Category Archives: New Media

Virtual Lettuce Head

I am now an official resident of Second Life. I’ve been looking for a virtual community to join for experiment purposes but hadn’t ever made the leap because I’m:

1. not into Lineage or WoW
2. unable to commit that much time
3. not crazy about the pay methods

Eve was a close choice. Second Life offers more of the kind of interaction I’m willing to experiment with: real object scripting and site manipulation. SL also offers a virtual world that can slowly materialize much like the way I think about story: start and let the thing happen at its own pace. It’s a rich world and if I do build there and make friends–already have one–then I can experiment with narrative building as a matter of implicit in-world logic.

I’m already thinking about in-world hypertext and patterns for learning.

On another note, I’ve noted this semester that I am less able to do school work during the weekends. The week days are as intense as they’ve ever been with numerous initiatives at the college. Weekends are now reserved for rejuvenation, rest, project play, and reading Milton till 1A.M..

Narratives and Scope

Here’s to Susan, Jim, Joanne, James, John, Josh, Kasandra, and Jason, quickly becoming group Fellows. I thank them most heartily.

It was about air and the things we see, hear, and smell through it and because of it. The evening was complex. Facade with the screen covered made for different experience minus the elegant expressions, and the sound design of HL2 is just astounding. The details matter. How the air sounds in a hall or how a voice diminishes with distance and the sound of glass against concrete. I keep learning how hard it is to write the effect, to catch the dust and the protuberances. It’s an exciting challenge.

And here Susan Gibb examines one of the great spatial descriptions of death here.

Digital space and storyworlds

I’ve played through a few more rounds of Half-Life 2, Facade, Post Mortem, and Syberia II. The subject here isn’t genre, but story, narrative, and environment.

Where do these pieces excel? In their environments, where the user is placed into a fiction that invites the attention and motivates action. Half-Life 2’s power is in the environment, its “in-game” experience, and in its use of sound; it’s the first environment I’ve seen which gives a sense of a setting sun (but this is my own limited experience). It’s weaknessess are in everything else. Once in the world, you quickly get the sense that you can do lots of things: move objects, drive, and jump. You can barricade yourself again moaning creatures with crates. Unfortunately, as a FPS, the combat and conflict hardly make sense point A to point B. Creeping about does no good, the rebel forces are inept, and the enemy seems to know exactly where to aim when you exit a tunnel, enter a room, or set up a sniper position, which just seems dumb. The fog of battle is one thing, but an enemy that seems too competent feels like an overreach. So you run, shoot, and reload the sequence for a quicker route. The physics of the space is wonderful and frustrating as it should be and is a great achievement; the AI of the enemy, however, doesn’t promote a sense of strategy or outthinking or alternatives, as in Deus Ex. In this sense, I find the AI simply misconceived. And the story concept is loaded with questionable decisions. (At least provide a sequence where Freeman and Alyx make a life, walk the beautified canals, and make love, then Freeman can be taken away in that poigniant last scene–love stories and conflicts of reunification can work as major resolutions in shooters too; but this guy with the briefcase at the end is pure “been there done that.”)

The greatest weakness to Half-Life 2 is the point of view, though. Gordon Freeman is empty space, characterless, and silent to the point of absurdity. My greatest frustration is just not being able to connect to other characters through him. This makes no sense technically or in terms of design. Restoration as objective should come with some reminder of why the story is important to tell.

This last point, however, is where Facade and the Syberia sequences are more effective as environments and storyworlds. Facade, compared to Half-Life 2 in this regard, is much more sophisticated as an interactive, human-driven place to make decisions. You interact with Grace and Trip and their environment in important ways, ways that could have build the world of the Combines into a richer more engaging experience. You learn that you are a part of their history and this knowledge as you learn it serves as another way to contribute. In addition, the environments differ only in graphical design and presentation. Facade and HL2 are very similar in the way one moves about. Both are fluid and striking (not new). But the sense of penetrating the world is more pronounced in Facade, because you can respond to the world beyond single key strokes and through listening. You may drink the digital wine. You may make observations on objects. The ability to address the inhabitants, the principles, is part of going inside the fiction.

In Syberia, Kate Walker’s character develops along a real and substantive story arc. Her decisions (which are your decisions) make sense; as the story proceeds, cut scenes and filmic visuals can be read as Kate’s imagination and inner experience visualized as further elements of the developing fiction, a narrative element which I find incredibly interesting aesthetically, which may be unique to new media. The flashbacks Kate experiences of Hans aren’t experienced by her in the same that they are viewed by the user but they may be an approximate vision of her mind at work, a visualization of her own development. Same goes with the arcs in Facade, although the weakness of the eventual stories has already been noted.

Again, this is not a question of genre; this is a question of the limits and potentials of any sort of digital environment where a user is expected to input information with meaningful intent and for meaningful outcome.

It’s a good time for big developers to consider adding teams of people who know about story and its difficulties to their rosters and to start taking independent initiatives seriously for their ability to contribute to future projects whose results aren’t “just” this sort of thing or that sort of thing with great graphics and intricate machine intelligence, but begin to take human complexity seriously, a sort of marriage of entertainment and serious games.

Half-Life 2 and simple machines

It turns out that I didn’t have to kill the queen of the antlions in the prison/assylum. The great John Timmons has already completed the work in a weekend and in comparing notes, we’re noting how things went differently, given choices within the environment and our different responses to the physics.

For me, learning the environment has a lot to do with understanding simple machines, such as the fulcrum.

A view of the bridge. The sense of distance and scale.

Same bridge. Freeman suspended, hoping not to fall. Vertigo.

Environmental themes

Before things heat up in the classroom and online, I’ve decided to get through as much of Half-Life 2 as I can and then do some comparative writing on Galatea, Facade, and this graphic intensive shooter.

I find similar and interesting environmental themes between these works. In Half-Life I’m currently zapping zombies and tossing things around with a gravity gun.

Backchanneling

Susan Gibb sends along this mention of backchanneling and other ongoing computing offshoots from if:book. Two issues that come to mind with these complex adaptive projects are resources and large scale modeling in a learning context. I’m wondering if there’s enough information here on how decisions are made about what sort of sifting is to be done; what sort of interaction may “enhance” a learning environment, and how to think about the obvious clutter.

Interesting and challenging.

Design over time

Cogent analysis from Mark Bernstein on design work

The core idea that makes Agile sensible, though, is that good and complex design can be incrementally created through simple, local changes. That’s a new idea, a discovery of the last generation. When birds flock, they fly in complex patterns and formations — but it turns out the birds don’t need a complicated playbook, just some simple rules about following your neighbors. Cell differentiation, it turns out, leverages simple rules as well; there isn’t a big master plan for building a kitten or a kidney, just lots of local rules. People didn’t know this in 1960, just like people didn’t know about evolution in 1860. They know it now.

Food and interactive story

Today will be made from preparations for fajitas on the grill. Fresh pico de gallo and lots of grilled peppers and other vegetables. I don’t know what will happen and I look forward to the making and the eating. (I’ve learned over the years that if you don’t cook with hardwood then you shouldn’t cook outside at all. But that’s just me.)

Also, I recently finished Chris Crawford’s On Interactive Storytelling. I thought his ideas about this vein of thinking are pretty competent. His discussion of the code workings and mathematics were what I was most interested in. But as I was reading the book, my soft bias against interactive storytelling keep on rising up. I enjoy the code but I don’t buy the systems yet. (I also have a soft bias against things like community storytelling, but that’s another story.)

How do I get by falling back on this idea: we already have a system for interactive storytelling. It’s called life. The other thing that’s been taking time in my head are the references I keep reading to Facade as a “game” and to the associations of interactive storytelling to games. Here’s an example where game as model is woven into an idealistic description of interactive storytelling. It comes from Marie Laure-Ryan:

The user should participate and interact out of interest for the story, not for the sake of solving problems or beating opponents. In contrast to the standard game player, she will prefer a less efficient action over a more practical way to achieve a goal, when this action leads to more interesting narrative possibilities.

Okay. My response is: why even consider the phenomenon in the context of “game” to begin with? Maybe I need schooling on this, but what would “the standard game player” have to do with this in the first place?

indiscretion and Facade

Susan Gibb finds another disclosure, this time by Grace

GRACE
In college… I was in love with someone else.

TRIP
What?!

GRACE
An art major, named Vince.

TRIP
An art major named Vince —

GRACE
And…

GRACE
And I slept with him.

TRIP
Y — y — you what?

AUDREY
Grace, don’t say any more

GRACE
The night before you proposed to me.

GRACE
I jinxed our marriage, Trip.

GRACE
I jinxed it. I’m sorry.

GRACE
This is all my fault.

In this case, it would seem, Grace was in love with Vince and Trip when Trip proposed and thus feels that sleeping with Vince betrayed the other lover thus her use of the word jinx. She is troubled by guilt. We don’t know how many times Trip proposed, though. Grace doesn’t tell us that she accepted this particular proposition or if Vince ever proposed himself. She makes love with Vince the day before Trip proposes. But I wonder if Trip was ever aware of Vince now that Grace brings it up.