leilas-digital-scrapbook-blog

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Found this interesting piece on female videogame protagonists from a male gamer’s POV while researching demographics for games similar to my project. I’m going to do the responsible thing and focus on my pitch instead of launching into a 6000-word post about writing diverse characters and gender bias, but I thought I’d share it anyway.

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Individual Project – The World of Henosis

I was looking for visual references for my individual project and came across this art by Radoslav Zilinsky that perfectly represents the game’s world:

The central conflict of Henosis’ story is based on the irreconcilable dichotomy between the Centre and the Wasteland. The two factions are polar opposites in values (the “American dream” mentality of the Center vs the Wasteland’s prioritizing the need of the many over the need of the few), beliefs (the Center’s almost fanatical adherence to the state religion vs the cynical atheism of the Wasteland), government systems (democracy vs an authoritarian aristocracy), technological advancement, way of life and so on. The most immediately striking difference, though, is how different the two worlds look.

Exploration is a big part of the gameplay; both during missions and in the down time between them, the player will have a chance to explore a vast, diverse world, and to interact with the people that inhabit it. This isn’t just a way for the game’s artists to showcase their talent, but is essential to the plot – Mira’s sense of wonder at the utopian beauty of the Center is the first step in making her realize the people that inhabit it are more than the faceless enemies she’s hated all her life, while Sirius’ plight in the toxic, barren world of the Wasteland makes it very clear that the war he’s fighting is more than an obsessive quest for revenge.

Below are some visual references for a few locations in the story world. While they aren’t quite how I picture the game to look like (the Center’s architecture is futuristic and sleek, but should also have some more classical elements to it like pillars and marble, while the Wasteland is not a desert as much as a burnt out landscape still filled with debris), I believe they do an effective job at depicting the very different visual impact of the two settings.

The Center:

(https://editballai.artstation.com/projects/v1zVQY)

(http://www.arch2o.com/hyperions-vincent-callebaut)

A few sample Sectors*

Magnolia Sector:

(http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php/71114-Blizzard-pic-at-the-end-of-p-1-update-November-1st-p2?p=913801&styleid=39)

Vista Sector:

(https://architectureau.com/articles/green-light-for-queens-wharf-brisbane-casino-resort)

(https://www.this-is-cool.co.uk/the-superb-sci-fi-artworks-of-yi-liu)

Raven Sector

(https://www.artstation.com/artwork/3ady2)

*Sectors surround the Center and form the suburbs of Henosis. They’re a middle ground between Center and Wasteland, and not only physically – while they’re often as stunning and technologically advanced as the Center, their inhabitants only have token representation in the government and often live in less than optimal conditions. They’re the place where most of the missions take place.

The Wasteland

(http://starkovtattoo.spb.ru/surreal-wallpaper-1080p/img658169F2A32)

(https://www.artstation.com/artwork/dXoKx)

More to come…

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Giving Love a Bad Name – Confessions of a Fanfiction Writer

I know we’re supposed to blog about our major projects this week and I promise I will get to that soon, but I’d like to go off book for a moment to address something that’s been bugging me since last Thursday’s class. As someone who’s always tried to engage with fandom in as creative a way as possible, I hoped a class on user generated content would offer a fresher perspective than the usual amount of prejudice and self-righteous superiority that sadly seem to accompany the subject of fanfiction even amongst people that make stories and their passion for it their bread and butter.

Guess I should have known better.

In the world of professional writers, fanfiction is still a filthy word. It sums up everything that’s wrong with the people you’re sharing your stories with: the obsessiveness, the entitlement, the disregard for boundaries, the penchant for making everything about sex. Worse, gay sex, as unspeakably dirty as it’s hilarious. Be warned, writers: if you make it big, your stories will inevitably become a free-for-all at the mercy of those people. A worse fate than even George R. R. Martin could wish on his own characters.

I’m used to seeing the world of fanfiction belittled and disparaged, of course, and I’m the first to admit that the community is often its own worst enemy. But for some reason it still hurt a little to sit in class and listen to people I’ve come to like and respect during these past few months buy into every bad stereotype associated with the form. Not because I felt called out (though yes, I do write fanfiction from time to time, and I happen to quite enjoy reading it too), but because of the underlying assumptions that 1. something that’s not 100% original cannot be art, it’s a violence in fact, especially if it twists someone else’s creation into something it was never meant to be (in this case, queer representation); and 2. there’s something wrong with creating exclusively out of love, without ever expecting to be paid for it. And I have Strong Opinions on that.

So let’s talk about fanfiction.

Actually, scratch that, let’s talk about my favorite subject – yours truly. As you may have gathered by now, I love fanfiction. A whole fangirly lot. My gateway drug into it was my obsession with Lost about 10 years ago and its pesky habit of offing every character I was foolish enough to get attached to. But lo! Someone was keeping them alive through their stories! I felt blessed. I got to spend more time in a world I loved, and I stopped flirting with the idea of giving up on the show every time another character I liked bit the dust. Everybody won.

Even more than as a fan, though, I appreciated the world of possibilities that fanfiction opened up to me as a non-native speaker. I come from a small town in the north of Italy; the access I had to foreign books in their original language was limited, and if I wanted to read something in English I’d have to spend quite a lot of money on one of the very few novels (usually chunky airport bookshop thrillers or housewife romances – not exactly my preferred genres) that shared a single shelf in the bookstore with German, French, Spanish titles. But fanfiction was free, accessible, and there was so much of it. If I didn’t like a story, all I needed to do was move on to the next. Suddenly there was an infinite library of engaging stories to help me make my English better. True, they didn’t all read like a published novel would – there’s a lot of unpolished, error-plagued, stream-of-consciousness-y material out there. But there are also so, so many beautifully written works, and believe me, even for a non-native speaker it’s very easy to spot the difference.

Fanfiction also gave me the chance and motivation to practice my English writing in a way school never could have done. I’ve been writing my own stories since I could hold a pen, but I didn’t dare write in English until I was a fanfiction-loving teenager. It was a marketing decision, really – my first foray into writing fanfiction was for a fandom so small that I wouldn’t be surprised to find out I’m the only Italian representative, so if I wanted any kind of feedback on my work I’d have to suck it up and try my hand at writing in a language that didn’t come natural to me. I would never argue that the feedback I got on my works made me a better writer – contrary to popular opinion, the fanfiction community is made up of the nicest, most supportive people, and alas, you’ll never get a comment on everything you did wrong with your structure or even just pointing out common grammar mistakes from them (though I was lucky enough to have someone explain to me how dialogue punctuation works differently in English than in Italian, so I guess something can be learned even from the Internet). It did motivate me to keep writing, though, and that made me a better writer. If you think I’m being too dramatic, dishing out this monster of a post nobody asked for just to declare my eternal devotion to fanfiction, it’s because it’s personal to me. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been told that I write in English as well as native speakers, and fanfiction is a big part of why that’s true. I doubt I would even be in this course if it wasn’t for it.

And then, of course, there’s the gay thing. I’m not going to argue about how heteronormativity sucks and representation matters because I’m sure everyone’s as sick of talking about it as I am, but please try to understand how it felt for a gay person like me, used to be depicted in media as a plot device or token secondary-character representation if at all, to be able to step into a world where queerness was the default for once. Where queer protagonists had meaningful queer love stories and queer friends and got to save the world from the Apocalypse too. Or to fight the Empire or go to Hogwarts or everything else fictional straight people have had a right to do since the dawn of storytelling in addition to romancing the hottie of their choice. I’m not asking you to feel as passionately about it, of course, but (especially if you’re straight) you might try and empathize the next time you think a fanart of two boys kissing is something deserving of your amused contempt.

I hope I’m not coming across as the person that screams “homophobe” at everyone who disagrees with her because I guarantee that’s not what I’m trying to do here, but I think the general distaste for slash says a lot about the way our society sees heterosexual relationships as love and homosexual relationships as sex. Yes, there’s a lot of gay porn in the world of fanfiction. But you know what you’re most likely to find? Romance. Not in the saucy literary sense of the word, but in its simpler, most literal acceptation. Fanfiction is just one more way for humans to express themselves, after all, and love has always been front and center in our art. Love, not sex – even if it’s gay. In fact, explicit material doesn’t even make up the majority of what you’ll find on a fanfiction website. Don’t worry, I don’t want anyone to taint their souls by visiting one of those dens of iniquity so I pulled some stats myself. Here’s the number of works for each rating in three of the most popular fandoms on Archive Of Our Own, the current go-to website for the fanfiction community (sorry Fanfiction.net) – Harry Potter, Supernatural and the Marvel Cinematic Universe as of 9/3/2019:

Even counting both Mature and Explicit works as straight-up porn (which I don’t think is quite fair, but that’s a discussion for another day), they only make up less than 1/3 of the material. Kinda disappointing, for a medium that’s supposed to be all about filthy graphic gay sex. Imagine if only one in three musicals actually featured singing and dancing, or superheroes weren’t in the majority of superhero movies. They’re lucky fanfiction is shared for free, or I’d be screaming for my money back.

Maybe I’ve just been brainwashed by SJWs, though, and this has nothing to do with my being an immigrant or a lesbian. Maybe my inability to see what’s so bad about appropriating someone else’s intellectual property for your own amusement is a cultural thing. I apologize – as mentioned, I’m Italian, and we all know Ancient Roman culture was basically just a ripoff of everything those inventive Greeks came up with. It’s in our blood. Hell, our 2€ coin, the biggest, has the face of Dante Alighieri on it, a writer most famous for having written 14.000+ verses of self-insert real-person-fic in which the girl he fancied as a teenager, his favorite author, and God himself all fall over themselves to tell him how awesome he is and he gets to prophesy an eternity in Hell for his political enemies. Talk about wish-fulfilling entitlement. Not to mention all those creatively arid Renaissance “artists” celebrated for stealing characters from the Bible and Greek mythology (seriously, the fact that Greece hasn’t unleashed an army of lawyers on us yet is nothing short of a miracle) and putting them in their cheesy paintings. Other countries can rely on a much stronger moral backbone and endless imagination – I’m sure Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, those creative geniuses at Disney and countless others never had to resort to something as cheap and despicable as borrowing other people’s characters to tell the stories they wanted to tell.

Either way, I can’t help it – I see the prospect of creating something that will resonate with people so strongly that they’ll make it a part of themselves, that it’ll compel them to make more art, to reach out and connect with other fans, as something incredibly beautiful rather than scary. Maybe this is my usual naiveté speaking, and I will come to eat my words. It’s certainly disturbing that a bunch of entitled fans bullied the Mass Effect developers into changing the series’ ending, and sending actors explicit fanart of themselves is straight-up harassment, but is fanfiction really the problem here? Or is it social network culture, with its power to destroy all barriers and foster hive mind? To give resentment a platform to spread and be heard? I promise that the average fanfiction writer wouldn’t campaign to get an ending changed. They’d just roll up their sleeves and write a better one themselves.

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Individual Project - An Outline

Just a quick schematic update about my project to try and introduce the idea in a way that makes sense...

Working Title: Henosis

Format: videogame

Outline: a single-to-multiplayer RPG that brings together the two elements that are most important to me in gaming – storytelling and connection. The rich, complex story centers around the conflict between refined, all-powerful Citizens and wild-spirited survivalist Forsaken, and allows the player to choose which side to fight for, making hard decisions and building relationships that will determine the fate of the entire world. About halfway through the game, the player will be offered the choice to link their adventure to that of another player fighting for the opposite side, thus forming an alliance that’s the only hope to bring the conflict to a peaceful resolution.

Platform: PC/Mac

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“Will You Confess?” – National Geographic’s Witch Trials

This week we got to pick an interactive experience of our choosing, and after stumbling aimlessly about the Web for a while I found an interesting project called Salem Witch Trials amongst the resources on the official National Geographic website.

I noticed a little too late that the experience was recommended for fifth- to eleventh-graders, but considering how unsettled it ended up making me, it’s probably for the best that I didn’t look for more adult-oriented content.

While Italian schools tend to focus more on the Inquisition than the American witch trials, I know enough about that chapter of history to have very mixed feelings about it. On one hand, the psychology behind it is fascinating, and although I’ve never believed in any kind of supernatural forces, I’ve always been drawn to the stories and beliefs of people who do; on the other, as an incredibly naive person who strongly believes in the fundamental goodness of humanity, I struggle to come to terms with all the damage we’ve inflicted on each other through the centuries, and it’s almost physically painful for me to read up about it in detail. It doesn’t help that in spite (or maybe because) of my Catholic upbringing, violence in the name of superstitious Christian beliefs terrifies me in a profound way that I can’t really rationalize. Even if it happened centuries ago.

So while I can’t say I enjoyed the interactive experience, because there is absolutely nothing enjoyable about “experienc[ing] the 1692 Salem witch-hunt in a terrifying online trial”, I definitely found it gripping. Mind you, “interactive” is used a little generously: the narrative unfolds almost entirely on its own, with the user only clicking the screen to read panel after panel about the typical fate of someone accused of being a witch. The only choice the user can make comes at the most poignant moment in the story, when, after being accused repeatedly of being a witch during a psychologically scarring trial, you’re asked to confess.

Strangely – and historically-accurately – enough, denying it will get you hanged, while confessing will save you – but at the cost of pointing the finger at other innocents and sending them to die in your place.

At first I found the lack of options a little frustrating. This was supposed to be interactive, the story was even told entirely in second person, and yet the only moment where I could take a modicum of control over my destiny was when I was already well on the way to get senselessly slaughtered. It made me feel trapped, like the events I was living through were thrust upon me by forces I had zero control over and I was going to be damned not because of a choice or mistake I’d made, but because… Just because.

Oh.

Okay, that was clever. Be it thanks to the vivid descriptions, or my being more susceptible to the use of second person narration that I thought, or my questionable choice of listening to Southern Gothic as I was playing, or maybe even a combination of the three, I was completely immersed in the story. And not being able to do much to save myself helped me really feel what I already knew in a cold, rational way – that the victims of those trials were powerless, caught in a destructive web of collective hysteria and superstition.

I do wish the experience allowed you to make a second choice, though, between accusing other people to save yourself or staying silent. I’d gladly have been fake-hanged a second time just to prove a point.

More to come…

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Individual Project – An Update

Sooo I’ve kinda decided to go in a different direction with my final project. The main reason being, I’ve looked into VR and as it turns out I’m not as into it as I thought.

Videogames have always been a group experience for me. I got into that world watching my older siblings play and when I started developing my own taste I always favored multiplayer experiences and games with such a rich, compelling story that they could be enjoyed even by someone who wasn’t physically holding a controller.

VR seems to take that away. You get one headset, one point of view, one player. It’s about taking you into another world to have immersive experiences and live crazy adventures, not about bringing the magic and fun here in the real world. I’m sure there are exceptions, of course (my first brush with VR actually came in the form of a Danish student game that was all about getting two players to cooperate), but trying to make that work would still mean revolutionizing my premise so I might as well start working on something entirely different.

The new project (as yet untitled) is still in the very early stages of development but much like Breakaway favors the narrative aspect over everything else. It’s born of my lifelong desire to tell a story where there aren’t good or bad guys, just completely different perspectives and interests at play. Much like in the classic Pokémon RPGs, the player would be able to choose between two different versions of the game – one set in the luscious, technologically and philosophically advanced capital of the Empire, the other in the Wasteland where the opposers of its strict regime have been exiled for over twenty years.

The story follows two best friends, perfect soldier Mira and self-sacrificing Sirius, who grew up in the Wasteland and learned to hate and fear the Empire. When Mira is captured in a mysterious Imperial incursion, the tension between the two factions explodes again… but her experience in the Empire’s capital shows Mira that things aren’t as black and white as she was led to believe. Players who want to give the Empire a chance will follow Mira’s story, while those who want to see the oppressors destroyed will get the chance to play as Sirius. About halfway through the game, the players will be able to choose between continuing the adventure on their own or linking their game with a friend who’s playing the other version, thus starting a two-player alliance that can ultimately bring a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

One last note on the platform – I’m very tempted to follow Ingress’ example and make this a huge, immersive experience that borrows real-life elements and connects players from all over the world, but I’m still struggling to come up with a way to make a complex plot work within that frame. We’ll see. If I can’t make it work, the Switch also seems like a good option, and it has the added bonus of catering to my nostalgic Nintendo fangirl’s tastes.

More to come…

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Do Not Track – Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Web?

I’ve drunk the Kool Aid and it’s too late for me.

My experience this week with Do Not Track, “a personalized web series about privacy and the web economy”, is far from being the first time I’ve heard about the extent of the access GAFA and other big soulless companies have on all sorts of information about us. And it’s really all sorts of information. Who and were we are, what kinds of people we associate with, whether we’d be a good candidate for a loan. According to The New Yorker, Twitter can determine whether we’re male or female based on the way we talk – or well, tweet, I guess. (They made no mention of people who fall outside the binary spectrum, so I’m assuming they’re safe, at least for now.) Facebook can predict our actions better than our friends and family. And every time we accept the ever-present cookies, something we can’t opt out of if we want to browse a website, we’re effectively allowing not only the website in question but also a string of third parties to collect our data so they can try and sell us stuff. Scary stuff. Or is it?

Do Not Track compellingly sheds some light on the issue with its mash-up of videos, article links and the chance at a personalized experience (more on that below), but the vaguely eerie visual style and its decisive condemnation of the model failed to sway me over to its side. Again, it could be because I’m an almost digital native and I’ve been brainwashed long ago to believe that this is all fair and normal. Or because I’m too ignorant, too unimaginative to foresee the dire consequences looming over us. I’m perfectly aware that I could be in the wrong here and I’m anxiously anticipating the day someone finally shows me what’s so bad about the current state of things. Still, Do Not Track failed to do that.

Google, Twitter, my much despised Facebook, they’re all services we get without having to pay a dime. They earn enough to sustain themselves, and even make a huge profit, off our activity on them. Off what we like, click, look for, and yes, in abstract it’s a little uncomfortable to think someone out there knows what we’re doing on our laptop or where we’re carrying our smartphone, but the thing is, they’re not people who know us and will be in any way affected by our behavior. Nor are they going to track us down and murder us in cold blood. They’re really only doing this so they have more chances at selling us stuff, and I’m… kind of okay with that? Especially since it means I don’t have to pay 10€ a month just to google a recipe or semi-relevant gifs of Ron Swanson?

Shush, Ron, I’m trying to make the opposite argument here.

I might be naive, but to me targeted advertisement looks like a much bigger scale equivalent of the street vendors in Rome, that almost magically replace their knickknacks with umbrellas the second it starts raining. They might not big faceless companies, they don’t know what you’ve been up to every second of the last month, but the end result is pretty much the same. They know you’re outside, they know you’re getting wet, they’re offering you a product that will prevent that. That’s it. They’re not interested in your life besides what could get you to give them money for their service, and neither are advertisers.

The interactive aspect makes Do Not Track more engaging, but it also felt a little weird to me. Here you are arguing that privacy is incredibly important and I shouldn’t have to give it up in order to live in today’s society, and yet you ask me for my email and gender and whether I have nudes on my phone. Although, maybe that’s the point – to make the user reflect on the kind of information they are comfortable sharing about themselves, and realize that are already sharing most of it, willingly or not. I definitely enjoyed that part, but then again what do I know, I’d let a complete stranger use my phone for ten minutes.

Also – the results of their data collection weren’t as accurate as they made me fear. Yes I’m female and yes I have less than 30 apps on my phone – big deal, I just told you that. But maybe the reason I didn’t spend more than a few minutes connecting words on your website isn’t that I’m inactive or in a rush, it’s that I found it kinda boring, and if you think the Edinburgh News is the website I spend the most time on just because I told you it’s where I get most of my news these days, you might want to rethink your algorithm. The whole experience was a little surreal, and it made me think of this absolute gem of a passage in Terry Pratchett’s Feet of Clay:

He distrusted the kind of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, “Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times,” and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!

I know this hardly applies to the big companies, that have endless amount of data and are therefore bound to make way more informed deductions. Still, I am secure enough about my complexity as a human being not to consider my shopping habits my most defining characteristic, and if Amazon wants to take a crack at predicting those, it can be my guest. I just hope it hurries up and shares the result with me, because I have to buy new picks and I have too much work to do to spend six hours comparing options.

More to come…

[leilas-digital-scrapbook-blog]

You know what part of the Baten Kaitos battle system doesn’t get enough praise?

The result screen. I know you can disable it but why would you? It shows you exactly what your combo did, what elements that you used were or weren’t effective and which one(s) the enemy uses to parry so you can update your strategy accordingly. It’s also the only moment you can really afford to take a bathroom break mid-battle if you have too.

Why did they remove that in Origins? Am I doing good or very badly in Origins? Who knows. The elements don’t work the same and it doesn’t show me which ones were effective. I wanna know exactly what my attacks did so I can, you know, actually build a strategy on the fly like I could in the first game instead of just picking whatever cards are on screen and hope for the best 

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“Your Favorite Game” – Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean

It’s all about videogames this week and I am living. Seriously, if 14-year-old-me had known one day she’d be sitting in a classroom in Edinburgh watching a presentation about the history of gaming, she might have been less emo about her terrible life choices. I’m sure she would have been proud of future-her for tearing up at the Wii picture, at least.

The battered PC I shared with all six of my siblings and a number of different Nintendo consoles have always been my gaming platforms of choice; the mainstream, more toxic-masculinity-oriented worlds of Playstation and Xbox (I’m sure that’s a load of crap, but that’s how they looked to me at the time – and in my defense, their fans did nothing to prove me wrong) held zero attraction on me. As for apps, well, I’ve bought my first smartphone about four months ago and still have to download a single game on it.

But Leila, that is great! You finally have an excuse to try! You love Pokémon! You love augmented reality! Download Ingress! Download Pokémon Go! Blog about those!

That sounds sensible, doesn’t it? (Or it would sound sensible if I hadn’t gone overboard with the exclamation points, at least.) But option #2 is to blog about my favorite game, and I will never, ever pass up an opportunity to gush about Baten Kaitos. Sorry, Pokémon Go. I promise I will give you a chance someday.

So, meet my greatest gaming love and lifelong companion, the game that ruined every other RPG for me and at the same time ensured that I would never really stop playing. Drumroll please.

Just to give you the basic information, Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean is a 2003 JRPG developed for Nintendo GameCube by Monolith Soft and tri-Crescendo. I played it for the first time when it came out in Europe in 2005 and as you may have gathered by my completely chill and detached tone, I’m still very much not over it.

As mentioned in a previous post, in order to fall for a game I have to fall for its story, and boy did Baten Kaitos deliver on that front. The premise is almost banal in its simplicity: a gang of improbable heroes gets together to try and collect a series of magical artifacts that will help them thwart the evil Empire’s plans of domination over their fantasy world. Yawn, right? Except that their quest is filled with mind-blowing twists and shocking reveals, and even before those come into play, the complex, lovable characters, the breathtaking world building, and the perfect balance of heart and humor make for the most compelling epic fantasy I’ve ever come across – not just in the gaming world but on any platform.

What really sets Baten Kaitos apart from other RPGs, though, is the gameplay. Even though I’ve happily played a wide range of genres, RPGs have always been my undiscussed favorite – and in most of them I’ve found the same two fundamental problems: one, the annoying notion that the player has to identify with the main character, which results in cardboard protagonists that rarely engage with NPCs beyond replying “Yes” to everything they say if they’re good guys and kicking their ass if they’re bad guys; and two, a boring battle system, which makes the hours spent leveling up a tedious obligation rather than one of the most fun parts of the game.

Baten Kaitos brilliantly solves the first problem by making the player’s mirror and the protagonist two different characters. In its world, special people can bond with Guardian Spirits that will advise them and make them stronger – and that’s exactly what happens to the protagonist, Kalas, at the beginning of the game. This solution allows the player to identify with the above-it-all Guardian Spirit, to move around and fight as Kalas, and to enjoy a rich, well-crafted story where the main character is allowed to speak his mind, to make mistakes, to grow. And it blurs the line between fiction and reality by making the Guardian Spirit a creature from another world – our world –, not really a character but rather a role for the gamer to play.

As for the battle system, as it often is the case, it’s probably way more complicated to explain than to just play. And it is pretty damn complicated to play in the first place. It’s turn-based (attack and defense), which is great for me because I’m not handy enough with a controller for real-time combat. Just ask the dozens of people who pwned me on World of Warcraft before I ran from that game in tears. And it’s card- and number-based, which admittedly can be a bit of a turn-off on first impact. After all, there must be a reason why Baten Kaitos sold so poorly in spite of being The Best Videogame Ever. But once you get the hang of it, there’s nothing like the rush of selecting the right combo, and even fighting puny soldiers and lesser monsters becomes as engaging as big, epic boss fights. After all, there must be a reason why I keep wanting to return to it even after completing it four times and knowing the story by heart.

Baten Kaitos is special to me for many reasons, some of them really personal, but from a more course-oriented point of view, it’s the shining model I want to follow for my individual project. Because I see videogames first and foremost as a medium to tell stories in a different way – by allowing the audience-turned-player to live them in first person, making important decisions and taking part in the action in a way we couldn’t imagine on a TV screen or in the pages of a book, and Baten Kaitos does it spectacularly. Here’s hoping Breakaway will come close.

More to come...

[leilas-digital-scrapbook-blog]

Breakaway – The Premise

20-year-old Gail Manning is not your typical young adult – she’s part of the Maya Project, a secret organization that brings together people with supernatural abilities to fight crime and protect the metropolis of Afterlife. But after she’s almost killed during a mission, she wakes up in a hospital… where a man who claims to be her father and an army of doctors all swear to her that superheroes aren’t real and she couldn’t be more ordinary. Why does she keep being pulled back to her old life every time she falls asleep, though? Why is her ordinary college populated by people she already knows from her extraordinary world? And why do her actions in Afterlife seem to affect her normal life too? What is real and what isn’t?

In this plot-heavy half point-and-click, half VR-action videogame, the player will wear Gail’s shoes as she tries to figure out what happened to her, makes allies and foes, and learns the truth about the Maya Project – all while kicking ass in Afterlife.

This project is born of two different sides of who am I (or was, at least, before Uni and work and life and other passions got in the way) as a gamer. The first is the reader, the story-listener, the kind of player that forced herself though hours of tedious leveling up and puzzles smarter than she was just to know what happened next. I’ve played a little bit of everything over the years but if you asked me to give you a top ten of my favorite videogames ever, you can bet that about 90% of the items on that list would be plot-heavy titles that won my heart with clever dialogue and compelling characters before I even started thinking about the gameplay. Mass Effect. Fire Emblem. Hotel Dusk. Titles 1-4 in the Monkey Island series. Baten Kaitos, the one world I can’t seem to leave behind even now that I keep saying my gamer days are over. Stories shouldn’t be an afterthought, they should be both the foundation of a videogame and the cherry on top of it, and Breakaway is an attempt at appeasing that story-loving kid that’s still very much a part of me.

The second side is the geek who’s fascinated by the way the gaming world is changing and all the new possibilities that are opening up. The most immersive gaming experience I’ve had was probably Wii Sports (go on, laugh at me), so I immediately jumped on the chance to explore the world of VR and catch up on all the spectacular, brain-wrinkling awesomeness I’ve been missing. Seeing what titles like Subnautica and The Talos Principle have achieved makes me hopeful about what will come next and really excited to jump in. Wish me luck ;]

More to come...

[leilas-digital-scrapbook-blog]

Fort McMoney: A First-Person Documentary

I’m not generally big on documentaries. Don’t get me wrong, of course I appreciate the incredible amount of work that goes into making a good one, and they’re a great place to turn to when I’m doing research or feel the need to put a social justice spin on my lifelong dislike for The Simpsons. But sitting down and watching an entire documentary just because the premise sounds interesting? That’s never been me.

I think that’s partly because I’m very lazy when it comes to trying new things (which is also why I don’t watch as many movies as I should), and every documentary is a new thing – it’s not a TV series you already know and can simply go along with, it’s a whole new world/issue/perspective to get invested in. Partly, though, it’s because there’s a very high chance that by the time I reach the end I’ll feel indignant. Frustrated. Ultimately, powerless. Documentaries show us worlds we’ll probably never get to explore in person, struggles we’re not a part of, injustices we have no hope of vanquishing. I feel like they ask me to empathize for about an hour and then move on, because there’s really nothing more I can do.

Coming from that perspective, I immediately embraced Fort McMoney’s concept. The documentary-slash-game is an interesting experiment in giving the audience a more active role by letting them explore Fort McMurray, a Canadian community built on the oil industry and the eternal human struggle to create a better future for themselves. There is no fixed narrative; the player is able to roam around more or less freely, attending council meetings and chatting with the worryingly numerous homeless population, coming face to face with different opinions and perspectives every time they talk to someone new.

I have to say, as far as games go, Fort McMoney isn’t a particularly exciting experience – most of the time is spent watching videos and asking people questions. The most interesting feature, the chance to interact with other players and make decisions about the future development of the town, was (sadly but understandably) a one-time-only opportunity that required the player to log in at three different times over the course of three weeks back when the game was launched in 2013. But if we forget about games in a more traditional sense and look at Fort McMoney as the interactive documentary that it really is, it’s incredibly easy to fall in love with it.

Fort McMoney doesn’t just show the audience a different world – it invites us to immerse ourselves into it, to live it, to really think about it and how to improve it. Is it better to present an idyllic image of the town to the outside world or to warn the future immigrants of the hardships they’re going to face? Would a new highway be worth the inevitable damage it would bring to the environment? For once, the audience gets to decide. And while it’s not like these decisions have a real impact on the community (that would make Fort McMoney a pretty terrifying game, to be honest), they do make the player feel like they’re learning something – not just about Fort McMurray, but about something closer to their day-to-day life. What it means to be part of a community, maybe?

Either way, I finally enjoyed a documentary without having an ulterior motive, and Fort McMoney deserves all the praise for that.

More to come…

[leilas-digital-scrapbook-blog]

One of the biggest confusions in the world of augmented reality is the difference between augmented reality and virtual reality.  Both are earning a lot of media attention and are promising tremendous growth.  So what is the difference between virtual reality vs. augmented reality? What is Virtual Reality? Virtual reality (VR) is an artificial, computer-generated

[leilas-digital-scrapbook-blog]

Seven Digital Deadly Sins: Human Frailty and the Internet

Just to let y’all know how tech savvy I am – I really wanted to write about The Space We Hold, an immersive, transformative project about the experiences of three women forced to become sexual slaves for Japanese soldiers during WWII, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how it worked. Feel free to look it up and let me know just how easy it was for you.

Anyway, that left me with one other option: National Film Board of Canada and The Guardian collaboration Seven Digital Deadly Sins, a platform that uses brief articles, cheeky video interviews, an interactive interface and a vaguely dystopian but strangely satisfying polling system to discuss the way the Internet is taking up more and more space in our lives. Social media, of course, is a big part of the conversation.

And this is the part where normally I’d start rolling my eyes, for the same reason why I avoided essays on the topic like the plague throughout high school and couldn’t make it past the first handful of Black Mirror episodes. It seems like the only thing more pervasive in our society than technology is the constant rhetoric of how bad it is for us, how it brings out the worst in people or, even more often, how it turns us all into brainwashed zombies incapable of critical thinking. Hell, even people who use social media on a regular basis feel the need to add the disclaimer “I know most of it is stupid, but…” whenever I mention that no, I have no interest in using Facebook, nor am I likely to post a single picture on my Instagram in the foreseeable future.

I’m not saying none of it is true. Like the guy in Seven Digital Deadly Sins’ article “I click to get angry”, I have wasted time basking in online content that I knew from the start would fill me with righteous fury. I used to take it as a personal offense when I was hanging out with a friend and they kept checking their phone, and while I’ve learned to accept that it’s not ‘cause I’m a boring useless person, it’s just that most people my age can’t help it, it still stings a little. And yes, of course it’s terrifying to think of thieves stealing your car from their laptop, of bullies being able to spread their hate with a simple click, even just of parents snooping around on their children’s social media. But is this really about the Internet?

This is where, in my opinion, lies Seven Digital Deadly Sins’ biggest strength in discussing the topic. Forget the cool interface and the charm of the interviewees – by framing the discussion into the context of age old deadly sins, that (this came as a shock even to me but I guarantee it’s true, I checked) predate even Friendster, the platform has brought the focus back on what this is really about: human nature. The Internet might be giving us new, more extensive ways to express ourselves, but everything we post, text, upload, PM, DM, and all those other acronyms I totally know, ultimately comes from us. The book of human history is basically an itemized list of sin and wrongdoings – just ask the women from The Space We Hold – so why would it be different on the Internet?

That’s the thing about sin, though – it’s always a choice. The Internet gives us the chance to be as envious prideful wrathful greedy as we’ve ever been, but it’s also a chance to reach out to each other, to be compassionate, to be kind. I think we can start by not condemning people for sharing pictures online to feel a little better about themselves. Yes, even if said pictures are not as candid as they’d like us to believe.

More to come…

[leilas-digital-scrapbook-blog]

A word of introduction...

Hey! Hi! Welcome! I don’t know why I’m using so many exclamation points I’m nervous!

My name is Leila and I’m a writer, editor, and MA Screenwriting student at Edinburgh Napier University. This blog is part of an assignment in my Interactive Media module, and will be an attempt at documenting, commenting and hopefully even expanding on materials I come across in class or on my own during the course. It will update weekly right until around the middle of April.

I say “an attempt” because while in the last ten-odd years I’ve been on various social media platforms (Tumblr included. Yes I know everything about female-presenting nipples and the Mishapocalypse ;P), I’ve always been more about stalking – pardon, appreciating other people’s work than making my own and this whole idea of putting ACTUAL CONTENT out there, content I have written and OTHER PEOPLE WILL SEE is pretty new and terrifying to me. We’ll see how it goes.

For now just relax, enjoy the super cute theme that it took me only three hours to settle on, and rest assured that proper posts will come soon. Writer’s honor ;]