Bend the rules

EMPOWER the player. The principle of interactivity marks the digital from the traditional.

For three days, the Arts and Humanities cluster of the University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu was cloistered in a room in uptown Cebu, learning the art and technology of new media narratives.

The art side reminds me of scenes in Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose”. In a 14th-century Italian monastery, medieval monks copied books by hand in a labyrinthine library that spawned murder and all the other deadly sins. As centers of learning, Catholic monasteries alleviated the Dark Ages.

Contrasting starkly with the wizened masters of the medieval manuscript culture, some of our new media mentors looked as if they just crawled out of the crib. But there was no mistaking the authority with which these digital natives guided our navigation of the Web.

Loren Kara Leonardia is a multimedia artist. Khail Santia, an indie game developer, is the founder and developer of Moocho Brain and the Bamboard Game Project.

At 24, Kara is an old hand at parking her pony-tailed self in front of a screen for hours that flow into days. That’s partly the reason why she was the perfect guide for our tour of visual storytelling from multimedia articles in the Web to digital storybooks, apps, games, music videos and advocacy.

Creative technology transforms the ageless curiosity of audiences into preternatural storytelling, Kara argued. Taking her cue, I read at home the webcomic “Margot’s Room”.

I didn’t experience the story as it was first released to followers of Emily Carroll, who publishes some of her short comics on her website, www.emcarroll.com. For five consecutive Fridays from September to October in 2011, Carroll released a set of verse that serves as clues to what actually took place in Margot’s Room.

Like Kara, I came upon the homepage of “Margot’s Room,” dark save for a slip of poetry and the illustration of a child’s room bearing the unmistakable signs of savagery. While the verses chanted inside my head in an eerie singsong voice, I looked in vain for an arrow or an icon to click so I could leave that room, where horror is made more acute because it is merely hinted at but seemingly inescapable.

At last, I found that the objects in the room are clickable and lead to other verses and pieces of the puzzle-story. Relief mixes with foreboding. Yes, I can finally leave that unspeakable room. Wait, where will it take me?

This interactivity makes digital storytelling superior in many ways to the tales spun by our parents and grandparents, pointed out Kara. By randomly clicking objects in Margot’s Room, the audience can experience the story in a different chronology as it was intended by its creator.

These alternative streams, where the end can seem like a foreshadowing and the beginning can become a flashback, subvert the traditional linear form of storytelling but achieves the same end: the audience rushes to close the tale.

Seeking a social end, game developer Khail partnered with two other Silliman University students to design a bamboo board game. For teaching math as a game in schools that are challenged by technology and the drop-out trend, the Bamboard team was the first Benilde Prize Winner.

Kara and Khail show how the game infinitely changes when the rules focus on the players.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com)


*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s October 11, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Spawns of Mabini’s legs

IT’S become a case of the accidental overshadowing the premeditated.

During the Sept. 29 ceremony for the Apolinario Mabini Awards at the Bulwagan ng mga Bayani at Malacañang Palace, the President voiced out his concern that today’s students may be inadequate in their grasp of our history.

He told the audience, which included awardees distinguished for their work with the disabled, that he shared the sentiments of many Netizens reacting to a question posed by three college students to actor Epy Quizon, who played Mabini, on why he never stood up during “Heneral Luna”.

Despite extreme poverty and the paralysis of his lower limbs, Mabini’s brilliance and patriotism stood him in good stead as the country’s first prime minister. My generation was one of those that memorized the “Sublime Paralytic” tribute made to Mabini, also recorded in textbooks as “the brains and conscience of the Revolution”.

In his Apolinario Mabini Awards speech, Aquino called on Education Secretary Armin Luistro to address possible deficiencies in the teaching of history. Luistro later assured the President in a text message that he will discuss this concern with curriculum supervisors.

The spiral of consequences triggered by the furor over Mabini’s legs reveals some of the power unleashed by “Heneral Luna”. Time and history will determine if the movie will join the ranks of classics, immortalized not only for exceeding the standards in filmic storytelling but also for moving us to examine ourselves and aspire for more beyond our usual preoccupations with showbiz and politics.

“Heneral Luna” made me realize how parched we are as a people and as a nation of filmgoers. After stepping out of the theater, I shepherded my sons to the mall’s bookstores to search for a reference.

The dramatization of the past in “Heneral Luna” raised more questions than answers. I wanted to winnow facts from artistic interpretation. I also doubted my memories of the Philippine revolution, memorized under duress of miserable mastery exams and the horrors of class recitations.

It took only a few minutes to confirm that our history is an endangered genre. I could not find the titles that stood out in more than two decades of study under the pre-K to 12 system. Zero copies of Teodoro A. Agoncillo’s “History of the Filipino People,” Renato Constantino’s “The Philippines: A Past Revisited,” and Renato and Letizia Constantino’s “The Philippines: The Continuing Past”.

Later, I found an entire shelf of Agoncillo’s book in a branch that seems to serve as a warehouse. Should the scarcity of scholarly and critical references on Philippine history mean bookstores can hardly replenish their stocks fast enough to catch up with demand?

Or in the face of apathy from readers and schools still adjusting to K to 12 upheavals, are books on Philippine history stockpiled in the warehouse to make more room in mall branches for adult coloring books and perfumed pens?

The most important question spawned by the furor over Mabini’s legs is: If artists, educators and other influencers will not bring the discourse on Philippine history to social media, micro media, and the rest of new media, which is the portal of choice of Millennials and other digital natives, are we doomed to forgetting and repeating history?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s October 4, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Guardians of the gates

You can turn martial law and the dead into entertainment. If you’re a nine-year-old with a smartphone and a tablet, you definitely can.

That’s my most memorable take-away message from the recently concluded Cebu Press Freedom Week (CPFW).

I got into the Internet on a tourist visa. I’m not close to a digital immigrant and, most certainly, am not a digital native.

In his 2001 article, Marc Prensky created these distinctions. Millennials, born in the 1980s just as the Internet was booting up, take to technology as anyone in a bib given a digital mouse as a pacifier will.

However, this tourist-nearly-half-a-century-old also digs the Internet, a virtual public playground. Last Sept. 21, Sun.Star Cebu’s “Top of the week” editor singled out the online trend of posting selfie photos with the dead. After a prize was awarded to the best selfie of the week—the “photo of a girl, 13, who died in a car accident, with her relatives grinning beside the corpse”—a popular blog drew the attention of the police.

Last Sept. 21, I was also at the Marcelo Fernan Press Center theater, joining an audience dominated by millennials. A meme showed Rodrigo Duterte comforting a teen stood up by a date. When the Davao mayor mutters about cutting off the head of the fickle lover, a section of the audience titters.

The burning at the back of my neck forces me to count slowly. After reaching 10, I’m glad I’m not about to have a stroke. But the heartburn doesn’t go away until I’ve spoken out in the open forum.

Duterte, that most charismatic of politicians, jokes about summary killings on the day Filipinos remember martial law, the darkest in the nation’s long history of betrayal, repression and rebellion. Some of the millennials, born decades before Proclamation No. 1081, laugh at Duterte’s joke.

In my view, the black humor is watching the young be entertained by a viral meme about Duterte, dark knight of a “separate peace,” whose association with the Davao Death Squads brings back more than a stench of the nameless and faceless dead unearthed from unmarked graves dotting the landscape when the Marcos dictatorship imposed the New Society over the country.

Technology gap? Natives versus immigrants? Open access versus gatekeeping? All of the five CPFW events my students and I recently attended tackled the impact of technology and its potentials for good and evil.

Now on its 23rd year, the CPFW is the only event in the country that the news media industry organizes to commit to collective memory the stories that should never be forgotten. In the many fora held during this week, local students and teachers are not just warm bodies filling a venue. We are at the frontline of preventing mass amnesia.

Despite information overload, epic struggles with school administrators, and extra commuting costs for schools without buses, Cebu academia must make time for the CPFW.

Prensky challenges teachers to reach out and converse with students despite the gaps created by our generational differences in the use of technology. We should not be the last to wake up to the fact that the micro-media mocking history emanate from the young, absentmindedly doodling while we ramble and scribble on the board.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s September 27, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”