Is Halo 3 An Excused Absence?

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 03:00:05 GMT

Halo 3 is coming out Tuesday. Now I'm not a big video game player but I enjoy Halo. My son and I have been known to play for hours at a time. Of course my son beats me miserably every time we play. That means I need to practice a bit before he comes over the play. He's got work Tuesday and dedicated professional that he is he will be hard at work that day. I on the other hand am being asked to help with Halo 3 launch events. Seems to me that practicing the game should count as work related on the job training. So if I am slow to answer email on Tuesday you'll understand that I am hard at work.

Gotta keep up with the kids on the team somehow.

Fake Reality - Just another name for fiction?

Sun, 07 Jan 2007 21:54:56 GMT

I read today about a blog for characters of a comic strip. One can go online and read "blogs" by characters in a number of TV shows. At one level these are all attempts to promote the show/comic of course. But at another level they are a chance to learn more of the backstory of the characters and the world they inhabit. They are really just an extension of the story. Sequel, prequel, parallel story - these are all things we are used to in books, movies, comic books and TV shows. It's just that we are not as used to these things taking place in a completely different medium.

Of course if we think about it we see that they do. Movies are made from books (and the other way around) all the time. But the Internet is still pretty knew so the cross over to it also seems new. Plus of course with blogs we have this ideal that blogs are somehow supposed to be real and genuine and the voice of actual people. Great theory.

In practice I think creative people use what ever medium strikes their fancy. People look at a medium and ask themselves what they can do with it. What they decide is often different from the ideas or even wishes of those who create the medium. This is reality.

The printing press was created largely to make it easier to create copies of the Bible and other great works. Would Gutenberg be happy to see pornography being printed in such large numbers as it is today? I suspect probably not (though someone who knows other wise or even just wishes it were other wise may very well correct me.)

I remember taking a course is Photoshop some years ago. It was taught by faculty from the Art Department at Philips Academy (Andover) where I was working part-time at the time. We had an interesting discussion about the use of this tool by artists. One of the things that came up was that at that point most of the artistic usage was by artists who were coming over from other mediums. Photoshop was not their main or most natural tool. The real good stuff would come when artists started with the computer as their tool.

Likewise we are seeing a new generation of artists that are starting with digital media (audio, video, photography and composites of all of that) as their art form. We're only starting to learn where that can lead. As artists mix media (authors of books try creative works in blogs for example) we are going to see them continue to inspire people to start with those new media. And that is going to be exciting.

Technorati tags: art, blogs, fiction, new+media

Alfred Thompson the Cyberspace People Watcher: Entertainment

Is Halo 3 An Excused Absence?

Fake Reality - Just another name for fiction?