My Sky is Falling image courtesy of Reboot Stories, from the Envision 2013 playthrough

The elevator doors open. As I step out, a woman in a hazmat suit and surgical mask steps forward as our guide, offering surgical masks to our group. Masks firmly in place, we’re guided to a classroom liberally strewn with backpacks and jackets. There are already a handful of people milling about in the room without the dubious protection of our masks, grabbing sandwiches and chips from the front of the room. A dissonant hum serves as disconcerting accompaniment to the otherwise silent room. Finally, we’re welcomed by our guide and offered a choice: leave the mask on and remain a silent observer, or take it off and step into the strange world in which we found ourselves.

Over the next hour, my fellow participants and I progressed through a dystopic science fiction world designed to leave us disoriented, confused, and isolated as part of the interactive theater experience My Sky is Falling. The performance, a fictionalized retelling of filmmaker Lydia Joyner’s own experiences in the foster care system, was brought to light by creative director Atley Loughridge through the startup Reboot Stories. The project was also a collaboration with Reboot Stories co-founder Lance Weiler’s New Media Producing class at Columbia University and the Orange Duffel Bag Initiative, a non-profit dedicated to helping teens transition out of the foster care system. Representatives from the United Nations went through the experience at Envision 2013, while I experienced the performance as part of DIY Days NYC, a free conference that took place at The New School at the end of April.

DIY Days exists as a celebration of the rapid prototyping and iteration process, organized around three themes: Learn, Do, and Share. The morning session kicked off the “Learn” section with a series of keynote addresses. Little Bets author Peter Sims kicked off the morning by presenting a series of anecdotes on the importance of innovation through iteration. Sims drew attention to the slow transition of Pixar from the high-end computer hardware business into animated film studio through a series of calculated risks. Next, Alexa Clay argued that our current search for innovation is hampered by our blindness to “the Misfit Economy” — the collective of black market, grey market, informal market hustlers written off for their unsavory activities. Clay challenged the audience to explore how to learn from the often overlooked corners of society, and how to repurpose their efforts for more productive purposes. How would the skills garnered executing Nigerian 419 scams transfer into providing IT support?

Brian Clark shifted the conversation to a more theoretical bent, presenting his manifesto calling for a return to phenomenology in experience design. Clark challenged the audience to look back at the philosophical musings of Kant and Husserl to inform creative works. Focusing purely on the objects we are creating ignores the reality that those objects only gain meaning through the audience’s experience of it. Can fans truly experience Netflix’s House of Cards when the company’s insistence on treating their stories as a DVD forces audiences to experience the series out of sync with each other? Ele Jansen continued to explore the theory behind creation, presenting an ethnographic look at the iterative design process that informs her collaboration on Reboot Stories projects like Laika’s Adventure.

Closing out the morning’s “Learn” session, Colleen Macklin exposed the audience to non-traditional types of games ranging from Budgetball, a game that pits the Congressional Budget Office staffers against students in an annual competition of fiscal responsibility and play to JS Joust, a game that coopts Playstation Move controllers for a console-free competition. Macklin highlighted the highly political nature of games as a communication medium, reminding the audience that the New Games movement’s parachute games were a commentary on the Vietnam War that actively sought to subvert symbols of war. Similarly, Monopoly‘s earliest incarnation as The Landlord Game was a political critique on unbridled land grabbing.

In the afternoon, talks gave way to experiences with the “Do” phase. In addition to the My Sky is Falling interactive theater experience, the audience had the opportunity to experience a host of improvisational storytelling experiences and games. With so many events going on, there was only time to get a small taste. I wasn’t able to stay for all of DIY Day’s inaugural Creative Sparks pitch competition, but did drop in long enough to clap, stomp, hoot, and holler along with Benjamin Ryan Nathan’s tap-dancing pitch for his documentary I Can Dance in an interactive pitch that was reminiscent of Jane McGonigal’s Top Secret Dance Off experiment. I also had the pleasure of witnessing the Creative Sparks winner Alexander Reben show off BlabDroid, a tiny cardboard robot programmed to travel around asking people probing questions. The tiny robot made quite an impression at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier that week, taking advantage of the ELIZA Effect to elicit deeply personal and unexpected responses. I also made it out to Mark Harris’ post-mortem of his immersive film The Lost Children. After the formal presentation, he gave the audience a chance to play the working prototype of a game he’s planning to use for an upcoming post-apocalyptic narrative.

For the final “Share” segment, the conference circled back to My Sky is Falling, which leveraged real-time measurement and analysis from the Harmony Institute to provide insight into our experience exploring a dystopic future for the foster care system. Select individuals were hooked up to Q Sensors throughout their My Sky is Falling session. The devices assessed engagement and arousal through the participants’ movements, skin temperature, and electrodermal activity from one moment to the next. When combined with pre- and post-event survey results, the team was able to assemble an on-the-spot presentation deconstructing which elements of the performance worked, and which would need to be tweaked for the next iteration. The team at Wicked Solutions then described a proposal for addressing some of the issues highlighted in the experience that emerged in large part from participants who emerged from the foster care system, soliciting volunteers from the audience to help execute that vision.

I’ve been to DIY Days in New York three years in a row, and every year I am amazed Lance Weiler and the Reboot Stories team is able to put it on for free in locations around the world. According to Weiler, the New York event was delivered on a budget of only $2,500 thanks to generous in-kind donations. The day was a rush of insightful speakers, intense events, and powerful ideas that has left me still reeling from the experience.

Head over to diydays.com to find out if there will be a DIY Days in your area. You can also find archives of past panels online to get a taste for the experience.

An author sells his soul to Asmodeus, King of the Nine Hells for a shot at fame and fortune. Rebels seek to topple a warlord who set himself up as the mythical Minotaur in the land of Dis, a power station left abandoned after the world is struck low by an airborne virus that transforms its victims into violent berskerkers. Two different short stories, depicting seemingly unrelated worlds. The only commonalities? Both tales are riddled with Apocryphal references, and the secrets concealed within both short stories provide pieces to a puzzle contest that could net you $5,000 Canadian dollars and a Kobo Glo eBook reader signed by Dan Brown.

With Dan Brown’s new novel Inferno coming out soon, the Toronto-based eReader manufacturer Kobo saw it as the perfect opportunity to launch a narrative-driven puzzle contest called The Descent. The contest is designed to reacquaint readers with the themes of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy that will feature heavily in Brown’s newest exploration in symbology. To provide the framework for The Descent, Kobo brought in author J.F. Penn to write three short stories exploring three sins: the Sins of Temptation, the Sins of Violence, and the Sins of Treachery. Each short story is offered free for the Kobo eReader or as an EPUB for reading on your desktop, eReader, or mobile devices.

In addition to the short story, each installment contains a puzzle to solve that extends past the virtual pages, leading to a piece of the meta-puzzle. In Sins of Temptation, for instance, readers are asked to explore Tobias “Tobit” Fanshaw’s website. As the nephew of the recently deceased author featured in Sins of Temptation, Tobit shares his uncle’s fascination with the occult and symbology, reminding us that it’s still possible to build websites on Angelfire.com and serving as a helpful reference point for the many symbols referenced throughout The Descent.

One nice feature about going through the puzzle-solving experience on the Kobo device is its Book Stats section, which allows readers to share their thoughts on the short story, and collaborate on the puzzles or, alternatively, to hide spoilers and proceed on their own. While no one has taken advantage of these features yet due to the competitive nature of this contest, it remains a useful feature as non-competitive narrative puzzle books like Mike Selinker’s Maze of Games and Andrea Phillips’ The Daring Adventures of Captain Lucy Smokeheart become more common.

Once the final short story is released on May 9, players will have enough information to locate and solve the final puzzle by unearthing a secret webpage with a submission form. The first to complete all the puzzles will receive the cash prize and signed Kobo eReader. The next four qualifying players to finish will also receive a signed eReader, along with $100 CAD online credit to their Kobo account. Players are required to have all three free stories in their Kobo library to be eligible to win.

Editor’s Note: ARGNet received a reviewer copy of the Kobo eReader.

Ricky Collins (Maxwell Glick), Charlotte Lu (Julia Cho), Lizzie Bennet (Ashley Clements), and Lydia Bennet (Mary Kate Wiles) at the final celebration, courtesy of Pemberley Digital

It’s been almost a year since Lizzie Bennet introduced herself to the internet through her video blog, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. With twice-weekly video updates serving as a voyeuristic window into Lizzie’s personal affairs, viewers were effectively invited to take up digital residence at the Bennet household. After spending so much time getting to know Lizzie’s family and friends, watching the final installment of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries was like saying goodbye to old friends.

Of course, in many ways it was saying goodbye to old friends. The Lizzie Bennet Diaries was a modern adaptation of Jane Austen’s much loved novel Pride and Prejudice, which recently celebrated its 200th anniversary. Over the years, I’ve witnessed Elizabeth Bennet fall in love with Fitzwilliam Darcy countless times, complemented by everything from Bollywood dance numbers to zombie attacks. With The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, co-creators Hank Green and Bernie Su sought to re-imagine the classic love story through the modern lens of YouTube.

To modernize the story, the team took more than a few liberties. While Mrs Bennet’s blatant maneuvering to secure husbands for her daughters remains as comically anachronistic as it was in Pride and Prejudice, her notions are not completely out of circulation even two centuries after Austen brought them to light. The family businesses did receive an update, evolving into online production companies like Collins & Collins and Pemberley Digital that serve as bases of operation for some of Pride and Prejudice‘s original suitors that assume roles that are just as important as the Bingley mansion at Netherfield.

Surface-level changes were made to many character names, but it doesn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to connect the dots between Charles Bingley and Bing Lee, or Georgiana Darcy and Gigi Darcy. Even Mary Bennet and Kitty Bennet, who were excised from the core Bennet clan, still find their way into the narrative. The major changes arose through the challenges faced by the lead characters. For Lizzie, Charlotte, and Jane, the prospect of creating a life independent of marriage is an ever-present and essential reality, and the three finally realize that goal in new and interesting ways that challenge their relationships. While Lydia’s narrative arc still thrusts her into scandal, her character’s reaction to that scandal takes a different turn.

Embracing the vlog format, the bulk of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries videos revolve around Lizzie speaking directly into a stationary camera, holding a one-sided conversation with the viewer. Even when Lizzie is joined by Jane Bennet, Lydia Bennet, and Charlotte Lu, the attention remains focused on the viewing audience with her friends and family standing by to check Lizzie’s more extravagant claims and provide a different perspective on events. For added entertainment, Lizzie frequently coerces her guests into donning costumes for dramatic reenactments of recent conversations and events. At one point, Lizzie even convinces Darcy to reenact a scene in costume, playing himself. Looking back on the project, Bernie Su reflected that Lizzie Bennet Diaries co-creator Hank Green’s video, How to Vlog: From the Vlogbrothers was a strong influence to the show’s format and style, with its clear instructions on vlogging best practices.

While format and narrative arc both required modifications to fit in with the YouTube mold, the most extensive modification to the story came in adapting Pride and Prejudice to incorporate the sense of community that YouTube engenders. While The Lizzie Bennet Diaries‘ audience could chat with the show’s characters on Twitter and Facebook, leave video responses to the various channels,  and even ask the characters questions through frequent Q&A videos, the project remained a story. The audience could not stop Lydia from falling into scandal any more than they could prevent Lizzie and Darcy from getting together in the end. Hank Green did note that Lydia’s increased presence in the series was due entirely to the positive fan response to her portrayal, but that is inherent in the nature of responsive serial fiction.

Since some of the most intensely personal aspects of the YouTube community could not be carried over while adapting a classic novel, the characters in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries stepped in to fill that void by forming a core community beyond the main YouTube channel. To deliver on that promise of agency, the series’ transmedia focus was on building outlets for all of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries characters to have their voices heard and to allow the characters to interact with each other. Characters discussed on Lizzie’s vlog were presented through Lizzie’s heavily biased perspective, so these extensions were often the only way for the characters to reclaim ownership of their stories. And each character reclaimed ownership of their story in different ways.

In the main videos Charlotte, Jane, and Lydia were often relegated to supporting Lizzie in telling her own story. To get a better sense of each of their own personal stories, it’s necessary to look to their larger online footprint. For Lydia, that footprint took the form of a competing channel that frequently provided direct commentary on Lizzie’s videos, and introduced another side of Lydia through her interactions with Mary and Kitty on the channel. Jane’s online presence through her LookBook account helped her cultivate her interest in the fashion industry, leading to opportunities that filtered back up to the dominant narrative in the main channel. With Charlotte, the focus centered on her efforts mentoring her younger sister Maria.

Fitz William and Gigi Darcy’s online activities provided some of the most meaningful opportunities for fans, as both characters openly watched The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and shipped Lizzie and Darcy (“Dizzie”, as they liked to call the pair) as a couple. While fans couldn’t take concrete actions to throw the two together, Fitz and Gigi could serve as a voice for the fans through their reactions to the evolving love-hate relationship shared by the two. As the growing cast of characters met each other, their online profiles created an underlying lattice of social interactions that informed the show’s progress and added depth to the characters. Caroline Lee’s most humanizing moment in a series that generally thrust her into antagonistic roles was a Twitter conversation about her near-disasterous efforts to prepare a Thanksgiving feast for her friends. Lizzie’s main video series eventually reached 100 episodes, but additional videos from the Q&A sessions and spin-off channels resulted in over 9 hours of content across over 150 videos (as well as a host of websites and social media profiles) for the full experience. Characters even made in-character appearances at conferences like Vidcon and SXSW.

While the Lizzie Bennet fan community (often referred to as “Seahorses”) did not possess the agency to change the events of a 200 year old story, they did embrace the opportunity to interact heavily with the characters through the communication channels carved out for them in the narrative. And their creative efforts spilled out onto other platforms, with nearly every episode seeing popular moments transformed into animated gifs. Fans filmed video homages to the series, drew fan art, created Valentine’s Day cards, and set up an online discussion group enabling fans to read the book and watch the series in tandem. One fan with a sense of humor even uploaded a “Regency-era fanfic” of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries by copying and pasting the first chapter of Pride and Prejudice.

While the budding romance between Lizzie and Darcy was pivotal to The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, its true strength was in fleshing out many of the minor characters in Pride and Prejudice through the transmedia elements making audiences familiar with the story consider alternate readings of the source material, and new inductees to the world of Austen to turn to the text for the first time. Fans of Pride and Prejudice rarely cite Lydia Bennet, Colonel Fitzwilliam, Gigi Darcy, and Richard Collins as their favorite characters, and yet those characters were able to claim the spotlight in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. Accordingly, it’s fitting that Lizzie’s last video was not the true end for The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. After the last video’s surprising conclusion, many characters returned to social media for one final farewell.

Even those goodbyes do not mark a true end to our tale. Shortly before Pemberley Digital made its fictional debut in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries narrative, Hank Green and Bernie Su registered the very real corporation as a LLC that is currently raising funds to support the DVD release of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and a canonical follow-up project taking Gigi Darcy to Sanditon, California in a video series based on Austen’s unfinished novel, Welcome to Sanditon. The team is also looking to follow up The Lizzie Bennet Diaries with another full-scale adaptation of a classic novel that has yet to be identified. To date, the Kickstarter campaign has raised over $355,000, readily surpassing its target.

If you’re interested in watching the Lizzie Bennet Diaries in its entirety, here is a link for a playlist with the series and all of its related videos. Alternatively, you can visit the show’s Kickstarter page and order the full series with commentary and extras for a minimum contribution of $55. There’s even an option to purchase a Lizzie Bennet Diaries-branded version of Pride and Prejudice.

As initially reported on WIRED’s Danger Room blog, the Intelligence Advanced Research Agency (IARPA) issued a Request for Information on “Using Alternate Reality Environments to Help Enrich Research Efforts” (UAREHERE). IARPA is particularly interested in collecting information on the practicalities of running research in tandem with alternate reality games, managing privacy and safety concerns amongst alternate reality game players, and designing a game that balances free play and interactions with more controlled data collection.

Particularly intriguing is the RFI’s final question on preserving the privacy of UAREHERE’s participants, asking:

What protections can be put in place to maintain the privacy, safety, and anonymity of subjects…consider[ing] issues regarding the collection of data via personal identifiers that may be sensitive (e.g. user names, phone numbers, emails, IP addresses, etc.), other data that may potentially be sensitive, and data security and protections[?]

The RFI explicitly mentions our coverage of Conspiracy for Good on WIRED as an example of the type of project it is interested in pursuing for research purposes, so those security concerns may cross over from digital touchpoints to real world interactions. Conspiracy for Good‘s gameplay included a series of four live events that called upon participants to use mobile devices provided by the developers to navigate the narrative.

IARPA was created in 2006, focusing on investing in “high-risk, high-payoff research programs that have the potential to provide the United States with an overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries” with programs that run between 3-5 years. The RFI for UAREHERE was issued under the Office of Smart Collection, which focuses on improving the value of collected data to intelligence communities.

While this RFI does not guarantee a government-run alternate reality game in the near future, it does provide an outlet for players and developers to voice their thoughts on best practices, particularly regarding privacy and research concerns. The deadline for responses is April 19th, electronically submitted following the guidelines in the RFI.

The Maze of Games is a full-length puzzle novel that follows the adventures of the Quaice siblings as they make their way through the Gatekeeper’s labyrinth. While traditional Choose Your Own Adventure novels direct readers through branching narratives through a series of choices, The Maze of Games‘s “solve your own adventure” format directs readers through the experience through the same series of puzzles facing the Quaices. Solving the puzzle unlocks the page number of the next narrative installment. Illustrated by Magic: The Gathering illustrator Pete Venters, the book is designed to look and feel like a book from the Victorian Era.

The puzzle adventure’s author Mike Selinker launched a Kickstarter campaign for The Maze of Games last month seeking $16,000 to fund the project. To date, the project has drawn in over $109,000 in pledges, with an ebook/iDevice edition available to $20 donors and a hardcover edition available for $50. As an added perk, Selinker has arranged for the Gatekeeper to lock a series of famous puzzle designers in cages until they agree to contribute a Victorian-era puzzle to the Conundrucopia, a bonus set of puzzles in The Maze of Games. At set Kickstarter milestones, the puzzle designers are set free from their cages and put to work. The list of confirmed puzzlers is an impressive one that reflects the variety of puzzles contained outside the Conundrucopia. Innovators in the space including ambigram pioneer Scott Kim, 74-time Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings, Perplex City puzzle designer Eric Harshbarger, Puzzazz founder Roy Leban, and Duck Konundrum inventor Dan Katz have all spent their time locked up by the Gatekeeper, with more to follow.

While Kickstarter campaigns are often centered around using the campaign as a preorder process, Selinker is using the campaign as an excuse to seed puzzles everywhere and anywhere he can. As he explained to the StoryForward podcast, “when I started out, I said I’m going to design an ARG masquerading as a Kickstarter campaign…but there is going to be a book at the end.” Fulfilling on that promise, Selinker scattered a series of puzzles into the various sections of the Kickstarter page itself. Additional puzzles are scattered throughout his interviews on Wired.com, Reddit, StoryForward, and Kickstarter Update posts. Weekly puzzle challenges have asked contributors to respond to creative prompts like rewriting the infamous -GRY riddle.

Over the years, Mike Selinker has worked on quite a few projects that transformed puzzling into performance art. In addition to working on traditional alternate reality games like Citizens of Virtue, Selinker set online audiences on a nationwide manhunt (twice), invented “juzzling” for the cross-country w00tstock festival, hidden a secret message in the spines of WIRED Magazine, and even installed larger-than-life crossword puzzles in a chain of bagel cafés. Therefore, it’s reasonable to suspect that The Maze of Games and the rest of its Kickstarter campaign will be a spectacle to behold.

Be sure to check out The Maze of Games Kickstarter campaign before time runs out on March 14th. To my knowledge, this article does not contain any puzzles or clues associated with the campaign…but with Mike Selinker, you can never be too careful.

Friday, February 15th is a big night for Psych, USA Network’s pineapple-loving homage to ’80s pop culture. Starting at midnight, fans will don their Psych slippers, heat up a pineapple upside-down cake, and settle in for a marathon of 7 fan-selected episodes. And as a surprise addition to the day’s festivities, USA is launching The S#cial Sector, sequel to the show’s Emmy-nominated transmedia experience Hashtag Killer.

The S#cial Sector will exist as an online interactive Psych episode elapsing over the course of eight weeks, much like its predecessor. Directed by Kirsten Nelson (who plays Chief of Police Karen Vick on the show), the narrative follows Shawn and Gus as they investigate a deadly reality television show known as “The S#cial Sector” that takes the elimination process literally. Unbeknownst to the show’s contestants, getting taken out of the competition means getting taken out. It’s up to the show’s fans, interacting with Shawn and Gus on “The Fan Theory Board” as digital assistants, to figure out why the contestants are being killed off, and how to pull the plug on the deadly reality show before it’s curtains for the show’s cast.

As one of Hashtag Killer‘s 452,000 players, I was deeply impressed at the team’s ability to capture the show’s tone, and transfer it to a smaller, more interactive screen. Struggling to keep up with Shawn and Gus’ witty repartee on the SocialSamba platform that drove players’ interactions with the show’s characters reinforced my excitement at hunting down the show’s seemingly endless pop culture references and easter eggs, and working through the meta-puzzles introduced me to the show’s vibrant fan communities as discussion spilled over from the show’s official social platform to more traditional social networks like Twitter and Tumblr.

This spillover was particularly fitting for Hashtag Killer, as the transmedia experience can trace its origins to social media. As USA Network’s SVP of Digital Jesse Redniss related to Brian Solis, Hashtag Killer originated as a direct result of Dulé Hill’s overly enthusiastic penchant for using hashtags on Twitter: after tagging a tweet with the hashtag #VampireKiller, Redniss tweeted back, “Dulé, you gotta cool it with the hashtags, we’re just gonna start calling you Hashtag Killer.”

USA Network is reassembling the Hashtag Killer team for The S#cial Sector, partnering with Ralph, Social Samba, and 30 Ninjas to create the transmedia landscape for the eight week experience. With the creative agency Ralph added to the mix, the team is taking things a step further. In Hashtag Killer, players enjoyed the illusion of conversation while chatting with the show’s characters on Social Samba’s online platform, collecting clues through online mini-games, and competing for the dubious pleasure of serving as one of the the serial killer’s victims. Individual players’ comments and theories were occasionally integrated into the broader narrative through in-game shout-outs from Shawn and Gus to add to the illusion of agency, but Hashtag Killer still felt like a well-scripted performance. Audience participation will take a more prominent role in The S#cial Sector as players will be encouraged to share videos of their theories about the case with the help of the Theatrics, a collaborative storytelling platform used to create the collective fan experience Beckinfield.

While you can start playing The S#cial Sector (and Hashtag Killer) at any time as a standalone experience, there’s a special thrill to playing the single-player game at the same time as the fan community at large, so stop over at SocialSector.USANetwork.com before slipping into your Psych snuggie for tomorrow’s Slumber Party. But take a lesson from Dulé Hill: think about leaving out the extra # in the game’s name if you’re planning on talking about it on Twitter, unless you want to be a Hashtag Killer.

For over ten years, a panel of judges pulled from the ranks of advertising agencies and brand marketing teams have sifted through the best the web can offer on a daily basis for the Favorite Website Awards (the FWA). Their goal? To highlight a single online property that exemplifies cutting edge creativity as Site of the Day. Rounding out the year, the international panel of judges select one site as FWA’s Site of the Year. And in 2012, that honor went to the interactive documentary Bear 71.

ARGNet previously covered Bear 71 when it was introduced to the world as a featured installment at the Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier. The 20-minute documentary follows a collared grizzly bear, tagged as “Bear 71″, as she travels throughout Banff National Park. Visitors to the site experience the wildlife of the forest through Bear 71′s perspective, narrated by The L Word‘s Mia Kirshner. The data-driven project taps into trail cams, animal tracking tags, and photography to tell a story customized to your exploration of the Park, its wildlife, and its many human intrusions.

More than a few transmedia campaigns we covered here at ARGNet have been selected as the FWA’s Site Of The Day. Prometheus, Daybreak, Tap Joint, and Byzantium Tests all received Site of the Day accolades from the FWA. But for the 58 international judges on the 2012 selection committee, Bear 71 stood out as the best of the year.

FWA’s founder Rob Ford praised Bear 71 for its ambition, noting “In a year when we have seen so much experimental work, so many agencies and clients focused on just trying to be cool with mobile, I was delighted to see a real idea and a powerful story win this year’s Site Of The Year.” Ogilvy & Mather judge Corinna Falusi praised the campaign’s design choices: “I especially love that the interactive and fragmented style of storytelling in Bear 71 does not act as superfluous artistry – it truly helps the film makers create a deeper narrative totality. People have been discussing the possibilities of interactive film for decades, Bear 71 is one of the first examples of a director getting it right.”

To experience Bear 71 for yourself, set aside 20 minutes to explore the documentary, but be prepared to spend a few more minutes exploring elements of the map you might have missed the first time around.

The silent epidemic began in the year 2011. Children around the world were born without the ability to learn language. They didn’t babble as babies. They didn’t speak as they grew older. They couldn’t understand what their parents were saying. They seemed to show no interest in using language at all. Parents became frustrated, trying every obscure teaching method and advertised miracle cure. Scientists were baffled. There was no virus, no environmental toxin they could pinpoint as the cause of the disorder. As years went by, hope for a cure dwindled, but it became obvious that there was something more to the silents, something everyone had failed to notice.

This is the premise of a new, serialized digital novel, The Silent History, by Kevin Moffett, Matthew Derby, Russell Quinn and Eli Horowitz. Fans of puzzle hunt books might recognize Horowitz as one of the authors of The Clock Without a Face, a children’s book filled with hidden clues that led to real-world buried treasures.

While The Silent History doesn’t have cryptic clues or buried jewels, it does encourage readers to explore the story in several new and exciting ways. The creators, who designed and released The Silent History as an iOS app, are calling it “a new kind of novel”. Initially, the app offers video and text that introduce the reader to the story world. There are then two different experiences a reader can choose to explore: the time-released Testimonials, or the location-based Field Reports.

The Testimonials are first-person accounts told by the family, friends and others close to the silents. Theodore Green describes his life as a single father, seemingly obsessed with getting his daughter, Flora, to speak. Margaret Lafferty doesn’t trust the silents, and thinks they are destined for trouble. Nancy Jernik, a successful business woman, is irritated by her young son’s lack of communication and begins ignoring him completely.

The Testimonials work together to tell the history of the silents from when they were first discovered until the year 2043. While one might think it hard to keep track of the more than twenty characters over a period of 32 years, it is surprisingly not difficult thanks to the app’s user interface and the way the characters’ stories start to converge and overlap. Each Testimonial is approximately 1,500 words and, when all are released, will add up to the equivalent of a 500 page novel.

The Field Reports are location-based stories that expand The Silent History‘s universe. These are unlocked when the reader is within 10 meters of the Field Report’s GPS coordinates. These unlocked stories use real world details found at the physical coordinates to enhance the reader experience. For example, one of the Chicago-area stories about boarding an airplane can only be unlocked at O’Hare airport. As of this writing, there are nearly 250 Field Reports across the globe (including one in Antarctica), but the authors encourage readers to become reporters and submit their own Field Reports.

The Silent History app can be downloaded for $1.99 in the App Store and includes access to the first volume, which contains 20 Testimonials. The remaining five volumes can be purchased separately or in a $7.99 bundle.

Over the years, Rockne S. O’Bannon has transformed more than a few science fiction projects into cult classics: O’Bannon helped shape the futuristic worlds depicted in properties including Alien Nation, SeaQuest DSV, and Farscape. With his newest project, Defiance, O’Bannon explores a future, post-apocalyptic Earth where aliens and humans are forced to cooperate in constantly-warring factions to survive.

While humans and aliens are entering a tentative alliance in the Defiance narrative, television and video games are entering into a novel alliance to tell the story. While a Syfy television show will play out in a refugee camp located in the former city of St Louis, a massively multiplayer online first-person shooter (MMOFPS) developed by Trion Worlds (makers of the popular MMORPG Rift) will follow events in San Francisco, with crossover events from both storylines impacting the developing narrative. The Defiance television show does not debut until April, with the video game version preceding the television premiere by one week. However, the stage is already being set for the launch through a website for Von Bach Industries, a company within the transmedia narrative’s universe.

Von Bach Industries, which specializes in taking alien technology and modifying it for human use, is currently offering the technology to those who want to participate in training to become Ark Hunters: people who scour the Earth’s wastelands in search of alien technology to be recovered and sold to the highest bidder (presumably Von Bach Industries). The tech used by the Ark Hunters is called the Environmental Guardian Online (“EGO”). The symbiotic implant “alters its host at the genetic level, providing encyclopaedic heads-up intelligence, while simultaneously unlocking and managing corporeal-maximization, or EGO Powers.” Some of these “powers” include enhanced instincts, informational overlays to aid in threat identification and bio-medical monitoring, and personal cloaking.

The EGO technology will be made available to anyone wishing to become Ark Hunters and participate in the next Advance Mission BETA. According to the countdown on the Von Bach Industries website, the “exclusive opportunity for in-the-field combat and exploration” will start on January 18th. Registration is required and interested parties are encouraged to do so soon, as a limited number of spots are available.

Interested in learning more about what might be the next form of interactive storytelling? Then head over to Von Bach Industries and enlist as an Ark Hunter for the Advance Mission BETA, or watch the Making of Defiance documentary series for more information on the transmedia production’s storyworld.

Five brilliant young scientists collectively known as “MHD-6″ disappear from Belgrade University. Shortly after, a video of the kidnapping makes its way to the foundation that sponsored them. A mysterious person known only as “The Donetsk Voice” feeds bits and pieces of information relating to the disappearance of the MHD-6. As the investigation progresses, the Alvinson Foundation puts out a global call for help solving the mystery. Players who respond to the call are thrown headfirst into the European-based transmedia experience Alt-Minds, an eight week long paranormal mystery that incorporates puzzles, websites, geo-locative content, and a Facebook game.

French telecommunications corporation Orange joined the French game development studio Lexis Numérique to create the Alt-Minds experience, which launched on November 12th, in four languages: French, German, Spanish, and English. According to a press release by Orange, “Alt-Minds is a cohesive set of films, games, monitoring tools and web documentaries.” The story unfolds live over the game’s eight week span, using the web series format as the framework for players stepping into the role of investigator.

Lexis Numérique is no stranger to this kind of transmedia product. In 2004, the studio launched the game In Memoriam, published by Ubisoft. In Memoriam incorporated a network of websites, film footage, and real-time emails into its game play, where the player matched wits and interacted with a serial killer in order to achieve the game’s objectives. Those familiar with In Memoriam will easily spot its influence on the Alt-Minds game structure.

Alt-Minds allows players to choose whether to interface with the game through the main website or via their mobile devices, and those who are located in Europe can enter their mobile number for additional layers of interactivity. An Alt-Minds app for Android and Apple devices, available to European users, allows players to follow the story in real-time. Non-European users may also follow along, although their experience is limited to the website’s content.

Logging on to the main website, players access their dashboard, which shows their progress through the experience. Documents and videos are provided to the players to help them solve the puzzles and advance the content. The interfaces provide tools that players can use to analyze videos and documents, such as sliders that alter brightness, contrast, and saturation, and a zoom tool. Players may send puzzle solutions through the in-game messaging system, earning experience points in the game, or they may skip ahead to the next part of the narrative. As the game progresses, more content becomes available, such as the geo-locative content or the related Facebook game. Alt-Minds is also releasing a series of mini documentaries that explore some of the themes and questions raised by the narrative.

The creators of Alt-Minds have experimented with the “pay-to-play” model by offering the first week of story, puzzles, and clues for free, then charging a fee for each week following, much like buying episodes of a television series from week to week. The full series can be purchased for EUR 14.99 or per episode at EUR 2.59. After the live stream ends, the Alt-Minds experience will still be accessible by those who purchase episodes or the whole game, through the system’s “catch-up” mode that allows players to replay past episodes and events. According to the Alt-Minds FAQ, game play can exceed 50 hours if players opt to take on the secondary missions.

While all of the location-based content in Alt-Minds is currently centered in Europe, the website notes that a version of the experience is being developed for the United States and South America for release in 2013.