Archive for the 'narrative' Category
August 23rd, 2010 by Mary Hamilton
I’m off to Greenbelt Festival at the weekend, and this year I’m on the team creating a print newspaper for the festival.
I blogged last year (when I was just starting out here) about the newspaper they gave out at the festival – a 16-page freesheet called While We Were Here, made possible only at the last minute with sponsorship from Hewlett Packard. It used content that was already online, sourcing images from Flickr and text from blog posts, in a neat reversal of the print-first view you (still, sadly) often see in traditional newsrooms, and it was available for download for free online as well as handed out on-site. It was – is – a wonderful souvenir of the festival, as well as being an excellent way to convey the intangible experiences of the festival. Because it was created by people right in the thick of things, writing from-the-heart blog posts/I-pieces and not carefully detached articles of traditional journalism, it does a much better job of conveying the atmosphere of the weekend than any events listing or simple description could.
Since reading and enjoying While We Were Here last year, I’ve had some experience creating newspapers from scratch on my own. I made a miniature four-page newspaper as part of a performance/installation/community experiment called Home Sweet Home by theatre company Subject to Change, consisting of a tiny cardboard suburb where people from Norwich built their own mini houses, flats and businesses, using the community billboard, radio station and postman to create stories. I built a tiny Evening News newspaper office complete with tiny clay journalists and mini bundles of newspapers, and I ran a breaking news service (on a billboard made of card and matchsticks) for three days.
The paper itself was a four-hour job in InDesign using the Evening News print templates and masthead to create something faithful to the design of the paper I was representing. The stories were a more complicated proposition. Some folks volunteered bizarre tales and information themselves in letters; others created things I found fascinating, so I wrote letters asking for more information. Many stories came from the community noticeboard, which became an outlet for frustrations and campaigns as well as plenty of advertising. It was important to create a souvenir, something tangible people could take away, and to give people who hadn’t been there a flavour of the absurdity of the event – and part of that was treating very silly stories with the seriousness I would if they were real. The skills you need to gather stories in tiny cardboard towns are, it seems, the same as you need in big concrete cities – sharp eyes, a willingness and ability to engage and converse, the ability to go where people are talking and listen to what they say.
That experiment taught me a great deal about what’s important in newsgathering. I hope the weekend’s antics will teach me something new about storytelling. Greenbelt is an entirely different proposition to Home Sweet Home – many thousands more people and much less clear avenues for newsgathering, for a start, plus the fact that the newspaper is likely to be focussed once again on individual and collective experience rather than hard news. (Though if Peter Tatchell’s talk gets really controversial, that could conceivably change.) Although I haven’t yet had a detailed brief from project leader James Stewart – and I’m not expecting one till I get there – I suspect the paper this year will once again function primarily as a record of the experience of being there – and that means a different set of challenges to what I do every day. I’m looking forward to helping to make it happen.
July 26th, 2010 by Mary Hamilton
In 1985 American literary critic Jane Tompkins published a book, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction. It was an attempt to attract critical attention to novels – often bestsellers – that had been traditionally ignored or even panned by the canon-makers who dominated literary criticism. It represented an opening up of “low” art to “high” critical modes. Among other books, it looks at Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin not just as a sentimental novel but as a persuasive political text that swayed the hearts and minds of Americans everywhere. It credits it with an important role in the Civil War – that of getting the word out and making it cool to be anti-slavery.
Tompkins talks about bestselling fiction as cultures speaking to themselves. Harry Potter and Twilight and Dan Brown’s works aren’t just bestsellers because they have a good story or they’re wonderfully written – if anything, they suceed despite that. What those books all do is take a central cultural dilemma and work it out in a safe, controllable way, helping to assuage the fears and worries of millions of readers and allowing them to reimagine the world with those conflicts resolved.*
Journalists are just as much a product of the cultures we write in and about, no matter how much we’d like to pretend otherwise sometimes. Perhaps the only exception is Wikileaks, because it’s outside national cultures; even so, its journalism work is subject to the same forces and influences as the rest of us.
Yesterday Wikileaks published, simultaneously with the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel, 92,000 logs from the war in Afghanistan that show the conflict at its most naked and basic. There are too many of the documents for the picture to be clear at this stage – there’s still a lot of work to be done – but the three news organisations have already done a great deal of work towards stitching coherent narratives together to make stories for easy consumption.
But the story resists consumption. There is no easy line through the logs that builds a narrative anyone can agree with; the documents are sticky and difficult and present problems that are simply insurmountable. As Wikileaks fouder Julian Assange said today:
The real story is that it is war, it’s one damned thing after another. It’s the continuous small events, the continuous deaths of children, insurgents, allied forces (…) This is the story of the war since 2004 and like most of the accidents that occur in the world, they are as a result of cars not buses, most of the deaths in this war are the event of the everyday squalor of war, not the big incidents.
But that’s not a comfortable story that gets us to sleep at night. It’s not our brave boys or the illegal war or Private Jessica Lynch, whichever version of the story you read. The good guys aren’t so great and the bad guys aren’t easily identifiable and everything is blurred right down to the level of individual decisions that might or might not be right, on the ground, in that time and place. That’s not a story that assuages any fears or resolves any conflicts neatly or easily.
And for that reason, I agree with @jayrosen_nyu. He says:
I’ve been trying to write about this observation for a while, but haven’t found the means to express it. So I am just going to state it, in what I admit is speculative form. Here’s what I said on Twitter Sunday: “We tend to think: big revelations mean big reactions. But if the story is too big and crashes too many illusions, the exact opposite occurs.” My fear is that this will happen with the Afghanistan logs. Reaction will be unbearably lighter than we have a right to expect— not because the story isn’t sensational or troubling enough, but because it’s too troubling, a mess we cannot fix and therefore prefer to forget.
Journalism, like literature, is a culture speaking to itself, defining itself, creating and reinventing itself. Whether fiction or non-fiction, a good story has to be in the right place at the right time in order to make real change within a culture. Yesterday’s Afghanistan log disclosures aren’t safe, or pretty, or easily understood. They don’t tell a story that anyone can nod along to. They don’t lend themselves to easy summation or even a coherent narrative. They remind us that the situation is far more complicated than we normally imagine. And I don’t think that’s a story we want to tell ourselves right now.
* Because those are all relatively recent works, it’s hard to pinpoint precisely which conflicts they’re resolving and how. If I had to: Harry Potter is dealing with anti-technology backlash, fear of rapid change, desire for an underlying order in a world without metanarratives, and the fact that the good and the bad guys all look the same these days; Dan Brown is dealing with surveillance and secrecy fears as well as the terror of the destruction of metanarratives and the worry that there might actually be no underlying purpose for anything; and Twilight is tackling changing and confusing rules and mores in male and female sexuality and transposing them into a “safe” traditional narrative where everyone knows the rules. But it’ll take a good few years yet before the picture is as crystal clear as, say, the way Peyton Place’s popularity came from how it dealt with fears and growing understanding of human sexuality in the wake of the Kinsey Report.
July 22nd, 2010 by Mary Hamilton
This post is long, overdue, and wordy, and some of it was written while I had a fever. So I present as a pre-emptive antidote a very enjoyable and quite silly browser game about information overload.
Continue reading ‘The aesthetics of hyperlinking’
June 29th, 2010 by Mary Hamilton
It’s a little quiet round these parts at the moment, thanks to a couple of work projects, a couple of extracurricular projects and these pesky impending exams.
So here’s a quick look at a few things I’m working on. A more regular blogging schedule will resume after Friday’s NCEs.
While I’m at work:
City of Culture
Since March, I’ve been planning, organising and running the Evening News campaign to make Norwich the first UK city of culture in 2013. (Do you know how much cumulative time, energy and repetitive copy it would save if I could hyperlink like that on my paper’s website? Anyway.) I’ve written or at least planned a page lead at minimum most days since the campaign began, jumping to more than 2,000 words a day during the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. Now we’re in the final push – the decision’s expected sometime in early to mid July, but we don’t know when. My job at the moment is to make sure we’re ready, whatever the decision, whenever it comes. Including if it comes on exam day.
Lord Mayor’s Celebrations
Every year since 1976 Norwich city council has held a celebratory weekend with a procession of floats. (The history of the parade goes back to the middle ages or further.) This year, the Evening News is printing 10,000 souvenir issues for the parade on July 10, with an 8-page supplement wraparound, as well as a lead a day in the week before the parade and the now-traditional 8-page picture-led supplement for the following Monday’s paper. I’m planning and writing most of the coverage for both, as well as shooting video and, bizarrely for me, sitting on the float judging panel.
Both of these are on top of the day-to-day general reporting life, tackling calls, early and late shifts, magistrates and crown courts, council committees and meetings, and other diary and patch jobs.
Oh, and revision. I forgot about the revision.
Extracurricular activities:
Six Months In Scents
I’ve just begun a blogging project I’ve planned for a while, challenging myself to write reflectively every day. I’m using my weirdly large perfume collection as a lens for a daily blog on scent, memory and the evocative links between them. Or I’m just writing an extended essay about the experience of community and collectivity around perfume that wouldn’t be possible without the Internet. Or I’m wearing a different scent every day for six months and waffling about how it makes me feel. It’s an experiment.
Live-action Pokemon Red game crossed with pub crawl
This needs no explanation. Well, actually, it needs a lot of explanation, and I’ll blog about it properly once we’ve considered the results from Saturday’s playtest.
Serious Business
My partner and I are going through the tricky business of writing up a business plan to turn Zombie from a not-for-profit hobby into a potentially profitable business. At times it’s mindtwistingly complicated but slowly it’s taking shape as a project that might turn a profit in a couple of years’ time.
On this blog:
I’m about 2/3 of the way through writing an enormous thinkypost about the aesthetics and grammar of hyperlinking in the wake of the Nick Carr affair. There are posts in the pipeline about Kingdom of Loathing‘s community, economy and monetisation, personalising journalism rather than customising experience, and a few other ideas that have caught my imagination.
But for now I think it’s fair to say it’ll be a little quiet around here till I’m the other side of the exams – even if it’s not so quiet anywhere else.
June 10th, 2010 by Mary Hamilton
Spinning off a tweet by @jayrosen_nyu, I’ve been thinking about levels in gaming and what journalists could learn from them.
For the record, I don’t think that levels in the sense of levelling up are a particularly useful way of classifying news readers or users or players or whatever paradigm we choose to use today.
For many video gamers level grinding removes the fun from a game and turns it into work. In tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons unequal leveling within a group can cause such huge balance problems that small disparities between characters can prove insurmountable. And in both, leveling is an illusion – while the character’s powers and abilities increase and improve, so do the challenges they have to overcome. Much of the time leveling is simply a numerical way of forcing characters to go and explore before they can advance the plot.
Essentially, I’m not sure what useful lessons we can learn from leveling per se, apart from the lesson that it’s hard work and tends to encourage grinding as a form of competition – not meaningful engagement with content.
That’s not to say that every leveling system is evil, you understand. It’s just that these days there is a wide range of advancement systems to pick from – points-based cash-in or free-form systems, for instance, or activity-based systems, or good old achievements – and if we’re going to talk about user advancement systems we should talk about all of them and work out which ones are relevant for what we’re trying to do here.
But level design is a different matter.
Level design is about balancing technology and art. It’s about pulling together huge swathes of pretty content (pictures, video, audio, in this analogy) and making a coherent, structured narrative which makes it clear which way players are meant to go while giving them room to explore if they want to – and doing that within the confines of the tecnology available. That’s not a bad model for news online.
There’s a quote from this article that’s worth teasing out:
A level designer is not just an architecture monkey or a guy who throws “cool stuff” into the pot of development. Above and beyond everything else they need the ability to judge what is fun, what gameplay elements work and what do not. He needs to judge what content works in any context while making sure his work is cohesive with the rest of the game.
If you accept that the “game” is what we’re calling the “story” (or, more precisely, the “topic”) at the moment, then level design theories about pacing, controlled freedom, risk and reward start to become relevant to engaging the reader/user/player in what we’re trying to get across.
What do you think? Am I in a theoretical hole with no practical applications, or is there an analogy here that online and multimedia journalists could find useful?
June 9th, 2010 by Mary Hamilton
Alison Gow recently wrote an excellent post suggesting that newsrooms should get rid of the dummy – the page plan that tells print new teams what space we need to fill in the paper and where.
She said:
Everywhere I’ve worked it’s been called something different – The Book, The Plan, The Dummy, the Flatplan – but recently I’ve started wondering if it should be called The Box, because we think inside it.
… the HOW of filling a newspaper can become more absorbing and demanding than the WHAT …
…I would love to hear the phrase ‘How many words do you want?’ replaced with ‘How do you want this told?’ Is that happening on any editorial floors in the UK’s regional press yet? I’d love to know – because that really would be a converged newsroom.
I’d love to know too. As a general print journalist without an official specialism – and as a trainee, too – I’m not yet at the stage where the demands of the dummy consume my day as much as they do the content editors who have to fill its hungry boxes.
But the demands are becoming more apparent. We’re in the process of switching from a Microsoft Word-based CMS to Atex, built around InCopy and InDesign – and designed to allow reporters to write directly onto the page.
In effect, that means many stories have to be written to an exact length. Things weren’t particularly flexible for us before – we were writing to imaginary boxes 30cm or 8cm or sometimes 450 words long – but we could tweak our stories if we discovered they were “worth less” than we thought. That’s still going to be possible, but not as easy. Instead of writing the story to whatever length reporters felt was best and letting subs pick the right story lengths to fill the page, we’re now starting to see a situation where we have to work out how long our story will be before we begin to write it and set pen to paper.
It’s a different way of working and it may well suit some journalists better than it does me. But for me, the psychological impact of writing a story into a box is that I find myself stretching stories to fit, squeezing an extra quote or two in or lopping off a few facts.
And I have to change that. If stories are too long or too short then they’re in the wrong box, and I have to move them to fit. But that process has illuminated for me the problems of writing for boxes in the first place, especially for the web. If we write the boxed-in print version first, the web version will never flow the way it could given the unlimited space we have there to play in.
Allen Ginsberg once said – though I can’t find a cite online for it, I’m informed by a university tutor – that the length of a line of poetry can be constrained by the paper you write on. (Another beat poet, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, wrote him a letter on a length of toilet paper afterwards.) His argument was that the words should fit the breath instead.
Boxes constrain and limit us, and force unnatural shapes onto the writing process. No matter how many journalists, editors and newsrooms begin to break away from the dummy and start asking how we can tell stories instead of what shape they should be, if the technology we use keeps dragging us back there, journalists will still be writing 30cm page leads first and thinking about everything else – including innovating for the web – as secondary.
May 21st, 2010 by Mary Hamilton
There’s a cake shop next door, a giant hamster over the road and soldiers are fighting zombies on the roof. MARY HAMILTON welcomes you to the new-look Evening News.
Breaking news: the postman has delivered a letter.
That’s how most of the news comes in to the Home Sweet Home offices of the Evening News. It’s delivered by a tall man in short trousers, a flat cap and socks, who leaves the envelopes leaning up against the front canopy of the 20cm cardboard building.
I built the office myself, from flat-pack cutout to fully-fledged busy office building complete with newspaper bundles and Plasticene journalists, sharing glue, card and colouring pens with neighbours and strangers.
I even recreated Bernard Meadows’ eyecatching bronze ball sculptures, carefully rolling and squeezing yellow moulding clay and poking it gingerly with a pencil, before giving the rest of my clay to an excited six-year-old who wanted to make bees for her garden.
It is part of a performance – or perhaps an exhibition – called Home Sweet Home, the brainchild of Goldsmiths graduates Abigail Conway and Lucy Hayhoe, in which participants build their own city from flat-pack parts and then experience its evolution as it fills with people playing along.
Watching the tiny town sprout from a black and white canvas into a riot of colour in the extravagant surroundings of Blackfriars Hall was both surreal and sublime, as bizarre buildings and peculiar personalities developed thanks to the imagination of neighbours.
But when the letters began to arrive the town took on a new and magical dimension, with stories, greetings, and feats of collective imagination all emerging thanks to the postal service and the presenters at the radio station.
My letter reads: “Dear Editor, An escaped swan ate my shoes! Please put it in your newspaper! Yours, Joz Norris, No. 188”.
Immediately I spring into action. I post a breaking news update on the billboard outside the office – crafted from matchsticks, card and successive layers of paper posters – and dash off a return letter asking for more detail about the attack.
Over time, petitions spring up on the community notice board. A campaign to build a public swimming pool gathers pace. Disgruntled residents try to force an election. A little girl who runs a flower shop donates a sponge-and-cocktail-stick floral display to my office.
A small zombie outbreak spreads and threatens other city properties, so the Evening News drafts in a local militia to fight them off. Other businesses welcome the zombies, selling them vintage clothes and inviting them in to a night club.
And I get another letter from Joz saying that he’s bought another pair of Doc Martens but he doesn’t think he’ll be able to look a swan in the eye ever again.
The whole experience is a testament to the power of play. Adults and children alike tap into the storytelling possibilities of the town, expressing their personalities through their houses and opening them up as the community evolves around them.
While some people come along, build houses and leave, those who stay build stories around their houses, and the whole community evolves and changes as the project progresses.
A giant hamster in the back garden of one house is asked to join the Spiegeltent as a performer. A few hours later he has moved to the circus with signs advertising his upcoming performances.
I spend the weekend doing what journalists do: asking questions, writing down stories, monitoring the notice board and answering letters, preparing for a burst of activity on Sunday night as I put the Home Sweet Home edition of the Evening News together.
The following day, when I return to Blackfriars Hall with a stack of miniature newspapers under my arm, the Spiegeltent has disappeared, replaced by a giant hamster run with tunnels, hoops and a swimming pool.
I arrive at the office to discover someone has stuck a giant red ball to my door, in imitation of the large inflatable ball currently touring Norwich as part of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. They are planted on the church, the fire station and the city hall, too.
For a short time this miniature cardboard community has been incredibly real. It has had action, politics, feuds, joy, fear and anger, and the people who created it have told hundreds of tiny stories that were, for a while, incredibly important, as they literally changed the way their city was constructed.
As the houses were dismantled and returned to their owners, I felt deeply privileged to have been present at the birth and the death of Norwich’s smallest suburb, and to have been able to tell just a few of the stories the residents created.
A version of this article and its accompanying miniature newspaper
were originally published in the Evening News
(www.eveningnews24.co.uk).
Posted via email from InterMediaMary
April 26th, 2010 by Mary Hamilton
For those who don't know, on Saturday I and a team of others ran the seventh Zombie LARP game. We're hoping the next major event will be a big leap up in size, in ambition and in attendance. But before that happens I want to note down a few of our important principles – and important problems we need to solve.
What on earth is Zombie?
First, though, an explanation. Zombie is a live-action simulation game where people take it in turns to try to survive in an industrial complex overrun by the living dead. We run several scenarios over the course of the game, with a different group of people “surviving” in each one. When players aren't trying to get out alive, they're pretending to be zombies so that someone else can have a turn.
The game is a sort-of bastard child of traditional
live-action roleplay (LARP) systems, fast-paced video games like
Left for Dead, and the kinds of cowboys and Indians/summer water pistol games you played when you were a kid. The combat resolution system is based on Nerf guns (players shoot zombies) and a low-contact mechanic (zombies touch players on upper arms to represent biting, mauling etc.)
If you've read this and you still have no idea what we do, please leave a comment to tell me. I'm trying to improve my ability to explain the game to people who have never played a LARP or a video game before, so the experience would be useful.
How are we telling stories in Zombie?
Video games almost always have plot. Sometimes that plot is
stretched over 50 or more insanely complex hours; sometimes it's
over in minutes so you can get on with killing things. Sometimes the storytelling is so
deeply entrenched in the game that it's inseperable from it; sometimes it's abstracted from it so that the
gameplay and the overarcing story are essentially separate entities. And sometimes the plot is about football.
Almost all LARPs are plot oriented. Some big games have top-down storytelling systems where world-changing events are affected by the big players in the game, while others have grass-roots player-oriented plot systems that allow even the most minor player characters to affect the universe.
In Zombie, plot takes a back seat to gameplay. Players might have twenty minutes at most to survive, and most of them won't. That time seems a lot longer than it really is thanks to the game pacing and the adrenalin (much like the experience of riding a rollercoaster) but long-term character development is not an option, and neither is sticking around to watch the game world evolve. Zombie does have a wider plot system and the players can and do affect what happens, but when you're running screaming down a corridor pursued by the undead trying to eat you, it's impossible to take that in.
As refs and storytellers, we do several things to try and work with the game elements to make the game story rewarding. Most of these were worked out through trial and error and getting it badly wrong before we worked out how to get it right.
- Broad brushstrokes. We talk in bold black-and-white hyperbole. Every run is all-or-nothing, do-or-die. Players are given missions that affect the fate of the wider game world, so their actions carry weight and the game retains a sense of urgency.
- Metaplot and wider world. Zombie has an overarching plot framework that makes it possible to slot game events into place. There are several organisations in the game's world – a shady scientific corporation, an armed resistance unit – and the real-time games take place within a framework created by the actions of those organisations.
- Sandboxing . Runs in Zombie are set up to be sandboxes where the players can take many different routes to the goal. We have set pieces for players to encounter – a room full of injured survivors, or a super-powerful zombie intent on taking them down – but those are never static events that play out in a pre-defined way. They are elements of the game world that add authenticity to the run without scripting players' actions or requiring them to act in accordance with anything.
- Emergent stories. This is a common concept in video game design but in my experience is used much less outside specialist gaming environments. It refers to narratives that are uncovered or revealed during gameplay, and which require input from players to understand and piece together. For Zombie, I commonly use the term to describe stories about moments in the game that are unpredictable and unpredicted, that form unique and structured narratives, and that are the result of player interaction with their environment.
And this is the important one. We try and make sure that after the chaos of the run, players have their own, personal stories to tell. We give them space beforehand to construct back story for themselves – encouraging team action – and we give them briefing time and attention afterwards to help them construct individual and group narratives about what happened. We try to give them tools and communities in which to tell those stories, we respond to them and retell them and incorporate them into the structure of the game.
Some stories filter out and fall. Others become local legends – the tale of the player who leapt six feet over a group of zombies only to later be mauled to death in a dead end, or the player who hid from the zombies successfully for twenty minutes before his mobile phone went off, alerting them to his presence (he died shouting “Now is not a good time!”). Last night one player managed to obliterate about 40 zombies with a heroic show of power – that story too will be permanently recorded in the mythology and mythos of the game. We give people awards for creating brilliant stories – often those awards are nothing but a shout out, a retelling of their story and a biscuit or a sticker, but they carry value and people strive to obtain them.
What's so good about emergent stories?
Zombie is an activity that, at heart, is very difficult to share. It's designed and conceived as a completely immersive experience while you're playing, making it very hard to film video or take pictures. Backchannel chat, feedback and social sharing in real time are impossible. Very few images or films survive from our early events (though a couple of Youtube videos do get a steady stream of views and bring in occasional new interest three years later).
But even in the first game, our players found a way to share their experiences. They told stories to each other and to their friends, passing on their favourite experiences orally. Almost everything we've done with our storytelling framework since then has focussed on creating the brilliant moments that make those stories, and encouraging people to tell them.
In planning meetings we make lists of “moments of awesome” that will be memorable if they work right, things that will stick in the mind. We put single zombies in weird situations just in case a player stumbles across them. We make tableaux, design interesting characters for players to meet and memorable situations for them to meander into.
We try not to dictate the stories. More often than not they happen organically. We can't make the player team split up and get lost; we can't force someone to go to incredible lengths to avoid in-character death; we can't ever guarantee that what we do will be the focus of player attention. More often than not our efforts simply go to create a better atmosphere for these experiences to occur. We make it easier, but it's the players who make it work.
And we can't dictate how the players ought to tell stories. We try to give them as many routes as possible online, both by creating our own community area and by using Facebook (and Twitter to a lesser extent) to curate and collect and encourage. Stories like this are ephemeral, and while we want people to tell them and we want a long-lasting record, we know we can't rely on ever having one.
Many non-gaming events rely on video and images for a record. Increasingly, conventions and similar (relatively passive) events are relying on backchannel chat and the wider analysis of that conversation to provide useful data and a lasting record of what occurred. For us, the record lies in memory and in oral channels that are hard to replicate online – because of the immersive nature of the experience along with various technical issues, it's impossible to get an idea of “what it's like to be at Zombie” from any one medium. But when our players tell their emergent stories, that has immense value for us. It's the best marketing possible because it comes with a direct endorsement and genuine enthusiasm. It's an elusive currency but it's vital to our survival and it's been integral to our growth.
There are four main areas of uncertainty for me that arise from our approach, with questions that I don't yet know how to answer. They are:
- How do we continue to foster personal, individual experiences and therefore stories while scaling our game upwards? If there are 180 players instead of 60, how does that affect our model?
- How can we encourage people to create and share content online that resonates with their emergent stories without sacrificing our immersive in-game experience? We already have teams going in with cameramen to film them, but the footage is necessarily low-quality and shaky and never reflects the full experience. How can we depict the game in ways that encourage emotional response and act as anchors for emergent stories in the same way that text can?
- How can this model apply to other events? How does it fit with (un)conferences and industry events? Networking events? Rallies? Fetes and carnivals? Riots and demonstrations? Is this another way of looking at and describing oral history? Or does this work to foster, encourage, document and curate emergent stories have journalistic potential?
If you have any suggestions for answers, or any more questions, please share them in the comments.
Posted via email from InterMediaMary
April 3rd, 2010 by Mary Hamilton
It’s not the most beautiful meal in the world, but it’s one of my favourites: garlic soup.
The idea for this meal came from book called Outlaw Cook by John Thorne – both the initial recipe and the approach I tend to take when cooking it. The recipe as given is very simple, based on a Spanish dish eaten by those too poor to eat much else, and nicknamed ‘Water of Life’ for its heartening, comforting qualities.
One thread running through the book I the idea that cuisine is intensely personal. Outlaw Cook tells John Thorne’s own story of learning to want to eat and cook well – from eating packaged foods in bed to the discovery of pasta to building a bread oven in his back yard. And though my journey has been different there are elements that are very familiar to me. When I stood in my own kitchen for the first time age 16 I too had no idea where to begin.
Perhaps the hardest thing to learn so far has been how to improvise, understanding textures, tastes and flavours so that it becomes possible to conceive of a taste, go to the kitchen and create it from raw materials. Outlaw Cook was the first food book I read to revel in that sense of play in the kitchen. And that’s what garlic soup is about for me.
There are a few elements that remain constant every time I make it.
Garlic is the base, usually a combination of fresh and smoked, sometimes pickled, generally crushed or very finely chopped. Often there will be beans involved – kidney or butter beans usually, but sometimes others. Almost always I will grill strong cheese on top of stale bread and line the bowl with it, pouring soup on top. Rarely if ever will I add anything to thicken it.
The rest is pure invention every time, and a glorious way to bring fun to cookery.
To make today’s incarnation:
Crush together pink and smoked garlic, bird’s eye chilli, dried red chilli, sun dried tomatoes, sea salt and fresh thyme, to make a paste.
Sweat the paste in butter with bacon lardons and finely diced shallots.
Add a tin of butter beans, water, tomato purée and vegetable buillion, and simmer till it is tasty, not watery but not too thick or reduced.
In the mean time grill a slice of stale bread spread with tomato purée and topped with mature cheddar.
Serve the soup ladled over the bread and garnished with cherry tomatoes and a few very thin slices of fresh pink garlic.
Posted via email from InterMediaMary
March 28th, 2010 by Mary Hamilton
Today I am in mourning for my xbox 360. After 4 years of long service it finally red ringed last night while I was trying to play my first proper sidequest on Mass Effect 2.
I feel a need to mark its passing somehow. I bought it way back in spring 2006 if memory serves – it was a first generation machine, obnoxiously noisy, occasionally buggy, and lacking an HDMI port.
While other people swapped broken consoles constantly thanks to Microsoft’s poor performance – I have friends who went through 4 360s in a year thanks to the dreaded red ring – mine soldiered on quite cheerfully. It survived 6 house moves – including going from Newcastle to Norwich wrapped in T-shirts in a suitcase on the train. It saw me through relationships ending, through graduation and a career change and my NCTJ prelims. It saw me married.
When thinking about major time periods in my life, I can link them still to the games I was playing at the time. All, or almost all, Xbox. Second year of university, wrapped up in work and writing constantly – Oblivion. Applying for jobs after uni – Guitar Hero 2. Breaking up with a long-term partner – Assassin’s Creed. NCTJ course – Portal, Braid, Fallout 3.
And looking back it’s striking how often I played out the conflicts and themes in meatspace life through gaming. In periods of intense factual learning I gravitated towards puzzle games with neat solutions; when I felt I couldn’t get anything right I retreated to conquerable, affirming rhythm games; at times of uncertainty and doubt I repeatedly threw myself off tall buildings.
Gaming has been self-care and healing, escapism, social interaction, fun, exploration, achievement and space where achievement no longer matters. It won’t end here – I have every intention of going out today to pick up a replacement. But this does feel very much like the end of an era. The next one won’t be the same.
I wonder if this is how I’ll feel if my iPhone ever dies.
Posted via email from InterMediaMary
