Henry Jenkins, the prolific writer (academic behind the MIT Convergence Consortium and Convergence Culture book among a hundred million other things) who has been blogging at Technology Review, Computer Games and recently I’ve seen him at Media Center’s ‘We Imagine’ section of Morph. Well, just this month Henry has started his own blog: Confessons of a Aca/Fan (part academic, part fan). Arck! too cool.
The latest issue of The Escapist Magazine (which can be read in Second Life as well) has an article by Shannon Drake on the ARG Perplex City: Breaking the Fourth Wall. Ignore the first page with unhelpful comments such as ARGs “are growing up, moving away from experiments and marketing gimmicks” (referring to The Beast, Majestic and I Love Bees), and you’ll find some interesting chat about Perplex City from Andrea Philips.
Terra Nova reports that 15 papers on virtual worlds are online for free and easy consumption. The papers were written by students of the “Games for the Web: Ethnography of Massively Multiplayer On-line Games.” or “Games for the Web” course at Trinity University. There is a great collection of areas of investigation. I’ve had a quick read of some and they look really interesting. They cover MMOs as therapy, as pedagogy, as sexual gratification, as bonding and so on. I have alot to say about these topics but I have to get back to finishing a paper I’m writing. Doh! Anyway, enjoy the papers.
The ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge is being held in August 9-12 this year. Artists will be given the opportunity to pitch their ideas live on stage to thousands of audience members, once they get through the game that has been planned for them.
C5 Quest for Success is curatorial selection as urban game, testing competitors’ analysis, management, and cooperative decision making skills - traits needed for success in Silicon Valley. The grand prize is a six to twelve week residency at the Montalvo Arts Center co-sponsored with C5 and a Silicon Valley corporate partner - a great opportunity for the right player with the right project pitch. Contestants navigate the streets of San Jose exploring GPS controlled narratives in an attempt to locate the C5 Corporate Limo. Once there, you just might have the opportunity to pitch your proposal to a panel of distinguished experts.
The contestants, cast as arty versions of The Apprentice it seems, have to drive around in specially made go-carts with a GPS to activate a narrative segment they then interpret for a possible path through the city. The main site mentions stuff about how they then use this narrative as backstory in their pitches (seems these artists have an awful lot to do). But what I found interesting – besides the convergence of art festival, industry pitch, locative art and marketing (C5 “specializes in cultural production informed by the blurred boundaries of research, art and business practice”) – are the “storytelling cars”.
GoCar is the first-ever GPS-guided storytelling car.
That is such a great idea! It is basically a pre-recorded narrative tour like galleries have had for years, but with GPS. But having the hardware, having a car that you can drive around the city, that has GPS and obviously a screen for narrative segments. It is something that writers can use (hopefully) for their own projects. We need more of these sorts of grown-up ‘toys’ that can be used for narrative games. I for one am starting a business in that area, because I’m not alone in that desire for intellectual play.
That’s right. I’m lucky to have been asked, nominated and voted in to one of Australia’s key media arts organisations: dLux Media Arts. They’ve been branching into mobile arts and multi-platform arts and that’s why I’m there. I’m working with the excellent team they’ve assembled, including Jamie Leonarder (of SBS Movie Show fame) and the mobile technology genius Leslie Nassar (behind the ABC podcasts and MTV, MIA and so on) and Adriaan Stellingwerff (who was recently awarded a Rhizome commission for his work Eternal Sunset). I’m really excited, we’re going to do some really interesting stuff over the next year: locative arts, experimental film, the archive and so on. I’m especially looking forward to developing the organisation into a well integrated multi-platform one. I’ll keep you posted.
I haven’t been blogging about the projects I work on or projects I follow intimately. For some I cannot until they are in the public domain and others I just, dunno, haven’t. Well, that is silly. There is a project I’m involved in, a thriller film, that will be inviting a lot of participation in the production of it. It really is a pulling of the curtain of a studio. We’ve started the process over at MySpace. The first video of the director arriving in Melbourne is now online. I can’t tell you the name of the film because we’re leaving that up to the fans!
The second is one I’m not officially working on and has started publicity a while ago. The producer and director contacted me because they love my work on polymorphic narrative. 
That is SMSSugarman (a trailer is at the site). What I love about Aryan and Jeremy’s approach is that they are creating a different narrative for each platform: cinema, mobile, web, DVD. It is beautiful. There is an interview with Jeremy Nathan online at Aryan’s blog which is interesting:
10. Did you watch the distribution successes of Steven Soderbergs Bubble to see how the mixed-media simultaneous distribution approach many work?
Yes, I think its an amazing start. The closing of windows is good for filmmakers, and for audiences. People now can chose what medium they want to view a film. Cinemas will always be with us, but the media will proliferate,
so allowing people more options.A polymorphous approach to distribution will start to invite new story-telling techniques, as we progress through this virtual world.
11. What do you think about the future for cross-media film distribution?
I think it is the future. Traditionally the rights are exploited across theatres, television and DVD, but the advent of Mobile and the Internet will change the way films are distributed. Its starting slowly, but it is gathering pace.
Different and new audiences will come to films on different media platforms. And film form will change to meet this demand.
Filmmakers will be able to cut out the middle-men, and to start to retain control over the distribution of their films.
The Internet is yet to be explored in its full entirety - in time to come I think it will become the glue that binds the various platforms. [CD: I'm writing a paper on this at the moment!]
Jeremy also talks about content on the mobiles and where it is going. Very good stuff. I can’t wait to get these guys over here! And, lastly but not least. We’ve just upgraded our interface at my other blog I co-edit on new media arts specifically, WriterResponseTheory. Lovely.
Well I’ve missed two events in SecondLife, that I really wanted to attend, because I’m rimming my broadband usage allocation for the month. Next month the locks are off, so I can cyplore as much as I like. In the meantime I’m feeling a bit melancholic. I had a few days recently with no email or websites and now no downloads or virtual worlds. This situation is serendipitous, as I am retreating into my cave to write more. I’m working on, among other things, my PhD. I’ve found refuge, though, in a novel I’m reading at the moment: Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Television.
The amusingly odd protagonist and narrator of Jean-Philippe Toussaints novel is an academic on sabbatical in Berlin to work on his book about Titian. With his research completed, all he has left to do is sit down and write. Unfortunately, he cant decide how to refer to his subjectTitian, le Titien, Vecellio, Titian Vecellioso instead he starts watching TV continuously, until one day he decides to renounce the most addictive of twentieth-century inventions. As he spends his summer still not writing his book, he is haunted by television, from the video surveillance screens in a museum to a moment when it seems everyone in Berlin is tuned in to Baywatch. One of Toussaints funniest antiheroes, the protagonist of Television turns daily occurrences into an entertaining reflection on society and the influence of television on our lives. (From the Dalkey Archive Press)
Here is a wonderful quote from the book, where television is described in all its glory:
Everywhere it was the same undifferentiated images, without margins or titles, without explanation, raw, incomprehensible, noisy and bright, ugly, sad, aggressive and jovial, syncopated, all equivalent, it was stereotypical American series, it was music videos, it was a film scenes removed from their context, excerpted, it was excerpts, it was a snatch of song, it was lively, the audience clapping along in time, it was politicians sitting around a table, it was a roundtable, it was the circus, it was acrobatics, it was a game show, it was joy, unbelieving stunned laughter, hugs and tears, it was a new car being won live and in color, lips trembling with emotion, it was documentaries, it was World War II, it was a funeral march, it was columns of German prisoners trudging along a roadside, it was the liberation of the death camps, it was piles of bones ont he ground, it was in all languages and on more than thirty-two channels, it was in German, it was mostly in German, everywhere it was violence and gunshots, it was bodies lying in the street, it was news, it was floods, it was footaball, it was game shows, it was a host with his papers befor ehim, it was a spinning wheel that everyone in the studio was watching with heads raised, nine, it was nine, it was applause, it was commercials, it was variety shows, it was debates, it was animals, it was a man rowing in the studio, an athelete rowing and the hosts looking on the anxious expressions, sitting at a round table, a chronometer superimposed over the picture, it was images of war, the sound of framing oddly uneven, as if filmed on the fly, the picture shaking, the cameraman must have been running too, it was people running down a street and someone shooting at them, it was a woman falling, it was a woman who’d been hit, a woman of about fifty lying on the sidewalk, her slightly shabby gray coat gaping half open, her stocking torn, she’d been wounded in the thigh and she was crying out, simply crying out, screaming simple cries of horror because her thigh had been ripped open, it was the cries of that woman in pain, she was calling for help, it wasn’t fiction, two or three men came back and lifted her onto the curb, the shots were still coming, it was archival footage, it was news, it was commercials, it was new cars gently snaking along idyllic roads in the light of the setting sun, it was a rock concert, it was a series, it was classical music, it was a special news bulletin, it was ski-jumping, the crouching skier pushing off down the ramp, serenely letting himself glide onto the jump and leaving the world behind, motionless in midair, he was flying, he was flying, it was magnificent, that frozen body bending forward, motionless and immutable in midair. It was over. It was over: I turned off the television and lay still on the couch. (Toussaint, 2004, 10-11)
I recently posted about a great MySpace parody/homage: MySpace: The Movie. Well, I just listened to a podcast of Inside the Net, where Steve Chen the CTO of YouTube was interviewed. He gave the following stats:
As a nice followup to my recent post on SL marketing (an initiation rite that all SLers do!) Wagner James Au reports that there will be followup to the great article on Avatar-based Marketing with a panel discussion in this Friday in Second Life!:
Moderated by Ansible Berkman (the indefatigable host and caretaker of Second Life’s Berkman Island) this will be a roundtable of real world/virtual world marketers, consultants, developers, journalists, and combinations of all four, including myself. Should make for a fascinating afternoon:
“Avatar-based Marketing: What’s the future of Real Life Companies Marketing to Second Life Avatars?” Friday, June 23 at Noon, Second Life Time (i.e., PST), Berkman Island.Panelists:
- Hempman Richard (aka Paul Hemp, Senior Editor, Harvard Business Review)
- Cristiano Midnight (SLUniverse/Snapzilla)
- SNOOPYbrown Zamboni (aka Jerry Paffendorf, Second Life Future Salon/Electric Sheep Company)
- Zero Grace (aka blogger Tony Walsh, Clickable Culture)
- Razor Rinkitink (aka Raz Schionning, Director of Web Services, American Apparel, with just-opened Second Life outlet)
- Hamlet Au (aka blogger Wagner James Au, New World Notes)
I’ll try and make it (it will be Sat 5am here). If you see me there, Lythe Witte, IM me a hello!
The 2005 ELSPA UK Interactive Entertainment Industry Report is available now at their website [pdf]. It covers console, mobile, on-line (to some degree) and causal gaming. I found their section on why people don’t play games the most interesting. Particularly this quote:
Gaming is a lifestyle pursuit which is in competition not only with other forms of entertainment and hobbies but also the primary activities which certain age groups prioritise at different life stages. These could be teenage dating, university, first job, career and marriage. These people do not have hours to spend unwisely when they are being so wise the rest of the time. (p. 53)
I know what they’re getting at with the last line, but gee it is funny.
