[BioWare co-founder] Muzyka explained that the designers of the game wanted to ensure that The Old Republic was a story-based MMO that followed in the tradition of the Knights of the Old Republic. He added that while people have often asked BioWare if the company would ever produce the third installment in the Knights of the Old Republic franchise, this new game amounts to installment Nos. three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and beyond.
The Little Things
There’s no release date as yet, so the game is probably more than a year away. I visited the game’s flashy-flash website in the hopes of subscribing to an RSS feed or something, so that I could periodically get news updates. There’s a newsletter, but I’d rather not give them my email address. I didn’t see a feed on the home page, but I did see this familiar row of social media icons:
Great, I thought, I’ll just subscribe to the Twitter feed. The link goes here. Unfortunately, there’s no account there. In fact, ‘starwarstheoldrepublic’ is too long for a Twitter user name.
Ah well, maybe I’ll just subscribe to their YouTube channel instead. I click the little YouTube icon next to the Twitter one. Nope. That’s an invalid user name, too.
The other icons–Facebook, MySpace, Flickr–do work. But it’s a reminder to ensure that you get the little things right. I’m guessing their website has received, what, 50,000 visitors in the past day? At the very least.
No RSS feed on the home page and a 40% failure rate on their icons is a bit of a shame. I doubt they’ll lose many players at this stage, but those early adopters are too valuable to give away so easily.
After digging around a bit, I did find a developer blog for the game. I’m going to subscribe to that for the time being.
I should say that I’m looking forward to trying another Star Wars MMPORG. I quite enjoyedStar Wars Galaxies, at least until they screwed it up.
Today I happened to see the video for the catchy Sara Bareilles tune “Love Song”. I first heard this song about a year ago, but apparently it just went huge on the Tube o’ You.
I was struck by how much of the video was shot in the style of the average YouTube video. Ms. Bareilles is centered in the frame, looking directly into the camera, and the shot is basically just her head and shoulders.
Compare that with another singer-songwriter-at-the-piano video from 2002: Vanessa Carlton’s “1000 Miles” (could she look more underwhelmed in her photo on Wikipedia?). I’ve put a few screenshots together to illustrate:
Obviously this is only a single data point, but I’m reminded of an earlier post I wrote about musicians co-opting the style and conventions of YouTube.
Music video directors must recognize that a huge part of their viewership has shifted mediums. I wonder how much (and how else) the move to YouTube is impacting videos? Do they use more saturated colours? Simpler set ups? Any thoughts?
On a related note, it’s interesting that I’m not allowed to ‘embed’ (that is, include in a blog post or elsewhere) either of these videos. It’s been disabled on YouTube. What are record companies and managers afraid of?
I wanted to post a quick note to say congratulations to the Strutta team for their official public launch today. Congrats to Danny, Jordan and the rest of the Vancouver team for a job well done. Here’s the blurb on Strutta:
From grassroots scrappers to all star pros, Strutta brings players together from around the world in the spirit of true competition. Whether it’s beatboxing, shredding up the slopes, or giving the legends a run for their money with a smack on Guitar Hero III solo, there is a game for everyone on Strutta. Players upload their original performance videos to compete with their peers and prove they are the best in their game.
I don’t have a lot of feedback on the site yet–I only checked it out for the first time last week. The design is unassuming, and it does what it says on the box, which are good things. I’m not sure how I feel about getting randomly redirected when I visit www.strutta.com, but I’m guessing that’s a launch gimmick.
My opinion is a bit moot, though, because I’m really not Strutta’s target audience. I’d guess that they’re shooting for the 12 to 25 crowd. Plus, I’m barely a video watcher, much less a creator. Lastly, I’m not particularly competitive. Or playful. Fortunately, there’s zillions of youthful, chippy video-makers out there.
I just watched the eight extant episodes of The Guild (YouTube channel), a (what is the right term for this? Webisode?) comedy series about the lives and times of gamers. Here’s the first episode:
If you’re a World of Warcraft player, you’ll get all the jokes. If you’re any other kind of gamer, you’re probably get 80% of the jokes (“You like my helm? It’s +5 Sexterity”). Everybody else might get half the jokes.
The performances range from decent to marginal, but that’s pretty standard for any pro-am type project. The main creative force and best actor is Felicia Day, who’s done a lot of work (she was on Buffy in the final season, though I can’t specifically recall who she played–one of the new crop o’ slayers, I suspect).
The conceit of offline and online lives colliding feels fresh, though, and the writing is occasionally witty. In any case, there are worse ways to spend about 40 minutes (eight episodes times about five minutes).
I think this is probably the first piece of fictional video that I’ve watched consistently on YouTube. Do you have a favourite web-only show?
ZDNet reports that YouTube faces criticism and possible legal action for hosting anti-semitic videos:
The videos hosted on YouTube include clips of a 1940 anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Suess and two music videos of outlawed German far-right rock band Landser, which show footage from World War II depicting Nazi military operations.
Report Mainz, which is due to air the program, said in a statement that Social Democrat (SPD) parliamentarian Dieter Wiefelspuetz said airing the clips on YouTube in Germany was scandalous. Report Mainz quoted him as saying: “Publishing these films amounts to aiding and abetting incitement of the people.”
You know, the older I get, the less sure I am about dealing with hate speech, particularly in a context like YouTube. After all, the web has increasingly sophisticated filtering mechanisms which enable the truth to bubble to the top. Nothing lives in isolation online, and so people who comment on and link to a hateful video can dilute much of its power. Is metadata a reasonable replacement for anti-hate speech laws?
Being a Caucasian, male, straight Westerner, I’m pretty much in every majority group you’d care to identify, and so I’m not really the target of any such speech. I’d probably feel differently if my grandparents died at Auschwitz.
I couldn’t figure out how to tastefully work in a reference to JewTube in this post, but it’s just staring us in the face, isn’t it?
I was looking at something on YouTube the other day (maybe it was this animated project from Bud.TV), and noticed a so-called “Director Video” (I gather these are pay-for-placement) featuring an 18-year-old doing a monologue (not “To Be Or Not To Be”, to his credit) from Hamlet, apparently in a vacant lot:
He’s certainly givin’ ‘er, isn’t he? He’s got plenty of passion and enthusiasm, which is great. And he’s got the thing down, memorization-wise.
What the Words Mean
I’m no Shakespearean performance expert, but this piece highlights a really common difficulty in performing the Bard’s work: you can’t do a great job if you don’t understand the words. All the words. And not just what they mean, or meant in the 16th century, but also some context for their usage. A ‘fishmonger’ isn’t just a guy who hocks cod–it’s also a slang term for ‘pimp’.
Anyhow, I’m not picking on this kid–he seems to have the heart and spirit. You can probably teach the rest.
I did get to thinking about what other Hamlet-related videos I could find on the Tube.
As you might expect, there are many earnest, exceedingly-awful recitations of monologues. I’ll spare you those, but here’s a top tip to aspiring thesbians: memorize the speech instead of reading it off your screen. Here are some of the more interesting videos I found:
The wonderful (if overly fey) Derek Jacobi, along with Patrick Stewart as Claudius:
I’d forgotten all about Cat Head Theatre:
“Hamlet the Musical”, from Gilligan’s Island. That’s truly priceless: “From Ophelia, no one can steal ya, you’ll always be my own”.
And finally, here’s one young actor who’s got her lines down:
