Watch the Footage

screenstorming wrote:Thanks for the welcomes.

But Adaptation came out a decade ago, and dramatic methods have now evolved into the vast potential of alternate reality games, which put storywriting privileges into the hands of players. And after all, "all the world is a stage, and the men and women merely players," right? I wonder if Shakespeare could have imagined his players co-creating alternate reality games!

And so, the cracks in the wall...

Screenstorm, welcome to the forum! Always great to see new members, and tyhisis a fascinating dialogue you and Qara ave going here. Allow me to prodive you with your introdfuctory Glomp.

*GLOMP*

ARG's when you think about it, are pretty postmodern just by their very nature, right? I mean we keep having to go Meta in order to answer some of the problems, and there's the fact that we're interacting in a situation which is put across as 'real' even though it isn't, and drawn together to act in the Real World based on that willing suspension of disbelief, and sometimes we lampshade these things.

Of course the whole 'putting storywriting privilidges in the hands of the players' carries certain problems which we, in the early days of ARG games, are only just overcoming. I think it's very worthwhile though. It allows the writers a glimpse into the brainmeats of their players, and allows the players a layer of control and action in a story they'd otherwise just be watching passively, wehich is pretty cool.

I've never seen adaptation, you've remidned me that I want to.

Scarab wrote:ARG's when you think about it, are pretty postmodern just by their very nature, right? I mean we keep having to go Meta in order to answer some of the problems, and there's the fact that we're interacting in a situation which is put across as 'real' even though it isn't, and drawn together to act in the Real World based on that willing suspension of disbelief, and sometimes we lampshade these things.

Yeah, ARGs are perhaps even post-postmodern. It's all very meta. Fortunately, I love meta. Echo Chamber's "Show Within A Show" episode really clicked with me, the Venn diagram showing the show and real life having overlap. All the more so, because so many tropes are applicable to real life, and represent categories that are already within many of our minds in some form.

One of the interesting -- and complicated -- parts of it is even the fictional characters, as acted by the *actors* or *GMs* or whatever combination, at times personally have to react dynamically to the interacting players. So, the combination between scripting and improvisational acting, or even Enforced Method Acting, makes for potential Gambit pileups, as contradictions and conflicts can creep in that affect the overall narrative. There are so many layers to that -- it probably deserves its own thread.

I think it would be interesting to see a series made based on the GMs struggling to adapt the the players, as they also struggle to adapt the players to their storyline and keep the plot progressing. A sort of reverse Echo Chamber!

Scarab wrote:Of course the whole 'putting storywriting privilidges in the hands of the players' carries certain problems which we, in the early days of ARG games, are only just overcoming. I think it's very worthwhile though. It allows the writers a glimpse into the brainmeats of their players, and allows the players a layer of control and action in a story they'd otherwise just be watching passively, wehich is pretty cool.

Yeah the active engagement in story is great. I've taken that so far to think about life in general in those terms, with multiple threads to navigate. I've started to find others who are using that conceptualization, like Donald Miller's Storyline.

I found this article earlier this year, which sums up a lot of these life-as-story principles:

A Hero's Journey for the 21st Century
http://www.edutopia.org/blog/heros-jour ... -betty-ray
Back in the olden days, there was a clear distinction between storyteller and audience. Now that we have literally hundreds of new social story platforms, we are co-creating stories with others all the time. As such, our new heroes are no longer lone warriors. Instead, they can witness each others' epic wins and fails, and offer support to one another from worlds away when the going gets tough.


Of course, the social storyweb creates all kinds of new quests for our young heroes. We have new issues of identity and digital citizenship. (What is "real"? How do I know who I can trust?) And as our ability to self-express becomes limitless, our privacy is increasingly negotiable. (Is it convenient or creepy that Google and Facebook know more about me than my husband does?) And, finally, what can we do together to make the world a better place?


I've only seen a few scenes from Adaptation, but the the premise and those couple of scenes are interesting. I'm interested in how story and games can be combined broadly with people's own ongoing decision streams, and balancing different threads within life, especially in a world of information overload. How do you possibly navigate all of the content, and even games, available online? As that article put it, who do you trust to help you sort through it?

And that even connects to thinking about how to play an ARG like this, or think about next iterations of all of these things.

screenstorming wrote:And that even connects to thinking about how to play an ARG like this, or think about next iterations of all of these things.

Mind if I get a mod to move this entire discussion to it's own Off-Topic thread? It's interesting and warrants it's own space.

Dryunya wrote:Done. Sorry for cutting your glomps out of the introductions, and for the goofy title, as I'm too braindead to come up with something suitable.

Thanks Dryu

Thanks Dryu and Scarab. I like the title, btw.

This is a long post, but some of you may find it interesting. I'm interested in adapting the approach I take here, linking tropes, questions, and reflections, into whatever formats may be easier to digest. Just like navigating TV Tropes, there are quite a few links, so there are a lot of paths you can go down, reading it straight-through, clicking on tropes and so on. If nothing else, I think the tropes I reference here are worth being familiar with and thinking about. But YMMV!

I've been trying to apply tropes and other narrative principles to real life for a while, as a tool for myself and others to understand their situations in terms of long-arc backstory and multiple-protagonist Sympathetic POV. I think some of what I learned may be relevant to helping with TWWF, as well as to various other forms of interactive fiction, interactive reality, and augmented storytelling.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around this ARG, including in terms of the broader storyworld of Echo Chamber and the real lives of the characters -- I mean players -- I mean people -- involved in it, including any public audience or other people who might become interested in ARGs, or how trope and narrative principles might be relevant to thinking of life in general.

In a typical game, the player becomes the protagonist, often acting out the trope Villains Act, Heroes React -- which expresses the reactive nature of many protagonists in the storyworlds created for them or that unfold in real life. A Call to Adventure occurs, based on some adversity that must be overcome. But who decides what that is? And, when open-ended contributions or gameplay selections are allowed, when the player becomes a co-author, at least within a story-within-a-story, there are nested sets of questions that arise.

This is especially so with this Mr. Administrator character, who was shown in Echo Chamber to be seemingly more powerful than the showrunners, who are also GMs on the ARG. Perhaps the exact relationship between TWWF, Echo Chamber, and real life is to be determined, but EC's Show Within A Show episode made it clear with Tom's Venn Diagram that there's overlap between the show, and real life, which does, indeed, have mind-boggling implications.

How many who are playing the role of metaguards have seen EC, particularly the premiere and finale of S1? After spending much of today watching the chat, I took an information-processing nap and woke up thinking of the Mr. Administrator depicted in Mysterious Employer:

Echo Chamber: Mysterious Employer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkc4DM-II8U [7m]
"the vague motivations, the toying with employees"

This actually has parallels to a scene from the film Devil's Advocate, particularly how Satan characterizes God in this speech:

Al Pacino Speech on Devil's Advocate [2m]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGR4SFOimlk

That speech slides far to the cynicism side of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Vs. Cynicism, and toward the serious side of the Sliding Scale of Silliness Versus Seriousness-- but it's a good point of reference. How is this work intended to be presented, and how many ways can it be interpreted by the audience? The tone of the Mysterious Employer episode, and Mr. Administrator videos in general, is at the extreme serious side of the spectrum, even as Twitter interactions with him can be downright silly, at least in the eye of some beholders.

Which tropes are really present in all this? Who's in charge, when the creators have created a character potentially more powerful than them, and a game-within-a-show that many are playing as a story-within-a-game-within-a-show-within-a-game-within-real-life that has real-world competition from the likes of Ingress?

Okay, that's making it overly complicated, isn't it?

I'm trying to step back and think about how everyone is thinking about this, including the fictional characters. It's the only way I can think to help coordinate a response, and provide meaningful suggestions on how to solve a very convoluted set of storylines, which have the potential for *continuity* past the end of this particular phase of this particular ARG.

The human psyche understands many things best in terms of story, but most stories have a single active protagonist, a handful (or loads and loads) of more passive and reactive protagonists. It gets harder to cognitively process loads and loads of characters with their own personal agency, Hidden Depths, and perhaps in-progress Character Development.

( Robert McKee has a model of story that expresses that is relevant to the discussion of active vs. passive, single vs multiple protagonists, and classic story structure vs. alternatives : http://markhaacrit.tumblr.com/page/3#4284987224 -- I'll try to unpack some of that in a later post.)

What are the rules, guidelines, and intentions here? I'm thinking of the Wonka scene, the contract, the magnifying glass, the "you broke the rules!" speech. That also has parallels in tone to the perpetually irate, over-burdened Mr. Administrator. This ARG is clearly experimental, but there are a number of ways you can interpret it.

My idea is, if you take the time to become familiar with a wide set of tropes, noteworthy film and television scenes, and other concepts and references, you can build up a cognitive toolkit that lets you see the world through a bigger set of lenses. Learning to select the right lens in the right situation is the key to having that be an *asset* rather than a *liability.*

Think of it as a collection of Plot Coupons -- http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotCoupon -- and I'd suggest getting to know that trope and its subtropes, to be able to get a better handle on the possible value of any particular thing you come across. Tropes are actually also examples of models -- mental models -- of which there are many worth learning about, including decision-trees. A good set of conceptual tools can go a long way to making sense of things, and facilitate Genre Savviness.

As Scott E Page says in his Model Thinking course description on Coursera:
https://www.coursera.org/#course/modelthinking
"The models covered in this class provide a foundation for future social science classes, whether they be in economics, political science, business, or sociology. Mastering this material will give you a huge leg up in advanced courses. They also help you in life. Here's how the course will work. For each model, I present a short, easily digestible overview lecture. Then, I'll dig deeper. I'll go into the technical details of the model."

One such model is the Decision Tree:

4 5 Decision Trees-Model Thinking-Scott E. Page [14 min]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8n7SRF_3SI
"Decision tree models are really going to be useful, in terms of making decisions when there's lots of contingencies, when there's probabilistic events, when we don't know the future state of the world. So a big reason we want to learn to use this model is just to be better thinkers, to make better choices, make better decisions, rather than throw up our hands and say 'I can't figure out what to do, I think I'm going to choose this.' There's gonna be two other reasons as well: one... to infer things about the world, about other people's choices, so we're going to see someone's choice, and from that, we can get some understanding about how that person thinks about the world, so we can use it to explain what's going on, and then a third reason, for fun, is to maybe learn some things about ourselves."

Am I simply making this too complicated? What do you all think?

*wipes tear* BRAVE BRAVO Have a million LIMES

As for what I think, mind screw aside this is a fantastic analysis of this all, the show, ARG... etc.

Just great job all round.

JRPictures wrote:*wipes tear* BRAVE BRAVO Have a million LIMES

As for what I think, mind screw aside this is a fantastic analysis of this all, the show, ARG... etc.

Just great job all round.

I know, right? Screen is gonna bit RIGHT in around here

I shall try and have coherent thoughts later...

You should be submitting this somewhere as an academic thesis. For real.

...I'll just read it sometime later. You're routinely out-Wall-Of-Texting everyone.

(Preface: This may look like a Wall of Text, but it's filled with references to tropes, and quotes from them. So give it a chance, you might learn something of relevance to TWWF. )

Most anything I have to say beyond my personal backstory has already been expressed by those in academia and/or on TV Tropes and/or in popular media, so my goal is to facilitate interactive experiences that have relevance to people's real life situations. That includes helping people to learn and create, to survive and thrive, all things which *academia* often doesn't do a very good job at.

I should know. I have a long-arc backstory that goes back to being a kid growing up with unhappy academic parents who themselves had unhappy parents. And I ended up facing the trope Generation Xerox:

Often, certain key events will happen exactly as they did in the past. Turn Out Like His Father is most likely to fail when crossed with this trope. In many plotlines, however, the outcome will change at the last moment since the hero(ine) has heard the story from their parents and has had the time to work out what went wrong and worked up the guts to change it.

Better get to work figuring out just how they screwed things up, because if you don't, chances are the same tragedy's going to happen again. And it'll be your fault this time around, in which case you'll have no choice but to pass the entire scenario on to your son or daughter and hope that they can Set Right What Once Went Wrong — a sort of generational Groundhog Day Loop.

Rather than a Freudian Excuse (See Echo Chamber S1E2: Freudian Excuse), I have a vision for shining some light into a World Half Full. The Freudian Excuse view of life, especially mixed with Hobbes Was Right, actually expresses the view of psychology and human motivation that too many people are stuck with. Whining and/or pathetic miscreants, stuck in a futile and depressing war with each other.

Fortunately, there's so much more to life! And, life can get better, though it's also more complicated than that. People *do* tend to have Hidden Depths and the capacity to engage in Character Development, but the path to these is not always obvious.

I've had glimpses at that fact over the years, including my own Cloudcuckoolander-like attempts to break out of the proverbial Platonic Cave, but my discovery of TV Tropes has helped me put words to much of what I've experienced, and has given me the tools to better understand my situation, as well as invert the tropes that so often limit people's vision of life and, hopefully, create new ones.

One mark of a Cloudcuckoolander is when, 90% of the time, you think the character is just plain nuts, but 10% of the time, you suspect that the character is in fact the Only Sane Man on the show. In other words, a Cloudcuckoolander has massive knowledge and understanding of the workings of the universe... Unfortunately when they are Genre Savvy, nobody else is, and when they are not, everybody else is. In any event, they can be oddly endearing, if not downright Crazy Awesome.

In a community where many people are not only Genre Savvy but actively motivated to learn about and invert tropes, the world of possibilities for making new things is nearly limitless. Even more so in an ARG like TWWF! I've talked to college instructors who discuss Breaking the Fourth Wall in the course of their courses, and even my dad and stepdad had variants of that, in order to better explain the world to their students. And TWWF-styles ARGs are much more open-ended than a class within academia, even if there are *some things* worth knowing that are now bursting out of those ivory tower walls in the form of MOOCs.

(See thread What happens when ARGs collide with MOOCs? for more details.)