Justin T Stanley

Digital Media & Culture Theory. Transmedia Fiction. Awesomeness.

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The budding discipline of digital humanities does, on a very basic level, have to do with using computers to read books.

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Game developer Naughty Dog has raked in enough awards since its June release of "The Last of Us" to be considered this year's best in show. Co-created by Carnegie Mellon University alumnus Neil Druckmann (MET'05) and Bruce Straley, the must-have post-apocalyptic thriller is the fastest-seller in Pla...

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Over the Hump: or, Camel Litearature

There is an old maxim that holds that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. The complexity involved in crafting a game, especially modern video games, is too much for one person to handle.

Does that necessarily mean that games will never reach the same heights or plumb the same depths as a work of text by a single author? 

As much as I love film, no film has yet to surpass literature in the realm of crafting experience. The reason for that is the utter lack of interiority of films. A great actor can communicate their internal dialog and emotions through external means, but a book bypasses that entirely and puts us into someone's head. 

Games on the other hand, have a shot at achieving that level of interiority. How can works developed by groups of people develop the same consistency of depth of a work developed by a single mind, rewritten or edited until it reflects, however poorly, the intent of the author? Where every single word is there to mold the experience and draw the reader deeper in to the story. 

Okay, that doesn't happen for every book, but it does for the great ones. Where are the games that can do that? Braid is the best and closest example that I'm aware of when it comes to games as literature. It is a triumph and that cake is real. The entire game was developed to, dare I say, author's Jonathan Blow's vision. I have no doubt that the rest of the development team contributed significantly to the end result, but Blow's determination and focus is what drove the project. 

Braid is a step in the right direction. Not that every game needs to be the singular vision of an author, but that every game needs to strive to be a singular vision. Each piece of the story needs to be embraced, whether by an individual on the team or the totality of the studio. Game designers, indie ones particularly, need to see themselves as storytellers*, as authors*, and as explorers into conveying what lies behind another's eyes. 

* Yes, not every game needs to be a story. Gun, Monster, Point, Click... yeah, I get it. Not every book or movie is War and Peace either. In the immortal-ish words of Teddy "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those timid spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."**

** AKA try it. 

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New project

I've decided to embark on a new project. I've been tinkering with corpus compilation using Python and I had an idea on how to judge social networks various moods.

To begin with it will be pretty simplistic, just a little NLP here, a dash of counting there, and a sprinkling of a dictionary containing words of positive and negative emotions. I'm starting on Reddit rather than Twitter. Reddit uses more words per comment, so I will have more to work with. 

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Jazzpunk is a quirky adventure comedy game chock full of charm, humor and more pop culture references than watching VH1. Nearly every object and character you encounter along the way is an opportunity to make you laugh. But you get to deliver the punch line.

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Awesome MEDIA RELEASE 13 February 2014 The Media Text Hack Group is proud to release v1 of the hacked Media Studies Textbook, following a highly successful remote collaboration with participants from acros...

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Little Evils

Everybody loves free things.

Television broadcast over the air is still the most watched, people listen to the radio, be it FM or Pandora, and people play free games with advertising. The cultural theorist Dallas Smythe argues that nothing is free. Instead audiences are packaged up by media providers and sold to advertisers. Given that he was theorizing about television in the early 1980s it is astonishing to see just how accurate he is about the workings of modern advertising. 

Some game developers have decided to eschew advertisements. Instead they make use of microtransactions. These can make the game easier, allow you to purchase bigger weapons, funny hats, or clicks of a cow. This can be great for gamers, they aren't subjected to interstitial advertisements or banner ads that suck real estate from the game. League of Legends, a popular MMO strategy game supports itself through just such a method with astonishing success. 

And then there are games like EA's re-release of Dungeon Keeper. The game itself is a wonderful update of the 1997 hit, the graphics are smoother and feel like they belong in this century. However, the game is a prime example of what not to do with microtransactions. It is technically playable without paying a cent, but it takes a full twenty four hours to accomplish what you could in the original game in roughly five minutes.

Microtransactions in games usually take the advantage of the interest curve. After putting the player in a position where they have to struggle almost to the point of walking away, microtransactions make the game easier for a time, bringing the player back into the center channel of interest and spurring them on. 

Dungeon Keeper, on the other claw, is essentially broken as a game without spending money. The most disheartening thing of all is the legion of fans of the original series calling for a full game, sans microtransactions, for $9.99. I know that I could be tempted to purchase the full game for such a price. 

Instead EA is betting on microtransactions as the way of the future. Who wouldn't want continuous revenue from a game instead of a develop, sell, develop cycle? I don't object to the idea, I object to the current goldrush mentality behind shifting to microtransactions as a way to make money from a game. It can truly ruin the experience and that's what it's all about. 

For game designers, this is an important lesson. If you are lucky enough to develop a hit game, keep it playable and listen to your fans. 

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Transmedia storytelling! As in real life, it's tough to make everyone happy in this story-driven indie game.

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Advancing through games More than 130,000 volunteers are contributing to RNA molecule research by playing EteRNA, an online game from Carnegie Mellon and Stanford University. Their design work, which is taking place in a virtual global laboratory, is superior to what is produced by  the newest and fastest computer tools av...

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Distractions are a problem, this is one way around it. Mindfulness is different from the hyperalert way you might feel after a great night’s sleep or a strong cup of coffee.

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Set emotions to awesome MIT Media Lab's sensory fiction device will enable readers to feel what the characters in the book are feeling.

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Ya. Basically. Someone PM'd me an interesting question. Basically, can you make a living as a writer? Yes. You can. That's the short answer. Will you make a ton of money? Some do, some don't. I don't think Veronica Roth will be in the food stamps line anytime soon. Nor will I, for that matter. But average for a YA book is probably around 25k. I make a lot more, VR makes a hell of a lot more, and JK Rowling could buy us both with the loose change under her sofa cushions. First, you need talent. No, there's no way around that. If you don't have some basic talent, I'm sorry, but you're going to have to do something else. Even lousy successful writers have talent. And I believe I get some maturity points for not naming any names. But talent is just the necessary-but-not-sufficient condition for a career as a writer. If you have talent you then need some smarts. Learn your job. I learned my job ghostwriting Sweet Valley Twins of all things. And crap for Disney. Everyone wants to go straight from "Talent" to "Billions of dollars." That actually happens sometimes, but not as a rule. So, have talent, then learn your job. That starts with the mechanics of writing - how to create a character, how to define a milieu, how to distinguish voice, how to plot, pacing, all that stuff. You know, the writerly stuff. It also means understanding the market, and understanding the business. I know Katherine Tegen likes me, but if I give her a 900 page story about boring characters doing boring stuff, guess what? She'd still probably like me, (I'm very likable, once you get past my obnoxious personality) but she's not going to pay me to give her crap she can't use. Go to your local book store. Stare at the shelf you want to be on. Read and stare and read and stare until you understand what you're looking at. That's your market. Do you see a 900 page book about boring people there? No? That's a clue. Write a 300 page book about interesting people. There are a whole lot of things that get in your way. You can't let them get in your way. Be ruthless. The biggest obstacle is your own fucked-up brain which will do everything it can to stop you. So you don't let that happen. You're tired? Fuck you, write. You're not in the mood? Fuck you, write. Your cat died? Fuck your cat, write. You have "writer's block?" I will come over to your house and slap the shit out of you: write! If you don't type the words onto the page you will not have a book to sell. I know that sounds obvious, but probably 90% of wanna-be's who crash and burn do so because they forgot Rule #1 which is: Write. You know why I list my occupation as "writer" and not "author?" Author is a title. Writing is a job. Don't be something, do something. Put your fingers on the keys and make words appear on the screen. Have some talent, learn your job, understand the market, and do the work. And then you're very likely to make a living. And if you also get really lucky you get the castle in Scotland and you can hire Mr. Bates to dress you every morning while Mrs. Patmore makes your pancakes. Mmm. Pancakes.

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Short answer: yes Will any of these experiments in storytelling become the dominant forms of tomorrow? Or are they merely timely novelties whose relevance is tied up with the technologies that enable them?

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Damn right it is As Britain debates government spending, an 1844 cartoon seems to capture the moment.

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Sweet Defiance

The recent buzz over CandyCrush maker King applying for a trademark on the word “Candy” has prompted a newer form of protest, a game jam. While the outrage seems to stem from a misunderstanding of trademark law and its uses, the #CandyJam is full steam ahead, with 29 games submitted at the time of this writing.

Trademark filings are by no means the same as actually receiving the trademark. From a business and intellectual property standpoint King is making a smart move. The CandyCrush Saga is a multimillion dollar tasty piece of intellectual property and the company deserved to reap the rewards from its hard work, level design, and obvious skill. However, the game is a knockoff. It’s a well done knockoff, but clearly it’s a tweaked version of Bejeweled. Of course Bejeweled is a tweaked knockoff too, of Tetris, SameGame, and Dr. Mario, but in internet time it’s the grand ole man of tile matching games, despite only being published in 2001.

In the ancient times of yore Bejeweled wasn’t the actually named Bejeweled. Instead it was called Diamond Mine. Microsoft suggested Bejeweled to eliminate possible confusion with an existing game Diamond Mines.

Similar game names isn’t a new problem and as I stated above, King is making the right business move. The jury is still out on if the application is too broad, I’m not a lawyer so who knows, but the reaction of the game developer crowd does highlight several potential problems in too big a broom.

Still, I think the reaction is a positive one. Instead of other, more malicious means of protest, people are doing something creative. Using frustration as a spark the #CandyJam is at least on the right track. Let people have their cake and eat it too.

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Solid logic