bright falls
cyberfield
An old, I even may say: a founding member of cyberanthropology as an anthropological enterprise in Munich, has re-entered the scene. Some days ago he visited me at my office, and I have to say he really has his hands on an interesting and hot topic. Check out his newly opened weblog ↑The CyberField [mixed German and English].
interview at the diner
Maniac and Aavenr from the much respected Max-Payne-site ↑Deep Six met with Remedy’s Sam Lake (Lead Writer and the man who lent his face to the original Max Payne—although at first glance I thought it was Mickey Rourke, no offence ;-) and Petri Järvilehto (Lead Game Designer) at a Diner like seen above (I mean an online one) and conducted an enlightening ↑interview [via ↑AlanWAKE.Net] on Alan Wake. Now we know about the story from first hand:
SL: Alan Wake is a successful horror writer. For the material of his first novel, he used the strange dreams that he had started seeing after he met his fiancée. In a very concrete way, she was his muse. When the book was published, it became an instant bestseller. It was a dream come true for Wake. But then his fiancée went missing under mysterious circumstances. Wake was devastated. He couldn’t write anymore. His dreams stopped and he began to suffer from insomnia.
At the beginning of the game, Wake travels to a sleep clinic to get help for his condition. The clinic is located outside the small town of Bright Falls in the idyllic state of Washington. There, Wake is able to sleep again, and there Wake runs into a woman who is the very image of his missing love. At once, he begins to see dreams again, this time they are terrible nightmares. Almost out of habit, and to save his career, he begins to write a new book based on those nightmares, but something goes horribly wrong. Bright Falls starts to turn more and more nightmarish, and starts to resemble the details in the book Wake is working on. He ends up fighting for his life, trying to understand what is happening. […]
In the Max Payne games we used the structure of a movie for the story, and movies, as we all know, are rather short. With Alan Wake we are using a season of a TV-series for our story template, and that should give you a fair idea of a longer game.
Regarding the question if a modding-community will be supported, we learn:
PJ: We’d love to. We really liked seeing what the mod people came up with for the Max Payne games. Having said that, here’s a big disclaimer… we’re using so much different middleware and other components, that I’m not entirely sure whether we can get all of the legal bases covered for the release of the tools. We’ll keep you posted on this though.
Besides this there was quite some activity in the AWnet forums: Two new photographed ↑screenshots from a finnish gaming-magazine were posted, and Uisor courteously ↑translated the accompanying finnish text.
More of the old-timers ↑trickle in. Then there was speculation about the character-model of Alan Wake being based on ex-Remedy-man ↑marvel—the link refers to an old interview ↑biXen did with marvel at the end of the 20th century. It is mainly on marvel’s involvement with the ↑demoscene. The latter being a topic in itself, very much related to gamemodding—other MP-modders like ↑Maddieman have roots in said scene. biXen’s old site ↑apollo-X from 1998/99 is a good primer on that, and a good example for the scene’s sense for self-reflection and its own history.
official welcome
Just three hours after my musing on AlanWAKEnet becoming the official fansite and the developers’ attitude towards the fanhood, ↑MikaRMD announced AlanWAKEnet to be the game’s official fansite:
It also gives me a great pleasure that we can announce ↑www.alanwake.net as official fan site. The site is still owned and run by our long time fan, ADoomedMarine. By calling it an official fan site, I hope that we (our guys at Remedy) can make alanwake.net forums our interactive “home” on the internet. The official home pages at ↑www.alanwake.com will, of course, be the place to get the latest official news and downloads. I’m sure that some of you know that during the Max Payne games our home was at the 3DR Forums (↑www.3drealms.com). It offered a great place for us to talk with different people and, of course, for people to talk to each other. This is what we want to achieve with alanwake.net.
Us (Remedy, again) having a special place to post things did not stop us from doing pretty nice things with other fan sites like having interviews, dropping by occasionally and chatting with people, and giving away cool things as prizes. We like our fan sites, have always had good relationship with our fans and intend to continue doing so in the future. So, if you are intending to put up a fan site, I urge you to go ahead. Just put a bit of thought into what makes your site unique and interesting to other people. Just like with different games, there is wealth in diversity.
road to wake
At ↑Remedy‘s official ↑Alan Wake website a ↑read the buzz section has been added, being a link-collection to press-comments on the presentation of ↵Alan Wake at ↑E3. Furthermore a link to the ↑AlanWAKE.Net Forums has been prominently placed—the developer-company has linked itself officially to the emerging community. At the latter forums there now are world exclusive ↑screencaps of the E3 tech demo to be seen. Naturally they are quite blurry, but are giving a little more impression of Pride Falls’ universe. Call it marketing-strategy or what you like—I sense it to be something more, an integral part of the online-culture of computergames and gamemodding at large. There are direct hints to the Remedy-staff not merely playing the game of marketing, but feeling a certain affection to, maybe even ‘communitas’ with the gamemodders. For example their longtime presence at various Max-Payne forums and practiced interaction, and—most revealing—a ‘secret’ Max-Payne-modding project which one of the Remedy-guys does together with a handpicked posse of modders. In the end, this play of teasing, of secrecy and piecemeal revealing, of luring one to the imagination of being close to the closed developers’ laboratory, definitely has its psychological effect on me. I already feel being there, on the road to Pride Falls.
outtakes
One rung of the ladder to Jackie Chan’s fame are the famous outtakes at the end of his movies, mainly showing off stunts that went wrong. Jackie getting his head bashed by a pinball machine, Jackie breaking his ankle, and so on. In Pixar’s ↵cg-movie “A Bug’s life” there are outtakes at the end, which play to the fantasy of the animated characters being actors who are subjects to the profession’s pitfalls, too. ↑The Ludologist, Mr. Jesper Juul himself, recently saw those fake outtakes and wondered how fake outtakes of a computergame would be like. As a result he brings to us ↑the hitherto unseen outtakes from Space Invaders. Please go, see and play yourself—yes, computergame-outtakes of course are playable! It simply is phantastic.
sidebar
Finally I updated and rearranged the sidebar a bit. The blogroll now has its subsections ordered from most close to my project and specialized to farer away and more general (from the top down). The entries in the subsections now are in alphabetical order, and the section ‘anthropology’ is newly added—with the recent explosion of the anthropological blogosphere this became necessary. Below the blogroll my siteroll has appeared, which carries the visible, the public-access-parts of my community’s space. This is where I roam around a lot.
When ↑biXen saw my blog for the first time he meant that the content is very worthwhile to him, but that the site needs a big CSS-overhaul. Frankly, I didn’t quite know what to make of that. After I read that Kerim Friedman had ↑problems with the excellent layout of savage minds when viewed in IE, it slowly trickled into my mind. Well, today I tore IE up from the darkest corner of the cellar, and indeed it messed up xirdalium quite a bit. Now the CSS-settings are adjusted accordingly and xirdalium looks as intented in IE6, too. Although the up-arrows ↑ (marking offsite-links) still look a little scribbled at the point, and even the sixth installment of this magnificent browser (puke) refrains from displaying the beautiful crooked-arrow ↵ (marking links to somewhere inside xirdal.lmu.de). IE-users: take the little I-do-not-know-about-this-as-I-am-from-Redmond default-square as the marker for in-domain links.
mphq again
Just some minutes ago I discovered that ↑Max Payne Headquarters (MPHQ), the once blooming, thriving, and buzzing core of my community has once again gone online—maybe since 12 May 2005. A new chapter in its changeful and sometimes fateful history. Which gives me the chance for a little roundup of the community sites. The most reliable and sustainable sites—apart from the official ↑3DR-forums—of the MP-community have been the German ones: ↑Max Payne Area and ↑Max Payne Zone. And those still are quite active, but ↑Max Payne Source, once the hopeful substitute for then vanished MPHQ, idles. ↑Payne Reactor at the moment still undergoes a series of changes, but its interactive side has seen a magnificent rebirth in the form of ↑Max Payne Forums. ↑Deep Six still is going strong, but can not be reached sometimes—or is that just me? Now to the next generation: ↑AlanWAKE.net grows promising, now having 47 registered members—the ‘most users ever online’ suddenly jumped from 21 to 118. ↑WakeReactor and ↑Alan Wake Zone are still in the making.
savage minds
There is a new anthropological group-weblog. The ↑savage minds behind the accordingly named endeavor are ↑Alex Golub, ↑Antti Leppänen, ↑Chris Kelty, ↑Kerim Friedman, ↑Nancy Leclerc, and ↑Dustin M. Wax. ↑anthropologi.info kindly ↑commented: “Great! A new anthropology group blog! Something like an American version of the German ↑Ethno::log.” This comment is kind in respect to the ethno::log, as with the latter we never had the impact savage minds already has after just some days—and I dare say we never had this kind of quality. Not that the entries at ethno::log lack quality, but they possess a different kind of it. Savage minds is a group weblog for anthropology, like ↑many2many is for social software, or like ↑media@LSE. My experience is that entries at group weblogs normally are of considerable length and more in depth. The ethno::log never was a group weblog, but something of a wiki-weblog, meaning that everybody who registers can post entries. In consequence the group of authors is not defined, but as open as it can be. With a policy like that there is the danger of drowning in spam—but that never happened. What happened was that the ethno::log quickly found a wide readership, but from the start on carried the illness of far too less people who actually fill it with content. What the founding fathers (↑KerLeone and me) originally had in mind was a global platform for anthropology: news, conferences, call-for-papers, job-opportunities, publications, discussions, and whatyouhave. But that never happened—maybe my view is a bit too bearish and resigned. The two of us, backed-up by activists like ↑fab and ↑2R, made several attempts to refurbish the ethno::log—but till today it refuses to bloom as we had envisioned. What struck us most was the fact that the vast majority of our institute’s anthropology-students (and we have 1200+ !) never made good use of the ethno::log—despite of random reading. I assumed that the cause was the bondage of having to write in English (as you easily can deduce from my own faulty writing, I am all but a native-speaker, too). So we dropped the language-barrier and allowed every language. Which inconsistently may have cost us quite a bit of our international readership. Anyways, I am terribly proud that both the ethno::log and my xirdalium reside on savage minds’ blogroll.
alan wake zone
The wake spreads—on 18 May 2005 ↑Max Payne Zone has launched its offspring ↑Alan Wake Zone. ADoomedMarine from ↑AlanWAKE.net commented: “Let me just say it’s good to see everyone from the Max Payne community jumping ship and supporting Remedy like that. Agree?” It seems like ↵I was right with ‘Max Payne is dead—long live Alan Wake.’ This ↑comment suports it, too: “We’ll wait and see but we are gonna enjoy this game as a fanatic Remedy hailing community, that’s for sure.”—↑Froz.