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And that's why I put a bullet in my computer monitor, everybody
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Aug 9, 2012 00:57
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MikeJF posted:Next dream sequence is just a series of flashes and graphics on the screen which leaves you confused, but then that night you dream the actual dream sequence itself. Am I just weird or would the possibility of something like that working really, really own?
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Aug 9, 2012 08:21
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MikeJF posted:Next dream sequence is just a series of flashes and graphics on the screen which leaves you confused, but then that night you dream the actual dream sequence itself. Dream hacking would scare the poo poo out of me, not least because I've seen that movie already.
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Aug 9, 2012 08:41
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It'd also be kind of inconvenient for going back and re-reading if you wanted to quickly check on something. 
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Aug 9, 2012 09:42
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Suaimhneas posted:It'd also be kind of inconvenient for going back and re-reading if you wanted to quickly check on something. Really the main reason why Kaz won't be doing it, of course.
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Aug 9, 2012 11:05
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Firefox was dying just as I read through the update, and I assumed all the glitches were dream stuff. Could have been interesting, I guess.
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Aug 9, 2012 12:21
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MikeJF posted:Really the main reason why Kaz won't be doing it, of course. Are you implying I can't, Mike? Are you really implying that Ch'marr and I can't do that with CSS? In other news, taking a day off after the last update, I decided to go back in this thread and read some of my earlier posts. I honestly miss the interesting debates early on, in particular my exchanges with Reiley and The Worst Unicorn on this page. Looking back at it I stand by pretty much everything I said, but over the course of this endeavor I feel like I have become more understanding of myself and the comicing process in general. The main point of contention back then was apparently my statements about building a large audience, and how doing derivative/fanwork could be an efficient choice if you wanted to get an audience quickly. At worst, my methods were described as "manipulative and ethically bankrupt". I was essentially metagaming to get a lot of readers fast. But what I've since come to realize is: I like the metagame. I like it more than I actually like drawing. When you're drawing, you just kind of scribble on a tablet until it looks how you want, but beyond that there's this huge and intricate tactical puzzle of making your work both noticed and loved. There is an art to making people read your work, reaching niches, meeting or defying their expectations, studying their reactions, and slowly figuring out how to simultaneously blow everyone's minds, and it is an art more complex and beautiful than any visual. My appreciation for these "manipulative" aspects of entertainment only gets deeper and deeper as I gain experience with them, and it saddens me when artists downplay them as "ethically bankrupt" or suggest I shouldn't discuss them in public. To me (and many others, I've found!), these social elements are the most compelling. I'd rather work with people than paper. And as far as fanwork goes, I am pretty sure my writing and drawing abilities would not be where they are today if not for the automatic readership I got from the MSPA and TES communities. Looking back in retrospect, I cannot emphasize how amazingly powerful it is to have an audience. There used to be a day when I actually had to ask for criticism; these days I can drop something on the internet and watch thousands of reactions pour in. I can change what I'm doing, and see the opinions shift in real time. It's like slowly learning to dance with a strange, massive "audience" entity; seeing how they respond to my movements and slowly getting into a perfect sync. Until finally, you reach that point where you are practically a part of your audience and start scoring those critical hits where more and more people begin to feel exactly what you want them to feel, exactly how you wanted them to feel it. And it feels great. Originality? I think it's overrated. Making something different does not necessarily make it better, and I believe that is the failing of many artists. I am glad I have had the opportunity to work with someone else's setting before cluelessly stumbling through the process of creating my own. I've had an opportunity to study and learn why this setting worked (or for some people, didn't), and when I create my own for future projects it isn't going to be out of any desire for originality, but rather because I've learned enough to do better than Bethesda ever could. The same goes for the art style; what began as a tribute to MSPA has since allowed me to discover why Hussie made many of the stylistic choices he did over the course of Homestuck. I'm glad I did it. I feel like my views on art have been developing a lot while doing Prequel, and I'm no longer sure if they make lick of sense to people who aren't me. I just cannot stress how amazing and fun these social/tactical elements of art have proven to be; more and more, I'm starting to feel like I can see how the machine works and I'm excited to test my further ideas on it. I am going to manipulate the gently caress out of all your thoughts and feelings and, if my theories are accurate, you are going to love it. I'm not ashamed of that. So yeah, reading back in the thread was a fun nostalgia trip. I guess it's just fun to look back and see how far I've come doing this, and possibly how far it has driven me to the brink of insanity/comprehension. You are all the coolest audience ever, and doing Prequel is both educational and a total blast. I can't wait to draw more sad cats  edit: vvvvvvv err, right, that too. Kazerad fucked around with this message at 13:30 on Aug 9, 2012 |
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Aug 9, 2012 12:38
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Some happy cats would be nice, too. Maybe just one, sometime? 
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Aug 9, 2012 13:23
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Kazerad posted:Are you implying I can't, Mike? Are you really implying that Ch'marr and I can't do that with CSS? YES I AM SO WHAT'CHA GONNA DO ABOUT IT PUNK
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Aug 9, 2012 13:35
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Kazerad posted:In other news, taking a day off after the last update, I decided to go back in this thread and read some of my earlier posts. I honestly miss the interesting debates early on, in particular my exchanges with Reiley and The Worst Unicorn on this page. Looking back at it I stand by pretty much everything I said, but over the course of this endeavor I feel like I have become more understanding of myself and the comicing process in general. I thought that was a really interesting discussion too. One thing I can say as an illustration student is that we are trained to manipulate the poo poo out of people. Every single decision we make about lighting and color and layout and framing and whatever else is supposed to work toward that intended goal of bending someone's brain in the direction we want it to. So I think manipulation, in that sense, is a pretty fundamental part of art and entertainment (and really any kind of communication), and it's hard to deride it too much. What's less good is when people see manipulation as blatant and transparent and it kind of breaks the suspension of disbelief (e.g. every time I've watched a James Cameron movie). And that perception is going to vary from person to person, definitely. Despite your protestations of heartless Jim Davis style puppetmastery, the comic is still compelling to me, so from where I'm standing you're doing a good job. v v
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Aug 9, 2012 18:22
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Kazerad posted:I feel like my views on art have been developing a lot while doing Prequel, and I'm no longer sure if they make lick of sense to people who aren't me. I just cannot stress how amazing and fun these social/tactical elements of art have proven to be; more and more, I'm starting to feel like I can see how the machine works and I'm excited to test my further ideas on it. I am going to manipulate the gently caress out of all your thoughts and feelings and, if my theories are accurate, you are going to love it. I'm not ashamed of that. You know, fittingly enough, you're starting to sound an awful lot like Hussie here. And I mean that in the best possible way. I like that you've now really embracing the internet as a medium, and not just posting static panels like most do.
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Aug 9, 2012 19:35
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Kazerad posted:In other news, taking a day off after the last update, I decided to go back in this thread and read some of my earlier posts. I honestly miss the interesting debates early on, in particular my exchanges with Reiley and The Worst Unicorn on this page. Looking back at it I stand by pretty much everything I said, but over the course of this endeavor I feel like I have become more understanding of myself and the comicing process in general. My, I wish I was here for that discussion, would have loved to be part of it. I have this horrible habit of bookmarking threads when they're created and then ignoring them until they're hundreds of posts long.
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Aug 9, 2012 19:39
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It's kind of weird to come out and admit that you like figuring out how to sell the comic manipulatively, like you're giving us the secret behind the act, but maybe that kind of honesty is needed. For one I don't think I should be one to judge other people's motivations. Everyone is obsessed with being better than everyone else and it creates an environment where no one can actually say what they mean or else be incriminated. You cannot be nice or completely selfless at all times and achieve anything, but you have to pretend you are. A real artist cannot apologize and most believe in their own work. When Christain Bale yelled at someone on the set, I was fine with it. This is his job, he can be invested in it. I've been yelled at a few times by people in authority this last year, and I have to learn to just use it to help me improve instead of being demoralized. Actually doing anything - especially things that not everyone is going to just let you do - requires getting hurt and might require you to not yield to people who are hindering you just to be polite. There's a lot of people who have never tried to do anything difficult and judge people who do very harshly. If your motivation is selling your work to a wide audience, I do not feel I have the authority to judge. I'm not ever going to make art, and I suspect a lot of artists have the same motivation but can never actually say it. And knowing how to sell is a necessary skill. Media overflow has been achieved. lovely newgrounds and youtube videos, fanart, porn, music, everything is distributed for free and yet the art that has effort behind it often doesn't give a reason to be noticed. Memes are now... I don't know what they are or what people think they are, it feels like four or five years ago someone would say something funny, others would spin the joke until no one could forget it and that's what a meme was, not poo poo like those reddit comics where people talk about some boring crap that never happened and no one can relate to using faces copy-pasted from other comics and other peoples jokes as serious dialog and that make me kind of want to die when I see them. Everything thinks they're an artist because they can write better than the lovely movies released for general audiences but no one reads books or plays and realizes what the upper bound for writing actually is. No one gets that writing is not easy and their first tries are not good enough. It gets hard to decide what or WHY to read anything. So the best metric these days is to read what people you like are reading. I don't understand other people at all, so I cannot do this that well. But knowing how to sell is now necessary for goddamn everything. I've now learned that even if you do math research, you have to know how to sell your results to an audience and write your paper for that purpose. On the other hand, I think you're giving yourself too much credit. Prequel has good word of mouth because it's a well written comic - the main character is a sympathy grab but honestly a comic where bad things happen to a likable lead and the main character constantly fails is HUGELY different and more relatable than a lot of content on the web that tries to ape the last epic video game/anime the author played or read, full of poo poo that happens to nobody and characters that are not alive or could ever be met or understood. Either that or stuff that's just so sacchirine and "cute" and "kawaii" and again has no basis in reality, see my little pony and 90% of anime these days. Most people's lives are not adventures, don't have everything go right, and are full of mistakes and regret. Or at least that's how mine goes. Sometimes it's fun to laugh at how you know Lucy is going to pull the football away when you try to kick it. A comic about a character whose life is an e/n thread but keeps on trying anyway is rare, and I think that has more weight than having TES content or a furry main character could. I think more people are invested in hoping Katia succeeds than care about that. But then again I guess that's where the choose your own adventure structure gains an audience pull. Still most of the comic is your own work, especially since the story is not decided by the commands.
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Aug 9, 2012 20:17
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I'm just holding out until Katia goes toe-to-toe with Mehrunes Dagon.
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Aug 9, 2012 21:55
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oh yes oh god yes form the head FORM THE HEAD unghhhh...
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Cat Mattress posted:
How'd you pull this out? I'm seriously considering putting these gifs together as my boot animation.
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Aug 10, 2012 03:52
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All of the Katia frames are stored in one image. You can find it by looking at the page source for div id="kat". You'd need to put the ones you want back together into an animated GIF, though. Or, I presume, someone on the Internet has probably already done it for us.
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Aug 10, 2012 04:48
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raverrn posted:How'd you pull this out? I'm seriously considering putting these gifs together as my boot animation. If you drag Katia's sprite into a new frame, you get all her frames in a single image.
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Aug 10, 2012 05:11
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raverrn posted:How'd you pull this out? I'm seriously considering putting these gifs together as my boot animation. Off topic, but do you have a quick link talking about that? I'd love to set up my computer so that it has more of a bullshit "fake tv/movie os" look. I don't really have anything to say about this manipulation business, and I don't like the feeling. Obviously it's bad or whatever, but there really isn't any kind of response that I can make other than to say it feels vaguely creepy. I don't have a problem with people making money off of their intellectual property, but it somehow disturbs me to thank that this kind of work is specifically made so that I will want to consume it. The idea that its chief value is its consumption by others, rather than some inherent value that compels its creation, is for some reason disconcerting. I guess the whole "the books write themselves; I have to write" "the statue was already in the marble, I just let it out" thing is cliche, but I like it. If I'm not down with this calculated creation here, why would I be down with something like Coca-Cola? Am I going to say gently caress it and go live in a commune or something? No. No, I can't really say too much bad about it. I'm going to keep reading to find out what happens. I'll never become a mega-fan because of it and a few other things, but don't really feel like it should be condemned or anything. I can't come to a definitive statement about it, I guess.
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Aug 10, 2012 05:23
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SniperWoreConverse posted:I don't have a problem with people making money off of their intellectual property, but it somehow disturbs me to thank that this kind of work is specifically made so that I will want to consume it. I think you're looking at it the wrong way. It's less trying to specifically create something that you'll consume and more finding ways to make the art created by the author more enjoyable for everyone. I mean, yeah, we've all seen the kinds of poo poo that's got "this is an artless work that was made by a boardroom that decided on how to make it with the this research telling them what to put in to to make you more likely to want it deciding everything" every so often, and such works are just as hollow as you'd think, but that doesn't mean the research itself is inherently bad, it's just being used wrong, as the deciding factor of the creation rather than informing the creators on what the audience is reacting to. Kazerad is less creating based on market research and more letting said research inform his creative decisions, which is far from "morally bankrupt" as others have been saying. Learning to entertain others is never, ever a bad thing. I will say that he's vastly overestimating his userbase and the feedback he gets from it. The nature of this comic encourages user feedback to a much larger degree than other media, and the very idea that what someone says to the author will show up in the work itself, even getting mentioned by name (which feels great by the way  ), means he's getting a lot more response variety than he would have if he'd done something more ordinary, but it's still only what users choose to tell him, and it's only information on one comic, only applicable to one comic. He calls it "metagaming", I call it a natural part of creating a user driven adventure comic and that heavily depends on users suggestions to drive the narrative. You're not gonna get this same level of feedback for something more typical..... I had more to say but I deleted it after reading it and realizing I was just rambling...
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Aug 10, 2012 05:52
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Making a sell is pretty much an integral part of any art form these days, and that's not necessarily a bad thing? When Hollywood takes it to an extreme the product is utter poo poo, but it's also utter poo poo on the extreme edge of inaccessibility. I feel like art that is purposefully inaccessible is becoming marginalized to a bunch of pretentious new yorkers and angelenos pretending that having complicated opinions about fine art and noise rock somehow make them better people. The result is that genuinely good artists have an increased drive to make art that's both meaningful and entertaining, two things that don't have to contradict each other. Accessibility is a facet of style, the means of delivering whatever the artists wants to communicate. If there is something worthwhile to communicate, accessibility just makes that message easier to hear. As someone who also makes a comic about bad things happening to a cute animal, it's interesting for me to think about why Prequel is so much more popular. It's probably because: 1. it has a built-in audience of homestucks and elder scroll fans 2. it has a level of interaction that makes it more involving 3. it has action and violence and danger and dire stakes and villains and other stuff that makes a narrative easily involving and it's also probably because: 1. it has good writing and good art 2. there's a lot of content and it comes in at an impressive rate 3. it's doing compelling things with the webcomic format those last three aren't negligible selling points.
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Aug 10, 2012 06:00
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snucks posted:3. it's doing compelling things with the webcomic format Before the last two updates, it hadn't really done anything that MSPA hadn't done, except handling the commands in a different manner (as thoughts instead of commands) I guess.
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Aug 10, 2012 06:06
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SniperWoreConverse posted:...it somehow disturbs me to thank that this kind of work is specifically made so that I will want to consume it. What you're trying to express is essentially the Frankfurt School of critical theory, best represented by the views and writings of Theodore Adorno. Adorno's a tough read, even in the original German, but the short version is there's a difference between true art and art produced for and by popular culture. According to Adorno, art created for mass consumption is a tool of what he termed the culture industry, which is a means by which the ruling class maintains society's status quo. Art that is easily understood – art that uses the conventions of society and which challenges nothing – is not art, but rather something that can be commoditized and sold by the culture industry in order to keep the masses passive and content with society as it was. True art, he said, challenges its audience and the society in which it is created. It is daunting, inaccessible, difficult to understand, is never designed to be pleasing or "pretty" and, as a result, has a very small but well educated and socially aware audience. Adorno towers over discussions of art (especially music) created after 1900, but whether or not he was right is for you to decide. I agree with his ideas about the culture industry, but I certainly don't agree that art cannot be pleasing, or that an artist can't design something to be appealing to a broad audience. A lot of art is about knowing how to communicate with your audience; that includes making them feel what you want them to feel. There's a difference between skillfully taking your audience along for a ride in order to tell the story you want to tell, and creating a piece of "art-by-numbers" where you don't care about the content of the product except in terms of how well it will sell to a targeted demographic.
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Aug 10, 2012 06:21
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Adorno kind of sounds like an elitist rear end in a top hat from what you've said. "True Art only exists for a small subset of the population, the few intellectual sophisticates who deserve it."* *not an actual quote here
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Aug 10, 2012 06:39
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Pretty much, though I suppose to be fair to Adorno, it wasn't so much that true art wasn't for the masses, it was that the masses who had been lulled into complacency by the culture industry would never understand true art as long as they remained complacent. For him (and for a lot of artists and critics ever since) it's a question of accessibility: can art that can be immediately understood and appreciated by its audience say anything of value? For Adorno, the answer was no: anything that quickly and easily understood is only accessible because it uses established conventions, and so in using society's conventions it says nothing critical of society, is saying nothing new, and therefore isn't of any value except as a commodity for the culture industry. I really disagree with that bit, but he does make excellent points about the driving forces behind and the effects of popular culture, which I suppose isn't surprising considering he was among the leading sociologists studying propaganda and authoritarianism in the post WWII years.
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Aug 10, 2012 07:01
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Tollymain posted:Adorno kind of sounds like an elitist rear end in a top hat from what you've said. "True Art only exists for a small subset of the population, the few intellectual sophisticates who deserve it."* You don't have to be some fancified ejjicated book-learnin ivory tower type to be challenged or stimulated by ideas you run into, and it's pretty funny that you seem to instantly assume this to be so. Depending on your critical slant the difference can be as simple as, I dunno, Batman vs. Robocop. It's not fundamentally a high-culture versus low-culture argument, it's about the notion that art is about communication, and examining what exactly is being communicated.
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Aug 10, 2012 07:05
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Of course, given the level which Kaz is openly acknowledging and describing the meta-game of appeal, and enjoying it even more than the drawing, it could be argued that it's his approach and method on that meta-game exploitation which is a piece of art, and both the comic and us readers are merely raw material used in its creation.
MikeJF fucked around with this message at 07:17 on Aug 10, 2012 |
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Aug 10, 2012 07:14
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MikeJF posted:Of course, given the level which Kaz is openly acknowledging, enjoying and describing the meta-game of appeal, it could be argued that it's that meta-game exploitation which is a piece of art, and both the comic and us readers are merely raw material used in its creation. Well hell, how many pages go back to the "LOOK at this loving POST" joke?
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Aug 10, 2012 07:19
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MikeJF posted:Of course, given the level which Kaz is openly acknowledging and describing the meta-game of appeal, and enjoying it even more than the drawing, it could be argued that it's his approach and method on that meta-game exploitation which is a piece of art, and both the comic and us readers are merely raw material used in its creation. Tubgirl Cosplay posted:You don't have to be some fancified ejjicated book-learnin ivory tower type to be challenged or stimulated by ideas you run into, and it's pretty funny that you seem to instantly assume this to be so. snucks fucked around with this message at 07:35 on Aug 10, 2012 |
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Aug 10, 2012 07:29
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SatansBestBuddy posted:I will say that he's vastly overestimating his userbase and the feedback he gets from it. The nature of this comic encourages user feedback to a much larger degree than other media, and the very idea that what someone says to the author will show up in the work itself, even getting mentioned by name (which feels great by the way I agree with most of what you say in your post (and happy I'm not the only one who finds this topic interesting!), but I am baffled by this strangely common assumption that I am going to do something more typical after Prequel . Like, I can't imagine what force would make anyone look at a recently completed project and say "wow, that was fun! I can't wait to move onto something more ordinary!". As with my other statements about originality, my primary goal with the format is to isolate what makes it successful, and if possible refine it into an even more purified form. The notion of doing something normal doesn't sound very promising, but I am already beginning get ideas on how I can build off the more successful aspects of Prequel's format. It's stuff that will require more experimentation though (which might already be going on without you noticing it!).In other words, I'm not planning break into the Perfectly Normal Things industry after Prequel. As you, Yonic, and Snucks were sort of getting at, doing such would require me to abandon a lot of the more successful things I've discovered. But whatever I create after Prequel, it probably won't be easily recognizable as the same format. Loden Taylor posted:According to Adorno, art created for mass consumption is a tool of what he termed the culture industry, which is a means by which the ruling class maintains society's status quo. Art that is easily understood – art that uses the conventions of society and which challenges nothing – is not art, but rather something that can be commoditized and sold by the culture industry in order to keep the masses passive and content with society as it was. True art, he said, challenges its audience and the society in which it is created. It is daunting, inaccessible, difficult to understand, is never designed to be pleasing or "pretty" and, as a result, has a very small but well educated and socially aware audience. I am familiar with this attitude but never knew its origin. Personally, I've always felt like it places too much of the creator's responsibility upon the audience; essentially saying "You don't understand my work? Well that's your problem". It paints the "true artist" as someone who thinks he has great ideas, but can't necessarily communicate them to people who don't understand... a description which describes nearly every single person in the world. At least in my opinion, I think an artist should be defined by his ability to communicate ideas. To use Adorno's setup, someone who can present an idea to the general populace in a way that makes them question the conventions of society, rather than just being a veritable circlejerk among the pretentious. Yonic Symbolism posted:It's kind of weird to come out and admit that you like figuring out how to sell the comic manipulatively, like you're giving us the secret behind the act, but maybe that kind of honesty is needed. It's unusal, but I don't think it's weird. Art (or perhaps I should say communication/entertainment, to avoid controversy?) is something a lot of people care about, and it is something that can be studied. If I'm honest about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it, people will be able to learn from my successes - or, should my actions backfire disastrously, learn from my mistakes. It's not something I really feel any shame in. Kazerad fucked around with this message at 07:56 on Aug 10, 2012 |
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Aug 10, 2012 07:51
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It's not weird, it's entertainment. You find an audience, you get inside their head, you figure out what they want, and you give it to them.
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Aug 10, 2012 08:22
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Kazerad posted:I am baffled by this strangely common assumption that I am going to do something more typical after Prequel Sorry, wasn't making myself clear; I wasn't saying you were going to do that, I was saying you couldn't, that doing research only on people's response to Prequel means you'll be driving yourself into that niche, since you're only getting info from people who like this style of story. People who hate it aren't giving you anything, so your research will work to keep people who are already reading to keep reading, but you'll still have to guess, experiment and even contradict your data if you want to get people who don't like the format reading another story in that format. I think it can be done, but it requires learning why people don't read your work, and that requires information you don't have access to, since you're limited to people already enjoying the comic as is. quote:Art (or perhaps I should say communication/entertainment, to avoid controversy?) Communication/entertainment is art. 
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Aug 10, 2012 08:23
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SatansBestBuddy posted:
I'd say entertainment can be art and that art can be entertaining. I wouldn't label Kaz as an artist in a very strict sense though. He's an entertainer; he's striving to entertain and cultivate an audience. Artists in the strict sense create art for art's sake. They don't care about audience, they just have this almost possessed quality that compels them to make...stuff. Sometimes it's intellectual, sometimes it's mindless; sometimes it finds an audience, sometimes it doesn't. Kaz is someone who loves the medium and wants to experiment with it and see what works with people. Someone who people might say is more artistic will create all that original material that people are claiming Kaz doesn't, but they also don't care that much about whether people find it appealing or not. Something may be original, but it doesn't mean people are going to understand it or gravitate toward it. I've got more things I can add to the discussion but I'll take a break for now. I specifically want to address Prequel's use of the Elder Scrolls universe as a setting and original comparisons to Hussie.
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Aug 10, 2012 10:55
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Loden Taylor posted:According to Adorno, art created for mass consumption is a tool of what he termed the culture industry, which is a means by which the ruling class maintains society's status quo. Art that is easily understood – art that uses the conventions of society and which challenges nothing – is not art, but rather something that can be commoditized and sold by the culture industry in order to keep the masses passive and content with society as it was. True art, he said, challenges its audience and the society in which it is created. It is daunting, inaccessible, difficult to understand, is never designed to be pleasing or "pretty" and, as a result, has a very small but well educated and socially aware audience. Adorno also thought that it was impossible to create art after Auschwitz. (Or maybe that was just poetry, rather than art in general.) Anyway I think he kinda conflated "challenging to society" with "challenging to grasp", which is not exactly appropriate. Though I'll grant him that if something is really obscure and hard to grasp, then it's less likely to be assimilated into irrelevance by pop culture. Just look at, for example, 1984: it has been completely assimilated. There are people using the phrase "double-plus-ungood" in actual speech. "Orwellian" has become an adjective. Everyone knows the slogan "Big Brother is watching you". And yet nearly nobody cares about CCTV cameras everywhere in the cities, USAPATRIOT acts or wiretapalooza on the Internet. (I mean, there are some people voicing some mild-mannered outrage about it, but it's just background noise and in effect nothing is done against it.) Not to make a derail on that subject, just to give an example of art that challenged society and was rendered completely ineffective.
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Aug 10, 2012 12:31
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What I'm curious about, Kaz, is the relationship between readership numbers, update speed, and quality. Scott Kurtz argues, sometimes loudly, that one of the biggest reasons his PvP is successful is his rigorous adherence to a predictable schedule. And, indeed, love it or leave it, you can pretty much count on a new PvP strip every weekday. The Order of the Stick is superior in pretty much every way to the very similar Our Little Adventure save one. Our Little Adventure updates every couple of days, while The Order of the Stick struggles, and often fails, to get one strip out a week. When all is said and done, OotS will probably be considered the superior work to OLA, but right now the pacing of OLA is better. In his author commentaries for the print edition of The Order of the Stick, Rich Burlew writes about how cognizant he is of the difference in pacing between a written version and a webcomic version of the same material. What works when reading a book over ten minutes does not when stretched out over the course of weeks or months, leading him to cut material from the web version that would drag things out too long. On the other hand, scenes like the death of Roy or Haley getting blasted out of panel really only work in the webcomic format and their translations to print were less than successful. Which, like as not, is why we haven't seen that kind of experimentation in OotS lately. Most of Rich's income comes from the book sales, so going out of his way to experiment with format in a way that makes the books less palatable is counter-productive to his making a living. In your case, Kaz, there's no question of there ever being book sales. Setting aside the legal issues, too much of Prequel is in the animations and even the little Flash games to make a printed version at all worthwhile. So Prequel is a purely web only experience, and that's given you the freedom to play around with things as in the recent stairway strip. Of course that sort of effort takes time, as do your Flash games and so on, which contribute to the comparatively long gaps between episodes. My question, then, lies in the realm of your beloved meta-game. Ignoring the questions of artistic merit and the value of experimentation for its own sake, how have your readership numbers been affected by the long delays between strips that your recent experimentation has required? Pretty much everyone who's commented on the stairway strip has loved it, but was it worth the amount of time it took to produce? Obviously, one would prefer both, but if forced to choose between quality and regular updates which is better? Prequel is clearly written more with an emphasis on the former rather than the latter, but as far as the meta-game goes, was that the right choice? In short, for the TL:DNR crowd, how important are regular updates in attaining and maintaining a regular audience when compared to high quality work delivered irregularly? jng2058 fucked around with this message at 13:02 on Aug 10, 2012 |
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Aug 10, 2012 12:58
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That's probably a question of "how many marginal readers will I lose by taking longer with updates" vs "how many new readers will I pick up by word of mouth with cool stairs" and I would guess it's tipped toward the latter. Most people probably prefer a regular schedule, of course, but Kaz is very communicative during delays and usually brings something that makes up for the wait.
Haledjian fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Aug 10, 2012 |
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Aug 10, 2012 17:27
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jng2058 posted:The Order of the Stick is superior in pretty much every way to the very similar Our Little Adventure save one. Our Little Adventure updates every couple of days, while The Order of the Stick struggles, and often fails, to get one strip out a week. When all is said and done, OotS will probably be considered the superior work to OLA, but right now the pacing of OLA is better. Prequel has a bit of the same problem with regard to MSPA. And impressive as the JavaScript tricks are in this dream sequence, MSPA also experimented with HTML stuff (Scratch sequence, that Cascade flash that got out of its initial boundaries), so fancy stairs, while cool, aren't enough to make it really different. And Prequel never had an impressive update rate anyway, especially when you compare it Hussie's insane production speed (current hiatus notwithstanding).
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Aug 10, 2012 19:40
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That's pretty impressive, kudos to your programmer. And also you, of course, Kazerad. 
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Aug 11, 2012 00:04
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My favorite counterexample on the matter of art being a different thing than entertainment is, of course, Shakespeare. Widely regarded as one of the best writers ever to live (if not actually the best), his works studied as Great Art literally for centuries, made a whole big bunch of dick jokes. Seriousy, half the stuff in any Shakespeare play is bullshit he put in to make people in the cheap seats laugh. And the other half is in there because it would make his patron happy.
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Aug 11, 2012 01:49
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SatansBestBuddy posted:Sorry, wasn't making myself clear; I wasn't saying you were going to do that, I was saying you couldn't, that doing research only on people's response to Prequel means you'll be driving yourself into that niche, since you're only getting info from people who like this style of story. People who hate it aren't giving you anything, so your research will work to keep people who are already reading to keep reading, but you'll still have to guess, experiment and even contradict your data if you want to get people who don't like the format reading another story in that format. I think it can be done, but it requires learning why people don't read your work, and that requires information you don't have access to, since you're limited to people already enjoying the comic as is. Ah, sorry; I misunderstood what you were saying, yeah. Your concern is definitely a valid one; a lot of the feedback I get is from people who already like the format. I try my best to monitor criticism from people who don't read the comic (or gave up on reading it) and track some statistics like where people leave the site, but things like that still only give a part of the picture. Still, I do feel like I have enough extranicheular experience that I am not developing myself into a corner. I've lead other projects that were pretty vastly different, and before doing Prequel I did receive a number of awards and accolades for doing Perfectly Normal Art Things. I also have the advantage that this is not the first interactive-forum-adventure-type-thing I've ran. I had another one years and years ago, back before Andrew Hussie even did Jailbreak, and as such I've had the opportunity to not only monitor what worked well this time, but compare/contrast it to my previous. As much as it could be said I am just running off of MSPA's hype, there are many elements to this format that worked incredibly well even before MSPA popularized (and, I would say, refined) it. But I think the biggest protection I have against becoming too buried in my niche is that, with Prequel, I have been intentionally experimenting in appealing to niches without them limiting my audience. When I posted the first Prequel update on the MSPA forums way back when, I didn't advertise it as Elder Scrolls fanfiction at all - people who were familiar with the games said "hey, Oblivion!" and everyone else just took it as a regular story. When I did that interview with Webcomic Beacon, the interviewer actually read the entire comic including the About page and somehow still didn't realize that I was basing it off an existing setting. The story has an appeal to Elder Scrolls fans, but at the same time I try not to turn away people who have never played the games. I do admit I was pretty surprised when it started getting a following from people who didn't even know about MSPA. If I had predicted that, I probably would've done things a little differently with the site design - one thing that stands out to me is the [S] before flashes, which would probably make more sense as a Flash logo or a speaker symbol. But yeah, I think I'm approaching this in a way that will keep my future projects - or even Prequel itself - from becoming too niche-oriented. I make an effort to keep this pretty accessible, and judging from the range of places readers come from it does seem to work relatively well. Though of course, I am keeping an open mind and trying to still interact with things outside my normal area so I can ultimately better my ability to reach people from those groups as well. jng2058 posted:What I'm curious about, Kaz, is the relationship between readership numbers, update speed, and quality. Scott Kurtz argues, sometimes loudly, that one of the biggest reasons his PvP is successful is his rigorous adherence to a predictable schedule. And, indeed, love it or leave it, you can pretty much count on a new PvP strip every weekday. I actually posed a question related to this at a small business seminar I was at a few months ago. I asked a speaker if this was a natural progression for someone in my position - to get a large audience that slowly narrows down into a smaller, very dedicated one. He responded that this was actually something you actively have to counteract through continued networking/advertising. If your audience is getting smaller - even if it just being reduced down to the most dedicated people, he explained - that is never a good thing. You have to keep guiding new people in, revealing more and more "dedicated" readers to counteract the losses should the less dedicated decide to leave. In terms of regular-vs-irregular, Prequel's took its inspiration from the irregular schedule applied by MSPA - in terms of behaviorist reinforcement schedules, it's known as Variable Interval reinforcement. Variable Interval is characterized not only by very frequent responses (people will check the site a whole lot) but for being very difficult to extinct - that is, if people are used to irregular timing, then it will take a pretty big delay before they stop checking. Even if I were capable of producing once/twice-per-week on the dot, I would probably add a day or two of variance just to get this benefit. So yeah, I think I made the right choice. Speed is good and a lot of people demand it, but for something serial like this where every update becomes a permanent part of the archive that people will be consuming as a single work, I wouldn't want to sacrifice quality. I suspect this is about how Rich Burlew feels regarding OotS. Though during his Kickstarter drive we learned he can update fast if you constantly throw money at him, so I don't know. Yonic Symbolism posted:Before the last two updates, it hadn't really done anything that MSPA hadn't done, except handling the commands in a different manner (as thoughts instead of commands) I guess. Well I did have a poledancing minigame, too. I think we can all agree this is the main thing that was missing from Andrew Hussie's epic story about 13 year old children. Sindow posted:That's pretty impressive, kudos to your programmer. And also you, of course, Kazerad.
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Aug 11, 2012 04:11
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| # ? May 30, 2024 12:57 |
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You are the anti-wizard of Oz. "PAY ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!"
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Aug 11, 2012 04:23
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