Independent Games

As much as we've talked about the consolidation of mass media and its negative effects on community development, we haven't really covered another medium that is being consolidated at an alarming rate, that being the realm of videogames.

Ever since the videogame boom began in the mid-80's, there have been major players and minor players, development giants that dominate the market as well as smaller independent houses that quietly produce terrific games. Consolidation is often inevitable as smaller firms struggle to keep up with rising production costs, constantly evolving hardware, and a financial playing field where the market share does not gradually change but rather swings wildly, by as much as 30% between rival companies with the introduction of each new generation of gaming machine.

However, much of the time the larger production houses are focused on their bottom line rather than pushing the boundaries and imagination of gameplay, shelling out mediocre sequels to best-selling franchises, crappy movie tie-ins, and flashy shoot-em-ups rather than taking a chance on more innovative, less predictable game concepts.

Electronic Arts, for example, uses the same formula over and over again to great effect. Its Madden NFL franchises are best sellers every year, and its constant reinvention of its Need for Speed, Sim City/The Sims, and Command and Conquer franchises bring in a large portion of their revenue. However, many of these, particularly the sports properties, are based upon a model of yearly updates, wherein only rosters or small details are changed and the "new" game is sold at full price despite lack of innovation.

Big videogame corps have also been widely criticized for pushing out mediocre games based upon formerly sterling intellectual properties by buying smaller reputable development houses. Electronic Arts has claimed talent-rich development houses Bioware and Pandemic Studios, and recently tried for a buyout of Take Two Interactive, the parent company of Rockstar. Rockstar has singlehandedly produced some of the most controversial and groundbreaking games in the past decade, including the Grand Theft Auto series, Bully, and Manhunt, not to mention the recent masterpiece BioShock. Vivendi Universal recently acquired immensely successful Activision, which in turn had absorbed various smaller studios in its time.

Is this all bad news for videogames? I would say yes. The only benefit is that sometimes consolidation means saving talented yet faltering studios from blinking out of existence. But the greatest problem lies with the watering down of overall game quality. With only 2 or 3 parent companies overseeing all game development, a very homogenous production quality would soon emerge, as has already happened in the radio, music, and television industry.

But hope springs eternal on the internet, which serves as a new, worldwie testing ground and marketplace for many game studios still on training wheels. Development houses like The Behemoth for example. This small studio began as a few guys making flash games for the portal Newgrounds, which quickly gained popularity at very little cost to the developers, and soon they had a deal to produce their popular flash side scroller Alien Hominid for all major game platforms in 2004. The game is colorful, inventive a throwback to old-school shooters and beat-em-ups of the 80's and 90's. They got their start on the internet along with many other game studios, avoiding much of the costly publicity and production costs that often handicap small mainstream studios. The Behemoth is a sort of indie game icon, flying in the face of the flashy visuals, media hype, and repetitive publishing strategy of giants like EA.

Lots of other small development studios use the internet as a public forum to test and hype their games. They can blog about the development of the game and get direct feedback in a way that avoids and often surpasses costly focus testing conducted by larger studios.

Some will decide to release them for mainstream consoles, and some will choose to remain direct-downloads. Indie success stories like Crayon Physics and World of Goo, recent winners and finalists at the Independent Games Festival, are flourishing as direct downloads rather than going the console route (although they will eventually enter the console marketplace after establishing a strong digital fan base.)

It goes to show that while the console industry is still king (actually eclipsing the movie industry in revenue last year) the internet provides hope for independent developers who strive to create original, envelope-pushing properties without fear of being forced to accept a giant takeover.

The Behemoth
http://www.thebehemoth.com/

World of Goo
http://2dboy.com/games.php

Independent Gaming Source
http://www.tigsource.com/

Independent Games Festival
http://www.igf.com/

http://www.indiegames.com/

http://kloonigames.com/crayon/

Archive Fever

"Archive Fever," a current show at the International Center of Photography, includes "Front Page 9/12," a collection of 100 front page world newspapers from September 12, 2001. There is, in the caption on the wall identifying the artist as Hans-Peter Feldmann, from Dusseldorf, a phrase. Something to the effect of "revisiting not the event but its aftermath through its mediatized manifestations."

Better than all the 9/12 newspaper covers, whose purpose and critiques are hardly clear, is Harun Farocki’s and Andrei Ujica's Videograms of a Revolution -- "a montage drawn from 125 hours of amateur and professional archival video footage shot by journalists and ordinary people during the chaotic ten days of the Romanian Revolution in December 1990. The film not only refutes conventional models of media critique and theories of spectacle, it exploits the techniques of spectacle as a tool with which to construct a view of history."

- freddy

revised syllabus

389b. Alternative Media: Projects, Platforms and Networks Syllabus
This course explores films that are beyond the cineplex, radio broadcast by pirates in Yonkers, cell phone video operas, and other forms of communication in our wired and wireless world.

Course work will consist of weekly reports written in a class blog, a curatorial web video project, a mid term quiz on the readings and a final report due on Wednesday of Exam Week. There will be some external screenings and events required.

The required books are:
DeeDee Halleck, Hand-Held Visions, Fordham University Press
Geert Lovink, Zero Comments, Routledge Publishers

The recommended books are:
John Downing, Radical Media: Communication and Social Change, Sage
Clemencia Rodriquez, Fissures in the Mediascape, Hampton Press.

January 23 MEDIA RESISTANCE IN THE UNITED STATES
Screening: Paper Tiger Reads Paper Tiger
Reading Assignment: Hand-Held Visions First 4 sections (pp 3 - 186)
Radical Media: pp 299-324
Internet: www.papertiger.org, www.deepdishtv.org, www.deepdishwavesofchange.org

January 30 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA AROUND THE WORLD
Reading: Hand Held Visions next 2 sections (pp 186-283)
Screening:Herb Schiller Read the New York Times
Internet: www.fcc.gov, www.freepress.org, www.

February 6 PUBLIC ACCESS: MEDIA DEMOCRACY
Reading: Finish Hand-Held Visions (pp 286-430)
Guest via i-chat : Michael Eisenmenger
Internet: www.freepress.org, http://ourchannels.org
Reading: Autonomia

February 13 VIDEO HISTORY
Screening: Videofreex
Reading: First Proposal for initiating Democracy Now TV, Proposal for Indymedia

February 20 ALTERNATIVE NEWS
Screening: Democracy Now!, INDYMEDIA , The Real News, Alternet,
Jon Stewart, Laura Flanders and others.
Reading: Radical Media, John Downing Chapters 15
Reading: Geert Lovink Zero Comments, Chapter 4 pp 99-116
Internet: www.indymedia.org

February February 27 WHOSE BAND WIDTH? OUR BAND WIDTH!
Screening: Barn Raisings in Tennessee and Oregon
Reading: Prometheus Newsletter
Assignment: youTube/blip/blog curated projects Each student will curate 10 minutes of internet video and copy to a DVD-R disk or flash drive.

March 5 THE RADIO PIRATE OF YONKERS
Visitor: Joseph Paul Ferraro of WHVW (and former radio pirate)
Reading: Article about/by Ferraro
Internet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHVW
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9804E3D81F3CF931A2575BC0A9679C8B63&n=Top%2FReference%2FTimes%20Topics%2FSubjects%2FC%2FCorporations

March 12 , March 19 SPRING BREAK

March 26 MIDTERM Quiz/Discussion on Readings, Screenings of selected
youTube programs
LABOR AND MEDIA
Screening: The Lie Machine, film made by Coal Miners Union in the UK
Korean Labor News; youTube clips from Screen Writers Union Strike
Guest: Hye Jung Park, Director of Media Justice Fund, Funding Exchange
Reading: Geert Lovink Zero Comments, Chapters 6, 7, 8
Internet: www.itu.org, www.apc.org, www.amarc.org, www.crisinfo.org

April 2 INTERNATIONAL NETWORKS AND WSIS
Screening: Interviews from the World Summit on the Information Society
Reading: Zero Comments: Chapter 9, 10, 11
Guest: Elizabeth Press Screening: Still We Ride (about Critical Mass)
Internet: www.dictionaryofwar.org

April 9 PLATFORMS AND FORMATS
Screening: Dictionary of War, Sarai, Tetsuo Kogawa's Radio Homerun, Democracy Now! Gulf Crisis TV Project, Shocking and Awful
Reading: Micro Radio Article by Tetsuo Kogawa from Cultures in Contention.

April 16 DISTRIBUTED AESTHETICS
Screening: Mobi Opera: Shulea Cheang's cellphone extravaganzas
Adriene Jenik: Library Revolution
Internet: Game Industry Defense: http://gamepolitics.com/
Reading: Chapter from From Sun Tzu to X Box by Ed Halter

April 23 GAMES AND GAMERS
Reading: Ed Halter's blog http://warandvideogames.typepad.com/
Internet: Liberation Range-- http://dollyoko.thing.net//subtle/
Eddo Stern : http://www.eddostern.com/
Screening: Sheik Attack by Eddo Stern

April 30 MEDIA JUSTICE/MEDIA REFORM/MEDIA POWER
Screening: FCC hearings at Hyde Park, Excerpts from Media Reform Conference
Internet: freepress.org,Bill Moyers' speech: http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1112-10.htm

May 7 (Last Class)

May 14 Final Reports/projects due

May 20 Class Party/Screening

Vintage Satire

Sorry for the late post-had this up earlier on the site under a different blogger name initially.

Anyway, I find a lot of new media, particularly internet-based content lacking in substance. It seems that a lot of times authors, directors, and artists get caught up in the tricks of photoshop and iMovie (or FinalCut if you're dedicated) or audio editing and overlook the step of actually imbuing their creations with an original, interesting idea. Nowhere is this more evident than on YouTube, an extremely popular repository for parody videos, "funny" home accident videos, along with other attempts at humor often cheapened by overuse of star wipes, glitter, and the addition of bad music to hype up the video. Anyone can take a music video or coverage of a campaign speech and do a "funny remix" on youtube, like the spate of digital video copycats that resulted from the SNL shorts "Dick in a Box" or "Lazy Sunday". When so many seem to be substituting computer effects and editing tricks for real humor, I often find the greatest laughs from a decidedly low tech option: Married to the Sea, otherwise known as the "champagne of comics".

This little gem of a webcomic has provided me with laughs on a regular basis since I came across it last year. Every strip is an absurd story told with random illustrations, including victorian scenes and 70's instruction manual scenarios, which the author warps to his own twisted ends through the addition of simple Times New Roman style captions. He does some photoshop manipulation of the images to fit them in frame, but there is no alteration whatsoever beyond simply arranging them to tell a story. It often looks like the author has just ripped his illustrations out of some old textbook or airline safety card, erased a portion of it with the end of a number 2 pencil, and finally run it through an old typewriter to add his ridiculous commentary.

The whole presentation reminds me a lot of the DIY charm of the Paper Tiger TV video we watched in Alternative Media. I'm not sure if this actually constitutes "Alternative" (I'm not sure what that actually means at the moment either-perhaps soon), but it is certainly a rougher, more old-school (hah) option for your daily humor fix. I think for that reason it escapes the glut of parody videos and flash animation that constitutes a large part of mainstream internet humor.

The link is:
www.marriedtothesea.com

~Ben D

Class pictures