Deep Media

"Nightmare High": The BAFTA-winning game that gets you through your worst day of school—ever

We all have our bad days — but some bad days are way worse than others. And it's hard to get worse than a first day at school that goes totally, horribly, mind-bendingly wrong. So how do you put such an experience behind you? That's the question that provoked Nightmare High, an online game for pre-teens that recently took home an interactive children's award from BAFTA, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

Developed for the independent UK broadcaster Channel 4 by Somethin' Else, a highly regarded London production company, Nightmare High is inhabited by the likes of Mr. Piltdown, the criminally boring physics teacher, and Liam Bastin, the school bully even the teachers are afraid of. You start out on your first day of secondary school with the best of intentions — but by the end of the day your gym uniform has been tossed out the window, the teacher has made you wear a leotard instead, a fellow student has recorded it on all on video and posted it to YouTube, and you've become the laughingstock not just of your new school but of the entire nation. At which point, reality cracks wide open — and now you've got to pull it together again. Good luck. 

Sheffield Doc/Fest: When Games and Stories Collide

Last June, when I was giving the opening keynote at the Crossover Summit at Sheffield Doc/Fest, I was asked to talk about the relationship between games and stories. It's a meaty topic: If stories in the digital age are becoming participatory (alternate reality games like 42 Entertainment's Year Zero with Trent Reznor, or the "response" videos from Wieden+Kennedy's "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" campaign for Old Spice), then almost by definition they would be turning gamelike as well. 

As one of the leading events on the international documentary circuit, Sheffield was a good venue for this discussion. The summit, produced by London's Crossover Labs, attracts filmmakers and television executives from across Europe and beyond. (An unexpected bonus was the opportunity to be interviewed by Rob Barker and Matt Mella for their then-nascent blog, Overlap, which covers emerging forms of narrative.) Now that the video of the talk has been posted online, I thought I'd give a little background. 

What Richard Wagner Can Teach Us About Storytelling in the Internet Age

The games blogger at the Guardian, Keith Stuart, posted an essay recently that started out like a broadside against the whole idea of telling stories across multiple media platforms. "Most big video game releases now come with tie-in books, comics and even movies," the subhead declared provocatively. "But is this really about extending the story or is it just marketing?" Things seemed to go downhill from there: 

It has become routine now. A few weeks after the announcement of any big new game release, there will be another thrilling revelation: a tie-in comic book series, a novel, a made-for-TV movie. . . . Of course, much of the excitement revolves around the marketing potential of the linear tie-in: every new story platform is an advert.

This used to be called merchandising, but now we must use the term "transmedia storytelling". Nowadays, developers are aiming to produce narratives so compelling that they transcend platform limitations; a high-tech realisation of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk concept.

To my mind, the idea of drawing a line between "extending the story" and "marketing" is antiquated at best. The Internet, which is ultimately what makes transmedia a compelling and contemporary phenomenon, is all about blurring lines, none more so perhaps than that one. As for Gesamtkunstwerk, which preceded all this by more than a century and a half, Wagner's idea of fusing multiple art forms—music, drama, dance, poetry, whatever—into a "total art work" is an intriguing precursor, but the aptness of the comparison is not immediately apparent. If anything, the notion of a unified work of art seems almost at odds with the idea of a work of art that finds expression in multiple media. Not that that should necessarily be the case. 

It turns out, however, that Stuart isn't so much opposed to the concept of transmediagesamtkunstwerk (to coin a catchy new polylingual phrase) as he is appalled by the realization—by most of the realizations that have been done to date, anyway. And there I'm afraid he has a point: 

A key issue is that the linear content is rarely of a similar quality to the source material. Assassin's Creed the game is an astonishingly rich and detailed interactive universe, but the novelisation, Assassin's Creed: Renaissance, is lumbering, stilted and repetitive. . . . Why would I read the novelisation of Quantic Dreams' psychological thriller [Heavy Rain], when I could read Jim Thompson, John Connolly or Thomas Harris?

There's no end of other examples, and they're hardly restricted to properties that started out as video games. Avatar, for instance, was sadly underserved by Avatar: The Game, despite the fact that the game-production and movie-production teams collaborated intensively. And that's a case in which they were actually trying. Game publishers, as Stuart points out—and the same could just as well be said for movie studios, television networks, and any other outfit producing big entertainment properties—often seem all too happy producing spin-offs on the cheap in hopes of slurping up some additional fan coin or luring more bodies to the box office. We're already seeing what this kind of opportunistic approach can do to 3-D. 

Actually extending a story into other dimensions is a painstaking and expensive process. An alternate reality game on the order of Why So Serious?, the 42 Entertainment production that drew some 11 million people into the world of The Dark Knight before the movie's release, requires a highly creative team, a total mastery of logistics, and a multi-million-dollar budget. This is about as far from a novelization as you can get. 

The truth is that we're still lucky to get a story that's told well in one medium, much less in two or three others. And to move beyond this point is going to mean focusing less on the trans- and a lot more on the gesamt—not to mention the kunst. 

The Legacy of "TRON: Legacy": Theme Parks, ARGs, and the Ever-Shifting Art of Immersion

A ScreenBurn presentation at SXSW Interactive, "The Art of Immersion: TRON" takes place at 5 PM Sunday in Room 12AB at the Austin Convention Center.

Decades before anyone thought to create an alternate reality game, Walt Disney invented the theme park. Disneyland and its successors—Walt Disney World, Universal Studios Hollywood, and their clones—were conceived as narrative architecture, purpose-built to provide an immersive entertainment experience. Nowadays, you don't need to walk through Sleeping Beauty's Castle or go on Jurassic Park: The Ride to find yourself in a real-life simulation of a fictional narrative. But the theme-park experience still appeals to plenty of people, as the lines at Disneyland attest.

Now, with ElecTRONica at Disney California Adventure, there's an alternate reality experience inside a theme park. An outgrowth of the Flynn Lives alternate reality game that played out at Comic-Con and elsewhere in the 18 months leading up to the release of TRON: Legacy, ElecTRONica is a movie transmuted into an ARG reborn as a theme-park attraction.

So, how does that work again? On Sunday afternoon at 5:00, I'll be exploring this question at SXSW with Justin Springer, coproducer of TRON: Legacy; Susan Bonds, CEO of 42 Entertainment and producer of Flynn Lives; and Doug McIntyre, director of show development and production at Disneyland. 

Flynn Lives—which last night became the first ARG to receive a Thea award, given out by the Themed Entertainment Association—took the sucked-inside-a-computer conceit of TRON to Comic-Con and brought it to life. So does ElecTRONica. DJs, dance crews, lasers, a re-creation of Flynn's Arcade (lots of '80s arcade games) and the End of Line Club (for programs, but now for humans too)—this is a long way from E.T. Adventure at Universal Hollywood. 

Like movies themselves, conventional theme-park rides were the product of an industrial mindset—they were personal experiences stamped out by the million, day after day. This was Hollywood's idea of participatory entertainment: You'd get on a tram or a boat, bolt yourself in, and spend the next few minutes being shuttled through a building where you'd be terrorized by dinosaurs, fly into space with E.T., or whatever. There was no room for variation, and certainly no way for the audience to have any say in what happened. 

Still, it was a first-hand, real-time experience, at a time when there was no other means of creating one. So it’s not entirely a coincidence that 42’s president spent years engineering such rides.

After an early stint at Walt Disney World and several years at Lockheed Martin's famed Skunk Works, Bonds returned to Disney as a creative director in its Imagineering group, building theme park rides like Indiana Jones Adventure, which opened in 1995. “People want to be involved in stories,” she told me. “And Disneyland is about bringing stories to life.”

But you could go only so far. Bonds came up against the limitations of theme park rides when she was working on the Mission: SPACE ride at Disney World. She wanted to create a ride with multiple endings because, as she put it, “the generation today wants to be able to control what happens.” But how could you do multiple endings on a theme park ride and still achieve a throughput rate of 1,600 people per hour? The whole thing was frustrating. A few years later she landed at 42. 

In an odd way, the new TRON and ElecTRONica close the loop on the Disney legacy. When the original TRON was released, in 1982, it seemed utterly alien to Disney and what it stood for. At the time, the company was struggling to find its place in the world; Walt had died in 1966, but "What would Walt do?" was still the mantra in the executive suite. That such a futuristic film, not to mention a computer-animated one, got made at Disney back then was a fluke of the first order. (The studio brass wasted no time getting rid of Tim Burton and John Lasseter when they surfaced on the lot in the same period.) Yet Disney himself was both a serious techie—he pushed the invention of Audio-Animatronics, for example—and a pioneer of the alternate reality experience, in the form of Sleeping Beauty's Castle and Main Street USA. It's a measure of how far Disney has come since that it would put a TRON experience at the center of Disney California Adventure.

Can "Heavy Rain" Live Up to Its Grand Intent?

From the moment of its introduction at E3 2006, Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain promised an experience games have never truly managed: Narrative at the fore, with gameplay built around a story rather than a story that’s wedged into the gameplay. Now that it’s out, it’s clear that Quantic Dream CEO David Cage has managed to harness the participatory nature of games to create some emotionally jarring scenes. Yet even so, Heavy Rain’s illusion of choice and consequence will not hold up for a seasoned gamer.

The story provides some tense and sometimes frightening moments. I agonized over two decisions that were required of me, going so far as to pause the game and ask friends and family what the best decision would be. Some action scenes almost make you feel like your life is actually in danger. And while video game morality is usually just a masquerade—choices that seem moral are really more about raising your “good” or “evil” stats—some of Heavy Rain’s choices offer real moral dilemmas. At the game’s best, these choices can considerably alter your experience. And the changes can be so seamless, you probably won't notice that the game could have played out in numerous different ways.

The most innovative aspect of Heavy Rain are its quicktime events. Failing a quicktime prompt won’t necessarily kill you as it does in other games, but it will change the course of the action. If someone takes a swing at me, I will be prompted to block or dodge the onslaught. But whether I succeed or fail, the action will continue unabated.

 

There are other nice touches. Heavy Rain’s button prompts, for example, often try to mimic the action onscreen, even if only metaphorically. When sneaking around a suspect’s home, you will open doors, but to conceal your snooping you have to push the analog stick forward slowly as to not arouse suspicion. Other, more difficult sequences will have you strain your fingers into awkward positions, forcing you to hold down numerous buttons simultaneously, creating a real sense of panic and duress.

"The Emotion Engine": A Conversation with Peter Molyneux at SXSW Interactive

 

Peter Molyneux, the creative force behind the Fable series and the seminal god game Populous, recently said he'd gotten hate mail from people who couldn't bear the excruciating choice that confronts them near the end of Fable II: Who will they sacrifice—thousands of people, or their dog? But then, Molyneux's ability to strike a nerve is near-legendary. It's not just his commitment to narrative and emotional involvement. It's the delight he seems to take in putting people in situations that show who they really are—sometimes uncomfortably so. 

Molyneux and I will be talking about this sort of thing in a session at SXSW Interactive called "The Emotion Engine: Can a Video Game Speak to the Heart?" Scheduled for Sunday, March 14 at 5:00 PM, the conversation will focus on the expressive potential of games in general and in particular on what to expect from Fable III and Milo and Kate, currently under development at Lionhead Studios, his headquarters outside London.

When I first spoke with Molyneux—in August 2008, a couple of months before Fable II came out—he explained why he gives players these kinds of choices. "It's a personality test. It reflects on what you're really like. If I can make you care about something, then the story will be much more meaningful. So I wrap the AI around a dog—he's going to love you, he's cute and fun as a companion, and in tests, people can't help but care about a dog. This is what we can do that books, TV, film cannot." 

He's clearly ambivalent about Hollywood. With a movie like The Dark Knight, he said, "it's so evident the skill it takes—who are we even to dare to say we have that skill?" But he also said, "The trouble with a lot of Hollywood stuff is—I'm so bored with it. James Bond, Tom Cruise—the character of the hero is locked in concrete. He must have a love interest, they must end up in bed, he never talks under torture. The only surprise is whether they're on top of a cliff or under water. 

"But that's great—you've got that hero template, and now I can start messing with it. Maybe, just maybe, you'll play Fable II, and the next time you go to the cinema you'll see one of these heroes and say, You know what? I'd never be able to do that." 

People playing Fable III, as Molyneux explained last summer at GDC Europe in Cologne, will face an entirely new set of choices. Midway through the game, the hero becomes ruler of the kingdom, with all the power and responsibility that entails. To write this part, Molyneux and his team spent a lot of time poring over European history, which has no shortage of potentates making bad moral choices. 

In Milo and Kate, he wraps the AI around a little boy named Milo. Like Fable III, Milo and Kate relies not on a conventional controller but on the interface he's spent years developing as part of Project Natal: an Xbox 360 peripheral that reads your facial expression and tone of voice as you play. How much does Milo actually "know"? What kind of trouble can a hero-turned-ruler get into? From Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA to Shakespeare's MacBeth, we'll have plenty to talk about at SXSW. 

Ubisoft's "Avatar, The Game": Building a World, or Marketing a Movie?

 

Ubisoft, developers of Avatar: The Game, are fond of saying that the world of Pandora can be experienced through both their game and James Cameron’s movie. This ability to explore a fictional universe in multiple media and through multiple storylines has been the goal of many failed efforts, most notably Enter The Matrix. So it was up to the team at Ubisoft Montreal, makers of Assassin’s Creed II and Prince of Persia, to assuage the doubts of skeptics and live up to the promises made in their developer diaries. Unfortunately, Avatar: The Game offers all too little insight into Avatar the universe.

It’s no secret that movie tie-in games are generally atrocious. Just this year we’ve had the displeasure of experiencing another round of The Lord Of The Rings games, Terminator Salvation, The Godfather II, Up, and a slew of others. It’s not just that these games were poorly designed and hastily put together; they are also unabashedly derivative. None of them provide more in terms of story than their cinematic counterparts; instead of offering a fresh experience, they expect players to play through a plot they’ve already seen at the theatre. Even the few titles whose developers were given the time and license to provide compelling gameplay—King Kong and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, for instance—fell victim to the issues of poorly constructed games: Their storyline and characters felt all too familiar.

A rare few have succeeded in being more than being a decent clone. The first Riddick game, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, not only pushed the boundaries of first-person combat and stealth but created a new story arc separate from, but consistent with, the films. As Riddick, the player could experience first-hand what being a feared, ultra-violent assassin was like without knowing every plot twist. But Starbreeze wasn’t finished there: The developers released another game in the series (the only film-game sequel I can think of besides Star Wars), Assault on Dark Athena, that built on their previous success and added yet more mythology to the Riddick canon.

In 2003, Enter the Matrix had promised to bring the integration of games and film even closer. Conceptually, the idea was brilliant. The writers of The Matrix Reloaded—the second movie in the series—created a subplot that would be seen only in a very peripheral way through the movie. The game put the player in control of the characters introduced in this subplot, letting the player watch the movie’s story unfold from a completely different perspective in an interactive environment. But even great ideas can falter with poor execution. 

How Trans Is Your Media? (Part 2)

If last Wednesday’s program at Future of Television East offered a taste of the deep media future, this past weekend’s Futures of Entertainment 4 at MIT was a full-on banquet. Convened as in the past by Henry Jenkins, who recently left MIT for a deservedly big-deal professorship at USC’s Annenberg School, the two-day conference was an immersive discussion of the prospect that entertainment will no longer be restricted to a single medium—that stories will increasingly be told in multiple formats and engage the audience in a more or less active fashion. In other words, precisely what my book is about. The proceedings inspired a flood of thoughts, some of which I've actually managed to jot down.

The Fallacy of Newness

In his opening keynote, Henry sought to put the subject in historical context. “The focus on newness may mislead us," he said. This bears repeating. People on all sides of the debate about where media is headed seem to assume that what’s now is the way it always was, and what’s new is some kind of radical departure. This is a crippling form of myopia. 

Henry cited multiple examples of transmedia storytelling that long predate the Internet—from Felix the Cat, the early cartoon figure who still adorns a 1920s car dealership near the USC campus, to The Wizard of Oz, which was told not just in a book and the Judy Garland movie but in many other books, a stage musical that included a product placement for Budweiser beer, and a lecture series in which L. Frank Baum, the author, gave a slide-show tour of Oz. Oh, and don't forget the Bible, which for centuries was taught through sermons and stained-glass windows. 

The "BioShock" Conundrum: Gamers Can Pull, But Will Hollywood Push?

When Take Two Interactive lifted the embargo on previews of BioShock 2 last week, gamers discovered a major twist to the storyline. The teaser trailer and ad campaign for the sequel had focused heavily on an invincible cyborg known as the Big Sister as your new nemesis, stalking you as you traverse the underwater city of Rapture ten years after the demise of of its founder, Andrew Ryan. Now we learn that this idea has been scrapped because, as senior producer Melissa Miller explained, the development team at 2K Marin felt that fighting and never defeating the Big Sister time and time again would not provide the satisfaction gamers got from their encounters with the Big Daddies in BioShock. 

Instead, players will find multiple Big Sisters to fight and defeat throughout the game. Replacing the Big Sister as Rapture's new mastermind is Dr. Sophia Lamb, a clinical psychiatrist turned altruistic despot who believes that every one of our actions should contribute to the greater good. The change offers a good example of how storyline has to be subservient to gameplay. This has big implications, not just for the followup to the best-selling game but for the movie that’s in the works as well.

Unfortunately for BioShock fans, they will be waiting until 2010 for their next Rapture fix: the game sequel has been pushed back to February 9, and the BioShock movie is only now getting back on track after Universal put it on hold in a budget panic last spring. Now the picture is to be directed not by Gore Verbinski, who had developed the property, but by a little-known Spanish director, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, with Verbinski producing.

More unsettling still, Ken Levine, the game’s originator, is playing only a small part in either project. 2K Marin promises an engrossing storyline and single-player experience, inspired by the original but expanding on almost every aspect. But with Levine working on his own project and many of BioShock 2’s resources focused on a multiplayer experience that is completely foreign to the first title, the team at 2K Marin has a lot to prove.

Sony's Chris Cao on Why MMOGs Are Such an Effective Way To Tell Stories

When DC Comics' Jim Lee and Marv Wolfman take the stage at Comic-Con this weekend to talk about how they tell stories in DC Universe Online, they'll be focusing on S.T.A.R. Labs — the fictional R&D center where experiments tend to go hideously awry — as a narrative device. But what about the narrative power of massively multiplayer online games themselves? A couple of weeks ago I spoke about this with Chris Cao, studio creative director of DC Universe Online. From his perspective, it's all a matter of emergent properties. 

"In a single-player game, it's my own experience," says Cao, who heads the team that's developing DCUO at Sony Online Entertainment's studio in Austin, Texas. "In a multiplayer game, the experience is shared. Because you're doing it with other people, It shifts from me affecting the world to me and my friends talking about what we did together. It's like serial television versus sports — the narrative is us." 

There's a reason game narratives used to be fairly primitive. "A lot of single-player games are very linear," Cao points out. "Even games with branching storylines are basically linear." That limited the possibilities for telling stories: Almost the only way to advance a narrative was to take the controller away and make the player sit through a video sequence. By the time the cut scene was over, the player's fingers were liable to be twitching uncontrollably. 

But as advances in artificial intelligence and physics enabled developers to come up with more sophisticated games, the tension between game and story began to diminish. No longer was it necessary to limit players to a linear sequence of actions — open a door, enter a room, kill a bunch of enemies, repeat ad infinitum. You could give them some freedom. And instead of telling the story through cut scenes, you could introduce the characters, set out some conditions, and let the story evolve from the gameplay. "In Grand Theft Auto and other open-world games, the stories are completely emergent," Cao observes. 

With MMOs, even more so. "In a game like DCUO, emergence is going through the roof," he says. "Stuff you wouldn't predict is happening, and the world feels more real because of it." In the process, storytelling becomes both more natural and more important. "A shared world creates stories that people tell each other. These stories come from what we experienced together, versus what the designer intended us to. And that's imperative if you want to creates a sense of community" — which translates into passion for the game. 

There's also a more prosaic advantage to games with emergent storylines: They're cheaper to build. As consoles grow ever more powerful, game development has become increasingly complicated and expensive. "Linear games will soon cost as much to make as a Hollywood blockbuster," Cao says. "With linearity you have to cover all the cases because you're trying to make a specific thing happen. But as emergence is harnessed more and more to storytelling, you'll be able to create more experiences, tell more stories. Plus, it's a lot more fun than sitting through a movie." 

Depending on the movie, of course.