no shit
25.11.2010
Cameron, A et al ~ Above the Bottom Line
category: PhD sources
tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Cameron, Allan
Verhoeven, Deb
Court, David
2010
Above the Bottom Line: Understanding Australian Screen Content Producers

Results of survey of Australian screen content producers.
4000 producers identified, 2000 contacted, 12% completed survey.
First question: You a producer? If not, no survey.

91-94
Lit review: producer.

94-96
Lit review: Creative Industries.

95
“The important implication for our argument, however, is that what were formerly known as the ‘cultural industries’ (film, TV, music, and so on) have now been subsumed into a broader category that includes non-media-based creative outputs such as design, fashion, heritage activities, and so on.”
“In the push to get cultural production taken seriously by governments and government agencies, the very real distinctions among skill-sets and working cultures arguably have been glossed over.”

97
“A staggering 42 per cent of film producers have a postgraduate degree.”
75% hold Bachelors degree.

100
“[Producers'] optimism about their own outlook contrasts starkly with their outlook on the industry as a whole”.
“what the survey results describe is something other than the slightly romantic notion of the ‘creative class’ advocated by Richard Florida (2002), and perhaps a little closer to the unstable context of ‘media work’ outlined by Mark Deuze (2007).”

101
“And we need to be attentive to the fact that cross-media mobility is not simply a characteristic of media consumption, but is increasingly a fact of life in production as well.” Oh really?

17.11.2010
Dena, C ~ Cross-Media Management Technologies
category: PhD sources
tags: , ,

Dena, Christy
2008-2010
Cross-Media Management Technologies (17.11.2010)

Very good list of efforts to EA bible/process/coordination software.

For more hands-on advice, see Watson, J ~ Content management and delivery tools for indie ARG producers

17.11.2010
Watson, J ~ Content management and delivery tools for indie ARG producers
category: PhD sources
tags: , ,

Watson, Jeff
09.02.2010
Content management and delivery tools for indie ARG producers (17.10.2010)

Gives a good list of tools one can use to coordinate EA. Often very practical advice (use whiteboard). For comprehensive software solutions, see Dena, C ~ Cross-Media Management Technologies

16.11.2010
Szulborski, D ~ This Is Not A Game
category: PhD sources
tags: , , , , ,

Szulborski, Dave
2005
This Is Not A Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming

Lots of definitions of play, immersion, ludology, narratology, etc.

1
“Regardless of which name we ultimately choose to apply, Alternate Reality Gaming is a rapidly emerging game genre and is one of the first true art and entertainment forms developed from and exclusively for the Internet.” It is not exclusively for the Internet, and he knows that: he mentions real life events, etc. later on.

47f
‘To be completely faithful to the TINAG philosophy, a game’s beginning (or launch, as they are commonly referred to) should be unannounced, although not all ARGs have followed this procedure and have still been successful.”
He is too prescriptive. ARGs are evolving. He published this in 2005, only 4 years after The Beast. How can there even be any categories or rules. Even in 2010 it is still Wild West out there. There is no such thing as a TINAG philosophy. Even the inventors of ARGs think they should never have invented TINAG. It is not a rule that people have to follow. It was an idea, and not the best one at that. And there are no shoulds in ARGs. Nobody knows enough to tell other people what they should do. Doing this would stifle creativity and evolution way too early!
He knows all this (see p. 191), I think, just has an inaccurate writing style.

66f
From Meadows, Mark Stephen ~ Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative
“Meadows: What was the interaction between the authors – you guys – and the readers, or players? Was there an instance when you didn’t know what the outcome would be but had to keep writing anyway?
[Elan] Lee: Oh, definitely. There was one puzzle where there was no answer. We had no idea how it was going to resolve. There was an artificial character that thrived on nightmares and was born in a psychological institute that had become so addicted to nightmares, it was looking for what scared people the most. See, it had to generate more nightmares to feed itself. We opened up the doors to the players and wrote out a distress call: “Help me” came from a character that the players liked who Loki had overwhelmed, but we didn’t know what the response would be. We wanted to leave it to the players to come up with something creative. They wanted to find a way to trap Loki and put out bait and destroy him, so they all got together – thousands of people – and they made a dream database and put all of their own nightmares into this database (it was beautiful to see them all work together like that), so we directed Loki toward the site and there he died. We created the animation sequence of Loki living though one line of everyone’s nightmare and phrased it in a way that read from everyone’s paragraph, but it was a single series of a total, truly nightmarish experience.
Meadows: That’s a pretty unique form of authorship that gives a lot of control to readers.
Lee: Oh yeah. The players felt totally in control and totally powerful, so the game was changing the story based on their specific writing.”

71-92
“Chapter 6: ARG Pre-History”
Lots of precursors.
Categorises Ong’s Hat: Incunabula as the first ARG.

100
The Beast’s alleged budged was USD 1,000,000.
The same goes for I Love Bees’ budget.

105-117
History of Majestic.
Most details I have found so far.

112
“[...] EA [...] announced it would be offering a retail CD-ROM version of the game in November 2001, containing the introduction and the first four episodes for $39.99.” So it was not a flatrate fee for the online experience, but a last attempt to repackage what already existed.

191
“Currently, this whole genre is really still in its infancy. I liken where things are now with television in the early 1950s.”

342-377
Self-promotional EA called Errant Memories. Made for ARG newbies to read through and understand what an ARG is.

13.11.2010
Lee, E ~ The “Rolling Stone” Interview, Part II
category: PhD sources
tags: , , , , , , , ,

Lee, Elan
27.07.2010
The “Rolling Stone” Interview, Part II (13.11.2010)

“We actually built an A.I. fighting game for the Xbox, a racing game for the Xbox, and a gladiatorial combat game for the Xbox. And the problem with all those games was that an audience isn’t going to know how those fit together. They’re not gonna understand how the characters kind of move from one game, to the next game, to the next, especially with a franchise where some of them may not have even seen the movie.
So we thought, what we really need is just kind of like, the glue between those properties. So we thought, what if we built a game that didn’t actually live on any platform, it just sorta lived everywhere. And characters could call you, and characters could send you email, and the characters that you saw in one game could hop out of that game into the real world for a while, and you’d play along with them. And then they’d hop into the next game, and that’s episode two. Episode three they’re gonna hop back out into the real world, play with you, and then episode four they jump into the next Xbox game. So we built that, and we called it The Beast, because we didn’t know what else to call it and we thought it would be cool.”

“Then we saw the movie A.I., and… I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie A.I., but umm, you don’t exactly… It’s a movie about a fake boy who really wants the love of his mom and would do anything to be real, but at the end we realize he can’t actually be real and his heart is broken and he’s buried at the bottom of the sea forever… No one walks out of that movie thinking, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to play the Xbox game!’ right? You’re screwed. So me and my team walked out of the movie and just thought, ‘Oh, we’re so f**ked!’ We have nothing.
So we went back to Redmond and we canceled all the games. We just killed them that day cause we thought, ‘We have no chance, no one’s gonna buy these things.’ But as we’re slashing these games, we kinda realize ‘But that other thing, the glue, that’s still kinda cool. That actually has emotional resonance, and actually fits in really well with the movie, because it’s all about people’s real lives. And their passions and their hatreds and their conflict, and, it’s just gritty and real and awesome.’ And so we thought, ‘Well, we own the rights anyway, so let’s just release that, even though it’s not promoting any of our games.’ Even though it’s not carrying characters from one piece to the next. We built it anyway, so we might as well just launch it. And so we did. And it wasn’t meant to be promotion for the movie… it was meant as a clue for these other Xbox games, which no longer existed. So we had no agenda. I mean, absolutely no agenda.”

05.11.2010
Schell, J ~ The Art of Game Design
category: PhD sources
tags: , , , , ,

Schell, Jesse
2008
The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses

299-307
He talks about transmedia worlds and says Jenkins coined the term (did he really?).

301
Definition-transmedia world:
“Henry Jenkins coined the term transmedia worlds to refer to fantasy worlds that can be entered through many different media — print, video, animation, toys, games, and many others. This is a very useful concept, for it really is as if the world exists apart from the media that support it. Many people find this a bizarre concept — they think of books, films, games, and toys as separate things, each standing on their own. But more and more often, the real product that is created is not a story, or a toy, or a game, but a world. But you can’t sell a world [oh I think you can], so these various products are sold as gateways into this world, each leading to different parts of it. And if the world is well-constructed, the more gateways you visit, the more real and solid the world will become in your imagination. But if these gateways contradict each other or provide inconsistent information, the world crumbles quickly into dust and ashes, and suddenly the products are worth nothing.”
“Why do worlds become so real for us, more real than the media that define them? It is because we want them to be real. Some part of us wants to believe that these worlds aren’t just stories in books, sets of rules, or actors on a screen, but that these worlds actually exist, and that maybe, somehow, someday, we can find our way to them.”
“This is why people so casually throw out magazines, but hesitate before throwing out a comic book — after all, there’s a world in there.”

299-303
Explains the transmedia world of Pokémon.

303-305
Transmedia worlds have 3 properties that make them interesting:

  • They are powerful
  • They are long lived
  • They evolve over time

304f
He gives great examples of how transmedia worlds can evolve over time and stay coherent even though there is no entarch behind it:

  • It was never mentioned in the original books that Sherlock Holmes wore a deerstalker cap and an oversized calabash pipe. A theatre actor (William Gillette) invented them. And they stuck.
  • Santa Claus‘ reindeer were introduced in 1823 and Rudolph in 1939, and both became canonical. Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum’s additions however (“Santa’s origin as a mortal selected for immortality by a council of nymphs, gnomes, and demons”, p. 305) never stuck.

305
“Who decides which new features enter a transmedia world, and which ones are rejected? It somehow happens as part of our collective consciousness. Through some unspoken democratic process, everyone just decides whether a particular feature seems appropriate or inappropriate, and the fictional world changes slightly to accommodate. There is no formal decision — it just happens. If a story feature is well-liked, it takes root. If not, it fades away. In the long run, the world is governed by those who visit it.” Really fucking good!

305f
Transmedia worlds have several things in common:

  • They tend to be rooted in a single medium.
  • They are intuitive.
  • They have a creative individual at their core.
  • They facilitate the telling of many stories.
  • They make sense through any of their gateways.
  • They are about wish fulfillment.

306
“Transmedia worlds are the future of entertainment.” => EfuckingA!

307
“Lens #74: The Lens of the World
The world of your game is a thing that exists apart. Your game is a doorway to this magic place that exists only in the imagination of your players. To ensure your world has power and integrity, ask yourself these questions:

  • How is my world better than the real world?
  • Can there be multiple gateways to my world? How do they differ? How do they support each other?
  • Is my world centered on a single story, or could many stories happen here?”
05.11.2010
Hon, A ~ Alternate Reality Games and Perplex City Season 2
category: PhD sources
tags: , , , , , , , ,

Hon, Adrian
2007
Alternate Reality Games and Perplex City Season 2 (11.05.2010)

17:54
Definition-story arc:
“analogous to chapter in a novel” -> so in his terminology arcs cannot overlap? -> Not my understanding of story arcs.

Story Arcs

19:48
They started off with influencable stories that branched out, were complicated, and depended on how the audience interacted with them. Later on the stories became much more linear, because these a easier to play. “Leave the story to us… but we’ll still change it anyway.” (slide text) if the audience likes a character, for example -> not player-directed but player-influenced story.

20:16
People like seeing new websites/content.

ARGs require new skill sets -> everything has to happen faster -> storytellers work under a constant deadline -> they’re not used to that, have to adapt

30:48
Mind Candy didn’t create a storyworld bible, but the audience created a Wiki and a Google Maps mashup that became the de facto bible!

19.10.2010
Yakob, F ~ The Future of Brands
category: PhD sources
tags: , ,

Yakob, Faris
23.11.2007
The Future of Brands: I Believe the Children Are Our Future

Applies Jenkins’ transmedia storytelling to advertising: “Transmedia Planning”.

14.10.2010
Juul, J ~ Half-Real
category: PhD sources
tags: ,

Juul, Jesper
2005
Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds

When Jesper Juul writes about transmedial games, he refers to the fact that games are a transmedial phenomenon: “many games move between media: card games are played on computers, sports continue to be a popular video game genre, and video games occasionally become board games” {Juul, 2005 #270, p. 48}. He gives the example of chess “as one of the most broadly implemented games, since [it] is available as a board game, on computers, and [is] even played blind, where the players keep track of the game state in their head” {Juul, 2005 #270, p. 49}. He points out “there are big differences in the ways that games move between media. Card games on computers should be considered implementations since it is possible to unambiguously map one-to-one correspondences between all the possible game states in the computer version and in the physical card game. Sports games on computers are better described as adaptations, since much detail is lost in the physics model of the computer program because it is a simplification of the real world, and in the interface because the video game player’s body is not part of the games state. Adapting soccer to computers is therefore a highly selective adaptation” {Juul, 2005 #270, p. 49}.

14.10.2010
Jenny, L ~ The strategy of form
category: PhD sources
tags: , , ,

Jenny, Laurent
1982
The strategy of form
In French Literary Theory Today: A Reader
edited by Tzvetan Todorov
translated by R. Carter

44
Definition-intertextuality:
Laurent Jenny characterises intertextuality in the following way: “it introduces a new way of reading which destroys the linearity of the text. Each intertextual reference is the occasion for an alternative: either one continues reading, taking it only as a segment like any other, integrated into the syntagmatic structure of the text, or else one turns to the source text, carrying out a sort of intellectual anamnesis where the intertextual reference appears like a paradigmatic element that has been displaced, deriving from a forgotten structure.”