Six years ago I sat down for lunch with Jesse Ausubel of the Lounsbery Foundation to explain to him an idea I had to explore the potential value of virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online games for public diplomacy and cultural dialog. I had recently left the State Department where I had spearheaded a number of new technology and public diplomacy projects. I had noticed how collaborative acts of creativity and cultural dialog were appearing in new and exciting ways in online spaces, especially video games and virtual worlds. And I wanted to help government understand that.
I was at USC at the time where I had just launched a foreign policy think tank and I told Jesse that what I wanted to generate was hard, quantitative data to prove the value of these spaces to policymakers. Jesse offered me some words of advice that I’ve kept with me since then: He told me that the Lounsbery Foundation was an activist organization and that the project, if it was to be supported by them, should focus on actions that demonstrate the value of the space.
He then shared with me a story about working with Will Wright on a version of Sim City called “Sim University” … Instead of learning about how to run the the university, which was the intent of the project, the players all attempted to bankrupt it.
Go to the players he said. And so, instead of hiring students to collect data, we held a contest, called the “Public Diplomacy and Virtual Worlds Contest.” We challenged players and game designers alike to explain to us how these spaces could be used for cultural understanding. The winner of that contest, Asi Burak, who designed the game “Peacemaker” is here today.
Fast forward to the design of the Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds project. When Rita J. King and I decided to collaborate on this project, I described a series of activities we could create to help elicit ideas and data from the space, this included bringing US members of Congress into virtual worlds to discuss Islam. Within weeks those ideas had already been done by various organizations and, Congress even had a Hearing on Second Life.
I have a better idea, Rita told me, “Let’s make this a quest.” For Rita, an investigative journalist by training, this was a natural approach. She had just completed three grueling years worth of quests: A major investigative report exploring corporate profiteering in the Gulf Coast immediately after the devastation of hurricane Katrina in which she drove around the region in a rental car and described scenes that sounded to me like nothing short of a real life Lord of the Flies. This was followed by a civil rights quest through the deep South. And finally a quest into the virtual world of Second Life where she chronicled the development of IBM’s virtual universe community.
Rita’s expertise is in telling stories. To be a good storyteller, you have to first be a good listener. And this project, at its heart is about listening and telling stories.
Earlier this week, President Barack Obama launched the first public diplomacy campaign of his presidency by granting his first international interview to a non-US satellite television news station, Al Arabiya. In doing this he effectively went over the leaders of the Middle East and spoke to the people . And what he told them was that he wants to listen “because all too often,” President Obama said “the United States starts by dictating … so let’s listen.”
This project at its foundation is about storytelling which is about understanding something new about the human condition. Public Diplomacy, Cultural Diplomacy or Strategic Communication as it is also known, are efforts by governments, NGOs, and civil societies to tell their story to foreign publics. Too often public diplomacy is criticized for being too preachy and not listening.
The idea for Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds project was hatched with a very specific idea in mind: How could we learn about other cultures in an authentic, experiential space – specifically, how could we learn about cultures that self-identified as Muslim? We chose Second Life for many reasons among them that it is the best internationally – more than 70% of its users are from outside the United States.
Our goal was to to see what we could learn about Islam — not by inviting particular people with particular perspectives into Second Life, but rather to follow the trail of what was already happening culturally in the space that might yield new insight about Islam.
Our work was a bona fide listening effort. Virtual worlds add a twist to that effort because you become a part of that narrative. We went into communities in Second Life that either self-identified as Muslim or were self-declared efforts to better understand Islam, and we asked people about their stories. IWhat people are doing is building new narratives to find ways to coexist. That said, we are not Pollyannas, and Second Life is not a utopia. We encountered numerous situations where tense, impassioned dialogue occurred. But the virtual nature of the space provided an opportunity for people to find new ways to work through differences.
We met people from England, the United States, Libya, France, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, the Netherlands, Germany, Chile, Turkey, Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Qatar, Portugal, Canada, Mexico, the Russian province of north Ossetia, Indonesia, South Africa, Morocco, Japan, Israel, Jordan, Italy, and Spain. They took us into their virtual communities, houses, and mosques, invited us to fatwas, took us on a virtual hajj to Mecca, and discussed their perceptions of extremism, integration, creative collaboration, and cultural values.
As they shared their stories with us, they knew that we were creating a story of our own that included them as characters.
