[MUD-Dev] Much Respect to JessicaM

[Michael Tresca]

>From Jesscia Mulligan's Biting The Hand #33: Much Water Under the
Bridge, Much Beer Over the Dam...

> The take-away here should be A) games arent TV or movies, B) what
> makes you a success in one market doesnt automatically guarantee
> success in another, and C) games are shared participatory and
> creative experiences, not shared observational
> entertainment. Until Hollywood truly understands point C), theyll
> never understand how to capitalize on interactive entertainment
> and will continue to be merely companies from which game
> professionals occasionally license properties.

I'll take this one step further.  The nature of MMORPGs is
user-crafted content.  In all media.  ALL MEDIA.

No more traditional movies.  You plop the camera in a MMORPG, buy
the rights from the guys who participate, clean it up, and sell it.
That's your next movie.  Virtual actors have already removed the
need for storyboarders since you're filming the action in real time
and can tweak the characters' actions later. Less and less
traditional film roles are necessary.

No more traditional TV.  Just plop the camera into a Soap MMORPG
(it's coming, I'm sure).  Watch it for an hour.  Gee, kind of like
Big Brother.

No more traditional music.  The war's on already.  Small bands get
their music out on the Internet.  Thus the long, slow death struggle
of the music industry.  They're losing control and the means of
making money off of the industry in a traditional fashion.  Worse,
the market (i.e., us) has a more direct influence over the success
of a product every day.  More and more, producers are going STRAIGHT
to consumers, no middleman included.

Witness: American Idol's voting system.

Hollywood will have to change.  Right now, they're going to fight it
tooth and claw, because it means a lot of old jobs are on their way
out.  Script writing?  Poof.  Movie actors?  Poof.  Pregenerated
content?  POOF.

Ironically, the actors who are rising to the top are the traditional
stage actors, who are more accustomed to acting in invisible and
imaginary environments.  Imagine -- an entire generation of actors
who are trained to be dramatic (i.e., role-play) in a MMORPG.  And
the company who makes the MMORPG pays them millions of dollars to
film what their avatar does every day!

We're almost there.  Graphics are striving, by hook or by crook, to
become indistinguishable from real life.  Once the graphic quality
becomes that good, the shift will happen at high speed.  And a lot
of creative (and not so creative) folks are going to be out of jobs
in Hollywood.

No more trilogies, no more movie sequels.  You sell universes.  The
Batman universe.  The Aliens universe.  The Day of Our Lives
universe.  I expect copyright law to change pretty soon to protect
and extend this new way of making money.

Now, if only we could get the music industry to understand that.

Mike "Talien" Tresca
RetroMUD Administrator
http://www.retromud.org/talien




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