I’ve reached a point where I refuse to buy any more objects where I have to become a rebel in the war between actual vs. allowed functionality just so I can use the technology the way I want.
That includes the Apple iPhone and the Sony PSP.
Archive for September, 2007
29
Sep
Consumer Warfare
29
Sep
Stop Motion Anime
Something in the media distribution system seems to be breaking down faster and faster lately lately. There’s no shortage of media in the world for us to watch, listen to, or interact with. But the ability to control that media in a way that makes it profitable seems to have been outstripped by the consumer’s ability to gather and share it directly.
In fact, the greater a fan you are of a particular thing the more likely you are to be able to leap over the proscribed boundaries and find the more obscure bits and pieces of your passion. Looking for the next new byte of media also has an added benefit, in that when you search for that material it puts you directly into contact with other like minded fans. People who will welcome and celebrate another explorer.
So it’s a bit disconcerting to see a company going down the tubes when it’s more than likely that file sharing had a lot 
to do with their downfall. Geneon isn’t a business that most people have heard of, but they’ve been a big player in the American anime industry for almost a decade, and their inability to pay the bills is a frightening reminder that money needs to change hands if you want a business to stay in business.
And the current economics of anime can’t be good if you’re a publisher. When a show appears in Japan it is rapidly translated (fansubbed) and posted to the internet within a day of it’s appearance in Japan, by a fan community that’s ravenous for fresh content. The fact that most of anime is comprised of serial episodes that go on for dozens or even hundreds of episodes, is even more incentive to get every one of them into your eyeballs as quickly as possible.
The practical effect is that by the time a show has been licensed, dubbed, subtitled, packaged, and delivered to stores by an American licensor, the community has long moved on. They’re either 100 episodes ahead, or they’ve moved on to a different show entirely.
There’s no doubt that having an active and aware fan base does have some kind of positive marketing effect when the media hits. Up until the last few years the Anime industry has been to turn a blind eye, let the fans do their thing, and create a “buzz” around their media. In return the subbers often pull the “official” torrent links when a show is licensed. But you can’t un-release information. And with the increasing nerdification of the nation,the dynamics of the industry are changing in a way that is cutting the traditional publisher out of the equation entirely.
And if you want to see the cutting edge of the coming media trends, there’s few better example of a dialed-in and passionate community than anime fans. They’ve figured out that you don’t even need to know how to use bit-torrent to catch up on the more popular shows. They’re simply chopped up and fed directly onto YouTube.
What does this mean for the media industry at large? Certainly the concept that linear media overlords can spoon feed content to a willing audience is an idea whose time has passed. DRM just becomes a way for the elite to prove how cool they really are, by crawling over each other in their efforts to crack it. And the concept of file-sharing as a criminal lottery doesn’t seem to have stopped the phenomenon of peer to peer file sharing from growing leaps and bounds. After all, the more people who are doing it, the less like it is that you’ll be the one who’s going to get caught.
But it’s still a free market, and there’s still money to be made, if you’re smart. After all any system, even the “free information” society, still has points where money can be extracted, especially when the alternative is no entertainment at all.
The question is, will the traditional media companies be the ones to figure out how to do it? History says probably not. And change, especially when you have a wealthy, complacent, and angry traditional business fighting against it, is never a pretty thing.
24
Sep
Just for one day
It’s good to have Heroes back on the air, even if it is such a mass-market show that it hurts to watch sometimes. As much as it has its moments of greatness there’s no denying that a whiff of “product” that comes off of it sometimes. I suppose it’s good for the long-term health of the program, for maybe it’s too baby-proofed for its own good. Everything feels a little too delicate, as if the writers are worried that if they push too far they’re going to piss people off, and all the magic will drain away.
It’s also far more like a soap opera than most of the shows I’m used to, with characters dying or just vanishing in roughly equal numbers, as their acting commitments or salary demands doom them to exile or extinction.
It’s also a marketing vehicle for literally marketing vehicles, and has been since Hiro took his Versa on a nationwide tour in season one. As I remember it he actually said goodbye to the car when it left the show. And while I’m happy to thank Nissan for providing my entertainment with limited commercial interruptions, I’m still not sure I’m used to the amount of integrated advertising that you get in television shows these days. When Claire thanks her dad for giving her a Rogue near the beginning of the season two premier you almost expect little computer graphic TM symbols to float out of her mouth as she says it. I suppose it’s the price we have to pay now that a network can no longer guarantee when, where, or how a show is going to be watched by its audience. But it still pulls me out of the world a little bit. Like we’re no longer watching television, but playing a game of spot the ad.
Of everything I’ve watched, Gilmour Girls probably had the greatest density of in-show advertising I’ve ever seen. In one episode in season three they managed to name check on the order of five Warner Brothers musicals in one scene. I had to imagine that they had a box set coming out. They also freely cram in products where ever possible, even managing to put in a rack of Frito-Lay chips into the display window of restaurant so it could act as a backdrop for Lorelei and Rory. Classy!
That was back in 2002, so I’m sure that it’s only become more common since then.
My concern isn’t really the fact that I’m being advertised to. That’s a fact of life. But I wonder if more fantastic genre programming that can’t take advantage of easily integrated advertising is tougher to get made these days. After all it’s almost impossible to stuff something full of product placement if it’s set completely out of our world. Do shows Battlestar Galactica or Farscape have one more hurdle to jump before they can get the green light?
22
Sep
The Flavor of Hype
The sheer marketing force that surrounds a game like Halo 3 is almost beyond comparison. The effect created brings to mind things like hurricanes, firestorms, and quantum tunneling. It feeds off itself, creating something that is awe inspiring in its ability to toy with known laws of physics, and create a sheer destructive force that can remake the landscape. You may not like the fact that the internet is burning down around you, but it’s hard to argue with the effectiveness of it.
There may be no other title that hits the gaming world with the same impact that a new Halo does. I suppose the closest cultural event are the Star Wars films back in the day, or the release of the fifth Harry Potter novel.
But video games are different. The shared cultural intimacy of actually experiencing a game is unique. It isn’t just a few hours in a movie theater, or being curled up with a book. Once released the audience will actually be able to share the game together in a way that goes beyond what traditional media can can offer. Both through multiplayer, and \the ability to cooperatively play through the story mode, it’s possible to play the game, generate a totally unique moment, and then discuss that experience, every time. And looking at the kind of new features that are being offered with this game, it’s pretty clear that the potential that offers wasn’t lost on the game developers.
Every “AAA” game title is ultimately about the polish. The time spent making the good better, and the better perfect. It also demands that the developers have a deep understanding of what it is that they’re going to be making great. That’s what Blizzard does so well for instance, and why they’ve been able to take over both the RTS and the MMO genres. They make it so much smoother than what has come before that you can’t help but be a little seduced by it.
And Halo seems to be following that trajectory. Like a firestorm it both feeds and expands the audience by not just polishing the quality of the interactive experience, but also letting the player know that they understand what a multiplayer experience is in a way that lets them move the bar.
With this much hype it’s the game itself that can get a little lost in the shuffle. But I’ll argue that the ability for a game experience to transcend the expectations that you bring to it is an advantage interactive experiences have over traditional media. Here’s hoping Halo 3 lives up to the hype.
17
Sep
Trailer Perks
It wasn’t that long ago that high quality video game trailers were being treated as if they were valuable treasures. Sure, you could see the Halo preview on YouTube, but game imagery seems to lose a lot of it’s pizzazz when it’s pushed through their deflavorizing algorithms. So gaming “news” sites like IGN, and some of the pay to download sinkholes decided that they were actually doing the fans a favor by letting them see what are essential
ly hi-rez commercials. For those of us who were unwilling to pay a premium for the privilege, we could only hang out at the gates to their digital wonderland, taunted by their delicious full-screen goodness like urchins with their n
oses pressed against the bakery window on Christmas Eve.
But Game Trailers has changed all that. Everything on their site is free, free, free. Unfettered by mandatory memberships of any kind. Oh sure, you can log in, but the first time I hit the “HD” button I was instantly taken to the hi-rez version. Stunned is the only way I can describe it, and I knew that there was a different attitude here.
It’s not all about the free game movies, either. For something that’s involved with video games the site is almost ridiculously easy to navigate. No semi-hidden drop-down search boxes or needlessly complicated flash menus. The main page is constantly being updated with new stuff, and you can find almost anything you want by just entering the name of the game, the platform, or the company that makes it. It’s got an honest to goodness RSS feed, and the whole thing feels like actual gamers are working on it.
But wait, there’s more! The reviews are actually good! Divided into clear sections, making reasonable arguments, backed up with excellent snippets of gameplay it’s the kind of well-executed web content that should have the (remaining) print magazine publishers quaking in their boots. Even the motion graphics are fun and well executed.
Back that up with some solid feeds from the different conventions and events, interviews, and original reporting that’s damn close to watchable and you may see why it’s worth pointing people to it as an example of something good on the web. I haven’t had time to check out the forums, so if they’re more than the usual jungle of smart asses, flame warriors, and jerks it will be up to you to find that out.
Is it perfect? No. But it’s more than good enough. And if you’ve struggled through an endless sea of aggressively crappy video game industry web sites for the last decade, that’s a lot.
Oh yeah, and it’s also part of MTV Networks… So there’s that.
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