Have you ever felt your skin prick up as you walked into a foreign environment? Throughout my life there have been times where I’ve entered an unknown venue, be it when exploring the world as a solo traveller, or starting a new job. The mixture of excitement and anxiety that I’ve associated with an entry into the unknown has been a full body experience, reflected in the pores of my skin and in the heat pulsing through my limbs.

I reflected on this phenomenon after my somewhat recent experience of Tender Claws’ The Under Presents, which is described by its makers as ‘an intriguing multiplayer experience set between two worlds’. Others might describe it as a clever and mysterious VR game that affords the user six degrees of freedom.

Image from: https://tenderclaws.com/theunderpresents

First activating the free demo version of this experience in the Oculus Quest, I found myself in a dark and waterlogged wasteland, with little idea of what to expect. I edged towards the ruins of a nightclub from which muffled music exuded. After several moments of uncertainty, a mysterious guide appeared and shepherded me into the building. I was followed into a room full of doors by masked figures in black capes. After some moments, I realised that their strange actions were actually a replay of my own awkward explorations of the space moments earlier. Past and present collided, giving me an uncanny insight into my own behaviour. As with the ‘real world’ experience described above, I felt acutely aware of my own body in this unknown virtual environment.

After much experimentation, I managed to access the depths of the nightclub at the heart of The Under Presents, where a number of other black hooded spectators milled about, enjoying the on-stage entertainment. Are these real people like me, I wondered? It certainly seemed a possibility. Like me, the other guests clumsily engaged in creating and eating food while exploring the environment. One hooded figure handed me a keyboard guitar before scurrying towards an exit.

Image from: https://tenderclaws.com/theunderpresents

Unfortunately for me, I came to this VR experience somewhat late. It’s notable that earlier iterations of The Under Presents saw live actors teleported into the multiplayer experience to interact with users in what could be described as virtual live immersive theatre. A quick scan of the reviews of the project on the Oculus website reveals the novelty of this spontaneous and communal experience. A video on Tender Claw’s website outlines the innovative interface that allows actors to enter into the VR experience, choosing their appearance and powers that they can utilise to interact with players, so as to enhance the narrative experience. 

The affective nature of video games featuring navigable 3D environments has been explored by a number of scholars (Crick, 2011; Klevjer, 2012; Scriven, 2018). This comes after significant work interrogating the way that cinema ‘moves’ and ‘touches’ us on a bodily level (Marks, 1996; Shaviro, 1994; Sobchack, 2004; Williams, 1999). Klevjer describes how video games extend our bodies into the screen space:

When we play, because the avatar extends the body rather than pure agency or subjectivity, screen space becomes a world that we are subjected to, a place we inhabit and where we struggle for survival. We learn to intuitively judge, like we do in the real world, the opportunities and dangers of the environment. Klevjer, 2012, p. 13

This quote resonates with my experience of The Under Presents, where I slowly learned the rules of the virtual world, thus enabling me to progress through the experience. In doing so, I had to embrace ‘unknowing’, meaning I had to come to terms with my vulnerability as a virtual body in a foreign environment. I was never quite clear on where I was located or where I was headed, but in retrospect, this was half the fun. 

In recent years, emerging scholarship has probed the specificity of narrative VR experiences in terms of spectator positioning, presence and/or embodiment (for example, Dooley, 2021; Nicolae, 2018; Vosmeer & Schouten, 2017). The bulk of this work is concerned with cinematic virtual reality rather than more interactive VR experiences with narratives that are emergent or open-ended. I would suggest that The Under Presents offers a case study of a narrative experience that successfully draws upon immersive theatre and video game conventions, as well as cinematic tropes, giving rise to a unique embodied experience that is about ‘story making’ rather than ‘story telling’. The computer-generated story world provides a playground for multiplayer interaction, but the mystery of a stranded ship (the ‘time boat’) sits at the heart of the narrative experience. The limits of the game seem linked to the user’s tolerance for learning the rules of the world; in other words, there are seemingly endless threads to explore, if one takes the time to uncover them. 

My enjoyment of The Under Presents makes me think that the notion of embracing ‘unknowing’ is an apt one for VR creators as well as audiences. In the past, I’ve written about the need for creators to guide the viewer through a narrative VR experience, creating attention cues and allowing time for exploration and acclimatisation. As described above, the makers of The Under Presents adopted these techniques to some degree. However, I’d argue that the experience’s frequent lack of signposting and foreshadowing fosters a sense of uncertainty and intrigue that increases rather than decreases engagement. Maybe this is what great VR storytelling is all about – creating an affective experience that allows the user to ‘live’ the story while navigating unfamiliar territory. 

Postscript: The Under Presents is once again featuring live actors in the environment in the month of April 2022, so this is a good time to visit or revisit the experience!

References

Crick, T. 2011. ‘The game body: Toward a phenomenology of contemporary video gaming’. Games and Culture, 6(3), 259-269.

Dooley, K. 2021. Cinematic Virtual Reality: A Critical Study of 21st Century Approaches and Practices. Springer Nature.

Klevjer, R. 2012. ‘Enter the avatar: The phenomenology of prosthetic telepresence in computer games’. In The philosophy of computer games (pp. 17-38). Springer, Dordrecht.

Marks, L. U. 1996. The skin of the film: experimental cinema and intercultural experience. University of Rochester.

Nicolae, D. F. 2018. ‘Spectator Perspectives in Virtual Reality Cinematography. The Witness, the Hero and the Impersonator’. Ekphrasis. Images, Cinema, Theory, Media, 20(2), 168-180.

Scriven, P. 2018. ‘The phenomenology of the “other” in computer game worlds’. Games and Culture, 13(2), 193-210.

Shaviro, S. 1994. The cinematic body. U of Minnesota Press.

Sobchack, V. 2004. Carnal thoughts. University of California Press.

Vosmeer, M., & Schouten, B. 2017, June. ‘Project Orpheus: a research study into 360 cinematic VR’. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for TV and Online Video (pp. 85-90).

Williams, L. 1999. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the” frenzy of the Visible”. Univ of California Press.

Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest.

All the Delicate Duplicates
By Mez Breeze and Andy Campbell

Can a first-person gaming environment be used to tell a story? Of course! But, typically in experiences of this type, the balance between story and game falls heavily on the side of the latter. With All the Delicate Duplicates, Mez Breeze and Andy Campbell seek to turn that convention on its head.

The focus of Delicates is on John, a single father who inherits a collection of arcane objects from his mysterious relative named Mo. These are no ordinary objects, though and they lead John and his daughter Charlotte deeper into Mo’s memories and mysteries, changing reality around them.

The game world—filled with beautiful and haunting imagery, soundscapes, and more than a few startling turns—is accompanied by a web-based non-linear text that’s essential for filling in its wide-open spaces, especially for impatient readers like me. But make no mistake: story here is king and the emphasis of moving through the game’s world is to observe, discover, and reflect. More than a year on from its release, it remains a remarkable achievement.

Find out more at the project website.

There were a lot of things to like about the Episodic conference that took place in London in October. Run by the Storythings team, it featured a range of interesting speakers working in podcasts, games, comics, and TV, an engaging host in Anna Higgs, and a lovely, friendly audience. I hope they do another one.

Here are five things I learned:

1. Sarcasm is over: For those of us who came of age in the time of Gawker and associated online snark, the message was clear: sarcasm is dead and sincerity rules supreme. That goes for both connecting with audiences and with interviewees. Naomi Alderman and Adrian Hon talked about their game Zombies Run, designed for people like themselves, who might not enjoy running, aren’t competitive or aren’t expecting to improve, and who shouldn’t be patronised when doing something good for their health. Sincerity is working well for them, as shown by the millions of people who regularly use the app. Starlee Kine’s taped interview with someone working at a Ticketmaster call centre, shifting from practical questions to winding conversations about what matters in life, was a delightful example of how this approach can also result in unexpected and interesting stories. And it also illustrated her argument that you should “record everything, because you don’t know what you’re going to get.”
2. There’s a difference between what you do for love and what you do for money. Making a living from episodic storytelling means you need to look after both your emotions and practicalities.Having different levels of emotional investment in the work you do for love, and the work you do for money helps with that. Or, as Jamie McKelvie suggested, use an “emotional contraceptive” for the work ones. And make sure you have clear agreements about things like intellectual property rights and expectations, especially if you’re going to try and get advertisers to pay for it, as Imriel Morgan explained.
3. Structure your content to fit the medium. As Starlee Kine says: don’t just arbitrarily create a cliffhanger because you feel like you’ve decided on the right length of an episode. It needs to feel right and make sense. That said, I enjoyed how honestly Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie spoke about structuring the storylines of their comics to fit into their publishing sequences. If you’re publishing both every month, and then also combining six of those into a half-year compendium, have a good think about where you put the cliff hangers. In this day in age, do we even really need cliffhangers to get readers/listeners/viewers to come back? Probably not.
4. Be ethical in how you tell stories. Ask people permission beforehand, because nobody wants to be caught out. Let them have a say in how they’re presented, even, for example, giving them the tools to do some of the original recording themselves, as Jane Merkin showed in her powerful documentary “Exodus” about refugees coming to Europe. Don’t toy with your readers’ emotions and have horrific things happen to your fictional characters (especially ones that are different to you) as a cheap way of building suspense. And be ethical in how you work with people. Part of that? Don’t ask people to work for free.
5. Understand what your chosen medium does well. Podcasts are intimate, direct to someone’s ear. As Naomi Alderman pointed out, telling stories using only voice depends on having a reliable narrator about place: “If they say it, it’s real”. Comics can be online, but then they become something else, so chasing new technology doesn’t necessarily make your work better. Have matrices for success if you’re looking to make a living from it and sell it to advertisers, but know that competition is fierce for podcasts, for example, and that making good ones takes a lot of time and money. This pretty much summed up one of the main themes of the day for me: make sincere work, that’s as good as possible. Not a revolutionary concept, perhaps, but one worth following.

Now more than ever, writers are moving away from traditional narratives and towards interactive and experimental storytelling. Role-Playing Games (RPG) enable each participant to assume the role of a character that can interact within the game’s imaginary world. Participants create in-depth storylines and develop highly complex skills in character development and pacing. And with a constant, interactive audience, writer’s block is near impossible.

RPGs are a phenomenon that is rapidly gaining followers of all ages, all over the world. We spoke with 14-year-old Mathilde, who lives in central France, about how interacting with other writers in RPGs has enabled her to improve her writing and meet other like-minded writers. Take it away, Mathilde!

Can you tell us a little more about RPGs?

RPG is the abbreviation of Role-Playing Game. It is a role-play but a written role-play. The concept is to write the story of the characters that we have either invented ourselves or the characters of books, films, series that we bring alive with other writers. RPGs cover many worlds, they could be an epic quest in the world of elves, warriors, dragons, gang warfare or an ordinary life in an ordinary school or a remake of Hunger Games… Role-playing is almost like writing a book, except that the book is written by up to 50 writers and we need the other players to write and play. It is very productive, as instead of writing alone, we write and laugh together. We have great fun.

How do RPGs help you engage with other writers?

We link up with other writers because with RPGs, by writing, we reveal something of ourselves. With RPGs we can find all types of personalities. There are jokers, cynical writers, gifted writers, mature writers, young writers, depressed writers, new and experienced writers. With the range of personalities we can always find someone who can become a friend. However our best weapon in RPGs is humour. We laugh about what has been written, without judgement. Obviously we get on better with some than others. When you set out on this journey you are not aware of how close you can get, of how much you have in common and at what point the other writers are there to help and listen to you. It is the same thing when you leave an RPG for a while, they understand and give us the time that we need to come back, and when we do, we are welcomed with open arms and the role plays continue. We all have our own universes, some prefer RPGs which are realistic and others prefer more fantasy orientated universes. We often meet the same people on different forums. We are a big family and we support each other.

What do RPGs offer writers and readers that other games cannot?

The opportunity to express ourselves and to evolve. To evolve in writing and in our artwork. Many of us enjoy drawing. Some are accomplished artists and others improve day by day. Everyone participates and they draw and colour the characters that they have invented or who belong to the culture of the RPG they’re in. We progress in all ways.

Do you know the average age of the writers you interact with on the site?

I would say between 10 and 17 years. But there are some exceptions with writers of 20-30 years. I also once role-played with a young girl of 9 years old.

How do RPGs make you a better storyteller?

They enable us to explore the depths of our imagination, the reactions and the ideas necessary to progress in situations that we had not envisaged. But above all, I would say that RPGs enable us to enrich our vocabulary and improve our spelling. The great thing with RPGs is that we can see the replies of the other players, we can compare our writing styles and we can see all the mistakes. As a dyslexic, I can say that I have made incredible progress in spelling thanks to RPGs. When I read someone who writes very well and who is of the same age, I am motivated to do better and I take more care over my spelling and the vocabulary that I use. Within our RPG we are not allowed to use SMS language and we are obliged to pay attention to our spelling and the vocabulary that we use.

What do you see as the main opportunities and challenges for young writers in France today?

The challenges: The competition. Whether it is national or international, the competition is hard. You have to have at least two books edited before you can make a name for yourself.

Opportunities: In France we have a very good literary education. At school and with specialist options (Society and literature, Philosophy, Advanced Literary Studies) and a beautiful, poetic and very rich literary language

Writer’s block, is that possible with RPGs?

No. We can get fed up and not want to write and in that case you need to take a break. We can not suffer from « writer’s block » because sometimes we don’t know how to respond at a given time but the advantage of RPGs is that as the writing evolves, it moves, it lives. Someone, somewhere will reply and it will enable you to reply once your inspiration returns.

Does your involvement in RPGs interrupt your homework?

Do I really have to answer this question!

OK, homework is a question of organisation. We can consider RPGs as a reward after homework, an obsession or a way of relaxing. For me it is a way of relaxing. As soon as I get home, I go onto my computer and I read the replies and reply accordingly. Then I do my homework but I check the replies between exercises and when I have finished my homework I am free spend my free time doing what I love doing. Sometimes I spend too much time writing …

Do you think you will turn your writing in RPGs into something concrete, perhaps a novel?

Absolutely! Developing our and other’s characters, in a world that we had not imagined ourselves, enables us to add depth, maturity and credibility to our characters. I have realised that I evolve with my characters. Writing in RPGs gives me more and more ideas of stories and scenarios and I write them down on paper. We have to be careful however not to steal the ideas of the worlds and characters of other players. If we respect these rules, it is an excellent way to develop our characters.

What advice would you offer to other writers keen to try RPGs?

Don’t be afraid. RPGs can be overwhelming when you start but if you are on the right forum for you, you will be very well received. Sign-up to a new RPG or a recent RPG and you will be more at ease. Don’t start with thirty characters! It is very difficult to manage them all especially if you have the habit of writing long monologues. A final point, if you leave a RPG, which can happen for many reasons, don’t run away like a thief but communicate and keep them informed to avoid the Role Play Masters blocking your account for lack of activity on the forum.

I am very proud of being part of the family of digital writers and I am so looking forward to meeting other budding writers…see you soon…à bientôt…

Victoria Bennett and Adam Clarke form one of two teams we are supporting through the 2015 Writing Platform Bursary Programme, in association with Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. 

Victoria’s and Adam’s project uses Minecraft to immerse the player in the experience of a poem and expand the idea of what literature and video games can be.

The final work, titled My Mother’s House, is a poem-world built in Minecraft. Since starting this project Victoria has been caring for her mother who is in the last phase of her life and the subject and form of the poem reflect the process of letting go of someone you love. My Mother’s House demonstrates how writing and gaming can come together and help us explore and engage with aspects of life that are difficult to talk about in a way that is accessible and unintimidating.

If you have Minecraft installed, you can download the free playable map.

Watch the video walkthrough of My Mother’s House by Victoria Bennett and Adam Clarke

Watch Victoria and Adam’s final video diary on the making of My Mother’s House.

Adam and Victoria will be showcasing My Mother’s House, and discussing their creative collaboration, at the MIX: Writing Digital conference on 2nd July 2015. Full conference programme and booking information is available here.

Warning: the following contains potentially crucial, but mostly lukewarm, spoilers for the film “Jupiter Ascending”. Consider yourself notified.

My first critical thought on viewing the latest Wachowski filmsprawl actually wasn’t one. And by stating this, I’m not intending any smartarse obscuration, though I am aware that even using that term “filmsprawl” could firmly place me in that very territory. Instead, my initial reflections about the film centred on how simultaneously expansive and reductionistic it appeared. The film seemed tailor-made to appeal to an audience well versed in contemporary game aesthetics, an audience to which interactive entertainment conventions are de rigueur.

My primary take on Jupiter Ascending differs distinctly (but not wildly) from other perspectives I’ve encountered – and by others I’m referencing peers and friends as opposed to goldstar reviewers, as I’ve made sure to read less than zero blurbs keen to theoretically carve up the movie into its non-gestalt parts. Most mentions I’ve encountered peg Jupiter Ascending as a clumsy but original (to use a cognitively-velcro-worthy-term) “hot mess” of a film.

Others view the movie as a type of wayward space opera, a CGI-fest of hodgepodge philosophy clunkily melded with awkward-but-gorgeously-Michael-Bay-like-derision-worthy-screencandy. When James Dominguez informed me (prior to watching said movie) that: “…apparently it’s terrible in a very entertaining way”, I believed him. When my Cinema-Going Companion (CGC) asked me (post-viewing) whether I would be keen to watch Jupiter Ascending again, I replied that yes, I would: he speedily said he would not (he had also indulged in brief microsleeps during one of the lengthy action sequences). CGC’s critique of the movie hinged on the fact he thought it was trying to do too much at once, and that he just couldn’t get excited about such overblown sequences – hence the microsleeps. I, on the other hand, did indeed find the film straight-up enjoyable.

The considerable reviewer vitriol surrounding the film’s release highlights the film’s skewing of traditional filmic conventions. Stock standard monomythic story requirements are employed in a traditional sense in the film, but these are somewhat counterbalanced by a fantastical emphasis on game-emulation aesthetics. In my view, action sequences like those found in contemporary movies like Jupiter Ascending directly emulate game mechanics that are relevant to a large chunk of contemporary viewers. Such invocation of interactive based mimicry (think: apps, games) transposed into a passive medium (film) isn’t new – think on the preponderance of game-to-film adaptations – but is becoming increasingly relevant in contemporary media.

In Jupiter Ascending, the nature of class privilege and the insidious nature of social stratification, otherness-classifying, socioeconomic determinism, the grab for immortality, consumerism/greed, industrialisation and the military-industrial-technological-complex in general are all plot-and-theme threaded. Want some heavy holistic allegory and steampunkish-laden visuals thrown into the mix? Done. How about some reincarnation amnesia and fantastical genetic cross-species warnings as well? You got it.

The fantastical elements in Jupiter Ascending present as bricolage. Such variables also act to illustrate just how such a movie might reshape established indicators of what makes a film great (or even watchable). Instead of free-falling into harsh reviewing mode, maybe audiences could instead learn that such fantastical elements are ripe for what I term “functional mapping”. Functional mapping describes the disjunctive process when prior cognitive associations are made elastic in order to overwrite previously hardbaked/templated cognitions. When Caine first shows off how his gravity-mod boots work, there’s the potential for a viewer to undergo a type of believability disconnect: a disturbance-twinge in the Willing-Suspense-of-Disbelief force, if you will (*cough*).

The boots and their functional aspects – such as Caine speeding off looking very much like he’s ghost-skating/rollerblading – seems jarring at first, as do his eventually reinstated wings as evidenced in the movie’s dénouement. This jarring comes from strong prior association-sets present in our canon heavy entertainment. When seeing a character perform actions that many audience members strongly associate with quantifiable behaviours, our belief might just waver: when asked to map new imaginings over such a prior-based associations, some viewers may find this incredibly difficult. When bees are used to replace a more standard take on ecological symbolism (think: the far more palatable convention of using bird or butterfly murmurations), many may think this absurd, as stretching believability boundaries a tad too far.

To those raised on cultural settings based off gamification and karma whoring, where positive (and vicarious) reinforcement sits easily alongside intense visual diets comprised of cinematics, machinima, supercuts and cutscenes interspersed with intense fps-action bursts, the Jupiter Ascending action sequences and computer generated graphic bombardment present as very normal. So too, does the requirement of functional mapping, where transmedia-based characterisation and Storyworld construction easily rewrite such mono-channelled associations.

In a typical Studio-backed movie, mainstream story structures allows for certain elements, including ye olde girl-meet-boy, boy-loses-girl, boy-regains-girl yawn to effect our Willing Suspension of Disbelief. When this structure is toyed with, or heavily modded in substantial ways, confused audiences can be left hypercritically picking at the result in an attempt to cobble together a meaning curve predicated heavily on the known, rather than making the cognitive leap to another (emergent) meaning-creation paradigm. And although I empathize with the urge to overanalyse in order to establish quality markers, this seems to be a somewhat futile exercise in today’s media platforms. Shouldn’t we instead alter canonistically-predicated criteria in order to establish relevancy/quality as directed by changing methods of entertainment creation?

Victoria Bennett and Adam Clarke form one of two teams we are supporting through the 2015 Writing Platform Bursary Programme, in association with Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. 

Victoria’s and Adam’s project uses Minecraft to immerse the player in the experience of a poem and expand the idea of what literature and video games can be. They are documenting the evolution of their project and their collaboration through a series of video diaries recorded in Minecraft.

In this second video diary Victoria and Adam – and their chicken, Ted Hughes – take take us through the latest developments in their Minecraft poetry project, including: using command blocks to display text in different ways, using redstone repeaters to create a visual experience of how a poem might be heard, and using frames to trigger audio. They also delve deeper into the idea of the labyrinth, both as an established poetic form and as a way of creating an environmental experience or a poem within Minecraft, and share their vision of how they might pull it all together in order create an adventure for readers, players and listeners.

You can watch Victoria’s and Adam’s first video diary here, and read about the other bursary project, created by Kelly Jones and Linda Sandvik, here and here.

Victoria Bennett and Adam Clarke form one of two teams we are supporting through the 2015 Writing Platform Bursary Programme, in association with Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. 

Victoria’s and Adam’s project uses Minecraft to immerse the player in the experience of a poem and expand the idea of what literature and video games can be. They are documenting the evolution of their project and their collaboration through a series of video diaries recorded in Minecraft.

In this first diary Adam and Victoria share their early ideas for the project – how they might go about building worlds from words, how players might experience and play with story in Minecraft, and draw interesting parallels between writing and building. As Victoria says:

“we started talking about how does that blank world relate to the blank page? As a writer, when I approach a blank page, I’m thinking, ‘what am I creating here?’ Each word that I place down is like a block, and this relates to how we create a world block by block within Minecraft”

We are also supporting Kelly Jones and Linda Sandvik through the bursary programme. Their project is inspired by Kelly’s parents meeting on illegal CB Radio and uses physical computing to explore the ideas of connection and intimacy, ephemerality and permanence. You can read their first diary post here.

“What about you? What are you waiting for? The Revolution? End times? Forget waiting. The revolution is here and you need to know the truth.” —  Stella, Endgame: The Calling

This was the urgent message Stella had for me as I watched the video promoting the alternate reality game (ARG) accompanying Endgame: The Calling, the first in a series of three novels by James Frey and Nils Johnson-Shelton. According to Stella, a character in the Endgame ARG, an ancient secret was being kept hidden from the world by a corrupt organisation and the only hope we had was if people like me, motivated, creative and special people like me, rose up in nothing less than revolution to stop them and reveal the truth to everyone. It was all meant to sound terribly exciting and, well, revolutionary.

The problem was, I felt like I’d heard it all before.

Way back in 2008, at a gaming conference in London, writer and interactive designer, Adrian Hon, identified what he saw as the emerging cliches of the relatively nascent alternate reality game genre. In a playful talk, Hon skewered an increasingly amusing series of tired tropes on display in many ARGs of the time. They included:

“Helping a teenage girl; helping an attractive teenage girl. Helping an attractive amnesiac teenage girl;…“the fucking order” or, “some secret society” or anything to do with the Illuminati or any of that crap…Fucking countdowns…Treasure hunts: oh, I’ll smack the next person who proposes a treasure hunt…Millions of blog entries that no one will read apart from five people…(and) jumping through fucking hoops: by which I mean…seeing an intriguing movie credit that leads you to an intriguing website that leads you to an email address that leads you to an autoresponder that leads you to…”
— Adrian Hon, Let’s Change the Game Conference, 2008

Hon’s expert dissection of ARG cliches of the time was probably only possible because he had made many ARG-like experiences through his role as Chief Creative at the interactive studio Six to Start. I too have flirted with the form and its cliches (yes, guilty as charged your honour) through my role as Creative Director at Hoodlum, a Brisbane-based multiplatform studio. Which is possibly why, seven years after Hon’s speech, I could only greet Stella’s breathless call to action with a weariness I usually reserve for tax returns.

Unsurprisingly, the story of the novel Endgame: The Calling is also a checklist of well worn ARG tropes, as is much teen fantasy/dystopian fictions like The Hunger Games, Divergent and The Maze Runner. It tells the story of twelve teenagers who are chosen to do battle with each other in a global game in order to find a special key that will preserve their ancient bloodline and save the world.

In interviews, James Frey has stated that the idea for the book series and the ARG were inspired by the 1979 children’s picture book Masquerade by Kit Williams, which, in a precursor to the modern ARG, hid the clues to a real world treasure in the details of its intricate illustrations. The Endgame book series and associated ARG is being promoted by its creators, James Frey and Nils Johnson-Shelton, in collaboration with Google’s Niantic Labs, as a ground breaking storytelling experience — which feels like the default position any new media property is obliged to take in these hyperbolic times (can’t something just be “really cool” anymore rather than “unbelievably game changing”?). But there’s no doubting the impressive scale of this thing. There will be three novels, a movie franchise (currently being developed through Fox Searchlight), a global app-based locative game as well as, of course, a multiplatform ARG that fills out Endgame’s intricate mythology via community interaction across Twitter and YouTube. Oh yeah, and there’s $500,000 in gold to win for the reader/player who can decipher various clues peppered through the pages of the novel. For the second novel the prize is $1 million and for the third novel the stash climbs to $1.5 million. This prize sum is unprecedented for an ARG, although other experiences like Perplex City, which Adrian Hon designed, incorporated cash prizes.

The question is, however, how much of the Endgame ARG will also be unprecedented (at the time of writing, Endgame: The Calling had not yet launched). Will it be the revolution in storytelling its creators promise? Stella’s call to action didn’t fill me with great hope. How is it that a well funded, well resourced property written by a successful high profile author like Frey, and an innovative company like Google’s Niantic Labs, could be trotting out the same old tired cliches? Perhaps that was my answer right there — a “well funded” (i.e.; expensive), “well resourced” (i.e.; expensive) property written by a high profile author (i.e. expensive). Nothing generates safe, conservative, cookie cutter creative choices like lots of money — the unstoppable tsunami of Marvel and DC comic book movies that have already been scheduled well into the next decade are proof of this.

But it couldn’t just be the money. Niantic Labs have reportedly been given a green light at Google to experiment without concern for a viable business model, which is how they’ve been able to create Ingress, a fabulously clever locative game with serious storytelling and social potential. Ingress uses the technology behind Google Maps to create a massively scaleable game in which players worldwide compete to secure “energy portals” positioned around real-world cultural landmarks — everything from the Statue of Liberty to that weird community mural in your local park. Thanks to the technology and smarts of Niantic, Ingress is probably one of the best current examples of location-based gaming that meaningfully engages players at both a local and global level. So Niantic’s (relatively) big bucket of money didn’t get in the way of them doing something new with Ingress. But even when there is no money, the history of ARGs has shown us that even independent (i.e. penniless) producers often circle back to the same old tales of high-tech activism, corporate conspiracy, ancient secrets and, yes, cute teenage girls that need your help.

Sigh.

Maybe it has something to do with the technology shaping the story. For example, the techniques of early cinema literally mimicked the proscenium arch of theatre — perhaps the interactive and hyper-networked life of twenty-first century digital consumers pushes storytellers towards narratives that imitate the treasure hunt structure of browsing, networking and hacking. But this sort of thing is so everyday now that it borders on the mundane. It’s no longer the novelty it was when The Beast, reputedly the first ARG, crawled from the digital swamp to the chirp of a 56k modem. Do we still need to be so literal about the devices we use for storytelling that they become part of the story? Even Apple has finally discarded the skeumorphism of leather bound calendars in its latest operating system. Can’t ARGs finally be liberated from the technology that delivers them?

However, to their credit, the creators of the Endgame appear to be very aware of some difficult lessons from the patchy history of ARGs. As Niantic founder, John Hanke, indicated in a recent interview with StuffTV: “Endgame is a game, not a marketing stunt like previous ARGs…A lot of those were done as marketing stunts, for Halo or the Batman movie; so they were designed to build up a frenzy around launch and then fizzle out … So what we’re doing is inspired by ARGs, but it’s really not like any of those ARGs.”

To avoid these sorts of pitfalls, Niantic brought on Jim Stewartson, a veteran of previous marketing-led ARGs including I Love Bees (for Halo 2) and Why So Serious (for The Dark Knight). “One of the things we’ve learned is that you have to create experiences that will serve a number of different categories of people,” says Stewartson, “from casual observers down to the most hardcore players.”

An exciting aspect of Niantic’s plan for Endgame is its unique ability to incorporate location into a storytelling experience. Prior to joining Google, Hanke founded a company called Keyhole which eventually became Google Maps which, as discussed earlier, is the technology behind Ingress. Yep, these guys know location more than any other company. What’s more, as Stewartson argues, mobile technology is far more advanced and ubiquitous than in the days when I Love Bees employed payphones to distribute their story (try pulling that stunt now).

So, there are some very smart people involved, a high profile author with a story that appears to neatly fit an ARG experience and the technology finally seems to be in sync with the possibilities. And, of course, there’s the prize money — there’s nothing like cash to turn a causal newb into a frenzied hardcore fan.

But will Endgame be the game changer that ARG fans have been waiting for, the one that finally takes their niche artform into the mainstream? It’s not at all clear and even Hanke seemed to be hedging his bets in the interview with StuffTV on whether it will herald a revolution in storytelling; “It’s just a much more open-ended, flexible, immersive, deeper, longer-lasting way of telling a story. At least for certain types of fantasy, science fiction, those things where you really want to create alternative worlds, that really should be the primary form, not a secondary thing.”

And maybe that’s the crux of my problem with ARGs (if you hadn’t already worked out, I do have a few problems with them). Not all stories need the expansive (and expensive), interactive, multiplatform ARG treatment. Fantasy? Sure. Science fiction? Undoubtedly. But would House of Cards or Parenthood or Louie be better with a multiplatform ARG?  And, I would argue, even when the story does suit an ARG experience, there is little evidence audiences actually want it (despite the highly opaque stats presented in company press releases and sizzle reels). Notwithstanding the fanfare surrounding classics of the genre like Why So Serious and The Beast, it would be hyperbolic in the extreme to describe them as mainstream entertainment experiences. In fact, the hype often surrounding ARGs is a result of them being so different, strange and unclassifiable, more akin to digital installation art than mainstream entertainment. The impenetrable interactive design of past ARGs virtually guaranteed their cult status but its hard to build a revolution when no one knows where to go or what to do. And how much do audiences want this revolution anyway? Undoubtedly, they want to talk about the story, but do they really want to participate in it, create it or even leave the house for it? If there is a revolution happening in storytelling right now, I would argue its the phenomenon of “binge-watching” pioneered by Netflix that ensures that most of us will not leave the couch until we’ve watched just one … more … episode of our favourite TV show.

It’s a frustrating paradox that something as seemingly creative and open-ended as ARGs could produce so much uniformity in their subject matter and execution. But there have been lessons learnt along the way and subsequent innovations in storytelling and gaming have been taking them on board — Ingress has overcome a major obstacle to participation by making the story and gameplay accessible from anywhere; the Lizzie Bennet Diaries (2012) embraced the lo-fi storytelling qualities of vlogs to retell Pride and Prejudice for a YouTube generation; and Zombies, Run! (2012 and incidentally co-created by Adrian Hon) immerses jogging enthusiasts in a world crawling with brain-sucking zombie hordes. All of these examples, while not strictly ARGs, do take ARG-like elements and make them accessible, entertaining and commercially viable — all without an ancient conspiracy, treasure hunt or amnesiac teenage girl in sight. Will Endgame join this list of innovative story/games? My initial impressions from its pre-launch publicity material suggests not. Surprisingly, it sounds kind of old-fashioned in its execution, from a time long past (which, these days, is pretty much anything more than three years old). I may be wrong. I hope so. But while Endgame’s story has a long way to go, I wonder if ARGs as a form has already reached its own end game.

Storyjacker.net is an online story-writing game collection that is opening to the public. To celebrate its launch, Storyjacker is inviting established and aspiring authors to participate in a series of online showcase games on its Bamboo and Twisted games. These games will be a focal point for author collaboration, a fun and experimental way for writers from different locales and areas of fiction to write together. 

The stories produced in these unique collaborations are expected to be as entertaining to read as they have been to write and inspire others to collaborate using the free-to-play platform. Authors already confirmed for the launch include acclaimed novelists Ross Raisin and David Whitehouse. Dates for their games are still being confirmed, but their writing is sure to represent an exciting collaboration.

The Storyjacker project is the work of PhD candidate David Jackson. He first got hooked on games that could help people write better stories together through an interest in interactive fiction. Realising that the best way to have complete control over the narrative of a game was to be one of its authors, he switched his attention to story-writing games – and Storyjacker was born. Storyjacker’s games combine normal aspects of the writing process, such as high levels of creative freedom, with elements more common to games, like challenges, competition and randomly generated constraints.

Prior to public release, the games have been tested with over 70 writers and feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Rather than finding the game elements obstructive to their story writing process, the vast majority of writers have said they find the games make the process of writing – especially in collaboration – more fun, engaging and challenging.

Writers interested in taking part in this project should contact david@storyjacker.net including their name, a short bio and any periods of availability between June and August 2014.

For more information about the project, go to www.storyjacker.net.