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August 13 2010
ARGFest’s Artifact Academy Puzzle Trail
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.
August 05 2010
A Content Strategy For Audience Engagement
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.
July 11 2010
Hard Knocks of Crowdsourcing: Don’t Throttle Participation
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.
July 10 2010
Hard Knocks of Crowdsourcing: Don’t Throttle Participation
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.
July 07 2010
Elan Lee: The “Rolling Stone” Interview, Part I
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
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
June 30 2010
CALL FOR ENTRY: The Pixel Pitch
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
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
June 11 2010
Quick Hit: You Suck at Transmedia
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
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.
December 15 2009
WE FEEL FINE – an interview with Sep Kamvar
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.
December 02 2009
CULTURE HACKER: ARG Takes Center Stage
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?
Read More at Culture Hacker
RELATED: Douglas Rushkoff DIY DAYS PHILADELPHIA keynote
Haley Moore is a mild-mannered reporter by day, super spy by night: an Alternate Reality puppetmaster whose game credits include Catching the Wish and Monster Hunters Club, and a news writer and columnist for the Coppell Citizens’ Advocate. When she isn’t sculpting chain-smoking midgets out of polymer clay or plopping pirate hats on unsuspecting passers-by, she writes for Culture Hacker from her Texas home.
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