Funny Picture

Brooke Gladstone does the "On the Media" program on NPR, where she takes on how the media shape, distort and hype stories. Her podcast on the revolution in Egypt is particularly compelling. She's been one of the rare voices of reason in a media market saturated with blatant untruths.

Now she's got a book on the media. THE INFLUENCING MACHINE tracks the history of the news media and how they shape our world, from ancient Mayan publicists through Civil War journalists to Fox News. And it's a cleverly drawn graphic novel whose style is inspired by Scott McCloud's excellent Understanding Comics.

How do we get the media we deserve? Why does debunking a lie often make it stick in people's heads even more firmly? This book should be (and probably will be) required reading in communications courses. It's also worth reading by screenwriters, because every story teller needs to know how we understand the stories going on around us.



Check it out.

Full disclosure: Brooke is a dear friend, and I'm acknowledged in the book.

I'm trying to learn about game design. But I also like to read books that are about creating things that are not screenplays; often they give me fresher insight than screenwriting books do. (As Ram Dass said, "When you know how to listen, everybody is the guru.")

Jesse Schell's ART OF GAME DESIGN: A BOOK OF LENSES presents a hundred ways to look at game design. It's about your process designing a game, seen from a multiplicity of angles. It's incidentally also about making movies, although it pretends not to be. It is also probably about fashion design, although I know nothing about fashion design.

For example, in dealing with dumb feedback, don't agree to the client's changes, or reject them. Instead, try to figure out what problem the client is trying to solve. Schell had a client ask for more chrome on the racing cars in a game. When Schell asked what problem the client was trying to solve, it turned out that the client thought the cars should go faster, but assumed they were going as fast as the game's computer processor could handle. He thought that more chrome would feel faster. Adding chrome probably wouldn't have fixed the problem. Lowering the virtual camera so it was closer to the ground did fix the problem.

Or, the "three layers of desire." What does the client say she wants? What does she think she wants? What does she really want? Your client may say she wants an educational game. But what she really wants is a space game; but she has money from an educational game publisher, so she has to deliver an educational game. That's why she's so hot on the spaceships in your educational game. What she really wants, though, is to become a game designer herself, a desire you must consider as you work with her.

Relating these ideas to the movie world is left as a fairly simple exercise.

I could go on, but then you might not go and read the book. It is really an extraordinarily smart book.