earthx.org blog

ExploreLearning’s new Buzz blog is up, thanks to the work of Edward, who is also responsible for the king of Red Sox blogs, Bambino’s Curse.

Randy Littlejohn’s “Agitating for Dramatic Change” (registration required) presents a theory of a richer dramatic experience in games, places a lot of weight on interactive NPCs or “synthespians,” and argues why it will pay.

“In a nutshell I want to encourage a dramatic story-environment in which the experiencer and truly AI-smart NPCs, each with their own goals, biases, and methodologies, co-create the narrative at the micro-level, in real time, as their actions trigger the results of dramatic situations that are pre-defined at the invisible macro level by an interactive writer/ dramatist.”

The article links to or mentions:
Erasmatron
Haptek
InteractiveStory.net

Persistent “world” game (in this case, maybe “persistent galaxy game”) Earth and Beyond.
Review
Official Site

We saw Stan Lee’s lecture last night and really enjoyed it. Highlights:

- Stan moved to LA 22 years ago to set up Marvel’s animation company, so that Marvel would have control of the production of cartoons featuring their properties. They also produced other animated properties, including Muppet Babies.

- Started writing comics in the 1940s, at age 17… I’ve always thought Stan was Dick Clark-style ageless, but he was a little more grandfatherly last night.

- I’d heard a variant of this story, I think, but in the 60s, Stan’s boss was playing golf with the boss of National (DC), who was talking up the then-new Justice League of America. Boss told Stan to do a team book, so he created the Fantastic Four.

- Stan hates teenage sidekicks and used to rib Bob Kane about it. “If I were a superhero, there’s no way I would go around with a teenager all the time. At the very least, people would talk.”

(more…)

What is this supposed to inspire me to do?

Motivational Poster featuring the Punisher

I’m waiting for the Harvey Pekar line from Despair.

Nick McCrea writes about the trouble with MMORPGs, which I’m firmly convinced can be read as a narrative problem. These are radically different sort of fictions, but they are fictions — they have to have enough internal consistency to make sense, but you don’t have to do that by replicating the banality of life. You aren’t restricted to a flatly capitalist “real world” story with acquisition as a goal. Anyone who’s spent more than an hour in EQ killing rats for hides knows where I’m coming from.

Which provokes the question: what other economies can be imagined or generated? Because these games do operate on economies. It seems like crafting interesting new ones would be the fun part.

Still, you can’t be too harsh… I can visualize the meeting where some marketing guy from Sony says all he requires is that the bastard is released in 18 months, forcing the team to say, “Well, crap, guess we should just go with the rat-killing economy, then.” It’s tough to resist that. The marketing guy doesn’t realize extra time spent on something new and engaging will pay off in the long run.

I think Second Life is an exception — an different kind of online economy that has a lot of potential. It’s also an exception in other ways, as well: it’s a borderline case between a coordinated, digital fiction and a coordinated, digital, stylized version of reality. I know, I know, six of one, but I think there’s a distinction that needs to be studied.

Slashdot discussion of the article.

Warren Ellis’ Global Frequency is a 12-issue comics miniseries about a global rescue force that operates like a smart mob. From issue one, you could pretty much tell that he was structuring it to be pitchable as an episodic television series. And now it will be an episodic television series.

The short film Troops is one of my favorites — a brilliant example of how a persistent, genre-based world like Star Wars, over time, tends to invite other genres into it…

I really liked this essay from David Rees (of “Get Your War On” fame) on his creative process.