The interactive game, Hunt for the Noor Stone, just launched and features an in-depth, standards-aligned study guide for middle school students. The inspiration for the game came from THE 99, the comic book series featured in Solotaroff’s documentary Wham! Bam! Islam! which aired on Independent Lens last week, and is currently streaming for free on PBS.org. BTB caught up with Soloratoff last week to ask — why a game, and why now?

Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Isaac Solotaroff and on my good days I get to work on documentaries and on my bad days I try to figure out how to raise money to make documentaries.

How long have you been working in documentary film and what inspires you as a filmmaker. Also, what did you do before making films?
I have been working as an editor and director since 1999.  Before this I was a high school history teacher in a town outside of Oakland, CA. The thing I loved most was my students. The next thing I loved the most was creating and executing lesson plans that allowed me to reach into the dry text books we were using and create narratives that somehow applied to the lives of my students. At the end of my first year, we were doing a section on the Reagan administration and I had my students watch excerpts from Hoop Dreams. It stimulated the most incredible classroom conversation we had all year — I get goose bumps just thinking about it. That was the moment I decided I wanted to make documentaries.

How did you come up with the idea for Wham! Bam! Islam! and why do you think the story of Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa’s quest to create new heroes for Muslim youth around the world is an important story to tell on public television?
I met Naif through family friends in the summer of 2006. He was just finishing raising his first round of capital for THE 99. I had been looking for a project to do in the Middle East and I was fascinated by the social experiment that Naif was embarking on. I had just finished reading a couple of excellent books about contemporary Muslim societies and was thinking a lot about some of the internal fault lines in that part of the world beginning with this struggle between fundamentalists who wanted to anchor their culture to religious traditions that date back 1,200 years and modernists who wanted to create a more secular society that could integrate into the 21st century. Obviously, Naif in creating new heroes and story lines for Muslim children in an American-styled comic book, was very publicly advocating for a more inclusive social approach to educating and entertaining kids. I was intrigued to see where this journey was going to take him.

We like to see producers working directly with local stations and reaching local communities in innovative ways. With Wham! Bam! Islam! you’ve ventured into gaming, and educational video modules and lesson plans. What made you take this approach?
My inspiration to make documentaries started in a classroom with 35 high school students!  I am thrilled at any opportunity to leverage the stories I am able to capture to create new approaches to reaching young people. I also had such a blast working with my incredible animation team led by Reno Msad and Rene Avalos and I thought it would be very cool to find another way to apply their talents to expand the reach of the film.

What’s the next big thing for you, Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa and THE 99?
For Naif and THE 99 its the launch of THE 99 animation series on Cartoon Network in Australia and Asia beginning this January. Unfortunately, it seems that Naif has hit a road block getting the animation broadcast in the United States because some extreme voices in the media have made some uninformed attacks on THE 99 which has led the broadcasters to get cold feet. I am continuing to document this and look forward to being able to update the film later this year. In addition I just finished producing a documentary called Pelotero — which — and I hate to make the comparison — is like Hoop Dreams but about two young Dominican baseball players with dreams of making it to the Big Leagues.

And now for a few quick fire questions…

Android or iPhone?
Regretfully, iPhone…I mean its a great toy but a terrible phone

Dogs or cats?
I live in a 500-square foot apartment in Manhattan so the answer has to be cats. My cat Bodie is actually sleeping next to my keyboard right now. I named her after my favorite character in The Wire.

Elmo or Grover?
My heart says Grover but my nephew says Elmo! Elmo! Elmo!

I’m currently listening to…
I’m listening to a Spotify shuffle…at the moment its J Dilla — legendary hip-hop producer..

I’m currently reading…
Confidence Men…

I’m currently watching…
The MLB playoffs — Go Tigers!

Most overused phrase:
Its a toss up between “class warfare” and “clash of civilizations”

Watch Wham! Bam! Islam! streaming free on PBS.org

Visit iTunes and own a copy of Wham! Bam! Islam!

World Without Oil

It’s been reported that the digital game industry is now bigger than the film industry, and dollar for dollar, this has been debated. What can no longer be debated is that, eyeball for eyeball, more people now play games than watch films.

A study released by a marketing research group reported that more Americans play video games than go to the movies. Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell claims that there are more FarmVille players than there are Twitter accounts: 75 million players per month. And with the explosion of mobile games such as Angry Birds and Doodle Jump for iPhone and social games like Mafia Wars on Facebook, games are taking up even more of our time. In a recent presentation at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, game designer and Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future, Jane McGonigal said that by the age of 21, a majority of kids will have spent 10,000 hours playing online games. And it’s not only kids playing games anymore. In fact, another recent study by PopCap Games, a popular social gaming company, found that the average player of online social games is a 43-year-old woman. So much for the stereotypical image of a gamer being a kid in his basement mowing down zombies.

The Garbage Dreams Game

Clearly, Hollywood is trying to take advantage of the massive popularity of gaming and it seems as if all blockbuster action flicks these days are released with an accompanying game. But what about documentaries and independent films? How do they relate to games? First off, games are no longer just adrenaline-fueled racing and shooting escapades. Today, the game industry is almost as diverse in terms of content as the film industry (who could have guessed that in 2010, the biggest game in the world would be about farming?)

This week kicks off the 7th Annual Games for Change Conference (G4C) in New York City. G4C is the only conference of its kind that is dedicated to digital games for social change: “games about the most pressing issues of our day — from race to poverty to the environment.” Just as documentary films explore social issues, so can games.

ITVS has seen the potential for combining documentary storytelling with games for some time now. Off the Map, launched in 2005, allows users to create online backyard paradises. Fatworld, a videogame about eating, obesity, and the politics of nutrition launched in 2007. World Without Oil, an alternate reality game, imagined a global oil shock that enlisted the world’s collective imagination to document the oil crisis with blogs, videos, and images. And most recently The Garbage Dreams Game invites players to take on the role of Cairo’s Zaballeen who recycle 80 percent of the trash they collect.

These types of immersive experiences shift the experience from a passive one — watching a film — to an active one — putting the viewer directly into the issue being discussed. This serves to personalize an issue and engage a viewer with it directly, giving a first-hand experience with the consequences of certain actions and the rules that govern a given issue in the real world.

It isn’t that games are going to kill TV or cinema, but that games created as integrated elements of many productions can expand an audience exponentially. And when the message is social change, that kind of extended reach could lead to a different type of impact than just an explosion of pixels on a computer screen.