GENERATION 247 - Web TV, Internet Streaming and Online Entertainment by Kevin Foong

Top insider tip ... new ARG title coming out soon

Teaser - kewego
Teaser for Confession: The Game

Keywords: teaser game

Video from confessiontg

How to make your own Alternate Reality Game

Alternate Reality Games made Harvard's Top 20 Breakthrough Ideas 2008 List

Here's an excerpt from Jane McGonigal's article "Alternate Reality is the New Business Reality" which boldly forecasts this future:

"In the coming decade, many businesses will achieve their greatest breakthroughs by playing games—specifically, alternate reality games, or ARGs. Custom-designed ARGs will enable companies to build powerful collaboration networks, discover solutions to specific business problems, forecast opportunities, and innovate more reliably and quickly.  Why? ARGs train people in hard-to-master skills that make collaboration more productive and satisfying. Playing an ARG teaches 10 collective-intelligence competencies. These include cooperation radar, a knack for identifying the very best collaborators for a given task, and protovation, the ability to rapidly prototype and test experimental solutions. Using these skills, players amplify and augment one another’s knowledge, talents, and capabilities. Because ARGs draw on the same collective-intelligence infrastructure that employees use for “official” business, games will map directly to a familiar reality—no translation required."

What is a social game or social gaming?

Definition from Wikipedia: Social Gaming commonly refers to playing games as a way of social interaction, as opposed to playing games in solitude, like some card games (e.g. solitaire) and the single-player mode of many video games. It may refer to: board games, multiplayer games, role playing games, alternate reality games.

Why is it interesting? We're witnessing a growing number of social games emerge exploiting popular social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. According to data by Developer Analytics, messaging applications like Superpoke average 3 pageviews per visitor, dating applications average 20 pageviews per visitor but social gaming applications average 50 pageviews per visitor.  According to Charles, the "multiplier" of social games over dates is 2.5X ... in other words: how much do people prefer gaming over sex???  2.5 times!  What equally interesting is that Charles estimates that 20-25% of Facebook users play a social game and this appears to be growing.  So in a nutshell, social games are interesting because they appear to be more engaging and social gaming appears to be a rising trend.

Here's 25+ mins of Charles' presentation at Interplay:

Free video streaming by Ustream

An original web TV show DELETED: THE GAME with an integrated online game?

I am delighted to share that the web TV / online game production I've been funding has released a trailer for public viewing. You can check it out at www.youtube.com/deletedthegame and/or www.myspace.com/deletedthegame, you'll learn a lot about the project from on their website but the team still has lots of tricks up their sleeves - one of which is a launch in autumn in six languages (English, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Spanish), you heard it first here.  The team is trying to decide if they want to commit to playing the game out on YouTube or MySpace ... let me know what you think.

There's a wonderful and sublimely talented group of people behind this, here's a shout out: Andreas Hager, Carmine Picarello, Charlie Miller, David Rudd, Elia Monte-Brown, Joshua Davis, Josie Torres Barth, Matt Gielen, Ning Zhou, Ryan Gielen, Shawn Parsons, Thomas Jacob and last but not least Tom Cryan. It's a nice mix of skills, some internet TV veterans, actors, filmmakers, viral marketers and info technologists.

What the hell is an Alternate Reality Game?

Quick post, some of you have been asking me to explain what an Alternate Reality Game is in relation to my stealth mode project. No, I will not reveal it here and it will remain in stealth mode for a little longer so do be patient :-)

Here's an explanation from Wikipedia:

"An Alternate Reality Game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions.

The form is typified by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real-time and evolves according to participants' responses, and characters that are actively controlled by the game's designers, as opposed to being controlled by artificial intelligence as in a computer or console video game. Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and often work together with a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities. ARGs generally use multimedia, such as telephones, email and mail but rely on the internet as the central binding medium.

ARGs are growing in popularity, with new games appearing regularly and an increasing amount of experimentation with new models and subgenres. They tend to be free to play, with costs absorbed either through supporting products (e.g. collectible puzzle cards fund Perplex City) or through promotional relationships with existing products (e.g. I Love Beeds was a promotion for Halo 2 promoted the release of Halo 3  and the Lost Experience promoted the television show Lost). However, pay-to-play models are not unheard of."

Computer games for education?

A lot has been made of applying gaming to education, this is exactly what Harvard alum and Columbia MBA, Nteido (aka NT) Etuk, has spent the last four years doing. The premise is that educational computer games enable student players to better retain information because abstract concepts can be turned into experiences and therefore more easily retained. NT's company, Tabula Digita is privately held, here's the boilerplate: "The company creates cutting edge, immersive, 3D educational gaming modules that complement existing methods of teaching by offering a relevant and engaging way for students to interact with middle and high school subject matter. Focused initially on the introduction and review of algebra concepts, Tabula Digita intends to extend its expertise in creating immersive educational entertainment products to encompass subjects at all levels of education."

Do you have a Quarterlife crisis?

I love this American web TV series!  For a couple of reasons, firstly, it's great entertainment, it really captures the essence of being a 25-year old square-peg-in-a-round-hole, yearning to find a home for one's self evident talents (here's the science), and yes, I hear some of you screaming that I'm still a 25-year old ... so I should know! 

Secondly, it's a great experiment that I plan to repeat, but differently. I think the web-to-broadcast concept doesn't work and they've got the monetization model wrong. 

What I have in mind will blend (a) a web TV series with (b) reality gaming and (c) e-commerce.  Yes, it's new to the world stuff. The pilot should be out this Spring.  And thanks to Quarterlife's education of our audience on mySpace, our customer acquisition cost just plummeted.

Check out this video: quarterlife Trailer

Add to My Profile | More Videos