Clickable Culture Official research blog of Phantom Compass: Culture, technology, commerce, and play. 2008-09-04T02:06:18Z Copyright (c) 2008, Tony Walsh Clickable Culture tag:secretlair.com,2008:09:04 For The Record:  Walsh on Writing Alternate Realities tag:secretlair.com,2008:index.php?/clickableculture/7.5251 2008-02-29T17:01:00Z 2008-02-29T17:48:49Z Tony Walsh http://www.phantomcompass.com/ Tony Walsh for Clickable Culture, available via Atom. Copyright (c) 2008 in whole or in part, Tony Walsh.]
The Austin Chronicle published an article about games and storytelling today, written by Joey Seiler, frequent contributor to Virtual World News. I'm quoted in the article, and while I won't go so far as to say the quote was out of context, it doesn't reflect what I would have said given the context the quote now appears in.

In the article, I talk briefly about extending the Halo game universe across multiple media, but neither I or the article mentions the groundbreaking Halo Alternate Reality Game known as "I Love Bees." As an ARG writer and designer on the award-winning Fallen and Regenesis games, I am well aware of this precedent, I just didn't think to mention it in the interview, although it was obliquely referenced.

My interview, in its original context as an email thread, follows for the record.

Seiler: Since you're talking on what the video game industry can learn from ARGs, what does that change for the writing side of things?
    Walsh: Bringing ARG sensibilities to video games could mean a greater opportunity for character development and world building--at minimum we might be able to bring greater depth to characters and create more robust 'lore,' but ultimately a game's entire universe would extend across multiple media formats. Hiring a writing team to create transmedia narratives prior to and following a game's launch could be a great way to retain fan interest in game worlds and personalities between chapters or sequels.

Seiler: One of the things that particularly interests me is how the growing interest in casual games, social experiences, and massively multiplayer games is changing the way writers approach video games. You've looked at everything fro Metaplace to WoW to Facebook. What's your take?
    Walsh: Even traditional games are moving more and more towards multiplayer--a single-player game can only entertain a player for so long. While single-player and limited multiplayer games offer a writer a lot more control over the story, some of the most exciting possibilities are provided by players as storytellers. It's fine for a writer to lay out tightly-defined storyworlds, but I think the successful games of the future will provide player with story hooks and loose ends with which to co-create shared narratives within a cohesive framework. This being said, there will always be a market for well-crafted interactive stories with limited player options.

Seiler: As someone who's worked in both the more traditional game industry and now in the broader digital / cross-media environment, how do you see writing change when it's for "serious" applications instead of games?
    Walsh: Actually, most of my career has been spent working with interactive digital media (such as web-sites and Flash games) rather than console and computer games. In the last several years, I've worked largely on cross-media and convergent entertainment projects. Writing for games is geeky-fun. Writing for serious applications is accountant-fun. One of my main areas of interest is in making serious applications more game-like. When the business world can relax and play a little bit, it makes everyone's job that much more enjoyable.

Seiler: I was also curious about the pragmatics of hiring a writing team to maintain an ongoing, ARG-style video game.
    Walsh: ARG production is very complex. In my opinion, ARG writers need to understand gaming more than video game writers. Video games are typically a "canned" experience, whereas ARGs are a lot more organic and responsive. An ongoing ARG-style video game would probably need at least one game designer on the writing team, and would be writing a lot of material "live" or at least for rapid conversion into game material.

Seiler: I was talking to some folks about it today at the Metaverse Roadmap in relation to the Matrix Online experience. They created an ongoing story with new chapters and events instead of simply expansion packs. It's a fascinating idea to me, but it also seems fairly difficult and expensive.
    Walsh: Totally difficult. And in a perfect world, totally expensive. The problem in my experience is that ARG producers either don't seem to be asking for large enough budgets, or clients aren't sufficiently educated about the complexity (and therefore hefty resourcing requirements) of ARG productions.

Seiler: It seems like you're talking more about writing Halo books, videos, and so on, though. Right?
    Walsh: Not exactly. I'm more talking about being able to chat with a future Cortana over the phone or AIM, or discovering "real" corporate web sites that might be on the cusp of AI breakthroughs. The seeds and threads of the Halo universe working their way into our contemporary reality. Maybe a fictional version of the SETI project makes contact with what we later realize is the Covenant; maybe scrolls uncovered in Egypt are actually ancient blueprints for a Halo weapon. There are lots of ways to extend the fiction of video games as believable real-life artifacts, characters and stories.

Seiler: Any thoughts or anecdotes on how gamers react to storytelling popping up outside of their games? I know some people love, but some hate it.
    Walsh: I've never heard of anyone hating well-produced "spinoffs" of their favorite game, but your mileage may vary. If ARGs continue to grow as a force spanning marketing and gaming, I think ARG-style extensions of game stories will be the norm, not the exception.

Seiler: How does a storyteller sell the YouTube experience to someone who's already finished the fight?
    Walsh: Not sure what you mean exactly, but here's my best response: The fight is only as finished as a game publisher's willingness to contract a sequel or prequel. As long as a franchise is healthy, there's an opportunity to expand it across multiple media.
Comments?]]> Case Study:  Bringing ‘Warcraft’ To The Tabletop tag:secretlair.com,2008:index.php?/clickableculture/7.5210 2008-01-08T15:18:00Z 2008-01-08T15:37:13Z Tony Walsh http://www.phantomcompass.com/ Tony Walsh for Clickable Culture, available via Atom. Copyright (c) 2008 in whole or in part, Tony Walsh.]
Gamasutra features a fascinating rundown of what was involved in bringing World of Warcraft to the tabletop as a role-playing game. Written by Luke Johnson of White Wolf, the article identifies "content" as being the biggest challenge in extending Warcraft's world--apparently, Blizzard wasn't comfortable giving White Wolf freedom to invent their own Warcraft lore. Johnson explains the process:
  1. We would write the books [...] making stuff up when necessary.
  2. The good folks at Blizzard would check the manuscript to make sure that a) everything in it was consistent with both their vision of the Warcraft setting and the information that had already been presented in some other format (the video games, the novels, and the like); and b) that we didn't add anything that they didn't like.
  3. The writers would then alter the manuscript as per Blizzard's requests, and we'd return to step 2.
Sounds painful, doesn't it? It's a shame a reputable game maker like White Wolf wasn't given more freedom to expand the Warcraft universe. Blizzard might own Azeroth, but that doesn't mean it has a grasp of what works for tabletop role-playing.
Comments?]]> Do Gamers Make Better Baggage-Screeners? tag:secretlair.com,2007:index.php?/clickableculture/7.5172 2007-11-19T19:25:00Z 2007-11-19T19:46:29Z Tony Walsh http://www.phantomcompass.com/ Tony Walsh for Clickable Culture, available via Atom. Copyright (c) 2007 in whole or in part, Tony Walsh.]
"Security screeners at airports might do a better job spotting weapons if they spent their downtime playing video games - specifically, wasting aliens in lurid first-person shooters like Halo 3," The Boston Globe's Christopher Shea wrote yesterday. The 3-page online article resonates quite well with my quickly-written 2006 proposal "Airport Screening Is A Badly-Designed Game."

Specifically, Shea finds, as I mentioned last year, that even trained security professionals have trouble distinguishing harmful from safe objects; the human people have trouble finding exceptional objects (like guns) amid a sea of common objects (like toiletries). Additional information Shea gleaned from scientific sources shows that moving objects are easier to spot--yet X-ray scanners show stationary objects; first-person shooter gamers erred less in threat-identification tests than non-gamers. A number of interesting solutions are summarized in the article, none of which seem to involve making airport into an MMO (that was my semi-serious proposal), but some of which suggest that gaming might not be as unrelated to crucial security tasks as we might have thought. Sweet, sweet validation.

Also see my proposal for turning prison surveillance into an MMO and Dave Edery's article "Using Games to Tap Collective Intelligence."
Comments?]]> ‘Tale of Tales’ Interviews CMP’s Simon Carless tag:secretlair.com,2007:index.php?/clickableculture/7.5159 2007-11-12T14:02:00Z 2007-11-12T16:08:46Z Tony Walsh http://www.phantomcompass.com/ Tony Walsh for Clickable Culture, available via Atom. Copyright (c) 2007 in whole or in part, Tony Walsh.]
Simon Carless, editor and publisher with the CMP Game Group (Game Developer Magazine, Gamasutra, GameSetWatch and more) was cornered by independent art-game maker Tale of Tales earlier this year. Tale of Tales published the interview over this past weekend, touching on Carless' background, his shift towards business/product management of CMP's many game-related initiatives, and discussing today's independent game scene.

As Chairman of the Independent Games Festival, Carless helps to shape the future of indie gaming. He told Tale of Tales that the rise of independent developers is due both to game-industry veterans forming their own teams, and "bedroom programmers" publishing on the web and making money by running ads. Although not business-focused, Tale of Tales is a very strong artistic contender in the indie arena, having launched the acclaimed Endless Forest microworld in 2005 and The Path, its entry into the 2008 Independent Games Festival.
Comments?]]> Quick Links for 2007-10-31 tag:secretlair.com,2007:index.php?/clickableculture/7.5143 2007-10-31T11:26:00Z 2007-10-31T13:54:06Z Tony Walsh http://www.phantomcompass.com/ Tony Walsh for Clickable Culture, available via Atom. Copyright (c) 2007 in whole or in part, Tony Walsh.]
Comments?]]> links for 2007-10-19 tag:secretlair.com,2007:index.php?/clickableculture/7.5126 2007-10-19T11:28:00Z 2007-10-19T11:51:44Z Tony Walsh http://www.phantomcompass.com/ Tony Walsh for Clickable Culture, available via Atom. Copyright (c) 2007 in whole or in part, Tony Walsh.]
Comments?]]> Guy Parsons On Rock’n’Roll Storytelling tag:secretlair.com,2007:index.php?/clickableculture/7.5113 2007-10-09T13:49:00Z 2007-10-09T13:22:46Z Tony Walsh http://www.phantomcompass.com/ Tony Walsh for Clickable Culture, available via Atom. Copyright (c) 2007 in whole or in part, Tony Walsh.]
Former Perplex City ops-team member Guy Parsons has posted a web version of a recent presentation entitled "Text, Drugs, and Rock'n'Roll," wherein he engagingly argues that stories can become more participatory by injecting rock'n'roll--loosely defined in the context of his presentation as "jumping off the author's stage and diving headlong into the crowd..." -- a crowd Parsons knows (as do others in the ARG, live-game, and participatory fiction space) from first-hand experience is capable of "waiting to catch you with open arms" and co-authoring the experience.

I'd like to see more rock'n'roll in more forms of media, but I don't think that sort of mashup is necessarily a superior form of culture. I'm a bit tired of futurists telling us how one-way media is "dead," but I think Parson's barking up the right tree in explaining why participatory culture is an attractive and satisfying option for engaging contemporary audiences.
Comments?]]> links for 2007-09-24 tag:secretlair.com,2007:index.php?/clickableculture/7.5095 2007-09-24T11:22:01Z 2007-09-24T11:37:27Z Tony Walsh http://www.phantomcompass.com/ Tony Walsh for Clickable Culture, available via Atom. Copyright (c) 2007 in whole or in part, Tony Walsh.]
Comments?]]> links for 2007-08-12 tag:secretlair.com,2007:index.php?/clickableculture/7.5034 2007-08-12T11:18:00Z 2007-08-12T14:37:53Z Tony Walsh http://www.phantomcompass.com/ Tony Walsh for Clickable Culture, available via Atom. Copyright (c) 2007 in whole or in part, Tony Walsh.]
Comments?]]> links for 2007-07-31 tag:secretlair.com,2007:index.php?/clickableculture/7.5013 2007-07-31T11:23:00Z 2007-08-06T14:40:49Z Tony Walsh http://www.phantomcompass.com/ Tony Walsh for Clickable Culture, available via Atom. Copyright (c) 2007 in whole or in part, Tony Walsh.]
Comments?]]> links for 2007-07-16 tag:secretlair.com,2007:index.php?/clickableculture/7.4963 2007-07-16T11:18:00Z 2007-07-17T19:04:24Z Tony Walsh http://www.phantomcompass.com/ Tony Walsh for Clickable Culture, available via Atom. Copyright (c) 2007 in whole or in part, Tony Walsh.]
Comments?]]> links for 2007-07-08 tag:secretlair.com,2007:index.php?/clickableculture/7.4941 2007-07-08T11:19:00Z 2007-07-08T13:57:20Z Tony Walsh http://www.phantomcompass.com/ Tony Walsh for Clickable Culture, available via Atom. Copyright (c) 2007 in whole or in part, Tony Walsh.]
Comments?]]> Military Expert Weighs In on War Games tag:secretlair.com,2007:index.php?/clickableculture/7.4804 2007-03-22T13:30:00Z 2007-03-22T13:45:03Z Tony Walsh http://www.phantomcompass.com/ Tony Walsh for Clickable Culture, available via Atom. Copyright (c) 2007 in whole or in part, Tony Walsh.]
Keith Stuart of the Guardian gamesblog has posted an interview with military expert Dr. Malcom Davis and explores how contemporary military-themed multiplayer video games compare and contrast with the real thing.

According to Davis, similarities include realistic environments, real-time communication between roles, and an emphasis on networked battlefield forces. Davis said "This is interesting because in the real military, there is a great deal of effort to bring such a capability about - its called 'Network Centric Warfare' or NCW. NCW is seen as the basis for future military transformation and delivers a significant advantage to the networked force over the non-networked force."

On the other end, the unrealistic aspects are fairly obvious: Nobody gets killed or injured in any meaningful way, resulting in a lack of fear. Davis said that the chaos of battle is also missing (there are no civilians in video wargames), and pointed to movies like Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers as an example of a more realistic portrayal, adding that the Call of Duty games for the Xbox 360 are closest to real life war.

From personal experience, nothing makes a modern military shooter more chaotic than turning "Friendly Fire" on, but I don't think most wargamers are interested in that kind of challenge or punishment (based on my 3-year run playing the Battlefield series of games).
Comments?]]> Recent Snippets of Sexism, Racism, Homophobia in Gaming tag:secretlair.com,2007:index.php?/clickableculture/7.4764 2007-02-22T14:11:00Z 2007-02-22T15:19:02Z Tony Walsh http://www.phantomcompass.com/ Tony Walsh for Clickable Culture, available via Atom. Copyright (c) 2007 in whole or in part, Tony Walsh.]
A handful of stories related to society and gaming have caught my eye this week, punctuated by an event which occurred in a Storytelling in Games class I taught yesterday. I was showing the students some cutscenes from the recently-released Xbox 360 title Crackdown--one scene described a scantily-clad female villain as "hot" and "dirty." The males in the class chuckled uncomfortably while the sole female student in the class was understandably nonplussed. I pointed out that none of the male characters I'd seen in the game were described in the context of their sexuality. I felt embarrassed not only personally, but for the mainstream games industry, which seems to be slower to evolve socially than society has evolved in its capacity to thoughtfully criticize games--consider this a theme when reviewing the following recent excerpts:

Richard O. Jones, BlackVoiceNews.com: "Psychologists agree that if your race is always the thief or killer, then after a while you start to think that's how you should be, or you think that's how your people are... the games that are being designed unconsciously include the biases, opinions and reflections of their creators. And obviously, whites see Blacks and Latinos as criminals and gradually that's how our children see themselves and behave according."

tiny dancer, GayGamer.net, commenting on Jones' article (quoted above): "It wasn't a questionable article because Jones is wrong, it's questionable because he used only one example (when there are dozens). The recent Crackdown prison-reality-check themed commercials have had me thinking about this issue, because they seem very strongly biased in favor of promoting racial stereotypes."

Blair Cooper, GameCareerGuide.com: "'Gaymer,' one such variation [on the word 'gamer'], is used to describe lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) gamers. While the origin of 'gaymer' is hard to pinpoint, it’s clear that the term has garnered some attention. Many embrace it for its sense of community; others decry it as exclusionary."

Simon Carless, GameSetWatch.com: "[the term 'gaymer'] does construct a straight-gay binary that leaves no room for in-between space, fluidity, or alternate identities. The potential for exclusion is great. Furthermore, 'gaymer' is also used derogatorily."

Matt Cundy, GamesRadar.com, in an article entitled "Are they gay...?": "Kratos (God of War)--Sure, he's violent, full of rage and enjoys pleasuring generously breasted ladies, but he's still a buff, bald-headed, semi-naked Greek Adonis that isn't shy of flashing an inch or two of thigh. He also 'accidentally' killed his wife and daughter. Which probably means he's got a grudge against women. Or something."

Hassan Mirza, Gay.com, on Cundy's article: "While it's reassuring to know that gamers are interested in the sexual orientation of digital superheroes, Matt Cundy's 'Are they gay?' article relies on a series of juvenile stereotypes and clichés... it can be dangerous to suggest that looking 'camp' means gay, or worse, that gay men hold violent grudges against women... Cundy's facetious tone, dismissive of an impressionable audience, justifies making jokes about the LGBT community."

Super Timsy, GayGamer.net, on Cundy's article: "Goodness knows what was going through his mind, but I certainly don't appreciate it. If your [sic] going to out video game characters, try to do it with a little taste and sensitivity for the referenced group of people. Gay gamers are out there, this and other sites show that we're here and we're not going anywhere."

Personally, I'm very happy to be teaching classes to diverse groups of students in one of Canada's most multicultural cities. The older I get, the more I tire of the privileged, White, teenage-brained, male mindset that seems to dominate the games industry. In my experience, the freshest and most interesting game ideas and solutions often come from designers and developers outside of this very specific demographic. It's a pity that games like the just-launched Crackdown are still being made, and potentially turning newcomers to the games industry away.
Comments?]]> Tech Digest:  ‘Justin Bovington Was Not Misquoted’ tag:secretlair.com,2006:index.php?/clickableculture/7.4663 2006-12-13T18:48:00Z 2006-12-13T19:23:16Z Tony Walsh http://www.phantomcompass.com/ Tony Walsh for Clickable Culture, available via Atom. Copyright (c) 2006 in whole or in part, Tony Walsh.]
At issue: Whether or not Justin Bovington of metaversal branding agency Rivers Run Red said "'We did a block party with Reebok, and it was the first time we saw black avatars coming into Second Life." The quote appeared in a Tech Digest article on Bovington's Second Life efforts. I re-published the quote in a post about Bovington's alleged statements.

Bovington says he was misquoted by Tech Digest, and "doubly misquoted" by Clickable Culture. The author of the Tech Digest article, Stuart Dredge, stands by the accuracy of the quote.

Someone is not being entirely truthful here, and I am stuck in the middle. My position has been to update the relevant posts to reflect each party's position. However, this has been a pain in the ass for me, and possibly for my readers as well. It's also brought a lot more attention to Bovington's disputed quote than he would probably like. This situation could have been handled better from a public relations standpoint, methinks.
Comments?]]>