The Stealth Objective

A note-to-self about the subtext of developing an ARG within the confines of an academic institution. It seemed to me at the time that a good idea would be to try to design the ARG such that it would ultimately invite players to become authors; in short, I imagined a game that would become kind of like a secret school newspaper, a club that you could only become a member of once you delved deeply into its mysteries — and once you were there, you’d be invested enough that you’d want to see it continue. Could this model work for motivating collaborative storytelling in other contexts?

STEALTH OBJECTIVE

A collaborative storytelling project. An increasingly baroque fictional system develops around a newly-constructed building on a university campus.

Public interventions ==> Oddities on iPhones ==> Web intrigue ==> Dark Art Portal

Now, what could I mean by “Dark Art Portal”? Admittedly, it sounds a little ridiculous. Let’s just say it’s a place holder for now. The idea is this: readers spiral into the Web intrigue via a variety of rabbit holes. Once there, they encounter password and player-to-game-communications puzzles. Solving these puzzles leads to additional text and layers of story. Active readers/participants (for web forums will be crucial components of this project) will eventually be contacted by the puppetmasters and asked to continue the story. This request will come in the form of a formal invitation.

This activity is a kind of anti-journalism ocurring in reverse.

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CityStory

The CityStory project was an experiment in crowdsourced cinema that invited participants in Japan and the United States to gather video of their home cities in response to SMS messages sent to their phones via Twitter. The resulting video archive was displayed in a variety of ways, including a 4K projection at Cinegrid 2008 and a Flash application (see below).

Flash application screen Capture

The videos gathered from participants in the CityStory experiment were assembled into a digital archive. An interactive Flash application was written to display the videos and text snippets based on user-selected keyword tags. (A generative music soundtrack was also created on the fly by the application, but is not audible in the above screen capture.)

Project blog

MEML notes 18 Sept 2008

These notes, from the 18 September 2008 TFOTS/MEML meeting, collate some of the earliest ideas related to the Million Story Building project. The “ideas to date” section refers to concepts we were trying to develop for SMS-based text cues for improv filmmaking projects. The other snippet here, “city story notes” seems primarily concerned with notions of database-driven cinema archives and the question of motivation (for example, “NASA” refers to a suggestion someone had to make the CityStory archive something that would be sent into space on a flash drive or similar media, the idea being that this would be an inspiring motive for people to participate in the crowdsourced-cinema project we were cooking up). Ultimately, the SMS text-cue experiments and the CityStory crowd-cinema experiment would merge into a single project.

TFOTS
18 Sept 08

ideas to date:

-concrete visual, chain letter, xquisite corpse (“cinerenga”)
-interpretive emergence, charades (“scary face”)
-i ching-style one liners (“oracle”)
-fictional undergrad/blog poster (“zombie”)
-in/out, peach boy (“moviebits”)

-city story notes:
-public good
-see “flickr commons”
-fifth element
-a permanent archive
-NASA?
-permanent installation in lucas building