Image by SobControllers via Flickr

By integrating choice and multiple user-controlled view-points into the game, Dead Space 2 provides a refreshing alternative to traditional video game cutscenes.

In the extraordinarily crowded field of video games, many seek attention through cut scenes of increasing complexity or realism. I found it somewhat ironic then that Dead Space’s particular unique treatment of cutscenes was mostly ignored.

Despite increasing complexity, user interactions with cut scenes have been pretty limited. You have two choices with a rare third. Choice 1: Skip. Choice 2: Watch. Then some games, oddly, allow you to fast-forward through them.

As a result, video game players and participants in video media in general tend to present two types of video. “You can skip this” or “you are not allowed to skip this.” Video games, television, web videos, heck, video advertising in general all subscribe to this binary choice.

The problem is perspective. For almost all video engagements, only one point of perspective is presented and one line of narrative: the whole of the screen and its single focus. Despite our allegiance to single viewpoint video the technology (starting with Picture-in-Picture TV) to support doing otherwise as a choice for the participant has existed for a while. Admittedly, it was much more difficult for video games to do until recently. However, this is not really an excuse for the sad state of video game cutscenes.

There are any number of problems that could be brought up with video game cutscenes, their ever-increasing length, their sometimes division from the actual content of the game, their complete nonsensicalness. My biggest problem with cutscenes is how designers like to dangle them as a reward for playing the game. I have a problem with the idea that the reward for fun interaction with a game is to have to sit still and listen to the game explain itself via gussied up old media. But if not this, than what?

I think that the Dead Space series provides an answer.

If you are not already familiar with it, in addition to standard cutscenes, Dead Space 1 and 2 provide character-focused videos by projecting them from the main character’s suit, producing a small in-game screen at a locked position and angle from the character, though not the camera. In the game’s universe these are usually produced by some sort of recording device built into the same arm that holds the projection device.

These cutscenes can be viewed at multiple angles by rotating the camera around the character. In addition, there are a few instances where you can also see the character who is projecting to you while watching a close up of their faces on the closer projection.

How Dead Space could revolutionize in-game video.

Notably, Dead Space offers you a half-way point between the standard binary cutscene choice for these events. While walking through the deadly space colony, if you extend your arm to aim your weapon, and choose to exhibit some extra caution while climbing through undead monster territory, the visual portion of the video disappears, leaving only the audio.  Presumably because you wouldn’t want to be distracted while shooting something by a talking head.

This is an alternative even to the in-game videos that are standard to RTS games or the slowing down of action for a video or audio briefing done in Gears of War or Vanquish. In an action game with a focus on building fear, forcing the players to make a choice allows them to build more of themselves into the character. It also creates an opportunity to show the inherent risk in the environment.

Giving participants an alternative to watch-or-skip cutscenes is a valuable contribution in and of itself. One that, alone, could have some applications outside of video games. Just as an example beyond the voice-over, short audio advertisements could play in scenes for a TV show. I’d prefer that to some of the more blatant product placement. Another possibility would allow you to choose audio only ads, since most of us are paying attention to another screen anyway.

Even more interesting are the sequences which allow you to view a character from a distance while speaking to them on their wrist-video-thing.  In the game, these are often used to build drama. There are situations where you are tantalizingly close to someone but for some reason unable to help.

In situations like these, there is more tension than even in a cutscene of the same situation, because there is increased player agency that can’t be used to alter events. If the game was slightly better written, you might even want to turn off the video, simply to not see what might happen next to a character. There is serious potential for tension. Even when the character on the other side of the screen isn’t right next door, there is a greater sense of wanting to reach into the screen and help. It’s the sort of juxtaposition thing that creates participant tension to begin with, and that tension is only increased by remaining in control of your character the whole time.

When provided with multiple perspectives on the same action, it gives both the event and characters more depth. It allows you to get a close up of the character’s reaction to battle while allowing you to still see the whole of the action. It’s a great tool for humanizing Dead Space 2′s characters, particularly Ellie and Stross who move with the virtual camera and while they talk in a way to give them a certain veracity.

Other applications.

Giving the participant more control over these types of actions is always a good thing. Especially in video games, where cutscenes are a splinter in the paw of many intelligent gamers.  It doesn’t have to be a holocomm, (even to do multiple viewpoints) it could be a video phone, video integrated into the background or similar applications.

Beyond that, multiple user-selectable camera angles accessed simultaneously could be the opiate for the increasingly disengaged TV-viewing masses. Getting the film would be easy, even live, most directors film more than one angle simultaneously anyway. It might be especially applicable in reality shows in closed environments, where viewers long for greater and closer contact with the subjects. In a world of DVD extras and online broadcasting, this could be a great incentive for watching live TV.

As for method, the picture-in-picture option still holds serious possibilities, imagine if you had whole channels of related narratives for each TV show you watched and you could view them at the same time as the main narrative on the screen. If you wanted to go a little crazy, you could even try it 24-style, with users selecting multiple viewpoints to watch important events from and able to switch through a larger set.

It’s the sort of universe depth that audiences go crazy for.

Web users could play with YouTube videos, stacking them next to each other and allowing users to select multiple videos to view together.

Indeed, depth is the name of the game here. As a general rule, giving your participants multiple windows into the universe’s action increases engagement.

Related posts:

1. Whoever wrote the ending to Red Dead Redemption is one dumb cowpoke [Reasoned Reviews]
2. First Episode of Patriot Games!
3. Drawn by Pain [Cool Stories]

If you haven’t been watching Kirby Ferguson’s excellent Everything is a Remix videos, here’s a quick collection and some links to the excellent documentary. We often talk about remixed media as if it were something new to our culture. However, in these extremely informative videos Ferguson traces the modern remix back to 1961 and walks you through a history of cultural reuse that is both fascinating and required consuming for anyone creating content today.

Everything is a Remix from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Everything is a Remix Part 2 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Robert Grigsby elaborates on Kill Bill as a remix.

Everything Is A Remix: KILL BILL from robgwilson.com on Vimeo.

Find out more about the series of videos and remix culture at Ferguson’s website. You can also find the video’s creator on Twitter.

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1. Remix Linkin Park [Press Release]
2. Remix Project Idea [Assignment]
3. Remix Project [Assignment]

Amid the controversy around Facebook user settings, privacy violations and monetization, The Social Network humanizes Facebook’s founder and, like it or not, Zuckerberg should count this as a win.

Image via CrunchBase

I’m not going to go into much detail about why The Social Network is an excellent movie (and it is) but trust me, you should go see it. In the weeks leading up to the movie’s premiere, it was pretty clear that everyone thought that the film would be a huge PR hit against Zuckerberg, that he would come out looking like a horrible person and that it would be bad for the company. However, if you were expecting something along the lines of Pirates of Silicon Valley’s treatment of Steve Jobs, you’d be very wrong.

Instead, Eisenberg’s portrayal of Zuckerberg felt eminently human. You may not like the movie and you may not like Zuckerberg’s actions as portrayed or in real life. However, Zuckerberg has been plastered in the media as the poster boy for our disappearing privacy on the internet. Of course, this is patently untrue. We choose to put our information online and the moment we do so, we’ve given it up. Google probably deserves more blame, because they make the information so accessible, than Facebook.

Image via CrunchBase

Facebook made the internet cool for the masses and, more than any other site, really broke the barrier for the social web and in our heads, when it comes to sharing information about ourselves. As a result, Zuckerberg often is the scapegoat for our entrance into the panopticon and he doesn’t always deal with it well. Zuckerberg has become a symbol to many for the loss of privacy in the internet age but The Social Network has taken a big step in breaking this down.

Past here are spoilers, so go see the movie, come back and we can continue the discussion.

Zuckerberg’s character in the film feels the loss of privacy himself, before Facebook even begins and in many ways he’s burned by it. However, that’s not the most significant thing in the movie that should help the Facebook founder’s image.

A great line comes at the very end of the film:

“Every creation myth needs a devil.”

The thing is, we’re not talking about the creation myth of Facebook, but of the new age of social networking. In our information age, Zuckerberg is pretty much the privacy devil to many. More than anything else, the film did a great job of contrasting the expectations and assumptions others dumped on Zuckerberg to the life of a real human being. Zuckerberg may have come off as a bad guy or socially incompetent but he still seems human. This might be the biggest PR victory for Facebook yet.

The best part is subtle and only fully uncovered at the very end of the movie. In the end, The Social Network, fact or fiction, is a movie about a guy and a girl. The whole thing starts off as a reaction to a break-up. Throughout the movie, we see Zuckerberg staring out into space and it is pretty clear that he thinking back to the girl in the beginning of it all. Then there’s the final scene, Zuckerberg, sitting by himself, refreshing his computer to see if the woman he cares about will accept his friend request. The last sounds we hear are just him clicking the refresh button over and over.

Mark Zuckerberg can’t be easily portrayed as an inhuman devil after seeing this film. Good or bad, Jesse Eisenberg has made him powerfully human.

Related posts:

1. Facebook Bans News of SpeedDate.com
2. 4 Step Social Media Strategy – MEGA [Re-post]
3. Stay on Target! Stay on Target! [The Happening]

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I am immensely excited about the upcoming TRON movie for many many reasons.

As it turns out, the trailer has just gone live, along with some sort of ARG-looking thing. I’ll be following this more closely later, but it is late, so I’m just going to post the links.

New TRON Legacy Trailer – http://www.program-glitch-esc.net/

#FlynnLives – http://www.flynnlives.com/

Check it out!

Related posts:

1. Live: Listening to Rob Curley

So, I did something I almost never do. I went to a movie on opening night. It would be a lie if I said this wasn’t partially due to PG’s influence. However, I really wanted to see it too. Despite the bad reviewers, I wanted to see The Happening. And there are really bad reviews, really bad. The Happening got a combined metacritic score of 37 and a 20% on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s pretty bad.

However, when I got out of the movie, I liked it. Actually, I liked it a lot. A brief look at the reviewers who had been giving it such awful scores and from my experience at the theater, I think I know the problem. People went into the movie expecting The Sixth Sense, but got a B-movie instead.

There is no mistaking The Happening for anything but a B-movie. It uses classic schlock horror techniques left and right, in some cases quite heavily. The use of certain angles, the TV, the radio, the internal and external arguments, the crashing through windows, a number of the shots look as if they’ve been ripped right out of Night of the Living Dead.

I’m not sure why they’re surprised, Shyamalan has not exactly hid the fact that he wanted this to be a big-budget B-movie. He said so in an interview on NPR’s Science Friday. (I’d highly recommend checking it out, if you are having trouble deciding on whether or not to see the movie.) He’s not the only one either, the recent enormously successful Grindhouse set of movies worked on much the same principle.

So what’s the point of creating what traditional critics would call a bad movie? Why did Shyamalan do it and why have others been doing it?

The pursuit of a niche audience.

On a financial level, this is something that only a few directors can get away with. If The Happening had been directed by a more unknown persona, it would be a complete failure. As it is, it probably won’t rake in a huge profit. Shyamalan (and Robert Rodriguez) can get away with it, because it is their name on the product. Winning an Oscar is all well and good, however, winning a niche audience is much harder.

In our age of Internet communities however, a niche audience will give The Happening more staying power then No Country for Old Men will ever have. The Happening will become a cult film. Around a cult film you can see communities building up, interactive Internet fan clubs which will all buy copies of the film on DVD, re-watch the movie in re-play theaters, and so forth. For a director, building a community like that around your films has far more future advertising and audience potential then even the award for Best Picture. Communities give feedback, try to act as spoilers, eat up movie reprints, hunt down news, and play an active role in searching out the director’s activities and involvement.

I’m going to bet that Shyamalan’s next movie will delve into a serious viral marketing campaign before its launch, just like Heroes has.

Related posts:

1. Requiem for a Geek: The Social Network is good news for Zuckerberg

In this article, director Gore Verbinski, whose latest hits include the Pirates of the Caribbean series talks a little bit about video games, their potential as an art-form, his own projects and the idea of a video game with “zero narrative”

Considering his stature, it is well worth a look. As media continues to converge, more people like Verbinski will find themselves getting involved with the gaming community.

Via Kotaku.

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2. 101 Free Games 2008
3. Decompressed Storytelling and Sandbox Games

In line with my recent meanderings on interactivity and narration in video games, The Escapist ran a recent article titled “The Secret of Monkey Island” which comes to some of the same conclusions that I did about the interaction of imagination and games, but by a far different route. Instead, the author Rob Hearn pointed to an increase in audio, video, and the increasing quality of Next-Gen game elements as the reason behind imagination-loss for video game players. He compares it to the issue where CGI-driven movies are leaving story behind. He extends the comparison between movies and games by pointing at the success of older movies such as Citizan Kaine and still high quality elder games like the titular Monkey Island series.

Says Hearn:

However, the word “interaction” has another shade of meaning; you’d probably characterize it as an imaginary or constructive process. This is the kind of interaction that occurs between a reader and a book, or an impressionist painting and its audience. In the case of a book, the writer provides the reader with cues in the form of words. For example, take “the man walked into the green room.” Everybody who reads this sentence supplies his own man, his own room, his own shade of green. He constructs the scene largely from the store of his imagination, so that the resulting memory is a joint production. Similarly, while appreciating Monet’s “Impression Sunrise,” the viewer is really supplying much of the scene himself. Monet provides the colors and, to an extent, the form, but the precise appearance of the three daubed-boats retreating from the foreground, the adumbrated chimneystacks and amorphous structures in the distance, belongs to the viewer. The audience of a black-and-white silent film, meanwhile, provides its own sounds and colors, engaging in a kind of sensory interaction with the filmmakers, collaborating with the creator to construct the scene.

Sound familiar eh? Check out the entire article. It is quite good, even if I don’t agree with it.

My response (posted on the article’s comment thread) was:

An interesting idea. I recently was thinking about reader response criticism and how the ideas behind the theory show that even reading a book has a measure of interactivity.

However, I think that your nostalgia blinds you to a point, especially for IFs and old (or even some current) adventure games. The media in the game (audio, graphics, etc…) does not necessarily blind the imagination, it is the style of the gameplay. In IFs or some of the hard-core older adventure games (I’ve never played Monkey Island, so I can’t speak on that count) require a certain style of puzzle solving and path finding. The truth of the matter is, you are required to think in a certain way and look at the game in a certain way in order to solve these puzzles.

For instance, in an interactive fiction: you may be able to visualize the room described and paint it in all the mental colors of the rainbow, but if you fail to visualize the correct sized box, in the correct position, under the correct pipe, you fail to be able to solve the puzzle. The same in some classic adventure games. No matter how new or old the graphics are, if the gameplay is like Myst, you are required to think in a certain analytical way identical to everyone else who plays the game. This sort of game structure forces the player to suppress their imagination, far worse then simply not requiring it. It means that for some of these games, despite the physical interactivity, there is less mental activity then when you read a book.

On the other hand, more free-form games give the player much more room for imagination and interactivity with the game world. As a kid I’d let my own imagination run free when playing Asteroids. It’s the same reason why there’s plenty of WoW fan-fiction out there. The very openness of the environment invites the imagination to work. In this respect, it is a representation of the tendency of the human mind to pluck connections from chaos, even when they don’t exist. The same does not always follow for order.

To blame the lack of imagination prompts in games on graphics is to do them a vast disservice. It is function, not form, that leaves imagination behind.

To use his metaphor, the failure of CGI movies to capture the viewer’s imagination lies not with the CGI, but with the movie’s screenplay and its writers.

Related posts:

1. Reader Response
2. Decompressed Storytelling and Sandbox Games
3. The Missing Path – (Not-)Fun in the Land of the Dead