Andrea Phillips's Blog, page 17

Get a Game on the Hugos

It's awards nomination season! And so authors of my acquaintance are assembling lists of their eligible works, to helpfully remind their adoring fans what to put on the nomination ballots.

Well, I thought, perhaps I should do that. 

But Lucy Smokeheart, while fun, isn't really Hugo-winning material and I know it. A couple of thoughtful posts about Worldcon don't make me a notable fan writer. And as much as I'd love a rocket one day, lobbying for something I know damn well I haven't earned isn't the way. So scratch that. 

The big chunk of serious writing I did this year was for The Walk, which is an audio-driven science fiction fitness game (and it bears noting, by the way, that I was writing under the lead of Naomi Alderman, and in production with Six to Start; I don't deserve all the credit for it, and I'm not speaking on behalf of the company, etc., etc.)

Now, The Walk falls under the category Dramatic Presentation (Long Form). Unless you want to nominate an individual episode, in which case it's Dramatic Presentation (Short Form). But the game hasn't been out long enough for much of anyone to have played it through yet (I think?), so determining if it's earned an awards-worthy amount of enthusiasm by the time the nomination period closes is unlikely at best. Still, this all got me to thinking...

It's time to get a game on the Hugo ballot. Past time. Let's do this thing.

io9 commented on this last year, and the post still bears reading. Games like Mass Effect and Portal have had a tremendous impact on the genre of science fiction as a whole, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. Likewise works from Legend of Zelda to Shadow of the Colossus have been lasting works of fantasy.

So here are a list of games I'd like for all of us to consider nominating this year under Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form):

The Last of Us by Naughty DogAssassin's Creed 4: Black Flag by UbisoftMass Effect 3 DLC: The Citadel by BiowareBioshock Infinite by Irrational Games

I'm probably overlooking any of a hundred gorgeously executed indie games. If you can think of more and better games to nominate, please do comment.

My own money would be on The Last of Us, which I found unexpectedly touching and human; it's a work of art, no question, and deserving of recognition for its portrait of the complicated webs of humanity under duress. Your tastes may vary.

Now, Dramatic Presentation is a crowded field. It encompasses films, TV shows, games, podcasts, and more. But great work in science fiction and fantasy is happening in interactive media, too, and it's time to represent that enormous influence on the field in our genre's major award. And if the field becomes so crowded that we can't fit everything we feel is award-worthy onto one ballot, then surely that means it's time to split Long-Form into its distinct media. There's a whole lot more to our beloved genre than writing and ~~everything else~~ these days.

C'mon, folks. Games are important to our subcultural discourse, just as important as all of those episodes of Dr. Who and Game of Thrones that got nominated last year. Let's recognize that truth.

TEDx Transmedia

In September of last year, I had the privilege of attending and speaking at TEDx Transmedia in Rome. The talk, "The Ethics and Responsibilities of Fiction," was a new one for me. I covered some of my usual ethics-of-transmedia concerns, of course. But I also took it in the same direction as my GOOD piece, pointing out how the stories we tell fundamentally change society.

I think it was a good talk. I hope you like it.

Temp

Just ignore me.

 

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Sinterklaas

I made you a present, internet! I wrote a little story in, uh, in celebration of the season. It's about Santa Claus. It's a little dark, so don't go expecting holiday cheer, OK?

Now I just need to do my similar treatment for the Tooth Fairy...

So How Was 2013?

It's the time of year when the idle mind drifts toward the past year's accomplishments and failures. This has been a strange year for me; I feel like I've taken enormous leaps forward in some respects, and lost ground in others. I guess that's fair, since 2011 and 2012 were both pretty big for me. They can't all be big.

So call this a fallow year, perhaps, getting the spirit ready for new growth in the new year. One can hope.

I Did Some Projects

It's no secret that the curious intersection of games, story, community management, and marketing in which I do most of my client work has had a shaky year or so. That's been visible in my pipeline of paying client work; the flow of work dried up unexpectedly at about this time a year ago and never fully recovered. It's been a pleasant break from always doing four projects at once, to be sure, but a little rush of when-it-rains-it-pours would be welcome for my bank account right... about... now.

That said, I'm pleased with the client projects I did in 2013. For one, I made forays into the fashion industry this year -- I helped out the Diesel Reboot project which was nominated for a Mashable Award. And I got to do a little workshopping at Glamour, which was lovely.

My biggest project for the year, though, was probably The Walk -- a co-creation of Six to Start and Naomi Alderman, for which I had the joy of doing storylining, character creation, early drafts and additional writing. The game will launch in just a few days, and I'll have a little more to say about it once that's happened.

A project from 2012 finally launched, too: the GE Wonderground project went up in the spring. (...But seems to be gone already. Ephemerality, eh.)

Which moves on to my next point: this was another big year for evaporating projects and unsuccessful pitches. Early on, a simply marvelous project in the beauty industry that had seemed like a sure thing -- even to the point of sending across a deal memo for me to sign -- fell through at the eleventh hour. And a pitch for an extension of a TV show I desperately wanted to work on wasn't greenlit, either. I have regrets; both of these projects would have been stellar if they'd been built out. Alas.

Well, there's always something else, right?

Indie Work Ahoy!

I've been saying for years I want to focus harder on making and shipping my own work. That's the silver lining in that slow pipeline -- this year I finally started to follow through. To that end, Lucy Smokeheart is my flagship accomplishment for 2013. Not in terms of money, really (though $7700 in Kickstarted funds is nothing to sneeze at, as far as publishing goes!) But I feel those creaky wheels start to turn. You cannot build an audience without shipping work.

Lucy has been tremendous fun to write. It's also been a difficult project for me, as far as setting my own expectations at a reasonable bar. I'm used to working on a scale of audience a couple of magnitudes bigger, so while Lucy's been a success by the benchmarks I set myself up front (earning about as much as a genre novel advance in Kickstarted funds) I haven't really seen the steadily growing flow of additional sales I'd hoped for.

The readership also hasn't formed much in the way of a cohesive community, and by and large hasn't been especially excited and talkative about the project (at least not anywhere I've seen). This leads me to the conclusion that it is simply not as awesome as it needs to be. I am of course committed to finishing the Lucy project no matter what, but I'm newly riddled with insecurity regarding whether I got what it takes, etc., etc. 

In other independent work: you may or may not remember my talking about Felicity throughout last year. At the beginning of the year, my agent was shopping around Felicity, and apparently got some interest -- but editors wanted to see a complete manuscript before biting. To that end, I've started writing from the outline. This is going much more slowly than I'd prefer, but publishing is a slow game and requires nerves of steel.

Appearances and Speaking

I made a conscious choice to do much less punditing this year. In total I only appeared at five or six events, and only attended a couple more on top of that. I feel like speaking about transmedia and marketing has been actively taking away time and energy from doing the work I want to be doing, and from spending time with my family. I don't want to become the person who talks about stuff but never does it anymore.

Some of the engagements I was getting were increasingly making me uncomfortable, too. The applications of transmedia in a B2B situation? Not what I'm here for, not what I'm good at, and trying to squeeze into something like that was starting to make me feel dishonest.

...That said, it's plausible that my pipeline was thinner this year because I did less speaking, so I may have to reconsider that for 2014. 

Miscellany

I started a podcast called The Cultures this year with dear friends and colleagues Naomi Alderman and Adrian Hon, so that was nice! It's been a lot of fun to carve out a space each week for thoughtful conversation about religion, science, art, how to live a good life, and so on. I'm delighted to do it, delighted we have some listeners, and in general it's been a lovely experience all around.

I'm doing a little goofy eBay art project called Letting Myself Go, just... because.

I redesigned my website. Isn't it pretty?

Oh yeah, and I had cancer this year? So that happened. I have some thoughts regarding that, but... I think I'm going to put that into another post.

For 2014

So what do I want out of 2014? What are my plans, what are my wishes?

On the practical front, I have a client project in the works right now, but the time commitment and time frame are still a little up in the air. So I might need to hustle. Now my kids are both in grade school, I'm contemplating whether the timing is right for me to finally get a real actual job; a little predictability would be pleasant, and I'm absolutely dying for a project where my involvement is measured in months, not weeks. I'm not convinced, but at the very least I'm much more open to that conversation than I have been in years. Either way -- if you'd like to work with me, as always, drop me a line. 

For Lucy: I keep on keeping on; I'm even working on a secret proposal for a thing related to Lucy which will hopefully come to fruition at about the same time Lucy concludes, in May or June. (Though we'll see; writing time and scheduling being what they are, it may hit end-of-year instead.) I'll let you know more once I'm a little more confident it's going to pan out.

That vanishing beauty industry project also left me with a story concept I love to pieces, and I may try to get an animated transmedia series produced. A huge undertaking, but I do really, really love the story, so... I just need to get the ball rolling, for right now.

Finally: I parted ways with my agent a few months back, so now I'm officially looking for representation for SF/F genre work. In particular, I have that novel about The Wiki Where Your Edits Come True I'd like to sell. If you are an agent or you're on good terms with an agent and you'd like to introduce me, by all means, reach out. On the other hand, if I've done an honest job of shopping and haven't found an agent by, say, June, then I'm going to find another way to get it out there.

Annnnd I guess that's about a wrap on 2013. A year marked by uncertainty. Here's to being sure of ourselves in 2014, eh?

A Feminist Defense of Princess Culture

I have a long and troubled relationship with the Disney princesses. I used to know exactly what to think: as a feminist and a mother of daughters, the princesses were terrible. Unfeminist. Passive and appearance-centric, romance the central motivator in their lives, they were full of nothing but terrible, regressive lessons, and I should keep my house clean of the Pink Demon as much as possible.

I've had a lot of changes of heart over the last decade. One of them was an embracing of pink. I spent so many years rejecting the feminine on the grounds that it was icky and inferior, without ever realizing that was itself a kind of misogyny.

And yet that sort of circular thinking is everywhere: if it's for girls, it has to be bad, because girl stuff is bad. It's bad to have Rebelle archery sets, because the plain black Nerf ones should be fine for everyone. It's bad to have Lego Friends, because girls should just be able to play with the same ones the boys do.

I've talked about that particular issue before.

So I've been thinking: I know I would have loved pink and sparkles and ruffles and True Love Overcoming All when I was that age. Sometimes I love it now. And I started wondering if the princesses were actually as anti-woman as I'd always been taught to believe.

And I've started to think: no, actually. Princesses aren't the evil plaguing our daughters, and you know what? They might even be doing some good.

Two Sides to Every Story

You can get a pretty terrible moral out of any given princess story.

It's sort of true that The Little Mermaid, for example, is about how finding a man is important enough for self-mutilation. But that's a very uncharitable reading, and overlooks the film's significant and overt themes: how young women need freedom and agency apart from their parents, so they can make their own mistakes and live their own lives. Similarly, Beauty and the Beast is as much an allegory about the difficulty of loving someone who has suffered a past trauma as it is about Stockholm Syndrome and abusive relationships.

You could play that uncharitable reading game with just about any movie. The Wizard of Oz is about a murderer who will do whatever she has to to get what she wants. Sherlock Holmes is about a fatally obsessive man with a terrible drug addiction. Star Wars is about a group of criminals and terrorists trying to take down the government. 

Let's look a little closer at one of Disney's older films: Cinderella. In this one, the princess does literally nothing to affect the outcome of the movie, beyond being pretty and pleasant at a party. She's a victim of circumstance who gets out of an oppressive situation by capturing the love of the right man.

But look, even Cinderella is fundamentally about how the hopes and wishes of a woman could matter, be important, even transform her life. Against the grand backdrop of history, that strikes me as not a terrible message. Remember, when Cinderella was created, it was totally cool in contemporary entertainment for Desi to spank Lucy for being naughty... and he wasn't alone, either. When Cinderella was made, Disney didn't hire woman animators.

Sure, Cinderella didn't have much agency. Sure, everything is handed to her. But that's a very compelling fantasy, the fantasy of being taken care of. And for people who are in an oppressive situation, a story where you don't have to struggle more than you do already to get what you deserve -- that everything will just magically resolve -- that also has value. It's a story of hope. For a child who has basically zero agency in their own life, the message that someone in authority could help to make it all better if you talk about your problems is... you know, maybe not the worst thing.

Ah, but they're all still romances, right? Disney propagates the idea that being in a relationship is the most important thing. Look, there's nothing wrong with romance, and suggesting that a story fundamentally about love has cooties and is bad is its own kind of misogyny.

i'm pretty damn feminist, both in word and in action. I can write a book, change a tire or a diaper, repair a toilet, apply liquid eyeliner, grill a steak, deliver a talk and a bedtime story both, and on and on. And I loves me a good romance, because love is a powerful and important part of the human experience. Remember, the idea that being a feminist means hating men is abject slander from the 1970s. You can be a feminist and a loving wife and mother all at the same time. You can be a feminist and still want to fall in love.

Disney: Keeping Up With the Times

Cinderella might not be the most progressive story out there, but looking at the arc of the princesses -- from Snow White on to Belle, all the way to Frozen's Elsa and Anna, we see a track record where Disney is constantly iterating and doing better. The princesses are increasingly feisty, decisive, smart. They desire and they think and they act.

Disney is to some extent chained to its traditional princesses and stories that were palatable to their times -- remember, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White were a product of the 1950s and 1930s, respectively. (...And based upon fairytales that are centuries older; the films aren't true to tradition, sure, but making them more traditional makes the feminist angle worse, not better, what with all the rape and all.)

But progress has been made, and lots of it. When we look at the modern princesses, we have Mulan and Merida, both warriors. We have Tiana the entrepreneur. Belle the bookworm. Rapunzel, Anna and Elsa are all complex and well-drawn characters that defy being pigeonholed by any single descriptor at all. Disney's not perfect, but they're trying as hard as they can, I think. The princesses get more interesting as characters and people, and not just as fashion dolls, with every passing princess film.

So is the problem that the legacy princesses keep hanging around with their not-feminist-enough messages? Disney's had the good sense to lock away Song of the South with its racist streak. Should we demand the same treatment for Snow White? 

I think not. The goal of feminism -- my feminism, anyway -- is that women should be free to make the choices they want for themselves, with no judgment for wanting "the wrong things." The win state is not that the damsel should never be in distress, just that she shouldn't have to always be in distress. By now, Disney's actually drawn a pretty broad variety of situations and characters.

Imperfection

It's true that princess culture is complicit in keeping in place many of the troubling stressors women and girls suffer. But when you talk to me about impossible beauty standards and eating disorders, I'd point to Photoshop and the "obesity epidemic" before I'd point to stylized animation. When you talk to me about early sexualization of children, consider the retailers selling padded inch-thick push-up bras in the kid's department before looking at Disney's chaste kisses between adults. (Unless you think a kid shouldn't see their parents kissing, in which case... I don't think we'll ever be on the same page.)

These are problems, sure, but they're not problems Disney created, and Disney isn't the primary villain here. At least not while my seven-year-old is walking by billboards for Victoria's Secret the size of a school bus.

It's also true that Disney has an imperfect track record when it comes to diversity, to put it kindly. I can't defend that, and I won't try. It's worth noting that to this day, when you go to the Magic Kingdom during the holiday season, there's not a Chanukkah decoration to be found for sale or on display for love or money.

And while they've tried to make a racially diverse array of princesses, those efforts have smacked of tokenism, the worst kind of stereotyping, and appropriation. I was incredibly disheartened to see that there wasn't a single person of color in Frozen. (Unless you count rock trolls or snowmen, which... I do not.) And as for heteronormativity... well. Let's just say I think we've got another twenty years to go on that one.

And indeed, it's true that Disney is contributing to a consumerist culture that is environmentally damaging at best and destined to cause the annihilation of our species at worst. To fix that one, we have to look to government and economics; Disney (and Apple, and Sony, and on and on) are only playing to win by the rules we've given them.

These are real problems. Upsetting problems. But these are not the arrows that (mostly white) feminists throw at Disney when they say we shouldn't let our little girls play at princesses. 

The Evidence

But all of this is just theory. So here's the thing. Princess culture as we now know it has been in full swing for a solid twenty years. So if there were an epidemic of girls taught to be passive spectators to their own lives, to swing for a man and get him to the altar as fast as possible, then we'd be seeing it happen by now.

And if you see a little girl in the throes of a princess obsession, do you see a wilting wallflower waiting for someone to notice her? No, you do not. Think of the pejorative use of 'princess': it means 'a woman willing to fight to get it her way.'

No, coming out of princess culture, you see girls who know what they want and are determined to go after it. You see girls who stand their ground, girls who use their voices. You see girls who have been catered to, girls who have been told that what they like matters. 

This is no small thing, my friends. Women are now more likely to aspire to go to college than men... and to actually graduate. Marriage rates are at an historic low, and women are getting married at the oldest age in more than a hundred years. Perhaps this isn't in spite of princess culture. Maybe, just maybe, it's because of it.

Because we've spent a couple of decades telling little girls that what they hope and dream and wish for is important. And the value of that message simply can't be overstated.

Occupied Walt Disney World

Last week, I enjoyed a lovely family vacation to Orlando, Florida. And as one does, I shared my, ah, my adventures on social media. Plus a little embroidery, because apparently I can't stop making stuff up even on vacation.

Aggregated here for your amusement, then, is...

Asking the Wrong Question

Transmedia hasn't exactly had a blockbuster 2013. In some circles transmedia's been declared dead and/or an empty buzzword, which amounts to the same thing; we've even seen the autopsy. 

But more telling, in my eyes, has been the dearth of new projects released this year. Work has been slow; budgets have been tight. Some great work is still being done — work is always being done — but the last two years have seen a decidedly downward trend in the number and variety of transmedia projects being launched. The once-vibrant community active on Twitter and at conferences has fallen quiet. 

It's disheartening to me, both as a creator who wants to be a part of something, and as a person who would like to continue using these skills I've sharpened to keep myself in coffee and warm socks. And, you know, everything else that requires money, too. Which is most everything, it turns out.

It's easy to think this is a crossroads for us; do we carry on? Do we accept that all industries have up and down cycles, and wait for the pendulum to swing back again, as it surely will? Or do we put down our swords and shields in defeat, leave the battlefield, and start new lives in a new place doing something else?  It is in that spirit (or so I assume) that I've been invited to a think tank* to discuss...

...the definition of transmedia. Sigh. 

This invitation-only event** is intended to once and for all hammer out a unified and mutually acceptable definition for transmedia, with the intent of looking at what we have and seeing if it is worth creating some sort of "industry group." 

What is transmedia? This is the wrong question to ask; a definition is beside the point. It's fundamentally not even the problem this group of people are trying to address.  Here's the question we need to be asking:

Given that we are a like-minded group of creators and entrepreneurs; how can we band together for the benefit of each other and our craft?

We already know perfectly well we have a lot in common. You don't need to agree on what transmedia means first — and indeed, I think we've been poorly served by our historic checklist-driven approach to a definition anyway.

Adrian Hon recently introduced me to Wittgenstein's theory of family resemblances to define what a game is. I think transmedia is the same thing. We'll never, never find one master checklist, because some members of the family don't have the same nose, others don't have the same curly hair. Some of us are interactive and others have tentpole films. 

But we already know we're all a part of the same family... it's the family of creators and projects and businesses who show up at the table to a discussion of transmedia in the first place.  So starting out the conversation by trying to nail down for once and for all what a member of the family is going to look like is an effort destined for failure. 

I've been down this road before, with the Transmedia Artists Guild. We, too, started with that wrong question. How do we decide who to let in and who not to? This is a question that matters very much if you're issuing a professional accreditation and have to decide who's earned the credit and who hasn't, or who qualifies for a grant and who doesn't. PGA, TriBeCa, Sundance, we're cool.

But if your goal is to make an industry group to support and promote the people and businesses who are making awesome stuff, to allow them to band together for mutual support and advancement, it is the wrong approach. Because the other way to frame that question is: what isn't transmedia? What do we choose to exclude? Who isn't invited to our club?

And that will always result in cutting out the edge cases, the fringe, the innovators. In short, exactly what any transmedia group should be rushing to embrace.  Which is why, in the end, the Transmedia Artists Guild was open to everybody. 

I'm ready to go all-in to an industry group, I really am. I wish the Transmedia Artists Guild had succeeded. I miss the feeling of being a part of something and sharing this journey with like minds. I'd love to share what I know and have with others to promote better work, and I'd love to have a network to support me in my crazy indie efforts, which are getting more ambitious every day. 

But to get there, you have to start by asking the right question. 

* Details and names intentionally omitted because reasons; I'm actually uneasy writing about this event at all, but I feel like the importance of this discussion to the community overrides my duty to respect the shroud of privacy around this event.

** I'm deeply uncomfortable with the framing of this event as an invitation-only think tank of thought leaders, because this means someone has already decided who deserves a voice in this discussion and who doesn't. That's very definitely not the indie-friendly, warm, open community I used to love to pieces.

Thematic Resonance & Wrecking Ball

I talk a lot about thematic resonance — the idea that all of the parts of a transmedia work should feel fundamentally the same in mood and tone, if not in content. If your project is a moody, serious documentary about the aftermath of a natural disaster (just for example) then adding in a cheerful web comic with an animal mascot teaching you safety and survival tips probably isn't the best approach. 

Thematic resonance is crucial. It serves to tie the pieces of your project together, to make everything feel connected. If the different elements of your work are substantially different in feeling, then the final result is going to be jarring to the audience. And it might actively work against whatever you're trying to accomplish.

The best way to illustrate this is the video for Wrecking Ball, by Miley Cyrus. Yes, I'm serious. Take a look.

Let's engage with this on a serious artistic level, all right? There's a lot going on here.  On the level of lyrics and vocal performance, this is a powerful song about heartbreak. But the impact of the song is dampened by the performer's need or desire to appear sexual in the video. On the shallowest layer, it still works — the metaphor of the sledgehammer and wrecking ball destroying a relationship is a little heavy-handed, but that's fine. Lying in the ruins of the thing you destroyed? Great imagery.

But then there's the part with the licking a sledgehammer while making eyes at the camera. The nudity could still work; there could be a metaphor there about underlying vulnerability, but it's diminished or eliminated by the, well, the writhing.

Now, I have nothing against anyone in general or Miley in specific being sexy. I'm not engaging in moral panic here. If Miley wants to be sexy, more power to her; she's an adult now. But on the level of art, the sexy stuff dilutes this specific work on an artistic level, because this song and metaphor are fundamentally not about seduction.  This results in a mixed message, with Miley singing tearfully about regret and sorrow, and then behaving visually in ways that would imply she enjoys and desires that kind of destruction. 

There is no thematic resonance between the song itself and the visual performance. The pieces simply don't fit together as if they are parts of the same work, or the opinions of the same person, and as a result, the final video is much weaker on the level of art than it should have been.

By way of comparison, Robin Skouteris has done a mashup of Wrecking Ball and Sinead O'Connor's Nothing Compares 2 U. 

Even ignoring the changes in the music and the addition of Sinead — this version works visually much better than the official Wrecking Ball video does, because it focuses sharply on the raw feeling of loss and despair. You know, what the song is actually about. You're not distracted from the emotion by thematic dissonance.  

And this, kids, is why thematic resonance is important. Every detail of everything you make for a single project has to support the same emotional payload. Doing otherwise makes for worse art.

The Cultures, A Podcast

A few months ago, I quietly began a new project with my long-time friends and colleagues Adrian Hon and Naomi Alderman. It's called The Cultures, and it's a podcast where we talk about art, music, money, religion, technology, and culture — you know, all the most interesting stuff.

So far, we've talked about why we hate advertising (and why we're all hypocrites about it); the relationship between routine and creativity; the cultural dynamics of talking in a movie theater; and of course much, much more. We're thirteen episodes in already, and having a lot of fun with it -- maybe you'll join us?

Follow us on Twitter!  Listen to the episodes on Libsyn! You can even subscribe on iTunes! Have a listen, and let us know what you think!