I just heard that CBS has announced a partnership with Eqal Studios, who are the folks behind Lonelygirl15.
Huh. Good for them.
I wonder if this means anything for the ARG genre or not? It's not epochal change, but it is, at least, change.
I just stumbled upon Twistori, a site that pulls anonymized Twitter updates based on... well... just go see it. It's mesmerizing and comforting, little cross-sections of other people's hearts and minds. This is nothing short of a work of art, though the artists, Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs, call it the first phase of a social experiment. I wonder if there's really any clear distinction between the two anymore?
This is one more to add to my list of unusual uses people are finding for Twitter, along with The Good Captain, which has concluded, and my own Madame Zee project. There's certainly a lot more to come.
Thanks to @playbe for tweeting about it!
I just read a transcript of a talk by Clay Shirky, who has recently written a book called Here Comes Everybody. It's getting a lot of buzz, you've probably heard of it from someone besides me.
Anyway, there's a tidbit at the end of this transcript that gave me chills:
We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?"
That, my friends, is as close to a manifesto of digital culture as I have ever seen. There's also a video of his talk, if you're the kind what looks at online video:
Many thanks to Making Light for bringing this to my attention. You can bet dollars to doughnuts I'm going to be going out and picking up that book.
I've just discovered that the Reading is Fundamental program is being jeopardized by serious funding cuts. (Apparently I'm a little late to the party; honestly I'm not sure how it's escaped my attention as long as all this.) Now, ordinarily I try to keep political and professional matters mostly separate, but in this case, the politics cut so close to the heart of what makes me who I am, personally and professionally, that I just can't let it go.
If I may quote myself from elsewhere:
My life has been incredibly shaped by the power of the word, and it would be a damn shame if a child missed out on the kinds of opportunities I've enjoyed because his or her mother was smart enough to know that buying a book isn't as important as buying the milk. Please contact your congressional representation and ask them to preserve the funding for this venerable and well-regarded initiative.
So yeah. Click the link, follow the instructions, happy happy. And thanks.
I'll be participating in a panel on alternate reality games at an NYC IGDA shindig in New York City on Wednesday, May 14. The event is taking place from 6:30 to 9pm at the New School -- specifically Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang Building, 65 West 11th Street, 5th floor (enter at 66 West 12th Street).
I'm really excited about this, because I haven't had a chance to see a lot of the New York IGDA people in over a year, and because I do believe there are a couple of other terrific panelists lined up to participate that I'm excited to meet my own self. (Though I'm not 100% sure who else is confirmed, so I'm not naming names!)
There is limited space at the venue, so if you plan to go, please, please RSVP via the online form and reserve your spot.
Hope to see you there!
I just stumbled across a really interesting and somewhat sordid accounting of the never-released sequel to Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy via Wonderland. It's a fascinating look into how game design can go wrong (or any project, really). I could swear I've written some of those emails myself!
It's also a useful reminder that we're not the first group of people to push at the boundaries of story and technology. In particular, the bit about trying out a third-person point of view pushed this home for me. And really, so much of what we do is informed by the revolutionary storyforms that went before us. As good old Uncle Isaac once said, "If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
I'd like to offer my congratulations to my colleagues in Canada who have received Banff World Television Award nominations.
Stitch Media is nominated in the category of mobile program enhancement forThe Border: Interactive, and Xenophile Media is nominated in the category of interactive program enhancement for "Total Drama Island."
Great work, guys. Here's hoping for big wins!
I've been playing a little game on Facebook called Packrat. (OK, I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but there it is anyway. So sue me.)
There's an interesting sociological phenomenon going on here, though, and I thought it deserved a few minutes of prodding. See, on the surface of it, this game is designed to be absolutely cut-throat competitive. The object of the game is to collect matching sets of digital picture cards; there's a collection of candy-themed items, for example, and a tiki set, a zoo set, and so on. To do this, you can purchase items with money you randomly accrue while looking through your friends' current packs... or you can filch an item from a friend (and leave another item in return).
If you don't want an item taken, you can lock it by buying a lock and playing a minigame -- but another player can always try to break the lock by playing the same minigame and scoring better than you. Once you find five items from a matching set, you can vault those five things, adding it to your permanent collection and making them unstealable. But there are, in every set, numerous items that can only be built by acquiring and combining other items. So for example, to make a hula dancer, I'd need to combine a coconut palm, a grass skirt and a lei.
Some items are very scarce, and never sold in markets at all. And there are several rats -- basically faux friend profiles -- that will try to take your stuff; and there are some items that can only be built by combining several different levels of items. (There's an item in the Montezuma collection, for example, that can only be built by combining 27 maizes, 27 gold coins, and one rare two-headed serpent.)
With this setup, you'd expect to see a lot of nasty behavior, right? Lots of stealing that rare item from under a friend's nose, intense competition for the same super-rare item from an expired set that you might never see again. If this were how the game was currently being played (at least among my peers -- and I have no doubt it's being played that way by other groups) then it would be absolutely zero fun to me and I'd have stopped playing as soon as it became apparent.
In practice, though I see people making sets and completing collections in a community-based, collaborative fashion. If I'm working on the shoe set and I need the rare Fellini Eight Point Five pink pump to drop, I tell my friends, and they keep an eye out for me. If a rat turns up with something I need, a friend will steal it for me; and if one of their friends has the shoe but doesn't need it, because they don't want to collect that set, or because they've already vaulted that item, then it's going to make its way toward me.
I even have one friend who's working toward vaulting a set of items from a collection that expired in early March -- and he's got four of the five items he needs, because he has a broad network of people looking for him.
I'm just fascinated at how this really friendly, supportive community has grown up around something that at first presents as an astonishingly competitive game. I wonder if this was a conscious choice on the part of the designer, or just a decision to build up a more satisfying set of rules around the existing framework of the game on the part of the player community?
If somebody knows the designer for Packrat and could put me in touch, drop me a line. I'd love to hear about it.
A few weeks ago, The Good Captain, an adaptation of a Herman Melville story for Twitter, finally wrapped up. This story was written by Jay Bushman of The Loose-Fish Project.
The surprising thing about the Good Captain was how quickly it became a thread positively thrumming with tension. At first, it was admittedly a little difficult to follow the story, and I found myself tracking back frequently to make sure I really understood what was going on. But after the first several updates, as the scene was set and the story proper got underway, I began to learn some valuable lessons about tension and pacing.
The lesson is this: Giving your audience only the sparest taste at once with long pauses in between amps up the tension in a story like nobody's business. I should've known this from my Cloudmakers days, of course. That game primarily updated on Tuesdays, and the community would whip itself into a frenzy with anticipation of new content each week. But as it turns out, this effect works with more modest amounts of content, as well, and maybe even better.
That's because the anticipation gives each tiny piece a disproportionate significance. If I had been able to read this story straight through, I would have breezed through sentences like "Now I feel silly and I chuckle at myself. Dziga’s jumpiness must be getting to me." But when it's all I had to add to the story at once, I would find myself sifting through the story in my head word by word, trying to work out where it was all going. Was it foreshadowing? Was it a sign that something was about to happen? Could I take it at face value? What the heck was going on, here?!
And so this medium, tiny bites of story delivered intermittently, provided a fantastic vehicle for delivering incrementally more and more tense bits of story, and then, at the end, unwinding it all in a few short days with the final explanation.
Good work, guys. Can't wait to see your next one.
...since our journey down the rabbithole first began with that tiny detail: Jeanine Salla, Sentient Machine Therapist.
Happy Birthday, Cloudmakers.
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