A couple of days ago I posted about Willow mentioning Google on Buffy, and how cool that was. Exact exchange was, I believe, “Have you tried googling her?”, followed by Xander’s shocked, “Willow, she’s only seventeen!”
Ahem. Maybe you had to be there… Anyway – in the course of the episode, when in fact they google the girl in question, they stumble upon her site, where they find what can only be described as some bloody awful poetry. The site was visible on screen for a few moments. And here’s the extraordinary bit – it actually exists and is online: Cassie Newton’s Poetry and Paintings. There’s a thread on Metafilter all about it as well…
I had a conversation with a friend a short while ago about how similar this was (in some ways) to the AI game concept that Spielberg and Dreamworks dreamt up. Dan (the friend) and I, discussed whether or not the Buffy universe would be a suitable place for a game of the same size and scale as the AI one. Was it rich enough? Was it varied enough? Does it have enough scale, shape or granularity? And the answers, as Dan says, are clearly yes.
The question then is where or when you could launch such a thing – what potential benefits it could accrue for Joss Whedon and/or 20th Century Fox. The most obvious use for such a game would be as a parallel story structure to any potential Buffy-related movie, or as a long-teaser campaign for a Buffy-universe TV series. But I wonder – would there by any way in which an online Buffy game could emerge that paid for itself? Or are these kinds of games destined to be classy, intelligent and engaging promotional materials alone?
PS. Should Mr Whedon and the Buffy creators be interested in such a venture, I know exactly which people should be developing it – and one of those people should be me. My e-mail address (on the off-chance), remains tom%40plasticbag.org.