Re: Kick this thing off!

[IGNORE the HYPE]

Hey all,

OK, first off I'm Neil MacKay but I usually go by IGNORE the HYPE or Joe
Tomorrow online. I'm in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I live, work & go to
school at York University (computer coordinator by day, mass comm major by
night), father, husband, publisher of zines "The Annihilation Fountain" 
and "Viewer Discretion", avid reader, I watch little tv (mostly news
shows). But enough about me... A friend sent me the url referring to
idrama and it looked interesting so...here I am.

> articles recently about the decline of the sitcom.

Thank God <g>

> Who's defining the story, the content creator or the audience? 

I'd say intitially it was the content creator but now it is a co-dependant
relationship. The one thing I hate about mainstream American media 
vehicles (tv, movies, books) is that there is this obsessive desire for
happy endings (read - not reality based). Watch the original Dutch version
of The Vanishing - a very dark obsessive film with a very unhappy ending
and then the American remake (interestingly enough by the same director
who said he was offered *a lot* of money...) and the remake has this hero
happy ending. A tv example would be Millennium. It ended season 2 with a
great apocalyptic plague end-of-the-world fade out. Even with being a fan
of the show my first thought was "I hope they have sense enough to end the
series here." But of course they didn't. The spin doctors (content
creators) gave us some cooked up "it wasn't as bad as it seemed" new
beginning. 

I guess this is long way around to saying that with movies being shot with
multiple endings and then tested to see which ending is most desirable
(and other media taking their cues from movie sucesses), there is a
symbiosis of creator and audience. Unfortunately the test audiences
determine what the rest of us see.

> Can the audience alter the story, or just the manner in which it's told?
> If they alter how it's told, does this include temporal changes? How
> does this apply to audiences of more than one? Much of storytelling
> involves what portion of an action is shown to the audience, how does
> giving them free reign over the camera change that? Note that DVD
> already allows this and assorted porn titles are using it (so I'm told).

Within the confines of a co-dependant relationship of current media,
the audience can both alter the story and the manner in which it's told.
But these changes ultimately end up being relegated to "fads" or "styles".
An example would be Terrentino (like him or not). He somewhat altered the
way a story is told on the big screen and was a commerical sucess. So the
mass audience to an extent effected change in the way a story is told by 
making that QT style a success (spawning various imitators). Also if you
look at the subject matter of mass media entertainment over say 40 years,
then society's morality has altered not only the way the story is told,
but the actual story that is told. There are far fewer taboos today (the
movie Kiss for example) than 30-40 years ago. 

I've heard about the free reign of the camera type of DVD's as well but
haven't seen any. I would imagine though that the free reign is still
somewhat limited to the amount of footage shot from various camera angles.
It's a neat idea but still more of a gimmick (I say this without actually
having seen the product, just read about it - so I'm open to change my
mind on it as well).

> How does the nature of building community and a shared experience relate
> to all of this?

Hmmm...does life imitate art or art imitate life? Or are they both
reflections of each other like two mirrors facing each other reflecting
the other's reflection of itself ad infinitum. On the email front I'd say
that the gathering of like mined, or even not like minded people who are
willing to discuss ideas in an open, friendly environment is the
foundation upon which a healthy community can be built. And yeah, I do
think that certain email lists take on a community like atmosphere if
nurtured in a positive manner.

> Can "Choose your own adventure" work in this medium when it's failed in
> all the others?

I would say offhand yes. But the audience numbers will never be that of
watching America's Greatest Police Chases or something similar. But with
the computing power available I think a story could be programmed to have
variable factors that are calculated in real time based on the historical
choices made by the player and the future predictions (ramifications of
choices). I would think you can have an almost limitless numbers of
choices based on an equally limitless variables. Has it been done? Not
yet but I think that is more due to the media's restrictions 
(cd=74minutes, 650MB). If a story/community was to be built in real time
within a few huge servers (RAID equipped) then the media/hardware issue
woul dbe mute. But then we get into the bandwidth problem. So it seems
we're still limited by our technology.
 
I think the idea of this list is a good one and look forward to reading
what others have to say. Anyways, that's my 2(non)cents worth for now <g> 

Regards,
neil

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