Category Archives: Blog

Spontaneous transmedia combustion: collaborative storytelling, Cooks Source, and the Talking Dead

Posted on Nov 6, 2010 by Jeff Watson

Online collaborative storytelling is an idea that people seem to get excited about in waves. At the peak of a given wave, designers and observers rightly express confidence that wholly new and powerful kinds of storytelling are just around the … Continue reading →

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Transmedia: New Platforms – The Games of Nonchalance

Posted on Oct 15, 2010 by Jeff Watson

[This post originally appeared at In Media Res as a part of the Transmedia: New Platforms theme week.] This video is a trailer for “The Games of Nonchalance,” a four-part transmedia experience “woven into the fabric of San Francisco.” Participation … Continue reading →

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Fandom Squared

Posted on Sep 22, 2010 by Jeff Watson

My paper, “Fandom Squared,” was published this month in Transformative Works and Cultures. From the introduction: Being a fan has always been about more than just “voting” for a particular story world. Indeed, in contrast to the streamlined logics of … Continue reading →

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Super Mario Sidewalk Speedrun

Posted on Jul 13, 2010 by Jeff Watson

Whoever plays such a speedrun knows the levels by heart it’s safe to say. A clear challenge in a game like this is that the frame doesn’t show you what’s a bit to the right until you’re close to it (danger). What’s nice about this piece is that it actualizes the expert player’s memorized map of these levels – laid out on a sidewalk. Continue reading →

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ARGFest Panel: City Gaming & Public Art

Posted on Jul 6, 2010 by Jeff Watson

ARGFest 2010 is just around the corner, and I’m lucky enough to attending as a panelist. I’ll be taking part in a discussion with Anne Dennington, Carl DiSalvo, and Sara Thacher titled, “TransGenre: City Gaming & Public Art.” Continue reading →

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IBM supercomputer “Watson” to appear on Jeopardy

Posted on Jun 16, 2010 by Jeff Watson

…just don’t count on him to open the pod bay doors. Continue reading →

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Incredible archive of 19th century scientific illustrations from the Challenger expedition

Posted on Jun 12, 2010 by Jeff Watson

The Challenger expedition was an ambitious scientific mission that sought to catalogue the geology and biology of the world’s oceans. Among other achievements, the expedition managed to scoop up bizarre life forms from the deepest parts of the ocean, including … Continue reading →

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No File: Brown – an interactive locative experience

Posted on May 31, 2010 by Jeff Watson

We will be presenting No File: Brown, an interactive locative experience, at the ELO.AI conference at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island from May 3 to 6, 2010. Continue reading →

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Another City for Another Life: the unforeseen games of the city of the future

Posted on May 26, 2010 by Jeff Watson

ARGs, pervasive games, and location-based social games echo and reiterate a range of earlier experiments in ambient and locative art. Graffiti, sticker art, mail art, and other kinds of analog methods for creating distributed narratives paved the way for the kinds of practices that are today exploding in number and purpose thanks to ubiquitous computing and the real-time web. Lettrism and Situationism redefined urban space as a canvas for experimentation, play, and collaborative production. Continue reading →

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Designing interactions in the flow: tagging books at Bibliotheek Haarlem Oost

Posted on Mar 25, 2010 by Jeff Watson

Nina K. Simon’s excellent paper, “Going Analog: Translating Virtual Learnings into Real Institutional Change,” describes how designers can approach integrating new user behaviors into existing ones — and why it’s often essential to do so. Continue reading →

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