Spore® is a new video game. So what? Video games are out there for a good number of decades. Everything and anything has been turned into a video game. Poe was no exception. His stories have been used over and over as we had a chance to talk about one during class time: The Dark Eye, based in "The Mask of the Red Death," which eventually was raised to a status of cult. The game now is history due to the ever changing nature of the electronic technology. One that would have been of great interest to Poe, I think.
Spore® is not a video game about Poe or pretends to use Poe's texts in any way. What I find conceptually worth mentioning in connection to Poe is about its marketing and distribution approaches. The game was designed, developed, and implemented in a period of eight years. It was released to the Market in September 2008 and until December 14th 2008 a total of thirty four million creatures had been created. Yes 34 Million creatures. The game allows the user to create a individualized version from a given set of rules and regulations. Quite the opposite of mechanically reproduced printed pages. 34 million versions of the same story; some how connected, sharing something in common.
How does Poe fit in here? For me all the stories that he created -or at least all the ones I have read or listened during these sixteen weeks- are somewhat connected as well. These subtle connections mimic the Spore metaverse environment, similar to Poe's intention during his lifetime.
Poe wanted to generate an audience with his stories, a pattern, a voice; just like Spore, an individual voice among the community of voices telling the same story with customized outcomes.
Side note: I am constantly wondering how Poe would have done today, in the midst of a consumer society eager to ingest byproducts of fear by the hour. I see him as the Dick Wolf of his time who was born in wrong time.
So what about Spore? What did I do with it? I used the Spore® Creature Creator Interface to render 3D characters -monsters really- based on Poe's stories. Throughout the semester I would sooth my brain from Poe's dark and macabre stories after my long commute back home, by creating my interpretations of the monsters described in his short stories and poems.
The First one I designed was The Raven himself. To me, The Raven has nothing to do with a Raven. After so many years for teaching semiotics and symbolism theory to design students I believe that words are mere doors to meaning until they are given form, but that is a different story.
I deal with semiotics on a daily basis. We all do. They come to us -meaningful messages- taking the shape of sensory stimuli. In the case of the written word -unless the text is meant to be technical writing- the meaning must be extracted, interpreted, constructed from the pieces of organized language. Their relationship to one another, their positioning within the printed or electronic texts are relevant pieces of information that help construct a final meaning.
The latter takes vital importance in this exercise since the electronic text must be considered "living" text. Alive, breathing, moving.
According to Julia Flanders (Electronic Textual Editing: The woman Writers Project: A Digital Anthology) Digital textual projects give the reader access to raw, unedited textual information with the great potential of empowering the regular user with the possibility to make editorial decisions, to "make the reader a potential participant in the process."
I see Spore® as a huge book filled with living texts creating intertextual auto regulated editions of itself.
So there found myself, facing the challenges of this electronic metaverse filled with 3D parts and pieces. The idea was standing by itself, bold: Extract the spirit of each story and turn it into a 3D creature. Very simple, very soothing. Make the macabre monsters go away; take them away from my brain.
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