Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales http://1001tales.posterous.com tracing the roots & tendrils of storytelling today posterous.com Fri, 05 Nov 2010 03:48:00 -0700 Great Summary from Tom Sawyer of Power to the Pixel's tips for cross-media entertainment / pervasive game creation « The Tom Sawyer Effect http://1001tales.posterous.com/great-summary-from-tom-sawyer-of-power-to-the http://1001tales.posterous.com/great-summary-from-tom-sawyer-of-power-to-the

We’ve already shared some of the best case-studies Power to the Pixel cross-media conference as part of the London Film Festival, here is the promised round up of the insights and advice that were given on the night.We’ll add in our own thoughts following another pervasive Winterwell event last weekend soon!

Liz Rosenthal – CEO of Power to the Pixel

The way that consumers are consuming entertainment is changing… stories are being told, delivered, and shared across different platforms but also the viewer is being given different degrees and types of influence on the story. there are more ways to tell a story than ever before, but there are many more ways to receive one. New audiences are accessing and switching between different platforms – but most broadcasters are still looking for delivery on just one channel. It’s time to change that…

Michel Reihlac - Executive Director at Arte France Cinema

  • Play is circular – you can start again at any point;
  • play is open – you can become something or someone different
  • play is freedom – you don’t have to do anything that is asked of you
  • The most powerful tool to get people interfacing with a story is status. Cash or material rewards are ineffective
  • There are four types of players – achievers (use fair play to win); socialisers (are not playing to win, but to be playful); explorers (like to experience the game for its own worth) and killers (don’t just want to win, but want everyone else to lose)

What defines a game? it needs to be

  • fictitious (different to real life somehow)
  • separate (limited and contained within its own world)
  • regulated (by rules. obviously)
  • unpreddictable (with different outcomes possible)
  • fun (possible in many different ways)
  • free to join or leave (opt-in)
  • non-productive (not commercially based)

Mike Monello – Co-creator of the Blair Witch Project and founder of Campfire

Gave us an overview of designing for communal experiences

  • Make it tangible
  • Foster a sense of discovery
  • Make it personal
  • Build a world larger than your characters

From what he was sayin he seemed to have a sixth rule which he didn’t list:

  • To allow the players room to add to the experiences themselves (there, I just added that!)

Maureen Mchugh. Veteran cross-media writer and leader of – Nomime media

We are a young and naive artform. We copy older artforms – videogames, and – *even older* – film.

As a result we dont have our own conventions yet. we rely on conventions from these older platforms in order to make people comfortable and not be overwhelmed by the noise from multiple platforms.

Maureen said a lot more, but I was too wrapped up in it to make so many notes.

Lance Weiler – writer, director and one of the best known game-makers in the business

  • Story gameplay and community come together to create a social entertainment environment.
  • Stories have been controlled for a long time by the few.
  • the player wants to put their finger on the pond and watch the ripple
  • Take time to evaluate the story
  • Ask hard questions – why should anyone care about what you’re doing?
  • Let go of a single point of view
  • consider how to show not tell
  • make it easy for the audience to become collaborators
  • dont let the world get in the way of the story

 

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Tue, 01 Jun 2010 21:11:13 -0700 Part 6 Using Interactivity |Maureen McHugh's final installment http://1001tales.posterous.com/part-6-using-interactivity-maureen-mchughs-fi http://1001tales.posterous.com/part-6-using-interactivity-maureen-mchughs-fi

How then, to create an interactive experience that is also scripted? There are a couple of answers to that.

Of all of the aspects of making a transmedia project, writing is the most flexible. The place where the audience is most likely to affect the story is in websites and in email responses. This can range from referring to something that the audience has emailed to a character, or left as a message on an answering machine (more likely the former than the latter, because it is a lot easier and takes a lot less time to scan 300 emails for content than to listen to 300 voice mails, and these projects are usually run by a very small crew) to actually using audience speculation as a plot detail. During The Beast, two different graphic production guys working on two unrelated websites picked stock photos of the same woman to use on the site. The audience noticed the mistake.

On the email thread where they posted about the mistake, they eventually came up with a reason. The character, who worked for a research company called Donutech, had moonlighted by selling her likeness to a company that made androids. The idea was such a good one that the people creating the experience (called puppetmasters by the audience) incorporated it into the story. They put something in (I don’t remember if it was an email or what it was) that dramatized the scenario worked out by the audience.

Unfortunately, if the audience corrects a mistake, they don’t know about the effect they’ve had on the story until after the story is over when the creators tell them. It’s an odd interaction that doesn’t feel interactive.

Interaction, promised by computers and the internet, isn’t really very sophisticated yet. Anyone who has ever suffered through a dialogue tree in a video game knows that. (Video games are developing conventions to avoid conversations between the player and npcs, specifically because of this.) Phone and text parsers make mistakes, the way spell checkers make mistakes. Language is slippery, flexible, difficult. Programming is advancing but Eliza doesn’t really feel human yet.

The ideal is the holodeck, of course. An artificial intelligence that responds to the audience, changing the plot, running the characters, making the story adapt to actions.

In the interim, we transmedia creators are all waiting for widespread augmented reality. We are looking forward to a time when we can tag the world, and leave a trail of messages that you can see, written on walls, in subways, on sidewalks, when looking through your phone.

And we are trying to create our breakthrough, our Grand Theft Auto or Gone With the Wind.

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Tue, 04 May 2010 04:59:58 -0700 Part 3 A New Frontier in Storytelling | MimeFeed http://1001tales.posterous.com/part-3-a-new-frontier-in-storytelling-mimefee http://1001tales.posterous.com/part-3-a-new-frontier-in-storytelling-mimefee

As I said in Part 1, because the artform takes stories and shatters them into pieces, it’s a lot easier for the audience to put the story back together if it’s a kind of story they recognize. If it’s, in other words, a conventional narrative. So, say, detective mysteries tend to make pretty decent transmedia stories. In print stories, I like to break conventions, use less well understood conventions, and generally fart around. In transmedia, I’ve had to learn that I can make the character as complex as I want, but the structure of the narrative better be pretty simple.

The funny thing about transmedia storytelling is that for all it’s reliance on conventions, the artform itself doesn’t yet have many established conventions. And the ones that it has are probably conventions that will fall away as audiences learn the artform and as technology gets better.

For example, right now in connecting the pieces of the story, we often use puzzles. An audience member watches a video and in the video, the character mentions a particular kind of bike lock and asks that the audience member help him get it open. The audience member googles the make of bike lock and discovers it can be opened using a bic pen. When the audience member emails that information, it triggers the next chunk of story. That particular puzzle is simple. But the puzzles are often much more complex—ciphers, codes, hidden messages.

This particular structure was very successful in a breakout transmedia work, the ARG for Steven Spielberg’s AI. Elan Lee, Jordan Weisman, and Sean Stewart built a story which was gated by puzzles. When they created the work, known now as The Beast ARG but nameless when they created it (ARGs don’t have title pages), they did not for a moment think that all transmedia stories would be a series of websites and email communications gated by puzzles. A community of about 3,000 active members and 10,000 total followers came together to ‘play’ this story. (One player said about ARGs, ‘they’re a game in which you play a person exactly like yourself except you pretend that the story you are following is real.’) That community was unexpected. The collaborative work of solving puzzles—morse code hidden in a sound file of water dripping from a faucet, clues hidden in jpg images, messages in website source files, etc.—became the pleasure of the experience for some of the audience.

They enjoyed it so much that when it was over, several of them created their own grassroots transmedia internet experiences, modeled on The Beast ARG, including puzzles. But enjoying puzzles, like chess or bridge, is not really everyone’s cup of tea. A lot of people liked Myst, but the majority of them never finished it.

Making a transmedia project, like making a movie, can be expensive. We often do video and audio recordings. Streaming requires bandwidth. Websites have to be designed. Email and phone calls to thousands are expensive. Creating events and experiences in cities is also expensive. A project can easily run to the low seven figures. That’s a million dollars. Chump change in the movie industry, but not something you find lying around in the couch cushions. To raise that kind of money we need to reach a pretty large audience, but making transmedia narrative dependent on puzzles eliminates a vast percentage—probably the majority of that audience.

Nobody is quite sure how to make money from these things but if the audience doesn’t grow, no one is going to make money from these things. Transmedia projects have attracted hundreds of thousands of ‘hits’, that is, websites have had hundreds of thousands different people come to them, but no media project has yet broken out into mainstream awareness. There is no transmedia equivalent to Twilight, or Grand Theft Auto, no Lady Gaga or even Mad Men. There will be (and when there is, a lot of the people reading this post will be rolling their eyes and saying ‘New? New? I’ve been doing this for years!’) But something that depends on people figuring out morse code is not going to break out. (Although I wouldn’t have put my money on American Idol, so I am not an especially accurate authority on matters cultural.) But to me the puzzles are a limiting function. Might there always be some transmedia projects that use puzzles? Sure. There are video games that use puzzles. But there are lots of other kinds of video games, and there are lots of other kinds of transmedia narratives.

Maureen McHugh's 3rd post on New Frontiers in Storytelling is up on No Mimes Media

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Wed, 21 Apr 2010 20:57:20 -0700 Part 2 – Conventions | MimeFeed http://1001tales.posterous.com/part-2-conventions-mimefeed http://1001tales.posterous.com/part-2-conventions-mimefeed

Human beings construct narrative. It’s what we do. We impose meaning and cause and effect on events. We say, this happened and then because of or it, that happened. We do it even when it’s not true—which is how places like Vegas stay in business. If you’re flipping a coin, and it comes up heads nine times in a row, what are the odds on the tenth toss? 50-50. Statistics are not narrative.

How we construct those narratives is strongly affected by culture. The stories that are told to us teach us to expect things to happen in certain ways. Some of those conventions are probably more universal than others. I suspect that teaching fables, like Aesop, are common across cultures. Stories of spirits—he didn’t realize it was a ghost until/ he woke up and the beautiful mansion was really a ruin/ the parents told him their daughter had died a year ago/ are also probably fairly widespread. Maybe the story of virtue rewarded, which is a kind of teaching story (do the right thing) is also fairly universal. I’m speculating here. Cowboys and cops are a kind of subset of the convention of the hero. But it is neither a truth nor a universal convention that a car, flying off a cliff, explodes spontaneously and cataclysmically in midair. That convention is one of American TV and movies.

According to Nielsen, the average American watches over four hours of television a day. Insert the usual caveats about averages and Nielsen ratings here, because I’m not sure how people manage this, given that so many of us have jobs and school. But we watch a lot of TV. Even given that some of that is news and sports, there’s still a lot of storytelling in there. Kids watch more. Again, according to Nielsen (caveat, caveat) kids spend 900 hours a year in school and watch 1500 hours of tv a year. That’s almost six hours a day. Making narrative may be a human condition, but I have to wonder, has any culture ever been subjected to so much storytelling, by so many different storytellers, in history?

It makes us very savvy about narrative conventions. Think about how many times you walk into a room and a television show you know is on. You don’t really know the exact time, but you glance at the screen and, say, Dr. House is sitting in his office, tossing the ball into the air, and he gets up and limps out. You know it’s somewhere between quarter of and five minutes of the hour (if you have watched House a couple of times, and maybe even if you haven’t.) We know the conventions of shows. We know when the detective is about to get the murderer to confess. We know when the diagnosis is a blind alley. We know the moment when the sitcom star realizes that they are in a situation (which is why they are called situation comedies.) We know the rhythms of the stories. The same is true of pop songs. I lived in China many many years ago, and when I listened to classical Chinese music, one of the things that struck me was that I never knew when the song was going to end. I had no internal model for the structure of the music. Chinese pop songs, on the other hand, were much more familiar to me, even though they were being sung in a language I barely spoke. They had refrains and bridges.

Television shows and movies have very strong structural conventions. Over time, watching and learning these conventions has had an interesting affect on TV and movies. Television shows today, like CSI, present three story arcs in the same time period that a show like Starsky and Hutch would present one story arc. Some of the events on TV are now abstracted rather than dramatized or explained.

What does this have to do with transmedia storytelling?

In my case, a lot. (Cont’d in Part 3, next Wednesday)

Another excellent post from Maureen McHugh (I can hear the ghost of Mamet in the opening - but no wait - he's still with us! phew!)

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Wed, 07 Apr 2010 21:22:42 -0700 Storytelling and the Illusion of Authenticity | MimeFeed http://1001tales.posterous.com/storytelling-and-the-illusion-of-authenticity http://1001tales.posterous.com/storytelling-and-the-illusion-of-authenticity
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Maureen McHugh on the illusion of authenticity & transmedia - well worth reading

"...Almost every project I’ve worked on has drawn on a completely new and therefore naïve audience. While there are conventions to ARGs—the countdown, for example—the stories seem most effective when the plot of them is rather conventional. Too unconventional and the novelty of form and story feels overwhelming for the audience. But if the audience has a sense of where they are in a story—oh this is the part of the story where something criminal happens, oh this is the part of the story where the hero rescues the scientist, etc—then they can follow along, just as everyone knew that crossed arms and hands flat against breast meant that the heroine had been dealt a harrowing emotional blow. But just as Duse’s doing it with the boy’s arms felt fresh, learning that the girl has been kidnapped in an email feels intimate, startling, novel.

So achieving ‘authenticity’ requires novelty in an established convention. The audience needs some level of comfort and some elements of surprise. For now, Transmedia is pretty much always surprising for the audience. I suspect that in ten or twenty years, we may have to work harder at it.

I, for one, intend to milk this moment for all it’s worth."

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