3pointD.com

A while back, Glitchy and I were contemplating creating a comic book that instead of being drawn would be shot in a virtual world or computer game. You set up the scene for each panel in a place like Second Life, World of Warcraft or (as seen at left) Lego Star Wars, take the right screenshots, put it all together with Comic Book Creator, and hey presto, you’ve got yourself a cool graphic novelette. Well, it seems someone beat us to the idea long before we even had it, as you can see from yesterday’s Glitchy Links, which flags a report from Matteo Bittanti, who’s writing about the Gamics site. There, Nathan Ciprick has been creating “gamics” for some time now, and has cool offerings from all kinds of games and online worlds. Comic books, of course, are one of those media that do not suffer from existing in two dimensions. But I love the fact that you can go through 3D to get there. Is anyone doing this in Second Life? Plywood was an absolutely fantastic SL comic strip, though it’s no longer in production. What I’d really love to see (or create) is a comic that isn’t tied to the fiction of the world in which it’s produced, but that only uses that world as art to illustrate a fully formed story that stands on its own. Can anyone help us out?

I saw some relatives for a holiday dinner last night out in Queens here in New York. We had a lovely time — as well as an interesting 3pointD moment. A new addition to the family — a Windows laptop — was at several points the focus of attention. Not only were my cousin and her husband proud of the fact that they’d been able to set up a wireless router (without technical leet skillz other than the ability to hook up game consoles for their son and daughter), but she told me the family’s favorite app these days was Google Earth. Apparently, they spend hours sitting in front of the computer, touring not only the sites involved in the kids’ homework assignments, but my cousin also sometimes stays up after everyone has gone to bed, just poking around the planet. I was really struck by the way this resembled television consumption (which until now, and perhaps still, remains the family’s media of choice — they are huge sports fans). And when I showed them how to turn on the layer of 3D models, things got even more exciting. Soon we were downloading Shea Stadium and dropping it right where it belonged — much to the wonder and delight of my cousin’s 12-year-old son. Everyone also seemed to grok the fact that the 3D models had been made not by a company, for the most part, but by other users. The death of television as we know it is closer than you think. Make way for the New “New Media” ^tm — entertainment in the 3pointD mode.

The Reuters news service, which has a bureau in Second Life, has just scored a huge coup, having recruited comic book writer Warren Ellis to write a weekly column on Second Life. Ellis’s musings on SL at his own site are always interesting, and pleasingly bloody-minded. It’s both pleasing and surprising to see Reuters land him, as the news service is not exactly known for its reverence irreverrence. When I worked there, more than ten years ago, it would have been unthinkable to establish a news bureau anywhere near cyberspace, let alone recruit someone so resolutely individualist as Ellis to write a column about it. The column will also bring greater exposure to a writer who definitely deserves it. Go, Reuters!