2013-05-18T15:16:50-04:00 Dave Morris http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=dave-morris Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Dave Morris Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2971509 2013-03-28T10:48:14-04:00 2013-04-02T06:33:26-04:00

Dave Morris http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-morris/
A new medium always has a period when it is struggling inside the confining box of an earlier medium. Creators have to unlearn what they knew before they can see the fresh, uncharted vistas stretching before them. You don't get The Unfinished Swan or Shadow of the Colossus or even Telltale's Walking Dead until you've sat through the long linear infodumps of something like Metal Gear Solid. You can't arrive at the end of Tony Soprano's driveway without passing through Peyton Place.

I talked a while back about how digital reading platforms can change comics. For "change" read "liberate" - from the tyranny of the page, from having to hit a reveal on just the right panel, from having to take a machete to the dialogue (a particular bugbear for a word nerd like me) because it takes up too much space.

Comics have always been storyboards. In the absence of today's tech, writers and artists had to find ways to nudge the reader's attention to the right word balloon, to make them parse and run the images cinematically in their mind without the intrusion of a storyboard's zoom lines and motion arrows.

To be clear, I'm not talking about motion comics here. Motion comics are just cheap animation. Very cheap animation. And I like animation, almost as much as I like comics, but I'm not rushing to pay out for a cheap hybrid of the two. When Porter Anderson, publishing industry scrutineer and a stalwart champion of serious literature, originally told me about Malk Waid's talk at the Tools of Change conference, I feared that's what it was about. I should have had more faith in the author of Irredeemable.

There was an attentive silence in the room as Mark Waid demonstrated the comics that his company Thrillbent are producing. And this at TOC, where awe is awful hard to earn. So maybe that's another way that new technology can liberate comics. It can liberate the medium from the stigma of pulpy trash that so many people in publishing attach to it.

I'll close with the two key takeaways from that talk: "This is using digital storytelling tools to do things you cannot do in print," and yet: "Like any other form of reading, you are in control of the pace at which you absorb the story."

See, there's nothing to be afraid of. For all the glitzy new tech, right at the heart it's still comics.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2957436 2013-03-26T14:33:55-04:00 2013-03-28T12:20:54-04:00

Dave Morris http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-morris/ Off The Page, a new series of networking events exploring the boundaries between books and technology. The theme of the evening was gaming - especially appropriate for me as I started out writing choose-your-own-adventure style gamebooks.

One of the gamebook series I created, Fabled Lands, is also the name of my company, and the reason we named the company after it is that it was pretty revolutionary for its time. Each book added a new region to a huge fantasy world, and you could go back and forth between the books in an open-ended, sandbox narrative, making it a precursor in text form to things like Skyrim.

People nowadays think of gamebooks as rather old hat - and, after all, it was twenty years ago. In their heyday, though, they were a phenomenon, selling upwards of a hundred thousand units per title. And it's not as old hat as you might think: the same design skills I used in those days apply equally when I'm creating modern videogames. The important lesson here is that books can do interactive stories very well; it's not something we have to hand off to the games industry.

How do we get people to interact with a story? Well, in the first place that's completely the wrong question to ask. I could put a sudoku at the end of every chapter and you'd have to solve it to progress through the story, but that doesn't address what would make people want to interact. What engages us about stories? What makes us care enough to get involved?

Here's a clue. My favourite show is Breaking Bad. I don't care about crystal meth distribution in Albuquerque, or even that much about crime dramas. But I am fascinated by the problem of Walter White. Character - that's what is compelling about a great story. And when we put character and interactivity together we have the ingredients of relationship.

Relationship is at the heart of Frankenstein, which I did last year with Profile Books on iPhone and iPad. You're Victor Frankenstein's confidante. He's asking you for advice. Sometimes he'll take it, sometimes he won't. Sometimes he'll take it and then he'll blame you if things go wrong. And you get to shape the kind of person he becomes. When you first meet him in the story he's a very young man, so the things you're urging him to do will affect how he develops as a character.

Under the hood, Frankenstein is still a lot like a gamebook. The device is crunching the numbers for you, so there's no need to roll dice and keep notes. But the big difference is the variables being tracked aren't combat ability and hit points. They're things like trust, guilt, pride, and alienation - the elements that make up our relationship with Victor and his monster.

At the other end of the scale from that, Dreams is a game I designed for Microsoft a few years back. The brief was, "like The Sims, but nothing like The Sims". Now, I admire The Sims as a game, but from a story viewpoint there are two glaring problems. First, your relationship with those characters is like they're bugs in a jar. There's no empathy. And secondly you've got this clunky, chemistry-set interface between you and them, with bars to show how tired or angry they are. It's all tell not show.

So in Dreams I swept that all away. You have the town, the characters, and you can reach in with a hand, tap them on the shoulder, and point out things or people you'd like them to interact with. Say I lead two characters to an art exhibit. If I listen in on them, I may hear them talking about the exhibit. They might bond or fall out over their opinions of it; that depends on their personality, tastes and mood. We had hundreds of unique lines of dialogue for each character, so they could do a whole lot of talking.

In Dreams there's no layer between player and character. The interface is all in the world. One example: when they make friends or enemies, that generates magic dust that floats around the town. I can grab a pinch of that and sprinkle it to spice up the narrative. There are two flavours: dark dust for what I called "Tim Burton" effects, and the bright dust for "Walt Disney" effects.

If you zoom right in on a character you get a one-on-one conversation. They tell you their hopes and fears. You might see a girl in the street, swoop down, and she'd say, "My boyfriend's gone to the art gallery with another woman. What are you going to do about it?" Whether I help her out or not, she'll remember. If I mess her life up, she'll bear a grudge and shake her fist every time she sees me. So the game is really about forging all these virtual relationships.

A lot of noise is being made recently about Telltale's Walking Dead game. Is that a good interactive story? Yes, it's brilliant. The choices are difficult, they're moral, they have far-reaching consequences, they're character-driven. But I can do all of that in text. So part of the reason publishers are getting so excited about it, I think, is that they're being seduced by the beauty of realtime 3D graphics.

Images are immersive, there's no doubt about that. It's easier to believe in your pretend relationship with a character you can see on-screen than with a chunk of prose that only tells you what that character is doing or saying. But book publishers don't want to spend millions of dollars on game-quality graphics. What's the solution?

One option is comics. (Full disclosure: I am bound to advocate comics, as my major project these days is the ongoing graphic novel Mirabilis.) If you think comics just means The Beano or Superman, look at Mark Waid's talk at Tools of Change last month. Comics don't have to be static, either. Japanese visual novels demonstrate that a minimal level of animation can bring comics-style graphics to life.

There's nothing new about using comics for a low-cost visual solution. Ten years ago, Remedy didn't have the money for 3D cut scenes in Max Payne, so they gathered the development team, posed them for a photo-novel, and gave the final result a comic book touch-up. The result is classy, it fits the style of the story, and crucially, a decade on, it stands up against cut scenes from the time that would have cost ten times as much.

Another option is live action. It's cheaper than you'd think, especially when stylistically distressed - though of course you are limited in how far you can interact with it on a moment-by-moment basis. Alternatively, we could go the other way: simple and highly stylized, like Story Mechanics are doing with shadow-puppet visuals in The 39 Steps.

In short, there are lots of ways to get smart and stylish visuals into interactive stories without having to compete with videogame budgets.

What kind of relationships can we put in these stories? All kinds. Here's just one example. You're not James Bond, you're his controller at MI6. You're in touch with him all the time, giving him orders, but a man who's licensed to kill doesn't play well with others. So you have an adversarial relationship. And conflict, of course, is the motor of drama.

Really, though, we need to be going a lot further, breaking the whole frame of what historically constitutes a novel. How about: a massively multiplayer, ongoing, episodic, interactive soap opera? Here's the sort of thing Dickens would have done if he'd started out working at a game developer instead of a blacking factory. All the readers are able to interact around the fringes of the world and some of that feeds into the core narrative that everybody's following. It can even be text-based. The novel itself, in effect, is now the emergent main thread being woven out of an interactive world.

These are the kinds of experiments we should be doing. Novels, liberated from paper and cloth, don't need to remain in the form they've been constrained into for the last three centuries. Publishers will protest: "We're not in the videogames business." But you know something? That's just fear talking. Those two land masses are connected now. There's going to be some evolving together, some exchange of creative DNA, some blurring of boundaries. A generation of authors have grown up playing games. Now it's time to mix those influences together and see what wholly new media we might create.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1954428 2012-10-10T10:44:18-04:00 2012-12-10T05:12:02-05:00

Dave Morris http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-morris/
Let's first of all take the fifty thousand foot view. From here, the ultimate success of a book concept is to break out of print and spread its story and characters across a rainbow bridge of movies, games, toys, lunch boxes and who-knows-what. I appreciate, of course, that's not what every author is striving for. I'm usually not myself. But we're talking about commercial success here, not creative success. Some unseemly snuffling around the trough is inevitable.

Not every property (I warned you we were at the trough, didn't I?) is going to be Iron Man, but as we zoom in we see the same pattern, only now it's repeated across fewer media, or even just subspecies within one medium. Excepting the call from Hollywood or Hasbro that may never come, publishing can most efficiently monetize a work by releasing it in many forms to target different segments of the market. Think of it as a funnel in which the pile-'em-high-sell-'em-cheap (or free) stuff is there to draw in a flood of readers who you can filter down through bands of commitment towards the premium purchases.

This will likely lead to the reversal of the usual pattern of releases, which began with the hardback and often went no further than the trade paperback twelve months later. That model implicitly conflated two premium attributes: the quality/durability of the product (bigger format, hard cover, dust jacket) and the availability (I'll pay not to wait a year to read it). Nowadays the immediately available format is also the one least intrinsically valued by consumers, as it's just a squirt of bytes down the broadband pipe. That's one reason why publishers (corporate or individual) shouldn't be in too much of a hurry to abandon print. People place a high premium on gifts, whether for others or for themselves, and they don't see virtual goods as gifts.

This is where the plucky self-publisher will struggle. They can set up their books for print on demand, but few will have the resources to produce the deluxe box sets with fold-out maps and meticulous annotations (I'm picturing a series like Peter Wimsey or Inspector Rebus here, if that helps) for which the aficionados will pay lavishly. In fact, few will have the marketing resources to build a hardcore of aficionados in the first place. Even worse, much of the early money in publishing may in the future come from subscription funding (think HBO for books rather than twitty fanboyish pitches on Kickstarter) and self-publishers as they start out lack the brand power needed to make that work.

Okay, so what are the advantages that the corporate publishers can still boast? The main ones are - as they have ever been - deep pockets and a full Rolodex of key media contacts. (I'm not including editorial skills here because you can hire those, although I'm not convinced an editor can do their job properly when the author is the one paying them.) If you're an author whose work is geared towards building a highly esteemed brand then in general you are going to need the careful nurturing over several books that publishers (sometimes) (used to) give.

If you're out in the cold then you're mostly stuck with the pile-'em-high model starting out, and you just have to hope that either attracts the attention of a publisher or makes you enough money in its own right to fund all the other stuff. Good luck if you take the latter route; that crunching underfoot is the remains of other authors who went before you. And if a publisher does notice you, remember that they're no longer the T-Rex and you the trembling hadrosaur. You can benefit from partnering with them, but it no longer has to be indentured servitude. Treat it like a joint venture. You are bringing a following and the work that you invested time and craft in making. Make them reveal what they're going to contribute. If they won't be transparent, you should walk away.

But how does our intrepid self-publisher ever get to that first ledge on his/her way to the summit? Unfortunately, probably not by writing the kind of fiction you'll be proud of in later life. (I say this as one who has hacked his way through any number of paying jobs, and I will readily accept being called a mercenary only to avoid a term with even less admirable associations.) So you find a "tribe of readers" whose tastes are clearly definable by the specific box-ticking requirements we call a genre, the tighter the better for or purposes, and you craft stories that fit that genre and you market yourself (again we must avoid the disparaging p-word). Remember that Rolodex on the publisher's desk? It has less of a competitive edge when the readers you're targeting all gather at the same internet watering holes and tend to shun the books section of the New York Times as if it were a monolith found on the moon.

Now, hopefully you will yourself have some liking for the genre when you start out, otherwise you will be making for yourself a very special kind of hell. All the same, even if you are a part of that tribe you're setting out to please, if you have any degree of real talent you will inevitably come to the same conclusions as Theodore Sturgeon in his SF writing - only you may not share his lenient assessment that only ninety percent is crap. You may be in business flying high, but try seeing it from the other side of the mirror: rather than real success as a writer, you have had moderate success as a marketer. At least, being a writer, you're well qualified to appreciate the irony there.

If your own tastes run more to Henry James than E L James, you will find all this talk of tribes to be very far from your own understanding of the value of literature. If so, it's not all bad news. While half a million (hey, I'm trying to be optimistic) new would-be writers are all lining up to sell 99-cent trinkets to the tribes, the area of non-genre fiction will be less aggressively targeted. There, each book you write will be quite different from the last, the quality that holds your readers being, not a two-fisted detective or the shenanigans of galaxy-hopping rapscallions, but rather the pleasure of spending time with your imagination and your particular authorial voice. I never said it would be easy, but as the tribal market gets saturated by willing hacks, I remain hopeful that the self-publishers who are trying to pull off that most fundamental goal of literature - to surprise and delight - will still find some wriggle room.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1483921 2012-05-07T19:00:00-04:00 2012-07-07T05:12:01-04:00

Dave Morris http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-morris/
Television Centre burned with lights. It wasn't three-quarters empty then. The curved face of the building made me think of opening the Tardis doors to find an alien city. There had only been half a dozen episodes of Doctor Who broadcast, but already most things made me think of the Tardis. The real raw London wind, as my dad led me across the BBC car park, was not so chilling as that low, mournful soughing in the boughs of a petrified forest. No hum of traffic thrilled like the radiophonic pulse of a Dalek control room. Six years old, and I already knew that my natural home was the world inside the head.

Daleks. It was as if I'd been waiting for them. Like they were an inevitable discovery, not something somebody had just dreamed up. And meeting one for real - that didn't seem then, as it does to me now, like the most incredible and lucky privilege. It seemed like it was naturally bound to happen.

Dad was an electrical engineer and in early 1964 he was doing design work for the BBC. Not on Doctor Who itself - that really would have been proof of a benevolent god - but some complicated stage machinery for Billy Cotton. His friends in the workshops may have included Ray Cusick - not a name anybody knew back then, even though Terry Nation was already my J. K. Rowling.

"DAL to LEK," said Dad as we crossed the cavernous workshop with its pitted green lino floor. "So that's one volume to cover A to C and then another for the next nine letters?"

"But, Dad, it's true. It said so in the paper."

Beyond the shelves full of wire and brown boxes of rivets was a wide space between drill-lined workbenches. Sharp parings of aluminium littered the floor. A group of men in long beige work-coats waited for us. They parted and I got my first glimpse of it. You just can't add a Dalek to a real-life scene without causing a tingle at the back of the scalp, even back then when they'd had two or three appearances at most. Its presence behind the group made them seem for a moment like prisoners.

Dad and his friends went off to talk shop, leaving me alone with the Dalek. Maybe it was 10 minutes, though it could have been hours and still not enough. I was never the kind of kid to go in like Flynn with a new toy. I probably walked around it dozens of times just brushing the surface with my fingers. Details remain sharp nearly 50 years later. The hemispheres down the side - bobbles, as I called them - are my first memory of light blue. Anything that I'd seen of that colour previously was overwritten. A neural map of my brain at that moment would have seen it glowing like the LHC, counting and memorizing the panels on the sides, the metal bands, the perspex disks behind the eye. The lights - ping pong balls, I think - that flashed when the Dalek was speaking. The ball joints on which its limbs swivelled.

The eye itself, that was a gaze thrilling to meet. I knew the alien mind that lay behind it like my own. I had to look up to meet its eye, the same way a Dalek looked up at Thals and humans. It was part of the key to its psychology, that small hectoring thing ranting with tinny hysteria as it swung its eye-stalk up to scrutinise you.

The gauze grille around the head was easy to see through with the light behind it, making the casing look disturbingly hollow. I pulled at the sucker arm and it telescoped out and out. So far! A Dalek could reach out and grab you from right across a room.

It wouldn't need to, though. Because there was the gun. What an artefact of absolute perfection. A design that expressed alien violence, cell-smashing radiation, extermination. A device that would flip you like a negative and leave you without a spark of life. Oh, I wanted one.

The adults came back and one of them lifted the top off. The casing divided below the torso, the head and arm section coming away to reveal a plain wooden interior with a little seat.

"You could sit inside it," suggested Dad, but I didn't want that. I preferred the Dalek interior that I saw in my mind's eye: something small, vulnerable and fearful surrounded by electronics and armour, gazing out at the world through a screen. With a gun. With that gun.

"I'll make you one," said Dad as we drove home. I didn't even need to tell him. And, nearly a half century later, I realise I was the luckiest boy ever.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1456960 2012-04-30T19:00:00-04:00 2012-06-30T05:12:02-04:00

Dave Morris http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-morris/

The dumbing down started early for Frankenstein. Barely five years after Mary Shelley first sent her "hideous progeny" out into the world, Richard Brinsley Peake's stage play, Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein began the process of turning a complex psychological novel about the divided self into a crowd-pleaser with hunchbacks.

Taking their cue from Peake's version, later adaptations usually opt for a reading in which Victor Frankenstein is moustache-twirlingly evil, the woebegone monster just wants to be loved, and the whole thing is wrapped up in a science-gone-mad cautionary tale. Hence all those rifled graves, stitched body parts and creepy castles thrown in to provoke a cheap shudder.

Well, okay. Frankenstein is a work rich in possible meanings, so the horror-show interpretation is as valid as any. But when we consider the clue that Mary Shelley left for us in those words "a modern Prometheus", we might usefully dig a little deeper.

The Victor Frankenstein of the novel is a genius and a rebel, a Byron of the sciences. He descends into the belly of the beast, risking insanity and broken health to bring back a secret that gods have tried to keep from Man. The fire he finds is the means of creating life. If this is a tale of duality, then the man he makes is his own passionate, unruly, all-too-human side. Victor, by focussing too exclusively on the super-ego, dredges up his own monster from the id.

Some have said that Frankenstein is a story of a bad parenting giving rise to a troubled child. On the level of social metaphor, that's a reading to which Mary Shelley certainly would have given the nod. But there is more to a work of fiction than picking at the plot as if it were an account of real events. We could ask whether Holmes could have faked the whole existence of Moriarty, for instance, but a literal interpretation is not the ultimate point of good fiction. Moriarty is both an actual antagonist (in the "reality" of the story) and Holmes's alter-ego (in the story as a work of fiction).

Likewise in other media. To take another great tale of duality, Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt is not, within the universe of Thornton Wilder's screenplay, a literal demon conjured from Young Charlie's subconscious - though in fictive terms he's nothing but. It is the richness of literature (and cinema) that it allows for more than just a literal reading.

A well-written novel, the most immersive of all forms of storytelling, should command your full attention and belief. Yet, even while held by the spell of belief, you can appreciate the novel simultaneously on several levels: as a description (honest or otherwise) of the events of the plot; as insight into the characters' feelings and relationships; and, on a level beyond the plot seen as a make-believe reality, you can tune into the themes and resonances that the author has placed there that make it, not a mere account of events, but art.

In retelling Frankenstein in interactive form, I don't intend it as a replacement for the novel any more than Mrs Shelley intended her story to supplant Paradise Lost. Like a movie adaptation, this new version of the story emphasizes some aspects, downplays others. I've written it in a style that is necessarily "to the moment", and the interactivity certainly does pull you into the story. You may earn Victor's trust - or his disdain. He'll ask your advice, even if he may not take it. Either way, you're not just reading about a character. You've got a relationship.

Interactive storytelling emphasizes a personal connection with the characters. It is a powerful tool that can draw you so deeply into the world of a story that you lose sight of it as a story. You think you are there - at least, if it is done right. And therein lies a caveat, of sorts. When you're interacting directly with a character, your attention is going to be on what happens - the plot as imaginary reportage. You aren't looking for the authorial artifice, the iceberg of meaning beneath the events themselves.

So, by all means interact with Victor and his monster. It's a new thing under the sun, this, and how often do those come along? But don't leave it there. Also take a look at the narrative that was left behind in the wake of all your choices. There you have a unique, personal version of the text, created by your interaction with the narrative, that you can go back and read just like a traditional novel. The themes are all present - Mrs Shelley's, that is, not Mr Peake's. You just need to raise your view from the decision tree to see the whole forest of ideas that the author planted. And the potency of her original story, not the cackling hunchbacks and brains in jars, is the reason Frankenstein is likely to remain a bestseller for another two hundred years.]]>