I've been doing research for my egame group, but along the way I kept getting distracted by on line comics. In this month's "Wired," (That’s a link to an older article-I don't think you can get the current issue on line for free) there's an interview with Scott McCloud, who wrote "Understanding Comics." I'll have to read it once school is out! In any case, in the interview he talks about the future of comics on line. I find it especially interesting when he talks about the freedom of space that you have online with a comic (they can be 100ft long if you like!). But it's tricky to design the right way so that there's not a lot of scrolling and not a lot of time to download. I read "When I am King," which people have probably heard of (warning: Scott McCloud describes it as a "wordless, oscillating, scatological sex farce...that could exist only in a digital environment"). I also checked out McCloud's homepage to see some of his work.

In any case, I see this relating to games in many ways, including: designing appropriate, efficient, and elegant user interface/controls, breaking free from the conventions of paper based things --how to explore the potential of the web, making effective and gripping stories that don't take a lot of bandwidth or words necessarily. I'm thinking about the connections between comics and games. I think people often dismiss both categories as frivolous, but obviously this is not always the case. Scott McCloud's interview is a good example. The interview itself is done in comic form, but he makes some very valid and intriguing points. The same is true for "Maus" by Art Spiegelman. It's a comic book/graphic novel about the Holocaust. When I tell people about the book, they look very uncomfortable about the idea of a Holocaust comic. But it’s a really touching story about the artist's father, who was a Holocaust survivor. I can bring it to class if people are interested.