A lot of new projects appearing this month in this blog, maybe because for once I have been around a little more so I actually saw some of what is going on..
During the seminar on cross media at Cinekid Patrick Crowe introduced this brilliant project for teens, called Total Drama Island, by the multiple award winning Xenophile Media (interactive Emmy for alternate reality games Fallen and Regenesis. oops, sorry, Regenesis is an EXTENDED reality game). The interactive format makes fun of the various Survivor and Big Brother-style TV formats, and creates a highly ironic universe in which the system is basically the same, with a twist. The interaction architecture is all but obvious, and I found the ironic approach very educational, as irony may be the only defense left when one grows into a mature viewer.
If you wish to have your avatar selected for the Total Drama Island TV show, you should win a lot of games online - have fun!

Tomorrow night, at 10 pm eastern time, 7 pm SLT, CSI: NY “Down the Rabbithole” will go on the air - detective Mac Taylor / Gary Sinise will have to follow a killer in Second Life, but he won’t find him/her until spring. In the meanwhile all viewers have a shot to catch the techno-savy murderer in the CSI island, or working shoulder to shoulder with pros at the Crime lab in Second Life.
The interesting thing is that the CBS network had to build a simplified interface to Second Life because the main one was considered too difficult for the average TV viewer - the OnRez viewer will combine Second Life features, like chat and teleporting, with services such as virtual shopping.
Definitely worth attending, I ll be there

Technorati Tags: alternate reality games, cross media, event, virtual worlds

Yours truly gave a talk today about “Cross Media between Games and Storytelling”, slides available at the Mediamatic website, here - note: it is very interesting how the fact that I don’t belong to a specific institution makes it extremely difficult, bordering to the embarrassing, for people to introduce me. I really wish the situation will change soon, or that while keeping on at some point I will earn the difficult title of “independent scholar” (Mary Laure Ryan is one, but, well, she was at MTI first, AND she is Mary Laure Ryan.. oh well…)

Technorati Tags: cross media, event, personal

The goal of this workshop from Mediamatic, starting today in Amsterdam, is to create cross media games - the tools employed will be machinima software, virtual worlds such as Second Life, Sims2 and World of Warcraft, and 3D modeling software such as Mediasandbox and Linden scripting.
Julian Oliver and Friedrich Kirschner kicked off the workshop talking respectively about augmented reality and mixed reality (finally I understood the difference, thank you Julian!) and about the software Mediasandbox.
Interesting how cross media is considered only tangentially, we’ll see tomorrow.

Definitely Picnic is all but a no-frills conference. A central salon looking like a slightly under-toned Biennale, wall sized projections, giant faces half open, performance actresses with heart-shaped heads, human avatars you can control though a mike (the Girlfriend Experience), press rooms with floors made of wood scraps, and above all the omnipresent RFID tag machines proposed by Mediamatic, to put to good use the RFID tags you would be given at the conference.

My favorite has been of course the Friend Drink Station, that would print free drinks coupons, too bad I accidentally deleted all the pictures from Amsterdam, and I can’t find a picture of it online.
Here is the iTea Table, that would show information about you to others when you sit,

and the photo booth, to take pictures of you with somebody else and have the pictures immediately published on Flickr and the profiles of both (you need to be enrolled to the Picnic network in order to access all this fun stuff) would become connected on the Picnic network, and so on.

Oh well. This and more you could do with your RFID tags; at the end of the first day, after a lifetime of spy stories and movies, I felt so nervous that I slipped my tag into a nearby lady’s bag on the bus. Just in case.

November 16 is the deadline for the overly interesting call for projects by Cancer UK research, to produce an ARG to raise attention about, and most importantly funding for, cancer research.
There is no real prize (a meagre £1000 per team) but the winners will receive infinite publicity and will get production tips and assistance from some seriously creative (and famous) professionals. Here it is.
One comment: I really hope this will be a great fundraising event, but I also hope the winner ARG won’t create a model for commercial ARGs devoted to less noble purposes..
Also, when I started thinking about an actual game project, after some minutes I begun feeling this urge for knocking on wood, which I guess is also the average reaction of average people when thinking about cancer; I am really curious to know how the winner project will be able to overcome this attitude.

Technorati Tags: alternate reality games, Call for papers, educational, games, participatory, pervasive games, serious games

Very strange conference this Picnic conference - after months of network building on the picnic network site, and very cool network features, like when you see to each event the profiles of the other participants, I was almost hoping you could rank the presentations, before and afterwards. The apparently chaotic organization made so that at each meeting you would meet completely different people (ok, I was missing the main conference, there must have been a stable group there). Anyway, that really felt the social network come alive, the natural emergence of the popular, and the spontaneous aggregation.
I still wonder if that strong feeling of “2.0″ has been only a side effect of a slightly messy although charming organization or a planned strategy to give that “In” feeling. In the latter case, wow.

Technorati Tags: conference, cross media, event, Web 2.0

In spite of the warning provided by Christy/cross-mediaentertainment.com last year, I did go to Cross Media Week, mostly because all the side events were free and open to grant-less cross media buffs like me (thank you Picnic) - I followed very interesting presentations about virtual worlds, social networks, online journalism, iTV and advertising, environmental activism, but still the “core” of the conference seemed to be some sort of gravitational void, with many interesting people talking about many interesting things (all the talks are now available at the Picnic website), but often forgetting to even mention cross media.
It is clearly important to promote the concept of “cross media”, even just as a buzzword, among the professionals, although it was very clear almost nobody had actually a reflection on the topic; I guess in Europe the term “cross media” is still interpreted as some futuristic pitch or just another word for repurposing - I wonder what the dutch cross media gurus Monique de Haas and Jak Boumans say about that.

Anyway, in my humble opinion, the Cross Media Week aroused much interest without actually saying what is cross media, from the point of view of structure, production, or business models (actually there is a presentation today about business models, will post about it later); this is why I am going back to Amsterdam next month to the workshop Crossmedia Games @ Cinekid to explain all about it OK, some of it.

Technorati Tags: conference, cross media, event, futuristic, iTV, social networks, virtual worlds

The Waag Society in Amsterdam developed, already in 2002, a “non verbal remote communication tool to support emotional communication”, targeting 80+years old.
Storytable offers a “multimedia jukebox” to stimulate memory and reminiscing and to encourage social interaction in elderly persons.
The Storytable is “intelligent furniture with footage from the 1920ies ot the 1950is”, also offering an Oral History database, continuously adjourned. Let’s see how it is works:
“This interface, designed in close cooperation with seniors, makes it possible for them to listen to or play digital multimedia clips from a large database. These multimedia clips contain songs, TV commercials, news broadcasts and other images from the 1900’s to present day. These clips are designed to reflect important events in a senior’s life. The Storytable’s navigation system was designed to make modern technology easily accessible to seniors. Thus, two “intelligent” buttons provide access to search and play the multimedia clips”.

Some weeks ago I discovered the educational project “Hole in the Wall” by Sugata Mitra, addressing children from Indian villages, and although that is not the same, it is interesting to note how we tend to forget that a large part of the population lacks the basic “technical literacy” to enjoy the wonders of Web 2.0.

I quote directly :
“The competition jury will award a prize of 2,500.00 euro to the work (published or unpublished) which best represents experimentation between arts and new technologies. The candidates for the prize (a short list of a maximum of 6 competitors) will be guests at the 4th edition of the Share Festival, taking place in Turin March 2008 at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti, Turin. In order to be declared winner of the prize, every artist has to take part in the 4th edition of Share Festival, by preparing his or her work of art, to be properly evaluated by jury and public.
The organization is available at offering all the costs regarding the preparation of the 6 selected works as well as travel and accommodation expenses for the artists, and, possibly, the prize itself.

Nomination of 6 candidates for the prize: by November, 2007. The announcement will be published on the following website: www.toshare.it The winner will be announced in March 2008 during the award ceremony at Share Festival”.

DEADLINE : 30 September 2007

Sort of interesting, and one of the first initiatives of the sort to be held in Italy…. I understand it also considers cross media productions