Universe Creation 101

A few days ago I published a post highlighting one possible reason why alternate reality games are perceived as hoaxes by some, and posit one strategy to circumvent the problem. The point seemed to caused a little confusion as some thought I was saying that all the content and marketing should be targeted to the ARG community only. [Steve was right, this would be quicker over a beer at a conference.] To be clear, that is not how I see a launch operates in any scenario. Launches require putting lots of content out into different communities of interest. My point was that a work that looks indistinguishable from real content would benefit from having a community that identifies it as fiction early in the launch process. That is: to target the ARG community in the first wave. Whether other communities are targeted at the same time or slightly after is a design approach relative to the creator — but the point is to include an ARG community early.

But, since focusing on one strategy in isolation is evidently not the most effective approach, I will step back and look at the bigger picture. One of the issues with ARGs is that they are often referred to as hoaxes, and sometimes (rarely) experienced as hoaxes. So my questions have been:

1) Are ARGs hoaxes?
2) Why are ARGs referred to hoaxes?
3) Why are some ARGs experienced as a hoax?
4) Why is it most ARGs not experienced as hoaxes?

Are ARGs hoaxes?
No. As I outlined in a post last year, a hoax is an attempt to trick, to deceive an audience into thinking something is real. Though many ARG designers try to make their content look indistinguishable from real life content as possible, the effort is not to deceive the player but to furnish a storyworld, an entertainment environment. They”re not trying to fool them, they”re trying to entertain them. An aim of an ARG is not to have players realise it was all fiction in the end, but to have enjoyed the different way the fictional world was created (indeed co-created). There is more I can say on this obviously, but I”ll leave it here for now because I think the other points will support this argument.

Why are ARGs called Hoaxes?
Many commentators refer to ARGs as hoaxes. This is for a few reasons, some of which I”ll posit here. One, they”re just using the term because someone else has used it but don”t really know either way. Two, even if the person knows ARGs to not be hoaxes, they may use the term anyway because it is dramatic. Three, they”re aware of ARGs, such as Save my Husband and Hope is Missing, that were experienced as hoaxes and tar all ARGs with the same brush. Four, they”re somewhat familiar an ARG design aesthetic of TINAG (this is not a game) where (among other things) the fictional status of an ARG is denied and played down as much as possible and think this correlates exactly with a hoax. It is this last possible reason for the ”hoax” labelling which I think pervades much thinking. There is this belief that ARGs have absolutely NO FICTIONAL CUES both inside the content and around the content. But it seems that drilling down and looking at why most ARGs have not been experienced as ARGs renders that TINAG assumption false. Designers do put in cues to its fictionality status. But first, I want to have a look at the ARGs that have been considered hoaxes.

Why Are Some ARGs Experienced as a Hoax?
In my previous post here I cited the example of Hope is Missing. Jumping off from Lance Weiler’’s retrospective assessment of one aspect of his ARG, I cited the issue of people not being able to distinguish a work of fiction without paratextual cues (eg: a disclaimer or production company credit). When I look at videos and websites of works that have been regarded as hoaxes (ARGs and non-ARGs) it is pretty clear to me that they are a work of fiction. But that is because I have developed fiction-identifying skills. I cited a recent study that talks about the skills of the ”Google Generation” and how they do not have critical assessment skills for the web. Weiler recognised this issue and posited that his ARG perhaps would not have been perceived as an ARG if it was first launched within the ARG community. You see, ARGers not only have these ”judgement” skills, they also produce a lot of content that identifies the works as fiction. But there is a more common strategy that ARG designers use to make it clear that an ARG is a work of fiction.

Why Is It Most ARGs Aren”t Experienced as Hoaxes?
As I said earlier, it seems concentrating on one strategy seems to cause problems. So, after a good chat with Steve Peters and SpaceBass in the comments of the last post, I”ve garnered a few strategies that seem to point towards many ARGs have not been experienced as hoaxes. I”ve divided them into cues within the content and those around it (paratextual).

In-Content Clue: Set in Known Fictional World
The Metacortechs ARG launched outside the ARG community but had the ARG community playing very early on. They didn”t have an issue of it being construed as a hoax (except for the issue about who the creators were). A reason? The content referred to a known fictional world: The Matrix universe. Terms such as ”metacortechs” etc are in The Matrix and so were picked up by Matrix fans almost immediately.

In-Content Clue: include ‘Unrealistic Statements of Truth’
In our comment discussion, Steve Peters mentioned that in the press release of Metacortechs, they described it as the world’’s leading software company. This reminded me of Virgil Tatum in the ARG Art of the Heist being referred to as a ”master video game auteur”. So, another strategy is to include statements that are fairly easily identifed as being false.

But the point with the ”judgement” issue is that despite clues of unrealistic statements (and even production quality or bad scripting etc) that many people still won”t be able to tell the difference. If I ever doubt this phenomena, I just recall my step-sister who last year, at the age of 18, spent many sleepless nights after I gave her the Blair Witch Project book. It was a few days before I realised that she had no idea that the Blair Witch movie was a work of fiction and couldn”t tell that in the book either.

So, if one cannot rely on certain factors inside the content, then perhaps what ARG designers do outside of the core content is the better strategy?

Around Content Clue: Access Through Existing Fictional World
Most large-scale ARGs have made the link between the ARG and a work of fiction (whether already existing or forthcoming) explicit from the beginning: The Beast, I Love Bees, Dark Knight for instance, had an early link to the ARG through a film or game trailer or from the main film website. There were sites on the Internet but then it was predominantly the credit for a sentient therapist on the A.I.Artificial Intelligence trailer that brought most of the players in. The same with the trailer for I Love Bees, which had a quick flash a few times of www.ilovebees.com at the end, and more recently with the trailer for The Host, in which the URL www.monsterhuntclub.com was listed after the words ”Monsters Are Real”. And as for Dark Knight. The first main fictional site was revealed on the main film site shortly after its launch on May 12th. Then on May 19th there were cards found in comic book stores etc. Also, the ReGenesis ERG had an entry-point into the game (the online tour of the fictional company) situated in the television show website. So, although there may be elements of the game out in various communities, there is a very short time between fictional content being discovered and there being an explicit link between a fictional property and it.

Around-Content Clues: Access-Restrictions to Fictional World
One of the techniques Xenophile Media does with their ReGenesis Extended Reality Games is to make all the fictional sites only accessible by players who have registered for the game. And as I said in the previous point, players enter the game via the television show site so the relationship is very clear in at least two ways.

Around-Content Clues: Access Through Players
What about ARGs that don”t want to announce an ARG is part of an existing fictional world at the beginning (which is what Weiler wanted to do with Hope is Missing)? Well, another way is to ensure that there are paratextual (that is: content external to the main work) announcing it as a work of fiction. So, if there is no explicit link between a product and property made then the designer has to rely on players and commentators. Since ARG communities are the most adept at judging if something is a work of fiction or not or perhaps more appropriately can identify ARG techniques being employed, and they are quite prolific in their experience of game then they would be a good pathway to the fictional content. But it doesn”t have to be ARG players. Metacortechs had Matrix communities providing that fiction-frame, and likewise Dark Knight had superhero communities. But once again, these are players of an existing fiction. If you”re going to launch an ARG that is not part of an existing fiction or don”t want to announce it until the end…well then ARG players I”d say are your best bet.

To show how these techniques can be used in combination, here is an example from Art of the Heist , which was commissioned to raise awareness (and sales) of the Audi A3 — and so did not have an existing fictional property (but had a product). Here is a chart of the rollout of the beginning of the ARG, based on data from McKinney-Silver’s official report video:

Now, as you can see they first put the ingame, story sites online, then major ad buys for ingame advertising of ‘art retrieval’ services and Virgil Tatum (’master video game auteur’). And then it was announced in the ARG community and then the video of the fictional break-in and then the ‘official launch’ at the car show, and then the PM-created gameplay sites. So, firstly the fictional world is furnished across the web and newspapers and these ads target lots of different communities. The ads raise awareness and curiosity. Who is this person claiming to a ”master video game auteur”? So, for a short while there is open speculation about the nature of the artifacts but perhaps the inflated claims about Virgil Tatum serve as fictional cues for some people. Either way, the ARG community is aware of it and they are announcing it on their main blog and are discussing it in their game forum unfiction. Players start to create gameplay resources. Then there is a break-in video which in my mind is the beginning of the game (the event that starts the plot and gives the players a mission). A few days later attendees at the Auto show see a missing Audi because of the theft. This launches it officially to the greater community but the ARG community is already in play. Then there is a PM-created gameplay blog and a micro-site on Audi. So, people learn about and access the game through the ARG community, Audi, media coverage of the ”marketing” enacted by Audi, and the ARG designer-created gameplay resource. [Post-Post Addition: Co-designer of this ARG, Michael Monello, commented that the ARG designer-created gameplay resource (the blog) made it very clear it was a game. See his comments below.] Here we can see how all of these strategies work together.

Basically the point is that most ARGs seem to avoid falling into the hoax pit of deception in a number of ways. It is clear that there is often an early clue that it is a work of fiction within the content (eg: set in a fictional world), but due to issues of judgement it is perhaps better to rely on the path people take to an ARG, how they discover it. That is: accessing it through an existing fiction or through players. In many cases even the ARG community benefit from the fiction-paths that PMs create. So, as we can see, the belief that the TINAG philosophy means PMs take out all the clues to fictionality (which is something I argued for a while), is false. However, the cues to fictionality are in many cases outside the work, in paths created by PMs and players.

In 1997, academic and designer Janet Murray published a book called Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. It not only gave voice to the dreams of technologists, fans and universe creators, but also inspired more. The thematic thread of Murray’s excellent book is the notion of the holodeck:

First introduced on Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987, the holodeck consists of an empty black cue covered in white gridlines upon which a computer can project elaborate simulations by combining holography with magnetic “force fields” and energy-to-matter conversions. The result is an illusory world than can be stopped, started, or turned off at will but that looks and behaves like the actual world and includes parlor fires, drinkable tea, and characters, like Lord Burleigh and his household, who can be touched, conversed with, and even kissed. The Star Trek holodeck is a universal fantasy machine, open to individual programming: a vision of the computer as a kind of storytelling genie in a lamp. (Murray, 2000 [1997], 15)

Murray (and others) hold up the holodeck as the ultimate storytelling machine. What can be more exciting than entering an fictional space that is indistinguishable from reality? There are many that are working hard to create technologies and content that will manifest this vision: sensory devices (both sensing us and enabling us to sense it), realistic graphics and artificial intelligence programs smart enough to do anything. All these efforts aim to make a work of fiction seem real, but they do not attempt to bring the fiction into real life. The holodeck is a separate space, in a magic-circle that one enters. What of a work of fiction that operates in your own life?

While this experience of fiction is not everyone’s cup of tea, it is very exciting to others. It is one of the attractions to ”alternate reality games”, as ARG designer Dave Szulborski explains:

In an alternate reality game, the goal is not to immerse the player in the artificial world of the game; instead, a successful game immerses the world of the game into the everyday existence and life of the player. (Szulborski, 2005, 31)

And ARG designer Elan Lee (who has now co-founded Fourth Wall Studios):

An alternate reality game is anything that takes your life and converts it into an entertainment space. (Lee in Ruberg)

ARGs are not the only format this desire towards a real world immersive space has emerged though. Practitioners of many different properties are playing with ”furnishing” their fictional world with creations that look real and exist in your own world. What I’m also interested in is what happens when this urge to have fiction enter your real world and ubiquitous computing takes hold. As a background to the idea, here is a short clip from Robert Zemeckis’s 1997 feature film Contact. I have used this in some of my talks over the last couple of years to illustrate the possibilities:

I’m not talking about stalking audiences! No, instead I’m interested in what it would be like to have that film scenario experienced in real life, but with fictional content coming through the various media. Indeed, how this can be experienced within a media integrated home. Well, a short while ago I posted about an an ”Anytime/Anywhere Content Lab” (AACL) being built by the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California (with big entertainment industry sponsors such as Disney, LucasFilms, NBCUniversal, Fox, Sony, Paramount). It is described as ”a modular, state-of-the-art, research and testing site where the industry can explore how consumers interact with high-quality entertainment in an integrated environment”. Here is their artist’s vision pic:

This lab is a wonderful opportunity for creators to experiment with testing creations that employ ”concurrent” and ‘’simultaneous” media usage (which I’ve posted about a couple of years ago here, here and here), but also for coming up with (what I think is) exciting media-integrated experiences. Imagine you come home after just getting the latest Alternate Reality Home Module^TM. You and your partner put the special ”Game in Play” message on your door and then load the special USB drive into your computer or special device. It does a system check to ensure all your household devices are connected either with cables or wireless. It installs any special plugins your toaster or fridge might need, loads all the programs needed, asks if you want to know how long the experience goes for, the verbally-triggered ”STOP” command and whether you’re ready to commence. You look at each other with eyes wide and giggle. Click.

The lights go out. Your TV starts up and so you wander to the loungeroom. On the screen is a news report on an event that happened just a few minutes ago. You watch it, gathering all the details you can, trying to figure out what the events on screen will mean for you. You hear your kettle boil. The game obviously wants one of you in the kitchen while the other finishes watching the news report. You make two cups of tea while your heart pounds. You hear voices upstairs, freeze, then realise that the radio in your bedroom has turned on. You go upstairs, slowly, and enter your bedroom. The radio is another news report, but this time you’re hearing live calls from people at the event. The phone rings. You answer it and get a government recording telling you that you need to evacute your home immediately and go to this location. You run downstairs to your partner who excitedly says he’s found out something but you tell him you’re got to leave immediately. Your partner looks at you with raised eyebrows. Really? Yes! Cool. Your partner quickly prints out what he found while you grab blankets, your mobile and a torch. You both jump into your GPS-enabled car and….

Now, there are a whole lot of other things one can do in the home, and it doesn’t have to be scary-style. Design issues would include working out how much time people would need to figure something out; leaving cues in the peices as to when a player can leave them (so they don’t feel stuck), indeed: encouraging agency; also balancing the joy of discovering against the game revealing everything for you; using devices to create a setting and tone and for narrative information above mere suspense or house-navigation; a system that can discern the spatial location of your devices to ensure the position of participants is utilised to the greatest degree and so on. But I like the possibilities…Do you have any ideas how the media-integrated home can be used for entertainment?

References
Murray, J. (2000 [1997]) Hamlet on the Holodeck: the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts

Ruberg, B. (2006) ”Elan Lee’s Alternate Reality” 6 December Gamasutra.com, URL: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20061206/ruberg_01.shtml

Szulborski, D. (2005) This Is Not A Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming, New Fiction Publishing.

One of the issues when creating an ”alternate reality game” is that it may receive negative backlash from being perceived as a ”hoax”. Alternate reality games (ARGs) if you recall, are (among other things) multi-platform works that remove any cues to its fictionality. So, if you put fake newsfootage online, there is no meta information around it explaining that it is a work of fiction. There are many examples of negative backlash due to confusion over the fictional status of a work, a recent example is LonelyGirl15. August last year I posted a short essay on Why ARGs Aren”t Hoaxes on my old blog (which I’ve moved to my personal site). The argument I put forward was that ARG creators actively encourage players to co-create the work of fiction with them and the resulting player-production that occurs (gameplay resources) then puts all the fictional cues back in. ARG creators take the cues to fictionality out while the players put it back in. This has worked well with many ARGs, except those that are not launched to the ARG community first.

ARGs that launch outside of the community often garner lots of media buzz, but for (I argue) the wrong reasons: people are discussing whether it is a hoax and how this makes them feel. In an interview at ARGNetcast, filmmaker Lance Weiler, reflected that the reason why his ARG to market the Warner Bros. VOD release of his film Head Trauma, Hope is Missing , faulted temporarily under this hoax accusation was because it was launched outside of the ARG community. Weiler will be on a forthcoming podcast here (talking about distribution techniques and so on), but for now I wanted to explain why I think ARGs launched outside the ARG community suffer from hoax issues.

As I discussed in my mini ARGs & Hoaxes essay, ARG players have a new media literacy of ”judgement”. I reconfigured this new media literacy posed in the new media literacies whitepaper ”Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century” in the context of ARGs:

Judgment: players evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources (to discern whether the sources are part of a game, or discovered at the right time) through activities such as checking the date the website domain was registered, who the website was registered by, the depth in the archives and the links to and from the site and ingame references.

Recently, a longitudinal study ”Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future” conducted by CIBER research team at University College London has found that the ”Google Generation” (among other things) lack the skills to critically assess online information. This deficiency of judgement is due in part I believe to the lack of education in schooling. At many universities and secondary schools there is a ”no web” policy where teachers do not train students how to judge websites, they just forbid them from citing the web. One of the reasons why this policy is so rampant of course is because many of the educators don”t know how to judge websites either. But the inability to judge content (including its fictionality status) is a skill in itself. That is why many educators are excited about using ARGs — they (among other things) help teach such literacies.

Anyway, this phenomena explains in part the issue of a ”hoax” perception in some ARGs and reveals a strategy that can be used to circumvent it. Target those who have these judgement skills, wait until they create resources that frame the work, and let the ripple effect spill over into the non-ARG communities (with well timed efforts to raise awareness from yourself too). How practitioners target the ARG community will be the topic of another post…but in the meantime, if you have any thoughts on this issue comment away!

[26 JAN EDIT: This post seems to have been misinterpreted by some, so I've cleared up and developed the idea with Steve Peters and SpaceBass in the comments here and also in my follow-up post here].

Hello! Sorry for the break in transmission. I intended this site to be a place for sharing design information and thought that with my concentration on finishing my PhD, that podcasts would be a quick and simple option. I’ve since realised that podcasts actually take more time and effort than a post and so will be doing some posts in between the podcast gaps. I’m inspired to share more because what I think the area of multi-platform/transmedia/cross-media/360/integrated content needs most now is:

• rigorous research
• talented practitioners
• informed reporting and reviewing
• production infrastructures
• funding and revenue streams
• measuring technologies and strategies

Research is slowly emerging from specially-tasked academic groups such as the recent ”Crossmedia Experience Learning Laboratory” at the Research Center for Communication and Journalism, Hogeschool Utrecht (Jak Boumans has written on the introductory lecture and book by Harry van Vliet here and here); the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT’’s Comparative Media Studies program, and some forthcoming PhDs by researchers such as Marc Ruppel and…myself!

Measurement is moving ahead slowly but surely, especially with the guidance of the Media Measurement Integration Task Force (MMITF). Funding and revenue streams are influx and in some cases undecided. Reporting is still a problem as many journalists and reviewers assess according to (understandably) their own media awareness and in many cases according to an inappropriate 1980s franchise-logic. Production companies are experimenting with different ways to work with consultants, creatively-control licensing and encourage collective efforts internally between various departments (Mark Deuze’s book on ”Media Work” provides some interesting information on these approaches).

But this site hopes to assist the development of practitioners. The scope is design techniques and strategies on distribution, adaptation, repurposing, transmedia expansions, technologically-connected gaming and arts learnt from film, TV, books, gaming, theatre, radio and art; voiced from practitioners, researchers and strategists from mass entertainment, marketing, independent art and gaming; at locations all around the globe. I believe we”ll all get better at it once we share more.

So, I’m interested in your lessons, techniques and ideas. Rather than general descriptions though, I encourage articles that address a specific design issue…that drill down. And rather than talk about just what is known, let’s also explore possibilities. I’ll be sharing some of my understandings, but I’d love it if you sent through ideas you have for articles too. Short 750-1,000 word pieces addressing a topic or posts that explore what you’d like to see. Email me your thoughts. Take your time, I know you”re busy and probably blog-shy. We”ve got plenty of time to change the world.

Hello All! More stuff coming to this site soon. In the meantime, here is the transcript for the podcast interview with Evan Jones, which was uploaded on 23rd October 2007:

[Intro]
Christy:This podcast today is going to be about poetics, about design techniques involved in creating cross media trends, media 360 experiences, whatever you want to call. In exploring these techniques, I’ll be speaking with creators from all sorts of independent and commercial sectors. What is interesting is that I find that the best creators or producers are usually people that are thinking across media or multi art way before realizing it’s actually an industry trend or there’s actually an economic imperative involved in it. One such creator is my first special guest on this podcast. His name is Evan Jones of Stitch Media.

You may know Evan from his work on the ReGenesis Extended Reality Game that he worked on whilst at the innovative Canadian company called Xenophile Media. I’ll hopefully have the folks from Xenophile Media in this podcast sometime in the future, but for now we”re concentrating on Evan Jones and his many talents. So, without any further delay, welcome Evan.

Evan Jones: Thanks.

Christy: So, let’s start with Stitch Media. I love that on your site, you”ve got this very simple, yet effective little mantra there basically saying: “We make interactive stuff and we make stuff interactive.”

Evan Jones: Yeah. I really love some of the new sites that are coming out and the way that they’re branded with a much more conversational tone and so I wanted to be really personal in the way of describing what Stitch Media was up to. Really, it’s the reversal of those subjects and objects and flipping the language around to say that really what my strategy is, is to take traditional media sources, books, television, music, and film and to help them become interactive in different ways. Some of those ways involve websites and mobile applications and games, things like that, but really it’s about integrating the two and that’s where the stitching together comes into the business model.

(Read on …)