Red Redemptions - Fate of the World: Tipping Point - environmental policy gaming

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Description from the site:

"About Fate of the World
Fate of the World is a PC strategy game that simulates the real social and environmental impact of global climate change over the next 200 years. The science, the politics, the destruction — it’s all real, and it’s scary.
Your mission: Solve the crisis. But, like life, it won’t be easy. You’ll have to work through natural disasters, foreign diplomacy, clandestine operations, technological breakthroughs, and somehow satisfy the food and energy needs of a growing world population. Will you help the planet or become an agent of destruction?.."

According to the Guardian UK the game has been downloaded over 1 million times. Nice.

Teaching History 2012: The Titanic: Live-Tweeted to Mark 100 Year Anniversary - @TitanicRealTime

This latest project is the work of The History Press, one of the UK’s largest local and specialist history publishers, and the 100th anniversary of the sinking of Titanic is one of its biggest campaigns for 2012.

“We’re very keen on embracing digital outlets to optimize our content,” says Christian Bace, Marketing Executive at The History Press. “To this end, we have created our very first iPad app too, which is due to be released on March 15th.”

So, in addition to the Titanic Twitter account, you’ll also be able to delve deep into the famous ship, with Titanic: Her Journey, collating the knowledge of the world’s foremost Titanic experts in an interactive app.

!!!! Pottermore finally vanquishes technical obstacles to open access | Children's books | guardian.co.uk

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Excerpt:

"Frustrated Harry Potter fans have finally received the news they have been waiting for: JK Rowling's much-delayed Pottermore website is set to open to all comers in early April, with ebooks due out around the same time.

Pottermore, an interactive version of the Harry Potter universe where users can duel their fellow wizards, cast spells and progress through the storyline of the Potter books, opened to one million beta users last July. Full launch was initially scheduled for October, but the immense popularity of the website among users – 550m page views were made in just two months – meant it was delayed until 2012.

Officials have now announced that pottermore.com will open to everyone in early April. A spokesperson for Rowling confirmed to the Guardian that the long-awaited Harry Potter ebooks, which will be sold from the site, would launch "at around the same time", but provided no more details. The Potter ebooks and digital audiobooks will be distributed to more than 18,000 school and public libraries worldwide by Overdrive, it was announced last month.

Pottermore admitted that the "extended wait" for Potter fans "has been frustrating", and thanked readers for their patience so far. The delay, said officials, was down to a decision to move Pottermore to a new platform set-up.

"We always knew Pottermore would be incredibly popular, which is why we made the decision to only open to one million beta users to begin with. We wanted to make sure that we had a really good understanding of how people want to use the site and which bits we'd need to modify before giving more people access," they said in a statement.

"We gathered some incredibly useful feedback from our eta users, and it became clear that our original platform wouldn't be suitable when millions more users came on to the site. So we made a big decision: to move Pottermore to an entirely different platform set-up. This 'invisible' change has involved a lot of work behind the scenes but it will enable our users to get the best from Pottermore as it grows and develops."

full post here!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/childrens-books-site/2012/mar/09/pottermore-harry-p...

Six to Start's Adrian Hon @SXSW on Creating The Code: A BBC Transmedia Documentary

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From the SXSW schedule:

"The Code is a BBC documentary about Professor Marcus du Sautoy's search of a mysterious code that governs our world through numbers, shapes and patterns. It's also a next-generation transmedia treasure hunt aimed at all ages and abilities that takes place online through games, puzzles, Facebook and Twitter, in the real world, and in Lost-style clues hidden within the TV show itself.

The Code is one of the most ambitious 'native transmedia' projects ever created by the BBC and Six to Start, and it demonstrates what's possible when a broadcaster with the reach, reputation, and quality of the BBC meets the breadth and depth of engagement that the web can provide.

In this session, we talk about the challenging journey of The Code from its inception, through design, production and delivery, we explore the best practices for making similar projects, and we reveal audience figures and engagement numbers from the experience."

Love Love Love: Tiny Story: A Short Film About The Fundamentals of Narrative Design | Co.Design: business + innovation + design

John Pavlus on:

"Good storytelling looks ridiculously easy when it’s done well, but is in fact devilishly hard to pull off. (Just ask Ira Glass.) The only way to get better is to practice--and what better way to practice than by forcing yourself to tell a story with only the simplest possible elements? That’s what animators Sebas and Clim have done with Tiny Story, an animated film that plays like an Elements of Style for narrative design. Their tools: a dot, a line, and a colored background. Their results … well, just see for yourself:

Like Nathaniel Whitcomb and Moonbot Studios, Sebas and Clim earn points right away for thinking outside the standard widescreen box. But the simple elegance of what they do inside that box is what makes Tiny Story so delightful and inspiring...."

full post here:

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669074/tiny-story-a-short-film-about-the-fundame...

Nuno Bernardo: Transmedia in Documentary Storytelling | MIPBlog

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Excerpt from Nuno Bernado's post on MIPblog:

"Transmedia is seen by the TV industry as a tool – some call it a gimmick – to engage young audiences around scripted formats and franchises. It’s clear that this demographic includes most early adopters of new technologies. But with the success of new smartphones, tablets and social media services, all types of audiences are getting savvier and demanding more engaging content that they can take with them everywhere.
Looking at these recent developments in technology, we’ve been diversifying our slate of productions. It’s true that ten years ago, our first transmedia project was aimed at teen girls. The reason was obvious: they are big users of social media and mobile phones and they seemed the right demographic on which to try new forms of entertainment. But since last year, we’ve been developing documentaries and factual TV series aimed at older audiences and applying our decade-long experience in transmedia product development. Looking at the spectrum of projects available, we wanted to do something different. Again, we wanted to put the audience in the centre of it all...."

full post here:

http://blog.mipworld.com/2012/03/nuno-bernardo-transmedia-in-documentary-stor....T1nqat3wo6U.twitter