remixable - posts tagged 'design'

Transmedia Talk 34: SCA Reality

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 03:32:49 GMT

Welcome to Transmedia Talk, a podcast covering all things Story. Transmedia Talk is co-hosted by Nick Braccia, Dee Cook, and Haley Moore and looks to shed light on the topic of transmedia storytelling with commentary, interviews and tips on how storytelling is moving into the 21st century. Download | Subscribe with RSS |Subscribe with iTunes Jeff Watson from the University of Southern California talks about Reality, a creative game he designed with Simon Wiscombe for students at the university’s School of Cinematic Arts. Hosts: Nick Braccia from Culture Hacker Dee Cook from Dog Tale Media Haley Moore (and Host Emeritus Robert Pratten from Transmedia Storyteller) Special Guest: Jeff Watson, co-creator of SCA Reality at USC. From This Episode: USC’s Integrated Media Arts and Practice (IMAP) program. The collaborative production game SFZero Steve Jackson’s Illuminati The card game Fluxx Mary Flannagan’s Grow-A-Game A few of our favorite deals: Spacebound – Deal Page The Game – Deal Page Letters of My Lai – Deal Page

Transmedia Talk 32: GoBZRK and the Future of Publishing

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 19:43:36 GMT

Welcome to Transmedia Talk, a podcast covering all things Story. Transmedia Talk is co-hosted by Nick Braccia, Dee Cook, and Haley Moore and looks to shed light on the topic of transmedia storytelling with commentary, interviews and tips on how storytelling is moving into the 21st century. Download | Subscribe with RSS |Subscribe with iTunes Rich Silverman, Alex Lemay, and Transmedia Talk host Dee Cook discuss the future of publishing and talk about GoBZRK, the experience they have created for an upcoming novel by prolific young adult author Michael Grant. Hosts: Nick Braccia from Culture Hacker Dee Cook from Dog Tale Media, Experience and Community Moderator for GoBZRK (and Host Emeritus Robert Pratten from Transmedia Storyteller) Special Guests: Rich Silverman, Writer/Producer, GoBZRK Alex Lemay, Executive Producer, GoBZRK From This Episode: Animorphs Gone Silverman and Lemay are members of The Shadow Gang. Borders closed almost 400 stores in July. Egmont UK, the publisher of BZRK Nexus Humanus, the first in-game site for the experience. Why So Serious, the ARG experience for the Dark Knight. ( player forum ) Publishers Weekly’s interview with Michael Grant ARGNet’s coverage of the experience

Transmedia Talk 31: Evan Jones, Suspending Disbelief in Interactive Stories

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 15:06:43 GMT

Transmedia Talk 28 – Game of Thrones and the Maester’s Path

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 03:19:45 GMT

Welcome to Transmedia Talk, a podcast covering all things Story. Transmedia Talk is co-hosted by Nick Braccia, Dee Cook, and Haley Moore and looks to shed light on the topic of transmedia storytelling with commentary, interviews and tips on how storytelling is moving into the 21st century. Download | Subscribe with RSS |Subscribe with iTunes Steve Coulson of Campfire talks with us about The Maester’s Path, a sensory storytelling campaign for the HBO series Game of Thrones. Hosts: Nick Braccia from Culture Hacker Dee Cook from Dog Tale Media Haley Moore (and Host Emeritus Robert Pratten from Transmedia Storyteller) Special Guest: Steve Coulson from Campfire From This Episode: The Maester’s Path, Campfire’s sensory and puzzle experience for the show. The comprehensive making-of campaign Making Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones armor designer Simon Brindle showcases his workin a short video for Game of Thrones: The Artisans. Fans attempt to fix Adrianne Palicki’s costume for her role in the new Wonder Woman series. Michael Andersen walks readers through the Maester’s Path experience at ARGNet Writer JC Hutchins opens his Maesters Path scent box with care and irrepressible enthusiasm. Campfire partner GetGlue The binaural experience of the Inn at the Crossroads Campfire partner Luxurious Animals The virtual environment The Wall

Transmedia Talk 27: Socks, Incorporated

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 19:46:40 GMT

Transmedia Talk 26 – Dave Szulborski Memorial Show

Wed, 25 May 2011 12:19:40 GMT

Welcome to Transmedia Talk, a podcast covering all things Story. Transmedia Talk is co-hosted by Nick Braccia, Dee Cook, and Haley Moore and looks to shed light on the topic of transmedia storytelling with commentary, interviews and tips on how storytelling is moving into the 21st century. Download | Subscribe with iTunes Mike Monello, Brian Clark, Michelle Senderhauf, and longtime ARG player Roxanne (Enaxor) join us to honor the life and games of indie ARG creator Dave Szulborski. Hosts: Nick Braccia from Culture Hacker Dee Cook from Dog Tale Media Haley Moore (and Host Emeritus Robert Pratten from Transmedia Storyteller) Special Guests: Mike Monello, Founder and CEO of Campfire Brian Clark, CEO of GMD Studios Michelle Senderhauf of Dog Tale Media Roxanne, also known as Enaxor From This Episode: Dave Szulborski’s personal site with his biography, game descriptions and puzzles. Dave Szulborski’s book This is Not a Game Varin’s guide to Chasing the Wish Dee’s guide to Dread House EA’s game Majestic Push, Nevada Search4E Legend of the Sacred Urns Art of the Heist Monster Hunter Club Art of the Heist cube word search puzzle, aka The Evil Cube Over the Hedge Puzzle Trail Who is Benjamin Stove The Strange Creatures video from Monster Hunter Club, currently at over 4,700,000 views on YouTube. The Host Cryptid Love, a video from Monster Hunter Club. Dave’s character stringsends at Top Secret Dance Off Dave Memorial Video

SXSW: What ARG Makers Can Learn from UI Designers

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 23:24:50 GMT

Image courtesy of John Mark Josling

My visit to South by Southwest Interactive took me to a lot of talks on Transmedia – a term, by the way, that was the most overused and under-understood of the conference (Felicia Day even went on a particularly apt rant about it on Monday). Most of the “Transmedia” panels just didn’t seem to get it – there was no takeaway, there was a lot of gobbeldygook, and in one bizarre case, there was a futurist who seemed to be discussing how in 6-10 years we will all be watching programmed television. But I digress.

I ended up going to an exceeding dry-titled panel on a whim. I couldn’t bear to attend another Transmedia panel because the term had lost any meaning to me, and “Having Fun Yet? 10 Usability Heuristics For Games” sounded like the presenters had a good handle on their topic, at least. But what I found there completely blew me away and this panel took the crown for my favorite panel of SXSW Interactive 2011. These design maxims may be old hat for programmers, but I have never heard them applied together like this for ARG development, and there they are highly relevant.

1. Increase interaction speed over time. Repeated tasks should get quicker. Make frequent transactions more easily available. There was a recent game that had information that was only accessible if you entered a username and password. The way the webpage was coded, the browser did not ask if it could save the information for you, so every time you wanted to check for new content (which showed up regularly) you either had to memorize the login or search your email for it. Not good design.

2. Avoid conceptually conflicting inputs. Be conceptually consistent throughout the game. This means that the evil genius hacker organization probably wouldn’t be using simple substitution, folks.

3. Provide immersive cues – ambiguity makes the connection between the player and their world less immersive. If you want a player to call a telephone number or email someone, telegraph that to them. Don’t make them fearful to contact your characters – “Is this in-game or out-of-game?” is not being immersive!

4. Distinguish active from inactive. Provide cues so that players know what they need to touch. If they’re supposed to be hacking into your character’s email, fine – make that clear. But if they’re not, save yourself some trouble by making that clear ahead of time.

5. Prevent surprise errors – and if the user does fail, make sure they understand why. Allow them to undo errors. The first part of this rule can be helped with careful vetting and playtesting. The second part, say if a player thinks that they need to email Character A with information when in fact it’s Character B they have to contact – simply have Character A nudge them in the right direction rather than ignore them completely, so your player isn’t shouting into the wind.

6. Be game-state aware. Provide the correct data to players at the correct time, and let them dig deeper to the areas that they want to find out more about. Practice progressive disclosure. Don’t be absolutely rigid in your game design. Some of the best and most memorable ARG characters started out as throw-aways, but players got attached to them, the designers realized that attachment, and they wrote much larger roles for the characters, creating a much richer experience for the players. Listen to your audience and adjust accordingly. As well, don’t overload them with all the information right away. Just as you read a book chapter by chapter or watch a movie a minute at a time, you don’t play an ARG all at once.

7. Reading is easier than remembering. Make objectives clear and memorable; don’t overburden with information. Reduce the players’ cognitive load. In an ARG sensibility this can be said as: provide a player summary site, and keep it current. ARGs are notorious for being complex, deep, and sometimes impossible to keep up with for all but the most dedicated players. Will you be the one who can come up with the system that lets the casual ARG player join in?

8. Remember real life. Provide quick and easy exits. Consider the environment your game is played in. Another game recently had a live feed that displayed for 24 hours. The designers did it because they wanted to include a global audience. But for those players who started watching the feed at the beginning, it was very hard to turn it off and go to bed. Even a small, tongue-in-cheek card to change viewer shifts would have helped the viewers realize that they could switch off and let someone else take their place.

9. Maintain flow. Minimize content breaks and cognitive dissonance. Does it all feel like one system? Don’t make content breaks feel like punishment. Some games release content on a set schedule and there’s nothing at all wrong with that. But it should be with a small sense of closure that the last item of the chapter is released, so that players don’t receive something highly provocative and have to wait a week (or whatever the timetable is) to receive answers. If they’re punished by time for seeking answers, soon enough they will stop seeking.

10. Ask, “What could I remove?” Don’t include information that’s irrelevant and don’t let bells and whistles overwhelm your project. In other words, consider the principle of Chekhov’s gun – never put a loaded rifle on the stage if you’re not planning on shooting it by the end of the play. One red herring? Maybe. A dozen? Not so much.

As you can see, these principles adapt extremely easily to ARG design, but I think they can branch out into many other fields as well. I’d like to give many kudos to Corey Chandler and John-Mark Josling for a terrific, old-school SXSW presentation that gave much food for thought.

Slideshare here.

Transmedia Talk Podcast – Episode 14

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 04:19:38 GMT

Welcome to Transmedia Talk a new podcast covering all things story. Transmedia Talk is co-hosted by Nick Braccia and Robert Pratten and looks to shed light on the topic of transmedia storytelling with commentary, interviews and tips on how storytelling is moving into the 21st century. download Or Subscribe iTunes NB: If you’d like to give us feedback, recommend yourself as a guest or suggest topics to cover – please email us at talk@workbookproject.com or Tweet away with the hashtag #tmediatalk Hosts.. and Guests for this week Nick Braccia from Culture Hacker Robert Pratten from TransmediaStoryteller.com Dee Cook from Dogtail Media Haley Moore The panelists discuss their early & current experiences with developing and executing transmedia projects. Good discussion about the thrill of interactivity and designing ARGs. Running Time 00:00 Introductions 00:40 Getting started in transmedia (Rob’s story) 04:40 The Lowlifes transmedia project : Objectives & narrative design 16:40 Developing the interactive game for Lowlifes 29:00 Haley Moore discusses The Sketchbook Project 41:00 Dee Cook discusses her work with DogTail Media 44:45 The market for ARGs in 2011 46:00 Changing nature of ARG and developing for different audience segments

How to Improve Engagement with your Webisodes

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:02:55 GMT

Why do some web producers release their webisodes weekly when they have evergreen content? That is, if their series of web videos are not tied to current events, why not release them all at once?

One answer might be that the release schedule is tied to the production schedule – episodes are being produced one week and released the next. But why not release them two weeks apart or wait until enough episodes have been produced to release all at once or daily? Why not four hours apart or on demand?

My point is only that there should be some reasoning behind the scheduling and not just because TV has scheduled weekly content.

You see, if TV has taught us one thing about audiences, it’s that they don’t like to be kept waiting. They don’t like to wait while the commercial plays, they don’t like to wait while the episode downloads and they don’t like to wait week-to-week. Many people record several episodes of a series before the viewing or they’ll buy the complete series on DVD. But of course audiences come to TV and the web with different expectations so why copy the TV model online if you don’t have to?

Re-thinking your web series

This blog post looks at how you might optimize the release schedule for your webisodes. Core to my approach is understanding how you want the audience to engage with your story and then designing an integrated experience that consequently determines how the video will be released. There is no initial assumption that the schedule should be weekly or any other time period.

There is, I suppose, an assumption that most web series will have more than just the videos: there’s usually a website, a blog, a forum, a mailing list, a Facebook page or some other mechanism that represents an opportunity to inform the audience of a new release and provide them with a backchannel. These additional non-video platforms are what makes your web series “an experience” rather than a series of videos. Even a single YouTube channel with the comments and likes enabled creates a participatory experience. Whatever the implementation, it is the experience that builds, empowers and engages your audience – it multiplies the draw of the video.

Here’s a short list of considerations for determining the time interval between episodes with the key objective being to maintain engagement between episodes (i.e. you want audiences to watch the next episode):

production limitations & opportunities
distribution limitations & opportunities
business model limitations & opportunities
strength of story episode to episode (the narrative hook)
length of each episode (longer webisodes might benefit from longer periods between episodes to avoid overload)
audience expectations and headroom (giving too much to consume between releases may lead to abandoned subscriptions).

Mind The Gap: Is the Narrative Strong Enough to Bridge the Delay?

Figure 1 illustrates how we’d like audience to move from episode to episode. In this example there’s enough interest or engagement to have them come back for more.

Figure 1: Audience follows episode to episode

Unfortunately there are a number of failure scenarios if the period between each release is wrong. In Figure 2, the audience abandons the web series because the content isn’t strong enough to have them come back – there’s not enough pull to bridge the gap.

In Figure 3, the audience is asked to work too hard to keep up and soon they find they’re overwhelmed with content for the given schedule.

Figure 2: Abandons

Figure 3: Overload

In both these failure scenarios one solution is to adjusted or fine-tune the schedule – if that’s possible. As I mentioned earlier, there may be reasons why you’re stuck with the schedule.

Figure 4: Release schedule adjusted

Using Transmedia Storytelling to Maintain Engagement

Web series can be expensive to produce and the number of episodes is as likely to be determined by budget as anything else. This could mean you don’t have enough webisodes to span the schedule you’d like or you need to maintain engagement between webisodes because the schedule is fixed.

Figure 5 shows how narrative spread to secondary, less expensive, media can be used to stitch together the web series – providing a mid-episode fix of story for those eager for more. The trick here is in the storytelling: to have the webisode and secondary media satisfying in their own right and hence consuming all media is optional which hence alleviates the chance of overload. Implied in the notion of “secondary media” is that it may indeed not stand alone and should be consumed as additional exploratory content (e.g. another optional layer).

Figure 5: Transmedia Storytelling applied to web video series

Figure 6 in contrast shows two equal media platforms both scheduled for episodic release but appealing to different audience sub-segments or consumption habits: e.g. media 1 is consumed while at work and media 2 consumed on the commute.

Here, each media has its own (intervening?) release schedule with additional narrative hooks and branches to take the audience to the next episode in the same media or to alternative media.

Figure 6: Native Episodic Transmedia Storytelling

Finally of course, additional secondary media might be added to two primary media platforms – as shown in Figure 7

Figure 7: Multi-layered Transmedia Story.

Allow Audience to Go with the Flow

So far I’ve assumed that all audience members are to be treated equally. But why not reward engaged followers with either additional content or early “pre-release” content? And if you do, does it matter that they might share with others ahead of the “proper” release?

I believe that when you have someone that’s engaged you should allow them to ride the engagement out and see where it takes them. This means allowing them to request additional content on demand ahead of the release schedule which I further believe has the potential to turn engaged audiences to advocates – hence recruiting more audience.

YouTube’s “Unlisted” video option is perfect for this: casual viewers won’t see or find the video before it’s made public but engaged audiences can be sent the link.

Transmedia Example

My Lowlifes project has three primary media: novella, webisodes and blog. I determined that it should be scheduled to be released two days apart over a period of 15 days or so. I felt that daily would lead to content overload and at three days the whole release would drag on too long.

One approach would have been to alternate the media – novella chapter on day 1, video on day 2, blog on day 3 and so on. But this would have incorrectly implied a sequence or priority to the media platforms that I was keen to avoid.

Consequently, at the same time content is made public, subscribers receive an email with links to the three media episodes plus the ability to request additional content from anywhere within the series. This would allow someone who was really into the videos, for example, to watch them all in one sitting by simply requesting them.

It’s not a problem for me if someone grabs all the videos and posts them all on their own blog because my objective is to get them seen. It’s evergreen content and within 3 weeks it would all be available in any case.

For Lowlifes, the scheduling and on-demand requests for content is made possible by a service called Conducttr -a pervasive entertainment platform from my company TransmediaStoryteller.com and will soon be available for all members of our Community.

Take-away

In summary then, if you assume that the audience always has something better to do with their time and money, it will absolutely focus your mind on maintaining engagement between webisodes and this will:

determine the optimum release schedule where you have the flexibility to choose it
highlight the need for a transmedia experience around an inflexible release schedule
provoke a discussion about whether you should allow content on demand for the most engaged audience members.

Augmented Reality

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 19:33:10 GMT

Below is a short interview with Fred Steube – Digital Innovation Manager, Cox Target Media/Valpak. I watched him speak on an interesting panel about Augmented Reality at the DMA2010 conference.

What’s your experience with AR?

Our experience with AR includes a Martha Stewart promotion we did with our Valpak coupon envelope that allowed consumers to see if they won a daily prize and to see daily previews for the Martha Stewart show by holding up the envelope to their webcams. Additionally, we did a B2B ad campaign in Ad Age and DMNews that showed Marketers what our product offerings are by holding up a AR marker to a webcam and viewing in 3D.

What are your favorite examples of AR?

Favorite AR experience has to be the Toyota example we showed at DMA and the Coke Zero and McDonald’s Avatar promotions. Also the Mini AR campaign. Anything by Total Immersion (an AR technology developer) is typically very high caliber.

Virtual reality never lived up to consumer’s expectations. Is AR heading in that direction?

AR appears to continue to gain traction along with QR codes, particularly with mobile. The key there is the location based benefit of seeing content that geographically relevant and relevant to what they are looking for.

The word innovative is overused. What is truly innovative?

Innovative is anything that transcends a current way of doing something by being new. It should add value to a key stakeholder. It should break molds and be out of the box; something new and impactful. This can be a product or process.

Pt2: Investigating the Possibilities of Transmedia; Collapsus, a Case Study

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 15:55:09 GMT

Segment II: Why is Collapsus an example of a transmedia project? How is this a useful tool?

The concept of transmedia is grounded in the delivery and curation of specific information across various platforms. As compared with traditional media’s pattern of distribution (the same set of images relayed to viewers repeatedly through the same modes of communication) the innovation of transmedia is grounded in choice: developing successful projects means inspiring viewers to follow subject matter from one media platform to another. Information is provided as a reward, acting as an agent of incentive to produce sustained interest within the viewer. These “messages” act as a resource independent to a greater whole. (Culture Hacker: Transmedia Storytelling Getting Started) Content, therefore, has the capacity to enrich the spread of entertainment across multiple platforms.

Segment II of this blog series will examine what platforms the brand-new, transmedia project, Collapsus utilized. The distribution of factoids within this project highlights the benefits of using alternative methods to expand a project’s reach beyond traditional audiences.

A basic breakdown of existing communication reveals reading, listening, interaction, and watching to be the modern foundation of possible sensory content application. Reading (books, comics, ebooks), listening (radio, mobile, online), interaction (online, mobile, social, console, ARG) and watching (TV, theatre, mobile, live performance, online) are all media sources useful in releasing information and encouraging viewers to seek further analysis. (Henry Jenkins: Transmedia Education)

Inspiring viewers to self-reflect in the context of a project’s subject matter is directly related to the availability of information within a transmedia project. In Collapsus, “visitors to the Collapsus site can cut away from soap-opera-like webisodes to learn about energy issues through an interactive map, view fictional newscasts on the Citizenergy Channel, or watch real interview clips with experts, analysts, activists and journalists.” (Mq2: Collapsus)

Executing platforms that support and encourage choice is imperative in creating and sustaining viewer interactivity. As the sole content provider, producers control exactly what information is released, at what time, and to which audience; they guide the story (or project) as it unfolds. What exactly does this mean? It speaks to the nucleus of the transmedia experience: widened exposure equals more choice, and, more choice equals widened exposure. This implies a need to thoroughly understand one’s projected audience: who would be most interested in this material? What are the best modes of communication for conveying this on multiple media platforms?

Collapsus was produced with the goal of exposing a broader audience to the information found in the traditional documentary, Energy Risk, released by VPRO. See the original doc HERE

With an idea of audience in mind, creators and producers of the project conceptualized a multi-linear experience that blended genres of documentary, animation, fiction, and interactivity. Producer Tommy Pallotta explains, “This hybrid approach allows us to look at a serious documentary subject, but also to shift from the usual talking head approach to something that better reflects our time.”(MQ2: Collapsus)

Citizenergy, the Youtube channel for the original Dutch documentary, compliments the transmedia project, Collapsus: The Energy Risk Conspiracy, and is an example of this approach to media multi-tasking. (See the channel HERE) The CitizEnergyChannel provides several video segments linked to Collapsus’ theme of risk; clips provide expert analysis on the danger of a growing dependency on fossil fuels. Each video on Citizenergy is packaged content, the producer actively chose what was delivered to audiences. Utilizing Youtube and other video sharing sites give a lot of information to viewers, while allowing them to review at their convenience.

In transmedia projects the audience must chose to further his/her knowledge through exploring subject matter, playing games, and chatting with others. The endeavor of exploring a specific topic through various media can inspire a “community” culture of individuals working with a cohesive goal. When players are able to pool their knowledge with others, audience capacity multiplies. For Collapsus, this directly relates to the project’s undertone of social responsibility. As players and viewers interact with the material, they consult each other on personal methods to approach content. This allows for alternative modes of thinking, and the development of a furthered sense of self in a global community. A global community means increased global communication and a wider audience.

In researching the intersection of education and transmedia I came across an example of a school in Texas that utilized multiple media platforms to integrate education and technology. On August 22, 2009 in Rio de Janeiro, NAVE (Ncleo Avanado em Educao – Advanced Education Center ) a Brazilian high school, hosted Heroes and Smallville’s associate producer Mark Warshaw to teach a lesson on Transmedia Storytelling. The event was live streamed and interactive, as the audience, both live and online, participated in an interactive SMS game. The release of the Descolagem App later that day furthered the audiences span. The audience was literally guided through a lesson on transmedia storytelling through an actual transmedia experience. Beto Largman, who curated the event, hopes the format of the lesson displays the process as a resource; a strategy evolved to distribute content personally to a mass audience. (Transmedia Experience Streamed At Highschool )

The choice to pursue more components of a project is the apex of transmedia success. The interactive component of Collapsus’ narrative is directly linked with the information provided by the clips on Youtube. Soap-opera-like webisodes, an interactive map, fictional newscasts, along with the Citizenergy Channel, provide players with a platform of knowledge on the energy crisis, which gives them the ability, and inspiration, to interact within the overall narrative of the game. The goal clearly defined: Reviewing Collapsus for Public Radio Makers Quest 2.0, Julie Drizin states, “Truthfully, this is the kind of media that is better experienced than explained.”
Experience Collapsus HERE.

Director of Collapsus, Tommy Pallotta, will be interactively interviewed in Pt2:
Investigating the Possibilities of Transmedia; Collapsus, a Case Study.

Interview questions will come directly from reader comments to Tommy- the questions and his responses will be included in next weeks feature. Previously, he produced Waking Life, the first independently financed and computer animated feature produced, as well as A Scanner Darkly, and a multitude of other projects. Let’s delve into his animation process of rotoscoping, and understand how imperative it is to develop successful visual reaction in transmedia and cross-media projects.

Email any questions to Tommy: work@workbookproject.com
Please subject with: Tommy Pallotta questions

Source Links
1. http://workbookproject.com/culturehacker/2010/07/07/transmedia-storytelling-getting-started/
2. http://henryjenkins.org/2010/06/transmedia_education_the_7_pri.html
3. http://www.mq2.org/Collapsus
4. http://www.hastac.org/blogs/nancykimberly/transmedia-experience-livestreamed-brazilian-high-school

Pt1: Investigating the Possibilities of Transmedia; Collapsus, a Case Study

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 14:45:12 GMT

This blog post focuses on the intersection of transmedia and learning. Presented in 4 segments, we will look at how transmedia is revolutionizing media creation and presentation. As modes of human communication continue to change, so too does the concept of audience, and the projects envisioned and produced. Through a case study on Collapsus, an Energy Risk Conspiracy project, I will expose components necessary for building a successful transmedia project, along with the capabilities and influence accessible through employing such processes. Gain access to exclusive storyboards and scripts, behind the scene details, and interactive interviews as WorkBook Project delves deeper into the process of transmedia.

I. What does it mean to experience a Transmedia Project?

Almost a year ago (November, 2009) Alison Norrington, for Wired News, posed the question: “The value of a good story remains; the question is will you prefer to read, listen, watch, or do?” (Wired UK: Transmedia Tales and the Future of Storytelling)

Since this publishing, how has the relationship between media and consumers changed? As the print to screen revolution continues, so too does the process, and production, of the content delivered. At the time of Norrington’s writing, transmedia had been introduced to many, but had yet to conquer the attention of general audiences.

Now a growing buzzword, transmedia can be defined as an approach to content delivery that weaves various storylines across multiple platforms intending to further immerse their audience within a specific media experience. (Seize The Media: What is Transmedia?)

This process transforms the viewer into somewhat of information “detective.” Transmedia projects have the potential to develop a relationship of trust between consumer, content provider, and the product delivered. Because the concept of transmedia is grounded on utilizing multiple outlets to distribute a variety of information, content producers need to immediately develop credibility to ensure a project’s success. Interest is the participant’s motivation, learning digitally no longer a passive role. A well-anchored vision can instill reliable participant relations.

Exposing accurate information through a multitude of well-designed media platforms give players/viewers the tools to build their own infrastructure of knowledge around a communal topic. To ensure a fluid audience while working with multiple media endeavors, pioneers in the field like Lance Weiler, plan “for multiple platforms from the start. They design fictional universes that are consistent however the audience engages.” (Wired: What is Transmedia) This leads to one of the best benefits to the transmedia approach: The cliché “there’s no ‘I’ in team.” Each participant gathers a “data-bank” of unique information that is bettered by employing other participant’s results. (Henry Jenkin’s article) Community building can be fostered and encouraged.

This innovative platform has shifted the production of culture and has revolutionized the concept of storytelling. Weiler recently helped to script Collapsus, a transmedia project developed by SubmarineChannel, with the Dutch public broadcaster VPRO. Collapsus signals a new experience in transmedia storytelling. Through documentary, fiction, animation, players interact within the narrative, choose his/her own perspective, and make decisions to affect the global energy crisis.

Does the innovative production of Collapsus signal a change in consumer choice as Norrington predicted? Yes- the meme spawned around the potential energy crisis reveals that to choose transmedia is to utilize options. Check out the project at http://www.collapsus.com.

Stay tuned for Part II: Why is Collapsus an example of a transmedia project? How is this a useful tool?
Delving into the significance of employing various media outlets in transmedia projects, taking a closer look at Collapsus, the creators behind it, and the capabilities of transmedia as a tool to inspire.

Source Links:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2009-11/25/transmedia-tales-and-the-future-of-storytelling?page=all
A brief education, this article breaks the surface of how technology is directly affecting writing and reading stories.

http://seizethemedia.com/what-is-transmedia/
A basic definition on transmedia accompanied by helpful info graphic. Check out the article’s home site to learn more on Chief Story Architect Lance Weiler.

http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2010/08/features/what-is-transmedia?page=all
Entertaining article that details the origin of transmedia storytelling and its progression to the mainstream market.

http://www.submarinechannel.com/articles/item/543
Submarinechannel.com is an interactive production studio based in Amsterdam. This article featured on their site details the development of the project Collapsus.

http://henryjenkins.org/2010/06/transmedia_education_the_7_pri.html
Henry Jenkins speculates on the future of transmedia education.

Transmedia Talk Podcast – Episode 7

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 00:15:37 GMT

Welcome to Transmedia Talk a new podcast covering all things story. Transmedia Talk is co-hosted by Nick Braccia and Robert Pratten and looks to shed light on the topic of transmedia storytelling with commentary, interviews and tips on how storytelling is moving into the 21st century. In a temporary departure from our usual format while Robert was in the UK, we present the second of two interviews from leading practitioners in the UK. In this podcast Hazel Grian – leading light in the transmedia world for her ARG work with Star Trek (and here), The Red Cross and 221b for the Sherlock Holmes movie (and here) – and specialist in interactive narrative and AI. download Or Subscribe iTunes NB: If you’d like to give us feedback, recommend yourself as a guest or suggest topics to cover – please email us at talk@workbookproject.com or Tweet away with the hashtag #tmediatalk Hosts Nick Braccia from Culture Hacker Robert Pratten from TransmediaStoryteller.com Guests Hazel Grian Video for two of Hazel’s projects… Tweeture Daemon

Transmedia Talk Podcast – Episode 4

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 07:30:52 GMT

Welcome to Transmedia Talk a new podcast covering all things story. Transmedia Talk is co-hosted by Nick Braccia and Robert Pratten and looks to shed light on the topic of transmedia storytelling with commentary, interviews and tips on how storytelling is moving into the 21st century. download Or Subscribe iTunes NB: If you’d like to give us feedback, recommend yourself as a guest or suggest topics to cover – please email us at talk@workbookproject.com or Tweet away with the hashtag #tmediatalk Topics cover in this episode (start time shown in bold) 01:14 Collaborative storytelling and world-building with Scott Walker of Brain Candy LLC (with reference to Scott’s property The Runes of Gallidon 34:45 The Webishades mini-ARG from NoMinesMedia Hosts Nick Braccia from Culture Hacker Robert Pratten from TransmediaStoryteller.com Guests Scott Walker from Brain Candy LLC Haley Moore from Culture Hacker Dee Cook from Dog Tale Media

Transmedia Talk Podcast – Episode 4

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 00:26:11 GMT

Welcome to Transmedia Talk a new podcast covering all things story. Transmedia Talk is co-hosted by Nick Braccia and Robert Pratten and looks to shed light on the topic of transmedia storytelling with commentary, interviews and tips on how storytelling is moving into the 21st century. download Or Subscribe iTunes NB: If you’d like to give us feedback, recommend yourself as a guest or suggest topics to cover – please email us at talk@workbookproject.com or Tweet away with the hashtag #tmediatalk Topics cover in this episode (start time shown in bold) 01:14 Collaborative storytelling and world-building with Scott Walker of Brain Candy LLC (with reference to Scott’s property The Runes of Gallidon 34:45 The Webishades mini-ARG from NoMinesMedia Hosts Nick Braccia from Culture Hacker Robert Pratten from TransmediaStoryteller.com Guests Scott Walker from Brain Candy LLC Haley Moore from Culture Hacker Dee Cook from Dog Tale Media

Profile: SubmarineChannel

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 13:11:15 GMT

Dutch media innovators Bruno Felix and Femke Wolting, co-founders of Submarine.com, collaborated to produce Submarinechannel.com, an initiative designed to explore and promote innovative approaches to media. Submarinechannel.com positions itself as both a distribution and production platform for artists looking to create interactive, cross-media projects.

Both Felix and Wolting previously worked at Dutch Broadcasting Organization, VPRO, in the 1990’s, an experimental period in the industry. Felix is credited with the development of new media strategy for VPRO during this time, and both are recognized as early moguls for new media. Their devotion to creating interactive relationships between media and consumer inspired Submarine.com, which ultimately led to the birth of Submarinechannel.com. The site highlights creative participation in various projects and films, and aims to question the multicultural and multifaceted digital identity of the Internet. The content highlighted relies on new modes of storytelling to break down the barrier currently separating arts, media, and politics.

United Vloggers, the guide for understanding the nature of vlogs, is a feature under the tab “Internet” on the site. Introduced in 2007 by Michael Schaap to support vloggers, the project quickly became a catalyst for connecting talent on a global scale. UnitedVloggers filters out quality vlogs and the selection varies from video art to grass roots journalism. Check out the recently posted “Touch My Body” a project where music videos are manipulated into green screens and posted on youtube.com for viewers to respond.

Navigate through Chunks under Film on Submarinechannel.com, the channel’s personal 24/7 online film festival featuring picks from all over the world; there are currently more than 50 to browse through. Another cool project about to debut is Collapsus, their upcoming project that epitomizes the site’s aim to broach the integral nature of global perspectives in digital culture.

Tommy Pallotta, renowned for blending technology, filmmaking, and animation, directs the project. Pallotta produced Waking Life, the groundbreaking computer animated feature film.

Collapsus places the viewer as director in an interactive, documentary-esque, animated film, replete with political agendas surrounding the future global energy crisis. As an active participant in the story, the viewer is required to take action in seeking solutions to the energy crisis; with each decisive click of the mouse the narrative changes to present viewers with varying futuristic crisis scenarios.

Submarinechannel.com hopes to instigate thought, but similarly looks to inspire artists working in every medium. The innovative site also features projects like DUTCH PROFILES, where viewers can learn about innovative projects at the heart of Dutch culture, in a documentary series featuring interviews with various designers in the region. Some other well known projects include: Minimovies, documentaries for the digital age. Sneakers: a guided tour through sneaker culture. Pretty Cool People Interviews: video interviews with creators. The Killer: Motion comic based on graphic novel by Matz and Jacamon.

Ultimately, Submarinechannel.com is an incredible source for those looking to further experiment with the potential of the Internet. Well-curated posts and projects permeate the website, and validate the portal as a content rich aggregator for projects aimed at young audiences ripe with global perspectives on digital culture.

Profile: SubmarineChannel

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 15:23:56 GMT

Tommy Pallotta, renowned for blending technology, filmmaking, and animation, directs the project. Pallotta produced Waking Life, the groundbreaking computer animated feature film.

ARGFest’s Artifact Academy Puzzle Trail

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 21:33:47 GMT

At ARGFest 2010, Michelle Senderhauf and I ran a workshop on game artifacts – how to use them to tell a story, deliver puzzles, and reward players. We invited our workshoppers to create artifacts to continue an ARG scenario I cooked up, and lead the players to the next part of the game using physical objects.

The facts were these:

The players had been asked to help a hot brunette recover his grandfather from mysterious kidnappers who have also stolen his uncrackable safe and hidden it in an unknown location. After remotely blowing up a courier car sent to retrieve the safe, and getting the coordinates of its destination from an apparently indestructible GPS unit, the players find themselves in the woods, unearthing the safe. It’s contents may reveal a secret about the hot brunette’s grandfather that he never would have guessed, or they may raise even more questions.

We brought in the tools and materials for a little ARG propmaking jamboree, and what the ARGFesters came up with was truly remarkable. As you can see, we left the prompt wide open for participants of the workshop to create as much or as little content as they desired, and to take the story in any direction they chose.

I never expected that at the end of a frantic hour and a half of crafting, we would have a complete puzzle trail, leading players to the next “live event” in our game.

Let’s rifle through this box of treasures. What you’re about to see is written, conceived, and assembled by the workshoppers. Michelle and I just facilitated.

First, we have a postcard that looks like it was shot in the 1960’s, but the caption on the back says it’s from the 1919 Indy 500 race. Curious.

Michelle found these postcards (front and back) in an antiques store in her native Chesterton, IN, on an artifact shopping trip. Michelle gave herself a $20 budget and was able to procure a good stock of old photographs and other things to modify to tell our story.

Next, we have a compass with no directions on it. Also curious.

I found these toy compasses in the party supply aisle of my local dollar store, with the pirate hats and paper eyepatches. I think they were six to a pack. They did have a direction sticker on the bottom, which was removed for the purposes of the game.

A letter about secret government research into…time travel?

“Dear Adrian,

You were not yet born when it all started, so I do not expect you to predict what will happen should the UNRC’s predictions be incorrect. But despite the agreement I signed and the importance of the information, I feel morally obliged to tell you what our last hope is. If the speculation of our scientists – my coworkers – is correct, we will be able to change history. Time can be changed, and if it cannot then it is already too late for us. I am writing to tell you that despite my distracted behavior recently, your father loves you. Tomorrow I move to the facility constructed in the late Piedmont Park in Atlanta. There everyone is gathering to complete the Algorythm. I only hope we are correct.

God help us.

~ Stefan”

It has a mysterious glyph at the bottom – is it a map?

This letter was hand written at the workshop on some paper that I enoldenated en masse a few months ago. I bought a cheap writing pad from the dollar store and steeped it in tea and coffee at near-boiling temperature.

The scroll unrolls into a nearly unreadable map.

I drew this as a “bonus” at the end of the workshop. The “scroll” is a roll of thermal paper I saved from an old thermal fax machine. Thermal paper is cool in that it “antiques” itself when it is exposed to heat. It is also translucent, like vellum.

There’s also this strange device – is it from the future, or the past? It has a blue monocle on a reel, and a UV LED on the side.

This is cobbled together from a dollar store intrusion detector toy, a UV keychain light from an invisible ink kit, and a real antique monocle that Michelle had picked up (along with a pair of glasses) on her shopping excursion.

And here we have the easiest puzzle of the bunch. Look through the monocle, and you’ll see a US map denoting some ominous and bizarre landmarks.

However, the most interesting thing in the safe is this framed photo – is this the hot brunette’s grandfather as a younger man?

The back of the frame has scuff marks where the backing is held in place. That’s odd. It’s not like you open and close picture frames a whole lot. Or do you?

The image is a real old photo -another of Michelle’s finds. According to her, photos like this usually run a few dollars at antiques stores. The frame is from the dollar store, and was roughed up with a pair of scissors.

Oh-ho! Secrets!

There is a page with letters and holes, and clock drawn on the back of the photo – but it has no hands! However, the shape in the middle looks familiar…

This is the real back of that photo. I love it – its so pretty, and its even more gorgeous with the hand-drawn clock face on it. The letter page was done with stamps for the letters, and hand written numbers. More antiqued paper.

The compass has a notch in it – and it turns out that we can use that to line it up perfectly with the “map” on the letter. We point the compass to the arrow on the letter…

And when we line it up with a similar mark on the clock, we get a time. 6:30. Perhaps this is the time of Stefan’s meeting in Piedmont Park (two blocks from the convention.) But Stefan is a time traveler? What day are we supposed to meet him on?

At this point, we know we’re missing a piece in the puzzle. We have that piece of paper with the holes in it, but the holes don’t line up with anything on the letter, or the clock piece. Where could the missing key to this puzzle be?

Hmm….

Found it! The glue holding the two cards together separates without damaging either, and now we can see that there is a secret star chart inside.

When we stack them, we can see that some of the letters are marked with red dots. From left to right and top to bottom – J, 2, Y, 8, 0, 0, U, 1, L, 1.

I’ll leave that one little puzzle for you to solve. If anyone has spotted time travelers at Piedmont Park, please drop us a line.

The ARGFest workshop was attended by @Ancalime, @DavFlamerock, @egotist, @JimBabb, @TheBruce0, and many others, who made these awesome things. Michelle and I mostly just watched.

A Content Strategy For Audience Engagement

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 21:29:46 GMT

When audiences connect well to your content, they go through three stages of engagement: Discovery, Experience and Exploration as shown in below.

The key to a successful content strategy is understanding (a) that there are these stages of engagement (b) what content is required for each stage and (c) what the goals are for each stage.

Failure to appreciate or acknowledge that there are these stages of engagement typically results in audiences being expected to do too much work too soon – which most won’t do – and hence the content fails at the Discovery stage and the real experience never begins. Or, expositional-type content that belongs in Exploration is offered as Experience content and hence fails to engage because it doesn’t tell a story.

Ignoring these stages is like expecting a kiss from a stranger before flirting with them or expecting to run off and get married after only the first date. Maybe in Vegas, but usually not anywhere else.

With transmedia, one media may act as Discovery content for another. For example, the comic book serving as Discovery content for a movie or, in the example of the Xbox game Alan Wake, six webisodes act as Discovery content for the game. However, it’s important to remember that each media also has its own Discovery>Experience>Exploration stages as shown in below.

This is particularly important for indies who may think that creating a comic book for their movie will result automatically in an audience for their movie. It won’t. The comic book first has to be discovered and experienced and it’s only if the content is good enough will the reader begin exploring and “discover” the movie.

Note that I’m fond of encouraging an iterative approach to creating transmedia projects but here I’m also proposing a recursive approach: each and every piece of content should attempt to lure, convince and deliver.

Engaging the Five Senses

The next illustration uses the metaphor of sensory engagement to illustrate how audiences connect to your content. The concept is that audiences are at first suspicious of new content and that if we are to draw them in and lead them to the highest level of engagement – contributing to the canon – then we must resolves their reservations and satisfy their needs at each stage.

Smell and teasers

The first sensory stage is smell. The audience approaches tentatively and sniffs: is there a whiff of the familiar?

We are creatures of habit because evolution has shown it serves us well. Repeating past satisfying experiences is a successful strategy for survival in the wild and with entertainment it’s a good indicator too.

The audience needs to be reassured that your content is worth its time and attention. You need to reduce the perceived risk by communicating “trustworthyness”, “coolness”, “quality”, ”appropriateness” – whatever values are sought by the audience for this type of project.

To communicate the correct values, I’ve created a content class called “Teasers”. Of course the “teaser” is familiar to indie filmmakers – a 30 second or less video intended to bait the trap; not to explain or reveal too much but only to temp further engagement. In this model however, I’ve broadened the teaser into a full content category to include all content that can be digested with the minimal amount of attention.

The figure shows the five content classes I’ve defined for each stage of engagement: Teaser, Trailer, Target, Participation and Collaboration.

Note that I had to create a name for the “target content” to avoid confusion with all the other content! Because of the recursive nature of this approach, any content might be at one time the target content and another time Discovery content.

Note too that because of the need to communicate quickly, visual clues from pictures, photos and web design are going to dominate the Teaser content class. But it’s also the headlines you communicate: well-known cast or crew, one-line quotes from reviewers and so on.

Taste and trailers

If your project smells familiar then the audience can progress to a more specific, personal question: will I like it?

The teaser has convinced the audience your project is something they might like, but what can you tell them to reassure them it’s worth their additional time and (possibly) money?

The movie trailer is a commercial. Its intention is to convince the audience that this movie is for them. In this model I’ve expanded the trailer to a class for all content that persuades. By which I mean content that removes the barrier between Discovery and Experience: it’s the barrier between the known – the Teaser and Trailer content – and the unknown – the target content.

This barrier is represented by toll gate 2 – TG2.

Tollgates

In this model, tollgates are barriers between one stage and another.

TG1 is tollgate 1. It’s the barrier that prevents audiences knowing that your project exists. TG1 can be breached by search engine optimization (SEO), recommendations, links and anything that puts your content on the map. But the first audience encounter should be with your Teaser content.

Tollgate 2 requires a little more explanation.

Think of TG2 as a wall that the audience must climb. The first tollgate image below shows how the project and business model will unavoidably create barriers to your content – some unintentional, some intentional.

Content that you provide in Discovery helps the audience scale the wall – as shown in below. In this example, price creates a barrier to entry that of course can only be scaled by the audience paying the fee. However, the tollgate is far higher than solely the price and the audience will only part with its money once the perception of the tollgate is lower than the payment. Stated simply, buyers rarely make decisions not to purchase based on price – it’s all those other barriers that have to be overcome first: value, suitability, risk, convenience, context and so on.

Touch and sight

It’s only when the audience touches the target content that it can see it for what it is. If your Discovery content has done its job then the audience’ expectations will be met or exceeded. But if you have deceived or misled them then they’ll be disappointed.

There is nothing more you can do at this point. The target content is what it is. This is what the audience came for and it has to deliver.

After – though sometimes during- the Experience comes the Exploration. The tollgate TG3 is the barrier to be climbed to have the audience increase its willing engagement. Sometimes there can be confusion and this will lead to unwilling engagement: the audience experiences the content but doesn’t quite “get it” and hence searches for an explanation or for help. In these situations of unwilling engagement, a high barrier at TG3 will lead to resentment.

Ordinarily we want the audience to engage further so reducing the height of TG3 should be a priority: make content easy to find and easy to access; signpost what content should follow the target content.

Listening and Participation

Although content in the participation stage may be available before the Experience, its goal is to aid exploration – not to tease or persuade (even though audiences might use it for reassurance to lower TG2).

Having experienced the target content – either in part or in full – the audience now listens for affirmation. They ask questions to themselves and to others and seek content that answers their questions or fulfils their desire for more.

Good content stimulates debate. Audiences want to discuss and share their experiences with others. They’ll also want to extend the experience and will search for add-ons or new target content.

Some audience members will want to show their affiliation to the content by buying merchandise or embedding widgets; they’ll want to encourage their friends to try the target content.

Content in this Exploration category is intended to reward and empower the advocate and to educate: it provides additional understanding and value to the target content. In this regard it may be acceptable to have “expositional” content such as character biographies, backstories and so on.

Collaboration

In this engagement model the ultimate audience engagement is collaboration or contribution. Not everyone in the audience will progress to this stage and some authors may think this undesirable.

Collaboration is not that same as participation. Participation might be passive (reading additional content and exploring the world) or active – voting, sharing, commenting, discussing, Tweeting and so on. Collaboration is adding to the storyworld: writing fan fiction, creating videos or illustrations. It’s providing new content that you, as author, are free to embrace or reject.

Between participation and collaboration is tollgate 4 – it’s a barrier created by the audience’ perceived lack of time and skills, fear of ridicule and lack of information about how to contribute to the world. You can lower this barrier by providing tools, methods, encouragement and a supportive environment.

How To Use The 5-Senese Engagement Model

The premise with this approach is that a transmedia storyworld maybe too vast to expect an audience to jump right in. They have to be teased and led like Hansel and Gretel by a trail of breadcrumbs. Imagine your world to be a huge cavern – if you blindfold your audience and then first open their eyes once they’re inside, the vastness is overwhelming – it’s a new and scary place. Your audience needs orientation. They have to be guided through an entrance tunnel and see the cavern open up before their eyes and at their own pace. The more complex the world, the more handholding you need to do.

There’s also the issue of the time, energy and cost required to digest a whole storyworld. Far better to give the audience smaller snacks at first until their appetite grows for larger, more time-consuming content.

Note that this content strategy is for audience engagement. When combined with the platform selection methodology, start first with revenue-generating target content and see how it might be prioritized by platform. Then use this engagement model to understand the relationship between the platforms and to identify additional content to aid Discovery and Exploration.

Hard Knocks of Crowdsourcing: Don’t Throttle Participation

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 01:02:32 GMT

Today, I am going to share a parable of net-native design for those interested in learning from the mistakes of others.

A few weeks ago, I launched the site and resources for my distributed object project, Sew By Numbers. Basically, I made a template that anyone could print out on a sheet of inkjet fabric, and if you followed the instructions on the sheet, you’d end up with a little doll. Because the whole thing is printed on the fabric, the doll’s and features can be easily customized without changing the template. It is basically papercraft, for fabric.

I had always planned to include a crowdsourcing element in Sew By Numbers, but since this was something I did in my spare time, I didn’t think I would get anyone interested customizing dolls without talking to them one on one.

And so, I published a blank template, with the half-hearted suggestion that people could design on them if they wanted to. The blank template had some flaws. The parts weren’t clearly labeled, and because constructing the doll involved flipping pieces over, it was almost assured that an arm or a foot would be backward if you didn’t know exactly where to place your graphics. The blank was really designed for testing, and to make “sketch dolls” that artists could draw on after assembling them.

There was also an artist template, with all of these flaws fixed, but at the time I was simply passing it around by email to a small group of artists, and had held off making it publically available, so I could tweak it if I felt like it.

Turns out I was wrong. About an hour after the project was mentioned to Aaron, an excellent character artist I’d never met, he finished a really excellent doll design on the publically available template – the one with all the design flaws. The result was usable, but needed hours of tweaking to add bleeds and fix one of those upside-down legs.

To fix it, I did three things – first, I made the proper template available at a short URL on our web site. Second, I emailed it to Aaron directly. Third, after talking to him a bit, I did all the necessary testing and tweaking for his design myself. I didn’t want the miscommunication to discourage an interested and talented person from making more designs in the future. The result looks great:

The lesson we can take from this snafu is – if you are going to get content from the crowd, make as many of your own resources as possible available to everyone. Don’t limit the average participant to working with substandard tools. This is doubly important for early adopters, who are more skilled, focused, and passionate about contributing than later participants.

It should also be mentioned that Aaron was a friend of a friend, not a complete stranger. It makes me think that crowdsourcing strategies might be useful even in smaller groups – basically, for anyone who you don’t speak to personally, your public presence is going to be your connection to them.

Luckily, this is not a post-mortem of my project. SBN looks to be proceeding apace – even in the early stages, it’s gotten the nod from Thingiverse, and Andrea demoed it at foo camp. I was even filmed putting together one of the alpha dolls for a documentary short about the Dallas Makerspace. So far, the process of making internet dolls has been fun and rewarding – as long as it’s done with the right tools.

Hard Knocks of Crowdsourcing: Don’t Throttle Participation

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 20:47:20 GMT

Today, I am going to share a parable of net-native design for those interested in learning from the mistakes of others.

Elan Lee: The “Rolling Stone” Interview, Part I

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 14:22:03 GMT

Elan Lee wants you to be a superhero!

[More on that later.]

“I’m trying to define a role in the world that doesn’t quite exist yet.”

A note of introduction: Through the good graces of Lee Sheldon (a game writer/designer and professor with whom I worked during my graduate program), the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics, and others at Indiana University, we were able to host Elan in Bloomington, Indiana for a series of talks on the arts of storytelling and game design. I was lucky enough to listen to him speak on these and related subjects, a lot. This three part, “Rolling Stone” style profile/discussion is a mash-up of those talks, a one-on-one interview, and a lot of coffee-fueled conversations–with me and others–over the duration of that visit (and even a couple of follow-up emails).

I should also state that I am now an awestruck fan of his work (the intentions that inform it, even more so), and though I aim to provide some substance, I can’t avoid the occasional out-pourings of puffery that is the hallmark of celebrity profiles. But I guess that begs the question – is Elan Lee even a celebrity?

Elan Lee is Famous

Elan Lee is one of the first individual identities ever associated with Alternate Reality Games, and with the “transmedia” [what do you call it? genre? evolution? debacle? … I’ll settle on…] arena more generally. Along with his fellow 42 Entertainment and Fourth Wall founders, he represents an approach to storytelling and game design that is lauded as the Next Big Thing. He’s the “transmedia” equivalent of Stephen Spielberg (with whom he has, of course, worked). But this gives him a little too much credit. According to Elan Lee, the stories we tell don’t change, it’s the way we tell them that evolves.

The Future of Storytelling

In the early stages of preparation for his TEDxSeattle talk on “The Future of Storytelling,” Elan is obsessed with the image of the horseless carriage, and it’s as an apt metaphor. In the early stages of exploration, the identity of something new is not yet understood or established, so we use the language of the past to intellectually encompass the future. Even further, we use the symbols of the past to iterate what we think will be the future.

Let me be more illustrative: The “Horseless Carriage” is the name for a car in the world of the horse. The “Alternate Reality Game” is the name for a story/game/something whose characters may or may not inhabit physical bodies and whose setting may or may not exist within the boundaries of reality or imagination…in the world that accepts a distinction between those two states.

[Who knew this would get metaphysical so fast?]

The Mercedes F-Class “Horseless Carriage” – new old school

Try Everything

But what does that mean?! Well, according to Elan it means that the field is wide open, and without any hard and fast conventions, we can make anything we want. And it may fail, but that only helps us define this incoming genre for the era where it becomes mundane.

The other half of this, of course, is the participation of the audience. Without an audience that comprehends the mechanisms of cutting and zooming and reverse shots, movies would look inconsistent, and the stories they tell would appear to be nonsensically non-linear and emotionally disconnected.

Such are the frustrations of the “transmedia” designer. We develop vast universes, profound characters, world changing events, the elements of which are constructed in the same way that we acquire narratives in our “real” lives – we see newspaper headlines, watch video clips, monitor facebook pages, and repost twitter feeds. There’s nothing about these activities that appear non-linear or disconnected, and yet, when we make up a story that is absorbed and distributed in these ways, it becomes somehow less easily understood, even though the behaviors stay the same.

“If It’s Not Broken”

Elan’s solution to this is two-fold: 1) talk about what you do in the blandest possible way, and 2) don’t try to fix what isn’t broken. Here’s a factoid that sheds some light on both statements – Elan is now writing TV shows. Don’t be dismayed, he’s bringing a little something new to the table. But only a little. Elan Lee is a pragmatic guy, and this is, of course, pragmatic. If the first car was an Enzo, the local horsebacked posse would have strung up the inventor of that deviltry by his thumbs.

That doesn’t make for very good ratings.

So point two reminds us that we can innovate without intending to spark a revolution, and we’re more likely to change the way people think, what they believe, and how they behave if we nudge them ever so softly, instead of pushing them off the ledge.

And of course, the language in which we talk about what we do has to be consistent with the language that is understood. So if we call something a “comic book” when it’s really an episodic, stop-motion, illuminated epic poem accessed through a fictional character’s Vimeo account, the more traction it’s likely to get with the funders and the audience when it doesn’t sound so avant-garde.

Discussion of the “transmedia” industry, strategic storytelling, and creativity in Part II (7.11.2010)

Elan’s TEDxSeattle presentation

Elan Lee: The “Rolling Stone” Interview, Part I

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 06:20:15 GMT

Elan Lee wants you to be a superhero!

[More on that later.]

“I’m trying to define a role in the world that doesn’t quite exist yet.”

Elan Lee is Famous

The Future of Storytelling

[Who knew this would get metaphysical so fast?]

The Mercedes F-Class “Horseless Carriage” – new old school

Try Everything

“If It’s Not Broken”

That doesn’t make for very good ratings.

Discussion of the “transmedia” industry, strategic storytelling, and creativity in Part II (7.11.2010)

Elan’s TEDxSeattle presentation

CALL FOR ENTRY: The Pixel Pitch

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 05:50:45 GMT

Power to the Pixel has just opened calls for it’s annual Pixel Pitch. Now in its second year the Pixel Pitch offers transmedia projects an opportunity to present their work to an international panel of judges consisting of producers, funders, sales agents and distributors. This year’s top project will be award a cash prize thanks to support from ARTE. To find out more read below or visit www.powertothepixel.com

The Pixel Market – How Does It Work?

Power to the Pixel will select up to 20 cross-media projects to be presented to potential international financiers, investors and partners at The Pixel Market, part of Power to the Pixel’s annual Cross-Media Forum held in association with The BFI London Film Festival. Selected participants will also gain free accreditation to Power to the Pixel’s Conference Summit on the first day of the Forum.

The Pixel Pitch, 13 October 2010
Up to half of the selected projects will be presented In Competition at The Pixel Pitch, a public event on the first day of the market on 13 October 2010 at NFT1, BFI Southbank. These project teams will compete for the £6,000 ARTE Pixel Pitch Cash Prize.

Producer-led teams will present to a hand-picked roundtable jury made up of financiers, commissioners, tech companies, online portals and media & entertainment companies.

Each team will have 10 minutes to pitch their project (including visual presentations) with a further 20 minutes for comments and feedback from the roundtable.

The Pixel Meetings, 14 October 2010
Day Two of the market is a by-invitation-only event. The 20 international teams selected for The Pixel Market will attend a day of one-to-one business meetings with potential creative and financial partners from across the tech, online, interactive, film, broadcast, arts, publishing and gaming industries.

This will be followed by an evening networking drinks reception where the Winner of the ARTE Pixel Pitch Prize will be announced.

Submission Guidelines

1. Projects must have a Producer attached and be submitted through a production company
2. Submissions must be made by the Producer
3. Producer(s) must own the rights to develop and produce the project in all required media
4. Applications from producers who are students on the dates of The Pixel Market will not be eligible
5. A maximum of 2 members per team will be allowed to present In Competition at The Pixel Pitch (if selected) one of whom must be the Producer or Director
6. Applications and supplementary materials must be delivered in the English language
7. Power to the Pixel will give preference to projects whose team members have a track record within their sector (eg. broadcast, online, gaming, theatrical, publishing)
8. Projects must be at an advanced stage of development
9. Application forms and all supplementary materials must be delivered online eg. stills, storyboards, moving imagery (10 mins max) by uploading files and providing urls to where materials have been uploaded
10. All application forms and supplementary materials must be received by 18.00 BST on 6 August 2010 at market@powertothepixel.com

Key Dates

16 June 2010 Call open for submissions
6 August 2010 Deadline for submissions (18.00 BST)
3 September 2010 Successful applicants informed
13 October 2010 The Pixel Pitch at NFT1, BFI Southbank in London
14 October 2010 The Pixel Meetings (venue tbc)
ARTE Pixel Pitch Prize Winner announced

CALL FOR ENTRY: The Pixel Pitch

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 05:50:45 GMT

The Pixel Market – How Does It Work?

Producer-led teams will present to a hand-picked roundtable jury made up of financiers, commissioners, tech companies, online portals and media & entertainment companies.

Each team will have 10 minutes to pitch their project (including visual presentations) with a further 20 minutes for comments and feedback from the roundtable.

This will be followed by an evening networking drinks reception where the Winner of the ARTE Pixel Pitch Prize will be announced.

Submission Guidelines

Key Dates

Quick Hit: You Suck at Transmedia

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 12:45:17 GMT

Transmedia designer and sometime WBP contributor Chrisy Dena launched a new site last night called You Suck at Transmedia, which plans to catalog transmedia failures and the lessons we can learn from them.

How do you/we/us stop sucking at transmedia? Well, this site is a step in that direction. This site welcomes contributions that really do aim to progress the state of the art. Here we can discuss the consequences of transmedia design, production and execution decisions.

In short, this site will cover transmedia decisions that never, sometimes, and always work.

The site already hosts one lovingly-rendered account of a failure scenario, as well as a great article on event scalability which asks my favorite question: “How can props be delivered in a replicatable manner to screens across continents?”

The blog is written toward encouraging discussion between creators. Drop by and join the conversation.

Quick Hit: You Suck at Transmedia

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 12:45:17 GMT

How do you/we/us stop sucking at transmedia? Well, this site is a step in that direction. This site welcomes contributions that really do aim to progress the state of the art. Here we can discuss the consequences of transmedia design, production and execution decisions.

In short, this site will cover transmedia decisions that never, sometimes, and always work.

The blog is written toward encouraging discussion between creators. Drop by and join the conversation.

WE FEEL FINE – an interview with Sep Kamvar

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:26:21 GMT

By Lance Weiler – In the upcoming issue of Filmmaker Magazine I write about the value of data to filmmakers. In my column I look at a number of projects and then tie them back into how they could be used by filmmakers to aid the curation, disovery and creation of films. One of the projects that I focus on in the piece is a data harvest project entitled “We Feel Fine.” Started in 2005 by Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris the project crawls blogs and twitter for the phrase “I feel” or “I’m feeling” and captures the results in an extensive database. This past November “We Feel Fine” was released in book form – highly recommend checking it out. Due to word count limitations found in print magazines I wanted to share the interview with Kamvar. The following is the extended version.

WBP: “We Feel Fine” is an amazing project that puts a face on various data. What types of things surprised you most about the project? In the sense that you were able to peer into a sea of what some would consider noise and in the process you created a project that has a strong emotional core.

Kamvar: One of the things that surprised us the most is when you strip away thoughts and opinions and focus on emotions, people are much more similar than they are different. The top 10 emotions are the same for men as for women, for people in London and in Bangcock, for blacks and whites. So this project for us has been about self-exploration as much as it has been about voyeurism.

That being said, there are also some real emotional differences between people. As people grow older, they tend to get happier, and further, they define happiness differently. Younger people tend to associate happiness with excitement, while older people tend to associate happiness with calm. And women express their emotions far more often than men, and have a far more nuanced vocabulary than men to describe their emotions.

WBP: When I look at “We Feel Fine” I see the potential for collaborative storytelling that makes use of various data. Have you ever considered this? And if so how do you think you’d approach it?

Kamvar: Absolutely. We Feel Fine is a story authored by millions of people who don’t know each other. The result is a coherent, authentic story. And this is not the only story that can be told this way — the story of love, the story of hurt, the story of helplessness. There are thousands of stories waiting to be told collaboratively by millions of people who don’t know each other.

When we talk about this kind of scale, the most appropriate thing to do to tell these stories is to build tools — tools that allow individuals to tell their personal stories in a meaningful way, and tools that collect, curate, recombine, and edit these stories to form the stories of the collective.

WBP: Can you also talk to the concept of data and it’s value to not only helping to discover but to also aid emotional and social connections?

Kamvar:: Most data analysis has focused on the macro level — statistics, trends, clusters, etc. These give important contextual information and meaningful insights, but rarely do they provoke a visceral, emotional reaction. On the other hand, many individual stories provoke an emotional reaction or social connection, but lack the context that data analysis brings.

For us, it’s important not only to present the high-level data analysis, but also to present the individual stories behind the statistics, and allow for the user to seamlessly shift between the two.

WBP: Do you have any opinions around DataPortability? The open accessibility to blog posts and comments makes a project like “We Feel Fine” possible. Do you have any opinions around DataPortability and the role that open data could play in the emergence of the real-time web especially related to new forms of art and storytelling?

Kamvar:: We are big believers in Data Portability. We Feel Fine would not have been possible without the phenomenon of blogging, and we have made an open API into We Feel Fine that allow people to make artwork and do data analysis with the We Feel Fine data. People have made beautiful work with the API that we would never have thought of ourselves.

In visualizing the data around “We Feel Fine” where there any considerations in terms of the way you shaped the project? Meaning did you discover and modify the project as it has progressed and if so how?

We agonized over every detail in both the website and the book. For example, the opening movement of the website, which we call “Madness”, is meant to convey the feeling of living in a large, anonymous city, like New York, where every day, we see hundreds of people who we will never see again, just for an instant. The overall energy is exciting and beautiful, but if one person were to be removed our substituted, it wouldn’t make a difference to the landscape. The swarming colored dots are meant to reflect that energy.

However, when you develop a relationship with one of the people in the city, that person becomes important, individual, and irreplaceable. The analogy here is clicking on one of the dots on the Madness movement and seeing the emotion of the person behind it.

Another element that is central to both the book and the website are what we call Montages. When there is a photo in the same blog post as a feeling sentence, our program automatically crops the photo and overlays the feeling sentence onto the photo. The resulting composition is often moving, often funny, often a nicely told sentence about ordinary emotion. We pay as much attention to what we leave out as what we leave in. By cropping the photo and not including context to the feeling, we allow space for the viewer. The viewer can fill in that space with memory or imagination, both of which are powerful allies.

WBP: Any thoughts on the future of the real-time web and where you’d like to see it go especially in relation to art, storytelling and / or discovery?

Kamvar: One thing I’d like to see is more depth in the real-time web. People’s behavior reflects the tools that they have available to them. In places where there are more McDonald’s, people get fatter. On the web, as tools make it easy to communicate via status messages, that communication has less depth. I’d like to see more web tools that are designed for deeper communication.

On the search side, I’d like to see a broader diversity of paradigm. A list of 10 ordered results work well for navigational and informational queries, but are not as good for learning more about people or communities.

WBP: What projects or technology excites you and do you have any predications towards the way people will discover stories, content and each other?

Kamvar:: I’m excited about a lot of things. One is the trend towards open source and open data. With mobile phones, there is a very real possibility that the dominant operating system will be an open source operating system (Android). Given how important mobile computing has become (and will continue to become), this will lead to more opportunities for developers and far better products for users.

I’m also excited about how little technology entrepreneurship costs. Technology that used to cost half a million dollars to develop now costs $15,000. This will lead to more unlikely entrepreneurs, more risk-taking, and more potential for highly impactful technologies.

And finally, I’m excited about the cultural shift that has led people to be comfortable with posting lots of information online. That availability of information is useful not just for storytelling, but across all the sciences. 10 years ago, a book like We Feel Fine could not be imagined. As more information flows to the web, it will be used as a database for many other things that are unimaginable today.

CULTURE HACKER: ARG Takes Center Stage

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 05:32:03 GMT

By Haley Moore – Smoking Gun Interactive is taking its new ARG Exoriare very seriously.

Just because the game is intimately tied to the release of a new graphic novel and a planned console game, they aren’t about to treat it like an advertising campaign. In fact, they’ve been sending out press releases, writing stories for BoingBoing, and talking to The Guardian in anticipation of the ARG, rather than waiting to cover it in triumphant retrospect.

Just from looking at Exoriare, you can tell that this game is meant to be the center of an experience.

Your first interaction with the game is breaking your personal computer out of the conventional network (through an adventure game that takes its first line from Zork) and into the Darknet, a staging ground for the game’s rebel alliance of hackers. As in portions of other ARGs – recent examples include Jejune and Project Abraham – the flash components of the game represent a computer terminal in an alternate world, with an alternate set of rules.

If you manage to break into the Darknet, you’ll be given a universal username for the Exoriare forums that will also track your progress in the game, and grant you access to a slew of programs for working through the story. There’s a space-age radio tuner that delivers audio snippets, a remote server hacking widget reminiscent of Uplink, and a punishingly hard DNA game that’s used to hack your computers biometric systems. For the moment, the experience culminates in a cooperative puzzle game called Global Forager, whose ultimate goal is to pull computers into the Darknet.

The greater storyline is a mashup of ARG staples, involving the Knights of Malta, ancient temples, government cover-ups, obelisks, and a looming alien invasion.

Smoking Gun says that the ARG is just the first element of a new property that will eventually encompass a graphic novel, codenamed X and scripted by author and old-school cyberpunk Douglas Rushkoff, as well as a traditional console game. (If you aren’t familiar with Rushkoff, you should be. We have him to thank for the term “viral media.”) The three narratives will intersect and interact to create a single pervasive story. According to Rushkoff, this has led to a fluid method of writing collaboration inside the Smoking Gun team.

I build a character, and then they stick her into one of their squads in the game; or they build a weapon that I then steal for the climax of one of the scenes in my comic. If we were trying to figure out whose IP was whose, we’d be sunk before we began – which is why we’ve developed a more “communal” model of creative control and ownership.

In other words, the connection between the three will be more than skin deep. The design of the ARG’s puzzle games, which are both original and challenging, already seems to signal a strong connection between the ARG design team and Smoking Gun’s traditional game designers.

For interactive story developers, the main question is, will it take? Will we see more ARGs and other pervasive media moving to the center of large extended experiences with other, commercial branches (such as this comic)? Will that mean a final end to the “curtain” of anonymity that separated ARG creators from their players in the games that defined the medium? Will more of our work get this kind of top billing?