I am reading — and loving, however disturbing a read that it is — a book by the French philosopher and psychologist, Jean-Claude Larchet, the title of which is The New Media Epidemic: The Undermining of Society, Family, and Our Own Soul. In brief, it is a revisiting of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains in light of how traditional people understand God, man, and the world. You can read an excerpt from Larchet’s book here and the transcript of a talk he gave in the lion’s den (so to speak) here.

I offer that information as a clue to my thoughts about ‘Augmented Reality Games’ in general and specifically of the Warner Brothers profit-taking exercise in this ‘genre,’ ‘Wizards Unite.’ The game, destined to act as a soul-sucking Dementor-with-a-smile to children and the childish around the world for years to come, is in beta testing Down Under.

‘Wizards Unite’ Augmented Reality Game in Beta testing

Magic is all around us in WB Games and Niantic’s new Harry Potter: Wizards Unite | Calling All Wizards video. The game is an upcoming augmented reality (AR) real-world mobile title inspired by the Wizarding World.

Following previous sightings of riderless Nimbus 2000s speeding through Australia and a discombobulated Niffler hoarding golden coins in an arcade, the video chronicles new classified incidents of chaotic magical activity that are appearing with greater frequency throughout the Muggle world.

In Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, each incident increasingly places the wizarding world at risk of exposure, and players must work to solve the mystery of this Calamity as new recruits of the Statute of Secrecy Task Force. Players will be able to explore their real-world neighbourhoods and cities to discover mysterious artefacts, cast spells, and encounter fantastic beasts and iconic characters along the way.

Co-published and co-developed by WB Games San Francisco and Niantic, Inc., Harry Potter: Wizards Unite is under the Portkey Games label. Portkey Games is dedicated to creating new Wizarding World mobile and videogame experiences that place the player at the centre of their own adventure, inspired by J.K. Rowling’s original stories.

Pre-registration Available

For those married to your phone, tweets, and texts and urls and all, this is just an FYI. For parents of susceptible children and to those attempting to escape this sort of technology and its great suck on attention and life, you have been fore-warned!

Eric S. at MuggleNet is not happy about the merging of PotterMore and WizardingWorld.com, the swallowing in effect of a supposedly Rowling-driven-and-controlled property by Warner Brothers to create another profit center for their Harry Potter merchandising franchise. He writes in Wrong Time to Further Monetize Brand:

Warner Bros. has some chutzpah. They already more or less run the world for Harry Potter fans, controlling all the rights, operating the theme parks, stage plays, both Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts film franchises, and meanwhile setting their crosshairs on what small, fan-formed community gatherings they can find. But this is not enough. Now, they’re going to incentivize Harry Potter fans paying them (I am presuming monthly) fees to be considered Wizarding World Gold members. And it comes with a special gold button that they can wear. Give me a break….

Every time I visit a bookstore, I find another shelf overflowing with official Harry Potter merchandise. The US Potter books themselves keep getting released with different covers. Funko pop vinyl figurines, board games, and more bust out from the shelves. Saturation for Harry Potter merchandise has reached an all-time high, and as I mentioned, quality for the largest properties is at an all-time low. Now Warner Bros. is taking Pottermore, which began as an earnest, delightful, and free companion to the Harry Potter books before it was gutted and replaced by the official-movie-photo-riddled, listicle-laden, soulless entry it is currently, and moving the content to a site where they are going to charge fans for access to the Potter e-books and to get decent seats at their overpriced, under-planned stage show. Count me the f*%# out.

Rowling Library ‘Daily Prophet’ #36 expresses similar sentiments.

The keeper line from Eric S.’s philippic I think is “Saturation for Harry Potter merchandise has reached an all-time high, and as I mentioned, quality for the largest properties is at an all-time low.” In case you think he is exaggerating about the new Potter related products available for sale, here is a list of gift items and fandom signal-tokens that have been rolled out just this week.

• New Vans Footwear for Hogwarts School and the Four Houses!  (‘Harry Latino’ full set of shoe pictures)
• Goblet of Fire LEGO kits: Beauxbatons Arrival, Little Hangleton Graveyard Battle
• Hallmark releases new line of Harry Potter gifts, mugs & collectibles  (Hallmark Harry Potter page)
• Funko to release new Harry Potter Yule Ball-themed keychains, pens, pen toppers

This is nothing new or especially lamentable. They had a display at the first HPEF fan convention in 2003 of Harry Potter products that included underwear and toothpaste. I bought a plastic plate there, a token which featured a picture of Harry catching a snitch, for my youngest son, now 18, who still treasures it. There’s a glut of products today that would not have been imaginable back then but the quality or ‘taste’ involved has not changed significantly.

What has changed is what we’re getting for our money in what Eric S. calls “the largest properties.” The movie adaptations of the original septology were only acceptable in light of the novels they reflected and our experiences we had therein; the films were servicable trailers for the imaginative entry or re-entry into the written stories. Rowling’s screenplays are not making it to the screen except as butchered re-packaging by Warmer Brothers mechanics named David, she didn’t write the play, and her new novels featuring Cormoran Strike have no wand magic.

If Rowling were to write up her screenplays as novels for Warner Brothers to adapt into blockbuster formula pieces, there wouldn’t be any bickering about the “monetizing” of PotterMore or the schlock available online and in gift shops. Here’s hoping someone at Rowling, Inc., headquarters realizes the brand is being devalued and urges her, in all her free time post twitter, to go with her strengths as a story teller — as a novelist, that is, not a screenwriter.

Your thoughts?

Readers who have read The Deathly Hallows Lectures know that I think a very helpful lens through which to look at Rowling’s work and especially the Hogwarts Saga finale is the logos epistemology of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. That is not a subject I want to revisit in depth here, but for the passersby who won’t read the relevant chapters in Lectures that make the connection between Coleridge’s understanding of God, man, and the world and Rowling’s artistry in Deathly Hallows, the short course is all the parallels between Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Harry Potter: a seven-part chiastic work, the eye symbolism and redemption via a transformed vision, the embedded story, the Christian content, and the genre melange and inversion.

I’ve been reading about Coleridge, consequently, for my PhD thesis research and am enjoying very much Malcom Guite’s Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a book I recommend to serious readers without reservation; it’s a joy to read and an edifying challenge. In it yesterday I stumbled on a reference to one of Coleridge’s better friends, John Cruickshank, whom Wordsworth claimed had a dream about “a skeleton ship with figures in it” which image STC lifted for Rime’s chilling scene of the dice game between Death and LIFE-IN-DEATH.

I suggested in Harry Potter’s Bookshelf that Hermione’s cat was named as a hat tip to Dickens’ illustrator and noted satiric cartoonist George Cruikshank. As fun as that connection was, I much prefer the Coleridge possibility if only because there are so few hints of a Coleridge-Rowling connection explicitly made in the books. Oxford’s Beatrice Groves in Literary Allusion in Harry Potter found one in ‘Porlocks,’ a harmless magical creature referenced in Phoenix and Fantastic Beasts the textbook, which is pointer to the “person from Porlock” who interrupted STC’s frenetic composition of Kubla Khan (p xiv).

What does Rowling say about the inspiration for Crookshanks? From ‘The Harry Potter Lexicon’ Crookshanks page:

When I was working in London in the late 1980s I used to eat my lunch in a nearby square on sunny days and a large, fluffy ginger cat that looked as though it had run face-first into a wall used to prowl around the sunbathers there; I assume it lived in a nearby house. I didn’t ever get close enough to give myself an asthma attack, but I became distantly fond of this cat, which prowled among the humans around it looking disdainful and refusing to be stroked. When I decided to give Hermione an unusually intelligent cat I gave him the appearance of this haughty animal, with the slightly unfair addition of bandy legs.

Hence the ‘crook shanks’ joke. I’m guessing hopefully that it was also a pointer to one of Coleridge’s friends and inspirations for Rime. Hermione’s pet has remarkable vision, for one thing, an eye for the evil in deceptive appearances, and while this works for the satirical cartoonist, it also matches up with the meaning and moral of Mariner. Let me know what you think. 

 

The Leaky Cauldron, the Sauron’s Mouth of Rowling, Inc., for fandom announcements, has announced in an “EXCLUSIVE Statement,” i.e., a press release vetted and redacted by Warner Brothers, that PotterMore is being folded into the movie goliath’s WizardingWorld.com franchise.

So what? Well, it seems there will be a subscription fee to get all the content though much of it will be free to all viewers. This ‘Gold’ level membership will create access to things that those unwilling or unable to pay won’t have. I’m not sure why this upsets fandom; they pay for books and for movie tickets to gain access to entertainment they wouldn’t have otherwise, not to mention the fees paid for entry to the internet.

The bad news? The “collaboration” thing is a joke. Warner Brothers has “engulfed and devoured” (Mel Brooks fans will get that reference?) PotterMore which is now no longer a Rowling property and responsibility. I’m not sure that’s bad news if all it comes down to is one less distraction for The Presence and one more channel for Warner Brothers to market their franchise (“fan servicing”).

The good news? If you read all the way down to the bottom of the “EXCLUSIVE Statement,” you’ll find this note:

Neil Blair said in an initial statement to The Booksellerthat the new venture between Pottermore and film rights-holders Warner Bros. means that now ‘the only limits will be our imaginations and what technology is available’ when it comes to crafting digital experiences for fans. The excitement of Pottermore originally was the promise of new J.K. Rowling content, and one main question fans seem to have is how involved J.K. Rowling is at this point. The new venture is run by a collaboration between Warner Bros. and Pottermore, so in a sense this is no longer her venture, but run by a collaboration between Warner Bros and Pottermore.

We were assured that the content written for Pottermore by J.K. Rowling (including the Sorting and Patronus quizzes, etc) will all remain free to fans. The aim, we were told, is not to take away from fans — ‘if anything we’re trying to put everything in one place to give bigger and better experiences’, our spokesperson told me.

If true, then the only thing I want from this membership site (and would be willing to pay for access to) will still be available for the cost of my internet hook-up. All good. It is hard to believe, of course, that they won’t be adding EXCLUSIVE Rowling content behind a Gold membership firewall to encourage subscriptions at that level, but we’ll see.

What do you think? Though Warner Brothers denies this is a profit-taking or money-making exercise, is this “adding insult to injury,” an expression one reader used in sharing this official-via-Leaky announcement? Share your thoughts by pressing ‘Post a Comment’ up by the post’s headline and writing what you think in the comment boxes below.

My mother died in 2006. Looking through her effects, I found photo albums from her childhood. Almost all the pictures were of family and school. One page, though, was devoted to a celebrity. Doris Day visited Philadelphia and she traveled as a young teen in the late 1940’s from her Mainline hamlet into the big city to see what was obviously a promotional gig for a movie. There must have been hundreds of such star-turns in her youth. Doris Day was the only one she went to see and capture on her brownie Kodak camera.

The Harry Potter connection? Not much, obviously. But here’s the late Doris Day, nee Kappelhoff, singing “It’s Magic” from her first film appearance, ‘Romance on the High Seas,’ 1949. She lived a long and apparently unhappy life. May she rest in peace — and be remembered for the musical and silver screen magic she brought into people’s lives.