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:

Pervasive games take place in the physical world
This is only to say that there must be a component of gameplay that does not take place online, nor on a game board as in a traditional board game. This could be an interaction with another person, an interaction with a particular physical object, or an interaction with a place or category of place. You may need to tag the human who’s wearing the bandana around her arm (as in Humans vs. Zombies). You may need to take a photo of a coffee cup and later upload it in order to fulfill the requirements of a mission. You may need to meet another player in a coffee shop of your choosing (rather than a particular shop dictated by the game). You may need to pass an object to another player. Etc., the point being that the gameplay requires some kind of interaction with the physical world, even if only on the honor system, as in the case of the coffee cup photo above. (This doesn’t preclude location-based experiences that require the player to be present in specific locations, but it is broad enough to take in experiences with don’t have that requirement attached, which is part of the reason I feel pervasive gaming needs its own definition.)

Pervasive games take place concurrently with the normal activities of players’ everyday lives
This is in the nature of the word “pervasive.” These games should “pervade” the life of the player — i.e., they should “be perceived in every part of” and/or “be present and apparent throughout,” as the dictionary has it. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re always-on experiences. But it does mean that when they are active, they are active not in a constrained area, but throughout most or all of the activities and places of one’s day. Perhaps you don a badge or scarf during the hours you’re available for gameplay; others with the same indicator showing are valid targets / allies / etc. Or perhaps play happens from 9 to 5 in the financial district of your city; you pick out a likely-looking stranger and give him the code word — if he’s also a player and feels like participating at that moment, he gives you the right response. In any case, games and gameplay sessions do not occupy finite periods of time, but rather unfold in a continuous fashion, with the player either always being involved, or dipping in and out of the “world” of play as they would in an MMO like World of Warcraft; gameplay continues, even when a particular player is not actively involved in it.

As definitions go, this one is not too fine-grained, and could probably use some refinement. But it seems a good start, to me. Is such a definition needed? That’s a different question. But I do think it’s important to be able to talk about “pervasive games” as different from “location-based games,” since (to my eye) they entail a different set of conditions, resources, and best practices. All of which are perhaps topics for their own post(s).

All that said, I’m perfectly willing to be wrong about this, which is part of the reason I’m looking forward to reading this dissertation, from Stine Ejsing-Duun at Denmark’s Aarhus University, which appears on first glance to conflate the two terms. Doesn’t matter: as long as people are looking at, playing, and creating this kind of experience, it’s a win.

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.

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.

Note that in some cases you’ll want your advisors to know what these criteria are, and in some cases you won’t. Regardless, it’s you who needs to know what you’re looking for from each. Plenty of people will tell you, “Sure, call me anytime,” but that doesn’t say anything about their obligation to call you back.

And be sure that the kind of help you’re seeking from each advisor is something they can provide. Don’t ask the open-sourcenik file-sharing dude how to market your B2B service to enterprise purchasing managers. You want to ask people for things you know they’re able to deliver. Or, put another way, you don’t ask for swimming lessons from a drowning man.

Other criteria for recruiting people to an advisory board:

• they believe in what you’re trying to build
• they’re well connected to a class of people you’re trying to reach
• they have experience building a company in or near the space you’re working in (or, they’ve worked at a high level in or near your space)

Not all advisors will hit all three of these criteria, but they’re a good way to start thinking about what you’re looking for — in part because you can generally expect to get one or more of three things from an advisor: marquee value, introductions, and/or advice:

Marquee Value: If you can recruit a well known figure from the space you’re working in, it can open some doors and/or be attractive to other people who may want to get involved or invest just so that they can get next to your advisor. So if you’re building an app that delivers a daily dose of comedy to your smartphone, you’ve got a huge win if you can recruit Jon Stewart, for instance, who could be valuable to you even if he never actually made any introductions or gave you any advice. That said, this is generally the worst reason to put someone on an advisory board, if you ask me.

Introductions: Possibly the best person to recruit as an advisor is someone who can help introduce you to partners of whatever kind, be they potential investors, potential employees, potential business partners, potential customers, etc. Not that you’re recruiting someone hoping he or she can introduce you to all of the above, but you’re recruiting someone hoping that they can introduce you to a very specific set of people. One advisor might be able to introduce you to great engineering managers, for instance, while another might know a lot of investors, another might be well connected in your target market, etc. You’ll probably get more than one type of introduction from a single advisor, but my advice would be to recruit an advisor based on a single type of introduction (makes it easier to define success), and be happy with anything on top of that.

Advice: Advisors can of course give you advice as well, in the form of feedback on designs, business plans, your approach to a market, monetization strategies, or any of the many other decisions that go into building a business. This is something you can expect from any of your advisors. In some cases, this is all you’ll expect. In that case, you probably want to find someone who has built a business that’s similar to yours in some way or who has great experience in the market you’re working in, and can lend you the benefit of their experience.

In addition, advisors can also provide you with a bit of moral support, especially if they’ve built a startup before. Don’t underestimate the value of this kind of assistance. And finally: advisory relationships can be a good way to feel someone out as to what they might be like as a full board member or executive of the company at some point down the line.

In terms of time commitments, don’t expect much, but do push for a conference call or meeting of the entire board once a month, if you can get it, or once a quarter at a minimum. And feel free to avail yourself of individual advisors’ help between meetings. Most people take advisory relationships not because they see a huge payoff in the 1/4 percent of equity you’re offering them, but because they think they can help you and they have an honest desire to do so. That said, they’re usually busy people, so I would say one of the number one rules here is: don’t be afraid to ask. And remember that there’s a time commitment on your part as well. You’re probably already creating a weekly update email for your investors (or if you aren’t, then you should be). Send it to your advisors as well, and also send along any material you want advice on in advance of any calls. Treat these people like their time is valuable to you.

You should also create an advisory agreement that lets their stock vest over time and allows you to call off the relationship whenever you want as well. Then, if your criteria for success aren’t being met, you can call things off.

How much stock do you offer? (Generally stock options, actually.) Anyone’s guess, but you’ll see anything from 1/8 percent to 1 percent, depending on who you are and who your advisor is, what you’re looking for from them, etc. No cash compensation unless you’re looking for specific deliverables, and then you want to do that in a separate agreement / transaction. But do offer them travel expenses to come to meetings, and buy them lunch occasionally.

So that’s the long way to answer the question of advisory boards. My advice would be to consider whether this would be useful, think about what kinds of people you’d want to recruit for a board like this (and start slowly with just one or two), and go for it if you think it’s the kind of thing that would help you get things going. It takes a little time and energy and equity, but I think it’s worth it.

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.

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.

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:

• Jeff Hull, who runs Nonchalance, a studio making pervasive games
• Hazel Grian, a multi-disciplinary artist (no other word for it, see below), who now works for Aardman Animation
• Constance Fleuriot, of the Digital Cultures Research Centre in the UK

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.

Hazel Grian introduced herself by saying, “I write stories and then I make them happen for real.” Grian has worked in theater, film, improv comedy, made ARGs, utilized robotics, interactive toys, and “anything which people use or see every day, to bring the magic of a story world into people’s everyday lives and get them away from their computer screens, by making stuff they can feel and touch and smell.”

“After all that, I’ve now got the first full-time job in my life, working for Aardman Animation [producers of Chicken Run, Shaun the Sheep, Wallace and Grommit, and more] helping to edge us forward into crossing over into the real world,” she said. Grian worked on the Star Trek ARG, and a pervasive game with an outstanding title that sounds like it was a lot of fun, 2.8 Hours Later. The trailer gives a sense of what the game is like: real-life zombies chasing real-life people through real streets as they try to make their way to resistance HQ in a span of 2.8 hours. One notable thing about this game is that it has proved to be a repeatable experience, and has been held in both London and Bristol in the UK.

The third panelist was Constance Fleuriot, who “meandered into this field via fine art and human-computer interaction.” Fleuriot works in the Digital Cultures Research Centre’s Pervasive Media Studio, where “we’re looking at how different companies and artists are creating street games and pervasive games and experiences, and looking at the language that’s developing around this, so we can feed it back to a wider audience.”

Fleuriot is engaged in a two-year research project, one product of which will be a “pervasive cookbook” that should serve as a handbook for practitioners creating pervasive games and experiences. “We want to give an idea of the sort of questions you need to ask when developing a project,” she said. “We’re basing our work on projects that actually exist.”

The panel mostly addressed best practices in creating pervasive experiences — not that there’s an existing body of thought on this. But Dena drew the panelists out on the techniques they use to approach the design of pervasive games and other experiences, with some pretty information and at times entertaining responses.

More than one panelist called out the need to remind players that the laws of physics still apply during pervasive games, and that people need to be aware not to walk in front of a bus while playing.

Grian described how she approached the creation of 2.8 Hours Later: “This is a giant zombie street game we’ve been running in different cities in the UK. We wanted to start with the idea of creating this dystopian, apocalyptic feeling for people in their own cities. People get the zombie theme, it has an appeal to a wider audience. What people love is seeing their own cities transformed. We have about 500 people playing at one time, we do it for three nights and it’s a sellout, we actually sell tickets. We transform the buildings that people see during the day into a movie genre they understand, so that people are running through experiencing, smelling, touching, feeling themselves almost as a character in a movie, and because of the genre they understand the rules of that world.”

Grian noted that they give players a “crash course in how to improvise and role-play in public. We make sure players understand the rules of behavior. We do that as efficiently as we can, at the beginning. They sign a disclaimer form. It’s a tricky area, people do get injured. We’ve also got actors that are chasing people through the streets of the city at night. It’s non-contact, but people get extremely excited.”

“We’ve transformed your city, but the laws of physics still apply,” Grian noted. “But as we’ve learned, if you trust people to enter into the world you’ve created for them, they absolutely know what to do.”

Hull described his experience creating the Jejune Institute (which has an awesome Yelp page): “The Jejune Institute was a fictional cult people heard about from various sources. The most popular was word of mouth, sometimes a sticker or a sign or a flyer, all leading toward this location, an induction center for the cult. The idea behind it was that interactive narrative-based experiences are event-based, but are actually built into the architecture of the city around you.”

“The induction center was a private office, you were greeted by a receptionist. You would tell them you’re there for induction and they’d hand you a key on a keychain and some instructions that led you down a hall. There you’d enter a room, this was a highly curated pseudo-scientific realm, there was a video presentation, oscilloscopes, crystals, crazy lights. And instructions not to open the drawer and take out the form, and to please not stamp the form with the ink stamp.” Which, of course, everyone did.

“Basically, there was this cryptic map that led you through this urban exploration. Throughout Chinatown we had a number of installations, some are still standing. Eventually, they led you back to the building, you’d get another key, to a lockbox, where you’d find instructions to listen to a pirate radio station. And all of this is just the initiation into the game, which had a series of episodic levels. What we did is to slowly build up trust, letting them further into the universe of the game. The deeper they come into our universe, the more we’d reach into theirs.” The final event of the game was “a huge party steeped in narrative, which took the form of a social reengineering seminar.”

“The great thing about the game,” Hull said, “was that it was surrounding you all the time, all you have to do is be curious enough to reach out and grasp for it.” Hull said the Jejune Institute experience saw a wide range of player types, and it was important to design to accommodate different levels of engagement.

“Event-based stuff is thrilling,” Hull said. “It’s time-based, so you’ve got to prepare. We all get a little rush from that impending happening. Our experiences have a wide range of elements, performance, automated phone calls, surprises, and other installations.”

On the issue of “replayability,” Grian said, “We’re working in an area where it’s never the same twice. Working in theatre, you know what’s supposed to happen every night. When you’re using the real world, things change a lot. You’re making somehting that first into a particular city. There’s an awful lot of work you have to do with finding buildings, shopping malls, churches, streets — we have to get all the permissions to create the specific show that works in that specific environment. As far as trying to make it replayable, we’re pioneering trying to make this thing work. You’ve got this massive live event, so much work goes into it. You’re not just working in one medium, you’re thinking pretty much 360 every minute, all with the sense of what’s happening to your audience, for several hours, across a real city.”

Hull talked about logistical demands as well, but noted, “There’s also something culturally about your player base to keep in mind. In previous games and ARGs there’s been a lot of hivemind problem-solving. We tried to create a culture where there were not a lot of spoilers happening, but players would mentor each other in ways that facilitated their initiation into the experience. Once one person had been through it, anyone could return to the beginning and catch up with the other players.”

According to Grian, “Part of it is letting people gradually feel comfortable doing completely different things. They know about imagination and good story and good character, those things are completely universal and historical. But getting people to try a completely different form of entertainment, you need to work on that for years. You can’t just throw it out there, it’s not an established medium.”

Asked what sorts of things are not being addressed, or what types of projects the panelists would like to see, Fleuriot responded, “I don’t play these games because I can’t run fast enough. Where’s the equivalent of street games or pervasive games for people who don’t want to run around in the dark streets making lots of noise?”

Hull noted that at electronic gaming conferences like GDC, there’s a lot of talk about scalability and being able to accommodate large numbers of players. “One of the main reasons we don’t have the depth of real-world engagement I’d like to see, we’re definitely trying to provide for people to have an experience, but we don’t as a company deliver impressions. We don’t care about impressions, we want to deliver an experience that has such a depth of engagement that our participants get tattoos of the logos on their bodies. We want to create a transformative experience in a very literal way. I don’t think you can do that through social networks or mobile technologies. The promise of those to bring us together has really been a failure. It’s not happening because we’re transfixed be the little glowing monitor, which is just a means to an end — which is actual engagement and real-life community-building. That’s what I think is needed.”

One issue the makers of pervasive games face is dealing with real-world spaces. Fleuriot says, “You have to know what the space is like at all times of day, and days of the week. What times is it full of commuters? What times is it full of students playing football?”

“It’s not like any other kind of production,” Grian added. “There’s no point in feeling you should do something in a traditional way. You have to use whatever’s there and make something from nothing, beautiful losers. That’s what it’s about. That’s not something that’s easy to monetize. It’s about meaning rather than action — again, not easy to monetize. Action the games industry understands. Meaning is too ephemeral to pin down. That’s what we do, we create meaning. You can create meaning from absolutely nothing, using whatever’s available to you.”

Hull put in that “as artists, we’re really inspired by the spaces themselves. You want to be on the ground and scout out those spaces, see what opportunities arise. Once you’re in the space, there are a bunch of different methodologies you can choose from: scripting, maps, logistics of mind, street art and the post-graffiti movement, theme-park design, a lot more technological and curatorial methods.”

On role-playing, he said, “Our role-playing games are a little different, because we do try to blur the lines between fiction and reality. You’re never quite sure if you’re playing a role or if this is yourself. It can be very liberating for people.”

An audience member asked, “How do you take the broader universe of a story and the available tools, and get to the heart of the story and what would be meaningful?” Grian answered, “It really is those simplest things, just interaction, being able to touch the world of the story and interact with it, having the right kind of actors who can improvise, the right kind of writing that’s just there at that moment. A lot of it is about improvisation. You have to be able to improvise as a creator and as someone running these things.”

Hull said, “It’s a great process and we’ve learned a lot from each step along the way. It’s a really personal thing as well. There’s a range of responses to each of the things you put out there. The best is when you create an eperience for a player when they’re asking, Could that really have happened? We’re like Situationists 2.0, we just have better tools now.”

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.

Read the above as a draft at more organized thinking. Just wanted to get something down. The way I see it, there are exciting days ahead for the craft of story. This description just scratches the surface.

Of course, we’re already starting to see works that hit all the notes above, but these so far remain a relatively small portion of the entertainment landscape; not too many people (at least, as compared to the number that watch TV, go to the movies, or buy Stephenie Meyer books) read serial novels or take part in alternate reality games. But they will. As current technology and consumption trends continue (a topic for another post), narrative entertainment will increasingly line up with the four points I’ve mentioned above.

As mentioned, much of this is in line with current thinking and practice in transmedia circles, including great thinking and projects coming from people like Henry Jenkins, Christy Dena, Jeff Gomez and Lance Weiler, to name only a few. But I’ve yet to see an over-arching vision of how all these pieces are going to fit together in the media landscape to come. This particular post isn’t mean to be that manifesto either. But it just may lay the groundwork. Stay tuned…

• 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.

Course description:

This course provides an overview of games in history, from board games to the most complex PC and console games. Game design and theory, non-linear storytelling, pre-production, and game art will be examined. Emphasis will be placed on the use of games in society and how humans relate to each other through games.

I may lean a bit harder on some fundamentals of gameplay design (this is a graduate-level course in the game design department, after all, and only one of 15 students raised her hand when I asked how many people had had a gameplay-design course in the past), but I’m very excited to get to spend a semester talking to students about “the use of games in society and how humans relate to each other through games” — which is a lot of what I was on about over at 3pointD.

We spent the first session (we meet weekly for 3 hours in the evening) talking about some of the oldest games in the archeological record, including early backgammonlikes like Senet and Mancala, early sports and dice games, and the Mesoamerican ballgame (human sacrifice!), among others.

I also asked students to pair off and play a few rounds of Rock, Paper, Scissors, in order to illustrate two concepts and lay the groundwork for a third. First up was the way complexity can come from simplicity; students described a variety of approaches to strategy that they took, and admitted to enjoying themselves despite the fact it’s game that’s blindingly dull and simple on its face. Next, we looked at the thing that Rock, Paper, Scissors has given to every great strategy game ever made: balance; RPS (not to be confused with RPS) is a perfectly balanced game: each choice is beaten by exactly one other choice, and beats exactly one other choice. Thus, no choice is intrinsically better than any other. The game is able to accept a great deal of variety and replayability because of this simple fact, and the principle is one that’s found in almost any compelling instance of gameplay, strategy genre or not. (We also looked at the interesting fact that the three hand signals are the equivalent of game pieces or units in a strategy game.)

To complete the goofily interactive portion of the program, I introduced students to the version of RPS that my stepkids (who are 9 and 12) taught me, which we usually refer to as Rock, Paper, Anything, since those are your choices: you can choose anything as the unit you’re going to use to try to beat your opponent — the kicker being that you are obligated to make the hand signal for it.

Students came up with some interesting examples, although I had an easy time beating my opponent. He threw “dog” (crabbed spider-like hand signal) to my “tidal wave” (cupped hand with fingers imitating breaking wave), and then tank (spider-like hand with tank barrel sticking out) to my “earthquake” (palm-down flat hand with vibrating fingers). It’s interesting to see how removing one constraint and introducing player creativity into the process changes the game completely. It’s also interesting to see how the element of negotiation that’s introduced changes how the game works. Tidal Wave > Dog is pretty clear, but two students negotiated a draw out of Rocket-Propelled Grenade Launcher (hands miming holding the weapon) vs. Mack Truck (hands on steering wheel). Talk about emergent gameplay! What I like about this is that I neither told them they could use two hands to sign the unit, nor that draws were possible and could be negotiated. Of course, when you’re playing with a 9- and 12-year-old, that’s often the most contentious part of the game: Death Star (hovering fist) vs. Tank, for instance, has a clear winner, but Nuclear Holocaust (blossoming fingers) vs. Cockroach (scurrying hand) is debatable.

(One thing we didn’t get into in class is the themed versions that are often played in my house, like Rock, Paper, Hawaii (you can do anything as long as it has to do with Hawaii); Rock, Paper, Food; or Rock, Paper, Cute, in which it’s the cutest entry that wins, rather than the most bad-ass.)

So if the first class was anything to go by, I’m looking forward to the rest of the semester. With only 15 students (or perhaps a few more if anyone adds), things should be engaging and fun. Even in that small a class, we have a good range of people, including the one or two people who aren’t games majors and don’t come with deep knowledge of the medium, and the one or two people who think they know more than I do (maybe they do!). I haven’t detected anyone who seems to be there to fill an easy requirement, which is nice. As long as the conversation stays interesting (and I find a way to sit down from time to time during the 3 hours!), it should be a fun semester.

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”?

PlayFirst, of course, is proud home of Diner Dash, which is more or less the original time management game (at least, as far as the capital-W West is concerned). Time management games (which, weirdly, do not seem to have a Wikipedia page) are games in which the player is asked to manage the time spent on various tasks to maximum efficiency. This generally takes the form of setting one or more tasks in motion, then waiting until they’ve completed, coming back to collect the beneficial result (or in other words, harvesting what you’ve sown), lathering, rinsing, and repeating. Yes, FarmVille is a time management game. Read more in TouchArcade’s time management category.

But do players think of them as such? Genres like “real-time strategy”, “first-person shooter,” and even “massively multiplayer online game” seem to make more sense to me as consumer handles. Apparently, the time management crowd responds to “time management” as a genre at this point. I’m only surprised because it doesn’t sound very appealing as a marketing label. Even “harvest games” seems better.

What would you call these things if you were trying to sell them to a crowd that had never heard of such a thing? Not that that crowd really exists anymore.