Early in 2008, I started to research ways to tell stories with modern technologies and social media.  I had been working on a story idea for about ten years and the narrative had grown into more than just a traditional linear book.  I wanted to adapt it into some kind of modern choose your own adventure story (which now has “secret online endings”! – how cool is that?).  That research led me to the wonderful world of alternate reality games.

After studying current and past games I noticed that many of the characters in these stories were very superficial.  Especially in the grassroots games that didn’t use characters with established identities from traditional media and other intellectual property.

I wanted my characters to have depth.  I wanted them to be complex.  I wanted them to be as realistic as possible, and to have an online history that went back more than a couple weeks when the game started.  With that goal in mind I quietly created several social media accounts for my protagonist, Martin Aggett, to begin the process of establishing his authenticity.

Another shortfall of grassroots or independent ARGs, I decided, was the limited ability to attract a large audience in the introductory stages of a new game.  To solve this problem I decided to connect with people who regularly play ARGs using the social media accounts I created for Martin.  I thought that when the game launched and people discovered that someone with whom they’d interacted with for months was a fictional character that they would be excited to participate in the game.  In hindsight I realize that was a very naive hypothesis.

So, while I developed my own Alternate Reality Game, Martin began making friends on Facebook, gathered followers on Twitter, participated in online discussions, played several grassroots ARGs, and was even a guest on the ARG Netcast and had an article published at ARGN.com.

After Martin Aggett had interacted with people online for almost a year without revealing his fictional nature I came to a crossroads. Many of the people that I had come to know through the character of Martin Aggett were encouraging him to attend ARGfest 2009 in Portland.  It was then that I realized that if I attended ARGfest in character as Martin and made real friendships and connections with people that they would feel betrayed and foolish when I revealed Martin to be fictional.  In truth, I had already formed friendships with people online through Martin’s character and many people felt betrayed, angry, and foolish for believing he was a real person when I finally revealed his fictional nature just prior to attending ARGfest.  (to be continued…)

As we prepare to release Chapter 2.0 we’re studying what went well and not so well during the first chapter so that we can learn and improve the game over time. Going into ARGfest, much of the game had already been planned. All of the un-lockable story elements were written and waiting to be published. Challenges were planned and drafted on the website. I even arrived at the venue a day early to explore the area and scout out locations for live events and dead drops. I was confident that after several years of planning that I was completely prepared. That was my first mistake.

The first lesson I learned is that I needed to be flexible. For example, for months I had planned to incorporate a university campus webcam into one of the game challenges. When I checked the webcam days before the event I discovered that the link was broken and the webcam was offline. Now I had to come up with a new challenge to make up for the one designed to use the campus webcam. In fact, two out of the six challenges had to be replaced because of one problem or another.

Two of the biggest mistakes I made during Chapter 1.0 were actually very minor but caused cascading consequences. The first small/big mistake happened during the Briefcase Challenge. This challenge used a locked briefcase that belonged to Martin Aggett and was integrated into the ARG Museum trivia game run by Geoff May from 4DFiction. Players had to scan the ARG Museum QR code to see the trivia question; which was “What is Martin Aggett’s birthday? M/Y”.

Players were told that the answer to the trivia question would be the combination to open the briefcase. The problem was that when I scanned and read the trivia question as a test I didn’t notice the “M/Y” at the end – the combination was actually the DAY and MONTH of Martin’s birthday. This small error on my part made the challenge unsolvable and frustrating for the players. They were enjoying the challenge of finding Martin’s birthday online and then trying multiple combinations to open the briefcase, but ultimately had to come to me to get hints about the year. That’s when I realized something was wrong and had to just tell the players that the year wasn’t part of the combination and immediately fixed the typo in the trivia question.

The second small/big mistake was another one that fell into the “attention to detail” category. During the Activate This Axon challenge, players were given the instructions “19 August 2011 – 1700 – 39 10 11N 086 31 47W” which would lead them to a payphone. To prepare for this challenge I scouted the payphone location a couple of days before the challenge and took good GPS readings using my iPhone. I even double checked the coordinates in Google maps to make sure the location was accurate. Then when I transcribed the latitude and longitude from my phone to the website I made the mistake of ending the latitude with “11″ instead of what should have been “00″. This resulted in more than a dozen players being sent about eleven blocks north of where they needed to be to complete the challenge. As a result, they gave up after about thirty minutes and I was left watching a payphone waiting for players to come around the corner at any moment.

This was definitely the more egregious of the two mistakes – because of a simple typo, I sent a group of people into a residential neighborhood where they were looking in trashcans and poking around in someone’s front yard. The group could have been arrested for trespassing, or worse, I could have accidentally sent them some place dangerous. I was lucky that the only real consequences of this mistake was a bunch of annoyed players and a disruption in the flow of the game.

There were a lot more mistakes than just the ones I’ve mentioned, and I’ll share more of the lessons I learned in future posts here. I’d like to use this to get some discussion going – what small mistakes have you made that turned into big mistakes? What could you have done to avoid those problems? Share in the comments! Thanks for reading.

The first challenge I’ll discuss is the problem of narrative pacing. In my opinion, a great alternate reality game has to tell an interactive and compelling story. Without a story and interesting characters the players are just going through the motions of solving puzzles or finding deadrops with no other motivation than to play a game with friends. An ARG has characters with whom the audience can relate and interact to help advance the narrative. In order to create drama and a sense of urgency for the players these characters often “need YOUR help” to get out of some kind of trouble or solve a life threatening problem.

As audience members, we’ve been conditioned to expect our stories to be delivered in standard sized packages depending on the medium. Movies are between one and a half to two and a half hours. Novels are 300 to 600 pages. Television dramas are 60 minutes and sitcoms are a half hour. What’s become even more standard are the plots and narrative structures. Most moviegoers expect the introduction of conflict within the first five minutes then a steady increase of excitement and drama until the conflict is resolved about two hours later. That presents a big problem for the everlasting ARG. Once you introduce conflict into the story (and compelling characters need conflicts to be entertaining) the audience expects a steady escalation of drama until the situation is resolved. The ARG storyteller has a unique problem not faced by creatives working in the traditional mediums – most ARG stories are played out in real time. It would be like asking the writers of LOST to script dialog for their characters to deliver 24/7 for several months instead of 24 one hour chunks per season. Maintaining that kind of pace would require an impractical number of writers, and that’s not taking into account that the drama would escalate at a ridiculous pace and the story would burn itself quickly. Many ARG creators use puzzles as artificial obstacles to slow the narrative to a manageable pace. If not done well, at best this will frustrate the players and become a barrier to audience building.

Remix Fiction’s transmedia story isn’t the everlasting ARG that Irene envisions, but it is close. Martin Aggett’s story started with his first tweet in 2008 and is scheduled to continue for another four years. The only way to make this possible is to employ a non-traditional narrative pacing strategy. Right now, there is very little conflict in Martin’s life, and you could argue that without conflict the story isn’t compelling. I would have to concede that point. At this stage of the project there are no damsels in distress or serial killers to capture; making it challenging for players to find a purpose.

The audience has the opportunity to get to know Martin before he is thrust into the midst of conflict. Some people will have known Martin for years before his story hits the conflict stage. Now, instead of seeing the story’s protagonist as just a fictional character there is a much higher chance that the audience will forge an emotional connection with Martin when he is in trouble. When that time comes (summer 2011), the pace will shift into high gear for about 8 weeks, and will follow a more traditional narrative structure. Then, after the conflict is resolved, Martin will remain online and continue to build friendships until the following year when we present the second season. By employing this protracted narrative structure Remix Fiction has created a persistent character that can be a guide for the audience both during times of intense story conflict as well as during the lull between seasons.

Consumers have been conditioned to ignore marketing calls to action or to scrutinize them for some kind of trickery, which makes it difficult for transmedia storytellers to craft calls to action that entice an audience to interact with their story.  Transmedia storytellers have to find a way to deliver a heartfelt invitation to participate in the narrative without being perceived as a spammer.  That’s the challenge I faced recently.

I wanted to generate some interest in Remix Fiction’s newest project; a behind the scenes documentary that takes a look at the independent ARG community.  We want to include tons of footage of ARG players giving their opinions on a variety of ARG design choices and their critique of independent games.  To that end, we decided to solicit the community for video contributions by creating Facilitator Network Challenges.  (I’ll talk more about the Facilitator Network later… right now let’s focus on the challenges)

I think that we did a few things right in the creation of the challenges.  Lots of people have expressed an interest in supporting Remix Fiction projects, but are at a loss when it comes to what they can specifically do to help.  We weren’t giving them specific tasks to focus their willingness to contribute.  So we decided to create the challenges to address that issue. 

After creating two challenges and posting them here at Open Game Design we tweeted, posted the links on Facebook, sent an email to our mailing list, and waited for the flood of audience participation.  We tried to make the challenges straight forward, but difficult enough to be considered a challenge.  We also wanted people to feel like they were contributing a small part to a much larger endeavor that couldn’t be accomplished by one person.

So here is where things went awry.  After getting no significant response after three weeks I decided to send a more personal call to action to Martin’s followers on Twitter.  Over the course of a few hours on a Sunday I sent the following direct message to 102 people:

Hi  – I’d appreciate it if you’d consider completing the Facilitator Network Challenges at www.opengamedesign.com Thanks!

Almost immediately people started sending replies with a variety of responses.  Some asked questions about the challenges which I promptly answered.  Others sent a polite “sorry I don’t have time to do it” or “I’ll try to do it later”, and some promised to complete the challenges.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that most of the responses were very positive and none were overtly negative.  In fact, some were even encouraging.  If I stopped there I might be able to spin this little experiment as a success story, but there’s more that I need to report…

Out of the 102 direct messages I sent, only nine people replied back, and only one (so far) has attempted to complete one of the challenges.  Which seems like a pretty good response until you take into account one more factor – When I sent the direct messages @RFMartin had 414 followers.  Today, that number has dropped to 407, and six of those are new followers.  That means that at least 13 people have unfollowed @RFMartin since I sent out the “Call to Action DMs”. 

In order to get one successful response to my call to action I sacrificed 13 followers.  Was it worth it?  What could I have done differently?  If you are one of the 13 unfollowers I’d love to hear your response, but I would wager that you aren’t reading this… are you?

[UPDATE] 30 September – @RFMartin has gained a few more new followers, but no one who left after the Direct Message have re-followed.  Honestly, I made the assumption that the significant drop in followers was directly tied to the DM I sent, but I concede that some may have been a coincidence.  I’ve gotten three more direct message responses; two saying “sorry no time” and one indicating they will complete a challenge.  After a little more than a month, only one person has completed a challenge…

The first topic we’ll tackle is producing video content for online consumption.  When Remix fiction was formed in 2009, we wanted to have a live, interactive, television-style news show.  We wanted to interview leaders in transmedia and alternate reality games in a “Larry King Live”-type format.  So we started scheduling guests and tried to get the word out about when we were going to air the shows on our Ustream channel.  Can you spot the mistakes yet?

Big mistake number one:

Producing a live show with a virtual studio audience is a great idea – if you already have an audience.  We were in the early stages of building an audience base when we tried doing live episodes of Remix Fiction Television, and getting more than a handful of viewers for our shows was improbable at best.  The other challenge with scheduling a live show is finding a time that allowed a global audience in multiple time zones to participate.

Big mistake number two:

We were too influenced by the broadcast television model.  We tried to cram a traditional TV format (hour-long interview show), and a restrictive broadcast time down the throats of an audience that is used to time-shifting their video content.  We weren’t creating content that was appropriate for the medium – the internet.

Solutions:

It has taken us a while to adapt and learn from these mistakes, but we’re making some progress.  The first thing we did was scrap the “live broadcast” format that made our audience feel like they missed something if they weren’t there for the recording of the show.  We may do live broadcast special episodes in the future, but this will be the exception.

The other big thing we’ve done recently is to change the length of the show.  This was a tough decision because we really enjoyed getting into in-depth discussions with our guests.  Our solution was to record an hour or more of interview content, but break up the discussion into more manageable, internet friendly chunks.  Now, our target for each episode is to have the final version come in under ten minutes.  Once we introduced the shorter format we saw a dramatic increase in viewership because we were able to release shorter episodes (less time commitment for the viewer) more frequently (builds loyalty through repetition).

So, that is our first installment of YSA Transmedia – Remix Fiction edition.  We encourage you to join the discussion in the comments below.  What else could we be doing with Remix Fiction Television to make it suck less?  What challenges have you encountered with your own internet video projects?  We’d love to hear from you!

At least weekly (sometimes more often) we will issue a Facilitator Network challenge.  We decided to create these challenges to give people who want to contribute to Remix Fiction some specific focus.  We’re also going to use the challenges to refine some of the game mechanics we plan to employ in our own project – so you’ll get a chance to try out different game mechanics and give us feedback during the planning phase of our Alternate Reality Game.

Virtual High Fives

In order to add some extra fun to the challenges we’ve decided to keep score to track the progress of the Facilitator Network.  Each challenge will have point values assigned to individual tasks.  The accumulation of points by the Facilitator Network team will be measured in Virtual High Fives (or VHFs).  Because we want to promote an atmosphere of cooperation and team spirit we won’t have a “leaderboard” or keep track of individual contributions.  Each VHF that you earn will be added to the Facilitator Network score and tallied each week.

It seems that the Virtual High Fives weren’t the best incentive after all.  We’ll be reevaluating how we encourage participation in the challenges and will change those incentives based on feedback and experience.

Joining the Network

Although it isn’t necessary to join the Facilitator Network to complete the weekly challenges, official members of the network will get notified first when challenges are posted and may get individual recognition for their contributions.

To make things a little more fun, we’ll be sending out Facilitator Network Challenges to everyone who signs up.  These group challenges will be tracked right here at Open Game Design and will give us a way to focus the network’s collective energy and willingness to help us succeed.  An example of a Facilitator Network Challenge might be to simply read a recent article at RemixFiction.com and share your opinion in a comment.  We’ll also use the challenges to playtest ideas for our alternate reality game and could include the recovery of a deaddrop, scanning a QR code, calling a fictional phone number, solving a puzzle, or any number of other game mechanic ideas we might want to incorporate into our final production.

The first step in joining the Facilitator Network is to fill out our survey to help us better understand your privacy concerns and the extent you’re willing to participate in our projects.

We always want to have a co-creation mindset where value is placed on the audience contribution at all stages of game development.  This website will be the repository for what some developers call META or “behind the scenes” information, but we’re going to take it a step further and invite the audience to be a part of the co-creation even prior to the story launch.  Through the site we’ll solicit input on all aspects of game mechanics, playtest some ideas, and share what we’ve learned while developing our game so that others can avoid the mistakes we make.