COLLABORATIVE STORYTELLING

AKA: Transmedia Narrative

Traditional GAMES

DEFINED RULES DEFINED SPACE GIVEN SET OF COMPONENTS

GIVEN VICTORY CONDITIONS

New Media GAMES

ENCOURAGE EMERGENT PROPERTIES

INCORPORATE IMMERSIVE REAL-WORLD ELEMENTS APPLY SOCIAL NETWORKING TOOLS FOSTER COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING AND STORYTELLING

Online Interactive Entertainment

www.hulu.com
http://www.secondlife.com/

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/index.xml

http://www.spore.com/

Interactive Advertising

Interactive Advertising

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcmm_QXbFiY

http://www.subservientchicken.com/

http://www.trydrugs.net/
http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php?season=12

Interactive Reality

thethirtynineclues.com

geocaching.com

Augmented Reality

INTERACTIVE STORYTELLING

"a form of interactive entertainment in which the player plays the role of the protagonist in a dramatically rich environment."
- Chris Crawford, Storytron Game Designer

(NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH)

INTERACTIVE FICTION

Democracy: Fiction or Non-Fiction?

How reliable are the masses?

"Ask 100 people to answer a question or solve a problem and the average answer will often be at least as good as the answer of the smartest member. With most things, the average is mediocrity," but, "with decisionmaking, its often excellence... as if weve been programmed to be collectively smart." -James Surowiecki The Wisdom of Crowds

THEN: Fireside Stories

The lost art of the Bard

[Greek] poems followed a strict meter dactylic hexameter 18 syllables per line with special stress. They were highly formulaic, including epithets (gray-eyed goddess Athena), familiar scenes (banquets, funerals), and traditional stories (the Trojan War). What literary scholars discovered is that these rigid structures permitted Homer and other bards the ability to deliver epic poetry in dactylic hexameter while composing in real time during a recital performance! Even as these formulae enabled composition, they also constrained innovation; as a result, these formulae effectively ensured that the content of the poems changed only minimally across generations. http://wisdomtools.com/documents/HCII2005-Siegel-final4.pdf

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L7VTH8ii_8

NOW: Self-Publishing

http://www.webook.com/

http://www.thisisby.us/

http://www.lulu.com/

RPGs
Role Play or Roll Play?

Shared Authoring
Y.A.R.N: http://cheats.gamespy.com/web-games/yarn-gamespy/

http://www.woodenboat.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-48628.html

http://rootclip.com/

Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG)

New genre of gaming (since about 2000) that combines real world events with the virtual experience. Built around solving puzzles or mysteries rather than killing enemies and has many emergent properties created by users rather than simple linear story-lines

ARG
Alternate Reality Gaming is, according to CNET, "...an obsession-inspiring genre that blends real-life treasure hunting, interactive storytelling, video games and online community...
"These games are an intensely complicated series of puzzles involving coded Web sites, real-world clues like the newspaper advertisements, phone calls in the middle of the night from game characters and more. That blend of real-world activities and a dramatic storyline has proven irresistible to many." These games often have a specific goal of not only involving the player with the story and/or fictional characters but of connecting them to the real world and to each other. Many game puzzles can be solved only by the collaborative efforts of multiple players, sometimes requiring one or more players to get up from their computers to go outside to find clues or other planted assets in the real world.

Traditional GAMES

DEFINED RULES DEFINED SPACE GIVEN SET OF COMPONENTS

SET OF VICTORY CONDITIONS

is the next stage in the game evolution.

EMERGENT PROPERTIES
IMMERSIVE REAL WORLD ELEMENTS COLLABORATIVE INTERACTIVE STORYTELLING SELF ORGANIZING STRUCTURE
(OF THE ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORK)

The Beast (the first mainstream ARG)

This much we were told from the beginning: Evan Chan was murdered. A web of clues was spun through the datasphere, and the Cloudmakers meticulously pored over each and every puzzle and detail. The Cloudmakers brought together diverse skills ranging from cutting edge spectral analysis to a unique and unrivaled knowledge of historical events and world literature . . . and a whole lot more. Two heads may be better than one, but seven thousand combined to form the ultimate crime fighting syndicate. -www.cloudmakers.org

A complicated promo for the movie AI. Began in 2000, ended in 2001 with over a million players.

A crafty way to self promote comic books. Ran for 3 years in 2 forms.

A complicated advertisement to increase interest for the TV series Fallen. Began and ended in 2006.

The first mainstream non-promo ARG. Very linear storyline. Simplistic card based puzzles. 3 years for season one, and sadly season two never happened.

www.argn.com

(www.unfiction.com/forums) www.unforums.com

despoiler taking the spoiler out of, um, spoilers

www.despoiler.org

www.argology.org

[Source: http://www.42entertainment.com/see]