Entertainment & Engagement Part 2: Choose your own adventures

Imagine a story, told in 6 different languages , from a myriad perspectives, that you personally have a hand in shaping and creating. Imagine collaborating with hundreds of people in countries all over the world to decipher a codex that ultimately reveals the location of lost artifacts physically located in cities around the world. Imagine building a network of explorers to visit these sites to unearth these objects. Imagine discovering the rules to a lost sport. Imagine teams of people all over the world learning these rules and training for months, participating in time trails and ultimately competing simultaneously around the world in a new Olympic sport.

Imagine following all this on blogs, youtube, twitter, facebook. Imagine communicating with the main characters – writing them emails, sending them video, and having them respond, having your contribution to the puzzle recognized and valued by your peers and becoming an active member of this community of adventurers and new athletes.

P.S. This is the future of our entertainment. And the future is here.

The scenario above describes some of the activities performed by the community that participated in 2008’s The Lost Ring. The Lost Ring was a trans-media production or Alternate Reality Game (ARG) jointly sponsored by McDonalds and the 2008 Olympics.

In a few short years we have amassed the skills and hardware to become an active audience of trans-media producers. We have been trained to vote for the outcome of reality TV shows, are enabled by an array of personal media production and editing equipment, and have enough everyday online interaction to play over a variety of platforms. As a result, we now have the ability and desire to fully participate in our entertainment and shape its outcome through our own personal contributions

Events like The Lost Ring encourage participants to become active agents in the outcomes of their entertainment. Participants become deeply engaged with the story, and empowered to go out and explore, create, and evangelize.

To date, many of these trans-media productions have been created with clear civic motivations. One of the best known “future modeling” ARG’s is World Without Oil (WWO). It was created in 2007 by Ken Ekland with Jane McGonnigal (also creator of The Lost Ring). WWO challenged participants to augment their own lives in response to a fictional oil crisis and document the process. Part game, part user created survival manual, WWO has become the benchmark for community building using interactive storytelling. A layered mash-up of technology and DIY, the community produced an array of blogged, video and photographic content to personally engage with an entertaining fiction, and collaboratively brainstorm solutions to a very real crisis.

Working to build and engage active and participatory communities in important civic issues, I believe there is much to be learnt from and shared with trans-media entertainment.

Both require agile and responsive organizers with a clear vision and strategy and great skill for facilitation and direction. Both require building relationships of trust and responsibility, of fostering and encouraging curiosity, innovation, and creativity. Both require the sustenance of a public and collaborative narrative - audience and producer working together to build, sustain and extend a story that merges and overlaps with our everyday in a multitude of ways.

To keep citizens motivated to get and stay engaged in a civic society, we need to be ever cleverer, enthusiastic, entertaining and convincing. Gaming metric and collaborative storytelling taps into some basic part of us that is competitive and imaginative and childlike.

Audience created collaborative fiction builds an emotional connection with the audience that better facilitates action and mobilization. It allows us to build a more trusting community who, having co-authored the story, will allow themselves to be guided through it. As a new political consciousness takes shape in and around popular culture, and we master to the tools to write our own narrative, we will truly be choosing our own adventures.

Some other great trans-media productions:

WeTellStories is a fantastic 2007 project developed in collaboration with UK based sixtostart and Penguin Books. Working with up and coming Penguin authors, sixtostart developed 6 stories into web based interactive adventures. Using existing and familiar platforms like blogs and Google maps, the collaborations have opened up new possibilities in storytelling platforms. My pick of the bunch is the exquisitely executed The 21 Steps by Charles Cumming - A murder mystery translated into a cross London chase over Googlemaps.

SixtoStart are currently producing an awesome new transmedia game to teach young people about privacy issues in social media:http://www.smokescreengame.com/ is getting rave reviews. Check it out.

Why So Serious: Multi-Award winning ARG Why So Serious was used to launch the Dark Night in 2008.

Personal Effects: Dark Arts A recent novel by JC Hutchins – Personal Effects: Dark Arts – combines the traditions of a paperback with the gameplay of an ARG - allowing the reader to enter the world of the story through interactive elements.

Yellow Arrow gives the personal storytelling element a 2.0 perspective. In their words: “ Yellow Arrow is a global public art project of local experiences. Combining stickers, mobile phones and an international community, Yellow Arrow transforms the urban landscape into a "deep map" that expresses the personal histories and hidden secrets that live within our everyday spaces”. Begun in New York in 2004 Yellow Arrow has grown to over 35 countries and 380 cities around the world.

Originally published at Echoditto.com on September 25 2009

Entertainment & Engagement Part 1: Reality TV

Has voting for reality TV, trained us to vote in reality?

Have reality TV shows like Big Brother or American Idol - which challenge the audience to vote to determine the outcome of their entertainment - trained a generation of Americans to get to the polls and become more engaged citizens? Are shows like Big Brother responsible for the highest American youth voter turnout since 1972?

* Youth Turnout Rate Rises to at Least 52% with 23 Million Voters Under 30
* 3.4 Million More Young People Vote than in 2004
* Young Voters Account for at Least 60% of Overall Increase
* 18% of All Voters Were Young

From CIRCLE – The Centre for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement

According to a 2001 survey of over 2000 Americans (aged 8 to 54): "The No. 1 reason people watch (reality TV) is the thrill of "guessing who will win or be eliminated from the show." That thrill is the reason cited by 69 percent of all reality TV watchers, and 84 percent of regular viewers, who make a point to watch. The second and third most common reasons viewers tune in are to "see people face challenging situations" and "imagining how I would perform in similar situations," stated by 63 percent and 42 percent of all viewers, respectively.

It is easy to see how these motivations for engaging with entertainment could be transferred to the political landscape.

Lets take last years election as example. With larger than life villains and heroes, a classical “sword from a stone” story arc, celebrity cameos, unlimited interactive trans-media, and MC’d nightly by Colbert, Stewart, and Fey, the election of Obama played out like a blockbuster series of American Political Idol.

Obama was able to build an engaging and relatable brand that people really cared about, his message of HOPE was able to become a generic vessel for peoples aspirations and he became a symbol for people apply their own beliefs to. Like many reality show contestants, he started out as just a regular guy, he let people imagine how they would perform in his situation.

We have now been exposed to about 10 years of reality TV. As a society we understand the format and what is expected of us as an audience. Audience responses demonstrate a sophisticated approach to what they are seeing that has been honed over long periods.

In a 2001 study of Big Brother fans, Jones writes: The fact that audiences apply a sliding scale of factuality to reality programs suggests one of the ways they have learned to live with this genre over the past decade. Audiences watch popular factual television with a critical eye, judging the degree of factuality in each reality format based on their experience of other types of factual programming. In this sense, viewers are evaluators of the reality genre, and of factual programming as a whole.

As savvy evaluators of our media, we are now versed to demand certain things from our entertainment. One of those things is the ability to participate in the outcome of events.

In 2005, the Super Girls phenomenon hit mainland China. Super Girls is a pop star making program modeled on the Idol franchise where contestants sing and are voted off by the audience. The final episode of the 2005 season was one of the most popular shows in Chinese broadcast history, drawing over 400 million viewers.

One of the main factors contributing to the show's popularity was that viewers are able to participate in the judging process by sending text messages with their mobile phones to vote for their favorite contestants. During the 2005 regional contest in Chengdu alone, 307,071 message votes were cast for the top three contestants…This was considered as one of the largest "democratic" voting exercises in mainland China.

Audience participation has been cited as the most crucial factor in its success. As winners were determined by cellphone short messaging votes... the show "blazed a trail for cultural democracy," said Zhu Dake, a renowned critic of cultural matters. "It's like a gigantic game that has swept so many people into a euphoria of voting and selecting, which is testament of a society opening up," Zhu argued… An even more noteworthy thing is that the Super Girls have stimulated the will to participate.

Politics as entertainment has the potential to both open doors to engagement and also trivialize important and serious issues. The key driver I see for encouraging a blend lies in the comment above – Stimulating the will to participate. If politics can act as entertainment, and the audience is taught to engage with their entertainment in a meaningful and critical manner, then people will learn the tools to increasingly engage in the debate, in the creation, and in the management of their society.

As we move towards increasingly interactive and pervasive entertainment, and audiences progressively demand the ability to influence and author the outcomes of events, it seems inevitable that we will learn to become more socially engaged in our communities.

This was originally published over on EchoDitto.com on September 21 2009.

Reality TV & the Will to Participate

Is Big Brother responsible for the highest USA voter turnout since 1972?

• Youth Turnout Rate Rises to at Least 52% with 23 Million Voters Under 30
• 3.4 Million More Young People Vote than in 2004
• Young Voters Account for at Least 60% of Overall Increase
• 18% of All Voters Were Young

From CIRCLE – The Centre for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement


Have reality TV shows like Big Brother or American Idol - which challenge the audience to vote to determine the outcome of their entertainment - trained a generation of Americans to get to the polls?

Has voting for reality TV, trained us to vote in reality?

I went to a Communications Forum at MIT last week that focused on: Popular Culture and the Political Imagination. The panel included Johanna Blakley, David Carr, and Stephen Duncombe, with Henry Jenkins as moderator. The conversation focused on the new political consciousness taking shape in and around popular culture and raised the concept of the election as entertainment.



With larger than life villains and heroes, a classical “sword from a stone” story arc, celebrity cameos, unlimited interactive multi-platform media, and MC’d nightly by Colbert, Stewart, and Fey, the recent election played out like a blockbuster series of American Political Idol.

According to a 2001 survey of over 2000 Americans (aged 8 to 54): "The No. 1 reason people watch (reality TV) is the thrill of "guessing who will win or be eliminated from the show." That thrill is the reason cited by 69 percent of all reality TV watchers, and 84 percent of regular viewers, who make a point to watch. The second and third most common reasons viewers tune in are to "see people face challenging situations" and "imagining how I would perform in similar situations," stated by 63 percent and 42 percent of all viewers, respectively."

It is easy to see how these motivations for engagement could be transferred to the recent election. As the panel discussed, Obama was able to build an engaging and relatable brand that people really cared about, his message of HOPE was able to become a generic vessel for peoples aspirations and he became a symbol for people apply their own beliefs to. Like many reality show contestants, he started out as just a regular guy, he let people imagine how they would perform in his situation.



We have now been exposed to about 10 years of reality TV. As a society we understand the format, the tricks and what is expected of us as an audience. Audience responses demonstrate a sophisticated approach to what they are seeing that has been honed over long periods:
"The fact that audiences apply a sliding scale of factuality to reality programs suggests one of the ways they have learned to live with this genre over the past decade. Audiences watch popular factual television with a critical eye, judging the degree of factuality in each reality format based on their experience of other types of factual programming. In this sense, viewers are evaluators of the reality genre, and of factual programming as a whole."

As savvy evaluators of our media, we are now versed to demand certain things from our entertainment. One of those things is the ability to participate in the outcome of events.

In 2005, the Super Girls phenomenon hit mainland China. Super Girls is a pop star making program modeled on American Idol where contestants sing and are voted off by the audience. The final episode of the 2005 season was one of the most popular shows in Chinese broadcast history, drawing over 400 million viewers.




"One of the main factors contributing to the show's popularity was that viewers are able to participate in the judging process by sending text messages with their mobile phones to vote for their favorite contestants. During the 2005 regional contest in Chengdu alone, 307,071 message votes were cast for the top three contestants, each vote costing 0.5 to 3 yuan. This was considered as one of the largest "democratic" voting exercises in mainland China."

Audience participation has been cited as the most crucial factor in its success. As winners were determined by cellphone short messaging votes... the show "blazed a trail for cultural democracy," said Zhu Dake, a renowned critic of cultural matters. "It's like a gigantic game that has swept so many people into a euphoria of voting and selecting, which is testament of a society opening up," Zhu argued.

A further comment: An even more noteworthy thing is that the Super Girls have stimulated the will to participate. The SMS voting seems to have introduced a new form for direct election. It is direct, it is convenient, it is fast and it works. It can simplify the voting process. It can be done in a few minutes' time. It seems to be just a technical problem to make it become the main means of voting.

Politics as entertainment has the potential to both open doors to engagement and also trivialize important and serious issues. The key driver I see for encouraging a blend lies in the comment above – Stimulating the will to participate. If politics is entertainment, and people are taught to engage with their entertainment in a meaningful and critical manner, then people will learn the tools to increasingly engage in the debate, in the creation, and in the management of their society.

As we move towards increasingly interactive and pervasive entertainment, and audiences progressively demand the ability to influence and author the outcomes of events, it seems inevitable that we will learn to become more socially engaged in our communities.


Note – I would love to find some more recent data to dis/prove this. Who can help?

Inauguration Special

The 5 things I'll remember most from the 2008 election.

1. Yes We Can Engage

A report by the PEW Internet & American Life Project on the Internet and the 2008 Election states that: a record-breaking 46% of Americans have used the internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilize others.

It goes on to say: 35% of Americans say they have watched online political videos, 10% say they have used social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace to gather information or become involved, 6% of Americans have made political contributions online, 39% of online Americans have used the internet to access "unfiltered" campaign materials, which includes video of candidate debates, speeches and announcements, as well as position papers and speech transcripts.

A deep and pervasive message of the Obama campaign lay in rebuilding peoples trust in a fair and evenhanded government. To do this they reached out through a variety of channels to engage people in the campaign, the issues, and the race to the white house.

Small donation funding through Changedotgov, online video messaging, mobile text messaging all played a role in campaign engagement strategies. Youtube dominated every aspect of the presidential campaign. It was used heavily by both campaigns, then by the transition government, and looks set to continue to be the preferred means of communication in the new administration.

Outside of the political arena, the election still dominated many online campaigns, with individuals and corporations soliciting for user generated content and comment around increasingly tenuous links to their products and the political landscape. Debates, formal consultation, music, and virals engaged millions, made multiple 15minute stars, and launched a new president with intimate knowledge about his fellow Americans.

Obama Girl kicked things off by telling B and us, just how much she is crushing on Obama.



And the Ron Clarke Kids just about wrapped things up by explaining how we can vote however we like.



Meghan McCain reached out to millions of younger voters with McCainBlogette.com sharing her musings on pop culture and the political trail.



Even Pepsi got in on the act with its Refresh Everything campaign – Dear Mr president...



As the PEW study confirms, despite the growth in the number of people who are politically engaged online, internet users express some ambivalence about the role of the internet in the campaign. On one hand, 28% of wired Americans say that the internet makes them feel more personally connected to the campaign, and 22% say that they would not be as involved in the campaign if not for the internet. At the same time, however, even larger numbers feel that the internet magnifies the most extreme viewpoints and is a source of misinformation for many voters.

It also provides a limitless record of all the gaffs and blunders made by the candidates during endless months of 24 hour news cycles. The following - McCain forgets - is possibly the most painfully awkward moment of the election.



2. Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama brings a little Abbey Bartlett sizzle, a little Onassis style and whole lot serious education and career credentials to the White House. She is a hugely inspiring woman, as a successful lawyer, public servant and nonprofit exec, a caring mother and supportive wife. On the campaign trail she has been a moving orator and stimulating advocate. Democratic Convention Speech:




3. I’ll See You in the Debates Bitches!



When the McCain team started trash talking with the Obama Celebrity Ad they probably didn’t count on the unlikely and bizarrely coherent response from the Hilton camp(aign?).


(NB. Luckily, lest we be confused by her coherence on energy policy and apparent dry wit, Hilton decided that one short inspired moment if irony could be spun into a hugely annoying and inane musical parody/grab for attention and balance was restored to the world.)


In other unexpected celebrity partnerships, Mike Huckabee teamed up with Chuck Norris to tell America how its gonna be.



and Will.I.Am teamed up with a whole lot of musicians to tell us that Yes We Can.



4. Palin



She came out of nowhere, she polarized opinion, she shocked, she horrified. She provided some of the most engaging and terrible sound bites of the election. She shattered the remainder of John McCains already tarnished reputation. She was “one step from stealing” from the campaign. She can kill and skin a moose. She inspired Tina Fey to new heights of comedic genius. She could have been president. There is little doubt that she’ll be back.

Katie Connolly, the McCain campaign Newsweek embedded reporter on Palins spending spree:



Matt “like a bad Disney movie” Damon says it best:



5. Daily News