jeff watson

[The entirety of this document, including lists of deliverables and a preliminary timeline, can be downloaded in .pdf form here.]

Summary

This course of directed research seeks to identify and implement a range of context- and location-based storytelling techniques by leveraging ubiquitous computing technologies – including mobile communications devices, broadband wi-fi networks, real-time sensor systems and the Internet itself – to create a layered, pervasive and interactive story experience rooted in physical space.

The primary deliverable of this project will be a so-called Alternate Reality Game (ARG) centered on the newly-constructed School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) building at USC. Working in concert with a team of mobile storytelling investigators and technologists headed by professor Scott Fisher, I will coordinate the development of narrative content for a long-arc story experience intended to enrich the physical and virtual environment of the SCA with layers of mystery, playfulness and interactivity.

By implementing a small-scale location-based ARG such as the one proposed herein, I expect to glean a variety of quantitative and qualitative insights into the limitations and possibilities of this nascent narrative form. These insights will feed directly into my primary doctoral inquiry into the question of how an increasingly mobile, ubiquitous and interoperable communications infrastructure can enable new forms of computationally-mediated narrative, both in terms of traditional author-to-audience storytelling and emerging modes of collaborative networked expression and participation. Further, by creating and managing a small team of co-conspirators (see “Approach,” below), and by extending an invitation to participate in the project to the SCA community as a whole (both through the mechanics of the game itself and as a part of the development and pre-production process), I hope to broaden the level of interest in this kind of storytelling by inspiring others to investigate new avenues for the transmedial exploration of character and myth.

Background

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are a relatively new form of narrative gameplay – the earliest incarnations of the genre date to the late 1990s and early 2000s – that use the real world and all its myriad communications modalities as the surface upon which to layer story and interaction. As a spatially- and temporally-distributed storytelling form, ARGs deploy narrative across a wide range of expressive media, including physical spaces and artifacts, websites, game worlds, books and graphic novels, music, television and movies, online video, rumors, cell phone content and live performances. For the player-participants of an ARG, apprehending the story and the mechanics of the game is an active investigative or archaeological task, a process of uncovering mysteries and sifting through answers in an effort to find the right questions. As such, playing an ARG is fundamentally distinct from traditional game or story forms in which a “magic circle” of play or spectatorship ceremonially defines the boundaries between the fictional and the real. In an ARG, the line between “in-game” and “out-of-game” is intentionally blurred. Jane McGonigal, a leading researcher in the field, describes this approach as the “this is not a game” (TINAG) aesthetic. When this aesthetic is adhered to with a modicum of discipline, the ARG as a story medium becomes more akin to hoax-making than novel-writing (although, it should be said, an ARG could conceivably deploy a novel as a component of its overall storytelling strategy): like a good hoax, a successful ARG will conceal itself beneath layers of compelling real-world information. Players of ARGs thus often begin playing the game before they even know that a game is afoot. In the apotheosis of this form, by the time players realize that there is an intelligence guiding their investigations into the mysteries that have inexplicably infiltrated their lives, their desire to uncover the truth of the matter becomes irresistible, and players will pursue the mystery to the end of the line, oftentimes sharing their insights and solving game problems collectively via self-organized online interactions.

To date, the peculiar affordances of the ARG have been exploited primarily by media corporations such as Microsoft, Dreamworks and Sony Pictures in order to launch viral marketing campaigns for other products. For example, one of the most successful ARGs in recent memory began with a mysterious bee-keeping website that came to the attention of participants via a brief flash of text at the end of a movie trailer. A great deal of Internet buzz ensued as interested parties began to investigate the website and its provenance, revealing a strange series of what initially appeared to be distress signals from some kind of trapped or kidnapped individual. Increasingly large groups of players began working collectively online to solve the mystery, and as things got weirder and weirder, word-of-mouth drew more and more participants into the world of the story. In the end, this project, known as “ilovebees”, turned out to be a promotional initiative for the launch of Microsoft’s Halo 2.

While the origins and historical applications of the ARG are rooted in viral marketing, more recent iterations employing the TINAG aesthetic have sought to create so-called “self-monetizing” ARGs. For example, 42 Entertainment, the studio that produced ilovebees and several other seminal ARGs, recently partnered with a small press to publish Cathy’s Book, a book for young adults purporting to be the private diary of a missing teenage girl. By framing this publication with an invitation to readers to help locate the missing teenager, the designers were able to simultaneously steer their audience toward multiple story assets exterior to the book itself (e.g. websites mentioned in the book, phone lines accessible via numbers scrawled in the “diary’s” margins, and so on), offset the production costs of writing and producing the project as a whole, and draw new readers to discover (and purchase) the book itself via the creation of an online following. The book sold well, debuting at #7 on the New York Times Best Seller list for Children’s Books, and the online community continues to be active.

In addition to revealing more about the potential uses of the ARG for both viral marketing and self-monetization, a significant goal of the project proposed herein is to explore the capacity of ambient story and game play to create and shape communities of player-participants within the constraints of institutional space. Questions to be addressed include: can ARGs and other kinds of layered or ambient story/game systems help to foster a sense of community and camaraderie in work and study environments? Does the presence of a continuously-unfolding mystery “accelerate serendipity” by bringing like-minded individuals into physical and virtual association in order to solve the mysteries with which they have been confronted? How can an ARG stimulate the production and sharing of media by its participants? More broadly, can highly-mediated approaches to play and narrative that involve the deep and tangled integration of story-telling, story-consuming, and even story-producing, into the fabric of everyday life produce emotional and social effects of similar character to those produced by the novel or the narrative cinema? Addressing these questions through the deployment of a small-scale ARG in the SCA will provide key practical insights into the creation and management of such projects, while also revealing new data regarding the intersection between structured social play and networked computational systems. It is my belief that an inquiry into the nature of this intersection is essential as we enter an age of ubiquitous information technology wherein the respective agencies of authors, crowds and machines promise to collide in productive and unpredictable ways.

Approach

Time is of the essence in the successful development and deployment of an ARG, and this project is no exception. The opening ceremonies for the new SCA Building are scheduled for mid-March, 2009, meaning careful coordination of resources and a strict adherence to a workflow timeline will be essential. To this end, work has already begun in concert with Scott Fisher’s “The Future of the Story” (TFOTS) research group (comprised of Professor Fisher, Will Carter, Marientina Gotsis, Jen Stein and Hidefumi Yasuda) to determine the specific technological, budgetary and personnel requirements and availabilities of the project. By continuing to liaise with this group and its derivatives (such as Will Carter’s “Design and Technologies for Mobile Experiences” class, CTIN 405), I expect to develop a precise set of practical parameters within which the story and game mechanics can operate by mid-January 2009. Once these parameters have been defined, I will begin the process of structuring the story/game experience and creating the necessary narrative content.

To act as a force-multiplier for these efforts, I have assembled a small team (“The Story Group”)  of writers, designers and programmers from the ranks of the Graduate Program of the IMD. This team will work under my direction to develop and deploy the creative and technical assets  required of the project. Four of these team members will be assigned primary roles and will be paid as interns for their work; an additional cadre of four to six collaborators will work in association with this core group to develop and execute the ARG. Further, as the timeline progresses, “pre-game” elements – small mini-games and story segments deployed in and around the SCA – will act as “rabbit holes,” enticing early participants who themselves will shape the development of the final experience, which will “go live” during the opening ceremonies of the new SCA Building.

UPDATE (15 July 2009): A portion of this project was demonstrated to a small test group in mid-May; observations and comments from the demonstration are forthcoming (as components of a larger paper on Location-Based Ambient Storytelling); their appearance will be noted here.

Mentality is a 3D knowledge-mapping system that uses semantic networks (or “mind maps”) created with a modified version of IHMC cMap Tools to procedurally generate information-rich virtual environments. These environments will enable users to navigate conceptual space using architectural metaphors. Mentality is envisioned for use in educational and project-development settings as an information visualization tool; other potential applications include use in health care/recovery as an assistive mnemonic system for patients dealing with memory loss, architecture as a means for analyzing flow and connectivity between discretely-purposed spaces, blogging as a way to create personal spatial archives, social networking as a way to map and enable relations between friends and affinity groups, and game design as a level-authoring tool. Finally, Mentality points the way toward a more thorough implementation of the so-called “3D Web” by offering a critique of the architectural metaphors underlying current online virtual spaces.

Technical Outline

In its simplest form, Mentality is a mash-up of mind-mapping and computer-assisted design (CAD) software. The application renders a “room” for each node on a source mind map, and a “hallway” for every connection between nodes (and, ultimately, other mind maps). In addition to creating nodes and connections, users can attach media objects, such as images, 3D models, interactive widgets, audio or video clips, web pages or autonomous software agents to individual nodes for examination and interaction. The virtual space will be generated procedurally at runtime, meaning any additions to or modifications of the cMap file will be represented immediately. The system will accommodate simultaneous authorship and access by multiple users.

The initial implementation of Mentality is envisioned as a way of spatially visualizing the rhizomatic structures of semantic networks. To get a picture of how this might work, imagine a simple semantic network on the subject of American history. To create this network, one might begin by writing down the names of a few presidents, say, “Washington,” “Lincoln” and “Kennedy.” One might then connect all three of these nodes with a new node called “Presidents.” Going further, “Lincoln” could be connected to “Republicans,” “Kennedy” to “Democrats,” and “Washington” to “Revolutionaries.” This process could be iterated at length according to the needs and knowledge base of the user (indeed, it’s not that difficult to imagine a system that could do this automatically, by stripping such connections from an already highly-interconnected information archive such as Wikipedia, Facebook or the Web itself). Furthermore, the user can add media artifacts to each node. For example, the “Kennedy” node could contain an audio clip of Kennedy’s famous “To the Moon” speech, while the “Presidents” node could contain an image of the Presidential Seal.

As the user adds nodes, connections and media artifacts to the semantic network, this information is passed to Mentality, which procedurally generates a spatial representation of the network by finding the most efficient uninterrupted paths (“hallways”) between nodes (“rooms”) and constructing a legible architectural environment to render these connections. When the user changes the semantic network underpinning the structure, these changes will be reflected in real-time, meaning that while connections between nodes may remain unaltered, the specific spatial/architectural arrangement of the nodes and connections will be dynamic, changing according to the needs of the larger system of connectivity demanded by the knowledge base.

Since this architectural knowledge representation will be created in three dimensions, sloping and curved hallways, “staircases,” “ladders” and “chutes” will enable a high degree of one- and two-way connectivity between nodes while maintaining a coherent (although fanciful) spatiality. A variety of algorithms will be tested as the project evolves in order to explore different approaches to rendering this architectural model. For example, in cases of heavily-connected nodes wherein the number of required exit pathways exceeds the limitations of architectural coherence, certain pathways could be shared, branching off to separate nodes prior to termination; alternatively, room size could increase in direct proportion to the number of connections.

Despite the potentially massive architectural representations that such a system suggests, Mentality is intended to make the most of available graphics processing memory and RAM, while leaving a relatively small footprint on data storage and network bandwidth. Because the virtual environment in Mentality is generated at runtime based on an algorithmic interpretation of mind map data, the representation itself is not dependent on huge amounts of storage space or bandwidth; all that is required is the map of connections between nodes and the set of rules governing how to display such a map, meaning the primary bandwidth/storage-intensive elements are the media artifacts within each node. In this sense, the system is akin to a web browser: it is an interpreter of information, rather than an archive. The textures and lighting that flesh out Mentality’s virtual spaces could also be generated procedurally, using techniques similar to those developed by .theprodukkt. Recent industrial and academic work in procedural world and texture generation suggest that this is a promising line of development.

Clearly, successful implementation of Mentality depends on being able to overcome many significant technical challenges. The project will require collaborative work with a diverse range of programmers, cognitive scientists, designers and artists. By working towards the creation of a prototype system, I hope to explore the range of possibilities, problems and theoretical implications presented by procedural spatial representation, and in so doing, generate new questions and objectives for future research. Some of my current thoughts on the implications of Mentality in the development of Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) gamespaces can be found in the “Discussion” section below.

Discussion: Procedural MMO Gamespaces

The fluid adaptive knowledge spaces proposed by Mentality present a direct challenge to contemporary virtual spaces that use architectural metaphors as a way of systematizing information and organizing communication. Second Life, for example, uses architectural metaphors in an effort to create what proponents describe as the “3D Web.” But if systems like Second Life are at least partially intended to point the way toward a truly “spatial” Web, then for the most part, they fall short of the mark.

Despite recent online and ubicomp shifts toward dynamic data collection, display and representation, information in social MMO gamespaces such as Second Life is presented in a static, hard-coded manner: while certain aspects of the architecture are dynamic – virtual screens, for example, might grab XML feeds to display changing content – the architecture itself is decidedly non-dynamic. Buildings are fixed in space and layout unless their owners engage in the laborious process of redesigning them and/or spend (real) money to relocate. Nowhere in Second Life is there a significant computational feedback between the information content of the virtual spaces and/or their owners and the organization of the spaces themselves. In this sense, Second Life is akin to the early days of the Web: a network of static, hand-coded sites updated only when the author sees fit to do so.

Furthermore, and crucially, the spatial connections between sites in Second LIfe are limited by the location of their initial instantiation: once users set up their virtual homestead, their immediate neighborhood is fixed. The resulting irony is that the geographical metaphor supposedly guiding Second Life becomes increasingly irrelevant over time, as even the most fundamental affordance of the Web – the ability to create hyperlinks – is not adequately represented using the spatial metaphor: if your friends aren’t located in an immediately proximate zone, you’re going to have to “teleport” to see them (whereas in a fully-implemented spatial metaphor, affinity and social networks would be represented architecturally, with proximity reflecting both usage and density of connections). As such, Second Life often takes on a ghostly, abandoned and untraveled feel, much like a selection of rarely-updated websites left over from the mid-1990s.

Like Second Life, the central question asked by Mentality concerns the utility of virtual spaces in communication and representation. But while Second Life suggests that these spaces must adhere to a certain baseline of spatial verisimilitude in order to be usable (ie, the virtual world must be represented as a fixed and contiguous landmass), Mentality asks for the reexamination of such limitations.

A hypothetical MMO virtual world based on Mentality would be a dynamic self-organizing space, shifting form based on context and the connections created by its users. Virtual “neighborhoods” would be organized not on the basis of property acquisition and fixed geography, but rather in terms of affinity networks and taste fabrics. Proximity would be mapped to density of connections and usage patterns; geography and architecture would thus shift to accommodate new connections and activities on a highly contextual basis. How would users react to such an ephemeral and transitory spatial representation? Would this kind of dynamic, contextually-generated environment be of greater utility than geographically static worlds that mimic the physical and economic structures of the real world? Or would it just be confusing? And finally, how would the system navigate and reconcile the multiplicity of contexts implicit in a massively multiplayer gamespace?

Investigating these and other questions raised by the notion of procedural MMO gamespace generation is a core objective of the Mentality project. In concert with several other current projects addressing this issue – from Georgia Tech’s Charbitat to Will Wright’s Spore – Mentality is intended to assist in the creation of a vision for the next generation of networked virtual spaces.