The Beatles, Zombies, and Wikipedia: My Winter "Break"

I've had an auspicious start to the new year, leading the winning team in the annual Storytelling in the Digital Age Workshop, AKA the Sony Games Design Workshop, AKA the competition that takes over students' lives for the last week of Winter break. It was a high intensity crash-course in crafting a studio pitch for a game based on an pre-existing media property. My team, comprised of Laura Boylan, Ben Decker, Cabell Gathman, and Sarah Sperry, triumphed with our concept of a video game set in the musical universe of The Beatles. We had stiff competition from teams led by Chris Casiano and Kenny Peng, Orit Kuritsky, and Andres Lombana, who produced amazing pitches for games based on the pre-history of Harry Potter, the Twilight Zone, and the Ocean's 11 franchise. Check out Henry Jenkins's blog for a judges-eye perspective on the events, and some concept art we designed for the pitch.

To put it in my own words, the game would be built on a virtual world filled with references to the Beatles--characters (Eleanor Rigby, Doctor Roberts, Desmond and Molly, etc.) , locations (an Octopus's Garden, the Long and Winding Road, Penny Lane, etc.) , and evocative images (everything from Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds) from their songs and movies. Players take control of the Beatles to explore the world and unlock side-missions, all the while avoiding mobs of fans, and alternately fulfilling and escaping their musicianly duty to perform. Though the game would bring together aesthetics and music from the entire Beatles oeuvre, the general attitude of the game, and the semi-fictional characterizations of the fab four, would be taken from the distinctly anarchic and sardonic A Hard Day's Night. Oh, and NPCs would perform choreographed dances like in any good movie musical.

So that's what I did last week.

Another exciting project of the break was a class I taught with CMS comrade Kristina Drzaic: Make Zombie Madness! We were entrusted by our department to educate the youth about the making of zombie films, and given a budget even. The ambitious aim of the class was to give five teams of filmmakers enough inspiration and materials to produce a 3-5 minute zombie film in about 7 hours. To this effect we presented a highly accelerated, two hour version of film school (Kristina also has a film degree from Notre Dame). But the key, I think, was the makeup tutorial generously given by gore-literate CMS undergraduate Clara Rhee. Subsequently, we loosed our filmmakers onto the MIT campus, confident that they would return with not only our expensive equipment but also some amazing zombie shorts. We were not disappointed. I shall post the results as soon as Kristina uploads them to the Internets. Until then, feast your eyes on horrific still images:



Actually, go to the photo gallery if you want to see more.

Finally, I earned the right to be called an expert on Wikipedia by sitting on a panel devoted to the online encyclopedia sponsored by the MIT libraries. Ha! Really, I was mostly invited to show some rough cuts of the video about WP I'm editing for my research assistant position on the Project for New Media Literacies. I also had some expertise to share in the realm of volunteer community management, thanks to my years working at Looksmart.com on their now-defunct Zeal.com web directory. Good to know those seven years weren't a total wash. My content seemed to be fairly well-received, and a scintillating conversation followed about the merits of Wikipedia as a research tool. If I were to make a vast generalization about the project, based on the interviews I've done and the reactions to the panel, I'd say that academics are slowly coming around to the merits of the encyclopedia, while its own users are sobering up to the rigors of writing and the difficulties of community self-policing. Which is as it should be, I suppose.

And now that I'm totally exhausted from my break, it's time to write my thesis!