The Silent Age ft. Crazy Shave: cut, shave & grow back Joe’s hair.

In the following paragraphs I will explain my transformative work that is called The Silent Age ft. Crazy Shave: cut, shave & grow back Joe’s hair. First I will provide brief information about what it is and after it I will explain how does it relates to digital culture and why I decided to create it.

The Silent Age ft. Crazy Shave: cut, shave & grow back Joe’s hair is a simulation of a game and a transformative work. It is a remix of the game The Silent Age: episode one (that we played in class) and the game Crazy Shave created by Bluebear Technologies Ltd. Hypothetically the game allows the players to shave Joe’s (main character of The Silent Age) beard and create multiple shapes of it and share it on social media.

This prototype game relates to digital culture, first of all because is a game that just can be played in Android and iOS. Not only but also because it gives you the chance to personalize Joe’s character as you want it (tailored for you) and share his new hair look in social media. Equally important is to identify this game as part of new media and digital culture because it uses variability and as Manovich says in The Language of New Media “Using the theory of prototypes, we can say that the property acts as a prototype, and different versions are derived from this prototype.” Meaning that the “base” would be The Silent Age and Crazy Shave.

For my transformative work, I would like to categorize it as part of fan fiction because

It is a fiction about the character Joe of The Silent Age and the setting from Crazy Shave (both “original” games). I created because I consider myself a fan of all the versions of Crazy Shave. For this prototype, I decided to merge these games because I really like to play Crazy Shave with my nieces and when I was playing The Silent Age I felt that it would be better if the game let me change the character or personalize his clothing or hair. It is a transformative work because it transforms the game into something I would like to play and see. And it is part of the “remix culture” because it merges two completely different games. As a fiction, I would like to be capable of import my personalized Joe to The Silent Age game and being able to play with the Joe that I previously created in The Silent Age ft. Crazy Shave: cut, shave & grow back Joe’s hair. As part of the fan fiction we can also compare my work with the term “participatory culture” because I got engaged with the game and I participated to create something different.

Finally I can say that I really enjoyed creating a transformative work from The Silent Age, and that it is challenging. Thus, it made me think about all the Harry Potter and Star Wars fan fiction, remixes, mash-ups and different creations that are considered “not original” and I realized how dangerous are the Copyright laws because with it, we are stopping new creative transformative works.