It's a MATH ARG! Whoot! Six to Start and BBC Team Up for “The Code Challenge” Transmedia Experience | ARGNet

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June 28, 2011 · By Kris Nordgren

"Six to Start and the BBC have teamed up to create a transmedia experience tied in with BBC Two documentary The Code, expected to air at the end of July. The Code is presented by Professor of Mathematics Marcus du Sautoy (Horizon on BBC2, The Beauty of Diagrams on BBC4) and explores how the world around us conforms to and can be explained by mathematical codes. Six to Start are next-generation storytellers with plenty of experience creating storytelling projects for different clients, often in the form of alternate reality games or treasure hunts. They’ve worked with the BBC before on projects like Spooks: Code 9 and Seven Ages Quest. As a first for the BBC and possibly a world first, an interactive experience called The Code Challenge has been seamlessly integrated in the writing and filming of The Code since inception. Viewers can participate in an engaging treasure hunt which will take place before, during, and after the series that will extend their understanding of basic mathematical principles.

The Code Challenge begins well before the airing of the actual show. Soon, 1000 people in the UK will receive a secret message with one of the first puzzles of the challenge. For a chance to be one of those 1000, keep an eye on Twitter @bbccode and apply via Twitter or e-mail. A few weeks before the show airs, several Flash games containing clues, puzzles, and more information about the Code will also appear online. The series itself is expected to air at the end of July and will be split into three 60-minute episodes: Magic Numbers, Nature’s Building Blocks and Predicting the Future. Six clues are connected to each episode. Three will be hidden in the programme itself, which can be watched live on BBC Two or on BBC iPlayer. One community clue can only be solved by working together with a group of players. Two further clues will be revealed on the blog and through a Flash game. Players can then enter the six answers they found for each episode into the ‘codebreaker’ to receive three passwords with which they can unlock the ultimate challenge.

The Code Challenge is conceived so everyone can play, even those with no prior understanding of maths or ARG experience, although the final stages of the treasure hunt will be increasingly challenging...."

Read the full post on argn.com

The future of TV is social & the revolution is coming! A Must Read Article from David Wasserman Digital Culture Blog « WCN TRANSMEDIA GROUP

"Named last year as one of the ten most important emerging technologies by the MIT Technology Review social TV is fast rising as one of the hottest topics since group buying. Ynon Kreiz, CEO of the Endemol group the largest independent production company in the world responsible for Big brother said Social TV is going to be huge.
“The ability to create content that will enable people to interface with each other, to connect, to recommend, to share and experience over television, is going to change the landscape of the industry.” 
But will social TV really live up to the hype? In this article we take a look at what social TV is, what the main trends are shaping TV, the challenges and the opportunities going forwards for media companies, businesses and marketers alike.

What is social TV?

Simply put, it’s about merging your social media networks to the TV.  It’s making TV social–again. It’s about taking the water cooler effect and making this virtual, it’s about the empowered consumer viewing content when and where they want, deciding who they want to share it with and being able to do this all in real time.In essence it is a term that describes technology that supports communication and social interaction in either the context of watching television, or related to TV content.Viewers are now using social media to connect with the TV with content that matters to them. Then, as the MIT study shows, they are engaging in massive real-time conversations around those shows and learning to be a part of that conversation and it is a participatory culture as well as a personalised one.TV always been social and on the face of it TV and social media seem like a natural fit but if the TV industry is going to make the most of the opportunities it is going to have change quickly and learn the lessons of the music industry...."

Social TV Figure
Figure 1 The Core elements of Social TV 

Simon Pulman on Pottermore: Understanding and Leveraging “Potter Points” | Transmythology

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Simon Pulman's breakdown of Pottermore's potential gamification:

"So we know that Pottermore will contain a “gamification” layer, whereby users will be rewarded for completing certain tasks with “house points.” These points will be awarded for reading the ebooks, interacting with certain site functionality and -almost certainly – for participating in limited time “events.” They will also be attributed by “house” (Gryffindor, Slytherin etc.), thus replicating the system depicted in the books and movies.

This begs the question: once users have started to accumulate these points, what can they use them for? Sure, gamification always tends to create positive associations when a little notification pops up and a pleasing sound effect plays (see, e.g. XBox Live), but it would strike me as a missed opportunity if the points were not then meaningful in some way.

1. Status
2. Virtual Items
3. Real Items
4. Story"

I (Siobhan) would add - what about fan-based social activism? move away from what can 'I' get? to what can we do in the world re. questions of social justice? social change.

See the Harry Potter Alliance - a fan-based social justice group acting on Rowling's principles in the real world

thehpalliance.org/

Great Crew launch New Project! » » Gaming Privacy (or, Privacy: The Game! For Ages 8 and Up)

We are tickled to announce that we were one of eight recipients to be awarded a generous grant from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s Contributions Program to create a pervasive/crossmedia game for kids, with kids as co-creators. The goal of the project will be to leverage children’s existing awareness regarding privacy to create a game that develops privacy literacy skills for ages 8 and up. We think this project is unique and critically important in its approach in a time when many efforts to protect children’s privacy are heavy-handed, alienating and ultimately counterproductive. These approaches tend to ignore the knowledge children have about the online world as well as the fact that a child’s privacy can be inadvertently compromised by his or her parents. By working with children as co-creators, we hope to create a respectful, engaging and fun game that teaches privacy literacy in through critical thinking and advocating for oneself. And, as a bonus, we get to help to launch a new generation of game designers!

"...an amazing advisory team comprised of some the top minds in Toronto (and beyond)’s indie game making and research communities:

Sara Grimes, Assistant Professor, University of Toronto; gender, gaming and education researcher
Adrian Hon, Founder, Six to Start (creators of Smokescreen)
Melanie McBride, Research Associate, EDGE Lab; educator and gaming researcher
Nick Pagee, Consultant on Gaming and New Media, TIFF Bell Lightbox; Programmer, Sprockets Toronto International Film Festival for Children
Jaime Woo, Co-Founder, Gamercamp and Gamercamp Jr.

read the full post on Atmosphere Industries

Arcade Fire, 'Super 8,' and the Trouble With Sci-Fi Kids - by Spencer Kornhaber - The Atlantic

"In somewhere U.S.A., at sometime post-2011, suburbia is at war. Patches of tract-home sprawl have incorporated into private companies. Militarized barricades separate them; night raids by ski-masked soldiers recur. What's the fighting over? Light pollution from shopping centers. The placement of golf courses. In other words, the NIMBYs have picked up guns.

This is the reality imagined in Scenes From the Suburbs, the short film "presented by" Canadian indie-rock act Arcade Fire and directed by Oscar-winner Spike Jonze (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich). Jonze has taken a literal reading of lyrics about "suburban war" from Arcade Fire's 2010 Grammy-winningThe Suburbs—even though vocalist Win Butler had been using the metaphor to talk about battles over culture and age, not zoning. But war really isn't the focus of the 30-minute clip, which premiered online Monday after a few film festival showings. Rather, the action lies with a band of kids. Around 15 years old each—impossibly pale and gaunt, the picture of Arcade Fire members-in-training—they bike and skate and tote airsoft guns around town. They party, they fight, they bullshit, they stare yearningly into the sky.

In Jonze's capable hands, the tale is beautifully—though perhaps too preciously—told. And it's a simple tale: One friend falls out with the others, for reasons as inexplicable as reasons for such things often are. Dystopia merely serves as a handy backdrop for a straight portrait of what it's like to grow up in a tribe. Time passes, people change, friendships are savored, and politics are forgotten. "When I think back about that summer, I don't think much about the army," narrator Kyle says in the short's first few moments. Viewers may just say the same when they think back about the clip.

But isn't this what always happens with fictional kids in fictional sprawl? It's impossible to watch Scenes From the Suburbs without being reminded of Super 8, the wide-screen J.J. Abrams/Steven Spielberg joint that opened to acclaim and box office success earlier this month. Like the Arcade Fires flick, it lovingly documents a clique of suburban children and their foul-mouthed banter with one other. We know the kids, we recognize the kids, we like the kids. And then a supernatural beast comes along, soon followed by camouflage-wearing troopers. Suburbia is again at war, but as audience members, we wish it weren't. We just want to hang out with those kids more. As The Atlantic's Chris Orr wrote in his review of the film, "The further the central mystery unfolds, the more you may wish you could fold it back up again."..."

Sandra Guadenzi updates on installation i-doc: “6 billion others” .:. Interactive Documentary

"I just went to Brussels and I was lucky enough to get there on the last day of the exhibition of “6 billions others” – by  Yann Arthus-Bertrand (see my comments on the whole project  in my archive).

The project has been going around the globe since 2008, both as a website and as a moving exhibition (not to mention the book, the DVD, the poster, the postcards and all the relevant merchandising). I have played with the website a lot of times, but I had not seen the exhibition yet… so I was very excited to catch it in Brussels…

The archive of footage is indeed mind blowing. And the fact of watching faces coming from the whole world, speaking to you about  personal things, is really touching. Interviews have been devised by themes (family, war, women, fear, happiness, religion etc…) and each theme is projected in a hut (or in Brussels’ case there were lots of small rooms). As a result one browses through a gigantic space, coming in and out from viewing rooms, and moving from a woman speaking about death in an Indian village to a man speaking about love in Canada. If some times the experience is a little too “easy” (is it enough to cut back to back people just sharing a topic?)… I have to admit that the justaposition of themes and people can create some interesting contrasts...."

Big LOVE: Invisible Cities, a geocoding social activity project by Christian Marc Schmidt & Liangjie Xia

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From the site:

"A project by Christian Marc Schmidt & Liangjie Xia

By revealing the social networks present within the urban environment, Invisible Cities describes a new kind of city—a city of the mind. It displays geocoded activity from online services such as Twitter and Flickr, both in real-time and in aggregate. Real-time activity is represented as individual nodes that appear whenever a message or image is posted. Aggregate activity is reflected in the underlying terrain: over time, the landscape warps as data is accrued, creating hills and valleys representing areas with high and low densities of data.

Invisible Cities maps information from one realm—online social networks—to another: an immersive, three-dimensional space. In doing so, the piece creates a parallel experience to the physical urban environment. The interplay between the aggregate and the real-time recreates the kind of dynamics present within the physical world, where the city is both a vessel for and a product of human activity. It is ultimately a parallel city of intersections, discovery, and memory, and a medium for re-experiencing the physical environment."

Like: Branding Is About Creating Patterns, Not Repeating Messages |Mark Shillum for Co.Design

Excerpt:

"...To succeed in a more agile world, a brand needs to think less about defining a fixed identity and more about creating coherent and flexible patterns.

Five similarities between patterns and the desired behavior of brands:

1. Patterns are both adaptive and coherent

Because patterns are composed of elements, they are reconfigurable. The elements can be reorganized to shift meaning, but this new meaning is still created from familiar elements.

One of the most reconfigurable patterns is the modern English alphabet. The Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words, but they are composed of only 26 letters. We detect words as a pattern of letters to which we give a pre-assigned meaning. Over time, we assign sub-patterns to each word, which means we begin to read patterns of words rather than individual letters.

Rseaerch icntidaes taht the oerdr of the ltteers in a wrod dnsoe't relaly mettar. Waht relaly mtteras is the frist and lsat leettr in the wrod. If tehy are in the rhgit palce, you can raed the wdors.

Consider the iPhone app grid. It allows the user to reorganize and personalize the face of the iPhone. Wobbling tiles signify the most flexible state of the interface. Each tile, although different and a brand in its own right, is recognizable as an Apple object through the use of a "glare" reflection and the standardization of form. The curved corners of the tile appear on each successive app, on the product itself, and throughout the Apple family of products. The app grid was originally introduced by Nokia, but Apple came to own it through the successful application of patterns.

The adaptability of patterns makes them perfect for iterative environments, as they can grow while retaining meaning in new contexts, allowing brands to adapt and evolve without the "shock of the new."...