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Archives for 2012

Scriptwriting Software

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Over the past year I’ve been thinking seriously about scriptwriting for the first time in a long time. A few screenplay ideas have offered themselves up as they always do — the majority of them irreverent comedies I’d like to write mostly to entertain my dull self — but I’ve also had a stageplay nagging at me in an uncomfortably persistent manner. As professional writers do when faced with the harrowing prospect of devoting time and energy to new projects, I finally relented to inspiration and budgeted some haphazard internet surfing time to looking at productivity tools as a begrudging means of avoiding any actual work.

Scriptwriting Software in Context
Before I offer up the results of my lackadaisical survey, a word about scriptwriting software in general. Computer technology has advanced so far during the course of my life that where success was once solely determined by performance specifications and productivity, high-tech hardware and software are now indisputably fashion-first industries. Precisely because everything from processing power to storage can be had in generic abundance for literal pennies, the marketplace is now more concerned with metrics like hipness, cultural relevance and branding than reliability and usability. Even something as purportedly revolutionary as the tablet computer is, for all its hype, simply a more comfortable way to kill time on the couch, albeit with panache.

So if you take nothing else from this post, remember: scriptwriting software will not make you a better writer, a more professional writer or a more successful writer. Most of the scripts I worked on for cash money were either written on a typewriter, typed up by someone else on a typewriter or word-processing program, or written by me on a computer using a now-defunct commercial package of macros compatible with various versions of Microsoft Word. Even when dedicated scriptwriting applications hit the market I stayed with my old-school methods, and I don’t remember feeling as if my work suffered. In fact, to the contrary, I often had a sense of smug satisfaction when I encountered grumbling comments from early-adopting and agitated peers who hd slaved themselves to a fussy proprietary formatting program. Life lesson: be very leery of installing an additional layer of balky complexity between you and your work.

A decade later, when I was primarily writing for interactive companies my work flow became even simpler. I still used Word, but instead of buying a new version of macros ever year or two for each new bloated release from Microsoft, I grabbed a small set of freeware macros off the internet that covered 99% of the formatting I intended to use. Small customizations to the default settings covered the rest, and all without so much as a separate interface or complex control-key learning curve.

Whether I’m really, truly interested in writing a script (or two, or five) I don’t know. One thing I am sure of, however, is that for the time being I’ll be happier pretending those shiny new ideas in my head won’t go to waste, so looking at scriptwriting software seems a reasonable response in any case. It’s probably been eight years since I used even the simplest tools for scriptwriting, and if I’m going to revisit that mode of storytelling I should probably do so cognizant of the latest tools. Particularly if the features I care about most are available in a single product, eliminating any need on my part to create workarounds or hacks, or to once again bend Word to my rusty iron will.  [ Read more ]

Simulation as Story

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Long before last year’s grisly crash of a highly-modified P-51 Mustang at the Reno Air Races, I fell madly in love with that iconic airplane. Between building model kits as a kid, to having the good fortune to have a P-51 hangared at the local airport, which I could peddle to on my bike on a sunny summer day (here’s the actual plane in the actual hangar), to the unmistakeable sound of its engine, every interaction I had with the Mustang’s perfect combination of form and function seduced me. Its power, its speed, its capability, its history — the more I learned and the more I exposed myself to that machine the more it became indelibly etched in my mind.

So when the personal computer came along, and people started making flight simulators, and flying games based on simulations, you know I eagerly anticipated the day when I could take a virtual P-51 into the skies. And when the PC developed to the point that full combat simulations were being created, often including dozens of planes in the air at the same time, and high-end joysticks hit the market with multiple functions including rudder, throttle and trigger controls, not only was I personally thrilled, but to my surprise the market for such products exploded. In fact, only a decade ago the world was awash in flight simulators of every imaginable kind.

So what happened? Where did all those flight sims go? Well, one limitation of flight sims is that they model 3-D space that you can’t actually experience. Yes, you can swivel your view around using keys on your keyboard or joystick, but it’s a very constrained view of what should literally be wide-open sky. Too, the inevitable feature-creep that infects all tech products (think Microsoft Word, which currently includes 2,016 functions that no human being has ever actually used), began driving a bigger and bigger wedge between players who wanted fun and players who wanted historical accuracy.

One of the most interesting aspects of the rise and fall of flight-sim software is not so much the fall but the rise. I don’t have sales figures handy, but I do know there were flight-sim titles all over the place, which seems a bit odd when you consider that even back in the day very few people were lamenting or protesting the lack of flight sims in the global marketplace. Even when flight sims were selling like hotcakes I suspect they didn’t top the list of games most consumers wanted to play. So why the popularity?

The answer lies in the central processing unit. Computers are good at one thing more than anything else, and that’s calculating. As long as the math can be programmed, computers can spit out results with dizzying speed and unerring accuracy. This leads to the potential not only for modeling complex processes like flight, but for allowing those processes to be affected by user inputs — which in turns leads to the intriguing idea of interactivity. (My definition of this badly abused term here.)  [ Read more ]

Writing is Work

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Whether you’re a dabbler, seasoned pro or tortured soul, pressing keys on a keyboard takes time. The more time you have available, and the more disciplined you are about protecting that time, the more productive you will be as a writer.

PCMag.com has an article up today about telecommuting and productivity, but because all writing is work — whether you’re getting paid or not — anyone trying to find regular writing hours at home can profit from the piece.

— Mark Barrett

The Zombie Problem

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When I was growing up there were two zombie variants. You had your Dungeons & Dragons zombies, and you had your Night of the Living Dead zombies. While I was too young to see that classic movie when it first came out, years later I watched it all alone, very late at night, on the Chanel 9 Creature Feature, which was sponsored by an aluminum siding company. No human being was ever more grateful for an aluminum siding sales pitch than yours truly that night.

At about the same time I was also binge-playing D&D, and in both contexts I still remember debating the moral and ethical issues surrounding the slaughter of zombies. It might seem that the only justification needed for hacking a zombie to pieces or shooting one in the face is the fact that they are intent on eating healthy non-zombie people alive, which is super creepy. But tigers and lions also display that same proclivity at times, yet except for a few low-brow, atavistic big-game hunters still wandering the world in search of their genitals humanity has generally moved away from the idea that every potential existential threat deserves to be turned into wall art or a throw rug. And besides — back in the day zombies moved so slowly you could always run away from them unless you were a total idiot, like, unfortunately, most of the characters in Night of the Living Dead.

If the mere threat of zombies wasn’t enough for me to justify their execution, then, there was the fact that zombies represented a desecration of the dead. Rather than allowing the deceased to rest in peace while politely decaying out of sight, zombification forced the dearly departed to get up and wander around in search of bloody meat, regardless of any physical injury or decomposition they may have previously suffered. Not only was this a cultural abomination, but it was super gross, and on that basis alone suggested a wide range of acceptable motives for zombie killing, from godly mercy to wholesome tidiness.

In the end, as young men often do, I settled on cheap contextual heroism as my ethical justification for hacking zombies to pieces or watching them get their brains blown all over the landscape, but even then, in the primal pre-narrative recesses of my mind, I knew I was getting away with something. I was killing without killing. Taking life without taking life. Murdering without murdering.  [ Read more ]

Game Violence

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Nathan Grayson put up an interesting post on RPS last week while attending E3. If you’re not familiar with E3, it’s an often-lampooned convention where game-industry professionals get together to decide the fate of each other’s bank accounts, in cavernous spaces far too loud to facilitate intelligible conversation. But it’s not all fun and games. Not only are unintelligible deals routinely struck at E3 that determine the games you will and won’t see in the coming year, but E3 quite literally saves lives.

The impetus for Nathan’s post was a game demo he attended, during which the interactive industry expressed enthusiasm for hyper-realistic gore effects:

I sat in a jam-packed arena-sized auditorium and watched a game demo unfold on a screen bigger than my hometown. OK, that wasn’t the surprising part. I’d been doing that all day. This one, though, came to a rather abrupt halt when – mere inches away from the camera – a man’s head erupted into a volcano of hyper-detailed gore after a point-blank shotgun blast. And then: deafening applause from hundreds of people.

This was the blaring exclamation point on the end of a day of gleefully grotesque neck-shanking, leg-severing, and – of course – man-shooting. I can honestly think of maybe five games – in four multiple-hour press conferences – that didn’t feature some sort of lovingly rendered death-dealing mechanic. And oh how show-goers cheered.

Now, as shocking as this may be, it’s worth noting that this sort of thing is really the norm when you stand at the corner of Tech Street and Cash Avenue. Put a few techies in a room with some suits and sooner or later somebody’s going to come up with something truly disgusting, at which point the suits will run the numbers and see if it’s profitable. Only when the project gets to the marketing phase will anyone conduct a focus group to determine if there are moral, ethical or cultural impediments to launching that product or service.  [ Read more ]

The Kindle as Medium

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The gruff but lovable John Dvorak at PCMag, on his experience with the Kindle:

The Kindle is not an iPad, not a computer, and not really a book. When you get a book, it has heft and pages and you know what you are in for as you begin to read it. It can be daunting. The Kindle is one page that is refreshed to another page. That’s it. There is no physical reminder that you have a long way to go to finish the book. It eliminates all sorts of psychological aversions from the reading process.

Yet, as Dvorak also notes, the Kindle seems particularly friendly to shorter works, including novellas and short stories, rather than the ever-longer books publishers have been pushing for the past decade or two in an attempt to equate value with tonnage.

— Mark Barrett

One Million Characters

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Writing is a solitary pursuit often requiring long periods of self-imposed isolation in order to complete a given work. Whether the end product is a book, script or blood-scrawled scroll, many writers compensate for the inherent loneliness of authorship by leading bawdy social lives centered around chemical binges and chaotic if not ultimately destructive relationships. While I fully support any writer’s determination to find a healthy work-life balance, not all writers are constitutionally inclined to such interstitial exuberance.

If you live a fairly quiet life, as I do, the time you spend writing may not seem all that different from the time you spend staring at the wall, flipping channels, surfing the web, or leaning on the open door of the refrigerator for the fourth time in twenty minutes. Such mind-numbing activities may actually increase the appeal of the writing process, turning each typo and turn of phrase into the most galvanizing thing that has ever happened to you, but the banality of such an existence presents a problem. Where more outgoing writers survive secluded toil by subsisting on memories of social conquests and defeats, or even pending legal action, mild-mannered types are at serious risk of cerebral whiteout, where the isolation necessary for work merges indistinguishably with the vapidity of down time.

While it is possible for introverted writers to break up the monotony of their non-writing life by engaging in socially acceptable forms of self-abuse like exercise or watching the news, the real problem with being a low-key person in a low-key profession is that it’s often hard to find motivations that can withstand the darkest hours of the writing process. Where your more socially engaged writer always has an intellectual foe they’re determined to prove wrong or embarrass, or a object of fancy they aim to seduce with the words flowing from their fingertips, the loner writer (not to be confused with the antisocial writer) often struggles to remember why they’re subjecting themselves to torment when they could just as easily be staring at a crack in the ceiling.  [ Read more ]

Interactive Entertainment and Detached Eddies

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Stand beside a mountain stream and observe the water for a while and you’ll see that most of it moves in a continuous flow. Look a little closer, however, and you’ll see that the bed of the stream and objects in and along the stream — logs, boulders, the legs of a bear — all have an effect on the flow due to friction. Look closer still — say, at a rock near the edge of the stream — and you’ll find that the flow may slow to a halt if not actually move in the opposite direction, creating what is commonly called a whirlpool, but more accurately described as an eddy. Peer at the boundary between the flowing current and the eddy and you’ll see smaller eddies form and detach again and again, dissipating as they flow downstream because they are no longer powered by the object in the stream that created them.

Known as detached eddies in the science of fluid dynamics, these disconnected but still churning whorls can also be spawned in the atmosphere, as bodies of air move over the landscape or interact with each other. Heat water to the right temperature and move a low pressure area over that water and you may spawn a monstrous hurricane that lasts for days and travels thousands of miles. Move that same hurricane over dry land, however, detaching it from its power source, and it will slowly dissipate, even as it may still wipe entire communities off the face of the earth.

The key component of an eddy, and what distinguishes an eddy from a vortex, is that in the middle of an eddy there is a void — a place of calm that experiences none of the rotational effects of the moving fluid that defines the eddy itself. Drop a leaf in the center of an eddy caused by even the most ferocious mountain stream and it will float exactly where you dropped it. In a vortex there is no void, but vortices can also detach like eddies. This is known, sensibly enough, as vortex shedding — a phenomenon that has led to practical applications in the real world such as winglets on airplanes.  [ Read more ]

The Healthy Writer

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Like many writers, I spend a lot of time sitting still. Maybe even more than most.

While I’ve always known activity is better than inactivity, like most writers I assumed I could balance the two in some fashion. Say, nine hours in front of the keyboard might be compensated for with thirty solid minutes of insane activity that left me gasping for breath and aching for days afterward. Lots of pain, lots of gain, so to speak.

I had this mathematical security blanket shattered early last year when it was reported that no amount of exercise could ever compensate for sitting still even for only a few hours a day:

The study followed 4,512 middle-aged Scottish men for a little more than four years on average. It found that those who said they spent two or more leisure hours a day sitting in front of a screen were at double the risk of a heart attack or other cardiac event compared with those who watched less. Those who spent four or more hours of recreational time in front of a screen were 50 percent more likely to die of any cause. It didn’t matter whether the men were physically active for several hours a week — exercise didn’t mitigate the risk associated with the high amount of sedentary screen time.

Like many writers who read that damning research I first denied that it applied to me because I’m not Scottish. In fact I’m mostly English, and as anyone who can read a map knows, England is all the way at the southern end of Scotland. In fact, England is so far away from Scotland it’s almost touching France. And you know how healthy the French are, despite rampant alcoholism and heavy smoking.

Given that I don’t drink or smoke and that I’m practically French, I told myself I had no reason to worry. Yet the report was so brutal and uncompromising, and I’ve spent so many years sitting absolutely perfectly still, in the back of my mind I thought I might die retroactively — say, back to 1994.  [ Read more ]

E-book Reader Update

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I still don’t own an e-book reader. Until a few days ago I hadn’t been particularly intrigued by any of the current models, but PC Magazine’s review of a new version of the Nook Simple Touch caught my attention:

With E Ink screens, you need an external light source—that is, until now. The Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch With GlowLight ($139 direct) includes switchable edge lighting, like you’d find on an ultra-slim LED HDTV. You’ll pay more for the privilege—$40 more, to be precise, over the existing Nook Simple Touch ($99 direct, 4.5 stars), which remains in the B&N lineup.

I spent all the hours I ever intend to spend staring at an electronic screen that requires ambient lighting when I was playing games on my original Gameboy. The idea that I might be able to read an e-ink screen in a dimly lit environment like, say, my bedroom, has considerable appeal when compared to reading in, say, a bustling cafeteria. (Along with its review of the new Nook, PC Magazine released a roundup of all of the current readers. Although their five-circle rating system has always been badly skewed toward the high-end, it’s fairly reliable when comparing products across a particular segment.)

When B&N’s Nook first came out it was lambasted by the same tech snobs that turned Apple into a religion. While the Kindle is still the leading e-book reader, the fact that the Nook is holding its own — let alone introducing new features — is having an effect on both Barnes & Noble’s economic health and competition in the e-reader market. Specifically, Microsoft, always looking for an opportunity to cross swords with Apple, Google and Amazon, is now investing heavily in B&N:

The e-book market is still young; if Amazon continues to be seen as the enemy, there’s no reason in theory why the Nook shouldn’t become just as popular, if not more so. It’s true that you can’t read Kindle books on your Nook, or vice versa, but over the long term, we’re not going to be buying Kindles or Nooks to read books. Just as people stopped buying cameras because they’re now just part of their phones, eventually people will just read books on their mobile device, whether it’s running Windows or iOS or something else. And that puts Amazon at a disadvantage: the Windows/Nook and iOS/iBook teams will naturally have much tighter integration between bookstore and operating system than anything Amazon can offer.

Whether that bit of prognostication proves accurate or not, Microsoft’s involvement can only broaden the range of e-reader options and help keep prices competitive, and that’s good for everyone who isn’t manufacturing e-book tech. More here on Microsoft’s gambit from the Wall St. Journal.

Not too long ago there was serious speculation that Barnes & Noble might follow Borders and other big-box bookstores into the dust bin of history. I don’t know that anyone thought the introduction of the Nook would potentially lead to B&N’s salvation.

Update: The Nook Glowlight seems to be a hit.

Barnes & Noble plans to add near-field communication (NFC) technology to its Nook e-reader platform, chief executive William Lynch said Tuesday.

Lynch also revealed that the Barnes & Noble Simple Touch with Glowlight, B&N’s latest Nook, has sold out.

I’m not surprised. In e-book reader commercials everyone may be reading at the beach, but in real life the only people reading on a beach are wearing one of these and still going blind.

— Mark Barrett