WGA East Follow-Up

Last night I had the pleasure of conducting a digital storyelling workshop for WGA East. It seemed to go really well, though I got on the express train to Tangent City instead of sticking to my planned outline. 

Anyway! I promised a follow-up post to some of the participants, to expand on some of the subject matter. Here is that information!

Transmedia Documentary

Transmedia documentary is so, so hot right now. This is a nice article about that. Note that we also talked a little about transmedia storytelling for social change -- documentary really ties into that, because on both cases the idea is to take something that is true and make people care about it in the real world. Here are a couple of notable projects:

National Parks Project

Welcome to Pine Point

18 Days in Egypt

Moneyocracy

This is not my area of expertise, however, and I'd be delighted if someone more knowledgeable than I am were to mention more in the comments.

The Beast

The Beast, also known as the A.I. Game, is one of the things I touched on but didn't cover in much depth. Alas, the original websites for the Beast have long been taken down and the archive site cloudmakers.org is currently infested with malware. 

Wayback to the rescue!

Along the sidebar, you'll find links to copies of most of the in-game websites. Also pay close attention to the Guide, which is a sort of narrative retelling of what it was like to experience the game as it played out. When you're done, you might find it interesting to read this post by lead writer Sean Stewart on what it was like to create this game. Lightning in a bottle, for everyone involved.

And Finally

So hey, it was really lovely to meet all of you, and I'm delighted to continue our conversation. If you were hoping I'd expand on something we talked about, poke me in the comments and I'll see what I can do to get you some answers. Thanks so much for coming!

Update on Wednesday, May 16, 2012 at 10:32AM by Andrea Phillips

AND ALSO I keep forgetting to mention -- you should all be aware of Storycode, formerly the New York Transmedia Meetup. Get involved! Meet like minds! It's a magnificently warm and welcoming community, and I promise you'll be glad you did.

ACG Unabridged: Adrian Hon

This week's ACG Unabridges brings you Adrian Hon of Six to Start, straight shooter and one of the geniuses behind the smash hit health game Zombies, Run! Adrian and I go way back; we were Cloudmakers together, and later he was my team lead on Perplex City. He never fails to astonish me with his scope of vision and ambition. He's a terse one, so most of his juicy stuff made it into the Guide proper.

Interesting to see what he had to say about Zombies before it came out...

Q: Can you tell me a little about your favorite projects? 

From a player's perspective, the best game I've played was The Beast - it had an intoxicating mix of fiction and real world gameplay, and it was truly cutting edge. As for the projects I've worked on, there are probably three key ones (four, if you include Perplex City, but I assume you're talking about that elsewhere!). 

We Tell Stories (2008) was a project we did for Penguin Books who wanted us to work with seven of their top authors to create stories that could only be told online. It was a fantastic opportunity because they gave us so much freedom, so we created a story told over Google Maps (The 21 Steps), a story written in real time by two people (Your Place And Mine), and a new kind of Choose Your Own Adventure story (The Former General). It was a critical and popular success, and I think that was down to the simplicity and the strength of the stories, and crucially, the fact that people could begin them with just a single click and zero instructions. Not only did it win Most Innovative Website at SXSW, but also Best of Show. 

Smokescreen (2009) was for Channel 4 Education, and was essentially a single-player ARG that took over your browser. The goal of the project was to educate teenagers about online safety, and we did that through a 13 part story. We really pushed the boundaries of what was possible with in-browser technology, and I think we succeeded in telling a really immersive story that could be played at your own pace at any time. The downside, however, was that it had little community feeling or multiplayer interaction. Smokescreen won Best Game at SXSW in 2010. 

Zombies, Run! (2011) is an original game we're creating for the iPhone and Android with Naomi Alderman. It's still in development right now, but it's self-funded (along with Kickstarter pledges) and we're aiming to tell a highly immersive audio story while you're out running in the real world - and we're also planning to integrate an ARG into the fabric of the game. What's great about this project is that we're able explore the full range of possibilities of what smartphone can do in terms of location-based and augmented reality storytelling; but the challenge is, as ever, making the game fun and accessible rather than gimmicky. 

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 This is bonus material from A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling, out on June 22 -- just six weeks away. Preorder your copy today! And once you do... why don't you get it signed in advance?

Fans Like Joss

I'm a believer in big-picture, long-term planning. If you don't know where you're going, you can't be surprised when you never get there. It's good to be frank with yourself about what it is you really, truly want.

And so I've been talking to various of my friends the last few months about where I'm going with all of this. With the blogging and speaking, the marketing work, A Creator's Guide, with Felicity and Shiva's Mother and Other Stories. 

Five years ago, I reached a pivotal moment in my career when I left Mind Candy -- almost exactly five years ago, in fact. I've been very honest about how hard a time I had finding jobs or projects after that. (The summary: Yeah, it was hard and it sucked.) Nobody knew my work... and if they did, they didn't know I'd been a part of it. Certainly nobody was banging down my door.

That gave me the goal I've been chasing ever since: to build a professional reputation; to become somebody that potential clients seek out. Somebody they've heard of before. To find a way to make a living doing this weird stuff that might be alternate reality games or interactive stories or, as we say now, transmedia. "As god is my witness, I will never be obscure again."

Is it obnoxious to say that I think I've done this? I think I've done this. My mortgage lender is very pleased.

That means it's time to set a new big picture goal, and tick-tock just conveniently when the old one's five years are about up. So what is it I want now? It really isn't my own TV show or an eight-figure budget, though those would be amazing and I'd certainly not turn them down. It's not to work with any particular colleague or director or writer or artist. It certainly isn't to start a booming business as a transmedia pundit, ongoing punditry notwithstanding. What do I want out of all of this? What is the moon I am shooting for?

What I want is fans like Joss Whedon has.

Suddenly, this all winds up being very topical. A Guardian article some days ago talked about the "age of the social artist," to which Chuck Wendig and Harry Connolly have both responded. On Twitter yesterday, I discussed the topic of fans with those two gentlemen and with Stephen Blackmoore at some length.

Talking about having or wanting or cultivating fans is a mind-bending business. It feels a little crass to say "Yes, I want fans." It's one of those things an artist isn't supposed to talk about or think about, right along with stuff like whether there's a market for their art. But, look, this is the thing that I want, and I don't see the point in pretending otherwise.

Fans. It's fans I want. As many as possible. Fans who will pony down cash money, absolutely. But money is just a pleasant side effect of the thing that I want, which is for people to love the things I make. 

So why do I say "fans like Joss" in specific? It's because the Joss Whedon fandom has these hallmarks:

1. It's not really about Joss. The Joss Whedon fandom is fundamentally about his work, and not about him as a human being or even as a persona. For comparison, think about the fandom of Justin Bieber, the Beatles, Stephen Colbert. Certainly there is a lot of fan love for Joss-the-man, but that's a carryover from the work; people love the work first, and Joss himself only by association. This is ideal for me and my Complicated Ecosystem of Neuroses™. 

2. Critical love. This is a fandom that thinks independently. On the one hand, this means that they scour the depths of his body of work looking for nuance and hidden depth. No subtlety is overlooked, whether he meant to put it there or not. And at the same time, when something just isn't working, the community isn't afraid to talk about it. "This is kind of racist, right here." "This was not his best work, because X, Y, Z." That kind of thoughtful, critical feedback is more valuable than jewels. It makes it easier for you to get better faster.

3. A stake in his career. This community feels a personal stake in seeing Joss succeed. Nobody's calling Joss a sellout for making Avengers; instead, the zeitgeist is "Great! Now he'll have more capital in Hollywood to make more and better stuff!" 

So there we have it. This is what I'm shooting for. And the only way to do this is to start making and releasing work I've done on my own: so Shiva's Mother and Other Stories. Felicity. Other surprises in store. Because if I'm after fans, I need to make it easy to be my fan. And if you have to kind of be a transmedia wonk to even know I'm out there or what I've done... yeah, that's not going to work real well, is it?

More From Maya

Last night while I was tucking Maya into bed, I told her how many people had read her story here, so far. She choked up. "That makes me feel very special," she said.

I've been astonished at how widely read and Tweeted and linked that post has been. I think it's the most astonishing traffic spike I've had since that one time I called out Campbell's for being pro-ana and got picked up by Salon. So naturally I've been spending a lot of time thinking about what happened to Maya, and how I feel about it, and about why this story has rung like a gong for so many of us.

It comes down to her painfully honest statement. "I don't like cars because I want other people to like me." It's a horrible, stabbing observation, and the whole problem is that she's not wrong. The heartbreak here is that at her tender age, she's perceptive enough and articulate enough to state that ugly, ugly truth.

I'm a semi-professional strident feminist. I give talks about sexism! I talk honestly to my kids about sexism, racism, homophobia. I've tried so hard to be a good role model. My daughters see me wear pretty shoes and bright lipstick, but also cleaning the rain gutters, swapping out the guts of toilets, playing video games -- making games, traveling the world for my career, doing what I want to do as fearlessly as I can. 

I've been fighting this battle on behalf of my daughters all their lives. And no matter how much I talk and do, there simply is no way to protect them from the great wide world and the people in it who will try to limit who they are and what they can be. 

If even I can't protect them from those ideas, even with all of that... what does that mean?

So Maya's storied filled me with a kind of despair. My example isn't enough. And that's why I reached out to you. Because Maya's not alone, and I'm not, either. And it was about time I showed that to her. It's meant a lot. Maya's still little enough I can see the wheels in her head turning when I read a comment to her and she comes across a new fact and has to fit it into her world view. Thanks to all of you and your comments, her world got a lot bigger last night.

This morning, on the way to school, I asked if she had anything she wanted me to tell everyone for her. She thought for a minute. "I'm going to tell everybody in my class." Did she want to say thank you, maybe? "Yes. Tell them I said thank you to everyone." And did she feel a little better now? "Yes, yes, yes!"

Thank you. Really, so much, thank you. I'll keep you posted on how she does.

Girls and Robots

My daughter Maya is five and a half years old. She's in kindergarten, and is as clever and adventurous a child as you've ever seen. She loves dancing and princesses and rainbows and anything that is pink.

Maya has also always, always loved cars and robots, right along with those butterflies and flowers and hearts. But recently she’s been saying that she doesn’t like these things anymore.

"I don’t like cars," she told me, "because I want people to like me."

This breaks my heart. And I imagine it breaks your heart, too. Five years old, and she's already figured out just exactly how this thing works.

It turns out that "it got out" in school that she liked cars, so she says. And then the other girls in her class made fun of her for liking boy things.

All her life I've been talking about being true to yourself, about liking the things you find in your heart whether it's a girl thing or a boy thing, and still, still, this is how fast it can unravel. Five years old, and she's already trying to change who she is because she doesn't think it's who she should be.

Internet, talk to Maya, and talk to me. Tell us about girls who make robots and cars and bridges. Girls who build rockets, girls who can make and build and invent -- girls who have grand adventures, but who can still go dancing, and still braid their hair, and still wear pink. Tell us about you. I know you're out there.

Update on Wednesday, May 9, 2012 at 10:41AM by Andrea Phillips

I've posted a little bit of an update, if you're into that kind of thing.