52!!

I am most impressed with the latest DC "Let's remake the universe" storyline - 52

I haven't read comics regularly since they killed the "Young Justice" series, but I am way addicted to this one.

It's like a comic book version of "24" but with superheroes and all those trappings, wherein there is a new issue every week, the events happen in real time as best they can for a comic book (i.e. the latest issue references that last Sunday was Father's Day), and they are doing a bang up job of really analyzing what would happen to the rest of the world if all these crazy events happened and dealing with the characters lives in a realistic manner.And (also much like 24) they have a really cool website done up like a "Daily Planet" website that has lots of cool goodies and clues to keep you guessing at what's going to happen next.

I'm digging it. Go check out the comics, as Christian Johnson has observed they could certainly use the support. And if you haven't read one in awhile I highly recommend you pick up the Infinite Crisis storyline while you are at it. It will keep you from wondering what the crap is going on, as well as entertain you with it's well plotted storyline and character development.

The Lake House and Me

My thoughts about the movie The Lake House are very similar to those of Roger Ebert who enjoyed the film and gives it a nice review. My wife and I had been looking forward to seeing this film ever since we say il Mare, the Korean film The Lake House is based on, early last year. We very much enjoyed the film's premise of "writing through time" and any attempt to tell an epistolic tale in the visual medium is a remarkable exercise. We all know letters aren't truly conversational, and in making the letter writing conversational both the Korean and the US film cheat, but it is neat to think of a romance that develops separated by time. The reference in the American version to Jane Austen's Persuasion is apropos.

The only real complaint my wife and I had regarding the American adaptation was the choice of dog they used in the film. The dog in the Korean version was just perfect and had the right balance of cute and vulnerable. Besides that, it reminded Jody and me of our own lost personification of love Oreo.

Which reminds me, the best line in Ebert's review is, "Dogs live outside of time, don't you think?" I would add that in the film's The Lake House and il Mare love exists out of time, and that dogs as personifications of love do as well.

You Never Know What to Expect in Los Angeles

On Saturday my wife and I went to a graduation party for Cathy Seipp's daughter Maia. Actually the party had a two fold purpose. The first was to celebrate Maia's graduation from high school and admission to UC San Diego. The second was to celebrate Cathy beating the odds in her battle against lung cancer and being able to witness her daughter's graduation. Cathy is one of the bright lights in Los Angeles. She is a Southland conservative who has friends across the political spectrum and sometimes her friends bring interesting guests.

At this particular occasion, you can imagine my befuddlement to be at a party on a sunny afternoon in Los Angeles when who should arrive? Ann Coulter?! Whuh?



I was certain, given her pale skin and dread aura, that she was a vampire and incapable of being out during the day. But as it turns out when I shook her hand, after being introduced, I did not gain the expected two negative levels. She was very accessible and had a long discussion with Southland liberal blogger Joseph from Martini Republic. It isn't often one gets to meet a professional provocateur, so I leapt at the chance to see if she was always "on" or if she saved being "in character" for high profile events. As it turns out she had a disarming self-effacing humor. She joked about how her ideal telvision role would be a murder victim on the Fox show 24. She laughed at both how much "liberals" would enjoy seeing her corpse and how much the press would eat it up.

LYT described her reception by observing, "It's funny how there are people here who have probably used all kinds of invective to describe her, yet immediately wanted to talk to her."


photos compliments and © Emmanuelle Richard

My wife tried to talk me into having my picture taken with her, as did LYT, but I only agreed to have one taken with my back to her pretending to be so cool that I could keep my back turned to one of the most divisive personalities in the modern day. If only Michael Moore had been there too, then my head would have exploded.

In case you were wondering, while I didn't gain two negative levels (as expected) I do believe I had to make a Will save, a Fortitude Save, and took somewhere in the realm of 1d8+5 damage. All of which explains the sunglasses Coulter was wearing.

As Swashbuckling Movie Fan and Shark Bytes 50 Fathoms Editor

I would be remiss if I didn't post this...

SciFi Network Picks Up Wizard Private Eye Series

The SciFi network has picked up 11 episodes of a series based on the "hardboiled" Wizard PI Harry Dresden. The best-selling series of novels by Jim Butcher are a combination of Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy series and Dashiell Hammett. My wife and I have been reading the novels and have found them to be very enjoyable, though Butcher sometimes overdoes the "hardboiled" writing. As I read aloud the words before we go to bed I sometimes feel like I am Kirk Douglas in Ace in the Hole. The first novel is a little clumsy, but written in a good pulpy spirit.

If you look very carefully at the upfront video, you can see some clips from the show. You can read some of the reaction on the Jim Butcher website here.

According to the press release, the show is being produced by Nicholas Cage's Saturn Films production company and Cage seems excited about the series and the inclusion of Paul Blackthorne in the titular role. Cage stated, "Norm and I feel that Paul's passion for the part and talent will translate into a charismatic performance." The show is being distributed by Lion's Gate entertainment and will air on the SciFi channel in January.

Conan Movie News

According to ICV2, the Hollywood Reporter has announced that a new Conan movie is not only back on track, but it appears also has a director lined up. The movie is slated to be a live action film and it appears that Warner want to "stick closer to the Howard" source material than the two existing Conan films.

What exactly the above means can only be guessed at, but the director slated for the film is Boaz Yakin. On the plus side is the fact that Yakin directed Remember the Titans an entertaining if prozaic film, and wrote and directed Fresh starring Samuel L. Jackson (a very good film). On the negative side is the fact that Yakin wrote the Dolph Lundgren Punisher movie, the Charlie Sheen film The Rookie. He also directed Uptown Girls and was Executive Producer on Hostel. Looking at this past work doesn't really give me a vision of what to look for regarding what Yakin's Conan will look like.

My hope is that the film will encorporate more of the weird elements of the Conan tales and depict the young Cimmerian in as human a fashion as Howard's stories. Conan may be preternaturally proficient with weapons, but in the stories he has a heavy superstitious streak as well.

Will Conan be young or old? Let's hope old. My favorite stories are of King Conan and not the younger one. Though Queen of the Black Coast is fun.

A Quick Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG) Q&A with Matt Forbeck

I play a lot of games. I don't necessarily claim to be a "gaming expert" or "expert gamer," but I definitely consider myself a fan of games in multiple media. In fact, I like games (as well as movies, literature, philosophy, and comics) so much that I am surprised when a type of game has existed without my knowledge. I don't mean that I overlooked a particular game that people play. I am certain that happens all the time. One only has so much time and thus can only be exposed to so many different games. I mean an actual type of game. But when I read Matt Forbeck's entry titled Clothes Make the Game, that is exactly what occured. Matt was talking about a type of game I didn't know existed, or I hadn't made the connection that it exists. I didn't know there was a such thing as an Alternate Reality Game.

An Alternate Reality Game (ARG) is defined by the Alternate Reality Gaming Network as:

Alternate Reality Gaming is, according to CNET, "...an obsession-inspiring genre that blends real-life treasure hunting, interactive storytelling, video games and online community...

"These games are an intensely complicated series of puzzles involving coded Web sites, real-world clues like the newspaper advertisements, phone calls in the middle of the night from game characters and more. That blend of real-world activities and a dramatic storyline has proven irresistible to many."

These games (which are usually free to play) often have a specific goal of not only involving the player with the story and/or fictional characters but of connecting them to the real world and to each other. Many game puzzles can be solved only by the collaborative efforts of multiple players, sometimes requiring one or more players to get up from their computers to go outside to find clues or other planted assets in the real world.

One such game, and maybe the most famous was The Beast an interactive advertising game designed for the movie A.I. where perceptive viewers found clues to a mystery. More on that below. There are many others, and I guess I had a hint that such things might exist when I discussed the phone number on the show Supernatural. I noticed they gave out a real phone number, called the number, but didn't explore to see if there was a game. There might just be, as I have explored their website more thoroughly and unlocked things I hadn't known were there. But the number is no longer active, likely do to the uncertain status the show had with the WB/UPN merger. Though that tension has been resolved. Another time I encountered a possible ARG was when I read David Blaine's book Mysterious Stranger which advertised a contest where readers who solved puzzles could win money. I didn't try my hand at the time as I was stressed about life enough at the time, but it seems I might have missed a fun opportunity. And recently I went to the website for Stranger Than Fiction which has more interactivity than I would expect without some "gaming" element.

With the advent of ARGs, it appears that games can happen anywhere and at anytime. With this knowledge, I asked Matt Forbeck, a game designer who did some work on The Beast, some questions in the hopes of writing an article. Time has conspired against me integrating his quotes into background for a more detailed article, so I will post the coversation here (my comments are in bold).

1) Where does the name "Alternate Reality Game" come from and how does it,
in your opinion, describe the phenomenon?

I'm not sure where the term sprang from, but I think it does a fair job of pinning a label to that sort of game. It can conjure up images of things like Deadlands, which is set in an alternate reality, but I think most people who learn a little about ARGs can recognized them for what they are.

2) Other than the Beast, the AI ARG, what are some of the more successful
ARGs?

ilovebees (for Halo), Dead Hand Poker (for Gun), Perplex City (a new CCG/puzzle/ARG from the UK).


3) Hecatomb had an ARG, which I was unaware of at the time, how does one go
about trying to find/identify extant ARGs?

It's hard sometimes. The Beast was designed to be viral from the start. The only way you would know about it is if you spotted a strange credit in the original AI trailer for Jeanine Salla, Sentient Machine Therapist. A web search popped up Salla's website, and from there you fast became embroiled in the game.

ARGN.com is a good source for details on ARGs, both new and old. Otherwise, the best thing to do is keep your ear to the ground and keep listening for something odd.


4) In your discussions with Sean Stewart, etc., did the old "Choose Your Own
Adventure" or "Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks" ever come up as an influence on
the construction of ARGs?

I worked very little with Sean. Pete Fenlon (formerly of ICE, now of Castle Hill Studios) directed most of my work. I think the analogy to those sort of pick-a-path adventures is clear. However, the Beast had a specific ending that the fans were meant to reach: solving the murder of Jeanine Salla.


5) What types of prizes are offered, if any, in a typical large ARG?

It varies from game to game. Perplex City offers a $200,000 prize. With the Beast, players were invited to early screenings of the AI film and given special movie posters that had their handles printed on them. I have mine framed in my office still.


6) What is your personal ARG design philosophy? By which I mean what types
of "game mechanics" do you think are most appropriate?

It changes with regards to the property involved. Puzzles always seem to play a big part in such games, as does mystery. It's great to come up with enough substance to your alternate reality to give it the verisimilitude such worlds require too.

There often aren't mechanics as such. With the Beast, for instance, the players kept solving things faster than the team could come up with them, so a lot of development was done on the fly. As Jordan Weisman once said, "It's like running a roleplaying game for 50,000 of your closest friends."


7) What role did you play in the creation of the Beast?

I wrote design documents for a bunch of the websites, including—in most cases—the full text. Most of these were the background sites that added to the game's sense of reality. I also helped out with some of the bit games tossed in, including a cell phone game I'm told only appeared in Japan.


8) What do you think are the long term implications, say the Lost "novel",
in terms of marketing opportunities for the RPG industry? In other words,
could Wizards create a d20 Modern ARG to accompany an animated or live
action show which also supplemented their own campaign supplements? How
would they go about communicating the existence/interaction of the ARG to
the PnP game?

The trick is that a great ARG requires a huge audience. In the RPG arena, only Wizards has a good hope of drawing in such a group. A smaller crew might be able to pull something like this off, but a good ARG is expensive to deploy and maintain.

In the past, most of them have been executed as marketing tools, not revenue generators, although Perplex City aims to change all of that. I'm watching their progress with great interest.

Getting people who already know about Dungeons & Dragons to try an ARG affiliated with it wouldn't be too hard. Most of the time, though, ARGs are meant to generate a huge buzz for the introduction of a new product/film/game. D&D is already established, so I don't know that an ARG would fit it all that well.

As for things like the Lost novel, Wizards did something like that last year when it published Three-Dragon Ante, which is meant to be a card game that characters might play in a fantasy world. I don't know if it brought in any new players that way, but it was a cool idea, and I hear it's a solid game too.

So, are you just picking my brain, or is this for your website? If not, I think it might be fun to run this Q&A on my site instead. If you'd like it for Cinerati, though, no sweat. Just let me know when you post it, and I'll put up a link on my site too.

Great questions, by the way. If you have more, just let me know.


A part of me is excited about the viral nature of these games, but another part is resistant to praise anything that creates an “insider” vs. “outsider” phenomenon. For example, with the AI thing, I had never heard of the Beast. I think it is a great idea, but I never noticed the obscure credit and so I was out of the loop. So now I feel like an outsider trying to catch up.

These all tend to be event-based games, and if you miss the event, you can't do much more than read about it afterward. Still, the event is one of the big draws of the games, so I don't know if anyone will ever want to separate that out.