I’m probably more excited than is appropriate that the Next Food Network Stars are Dan and Steve.
NER0 Goes Live
29-Jun-05
While I was at the Digital Media Collaboratory, I got to hang out a little with Ken Stanley and Bobby Bryant, who do some fascinating work with neural-net evolutionary AI. The DMC's NER0 project is an incorporation of that research into a pretty awesome shooter game. And now it's live — congratulations to the team!
Tom and L.Ron Zen
28-Jun-05
I’m so much more interested in unhinged, delusional Tom Cruise than managed, boring, blank Tom Cruise.
Tom Cruise is both a mythmaker — a recurrent figure in our mythology of blockbuster media events — and an adherent to a modern science-fiction made into mythology, made into faith. Fiction, religion and lived experience elude easy divisions in his existence.
Good Press
27-Jun-05
Enspire's business simulation, the Executive Challenge, has a writeup in the Training Media Review.
Search Improvements
18-Jun-05
Wasn't very happy with the results I was getting from the Drupal search module, so I've hooked up a site-specific Google search in its place.
Conferences
08-Jun-05
Greg L. sent me a link to Holy Men in Tights: A Superheroes Conference, and Ellen sent a link to Futureplay. I wish I had more time to go to conferences.
Everybody Wants to be Wolverine
05-Jun-05
Update 18 June 2005: And here comes DC. Here’s the Time Warner press release.
The Marvel/NCSoft case is old news now, but I’ve been percolating some ideas about it for a little while… less about the ins and outs of the case itself, and more about what it is a symptom of: a corporation’s attempt to react to, manage, and perhaps own the actions of fan recreation and response.
NCSoft/Cryptic is the defendant in this case, but their position is something like Napster’s — the real goal of Marvel is to control the traffic of their intellectual property, and City of Heroes isn’t so much an agent of copyright infringement itself as it is a host, an enabler, that allows fans to commit acts of creation and performance that Marvel finds threatening. Like the recording industry, the fear isn’t so much that it is happening, but that it is happening out of their control, outside of their profit streams. One recalls that Marvel announced a Marvel Universe MMOG with Vivendi some time ago, and City of Heroes certainly steals that thunder. The lawsuit can be read as an effort to make sure that, when superhero*-based MMOG play happens, it happens under Marvel’s watch.
And that’s all I’ll say about the case itself — far smarter and more informed people than I have been talking about it for a while (links: TN1, TN2, TN3, TN4, TN5, and Penny Arcade) — but I’d like to take a moment to speculate about this Marvel Universe game and what it might provide; what it might, by genre, be unable to provide; and why this makes City of Heroes more threatening than they might even imagine.
Marvel’s corporate strategy over the past few years, which DC is now apparently relearning many years after its own mass-market restructuring in the 1980’s, lies in the broad commercialization of a large but discrete number of cross-media entertainment properties. In other words, it’s all about Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman; Spider-Man, the X-Men, and (though the movie might really flop) the Fantastic Four. It’s not about the expansion or complication of an imagined complex world, but rather the reinforcement and increased brand equity of intellectual property clusters self-contained enough to sell.
(Important to note that both Marvel and DC are in the middle of rather large events that affect their universes as cohesive worlds or spaces. But these events, despite their publicity, will I suspect turn out to be either illusions of change or streamlining exercises to increase character marketability across media, not attempts to deepen or complicate what we understand as continuity for either universe.)
In other words, at this point in time (but not always… I think it fluctuates over time), the universe is secondary to the characters it houses. More so with Marvel than DC, as it always tends to be, but true for both. The universes are vehicles for these properties rather than properties in themselves. A subtle distinction, yes, but important, because Marvel Universe as a persistent world game would rely more on the universe than the properties it houses.
Take a look at The Matrix Online, which is making a valiant effort to continue the story of The Matrix in a dynamic way. But, tellingly, one of the main questions in their general FAQ is:
Can I be Neo?
New players start the game as characters just escaped from the Matrix. However, you will likely encounter some of the famous characters from the movie trilogy.
In other words, you get to be a foot-soldier: immersed in some everyday, routinized activities of fighting and leveling, maybe getting the chance to observe the fiction’s central characters in-game, maybe not. This quote of the day from a while ago relates to this, I think: a persistent world game is an exercise in the quotidian disguised in the trappings of adventure. And the promotion of branded, character-driven adventure properties through this medium will always suffer for that.
But this is the trick — once you get past the branded big guns, I think superheroes can be quite good at being quotidian. Top 10 immediately comes to mind: a world where the fantastic is omnipresent and coexists with, or becomes, the ordinary. In its own way, Chris Claremont’s early work on X-Men speaks to this as well… he took the “heroes with problems” template of Marvel and enriched it, giving us characters who cooked, tended plants, went on dates. Claremont retained adventure, but decentered it a bit, and forced the mundane into the mix: Top 10 disrupts adventure altogether by distributing it to the point where it doesn’t raise an eyebrow. The superhero genre is good at absorbing other genres: indeed, it can almost disappear into other genres, becoming a decoration to crime drama, or horror, or even the novel.
And this is where City of Heroes comes in: unconstrained by any properties other than the city itself, it can organize around a world rather than around a character or characters. Although Top Cow recently began publishing a City of Heroes comic with a shiny script by Mark Waid and an undue emphasis on marketable CoH hero Statesman and his dramatic adventures, it’s the previous series by Blue King Studios that really got it right: a guy moves to the big city, meets some friends, does some grouping, works through some missions. Oh yeah, and he’s a superhero. City of Heroes has successfully deployed the superhero genre as a framework for everyday experience, and has done so in a way such that no one is hierarchized (except by level, of course) and everyone is special.
When Marvel Universe comes out, how will they be able to respond to this — to allow uncontrolled character creation while preserving a world hierarchy that privileges Spider-Man and the Human Torch? Will you get to be Professor Xavier’s Gifted Student #9501? How will they reconcile a world of mass heroism with a cross-media universe where the heroism of Your Favorite Characters sparkles up an otherwise unremarkable world? Who’s going to settle for watching Wolverine do things, when everyone wants to be Wolverine?
* The term “superhero” being, of course, a shared trademark of DC Comics, Inc. and Marvel Entertainment Group.