This is a walkthrough of the Mime Academy Mini-Experience. Use it only if you get stuck.

1. Start: Once you enter your information and click the Submit button, check your email inbox. Momentarily, you’ll find a message from Colette-Therese Fromage, the headmistress of the International Mime Academy. Clicking the link at the bottom of the email will take you to the International Mime Academy website.
2. International Mime Academy website: Exploring the website, you’ll find information about the Academy, along with the history of mimes and information about the Director of the academy, the Master Mime. On the Contact Us page, you’ll find a phone number. Call it.
3. Phone message: Here, you’ll hear a message from Colette-Therese Fromage. Suddenly, the message is interrupted by a plea from someone who Needs Your Help. A young mime student named Oswald tells you to find out more information at his website: A Terrible Thing To Waste. So, go to www.aterriblethingtowaste.com.
4. A Terrible Thing To Waste blog: This is the blog of young Oswald, the fledgeling mime. It seems he’s in trouble and left you a clue here. If you look carefully, certain letters on the site are highlighted. Putting the highlighted letters together in order spells out YouTube Oswald the Mime. Entering this into your browser as www.youtube.com/oswaldthemime leads you to his YouTube channel, where there is a video message from Oswald, explaining his predicament.
5. Video: In the video, Oswald tells you that he’s locked in a basement at the academy, and that there’s a specific lock keeping him from escaping: A Kryptonite Evolution 2000, and that if you can help him to email him at “oswald at my website.” So now, Google “Kryptonite Evolution 2000.“
6. Research: At the top of the search results, you’ll see a link to an actual Engadget article about this particular lock and how to open it. It seems that you can use a Bic pen to open the lock. Better get that information to Oswald! Email him at oswald at aterriblethingtowaste.com and tell him that he needs to specifically use a Bic pen to hack open the lock. If you don’t give him clear enough instructions, he’ll let you know.
7. Success: If you’ve done everything right, you’ll have given Oswald all the info he needs to escape the evil Master Mime! You’ll know you’ve succeeded if you get a reply from Oswald thanking you for your help. Congratulations! But if you think that’s the end of the story, you’re in for a little surprise….

That’s it! If you enjoyed our quick example of the possibilities of transmedia entertainment, tell your friends.

But beware the Master Mime…

Order Now!  Webishades.com

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)

Let’s study, with objectivity and curiosity,
the mutation phenomenon of forms and values in the current world.
Let’s be conscious of the fact that although tomorrow’s world
does not have any chance to become more fair than any other,
it owns a chance that is linked to the destiny of the current art [...]
that of embodying, in their works some forms of new beauty,
which will be able to arise only from the meet of all the techniques.
(Francastel 1956, 274)
Translation by Regina Célia Pinto, emailed to the empyre mailing list,
Jan 2, 2004.

This is the epigraph that begins Christy Dena’s PhD thesis, available online. Christy is one the sharpest, most thoughtful, and yet still accessible thinkers on transmedia out there. I will be pouring over this document in the next few months. I am sure it will make me see things I hadn’t seen before.

I suspect that if you want to enter the discussion of transmedia, this is going to be a seminal text.

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?

I believe that an artform will arise out of the characteristics of the internet. I would like to be working on that artform. I just don’t know if I am.

What do I consider the characteristics of the internet? At least for art?

• Interactivity.
• Self publication.
• Plasticity of platform.
• Community.
• Technology linked to person, not location.

This is part of the larger parlor game going on in the community about what transmedia is. There are currently a couple of different flavors of people describing themselves as producing transmedia, and I’m pretty sure that for an outsider, the distinction between them is pretty thin. In Hollywood, it seems to primarily mean that a property (usually a franchise like, say, Spiderman) is transmedia if it has a movie, some comic books, and maybe a novel or a comic strip. That is, if it has stories that are part of the franchise on several different platforms.

I don’t deny that managing a project like that is complex. I’ve never seen the Star Wars bible, the massive collection of documents that tracks continuity, but I know two people who’ve written Star Wars tie in novels and they have mentioned that it is vast. I’ve worked off of a couple of property bibles myself, and let me tell you, it’s mind boggling, even when the property hasn’t got the sheer quantity of material in the public eye that the Star Wars franchise has.

But it’s not what I do. It’s weird for me to have people describe that activity, which is essentially a kind of document control system for managing information, as the same thing that I do. For one thing, it’s not as if what I do hasn’t been around for while. I started following this field in 2001, and started working in it in 2003. But by that definition, transmedia has been around forever. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a transmedia project. There was the novel. And there were stage plays. And there were paintings, staged photographs, and illustrated versions for children. You could argue that they were less controlled than franchises today, but I would point you towards fan fiction: George Lucas may not recognize Luke Skywalker/Hans Solo slash fiction as part of the franchise, but for a subset of fans, it is not only part, it is the most important part.

This model of transmedia doesn’t recognize interactivity. Interactivity is most realized as a form of entertainment in video games. A movie isn’t interactive. A print publication isn’t interactive. Interactivity is not unique to the computer—improvisational theater, jazz, even the call and response of certain kinds of church services are interactive. But the interactivity of the kind of transmedia I do is simultaneously private and public. Private, because it is in my email box, or on my phone, talking directly to me, engaging me as a character in the fiction. Public because I or anyone else who received it can record that phone call, or copy that email, and share it with a million other people online.

That weird negotiation between public and private is the art space, the place of exploration in transmedia today. What does the audience want? Some of them seem to want the community engagement of a vast story that no one person can completely experience on their own. But for others that community is forbidding, and they want a private, single person experience. Watching videos on Youtube of people interacting with an experience like 4th Wall Studio’s Eagle Eye Free Fall, it’s clear that there is a level of fascination and of discomfort evidenced by the nervous giggle. Is that because of the sheer novelty of the experience? Will that go away as people become more familiar with the form? Or does a transmedia experience need the kind of careful, mediating rules of a video game interaction, where the interaction often consists of shooting others in a arena of rules embedded in the game engine and quickly discernible by trial and error?

In the face of that, the idea that a Star Trek tie-in novelization by James Blish published nearly forty years ago is transmedia strikes me as missing a very big point about what is growing out of new technologies. We are on the verge of new ways to tell stories, and to make art.

So are we a niche, like, say live bluegrass? It’s pretty clear that if no one on an airplane ever has a clue when they ask me what I do for a living, we’re niche. The next question is, how come? We give entertainment away for free. The answer could well be that like some things—live bluegrass performances, for example—we aren’t just that intrinsically interesting at this cultural moment. The things we create have some of the same cultural characteristics as live bluegrass performance. The people who like what we do are often intensely passionate about it. A significant, if small percentage of our audience has moved into creating and producing transmedia themselves, either as amateurs or professionals.

For that matter we could be ahead of our time. We could be figuratively making nickolodean shows (the ones that showed short films for a nickel , not the kid’s TV network) while dreaming of making feature length movies. In many ways the technology doesn’t quite support us yet. The holy grail is to make entertainment that feels immersive and somewhat ‘real’. For that to happen, the interactions have to feel real. The problem is automating interactions in a way that feels real. Video games automate interactions. You ‘shoot’ someone/something and it falls down. (Or explodes or disappears in a glow or whatever.) Even simpler, in Farmville, you click on a cartoon tree full of mangoes and the mangoes disappear and you are informed that the tree has been ‘harvested’ and you’ve earned x number of coins.

The model for transmedia though is the model of photography or movies. The ideal is that you call a character and have a meaningful interaction. The technology for this is called phone parsing, and it is still problematic, as anyone who has ever stood in an airport, called an airline, and gotten a phone tree understands. (“Representative!” you say into the phone. “I’m sorry,” responds the cool even-tempered female voice, “I didn’t get that. Would you like to make a reservation, change an existing reservation, check your frequent flyer miles, or speak to a representative?”)

Email parsing is not much better. One solution is to use actors or have someone manually respond to emails. But that’s a niche response. It falls apart as soon as the experience begins to attract more audience or, in the vernacular of the industry, ‘scale up.’

So we do other things. We have the players call a number, get a password from a voice mail, and then enter the password into a website. It’s an interaction. But it’s not necessarily an intuitive reaction. When I’m on a website and there’s a phone number, my instinct is not to call it. My instinct is to avoid it. I go to lots of websites with contact information on them and I rarely call them because people I don’t know answer. And unless I have a reason to call other than ‘I wonder what happens if I call this number?’ they tend to feel put out. (Unless they work for Zappos, but that’s another story.) Even though I know that the International Mime Academy website is fictional, I worry about the 867-5309 effect, whereby someone makes up a number and the people who have that number then live lives of hell. I once had a phone number one number off from someone (I believe) from the Middle East. I don’t know for certain, because I didn’t speak their language and most of their callers didn’t speak mine. But they apparently got a lot of calls because enough of them misdialed that I got some of them.

Transmedia is currently mostly an entertainment that requires the audience to push through it. You can’t get passively hooked on a transmedia entertainment. You can’t even do that thing that happens in video games where you’re just going to get the next health power up and then quit. The experience offers you lots of places where you don’t really know what to do next and it’s easy to quit. Until transmedia entertainments not only interact with the audience in a compelling way that doesn’t make them giggle nervously, wondering what they’re supposed to say, but pulls them from platform to platform, it’s always going to remain a niche experience.

Technology is changing. Language parsing is getting better. Technology is allowing ever more creative ways to pull through experiences. In the 18 to 34 demo, an inordinate number of North Americans watch TV with a laptop or a Smartphone there so they can text or surf while they watch. It doesn’t seem to farfetched to use a television platform as a pull to keep an audience engaged while they branch out through emails and websites to experience a more complex and complete and interactive story. Nor does it seem too far in the future when software will exist to integrate multiple experiences seamlessly so that the audience doesn’t have to go to the website, the experience takes them there. In fact some of it’s here now.

I think that transmedia—multiplatform, interactive, person (rather than location) based—entertainment is ripe for it’s Birth of a Nation. I’d really like to write it. But it’s going to need three things:

• Technology that may or may not be enough
• Compelling entertainment through story or experience
• A lot of money.

The last one is really in many ways the big one. I’m going back to the nickelodeon now and work on what I can. But I’m going to keep dreaming about the big one.

How then, to create an interactive experience that is also scripted? There are a couple of answers to that.

Of all of the aspects of making a transmedia project, writing is the most flexible. The place where the audience is most likely to affect the story is in websites and in email responses. This can range from referring to something that the audience has emailed to a character, or left as a message on an answering machine (more likely the former than the latter, because it is a lot easier and takes a lot less time to scan 300 emails for content than to listen to 300 voice mails, and these projects are usually run by a very small crew) to actually using audience speculation as a plot detail. During The Beast, two different graphic production guys working on two unrelated websites picked stock photos of the same woman to use on the site. The audience noticed the mistake.

On the email thread where they posted about the mistake, they eventually came up with a reason. The character, who worked for a research company called Donutech, had moonlighted by selling her likeness to a company that made androids. The idea was such a good one that the people creating the experience (called puppetmasters by the audience) incorporated it into the story. They put something in (I don’t remember if it was an email or what it was) that dramatized the scenario worked out by the audience.

Unfortunately, if the audience corrects a mistake, they don’t know about the effect they’ve had on the story until after the story is over when the creators tell them. It’s an odd interaction that doesn’t feel interactive.

Interaction, promised by computers and the internet, isn’t really very sophisticated yet. Anyone who has ever suffered through a dialogue tree in a video game knows that. (Video games are developing conventions to avoid conversations between the player and npcs, specifically because of this.) Phone and text parsers make mistakes, the way spell checkers make mistakes. Language is slippery, flexible, difficult. Programming is advancing but Eliza doesn’t really feel human yet.

The ideal is the holodeck, of course. An artificial intelligence that responds to the audience, changing the plot, running the characters, making the story adapt to actions.

In the interim, we transmedia creators are all waiting for widespread augmented reality. We are looking forward to a time when we can tag the world, and leave a trail of messages that you can see, written on walls, in subways, on sidewalks, when looking through your phone.

And we are trying to create our breakthrough, our Grand Theft Auto or Gone With the Wind.

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.

Here’s a secret about transmedia. Every time the story shifts from one media platform to the next, a percentage of the audience stops following. Every time there’s a puzzle, a percentage of the audience stops following. In this way, transmedia is a great deal like video games. Only about 20% of all video games purchased are played to the end. (That’s a guess, by the way, from the video game industry.) People get to a sticking point—an ambush they can’t seem to get past, or a big boss they can’t defeat, and they walk away, and a lot of times, they never get around to coming back. The video game industry, at one level, doesn’t care if you finish the game. They just need you to buy it. Game designers do want you to finish the game.

What the audience wants from an interactive story is the sense that their actions mattered. Their sense of that possibility deepens their investment. It makes the experience feel ‘real.’ Historically, audience actions have changed the storyline. In the earliest days (okay, maybe even now) the stories were often still being produced even as the first installments went live. So if the audience took to a character, that character’s role would change in response. The audience wants to see the ripples of their actions through the story. They want to affect the story. They want to be part.

To continue to borrow from video game nomenclature, they don’t want the game to be on rails. That is, they don’t want the experience to be so scripted that they have to simply guess what the right answer is to unlock the next piece of story. They want room to play, to be part. They want power within the story. The ultimate expression of this would be what video gaming calls the sandbox. That would be that the experience sets up the world and some conditions and the audience creates the stories. Unfortunately, the intrinsic impetus for plot is that things go wrong. And the audience, like most quite normal people, don’t want things to go wrong. They want things to go right. But without tension, there’s no reason to go forward, nothing to resolve.

Sean Stewart says, “Storytelling isn’t broken.” That is, we know how to tell stories that work for our audiences. Most of the time, we are better at creating entertaining stories than they are. This is no reflection on the audience, I have spent thirty years practicing. Spend thirty years practicing piano and you’ll be better than most people. Story starts with something going wrong and the simplest rule of plotting is that things get worse.

MMOs like World of Warcraft get around this with quests. Quests are pretty simple plot-wise. They present a goal (the problem is ‘how do I get x’). There are obstacles (at first very simple ones but as the quests get more sophisticated, so do the obstacles.) Players who figure out how to accomplish the quest get resolution. The quests are not great storytelling (although the more sophisticated ones have more and more story in them.) But like sex, they are for many people a lot of fun to do, even if the what’s most fun to do may not be all that entertaining to watch. (Your mileage may vary.)

But when transmedia projects have attempted to allow the audience to create content, the results have not been particularly successful. What an audience wants is an existing story where their actions matter, rather than to create the story themselves. What they want most of all would be for the story to remain in flux. They would act, and then we would react, and create the next installment of the story.

This has actually happened, in some sense. During I Love Bees, an ARG set in the world of the video game Halo in 2004, the actions of a member of the audience actually scuttled the existing plot. During a live phone call (with an actress playing a character) the audience member revealed the location of another character. There was much re-writing and revision of the affected websites.

The problem is that video has to be done weeks in advance or it looks amateurish. Scripting, casting, planning, filming, and editing all take time. While it’s theoretically possible to turn content around in a week it’s also very expensive. The more lead time there is on creating websites, crafting video and audio, creating an interesting and compelling narrative, the better the experience looks and feels. This doesn’t mean that changes aren’t made at the last minute. I’ve seen a project where a producer was auditioning actors when an urgent request came in for an actor to do an audio recording. The producer picked an actor from the audition, sent the actor back to record right now, and the new audio file was posted before the audition was finished. But that’s a way to burn out the people making the transmedia project.

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.

Transmedia echoes television and older literary traditions (like Charles Dickens novels, which were serialized in magazines or the television show 24, which is rather like the perils of Pauline with torture) in that it’s often structured as a serial.

Surprisingly, transmedia has also resurrected the radio play. Part of the reason for that is economic. Audio alone is cheaper than video, and more compelling than text. But audio is also a novelty for an audience that has mostly only experienced music and talk radio as audio forms. It’s unexpected and it feels intimate, overheard. It can be delivered, in it’s shortest form, to a mobile phone, which makes it even more intimate and private. The story is whispering in your ear, just to you. The phone call feels interactive but for right now, that interactivity is limited. With a lot of back end programming and a parser, you can have a kind of limited conversation with a character. (You could hire an actor, but again, that limits the possibility of a real breakthrough into culture—can you hire enough actors to field a million phone calls, and would you want to even try?) So already there is an artificial convention in transmedia storytelling, the one-sided phone conversation. The monologue from the character to you.

A very effective version might be the pretense of a pocket call. Where the audience member has the sense that the characters don’t realize they’re broadcasting. The coincidence of important conversations accidentally being broadcast is no more artificial than the convention that every criminal leaves a clue. (According to the U.S. Department of Justice Statistics, about 30% of homicides go unsolved and that number is rising.) Or that business in Michael Bay movies where cars flying off cliffs spontaneously explode in mid-air.

That’s a convention that will lose some of it’s effectiveness as it becomes less novel. Early movie audiences screamed in delighted fright when the train came towards them. Now we don’t. For an audience right now, overhearing a conversation on a phone feels somewhat ‘interactive’ but when audiences become more accustomed to transmedia conventions, it will just become expected.

Which leads to Interactivity. Ah, interactivity. The Holy Grail.