I just got an e-mail from a friend of mine in SL, Scott Kildall, who is famous for his eccentric performance arts based in SL. Some of you SLers may have heard of his 28 Avatars Later where SL Zombies went through the grid, in various bars and locales, and infected other residents. This Zombie attack was documented as machinima. It turns out that he is embarking in a new project to build viruses and he is seeking funding for it. As his previous projects, this one is equally interesting. Here’s his description:

This is a huge endeavor, which began in Second Life and is culminating in a new artwork: a 13-foot high trojan horse which will be stuffed with paper virus sculptures. These will include real viruses such as rabies and smallpox and imaginary viruses such as the Andromeda Strain and Snow Crash.

We are presenting the work at the 01SJ Biennial in early September and here we will be conducting workshops for 2 weeks on how viruses work, how to build papercraft models and also on sustainable construction techniques for large-scale sculptures.

We have received partial funding but have to raise more to complete the project. We are fundraising through Kickstarter and if nothing else, I’d encourage you to watch the video and learn more about the project.

Why is this an important project? We are doing something unique in terms of technology, namely using a computer-controlled shopbot to build out a wood armature from a Sketchup model and using printing directly onto a recycled compressed bio-board to make this physical sculpture look like a 3D model. This type of project has never been done before and will hopefully inspire others to use similar techniques instead of messy and dirty ones. We will be sharing our techniques with the public.

Also, we will be teaching people how to make 3D paper objects in an burgeoning papercraft movement which encourages use of ones hands in an increasing digital age in a gesture to bring people together in real space.

Thank you for considering this and we appreciate any support you might be able to give,
Scott and Victoria

One of my favorite conferences is coming up this week. Regrettably, since I am currently out of the country I won’t be making it this year. This is a great gathering to meet so many interesting people: gamers, scholars, game designers, and people from the industry etc.  Those who participate not only get to play games but also attend some cool panels (here is the schedule) and hear some cool people talk  about designing experiences, games, and transmedia storytelling. This year’s keynote speaker is NoMime’s Media‘s Maureen McHugh who also became a friend over the last several years. Of particular interest to me is the City Gaming & Public Art panel sponsored by Nonchalance, an innovative experience design company that has worked wonders with their game the Jejune Institute. Because it is a game build around San Francisco, players discover things that they had never paid attention to about the city itself.  Panel organizers, Peggy Weil’s description of the panel is as follows:

ARGs are not only transmedia, they are TransGenre. Games in general, and city games in particular, have “crossed over” from the cult/gamer and commercial/marketing sectors as celebrated innovations in public art. International art festivals from the Venice Biennale to San Jose’s ZeroOne are commissioning game designers to create site-specific artworks transforming the urban landscape into urban gamescape.

While urban game designers are tech-savvy and urban gamers find themselves in virtual and augmented realities – required to take full advantage of mobile/social networks – games as public art have theatrical roots, particularly in street theater, improv, performance art, club culture and literature.

This panel will address the intersection of city gaming as public art identifying both precedents and opportunities for game designers to create work for public spaces.

The details for the rest of the panels are in the schedule, feel free to check it out.

This year (for the first time in a long time), I am spending several months over the summer in Istanbul, Turkey. I plan on being here till early August so, for the first time in a long time, I actually have some time to enjoy the city and catch up with friends with whom I haven’t met in ages. Having decided to stay here this long, it also meant that I had to bring work with me… except that 20% of my research was and still on YouTube and the Turkish courts had banned YouTube on May 5, 2008 because of “crimes committed against Ataturk,” the founder of the Turkish Republic. The story is this: Greek and Turkish YouTube users had been trading video insults prior to the ban, attracting much coverage in the Turkish press. Greek videos reportedly accused the founding president of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, of homosexuality and a Turkish user responded by calling Greece the birthplace of homosexuality. Wow, very mature of both nations. Their behavior is not unlike the griefer communities that I have been researching in Second Life, you know, the ones who plaster penises, swastikas, and communist symbolism in virtual environments and calling each other fags and various racial slurs. As a result of this silly controversy, the Turkish court has banned YouTube and the world went *wild* arguing that the ban was the result of the conservative politics of the current government in power. True, the Turkish government is currently in the hands of the religious conservative right (so was United States under the Bush government over the past eight years) and there are a lot of people who don’t like it (as there were under Bush). An important thing to remember is that the Turkish government has not banned the site for showing sex or child pornography (which is not permitted to upload on YouTube anyway), or for videos against Islam. It banned it for insults against Ataturk who was actually the reformist president who had put the religious right in its place and made the country a secular power. And since then, he is treated as the God above Gods.  We can argue whether this is appropriate or not till the cows go moo, but this is how it is. Top-level government officials themselves declared within recent days that they are indeed AGAINST the ban, Abdullah Gul (the president), Tayyip Erdogan (vice president), Binali Yildirim, and Tayfun Acerer are all against the ban and are willing to find some legal route to get the site. But as Google recently (and unexpectedly) bundled several of its services (such as Google docs, Google Earth) in the same IP address as that of YouTube, now access to these other services are also impossible. Unlike what some Western media outlet think (or would like to think because it is sensational), the Turkish government has nothing to do with this recent ban mess. So… clearly there is something else going on here for which Google is also responsible.

When this IP-bundle mess hit the fan, the Turkish government looked for the appropriate Google representatives to find a solution to make these various other services available. Ironically, all they could find was a small office that was in charge of advertisements and that Google had no official presence within Turkey. In other words, they weren’t able to find any Google representative to negotiate. The scam is simple: Earning advertising dollars in Turkey without having an office allows the search giant to *evade* taxes. And it is also conveniently *not* bound by the laws and regulations of the government. As a result, the Turkish government has mandated Google to pay $30.000 in penalty for the untaxed income it has generated.  As they should. So while some people are upset at the government for these bans, others are upset at the media giants who don’t treat them as *worthy* customers. Meanwhile, people have reported a considerable slowing down of Google’s services speed-wise. Not sure why this may be the case.

Google representatives are finally coming to Turkey this week to solve this crisis, but the people who make up Google’s $100.000 market share are a bit ticked off (me included). Telecommunications director, Tayfun Acarer, has promised a resolution.

For the love of god, please solve this soon, so I can continue doing my research, like now!

I am spending my summer in Istanbul this year. Having left this charming city thirteen years ago for graduate work, I must confess that I have really missed hanging out here. I hadn’t realized it until I actually came out here (for not so jovial reasons initially, but things are improving slowly). I have been working as well, for sure, but also I am getting out and attending Jazz concerts/clubs, exhibits, shows, and really getting into the culture of things… which, I must confess, I have been missing out on lately for one reason or another.

Yesterday, I ended up going to an exhibit on Istanbul that is currently taking place in Sakip Sabanci Museum which used to be the mansion of one of the wealthiest families in Turkey. His mansion overlooks the Bosphorus and therefore is privy to an outstanding view. Over the summer, various Jazz concerts take place in the gorgeous gardens of the house. He is also famous for being a big collector of art, and several years ago, he turned his mansion into a museum. Currently, Legendary Istanbul is in exhibit. The exhibit is designed as an outstanding experience that relates the history of Istanbul. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the museum is overlooking the very waters whose history it is recounting. You can feel the story of Istanbul in your bones through and through.

The museum starts by a brief movie summarizing the region’s past from the BC years with digitally mastered images and maps explaining how communities populated the region or how it may have looked like at the time. From then on, the artifacts found in the region are exhibited room by room, empire by empire, from emperors to sultans. As the Christian era ends with the conquest of Istanbul by the Turks in 1453, you are already standing in awe at the face of history. The exhibit even has the chains used to block the water traffic of Golden Horn in order to protect then-Constantinople from foreign invasion. Guests are then reminded that, when faced with these chains and finding it difficult to break through, Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror actually had his fleet move on the ground and penetrated into the city. Outstanding war strategy and determination to conquer one single city… And of course, the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the Turkish Republic… As the exhibit comes to a close, you enter into a room surrounded by the images of the skyline of Istanbul changing over time, the skyline as it was depicted during the Venetians all the way up to its current condition. Exhibited on the wall and projected on the artificial dome placed in the center of the room, you see the domes of each mosque that is found in Istanbul. Leaving the exhibit gives you the feeling of having just left a fairy tale. Truly an exceptional design of the Istanbul experience.

Last July, I blogged about Ted Striphas’s The Late Age of Print, a book that (as a book lover who hangs out in used bookstores) rang really true with me. What I like about Striphas’s approach to book publishing is that even though his main focus is examining the book as a cultural artifact and investigate the forces that impact its production, he is in close touch with the new media that surrounds it. As we are getting acutely aware, the book culture nowadays almost warrants taking into account all sorts of other media and practices that have emerged on platforms other than “print.” Accordingly, he posted a YouTube video that discusses his book (a practice that is getting more common among authors) and he used social media such as his blog and Twitter to expand on and re-examine his ideas. So I was not surprised at all when I discovered that he was launching yet another project related to The Late Age of Print that hopes to make the book accessible to a wider audience: The audiobook version of the book… The book is already being distributed freely under Creative Commons license as a PDF. His goal now is to produce a text-to-speech (T-T-S) version of the book, which will be released freely online under a Creative Commons 3.0 BY-NC-SA license. But he needs some cleanup of the text and he is crowdsourcing the task hoping that the Interwebs may be interested in helping him out as it will be released for free anyway. The raw text has all sorts of remnants from the original book layout (footnotes, page headers/numbers, words hyphenated due to line breaks, and whole lot more). They seriously messed up the recording, and so they need to go. Here’s his post and here’s the link the the wiki. As a scholar, I would like this book to be widely distributed and accessible by all. So I ask that we all contribute in our own little way

Last week has been quite intense: meeting new people, catching up with folks over drinks, engaging in good conversation, and attending great panels at the SCMS in LA… One such interesting encounter occurred on the last day of the conference with Peter Ludlow from Northwestern University who is one of the very first embedded journalists of virtual worlds. He was in the Archiving and Researching Virtual Worlds panel scheduled on that day. He started his online newspaper, Alphaville Herald, in his days in Sims Online, before he got banned from the world. He later renamed the tabloid newspaper Second Life Herald after he moved to Second Life. His book with Mark Wallace, The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse, is an interesting account of the tabloid news that relate to griefing and other day-to-day activities that occurred in Second Life as the world was getting established. I tend to view it as an ethnographically rich research on the cultural activities of the virtual world. At any rate, over lunch (and if I’m not mistaken, there was champagne involved), I accepted being an embedded journalist for the newspaper: I’ll be reporting on griefers. My co-conspirators are Parker Pennell (reporting on SL fashion), Pixeleen Minstral (a long-time veteran in reporting in SL), and of course Urizenus Sklar (Peter Ludlow who is the co-founder of the newspaper).

All I can say is… let the madness begin! It’s going to be messy, it’s going to be provocative, and it’s going to be fun!

Panelists: Mario Gerosa, Henry Lowood, Peter Ludlow, Donald Snyder

The last installment of my conference notes:

Fourth Panel: Who Let the Fans In? Next-Gen Digi-Marketing

In attendance were JD Black, Vice-President of Marketing in Sony Imageworks Interactive (2012, District 9), John Caldwell, Professor at the UCLA Department of Film, TV, Digital Media (author of Production Culture), Alan Friel,  Partner at Wildman, Harrold, Allen & Dixon LLP, John Hegeman, Chief Marketing Office at the New Regency Productions (The Blair Witch Project), Roberta Pearson, Professor at the University of Nottingham (author of Reading Lost, Cult Television & The Many Lives of Batman), Steve Wax, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Campfire (HBO, True Blood Revelation, Art of the H3ist: And Audi Project).

John Hegeman and Steve Wax talked about the Blair Witch Project, the former was actually involved in the project, and the latter is the current partner of Mike Monello who produced the project. The following account is the accumulation of what they said at the panel and my interviews with Mike Monello and Brian Clark from GMD Studios:
Brian Fleming, a film director, went to Orlando to film the television segments for John Pierson’s show called Split Screen. He hired a local cameraman, Dan Myrick, who had shot some footage in the woods of Maryland to edit as a film. Pierson saw this footage during the three-day shoot. Quite impressed by it, he licensed the rights to show sections of it in his show, but when he did so, he claimed that the filmmakers of the footage had inexplicably disappeared. According to Brian Clark, the licensing fees for the footage gave Myrick enough funding to edit the film. As Clark recalls, once the sections of the footage aired on broadcast, John Pierson’s discussion boards exploded with people inquiring into the veracity of the footage. Inevitably, there were also those who claimed to be the missing filmmaker. Because of the online speculation that emerged from the broadcast of the footage on an independent film channel, the creators of the footage, Dan Myrick et al., decided to set up a Web site to create a fully-developed world for the film which they were about the produce. The Web site was set up before they started editing the footage and almost two years before they took it to Sundance Film Festival.  Originally, the creators of the film were going to be characters in the film and that the story would have been about them as filmmakers. It is the reaction of the online audience to the footage that led them to understand that the raw footage, in and of itself, could stand on its own, a realization which led them to change the way they approached the project. Accordingly, they took the portion of the story about the filmmakers who got the footage from the family, and turned it into the online experience. They also created another piece for the Sci-Fi channel called the Curse of the Blair Witch. These elements became the extension of the raw footage that they had initially shot in Maryland. The film, as currently available, is really just that raw footage which is the narrative that they had originally planned before the Web made much more out of it. What made it great was that there was 18 hours of extra footage to create transmedia properties from. The Web site being established two years prior to the movie, along with the fact that it was organized around social media, made it all the more compelling as a story.

Transmedia storytelling relies on crowd-sourcing which is an aspirational culture that wants to become professionals. So the main question is, how do you ensure a long successful content creation when taking into account crowd-sourcing and runaway content creation?

Technology has given us a broader range of content and opportunities (limitations as well, but we need to focus on opportunities). One of the panelists openly said that user-generated content competitions are bull shit. Part of the problem is that when brands encourage fan participation, they give them sandboxes in which they can create content so they don’t damage the brand, fans may not like the rules of the sandbox and see the industry decisions as evil, although this is not the case, industry decisions are what they are.

When creating transmedia franchises, mother ship is the primary text. You should always keep that in view. People in the humanities and the academy are more expert than those in the industry.
One of the participants in the audience asked what should the film schools be teaching students so that they are successful?

• A basic understanding of IP (intellectual property) and fair use.
• How they can learn to pay attention to the audience: who is your audience, how are you going to engage them? Also we need to be rethinking how motion images are being studied. You can’t understand moving images without an interdisciplinary understanding. You can’t put them into the departments of film and television studies. That needs to be re-conceptualized.

IP theft: There is an implicit resignation to fans who are going to take whatever they want to take to do whatever with this content.

One audience member asked what kind of conversations go on behind the scenes? To what degree you are going to let them play with your content. The answer was that this depended on the content. If the content belongs to someone else you have to be more careful. Negative buzz or activity happening what can we do to change their minds? Frequently, the community balances the negative feedback and manages it without any interference. For example, when dealing with ARGs, when some paricipants get upset on forums recognizing some designing mistakes and indicating that the experience is not real (which mostly happened when ARGs first started taking place), the rest of the community members either disregard these comments or tell the person to mind his/her own business. The liability issues in designing somewhat risky issues also came up. Steve Wax noted that Campfire paid a lot for insurance. He also explained that in Art of the H3ist they had to change the bad guy several times as a result of how players responded to the game. In other words, marketing campaign has to be really flexible and adapt accordingly. Things are constantly fluid. Responding to your core fan base is key to designing effective experiences. The beauty is that the Internet leveled the plain field so the audience’s voice is just as loud.

A long-awaited picture: Henry Jenkins & I

Jay Bushman, Burcu Bakioglu, and Jordan Weisman

Felix... Hollywood, traditional style!

Third panel: Designing Transmedia Worlds
In attendance were David Brisbin, Art Director/Production Designer (Twilight, New Moon, The Day Earth Stood Still), Danny Bilson (The Rocketeer, The Flash, The Sentinel), Derek Johnson, Assistant Professor at the University of North Texas, R. Eric Lieb, Partner at Blacklight Transmedia and former editor-in-chief of Atomic Comics (28 Weeks Later), and Laeta Kalogridis, screenwriter and Executive Producer (Shutter Island, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Bionic Woman).
Building a world is about setting up a system of rules whereby all the events that will take place within that world will have to conform.

The panelists saw transmedia as partnership between different production sites. These production sites share some resources but they see the content slightly differently. Derek Johnson noted that franchise logic is an economic logic which in turn reflects the creative and cultural logic. The whole goal is to find an intellectually satisfying way to create content. Others noted that when creating worlds, the first thing you have to figure out is where the center of the universe is. The question “Where do you want to go today?” will lead you to that center.
Ultimately, transmedia is messy, it has different positions and investments whereas the producers tend to want something unified, and thus, present the locus of control. Fans, on the other hand, are long-standing experts on transmedia even if they are merely lurkers. They like to retell the stories, but by doing so, they create multiplicity and contradictions. While franchises themselves show intolerance for multiplicity in meaning-making, fans are quite resilient in accepting contradictory narrative developments.

Despite this contradiction, the existence of fans does not threaten the industry. As a matter of fact, the energy that fans put can serve as an industrial function in its own right. I would argue is that this is the reason why the creators of Lonelygirl15 were able to build their brand and eventually found EQAL, an entertainment company that develops what they later identified as “social shows.”

The most important thing about transmedia experience is ownership. As the audience is consuming individual parts of the transmedia franchise, or purchasing t-shirts, mugs, action figures, she is appropriating these texts and making it her own. Thus the sense of ownership is one of the important characteristics of these experiences. The trickiest part of transmedia production, as one would suspect, is timing the release of individual pieces. The games need to be developed in time to be released in the most effective manner, the comic books that may be filling in areas that are not covered in the movies must be released in between these films.

Here’s my talk on participatory culture …

Second panel: ARG: This is Not a Game. But is it Always a Promotion?

This panel interrogated to what extent the ARG, a gaming genre primarily born out of promotional initiatives, could be considered to be an art form. On the one side, the panel had Jordan Weisman, the creator of the Beast, the first ARG that was born as a marketing campaign for Spielberg’s AI. Considered to be the first of its kind, it left a lasting impact on its players. There were also folks from the established entertainment companies, such as 42 Entertainment (Susan Bond & Alex Lieu) and Big Spaceship (Ivan Askwith), in addition to relatively young, yet vibrant, companies such as No Mimes Media, including  Steve Peters, and Maureen McHugh. Will Booker, as an Associate Professor at Kingston University, was the sole representative of the academic hallways. As such, he was strategically situated between these two groups in terms of seating.

As expected, the conversation was *lively.* The excitement and passionate conversation during the course of the panel was highly indicative of the relatively unsettled situation of ARGs. As a burgeoning field, ARG presents quite a challenge in terms of its definition, rules, and purpose. More important, the contentiousness of the term became even more apparent as established companies and relatively young companies joined the discussion in making a meaning out of this unusual *beast* (pun intended). Here are some key ideas that came up during the discussion:
Global audiences are asked to collaborate on solving conspiracy theories as these theories are integral to ARGs. The goal of these audiences, therefore, is to reveal the intricacies of such mysteries. One of the key things to remember, again, is to remain “authentic” to the world and the story you’re trying to tell. ARGs need to target people in different ways and in multiple engagement levels because not everyone has the same amount of time and resources to invest in the game. It is important to keep in mind that in ARGs the real world becomes a platform in and of itself. In addition to being promotional initiatives for introducing movies, games, cars into the market, ARGs are used for educational purposes, in museums, and in travel. Sometimes, they are not about a story, but about exploring space and experience.

Jordan Weisman

Even though Jordan Weisman noted that there are no definite hallmarks for ARGs, a few have been noted:
• Narrative pieces only add up to a story in its entirety
• A giant collaborative audience is necessary otherwise it is a transmedia experience, but not necessarily an ARG.
• It has to be in real time, because it loses something in replay. The meat of ARGs is the living audience.

ARGs are usually used to tell the back story of the franchise or fill in the gap between releases. What is most important is to establish an emotional connection between the players and the characters so much so that the players care deeply about what happens to the characters.
Without a doubt, the distinction between art and marketing is blurred in ARGs, however, it would be erroneous to consider the ARG space as merely a promotional space. This space is also a space where the art can live. This is where the discussion got a bit heated between the 42 Entertainment folks and those who saw ARGs as more of an art form. When explaining the deep-rooted ties of ARGs to the promotional spaces, Jordan Weiss explained that this connection came out of necessity, not by choice. At the time of The Beast, the only place Weisman and his team could find funding from Microsoft was from the marketing department. This initial move gave the impression that the gaming genre was mostly an alternative promotional venture.

Maureen McHugh, from No Mimes Media, who started out as a writer who is primarily focusing on print fiction, emphasized the value of ARGs as an art form. Because she sensed that this unusual emerging genre could provide a new platform upon which to write new forms of fiction, she was eager to work in these spaces. She also noted that the ability of ARGs to play across different platforms, gives them the opportunity to address the needs of the audiences in a very unique way. Because the players are able to connect with the story through venues that they are most familiar/comfortable with, ARGs help establish strong emotional connections with the characters. In addition, McHugh noted that ARGs were performance based.

Maureen McHugh on the far right

42 Entertainment team was a bit inconsistent in describing how they saw this gaming genre. They used the words “art,” “story,” and “ROI” in the same breath, an inconsistency that caused somewhat of a tension between the panelists. The main claim of 42 Entertainment folks was that if they (entertainers) don’t figure out how to charge for the ARGs, they didn’t have an art form. This concern, of course, echoes a larger concern that is relevant to anyone who is producing content online: “How do you monetize good content on the Internet?” Ultimately one of the folks in the audience stated, rather idealistically, that “If you’re talking about ROI, it isn’t art.”

The panelists also expressed concern towards referring to these experiences as “games” as they fit almost none of the characteristics of games. A game in the traditional sense exhibits a defined set of rules understood by the players, has a set of win and loss scenarios based on these rules, creates a space in which the game is played, and embodies pieces and components, the mechanical elements of the game that facilitate the play but also make it identifiable as a game. The implicit premise of an ARG, however, that it is indeed not a game, challenges these components. It does not have a set of rules, no win-or-lose scenario, no pieces or components, or no specific play space. Jordan Weisman claimed that it was not them, as the designers of these experiences, but rather, the players who came out with this term. Interestingly enough, the players responsible for this misnomer were actually the players of The Beast, such as Steve Peters and Maureen McHugh, who later on formed their own cross-media companies and became game designers on their own right.

The panelists with Denise Mann