Nice, short, new interview with me at H+ magazine, about my new graphic novel series, eXoriare, and what it’s like to write story for a video game.
I read all of these books… Pause and Effect or First Person or what’s-his-name’s awful books on character and storytelling for games… or Marie Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality, or Hamlet on the Holodeck. All of these. And the more I read about it, the less I felt that there was a there there. This holy grail about somehow merging gameplay with narrative or story or passive media, it just doesn’t fly.
How We Get Past “Free” and Learn to Exchange Value Again.
Here’s my keynote from the O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference last week. It is my clearest articulation yet of how we’re using an obsolete operating system for money, optimized for a pre-Internet economy. This is a lot of what I wanted to talk about at the New School’s “Internet as Playground and Factory” last week.
As unlikely as it sounds, Rupert Murdoch may end up being our last best hope for a peaceful solution to the Internet’s war on professional journalism. A man who many blame for commodifying, globalizing, sensationalizing, and cheapening news is considering taking a stand against a force even bigger than himself: the Web link.
So, both for fun and in my ongoing effort to find a university homebase, I’m going to teach a course called Narrative Lab at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program next semester. You have to be in the program to take it, but I’ll try to keep some component online for the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, though, here’s an example of me actually doing interactive narrative – and a newspaper writer, from the Guardian (of course), who seems to totally grok what it is we’re after:
But a Vancouver-based studio named Smoking Gun Interactive may be about to merge the worlds of console and alternative reality gaming into one experimental new form. The team has yet to announce a name for the project – its codename is currently X, and there’s an intriguing online preview named, Exoriare, a title drawn from Virgil’s ‘Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor’ – let an avenger arise from my bones.
I just finished a new graphic novel – the first in a series I’m working on that will dig a reality tunnel through the universe of a video game series. Crazy stuff, but I’m the linear guy on the project (if you can believe that) so it’s not quite as brain-decimating as it could be.
It should be available as a printed volume of 120 pages or so in a few months.
Writing for gamers is harder than writing for regular people because I actually feel more obligated to make it work on many levels at once. Gamers spend thousands of hours in a world, so it really has to be true down to levels of granularity an author could ignore in almost any other medium. But it’s great to know people are going as deep into this material as I am. Way more intimate a sensation, really.
Robert Anton Wilson will be my guest on The Media Squat this Monday evening.
Alas, he’ll be visiting via magnetic recording tape, and not in the flesh. He’s the next in our series of Media Squat Classics – people whose ideas and approaches form the basis of the media squat ethos.
I’m doing a “live” appearance in Second Life, this Sunday evening at 9p Eastern, for CopperRobot.
We’ll be talking about Life Inc, especially in the context of how people create value on the net – and whether there’s a way for any significant number of us to make a living at it, anymore.
Following my own advice to go local, I’m ready to settle down in a real place and time. I’m hoping that will be teaching media, interactivity, and narrative in a friendly, NY-area program that offers me a place to do it in an ongoing way. Strange to have a moment of “openness” like this.
To that end, I’m doing talks at some of my favorite schools in the area, to meet people and let my intentions be known. Two weeks ago, I had a great time at the New School – where I was truly inspired by the radical stripe of the student body. It did not feel fake.
This Wednesday at noon, I’ll be at Polytechnic Institute of NYU, in Brooklyn, speaking about “The End of Narrative.”
A Lecture by Douglas Rushkoff
Presented by The Brooklyn Experimental Media Center and the Dibner Family Chair in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology
Interactivity changes our relationship to stories as well as the technologies through which they are transmitted. Where the power of a story to influence audiences often depended on the mysteriousness of the medium through which it was told, today’s storytellers must actually engender trust and playfulness – and they must do so on an increasingly violent paranoid playing field.
These are the challenges confronting anyone who wishes to communicate in today’s mediaspace. Do we create myths to compete with the ones we hope to dispel? Or do we abandon myth altogether? Is the traditional story itself a relic, incapable of providing meaning over time? Are the kinds of meaning it can convey biased towards creating childlike passivity in the recipients? Is it our job to create stories capable of competing with the ones currently programming our society, or to abandon this arms race altogether in favor of new artistic and cognitive mechanisms. And, if so, what are they?
I hope everyone who reads my posts already understands that the real beneficiary of the AIG bailout was Goldman Sachs. In brief, Goldman made money underwriting mortgage investments that it sold to various pension funds. Goldman suspected that the investments were doomed, and leveraged a whole lot of money to make bets against the very investments it was underwriting and selling.
When the mortgage industry collapsed, Goldman won very very big. They were right to bet against the investment products they were selling. So they made money on both ends – selling the crap, and betting against the crap. Problem is, AIG was on the other side of those bets, essentially insuring the awful mortgage packages. And AIG didn’t have enough money to pay Goldman its winnings.
Instead of letting AIG fail, and leaving Goldman with only its original profits from selling awful mortgage investments to major American pension funds, the central government (advised by its fiscal staff of former Goldman execs) bailed out AIG so that it could pay back Goldman its winnings. Our grandchildren’s tax money will be used to pay Goldman for winning its bets against the products it sold to our pension managers.
Now that Goldman has paid its executives the biggest bonuses in the company’s history, many people are mad. So the Administration’s bright idea is to force companies who took government bailout money to put caps on such bonuses. Problem is, Goldman didn’t get bailout money – not directly, anyway. They got the money, sure, but the loans were not made to Goldman.
So they get to keep it all. Again.
Kind of makes you wish you’d bought GS stock when it was down around 60 last year…
I can’t figure out who this is writing, but they definitely got what I was going for with Life Inc. It’s a site called Daily Mortgage Rates – but it’s basically reviews of books.
The last chapter of the book, “Here and Now,” subtitled “The Opportunity to Reconnect,” is in fact better than any marketing book, and may give you great ideas of companies that can make a difference. As the author reminds us in the previous chapter, PayPal’s original plan was to offer an alternative payment service. True, the business model changed as Paypal activity was perceived as a violation of the banking laws. But you may have other ideas… and it’s when they read scouring, abrasive books that entrepreneurs invent new rules — and eventually might pave the way towards a new economy, or creatively revisit Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. “Like the founders of America, who may have differed on almost everything else but this,” notes Rushkoff, “Smith saw economics as characterized by small, scaled, local economies working in interaction with one another.”
