CONTENTS Case study- whysoserious ARGs Case Studies.

TRANSMEDIA PERFORMANCE & PLAY

Rhythma Kapoor

Seminar Week 7

CONTENTS

Case study- whysoserious

ARGs

Case Studies

whysoserious

WhysoseriousThe campaign centred on the web

branched out over mobile

mail

flash mobs

scavenger hunts

casual games

user generated content

collaborative narratives and streaming video.

Whysoserious

Harvey Dent Vs. Joker’s army

CTAs: Joker cards found in comic shop

Participation: Ibelieveinharveydenttoo.com

Emails registered. When achieved sufficient numbers, they eventually revealed…

Rabbit Holes: "Jokerized" $1 bills are found that lead to Whysoserious.com

CTA: Whysoserious.com – a recruitment site for ‘goons’

CTA: RorysDeathKiss.com, challenging participants to take photographs in clown make-up by major national landmarks in groups.

RABBIT HOLES:THE CAKES Sent to locations (apparently bakeries). Once there, participants are to pick up a package left under the name "Robin Banks."

The package is a cake with a phone number on it. By calling the number, a phone inside the cake will ring. After digging into the cake, the participant will find an evidence bag with a cell phone, Joker card, cell phone charger, and a note:

“Good work, clown! Keep this phone charged and with you at all times. Don't call me, I'll call you...eventually.”

Results• Over 10 million participants - 75 countries = highly effective and

engaging entertainment/marketing campaign. • 50m Google searches for The Dark Knight and more than 55,000

videos tagged The Dark Knight on YouTube. • By July 18, 2008, The Dark Knight website reached 1.5 per cent of

entire users of the internet, the site had 5,270 sites linking to it • Blogsphere.com shows 106,299 blog posts on the launch day of

the film alone. • On July 18, blogpulse recorded a peak of 1.307% of all blog posts

on the web.• Some of the YouTube videos have received more than 4 million

views each and generated hundreds of thousands of comments.

What are ARGs?

An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions.

The key thing about an ARG is the way it jumps off all those platforms. It's a game that's social and comes at you across all the different ways that you connect to the world around you.

Transmedia Project Development

Story

Experience Audience

Platforms BusinessModel

Execution

Transmedia Project Development

Story

Experience Audience

Platforms BusinessModel

ExecutionAR fits here

Story Model ComparisonSingle-platform (movies, non-sandbox video games, books)

Clear boundary (or “magic circle”) separating story from non-story

Story contained within a single medium or artifact

Progression through the narrative orchestrated by authors or algorithms

Story as channel

Multi-platform (ARGs, transmedia stories)

Blurry boundary separating story from non-story

Story told across many media artifacts

Progression through the narrative negotiated among multiple authors and player-participants

Story as layer

Approaching ARGs

How might the story be best served with this platform?

What experiences can I create?

What content can I deliver?

How does it fit within the storyworld?

What business model opportunities are there?

What audiences will be excluded/ included?

ARG– when, where, how?

HomeHome Away

Tablet

Tablet

Public screen?

WHY ARGs?

Call-to-action AR marker (offline to online)

Narrative (video, animation, audio) Add interactivity to non-interactive media Provide contextual story

Exploration Provide contextual content

location-based content

Provide audience with tools gaming role-play

•[ARGs] are designed experiences with a strong potential for emergent, that is to say unexpectedly complex, group play and performance.•They are distributed experiences: distributed across multiple media, platforms, locations, and times.•They are embedded at least partially in everyday contexts and/or environments, rather than in marked-off gaming contexts and spaces. They prefer to adopt everyday software, services and technologies rather than exclusively gaming-platforms.•They have the effect of sensitizing participants to affordances, real or imagined. That is to say, they increase perception of opportunities for interaction.•Many, if not most, of their distributed elements are not clearly identified as part of the experience. Thus active investigation of, and live interaction with, both in-game and out-of-game elements is a significant component of the experience.•They have the effect of making all data seem connected, or at least plausibly connected.•They make surfaces less convincing. Underlying structures are what matter.•They establish a network of players who are in the know. They intentionally involve or engage others who are, at least temporarily, in the dark.•They inexorably create community. Jane McGonigal

This Might Be a Game, 45

What ARGs are out there?

The whole world is our platform…

Graffiti

Word of mouth

Signs

The whole world is our platform…

Movies

Graffiti

Phones &

Answering

Machines

Instant Message

s

Word of mouth

Events

Signs

The whole world is our platform…

Movies

Postcards

Graffiti

Single player games

Email

Books and

comics

Phones &

Answering

Machines

Instant Message

s

Word of mouth

Events

Signs

The whole world is our platform…

Theatre Movies

Postcards

Techno-toys

Hoaxes

YouTubeGraffiti

Multi-player games

Single player games

Email

Books and

comics

Phones &

Answering

Machines

Installation art

Instant Message

s

Blogs

Word of mouth

Events

Twitter

Signs

The whole world is our platform…

Wikipedia

(see * above)

Theatre MoviesAdverts History

LettersPostcard

sTechno-

toysHoaxes Software

CASE STUDIES

The Beast and ilovebeesFirst wave of ARGs, 2001-2004

The Beast – A.I. Promo (2001) elaborate Murder Mystery played out across hundreds of Web sites, and utilizing email messages, faxes, fake ads, and voicemail messages

The Beast ARG

The Beast ARG

Another example:I Love Bees

Used to promote Halo 2 launch (2004)

Elaborate narrative and radio play

Infiltrated the real world

Large Audience (thousands of players)

World Without Oil (WWO) was a serious alternate reality game in 2007,

a massively collaborative simulation of a global oil crisis, it set the model for using a net-native storytelling method (‘alternate reality’) to meet civic and educational goals.

WWO invited people from all walks of life to contribute “collective imagination” to confront a real-world issue: the risk our thirst for oil poses to our economy, climate and quality of life.

It was a milestone in the quest to use games as democratic, collaborative platforms for exploring possible futures and sparking future-changing action.

wwo

ARG: TRUTHABOUT MARIKA

Swedish alternative reality game. They used TV, newspapers, the web, live events and kind of took over the whole country for a few weeks. The premise was a fake event, but it was treated as real, and people engaged with the story in a sort of ambiguous way, not knowing forsure what was real, what was fake, what was conspiracy, etc. Such a fictional trope is often part of ARG work, and many would date it back to Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre’s radio adaptation of H.G.Welles’ WAR OF THE WORLDS in the 30’s.

MUSIC ARG: YEAR ZERO

YEAR ZERO is an ARG that involved fans of the band Nine Inch Nails at concerts by leaving USB drives in restrooms. Those who activated the files contained therein on a computer got instructions that involved them in launching the viral game, which depicts a theocratic dystopian future, the subject of the album.

GLOBAL CAUSE: CONSPIRACY FOR

GOOD

Global ARG called Conspiracy for Good, sponsored by Nokia. There were extensive live events that contained clues that could be retrieved via mobile augmented reality technologies, as well as many other events. The fictional elements, especially those aboutthe evil corporation, were quite elaborate. There was a real-world charity in Africa that benefited from the activities as well.

HEADTRAUMA

SHORT FILM ARG

COLLAPSUS

COLLAPSUS was a documentary film on Dutch television that was expanded into a broader transmedia experience that integrated game-play, global mapping, animation and other elements. Won the best interactive film awardat the SXSW festival in 2011.

WEB:TAKE THIS LOLLIPOP

Interactive Live Facebook Connect Experience

Take This Lollipop is a cinematic website created in HTML 5 that requires users to launch Facebook Connect and authorize the use of content in the account, which is integrated into a creepy, serial killer type short film. http://www.takethislollipop.com/The cinematic experience of “Lolllipop” is startling because it embeds images, maps, names and facts extracted from your Facebook account into the movie seemlessly.

ARCADE FIRE

LEVERAGES HTML 5VIDEOThe Wilderness Downtown. http://thewildernessdowntown.com/ : Indie Rock Band Arcade Fire, working withfilmmaker Chris Milk, released a song “We Used to Wait” produced with HTML5. Users enter the zip code of theplace they lived as a kid, and the video incorporates street scenes grabbed via Google Map Street View feature.Milk has a slew of experimental video/web projects on his site, including the 2012 FWA Best website (voted byfans), another collaboration with a band, this time Danger Mouse. http://portfolio.chrismilk.com/

3 DREAMS OF BLACK

USING Google Chrome’s browser forleveraging the power of Web GL technologies.Users can generate their own “dreams” by drawing on the landscape provided by the site or vote fortheir favorites.

WebGL/Chrome Project

LEVERAGES HTML 5VIDEOAIM HIGH is a web series about a teenaged spy. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1730374/ “Viewers log on viaFacebook” and by giving permission, become part of the story. https://www.facebook.com/AimHighSeries .

BECKINFIELD

Beckinfield (2011) – User submitted videos tell the story of a town

Beckinfield is a new site that creates a story world, e.g., a mythical California town, and a storyline thatcomes from the site, but the unfolding of the story is created by users who upload videos to the sitethat they have made in characters. The originator is an actor who had been helping fellow actorsupload “audition” type videos to YouTube, and yearned for a way to let actors use their improv skills tofurther their careers. The site’s platform company, Theatrix, hopes to license the software to othercontent companies who want to leverage their experience. They call it “mass participation television.”http://www.beckinfield.com/

Urban-based exploration game: ACCOMPLICE

The Accomplice is an urban-based exploration game/theatre piece, launched inNY http://accomplicetheshow.com/details-ny.php and now in Los Angeleshttp://www.accomplicetheshow.com/details-hollywood.php

ANAMERICAN STORY

ETHAN RUSSELL ebook (2012):“It’sYourHistory:HelpWrite It”

Rock photographer and music video director Ethan Russell http://www.ethanrussell.com/index.htmlhas justpublished his “illustrated” memoir “An American Story” that features copious photography, videos, and acompanion website that is seamlessly integrated into the narrative. He tells me the iBook version on the iPad isthe best user-experience. It’s also available for the Kindle, Nook, etc. http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/ethan-russell-american-story/id531762062?mt=11

The website allows users to post their own reminiscences of the historical timeline events itemized withinRussell’s nonfiction book. He intends to release these user contributions in subsequent versions of the ebook,which he titled version 1.0.

NEXUS HUMANUS

2011:Nexus Humanus from Michael Grant

a web-based story world for his next story, which is focused on amind-control organization. http://nexushumanus.com/

REMEMBERING 9/11

Clark’s GMD Studios created an interactive experience with the Smithsonian toremember 9/11. Simple, text and image-based. http://conversations.si.edu/

EDUCATIONAL: ROBOT HEART

Educational transmedia experience for kids

Group work 5

Complete the prototype of your ONE TM story world extension, which you will use in your final project.

Publish on CB & upload on BB.

Comment on at least 2 stories.

GROUP TOOLS!!!