Please distribute the following call to places you think appropriate: ================ Needed: Academics who have investigated Alternate Reality Games I’m writing a section on ARGs and Academia for the upcoming International Game Developers Association Alternate Reality Game Special Interest Group Whitepaper (IGDA ARG SIG). I?m after approaches from all fields using all sorts of methodologies, and by researchers … Read moreCall for ARG Academics
How do you get information from a poster, a billboard, a product on a shelf or a tree to your mobile phone? Well, here are some ways: Bluecasting: Viacom Outdoors launched a bluecasting campaign for Channel 4’s Four Docs program (I’ve spoken about this before). There is also a company called Hypertag offering the same service. … Read moreMobiles interacting with (previously) non-networked media
Ubisoft will be bringing out the Lost videogame next year. I’ve been looking at game adaptations a lot lately and found Alice’s comments at Wonderland interesting: I think TV conversions make far more sense than movie conversions, seeing as the movie’s shelf life is often mere weeks, whereas a successful show series can run and run. Episodic … Read moreLost Game, the other type of game
A sign of an area maturing is the presence of parodies. I don’t have any cross-media parodies, but I’m sure there are plenty parodies of franchises. Take this one from the webcomic Penny Arcade (thanks Jeremy): Tycho, the in-comic character, has been hired to write 13 fantasy novellas based on a game franchise. He explains in the news … Read moreCross-Media Parody
Scheduled viewing?watching a television show or film at a particular time, tuning in to listen to a radio show, attending a theatre performance?has been the dominant mode of accessing entertainment since early (Roman?) theatre. Sure, we’ve had street-player performances, but they are not scheduled or on-demand for the audiences. Such entertainment is impromptu (for the audience), … Read moreOn-Demand and Play
On May 11 Nielsen//NetRatings released their press release on the top social networking sites for the US [pdf]. ?Social networking sites are the reality television of the Internet,? said Jon Gibs, senior director of media, Nielsen//NetRatings. Top 10 Social Networking Sites for April 2006 (U.S., Home and Work) 1. MySpace 2. Blogger 3. Classmates Online … Read moreQuick Stats: Top 10 Social Networking Sites
On the 1st of April 2006, Foreign Media Group opened a cross medial publishing house in Amsterdam. Very exciting, it is this sort of studio approach that lends itself to true cross-media production. But it only works if talented people are also located in the same building, rather than being distributed across companies, in different … Read moreCross Media Publishing House
Australian MMOG platform creator, BigWorld Technology, announced in March an adjunct to their suite that allows a virtual world to be played on a mobile phone. Using their technology you can create a MMOG especially for a phone or make your existing one also available on the mobile. Exciting. It would be good if you could … Read moreMMOG on your Mobile
The Da Vinci Code opening weekend raked in $77million, “the second biggest opening weekend ever among adult-geared pictures behind The Passion of the Christ” (source: Box Office Mojo). The $125 million film is of course an adaptation of Dan Brown’s novel that sold between 40-60 million copies worldwide, depending on what article you read. The … Read moreCracking the Polymorphic Code
Keynot address by Clint Stinchcomb, Senior Vice President of New Media, Discovery Communications, at the nextMEDIA event. Stinchcomb will deliver his address, titled ?Distribution in the Post-Modern Multi-Platform Universe? to nextMEDIA delegates on Day 3 of the event (June 11). He will explore how programmers must position themselves to build strategies and financial models for … Read moreMulti-platform Distribution talk @ next MEDIA