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Tag Archive for Writing

Still beating my head against the wall of understanding…

February 17, 2010 People, Videogames, Writing Comments Off on Still beating my head against the wall of understanding…

See, now I’m stuck on this subject.  I really want to understand just *what* it is about our industries that makes us so “different”.  A number of the game people I talk to say “on, no, we have nothing in common with the movie industry” and many of the literary people I talk with say “no, we don’t have anything in common with games”.  The movie people, well they don’t talk much, I leave a lot of voice messages for them.

In all three cases, the initial idea, the primary concept, starts with a single creative type.  For this example, I am going with Game Designer, the Author or the Screenwriter.  In all 3 industries the core idea can come from a producer/editor/agent/actor/programmer or some place else, but there is almost always a single entity at the start of the project.

That person develops the idea, they pitch it, they bring in people to create content to prove the worthiness of the project.  Then they either sell the idea (to a game publisher/book publisher/film studio) for production or they put together their own team and go indie.

In all three cases, this is around the point at which the single entity goes to a “team” dynamic.  A film or TV show acquires writers/storyboarders/concept artists/designers.   A Game acquires writers/storyboarders/concept artists/designers.  A Book acquires an editor/jacket artist/proofreader/marketing guru.

Strangely enough, in a “middle-of-the-road” situation, it seems to take almost the same amount of time for all three types of projects to get completed.  An average (no, not AAA like Bioshock2) game takes about 2 years to hit the shelves.  An average TV show seems to take about 2 years to pilot, produce, find a timeslot, etc.  An average book seems to take about years to get edited, proofed, typeset, designed and printed, etc.

In all three cases we have 1. An idea guy/gal.  2.  A publisher/Producer who fronts the money to make it happen.  3. A team of people who make it a reality.

In all three cases you can have that idea bought or taken away from the creator, run through a committee or “focus group” and churned out as something completely different from what went in (though I think this may be harder in Lit, where the single creator keeps a hand in through the entire process).

In all three cases, you have the money-fronting entity taking the lion’s share of the revenue.

In all three cases you have a “team” that needs to be paid above and beyond what the original creative type negotiated for their share.

In all three cases we are looking at the buying and selling of an idea.  Of a story.  Of an IP rather than a single, concrete physical product (though a the end of the process the IP has been turned into some sort of warehouseable products).

In all three cases you have the money-fronting entity trying to own the entire IP across all types of media (film, TV, Lit, Game, video, etc. etc.) in exchange for fronting the money.

So it seems the devil (as it so often is) is in the details.  Do the differences lie in the structure of the organizations?  The way the deals are cut?  The distribution and marketing?  Am I missing some crucial detail here?  If you know, post away!  I’m asking these things (and blogging away) because I genuinely want to see what everyone else seems to be seeing.

Hall of mirrors…

November 12, 2009 Writing Comments Off on Hall of mirrors…

 

I am and have been a lot of things in my life already.  Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy…  I’ve had the opportunity, and occasionally *taken* the opportunity to try things I would never have done had I been properly sane, and even the most tragic of accidents has proven to be the seed of something I could put to use in some capacity or another.  It’s odd now that I’m looking down the barrel of something that has always been a secret fear, except I am seeing it mirrored in the work of another artist.

Art, whether it be painted, digital, written, printed, typed, mixed in a test-tube or spun on a turntable is inherently referential.  When you create a piece, it is the sum of your experiences, the left hand twist to the brush you use because you learned to paint on a 3×5 palette in your lap, the irrepressible use of commas in your writing because that’s the cadence you hear in your head as you type.  You use blue because the ocean was blue the first time you slammed your surfboard into the rocks, or the rotting feel of green makes your teeth itch.  I like to follow the career of artists and writers.  I never buy the first in a series of books, I never look just at the most recent museum offering.  I am interested in the evolution over time, like reading Matt Wagner comics from the original Comico version of Grendel through Mage and into the Arielist.  You can watch the growth, the inclusion of experience as time goes by.  Sometimes it is the lightening of a black depression, sometime it is the revelation of life experience, but there is almost always a change.

One of things that I have always worried about is the degree of revelation, that more of me will show in a piece than I really want out there.  That someone will point and laugh and that will be the end, anything else the piece might have to say is lost.

All this is coming around to the fact that I just finished reading Elegy Beach, hard on the tail of actually getting to meet the author, Steven Boyett at the La Jolla Writer’s (www.lajollawritersconference.com/ljwc)  conference this past weekend.  For perhaps the first time ever, I got the opportunity to meet the voice behind the text.  And an interesting thing happened.  As I worked my way through the journey of our old and new cast members, there were moments, revelations when that voice, not the narrator, not character A or character B, but rather Boyett’s voice itself became evident and shone through.  It was an interesting look at something I had not taken into account in the evolution of a body of work, primarily because I haven’t had the chance to meet many of the creators of the works I fancy.

There had always been a bit of a buffer there, the supreme confidence that no one would *really* be able to see mirrors of me in my characters, that my experiences would translate through as an amalgam, rather than as a clear voice.  That I was just being paranoid (which is not at all uncommon) and that as long as I stayed at arms length, no one would ever really be able to see *me* in there.  But now I find myself looking though my pieces, both game related and written, looking for similarities to be excised.

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