This is a Soviet H1N1 propaganda film that explains the proper health protocol according to the best doctors out of the USSR.
(This film has been dubbed into English.)
This is the first of three films that we shot in Atlanta, GA at the beginning of Jan 2010. We spent 20 hours and $20 to make all of these films. We had a bare-bones crew that was 6 people at its largest.
In other, completely unrelated news, Brian and I have been making a lot of progress on the BZD Films Trilogy, which we filmed in “the the ground floor area, club room, and laundry room on morning of Saturday January 9, 2010″!
We’re nearly finished with “Flu in the USSR” and hope to have it released by the end of the month.
When I was sitting in on the development of Tempting Fates, there was this holy grail that everyone would talk about. Someone would sit back and say the word “multiplatform” aloud, a distant look in their eyes (or were they dollar signs?). The room, otherwise busy with debates about characters and plots, would fall into a brief but reverent silence. Then we would carry on, just as before, because the word means absolutely nothing, and is unattainable.
To be multiplatform, a franchise must sustain delivery across a variety of media. Television, film, books, comics yes, but to disambiguate between spinoffs and adaptations: a truly multiplatform television show must be delivered in several ways simultaneously. Followers of Tempting Fates had to keep up with and comment on the “blogs” of the show’s several main characters, follow them on twitter, facebook, myspace, and bebo while watching the daily dramas in order to get the whole, whole experience. Those users who did only some of these things had a different, potentially lesser experience than others who did it all. Worse, if one’s franchise is designed so that missing half of the possible content it can provide does not affect the story it tells in any way, what does that say about the quality of the content?
It’s telling that the drive for multiplatform delivery, especially when it occurs on longstanding television shows — how many dramas of the last few years have advertised “webisodes” or “mobisodes” on their channel’s website? — it’s telling that these impulses seem to come from a mercenary attitude, not a creative one. Multiplatformism may not be the best thing for your story, but it does get consumers onto your website, hungry because they haven’t been fed a whole meal. That’s why multiplatform content is different from “extras.” It’s great that fans can see behind-the-scenes footage on their broadcaster’s website; content like that is truly “extra,” and by viewing the ads on, say, Syfy’s website, you are paying a little bit for that extra content. But splitting your narrative between two or more different media dilutes your story; worse, splitting your narrative splits your audience between the elite and the casual viewer.
A recent Writer’s Guild of Canada memo describes the “digital guidelines” for new work, implicitly requiring writers there to include a multiplatform strategy in their project pitches so that they can be competitive. I’m going to go ahead and cite another Canadian you may know who said, “the medium is the message.” If the medium is the message, what happens when your story spans several of them [several media]? A story — and I believe this absolutely — a story is a single message. Even if it’s episodic, it has just one heart. It should include no more and no less than what is necessary to tell it. Everything one writes should be there for a reason and contribute to the meaningfulness of the whole. By creating what I want to call “divergent media,” the whole suffers, from both an economic and a creative point of view.
Let’s look at the economic point of view. What gets creative people excited about multiplatform deployment is the idea of simultaneous, parallel narratives on facebook etc. and the idea that participants in the social network could influence the show or at least be rewarded for their involvement online. Of course there was some awareness at EYE, who did Tempting Fates, that this was a titanic amount of content: simulating the overwhelming quantity of the internet on the backs of just a few writers? Scary. There was some notion that this work could be delegated, reality-show style, but I won’t get into that. The amount of people you would have to reward, one way or another, to produce a branching narrative like that would be titanic. And what do you get for it? This is the exact same problem with branching narratives in video games. Let’s talk about that in Part 2.
Avatar’s box office during the first week was famously only a fraction of video game contemporary Modern Warfare 2. Grand Theft Auto 4 made headlines when it similarly couped Spiderman 3’s sales. Apocryphal or not, the growth rate of the US video game industry alone is astonishing, and is being seen as competition for Hollywood. The question is: why? Can stories in video games be a substitute for stories in the cinema or on TV?
I just finished playing Dragon Age: Origins. This is a recent role-playing game that was celebrated for its cinematic, accessible approach to something that the company who created it, Bioware, does very well: world-building and storytelling. Advancing the story involves having conversations with other characters, as is often the case in games of this genre. You can guide these conversations by selecting from several responses every once in a while during a conversation. It’s the same branching principle as choosing which page to go to next in an adventure book. Role-playing games have been like this since forever.
Branching games are cursed with the same problem as multiplatform television shows. In order to create even the pretence of free will for video game players, there have to be a number of branches, each with their own consequences, that create branching choices of their own. The amount of extra content one must create for even a handful of branches (there were probably three or four in Dragon Age, and even then they branched out mainly towards the end, and at the beginning) is exponentially more than is required for a single storyline. It also distracts from any sense of single meaning to the story. The solution? Commonly, it’s to create the illusion of choice, by having branches in conversation loop back onto one another. To Bioware’s credit, they do a brilliant job of creating this illusion. Early in the game you have a conversation with someone who wants to recruit you into their army. The dialogue will always end the same way (you have to go with them), but your dialogue options all end there gracefully, even if you resist.
So far so good. Bioware is very experienced making these systems. The problem, however, is the same problem one encounters with multiplatform content. Consumers are smart. They know when they are being tricked into a particular choice, or when they are missing content because of a choice they have made. They want to experience the entire meal. Playing through the game once, making a specific set of choices, I wondered what my experience would have been like (would it have been better?) if I had played it differently. Instead of feeling motivated to play the game again (which would, thanks to Bioware’s masterful “illusion” of free will, involve a lot of repetition), I felt unsatisfied, like I had not in fact ‘finished’ the game. Add on to that Electronic Arts’ plan to sell “downloadable content” that further enriches the story and I find myself in the same situation as a multiplatform consumer: paying with both time and money to ‘collect’ the entire experience. Needless to say I just looked online to find out what I missed.
There are a couple of other reasons why video games will struggle to be meaningful as stories: first is the absence of a protagonist. As the player, you are the main character, yes, but a protagonist is someone who has a concrete goal and takes specific action to achieve it despite adversity. He must be an interesting character in his own right, because his actions and their results reflect the message of the story itself. When Griffin Mill beats up and kills the writer who’s been threatening him in The Player, the twist redefines him and forces us to reflect on his priorities and the priorities of the real-world industry he represents. It’s a meaningful moment that becomes suspenseful as we watch him seduce the writer’s then-lover. Comparatively, a video game character resists all but the most basic definition, and his actions cannot surprise us because they are our actions. The silver lining is that we get to, in some sense, imagine our own story out of the video game. But as graphics become more literal even that ability dissolves into so many repetitive dungeons. More symbolic games, such as those that operate on a map of the world or are otherwise more abstract, retain more of this magic, but that’s besides the point. The point is that branching video games cannot sustain authorial messages beyond the mundane “slavery is evil,” “self-sacrifice is good,” and other polar coordinates. Even Dragon Age, which makes a deliberate effort to foil choices based purely on good and evil, cannot escape single-minded tyrants, and the forces of darkness. Perhaps this is because the nature of the game requires that you kill a lot of people without feeling too bad about yourself. Dragon Age did as well as it could to escape these tropes, I suppose, because the empty nature of a game protagonist does not seem to support characterisations more complex than “exiled from his people,” and the complexity of a story world comes from its relationship to the protagonist.
The second gotcha, I feel, is with the platform. Video games are so transient. There are several games that provide stellar experiences: immersive if not profound. One example, Deus Ex, was made not ten years ago and is now unplayable because of changes in technology. Unlike a book — examples over a century old are within arm’s reach — or even a film, the longevity of anything that requires a fine set of complex and short-lived hardware to reproduce is going to be minute. More effort goes into the development of a AAA video game than a summer blockbuster. What is the return on investment here?
A similar problem surfaces in multiplatform content. The wonderful HBO TV show Big Love produced a trendy set of Webisodes for HBO.com called Big Love: In the Beginning. They premiered after the second series but have since disappeared. This content is gone, pulverised by the relentless tide and churn of the internet. Multiplatform content is, by design, ephemeral.
This isn’t a rant against role-playing games. I’ve tried several times to make a game, and I still love them, but for other reasons. I just think that the impulse to view them as a vehicle for meaningful narrative may be unfounded. I’d like to explore their strengths: symbolic representation, world-building, empowerment, and through those things: an access to the imagination that is more direct than any other media. But to see them, and their multiplatform cousins, as replacements for drama with a single spine ignores their fundamental dissimilarity.
Recent Comments