About
Editor: Michela Ledwidge
Accounts
Friends
-
Loading...michela about 22 hours ago
Click here to check if anything new just came in.
August 25 2010
What a Filmmaker Learned From Farmville And Other Social Games
Social games are rapidly becoming one of the most successful forms of entertainment:
Disney purchased Playdom for up to $763.2 million and Club Penguin for $700 million.
EA purchased Playfish for $400 million.
The research form Next Up for pre-IPO trading service SharesPost estimates Zynga is worth three billion dollars.
Why are they thriving (even in a recession):
Social games are accessible throughout the day over multiple platforms.
You are rewarded with digital prizes the more you play.
Players act as evangelists marketing the game all over social networks to recruit new users.
Creators of TV shows and movies can now use similar techniques to have a stronger relationship with their fans. Emerging web start ups are making that possible. Miso injects interactivity into the TV and film viewing experience by utilizing a smart phone, laptop, or tablet as a duel screen with supplemental content. SCVNGR is an user generated location based scavenger hunt for your smart phone.
SCVNGR can create challenges based on a elements from a story e.g. a player is asked trivia from True Blood and if they get the answer correct they are given a clue to find their next location in their city. Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D and Dexter made SCVNGR a part of their marketing campaign by creating scavenger hunts around the San Diego Comic Con. To reach fans where they shop, scavenger hunts can be sponsored e.g. visit Best Buy and purchase a product marked with QR code to get your next clue. People can expand the experience to new locations by creating scavenger hunts revolving around fan fiction.
This keeps fans connected to a story no matter where they are located.
Players receive points and badges in Miso for checking into their favorite shows and movies like Four Square for content. Miso has a list of their highest ranking watchers; this competition keeps an audience coming back to a program to be number 1. By rewarding their engagement over time, I think this can transform casual viewers into hardcore fans.
Users on Miso can share what they are watching on Facebook and Twitter, their friends can now start following that show and converting more fans. They can also recruit them directly on Miso. This sustains and builds a fanbase.
Many games have been inspired by films/TV shows to create more compelling narratives e.g. Grand Theft Auto. Now Hollywood can learn from social games to keep fans connected to their stories.
What else can filmmakers and TV show creators learn from social games?
What a Filmmaker Learned From Farmville And Other Social Games
Social games are rapidly becoming one of the most successful forms of entertainment:
Disney purchased Playdom for up to $763.2 million and Club Penguin for $700 million.
EA purchased Playfish for $400 million.
The research form Next Up for pre-IPO trading service SharesPost estimates Zynga is worth three billion dollars.
Why are they thriving (even in a recession):
Social games are accessible throughout the day over multiple platforms.
You are rewarded with digital prizes the more you play.
Players act as evangelists marketing the game all over social networks to recruit new users.
Creators of TV shows and movies can now use similar techniques to have a stronger relationship with their fans. Emerging web start ups are making that possible. Miso injects interactivity into the TV and film viewing experience by utilizing a smart phone, laptop, or tablet as a duel screen with supplemental content. SCVNGR is an user generated location based scavenger hunt for your smart phone.
SCVNGR can create challenges based on a elements from a story e.g. a player is asked trivia from True Blood and if they get the answer correct they are given a clue to find their next location in their city. Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D and Dexter made SCVNGR a part of their marketing campaign by creating scavenger hunts around the San Diego Comic Con. To reach fans where they shop, scavenger hunts can be sponsored e.g. visit Best Buy and purchase a product marked with QR code to get your next clue. People can expand the experience to new locations by creating scavenger hunts revolving around fan fiction.
This keeps fans connected to a story no matter where they are located.
Players receive points and badges in Miso for checking into their favorite shows and movies like Four Square for content. Miso has a list of their highest ranking watchers; this competition keeps an audience coming back to a program to be number 1. By rewarding their engagement over time, I think this can transform casual viewers into hardcore fans.
Users on Miso can share what they are watching on Facebook and Twitter, their friends can now start following that show and converting more fans. They can also recruit them directly on Miso. This sustains and builds a fanbase.
Many games have been inspired by films/TV shows to create more compelling narratives e.g. Grand Theft Auto. Now Hollywood can learn from social games to keep fans connected to their stories.
What else can filmmakers and TV show creators learn from social games?
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.
July 31 2010
Film Review: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World
I got the chance to see this film during a screening at San Diego Comic Con. It struck a chord with me, and so I wrote it up for Culture Hacker’s first film review.
From the moment the Universal splash screen comes up for Scott Pilgrim Vs the World, you know that this movie is going to have a very special relationship with the 8-bit culture that inspired most of the film’s schlocky, fast-hitting action. The logo and the accompanying music have been translated into video game terms – pixel graphics with a chirpy electronic interpretation of the usual fanfare. The world of Pilgrim is like this to the core – the real world envisioned through the mind of a game player.
There is much constant and legitimate griping about the representation of games in film – everything from outdated game choices, to overacted controller-waving, to video games as a motivation for violent crime.
A while ago, CH contributor Nick Braccia proposed that the best representations of games use relatable game experiences to establish and develop characters in a meaningful way. We all know what it feels like to apply ourselves to solve a puzzle, beat a boss or earn an extra life. The term “level up” is bleeding out of gaming. It almost refers to something in real life – the turning point in which it becomes clear that we are better at something than we were before.
Pilgrim is the first major feature film I’ve seen that embodies this synthesis of game terms and reality. Where many shows use geek culture as a bucket of references, to be used to making a quick audience connection – I’m looking at you, Big Bang Theory – Pilgrim makes proper allusions to the culture.
In one instance, the eponymous Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) wanders through a dream world set to the tune of the Fairy Fountain song from The Legend of Zelda. It’s a great moment of geek recognition, but also full of meaning for those in the know – this place is renewing, ephemeral, strange. Another pivotal scene near the end of the film will resonate deeply with everyone who has ever played a console role playing game, but I’d rather not spoil it.
The music plays a principal role in the film, with a condensed plot revolving around Scott’s band, Sex Bob-omb, competing in a battle of the bands. The film features three musical acts, all of whom are voiced by separate talent and have distinct sounds. And although fans at creator Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Comic Con panel expressed sadness that they can no longer imagine these bands from the comic as their own favorite musicians, the creative choices in the film are sound. Metric’s performance as The Clash at Demonhead stands out as a crowning moment in the film.
The soundtrack, as well as the sound engineering in general, is overwhelmingly crisp and immersive. One character, Julie Powers (Aubrey Plaza), speaks in a string of profanities that are hidden behind a censor bar. Instead of the standard bleep, her words are translated into a varying digital babble. I found myself wishing for more scenes with Julie, because I liked hearing the sound.
I must admit I was convinced, early on, that Scott Pilgrim Vs The World was not going to work. Screenshots early on in the production cycle showed giant, Batman-esque sound effect words worked into the frame, something I thought was a sure sign of failure. In practice, the effect words are very fast-paced and integrated into the action. Again, they feel like a video game experience writ large, and for the most part supplement the experience rather than distract from it.
The film is extremely true to its comic roots, with most scenes scripted directly from the comic, and panels reproduced in minute live action detail. A few scenes are even translated into animated comics. The story is slightly contorted, especially near the end. The 240-page final issue of the comic covers about the last 15 minutes of the movie, but most of the elements are intact. The film’s villain, Gideon Graves (Jason Schwartzman), gets perhaps a more thorough treatment in the film – the books propose him as a mysterious and elusive figure, while the movie Gideon is nastier.
However, calling the film a faithful reproduction would misrepresent the creative process that went into the three pillars of the Scott Pilgrim world. The comics, the film and an upcoming video game were created in tandem over the past few years, and the final volume of the series was only released on July 20 of this year, just before Comic Con and the film’s premiere. Its easier to think of the Scott Pilgrim franchise as a larger project undertaken by O’Malley and a large pool of collaborators.
And that may be the reason Scott Pilgrim works so well. It hasn’t been finished and passed on to a secondary creative team to expand the world – the process has only just ended. All of the products are fresh and integrated, three retellings of the same story.
All of this means that older audiences may have a hard time connecting with the film. It speaks the language of people under 40, but for someone who has never beaten a mini-boss, the video game references may come across as obtusely wacky at best, and confusing at worst. The film’s MTV-inspired rock and roll credits sequence alone may induce sensory overload for some viewers. The film’s plot also proceeds at a fast pace – if your friends have a tendency to lean over and ask, “what just happened?” during a show, you may not want to take them to see this particular movie. You’ll want to keep your eyes, ears and brain free to take in the spectacle.
Based on what I saw at Comic Con, I’m giving Pilgrim a solid A for the young, and a B- for the older crowd. It hits theaters August 13.
July 27 2010
Elan Lee: The “Rolling Stone” Interview, Part II
Elan Lee wants you to convert part of your life into the storytelling experience
Thanks to a fortuitous mix of chance and invention, Elan Lee has found himself to be one of the few recognizable names in the transmedia business. With four separate companies (Fourth Wall Studios, edoc laundry, 42 Entertainment, and the “not worth mentioning” collaboration with Jordan Weisman called Myriad Mobile), a handful of patents, and a certain amount of reckless (or naive) experimentation, his projects have helped to define – or redefine – cross platform storytelling in the 21st century.
Last time we talked philosophy. This time we’re down to brass tacks: what works, what doesn’t, and what you do when you’re in the right place at the right time.
[This dude is dropping some serious insights - read closely, and between the lines - and you, Dear Reader, are better off hearing it straight from him. And he's a talker.]
Holy crap! Steven Spielberg walked into my office!
Phoebe: As a maker of ARGs, what are you selling?
Elan Lee: At first, when I personally started this whole crazy thing, it was not even a marketing effort. I can talk about where the first one came from, if that helps?
So, I was doing game design at Microsoft, and one day Steven Spielberg walked into my office…cause… Holy crap! Steven Spielberg walked into my office! And he basically said, ‘So, hey, your boss just bought the rights to my movie A.I. (A.I. Artificial Intelligence).’ And, the sort of fill-in-the-blank part there was that my boss really wants to get into Hollywood, and he bought anything with Steven Spielberg’s name on it. And he had signed us up to do a fighting game, and a racing game, and a gladiatorial combat game, and all of that sort of fell in my lap. And it was like, you get to build all these great games!
I went and watched the movie… Actually, even before watching the movie, we built those games. We actually built an A.I. fighting game for the Xbox, a racing game for the Xbox, and a gladiatorial combat game for the Xbox. And the problem with all those games was that an audience isn’t going to know how those fit together. They’re not gonna understand how the characters kind of move from one game, to the next game, to the next, especially with a franchise where some of them may not have even seen the movie.
So we thought, what we really need is just kind of like, the glue between those properties. So we thought, what if we built a game that didn’t actually live on any platform, it just sorta lived everywhere. And characters could call you, and characters could send you email, and the characters that you saw in one game could hop out of that game into the real world for a while, and you’d play along with them. And then they’d hop into the next game, and that’s episode two. Episode three they’re gonna hop back out into the real world, play with you, and then episode four they jump into the next Xbox game. So we built that, and we called it The Beast, because we didn’t know what else to call it and we thought it would be cool.
No one’s gonna buy these things
Then we saw the movie A.I., and… I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie A.I., but umm, you don’t exactly… It’s a movie about a fake boy who really wants the love of his mom and would do anything to be real, but at the end we realize he can’t actually be real and his heart is broken and he’s buried at the bottom of the sea forever… No one walks out of that movie thinking, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to play the Xbox game!’ right? You’re screwed. So me and my team walked out of the movie and just thought, ‘Oh, we’re so f**ked!’ We have nothing.
So we went back to Redmond and we canceled all the games. We just killed them that day cause we thought, ‘We have no chance, no one’s gonna buy these things.’ But as we’re slashing these games, we kinda realize ‘But that other thing, the glue, that’s still kinda cool. That actually has emotional resonance, and actually fits in really well with the movie, because it’s all about people’s real lives. And their passions and their hatreds and their conflict, and, it’s just gritty and real and awesome.’ And so we thought, ‘Well, we own the rights anyway, so let’s just release that, even though it’s not promoting any of our games.’ Even though it’s not carrying characters from one piece to the next. We built it anyway, so we might as well just launch it. And so we did. And it wasn’t meant to be promotion for the movie… it was meant as a clue for these other Xbox games, which no longer existed. So we had no agenda. I mean, absolutely no agenda.
And after about a month of running it, we kinda realized – this is really powerful. We’re onto something here. And so I went to my boss and said, ‘I wanna build more of these. This is cool, we’ve just entertained millions of people in a way that no one has ever entertained them before.’ And he said, “How much money did it make?” And we said, “Well, it didn’t make any money. It wasn’t supposed to.” And he said, “Well, go build an Xbox game, then.” And I thought…this job kinda blows. So I resigned from Microsoft, and started a company to build more of these things. And that’s even worse, cause now I wanna build these things that make no money…
Twelve hours later, Microsoft called…
Phoebe: What made you think you could form a company on the basis of this model when you knew…?
Elan Lee: Absolute naivete. I was so dumb. I just thought, this is really cool. This feels like more compelling storytelling than anything I’ve ever done. And I wanna just build them. And I can worry about the realities of… probably that I’m going to starve to death doing so. So, me and some friends literally started a company – we each put in a little bit of cash, and spent about twelve hours freaking out because now none of us have any income and we have no clients, and… Holy crap! What do we do now? And twelve hours later, Microsoft called and they said, ‘So, we’ve got Halo 2 coming out, and you guys are the only ones who know anything about the game (cause we were some of the original designers of Halo 1), and how do you feel about marketing it using that crazy A.I. thing you did?’ And we thought, ‘Uhh…Awesome! Okay!’
Phoebe: When you say twelve hours, do you mean literally twelve hours?
Elan Lee: Yes. It was a very tense twelve hours. … It was the silver platter. It was like, ‘Hey, how would you like to do exactly what you set out to do, and make money doing it?’
It was total wild west
Once we realized that there was money in marketing, and that in fact it was the only revenue we could come up with, then we just went full steam ahead with that. And we said, ‘Alright, let’s become a marketing company. And that will let us fund a lot of this research on someone else’s dime. Cause it really was research at that point. I mean, there were no rules. It was total wild west. Who knows what the hell is gonna work? …
So, 42 Entertainment was built as a marketing company. And to answer your question, ‘What were we selling?’ We were absolutely selling promotional materials. We could walk into most marketing firms, most giant studios, and say, ‘Your revenue model is dying. People are learning how to skip commercials, they pay no attention to billboards anymore, they have absolutely no tolerance for banner ads and every day that gets worse. But we just finished two projects in a row that had unprecedented numbers…’ It was a really easy business. I mean, it was such a compelling case that we could make to say, ‘We have a mechanism by which you can entertain someone in a new way.’
If you fast-forward that about seven years, now it’s impossible to launch a movie, or a TV show, or a rock album, or a videogame without an ARG. Everyone’s doing it. Or, at least, what they call ARGs. Because the traditional stuff doesn’t work, and it’s only the tent-pole projects that a company is willing to put so much marketing money into. Those things work, but everything else needs some edge, it needs some hook. And the irony of the whole situation is that ARGs are no longer an edge or a hook. They’re just commonplace now.
“ARGs” is such a stupid term that no one knows what it means
Phoebe: Well, commonplace, I think, to a certain subculture. A certain niche of people that are technologically proficient… I mean, even though I have a media-engaged background, I have never accidentally come across the rabbit hole for an ARG.
Elan Lee: Fair enough. Nor have I. In fact, I’ve never actually played one. So… (He laughs.)
Most marketing companies, at this point, will call whatever it is they’re doing an ARG. Because what they’re doing is basically saying ‘Let’s do traditional marketing, plus a Twitter account. Let’s do traditional marketing, plus a weird interactive website with a flash game on it.’ And they’re calling that stuff ARGs because “ARGs” is such a stupid term that no one knows what it means. So that stuff I think is actually commonplace – the things that they’re calling ARGs I think are commonplace, and most people at least know they exist. Every movie that comes out, you at least know how to find the website, if you wanted to. And if you were to go there, there would be some embedded flash experience, or there would be a link to a Twitter account, or a link to some other weird thing if they’re more elaborate.
An actual ARG, in the sense of what I Love Bees was, or in the sense of what A.I. was, and the few that we did after that…those are not nearly as commonplace. And those are – very much to your point – entertaining the hell out of that same group of hardcore geeks over and over again…
There is no upside to trading time for money
Which is exactly why I resigned from the company. I woke up one morning and realized two very important things: one is that I’m really good at entertaining the hell out of that small group of people, and two is that there is no upside to trading time for money. In other words, I only make money if I put time into this. And the moment I stop putting time into this, I stop making money. And that’s a service industry. That’s not a happy moment for me. I’m very uncomfortable with that.
And so I started–with some friends–Fourth Wall Studios because I wanted to change that. I wanted to not only entertain the same million people over and over again, but I also wanted to build things with permanence to them, so that even once I stopped pouring time into them, they would continue to generate revenue.
And so now what I’m selling – this is the longest answer to your question ever – so now what I’m selling is a true media experience with built in revenue models, established revenue models. We’ve got some that have microtransactions, we’ve got some that we’re building actual TV shows so those have ad sponsored revenue models built in. People already know these. We’ve got some with text messaging revenue models. We’ve got a book coming out that’s got a built in revenue model. All of those things, what we’re essentially selling to the user is…it’s everything you know, but the coolest version of it you’ve ever seen. Here’s a book! You know how to buy a book…here’s the coolest book you’ve ever seen. Here’s a TV show. You know how to watch commercials in a TV show, but it’s the coolest TV show you’ve ever seen. That’s the new proposition: it’s what you’re used to, plus.
It’s just a psychological manipulation
Phoebe: Now I guess what you’re doing with Fourth Wall is a slightly different take on embedding a business model into the delivery of your story, which is clearly a huge evolution from what you were doing with 42. Most of us, when we think about funding an “interactive experience” (for lack of a better term), the introduction of a new business model is often a hard sell. Especially because people in the media industry are trying so many different things and so many of those things are failing miserably.
Elan Lee: Yeah.
Phoebe: And so you go back and look at the marketing model that 42 was using, and you go, ‘OK, but still every marketing person is asking me about ROI and “Engagement”.’ And if I’m only selling the same story, or a different story to the same market, even if those people are fully engaged – which they may be – it doesn’t necessarily translate to selling products.
Elan Lee: There’s a few answers to that. First, let me put my 42 hat on for a second and answer that specific one. Whenever we took on a new client at 42, we would ask one very important question, which is: ‘What are you guys gonna use to judge the success of this project?’ Not, ‘What does success mean?’ but, ‘What do you think?’ And oftentimes, they would answer, ‘Oh, we just want column inches. We just want reporters all over this.’ And so we would tailor things to accomplish that very specific goal. Or they would say, ‘We want to sell movie tickets.’ OK, so we’re gonna tailor that. So, there’s tricks you can use to do exactly that, even if you don’t have a lot of players, you can tailor it to get a sh*t-load of press, or you can tailor it to get massive traffic to a website, even if it’s the same people over and over again, right? You can encourage repeat behavior… So that was one thing that we’d be really clear on: ‘What do you want to get out of this?’ And we’re gonna give you that. And we were very successful at that because it’s just a psychological manipulation…(He laughs.)
It’s not the game that has to be entertaining, it’s the players
The second thing is… Have you ever seen that inverse pyramid of the players?
So, the goal there, what we were always able to say which I think was actually really true, is: If you can build the game that has three core functions – one super hardcore thing that’s gonna keep the players engaged…and it’s gonna be hard and complicated and geeky, and all that’s actually good, cause those are the guys that are going to keep coming back. If you can build one medium engagement thing, so that you can play ten minutes a day–a flash game is a great example of that–then you’re gonna keep that middle group occupied. And, if you can build something that only takes ten seconds, like a really awesome website, something super spooky happens when you’re visiting, or you call a phone number. Then you’re going to get that upper crowd.
When it works right. When all those things are powering each other, what happens is, you get the bottom group entertaining the top. So, the core players are entertaining the medium players, the medium players are entertaining the really casual people. Cause they’re watching, like ‘Oh my god, these guys are going out in hurricanes and answering payphones!’ And you have all that insanity. And what happens is that triangle grows, because people from the top, every once in a while they trickle down to the middle. And people at the middle level start to trickle down to the bottom level. And that bottom level grows when there’s more core players doing more and more and more, the whole triangle grows because now there’s more to be entertained by. And although it looks like a triangle, it’s actually a circle. And if you build it the right way, you can get the player–nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd–you can get these guys to generate the viral spread for you. Because it’s not the game that has to be entertaining, it’s the players that have to be entertaining.
You don’t have to teach your customers how to spend money
Phoebe: So, back to Fourth Wall…and rather than selling somebody else’s product, selling your own original IP [Intellectual Property] in new forms… It sounds like you’ve already experimented with a number of different models, so what have been the most successful? Where do you wanna go?
Elan Lee: The two that have been the most successful so far is actually edoc [that's edoc laundry] clothing company – selling shirts, or clothes, makes a lot of money – and Cathy’s Book makes a lot of money. And I think the reason those two make a lot of money is because they’re established revenue models. If you have to teach someone how to spend money, that’s a loooooong road. So, using those established mechanisms is really good.
We have a lot of other mechanisms. One of the projects that we’re starting to develop right now – actually, the one I’m most excited about – which I can’t say too much about… is… how do I phrase this without totally screwing myself over? OK. (He pauses.) There’s a way that we all behave online. Nope, that’s a bad way to say it… OK. (Another pause.)
Here’s a statement: Marketers spend billions of dollars every year to make television commercials to get you to look at a product. Another statement is: Marketers spend a nearly equal amount to build banner ads to get people to redirect their behavior to a certain URL. To move their eyeballs to a certain URL. I think those are both true statements. OK. We have an experimental revenue model that I’m very excited about, because what it does is it makes part of gameplay moving your eyeballs to very specific websites, over and over and over again. And because that has such tremendous value, I think it’s a revenue model that you don’t have to teach. That you don’t have to teach your customers how to spend money. They just do it. And that has incredible value to marketers.
Let’s call that chocolate and peanut butter
I realize how nebulous I’m being about that, but if you look at it in that very abstract way, there’s something kinda beautiful about that, right? There’s value in people looking at your thing online, and the game is built out of things online, so let’s call that chocolate and peanut butter and put those things together, and build something where everyone wins.
Phoebe: So, if I can summarize: You’re talking about building a revenue model that is based on existing behaviors?
Elan Lee: Correct.
Phoebe: You’ve also had an opportunity with Fourth Wall to explore your own IP, instead of leveraging existing IP. And it seems like you’ve had a lot of opportunity to experiment with different media. Can you talk a bit about that?
Elan Lee: None of those have launched yet. However, we have started the process of writing and selling scripts in Hollywood. Some are television shows, some are webisodes, and some are feature length films. They’re all properties that we wrote in-house. And they’re all properties that have the interactive components baked into the DNA of the property. So, while it is possible to just sit back and watch a TV show…cause that’s not massively broken, and enough people know how to do it.
Lean forward and live in that world
All of the interactive components are an extension of that same experience across your cell phone, across your email address, across your facebook page. And rather than the interactive elements feeling like a marketing thing that was slapped on afterwards, what we’re trying to build – and what’s so exciting – is… When you participate in passive media, when you watch a TV show and watch a movie, you are sitting back. It’s a lean-back experience. And our claim is, in addition to that, the opportunity to then lean forward and live in that world – so that, when you decide to lean back again and watch the characters, they’re just continuing where you left off. My assertion is that that is the future of entertainment.
And getting to work with media where they let us play with that, and fund massive projects geared to not entertain that same million people who look for those marketing projects, but instead geared towards the 30 million people that are going to watch a TV show and then hopefully say, ‘Oh, there’s more? I wanna see what the more is, I wanna see what else there is.’ That’s a much more fun sandbox to get to play in. So, that’s what I’m excited about right now.
I’m sooo happy American Idol exists
Phoebe: Do you think that shows like American Idol, which are scratching surface of some type of audience interactivity – do you think that’s going to help with educating an audience so that they can deal with a cross-device experience?
Elan Lee: Yeah. For sure. I’m sooo happy American Idol exists. And I’m soo happy it’s doing as well as it is. Well, I guess it’s sort of declining a little but…what a run, right? I think that they showed…they took the first and hardest step in this process. They said, ‘For a massive audience, they are not gonna be scared to interact. And we’re gonna teach them over the course of many years how to do it. And we’re gonna reward them along the way, and we’re gonna introduce conflict along the way, and we’re gonna make it part of the experience. Part of the experience of American Idol is picking up another device – a computer or a phone and doing something. And we’re not gonna punish you for that, we’re not gonna make it complicated. We’re gonna make it fun and easy. And that’s the hardest damn step. And they did such a phenomenal job at it! Now, what’s even more exciting is what comes next.
You can just do it. Just do it today, this afternoon.
Phoebe: If I want to grow up and become a “transmedia designer”, what do I do? What’s the path for that?
Elan Lee: Right. Well, the shortest path is build one. What’s really cool about all this stuff is, you can just build one. If you’ve got a microphone and basic HTML skills, or a friend who has basic HTML skills, you can build one.
I think we’re in this phase that I call ‘wild experimentation,’ and no one has any idea what’s gonna work. There are certain lessons out there, but there are no rules. Everything is worth trying. And it’s rapid prototyping, and it’s rapid failure, and it’s wild experimentation. And for anyone who wants to grow up and be a ‘transmedia designer’…there’s no growing up involved. You can just do it. Just do it today, this afternoon. And those lessons that you learn there are what transmedia houses are looking for. Anyone who’s got any experience in this at all is what they’re looking for. But in success, and even in moderate success, people come to you and say, ‘That was awesome! What’s next? What are you going to build next? And can you slap this onto my product? And here’s some development money, and can you build it bigger and better and involve this thing instead?’ There’s quite a boom in this industry right now, because no one’s good at it. And there’s huge potential.
You get to convert part of your life into the storytelling experience
Phoebe: What’s been interesting for me in watching the development of this whole, quote-unquote transmedia environment, has been the role of academia and the media itself shaping the way people understand what it is. I mean even the term “transmedia” is not… I mean, did you coin that term?
Elan Lee: (Shakes his head.)
Phoebe: Right. So, the definitions have influenced what people expect. For example, there seems to be a set of conventions that go along with an Alternate Reality Game. And even within this frame of wild experimentation, it appears that what people are looking for is something formulaic… What do you think of when you think of an Alternate Reality Game? What does “transmedia” mean to you? Or does it have any meaning?
Elan Lee: I think that all it really means is that you get to convert part of your life into the storytelling experience. And the best ones are the ones where you get to define what part of your life that is. I don’t think there’s any formula about what it has to include or what it shouldn’t include. I’m such a huge fan of making people feel like superheroes. I just think that’s the key to everything. And so, if you can get someone to invite your story into their life, and what they’re gonna get in return is to feel like a superhero for doing so…that’s the ultimate transmedia experience. And I hate to define it more than that. I really think that’s the core of it.
Phoebe: More like transcendental media?
Elan Lee: Yeah! That’s a great way to look at it. (He laughs.) Yeah. I mean…I’ve had small experiences watching TV or movies, where I felt like a superhero just voyeuristically, but it wears off immediately. You know where the border of that TV is, and I know if I look to the left it’s not the TV anymore. That’s the wall of my apartment, and that’s the not having that experience anymore. And so transmedia is one where we say, well, the border doesn’t have to be there, the border is wherever I want it to be. And I really believe that’s the future of entertainment.
[But wait! There's more. Next time we'll cover Elan's take on creativity, and what makes him more successful at this than you.]
July 26 2010
EVENT: Transmedia Next
I’m often asked about transmedia and how my company Seize the Media is using it in the projects that we’re developing or producing. Besides being an excellent story R&D tool, transmedia also offers a wide range of benefits for those wishing to tell stories in the digital age. It’s a given that media consumption is changing and much has been written about an entertainment industry that finds itself smack in the center of a major transition. And while transmedia might not be for every storyteller, there are things that can be learned from the process of adapting and designing a story that travels beyond one device, platform or medium that can apply to anyone. For instance transmedia can create new opportunities to fund, develop, write, produce and / or distribute the stories you wish to tell.
This coming fall I’ll be part of an exciting training program called Transmedia Next which takes place in London on September 8, 9, & 10th. Over the course of three intensive days we’ll share an approach that my company has been employing on various films, TV, and games that we’ve produced. The event is funded by EU Media and will be open to those in Europe. We’ll be working with a small group of people as we pull back the curtain and share our process. Space is limited so if you’re interested you best hurry. There are also a number of scholarships for those based in the UK thanks to support from Skillset.
For more info on Transmedia Next and to see how you can attend visit www.transmedianext.com
EVENT: Transmedia Next
I’m often asked about transmedia and how my company Seize the Media is using it in the projects that we’re developing or producing. Besides being an excellent story R&D tool, transmedia also offers a wide range of benefits for those wishing to tell stories in the digital age. It’s a given that media consumption is changing and much has been written about an entertainment industry that finds itself smack in the center of a major transition. And while transmedia might not be for every storyteller, there are things that can be learned from the process of adapting and designing a story that travels beyond one device, platform or medium that can apply to anyone. For instance transmedia can create new opportunities to fund, develop, write, produce and / or distribute the stories you wish to tell.
This coming fall I’ll be part of an exciting training program called Transmedia Next which takes place in London on September 8, 9, & 10th. Over the course of three intensive days we’ll share an approach that my company has been employing on various films, TV, and games that we’ve produced. The event is funded by EU Media and will be open to those in Europe. We’ll be working with a small group of people as we pull back the curtain and share our process. Space is limited so if you’re interested you best hurry. There are also a number of scholarships for those based in the UK thanks to support from Skillset.
For more info on Transmedia Next and to see how you can attend visit www.transmedianext.com
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 28 2010
My Thoughts on E3
At a spectacle known as E3, I witnessed everything from 3D games without glasses to controller-free gaming. Before this conference I didn’t think Star Trek-like technology could be available in 2010. Can Hollywood learn from the constantly evolving game industry?
Below are some highlights from E3 and how I think they will impact filmmakers.
X-Box 360’s Kinect created by PrimeSense
Audience members could place themselves into scenes and those clips will automatically be shared on Facebook. How many girls would love to have an appearance in Twilight? Maybe, Kinetic could track where a viewer is in a living room to change the perspective of how they watch a movie. Additionally film environments could be interactive e.g. you can pause a film and then run your hand through raindrops.
Nintendo 3D DS
There aren’t any TVs on the market that deliver 3D film viewing on a budget. 3D DS gives consumers an incentive to purchase a movie vs. watching it through Netflix, pirating, or Red Box. With over a 125 million of the previous DS models sold, this could be a big market. The LA Times reports that Nintendo has already made deals with Warner Bros, Disney, and DreamWorks.
What are your predictions? Let us know in the comments.
April 30 2010
ARGFest heads to Atlanta
I had the opportunity to speak at ARGFest in 2008 and had a wonderful time. It’s a great group of people doing some amazing work in the transmedia space. I was thrilled to hear that ARGFest this year would be getting bigger and better. I had a chance to ask ARGFest Chair Brooke Thompson a few questions about this year’s event which will be traveling to Atlanta, GA.
What is ARGFest?
ARGFest is a four day event (July 15-18 in Atlanta, GA) celebrating the best in alternate reality games & transmedia entertainment. It started back in 2003 when Steve Peters (then of ARGN) and Sean Stacey (of unfiction) wanted to get together over drinks instead of over email (or chat). A dozen or so others decided to join them, named it ARGFest, and an annual event was born! Over the years, it has grown from a small group of us hanging out in Vegas into a full-fledged conference that attracts some of the most innovative and influential minds in the field. But, despite the changes, we’ve never let go of our roots – it is still a community oriented event, created by fans & creators for fans & creators. This helps to keep the conference from ever taking itself too seriously – you don’t come to ARGFest for the sessions, you come to have fun and meet (or make) friends with people who share your passion. What’s great is that actually makes the sessions more interesting and the conference all the better. I love how that works!
Brian Clark at ARGFest 2008
How will the fest be expanding this year?
So many ways! The most noticeable is that we’re going from two days to four. In the process, we’ve expanded the conference to two days and added a weekend long game festival. It’s all quite huge and seems a bit drastic, but it was a very natural move for us to make.
For the last five years, ARGFest has been a weekend event with Saturday devoted to a conference. This has worked well, but we reached the point where we were turning away some fantastic speakers & conference sessions. While we could have just expanded the conference to two days, the thought of spending our entire weekend shut in some conference room made us all a bit crazy. Last year, when we had a few creators talking about and showing off some of their location-based games, we realized that two worlds were converging. There’s always been an interest in urban play (from street games to geocaching to live events, ARGs have used real-world spaces for years), but with the rise in location aware phones, people are really beginning to look at place as a platform for transmedia entertainment. With that, we realized we could manage a two day conference and, if we moved the conference to Thursday & Friday, we could have the entire weekend for urban play, location based games, and explorations into the ways in which transmedia creators can play with space and/or live interactions.
It’s a bit of an experiment, I’ll admit, but we’re really excited about it all. Not only does this allow us to both talk about and showcase the various ways that people are exploring transmedia, it lets us reach out to the general community in ways that we’ve never done before. I like to think of urban play (especially if it has a strong narrative) as one of the gateway drugs to the transmedia world – it’s accessible and just strange enough to make you feel like you’ve experienced something special. Once people get a taste of that, their minds open up to all sorts of possibilities and they want to see & experience more.
What can be done to make ARGs and transmedia experiences more accessible?
Transmedia experiences, especially alternate reality games, can become very complex very quickly. This means that making experiences accessible is incredibly important – even when they are not aimed at a large or mainstream audience. Its no surprise, then, that over the years designers have played with a number of ways to make (and keep!) experiences accessible to their audience (and potential audience). I’m not going to say that time has been wasted – there is definitely much to learn and, even, a few techniques worth using. But I am going to say that there has been an abundance of over-thinking. In my mind, it’s quite simple… an accessible transmedia experience connects with the audience on their terms, where they already are, with tools that they’re already using, and in ways that they already understand. Ok, maybe it’s not that simple – but it’s only four things! How hard can that be? More than that, it’s four things that make sense! Think about it…
After you’ve put all this time and energy into creating your transmedia masterpiece, you want to show it off. That means, you want to make it as easy as possible for an audience to discover you. But you don’t want people to just see the front page, get confused, and walk away – so you need to do things that they already know and understand. And, while it might be interesting, you don’t want to make them angry before they’re committed to the experience – so do things on their terms. All of these things can change the deeper someone falls down the rabbit hole. But, until they get there, don’t force them to jump through too many hoops.
Once you’ve mastered those four things, then you can start exploring other techniques such as narrative guides and tiered experiences designed to immerse the audience at different levels of engagement. But, until then, you’ll only have minimal success with anything else.
For those wishing to design their own games where does one start?
Talk to people who have created and played games. They’re fairly easy to find – unfiction and the IGDA ARG SIG are good places to look if you’re interested in alternate reality games and twitter has become my tool of choice to connect with all sorts of people working in and with transmedia. There’s a strong feeling floating around in the transmedia sphere that we’re at the start of something huge. The thing is… nobody really knows how huge or, even, what that something is. The only way we’re going to figure that out is by encouraging people to create in this space. So, ARG & transmedia folk love to talk… a lot. They like questions. They like to think. They like meeting new people. And they love to share ideas and advice. So don’t be shy, come find us and say hi.
What are some of your favorite ARGs / transmedia experiences of the last year?
It’s so hard to choose – a lot of interesting things have happened in the space in the last year. Personal Effects: Dark Art seems to jump out for me. If you aren’t aware, Personal Effects: Dark Art is a book that comes packaged with a number of artifacts (business cards, ids, notes, etc.). In addition to supporting the text of the book, these items lead to websites and phone numbers that help bring the world to life. Granted, the idea and execution isn’t new – Cathy’s Book did the same thing a few years ago (and both were created by Jordan Weisman who was the ARGFest keynote last year). However, they each reached very different audiences as Cathy’s Book was geared towards girls in their early teens and Personal Effects was an adult thriller. Publishers seem to be more willing to try transmedia experiences with books geared towards younger audiences, so seeing a similarly executed experience succeed for two very different audiences has been great! Hopefully this will help encourage more publishers (and authors!) to explore the potential of transmedia storytelling.
If someone wants to attend, speak or volunteer where can they find out more information?
The ARGFest website (www.argfest.com ) will have all of the information that you will need. For more up to the moment news & announcements, you can follow us on twitter (@argfest). Whether or not you’re familiar with alternate reality games, I want to encourage you to come. ARGs are but one type of transmedia experience and, if you’re at all interested in transmedia entertainment, you’ll find like minds at ARGFest. If you are interested in speaking and/or have a great idea for a session – let us know! There are submissions forms on the website that we review on a regular basis and they really do help guide us as we pull this thing together. With more space to play with than ever before, we really do want (need!) your suggestions to help us fill it. This truly is a community driven event and that makes it your event… What do you want to see? Who do you what to hear? Let us know so that we can try to make it happen! And, of course, we’ll see you in July!
ARGFest heads to Atlanta
I had the opportunity to speak at ARGFest in 2008 and had a wonderful time. It’s a great group of people doing some amazing work in the transmedia space. I was thrilled to hear that ARGFest this year would be getting bigger and better. I had a chance to ask ARGFest Chair Brooke Thompson a few questions about this year’s event which will be traveling to Atlanta, GA.
What is ARGFest?
ARGFest is a four day event (July 15-18 in Atlanta, GA) celebrating the best in alternate reality games & transmedia entertainment. It started back in 2003 when Steve Peters (then of ARGN) and Sean Stacey (of unfiction) wanted to get together over drinks instead of over email (or chat). A dozen or so others decided to join them, named it ARGFest, and an annual event was born! Over the years, it has grown from a small group of us hanging out in Vegas into a full-fledged conference that attracts some of the most innovative and influential minds in the field. But, despite the changes, we’ve never let go of our roots – it is still a community oriented event, created by fans & creators for fans & creators. This helps to keep the conference from ever taking itself too seriously – you don’t come to ARGFest for the sessions, you come to have fun and meet (or make) friends with people who share your passion. What’s great is that actually makes the sessions more interesting and the conference all the better. I love how that works!
Brian Clark at ARGFest 2008
How will the fest be expanding this year?
So many ways! The most noticeable is that we’re going from two days to four. In the process, we’ve expanded the conference to two days and added a weekend long game festival. It’s all quite huge and seems a bit drastic, but it was a very natural move for us to make.
For the last five years, ARGFest has been a weekend event with Saturday devoted to a conference. This has worked well, but we reached the point where we were turning away some fantastic speakers & conference sessions. While we could have just expanded the conference to two days, the thought of spending our entire weekend shut in some conference room made us all a bit crazy. Last year, when we had a few creators talking about and showing off some of their location-based games, we realized that two worlds were converging. There’s always been an interest in urban play (from street games to geocaching to live events, ARGs have used real-world spaces for years), but with the rise in location aware phones, people are really beginning to look at place as a platform for transmedia entertainment. With that, we realized we could manage a two day conference and, if we moved the conference to Thursday & Friday, we could have the entire weekend for urban play, location based games, and explorations into the ways in which transmedia creators can play with space and/or live interactions.
It’s a bit of an experiment, I’ll admit, but we’re really excited about it all. Not only does this allow us to both talk about and showcase the various ways that people are exploring transmedia, it lets us reach out to the general community in ways that we’ve never done before. I like to think of urban play (especially if it has a strong narrative) as one of the gateway drugs to the transmedia world – it’s accessible and just strange enough to make you feel like you’ve experienced something special. Once people get a taste of that, their minds open up to all sorts of possibilities and they want to see & experience more.
What can be done to make ARGs and transmedia experiences more accessible?
Transmedia experiences, especially alternate reality games, can become very complex very quickly. This means that making experiences accessible is incredibly important – even when they are not aimed at a large or mainstream audience. Its no surprise, then, that over the years designers have played with a number of ways to make (and keep!) experiences accessible to their audience (and potential audience). I’m not going to say that time has been wasted – there is definitely much to learn and, even, a few techniques worth using. But I am going to say that there has been an abundance of over-thinking. In my mind, it’s quite simple… an accessible transmedia experience connects with the audience on their terms, where they already are, with tools that they’re already using, and in ways that they already understand. Ok, maybe it’s not that simple – but it’s only four things! How hard can that be? More than that, it’s four things that make sense! Think about it…
After you’ve put all this time and energy into creating your transmedia masterpiece, you want to show it off. That means, you want to make it as easy as possible for an audience to discover you. But you don’t want people to just see the front page, get confused, and walk away – so you need to do things that they already know and understand. And, while it might be interesting, you don’t want to make them angry before they’re committed to the experience – so do things on their terms. All of these things can change the deeper someone falls down the rabbit hole. But, until they get there, don’t force them to jump through too many hoops.
Once you’ve mastered those four things, then you can start exploring other techniques such as narrative guides and tiered experiences designed to immerse the audience at different levels of engagement. But, until then, you’ll only have minimal success with anything else.
For those wishing to design their own games where does one start?
Talk to people who have created and played games. They’re fairly easy to find – unfiction and the IGDA ARG SIG are good places to look if you’re interested in alternate reality games and twitter has become my tool of choice to connect with all sorts of people working in and with transmedia. There’s a strong feeling floating around in the transmedia sphere that we’re at the start of something huge. The thing is… nobody really knows how huge or, even, what that something is. The only way we’re going to figure that out is by encouraging people to create in this space. So, ARG & transmedia folk love to talk… a lot. They like questions. They like to think. They like meeting new people. And they love to share ideas and advice. So don’t be shy, come find us and say hi.
What are some of your favorite ARGs / transmedia experiences of the last year?
It’s so hard to choose – a lot of interesting things have happened in the space in the last year. Personal Effects: Dark Art seems to jump out for me. If you aren’t aware, Personal Effects: Dark Art is a book that comes packaged with a number of artifacts (business cards, ids, notes, etc.). In addition to supporting the text of the book, these items lead to websites and phone numbers that help bring the world to life. Granted, the idea and execution isn’t new – Cathy’s Book did the same thing a few years ago (and both were created by Jordan Weisman who was the ARGFest keynote last year). However, they each reached very different audiences as Cathy’s Book was geared towards girls in their early teens and Personal Effects was an adult thriller. Publishers seem to be more willing to try transmedia experiences with books geared towards younger audiences, so seeing a similarly executed experience succeed for two very different audiences has been great! Hopefully this will help encourage more publishers (and authors!) to explore the potential of transmedia storytelling.
If someone wants to attend, speak or volunteer where can they find out more information?
The ARGFest website (www.argfest.com ) will have all of the information that you will need. For more up to the moment news & announcements, you can follow us on twitter (@argfest). Whether or not you’re familiar with alternate reality games, I want to encourage you to come. ARGs are but one type of transmedia experience and, if you’re at all interested in transmedia entertainment, you’ll find like minds at ARGFest. If you are interested in speaking and/or have a great idea for a session – let us know! There are submissions forms on the website that we review on a regular basis and they really do help guide us as we pull this thing together. With more space to play with than ever before, we really do want (need!) your suggestions to help us fill it. This truly is a community driven event and that makes it your event… What do you want to see? Who do you what to hear? Let us know so that we can try to make it happen! And, of course, we’ll see you in July!
April 27 2010
One from the archive: Filmmakers That Think Outside the Film
The following article is one from the WBP archives.
In the 1940’s filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (known as “The Archers”) championed a multi-artform cinema. They created films that represented music, dance, painting, literature and photography; for they believed that ‘all art is one’. Now, with the proliferation of media platforms, the palette for filmmakers is stupendous. Not only is it impossible to encompass all artforms in a single film, but there are aesthetic and economic reasons for maintaining their integrity. All art is not one within the film, but in its relationships with artforms around it. Filmmakers are now thinking beyond cinema and DVD to include the web, theatre, books and mobile technology in their canvas.
In this article I’ll take you through a whirlwind tour of some of the ways filmmakers are thinking beyond the film. Our first stop is a look at how the assets of a film are repurposed. This is not a discussion about distribution methods or how the medium of delivery influences the experience. Instead it is an exploration of the ways assets can be reused to create new works. The first example is that of filmmakers offering components of their film in digital format for anyone to ‘remix’. Remixing is rife with fans, but it is only in the last few years that filmmakers have begun to offer their content for remixing.
Sometimes the offering is driven by a desire to create ‘citizen marketers’, such as New Line Cinema’s release of footage and music so that people could create a new trailer of Liz Friedlander’s Take the Lead (2006). They also specifically commissioned ‘official’ remixes (see Addictive). The logic behind New Line Cinema’s approach is best understood with this quote in the New York Times (6th April) by Russell Schwartz, president for domestic marketing for New Line Cinema: “Our assets become their assets, and that’s how they become fans of the movie.” For Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain (2006), assets – video, stills, audio – are provided so that audiences can create a music video at The Fountain Remixed . In this case, the offering is explained as giving audiences who want to contemplate eternal life the “chance to delve deeper” (from website). Peter Greenaway has made finding fragments, of a movie that is part of a large storyworld The Tulse Luper Project, a game. The Tulse Luper Journey involves players collaborating to complete 92 puzzles. On completion of each puzzle, a 1 minute film fragment is released to the player. It is then their task to compile the 92 minute film of Tulse Luper. The logic behind these offerings are manifold, from facilitating ‘citizen marketing’ to a highly personalized exploration of a storyworld. It should be noted too, that some filmmakers are experimenting with creating films specifically designed for remixing, such as Michelle Hughes’ Stray Cinema (2006), Aryan Kaganof’s SMS Sugarman (2007) and Michela Ledwidge’s (in-development) Sanctuary.
Filmmakers also engage in remixes of their own films. For the past year Peter Greenaway has been performing live VJing sessions of assets of his cross-media project The Tulse Luper Project . Workbook Project’s own Lance Weiler is currently touring the USA and Europe with his – ‘cinema ARG‘ of Head Trauma (2006). Weiler’s cinema event includes a remix, live music, theatrics and mobile phones. It is a unique experience of the film’s storyworld carefully curated by the filmmaker. His cinema theatrics are helping to revive the notion of cinema as event.
As well as remixing their own work, and offering their assets up for others to do with what they will, filmmakers are also commissioning artists to create interactive works out of the assets. On the main website of Head Trauma, for instance, Lance Weiler has included an interactive graphic novel that includes footage, stills and audio of the film. The website for David Slade’s Hard Candy (2005) has an – experience, and so too with Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain Experience . Indeed Peter Greenaway has also commissioned Digiscreen to create what they call a “webler” of The Tulse Luper Suitcases:
“Website constructed entirely from a film’s visual and aural elements that can be navigated and interacted with by a general audience. A webler should offer both an experience of the actual film as with a film trailer and an alternative expression of that experience.” (Digiscreen)
There are also non-web creative constructions of a film’s assets is ‘Blossoms and Blood’, a 12 minute montage of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love (2002). The short film is on the DVD and is constructed with deleted scenes. Since most of the shots included are of different points of view than those in the film, the work moves from vignette to being a kind of parallel universe. Poetic explorations of a theme are also rendered in print. Peter Greenaway has art books that accompany The Tulse Luper Suitcases (that he created), the Wachowski Brothers commissioned two volumes of graphic novels for The Matrix and Darren Aronofsky has written a graphic novel adaptation of The Fountain with painter Kent Williams. Aronofsky describes his entire project as “[a] story so grand, one medium couldn’t contain it” (source).
All of these works augment the film, providing a poetic rendition, but they also stand on their own as a work of art. They are at times a specifically designed prologue and epilogue. Indeed, some filmmakers push administrative detail to the side and instead prefer the films website to be a meditation on the theme. Examples are the websites for Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000); Christopher Nolan’s Momento (2000); Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001); Darren Lynn Bousman’s Saw II (2005) and more recently Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (2007).
[Screenshot from Momento website]
This treatment of the web as an expressive medium extends even further. Some filmmakers are populating their storyworld on the web shoulder to shoulder with real world sites. Sites for fictional companies and characters in films are emerging across cyberspace, almost indistinguishable from their real world counterparts… if not for their outlandish nature. For instance, the company that erases Joel Barish’s memory in Michael Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind (2004) has its own corporate site: Lacuna Inc. The company that provided the cloned child in Nick Hamm’s Godsend (2004) is likewise online: Godsend Institute. Companies mentioned in the Enter the Matrix digital game (2003), such as Omega Hardware Solutions were also online. The company that produces the NS-5 in Alex Proyas’ I, Robot (2004) has a site dedicated to the robot: NS-5. The company has even issued a press release detailing how the “NS-5″ will play several major roles in the film. Indeed, Count Olaf, the evil character in Brad Silberling’s Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) has his own website and blog, a place where he relishes in his starring role in the film.
In all of these examples it is clear that the storyworld is not married to the primary medium, to film, anymore. For some, this multi-medium existence has an immersive effect. Just like real life, it is present in all communication channels. Of course, this can be encouraged with websites that are set within the universe of the film. Early examples of this are seen with Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler’s The Last Broadcast website in 1996 and Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s The Blair Witch Project website in 1998. The later went on to also broadcast on the Sci Fi Channel a mockumentary, Curse of the Blair Witch, of the mockumentary and published a dossier of the “evidence” in 1999. Over the past few years, it is has been these practices – representing the world of the film as being real – that have emerged as a primary aesthetic for many audiences and creators. Four months before the screening of Takashi Shimizu’s The Grudge 2 (2006) a blog by Jason C was launched. Jason C is postgraduate student who is covering the making of the film as part of his research. So, the site works as both a making-of and fictional prologue. Why fiction? Jason C is a fictional character who, over the next few months, witnesses mysterious events on the set. Slowly, all of the cast and crew are affected by the strange events. In the end, Jason C disappears and his roommate takes over the blog in an effort to get help to find him.
Despite many diegetic web to film references, there are not many instances of references to fictional sites within films. Movie Poop Shoot, was in Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) and the character Paul Duncan in Godsend does search the Net for the Godsend Institute website mentioned earlier. But the only explicit referral by a character I’ve seen is Professor Bedlam’s mention of his website in Ivan Reitman’s My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006): ProfessorBedlam.com. The cross-platform traversal was not well executed however, as the website featured content that was set in the plot at the beginning of the film, not the end. These traversals need to make sense in terms of the flow of the narrative, which means creative control over them. Despite this flaw, the explicit referral of another element of the storyworld in another medium is a sign that the craft of multi-platform expression is maturing. Each component is not divorced of the others, in other words, it is a carefully constructed experience.
The majority of examples I have given thus far are adaptations of some kind. There are examples emerging of a storyline being extended. For instance, at the end of the Donnie Darko website (which requires moving through various levels by solving puzzles) the viewer/player is rewarded with press clippings that detail what happened to some of the characters after the events of the film. The Grudge 2 blog I cited previously is also an example of a metafictional prologue. A different approach to the extension of a storyworld is found in the DVD of Brad Bird’s animated film The Incredibles (2004). Near the end of the film, the mother (Elastigirl) listens to messages left by the babysitter of her child Jack-Jack on her mobile phone/cell. As we progress through the messages it is clear the babysitter is getting more and more frantic. The film ends, however, without us knowing what happened with the babysitter and the son Jack-Jack. We find out what happened, though, in the short animated film in the DVD: “Jack-Jack Attack”. Here we have a change of POV and an elaboration of narrative point in the film. Filmmakers are also starting their narrative in books. Unlike the adaptation model that has dominated, these books are designed to start the plot, which will then continue in the film. Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (2007) begins with three novels, and Chair Entertainment has begun their Empire story with a specifically written novel by Orson Scott Card. Chair Entertainment describe their approach as follows:
Chair’s unique value proposition is that we (1) create compelling original stories, (2) own and maintain creative control of our IP, and (3) create marketing synergy around that IP in 5 core franchise areas: video games, books, movies, comics, and merchandise. Each product we develop offers a unique perspective of the story and works together to expand the franchise. [source]
A similar multi-platform approach to addressing unexplored elements in a film is seen in EA Game’s The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-Earth II (2006). It is set during events that coincide with the events in Peter Jackson’s films, but take place in areas of Middle-Earth not covered in it. They are, of course, known from J.R.R. Tolkien’s books. With massively multiplayer online games, we have the Matrix Online (2005) as a good example of the continuation of a storyworld into a game. The gameworld is set after the events of the last film and although there have been mixed reviews, there are interesting plot developments such as the death of Morpheus. Due to the popularity of the genre, there will be many more integrated game and film projects over the next few years. Of note is the project Titantic director James Cameron has been working on for the past few years: Project 880. Once it comes out (a year or so apparently), it will be the first project that will begin as a multiplayer game and then continue in a feature film. But before looking too far into the future, lets return to the innovative transmedia expansions that are happening now and in the not-too-distant past.
[Screenshot from EA's Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth II]
The most referred to past project is the Wachoswki Brother’s The Matrix universe. Their storyworld existed in films, anime, comics and games. But unlike tie-ins and franchises of the past, the Wachowski Bros. creatively controlled each element and designed a continuous narrative across them. A highly cited example is the narrative thread of “the message”. In the short anime, “The Last Flight of Osiris” (2003), the character Jue and her crew discover the machines are boring to Zion. Their aim is to warn Zion of the impending danger by sending a message to the Nebuchadnezzar crew. At the end of the story Jue just manages to post the letter (thus ending a narrative thread), but we do not know what happens to the letter (a continuing thread). What happens to the letter is addressed in the digital game, Enter the Matrix (2003). The first mission for the player is to retrieve the letter from the post office. The player succeeds in continuing the narrative but we still do not know of the consequences of our actions. It is at the beginning of the second film, The Matrix Reloaded (2003), when Niobe (who is one of two characters in the game) reports on the ‘last transmissions of the Osiris’. The transmissions posted in the anime and retrieved by players in the digital game.
The Wachowski Brothers weren’t the only ones to persist their storyworld across media platforms though. In 2003 a group of fans conceived and implemented a unique project. Fan production is nothing new, but the form of this continuation of the Matrix storyworld was with a creative type that was only two years old. This group created an ‘alternate reality game’ (ARG): a storyworld that requires players all over the world to collaborate to find it and solve. Stories are distributed across numerous websites, emails, faxes, phone calls and real life events. Characters have blogs and chat to players via email, fax and phone. Fictional companies have sites that players have to ‘hack’ into and retrieve information from. The entire narrative is played out in real time, 24 hours a day and requires players to work together to solve very difficult puzzles to access information. The outcome is never fixed, for the creators always alter the world in real time according to the actions of the players. The ARG for The Matrix, MetaCortechs, is one of the most successful ARGs, with over 125,000 players from 115,000 countries. An invaluable book for those considering creating an ARG is the Project Mu Archives, for it documents The Matrix ARG from the player’s perspective. It is also available online. An ARG design book is also available: ARG designer Dave Szulborski’s This is Not a Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming.
Other films augmented by fans in the Jim Miller’s web-only Exocog in 2002. He chose the then forthcoming Minority Report as his storyworld and produced a 5-week project played in the build up to the film’s release. In 2004, VirtuQuest created an ARG set in the universe of George Lucas’ first feature film: THX 1138 (1971). SEN 5241 continued the narrative after the events of the film and was created to coincide with the launch of the DVD.
Fans are the not the only who have created ARGs though. Indeed, the first ARG (as it known now) was actually a commissioned by Microsoft and Dreamworks to publicize Stephen Spielberg’s A.I: Artificial Intelligence (2001) but ended up being described by Internet Life magazine as the ‘Citizen Kane of online entertainment’. The Beast was played by over 3 million people all over the world and created the new form of entertainment. Players who followed 150 characters across hundreds of websites, emails, faxes, files and puzzles for months and generated over 300 million impressions for the film through mainstream press such as Time, CNN, and USA Today, as well as niche outlets such as Wired, Slashdot, and Ain’t it Cool News, and won numerous awards including best idea (New York Times Magazine) and best web site (Entertainment Weekly). [4orty 2wo Entertainment]
[Screenshot of the Monster Hunt Club website for The Host]
In 2007, Magnolia Films commissioned ARG Studios to create an ARG for Bong Joon Ho’s The Host (2007). The ARG, Monster Hunt Club, helped market the release of the Korean film in the US. It was, I believe, the first ‘horror’ ARG (and Lance Weiler’s ‘cinema ARG’ the first of its kind, for scary movies too). More recently, an ARG-like campaign has started for the upcoming Batman film by Christopher Nolan: The Dark Knight. So far there have been fictional sites, such as the political campaign site for the character Harvey Dent (who becomes ‘Two-Face’) and clues left on playing cards left in comic book stores. One of the techniques that ARGs use is to remove all cues to fictionality: fictional sites almost indistinguishable from real ones. But as we have seen with the various projects mentioned in this article, this trope is not unique to ARGs. Indeed, making a fictional world seem as real as possible, extending it across media platforms, playing with it and enabling audiences to share and participate in its construction are just some of the key drives for filmmakers now.
In a keynote speech delivered at the Cinema Militans in September 2003, Peter Greenaway described the Tulse Luper Suitcases (a work that includes 3 feature films, a TV series, 92 DVDs and CD Roms, books and numerous websites) as: “an attempt to make a gathering together of today’s languages, to place them alongside one another and get them to converse.” Creators of film, print, TV, radio, theatre, games, new media and painting are all moving into this new paradigm of creation. Indeed, the future will not be the domain of artists who adapt or extend from their primary medium, but the domain of people who are transmedia artists from the beginning. Filmmakers don’t create films anymore, they create worlds.
One from the archive: Filmmakers That Think Outside the Film
The following article is one from the WBP archives.
In the 1940’s filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (known as “The Archers”) championed a multi-artform cinema. They created films that represented music, dance, painting, literature and photography; for they believed that ‘all art is one’. Now, with the proliferation of media platforms, the palette for filmmakers is stupendous. Not only is it impossible to encompass all artforms in a single film, but there are aesthetic and economic reasons for maintaining their integrity. All art is not one within the film, but in its relationships with artforms around it. Filmmakers are now thinking beyond cinema and DVD to include the web, theatre, books and mobile technology in their canvas.
In this article I’ll take you through a whirlwind tour of some of the ways filmmakers are thinking beyond the film. Our first stop is a look at how the assets of a film are repurposed. This is not a discussion about distribution methods or how the medium of delivery influences the experience. Instead it is an exploration of the ways assets can be reused to create new works. The first example is that of filmmakers offering components of their film in digital format for anyone to ‘remix’. Remixing is rife with fans, but it is only in the last few years that filmmakers have begun to offer their content for remixing.
Sometimes the offering is driven by a desire to create ‘citizen marketers’, such as New Line Cinema’s release of footage and music so that people could create a new trailer of Liz Friedlander’s Take the Lead (2006). They also specifically commissioned ‘official’ remixes (see Addictive). The logic behind New Line Cinema’s approach is best understood with this quote in the New York Times (6th April) by Russell Schwartz, president for domestic marketing for New Line Cinema: “Our assets become their assets, and that’s how they become fans of the movie.” For Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain (2006), assets – video, stills, audio – are provided so that audiences can create a music video at The Fountain Remixed . In this case, the offering is explained as giving audiences who want to contemplate eternal life the “chance to delve deeper” (from website). Peter Greenaway has made finding fragments, of a movie that is part of a large storyworld The Tulse Luper Project, a game. The Tulse Luper Journey involves players collaborating to complete 92 puzzles. On completion of each puzzle, a 1 minute film fragment is released to the player. It is then their task to compile the 92 minute film of Tulse Luper. The logic behind these offerings are manifold, from facilitating ‘citizen marketing’ to a highly personalized exploration of a storyworld. It should be noted too, that some filmmakers are experimenting with creating films specifically designed for remixing, such as Michelle Hughes’ Stray Cinema (2006), Aryan Kaganof’s SMS Sugarman (2007) and Michela Ledwidge’s (in-development) Sanctuary.
Filmmakers also engage in remixes of their own films. For the past year Peter Greenaway has been performing live VJing sessions of assets of his cross-media project The Tulse Luper Project . Workbook Project’s own Lance Weiler is currently touring the USA and Europe with his – ‘cinema ARG‘ of Head Trauma (2006). Weiler’s cinema event includes a remix, live music, theatrics and mobile phones. It is a unique experience of the film’s storyworld carefully curated by the filmmaker. His cinema theatrics are helping to revive the notion of cinema as event.
As well as remixing their own work, and offering their assets up for others to do with what they will, filmmakers are also commissioning artists to create interactive works out of the assets. On the main website of Head Trauma, for instance, Lance Weiler has included an interactive graphic novel that includes footage, stills and audio of the film. The website for David Slade’s Hard Candy (2005) has an – experience, and so too with Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain Experience . Indeed Peter Greenaway has also commissioned Digiscreen to create what they call a “webler” of The Tulse Luper Suitcases:
“Website constructed entirely from a film’s visual and aural elements that can be navigated and interacted with by a general audience. A webler should offer both an experience of the actual film as with a film trailer and an alternative expression of that experience.” (Digiscreen)
There are also non-web creative constructions of a film’s assets is ‘Blossoms and Blood’, a 12 minute montage of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love (2002). The short film is on the DVD and is constructed with deleted scenes. Since most of the shots included are of different points of view than those in the film, the work moves from vignette to being a kind of parallel universe. Poetic explorations of a theme are also rendered in print. Peter Greenaway has art books that accompany The Tulse Luper Suitcases (that he created), the Wachowski Brothers commissioned two volumes of graphic novels for The Matrix and Darren Aronofsky has written a graphic novel adaptation of The Fountain with painter Kent Williams. Aronofsky describes his entire project as “[a] story so grand, one medium couldn’t contain it” (source).
All of these works augment the film, providing a poetic rendition, but they also stand on their own as a work of art. They are at times a specifically designed prologue and epilogue. Indeed, some filmmakers push administrative detail to the side and instead prefer the films website to be a meditation on the theme. Examples are the websites for Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000); Christopher Nolan’s Momento (2000); Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001); Darren Lynn Bousman’s Saw II (2005) and more recently Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (2007).
[Screenshot from Momento website]
This treatment of the web as an expressive medium extends even further. Some filmmakers are populating their storyworld on the web shoulder to shoulder with real world sites. Sites for fictional companies and characters in films are emerging across cyberspace, almost indistinguishable from their real world counterparts… if not for their outlandish nature. For instance, the company that erases Joel Barish’s memory in Michael Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind (2004) has its own corporate site: Lacuna Inc. The company that provided the cloned child in Nick Hamm’s Godsend (2004) is likewise online: Godsend Institute. Companies mentioned in the Enter the Matrix digital game (2003), such as Omega Hardware Solutions were also online. The company that produces the NS-5 in Alex Proyas’ I, Robot (2004) has a site dedicated to the robot: NS-5. The company has even issued a press release detailing how the “NS-5″ will play several major roles in the film. Indeed, Count Olaf, the evil character in Brad Silberling’s Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) has his own website and blog, a place where he relishes in his starring role in the film.
In all of these examples it is clear that the storyworld is not married to the primary medium, to film, anymore. For some, this multi-medium existence has an immersive effect. Just like real life, it is present in all communication channels. Of course, this can be encouraged with websites that are set within the universe of the film. Early examples of this are seen with Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler’s The Last Broadcast website in 1996 and Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s The Blair Witch Project website in 1998. The later went on to also broadcast on the Sci Fi Channel a mockumentary, Curse of the Blair Witch, of the mockumentary and published a dossier of the “evidence” in 1999. Over the past few years, it is has been these practices – representing the world of the film as being real – that have emerged as a primary aesthetic for many audiences and creators. Four months before the screening of Takashi Shimizu’s The Grudge 2 (2006) a blog by Jason C was launched. Jason C is postgraduate student who is covering the making of the film as part of his research. So, the site works as both a making-of and fictional prologue. Why fiction? Jason C is a fictional character who, over the next few months, witnesses mysterious events on the set. Slowly, all of the cast and crew are affected by the strange events. In the end, Jason C disappears and his roommate takes over the blog in an effort to get help to find him.
Despite many diegetic web to film references, there are not many instances of references to fictional sites within films. Movie Poop Shoot, was in Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) and the character Paul Duncan in Godsend does search the Net for the Godsend Institute website mentioned earlier. But the only explicit referral by a character I’ve seen is Professor Bedlam’s mention of his website in Ivan Reitman’s My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006): ProfessorBedlam.com. The cross-platform traversal was not well executed however, as the website featured content that was set in the plot at the beginning of the film, not the end. These traversals need to make sense in terms of the flow of the narrative, which means creative control over them. Despite this flaw, the explicit referral of another element of the storyworld in another medium is a sign that the craft of multi-platform expression is maturing. Each component is not divorced of the others, in other words, it is a carefully constructed experience.
The majority of examples I have given thus far are adaptations of some kind. There are examples emerging of a storyline being extended. For instance, at the end of the Donnie Darko website (which requires moving through various levels by solving puzzles) the viewer/player is rewarded with press clippings that detail what happened to some of the characters after the events of the film. The Grudge 2 blog I cited previously is also an example of a metafictional prologue. A different approach to the extension of a storyworld is found in the DVD of Brad Bird’s animated film The Incredibles (2004). Near the end of the film, the mother (Elastigirl) listens to messages left by the babysitter of her child Jack-Jack on her mobile phone/cell. As we progress through the messages it is clear the babysitter is getting more and more frantic. The film ends, however, without us knowing what happened with the babysitter and the son Jack-Jack. We find out what happened, though, in the short animated film in the DVD: “Jack-Jack Attack”. Here we have a change of POV and an elaboration of narrative point in the film. Filmmakers are also starting their narrative in books. Unlike the adaptation model that has dominated, these books are designed to start the plot, which will then continue in the film. Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (2007) begins with three novels, and Chair Entertainment has begun their Empire story with a specifically written novel by Orson Scott Card. Chair Entertainment describe their approach as follows:
Chair’s unique value proposition is that we (1) create compelling original stories, (2) own and maintain creative control of our IP, and (3) create marketing synergy around that IP in 5 core franchise areas: video games, books, movies, comics, and merchandise. Each product we develop offers a unique perspective of the story and works together to expand the franchise. [source]
A similar multi-platform approach to addressing unexplored elements in a film is seen in EA Game’s The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-Earth II (2006). It is set during events that coincide with the events in Peter Jackson’s films, but take place in areas of Middle-Earth not covered in it. They are, of course, known from J.R.R. Tolkien’s books. With massively multiplayer online games, we have the Matrix Online (2005) as a good example of the continuation of a storyworld into a game. The gameworld is set after the events of the last film and although there have been mixed reviews, there are interesting plot developments such as the death of Morpheus. Due to the popularity of the genre, there will be many more integrated game and film projects over the next few years. Of note is the project Titantic director James Cameron has been working on for the past few years: Project 880. Once it comes out (a year or so apparently), it will be the first project that will begin as a multiplayer game and then continue in a feature film. But before looking too far into the future, lets return to the innovative transmedia expansions that are happening now and in the not-too-distant past.
[Screenshot from EA's Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth II]
The most referred to past project is the Wachoswki Brother’s The Matrix universe. Their storyworld existed in films, anime, comics and games. But unlike tie-ins and franchises of the past, the Wachowski Bros. creatively controlled each element and designed a continuous narrative across them. A highly cited example is the narrative thread of “the message”. In the short anime, “The Last Flight of Osiris” (2003), the character Jue and her crew discover the machines are boring to Zion. Their aim is to warn Zion of the impending danger by sending a message to the Nebuchadnezzar crew. At the end of the story Jue just manages to post the letter (thus ending a narrative thread), but we do not know what happens to the letter (a continuing thread). What happens to the letter is addressed in the digital game, Enter the Matrix (2003). The first mission for the player is to retrieve the letter from the post office. The player succeeds in continuing the narrative but we still do not know of the consequences of our actions. It is at the beginning of the second film, The Matrix Reloaded (2003), when Niobe (who is one of two characters in the game) reports on the ‘last transmissions of the Osiris’. The transmissions posted in the anime and retrieved by players in the digital game.
The Wachowski Brothers weren’t the only ones to persist their storyworld across media platforms though. In 2003 a group of fans conceived and implemented a unique project. Fan production is nothing new, but the form of this continuation of the Matrix storyworld was with a creative type that was only two years old. This group created an ‘alternate reality game’ (ARG): a storyworld that requires players all over the world to collaborate to find it and solve. Stories are distributed across numerous websites, emails, faxes, phone calls and real life events. Characters have blogs and chat to players via email, fax and phone. Fictional companies have sites that players have to ‘hack’ into and retrieve information from. The entire narrative is played out in real time, 24 hours a day and requires players to work together to solve very difficult puzzles to access information. The outcome is never fixed, for the creators always alter the world in real time according to the actions of the players. The ARG for The Matrix, MetaCortechs, is one of the most successful ARGs, with over 125,000 players from 115,000 countries. An invaluable book for those considering creating an ARG is the Project Mu Archives, for it documents The Matrix ARG from the player’s perspective. It is also available online. An ARG design book is also available: ARG designer Dave Szulborski’s This is Not a Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming.
Other films augmented by fans in the Jim Miller’s web-only Exocog in 2002. He chose the then forthcoming Minority Report as his storyworld and produced a 5-week project played in the build up to the film’s release. In 2004, VirtuQuest created an ARG set in the universe of George Lucas’ first feature film: THX 1138 (1971). SEN 5241 continued the narrative after the events of the film and was created to coincide with the launch of the DVD.
Fans are the not the only who have created ARGs though. Indeed, the first ARG (as it known now) was actually a commissioned by Microsoft and Dreamworks to publicize Stephen Spielberg’s A.I: Artificial Intelligence (2001) but ended up being described by Internet Life magazine as the ‘Citizen Kane of online entertainment’. The Beast was played by over 3 million people all over the world and created the new form of entertainment. Players who followed 150 characters across hundreds of websites, emails, faxes, files and puzzles for months and generated over 300 million impressions for the film through mainstream press such as Time, CNN, and USA Today, as well as niche outlets such as Wired, Slashdot, and Ain’t it Cool News, and won numerous awards including best idea (New York Times Magazine) and best web site (Entertainment Weekly). [4orty 2wo Entertainment]
[Screenshot of the Monster Hunt Club website for The Host]
In 2007, Magnolia Films commissioned ARG Studios to create an ARG for Bong Joon Ho’s The Host (2007). The ARG, Monster Hunt Club, helped market the release of the Korean film in the US. It was, I believe, the first ‘horror’ ARG (and Lance Weiler’s ‘cinema ARG’ the first of its kind, for scary movies too). More recently, an ARG-like campaign has started for the upcoming Batman film by Christopher Nolan: The Dark Knight. So far there have been fictional sites, such as the political campaign site for the character Harvey Dent (who becomes ‘Two-Face’) and clues left on playing cards left in comic book stores. One of the techniques that ARGs use is to remove all cues to fictionality: fictional sites almost indistinguishable from real ones. But as we have seen with the various projects mentioned in this article, this trope is not unique to ARGs. Indeed, making a fictional world seem as real as possible, extending it across media platforms, playing with it and enabling audiences to share and participate in its construction are just some of the key drives for filmmakers now.
In a keynote speech delivered at the Cinema Militans in September 2003, Peter Greenaway described the Tulse Luper Suitcases (a work that includes 3 feature films, a TV series, 92 DVDs and CD Roms, books and numerous websites) as: “an attempt to make a gathering together of today’s languages, to place them alongside one another and get them to converse.” Creators of film, print, TV, radio, theatre, games, new media and painting are all moving into this new paradigm of creation. Indeed, the future will not be the domain of artists who adapt or extend from their primary medium, but the domain of people who are transmedia artists from the beginning. Filmmakers don’t create films anymore, they create worlds.
April 20 2010
Creative extensions to the stories I tell
I find myself baffled at times by the lack of willingness to experiment. Where is the innovation? We find ourselves at an amazing time, one in which storytelling has vast possibilities thanks in part to advancements in technology. Yet many confuse this opportunity with what they literally see others doing or what bubbles up in various press coverage. Social media hype clouds the true creative potential. In fact in many ways the types of transmedia I find myself drawn to are all about story and have little to do with promotion and marketing. Now some of that becomes a natural byproduct but it isn’t what’s driving the story I’m telling. If I can build an audience along the way – why wouldn’t I? In fact they’re more than an audience to me they’re collaborators. Of course some will be passive viewers but others will be active participants.
The technology that we use to design, delivery and tell engaging stories with; is more than just a twitter, blog or facebook account for a character. It isn’t just about documenting the behind the scenes of a film or TV project that we’re making. Not that there’s anything wrong with documentation of a process in many ways that’s what makes the WorkBook Project possible. But for me It’s about creative choices that effect a vast world where the characters and stories we tell live. Where a scene can play through time and space. It can resolve itself on a mobile device, in a dark theater or in someone’s living room. The technology that we use is merely another creative tool no different than a lens or a camera.
There are some amazing projects that embrace technology and data sets. Data is something that touches all of our lives and it is a language that we all will find ourselves learning whether we like it or not. In many ways data is boring but it can also become a beautiful moving piece of art. For instance We Feel Fine jumps to mind. The project is emotional and tells a collective story that connects people all over the world. I could argue that it is as beautiful as some of the foreign films I love. It is an amazing piece of art yet informative and touching all at the same time.
Now Transmedia isn’t for all stories. In fact for some it could be considered a distraction especially if you try to shoehorn it into a project. But that’s because the language for telling stories across multiple devices and screens is relatively a new form. Like writing a good script it takes time to develop a rich storyworld one where you feel a connection to the characters, engage in the story and escape into the world that surrounds you.
One area that I’ve been focusing over the last year is within the mobile app space. The following column from Filmmaker Mag explains some of the reasons why.
It’s a known fact that the film industry has no shortage of middlemen. The path between filmmaker and audience is littered with them – some good, some bad. But the promise of a direct connection to an audience has become the currency of the future. These days it seems as if everyone is trying to find a way to capitalize on fostering stronger relationships with audiences. Much of these efforts are focused after the film is finished when it comes time to promote and market the work. Although some filmmakers are including audience development in their initial business plans, many are still only working to build awareness around traditional elements such as theatrical, DVD and VOD.
Are we missing a window of opportunity by limiting ourselves to formats, running times and traditional markets?
Consider the Following:
* To date, Apple has shipped more than 70 million iPhone and iPod Touch devices and it’s projected that within the next two years they’ll have more than 200 million in the market.
* More than 140,000 applications have been created for the iPhone and iPod.
* Each day, 60,000 Android devices ship.
* The fledging Android Market has more than 10,000 apps.
These stats are just one part of a growing mobile device market, which is currently expanding due to a new generation of tablets. Apple’s iPad and a slew of other computer and handset manufacturers have tablets entering the market over the next few months. Larger screens, faster processors, wireless connectivity and the ability to run various browser and mobile-based applications will all be here soon. We don’t know yet if this generation of tablets will resonate with consumers but, as we have seen in the past, devices do have the ability to influence user behavior and consumption. The iPod revitalized the value of a music track and now the publishing industry is hoping the iPad can do the same for books and zines.
March 27 2010
Real-time Audience Feedback
Remember the choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) books? Those old childhood standbys are being recycled in the form of audience participation in movies, theatres, and online. Does she or doesn’t she? You get to decide…
In movies, CYOA has taken several forms. In 2006, Lean Forward Media, a company started by two Harvard Business School grads, created The Abominable Snowman, a CYOA-based DVD designed for children. In 2008, SilkTricky created the online movie Survive the Outbreak, a zombie flick that lets you CYOA. (A heist movie – Bank Run – is in the works.) Survive the Outbreak has a total of 21 scenes, with 10 total decision points: six options lead to death, and two lead to survival. (h/tTubefilter.tv) More recently, creators have linked YouTube videos based on user clicks, a kind of DIY CYOA (examples). And just a couple of weeks ago? The web series Spade.
Some obstacles to uptake of this new format are familiar: audience familiarity with the medium, new ways of thinking by designers and filmmakers, technical issues with managing clicks. Moreover, these experiments raise some interesting artistic questions: what is the ideal ratio of decision points to scenes? Where should those decision points be placed? Does it differ for adults vs. children? One terrific feature of new media is that its easy to gather data to learn more about what works best – but it also means that there is still a lot of experimentation is left to do.
From a business perspective, the question, as always, is monetization. SilkTricky solves this problem by simultaneously formatting the online movies as iPhone games (which I couldn’t find in the online store for some reason); Lean Forward Media is selling children’s DVDs to parents (but they haven’t produced a movie since 2006, so I’m not sure how well that’s going). An interview with Lynn Lund of SilkTricky noted that they spent $35k on their movie, not including pre- or post-production, which they did themselves. These movies are not cheap.
But audiences really seem to like them. Web reviews of Survive the Outbreak were quite positive, with many lamenting only that the movie wasn’t longer (and some that the acting was bad – but that’s not exactly new for a zombie flick). That’s another possible problem with these new technique – they must stand on their own as movies and cannot rely on exclusively on a gimmick. So a filmmaker has to make 21 scenes to get to 8 endings, instead of (if we assume a similar ratio) three scenes to get to one. Making more scenes is more expensive, and demand will have to justify that cost.
What hasn’t been done on a wide scale are CYOA movies in movie theatres. CYOA has been used in live theatre productions (for example, the 2007 run of Intimate Exchanges, reviewed in the NYT) and in screenings at SXSW (The Weathered Underground, 2010). The question, though, is whether this technique could be used to bring people back to the theatres from their Netflix and their online gaming. And no one has yet put up the money to resolve that question. If audiences like it (as they seem to so far, at least on their own computer screens), this could lead to greater participation and engagement and perhaps a boost to the theatre-going experience.
There’s a reason why we all remember the CYOA books – they’re lots of fun. The next few years will undoubtedly see more attempts to transfer that sense of power and enjoyment to the big screen.
[SXSW] Rushkoff: Program, or be Programmed
The thesis: Our society is running on obsolete code. In order to keep the world working, we need social programmers. Douglas Rushkoff’s warning, and his call to action:
“If you are not a programmer, then you are one of the programmed.”
Rushkoff described Programming as a sort of daoist constant. He said the same type of action can be applied to the programming of computers, the construction of language and literature, the way people think about God, and the development of culture.
Player, Cheater, Author, Programmer
Programmers, according to Rushkoff, arise naturally from a society’s population through a series of gradual steps.
Rushkoff applies the analogy of a game player. At first, a person merely plays the game experimentally, seeing what can be done with it. At some point, they may hit a roadblock, and so the game player becomes a cheater – by looking things up on the cosmic GameFAQs, as it were. Once they glean all there is to be had from cheating at a game, this cheater may become an author, using the game’s engine to express their own ideas. Eventually, the author realizes that the game engine he uses is too rigid to express his ideas, and he becomes a programmer – they write their own game.
As a group, programmers also comprise a certain section of society, on the cusp of each wave of societal change. Rushkoff warned that the programmed are always one step behind the programmers.
To do any kind of programming, Rushkoff said, we have to learn to work through and around the biases of our tools. In recent years, he said, the culture of literature as delivered through books provided those biases. But now, the biases of digital media are supplanting them.
“We write in the box that Google gives us,” Rushkoff said, and to that end, he prescribed ten social commands (yes, instead of commandments) as antidotes to those biases.
Rushkoff’s Prescriptions
1. Thou shalt not be always on.
Although digital media is extremely adept at allowing us to have asynchronous, centralized conversations through its most basic forms – message boards and email – internet culture has become increasingly synchronized and time-sensitive in the past few years. The Twitters, Facebooks, and Instant Messengers of the digital world deliver realtime remote communication to our fingertips. They are always available to us, but we neither can nor should be always available to them.
2. Thou shalt not do from a distance what can be better done in person.
The internet is biased toward long-distance communication, but careless use leads to people texting across a room.
3. Exalt the particular.
The internet also has a bias of scale, but not everything CAN scale.
Specifically, production on the level of the individual can’t be scaled. Trying to do so creates a system of aggregation, not production – or as Rushkoff said, “businesses are becoming more bank-like.”
4. You may always choose None of the Above.
“Digital is symbolic as text is,” Rushkoff said. Since our interactions with programs, and with others through programs, are processed digitally, they do not reflect the analog nature of the real world. This leads to what Rushkoff calls discreteness, “a digital landscape of forced choice.”
Rushkoff cites the options on Facebook for “relationship status” as the ultimate example of a discrete choice mapped to analog reality – one which will likely never fully fit the options available. Rushkoff said that withholding choice from available options does not denote failure, and described that withholding as “life, not death.”
5. Thou shalt never be completely right.
As a parallel to the discreteness bias, Rushkoff says the net is biased toward simplicity. He cites a study showing young people who grew up listening to compressed MP3 audio can’t perceive certain nuances of sound. “Our perceptual apparati are declining,” he said, and went on to say that if Second Life is indistinguishable from reality in the near future, it will be because we have lost the ability to percieve the difference.
6. Thou shalt not be anonymous
The inherent anonymity of an internet user, Rushkoff says, is good for political refugees and software pirates, but it is bad for our sense of community in a number of ways. When we are anonymous, we become parts of polarized mobs. Rushkoff said in spite of the assumption that anonymity can negate prejudice, it is often used merely to sidestep the issue. He pointed to the figure that 80% of human communication is nonverbal.
Rushkoff said he exists under his own name online and that the experience is “liberating.”
7. Remember the humans
This speaks to the bias of anonymizing the source of the things that exist online. “We don’t have to deliver everything unto the hive for free,” he said. Rushkoff distinguished between making content available to a community and making it available to Google.
8. As above, so not below
The net has a bias toward abstraction, and abstraction is not reality. Rushkoff used hedge funds as an example.
9. Thou shalt not steal -or- Nothing is free
The digital space is the stage for a million kinds of content aggregation, but creation requires real work that can’t be discounted. When everyone is an aggregator, there are no producers, and no content to share.
Rushkoff said that being “open” to a large content aggregator like Google is equivalent to being “open” to a large wealth aggregator like the World Bank.
10. Program or be programmed
The internet has a bias toward serving end users. Rushkoff encouraged listeners to see not what a tool such as the internet can do for the user, but what the user can make it do. He said that end user culture surrounding the automobile has led to a transportation and energy crisis.
We are always one step behind our programmers, so, Rushkoff said if we stay there, we will be not the users, but the used.
Note: Rushkoff is the author of many books on the intersection of technology and society, including his latest, Life, Inc. In his SXSW keynote, “Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age,” he noted that its contents were originally a book idea, but were now intended to be part of a post-publishing age transmedia narrative event. For better or worse, I am throwing my own words on the pile here.
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.
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
