Games and tax credits

This found via Gamasutra

The Louisiana Senate Bill 341, an initiative to grant tax credits to companies setting up shop in Louisiana to produce video games and related interactive entertainment, has passed the Senate, according to online reports. The vote was 33-0 in favor of the bill, which means its passage to the House Ways and Means Committee is now clear.

The bill offers a tax credit of 10 percent of state income tax for companies who invest anywhere from $300,000 to $8 million in a Louisiana-based operation. Investments of over $8 million will earn a 15 percent credit. Any credits can be traded or transferred, but a failure to remain in business in the state for one year after credits are granted would result in penalties such as a loss of the credit.

Stoning Field update

As an obsessive, I find that it’s hard to let anything go that’s grabbed my interest, until the next thing comes along. One of the items on the obsession list is Stoning Field in Flash. With this I’m loving the programming. I remember back in the late seventies and early eighties being unable to get into BASIC because I really had nothing to do with it. The use never made sense to me. But the visual programming side of things has really grabbed me because it belies larger interests in spatialand memorial simulation. I work on the fundamental principles and the overall project. Anyway, there are two cells left to go then a whole lot of sweatening and then prep for publication. Then on to MX 2004, Lingo, and the college Composition course being built as a total digital environment.

Stoning Field update

With a little break before summer teaching and other work, I’ve been able to make headway on Stoning Field, a short story that I’m repurposing in Flash MX (not 2004, which I have yet to work with, although I’ve been practicing the new strong typing of ActionScript 2.0).

Anyway, what’s going on with the project?

First off a little background. I started planning the project in Storyspace, a decision that’s really payed off. Storyspace provided first iteration beyond the textual story and also set up the structure of the hypertext later to be mimed in scriptlinks. Next came further thinking about the bottom up creation in Flash, which can be problematic. Why? Because of the involvement of video. Originally, I had considered using very small video clips in certain areas of the work to act as motif and as a means of playing with time. The video clips represent memory as visualized instances and as a representation of “present time” action in the story. While the text of the story may involve a struggle to get somewhere in the “present,” video may represent a mental state or recollection hinted at in some other, earlier area of the story. Okay so far. But I had to crank up the quality of the video clips just a tad because of the optional sizing issues in Flash mcs, and because I can’t really know when the urge might come to say, “Hm, I need something a little bigger here.” A clip can be nested (contained) in a mc then resized on the stage. If it is decided later that a clip should cover say 400 by 400 pixels, the video has to be of sufficient quality to compensate. This, of course, means that the Flash files are going to get larger and larger and you change your mind later then you really can’t get the space back.

I had originally thought that I’d contain every cell of the story in one file and aggregate it in scenes. Quickly, it became apparent that 21 scenes with who knows how much video to come would be too big for Flash to handle with confidence, and I hadn’t reaaly envisioned a lot of multimedia in the first place. By scene 7, the fla was already climbing into the 30Mb range and I was having a difficult time saving for safety onto CD. This issue started to nag at me so much that concentrating on the “real” work became difficult. Luckily, copy/pasting frames and libraries into new swfs and having them “act” like scenes is simple enough. Director is the workhorse, however, for these bigger self-contained projects.

I had already taken the time to consider stage-size, button-size, palette, environment UI, degrees of interactivity, and instance names so the only real pain was the video itself.

Anyway, I revised the project by converting to this new structure: Multiple flas that load into level 0s. This gave me the opportunity to fine tune the embedded video and treat it with a little more respect. In addition to the Flash changes, I went back into Storyspace and retitled and reworked the text spaces to reflect the changes in Flash because Storyspace helps to maintain continuity. While I work, I have Storyspace, a notebook, and Flash open at the same time.

Now I’ve come to the fun part. It’s time to sculpt the later flas to suit the story and to add what needs to be added: animations, photograph and video manipulation, and hopefully the funof scripting.

Paths
In Stoning Field there are two base paths. One dictates the “present tense” (PathA) the other a memorial counterpoint (PathB). Here are two examples:

PathA:

In the desert beyond the stoning field, dust devils ride the sand. They disappear, reappear, impossible to forecast, invoked out of the elements that generate clouds and other fog and wind forms, blurring the distances, scrubbing the horizon in their circumambulations under the sun. The children see them as they leave the street and enter the field. They feel accompanied.

PathB:

At twelve years, I broke my wrist playing tetherball. The big yellow ball spun above me in quickly decreasing ellipses around the pole. I made a hard fist and leapt for the ball and struck the metal loop linking ball to rope. I remember hearing the metalic ring of a bell behind the crack of the bone. I don’t recall pain, but I do remember the sound and the infexibility of steel.

And I wonder if the authorities banned that loop. Did they put it on trial?

The idea here is to let the paths go but to also “tether” them together. Tethering, play, and odd forces are all ideas that keep coming up in the text; I didn’t have to think about “making sure” things fit together this way. It happened that the “tethers” exist. In the path B example above, it makes sense to “tie” a little yellow ball to _xmouse, _ymouse using a few variables that simulate inertia, flex, or acceleration to give a little push and pull to the interaction with the current frame.

Interesting challenges.

Dreams, poetry, and time

As the poem below would indicate, flight is a common motif in dreams. Does this indicate limitation or freedom in the substratum or surfaces of the waking world? For example, I haven’t had a flying dream in a long time. But while young, I’d often dream flying over El Paso at night. This notion is reflected in my story “Ejay Mariposa Dreams a Rocket Real”

In real life Mariposa drove a Buick. But in his boyhood dreams he sometimes had a lighter vehicle that could fly and fly fast, the anxiety in such a dream having to do with the height of electrical wires strung between the street poles (which he’d always interpreted as symbolic of the fear of accomplishment, the conundrum of those millions who might have been somebody if they hadn’t suffered insurmountable frictions in their busy and torturous lives). The dream began with the vehicle propelled upward by whatever energies and just clearing the wires. Then the car would gain speed, more and more speed, fly into infinite blue until the speed was so great, so gut-wrenching and reckless, that Mariposa the Younger would wish for a revoking of momentum, and he’d find himself back on the street, peering up at the electrical wires, then waking, haunted by the dream’s incredible physics. But now, Mariposa the Elder was trapped at the top of a rocket, wondering whether he’d bounce on impact with the desert, watching the sun climb the cloudless, rotund sky, the wind screaming in his ears.

The question is, of course, rhetorical, or should remain mysterious. Susan’s poem has no answers. It merely presents an image. Something happens, leaving us suspended in the image. Like spiders suspended in webs. A memory. The anchor’s in the red door. Could be terror there.

Dreams and poetry

Susan Gibb’s first draft in response to the poetry challenge

The Age of Dreams
by Susan Gibb

I flew when I was little
around the cotton candy room at night,
in and out the windows
with a soft swoosh of feathers
and eagle eyes to pierce
my sister’s dreaming sleep
and peer inside her head.
I’d glide above
her bed
and giggle.

These days I roam through
endless grey rooms in houses
built like factories filled
with friends in folding chairs.
My path defined
by hellos and conversation,
I maneuver, looking for
and never find
the red door
leading out.

There’s a nice beat here between “door” and “leading.”

Star Wars: down beats

I usually take my daughter to see the big blockbuster movies, so today we went for Star Wars episode whatever.

We left not understanding really why the story couldn’t be made to work. It has lots of potential: mystery, love, the fall of republics. But the story just doesn’t work. The continuity problems are enormous and the awful acting is a hole that can’t be plugged (you can hire as many powerplayers as you want but they still need something to say). We couldn’t figure out why such inconsistent psychological decisions were made: why does Anakin (or whoever he is) become Darth Vader? Because he believes the dark side of the force will save his wife from a death he envisions in dreams. Or, because he wants to be in charge; or, because he suspects plots and betrayal by the Jedi. The second makes more sense than 1 or 3, but the writer couldn’t depend enough on simple ambition, greed, or pride, and so all of them end up seeming forced onto the character because there “has” to be a reason. Nothing seems natural in the story, much like the dramatic “and” tiresome backgrounds, cities of steel that go on forever without a hint of flower, garden, water, or human touch. That doesn’t make sense either. None of the characters are likeable and without much to say or do the acting is embarrassing.

Ultimately, A. Skywalker is a dimensionless character because he can’t figure out who he is. If he’s “dark” then why not grow that aspect in a dramatic way rather just “deciding” to be bad (which is what he does), then argue with the other Jedi, try to convince them that the darkside is the way to go. The model is Julius Caesar. The answers shouldn’t be obvious. But author is too bent on making things obvious.

For current SciFi at its dramatic best, I suggest the recent Battlestar Galactica, a risky revision of the old family favorite now gone edgy. One episode has more dramatic power than all the last five SW flicks.

Too bad. But it all comes down the “writing.” Good thing we got mid-day price.

Poetry exercise: dream as narrative

We know that dreams often act as a spike for writing and reflection. But we also know that dreams change over time. What changes about them is translatable into image. How does this work:

1. Given: change
2. Significance

As a person grows, the texture and subjects of dreams change. My own significant dreams are those that come in a series and that have that texture of realism. You (second person as a point of view; no, third in my case would work best–but the poem should tell) wake up and are pestered throughout the day by the experience. In this case, motif is critical, it would seem to me. Here’s an example, regardless of interpretation: I used to dream a lot about a space filled with black widow spider webs. The space first had the dimensions of my high school band room’s storage room, where we’d put our instruments and books and things. Later, the dimensions changed to reflect multiple rooms: the band room, a particular friends’ basement, a barn. There were two constants: the spiders and the webs. These dreams would surface then go away after a few days leaving me wondering why? Why, of course, is a part of the fabric of the dream. Anxiety, decisions, whatever. Anyway, the dream would unfold with my entering the space and realizing that I had to make my way through or out; the webs were everywhere: above, in corners, under shelves, laced across the floor like stretched nets. The spiders as a given were shrowded like black points within the webs, terrific potentials, hovering pebbles.

I know the source: black widow spiders love El Paso, Texas. We’d find them all around the house, out back, in manholes. They hunt at night. We’d hunt and find them with flashlights. It was always electric. When you found one in the small, confining basement, hung cupped in its silver universe, you had to stop and and wonder. In addition, at work one time, I entered a dark pumproom at night and nearly tripped. I scrabbled for the light, and sure enough I’d stepped through a web laced across the threshold, like a tripwire. The spiders, after all, have an aura of creepy intension, as if they’re after “us.” To us, they live alien lives in alien worlds, thinking up sinister plots; their revelations, like their webs, are as hard as iron and they see thousands of us simultaneously. Of course, all of this is reflected in film, and, of course, dreams, where the world can become “weblike.”

That’s just one example. But I haven’t had such dreams for many years. Others have taken over. That’s the exercise: to poeticize the calculas of change: one example, two examples. How do these dreams form a parallel experience of existence? What is the story or image that the dreams provide via the memory space of the poem?