no shit
31.10.2009
Cuban, M ~ Sports Ratings Records
category: PhD sources
tags: , , , ,

“THe longer the shelf life, the more likely that there is a lower perceived participation value. Sure you may want to talk about your favorite TV show with others, but there is no rush. You can get to it when you get to it. More importantly, networks and production companies should work a lot harder at creating realtime participation around their content. If you can increase the value of participation, you increase the value of the show and the desire to watch the show at the same time as others. [Which is exactly what is happening with sports in record numbers.}
You cant stop people from recording shows on their DVRs, and you shouldnt try. But you should try to give them as many reasons as possible to take advantage of the increased entertainment value of participating with others. High participation equals high viewership. [That is exactly what record ratings for sports are telling us.]”

Cuban, M ~ Sports Ratings Records (31.10.2009)

29.10.2009
Martin, A et al ~ Introduction to ARG
category: PhD sources
tags: , ,

Good definition of ARG:
“Alternate Reality Games take the substance of everyday life and weave it into narratives that layer additional meaning, depth, and interaction upon the real world. The contents of these narratives constantly intersect with actuality, but play fast and loose with fact, sometimes departing entirely from the actual or grossly warping it – yet remain inescapably interwoven. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, everyone in the country can access these narratives through every available medium – at home, in the office, on the phones; in words, in images, in sound. Modern society contains many managed narratives relating to everything from celebrity marriages to brands to political parties, which are constantly disseminated through all media for our perusal, but ARGs turn these into interactive games. Generally, the enabling condition to is technology, with the internet and modern cheap communication making such interactivity affordable for the game developers. It’s the kind of thing that societies have been doing for thousands of years, but more so. Much more so.”

Martin, A et al ~ Introduction to ARG (29.10.2009)

28.10.2009
Montola, M. ~ Games and Pervasive Games
category: PhD sources
tags: ,

PG = Pervasive Game

7
“The magic circle of a game is the boundary separating the ordinary from ludic and real from playful.”

12
“breaking out of the proper boundaries of time and space makes pervasive games fundamentally different experiences that can utilize a novel set of aesthetics for creating engaging and meaningful experiences.”
Definition-pervasive game:
“A pervasive game is a game that has one or more salient features that expand the contractual magic circle of play spatially, temporally, or socially.”
“The socially constructed ludic space does not have to be a physical one.”
“Pervasive gamers inhabit a game world that is present within the ordinary world, taking the magic circle wherever they go. Unlike nonpervasive games, which seek to be isolated from their surroundings, pervasive games embrace their environments and contexts.”
Augmented reality expands/extends PGs incredibly well.

12-17
PGs are different from (and bigger than) classic games, because of 3 characteristics:

  1. spatial expansion
  2. temporal expansion
  3. social expansion

PGs are expanded games vs. unexpanded classic games
(legal-economical expansion also exists, but is less relevant for PGs)
=> pushed to the extreme, a PG BECOMES reality? -> they are inseparable / the same
=> PGs are not games?

19
“When the three expansions of pervasive games are taken to extremes, the magic circle starts to lose its meaning as a contractual boundary between ludic and ordinary. Extreme temporal expansion leads to ordinary life becoming a pervasive game. The same happens with space if the ordinary world is seen primarily as a game world: There cannot be a game world without the ordinary world. And, finally, a game where everyone is only an unaware participant is no longer a game.”
“For professional gamblers, athletes, and gold farmers, the metaphor of the magic circle loses its meaning as a ritualistic separator of ordinary and playful, becoming only a representation of a code of conduct within the game.”

21
“Both play and ordinary life can benefit from the blurring of the boundary.”

22
PGs & video games are intrinsically different.

28.10.2009
Stenros, J et al ~ Designing Temporal Expansion
category: PhD sources
tags: , , ,

97
“While spatially and socially expanded games use the tangible realness of ordinary life to spice up the game experience, temporally expanded games add the pleasure of gaming to ordinary life.”

103
“A lack of rhythm in a game makes it hard to parse noise from signal.” It is easier for players to integrate the game with their real lives if things happen regularly – even if this makes the game less plausible.
“The very start of a pervasive game often makes or breaks the whole game experience and, hence, should be crafted very carefully.”

104
Definition rabbit hole: “A common way of luring players into alternate reality games has been through rabbit holes, which are ludic entrances to the fictitious world of a game hidden in ordinary environments that people can find accidentally and then enter the game. Basically this means that puzzles or mysteries that lead to the game are hidden in plain sight.”
“Believability is the most important feature of a rabbit hole, […] [but] regular players have become quite apt to recognising them.”

107
Definition contextual adaptability: “The ability of a game to adjust, either actively or passively, to changes in the social environment so that negative effects on gameplay or activities overlapping play sessions are minimized.” (Bjoerk et al 2004)

108
“A good temporally expanded game strikes a balance between sufficient contextual adaptability [see above, p107] and thrilling pervasivity.”

109
“Temporally expanded games invade a player’s ordinary life and spice it up. They mix playful and serious activities and situations, producing a refreshing element of surprise that feels as though it is just out of the player’s control. The games add color to mundane, boring moments with the ever-present possibility of playing. However, as players can never control the games completely (without exiting the game), this does produce anxiety that needs to be taken into account in the design.
The ultimate temporally expanded game would completely erase the distinction between the ordinary and the ludic.”

20.10.2009
Scott, A ~ A New Map of Hollywood
category: PhD sources
tags: , , , , , , ,

958
“This new Hollywood emerged slowly and painfully out of the profound restructuring of the old studios that occurred from the 1950s to the 1970s, and that finally resulted not only in a new business model but also in a new aesthetics of popular cinema.”
“The basic argument set forth by these two authors revolves around the transformation of the classical vertically-integrated studio system of Hollywood into the much more vertically-disintegrated production complex that it has become today.”

958f
“The Paramount decision forced the majors to divest themselves of their extensive theatre (cinema) chains (see CASSADY, 1958), and television drained off the audiences that had previously flocked to motion-picture theatres. The net effect, according to Christopherson and Storper, was a dramatic rise in competitiveness, uncertainty and instability in the motion-picture industry, followed by the break-up of studio-based mass production, whose peculiar process and product configurations could no longer sustain profitable operations. Instead, the system was succeeded by a new order in which the majors divested themselves of much of their former productive capacity and contractual engagements, and became the nerve centres of vertically-disintegrated production networks.”

959
“This turn of events allowed the majors to cut their overheads, to pursue ever more diversified forms of production, and eventually to flourish in the new high-risk Hollywood”
“the majors continued to play important roles in Hollywood as centres of financing, deal-making and distribution.”
“the sources of the majors’ market power [... at least since the Second World War] have resided mainly in the internal economies of scale that characterize their distribution systems.”
“the globalization of Hollywood’s market range (BALIO, 1996) [and this phenomenon actually] appears – for the moment at least – to be reinforcing the centripetal locational attraction of Southern California for motion-picture production activities of all kinds.”

960
“its technical and organizational configuration was marked by quite high levels of scale and a degree of routinization, but nothing equivalent, say, to the typical Detroit automobile assembly plant churning out identical models by the thousands.”
“two other [main] organizational effects flowed from vertical disintegration in the motion-picture industry. The first was the transformation of the studios themselves into something closer to systems houses, i.e. large-scale (though comparatively downsized) establishments now focusing on the production of many fewer and increasingly grandiose films. [...] The second was the emergence of masses of small independent production companies and service providers”

961
“The Hollywood production system today can hence be described in terms of a prevailing pattern of major and independent film production companies [...], intertwined with ever-widening circles of direct and indirect input suppliers.”

962
The Hollywood majors - corporate ownership relations

962f
“Another way in which the majors proceed is to work with smaller production companies, where the latter assume primary responsibility for organizing overall production tasks. The smaller companies involved in these ventures comprise both the majors’ own subsidiaries and selected independent producers in projects that may range anywhere from a niche-oriented film to a high-budget blockbuster. In these collaborative ventures, the majors work in a range of protocols, though in probably the majority of cases these grant significant control to the majors over production and editing decisions. Typical procedures include financing, production and distribution deals, co-production pacts, joint ventures, split rights agreements, ‘first look’ contracts, and any and all combinations of these arrangements.”

963
“Many independents also unilaterally assemble packages of scripts, actors, directors and other assets that they then present to the studios in the hope of securing a production or distribution agreement, though few are ever successful.”
“although the majors continue to dominate the entire industry, and continue to maintain a significant degree of in-house production capacity, they also rely more and more on smaller subsidiaries and independent production companies in order to spread their risks, to diversify their market offerings, and to sound out emerging market opportunities.”
“independent film production has increased greatly over the last two decades, with the period of most intense growth being the early to mid-1980s when a boom in independent film production occurred, fuelled by the growth of ancillary markets”
“The distribution of films made by independent producers is handled for the most part by independent distribution companies, many of them highly specialized with respect to market niche”

963f
“perhaps the majority [–] of Hollywood independents rarely or never come into contact with a major, and work in an entirely separate sphere of commercial and creative activity.”

964
“the two tiers described above are actually complemented by a more indistinct circle of companies as represented by independents strongly allied to the majors together with the majors’ own subsidiaries.”

Schema of the Hollywood motion-picture production complex and its external spatial relations

965
“These four points all allude to important positive externalities underlying the Hollywood production complex, endowing it with strong competitive advantages in the form of increasing returns to scale and scope and positive agglomeration economies.”
“in spite of the centripetal locational pull of Hollywood, expanding streams of production activities have been moving to distant satellite locations since the 1980s.”
“Without effective distribution, the production system could attain neither the scale nor the scope that help to make it such a formidable source of competitive advantages today.”
“Most of the industry is clustered in a relatively small geographic area centred on Hollywood itself, but also spilling over into other parts of the region.”

966
“the industry not only continued to grow in absolute terms in Los Angeles over the 1980s and 1990s, but maintained its high level of relative geographic concentration as well.”
“Decentralization occurs for two main reasons, one being the search for realistic outdoor film locations (which has always been a feature of the industry’s operations), the other being the search for reduced production costs (which is a more recent phenomenon).”

967
‘Creative runaways’: “directed to Canada, Australia, Britain and Mexico, with Canada receiving 81% of the total.”

968
“In view of this analysis, we can obtain a clearer grasp of just why (relatively standardized) television films are more susceptible to runaway production than feature films.”
“pronouncements of AKSOY and ROBINS, 1992, p. 19, to the effect that: ‘Hollywood is now everywhere . . . production now moves almost at will to find its most ideal conditions, and with it go skills, technicians, and support services’, and of HOZIC, 2001, p. 153, who talks about ‘Hollywood’s exodus into worldwide locations’, are both exaggerated and premature.”
“Hollywood today is a large-scale, many-sided, cultural-production and franchising complex, disgorging an endless variety of products designed for many different market niches. The linchpin of the entire system is the high-concept, mass-appeal blockbuster, that is, a big-budget film with a simple but climactic central narrative, an uplifting finale, a major star presence and possessing many marketable assets”

969
“The distribution system disseminates the industry’s products on wider markets, pumps revenues and information back into Hollywood, and hence is a basic condition of the sustained economic well-being of the central agglomeration”
“Employment in the distribution branch of the business is densely developed in Los Angeles alongside the production activities that it serves.”
“Distribution is the segment of the industry where oligopoly is most in evidence.”
“the marketing and distribution costs of many blockbusters today are equal to or even greater than their actual production costs” (Cones, 1997)
“vertical integration has indeed been on the increase of late.”
“For independent distributors, the average domestic box-office per film is $2.3 million, and for majors it is $46.1 million.”

971
“the pioneering efforts of US firms have more or less naturalized American cinematic idioms on many foreign markets, making Hollywood films highly competitive with purely local products”
“block-booking by US-owned film distributors is prevalent in foreign markets, even though it is illegal in the US.”
“The MPAA is a highly-financed cartel representing the combined voice of the majors, and it has proven itself to be extraordinarily aggressive and successful in shaping trade agendas in audiovisual products, as well as in many other political tasks of concern to the industry.”
“the annual American Film Market in Santa Monica [...] has grown over the last two decades to become the world’s largest motion-picture fair, attended by more than 7,000 people from 70 countries.”
“the majors are just as likely to dominate content supply in the new order as they have done in the old. More accurately, we should say that if, in theory, new electronic means of communications allow small producers to tap readily into global markets, the massive resources of the majors will still in all likelihood enable them to gain a decisive edge in publicity and marketing, and hence in sales.”

972
“in the late 1960s [...] imports grew to the point where they represented fully two-thirds of all the films released in the US”
“Much more research, of course, is needed on particular aspects of Hollywood’s operations, including many questions about new digital technologies, creativity and innovation, local labour markets, the institutional fabric of the industry, agglomeration and decentralization processes, corporate organization, marketing, the dynamics of demand, and so on.”
“[A] steady convergence [...] appears to be occurring between the economic and cultural in contemporary global capitalism”

19.10.2009
Tryon, C ~ Reinventing Cinema
category: PhD sources
tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Very good introduction and conclusion!

29f
“Reworking the adage that “all screenplays are also business plans,” John T. Caldwell observes that any screenplay being considered for production

    “generates considerable attention and involvement at the earliest story sessions and producers’ meetings by personnel from the firm’s financing, marketing, coproduction, distribution, merchandizing, and new media departments or divisions. Such discussions and analysis seek to ensure that any new film or [television] series will create income-producing properties (reiterations of the original concept) that can be consumed via as many different human sensory channels as possible.” Caldwell, J ~ Production Culture, 2008, 232f

This vast expansion of the original film text suggests that the narratively contained world of the feature film is now the exception, as target audiences are encouraged to extend their consumption into other outlets beyond the initial theatrical screening. To be sure, this process of cross-promotion has existed for some time, whether through fast-food tie-ins or action figures; however, the process of incompleteness suggested by DVDs has helped to reconceptualize film narrative in ways that tie together the fictional world of a film with the economic goals of a studio.”
DVD was an earlier step to / a preparation of audiences for storytelling in an entarch.

57
“Thus, while digital effects provide filmmakers with new tools for telling stories, the true reinvention of cinema is taking place on the margins, often outside of Hollywood, where innovative filmmakers seek new ways to distribute their work.”

64
“[In 2007 each cinema] screen was watched by an average of one hundred people over the course of a single week, typically on weekend evenings.”

78
“less than 15 percent of feature revenues now comes from theatrical box office income” (Caldwell, J ~ Production Culture, 2008, p9).

85
“portable entertainment [iPod/iPhone] may offer new models of attention more associated with distraction and with extending the narrative world of a movie or television show beyond the confines of the larger screens.” The iPhone is not a new outlet for movies, but for extensions of movies. A step towards entarch.

86
“The idea that we’re all going to abandon the multiplex for the supermobile is nothing more than one generation’s fantasy of another.” (Longworth, K ~ Distribution Wars, 2007)

90f
“Blurring the boundaries between promotional and entertainment content, webisodes call for a new language for thinking about the definition of a film text and for thinking about our relationship to this material.”

91f
“digital media have also contributed to the dissolution of a vibrant, unified cinema culture, explaining that “when people prefer to identify themselves as members of ever-smaller cohorts – ethnic, political, demographic, regional, religious – the movies can no longer be the art of the middle.”" Gabler, N ~ The Movie Magic Is Gone, LA Times, 25.02.2007

92
“what might be called the era of “desktop distribution” has actually ushered in new models for the engaged film audiences that watch and discuss films in a variety of public and private contexts, even while providing new avenues for major media conglomerates to reach those same audiences.”

102
“independent filmmakers begin to find new platforms that may place less emphasis on theatrical premieres.”

123
“While crowdsourcing may very well help filmmakers build an audience, it can also shut down possibilities for others, particularly the middlebrow films that may depend upon a gradual, platformed release in order to manage expectations. These shifts have had particularly devastating implications for the major indie studios.”
“Good buzz spreads quickly, bad buzz even faster.” (http://weblogs.variety.com/thompsononhollywood/2008/06/laff-mark-gill.html)

148
“film blogs are perhaps the most significant evidence yet of a vibrant and engaged networked film audience.”

153
“These shorter videos should not be seen as a substitute for longer-form entertainment, whether movies or television, but instead complement, promote, and in many ways depend on the feature films and TV shows they parody.” He’s quoting Miller, Nancy; 2007; Minifesto for a new Age; Wired 15.3.

173
“whatever else digital cinema is doing, it is also quite clearly a means for expanding the sites where cinema can be commodified, for bringing movies to the widest possible audiences.”
“However, the reactions within the entertainment industry to these forms of fan activity cannot be separated from the industrial, social, and historical conditions that shape film exhibition, distribution, production, and consumption. While a number of media companies, including Viacom, have attempted to contain these fan productions, others, such as Fox Atomic, have sought to co-opt them by providing fans with material for creating their own videos.”

174
“the ongoing shift to digital exhibition challenges traditional economic models and exhibition protocols, altering not only the selection of movies available but also our relationship to film as a medium.”

174f
“film is defined not merely as a technological apparatus, but also as Lisa Gitelman reminds us, in terms of the social practices associated with it. Watching a movie in a theater, at home on a DVD player, or on the subway on an iPod enteils far more than the activity of looking at a screen, and in some cases the uses of new technologies, especially portable media players, upset normative definitions of public and private space, requiring people to develop new codes of etiquette to match the new technologies.” check out Gitelman

175
“this anytime, anywhere distribution model also has the effect of reshaping theatrical distribution model based on scarcity, in which there are only a limited number of screens available at any given time.”
“[Nicholas] Rombes observed that with the inclusion of extras on the DVD, audiences were given the perception that movies are infinitely malleable or expandable.” More recently, of course, film texts are expanded even further through additional scenes posted to the web, allowing viewers to broaden their experience of a film well beyond the initial textual boundaries, while also ensuring a seamless mix of entertainment, marketing, and branding. Or course, these supplemental do more than promote specific films; they also promote a specific relationship with the film industry itself, addressing us on DVDs in particular, as connoisseurs, as experts on film culture.”
“these textual materials present an important site for the ongoing definition and “self-theorization” of the production cultures associated with film and television.” see Caldwell

176f
“we are witnessing a vast expansion of DIY and ultra-low-budget film production, due in part to inexpensive production and distribution equipment, leading to a significant transformation of the practices associated with film exhibition. Thus, even though Hollywood blockbusters are breaking box office records, indies face the recognition that many films that had historically played in theaters would now be unlikely to receive theatrical exhibition, except perhaps at a few festival screenings.”

177
“Hollywood studios continue to produce massive blockbusters seen by millions of people, but the sheer volume of movies may have the effect of fragmenting audiences seen while providing individuals with precisely the films they would most enjoy.” He calls this “the loss of a common culture” p177.
“cinema remains defined primarily in terms of theatrical distribution.”

178
“In fact, while studio filmmakers and theater owners continued to criticize day-and-date-releasing, characterizing it in some cases as a threat to the very definition of film, a number of indie filmmakers have recognized it as a viable option for getting their films seen. These models have been successful in helping some low-budget filmmakers find a wider audience, but it remains unclear how these models will be used.”
“blogs in particular at least maintain the imagined experience of the communal experience of watching with a crowd.”

179
“cinema continues to play a vital cultural role, no matter when, where, or how we watch.”

18.10.2009
Kring, T ~ Heroes Creator Tim Kring On Transmedia Storytelling
category: PhD sources
tags: , ,

Heroes has LOTS of examples of transmedia storytelling – but they are still all based on the TV series:

  • graphic novel after every episode, which are then bound into a book at the end of the season
  • every sword replica is shipped in a box that has a story engraved in it – this story only exists on that box
  • Hiro’s love story from one of his time travels was published as a book, but not on the TV series

“A lot of fandom is based on the idea of social currency and your social currency is based on your knowledge of the show. So if you know one more thing than the guy next to you at the school the next day or at the water cooler the next day then you’re sort of one degree closer to being cool as a fan. And so that stuff is really at the heart of why this transmedia idea works with our particular fanbase, because our fans like to dig as deeply as they can into the show that they love and find all this information. And the real sort of goal of transmedia storytelling is to have aspects of the show that live in certain parts on certain platforms and then migrate to others.”

CinemaTech
YouTube

11.10.2009
Stenros, J et al ~ Pervasive Games in Media Culture
category: PhD sources
tags: , , , , ,

Chapter 13 in Montola, M et al ~ Pervasive Games

258
“We have identified three growing cultural trend that have influenced and given birth to pervasive games:
the blur or the real and the fictive,
the continuous struggle over public space in urban areas,
and the rise of ludus in society.”

“With the emergence of the global village, with its ever faster communication, multiculturalism, and cultural relativism, [finding supposedly factual truths] is becoming increasingly difficult. Truth is being replaced by a perspective, an opinion, a third class between truth and fiction.”
It has been important – and possible – to mark a work as fiction or nonfiction. “This is no longer the case; the gray area between fact and fiction is widening.”

261
“Truth becomes an opinion, and, in a perverse twist, opinion becomes truth.”

262
“The roots in the struggle [over public space] lie deep in urbanization: In order for there to be public space, there must also be private space.”

266
There is a general rise in ludic activities in society.
In “persistent online worlds such as World of Warcraft and EVE Online [...] play goes on perpetually with no winning or losing in sight. There are temporary victories and setbacks, and the players do measure success in various ways, but there is no permanent closure. These online worlds are also called games, even if they are more like environments where play occurs. This is underlined by the fact that for many players social interactions and intercharacter role-play are among the most important reasons for play. Yet neither is coded into the game engine, and there are not even any strict rules of conduct. It is easy, and commonplace, to appropriate the virtual worlds for activities that they were not designed for originally.”
Entarchs might also be more like environments where play occurs!
There was this ueber-ship that was destroyed in EVE, and because it was unique it disappeared for good. (mentioned earlier in the book)

270
Pervasive Games matrix

274
“The Beast pretended to pretend to be real so that the players could pretend the game was real as well. For many pervasive games, the question of what is ludic and what is ordinary is one of the central questions.”

275
“[...] reading news, watching advertisements, taking a walk in the park, surfing social networking sites, and even everyday face-to-face interactions are but stages where playing takes place. We are all players in a ludic society.”
“The ambiguity between game and life is a defining characteristic of pervasive games, but it is difficult for these games to achieve mainstream appeal unless the borderline is disambiguated enough for players to feel safe, comfortable, and oriented in a pervasive experience.” !!!
“It is also possible that as the real and fictive blur, they will finally merge.”

276
“[...] it remains to be seen what kind of foothold [pervasive games] will have as the environment that birthed them evolves into something else.”
“If the boundaries around traditional play continue to blur and break, and numerous more activities continue to incorporate pervasive elements, a separate category of pervasive games may lose relevance soon after it has been defined.”
“Arnold Pacey (1985), a historian of technology, identifies three aspects of technology: technical, social, and organizational. Whereas the technical aspect only deals with the dimension of technology that makes things physically work or not, social and organizational aspects are related to the way we actually make use of our machines and how those practices are combined with values, norms, and other structures of society.”
“The enculturation of digital information and communication technologies has just started, and within the emerging practices like those of pervasive gaming we might just be seeing the first steps of a new kind of culture being created through the human use of these new tools rather than just humans blindly accepting the uses these technocratic systems impose on them.”
“One way to view pervasive games, and their sudden emergence in the past 10 years, is to see them as a societal response to the need for advanced media literacy. Play has always had an enculturing function, and pervasive games teach players media literacy skills that are viatl in coping with the demands of the converging media culture. As long as these kinds of skills are required, pervasive games will be available as one appropriate field of expression and response to the increasingly mediated and complex surrounding social realities.”

10.10.2009
Adams, M et al ~ Art and Politics of Pervasive Games
category: PhD sources
tags: ,

Chapter 12 in Montola, M et al ~ Pervasive Games

239
“Even when a game is clear, concise, and conventionally structured, the chaos and unpredictability of public space complicate things. An inevitable porosity exists between the world of the game and everyday life.”
User-generated content is “a phrase that has three major problems. “User” suggests that people are utilitarian inputs to a system, “generated” posits that they produce things through some basic process (think of a random number generator), and “content” is an awkward and ugly syllogism for the ways in which the public contribute. For these reasons I will use publicly created contributions [...].”

240
“The insider has a role to play. The outsider role-plays.”

243f
“Designers do not need to convince layers that the game is real; the game simply needs to be designed so that players are able to pretend so. No narrative multiplayer game can reach its full artistic potential without role-playing, simply because it is the most effective and intimate way of producing engaging peer-to-peer content.”
“A reality tunnel is what you believe to be true and right, and it has to go right out the window in order for you to make a good pervasive role-layer.
This is the first rule of pervasive role-laying: Reality is not objective and external; it is subjective and internal. Unless you understand and use this fact you will fail, both as a player and as a designer. In other forms of role-playing, the reality of the game is largely externally manifest in the words of the game master, the graphics on the screen, or in the propping of the game area. But when you play on the streets, you will see the normal blank faces and fashion victims; very little outside your own mind helps you slip into the game state. Instead, pervasive games must use internal methods to establish the game world, the diegesis. External aids such as technology and special effects may give this process a boost, but in the end it is a feat of the imagination. To help switch to the world-view of the character, the player can take a page from “the method” built on Stanislavski’s work, try character-specific mantras, or extreme body language. But the best way to help players is to provide them with a very distinct reality tunnel.”

244
“Wilmar Sauter’s model of communication for theater reading has A (actor) playing B (character) to C (audience). In a similar way, role-playing games could be described as A (player 1) playing B (character 1) with C (character 2) played by D (player 2). Using the same kind of model for pervasive role-playing would read something like A (player) playing B (character) with C (bystander) who has no idea you are A and not B.”
“This is the second rule of pervasive role-playing: Your character is what you can get away with. When in doubt, just get up and leave. Nonconsensual role-playing is a feature unique to pervasive games and not for the faint-hearted.”
“[As a game designer] you have to convince your players that your story could be true. It is not about making them believe, just a matter of selling them a compelling “what-if” scenario.”

245
Third rule: “Reality is what you can get away with.”

246
“”[...] pervasive games tell us that games are not products. Those of us trying to make a living making these strange chimeras know this firsthand. We make do with grants, we make things for free, we get paid to make games that promote other things that are well-defined products – movies, television shows, video games.”
-> Like baseball: nobody owns the IP of if, but it is a multibillion dollar industry.

247
“Games do not mean the way stories mean. However, they mutate and evolve; stories carry deep in their DNA the fundamental structure of a statement. Statements are messages from a sender to a receiver, and any exploration of meaning within the context of a statement is going to evoke the entire complex context of messages: symbol, signal, noise, etc. But a game is not a statement. Lots of communication takes place in and through games, but it is not communication from a sender to a receiver. Players are not audience. Unlike messages, which transmit meaning, games are more like meaning machines, or meaning networks. Players and designers are agents within a system out of which meanings emerge.”

248
“Instead of becoming a new globally dominant form of message sending and receiving, [games] will shift our focus away from the idea of broadcasting inherent within that model to a new way of thinking about meaning-creation that is more like a network, like a conversation from which meanings emerge.”
“A good pervasive game is not an attempt to seamlessly integrate a game into everyday life; it is confrontation between game and life, an intrusion that causes players to reexamine their ideas about game, life, and the relationship between them.” Not sure I agree.
“No amount of commercial or artistic success will ever fully overcome game’s “outsider” status, a status that is especially well expressed by pervasive games.” Not sure I agree.

05.10.2009
Svahn, M ~ Marketing the Category of Pervasive Games
category: PhD sources
tags: , , ,

Svahn, Mattias
Lange, Fredrik
2009
Marketing the Category of Pervasive Games

Chapter 11 in Montola, M et al ~ Pervasive Games

Very good marketing article! Good overview of marketing pervasive games, but applies to all new products. Worth reading again when I’m writing about marketing the entertainment architecture.

219
“It is safe to say that some of the more extreme pervasive games, such as Momentum, can neber be mainstream hits.”
“We propose that the way to mass-market a pervasive game successfully is to stop thinking only about mainstream game launches, such as Halo 3 and World of Warcraft, and instead look more to the launches of brands such as iPod, Starbucks, or Jamie Oliver. Pervasive games are not really new. It is just that the mass market cannot really grasp them. They are where the mp3 player was before the iPod, where coffee shops were before Starbucks, or where cooking shows were before Jamie Oliver – they lack the one prototypical product that defines the whole product category for the mass market.”
“Categorization is fundamental in human life. People categorize things automatically, even without being aware of it. The human ability to group instances into categories is automatic and critical in everyday life.”

220
“Product history shows that it is highly important to consier categorization when creating business moels for nevel products. What use, situations, needs, and solutions already exist that our product is replacing or adding to? These questions are central to marketing strategy decisions, such as what advertising style to use, and where to put the product on sale.”
“Thus, a new product should attempt to catch the eye of the market’s leading consumers. If the first impression regarding a new product comes from an association with a down-market-associated category, then the new product will inherit the associations from that category.”

222
“However, the launch of a truly new product, a rare opportunity, offers some opportunity to shake up perceptions.”

224
“The Majestic case [EA pervasive game that was marketed alongside video games] also demonstrates how important it is to avoid using category essences from a different category (in this case major computer games) if these essences make people perceive the product as something different.”

225f
Pervasive games do not fit into domain of “entertainment”, because they are not the reward after work and chores like film, TV, or a rock concert are. They are with a player all the time. That’s why they need to be marketed as part of a different domain, for example “specialized hobbies and interests” which “can turn into mass-market products if they manage to establish themselves as “designer lifestyle” products.” They can be the next Harley-Davidson or iPod.
All of this applies to the entarch!

226
“Human consumers carry around a primeval feeling of there being a time and a place for everything and unaware participation goes agains that feeling.”
-> ARGs and entarch have to be VERY carful not to disturb that feeling!

228
“This quality of “while doing other things” contrasts the domain of [engrossing] entertainment and its members such as literature and the cinema.”
The domain of “reward” encompasses “entertainment” (a disruptive activity) and “leisure” (non-disruptive). An entertainment product cannot be marketed as a leisure product. But the entarch is doing exactly that! Can the entarch be sold as the matter that glues various forms of entertainment together, but itself if not “entertainment” but “leisure”, a “designer lifestyle product” that channels consumers to “entertainment” products?? If it were a “reward” product, we wouldn’t have this problem, but can you market something as “reward” or is that too abstract?

229
If their concept is sound, “it means that the competitors for the mass-market consumers’ wallet and attention are personal fashion items and visiting “fashion-places” rather than newly released titles for PlayStation 3. It means that in the short term it may be wiser to design a pervasive game for the iPhone than for the PlayStation Portable, even if the former is a technologically inferior platform.”