The decision has been made.
Come 2012, the ever-awesome ARGFest-O-Con will be finding its place, once again, north of the border – to be hosted in Toronto, Ontario!

In its earlier years, ARGFest had one incarnation in Vancouver, British Columbia, but over the following years the fest has grown and mutated, filling out its amazepants of awesomesauciness.

If you’ve been to previous ARGFest events, you’ll already know how entertaining and enjoyable the conference is, even just by the community focus and social tomfoolery. But in addition to all that, ARGFest has become a hotspot for speakers and experience designers to share their studies, advice and woes, educate and entertain through their presentations and case studies in the Alternate Reality Gaming and Transmedia Storytelling space – from grassroots creators to mainstream media marketing campaigns.

Speaking for myself, it’s greatly exciting to finally be able bring this event which is dear to my heart to my home country (I hadn’t yet been sucked into ARGs back when Vancouver played host), and it pleases me to no end that the fest committee has chosen Toronto to host next year’s conference.

ARGFest 2011, Bloomington

I very much encourage you to consider attending this event — the gears are in motion and planning is under way, and as soon as more details are decided (such as the dates), you absolutely must mark them off on your calendar!  Whether you are a professional designer, transmedia producer, ARG creator, artist, storyteller, or especially a player of ARGs, or simply enjoy creative projects, stories, and games – this event is for you!

The ARGFest committee has more than proven their ability to create a conference that will impact in many ways, both in professionalism and social merriment. With games to play, puzzles and mysteries to solve, wisdom to soak in, inspiration to take home, and many friends to make, meet and greet (probably for the first time in meat-space), and a wonderful urban attraction (Toronto, remember?) to explore and discover, how could anyone not want to come and experience some Canadian hospitality?

As the exquisite J.C. Hutchins, who offered the keynote at last year’s ARGFest in Bloomington Indiana, said:

People, man. People.

Canadians are all over that :)   Stay tuned for more announcements as the planning progresses… Read the official announcement at ARGFest.com

And finally, don’t ever, ever watch this video to whet your appetite for Canada… seriously, don’t even think about it. Ever.

Also: Poutine. Tim Hortons. Mounties. Canadian Tire. C(anadian) N(ational) Tower. Maple Leafs. Igloos. Royal Ontario Museum. Toronto Island. Ontario Science Center. Skydome Rogers Center. Harbourfront. Hockey. Hockey Hall of Fame. And sooooo much more, eh…?

Only days remain until a crowd of Alternate Reality Gaming and Transmedia enthusiasts converge in Bloomington Indiana for another year of ARGFest-O-Con.

This year I’m happy to announce that 4D Fiction will be officially curating the ARG Museum. This element of ARGFest is a place where creative artifacts and ‘swag’ incorporated into various campaigns and artful projects are put out for display for the fest attendees. It’s an opportunity for everyone to check out the work others have put into extending their storyworld tangibly into our reality, and perhaps for some aspiring puppetmasters and artists to gain some inspiration from others’ works.

This year I’ll be adding a section to the display specific for ARG-related books – whether game-specific, informational, or just related to the ARG genre in general.

This year’s museum will also incorporate an extended component, using – yes – QR Codes! Each display will have extended details about their project available for skimming by scanning their code on a smartphone. And as an additional bonus for the fun of perusal, there will be a trivia question for each display!

Yes, ARG Museum Trivia will be a playable component to this year’s museum.  Here are the juicy details…

Points will be rewarded for correctly answering trivia questions (and bonus points if you get it right the first time!).  The top 3 scoring (and present) attendees by Saturday lunch will win first choice of any of a selection of books to take home that were on display. At the time of this writing, the selection will include:

• “This Is Not A Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming”, by Dave Szulborski
• “This is Not A Game”, by Walter Jon Williams
• “House of Leaves”, by Mark Z. Danielewski
• “Codes, Ciphers, Secrets and Cryptic Communication”, by Fred B. Wrixon

So read up, stuff that ARG brain with campaign lore, and see if you can outsmart the rest!

A Call For Museum Submissions

If you’ll be in attendance at ARGFest this year, we’d love to have you help the museum by bringing any past ARG related items you may have to be included in the museum display.  Every year it’s been a collection from numerous community members and puppet masters.  The more items brought in to help populate the museum, the wider a variety of content and experience we have as a whole.

If you have something you can take to the fest, please contact me via this form, or on Twitter (@4dfiction or @thebruce0), so it can be registered in the collection.  Don’t worry if you’re not sure whether it’s appropriately ARG-related, I can be the judge of that :).  All items will be catalogued and guarded so they can be returned to their rightful owners at the end of the fest.

* As a bonus incentive for providing items for the museum’s display, those who bring any items that are put on display will be awarded bonus points towards the Trivia game!

Additionally, if you have anything you may wish to donate towards the prizes (collectible ARG artifact, books, etc), that would be awesome!  Please let me know beforehand.

Please visit this wiki page to see what people have offered to bring and whether you have something for an unlisted campaign, or an unlisted item for a campaign that may already be on the list. The more the better!

I’m very excited for this year’s ARGFest and Museum, and I hope you are too. ARGFest begins later this week in Bloomington – have you registered yet?
For more information, please visit ARGFest.com

When I was child, my best friend Greg and I went through a stage of imaginative paper-based adventures — sure, we occasionally played “cowboys and indians” and whatnot, and we played with toys and action figures, instilling life into Star Wars figurines (I even vaguely recall a Star Wars lunch pail!) — but this was different. This was actually a very simplistic, childish sort of ‘game mastering‘.

I can’t remember how it actually started, but this was what we did for fun: We each took turns designing mazes on paper, secretly, on our own time, and then we’d sit down and take turns pretending to be trapped in each others’ mazes, exploring and trying to escape by saying where we wanted to go or what we wanted to do.

If I was the one exploring, I’d only see a portion of the map – whether it was obscured by a piece of paper with a hole cut in the middle that he’d move around to follow where “I” went, or whether he actually drew the maze as I moved around. But as I explored, as I turned each corner, opened a door or entered a new area, something new would happen – I might discover some treasure, a special item, some crazy mysterious object, or have to face an enemy and decide what to do. Whatever happened after I made my choice was decided by him.

The levels we designed for each other would typically be very simple (we were kids after all), but we loved the fun of exploring, interacting with other, and making decisions on the fly knowing that the results really were made up as we went along – that’s what made it fun.

The more we played, the more adventurous our games got, the more our levels ‘matured’ as we tried new things. The environments became labyrinths, forests, or space ships with intricate maps and structures. We’d start writing little introductory stories to lay out a mission or some task that had to be accomplished. I remember designing out levels of buildings, with secret rooms and interesting items to find, pick up and discover. We even built in ‘triggers’ where, for example, we’d note that somewhere on that map a door or hole in a wall might now be open if they picked up a particular item or flipped a switch somewhere else.

As a child, this was our game-like way of storytelling, of having fun, and it was a unique sort of adventure for us. This type of gameplay was of course nothing new – it’s a basic form of what’s known as table-top role playing, where a game-master (GM) creates a world, and leads other people, friends or acquaintances, in a game of exploration with characters the players design and improve within the guidelines of the environment defined by the GM.  Every action and decision is interactive between the player and the GM, and the story itself might unfold over the course of a day, weeks, months, or more.

It’s also the basic structure of role playing games (RPGs) – where a player controls an avatar of sorts, and explores a storyworld, discovering its story and seeing their character grow and change dynamically with every decision they make and encounter they face.

As I grew older and migrated to computers for gaming, that form of play translated to computer RPGs – text-based dungeon crawlers (like Zork), early internet Telnet environments (like the Muddy Waters MUD), and classic graphical RPGs (like the Bard’s Tale trilogy).  One thing remained the same for me, however – it wasn’t the idea of role-playing that I loved as much as the act of discovery. Any game that had a complex story or an environment ripe for exploration, I set out to map. Whether it consisted of rooms I connected as nodes and lines on paper after exploring cardinal directions in text, or whether it was a map of walls and doors sketched on grid paper – I simply had to discover and explore, to visit every nook and cranny, find secrets, uncover the whole story.

Today, when I look back at those games I first played as a child on a piece of paper, I realize that the passion I had for exploration and discovery has translated into what many today call alternate reality games (ARGs).

While both ARGs and RPGs both generally consist of core narratives, ARGs do have a clear distinction from RPGs.  In a role-playing game, the player enters the realm of the story in the form of a character or avatar; you play that role and explore the storyworld within its reality, revealing the narrative and building your character. In an alternate reality game, it’s the other way around – it’s as if the characters in the story are “playing the role” of real beings in our reality.  Where in an RPG, the Game Master effectively throttles how we role-play a character in their world, in an ARG the Puppet Master (PM) defines how the characters play their roles in our world.

And yet, the PM still has the final creative word on how the story plays out. They decide what narrative is uncovered, what characters exist and how they interact, what events will, can, or might happen, and to what degree the players influence the story. But, by its very nature of playing out in our reality rather than in a relative sandbox of a defined world environment, it means the results of every action and decision made by the player are essentially decided live by the PM. As a result of this interaction, the story that the player takes away from an ARG can potentially be far more personalized – not based on the decisions of the character they role-play, but based on their decisions in the real-world, on themselves, now an actual part of the story.

For myself, I also find it interesting that my childlike love for exploration and discovery, for mapping out environments and worlds, has translated to the ARG genre.  If the world of an RPG could be mapped out on grid paper, then the ARG equivalent could be described as the ‘trailhead’ — a timeline trail of interconnected events and assets laying out the route that the player, or players, have taken through the experience, through the open-ended exploration of… well, a real-world series of ‘nodes’, as the story is revealed.

For me, that love for world-mapping has taken shape in the form of the wiki. That eventually led to the creation of Wikibruce.com – the resource I set up for ARG players, providing a platform to ‘map out the story-world’ as it were; to document discoveries and retrace stories as they’re uncovered – stories created by the puppet-master as their games progress.

I was never really one for “role” playing, personally (heck, I can count the times I’ve dressed up in a costume with three fingers). And even in ARGs I’ve recently begun taking more of a back-seat when it comes to interaction and ‘play’ (mostly due to lack of spare time).

But this, really, is one of my attractions to the ARG genre — I don’t have to play some version of me that isn’t me. I can just be myself (with a tiny bit of suspended disbelief, or rather performance of belief).  If you think about it, it’s actually the PM that ends up playing more characters roles in an ARG than the players themselves.

If I were to define an Alternate Reality Game, from my perspective it would be something like this:

An ARG provides an experience for both the discovery and creation of a dynamic story, in real-world time, that interacts with and incorporates its audience and elements of their real life within its narrative – from its beginning through to its end.

This is, to me, the most appropriate description of an alternate reality game or what I, here at 4DF, refer to when I say four-dimensional fiction.

The hallways and mazes once drawn in pencil on paper are now city streets; the items once picked up to the inventory now show up in the mailbox; the hidden items once discovered are now retrieved from GPS-located dead-drops; the puzzles once solved to unlock doors are now encoded messages in personal email or cell phone voicemail; the crazy mysterious objects are now physical, tangible artifacts from within the story itself; characters encountered while traveling down a street may now maintain blogs and have social profiles – and who knows, they may actually be encountered out on the street…

It’s my childhood pencil and paper games of discovery and adventure translated to 21st century real-life story-based entertainment — whether I am the one exploring the maze, or the one secretly drawing out the levels.

The Lost Zombies Ning community is still alive and thriving at lostzombies.com and you can reach Skot Leach through his website at skotleach.com. This case study was originally posted by Skot at the Transmedia Artists Guild forum.

One day, you sit down to watch TV, and catch a teaser trailer for a movie not scheduled for release for another year. It catches your eye, but you inevitably move on.

The next week, you receive a bulky piece of mail containing a hardcover book… you don’t initially recognize the author, or the company that sent it, but the topic interests you. As you open it, a piece of paper drops from its folds on which is written an email and phone number with a note asking you to contact the author by either method.

You’re curious, so you call the phone number and hear a recorded message from this person, who outlines their desperate situation and asks for help.

At this point you wonder where it came from. Out of curiosity, you start checking around. A quick google shows that the author doesn’t seem to exist, nor does the company. But you do find that the book and author are related to an upcoming movie, and you remember the teaser that caught your attention last week – the author’s name is familiar now, and you recognize their face.  Now you’re excited. For whatever reason, the lead character in the movie just contacted you, personally, and they need your help – a series of events are unfolding, right now, today, this week.

Enticed, you dig a little deeper… in doing so, you discover websites that reveal more about this character, this company, and the recent events that prompted them to contact you, and why. You find other people online who’ve been contacted as well, so you chat with them to find out what they know, and team up with them moving forward.

Over time, there are puzzling situations that you have to resolve, other characters you need to talk to, interact with and influence in your strive towards various accomplishments and resolutions, discovering more and more of the story as it plays out.

You’re taken places – nearby locations for secret exchanges of information, or for real-world tasks to be carried out. You watch videos, find clues in commercials, record and share videos denouncing an antagonist’s propaganda, even crowd-source a solution to a problem on your cell phone, with a bit of augmented reality thrown in… Your ongoing curiosity in this amazing story drives your enthusiasm. Your interaction and teamwork with others doing the same forms bonds and friendships, and a community of fans.

You become immersed in the story so much that when it ends and you’ve saved the day, you cheer and celebrate with your community and your friends!

Oh yeah, and there was that movie you wanted to see too… You wonder if or how your actions helping this author and the company had an influence in that story. Now you have to see the movie (and with friends, especially other people with whom you’ve shared the experience)!

You go and see the film. On screen you spot the actual location you visited to receive top secret information from the company that sent you the package. Then the person who asked you for help, the lead character in the movie, references the mystery that you just helped solve!

Your experience, the story you helped to complete over the course of a few months, connected you with a grander set of events – you became a part of the movie.

Shortly after the movie airs, Amazon shoots you an email recommending a novel that’s soon to be released – an autobiography written by the fictional author as their followup to their other book, the one you received in the mail.  You want it.

Being a comic book fan, you’re excited to hear about a series soon to be released centered on the company that sent you the package; about its rich history, chronicling many of its past …’mishaps’. You want it.

You’re at the local toy store one day, and you see a bobblehead – of the author. It makes you chuckle. You want it.

A year down the line, with this property still going strong (it’s now a thriving universe with a history, many developed characters, events, and stories you’ve come to follow and enjoy), a sequel to the film is announced… along with a video game spin-off on the gaming console you own. You want to immerse yourself in them, and discover what other exciting experiences the universe has to offer. You note their release dates.

Then, as you sit down for dinner, tuning into the latest episode of the TV series continuation that launched a few months ago, you get a phone call.

You recognize the voice.

It’s the author… the real person is talking to you. They’re called you because they remember how you helped them last time.  Your help is needed again.

They ask you, and you say yes.

(followup articles, links, and commentaries appended)

Can someone tell me what on earth “transmedia” means these days?  As an ARG enthusiast, traditionalist, and one who’s previously done some developing behind the scenes, I’m here adding my voice to the antitransmedia chorus.

Back in “the day” (mere years ago), there were these things called “Alternate Reality Games”. I remember them – potentially amazing experiences that involved their audience, told engaging stories, presented puzzles and games that were fun and actually made sense within their contexts, and allowed players to search and discover. These things were also somewhat subversive – they never actually said they were fictional, but we all knew they were anyway.

Sometimes they’d tie in to a movie, and we ended up choosing to see it; or a video game, and we ended up choosing to play it.  Or maybe they were just for fun, and we ended up making friends, forming communities.

Then word got out.  Slowly, more people heard about them, and more and more people wanted to make them, to try new things, provide unique experiences. Then we saw variations that focused more on one thing than another, like the puzzles, or the narrative, or interaction, or centered on a specific platform. They came up with variations on names that would better describe those experiences.

As Jeff Watson stated recently in an article reflecting on ARGs and the issue of accurately labeling the entertainment genre:

The boundaries between gameplay and storytelling, single-platform and multi-platform, real and virtual, author and audience, are all disappearing as we speak. It’s all fiction. Someday we’ll just leave it at that.

But soon these things really started to go mainstream… discovered by the kind of people who wanted to ‘embrace and extend’, as it were.  Some wanted to claim a label for what they produced, some simply wanted to help define the genre by providing a more descriptive and accurate label. It came to the point that ARGs in the traditional sense were now a sort of sub-set of a quickly widening and muddying genre of storytelling and/or gaming and/or marketing. We now had what Sean Stacey termed “Chaotic Fiction” – chaos, indeed.

Here are a few sample terms adopted over recent years by creatives in this media space:

Alternate Reality Game, Reality Game, Alternate Reality Events, Chaotic Fiction, Connected Entertainment Product, Cross-Media Promotions and Distributed Narratives, Cross-platform Experiences, Entertainment Experience, Experience Design, Extended Reality, Full-Media Entertainment Experience, Immersive Brand Marketing, Innovative and Immersive Social Entertainment, Interactive Marketing Solutions, Media Integrated Gameplay, Participation Drama, Pervasive Media, Search Opera, Story Game…

…or even, as jested by Steve Peters – a “Pervasive Entertainment Experience” (PEE)

But the term that ultimately caught on was “transmedia storytelling”. Short and sweet, to the point. It took the experience that Alternate Reality Games had come to represent, and provided a name which was more flexible and wide reaching; more simplistic, and generally a friendlier term to throw around for new cross-platform media experiences. Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, defined it in his article Transmedia 101:

Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.

Well, what we’re discovering now is the effect that this definition has had by excluding a limited scope for an “experience”. What was once a single story told or game played out across multiple media platforms has mutated into this (now shortened) buzzword “transmedia” (which is an adjective, by the way – not a noun) wherein a storyworld containing many stories can be told or experienced across multiple platforms.

It seems like these days a lot of the “transmedia” attention is given to projects that really take place only on the web, as classic multimedia (audio, video, graphics, perhaps some social networking), and are generally promotional material for some new product within an existing IP, or franchise – thus, a component or extension of the greater experience that is the transmedia franchise. They may or may not tell a story. They may or may not be interactive. They may or may not even be fun.

Where’d the ARG go?

In 2010, the Producers Guild of America adopted the position “Transmedia Producer” into its vocabulary. Here, the PGA explicitly states:

A Transmedia Narrative project or franchise must consist of three (or more) narrative storylines existing within the same fictional universe on [multiple] platforms

A “Transmedia Narrative” now seems to support any experience – as long as it consists of multiple connected stories, and utilizing multiple media.  …But is this not simply the making of a franchise?

The growing backlash at this diminishing of actual story-telling in lieu of franchise-developing is becoming apparent.  In a random tweet that began a slew of responses in what could be called an anti-transmedia movement, Steve Peters of No Mimes Media demonstrated that there’s a quiet subset of people who really don’t prefer ‘transmedia’ as the defining term for what they do on the smaller, story-sized scale.

Gawd I’m learning to hate the term transmedia more and more. Pretentious, pompous, not fun or entertaining. There, I said it. :P
~Steve Peters

Even Felicia Day, an actress and the creator of the web series The Guild, which now spans and incorporates multiple media, had this to say on “transmedia” at a SXSW 2011 panel (or listen, in answer to a question at ~51mins: mp3/src):

It’s just a really stupid word, and people use it because they don’t know. I just hate it. What does it mean? It means nothing! Listen, transmedia is any comic book that ever became a movie before the internet. [...] Anything is transmedia.

Dee Cook at Workbook Project even described the “transmedia” content at SXSW 2011 (where it was a boiling hot topic) in this way:

…the most overused and under-understood [term] of the conference… Most of the “Transmedia” panels just didn’t seem to get it – there was no takeaway, there was a lot of gobbeldygook, and in one bizarre case, there was a futurist who seemed to be discussing how in 6-10 years we will all be watching programmed television.

After SXSW, Steve went on in another series of ranting tweets (read the full exchange here):

Telling ONE story on multiple platforms is NOT the same as telling many stories in the same universe on multiple platforms…  By that definition, the earliest example of Transmedia is the Bible: stories, live events, plays, meetups, music, swag….  and if that’s the case, Transmedia is NOT SOMETHING NEW at all!

Transmedia SHOULD mean ONE SINGLE story on multiple platforms, not MANY stories in the same story world on many platforms

Franchising is NOT Transmedia. It’s FRANCHISING

Indeed, ‘transmedia’ by its current definition is not providing anything new – or original. It’s been around, really, since the beginning of human history, both intentionally and unintentionally!

Let’s start with some comments on current entertainment, such as Mythbusters…

I’d argue that MYTHBUSTERS is a very successful non-fiction #transmedia property: tv, web, books, science kits…
~@fossen

We certainly can’t forget Star Wars! Or Indiana Jones!

So far, the most successful transmedia franchises have emerged when a single creator or creative unit maintains control over the franchise. Hollywood might well study the ways that Lucasfilm has managed and cultivated its Indiana Jones and Star Wars franchises.
~Henry Jenkins, MIT Technology Review, 2003

And He-Man! (Or any property with action figures!)

From the beginning they thought of stories as resources out of which they could create their own fantasies, as something which shifted into the hands of the audience once they had been produced and in turn as something which was expanded and remixed on the grassroots level.  In that sense, the action figure is very much the harbinger of the transmedia movement.
~Henry Jenkins, He-Man and the Masters of Transmedia

Religion!

Rachel Wagner highlights several significant similarities between religion and transmedia, which are “complex, multimedia streaming worlds,” where, “a story is spread across multiple media platforms.” The central story-world is a key component of both transmedia and religion.
~drmeinstein.com, on Rachel Wagner’s “Making Belief: Transmedia and The Hunger For The Real”

The Bible!

For me, transmedia is more the choice of the author(s) for how his/her vision is experienced: it’s a means.  Stories have been transmedia forever. The Bible, for example, has been made successful as a transmedia project, from its creation myth to its world-building, and to its re-imagining and further transmedia exploration in such stories as C.S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles.
~Howard Goldkrand, director Dexter

Another, much older example of transmediation versus adaptation might be found in a somewhat unexpected place: the stained-glass windows of cathedrals. [...] hymns, sermons, artifacts, and, perhaps most spectacularly, enormous stained-glass windows. Are these transmedia extensions? One might argue that since a parishioner could first experience the story of Genesis through a rose window, then Exodus through a sermon, then Leviticus through hymns, and then Deuteronomy through paintings, the Bible has always been a transmedia franchise
~Geoffrey A. Long, Transmedia Storytelling, 2007

Your Life!

The array of media tools through which to “present ourselves” is already ubiquitous, and constantly expanding. Social networks, personal blogs, microblogs, digital cameras, location-based social applications [...] With every status update and photo upload and location check-in and “like” we click, we are producing an endless stream of new “entry points” into our personal narratives. [...] In the digital age, transmedia isn’t simply the default for how we experience entertainment, it is how we experience the story of our lives.
~Jenka Gurfinkel, Your Life is a Transmedia Experience

By the current trending definition of “transmedia”, I believe it is safe to conclude that Everything is transmedia – Everyone is a transmedia property.

Your mom is Transmedia.

So really, what’s the point of “transmedia” if everything is transmedia anyway?  What happened to the good old multi-platform-story?

In the essay “Do You Have A Big Stick“, Dr. Christy Dena clarifies this apparent polarization of transmedia productions, defining them as a “collection of mono-medium stories” (eg, a franchise), and a “collection of media that tells one story” (eg, an ARG).

Let’s get back to the basics.

“Transmedia” is not new, and it’s probably not going away. So we should encourage people once again to tell stories, to make compelling, entertaining, educational experiences that play out wherever people are at in their own lives (using whatever platforms and media they use regularly), or even better – make an effort to create experiences that encourage people to make the world a better place.

@GuyGonzales:
Most exciting aspect of transmedia is its focus on great storytelling over business models. Without good stories, there is no business.
Even marketers jumping on the transmedia bandwagon as the new shiny are focused on the power and value of a good story.

Just like legends or stories passed on through generations over a campfire, the best productions are the ones that focus on this. They’re successful in the long term not because of their business model or financial gain – marketing for a product is irrelevant and temporal! - but because the people who willingly immersed themselves in them chose to continue their legacy, because they loved the experience and wanted to continue to tell other people excitedly about it.

Bring back the Alternate Reality Game!

Thankfully, Adrian Hon from Six to Start provided a positive outlook and some insight into the “hype curve” at SXSW 2011 in his talk “Project 314: Putting the ‘Game’ back in ARGs“.

Additionally, the new Transmedia Artists Guild (TAG) is an advocacy group of experience developers and creatives who work in this media space.  From the About page:

The explosion of the internet and mobile platforms have put tools of media creation into the hands of people that previously couldn’t reach a wide audience.  Many have refocused from more traditional media channels to work in this new space. For lack of a better name, much of this work is being called “transmedia.”

The TAG forum is a great starting resource for those interested in producing transmedia experiences, to communicate and interact with passionate developers who create them both for a living and just for fun.

Now, all that said, I don’t mean to imply that anything developed under the “transmedia” umbrella lacks anything by default.  There also have been a number of quality projects, entertainment properties, and marketing campaigns that have been executed recently, along with a number of great ARGs that have returned to the roots of the genre.  And, I can personally accept and understand the use of “transmedia” as a term on the franchise level, if it’s indicated as much. I can grok Star Wars, Star Trek, The Matrix, and Halo as transmedia franchises.  But I think we need to bring focus back on the story-telling experience moreso than the franchise developing.

In the end, the “transmedia” label itself has certainly helped creators and enthusiastic newcomers grasp the concept and importance of synergy across platforms within franchises, properties, and single stories, providing a standard for consistency and encouraging a strive for quality storytelling in our modern social media world.

And that’s a Good Thing.

Followup discussions:

Some other great articles posted, weighing in on this topic:

• Mar 21] Steve Peters: The Transmedia Hijack (or how Transmedia is the New Dihydrogen Monoxide)
• Mar 21] Nine Bargiel: I Am a Transmedia Producer
• Mar 21] Tara Tiger Brown: Transmedia: post 1 of 5
• Mar 22] Silverstring Media: Last Thing I’ll Say
• Mar 24] Brooke Thompson: Love It or Hate It… Defending Transmedia
• Mar 25] PlayThisNext: Transmedia Thinking
• Apr 25] Brooke Thompson: Transmedia is Killing Hollywood is Killing Transmedia
• Apr 26] Brooke Thompson: Rebooting Transmedia
• May 2] Brian Clark: Reclaiming Transmedia Storyteller
• May 18] Steve Peters: What the hell *is* Transmedia?
• May 18] Andrea Phillips: WTF is Transmedia?

Additional interesting articles that discuss transmedia development at various levels:

• Q&A with Matthew Cullen of Mirada on transmedia and storytelling at JWTIntelligence
• Allison Norrington at Wired UK: Transmedia Tales and the Future of Storytelling (2009)

Structural analyses:

• Stitch Media chimed in with what I think is a very appropriate and accurate diagram of what we are currently including in the “transmedia” discussion, one of the best and simplest I’ve seen so far:

• The above diagram inspired me to write a followup article providing an individual’s walkthrough of a transmedia production on this scale: Transmedia Storytelling: A sample experience
• Another excellent analysis of this media space was published by Rob Pratten at Workbook Project – Transmedia Storytelling: Getting Started (2010)

UPDATE April 11, 2011: I’ve created a diagram geared more towards the confusion that seems to be caused by the Producers Guild of America’s “Transmedia Producer” credit. As an attempt to visualize the distinctive qualities of different productions, this depicts much of the structural differences between transmedia on a single experience scale, and a franchise scale. (click to enlarge)

Another followup diagram I made illustrates the type of general creation in this media space, but without the vagueness of the “transmedia” term. (click to enlarge)

UPDATE May 2, 2011: Brian Clark of GMD Studios posted a response article (on Facebook) summing up much of the situation, confusion, and controversy in the discussion surrounding “transmedia” in the context of storytelling and franchise – read it here: “Reclaiming Transmedia Storyteller“. His article has spawned an immense discussion. (Facebook login required)

UPDATE May 18, 2011: Steve Peters of No Mimes Media once again chimed in with another effort at clarification and trying to understand this confounding debate about “Transmedia”, with “What the hell *is* Transmedia?“. He offers this definition of “transmedia storytelling”

Transmedia storytelling is telling a single story spread beginning-to-end across multiple platforms.

In 2001, Alexander Sokurov set out to film a unique drama called Russian Ark – a film shot entirely with one take at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Comprised of over 2000 actors plus the cast and crew, it took three attempts to film the entire script successfully. Imagine the ordeal with those first two failed attempts, having to rewind completely and start from scratch because of a single  unrecoverable mis-step somewhere in the filming process.  Yet nonetheless, having every cue and movement planned and practiced, Sokurov and his cinematographer Tilman Büttner managed to capture their story to their satisfaction in one day, in a single long take.

For a production like that to be successful, the actors and crew need to know what’s coming and when so that they can produce what the director is looking for without straying so much as to break the intended flow of the production. They are within the environment and immersed in their roles and tasks, prepared for the camera and their cue. If something doesn’t go precisely as planned when the shot comes, they should be flexible in their actions, prepared to improvise, even having potential contingencies so as to keep the story flowing and natural enough that the director doesn’t have to scrap the entire take and start over. The director especially needs to be ready to improvise instructions at a moment’s notice to avoid a dreaded, unavoidable “Cut!”.

In forming a storyworld in which an ARG takes place, the environment should be built so it is, in theory, a living and thriving place on its own. Ideally, there should be room for discovery and contingency, prepared back-stories and fleshed out characters (whether ultimately discovered by players or not), websites, tools, and technologies at the ready. Flexibility is necessary for interactivity, at those times where the audience can have an effect on their surroundings, on characters and events, or even when they curiously wander off the path to explore. The response from the created world should be natural and smooth so as to keep the story flowing and believable, even if it directs them back on the path. Then a dynamic and flexible story can be told within it, minimizing mis-steps and taking the audience and players along for the experience that was intended.

In a successful ARG, there is no premature “Cut!”, there should be no immersion-breaking interruption from the director, or puppet-master. There is only a starting point and intended goal, with each essential beat in between defined to whatever degree of flexibility is desired to produce the desired experience, and remain as natural and complete as possible – all in one long shot.

If the PM yells “Cut!”, or steps in front of the camera while not themselves being a part of the storyworld, it can remove the player from their immersion and destroy the intended storytelling experience.  The players may also interact with the world in an unexpected way. If the PM panics, uncertain of how to respond, and that  may cause confusion and derail actors or crew, breaking the feasibility of the world and removing the player from the immersion.

Here, there can be no unplanned cut or edit, no re-take or removal of unwanted mistakes.

Roger Ebert, in reviewing Russian Ark, commented:

If cinema is sometimes dreamlike, then every edit is an awakening. “Russian Ark” spins a daydream made of centuries.

An ARG is an experience that is, by definition, an “alternate reality” – a dream-like progression through a fictional story taking place in our personal world. We should be able to interact with it, explore it, learn from it;  it may even affect us in such a way as to open our eyes to new ways of thinking in our real world.  Like any good dream (even nightmares!), waking up unexpectedly from it can leave us with a sense of incompletion, a wondering of what would have happened next, perhaps even frustration at being unable to complete our “dream’s” story.

Puppet-mastering an ARG or an interactive transmedia experience is like being a director for a single-shot film — but without the ability to start over. You must be prepared, be flexible. Build the world in which the story takes place, including its cues and essential content – first. Pay attention!  Try not to trip up the camera operator once filming’s begun, and try to hire competent actors and crew who can improvise yet still fill the roles they’re placed in enough that nothing irreparably breaks.

And finally, unless you’re also an actor, stay behind the camera!