How do you put an in joke into a context which everyone will get? You can’t. Sadly, we realized this only after our group decided to create yet another installment in the life of Captain Sidewinder. Our plan was to combine three completely different mediums! Live action film, machinima, and an interactive text based adventure game.
This project had a grave error in it even before we started. With its focus on Captain Sidewinder we were already limiting its audience to, well, us. No one would find the story very compelling or entertaining except for us and maybe our friends. While we were incredibly excited about the project, no one else would be.
In addition to this problem we were also faced with the problem of the live action segment of the story. Through time constraints and technical difficulties we were unable to film the live action segment of the project. With only windows movie maker, and no real actors or friends to help us with characters, the prospect of this portion of the project seemed doomed (this notion was only strengthened when our camera’s battery could not be found.) So we decided to abandon this part of the project. However, in retrospect, I don’t see how this really detracted from the project. The live action would not have introduced the audience to any aspect of the tale more soundly than the machinima does. All in all it seemed to us while making the machinima that not having the live action actually strengthened the project.
In his article The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book Steven Johnson quotes “the historian Robert Darnton describes this tangled mix of writing and reading:
“Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.”
This concept I think, while much grander in meaning than our project still applies to some of the projects base ideas. Our project breaks “texts into fragments and,” assembles them into new patterns. The idea of intertexuality comes heavily into play in our project and is illustrated in one of its earliest forms in our culture here.
The main strength of our project goes hand in hand with its main fault. While being inaccessible by many audiences, those audiences who might “get it” will note how our project comments somewhat on our contemporary gaming and new media culture. In the machinima certain aspects of Half Life 2 and game play in a broader sense are parodied. In Nathan’s text adventure you have to defeat Steve Jobs. This connects directly with a sentiment held by many recently in our culture today that apple in general is pushing us into an uncreative world of new technology where “the whims of a single company that had declared itself gatekeeper for your phone and other personal technology,” (Doctorow) will control most new technology.
All in all, while our project suffers from unmet high ambitions, technical difficulties, and inaccessibility it offers to those who will see it a hopefully pleasurable experience. An experience while initially made for purely entertainment also offers some critique on certain aspects of new media in our world today.
