successful in part because the learning takes place in a variety of
cognitive domains simultaneously. Both technological and creative
skills are required and developed, as is evidenced by the inherent
qualities of working with and in the MUD database.
The 'text', that is the data base along with the program for its
manipulation, has the cumulative property of culture as records "of
and for behavior, .. as the product of action and the precursor to
future action" (Kroeber & Kluckhone 1952). The text also has the
'revisable' property, again like 'real' culture; players may erase
things they have constructed and put new features in their place. As
their creative and technological skills increase, students frequently
change or enhance their previous constructions. The original objects,
however, have made impacts on the surrounding space, and these impacts
remain as archaeological features in the simulation. Students, as a
consequence of their active (and reflective) participation, develop
increasing awareness of the culture they themselves are creating. The
"system of stuff and rules" accumulates and becomes the increasingly
limiting and potentiating, and a more apparently real referent in
their lives (Freilich 1992).
At some point in this experience it suddenly dawns on almost every
student that s/he has been, and is, a collaborator in making the
system in which s/he finds hirself. S/he discovers the consequences of
the previous decisions, and begins to give increasing forethought to
consequences of present and future decisions. Sometimes this awareness
occurs first in the 'student' observer mind-set; in other cases it
occurs first in the 'Martian' participant mind-set. By the time it
occurs a certain definite distance has developed between the 'student'
and hir 'persona'. Communicating the insight from one mind-set to
another, from observer to participant, from participant to observer,
is a challenge that emerges for many of the students. We believe this
achieves the 'reflexivity' asked for by forward-looking
anthropological educators (Segal 1990, deRoche and deRoche 1990, Smith
1990, Peterson 1990).
The plausibility of the students' future history is not only
desirable, it is required. We allow the development of new
technological futures only to the extent that students can demonstrate
their feasibility, preferably by extrapolating from current research
trends or ideas. While this may seem restrictive, given the advances
made over the last century, it does preclude the students developing
"sudden" breakthroughs in, say, faster-than-light transportation. All
of the teams have available to them (both in the MUD and through
E-mail) a variety of expert professional advisors who specialize in
physics, legal systems, astronomy, and planetary data.
Yet another kind of learning occurs as students develop the virtual
model of their communities. A number of concepts familiar to computer
programmers, conce made challenging and even fun in a MUD. These
concepts include linked lists, loops, if-then-else clauses, Boolean
logic, pattern matching, set theory, variables, lables, attributes
tracing and parsing. Though, to a new user, these concepts would seem
baffling in a computer class, on a MUD they have immediatly visible
and applicable uses. Once someone has explained to a user that moving
a room is as easy as opening new doors to it from someplace else and
removing the old doors, (which a programmer would see as moving a node
in a linked list) they understand and are able to do it quite easily.
Once a MUDder starts learning the tricks possible in a MUD, it's only
a short transition to using them in a bonafide programming
environment.
Additionally students learn improved communications skills. One of the
benefits of using a MUD environment is that it equalizes (dare we say
"democratizes"?) the interaction dynamic within the student group.
Many students who rarely express their ideas, concerns and questions
in a seminar setting feel free to do so at a keybaord. This increased
participation using electronic media has been noted by others.
According to Sproull and Kiesler, perceived status in face-to-face
interactions has a high correlation to how much the person speaks. In
their experiments, however, discussions held electronically showed
twice as much equality of participation as discussions held
face-to-face (1991: 60). We find that, because we have greater
participation from all of our students, a broader range of ideas is
presented and considered as students develop their cultural systems.
Differentiation in traditional gender roles is also reduced
electronically, according to Sproull and Kiesler's observations. In
the NAU Solar System Simulation we've noted similar variation from
"traditional" roles. Female students aren't supposed to prefer "hard"
sciences; we've had women take on the design and theoretical
construction of power plants. Male students aren't supposed to be good
with words; we've had men take on the role of team historian.
Working in the MUD environment can act as a Goffman-esque "backstage"
for some students. They become used to interacting with other
students, and, time and again, we've seen these increased
communication skills carried from the MUD back into their everyday
lived experiences. This is not to say, of course, that working through
a MUD will cure a lack of social skills, but it has certainly helped
numerous students with whom we've had experience.
We come, then, to why we, as educators, have continued to use this
method of teaching anthropology. First, it works. Our students become
enthused, and willingly learn information about subjects in which they
previously had no interest, and (albeit sometimes unintentionally)
learn to look at their current world in a considerably broader
perspective. Second, by removing the course curriculum from Van
Norman's all-too-accurate description of the American academic
institution, we allow the students to teach themselves. This is not to
say, of course, than we stand idly by and let chaos reign--there are,
indeed, assignments and expectations and grades. In fact, we
frequently find ourselves running to keep ahead of new ideas, new
concepts, and new applications in order to be able to guide and
suggest alternatives to impractical ideas.
Finally, we are aware that we are treading on some not-yet-firm
ground, what Howard Rheingold calls "homesteading on the virtual
frontier". We are, in pushing anthropology into the future, studying
the initial impacts made by virtual communities--communities of
interest, not of location. As Rheingold observes, these virtual
communities have, and will continue to have, ramifications on "our
real-life relationships and communities [and] lead to fundamental
questions about social values in an age when so many of our human
relationships are mediated by communications technology" (1993: 146).
This, then, is anthropology for the future--and it's fun!.
_________________________________________________________________
Footnotes:
(1) Reed D. Riner (rdr@dana.ucc.nau.edu) is Professor of Anthropology
at Northern Arizona University, (Flagstaff, AZ 86011), where he
regularly teaches seminars on the anthropological study of alternative
futures. His most recent publications include "Anthropology About the
Future" Human Organization, 50(3), Fall 1991, and, with Melvin K.
Neville "The Futures of Higher Education: Past, Present and Future" in
"Creating the 21st Century", Futurics 15(3&4):57-67, 1991. Earlier
versions of this paper were presented at CONTACT VIII, Mar 1991,
Phoenix, Az, the 21st Century Conference, Apr 1990, ASU-West, Phoenix
AZ, the World Future Society conference "Creating the 21st Century"
July 1991, Minneapolis, MN, and the National Collegiate Honors Council
conference, Nov, 1991, Chicago, IL. The author especially thanks his
collaborators Mel Neville (NAU), John Bregenzer (U Dayton), and Denise
Aedan for their contributions in the development of this paper and the
project from which it derives.
(2) Jen Clodius (jclodius@students.wisc.edu) is a graduate student in
Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and studying
community-formation on the Internet. Her most recent publications
include several ethnographic technical reports for NORC at The
University of Chicago. She was originally introduced to SolSys and
DragonMUD when she was the teaching assistant for an anthropology
class involved in the SolSys simulation. Clodius has been
co-administrator of DragonMUD since May, 1991, dealing primarily with
issues of human relations, computer-mediated communications, and
human-machine interfaces. Additionally she has been an advisor on
SolSys since 1992.
(3) The sites, faculty members, disciplinary affiliations and
institutions, reading from the bottom of Earth's gravity well up, are:
Northwest Passage (a submarine city under Earth's north polar cap),
John Bregenzer, anthropology, U Dayton; Luna Station, Chris Jones,
political science, Eastern Oregon State College; L-5, Jim Funaro,
anthropology, Cabrillo College; L-4, Alluquere Rosanne Stone, radio,
television, film, U Texas-Austin; Mars Settlement, Reed Riner,
anthropology, and Melvin Neville, computer science, NAU, and James
Dator, political science, U Hawaii; Ceres, Don Robertson, honors,
Liberty High School, Issaquah, WA; Halcyon (Jovian Moon Mission), Doug
Raybeck, anthropology, Hamilton College. Additionally Alan Aycock and
Henri Beaulieu, anthropology, U Lethbridge, James M. 'Tim' Wallace and
Leigh Mills, anthropology, NCSU; Elizabeth Viau, education, CSLA;
Marilyn Garber, philosophy, CS-Dominguez Hills, and Ted Christiansen,
The George Washington University are participant-observers, intending
to lead teams in the next, Spring 1995, iteration.
(4) MUD (short for Multi-User Dungeon, originally) was the name of a
game written by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle when they were
students at Essex University in the UK. The first, and still one of
the most commonly-used American versions, was TinyMUD, written by
James Aspnes of Carnegie-Mellon University in 1989. Our program,
DragonMUD (Ver 1.5.5.J7) has been adapted and comprehensively
re-written by John P. 'Jopsy' Crane. Cited as one of the seven "first
rank" TinyMUDS in Bartle's critique, DragonMUD is the oldest
continuously-running implementation of the TinyMUD family, and the
only one of those initial seven still in existence. Originally put up
in December 1989, it became accessible to non-local players when NAU
went on the InterNet in March of 1990. Crane's version of the TinyMUD
code is now being used by several other sites, including Athens
located at Merrimack University in Maine, Prohibition in Santa Cruz,
California, ToadMUD in San Diego, and MetropolisMUD in Raleigh, North
Carolina, with several other sites under development.
_________________________________________________________________
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