It strikes me that a lot of the work going on right now in location-based experience design can trace its origins back to Situationism, sticker art, and — going way back — graffiti. There are also some obvious connections to amusement park and museum design. What are the big touchstones for you?

Wow. I’ve never had any one zero in so accurately on my influences before. For years, before we started Nonchalance, I was doing a guerrilla campaign called Oaklandish that was really attempting to fuse together the ideals of Situationism and Street Art. We’d use multi-media devices and historicaly driven content to produce happenings designed to gather large groups of people together in negative urban spaces, so they could begin to interact with each other and the space around them in new ways. It was literally “the construction of situations”, with a strong post-graffiti mindset. Haring and Basquiat are like Patron Saints to me for the very literate, site-specific graffiti art they did early on. And, yes, we absolutely had an amusement park mentality as we are created the Games of Nonchalance. When I grew up I worked as a child performer at a place called “Children’s Fairyland” in Oakland, and it was this magical hokey little fantasy world, where you could literally fall down a rabbit hole. They had magic keys where you could turn them in a lock box and suddenly hear a recording of a nursery rhyme, while looking at a diorama of the cow jumping over the moon, or whatever. There was a yellow brick road leading through the park to an Emerald City. We want to present those kinds of interactions everywhere across the civic realm, so that trap doors and side hatches exist all around you, all the time, fuzed into the urban landscape.

Over the past few years, a lot of different disciplines have been coming together around notions of embodied experience, public space, community, and play. Everyone from performance artists to game designers to educators and curators seem to be grasping at different versions of the same thing. But what *is* that thing? Do we even have a word for it?

Interestingly, most of our intern applicants have been architecture students. Somehow they’re all thinking about their work in a different way, too. There’s some kind of convergence. When I asked the question to our production manager Sara Thacher, she felt like it wasn’t necessarily useful to put a label on it, but we both agreed that the zeitgeist is happening. Sara is more interested in “why” so many different people are exploring this new “Third Space”. We agreed it is in part a reaction to the narrow confines of sanctioned activities in public space, which have been largely defined by commerce. We can legally: commute, shop, and drink a latte. Walk or run in a park between sun up and sun down. Otherwise you’re somehow suspect. People feel isolated by that. I think we’re all trying to loosen those reigns through their own individual contributions.

My name for it is Socio-Reengineering. That’s Jejune Institute terminology, and in our story it has dubious connotations, but we’re actually quite sincere about this aim. To infuse variability and play into the workaday world by re-engineering the way that people navigate and experience the space and the population around them. Sometimes it can happen in a seemingly spontaneous way, like a flash mob, and sometimes it is the result of meticulous design and effort.

One thing I really like about the Jejune Insitute is the fact that it’s a cross-platform interactive narrative that works a little bit like a gallery installation: it’s just *there*, online, on the air, and in physical space. This represents a very different approach to storytelling than that found in more “traditional” ARGs, which are typically structured around the gradual unveiling of story information leading up to a climax event of some sort. What made you pick this different path? What did you gain (and/or lose) by abandoning the unity of time?

You’re correct about the induction center as “gallery installation”. We wanted to create an immersive automated well-curated environment, and to have it exist semi-permanantly. We were outsiders to the ARG universe, and totally ignorant of it’s culture and customs. So when we finally appeared at the ARG Fest-o-Con in Portland, we learned that we had inadvertently solved one of the major stumbling blocks of earlier ARG’s; “replayability”. What we had produced could be experienced over and over again, and shared with friends, and so on. The big trade off was that it was local. People in other parts of the world are not able to experience it directly. But ideally we’ll be able to produce unique experiences in other cities in the future. Every city should have their own game!

The other thing that led in this direction was that after doing work in the streets for so long I became very curious about those semi-public and private spaces as well. What are the boundaries between them? A corporate office building has all those questions built into them. There’s this very sterile environment that is in someways meant to intimidate people. We used that to our advantage in the narrative, and at the same time subverted it by asking people to explore and reexamine that space. That was a clear incentive for us in creating the induction center.

You’ve been embedding story and play into the Bay Area for a while now. What kind of dividends has this paid in terms of building community and bringing like-minded individuals together?

For players; yes, there’s definitely been a coming together of like-minded people, especially with the recently released Act IV. It emphasizes group play, inter-dynamics, and trust so that when the group completes the experience they have truly been through a rite of passage together. We’ve been hearing from participants that they have really gelled with other players this way and formed deeper bonds. You can really see it in the EPWA protest video; all these weirdos just coming out of the woodwork to party in the streets. Ironically, because I’ve remained “behind the curtains” for so long, I don’t feel like I’ve benefitted socially from any of these activities! I’m really looking forward to coming out from backstage more and interacting directly with the players in the future.

Is civic engagement an artistic imperative?

I’d say not. Great art can be something completely personal and private.

I live in Los Angeles. Do the kinds of projects we’re talking about work best in denser cities like San Francisco or London? Or can we imagine locative stories anywhere, and on any scale?

I view these productions as being fully scaleable. It’s not so much an issue of geography and architecture as much as culture. A map isn’t unpredictable, but people can be! Once you know who the participant is then you can begin to imagine how they might interact in that particular environment. For example, I’d love to produce something for Las Vegas. There is also the “Accomplice” game in Hollywood, which operates a little more like dinner theater in the streets.

If you go back to the 1990s, a lot of people were predicting that the future of storytelling and play was going to be defined by screens, VR goggles, and, ultimately, brain implants. Thankfully, it looks like that’s not the way we’re heading — at least not right away. Where do you see all this locative stuff going in the next few years?

Mobile technology can potentially allow us to get away from the screen and back into the real world. I’m awaiting a few app features to be developed so we can take our immersive experiences to a new level, and which would allow other users to create their own real world adventures. I want my phone to let me know about the secret discovery awaiting me right around the corner. Then I want to share that discovery. I foresee every institution with real space developing their own interactive mobile applications; the Magic Mountain choose-your-own adventure iPhone game, the MOMA interactive mystery tour, or the narrative based campus orientation experience, as you had mentioned. I think at first there will be a ton of poorly designed ones, until people get over the novelty of it and recognize it as a true art form, like film.

What’s next for nonchalance?

On the practical side, we just put together a board of advisors to help us develop our business. On the creative side, we’re talking to a potential collaborator right now in the mental health field about producing a multi-sensory maze that serves therapeutic purposes. It would essentially be an inward-bound expedition through the gauntlet of emotions, with positive achievements built into it. Have you ever been on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride? It would be like that, but for your psyche. That’s one thing on the table, but we’re still looking at other opportunities.

Nonchalance’s practice stands at the intersection of three core concepts: Narrative, Consciousness, and Space (both public and private). Founded in Oakland in 1999 by director Jeff Hull, the organization’s primary goal is to infuse more variability and play into the civic realm. Over the intervening years the team has comprised a fluctuating roster of collaborators that currently includes Sara Thacher, Sean Aaberg, and Uriah Findley. Past projects have included “Oaklandish,” “The Liberation Drive-In,” “Urban Capture the Flag,” and “The Bay Area Aerosol Heritage Society.” With over 100 free public events under its belt, Nonchalance has received thirteen consecutive “Best of the East Bay Awards,” and produced exhibits and installations for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Oakland Museum of CA, Southern Exposure and the Oakland International Airport. They are currently wrapping production on the “Games of Nonchalance,” an “Immersive Media Narrative” leading participants on a journey of urban exploration throughout San Francisco’s hidden present and past.

I’ll be at SXSWi from Friday, March 12th until Monday, March 15th (view my conference profile here). Here’s what I’m thinking of checking out while I’m there:

Friday, March 12th

Friday seems a little light, but there are still a few interesting panels:

• 2:30pm, Day Stage DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Learning I just like the title of this one. Moderated by Anya Kamenetz of Fast Company.
• 3:30pm, 10AB Jacks of All Trades or Masters of One? “The web originated with generalists – webmasters designing, building, and developing. Today, a web team can have a dozen different specialist roles, each highly-focused. With that in mind, what are the strengths of specialists and generalists, and when are each put to their best use on a project or in an organization?”
• either 5:00pm, Ballroom B Time+Social+Location. What’s Next in Mobile Experiences? Featuring Naveen Selvadurai of foursquare. “As more devices become location aware, social uses will continue to evolve beyond just who and what, to WHEN. Adding the temporal dimension creates new opportunities for social interaction. Learn about ways to leverage and use technology to add features at the intersection of temporal, social, and location.”
• or 5:00pm 6AB With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: The Future of Video Games “Video games are more popular than ever, and new games are delivering all kinds of social benefits, from video-game therapy for treating PTSD, to sims for train surgeons, to alternate-reality games that actually bring people together in real life. Will video games be a positive force for people and society in the future (as they arguably are today)? This panel is co-sponsored by Discover Magazine and the National Science Foundation.”

Saturday, March 13th

This is where things really heat up…lots of great stuff about locative media, physical computing, ARGs, and more.

• 9:30am, Hilton G ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here? Chris Messina presents. “From Facebook’s newsfeed to Twitter’s relentless real-time updates, the metaphor of the “stream” has taken social networking beyond blog posts and on to rich social activities. Learn about ActivityStrea.ms – the open format adopted by Facebook, MySpace, and Windows Live – and how it’s fundamentally changing the social web.”
• 11:00am, 6AB ARGs and Women: Moving Beyond the Hot Brunette Presented by Andrea Phillips. “ARGs are often trotted out as a shining example of woman-friendly games. They boast unusually high rates of female developers and players, and a slew of kick-ass female leads. But if you dig a little deeper, are they just the post-Buffy version of Princess Peach, always needing to be saved?”
• either 12:30pm, 12AB Design Fiction: Props, Prototypes, Predicaments Communicating New Ideas Presenters include Julian Bleecker, Jennifer Leonard, and Stuart Candy. “Design fiction is an approach to design that speculates about new ideas through prototyping and storytelling. The goal is to move away from the routine of lifeless scenarios-based thinking. We will share design fiction projects and discuss related techniques for design thinking, communication and exploration of near future concepts.”
• or 12:30pm, 6AB Playing with Place: Location-Based Games and Services “Location based games and services are finally ready to go mainstream. This panel of professionals explores how to creatively craft the experiences and business models for different types of places like backyards, cities, towns, suburbs, exurbs, hiking trails, parks, and deserts.”
• 2:00pm, Exhibit Hall 1 Opening Remarks: Privacy and Publicity I’m definitely looking forward to seeing danah boyd talk.
• 3:30pm, Hilton F Moon 2.0: The Outer Limits of Lunar Exploration Can’t pass up a moon-oriented panel. “Space sector representatives will discuss how the use of web and mobile technologies create opportunities for participation in future exploration of the Moon. The panel focuses on how X PRIZE, NASA, commercial space companies, and others generate greater interaction and interest in Moon missions using collaborative platforms and social media.”
• 5:00pm, Hilton D Does My Sh*t-Talking Really Help Your Brand? Panelists include Ivan Askwith and Amber Case. “We’ve heard that ”all press is good press.” But during SXSW 2009, several panels provoked heated audience debates over a new variation: is social marketing successful if people talk about it? Controversial campaigns such as Whopper Sacrifice warrant a discussion about what really makes social media successful… and what doesn’t.”
• 6:00pm, Brush Square Park – E Dorkbot Great way to end the day. “Think of it as a science fair with free beer. Ample doses of electricity, tomfoolery, mayhem, makers and music combine to form one exquisite geek talent show. Sponsored by SXSW Interactive, the International Game Developer’s Association of Austin, Mr. Data, Ricochet Labs and the Digital Media Council. “

Sunday, March 14th

Another good day, slightly more tech-oriented.

• 9:30am, Ballroom E Web of Things – Connecting People and Objects on the Web “WoT is a vision of a Web with more devices than people on it. We extend the Web to the real world by enabling devices to become physical Web resources that follow the founding principles of the Web architecture (REST). We will demo a physical mashup with real objects the attendance can interact with using a simple RESTful API.”
• 11:00am, Hilton H Here Are Lions: The Cartography of the Future “A new breed of maps is revealing breakthroughs in our understanding of biology, neuroscience, ecology and the physical world. We can now map not just physical geographies, but also genomes, neural pathways, emotions, social networks and ideas. These new maps reveal how society will change over the next twenty years.”
• 11:00am, Ballroom D Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data Clay Shirky’s talk.
• 12:30pm, 5ABC The 10-Minute Transmedia Experience Presented by Maureen McHugh and Steve Peters of No Mimes Media. “Transmedia experiences ‘- stories played out across multiple platforms: on the web, through mobile and even in the audience’s environment ‘- are going more and more mainstream. Audiences are beginning to expect collaboration in the creation of the experience. What are the techniques to constructing an immersive, compelling 10-minute experience? Transmedia and Alternate Reality Game veterans Steve Peters and Maureen McHugh of No Mimes Media lead this core conversation, where participants will experience the astonishingly immersive nature of transmedia, and discuss the conceptual issues and architecture of the experience. Fans and professionals from any industry are welcome.”
• 3:30pm, Ballroom C Revenge Of Kick-Ass Mash-Ups with Punk Rock APIs More punk DIY stuff. “Last time we wrote an API layer for a dozen different sites and services, using nothing but free online tools and client-side JavaScript. This time we’ll crack into client-side OAuth. This time actual working code WILL BE WRITTEN BY YOU. This time … it’s personal. ”
• 7:00pm, Austin Grand Ballroom 13th Annual SXSW Web Awards Ceremony “The Web Awards Ceremony is the centerpiece of evening activities at the SXSW Interactive Festival and an event not to be missed. Hosted by Doug Benson with special surprises in store for the big ‘lucky 13′!”

Monday, March 15th

Some really great panels today — unfortunately I have to leave late in the afternoon…

• 9:30am, Hilton K Interactive Documentaries: A Multidimensional Narrative Panel features my friends from Take Action Games. “Documentaries are just not about ‘documenting’ an event – they interpret and synthesize many sources of information to explain a situation or express a specific point of view. So where does the user interact with this specific project? How can the users input influence the content and the creators? Meet interactive documentary producers to hear how they approach their medium. Learn what’s new when designing a weaving narrative and how do you make it engaging.”
• 1:10pm, 12AB Hyperlocal Focus: Growing A Vibrant Community Media Ecosystem “Filmmakers, videobloggers, podcasters, pirate & low-power radio jocks and public access TV producers are all creating content in your local community, but they often don’t collaborate or even talk to each other, despite using the same tools and sometimes even seeking the same audiences. A 15 year-old videoblogger and a 50 year-old technical director at a local network TV affiliate may have a lot to learn from each other, but in what context would they ever meet? How can you engage local content creators and build a vibrant media community? This session is about how to create (and utilize) healthy, sustainable user-generated media scenes in local communities, using community media centers, creative salons, non-profit media arts foundations, citizen journalism organizations and grass roots organizing principals.”
• 5:20pm, 12AB Transmedia Storytelling – Creating Stories That Work Over all Platforms Presented by James Milward of Secret Location fame. “Why and how are narrative worlds, be it traditional Film, Television, or New Media stories expanding across different media outlets and platforms? What are the emerging features of ‘Transmedia’ behavior, consumption and production? What do these new forms of storytelling, product and service design and branding tell us about future convergence of culture and technology?”

…and if I could stay until Tuesday, I definitely wouldn’t miss:

• 9:30am, 6AB Playing with 140 Characters: Designing Games for Twitter “Twitter: a strange new platform for games. In this panel, the design collective Local No. 12 discusses how they have learned to work within the tight constraints of Twitter, while exploring new forms of gameplay and social interaction. This session will cover the state of games on Twitter, what has and hasn’t worked, and best practices for creating games for this platform.”
• 11:00am, 6AB Pervasive Games and Playful Experiences: Rendering the Real World “The most photorealistic, networked environment you can play in is real life. Mobile internet, pervasive gaming and sensor-enriched public spaces enable new possibilities in game-play, distributed story-telling and immersive events. Building on previous SXSW events, leading practitioners will explore the ethics, design challenges and business potential of this new form. This session is supported by UK Trade & Investment and Arts Council, England.”

What have I left out? Let me know via twitter or in the comments. See you in Austin!

First off, I noticed your dissertation, “Follow the Pixel Rabbit,” on your website. Even though I can’t read German, I found it interesting to flip through the pages. Speaking generally, what’s your dissertation about — and what does the Alice reference in the title mean?

I wrote my dissertation on storytelling in video games around 2002/2003. At that time game studies was still a pretty new thing at universities in Switzerland (and games not really accepted as a serious academic subject). With the reference to Alice in Wonderland I wanted to make the statement that digital games offer a magic, bizarre and wonderful world for the one who dares to enter. My dissertation is about different ways of storytelling and player engagement of video games, hyperfiction and interactive movies – latter being a genre that failed remarkably in its beginnings – just watch/play I’m Your Man!

Mela Kocher Lennstroem

Obviously you are engaged with a lot of different fields of inquiry, from game design to narratology to aesthetics. How did you end up deciding to study/make this kind of stuff? What path did you take to becoming a theorist-practitioner?

Besides frenetically playing Games & Watch as a child, I lead a pretty video game-free life until my roommate in college got me into Myst and Riven. I studied German literature at that point and was curious to test the traditional literary theory frameset on games – and luckily my professor was encouraging that. Writing a dissertation on the topic was a pretty natural step (since it was fun, challenging and exciting), and during that time I played lots of games and taught many game workshops for teachers and librarians. In the past years I’ve been getting more and more intrigued by ARGs and their vast potential for storytelling and blurring the lines between fiction and reality – so I was more than happy to have gotten a research grant to study, play and now even make ARGs in the USA for two years.

You recently appeared on a panel at the Digital Media and Learning conference entitled, “Storytellers, Storymakers and Learning by ARG.” As a part of the panel, you and your co-panelist, game designer Ken Eklund (World Without Oil), designed and ran a mini-ARG. What was the purpose of this game, and how did it work?

The conference theme was “Diversifying Participation”, and our team wanted to discuss ARGs & participatory learning. Since it would probably take an hour to explain what ARGs are (and people still wouldn’t get it!), it seemed more effective (and way more fun!) to have the audience engage in one first hand. The game plot went like this: One of the speakers (which ended up being me) got lost on campus and was not be able to show up for the session in time. While Ken explained this to the waiting conference attendees, he had a “stress-induced narcoleptic attack of 20 minutes” so the audience was completely left to themselves (while our other two team members, PJ Rusnak and Stephen Petrina, stayed incognito in the room for possible trouble shooting).

I wish I had been there. How many people ended up participating?

You should have! There were around 40 people in a quite tiny room so it was packed. It was amazing which strategies the participants came up with – they started a Facebook search, tried to sneak Ken’s phone from his sleeping hand, they tweeted me, tried to call and text me and physically went out on campus to search for me – unfortunately for them, in my fictional world my phone was malfunctioning and I could only send them pictures from my location via tweet to ping.fm. That constraint gave way to lots of creativity, though (as our PM team had hoped for), and the participants truly engaged in their storymaking efforts.

Screen capture of Twitter activity from the mini-ARG, Feb 19, 2010

What kind of feedback did you get? How was the notion of “learning by ARG” understood by the assembled educators?

There was definitely excitement in the room during the game (I watched the video later on). Most of them immediately understood that it was a game, and got into play mode. My favorite reaction was the (failed) gamejack attempt of one man who offered to hold his own speech while they were waiting for the scheduled speaker. Another person doubted that I was truly lost but suggested that I might just need a bit of comforting to take up my role as speaker. Lovely!

Even from this short ARG performance, people saw the great potential ARGs bear for learning – via features like creativity, collaboration, common goals, instant player feedback, immersion, role play, problem-solving… Most attendants thought of the ARG as an inspiring experience during an academic conference stuffed with formal one-to-many presentations.

The players eventually 'found' Mela and directed her back to the conference room.

On a more meta level, how do participatory game constructs like storymaking ARGs complicate or extend your thinking on narrative in digital games? Are the categories of “story” and “game” collapsing into one another, or do the traditional boundaries still hold?

ARGs have a potential for storytelling and storymaking that video games do not have, because of the possibility for real time interaction with the puppet masters and the actual chance for the player (or the more believable illusion!) to influence the course of the game. Narrative adventure video games are in comparison to that so limited and often incoherent due to their closed programming. Of course, more open structured video games like GTA offer completely different ways of experiencing and creating a story as well which also extends beyond the realm of the screen, but ARGs just take this idea much further. But new options bear new problems, and ARGs rely on the puppet masters’ coherent and instant feedback and their fair choices – and on the collaboration of the fellow players.

To your second question: I’d rather keep the concepts of “story” and “game” apart for analytical reasons, even though they tend to overlap [in the case of] ARGs: [that is,] I can play by being part of the story or by trying to crack a code. I would say that ARGs make story playable, but they are more story than game – but then this also depends on what the player is looking for. I myself love to ’stalk’ a character and get into the game through character interaction while others love to solve puzzles etc. – the more traditional game-aspects of an ARG.

What’s next for ARGs — and for your research in general?

I’m curious to see if ARGs will develop towards shorter, replayable and even payable game formats for wider audiences (and therefore blend with features of video games).

I myself got very intrigued by having experienced a challenging setting like the academic conference as a playground, and I hope to investigate further in that direction. I’m not a fan of serious games per se, but I do believe that “play” in general provides at its core some of the most valuable experiences for living and learning.

Thanks, Mela!

Multiplayer social media games, including ARGs like Top Secret Dance Off and Must Love Robots, Facebook games like School of Magic, and collaborative production games such as SF0 are inherently about performance. These games allow players to exercise their public voices, step into the limelight, and actively engage with others through performative acts such as videotaping themselves dancing, submitting fictional robot-dating videos, engaging with friends in role playing mini-games, and creating and documenting ad hoc street art interventions. Likewise, performance artists are discovering the generative and poetic potentials of the magic circle and are finding ways to make theatre-going experiences more and more game-like. One example of this productively category-defying overlap is Coney’s A Small Town Anywhere, which is kind of like an elaborate game of Werewolf, and kind of like an evening at the theatre, and in many ways not at all like either of those things.

A Small Town Anywhere is a theatrical event. It happened at the BAC or Battersea Arts Centre between October 15th and November 7th 2009. A Small Town Anywhere casts a Playing Audience as the citizens of, well, A Small Town Anywhere. There are no actors in the Town except the Playing Audience, who are free to interact and explore as they please. Henri Georges, the Historian convening A Small Town Anywhere, wishes to stress that visitors will not be expected to ‘perform’ in any uncomfortable manner, merely conversing with other vistors and perhaps writing a letter or two. You can speak to Henri in advance of your visit and perhaps discover a history for yourself in the Town, or simply turn up to play your part. (smalltownanywhere.net)

Lyn Gardner’s piece in The Guardian summarizes the experience and impact of the event nicely:

The letter is not addressed to me, but I open it anyway. Having control over the mail is one of the perks of being the postmistress in a small French town. The anonymous writer is, I discover, making a serious allegation – and it’s about me. There are hints about a murdered baby, its corpse buried under a juniper tree. I am, of course, as guilty as hell.

I look around the town square where the baker and butcher are gossiping, watch the children going into the schoolroom, see the mayor walk by. I wonder who wrote the letter. Then I do what I have done with all the previous letters I’ve intercepted. I destroy it. Then I write several ­ letters of my own, slyly suggesting that the schoolmistress was, last year, rumoured to be pregnant. Soon, the whole town will know.

I’m taking part in A Small Town Anywhere, a theatre piece in which the audience are the performers. It’s currently playing at London’s BAC (Battersea Arts Centre), part of a season of interactive shows that redefine the boundaries of theatre. Here, the show is both drama and game. Audience members – there are about 30 per performance – play characters in an imaginary French town. There is no script; every audience member plays a part in developing the story, and thus becomes responsible for its outcome.

And that outcome is not always pretty. The show ends with the community deciding who must be banished from the town to save the rest. (The Guardian)

More: Brendan Adkins’ description of his experience at the event, Matt Trueman’s review.

Duncan Speakman’s As if it were for the last time is a soundwalk and street performance wherein audiences are “invited to download an MP3 and turn up at a secret location to listen to the track at a specified time.” Speakman calls this a “subtlemob”; in contrast to flash mobs, participants in subtlemobs are urged to “try to remain invisible” throughout the event by blending into the normal flow of a busy urban space. Consequently, much of the power and poetry of projects like As if it were for the last time lie in their ability to make participants hyper-aware of their surroundings and their roles in the performance of everyday life. As one participant put it, “it was like you were given permission to look — at the people who weren’t doing it.”

From the project’s page at subtlemob.com):

When you put on the headphones you’ll find yourself immersed in the cinema of everyday life. As the soundtrack swells people in the crowd around you will begin to re-enact the England of today. Sometimes you’ll just be drifting and watching, but sometimes you’ll be following instructions or creating the scenes yourself. Don’t worry, there will be nothing illegal or embarrassing, sometimes you might be re-enacting moments you’ve seen in films, sometimes you’ll just be playing yourself. This is no requiem, this a celebratory slow dance, a chance to savour the world you live in, and to see it with fresh eyes. (subtlemob.com)

Playwright and tech enthusiast Hannah Nicklin’s writeup:

This evening I took part in a sound walk-come-performance called ‘As if it Were the Last Time’. It was devised by Duncan Speakman and was put on by subtlemob. It took place on a small number of streets near Covent Garden. It was a (performance? Experience? Neither of these words do -) for two people. We were provided with a map, an mp3, and told to set it going at 6pm on the dot. My critical vocabulary is already struggling with this piece, because it really was very individual. That was the point. For each and every person who took part, the performance (for want of a more accurate word) was theirs. Entirely. And not, in staged theatre, as each audience member receiving the piece from a different perspective. This was each participant doing. The movements, the characters the gestures, the reflection in the shop windows and puddles, and the touch of someone’s hand on a shoulder, were all completely yours. Of your making. (Hannah Nicklin)

News of subtlemob events: http://twitter.com/subtlemob

I wanted to dive right into some nuts-and-bolts writer stuff, so here goes. Suppose you’re setting out to make an indie ARG. How do you begin? Do you start with particular design goals (e.g. modes of participation you’d like to elicit, networks you’d like to engage with, etc), or do you look for a story first?

Whether i’m working w/a client or doing an indie, i always begin with story. Of course, with a client i will have many things to consider (brand’s voice, brand’s audience, brand’s platforms, etc.) while creating a story that fits for the gig, but story is still most important. The way the story unfolds to & interacts with the online and offline world happens organically as i write the story (but i keep that list of mechanics separate).

Screenwriters and novelists typically articulate their themes by moving a protagonist through conflict, crisis, climax, and resolution. ARGs and other distributed story/play activities arguably function in a very different way — not least because of their fundamentally participatory nature, which has the effect of fragmenting the role of the protagonist across the player community. What’s your thinking on how ARGs can engage with themes and create meaning?

My ARG stories are very much like screenplays.. except instead of the conflict, crisis, climax and resolution only happening to the character world, it also happens to my players/audience. So, as i write the storyline/storylines for the characters, i’m not only working out how the events will change the characters, but also considering where the players/audience fit into this world and how they will/may touch it/affect it/change it.

Boundaries seem to blur rather quickly in the ARG space. I wonder: do you consider yourself a game designer or a storyteller — or neither?

I really consider myself a storyteller that loves ARGs… and i still like “puppetmaster”.

I’m curious about how you structure your projects. Do you work with a storyboard from the very beginning — i.e., do you use it to discover the arc of your story — or is it something you only bring in once you know where things are going?

Usually a story has been in mind for quite some time before I begin to write it, storyboard it, etc. At some point i buy a notebook, foam core and index cards. The notebook comes first. i write and write and write and soon the notebook leads to index cards and foam core boards. The first set of boards i create break down the Acts of the ARG (this will include diff paths the players/audience may create). The next set of boards will break down the characters. Near these boards i place boards for “assets” and begin those lists. Later in the process i will connect story and characters to assets via string. i’m sure that sounds archaic but i work best when i can touch it and live with it around me like that. i can look at and rework these boards for a long time. i have boards up right now that i’ve been working on for over 8 months. i’m slowly building a world and the boards are evolving as i write scripts, build sets, props, shoot, etc. soon i will begin the ARG boards. My ARG boards will take me from day 1 to end game/goodbyes and beat out what happens each day within the storyworld (including mechanics, assets, shoot sched, etc).

In your comments on my earlier post, you wrote: “my storyboard is separated from my assets charts.” Why do you think it’s important to keep things separate this way?

I prefer ARGs with a story. Some ARGs just deliver a string of events. For me, by starting with a “storyboard” that is dedicated to story only, i can be sure i will not make this mistake.

ARGs are inherently collaborative; creators often work in teams, and games almost always involve a large amount of back-and-forth between the players and the designers. How do you accommodate for this dynamism in your story planning?

You make sure you communicate well with everyone on the team. This means you must have a great way to share information and to keep everyone on the same page. On a recent project i simply made a doc out of my ARG boards. Each day everyone could look at that and see what was happening that day and where we were headed. It’s also really important to have a great producer staying on top of everyone with a hot sheet. Everyone should know as you head into producing the ARG that some things will change due to players/audience interaction/participation. So, you must make certain that you have the time in your schedule to accommodate those changes and forks in the road. i don’t think its a good idea to shoot a ton of stuff pre-launch. i do shoot some, but most is scheduled to happen post launch so that is really is happening during the “story time”. (its like live theatre that can react/change/or not to the players/audience) And again, you make sure you communicate the changes well with everyone.

Where are things going for ARGs? And for you?

i really don’t know where ARGs are going. i think if ARGs are to survive they need to grow and change. First, we need to tell better stories. i would love to see more artists and filmmaker types dive into the genre to help push the envelope. We need to examine how ARGs play out. There are many problems with how and where ARGs are played out now. Many people have told me they’d love to play an ARG but just don’t know “what to do” or “where to go”. i’ve been playing around with different “live help” ideas. On Levi’s we had “GameTeam” who were around the boards to help out newcomers. i know it was a useful tool but its only the beginning. Also, traditional forums are overwhelming to many newbies. The forum set up hasn’t changed much since.. um forever. we should redesign “the forum” or the space where the players organize and meet. Beyond all that, i do think that “interactive storyworlds” have a big future. i’m certain that someday, in the not so distant future, some cousin of ARGs and MMORGs will deliver episodic adventures to players/audience. i like this idea that on a given night a storyworld comes alive and you are invited to step into it and for a couple hours and then check back next week for the next episode.

Thanks, Jan!

Jan Libby created the popular indie Alternate Reality Games – Sammeeeees & Wrath of Johnson (Sam II). Her year following Sammeeeees was spent writing and designing for LG15 Studios (on the Lonelygirl15 Series season 1 & 2). She then partnered on Book 3 of the horror/sci-fi Eldritch Errors with Brian Clark & GMD Studios. Jan now works primarily as an ARG/ARE and Community consultant to Media Companies and Agencies. After recently wrapping on Levi’s GO IV Game/Experience, Jan has spent the last couple months building up her next indie ARG storyworld, 36nine.

This resource contains links to blog posts, conference papers, journal articles, and other texts related to alternate reality gaming.

Defining ARG

• WTF is an ARG? (Andrea Phillips, 2009) “Why can’t we reach a consensus on what an ARG is, and what an ARG isn’t? Why do we return home, like swallows to Capistrano, to that question: What IS an ARG? This is my attempt to wrestle with this knotty topic, and offer up a few opinions.”
• Undefining ARG (Sean Stacey, 2006) “I have a way to define alternate reality gaming in such a fashion as to prove to you that I cannot in fact define it at all. While the previous statement may seem nonsensical, I encourage you to bear with me. The following is written with the assumption that the reader has some passing familiarity with the history, mechanics, and gameplay of ARGs.”
• Alternate Reality Games (Sean Stewart, 2006) “Building an ARG is like running a role-playing game in your kitchen for 2 million of your closest friends. Like a role-playing game, we get players to actually enter the world of our story and interact with it, both online and in the real world.”

Design approaches and philosophies

• Everything you know about ARGs is wrong (Dan Hon, 2008) “There are, it seems to me, a number of differing interpretations as to what an ARG is, exactly, and that makes them quite easy to attack. If you don’t know what something is, it’s quite easy for it not to have lived up to your expectations.”
• ARGFest 2007 Keynote (Elan Lee, Sean Stewart, 2007) “Delivering a keynote address to this audience is really difficult. What can we talk about? We can’t talk about anything we’ve done in the past because you were all there experiencing it. We can’t talk about anything we’re working on right now because that would ruin the fun and the mystery of the experience. We can’t talk about anything we have planned for the future because frankly, you are the competition. All that’s left is self-deprecation and the elephant in the room…trust.” (summary here)

See also: Part 2

Poetics, formal analyses, and surveys

• Storytelling in New Media: The Case of Alternate Reality Games, 2001-2009 (Jeffrey Kim, Elan Lee, Timothy Thomas, and Caroline Dombrowski, 2009) “New media allows previously passive consumers to tell and shape stories together. Yet most information is still disseminated in a top–down fashion, without taking advantage of the features enabled by new media. This paper presents five Alternate Reality Game (ARG) case studies which reveal common features and mechanisms used to attract and retain diverse players, to create task–focused communities and to solve problems collectively. Voluntary, collective problem solving is an intriguing phenomenon wherein disparate individuals work together asynchronously to solve problems together. ARGs also take advantage of the unique features of new media to craft stories that could not be told using other media.”
• Emerging Participatory Culture Practices: Player-Created Tiers in Alternate Reality Games (Christy Dena, 2008) “This paper introduces an emerging form of participatory culture, one that is not a modification or elaboration of a primary producer’s content. Instead, this paper details how the artifacts created to ‘play’ a primary producer’s content has become the primary work for massive global audiences. This phenomenon is observed in the genre of alternate reality games (ARGs) and is illustrated through a theory of ‘tiering’. Tiers provide separate content to different audiences. ARG designers tier their projects, targeting different players with different content. ARG player-production then creates another tier for non-playing audiences. To explicate this point, the features that provoke player-production — producer-tiering, ARG aesthetics and transmedia fragmentation — are interrogated, alongside the character of the subsequent player-production. Finally, I explore the aspects of the player-created tiers that attract massive audiences, and then posit what these observations may indicate about contemporary artforms and society in general.” See also: Christy’s online augmentation for this paper.
• Towards a Poetics of Multi-Channel Storytelling (Christy Dena, 2004) “As yet no poetics to address transmedia, alternate reality gaming, cross- or multi-platform and cross-media of content have been proposed in academia; in addition no poetics has been invented for multi-channel single-story creation (that is: one story told over multiple media). This paper provides an overview of the poetics being developed for multi-channel storytelling. It is a narrative schema intended for instructional use in story creation and literary criticism.”
• IGDA ARG SIG Whitepaper (IGDA, 2006) “Although new to many people, Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are still far short of achieving their full potential, each new wave of games bringing major new innovations and increased understanding of what works and what doesn’t. We hope you find both inspiration and real practical help in this paper, and look forwards to playing the next wave of ARGs you come up with.”
• ‘This is Not a Game’: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play (Jane McGonigal, 2003) “The increasing convergence and mobility of digital network technologies have given rise to new, massively-scaled modes of social interaction where the physical and virtual worlds meet. This paper explores one product of these extreme networks, the emergent genre of immersive entertainment, as a potential tool for harnessing collective action. Through an analysis of the structure and rhetoric of immersive games, I explore how immersive aesthetics can generate a new sense of social agency in game players, and how collaborative play techniques can instruct real-world problem-solving.”

Theoretical context

• ARGs and Academia (IGDA ARG SIG Wiki, 2007) “For many academics, ARGs are the manifestation of theories they have been exploring for a long time. ARGs provide, therefore, the unique opportunity to see many theories in action. Popular topics of interest have been the notion of fictionality, the notion of a game space, interactive narrative, commerciality and player dynamics. They have entered the realm of ARGs informed by particular key ideas which are exemplified in the following texts…”
• Participation (Claire Bishop, ed, 2006) “Participation begins with writings that provide a theoretical framework for relational art, with essays by Umberto Eco, Bertolt Brecht, Roland Barthes, Peter Bürger, Jen-Luc Nancy, Edoaurd Glissant, and Félix Guattari, as well as the first translation into English of Jacques Rancière’s influential ‘Problems and Transformations in Critical Art.’ The book also includes central writings by such artists as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, Joseph Beuys, Augusto Boal, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. And it features recent critical and curatorial debates, with discussions by Lars Bang Larsen, Nicolas Bourriaud, Hal Foster, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist.”
• Relational Aesthetics (Nicolas Bourriaud, 1998) “Where does our current obsession for interactivity stem from? After the consumer society and the communication era, does art still contribute to the emergence of a rational society? Bourriaud attempts to renew our approach toward contemporary art by getting as close as possible to the artists works, and by revealing the principles that structure their thoughts: an aesthetic of the inter-human, of the encounter; of proximity, of resisting social formatting.”
• The Open Work (Umberto Eco, 1962) “The Open Work remains significant for its powerful concept of “openness”–the artist’s decision to leave arrangements of some constituents of a work to the public or to chance–and for its striking anticipation of two major themes of contemporary literary theory: the element of multiplicity and plurality in art, and the insistence on literary response as an interactive process between reader and text. The questions Umberto Eco raises, and the answers he suggests, are intertwined in the continuing debate on literature, art, and culture in general.”

Case studies and ethnographies

• ‘I am Trying to Believe’: Dystopia as Utopia in the Year Zero Alternate Reality Game (Alexander Charles Oliver Hall, 2009) “Year Zero, an ARG that includes a recent studio release by the “industrial” rock band Nine Inch Nails, is a dystopian narrative that is unfolding in the ARG tradition. As a dystopian narrative game, Year Zero is able to harness the cautionary element of the game for social awareness and quite possibly social action. Technology’s ability to resurrect its utopian energy by offering new ways of telling dystopian (and yet utopian) stories such as via the ARG is indeed ironic, but it is doubly important to finding utopian energy in postmodern culture and facilitating political action through gaming.”
• Fictional Press Releases and Fake Artifacts: How the Smithsonian American Art Museum is Letting Game Players Redefine the Rules (Georgina Bath Goodlander, 2009) “In the fall of 2008, the Smithsonian American Art Museum hosted an Alternate Reality Game titled ‘Ghosts of a Chance.’ We did this with three goals in mind: to broaden our audience, to do a bit of self-promotion, and, most importantly, to encourage discovery around our collections in a new, very interactive way. This paper will discuss the challenges that the museum faced, evaluate the successes and failures of each part of the game, and make recommendations for other museums interested in trying something similar.”
• Tracking the emergent properties of the collaborative online story “Deus City” for testing the standard model of alternate reality games (Adam Brackin, 2008) “This study explores the possibilities for better collaborative storytelling through Alternate Reality Games by investigating their origins as well as their definably unique qualities and characteristics; by critically analyzing the recent Alternate Reality Game “Deus City” which was specifically designed for the study to test new forms and delivery methods within the context of the genre; and by outlining areas of change which indicate where the future of Interactive fiction may be very soon.”
• Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming (Jane McGonigal, 2007) “This essay describes the design and successful deployment of a series of massively collaborative game missions in I Love Bees, the alternate reality game. Alternate reality games (ARGs) are massively multiplayer puzzle adventures that combine online interactive content with real-world game events. McGonigal proposes ’stimulating ambiguity’ as the central design philosophy of ARGs. She explores how ambiguous game content stimulates massively collaborative game play that allows for a greater share of leadership and meaningful participation in large-scale player groups. She also outlines how the open-ended puzzles of ARGs inspire multiple, creative interpretations that allow for diverse problem-solving strategies to flourish in a single player community. The essay is grounded in a close reading of player-produced content and their interpretations of the core puzzle of the I Love Bees game: a series of several hundred GPS coordinates, dates, and times that were listed on the central game Web site.” (.pdf here)
• See also: ARGs in institutions

Interviews with designers, researchers, and players

• Interview with Cathy’s Book Co-Author Sean Stewart (Michael Anderson, Sean Stewart, 2010) “[You] could argue that storytelling has only gone through five big revolutions: campfire stories, the invention of theater, the invention of the printing press and rise of the novel, the motion picture camera and cinema, and THIS, whatever the hell you want to call it. The multi-platform many-to-many art that the internet enables. I am incredibly aware of my stupendous good fortune in lucking into a ground floor suite in Revolution #5. It would seem ungrateful to turn my back on it just now.”
• Events, not ARGs: Interview with the founders of 4th Wall (Elan Lee, Jim Stewartson, Sean Stewart, 2009) Interview on Variety’s Technotainment blog. “Our new company — 18 months old now — the basic idea is to take the rock concert and figure out, ‘What’s the album? What’s the content version of that so you can have these experiences any time, so they don’t go away on the date of a future release?’ They can ultimately be monetized. So, we think of the format and what we’re building as a genuine new entertainment format, one that sits between moves and video games.”
• Producing Transmedia Experiences: Participation & Play (Frank Rose, Jordan Weisman, Ken Eklund, Louisa Stein, Mia Consalvo, 2009) Panel discussion from Futures of Entertainment 4. Moderated by Ivan Askwith. “One of the most overt forms of transmedia storytelling, the Alternate Reality Game (ARG), often makes participation a central and defining aspect of transmedia experiences, and creates opportunities to engage participants in play, performance and game-like systems. How can these interactive and participatory experiences be planned for? What is their function in the larger transmedia experience, and how do we understand the relative roles of the “author” and the “audience” in creating transmedia experiences?”

• An Interview with JC Hutchins: Personal Effects (JC Hutchins, 2008) Michael Andersen’s interview on ARGN. “[We] all know that most ARGs require what I call ‘bunches of brains’ … lots of players … to unlock puzzles and push the story forward. Dark Art is different in that we’re aiming to allure folks who’ve never heard the word ‘ARG’ to participate in this awesome breed of storytelling.” See also: Lance Weiler’s interview with JC on the Workbook Project.
• Storytelling 2.0: Alternate Reality Games (Elan Lee, Sean Stewart, 2008) TOC’s Liza Daly conducts the interview. “I wanted to know if ARGs are a viable form of commercial storytelling, if they can be packaged up after the experience has ended, and if they can engage with a wider audience beyond hard-core gamers.”
• Elan Lee’s Alternate Reality (Elan Lee, 2006) “I consider the first ARG The Beatles’ “Sergeant Pepper” album. Of course, it depends how you define an ARG. My definition is very loose. An alternate reality game is anything that takes your life and converts it into an entertainment space. If you look at a typical video game, it’s really about turning you into a hero; a super hero, a secret agent. It’s your ability to step outside your life and be someone else. An ARG takes those same sensibilities and applies them to your actual life. It says, what if you actually were a super hero, what if you actually were a secret agent? Instead of living in the box that’s your television or your computer, why not use your actual life as a storytelling delivery platform?”
• The Story Doesn’t Care: An Interview with Sean Stewart (Sean Stewart, 2006) “I honestly believe that the gods in their infinite mercy looked down and gave me a chance —miraculously and wholly unlooked for—to be at Kitty Hawk, to be in motion pictures in 1905, to be at a place and a moment in time where something extraordinarily exciting was just getting off the ground. As much as I’d like to think it had much to do with my merit, mostly it’s this huge stroke of timing and good luck to be in the right place at the right time, working with the right people, to have a chance to be in on something at an extraordinary cultural moment.”

Research resources and references

• ARGology.org “ARGology is a group effort by a bunch of great people from the IGDA ARG SIG. It is a site which hopes to aggregate much needed information about alternate reality games for developers, journalists, researchers and players.”
• ARGN “Simply put, ARGNet is the place to be when news breaks about new ARGs, as it offers insightful, investigative reporting from dedicated, knowledgeable volunteers through articles, interviews and netcasts.”
• ARG Stats and ARGs Around the World Super-comprehensive list of ARGs, including information about uptake, impact, and awards. Compiled by Christy Dena (whose site also hosts many other great resources like this and this and this).
• is this ARG? Real-time social media and news feeds about Alternate Reality Gaming and more.
• Google Scholar keyword search
• Wikipedia: Alternate Reality Game
• Wonder Weasels Game guides and player information for a variety of recent ARGs.
• Zotero Group: ARG Research Zach Whalen has set up a Zotero group “for building a bibliography related to Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), Transmedia Storytelling, Immersive Gaming and whatever other synonyms and related forms you can think of.” Most of the links found in this resource have been cross-posted there. If you are a Zotero user, please help the group to expand its bibliography!

Looking for a more traditional bibliography? Click here to view this list using the Chicago Manual of Style.

As always, any comments are much appreciated!

Know of something that should be listed here? Please get in touch with me via the comments and I will update the resource.

Museums

Games

• Ghosts of a Chance (Smithsonian, 2008-2010) “We live in a world in which information and entertainment are customizable and immediately available. The Internet has become a larger part of everyday life, and so too have networked games, as people seek community, activity, a sense of achievement, and the chance to be part of something bigger . . . Museums can reach out to their audiences in more ways, using blogs, podcasts, video, and social media, but can they meaningfully engage visitors using games? In the fall of 2008, the Smithsonian American Art Museum hosted an Alternate Reality Game titled “Ghosts of a Chance.” We did this with three goals in mind: to broaden our audience, to do a bit of self-promotion, and, most importantly, to encourage discovery around our collections in a new, very interactive way. This paper will discuss the challenges that the museum faced, evaluate the successes and failures of each part of the game, and make recommendations for other museums interested in trying something similar.” (Archimuse)

• More on Ghosts of a Chance: Georgina Goodlander’s paper, Nina Simon’s blog writeup, Anika Gupta’s piece on Smithsonian.com and goSmithsonian, Washington Post coverage, and NPR’s coverage.
• PHEON (Multiple institutions, 2010) “For the past couple of months CityMystery has been building a new game, called PHEON. (A pheon is an ancient Greek arrowhead that has come to symbolize nimbleness of wit.) The purpose of our game is to celebrate (and reinforce) the American impulse to innovate. An economist friend of mine recently said that we have to “invent” our way out of our current mess. With PHEON I am promoting the idea that Americans understand innovation as a reoccurring utility of our democracy, one that matches our ability to adapt and succeed. PHEON’s subtext has to do with how ideas are passed along: how one person articulates a wish that another fulfills.” (“Sneak Preview of a New Museum Game“)
• More on PHEON: see Pass on the PHEON!.
• Many museums are also developing location-specific games and storytelling activities (like this or this) that don’t fit comfortably into the definition of an ARG. For some starting points for looking into these kinds of projects, see my locative media and ambient storytelling resources, and visit Nancy Proctor’s site, Museum Mobile.

Articles and discussions

• Reshaping the art museum June 2009 article from ArtNews: “Confronted with urgent demographic realities, art-museum directors are drawing on game theory, interactive technology, and a host of other new strategies to help people feel welcome, engaged, and emotionally fulfilled.”
• Smithsonian 2.0 “The two-day Smithsonian 2.0 gathering explores how to make SI collections, educational resources, and staff more accessible, engaging, and useful to younger generations (teenage through college students) who will largely experience them digitally. Over 30 creative people from the web and new media world will meet with 30 Smithsonian staff members to generate a vision of what a digital Smithsonian might be like in the years ahead.”

Libraries and Library Systems

Games

• Find Chesia (Carroll County MD Public Library, 2009) “Carroll County Public Library simply defined their ARG as a game played online and in the real world, where players solve puzzles, collect clues and objects, and ultimately find out about the mysterious Chesia. The library’s definition focused on the interactive story element and the promotion of technology literacy. Lynn Wheeler, Director of Carroll County Public Library, expressed pride in the project and the volunteers and staff who ‘have worked tirelessly to create delightful opportunities for teens to learn about and in turn use Web 2.0 technologies to create fun learning activities.’” (School Library Journal)

• Blood on the Stacks (Trinity University, 2006-2007) “Blood on the Stacks began in the spring of 2006, with a charge from Library Director Diane Graves to invent an orientation to follow in the footsteps of the hugely successful Harry Potter-themed orientations created by science librarian Barbara MacAlpine. Librarians Jeremy Donald, Clint Chamberlain and Jason Hardin created a mixed-media, digital/analog experience that treated the library as both a cyberspace and a bricks-and-mortar campus hotspot. Communication professor Aaron Delwiche supplied the idea of making the library orientation an ‘alternate reality game,’ where a fictional online narrative combines with real-world people, places, and events to create a game that blurs the boundary between the real and the imagined, the online environment and physical reality.” (lib.trinity.edu)

Universities, Colleges and K-12

Games

• AFTRS/LAMP induction and orientation ARGs (Australian Film Television and Radio School, 2005-2009) “Mini Alternate Reality Games (mARGs), collaborative play and quests as part of LAMP residentials or AFTRS inductions.” Includes games designed by Gary Hayes and Christy Dena.

• ARGOSI (Manchester Metropolitan University/University of Bolton, 2008-2009) “Alternate Reality Games for Orientation, Socialisation and Induction (ARGOSI) was a JISC-funded project that ran from April 2008 to March 2009. It designed and piloted an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) to support the student induction process. This small-scale pilot project was . . . aimed to provide an engaging and purposeful alternative to traditional methods of introducing students to university life.”
• WOW! A Song for Skatz (UK K-12, 2009) Nikki Pugh, lead artist for this project, describes this ARG-like school activity as: “Immersive – you’re in it, it takes over; Challenging – you will be outside your comfort zone. You will step up; you will learn; you will grow; Awesome – it will be beyond your expectations. It will give you things that could not have been planned; Inspiring – there will be spaces left for you to fill in in imagination technicolour; Pervasive – it will seep out of the classroom and reach beyond lesson times; Malleable – it will mean different things to different people; also, you will need to plan and contingency plan… and then adjust those plans on the fly in response to what is presented to you.” Check out Nikki’s fantastic project documentation here.
• Skeleton Chase (Indiana University, 2008) “In late May [of 2008], Indiana University announced that it received a $185,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to explore how interactive digital games can be designed to improve players’ health. . . The [alternate reality game produced with this grant] was a collaboration between professors Anne Massey (Kelley School of Business), Jeanne Johnston (Kinesiology Department), and Lee Sheldon (Telecommunications Department).” (ARGNet)

Articles and Discussions

• Alternate reality games for developing student autonomy and peer learning Nicola Whitton’s case study of the ARGOSI project at Manchester Metropolitan University: “This paper discusses the educational potential of alternate reality games (ARGs), a relatively new game format that takes place both online and in the real world over a number of weeks, and combines narrative and puzzles to develop a collaborative community. In this paper, first the concept of ARGs are described, including their history and composition, and their potential pedagogic benefits are discussed in relation to constructivism, student autonomy and peer learning.” (lick2008.wikispaces.com)
• See also: Nicola Whitton’s ARGOSI PowerPoint presentation from the 2008 Let’s Change the Game Conference.
• MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition: ARG proposals Play without Borders and Earthrise are two recent DML competition proposals for school-based ARGs.
• Peer Puppeteers: Alternate Reality Gaming in Primary Schools “In this paper I will be reporting on a crosscurricular multi-media literacy project undertaken in a large South London Primary School over two years, which represents one element of my ongoing research into the potential of Alternate Reality Gaming in Primary Education.” (Angela Colvert)

Government, meta-institutional, and more

Not all educational or public-minded ARGs are necessarily tied down to a single institution or system. Here are a few notable games that have been produced outside of museums, libraries, and schools while still serving a larger learning or public service purpose:

Games

• ARGuing (European Commission Lifelong Learning Programme, 2010) “The ARGuing project helps teachers use the Internet (see Web 2.0 ) within language education. The project is funded by the European Union within the Comenius Lifelong Learning Programme. The project has developed and piloted a massive and very successful Alternate Reality Game (see Alternate Reality Games ) called the ‘Tower of Babel’ to ‘Engage’, ‘Motivate’ and ‘Excite’ students to learn languages using the new possibilities that the Internet age offers us (see more). ARGuing will build an educational methodology and teacher training guides and courses that can be used by teachers and teacher trainers to learn and understand how they can use the Internet, in a similar way to how their students are already using technology.”
• EVOKE (World Bank Institute, 2010) “When we evoke, we look for creative solutions. We use whatever resources we have. We get as many people involved as possible. We take risks. We come up with ideas that have never been tried before. An evoke is an urgent call to innovation. Evoking first started in Africa, but it can happen anywhere. And if you found this message, then it is your destiny to join us.”

• More on EVOKE: McGonigal describes the game on CNN
• Routes (Channel 4 Education/The Wellcome Trust, 2009) “Routes is an eight week game from Channel 4 Education in association with the Wellcome Trust that takes players into a world of genetics, evolution and the human genome.”
• World Without Oil (Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 2007) “WORLD WITHOUT OIL is a serious game for the public good. WWO invited people from all walks of life to contribute ‘collective imagination’ to confront a real-world issue: the risk our unbridled thirst for oil poses to our economy, climate and quality of life. It’s a milestone in the quest to use games as democratic, collaborative platforms for exploring possible futures and sparking future-changing action. WWO set the model for using a hot net-native storytelling method (‘alternate reality’) to meet civic and educational goals. Best of all, it was compellingly fun.”

Articles and Discussions

• Federal multi-agency Alternative Reality Game “The general idea of a multi-agency ARG would be to use game play as a way of engaging citizens in an exploration of democratic ideals. It would also be a way to discover new connections between Federal agencies, and new ways of connecting citizens to their government.” (Smithsonian 2.0)

Designers, observers, and policy-makers

• ARGLE Angela Colvert’s research into the potential of alternate reality gaming in education.
• Center for the Future of Museums “Musings on the future of museums and society from Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums, an initiative of the american association of museums”
• Georgina Goodlander Manager of the Luce Foundation Center (visible storage) at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
• Jane McGonigal Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future.
• John Maccabbee Game designer/producer/writer; involved in Ghosts of a Chance and PHEON.
• Ken Eklund author and game designer.
• MOERG “Alex Moseley is an Educational Designer at the University of Leicester. He is a learning and teaching practitioner, and conducts research into skills and subject teaching and support using paradigms from online games and social networks.”
• Museum Mobile Nancy Proctor’s MuseumMobile “is a forum for conversations about mobile interpretation – media & technology – for museums and cultural sites.” MuseumMobile also has a public wiki, which is an outgrowth of the Tate Modern’s Handheld Conference Wiki.
• Nicola Whitton “I feel that the combination of gaming characteristics and lo-fi environment in ARGs are ideally suited to learning.”
• Nikki Pugh “I work in the grey areas between and across Art, Science and Technology, instigating enquiry-led processes that are often highly participatory in nature.”
• Nina Simon “[works] with museums to design exhibitions, programs, and online experiences that engage visitors as co-creators and community members, not just consumers.” Her design consultancy, Museum 2.0 is “focused on creating participatory, dynamic, audience-centered museum spaces.”
• NITLE “The National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) is a community-based, non-profit initiative that helps liberal arts colleges and universities explore and implement digital technologies.”
• Playtime Anti-Boredom Society Creators of SF0 and many other exciting projects; involved in production of Ghosts of a Chance.

See also: ARGology.org: ARGs in Education & Training, IGDA ARG SIG Whitepaper 2006, IGDA ARG SIG wiki: Educators and ARGs, Google keyword search [1] [2] [3], Twitter hashtag #mtogo

Chris O’Shea:

Hand From Above encourages us to question our normal routine when we often find ourselves rushing from one destination to another. Inspired by Land of the Giants and Goliath, we are reminded of mythical stories by mischievously unleashing a giant hand from the BBC Big Screen. Passers by will be playfully transformed. What if humans weren’t on top of the food chain?

Unsuspecting pedestrians will be tickled, stretched, flicked or removed entirely in real-time by a giant deity.

Hand from Above is a joint co-commission between FACT: Foundation for Art & Creative Technology and Liverpool City Council for BBC Big Screen Liverpool and the Live Sites Network. It premiered during the inaugural Abandon Normal Devices Festival. (Chris O’Shea: Hand from Above)

Via Urban Prankster

Hey, how’s it going?

Heya Jeff. It’s going well, I s’pose.

Cool. So I wanted to talk to you about the role of narrative in and around your board game, The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands. One thing that really stood out to me when I played is the way the game provokes storytelling among the players. I know you’ve playtested this thing a lot — what kinds of storytelling behaviors have you noticed during your playtest sessions?

Yeah – I did pay attention to the emergent storytelling in the gameplay. Different pieces will wind up together on islands, and players will sometimes come up with little micro-narratives for these scenarios. For instance, if the two gentlemen characters wind up together, players tend to come up with some biting (British) trash talk between them. In one of the versions of the game, I had a lot of quotes from the characters in the character booklet [that comes with the game]. I spent a lot of time getting those quotes just right, but then I ditched a lot of the quotes because I felt like they were actually getting in the way of players imagining scenarios. I’ve had to stop myself from overdetermining the experience. It’s certainly the difference between designing a game and writing a short story. With a game, people have to meet you halfway with their own creativity.

Which came first, the game mechanics, or the storytelling? What were your original design intentions?

There was a story first. But it wasn’t the story of the Sandwiche Islands. It was a dream about a warped city intersection – and trying to cross crosswalks in order to strategically reorganize a group. The game was dark and it was called The Intersection. (I think I was watching a lot of The Wire at the time.) But it was just a little too dark so I set the game in another time period and I lightened up the narrative.

As for my design intentions: I can’t say I really had any. I didn’t set out saying: “I want to make a novelistic game or a literary game, or an old courtship or an educational game”….or anything like that. I just had a dream about this thing. I got out of bed and stared at a piece of construction paper for a while, then I decided to put down a couple of blocks…or spaces. Somehow, the game managed to hold my attention for an entire year.

For part of that time, you have to understand that I was going through a break up and somehow it was comforting — and a pleasant distraction — to just play out different scenarios in the game. There are hundreds of thousands of possibilities on the game board, and somehow it was soothing to play through these while my head was all disjointed from the breakup. It was a pleasant distraction.

At what point did you decide to start building a world of story around your game instead of just inside of it?

It started with one little detail that I wanted to include. But I couldn’t fit it into the character booklet. The South Sandwiche Islands are located just south of Galapagos and the story takes place about a half century before Darwin. One of the characters, Puff, has a hobby of collecting insects and he’s always mumbling on about stuff that sounds strikingly similar to the theory of evolution. But no one ever listens to him. Again, I couldn’t fit this into the character booklet, so I expanded it into a letter, and then I realized that I had a very detailed and coherent world (and history) in my head that I could include by way of these different letters.

Of course there’s also another story level of the game’s making and creation.

When I saw you the other day, you were working on writing customized “letters” to include with in each game box. You said the idea was that everyone who buys the game is going to get a unique letter written by one of the characters in the story world. You also said that this was turning out to be a lot of work. Could you talk about this a bit for people unfamiliar with this aspect of the project?

Sheesh – I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes too high. Realistically there will probably be 3 different versions of the game that each contain different sets of letters. The idea is that the different sets of letters are all different fragments of the grander historical puzzle. But, yes, even the 3 different sets of letters are becoming time consuming. I just wrote one in the voice of an 18th century weathered British ship captain and it’s hard to get the accent right – I just read a lot Moby Dick and hoped for a spillover…

Perhaps the most fun aspect of the letters is that all (or most) of them will mention someone holding another letter, or writing a letter, within it. For instance, when the ship captain sees Jules, Jules is holding two letters in his hand – and the reader might wonder if those letters will become important, or appear in someone else’s game box. This literary conceit of referring to the actual object of the letters (which later work themselves into the text) is something that you can find a bit of in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, which was published in 1740.

So, in summary – yes the letters are a lot of work; but I think it’s manageable; and I’m willing to do that work because letters somehow perfectly lend themselves to fragmented narratives.

Are there any particular outcomes you’re looking for here — for example, are you hoping that players will begin to communicate with one another in order to share the content of their letters?

(Totally loaded question!) Sure, breaking up the history of the game into these letters is a way, I think, to create a strong fan community. People talk about stories (like movies and books) anyway, because they create a shared cultural experience, so why not let people talk about the content and in talking about it find out more about the story itself? It’s including the socializing process of media into the content. Or the content into the process of socialization.

I was taking Henry Jenkins’ transmedia entertainment class and remember reading something about building vast worlds that are so deep that no one person could possibly collect all of the diegetic information, so fans have to exchange story information with others in order to get a better sense of the story and world.

I think that was what I was aiming for in breaking up the letters into different boxes.

What’s next for you?

I recently turned down a game deal from a small/mid level publisher. They wanted exclusive publishing rights. I wasn’t ready to make that commitment. Instead, I’ve decided that I’d like to see this game sold in bookstores. I think it has literary roots. I’m set on seeing it in bookstores.

For more info, see this post from Henry Jenkins, which includes Jim’s notes on the role of transmedia storytelling in the project. You can find out how to buy your own copy of the game here.

A few years ago, these kinds of systems were out of reach for most DIY designers and artists. This is no longer the case. Thanks to freely-available social media, mobile technology, and web publishing tools, ARG producers with shoestring budgets can now roll their own custom ARG management and delivery systems.

About this resource

For the purposes of this post, I’ve chosen to focus on providing examples of free technologies and services that can assist designers in managing/deploying content, architecting participation, and articulating game mechanics. To this end, I’ve organized things according to six key logistical requirements designers might encounter when running an ARG; these requirements are:

• The need to organize game assets and personnel
• The need to create and manage player profiles and communities
• The need to manage multiple web presences and social media profiles
• The need to deploy content on mobile devices
• The need to analyze participation and buzz
• The need to create and distribute physical artifacts

Obviously, not all ARGs are going to have every one of these needs, and some will have others that aren’t listed here. If you can think of a significant category of content-oriented requirements that should be here, please let me know in the comments and I will expand this resource accordingly.

Organize game assets and personnel

Keeping track of game assets such as websites, physical installations, performers, events, story flows, and the rest of it can quickly turn into a full-time job. For a really big ARG, production management presents challenges on the same order as the logistical operations seen in feature films — and often well beyond. Here are a few tips for how indie ARG designers can keep their games organized:

• Master the whiteboard Whiteboards are perfect for organizing the sprawl of media assets that characterize story- and interaction-heavy game designs like ARGs. If you don’t have a whiteboard, you can just paint one onto any wall. Don’t forget to take a photo backup of the board after you update it in case someone stumbles in and erases your game.

• Map game assets and story elements Mind-mapping software is an indispensible companion to the whiteboard, and can be the perfect tool for planning and tracking nonlinear distributed story-game activities like ARGs. My favorite instance of this kind of software is IHMC Cmap Tools, a free program (created with US tax dollars by the good folks at DARPA) that enables you to create semantic network maps like those described by Douglas Hofstadter in his book, Godel, Escher, Bach. Cmap Tools goes a long way toward automating making such mind maps, and it enables a bunch of other neat features, too, like embedded media, linked maps, parametric layouts, and more. These charts can reveal a lot about the interconnectivity of your story-world’s various components, and are great for visualizing the different ways that players will flow through the experience you are creating.
• Production management and collaboration tools Take your pick: Zoho, Google Wave, Campfire, and Ning are all great free online collaboration apps. For media-specific pre-production and production tools, try Celtx, “the world’s first all-in-one media pre-production system. It replaces ‘paper & binder’ pre-production with a digital approach that’s more complete, simpler to work with, and easier to share.”

Create and manage player profiles and communities

Customizing individual player experiences in an ARG requires being able link profile information to game states and story elements. Even a simple profile system can unlock powerful game mechanics and storytelling options such as progress-dependent content and in-game ability unlocks.

• Leverage existing profiles ARG designers can lower the bar to entry to their games — and take advantage of the affordances of mature social networking platforms — by making use of players’ existing accounts instead of asking them to sign up for yet another social service. APIs like Facebook Connect can bridge the gap between your game and your players’ everyday media flows — and provide you with a ready-made means for tracking game progress and delivering content. If you have a coder on your team, creating a dedicated app will be relatively easy; if not, Facebook’s developer documentation will help you to get started.
• Create dedicated social networking sites For designers who feel they absolutely must create a standalone player profile system, open-source software packages like Elgg, or free web services like Ning (for which many players will already have an ID) can be used to set up community hubs from scratch (as seen in this top-secret ARG and this fitness game).

Manage multiple web presences and social media profiles

Maintaining social media identities across a range of services is essential for running an ARG with a heavy online component. Here are some DIY content management and delivery tips for streamlining this process:

• Post status updates to multiple profiles Most readers are probably familiar with apps such as Seesmic Desktop, HootSuite, CoTweet, or Tweetdeck, all of which enable easy management of multiple social media profiles via a single interface. These apps also make it easy to track responses to your updates, post images to a variety of hosting sites, monitor keyword searches, and, in the case of HootSuite and CoTweet, schedule timed updates (great for producing “Twitter Drama”). There are dozens of similar apps, both offline and on; depending on the range of services you need to update, finding a handy desktop client or cloud app (not to mention one for your mobile devices) shouldn’t be too hard.
• Enable collaborators to easily post to blogs and other social media services Posterous is a powerful email-to-post blogging service that has a lot of potential applications in the DIY ARG space. Running a group blog with Posterous is ridiculously simple and fits into any workflow since the system uses ordinary email to make blog posts. Posterous will convert any images, audio files, or videos into web-friendly formats and lay them out nicely. But its most useful feature is the way it can “Autopost” content to a variety of other services, including Wordpress-powered blogs, Facebook, flickr, and Twitter.
• Aggregate posts from players and/or in-game characters Aggregate your content into one place using Wordpress plugins like FeedWordPress and Lifestream. These plugins, alongside Wordpress’ already-formidable content management features, can enable ARG producers to gather together not only the social media content that they produce, but also — and sometimes more importantly — the content that gets produced by their player communities. FeedWordPress is particularly impressive, as it will archive, categorize, and tag everything that it aggregates — providing you with another layer of content to feed back to your players.

Deploy content on mobile devices

Engaging with players and storytellers via their mobile devices opens up exciting new realms of location-based gaming and participation.

• Automate SMS interactions and/or make a location-based game As GPS and smart phones become increasingly ubiquitous, third party apps for developing and managing games that take place in the physical world are starting to emerge. SCVNGR is an interesting early arrival to this space. According to their website, SCVNGR is “the world’s first platform to enable anyone, anywhere to develop, manage and deploy sophisticated interactive location-based mobile games, tours and experiences.” I’ve used the system for a few projects, and it works quite well. Just a couple of years ago, setting up an SMS-driven interactive location-based game was a serious coding challenge that required serious money and time. Now it’s free and easy. Also, it should be noted that games designed with SCVNGR will work best on iPhone or Android, but are also fully playable via SMS (significant for designers who want to keep the bar to entry for their games as low as possible).
• Make a custom phone app Objective C coding skills aren’t as easy to come by as plain old HTML and JavaScript know-how. Which is precisely why PhoneGap is so cool: “PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript. If you’re a web developer who wants to build mobile applications in HTML and JavaScript while still taking advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry SDKs, PhoneGap is for you.”

• Piggy-back on an existing game or platform If it makes sense in your story, why not just use existing mobile media services to extend your game into physical space? Just as social media services like Twitter and Facebook have long been used by in-game characters and agencies, so too can web-connected mobile media services like Foursquare, Brightkite, and Gowalla function as vehicles for cross-media storytelling (for an example of this, click here). And since many of these services provide RSS feeds for user profiles, you can easily connect the mobile end of your game world back into your web presence.
• See also: Locative media resources

Analyze participation and buzz

Committed participants are easy to track. They post in Unfiction forums, attend events, set up profiles, and communicate with in-game characters. Tracking lurkers and occasional participants is a different matter — but a significant one, since casual observers will often compose the bulk of a game’s audience.

• Monitor Twitter activity Web apps like Twitalyzer, Twitter Analyzer, and Twittersheep (to name just a few) can help you to track and understand your player community. Thanks to Twitter’s remarkably open and flexible API, new tools for analyzing buzz and influence on Twitter come out almost every day. Try a search like this one to see what’s current — or check out top-n lists like this, this or this.
• Monitor link sharing Link shortening services like bit.ly may present serious problems to future archivists, but for real-time web projects, they’re an easy way to track traffic flows and spreadable media. From bit.ly’s FAQ: “bit.ly users receive a unique bit.ly link that lets them track clicks and other data separately, while still seeing totals for all bit.ly links pointing to the same long link.”

• Monitor site traffic Google Analytics is a free service that enables you to monitor traffic sources and activity via a simple script that you can copy and paste into your site’s header. This is particularly useful for ARGs that have large lurker populations and/or are geographically dispersed. It’s also a good way to see which parts of a website are being read — and which are being skipped over.

Produce physical artifacts, merchandise, and e-commerce

Locative media isn’t the only way to bring your game into the physical experience of your players. Artifacts such as books, clothing, and other customized items have enormous potential as vehicles for real world storytelling and play.

• Publish books and pamphlets Print on Demand continues to revolutionize indie publishing, which is good news for transmedia producers who want to incorporate novels, graphic novels, comic books, photo albums, or other printed materials into their projects. Lulu.com will print your books on demand using the same kinds of presses that are used to make the trade paperbacks published by the big “legitimate” presses — and they’ll help you to distribute them, too. Setting up a Lulu.com storefront is almost as easy as creating a blog with Blogger — only the output is a real book, an item with heft and presence.
• Make stuff — and retail it Merchandise can be a good way to generate money for charitable causes. It can also be a clever way to tell a story. Indie ARG Must Love Robots did both of these things with their in-game clothing brand, Inactiveware. Like Lulu.com, Cafe Press and other on demand services make it possible for transmedia producers to quickly create and retail a variety of physical media artifacts — from t-shirts and mugs to mousepads and posters — that can extend and enrich their story worlds.

Help me improve this resource: send me an email or leave a reply in the comments if you have any suggestions.

To set up his discussion, Sterling begins with a brief hypothetical confrontation between the “Old” Richard Feynman and his present-day counterpart, the “Atemporal” Richard Feynman. Drawing on a memorable speech by the real Mr. Feynman, Sterling outlines how “Old” Feynman viewed the process of generating knowledge as having three simple stages:

• Write down the problem
• Think really hard
• Write down the solution

“Of course it’s a joke,” Sterling observes. “But it’s not merely a joke — [Feynman is] trying to just make it as simple as possible.” This simplicity is confounded by the Atemporal Feynman, for whom knowledge production is at best a much more circuitous and unstable process, and at worst, a kind of upside-down hyperbolic oxymoron:

• Write problem in a search engine, see if somebody else has solved it already.
• Write problem in my blog. study the commentary cross-linked to other guys.
• Write problem in Twitter in 140 characters. see if i can get it that small. see if it gets retweeted.
• Open source the problem. supply some instructables that can get you as far as i was able to get. see if the community takes it any farther.
• Start a Ning social network about my problem. name the network after my problem. see if anybody accumulates around my problem.
• Make a video of my problem. YouTube my video. see if it spreads virally. see if any media convergence accumulates around my problem.
• Create a design fiction that pretends that my problem has already been solved. create some gadget that has some relevance to my problem and see if anybody builds it.
• Exacerbate or intensify my problem with a work of interventionist tactical media.
• Find some pretty illustrations from the Flickr looking into the past photo pool.

Sterling: “Old Feynman would naturally object, you know: ‘you have not solved the problem. You have not advanced scientific knowledge, there is no progress in this, you didn’t get to step three, solving the problem. Whereas the atemporal Feynman would respond, you know, it’s worse than that. I haven’t even done step 1 of defining the problem and writing it down. But I have done a lot of work about its meaning and its value and its social framing, combined with some database mining and some collaborative filtering, which is far beyond you and your pencil.”

More info: Futurity Now!

[Update: A full transcript of this talk is available here.]

Chicago’s Version 2010 (April 22 to May 2, 2010) is “now seeking proposals and presentations about tactics and strategies that help sustain our communities, find better uses of our resources, and maintain and expand our networks.”

For eleven days and nights, we will explore the best practices and boldest failures in interventionist, participatory, and collective social, political, and cultural practices. This year’s theme is presented in order to bring together groups and individuals seeking additional methods for connecting our networks and creating solid foundations for the practice of art, education and social activism well into the next decade. We want to use this opening during the current economic and political crisis to expand and amplify our shared ideals, values and strategies for survival and expansion. (Version 10 CFP)

Submissions are programmed under themed “platforms.”

• Free University
• Live Musical Performances
• The Chicago Art Parade
• Performance/ Interventions/ Mobile Projects
• A Catalog of Strategies
• the NFO XPO
• Version Group Exhibition
• Curatorial Projects
• Underground Multiplex (Film/Video)
• Printervention
• Web Selections
• The Other

Submission form here. See also the related call for papers from Proximity Magazine: “A Catalog of Strategies.”

Via @glowlab

There are real risks in reading the present moment into historical accounts, but I couldn’t help doing just that as I read “The Amateur Operators” by Susan Douglas (one of this week’s recommended readings for Henry Jenkins’ class, Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0).

For those who haven’t read the piece, the gist of it is that the period of 1906-1912 saw an explosion in amateur wireless telegraphy, with boys and young men across an increasingly urbanized America “[reclaiming] a sense of mastery, indeed masculinity itself, through the control of technology.” (191) Wireless kits and how-to guides (some published by the “founder of science fiction” himself, Hugo Gernsback) sold like hotcakes, and in just a few years there were several hundred thousand amateur wireless operators spread out across the country.

This hobbyist culture, at once intensely social — as it inherently involved communication — and potentially isolating — as it required technical skills that could only be acquired outside of the flow of ordinary life — bears a striking resemblence to the tinkering subcultures that have attended the rise of home computing, network culture, and social media. Like the initial “boy wonder” practitioners of homebrew wireless telegraphy, early adopters of computational and network technology have been characterized in the popular discourse as heroes of the arcane, the possessors of secret knowledge, and even potential messiahs. But, as was the case with amateur radio operators, the culture has a tendency to swing in the opposite direction as the technologies and practices in question become more widely embraced and therefore subject to greater scrutiny (and acts of mischief). In many cases this scrutiny has led to calls — rightly or wrongly — for regulation founded on anxieties about safety, morality, and legality (compare, for example, the heirarchically-minded US Navy’s half-pragmatic, half self-righteous outrage at the “leveling effect” of amateurs sharing the airwaves with professionals to academia’s worries over the loss of control over canon or the RIAA’s efforts to distinguish “professional” content from amateur production via vehicles such as tonight’s awkward and remarkably irrelevant Grammy awards ceremony).

Inspired by Douglas, I looked up the 1907 New York Times article that she references in her text, and found in it many parallels to early descriptions of Internet enthusiasts (among many other possible analogies — for example, such fascinated exaltations of the “boy-inventor” now can be found in press coverage of Augmented Reality designers, physical computing tinkerers, Y Combinator whiz kids or certain social networking platform CEOs). Have a look for yourself — the article is here. Then have a look at this gem from the Canadian Broadcasting Company, circa 1993:

Young Peter Mansbridge’s awkward yet strangely fascinating decision to not use the word “the” in front of “Internet” notwithstanding, a final parallel with wireless telegraphy occurs to me as I write these notes. According to Douglas’ account, the wireless boom peaked quickly and came to an end as the airwaves became so crowded as to be unusable. The US Navy, among others, fought and won a battle with the amateurs, despite the latter’s claims that “the ether was neither the rightful province of the military nor a resource a private firm could appropriate and monopolize,” and that “their enthusiasm and technical spadework entitled them to a sizable portion of the territory.” (214) In the end, none of these objections mattered: the airwaves were either militarized or sold off to corporate interests, and amateur radio was relegated to shortwave only (a limitation that caused an estimated 88% drop in the number of hobbyists in the United States). In light of this, could we consider the emergence of “boy inventor” and techno-messiah characters in popular culture as harbingers of public resource conflicts to come?

MIT’s CROMA group brings together researchers from media arts, architecture, and chemical engineering. The group “aims at developing technologies and use case scenarios for building responsive, programmable, and energy-smart architectural components.” Their “smart organic window” project proposes the use of electrochromic organic polymers to enable touch- and motion-sensitive brise-soleil techniques.

A basic premise of this work is that a programmable and responsive façade element can not only be aesthetically provocative and improve energy-efficiency of architecture, but also has the potential to alter the ways we relate to buildings and surfaces, opening exciting avenues for new kinds of interaction and experience, and requiring new skills and competencies in the fields of design, architecture, and engineering. (CROMA)

I’m curious to see what kinds of game design and storytelling projects will emerge out of CROMA’s research. A variable-opacity responsive window is pretty amazing, but the radical step is using such a window to articulate a ruleset or open up new vectors for communication…

I met Eric Gradman at a meeting of the recently-formed Transmedia LA group; his enthusiasm and sense of humor are as infectious in person as they are in his work. Gradman’s “uncomfortably augmented reality” project, CLOUD MIRROR, is currently on show at the Sundance festival.

The CLOUD MIRROR is an interactive augmented reality art installation… Live video captured by a camera and is re-projected on the wall behind the camera, functioning like a “magic mirror.” But the CLOUD MIRROR software alters the images on the way to the screen. It runs an algorithm that tracks faces from frame to frame and also examines each frame for 2D barcodes printed on attendee badges. By pairing each face with a badge, and each badge id with a database row, the CLOUD MIRROR can identify by name whoever is standing in front of the installation.

The CLOUD MIRROR then augments each frame, adding a thought bubble to each face in the image. The contents of that thought bubble are selected from a set of “tags” associated with that person. Tags come from various sources, including Facebook, Twitter, and SMS data.

When registering for the event, attendees were asked to optionally provide their Twitter name, Facebook profile ID, and to answer the question “Where is your favorite place in LA?” In the weeks leading up to the event, the CLOUD MIRROR software sent a friend request to any attendee that provided that information. The poor trusting souls who accepted this request had their personal profile gently data-mined. Specifically, the information captured was “Facebook updates,” “Twitter updates,” and “Facebook relationship status.”

CLOUD MIRROR also capitalized on peoples’ innate desire to embarrass their friends by allowing anyone to anonymously “graffiti” in a thought bubble by sending an SMS message to a special number containing the target’s unique badge ID. (monkeys and robots)

Update: Eric’s documentation from Sundance and his reflections on some of the privacy implications of the project.

From NASw-512, “Engineering Man for Space”; May 15th, 1963 (abstract).

More: Cyborg bibliography.

via @caseorganic

The Grid

This is a blank version of the grid I created for this exercise (larger view). The horizonal axis represents the degree to which a particular practice is participatory, with the rightmost end of the axis representing a maximally-participatory level of engagement. Individual practices are positioned on this axis based on how I answer questions such as:

• Did my fandom lead me into actively engaging with an intellectual property’s (IP’s) broader fan community?
• Did my enthusiasm for a media franchise or category result in me attending conferences, connecting with others online, and participating in other events, or did I let such opportunities pass me by?
• Did I engage with the world of the IP to the point where I began to produce my own extensions to that world?
• And finally, did my fandom lead me closer to an “active” community of practice, or did I remain within the confines of a more “passive” community of spectatorship?

The vertical axis of the grid maps the degree to which a particular fan practice is “comprehensive,” and addresses the following kinds of questions:

• Did my commitment to the IP or category make me want to accumulate everything that I could get my hands on related to that franchise or practice?
• Did I become an obsessive collector of related information and media, or was I content to merely sample smaller portions of the world of the IP?
• Did I gravitate toward an “expert” level of knowledge? Or was I happy to remain on the surface in terms of my apprehension of the totality of the world of the IP?

The Rules

I set out some simple rules for myself to limit the size of my sample and to render the visualization as useful as possible. First, I decided that there should be no limitation to a particular period in my life; rather, I would plot fan activities from across the the full 36 year spectrum of my existence in the hopes that I might discover certain commonalities and tendencies that transcend age and context boundaries. Consequently, I found it necessary to invent a second rule, namely, that the plot on the chart should represent the point of my maximum involvement in a given fan practice. To do otherwise would have meant introducing moving plot points to reflect the rise and fall of my interest in a particular IP or category — which, let’s face it, would be super-cool, but in the absence of an easy-to-use tool to do just that, designing an animated interactive chart lies beyond the scope of the present sketch. Finally, to keep the size of the sample from ballooning beyond manageability, I limited myself to a single 10 minute brainstorming session during which I would attempt to think of all the fandoms that I consider myself to be a part of.

The Sample

This list shows the result of my brainstorming session. After writing the list (which is incomplete and potentially embarrassing — looking over it now, I realize I have left out about a dozen of my absolute most favorite things) free-hand in my notebook, I then entered it into my text editor and sorted it alphabetically. This is what I got:

• Alejandro Jodorowsky
• Alternate Reality Games
• Anderson Cooper
• Andrei Tarkovsky
• Animal Collective
• Apartment Rock
• Battlestar Galactica
• Calgary Flames
• Chris Marker
• Cinema
• Clifford Odets
• David Foster Wallace
• David Lynch
• Dungeons and Dragons
• EA NHL Series
• Electronic Music
• Euripides
• Frank Capra
• Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Hockey
• Italo Calvino
• Jean-Luc Godard
• Jejune Institute
• Jersey Shore
• John Maus
• Jorge Luis Borges
• Krystof Kieslowski
• Lars Von Trier
• Miami Vice
• Orson Welles
• Paddy Chayefsky
• Portal
• Sid Meier’s Civilization
• Star Wars
• The Antikythera Mechanism
• The Pixies
• The Sopranos
• The Voynich Manuscript
• The Wire
• This is My Milwaukee
• Traveler
• Twin Peaks
• Vic Chesnutt
• V (original series)
• Werner Herzog
• William Shakespeare

The Plot

The next step was to plot each item onto my grid by asking myself the questions outlined above:

(larger view)

While the process here is obviously unscientific, the aggregate effect is nonetheless a reasonably good sample portrait of my fan practices. As I plotted each item onto my grid, I began to notice certain patterns emerging. For example, the bulk of my brainstormed fandoms settled along the leftmost edge of the chart. These fandoms were differentiated from one another by my level of expertise (or “comprehensivity”), but all shared a distinct lack of participatory engagement (at least in terms of commonly-held notions about what constitutes participation, such as conference-going, fan club membership, online forum activity, and so on). The remainder of the chart was populated by small clusters of interests which represented my more socially-engaged forms of fandom. Interestingly, there appeared to be little correlation between social engagement and expertise. at least in terms of expertise being a pre-requisite for participation; that is, it seemed just as likely (or, at least, almost just as likely) that I would be “expert” in something that I didn’t actively participate in as it was that I would participate in something that I had only limited knowledge of.

Having plotted the chart and conducted a preliminary analysis, I then proceeded on to a more in-depth look at the contents of the four quadrants.

The Four Quadrants

Non-Participatory, Non-Comprehensive

This is the most casual of the four quadrants. My fandoms here are typically born of simple affection. Anderson Cooper, for example, is just someone from whom I’ve gotten used to getting my daily dose of CNN; I consider myself a “fan” not only because I think he is the most well-informed of a crop of decidedly out to lunch major network broadcast personalities, but because he occasionally enacts a kind of earnestness that I find believable for whatever reason. I focus on Cooper here because his is probably the least participatory fandom represented on this chart: for a variety of reasons, I just don’t see myself ever feeling the need to get any deeper into the community around AC360 than I already am. My involvement with this “IP”  is essentially limited to watching Cooper on TV and clicking on news reports or blog posts that provide information about his life — and I’m fine with leaving it at that. What’s interesting here is that there are several fandoms listed about which I know even less than I do about Cooper — for example, I have seen the inside of Anderson’s apartment via various random web happenstances, while I’m pretty sure I’ve never come across so much as a picture of Italo Calvino (well, now I have…) — but with which I have been more engaged in terms of participation. Calvino, for example, I know only through two of his books — If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and Invisible Cities; but in the course of creating some mobile phone artworks last year, I produced an SMS-based collaborative storytelling project using snippets from Invisible Cities, which brought Calvino into the purview of a group of participants who might have otherwise never heard of him. While this engagement might not be within the boundaries of a traditional definition of “fandom,” I believe that at the very least it entitles Calvino to a spot on my chart a little bit to the right of Cooper. The same goes for the Voynich Manuscript, another oddball kind of fandom that I have placed even further along the continuum toward participation. While I know basically nothing about the mysterious manuscript — indeed, few people do, which is what makes it so interesting — I have taken the time to blog about it a little, and have pointed to it in other fora, including on Alternate Reality Gaming boards and Twitter. More recently, I have joined in on the discussion around the manuscript raised by its recent coverage on xkcd. Clearly, the amount I know about a given IP or practice does not necessarily reflect the degree to which I participate in that community’s fandom.

For me, the relatively passive fandoms of the non-participatory, non-comprehensive quadrant occupy the least amount of my time, and are in many senses the most easily-retained of my fan practices. Is this because the media properties in this quadrant somehow ask less of me? Or is it more a matter of me simply choosing not to get involved? My sense is that it is a combination of these two things. Some media properties do in fact inherently demand participation — World of Warcraft, for example, is almost unavoidably participatory. Other IPs or categories are more flexible. In general, those IPs and categories in the non-participatory, non-comprehensive quadrant must be in this latter group of flexible fandoms, for otherwise they would of necessity be located elsewhere on the grid.

Non-Participatory, Comprehensive

Moving upwards from the non-participatory/non-comprehensive quadrant, we move away from simple “messing around” and closer to “geeking out” (although, to be precise, full-on geeking out necessitates a degree of participation that will only emerge once we move into the quadrants explored below). This is the domain of much of my expert-level knowledge, such as that gained from my exhaustive back-to-back viewing of all five seasons of The Wire, supported by ancillary research on Baltimore, biographical research on the show’s performers, and even the printing of a t-shirt bearing the face of Omar Little (beneath which my girlfriend printed the text, “Indeed”).

The Wire sits along the left side of this quadrant with other properties and categories of which I would identify myself as a fan — which, as with the non-participatory fandoms in the previous quadrant, raises the not insignificant question of, well, what’s a fan anyway? To this I answer that to be a fan is to be on a continuum. While I have never participated in fan clubs, conferences, online fora, or the myriad other social activities that exist around the properties and categories in the leftmost portion of this chart, the fact that I’ve placed these things onto the chart at all indicates that on some level I feel a connection to the social structures that support and give life to them.

Some of the most interesting points on this chart are those that exist in the interstices. Two items from the (arbitrarily imposed) border between the non-participatory/comprehensive and participatory/comprehensive quadrants deserve brief note in this regard. First, the Calgary Flames: this is the hockey team I’ve followed since childhood, and as far as me and my friends are concerned, I know just about everything there is to know about the team. That said, my engagement with the larger fan community through websites such as Matchsticks and Gasoline has taught me that no matter how much I think I know, there’s always more to learn — a lot more to learn. This reveals an interesting phenomenon: as one moves deeper into participation, the notion of what it means to have “comprehensive” knowledge changes. Prior to my encounter with the online fan community, I got all my Flames news from the Calgary Herald, Yahoo! Sports and so on. Now, I realize that there is a whole underground world of independent sports analysts, girls who go to the rink to watch the team practice and listen to the coach, guys who hang around the parking lot after games to eavesdrop on the players’ conversations, and more. That is, getting involved in the community gave me a better sense of what I didn’t know as much as it opened vectors for me to learn and share.

Participatory, Comprehensive

Just on the other side of the border line between the top two quadrants is the category of hockey. In general, I am a huge hockey fan. I know less about hockey as a whole than I do about the particular “IP” of the Calgary Flames, but my involvement is much greater. For example, when I lived in Toronto, I participated in an artist-run hockey league, organizing a team that competed in dozens of games a year and put on a good show at the annual “Hootenanny,” a celebration of hockey and rock n’ roll that is probably only possible in Canada’s largest city. Here we see a fandom that has fully transitioned into the realm of the participatory; here we see my passion for the puck and music engaging directly with a community of like-minded others…

Fandoms in this quadrant require the most passion and dedication; indeed, many of the fan practices listed here in fact have become careers for me — my love for the cinema led to a career as a screenwriter and story editor, and my deep interest in role-playing games and improvisatory storytelling led me down the path that I presently walk, along which I have discovered such inspirations as alternate reality gaming (itself now a closely-held fandom). While distinctly non-casual, these kinds of fan practice are among the most rewarding activities in my life; so much so that I wonder if the word “fan” can and should still apply. Is the continuum of fandom in fact a part of a larger continuum, one which is ultimately inseparable from the desires and impulses of our deeper selves? Should we reconsider the word “fan” — or, conversely, apply it more broadly?

Participatory, Non-Comprehensive

My initial thought when I conceived of this grid was that this quadrant would be more or less empty. To my surprise, it ended up being almost as full as the participatory/comprehensive quadrant — and with a more complete sample set, I expect it would actually exceed it quite substantially. Indeed, on further reflection, I would like to suggest that in the future, this quadrant will be by far the most heavily-populated kind of fandom — that is, if “fandom” continues to be a useful category, which itself is something I have questions about.

The participatory/non-comprehensive quadrant contains activities that take place in inherently networked situations. Apartment rock is a part of a long tradition of shared mix tapes, crude recordings passed from hand to hand — a tradition that is now greatly expanded and accelerated by the Web and social media. The same goes for electronic music, exemplified by artists like John Maus, of whom I am both a fan and a remixer. Finally, at the rightmost extreme of the chart, we find an online video game — EA’s NHL 10 — that I play exclusively with others; in this case, my affection for the video game is inseparable from the act of participation — the sharing of points, the trash-talk in the lobbies, the intense team play that requires getting to know other players in order to win… Even though I don’t know that much about the game — there are others who clearly know 100 times as many tricks as I do, secret ways to fool the goalies, set defensive plays that produce breakaways, and so on — simply by virtue of playing, I am participating. I believe such intrinsic relationships with participation will be the future of fandom.

Final Word

Plotting a sample from my own fan practices on a Cartesian grid measuring degree of participation against degree of comprehensivity reveals that my fan practices shift depending on the form and context of the media artifacts they focus on. Key discoveries include insights into the new kinds of fandom brought about by the fundamentally participatory nature of online multiplayer gaming; a vision of the continuum of affinity and practice to which fandom belongs; and an acknowledgement of the inherent connection of even the most passive fan practices to active communities of fandom.

Readers are invited to download their own blank charts, onto which they may place their own fan practices. Blank charts can be downloaded here. Send one to me if you like!

Bestiario is a Barcelona/Lisbon-based Flash info visualization group whose projects “permit the treatment of abundant amounts of diverse relational information of all kinds.”

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