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TV Tropes’ Echo Chamber Turns Self-Referential Attention to ARGs

October 1, 2012 / Michael Andersen

TV Tropes is an intimidating website. Over the past eight years, the community wiki has displayed frightening tenacity in indexing, codifying, and analyzing the tricks of the storytelling trade in an oftenÂ irreverentÂ manner. Remember the pilot episode of Community? The TV Tropes community flagged those 25 minutes of television for using over 46 different tropes ranging from Worthless Foreign Degree to The Dulcinea Effect. And the community doesn’t limit itself to documenting tropes that appear on television: everything from fan fiction and webcomics to alternate reality games are fair game.

Here’s where things start getting complicated. Starting in 2011, the TV Tropes homepage was taken over by Echo Chamber, an episodic web series dedicated to illustrating tropes through the lens of an increasingly eccentric cast of characters. For two seasons, Dana Shaw and her collaborators Tom Pike and Zack Wallnau played characters in a “Trope of the Week” Show Within a Show that paralleled events in their fictional lives, under the direction of Zack’s father Mark, Director of Transmedia for “The Other Wiki” (TV Tropes’ tongue-in-cheek nickname for Wikipedia) and the inscruitable Mr. Administrator.Â Season two ended with a Mind Screw, as Mr. Administrator explains that the entire show is part of a diabolical plot to understand the true nature of fiction and reality in order to inject tropes into the fabric of reality.Â And that’s where the alternate reality game, named The Wall Will Fall by its players,Â begins.

Byzantine Tests Add a Touch of Magic to “Hunted” Campaign

September 21, 2012 / Michael Andersen

“We’re not for everyone. Just the 1% that matters.”

Byzantium Security International’s slogan embracing the financial elite’s privileged role serves as an uncomfortably poetic accompaniment to the one-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement. And with an out-of-home advertisement proudly flaunting a company’s exclusivity mere steps from Federal Hall in Wall Street, it’s no wonder the image has been repurposedÂ to support the movement.

There’s more to Byzantium Security than an arresting hexagonal logo and a general disinterest in 99% of the country. The fictional company features prominently in Cinemax’s upcoming drama Hunted, and the Wall Street advertisements are merely one of a number of rabbit holes into the company’s inner workings. The series, premiering October 19th, revolves around Byzantium Security operative Samantha Hunt (Melissa George) as she seeks to unravel the mystery behind an attempt on her life. Fans can get a glimpse into the world of a Byzantium operative by completing a five-part examinationÂ liberally dosedÂ with more than a few twists. Not everything is as it seems at Byzantium Security, which appears to be a recurring theme throughout the series’ interactive campaign, created by Campfire with the help of Jam3, the development team that worked on the interactive documentaryÂ Bear 71.

Yesterday, I received a puzzle box in the mail that serves as an alternate entry point to the Hunted transmedia experience. The hexagonal wooden box slid apart with relative ease, revealing a secret compartment carved into one of the pieces containing a miniature USB drive engraved with Byzantium Security’s overlapping hexagons. The drive contained a single password-protected file named “UNLOCK_ME.” Luckily, each of the three puzzle pieces had three letters etched onto their sides, spelling out “LOR / AGH / SSU.” Unscrambling the letters spelled out “Hourglass,” which unlocked a video driving to the Byzantium Security application page at ByzantiumTests.com.

Fourth Wall Studios’ “Dirty Work” Wins 2012 Interactive Emmy

September 15, 2012 / Michael Andersen

Tonight, the Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards held its annual awards, where the Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media – Original Interactive Television Programming was awarded to Fourth Wall Studios for their interactive programÂ Dirty Work.Â The Emmy-winning show is a dark comedy featuring an LA-area clean-up crew as they go about their grisly business, featuring guest appearances from everyone fromÂ Metta World PeaceÂ toÂ Kid Creole.Â Dirty WorkÂ is built off Fourth Wall Studios’Â RIDES platformÂ that integrates telephone calls, text messages, and user input to add a layer of depth to the viewing experience of the episodic web series.

Also nominated for the award was USA Network’s Hashtag Killer, and What’s Trending with Shira Lazar.Â Hashtag KillerÂ is an online murder mystery built around USA Networks showÂ Psych that allows players to virtually chat along with Shawn Spencer, Burton Guster, and the rest of the cast of the show while hunting down a serial killer who methodically stalked down and killed the top-scoring players in theÂ Hashtag Killer experience. The game was built on the SocialSamba platform and linked to fans’ Club Psych accounts.Â What’s Trending with Shira Lazar combines online news articles and video broadcasts to provide a direct feed into what’s popular on the internet. The show recently accepted a grant from YouTube’s Next Lab, Â bringing more live and interactive content to the show.

The Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media – Fiction category has historically been friendly to alternate reality games, with the FallenÂ alternate reality game winning in 2007, theÂ HeroesÂ Digital Experience winning in 2008, andÂ The Dharma Initiative winning in 2009. In 2010, Star Wars UncutÂ was the final winner for the category, before the Fiction and Non-Fiction categories were combined in 2011.Â This year, the Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media award was split into two new categories: original interactive television programming, and enhancement to a television program or series. Team Coco’s sync app won the program enhancement award.

Congratulations to Fourth Wall Studios for their win, and head on over to RIDES.tv to check outÂ Dirty Work and the other interactive programs the team has developed.

ARGFest-o-Con: “The Institute” Blurs the Lines Around Jejune

August 30, 2012 / Haley Moore

For day two of ARGFest-o-Con in Toronto last month, attendees were treated to a “sneak peek” of The Institute, a film by Spencer McCall about Nonchalance’s popular San Francisco ARG, The Jejune Institute.

The film focused on the player experience of Jejune and the effect that it had on those who followed its path through the streets of San Francisco and Oakland. Â Nonchalance presented a case study at ARGFest in 2009, but little of the content from that early phase of the game made it into the film. Â Most of those elements, which were posted in public places, had been taken down by the time McCall began shooting, first as a video producer hired by Nonchalance and then for the film itself.

“It’d be generous to say that we did an ‘uneven’ job of documenting the things that we created,” said Sara Thacher, who was lead producer on Jejune for most of it’s run. “Video was especially thin on the ground. Because Spencer’s project got rolling after the main parts of the experience closed, he had to rely on our archives and the archives of the participants.”

Later events are more fully documented in the film, including the controversial day-long seminar that concluded the game. The film also documents a rally to protest the game’s apparent villain, Octavio S. Coleman, Esq., a trip through the game’s installation at The Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, and one game mission that culminated with a player dancing in front of a payphone with bigfoot. Â The presentation also includes footage that was part of the game, with no markers to denote when the film moves between fact and fiction.

In a post-screening interview at the conference, McCall said he took inspiration from Banksy’s film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, a documentary widely known for blurring the lines between fact and fiction. Making a film of this kind without falling into the category of “mockumentary” is no small challenge, and with a room full of transmedia creators and some Jejune Institute players, ARGFest was a more demanding audience than most.

Koatoa Marine Kicks Off with Misdirected Interstellar Mail

August 28, 2012 / Michael Andersen

The 23rd century is finally upon us. Humankind has mastered interstellar travel and has spread out to colonize 12 brave new worlds, forming a Union of planets with a vibrant trade network. Taking advantage of these breakthroughs in technology, someone went through the trouble of shipping empty cans of fish to me, courtesy of the fine folks at Koatoa Marine in Kariyo, on the planet Oceanus.

Along with a handful of others, I received this highly curious package in the mail from Yimmu Logistics. Buried beneath a sea of packing peanuts was a small crate bearing the Koatoa Marine logo, with a copy of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species firmly tied down with twine, covering up eight empty cans of Razorkan Fish, priced at 3 credits per can. The graphic sensibilities of the 23rd century are apparently equal parts Dharma Initiative and IKEA, with the heavily branded products evoking a utilitarian disposition.

Susan Lucci Offers Ominous Warnings of Deadly Affairs

August 18, 2012 / Michael Andersen

By all accounts, Robert and Gabby Spencer have a perfect life. Only a few weeks away from their 13th wedding anniversary, the biggest marital conflict the pair currently face can be boiled down to some good-natured ribbing about over-salted sloppy joes. On Thursday, the couple took their three children out to see Unicorns vs Mechadon 3D, while tonight’s plans have the couple heading off for a romantic evening at the Candlelight Cafe. There’s only one problem: Susan Lucci.

That’s right, Susan Lucci, best known for her years playing the role of Erica Kane on the soap opera All My Children, is taking the Spencers’ wonderful life and predicting a dire future on the Is It A Deadly Affair website. And if anyone knows deadly affairs, it’s Susan Lucci. Since 1970, Erica Kane has lost more than a few husbands to infidelity, murder, faked deaths, and just about everything else an overly imaginative soap opera staff writer could conceive. Plus, Lucci is the host of a new show on the Investigation Discovery channel,Â Deadly Affairs, premiering September 8th at 10PM. To warm up for her stint at hosting a show about real life crimes of passion, Lucci is turning her attention to the Spencer family and the unknown tragedy that lies in their very near future.