PGA NMC Member Spotlight
A nice writeup about little ‘ol me that appeared in the Producers Guild of America New Media Council newsletter.
Member Spotlight – February, 2013
By Elaine Spooner
Susan Bell
“In film and TV, your product is passive – the audience sits and watches. Add transmedia and it’s become active.”
Do you know what a transmedia producer does? What about a transmedia producer of alternate reality games with a social media connection? Susan Bell is just such a producer. She knows what it takes to engage audiences with interactive activities linked to social media in games that automatically advance the story and draw in new players.
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WyrdCon
I’m designing two gaming events for WyrdCon this June. Both involve the Los Angeles Ghost Patrol in a fictional haunted hotel environment.
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The Miracle Mile Paradox
Help fund this alternate reality game (ARG) that I’m producing as a part of Transmedia LA!
Shadow Cities
If you have an iPhone or iPad, it is worth checking out the ground-breaking, location-based game Shadow Cities. Continue Reading →
Shadow Cities is a massively multiplayer online role playing game or MMORPG. I have seen it referred to several times as an ARG, but the only alternate reality it involves is its location-based playing field. There is no through story line or character interactions outside of chat with your teammates, who obviously are not fictional. Therefore I don’t consider it an ARG.
DIY Days LA
On October 28, 2011, I recharged my creative batteries at the DIY Days event at UCLA. DIY Days bills itself as a roving conference for those who create, and it takes usually place twice year, once on each coast. Jam packed with workshops, project demos and talks, the day was a non-stop whirlwind of meeting new people and learning of new approaches to funding, production & distribution. There were several great keynote addresses, including Henry Jenkins’s “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead.” Here are some brief insights from the panels I attended:
SALIGIA-7 Case Study – Ian Ginn
A transmedia sci-fi thriller whose first chapter, Zombie Alarm #1, ran in Amsterdam earlier this year. There are three main narratives: (1) Teenagers who start to display illness, (2) Zombie hunters who try to alert the public, and (3) Society’s reaction to the threat, which includes SWAT teams as well as a rogue officer. Ian called this “participatory storytelling” to differentiate it from an ARG.
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ARG or arrggh!
Last November during the Film Independent Filmmaker Forum I was introduced to the concept of an ARG or Alternate Reality Game. Unbeknownst to myself, I had been participating in mainstreams ARGs for several years, including Dexter Game On (I did the murder room at ComicCon ’10 – really cool) as well as Fringe, Super 8 & NIN Year Zero. As a casual player, I had no idea there was a community of ARG devotees until I started researching the subject. What really excited me about the concept of both ARGs and the looser transmedia world is that characters can both live on outside their media properties and come alive via player interaction. What creator wouldn’t want their characters to be real?
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