Well, not quite ‘death’ but an indefinite hiatus. I’m powering down this blog for a few reasons, one of which is my desire to finish my PhD. I’ve tried for the last year and a half to do PhD writing and work and this blog, but found the mindsets are somewhat incompatable. I’ve decided therefore to close this blog down. I don’t know if I’ll bring it up again and if I do when, or whether I’ll start another one. But I do know that I have thoroughly enjoyed blogging here these past few years. I have especially enjoyed meeting many of you because of the blog, and seeing ‘cross-media’ (etc) projects become ubiquitous. Thankfully, the area has alot more people looking at it now, from alot of different perspectives. Here are some blogs that will keep you informed:

• Networked Performance: research blog that posts about emerging network-enabled practice;
• You can read and listen to news about alternate reality games and just about any online extension of a film, TV or book property on the ARGNet blog and ARG Netcast (podcast);
• Henry Jenkins personal blog and the Convergence Culture Consortium blog has lots of goodies from a media studies perspective about ‘transmedia storytelling’ and ‘convergence culture’ in general;
• DeMontfort University share their investigations into what they term ’Transliteracy’ at their PART blog;
• Jeff Gomez, the CEO of Starlight Runner and longtime practitioner of ‘trans-media’ projects, is now blogging regularly about his insights and experience over at the Producers Guild of America blog;
• Monique de Haas blogs about ‘crossmedia communication’ occasionally;
• Tony Walsh posts semi-regularly on alternate reality games;
• Valentina Rao blogs about crossmedia games and anything related to that at Games Across Media, and will hopefully be starting her PhD on the subject soon;
• Johnathan Gray, Derek Johnson and Ivan Askwith are blogging about everything around TV and film at The Extratextuals;
• Crossmedia Dialog is a group blog that post regularly on crossmedia in Amsterdam and worldwide;
• Faris Yakob, Adam Crowe blog about ‘transmedia planning’ and other changes to the marketing industry;
• Jak Boumans posts every single day about stuff happening in the Netherlands and worldwide at Buziaulane; 
• Max Giovognoli runs everything to do with cross-media in Italy;
• MobileCrossMedia is a blog that looks at the different ways mobile phones can network with different devices and the real world;
• If you don’t already get it, the Convergence Newsletter has regular interesting newsletters about convergence in journalism and has been my favourite newsletter for the past few years;

I don’t plan to be blogging here about events or publications I’m involved in, instead I’ll pop them on my bio site. But for now, here are some events I’m involved with, in the not-too-distant-future:

• I’ll be on the ‘expert panel’ with Mark McCrindle and Tim Flattery at Mitchell Communications Group ‘s launch of ‘While You Weren’t Watching’, a documentary on changes to branded entertainment etc in which I was interviewed. The launch is private but the documentary will be put online I believe in Nov; 
• I have my own panel on ‘Designing, Experiencing and Analysing Games in the Age of Integration’, and I am a panelist in Darren Toft’s panel on ‘What Happened to New Media Art?’ at the Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment in Dec;
• I’ll be on the panel on ‘Cyber-Born Film’ at Megan Spencer’s Destination Festival (or DestFest) in Dec;
• In Jan 08, I’ll be a guest lecturer again for Sue Thomas and Kate Pullinger’s Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media, De Montfort University, UK;
• In Feb 08, my essay on ‘Tiering in Alternate Reality Games’ will be published in the special issue of Convergence edited by Henry Jenkins and Mark Deuze.

For now though, I will continue to be online in a different way. I’ve started a podcast, a podcast where I’ll interview talented people working in this area. My ‘birth’ podcast is a bit awkward, but the second is a great one: an interview with Stitch Media’s Evan Jones. At the site, I also provide sneak preview information about Stitch Media’s latest project.

That is it for me here, thankyou all for sharing this time with me. I’ll see you on the other side of my PhD.

Check it out: www.ChristyDena.com  

Check it out: www.UniverseCreation101.com

The point I’ve been championing is that tie-ins are not always conceived as exterior to the storyworld to those experiencing it. As I argued in my paper for How the Internet is Holding the Center of Conjured Universes (AOIR 06), there are definitely levels of authority placed on different works…but this is shifting. What this means for creators is that licensed works need to be creatively controlled in some way. The Wachowski Brothers did it with The Matrix: they enlisted comic and anime creators to expand their universe. Peter Greenaway did it with The Tulse Luper Suitcases: he (from what I’ve been able to garner) went out to companies and schools, shared his vision, and encouraged their own creations in response. Tie-in creations and their creators are elevated to acknowledged contributors of a storyworld.

I was thrilled, therefore, to find the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers (IAMTW), but then disappointed to find this post of their blog I Am a Tie-In Writer:

An author I know was recently taken to task by a disgruntled fan because a character in a tie-in novel mentioned visiting the Grand Canyon when, in a recent episode, the same character said he’d never been there. My author friend was surprised that a fan would care about such an insignificant detail. I agree with my friend…especially if you are writing book based on an on-going TV series. It’s virtually impossible for the books and the series to not contradict each other over little details. Publishing can’t keep up with production…in the time it takes for my finished MONK manuscript to reach the stands, an entire new season of MONK has been written and shot. I have no control over the content of the episodes that are conceived, written and produced after I have written my book. Which is why I added the following disclaimer to my Monk books:

“While I try to stay true to the continuity of the TV series, it’s not always possible, given the long lead time between when my books are written and when they are published. During that period, new episodes may air that contradict details or situations referred to in my books. If you come across any such continuity mismatches, your understanding is appreciated.”

Bottom line, it’s fiction. We are sharing characters in two very different mediums. The fans have to understand that these are characters in a fictional world…and relax. [Lee Goldberg, Canon Fodder, April 22, 2007]

Firstly, I wish to address the issue of the TV writing process. Goldberg is right when he says that the TV writing process as it stands cannot support continuity. Continuity will only occur with a massive restructing of the creation process. Mark Deuze has observed this in his book on the current state of media industries:

What I’ve found my research is, that under the banner of Integrated Marketing/Brand Communications and the shift towards full-service agencies a lot of work within holding firms has been overhauled, reorganized, and disrupted. To some, this meant increasing centralized control and monitoring of work, less attention to unique interests of the cultivation of specialized talent in favor of unified management strategies.

A way to manage the different interested parties has been put forward by Jesse Alexander, Executive Producer of Alias, Lost and Heroes at the 2nd Annual Hollywood and Games Summit, as transcribed at Wonderland:

Each group needs a transmedia czar or something, to connect the people behind the properties to the people creating the [new] content. You have to get the creators involved in that. I’m optimistic that that is happening at NBC.. They really regulate how the people who sell the IP out do that stuff..

What is also needed is creators who will be producing points-of-entry in other media and artforms to be brought in at the beginning. Note this comment by Julia London, who wrote a tie-in for the soapie Guiding Light (which Sam Ford has written about at the Convergence Consortium blog):

Even though the plot and characters were handed to me on a silver platter, it wasn’t easy to do, and in some ways, was harder than a lot of things I have written. Now that it is all said and done, I am glad to know that I have the chops to do something really different like a tie-in book…but I think I can safely say I much prefer creating my own worlds and characters. [source]

If creators were brought in at the beginning and felt as they were co-creators/co-initiators of a storyworld then perhaps the experience would be more fulfilling to them? Beyond this inclusive method of creation, there is a paradigmatic shift that also needs to take place. Note the (to me) frightening comment in Goldberg’s post:

Bottom line, it’s fiction. We are sharing characters in two very different mediums. The fans have to understand that these are characters in a fictional world…and relax. 

If tie-in writers think that the expansion across mediums means the work should be assessed and experienced differently then we have problems. It is perhaps another reason why transliterate creators and taking care of all of the points-of-entry in different mediums themselves. The mono-medium logic of tie-in writers is best evidenced in their logo:

I’m not saying that all writers have to become transliterate…just the ones that work in the business of creating cross-media worlds. Here is my counter pic, from my publishers presention. It does not include all the possible mediums, but it nevertheless includes books AND, AND..

In 2003 Henry Jenkins commented in his Technology Review article Why The Matrix Matters:

Most film critics frankly haven’t been willing to make the effort to “get“ this franchise because they are stuck within a mono-media rather than a trans-media paradigm–and thus, the second two films walk away with a row of Gentleman’s Bs. They can see something new is going on here but they really don’t know what to make of it.

The problem of a mono-media logic is STILL a problem with criticism, and as we’ve seen here, also with creators. 

Despite this rants, check out the yummy articles on tie-in writing on the IAMTW site.

• Kinoautomat (movie vending-machine), 1967… 2007

This 1967 work by Radúz Çinçera, One Man and His House, is a film that was screened at the Montreal World Fair in a specially-constructed cinema with buttons for the audience. The film continually stops at certain points, two of the actors then come on stage and ask the audience to make their choice of direction.  This is regarded as the first interactive cinema work and is interesting too because the film was specifically designed for this interaction. However, it should be noted that the interaction (like many interactive works for various technical and skills reasons) was only the illusion of interaction. As Media Art Net observes, although a different filmic sequence was shot and screened based on the audience choice. The next choice was always the same. It has recently been revived with an English version being screened in Prague. An interview with Radúz’s daughter, Alena Çinçera , and more pics is here.

Image sourced from Media Art Net. Copyright Radúz Çinçera

• Cause and Effect , 2002/…

Inspired by Kinoautomat, Chris Hales has been creating short ‘interactive cinema performances’. Cause and Effect has been running specially-created short films since 2002 and is currently touring Poland and Finland. There is a video available for download on the site, and here is a basic description from the main page:

We experiment with various techniques of group interaction and the types of interactive film that are commensurate with it. Although using sophisticated methods, the show is designed to be portable, tourable, and suitable for most venues. Currently interaction methods enable audiences to influence films by shouting, passing around bright or coloured lights, using mobile phone handsets, waving, singing soprano and humming. A typical performance consists of around eight short interactive movies (chosen from a substantial repertoire) covering genres of video art, drama, non-fiction, education, and music. The show is both entertaining and intellectual and appeals to a wide audience demographic. It is constantly developing, with varied modes of interaction being explored and new films being regularly created. Certain films are customised for the actual theatre and the language of the country in which the show takes place during a rapid pre-production phase when we arrive at the location. This localisation adds to the audience’s surprise and involvement with the films presented to them.

Image sourced from Cause and Effect

• Lance Weiler’s “Cinema ARG”, 2006/…

As I’ve mentioned here before, Lance Weiler created a unique theatre experience for the screening of his latest film, Head Trauma. His ‘cinema ARG’ involves special screenings of the film with a band playing the soundtrack live, actors and props from the film in the audience and mobile phone interaction. It has been touring across the USA and is now expanding to the web. His latest description:

This fall the HEAD TRAUMA cinematic gaming continues. Players will interact with the film’s characters; offline, online, and via mobile devices in what is a cross between flash mobs, urban gaming, and ARGs. The game starts in late September with the airing of a special web series. The series will run across a number of outlets such as myspace, xbox, twitter, eyespot, stage 6 and opera. Then on Oct. 20th, live cinema games will play out in 10 cities across the country. Within the series are clues aka rabbit holes that lead to hidden sites, blogs, social networking pages and media. A full list of cities will be released in the coming weeks.

• MSNBC’s Newsbreaker Game, 2007

As I’ve mentioned before in my post that includes stats on its success, this example is an interactive cinema advertisement. They actually call the work ‘interactive crowd gaming’ in movie theatres. It was created by SS+K in collaboration with Brand Experience Lab for msnbc.com. Here is a video of one of the cinema events:

[youtube y6izXII54Qc]

All of these works show without doubt the reinvigoration of the embodied and multi-modal cinema experience. What I find exciting are the fact that many of these works (and more to come I’m sure) are being specially designed. Do you know of some other interactive cinema performances/gaming?

[youtube 2-M7KqB2sO4]

A new kind of narrative is emerging from the network: the distributed narrative. Distributed narratives don’t bring media together to make a total artwork. Distributed narratives explode the work altogether, sending fragments and shards across media, through the network and sometimes into the physical spaces that we live in.

Although I argue that a distributed narrative can be a total artwork, Walker nevertheless provides some canny observations about the phenomenon. For instance, these forms are explained according to three values:

1) Distribution in Time (can’t experience in a single session)
2) Distribution in Space (cannot experience in a single location or single medium)
3) Distribution of Authorship (collective, emergent authorship)

Among the works Walker discussed to illuminate the theory was Nick Montfort’s and Scott Rettberg’s Implementation, a sticker novel that I’ve referred to in my talks many times. It is novel that has each paragraph distributed across stickers all over the world. It is described on their site as follows:

Implementation is a novel about psychological warfare, American imperialism, sex, terror, identity, and the idea of place, a project that borrows from the traditions of net.art, mail art, sticker art, conceptual art, situationist theater, serial fiction, and guerilla viral marketing. The text was written collaboratively by Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg with some contributions from others. Its initial incarnation was as a serial novel printed on sheets of stickers that were distributed in monthly installments.

Ludologist (game theorist) Dakota Reese Brown mentions a recent project that adds to Walker’s genre: a stencil story called She Loves the Moon. I cannot find any info about the creators, just the info and pics they provide at flickr:

The mission stencil story is an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure story that takes place on the sidewalks of the Mission district in San Francisco. It is told in a new medium of storytelling that uses spraypainted stencils connected to each other by arrows. The streetscape is used as sort of an illustration to accompany each piece of text.

Its a love story with 2 characters who start in different locations. His story starts at 16th and Valencia, in front of the Crown Hotel / Limon Restaurant with the text “He Leaves his Lonely Apartment.” Her story starts at 21st and Guerrero in front of a stunning mansion with the text, “She Leaves her Lonely Apartment.” Eventually their paths merge, at the point where they meet, and their paths travel together until drama pulls them apart.

Their are two possible endings, happy and tragic, and two other points where the story can end unexpectedly if the viewer chooses the wrong ending. All in all, there are 4 possible endings.

Looks like fun!

• More info on Walker’s ‘distributed narratives’
• Implementation site
• Jon Bauer’s Google Maps rendering of She Loves the Moon
• Mission Stencil Story at flickr

Joel and Cat Set the Story Straight is two weeks in the life of Joel Hedges and Cat Davis. Joel would prefer to get through his final year of high school without Cat Davis or his mother’s faux Spanish boyfriend and just hang-out with his best-friend Luke. Cat Davis has an annoying best-friend, and even more annoying little brother, and a deep abiding hatred of Joel Hedges.

Due to an unfortunate incident involving a leaking pen and suspected outbreak of Bird Flu, Joel and Cat are forced to sit next to each other in Extension English. To make matters worse, and to their mutual horror, they are paired together for a tandem story writing assignment. [source]

The story is delivered rotating between the POVs of the characters Joel and Cat and is linked by their tandem storytelling assignment; the writers, Nick and Rebecca, also wrote the story in a tandem storytelling style and the readers can also participate in the tandem storyelling assignment by submitting story threads on the website or SMS. The website was produced by IshMedia, which includes Kylie Robertson — the legend behind online & mobile interactive narrative works such as Jupiter Green (that I analysed for a journal), Girl Friday and Rock Chickz .

As I’ve said before, it is these sort of intimate and parallel media experiences that will increase over the next few years and will explore the potential of polymorphic narrative.

Check it out: http://www.joelandcat.com

But for now, check out the article. I haven’t included EVERYTHING but I’ve put alot in. In case I’ve missed something really important though, please leave me a comment either at the Workbook Project or here. I’d love to hear your suggestions.

Check it out: http://workbookproject.com/?p=239

Moderator: Alice Taylor VP Digital Content, BBC
Panel Organiser: Dan Hon COO, Mind Candy

Dan Hon COO, Mind Candy
Brian Clark Founder/CEO, GMD Studios/IndieWire
Evan Jones Creative Dir/Producer, Stitch Media
Brooke Thompson Giant Mice
Alice Taylor VP Digital Content, BBC 

ARGs & ROI

Man2: [A]dvertisers have typically been interested in reach: how many millions of people will see this. Now they’re starting to realize that the quality of the engagement and the quality of that interaction with the brand have a lot more impact than just the sheer number of people you reach.

So where a television advert might, in the best-case scenario, give you 30 seconds of attention, an ARG will produce session lengths that are 30 minutes or longer and heavy repeat visitation, for all the same reasons that people tune into an episodic television series.

Forensic Storytelling & Community

Brian: [W]hat we’re doing is trying to give the audience something to do, rather than just read. The simplest thing that you can do is take your narrative and break it into a thousand pieces and hide them all over the place. Then the audience has to become an active researcher. It’s like CSI, it’s forensic storytelling, where the audience is actually assembling that, and thus feels ownership over it.

Part of that is, “I know something you don’t know.” But it is also, “I know something you don’t know, and now I’m going to share it with you.” Rather than, “I know something you don’t know, and now I’m going to keep it secret.”

Realtime Writing

Brian: At ARG fest, your brother called it, “Just in time content creation,” which I thought was a wonderfully nice way to describe the feeling of chaos and terror that actually accompanies.

Dan: It’s panic. It’s writing copy, at three in the morning that really should’ve been up about 15 minutes ago. But the great thing about that is that it shows interactivity. This is really user center players into design.

We watch what the players are doing all the time. This is what you guys get with the Metacortex and with the other ARG. You watch what the players are doing. You watch what they like. You watch what doesn’t works and what works. And you constantly are adapting to it.

Brian: More specifically as a story writer, every ARG that we’ve done, we ended up rewriting it significantly half-way after it went public. Often, because the audience comes up with better writing than we came up with. They start thinking, “Oh, that guy’s going to turn on us.” And you think, wow! That’s a good idea to let that guy turn on him. You get all in a room and you start going, OK, what if that guy wasn’t the villain? What if this guy was the villain? How would we change the story from here on out?

That’s something you don’t get except maybe in the editing room of a film where you’ve already shot everything and you’re trying to piece the story together. But here you have the chance to let the audience tell you what they really want to see next.

ARG Demographics & Tiering

Dan: For us it’s interesting because the way we stretched it that first season, there were so many facets to it, so the audience that we had were following the strict story side was very different from the people who were playing the other side of our business which is the puzzle side, the straight puzzle side. 

[...]

Dan: It’s hard to say. What we do know is that there was a much higher proportion of women who were following the story than we would have expected otherwise. And that for the strict casual game side, for the puzzle card solving side, we had a very large age skew. So we were going from 10 years old up to about 80. So that was very much the casual gaming market, as opposed to, at the moment, the traditional audience we see for an ARG, which is slightly more hard-core. 

[...]

Brian: But I think that phenomenon of having a lot of women as players and developers in the community comes from the fact that most ARG models aren’t competitive gaming, they’re collaborative gaming, so the whole audience is solving things together. I think that’s one of the things that makes it appeal more to women than, say, a first-person shooter, that’s much more adrenaline-junkie competitive.

Accessibility & ARGs

Evan: I think one of the things that’s moving forward is the talk – and I’ve heard a lot of talk about making it into a more mainstream experience. I am interested to see all the different models that take it in that direction.

I think there may be certain games that are played at a hardcore level and certain ones that are played at a mainstream level, or ones that separate the community into different levels of play, and all sorts of different models that will allow people who… 

Seriality & ARGs

Brian: In a way, I think the number of people actually in the scene is greatly dwarfed by the number of people watching the scene and trying to figure out where this can go next. So we’re definitely in a, like, infancy phase in terms of what other people in these other communities as they grab this model and twist it into something else.

Dan: Definitely. So, one of the things that we’ve learned from “Perplex City” is that it’s terribly to hard to get into a game that’s two years long and then you’re about a year and a half in. It’s pretty much impossible.

So we’ve been looking at lots of other media. We’ve been looking at television because that’s a very easy comparison to make. We like to say, “Well, what is it that ‘LOST’…” Well, maybe “LOST” isn’t such a good example…

“So, what is it that ‘24′ does? What do television shows do to help you catch up halfway through a season, or three-quarters of the way through a season?”

I think we’re going to see a shift, and this is something we’re going to be trying out towards.

So I think we are going to see a shift. This is something we are going to be trying out towards much more episodic gaming. There is a shift towards that in the gaming industry in general, what with Half Life.

Alice: Yeah.

Evan: Sam & Max. Yeah.

Dan: So, there will be shift towards episodic gaming. Gaming will probably happen in more bite size chunks to make it more accessible to people, instead of having an episode in an instance of game play where you don’t know how long it is going to last. I think what we’ll see is, probably companies coming out saying this is probably going to only last two to six weeks. So you know it’s not going to completely take over your life.

Alice: So, it has a start and an end date, like a television series.

Dan: It has an end date. You know that you can come in. You can just catch-up. You can just play this episode. And that’s all that you’ll have to do. You can just dip into it.

Evan: It’s been an issue I’ve been bring up is that, with well established media like, for instance, books, they have this really tactile way of giving you the information of this is going to be this long, or that long, or something. And at the moment, we’re still working on that. It’s when you get involved in a rabbit hole. You don’t really know where you’re going…

Another item they talked about was Linda Stones’s notion of “continual partial attention”. I’ll be addressing this in a separate post. In the meantime, check out the full transcript.