Last Thursday afternoon I sat on a panel at the Merging Media conference here in Vancouver titled, “A Tale of Two Worlds: When Film/TV-Game Worlds Collide.” Fellow panelists included the current narrative director for the Halo franchise (Armando Troisi); the script writer for Steven Spielberg’s Big, Vague, Not-Boomblox Videogame Project from a couple years back (Adam Sigel); the writer for the Avatar and Lost videogame adaptations (John Meadows); a guy who is currently making an MMO based on the Family Guy series (Ian Verchere); and a woman from New York who specializes in something called “transmedia” (Caitlin Burns). “Transmedia” was only the second most overused buzzword at the conference. “Gamification” was the first.
Two weeks ago I consumed all six Star Wars movies–the prequels, the tampered-with originals, the special features–in the span of 48 hours. Not by choice or because I’d temporarily lost my mind, but because I was reviewing the new Blu-rays for the show. I locked the doors, lowered the lights, and kept a pillow nearby in case I needed something to rain blows down upon and/or cry into. I pressed PLAY.
And so it began.
I had an idea of how my life was going to turn out. I had a plan.
My plan was this: I was going to be a teacher. Preferably a college professor. Or, failing that, an instructor at a tony private school in the New England states, not unlike the one that Robin Williams teaches at in the movie Dead Poets Society. I would have my summers off, during which I would sip tea and tinker with my thousand-page novel in the afternoons and kiss my cute wife in the evenings. Each fall I’d select a turtleneck from my collection of turtlenecks–all shades of blues and blacks–and return to the campus where I’d resume my place in my creaking office chair while gazing profoundly out the window at the impossibly red leaves on the old maple tree in the Quad.
It was a good plan. Even now I get a little excited just thinking about it.
That plan obviously never came about for me.
>It’s my last day in Toronto. There’s still plenty to do before I can head to the airport–one more G4 booth hang-out (10 a.m. to noon), one more panel–yet I already I feel that vague it’s-all-over melancholy that’s an inevitable part of any trip. Make no mistake, going home will be great–it always is (hint: there are cats there)–but part of me wouldn’t exactly be devastated if I had to stay put for another day or two.
>I got up early this morning and went for a brisk walk around the block. The air was cool and damp. Surprise: it’s another gray morning here in Toronto. Gray mornings seem to be a Toronto specialty.
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>If you know me, even a little, then you know that I’ve had my struggles with booze over the years. I never drank every day, or doctored my coffee with schnapps in the mornings, or kept a flask on my person. I never loitered in barrooms often enough to qualify as a barfly. That said, whenever I did drink–typically anywhere from two to five nights a week depending on the kind of week I was having–I always did so to an extreme, with a sense of great purpose. I always drank with the desire to arrive somewhere else, someplace far away from myself.
>I’m away for the next week or so, in Upstate New York visiting my parents and my brother’s family for a few days before heading south to New York City to see some friends there and tend to some business.
>As you know, Xbox 360’s have failed me for the last time more often than Admirals failed Darth Vader in the Star Wars movies. Most recently, after my Xbox 360 Slim gave up its ghost making it the fourth 360 (and counting) to fail me, I tried to suss out a way to transfer my data from the hard drive of my busted Slim to my older model Elite 360.