November 2007 Archives

H.P. Lovecraft wrote more letters than it is easy to imagine, unless of course you live in the Age of Email. Scholars conservatively estimate that he wrote over 100,000 letters in his life: they have about 10,000 preserved, and to publish even those unabridged would take 100 volumes each 400 pages long. About a thousand of them are in print across a few handfulls of volumes. For me, his letters are both his towering artistic achievement, and his towering creative achievement in developing his relationship with the fans he did have, fans who would end up preserving his work for all of us. Lovecraft tries to disavow the power of his letters in a paragraph that sound suspiciously like the way many emailers and bloggers would describe writing today:

"Nobody expects anything of a letter, or judges any man's style by one. Even when I write one by hand I pay no attention to rhetorick, but just sail along at a mile-a-minute pace ... If you were to analyse the language of this letter you would find it shot all to hell with solecisms and bad rhythms."

I can't let that stop me: there seems to be so much power in his letters, an easy elegence of style that smells suspiciously 21st century. In an essay that Lovecraft wrote defending his work "Dagon," for example, he penned a line that I think is among the most revealing glimpses into his soul as an artist: "There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression." Here's the story of one of those "seven persons" and a few of the tidbits from those letters that have shaped my view of Lovecraft.

As a producer, I tend to think of Eldritch Errors as a machine with two modes: burn and coast. When the production is in burn mode during a Book, it costs more to keep Eldritch healthy. When we come into an Interlude, that cost goes down ... but if you coast too long you'll lose too much of your momentum. When Eldritch is in burn mode, I have budget goals for what I want to keep the expenses to each month in addition to GMD Studios' standing team. Budgets can be horribly boring, the mere mechanics of implementing ideas, but they can also be where you find the best "bang for the buck" approaches that make an idea a success.

What follows is intended primarily for other interactive storytellers or those really interested in the mechanics of what makes Eldritch work behind the scenes from a budget perspective as an independent production. It isn't intended as a tutorial or a comprehensive budget model. It is just one producer's notebook about ways to think about how budgets -- of live events, especially -- can become useful tools for both qualitative goal setting and for making small budgets look bigger than they are.

In any unfolding mystery, speculation is at least as important as evidence. Now that I'm working on the new Evidence section for the Eldritch Errors main experience site, capturing that community speculation into pages about individual elements of the story is proving a challenge. After all, I don't want people to read into that speculation any "official status" but, at the same time, want to provide a springboard for new participants into the theories of their peers.

So I'm going to need your help. In the perfect world, we're writing all of each Evidence page except for the "speculation," where we're faithfully curating your various takes on the topics. This would be the place to help us do that, by posting your comments here with references on the best of that speculation. If you're feeling really froggy, start a Sentry Wiki page and submit that as your link!

We've got 28 different topics in 4 categories to take that first swipe at an Encyclopedia of Eldritch Errors, and our plan is to launch a handful of them each week. We might as well let you dump your speculation on the whole pile of them, though, so that you can imagine how they fit together as a set.

Here at Eldritch, we sometimes talk about Lovecraft's fears of what science would eventually uncover and what terrible vistas it would unlock. That really sells the Old Man of Providence terribly short. Lovecraft's stories are very frequently the myth of Pandora updated to the scientific age in horrible new ways, but Lovecraft wasn't an occultist or a mystic. He might have been a social reactionary in some ways, but he was also a futurist and a man of reason if not of letters. Lovecraft saw life as a battle between science and charlatanry.

In fact, the oldest surviving writing of his -- in 1906, at age 16 -- was a scathing letter about an astrologist:

"To the Editor of The Sunday Journal: In the Journal for May 17, I notice among the letters to the editor a set of astrological predictions for 1906. Passing over the fact that astrology is but a pseudo science, not entitled to intelligent consideration, I wish to call attention to a striking inaccuracy in the aforementioned article. Its writer mentions a transit of Mars over the sun in July. Of course, as Mars is a superior planet, or one outside of earth's orbit, it cannot transit over the sun."

Most people think of H.P. Lovecraft as a "weird fiction" horror hack. Neil Gaimen described his prose as "clotty with adjectival froth." More people have probably seen a "Chthulhu for President" bumper sticker than have read any of his actual stories. Much of what you even think of as Lovecraft isn't the Old Man's work -- the Mythos is a composite of hundreds of authors, filmmakers, and game designers over three-quarters of a century, none of them working from anything more than a loose playbook of continuity. Eldritch Errors is an apostrophy now in that long legacy of collective creativity.

Explaining why Lovecraft -- the author, the storyteller, the social critic -- became such a central part of the way I was thinking about the story I wanted to tell is difficult. The issues of computer security and my feelings about the "politics of the day" lead me to think alot about hopelessness and what to do if you feel insignificant in the face of huge forces. That summoned up Lovecraft metaphors from some deep part of my brain, not because I was fascinated with monsters or cults, but because I was fascinated with the way Lovecraft channeled his feelings about that topic into an artistic legacy that continues to be frighteningly modern.

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to try to start trying to explain that. My attempts will likely be messy, perhaps even clotty with adjectival froth, and probably not of much interest to more serious Lovecraft scholars. There's something deep and fascinating in Lovecraft himself that his work is but one wrinkle of, and I'm going to focus much more on Lovecraft the scientific critic, and Lovecraft the correspondant in the age of letter writing, and Lovecraft the Open Sourcer, and Lovecraft the ARG developer.

If you're an Eldritch participant, though, and are trying to figure out if you even want to dive into Lovecraft, you deserve some water wings. Here's my personal suggestions.

On October 3, I received an email from Brian Clark of GMD Studios entitled "A very strange introduction". In the email, Brian excitedly but tenatively pitched to me an offer to act in the tile role in the ARG he was currently writing/producing, Eldritch Errors. He mentioned that had he not read my myspace, which talks at length about what a geek I am, and my blog, which is a dream journal, he would've been more trepidatious about approaching someone in this manner. But am I ever glad that he did!

My first introduction to ARG's came in the form of research that I had done for a podcast [episode 29] that my husband, my friend, and myself put out. The concept was difficult to grasp, at first, mainly due to the fact that our gaming background has always been in roleplaying games. In RPG's, there is a clear line between "character" and "self", or at least clearer. When you are "in game" you are not you, but a character that you have created; and when the game is over, you go back to being you. ARG's are different, in this way, because while people maintain an "in game" and "out of game" understanding, their persona "in game" is really them, the actual person. Granted, in some cases it is an amplified version of themselves, but regardless, it makes the interactions complicated on a whole new level that is not touched upon often, and most times purposefully avoided, in RPG's. There is a whole set of philosophies that I won't even begin to get into that talk about the intricacies of the relationship between character and self, but they are well worth checking out for the interested reader.

Creative players keep us honest:
if we mess up, then they'll be on us!
The Dog of Dreams
wields giggling screams:
just witness their Limerick contest!

We hate to show our cowardice,
but their humor comes sans notice!
We'd join them in play
but they keep us away
with their dreaded Terms of Service.

Can we survive the horrible pun?
Is there escape from what has begun?
Or have they unleashed
some horrible beast?
Damn, you guys are fun.

As the capper on a romp of a chat with participants last night, I couldn't resist kinda-answering some of the questions about Book 3: When will it start? What will it be about? Will you be doing live events in my town finally? The short answer was: "Book 3 is called Red Moon Rising: you already know when the peak of that story is, and the duration will be shorter than Book 1 but longer than Book 2." People who have been participating in the story have been pondering the implications of that for a while.

While we never want to spoil where the story is headed for people, there are certain goals for the series that I also hinted at. I want you to get to meet all of the characters in the story so that they breathe beyond just text -- some of those are so special, that it is worth doing it right rather than doing it quick. I want Book 3 to tie up most of the loose ends dangling from Book 1 into a rough "first trilogy," but we have alot more story planned for you than that. If we can accomplish 75% of that in the first trilogy I'll be satisfied, as long as each Book continues to top the previous Book in every important way (without putting us in a position where we can't top ourselves again in the Book that follows.)

It was just two weekends ago that I traveled to the second highest mountain in West Virginia. Nine friends spent the weekend on the top of the other second highest mountain in West Virginia. Yes, apparently, there are two "second highest mountains" just miles apart from each other in the Alleghenies and much of my weekend was spent looking out over my balcony on one peak across the jewel toned hills to the other and wondering just what my friends were doing.

I also spent time reflecting on Eldritch. It is very much unlike any project that I've worked on before and, to be honest, it's not a project that I ever saw myself a part of. When it comes to "transmedia entertainment", I come from a ludic background (games and play). Eldritch is much more a dramatic narrative. Interactive fiction is such a broad term and I've worked on dozens of projects that have used it but I have never felt as connected to it as I have over the past couple weeks.

Immersive experience designers make a big deal out of the fact their storylines and productions are dynamic or branching or adaptive to the audience's agency. In reality, that's frequently more lip-service than reality, with only minor details of an experience truly responsive to audience involvement. For Scream, we had a four part set of guiding principles:

1. Whatever situation the protagonists find themselves in should feel like the one we intended, however complex the real planning is behind the scenes to make that happen.
2. The diversion of storylines should be intense but brief, in terms of the overall length of the Book.
3. Each of the potential divergent strands should feel equally exciting even if they are different.
4. The Scream, a shared experience, is the climax, not the live event (which isn't a shared experience.)

Tonight at 9 PM EST / 6 PM PST, many of the creators, actors, and participants of Book 2 will gather together for a live online chat and we would love to have you join us - no experience necessary! If it goes over half as well as our first chat, you'll find plenty of friendly banter and loads of information on what it takes to design, develop, and participate in Eldritch Errors.

You can join in the chat using the ARGNet chat, just enter your nickname and use stfeline for the channel. If you'd like more detailed instructions, check out this unfiction thread. For those already familiar with IRC just head on over to irc.chat-solutions.org and join #stfeline.

We hope to see you there, but if you can't make it or would like to revisit the evening, we'll be sure to link to a log of the chat from this post after the fact.

One of Eldritch Error's artistic goals is to cast some light on the hidden costs of life in the global information age, a searchlight cast nearly a century ago by H.P. Lovecraft (who deeply feared the age science might usher in.) When you make the decision to immerse participants in the aptly-named "National Radio Quiet Zone" for Halloween scares, you have the rare opportunity to play with a new kind of boundry: the physical line where the information age simply ends. From an experience design perspective, we looked for places to maximize the unexpected emotional impact of shooting part of the community in tiny capsule around the dark side of moon, waiting for some word on their fate. The results -- the depth and immediacy of the emotions invoked -- surprised us.

We've always been fans of imagining the press coverage you want about a project, and then writing the press release as if it were the article the journalist would write. When you target that really well, journalists will occassionally just reprint your press release verbatim. At the very least, you can sometimes make it irresistible to play along. It might be time to start thinking about something similar for Eldritch Errors, which led us to start dreaming about the follow press release (that we'll probably never actually send):

Cultist lures Internet users to West Virginia wilderness -- strangers narrowly avoid becoming victims, return alive with their tale.

First things are first: a bow in front of the curtain to the stupendously incredible crew behind Book 2 of Eldritch Errors. I've worked with a number of amazing teams on truly insane productions over the last couple of decades, but I don't think I've ever seen a team as fearless or as eager to push the boundries one more notch than this one. That goes doubly for some of the new faces joining our merry band, people who we look forward to playing more with in the future.

"Eldritch Errors: Scream in the Mountains" (September 2007 - November 2007):

J.D. Ashcraft (GMD Studios, producer & actor) / Hidden J.D., logistics & story development
Chris Campbell (GMD Studios, developer & artist) / web, art & prop development
Brian Clark (GMD Studios, creator/producer/writer) / story, Howard Philips, Arthur Lydney, "Exu," Peter Severn & audio development
Andrew Cowan (GMD Studios, technical lead) / web & server programming
Miguel Drake-McLaughlin (actor) / Devon Conrad
Mike Ferraro (GMD Studios, assistant producer) / props, locations & logistics
Jeff Himmelman & "H.C." (actors) / Spukhafte Fernwirkung
Tammy Kearns (GMD Studios, producer) / logistics & story development
Caroline Murphy-Himmelman (actress) / B.A. Saint-Feline
Jim Rhoades (GMD Studios, developer & artist) / web, art, video & music development
Brooke Thompson (creator/producer/writer) / story, B.A. Saint-Feline, Dr. Betty Riley, Sploit and the dreamers, web & art development
Dee Winter (actress) / Hidden Dee

Special thanks to: Greg Agostini; Cass Historic Railroad State Park; the warm people of Pocahontas County, West Virginia; and "Providence" -- each and every last one of you.

When I went all William Castle back in September, I only hoped that our asses could cash the check my mouth was writing. Now that the last echos of action from "Eldritch Errors: Scream in the Mountains" are dying down, the cast and participants starting to pass for normal humans, and the soothing strains of the next interlude are rising ... we imagine we'll all have alot of questions for one another. We're feeling pretty puffed about what we experienced together, offline and on.

As a reminder to new participants, just because an interlude has started doesn't mean the action has stopped entirely ("less narratively intense breathers in between books" was the way we described it last time.) Meanwhile, though, we're blowing the dust off of Schmeldritch tents and making plans for how to describe the wonderful, twisty, intense story you told with us. In the immortal words of the West Virginia investigators: "Puppetmasters are sleeping. Meta only. Bring pie!"