Things as They Are.?

Lewis Carroll, er, American McGee's Alice, er....

BoingBoing links to a short article about the upcoming movie adapted from a game based on the original Alice in Wonderland in which an adult Alice returns to Wonderland to do battle with childhood demons (yeah-- that's quite a long lineage to get your head around).

The game version of American McGee's Alice, released in 2000, contains scenes directed by McGee himself (with writing credits for Lewis Carroll as well). No word yet as to who will be helming the on-screen adaptation, although my money (which isn't much) is on McGee.

Coming Soon: Google Universe

It seems that the folks over at Google at quite literally ready to expand their (and our) horizons. Google's purchase of Keyhole Corp. last year signalled a definite shift in the strategies for online maps and directions. Directions were now given real (if somewhat outdated) spatial models based on Keyhole's satellite imagery.

Now, Google's ready to expand this service from Google Maps to Google Earth, whose website contains the following description:

Want to know more about a specific location? Dive right in -- Google Earth combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world’s geographic information at your fingertips.

--Fly from space to your neighborhood. Type in an address and zoom right in.
--Search for schools, parks, restaurants, and hotels. Get driving directions.
--Tilt and rotate the view to see 3D terrain and buildings.
--Save and share your searches and favorites. Even add your own annotations.

Though it's more or less guaranteed that Google Earth will garner the same cult-like following that Google Maps did (click here for a good example of this fervor-- they even mention Google Earth), it'll be even more interesting to see how the capabilities of Google Earth, which combine terrain data and imagery and place them in a 3-D grid, are used and abused. Regardless, The Planet Earth is now a searchable, 3-D space. I see the potential here for a new kind of location aware fiction, one that, with the tweaks provided through a subscription to Google Earth Plus at $20/yr. (such as GPS integration, higher resolutions, drawing, writing and sketching annotations, KML annotation exchange, etc.), could use addresses and coordinates to not only frame specific neighborhoods, landmarks and buildings within their larger surroundings, but also use the depth of these places as further expositors of a narrative. The story may begin at the bottom of the Empire State Building, but it might also end at its peak.

Aarseth on Narrative Networks (?)

Amazing how quickly scholarship develops. The abstract for Espen Aarseth's Meet Death Jr.: The culture and business of cross-media productions, a paper which will attempt to "develop a critical language to address and analyse cross-media assets and their cultural cycles."

I'd better get started on that dissertation soon....

"Where Does He Get Those Wonderful Toys?"

On Wednesday, Batman Begins is released in theatres with the hopes that it will rekindle what has been a languid and rather unispired series of recent comic book to film adaptations (Sin City being the sole exception). Also released on Wednesday is EA Games' own Batman Begins, which promises to be a "a thrilling interactive companion to Christopher Nolan's reinvention of the Dark Knight."



Various other phrases have been thrown about with regards to this crossover, mostly focusing on the expansiveness of the game's environments.

Interestingly, though, the game also promises to allow "players to delve even deeper into the universe masterfully depicted in Christopher Nolan's film" through the incorporation of a a game script by JT Petty, writer of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell. We've seen something like this before-- video games, even as recent as Lucasarts' Revenge of the Sith, have incorporated deleted/ cut scenes into game, often due to the different production schedules of gamemakers and filmmakers (who could be cutting their films mere days before they are released).

But this could be the first time (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that a script has been written for a game that not only relies on the film as its source material, but also expands the story present in that film. This is again quite different from something like The Matrix series, where one medium was required to work in conjunction with others in order to fully exapand the narrative. With the Batman Begins game, we might be looking at an example of the movement away from the binary of horizontal/ vertical mediation that I mentioned previously here. Much like David Herman argues in "Towards a Trandsmedial Narratology" (found in Marie-Laure Ryan's wonderful Narrative Across Media) when speaking of the medium-dependence of narrative, there also exists a gradient of expansion/ remediation present in some narrative networks.

Truly Spoiled.

The neighbors have wireless. I have this view.