Cross-Media Entertainment

I’ve just watched a video of a virtual event for the third time. I found it so exciting and interesting, but some of you may find this response upsetting. You see, the event was not consensual. In World of Warcraft (WoW), a guild, Illidan, was holding an in-game memorial service for a member who had passed away in real life. The members of the guild were paying their respects, and videod the service to give to the family of the deceased. Then something happened. Another guild, Serenity-Now, attacked them. The funeral attendees avatars are seen strewn over the snow. They made of the video of the event too, to recruit new members to their PvP (player versus player) guild. You can watch a video at Google, download it there, and a hi-res torrent is available (but that is a different edit). Nate’s post at Terra Nova provides links to some fascinating online discussions and their are some interesting comments there too. 

I’m sure I’d be very upset if I was part of the funeral event, but as an observer I’m fascinated. It is interesting, to me, that the drama is because of a mix of the real & virtual world. If it was a realworld attack on a real world funeral, we’d react differently (though some are equally outraged at this event). And if the funeral was virtual then this event wouldn’t have so much tension. The whole idea of representation in the arts is at question here. We’ve been hammering on the idea of audience becoming active, of the reader becoming a user, of the co-creation of the text, of participatory arts. Well, it is happening. We now have the ability to participate in the creation of works and we are the event. The problem now is, how can we delineate between fictional behaviour and real world behaviour?

Okay, in the virtual world those players are not actually killing the other players in real life, they are killing their virtual representations. So, there is one delineation there. But it can still hurt. Someone can smash my favourite picture. The picture represents some memory I have, but it is just a representation. But it still hurts. Intention is the difference. Did the Serenity-Now players intend to hurt the other guild in RL? No. They intended to represent hurting them though… At what point have I crossed the line? Each avatar is a person, it is not a hollow puppet (besides the bots!). Many of these games, including alternate reality ones, are tettering on the edge. At present, we’re still covered in the muck of scripted entertainment. If we’re given a role suddenly, we say the lines we think we should say, as we’ve seen a million times before. But those words are quickly becoming stale, that echo will get fainter.

For decades, academics, artist, philosophers, anyone, has been championing the freeing of the individual. Power to the audience! Let there be a two-way interaction. Let’s destroy the tyrrany of the text. Let’s free people to have a voice and stop being help down by a dominant force. Well, maybe it was in place for a reason…

In Wired recently Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, commented on the need for a metaverse (a term apparently coined by Neal Stephenson — though I cannot imagine it never being uttered until 1992), a unified platform in which all our avatars can roam freely between the various virtual worlds. He argues:

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Ok, I’ve been asked by a few people if I’ll be at Game Developers Conference this year. I won’t unfortunately. So, if you’re going and end up attending any of the following sessions, let me know what you thought.

• What’s Next Panel 
• Advergaming, Game-Based Messaging, and Marketing I 
• Advergaming, Game-Based Messaging, and Marketing II 
• A New Vision for Interactive Stories 
• Agile Methodology in Game Development: Year 3
• ARG Group Gathering
• Brand Development for Video Games 
• Big Screen to Game Console: Case Studies 
• Broadening Our Idea of What Games Can Be 
• Building a Better Battlestar 
• Burn Baby, Burn: Game Developers Rant 
• Cinematic Game Design 
• Developing Franchise Properties for Simultaneous Release in Comics, Games & Film 
• Effective Advertising Models for Interactive Games: Selling Ads w/o Selling Out 
• Fun versus Offensive - Balancing the Cultural Edge of Content for Global Games 
• Game Curriculum Workshop: The Shape of Things to Come 
• Game Design Workshop 
• Games on Instant Messenger: Tapping into 170 Million Interactive Users 
• How to Generate PR for your Games and Build a Franchise for Company Skills 
• How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days 
• Is That a Franchise in Your Pocket? An Animal Crossing: Wild World Case Study 
• LucasArts and ILM: a Case Study of the Convergence of Games and Film 
• The Game Studies Download: Top 10 Research Findings 
• What’s Next in Design 

Just saw this video of a dance sequence of Guild Wars’ Elementalists. There are more of these videos and transcripts and such out there, especially from programs which are experienced one-on-computer but also from players in MMOGs. Check out the MMOG pranks that have been orchestrated and the numerous stageplays players have put online from the interactive storytelling game: Facade: Mark Marino’s Cancer Character; Marc Heiden’s; some more here, and here.The reasons are various, some possibilities are: they want to reach beyond their online peers, relive the experience, show other non-players what they do, and the transcript (in whatever form) is a creation in itself. Personalised technology doesn’t lead to the Death of the Shared Experience (as I’ve pondered before), it necessitates the creation of a personalised rendition of the experience. It seems technology, and how we’re using it, is bringing us closer to actualising the subjective manner in which we experience life. Enjoy the dance.

[from Wonderland]