Its Whedon's Universe, we just geek out in it....

Gobble gobble. Its Wednesday, November 24, 2010, tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and this is The Side.

So what am I thankful for?

I'm thankful to be working steadily. I'm thankful to have a roof over my head and food in my family's bellies. I'm thankful for my family and friends. I'm thankful to all my followers on here. There's ten times more of you now than last year. Some of you are still strangers to me, others are friends, a few of you I see as family, and you know who you are.

So to everyone, enjoy the holiday with your loved ones, and travel safe.

SCIENCE!!

So, I'm thinking about the origin of the Universe, and how it relates to Batman, which typically would be insane, but this times its not (HA!) because Greg Rucka was the one who posted the link.



A universe that existed before our own? Nonsense, you say? PIFFLE! Because we all know Galactus survived the Big Bang so something had to be there, right? And let's not even start on the thingie with CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, or ZERO HOUR since as it stands a fairly mundane superhero caused the Big Band. Sorry to all the Damage fans out there. All eight of you.

Seriously, a lot of the comics I've read put forth a lot of fun stuff about time. Recently Batman was at the end of time in which the last outpost was being destroyed by the heat death of the universe. The Flash once outran death by running forward in time and looping back to the beginning of time and finally making it back to the present. The big bang has also been shown in comics to have an opposite number "The Big Crunch", which I'm fairly certain Wolverine has survived.

Here's the theory, the Big Bang happened and the universe has been expanding since. But at some point, that expansion will stop and everything will begin to be drawn back into a single point, at which time things will get very crowded. There's also a thought that this cycle is like a loop so on some insane-o cosmic time table this could all have happened before and will happen again.

But that's how the universe is, and that's why I love it so. There's always stuff blowing up, or something getting sucked into something. And there's the weird crap that no one's quite sure what the hell is going on with. And we find thing out there, that might contain or be suitable for sustaining life. Then there's our gas giant planets with cool rings and spots running interference for us with their insane gravity wells to prevent space crap from smashing into us more than it does.

Oh, and Pluto might be a planet again, which is awesome because it'll always be a planet to me. I love Pluto.

And sometimes I worry that in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy there is a mother of a black hole sucking everything in and we're circling the drain at an insane speed, but its all so big that we don't notice it. I don't know why I worry about that.

But I do think its cool, because its reality. Reality is everything that exists in space and the events that occur in time. While reality TV mostly sucks, reality itself can be pretty damned epic.

It also makes for excellent fodder for writing comics.

YOUTUBERY!!

Chad, Matt, and Rob have been at it again. Go have some fun, but remember, its not shampoo, it's fuel.

BIZARRO BUFFY!!

As I discussed before, there is a new BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER MOVIE in the works, and it has nothing to do with Joss Whedon who created the character. This came as upseting news to many long time fans. But what does Whedon himself really think? Well, someone asked him, and he answered. So for those wailing and gnashing their teeth about the matter, take a cue from your Lord and Master, Whedon: just laugh at it. It's not the first time Hollywood has sought to cash in on something with an existing fanbase and screwed the pooch. That's why there's a pretty cool looking Kung-Fu movie out now on DVD called "THE KARATE KID".

Still, our sympathy goes out to Joss, that poor guy, as he deals with what's being done with his creation while still soldiering on to work on THE AVENGERS movie. Hopefully that movie will be enough to keep a little food on his table. Its hard being a struggling writer in these tough economic times.

MUSIC!!

Because Thanksgiving is all about family, being thankful, eating turkey and an old hippie with a guitar.




OK, that's it. I'm getting in my car and heading to the mountain in about an hour or so. You have the weekend off from my insanity, but I expect you all back here next Wednesday sharpish. See ya, then.

"This is MY story": The next generation of interactive storytelling.

I always wondered about my place in the story. A lot of people do that. They see themselves in different characters. I suppose there's a lot of boys who have imagined themselves as Luke Skywalker or Han Solo. Then there's people who put themselves in the story. They create their own character based on themselves and imagine how the story would change around them. There's a lot of fanfiction based on this. Seems quite a few kids imagined themselves being the newest member of the X-Men or another team like that.

Along came Choose Your Own Adventure with a series of books in which readers took control of the story. They were geared towards younger readers and written in the little used second person tense. Readers were prompted to pick between multiple decisions, some of which continued the narrative. Some brought the story to a rather abrupt and often unpleasant end. There were also multiple positive endings and ways of reaching them. This line of books spawned others in what would become known as "game books". My brother and I were very found of the ones featuring G.I.Joe in which you became the newest member of the team. I also found an old copy on "Wizards, Warriors and You" on my bookshelf written by none other than R.L. Stine before his days writing GOOSEBUMPS.

It's pretty easy to navigate your way through interactive media when its in print. You can see right there on the page where to go next and respond appropriately. As such this sort of storytelling stayed in print until technology could catch up with it. It did in the form of video games.

Over the years video games have become a legitimate story-telling medium. Telling a story in video game is inherently interactive. The player has to advance the narrative. Early on it wasn't much of a story.

Example.
Monkey has taken girl. Must rescue girl. Oh crap, he's throwing barrels at me.

This is mainly due to the limitations of the hardware and the software of the day. As these improved, so did the story.

Example.
Giant lizard thing kidnaps Princess in a mythical kingdom. I'm a plumber that can jump really high. Whoa! Mushrooms and plants give me super powers! I'm going to get past monsters and save the princess!

And it went on from there, but eventually something new arose: the alternate ending. This started popping up in games here and there. In the early days of video games there was no "beating" the game. You played until the space aliens got you, your cities were all destroyed by the missiles or that big monkey finally took you out with the barrels. Then, along the time of the coming of Nintendo, video games had their Final Crisis in which the people creating these games had to ponder, how are we going to end this thing? Yes there were games that had endings before then, most notably the arcade classic Dragon's Lair and Space Ace, however these were the exception. Nintendo brought the platform game to a whole new level and like any platform game you needed a story.

Everything you did in these games advanced your character towards an ending, but later which ending you got would become the question. Konami gets my attention here with their Castlevania series. This series of games was personal favorite of mine, and really did interesting things with it's storylines. The third installment offered a set of partner characters and different routes to take through the game, thus changing the narrative and the ending. The pinnacle of the series was it's debut on Playstation: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. For a long time I thought I had that game all figured out and had beaten it multiple times. I later realized that wasn't even halfway through the game yet.

This brings us to alternate narratives within games. Games like the GRAND THEFT AUTO series allow players to roam the virtual world doing all sorts of things and but the main story is pretty straight forward and the main missions drive the main narrative. FINAL FANTASY VII had extra character you could acquire and even had a scene in which the main character met up with another for a date if his previous interaction with her had been nice. If not, them the date did not happen. Players were used to controlling their characters on the screen but now they were starting to control the story.

HEAVY RAIN is looking to expand on this. While this game does have it's faults, it certainly is innovative. The story changes depending upon the players actions and decisions. I'm not sure if previous gaming systems could handle something like this. Voice acting has to be done for multiple different reactions. Scenes have to be done and redone in case certain characters aren't there or have done things to make people react differently to them. It's really a hell of an undertaking. I talked with a Gamestop employee and he said that the game is selling very well. Its a pretty hot item. I haven't played it due to a lack of Playstation 3 which won't be changing any time soon, but now I'm wanting one. With the amount of content that can be but on those game dicks HEAVY RAIN will likely only be the start of a new wave of interactive narratives in video games.

Video games aren't the only medium making strides in interactive storytelling. With the coming of DVDs movies makers had a lot more options on the table. Interactive movies haven't made much of a splash beyond a few POV porn videos. However, then comes the internet and YouTube specifically. YouTube has opened the door for many movie makers and now they've got the potential to make interactive media available right on your computer. At the forefront of interactive narratives on Youtube is CHAD, MATT AND ROB who have put up multiple interactive stories. I e-mailed Rob Polonski about these endeavors, and I'll be damned, he actually e-mailed me back!

MN: Did any of you read the old "Chose Your Own Adventure" books, and if you did, how much of an influence were they?

RP: I'm sure we've all, at some point, gotten our hands on one of those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. Something about them felt so magical, almost as an illusion that made the story so big and endless. It was always fun going back to see what happened if you chose differently.

We're all about telling a great story and creating likable and fun characters. Using the tools that YouTube provided -- we realized we could do a "Choose Your Own" type story. We wanted to recreate the experience you'd get from the books, but more importantly, make it our own. That's when we came up with the name "Interactive Adventure" .

MN: Are you considering doing anything like a DVD release or are current plans to remain as an online presence?

RP: We're currently developing our Interactive Adventures to bring to television. We've been using the web as a way to showcase our content. Our primary goal is to crossover into more traditional media such as TV and Film while we maintain a strong presence on the web. We've written a pilot, developed a couple Interactive TV concepts and are working on a feature.

MN: Are there plans for a storyline with multiple positive endings and/or multiple "routes" to achieve a positive ending?

RP: We've tried that in "The Murder" where there we're three separate story lines and over 30 different videos, but the reaction from the audience wasn't as good as with a much shorter adventure. We've learned to keep the adventures simple and focus on creating a great story.


MN: I saw that you guys go featured on YouTube. Congrats! How much of a traffic bump did that get you?

RP: Thanks so much! Every time you have an opportunity like that, to be front and center on YouTube's homepage, your views, subscribers, etc. get a nice bump up. But viewership & numbers is not, or never will be our focus. It's all about and always will be about creating the best content possible.


MN: Right now your adventures are fairly short in length. Is there anything in works that's of a larger scale where the story would be feature length or comparable?

Yes! We've written a bunch of Adventures and we're developing an Interactive TV series. There's just so much potential, it's super exciting!

I would have asked him about the creative process of making one of these adventures, but they already handled that.


So where is this going? Well, pretty much the sky's the limit. Blu-rays are pretty ridiculous, but they hold an obscene amount of content. I expect to see more games like HEAVY RAIN. I also expect more interactive adventures to come up from various sources on YouTube and other nu-media, although I expect Chad, Matt and Rob to stay ahead of the curve for quite a while.

Eyes open, people. There's stories out there and people are willing to give them to you so can make them yours. Turbines to speed. There's narratives to drive.