Deus Ex Machinatio

MS Paint Adventures

When I wrote my Voices case study some weeks ago, a few people in comments directed me to MS Paint Adventures. 

OMG, you guys. What took me so long?

You have to be reading this stuff. It's incredible. I am totally obsessed with it, even beyond past obsessions with such other high-quality webcomics as Gunnerkrigg Court.

MS Paint Adventures is a gamelike, massively collaborative webcomic. Originally, the artist did one panel a day, in which the main character would perform and action that had been suggested by an audience member. Now, the comic has become so successful that its original model doesn't really work anymore; the whole forum crashes whenever the suggestion box is opened. Still, the artist, Andrew Hussie, does take heavy inspiration from ideas brought up in the fan community. (He has also abandoned the pretense of using MS Paint; the most recent adventure makes liberal use of Flash and even incorporates music.)

If you've got no plans this weekend, I recommend you dive into Problem Sleuth first; it's a complete story, and will give you a fair grounding in how the comic works, plus insight into a lot of inside jokes in the current work in progress, Homestuck.

Read it. Love it. You're welcome, darlings.

Choice of Gender Roles

Are you familiar with Choice of Games? If not, you should be; they make light choose-your-own-adventure style interactive fiction for web browser and mobile device. It's a fun and timely concept, and I aspire to write a ChoiceScript game as my next indie personal project. (Full disclosure: One of the team members, Dan Fabulich, is an old friend of mine and a fellow Cloudmakers moderator.)

Thus far they've only done a couple of games in-house. In Choice of the Dragon, you get to live a titular life of treasure-hoarding and wizard-eating; in Choice of Broadsides, you're a young commanding officer aboard a naval vessel. 

Their approach to gender in their games is very, very interesting; in Choice of Broadsides, they essentially created two separate versions of the game -- one with a traditional patriarchal structure for men to play, and one with a gender-flipped matriarchal society for women. It's well-intentioned, to be sure, but the idea ultimately leaves me a little uneasy. 

I'm Not a Man But I Play One on Xbox

Here's the thing; in Choice of Broadsides, the male half of the game happens in... let's face it, in the real world, or in an historical variant thereof. The female universe is fictional. Never existed, never will. So the woman's version becomes a work of fantasy rather than historic fiction right off the bat. But more, swapping the gender roles and power dynamics to put the female in the more powerful position is... well, in a way, it's denying me a legitimate female experience in that world. This makes me sad.

A lot of games -- I am looking at you, Fable 2 -- give you the choice of playing as a female character in the same exact world. But that choice is basically a choice of avatar, and for the most part, the world doesn't react to your female-ness in any meaningful sense. You might as well be a man with breasts strapped on.

You may all be tired of hearing me talk about Dragon Age by now, but one of the things I found so captivating about that game was the overt sexism of some characters. It was incredibly satisfying to me to have a character take a dismissive attitude of me in the game, because I was a woman -- as in real life -- and have the power in the game to rise above it and prove them wrong, in a way I don't always have the courage or capacity to do in real life.

It bears noting that historical romance is a very popular genre. I speculate that part of the reason is the underlying power dynamic, where a woman in a position of relatively little social power nonetheless manages to get her heart's desire in the end. This is a very powerful fantasy.

Socially Just Fiction

Well then, what's the right way to do it? There are three basic approaches to dealing with sexism in fiction.

1. Telling your story in a sexism-free, utopian society.

2. Mirroring the gender-soaked world we live in.

3. The novel Choice of Games approach of reversing gender roles. 

Each of these has a terrible disadvantage. The utopian society won't feel true and can't address difficult issues; mirroring our world supports the notion that our current state of gender affairs is just how things are, and how they will be. And reversing gender roles can ultimately leave you with a series of games where you never really get the experience of playing as a woman, because the world never really lets you be a woman; it lets you be a man with some hand-waving around babies and pronouns.

It's not easy to be an activist and put yourself on the hook to speak out when you find injustice. But as difficult as that is, it's a lot harder to try to write good interactive content when you're trying to do the right thing, because there is literally no decision you can make that will leave you free of criticism -- well, short of just not making anything at all. And who wants that?

Walk a Mile in Someone Else's Shoes

There's a compelling counter-example to my criticism in the upcoming Choice game, Choice of the Consort. As I understand it, the default experience of the new game is actually the woman's experience, specifically as a woman who has attracted the attention of a philandering king. And so the flipped universe is the reverse of the Choice of Broadsides situation -- men are being placed in the shoes of the less-powerful sex. 

It definitely takes the tooth out of a lot of my criticism, because creating games where the initial or intended play experience is that of both genders is way less problematic than creating games where the default is always for men. Does the switch rob the men of the experience of playing as a man? Yeah, kind of. But at least both genders are getting the shaft in equal measures.

I find that far more interesting than building a matriarchal navy, in terms of ingenuity and ambition. As with the controversial FPS Hey, Baby, by putting a man in a woman's shoes and stripping him of gender privilege, it may shed light on something he never thought of that way before. Maybe it'll even subtly change a few hearts and minds against casual sexism. Stranger things have happened.

And finally: Kudos to Choice of Games for taking steps to address gender concerns in the first place. Indeed, they go a mile further, and are working hard to account for gay relationships, as well, which require additional layers of thought and world-building in their historical settings. 

And all criticism aside, every time we have this conversation, it helps a little more, and we all get a little better. I'm glad they're out there and taking this stuff seriously. 

Dragon Age and Narrative Structure (Part 2)

Yesterday, I wrote a love letter to Dragon Age and its storytelling. Today I'd like to bring it home and talk about what we in the ARG community can do to achieve the same narrative power -- and some things we can't do, or can only do with great difficulty.

Moral Ambiguity 

Does the classic ARG or transmedia experience have the capacity for creating decisions charged with moral ambiguity? Of forcing the players to pick sides in which neither one is strictly correct? As it happens, yes, we do indeed. At their best, this tension creates powerful controversy that drives an experience to new heights of drama. 

Weephun's betrayal of the Sleeping Princess in ilovebees springs to mind as one such moment, followed by the Mann Act II vote in the Beast. These were unforgettable decisions. Indeed, we have a rich tradition of requiring players to navigate tricky waters of who to trust with what information. 

And sometimes, as with life and as in Dragon Age, an ARG manifests unintended long-term consequences -- even from decisions you didn't know you were making at the time. In Dragon Age, how you handle one particular conversation with Alistair changes his personality subtly but significantly for the rest of the game. In Perplex City, the players unwittingly helped a murderer get to his victim, which kicked off the Helena Frye cycle -- meant to be an exercise in ambiguity from start to finish; she was a double agent, but was it on behalf of the police or on behalf of the shady religious cult?

That's not to say that you always get intense moral ambiguity from an ARG. But examples aren't hard to come by -- which means we're on the right track, from a narrative point of view. 

Meaningful Choices 

The choice framework in an ARG is fundamentally different from a traditional video game, because you aren't restricted to the few choices preprogrammed by the developer. In an ARG, the sky's the limit. The players can theoretically make any decision they can dream up. 

Indeed, it's theoretically much easier for an ARG to offer choice than a video game. Providing a meaningful choice in a video game means the dev team has to create an ever-increasing tree of content. Each additional branch makes it increasingly less likely that any one piece of content will be seen by any one player; you get diminishing returns on your development resources, the more choice you offer.

The classic ARG doesn't need to create a vast volume of content for paths not taken, though. In a pervasive online experience, the developer can create or adapt content on the fly, altering the course of the game to accommodate unexpected plot twists and player decisions. This is the ARG at its finest. 

We ARG writers and designers often lie awake nights trying to think of how to handle every conceivable choice, because the ones the players make will often be those you didn't think of (and therefore plan for). Murphy's Law would say they always make the decision you didn't think of! Yet you, as the developer, have to find a way to roll with it, even if that's to say "sorry, but no," gracefully and in character.

That said, providing the opportunity to make a truly meaningful choice on an individual level in an ARG is very, very hard. (And here I link to Dan Fabulich's fantastic post on what it means to provide a meaningful choice, anyway.)

It's a question of scale. The classic ARG is a community-played experience. It's easier to offer a meaningful choice to a few dozen people than it is to offer a meaningful choice to hundreds of thousands, when everyone plays in the same instance of the game. 

So how do you do it?

Methods

Dragon Age is a single-player experience, so you don't need to be concerned about the choices other players are making. They simply don't affect you. 

There's an increasing movement toward creating single-player ARGs, too. Fourth Wall Studios and their Rides platform have made great strides with this. The ability to track a single player's progress through the game and serve content accordingly definitely gives agency back to the individual player. And it makes the game about the player, whereas in most ARGs, the individual player is supporting cast -- which in turn robs the experience of impact. 

But it also increasingly locks you into the same branching problem that classic video games have; a single-player experience needs to be preprogrammed from start to finish. And you do lose the collaborative community play ARGs are famous for.

In a classic ARG, you have two basic options for providing meaningful choice points: allowing individual players to make meaningful choices on behalf of everyone else (like Weephun); or allowing choice based on community consensus (the Mann Act II vote). (The secret third option is to provide the illusion of choice, where none ever truly existed; this is a dirty secret I should address at length another day.)

There are pros and cons to each approach.

Allowing a single player to make a meaningful choice on behalf of the community is amazing for dramatic tension, especially for your decisionmaker. But it means that you're actively removing agency from the bulk of your players. Weephun chose to betray the Sleeping Princess (or if you prefer, chose to be truly loyal to the Operator); but thousands wouldn't have, and were forced to play a result not of their own making. Is that a truly meaningful choice, then? Hard to say.

Consensus-building and voting allows more players to have a voice in the outcome. But the polling mechanism can rob us of drama. The act of voting in an online poll is something we can do frequently and casually. And there's still a risk that the choice won't feel meaningful on an individual level, particularly if your scale exceeds thousands of users. If the vote is on a morally ambiguous topic, and you can incite tension in the community around it, then it becomes a more powerful narrative vehicle. But it's not a mechanic that will serve every game.

There is still another way... but it can get expensive. You can provide choice of alliance. Create a morally ambiguous choice: Red team or Blue, for example. Then build out a game structure that accommodates these individual-level choices in the context of communities of players working together in opposition, where each single player can make a contribution on the team level, but the drama plays out primarily as the result of the conflict between teams.

This requires some pretty solid player management, and for a large player volume, a technology build that tracks individual choices (just like a single-player game would). But it also creates a dynamic situation where players can make individually meaningful decisions, and yet aren't restricted to predetermined branching.

Conclusions

Design is hard. Even the best of intentions can be difficult or impossible to execute, due to limitations of budget or time or skill or scope. The design process is rife with those meaningful choices I keep talking about -- a delicate balance of opening some doors and closing others.

But assuming the basic goal is providing compelling narrative... we've gone pretty far, and we can go further yet. Dragon Age shows the best the single-platform video game has to offer to date. Let's see if we can top it, shall we?

Dragon Age and Narrative Structure (Part 1)

I've just finished my first play-through of Dragon Age: Origins. Oh my heavens I cannot express how much I love this game; it should be telling that I'm actually talking about playing through it again at all. As a general rule, I hate watching reruns, I rarely reread books, and once I'm done with a game I'll think of it fondly, but I won't go back to relive the glory. 

But I want to go back to Dragon Age. And not just because I have a mad crush on Alistair, whose endearing combination of sweet, funny, and kind of awkward reminds me of... well, of my husband, actually. (Shh, don't tell him!)

Playing Dragon Age again could be a substantially different experience, depending on what I put into it. Almost, but not quite, like playing an entirely different game. That''s because the game is an exquisite work of craftmanship on the part of the writers. I need to play it again to see how the trick was done, to know how it works, to do it myself.

This is the rare gem in the game world:  a game that presents to you meaningful and morally ambiguous choices, which effect the outcome of things small and large through the rest of the game. It has sparkling dialogue, deep characterization, and it delves into racism and takes strides toward gender and sexuality inclusiveness with uncharacteristic grit (though that's been covered extensively elsewhere.)

Let's take a look under the hood and see what we can learn, shall we? There will be spoilers ahoy, so beware.

Moral Ambiguity

In the world of Dragon Age, it's rare for you to see one clear, correct path forward. But this isn't the Fable faux-choice of two basic modes to play the game, the "good" mode and the "evil" one. No, these are true dilemmas, where there is never a win without a loss. Every choice you make, as in life, opens one door and closes another.

An example, from early in the game. I played through as a mage, because... well, because I'm like that. Something about hurling lightning from my fingertips appeals to me.

In the mage origin story, you're almost immediately confronted with such a moral dilemma: your best friend is accused of practicing forbidden blood magic. He is soon to be punished for it -- forced to participate in a ritual that makes him functionally a robot. He asks for your help escaping.

You have to make a choice. You can help him, or you can turn him in. But do you trust him? He's already been deceiving you on one front... he's been engaging in a forbidden romantic liaison. Might he not also be deceiving you on whether he practices illicit magic? But can you really allow the self to be removed from your best friend, a repugnant punishment at best? Anything you choose to do is a gamble and a betrayal. Do you choose friendship or justice, knowing that either may be flawed?

These choices crop up again and again. Who do you trust? How much mercy do you temper your justice with? Does it change if it affects your relationships with those around you? Do you choose what's you've been taught is morally right, what you believe is right in your heart, or what's needful in the moment? What if the life of a child is at stake? What if it's the life of your beloved? 

(On that note: Playing through the ending as a female Warden in a relationship with Alistair is vastly more compelling romantic drama than I have seen on film or in text since... ever. More powerful than the same story on any other medium, because it is me grappling with the potential consequences, and me making the final call.)

The stories that touch us deepest are the ones that look at people making these morally ambiguous or personally difficult choices. This is the heart of drama. This is quite possibly the greatest weakness of games writing. 

Creating Meaningful Choices

And yet this should be the greatest strength for stories in games. That's simply bringing the interactive, isn't it? The place where games should naturally excel is in allowing you, the player, to make choices that feel significant in the moment. 

This is the alchemy of gaming. This is its power. A game introduces an interesting plot point, and increases its power an order of magnitude over other media. Because it feels like it's happening to you, and not a character who you might be entirely sympathetic to, but who you are not actively driving.

Games are, by and large, filled with clear and simple definitions of good and evil, or hard-wired choices where one path leads to certain death. You rescue Zelda or you lose the game. You kill the zombies or you die. The moral judgements you are called upon to make are often peripheral, or few. That's if you even get a choice at all -- often the only choice you get is simply not to play the game.

But Dragon Age doesn't just put you in the position of making choices; these choices have genuine ramifications throughout the course of the game, in how people treat you, in paths opened or closed, in long-term consequences. The amount of writing effort that has gone into this game is just mind-boggling, and I feel like I need to buy a round for the team because they did such a great job on such a monumental task.

Methods

The specific technique Dragon Age uses appears to be limited branching. For many of these knotty moral choices, you're ultimately fulfilling the same basic game mechanic no matter what you choose. In the mage origin, that's going through the motions of helping your friend escape -- either out of legitimate friendship, or because you're forced to through the political machinations of your mentor. Maybe it's destroying a criminal cartel on behalf of a politician, to give your chosen ally additional popular support -- but which ally is up to you. 

It's a clever way of repurposing the same content. You create a different charge of meaning based on a fine web of intentions and consequences that exist mostly in the mind of the player. You'll clear the same dungeon, but do you parley at the end or do you just kill? Well, that's up to you. And changing the meaning of your actions depending on the choices you have made creates a depth that is frankly impossible in non-interactive media.

This is where games should shine. This is where all interactive media should shine! And yet so few experiences have the overarching depth or sense of choice found in Dragon Age.

In the next part of this blog post, I'll take on the ARG angle and examine what we as writers and designers can emulate from Dragon Age, and grapple with the particular problems we face that make it more difficult to provide a player with meaningful choices.

This post is continued in Part 2.

Voices: A Case Study in Failure

Roughly two years ago, I began a short-lived independent wiki fiction project called Voices. About a year later, it was dusty with neglect and overgrown with spam. I took it down, and it remains down. 

I've been encouraged to speak about the project directly and indirectly by several people, most notably Brooke Thompson, who wrote a thoughtful post on the need for more critical scrutiny in our field. I learned a lot of important lessons from the Voices experience, and even though the project is definitely not one of the gleaming highlights of my career, I thought it might be interesting and helpful to others to take a careful look at it and see what I was trying to do, and why it was ultimately a failure.

Intent

One of my core creative touchpoints is the idea of net-native literature. I am obsessed with the idea of making works that are inextricably native to the medium or media in which they reside. How do you make works or experiences that are so utterly net-native that they simply couldn't exist in another form? (My experiments along those lines also include Circular Logic, a super-short experimental time travel story told via Google calendar.)

With Voices, I was attempting to use the wiki as a fiction vehicle. There have been other works of wiki fiction before mine, of course; prior art includes Ghyll and at least a handful of Choose Your Own Adventure experiments. For a different spin on it, I wanted to incorporate talk pages as part of an emerging and collaborative experience, and see if I could come up with a work of fiction that had a single author, but was also shaped by the influence and input of audience/participants.

Concept

The idea I settled on was simple enough. I would make a wiki where the first-person narrative thread would unspool on the main pages, and the comments on talk pages would be "heard" by the character, as though they were voices in her head. Those voices could affect her thinking and decisions. 

Further activity on talk pages might even cause branching moments, where the story split off in multiple directions. And as the story progressed, the character would begin to talk back to the voices in her head silently, by posting on the talk pages of the wiki herself. This way the character and the players would develop a relationship that would affect the progress of the narrative.

With some technical and logistical help from the talented and generous Tom Bridge, I set up a wiki where only I could edit the wiki pages, but anyone could edit the talk pages. We soon learned that it was better and wiser to require registration to have any input at all, in order to prevent spam; but this immediately created a barrier to entry for participation, which proved to be unfortunate. It was, however, one of many, many elements of the project plan that proved to be unfortunate, as you will soon discover.

Utter Failure

I announced the project here at Deus Ex Machinatio and on Twitter; I announced updates almost exclusively on Twitter. This was a very poor method for accruing audience, because at the time, I had a readership that amounted to a couple of dozen on a good day, and about two people on a bad day (and one of those people was probably my mom). It's no surprise, then, that participation was very low. 

Ultimately, perhaps a half a dozen people, almost all good friends and a majority of them probably humoring me, went as far as registering for a user account and posting comments. I posted updates sporadically, aiming for a couple of times a week, but ultimately hitting once a week, and then once a month, before quitting entirely.

I still adore the core concept of Voices, but there's no question it wasn't a success. In fact, it might be the most failingest project I have ever done. So what went wrong?

Commitment and Participation

There was a vicious circle between commitment and participation for me. Participation was low, so I didn't get the buzzy jabs of egoboo I craved to keep me working on it; and as my commitment levels dropped off, my audience members didn't get enough payoff or frequency to keep them coming back routinely. So they... didn't. And who can blame 'em?

Look, commitment is a hard thing on a personal project. Paying work will always take first dibs on your time. And so will birthdays, grocery shopping, and general slackery. That's why we writers talk so much about butt-in-chair and discipline.

Building an audience is most often a long, hard slog. I knew it at the time, but I'd envisioned my audience numbers starting slow, but gradually increasing over time. This is the opposite of what happened. If I had it to do over, these are the things I'd think long and hard about doing:

• Don't expect instant gratification, duh
• --and make your personal project a high priority, so it gets done at all
• Provide more incentive and reward for audience participation (at least in terms of fiero or enjoyment)
• Update on a consistent and predictable schedule
• Continue to find more ways to bring in audience, or make the project more visible, even post-launch

Secrecy

But participation is, in a way, a red herring. Here's what I think is the most fundamental reason for the failure of Voices (and the reason it would be a failure if I did it in exactly the same way now, even though I have a much wider potential playerbase now): 

I didn't let my audience in on the joke. 

I was so busy being coy about my plan -- so wrapped up in the idea of surprises and emergent behaviors -- that I simply never made it clear what I was trying to do, or what made it special. 

At ARGfest last year, Elan Lee told me some words of advice that I have taken very much to heart. "If you want the players to know something, tell it to them." I didn't tell them, and they had no way to read my mind or guess what I'd planned to do.

How to fix this for another time?

• Write an artist's statement putting it all on the line straightaway
• Provide models of the kinds of behavior I anticipated or desired via alternate accounts on the wiki

Planning

Another big problem with Voices was that I simply didn't have a clear enough idea of where I wanted the story to go. I set it up with a lot of potentially juicy hooks; a woman stumbling half-drugged across a field in the middle of the night, immediately postpartum, and unsure of where she was or what she was escaping from. 

Did I know where I was going? Heck, no! I wasn't sure if it was going to be an alien abduction story, or about a secret insane asylum, or about conspiracy-style government experimentation on the innocent, or about genetic manipulation. No freaking clue.

I expected my audience to fill in the blanks for me by making suggestions! But the audience didn't have any idea what to expect, and certainly had no idea that's what they were supposed to be doing, because I'd never given them enough information about what was going on. They simply didn't have the tools they needed to fully engage with the story.

So the story staggered along until I'd painted myself into a corner. Players posted helpful, supportive comments encouraging the main character to keep her cool, and promising her it would all be OK, but not so much with the concrete ideas on where to go next. Which proves they were a sweet bunch of good human beings.

When I closed the doors on Voices, I hadn't updated for months, and I had no idea where the heck I was supposed to go next, because I'd never had a sufficiently clear core concept of where I was going.

Lessons learned?

• Always know what's going on behind the scenes, even if you aren't telling your audience, duh
• Have a clear plan of action; don't rely on your audience to do all the heavy lifting for you
• Have a Plan B, and a Plan C, too

Conclusions

There's a lot of water under the bridge since Voices. If you're familiar with my work, you may even see some of the ways I've applied these lessons learned to later projects. I'm still proud of the concept, but definitely not proud of my shameful dedication to the project. I let myself down, and I let down the (admittedly few) people who came into my sandbox to play with me. Sorry, guys. I hope I can make it up to you someday.

I'm also open to the idea that the project failed for other reasons than those I've outlined above; was the content too outre or graphic, the writing sloppy? Was the whole thing simply embarrassingly bad in execution? If you participated in Voices (or even if you didn't) and you have an opinion on why it ultimately didn't work out, I'd love to hear it.

The nice thing about failing is that you can always learn to do better. Every project is worthwhile, provided you learn from your failures. And I did learn a lot from Voices; so now, hopefully I've moved into new and different categories of mistake. Onward and upward.

Creative Spotlight: Mez Breeze

Creative Spotlight Week is over, but I figure I'll still do them from time to time, as the muse strikes. And the next contender is someone I've been dying to write about for ages... but I haven't been able to do her justice. See, whenever I try to write about Mez Breeze, I just can't articulate the awesome enough communicate it to anybody else. That's surely because the only language you can use to convey Mezness is of her own making -- mezangelle -- and for sure I'm not a fluent speaker.

Mez is a code poet and internet performer, and besides mezangelle, she (and sometimes her collaborators) have brought the world such works as Streamflow Conditions and Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1. She lives at the intersection of art and technology like nobody else I know, and the result is always on the spectrum of mysterious, deep, and terribly, brain-warpingly clever.

But here's the best part! I am beyond excited to tell you about FeralC, Mez's new project, which is launching in just a few hours. The site describes it thus:

_feralC_ is a “socumentary” [mix of social_networking mockumentary & Alternate Reality Sequencing] that will trace the Twitter output of special networked characters.

To take part, follow the Twitter list @pupa_mistress/feralC. The show kicks off at 3pm on the East Coast of Australia, which as best I can figure is about 1am on the East Coast of the United States.

I don't know much more about it, but I can assure you it is going to be totally awesome and you won't want to miss it. Keep your eyes peeled.

Creative Spotlight: Naomi Alderman

I have another beautiful thing to show you, and it is called The Winter House. This jewel of an interactive experience was written by Naomi Alderman. I won't spoil it for you, except to say that it's a short but simple interactive mystery, heavy on ambience and light on puzzle-solving. Go and gobble it up. It is delicious from start to finish.

Some of you may recall Naomi Alderman as the lead writer of Perplex City (and, not to sell him short, her collaborator Jey Biddulph as a key designer). If you do, it won't surprise you that the same pair were the ones to bring you the Library of Babel, which is similar in execution; this is the obvious next step in that style of storytelling, poised at the intersection of visual and literary arts.

This is poetry as the future will know it, you guys.

What you may not know is that Naomi is also an award-winning novelist. Her first book, Disobedience, came out to massive literary acclaim in 2007. Her second book, The Lessons, has just been released in the UK. I've had the pleasure of reading The Lessons, and it is likewise a beautiful work full of achingly real characters. If you can get your hands on it, absolutely read it at once.

I have an inkling what Naomi will be working on next, and trust me when I say it's going to be amazing. I can't wait to read it, and I can't wait to tell you about it.

Help Make April Super!

I am delighted to announce that we've opened My Super First Day for submissions from now through the entire rest of April! Put on your brainstorming cape and break out the keyboard. Show us what you've got! 

To submit, post your story on your blog and email us a link. Be sure to include the title of your story and the name you want to use on our site. (Or if you don't have a blog, email the whole thing to us and we'll host it for you.) For other questions, check out the MSFD FAQ.

There are already a couple of new posts up, but we're hoping to get a bunch more on this round. We can't wait to see what you have to share!

WTF is Transmedia?

Last year, I looked at the (nearly) decade-old question WTF is an ARG? I'd like to reflect on that topic a little more, now that some time has passed and new words are afoot in our shared lexicon.

Last time, I made this pretty diagram, and wrote:

We're looking for a name for all of the cool stuff that falls into that white circle in the center, which seem to ring our bells in a lot of the same ways. That white circle... that's what I'm interested in making. It's definitely bigger and more diffuse than that classic-ARG triangle, story + gameplay + community. I've been guilty of trying to expand 'ARG' to mean all of that stuff, but that's ultimately a bad idea, because people think they know what an ARG is... and it isn't that, not quite. 

Lately I'm reduced to calling it "Cool stuff on the internet." And that's why we keep going in circles about what an ARG is. We sort of know -- it's the stuff in the very center, but not all of the stuff in the center -- but we don't yet have a good name for whatever ARGs are a subset of. Digital culture? Guided pervasive experiences? It may be, in the fullness of time, that we need several names to accurately describe what the heck we mean.

Lately, we have a new contender for that whole "cool stuff on the internet" thing. If you've been following along at home, you already know that word is "transmedia." Is transmedia our umbrella term? Is that the magical word we've been looking for?

Well... yes and no.

WTF is Transmedia?

There is increasing inertia behind the word and its use to apply to ARGs and all its diverse cousins. No Mimes spoke at SXSW about the 10-Minute Transmedia Experience, which one might have called, not very long ago, a 10-Minute ARG. And I spoke at the MIT Story 3.0 workshop just a couple of weeks ago billed as an expert in transmedia storytelling, alongside Nina Bargiel and Brent Friedman of Valemont fame -- another experience you'd be hard-pressed to say was not an ARG. 

So what do people mean when they talk about transmedia storytelling? It depends on who you're talking to.

In one definition, admittedly the one I favor, a transmedia story is one that uses multiple media to tell disparate pieces of a single cohesive narrative. I call this the spiderweb definition. This is one of thousands of possible configurations for such a story, each using different elements:

 

But there's another definition in play, too, and it heavily favors entertainment franchises. Under this model, a transmedia story is one that uses multiple media (generally three or more) to tell distinct stories in a consistent and unifying story world. Let's call this the sequential model. Taken to its furthest extreme, the Smurfs might qualify as a transmedia story because it takes place in a single universe, and there are comic books, films, and of course the cartoons, each with their distinct stories.

 

Can the two definitions coexist peacefully? Hells yeah. This is actually my preferred outcome. I want to make narratives that are a hybrid of spiderwebbed and sequential elements linked together. But it's also possible that in the war for the word "transmedia," there will be a winner and a loser, and the fallout might not be pretty for the loser.

Let's put it this way. There's a reason we can't use, say, "interactive fiction" as our umbrella term. When was the last time you heard "interactive fiction" and thought of something substantially different from an Infocom game? That's because the consensus definition narrowed so tightly that it now excludes anything that isn't, essentially, a text adventure. Likewise, transmedia might eventually collapse to exclude the spiderweb definition.

So am I really a transmedia designer? Uh, I... guess? For now, anyway.

Defining Is A Process

Earlier today, there was a big announcement out of the PGA (the producers, not the golfers). They introduced a new credit for transmedia producers to qualify and join up. It's great news! Except for the places where maybe it isn't so great (but here's hoping).

Christy Dena quickly addressed the topic (though some of her points have already been answered; for example, video games were missing from the list by accident and not by conscious omission). There remain some concerns. It's fabulous that transmedia producers are getting this validation, but the PGA's definition of transmedia might wind up excluding a lot of the amazing work out there... including ours. 

To qualify, a project must have three stories told via three distinct media. It skews heavily to the sequential model, and doesn't explicitly account for the spiderweb model. 

Now, it's my understanding that this is just a first step; and you do have to start somewhere, with some definition. So I'm definitely not lighting the torches and sharpening the tines on the ol' pitchfork. From everything I know of Jeff Gomez, his heart is in the right place. He certainly isn't planning a campaign of exclusion. 

And let's not forget that this is by far the biggest validation our craft has received from a traditional media organization yet so far. We've received a lot of awards, sure, but this is the first step in turning transmedia from a gimmick into an accepted industry. This is our big break. 

We shouldn't turn our backs on the party because the invitations didn't spell our names right. If it turns out that the lines haven't been drawn in the right places, then the PGA will redraw them. Or maybe they won't, and we'll wind up in exactly the same place we were a year ago.

And in the meantime, we just keep doing the work. 

Why This Matters

To a very meaningful degree, this is all still wankery. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, yes? But like it or not, it's important wankery, because I need to know what to call the work I do... so that I can get more work doing it. It's sheer practicality. To wit, people know what an ARG is, or they think they do. As a freelance creator, this can actively work against me and my career.

If I tell somebody I'm an ARG designer, they might think "Oh, I don't want to do anything with puzzles," or "I don't want to do anything with live events," or worst of all, "But I'm not marketing anything!" Never mind the fact that I am very interested indeed in exploring all kinds of different forms and the stories you can tell with them. If I only ever call myself an ARG specialist, I promise you the opportunity will never arrive.

If I call myself a transmedia creator, opportunities might blossom that would have been otherwise unavailable to me. But if the word collapses toward a definition that explicitly excludes me and my work, then I've lost a big fight in selling myself and... well, my work. And folks, I rather like having a career. It brings me joy to bring you joy telling stories using these crazy new tools and techniques.

So is transmedia our umbrella term? I think so, I hope so, I'm working for it. But I'm not sure yet. Only time will tell. Maybe in the 2011 edition, we'll have our answer.

Why So Serious: Lessons in Transmedia Worldbuilding

The Why So Serious campaign for The Dark Knight was a huge achievement (and I'm not just saying that because it I love a lot of the people behind it). It's garnered awards, huge amounts of press coverage, and incredible fan love. I know I'm a little late to the game on this, but I don't think anybody has yet talked about the most important thing that the campaign did, in my eyes. 

Two digressions, first. One: Experiences like Why So Serious have come under criticism because they arguably don't create audiences where none were before. At the end of the day, the people who were really involved in Why So Serious were all people who were going to see the movie anyway, right? It's uncomfortable to admit it in public like this, but... yeah, it's probably true. 

Two: The most successful transmedia experiences are the ones where there is space for the player to live in the world. Harry Potter, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings; these are all worlds that are very much bigger than the action on the main stage. And that's what we do in the ARG space; we provide walk-on roles that let people live in our worlds, while not requiring them to step onto the main stage themselves. 

That's why the first Twilight book is poorly suited to transmedia; there isn't much of a world there outside of the couple in love. But the subsequent books increase the scope of the world more and more, incorporating group dynamics and government structures that add up to a world bigger than just Bella and Edward and their true, sparkly love. 

So why was Why So Serious such a big deal? It's because it took a world that did not have space for an audience to live inside it -- Gotham -- and created canon spaces where players could dwell, for the first time. They became voters and accomplices. It turned a property that was previously not very well suited to a transmedia experience and created one that suddenly is. It's not just Batman and his allies and enemies anymore.

And while the people participating in that world are probably the ones who loved the property before, all of that energy and excitement brings more people in. The person with the joker mask was already going to see the movie, but maybe their roommate wasn't going to, or their cousin, or the person they enthuse about the film to at work or at the coffee shop or on the bus. 

I know I started reading Harry Potter because of all of the fan energy around it; that's also why I read Twilight. Giving your audience the freedom and an outlet for their passion for your work leads to them converting peripheral audience members into fans, and people who were never a part of the core audience into peripheral audience members. Participation is the engine that drives fandom, and fandom drives success.

So there you have it, one of the most important keys to making a great transmedia world: Scope. Make it roomy enough for your audience to play in your world. They'll love you for it, and their love brings rewards.