Got Story?

…this New World Notes article is a few months old but was just brought to my attention while discussing my 2008 - The Year of Machinima prediction - CYHMN

Big media is finally grasping that the sands beneath its feet are shifting; and Vivendi’s bold step for Activision may be the beginnings of dramatic change for all kinds of digital entertainment.

And it’s about time. George Lucas (I know, major name-dropping here) told me not too long ago, that one of the key reasons for his studio’s success is the seamless integration between his LucasArts video games division and LucasFilm, his studio operation.

But he’s been doing it for years. Other studios simply have not been able to grasp the magnitude of that kind of arrangement. … The world is moving online, and the entertainment industry is no different. But like music, and then movies, Hollywood has been slow to see these trends develop, and by the time it does, it’s usually too late.  …

George Lucas has to be sitting in his office this morning; celebrating yet another reason for the industry to think of him as “visionary,” and it cost him so much less than the check Vivendi has to write.

CNBC Tech Check: Big Media Now Gets “It”

3D interactive media is going mainstream. Moving rapidly from video games to machinima and ultimately to TV, movies and augmented reality, interactive 3D will be the norm in less than a decade. 2008 will mark a key turning point as virtual world citizens and You Tube producers get their hands on the next generation of machinima production tools. Leading Hollywood directors have seen this coming:

Imagine a movie in which the viewer is swept along by a narrative, following the action from place to place, but without the intervention of a camera. You can choose which character to watch in a scene, as if you’re an invisible witness standing there while a real event plays out. This is still years away, at a level of realism people would consider cinematic, but certainly not decades away.

I can imagine the dense fantasy worlds I like to create for movies having an equal or greater life in a world of interactive play, authored by others, in a partnership. Of course, add massive multiplayer capability to this, and people will never leave their homes.

Beyond 3D: James Cameron in BusinessWeek

“Do you still use a typewriter?” he asks a TIME movie critic. “Do you go to a library and consult books for most of your research? Is your story set in type, letter by letter? No. Your business takes advantage of technological advances. Why shouldn’t my business?”

Google+YouTube=Handwriting of the Wall of the Web: George Lucas in Time Magazine

Beowulf is currently making a strong showing now, James Cameron’s Avatar movie is slated for 2009(see also More Signs of Convergence: Avatar - the Movie ) and there are rumors that The Hobbit will be a 3D production due in 2010. More productions are in the pipeline and theaters are gearing up:

• CNN: Movies in 3D: into the next dimension
• 3D Movies Rise Again
• Let’s Talk 3D Movies
• Time for the Digital Age

Given the level of realism being delivered by Second Life’s new Windlight viewer and improvements in avatar robotics, machinima is poised to explode. Some relevant links:

Machinima and what might be

Why Machinima Is Good For Hollywood

BBC: Machinima waits to go mainstream

Croquetlandia

Machinima For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech))

3D Game-Based Filmmaking: The Art of Machinima (with CD-ROM)

Eyeballs help build community, but their impact on revenue is indirect. What ultimately drives revenue are the experiences that occur when people participate in a story. This is what the book The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage is all about and why communities and commerce are tightly linked. Here are a few related links:

Google’s business isn’t really about monetizing eyeballs; it’s about monetizing clicks. That may seem like a small distinction - you have to attract the eyeball, after all, before you can spur the click - but I think there’s actually a very big difference. Eyeball monetization is the traditional media strategy: publish or broadcast content that attracts readers or viewers, and then intersperse ads among that content. The content, in this case, serves not to prompt action directly, but merely to draw an audience that’s attractive to companies looking to promote their products and services. There’s a natural distance, in other words, between the content and the ads - a distance that’s good for the content producer but often frustrating to the advertiser. The click monetization strategy removes that distance. In Google’s AdSense program, for instance, a media company, or other content producer, earns nothing by simply attracting eyeballs. It only brings in cash by getting viewers to click on an ad link.

Rough Type: The Click Economy

yes, in an attention economy, you have to get the eyeballs first. But the money, as many found out with internet stocks, does not automatically follow the eyeballs.

Interview with Richard Lanham

all the crap about attention allocation is primarily because that’s one of the best ways to build a community.
Community Value

A place where everyone can share stories.

CNN Enters The World of Second Life

Last fall, I said that the focus of this blog would shift to content and for a brief moment it did. The first GriotVision channel was launched as a sci-fi thriller played out in Second Life and on the web. While most people who saw it thought it was at least interesting if not innovative, it was a long way from fulfilling the vision and promise of GriotVision. It was nowhere near interactive enough and required too much centralized administration. I wasn’t surprised or disappointed because it was intended to be an interim, evolutionary step. However, shortly after launch, the lead writer was seriously injured in a car accident. This stopped the flow of new episodes and exacerbated the centralization problem. Then several months later, there was a major outage at the hosting provider resulting in corruption of the databases. While backups do exist, restoring the system would require a great deal of manual configuration of servers and I’ve chosen to stay focused on evolving the GriotVision platform. You may be asking just what is “the GriotVision platform”? The GV platform can be viewed as a stack of technical capabilities/services:

Various amounts of information about most of these can be found on the Sister Sites in the right column. Over the coming weeks I’ll be tying these pieces together here on this blog in preparation for a December roll-out. The first layer you’ll hear about is BOP which is due for a new release next week.

Narrative underpins all technology marketing and purchasing decisions.

Red Monk

Another confirmation of Storytelling and Understanding. These folks seem to really get the central role of story.

Unlike never-ending sim games, Desparate Housewives: The Game has a twelve episode story with a script written by series writer Scott Sanford Tobis, which incorporates both drama and dark humour.

Comicbookbin

I missed the introduction of this game, but just saw a commercial that l first mistook for a Sims game commercial. Very interesting meshup.

Storytellers and actors need settings, locations where their stories unfold. These places, I originally referred to as part of the GriotVision Multicasting Ecosystem but now refer to as The Meshverse. This blog has been covering many of the developments and trends in the emerging paradigm, but The Meshverse blog is taking over that role and the focus here will shift to GriotVision content!

A MUST READ interview with John Gaeta and Rudy Poat, two people who worked on The Matrix is available at Gamasutra: Beyond Machinima. John won a special effects award for his work on The Matrix and is clearly a visionary. This interview provides among other things, some excellent insights into the why of GriotVision, 3D and the handwriting on the wall of the Web from the perspective of knowleldgeable people involved in film and games. A little while ago, in Madden On The Holodeck, I said:

People tend to view TV and film as the ultimate form of media. However, media is evolving beyond these limited formats into the realms of the immersive and interactive.

John Gaeta and Rudy Poat are taking media to the another level, developing a hybrid environment that draws from the best of games and film

Continue reading →