Merging+Media 2011 Transmedia Lab

So, it looks like I got into the Merging+Media lab being held in Vancouver on April 28th and 29th, 2011. I’m pretty excited about it, only 24 people from across Canada have gotten into the lab which is going to be lead by Anita Ondine. She’s got a lot of experience in developing transmedia properties for film and is currently producing “Pandemic” for Lance Weiler’s next film “HiM”. He’s currently one of my favourite independent film producers as he’s got the business savvy that has allowed him produce his own films, distribute them and make money without ever having to deal with a distribution company. This has been the largest roadblock I’ve encountered to getting transmedia properties up and running in Canada so I’m looking forward to the feedback and expertise in the room.

It sounds like I’m the only one in Alberta who got into the lab, everyone else is from Toronto and Vancouver. Given the increasing interest in taking storytelling out of traditional media, I’m expecting to hear about a lot of new and creative approaches. It will also be interesting to see how the changing hardware market is going to influence how media is going to be produced and consumed as well. It always comes down a great story but it is becoming a very interesting time to be a storyteller.

QR Codes become a nifty way of distributing media, goodbye parts bin…

QR Codes, or “Quick Response” codes are a two dimensional barcode that contains information that can be read by a scanner or smartphone. You may have seen them around, they are those black squares with a seemingly random collection of pixels on them. They kind of look like an early video game from Atari. They were initially developed by Toyota to quickly provide information so that parts could be tracked in the manufacturing cycle.

They’ve now become a fast way to provide information to people in the form of text or URLs. A smart phone can scan a QR Code and automatically show you the text it represents or a URL. You can then follow that URL to a website to get more information.

QR Codes are kind of cool because they’re fast and can pretty much take you anywhere on the web. If you are putting physical media out there, posters, postcards, business cards, whatever, you’ve got a quick way to let people investigate further. They don’t have to copy down URLs or try to type them in, just a quick scan with an smartphone camera and you’ve got all the information you need to continue.

The QR Code to the left will show you the URL for my PhD research site. It is the kind of thing that would be great on a business card or poster presentation at a conference. Those times when everyone is too busy to really hang onto another piece of paper, instead they have it in their phone for later. The same thing works for any kind of media campaign or trans-media narrative. You can create something that will generate some curiosity, even if it is a 12-foot tall cardboard hedgehog,  and then have a QR Code on the side that provides a pathway to start down the rabbit hole.

So, there’s another way to get catch the attention of your audience, no matter what you’re trying to do.

How-to make your own QR Code

If you want to try it yourself go check out: Kaywa, the have a QR Code generator that lets you make your QR code and they have a viewer available for download as well.

The DARPA Network Challenge

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has put out a challenge. Try to find ten 8-foot, red weather balloons located at ten fixed locations in the continental United States and then report their locations. This challenge has started a bit of a buzz in the ARG community and has led a number of influential figures to call for the gathering of the kinds of collective problem solving groups that appeared during The Beast and ilovebees. Groups, like The Cloudmakers, who solved the ARG The Beast, were able to sift through clues located throughout the web, solve puzzles presented in those clues and ultimately finish the game. The ARG community has long believed that they could deal with real world problems and approach them in ways that were quicker and more innovative than traditional approaches. If this latest call to action is taken up they might finally have a chance to prove it.

The idea that ARG players could deal with real-world problems isn’t new. The things that happened during game play started to get a few people interested in what an organized and motivated group of people could do with a real world problem. The Rand Corporation was just one of many who speculated about what could happen. Their 2004 report, Out of the Ordinary: Finding Hidden Threats by Analyzing Unusual Behavior, examined how a dynamic network of information in the hands of an ARG-like group could be used to identify a threat. They believed the same behaviour used by self-organizing ARG players could be used to sift through real information. The result would be patterns and meaning that would not be readily apparent otherwise.

I’ll be watching the chatter back on forth in the community to see where this goes in the next few weeks. It would be very interesting if the community took up the challenge and were able to step out of the world of alternate and into the pure reality.

We have a winner! And it is MIT so they are the ones that end up holding a giant $40,000 cheque. It appears that a formally organized institution was the most successful in taking up the challenge. There were some smaller groups that got up to 7 balloons and even some individuals who took on the challenge by themselves. It would have been nice to see a de-brief about HOW they actually found all those balloons but perhaps they are hanging onto those secrets for next time.

Productized ARGs

Another post on types of ARGs. The categories continue to be broken up based on their business models (or lack of one).  In this one I’ve updated the information on Xi, a PS3-based ARG from Sony.

Productized ARG projects are currently quite rare. They are based on a business model where the players pay a subscription fee for the game and are promised a high quality and innovative experience. Game companies have started to explore ARG as commercial properties and are following similar kinds of business models as commercial Massive Multiplayer Online (MMOs) games. There has been no real financial success so far so most game companies seem reluctant to risk millions of dollars on experimenting in this space.

Majestic (2001)

Electronic Arts decided that they would try to build a commercial ARG called Majestic. The goal of the game was to create an audience who would be willing to pay a monthly fee for a high quality ARG. The narrative was based on a shadow government conspiracy set in the United States. The players had to uncover the conspiracy and would be rewarded with new episodes of the story. The video segments were professionally developed and used recognizable Hollywood actors to fill roles within the story.

The game was originally put on hold after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks due to considerations over the content of the game. The game was completely cancelled in 2002 after EA announced there they did not have enough paying subscribers to continue with production.

Xi (2009)

Xi is the first ARG run through a game console. This ARG is based in Sony’s Home, a virtual world that is available to owners of a Sony PS3 game console. The game began in March, 2009.  It ran for 12 weeks from that point. The ARG can be started by going to the common meeting area in the virtual world and finding the spray painted symbol for Xi on one of the walls. The general premise was that underneath Home was another virtual world that was created by the alpha testers of the virtual space. Here’s a clip of some of the teaser video that would appear in Home and signaled the beginning of the campaign.

The symbol stayed in place for a few weeks, enough to generate curiosity among the inhabitants of Home. The hatch finally opened after a few weeks and players began to solve puzzles and find clues that appeared with the start of the ARG. Unraveling those puzzles gave the players access to the narrative and secret areas within the virtual world. The entire game is revealed in this video (spoiler alert).

The Xi ARG got quite a buzz among the community in Home. Given the success of the first ARG it would seem likely that another one will be launched on the PS3 in the future. I haven’t come across anything yet but I’ll make sure I update this post if anything appears.

It is interesting that Sony took an existing component of their game console and decided to turn it into an ARG. The reason that Home was developed in the first place was to create a social space and a media store of Sony products for users of the PS3 console. Now that they have successfully engaged that social space with a narrative and an Alternate Reality Game it will be very interesting to see how creative Sony can be in the future. They have access to a huge catalogue of media and artists, there should be no limit to what they can do with that material in both the virtual and the real world.

Babelgum Pixel New Media Pitchfest

I’m sure everyone has heard of, or been to, a Pitchfest. These kinds of events are like speed-dating for screenwriters and development executives. Usually a screenwriter will be trying to sell a concept or a script for a television series or a film in a very short amount of time, often a few minutes. The development executives are there to listen to the pitches in the hope of finding new material to make into creative properties. If it is an organized event they might offer some useful feedback, most often they’ll take your card and tell you that they’ll call. Maybe sometimes they actually do.

What is interesting is that media is changing very, very quickly. It would make sense that pitch sessions would start to become very different as well. One of the first attempts that I’ve come across happened in London just a few days ago. The Power to the Pixel festival in London has a pitch session this year aimed specifically at cross-media pitches. The Babel Pixel Pitch Award had 120 submissions from 14 different countries. The news release has a list of the 7 top entries that were able to pitch to a panel of judges. All of these pitches are an attempt to spread the story across multiple mediums but some of these are designed to be a lot more engaging. Of the seven entries that made it to the final pitch session, five of them explicitly define an Alternate Reality Game as a component of the pitch. Most of them have film, television and video game components as well but this idea of having a more complex vision of a creative project is an exciting and challenging new area for media.

What would have been as interesting as the pitches would be the panel they put together to evaluate them. It would need to have a lot more depth than a film or television Pitchfest. Those kinds of events are filled with the agents and development executives from film and television that often show up to these kinds of sessions. Most traditional media producers are firmly committed to a traditional, linear approach to creative properties. Instead, a cross-media Pitchfest would take a real multidisciplinary jury that would be able to communicate with each other using some semblance of a common language. Groups of individuals that can form a community of peers and talk about New Media proposals must be rather rare at the moment.  However, they can’t stay rare forever. The Babelgum Pixel Pitch event had a jury of 26 individuals from media, video games, film, television and academia. It was a huge number of people to evaluate the seven pitches. This may well be the size of a jury to evaluate these pitches as they are complex, multi-layered and cover a wide range of competencies. It will be interesting to see the evolution of these juries as they will need to evaluate these new breeds of narrative pitches and provide the kinds of feedback that are going to make it feasible to move them forward to development.

I’m looking forward to what comes out of this year’s pitchfest. I’m also hoping that some of these pitch sessions make it onto the web in video format so I can take a look at them in detail. Hopefully I’ll have a postmortem of those sessions for next week.

Halo 3 ODST: The Return of the Narrative

So I finally sat down and worked through Halo 3: ODST on friday night in co-op mode. The ODST stands for Orbital Drop Shock Troops and it is the latest in the Halo series of games. I’ve been playing the Halo series since Halo: Combat evolved came out for the xBox in 2001. Bungie Studios created the game and they had always been one of my favourite studios before they were purchased by Microsoft. I was eager to see what they had created. I wasn’t disappointed with the original game but I’ve been less than impressed with the sequels. ODST tried to do a few things a bit differently though. There was an attempt to weave a side-story into the gameplay in  a way that hasn’t been done in previous games. It seemed to be an attempt to bring in outside narratives that were developed through the Halo book series and the ARG ilovebees, done for the release of Halo 2.

Anyone not familiar with the ad campaign or the ODST game itself can see the live action promotion that builds the back story for one of the main characters in the game.

Using real characters and a cinematic styles similar to Saving Private Ryan was perhaps an attempt to move towards a more realistic game that was less like the Hollywood-style science fiction of the first games in the series. It was certainly a departure from the previous marketing done for the Halo franchise.

The gameplay begins in the year 2552, in the Kenyan city of New Mombasa. The main goal is to fight your way through the city which is full of The Covenant, an alien race who have invaded Earth. You play the role of a rookie soldier who moves through the city, finding fragments of the story of his squad-mates left behind in their equipment. He has become separated from them during the drop from orbit and the flashes of video he finds tells their story in the now deserted landscape of the city.

Another character in the game is the AI that controls the entire city. This AI has been damaged in the attack but still attempts to help the character in two ways. It provides clues and hints that are communicated through traffic signals and signs. It also provides pieces of a side story about a young woman, named Sadie, who is trying to get out of the city before the attack begins. These segments of story come through telephone booths around the city. They contain voice clips, traffic camera and security camera footage. The AI is trying to tell the story so it can explain why The Covenant have come to earth, specifically the Rift Valley part of eastern Africa. This clip shows the AI going through the attack and coming back to life as the ODST drop into the city.

It might seem that a side story within a game is nothing special but ODST has some interesting DNA. There were six novels written in the Halo universe that provide a greater level of depth to the universe and the characters in the game. These novels have received enough critical acclaim and sales that they continue to be published. The other interesting bit of history is the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) ilovebees that was created to promote Halo 2 before its release. The story in ilovebees revolved around a shipboard AI that had been damaged and was trying to re-integrate itself. It communicated through hacked websites and telephone lines as it tried to figure out why it had been damaged and why The Covenant was headed to earth. The ilovebees story begins to identify an artifact, buried on Earth, that The Covenant is trying to recover. The story ends with the realization that the artifact is designed to activate the Halo ring worlds located throughout the galaxy. If these are activated they will kill every sentient creature within the galaxy. The end of this story is where the game Halo 2 begins.

This apparently was no accident as Curtis Creamer, the executive producer on Halo 3: ODST tells that they were on a very tight development schedule (article). They were looking for story elements and they thought they could scavenge their earlier efforts in ilovebees to provide a vehicle for that story.

What is interesting is the tension between a game like Halo trying to be an epic and complex science fiction narrative and a fast moving first person shooter/ twitch game at the same time. The reviews so far would indicate that the side story has been received as an hour long distraction that slowed down players from moving through the game even faster. Most regard it as weak story that doesn’t add much to the game play. I think it is likely that most players really haven’t engaged in the Halo franchise for the story. The first copy of Halo sold over 10 million copies while only 100,000 copies of the first novel were sold. The ARG ilovebees was a complex and challenging game that involved solving very difficult puzzles and figuring out the sequence of hundreds of fragments of a radio play before the real story could be put together. It would seem that neither the novel or the ilovebees ARG really appealed to the hardcore gamers that were just looking to engage in another first person shooter that they could dominate and finish as quickly as possible.

This recent attempt by ODST to add in ARG-like elements into the game and build on the larger narrative on the novels was a great idea. I think what was missing was some way to allow those elements to remain separate from actual game play. They essentially forced the game player to deal with those elements even if they weren’t interested. It was critical to actually get through to the end of the game. Perhaps with the time and effort to build these side stories it was considered necessary to force the players to actually consume them. The design decisions may some day come out with a postmortem from the Microsoft development team. Regardless, I hope this will be the start of some consideration to allowing a more in-depth kind of experience to come out of a first-person shooter. If book sales are any indication, that might appeal to only 1% of the players of this kind of game. This might seem like a good argument to never even attempt this kind of design. It might also be a argument that the kinds of players who are interested in more in-depth narrative might actually be attracted to first person shooters rather than just dismissing them as linear, shallow experiences that quickly grow boring.

Whatever does happen next in the Halo franchise it will be interesting to see how much experimentation they are willing to allow. They are driven by profit like any other company but hopefully there will be some room to allow for some of the interactive elements of narrative to grow. The advances in physics engines and graphics rendering have overshadowed most game development so it is time for some of that creative energy to be channeled into creating an interactive narrative that goes beyond the typical cut scenes. Halo 3: ODST has tried and I’d like to see these kinds of attempts at new design approaches continue. Having a full ARG integrated into a first person shooter would be be one of those experiments. Obviously some people at Microsoft are thinking this way or ODST would have been the same disappointing re-mix of Halo that showed up in Halo 2 and Halo 3. A creative approach might take games like Halo 3:ODST to a memorable place where the story holds the player beyond the four hours it apparently takes them to blast through the entire experience.

The New Audience

The Audience

A considerable amount of time and effort are put into understanding the audience of any film. For any commercial film, this is critical to the future survival of a writer, studio and production staff as the ticket sales from the audience will determine its level of success or failure. For a film that is more focused on impacting an audience than the financial returns from ticket sales, there is still a need to engage their audience so the narrative or exposition will actually reach them.

The filmmaker often thinks about their audience in terms of demographic. Their age, their spoken language, their gender, their culture, the multiple factors that define that amorphous group of the potential audience. The new options for presenting a narrative to the audience have added another dimension, engagement.

Measuring the Audience

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), cross-media narratives and trans-media are all names given to very similar kinds of storytelling. All of these design approaches allow a story to be presented across many different types of media (see ARGs). One of the important elements that make them so different is the audience that actively engages in the story as it unravels. This audience needs to be constantly looking for new pieces of the story, solving puzzles and mysteries as they make their way through to the end. When writing and creating these kinds of stories there are some new aspects of this audience that need to be considered. I came across a marketing report that was trying to understand a similar kind of problem (Marketing’s new metric: engagement-Report). The marketing industry is dealing with a serious issue, passive viewers of their marketing messages are becoming increasingly adept at completely ignoring the message entirely.

They came up with three categories of potential customers for brands based on levels on engagement. The categories work well for ARGs as well and are worth considering as you both write and implement any form of narrative where engagement is a component of the production. The three categories are: Passive Participant, Semiactive Participant and Brand Zealot. These categories relate to the level of interaction the audience has with the production you have created. Each of the categories has four attributes: Involvement, Interaction, Intimacy and Influence. These are all different kinds of audience members that may or may not become part of your production. It depends entirely on the type of story you have created and the way you have designed your production. These categories all have their own consideration.

Passive Participant

Their level of involvement is low, they might only visit a website once or twice a month. The level of interaction is low, they will usually only view any content that is obviously available and they will read comments, made by others, about the ARG production. They are not a huge fan of the ARG but there is enough interest to bring them back to the production. Their level of influence is low, it is unlikely to be bringing others into the storyline. They are not likely to have ever signed-up for any part of the ARG and are likely lurking through the easily accessible content and open discussions forums.

Semiactive Participant

You get to be called semiactive when you actually start engaging in the ARG production. This means you’ve signed up for any lists to get current information and you’ve been active in the player forums.  More than just leaving a few comments, this type of player has actively engaged in the dialogue about how to decipher existing clues, pieces of media or to try to determine what is coming next in the narrative.

Brand Zealot (or, in this case, the Harcore Gamer)

There are going to be avid fans of your ARG (hopefully). These are the ones who will be waiting for each new clue or media fragment and quickly move through the content that you thought would take a week…in about eight hours. They are your more valuable audience member as they will not only be active in moving your narrative forward for the community but they will be recruiting their peers to join in the experience. These types of audience members will often expect extremely challenging puzzles to solve that will move the story forward to the next turning point. They will often report back to a larger community about whether or not the challenges are sufficient to actual warrant more hardcore gamers from getting involved.

The Problem

You can target your narrative and ARG towards any of these groups and hope to gather other groups in on the periphery. The problem is that building an experience for one type of audience will only attract a small number of other types. The hardcore gamers might appreciate the extremely difficult challenges you put in place for them but you will lose almost all of the casual players and most of the semiactive ones.

The Solution

The solution then seems to be a narrative that is complex, multi-layered and can provide a meaningful experience for all audience members. You want to be able to provide a path that will give every potential player an entry point into the story that will encourage them to go all the way to the end. It will be very much like having three different cuts of a film, all aimed at pleasing a different type of audience. More than just footage, an ARG will also need to understand different types of interactivity and challenge as well. There isn’t going to be a director’s bible on how to do this, each new story is going to have to explore how this is going to work.

Screenwriting and cross-media

Writing a script for an ARG is very much like writing a script for a film. The narrative has to be engaging and cohesive and tell a story. The major difference is that you are not always thinking visually about how that script is going to be implemented. When the story development is written up in blogs, emails and text messages you need to think about the story from the perspective of the character themselves. You still need to be aware that whatever is created needs to be able to tell the story, not provide an explanation of the narrative. Whatever is written needs to speak for itself and allow the viewers to develop the narrative themselves.

In many ways the writing is more intimate and confessional in nature. Although many ARGs have video and audio segments, they also rely on original writing from the characters themselves. Rather than having the narrative interpreted and edited they are relying on the original source material for much of the story itself.

The script outline will need to be taken and broken into scenes that can be accommodated within the structure of the ARG. Once this basic breakdown occurs, the script can be written into a full 90-120 page script. The contents of the script will reflect the affordances of the media that will be used to cover that segment of the script. For example, a personal narrative of a character could be captured in a vlog or amateur video. The nature of that media would need to be reflective of the storytelling approach being taken by the ARG. If the project is meant to be told exclusively as a first person perspective of the story, there would be no professionally shot footage of those scenes.

ARGs and Independent Film

There have been several creative approaches to using ARGs and ARG-like promotions for independent film. The rational for using ARGs as a promotional tool is the high cost of conventional advertising, marketing and distribution for film. Lance Weiler, an independent filmmaker has created ARGs for both his films, The Last Broadcast (1998) and Head Trauma (2006). In both of these films he tried to take the narrative out of the film and weave it into an alternative narrative online in order to attract an audience.

The Last Broadcast (1998)

This small, independent film followed a documentary filmmaker as he investigates the murders of two cable show hosts. The film pre-dated The Blair Witch Project (1999) and is very similar in terms of the way the story was handled. The story was about some public broadcasters who disappear while investigating the paranormal. The broadcasters had planned a trip into the forests of New Jersey to look for the legendary New Jersey Devil. They had planned to connect with the real world using chat and webcams while they were on location. This left the story open to a wide range of media that could have been produced during the fictional event.

The film producers for The Last Broadcast had few resources for promoting and marketing the film. In an attempt to get some buzz about the movie, they set up a website so that it would appear that the murders were real. The media created wasn’t really a game; it was designed to engage viewers in the narrative. From that point, the website would become a jumping off point for the film.

Head Trauma (2006)

(http://www.headtraumamovie.com/)

Initial Film release

In a following project, Weiler decided to create a campaign to promote Head Trauma that went beyond a simple marketing campaign. He didn’t have a distributor for the film and had to figure out how he was going to gather audiences on his own.

He began by creating a public event where the film would be presented. He then tried to create a community vibe around the screening. He wanted to create a cinema event that was unique, rather than the same each time you viewed the film.

The event consists of three core elements:

1. A screening of Head Trauma with a live soundtrack performance by Bardo Pond, Espers, Fern Knight, Marshal Allen (Sun Ra), Steve Garvey (Buzzcocks) and others. The live music was done in conjunction with the recorded dialog and sound effects tracks from the film. It created a new alternate soundtrack.

2. To tie the film to the live event, various props and sets from the film were set on stage and certain characters from the film emerged from the audience.

3. A phone number would appear on the screen during the film. When viewers called the number, they were actually being drawn into the first rabbit hole of the ARG.

What followed the initial live event was a number of cryptic clues that the audience were asked to decipher. The ongoing interaction involved phone calls and text messages from the characters of Head Trauma that led viewers to hidden clues spread across the Internet.

Weiler’s goal was to change the cinematic experience. He wanted to take a narrative and move it across multiple devices and screens. This included podcasts, an interactive graphic novel and numerous hidden elements within the websites linked to the film. In this way, he wanted to engage the audience in new and different ways. Some viewers have given the name “Cinema ARG” to this new cluster of media. The response so far has been exceptional. In terms of mechanics, the live event show was very difficult to scale to take it to more places.

Rather than writing and creating all of these ARG elements after the film was finished, they wrote the entire time they were shooting film. They also needed to create digital content for the web at the same time. This digital content affected what and how they were shooting. They needed to have narrative elements available for both the film and the ARG and do so under a tight budget. This required them to think about how they were telling narrative strands across multiple media throughout the entire film creation projects. There was a set narrative for the ARG but the team didn’t stop once they had finished the writing and content creation. They needed to deal with the community that engaged in the ARG, seeing how they responded and shift the story in response to the audience.

Once the film was completed the producers started the traditional approach of taking the film into the film festival circuit. They did not believe they could think about traditional distribution though. The independent film market has changed. It has eroded and become congested with the sheer volume of films available. Festivals used to be a place to get a distribution deal but currently that is not the best place to strike a deal as the terms for the deals favour the buyers. This in mind, the producers went into the LA film festival thinking about self-distribution.

They looked at doing a platform release where the movie would be available in DVD five weeks after the theatrical release. This is unusual as most independent film go out onto the festival circuit for a year or so. Weiler decided to push the movie out faster. In order to do this he needed to get press coverage as a way to get some notice of the film.

The promotion continued throughout the release with promotion at film festivals where a small comic book was handed out with the words “Do you want to play a game?” written on the back with a phone number. When the number was called, the phone would be answered by the evil, antagonist character from the film. The caller’s phone number would be captured after they called in and the ARG would then call them back. The antagonist from the film would then tell them they shouldn’t have hung up because “we’re not finished yet”. From this initial point, the players were drawn into a narrative from the film, with a goal of piquing enough interest that they would actually seek out the film for viewing.

Warner Video on Demand Release “Hope is Missing” ARG

Weiler negotiated a contract with Warner to release the film on their Video on Demand (VOD) service. He decided to create a new ARG specifically to promote the film within that service. This led him to the idea of created a new ARG called Hope is Missing. The film was well beyond release so all the actors were gone and he had to come up with a new way of extending the story line. He created a new story around a character named Hope Wilcott. It was set in the same fictional universe as the original Head Trauma story. In the story, Hope is away at school and starts getting phone calls at 3:07 am every morning from her mother. The phone calls sound as if her mother is in trouble. Hope calls the Police mother has no recollection of the call being made. Hope goes home to discover that her mother has some strange nocturnal behaviours. The story continues when Hope’s fiancé gets a letter saying Hope has now disappeared. The letter comes with a package with a video and clues within the video. He puts the video up online and asks people to help him figure out where Hope has gone. Weiler released 4 short movies over 2 1/2 weeks. He had planned to stretch it out longer but interest in the story and demand for content required him to accelerate the timeline.

This ARG proved to be a successful promotion to build interest around the VOD release of Head Trauma with Warner Brothers. The impact among the audience was mixed. Some people thought it was real while others thought it was a hoax. The story of the disappearance and the way it was delivered did end up offending some of the people who viewed it.

Implications for Independent Film

Weiler fully believes in the concept of expanded cinema. It is more than just a traditional film. Once you start thinking this way and the property becomes expanded, it changes the writing, the funding options and affects distribution as well. By promoting directly to the audience of the film, it puts the property into the hands of the viewers looking for that content. For Weiler, ARGs have been the most cost effective way for him to get to that audience while maintaining creative and financial control of his creative properties.

As ARGs are a new form of narrative for most filmmakers, many of them are not familiar with it. It is unlikely that all of the current approaches to ARGs cover the full range of creative opportunities for filmmakers. Some of the current uses include the pre-selling of the film by getting an audience before the actual film release. The ARG can serve as a discovery mechanism for the narrative, characters and setting of the film. This personal level of engagement allows the filmmaker to connect with their audience before they have even seen the film.

The lack of a single distribution mechanism means that independent filmmakers are looking at a challenging mixture of broadcast options. Theatres, VOD, online download, streaming and rental venues are all potential distribution channels for a film. Each of these has a potential audience that can only be reached through the marketing channels provided by each of those broadcast option. The filmmaker faces a very fragmented audience among all of those options. This means that one film needs to stand out among all the white noise and the reduced amount of time most people have to filter through it. An ARG is one method of tying together that audience. It allows the film budget and creative team energies to be focused on one marketing campaign instead of trying to dilute the marketing among a number of different channels.

It is also possible to integrate branding and product placement into the ARG campaign in a more transparent way than usual. You aren’t required to use obvious product placement throughout your film. This will present the filmmaker with new offerings during the fundraising portion of the film production.

Independent film has always had a huge amount of creative energy in place to break down barriers to both making and distributing film. The introduction of digital film creation and distribution were explored successfully early on as an alternative to film stock. The high cost of celluloid made it almost impossible for independent filmmakers to make films affordably. Exclusive distribution through established markets made it very difficult to actually distribute the film once it was made. The drive to maintain creative and financial control of their films meant that new solutions were constantly being developed to deal with the issues. ARGs are one of the latest options and successful independent filmmakers will continue to explore their abilities to share narratives and engage their audiences. It is possible that with the cross-media approach to narrative being taken by independent film that filmmaking may not even be an appropriate term anymore.

Grassroots ARGs

Grassroots ARGs usually come in two forms. One is based on a completely original concept and story. The other is based in an existing story world. These ones are similar to fan fiction projects run by fans of a particular creative property. Anyone who has followed the rise in popular culture of the “Twilight” series of books and films can find volumes of stories written about the characters and within story universe. Once fans have  consumed all of the existing narratives in a creative property there is a strong motivation to continue creating their own version of that reality. Rather than writing a new story, a grassroots ARG group, usually an individual or a small group, decides to build and run their own ARG.  They are generally self-funded and so run on much smaller budgets than promotional ARGs, usually just a few thousand dollars. The incentive to spend money comes from a desire to increase the production quality of the ARG. Generally, the higher the production quality; the more likely the ARG is to attract players.

The number of players attracted to these types of ARGs is generally small. The team resources are limited so they are usually designed to keep the number of players at a low number. One exception was the MetaCortechs ARG that managed to attract around 12,000 players. These kinds of games rely almost completely on volunteers to run them. The demands and time span of the project can often lead to a high staff turnover.

Some of the better-known grassroots ARGs are:

Lockjaw (2002)

After the initial success of The Beast, a number of players who had organized themselves to play that game decided to start designing and running their own ARGs. The group was known as The Cloudmakers and their first attempt at running their own ARG was Lockjaw. This first attempt was a quite successful although the exact number of players is difficult to determine. The ARG was composed of mostly websites and text-based clues.

Metacortechs (Project Mu) (2003)

The Cloudmakers group decided to use the fictional universe from the film The Matrix (1999) as the background for their next ARG. It is very similar to many fan fiction sites created for The Matrix franchise. At the time, the producers of The Matrix were encouraging alternative narratives set in the Matrix universe. They had just helped produce The Animatrix (2003), a collection of short anime films based on the original film. The producers actively encouraged fans to produce their own stories based on the film and, if possible, would even facilitate the creation of a rich flow of original creative content that was based on the original franchise.

The ARG was extremely successful for an independent effort. It managed to attract 12,000 players, almost as much as some professional run promotional ARGs. The success of this ARG led the group to move into commercial ventures with ARGs as part of a business model that sold merchandise. The name of this ARG was Perplex City.