A few years ago (four years ago), I created a mini-alternate reality game for an industry residential I was mentoring at. The residential was to help teach film and TV creators (what was called at the time) cross-media. But we didn’t just want to tell them about cross-media, we wanted them to experience what it is like receive an SMS from a character, go to a fictional website to find clues, and participate in a live event. This direct immersion approach is something that Michael Andersen would be happy to hear.

The experience was designed and created by two of us (myself and Jackie Turnure), in two weeks, and launched two weeks before the residential. So prior to the event all the practitioners experienced a small issuing of SMSes, email and websites to help prime the narrative and build the desire to participate. But at the actual residential (a lovely resort), they were split into teams. I split them into teams because it would be easier to manage them, and it would facilitate them having to act (rather than leaving it to the loud ones). The most significant reason for the split, however, was the desire to give each team a different experience of the story event. But before I go into why, check out this quaint little chart (see pic) showing the different teams and the ideal path I wanted them to travel through. [The use of wines for names is because the residential was smack bang in a wine valley...and so we created a story around a murder and conspiracy around the nefarious underworld of winemakers. Heard that before?]

So each group was given a different mission and puzzle to reveal, importantly, a different point of view on a murder. I did this because it was around this time I was reflecting on (ex-game designer) Chris Crawford‘s design lessons from his book on Interactive Storytelling. The first is design lesson #12: “The storyworld is composed of closely balanced decisions that can reasonably go either way“.

Lesson #12 presents one of the most important conceptual shifts the storybuilder must make in moving from conventional stories to interactive storyworlds. A storyteller creates a conventional story by striving hard to create a sequence of entirely reasonable decisions that lead to an interesting and perhaps unexpected conclusion. The storybuilder, however, must banish such thinking and instead concentrate on decisions that could plausibly go either way. This concept is totally new in storytelling, so alien that it could excite suspicion or rejection. (54)

Crawford develops this further with lesson #13: “The storybuilder’s most important task is creating and harmonizing a large set of dramatically significant, closely balanced choices for the player“. He continues, saying that you “do not saddle the player with endless trivial decisions about where his feet should be or whether he’ll have one lump or sugar with his tea or two” (55). So, I was thinking about giving players choices which are evenly weighted with significance. Not giving them one option that is ideal and others that are obviously not. Instead, I wanted to give the players a dramatically significant decision to make.

But at the same time I was also researching ‘tiering‘ in ARGs – where different content is issued to different players with different media. So, what I wanted to experiment with in this mini-ARG was giving each of the teams a different and valid point of view of a (fictional) murder. Each of them went through a process that lead the players to think a different character was the murderer. The next step was to have the players come together and have to solve the case together because the journalist that was coming was just in a car crash. The TV crew was there (we had cameras and lights) and so they had to come up with the solution and report it ‘live’ on TV within a certain time. Sharing of information, conversation and debate was ensured because each of them had a unique point of view, and there was an urgency. The choice wouldn’t be easy because all evidence seemed to point to different people, therefore increasing the stakes and dramatic intensity. Sounds like a good plan, eh? So what happened?

1) I suck at plot and participation balance. Why? I had narratively weighted the experience of each team to a fine degree. There isn’t a problem with this, except that it could only work if the players did in fact experience what I had planned. You can image then, something didn’t go as planned. One of the performers (actually one of the organisational peers at the residential, not a trained actor) decided to improvise by bringing in some props for his character. Sounds fantastic eh? This is exactly what you want. But those props ended up tipping the narrative reveal into the direction of another team’s reveal. In other words, the team that was meant to gather information from their interaction with a character came to a similar conclusion to another. This means the whole tiered narrative was not evenly weighted. There was still discussion and debate, but the evidence pointed in a particular direction. So, what lesson did I take from this? Having a dramatically significant choice is easier to implement in interactive systems where you have control over what is given the players (and what they can return). But these sorts of live participatory experiences always have a big degree of the unknown: people! So it is important, I found, to leave room to breathe, to plan for the fact that people are not convenient scripts! But I also learned that making sure everyone is fully briefed on the overall goals and vision is important.

2) I suck at feedback. At the end of the event we ran a debrief session in which we spoke about some of the design process we went through (to help the practitioners apply the experience to their work), and to get feedback. Now the feedback problem isn’t the way we ran the debrief. No. Instead it is what we discovered during that session: the players wanted to know which person was the murderer. They wanted to know if they had made the right decision. My colleague said she had a particular murderer in mind, but I said I seriously didn’t. To me, they all could of been the murderer. The lesson? This doesn’t mean we should of designed the experience to have one definite murderer. But what I realized should of been at the end of the experience was some kind of confirmation for the players that they had made the right decision. We could of done that any number of ways, whatever outcome they chose. For instance, having some character or prop emerge to confirm their decision. I now always make sure there is a feedback loop if players are asked to make a significant decision.

So, did you learn anything from my transmediocrity? Are there other lessons I don’t see? Or do you have a similar tale to tell?

In the last few years there has been a rise in the importance of the ‘live event’. This is an inevitable reaction to the pervasiveness of digital technologies. The internet has without doubt facilitated music, TV, films and radio being easily accessible and free. What many have reflected on, but which Kevin Kelly articulated so well in his essay titled Better Than Free, is that: “When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.” He continues:

From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free. In a real sense, these are eight things that are better than free. Eight uncopyable values. I call them “generatives.” A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.

These Eight Generatives are: Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability. Brian Newman has since adapted these to films specifically:

Live events provide a compelling reason to buy. That is why musicians tour the world all the time, and why broadcasters and filmmakers are starting to fall over themselves trying to create compelling events. Event broadcasts are going well, especially with social media, but they have a long way to go when it comes to harnessing the power of global live events. Indie filmmakers (no, I’m not going to define indie) are certainly exploring the power of live events. I mentioned some early examples of cinema events on my old blog, and in my thesis I mention more of the history of cinema performances, and I’m currently consulting at Openindie — helping filmmakers (among other things) develop a compelling live event that compliments their film. (Got some more good links on live events for films? I’m hungover and sick of searching through stuff.) There is a compelling reason why filmmakers (any artforms) should think more about live events.

Indeed, I mentioned this during The Forum at Whistler Film Festival. I was on the panel with Tony Safford, EVP Worldwide Acquistions, 20th Century Fox; Dr. Greg Zeschuk, President & General Manager of BioWare & Vice President of Electronic Arts; Jonathan Simkin, Founder, Simkin Artist Management; and Daniel Cross, President, Co-founder, Eye Steel Film. Now, when I spoke about filmmakers creating cinema events to bring in audiences, Tony Safford nodded and said that is what they do. He said we build up a film to be the most important film you should attend (he referred to Avatar), and then do another one the next year. Now, I’m not quoting him word for word, but he was talking about creating an event around a film, not the actual cinema experience. We could easily quip about how he obviously missed the point. But did he?

Now I’m not putting down live events. Certainly not. They are crucially important, and I plan for them where possible in my own projects and when consulting on others. But the point I want to highlight here is how we suck at scalability. If you don’t know what scalability is and you wonder why you’re not reaching large audiences/players, then you suck. Wikipedia describes scalability as follows:

In telecommunications and software engineering, scalability is a desirable property of a system, a network, or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner or to be readily enlarged

Now, what it means in the ‘live event’ context is how you’re able to handle many live events or lots of people turning up to events. What I’m saying is this: yes, live events are important — for indies doing a tour they are great, and for alternate reality game creators they are often a great way for players move more fully into the performative — but these sorts of live events can only happen at certain times and places. Scarcity does facilitate a desire to purchase. But at this stage, it doesn’t seem you can easily rollout a live event across multiple locations. How many cast and crew can turn up to how many places? How can props be delivered in a replicatable manner to screens across continents? How can players in multiple locations spread globally participate in live events? Why does this matter?

It matters for two reasons. There is a demand for live events. If your live events are reliant on non-scalable factors, then you will never meet demand. This is a problem then because you lose precious chances of generating revenue, revenue from the increased amount of events being held, from people attending, and from the sales of merchandise etc at these events. So, here are a couple of ways live events can be scalable:

For films: music is already designed to be executed without the original creator present. You can easily hire musicians to play at cinemas around the world. This is already done, but not often. Perhaps there needs to be a live event agency that takes care of these things on behalf of filmmakers? They speak with the cinemas and arrange events that fit with the film.

For alternate reality games, pervasive games, etc: Jane McGonigal did a neat thing in The Lost Ring ARG for the Olympics. She created the rules for a Lost Sport of the Olympics, and then encouraged players worldwide to run their own lost sport events. This is a big shift from most live events in ARGs, where the creators host special events that only certain people in the world can attend, at a certain time. McGonigal simply created a generative system where players can execute a live event on demand.

What other ways are there to not suck at scalability?