Sagasnet; developing interactive narrative content

Today we will be working on how to pitch your idea (Sibylle Kurz and Frank Boyd)
Then Lee Sheldon is going to talk about the emotional divide in movies and games.

Tommorrow
Hunting for funds.. (Inga von Staden).
Understanding your user - personas as digital tools.(Frank Boyd)
Where the mass meets (Inga von Staden)
New virtual state of world of warcraft (Teut Weideman)
Creating tools for conviviality future challenge ( florian schmidt)
Second life rocks, second life sucks ( michael rueger)

Next day:
Raimo Lang (One of my favorite coaches!!) on interactive narratives and communities ..
designing content & context
IPTV ( Ingo Wolff)
Digital rooms with VVV (max wolf & Sebastian Oschatz)
The illusion of life - revisited (Ken Perlin... I am curious to see Ken again..)
The machinima circus ( Friedrich Kirschner & Klaus Neumann)
How television viewing is changing (peter olaf looms)

Word into action adapting other media ( Lee Sheldon)
We all want emotions in games (Gilles Montseil, Ubisoft)
Intermediary bodies and virtual worlds ( philippe Queau, Unesco)

Starting in a minute, keep you posted

Dutch Platform for 3D worlds

The EPN (Dutch platform for the information society) has launched a platform for 3D worlds, together with Technical University Delft, University of Twente and Free University in Amsterdam. Goal is to enhance knowledge of 3D worlds. Cooperating also are ING, ABN Amro, Philips and IBM. These parties are already active in 3 D world Second Life. But they are still in minority. From a research of BDO Camps Obers we see that 56% of companies know of Second Life, and 90% say they are not planning to do anything in this virtual world, 68% sees it as a hype and only 17% sees a real future promise in Second Life.

The plaform (Platform Virtuele Werelden; PVW) wants to accumulate international research on the subject and investigate demographics of the residents. What's on, what are there interests? Will this world reach critical mass? What applications are appreciated and which are not. Etc.

Sounds very interesting and relevant to me. I hope the platform will be open, so we may all learn some more..

http://www.epn.net/content/view/176/2/

source: http://www.emerce.nl/nieuws.jsp?id=1957272&WT.mc_id=nb (in Dutch)

nine months in second life

Douglas Gayeton lived in second life for nine months to find out the where abouts of Molotov Alva, a man who disappeared from his californian home. Gayeton found material of Alva in Second Life.. you can watch the seven episodes machinima documentary here http://www.molotovalva.com.
If you want to find out backstory to Molotov Alva check this: http://www.thecircuitbooks.com/pages/molotov.html

To make his documentary Gayeton lived in complete isolation for nine months and did not want to step out of second life (where the film was shot). The documentary "my second life" was premiered yesterday in Amsterdam, Toronto and Second Life simultaneously at the 23rd Fantastic Film Festival.. still running till 25 april in City Theatre in Amsterdam.

I met some people of this festival at Mediamatic a little while ago as we were working at a machinima workshop they where hosting. Very much fun to do! Machinima is an effective way of trying complicated shots, low budget, but also you do need a different way of working. Life in the game world continues, rules of the game still apply. Although you learn how to hack your way around that, it is not working as a set of actors that do as they are told when you want them too. Which makes it all the more interesting to do. It works much more like reporting in real life.

CMID 07

Finally I have some time to report on CMID07. First of all, what a wonderfull thing Charlotte did by organising this event in the lovely Hemavan Zweden. We had a very diverse bunge of people coming from all over the world and from all different disciplines.

Christy Dena made a clear start with addressing the subject of what crossmedia is. She envisioned the powers that influence the field and that are all to be counted for when developing crossmedia material. Content or the story off course, marketing, business modelling, technology and the audience. With a lively presentation on do's and dont's the head was off. We saw a couple of really nice projects, urls you can find at the bottom of this post. Liam Bannon came in the second day. As an interaction design specialist Liam posed the question what is the relation between crossmedia and interaction design? How are we to frame the field in order to
investigate and research its subjects? His general conclusion was that there were many different angles to the subject as was already visible through the wide variety of participants in this conference and a lot needs to be thought over to come to a good framing of fields. To me it is clear that there are a lot of questions to be investigated and researched. Framing the field scientifically is therefore highly important. Major issue within the framework of forcefields sketched by Christy Dena is the balance of power between audiences and "senders". Where the profound change is that audiences become senders as well, changing the classical balance of the value chain completely. Unnecessary to say that this has a large impact on our lives and therefore also needs close attention from academics and researchers.

Some interesting projects presented:
http://www.spaceacademy.tv
http://www.oclc.org (norways collective memory)
http://www.kuvakirja.fi
http://www.moo.com
http://www.sooda.com
http://www.eve-online.com
http://www.jpgmag.com
http://www.otava.fi
http://www.behavioristics.com