Deep Media

Sheffield Doc/Fest: When Games and Stories Collide

Last June, when I was giving the opening keynote at the Crossover Summit at Sheffield Doc/Fest, I was asked to talk about the relationship between games and stories. It's a meaty topic: If stories in the digital age are becoming participatory (alternate reality games like 42 Entertainment's Year Zero with Trent Reznor, or the "response" videos from Wieden+Kennedy's "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" campaign for Old Spice), then almost by definition they would be turning gamelike as well. 

As one of the leading events on the international documentary circuit, Sheffield was a good venue for this discussion. The summit, produced by London's Crossover Labs, attracts filmmakers and television executives from across Europe and beyond. (An unexpected bonus was the opportunity to be interviewed by Rob Barker and Matt Mella for their then-nascent blog, Overlap, which covers emerging forms of narrative.) Now that the video of the talk has been posted online, I thought I'd give a little background. 

The blurring of the lines between games and stories was one of the key questions I had when I started working on The Art of Immersion in 2008. It was already obvious that, even as stories were growing gamelike, video games (Heavy Rain, for example) were becoming more and more narrative-driven. 

“We have the opportunity to make the player the hero,” Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft Game Studios, told me early on. “That’s something movies and television can’t do. But it begs the question, What is the player doing to attain that status? The way to do that is through story. You build a narrative arc and let the player play through it.” 

So stories were becoming games and games were becoming stories. But what did that mean, exactly? And what were the implications for filmmakers and game developers? That's what I was trying to get at in the book, and in my talk as well. 

It's no secret that a many top game designers—Cliff Bleszinski, Hideo Kojima—are seriously in thrall to the movies. But for all their movie envy, game developers have not been able to match cinema’s narrative and emotional force. 

In part that's because they keep running up against the still-considerable limitations of gaming hardware. In Fable II, set in the mythical land of Albion, Peter Molyneux gives you quests to fulfill whilst you roam the countryside, have sex, get diseases, get rich, kill people, save people, etc. In most games the opportunities for personal interaction are limited to talking and shooting, but Molyneux wanted his players to be able to express emotion.

To do that, he devised an “expression wheel” that let you smile, laugh, flirt, even fart. Simply by pressing some buttons on the controller, you could dial up the appropriate response. But what was intended as a way of extending the game’s emotional range succeeded mainly in highlighting how pathetically clunky emotional expression in video games remained. “You pressed a button—it all seemed so trivial,” Molyneux lamented. “That’s not how it’s done in real life!”

Bleszinski took a less ambitious approach with Gears of War. In Gears you play Marcus Fenix, a major-league tough guy, and you earn your hero status by defeating the Locust Horde, a nasty assemblage of beasts and humanoids that has all but annihilated the human population.

Gears is not a mindless shooter. It's designed to reward stealth, cunning, and tactical thinking; the look is vivid with detail, in the way a fictional world has to be to feel convincing. And the story, while thin, is nonetheless capable of conveying drama and emotion—as in the excruciating scene in Gears 2 when Marcus’s sidekick Dom finally finds his long-lost wife, Maria, only to realize she’s been terminally damaged by torture.

“Gears of War will never be remembered as a great work of fiction," Bleszinski admitted cheerily, "and we’re okay with that. I find that a lot of the narrative in video games exists just as a cool excuse for fun things to happen to the player. But it’s not just story. Often it’s the premise—the setup, the context of your actions, the way it makes you feel you’re in the world.”

A New Grammar of Fun

In a New Yorker profile that was later incorporated into his book Extra Lives, Tom Bissell described Bleszinski and his peers as having “established the principles of a grammar of fun.” That’s certainly the idea, but Bleszinski’s own assessment was more modest, and probably more accurate. “My two loves have been video games and films,” he told me. “But movies have had 75 years to teach audiences what to feel. We’re still continuing to master our craft.”

Movie-makers certainly took long enough to hit their stride: It was 1910, roughly 20 years after the invention of the motion-picture camera, before they even caught onto the idea of stars. Until then, film actors were kept anonymous in a misguided attempt to hold down their salaries. But games are participatory by definition, and that introduces an issue even knottier than actors’ salary demands: control. The designer creates the game, but the player decides what to do next—so who’s controlling the story?

One way of settling the matter is to neutralize the player by deactivating the game controller. That's the Kojima approach. Kojima is the master of the cut scene, those little video interludes that come between bouts of gameplay, advancing the plot while the player watches patiently (or not). In Metal Gear Solid 4, the most recent full-bore installment in his ongoing saga, Kojima idles the controller for nearly a half hour at a time—more than eight hours in total.

In cinematic terms, cut scenes are more or less on a par with the proscenium arch shot, which is done with a single, stationary camera planted front-row center, as if to record a stage play. That’s what early movie directors used before they invented cuts, fades, pans, and close-ups—techniques that allowed them to take advantage of their new medium’s possibilities. Cinema didn’t make any real headway as an art form until it ceased to mimic stage-acting and developed its own grammar of fun. 

Rockstar Games took a big step forward last year with L.A. Noire, a scripted detective story set in 1947 Los Angeles. Detective stories are implicitly participatory anyway, as generations of Sherlock Holmes fans can attest. But in this one you don’t have to content yourself with second-guessing the endlessly clever protagonist; you get to examine the evidence and question witnesses and suspects yourself. Since a great deal depends on your ability to read faces and body language, It doesn’t hurt that the characters are portrayed by professional actors, or that their performances were recorded using a motion-capture technology that rivals James Cameron’s for sophistication.

Still, it wasn't until I spoke to Will Wright, creator of SimCity and The Sims, that I really began to understand the relationship between games and stories. In open world games like The Sims, there’s no scripting at all. Instead, the story emerges from the complex and often unpredictable interaction of characters created by the player and rules laid down by Wright. 

“I love movies,” Wright told me when I interviewed him for the book. “But I’ve never wanted to tell a story in a game.” He’d rather let the player tell the story. Which is how you get “Alice and Kev,” a blog about two Sims char­acters created by Robin Burkin­shaw, a game design student in England.

Burkinshaw made Kev mean-spirited and insane and his daugh­ter Alice sweet but unlucky and suf­fering from low self-esteem. Then he took away their money and left them living in a park. What hap­pened after that was deter­mined largely by the game it­self. When Burkinshaw sent Kev to look for romance in the park, he turned up without any clothes. Alice grew increasingly depressed and angry until finally she told her father off—much to his surprise, and Burkinshaw’s.

“Think of Star Wars,” Wright said. “You’ve got lightsabers and the Death Star and the Force and all this stuff that leads to a wide variety of play experiences. I can go have lightsaber battles with my friend. I can play a game about blowing up the Death Star. I can have a unique experience and come back and tell you a story about what happened. The best stories lead to the widest variety of play, and the best play leads to the most story. I think they’re two sides of the same coin.”

This doesn't solve the control question, of course. But it does put the issue in perspective. If stories (documentaries, for example) are going to be gamelike, the storyteller has to make room for users. That doesn't necessarily mean giving them control of the story, as Wright does, but it does mean not hogging the game controller. How this compromise should work is something people are still sorting out—but at the stage where we are now, that's to be expected. What's great about being a storyteller today is that you get to help figure out the answer. 

How Pepys Road Takes You into the Fictional World of Britain's Coming "Lost Decade"

Some of the most intriguing innovations in story­telling these days are happening in the UK, where broadcasting networks, book publishers, and even newspapers have embraced the idea of creating immersive narratives that invite the audience to join in. The latest effort comes from Matt Locke, former head of cross-platform programming at Channel Four, who left television last year to start Storythings, a consultancy that's been developing projects with top brands and media outlets. Storythings' first project, released last month, is Pepys Road, an online story that ties in with the John Lanchester novel Capital, recently published by Faber & Faber. 

Capital documents the lives of characters on a fictional South London street as they deal with the fallout from Britain's ongoing financial crisis. Pepys Road is designed to bring all this home to the reader. To experience Pepys Road, you go to the Web site, type in your date and place of birth and the place you live now, and wait for what happens next. Over the next 10 days, you get a series of emails containing, among other things, stories by Lanchester that demonstrate how you might be affected by the economic changes the next 10 years are expected to bring. The experience is immediate, immersive, and highly provocative. Here's what Matt had to say about it:

Capital is a novel about the people who live on Pepys Road, but Pepys Road is all about what happens to you, the reader. Clearly these are meant to be complementary—but what does one give you that the other doesn't?  

The novel Capital illustrates how growing financial inequality has led to London being a city of social layers—classes of people who live close together, but whose lives don't really connect in a meaningful way. When you read the book, you can't help but think about your own life, and how your own network and activities are defined by similar economic and social segregation.

Talking to John Lanchester at the beginning of the project, we were discussing the "Lost Decade"—the period of stagnant or negative growth that most economists are predicting—and what it might mean for society. We felt that a lot of people feel a great amount of uncertainty about their future, and the future of their families, and that this was an interesting way to introduce people to the themes of the books.

If you're trying to get people's attention online, you have to think about what they are concerned about, or the information they value. The idea of telling the story of their life in this "lost decade" felt like something that is very much at the heart of the book, but also valuable as an exercise for users on a personal level. This is at the heart of online storytelling for me—how do you take people on a journey from their own questions and issues, which are the start of any journey online, into the storyworld you're trying to create?

I gather you developed Pepys Road in tandem with James Bridle, who's sort of a maverick within the UK publishing industry. What did he bring to the party, and how did you work together? 

James has been producing really fascinating work and writing about books and digital technology for many years now, so I really wanted to work with him on a book project. Capital is partly about the invisible flows that affect our lives in the city - the flows of data, money and other information that influence where we live, who we meet and what we buy—and James has been producing some lovely online projects based around how we visualise and tell stories about data. I originally hired him right at the beginning, when we were producing ideas for Faber around a couple of titles, including Capital, and we had a few wide-ranging con­ver­sations about how we could join his interests in data and "new aesthetics" with the storyworld of Capital. From those early con­ver­sations, we developed the idea of a series of short narratives, and how we could punctuate these with a couple of "data illustrations" that use live data to illustrate how these invisible flows affect your life. We then brought a stellar team together, including Chris Thorpe, Kim Plowright, Dean Vipond and Phil Gyford, to work these early ideas up into the full project.

Books are generally written by one person, two at most. How important is collaboration in a project like this? 

The collaboration with John was really important, as I wanted the online project to be a subtle "on ramp" into the work of Capital, and in particular, John's writing. He's an astonishingly good and prolific writer, and fortunately he loved the idea enough to make time to write 13 mini-stories for the online project. He was really interested in this way of working, and was completely across the way in which the mini-stories fitted into the whole user experience of the project. Its not incredibly complicated as a project, but I think its elegant—it has just enough complexity, but hopefully that doesn't get in the way of people really appreciating John's writing, and going on to buy and read the book.

You've mentioned that one of your inspirations was OhLife, the online diary-writing service. Is OhLife something you use yourself? How does it work, and how did it figure in coming up with Pepys Road? 

OhLife is a really simple private diary service that sends you an email every day asking how your day has been. You respond by replying to the email, and it stores your diary entry, so you can use the service without ever actually visiting the site. It quickly becomes a habit, and I've kept a diary for longer with OhLife than anything I've ever used before, partly because it's private, and partly because it plays this lovely trick of giving you an old diary entry at the beginning of each email. This moment of reflection is a really good spur to keep you writing your diary—it shows you the value of doing it, and helps you reflect on what you've done and where you've been in the past.

This kind of reflection was really important to Pepys Road, as I wanted people to think about how their lives might change in the future. I also wanted to create a longer attention pattern for the project—a lot of marketing focuses on creating one spectacular "hit" that you can instantly share, but little incentive to come back to the project after that initial visit. Capital is a big book, and I wanted the project to reflect the attention pattern of reading—a few minutes a day, every day, rather than the instant hit and share of most online content. So we borrowed two ideas from OhLife—the use of email to create a habit of reading in the stream of our daily digital activities, and the use of feedback to help people reflect on what they're doing and have done in the past.

Aside from getting them to buy the book, how would you like Pepys Road to affect people? 

The mini-stories that John has written for the project are really affecting, I think. Without us discussing it, he's used the perfect tense online—the texts talk about "you" in the way that most Web services do, so the writing has that feel of online vernacular. They feel familiar, but they're describing how the world might pan out, and what your position in it will be, so there's something a bit uncanny about it. I hope that the stories make people think about the way our attitudes and lives might change in the next few years, and the paths our own lives will take. This is absolutely the feeling I got reading Capital, so I think Pepys Road is very much a part of that storyworld.

You were head of cross-platform development at Channel Four. What did you do there? Is it very different working with a book publisher? 

Publishing has had a much sharper and more destabilising shift to digital distribution than TV, so the need to innovate and understand the new patterns of audience attention feel more urgent there. TV has been exploring digital for over a decade, yet most traditional broadcasters are still generating the vast proportion of their income from linear TV ads, sold according to sampled BARB or Neilsen data. The economics of broadcast has not been disrupted yet in the way Amazon has disrupted publishing economics in the last few years, so TV is still having fun playing around, but isn't feeling the shift in its bottom line yet. The last 10 years I've spent in broadcasting have given me valuable experience from all the experiments and innovation we've had time to do, but it's great working in publishing, where the feeling is that the change is happening *now*. I think there's a magical figure of 20 per cent—when a traditional media company sees the amount of its bottom line income from digital reach 20 per cent, the industry goes into a different, more urgent, period of change. TV isn't there yet, but publishing is. The music industry was there about five years ago, and the film industry is a few years away. The games industry is crossing that line at the moment.

I'm always getting asked if experiences like this—experiences that take you deeper into a story—will ever stand on their own, or if they will always be marketing tools for a movie or a book or whatever. What's your take on this? Does it matter? 

I don't think it matters at all. I think of culture as something that begins when you first hear about it, and ends when you're talking about your experience of the project with friends, so to call one element "the work" and the rest "marketing" isn't that useful. When the cost of moving your attention from one piece of content to another is so small, we need to look at the attention curves around content, and how the work can reward and trigger certain kinds of attention patterns that help us tell the story.

This is what David Simon was doing when he created The Wire—telling a story that required a longer, more intense kind of attention than the usual CSI hour-long EP. It's why Angry Birds is optimised for 10 minutes of play at a time. We're seeing lots of different kinds of attention patterns that are now viable as media devices have made every minute of the day a possible cultural moment. I think we're just beginning to discover what kinds of attention patterns people are willing to fold into their daily lives, and the kinds of economics that will support them.

This isn't just a recent phenomenon. When the Telefon Hírmondó, the Budapest "telephone newspaper," first used the telephone as a broadcast network in the late 19th century, it faced the problem of how to schedule content for audience's attention across a 12- or 24-hour period for the first time. It decided to use blocks of 1 hour/30 minute/15 minute content, a format that we still use in TV over a century later. Every cultural form has been created around the possible attention patterns for its audience—how long they can comfortably sit in a theatre, how big a book you can carry, etc.—and we're just beginning to discover what these are for these new forms. I'm currently writing a book on the "history of attention," looking at how earlier cultural forms were shaped by the attention patterns of the time, and what we can learn from the interplay of artist, economics and audience that create the dominant patterns at various times in our cultural history.

More than a decade ago, Electronic Arts created Majestic—a fictional game that bled into your life. It didn't work, largely I guess for economic reasons. Do you think something like it could work now? 

Again, I think there are some very mature and mainstream patterns of attention in our daily lives that you can use to tell stories. Where a lot of alternate reality games and immersive stories fail is in asking for too much attention, and not being aware of the kinds of patterns that people are willing to give to new forms of stories. Only a tiny proportion of the audience is willing to give up their daily routine to a story that could pop into their lives at any moment and demand their attention. I think it's better to really look at people's patterns of attention, and think about how you can work with the grain of this experience, rather than trying to disrupt it.

Disruption, or trying to get audiences to follow a new pattern of attention, is extremely hard, and should be used only for a specific, visceral effect in an online story. It's the digital equivalent of Brechtian breaking of the "fourth wall" in theatre—you need to really demonstrate to the audience that you understand the aesthetics and vocabulary of their context before you break it, otherwise is just annoying interruptions instead of drama.

You've written about "spiky networks" as a defining aspect of digital culture. What do you mean by that? And what are the implications for anyone trying to make an impact? 

I think that Bill Wasik's And Then There's This is the best definition of what spiky networks are—that's a fantastic book about new attention patterns around digital culture. In short, spiky networks are what happens when there is very little economic, technical or cultural barriers to audiences switching their attention from one cultural object to another. In the days of analogue media, where the choice of content was severely limited, and the act of switching attention had economic or physical costs—buying another newspaper, or physically switching channels. This created an era of abnormally stable attention patterns, and cultural forms developed to take advantage of this.

We are now in an age of spiky attention, where no platform, channel, or artist has a monopoly on our attention, so everyone has to work harder to develop relationships and habits in the audience that will keep their attention. It is characterised by huge spikes of attention, as our cultural networks temporarily align to give large amounts of traffic to a particular cultural object, but this attention will shift in the next moment to a new object, and keep doing so. The challenge now is how to build loyalty and retention of attention, rather than one-off viral hits. This is what games companies like Zynga understand, why YouTube has redesigned around channels rather than viral videos, and ultimately why the big four—Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook—are focusing on building ecosystems rather than platforms.

In the 20th century, scale was technologically and economically really hard, but if you acheived it, you had a monopoly on attention and longevity was the reward. In the 21st century, scale is not technologically or economically hard. It's hard for different reasons, mainly to do with aligning taste networks to get spikes of traffic, but you will never have the same monopoly on attention, and so longevity is hard. If scale was the problem that mass media had to solve in the 20th century, then retention and longevity is the problem mass media has to solve in the 21st century. If McLuhan were alive today, he'd be writing about archives, privacy policies and algorithms that align our taste profiles. These are the factors that define how we share culture today.

C21 Author Learns To Make Pineapple with Readers

A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk at ad:tech Sydney that got written up in a blog post on MarketingDirecto.com, a Madrid-based marketing and publicity site. My Spanish is not so great, but with a little help from Google Translate I could see that their correspondent had gotten my point—that brand marketers need to stop trumpeting their message and start enlisting the consumer to spread it for them. It was the headline that threw me: “Para contar historias, las marcas deben hacer piña con el consumidor”—which Google rather unhelpfully translated as, "To tell stories, brands must make pineapple with the consumer."

Funny—I couldn't remember saying anything resembling that. 

So I Googled "hacer piña," which didn't provide much help until I thought to throw the word "idiom" into the search. Then I learned that "hacer piña" is a slang term that means "come together." There's even a management book called Hacer Piña that's all about the importance of teamwork. So what the headline actually said was that brands need to become one with the consumer.

I couldn't have put it better myself. But it wasn't until I got to New Zealand a couple of days later that I really began to understand what I had been talking about. 

This was a trip that perfectly illustrated, in a microcosmic sort of way, the power of social media to forge human connections. I was flying to Auckland to speak as part of New Zealand Book Month—an appearance I owed to one of my readers there, the filmmaker Toa Fraser. It started back in December, when I mentioned on Twitter that I was going to be speaking in Sydney. A few minutes later I got a message from Toa, whom I didn't know, asking if I would consider giving a talk in Auckland while I was in the neighborhood. Sure, I said, if you can make it happen.

It took him a couple of months—but with the help of the Auckland Central Library, the New Zealand office of DraftFCB, and Brian Boyd of the University of Auckland, it all came together. What ensued was, for me, an object lesson in how social media can enable an author to connect with readers. 

Toa is the award-winning director of Dean Spanley, a 2008 comedy/drama set in Edwardian England and starring Sam Neill and Peter O'Toole, and No. 2, a 2006 film based on his play about a Fijian family in modern-day New Zealand. Himself the UK-born son of a Fijian father and a British mother, Toa has focused as a storyteller on the cultural connections among disparate types of peo­ple—which is to say, on the human condition. 

Over lunch last week at Auckland's Ponsonby Road Bistro, he explained why he'd contacted me. After Dean Spanley, he'd felt frustrated by the limitations of film but uncertain of what to do about it. When he read my book, he said, he felt it gave him permission to do what he'd been wanting to do all along—experiment with other, more immersive forms of storytelling. It changed the way he thought not only about his work but about life. 

I've published several books before, but none of them ever resulted in my sitting in a café on the far side of the planet listening to someone tell me I'd changed his entire approach to life. It was certainly different in the mid-'90s, when my last book came out. 

And not just for authors, either. I was reminded of a story I'd heard in London from Matt Locke, the former head of multiplatform commissioning for Channel 4 (where he worked with such shows as Big Brother and Skins) and now founder of Storythings, a consultancy focused on new ways of telling stories. (More on Storythings in a coming post.) 

Matt's tale involved Richard Curtis, who—before he became famous as the co-creator of Mr. Bean and director of such films as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill—teamed with Rowan Atkinson to create the groundbreaking British comedy series Blackadder. This was in the early '80s, long before the advent of social media or even, in the UK at least, television ratings. In a desperate attempt to peer into the void of audience response, Curtis recalled in a recent BBC documentary, "I used to wander round Shepherd’s Bush, looking in people’s windows, particularly people in basement flats, to see whether or not anyone was watching." 

Twentieth-century mass media—television, books, what have you—were great at broadcasting ideas and entertainment, but they were notoriously bad  at enabling the person who had those ideas to make contact with anyone who cared about them. Now all you need to do is keep a running search on Twitter. Not only do you not have to skulk around looking in people's windows; you'll find them standing at the door, waving you in. 

The next day, I gave a talk on immersive storytelling at the library and was joined in a discussion afterwards by Toa, Brian Boyd, and the Oscar-winning Weta Digital animator Mark Sagar. This meant we were coming full circle, because just as my book had influenced Toa, Boyd's remarkably insightful On the Origin of Stories had greatly influenced me. In fact, I'd just quoted a key passage from it in my talk in Sydney about brands needing to become one with consumers:

Signals that evolve through competition tend to be costly, as arms races develop between insistent senders and resistant receivers. Messages become louder, longer, more repetitive, massively redundant, like the roars of red deer stags or Superbowl advertisers. Signals used for cooperative purposes, by contrast—“conspiratorial whispers”—will be energetically cheap and informationally rich. 

"Energetically cheap and informationally rich"—I love that phrase. For anyone with a story to tell—authors, television producers, film directors, brand managers—social media is all about cooperative signaling. It's the home of the conspiratorial whisper. 

In any case, my experience in New Zealand was hardly a one-off. No sooner was I back in New York than I flew up to Canada to speak at the Rencontres Cinématographiques de Québec—thanks to Vincent Routhier, the entrepreneur behind Québec's Saga Film, who like Toa had gotten in touch through Twitter after reading my book. Meanwhile, I saw a tweet from an ad professional in Baton Rouge who had just picked up a copy and wanted to know what I was reading. To which I replied that I was reading Sarah Bakewell's How To Live, or, A Life of Montaigne, which takes the 16th-century French essayist as a sort of model human, one whose writings have a resonance with the way we live now. Mullen's Edward Boches, who had recommended my book to the guy in Louisiana, tweeted that he was adding Bakewell's book to his reading list too. Which prompted the following response from @Sarah_Bakewell: 

That's nice to hear, @edwardboches and @frankrose—thanks & hope you enjoy it!

Thanks, Sarah—I am. And by the way, if you don't mind my asking—what do you think Montaigne would make of Twitter?  

Immersion 101: How Punchdrunk's Sleep No More Turns Theater on Its Ear

In March 2011, when London’s Punchdrunk Theatre Company opened Sleep No More in an abandoned warehouse block in New York, few imagined it would still be running a year later. A strangely wordless interpretation of Macbeth as filtered through film noir with a nod to Hitchcock, Sleep No More defies every convention of theater. It has no stage, no seats, takes place in a labyrinth of oddly decorated rooms, and requires audience members to wear Venetian-style masks but gives them no clue how to respond to what’s going on—which can be anything from nothing at all to a naked man in a bloody bathtub.

Photo: Yaniv Schulman

The Macbeths in a private moment, as seen in Punchdrunk's Sleep No More

“What is it?” asked Punchdrunk producer Colin Nightingale over breakfast the other day. “An art experience? A piece of theater? Nightlife? We don’t want to tell you. We think our audience is intelligent enough to work it out.” Apparently they are—for not only is Sleep No More still running, it’s playing to sellout crowds. The best explanation anyone can come up with: It’s immersive. Surreally, voyeuristically, even hypnotically immersive.

People have always wanted to immerse themselves in stories, and digital media have given them any number of ways to do so, from Grand Theft Auto and L.A. Noire to alternate reality games like Why So Serious?, which drew more than 10 million people into the saga of The Dark Knight before the movie opened. But the desire for immersion has spilled over into the purely analog world as well, as Sleep No More attests.

This afternoon at 3, I’ll be exploring this at South by Southwest Next Stage with Susan Bonds, CEO of 42 Entertainment (the group behind Why So Serious? as well as Legends of Alcatraz, the latest installment of which played out in Austin yesterday), and Paul Woolmington, founding partner of the branding agency Naked Communications. We’ll be deconstructing five different media experiences, Sleep No More among them, in an attempt to explain what makes them work—and in particular, what makes them work right now.

For Nightingale, Sleep No More is part of a journey that began on a random day in 2002. He was walking through an art fair in South London when he stumbled across Punchdrunk’s first major project, an adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist farce The Chairs. “I walked through a door, into another world, and out the other side,” he said. Apparently he would not be the same again.

Punchdrunk was the brainchild of Felix Barrett, who as a student at Exeter University had recently started thinking about how you could break down traditional expectations of theater. Nightingale was a DJ who liked to throw warehouse parties in the dicier parts of East London, providing his guests with hand-drawn maps that were slightly wrong. But he was looking for something more, he said, “and when I went into Punchdrunk I felt, this is it.”

“With clubbing, you’re very much at the center,” he went on. “It’s not like you’re sitting in a theater. I don’t think anybody should underestimate the impact that had on a generation of people.”

Punchdrunk went on to produce several large-scale events in the UK—among them an adaptation of Goethe’s Faust, which the Observer called “one of the most astonishing events, not just in the theatre, but in the whole of London”—but none of them quite on the scale of Sleep No More.

That’s partly a function of real estate. As a site-specific theatrical production, Sleep No More depends on the producers finding a location big enough to contain it.

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Today at SXSW Next Stage I'm leading a discussion on IMMERSION 101: Inventing the Future of Entertainment, with Susan Bonds of 42 Entertainment and Paul Woolmington of Naked Communications. Immediately afterwards I'm doing a book signing at the SXSW Bookstore upstairs.

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Punchdrunk may finesse that issue, however, with another type of production it’s planning: Punchdrunk Travel. The idea is to have people turn up at the airport with nothing more than their luggage and a locker key. Their destination and everything else about their travel experience would be revealed to them in due course.

What this creates is a story with no boundaries. “When people have no idea what they’re doing, it heightens the real world for them,” Nightingale explained. “They have no idea what’s part of the story and what’s not.”

Which is precisely the way he likes it. “I want there to be a hidden door,” he continued. “A rabbithole to fall through. I want to believe there’s more.”

Cross-posted from Wired/Underwire

Peter Weyland of Prometheus Makes a Surprise Appearance at TED: "Allow Me To Introduce Myself."

Yesterday saw the release of one of the most compelling TED talks ever: Peter Weyland's in the year 2023. Of course, 2023 hasn't really happened yet, and neither has Sir Peter. But both will arrive soon enough—in June, to be precise, with the release of Ridley Scott's Prometheus. The TED talk—performed by Guy Pearce, who plays the seriously overreaching CEO of Weyland Corp. in the film—is one of those great in-fiction artifacts that make the boundary between entertainment and reality so fungible these days. 

Pearce's stentorian delivery makes him the perfect TED orator: He comes across as a sort of Richard Branson on steroids. As the camera sweeps the stage, he holds its gaze relentlessly: 

At this moment in our civilization, we can create cybernetic individuals who in just a few short years will be completely indistinguishable from us. Which leads to an obvious conclusion: We are the gods now. For those of you who know me, you will be aware by now that my ambition is unlimited. . . . For those of you who do not know me, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Peter Weyland, and if you'll indulge me, I'd like to change the world. 

Directed by Luke Scott, Ridley's son, and written by Damon Lindelof, who co-wrote the screenplay for the movie, the video is presented on the TED site in deadpan fashion, with an "about the speaker" write-up that details Weyland's role in launching "the first privatized industrial mission to leave the planet Earth." In a Q&A on the TED blog, Lindelof says, "I never thought in my wildest dreams we would get the actual TED branding." But he got in touch with TED's Tom Rielly, and pretty soon they were on. 

Lindelof has been involved in this sort of thing before, of course. In May 2006, when he and Carlton Cuse were exec-producing Lost, ABC ran an ad for the fictitious Hanso Foundation. This turned out to be a rabbithole for The Lost Experience, the alternate reality game that played out that summer. Two years later, ABC ran a spot and even put up billboards for Oceanic Airlines, whose plane crash kicked the whole thing off. 

But Lindelof is hardly the only one to use real-world media outlets to spread an in-fiction narrative. This past December, as part of its viral experience for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 42 Entertainment produced a vintage episode of Hard Copy that contained disturbing allegations about the disappearance of Harriet Vanger. And back in July 2008, a few days before Mad Men began its second season on AMC, Advertising Age published a special issue from 1960 that featured actual ads from purported clients of Sterling Cooper as well as an amusing interview with creative director Don Draper: 

How do you think this new medium, television, will change the way advertising talks to consumers--and how will it affect advertising in general?

Well, the first thing I've noticed, it seems to be more about show business, not just putting ads into television shows without irritating viewers. But the ads themselves have to tell stories, have music, have striking images, be entertaining--maybe even more entertaining than the shows. It's going to be a tough one.

In its advertising column, the New York Times reported that Lionsgate, which produces the show, paid for the fake issue of Ad Age (actually a 16-page insert in a regular issue) at the suggestion of its media agency, Initiative. So far, the Times itself has not (knowingly) been sucked into anyone's fictional narrative. I'm waiting.