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.

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.

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