You Suck at Transmedia

This is another post about what other people have written about. I’m just still head down in the middle of run time for a project, and so that is the reason for my lack of personal contribution. But I’ve been seeing some awesome stuff out there, including these notes from a special workshop run by community and gaming legend Amy Jo Kim (I’ve recommended her Community Building book to many people) for (what looks to be a very exciting company) Big Door. Geoffrey Nuval now works at Big Door, and he shared his notes from Amy’s gamification workshop. Here is a summary of the headings, but see his site for the full post:

I. Identify and Address your Audience

II. Member profiles are very important

III. Types of Users in a Gamified System

IV. Random quotes heard that I felt important enough to write down…

– “Make it easy for everyone to understand: How do I win?”

– “Iterative Development”

– “Show them what they can eventually achieve upfront… establish goals.”

– “Designing a game site for entertainment is very different from gamifying a system”

– “Give new users lots of sugar in the first 15 minutes.”

V. On Building a Community

VI. Mechanics in a Gamified System (what AJK called: “metagames”)

VII.  On Creating a Social Moment

VIII. Gamified System Monetization

A new website is having fun helping/playing: What the Fuck is My Social Media Strategy? It is a random generator of strategies, well, “common wisdom” (whatever that means).

J.D. Meier has done a lot of research to write up a post on lessons learned from Seth Godin. While Godin’s insights are not about transmedia, they’re about your career and life, which trumps all! I’ve summarised the headings of Top 25 Lessons Learned, but see the full post for all the details and lots of quotes and links.

Have a bunch of good runs before the sun sets.

Be remarkable.

Success is a skill.

Being the best is the best place to be.

Be missed.

Everybody is an expert about something.

Success is a hierarchy.

Don’t do A as a calculated tactic to get B.

Be in it for the long haul.

Quit the right things and lean into the right Dips.

Decide if you’re a freelancer or entrepreneur.

It’s like walking through a maze.

Everyone is not your customer.

Feed, grow, and satisfy the tribe.

Small is the new big.

Find the new scarce.

It’s the FREE PRIZE INSIDE.

The third century is about ideas.

Spread your ideas.

Don’t wait for perfect.

Don’t get paid to alter your behavior.

The goal of reading is to choose what to change.

The world changes whether you like it or not.

The game of marketing has changed.

Feed, grow, and satisfy your business.

The massive social game experience created by Jane McGonigal for the World Bank, Evoke, finished a little while ago. But the team is currently having a debrief and will be sharing their lessons learned online. The first post outlines what went right and what went wrong. I’ve summarised the headings here, but go to the post for the full description, solutions, and section on education outcomes.

Top Ten What Went Right:
1. We created an extremely active, productive community from scratch, virtually overnight.
2. We focused on real, intrinsic motivation and real activity.
3. We defined and bounded the experience very clearly: “a crash course in changing the world”, brought to you by the World Bank Institute: 10 Weeks, 10 Missions.
4. We made it social.
5. We designed multiple win levels.
6. We invented the Leader Cloud.
7. We created a highly addictive activity feed.
8. We created a super-satisfying feedback loop: runes automatically lighting up for completed quests and missions.
9. We designed a great hero’s journey (the quests).
10. We created a real “game-changer.” We took full advantage of media opportunities to create an extremely high-profile project – and to tell an urgently optimistic story – and as a result, EVOKE changed what people think is possible.

Top Ten What Went Wrong
1. We failed to start the gameplay soon enough – ideally, during registration.
2. The social world wasn’t bounded enough.
3. Weekly missions and the final EVOKATION weren’t connected enough.
4. We didn’t design meaningful SMS gameplay.
5. We missed the opportunity on real-time mentors.
6. The +1 voting wasn’t fun or meaningful enough.
7. The quests would have been more valuable if they were more integrated with the missions – players using unique strengths and vision to respond to the URGENT EVOKES.
8. Overall, the collective experience of the EVOKE network subsumed the individual journey toward social innovation.
9. We needed more meaningful opportunities for strengths-based collaboration and teamwork.
10. We definitely want to do a better job presenting the EVOKE Code of Ethics and getting player buy-in.

Thought I’d share a preso I did at The Pixel Lab in the UK for film & TV practitioners. In this preso I’m trying to help new practitioners not suck at transmedia story (and game) design. Feel free to share other ways people can not suck (or even say how I suck!).

Ilya Vedrashko recently did a post about his experience with running a ‘viral’ campaign. He offers some interesting tidbits, including the insight that most people come at the beginning of a campaign. This correlates with what I’ve found in ARGs. This is why it is so important your entry experience is so smooth and compelling, otherwise you’ll lose a great opportunity.

It is an unfortunate but understandable reality that while we often marvel at digital projects that spread like wildfire across the web, we rarely get a chance to look at the numbers behind them. Between January and May, we built, launched and monitored Jerzify Yourself (warning: sound on autoplay) to get just such a glimpse into the dynamics of spreadable content.

The full post — A Site That Went Viral and The Numbers Behind It — is here.

In response to a call for lessons learned with measurement, David Varela gave an informative comment. So I’m putting it here as a post (with permission):

So – a couple of lessons learned in measurement.

I’m running an ARG at the moment and I’d love to talk about it, but maybe that’s not the smartest idea. Instead, I’ll talk about an ARG I ran last year called Xi, and which I summed up at last year’s Power to the Pixel event (Christy was chairing). The slides from my presentation are here, or you can watch me mumble through it on video here:

One of the advantages of this ARG was that it was largely based in Sony’s virtual world, PlayStation Home. Owning a PS3 and visiting Home was a prerequisite of playing, so we could *really* track players and measure our success/failure. Well, I say ‘we’… Sony actually has full control over those stats and is very careful about what they pass on, even to first-party developers. But still, we could get some very meaningful figures.

Home is a growing community. When our game began in March 2009, there were 5 million users worldwide; by the end in June, there were 7 million. Last I heard, it was over 12 million.

Sony never set us targets, but they wanted us to increase the amount of time people spent in Home and, more particularly, the number of repeat visits. (In those early days of Home, people tended to turn up once, look around, and not come back.) The Sony people were very happy with us at the end of the game, so I guess we did well.

The numbers: our core space in Home got 4.5 million visits from around 620,000 players in 3 months. There were another 11 spaces that came and went during the course of the game. There were other numbers too: the Xi messageboards had 18 million views and tens of thousands of messages. There were hundreds of Xi-related videos on YouTube and a dozen or more wikis and fan sites. Anecdotally, some players said they’d gone from visiting Home maybe once a month to spending 40+ hours a week in there.

So a few lessons in learned:

1. Advertisers love these figures. But the thing is, the anecdotal ones carry more weight than you’d think – they become the headline that the ad man leads with when selling the concept. They maybe not have the rigour of online tracking, but they have emotional power. Like a good newspaper quote, they can really help demonstrate success.

2. Measurement never ends. Xi ended a year ago today (!) but the Xi Alumni Hub – a kind of memorial to Xi based in Home – has had another million visits since the game ended. It may be unusual for an ARG to have a long tail, but it shouldn’t be ignored. The legacy of your game could have a really measurable impact beyond the intangible word-of-mouth generated by happy memories. And coming out of that…

3. Another thing we suck at is leaving something behind after our ephemeral, magical experiences have run their course. If you’re trying to convince someone to fund an ARG, think of it like an Olympic bid: you need to think about the legacy you’ll leave once the main event is over, and this can be a major selling point of your proposal. That mini-game in Week 1 or those in-game videos could be getting hits long after the PMs have walked away.

I learned plenty of other lessons during Xi, but I’ll save those for another day.

I had a friendly query from a colleague the other day. He wanted to know the range of projects that will be covered here. He probably forgot that I have championed all types of transmedia for years, from any industry. But his query alerted me to the fact that perhaps should overtly outline the range that will be covered here. so, here are what I consider the four key types of transmedia. I discuss these types in my PhD (I give them big word terms, so we need to come up with industry-friendly terms as well), and I will be discussing the different story design techniques one employs for each one of these types when I mentor at the Pixel Lab in the UK in July. But here is a quick overview:

Clear as mud? That is why I spoke about films and live events, as well as ARGs in my first two posts. That is also why I’ll talk about and encourage discussion about projects that are designed to be transmedia at the very beginning, and those that become transmedia after a mono-medium one has been created.Let me know if I should elaborate or if you have some other views.

I also want people to know that if you post here, you can cross-post on your own website at the same time. Also, I’d be happy to repost some of the great posts that have already been published by others elsewhere, but which may not have reached the readers of this site.

Anything else suck?

Righto! Looks like we already have some questions rolling in. As a default I won’t publish names of the person who asked the question (so let me know if you don’t mind!).

• So, first, one person wants to know “if anyone can provide ‘measurement’ with their experiences…personal opinions are great…but at the end of the day…clients all want measurable results or findings”. Aha! As a start I’ll refer you to my ol’ resources pages on alternate reality games and extended entertainment experiences: ARG Stats & ARGs Around the World. These need updating and of course they don’t give the whole picture, just what people are prepared to publish. In other words, you suck at publicly published measurements of transmedia projects! So, what is needed is a discussion about lessons learned in measurement.
• From some discussions, it also seems a chat about the iterative nature of many transmedia projects would be a good topic.
• In another discussion space there has also been a query about how medium specificity operates in transmedia.
• Lastly, a question in the Solve my Suck section is about “where is the best place (or what is the best way) to find like minded lunatics who want to spend countless hours working on a project”? I’ve pointed out the Unfiction Unforums, but there may be some people on this site that contact the questioner directly, or there may be another place on web. This question has been asked at many industry events too. So, if it doesn’t exist (cannot recall any place right now), then someone needs to make it happen.

OK, so these are topics to be explored. I’ll put together some posts, but there is plenty to be said about all of them, so if you have any thoughts or would like to write a post – do it! But a reminder: this is not a site for posts explaining things for newcomers. There are plenty of sites that take care of that now. Instead, here is where you talk about things that suck in your own and others projects. You’re addressing your peers. Oh, or you can talk about whatever you damn well please.