ssmaudience

A Business Proposition

I look at the transmedia storytelling industry today, and I generally see two things: big companies like Starlight Runner and 4th Wall, who gets lots of money from big entertainment properties to make transmedia projects, and indie creators wanting to make their own cool stories and often having to do so without much potential for …

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ssmmusic

Music and Motif in transmedia

When you talk about transmedia, you usually hear about films, TV, digital media, games, comics. Increasingly, books make the list. But it’s not nearly as often you hear about music. And yet, as Nick Braccia, Haley Moore, and Campfire’s Mike Monello discussed in the latest Transmedia Talk podcast, the music industry has been doing “transmedia” …

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Tying together transmedia through theme

The oft-discussed construct that ties together the individual pieces of a transmedia property is the storyworld, the universe in which the stories all take place. But I think that’s pretty self-evident — if they don’t take place in the same storyworld, they’re not connected in the way transmedia needs to be. What’s discussed much less, …

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ssmaudience

Broadening story threads

Two posts in the last couple of days — from Simon Pulman, and a response from Alison Norrington — have looked at localization in transmedia, working transmedia stories to appeal to different demographics, international audiences, etc. Transmedia has great potential to do this well — with different storylines fragmented over different media, one storyline could …

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What D&D can tell us about Transmedia (Part 1)

I’ve played Dungeons & Dragons for 14 years. And I’ve realized lately that this has, in many ways, done a lot to prepare me for writing for transmedia. There’s so much crossover between the best practices in D&D and in transmedia writing. The next few posts will look at this relationship and what we can …

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A Business PropositionMusic and Motif in transmediaTying together transmedia through themeBroadening story threadsWhat D&D can tell us about Transmedia (Part 1)

Mar 26

Reasons People Will Pay

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Business, Events

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Rochelle Grayson On Friday, I attended a workshop hosted by Vancouver’s Merging Media called Access 360: Increasing ROI through Social Media and Gamification, with Rochelle Grayson and Scott Dodson. It was quite a valuable workshop that went far beyond the usual fluff about social media marketing and gamification and into real metrics, economics, game design theory, and more.

One major topic covered by Rochelle Grayson on social media marketing was: What is it that people are willing to pay for? This is important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it helps those of us trying to make money off of projects make money off of projects. But it’s not just about what people will pay for, in the sense of money. It also addresses any time the audience is asked for something — their time, their attention, their action, whether that be liking a Facebook page or following you on Twitter (and putting up with your updates on their news feed), participating in an interactive story, or moving from one medium to another. You have to ask — what is the audience getting from that? And is it something they want?

So what do people pay for?

Time

People buy more expensive microwave meals because it saves them time. They spend lots of money at restaurants because they don’t have to clean up after. People will pay for getting things faster.

If you have a serial story, perhaps you release it for free with one instalment at a time over the course of a year, but give it all at once to people who pay for it.

This also translates to the value of summaries — if I can read a summary of a book, that may be all I have time for, or it may be preferable to buying the whole book if I’m not yet sure I’m going to like it. Curated links and summaries of articles save me the time of finding them for myself and reading things I don’t really care about. You can provide value to a social media audience by doing just that.

Convenience

People pay a premium at a 7-11 because it’s probably closer and open at odd hours when nothing else is. People pay for convenience. Give your audience value by making life easier.

Immediacy

Related to time, people pay to have things now. The impulse buy is now the norm — it’s just the buy. People don’t want to wait. This is the power of Netflix.

Comfort

People pay to stay in a hotel rather than, y’know, a tent. I put a value on my comfort. And this was an interesting point:

Ads are a discomfort. They’re a slight annoyance that we introduce into the user experience — and that some people will pay to remove. So the question is (and this sounds so wrong) what slight annoyances will your audience put up with if they don’t want to pay, but might be willing to pay to get around? That’s what a lot of freemium models are built around, after all, and what a lot of these points boil down to.

Entertainment

People of course pay to be entertained, which is I think what a lot of us creators are counting on. In fact, Rochelle gave a very broad suggestion that people pay about $5 per hour of entertainment — you go to a two-and-a-half-hour movie, you pay about $13, right? There are of course complexities that could warrant an article or five on their own, but it’s an interesting benchmark.

Vanity

We want to be the cool kid in high school, to feel good about ourselves. This could be achieved by donation – we are supporting a cause, we are being generous, and that feels good. It could be about status, about looking good to your friends. We want to stroke our audience’s ego, make them feel special, and they will pay for that.

Relationships and Belonging

We pay to connect with people. To feel closer to someone, to be part of a community. This is true from LinkedIn to dating sites, from the ability to say “I was a part of this” to being involved in the community around it. A common Kickstarter reward is access to special forums or input into the project, and no wonder. We all want to be in the VIP group.

This extends to premium content — we’ll pay to be part of the inner circle. It could also be facilitated conversation. The question you have to ask, though, is if I’m paying to be part of a VIP group, what are the perks I’m getting for that? Make that clear.

Scarcity

“You can only get this right now, and we only have ten to sell. Act fast.” People pay when things are scarce. But this is also about premium items, limited edition objects — 100 of these posters will be signed by the whole cast. This is of course related to status. It also encourages the impulse buy if the scarcity includes a time limit.

Health and Well-Being

This could be physical well-being or safety, but it also includes mental health, the reduction of stress. The phrase, “Don’t worry — I’ve got you covered,” can be extremely powerful. People will pay if you offer them trust.

Knowledge

People pay to learn. In a social media context, this could be my willingness to like your page because you are going to deliver interesting, informative content to me. I’m going to learn new things for following you. From a transmedia point of view, this could be paying for a more engaging, interactive learning experience, since we know learning in this way is far more effective than didactic learning.

Self-Expression

Related to vanity, people pay to express themselves. From the customization of avatars to sharing content as a means of expressing who you are and what you’re interested in. People are all about defining themselves to their peers and the internet at large.

Wealth

Finally, people pay money to make money. They sign up to services that give them a chance to make money, they gamble, they invest. Give them the possibility of making money off of something, and they may very well do it.

But Communicate The Value

You may be saying, “Why yes, we do offer x, y, and z to our audience,” from the list above. What you have to make sure is that if you do, you are communicating it. Make sure your audience knows exactly what they’ll be getting by giving you money, time, effort. Make it as clear and up front as you can. Tell them the value of their support.

Thanks to Merging Media, Rochelle Grayson, and Scott Dodson!

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Mar 06

Blueprint for a Transmedia Classroom

Categories:

Education, Events

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Laura Fleming and Karen Wehner at DIY Days

On Saturday I was at DIY Days in New York, an event organized by Lance Weiler’s Workbook Project as a gathering of creatives. I was honoured to sit on a panel with Laura Fleming and my Time Tribe partner Karen Wehner on using transmedia in education and for children. Education has always been an area I wanted to explore with Silverstring Media, back when I started in 2010.

The panel, which we called Worlds of Learning, started off by looking at where education has gone wrong — that one-way lectures and rote learning don’t work, that schools are lacking for funding and teachers, that kids aren’t learning the skills and technologies that will actually help them in the real world. It’s a hot-button issue — millions of dollars are being poured into trying to find a solution to these problems.

Karen, Laura and I suggested that one solution is to use transmedia storytelling methods to engage kids in their education. The panel was a launching point for a new initiative we want to develop: creating a blueprint for a transmedia classroom, a resource for others to use and iterate on to help us improve education across the board.

Engagement vs Passivity

Where typical schooling involves rows of kids sitting in desks listening to teachers talk ad nauseum, reading textbooks, and regurgitating facts and dates on tests, transmedia is one way to make learning an active process. Learning is accomplished better by doing rather than listening, by creating rather than regurgitating. Pulling students into a transmedia experience engages them in the content and asks them to actively participate — they can explore the edges of the story, create their own content to enhance it, and engage in a two-way dialogue with the teacher. It’s an invitation to get involved.

Reaching kids where they are

Transmedia learning happens across the platforms that kids are already using, engaging them in digital media, social community, and current technology in ways that schools don’t often right now. Kids are using computers and cell phones more naturally than anyone, so why aren’t we meeting them there? Transmedia can also engage them beyond the classroom — creating an experience that interests them enough to engage with at home, in play as well as in school.

Passion, Interest, Imagination

By having space to explore a topic or story, kids can engage when and where they are most passionate. They can find their own way into a story and be more engaged for having that personal connection. They can learn the way they learn best, and transform that engagement into creativity and imagination, to express themselves and learn by doing.

Part of what we’re hoping to do with the transmedia classroom blueprint is to bring in discussion from the community of transmedia practitioners and educators. To that end, we started the twitter hashtag #tmlearn, with which you can share your own ideas and help create a discussion.

We also asked the audience at the panel for some ideas and had some interesting responses.

Using digital media, students could create avatars to take through an educational experience; you control them and are attached to them, but don’t care as much if something happens to them — punishing an avatar could be used as an alternative to punishing the student himself. They also create a level of abstraction that might allow students to take more risks in their work and education.

The stories told in a transmedia experience, whether told to the students or by the students, create a space for kids to explore their worlds and grow up. Much like a YA novel dealing with difficult issues creates a safe space for people to deal with their own issues, a transmedia experience can create a space for kids to learn and expand.

There must be a loop between online and offline — engage kids where they are online but then bring it back to the real world, the physical, the interpersonal.

Empower students to tell their own stories, sharing with their peers and feeling like they can succeed, and turning that into skills they need.

Kids will go where the stories are — they’ll seek out other stories when the bell rings, so transmedia allows us to extend into the community and the home, and stay with them, keeping them engaged.

Using increasingly cheap and available technology allows us to cross the socioeconomic divide and create opportunities for all.

And so we are left with the challenge of making these transmedia lessons modular, and able to fit within existing teaching plans and curricula. Despite all the support we’re seeing, this is going to be a long and slow slog, but it’s a slog we need to embark on.

So with this briefest of summaries, Karen, Laura and I would like to invite you to join us in developing this blueprint for a transmedia classroom. What do we need to consider? What challenges do we face? What can transmedia allow us to do? Comment, share ideas with #tmlearn, and let’s together start the long process of creating a framework with which we can work.

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Feb 27

Writing with Inform 7

Categories:

Case Studies, Transmedia Theory

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zork Last year, I taught myself the basics of writing Interactive Fiction using Inform 7. I did it to create one of the pieces of bonus content for Azrael’s Stop, a short game called Dreamscape. A couple weeks ago, Sara Thacher and Lorraine Hopping expressed interest in the process of doing so, so I thought I’d write a little post.

What is Inform 7?

For those who don’t know, Interactive Fiction is the term used to describe story/games like the classic old text adventure games, like Zork. Rather than using a graphic interface to play a video game, it was all text based — the game would say “You find yourself in a room. A door leads north.” and you would type in “go north” (or just “n” for those who knew the shortcuts). And you would type “examine sword” and “use sword on troll” and “attack troll” and “tie rope to railing” and “climb down rope” and things.

Inform 7 is a natural language programming language for creating Interactive Fiction. That is, it’s a tool specifically designed for people like me to use to write games/stories like Zork. It’s incredibly intuitive, though still requires a lengthy guidebook, and that guidebook is very comprehensive and well-laid-out. The fact that it uses so-called natural language means that I can type a line of code that says “The Pantry is a room west of The Kitchen.” and it will know to create two rooms, one called The Pantry and one called The Kitchen, and make it so that if I’m in the Kitchen and type “go west” I will end up in the Pantry.

So basically, it’s pretty cool.

Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7

Sara was most interested in the actual process of learning Inform 7 and how it shaped what I made. It’s an incredibly versatile language, from what I saw of it. Anything you could want to do in an interactive fiction game, you can figure out a way to make it happen using Inform 7. The documentation is extensive — there’s both a guidebook, Writing With Inform, which teaches you from basics to advanced functions how to use Inform 7. The Recipe Book is organized by what the author wants to accomplish, making it a good reference in the middle of programming.

It does make for a learning curve, though. You certainly can’t just jump in and expect everything to work — or expect to know how to do everything you want. There are a lot of possibilities, and a lot to learn.

When I wrote with it, I was trying to create something pretty specific, but pretty small. I learned the basics, and then any advanced function I needed, I figured out as I worked. The resulting game certainly isn’t very complex as far as Interactive Fiction goes, and it made for some very frustrating moments for me as I tried to figure out how to do something I thought should be simple, but overall worked pretty well.

I would recommend spending as much time as possible learning the language and practising with simple test games before launching into the main thing. You know, that structure and patience that I don’t have. (I just wanna make it!)

Programming

It’s important to remember that even if Inform 7 uses natural language, it is still a programming language. It is not a human. It requires a very specific syntax to understand what the hell you’re talking about, and yes, a misplaced semicolon can cause a huge error that leaves you searching through lines of code for an hour until you realize how stupid it was that you missed a semicolon just there.

Inform 7 made me appreciate my programming friends a little more.

So it’s nice, and it’s pretty easy to figure out for all its natural languageness, but it’s still a programming language.

Shaping What I Made

Most of the interactive fiction I had experience with going into it was Zork, so I think that influenced what I made more than anything. But I know there’s a ton of amazing Interactive Fiction out there that completely turns those kinds of expectations on their heads — and they can be made with Inform 7. Nothing inherent in the language made me do things a certain way, I don’t think, unless it was simply that to do something more required learning a new part of the language that I didn’t have the time for.

Using Inform 7 With Transmedia

I wrote a post back then about how Interactive Fiction is like transmedia in some ways, and how it could be used, but I want to look at that a bit more. IF is a great tool, and can make for some cool storytelling or gaming for sure. It can add a level of interactivity to a project that doesn’t exist otherwise. One of the things I see some neat potential with is just exploration — create a textual version of your world and let the player explore it to discover the places and the people and the history and all that in a way that doesn’t come naturally in the story itself. A sort of interactive wiki.

The problem, I think, is this: Interactive Fiction is a very niche form, and people with no experience with IF may have a hard time understanding what they’re supposed to do — even if you explicitly explain how the game works. And they don’t know the standard conventions of phrasing, which can lead to them trying things that should logically work but which the program doesn’t understand. (Another issue with Inform 7 — it has a lot of built-in commands (go, pick up, etc.) but inevitably there will be ones that seem perfectly natural to the player, which you’ll have to write a specific response for.)

For use in an ARG or something, it would have to be completely natural for IF to appear in the story — it can’t be abstracted that I did with Azrael’s Stop (“This is a new way to access the story! Have fun!”). For Perplex City, Andrea Phillips et al created a live performance IF game (two actually: Receda’s Revenge and Receda’s Revenge 2: The Revenge) in which the players thought they were playing IF but were actually getting live responses from the writers — the point there, though, was that there was a reason the players were engaging with Interactive Fiction: “In the game, it was a sort of subterfuge for agents of a secret society to get information, as I recall,” Andrea tells me. (Check out a chat log here!)

They probably also had a benefit wherein ARG types are likely the kinds of people who know Interactive Fiction and how to interact with it. Non-gamers, and non-oldschool-gamers, have (in my experience) a much more difficult time understanding how to understand Interactive Fiction and what they’re supposed to do, even with explicit instructions.

So that would be my final thought on it. I think Interactive Fiction is fantastic, and Inform 7 an amazing tool to create it. But make sure you design what you’re doing for your audience — are they going to inherently know what to do? How resistant will they be to even taking the time to figure it out? How can you make it as natural as possible?

Otherwise, the possibilities are endless.

I’d be happy to answer any specific questions about my experience with Inform 7 as a total newb in the comments!

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Feb 20

A Shift in Paradigm

Categories:

Transmedia Theory, TransmediaVan

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2011/365: June 22

Shifting my pair o' dimes.

At last week’s Transmedia Vancouver Meetup, we had a number of new faces in the crowd, which was exciting. So I decided we should talk a bit about what transmedia storytelling is, before letting the discussion go into the minutiae of funding and such concerns. I asked three long-time members to give their definitions, and was actually surprised by the cohesion of thought — given that everyone in this community seems to have somewhat different ideas. It was encouraging.

I then gave my standard spectrum definition — you have ARGs on one side, and integrated transmedia franchises on the other, and transmedia is kind of basically everything in between.  But then I brought up something else I’d been thinking of more recently, and that is that transmedia isn’t so much a thing itself — the fact that we all have slightly different ideas of what it is and yet still manage to have great discussions and whole conferences speaks to that — but rather a kind of way of thinking about storytelling. It’s a frame of mind.

This was partly thrown into relief for me during a discussion I had last week with Brian Clark. (Discussions with Brian have a way of turning my thinking on its side. In a good way. Darn mad scientists.) Brian made the argument that “transmedia” is not an industry, but an artistic movement. It is the most recent form of the avant-garde, literally the forefront of an army or movement — an artistic movement in the same way the beat generation was, but instead of being united by a geographic area in which we meet and gather and mutually explore each other’s ideas, we are united by the internet, on which we gather and…mutually explore each other’s ideas.

A year ago, I was much more concerned with the discussion of “this is transmedia, this isn’t.” Today, my thoughts have shifted more. I don’t care as much any more if you call your project transmedia, or if you let me. There are of course issues with funding and branding and jobs that are important to consider.

But to me what makes transmedia exciting is the community, this group of people from around the world sharing ideas about awesome ways to tell stories, and awesome ways for an audience to experience stories.

That, to me, is the essence of transmedia, whatever the definition. Transmedia is a way of thought, a way of conceptualizing storytelling and experience in a way that is not limited to a single form or medium, and at its best takes full advantage of that tack.

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Feb 13

Audience and Story continued

Categories:

Transmedia Theory

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Last week I wrote a post about story design in games and that relationship to transmedia. My argument was essentially that while there is certainly a place for the kinds of games that want you to completely construct your own story, like Skyrim (or perhaps more to the point, Minecraft), I think there will always also be a place for more structured or linear narratives like those found in games like Dragon Age.

I had some great comments there, and Simon Pulman wrote a full response on his blog. I also had an interesting conversation with Brian Clark about reader-response criticism, that all stories should be evaluated as essentially the audience’s regardless of authorial intent — which is fair enough, but there’s nonetheless a spectrum of how much control an “author” tried to put on a story, from deliberately making an open sandbox to, say, a novel.

I also suggested that transmedia may be a good way to have the best of both worlds — a way to have a story that is designed to be constructed by the experiencer, as well as a story with more structure and authorial intent. [My language here is imperfect, as even a novel should be designed with the experience of the audience in mind. Nonetheless, I hope you see the difference in what I'm saying.]

I then saw this article, which describes how game designer David Jaffe argues that games shouldn’t try to tell a linear, movie-like story, because that’s not what they’re good at.

But Jaffe did argue vociferously against “games that have been intentionally made from the ground up with the intent and purpose of telling a story or expressing a philosophy or giving a designer’s narrative.” Because no matter how hard we want to fight it, Jaffe said, games just aren’t meant for this kind of storytelling.

… [I]n chasing movies, games lose something that’s unique to the medium, Jaffe said. The biggest successes in video games—titles like Modern Warfare‘s multiplayer, Skyrim, Guitar Hero, and Angry Birds, make a huge impact without ever pushing a developer-driven story on the player. The game industry should respect the success we’ve had in entertaining the world, he argued, and stop trying to force more from what has historically been the worst medium for expressing complex narrative ideas.

… In other words, if you think you have something significant to say about philosophy or human nature, stick with the media that have proven they’re suited to imparting that message effectively.

I still disagree — I think a developer-driven story can mesh well with interesting gameplay and player freedom (I point towards the Final Fantasy series as what I think is a good example, or again something like Dragon Age (which I started playing this weekend) which has fairly linear overarching storyline that you can nonetheless explore in a pretty open way), just like any game of D&D.

(Furthermore, I think saying we shouldn’t try to include any kind of theme or philosophy or argument in a game is to fail as a creator.)

But it does raise a question for me, regarding transmedia — is transmedia only really good if it involves significant audience participation, if it allows the audience to drive the narrative and create the structure? Is a project that delivers a more linear story by nature inferior because it’s not living up to what the medium (transmedia) is best at?

I admit something of a personal concern in this — Azrael’s Stop for instance was never meant to be highly participatory, but I still consider it transmedia (though it has always been an “experiment” first and foremost, and whether or not it’s labelled as transmedia isn’t so important to me). But I also have a bias towards even video games and D&D games that have a driving storyline that I give myself over to. So I wonder again — is there room for both?

You tell me.

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Feb 06

The Audience and the Story

Categories:

Transmedia Theory

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There are all sorts of forms of storytelling, and all sorts of relationships between “author” and “audience.” When we talk about transmedia, we often talk about the role of the audience (as well we should), and giving control of the story over to the audience. We also talk a lot about “story” versus “world.” But what is the ideal relationship? I don’t think there’s only one, and I think it’s important we remember that.

I read an article this weekend on GameSpy about Skyrim and the future of gaming. The article suggests that Skyrim’s open world and ability to generate meaningful, rather than random, quests in some ways customized to the individual player, is where storytelling in gaming is headed. Skyrim can create situations that have meaning to a player based on past experiences, and thus the storytelling comes not from an authored storyline the player is following, but from one created by the player through the very act of playing.

The actual storytelling comes afterwards, when veteran players retire their hearths and relate unforgettable, unbelievable tales of adventure to one another.

[...]

So while the idea of a linear story written by an author and delivered through dialogue and cutscenes in the style of Batman: Arkham City or Assassin’s Creed: Revelations is probably going to stick around a while longer, this developing approach to more dynamic stories will certainly have an impact on the narrative experience of future games. The Radiant systems create opportunities, rather than guarantees, but if things come together correctly, the experiences can be exhilarating. These kinds of systems will only continue to develop, and eventually may learn to spontaneously create more subtle and complex dramas in the future.

As Chuck Wendig puts it, “The game does what I like games to do in terms of storytelling: it lets me assemble the story of my own telling. I don’t mind a game that has its own story to tell, but the games to which I really respond are the ones that give me all the pieces and let me put them together according to my own style of play. It cedes some narrative authority to me.”

This raises some interesting questions for me. After all, I’ve always preferred games with amazing stories written into them than not. Games like Final Fantasy VI, Baldur’s Gate, and Ogre Battle 64 are all most awesome for me because of the stories behind them, combined with the gameplay itself. Ogre Battle is a tactical wargame, and I play it to design and control my army, but I love the characters and the story behind it, the reasons for the war and the shifting machinations. Baldur’s Gate (made by the same guys as Dragon Age — I just haven’t played many more-recent games) allows me to fully create and roleplay my own character, and explore the world fairly freely, but still has a driving story that I’m following and uncovering, featuring my character. And Final Fantasy VI is extremely linear in most ways, with characters I have very little customization over, but which are fully realized characters with arcs and backstories set in a fabulous plotline, and is still a game I consider to be one of the best I’ve ever played.

So is the player-experienced storytelling of Skyrim the pinnacle of storytelling? Clearly there’s a place for it, and quite possibly a significant place, but I don’t think it will ever completely replace more narrative games. Or at least, I hope it won’t.

Let’s look at it from another angle: that of an author. If I’m creating a story, sometimes I’m happy to try to craft a world that people will want to just play in and create their own stories. But often (and in my case at least, more often) I have a story that I want to tell. After all, there’s a reason I’m telling the story in the first place.

This is true of when I run a game of Dungeons and Dragons, too — some DMs will give full control over the story to the players, and build the narrative around them; while my players clearly control what they do and how they react to the situations around them, they trust me to create a compelling story that they can follow and be a part of, and I enjoy creating a story that puts them at the centre but which I ultimately weave the fabric of. Different strokes for different folks.

And I think when we talk about putting control of a story in the hands of the audience — and here finally we get to why I’m writing about this on a transmedia blog — we sometimes put too much emphasis on that, as if no matter what, the story the audience wants to tell is more important than anything else. I think we sometimes underestimate the importance of an author’s story.

John Green’s NYT-bestselling new novel The Fault in Our Stars could not have been told by his massive and dedicated audience. Giving them that world and situation would certainly not have resulted in the same work of genius that he wrote, and while it might have been a cool experience for those audience members, it wouldn’t have been the same experience. And there’s a lot to be said for the experience he did create.

I love the ability to create my own character in a world and explore and tell my own story there, but I also want to be told a good story — especially if I can be made to feel like the hero of the story. When that happens, I’m ok with ceding control, with going along for the ride.

So is there a balance? I think there is. I think there’s a way to tell a story, a relatively-linear narrative, while simultaneously giving the audience a place in that story.

One way I think is in the discovered story — something I think ARGs do a lot. Your role as an audience member is partially to figure out, to uncover, what the story is, and what’s going on, even if the hero and all the other characters are controlled by an “author”. I think there’s a way to have such a story while also generating your own narrative in the way that you experience that story.

I think a benefit of a larger transmedia world can be the ability to have both — to tell the audience a story or let them discover it, while simultaneously giving them an opportunity to be the hero in their own story.

But clearly not everyone agrees with me. I’d love to hear your thoughts. What makes a good story as an audience member? Do you want to be told? Do the telling? Some combination? Is it possible to find an ideal, or will we always need to understand that different people want different things from their stories, and we can’t satisfy them all?

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Jan 23

This Stuff Is Awesome: Andrea Phillips at Transmedia Vancouver

Categories:

Business, Transmedia Theory, TransmediaVan

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Way back at the start of December, the Transmedia Vancouver Meetup used our digital magic to bring a signal carrying the wisdom of Andrea Phillips all the way from Long Island to our little group. Andrea talked us through a number of the projects she’s worked on, and 15 lessons she learned from them.

You can check out a full recording of the event at http://livestream.com/silverstring, and her slides below, but I’ll take you through some of the larger themes discussed.

15 Lessons from Ten Years in Transmedia Storytelling

Awesomeness

Andrea got into transmedia as a player and moderator of the Cloudmakers in the Beast, commonly hailed as the first real Alternate Reality Game, and it was mind-blowing. She stumbled on a fictional website that “was part of this… thing that we didn’t know what it was, there were people that we knew weren’t real, but if you emailed them then they emailed you back…”

Her first lesson? This stuff is totally awesome. Then when she actually worked on one, with Perplex City, she refined that lesson: it’s not as awesome as you think to make this stuff — it’s way more awesome. She called creating an interactive transmedia experience the best way to write fiction possible, that while writing usually involves sitting alone at a keyboard for hours at a time, with this you get immediate feedback from the audience, a dialogue that never stops, the feeling that you’re not alone at your keyboard anymore. It’s addictive.

Better as a Result

One of the things Andrea said regarding the Beast was that the movie AI was better for those who had played the game. That you had already established relationships with the characters, and an understanding of some of the backstory. That the movie, which didn’t do so well at the box office, was stronger as a result of that relationship to the story.

I think this is so key to a good transmedia experience. The pieces should not be isolated from each other. Consuming all the pieces shouldn’t just make for a larger experience that’s better as a result of it being bigger, of there being more pieces to the puzzle; it should make each one of those pieces better for having experienced the others. That’s one of the things that makes transmedia special.

More Emotions

Another one of Andrea’s broad points that started with the Beast was that interactive storytelling in particular can elicit a broader range of emotions than ‘flat’ media like a single novel or movie. A television show can make you laugh or cry; an interactive story can make you feel complicit, responsible, even guilty.

Furthermore, relationships with characters can feel that much stronger. Two-way communication with them can make them feel alive, feel like friends. When something tragic happens to them, you feel like you have to do something about it.

Getting into the Story

Perplex City taught her something I too have talked about before: that the longer a story goes, the harder it is for new audience members to come into it. It can’t feel like the audience has to do homework to figure out what’s going on, or they won’t even bother.

“Story So Far” rolling recaps are certainly one way around this. In general, you want to make it as easy as possible to figure out what’s going on.

Reacting to an Audience

It seemed that the most rewarding projects and moments were those in which the creators could react most to the actions of the audience, where what the audience did had an impact on how the story unfolded.

Andrea noted that this was far easier to do the fewer lawyers were involved, when not every little detail and communication need be vetted before it can be released — and is thus easier with more indie projects, or those given freer reign.

She also noted that it’s possible to have a blend of highly reactive content and pre-made content, allowing you to have most of your content ready ahead of time but still feel highly reactive to the audience.

At the same time, something that is responsive doesn’t have to die forever once it’s done — the story could be replayed or replayable, even if it becomes a bit less reactive as a result.

And finally, the audience won’t care nearly as much as you do how realistic something is. They are willing to suspend disbelief for, for example, who is filming something and why.

Business Lessons

Andrea also shared some good basic business nuts-and-bolts lessons.

If you’re a freelancer, be warned: you can’t get unemployment benefits. And make sure the scope of the contract is clear, and you know what happens in it takes longer than you expected.

There are ethical considerations in transmedia storytelling — what happens in someone stumbled on an in-fiction website and assumes it’s real? (For a longer discussion on this point from Andrea, see here, here, and a comprehensive Wired article about her SXSW talk, here.)

As mentioned regarding lawyers, the more money is involved with a project, the more limitations there are. On the other hand, budget doesn’t matter nearly as much as the passion of the creators in making something truly awesome — or the passion of the audience.

And launching a project can be tricky. An email blast saying “check out this link” is not the way to do it, but what is the way depends on the project. Maybe a press release, maybe a beautiful package sent to 100 key influencers, maybe both, maybe neither.

~

Overall, Andrea was delightful as always and full of great insights.

You can pre-order her upcoming book, A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling, at Amazon. I’ve read it, it’s fantastic, and well worth the time and money of anyone interested in transmedia storytelling. Find her on twitter at @andrhia, and at her blog, deusexmachinatio.com.

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Dec 23

Creative Voice: Carrie Cutforth-Young (Part 2)

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Creative Voice Interviews

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This is part 2 of my interview with the awesome Carrie Cutfort-Young. Part 1 is here.

You’re co-founder of our sister transmedia meetup in Toronto! How’s that going? How’s the transmedia scene in the T-dot?

The one thing I learned in studying art history at OCAD, was the pattern between fostering community and artistic success. There is a hangover from modernity, which triumphed the individual, that gave us this idea of solitary artists languishing in obscurity, creating masterpieces alone in studios, which couldn’t be further from the truth. If you analyze the most successful art movements in history, you will see somewhere along the line artists got this crazy idea that they should get together and meet up. The Canadian art scene has always understood this and we are renowned for our artist collectives (from the Group of Seven to General Idea and onward). There also happens to be a thriving Toronto Web Series community. Inspired by the Transmedia Meetups around the world, Siobhan O’Flynn and I felt that a Toronto group was long overdue as we each individually knew pockets of people doing their own thing. Now the time was ripe to bring as many as we can together for in the very least mutual interest and support.

We are still pretty much in our infancy, with only three meetups in and plans for another bi-monthly meeting in January in the works but so far the interest has been gangbusters.

It is wonderful to see conversations are bubbling, collaborations are brewing, and I’m very much excited to be a part of this community as it just begins to take shape.

What drives you as a storyteller? What are you interested in, and what do you hope to accomplish?

I like to tell people I had a melodramatic childhood, as opposed to a traumatic one, but it would be fair I had my share of both. Story was an escape for me. And when I have had really horrible things happen in my life (or very melodramatic things), my first impulse is to refashion the sculpture of my tragedies (and triumphs) into a work of fiction: one where I am in ultimately in control of the universe. Story is not only my coping strategy, it’s my survival instinct. At the risk of inflicting you with purple prose, I would like to assert that I write the blood of my life out of me in ink. But I don’t want you to think I’m dreary and emo, because my stance on storytelling couldn’t be further from that mark.

One of my writing heroes is Preston Sturgess and I beg all writers to watch Sullivan’s Travels (the movie from where the title Oh Brother Where out Thou? comes from) at least once in their lifetime. Without going into too much spoiling, it is a brilliant screwball comedy about a director who struggles on a fool’s errand to make a serious film that will transform people with his art. And I pretty much prescribe to the medicine Sturgess prescribes in that film

In its use of participatory models of co-creation, Transmedia has the ability to amplify the health-giving benefits of immersive storytelling. As much as I admire transmedia activism, I am somewhat unashamed to admit that I am not transmedia activist, except in the instances of challenging people’s perceptions about gender, sexuality, belief, equality, paradigms, etc. through fiction by creating both strong and weak, but nevertheless, fully fleshed out characters you can sink your teeth into. And that’s not just a figure of speech. With transmedia, one can literally bite a character if one wanted to. (But please don’t as the actors’ unions would be up in arms).

What would be your advice for an indie transmedia writer/creator?

Right now, transmedia is suffering from guru-fication. My best advice for creators just coming into the transmedia fold is have an understanding of what came before, be part of the current conversation, but don’t be afraid to forage ahead and start developing a body of work that speaks to one’s own particular vision of transmedia.

Where ado you want the transmedia industry to go? What would you like to see happen in this community, especially in Canada?

I really <3 the international transmedia community. It’s rather small at the moment so it can feel a little bit like family. And, for the most part, the transmedia community lacks the cut-throat shark frenzy of other media making communities although there are a few snakes in the grass (but I’m getting better at spotting them). I would like it to retain this great supportive nurturing mojo it has going on as it gets larger (while the sharks begin to pool into these waters as transmedia becomes more mainstreamed), but perhaps I’m being just an idealist on this point.

Right now, there are creative clusters in transmedia forming across the Canada, particularly around web series, but we have a lot of bridge building to do between those clusters in Canada, and outreach to those outside of it. And then we can build towards forming an industry.

And the women! Transmedia has so many inspiring women working in the field, which is amazing when compared to the gaming and film industries. I’d like that trend to continue but also widen out to be more representative of all groups.

Finally: who’s your favourite other person doing cool stuff in the field?

Ahaha. The biggest problem with becoming a producer is that you suddenly have no time to be a consumer, and I really miss my days of trawling unfiction for the latest trailhead. I feel like I’m missing so much great stuff. Floating World (Andrea Phillips) looked so elegant. I soooo wanted to play it. And there are so many projects I don’t even have time to find out what they are anymore.

I really admire Tim Kring for trying to change the paradigm within television and being of the very few to do so. So I feel he is a real pioneer. I really like Mike Monello’s loudmouth practioner stance and how encouraging he is of indies to just get out there and get their hands dirty.

I’m a huge admirer of the community builders, as I know how much work that kind of work takes. Mike Knowlton was fantastic source of inspiration and initial advice for Transmedia Toronto. And I couldn’t have a better co-conspirator in community building as Siobhan O’Flynn, who in a cursory way is the reason I got into transmedia because if it hadn’t been for that night at the CFC Hybrid Media Lab…ya’ never know. I was so excited about Transmedia Vancouver starting up for the Canadians to represent so kudos to you on initiating the first group in Canada—you are an inspiration. And all the virtual groups and networks. I really dig people who get community building: Karine Halpern, Lorraine Hopping, Simon Staffans, Scott Walker, Paul Burke, Nedra Weinreich, Geoff

Maye, Gunther Sonnefield, Alison Norrington ….geeze I’m going to kick myself for whoever I’ve left out. Oh, I guess that’s what the comment section is for.

But the people I’m most keen on are the people who I am collaborating with. Tom Liljeholm is a rockstar in my opinion. And Jim Martin shits rainbows for breakfast. Sometimes, I literally leap out of bed to check my email to see the pages he has written the night before. Everyone on the team is amaze balls.

———————————

Be sure to check out our experimental fiction project Azrael’s Stop, about a boy who must learn to live when everyone he loves has died. Updated daily at azraelsstop.com

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Dec 16

Creative Voice: Carrie Cutforth-Young (Part 1)

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Creative Voice Interviews

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Carrie appeared on my radar sometime earlier this year (on Twitter, of course). Then a few weeks after I started Transmedia Vancouver, she started Transmedia Toronto. Then we finally met in person at StoryWorld, and I think there was a little bit of magic. Carrie is outspoken, even more crazy energetic than I am when it comes to this stuff, and also hilarious. I think it would be wicked fun to work with her on something, but I’ll have to be content for now with an interview. Her responses were lengthy! However, I feel that there is no containing Carrie; rather than try to cut it, I’m just going to post it over two weeks! Here, then, is part 1, which I think is a really cool look at becoming completely immersed in the transmedia world.

First of all, what excites you most about transmedia storytelling?

Without a doubt: the total immersion of living and breathing a story is what excites me the most. Telling stories and consuming stories has always been my personal drug of choice; being able to be surrounded by an all-encompassing narrative, it is magic.

As a kid I loved playing pretend and it broke my heart as all my friends, one by one, became “too mature for that.” It used to baffle me that such a powerful tool would fall to the sidelines in a fool’s quest for a tentative hold on a certain sense of grownupness. I really think transmedia storytelling is one of the few practices actively employing a consensual participatory fiction in its repertoire of tools and I can’t wait to see how far and in what ways this can be pushed forward. That being said, I think there is a lot of truth to what Jeff Gomez said at Storyworld on issues of addiction to total immersion and how we need to facilitate healthy disengagement as well.

What’s your background? How did you get interested and involved in transmedia storytelling?

When I was a kid, I was a voracious reader and always knew that someday I would be a writer. But I always wanted to tell stories in a different way: narrative unbound by the constraints of a single medium — a book, a film, etc. Even at the age of eight, I toyed with the idea of a story contained within a room where you could enter it, read the character’s calendar and daybook, and handle their objects to get a sense of the narrative.

The dream of becoming a writer was quashed by a pervasive small town Canadian attitude that really negates aspirations for working in the creative industries (I mean, my dad even still refers to my BFA as a degree in basket weaving). I really bought the culture’s negative line on becoming a writer/artist hook-line-and-sinker, and, although I went to BealArt (a respected advanced art program in a public secondary school in London, Ontario), most of my twenties were spent on dead end minimum wage jobs while I wrote stories and scripts in between changing my kids’ diapers. It’s not that I ever stopped working at my craft, it’s just I didn’t believe it was possible to make a viable career out “what I was actually good at.”

Finally, in my early thirties, I decided to go to OCAD University to become a curator, which I erroneously believed would lead me to the holy grail of paid work in the arts. The program was very heavy on theory and very light on practice and I realized I had to hustle my ass to make a name for myself during my full time studies in order to land on my feet running by the time I graduated. I started a curatorial practice with my then creative partner Patrick Phillips to form Kultur Vultur, and we had several successful shows: particularly The Dood Show, which inspired public participation in the creation of a crowdsourced work of art (back in 2006 when this concept was fresh). Yet despite these successes, I felt like I was spinning my wheels, as no matter how good I was at hustling my ass curating, it wasn’t my calling.

In the meantime, I had become an arts columnist for BlogTO. When another writer became sick, the CFC’s Hybrid Media Lab opening gala landed at my feet. There I met Ryan Fitzgerald who had just finished working on a delightful project called Perfidia Gardens. When he sat me down, I had little idea that this conversation was about to change my life. He asked: “Do you know what an Alternate Reality Game is?” I said, “Nooooo.” Then he asked, “Do you know what Transmedia is?” Again I replied I did not. It took him twenty minutes of patiently explaining these foreign concepts to me before the paradigm shift took place in my head. The moment I “got it” was also the moment I said: “This is what I’ve been wanting to do my whole life; this is what I must do.”

I finished off my degree but decided to get a double minor in both Digital Media Studies (where I got a strong foundation in the theoretical underpinnings of transmedia) and English (with a focus on creative writing). And since graduation, I’ve been simply eating and drinking transmedia every day; and of course cranking out content and hustling my ass.

Speaking of content, you’re involved as a writer in an upcoming project called the Karada, which promises to be a transmedia experience. Can you tell me a bit about the project? What can we look forward to?

The experience on The Karada has been mad crazy. Back in late July, Tom Liljeholm approached me about working on an idea and asked if I would like to be a part of the team. I jumped in and then mentioned there was the deadline for The Pixel Pitch coming up and suggested we give it a go. This was I believe thirteen days before the deadline. Imagine five people in three different countries working round the clock to produce the fundamentals of the application including a trailer, website, and most important – a fully fleshed story from scratch – in less than two weeks. It was nuts!

Even though The Karada didn’t get selected (go figure), the Power to the Pixel’s vigorous application process provided the perfect template for honing our vision. The Karada was originally intended to be a transmedia property with a web series as its spine but then TV got interested in it. And when I say TV: I mean we even had the VP of a major US cable channel contact us out of the blue. How did he hear about us? The Karada popped up in his Google feed and he fell in love with it.

So things on The Karada have been in high gear since late July. However, our team only recently came to the realization that we are a transmedia production team not a television production company. We could very well be a television production company but not within the next two months and it’s time to strike while the iron is hot. We are now in the process of partnering up with an established television production team for a symbiotic relationship. The idea for The Karada has always been a complete transmedia integrated drama series so both teams will need to act as one entity.

If things move forward as hoped, we should be in production in the new year. But prior to this, there will be an overhaul of content on the website to reflect the recently crystalized vision of the project. And we will start releasing fresh teaser content soon.

How did you get involved in it, and what exactly is your role?

Ahaha. You have just asked me my second favourite story to tell of all time (the first being how I got with my husband of eighteen years).

After graduation from 5 years of full time university (including summers) and curating besides (and other stuff besides, besides, besides), I spent a few well-deserved months decompressing in pajamas while watching Judge Judy. I’m not kidding. Then I caught wind of news that Tim Kring (the creator of Heroes) and the Company P (the production behind the Truth about Marika) were launching a transmedia project called the Conspiracy for Good, the Alternate Reality Game of which was being produced by Tea4Two Entertainment. First, I decided there could be no better case study for me to immerse myself in transmedia. Second, it became my sole ambition to become the most hardcore player that ever cored it hard in order to get Tim Kring and other members of the production to sit up and take notice. I have to admit, even to myself, this was probably one of my more insaner ideas.

And I was a total nut bar in that game. I mean some of the things I did to get attention I’m a little embarrassed to mention (well, not really: I’m pretty shameless). And someone did notice me from the production team, but it wasn’t Tim. It was Tom.

The CFG ARG had an amazing chemistry between all the hardcore players and the PM team. There is a special strange bond that can occur between players and puppet masters, and the bond Tom and I formed was exceptional. We both learned how much fun we liked to play off against each other on opposite sides of the curtain and began to respect each other’s intense level of production and work ethic. And I was keen to suck the transmedia marrow from his bones dry; leach everything I could about the biz from him. Jim Martin (who worked on Heroes) also happened to be a PM for CFG, and some of our interactions with his character…well, are some of my favourite conversations of all time. When I was invited by a fairy godmother on the production team to fly to London for the Live Events, the chemistry between Jim/Tom/Me (and a whole lot of other people) was palpable. You could see the sparks flying between us.

After CFG ended, realizing I had blown my chances with getting a gig writing for Tim Kring, I had no choice but to pull myself up by the bootstraps and start to create a body of work. I soon worked with the internationally renowed artist Lillian Allen on two locative media projects, Textapublication and Ripple, with another former CFG hardcore player, Jon Kissinger. I developed a transmedia project of my own and sought funding by submitting unsuccessful grant applications to Arts Councils. I wrote a 25,000 novella for the Veil Science ARG. I just pounded the pavement day in and day out.

In the meantime, I’m fairly certain Tom forgot all about me. So I started messaging him industry links and tweets of interest…you know: just to keep me in his radar.

I was in the middle of developing my own portfolio project, a grass-roots ARG, with my husband and partner of our company Queen Spade Creative, when Tom, out of the blue, invited me to work on an idea Ki Henriksson (his partner for Tea4two and one of the most talented writers I have ever met) had developed. Soon Jim was on board along with Jakob Berglund of Furnace Fighter Media, artist Hugo Arias (a brilliant artist who I had curated before under Kultur Vultur) and our mad skillz accounts man: Adam Boderus. And it has been magic ever since.

———————————

Part 2 will be next week! And be sure to check out our experimental fiction project Azrael’s Stop, about a boy who must learn to live when everyone he loves has died. Updated daily at azraelsstop.com

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Dec 12

Nael Darkfell

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Azrael's Stop, News

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My experimental transmedia fiction project Azrael’s Stop has been going again for about a month and a half, which means we’re nearing the halfway point of the year-long story. I’m hoping that things are going to be even more interesting going forward as we try out a couple more cool experiments, and the story amps up a bit.

So far we’ve been introduced to the bar, Azrael’s Stop where people seem to come when they’re ready to die, or when they need the camaraderie of others who have seen death. We’ve met the main characters, and their conflicts: Ceph, who wants to live but doesn’t know how after seeing so much death; Rye, stuck in Limbo while the boy he loves can’t seem to live himself; Nael, wise but unable to forgive the past. And others: Old Tom, who finally died when he forgave himself; Lona, the huntress who seems to know too much; and Trin, the girl who doesn’t seem to belong at the Stop.

With Tom gone, Ceph is even more lost than before. Lona and Trin have shaken up his unchanging world. And now Nael has been kicked out for his disrespect, and Ceph is left with few to turn to.

If you haven’t been following, now is a great time to start. You can find the complete archives of the story so far at Book Country and Wattpad, and up to Chapter 4 at Scribd and our main website. You can listen to the audio play that tells the story of Old Tom’s long-awaited passing, and check out Nael’s music.

But what’s become of Nael since being kicked out of the Stop? While we await his return, I decided to show his story a little bit as well. As an extension of the experiment, we’ve brought Nael into social media as an independent character and musician in his own right.

We don’t have tons planned for this little part of the experiment, but you can follow Nael on Twitter and Facebook — and interact with him! — as well as check out his music on Bandcamp.

I’m mostly interested in having fun with this little extension of the project, seeing where it goes, and seeing what I can learn about running a fictional character online. I’d love for you to join me — and Nael.

As always, comments and questions are welcome! What would you want to see from Nael?

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