I was recently directed to “The Magus” by John Fowles. It’s a book that you’ll either love or hate, but its significance isn’t in its merit as a work of fiction. Many people on the outer rim of new media’s entertainment circles look to this book as the genesis of a new kind of theater. I’ll dive into this a little more in other writings, but for now let’s focus on the book’s take on things.
While the book calls it the “meta-theater” at one point and the “godgame” at another, the purpose is simply to destroy a person’s sense of what is real and what is not. On a certain level this can be fascinating as you unravel the web of lies and deceit in the quest to find something real or some purpose to it all.
This is accomplished via a variety of interactions with people pretending to be someone acting as someone who is pretending to be someone else. Every time you think you’ve discovered the “real” person, you’re in fact looking at a carefully crafted fictional character concealing yet another invented character. The hope is that you become emotionally attached to one or more of them, at which point they betray you, regain your trust, and betray you again.
Etcetera.
The twists and turns in the book are such that you will not be able to put the book down until you are finished. In part this is because every time you think you know where the story is going it veers off wildly in a new direction, compelling you to seek out the ending.
Unfortunately, the author felt that since the point of the whole thing is to leave a person with no sense of what anything means, he leaves the book up in the air in order to give the reader a proper sense of eternal bewilderment. Picture Romeo and Juliet, but with the curtain falling as Romeo discovers Juliet unconscious and is in the process of deciding to kill himself… but you never find out if he does, or what happens to Juliet.
Oh how droll. How avant-garde. How … completely disrespectful of your readers.
But I digress… the good, the bad, and the ugly of “The Magus” by John Fowles follows.
*SPOILER WARNING* – Do not read any further if you’d like to avoid having details of the book revealed.
Every time I see a picture of Nick (57 Miles in Second Life) he looks like a completely different person. I should make a gallery someday… “the many faces of Nick”. Something about the way the camera catches him.
Always good to see the boss-man get some well deserved press. The show is The Virtual Worlds BusinessCast and is a very tech-savvy media-savvy broadcast. 57 gets a chance to give the history behind Metaversed.com, the metamorphosis into Clever Zebra, and how we’re helping businesses make real headway in virtual worlds.
With the heart of new media being word-of-mouth, expect this movie to make some money. Just don’t be deceived into thinking that it’s unusually creative or has any particular merit as art. I’m not saying you won’t enjoy it, mind, just that “Shoot ‘Em Up” pretty much put the nail in the coffin of the “violence is fun” genre.
The only room left in the genre is for the true innovators. For instance, I give you “Battle Royale“.
7th graders forced to kill one another for the sake of cultural balance isn’t exactly for the timid either, but at least the trailer sells the story. You get an interesting choice with Battle Royale: either enjoy it for its sheer mayhem and “wrongness”, or enjoy it for the profound statements it makes about society and the individual. The difference is that good art gives you the choice, and says more about the people watching it than it does about anything else.
I don’t usually blog about work here but this was just too sweet not to comment on. Clever Zebra’s first big project, “Zebra Corporate”, released version 0.1 yesterday. There’s me and Lordfly hanging out on stage, answering questions about GPLv3, open source, and the worthiness of giving out something and encouraging people to make it their own.
Now, I’m not a builder. Neither am I an artist. In fact, beyond rezzing cubes and rectangles, I’m totally baffled at how Lordfly does what he does. Having said that, I managed to create some pretty fun versions of the amphitheater with very little effort. Here are some examples:
I discovered that this is what happens when you highlight everything and just change the color. Alright… maybe I won’t do that again. The beauty of it though is that I can just delete the whole thing and re-rez it. No worrying about non-copyable scripts or objects or any of that nonsense.
Next step was to make a dark version. The light gray looks nice, but I wanted something that looked a little more dramatic. I’m a big fan of good lighting too, so I played with that a bit. It has a club feel, doesn’t it? I really liked this one but it was only 5 minutes of work, so I deleted it too. I can re-create it pretty quickly if I ever need to.
It was at this point that I discovered the Torley Linden texture pack that had been kicking around in my inventory. Welcome to Club Watermelon! I spent some time playing with the “Glow” setting in the Windlight client for this one. Again, too easy to re-create, so I wiped it… which will probably relieve a great number of people I’m sure.
The thing is, I don’t even know what I’m doing and I was able to create some pretty interesting spaces. I can’t wait to see what happens when someone with talent gets their hands on this thing!
Launches Saturday night. I got a sneak peek from Dizzy Banjo the other day. This is not an exaggeration: Parsec is the most staggering audio / visual interactive experience in Second Life. Period.
Wouldn’t you know it, my weekend is jammed… but as soon as I can I’ll have some machinima up here. Meanwhile, you can click the image above. It’s my current wallpaper.
Every time I see a picture of Nick (57 Miles in Second Life) he looks like a completely different person. I should make a gallery someday… “the many faces of Nick”. Something about the way the camera catches him.
