This is the part of the story where I start fulfilling some of the promises I made to you ages ago. First, let’s talk about ARGs.

ARGS are “Alternative Reality Games,” a fancy word for multi-channel (Transmedia) storytelling. Hm, there were a lot of fancy words in that last sentence. At its core, an ARG is game where the setting is the real world, think Personal Effects but more expansive. There are often a bunch of clues strewn about, websites to visit, puzzles to solve, and fake phone numbers to call, all for the sake of unlocking the story and finding out what’s going on.

One of the first commercial ARGs was a game called Majestic. It was released by Electronic Arts in 2001 and it was a story of conspiracies and aliens and all sorts of other interesting sci-fi tropes. Players would be able to “chat” with characters in the game on AIM, and they would even receive phone calls and faxes guiding them through the storyline. Unfortunately, it never picked up enough steam and after being stalled post-9/11 it was completely discontinued in 2001.

Since then, there have been a number of ARGS – I Love Bees promoted Halo, Lost Experience was built around the show Lost and Perplex City was an ARG used to drive interested for a collectible card game. Each of these games has met with varying degrees of success, as game designers try to balance the complexity of “real-world” gaming against good storytelling.

Before you get too excited about building your own ARG, I wanted you to read this article, which was written by Dan Hon of Six To Start, a successful developer of ARGs including, “We Tell Stories” an ARG commissioned by Penguin Books to promote some of their up and coming authors.

No single quote does this post justice, what I will say is this: the greatest crime a storyteller can commit is to forget his audience. We had an entire segment on this and what Dan is pointing out is that the reason so few people have heard of ARGs and so many of them die on the vine is because their creators are so wrapped up in the medium that they forget the point.

If you’re still not sure what an ARG is, maybe these will help.

“Jeff Gomez said that what the attendees should understand is that young people watch 15 things at once, and that TV is no longer the sole centre of attention. So it’s necessary not to be worried about TV’s future but realize it’s position has changed. His company takes television and film properties that normally would exist in a silo and expands them to all the possible mediums it can be spread to. People are seeing things from a multi-tasking perspective, he said, and producers need to look at their properties in the same way.”

This quote comes from an article in Techvibes and it’s a strong statement about the progress of storytelling. We’ve touched on Transmedia Storytelling and I promised we would look at it more closely, but this isn’t the time. Right now, I wanted to give you a peek at the future. If you look at television shows like Heroes (which we talked about before) or books like J.C. Hutchins Dark Arts (which we will talk about soon), what you will see are stories that obliterate the boundaries between media, combining the best parts of a variety of different platforms to create something better.

I mentioned quite some time ago that you should focus on the story, not the platform on which you’re telling it and I’d like to extend that by saying – you should open your mind to the idea that in order to tell the story completely, you might need to cross the boundaries between storytelling mediums and bring your audience along for a ride.

By now, you’re probably asking about the video.

What are you looking at and just what does it have to do with cross-media storytelling?

Well, why don’t you find out and come back and tell me about it.

Your hint, 5:15:2:0:4.

Let me introduce you to Transmedia Storytelling, something we will be discussing in a bit more detail later on. For now, it’s a good illustration for what I wanted to convince you of this segment — you shouldn’t feel locked in by your medium. There are as many ways to tell a story as there are stories to tell. Take some time to explore the different methods you could use to convey the information. Maybe video is what you need. Maybe audio would make more sense. How about a powerpoint presentation or a photo gallery? Performance art?

Experiment, try different things, realize that a story is just information delivered across a platform and that you, the storyteller can choose to craft that information to fit the platform of your choice.

Before I forget, since I mentioned performance art meet Jillian McDonald, a performance artist we will be talking about a lot more in a story we’re doing on America’s favorite decomposing slabs of flesh, the Zombie. In the meanwhile, I’ll leave you with a piece she did about Billy Bob Thorton which is a bit more relevant.