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Willful Ignorance as Productivity Tool

August 22, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

I said in a previous post that I had “complete unfamiliarity” with the subject of fiction on the internet — then I promptly launched into a high-level analysis of blog fiction in the same post. Since that seems a bit incongruous even to me, I thought I’d get a few things into the record before relating any more of my fiction hunting escapades.

Prior to launching this site I had a lot of questions about the state of storytelling in the digital age, but I didn’t do much (meaning any) research or scouting ahead of time.

Here’s why:

1) I didn’t want to spoil any of the surprises I might find along the way. If there are great stories out there on the web, or there are growling literary factions at war over virtual turf, I wanted to experience it all with this blog at the ready. (I’ve already deployed all the sticky notes my desk can handle.)  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: ~ Tangents

Googlezilla vs. Micromonster (and friends)

August 21, 2009 By Mark 3 Comments

I don’t pretend to know the full story behind the battle that’s shaping up over Google’s plan to make millions of books (many of them out of print and hard to find) available for purchase online. I don’t even know all of the arguments so I’m going to dig into the issue more tomorrow.

There are two conclusions I can draw, however, based solely on last night’s lede from the New York Times:

Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo are planning to join a coalition of nonprofit groups, individuals and library associations to oppose a proposed class-action settlement giving Google the rights to commercialize digital copies of millions of books.

First, whatever the outcome, after all the trials and suits and counter-suits are settled the landscape for writers will have fundamentally changed because distribution will have fundamentally changed. The current technological marvel and oddity that is electronic publishing will quickly become the norm, even if individual copies of these books are also made available in printed form.

Second, none of the musclebound corporate antagonists fighting to control this process is involved because they love writers and want to protect them from bad people. Profit motive is driving everyone’s interest, and the names of the tech-company titans who are squaring off should suggest just how much money is involved.

More soon.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: Google, lawsuit, Microsoft

Site Seeing: WebFictionGuide.com

August 20, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

If ‘blog fiction’ is an obvious term for fiction on the internet, so is ‘web fiction’ — and that broader term is what I typed in the search bar yesterday for my first formal surfing safari. The top hit for that phrase turned out to be a site called Web Fiction Guide, which describes itself as a “community-run listing of online fiction”. (Sweet!)

As a first stop on an uncertain journey it seemed a welcoming place, and after taking a look around I think it would be worth your time to stop by as well. (Visiting the WFG Forums will give you a sense of the traffic on the site, as well as the vibe of the community.)  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: blog fiction, site seeing

Blog Fiction: the Big Picture

August 19, 2009 By Mark 4 Comments

In what I’m sure is an unflattering admission, my complete unfamiliarity with the subject of fiction on the internet includes the current terminology for the various expressive forms. For example, although I had heard of individual instances of blog fiction, I didn’t know if ‘blog fiction’ was a generally-used term, or even a broadly-used, all-encompassing term.

Well, yesterday I read a short Wikipedia article on Blog Fiction which not only provided a useful overview, but also answered or at least paralleled a number of my own thoughts about the subject. I’m still not sure of the scope of the term, but I now know I’m not alone in that uncertainty. (I encourage you to read the piece when you have a moment.)

Specifically, the article confirmed my belief that there are two big questions facing blog fiction and other types of internet fiction (if such distinctions need to be made):

1) Can old and new storytelling techniques be harnessed into a mature craft which will make internet fiction the emotional and artistic equivalent of more established types of fiction?

2) Will the potential for — and seduction of — authorial ambiguity in blog fiction create useful tension as a technique, or simply confusion on the part of the reader?  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: blog fiction

Getting Underway

August 18, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Launching even a small web site like this is both fun and frustrating. It’s fun because it holds promise. It’s frustrating because for every coding rule there’s an exception, or a variance necessary to coddle some third-party application or software or browser which steadfastly refuses to join with the rather blindingly obvious cause of standards compliance.

Still, at some point in the development process (which is itself a grand term for what I’ve been doing), the cobbled-together back end and the bells and whistles out front achieve a state of grumbling tolerance, and there’s nothing left to do but get on with it. Call it a shakedown cruise. Call it a public beta. Call it open-source testing.

All of which is to say that you’re going to find some glitches here and there as I continue to tweak this and that. If something doesn’t work for you, or displays poorly, please let me know.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com Tagged With: Ditchwalk, feedback

You Say You Want a Revolution…

August 17, 2009 By Mark 3 Comments

The more things change, the more they stay the same. When it comes to human beings and their actions and choices, I believe that.

But sometimes change really is change. And once in a great while, change is revolution.

Right now — today — is one of those times, because the internet is clearly a revolution. (At least until a global power shortage forces us all back to cold chisels and granite slabs for communication.)

I’ve been a professional writer and storyteller for more than twenty years, and for over a decade I’ve been making a living as a direct result of the advent of the internet. But that’s only looking at the internet as a communication pipeline that allows me to work for clients across the country and around the globe without leaving my chair. Amazing as it is (and it still amazes me), that part of the revolution is pretty much over.

But there’s another way of looking at the internet, and that’s as a medium — as this web site, web page, and these words attest. As a publishing medium in particular the internet is still evolving and growing, while powerful established industries such as newspapers, television and the book business are already reeling as a result of the force of this change.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com

Summing Up

September 20, 2005 By Mark Leave a Comment

I’ve been working and living outside the walls of the interactive community for a year and a half now (maybe closer to two), and I have a few thoughts about the industry as seen from that distance.

Irony Abounds
Many moons ago the interactive world sneered at anyone who tried to use full motion video or other cinematic techniques to bring actors (and by extension, narratives) to life. That was back in the day when the processor was going to solve every problem, and we were going to be able to tell interactive stories on the fly. Because FMV was non-interactive – and inherently scripted – it was derided as an antiquated solution to a new-age problem.

Flash forward to today, and much of the talk in the IE community is about how GPU’s are spitting out dynamic scenes that look as good as film, and how scripted sequences are conveying the same force and power of the best motion pictures. And this is all being done with a straight face.

The awful truth is that most attempts to create real narrative interactivity have failed, and most of the techniques currently being used to deliver narrative force have been derived from the film industry. Sure, using game-engine graphics for cutscenes and scripted sequences provides cost savings over location shoots, safety during production no matter how crazy the stunts, and continuity with other graphics in the game, but the end product is still a movie.

Think about it. While a lot of the eye candy that helps sell the best shooters requires a processor, much of the narrative does not. Which raises an interesting question. How much of the entertainment value of a given successful title is due to algorithms, and how much due to the non-interactive authorial control being exercised by the designers? Even five years ago adventure game designers were derided for heavily scripting their games, while the case could be made that their craft knowledge is now more applicable and important than it ever was.

Years ago I wrote an article that talked about the need to focus on real interactivity, where choices determine outcomes, as well as the need to improve on magicianship, or the illusion of interactivity. In the intervening years, the one thing the interactive industry has really gotten right is convincing the user that a button click has determined an outcome, when in fact it is only revealing an outcome that has been pre-designed. Predictably, as products have tipped more toward these predetermined effects, the promise of interactivity – where each user would be able to make free determinative choices in a given environment – has waned. And serious commercial attempts to move past the current limitations seem to have waned as well.

Are people still fighting the good fight? Sure, but just as many people are faking the good fight, and there aren’t that many people in the industry who can tell the difference. If the industry continues to excel at magicianship, there may come a day when there is very little interactivity in any product, because it costs money to give the user choices and options.

Business models have firmed up, bureaucracies have calcified, and everyone knows where the sure money is so those are the products that get into production. The goal of providing interactive storytelling has been replaced by the goal of faking interactive storytelling, which probably isn’t a healthy development for an industry whose main selling point is interactivity.

Gatekeepers and Death
I was as interested as anyone in trying to advance the cause of narrative interactivity. But after having endured the disintegration of an incredible opportunity because of the blindness of that team’s leadership, I took a long look at the premise of leaving it up to others in life to determined when I would and would not have the opportunity to create. In the end I decided I’d much rather make my own stuff under my own direction, even if it was in another medium, than wait around to see if the fates would shine on me at the big table. I’ve just seen too many people grinding it out year after year, hoping that their self-absorbed boss or bottom-line company will give them a chance to show what they can do, and I don’t think that’s a healthy way to live if you’re driven by creativity. Unless of course you’re immortal.

Which brings me to my next point. Clearly one of the factors in all this is that I’ve gotten old enough that I think about how much time I have left to be productive, but that’s only part of the story. The main reason I can’t really trust the fates is that I just haven’t run across that many leaders and managers who understand that their job is getting the best out of the people they have, as opposed to getting what they themselves want out of the people they have.

That’s true in sports, too, where there are two kinds of coaches. The most common kind, by far, is the coach who has a system he or she likes. These coaches teach their system to their team, molding each crop of players into pre-assigned slots in the system, whether or not they’re ideally suited to those slots. The other – and much rarer – kind of coach is the one who looks at what each team member excels at and then builds the team around those skills and abilities. Unfortunately, I’ve been looking for that kind of coach most of my creative life, but I have yet to find one.

Caring About Caring
I remain convinced that the key to real mainstream success for the interactive industry is getting people to care emotionally about the interactive choices they make. That’s true for the illusion of interactivity as well as for real interactivity, but it’s emotional involvement derived from real interactivity that the industry needs to demonstrate. More than anything, users still want to care emotionally (as opposed to rationally) about the in-game choices they make.

If there’s a final irony in this for me, it’s that after watching millions of dollars get flushed down the toilet in the IE industry, watching failed designs get green-lighted due to incompetence, watching craft knowledge get trumped by ego, watching people with power and no talent abuse people with talent and no power, I ended up not caring about the industry. I tried to deny it for a while, but when I’m doing creative work I have to care about what I’m doing in order to do it well, and I didn’t have any reason to care about interactive entertainment any longer.

Next Steps
So, where to from here? As of today I’m about seventy pages into my first novel, and while I don’t know if it’s any good or not, I do know that I’m enjoying myself and feeling good about my work. I care about writing, and about what I’m writing.

I’m also learning the craft of stained glass, and I’m even doing a little drawing and painting, which I haven’t done in years. Chances are none of this will pay off enough to keep my head above water and I’ll probably end up driving a dump truck, but that’s okay, too. Provided the brakes work.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: interactivity, irony

Academic Intent

June 18, 2004 By Mark Leave a Comment

This is the text I submitted to the First Person project, which you can read more about in the post immediately prior to this one.

In college I took a run at academic criticism, including semiotics. I spent time studying films and writing them, studying fiction and writing short stories, and studying theater and writing plays. The most surprising thing I learned in my criticism classes was that most of the people sitting in the chairs beside me had no interest in making anything. They were there to learn how to talk about the medium they loved, not how to better create in the medium they loved.

To be clear, I have no axe to grind with anyone who enjoys debating the merits of any subject, from sports franchises to music to movies, but as a creator those debates do not further my cause. I need to know how to make things, and that means I need practical solutions and reliable techniques to draw from. If that be bias, then I would say it is the bias of the surgeon who needs scalpel and sutures to save the patient.

It’s no secret that academic interest in the interactive industry has exploded over the past few years, but there is a wrench in the works. As an expressive art form interactivity is still in its infancy, and one of the core problems in the medium – interactive storytelling – has yet to be cracked. Over the past decade myriad failed commercial attempts have provided a number of important lessons, one of which is that the core competencies of the interactive entertainment industry are not particularly suited to solving this problem. This necessarily led to a more theoretical analysis of how the problem might be solved, including research efforts at various academic institutions around the world. These academic research projects have in turn piqued the interest of academic critics in the medium, even though it is not yet fully formed.

Another more concrete lesson that can be taken from the failed interactive storytelling attempts in the commercial industry is that some things simply do not work. Many of these failed efforts were in fact valid approaches born of reasoned theory, which in turn helped define and describe the barriers we still face. Unfortunately, reading commentary from the academic world I sometimes get the feeling that these failed attempts are viewed more as serial stupidity than as the experiments I believe them to be. Like the NTSB reassembling and analyzing the scattered remains of a downed experimental aircraft, I believe analysis of failed commercial attempts at interactive storytelling can actually lead us to basic understandings about the theoretical limits of interactive storytelling itself, and I think the academic community is well-situated to begin that work.

I mention all this as preamble to my response to Janet Murray’s essay in a new book entitled First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game. I have read Janet’s essay three times now, and as a creator I must report that I can find nothing in it that is of use to me. This is not a criticism of Janet’s rhetoric or of her essay, but a simple fact. Moreover, as someone who has been wrestling with the issue of interactive storytelling for close to a decade, I can say with certainty that many of the issues Janet raises have already been encountered in the commercial interactive entertainment industry. My concern with Janet’s article is that she does not reference this considerable history in her own discussion.

For example, Janet begins her essay by proposing and defining a new term (game-story), after which she proposes a number of new ways of defining the medium as it exists today, and may exist tomorrow. That we have no common language with which to discuss the craft of interactive design, and in particular interactive storytelling, has been a recurrent problem. Doug Church first attempted to advance the cause years ago by codifying a number of Formal Abstract Design Tools for commercial designers, but in the intervening years we have made little headway. Within the academic research community the problem is exponentially worse.

Exacerbating this problem is the fact that turnover in the interactive entertainment world is high, meaning that every few years an almost entirely new group encounters and attempts to address the same craft-language deficit, with little or no success. (Anecdotally, I have seen this happen myself at least three times in the past ten years, and my fear is that the academic community – through essays like Janet’s – is now embarking on a fourth.) Worse, significant problems can arise when new definitions ignore (or are oblivious of) practical lessons that have already been learned.

For example, here’s Janet at the end of her essay, talking about ‘agency’:

But the more useful question is, how do we make a better cyberdrama? One criterion that I have found useful is the concept of dramatic agency. Agency is the term I used to distinguish the pleasure of interactivity, which arises from the two properties of the procedural and the participatory. When the world responds expressively and coherently to our engagement with it, then we experience agency. Agency requires that we script the interactor as well as the world, so that we build up the appropriate expectations.

On the face of it I think I know what Janet is talking about here, but I’m not one hundred percent sure. If I’m just reading her essay to be able to kick a bit of theory around, that’s fine. But as a creator looking for techniques that I can use to deliver interactive storytelling, agency presents two problems. First, there’s the implicit claim that virtual worlds can respond “expressively and coherently” to user inputs in a dramatic context, which as a creator I know to be extremely difficult to achieve, and almost impossible to sustain. Second, there’s the imposed constraint that we must script the interactor, which runs contrary to the freedom of choice that most people view as the main benefit of interactivity.

My point here is that in order to define and promote new terms like agency, we need to be clear about the concepts upon which those new terms are predicated. After a decade one would think that there might now be a universally recognized definition of what interactivity is, but there isn’t. My own, which has held up quite well, states that interactivity is choice which determines outcome, but the very fact that I feel obligated to say ‘my own’ makes it clear that we have not collectively answered one of the most basic questions facing our medium.

Now, it is true in the academic world, and in particular in the realm of academic criticism, that many of these problems are new. For that reason I certainly have no problem with Janet or anyone else attempting to codify the language of interactivity for the sake of analysis. If these efforts in turn lead to a more formal language that the industry itself can adopt, that’s all to the good. And it may in fact be that the academic industry’s inherent stability will provide an opportunity to establish the mature language of discourse that has so far evaded the more transient commercial industry.

What is not clear to me even now is whether that is the specific intent of Janet’s essay, or whether she really does mean to go beyond language to questions of craft and technique. If academics are going to be helpful in solving the interactive storytelling problem, I think it is extremely important for them to be explicit about their intent, exhaustive in their historical analysis and rigorous with their language. The danger in failing to do so is not simply that confusion will arise, but that academia will perpetuate the reinvention of the wheel among the transient student populations in the same way these issues have reappeared a number of times in the transient commercial industry. And from where I sit, as a creator, the last thing any of us needs is another generation of designers thinking they’re getting in on the ground floor of the interactive storytelling problem when they’re not.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: agency, criticism, Cyberdrama, First Person, interactivity, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Pat Harrigan

An Invitation to Rant

June 3, 2004 By Mark Leave a Comment

A few weeks ago I received a note from Noah Wardrip-Fruin, coeditor along with Pat Harrigan of a new book entitled, First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game. Noah asked me if I’d be willing to take a look at the book and respond to the essays in the Cyberdrama section, and I agreed. As the book has now arrived I’d like to point you to a few links on the subject to busy yourself with while I digest the material and prepare a reply.

Your first stop should be at the Electronic Book Review, which is where my reply will eventually be posted. The site is just up but I’m given to understand that additional posts are at this very moment making their way there.

Next you should take a look at Greg Costikyan’s response to the book, or more accurately, to the press release for the book. I have little doubt that Greg will be weighing in with more soon.

Finally, here is a link to GrandTextAuto, a blog on new media which Noah posts to.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: Cyberdrama, First Person, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Pat Harrigan

Tough Love

March 29, 2004 By Mark Leave a Comment

In my last post I observed that the design mechanics of even simple, non-narrative board games induce different degrees of emotional involvement, however subtle such differences might be. From this observation I posited a z-axis of interactive design that we might use in designing interactive entertainment that is more emotionally compelling. Unfortunately, initial returns on that post suggest that instead of prompting a discussion about how we might increase emotional involvement in our games along the z-axis, I seem to have created the design-theory equivalent of a Rorschach test.

Having spent the better part of a decade trying to be respectful of diverse views, while at the same time advocating for changes that I think our industry needs to make, I find myself at a point of departure in trying to reconcile those two aims. As recently noted I decided to skip the GDC this year if not pull back from the industry entirely, so on that point alone you should feel free to discount what follows as tainted with spite.

Speaking of the 2004 GDC, I’ve checked several reliable web sites over the past few days to get some sense of what transpired, but I’ve seen little mention of the proceedings overall, and almost nothing in the mainstream media. That is, until last night, when I happened by pure chance to notice the following headline while checking an email account: “Video Game Industry Faces ‘Crisis of Creativity’.”

As someone who believes the interactive industry is facing a crisis of creativity, that headline caught my eye. Linking to the story revealed it to be a Reuters article about the GDC in San Jose. Here are the first two graphs:

SAN JOSE, Calif. (Reuters) – The video game industry is facing a hardening of the creative arteries as aging gamers’ tastes increasingly shift toward sequels and games based on movies, industry participants said this week.

With more and more titles chasing the success of their predecessors and content owners digging deep into their libraries to tap older material for quick fail-proof conversion into games, the industry is faced with a question more serious than rhetorical: What’s new?

As someone who believes the game industry is facing a hardening of the arteries as aging gamers’ tastes increasingly shift toward sequels and games based on movies, that opening paragraph also caught my eye. I also agree that the question at the end of the second paragraph – ‘What’s new?’ – is more serious than rhetorical.

So let’s ask ourselves: What’s new? Which craft subject, of all the subjects related to interactive entertainment, no matter how tangentially, really deserves exploration?

Wait a minute – how about emotional involvement? I know for a fact that almost no serious work has been done on the subject, meaning there should be good avenues of exploration available right off the bat, and perhaps even a few unexpected riches within easy reach. As it stands, the faint acknowledgment the industry gives to the idea that players might want their choices to have emotional as well as rational consequences usually leads to the use of filmic techniques that are antithetical to interactivity. How crazy is that?

Yet we shouldn’t be rash. If the interactive industry hasn’t really taken the subject of emotional involvement seriously, there must be a good reason. Particularly given that there’s no conceivable downside to increasing emotional involvement in a product. I mean, who wouldn’t want to have a more powerful effect on the player than we’re already having? Only a crazy person, that’s who.

After a good deal of thought, here are my top-five prioritized reasons why the interactive industry has yet to embrace emotional involvement as a specific design goal:

5) Paralyzing Groupthink
It’s only natural: you do the same thing again and again and after a while it gets hard to think outside the box. Somebody says ’emotional involvement’ and you think ‘cutscene’. Who doesn’t? I mean besides this guy. (To see a classic example of industry groupthink in action, read the rest of that Reuters article and try to find any hint of a new idea anywhere.)

4) Institutional Gatekeeping
Industries and bureaucracies tend to protect themselves even when they aren’t working efficiently or profitably. In our business there are myriad entrenched interests that support the current design methodologies almost reflexively, while opposing innovation with equally thoughtless ease. Key people preside over key power centers and transaction points, and over time those people act more as gatekeepers than facilitators.

3) Condescending Ignorance
This one’s a little tougher to brush off. Unfortunately, there are some people in the interactive industry who will look right down their nose at you and tell you they see the universe in three dimensions, when in fact they barely see it in two. The problem is that it’s hard to talk to somebody about the z-axis when they live in Flatland. How exactly do you explain to someone what they don’t know when they don’t know what they don’t know?

2) Bald Ego
If it seems impossible that the interactive industry could be in trouble when it employs so many talented people, consider this example from another industry full of bright lights. One day several key players were called into a meeting room to discuss a problem with potentially life-threatening consequences. After going around the table there was unanimous agreement – albeit some of it due to timidity – that there was absolutely nothing to worry about. The work product of that meeting was a space shuttle disintegrating over Texas.

1) Economic Cowardice
If you’re a gambler – and anyone who predicates a business on creative content is a gambler – you want to hedge your bets. If you don’t have bankable stars like the movie industry or the recording industry you look for other identifiable means of assuring a return on investment. In the interactive industry that means sequels and licenses. If you have an original idea, remember this: Will Wright had to go through hell to get The Sims made. And if the money people don’t believe Will Wright is worth the risk, they won’t believe anyone is worth the risk.

As I look back on my time in the interactive industry, what’s fascinating is that despite the fact that all passive entertainment mediums derive great economic benefit from involving their audiences emotionally, our industry still believes that getting people to care emotionally about the interactive choices they make should be an afterthought. To the extent that people think about it at all they tend to confuse the issue of aspiring to emotional involvement with aspiring to interactive storytelling as if they’re the same thing. They aren’t.

Labels aside, our industry needs to craft experiences – memorable emotional interactive experiences – and we’re not doing it. Worse, we don’t seem to recognize that that’s a problem, or care enough to take the time to figure out how to solve that problem.

The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one, and I admit it.

Do you?

Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: computer games, ego, emotional involvement, gatekeeping

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