More things on Jane
Stuff she's said that I like:
A well-structured experience, an elegantly architected interaction, is a form of art.
Games are the dominant art form of the 21st century. Not just videogames (but those too). All games.
Games are serious. Some people dismiss them as "pointless," but they are blind to the power of pointlessness. The power of games is in their intrinsic pleasure. The nature of games is not to point. The nature of games it to experience. And experiences can be extraordinarily powerful things.
Games are a persuasive platform. Games are a self-expressive platform.
Collective gameplay helps us gather the collective wisdom of crowds.
Collective gameplay can mobilize and harness the benevolent power of the public.
We should define public spaces as the spaces where you can find the public.
The story I help write and tell is the story of the players. My relationship to story and games is in giving players stories to tell about their experiences, creating narratives of their interaction in particular spaces and with each other. I write mission scripts and rule sets that ask players to perform in public spaces, to take actions and create moments, and then I write and document those moments so there is a record of the live gameplay. This can take place on an in-game blog, or an in-game Flickr photo-pool, for instance.
What is the story prompted by a GPS coordinate, a date, and a time? It asks players to locate a physical space, to take whatever (often extraordinary) measures necessary to get there at the right time, and to really be there, ready for anything to happen. The story is the story of what players were feeling, waiting in that spot, for something to happen: the anticipation, the adrenaline, the burning curiosity. The story of how they got there--crossing international borders, driving eight hours, leaving work even though the boss said no, sweet-talking a manager to open a locked door, calling a distant cousin six states over that you haven't talked to in years to go to the location on your behalf, as a personal favor. Those stories about the ingenious, impassioned action and interactions of the players--that's the narrative. This "emergent narrative"--the story of the game, rather than the story told in the game, is a major area of interest for many game designers; I am one of them.
The best experiential marketing campaigns to date have been designed and developed by gamers, who understand that games are a perfect social and interactive platform, a "tool for engagement" as I sometimes say.
The goal of games like The Beast and I Love Bees is to create an immersive experience that is really community-drive(n), personally rewarding, intensely engaging, memorable, and unlike anything the participants have experience before. This set of goals works equally well as a set of experiential marketing goals--it gets attention, builds good-will and loyalty, and showcases the original IP and brand in a really exciting way--and as a set of experimental game design goals--to develop new tools for engagement.
The Go Game is an afternoon-long urban adventure in which competing teams receive clues over their cell phones to specific locations around their city. When players arrive at each location, they download a superhero-themed performance mission: assemble undercover disguises using whatever you can find at a nearby thrift store; make a secret agent waiting for you on the #30 bus laugh by any means necessary (not that you have any idea which of the dozens of people on the bus the secret agent is); conduct a séance on the floor of a crowded café to improve the psychic atmosphere; figure out how to get onto a luxury hotel rooftop and attract as much attention as you can; get a whole barful of strangers singing and dancing along with you to any song you want to play on the jukebox.
The willful subjectivity of a performer is in its own way a kind of self-determination, a co-authorship with the writers. Media critic Thomas De Zengotita acknowledges this in Mediated (2005) when he discusses the flash mob phenomenon as a kind of middle ground between reality and optionality. In the middle of "so many flash mobs... you were being the phenomenon as you were seeing it represented, in real time, unfolding before you. You could see the impact of your role on the national stage in essentially the same way you can see the impact of your button-pressing in a videogame. You were the agent, you were the star" (152). As De Zengotita points out, performing in the public eye gives players an expressive visibility and an audience that provides the same quality of feedback a digital game offers. The audience reaction becomes the new metric, equally capable of giving players a sense of responsibility for a given outcome.
Here are the key words: public, social, spectacular (designed to attract attention), transparent (onlookers should understand that it is play and be able to join in), and ludic (structured like a game: a clear goal, a win condition, rules limiting action).
Some of the traditions I feel a part of, and have been greatly influenced by include: Happenings, Fluxus, Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed, theater games, and good-old-fashioned parks and recreation. Parks and Rec is a hugely overlooked wealth of history and knowledge about how to bring communities together in real-world spaces for play and collective experience.
Stories linger in the places after we experience them. And the stories we tell about our personal experiences in a place help us own that space, to feel comfortable there, to make others comfortable there, to feel alive there. I believe the job of the designers of reality-based games like big urban games and alternate reality games is to figure out: What kind of story would players want to be able to tell about this space? For I Love Bees, the space was a payphone; the story that players can tell is a classic superhero, action hero tale: "The phone was ringing. I raced to answer it. The voice on the other end had a special mission for me..." Every time a player walks by that payphone, they remember that they were needed, and that they were successful, and extraordinary. So I believe new media designers need to think about the narratives people want to tell about their everyday spaces, and to design experiences that give players those stories, for the rest of their lives. http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/mainpages/new/july06/mcgonigal.html
(pleasant sigh)
A well-structured experience, an elegantly architected interaction, is a form of art.
Games are the dominant art form of the 21st century. Not just videogames (but those too). All games.
Games are serious. Some people dismiss them as "pointless," but they are blind to the power of pointlessness. The power of games is in their intrinsic pleasure. The nature of games is not to point. The nature of games it to experience. And experiences can be extraordinarily powerful things.
Games are a persuasive platform. Games are a self-expressive platform.
Collective gameplay helps us gather the collective wisdom of crowds.
Collective gameplay can mobilize and harness the benevolent power of the public.
We should define public spaces as the spaces where you can find the public.
The story I help write and tell is the story of the players. My relationship to story and games is in giving players stories to tell about their experiences, creating narratives of their interaction in particular spaces and with each other. I write mission scripts and rule sets that ask players to perform in public spaces, to take actions and create moments, and then I write and document those moments so there is a record of the live gameplay. This can take place on an in-game blog, or an in-game Flickr photo-pool, for instance.
What is the story prompted by a GPS coordinate, a date, and a time? It asks players to locate a physical space, to take whatever (often extraordinary) measures necessary to get there at the right time, and to really be there, ready for anything to happen. The story is the story of what players were feeling, waiting in that spot, for something to happen: the anticipation, the adrenaline, the burning curiosity. The story of how they got there--crossing international borders, driving eight hours, leaving work even though the boss said no, sweet-talking a manager to open a locked door, calling a distant cousin six states over that you haven't talked to in years to go to the location on your behalf, as a personal favor. Those stories about the ingenious, impassioned action and interactions of the players--that's the narrative. This "emergent narrative"--the story of the game, rather than the story told in the game, is a major area of interest for many game designers; I am one of them.
The best experiential marketing campaigns to date have been designed and developed by gamers, who understand that games are a perfect social and interactive platform, a "tool for engagement" as I sometimes say.
The goal of games like The Beast and I Love Bees is to create an immersive experience that is really community-drive(n), personally rewarding, intensely engaging, memorable, and unlike anything the participants have experience before. This set of goals works equally well as a set of experiential marketing goals--it gets attention, builds good-will and loyalty, and showcases the original IP and brand in a really exciting way--and as a set of experimental game design goals--to develop new tools for engagement.
The Go Game is an afternoon-long urban adventure in which competing teams receive clues over their cell phones to specific locations around their city. When players arrive at each location, they download a superhero-themed performance mission: assemble undercover disguises using whatever you can find at a nearby thrift store; make a secret agent waiting for you on the #30 bus laugh by any means necessary (not that you have any idea which of the dozens of people on the bus the secret agent is); conduct a séance on the floor of a crowded café to improve the psychic atmosphere; figure out how to get onto a luxury hotel rooftop and attract as much attention as you can; get a whole barful of strangers singing and dancing along with you to any song you want to play on the jukebox.
The willful subjectivity of a performer is in its own way a kind of self-determination, a co-authorship with the writers. Media critic Thomas De Zengotita acknowledges this in Mediated (2005) when he discusses the flash mob phenomenon as a kind of middle ground between reality and optionality. In the middle of "so many flash mobs... you were being the phenomenon as you were seeing it represented, in real time, unfolding before you. You could see the impact of your role on the national stage in essentially the same way you can see the impact of your button-pressing in a videogame. You were the agent, you were the star" (152). As De Zengotita points out, performing in the public eye gives players an expressive visibility and an audience that provides the same quality of feedback a digital game offers. The audience reaction becomes the new metric, equally capable of giving players a sense of responsibility for a given outcome.
Here are the key words: public, social, spectacular (designed to attract attention), transparent (onlookers should understand that it is play and be able to join in), and ludic (structured like a game: a clear goal, a win condition, rules limiting action).
Some of the traditions I feel a part of, and have been greatly influenced by include: Happenings, Fluxus, Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed, theater games, and good-old-fashioned parks and recreation. Parks and Rec is a hugely overlooked wealth of history and knowledge about how to bring communities together in real-world spaces for play and collective experience.
Stories linger in the places after we experience them. And the stories we tell about our personal experiences in a place help us own that space, to feel comfortable there, to make others comfortable there, to feel alive there. I believe the job of the designers of reality-based games like big urban games and alternate reality games is to figure out: What kind of story would players want to be able to tell about this space? For I Love Bees, the space was a payphone; the story that players can tell is a classic superhero, action hero tale: "The phone was ringing. I raced to answer it. The voice on the other end had a special mission for me..." Every time a player walks by that payphone, they remember that they were needed, and that they were successful, and extraordinary. So I believe new media designers need to think about the narratives people want to tell about their everyday spaces, and to design experiences that give players those stories, for the rest of their lives. http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/mainpages/new/july06/mcgonigal.html
(pleasant sigh)