Christy Dena

Eighteen months ago I submitted an essay idea to Henry Jenkins and Mark Deuze for their special issue of the Convergence journal. The essay, titled ‘Emerging Participatory Culture Practices: Player-Created Tiers in Alternate Reality Games’ is in the publication and is now available online. I’ve created a website to go with the essay for a few reasons….some of which is to provide general-reader designer-oriented content, to provide the basic info it wasn’t appropriate to put in an analytical essay and because the copyright agreement is that I cannot publish the essay on my site for a year. Here is the full list of contents:

• Henry Jenkins and Mark Deuze > Editorial: Convergence Culture
• danah boyd > Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence
• Neil Perryman > Doctor Who and the Convergence of Media: A Case Study in `Transmedia Storytelling’
• Christy Dena > Emerging Participatory Culture Practices: Player-Created Tiers in Alternate Reality Games
• Hector Postigo > Video Game Appropriation through Modifications: Attitudes Concerning Intellectual Property among Modders and Fans
• Daren C. Brabham > Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving: An Introduction and Cases
• Larissa Hjorth > Being Real in the Mobile Reel: A Case Study on Convergent Mobile Media as Domesticated New Media in Seoul, South Korea
• Gunn Sara Enli > Redefining Public Service Broadcasting: Multi-Platform Participation
• Samantha Lay > Book Review: Barbara Klinger. Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home
• Melissa Gregg > Book Review: Mark Nunes. Cyberspaces of Everyday Life

I look forward to reading the other essays. I hope this issue provokes some conversations, please send through your thoughts on the comments here or via email. I’d love to hear them.

I’ve gone a bit New Year crazy and posted four items on UC101:

Ep 002: Transcript of Evan Jones Interview

The first is the text transcript of Evan Jones’s interview – he’s got some great quotes in there (and my conversational style doesn’t translate too well) :/

Admin Update: What’s Happening?

The admin update is a quick overview of what I think this exciting area needs, changes to the UC101 site and a call for contributors. So let me know if you’re interested!

Launching Strategy: Birth Your Alternate Reality in an ARG Community

The launching strategy post is the first in single-topic articles that share some of the lessons learnt so far. In this article I tackle how one can get around the ‘hoax’ issue in ARGs.

Possibility Post: Will Integrated Media Homes Kick the Holodeck’s Butt?

This article is the first exploring possibilities for the future. In particular I look at storytelling and gaming possibilities in a media integrated home.

I look forward to hearing any feedback and ideas you may have.

Welcome to 2008! Wohoo!

As many of you are aware, I’m busy in my PhD writing cave…tapping away at my keyboard to share with you some of my findings from my research over the past few years. Although I’m still active in social sites like Facebook, doing some consulting and writing some articles, I’m working hard to keep focused on writing a PhD I will be proud of. At times, it is a particularly looney state of mind in my cave. Indeed, I bought a t-shirt for myself for Christmas with the writing: “Caution: Thesis Writing in Progress”.

I also counter-balance my deep-furrowed-brow-leather-patched-elbowed-jacket-contemplation with extreme cyberslacking. So, here are some of my favourite distractions for the year so far, along with some notable announcements:

Following on from the 2006 conference, the Beyond Belief series continues the exploration of religion, consciousness, belief and quantum physics with top generous and deep thinking scientists with Enlightenment 2.0. All the vidoes of the presentations are online. I’m enjoying the friendly academic jousting and discussion and also some really clear explanations of complex theories. For instance, David Albert’s presentation on the questions quantum physics has raised.

As for pure non-fiction. I’m so pleased to see a webisode that isn’t targeted to some teen or tween. I’ve been enjoying quarterlife because it does deal with people a bit older. The acting and script is alot better than most webisodes. As for looney surprises. I’m a bit addicted to iChannel now. Here is the webisode premise:

“iChannel” is a collaborative web series about a young man who has his life magically taken over by an audience… YOU. Our goal is a compelling original series where the audience can interact with the creators and the show’s characters in unique, unprecedented ways.

Now, that blurb does on the face of it smell like every other claim about interactivity and participation etc. But this one is really well done. What they do is take comments from the previous episode and integrate them throughout the next episode. Sure, this has been done before, but not to the degree undertaken in this webisode. For instance, while the protagonist is dealing with some issue, he receives an SMS from one of us, or he sees a video, a bit of grafitti on the wall and responds. For the audience, this means we start making comments that we feel will work well in defining or answering certain situations we anticipate. Check it out.

Another bright-side of looneyness is artist Ethan Hayes-Chute’s weekly Good News Newsletter. It is a great way to balance the influx of serious email.

Speaking of participation (not looneyness), theorist Axel Bruns has launched the companion website for his forthcoming book: Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage:

Produsage, and Produsage.org, is an idea whose time has come.

It builds on a simple, yet fundamental proposition: the proposition that to describe the creative, collaborative, and ad hoc engagement with content for which user-led spaces such as the Wikipedia act as examples, the term production is no longer accurate. This is true even where we re-imagine the concept of production as user-led production, commons-based peer production, or more prosaicly as the production of customer-made products: not the adjectives and qualifiers which we may attach to the term production are the problem, but the very noun itself.

Another colleague, fellow Rotten Tomato Mark Marino has published his elit peice A Show of Hands in the latest issue of Hyperrhiz. While the other rotten tomato Jeremy Douglass has not only finished his PhD on interactive fiction (yay!), he already has a postdoc researcher position for the Software Studies program at the Uni of California San Diego. I love my fellow robed techies.

Best quote of the year (so far):

[W]hile the industry talks about “participation” and “user-generated content,” I don’t think developers always realize how important this is – how they take me back to a time when the best thing in the world was making a new one. Chris Dahlen

As for Cross/Trans/Multi-platform/media/storytelling, the National Association of Television Program Executives (NAPTE) is happening on 28-31 Jan and has a special session on alternate reality games with lots of familiar faces:

Adventures in Storytelling: Alternate Reality Games
Audiences are now living across platforms where their viewing experience is enriched with additional characters that advance storylines and unravel plots beyond weekly broadcasted episodes. Alternate reality games allow the audience to interact with characters and each other in worlds were fiction fuses with reality. Now, both story and audience evolve together. Fast becoming a genre unto itself, cross media production demands new shot callers. What are the roles of executive producers of cross-media? How does technology, distribution, content and social behavior dictate development? With audiences living across multiple platforms in story specific communities, what is the future for traditional television show formats? Brian Seth Hurst, newly appointed second vice chair for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and one of The Hollywood Reporter’s Digital 50 for 2007, will be our expert resident for this panel discussion.

Moderator(s): Brian Seth Hurst, CEO, The Opportunity Management Company, Inc.
Panelist(s): Stephen Andrade, Senior Vice President of Digital Development and General Manager, NBC.com; Patrick Crowe, President, Xenophile Media, Inc.; Matt Wolf, Founder, Double Twenty Productions

Before then, on the 21st of Jan, submissions for the 2007 MIPTV 360 Content Pitching Competition will need to be in. Interesting change of terms and themes in this years event: ‘multi-platform co-production on human rights’, ‘mass participation fiction and entertainment’ and ’cause related marketing’.

By the end of Jan you’ll need to get in your application to be an Alternate Reality Game Producer for Six to Start, with (among others) the team from Perplex City.

Also, as many of you would be aware, a lot of projects will be coming out this year and many have already launched. Find815 is the latest outside-TV extension of the Lost universe. The five week interactive online experience is created by Australian company Hoodlum Digital Entertainment. That was obvious (to me), as they’re using a similiar game mechanic and interface they used for Yahoo!7’s PSTrixi. Hoodlum is also behind projects such as ITV Emmerdale’s ‘Who Killed Tom King?’ and Fat Cow Motel.. Although I love the billboards popping up all over the US it seems the ABC have decided to scale down the amount of platforms, reduce the advertising (ya!), and make it more accessible to casual audiences. I hope it works for them.

Well, the final goodie is another ARG design chart. This one is the excel document for the Sharp Legend of the Sacred Urn campaign. It is generously supplied by Michael Monello of CampfireNYC. The pdf is on the ARG Design Charts page.

Okay, I think that is it for now. Except for…Hi, my name is Christy Dena and I’m addicted to area/code’s Facebook Parking Wars game.

Apologies for the lateness of this post — I’ve been snowed under in tropical Australia.

For your holiday pleasure, I’ve put together a listing of ‘Cross-Media Christmas’ gift ideas of goods that came out in 2007. The following are not only cross-media (they’re transmedia & 360 etc) and they’re not only for Christmas, but the alliteration sounds good.

CROSS-MEDIA BABIES

Tiny Love’s DVD MAGIQ™
For babies 3-36months, Tiny Love’s DVD with specially integrated toy looks like a great pressie. What I find especially interesting is the language used in the product sheet. The arguments put forward about the functions of this cross-media product are almost exactly the same rhetoric for those in cross-media entertainment in general. Here is a snippet:

The MAGIQ™ lies within the special triangle formed by baby, doll and media. Baby no longer stares passively at the screen, but looks aside at her friend the doll, pondering its reactions, and causing her to explore her own feelings and react proactively to the stimuli on the screen. The experience here becomes a multi-directional and dynamic interaction between the DVD content, baby and doll. This experience is Active Viewing. The result: Baby is stimulated on a much deeper level, and has a richer and more holistic experience. The Active Viewing experience that DVD MAGIQ™ provides engages baby on a higher intellectual, emotional and social plain and encourages genuine interaction. [source]

CROSS-MEDIA TEENS

Joel and Cat Set the Story Straight
The novel is delivered rotating between the POVs of the characters Joel and Cat, and is linked by their tandem storytelling assignment. The writers, Nick and Rebecca, also wrote the story in a tandem storytelling style, and readers can also participate in the tandem storyelling assignment by submitting story threads on the website or via SMS. I posted about this here.

OTHER CROSS-MEDIA BOOKS

Raw Shark Texts
Steven Hall’s book, Raw Shark Texts, was launched with special content on the website and had a small ARG surrounding the launch. I posted about it here.

CROSS-MEDIA TV

Twin Peaks
The beginning of it all, David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks came out this year in the Definitive Gold Box Edition. You’ll have to buy the feature film and books separately though.

Heroes
NBC’s Heroes exploded from the TV with Heroes Evolutions (Heroes 360 Experience) and graphic novels. You can buy the season one DVD, but you can’t buy the comic that is in the TV series (9th Wonders) (although they did give copies away to fans, the fact that you cannot buy this comic is IMHO a very big missed merchandising opportunity). You can buy the comics that are part of Evolutions though.

Lost
The complete season three of Lost is now available on DVD. ABC’s Lost TV show had of course the The Lost Experience, a book and numerous websites that expanded beyond the episodes. I posted about The Lost Experience when it first started here.

Jericho
During September 1996, CBS launched Beyond Jericho the day after the pilot aired on TV. The webisode series was to follow different characters than those in the series. Only one webisode aired however. But in October the same year a new webisode, Countdown, began. Countdown (Oct/…) was published during the nine-week hiatus. It is a prequel to the events in the TV series. It has only one character from the main series, Robert Hawkins, and follows his research about nuclear bombs before moving to Jericho. In 2007, the first season was made available on DVD.

CSI: NY
In 2007, the complete third season was released on DVD. It includes episode 4, ‘Hung Out to Dry’, which includes real life websites and the ARG t-shirt company EDOC Laundry. So you can buy the DVD (or individual episode) and the t-shirts featured in the series (which are also part of their own ARG).

The Office
October 2007 (perhaps earlier) NBC put up a fictional company website for The Office: Dunder Mifflin Infinity. Mid 2006, between season 2 and 3, they also put out a webisode: The Office: The Accountants. You can buy the DVD and the game that was released in Nov 2007 as well.

Ghost Whisperer
In March 2007, CBS’ Ghost Whisperer: The Other Side webisode provides a shift of point-of-view from the TV series as it is told from the perspective of a ghost, Zach. Eight webisodes were netcast. Slam Internet Productions produced an online graphic novel for Ghost Whisperer, titled Spirit: The Ghost Whisperer . It was edited by Ron Frenz and is available for download in PDF form. The graphic novel is a flashback to the character Melinda Gordan’s school days as a cheerleader, prefiguring the release of the ‘Mean Girls’ TV episode which was broadcast on 9th Feb 2007. The complete second season DVD includes the webisodes.

Skins
From January 2007, after each television episode of Channel 4’s Skins is aired on their pay-TV channel E7, an episode that elaborates on events is released on the web in Unseen Skins. Two extra episodes not published online are supplied in the DVD of the first season.

Firefly
Joss Whedon’s Firefly TV series continued in webisodes, comics and a feature film. A Collector’s Edition of the feature film, Serenity, was released this year and includes the webisodes. You can Buy the comics and TV series on DVD and you’re set!

My Name is Earl
In May 2007, for a special episode of NBC’s My Name Is Earl, ‘Get A Real Job,’ viewers could participate in ‘the first ever “Laugh ‘n Sniff” interactive episode’. Whilst watching the show, viewers were prompted to scratch the special boxes supplied on the scent card in TV Guide. The scents included a ‘new car smell’ for a blow-up doll. So, if you get the episode, ‘Get a Real Job’ through iTunes and an old copy of the TV Guide — you’ve got a replayable simultaneous media experience that is alot of fun. Indeed, this episode was one of the year’s highlights for me. MNiE also has a blog and has done lots of interesting things with fans. I posted about the ‘Laugh ‘n Sniff’ episode here.

CROSS-MEDIA FILM

Late Fragment
This Canadian interactive film by Daryl Cloran, Anita Doron, Mateo Guez, Anita Lee & Ana Serrano, Late Fragment, is the first interactive dramatic feature in North America. It was Vjeed live is available on DVD.

Head Trauma
Lance Weiler’s feature film Head Trauma was, in cross-media exploration terms, the stand-out cross-media project for 2007. It included both a cinema ARG, ARG (Hope is Missing), interactive graphic novel and many other online explorations. YOu can buy the Head Trauma DVD at Lance’s online store, get it VOD through portals such as Amazon UnBoxed and Xbox Movies, or even a DVD bundle with The Last Broadcast — the first integrated feature film & website project. I posted about Head Trauma here and here.

Pirates of the Carribean
Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End Collector’s Edition came out in 2007. Pirates of course has a long history, beginning as a ride at Disneyland and includes projects such as the 2006 online interactive adventure: Dead Man’s Tale. Worthy of note too, is the specially-crafted book that came out in 2007: The Secret Files of the East India Trading Company. This book is set after the events of the third film, and is written in the style of ARG-like Cathy’s Book: written incharacter with bits that fall out of the pages. Respected imagineer Jim Hill reviews the book created by Becker & Mayer.

The Host
In 2007, Magnolia Films commissioned ARG Studios to create an ARG for Bong Joon Ho’s The Host . The ARG, Monster Hunt Club, helped market the release of the Korean film in the US. The DVD was released July this year.

Southland Tales
Richard Kelly, the director of Donnie Darko, brought out his cross-media project that combines a feature film, experiential website, and graphic novels.

CROSS-MEDIA MUSIC

Year Zero
Earlier this year Trent Reznor expanded the music experience to an alternate reality game: Year Zero. Though the game has finished, you can still go through most of the sites and read the still-active community posts, and buy the music in digital and/or CD form.

American Girl Posse
Tori Amos’ album American Girl Posse features five different characters, each of which have their own blog: Clyde, Isabel, Tori, Santa, Pip. So, you can read the blogs and then hear the characters sing on the CD.

CROSS-MEDIA GAMING

World of Warcraft
You can buy a subscription to the World of Warcraft MMORPG and the comics have begun to be sold.

The Lord of the Rings Online
2007 saw the release of the Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, a highly regarded online game that is set in the LOTR universe. You can give a subscription to this continuation of the LOTR experience.

CROSS-MEDIA DONATIONS
And then of course there is the trend of using the money you would to buy someone a gift and donating it to a charity, cause or community of their behalf. Here are a couple of cross-media related communities ideas:

• Donate to the Unfiction Unforums, the community where most ARGs and most transmedia works are played
• Donate to Networked Performance, a blog that has for the last few years been sharing information about all forms of networked performance, locative arts and games, along with Turbulence, and important organisation that funds networked performances. They need $25,000 by Dec 31st in order to keep going, and ask for a mere $5 pledge. More info on the fundraising.

CROSS-MEDIA THEORY
As for theory or design books…There have been no books dedicated to cross-media that have come out this year. There have been plenty of books out about Heroes and Lost etc, but none of them feature any substantial information about their extended experiences. There are two publications, however, that aren’t academic books (they’re written by academics & designers for general readers) that may be of interest:

• Kristin Thompson’s The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood. Check out the blog for more info.
• The edited collection of Space Time Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level. In this collection ARG and pervasive game designers & theorists contributed lots of short entries (including me). Check out the main site.

Anyway, that is a quick list of some gifts you can buy for a cross-media fan. They do not include all the cross-media projects that happened in 2007, and not all of them are good, but the list is nevertheless fun. Let me know if you have some suggestions too.

I look forward to 2008 — there are some great projects coming out, and I’ll have my PhD finished. Very, very exciting.

All the best,
Christy

Now this is something I find interesting. The Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California (with big entertainment industry sponsors such as Disney, LucasFilms, NBCUniversal, Fox, Sony, Paramount) are building an ‘Anytime/Anywhere Content Lab’ (AACL). The overview:

The AACL will showcase a wide spectrum of leading edge products, services and technologies in action. It will use these tools to examine the technological and sociological implications of providing content to consumers who desire it at anytime, on any device, anywhere they happen to be. The Lab’s activities will advance the interests of all industry stakeholders, especially content producers and distributors, network providers, electronics manufacturers, hardware and software companies, service providers and consumers.

The lab research questions:

1. Understanding the Consumer – What are consumer expectations for the integrated digital home and for content on the go? What new attributes and features will consumers find valuable? How can we begin to illustrate tomorrow’s consumer demands and usage patterns, today

2. Digital Delivery – How will consumer demand shape the delivery of digital content, whether by pipe (terrestrial TV, cable, satellite, broadband) or by physical media (DVD, solidstate memory, portable devices)?

3. Managing Content – How will content be moved from device to device and from server to device? How can access to content be made seamless, yet still support commercial transactions and a range of consumer usage options?

4. Identifying Synergies – What are the potential areas for cross-industry collaboration to create new product offerings and to provide greater choice and enjoyment to consumers?

Boy, I would love to get in there are trial specially-designed stories and games for such a media-integrated environment. Indeed, my intention at the beginning of my PhD research was to do user-testing of cross-media stories I had created…but I just ran out of time. It is great to see this sort of thing happening though: a lab for the next generation of technologists and creators.

• Check it out

Henrik Örnebring, who is at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, and is an ARG researcher that I covered in the 2006 IGDA ARG SIG Whitepaper (see this pub page), has published his essay on the ARGs created for the US TV show Alias. The essay, ‘Alternate Reality Gaming and Convergence Culture’ is in vol 10, no 4 of the International Journal of Cultural Studies. Here is the abstract:

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are a form of internet-based mystery game in which participants are immersed in a fictional world and engage in collective problem-solving. This article studies three ARGs connected to the TV series Alias (ABC, 2001—6), two of them launched by the network ABC as part of the marketing of the TV series, the third produced by fans. Previous research on ARGs has not sufficiently problematized the fact that many ARGs are marketing tools. While ARGs can be analysed as part of a wider context of convergence culture and fan culture, such an analysis must take into account the underlying commercial logic of popular culture production. Despite the differences found between industry-produced and fan-produced ARGs, they still share a framework of consumption that conforms to corporate goals of marketing and brand-building as well as fan audiences’ goals of pleasurable interaction with fictional worlds.

Congrats Henrik.

Check it out [and hurry, because if you don't have institutional access to Sage, you can currently download for free until 30th Nov]