Universe Creation 101

 ep004_TimWright: Download

Another podcast! Yay! At this rate I might even crack three podcasts a year. hehe. Joking aside, I’m excited about our guest today. UK digital writer Tim Wright shares his vast experience with over a decade with online interactive drama and more recently multiplatform storytelling. Below is a time guide showing you topics Tim touches on a certain points. Everything Tim (and I) refer to is in the show notes.

00.00: Online Caroline
11.10: Lonely Girl 15
13.18: closure
15.58: Balancing world creation and fan fiction
19.56: Mount Kristos
25.33: The Search of Oldton
39.32: Multiplatform storytelling
52.09: Scaling
Happiness…

Show notes:

• Jill Walker-Rettberg’s essay: ‘How I was played by Online Caroline’
• Rob Bevan
• MindGym
• Jenny Cam
• Online Caroline
• XPT (fictional company)
• Richardson’s Pamela
• Lonely Girl 15
• Mount Kristos
• Kate Modern
• You Sucjk at Photoshop
• In Search of Oldton
• Writers for the Future
• trAce Online Writing Centre
• Sue Thomas
• Multiplatform Storytelling for Screenwriters @ 01ZERO-ONE
• Ted
• The Lost Ring ‘Running of the Labyrinth’ instructions
• Jane McGonigal’s SXSW presentation: Alternate Realities (PPT at SlideShare)

More info about Tim:

• Tim Wright’s blog
• XPT (Wright & Bevan’s company)

Other interviews conducted at UC101:

• Lance Weiler (video)
• Evan Jones (audio and text transcript)

Postscript:
Sorry about the technical difficulties with the podcast. The video editing software I use doesn’t let me do edits to the second, and I’m still trying to figure out how to get both myself and the interviewer at the same sound level. Tim teases me about being in a black room (it was midnight for me!), and being close to the screen with bad lighting. What can I say, I’m an interactive drama cliche. I’ll have to increase the drama with a call to save the world or something.

Well, not quite ‘death’ but an indefinite hiatus. I’m powering down this blog for a few reasons, one of which is my desire to finish my PhD. I’ve tried for the last year and a half to do PhD writing and work and this blog, but found the mindsets are somewhat incompatable. I’ve decided therefore to close this blog down. I don’t know if I’ll bring it up again and if I do when, or whether I’ll start another one. But I do know that I have thoroughly enjoyed blogging here these past few years. I have especially enjoyed meeting many of you because of the blog, and seeing ‘cross-media’ (etc) projects become ubiquitous. Thankfully, the area has alot more people looking at it now, from alot of different perspectives. Here are some blogs that will keep you informed:

• Networked Performance: research blog that posts about emerging network-enabled practice;
• You can read and listen to news about alternate reality games and just about any online extension of a film, TV or book property on the ARGNet blog and ARG Netcast (podcast);
• Henry Jenkins personal blog and the Convergence Culture Consortium blog has lots of goodies from a media studies perspective about ‘transmedia storytelling’ and ‘convergence culture’ in general;
• DeMontfort University share their investigations into what they term ’Transliteracy’ at their PART blog;
• Jeff Gomez, the CEO of Starlight Runner and longtime practitioner of ‘trans-media’ projects, is now blogging regularly about his insights and experience over at the Producers Guild of America blog;
• Monique de Haas blogs about ‘crossmedia communication’ occasionally;
• Tony Walsh posts semi-regularly on alternate reality games;
• Valentina Rao blogs about crossmedia games and anything related to that at Games Across Media, and will hopefully be starting her PhD on the subject soon;
• Johnathan Gray, Derek Johnson and Ivan Askwith are blogging about everything around TV and film at The Extratextuals;
• Crossmedia Dialog is a group blog that post regularly on crossmedia in Amsterdam and worldwide;
• Faris Yakob, Adam Crowe blog about ‘transmedia planning’ and other changes to the marketing industry;
• Jak Boumans posts every single day about stuff happening in the Netherlands and worldwide at Buziaulane; 
• Max Giovognoli runs everything to do with cross-media in Italy;
• MobileCrossMedia is a blog that looks at the different ways mobile phones can network with different devices and the real world;
• If you don’t already get it, the Convergence Newsletter has regular interesting newsletters about convergence in journalism and has been my favourite newsletter for the past few years;

I don’t plan to be blogging here about events or publications I’m involved in, instead I’ll pop them on my bio site. But for now, here are some events I’m involved with, in the not-too-distant-future:

• I’ll be on the ‘expert panel’ with Mark McCrindle and Tim Flattery at Mitchell Communications Group ’s launch of ‘While You Weren’t Watching’, a documentary on changes to branded entertainment etc in which I was interviewed. The launch is private but the documentary will be put online I believe in Nov; 
• I have my own panel on ‘Designing, Experiencing and Analysing Games in the Age of Integration’, and I am a panelist in Darren Toft’s panel on ‘What Happened to New Media Art?’ at the Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment in Dec;
• I’ll be on the panel on ‘Cyber-Born Film’ at Megan Spencer’s Destination Festival (or DestFest) in Dec;
• In Jan 08, I’ll be a guest lecturer again for Sue Thomas and Kate Pullinger’s Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media, De Montfort University, UK;
• In Feb 08, my essay on ‘Tiering in Alternate Reality Games’ will be published in the special issue of Convergence edited by Henry Jenkins and Mark Deuze.

For now though, I will continue to be online in a different way. I’ve started a podcast, a podcast where I’ll interview talented people working in this area. My ‘birth’ podcast is a bit awkward, but the second is a great one: an interview with Stitch Media’s Evan Jones. At the site, I also provide sneak preview information about Stitch Media’s latest project.

That is it for me here, thankyou all for sharing this time with me. I’ll see you on the other side of my PhD.

Check it out: www.ChristyDena.com  

Check it out: www.UniverseCreation101.com

Jak Bouman has posted about the Monkey Murder Mystery which started on Oct 4th:

From October 4th, 2007 a real street game, the Monkey Murder Mystery, will start in four Dutch cities. The Monkey Murder Mystery is a local interactive reality game, which gets gamers away from their computer. The gamers will hunt or be hunted, not with a water or paint pistol, but with a camera equipped mobile.

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

Although not everyone realises it, I am actually based in Australia. I spend alot of time online checking out what is happening around the world. The Net is great for this, but at the same time I hardly ever get to meet my colleages in person. This year I’ve travelled to five countries and meet many researchers & designers who have come to Oz from OS. Here are some pics of me (in order of meeting) with some colleagues who share my research interest (I’ve met others but don’t have the pics): 

Photo by ?, uploaded by Eric Voight on flickr

This motley crew is the group shot from the First International Conference on Cross-Media Interaction Design held in Sweden in March. Wohoo! It was great meeting lots of people, including my fellow keynoter Liam Bannon. But in particular I was thrilled to meet Monique de Haas and Jak Boumans. In the pic: bottom right in the blue jacket is Monique, behind her is Liam, beside Liam is me, beside me (to the left) is Jak, and below Jak is Charlotte Wiberg who with Mikael Wiberg (the first guy to the left of Charlotte) are the conference organisers. 

Monique and I have been championing cross media for years now. We were discussing this stuff via emails and through our blogs long before it became a pervasive economic imperative. I got to spend lots of time with Monique as I stayed with her in Amsterdam and then Monique, Jak and I gave an impromptu panel session at Noordelijke Hogeschool where I was asked to give a lecture (organised by Eric Voight who is also in the pic). It was a delight meeting Jak – whose years of experience with the area has given him a balanced wisdom and generous spirit.

Photo by a lovely lady from AMP, on Jane’s flickr

This is myself and Jane McGonigal (right). Jane is of course the first major researcher of alternate reality games, she has lots of presentations and articles and a dissertation on the topic. It was especially great chatting with Jane because we got to talk about ARGs but also because she works in industry and academia. It was so good to share stories with someone who understands what it is like.

Photo by Tama Leaver, on flickr

This is Lisbeth Klastrup (left), myself and Jill Walker (right), both of whom I met for the first time at perthDAC 2007. Lisbeth co-wrote a paper with Susana Tosca on ‘Transmedial Worlds: Rethinking Cyberworld Design’, which I have referred to here and in my papers and is in my chapter on World Creation in my thesis. The paper is available for download on Lisbeth’s articles site. Jill has written on ‘distributed narratives’ which I’ve referred to here many times, in many of my presentations and of course is in my thesis too. Check out her dedicated minisite  and here is a snippet:

Distributed narratives don’t bring media together to make a total artwork. Distributed narratives explode the work altogether, sending fragments and shards across media, through the network and sometimes into the physical spaces that we live in. This project explores this new narrative trend, looking at how narrative is spun across the network and into our lives.

Now actually meeting people who share your research interest may not be exciting to you, but to someone who doesn’t get to meet people who work in this emerging area (and so not many looking at it) it is an absolute delight.

In 2004, well-known academic Jill Walker Rettberg (who among other things did a great piece a few years ago about the online drama Online Caroline by XPT) published a great paper called Distributed Narrative: Telling Stories Across Networks:

A new kind of narrative is emerging from the network: the distributed narrative. Distributed narratives don’t bring media together to make a total artwork. Distributed narratives explode the work altogether, sending fragments and shards across media, through the network and sometimes into the physical spaces that we live in.

Although I argue that a distributed narrative can be a total artwork, Walker nevertheless provides some canny observations about the phenomenon. For instance, these forms are explained according to three values:

1) Distribution in Time (can’t experience in a single session)
2) Distribution in Space (cannot experience in a single location or single medium)
3) Distribution of Authorship (collective, emergent authorship)

Among the works Walker discussed to illuminate the theory was Nick Montfort’s and Scott Rettberg’s Implementation, a sticker novel that I’ve referred to in my talks many times. It is novel that has each paragraph distributed across stickers all over the world. It is described on their site as follows:

Implementation is a novel about psychological warfare, American imperialism, sex, terror, identity, and the idea of place, a project that borrows from the traditions of net.art, mail art, sticker art, conceptual art, situationist theater, serial fiction, and guerilla viral marketing. The text was written collaboratively by Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg with some contributions from others. Its initial incarnation was as a serial novel printed on sheets of stickers that were distributed in monthly installments.

Ludologist (game theorist) Dakota Reese Brown mentions a recent project that adds to Walker’s genre: a stencil story called She Loves the Moon. I cannot find any info about the creators, just the info and pics they provide at flickr:

The mission stencil story is an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure story that takes place on the sidewalks of the Mission district in San Francisco. It is told in a new medium of storytelling that uses spraypainted stencils connected to each other by arrows. The streetscape is used as sort of an illustration to accompany each piece of text.

Its a love story with 2 characters who start in different locations. His story starts at 16th and Valencia, in front of the Crown Hotel / Limon Restaurant with the text “He Leaves his Lonely Apartment.” Her story starts at 21st and Guerrero in front of a stunning mansion with the text, “She Leaves her Lonely Apartment.” Eventually their paths merge, at the point where they meet, and their paths travel together until drama pulls them apart.

Their are two possible endings, happy and tragic, and two other points where the story can end unexpectedly if the viewer chooses the wrong ending. All in all, there are 4 possible endings.

Looks like fun!

• More info on Walker’s ‘distributed narratives’
• Implementation site
• Jon Bauer’s Google Maps rendering of She Loves the Moon
• Mission Stencil Story at flickr

My old list of mobile phone content has been getting some attention of late. At the time when I wrote it there were not many sites that featured mobile phone content (particularly creative stuff). More recently, however, there has been a growing interest in the area. Here are some links (some old, some new) you may find interesting:

• Téléphone mobile, codes optiques et cross media

A blog about the role mobile technologies play in cross-media. Some great examples of technologies that get networked and non-networked media communicating. There are some great video examples of QR codes etc being used in entertainment and gaming.

• Mobile Aesthetic

Vassilen Iotzov’s research for a diploma thesis at the Berlin University about the emergence of mobile TV aesthetics (mainly german-speaking). Once again, lots of great info and videos for those of us who don’t speak German. Iotzov also emailed me some great additions to my mobile content round-up, which I’ve now added.

• Poetics of Mobile Media

Dean Keep’s research blog for his Masters at RMIT on micro-narratives.

• Dr Reinhold Grether’s Directory of Mobile Art and Locative Media

This is a fantastic listing of projects covering mobile art and research.

•  PicturePhoning & Textually

Emily Turrettini’s sites are always a great resource of information about the industry and creative projects

Oh, and here is a great guide I stumbled upon: DotMobi Mobile Web Developer’s Guide.

I’ve just read the proceedings to Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth’s Mobile Media 2007 and there are some interesting papers. In particular I liked:

• Hidden Meanings: Understanding the new social-psychological impact of mobile phone use through storytelling by Kathleen M. Cumiskey
• From Mobile Phones to Mobile Media: Current developments in mobile phone-based cultural consumption by Juan Miguel Aguado and Inmaculada J. Martinez
• Mobile Phones, Networked Selves, Media Ecologies by Marsha Berry
• Games without Borders: Globalisation, gaming and mobility in Venezuela by Thomas H. Apperley
• Domesticating New Media: a discussion on locating mobile media by Larissa Hjorth
• Perspectives on mobiles and PCs: Attitudinal convergence and divergence among small businesses in urban India by Jonathan Donner

That’s it from me on this topic for now. Let me know of any other sites I’ve forgotten or don’t know about.

The Digital Communication and Culture Department at the University of Sydney (which is the Uni where I’m doing my PhD) invited me to give a lecture to their Digital Cultures students. Tomorrow I’ll be giving the talk titled Multi-Platform Art versus Commodity Intertexts. I’ll present on the different approaches to cross-media/transmedia/multi-platform in mass-entertainment, independent art, gaming, literature and so on. I’ll also look at how this has changed over time (I go back a few decades) and how the theory around these forms has changed too. Looking forward to it!

The DIMEA 2007: Second International Conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts will be held on the 19th - 21st September 2007 in Perth, Western Australia. DIMEA 2007 is organised jointly by Murdoch University and ACM SIG CHI (Singapore Chapter).

DIMEA 2007 is a cross-disciplinary conference that will bring together researchers from the areas related to digital interactive media in entertainment and arts. The conference will accept different submission types that present new scientific ideas, improvements to existing techniques or provide a new way of examining, designing and using digital interactive media. Suggested topics for the conference include, but are not limited to:

Entertainment Art and Technology
New Media Emerging Technologies
Code Art
Digital Visual Media
Moving Media
Culture of New Media
Interactive Stories

Check out: www.dimea.org