Universe Creation 101

“PopMatters has put this question to our vast staff of cultural critics and have come up with a list of 50 DVDs that every motion picture aficionado should have as part of their own aesthetic assemblage. By no means all inclusive, but definitely the result of much handwringing (and film watching), our plan is to provide a guide to what’s good, and what’s grand, about these silver slices of Heaven. [...]

Here it is, divided into fives sections covering as many significant shifts in the motion picture perspective. Beginning with Part 1: Pure Classicism and moving through Part 2: The Changing Face of Filmmaking, Part 3: The Stellar ‘70s, Part 4: Challenging Convention and finally, Part 5: The Return of the Auteur, our crew hopes to enlighten you on titles and artists you may never have heard of, as well as hit on those mandatory efforts that failed to peak your interest the first time around. But it’s more than just the movie being discussed—it’s how DVD changed the way we look at it. This feature also concentrates on how supplements and commentaries, remixed soundtracks and pristine transfers revived lost or forgotten gems, while perfectly preserving those works that warrant safeguarding.”

Check it out: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/features/series/284/

Chris Dahlen, a contributing writer to publications such as Pitchfork Media, Paste Magazine, The Onion AV Club and The Wire N.H., has started a blog. His blog, Save the Robot, discusses among other things ‘transmedia’. Chris says that ‘Jenkins and others have defined this concept really well’ and wonders what is left for him as a columnist. I disagree that Jenkins and others (including me) have defined the concept really well. Sure, many people do get the fundamental concept — storyworlds continuing across media platforms — but that statement is not a one-stop shop. There is a such a complexity to the area, different ways that a story continues and doesn’t (I think most cross-media works have a mix of repurposing, adaptation and extension, and for very good reasons). The point I want to make is that there is soooooo muuucccchhh that hasn’t been explored and so much that has but hasn’t been finished or published yet (my PhD for instance!). What is good is that Chris has gravitated towards an area that he will be exploring with vigor:

[T]he direction I seem to be taking, without even planning it, is to look at what drives people to invest time in these sink holes - why there are some people who are fine with watching an hour of Law and Order and forgetting it the minute they go to bed, and then there are other people who watch every episode of Battlestar Galactica at least twice, listen to the podcasts, watch the forums, engage with the characters, write fan fic, and secretly hope there will be an MMORPG so they can walk up and “hang out with Starbuck” anytime they’d like. What drives their obsession? In other words, why do they love this stuff so much? [from this post]

In particular, Chris will be looking at the appeal of characters:

In fact, the characters in these worlds are the thing that interest me the most: we’re flooded with characters nowadays, and the ones that stick start to engage us on many platforms. Where do they come from? Why are we drawn to them? [...] But here’s the catch: the characters and worlds we’re talking about aren’t just getting richer and more interactive; we’re also scaling ourselves down to live in them. [from this post]

Indeed, Chris reviews a lot of digital games and so his take on the relationship between characters and fans should be interesting. It is good to see a gamer talk about the craft and experience of transmedia forms and not the marketing. He’s also looking at politicians and the nature of seriality. Great stuff Chris! I look forward to reading more.

Check out: http://savetherobot.wordpress.com/

Most of you would be aware that the Halo 3 ARG has begun. It has received quite negative reviews from many gammer-community-ARG-crossovers. It seems that the ARG is breaking design techniques such as: progressive disclosure, choreography of the rollout, audience tiering and player-production facilitation. Conversely, alot of the posts seem to be by people who are not conversant with ARGs or are not utilizing the player-created resources. This tiering issue is one that I address in a paper that may be out early next year. But, as I’ve haven’t delved too far into the most recent ARG yet, this isn’t the point of this post. (If you’re interested in playing or lurking though, check out The Bruce’s guide for the ARG.) Instead, I just wanted to flag how that it appears the Halo ARGs — I Love Bees and now this one — have provoked the most ARG parodies I’ve seen. I’m not aware of other parodies of ARGs (tell me if you know of them) and so the fact that there are 2 (that I know of) is more than any others! Here are the 2:

I Love Beer

Penny Arcade comic about the lastest Halo 3 ArG

And then there is also the site that is a very clever grafting of another storyworld into the I Love Bees ARG:

CAPitALLism

Is it because of the convential gaming communities involvement in the ARG scene or is it something in the Bungie-commissioned ARGs or is it their high-profile status that lends it these parodies and supplements? Seems to me a mix of all of these factors.

Thanks Leslie for pointing out the pennyarcade comic.

In 1980, on a November evening in Los Angeles, pedestrians who walked past the glass windows of the Broadway Department Store noticed something strange…they did not see their reflection. There were other people walking by, just not them. They ended up talking with the alien reflections and realized that they were in two different locations, indeed, on other sides of a country: the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City and the Broadway Department Store in Century City in LA. This work, called Hole-in-Space, was created by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz.

Last year I was recruited to a group to consult on a project for the Australian communications company Telstra. I recommended that Telstra, given their core brand is (I believe) enabling people to communicate with each other (not tourism!), that they install a contemporary version of Galloway and Rabinowitz’s work. Using their substantial communications infrastructure they could link together two key and important communities: rural Australia with urban Australia; and Australians in the street with people in the streets of the online virtual world Second Life. The project has been put on hold indefinitely and since the future of the project is unknown and I wasn’t compensated for my advice, I’m sharing it here. But recently I came across a different iteration on the theme, and one that bypasses the corporate and art world.

A few years ago Dr. Sugata Mitra, head of research and development at an IT firm in India, installed a computer in the wall of a slum area in India. He put it in to enable the children to use the computer and the Internet for free. He wanted to see what the children would do if they had unlimited and free access to these technologies. He called it the Hole in the Wall experiment. Within minutes, a Frontline segment explained, the children taught themselves computer literacy. Dr. Mitra has installed computers in many areas now and revels in the response. He is quite conscious of the immense impact of his cybernetic seed:

“If cyberspace is considered a place,” Mitra tells FRONTLINE/World, “then there are people who are already in it, and people who are not in it … I think the hole in the wall gives us a method to create a door, if you like, through which large numbers of children can rush into this new arena. When that happens, it will have changed our society forever.”

The segment told the story of the first boy to teach himself the computer and Net: Rajinder. He creates things using paint programs, plays games and browses the Disney website. His teacher notes that ‘he has become quite bold and expressive’.

When Dr. Mitra asks Rajinder to define the Internet, the doe-eyed boy replies immediately, “That with which you can do anything.”

And so, we move from people connecting with each other, to people tapping into possibility. The continuing theme, whether it is enunciated by artists, the corporate world or a single person who wants to heal the rift of the digital divide, is that of creating portals where once there where walls. It doesn’t matter if the wall, the ostacle is financial, cultural, geographic or technological, we’ll find a way to dissipate it. I’m so happy to have front-row seats to one of the most amazing times in Earth’s history.

Check out full Hole in the Wall article and video by journalist Rory O’Connor, and the amazing collection of Social Entrepenuers videos at Frontline/World. Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for posting about it.

For the past few months I’ve had the pleasure of mentoring a best-selling UK author through the fabulous De Montfort University Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media program (a course I’ve been a guest lecturer for). Alison Norrington has written many novels that could be described as ‘chick-lit’ (is it still OK to use such a term?). She has also created online works such as Naked HandStand (warning: nudies!). Her latest novel is about a character called Sophie Regan. Sophie has decided, after a bad run of relationships, to stay single for a year. Instead of publishing her story as a book though, Alison set Sophie free on the Net and beyond…

The primary narrative is delivered through Sophie’s blog (which is also delivered via email). She has been  blogging her journey in a first-person manner recently. Alison has also been shifting focus from Sophie to other characters within the blog, which is a gutsy thing to do in a blog which lends itself to a first-person narrative. At times I found it jarring but mostly I actually enjoyed the unconventional form. It is good to be surprised with techniques and it is good to see writers experimenting with expectations. What also works well with this style is that information about other characters is provided in the main pivot point — the blog — rather than at other sites. Fragmentation of stories is an increasingly desired trait in ‘alternate reality games’ and what theorist Jill Walker calls ‘distributed narratives’. But fragmentation is also very inaccessible to the majority of readers. With this mixed-voice style of blogging we are able to find out, for instance, that another character has created a false identity to contact Sophie. And so, when we read about Sophie receiving invites from a person called ‘John Pamenter’ we know the truth behind the avatar! Alison is also having fun creating artifacts of her storyworld: here is a fictional magazine that is run by Sophie’s nemesis (see below). I also got a real thrill when Sophie sent me a postcard when she went on holiday.

Sophie has also been posting humorous videos of pick-up lines she and her readers have to endure at YouTube. It makes for nice light relief, a conversation starter, but also provides another point-of-entry (POE) to Sophie’s world.

[youtube q8GYE9F-Z84]

Sophie also has a presence on social networking sites such as Bebo and MySpace. The Bebo one is more active, which is interesting — the demographic seems to be young women! To help give people quick updates on what is happening and provide another POE, Sophie also twitters. You can also go clubbing with her in Second Life. I (Lythe Witte) met with her and went dancing with a mate while single Sophie watched. Hehe, we were roleplaying! You can see Sophie in the blue top watching Lythe and my buddy dancing.

In this article for the Philadelphia Inquirer (which talks about another cross-media story), Alison spoke about her aims with the project and her relationship with the protagonist:

“I would like for readers to really engage with Sophie as a real character,” Norrington says. “Although she is fictionalized she is very much a real person in terms of her thought processes and emotions. As a published novelist I am very aware that writing a good book means getting the reader to unpack her bags and settle in for the duration.”

It has been great working with Alison on this project…how the narrative has altered, the ideas she comes up with, and the endless work involved with managing an online persona. It takes alot of work to be all over cyberspace! Beyond some of the cross-media poetics that I’ve mentioned here, it is a good read…watch, dance and click.
Check out Sophie’s blog

A month or so ago I gave a talk at Sydney University called ‘Multi-Platform Art Versus Commodity Intertexts’. The aim of the talk was two-fold: to explore just what has changed in the object (entertainment) from so-called marketing tie-ins of the past and ‘transmedia’ forms of the present as espoused by Henry Jenkins and myself among others; and also to explore how the study of these objects has changed (the idea being that sometimes it is the researcher that has changed, not the object).

I notice that many people presume that any extension of a storyworld across media platforms is a mere marketing exercise that has no artistic intention. In trying to understand this I’ve looked at just what qualities in an object lends itself to this view. I hypothesized that one of the values people use to make a decision about art is the producer. And so, in my talk I removed the title and producer of a work, described the construction of it — how the elements in each media relate to each other in as neutral way I could — and then asked the students to tell me whether they thought it was marketing or art. They named it art. The work I described was the alternate reality game The Beast – a campaign commissioned by Microsoft and Dreamworks to market Steven Speilberg’s A.I. It is a ‘marketing campaign’ that has, incidently, been described as ‘the Citizen Kane of online entertainment’.

I also looked at what possible qualities there are inside the work that signify a difference from so-called ‘tie-ins’ of the past and the ‘transmedia’ forms of the present. Here are some differences I posited:

• creative control over the extensions either by having the same creator or commissioned creators;
• part of the primary narrative (needed for coherence);
• deals with primary characters and settings;
• conceived at the time of creation rather than after it;
• consideration of the combined experience of the units in each medium for a particular (polymorphic) aesthetic effect;
• cross-media traversal techniques are embedded in the work;
• consideration of relationship between the narrative information, medium, arts type and audiences;
• a sincere representation of the artistic preferences (transliteracies) of the creator;
• targets and is experienced by more than fans;
• ubiquity: employed by many major entertainment corporations, but also by independent artists and writers…

Now, these are just some, and they are not the only factors and are not strictly speaking the only way to identify a work with artistic intentions (which can also have economic ones). But I think these are some of the markers that distinguish works. What do you think?

My grandmother, who passed away just a couple of months ago, was a late-comer to ‘new media’. But at the age of 95 she was teaching computers to the ‘oldies’ in her village. She used to dazzle us by insisting she had the latest software, reeling off features like a car fanaticist would engine parts. I took her along with me inside the online virtual world Second Life  for a Christmas party once. She wasn’t fazed by the presence of avatars controlled by people all around the world, or how we could fly around, she just thought the girls were inappropriately dressed for the snow. But companies had a hard time understanding that she was a real person. She was kicked out of her online banking because the administrators didn’t believe her age. They thought they had outsmarted an automated program trying to access the account. She wasn’t a robot, she was my granny.

I like to relate these stories to people who claim that it is not possible to learn technology when you’re older, or that young people are the only ones who understand it. Both of these assumptions are simply not true. I know plenty of young people who don’t have a clue about the diversity of things on the Net (yes, really!). People, markets and communities cannot be segmented according to their age or geography anymore. But that is rant for another time. My point is that just because someone is ‘young’ doesn’t mean they understand technology any better and conversly that the ‘oldies’ don’t have anything to teach us. Here are two examples of ‘oldies’ doing online marketing better than many:

THE ZIMMERS

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The Zimmers are well-known across cyberspace because of the content sells itself. But their sites are also well managed: they’re even getting ’consumers’ to ‘participate’ by asking everyone for ideas on what songs to record for their album. How can you contribute? On their forum of course! This isn’t just some company (BBC) pulling all the strings though. Alf is ‘geriatric1927′ on Youtube and he did a preliminary vlog about the upcoming music video a while ago. In the video he refers you to their myspace, the motivations behind creating the song, the need to have a short vlog and so on. He’s aware of technology and the culture surrounding it:

[youtube ztclyGYYwHU]

SEWING 101

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Now this is Mavis from Mudgee Australia. I came across Mavis from a post at videomarketingcoach about a talk presented by Carol Solomon. It is just great the way Mavis tells us about her work, the ebooks we can download etc. I am so impressed by the simplicity and effectiveness of having a video introduction that I’ll be putting one on my bio site. Thanks Mavis.

Check out Mavis’ site: http://www.i-sewing.com/

Looks like the elders of the village are back, and they’re in cyberspace.

SL and RL colleague Angela Thomas – who was on TV with me last year (see the 7.30 Report link in my press page), edits the Slate Night magazine I write for and is at the same university as me! — was flown to the US recently to deliver a talk on ‘Pleasure, Play, Participation and Promise: socio-emotional dimensions of digital culture which are transforming the shape of new media literacies’ for the New Media Consortium. It is a great talk, jam-packed with info about what youth are doing in worlds, how they are playing with their identity and so on. I’ll be posting about the Zimmers until in my next post, but first enjoy Angela’s presentation as the audio and ppt are online at the New Media Consortium, and check out her site if you don’t already know about it.

In a previous post I mentioned video trailers being made for books: Harper Collins Trailers and the wonderful Vidlit. Now Simon and Schuster have started doing video podcast (a type of vlogging) on books: BookVideos.tv.

BookVideos.tv offers compelling video stories that give readers insights into some of the world’s best authors. The social media video site offers the back story about the lives, personalities and the inspirations of these engaging writers. We created Bookvideos.tv to give readers the real story behind the story. It is the place where your favorite books and authors come to life, and it’s also where you can engage with the literary community on a whole new level.

There are plenty of audio podcasts by authors reading and discussing their works (such as Cory Doctorow’s podcast), and audio podcasts by publishers such as Penguin UK podcast, but I think this is the first video podcast. They’re doing just what filmmakers have been doing for a long time: posting the pre- and post-production of films. About time! It seems that video really is the preferred medium for many on the web. It can communicate so much more in a shorter period of time. Here is a sample of BookVideos.tv:

[youtube RNDpQTwyDls]

Check out their site: http://www.bookvideos.tv/

via El MarMOogle

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