Interactivationary Digitizational Media-ology

Here's a short film I made for my 'Video & Sound for Interactive Media' class.

Before taking the Production Tools course, I had never heard of and therefore had no idea what "responsive design" was. But it turns out I had been seeing it in action pretty much every time I browsed the internet on a mobile device. Nowadays it's everywhere, but unless you know what it is, it's unlikely you're going to realize when you're looking at it.

If you were to take a webpage (a newspaper article, for example) as it appeared on your desktop browser and display it as is on a smartphone, it would not make for a very comfortable viewing experience. Everything would be so small as to be unreadable, and to make it readable, you would have to do a lot of zooming and scrolling, which involves a lot of tapping and pinching with your fingers.

This is where responsive design comes in. The term refers to the visual reformatting of web content for a variety of devices (i.e. different screen sizes). Good responsive design would take all of the content on that newspaper webpage and display it on your smartphone in a way that's readable and easy to navigate. This is done through CSS. Thanks to a CSS module known as Media queries, the style of your HTML markup can be rendered differently depending on the size of your screen. Such user-experience oriented web design has become very important now that mobile browsing is much more common around the world.

I'm not the most active social media user, but thanks to the proliferation of news articles reporting on the Twitter feeds of certain people, organizations and other groups, I've seen or heard about a number of interesting uses of social media for a variety of purposes (most of them the marketing/promotional kind). Now that I'm in this program, and paying more attention to what's going on in the industry, I'm now realizing that these relatively new methods of communication can help your company reach an enormous number of people who might otherwise be completely unaware of your brand or message.

While I was doing research for a presentation for another course, I came across a particularly inventive social media campaign that was used to promote the premiere of The Walking Dead in France. Since the show's age-restricted rating prevented regular broadcast promotion, and because it had already been on the air in the States for some time and was among the most heavily pirated, the Darewin agency had to come up with an innovative way to drum up interest for the French premiere. Their idea? The very first Twitter and Facebook zombie attack.

On the official site for French network NT1, visitors were advised to NOT use #walkingdeadNT1 as a hashtag or in Facebook posts, or they would face zombie-related consequences. Tweeting or posting the hashtag caused users to be "attacked" by a horde of zombified Twitter and Facebook accounts. After more than 30,000 people were followed by digital zombies, the premiere of the show was a success, scoring massive ratings, and was among the most-tweeted premieres in France.

#walkingdeadNT1 was an example of social media being cleverly employed as a marketing tool, but this next campaign shows how Twitter can do more than just raise awareness for a TV show.

One of the presentations at last month's Fall Tour Interactive detailed another creative but considerably more noble social media campaign on behalf of the Tourette Syndrome Foundation of Canada. It should come as no surprise that most people don't have a clear understanding of what Tourette Syndrome is and how severely it affects the lives of those who have it. Through a desire to educate the largely misinformed masses, the #SurrenderYourSay Twitter campaign was born. Earlier this summer, Twitter users who signed up to participate in Surrender Your Say handed over control of their Twitter feeds for 24 hours to a bot that posted tweets for them. The tweets were often nonsensical and sometimes offensive in nature. The idea was to have users experience the same loss of control over what they said that people afflicted with Tourette's suffer through every day. Almost 9,000 users participated in the campaign, with over 3.9 million people being reached worldwide. 

Last month I attended Gamercamp, an annual event that celebrates videogames through game demos, presentations and exhibitions. The big draw this year had to be a chance to play with the new PlayStation 4, but the most interesting thing I saw (for reasons both good and bad) had to be the Oculus Rift, a new virtual reality gaming headset created by Oculus VR. I browse gaming sites regularly so I had heard about it, but didn't think of it as anything more than a gimmick, a novelty along the lines of Nintendo's infamous Virtual Boy system from the 90's.

Thankfully, the Oculus Rift is not the Virtual Boy. It uses stereoscopic 3D technology to immerse players in a game world. According to the official site, the Rift is different from 3D viewing on TV and at the movies because it's "presenting unique and parallel images for each eye."

When I put the not-too-heavy headset on for the first time, it was an eye-opener. I don't know what the game was, but I was on a military base of some kind, and the image took up my entire field of view. I couldn't see anything in the real world. Turning my head in reality shifted my view in the game as it should have. The depth I was experiencing in the environment was impressive. I was able to move using joysticks on the two Wii-like controllers in my hands, similar to the way you move in a first-person shooter. Onscreen, I was holding a checklist in my left hand (with a list of objectives), and a video camera in the other. When I moved the controller up towards my face the checklist came into my view. These may seem like trivial things but such details are critical to the sense of immersion that always deepens a gaming experience.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to complete any of the objectives on my checklist because after about a minute of walking around in the game I suddenly felt very nauseated, and had to remove the headset and sit down immediately, out of fear that I might throw up right then and there.

The world's changing, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the media, the way media is presented to audiences, and the way audiences interact with media. All media is digital now, and new trends have emerged. Mobile has taken the world by storm, ridiculous-bytes of data are being compiled and analyzed and stored. Everyone and everything is connected, 24/7. It's a little frightening, but also pretty cool.

How is Centennial's IDM program preparing us for the road currently being paved by the onslaught of all these digital trends? I present a rundown of which courses are tackling which trends:

For starters, Interactive Narrative (the very class for which I'm writing this post) introduced digital media trends. Some of them I was aware of from everyday life (social media, mobile, apps) while others were foreign to me (analytics).

Speaking of which, Emerging Technology feels like a course designed specifically in response to these trends. We just had an entire class talking about analytics and social media, and spent another class learning about the innovative ways developers are creating apps for mobile platforms.

Production Tools is teaching us the basics of coding. One of the key elements of coding these days is responsive design, which formats code to fit a variety of screen sizes. It's now a standard practice that web services and products - sites in general - be usable for the mobile and tablet market.

As social media has become more and more prevalent, so to have the ways people and companies present themselves to the world. Apps like Instragram and Vine are allowing people to tell their story visually, through images and video. In Video Production, my group is in the process of shooting a video with the hope that it'll go viral on several different social media platforms as well as YouTube. We're learning about the theory and application of traditional filmmaking techniques because they will prove useful for these new methods of storytelling.

Last week's Fall Tour Interactive (which I wrote about in an earlier post) provided a wealth of information, showing us how actual businesses are adapting to these digital trends. Most of the game developers we visited use the free-to-play model. The Hailo app makes people's lives easier by saving them the trouble of having to stand by the curb, trying to wave down a cab, while an e-commerce platform like Shopify is allowing  businesses, big or small, to reach customers in a new way.

When I asked myself "Why IDM?" in the first post on this blog, I answered honestly that I wasn't quite sure. It's one thing to be a user of interactive tech and consumer of digital media, but what was it like on the other side? Fall Tour Interactive, an annual event founded by Tim Willison, the Director of media solutions provider Oddly Studios, gave attendees a glimpse at what it would be like to work in the local industry, and introduced me to a number of talented people working in Toronto. FTI provided tours of local businesses, held panel discussions and keynote presentations with industry talent, and set up workshops that gave attendees a chance to network with said talent, as well as students from other schools.

Some highlights from the two day event: Bensimon Byrne, an advertising agency responsible for many national campaigns (including Svedka Vodka and Scotiabank). The building where the agency was located was completely nondescript on the outside, but inside revealed a sleek and ultramodern office. My group was given a tour of the agency's many departments and their duties.

A presentation by Jay Bregman, CEO of Hailo, an ingenious smartphone app that puts people in touch with taxi drivers using GPS. The story of this company's humble beginnings on a boat and its expansion to cities around the globe was insightful and really quite inspiring.

Rachel Kennedy and Shauna Roe, "Canada's Ballsiest Interns": These two bright and talented women - who both currently work at ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi - showed us the creative ways they were able to distinguish themselves from hundreds of other interns: by challenging agencies to complete outlandish tasks in exchange for an interview. An interesting look at what it takes to get noticed in the industry.

Shopify, an e-commerce platform that acquired local UX design agency Jet Cooper earlier this year. This stop on the tour was a pleasant surprise for me personally, as I happen to know the company's Director of Design and former Co-Founder of Jet Cooper. Representatives Arati and Trevor described the services the company provides, and detailed the many perks you receive when working there. The most intriguing thing we learned was how the company breeds creativity by holding "hack days," a 48-hour period that allows employees to work together on creative, non-work related projects. Shopify is definitely one of my top choices for prospective field placement next year.

Get Set Games is a local game developer known for popular mobile games Mega Jump and Mega Run. What I think was supposed to be a presentation by Producer Andy Smith quickly turned into an excellent Q&A session that provided a lot of insight into the mobile gaming industry.

A keynote presentation by one of the Animation Directors from Ubisoft Toronto, developer of "Splinter Cell: Blacklist." Using gameplay videos, the keynote showed how character animation and dialogue interactions further immerses players in the game world. I have no interest in game animation but this inside look at what goes into the making of a single feature of a AAA blockbuster game was a tour highlight.

For future students taking the tour next year, some words of advice: be prepared for long walks and cold weather. Be sure to grab a business card from keynote speakers, panelists, and studio tour guides. If you have your own cards exchange them with other people taking the tour. And most important: ask questions. The people you're there to see are fountains of valuable information; you just need to ask the right questions to get it out of them.

This Friday, the next installment in the critically acclaimed Batman: Arkham series of video games, titled "Arkham Origins," will be released worldwide. Given how well received the first two games were by critics and gamers alike, you would think the anticipation for the next chapter would be at an all time high.

But you'd be wrong.

I'm not conducting polls or anything, but based on what I've seen from comments on various "Arkham"-related news stories, it seems like most gamers have been reacting to what they've seen from the new game with a collective shrug. There are a few reasons for this. Those who keep track of the development side of the industry know that "Origins" wasn't developed by Rocksteady Studios, which developed the original "Arkham Asylum" and its sequel "Arkham City." Paul Dini, an Emmy Award-winning writer of "Batman: The Animated Series" and its many spin-offs, would not be returning to write the new game (he was hired to write the stories for the first two games). And for many, the final nail in the coffin was the absence of voice actors Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill, who reprised the roles of Batman and the Joker (respectively) from the animated series for the games.

For fans of the franchise and the character, these announcements set off a lot of warning bells, and not without good reason. Although Rocksteady was pretty much an unknown entity before "Asylum" was released (i.e. no one knew if they could make a good game, much less a good Batman game), the studio showed that it had a good grasp of the character, his world, and enhanced both with strong game design. Paul Dini has written some of the best Batman stories ever (onscreen or in print), and Conroy and Hamill have been hailed as giving the definitive portrayals of these two iconic characters.

But is the absence of all these creative touchstones enough to completely write off the new game (before playing it)? I don't think so, for a couple reasons:

1. Development for "Origins" is being handled by Warner Bros. Games Montreal, and while the studio itself is new, many of its employees are industry veterans, including Creative Director Eric Holmes (The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, Prototype), and the story for the new game is being written by Corey May and Dooma Wendschuh, who've written for the Prince of Persia and Assassin's Creed series. That's not a bad track record.

2. As much as I love both the earlier "Arkham" games, neither of them were perfect. The combat has always been great, but the final boss battle of "Asylum" involved fighting a Joker monster, and certain sequences didn't match the high level of quality of others (the Scarecrow stages were terrific, but walking around looking for plants in the sewers was tedious). "City" features a highly detailed and atmospheric open world, but suffers from some bizarre level design (why is there a city underneath Gotham?), poor boss battles, a weak storyline and quite a bit of stilted dialogue (Dini is a great writer, but he's not infallible).

3. Many other actors have played Batman and Joker, in many different incarnations. It's true that the lack of Conroy and Hamill will cause a bit of a disconnect in the game's universe, but it's not a dealbreaker. I don't think Roger Craig Smith sounds great as the new Batman, but neither did Christian Bale, and I was able to look past that. I think what he says is more important that what he sounds like (which is a task that falls to the writers). On the bright side, Troy Baker sounds very good, giving his take on Hamill's version of Joker, and it's very similar. Check out this video of Baker reciting a monologue from Alan Moore's 'The Killing Joke' to get an idea of what he's bringing to the table:

I know, right?

A few other reasons I'm looking forward to playing "Arkham Origins"

4. "It's more of the same." That phrase has been thrown around a lot, and it's one of the main reasons many gamers haven't been chomping at the bit to play "Origins." For me, it's the main reason I want to play the game. "Arkham Asylum" and "Arkham City" were both great, and enough time has passed between the last one that I'm ready to play through a new adventure (or an old one in this case - "Origins" is a prequel). If you see the various gameplay videos that WB Games Montreal has been showing off over the past several months, you would see that "Origins" does indeed look very similar to "City," with its vast open world gameplay and almost identical combat mechanics. But I'm okay with that. The game world has expanded to include all of Gotham City, which means a whole lot more gliding (which is awesome), and the original games' freeflow combat system was a simple but deep mechanic that was a lot of fun, so I'm glad that it doesn't seem to have been tinkered with all that much.

I see "Origins" as a chance to refine the established formula. After all, you could argue that games like "Uncharted 3" or "Grand Theft Auto V" are "more of the same," and that would be selling them very short.

5. 8 Assassins, a Snowy Christmas Eve. As I mentioned earlier, I found "Arkham City" to be a lesser Batman story, even though it was a great game. The premise for "Origins" - which sees an early career Batman being hunted down by eight assassins (some more recognizable than others), each looking to earn the $50 million bounty placed on his head by Black Mask - is fantastic, and ripe with potential. The eclectic group of bad guys will hopefully make for some great and varied boss battles, something that the previous "Arkham" games couldn't deliver (with one exception).

6. This:

I usually don't care for video game trailers since they tend to be unrepresentative of how the game will actually play, and while that's still the case here (the actual game won't look this good), this may be one of the best pieces of advertising for a game that I've ever seen. I was always interested in playing "Origins," but this trailer put the game on my must-play list for the year, because it showed me what the creative team is trying to accomplish in terms of tone. It's clear they haven't forgotten that the Batman character is one defined by tragedy, and I'd like to see that underlying sadness play a pivotal role in whatever story Eric Holmes and his team is telling.

A great example of this is YouTube, which can be downloaded from an app store, or accessed directly from your mobile browser. Personally, I find the web app more attractive, more appealing to use, and I find some of the native app's features distracting. I'm also pretty sure that the native app consumes more of my iPhone's battery power.

There are a few reasons why developers would want to create an HTML5 app instead of a native one. While native apps can take full advantage of a specific platform's capabilities, developers would need to build the same app more than once in order to make them work on different platforms. With HTML5, a developer wouldn't have to start from scratch, needing only to develop one app that will work on multiple platforms. This results in lower development costs. Combined with the fact that, because these apps live on the web and not in an app store, they don't need to undergo an approval process by Apple or Google, nor do developers have to share a cut of the app's revenue with those companies, and it becomes clear that HTML5 is a very cost-effective method for app development.

But it's not a complete win. Because there's no centralized app store for HTML5 apps, there's no easy way to promote them, making it difficult for users to find them.

A way around this is by "wrapping" your mobile web app into a native container, creating what's known as a hybrid app. Hybrid apps are still easily developed using the familiar HTML5, and they have the advantages that come with being hosted in the App Store or Google Play Store.

"Kill my boss? Do I dare live out the American Dream?" -Homer Simpson

Okay, the title is just a cheap grab for attention. I do not believe that HTML or CSS, tools for creating webpages, are evil* in the same way a wartime alliance can be evil, but they do form an alliance. Going off of what I've learned in the IDM Production Tools course over the past month, the relationship between HTML and CSS is one of function and form. The identifiers are found in the words that help make up each acronym:

HTML = HyperText Markup Language

CSS = Cascading Style Sheets

Without HTML, many webpages would be blank. There would be nothing to see or do. It's one of the languages of the internet. It allows you to display your content for the world wide web. CSS gives that language its style, rendering it in an aesthetically pleasing way.

When writing your markup, your style sheet is done in a separate document, and your HTML links to said document in order to use its styles.

Why keep them separate? I imagine the main reasons are one of convenience and usability (that word will come up a lot in this blog).

A website is usually going to be made up of more than one webpage. If you wanted those pages to share the same visual design to give the entire site a cohesive look, repeating those styles is as easy as linking every markup page to a single style sheet. Chances are the markup of each webpage is going to be different, and if you were to use inline styles (that is, style tags written directly into the markup), you'd be writing out all those styles in page after page after page. Programming is hard enough as it is without having to go through such a process.

So far I'm having a pretty good time playing around with both, but I'm just speaking as a novice. I'm sure it gets way more complicated, and I can see how both can be frustrating. Keeping the two separate from one another helps temper some of those frustrations.

That's the question, right? For myself and 17 other people in this program at Centennial College, it's the "To be, or not to be" of it all.

(Well, it's not that heavy, but it is an important question.)

Intriguing Possibilities The honest truth is that it's too early to know if a career in interactive media is what I really want for the next phase of my life. I found this program by chance, looking through various college and university sites when 'Interactive Digital Media' caught my eye. It stood out to me because I've always been enamored of technology and design. But what was IDM exactly? My first thought was that it was related to video games. They're a form of media, they're created with the help of computers, and they're interactive. And while games are indeed a part of the industry, they're not the whole thing. I learned as much during my first meeting with the program's coordinator, Sasha Boersma. She described a number of possible career paths that could be pursued after finishing this program. It couldn't be more broad, or less cut and dried from other programs. You get into law to become a lawyer. You study medicine to become a doctor. You study interactive media to become... well, what you become is up to you to decide. I've been told you can be a producer, or maybe a designer, but the beautiful thing about those two terms (and others) is that they could mean almost anything. Job titles seem like a formality in this industry. It's more about what you do than what you are. There's a sense of freedom to it, and that freedom, more than anything else, is what I find so appealing.

Pieces Form the Whole If there's one unifying concept that ties together all the first-semester courses in this program, it's the idea of user experience. Usability is the key to the interactive media experience, and content is king. As a user, this makes sense. I use Facebook, and I hate when its layout radically changes out of the blue, forcing me to relearn how to navigate the site. I have another blog (which hasn't been updated in a while, but it's there), and while it's nothing fancy, I made sure posts were easily accessible. As a movie buff, I love using the Timeplay app when I go to the movies, and I'm outraged when the game starts but the theatre screen is blank (clearly something has gone wrong). I play a lot of video games*, and that is a medium where user experience is paramount to ensuring a successful product. If your game or app or site doesn't control well, if the navigation is cluttered and confusing, if users don't enjoy using, then it should be fixed. I'm interested in being involved in that part of the industry, hopefully in a way that allows me to help deliver a great experience to users.

*As a side note, one of the things that influenced my decision to enter this program was The Last of Us, the PlayStation 3 exclusive from developer Naughty Dog. Coming towards the end of the current console generation, here was a game that managed to represent everything that this young industry had grown into over the last several years. At the time, I wasn't sure that games could be character-driven in the same way that movies and TV can be, but thanks to motion capture technology, talented actors, and nuanced writing (working seamlessly with solid gameplay mechanics and high end production values), The Last of Us was more than just an exciting game. It was an emotional, harrowing, at times devastating experience I won't soon forget. I would love to work in the same industry that could deliver a product like this.