Book 2: November 2007 Archives

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.

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.

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!"