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I’m excited about the newly-announced Movable Type 4 Beta for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is the local registration system. If I built this into the site so people could have their comment names and emails saved, so they could comment without waiting for me to approve it, would you guys use it?
The only thing I’m unsure about in the beta is the new UI – I just think it looks a little too much like Basecamp. What do you think?
I have a ton of open tabs I need to close because right now my laptop is running like a snail through molasses… The trouble is, I have more to say about a number of these than a simple ‘links list’ entry would cover, so you get a flurry of short posts.
First up on the docket is Apple’s release of new MacBook Pros earlier this week. Seeing the new specs, I found myself with a flashback to those ads from the 80s: “Where’s the beef?” The new Santa Rosa chipset is a welcome addition, as are the minimum of 2GB of RAM per machine and the mercury-free LED displays, but I’m not only disappointed that the new machines don’t have more to offer but that they dropped only a week shy of GDC. This suggests that if there is a new-and-seriously-improved MacBook in the works, then it won’t show up until 2008 at the earliest. Now, it’s possible that this is just a kludge solution until a new machine shows up with a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD drive (support is rumored to be included in Leopard), a flash memory hard drive (as has long been rumored to be included in the even longer-rumored subnotebook – MacBook Nano?) and dear sweet Jesus come on an industrial design refresh.
Many Mac fanatics out there will scoff, “Why mess with perfection?”, but that’s the role that Apple should play, and used to play – to lead the industry and show what’s possible. Take the Intel-sponsored concept laptop, for example; it’s barely thicker than a Motorola RAZR phone, offers a screen in the back of the lid for quick access even if the machine is closed, has a crazy battery life of 14 hours, is really lightweight and is freakin’ gorgeous. C’mon, Apple – this used to be your department. Someone call Ive and remind him that even though ‘Computer’ is no longer in the company’s name, that’s no reason to ignore the company’s core business. I don’t care if iPods are the company’s growth leader at this point – they were suppoed to serve as a Trojan horse to convert more Windows people to the Mac platform, and it’s worked. Now give them something amazing to convert to, dammit.
I’m sitting here watching the extras on the 2-disc deluxe edition of Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, which are even better than I’d expected. The featurettes are really and truly fantastic; one is all about the mythology behind the films, one is about del Toro’s color and symbolism, and another is about the special effects of the film. The SFX one is right up there with the extras on the Lord of the Rings extended editions (and one of the SFX guys has the same Hellboy t-shirt that I do, which is cool). One part explains the cheek scene, which is sort of comforting, but the scenes with Doug Jones in the Pale Man and faun costumes are unexpectedly deeply creepy because they’re so bloody convincing. Jones is talking to the camera, explaining what all the parts do, but for some reason the disconnect between ‘creature’ and ‘man in suit’ is largely oddly absent, so it feels like a giant freaking faun walking around the set, which is somehow even creepier than the scenes in the film. It’s bloody brilliant.
Lately I’ve been thinking a great deal about game design, although in a different style than some of my game designer friends. I now have a number friends working in the games industry – Alec Austin, a friend of mine from C3, is going to be a game designer for Activision this fall; Chris Casiano is graduating from MIT as a CMS major and is heading to Austin to work for Midway; Kristina Drzaic, one of my cohorts, is heading to Australia to work in the games industry this fall; David Edery, a cofounder of the C3 group, is now working for the Xbox Live Arcade group in Seattle; Nick Hunter, who graduated from MIT last year, is now working as a producer at EA; Kent Quirk is the founder of Cognitoy here in Boston and is working on games for change; Dan Roy, one of my cohorts at CMS, is heading to San Francisco to work on an edutainment game after graduation; Chris Weaver is a cofounder of Bethesda Softworks and served on my thesis committee. This list doesn’t even include Philip Tan, Peter Rausch, Scot Osterweil, Alice Robison, Doris Rusch, Ravi Puroshotma, Ben Decker, or a bunch of other folks. Tons of gamemakers, tons of game players, and tons of people thinking about games. I am proud to be one of them, although my own interests are a little different from these guys.
Each of these folks have noted strengths and interests – Dan’s huge on edutainment games, Alice and Doris are looking at games in academia, Peter’s looking at games and philosophy, and Alec’s fascinated by the rule systems that make up the underlying architecture of game mechanics themselves. Me, I’m thinking about interactive narratives and how to emphasize design in game design.
I’m fascinated by the aesthetics and story of games. I’m fascinated by the moods created by games like Shadow of the Colossus and some parts of World of WarCraft. I’m wondering where the high design games are, about where the sense of style in games will come from, where the sense of auteurship comes from and, all too often, goes. I’m interested in the Shigeru Miyamotos, the Fumito Uedas, and so on. I’m interested in using the systems for alternative uses, such as digital poetry. I’m interested in the rise of indie gaming on widespread console systems with new initiatives like XNA. I want to know what happens when you make a game that feels like an issue of Vanity Fair, or what happens when you shift the emphasis in the game away from the interactivity and more towards immersion in a sensual experience.
I have a theory that says that all of these people who hoot and holler about how interactivity is the be-all and end-all of these new media forms need to go back and re-examine their media history. When television first appeared, its primary use was ‘remote viewing’, and it was only later that innovators began using it to broadcast pre-recorded narrative entertainment. The Internet was first developed as a military application for communications and backups; look at how far it’s grown past those initial models. I suspect that the games industry is headed for a similar course of development, if the infrastructure can be ironed out. The current market system for games is so ludicrously broken that I think only the digital download path can really offer the degree of continued commercial accessibility that the game industry requires to continue to grow.
I’m curious to see where all of this takes us, and where it’s all going for the next couple of years. Suffice it to say that I’m in the right place at the right time for this whole thing – I’ll post more about this once the ink dries, but I’ll have something to announce here soon enough. Stay tuned!
I mentioned this briefly in my last post, and I was going to leave it at that, but then I carved up a particularly massive issue of GQ and realized that I still had something left to say.
My relationship with magazines is a weird one. I subscribe to at least half a dozen different magazines and pick up another two or three on the newsstands each month, and that doesn’t include my comics habit. I’ve always loved magazines – I remember discovering weird, beautiful literary journals like Globe when I was in junior high or high school, as well as the weighty, super-glossy advertising magazines like Communication Arts, Print, HOW and Step (both in its Step-by-Step Design and Step Into Design incarnations). I was intoxicated by the beauty of these things as objects, the cumulation of writing, storytelling, photography, illustration, layout, and so on. That’s why I still can’t help myself when I get the opportunity to help design a new print document, even when so much of my work now is done online. When I was in elementary school I made my own Kids’ Ghostbusters magazine and served as the editor for the Titan Times Jr. newspaper, I co-edited the Titan Times in high school, I founded Inkblots in 1995 and published it off and on for over a decade, my “senior prank” was designing the literary magazine for the high school next door when its editor recruited poor Nick to do it (even though layout was never his thing for Inkblots), and in college I did layout and design for Hika and Catechresis, a little for the Kenyon newspaper and some for Exposé, the newspaper at the University of Exeter while I was over in England, among other publications. I’ve done newsletter designs for RBB Systems, book design for Ben Brown’s So New Media, and here at MIT I redesigned In Medias Res for the CMS department as soon as I could. Still, in almost every design I’ve done, there’s been something largely (blissfully) absent: ads.
This evening I took an x-acto knife to an issue of GQ that weighed in at over 400 pages and neatly sliced out the content that I found worth keeping. The total amount of keeper material? 20 pages, and about a quarter to a third of those actually were ads, pictures of noteworthy outfits or color combinations that I wanted to remember for future projects. There’s one article on Zach Braff, one half-page piece on coffee, a couple pages of gadgets and doodads, a page on hosting, a page on how to make a really great sandwich, and the rest wound up in my wastebasket.
I find something deeply satisfying about destroying a magazine, which seems ridiculously at odds with that earlier paragraph until I clarify: there is something deeply satisfying about destroying a magazine from Condé Nast. I simply don’t view most of these Condé Nast bricks as artifacts of the same stuff as the literary journals and design magazines. I would never slice up an issue of Communication Arts, for example, and I’d be hard-pressed to take scissors to an issue of Dwell, but I barely bat an eyelash at cutting open an issue of Architectural Digest, and chopping up an issue of GQ or Vanity Fair is a real visceral treat. This is so because these issues are so completely and utterly bloated with ads. To me, these ridiculous Tijuana bibles of commerce are artistically criminal; yes, they have some great articles, but flipping through twenty, thirty, even forty pages of ads in an issue of Vanity Fair before you even reach the table of contents is absurd.
I still find things in these issues worth keeping – the 20:400, or 1:20 ratio is actually about right – but still, grabbing the two halves of a magazine and tearing it right down its spine is really quite satisfying. Ripping out page after page of silly, pointless pictures of models with eyes like Jersey cows (behind which can be found usually about a tenth as much intelligence) feels like a strike for good in the world. Am I saying that literary and art journals don’t suffer from a similar signal to noise ratio? Hell, no. Most literary journals are loaded to bursting with page after page of writing that, if not out-and-out crap, isn’t my cup of tea. The same can be said about any type of publication; most stories in the sci-fi magazines usually aren’t that great, the majority of the content in The Wall Street Journal falls outside of my area of interest, and so on – yet even there it’s a noted difference between the ratio of signal to noise and the ratio of signal to relevant signal. Publications like Vanity Fair and GQ are often so swollen with ads that they’re mostly noise, and then the high-fashion stuff isn’t anything that most people would wear, so that’s irrelevant signal, leaving only one in twenty pages (if you’re lucky) to prove relevant to a reader like me.
Rip rip rip rip rip.
Lately Uncle Warren has been ruminating about magazines and Burst Culture, and there are some ways in which Ellis is right and other ways in which he’s full of crap. For instance, he writes that “I love magazines that commit and pay for long articles and long fiction. The web rewards neither approach. It’s a packeted medium, a surf medium. Short bursts are the way to go.” I disagree with this analysis. If the content is right and the execution is right, people will consume content off anything for hours on end. Arguing that content delivered over the web has to be short is horribly short-sighted because it woefully ignores the hours upon hours upon hours of time spent by people watching long-form shows and films sucked down over BitTorrent or YouTube, or reading weblogs, or running around as an Orc or an Elf in World of WarCraft. One could argue that reading webcomics or blog posts or watching the short clips on YouTube isn’t the same, but even books are chopped up into smaller bits, be they sections or chapters or even pages. A compelling story keeps audiences clicking the same way that it keeps them turning pages. Length is irrelevant, as long as the story quality remains consistently high throughout. Will people’s eyes get tired after staring at a screen for a long amount of time? Sure. Will their hands get tired from holding up the latest Harry Potter brick for hours on end? Absolutely. Each medium has its weaknesses and strengths, but I think arguments that say that web-delivered media has to be short is simply, well, short-sighted.
I think that online magazines are due for some sort of revolution. I was heartily encouraged by Derek Powazek’s JPG Magazine and 8020 Publishing until Derek was unethically forced out by one of his cofounders, at which point my loyalty to Derek (and my own personal code of ethics) won out over my interest in the company. Still, I think 8020 is a step in the right direction, and I think that other publications would be wise to follow suit. Still, I think there’s more than enough room online for real good, solid publications with high-quality writing and a strong design aesthetic, powered by Google Ads and produced with a much lower overhead (and a much lower impact on the environment).
Perhaps someday I’ll bring Inkblots back and try out my theories. For now though, I’ll have to be satisfied with cutting up the pile of magazines that arrives on my doorstep every month. Money is money and the ads aren’t going away anytime soon, but at least I can control (to some extent) the signal to noise ratio in my own library. This is some small comfort – which, along with the joy of tearing an issue in half, should keep me satisfied. At least for now.
This weekend I availed myself of Dotster’s Memorial Day sale – half off all .com, .net and .org domains with the right code, and please don’t start in with the “Yeah, but so-and-so is always cheaper, blah blah” because I’ve used Dotster since like 2002 and am a faithful customer, so there – and now a couple of long-term oddities have been rectified. First, geofflong.com now redirects people to the appropriate site, geoffreylong.com, and (thank you, Ivan) tipofthequill.com now redirects people here. Similarly, bonesoftheangel.com, neverjack.com and winterchildren.com all redirect people to my Writing page. These little domains may not mean much now, but if I ever turn these stories into full-fledged books, games, movies or whatever, I’ll have my bases covered.
Aside from that, I spent my day dealing with little projects that had been piling up while I was otherwise occupied with school stuff – primarily cutting articles out of magazines, scanning them, adding them into my database and chucking the remains. I figure I’ve reclaimed several feet of shelf space today alone. Go me.
I know this feeling all too well – curse you, wikipedia! And weblogs! And newssites! And games! And, and, and… Yeah!
My friends Ivan and Vicki and I watched the season finale of 24 on Monday night and we, like most of America, shared a moment of delightful commisseration with Peter MacNicol’s Tom Lennox:
(Image by Ivan, of course.)
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