ACG Unabridged: Evan Jones

Evan Jones is that rare combination: Creative, a great head for business, and a stand-up human being, too. That makes Stitch Media one of the companies I completely love working with (no, no, of course I love your company the most!) Evan has been in the transmedia business for ages, and he's got an Emmy to his name, so when he talks, you'd do well to listen. I sure do.

Q: How did you get into transmedia?

A: Complete and utter indecision.  Call it a fear of commitment, but I have always lived my life enjoying all aspects of storytelling and I couldn't see myself defining my own creative efforts under a single medium.  It's bizarre how you look back on life and see the path so clearly.  Some of my earliest memories involve scavenger hunts around my farm, telling stories on long car trips and getting immersed in stories so much I'd be creating spin-off stories in those worlds.  Silly stuff like making stop-motion videos of action figures after reading comic books all morning.  I was always experimenting.

I do remember the exact moment the light bulb went off as an adult though.  I'd been studying Computer Science for three years at University because the earliest days of the dot-com were upon us and everyone was talking about 'computers are where the jobs are'.  I was literally falling asleep in every class.  There is no way my brain needed to know that much about Machine Language.  At the same time, I was distracting myself with all these creative hobbies - I was Production Manager at my community radio station; I was acting in theatre; I was writing for school newspapers; etc.  And then I got a job as Tech Support for the local hospital.  They actually said "You know about computers - can you make us a website?" So I grabbed an HTML book and started cranking out the most embarrassing website you've ever seen.  I am pretty sure we had multiple blinking objects.  But the moment I launched it, I was hooked.  There were so many creative roles needed for even this administrative website that the next day I registered my own domain and started building a blog from scratch.  Somewhere to just start writing and tossing some of my work online where others could see it.

From there, transmedia was just built in.  I was constantly dabbling in all forms of media production and its underlying technology, so when an idea struck me it was only natural to ask "Which methods should I use to tell this story?" None was more important than any other because at that stage I wasn't thinking about business models or career paths - I was just tinkering.  As I was making different games and books and videos and organizing events, I started to see that the same people were finding them and giving me feedback.  I realized that I didn't have to start all my stories from scratch because many of the 'fans' would have seen my earlier work.  I could choose to start new projects by building on my past work like a sort of shorthand.  It allowed me to go much deeper into each project without reinventing the wheel, and it excited me to know that people enjoying a story enough in one platform to seek out the next portion of it somewhere else in a completely different but complementary way.

Q: Can you tell me a little about your favorite projects?

A: This is a challenge because it shifts from so many viewpoints.  I have favorites as a player, as a writer, as a producer and as an entrepreneur. Of course, some of the first alternate reality games I ever played will stick with me because they excited me enough to shift my career path entirely.  A completely self-serving favorite is my first mainstream transmedia project, ReGenesis - all my enthusiasm as a player went into that project and taught me a ton of lessons I use today.

I also feel it's important to stretch projects outside of straight transmedia.  I mentioned earlier that some of my work started to bleed into the next and those ideas really came from voraciously reading Kurt Vonnegut Jr. as I entered university - characters kept appearing in completely unrelated circumstances but carrying all the baggage that they came to symbolize in each story - it was a sort of narrative shorthand that I loved.  At the same time I was reading pulp noir mystery novels and studying film and realized that they were set in a mythic place where Los Angeles was always rainy and riddled with bullets. I was also a child of Star Wars and only as an adult do I see how early on the ideas of 'transmedia' and 'story worlds' were planted in my mind.  I still think of the oblique reference the Obi-wan makes to the 'Clone Wars' in 1977 that sent my imagination reeling as a child and now seeing it fulfilled a generation later.  I'm also a shameless fan of 'reality television' and how it parallels interactive narrative by taking unpredictable situations and putting them on rails.  You've spoken yourself about the 'illusion of interactivity' and I think reality television does this extremely well.

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This is bonus material from A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling, out on June 22 -- just one month away! Preorder your copy today. And once you do... why don't you get it signed in advance?

Shiva's Mother and Other Stories Is Out!

It's here -- Shiva's Mother and Other Stories! It amounts to 12,000 words and six stories of moody, somewhat literary science fiction -- or maybe fantasy. (Someone please tell me what genre I write?)

It is three bucks! Free on Kindle lending!

I've launched it on Kindle only for now, and I've enrolled in KDP Select, in no small part because I'm very curious about how that plays out. I'll also be doing a 48-hour promotion in which the book will be free-as-in-beer very soon (like, tomorrow and the next day?) I'll share information on how all of that plays out if I can, but I may not be allowed according to Amazon's Terms of Service. I'll need to take a look. Advice on this front appreciated.

So there we have it! A book! Of short stories! That I wrote! That you can buy or maybe read for free! What an amazing world we live in.

WGA East Follow-Up

Last night I had the pleasure of conducting a digital storyelling workshop for WGA East. It seemed to go really well, though I got on the express train to Tangent City instead of sticking to my planned outline. 

Anyway! I promised a follow-up post to some of the participants, to expand on some of the subject matter. Here is that information!

Transmedia Documentary

Transmedia documentary is so, so hot right now. This is a nice article about that. Note that we also talked a little about transmedia storytelling for social change -- documentary really ties into that, because on both cases the idea is to take something that is true and make people care about it in the real world. Here are a couple of notable projects:

National Parks Project

Welcome to Pine Point

18 Days in Egypt

Moneyocracy

This is not my area of expertise, however, and I'd be delighted if someone more knowledgeable than I am were to mention more in the comments.

The Beast

The Beast, also known as the A.I. Game, is one of the things I touched on but didn't cover in much depth. Alas, the original websites for the Beast have long been taken down and the archive site cloudmakers.org is currently infested with malware. 

Wayback to the rescue!

Along the sidebar, you'll find links to copies of most of the in-game websites. Also pay close attention to the Guide, which is a sort of narrative retelling of what it was like to experience the game as it played out. When you're done, you might find it interesting to read this post by lead writer Sean Stewart on what it was like to create this game. Lightning in a bottle, for everyone involved.

And Finally

So hey, it was really lovely to meet all of you, and I'm delighted to continue our conversation. If you were hoping I'd expand on something we talked about, poke me in the comments and I'll see what I can do to get you some answers. Thanks so much for coming!

Update on Wednesday, May 16, 2012 at 10:32AM by Andrea Phillips

AND ALSO I keep forgetting to mention -- you should all be aware of Storycode, formerly the New York Transmedia Meetup. Get involved! Meet like minds! It's a magnificently warm and welcoming community, and I promise you'll be glad you did.

ACG Unabridged: Adrian Hon

This week's ACG Unabridges brings you Adrian Hon of Six to Start, straight shooter and one of the geniuses behind the smash hit health game Zombies, Run! Adrian and I go way back; we were Cloudmakers together, and later he was my team lead on Perplex City. He never fails to astonish me with his scope of vision and ambition. He's a terse one, so most of his juicy stuff made it into the Guide proper.

Interesting to see what he had to say about Zombies before it came out...

Q: Can you tell me a little about your favorite projects? 

From a player's perspective, the best game I've played was The Beast - it had an intoxicating mix of fiction and real world gameplay, and it was truly cutting edge. As for the projects I've worked on, there are probably three key ones (four, if you include Perplex City, but I assume you're talking about that elsewhere!). 

We Tell Stories (2008) was a project we did for Penguin Books who wanted us to work with seven of their top authors to create stories that could only be told online. It was a fantastic opportunity because they gave us so much freedom, so we created a story told over Google Maps (The 21 Steps), a story written in real time by two people (Your Place And Mine), and a new kind of Choose Your Own Adventure story (The Former General). It was a critical and popular success, and I think that was down to the simplicity and the strength of the stories, and crucially, the fact that people could begin them with just a single click and zero instructions. Not only did it win Most Innovative Website at SXSW, but also Best of Show. 

Smokescreen (2009) was for Channel 4 Education, and was essentially a single-player ARG that took over your browser. The goal of the project was to educate teenagers about online safety, and we did that through a 13 part story. We really pushed the boundaries of what was possible with in-browser technology, and I think we succeeded in telling a really immersive story that could be played at your own pace at any time. The downside, however, was that it had little community feeling or multiplayer interaction. Smokescreen won Best Game at SXSW in 2010. 

Zombies, Run! (2011) is an original game we're creating for the iPhone and Android with Naomi Alderman. It's still in development right now, but it's self-funded (along with Kickstarter pledges) and we're aiming to tell a highly immersive audio story while you're out running in the real world - and we're also planning to integrate an ARG into the fabric of the game. What's great about this project is that we're able explore the full range of possibilities of what smartphone can do in terms of location-based and augmented reality storytelling; but the challenge is, as ever, making the game fun and accessible rather than gimmicky. 

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 This is bonus material from A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling, out on June 22 -- just six weeks away. Preorder your copy today! And once you do... why don't you get it signed in advance?

Fans Like Joss

I'm a believer in big-picture, long-term planning. If you don't know where you're going, you can't be surprised when you never get there. It's good to be frank with yourself about what it is you really, truly want.

And so I've been talking to various of my friends the last few months about where I'm going with all of this. With the blogging and speaking, the marketing work, A Creator's Guide, with Felicity and Shiva's Mother and Other Stories. 

Five years ago, I reached a pivotal moment in my career when I left Mind Candy -- almost exactly five years ago, in fact. I've been very honest about how hard a time I had finding jobs or projects after that. (The summary: Yeah, it was hard and it sucked.) Nobody knew my work... and if they did, they didn't know I'd been a part of it. Certainly nobody was banging down my door.

That gave me the goal I've been chasing ever since: to build a professional reputation; to become somebody that potential clients seek out. Somebody they've heard of before. To find a way to make a living doing this weird stuff that might be alternate reality games or interactive stories or, as we say now, transmedia. "As god is my witness, I will never be obscure again."

Is it obnoxious to say that I think I've done this? I think I've done this. My mortgage lender is very pleased.

That means it's time to set a new big picture goal, and tick-tock just conveniently when the old one's five years are about up. So what is it I want now? It really isn't my own TV show or an eight-figure budget, though those would be amazing and I'd certainly not turn them down. It's not to work with any particular colleague or director or writer or artist. It certainly isn't to start a booming business as a transmedia pundit, ongoing punditry notwithstanding. What do I want out of all of this? What is the moon I am shooting for?

What I want is fans like Joss Whedon has.

Suddenly, this all winds up being very topical. A Guardian article some days ago talked about the "age of the social artist," to which Chuck Wendig and Harry Connolly have both responded. On Twitter yesterday, I discussed the topic of fans with those two gentlemen and with Stephen Blackmoore at some length.

Talking about having or wanting or cultivating fans is a mind-bending business. It feels a little crass to say "Yes, I want fans." It's one of those things an artist isn't supposed to talk about or think about, right along with stuff like whether there's a market for their art. But, look, this is the thing that I want, and I don't see the point in pretending otherwise.

Fans. It's fans I want. As many as possible. Fans who will pony down cash money, absolutely. But money is just a pleasant side effect of the thing that I want, which is for people to love the things I make. 

So why do I say "fans like Joss" in specific? It's because the Joss Whedon fandom has these hallmarks:

1. It's not really about Joss. The Joss Whedon fandom is fundamentally about his work, and not about him as a human being or even as a persona. For comparison, think about the fandom of Justin Bieber, the Beatles, Stephen Colbert. Certainly there is a lot of fan love for Joss-the-man, but that's a carryover from the work; people love the work first, and Joss himself only by association. This is ideal for me and my Complicated Ecosystem of Neuroses™. 

2. Critical love. This is a fandom that thinks independently. On the one hand, this means that they scour the depths of his body of work looking for nuance and hidden depth. No subtlety is overlooked, whether he meant to put it there or not. And at the same time, when something just isn't working, the community isn't afraid to talk about it. "This is kind of racist, right here." "This was not his best work, because X, Y, Z." That kind of thoughtful, critical feedback is more valuable than jewels. It makes it easier for you to get better faster.

3. A stake in his career. This community feels a personal stake in seeing Joss succeed. Nobody's calling Joss a sellout for making Avengers; instead, the zeitgeist is "Great! Now he'll have more capital in Hollywood to make more and better stuff!" 

So there we have it. This is what I'm shooting for. And the only way to do this is to start making and releasing work I've done on my own: so Shiva's Mother and Other Stories. Felicity. Other surprises in store. Because if I'm after fans, I need to make it easy to be my fan. And if you have to kind of be a transmedia wonk to even know I'm out there or what I've done... yeah, that's not going to work real well, is it?