I came across this post on ‘lessons learned‘ by a 17 year old independent filmmaker Mahogany J. Slide about her film The Saving, and thought they were great:

1. THE SAVING runs on Dunkin…ok more like Krispy Kreme but you get the idea.

2. Always slate every take (shot). Even if you have to dig through the back of a Hummer to find the dang clapperboard, DO SO! Your editor will love you forever. Unlike mine heehee

3.  Situations are only as awkward as you allow them be. After that, it just gets funny.

4.  I finally understand what the phrase “punch drunk” means (slaphappy with exhaustion)

5. To me, when it comes to filmmaking its very hard to over-communicate. If it feels like overkill then you’re probably doing your job well.

I love number 3.

I read this article the other day about the “National Theatre’s screw up“, and it reminded me of a time I screwed up in an ARG. I have of course screwed up more than once, but the article reminded me of a specific event. The article discusses a tweet sent out through the National Theatre twitter account, a tweet that involved pretty crass swearing about another person. The article notes how people responded with understanding to the error:

Rather than berate the theatre for such a terrible lapse of protocol or judgement, the audience acknowledged it for it was – a mistake, and an oddly funny one at that. And as we can see from the representative responses above, the theatre inadvertently presented itself as being fallible, human and honest. Whether it was a lapse in judgement, or just an errant slip of the keys – sending tweets from the wrong account – it nonetheless made the institution a little bit more likable in the eyes of its followers. Just for one brief moment, the National Theatre let a personality shine through the cracks.

And then the article continues, lamenting how the National Theatre then tried to deny the incident:

However, the theatre’s response to all of the above saw them revert swiftly, and sadly, back to type. Rather than admit that someone on staff had clearly stuffed up, or perhaps a disgruntled former employee still knew their login passwords, the theatre instead deleted the post and announced that they “believed(ed)” that they had been hacked.

The article then eloquently explains why this response was antithetical to contemporary interaction:

Two guiding principles in social media, we believe, are to Be Human and Be Honest. Had the National Theatre adopted either policy, they might have done themselves a service. To err is human, and ‘being human’ is increasingly what we respond to when bumping into organisations online. Social media differs from traditional marketing by asking us to ‘be human’, to drop our guard a little and be conversational – to get in amongst our audience and act like ‘real people’ (this shouldn’t be terribly difficult, we are ‘real people’ after all).

I completely agree. Now, what I recalled with my mistake was the time I signed off under my own name not as my character when conversing with the player. I felt terrible (and now create a signature in my character emails so I can’t make that mistake again), and wanted to do something about it. The player emailed back to me, continuing the conversation we were having, and also made a quick funny remark about my slip. The question was how to respond. I wanted to make some clever remark about the slip in-character in some way, but the team voted that I respond to the conversation, and not say anything about the slip. I did so, and the player and I continued to have some interaction in-character.

But what I feel is that there was a great opportunity for the player and I to bond at that point. By not acknowledging it in some way, I sent a message to the player that I was uncomfortable about the slip and wanted them to forget about it. I did feel terrible about the slip, but I didn’t feel uncomfortable about it. I wanted to use it. I understand that there are situations where you don’t want to move too far out from behind the curtain. You want to keep the player immersed. But I think at times an unacknowledged slip can do more harm than a slip.

I remember another ARG where I had the freaky occurrence (there are always freaky occurrences during ARGs). The name of a character I had murdered in the plot, and their profession, was exactly the same as a friend of one of the players. That friend had the same profession and had been murdered too, in real life. The player emailed me (the character) and told me about it. I thought the only ethical thing to do was to email the person directly as a game-master (not as a character), and apologise. I offered to downplay the murder victim or even change the plot if it disturbs them. I sincerely was prepared to change the plot if needed. But they emailed back that the person who died would of loved this coincidence, and so it became a kind of a homage to them. The issue was therefore resolved, the game could go ahead without any feelings of discomfort from both the player and myself, and we bonded. None of this would of happened if I hadn’t emailed directly and said the things I sincerely wanted to.

I recall people saying a couple of times during the reveal of the Rachel Webster person as a character in J.C. Hutchin’s Personal Effects ARG, that the actions of a team and the characters after a hoax are more important than the hoax (intentional or not) occurring in the first place. All of these experiences, and my previous thoughts about sucking, all show me how your response to imperfection is more important than ignoring imperfection.

Today I came across this great website that features the dirty tricks web designers play on people. Here is a presentation by the curator of the site, Harry Brignull:

I don’t find the books he featured teach dirty tricks, but according to the definition of dirty tricks Harry employs, they would:

This pattern library is dedicated to Dark Patterns: user interfaces that have been designed to trick users into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise have done. Normally when you think of “bad design”, you think of laziness or mistakes. These are known as design anti-patterns. Dark Patterns are different – they are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind.

To me, it is Harry’s examples of the ‘default’ and making it really hard for someone to opt-out that are excellent illustrations of dirty tricks. He offers more great ones on his Dark Patterns site. But the site also got me thinking about a post that we haven’t seen on YSAT yet. What dirty tricks have you seen in transmedia? What unethical actions have you seen? (And I’m not talking about what people do in the industry generally. Crikey, I could talk for ages about the dirty tactics people use. I’m talking about the dirty tricks in relation to the audience/player.)

I was asked to write an article about my company for the IGDA Newsletter special edition on ARGs. I chose to write about why I’m “Going Indie for Meaningfulness and Money“. I thought I’d share it with you since many of you may be traveling down the same path. I also wanted to share with you a postscript. It is a quote from a colleague who I was chatting with in Skype:

Heart, art, and commerce can connect. In fact, that’s where the real gold is.

Great stuff, eh? The IGDA special issue has many articles by people, including some nuggets from Steve Peters and Maureen McHugh, like these tips for meaningful interaction:

* Unlock story content for everyone
* Interact with story characters
* Get information to provide to story characters to move the story along

Read their article and many others here.

Now that sounds like a weird title, doesn’t it? What do I mean by ‘actualising your depictions’? What I’m referring to is the depiction of a character searching the internet, or having a social media conversation in a video, and then not having them seeded online. That is: I hate it when I watch characters doing things on the Internet (in a film, TV show or webisode) and then I (of course) jump online to see the evidence of their activity only to find it isn’t there or it is different. I witnessed this recently and so that is why I decided to rant about it now. It was also done by a person/company that didn’t intend to do a transmedia project and so I’m not giving them a bad time, necessarily. So, what happened?

A couple of days ago Twitter announced the forthcoming launch of the New Twitter:

As many (most) of you would of noticed, the character in the video tweets a pic. I, of course, went straight to the character’s Twitter page (who turns out to be the guy who makes the Twitter videos – which is fine, nice meta). I’m happy to see Jeremy Brigg’s (@gigglebriggs) page does intend have the tweets featured in the video (see screenshot below):

BUT, when I open up the Twitpic it is not the same image as the one depicted in the video:

Source: http://twitpic.com/2mty7m

Source: Screenshot from video

The image is by another person, and is a similar image (of a moon), but is not the image depicted in the video and is by someone else. This sucks. It sucks because it is clear the Twitter implementation is not considered part of the video experience (although it is half-way there). It is clear the creators didn’t think anyone would notice or care. Only the video matters.

This situation is emblematic of a pre-transmedia mindset. In the past (and many times in the present), creators think only about the main medium and don’t care about what the experience across media is like. They start to make an effort but if they don’t decide to make each medium a meaningful and equal part of the experience then it is treated as lesser.

Consider this example from the Godsend movie, where a character searches online for a (fictional) corporation.

I did have images of the character viewing the webpage but I cannot find it in my numerous backups over the years (probably in the two external hard drives I have that are still corrupted). In this scene the character searches and views a corporation. If you went to the website, it existed, but it looked different to the page depicted in the film:

Now the webpage has been taken over by someone who has taken all the images out and has put ads there (obviously taking advantage of the traffic they’re getting). The lack of continuity from the website in the film to the online version annoyed me. I then do of course love it when conversations and sites are actualised with continuity. For instance, I enjoyed watching this Jake and Amir video back in 2008:

And then jumping into Twitter to find the character’s posts as they occurred in the video:

Now, obviously you cannot view these tweets after the watching the video now. That is one problem with creating authentic social media conversations after a broadcast or screening. But it is bloody fun when you do catch it.

Do people really care though? Since the release of the New Twitter video, there are now over 1.500 views of the Twitpic alluded to in the video, and comments by people. And as I like to cite, multiple visits and comments at a website created by a fan for a website depicted in the Bourne Ultimatum. The character Jason Bourne searches Google for an investment company, Sewell and Marbury. The site is there and depicted in the movie. But the site hadn’t been created by the producers and so a fan secured it and created it to a small degree according to the fiction at www.sewellmarbury.com. The website was created in 2007 and has had to date over one-thousand comments from people all over the world (more would have visited the site and not left a comment).

I talk about this example and how a domain name, password, social media account, email and phone number glimpsed in a TV show or film is a powerful call to action to many people. So, it sucks when this opportunity is ignored, misunderstood or used to ill effect.

I discovered this video through Armen Antranikian, a cracker about the power of being an artist over a “careerist”:

This is another fun break: the latest webisode from Kevin K. Shah and John T. Woods, where they put the boot into all the hack consultants out there (which may be directed at all of us…but I don’t care, I find it funny). The series follows Bret Donovan, the “New Creative Director and PMD of SABI Pictures”. Bret has his own blog of course, Facebook and Twitter. In the latest episode he helps out with motivation and offers advice on re-editing their trailer.

BOSS OF ME – Episode 3 from Sabi Pictures on Vimeo.

Near the end of the video he mentions emailing some more trailer advice, which he shares in Twitter:

And of course he has a flowchart:

Check out the rest of the vids at Boss of Me.

I find it interesting that there has predominantly been two types of responses to this website. Beginners always ask how they can avoid ending up here, how they can avoid sucking at transmedia; while people who have worked in the area for a while are really excited about the idea of sharing the times they suck, their “war stories”, “lessons learned” and so on. This, and a few events in my life, has got me thinking about the weird but (to me) undeniable reality of working in transmedia (or perhaps any area really): things will always go wrong.

I remember when I started in this area, I thought that if I could learn all I can about the craft of transmedia I could therefore create great stuff. But I then realised that you don’t get anywhere in this industry/artform (or any) without also understanding the business — working with people, the politics, marketing, and so on. That is why you have services like Marvin Acuna’s Business of the Show Institute, helping writers understand the business side of screenwriting.

But another thing it took me a long time to realise was that no matter what level of knowledge and amount of experience you have in the area, things will always go wrong. There will always be things that happen that are outside of your control, like weird occurrences, client decisions, things you didn’t foresee, technical failures, unplanned audience responses, and so on. And just about every member of the team (including yourself) will make some mistake some time.

On reflection, I realise that I also had another assumption working in the back of my head. I thought that if I follow my dream, my life will become easier. I’ve learned that I am more satisfied with my life when I do what I want, but things do not get any easier. In fact, I’ve found the more unique and different your ideas and methods, the greater the obstacles will be thrown at you. Things get harder, they really do. (Or maybe it is just me?)

What is the point of all this? I want to highlight something that I think many people who work in the area already know, but those new to the area are trying to avoid: without a doubt, things will suck. Do you best to avoid what you can, learn to recognise when something is sucking, respond and learn from what is sucking immediately, and try not to repeat it. And in the end, the best thing you can do is enjoy the ride. Don’t wait for a time when everything doesn’t suck, because it will never happen. Instead, make identifying what sucks and dealing with it part of the reality of your process and not some uninvited imposter. And then ultimately, you’ll be more likely to enjoy it all.

In response to Nicholas Lovell’s book How to Publish a Game, Phil Stuart of Preloaded wrote a detailed and helpful post about how they publish online games. He includes the following points:

Seed your game smartly
- Seed your game smartly
- Time poor seeding
Integrate with Portals
- Adapt to the environment
Work with the ‘Pirates’
Listen to your players
Analytics rule
Be SEO friendly
Conclusion

I haven’t seen someone be so honest about their approach for a while. I hope this inspires others to share their experiences. It doesn’t have to be your strategies, it can just be the stuff you learned. I know many of you are keen to do this but have troubles with NDAs. I hear ya. But you can post general lessons without mentioning a project or client, and I’m happy to publish posts under a codename. Anyway, check out Phil’s post.

The other day I received a lovely invite to be on the new Transmedia Talk podcast over at Lance Weiler’s Workbook Project. Nick Braccia and Robert Pratten co-host the show, which features both Anita Ondine from Seize the Media and Dee Cook from Dog Tale Media. Nick and Robert wanted me to talk about this website and give 5 tips. I thought I’d do something a little different and talk about consulting tips. A lot of consulting tips apply to any industry or artform you’re working in. But I think there are so many people working in transmedia now that we are at the point where we can share some of our experiences working with clients. Here are the ones I gave in the podcast:

Tip #1: If a prospective client has no understanding of interactivity and perhaps marketing, then you will most likely spend most of your time educating your client about these and not transmedia. So be mindful of the minimum skill-set you would like your client to have before you agree to work with them.

Tip #2: There is only so far a client will stretch during your work with them. They may be begin with lots of excited exploring, but they will eventually recoil back to a step or two beyond where they are now. Take heart, you’ve taken them some distance, and the next person they work with will benefit from your work.

Tip #3: Many clients have little to no ability to identify whether you have transmedia skills or not. Depending on your ability, this means you’ll have the opportunity to fly by the seat of your pants and learn on the job, or your efforts will largely go unrecognised. Either way, just put your head down and do your best.

Tip #4: Choose who you work with, spend time with, and listen to, wisely. It is easy to believe that the views, skills and business practices of a small few around you represent all. Who you spend time is important because they will ultimately have a strong influence on you. So choose to spend time with people that make you a better creator and better person.

Tip #5: What’s yours?

Nick and Robert both gave their tips for consulting too. So make sure you listen to the podcast to hear their tips (and all the rest of awesome). And also let me know some things you’ve learned. I’d love to hear them.