4D Fiction

Whether you’re planning to be in attendance at SXSWi this year or not, the SXSW online panel picker is now open for the public to vote for the panels they feel should be presented at the event.

Transmedia is a hot topic at SXSWi this year.  Of more than 2300 submitted panels covering a smorgasboard of topics, there are at least 23 submissions that touch on Transmedia if not already entirely focused on it in some capacity.

Below are some panels I recommend reviewing and voting for.  If you wish to browse more, visit panelpicker.sxsw.com.

SXSW takes place March 11-15, 2011 in Austin, TX.

• ARGS Don’t Work: The Future of Transmedia Stories
  – Maureen McHugh (NoMimesMedia)

• Hoax or Transmedia? The Ethics of Pervasive Fiction
  – Andrea Phillips (Deus Ex Machinatio)

• Audience Engagement in the Transmedia Age
  - Steve Peters (NoMimesMedia)

• Transmedia Artists Guild: New Media Needs New Representation
  – Jay Bushman (.com)

• Project 314: Putting The ‘Game’ Back Into ARGs
  – Adrian Hon (Six to Start)

• How Progress Bars Change the Way We Live
  - Evan Jones (Stitch Media)

• Transmedia Production: Making The New Frontier
  – Benham Karbassi (NoMimesMedia)

• Documenting your Transmedia Project (how to & why)
  – Brooke Thompson (Giant Mice)

• Your Life Is A Transmedia Experience
  – Jenka Gurfinkel (Social Creature)

This year ARGFest took place July 15-18, in downtown Atlanta. It was high summer, but once again ARGFest came together for a great conference, even in Hotlanta!

My brief recap of ARGFest events has been posted to ARGNet, so please check that out. No words, though, can truly express what a joy it was to meet up with friends once again, and to make new friends and acquaintances, social and professional, in this growing and evolving community. I certainly came away inspired, and with lots of ideas for the future.

The ARG Museum was in full swing again this year as well, which was great to see. The hope for the museum is that the creativity poured into some of these ARG/Transmedia artifacts would provide inspiration for such creativity in others.

This year, some of the best parts of ARGFest for me included:

• Andrea Phillips‘ session Beyond the Brunette, and subsequent opportunities I had to chat with her about creating projects
• Benham Karbassi‘s Jeopardy-like videochat session on Transmedia Production
• Maureen McHugh‘s provocative, yet touching, and overall awesome keynote speech (lightning and all)
• Being able to chat with Steve Martin Aggett of Remix Fiction, who’s doing a wonderful job with his photography and TV videocasts.
• Playing Munchkin again with great friends
• Witnessing the birth of ARG Fluxx!
• Being inspired to buy Rock Band and practice some drummering
• Finally being able to meet some more people in the face!
• Being the 2nd to solve Stitch Media‘s pamphlet puzzle and earning a great sling bag, and a $50 food voucher for some local Atlanta restaurants (which was never used…)
• Locating one geocache in the heart of the Atlanta airport near Delta’s HQ with SynthBio. Then running around in the heat visiting a few geocaches in Piedmont Park, but logging none.
• An unbeatable evening with Tongo Hiti at Trader Vic’s tiki bar, and their serene-turned-metal cover of My Heart Will Go On. Whether it was the tiki bar environment or pure unadulterated amazingness, that night will go down in infamy.
• Okay, one thing beats Trader Vic’s — being able to connect again and spend time with some of the best friends people can have. Mingling with professionals and players alike, getting a taste of and being inspired by the high-end production and creative process while seeing all that can be possible by even grassroots lay-people with no budget, and the value of community – all of it is what makes ARGFest so great.

I can’t stress enough how wonderful an opportunity ARGFest is to dig right in at ground zero and associate with creators and players, veterans and lurkers, both professional and grassroots.  If you’re in the Transmedia or ARG or whatever-you-happen-to-name-it-today industry, or you’ve played ARGs or experienced a transmedia story or game, or just want to come and hang out with great folk, it’s for you. It’s educational and entertaining, and it’s an event that we look forward to every year, bringing together a community of people from across the nation, continent, even the world.

Stay tuned to ARGFest.com for news and updates about 2011′s date and location.

• Check out my photo collection from Atlanta on Flickr (or everyone’s photos)
• Check out Remix Fiction‘s ARGFest videos, or Ineffabelle’s videos

Where would you like to see ARGFest in 2011?  Voice your thoughts at Unfiction, and we’ll see who’s willing to step up to the plate and present a feasible plan and location. Next year, it may be near you! Hope to see you there, wherever it goes.

More? Here are a few memorable quotes and comments overheard during ARGFest:

“Success for any of us is success for all of us”
– On competition in the creative community vs in ad agencies

“Strangely this year we have an unusual number of B’s”
“I love B’s!”
- On ARGFest registration

“What is the best transmedia technology a producer can’t live without?”
“His team’s brains!”
~ Benham Karbassi

“F* you, I went to see it in theatres and couldn’t sleep for 3 days.”
- On The Blair Witch Project

“Transmedia isn’t telling us something we should know already… I think it’s making something more true than it’s ever been before”
~ Maureen McHugh

“ARGs are dead. But transmedia is lightning in a jar.”
~ Maureen McHugh

“I love your tongue, it’s cute!”
- Sockpuppet workshop

“So there I am, asking transvestites in a cafe, ‘are you a student of Spelman?’”
- Jonathan Waite, on the city game Unobtrusive Measures

UPDATE 8/13/10: The original article on ARGN has been syndicated to Wired’s Decode online magazine – check it out!

The past few days have seen an increase in discussion of labels and content production due to the PGA officially recognizing “Transmedia Producer” in the Producer Code of Credits. But what is “transmedia”, and is their definition of a Transmedia Producer an accurate representation of the people who claim to ‘produce transmedia’? In the midst of this hot topic, however, another caught my eye -- Rowan72 tweeted a challenge for ARG creators:

Create an ARG where the missing friend is found and/or the mysterious journal is explained -- AT THE BEGINNING OF THE GAME.

Labfly expanded:

and then players realize they shouldn’t have found the journal or friend and they must spend the rest of the ARG plotting and executing re-vanish

It may have been a bit tongue in cheek, but the challenge is a sincere one. Rowan followed up by posing the age old question:

Why does it seem like the majority of games are about finding the missing person or explaining the mysterious thing?

Maureen McHugh of NoMimes Media raises the point in Storytelling and the Illusion of Authenticity that “the stories seem most effective when the plot of them is rather conventional”. We do tend to find these days that many ARGs are telling the same stories -- just with different characters and different places.

Rowan’s concern reminded me very much of Rob Paravonian’s Pachelbel Rant:

The ARG ‘formula’ is getting so saturated with copycat conventions that it’s like walking into a book store and having to skip the genres we don’t like, heading straight to our favourite aisles. But even in the midst of all the noise, occasionally one book may stand out, a best-seller perhaps, and we curiously dive in. Why?

These are the games that, as Rowan later put it, have “personality”. The ones that stand out from their neighbours in some way. Or, as Maureen also wrote:

The audience needs some level of comfort and some elements of surprise. For now, Transmedia is pretty much always surprising for the audience

Just as with novels, there a couple of major factors to take into creative consideration: Plot formula (eg, rescue the kidnapped girl), and content personality (are the characters lovable and unique so that people connect with them?). If neither are up to par, chances are it will get pushed to the back of the shelf, perhaps picked up a few times, but mostly put back to gather dust. But if either factor attracts attention, there’s a much better chance it’ll start flying off the shelves. If something catches our curiosity, it may cause us to accept the parts we’re not as excited about, and end up having a great experience anyway

There will, however, always be an audience for the ‘rehash’, stories and games using the same old safe conventions. The “OMG help! My friend is missing!” for one, is on track to become a “cheesy romance novel” of ARGs. Everyone has their likes and dislikes, and that’s great! But I think, if we want to evaluate this form of entertainment and engagement, we have to stop looking at this creative method (ARGs, Transmedia, pervasive gaming, ‘insert-name-here’) on the whole where every item effectively defines the genre in some way, and rather come at it with more of a bookstore mentality.

Just as novels will never disappear, ARGs and transmedia storytelling are here to stay. As its sphere of influence and visibility grows, we’ll be seeing more of this mentality. Our bookstore layout is changing year after year, even month after month while we try to organize the aisles with appropriate categories -- it’s growing and expanding at an exponential rate. It will be filled with endless genres and variants and labels. It’ll be filled with best-sellers and dust-gatherers, novels and videos, fiction and non-fiction, education and entertainment, reference and religion. It will have new releases, and newspaper archives. There will be special events and games taking place in its doors. It’ll attract old and young, rich and poor, window shoppers, lurkers, and buyers. It will house promotions, contests, and community events. There may even be book signings. Our bookstore is a thriving location for creatives and community. It could even take the form of a library where rather than providing only one-time purchases, items can be checked out and experienced repeatedly by many.

We can’t gauge the overall state of “Books”, but we can certainly see trends and we can survey book enthusiasts in efforts to drill down and analyze the latest and greatest. Novelists don’t define “Books” either, that’s rather redundant -- they simply create content in their style which attracts a certain target audience, and their novel naturally finds a place in some aisle (or may potentially even find a place in multiple). An unsuccessful novel doesn’t indicate that books are dying out, nor its genre, and neither should unsuccessful transmedia productions have a negative defining effect. We’re at the point now in this industry that everything that has been created will be created again -- the aisles will expand, being populated with non-unique productions, rehashes and copycats, utilizing tried and true conventions -- and they’ll still have an audience. But it’s the first movers and innovators that are the ones pushing for new subject aisles and categories entirely, the ones that seek to expand the selection within the bookstore.

What we’re on the verge of right now is breaking out of the ‘aisle’ mentality. Other industries look over here and see creators debating about the subject and what the aisle should be labeled, rather than being guided to what they’re looking for. They see some separate out to make their own aisle, sometimes for exposure and 15 minutes of fame, but usually because the creator realized what they’ve created or want to create seems out of place in our aisle or they felt limited by its particular definition and is better suited elsewhere, under some other new label. Additionally, if someone looking to break into this creative community generates a project that doesn’t quite fit the current label or fails outright, they’re left in the cold as some undefined independent ‘thing’ because accepting it into our subject aisle means the others are condoning something that doesn’t quite represent accurately what our aisle’s about, and that’s a bad thing because we’re still trying to define our aisle. Then the other industries are drawn to wherever the popular buzz of activity is, like moths to a flame, and we wonder why they don’t get it.

If we embrace the bookstore mentality, we’ll be able to expand and collectively accept the growing repertoire of styles and methods. Subject aisles become collections of similar ideas and implementations without a sense of inherent ownership of the label or method. It doesn’t by any means limit the potential or scope of creative productions, but rather encourages a more positive perception as this industry evolves. There will be a place for everyone in its doors. It’ll have projects we don’t really like, and some we love, plus many we’ve never even heard of because we can’t keep up with everything that’s being created. Stories and games will be created and they may sneak into an aisle with no warning, but it won’t matter -- because someone will still come across it and be interested in it. It’ll be easier to freely create, and whether it’s free entertainment or marketing, rehash or completely new, there will always be an audience, and the cream of the crop will rise to the top as the best-sellers, regardless.

We want more best-sellers! We want writers and creators who challenge our thinking, who create unique, memorable, refreshing experiences. But love it or hate it, there will always be someone posting to a blog begging for people to help them rescue their kidnapped friend — the cheesy romances are here to stay.

Perhaps this article would be better entitled: Why I love Halo: An Epic Analysis.

I’m not a Halo fanatic…relatively speaking. I’m not shy about being an enormous fan of the Halo franchise, but I don’t own a Master Chief costume, nor have I ever worn one. I don’t know every little intricate detail of the Halo universe. I can’t ramble off stats, ID numbers, the name and rank of every known character. I don’t play the video game most of the day, every day, and it’s a fat chance I’d “pwn” anyone in multiplayer these days if I did. At all. I’m what you might consider a discoverer, or a story enthusiast.

I was an early adopter of the original Xbox back in 2001, due solely to previews of Halo: Combat Evolved. At that point, I was a gamer. My friends at first were annoyed with my constant raving about Halo, yet many eventually caved and began playing as well – and soon, much more than me. My game-playing fanaticism and multiplayer skill slowly faded as I was drawn further into the mystery, the story world that had been created by Bungie Studios.

I would not hesitate in the slightest to refer to the Halo franchise as “Epic”.

Quite often I compare the potential scope of this universe to that of Star Trek or Star Wars. To me, for a story to be epic, it must have potential to become a ‘part of the whole’, a story told within what feels to be a much, much larger untold story. For an epic to be successful in my opinion, it needs to employ a certain formula. It needs first to be told from the perspective of an individual, or providing only a very small portion of the larger picture, and still make a personal connection with the audience. If done right, this story alone would capture its audience.

Consider recent entertainment franchises like Terminator, The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, or even the Chronicles of Riddick. Each begins by telling a self-contained story from a single perspective, while leaving many questions unanswered in the end. Sarah Connor has to survive against a deadly killing machine from the future. Neo strives desperately to discover and understand what the Matrix is. The little hobbits in peaceful Hobbiton have their worlds turned upside by an unknown, evil force. Harry potter learns about a strange, magical, hidden world. The convict Riddick uses his extreme skills to survive and escape a deadly planet. Each of these tease at a larger universe with untold stories, but begin with an engaging tale of discovery or exploration of something unknown.

Enter Master Chief, Spartan John-117.

Presuming one knows nothing of the previous, indirectly related Marathon titles – with Halo, we begin from the Chief’s perspective, opening up not only in the middle of a war we know nothing about, but making that first, eerie discovery of a foe that threatens much more than we could imagine (I will never forget watching for the first time the cinematic cutscene in which the Chief discovers the Flood). Already, the premise is clear that this isn’t just a self-contained video game story, but actually only a very small window into a universe filled with history and a future, conflict, and characters that truly feel as if they have backstories and full lives.

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