Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

Lately I’ve been honored to be a regular contributor to the Transmedia Talk podcast over on Culture Hacker. Check it out, if you like. I think it’s pretty keen.

I have completely revamped my portfolio to be much snazzier and awesome and it is now located at DeeCook.com.

In addition, I’ve been totally remiss in not mentioning my partnership with two of ARGdom’s leading lights, Michelle Senderhauf (a.k.a. Varin) and Marie Lamb (a.k.a. Gupfee), in the formation of Dog Tale Media LLC, a new transmedia house. We’re very excited about our venture and think we’ve got some great stuff in store, so stay tuned.

Here’s the tribute that Michelle Senderhauf and I did at this year’s ARGFest:

I wasn’t really surprised when it happened. After all, I’d been having the dreams for years. A slow drift up, a kicking off, and I was afloat. Like air was water. Like I was on the moon.

Most people, when they have flying dreams, imagine themselves zipping high through the air, looking down at the ant-like specks of people below. Zooming, like a jet. Targeted. Ballistic. Not me. I dream-fly in lazy, languid arcs, a casual flick off whatever stationary object is nearby used to change my trajectory. More a low-gravity leap than flight, really.

And so the day after the night of a week’s culmination of insomniac tossings and turnings in bed, my consciousness itself was drifting in one of those lazy arcs. I felt caught between the tasks of the day and the siren song of the snippet of dream from the night before (or was it two nights ago?) – I was arm in arm with a friend, and we were skipping in long, powerful leaps across the — oops?

As I daydreamed, I tripped. As I tripped, my dream memory took over and I instinctively leapt. As I leapt, I stayed afloat in the air, wide eyed, afraid to look down in fear that I would encounter Wile E. Coyote Syndrome and reality would come, literally, crashing around my ears.

I extended a leg. Pointed it earthwards. Came drifting gracefully, if a bit wobbly, down. Looked around. Nobody notices anything in this damned city. I’m undetected for now.

So now what? I can float through the air. What sort of heroic incredible power is that? What am I supposed to use it for? I mean, something like this, I should be wearing a cape and have a fancy pseudonym and join a consortium of similarly-enhanced individuals, right? Because to be honest, all I want to do is go out on a moonlit night to the park and jump, and jump, and jump.

What’s this all about? Visit My Super First Day to find out.

I came to the realization that there’s no way I can maintain a one page resume. I keep having to bump projects off, and it’s getting harder and harder to cut some of my babies off there. So I’ve reworked the thing to put the most salient stuff on the first page, and I guess I’ll just deal with the consequences if the two page format pisses anyone off. That being said, here she is in all her shining glory, freshly updated and gloriously resplendent.

Resume (pdf) and Resume (doc).

I spent the weekend in Pennsylvania at the memorials for Dave Szulborski. I’m still incapable of expressing all that he meant to me. He was a mentor and a friend and a big brother and an inspiration. It seems impossible to me that I won’t be exchanging chatty emails with him anymore and hearing about the amazing stuff he’s been working on lately.

Anyway, I looked through my backup drive and found this old treasure from Catching the Wish in 2006. Here’s the story: The mayor and other entities were fighting to tear down the library and digitize all the books. Dave’s character, Dale Sprague, and my character, Sarah Wyatt, were totally opposed to the idea. The players rallied to the cause, bombarding the fictional development company with email and setting up a petition site to save the library. This is the audio recording of a call-in City Council meeting where Aglaura opened the floor to let non-residents make statements about the issue. All those who called in were players, save the crazy singing lady, who was one of the puppetmasters – Haley Moore. 😉  Mayor Dobbs was played by Paul Melamud, Sam was Michelle Senderhauf, Bruce was Nick Braccia, and Diana was Kassandra Standridge.

Enjoy!

Aglaura City Council Meeting, June 22, 2006 (MP3)

I don’t have the words to express my feelings right now. I may never have them. Dave Szulborski died last night. All I can do is make travel arrangements to his memorial service. Still in shock.

One of the things about being an ARG designer is that you don’t often have time to be an ARG player. It’s easy to fall out of touch with the rhythm of the player’s side, that feeling of groping in the dark for a light switch that just barely illuminates a tiny patch and then the trek onwards to find the next flash.

I receive a fair amount of trailhead packages in the mail and via email, but either they come at a time when I’m too busy to participate or they don’t pique my interest. The tape recorder for the “Charlotte Is Becoming Real” game (could I have dubbed it anything goofier, I wonder?) was a perfect storm. It came when I had time to play and it was mysterious enough to make me monkey around and figure out just what in the hell it all meant. Normally these things come with some sort of overt puzzle. This, not so much. In fact, it took nearly two weeks to realize there was a puzzle there at all.

This led us down a twisting, snarled pathway of Facebook updates, websites, telephone calls from game characters, both authoritative and confused, frantic searches in Central Park for hidden objects, and finally a paid trip for two players to Berlin, where they had a finale in the Sacrow woods involving a mad psychiatrist, a wobbly rowboat, a bloodstained bathroom, and the grinning author of Therapy, Sebastian Fitzek.

Granted, there were some bugs in the game, at least from my perspective. First, the pacing was uneven – at times glacially slow and at times very quick. Second, the events of the finale were geared almost exclusively towards the two people who traveled to Berlin, and left the people at home no way to participate (or even watch live, because cell signal was weak and the phone battery ran out). Last, the players are left with more questions at the end than they started the game with, which runs contrary to how we expect ARGs to be. However, I’m reserving judgment on the last, because we do have a scheduled PM chat for next Wednesday and it’s possible that there is a reason for these questions to be left. I’m all for telling stories in new ways.

Now, those criticisms aside, I have a lot of praise for the game. First of all, I think that it’s important that an ARG be built around a solid product, and Fitzek’s Therapy is a rollicking good read (although perhaps a bit heavy-handed on the foreshadowing). I just finished reading it again for the second time, going back and noticing subtle clues that I wouldn’t have known to look for in the first reading. My mind is still on stormy Parkum Island, with my ears and toes chilled. But besides the book, the game was intriguing. It was fearlessly gung ho in ways that corporate American games are not: there were no waivers to sign, players were supposed to explore the return address the packages came from, someone needed to go to San Diego and dig up a tape recorder from a random place in a park, and so on. This was not a carefully-cultured, bubblewrapped entertainment experience. It felt more like a gritty, personalized, grassroots game, the kind you can sink your teeth into. A real, old-fashioned ARG, in other words, the kind your Mama used to play.

So to the game designers at VM-People and to Sebastian Fitzek I would like to say thank you for lighting a fresh spark of wonder in my cynical puppermastery heart. I had such a good time playing your game. I hope you do many more here in the U.S. and they’re met with great success. Kudos!