Month: May 2010 (Page 1 of 3)

Cocorico! For ARGs in France: A Point of View on Supernatural Oddities

May 29, 2010 / Nadia Elmrabet

Â«Â JC, my brother, I havenâ€™t forgotten you. Goodbye â€“ FredÂ Â».

This message, hidden in an encrypted note found in a Parisian hotel room, finally gave some closure for JC, the protagonist in Supernatural Oddities.Â JC embarked on a journey to investigate the supernatural after his brother JC disappeared 20 years ago, driven by the mottoÂ : “Supernatural is Normal!” Â On April 29th, JC discovered that Fred became a matchmaking angel, and that they would probably never see each other again.Â Nicolas, one of the players of the Finding Fred alternate reality game joined JC, his mother-in-law Simone, and his wife Muriel in the hotel room for the discovery.Â A few days later, the community watched the epilogue to the ten-day long investigation on JCâ€™s mockumentary webisode Life Really Is a Funny Thing, guest-starring Nicolas as a full-fledged character in the fiction.

Jane Doh introduced ARGNet readers to the Finding Fred ARG, part of the Supernatural Oddities transmedia projectÂ produced by Happy Fannie in partnership with Orange.Â In recent years, Orange, a French public telecommunications company, has moved its core business model from selling telecommunications pipes to global production in the mobile, web, and content sectors.

Sandrine Girbal, co-founder of Happy Fannie and executive producer of the project, explains that “Supernatural Oddities is the first transmedia fiction project for TV, Internet and social media in France. We partnered with Orange who wanted to take part in this experiment. They also wanted to try and find original content for their cable TV Channels, Orange CinÃ©ma Series / Choc.” Â She explains that the main challenge was to change viewersâ€™ habitsÂ :

Fiction is a very formal genre in France, very few attempts have been made these last years to change that. Supernatural Oddities is our attempt to cater to an audience hungry for more interaction with the fiction and the characters! Supernatural Odditiesâ€™ challenge consisted of a 4-month real time story developed for several media platforms. More than a simple TV program available on different platforms, our wish was to go further in terms of storytelling.

Global Competition Awards Millions to Digital Media and Learning Projects

May 27, 2010 / Jane Doh

This month, winners are being announced for the third annual MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition, who will share over $1.7 million in funding to pioneer the use of games, mobile phone applications, virtual worlds, and social networks in education and learning.

Launched in collaboration with President Obamaâ€™s Educate to Innovate Initiative, the Learning Lab Designer Awards will fund learning environments and digital media-based experiences that encourage young people to grapple with social challenges using activities rooted in the social nature, contexts, and ideas of science, technology, engineering, and math. The Game Changers Awards, to be announced at this month’s Games for Change Festival in New York, will recognize creative levels designed for either LittleBigPlanetâ„¢Â or Sporeâ„¢Â Galactic Adventures that offer young people learning opportunities and engaging game play.Â

Interview with Author Patrick Carman

May 17, 2010 / Michael Andersen

Below is an interview that Michael Andersen conducted with prolific multimedia author Patrick Carman. Over the past few years, Carman has released a number of projects that seek to redefine the novel. In addition to his Skeleton Creek series, Carman wrote The Black Circle, book five in the 39 Clues franchise. Carman released Thirteen Days to Midnight in April and TRACKERS in May.

MA: What lead you to start writing transmedia novels? (Also, is there another term you prefer for the format?)

PC: I’m just going to come right out and say it at the top: Transmedia, as a unifying term, is beyond lame. And it points to a challenge we’re facing in this space: coining a term is a tricky business. What the heck do we call what we’re doing? I tried vBooks (also lame), others have tried Diginovel, iStories, Vook, cross-platform…the list goes on, and I think they all fail to inspire at a level that will bring everyone under one tent. You guys did better with ARG – Alternate Reality Game – it stuck. How’d you do that?

To our credit (and by “our” I mean everyone trying to explode books into the 21^st century landscape) we’re talking about a brand new way of telling stories. We’re probably supposed to fumble around in the dark for awhile, but I think we’re getting closer. My two cents as of today is that we’re basically talking about something that’s been around for a long time, namely multimedia. And really, that’s a pretty good term to describe what’s happening to with these books; they’re becoming something broader, encompassing different medias. It’s interesting that movies and TV shows and web sites don’t have the same challenge. Creators of those mediums aren’t sitting around debating what they should call something when a movie has an ARG and spawns a TV show. It’s simply multimedia. The difference with a project like Skeleton Creek or TRACKERS is that I’m committed to a simple premise those other examples aren’t interested in: for me, the destination is always the book. That means the videos, the games, the web sites – they have a job to do, which is to get young readers turning pages. At PC Studio, where we make all these assets, a video is only as good as the pages it pushes a reader to turn.

Long winded already and I haven’t even exited question number one. The short answer is MULTIMEDIA. That’s what it’s called, that’s what it is.

An Arcade Classic Comes to Life, Secret Blueprints Revealed

May 17, 2010 / Geoff May

An important and much hyped event in the Flynn Lives! ARG came to fruition May 6th–the public unveiling of Encom International’s online version of their 1981 arcade classic “Space Paranoids,” which debuted at San Diego’s Comic Con 2009 for the Flynn’s Arcade event.

As a prelude to its release, a special countdown teased the game’s release. Players who visited the countdown splash page were able to click and destroy Recognizers that appeared and hovered across the screen. It served merely as a timewaster, but if players had the patience to keep clicking and destroy 99 Recognizers, they received a badge on FlynnLives.com. By persisting further and destroying 999, they received another badge.Â Finally, when the countdown ended on May 6th, Encom published their much-anticipated Space Paranoids Online arcade game, just as Alan Bradley had announced.

Aguatero Industries: Message in a Bottle, or SOS to the World?

May 12, 2010 / Michael Andersen

Earlier today, I received a package containing a message in a bottle from Aguatero Industries. The company was so excited to announce its expansion into the Las Vegas and Los Angeles markets, it sent me a message secreted inside their newer, more eco-friendly bottle design. On the inside of the bottle cap, I could faintly make out the letters “WP.ME /PURU9-2” written in pen, with the number 998 embossed beneath that.

Sadly, in order to reach the message in the bottle, I had to cut the water bottle apart. Once inside, I unfolded the press release, revealing the following message describing Aguatero Industries’ involvement in worldwide urban water system operation, and announcing its plans for expansion. According to the company’s website, its expansion into Las Vegas and Los Angeles is only part of a larger rollout of services. The press release was dated in the near future, on June 10, 2010.

The company has a social media presence with its twitter account. Refreshingly (pun entirely intended), no one seems to be in physical danger. However, typing in the shortened url on the bottle cap leads to the Our Water Planet blog, which suggests the empty bottle I received represents something more insidious: “It represents something far too many people experience: a lack of water.” Â The blog is run by Connor Arter, who maintains a twitter account for the site.

All the signs seem to indicate that this is the launch of a new serious game addressing water scarcity and resource management issues: the Our Water Planet blog even includes a donation link to Charity: Water. Charity: Water is near and dear to to the hearts of alternate reality game fans, as players of Levi’s Go Forth treasure hunt selected the charity to receive a $100,000 donation from Levi’s at the game’s conclusion.

Was this message in a bottle simply a press release, or was it an SOS to the world?

Click Here for the discussion at Unfiction.

Iamamiwhoami: Those Who Play in Mud Grow Mandrakes

May 12, 2010 / Nicko Demeter

Imagine that in todayâ€™s tough economy you were forced to sell gizmos to as wide of a population as you can reach. And, all things being equal, your gizmos are not really that unique. Other salesmen are out there trying to sell their similar gizmos to a wide demographic as well. What do you do? Wrap your gizmo inside a shiny wrapper of course! The philosophy also applies to viral marketing that attempts to push a product such as a movie, a video game, or even (in this case) a new album from a music artist to the consumers.

Enter iamamiwhoami, a YouTube user that joined the service and set out to upload music videos of various time lengths under cryptic names and with a content that resembles something between Bjorkâ€™s artistic creations and the feature film Panâ€™s Labyrinth. As time went by, a more coherent message emerged from this viral campaign.

But letâ€™s talk a bit more about the video content. The central figure appears to be a female that quickly sparked the general interest among those following the viral. Speculation aboundedÂ with regards toÂ her identity: the popular choice shifted from Christina Aguilera, to Lady GaGa, to a speculation that this is an artist backed by Trent Reznor of NIN/Year Zero fame. Finally a strong possibility has emergedÂ that Swedish singer/songwriter Jonna LeeÂ is the culprit even though her own management denied involvement. The otherworldly themes that appear on the video tend to have a more eco-conscious message, and the music ranges from tribal to electronica. And yes, it even features a male character dancing around in his underwear.