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| This is a slightly modified version of the talk I gave at the Reader/Writer Mashup event, which was run by The Reading Agency and Creative Partnerships, and aimed to explore the changing face of literacy in a digital age. My name's Guy Parsons, I do game design, community managment and digital strategy. I have both a personal profile with contact details, and a weblog called Vex Appeal. Because I'm fancy. Let's start with the meaning of life. Why do you get up in the morning? It's a deep question that philosophers have debated for centuries, but I reckon there are two very basic reasons:
By this I mean, life is first and foremost about doing stuff. We have goals, dreams, ambitions, and objectives, and we engage in various activities and take on various responsibilities in order to fulfil them. (Aside: it remains interesting that it isn't especially important what you do - it's the process of doing that's the fulfilling aspect. Compare attempting to climb the corporate ladder to, say, becoming the toughest hoodie in your neighbourhood - two different variations on the same power/status theme.) Second, we like seeing what happens. Life has a habit of being pretty interesting if you keep your eyes open. Besides, "stuff happening" is really just a side-effect of "doing stuff." For instance, the rules of football are a dull read indeed, but it remains a popular pursuit to watch people playing football, because from a simple set of objectives and constraints, heartstopping drama emerges. Stories themselves are about people striving for a goal in the face of antagonising factors.
So, wouldn't it be good if entertainment and media did a better job of uniting these two modes of being, modes that are naturally part of our day-to-day lives? Yes, yes it would! And in fact, that's an ancient tradition. Consider, if you will, the humble conversation, communication in its rawest form. We don't think of that as the "me/you mashup", yet it deftly combines active participation with listening to create freewheeling, edifying experiences - experiences that ultimately become more than a sum of their parts. If you zoom out your perspective historically, you'll find that it's not "the mashup" that is new, but instead the idea of broadcast; passively receiving culture through a one-way screen, disenfranchised from the means of production, may turn out to be a temporary aberration. Go back long enough - before movies, television, radio - and cultural activity was inherently communual, not least because it involved a bunch of people getting together in close physical proximity to the source. The digital revolution is really a powerful return to a natural, more human equilibrium. Isn't YouTube the new Speaker's Corner? In fact, a lot of the "radical changes" we think of the internet bringing are equally historical. In advertising, people are talking about "the market as a conversation" as a new idea, as if they've forgotten that actual markets involve plenty of actual conversation. That'll be three pahnd a pahnd, luv. Anyway, let's consider a 21st century example of a blended active/passive experience - the humble rock show.
Now in theory, a show like this is a passive experience - everyone stands there and watches the band play. But we know this isn't true. We've got crowd surfing. We've got dancing. People shout out requests, applaud, heckle. The band are interacting with the audience, the audience is interacting with itself, and the audience is interacting with the band. In fact the audience is doing so much exciting stuff that the guys at the side of the stage are watching them rather than the band playing right alongside them. Note also that there's room in this setup for people at the back to passively watch the band if they so choose - but don't think that they're completely separate from the process. Clearly the guys and girls up-front are adding to the spectacle for all concerned. They create atmosphere. We can even try and spot the flows of attention:
So: participation adds value and increases engagement for everyone. If it didn't, all these people would be at home listening to the album instead, right? It's a good model for interactivity, too - the crowd isn't intensely debating whether the next chord should be an A minor or a C diminished 7th. The experience is still authored, while remaining flexible, participatory and communitarian. How can we bring this kind of rock'n'roll dynamic to storytelling, then? What would fiction be like if it was live, human, and something you could dance to? Well, I'm going to talk about one possible method to create that kind of experience using the kind of egalitarian digital approach we talked about above. The term of art, clumsy as it is, is "alternate reality gaming." As a genre of entertainment, it involves a bunch of different, interrelated components, but bear in mind as you read that none of them are explicity necessary. I'll describe these games like I might describe horror movies: you can have dark, gothic settings, a taut soundtrack of stringed instruments, and a beautiful cheerleader unable to run faster than a menacing enemy can walk, but none of these things are exactly mandatory. The components of alternate reality games (or ARGs from now on) are generally designed to create engagement, novel experiences, curiosity and conversation, in the same way that horror movies are designed to create suspense and terror. So, the ARG I was involved in running was called Perplex City.
Perplex City was an eighteen-month long, interactive treasure hunt with a £100,000 cash prize. It was a story more than a million words long, told via online diaries of characters, websites for fictional companies, a fake online newspaper, phone numbers, live events, postcards, banner planes, and more besides. So that's the first interesting thing about ARGs - they tell their story across lots of different media, and they don't necessarily tend to rely on any one more than the others. We tend to consider content around IP in three different ways:
That is to say: there's the thing itself, the "authentic" content. Then there's all the other stuff. If it's free, like a website or launch event or something, we call it advertising/marketing/PR. If you have to pay for it, we call it a spin-off, as the property owners wring every last cent from the concept by transposing it to film, games, soundtracks, lunchboxes and so on. But what if we didn't make these distinctions? They're all equally valid methods of storytelling. What if a scrap of paper in Toy Harry Potter's satchel revealed a new piece of information about his history? What if rather than a film of every book, the films told different but related stories? Would more people go and see them, then? What if part 1 of a narrative was a book, part 2 was a radio series, part 3 was a game... altogether telling one big interconnected story? One light implementation of this was the awesome Donnie Darko website, which didn't just promote the movie, but contained a bunch of extra context and content about the story, helping confused viewers make sense of the elliptical ending. This extends to a different idea, which is that of bringing user-generated content into the story universe. Check out this dude (well, actually, my friend Jey) dressed up as a character from Harry Potter:
Wouldn't it be cool if the enthusiasm fans had for the story was reflected in the story itself somehow? What if, in-between books, Harry Potter had needed some help in the Muggle world we live in, and readers were invited to lend their assistance digitally, and those most helpful to his quest got a shoutout in the prologue to the next book? That would be neat. So, cross-media storytelling can be powerful stuff. Another aspect of ARGs is the gaming element. As we saw above, gameplay implies activity - doing stuff. And doing stuff is exciting for all concerned. What did we get people to do in Perplex City?
Here are a few things our players did:
A few striking things about this sort of thing: first, you can get people to do almost anything, which isn't a criticism of people, so much as a reminder that we're all desperately looking for excuses to have fun. In much the same way, a rock concert lets you throw yourself about sweatily amongst strangers, sing at the top of your lungs and be carried aloft by a huge crowd of people, opportunities that aren't usually present in day-to-day life. (More's the pity.) The fact you can inspire people to action is a powerful tool for lots of different people. For educators, you can conveniently find a way to inspire your pupils to learn vector calculus in order to catapult their protagonist across the river on whose banks they find themselves stuck. For publishers and marketers, it's a fantastic opportunity to create eyecatching PR opportunities. And for human beings, it's just a totally awesome way to mess about, meet people and have tons of fun. Also, authors, like the charismatic lead singer of our analogous band, can create different kinds of challenges to create different effects. The unique opportunity afforded by ARGs is that you can get people to work together for a common goal, which is a powerful and life-affirming mode of play that is hard to create in typical rule-based "sporty" games. There are different ways of achieving this. One of the first ARGs simply involved so many difficult puzzles that the player community had to pool its resources in order to progress - when one puzzle requires the expert insight into medieval lute tabulature and the next the knowledge of a biophysicist, communication and info-sharing are bound to occur. But the same team went onto make another game where the only challenge was to answer hundreds of ringing payphones across America, a much more accessible experience that nonetheless demanded co-ordination and co-operation between thousands of former strangers. Equally, there are challenges that require complete co-ordination amongst players - a disciplined, army-like response - and those that let the players simply act like a swarm. So in our code-breaking example above, a bunch of players worked together closely to study the code, build the requisite program and make it available to the masses, but thousands of other players could participate simply by downloading the program and letting it run, without needing to establish a dialogue with other players.
As I hope I've demonstrated, ARGs are great at building large, enthusiastic communities in a way that's all too rare in the world of reading and writing. Because ARGs tend to be natively digital, establishing connections between readers is usually in close virtual proximity to the content itself. Communities are good for lots of reasons, including:
One of the ways the community of Perplex City players improved the experience for everyone (even those who didn't participate) is through the creation of the Perplex City Wiki. Like a mini-Wikipedia for the world of our game, it documented every single blog post, event and clue in the story. It was so detailed that we started referring to it ourselves - because the players didn't know what was important and what wasn't, they wrote down everything, whereas we only wrote down what we planned on being significant. So when we needed one of our characters to naturally meet someone from a certain company, we were thrilled to consult his entry on the player wiki and discover he'd briefly dated someone there six months previously. Let's talk about this sort of meta-, user-generated-content for a second. In a very real sense, it is a significant and valuable part of the experience. If you joined the Perplex City experience a year in, the only way to conveniently catch up was to consult the player-created resources. Baudrillard once said "the territory no longer precedes the map." Well, in this case, it's more accurate to say "that the map is a big part of the territory itself." If you can encourage your readers to make this sort of content, they aren't just doing something "about" the fiction, they're adding to the experience of the fiction - whether you like it or not.
Any game needs to respond to the actions of its players. ARGs are no different. I never introduce the Perplex City as an exercise in interactive storytelling, because it makes people think of that (once-hip) idea of a TV show where you can call in and vote on what happens next. It turns out that letting people do this is a terrible idea because you can't be curious about what happens next if you get to decide what happens next. Secondly, it's like hitting your audience over the head with a large bat inscribed with the slogan "THESE CHARACTERS AREN'T REAL." Thirdly, most people aren't great storytellers. Fourthly, crowds are especially bad storytellers. What we want to achieve is a way for people to influence the path of the story within the context of the story itself, in a way that's satisfying to both author and audience. There are two ways to do this.
So as an author, you want control of a story. If you're trying to build a live, interactive, cross-media story, control is even more important because you've got to be able to plan ahead, establish larger plot-arcs, and so on and so forth. This is a situation that calls for directed engagement. It's when the story says: "we need you, the audience, to accomplish X." It's the most common form of goal-based play that we associate with typical computer games. To return to our rock'n'roll analogy, it's the equivalent of standing on the monitors and shouting PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR, CHICAGO! People like it because they get the reassuring sense that X is what they're meant to be doing, and that they aren't going to look silly by doing it, because everyone is on the same page. Stories usually have momentum in a particular direction, so it's easy to get everyone on board by, say, putting your protagonist in mortal danger. It's usually most effective to have a "losing condition" though, because otherwise you'll lose a disproportionate amount of sleep ensuring your audience manages to accomplish the task, and your players can sense that it's impossible to fail in the same way that sharks smell blood. Then they'll stop trying, which is never good. So, maybe it's better to put your protaganist's boyfriend in mortal danger instead, such that you can kill him off if necessary. You can also spice it up a little by setting your audience tasks without specific ways of accomplishing it (see the "find this guy using his photograph" example earlier) and creating multiple possible routes and outcomes - outcomes you've nonetheless been able to plan for.
It's also possible to create places for open, freewheeling experiences within a story though. In Perplex City, one of the ways we did this was through our game's newspaper, the Perplex City Sentinel. We created spaces for players to write op-ed columns on the latest in-game events, send letters to the editor, and put questions to the City's elected officials. Sometimes we'd latch on to an injoke the players had started and run with it ourselves, weaving it into the main narrative. Creating these kind of sandboxy spaces for open creativity - rather like The Sims - is an important part of the mix, allowing the audience to genuinely take ownership of aspects of the story, explore the world of the story more fully, have their input taken seriously - which means greater investment in the experience as a whole. It's not call/response pantomime - it's freeform word association. It's banter with the crowd. It's a neatly executed, temporary stage invasion. It's taking a request for a classic, but not having your entire setlist dictated. It's a key part of the rock'n'roll experience.
So in conclusion, it is possible to tell stories in a more rock'n'roll fashion, and web technologies make it even easier. Let's look at the methods one last time:
It'll always be possible to get people to sit down, shut up and listen to an interesting story, in the same way theatre remains successful despite the ascendancy of cinema. But if you're interested in building communities, engaging your audience, and creating fun new experiences, try jumping off the author's stage and diving headlong into the crowd - they'll be waiting to catch you with open arms. = = = Thanks for reading. For more thoughts visit www.guylewisparsons.com or my blog www.vexappeal.com. You can also email me at guy.lewis.parsons@gmail.com, especially if you have any comments, which I'll append to the notes section below, or include in the text itself if you've spotted an error on my part or have a particularly pertinent insight. (Never let it be said that presentations cannot themselves be participatory.) Notes Thanks so much to all the kind people on Flickr who take the time to license their photos under the Creative Commons license - it's a privilege to be able to use your lively and powerful imagery in my work! Credits to soldiersmediacenter (parachutes "open" pic) Delgoff (ecstatic man "just add rock'n'roll" pic) Sage (cat "passive" pic) Kivanç (dancing girl "active" pic) Jon Mack (rock'n'roll crowd pic) babasteve (Bible "canon" pic) Gaetan Lee (street preacher "ads" pic) the extra-lovely Laura Hall (werewolf Jey pic and people crammed into phonebox pic) Wetsun (bendy hope sign, "interactive/flexible" pic) Gesal (Red Arrows"directed" pic) and finally IanMatthewRoper for the stunningly fortuitous headline image of a rock show in a book store. A few other related points:
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