Universe Creation 101

For those who are in NY or can get there, this event seems like a ‘to-do-er’: The Media Center, ‘the nonprofit media-technology-society think tank’, will present We Media: Behold the Power of Us on Wednesday, October 5, 2005, in New York City.

Leading thinkers and innovators at the intersection of media, technology and society will participate in series of conversations on the phenomenon of mass collaboration, focusing on such topics as citizen journalism; activism and democracy; media gawking; culture, politics and buzz; marketing; and trust networks.

The list of speakers looks impressive, a good sign that good ideas (or understanding at least) will come out of the event:

* Lex Alexander, Citizen-Journalism Coordinator, Greensboro News-Record
* Merrill Brown, Founder & Principal, MMB Media LLC
* Jason McCabe Calacanis, Chairman & Co-Founder, Weblogs, Inc. Network
* Farai Chideya, Founder & Editor, PopandPolitics.com
* Jessica Coen, Editor, Gawker
* Henry Copeland, Founder, Blogads.com
* Ana Marie Cox, “Wonkette”; Editor, Wonkette.com
* Tom Curley, President & Chief Executive Officer, The Associated Press
* Susan DeFife, President & CEO, Backfence.com
* Rick Ducey, Executive Vice President, BIA Financial Network; President, SpectraRep
* Richard Edelman, President & CEO, Edelman PR
* Craig Forman, VP & GM, Yahoo! Inc.
* Dan Gillmor, Founder, Grassroots Media Inc.; Author, We the Media
* Paul Ginocchio, Analyst, Deutsche Bank
* Seth Green, Executive Director, Americans for Informed Democracy
* Andrew Heyward, President, CBS News
* Ellen Kampinsky, Senior Editor, Glamour
* Larry Kramer, President, CBS Digital Media
* Nicholas D. Kristof, Columnist, The New York Times
* Rebecca MacKinnon, Co-Founder, Global Voices Online; Research Fellow, The Berkman * Center for Internet & Society at Harvard
* Susan Mernit, Senior Vice President, 5ive; Senior Fellow, The Media Center
* Craig Newmark, Customer Service Rep & Founder, craigslist
* Patrick Phillips, Founder & Editor, I Want Media
* Scott Rafer, President & CEO, Feedster
* Brian Reich, Director, Mindshare Interactive Campaigns LLC
* Jay Rosen, Founder & Blogger, PressThink; Associate Professor, New York University, Department of Journalism
* Steve Rubel, Blogger, Micro Persuasion; Vice President, Client Services, CooperKatz & Co
* Richard Sambrook, Director, BBC Global News Division
* Karen Stephenson, President, NetForm
* Dominik von Jan, Director, NextNextBigThing

I’ve spoken about ARGs many times, and I’ve thought about having a TV series involved in an ARG, but now a group of producers are creating THE ‘alternate reality’ mix: a reality TV show about creating an ARG. Project Game Light will be launched in 2006. Here is the description:

Project Game Light : The first contest of its kind, blurring the lines between Reality TV, Game Development and Alternate Reality Gaming. Contestants and viewers will get a firsthand, real-time taste of the challenges of the creation of an actual game in an exciting new hybrid form of entertainment.

Project Game Light will feature three teams of amateur alternate reality game creators, or puppet masters (PMs), as they struggle to make an ARG under the strict budget and scheduling constraints of a commercial project. Project Game Light’s audience will be allowed and encouraged to interact with the teams and the events of the contest itself, by suggesting in-game situations, puzzles, and other game elements to be included in each team’s ARG.

Here is the call for sign-ups:

Do you think it would be fun to be a professional game designer or really cool to be on a reality TV show like Survivor or Big Brother? Project Game Light might just be your chance to live out both of these dreams, at the same time!
* Project Game Light is the first contest of its kind, combining the very best and most exciting aspects of Reality TV, Game Development, and Alternate Reality Gaming.
* But Project Game Light is groundbreaking in another way, too. Project Game Light is a new and truly unique hybrid form of entertainment. It’s not just a videotaped show made for the Internet, or an Internet contest with video elements. Instead, Project Game Light combines the immediacy and emotional drama of the reality TV show format with the interactivity and pervasiveness of a multimedia narrative marketing campaign. [...]
Sign Up Today!
You don’t have to wait for Project Game Light to actually begin to start building your relationships with other Project Game Light and ARG fans. The Project Game Light IntroNetwork is available right now. Click here to sign up today!

I’ve signed up. I’d like a front-row seat on this one (as close as I can get without being seen though).

I’ve been participating in the ‘group-read’ of the email story: Daughters of Freya. The ‘group read’ means that everyone starts receiving the emails at the same time, and discusses the work in a forum. The email story is delivered via email (just to be clear) over a period of 3 weeks. Not much effort there, you’d think. But even though it seems well-written and the delivery is genuine and well-orchestrated, I don’t read them all. In fact, I haven’t been able to read most of them. And, although I have them all in a special folder, marked by number to ensure proper order (thank God for good design), I miss a major part of the email experience — delivery, reading, anticipation…

I realise now why I do not enjoy such works (including alternate reality games): I am an ‘on-demand’ reader. Email fiction (those delivered to your email address, over time) and ARGs require you to attend to the updates (which in the later case involves pages and pages in forums and websites). These types of works are very exciting — they emerge, are reactive, you’re in the middle of the action — but very demanding. I have to experience them on their time. They are akin to ‘appointment viewing’ (think of traditional TV, where you have to sit down at a certain time to view your favourite show). Some ARGs are designed so you can pace yourself, but after a couple of weeks or more of inaction, you are informed that if you no-longer wish to receive emails, simply do nothing and you’ll be removed. Do nothing and you’ll be removed. I understand the need to do this (who wants unwanted emails?), but what about the person who wants to experience the work, later?

Why the ‘experience police’? To make it clear what I mean, consider this analogy:

Imagine an author stands in the corner of your bedroom. Every night the author watches as you go to bed. He doesn’t care if you’re tired, busy, worked a 20 hour day or reading another book; he just waits to see if you pick up his. If you don’t, he picks up his clipboard and puts a red cross by your name. If I have not picked up his book over a two week period the author storms up to me, whereever I am, waving the book, and red-faced, spits out that he is taking the book away from me. If I want to read it, I have to come back and ask.

Thankfully the authors of the 7 books I’ve had on my bedside table for the past year are not crowded in a corner. If they were, I’d never have the chance to read those books, a chapter at a time every few months.

Whose work is it anyway?

You can now subscribe to my blog and have snippets of my posts emailed to you rather than travelling all that virtual distance (click time). Sit back and let me come to you. Subscribe by entering your email in the box provided on the side-bar. It is that easy.

Lazy, sunny days in cyberspace.

It is with great pleasure that I announce that the Australian Film, Television and Radio School and Gary Hayes (producer of new media at the BBC for 8 years) having teamed together to conduct workshops on cross-media storytelling. They are touring Australia, running one-day workshops, residencies and ongoing mentoring. The Laboratory of Advanced Media Production, LAMP, is described as follows:

According to AFTRS’s head of digital media, Peter Giles, LAMP will comprise “a series of cutting-edge seminars, workshops and labs that will enable Australian content creators to create entertainment for the global stage.” Much like the AFI Digital Content Lab’s workshops, LAMP’s workshops will be tasked with bringing together teams of producers, writers, directors and designers, in order to create prototype, cross-platform (TV, Web and mobile), interactive digital programs and applications. “LAMP will follow similar models in the UK and USA that have really stimulated the interactive industry, but it is important that we do not lose sight of the uniqueness of the Australian story,” Hayes said in a prepared statement. “In Australia, only 24% of new TV programs are created locally, compared with 91% in the UK and 75% in Canada. LAMP will help redress that balance as the audience shifts over to online delivery of content.”

I am very lucky to be selected as a presenter and mentor for the Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney workshops. Wohoo! I’ll keep you updated with all the juicy details soon.

I just watched The Teen Choice Awards and saw the ‘v-cast’ award. V-Cast is a Verizone Wireless content site. As you can see by the nominees of the award, the content offered is bascailly a remediation of shows produced for TV:

CHOICE V-CAST
24 Twenty-Four
Alias
American Dad
Arrested Development
Desperate Housewives
Extreme Makeover
Lost
The Simple Life: I

The winner, as voted by teens, is ‘Desperate Housewives’. Hmmm… It is hard to tell how much of teens votes are just regurgitations of what they see in the media as being popular and how much are what they find entertaining.

Here is a snippet from a report on the Australian Entertainment Industry in the Hollywood Reporter:

SYDNEY — It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the Australian media landscape is in flux as never before. So great are the shifts taking place in technology, business and regulation that one commentator refers to the situation as “motion blur,” meaning that the minute an observer believes he or she has a fix on it, it changes again.

The Australian government is preparing to relax cross-media ownership laws so that proprietors can, for the first time, control a television station and a newspaper in the same city. Analysts predict that the resulting carve-up of media assets in 2006-07 could generate AUS$4 billion-AUS$14 billion ($3.1 billion-$10.8 billion) in transactions and significantly alter the playing field as new alliances are made and enemies sworn.

Meanwhile, technology continues to evolve and affect Australia’s traditional entertainment sector. By December 2004, 84% of the nation’s 20 million residents owned cell phones, translating to a handset for every person save for the very young and very old — and even those groups are starting to come around. There also were 1.55 million Australian broadband subscribers in December, a 122% year-on-year increase driven by a vicious price war led by dominant telco Telstra, which commands 41% of the broadband market.