Postscript

Media, Culture, Technology

Month: May 2015

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Mobile Gaming: Are You Really Having Fun?

May 27, 2015 / / 14 Comments

Smartphones are pretty amazing. Seriously, I only just got one a few months ago after having the same dumb phone for 5 years, and it has changed my life. And by “changed my life” I mean “it’s made me waste a whole bunch of time.” Some of this time is wasted on YikYak, some is wasted watching Whose Line clips on the toilet, and some is wasted swiping right on every single human being on Tinder. But all of those pale in comparison to the time I’ve wasted playing games on my phone. As we all know, the gaming and smartphone landscape has been transformed by the emergence of mobile games, but why are these games so popular? No doubt their price, easy access, and simple play mechanics–but I would argue that there is one more element not usually considered. These games trick us into thinking we enjoy them.

Quite an accusation, right? Trust me, I can back it up. I spent this semester helping Prof. Steirer with research on mobile games, and my job involved playing every mobile game that was related to a console game or franchise from the last three years. This came out to about 35 companion apps and around 30 actual games that could be played without owning the console game. I think I could argue that almost all of the games I played involved tricking the player into thinking he or she enjoys the game, but two stand out above the rest: Injustice: Gods Among Us and Marvel: Contest of Champions.

Both games are superhero fighting games with an emphasis on collecting heroes and building up their stats to fight against other heroes. They differ in the fine details (Injustice features teams of three heroes in each battle, Marvel has a map screen where you can decide what battle to do next), but these differences are mostly irrelevant. The core gameplay remains the same for both games. I won’t go into detail as to how the gameplay works, as the games are way more complex than they need to be. Plus they’re free, so you can go play them for yourself if you’re really curious. Simply put, the gameplay of each game involves picking a hero on your team who is stronger than your enemy and tapping the screen until you win. I wish I were joking. And yet each game has over 10 MILLION downloads, and some surprisingly active communities on Reddit and on the games’ respective official forums. So why then are these games so popular? Because each game adds a few simple features that make the game feel rewarding to play without actually being an engaging experience.

Both of these games use design choices that help disguise how boring the gameplay actually is. Essentially, the game is designed to make the player think he or she is having fun when really he or she is just enjoying being rewarded by the game. The games reward players do in a variety of ways. For instance: Booster Packs. Both games have “booster packs” (Marvel calls them Crystal Packs because I guess superheroes all come out of crystals now) where you pay some in-game currency (or real-life currency if you’re that bougie) to get a few random heroes or power-ups. What makes these packs feel rewarding is that getting something really good isn’t guaranteed. Rather than being like a store transaction (boring…), they’re like gambling (exciting!) where gains are determined by chance, thus making any gains feel much more rewarding. The impatience aspects of Injustice and Marvel serve the same purpose. Because your “energy” (ability to just play the game) will run out after a while, you start to look forward to when your energy will be refilled and you can play again. Or in Marvel you can just spend some money to be able to play again. You know what they say, “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” And in this case, the game is purposely being absent to make you miss playing it. It’s deceptive and annoying but it seems to work.

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Injustice and Marvel also make use of RPG elements like stats, leveling up, power levels, and experience. Again, the fine details differ somewhat. For instance, Marvel makes you spend an in-game resource called ISO-8 and gold to increase your heroes’ stats, whereas heroes in Injustice will level up from experience alone. And once again, these differences don’t really matter because they don’t change the way you play the game. Injustice levels up the character that I use the most, and Marvel lets me choose which characters to upgrade by spending money and ISO-8. But I’m only going to upgrade the characters that I use the most anyway, so Marvel is just putting extra steps in between playing the game and leveling up characters to make it feel like I’m accomplishing more than I am. Heroes in each game can also be promoted (subtly different from leveling up) by spending yet another form of in-game money. Two types of leveling up means twice as much opportunity for the player to feel like they’ve accomplished something! This leads to a complicated interface with over-designed, confusing menus that serve to help me do something that could just be automatic. But the games employ effects that compliment what should be an annoying time-waster to make it feel fun. Leveling up in Marvel feels good because of the flashy visuals and big sound effects–never mind the fact that you don’t ever get to really feel the effects of leveling up a character, because every battle plays out the same way. Tap the screen for a while (maybe swipe left to right a few times too) and if you’ve spent enough currency and have better numbers you win. Which brings me to my next point…

Money. Currency plays a major role in both games.  Injustice has three different kinds of money (challenge credits, power credits, and alliance credits, plus you can spend real money to get more power credits). Marvel has five! FIVE different kinds of money! If Marvel: Contest of Champions was a country, it would have the most insane economy of all time. Battle chips, ISO-8, gold, alliance points, loyalty, not to mention crystals, experience, “units”–GOOD LORD, WHEN DOES IT STOP?! Marvel and Injustice have so many different ways to reward the player, but none of these things have any real impact on how the game is actually played! Collecting things is fun, sure. But what’s the point in having an inventory screen full of stuff and a virtual wallet full of money if there’s no fun way to use it? The thing to note about all of these RPG elements, items, and currencies is that they make the games incredibly complex, but not at all deep. Complexity is simply the number of rules that a player needs to know in order to play the game. Depth is a measure of how many meaningful choices a player can make given a rule-set. Having a ton of stats, upgrades, currencies, and items adds a lot of complexity. But the only choice a player makes during actual gameplay is which hero to use in a fight (and Marvel already tells you which character in your party has the best chance of winning so even that isn’t really a choice). With all of that complexity, the games have almost no depth because the player doesn’t get to make any real choices during gameplay.

Injustice screen

All of these elements serve to reward the player. These games feature tons of different items and currencies so that after a battle the player is rewarded. Finishing a fight and seeing a list of stuff that you earned feels satisfying! But these rewards are artificial and don’t change how we play the game in any meaningful way, so what’s the point? The point is just to compel us to keep playing the game even though the game isn’t really engaging. The rewards exist for their own sake, and don’t really factor into any greater purpose. Getting rewards are just a means to get even more rewards. To me, the most well-designed games are ones in which simply playing the game is its own reward. The reward in a fighting game should be that you won the fight! Not that you got some upgrade stuff and some money. Getting to the end of the story and beating the bad guy should be the reward of games with linear narratives. But maybe we don’t want all that depth in a mobile game, right? Maybe we just want something fun to makes us feel satisfied that doesn’t take much thought. I would counter that with one example: 2048.

Everyone reading this has heard of and likely played 2048. The gameplay is simple: swipe numbers together to create bigger numbers with the ultimate goal of getting a tile worth 2048. There’s no RPG elements, no upgrades, no money, no levels, and no rewards beside the main goal of the game. It is a game with little complexity, but a surprising amount of depth. The game gets harder as it progresses, rather than keeping the same level of challenge throughout and just giving the player higher numbers to throw around. And the good news? There’s actually a lot of games out there like this (1010!, Cut the Rope, even Flappy Bird could be argued to be like this). More and more unfortunately are starting to include elements of trickery like the ones used in Injustice and Marvel: Contest of Champions. Cut the Rope when it first came out didn’t have any fake rewards or impatience aspects. But Cut the Rope 2 came along and gave us solar energy that drains as we play, superpower upgrades to let us do the levels without actually doing them, and a silly pointless map screen to give the player an artificial feeling of progression. Games don’t have to be like this. Playing a game, even a mobile game, can still be an engaging experience in and of itself; designers need’s doesn’t resort to trickery to get us to keep playing.

So next time you play a game on your phone (or anywhere else for that matter), think about how you’re experiencing the game and ask whether you’re really having fun, or if the game is just trying to trick you into thinking you’re having fun. And don’t be satisfied with games that do the latter when there are so many better ways for games to engage players.

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How I Met Your Victorian Society

May 8, 2015 / / 0 Comments

I’ve been taking a Victorian Sexualities class this semester. And throughout I’ve been surprised by the connections between Victorian society and our present-day society. For example, both involve radical changes in technology, concern over family values and morality, and a large amount of coded talk about sex. Although a lot has changed and the conversations differ in content, many of the anxieties of the Victorian era, especially around sexuality and gender, seem to pop up today. One of the places where I was surprised to find myself suddenly thinking about the Victorians was the TV show How I Met Your Mother, created by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas.

The unmarried woman was a big concern for the Victorians. The growing number of single women in Britain was in conflict with the traditional role of women as wife and the mechanisms of inheritance and property. William Rathbone Greg wrote “Why are Women Redundant?” in 1862 to address this problem. He believed that it was in women’s nature to marry, so that if they weren’t marrying, it was for unnatural reasons: bad temperament, desire for work, and a lack of eligible men. I think the Robin, one of the two female protagonists, is the modern day manifestation of a similar fear. Most of her characters’ conflicts have to do with whether she wants a man or a career. So which will she end up with? And if a man, who? The show spends a lot of time dwelling on which path and which man is a better choice for her. This focus on marrying off the single women strikes me as very Victorian. Her role as a woman is also complicated through her non-traditional portrayal of gender. Robin has a lot of traditionally masculine characteristics, and the show wants us to see them as such. Her drinking scotch and smoking cigars makes her a ‘bro’. As does her lack of desire for children or for commitment.

Set against Robin’s gendered identity, Lilly’s performance of womanhood becomes the other half of the binary. Lilly wants a husband and children. For most of the show she is a kindergarten teacher. Her character has nurturing and maternal instincts that Robin seems to lack. Though Lilly isn’t always traditional, she is aligned with the traditional ideals of womanhood as mother and wife. Just as Greg was thinking about what the proper role for women was, How I Met Your Mother proposes these two ideas: Robin or Lily. In addition, Wilkie Collin’s book The Woman in White sets up a similar binary with its two main female characters, Laura and Marion. Laura is a traditional woman—quiet and passive—while Marion is frequently compared with men—rational and stubborn. This concern over what makes a woman is also in our consciousness today. Certainly How I Met Your Mother’s women are different from those in the Victorian period, but we are still trying to figure out what gender means—especially for women in relation to marriage. What is the ‘natural’ role for women? Is there one?

Another Victorian trope that has found its way into the show is that of the potential (or definite, depending on how you see it) homoeroticism of male friendships. Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest is packed with jokes about gay sex. In Wilkie Collins’ work, there is a pattern of homoerotic love being expressed through the desire for the same woman (see, for more on this, Carolyn Dever’s “The Marriage Plot and Its Alternatives.”). In How I Met Your Mother, the bond between Ted and Barney has similar coding. The greater importance of their relationship with each other over their brief and unimportant heterosexual bonds mimics that of men in Victorian literature. Their strong and foundational love and care for each other is greater than that of marriage—which is shown as shallower. Add to this Ted and Barney’s mutual love for Robin and you have a Victorian love triangle. The homosocial relationship is, perhaps, coded in their desire for Robin. The questions that Wilkie Collins and Oscar Wilde asked are still concerns today: What is the role of homosocial relationships? Is marriage still the most important relationship if the ‘bro code’ is supposed to come first? Or does the show’s narrative framework suggest that, despite the importance of homosocial bonds, marriage wins out in the end? The whole point of the framing narration is, after all, to tell an audience of children about their family history or what—for lack of a better world—their inheritance.

While I believe that a lot has changed since Victorian society, it seems odd to me that so many of the questions they were grappling with are still valid today. Have our thoughts on marriage changed so little? Or have we returned to a time of these odd hypocrisies? Morality, family and marriage are central concerns while sex and sexual deviance are both immoral and everywhere. I don’t have a claim, or a ‘so what’ to answer these questions. I think the pattern is worth some thought however. The Victorians were trying to adjust to changing gender roles and ideas of sexuality. So are we today. Our society is in the process (hopefully) of rearranging how we think of gender and all of its institutions. Do we look to the Victorians for help perhaps? How come we’re still so stuck on these issues?

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Interview with Leigh Arsenault

May 7, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Leigh Arsenault is the Program Manager for Federal and State Policy at the Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program, where she oversees the Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence. Before joining Aspen, Leigh served as a Senior Policy Advisor for higher education at the U.S. Department of Education. She also worked as National Youth Vote Director and National Policy Coordinator for Obama for America for the 2008 and 2012 elections, respectively.

THEO: Okay! So I’m going to pull up you’re LinkedIn profile.

LEIGH: Oh jeez, so you’ve been doing research!

THEO: Yes, I came prepared. . . .Okay, so you worked on the Obama campaign. How was that?

LEIGH: It was an incredible experience! It was my first job right out of college so I actually moved to New Hampshire when President Obama announced in 2007 that he was going to run. I worked the primaries as a campus organizer, so I moved to colleges across the state to organize student chapters of what was then called Students for Barack Obama. It was an amazing opportunity for me to be a part of something where you could really feel the day-to-day tangible impact you were having. I had to measure the number of people I was talking to, learn what they cared about, and figure out how I could then turn that into real organizing on the ground. It also taught me a lot of skills that I continue to bring to my day-to-day work.

THEO: So your interests fall on the political side of things, but also lie in education? Would you say that you’re more interested in one or the other, or are they equal for you?

LEIGH: I would say that I am now on a track that puts my career squarely in the field of education, particularly education policy—and, in my current work, also research on institutional practice. What I think connects those two things—my political experience with my work in education—is my own personal drive to dedicate my time to issues that will help make positive change, however that may be. With education, I think that if we can further improve outcomes for students and ensure greater equity within our system as a whole, that can have larger benefits for our society. As for my organizing work, I would call it more organizing work than political work really in terms of how I view it, but I was also compelled to work on things that would have an impact on social issues and help produce change that would really be meaningful to people.

THEO: So when would you say your interest in education began?

LEIGH: My mother was a teacher, my sister’s a teacher…I come from a background where the importance of education was told to me early and very often, so I always understood the importance of that. I’ll be honest though: When I was in college I didn’t know that I would work in the field of education. I didn’t plan for that at all. When I completed my work on the Obama campaign, I moved to Washington D.C. and I was hired to work at the Department of Education to support the Under Secretary of Education—her name is Martha Kanter, and she was the former Chancellor of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District. My job was to support her in her work and through that I was exposed to a number of different issues on a very global scale, in particular those related to higher education. Martha was the first person to take me under her wing (she does this with many people), and she quickly became a mentor to me. I was very lucky in that regard. Once I was exposed to higher ed issues, I began working on them and moving further down that path so, though I wish I could say I planned my career path all out from the beginning, it really evolved organically on its own for me.

THEO: Was there ever a point where you wanted to teach at a college or a high school or did you want to do something different with education from the start?

LEIGH: Working at the Department of Education, I was exposed to policy issues and I now work for a nonprofit organization that researches community colleges specifically in terms of the practices that result in successful outcomes for students. So I’ve continued to be exposed to that work, but I’m continually drawn down to the institutional level of education. In fact, I’m actually considering whether to continue my own education by pursuing a doctoral degree in higher education. And I hope to have the opportunity to teach—that’s something I’d really like to do. So the short answer is yes, I hope that I will teach in my career.

THEO: So you mentioned briefly the program you are working with now. You are the Program Manager for Federal and State Policy in the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute. Can you tell me a bit about that?

LEIGH: Our program is to support institutional practice and policy and leadership that results in high and improving outcomes for students. That’s a quick summary of the work. In terms of how we do that, we offer what’s called the Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence. It’s a million-dollar prize for which community colleges across the nation compete. To identify colleges doing ground-breaking work, first we look at data in terms of how students are varying in persistence and completion at a different colleges. We reach out to the top ten percent of community colleges from a pool of over a thousand and invite them to apply for the Prize. From the information they provide, we then learn more not only about how many of their students complete certificates and degree but what strategies the schools use to measure student learning. That is, what are students learning in their courses, and what value will those courses have for their jobs in the future? We learn how well colleges help students complete and also how well they help them land jobs, whether or not they earn livable wages, whether or not the outcomes achieved are equitable, and whether the students who would like to receive an education are able to obtain it. So that’s the work we do. It’s really fun, because we get to go to the colleges, spend time with professors, students, and college presidents and learn who they are, why they do the work they do, and how their personal dedication translates into the outcomes they’re achieving. At the end of the process, we acknowledge the top ten colleges and present the prize to the winner.

We also look at leadership for higher education more generally, so we try to study the qualities that make exceptional leaders–exceptional meaning they’re able to ensure that their institutions achieve great outcomes for students. The other thing we’ve been engaged in recently is looking at ways in which we can encourage the top colleges in the country to increase their diversity in terms of socio-economic status, how they can enroll greater numbers of students who may come from low-income families and who may not otherwise have been able to afford college without some sort of scholarship and assistance.

 THEO: So you work with colleges to make this happen or are you working with students?

LEIGH: We’re working with college presidents and with policy makers really, to ask the questions and look at the data to find out what the current level of socioeconomic diversity is for colleges in America and then ask the question: How can we improve upon that? How can we ensure that more low-income students are able to access and enroll in colleges where we know they can and should succeed?

THEO: How long has this program been going?

LEIGH: We’re pretty new. Our program was founded in 2010 and it was founded specifically for the purpose of delivering the Aspen Prize for Community Colleges that I mentioned.

THEO: Alright, I’m really curious: Can you describe your average work day?

LEIGH: Oh, that’s tough! Every day’s a little different…I’m trying to think what my day was like today and see how that maps out…So, for today, I basically edited a report—I’m giving a full laundry list, here—I edited the report, also edited the design component of that report. I staffed a meeting where my boss was producing video clips talking about who this year’s prize winners would be. I worked with our Communications team to develop press releases to talk about that. I had a staff meeting talking about program management and how to improve our budgeting practices in our program. And I worked with researchers to define outcome measurements for colleges that we’re working with that are setting improvement plans at their institutions. So as you can see, there is a whole host of things that occupy my day everyday.

THEO: Seems very busy! So you’ve been with this program since it started in 2010? 

LEIGH: I joined the program a year and a half ago.

THEO: And are you thinking about staying with them afterward? What do you see yourself doing in the future?

LEIGH: As I mentioned, I recently applied to graduate school, and I’m considering now whether to enroll in a PhD program for higher education. That would be a five-year program, so that would entail research and teaching experience and also developing the course skills and cognitive skills that I need to hopefully one day lead research efforts and work at an educational institution perhaps. So that’s really exciting.

In terms of the College Excellence Program, one of the really great things about working at a non-profit is that you get exposed to a lot of people and ideas, and the programming you do always has to quickly change—there’s a lot of change in terms of the projects that come your way. So, as I described, we have the Prize, and in our leadership work we’re developing a new curriculum to help prepare the next generation of community college leaders, and that adds a whole host of aspects to the work that are really exciting and involving. We have policy projects like the one I mentioned to you about increasing socio-economic diversity at colleges. That would be a year-long project and evolve into many other things, so it keeps me creative and on my toes at all times. For that reason, each work day is always different, but also very engaging and exciting. So, if I don’t continue my education, there’s a lot of opportunity along the road at Aspen. And the work I’d be doing here would have a lot of impact on the world, which is, you know, what you really want out of a career.

THEO: Going back a little to your time in the Education Department, I was wondering: How did you get involved in all this? Did they come to you, or did you seek out them? Again, I’m a college student, so I’m interested in how I can get involved in this as well as other career paths.

LEIGH: My work on the campaign was actually a natural pathway to that job because I was what is called a “political appointee.” Those who had worked for the President on his campaign were given priority for positions classified as political appointments, and because I would be starting out in an entry-level position in terms of providing administrative support, those kind of job opportunities were available to me. It took two long years on the campaign (and super long days!) to get there in DC, but that was my pathway. I know it’s not the natural pathway for everyone.

In fact, there are two additional pathways for government jobs in DC. Instead of being a political appointee, who’s only employed for the life of the administration, you could be a “career employee,” who’s in their job for their entire career, across multiple administrations, and really keep the government functioning at a high level. So for you, when you finish your degree, you could apply right away for a position in any of those offices as a career employee. There are also opportunities called Presidential Management Fellows, where you would apply to be a Fellow and spend time in multiple agencies. That’s a great opportunity to get a bird’s eye view of government/public service work and expose yourself to subjects you might want to grasp onto, such as education. Does that help?

THEO: Definitely, thank you. I’m a junior, so I’m still trying to figure out what I’m going to do with my life after I graduate.

LEIGH: So you’re a junior, and you’re making decisions now. You’re an education minor.

THEO: Yes, I’m an English major with an education minor. My original plan was to become a high school teacher or teach at the college level, but I keep hearing, especially from Professor Steirer, that I should keep pushing myself and try to look at all the different avenues of the education sector. It’s a lot of exploring right now, and I’m still trying to figure out what to do. It’s pretty interesting.

LEIGH: That’s great! And when you think about it, what sort of careers pop out at you?

THEO: I don’t know yet. That’s a lot of the reason why I’m looking around. I had always thought the idea of being a teacher would be nice. I volunteer a lot at schools, and I like working with kids. I guess I just don’t know yet everything that’s out there, career-wise.

LEIGH: Teaching obviously is a great profession, but I agree there are a lot of other options and knowing that you like to work with people is good. Starting there with what you enjoy is a good place to start. I guess my message to you for right now would be: You don’t need to figure out what you’re going to do for your whole life. You need to figure out how you want to spend your time, what you think is rewarding for you, and what you think you’re good at—like working with people. Then spend your time in that way, and I think opportunities will always follow. So if education is the path for you, know that and follow that, but a lot of different things can emerge and you don’t know where they will lead you.

THEO: So plan for the next year or so rather than the next five or ten?

LEIGH: Someone once gave me the advice that you always need to have an answer for where you will be in five years, but it doesn’t mean you have to stick to that path. You just have to do the hard work to know you’re moving forward. You need to focus and know you’re doing good work and you need to have a plan, but being flexible is okay. Be adaptable. Things may change, and that may be for the good. As long as you know how you’re oriented, what you care about, and where you hope to go, you’re on your way.

THEO: Alright, well thank you. it’s been very informative!

LEIGH: Thank you! And good luck!

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The Dick Van Dyke Show

May 3, 2015 / / 0 Comments

The Dick Van Dyke Show can be seen as one of the first sitcoms that resembles our modern conception of the genre. The show strayed from its predecessors, with Mary Tyler Moore’s spunky take on the housewife role and a new mobility evoked between home and work. At the same time, The Dick Van Dyke Show has roots in the older Vaudeville-variety style of the 1950s. This in-between existence is perfectly exemplified in the season one episode “Oh How We Met the Night We Danced.” The popularity of this episode most likely stems from Van Dyke and Moore’s incredible comedic and dancing talent, both of which were hallmarks of the show. However, this seemingly simple episode reveals much about the historical, political, and industrial contexts of the series.

One of the most popular episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, “Oh How We Met the Night We Danced” reveals how Rob and Laura Petrie, the protagonist couple, first fell in love. When Laura comes upon Rob’s old Army boots, Rob tells the story to their son Richie (played by Larry Matthews) through a series of flashbacks. The scene opens on a dance number for the USO during World War II. Rob is working as an emcee for the stage, and meets Laura during rehearsal. For him, it’s love at first sight, but Laura is utterly disinterested, prompting Rob to go to great lengths for even a second glance–but, of course, ultimately winning her over in the end.

This episode heavily spotlights Mary Tyler Moore, whose take on the housewife character offers insight into the changing representations of women throughout the series. Given that The Dick Van Dyke Show premiered the same year the National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded, the nascent radical feminist movement is nowhere evoked in the show. Instead, one can glean progressivism with regards to gender roles from certain creative choices behind the show.

Even today, Laura Petrie remains iconic, from her warbling exclamations of “Oh, Rob!” to her fashion-forward cigarette pants. This sartorial decision in particular–apparent throughout “Oh How We Met the Night We Danced”–is symptomatic of the understated feminism throughout the series. Originally, Moore was supposed to wear the classic pearls and dresses of the 1950s, but at her insistence that this would not be an accurate representation of the modern housewife, the costumers agreed on her soon-to-be ubiquitous pants. This decision to break away from previous tropes, however trivial, foreshadows the atypical housewife that Laura would prove to be. Unlike the unobjectionable domestic goddesses of The Donna Reed Show and Leave it to Beaver, Laura had a more fully developed personality. Like Lucille Ball’s Lucy, another exception, Laura was depicted as sarcastically funny, physically attractive, and domestically gifted, all simultaneously. Also like Lucy, she sometimes longed for a life beyond the kitchen, fondly remembering her days dancing in the USO, as seen in “Oh How We Met the Night We Danced” (and in one early episode even going back to work as a dancer). Though she was by no means a major agent in the then-burgeoning women’s liberation movement, Laura presented her own discreet, feisty, sharp-witted kind of feminism.

Though The Dick Van Dyke Show can be seen as politically progressive, it should be noted that stylistically it bridged the gap between the classic vaudevillian-comedy shows of the 1950s and the more realistic products of the 1970s, but often retained some of the increasingly old-fashioned comedic devices of the former. Throughout “Oh How We Met the Night We Danced,” the influence of vaudevillian comedy is particularly evident. First, the flashback opens on a soft-shoe sequence, one of several such scenes. This focus on stage performance hints at the traditions of old-style variety shows in which dance numbers were a major attraction. The climax of the episode occurs when Rob and Laura finally dance and sing together, strengthening the importance of the stage through the show. Perhaps even more revealing of vaudevillian influence is Rob’s comedy intro to the dance performance, a programming format directly derived from variety shows. With slapstick physical comedy, Rob entertains the troops before turning the stage over to “The Idaho Potatoes,” a jazz band, thus alluding to the show’s vaudevillian origins. To heighten this similarity, the scene is shot head-on, effectively putting the viewer in the dance hall audience’s position. It is unsurprising that the show features vaudevillian characteristics, since many show regulars, including Rose Marie (Sally) and Morey Amsterdam (Buddy) started their careers on the vaudeville stage. Carl Reiner, the show’s producer, also sometimes sent scripts over to radio scribes and vaudeville fixtures for “punching up.” With this continued influence of variety, it’s clear that The Dick Van Dyke Show was truly between eras.

Many sitcoms that followed this iconic series borrowed ideas that either originated from or were made popular by The Dick Van Dyke Show. This sitcom was one of the first that explored the meta-subject matter of a show-within-a show. Largely basing it on his experiences with Your Show of Shows, producer Carl Reiner created the predecessor to 30 Rock and The Larry Sanders Show, which also followed the behind-the-scenes of fictional TV shows. Like these later iterations, The Dick Van Dyke Show used self-referential humor to poke fun at the entertainment industry in a refreshing new brand of comedy.

The Dick Van Dyke Show was also original in its focus on both the home and the workplace. Previously, sitcoms such as I Love Lucy mainly followed domestic life. In this series, however, Rob moves freely between home and work, as plotlines weave among all the characters. In “Oh How We Danced the Night We Met,” the story shifts from the home to the professional pasts of both Rob and Laura. Indeed, Laura’s background as a dancer, an unconventional career for a sitcom housewife, is a surprising variation from her wholly domestic predecessors. This mobility is representative of the increasing movement of women between the public and private spheres occurring on a larger societal scale. In terms of sitcom history, this mixture of settings paved the way for future shows to provide insight into the workplace and the home, a feature prominent in modern television.

Perhaps the strong influence that The Dick Van Dyke Show still has on modern sitcoms is the reason for its ability to withstand the test of time. Over fifty years later, “Oh How We Met the Night We Danced” continues to be utterly hilarious. Van Dyke and Moore delight audiences with good-natured sarcastic banter and charming chemistry. The dance numbers, though they were actually challenging for Van Dyke and Moore to master, look effortless and hold timeless appeal. Like the rest of the series, this episode feels both modern and decidedly vintage, as universal humor mingles with classic vaudevillian presentation. A time capsule from the Camelot era, this upbeat, sharp-witted show will remain a classic worthy of its place in the annals of television history.

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