Archive for November 26th, 2007

26
Nov

Comic book companies fight the future

By Drew 0 Comments
Categories: Media Shift, Media Wars, Comics and Linear Media

While the rest of us were consuming our Thanksgiving turkey, Marvel and DC decided to take action against the Internet and comic book scans:

The popular comics tracking site Z-Cult FM has received legal letters demanding the immediate cessation of all illegal activities on the site from both DC Comics and Marvel Comics, according to a report at TorrentFreak, a blog that tracks activities related to BitTorrent file sharing.

According to the report, Z-Cult immediately took their tracker offline to assess the situation and to double-check the authenticity of the threats. At press time, they were able to verify the threat from DC Comics was legitimate.

The report goes on to sat that a prolific scanner of comics named ?Oroboros,? who posts his releases on Usenet newsgroups, has received a DMCA notice from his newsgroup service and will no longer be offering his illegal scans on the newsgroup.

It’s understandable that they don’t want their stuff up there without getting any money, but once again they’ve stymied consumer who’ve showed a preference for what they really want without offering any real alternative. 

It’s likely that some people would be willing to pay a fair price to get high quality comic scans digitally, but neither Marvel or DC is offering that service.  Instead we’re getting an indie comics experiment, and a greatest hits subscription service that’s still in search of a business model.  And in neither case do you actually get to own anything.  It’s hard to believe that after ten years of the music industry managing to sue itself into a corner the content providers are still making the same mistakes.

While they still hold the biggest licenses Marvel and DC aren’t the only game in town these days, and one comics company has decided to take a different tack:

One publisher sees some benefit from illegal comics downloading. In a surprise move, SLG Publishing, who  previously asked the Z-Cult administrators to ban the distribution of SLG titles on their tracker — which the Z-Cult admins agreed to — has reversed it’s decision and has given permission to Z-Cult and its users to distribute their titles on their tracker.image

In a statement posted on the site, SLG said, “SLG publishing would like to thank the moderators and forumers of Z-Cult for the respect they have shown in regards to our ban request. Obviously, our preference is to have each comic legally paid for, and the efforts undertaken to honor this desire have clearly shown that Z-Cult is not a forum overrun by those expecting a free ride. In return, we have decided to lift the ban from our independently published titles being distributed on Z-Cult. Of course, this is not an entirely selfless act - we hope that exposure to our large library of titles will help encourage support of our legal download site, www.eyemelt.com. It is our belief that there is a market for legally downloadable comic books, and we hope that we can prove this to the comics industry by showing success through our our digital distribution system.

Very succinctly put. It’ll be worth following up and seeing how it works out for them.

26
Nov

Mario has feelings, and flow

By Drew 0 Comments
Categories: Video Games, Think Like a Designer and Game Design

There’s an interesting article in Gamasutra that discusses game “feel” using the Mario series for its examples. It’s a little pedantic in parts, but I think it does manage to lay out some of the difficult issues that a designer can face when trying bring a character to life, and then hand control of it over to an anonymous player.

However you describe it, it?s hard to deny that the sensation of controlling a digital object is one of the most powerful — and overlooked — phenomena ever to emerge from the intersection of people and computers.

There are lots reasons for this, but the main one is that game feel is slippery. It?s mostly subconscious, a combination of sights, sounds, and instant response to action. It?s one of those ?know it when you feel it? kinds of things. If it?s off by just a little bit, a game?s goose is cooked. If it?s ?responsive?, ?tight?, and ?deep?, it can be magical. image

A good action games lets us connect to the game in a way that almost feels as if its us inside that world.  It’s more than just the imagination. On some level you’re looping and flipping with the character. This column does a pretty good job of teasing out some of the ways that games allow that to happen.

One thing that I think it does overlook is animation.  Even if you’re looking at classic “non-interactive” cartoons, there’s something about the clear animation that gives an audience the feeling of being there.  It’s the same vicarious experience that draws people into a sporting event, or an action sequence. If you can’t capture the right details in your drawings the audience isn’t going to get what you’re going for no matter how powerful the engine is under the hood.

It’s not as hard as you might think to get it to work right either.  The Xiao Xiao series started out as a series of short animations that manage to really capture the fluid feeling of a Hong Kong action film using only stick figures.  Later on some actual games were created using the animation techniques, and it’s pretty obvious they were weaker than the animations themselves in terms of communicating with the audience. Finding that delicate balance between feedback and attention is where the real mastery often lies.

In his response over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Jim Rossignol adds a little more depth to that part of the discussion:

I can?t help thinking that what people are talking about when they refer to the ?feel? of a game is its capacity to get us into a flow state. We reject games with a poor feel because we aren?t able to get into that state. It?s somehow analogous to listening to music: we?re just able to enter the pattern completion of certain types of music, while our tastes seem to reject others. Games with bad feel can still be played, but they irk us, like dancing to music we don?t enjoy.

Feel and flow are one of those topics that we’ll probably never reach the bottom of, like music or dance, but it’s certainly a worthwhile discussion.