Shelving!

Like, I think, 90% of the inhabitants of first world countries, Lidia and I were plagued by a room full of books hosted on cheap IKEA shelves. The shelves accreted over the years; somehow I had the feeling that each time we took them down to move they reproduced in the trucks so that we had more when we unpacked.
We're both book lovers, but we were stuck in a home office with these walls of ugly brown fake wood shelves with the structural integrity of a famous Pisan landmark. They were old, unattractive, flimsy, and generally unloved. So... what to do?
Solution 1: Sliding shelves.! Space efficient, cool, elegant... Estimate: $15,000. Oh.
Solution 2: Extend the office space. Estimate: Legally impossible. Ooops.
Solution 3: One day, after a bit of brainstorming, we came up with the idea of ... hiding them. Seriously. A brilliant idea.
We contracted our friend Krzys (one of the apocryphal Polish handymen that the French seem to fear will undermine their way of life) to take care of it.
He set the IKEA shelves plumb, attached them to each other and the wall so that they were nice and sturdy, and hung simple white sliding panels in front. Ta daaaa! Things of beauty. One day we will take over-sized photos and decorate the panels with them; for the moment they're fine like this.

Me at the NLGD

This is cool -- I will be doing a games writing presentation at a developer's conference in Holland in June. The topic is relatively open, but I will be in particular discussing the integration of story into game design, and the problems and techniques of handling narrative (in particular multiple narratives) in a game story.
More information on the conference can be found at their site.
The dates are June 18 to 20, and my presentation will be on the 19th.
Pictures and bios of the presenters can be found here.

These are further thoughts inspired by Richard Dansky's blog entry (mentioned earlier). I responded to him, saying:

"No further proof of the fundamental artistic gap between movie and game is needed than that of the games that are made as tie-ins with movies."

For those of you who don't know, they have a history of being awful, or at best, acceptable.

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that there are more fundamental differences between these art forms than there are similarities. We seem to be hooked on the idea that because they are both viewed on screens, or because they both depend heavily on dialogue, they must be similar.

It is true that there is a great deal of cross-pollination between them. Games strive to have the setting and atmosphere of great movies. Movies, it seems, with the surge in the use of hand-held cameras, seem to be going for the POV visuals and visceral feel of games. Blockbusters in both of these media share a preference for epic plots, large explosions, and larger-than-life heroes and villains.

But on the subject of storytelling, the two arts have little in common. Movies from a storytelling point of view are merely books with moving pictures, animated graphic novels, or theater plays with big budgets. Telling a story via a movie, play, or book is fundamentally similar:

1. The observer is passive; there is no influence over the advancement of the plot.
   
2. There is by necessity a single story line, all characters are immutable, and all actions pre-ordained.
   
3. The consumer is absorbing, watching, listening; in the case of books they are using their imagination.
   

Games, however, are fundamentally different:

1. The consumer is active, choosing (within the limits of the game design) what will happen next.
   
2. As there are multiple possibilities, there should be multiple outcomes. Characters in the game are expected to react differently to the player depending on the player's previous actions. Choice is limited (or else the game project becomes infinitely large), but within this the player is free to act as they wish.
   
3. The consumer is reacting, thinking, and involved as a participant.
   

And these are just the macro issues. From the purpose of the dialogues to the character that says them to the intended effect on the audience, the building blocks of games and movies serve different purposes.

Lidia and I decided to spend a romantic weekend there and yes, it is worth doing. There is no point in going on about the wonderful and fascinating combination of history and politics that form the backdrop of the city; others have written of it elsewhere and better. I will simply say that it is a great city for walking around, and an excellent city for modern architecture.

Pictures of our adventures are here.

And what do you know, from mid-March to mid-April it is also a phenomenal city for eating. There is a yearly festival / contest between 30 or so of the best restaurants in the city. They each provide a cheap menu of what is usually very expensive food, with the idea of enticing the average bier-and-wurst-eater to try something better. Kudos to them; it was brilliant and we did it two of our three nights. For planning your 2009 excursion here is the web site: http://www.tour-de-gourmet.com/

Our choices were the Zille-Stube and the Atelier im Maritim.

We stayed at a hotel called the Upstalsboom in an up-and-coming area called Friedrichshain.

Berlin is fun. We saw a movie at the awesome Sony Plaza, ogled the architecture, and ate well.

Spotted in Berlin

Extreme weirdness. Who would ever name anything "Titanic", particularly when it's a travel agency?

Why storytelling in games has problems

Here are two lines from a job offer for a "Content Designer":

- Good programming or game scripting skills (basic C++ or Java or game scripting).
- Good creative writing skills and imaginative storyline ideas.

There you go -- just hire a coder who can write. Who needs a writer?

"Where No Fed Has Gone Before"

I quote this; it is the title of a BusinessWeek article on the injection/loan/fibrillator treatment that the Fed gave Bear Stearns.

Spec fiction is everywhere, and Star Trek has become part and parcel even of business culture.

The joy of foreign languages

In the US, it's a well-known baby food: Gerber.

In French, it means "to puke".

It's little discoveries like this that make all the hours worth it.

Why kids _really_ need to watch movies with a responsible adult next to them

Because if they don't, they'll learn bad science and be incompetent as members of an advanced society (okay, maybe...).


Interbreeding with aliens? Moving slowly in low gravity? Explosions in space? Movie directors are idiots? You be the judge.

http://io9.com/367792/bad-movie-physics-a-report-card

Survival of the arts in an on-line world

According to the news media (and their owners/backers who have a stake in the perception of the truth), free downloading, peer-to-peer, and loaning copies to friends will mean the demise of all forms of creative artistry. The argument goes that as created works are distributed for free, the artists will not receive money. The artists will therefore not produce, and mass culture as we know it will implode.

There are a number of enormous holes in the argument, the hard ones being a) people are still willing to pay to have the quality of the DVD plus its special features, or the features of the game discs plus included artwork, or the fidelity of the CD plus its liner notes in flippable form, etc., b) people who download and share tend to be people who buy, but we are in an age where p2p and social networks are the trusted ways to find new music, c) entertainment budgets that used to only go to books, movies, and records now get split up among books (and on-line books and self-published books and sites like fictionwise.com), and movies (and their corresponding DVDs and downloads and Netflix etc.), CDs [with monopolistic price gouging (but that's a separate discussion) and iTunes and indie labels etc.], the enormous business of video games (which didn't exist in this scale ten years ago and certainly takes a nice chunk of disposable income), plus everything else that you can spend your spare change on that didn't exist ten or fifteen years ago. And this is without even discussing the "soft" questions of convenience, time invested, and attention span.

But whether you drink the MPAA/RIAA Kool-Aid or not, the question remains: In an age where creative content can be easily copied and distributed and thus becomes essentially free, how does the artist/creator make money?

There are some simple solutions that most companies are exploiting, such as:
1. Include goodies in the object you buy in the store that make it more interesting than the object you download for free. Yes, it costs more, but historical operating margins were ludicrously overblown. Think of it as justice for the consumer.
2. Make additional content available (e.g. on-line) only to customers who have a key from the original item. This is easy to track, and is especially popular for games.
3. Make the quality of the original item higher than anything other than an enormously large download.

But those are not really solutions, because they are simply attempts to perfect a business model that seems doomed in the medium term. They are band-aids.

The best discussion of that I have seen to date on how to really actually survive as an artist, using the business structures and environments that have been provided by the on-line world, is on Kevin Kelly's blog here:

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php

The idea is that if you have (say) 1,000 true fans, who wll always buy your stuff in whatever form it comes out, you have enough to support yourself pretty well. If each true fan coughs up $100 of pocket money per year on your creations, you can certainly continue to make a fine living from them. He goes on to discuss microfinancing and other ways for beginning artists to get started, and it is certainly worth a read if you have skin in this game.

Kelly's ideas continue on the now ancient premise (from way back in the nineties) of disintermediation; as long as the middle-man does not add perceptible value he will be bypassed. Perceptible value is provided by talking and sharing with friends or listening to radio stations that have your tastes. Perceptible value -- particularly in music and cinema -- is essentially zero for the labels and production companies. I have never heard in my life, nor will I, statements like, "Hey, have you heard the latest band from Universal?" or "Look at this! New Line has a movie coming out!" The perceived value to the consumer of these brands approximates zero. The music that the band makes has value, the distribution stream used to get the music to the consumer has value. Napster had value. A CD can be made in the studio for $500 and distributed on-line, and there is no going back.

The simple facts remain that consumers are not essentially evil, and that people are willing to pay for what they perceive to be valuable, but that neither legislation nor marketing can roll back perceptions of value that have been so fundamentally altered.

Game writing and movies -- nice essay by Richard Dansky

On his shared blog Richard has written a nice bit about movies and games -- and why the two forms of entertainment have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.

http://www.storytellersunplugged.com/our-writing-is-not-of-your-world

The Queen and the Lycans

A great movie, with Helen Mirren justifiably a multi-prize winner for her role as Queen Elizabeth.

I had to smile when I saw it, though, because of the actor who played Tony Blair. First off he was great; he projected that mix of excitement and naïvete and hard-headed media savvy that Blair seemed to have. But the reason I smiled is because I recognized him from another role -- Lucian, the leader of the Lycans in the "Underworld" movie series.

Hah! This staid British actor, portraying the highest elected official in Her Majesty's Government, also has had to spout lines like:

"We were slaves once. The daylight guardians of the vampires. I was born into servitude. Yet I harbored them no ill will. Even took a vampire for my bride. It
was forbidden, our union. Viktor feared a blending of the species.
Feared it so much he killed her. His own daughter. Burnt alive for
loving me."

Hey, everyone has to pay the heating bills.

Integrating the story into a game (process)

Here are some musings on how one could approach the question. This is hardly a recommendation, and even less an explanation of the "right" way to do things. It's simply a process that seems to be effective.

The key advantages are that it is iterative, that it starts at a high level at the same time that the designers are mulling over what the game will look like, and it tries to ensure that design and story develop together rather than separately or serially.

First Document: Pitch
This is really a marketing/business oriented text with the setting, a few main characters, the basic story arc, and how it fits in the series/IP/brand. It's a 2-3 page overview that has 0 gameplay elements.

Second Document: Synopsis
Here the story gets broken down into macro chunks: Campaigns/settings/levels, major characters/NPCs, and maybe major missions/arcs within the overall plot. Gameplay may be included, but it's more along the lines of ideas, suggestions, possible new features, etc. Up until this point the designers have been working on their pre-production issues, so the process shouldn't be slowing them down.

Third document: Scenario
Now we start getting to the point where we have to think about gameplay. Here the story is translated into the game chunks that the player sees -- campaigns, levels, objectives, maps. Because at this point we are creating the quests and NPCs that will drive the player's actions, integrating the story and the gameplay is a necessity.
However, since the developers have contributed to the documents created so far, and since in practical terms we are already exchanging ideas of how to make certain plotlines/quests work, we don't run into the "not invented here" syndrome.

From here on in the classic writing elements finally come into play: Writing dialogue, doing the in-game texts, refining the characters and the story details. Without the upstream part, however, the story will feel pasted on to the gameplay, and the player risks seeing scenes and hearing dialogue that have nothing to do with the actions he is taking.

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More thoughts about gameplay and story structure

It seems to me that the discussion of storytelling and games is hampered by the basic fact that a lot of games don't really need or want to tell stories. Think of Tetris, or chess, or gin rummy -- games that are intrinsically story-less. One could say that there is even a bit of story in Monopoly; the kind of story where you regale listeners with who landed on what and who had to mortgage his hotels to pay for it. That's not writer-directed story, but it's certainly a series of events and obstacles with protagonists and antagonists leading to a climax. By most literary definitions, that is the backbone of story.

But I think that this definition of "story" is misleading, because unlike in Monopoly, story has a purpose in most video games. In a huge, open RPG game the story guides the player and tells him where to go next -- or, in a more dramatic way, tells him where his unique services / skills are needed next to forestall the collapse of civilization as we know it. The story is not merely dramatic, it is practical. It serves both a narrative purpose, and a pragmatic one.

So it seems to me that, depending upon the type of game, what we call story has widely different functions. I am batting around a list of these ideas, trying to see what may and may not make sense.

1. For anything in the FPS-Survival horror-Action-Suspense genre, the story really drives the gameplay. The player has a total immersion in the game world; even the tips and hints are often given in the guise of NPC's or in-game documents, furthering the sense of immersion in the immediate environment.
The point of view (cinematically speaking, not literarily speaking) is first person or tight third person. The game advances in a series of quick, action-filled, life-or-death moments where the player must constantly move and take decisions.
In the literary world, this is classic hard-boiled private eye stuff. Tight first person, action and violence, life-or-death stakes.
The purpose of the story is to drive the gameplay, to lead the player almost by the nose into (and perhaps even through) the next series of obstacles and challenges. The gameplay is largely linear, though it may pretend not to be with a series of linear-but-parallel sub-quests available.

Okay. Now I have to go off and think about other literary and ludological genres, and how they compare.

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Game writing: Back to the basics

I am working on a (potential) article about beginning game writing, but in trimming the article an awful lot of thoughts are ending up on the cutting room floor. I'll drop some of those into my blog from time to time, because writing these things out helps me to better understand the proces of game writing and what I have learned.

The problem for a fiction writer is that writing games is like writing a story, but without the story part.

I jest. It's actually like writing a story, but without exposition, setting, internal dialogue, description -- it's writing a story when you can't say a thing about what's going on in the protagonist's brain, because the protagonist is the player. They have to know what's going on anyway, and you yank their chair-shaped butts right through the fourth wall if you dare to actually stop and tell them.

Everything happens through what the player sees, what the player chooses to do, and what dialogue the player hears and/or selects. Those are the only colors left out of the fiction writer's entire palette for creating the story--visual setting, action, and dialogue. Three damn fine ones, admittedly, but they make it a real exercise to develop an entire picture without using all the others tools that a fiction writer usually relies on.

It's even worse, actually, because all you can do is hint at what the action should be; leave a trail of breadcrumbs that the player will hopefully want to follow. The more you make him follow a given path, the less he feels like he's playing the game and the more he feels like the game is playing him.

And that's really the big difference. You can't say what your protagonist is going to do, only the player can say that. You can lead him by the nose, but the heavier the hand is that guides the player's actions, the less immersive and interesting the story becomes. If things go that way you get what I think of as "dramatic rupture" -- it's not the player's story any more because the player doesn't feel like they made it happen. Instead, the player feels like it's someone else's story and they're just along for the ride.

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The Pradaic Devil

A fun movie. Snappy dialogue, rich characters, the incomparable Meryl Streep, glamour and glitz.

Except for one thing that really annoyed me; the writers wimped out. They wimped out when the protagonist, Andy, was chosen over her supervisor, Emily, to make the trip-of-a-lifetime to Paris. And Andy had to break the news. It should be a difficult moment; Andy, as the up-and-coming acolyte, has to tell her mentor that she has been replaced. It was stressed at several points during the movie that the entire focus of Emily's life is this trip to Paris.

So it should be an intense moment. Andy, who has clawed her way up in the face of her own doubts, the loss of her friends (and boyfriend), and the toughness of her boss, must tell the person who trained her that it is now Andy who is top dog. Emily loses; Emily is out. Emily is being replaced. There should be anger! Angst! Recriminations! Shattered dreams! Catfights!

But none of this happened.

Conveniently, Emily gets hit by a taxi and breaks her leg. She can't go to Paris anyway; she is still angry that she couldn't have gone but it's a whole different story. Andy is exonerated, she didn't have to be cruel, she didn't have to take and then impose a morally difficult decision. She didn't have to carry the responsibility of the act, she wasn't forced to confront the results of her actions.

Boring. A letdown.

The writers wimped out.

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Why Bernini was a genius

It's only one man's opinion but...

Son of a sculptor, in his early 20's Gianlorenzo started creating his own works. His David, Apollo and Daphne, and Pluto and Persephone alone are worth a trip to the Galleria Borgehese. Maybe even a trip to Rome. (The Wikipedia articles on these works are good starting points.)

But the one that I find the most amazing is his Constantine. He was commissioned by the Pope to do a work for a niche of the Scala Regia staircase, which leads from the Vatican to Saint Peter's (the stair was also designed by Bernini, wearing his architect hat. Like Michaelangelo, he was good at a wide range of things.).

I'd like to start with that. He had to make a statue for a long, shallow, niche ; it requires a special sort of inspiration to take that starting point and decide to create a life-sized mounted figure. In order to fit it he had to remove a limb from the horse, but who's counting?

The statue depicts the moment before the battle of Ponte Milvio, when Constantine saw the Holy Cross in the sky and converted to Catholicism. True to the Mannerist / Baroque style of Bernini, he has chosen a moment of emotional intensity and violence. Remember, this was the first person to think of doing a David in the moment before he throws the rock. Not the pretty, petulant victor of Caravaggio's painting or Michelangelo's statue, but a muscular, intense athlete putting all his body and soul into the rock and the sling, not knowing (of course) what the outcome would be.

Back to Constantine. Above the niche there is a window, so light is thrown directly down on the statue from above. Mounted on the horse, twisting up and slightly to the left as the horse twists to the right, the emperor Constantine is staring straight up into the daylight ; his face is fully lit while the rest of his body and the horse are partially shadowed. This is good old chiaroscuro and contrapposto and everything else that you learn about Mannerist and early Baroque art. The clothing, the muscles of the horse, the expression of the emperor -- all of them are executed with the detailed perfection of his workshop and his style.

When I first saw the statue, and looked at the placement, the choice of subject, the execution, the form, the use of the existing window ... I was stunned. It was worth having to argue with security guards and jump a couple of queues to get a closer look when we were in Rome in November, even though the Swiss Guard looked ready to start swinging halberds at me. If you ever get to Saint Peter's, you should do it too. In my books, for that statue alone Bernini deserves all the accolades he has been given.

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I think that I shall attempt it again seriously this year.

I have not managed to actually write 50k words in a month since my first NaNoWriMo year; however I think that this year looks promising for it. On the other hand I may cheat and write a series of short stories or other fiction instead of a novel, but I don't think that they'll penalize me for that.

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Summer's vacations

Time to backfill all the stuff I haven't written for the last two months.

First off, the four of us went on an amazing hike in the French Alps. It was four days / three nights, with each night spent at a "refuge". These places are wonderful, as they provide room and board so all you have to carry is clothes and personal stuff (books, flashlights, band-aids...). They are generally not accessible by road, so all the food comes in by mule, hiker, or helicopter. Pictures (commented) can be found here:

http://picasaweb.google.fr/jeff.spock/HikeInTheAlpsJuly2007


In July/August we were in Kentucky for my sister's wedding. The wedding was a great weekend -- including cousins we had not seen for 33 years -- and the pictures (uncommented) are here : http://picasaweb.google.fr/jeff.spock/JennDavid02

We then took some time to go hiking, climbing, kayaking, etc. Kai, my nephew, was with us so if you see a third child in the photos don't start wondering. Kentucky was beautiful, and as if to compensate for the embarrassing idiocy of the creationism museum, there are excellent kid-oriented science museums in both Lexington and Louisville.

We also visited the factory where the Louisville Slugger baseball bats are made, a horse farm, and the Wild Turkey Distillery. The latter, of course, was not really for the kids.

Louis is now proudly wearing a Lousville baseball cap.

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Every once in a while you run across something that simply Must Be Blogged.

"Goldilocks Dies With Honor at the Hands of the Three Bears" -- one of the titles from this page of "Klingon Fairy Tales" :

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/lists/22MikeRichardson-Bryan.html