i-Anya

I arrived back from Tasmania on the weekend and one of the 1000 emails awaiting me was from the popular Daughters of Freya author, Michael Betcherman, announcing his new email narrative, Suzanne. I signed up immediately and have started reading the first instalments over the past 3 days - forget the 999 other emails I am still wading through, these are the most fun emails to receive every day. Here’s a little synopsis:

Suzanne
by Michael Betcherman

“A delightful farce … Jane Austen meets Carrie Bradshaw, or maybe Woody Allen meets Shakespeare.” - Jake Onrot, Vancouver BC.

Opening your email will never be the same again!

Suzanne Braun has been invited to a cottage on Lake Joseph, the summer playground for Toronto’s rich - and very rich. She heads north with one goal in mind, to return home with a wealthy fiance in tow. And she won’t let anything stand in her way.

The story is told through emails exchanged among the characters. But instead of reading the emails in a book, they’re delivered straight to your inbox in “real time”, 2-3 emails a day over the three weeks it takes for the story to unfold.

You can’t turn a page to find out what happens next … you have to wait for the next email to arrive.

I just love what I am reading so far - it *is* delightful and makes me laugh and smile and … I would love to chat to others about it - is anybody else reading it and want to share your thoughts with me?

In lonelygurl15 fashion, the television series Law and Order have devised an episode around a videoblogger (Michelle Trachtenburg guest stars as “Weeping Willow 17″). They have released a series of videos in a fake video blog and I have seen them mentioned on a few sites already around the blogosphere.

This makes yet another addition to the list of fictions which traverse several media forms - here’s Christy Dena’s list of some of them. I met a guy recently doing his PhD on the way the TV show LOST has created a multi platform narrative experience - what a fun PhD that must be! But I think its interesting that other TV programs are beginning to incorporate additional media forms to enhance their narratives which are usually confined to within the 30 minute show.

I am almost sufficiently recovered to blog about the continued events I have been involved in over the special 12 day NMC Symposium on The Impact of Digital Media.

Slatenight hosted a four hour series of events which, despite a few technical hitches, went really well. I am so pleased with how it all turned out!!

I started off the events by speaking about The Avatar as Communication. You can listen to the podcast version here.

Following my talk was a special kind of fashion show, where people were invited to showcase their unique identities and discuss their decisions and reasons behind constructing the avatar that they did. The podcast of this event is here.

Following this, Christy Dena spoke about Imaging Space, podcast here.

We had a panel discussion with some live musicians in SL who spoke about the SL live music scene. Ironically, there were some technical hitches with the audio so the podcast is brief but here.

Then we were entertained by the musicians with some live music from each in turn:

Mel Cheeky

Cybster DJ

and you can hear the music they played on the podcast here.

Next up was the incredible Dell Wilberg, who’s talk was entitled Future Perfect: Towards a Better Second Life. Using knowledge of trends in technology over the past several decades, Dell offered us an insight into what we might expect in our immediate future.

Very exciting indeed! Podcast here.

Finally we heard from Danielle Mirliss and Heidi Trotta who spoke about their work with Undergraduate students in Second Life: Engaging the Disengaged. It was fascinating to hear their experiences and to compare their thoughts with my own experiences with post-grads. The podcast is here.

And finally, at 4am, I gave a few brief closing remarks (podcast here).

In my closing remarks I mentioned that Christy was being interviewed in just a few hours time by the ABC media in Australia about Second Life, and here is the podcast for that (go Christy!!!).

The NMC blogging and recording of the four hour event was fantastic and my thanks go to Larry Pixel and CDB Barkley for inviting us to be a part of this very significant symposium. it was an honour and a thrill to be invited.

85 more photographs here, thanks also to Gary Hazlitt and NMC for many of the photographs in this set.

So the Yahoo / Channel 7 franchise have developed what they are calling “a ground-breaking 10 part drama” called PS Trixi. Christy mentioned this in her talk last week and since then I’ve spotted it being advertised all over the place. In an attempt to “encourage” people to visit all of the various components of Yahoo and Channel 7 and to catch the teen audience, the story takes place over podcasts, radio stations, a blog, image galleries and mobile phones. The web cam episodes are supposedly based on the LonelyGurl15 set up.

I am somewhat sceptical because of how contrived it seems to be - like the process is more important than the content, but I am hoping to look more closely at it when things ease up here in the near future.

Yesterday I went to the most fascinating presentation by Christy Dena and she has totally converted me into the heady world of Mono-Polymorphism!! This was one of the best “big picture” conceptualisations for the many forms of distributred narratives, ARGs, digital fiction, fan fiction and media franchise narrative “events” that I have ever seen. I love talks like this because they remind me how SLOW education is in this field and really challenge my thinking to new levels. Here is Christy’s abstract - if only I had some of her mind blowing slides to show too!

Mono-Polymorphism: A Paradigm for Understanding Cross-Media Entertainment
Christy Dena

In the age of cross-media production works are distributed over time and space like never before. A story can be adapted into numerous media and arts forms; episodes traverse television and digital games; a plot can stretch from a book to the web; a work of fiction can be indistinguishable from reality and a work of art indistinguishable from marketing. The methodological discourses touched by this phenomenon are, among others, Narratology, Ludology, Media Studies and Semiotics. How does one recognise, analyse and frame these works? Introducing Mono-Polymorphism: the theory where many forms and the singular co-exist. Giddy with the notion of a ‘unified theory of everything’, this theory seeks to provide a schema for understanding the meta-discursive, taxonomical, and rhetorical complexity of these works. And yes, the dissonance with ‘mono-polymorphism’ is intentional.

Eeep, I have been so caught up with writing, working, and managing 20 projects all at once that I missed this fascinating story! Lonelygurl15 is a series of videos which have been telling the story of a teenage girl, Bree, over the US Summer. I managed to read the full story on Danah’s blog here, which gives a run down on the mystery of who lonelygurl15 actually was, the fans who managed to crack the mystery after suspecting she was a hoax, and the media reports about the way the narrative and fan activities played out.

It’s wonderful because it’s another form of blog fiction but taken one step further - using youtube and myspace it reflects the teen vibe better than I have seen elsewhere although as Danah pointed out, it was clearly a fake because it didn’t *quite* convince.

UPDATE: Henry Jenkins has a very well constructed response here about Lonelygurl, and the comments are also enlightening. Fantastic reading!

Yay!!! Uses of Blogs, which has my chapter on Fictional Blogs in it, is now available!

Links to the table of contents, chapter one, and the contributors can be found here. This is very exciting!

Once again, I have found a gorgeous example of valuing a traditional literary experience by reconstructing it into a new form. Here is the wonderful A A Milne story of Winnie the Pooh - in particular, the game of “Pooh Sticks” recreated by Angrybeth Shortbread. If you want to play it yourself, you can go here.

Yay!! I now have the complete set of gorgeous jewels, thanks not, I am afraid, to my own skills at deciphering clues, but to the skills of my now very favourite person because he is so clever and he found them when I couldn’t - Dell!!

here is my navel ring:

Here’s an earring and one view of my necklace:

here is a better view of the necklace:

and here’s me wearing everything in the set:

That was a very difficult quest but luckily I have the right contacts to help and voila! Gorgeous jewels are mine!!!! What fun. I do think there’s a lot to think about in terms of storying and gaming and the hybridity of the two in quests like this. By the end of this particular quest the story had little value or impact, and the game became more significant. I am wondering whether anybody has done a study of the schematic structures of game-narratives?

Anyway, huge thanks to the creator of this quest, Random, and to my riddle-solving questing companion, Dell!

Well, I must say this Mata Hari Quest is very challenging but lots of fun!! Today I enlisted the help of my friend Dell in solving all the clues and puzzles because I had spent an hour looking for the ring the day before to no avail. So I filledDell in, gave him the notecard with the obvious clue on it, and said let’s go! To my absolute amazement and embarrassment, Dell found the ring in under 5 seconds!!! Gah!!!! Here’s a close up shot of the ring (isn’t it just divine - all prims and no textures, imagine the HOURS of building work put into this!!):

This yielded the next clue, a cipher which this time at least Dell and I solved together! This led us to the bracelet:

Now you might think we were going well, and we were til then, but then it took a while for us to solve the next clue (involving a Bannister) and work out how to retrieve what was at the end of that clue: another clue! And this third clue is very difficult. We both spent ages tackling it and can’t decide whether its some sort of anagram or cryptic crossword puzzle or what…. It will lead to the navel ring jewel but so far I am afraid to say my navel is bare….. I wonder how I can get a little hint for this one? *grin* Stay tuned….