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Posted on 09.03.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 03:01
Even unexpectedly, news stories can become a game. The TV show Fantástico, a weekly variety show with dramaturgy, humor sketches and journalism that airs every Sunday night in Brasil on TV Globo, ran a story about how a singer called Belchior, very popular in the 1970s, had vanished for months. The arm of Globo?s journalism online, G1, ran the story (originally produced for the TV show) in digital form (sorry, link in portuguese). They transcribed part of the text from the video and it was online a few hours after it was seen on television. Immediately, readers from every part of the country started to send information about Belchior sightings. They had photos, stories and dates. “We didn?t expect that”, says Renato Franzini, executive-editor of G1. “In the morning, we had many messages telling us about sightings of the singer. We decided to put it all together and make it a new developing story.” The editorial team made a map where it was possible to pinpoint a sighting and the date Belchior was seen there. This is an example of a challenge that was established for the audience (find Belchior) even though nobody in the TV show or the website, asked for the help of the audience. It emerged naturally. People started to post videos on You Tube parodying Britney Spears while Fantástico kept promoting the story with other artists talking about the singer. The news story became suddenly something that looked a lot like an Alternate Reality Game. And people even started to think that it was some kind of promotion or viral. After one week, the TV show ran a story showing that they had found the singer in a cabin in Uruguai, ending the search. The way the show handled the highly anticipated finding of the singer was an anticlimax at best, but the original concept is too good to be ignored. The mix of crowd sourced journalism and ARG is a very interesting tool in the new cross over between social media tools and media outlets. Filed under: New Ways to Play and Rules of the Game and Social Media and The World as a Playground Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: None |
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Posted on 06.28.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 11:22
We have a lot to learn with the ARG (Alternate Reality Games) puppetmasters (the guys that manipulate the events from behind the curtains) for our media products. And 42 Entertainment is the company to look up to. They won the Grand Prix Award at the Cannes Cyber Lions ceremony on June 24 for the Why So Serious campaign, for the movie Batman – The Dark Knight. Las year, they won the same prize for another campaign for Nine Inch Nails. And if they didn’t win this year, it would be a huge surprise. More than a year before the launch of the movies on theaters, the fans of Batman were frantic over a seres of websites and events around an election in Gothan City and the crazy actions of an assassin clown. It was 42 Entertainment’s Why So Serious campaign running full power, although, almost stealthily. The crazy beauty of these ARG campaigns is the way they deceptively make noise indirectly, creating waves of excitement that generates spontaneous reactions from fans. They engage and start talking about it in forums, blogs and social networks. At some key moments, the fictional events suddenly transpire to real life and call attention of the conventional media outlets. There is something happening and they just can’t ignore. A well run ARG-viral campaign like this makes waves with no press releases. It becomes a real world event on itself. It has to become news at some point. People spontaneously make it happen. But when I say spontaneously, I am not saying that there is no manipulations. Oh no. That’s exactly the opposite. As Alfred Hitchcock said in interviews, he played his audience like an instrument. He put images, sound, music to get exact responses from his audience on theaters. He said he played his audience like a musican instrument. It’s always stimulation. But we have to think about what what is the one we want to give. For media as entertainment, it is straight forward in a way (but as hard as always, I must say). You just have to work towards the right impact and feelings on your crowd. But when we talk about journalism, there is something that just don’t add up. Journalist tend to talk about the purity of the profession. About how everything that we report has to have a sound reason, a foot on the public interest and common well. Using this principle, something that is not popular or that generates no interest, but is important, has to be there, no matter what. I agree with this necessity of reporting relevant news no matter how hard (or boring) they are. But in reality, we know very well what happens. Important things that doesn’t excite people anymore, are relegated to less than stellar spaces. It’s like we are saying: “oh damn, i have to release this information, but it is not exciting anymore. So let’s put this note about Swine Flu on page 10, in the bottom”. So, although journalists hate to admit, which is silly but that’s how life is, there is an entertainment level in their work that can’t be ignored. We should learn to embrace it and use it for good. Well, some of us do it already. A few even do it in a very good way. Filed under: New Ways to Play and Rules of the Game and The World as a Playground Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: None |
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Posted on 05.27.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 00:56
I was talking earlier about how Ebay (among others) made a business of turning auctions, highly addictive play like events, into an even sexier activity. Yesterday I saw an add at the underground here in London of a website called Swoopo. They took the Ebay concept to another level. It works like this: people put objects for auction for insanely low prices and the bids go up in 10p increases. But to make a bid you pay 50p and a piece of this money goes to the seller. The bidder buys tokens (50 bids, 100 bids) that will use in auctions. The auctions happen in short periods of time and if someone makes a bid inside the last 20 seconds of the deadline of an auction it gets a time extension. This mechanic tends to get lower prices and the seller will make extra money from the bidding. So, the more interesting an item is, more bidding it should generate. So, an auction becomes, more than ever, a strategy game where timing and pacing is very important. The creators turned the activity in a bona fide game. I don’t know if it will work. But the concept is amazing. Filed under: New Ways to Play and Rules of the Game Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: None |
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Posted on 04.02.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 01:13
Big story of the week for Hollywood execs is the fact that Wolverine’s movie leaked and anybody with a peer-to-peer software is able to download it. So here comes the execs with those good old stories. The copies will hurt ticket sales! We are doomed!! Things like that. For me it is very simple. Wolverine is a big action estravaganza. People that chose to see a movie like this in a computer screen, in a terrible copy, with crappy sound and poor picture quality, taken with a camera from a movie theater in some obscure corner of the world, would not pay for a ticket anyway. This is people that don’t care about going to a theater. Plain and simple. Or else. Could be a really curious fan that wants to see the movie as soon as possible and, surprise, will go to watch on a theater anyway. Crap! He will go again, one week later, watch it on Imax. And, oh!, will buy the special edition in august too. So, enough with the screams! The thing is. All these fireworks just hide the really juicy fact in this curious case: it is not the final movie, but a high quality copy with unfinished effects and soundtrack. It is the kind of thing that journalists and executives have the chance to see all the time, but not the crowd that would go to a theater. Hell! I don’t download this kind of stuff and this time I even was curious to see how this copy looked. People will download it just to see how an unfinished movie looks. Plain simple. This case has an edge, a challenge embedded. This copy has something completely different. Works as a souvenir for the fans. People will download it and, if the movie rocks, since they couldn’t see the finished effects, they will run to theaters on may 1st. This is such an interesting situation that, if I wasn’t such a nice guy I would even think that Fox leaked this on purpose. But if the movie is terrible. Well. Fox is in serious trouble, because that first week crowd may not appear in such big numbers, after bad reviews start popping everywhere on the internet. In the end, whoever makes good stuff can have good results from positive buzz. But your product better be good, dude, or you are in serious trouble. New world, different rules. Filed under: Definition and External Content and New Ways to Play and Rules of the Game Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: None |
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Posted on 04.01.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 06:43
Design is an absolutely relevant part of any product. I feel that launching a media product without design is like going to an UFC competition without any training at all. You will have you ass kicked big time. Well, even with training you can get your ass kicked. But i digress. Off course that bad content with good design is just a ruse. But it’s almost the same thing the other way around: good content with bad design is just content that will not be seen. Good design influences (or at least should) everything in your product. It is part of that idea of asking your audience to a dance. But enough of me, for now. We will have plenty of time to talk further about design in the near future. Just take a look at this video from TED talks: Filed under: Definition and External Content and Rules of the Game and Videos and design Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: None |
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Posted on 03.16.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 03:24
It is hard to think of better examples of Play Factor application than deep media products. You know them. TV shows like Lost, The Office, Battlestar Galactica, Gossip Girl. Movies like The Blair Witch Project, Matrix, A.I., Batman – The Dark Knight and Watchmen. Book series like The Da Vinci Code, The 39 Clues, music artists like Trent Reznor or the band Radiohead. And games. Oh, come on, they had to be there too, right? You can start with the Alternate REality Games and now wich some big titles like Halo and Dead Space. But it doesn’t stop here. If you just stop to look at Deep Focus and 42 Entertainment projects for a few seconds you will see the possibilities emerging. They are everywhere, as the South by Southwest Conference can show us. And they use all the possibilities of the Play Factor. They try to engage the audience in various ways. They even are capable of engaging different demographics in the same fictional universe through different channels. But more importantly, they make people interact, play the products and with the products. But, please, there is a difference between a product that is adapted for more than one media and a real deep media experience. Gone With the Wind the book became Gone With the Wind, the movie. Great. We are talking about a TV show like Lost. It has a mythology that transpires to the real world and make it’s audience enjoy it at various levels of complexity. Being complex, naturally chalenging it’s audience in subtle and sometimes in very direct ways, the show becomes more than a show, and the game, and the books, and the websites. The Play Factor is obvious here. Filed under: New Ways to Play and Rules of the Game and Social Media Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: 1 Comment |
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Posted on 03.14.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 10:42
We are more sophisticated by the minute. You don’t expect that with all the technology, all the interfaces surrounding us, all the stimulae we would keep doing things the same way, right? We change and evolve. We look at old things and make them different and new. Let me give you an example: the good old building blocks. Everybody with a heart liked them as kids. They are colorful, have shapes, texture and we can move them around and build things. We can play with them and we can play games with them, if we develop the right rules. Wood blocks. Beautiful and simple. A few years ago, in a toy store at New York, I saw these blocks here. Simple as they were, they blew my mind. They were just an amazing idea. See? There is a game component, some rules about assembling. But the whole thing is more like a sandbox where you put things together and just ave fun with the result. Really, really interesting. But, as I said, I saw it years ago. You couldn’t think that things would stop there, right? The MIT guys agree… Now, think about the possibilities. Think about the fact tha play is a lot more than just games, puzzles, sudoku and crosswords. Playing could be something more subtle, a small challenge that people don’t even realize that is happening but that is able to move them. Look at the building blocks and open your mind for new ideas. Shuffle them and think again. Filed under: New Ways to Play and Rules of the Game Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: None |
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Posted on 03.12.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 04:09
One of the first lessons some companies learned (or not) when playing with new media is that this is a different kind of beast where, instead of a monologue, you have a conversation (ok, I heard it som many times that this phrase annoys me). Even when you don’t want to. A few years ago, GM launched a campaign asking internet users to make video ads about one of its cars, the Chevy Tahoe. Oh, you can imagine how excited they were. How modern to make such a campaign. The, hum, “problem” with these kind of ideas is that when you give power to the people, it is difficult to take it back. The users started making ads about how the Chevy was a terrible car that was bad for the environment. L-o-t-s of ads. If you want to give control away. Give it and go with the flow. If you do it the wrong way, backlash is coming certainly. This was one history for the books about do’s and dont’s of the new era of advertising. But it seems that some people don’t read these books. Or don’t have a good memory at all. Skol, a beer brand from INBEV in Brazil, launched a campaign that was supposed to be hip, modern, smart and oh! so cool. They hired two of the best comedians of the new generation in Brazil and made videos where these guys told jokes about Carnaval and made a call to everyone: send your jokes and stories and we will tell the best ones here. One guy liked the idea and developed his videos. But not exactly what Skol’s marketing people had in mind. He made a video telling sad stories about drunk people driving and killing bystanders or just beating their relatives. But he told all of that as they were really funny stories, copying the aesthetic of Skol’s videos. It became a huge hit instantly. And it didn’t take long before he was “gently” asked to take the videos out. He told the story in his blog and changed the video. He took off all the graphics linking his video to Skol but kept the text. The result is even stronger, if you have the context. Even though you don’t understand portuguese, just take a look at the three videos and get the spirit of the story. Here is the video from Rafinha Bastos. This other one is from Danilo Gentili. This is the video from Ronald Rios that talks about how drunk people can do bad things. He tells terrible stories as if they were really funny. Notice that he took all the graphics off, to break the visual link to Skol’s campaign. What Skol’s guys didn’t seem to understand (like GM’s marketing guys didn’t see in 2006) is that the internet and social media doesn’t work their way. This is the first stop in our journey about knowing what game you are playing. In the metaphor I am trying to develop in this research, you need to know if you are playing Game of Life, Risk or Monopoly. If you are playing with Legos or woodblocks. If you are painting together with a group in a room, or just looking at a naked model. You need to understand the game you are playing, the play and then develop or read the rules. With that in mind, the next step is to call the right people, to the right place to play. When you start to understand that, things become more and more clear. But you still have a long way to go. (With thanks to Trabalho Sujo) Filed under: Rules of the Game and Social Media and Videos Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: None |