Tuesday
Apr122011
Cloudmakers Plus Ten
Tuesday, April 12, 2011 at 3:30AM Ten years ago today, a man named Cabel Sasser started a Yahoo! group called Cloudmakers to help keep better track of the funny things they'd been talking about over at AICN. The rest is, of course, history.
Now I'd like to reach out to my fellow Cloudmakers to ask where you are today. Was the game just a blip on your radar? Did it change the course of your life irrevocably, like it did for me? Something in between? C'mon into comments and share. Or just wallow in the nostalgia a little. There's plenty of room for everyone.
Reader Comments (10)
I remember the first time I heard about The Beast, I thought it sounded like a silly marketing stunt that I wanted nothing to do with. Fortunately, it kept on cropping up in places like AICN and Wired, and I eventually caved in and visited the Aragon Institute of Technology.
"Wow," I thought, "this is really well written!" It was the heady combination of a gripping SF story and an unending line of new media tricks that kept me in, and it was The Beast's sheer length and complexity that led me on the long, long, long task of writing The Guide - and to many other things as well.
After The Guide, I started writing a blog at http://mssv.net, all about massively multiplayer online entertainment, with the very specific thought that one day, it would get me a job (since, frankly, none were available at the time). A mere three years later, such a job appeared at Mind Candy to create Perplex City, which was a very enjoyable time, and then Dan and I left to found Six to Start, which I now run and is making and designing various fun ARGs and games for people like the BBC and Disney.
Anyway, Cloudmakers was a very special moment, a time when we knew enough about the internet to imagine possibilities, but seeing those possibilities enacted was truly *novel* and truly delighting. We're all lucky that we were there at the right time (and as it happens, I'm pretty sure we're at the same moment, once again, for ARGs on mobile, but that's another story...)
Fun fact: I was one of three Cloudmakers that attended the Premiere of the A.I. movie in the Netherlands.
Happy 10th Birthday to the Beast and The Cloudmakers.
I joined the Cloudmakers and #evanchan a bit late in the game, following the bread crumbs in the A.I. trailer only after I had finished my final exams in May. I remember googling Jeanine Salla, reading through several pages on BWI, making the breakthrough of actually *calling* a phone number that I knew to be fictional (which was um, awesome?) and finally finding the Cloudmakers group when I took a step back to ask myself what the hell was going on.
In Cloudmakers, I found a group of smart, motivated people, focused on solving a series of puzzles whose purpose they could only hypothesize. And though the Beast could have become a wholly competitive exercise, the Cloudmakers community formed a sort of amazing collective intelligence (not unlike the TP-Web?) aimed at solving puzzles collaboratively, while guiding newbies gently into the world the Puppetmasters had created (okay, we were snarky at times).
So how did Cloudmakers change my life? Well, every time I walk past the Bull Moose Saloon, I have fond memories. And while my career has not involved the direct application of (or involvement in) the evolving world of ARGs and transmedia in general, I've never lost my love of puzzling - which is surprisingly helpful in a lot of situations.
More important, I think, was that Cloudmakers provided a space in which we all could step out of our comfort zones and share a fascinating new experience. We all knew that it was a game (in-game pronouncements notwithstanding), but we had no idea of the parameters - it could take us anywhere, and it did. Having a few thousand friends around for the journey made it seem less like an LSD-induced trip down Alice's rabbithole and more like an exciting sea voyage through uncharted waters.
Enough wallowing in nostalgia - Happy Decennial, Cloudmakers! See you in #evanchan for the afterparty!
* * *
(Five years later...)"The one thing I don't quite get - why is there this random guy named Evan Chan in your Star Wars book?"
* * *(Three weeks age)"Dad - we started "Twelfth Night" in college today, and I burst out laughing at the first line - "
"DON'T REMIND ME."
"If music be the love of food..."
"IT WASN'T ME! IT WAS THE WEB DEV!"
* * *(three minutes ago)
"Where would I go to say Thanks and Congratulations?"
* * *(almost ten years ago)
This is what I wrote on the last day.
http://familiasalla-es.cloudmakers.org/Mail-7-24.htm
Some things fade over time; come to seem a little less special once the adrenaline high passes and the rush of life goes on.
Not this.
Not you.
Thanks, again, for the most incredible experience a writer ever had.
Yes, it changed the course of my life. 10 years ago, I never would have believed that today I'd be writing this from my job working for Sean and Elan.
There's a lot that's been written over the past few years about focus and distraction and the web. Something that The Beast taught me was that sometimes, the distraction is more important than what you thought you needed to concentrate on. :)
The acting bug accidentally bit right as I entered my teens, and stayed with me all through college. I also studiously kept personal paper journals, and wrote really bad poetry. I read like a fiend.
All this to say:
And then I played The Beast.
Suddenly, my imagination ignited: this was a painting of a poem of a story we were all telling to each other. It was theatre-in-the-round. I couldn't sleep each night (for fear of Eliza, or a call from Teddy, but mostly because something! might! happen! and I might miss it!! because I was SLEEPING!). I was totally in love with this way of telling a story.
It scratched all of my itches.
Before my experience as a Cloudmaker had come to a close I was already knee-deep in another mailing list: spontaneously writing copy and designing web pages and live events for Lockjaw (Which turns 10 itself, next year).
I have made many dear friends and changed my life completely. I still do some theatre, and I still keep a journal. Occasionally, I draw something terrible.
But my heart sings to mash it all together into something like what the Beast was, to bring people together and shine a light on the best parts of what humans can be.
(sorry for excessive cheese, but that's how I feel about it, ahaha.)
The experience changed me both more and less than I'd expected. I had hoped that it would usher in a new dawn for story+puzzle games; that from now on everything would be like this. That's not the way it turned out. Instead, it just changed my life forever, and the lives of my friends.
Sean, Elan, Jordan: Thank you.
Cloudmakers: You're the best. Love you all.
http://bits.tombridge.com/post/4564382889/ten-years-ago-the-internet-changed-everything-in-my
Like the rest who've posted here, my life changed irrevocably. I came in after the AICN mention through a friend (SPAAD!!!) who saw it on a "women's web" mailing list. I was quickly sucked in, exploring the game and, after a local meet-up (thanks, Tom!), chatting and puzzling away in #evanchan during much of the day; at night I would do my actual job.
I attended a talk by Frank Rose last night about immersive entertainment/storytelling and he believes strong, excellent narrative that leaves room for the audience is the key to this whole (not-so-) new immersive experience. That's precisely what Sean and Elan and their team gave us. We cared about the characters; and wanted to know what was happening to them, what they cared about, and how we could help/hinder their aims.
As a bonus, it begat a community that we cared about in the same way. Some of us stay in touch, we support each others' projects and dreams - we are friends. Some of us formed professional and personal partnerships (thanks again, Debbie, Tom, Bronwen - Dan finally has that green card! ;)). The game shaped my future in ways I for which I was completely unprepared. That constitutes special in my book, and extraordinary isn't an exaggeration.
Thanks all y'all, again and always. Happy birthday, CMs!