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.

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.

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.

Here it is! OMG! I cannot believe I’m doing this.OK, here goes.

You Suck at Transmedia!!

Yes, this is something many of us have been wanting to say for a while…to others (mostly) and to ourselves (sometimes).

But don’t worry, this site isn’t about trashing specific people or projects. I’m a practitioner too, and so I know how even though we learn quickly, we cringe at old mistakes. But importantly, I also know how bad design is often the result of processes and people you don’t have control over. You know it sucks but nobody listened, or believed you, or worse still…you didn’t tell them. This site is part of that conversation. Encouraging us all to feel confident about what we know (and find out) sucks.

A while ago I put this video on my company site, to explain what it is like being a transmedia analyst. But here I want to imagine us all being ‘The Wolf’ from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction for a moment: sweeping in to help our clients, each other and sometimes ourselves with awesome knowledge about what needs to be done to clean up the mess. I mean, there are transmedia corpses (at least mutilated limbs) everywhere!

So pretty please, with sugar on top, stop sucking at transmedia!

How do you/we/us stop sucking at transmedia? Well, this site is a step in that direction. This site welcomes contributions that really do aim to progress the state of the art. Here we can discuss the consequences of transmedia design, production and execution decisions.

In short, this site will cover transmedia decisions that never, sometimes, and always work.

More detail about the aims and methods of this site are in the About page.