View ByoLogyc’s 20th Anniversary Celebration on Youtube

On March 20, 2012, ByoLogyc Inc held an exclusive party for “investors” in the corporation. With ByoEnrich, ByoMate, ByoBreath, and ByoGrow on display and CEO Chet Getram giving his celebration speech, the event demonstrated ByoLogyc’s dedication to improving the human lifestyle through highly advanced biotechnology.

ByoLogyc Inc is an organization in the fictionalized live performance / interactive drama project being created by ZEDToronto. ZED.to has created a crowdfunding campaign through IndieGoGo to have the audience both support and participate in the endeavour, to experience the story over 8 months through online narrative and in 3 planned live events.
To take part and help fund this creative project, simply become a contributor through IndieGoGo donating any amount you choose from the available tiers – each successive amount provides increased immersion and rewards.

As for the party, after a short period of mingling in the Ingram Gallery with staff and trying out products, Chet arrived with Diva Capricia as his ‘special guest’, who gave a chilling performance of “Ebben? Ne andro lontana” from Catallani’s opera “La Wally” to help set the mood for the evening.  I can’t say I’m a fan of opera, but after being chilled to the bone by Capricia’s live performance, I had to research the song and find out what story it was that she was performing. The discovery did not disappoint.

That was only the beginning of the night, however, as more drama unfolded throughout the party – including a minor brawl with the bartender, and the removal of the contracted media coverage team for asking too many questions.  And sadly, Capricia was the one left behind at the party as Chet took leave early – with Olive Swift on his arm.

But what of the attendees? We were given the opportunity to try some of their products.  We were treated to catered oer d’oeuvres …from a biotech company experimenting with pharmaceutical drugs hoped to improve human lifestyle. Could we have really been labs rats? Two ByoLogyc scientists, including Davian Baxter, who were taking swabs from guests and asking a list of questions didn’t provide any comfort on that front.

The event was held at the Ingram Gallery in Toronto and was a live preview event executed as part of the ZED Toronto project. The full experience plans to ‘chronicle the end of the world’, in a zombie apocalypse as it were, with ByoLogyc at the helm. The finale event to be held in October promises to be a live, exciting and dramatic experience, and a struggle for survival at a yet undisclosed location.

What happens next? Sign up at ByoLogyc.com for the company newsletter, and follow @ByoLogyc, @ChetGetram, @OliveSwift, and @DavianBaxter on Twitter.

Please consider helping to fund this creative team of storytellers and actors by visiting indiegogo.com/zedto and pitching in — Campaign funding closes April 15th.

More information about the project is available at ZED.to and via @ZEDToronto

Check out many more photos from the event below, and at lisamorrismurray.com and these flickr galleries

“Ebben? Ne andrò lontana“ from Catalani’s opera “La Wally”

Ebben? Ne andrò lontana,
Come va l’eco della pia campana,
Là, fra la neve bianca;
Là, fra le nubi d’ôr;
Laddóve la speranza, la speranza
È rimpianto, è rimpianto, è dolor!

O della madre mia casa gioconda,
La Wally ne andrà da te, da te
Lontana assai, e forse a te,
E forse a te, non farà mai più ritorno,
Nè più la rivedrai!
Mai più, mai più!

Ne andrò sola e lontana,
Come l’eco è della pia campana,
Là, fra la neve bianca;
Ne andrò, ne andrò sola e lontana!
E fra le nubi d’ôr!

Rough English translation:

Well? I will go away,
As goes the echo from the church bell,
There, amid the white snow;
There, amid the clouds of or;
Where the hope, the hope
Is regret, is regret, is sorrow!

O my mother’s joyous home,
Wally will go away from you, you
Far enough away, and maybe,
And maybe, he will never return,
Nor see her again!
Never again, never again!

I will go alone and far away
As the echo of the bell,
There, amid the white snow;
I will go, will go alone and far away!
And the clouds of gold!

ByoLogyc Inc. is a pharmaceutical research company that is claiming to provide humanity with lifestyle enhancing drugs and technologies. Meet Chet Getram:

“At ByoLogyc, you’ll not only be investing in one of the most profitable, forward-thinking biotech and lifestyle enhancement laboratories available, you’ll be helping humanity fulfill its deepest desires, and unlock its hidden destiny.”

Chet is the CEO of ByoLogyc Inc, the central organization within  a 3-part theatrical storytelling experience being created by Mission Business, an “adventure laboratory” based in Toronto. This project, ZED.to, is being presented as a live theater, an immersive, interactive storytelling experience, which will include online components and 3 live events in Toronto, culminating at the final grand apocalyptic event in late October.

ZED.to is also asking for support via an IndieGoGo campaign, to help raise funds for the project and invite interested participants to experience the adventure and the story they’re planning to tell through the year. Online components help fill out the narrative and open the story to a much wider audience who won’t necessarily experience the live events.

You can visit ByoLogyc Inc’s website ByoLogyc.com. They also provide a call-in number 1-866-BYO-6090 for testimonials, and their Twitter account @ByoLogyc. Chet Getram, its CEO is also on Twitter, along with other employees, Davian Baxter – head of research, and Olive Swift – quality assurance.

ByoLogyc also provides details about some of their products:

• ByoMate, magnify your natural desireability
• ByoEnrich, all-day vitamin enhancements
• ByoBreath, get more oxygen from the air you breath
• ByoGrow, enhanced hair growth
• ByoBaby, biological and genetic enhancements throughout pregnancy

Surely, these products have been perfected… right?

The Invite: 20th Anniversary Celebration

On March 20th 2012, ByoLogyc is hosting an exclusive preview event specifically for IndieGoGo supporters and select invitees. ByoLogyc products will be on display for perusal and hands-on viewing. Chet will also be speaking in person following a special video presentation.

ByoLogyc is celebrating their 20th anniversary with an invitation-only soiree at a swanky art gallery. This is our first in-narrative event, and we’re going to make it count. The purpose of the event is twofold; we’re using it to avoid the notorious mid-crowdfunding-campaign slump, and we’re also initiating our asks for larger donors and sponsors down the road. To that end, we’ve invited a pretty hot crowd of influencers, connectors, and people-in-the-know who can help us take the project to the next level. The event is a small taste of what ZED.TO will be; we’ve got all our characters playing major roles, we’ve got actual ByoLogyc products for sampling, and we’ve got live opera.

Upcoming campaign events

What’s in store for this entire production? Well, if you become a supporter of ZED.to’s campaign on IndieGoGo, you’ll have exclusive limited access to content and narrative elements.  Take a look at some of these tier perks:

• A personal call and thanks from Chet Getram
• Sampler packs of ByoMate pills
• Super-secret sensitive data from ByoLogyc
• A special limited key providing access to a restricted area at October’s finale event
• Become a part of the finale event; a custom experience and role, plus other luxuries
• A special extravagant dinner with Chet, on him, to talk the future of biotech
• …and more

With 27 days left in the campaign as of this writing [March 20], there’s still time to get your foot in the door of this fast-moving corporation, and help the project truly take off – whether you’re participating at the live events, or only online. Who knows what this corporation could do for humanity’s future!  Live events are scheduled for:

• July 4-15: Toronto Fringe Festival
  “ByoLogyc: Where you become new”
• September 29: Scotiabank Nuit Blanche
  “Patient Zero”
• October 17-Nov 3: Undisclosed location
  “End Game”

More details are available on their IndieGoGo project page, and ZED.to’s blog.

Relevant links:

• IndieGoGo Campaign page
• ZED.to / Blog
• ByoLogyc.com
• Twitter: @ZEDToronto, @ByoLogyc

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.