You Suck at Transmedia - Christy Dena's New Blog with a big challenge for us all

Chisty Dena's You Suck at Transmedia:

A few years ago (four years ago), I created a mini-alternate reality game for an industry residential I was mentoring at. The residential was to help teach film and TV creators (what was called at the time) cross-media. But we didn’t just want to tell them about cross-media, we wanted them to experience what it is like receive an SMS from a character, go to a fictional website to find clues, and participate in a live event. This direct immersion approach is something that Michael Andersen would be happy to hear.

The experience was designed and created by two of us (myself and Jackie Turnure), in two weeks, and launched two weeks before the residential. So prior to the event all the practitioners experienced a small issuing of SMSes, email and websites to help prime the narrative and build the desire to participate. But at the actual residential (a lovely resort), they were split into teams. I split them into teams because it would be easier to manage them, and it would facilitate them having to act (rather than leaving it to the loud ones). The most significant reason for the split, however, was the desire to give each team a different experience of the story event. But before I go into why, check out this quaint little chart (see pic) showing the different teams and the ideal path I wanted them to travel through...

via YouSuckAtTransmedia.com

A Call to Action for Alternate Reality Game Developers: 'embrace the casual player'

 

A Call to Action for Alternate Reality Game Developers: Play ARGs

June 7, 2010 · By Michael Andersen in Opinion 

In recent weeks, a number of alternate reality game developers have called for some changes. Brooke Thompson, the chair of the International Game Developer’s Association ARG special interest group, asked developers to make postmortems of completed games publicly available to foster an environment for constructive criticism. No Mimes Media co-founder and ARG Netcast host Steve Peters asked developers to concentrate on creating compelling player experiences as opposed to relying on free giveaways to generate buzz. And now, I’m throwing my hat into the ring.

Play alternate reality games.

Whether you’re an aspiring developers or one with a number of successful campaigns under your belt, you should be playing ARGs as often as you can. Take the time to go through the experience of discovery, and remind yourself what excited you about transmedia and alternate reality games by experiencing the communities that develop firsthand. People enmeshed in the television industry will still go home and watch television: after all, Joss Whedon is a self-professed GLEEk, and George Broussard and Scott Miller (formerly of 3D Realms) love World of Warcraft. What makes alternate reality games so different?

The answer I hear most frequently when I pose that question is “time.” There’s a perception that playing alternate reality games demands extensive time commitments that developers don’t have. And since ARGs have indefinite lengths, it can be even harder to commit to a game. However, if you find yourself unable to drop in and interact with an ongoing game, I would argue that’s a design flaw that you should internalize. Assuming that all ARG players have large blocks of time to dedicate to your game is a dangerous assumption that limits your audience to players dedicated to your game to the exclusion of almost everything else.  And making that assumption feeds the stereotype that gamers are people with shallow pockets and lots of time on their hands. Based on anecdotal evidence, that is far from the truth. However, if game designers continue to operate on that assumption by creating games that are largely inaccessible without absolute dedication to a single game, it may become an unfortunate reality.

 Every ARG should have actionable and entertaining elements that can be enjoyed with relatively little knowledge of the game’s intricacies. And the best ARGs tend to provide these opportunities at regular intervals. In Must Love Robots, players were given the opportunity to save (or destroy) robot-kind by mixing up a suicide soda at Subway by pressing 8335 (or 5338) and posting the video on YouTube. In Chain Factor, players could uncover error message puzzles and control the fate of the world by playing the highly addictive flash game, Drop7. And in Repo Men, players were provided a steady stream of photographs and videos to parse for clues that might lead to capturing the four runners. All of these opportunities involved negligible time commitments on the part of players, with the potential for substantial rewards with regards to advancing the plot.

This isn’t the first time I’ve called for game mechanics that embrace the casual player. But perhaps if ARG developers take the time to play for themselves, it will be the last time I make the request. So I repeat my call to arms.

To all the aspiring transmedia producers, puppetmasters, and puzzlemakers: play a game. Use the skills you’ve honed on the development side to tackle a difficult puzzle, create compelling user-generated content, or build a player resource. Interact with the communities that form around ARGs to know your audience better, and to reignite your creative spark. And apply the lessons you learned as a player to your next project, so that other developers can enjoy your project as well.

via argn.com

 

What Does the iPad Mean For Online Video? a great opportunity to modernize the video playback experience

Nick Wilson is CTO at Break Media, an entertainment community for men. He's spent the last two decades building products that leverage digital content and is a recognized innovator in the digital entertainment field. He's excited about Break.com being one of the first HTML5-enabled video sites.

Fast forward ahead to 2004, when YouTube and casual gaming sites burst onto the scene and we finally had killer applications that meant one thing: To experience the new wonders of the Web, one had no choice but to download Adobe's Flash browser plugin. After all, the two most popular browsers, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox (collectively with 80% market share), still have no native way to play a video or animation without installing Flash.

So the massive demand for video on the Web was enabled by a few de-facto standards that converged at just the right time, and was led by Adobe Flash, which is now installed on over 98% of all desktops and laptops. The trouble is that we engineers always viewed Flash as a transitionary technology: a platform that enabled a browser to do things that couldn't be done using the archaic Internet standards of HTML and JavaScript alone.

Every transitionary technology reaches a peak (98% adoption is a pretty good peak!) and eventually declines as newer developer-friendly technologies with better standards compliance take hold. Of course, with Flash being so ubiquitous on desktops and laptops it will be years before developers ditch it all together. But the desktop isn't where the next battle for video will be fought - rather it will be the new breed of platform and mobile devices like smartphones, tablets and set-top boxes - all of which have limited processing power and little to no ability for a user to download and install plugins like Flash.

ipad cdp.png

With the newest crop of browsers, principally Apple Safari and Google Chrome (soon to be joined by Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9), come a new set of capabilities based upon existing standards: HTML, JavaScript, and H.264 video playback. Using this trinity of technologies, it's possible to engineer a completely immersive video playback experience that's indistinguishable from a Flash-based player to the user, but is far faster and easier to develop and is supported out of the box within the browser.

The arrival of the iPad unquestionably puts the fate of online video - and the means by which it is distributed - center-stage. It's unsurprising that Apple's newest baby, the iPad, would follow in the footsteps of its older sibling, the iPhone, by relying on the browser to handle video rather than allowing a Flash plugin. But there's one critical difference: The iPad allows an embedded video playback experience, so the video can appear within a normal Web page without having to go full-screen as with the iPhone.

This seemingly minor difference, coupled with Safari's mature HTML5 implementation, means that a website can be modified to work on the iPad and can retain all of the functionality of a Flash-based player but with a developer-friendly HTML and JavaScript implementation. Provided that your videos are already encoded in H.264, modifying a video playback page to be iPad-compatible should not take more than a day or so (see the iPad screenshot above). Adding some iPad-specific features such as pinch-to-zoom with auto page rearrangement (impossible to do in Flash) take longer, but are still very straightforward to implement.

And what about the online video economy, with its Flash-based pre-roll videos and overlay advertising units? Well, with some clever coding they can work just fine on the iPad, too. Transcoding video ads into H.264 is a straightforward process, and ad units such as a "video bug" (those pop-up messages that show at the bottom of a video) can easily be reprogrammed to work in HTML5. When we combine the in-video units like preroll and video bug along with non-Flash IAB-standard ad units, there are plenty of opportunities to monetize a video view impression.

So the iPad without Flash, rather than presenting a problem for online video, presents a great opportunity to modernize the video playback experience, supporting the unique and immersive user experience that the iPhone started and the iPad will continue and enhance.

So the iPad without Flash, rather than presenting a problem for online video, presents a great opportunity to modernize the video playback experience, supporting the unique and immersive u