5. Twilight

The runaway success of what is essentially a non-ironic vampire soap opera is vexing for fans of more traditional genre media. It also seems to come without the usual focus on deep story and “realism” that had been a hallmark of the 2000s.

In the end it’s a tale of teen angst that wears its heart on its sleeve, because that’s all it really has to offer. And while most of the other properties on this list have moved relentlessly forward into spectacle, Twilight is unashamedly old fashioned, focusing on emotion and chastity, with over-wrought and tormented characters that are so forthright they seem to be beyond parody.

But at the same time that genre movies have become increasingly focused on CGI and explosions an entire generation of female fans having been grown up with the gender-bending romance of anime, along with the emotionally driven fantasy of Harry Potter. Given that, along with the fact that women are, statistically, far more likely to read a book, the idea of a creating a strongly female-focused paranormal romance makes a lot of sense.

If the genre continues to grow, and there’s no reason to think it won’t, we’ll see other properties appear in the next decade that are similar, but hopefully with a bit more narrative spine than Twilight’s pastiche of longing looks and romantic clichés.

Theatrical Movie:                   Yes
TV Series:                               No
Novels:                                    Yes
Comics:                                   No
Video Games:                         No
Roleplaying Games:               No
Collectable Card Games:       No

4.The Avengers

Coming into the new millennium, Marvel comics had been all about the X-Men. Not only had they been Marvel’s top comic book superstars since the 1970s, but the decade started off with a shiny new movie that fans felt had finally captured the soul of what made the comic great. Born with strange “mutant” powers that also marked them as outsiders, they had just enough gritty ennui to make them seem more realistic than the typical costumed hero with a hyphenated name and a colorful costume.

But brewing in the background was a revolution. Brian Michael Bendis was cooking up a plan to bring the classic marvel superheroes back to the front burner. His plan was to reboot Marvel’s most venerable team-up book, The Avengers, by putting all their biggest and most-popular heroes, including Spider-Man and Wolverine. The book would be the flagship for the Marvel universe, featuring massive battles set against personal issues that would give this world of costumed do-gooders a genuine sense of verisimilitude.

After killing the old team off in Avengers Disassembled, the comic, now titled “New Avengers” started off with a bang, mining the long history of the Marvel universe and tying together hundreds of loose threads that had cropped up into continuity over the last two decades.

The book was a smash hit. Fans were clearly hungry for this kind of re-invention. It wasn’t just about making the characters gritty, which had been the formula in the 90s; it was about being willing to tell deeper stories, and treat the world like a canvas. It also meant treating the ridiculous with the same degree of intelligence and detail as the sublime. Marvel’s chief-editor, Joe Quesada embraced this vision, and made it work across the line.

The Iron Man film was an attempt to take that formula and make it work on the big screen.  It was a smash hit, with a sequel on the way. But more than just a single hit film, Marvel is attempting to bring continuity to the movies, creating a series of films that share a consistent universe. The Hulk, Captain America, and Thor are all pieces of a puzzle that are supposed to come together with an Avengers film appearing on-screen in 2012.

The fact that Marvel has been able to build up a property with so many characters, and so much flexibility, shows the raw power that they wield now that they’ve been retooled and rebuilt. It will be interesting to see how things go in the next decade with Disney in charge of the cross-media reigns.

Theatrical Movie:                   Yes
TV Series:                               Yes
Novels:                                    Yes
Comics:                                   Yes
Video Games:                         Yes
Roleplaying Games:               Yes
Collectable Card Games:       Yes

3.The Lord of the Rings

While the classic trilogy had been venerable best-sellers for decades, the genre of high fantasy that sprung from them had always had an uneasy relationship with other media. In many ways it existed as a strange child of the seventies, often appearing on-screen in a manner that was goofy and off-putting, with a macramé and clay-pot sensibility that had only reinforced the feeling that it couldn’t really work on the big screen.

But in the 90s Xena and Hercules, although post-modern and sort of a parody, flirted with an edgier vision of modern fantasy. Building on that heritage of New Zealand production, Peter Jackson, using all the tools at his command, created a version of the story that infused the whole production with a new level of detail and craftsmanship that remade the series as a historical epic about a world that never was.

From the clothing to the landscapes, the movies existed as a portal to another reality that often felt richer and more detailed than our own. It wasn’t just a story to watch, it was a place to inhabit. And by the time the final film had won the Oscar for Best Picture, it seemed as if the audience had become almost overwhelmed from the richness of it all.

Still, the series had redefined the vision of fantasy in the mass-market, banishing the seventies excesses, and allowing fantasy a genre to flourish both on-screen and off. With a new series of Tolkien movies starting up production under with Del Toro directing, it will be interesting to see if the franchise has legs longer than a Hobbit’s.

Theatrical Movie:                   Yes
TV Series:                               No
Novels:                                    Yes
Comics:                                   No
Video Games:                         Yes
Roleplaying Games:               Yes
Collectable Card Games:       Yes

2. Batman

In the beginning of the decade Batman was a brand in decline. The “franchise” had been totally derailed by the disaster film known as BATMAN AND ROBIN, effectively killing off an iteration of the character that Tim Burton had started a decade before.

Comic books in general were feeling tired after the over-hyped insanity of the 90s, with Batman having been subjected to numerous interesting re-interpretations, but essentially rudderless.

Even the Animated Series, which had probably done more to define the character as a brand than anything which had come before, had decided to retire Bruce Wayne, and created the futuristic “Batman Beyond” as the standard bearer for the animated continuity.

A mid-decade attempt to reboot an animated version of the character as “The Batman” didn’t manage to find real purchase with the fans, although it did run for five seasons.  The current “Brave and the Bold” cartoon series started in 2008, and is skewed younger, but feels far more iconic.

Meanwhile, back in the comic books, the character slowly found his feet over the course of the decade, with Grant Morrison’s current run finally managing to find a perfect balance between the outlandish and gritty elements of the character that had always seemed to be in conflict before.

But for the brand, the proof that things are different now came with the release of “The Dark Knight”. This second Bat-Film by Christopher Nolan was the ultimate Batman film, with Heath Ledger’s Joker finally giving the character the genuine on-screen menace he deserved.

Batman is a venerable franchise that’s currently firing on all cylinders. It’ll be interesting to see where it ends up going over the next ten years.

Theatrical Movie:                   Yes
TV Series:                               Yes
Novels:                                    Yes
Comics:                                   Yes
Video Games:                         Yes
Roleplaying Games:               Yes
Collectable Card Games:       Yes

1. Harry Potter

While other properties on this list are older and more venerable, Harry Potter is the true ideal of creating and nurturing a cultural phenomenon in the 2000s.

Already rolling when the decade began, the movies and books kept coming out at regular intervals, with the films managing to gracefully transition from a book about magical shool-children, and produce interesting films that on occasion surpassed the narrative of the books they were based on. Meanwhile the hype machine kept relentlessly chugging away, along with a torrent of branded material, and filling store shelves with tiny plastic brooms.

It’s hard to believe that the same pre-teen “kids” who started out reading the first volumes of the series when they are now adults in their 20s, but it’s also hard to believe that they won’t show up to see the final two films.

Already completed in their original novel from, it’s now up to the movies to determine whether the story of the boy wizard will end with a bang or a whimper.

Theatrical Movie:                   Yes
TV Series:                               No
Novels:                                    Yes
Comics:                                   No
Video Games:                         Yes
Roleplaying Games:               No
Collectable Card Games:       Yes
Toys:                                       Yes

In the book McKee discusses how Fantasy is the genre that ends up hewing most closely to a classic narrative structure.

Since in most fantasy stories the character’s internal emotions end up getting externalized as metaphorical monsters and objects (Is that a magic sword in your scabbard, or are you just happy to see me?) it makes sense to me that the stories themselves would end up following a very traditional narrative structure.

I think that’s undermined a bit with urban fantasy stories, and its also probably one of the reasons I think that Martin’s GAME OF THRONES tends to feel a bit different. Five books in, and it’s still not really clear who the hero is yet…

But in the end, even the conflicted anti-heroes like Elric seem to always end up solving their internal issues through an external event.

Or am I thinking too broadly here?

But let’s give credit where credit is due: The story is, for the most part, motivated by character, even if that happens in much the same way that a freight train is “motivated” by a massive diesel engine capable of dragging tons of freight up a steep incline. And like this tortured metaphor, Avatar is not only impossible to stop once it gets going, but is also clearly heading towards a single destination that has to be clearly laid out beforehand.

But what struck me more than anything is how Avatar crafts something unique out of the new tools of visual storytelling. Cameron seems to understand that the main danger of using such massive amounts of computer-generated imagery is that it can interfere with our fundamental need to form an emotional relationship with the characters on-screen. It’s clear that  he spent a great deal of time giving his digital characters the ability to emote with enough human subtlety that we can’t help but find ourselves intrigued by them. These may not be humans, but they are, for a few instants at least, the first screen creatures that seem to truly engage our emotions at the most fundamental level. Gollum was a good effort, but he was a monster. He could evoke pity, but he was an animal. He wasn’t a creature that we could engage in with respect.

And that’s why having the Avatars be remotely driven creatures is such an excellent metaphor. These creatures look like the humans that control them, and they have human emotions, although they’re not quite like us. On another level they are also obviously motion-captured from human performances, giving us permission to believe in the gorgeous cartoon panorama that is the alien world of Pandora. And finally they are a metaphor for the audience, as we are dumped into this virtual world that constantly assaults our senses with strangeness and beauty.

The last film that tried to create this realized other-world was King Kong. But by putting that cross-species love story into the horrible and hostile world of Skull Island it ended up wearing its spectacle on its sleeve, and made it difficult to connect with.

As I discussed in my piece on the Spectacular Shift, CGI imagery has a tendency to push us out of our normal method of perceiving narrative media, and slip the audiences into a state where they are open to purely visual stimulation. Although the story is getting a lot of grief for being too simplistic, Cameron’s greatest achievement in Avatar is how he determinedly, and effectively, swims against that tide for most of the movie. His goal is to keep us emotionally grounded even as our senses want to make us float away. It’s a shame that in the third act he seems to give up on this effort entirely, and spends the last hour of the film pummeling us with over-the-top imagery until we are nothing more than an over-stimulated bundle of rods and cones with an alarmingly full bladder. But if we are going to move beyond the idea of a big budget computer-generated move as nothing more than a loosely plotted series of explosions and pretty effects, it seems that Avatar may be showing us the way.

Take a look at these pictures and tell me that you don’t get a least a little bit of a hard SF vibe, or at least a feeling that you could play a level or two of Halo in that city, or a rebirth of Disney’s original dream of building an inhabitable amusement park.

And even though it was built in a desert halfway around the world, to me it looks like a kind of fictional American future—a mall city constructed in the middle of a desert on the cutting edge of technology and capitalism. Vegas and Wal-Mart smashed together under a repressive theocratic government.

We’d already heard a great deal about the corruption and suffering that lived behind the facade, and I’m sure we’ll hear more about in the months and years to come as the cracks widen.

Whether it lives or dies, it’s pretty clear that the dream of Dubai as a place where excess can birth mega-projects on a river of money is over now.

And the strains of Ozymandias keep ringing in my ears…

`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.

So perfectly apt for this city built in the desert it’s almost ridiculous…

I’m about halfway into the new Batman game, and I already love it.

And it’s not because it’s actually a great game. The thing is clunky in twenty different ways, not in the least of which is that Batman can’t actually jump, which is a usually sure sign that at some point in the middle of production the developers had to make some hard choices about time, money and a “truly free roaming environment” and ultimately decided that that roaming free is something better left for ethnic gangsters running around inside of full scale recreations of modern American cities. But Batman interacts with things well, and it isn’t broken, for the most part. Eidos clearly allowed the team to polish up what they had until it, well not gleamed—until it did whatever it is that dull metal does when you polish it up very well.

To be honest I wasn’t much expecting to like the story either. I’m a huge fan of the Batman Animated series. In retrospect it wasn’t just a seminal work for television Animation, but it actually did an amazing job of cementing the fundamental character of Batman as a media property—certainly more-so than the nonsensical (but successful) movie version of the sixties TV show that proceeded it. But more often than not writers of literary media end up coming off as parodies of themselves when they create something interactive, but Paul Dini, the heart and soul of the Animated Series works wonders here.

They game also uses two of the iconic voices of the series, Kevin Conroy (Batman) and Mark Hammil (The Joker), to recreate the Batman and the Joker, respectively. But these aren’t the same versions of the characters you may remember. They’ve been “re-imagined” into character designs that reek of the kind of “grit” that usually tends to be a clear sign that the creators are desperately to convince people to ignore the substance of their product. It didn’t work in Gotham Knights, last year’s anime “prequel” to Batman Returns. Conroy played Batman there, and it was awful.

So, as you can imagine, my expectations were fairly low going in, but against all odds it works. Everybody involved seems as if they were working together to make something good, and what comes out is completely unique. There’s a hint of pure nostalgic fanboy love without it reeking of it like an unwashed forty-year-old in a ill-fitting costume.

Ultimately what you get here is a fairly straightforward Batman story, no matter how many times the Dark Knight growls “No Jim, this time it’s different.” The Joker has turned Arkham Asylum into his playpen, giving him a chance to put all the series greatest (and not so great) villains to work for him. The closed environment is a smart choice, and it means that The Joker can get on the intercoms/video screens and constantly taunt Batman without the player feeling like he’s being held back from kicking some clown ass purely for game reasons, although early on it does do exactly that early on.

But what makes it game work so well is that it’s great Batman. It understands how to use the license in a way that allows the player’s expectations to pave over all the clunky bits. And that, frankly, is fucking amazing, because if there’s one place where games usually fail spectacularly it’s in expressing dramatic expectation as gameplay.

And despite some clunky control choices, everything you do feels Batman-y. From your “detective vision” that lets you find needles in haystacks, to being able to hang upside-down underneath gargoyles (de rigeur for the well appointed nuthatch) and pluck unsuspecting bad-guys into the air., to the ability to dodge and weave between multiple enemies. Encounters in this game are tactical, fast-moving and fun. It’s closer in experience to a game like Tony Hawk than Street Fighter, and manages to pick up on many of the same notes that made Wolverine such a blast to play.

It’s also got lots of crawling, climbing, and general exploring (but no jumping), along with a few (moderately frustrating) puzzles. And even thought it’s a little linear, with a number of rooms that seem to have been designed only to be entered and exited by air-duct, it keeps moving at a brisk pace.

And like any good modern hardcore title the world also feels stuffed. There’s lots of goodies to find (courtesy of the Riddler) along with a (very) light RPG style upgrade system that seems to have managed to get right what it is that other games, such as Prototype got wrong.

In fact it’s like Prototype in a lot of ways, except that it works. Prototype was close, but in the end it was the attempt to push all that into a truly free-roaming world that seemed to kill it. Maybe it’s a good thing that Batman can’t jump after all.

It’s not easy to boil down 72,000 words to a few sentences. In fact it’s impossible. But the truth is, that’s not what you’re actually trying to do.

The real heart of a good description is to hook in your audience by getting them hooked on the conflict of your story.  It’s about weaving together a compelling description that’s going to leave them asking enough questions that the only way they’re going to get the answers they’re looking for is by actually consuming the media that you’re summarizing.  That’s true whether you’re pitching or selling your project.

And that’s why I found this description for the movie Feed, somewhat amusing:

After uncovering a sexually charged Web site that features morbidly obese women being held captive and taunted with fattening food, Australian cop Richard travels to Ohio to investigate. Viewing the Aussie’s appearance as an opportunity for a fun game rather than a reason for him to go offline, the site’s sadistic webmaster lures Richard into a dangerous game that’s unappetizing, to say the least.

Does that really make you hungry for more?

So-called “Open World” games have improved a great deal since GTA3 first landed on the scene with a collective “Eureka!” from everyone who’ve played them. And they’ve been around long enough that we’re starting to generate sub-genres, from Bethesda RPG focused fantasy environments, to the criminal ridden dystopian super-cities of Crackdown. And the MMOs are beginning to borrow from that tradition, slowly offering more interactive treats than just things to see and monsters to kill.

But players like to do more than play. One of the first things they’ll do in any environment is throw themselves repeatedly against the walls of their entertaining prison like a fly smacking into a closed window. That isn’t actually mean it’s a bad thing. You’ve got to have rules, and rules mean edges. Sooner or later they’ll head the other way.

But once they do it’s important that there’s something fun to do besides breaking the world you’ve put them into. Gaming is about turning thoughts into action, and if you’re not keeping them busy with planned entertainments they’ll always find a way to overcome the limits of the system.

That may not be a problem in a single-player game, but it’s a red-alert crisis when your players break through the constraints of a multiplayer world. Any exploit, no matter how trivial can lead to a potential melt-down. Like a crack in the damn, the flow of water may seem trivial at first, but it’s the pressure behind it that can quickly lead to catastrophic failure.

One of my favorite examples of this was The Sims Online. Trading in the god-like powers they’d been given in the single-player version they instead were given a chance to become one of the burbling Sim creatures. It was a simple life of work and reward, as you ground your way up the ladder; day to day life, only not as good as the real thing. And pretty quickly the players figured out how to exploit the system.

The game provided power in numbers, the as people banded together into gangs, it revealed itself to be an ideal simulator for criminal activity. A mob moved in, calling itself the Shadow Government, and creating rackets and intimidating other players. A virtual sex industry soon sprang up as well. As shocking as these developments seemed to be, they’re actually pretty classic game activities. There’s a reason that GTA uses crime as its backstory, and it’s not just to piss off New England Senators.

In the end the problem isn’t what people were doing, it was that it was well outside the simple, wholesome intentions of the game. The players had jumped the walls because the fundamental gameplay wasn’t compelling enough to stop them from trying. So if you’re game is popular enough to attract a big crowd you need to be damn sure you give them something to keep them occupied. Otherwise they’ll make up their own games to play.

With Video Games it’s not as clear what our “talkies” moment is going to be. Certainly there are lots of issues with narrative, and as we solve them games are become less and less about pure goal getting, and more about uncovering story. But it seems to be social gaming, from World of Warcraft, to Rock Band, to games on MySpace and Facebook, that are moving games in a new direction. We’re leaving behind the lone player in his heavily simulated reality, and heading toward a world where we games are part of an ongoing, evolving social interaction with hundreds of even thousands of others. It’s a world where gamers aren’t just buying an experience, they’re getting into a relationship.

Two years ago Raph Koster predicted that single player games were coming to and end. At the time it seemed implausible, almost hard to understand. And the idea set off a minor firestorm of conversation across the internet. It was easy to dismiss his ideas at the time, but things have only accelerated since then, with multiplayer becoming the core experience on the PC, and co-op play being a part of almost every successful console release this years.

There’s a variety of reasons why that trend will continue to accelerate, but one clear effect of adding in a social relationship to your game, whether it’s with other players or the publisher, is that it turns all the “peer to peer” tools of piracy from negatives into positives. When it’s the relationship that the player is paying for, the more easily they can access the content the more money the publisher can make. And that seems like a win for everybody.