Strawburry Miwk

A friend of mine who works in PR told me she was recently having trouble getting the press to pick up on one author’s children’s book series. The concept behind the books is novel (forgive the pun) enough: Describing old children’s games like kick the can and four square that have largely gone by the wayside with the advent of video games and television. The books have a fun story built around children playing these games, and the idea is to inspire kids to get off the couch and into their backyard…to kick a lousy can around…

Sarcasm aside, the author seems to have done everything right: Hired a professional artist to illustrate the series, put a seasoned PR person on gaining exposure, even chalking up contests and promotions to garner interest in this series that, you’d think, parents would be gobbling up for their kids. So why is no one picking up on it?

A quote I’ve collected from one Roy Blount may shed light on this: “People who want to keep on doing creative things for a living must be vigilant about any new means of transmitting their work.” The quote stemmed from a news article about authors defending their intellectual property rights over their work in light of such devices as Amazon’s Kindle (or now, Apple’s iPad), but made the point nonetheless about keeping up with new technology, be it to defend your rights over your work or for finding the best means of promoting yourself.

To that end, I’d like to introduce something that none of you will be able to read a word of unless you speak German: Wildwechsel by Andreas Kuhn. Wildwechsel, which roughly translates to “wild animal trail/crossing,” is a story about a fox that’s…trying to build a house? And he runs into a hog, helps a hippo with her emotional issues, and then…builds a robot? Clearly, I cannot read German, but that’s not the point. The point is, Wildwechsel is an online, interactive, animated children’s story book. I’m sure it’s not the first of its kind, but it is definitely the most sophisticated of its kind I’ve ever seen.

Screencap from Wildwechsel

Currently its only downside is the extremely long load time (if you opened in a new tab/window and gave up, please try it again…it’s definitely worth the wait!), but imagine if the technology behind this sort of storytelling became even more efficient. Imagine these kinds of stories becoming mainstream, with special applications being developed for portable reading devices like Kindle or iPad. If you do browse through Wildwechsel, you will notice a handful of pages give you two or three options to choose where to go next – imagine a classroom of young students, all with digital reading devices, reading such a story and discussing together about what options characters can take, and what the consequences might be. Already many are considering the implications of a digitized classroom; Interactive, animated children’s stories are but one example.

If I were the author of children’s stories about backyard games to play, I would think about taking a more digital, interactive route such as this. If you can power up an iPad, take it outside during a gym class and play a demo of how some backyard game might be played, and have the chance to try it for yourself, you might find a closer bond with the written stories connected to it. If the story involves animated characters that give you options to select as their tale progresses, then that’s guaranteed icing on the cake….and money in your bank, ideally.

Children’s books aren’t the only area in children’s entertainment where there is room for innovation. While it would seem there’s no way to go wrong with toys outside of using the wrong kind of paint on them, you can still bring the realm of online interactivity to physical objects, and make such toys more memorable, more talked about and thus more in demand.

While there is plenty to gripe about James Cameron’s latest film Avatar (which, believe me, I will get around to in this blog sooner or later…), the movie did have some undeniably cool creatures. I wandered down the toy isle while shopping today out of curiosity to see how such creatures translated into action figures after hearing some buzz about them on the web, and on an impulse buy, bought myself the Thanator. After some migraine-inducing assembly, he is now fully constructed and proudly on display next to my Lord of the Rings Wraith Rider and Edward Scissorhands figurines…yeah, I’m that kind of person.

The Thanator came with a thin piece of plastic with an ID-badge kind of sticker on it. This badge had the URL www.avataritag.com printed on it. I visited the site, downloaded the small software bundle, followed the on-screen instructions and before I knew it, this was appearing on my screen via my web cam:

Thanator Web Cam

Yes, a 3-D representation of the fearsome Avatar beast had appeared on my screen, and tilted whenever I tilted the card, always scratching with his paw and performing a series of animations. There was an “attack” button on my screen which would cause him to back off the platform and pounce forward again. Another button showed a pop-up with information on the creature, which you can see in the screenshot above. If you visit the i-tag site and click on “Demo,” you can get a rough idea of what this looks like.

Although I consider myself to be pretty well-seasoned when it comes to technology, this nonetheless blew me away and put an instant smile of amazement on my face. This is definitely a stunning innovation as far as toys and action figures go, albeit limited by a few things. As the site and toy packaging clearly state, a web cam and high-speed Internet connection are required for this to work, and some light software is needed (all-in-all this took me roughly 5 solid minutes, though I can imagine today’s busy parent not having the time, patience or know-how for such a thing…especially after spending close to a half-hour assembling the darn thing). The i-tag must be visible by the web cam in order for the creature to display; When I tilted it too far back, the Thanator kept disappearing and wouldn’t re-appear until I held the badge up in plain view in my web cam. Lastly, as the demo suggests, the only real fun you can have with a single toy is moving it about and seeing its animation loop or activating its one “attack” move, unless you purchase more toys to interact with one another on the screen.

As a kid, I was an avid fan of Nintento’s Duck Hunt, a game that allowed you to shoot a plastic gun at your tv screen to zap pixelated ducks out of the air (in case you don’t remember!). Much more recently, I became enthralled with the Wii (Nintendo again, of course…they’re on to something here) and its Fit/Fit Plus games, which monitors your balance and activity on its Balance Board and displays your Mii performing similar actions on the screen. While combining a plastic toy with the online i-Tag system doesn’t yet offer the same kind of long-term play, it challenges what a traditional toy should be or do, much like Duck Hunt or the Wii have challenged traditional, on-screen, push-button video games.

There is definitely much more that can be said or explored on these two examples and more, but for now I will simply wrap this up here and keep my eyes peeled for other online innovations of traditionally tangible things. I wonder if, very soon, the idyllic family scene will no longer be images of reading children bedtime stories or watching them play with their new toys next to the Christmas tree; -Instead, they’ll gather around the computer and digitally explore a story or unwrap gifts made of 1s and 0s… Such new creative transmission of work will certainly be interesting to watch.

I’ve been told a great deal of conflicting advice in my lifetime concerning any career aspirations. I’ve been told it’s ok to go into college “undecided,” it’s ok not to know exactly what you want to do or be by your mid-twenties, it’s ok to do one thing only to jump around to do another…and even another. And I’ve been told constantly by people older than myself, “heck, I still don’t know what to do!”

This kind of advice is always told with a sort of bittersweet pat on the back, with a gleam in one’s eye upon seeing a young person such as myself with still so much future left ahead of me to fill with whatever hopes and dreams I may. It’s the sort of advice people give hoping they can help you more than they’ve ever been helped themselves, perhaps. Well, this advice was perfectly fine to toss around in 2004 when I was a freshman in college, enrolled as an English major largely because English/Reading was always my strong point in high school, and less than guaranteed A’s and B’s would have been scarlet letters for me. This advice was fine to reinforce throughout my college career when I picked up an illustration job at the local paper that later blossomed into a design/editor job. This advice was fine to continue to praise me with when secondary education turned out not to be my thing, and I picked up a minor in Information Technology Studies instead, delving into web design and even winning an award for a research paper on Internet subcultures. Yes, throughout all these accomplishments, big and small, profound and useless, however varied they all were, it was fine for everyone and myself to say it was fine to do it all and be decently good at it all without a damn clue of what specifically I wanted to be through it all.

Yes, all that was fine between August 2004 and early 2008. But that flower previously blossoming in an open garden now only has the dirt dusted in-between the cracks on a sidewalk to grow in now…melodramatically speaking, that is. Ok, maybe it’s more like some bucket of dirt in a dimly-lit windowsill that the cat keeps threatening to knock over with its tail, but still..

I don’t look on much, if anything, in my educational career with regret, per se. But comparing myself to some of my friends who have had more–as I call it– streamlined educational careers, I do feel a bit…jealous. Misguided. And perhaps what I find most bitingly ironic about said friends is that they, too, considered themselves to be in the “undecided” crowd. They had, however, the courage–or the cowardice, depending on how you interpret them and their lives–to focus on one thing they knew they could do well, and to do just that.

Part of my “Strawburry Miwk” empire is a Twitter account that I use primarily to collect quotes, and one quote I discovered after graduation (again with the haunting irony) was from none other than Plato: “Each man is capable of doing one thing well. If he attempts several, he will fail to achieve distinction in any.”

This was said at a time when you could mend shoes really well, or build houses really well, or drive a manure cart really well and make a living out of it. Few people had the resources or the time to try multiple things, and the technology to excel in more than one thing didn’t even exist. When we think of technology today, we focus a lot on HD TVs, MP3 players, game consoles and other nifty things that revolve around entertainment, but we often neglect to see how even these devices, coupled with expanded mobile networks, faster data processing and increased information creation, storage and transmission, have exponentially increased the amount of work we can do, and decreased the time and manpower that work takes to get done. You can no longer expect to get by just knowing how to mend shoes–such would be entirely laughable. You need to know how to build an identity for your shoe line, how to manage your business’s finances, how to keep up with emerging trends and develop new shoe designs, how to utilize the web and social media to get the net buzzing about your shoes in some whacky viral campaign, and how to accurately log your time and data use through it all to keep on task and moving forward, forward, forward.

In today’s world, you are already assumed to be able to do many things well.

Yet, what I’m realizing now is the key word in this quote is “distinction.” I laughed when I first read this quote, thinking highly of everything I had accomplished in my fairly short time alive on this planet. Yet, since graduating in May 2008 in a job market that’s less than hospitable to today’s “undecided” Renaissance Man, I’ve come to realize…the joke’s on me. I can do a lot of things. I can do many things well. But I feel as of yet I lack any real sense of distinction. With resumes flying past employer’s desks left and right with much of the same skill set as I have, what do I have that makes myself…more distinct?

I’ve had in my mind for a while a vague cloud of generally hazy rough ideas in an ambiguous fog of thought of what I wanted to do with this blog. I wanted to write about the things I’m interested in or that affect the things I’m interested in–web design, illustration, multimedia, social networking, writing, grammar and linguistics, etc.–to better my knowledge of them, especially in a professional sense, but I was just never sure of where exactly to start. This entry seems like a perfect springboard into what this blog will be about; My ongoing quest to achieve distinction. (And just…generally anything I think is important enough to blog about…distinctively.)

Do I go back to school? Do I continue to find jobs in what I can currently do to expand my portfolio? Do I lean more on the focus of my college degree? Do I take a new direction entirely? Do I even stay in this state, in this country, or do I go somewhere else entirely? How will I ever find any of this out?

That is what this blog, and your comments, will be here for.

Just what the f*** is Strawburry Miwk?