Christy Dena Interviews Jan Libby on her ARG Snow Town » YSA Indie ARGs

Jan Libby is a respected indie alternate reality game designer, whose day job is a freelancer working with brands to create interactive experiences. (Her impressive bio is at the bottom of this post.) Jan has recently run an indie ARG called Snow Town. I unfortunately missed the participating through the whole experience, but I wanted to hear more about how she has moved from doing long complex ARGs to short ones – an approach that would benefit new ARG creators. Wired covered the beginning of Snow Town, and here Jan shares a post-mortem on how she made the “short story ARG”:

read the full interview on Christy Dena's blog: You Suck at Transmedia!

Very Cool. Documentary + Game = Independent Transmedia Project called “THE GREAT WORK” « Culture Hacker

From workbookproject:

“The Greak Work” is a documentary by two Swedish filmmakers, Oskar Östergren & Fredrik Oskarsson (details at the end) about 30-year-old Christer Böke from Malmö, Sweden. He has taken one year off from his well-paid job as an IT-salesman to become a full-time Alchemist. The film concerns mankind’s eternal ambition of wealth and immortality and one mans dedicated struggle to solve “The secret of all secrets”. This struggle is known at The Great Work.

What’s particularly interesting about this project is that the filmmakers have teamed up with an independent game designer, Niflas, to create a game to complement the movie.

The Great Work will be screened on SVT (Swedish Television) as a 58 minute version, winter 2011. So don’t forget you heard about it here first on WorkBookProject.com!

GAME ENGINE: THE REAL WORLD IS STILL HERE | A pointed critique of McGonigal's Reality is Broken by Heather Chaplin

McGonigal goes on to talk about an alternate reality game she helped build for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. She talks a lot about how engaged the players were and how fulfilled they felt by their collaboration and success of mastering the game — all wonderful feelings that games can absolutely induce. But then she mentions in passing that the game was sponsored by McDonald’s. McGonigal talks specifically about solving problems like global warming and global poverty, yet she doesn’t seem to realize that a corporation such as McDonald’s is actually part of the system that creates these problems in the first place. And something is terribly wrong about the fact that it didn’t even seem to feel odd to McGonigal to be making this game for an Olympics held in Beijing, the capital of one of the most terrifying, totalitarian regimes on earth. How out of touch with reality can you be?

Of course, McGonigal built her rep as a gaming expert at the Institute For The Future, which is a nonprofit forecasting organization. And, oh that’s right, it happens to be made up of a who’s who of the most powerful global corporations on the planet. Monsanto, General Mills, General Motors, Kraft Foods, Pfizer, Unilever, Amway Corporation and PepsiCo, to name a few. So when McGonigal preens over her game World Without Oil, in which players participated in an interactive narrative exercise about what would happen if we ran out of oil, the reality is she’s actually providing data for global corporations about how to sell things to us down the line. Also players are providing millions of dollars in value with their creative output in the game — which McGonigal talks about so enthusiastically — but are not paid a cent. McGonigal says paying people for this kind of work would actually be a mistake because people are better motivated by a system of pretend points than they are by money. In fact, she has coined a term for this: the “engagement economy.”

I can’t decide if I think this is simply fairy-tale thinking or out-and-out evil plotting. It makes me think of all those bloggers working for free for the Huffington Post who didn’t see any of the $315 million AOL paid for the site in its recent acquisition, despite having helped create its value through the content they produced.

This is an unsolved problem in the digital economy, and I don’t blame McGonigal for it. But I do blame her for being so caught up in a fantasyland as to fail to see the real consequences of what she’s so eagerly championing, which is more for the people who already have it and less for those who don’t. That’s not my idea of a better world.

I shared some of these thoughts while listening to McGonigal - upshot: one potential strategy for world change but not the only one. And I agree with the critique re. corporations & the question of who is being served - definitely a relationship that needs critical reflection

Read the full article:

http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/news/2011/04/game-engine-the-real-world-is-s...

Why We Need Storytellers at the Heart of Product Development | UX Magazine Article by Sarah Doody

In his book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule The Future, Daniel Pink explains that we're in the "Conceptual Age" and that skills that were revered in the Industrial Age and Information Age are not as integral to where we are as a society today. Pink writes:

We've progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers. And now we're progressing yet again—to a society of creators and empathizers, of pattern recognizers and meaning makers. We've moved from an economy built on people's backs to an economy built on people's left-brains to what is emerging today: an economy and society built more and more on people's right-brains.

Who are the right-brain thinkers? Through years of research, Pink has identified six aptitudes for the Conceptual Age: design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning. Most relevant to us is the aptitude of story. Crafting stories is not about assembling facts. Instead, according to Pink, people who understand story have "the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact." The impact to story in business is that, "like design, it is becoming a key way for individuals and entrepreneurs to distinguish their goods and services in a crowded marketplace." If you want your product to be heard by consumers, it must be rooted in a story that consumers can emotionally connect with.

Read the full article here:

http://uxmag.com/strategy/why-we-need-storytellers-at-the-heart-of-product-de...

Will Renny Reports on: Across Transmedia from Power to the Pixel: The Cross Media Forum. Oct. 2010 (still worth the read!)

One of the really fascinating keynote presentations of the day for me was Michel Reilhac’s The Game-ification of Life. Michel, who is currently Executive Director of ARTE France Cinema and Director of Film Acquisitions for ARTE France, has been involved in producing, directing and writing films since 1998. His talk wasn’t about film making though. Michel instead spoke about how games and the notion of ‘play’ have recently emerged as models to incentivise engagement, learning and social change.

Michel posited the idea that games have contaminated reality, now more so than ever. Contamination sounds a little OCD, but I think the premise of infiltration works. As if gaming is leeching into the system, below the radar. Michel went further to suggest that the ‘As if’ scenario within a fantasy game structure, is now becoming an ‘As is’ scenario in reality. By this I think he meant that the mechanisms of gaming are being folded into the real; the lived, physical world. A game structure can now be used to wrap around other things in order to make them more attractive as well become an integral form of interoperability – between ourselves and the world around us, as well as with the people we engage with.

Michel maintained that the reason games are beginning to proliferate into our daily lives is down to two factors: Social networks and geo-localisation. Both of these factors you should note are down to technology making it possible for us to connect on the move, and across multiple types of networks. So it’s about our improving ability to connect, that and the fact that games are more fun, as Michel says, than reality. Once connected, we can now have ‘fun’. We can now play.

The concept of play really resonated with me as something that is not only integral to how we learn (Michel made this point too) but also something that needs to be comprehended when considering what makes transmedia storytelling different to more traditional one to one or one to many forms of storytelling.

Read the full post on jawbone.tv - excellent article!