What’s the Best Definition of Pervasive Gaming?

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Mark Wallace

I’ve just noticed that the Wikipedia page for “pervasive game” redirects to the page for “location-based game,” though I don’t believe the two are congruent. Location-based games leverage the player’s presence at a specific location in some way, while pervasive games don’t necessarily need to.

Humans vs. Zombies, for instance — in which college students hunt each other around a campus — takes place in the physical world around the players, without being dependent on particular locations. One could imagine a host of other gameplay possibilities that leverage mechanics that depend on interactions with other players or with categories of objects or locations (“coffee shops,” for instance) rather than interactions with particular locations (“the Starbucks at 2nd and Market”).

With that in mind, what’s the best definition for a class of games we could call “pervasive”? Here’s my current thinking:

A pervasive game is a game that takes place in the physical world, concurrently with the normal activities of players’ everyday lives.

Let’s pick that apart a little:

  • a game that takes place in the physical world
  • a game that takes place concurrently with the normal activities of players’ everyday lives

Explicated below:
Continue reading →

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His Father was the Pope: The Exquisite Corpse of GS623

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Mark Wallace

In the graduate studies course on the history and techniques of games that I’ve been teaching, I have my students create a prose Exquisite Corpse as part of our unit on parlor games. (We are also talking about participatory storytelling around this time.) This involves one person writing the beginning of a story at the top of a sheet of paper, then folding the page so that only the last line is visible. The page is passed to the next person, who writes the next part of the story and folds the page so that only the last line is visible, etc.

What I love about this particular story is that the last installment is the classic Exquisite Corpse ending — and was written (in huge block letters) by someone who had never helped write an Exquisite Corpse before. Here it is in all its glory, with passages from one person to the next marked by “/”

I came to work on Tuesday and looked out to see a sea of shining faces, all eager to learn. But when I asked them for their homework / they chose to instead turn it in late, causing a ruckus of epic proportions. / The two dogs continued to fight until one ripped the head off the other. / So thinking he had won, he strolled down the street but fell down a hole. / Even after waking up at the bottom of the inescapable hole, the LSD had yet to wear off. / Disturbed by the enduring effects of the neurotoxins, Mickey jumped in his riverboat and rushed downriver to find a doctor. Trying to conceal his distress, he started whistling a tune. / It was an old military song. His father used to sing it every night. But despite the old good memories, it still brought back the terrible details of his death. / To top it off, he found out his father was the pope and he had a hand in the hoax of the lunar landing. / Where they had a drink and then the pope killed him. / The pope was arrested and no one knew what to do. How can you send the pope to prison for murder? / And could it even be called murder? Although there was much confusion, many claimed it was self-defense and he had no other choice. / So he should just tun away or call the police. However, he doesn’t do anything. / EVERYONE EXPLODES AND EVERYTHING DIES.

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Startup Advisors: Defining Success

Posted on November 20, 2011 by Mark Wallace

A young entrepreneur I met recently asked me how to think about advisory boards and I ended up writing him a long email, which forms the basis of this post.

The biggest value-add I can impart here is a piece of advice that was passed along to me by an associate at the VC firm that funded my first startup, and it’s this: define success for each of your advisory relationships. Don’t just sign someone up as an advisor and then start leaving them messages asking what they think of the latest site design. Instead, be very specific about the kind and amount of assistance you want to get from this person, and then hold them to it. This entails some personnel management on your part, but it’s the best way to know you’re getting your equity’s worth from them. Advisors don’t get a very big slice of the pie, but as an entrepreneur, any slice is a big slice, so you want to know you’re getting an appropriate amount of value out of the relationship in return.

So define what success is in each case. From one person, you might expect to get an hour-long conference call every month in which you can seek feedback on the latest site design. From another, you might expect a steady flow of meetings with potential investors (one a month? one a week? depends in part on where you are in your funding cycle). Or you might have an advisor you’ve recruited because they’re well connected to engineering managers, so your criteria for success here is, help us land our Director of Engineering within the next three months. Continue reading →

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Transmedia and the Future of Narrative Entertainment

Posted on November 17, 2011 by Mark Wallace

I have a picture in my head of someone’s experience, circa 2-5 years from now (and probably starting sooner, like already), that is about how we will discover and consume our stories — our narrative entertainment experiences of whatever kind. Imagine a 17-year-old girl. While finishing some seriously late homework on her MacBook one morning before school, she happens on a Facebook post in which one of her friends has “Liked” a 6-minute video Webisode of Ninja Dino-Zombies of the Vampire-o-Sphere (more commonly known as “Ninja D’s,” or in other words, Entertainment Property X). The Like was posted from the smartphone on which the friend viewed the Webisode, and is coded with the geolocation of the bus line the friend was riding as she was watching it. Our girl watches the embedded video on Facebook and discovers a gripping tale of highly competent giant undead lizards trapped in a world of bloodsucking astronauts — naturally, she becomes interested to know more about the story, and clicks through to a page that lets her subscribe. She reads a chapter of a parallel narrative thread that’s just appeared as a blog post, checks out the zombie dino-damsel’s distress calls on Twitter, then heads to class. (What about the homework? Oh well.)

In class, she’s embarrassed by the chirp of her phone — it’s a text message with a news headline about developments at the vampire space station. Once the bell rings, she clicks through to download the next 6-minute video installment, and watches it while she heads off to Civics, which is two corridors away (so she has plenty of time if she takes it slow). At home that evening, she finds she’s gotten an email flagging the next chapter of the text-based narrative. While reading that, she notices a link to a Web-based scrapbook one of the other characters has created, explaining his love of the zombie dino-damsel and why their relationship is fated never to be (she’s just not that into inter-racial vampiric hookups, it seems). Our girl is more open-minded, though, so she posts a comment hoping he sees his way clear to confessing his affection, and — if she’s part of the 1 percent — maybe even writes her own alternate next chapter (or couple of paragraphs, anyway), in which he does confess his love, and sets off to rescue the maiden.

Meanwhile in Des Moines, there’s an aspiring writer who’s been following the same story (he’s mostly been playing the associated vampire-space-station-simulation game, though he refuses to buy any virtual blood), who spots our girl’s contribution, and who decides to run with it. Because Ninja D’s bears an accommodating license (like all truly popular works of the period), our Iowan can go ahead and cook up an entire alternate storyline in which the lovestruck bloodsucker rescues his girl and the two fly off to set up shop on a nearby planet — where a whole host of spinoff adventures start happening to them, authored both by this guy (who is so good that he’s making his living off the revshare produced by his work) and by other readers who pick up parallel threads of the cloth he’s weaving. This material too gets pushed out in the form of blog posts, chapters, video, text messages, Twitter accounts, push notifications, images, and more — all of it placed within the broad stream that is a single entertainment property in the transmedia age.

Insert end-of-vision tag here. I realize, of course, that there are already entertainment properties out there that are starting to behave in a similar manner. But what I’m really talking about here is the system that underlies those works, and that lets people create, consume, contribute to, discover, and distribute them on a synthesized, systematic basis. If you are interested in helping to build something like this (or think you already are), please get in touch.

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Other Transmedia Business Models

Posted on November 12, 2011 by Mark Wallace

Henry Jenkins has a great series of guest posts from Brian Clark up on his blog at the moment. It’s a five-part series on transmedia business models, and it makes a lot of interesting points, including looking at transmedia production through the lens of ten business models borrowed from other contexts. Clark looks at five bottom-up business models, and five venture-funded business models. These range from self-financing, no financing or fan financing, to doing ticketed events, enlisting the audience as co-creators, or raising venture finance, as well as a few others.

Clark covers most if not all of the bases. (I also think he discards the sponsorship and patronage model too easily.) Here are two other possibilities he doesn’t really mention:

One that is somewhat subsumed by his “infrastructure” model in Part Two (fund the production in part through revenue generated by licensing the underlying technology), is a distribution play. I think there’s a really interesting opportunity here at the moment. There is as yet no good channel for the promotion of transmedia projects and properties (nor a good word to refer to them yet). They are discovered virally, or as part of a marketing campaign around a more traditional narrative property, or around a single thread of the transmedia property. But as the games and app industry already knows, acquiring an audience member can mean more than just having that person’s attention for the duration of a single experience. Once you’ve built an audience, there’s a great opportunity to cross-promote other properties to those people — whether they’re your own productions, or those of others (in which case you’re taking a cut of the revenue that flows through you to them). This strategy is generally underleveraged outside of games, and could be of great use to transmedia producers.

The other way transmedia productions could benefit from the experience of the games industry is in relation to “freemium” models. Just as free-to-play mobile games now make more money than paid apps, we may find that ticketed events produce less revenue than experiences the consumer can get involved with for free, but that require a payment (or payments) to unlock additional content of whatever kind. This could take the form of story threads that are not available to everyone, virtual goods for use in games or in character customization, access to premium live events, etc., etc. The thing not to miss here is that consumers are still paying for content in droves, they’re just paying for it in much smaller chunks.

All that said, these models are not entirely in line with Clark’s series. It occurs to me that what he’s really writing about are (very important) financing models, rather than trying to ring the changes on all of the revenue models that are possible. Taken together, these create a much larger number of possibilities than the ten scenarios he describes. That’s not to take away from his series, though, which is very valuable reading for anyone considering a venture of almost any kind in today’s media, trans or not.

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Pervasive Gaming and Best Practices at StoryWorld

Posted on November 7, 2011 by Mark Wallace

I was at the StoryWorld conference in San Francisco earlier this week. It’s great to see the beginnings of a cohesive community and body of thought emerge around transmedia and evolving narrative — it reminds me of the early days of the community coming together around virtual worlds, and what fun it was to chronicle that.

I talked to a bunch of interesting people, but only sat in on one or two of the panel presentations. Herewith some notes on one of them, titled Streets That Tell Stories: How Pervasive Gaming Engages Audiences — pervasive gaming being the kind that inhabits the real world around you, that takes place over hours or days or weeks or months, and has as its playing field a building or street or city or actual, physical world. You may not have heard much of this kind of game before, but there have been some very cool examples (linked below, of course).

The panel addressed techniques and approaches for creating pervasive games, and was moderated by Christy Dena of Universe Creation 101 (among other things), and featured three panelists:

Some of the recommendations and experience that came out of the panel:

  • If you trust people to enter into the world you’ve created for them, they absolutely know what to do.
  • Design to accommodate different levels of engagement.
  • You’re not just working in one medium, you’re thinking pretty much 360 every minute.
  • You have to know what the space is like at all times of day, and days of the week.
  • There’s no point in feeling you should do something in a traditional way.
  • You want to be on the ground and scout out those spaces, see what opportunities arise.
  • You have to be able to improvise as a creator and as someone running these things.
  • We’re like Situationalists 2.0, we just have better tools now. — Jeff Hull

Hull introduced himself as Creator Director of Nonchalance, “a situational design agency” in San Francisco. “Situational experiences involve spaces and people and other things to add to the environment. This is in contrast to experiential design, which very often can be kept within the two-dimensional monitor-based realm. Our mission is to provoke discovery through visceral experience and pervasive play, by reengineering the way participants and audience members interact with media, with the space around them, and most importantly with each other.”

Hull’s Nonchalance is best known for a very cool pervasive game built around an organization called the Jejune Institute, in which players worked to solve mysteries whose clues were hidden around SF, take part in protests, and participate in other immersive experiences that took place in the streets and buildings of the city. To get more of a feel for the particulars of the Jejune Institute, watch the trailer, and read this New York Times piece about the game.

While this isn’t too far removed from alternate reality gaming as we’ve come to know it, Nonchalance seems to be aiming for a more immersive and pervasive experience than most of those we’ve seen before. I think there’s a lot of potential for this, especially when combined with tools and practices from more “traditional” electronic gaming — not to take away from the pervasive experience, but to enhance it and help drive players to engage. Continue reading →

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Playing the Story

Posted on October 30, 2011 by Mark Wallace

I’ve been doing a bunch of of over-thinking lately about the evolution of story and the future of narrative entertainment, so rather than continue that navel-gazing, here’s the short form (the short story, so to speak), and I’ll have more to say about this later. Not that all of this thinking is original to me; I’m just doing what I always do: scanning the landscape, picking out the relevant pieces, putting them together in a way that makes sense to me, and adding my own contributions as I go. So…

In the future, books will behave more TV shows. And not just TV shows, but interactive TV shows you can play like a game on your mobile device between reading installments of a parallel story unfolding at the same time. They’ll be released in episodes, there will be more than one thread to them, they’ll be interactive / participatory / responsive in some way, and we’ll take them with us wherever we go. And this won’t happen in the distant future, but within the next five years or so, and perhaps sooner (like now). Not to all books (or films, or games, or what-have-yous), but certainly some, most likely many, and possibly — eventually — most. At some point, in fact, it will become difficult to tell a book apart from a television show, and we’ll need a new name for this kind of narrative entertainment experience. We have the word “transmedia,” but that’s an adjective, not a noun (and it’s a term of art, in any case, rather than a consumer-friendly word). I’m not going to propose a new noun here (though I’m interested to hear ideas), but I do want to take a minute and describe what this experience will look like.

Here are four broad bullet points (not all of which will apply to every work):

  • Serial: Content will be released over time, in bite-sized chunks that can be consumed in a single sitting. Most narrative art — whether it be text, video, audio, or otherwise — will take the form of episodes. Long-form content won’t go away, but serialized narratives will be the default. You might get a bit every week, or a bit every day, you might get a number of text messages daily, or the pace of the story might vary according to how often you interact with whatever’s framing the experience — perhaps a framework like a game.

  • Multichannel: A work will feature multiple story threads, or “channels,” each of which will add its own unique content to the overall experience. These may be in the same or different media, and they may be narrative or merely descriptive (e.g., the fictional Web site of a scientific institution featured in a work). We will need new paradigms of linkage in order to navigate all of the fragments; an episode in one channel may point to an episode in another, which may in turn loop back; sequence may be important, or it may not. Narrative experiences will need to develop the signals which indicate these things to us, both technologically and in terms of the narrative itself.

  • Participatory: At least part of the form, distribution, sequencing, and/or other elements of the content (including, in some cases, portions of the content itself) will be shaped or created based on the participation of the audience. Rarely will a narrative be the same set experience for all who consume it. You may enter and leave it at different points, your choices may alter the sequence in which you experience it, the collective choices of the readership may alter what everyone sees, you may write a portion of it even as you consume some other element, or one of too many alternatives to list here may also be the case. Some of this may happen incidentally, merely as a result of following linkages, some may happen more consciously, some may happen as a result of a game, etc. But the monolithic story-object will become largely a thing of the past, and the shape of the experience will come to be determined at least in part by the actions of the audience.

  • Ubiquitous: Content will, at a minimum, be portable via mobile devices, and may also encompass platforms that reach all areas of a consumer’s daily life. That is to say, you may take your experience with you on a mobile device, or you may find that the experience follows you around across many devices and many contexts, despite the choices you make. As we become more connected, not just to the Internet but to the environment around us, narrative will take advantage of those connections and come to saturate them with story wherever it can.

Continue reading →

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Graduate Studies in Rock, Paper, Scissors

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Mark Wallace

I chose "A"
On Tuesday, I started teaching a graduate studies course in the History and Techniques of Games at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. (To prepare, I ran through the Academy’s new faculty orientation, which included the above multiple-choice question, much to my delight). We’ll be looking at the history of games and gaming from the very beginning (i.e., ca. 5,000 years ago) on through the very latest. I want to construct the course around three main ideas:

  • what games are and where they come from
  • how games are made (in terms of both design and culture)
  • the roles of games in society and our lives

The course description (which I did not write) sounds pretty cool (see below), though it does not include the game of Rock, Paper, Anything (more about that below as well) that I had students play. Continue reading →

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Genre-ifying Time Management Games

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Mark Wallace

not how I'll be spending my time

I recently got a promotional email from PlayFirst (see above) pushing their “top time management hits” and exhorting me to “check out these fan favorite time management games!” My question: Are there really people out there who are thinking to themselves, “Hm, I wish I had a new time management game to play”? Isn’t that like someone thinking, “Okay, time to buy a new audio-based interpersonal communication device,” instead of “I need a new phone”? Continue reading →

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Didn’t Actually Exponentiate

Posted on August 2, 2011 by Mark Wallace

Nicholas Lovell’s GamesBrief has an Interesting look at iPad / iPhone sales figure for Great Little War Game, which is actually a very good (but I would not say great) little strategy game. Co-founder Paul Johnson notes that a 5-star review from Touch Arcade, the biggest iOS games site on the Web, produced a nice spike but “didn’t actually exponentiate.” I’m not actually surprised to hear this, not because of the nature of games review sites, but because of the nature of the game. Because GLWG doesn’t actually include a multiplayer mode (other than in-the-room-with-friends “pass and play”), it’s hard to see how a spike in uptake would turn itself into viral adoption. Of course, Angry Birds was in the same boat, but that’s a different beast, aimed at a different (and much broader) audience, and with a different (and again, much more broadly welcoming) price point. So this GamesBrief post ends up being a look at the pop you can get from high-profile reviews and front-page category listings in the app store. These things turn out to be only an intro into the top of the sales cycle; what you do at that point is up to you, and it seems that the nature of the game is what determines the outcome more than anything else. In this case, I’d say GLWG might have a better time pursuing other marketing channels. Given the profile of the audience, a turn-based strategy game is never going to take off like wildfire in the app store. But I’d suggest there are channels where it might capture a more appropriate set of eyeballs, eyeballs that are ready to cough up more cash (so to speak) than most casual / arcade games are asking these days.

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