Deus Ex Machinatio

New Business Cards!

The gracious and talented Marcus Riedner has recently designed new business cards for me. I wanted them to give out at ARGfest, but I'm so pleased with them I thought I'd show off to the world at large. Go take a look! 

Marcus is interested in breaking into the ARG world, too, so if you have a project you might need him on, go ahead and drop him a line. He's funny, he's creative, he's diligent, a good time will be had by all.

Augmented Reality & the iPhone

Augmented reality still has the aura to it of a far-future technology, something eternally five, ten, even twenty years away. But the truth is that we have the tech right now. I'm sure you've all seen GE's fun augmented reality demonstration. Or maybe Hidden Park. Or how about Kweekies? That's just a trickle compared to the flood we'll be seeing by this time next year.

AR hasn't taken the center stage yet, to be sure; but since it's inevitably coming, this means we're in for this decade's biggest and most significant format war. Forget HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray; who cares about dead media when digital distribution is the future anyway? No, the next big format war is one of platform, and has more in common with Xbox vs. PlayStation, or Mac vs. Windows.

A cabal of high-profile AR developers and researchers have come together to fire the first big shot across the bow in this looming battle. They've written an open letter to Apple asking the company to open up the iPhone SDK to provide developers with a public API to manipulate live video in real time. This is a crucial tool that would make the iPhone a powerhouse for mobile augmented reality applications. If you can't access live video, the device just can't access reality in order to augment it, so to speak.

I don't know if Apple will do it; they're a company that take their walled gardens very seriously. But hey, Apple, I think it would be a foolish business move not to. Developers are on your doorstep begging for the chance to make your device the go-to platform for mobile computing -- and you can give it to them now, not five years from now. How can you possibly turn that down?

Fill Up My Dance Card

I'm just about recovered from Routes, and it looks like my pernicious hardware issues are finally sorted out. That means I'm ready to get back to work making exciting stuff. I've got dozens of projects in various stages of planning (of course), but have a decided preference for stuff that's likely to be income-bearing, so I bring it to you, my faithful readers: Are you making anything I could help with? Do you know anybody who is?

My next big commitment is very tentatively scheduled to begin in late June or early July, so I've got several weeks mostly free on my dance card (in a pinch, it's likely I could push that commitment back a bit, too). If you're running an interactive online experience and you need game/interaction design or writing, I'm definitely your girl. But times and money being what they are, I'm open to all kinds of projects. Website copy? Certainly! Catalog copy? Sure! Technical documentation? Absolutely! Reasonable rates, quality guaranteed!

Go ahead and browse my LinkedIn profile, resume and writing credits. If you've got something you'd like to run by me, feel free to drop me email, or you can ping me on AIM (Andrh1a) or Skype (Andrhia). If not, well, thanks for looking, and please do pass on my availability to anyone who might need my services.

ARGs and the Economy: Part 3 of 3

Movies haven't been doing so well in recent years, but it's not because people are opting to stay at home watching their grass grow. Instead, it looks like a lot of that discretionary spending has shifted to the thriving video game market:

It's also a given that no matter how you look at it, the global games market has been absolutely booming the last several years. Between 2000 and 2001, the U.S. games industry grew from $6.6 billion to $9.4 billion. In 2007, that figure was up to a record-shattering $17.94 billion (and it doesn't even include PC game sales or online revenue).

The economy may be tanking, but you sure couldn't tell by looking at video games. It's important to recognize that games aren't just seeing success around AAA console titles. It's been a great year for indie gaming, too. There's ample evidence that even a small team of designers can put together an incredibly popular experience.

In Part 1 of this series we figured out that ARGs don't want be more like movies in order to be successful. In Part 2 we established that it's going to be lean times for the marketing ARGs, as budgets shrink and clients flee for more measurable measures. But this third cousin of ours, the video game? I do believe we've found ourselves a good role model. 

So if the ARG community wants to hit its own boomtown days, we have a couple of questions we need to answer, namely: What do video games have that movies don't, and what does that mean for ARGs? My answer is that video games are active, social, and convenient -- more on that in the next post. In short, though, these are traits already inherent to the ARG. We're much more like video games than we are like movies already.

But none of this directly tells us how the hapless ARG designer should plan to weather the bad economy. The problem is that video games already have a clear and well-trodden path to revenue, and ARGs don't, not yet. 

There have been a lot of different experiments in monetizing ARG-style immersive gameplay directly, without first pitching to a client and creating an experience tailored to that one brand's preferences (and subject to its creative veto, too). And here is our path to survival. We have to go out and do more of that, boys and girls. First we build a rich, engaging experience that people love. Preferably a lot of people. If you do that, then you're free to make money in several ways.

• Offer subscriptions or added content for money.
• Sell material goods for money. (Books, shirts, artwork, maps, keys, posters, plush dolls...) 
• Tap into those marketing dollars from the other side: Get your eyeballs first, and then sell them via product placements, sponsorships, partnerships, affiliate relationships, or good old-fashioned Google AdSense. It's definitely worked before. (And now we've arrived at Brian Clark's prediction of pushing risk to the content creator, though by a different route: The content creator is taking on the risk of creating a user experience that just might flop, and if it does, it's all out of pocket for the dev team, since no sponsor has come on board.)

At the end of the day we need to recognize that our art lives in an attention economy, and the things we need to do revolve around gaining and keeping that attention. Once you have that, the ways to eke out a living are varied and plentiful. Frankly, if you have enough eyeballs looking your way, money will be banging on your door and describing exactly how to let it in. It's cheesy to say "If you build it, they will come," but it's accurate. Not the players, you have to work your tail off for that -- but attention-seekers with money.

We do need to get out of the pernicious mindset that making money at all is a grubby thing to do. We're not betraying the trust of our audience if we use the gift of their attention to line our own wallets (or pay our own mortgages, as the case may be.) Why don't more grassroots games try to monetize? Why is sell-out a dirty word? The audience is sophisticated enough to recognize that we can't all build the things they love purely out of the goodness of our own hearts. You're going to want to do it in a respectful way -- for heaven's sake, don't go selling the phone numbers and email addresses you've collected to any and all comers -- but that doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't profit at all.

And as for me, the freelance ARG designer? I'll be keeping my hat in the ring, of course -- I'm certainly not one to turn down marketing dollars. Less risk and less uncertainty is still a fat checkmark in the plus column as far as I'm concerned. But if it comes down to it, I've also got my eye on just laying it all on the line and making cool stuff (and ultimately hoping other people like it, too.) Making cool stuff is the whole reason I'm in this game at all. 

And hey, the United States is officially in a recession, job losses are mounting higher every day, and venture capitalists are putting their wallets away. People are going to need cool stuff to help take their minds off it all.

This is the third part of a three-part series. Part 1. Part 2.

ARGs and the Economy: Part 2 of 3

Like it or not, the worlds of advertising, marketing, and the ARG are tightly braided together. We've already discussed the ARG's utility in marketing movies, but that relationship also reaches to other products like automobiles, video games, TV shows, and even perfume. Many of us are actively exploring the possibilities for making a living by making ARGs with our own intellectual property; but even some of those rely on marketing dollars to succeed -- as the flip side of the ad coin: the main event content, and not just a lead-in to something else. 

So it's fair to say that the fortunes of the ARG are vulnerable to the same invisible forces that turn the tides of the ad world. But how do those fortunes do in bad times, traditionally? How have they been doing, and how are they projected to do?

Well, if we look backwards, what we get are bad news. Typically during a recession, ad and marketing budgets are the first cuts a company makes (despite the questionable wisdom of making cuts like that -- hey, a business is only as rational as the people who run it). And that's exactly what's happening right now. I won't sugar-coat this: It's ugly out there.

Or is it? It turns out this is one of those topics where experts can't seem to agree on what's going on, or how bad it is. The Economist has a fairly rosy take on the future of online advertising, considering the gloom and doom found in other industries:

This week eMarketer, a market-research firm, predicted that online-advertising spending in America, which makes up about half the global total, will increase by 8.9% in 2009, rather than the 14.5% it had forecast in August. The firm thinks search advertising will grow by 14.9% and rich-media ads by 7.5%, whereas display ads will grow by 6.6%. In short, online advertising will continue to expand in the recession—just not as quickly as previously expected.

That doesn't sound too bad at all. But let's not forget that "online-advertising spending" can cover a lot of categories that have not a whole lot to do with ARGs: banner ads, Flash microsites, search engine optimization. The Wall Street Journal digs a little deeper and tells us:

Areas like mobile, virtual worlds and widgets are expected to be hit particularly hard, as it remains unclear what kind of impact ads in these media have. These campaigns often reach a small number of people, and standard measurement systems have yet to be developed.

Ouch. That's the truth, folks, and boy, does it hurt. So what's the takeaway here for the ARG studio or the budding ARG developer (and, of course, for freelancers like me)? The studio will have to fight a little harder and talk a little louder to get a piece of marketing budgets, for one thing. As for me -- do I need to sell my house or go back to school to get my DBA certification? Is the well dry?

My answer: Don't panic. There's still hope for us in the ARG world. But it isn't going to come at the hand of juicy marketing budgets. If we want to thrive in this risky financial climate, it's clear we're going to have to forge a path for ourselves away from that comfortable marketing symbiosis. Let's look on the bright side; the golden handcuffs have broken off and we've been set free to find our rightful place in the world. Next up: Video games, another close cousin and maybe -- just maybe -- our role model for salvation.

This is the second part of a three-part series. Part 1. Part 3.

ARGs and the Economy: Part 1 of 3

The United States is officially in a recession, job losses are mounting higher every day, and venture capitalists are putting their wallets away. These are scary, uncertain times. And as somebody with a career in freelancing, I'm biting my nails wondering where the next contract will come from -- or whether there are going to be any other contracts at all. After all, the high-profile Lost Dharma Initiative was axed recently, apparently the victim of budget cuts. So are ARGs recession-proof? Well, actually... they might be (or may at least be more robust than you'd been thinking.)

Commercial ARGs are varied and it's difficult to make a solid prediction based on the historic record of any one other industry. We have ties and similarities to movies, advertising, and video games, but we're not quite the same as any of these. Still, looking at how these businesses have done -- and are projected to do -- is helpful in trying to read our own tea leaves.

From a purely rational point of view, one might think that in hard times, movies and games would do poorly as consumers hoard their discretionary dollars for more important considerations. On the other hand, one might expect advertising budgets to increase, as companies fight a little harder to get their piece of a shrinking pie. As it turns out, though, consumers are anything but rational, and neither are businesses.

Movies famously did well during the Great Depression and so are considered recession-proof. But that turns out to be nearly an urban legend:

Although the movie industry considered itself Depression- proof, Hollywood was no more immune from the Depression's effects than any other industry. To finance the purchase of movie theaters and the conversion to sound, the studios had tripled their debts during the mid- and late-'20s to $410 million. As a result, the industry's very viability seemed in question. By 1933, movie attendance and industry revenues had fallen by forty percent.

And there are some important differences between the environment of the Great Depression and of today. Most notably, in the 1930s, the much cheaper alternative, television, hadn't yet saturated American households. But how are movies actually doing? Well, there's some good news and bad news. Actual attendance is down about 3.6% from 2007. But apparently box office receipts hit 2007's tally in mid-November, before the traditional holiday movie season got started. This isn't cause for wild cheering, though, because total box office receipts for four of the last five years have been down, anyway. 

Movies are a doubly interesting metric for ARGs, because our fortunes are so often tied to theirs. Since so much of our work is promotional, rather than box office revenues, we should perhaps look at marketing budgets. Historically, marketing is where a movie budget's big bucks get spent. One could assume that these marketing budgets are hence prone to fall under the axe as times get leaner, as with Dharma Initiative. 

But perversely, one developer I spoke with indicated that he's seeing, if anything, increased interest from potential marketing clients. That's because a shrinking marketing budget means a more judicious eye watching where each dollar goes, and ARGs carry fairly modest budgets compared to traditional media buys.

Still, movies haven't been doing so well in years and years, even in good times, and even as the ARG has seen its star rising in the sky. So let's look at another cousin to see if we can find a more illuminating precedent. Next up in Part 2: Advertising.

This is the first part of a three-part series. Part 2. Part 3.

Rise in Video Game Sales

There's a report on Reuters that sales of video game hardware and software are up 28% for July 2008. Good news, folks:

Helped by a steady flow of blockbuster titles, the video game industry has proved resilient to the economic hardships hitting other industries. A Nintendo representative said the company was seeing no impact from a slowdown in U.S. consumer spending.

This is a pretty impressive growth for a non-necessity during an economic slump, if you ask me.

I sometimes wonder how recession-proof the games industry is; I do, after all, have a vested interest in it. I comfort myself with the thought that the movie industry did fairly well during the Great Depression -- escapism during hard times is a pretty good seller, right?

And compared to cinema, video games offer a pretty good value proposition when you look at dollars spent per hour of entertainment. You can take a family of four to a two-hour movie for $24-$50 (plus more for snacks, specific cost depending on region and time of day) or you can buy a game for the same amount that can in theory entertain each of you for 10-60 hours, plus some replay time. If I only have $35 in entertainment money to spend, I sure know which one I'll pick.

CBS & Eqal

I just heard that CBS has announced a partnership with Eqal Studios, who are the folks behind Lonelygirl15.

Huh. Good for them.

I wonder if this means anything for the ARG genre or not? It's not epochal change, but it is, at least, change.