This past May, I found out about a horrible article about “philes” in the Fall 2006 issue of 2600. I wrote a weblog entry about this article, which was entitled “Where Have All the Philes Gone?” The upshot of my entry was that the original article wasn’t very good or accurate, and it was a shame 2600 printed it, especially considering how even basic efforts to fact-check it would have left it in the slushpile. On the urging of Flack O’Hara I sent in a version of my weblog entry to 2600 as a letter to the editor, so that it ended up somewhere.
They’ve printed it in the Fall 2007 issue. They even put a paragraph of response.
Here’s that response:
“While we understand your obvious passion for what you do, it is possible to convey knowledge of the information you provide without insulting us or our writers. People submit articles with the knowledge that they are aware of, others with additional knowledge add to this or correct the mistakes. It’s not about trying to fill pages or speaking out of ignorance. It’s a process that results in a dialog amidst the clearinghouse of information that passes through here. To us that dialog is as important as the conclusions since it gets people into a thinking mode. When you put people down for not having the same knowledge as you, then that dialog is poisoned and overshadowed by negativity. There’s already enough of that to go around, past and present.”
Ah yes. So here we go.
Make no mistake; I’ve been reading 2600 on and off for 23 years. Really. Since the beginning. I even got to go to one of the first 2600 meetings at the Citicorp center and even had the privilege of going to the aftermeeting that inevitably happens when you ditch the losers, a tradition that continues at many 2600 meetings to the present day. I consider Emmanuel/Eric a colleague if not a friend (we interact way too little for one to throw the term “friend” around). I have gone to a majority of the HOPE conferences. I’ve spoken at a few. I’m not the fuckin’ enemy.
I don’t know who writes the responses; I believe it’s a rotating set of editors but it could easily be Eric doing the whole thing, so I won’t assume either way. I will however, assume the response represents an accurate representation of the opinion of the 2600 staff.
Regarding being hostile, I can only say, “bite me in the ass”. Let’s move on.
The core of the response seems to be that 2600 magazine, to my honest surprise, does not function like a magazine, that is, a printed collection of researched articles and photographs overseen by an editorial staff and assisted by fact checkers, copywriters and researchers. Instead, apparently, it thinks of itself as a paper based forum, where each article is an entity unto itself with the responsibilities of accuracy and research incumbent upon each individual author. This is, of course, fine. But it’s not what I would have expected for a publication printed 4 times a year.
The idea that printing an entirely inaccurate article (and I must again stress, the core issue is that the article is entirely inaccurate) is a contribution to dialog… that, like lighter fluid, it functions merely to get things started and will then be improved by later interactions, is crap.
The definition of “thinking mode” surely can’t be “here is some paranoiac, historically false and chronically retarded writing…. GO”. I don’t know who or what would be inspired to go into a thoughtful contemplation upon being told that the world has closed up since the “good old days” and that you have much less access to information that you once had. This is so not true, on its face, I can barely contemplate it being something someone isn’t presenting cynically, as a talk show host drops a psychic bomb on their listeners to ensure reaction and continued audience/ratings. Simple as that; hence my reference to page-filling.
As often is the case, my own cantankerous personality is a contrast to the archives I make available, and I do my best to ensure the Fellow doesn’t affect the Files. If you don’t like me, you barely have to go by me to get to my stuff. “Negativity” is a general dismissal of efforts. There was no effort in this article. A magazine of any substance would have thanked the submitter for their contribution, smiled helpfully, and then fed it to a goat.
So while I’m here, I will say again what I hinted at in the previous entry: 2600 has made more and more effort to be utterly and completely irrelevant over time. What drives me and what surely must be a significant number of sometime-readers mad is how much potential it exudes while gleefully rejecting this potential at any turn.
In January of 2007, 2600 started an online forum. January. 2007. Yes, they had a BBS way back when, and in fact I may be one of the only sources of copies of some of the messages that ran on this BBS. It was called “The Private Sector” and wasn’t actually run by 2600, instead run by fans who 2600 lent their name to. The BBS was taken down in summer of 1985 and that’s been about it for 2600-based online discussion mediums until 2007. 22 years is a long time.
To read 2600 in PDF form, you must depend on crappily-scanned efforts, available on torrents or newsgroups. Text of old articles is not searchable; nothing is on the site to give you anything but a prideful collection of covers. 2600 certainly has a news section on its site, but it primarily informs you that a new radio show is available, a schedule that should be in its own separate location, providing it to people for whom a radio show is a preferred method of gaining new information. There is no “basics of 2600” or “basics of hacking” information on the 2600 site. There is a collection of payphones, however, although there is no information on the payphones beyond the basic information one would expect of any photo, or even Flickr. Flickr, by the way, has over 4,000 tagged photos of payphones as of this writing.
So yes, negativity, that is, pointing out something is lacking, is what I do.
Who do I think gets it right, does what I think 2600 should be doing, does it better than I could have ever dreamed? MAKE. Yes, Make, magazine of tinkering, electronics, building. Make, it of slick advertisements and owned by O’Reilly Media and published quarterly. This magazine gets it right, gets it proper, and if you blinked and missed it, has dumped more information of a quality nature in 12 issues and supplemental packages than almost all of 2600’s entire run.
How do I make such a bold statement? Well, Make is the work of, among other people, Dale Dougherty and Mark Frauenfelder, two people who know how to put a goddamned endeavor together. The magazine’s website and projects reek of endless meetings attempting to not just “get it”, but “improve it”. All issues available in PDF form for subscribers (with no limits on the PDF). RSS feeds everywhere. A weblog to accompany the magazine to get on-the-spot information to you. Forums. Accompanying books that cover the basics of electronics and building, which is vital for not repeating mistakes.
The choices of stories range wildly, from how to make simple projects a dog with a screwdriver could accomplish up through to injection molding in your kitchen or a profile of a vodka-maker and the process by which he does so.
But what of the hacking, right?
Well, the thing is that Make exudes hacking, drips from every page the excitement of creating, of assembling, of testing, and even of breaking or unexpected dead ends. The ethics and internal “heart” of hacking, instead of being constantly referred to in each article in 2600, is simply the resonance that each article provides in its writing. This comes, of course, from articles being edited, fact-checked, quality-compared, and so on. And the articles are, to some extent, timeless. News-related information is disposable as expected, but the lessons learned in how to ‘do’ stuff build on each other, such that assembling all the current issues of MAKE has inherent value, the value of a combined set of processes that give you tools.
2600’s portrayal as a martyr, distrusted by the bulk of the world and in a constant locked-horned battle with the forces of censorship and fuddy-duddies is a tired song, long bereft of its melody, an attractive glitter to children but not reflecting of a world where the wires are rapidly disappearing and a year of music fits in your pocket.
This week is catch-up week, trying desperately to get a bunch of stuff done that isn’t documentary related as well as doing my day job. I can put some things off for months, and it’s good to set a little time aside to make the calls, ship out the packages and envelopes, and generally be on the ball.
At this stage in my game I am hovering to the point where a personal assistant would make sense, but poor planning in that realm means that I simply don’t have the means to properly have one, either money wise or space wise. That’s a shame. And what a miserable person they’d be!
OK, fine, there’s a lot of stories to tell. Like, I’d never run out, and if I had to fill 3 hours of talking in a conference or on a podcast or some other forum, I could just sit there and spin them out indefinitely.
Most of the stories stand out on their own. Usually, I’m an eyewitness or the progenitor or otherwise able to verify the story. Unless it’s movie trivia, which I often repeat verbatim and then find out 10 years down the road I was entirely wrong. But hey, movie trivia.
For most of the rest, I can know that the story is true and verify it. For example, I remember during my childhood I was at a snow hill on the back of a elementary school in Brewster, NY. Brewster being what it is in the intelligence soup, this snow hill went down a bunch of sizable bumps and then ultimately shot over a 6 foot wall directly into traffic. Obviously, it was incumbent upon children/teens going down this hill to veer off at some point before going off the wall onto certain death, in the path of cars going between 20 and 50 miles per hour.
So, not content to rest on the mere idea of hurling towards a road on a sled down bumpy hills, someone devised an even better idea: take a Red Ryder sled, put some inner tubes on it, and load THAT with a bunch of kids.
So there we have it, a bunch of kids perilously loaded on a sled piled on another sled, going down a very steep hill that was in fact a series of large jumps, ending in a drop-off into traffic. We did this. We piled into it and we went down this hill.
For the happiness of all involved, the sled naturally capsized after two major jumps and sent 7 kids tumbling in all directions and tumbling the sleds instead of sending them flying at top speed into some hapless driver’s passenger window.
I was there, this happened, and if I think it fits into a conversation (or weblog entry), it goes in.
On the other hand, the superchickens story was unverified, and that was a shame because I saw a neat lesson in it.
The story goes like this.
For most of the 20th century, there’s been aggressive breeding of most farmstock, be it cows, horses, what have you. This includes chickens. You take an animal that shows promise in some aspect of itself that you want, let it make lots of little friends, and the resultant baby animals are checked for that aspect. Then you let the ones with that aspect breed, ideally with others of the same quality, and so on. You watch out for inbreeding, you make sure the little suckers are happy, and so on. Pretty simple.
The result of intense breeding resulted in the Leghorn Chicken, which is heralded for its prolific egg-laying. You can get well in the triple digits with these gals, some of them laying over 300 eggs a year. This is from nearly a century of selective breeding for egg-laying abilities.
The problem is, they didn’t check a lot of the other attributes. The reason that this strain of chicken lays so many eggs is because it’s an asshole.
The chickens attack each other mercilessly. They freak out in close quarters. By breeding for egg-laying abilities, they were also breeding for meaner, huger chickens. These things are massive (for chickens) and will eat a nearby neighbor if the mood strikes it. The mortality rate is through the roof, as much as 80%.
The solution, therefore, was plain: debeak the chickens. Hundreds of thousands of these White Leghorn chickens have their beaks ripped off by machines so they won’t kill each other. Regardless, tons of them die anyway, and they can’t be jammed together in close quarters dependably.
So I had no direct links to any papers or sources about this. But now I do. Trust in the Chickens: Group Selection and Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems by Benjamin McGee Good (April 26, 2000) which specifically references the work of Muir, W.M. (1996). Group selection for adaptation to multiple-hen cages: selection program and direct responses. Journal of Poultry Science 75, (pp 447-458). Once I had that, the world opened up to me and I’ve found a lot of citations of this paper, in many locations online.
Now, why do I care about this? Because this whole situation is a perfect parable for unintended consequences. And I was inspired, some time ago, by a small rash of comparisons to chickens and Enron. Here’s a good entry on such with bonus over-the-top conspiracy theories in the comments, trying to derail the conversation! Two for one.
Anyway, it’s good to have the papers and links for my stories. They feel stronger and healthier, that way.
I first heard about this documentary about a year ago, in bare terms which you might be first hearing too: a film guy named Eric Steel traveled to San Francisco, got a permit to film the Golden Gate Bridge for a year, and proceeded to do so. What he didn’t explain in his permit was that he was recording suicides. Utilizing a crew that shot every daylight minute of 2004, he captured 23 suicides on camera, then tracked down witnesses, family members and friends and recorded their thoughts on the jumpers’ lives and motivations. He did not tell them he had footage of their final moments.
You are some variation of aghast or intrigued. I was the latter. I also knew how wrong this project could go, or how ham-fistedly it could be handled. Recently, I saw it was on DVD, bought it, and watched it.
The Golden Gate Bridge dominates this film; shot after shot from many places show how the bridge is seen from throughout the landscape near it, one of the wonders of the modern world. You can see what draws people to it, what makes them want to walk across it, what makes it stay in their minds, even as their world grows dark, even as there’s no hope.
I do not think I would be doing this film justice to do some sort of reviewer play-by-play of what goes on in the film and coating it with my thoughts on each little decision, each little branch the film goes. I’ll keep it simple: the stories are real, the people are eloquent, the images are crisp, the emotions you feel are many.
People who make it their stock in trade to complain will complain (and have complained) about all aspects of this film: the subject matter, the ethics, the approach, the editing. This is a film about suicide, and it changed my opinions on the debate to some degree. That is a great film that does this to its audience. And this is a great film.
People will look back many years later and wonder why it was so little heralded, so slighted by its contemporaries.
I was very good, I think. I was certainly pretty good at video games that required me to learn a few basic rules and then apply myself towards a bunch of simple sprites who worked in a fairly predictable manner. My control was a joystick and a button, or maybe a spinning knob, or even smattering of large buttons. I could play the games for some time, although I never would call myself a world champion. But I knew, in the grand scheme of the population of the world in raw numbers, I was in sight of the top.
Those days are over.
I play Halo 3, this newest game of newest manner, and I have my ass handed back to me with a side of potatoes. I am not being exaggerative, when I say that I play the part of the tree branch and the other players play the part of the wood chipper.
I know I can punch the person in the head and win, and I run towards them and I am dead. Half the time I don’t know why. Another half I don’t know the rules, or where I am, or who is killing me. Sometimes I don’t know what team I’m on or what weapon I’m carrying. And many, many times, I have the same general resources as someone else and yet in a person-to-person showdown I am a pancake.
Oh, sure, I could claim that I “have a life” or that there’s something genetically or mentally wrong with my opponents or I am in some way superior in some other measurements. But come on, that’s lame. The fact is, they’re better. They want it more. They practiced. They got good.
I play these multi-person melees like I do a lot of things; scooped with a dollop of humor, talking incessantly, lackadasically running through the rules and ignoring most of them, and hoping that I have some sort of golden boy luck that lets me finish the assignment having done none of the homework. So guess what. I’m not the leader of the pack. I’m not even the hunter. I’m the rabbit scurrying into the super-obvious burrow with his white tail sticking out the hole and I’m someone’s dinner.
We all want to be the hero, all want to be the person who comes in, unexpectedly, and turns into a Mozart before the very shocked eyes of our colleagues, friends and family. But it doesn’t always work that way. Here’s one case where I will not hide behind my successes of a quarter-century ago, my advancing age, or my priorities. I play this game and I am a wall mural, over and over. If I concentrated more, I might do incrementally better. But I will never be a champion, never be the top of the heap.
And so it’s up to me to be willing to not be the lead dog and still want to be on the run. And I do.
I bought a Canon HV20 a little while ago. This is basically a handheld high-definition camera that costs $1000, with accessories. It shoots in HDV, which is a lower-bandwidth high def format that can fit on the old MiniDV tapes instead of the P2 cards I currently shoot with.
Am I moving to a new camera? No. The $6k I spent on my camera has been worth it and I’ve been getting some great shots; this new thing is for second-unit-type shots, that would put the other camera at too much physical risk, or be too cumbersome to conduct stuff with. I am then giving it to a filmmaker I’m working with, where I am helping produce a new documentary. Yes, a third one. I refuse to make the mistake I made with ARCADE and give much in the way of details.
Anyway, I took it with me to the Penny Arcade Expo, and did some test setups and shooting and the rest. Some of the still frames from that footage is here in thumbnails. I then took an MC Frontalot song about Penny Arcade and cut some of the test footage I shot. I have gone ahead and rendered it out, in the three sizes you might want: youtube, large, gargantuan.
Here’ the youtube link, which is pretty much good for getting a feel of if you’d want to download the other two.
So here’s the large size, 75 megabytes, MPEG video, 1:40.
And here’s the gargantuan size, 325 megabytes. MPEG M2T video (plays in Videolan VLC).
Bear in mind, this camera is tiny, about the size of a regular has-a-separate-lens digital camera, or a baseball. And I put it through some paces here, intentionally. I shot in low light, bright light, moving crowds, masses of flashing stuff, people walking around, and so on. I’m rather impressed with what came out.
One of the issues of the current stream of consumer level video hardware (and that’s definitely what this is) and even the I-hate-the-name “Prosumer” level is that there are certain situations where the camera’s output just doesn’t look good, specifically very low light and high-motion shots. As a result, someone shooting will end up either eating the lower quality, or shoot stuff and turn it into the look they wanted. I’ve discovered the hard way how tools can end up controlling you without knowing it, so this isn’t a good thing, although time will likely fix this. The other issue is that the sound on this is a major step backwards, taking in what’s basically a headphone jack instead of the XLR jacks I ran too after the sound issues on BBS Doc. This means that you’d have to record sound somewhat separately, which means you have to play SYNC SOUND GAMES like the old film days. That blows, but at least the solutions sitting out there, instead of you having to hack it up. One more annoying step.
Also, this footage is good for showing off PAX, which was fantastic.
Some time ago, I wanted to license some music. I had plans for that music.
As luck would have it, the artist had heard of what I was doing in terms of a project, and he was excited, and wanted me to use his music too. He’d written it five years previously, for a band that didn’t exist any more, so what a nice way to have the music get used in a new and interesting way.
He told me I should speak to his record company, who he cc’d and told them they should let me use the music.
The record company took months to get back to me. When they did, they asked exactly what I was going to use it for.
I wrote and told them what I wanted to use it for. They took a month or so to get back to me.
They quoted me some theoretical costs for using the music, I said I could pay those.
They then explained to me (a few weeks after that, now putting us roughly six months from when we’d first made contact), that the price they gave me was going to be just for the rights for playing it at festivals, and then they told me how much it was going to be to put it on a set number of copies of DVDs, and then how much it would extend if I happened to make more than that number of DVDs, plus how much extra it would be if it ended up on TV or anywhere else other than the DVDs. The amount was more than the entire production had cost up to that moment. I passed.
Later the thing came out, and the artist asked me why his song wasn’t on the documentary anywhere. I told him, and he was really bummed. And by bummed, I mean on fire. His record company, you see, hadn’t told him they’d given me this massive price to use the music (money, by the way, for them, not for the artist). So his old song didn’t end up on my project, and he wasn’t even told what was going on.
So yeah, fuck record companies.
I mention this because I’ve had a couple similar situations with GET LAMP, where my playing things by the rules are costing me more money than I want, are making me bow and scrape to people to get the privilege of putting my money down and go through the physical effort of filming, and where I was hoping to be a beneficial entity but I am being treated like a dynamite-strapped terrorist running deep into a nursery.
This happens. I have contingency plans in place for all occasions; I never put myself in the position of having anything “completely vital” to the projects I do such that I am utterly and totally beholden to another entity’s whims, especially where it’s obvious I mean as much to that entity as a twist-tie. But people sometimes end up thinking I “forgot” to do something or I “missed out” on a situation, and in fact there’s this whole ugly screaming match or endless looping bullshit parade that represents the dull and lifeless outcome.
I mention all this because sometimes I might paint things as too easy. Way way back in film school, my kick ass film teacher explained to us how he had a friend who worked in the Industry who had a huge woodpile out in back of his house. Not because he particularly needed wood, mind you, but because sometimes, dealing with the brain donors of his daily life, he needed someplace to go and split things in half with an axe.
Everyone, if they work at something that needs the assistance of others, or even the non-obstruction of others, will find themselves stymied with what apparently is even worse than malicious sabotage but in fact in needless complication, done by people who consider inertia their personal gods. It happens. Don’t let it stop you from your stuff, just realize that what comes out the other end is rarely 100% as you dreamed it would be.
Only your buddies know exactly how to send you veering off the rails into completely well-tread, insane arguments that can last for hours or days if you let them. That’s why they’re your buddies. If they were your enemies, you’d be screwed.
One good discussion that just pokes my emotional hornet’s nest with a stick is the nature of reality in documentary form.
I know, it doesn’t sound overly exciting or even something to get even slightly cranky about…. but it’s truly fundamental, to a person telling a story in visual form from a collected set of images and recordings. If you pretend it’s non-fiction, it should be somewhat real. The problem that immediately rises up is what is real and what steps one takes in the process of going from reality to a documentary may or may not upset the “realness”. This can suck up hours. It’s a tornado of controversy.
Let’s get the basics out of the way.
Hundreds of hours of human life are spent recounting, to people either getting a film degree or who decided to take an elective class:
When you shoot something with a camera, you have inherently made a choice where to aim that camera.
When you start shooting, you have made a choice to record reality at that point, from that angle.
When you stop shooting with the camera, you have inherently chosen not to record that reality.
Later, you will assemble your shots, therefore making choices on what to shoot.
From these stated premises comes the following variant conclusions.
You should be extra careful when you shoot a documentary because the potential to mislead and misdirect is so great.
You should not be extra careful and just try to make a good film from the reality-based material.
There is no such thing as a documentary as people think it means.
Must Kill Michael Moore.
Even though it doesn’t really show realty, it is possible to provide an accurate semblance of reality, as one would expect a news program to be.
News programs are even worse because they make every attempt to claim they are reflective of reality.
What is truth?
What is reality?
If anyone needs me I’ll be in my bathtub killing myself.
Personally, I buy into the idea that you can, utilizing care towards the subject and methods of filming, produce a relatively useful semblance of reality in documentary form. But it is so easy to mess up, and the reality you end up portraying may be totally different than what you ever expected your film to be about.
Documentaries have been around a long time, but two factors have changed in the past few years: Michael Moore and Digital Video.
Moore’s his own thing, and I do enjoy his films (even though Fahrenheit 911 shows a lot of earmarks of being rushed out the door), but they’re a different style of documentary, more Op-Ed pieces with video sidebars, couched together with really funny editing and a lot of moments of farce mixed in with claims of facts and situations and demanding/requesting people take action as a result of the statements in the film. This is a different breed of documentary than has often appeared before, and even the pre-Moore documentaries that do have a similar approach never got the worldwide attention his films do.
Digital Video, meanwhile, has dropped the cost of documentary shooting through the floor. I remember shooting with 16mm film (actual, spokes-in-a-line-of-kodak-film film) and the cost for me worked out, after development costs, to about $3 a minute. Compare that with an hour of Mini-DV tape which can record an hour for the same price. And you can re-use the tape if you screw up badly. And then, and this is critical, you can really really fuck with the final images really really easily.
Previously, manipulation of imagery on any scale beyond in-camera tricks or utilizing on-set manipulation to fake reality was prohibitively expensive. You could do it, but you had to have a lot of time, a lot of money and it was pretty noticable. That situation is no longer the case. You can change things on the fly, modify colors, fix up sound, and altogether make that sad little collection of 720×480 (or 1920×1080) frames do whatever the hell you want them to do.
So for my two little critical events, Moore and Digital Video, here are the outcomes.
People who are intent on deriding or castigating Moore’s assertions in his film have gone about it a number of ways. Some of them are simply to compare numbers or stated facts. Fine. But others have gone after whether his film is a “documentary” or not, where the edited sequences fall in real time, what full speeches the decontextualized statements come from, and the rest. And the thing is, almost no documentary can sustain that sort of attack because all documentaries edit. If you make editing an inherently evil process, then all documentaries are evil. And if you dislike choices made in the film about what to say, then you will easily find a pile of inconsistencies or omissions you don’t like. I contend that documentaries are no more or less flawed a medium than they ever were; the issue arising is laying an awful amount of load stress on a filmic architecture that can’t sustain it. Class dimissed.
Digital Video, however, is a much more intractable problem. Like I just said, the cost of digital video is so much cheaper than film ever was and digital video tools are now ubiquitous and amazingly powerful. Here’s some footage I shot out of a plane, which I then threw into a tool called “Deshaker” which is a plugin to a free tool called Virtualdub. It’s 12 megs and in Windows Media format. Sorry about that.
But the point, for people not wanting to download it, is that the original footage is shaky and a little messed up. There’s a small window in this footage showing it “after” I process it, where all my shaky camera work is gone. In other words, for free, I was able to eliminate camera shake, an ability the best-funded Hollywood blockbusters could not easily do through the majority of cinematic history. If you look for it, you can see shaking cameras everywhere in top-notch productions, because there was nothing that could be done. Now, for absolutely no cost, the image can be manipulated to take this problem out completely.
And there we have the lines I discuss.
We, filmmakers or people who just shoot video for fun, have at our disposal the ability to do almost anything we want to an image. Just a browse among Ryan Weber’s VFX Page shows how much you can do with hand-rigged effects combined with digital trickery.
So that’s the line. How much do you manipulate beyond even what editing does, and still consider your work truthful?
I’ll disclose that several things were done to the BBS Documentary digitially. Color correction occurred, fixing badly tinted scenes. Sound was punched up to make someone’s voice stand over the background. Boom mikes were digitally removed from scenes where they showed up in frame (it turns out the Canon XL-1’s viewfinder is inaccurate). I removed myself from reflections in windows and shiny surfaces. In one case, I removed someone’s stutter from their voice.
Do any of those cross lines? They don’t cross any of mine as I made the film. But they may cross yours.
My friends have done things in their films, and I have heard of things in the commentary tracks and message bases of other films, that I think cross my own lines. Adding items to shots. Indicating that two people didn’t eat together when they did. Indicating two people never met when they did. Having an actor play one part of an interviewee unwilling to be on camera. Omitting footage that makes concrete statements to prefer more vague ones.
But in our heated discussions, our back and forth, they don’t see crossed lines, don’t feel like they’ve hoodwinked anyone any more than I feel I’ve hoodwinked people by removing boom mikes. I’m so ready to stand on my own deceits and think that I’m doing the viewing audience a favor that I end up cornering myself into pointing at someone’s similar intent and crying “for shame” at them. That’s a crossed line too, I guess.
These are the things you think over, in your medium or sphere of choice. Little omissions, little constrictions or expansions, with the best of intentions, but the ever-painful situation of deciding whether or not you’ve gone too far.
As I work on the GET LAMP documentary, one of the things that keeps coming up is that Interactive Fiction/Text Adventures are a moving target. Even though to some people the subject might be closed and gone, trapped in historical amber, this just isn’t the case. There’s scattered groups of people composing, working on, and crafting new games and projects. I’ll probably go into a number of these in coming months as I wend my way towards the end of my production, but one of these projects is about to pop up, and if you have any interest in the subject, it would do you good to check it out.
Traditionally, and by traditionally I mean for the last 15 years or so, the standard interactive fiction project was a solo affair taking months and more likely years of work, crafting and composing all the possibilities of the design you’d made, followed by months of bugtesting with your voluntary playtesters, finally releasing your work to the masses through the established distribution sites. At that point, the number of people playing it would likely number in the dozens, and your work would then join the pantheon of created IF works, and then, as far as a lot of the world was concerned, sink without a trace.
Now, this is a relatively glib way to put it all; in fact some games take off and are played far beyond the community of creators and players, some games are made in shorter times, some games are recognized as classics. One of the best aspects of text adventures is that playing one made in, say, 1998 holds none of the obvious earmarks of outdated software. You can boot up a game made 10 years ago and it will as fresh and enjoyable as one finished two weeks ago. But the problem of “how do we encourage more activity around the release of games” is one that’s been recognized and considered a long, long time.
In 1995, a solution was created, and it’s worked out pretty well: The IF Competition.
The IF competition basically sets up a framework where a bunch of games come out at once (giving players a bunch of games to choose from), around a deadline (helping to give people structure where there’s no financial incentive), and setting up judging rules (ensuring standards among the games in terms of play length). This last situation with length is rather clever: the idea is that you can get a very good idea about the game in just a few hours of playtime. This encourages the writers to focus on smaller, tighter games instead of expansive, never-to-be-completed games. While sometimes you get front-loaded creations (they look great up through to two hours and then aren’t as well done), what you often end up with are works that are understandable within an afternoon.
This may not sound like the games of old, but in fact a lot of people want to imagine they have the time to play massive games, but then they don’t. Nobody, on the other hand, can’t say they don’t have a few afternoons to tackle some good puzzles.
Yet another excellent metric are the winning entries themselves; I have friends who play these games who use the IFcomp archives to find the top-rated winners of various years. It’s a good way to know that you’re not going to follow the trials and tribulations of a given work until you suddenly stumble on a uncompleted hallway and a sign saying “BACK LATER”. Generally, the winners give a guideline of guaranteed quality.
So, we stand on the cusp of the 13th annual competition. On October 1st, the entries will be released into the wild, and you, yes you, can download the games, play them, and then rate them. Instructions on the IFcomp site give you all the guidelines for how this is done.
In other words, in just a few short days, you will be given not only a ton of crafted, honed games, but you will be asked to rate them, judge them, and reward those creators with prizes for their year of work. How could you resist?
There’s nothing like a good lesson. Well, except an expensive lesson. Or a lesson that can still make you go “oh yeah, that lesson” a full five years later.
My lesson is Andgor.
Ah yes, I was just a mere sprite those many years ago when I read on Slashdot a story about a concept that grabbed me by the throat: personalized action figures. The concept, so simple, so cool: send in a photo and this company would create a personalized action figure, a doll with a hand-sculpted head placed on a generic body, with additional possible custom features attached. What an amazing idea.
So I went to their page, with its flashy graphics and clear statement, and containing a bit more expendable cash that perhaps I deserved, I paid for a figure ($400), and, in what is now a laughable irony, an additional $200 for a “rush fee”, so that the figure would be ready for the wedding it was to be a gift for. In my money went, and then I sat back and waited.
And waited.
Well, the couple who I got it for has had two children since then. One of the kids and I chat every once in a while. I started, filmed, and finished the BBS Documentary in that time. I’ve moved three times. And here I am almost done with GET LAMP and yes, there’s no chance of my figure ever showing up. It has been 6 years.
Oh, I made my calls, my pleadings, my annoyed letters. I called the better business bureau. I even filled out a form with the Orlando Attorney General’s office. That money, my friends, is gone. Gone, gone, gone.
Many people have written about being ripped off by Andgor. They are scam artists. Pages like this one abound, but there are many others marveling over the idea of getting a personalized action figure. They marvel over the idea; they do not marvel over what they actually got.
AndGor Toy
254 Ronald Reagan Blvd
Suite 223
Longwood, FL 32750
407-331-5890
All Emails:
sales2@andgor.com
customerservice@andgor.com
orders@andgor.com
info@andgor.com
So, the question is, why do I sit back and “take it”? Well, for one point, let’s be clear: the next time I’m in Longwood Florida, they are getting a brick through their front window. This is worth getting arrested for. I would love for them to try and get a judgment against me.
But until I get a chance to stop by and smash their window, I let this lesson, this painful lesson, bubble up to the surface of my thoughts every once in a while. Believe it or not, I’m a very trusting person. This little endeavor reminds me how there are people who, in the face of everything, will scam, scam and scam. They will hold their own and take advantage, and promise things they can’t deliver and steal from people. I’ve been a very lucky person, scammed very little in my life. Andgor stands as my biggest betrayal. It’s nothing compared to losing a home or a child, but it definitely sticks with me. And it reminds me how hard I should work, when doing business with people as a person who makes these films, to treat all people with respect and quick response. And to take the high road.
P.S. I am serious. I am going to break their window.
