Crowdsourcing “K”

Killers. Stone cold killers crept from shadow to shadow on the edge of perception; dark silhouettes painted terror on the stone wall as they flitted through the lot at the end of the alley. Amber tried to focus on the forms as they dodged around the parking lot, but quickly gave up.

At the center of their abbreviated movements, a zombie clad in a bloody wedding dress hunched over her still-screaming victim. Amber had found the source of the scream. An old man, who had apparently been hiding under a car, was trying vainly to drag himself away from the creature, but he was a bloody ruin below the ribcage. It ignored his attempts to flee, tearing violently at his stomach and lower half.

Amber brought up her gun, leveling it first on the old man, and secondly on the zombie… but she couldn’t take the shot. She didn’t have to. A shadow tore itself from the edge of her vision, and the zombie was missing an arm. Another shot of darkness screamed across the parking lot, and then the zombie’s head was sailing through the air. A third figure moved with inhuman speed to silence the old man. It stood there over the corpse in front of her, a man six feet tall and clad in black, with a katana clenched in both hands.

As the figure turned its dark gaze upon her, realization dawned: Amber was in the presence of ninjas.

Reading Along the Lines

http://www.ted.com/talks/scott_mccloud_on_comics.html

McCloud’s timeline structure ideas triggered some interesting thoughts for me, since it reminded me of the ‘cave drawing’ I had to decipher in class. The author had begun with the traditional comic structure, but at one point, to represent the character falling over a cliff, dropped along the Y axis for several panels before resuming it’s rightward progression. McCloud mentioned this same structure of what I will refer to as “directional storytelling” in his speech on TED.

This got me to thinking about the future of comics in general. One of the directional diagrams McCloud shows seem as though the comic is moving toward the audience, which was tricky for me to imagine. Comics are, after all, a two-dimensional media form. It’s easy to take a 1-dimensional story and tell it on a 2-dimensional plane, but it’s harder to imagine it moving along a third axis.

The closest I can imagine to a comic “coming at you” would be either a single animated panel on some sort of screen, or a lower budget but similar idea involving a flipbook. These seem too much like technologically backward televisions though. Perhaps as virtual reality becomes more fact than fiction, we will see something like three dimensional comic-games. Only time will tell.

Run, Lola, Run!

Time travel is okay, right?

One thing that I felt was bizarre and never fully addressed in Run, Lola Run! was the issue of time travel. Lola travels back in time twice without any explanation, simply willing herself back in time for a ‘do-over’. At first this reminded me of video games, which often use flashbacks either in cut-scenes or in the form of extra ‘lives’. Later though, I realized that this narrative form was designed to capture our interest and keep us watching through the film. Lola doesn’t merely travel through time, however; she literally gets a second life, and then a third, which she can use to try to right the wrongs in her life.

To be fair, I don’t know that we don’t get rewinds when we die. Maybe we all get a second try when we die, and forget our past lives. There is no proof that this is not the case, and there is nothing in Run, Lola, Run! so suggest that she remembered her past life, other than the perceived desperation of further attempts to save her boyfriend. If we could go back and redo our lives, would we do anything any different?

My Response to DICE video

http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-box-presentation/

After watching the DICE video, what struck me the most from the many points addressed in the movie was how drastically the psychological tricks new games use are affecting the way we live and play. Developments like Microsoft’s achievement system, Wii fit’s weight loss tracking, or Facebook’s friend comparison scoring have led us as gamers to think of games as real-world relevant subjects and not as the escapist satellite pastimes that they were in the 90s.

When coin-operated games came out back in the day, beating the high score of a neighbor was tempting goal. That same goal is now storming through today’s youth in the form of Facebook games, which bring every friend in a friend list together as a neighbor and cast an analog feel on arcade gaming.

Microsoft’s achievements break the fourth wall by connecting the player to the game through awards outside the box that stay with the player in the aptly named “Gamerscore”. Nintendo goes a step farther with their Wii console, which tracks the player’s coordination, weight, health, and play time in order to encourage improvement through more hours of play.

This amounts to more money for far less effort on the part of the company, by relying not on pixel count or frames per second but on psychology, which is much easier to implement in a game. Where is this kind of thinking taking us? I have no idea, but I can’t wait to get there.