Archive for the ‘Transmedia’ Category

Syndicate: The RPG

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

I’ve mentioned Syndicate before. It’s the book I’m working on. I’ve also mentioned that I love some of the transmedia stuff out there to extend the story. What I haven’t mentioned is that I used to play D&D1 and have an unnatural love for Paranoia.

I came across an article2 talking about making your stories into RPGs for some cross promotion if it’s applicable. I did my usual thing and ignored the cross promotion aspect, instead going back and thinking about these stories I’ve made. And you know what? Syndicate could work.

Over the course of the series, there are a lot of things that get introduced to the story universe. There’s a system of magic for different types of people, there’s things that could be called classes, theoretical stats and campaigns. Every quest is essentially a dungeon crawl if you look at it right, but there’s opportunities for much more story driven campaigns as well.

The only issue is that it’s really more of a single player game as the universe stands now. I focus a lot on the freelancers and they aren’t all that keen on getting a group together and splitting the profits in the end. Sure, it happens. It doesn’t happen often enough, though.3

However, at the end of the series, Wipe happens.4 After Wipe happens and things start moving from there, the universe opens up a little more to multiple and single person campaigns. There are more enemies, more chances for random encounters, more of just about everything that would make the world a lot more dangerous to play in, and therefore more fun.

Granted, I’m sure there’s plenty you could do with the universe now, but I rather enjoy the prospects of a land fraught with danger than an organization that people have to report to.

I might have to make the game, is what I’m saying. Eventually. Once I do my research and get the stories themselves written. But one day, you may see the game out there.

  1. I also played some White Wolf in there too. [↩]
  2. Of which I just can’t find [↩]
  3. Well, technically it happens all the time in other districts, but those never get covered in the series. [↩]
  4. No, I won’t be elaborating on what exactly Wipe is just yet. It’s something several years away. [↩]

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Old Spice Ads

Friday, August 6th, 2010

Participatory culture is a bit of an odd phenomenon. I know about it mostly through Henry Jenkins‘ book, Convergence Culture
, but until recently, I’d never seen a very good professional example of it. Sure, there are smaller fan-based works and online series that incorporate this , but that I’ve now found a well done professional example of it, I’m quite happy.

I speak, of course, of the Old Spice guy.

Those of you who subscribe to him on Youtube will already be familiar with it. He had a wonderful back and forth with Alyssa Milano, after all. He took questions from Twitter, Facebook, Youtube comments and other places I can’t name off the top of my head from users of all sorts. He even went a little meta.

Now to explain. Paricipatory Culture is when the fans, haters or general observers of something become an active part of contributing to it, whether they necessarily realize it or not. Many times, they will come to realize their part in the property quickly. In this case, fans contributed questions and the Old Spice guy tore down the fourth wall to respond to them.

It’s not necessarily an easy thing to do. Constraints need to be made to preserve whatever narrative or structure the base property requires. If you can find a way to balance it out, though, it can turn into quite a bit of fun.

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Straight Cross Media Adaptation and Why You Shouldn’t

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

aka Stop Copying Yourselves, Guys

I’m of the opinion that a straight adaptation does no favours to anyone. From a viewer’s perspective, they look like they’re just trying to cash in on a property without hiring a creative team. From my perspective, most of them also look like they’re saving money by not hiring a few medium consultants to fix the writing.

When adapting things across mediums, it’s always important to remember that different mediums allow for different storytelling methods and some methods that work in one don’t work in another. Movies are not comics. Comics and novels have different methods of showing and telling. Television shows cannot always be condensed into a neat little 120 minute package and not every comic would make a good movie.

Media specificity plays a huge part in why some things fail in their adaptation. Take the Sandman: Dream Hunters adaptation. While the text does a fine job of telling everything, comics are a visual medium. If the action isn’t shown panel by panel and is instead shown through the text, then you aren’t doing a very good job. The medium is important to take into account, as are the constraints that medium holds.

The other problem with straight cross media adaptation is that it actually adds no value to the property. If I’ve already seen the movie, why would I spend money read a comic with the exact same story, lines and outcome? Maybe if I were a collector or a completionist, but if you aren’t even going to do it well I don’t know if I’d bother.

There’s other ways to put properties into other mediums that will not only add value to the property, but will also work well within their mediums and may even draw in a larger fanbase, which is part of what these adaptations are all about. How do you do that?

Ah, that’s a post for another day.

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Star Wars Augmented Reality Game

Friday, July 30th, 2010

Has anyone else seen this? Because it’s damn cool.

To promote their product, TomTom seems to have only started by harnessing the Star Wars fanbase with their commercials, which feature such amazing things as Darth Vader trying to say “Round about” and force choking the hell out of anyone who dares tell him he’s doing it wrong.

But it doesn’t stop there. On top of that, they’ve created an interesting game to go with their contest to win a free one, all based around Star Wars which tests your ability with the force. If you have a webcam, I recommend at least checking it out because it’s incredible.

And, to make this somewhat credible and not just gushing over an advertising campaign, a little explanation on augmented reality.

Augmented reality is when you have to do something in the real world to affect the game world. I have a little experience doing this but, that was an art installation and not quite as accessible as this one is. It can involve things like an augmented reality tattoo or just physically moving in front of a camera and interacting with the system in the physical world without using a controller.

And, it seems, that these are better pulled off by advertising companies as small gimmicks than game companies who try to do whole games based around them.

Although I do wonder if you could implement some of these games into an alternate reality game in the future. It would certainly make the experience a little more immersive … but I’m getting carried away and this is a much longer post for another day.

The feasibility of it is pretty dependant on funding, so they aren’t quite so common right now, though there are more coming out of the woodworks. Yoda and Vader yelling at you for failing the Force test certainly isn’t the first example of it, but it’s certainly the coolest that I’ve personally come across.

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Westernizing Visual Novels

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Japan is weird.

It’s just a fact. They’ve given us a lot of weird stuff over the years, from a wide variety of Hello Kitty paraphernalia to… actually, I think I started with the weirdest thing I could think of there. Anyway, it’s a strange place and has spawned a whole genre of animation and even a type of game called a visual novel.

Remember the Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) books from when you were younger? A visual novel is a game that operates sort of like that. You get a scene with an introduction to the cast, each of them sliding in and out with different expressions and saying their lines to exposit the scene. It ends with your character at a crossroads with several choices to direct the story.

I’ve been trying to do research on these games and figure out how they operate. There are playable areas with mini-games in some, while others rely on the story to be the driving force to get the players to complete watching. Really, it’s a bit of a comic/CYOA novel hybrid where the “player” gets to choose where the story goes and how events will play out.

I’ve been trying to play the free games that have been translated as I lack the funds to invest and the ability to read Japanese. The ones I’ve had access to have two key things in common. First, they are largely based around relationships. They have been largely about the token male lead trying to woo one of the female cast in the harem to him.

The second is that there’s a lot of porn in these games.

Like, a lot.

Rather than focus on that, I’ve been trying to think of ways to make this into something that I’d actually be able to work with. Given that I’m not Japanese and I don’t really want to tell any stories with a guy trying desperately trying to pick up school girls, I have been thinking of ways to make it a little more western. And by western, I mean something that I would actually write.

Change the first, of course, is to change the art to something western. That alone will change the aesthetic to something a lot more western as it is. But that’s not quite enough.

Next, animation. There are some animations in them already, granted, but those seem to be in much higher budget games and limited mostly to lip flaps and big dramatic cinematic. Western audiences seem to like seeing things move on their screens, so an animated sequence, or a generally more cinematic approach to the medium would be a great means of making it a lot more western. Budget comes into play, but I’m going to count this as a bit of a wish list item to the medium.

Lastly, the stories. The stories are almost all either romance (From what I’ve played) or creepy horror mystery stories (Or so Higurashi is supposed to be) and not as many of the latter than the former. With the game play abilities that they’ve implemented, there’s got to be a way to create an immersive experience in the more western, non-harem themes.

It’s on my list of things to try to write one day. I have a few stories that could work really well in the medium, though they will have to wait a bit. I do still have a book to write.

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Don’t Fear the Medium

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

A large part of what I learned in SIAT was based around this one quote by Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message. And I’ll be honest, I hated that quote and still get that little flash of red in the back of my mind when I hear it. It was stretched and twisted until it fit with every point that the professor wanted to make, or introduced and quickly dropped at the start of class. By the end of school, it was just a footnote at the back of my mind to be brought up when I wanted to sound smart. That was all.

And then I discovered transmedia storytelling and I did a little more thinking about it in that context.

Now don’t get me wrong. I still think that the message is the message. The medium, though, works as a platform and choosing the right platform is an important part of getting the message across. More than that, choosing your medium, the one you want to focus in as a writer, shouldn’t be something you choose lightly.

Stories are a strange thing to start with. They start as something small, just an idea, that a writer takes and shapes to be whatever they are going to be. To many people that’s enough. They want to be a novelist, they have an idea for a story and they write a novel. That works most of the time, but I’ve started add an extra little step in there, after the idea and before the writing.

I pick a medium.

I want to be a novelist. I know that’s one of my ambitions, but when I look back on my stories, not all of them are a good fit for novels. I have an idea for an ongoing super hero series that is really better suited for a more visual medium. I have an idea for a story about demons flooding a snowed in campus that would be more spectacular with a different ambiance entirely with different characters. There’s a whole series I want to make that revolves around characters that are all equally interesting, but as a book would get bogged down transitioning between them all.

For me, my stories aren’t clearly defined as novels anymore. While I still want to write novels, I know that’s not always what’s best for my fiction. I’d love to write them as novels, really. I know how to write a piece of prose better than I do any script, but that’s not the best medium for them. I could twist and shape them into the shapes I want them, but I doubt that I’ll be satisfied with the end result.

Because of this, I’m exploring more. I’m learning how to write for comics, still image by still image, and learning to split up dialogue for the medium. I’m learning about animation techniques, audio and voice acting for animation. I’m learning about the different sorts of narrative driven games so that I can write for those sorts of games as the narrative demands.

So how many other people are doing this? Is there anyone else out there who thinks about what medium their story is best told in before they start writing, or do you make your story work for the medium you want to write for?

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