Universe Creation 101

The Alternate Reality Gaming Network has started a podcast, well, netcast. It looks like they will be delivering ARG commentary every week, which is great news. Although the style of the show is casual, subjective chat, there are some gems for would-be ARG designers, researchers and marketers out there. So far there are two episodes up. Good luck ARGN! I should get off my butt and publish my podcast which is just waiting to be released. News very soon. I promise.

Check out the ARGN Netcast.

When I started in the digital effects industry as a producer I noticed that the best people in the business were distributed across companies, states and the world. You never had more a couple in the one company. I remember working discussing with AIMIA back then in the early 90s about how they can group these talented people together. This sort of concern persists, in many sectors. Well, just recently, one of the most high-profile people in new marketing, Joseph Jaffe, decided to gather up all the experts he knew to form a company (or uncompany as Jaffe likes to say). Here is the team: Michael Denton; Neville Hobson, Shel Holtz, Gary Cohen, Joseph Jaffe, Aaron Greenberger, C.C. Chapman and Chris Trela. Now, to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t of blogged about this company if it wasn’t for C.C. Chapman. He is new to the area but has a good mind. I respect his views and will continue to show support of his ventures even though I didn’t receive an invite to their Second Life launch. * sniffle *
The company should do some interesting things. Good luck guys. (Guys, no girls? Hmmm.)

Check out Crayon now, keep on eye on their blog, and if you’re in Second Life, their island.

I found out about an ARG that had been created by some educators in Queensland and covered their research in the forthcoming (I hope it comes out soon) IGDA ARG SIG Whitepaper. Well, just yesterday I flew down to Melbourne to be the external assessor for a class that had the project of creating an ARG (well, “CROSS-MEDIA FICTIONAL WORLDS”, but they could choose ARGs and they did). They were seperated into two 20-person teams and had 5 weeks to conceive and design and implement an ARG. They are 3rd year students for a MultiMedia and Digital Arts design course run by Troy Innocent at Monash University. I was so delighted to see what they had done. It was really interesting to see the difficulties they had with managing the magic-circle (the game-play space) because they designed it so the general public could find out about their ARGs. So, they had people ‘play’ the game without knowing it was real. The designers had real problems then, managing posts from people who were genuinely involved. This is a problem for games that recruit participators through public spaces and not through ARG gateways such as ARGN. I had a similiar problem with the mini ARG I created for an industry residential. SMS and other emails were so real the participators didn’t realise it wasn’t. Now, this is fun when you want to be immersed, when you opt-in, but for those people who are unaware of the fictional status and who are not aware of ‘alternate reality’ techniques, it can be quite disconcerting (until they find out it is not real, and then they love it). There is a big difference between employing alternate reality aesthetics and having a constructed world operate as if it is real.

It was so exciting to see alternate reality games being created as class projects, hopefully this is a sign of many more to come.

A colleague of mine, Peter Giles, Head of Digital Media at AFTRS, has written an interesting post on how animation lends itself to cross-media strategies.

On Friday night/Friday morning I presented my first inworld lecture inside the virtual world Second Life. Drawing from my articles in Slate Night Magazine, I spoke about the ‘Remediation of the Art Space in SL’. This lecture was part of a special session Anya Ixchel, the editor of Slate Night arranged for the New Media Consortium’s Impact of Digital Media Symposium. CDB Barkley has already podcast my session. Anya’s presentation was fabulous, so was the ‘Fashioning the Avatar’ show where we discussed unusual choices of avatars, and the SL musicians panel was great. Anya/Angela has posted all the links to all the sessions here. But then I had to leave (it was 2am in Australia by this point) so I could get some sleep for a radio interview. I was interviewed on Saturday morning by Alan Saunders of Radio National on the By Design show. I spoke about “Alternate Reality” design aesthetics and, you guessed it, Second Life. This is already podcast too!

But I want to mention too, the closing keynote of NMC’s Symposium was Howard Rheingold! You can listen to the podcast here.

Apologies for the late notice, but there has been an amazing week of events happening in Second Life. The New Media Consortium has been holding a 12 day Impact of Digital Media Symposium. The pic you see is an event I attended last night for the MacArthur Foundation press conference in to announce their $50 million investments to support programs in digital media (Building the Field of Digital Media and Learning). What was great is that they televised us in SL to the screens in the press conference as well, and took questions from us. Here is a post at NMC on the event. There are lots of pics of the event here, including many of Anya (the blonde) and a few with me in them (the black-haired chick with pink bows). hehe. Anyway, on Oct 20th at 7am (US time) Slate Night Magazine (the SL arts and entertainment magazine I write for) is having a special session. Here is the run-down from i-Anya’s blog:

* The Avatar as Communication - Dr Angela Thomas, Sydney University (Anya Ixchel, editor of Slatenight)

* Fashion parade: Fashioning the Avatar (showcasing the range of unique identities in SL)

* Remediation of the Art Space in SL - Christy Dena, Sydney University (Lythe Witte, writer for Slatenight)

* Music in Second Life: Panel Discussion and Live Music - with Silas Scarborough, ZeroOne Paz, Mel Cheeky, Cybster Curtis and Billy Thunders (Cletis Carr)

* Future Perfect: Projections forward to an even better world - Dell Wilberg (creative designer of Slatenight)

* Engaging the Disengaged: Using SL to Revitalize the Undergraduate Classroom - Danielle Mirliss and Heidi Trotta, Seton Hall University, NY (Danielle Damone and Heidi TeeCee, writers for Slatenight)

If you have Second Life downloaded already, and are a member of the NMC guests group (to access the NMC sim you need to be a guest of the group), here is the SLURL.

For a list of ongoing posts about the many other symposium events (including a talk with Howard Rheingold!), check the NMC Observer.  

The full schedule of the events is here. Oct 21st has Howard Rheingold!! Hope to ’see’ you inworld! IM me if you’re having trouble figuring out how to get there.

The latest issue of The Velvet Light Trap (Number 58, Fall 2006), spotlights film and TV narrative. There is a wonderful selection of papers with one by Jason Mittell:

• Keating, Patrick. Emotional Curves and Linear Narratives
• Newman, Michael Z. From Beats to Arcs: Toward a Poetics of Television Narrative
• Mittell, Jason. Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television
• Kerins, Mark. Narration in the Cinema of Digital Sound
• Lavik, Erlend. Narrative Structure in The Sixth Sense: A New Twist in “Twist Movies”?
• Cameron, Allan. Contingency, Order, and the Modular Narrative: 21 Grams and Irreversible

You can only access the journal through an institution subscription though. But if you can, it will be worth it.

DAC, the premier international digital arts conference, will be in Perth next year with Beap. They have just announced the first stage of acceptances:

The reviewing of the 230 abstracts has now been completed, and many thanks to the reviewers for the enormous task. In a process that turns out to have been highly competitive, 48 abstracts have been invited to be developed for presentation at the conference. This will involve the writing and reviewing of the full paper. All submissions will be notified by e-mail, with a report of the reviewing process. Anyone who submitted who has not received a report by the end of October should contact a.hutchison@curtin.edu.au.

48 abstracts have been invited to be developed and presented, while 31 abstracts were outright rejected due to being Too far off topic, Insufficiently original or Unclear / unconvincing. The rest of the abstracts (150) were rated as “valuable contributions” by the review panel, and were not rejected as such, but the DAC format unfortunately simply does not have room for them. Hopefully, these abstracts will be developed further for future presentation. While the review panel was excited about many papers, it did make the observation that a lot of writers did not seem to understand the art of writing an abstract, and that many seemed to be under-informed by obvious, current reading/theory in their area.

Apart from the outstanding papers we are expecting to develop from this selection process, the conference experience will incorporate visits to all of the major exhibitions in the BEAP festival, networking opportunities, artists talks, and the conference itself will take place directly in the heart of Northbridge, PerthÕs cultural and nightlife centre.

I’m so thrilled to say that my abstract has been accepted! Wohoo! I’m so excited. The paper will outline a schema for how people approach media in the multi-platform landscape. I discuss theories of multi-tasking, ergodics and interactivity (and lots more but I’m not giving it away now!). Of course, my paper needs to be accepted through peer-review before I’m actually in the conference, but this is a great start. Wohoo!

I’m way too busy again, so apologies for the lack of posting about interesting things happening around the world. Here is an update on what I’ve been doing though:

• Last week I did my first video skype lecture to students at the University of Western Australia on cross-media entertainment. It was for the Masters and Honours level course in Communication Studies: iGeneration: Communication and Participatory Culture. It was great to ‘meet’, well, see Christina waving in the distance and the rest of the class, and of course Peter. I’ve been checking out the vlogs and blogs of the students and am really impressed.
• I started a wonderful mentoring program with the Booranga Writer’s Center: Youth Online Writing Workshop (YOWW). They’re running an online writing program (which means we converse and publish online and create electronic literature) for six months and I’m one of the three mentors. I’m lucky to to be co-mentoring with Bernard Cohen and Johannes Klabbers. Fantastic! I met the participants on the weekend and we took them through some exercises and gave an intro to the various forms of electronic literature around. They’re a very talented bunch of writers so I really look forward to working with them. I’ll let you know once the public part of the cool YOWW site is up.
• I was on radio again about Second Life, on ABC’s PM show. The segment was good but I’m feeling a bit pimped by the media at the moment. They keep putting in the inane things I say in the interview. [Note to self: Don't say inane things.] Part of the problem is, however, that the interviewers are just findingout about SL and want to report ont he basics of it, the sensationalist angle. This is a first step though. There is much more interesting stuff that can be said about the creative community and what is actually happening in SL that is unique. Ho hum. One day I’ll get to talk about that I hope. Anyway, here is the blurb:

Internet Attracting Virtual Worlds
More and more people are escaping workaday reality by starting a new life in virtual reality. In 3D virtual worlds on the internet, you can create your own body and personality, meet virtual friends and carry out everyday activities. One online society, called Second Life, now has more than 870,000 residents logging in around the world. But social commentators are warning that some addicts of the virtual world run the risk of being trapped in a fantasy of cyber perfection.

• Speaking of work in virtual worlds. The next issue of Slate Night Magazine will be out shortly with another article by me on a virtual art. The previous issue, in which I (Lythe Witte that is) wrote about the remediation of virtual world art is now available in pdf form.
• And this week I’ll be speaking at the New Media Consortium’s Impact of Digital Media Conference in Second Life. They’re running a symposium in Second Life to augment the real life and internet activities (or vice versa). Here is the blurb:

The NMC is hosting a 12-day symposium on the NMC Campus in Second Life focusing on the impact of digital media on all aspects of our daily lives. At the intersection of virtual 3-D space and the “flat-web” of the browser, virtual worlds like Second Life are active settings for collaboration and socialization. The Symposium on the Impact of Digital Media will explore the ways we encounter and understand digital media — inside such a setting.

Angela/Anya has arranged a Slate Night session in which I’ll speak about the remediation of art in SL. Keep up to date with the symposium at the NMC Second Life blog.

Here are two projects by wonderful colleagues of mine:

Is Your House Killing You? was my team for LAMP. It will be on SBS soon, but at present there is a call for people to be on the TV show!:

Put YOUR home under the microscope in our groundbreaking new science show ‘Is Your House Killing You?’

We’re looking for ALL TYPES of houses and occupants to take part in this exciting new series on SBS.

You are invited to take up the challenge to ‘detox’ your home. From inner city apartments to country fibros, our expert team will swarm, probe and strip back a diverse range of homes in a CSI-style investigation. No matter what house you live in, they all harbour a parallel microscopic world of hidden dangers.

‘Is Your House Killing You?’ is an innovative new scientific makeover programme that will expose this parallel universe and consequently help us to live healthier, happier lives.

Are you a cleaning freak or the opposite? Are you renovating or redecorating your house? Do you live in a rambling old quirky house? Are you expecting a baby and in a nesting frenzy? Does your bathroom have things growing in it? Have you recently bought new furniture? Do you suspect any kind of pest problem and/or have you been using pesticides? Do you spend a lot of time in the garage tinkering with cars? Do you have a mould or dampness problem? Are you a market gardener? Do you suffer from asthma or allergies? Do you have eczema or dermatitis or have a persistent cough? Do you live on a busy road?

Your house, garden or garage might be toxic!

However great the challenge, our super brainy team will come up with a makeover plan to rid each home of their toxic time bombs.

Join our scientific sleuths as they take Australian households on a journey of discovery, and find out about the latest scientific facts and great DIY tips.

If you, or someone you know would like to have their house detoxed, contact us immediately.

[...]

Life will never be the same once you ask IS YOUR HOUSE KILLING YOU?

Check out the call here

And here is the pilot for a mini-screen series by mobile content researcher Andrew McKenzie: A Bullet Waits for You. The pilot is on YouTube.

Go Jen, Carl and Andrew!