News and Blogs by No Mimes Media (and friends)

Well, this is the obligatory SXSW Panel Picker Post. There are lots of great Transmedia/ARG panels up for voting this year (including three by NMM partners), and here are our favorites, for your consideration:

FILM:

• Transmedia Production: Making the New Frontier – Behnam Karbassi (No Mimes Media)
• Documenting your Transmedia Project: The How and Why – Brooke Thompson

INTERACTIVE

• Your Life is a Transmedia Experience – Jenka Gurfinkel
• ARGs Don’t Work: The Future of Transmedia Stories – Maureen McHugh (No Mimes Media)
• Battlestar Galactica and Transmedia: A Case Study – Craig Engler
• Transmedia Artists Guild: New Media Needs New Representation – Jay Bushman
• Hoax or Transmedia: The Ethics of Pervasive Fiction – Andrea Phillips
• Audience Engagement in the Transmedia Age – Steve Peters (No Mimes Media)
• City as Platform: Gameplay in the Third Space – Sara Thacher

If you’re a transmedia fan, please take a look and vote!

ETA: Sara Thacher’s panel

From ARGNet: Our own Maureen McHugh’s no holds barred keynote, complete with a menacing lightning backdrop!

Near, far, wherever you are – ARGFest 2010 in Atlanta, GA was a blast. Whether at ARGFest or its virtual Twitter counterpart #PretendARGFest, the annual…(read more)

I get on a fair number of airplanes. (I hate it. Carbon footprint the size of Rhode Island, and growing.) Most of the time, we all observe the etiquette of plane flight, which is that each person is enclosed in their own private bubble of space, and the only interaction between me and my seatmates usually involves guerrilla warfare over who get s the armrest. (Person in the middle. Hands down. Just my opinion.) Occasionally someone will engage me in conversation, and what they usually do is ask me, ‘What do you do?’

If ARGs/transmedia entertainment/whatever-we-are-calling-ourselves-today was a mass entertainment, I could just say, I write for transmedia. As it is, my family isn’t even really sure what I do. On airplanes I usually default to ‘marketing.’ Because given the way the work I do is funded, it’s mostly true.

But we have not broken out in a visible way to people. We haven’t had our Birth of a Nation. Our hit single. We’re not even yet ‘that things that kids do that I don’t understand’ which was what video games were for a long time. The question is, will we ever be? Read more

Why transmedia? Why not watch a movie? Or read a book? Because video games have taught a whole generation that it is possible for the audience—in this case, the player—to interact with the story. The interaction is extensive in video games. Without it, there is no experience.

But the story is also pretty limited. Video game interaction is repetitive, limited, and often tangential to the story. For many players, story interrupts the game, just go online and read about any video game that doesn’t allow the audience to skip the cut scenes. It’s the experience, the shooting, the driving, the changing the radio station, the exploring, that engages the audience most.

Interactivity is a double edged sword. We don’t put video games on TV because watching them is, frankly, boring as hell. Doing them, despite their often repetitive nature—shoot that, now shoot that, now shoot that—is fun. Read more

Conventions are essential to transmedia work. Stories that have shapes familiar to the audience. The damsel in distress. The disappearing person. The murder mystery. Transmedia is also establishing conventions for itself.

Many of the conventions of transmedia are borrowed. And many of them are rather old conventions that have fallen out of popular use. Transmedia is a new, naive medium, and so it makes fresh some existing conventions that have become clichéd or technologically obsolete. Read more

As I said in Part 1, because the artform takes stories and shatters them into pieces, it’s a lot easier for the audience to put the story back together if it’s a kind of story they recognize. If it’s, in other words, a conventional narrative. So, say, detective mysteries tend to make pretty decent transmedia stories. In print stories, I like to break conventions, use less well understood conventions, and generally fart around. In transmedia, I’ve had to learn that I can make the character as complex as I want, but the structure of the narrative better be pretty simple.

The funny thing about transmedia storytelling is that for all it’s reliance on conventions, the artform itself doesn’t yet have many established conventions. And the ones that it has are probably conventions that will fall away as audiences learn the artform and as technology gets better. Read more

Click to Download Video

Last month, Maureen and I were honored to be part of a day-long series of panels put on by USC and UCLA Film Schools called Transmedia Hollywood: S/Telling the Story.

Now, videos of the entire day have become available. You can download our panel, ARG: This is Not a Game…. But is it Always a Promotion? (Jordan Weisman, Will Brooker, Ivan Askwith, etc.) directly from their site, or go here to catch all the videos from the entire day (they’re still in the process of adding all the videos).

Human beings construct narrative. It’s what we do. We impose meaning and cause and effect on events. We say, this happened and then because of or it, that happened. We do it even when it’s not true—which is how places like Vegas stay in business. If you’re flipping a coin, and it comes up heads nine times in a row, what are the odds on the tenth toss? 50-50. Statistics are not narrative. Read more

(Maureen McHugh)

This is part one of a six part post based on a talk I gave at Duke University. Check back on Wednesdays for subsequent posts.

I write transmedia. Or crossmedia. Or ARGs. As transmedia/crossmedia/ARG producers, we take narratives and spread them in pieces across multiple platforms. We tell part of the story as a movie, part as a website, part as an email.

This creates a number of storytelling constraints.

• First, most things on the internet need to be short. Read more