Deus Ex Machinatio

I Am Not a Transmedia Producer

Andrea Phillips — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:10:46 +0000

The go-to job title for transmedia work these days seems to be "transmedia producer." As a result, I've been getting a statistically significant number of pings from projects looking for such a transmedia producer; after all, I'm a transmedia person, right? And I'm definitely hustling for work. So surely it's a perfect fit!

But in my lexicon, drawn largely from games and marketing work, a producer is the same thing as a project manager. A producer manages budgets and timelines, obtains approvals, wrangles logistical details. A producer manages the practical and technical half of the equation, not the creative half.

This might be heartbreak caused by differences in cross-industry lingo -- I think in film a producer often has a much more creative role, on top of the basic logistical one. (Correct me if I'm wrong?)

Dealing with those logistics is a crucial, necessary role, and to be fair it's one I've done before -- indeed, I did quite a lot of production work for Perplex City. But it's really not my strong suit these days, and hiring me to do it is a poor use of your money. Those who remember the early days of the IGDA ARG SIG may recall that my arithmetic is legendarily bad. I never once sent out a chat announcement having calculated all of the time zones correctly. Accordingly, I do much, much better in projects where there is someone else handling that incredibly important budgets-and-timelines work.

Me, I'm all about crafting words and interactions. I'm a writer. A content creator. A builder of imaginary cities and conspiracies and lives, either out of nothing at all or built on the foundation of someone else's work. You want a puzzle about genealogy, a lovelorn Tweet stream, a forum full of chatty vampires, a secret history of bees, an encrypted message from Jupiter, six weeks of scripts filled with filthy jokes, then yeah, I'm your girl, let's talk. But if that's what you're looking for, I humbly suggest that you give that role a job title that does not have "producer" in it.

You want someone to make and manage a budget? I love you, you're wonderful, but alas, you're better off finding somebody else for your project. But do call me when you're looking for a creative, as the ad people say.

Making Isn't Enough

Andrea Phillips — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 15:45:20 +0000

You've probably heard a common refrain in the transmedia scene: "Just make something." It's the wisdom of centuries of artists before us -- you can talk forever, but you never become a creator if you don't actually apply all that theory. Writers write.

There's also a honing-your-craft angle to it; we writers say you have to write a million words of crap before you start writing anything good. Practice makes perfect: You have to try and fail a few times just to get the hang of most things, much less to make anything you're proud to hang your name on.

But a conversation with Transmedia Talk's own Nick Braccia a few days ago has me realizing that a lot more goes into climbing the skill ladder than just milling out content. There are writers who churn out millions of words of manuscripts in a year, each worse than the last; there are transmedia creators who likewise make disjointed and unfocused projects that never quite hang together into a cohesive whole. So here are five things that an ambitious creator will do, even above and beyond that old standby, "Make something."

1. Learn from work like yours. One of the most common ways of breaking into transmedia is inventing it. But when you do work in a vacuum, you're doing a huge disservice to yourself, your project, and your audience, because you aren't climbing onto the shoulders of those who have gone before you so you can see a little further. There's no sense reinventing the wheel. When you're wishing there were an easier or better way to do something, check to make sure someone hasn't already found one.

2. Talk to other creators. Sometimes learning from public examples isn't enough; become friendly with others doing similar projects, and trade information about roads not taken, close calls, war stories that might change how you do something. Sometimes a project that looked OK on the surface was a nightmare behind the scenes, and that's important to know if you don't want a nightmare on your hands, too.

3. Make every decision mindfully. Make sure you very clearly understand all of the parts of your project and how they fit together. At every step know what work is being done -- characterization, exposition, furthering the plot, making the user experience better. That applies to written and video content, to design and interface elements, to challenges, everything. If you can't explain why you're making the choices you have for everything from platform distribution to font choices, then you haven't yet thought it through well enough.

4. Seek out criticism of your work. This one is hard. Really, really hard. Partly that's because it's difficult to hear criticism of something you love; it can feel weirdly personal and put you on the defensive. (You have to get over that, sunshine, if you want to go pro.) But the other reason is that honest and robust criticism is rare in the transmedia space. There's snark between friends in private, to be sure, but very little moves into the public sphere. Try to get your hands on that honest criticism, be it from your audience, from other creators, from your dev team, or anywhere else you can find it. Feedback is valuable above jewels, and you should make it a priority if you want to actually get better at this stuff.

5. Own your failures. This one's hard, too, but mainly because of pride: Don't buy your own hype. Don't believe your press releases. Know when you've totally screwed up, and admit it to yourself. That's the first step to working out why and preventing a repeat. Even when you haven't totally screwed up, though, even for magnificent and award-winning work, turn your analytic eye to every part of a project once it's done to see what could've been done better. And then make something else -- better.

Of course, it's true that none of this applies if you haven't taken that first step, that step where you actually make something. But there's a lot more to doing good work than putting together any old inspiration and tossing it in front of an unwitting public. I can't guarantee that these five steps will turn you into a rockstar transmedia creator overnight, of course. But I promise you if you aren't doing these things, your path to the top will take a whole lot longer -- and you may never get there at all.

Journeys to Awesometown

Andrea Phillips — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:03:04 +0000

The world is completely full of awesome things right now -- as it always is -- and here are three I would like to call your attention to.

The first is author Leonard Richardson's project Constellation Games. This is a story about first contact and video games being told as a serial, and if you suspected there were some transmedia-ish elements to it, you would not be wrong! My favorite line from the sample chapters: "Crying isn't sadness; it happens because an emotion is too big for your body." They've cleverly put together Kickstarter-like reward levels, so you can choose just to get the serial, or you can add on bonuses like an alien phrasebook or bonus short stories. Rad.

And speaking of Kickstarter -- ARG fans will already be well famliar with the unstoppable and irresistible Jan Libby. You should also know that she's turning last winter's beloved Snow Town ARG into an iOS app -- check out the Kickstarter and see if you can throw a few dollars her way. If Jan is making it, it's guaranteed to make you smile.

Last but not least, if you just don't have any pocket money right now, I still have something for you -- and that is Chuck Wendig's How You Die, a creepy Tumblr project full of whispered predictions of one's own demise. Fear and resignation mingled. This is, of course, in preparation for Chuck's forthcoming novel Blackbirds. Take a look at it, and then tell us how you're going to die, too.

Annnnd that's it for today. If you know of something else completely awesome going on right now, do feel free to talk about it in comments!

Changed and Changing

Andrea Phillips — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:00:19 +0000

As you may recall, one of the reward levels for my Shiva's Mother Kickstarter was a bespoke short story. The deal was this: I'd write a short story of up to a thousand words per my backer's general requirements, and they'd be free to use it however made them happy. I was frankly astonished that any of them sold -- and in fact all four of them did, in the end.

The first of these stories I wrote is Changed And Changing, for Lucas J.W. Johnson's transmedia project Azrael's Stop -- he asked if I could play in his world for a little while, and I was of course delighted to do so. It was a bit of a stretch for me to write as I do precious little pure fantasy -- I was concerned the result if I tried would be a little trite -- but I am actually quite pleased with how it came out.

Now Lucas has put it out into the world for your entertainment. Thanks to Lucas for supporting my art and for sharing the result!

Please do read it and let me know what you think -- and then be sure to poke around Azrael's Stop a little more!

BlagOPet Shenanigans

Andrea Phillips — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 15:20:05 +0000

Goodness! Something new happened to my BlagOPet, and I didn't tell you!

So there's... that.

You may or may not recall that BlagOPets are an indie effort by the lovely and talented Haley Moore. The IndieGoGo is over, but I bet you could commission more from Haley directly...

Evolution of Process

Andrea Phillips — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 22:01:54 +0000

I've written before about how I've come to see politics as a game, and now I'd like to introspect a little on the gamification of story -- or to be more accurate, the way that my creation of stories and my creation of games have come to use the same general process.

Time was, I thought a character was a collection of attributes: Brown eyes, shaggy hair, a tattoo. And a story was a collection of things that happened to that character: A phone call, a car chase, an explosion. But now that my eyes see everything in the same way I see games, characters and plots have become dynamic webs of possibility.

When I design a game, I think a lot about balance. That manifests in a lot of different ways. In Floating City, for example, it meant ensuring a steady flow of new items into the game over the course of the run. Making sure that positive behaviors like trading and being sociable on the forums were rewarded enough to be encouraging, but not so rewarding that any one action became exploitable to the detriment of the big picture. Devising a formula that struck a balance between individual achievement and collective action that could theoretically allow a tribe of any size to win.

And now I don't see a character as an empty vessel with brown eyes and shaggy hair, either. Now I see those same patterns of cause-and-effect relationships. If we give 10 points for posting to the forum, people will spam the forums; so to prevent that, let's cap those points after a few posts.

By that same thinking, this brown-eyed, shaggy-haired character doesn't have a lot of money, so maybe they're skimping on haircuts. Or maybe that trait manifests as something else: sneakers with the soles falling off, or a lack of awareness of current TV because they've cut cable service and are working double shifts anyhow. The specific signifiers are all but irrelevant to me, except insofar as they communicate that tension.

Plots, too, aren't so much about the stuff that happens for me anymore (or they aren't at first, anyway). Instead I begin with a completely abstract rise and fall of tension and stakes. Here there will be a dramatic setback, which might be a betrayal or a missed deadline. There is a new hope for a happy ending -- the last-minute call from the governor, the discovered loophole.

The net result isn't so much a collection of stuff that happens, the way I once thought of it. Instead, as with game design, I wind up with an intricate web of cause and effect relationships. Events aren't important for what they are so much as for the work that they do in shifting the flow of the whole.

As a result, I find I understand my own stories and how they fit together in a much clearer fashion than I did lo these many years ago, when I was a less experienced writer (and a less skilled one, or so one hopes.) I can run my fingers down a thread and understand that if I twist it a little here, it'll pull a little harder there, and the whole thing will look just a little different.

It affects how I see the stories of others, too, sometimes -- I watch plots coming apart in my hands like clockwork. I play a fun game with my friends imagining how else we might have assembled the same cogs and gears to make it run faster or quieter or keep time better. It's the same part of my brain that engages when I analyze gameplay.

This shift didn't happen all at once -- it took place over many years, and started a bit backwards: first I would think "a character with brown eyes is in a car chase." Then I got a little better, and thought "A character with brown eyes is being pursued in a car chase, so they must be afraid and maybe a little angry. Maybe that's because they have some issues with authority figures." Over time that has gone even another step: "A character with a cavalier attitude toward authority is afraid of something -- maybe the police are after them, then."

Maybe it's a sign of growing maturity as a writer; maybe I started out backwards; or maybe it doesn't matter either way, and my brain is simply adapting to the conditions I usually work in. It's interesting, though, to get a front-row seat on such a pronounced change in my own cognition. That's not something you can observe much after you've grown up, and not something you notice much when it happens while you're a kid.

The Written World

Andrea Phillips — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:49:40 +0000

One of my most cherished memories from Perplex City is Receda's Revenge and its sequel, Receda's Revenge 2: The Revenge. The logs for both events still make me giggle, as well they should. This was improv text adventure; the players and writers in a chat room together, making up something completely awesome together built on only a loosely pre-written framework.

That's why I'm so excited about The Written World. The team behind it are aiming to build something just a little like Receda's Revenge, but better -- all grown up, scalable and playable whenever you like. From the sound of it, it's going to be amazing.

In fact, I believe in what they're doing so much that I've agreed to be a reward level for them -- so if you contribute $70 to their campaign, you'll get access to a special storyframe I'm going to write just for them. But me and my reward are beside the point. The point being that this is an awesome project, and you should think about giving them $5 or $10 or $25 to bring a rare and particularly delicious variety of fun into the world.

C'mon, you know you want to...

Twitter Charades v0.2

Andrea Phillips — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 02:23:04 +0000

Remember that one time when I tried to make Twitter Charades? Like... last week? It's time to iterate, baby. Twitter Charades v0.1 was a learning experience. Here are the things that went wrong in that first test:

1. Waiting around for the other team to work out what their guess was really, really boring, and there's no need for that. Twitter can accommodate asynchronous play perfectly well.

2. Coordinating multi-member teams was really, really hard, and non-ideal for the medium.

3. Some links popped up bit.ly malware notices -- not because there was real malware, but because in some cases the URL had been through more than one round of link shortening.

With that in mind, here are the rules for three distinct variants I'd like to try out. Please, please feel free to play a game or two, and please, PLEASE post comments on your result. Be as ruthless as you can! You can't make great games by turning a blind eye.

On Twitter, I'd appreciate it if you could use the #charades hashtag. I suspect this game would also be fun in other text-heavy media, like IM or G+ comment threads. If you try this out, I would love to hear how it goes.

Annnnnnnd away we go.

Team Options

Classic Team Play - Equal-sized teams of roughly equal numbers of players compete.

Twitter-Native Team Play - Two "captains" choose secret phrases and give them to each other; each "captain" tries to get their own followers to guess.

Collaborative - Two players take turns randomly assigning themselves secret phrases and acting them out while the other player guesses.

Phrase Assignment Options

Classic Team Play - Assignment by a member of the opposing team. Teams brainstorm among themselves, either through Twitter direct messages or non-Twitter means, like Skype, AIM, or email.

Twitter-Native Team Play - Assignment by the captain of the opposing team, arranged as desired.

Collaborative - Self-assignment through an agreed-upon link randomizer, such as Wikipedia, IMDB Random Title, IMDB Random Name.

Win States

Classic Team Play - Alternating turns until a pre-arranged win score is met, with each team winning a point each time a phrase is successfully guessed.

Twitter-Native Team Play - Teams guess simultaneously; the team to correctly guess their secret phrase wins a point for that round, then both teams move on to the next secret.

Collaborative - Play to a high score: The most correctly guessed phrases in a chain, with no giving up.

Time Limits

These are optional. If you go with a time limit, start with ten minutes, to allow for players with lag or partial attention.

The Fundamentals

1. When you are on stage, you may not type any words at all!

2. You can link to images in place of pantomime.

3. The link must not have any tags or titles, and the word you're trying to convey must not be in the URL. The suggested method for this is to use Google images search, and from the results page, right-click and go to 'Copy Image URL.' The result should look something like this:

http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTXUOJyjM8UbXsX9u8jDZLt15TjWYDUFnP70WaqJAznqoYvJpbS

You can also right-click and get the direct link to an image on Flickr. The link should look something like this:

http://farm1.staticflickr.com/1/345930_cb3a94ca77_o.jpg

TWITTER WILL SHORTEN LINKS FOR YOU. MAKE SURE YOU DON'T DOUBLE SHORTEN THEM.

4. The image can't be directly from or of the phrase you're conveying. So no using a still from the movie E.T. or a piece of E.T. fan art, for example, to convey E.T.

5. ASCII art and Unicode is also acceptable, ex. ♫ to indicate a song, or @-'--,----- to indicate a rose.

Suggested Vocabulary

o)) sounds like
||| three words
.|. second word (of three)
,,, three syllables
.,. second syllable (of three)
!!! yes, that's it
~~~ almost, close but not quite
/= no, that's not it, you're on the wrong track
+++ you're getting closer, you almost have it before
--- you were closer before, back up some
{ link } the phrase is of the category shown in the linked image (a book, a person, etc.)

And as before, many thanks to Ken Eklund and Sara Thacher for inspiration and logistical assistance!

Preliminary Thoughts on Skyrim

Andrea Phillips — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:08:19 +0000

...having played only the tutorial level:

The tutorial really blows. It tells you "press this stick to move," and then says "head to the keep" without ever telling you how to work out where the keep is.
And working out how to change your character's gender is extremely non-intuitive. I was nearly convinced it wasn't even an option before I stumbled on it; I only persisted because I was sure there would have been massive feminist outrage if it weren't an available choice.
The game tells you "press this button to attack," but doesn't walk you through any other element of combat. Does it matter if my back is to my enemy? Or how far away I am? Can I get some kind of warning when I'm about to die? Note that I actually died in the tutorial trying to figure this stuff out. And I am not exactly new to the console RPG, either.
The camera also blows. It doesn't let you do a full-circle; there's an arbitrary stop in, presumably, the back of your head. Extremely annoying.
Having the camera bob up and down when the character is walking over rocky terrain is unpleasantly disorienting.
Things got much better when I accidentally switched away from the straight first-person view. Wish I knew how to do that on purpose.
Was that one dude using two voices and two accents, or... something? I feel like something weird was going on with him.
The lockpicking minigame is fun.

Cut Lego Friends a Break

Andrea Phillips — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 23:44:25 +0000

Today, Lego announced a new line aimed square at girls: Lego Friends. These sets include pretty, feminine figures that are more articulated than classic Lego minifigs, blocks in a palette of colors including pink and purple, and sets like bakeries and dog shows -- a far cry from the pirate and cowboy-themed fare Lego typically sells nowadays.

The internet is seemingly outraged by this move. And to me, that outrage reads as, "Look at all of this femininity! Lego are supposed to be unisex toys! How dare they be infested by girl cooties!"

Look, it's true that the figures have some elements that make me a little uncomfortable: The pretty figures, the pink, the fact that the sets include a beauty salon and a stage. And I think that's the real heart of the outrage, here -- Lego is making something coded for girls, and therefore it has to suck, right? And be antifeminist? Because any time you make something pink, that's letting the sexists win!

This is internalized misogyny. Just because something is coded as meant for girls doesn't mean it automatically sucks or is antifeminist.

It's great to think Lego are for everyone. But the market reality is this: "unisex" toys are by and large mixed in with the boys' stuff. (Given how gender-segregated toy retailing is, this is only practical, and arguably reaches a broader market. While it's rare to see a girl go over to buy some Matchbox cars, it's less common yet to see a boy venture over to look at the baby dolls.)

So right now, if you walk into any toy store -- heck, walk into any Target -- you're going to see Lego shelved with the trucks and the construction equipment and the dinosaurs. And your typical girl isn't going to even walk down that aisle to see any Lego sets in the first place (even assuming she wants any part of their pirates, cowboys, and rocketships). The store layout, the packaging, the content are all elaborately designed to signal to her that those toys... well, they're not meant for her.

Lego Friends, on the other hand, is cunningly designed to be shelved right by the My Little Ponies and Littlest Pet Shop lines. They're colored and packaged to blend in perfectly. But there's a secret STEM bomb hiding right alongside that stage for the singer, in with that beauty salon. They've planted the seeds of adventure, intellectual and otherwise: a tree house, an inventor's shop, and the best, most progressive rendering of a fashion design studio I've ever seen, showing it as a place where you do math, not a place where you look pretty.

If these kits can get little girls interested in building and making, for crying out loud, who cares about anything else? Becoming an engineer or a scientist or a computer programmer doesn't mean you have to give up on being a girl and liking girl things. Because there is nothing wrong with being a girl.

It looks like Lego gets that. I wish the rest of us could get that, too.