Taking risks and dancing with the audience.

http://remotedevice.net/blog/taking-risks-and-dancing-with-audiences-andrea-phillips-on-writing-for-transmedia-and-args/

This is an intersting blog , in which Jeff Waston talks to ARG writer Andrea Philps about the chanlleges faced by writers entering into the transmedia story telling. Although in the main it focus is on the issues surrounding ARG ( Augmented Reality Gaming) some intersting things are said about the roles of a writer in this space which I feel are directly applicable to any writer attempting to create a transmedia narrative.

One of the key issues is scale. It is one of the issues which I have come across in my own work on the SEER and one which I feel aevrybody looking into transmedial story telling must confornt. Transmedial worlds are often large and complex , infact so large that it can be difficult for one writer to deal with all tyhe story elements on thier won. As Andrea says about a project she worked on

"there were so many writers on the project that its hard to know whose hand is guiding the wheel."

One of the ways that Andrea sees as solving this problem is the dividsion of the writers role into narrative designer and world designer.

"The first step would be looking at the kinds of roles game writers and transmedia writers fall into right now, to see if we can find common structures. In games, there’s a lot of support for the title ‘narrative designer’ right now. That’s the person who comes up with the spine of the story, whether or not they ever write a word of player-facing copy. Maybe we need to go in that direction, and separate the narrative designer from the world designer."


I found this to be an interesting and I feel very useful way of dividing the work load within transmedia authorship.It is something that I will explore in my own work and seek to find out more about.

Another issue raised within the blog concerns the often event - driven time-released nature of most current ARG's ( so normally a situation where you need to do a certain thing at a certain time to progress the story). This is a significant problem for the ARG creator since it means that once played the ARG is effectivly dead. It cannot be replayed or even reviewed. Andrea sights the creating of mini webisodes ,in which the actions of those particpating in the ARG are filmed as a partcial solution. Allowing others to review the game at a latter dated and although this viewing experience will be completely different from actually playing the game, it does provide the ARG with a longer tail / shelf life. For me this raises issues of access and longevity issues that I feel are important to anybody in this space.