Universe Creation 101

A few weeks ago I gave a presentation at the Web Standards Group on ‘Thinking Outside the Web’. After the talk I was approached by the Workflow Specialist for the Northen Region, Integrated Sales and Marketing of Fuji Xerox Australia, Duane Mackey, who shared with me a project created by Fuji Xerox Australia to market their XMPie technology. I tried it out and it is fabulous! It is a short, fun experience that utilises a website, email, SMS. I’ve spoken with Eliot Harper, the man behind the work as well and they’ve confirmed some changes that they’ll be making (I sent some friendly suggestions). The service can also handle international mobile numbers so just pop in your country code (no + needed) and your mobile number without the 0 at the beginning.

In my talks I’m always trying to find ways to show people who have not experienced cross-media works the potential of what can be done, especially in a simultaneous media usage manner. I’ll be pointing people to this short work as an example of how seamless and fun it can be.

Check it out: http://www.beasuperhero.com.au/

I was very happy to see this, a multi-place commission:

AVENUES OF INVESTIGATION: we are looking for works that (1) bridge multiple realities while maintaining autonomy; (2) engage the user as a participant; (3) include the dynamics of both one-to-one and one-to-many communication within the work; (4) require collaboration between artists, programmers, scientists, and others; and, (5) encourage dialogue.

CRITERIA: (1) ability to conceive the project for three spaces-a synthetic, 3-D rendered environment, the Internet, and physical space; (2) intellectual and artistic merit; (3) degree of programming skill and technological innovation; and (4) extent of collaborative and interdisciplinary activity.

And the results:

MIXED REALITIES was an international juried competition that resulted in the commissioning of 5 networked art works to be exhibited/performed in 2008 at Turbulence.org; Huret & Spector Gallery; and Ars Virtua, a gallery in the online 3D rendered environment, Second Life. Each commission is $5,000 (US).

 The winners are:  

1. Imaging Beijing by John (Craig) Freeman
2. Remotely Coupled Devices (working title) by Usman Haque, Georg Tremmel and Neill Zero
3. No Matter by Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott
4. The Vitruvian World by Michael Takeo Magruder, Drew Baker and David Steele
5. CATERWAUL by Pierre Proske, with technical assistance from Artem Baguinski and Brigit Lichtenegger

Being in Australia, I can only experience 2 of the 3 parts. But that is exactly the point of these works, and the challenge for the creators: to manage the different points-of-entry.

Check it out: http://transition.turbulence.org/comp_07/awards.html

At the beginning of my research a few years ago, I analysed the Nightmare video-board game. The new Atmosfear DVD board is still part of my research and so I was thrilled to see an article in the latest GameNews enewsletter on ‘Mixed Media Board Games’.

In the broader scheme of things, the video game industry co-exists with the board game industry, however the connection between the two is little explored.  At the same time that video games have been establishing their credentials as a popular form of entertainment, the board game industry has also prospered, partly as a result of a European rennaissance spurring game design and partly due to innovative board games that incorporate moving images and digital media.

Board games have at least three key aspects: family or group involvement, replayability, and very easy set-up. Video games on the other hand have come from a tradition of requiring the necessary hardware to play, providing enjoyment for the single player, and depending on the genre or type of game of course, little focus on replay value.

The European renaissance in board games refers to a situation credited to a game of the year award introduced in Germany in 1978, which resulted in the creation of a run of modern board games that are popular in Europe and have been translated into English, to find much broader appeal. However the incorporation of moving images and digital media into the world of board games has a close connection with Australian industry as a result of the success of the trailblazing game, Nightmare, and its follow on products, and additionally today through the efforts of DVD Trivia Games and its series of sports and popular topics DVD board games.

Going back to the late 80’s and early 90’s, Phillip Tanner explains that he and Brett Clements had a production company called A Couple ‘A Cowboys and Brett “had a lot of success with a board game called Oz Quiz initially and then together we created Dare, The Truth Hurts, and Idiot Box – all traditional board games.” “Brett suggested we combine our production skills with our board game skills and that is how we created the video board game genre.”

The original video board game Nightmare debuted in Australia in 1991 and throughout Europe in 1992. Three sequel tapes were created, Nightmare II Baron Samedi The Zombie, Nightmare III Anne De Chantraine – The Witch, and Nightmare IV Countess Elizabeth Bathory – The Vampire. And in 1995 Atmosfear The Harbingers was launched.

“Nightmare is a race against time and is all about frightening fun.  You have a host that guides the game, makes you jump, makes you laugh and sets you up against your friends” explains Phillip, adding “it is a lot of fun to play and is at its very basic the simplest form of interactive television – you talk to the TV and the TV talks back to you.”

The VHS video allowed for very easy setup of board games that incorporated moving images, and the DVD player does so today.

Tom Parkinson, Managing Director of DVD Trivia Games Pty Ltd, says the DVD format is a relatively free, easy way of playing games.

[...]

Phillip reports that Nightmare sold 3 million units worldwide as a video board game, and the DVD version, renamed Atmosfear, has sold an additional 750,000 units in the two years since launch in 2004. Phillip partly attributes the remarkable success to marketing stating that “Nightmare was marketed wonderfully through Village Roadshow and included TV, Cinema, and even video tapes. It was branded not just as a game but as an entertainment package. The guy in charge of selling the game in [to wholesale], Milt Barlow, was very passionate about it and every distributor world wide felt the same.”

The DVD Trivia Games products AFL DVD Trivia Challenge, World War 2 DVD Trivia Challenge, and Cricket Trivia Challenge were launched towards the end of 2006 and in regard to commercial success so far, Tom says he “wouldn’t put it down to giant.” “We have made our money back but are not in profit, the money has been reinvested in the product and further development” explains Tom. This has led to a move to cross promote the board game through mobile phone spin-off games and PC downloads. The mobile phone spin-off games include recently released AFL Grandfinal and NRL Final games available through the Telstra network, which includes a revenue share back to DVD Trivia as well. The additional products and promotions aim to introduce people to the DVD board games.

Phillip comments that games are all about a journey, skill, and chance. “With board games you spend a lot of time working out the basics because normally you just have a board, playing pieces and dice – it is what you do with them that makes it interesting. With video games you add functionality, graphics and audio but if the underlying game is crap it doesn’t matter how cool it looks.” “Make the game fun and interesting, know your target market and hopefully make some money” remarks Phillip.

For those in Melbourne, Australia, Tom Parkinson will speak at the next Dissecta on 25th September.

I’ve spoken with some theatre directors about using the web and communities to draw patrons into their productions but it has fallen on deaf ears. So, I was pleased to see a not-for-profit company making an effort for the production of ‘Coast of Uptopia’. The website, includes pictures and videos — just the sort of media that many need for making a decision about whether to attend.

Check it out: http://www.coastofutopia.com/

Penguin Australia have launched a new book for the 13+ market: Joel and Cat Set the Story Straight. Written by Nick Earls and Rebecca Sparrow, the story is described as follows:

Joel and Cat Set the Story Straight is two weeks in the life of Joel Hedges and Cat Davis. Joel would prefer to get through his final year of high school without Cat Davis or his mother’s faux Spanish boyfriend and just hang-out with his best-friend Luke. Cat Davis has an annoying best-friend, and even more annoying little brother, and a deep abiding hatred of Joel Hedges.

Due to an unfortunate incident involving a leaking pen and suspected outbreak of Bird Flu, Joel and Cat are forced to sit next to each other in Extension English. To make matters worse, and to their mutual horror, they are paired together for a tandem story writing assignment. [source]

The story is delivered rotating between the POVs of the characters Joel and Cat and is linked by their tandem storytelling assignment; the writers, Nick and Rebecca, also wrote the story in a tandem storytelling style and the readers can also participate in the tandem storyelling assignment by submitting story threads on the website or SMS. The website was produced by IshMedia, which includes Kylie Robertson — the legend behind online & mobile interactive narrative works such as Jupiter Green (that I analysed for a journal), Girl Friday and Rock Chickz .

As I’ve said before, it is these sort of intimate and parallel media experiences that will increase over the next few years and will explore the potential of polymorphic narrative.

Check it out: http://www.joelandcat.com

For the past year or so these hard-working and clever individuals have been working towards their Masters at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Department. They’ve been developing their theories on TV, videogames, digital media, animation, museums, transmedia and convergence and now they’re online:

IVAN ASKWITH
TV 2.0: Turning Television into an Engagement Medium

ALEC AUSTIN
Expectations Across Entertainment Media

LISA BIDLINGMEYER
Agent + Image: How the Television Image Destabilizes Identity in TV Spy Series

KRISTINA DRZAIC
Oh No I’m Toast! Mastering Videogame Secrets in Theory and Practice

AMANDA FINKELBERG
Models and Simulations: Digital Cartography in the Networked Environment

SAM FORD
As the World Turns in a Convergence Environment

NEAL GRIGSBY
Ceaseless Becoming: Narratives of Adolescence Across Media

RENA HE HUANG
Journey to the East: the (Re)Make of Chinese Animation

GEOFFREY LONG
Transmedia Storytelling: Business, Aesthetics and Production at the Jim Henson Company

PETER RAUCH
Playing with Good and Evil: Videogames and Moral Philosophy

DAN ROY
Mastery and the Mobile Future of Massively Multiplayer Games

KAREN VERSCHOOREN
.art: situating internet art in the modern museum

Check them out: http://cms.mit.edu/research/theses.php

Last year I posted statistics I’d researched on alternate reality games. The list needs some minor editing since some links have moved. But before I do that, I wanted to add some more stats. Let me know if you have others to add to these ARGs or any others.

ReGenesis Extended Reality Game II
These stats from a talk delivered by Evan Jones, then Creative Director of Xenophile Media, ‘Extended Entertainment Experiences‘, 24th Nov, 2006, Paddington, Australia.

• • First ARG linked to a full television season 
  • 2 hours exclusive footage
  • 9 distinct websites
  • Included email, telephone, SMS messaging
  • 6 months to build
  • 30 people on the team at Xenophile
  • Ocktopods (hardcore players) = 1-2,000 players
  • 6 fan websites were created
  • Cost significantly less than on episode of TV
  • All those that registered their email and did the survey said they watched all 13 episodes of the TV show
  • Average age 29 years
  • Male and female players
  • 1/3 of audience international 

The Lost Experience
These stats are from a talk delivered by Cricket Wardein, Marketing Director, Yahoo!7, ‘Extended Entertainment Experiences‘, 24th Nov, 2006, Paddington, Australia. They are for May 14th onwards for the Australia part of the multi-country ARG-style project.

•  
  • After launch video broadcast (advertisement) with a call to action to ring a number: 15,000 calls were received
  • 900,000 unique users
  • 7.6 million page views
  • 1.9 million video streams
  • 200,000 forum messages
  • average time spent online: 12 mins

In The Lost Experience, there were also many advertisers. The following information about the involvement of Sprite is sourced from Word of Mouth Case Studies.

“The LOST Experience is an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) designed to bring consumers closer to the fictional world of the ABC TV show, LOST. The ARG features 4 advertisers embedding clues into their online & offline properties for consumers to discover more information about the show’s characters. Sprite began on May 10th by placing the new Sublymonal.com URL into a faux TV commercial that ran in primetime during the ABC network show LOST. The URL drove consumers to a puzzle solely related to the show with the only brand mention being the actual URL. Afterwards, the ARG transitioned to a scavenger hunt with embedded DJ podcasts, videos, and hidden memos within Sublymonal.com. A final component includes embedded codes in print ads in Entertainment Weekly and People Magazine. The codes can then be used to unlock further content online.”

Results:
1. Sprite web traffic up 400%
2. Average visit time up 275% and +300% vs benchmark
3. 500K valid codes entered … and climbing!

Credit Information
————————————–
Client: Coca-Cola North America
Agency: AKQA
Budget: <$150,000 excluding media
Date of Campaign: May - September 2006

Meigeist
The following Meigeist statistics are all sourced from: ‘MeiGeist Placement and Research Report’, Diffractions, 2007 [pdf ]

•  
  • Gender: 56% male, 41% female, 3% unknown (note: stats from only 30 respondants)
  • Age: 37% aged 30-38, 28.5% aged 20-27, 27% aged 40-47, 7.5% aged15-19 (note: stats from only 30 respondants
  • Country: 47% USA, 44% UK, 6% Canada, and 3% Germany (note: stats from only 30 respondants)
  • Visitors to main ingame website by country: 40.73% Other; 21.8% United States California; 18.6% Great Britain; 14.48% United States Virginia; 4.93% United States > Arkansas.

This Wednesday you can attend this event inside of Second Life:

“In World” Panel Discussion (Re-run)
29 August @ 9.30am - 10.30am
 
One of the fastest growing online communities today is the virtual world of Second Life. With more than 6 million users worldwide, many big corporate including IBM, Toyota, Dell, Telstra, Sun Microsystems and the ABC have already set up a presence in Second Life.

 On 29th August from 9.30am – 10.30am, the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) is holding it’s rescheduled panel discussion event where key industry experts will provide insights into this virtual world, which analysts predict will become an essential part of online life within the next four years. The panel will also address the critical question for marketers.

Panelists include:

Lisa Romano, Project Manager, Strategic Development, ABC Innovation - ABC
Lisa will discuss ABC’s Business and Marketing Objectives and achievements to date with its Second Life Island, and building virtual communities
 
Kelly Yeoh, Virtual Worlds Engineer, IBM
Kelly has been involved in several of IBMs high profile Second Life builds including the Australian Open.  She will discuss IBM’s presence in SL and the importance of open standards within virtual worlds and the need for scalability and security.
 
Mandy Salomon, Senior Researcher, User Environments, Smart Internet Technology CRC - Swinburne University of Technology
Mandy will discuss what threats and opportunities exist in setting up a presence and doing business in Second Life.
 
Grace Roberts, Founding Director - Second Life TV Network & Cattle Puppy Productions
Grace will bring an innovative perspective to real business opportunities taking place in this virtual world, and how collaborative partnerships and building global networks is a key attribute to these worlds.
 
Nick Abrahams, Leader of Technology Media & Telecommunications Group - Deacons
With a GDP of US$700 million, Second Life is a significant economy. Like all economies there are capital inflows and outflows and participants investing in these Virtual Worlds need to have transparency and certainty about the way these economies are run. Nick will discuss the risks, legal and otherwise, for corporates when they create their Virtual World presence.
 
Moderator - David Holloway, Director - SLOz
SLOz is a site devoted to bringing an Aussie slant to the Second Life experience. Launched in November 2006, SLOz believes that Second Life at the very least may bring a new approach to internet-based interaction, and we want to cover the fun ride to be had along the way. 

Details on how to get the teleport location at their website

I’m not one for fear-driven motivation, but this is funny:

Picture by Paul Cleghorn at Flickr

Yesterday the Official Serenity Ship Papers went on sale at Quantum Mechanix. The papers are replicas of the authorisation materials used by the fictional characters of Joss Whedon’s Firefly/Serenity verse.

The Ship Papers set includes 13 full-color sheets of various sizes up to 8-1/2″ x 14″. Certificates are hand stamped with the official seals of the Alliance, and are hand signed in English and Chinese by the appropriate Alliance officials. The documents contain endorsements required to operate a variety of ship’s systems, and also include system maps, operating licenses, safety inspections, and a wealth of background material covering all manner of information on what it takes to operate a Firefly-Class Transport in an increasingly bureaucratic and restrictive ‘Verse.
 
Those documents come wrapped up in a handcrafted leather wallet with brass fittings and a handmade screw-down plate. The Official Serenity Ship Papers are designed to pass muster with the most ornery Alliance thug and the most discriminating Browncoat.

It is these sorts of props that represent what I argue is an emerging compelling type of merchandise: ‘exported fictional artefacts’. I spoke about exported and imported fictional artefacts recently at a presentation I gave to the Australian publishing industry.  Exported Fictional Artefacts are, quite simply, products that exist within the fictional world. Harry Potter’s wand, for instance has this trait, but a towel that features Harry Potter the character does not. A few years ago I hypothesized that any product which has this trait would be more popular with fans. The main reason is the ‘immersive’ effect of these products: they bring the fan closer to the fictional world and raise the immersive feel of it.

Anyway, check out the Serenity papers, it is a limited-edition run with 1250 of the 1500 available already sold.