WTF?

At SXSW, I sat in a session with some of the brilliant minds in interactive experience creation including: Victoria Ha from Stitch Media, Phil Stuart of Preloaded, Mark Pytlik of Stink Digital and Rick Webb from the Barbarian group. They wasted a good 10 minutes of the panel discussing the classification of games versus experiential video. Is it a game? Is it a video? Stop worrying about how to classify the damn thing and put that time to good use working on the experience. Writer, researcher Martin Sarafian [God Marty, why aren't you blogging yet? At least get on twitter!] and I classified all of this stuff 10 years ago so you would not have to worry.

We Call it Non-Linear Entertainment

A vocal academic came to the microphone and offered her “perspective” on the conversation, arguing with the panel about her thesis in which she wrote 400 pages on the classifications of various mediums. Either she did not do the paper justice or she wasted a lot of time and money at Indiana University (see below for video) because I can sum it up right here. It’s called Non-Linear Entertainment (NLE). The criteria of NLE is that you have some sort of story line that requires the consumer of the video to make some kind of choice. NLE does not usually go from point A to Z in a straight line so that everyone (given 5 senses and taking perspective out of the equation) experiences the exact same content in the same way. The Dark Knight that I saw was the same as the one you saw. That was linear. This is different.

Non-Linear entertainment allows the viewer, or even the reader to make choices. These choices are influential in the way that the content is consumed. NLE includes games, ARGs, MMORPGs, RPGs, experiential videos, even choose your own adventure books. Most times NLE has alternate “plots” or even open-ended outcomes, the exception would be instances where the camera angle can be changed to give a different visual perspective, even if they do not necessarily change the plot. I still call that NLE because the user has an aspect of control. Rick Webb summed up arguing the symantics pretty well:

Non Linear Entertainment Panel at SXSW from the Michael Schneider on Vimeo.

Writing a Matrixed Script is Tough

Eventually we moved onto bigger and better things. What kind of writers do I need? The answer is that you need people who understand writing matrixed scripts. These experiences are time consuming to write, shoot or develop, particularly if you want them to be particularly long. I suggest not attempting to boil the ocean in the short term. Keep your experiences to 60-180 seconds of content and limit the amount of characters because every character adds complexity. Imagine a very simple storyboard beginning, middle and end. Now lets say there are 7 controllable characters in the story and that each requires perspective. Now each character needs a beginning middle and an end.

Thank goodness we finally moved on and Victoria Ha took over and told us about their execution of an event at a comic convention that featured “hot chics” (her words, not mine) with water guns and temporary tattoos approaching nerds at the convention and asking them if they could apply the fake-ink which actually was a series of clues. So here you have a bunch of people walking around the convention with contest clues on their body which caused people to interact both on and offline. I can imagine the conversations: “Hello, I am Milton Scrathmore. I love your Frank Cho, limited edition t-shirt, can I please scan the tattoo on wrist?” Should we call that offline experiential gaming with QR codes? Nah. NLE.