Category: Features (Page 28 of 37)

Part Two â€“ PICNIC â€™07 â€“ Three days of cross-media madness in Amsterdam

October 10, 2007 / DaniÃ«l van Gool

Editor’s Note: Daniel is an administrator at the Unfiction forums and was part of the team that created the Project MU Archive Book. He was on the scene at PICNIC ’07 as a representative of the ARG community and was kind enough to submit a report on his experiences. This is part two of the report. We thank Daniel for his support of ARGNet and his wonderful report and pictures.

The next day started out with a discussion between two people who are both known as quite visionaries when it comes to the Internet. The first was David Weinberger, who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy, is a prominent commentator on internet marketing strategies, and is the author of the book Everything is Miscellaneous. The second was Andrew Keen, a digital pioneer, author of the book Cult of the Amateur and a leading contemporary critic of recent developments regarding the Internet.

This set up a really interesting debate, between a Web 2.0 fanatic and one of its most prominent critics. Weinberger gave a compelling presentation of his views on the Internet, that it was made for one purpose — to organize messiness. Hyperlinking as a concept was invented so that content could be offered in multiple places, just by linking to it. Having user generated content, with Wikipedia as the main example, creates more content and complexity in that content than could otherwise have been achieved, which is A Good Thing.

Keen, however, fundamentally disagrees with this view, condensing his own take on this as â€œcomplexity bad, simplicity goodâ€ and stating that the media and the Internet should try and reflect the world, rather than trivialize it. Nowadays, the Internet â€˜complexifiesâ€™ the world and a lot of the information that is being offered is wrong or corrupt. He kept arguing that Weinbergerâ€™s approach was much too philosophical and that he needed to be more practical. One of his better examples was the Wikipedia entry for â€˜truthinessâ€™, a term coined by Stephen Colbert. Its word count is almost exactly the same as the entry for truth, demonstrating that Wikipedia has no context and that thereâ€™s nothing there to tell us whatâ€™s important and not.

Weinberger countered this by arguing that incidents like the ‘truthiness’ entry will automatically be dealt with by the community, which is an argument I also tend to rely on a lot. Overall, I thought Keen was coming off as being rather sour and negative, while Weinberger seems to be more of a visionary and has much more of a pioneering spirit. I know one thing for sure — I will definitely go and read Weinberger’s book. Oh, and hereâ€™s a funny little fact — Amazon lists Keenâ€™s book as a â€˜Perfect Partnerâ€™ for Weinbergerâ€™s. 🙂

Part One â€“ PICNIC â€™07 â€“ Three days of cross-media madness in Amsterdam

October 8, 2007 / DaniÃ«l van Gool

Editor’s Note: DaniÃ«l is an administrator at the Unfiction forums and was part of the team that created the Project MU Archive Book. He was on the scene at PICNIC ’07 as a representative of the ARG community and was kind enough to submit a report on his experiences, which we will release in parts over the course of the next few days. We thank Daniel for his support of ARGNet and his wonderful report and pictures.

For the second year in a row, I was able to attend PICNIC, the Crossmediaweek Foundationâ€™s conference on media, internet, technology and creativity in Amsterdam. Once again, I went courtesy of ARGNet, and like last year, it was a blast! The past few days really flew byâ€¦ Iâ€™ve been to my share of conferences, and the thing with PICNIC is, the moment you walk onto the Westergasfabriek site, where the conference is held, the atmosphere just grabs you.

The site is a rather peculiar place, or at the very least not the typical conference environment. The area consists of about fifteen small and large brick buildings, originally part of a natural gas processing plant, but now built to suit anything from dance parties to exhibitions and conferences. The first thing you notice when walking around is the high production value of the whole event — every area and room features a patch of grass, paths laid out with wood chips, plants and flowers everywhere, wooden picnic tables and of course the obligatory red and white checkered tablecloths.

There is also the PICNIC Club, the main lounging area where demos are being held, at which several sponsors have set up their booths, including artists showcasing their creations and a lot of other interactive stuff. Then thereâ€™s the Extraction Hall, the main conference hall, where the stage is actually a garden, complete with flower beds and 50-foot high banners hanging down from the ceiling, lighted in such a way it looks like see ants and other bugs are crawling around, to give you the real outdoorsy feeling. Very impressive.

For those of you not quite familiar with PICNIC, this is the second time the Dutch Crossmediaweek Foundation has organized a massive conference on cross-media and everything related to it. A lot of very interesting people attend, including many pioneers in media, technology, the Internet, and also (pervasive) gaming. This year, in addition to the three-day conference, there were many affiliated events planned as well. Take for example PICNIC JR, an attempt to get younger people interested in media and creativity, or the PICNIC Academy, a mini-conference intended for students. There was also the first Dutch edition of Come Out And Play festival, which turned the city of Amsterdam into a giant interactive playground. For more details about PICNIC and all these partner events, head over to the PICNIC website (http://www.picnicnetwork.org/).

Find Friends to Foil Fake Fforde: A “Thursday Next” ARG

June 24, 2007 / Michael Andersen

Amy Greenford is a mild-mannered bookstore employee working in the Classic books section of Foyles on Charing Cross road, and the books in her store have been behaving oddly. Books get mysteriously misfiled in the wrong section, pages of text simply vanish. Oh, and a bride and groom have materialized from a book and fled the store. Literature is in danger, and only we can save it, with the help of Spec-Ops 27 and the literary detectives.

Most specifically, Jasper Fforde’s upcoming Thursday Next novel First Among Sequels, scheduled to be released on Thursday July 5th, is in danger. Slight errors and suspicious emails to fans of Jasper Fforde who entered an online quiz competition led them to June Haversham’s blog, a publicity and marketing employee for UK publisher Hodder & Stoughton. It appears an impostor is trying to supplant the real Jasper and release a different version of the book. Both plots appear to be converging with Jasper Fforde’s scheduled book signings at Swindon Waterstones on July 7th and Foyles on July 9th.

This alternate reality game appears to offer a “novel” exploration of the line between the real world and the fictional including a woman dressed as a bride singing opera in the streets of London and numerous dead-drops inside misfiled books at Foyles. If you have a deep and abiding love of the classics, this may be the game for you. It might also be worth checking out Jasper Fforde’s books, as they include many elements that would be appealing to avid alternate reality gamers.

Click Here for the trailhead.
Click Here for the UnFiction discussion.
Click Here to learn more about Jasper Fforde and the “Thursday Next” series.

Paul Denchfield + Violet Kiteway = Fun

May 26, 2007 / Jonathan Waite

Three weeks ago, we reported on the Frozen Indigo Angel game promoting BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend music festival. On the same day, we also found out about a season two preview for Perplex City. As it turns out, the two were fated to be reported together, as they were officially connected on May 12th in a blog post on Violet Underground, with a puzzle found in one of Paul Denchfield’s videos leading to a new PXC game web site.

Within a day of finding the puzzle, players of the Frozen Indigo Angel (FIA) game had solved it (see this thread at unofficialmills.co.uk) and discovered the tie-in with Perplex City. On the 14th, Denchfield posted on his blog about the recent activity and the new PXC web site, and Violet blogged about receiving emails which put her in touch with Denchfield himself. At this point, the story revolved around Cyrus Quinton, a member of the myserious Third Power who had set up a secret web page at the newly discoverd Silburn-Griggs Mining web site. Cyrus, according to Violet, is a “sound-engineer-slash-mass-murdering-psychopath,” and Denchfield warns about a “subliminal messaging scheme” Cyrus has planned for the Big Weekend concert — just as Cyrus warns his agents about Denchfield.

From the 15th to the 18th, Cyrus created “ticket challenges” for people to take part in during real world events. These challenges were noted by both Violet and Denchfield in separate blog entries, and players quick to solve the puzzles were awarded with tickets for the concert event. However, not everything is as it seemed, as a timetable was discovered at the same time, revealing that Cyrus was planning on using Perplex City technology during the weekend to send subliminal commands to listeners of Radio 1 who attended the Big Weekend concert. Alas, even as players, led by Denchfield, were told to do whatever they could to stop Cyrus from broadcasting a “primer” over the airwaves, the signal ended up going out on the 17th, “drowning out Beyonce and Shakira.”

Crossing Your T’s

May 17, 2007 / Jonathan Waite

About two months back, I was watching the Conan O’Brien show on a whim, when I was treated to his story about hornymanatee.com. As Conan related to his audience, he had used the URL as part of a joke on a Monday night, but when the standards department of NBC got wind of the situation, things got complicated. Conan was told that if a web site URL is used on-air and doesn’t already exist, then NBC may be liable for the site’s content, which means that they must go out and purchase the URL themselves. So, in summary, NBC is the proud owner of a fake manatee porn site because of an ad-libbed joke.

As fans of alternate reality gaming already know, assets of any ARG must be secured before a game utilizes the asset in a live situation. If a game is going to use a particular email address, then the creative powers behind the game must secure that email address well in advance of the game being launched, and the same goes for web site URLs, phone numbers, addresses, and so on. At ARGFest 07 in San Francisco, Evan Jones commented about this type of situation, recounting a story about how a dot-com email address used in the ReGenesis show had originally been written into the script as a dot-ca address. A well-meaning editor thought “dot-com” sounded better and changed the script without notifying the extended reality creators. Fortunately for the creative team behind the ARG, the dot-com site was registered by someone on their team ahead of time, and everything worked out.

Fast forward to this week, in which a similar situation has unfolded.

The Unseen: A Thank You to A Few of the Individuals Who Help Make the ARG Community A Great Place

April 19, 2007 / Jessica Price

It takes a lot of people to keep the ARG community running. ARGNet is a news organization, and as such we tend to focus our reporting on the people who grab headlines, to indulge in a clichÃ©: puppetmasters, players who win prizes, and so on.

However, many of the people who make the community what it is — and ARGs what they are — work nearly invisibly, quietly creating essential resources, keeping websites updated, and using their skills and talents in other ways to benefit the community and games that they love.

ARGNet would like to take this opportunity to recognize some of these individuals and their contributions. We would like to make this a regular series, and hope our readers will keep us informed about other people from whose work we all benefit but who may not get the credit they deserve.