Jeff Grubb

Please write briefly about your impressions of guest speaker Jeff Grubb and the experiences he shared with you in class.
Jeff Grubb brought up an interesting point when he mentioned he star wars book story and made me think about the idea of fan ownership of worlds vs commercial ownership. Quite often people connect with a franchisee because they claim that it speaks to them and they feel they own something of it after a while.Such as, Star Wars was My favorite movie or growing up i felt a connection to the goonies or such. Once that franchisee is absorbed enough by the fan public the line between where the creator’s public wares and the fans such creations can tend to blur. When you have insanely complex or large franchisee having the owners’s world and the license sold world, in the case of the lucas properties grubb noted, seems like both a great idea and something that will bring conflict down the line.Have there been any really successful franchisees that make sure their property is kept within the creator’s vision and left unaltered by the general public? or is it that once something reaches a certain level of saturation within the public that it is just expected to be shaped outside the creator’s control and that to fight that would bring no resolve?

Scott McCloud on comics

Scott McCLoud’s take on comics, and the visual design of story telling brings up some interesting questions. In our story making session with Jordan I would be inclined to say that most of the students took the path of creating the left to right story telling inside boxes. There was some clear-cut way of establishing new frames in each rendering. I believe we did this not simply because of the media we had, our own paper, but because we have simply become accustom to this effective method of storytelling.
Types of narratives contained outside the frame I often think as experimental and still at some level are still contained within the frame.
Scott brings up the example of “pup ponder the heat death of the universe” An interesting comic that takes the form of a very long landscape , however when I find myself viewing it I’m not viewing it as one long comic I’m clicking on the horizontal bar to see a section at a time, just the same as I would if I was clicking the next button or flipping a page. Just simply because there is the possibility of viewing as a long scrolling narrative, doesn’t mean we are going to do so. Having comics on the internet and on our personal computers gives viewers the ability to view comics the way we please. He notes that it is drawn on an infinite canvas; well if you simply add more pages to the book how is that not extending the canvas?
His second never ending canvas strip, pocom worked more than just the horizontal plain and I can see where the interest in story telling can be. It was a unique take on different story paths and tangents that went off on their own way.
There seems to be an interest in new technology for comics as long as it doesn’t change what comic books are. He was upset with the motion comics of the 90’s cd-rom since it tried to make comics into animated novels. I would be quite interested to hear what his thoughts would be on motion comics that are now found on some DVD movies. While I have yet to see it I hear watchman created an animated comic movie along with the feature film, would this for him be just an extension of the failed 90s cd rom or a different way of inviting motion [ if it was just camera motion and not char motion] as a differing plane?

Run Lola Run

As a film student I find it quite hard to limit my discussion of Lola Rennt, English Run Lola Run, to just one aspect, so I’m going to try and limit the discourse down to just two aspects .The aspects of Lola Rennt I am going to focus on is the common game comparison aspect and Lola Rennt in a programmatic sense, i.e. films turning into programmable shells that could have new data put in to create a product.

Obviously Lola Rennt is unique in that one event is being reviewed three times over until it finishes. Though it is far from being the first to do such. Even going back to films decades ago Rashomon the iconic 1950’s film by Akira Kurosawa to the Usual Suspects to the dreadful groundhog day this altered time state has happened.

Lola Rennt is a program running waiting for a series of values to be met before it can be complete. First off the world and values are created. The Ints being Lola, Manni, father, Ronnie ect. A program goal is established, by noon 100,000 marks must be in the hand of Manni or else it is assumed the program will fail. Also if any of the Ints equal zero, i.e die, the program will fail. In that case you will be given the blue screen of death, in the movie being the red screen of death, and you have to start over.

Once the global rules have been set the program is run until the program meets a successful conclusion. The early runs, run1 and run2 are both failures and cause the program to restart , kill screen, and go to the initial starting point.

In each of these runs, or a single loop there are the same events , but because there is minor different input from the core int, Lola, there are slight different reactions.

Lola meets the woman pushing a baby each run a slightly different way giving her end resulting end value is different each time. The interaction with the car pulling out of the alleyway, the nuns, the man on the bike to name a few.

The idea of the movie as a program also gives way to the idea of how other multimedia also falls into this fashion. Just as in Lola Rennt same events are alerted causing new futures, couldn’t the same be said of formulaic TV shows? Are shows just the same structure being played over and over again? Or is that simply a part of being a TV show, the required arc structure and desire to have a finite conclusion makes TV shows prone to such limitations.

There is often the comparison that Lola Rennt is like a video game. But the enviable this is no a pipe comparison can be made. Lola Rennt is not a video game, it is a visual interpretation of what multiple runs in a video game may look like. Overlooking the pipe drawing ideology, the movie does contain many video game like restrictions both success and failures, something that is quite needed for a game to work. If a game offers no [ theoretical ] possibility of someone either winning or losing can it really be thought of as a realistic videogame , i.e. Simcity the movie would be a nightmare, a Michael bay hell that simply would never ever end.

Each run of the game the setting, or stages are the same with slightly different object placement. Only if certain paths are taken, will other future events be available. Because Lola missed the inside of the bank on the 3rd run she was lead to the casino. Only because Lola got a gun in the second run was she able to go to an exclusive part of the bank she was unable to go into from the first run. A very similar train of thought also found in the programmatic approach

There was also the idea of a static moving neutral object, the bus. Almost as something you would find a Mario world. You can use it to help you move from point A to B, but if your standing in the wrong spot it will simply push you away. That while it has no positive of negative standing, it is an object that can cause both good and harm and if you use it or not, it’s still going to happen.

Lola Rennt has a time limit just as many games do, get the money to the location by noon or you lose and can’t win the game.

Also nifty video install using lola rennt as the source media:

Run Lola Run Lola Run Lola Run Lola Run from shiffman on Vimeo.

“Run Lola Run” Demo on the IAC Video Wall

The Dice Video

The single message I extracted from the DICE video was that there appears to be an interest to try and merge different aspects of our life into one single stream. Schell believes that one of these aspects that needs to be merged into of our lives, games, should be mixed into our everyday actions. Though while Schell tries to make games out of everything on our daily lives, the real thing he was simply doing is just rewarding us for normal actions. While there may be some debate on what is a game, most of the examples brought forth in my mind were lackluster. Is brushing our teeth every morning a game? Eating the same cereal every day a game? These all are games just as washing the floor is a 3rd person interactive sponge guiding adventure. While I see what he is trying to get it, the moniker of game is misleading. The shifting of our lives into games for him is done so simply for the purpose of getting rewards. While it sounds more interesting to label it as a game, it is simply daily tasks , now with rewards. He is calling it a game simply for there is a measurable way to keep score [ points] and a possibility of rewards. The prizes, a discount on a product or maybe a a free product, seems more like a marketing ploy to get people to use their products. What about tasks such as walking your dog? Or tasks that don’t involve companies or sponsorship? Could the state deal with something like rewards for library usage?- Minor side note, I do know of the kids reward program years and years ago that got kids free bookmarks for reading a certain number of books, but something for adults. I felt distanced by the speech , for me Schell evoking certain tasks as games gives the impression of a CEO saying buying our products is like a game, you win if you buy everyone and get double points if you buy then twice.

Some of these ideas reflect the mentality of a parental relationship just with technology. As a kid i would be given a reward for doing such tasks as chores or extra cleaning, something small. Of course as i got older this type of reward system was taken away. The idea was that some action was good in itself, not just simply for the reward. These types of systems make me think about the debate about paying kids for good grades, at what point is the reward removed that people will want to be good, get good grades or follow on positive actions. We should be leaning toward the action in-itself is good not the ending result. People love the idea of getting these points, because the points are somehow tangible in some sense, but they will cause a withdraw for non point related good actions .

At the same time , while I don’t find this level of positive reenforcement interaction that thrilling I have many friends that have gotten interested in this type of interaction. The iPhone has, had?, a program that allowed you to check into various restaurants and by doing so give virtual points to a charity and has a score board as well for the people doing the best. A few of my friends have got in races against each other to try and outscore others, all at the same time they are doing something for good.

Also Schell popped up on CNN yesterday

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/05/games.schell/index.html

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