Category: Features (Page 11 of 37)

Ed Zed Omega: A Serious Game Visualizing New Approaches to Education

August 17, 2012 / Brandie Minchew

“There’s this expression, “zed omega.” It means “so over.” When you go zed omega, you are done.”
–Ed Zed Omega RevealedÂ

When it comes to public or private education, everyone has an experience, everyone has a story, and everyone has an opinion. The internet is rife with pointed discussions about the problems in education, and full of suggestions on how to solve them. While education issues vary broadly from state to state and nation to nation, they share at least one commonality: solutions tend to be easy to propose but difficult to implement. Education reform is an ongoing conversation amongst government officials, educators, and the public, and conversations between these groups are often politically charged and riddled with miscommunication and misunderstandings.

Andi McDaniel and Ken Eklund have brought something new to the conversation about education with their freshly-launched project, Ed Zed Omega. The project focuses on a set of voices that often gets lost in the cacophony that pervades the education discussion: the voices of those most directly affected by our education systems, the people currently subject to the state of “being educated.” Ed Zed Omega features the stories of six fictional teens who have decided that they are done with education, and that they’re not going back. Their guidance counselor, Mary Johnson, has convinced them to use the time they would have spent in school to complete one more assignment, exploring solutions to the problems they perceive in education.Â Ed Zed Omega launched on August 15, 2012 and will run through November 15, 2012 to follow their journey.

Alternate History Serial “Balance of Powers” Launches

August 8, 2012 / Brandie Minchew

“Think of it as an alternate world Cold War era spy adventure, if that kind of thing included stuff like blood sacrifices packed with dark beings.”
– Andrea Phillips, Balance of Powers Kickstarter campaign video.

Before Adrian Hon and Naomi Alderman took to Kickstarter to fund the mobile app Zombies, Run,Â there wasÂ Balance of Powers. The Kickstarter campaign sought to reunite Hon and Alderman with formerÂ Perplex CityÂ collaborators Andrea Phillips and David Varela to tell an “alt-history Cold War-era spy adventure.” Finally, almost a year after meeting its funding goals, Balance of Powers is ready to see the light of day.

An update to the Balance of PowersÂ Kickstarter page on August 1st alerted backers to the opening of the story’s website. On the first of August, a short but intriguing prologue gave a quick glimpse into the beginnings of the story and the mind of Major Sonja Slade. The August 1st update also included details on an upcoming live online event, which is scheduled to take place on August 25th at 7pm London time (4pm EST, 1pm PST).Â Details about the live online event and how to participate will be announced in the weeks leading up to the event.

A few days later, the first chapter posted, introducing character John Noon, the insurance clerk, while providing readers some insight into the shape and flavor of the world.Â The story weaves together the lives and adventures of an ex-spy who asks too many questions, an insurance clerk who is out of his depth, the daughter of a man accused of terrible deeds, and a major in the Prussian Army pursuing an investigation of the Bulgarian ambassador’s murder. In a city called Midway, the characters will come together â€“ but for what purpose?

Miracle Mile Paradox Builds Bridge to the Past Through Time Switch

August 2, 2012 / Brandie Minchew

Something very strange happened to Rexford Higgs back in March. An aficionado of wondrous artifacts and things from bygone days, Rex uncovered by chance a set of blueprints for a strange device, hidden in a tin box in a construction site near LA’s Miracle Mile. Fascinated by his find, Rex launched a Kickstarter campaignÂ to fund the building of his Time Switch. This campaign was used byÂ Transmedia L.A.Â to serve as the real-world Kickstarter campaign to fund Rexford Higgs’ story as an alternate reality game, TheÂ Miracle Mile Paradox. Transmedia L.A., a monthly meetup group of people in the Los Angeles area interested in transmedia storytelling, is usingÂ The Miracle Mile Paradox as an experiment in alternate reality game development for its members.

In late May, Rex succeeded in activating the Time Switch and received a transmission from the past sent by a woman, Jane Winthrop, warning him that he was likely being watched, but he must continue his work. Two days later, he received a cease and desist order from Agent Intellect Corp (AIC). This marked the beginning of a series of threatening messages warning Rex away from Miracle Mile. After being assaulted, presumably by AIC agents, Rex fled into hiding after securing the Time Switch device in a secret location, leaving his friends and followers to piece his clues together and help retrieve the rest of Jane’s message.

The Miracle Mile Paradox ARG officially kicked off on July 4^th and will run through the first week of September, so there is still lots of time to get caught up on the story and participate. While the ARG is location-based in the Miracle Mile area of Los Angeles, California, Transmedia L.A. has provided non-resident supporters with a number of ways to follow along with the story and help solve the mystery of the Time Switch, Jane Winthrop, and the powerful AIC. According to the game’s Kickstarter page, online players can follow the story through “Rex’s blog, websites, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, LinkedIn profiles, Pinterest boards, email accounts and much, much more. There might even be some hacking in to AIC employee accounts….” Local participants can unlock and retrieve Time Switch messages within the Miracle Mile itself â€“ all under the watchful eye of AIC, of course.

“Suits Recruits” Throws Fans Into the Deep End at Pearson Hardman

June 12, 2012 / Michael Andersen

On Thursday, June 14th, USA Network’s legal drama Suits comes back for its second season. For some fans, however, the season started early with an application for an unpaid internship at Pearson Hardman, one of Manhattan’s most elite law firms and the setting for Suits. Over the next five weeks, interns will work as paralegals and interns supporting the cast of Suits on a pending lawsuit in Suits Recruits, an interactive story-game running in parallel with the television show. Two interns will even receive a $50,000 bonus after the successful completion of their time at Pearson Hardman, embracing a compensation plan that’s quixotic even for “big law.”

The experience starts with your job interview at Pearson Hardman, where Donna (Sarah Rafferty) asks if you want to join up as an assistant or paralegal. Assistants are exposed more to office gossip and politics, while paralegals may find themselves parsing through the details of the lawsuit. Most of the game’s action is conducted over the company’s intranet, with characters from the show periodically asking questions to seek advice, gauge how well you’ve been paying attention, or even test your pop culture knowledge. Players are then assigned their first case, a lawsuit ripped from the headlines, with a former intern suing his former employer for unpaid wages a month before the company’s stock goes public. Your goal is to assist the Pearson Hardman team in representing the company…and while getting questions wrong won’t derail the investigation, missing too many questions might result in losing your chance at the $50,000 bonus.

Jesse Redniss, SVP of Digital at USA Networks, explains that Suits Recruits is designed to “bring the intrigue and excitement of working at a law firm to life . . . [and to] simulate that team experience you get when working in a law office.” Accordingly, in order to rise to the top of the internship pool, paralegals will need to share information with their assistant counterparts either by enlisting a friend to join the fun, or at the Water Cooler. As 30 Ninjas’s Julina Tatlock explains, “the two different roles work as a narrative fugue.”

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A Backstage Pass to the 2012 MIT Mystery Hunt

June 12, 2012 / Alex Calhoun

Image of the MIT Mystery Hunt Closing Ceremonies with permission from photographer Chris Ball

“A dim witted love god.”

I was gazing at the dense, tall pine trees around us, a refreshing change from the dry brown and yellow landscape we had already driven past. My wife and I, both Boston natives, were driving south from San Francisco for a wedding, and entertaining ourselves with one of our regular puzzle games. The first person provides a simple description, and the other must answer in the form of a rhyming adjective and noun pairing.

“Stupid Cupid,” I stated rather than asking, confident in my answer. It’s not a tough game, especially when you’ve played it together before as much as we have. That was in September of last year, and that drive inspired us to evolve our casual game into a much more challenging form: a puzzle for the 2012 MIT Mystery Hunt.

Last year our team Codex won the 2011 Hunt, which is held in January over Martin Luther King, Jr. Day weekend. It’s a team-based puzzle solving competition that draws over a thousand diverse fans every year. The victors’ prizes are well-earned respect, and the responsibility of writing and organizing the following year’s Hunt. Each Hunt has a theme, ostensibly to provide a reason for solving all the puzzles. 2011’s Hunt led by the team Metaphysical Plant, had a theme centered around video games. For 2012, Codex chose to focus on musical theater, specifically The Producers.

For the past eight years I competed in the Hunt and even wrote a handful of puzzles for friends, but none had the level of complexity and polish usually found during the Hunt. Every long-time Hunter has a list of puzzle ideas they would like to write someday if they given the opportunity. Translating those ideas into over a hundred working, solvable puzzles takes many thousands of man hours. As our team quickly recognized, years of solving puzzles doesn’t immediately translate to creating puzzles and organizing a live event for hundreds of people. Thankfully, Codex’s team of leaders and editors provided a framework for both novice and experienced writers to participate in the process.

Lizzie Bennet Diaries Brings a Classic Spin to the Vlog

May 22, 2012 / Michael Andersen

Lizzie Bennet’s mother wants the best for her three daughters. Unfortunately for Lizzie, her mother’s antiquated impression of what is best involves settling Lizzie and her two sisters down with the first rich, eligible bachelors to come along. She even printed out a motivational tshirt for poor Lizzie, broadcasting that “[i]t is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” As a graduate student living at home and pursuing a Masters degree in Mass Communications, Lizzie is taking out her frustrations at her mother’s overt attempts to control her life over social media for a class project she’s calling The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, with a little help from her best friend Charlotte Lu. Sound familiar? No? Maybe this will help: the Bennet family’s new neighbor, Bing Lee, is best friends with an abrasive socialite named William Darcy.

That’s right, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is an adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice, with a modern twist. Lizzie unabashedly assumes the role of unreliable narrator in the video blog (“vlog”) series recounting her various adventures that serves as the crux of the experience. While Charlotte and her sisters occasionally take over the vlog, the cast is purposefully minimal, forcing Lizzie, Charlotte, and her sisters to don over-the-top costumes while mimicking their parents, William Darcy, and even each other in a format that should be very familiar to frequent YouTube viewers. These videos offer a powerful platform for the sisters’ disparate personalities to shine through, allowing the plot to serve as a pleasant afterthought supporting a steady stream of sisterly bickering.

Since the YouTube videos themselves center around Lizzie’s highly biased take on the story, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries provides its on-screen and off-screen talent with social media outlets suited to their sensibilities, allowing viewers to gain a better sense of the story. While Jane’s fashion-centric Lookbook account and Lydia’s animated gif-heavy Tumblr do little to add to the plot, twitter accounts for Bing Lee, his sister Caroline, and William Darcy provide a parallel view of events that does an admirable job of complementing the vlog entries. While these elements are by no means necessary to the story, many of the show’s most amusing moments are either told (or remixed) over these side-channels.