Confrontations over Coffee and Cigarettes

Conversation, it’s the craziest game you’ve ever played.

Game designer David Cage said in an interview, “If we can make simple scenes from daily life interesting to play, like two people just talking, then we have a whole new world in front of us. Then we can do anything.”

In an industry obsessed with running and gunning, this quote sounds absurd. “Bullets and blood, not tea and biscuits!” cries the typical gamer. With each next generation, processors become more powerful, outputting more textures and smartifying AI. We’ve gone from sprites with three frames of animation to polygons expressing a ballet of 3D motions. And with games mirroring the production values of Hollywood blockbusters, it makes sense that part of the next generation will be emotional display through motion-capture performances and facial expressions. An exclamation mark was the old-school way to convey loudness, but now we can squint the eyes, furrow the brow; the curving of lips can be just as sexy deadly as muzzle flashes.

Film Producer Todd Eckert says, “Today, the greatest potential for meaningful interaction between the entertainer and entertained exists in videogames.” The Writers Guild of America has also recognized this potential by creating a new award category for best videogame writing - though it’s nothing monumental since the best writing of 2008 came from people who weren’t WGA members. Says Ken Levine, “I’d never even heard of it. I don’t even know where to start to get involved.”

And while Bioshock was widely recognized more for its writing than gameplay, let’s mention its extreme, Shadow of the Colossus, an epic story masterfully told through visual cues and a silent protagonist; a game that, as we play we ask ourselves how does killing the colossi bring my loved one back or what do they represent. But the most important and disturbing question: “who is the bad guy - the colossus living a peaceful existence or me, the person slaughtering them?”

The industry has proven it can handle action opera. I’m wondering if we’ll ever see a game described as the interactive version of Before Sunset.

monetization and its discontents

Monetization of all of the content created online has been one of the long-standing questions in digital media. Another has been how to court large, active, influential communities, such as fan groups. These are desirable, but often prohibitively difficult feats. Hence why, according to a recent interview in Time Magazine, 4chan founder Moot discusses how even the biggest community online, and the source of a large portion of the most successful memes and “viral” content, still doesn’t have a consistent means of generating significant income.

Fan communities, in particular, are often on my mind, due to both my work here at Big Spaceship and at MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium, so two recent fan culture monetization news items caught my eye. One is the announcement that Fanlib.com, the company that tried to monetize fanfiction, much to the ire of fans, was going to fold.

Another, perhaps more interesting in some ways, is the controversy brewing around a certain website that seeks to create a fan history wiki that would serve as a resource for both fans and marketers. I’m not going to link it here because it’s practices are so absurd and offensive that I don’t want to contribute to driving traffic to the site. There is a fairly thorough rundown of the controversy here. In the spirit of fairness, I’ll also link to the only post I found on he supporting side of the ill-conceived project, though it is less informative about the stakes and events surrounding the kerfuffle.

I’m planning to write a lengthy analysis at a later date, most likely to appear at the C3 blog when this has developed more fully and more people from both sides have weighed in, but for now I’ll say that one of the core issues at work here is the problem of trying to set monetary values and systems for a social structure based on a gift economy, a system of exchange that is explicitly and intentionally removed from commodity culture. This is a tension that is in some ways characteristic of most web 2.0 endeavors, which is what makes this case, and others like it (and I find it comparable in various ways to the Facebook Beacon/social ads fiasco, services like Rapleaf, and of course, Fanlib.com), worth thinking about, though they are dealing with particular niche groups that have specialized interests. Though what’s at stake may not be universal, the question at the heart of it is: how do you create value for both communities and commercial entities, and how to we find a way for commodity culture to co-exist within the gift economy?

A Journey Retold

Journey to the West. Four-hundred and some years later, this classic piece of Chinese literature has been presented in a new light. A Buddhist monk makes his pilgrimage to India to get his hands on some quite righteous spiritual scriptures. A few disciples, including a badass monkey, help him along the way.

I’m giving an oh, so brief synopsis of a book comprised of 100 chapters. But the BBC told the story in an equally simple way (here’s a bit on how they did it). In promoting their coverage of the upcoming Beijing Olympics, they turned the tale into a two-minute gem, ending - after some fabulous Olympic-style leaps, twists and escapes - with the lighting of the mighty torch. The network partnered with fellow Englishmen Jamie Hewlett and Damon Albarn. No strangers to collaboration, they’re the brains behind Gorillaz and also helped co-create the opera Monkey: Journey to the West - this looks like it rocks, by the way. And in Albarn’s case, let’s not forget about the amazing music of Brit supergroup The Good, the Bad and the Queen.

The visuals are based off of Monkey (or Monkey Magic!), a popular 1970s animated series. Maybe that choice was rooted in nostalgia. Regardless, it’s much more interesting than the traditional glorified athlete promo. I think it’s a lovely retelling of an age-old story. Condensed, yes, but attention spans are not what they used to be. Is that because of digital platforms? I’ll answer that when I have more time (to concentrate on the question). First, I need to get Monkey on my mobile.

Your Sin or Sunday Religion

During the Computer and Video Game Industry’s successful saving throw against Game Over eternal, there was no such separation as the casual and core player. If you inserted credits, if you bought a console system, you were a gamer. And if you were a gamer, you were hardcore. As the Lightning Seeds say, “pure and simple every time.”

Now in the age where Nintendo has the luxury of kicking back and watching their hardware print money as grannies everywhere Wii, separation is part of the game. And the rules for placing people on the gamer spectrum?

If the majority of games you play are considered hardcore yet you play casual games on the side, what are you? If you play casual games exclusively yet also play for an unhealthy amount of time, what are you? If the only two games you love-touch are WoW and Sunny Day Sky, what are you, besides an anomaly?

Which is the better gauge - time spent or games played?

A typical hardcore gamer would say it’s the latter. You could even argue these labels were conjured by the old-school hardcore crowd - the ones who have been gaming since the 80s. They are the ones who would be most vocal about segregating the masses with their “colored gem games” from the hardcore’s “I’ve been gaming with a mouse-and-keyboard since before you were born” fortress of solitude; they talk like they did multiple tours in Nam.

I think pretty soon, when people say they are casual gamers, it will also mean they game just to have something in the background while they Ventrilo with friends. A new way to party. A new kind of social lubrication.

Better Parking through Technology

Without a smartphone of my own, I sometimes feel at a loss while I’m out and about the city. I can’t use Yelp to find a recommended cafe nearby or even make sure I’m headed in the right direction with the help of Google Maps. Luckily, I’m usually joined by someone who carries no fewer than 2 smartphones (and usually more like 4) with him at all times.

The news coming out of San Francisco makes me think twice about getting a smartphone of my very own. The City of San Francisco has partnered with the company Streetline to update the chore of finding parking with newfangled technology. With new “bumps” being installed along city streets, the city can track the comings and goings of cars in and out of parking spots. With the help of “smart dust,” that data is relayed to a smartphone-accessible website and to street-level displays. Paying meters by phone is in the works too.

So the next time I drive in to work and tour the streets of DUMBO, I’ll dream about the technology that could point me to the elusive parking spots in the area.

And BTW, that is my lovely parking job in the photo. I probably could have done better with Streetline’s help.