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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The concept of an ARG doesn’t seem immediately intuitive. Several diagrams that follow illustrate how narrative compares between ARGs and other narrative genres such as film and video game. They might help to clarify the design paradigms as well as identify some of the distinct components that are currently used in the implementation of ARGs.
Figure 1. Film Narrative
In general, film runs through a linear course with a narrative that is usually in a three-act structure. The story structure builds towards a crisis, resolution and finally a conclusion. There are some exceptions to this approach. The film Late Fragment (2007) was North America’s first interactive film that allowed a non-linear approach to a narrative about three characters in the film. Eventually, the viewer would uncover all of the narrative elements but in order to make sense of them, they were required to make meaning of the narrative themselves. Figure 2. Video Game Narrative
Video games often have a narrative running through them that ties together the various levels that must be played to finish the game. The narrative can have varying levels of importance within the game itself. A first person shooter, such as Halo (2001), had a narrative running through the entire game to provide a back-story and context for the game levels. It was not critical to that actual game play to be aware of the story or understand its implications. Other games, such as the role-playing game Knights of the Old Republic (2003), had a detailed and branched storyline. Understanding that narrative and interacting with it could significantly alter the outcome of the game and the experience of the player.
Figure 3. ARG Narrative
ARGs have a design that covers a variety of passive and active media. The narrative elements are used to tell expose the story to that participants and the challenge elements provide the points when a player needs to actively engage with the ARG to continue the narrative. The order of the media does not have to be set in a way that immediately makes sense. In some ARGs the challenges help the players discover components of the narrative but there is an additional challenge to place the media into an order where the story actually makes sense.
