Reality ends here: A (trans-)media making alternate reality game for cinema students | 21st Century Scholar
Posted by Jeff Watson - excerpt:
"Reality ends here: A (trans-)media making alternate reality game for cinema students
The strength of the Collegeology project I mention in my 21st Century Scholar posts is intimately tied to our collaboration with Tracy Fullerton, Director of the USC Game Innovation Lab, and her game design team. Jeff Watson’s blog below describes a fascinating project that illustrates just why Tracy and her students are at the forefront of game design. –Zoe Corwin
Just over three weeks ago, we stopped the countdown clock and launched SCA Reality (a.k.a. Reality Ends Here, a.k.a The Game), a collaborative production alternate reality game that takes place over 15 weeks at the USC School of Cinematic Arts (SCA). Since then, groups of students from across all divisions of the SCA have banded together into groups large and small, lasting and temporary, to collaborate on making media artifacts based on creative prompts generated by the collectible trading cards that are at the center of our game. The thing has a momentum all its own, and it’s exhausting to keep up with. But as anyone who has ever run a live action pervasive game or ARG (alternate reality game) would know, it’s also exhilarating and crazy fun.
Breaking down boundaries
SCA Reality is a collaborative production game wherein players earn points and “level up” by creating and completing mediamaking challenges. As players cross point thresholds, both in terms of overall points and weekly points, they receive customized “trailheads” leading them to intimate and offbeat encounters with SCA alumni, artists, and other industry professionals. This reward system, combined with the intrinsic fun of creative sandboxing and performance, leads to serendipitous peer discovery and collaboration across the various divisions of the cinema school. Transcending these divisional boundaries is one of the primary mandates of the game—we’ve gone to lengths to make sure that players are not identified by their major, but rather by the kinds of things they say and do in the game. So far our approach seems to be working: players from the screenwriting division are making absurdist video games, writers and animators are working on live action films, production and interactive students are telling stories with “character artifacts” and fake Facebook profiles, and students across the board are quickly embracing a cross-platform or transmedial vision of the future of entertainment.
A Procedural Creative Prompting System
The game is driven by a card-based “procedural prompting system”: by sharing, trading, and combining cards, players create challenges within the constraints of a connectivity play mechanic.
As designers, we knew from the start that it was important that the challenges in our game come from the players, not us. We knew that a set of challenges curated “from on high” would take away many crucial aspects of agency and authorship from our players—and since those things are at the heart of the kind of creative and performative impulses that underly engagement with our game, we knew we needed to protect them. We also believe that players should author the challenges themselves because in our experience, doing so is an integral part of what’s fun and engaging about these kinds of games. In this sense, Reality Ends Here has a lot in common with other open-ended collaborative production games such as SF0 or Super Going.
On the other hand, we felt that a total lack of constraints could be hobbling to creativity, particularly for players who are not already ensconced in strong “maker” or DIY communities and practices. As Orson Welles famously said, “the enemy of art is the lack of limitations.” Brainstorming, story workshopping, or any kind of creative spitballing without clear constraints and anchors will often drift into outright confusion. To address this issue, we devised a simple card game that structures and limits creative brainstorming in a manner similar to a Tarot deck or an idea generator like Grow a Game. Here’s how it works (see above):..."