Hypercompendia

Excellent post from Tale of Tales on the history, the rise and fall, the pros and cons, of producing a “new” style of video game not for the gamer perhaps as much as to reach and appeal to the non-gamer audience.

I found it interesting for many reasons but basically two: 1) a high degree of interest in the game once I saw the trailer and the exquisite graphics and work that went into this, and 2) I’m facing the same dilemma in literary hypertext. Shall I continue to bother “breaking into” the reading audience that chooses romance, sci-fi, or whatever’s trendy and appeal to their interests which I’ll try to appease, or do I write for the experienced hypertext reader, i.e., the academic, the new media or contemporary literature professors, or the coding folk.

This also caught my eye within the article:

But all the modelers we tested just couldn’t get the style right. To create stylized characters for a horror game that are not cartoony but still attractive, is apparently a skill not taught in 3D academies. Part of the reason probably was that we only got male candidates. Our experience with finding our wonderful animator Laura Raines Smith had taught us that it takes a woman to animate girls properly. Maybe it takes a woman to model girls as well. We don’t blame the men. We blame the fact that more women don’t choose 3D modeling as a career!

Ah, but there for the span of thirty years, would I be.

Found on Dark Roasted Blend, the Great Sperm Race: The Most Extreme Race on Earth which has a lot of the screen shots of the forthcoming National Geographic program which will be aired tomorrow, Sunday, March 14th at 9 p.m.

This looks like an amazingly different take on the topic of reproduction, judging from the photos, but it is put out in an interesting and imaginative manner. The images reminded me somewhat of an old Woody Allen movie that had a particularly hysterical scene wherein Allen and others, all dressed as sperm cells, were arguing over the ejaculation and journey to the womb.

To bring back some of the fun–check out the game on the National Geographic site; I almost knocked over my laptop when I bonked my sperm into the vaginal wall. Then, when I got my laughter back into a reasonable semblance of gameplay and moved on, I killed it with oozy acid. Too funny.

Every now and then Chris Crawford’s Storytron comes back to mind and it’s what I thought of this morning when I ran into this note on my newsfeed on a game called “Spirited Heart.”

Spirited Heart is a fantasy life sim game. You’ll be able to create your alter ego choosing from 3 races: Human, Elf and Demon. Each race has different starting attributes, and unique dialogues and events, so if you play with a different race you’ll see different in-game situations.

You can see where I mentally linked the this with Storytron, in the mention of “Each race has different starting attributes” so that events will play out according to certain predetermined conditions that need to align. I’m sure this is nowhere near as calculated and intricate as Crawford’s work which he and his team have put years of effort and intelligence into.

Time perhaps for me to revisit Storytron and other exciting ventures such as Facade that are at the forefront of new discoveries in gaming and new media.