Item 1: It is now revealed that the train in the recent deadly derailing in Philadelphia was rolling along at twice the speed limit for that stretch of track.
Item 2: A sales exec is suing her former employer after being fired for uninstalling a GPS tracking app from her phone that allowed the company to track the movements of its sales force, 24×7, including after work hours … including how fast they drive.
Item 3: During Google’s recent on-road test of its self-driving robot cars, all of the wrecks that occurred were caused by humans driving the other cars on the road.
My readers are smart, and I’m sure you’ve already made a connections here.
Get this: One game world, dozens of games.
What is it? A single, sandbox virtual setting that is open to third-party developers for developing games, shows, or anything they like.
Working Title: Dove City
Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto franchise has hit a wall. Don’t get me wrong, I love the lavish detail of V‘s fictional state of San Andreas. And, the multi-character gameplay is incredible. And, the Heists are doing fantastically. Adverbially and financially speaking.
But, all of these things are symptoms of the fact that the franchise has hit a wall. That wall is one of scale. The open-world aspect of the game has become so remarkably broad a simulation that it overwhelms even the admittedly engaging story and characters. This is why three playable characters still feel dwarfed by the world in which they live. This is why Heists is necessary. Or … are necessary. Or whatever.
GTA has outgrown its premise for some time now—thus the tradition of extensive downloadable content (DLC)—and so have its clones and many other franchises. Some critics think all of these video game franchises should just be shut down. I’m not quite that pessimistic. I think the standard series like GTA, Assassin’s Creed, and Halo can be salvaged with some core tweaks. I’ve discussed how to save AC‘s seafaring trope before, but I think the satiric, modern-day, urban trope of GTA can be saved as well.
A while back, when J. J. Abrams was first tapped to direct the next Star Wars flick, I did a parody script for Episode VII based on how Abrams had rebooted the Star Trek franchise. I teased him about his incessant use of lens flaring, his debris-riddled space battles, his character role reversals, and his racial casting switcheroos, i.e., Khan Noonian Cumberbatch.
But, Into the Dark Side primarily lampooned his directorial penchant for fan-servicing references. Well, now he’s admitting that he was doing so much of this in Episode VII that he had to pull back. Called it!
It could’ve been worse. He could’ve cast Matthew Smith as Chewbacca, Jr.
Good ol’ Christopher Pendegraft at Scriptshadow has hit on it again.
First, he takes a very clinical approach to teasing apart blockbuster successes and failures. For the successes, he rules out existing intellectual properties (“Batman and Avengers … couldn’t make less than a billion bucks if they tried.”) and stuck to the surprise hits like Guardians of the Galaxy and Life of Pi. For the failures, he looks at those that surprised the studios by flopping despite the money poured into them, like Lone Ranger and Battleship.
Then he digs into why those that worked worked and why the others didn’t.
I disagree with him on a few points, but I’ll cover that after the quote (which comes after the jump). Continue reading
Hillary Kelly has a historically well-informed (rare!) and strategically insightful (rarer!) opinion piece on novel serialization at the Washington Post:
More than 150 years [after Dickens serialized “Dombey and Son”], the publishing industry is in the doldrums, yet the novel shows few signs of digging into its past and resurrecting the techniques that drove fans wild and juiced sales figures. The novel is now decidedly a single object, a mass entity packaged and moved as a whole. That’s not, of course, a bad thing, but it does create a barrier to entry that the publishing world can’t seem to overcome. Meanwhile, consumers gladly gobble up other media in segments — whether it’s a “Walking Dead” episode, a series of Karl Ove Knausgaard ’s travelogues or a public-radio show (it’s called “Serial” for a reason, people) — so there’s reason to believe they would do the same with fiction. What the novel needs again is tension. And the best source for that tension is serialization.
Perhaps I am a bit biased in my enthusiasm, since I just embarked on a Free Fiction Friday project to serialize my own novels. But, I’m doing it more to keep the pressure on myself to write, rather than to “juice sales figures.” (After all, it’s Free Fiction Friday.)
In any case, I agree with Kelly that serialization helps build tension, not only among readers but also for the writer for whom the imposed breaks in the narrative serve as reminders that the story must remain interesting.
What do you think?