We’re currently in the midst of running our sixth LAMP cross media prototyping residential in Freycinet, Tasmania. It has been a very lively and challenging experience with creative teams taking part from a wide range of backgrounds with a dynamic team of mentors and developers. We’ve been very lucky to work with Tony Walsh, a Canadian creative developer who has done a lot of work on alternate reality games and teaches a games course at George Brown College in Toronto. Also Paul Bennun from UK cross media company Somethin’ Else has brought insight and energy to the workshop with expertise in games, radio, web 2 and theatre. We are also working for the first time with Lisa Romano who brings years of experience in iTV production at XYZ and ABC New Media to the workshop. She is currently working for the new ABC Innovation group. And of course all our regular mentor mainstays are back for more, a full list can be found here.

The strength of the LAMP workshop is the collaborative production and brainstorming experience resulting from the interchange between a diverse group of people working intensively for a five day period. It really is like going into another zone when you take this time out from your everyday life to immerse yourself in the process. The energy of creative interchange, particularly between people from different specialisation areas, is inspiring to watch and is truely the fuel of innovation. Thinking outside the constrictions of your own area of specialisation is a necessary first step to rethinking creative media production so it’s relevant for a rapidly changing global media environment. In an age of distributed media it is going to be the nimble producers who can transcend the restrictions of particular media platforms who will be successful. We start out the LAMP workshop by looking at the major paradigm shifts taking place in the media and our objective is to engage creative participants to take up this challenge in their own work. The next stage that is needed is for commissioners, content providers and funding agencies to invest in content that goes beyond the confines of formats that we already know.

An interesting short article in the LA Times about serious games led me to mtvu which is fantastic MTV portal aimed at university students. You can read the article by clicking here (free registration required)

I’ll get back to serious games later – because they were feature on the portal – but what a step up from College Radio this is: mtvu is a rich web service where radio is just the portal soundtrack which then opens to the college newspaper, video, music and creative challenges offering prizes for innovative work in the emerging media space. Well worth checking out to see how MTV (at least in the US) are staying ahead of the game and keeping their brand alive with one of their core demographics.

While college kids on the whole might be hedonistic and looking for entertainment the serious game Darfur caters to those with more worthy inclinations.The game is really just another offering on a great niche portal and offers another way in for charity organisations to increase awareness of the famine in Sudan by putting game players in the place of an everyday Darfur refugee.

While the game is simple and doesn’t really have the depth to engage a player for a long period, you get a strong message that water is scarce in the camp, corruption and violence are rife and that there is a need for aid $ to help rectify a desperate situation. For me it was more like an advergame which you see virally spread through email more and more these days but it got a strong message across. You can play the game by clicking here.

The other serious game mentioned in the LA Times story is more sophisticated in that it has multiple levels and sim-like qualities to predict how government decisions will impact climate change over a ten year period and beyond. It’s also made by that formidable producer of content linear and interactive, the BBC. The player is put in the hot seat playing the part of a European President and the challenge is to come up with the right mix of policy to reduce greenhouse emissions. You can play the game by clicking here.

There is an old but good article on MSNBC on Bringing Emotion to Video Games. It can be accessed by clicking here.

David Freeman is interviewed in the article and his book ‘Emotion in Games’ has a lot of great pointers for game developers to understand writing techniques which help develop player empathy for characters and emotional investment in the gameplay. There’s no doubt that David is one of the leaders in this field, although my feeback from film writers is that the techniques he discusses are very basic writing pointers indeed. But games are in a much earlier state of evolution than films and I think any attempt to deepen the experience of gameplay is worthwhile. David explains it here:

Most game designers started as programmers, testers and sometimes visual artists,” said Freeman. “So none of these people have a background in sophisticated story telling.

Also mentioned in the article is the pioneering game Facade which we have frequently mentioned in classes and public seminars exploring the future potential of games and storytelling. The game has to be downloaded and installed on your PC to play but it is well worth it. You find yourself at the apartment door of two friends you haven’t seen for years, Trip and Grace. Once you enter the apartment it is apparent that there are tensions between Trip and Grace that threaten to burst to the surface at any moment. It’s up to you to either bring it on or to broker a reconciliation. If you don’t do this sensitively enough you are promptly thrown out. The character engagement in this game is a huge leap over anything else and in a world (real and virtual) dominated by first person shooters it is a glimpse into emerging genres of games we can only dream about. While Facade is pretty rough graphically it is a great example of a game that is emotionally engaging.

Trip and Grace from Facade

We have recently been putting a lot of thought into how we best engage with games in our educational programs. As a media school it’s overdue that we make a more serious engagement with a form of media that is becoming more potent every day. But should our post graduate courses train game artists to fill the many empty seats in games development studios or should we aim at other areas? Writing has always seemed a fertile area to develop in emerging media industries that are often over dominated by technologists. This is the direction we are about to take training media writers and producers in developing their skills for the emerging areas of virtual worlds, games and machinima. There is a brilliant article on N’Gai Croal’s blog Level Up examining the craft of games writing on ‘God of War II’ where the writers compare the process of writing for linear TV and games. Writer Marianne Krawczyk says she approaches writing for games in much the same way as writing for TV. However the medium of games has some fundamental differences, most notably that everything (including the story) must serve the gameplay. Her collaborator JM Barlog, the father of the ‘Gods of War I’ creator Cory Barlog, talks here about negotiating story through judicious use of cut scenes:

Barlog: The first question we always asked when dealing with cutscenes is: Can we somehow show this or reveal that in game play? Only when there was no other alternative did you resort to a cutscene. To make a cutscene meaningful, you make your protagonist look at himself and his actions. Succeed at that and you enrich the depth of your story. A video game poses special challenges over a book or movie, since you only get a few seconds to accomplish it. You start by writing those short little cutscenes ten different ways until you find one that delivers the goods. At each step we wanted God of War II to be about a meaningful journey. In video games, this proves particularly challenging because each second the player is away from the game play is a second you risk losing his/her interest

The second part of this interview is well worth reading and includes some great comments on emotional engagement with characters in games.

I know that in Korea computer gaming is so popular that it is one of the most popular spectator sports. But I didn’t immediately think of this as a viral technique built in to the game play. Computer games can be a very solitary experience if they are played alone but online game play and mobile games move them out of the bedroom into a social space promoting their spread. But if we’re able to see games being played, what better incentive to try them out ourselves?

In the future, some amount (perhaps most) advertising could be replaced with the ability to view real-time, streamed games in progress, enticing players to click a download button and jump into the action. The more that games can expose real “live” gameplay to potential players, the more likely players are to try a game out.

This quote is from a Gamasutra article I’ve been reading on building viral aspects into games design. Many of the themes raised in the article are very games focused but are also very applicable to cross media creation. While this is a very foreign way of thinking to many film and television people the point is that the boundaries between ‘marketing’ and ‘content’ are breaking down. Most importantly, methods to encourage the audience or players to create their own content are central to any viral strategy. While only a small number of people will do it, they will, however, be your most die-hard fans who will influence others to come across. The conclusion from the article is particularly insightful.

Virality is no longer a catchword for the marketing department. It must be incorporated into a game while the rules are being designed and the technical architecture is being established. It is about making games that players feel invested in, that they want to share with friends—games they’ll go out of their way to show to others. When designing a game, developers should begin asking themselves not only “how will this make the game more fun?” but also “how will this encourage players to share the game with others?” Players will become your most active sales resource, if only you empower them.