Osma. Game. Company. Playability. Edm. Reality has a gaming layer - O'Reilly Radar. Kevin Slavin has been thinking about the intersection of games and daily life for nearly a decade. As the managing director of Area/Code, he’s worked with Frank Lantz to integrate gameplay into the fabric of reality using a technique they call “big games.” In the following interview, Slavin discusses the thinning boundary between the game world and the real world. What are “big games”? Kevin Slavin: They’re games that take place using some elements from the game system and some elements of the real world. Something Frank Lantz had worked on with Katie Salen and Nick Fortugno was called the Big Urban Game. It involved transforming the city of Minneapolis into a game board. They did that by using huge inflatable game pieces, about 25-feet high. At Area/Code we built another big game in 2004 called ConQwest. That was a very exciting thing to play around with. Using an urban landscape as a game board sounds a lot like Foursquare.
KS: It’s not a total coincidence. Related: Using Video Games to Burn all that Fat Caused by Playing Video Games (TCTV) HopeLab is a nonprofit video game lab founded by Pam Omidyar, wife of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. That’s right, I said non-profit video game lab. It seeks to make the world better through video games, and it’s hoping it has a new hit on its hands with Zamzee. Zamzee combats sedentary behavior by giving kids and teens points for moving more throughout the day and those points can be used to buy virtual goods or exchange for gift cards. Early research shows a whopping 30% jump in activity when people play Zamzee– the equivalent of running a marathon every month.
HopeLabs has decided to spin the game out into a for-profit company to help commercialize the game faster. Using Video Games to Burn all that Fat Caused by Playing Video Games (TCTV) Augmented Reality Modelling Tool. Storytelling 2.0: Alternate Reality Games - O'Reilly Radar. Publishers are experimenting with an emerging form of interactive entertainment known as Alternate Reality Games (ARG). ARGs are mediated by the Web but they also extend into the real world, with players traveling to physical places and interacting with game characters via email, text messaging, Twitter, and even “old-fashioned” telephones.
I spoke to the founders of ARG design firm Fourth Wall Studios, the company that created the first publishing ARG, Cathy’s Book. I wanted to know if ARGs are a viable form of commercial storytelling, if they can be packaged up after the experience has ended, and if they can engage with a wider audience beyond hard-core gamers. Q: Do you think the high level of engagement required of an ARG limits the audience? Is there such a thing as a “casual” ARG, that can be enjoyed in the spare moments between soccer practice and dinner time? A: Elan Lee, Fourth Wall Studios Founder/Chief Designer: ARGs up until now have been like rock concerts. Related Stories: Augmented Reality op de campus - Universiteit van Tilburg. The Revenge of the Origami Unicorn: Seven Principles of Transmedia Storytelling (Well, Two Actually. Five More on Friday)
Across the next two weeks, we will be rolling out the webcast versions of the sessions we hosted during the recent Futures of Entertainment 4 conference held last month at MIT. (see Monday's post for the session on Grant McCracken's Chief Culture Officer). Many of the conference sessions were focused around the concept of transmedia entertainment. The team asked me to deliver some opening remarks at the conference which updated my own thinking about transmedia and introduced some basic vocabulary which might guide the discussion.
My remarks were largely off the cuff in response to power point slides, but I am making an effort here to capture the key concepts in writing for the first time. You can watch the recording of the actual presentation here and/or read along with this text. Many of these ideas were informed by the discussions I've been having all semester long within my Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment class at the University of Southern California. 1. 2.