Gaming needs a new controller

I’ve played games across every conceivable platform - from classic TV sports consoles in the late 70s and early 80’s, and the beginnings of home computer gaming with the Microbee, Vic20 and C64, through numerous nintendo and sega consoles, to my modern custom built pixel-hurling, tweaked and modded PC rigs and current generation media-centre consoles. (not to mention soft-core gaming on smartphone and tablet)

 

But from this diversity and history I have to come to a conclusion. Console Control pads are an abomination and the keyboard and mouse has nothing more than a niche future. 

 

Video gaming needs a new controller.  

Lets be clear - the console Gamepad is just plain WRONG and it is holding gaming back in a lowest-common-denominator mire of tedium.

The modern gamepad really offers nothing more than the arcade joy-sticks of old. Conceptually it has progressed game immerisve control not at all. of course, the joystick was once-upon-a-time the perfect control solution; but its simplistic elegance was tied directly to 2D top-down and side-scrolling interfaces. By extension the gamepad is a perfectly viable choice to control racing games, isometric and 2D games but for 3D perspective games, it is entirely clumsy and absurd. It’s position as the default interface for the modern console was arrived at simply through habit and legacy, NOT from any form of design solution process. Not from a considered investigation into what might be a logical and effective way to control a gameplay point of view in a 3D space. 

 

This is not a PC vs Console nerd-argument but a simple fact; keyboard and mouse following the classic WASD configuration is far and away the most accurate - and indeed logical - way to manipulate first or third-person perspective in a 3D virtual game space. Certainly we can give numerous reasons for this but its easiest just to point to all the 3D game mechanics that are needed by, and exist only on consoles, which are nothing more than desperate attempts to work around the short-comings of clumsy and inaccurate gamepad manipulation.

 

Cover-based shooting, for example, is entirely unnecessary on a PC with mouse and keyboard. Cover-based shooting was developed as way to make shooter action coherent and physically feasible to less than expert players using a gamepad. Cover-based shooting means the player does not have to manipulate the unwieldy and clumsy pair of sticks in opposing spatial constructs just to be able to see and shoot. Cover based shooting dilutes 3D shooters from spatial navigation and immersion, to the banality of an arcade pop-up duck-shoot gallery.  

 

We might also look at aim-assist and target lock-on which are also concepts that virtually did not exist on the PC but which are absolutely necessary to make a first-person shooter on console even remotely enjoyable. Aiming a cross hair with a thumb movement in a half-inch high joystick is the very epitome of tedious - an epic failure of design to fulfil a function. 

The history of 3D gaming also tells us much about the more organic and intuitive nature of keyboard and mouse control over gamepad. Consider that the modern 3D era arrives with the seminal First Person Shooters such as Doom and Wolfenstein. The natural and original home of these games is on the PC with keyboard and mouse. The first person shooter was specifically designed for keyboard and mouse control. The success of this WASD paradigm was that it understood that, despite 3D game space, the controls themselves still needed to operate on 2D planes in order to function on a 2D screen. Controlling FPS POV is the self same control as manoeuvring a mouse pointer on screen in Windows whilst adding a horizontal plane with through WASD.

 

I have several times run classes on games and gaming for non-gamers - introducing game genres, mechanics and narratives to digital-immigrants who have never really played before. The evidence for the absurdity of the gamepad for 3d games is evident in these scenarios where total newbies could go some way to effectively manoeuvring first and third person games on PC in the space of a less than an hour. But doing the same on console was impossible, demanding many more hours just to be able to coordinate two thumbs to move and look independently.  

 

From it’s birth on Keyboard and mouse  3d gaming took off in popularity and the consoles of course wanted in. But here in lies the problem. Whilst Mouse and Keyboard is by far a superior control mechanic for 3d games either first or third person - more fluid, more logical more subtle and more accurate, you do have to be sitting at a desk…!

 

The console lives in the living room, is more physically social, and you can chill on your couch. It’s a more relaxed and inclusive form of gaming and hence the PC gamer being regulated to a hardcore niche whilst the console dominates the mainstream. 

 

Despite the obvious failings of the console game controller for many contemporary game forms, the answer is alas, Not to bring keyboards and mice into the lounge room if you want a better, more accurate and immersive gameplay experience. You can’t use a keyboard and mouse on the lounge. But the gamepad is surely not the answer either. 

 

The gamepad as we know it is a great big boat anchor around games and game innovation. The keyboard and mouse gave games precision and spatial dexterity. The gamepad traded these in for lounge room real estate and a casual experience. Neither is satisfactory and neither is helping gaming develop.

 

Many in the games industry seem to think motion controls are the solution to the two problems - the insularity of the Keyboard mouse and the clumsiness of the gamepad…. But im highly dubious of motion controls as they currently stand.

 

I find myself in whole-hearted agreement with yahtzee of Zero Punctuation who observes that whilst motion controls can be fun, popular and social they are NOT (as too often championed) more ‘immersive’. In fact quite the opposite. Immersive means to feel immersed in a fictive situation (the game) to the point where your awareness of the real space you are in and it’s real world distractions are temporally suspended. To be immersed is to forget yourself and your surroundings.

A Wii controller being swung, friction and weightless, in your living is the opposite of immersion. They remind me constantly of the room i am in, they take my mind out of the game and into the room where i am playing the game. This is NOT immersive.

What we need is something else. The gamepad is clumsy and awkward, keyboard and mouse is niche and isolating. Motion controllers negate what is, for me, the very reason to game - to be lost in a world and escape to another place.

I don’t know what this new controller looks like or how it works. someone one day will. In the meantime I will continue to play most 3d games for a truly immersive game experience on PC and live with my isolation from the living room.

 

 

Underwater

Being on holidays i had the rare opportunity to shoot and edit something just for fun. No story, no complexity, no crew, no reason. Just documenting my recent scuba dives around Sydney.

And now back to work….

Breaking Bad and the 99%

Sometime back I wrote a post entitled “Breaking Bad, The Dramatic Cauldron and why no other country bu the USA could have made this show”

Aside from exploring how utterly superb the show is I noted that the  deftly constructed dramatic pressures of the breaking Bad storyworld are pressures that in the Western world ONLY  exist in the USA. 

And this image saids it all.

It would be dramatically impossible to set Breaking Bad pretty much anywhere else in the Western World because only in America it seems is the absence of a socialised health system celebrated as a virtue of national values… But perhaps its a fair trade swapping universal health care for bloody great TV drama…?

Transcending Plot

For all my love of narrative and story complexity, there are times when spectacle, beauty and the purity of the image just seam to transcend causality, plot and character. Sometimes I forget how moved, effected and inspired i can be by simple documentaries about interesting people in interesting circumstances. Watching my wife lately produce a set of short-form doco’s, museum projects and motion graphic images has made me want to pick up a camera rather than pick up a script. 

The rise and appeal of episodic stories

 The rise of what’s being called the New Golden Age of TV is more than just a collection of high profile shows from US cable. Certainly HBO, and those that have followed suite, have proven that sophisticated long-form episodic series and serials can attract both critical acclaim and long-tail profitability. But the bigger picture of Episodic Storytelling on Screen goes well beyond cable subscription TV. 

 

On one hand the shifting and booming infrastructure of online delivery and IPTV provides enormous opportunity in a space that was traditionally dominated by a fixed program schedule of timeslots and thus limited audiences. Content is Capital and the traditional technology companies (such as ISP’s, search engine developers and the like) realize that bandwidth and engagement are their only commodities. And the only way to sell those commodities is with rich content.

 

But aside from the critical mass of screens, revenue streams and the diversification of what were traditionally ‘broadcast’ modes there is something much more human at play. Long-form episodic stories create a level of deep engagement with character and storyworld that - by virtue of sheer lengths of time measured in seasons rather than minutes, hours rather than ad-breaks – engage viewers proactively in a way that feature films rarely can. If the modern episodic series it the screen equivalent of the Novel (as surely shows like The Wire and Deadwood must be regarded), then feature film narratives are analogous to little more than short stories. And it’s the breadth, length and depth of novel-like stories that are driving the popular discourse of modern audiences. Water cooler conversations are no longer about the latest theatrical release, but rather the swapping of DVD boxed-sets and the debate over what will happen next on Breaking Bad..?

And if we step back just a little we can see a much bigger picture of what Episodic Storytelling is… The core idea is simply Stories told in Pieces, metered out over time. And in that context there’s a whole range of Episodic Stories outside the TVesque model. Most narrative computer games are episodic in nature, designed to be consumed and returned to in doses. Transmedia and multi-platform projects are by nature episodic. And what unities these forms is the crucial idea of a Returnable Element - that thing that prompts us to return, that keeps us coming back. it might a plot cliff-hanger and a ‘what happens next?’ dramatic question; it might be a character that we come back to spend more time with; it might even just be an idea or a way of feeling. The articulation of compelling returnable elements is the backbone of episodic narratives and the more clearly a creator can articulate, define and energise their returnable element, the more compelling and complex the experience will be. 

 

There is nothing new about episodic storytelling and the same forces that drove Dickensian readers to buy chapters form street vendors of Great Expectations or of ancient aural cultures to gather to hear installments of The Odyssey.

 

Audiences of episodic content and the intuitions that create, deliver, study and teach episodic content are quickly moving in this direction; not only at the high-end of broadcast cable drama but also across the independent spectrum of online web-series - which are arguably becoming the new proving ground for aspiring filmmakers once dominated by short-films and festivals. Below are collection of links and articles that speak to both business and audience imperatives and trajectories in episodic storytelling. And in the WebTVResource page of this site you find a lareg collection of resouecs articles and commentary on the topic of emerging WebTV networks and content. 

Are films bad or is TV just better?

 

Google’s Big Video Push Is Here: YouTube Getting More Than 100 New Channels

 

AMC Launches AMC Digital Studios 

 

Independent production fund Canada. Webseries development

 

Who needs TV networks?

 

As TV becomes more accessible to students via the network, networks are using the “webisode” to meet this demand.

 

Investing in the Future of Video: YouTube Announces Partner Grant Program

 

Buckle up: Traditional TV is in for a heck of a ride

 

AOL drops big bucks on original web video

 

TV on the Web: Q&A with blip.tv’s Dina Kaplan

 

Tom Hanks is Making a Web Series, ‘Electric City’

 

Web TV is just waiting to click

 

Storyworlds & Big things to come

Very excited to be working with Julian Mcrea and Portal Entertainment in 2012; creators of The Craftsman… Very big things in the works. Watch this space….

And you have just over 1 week left to get your entries into our Immersive Writing Labs STORYWORLD Writing Competition. One lucky writer will have the opportunity to win 6k to see their storyworld developed by Portal Entertainment. 

GoPro cameras and Underwater Perspective

I’ve owned and used a lot of cameras over many years. Big-ones, little-ones, medium-sized ones. Cameras have always intrigued, excited and empowered me. And for a long time it was size and scale that drove those emotions. Bigger, more complex, more expensive was equated to greater creative possibilities. But a few weeks ago (rather late to the party) I purchased a GoPro and I can honestly say that I haven’t been this excited about a camera in a long time. It’s small, simple and cheap but what it embodies - that far outweighs its image fidelity shortcomings - is Possibility.

As soon as you hold this tiny camera no bigger than 2 match-boxes and gather the assortment of suction cups, clamps and mounts that accompany it, your mind immediately spills into a landscape of image potential. Strange, wondrous, absurd places you could stick it… Creative, dynamic, kinetic perspectives it might capture. All the the DSLR’s F3’s and RED’s in the world will, of themselves, prompt your creative imagination no further than how sharply you can rack-focus and how pixel-dense your image can be. But pick up a GoPro and you immediately stop thinking about framing and focus, and instead start imagining in terms of Space, Motion and Perspective. Hence I feel compelled to suggest that the most ‘cinematic’ camera released in the past few years is NOT an F3, or a 5D, its not a RED Epic or an Alexa, It’s the GoPro. The word Cinema derives from Kine meaning motion. The GoPro is the one camera I have picked up in many years that immediately makes me want to Move and to think in Kinetic dynamics.

It’s also a great camera to document a scuba dive. Its not the best underwater camera owing to a curved housing lens (flat works better to account for light refraction in water) But, its the perfect, hassle-free way to document a dive. I just strap it to my wrist, press record on the surface and capture the entire dive in one long take. 

This dive was at Shelly Beach, Manly - a location right round the headland from Sydney Harbour. Not many places can boast such great diving right within a major city metropolis . Wobegong sharks, eastern blue Gropers, giant Cutlefish, Stingrays and a back flipping Numbfish. A great dive with Dive Centre Manly divesydney.com. 

Marriage Equality and the Power of the Screen

Not sure if my pride in this superb film stems form the fact that it might just make a difference or that it was made by some of my former students who demonstrate that they may have indeed learned something about the nexus of craft, concept, voice, emotion and narrative.

This short film is profound, moving and most of all Human.

We’ve removed discrimination from our hearts — now it’s time to remove it from our laws. Join the campaign for marriage equality.

Reflection on WebSeries Development Programme

In recent posts I have spruked two webseries projects that came out of the WebSeries development programme I ran this year at AFTRS with my colleague Karen Pearlman. I feel enormous pride in the work that came out of this program and the process we engaged of focusing on iterative, drafting development centred on the series bible and storyworlds. The program ran throughout 2011 with a select group of candidates and as it has drawn to close I’m prompted to reflect back upon the impetus for the program in the first place.

Earlier this year I gave a presentation at the Screen Futures conference hosted by the Australian Teachers Of Media (ATOM) in Melbourne, Australia. The title of the presentation was “OnScreen Drafts, Development and Episodic WebTV” and in it I outline the thinking that went into the programme, what questions it was seeking to answer and what solutions we were hoping to arrive. I’m pleased to say that in hindsight of the programme’s completion it it feels like we found some grounded truth the speculations we proffered. 

Click HERE to download the audio recording (right+click, save as…)

The presentation that covers these topics:

- The problematic nature of the short-film > feature-film model

- The power of episodic patterns

- Transmedia as Adaptation

- Onscreen drafting and prototyping 

- Industry calling-cards and permission culture

- New technologies, New processes

- Evolution NOT Revolution

- Audience-focused development

- The virtues of the Web-Series

- Returnable Elements and Patterns of Closure

- Series Development Bibles

- Web Series myth-busting

Newtown Girls Webseries

The Newtown Girls is the second of the WebSeries projects to emerge from our WebSeries development program at AFTRS that I oversaw through 2011. Developed by showrunner Natalie Krikowa, the series brings a fresh angle to the search for love in the inner city. It also happens to be set in my own neighborhood of Newtown - the very heart and soul of Sydney. The perfect place to set a sharply written, funny and moving protrayal of modern love. 

The Newtown Girls is a 8 episode webseries created to entertain and engage online audiences and explore the foibles of love and friendship - experiences common to everyone! Although it revolves around lesbian characters, their trials and triumphs are universal and transcend sexual orientation. The Newtown Girls was created with the intent to depict lesbian relationships in a more realistic and comedic way. It does not overtly preach political opinions or rehash the usual ‘coming out’ stories that dominate queer storytelling. The Newtown Girls looks at situations that arise when you go looking for love and how you often end up finding love where you least expect it!

Scarlet is our social experiment and she embodies all of our insecurities and flaws. She thinks she knows what she wants, she thinks she knows what needs to be done in order to get what she wants, but she quickly learns that knowing what you want and getting it are two very different things.

The Newtown Girls features an outstanding cast of experienced (and lets been honest, downright gorgeous women) including Renee Lim from Australia’s most outstanding crime drama of recent years,  East West 101.

The series is in post-production so keep your eyes peeled for its launch in the coming year.

www.thenewtowngirls.com