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The chat will be held Tuesday, January 13 at 9:00 PM EST / 6:00 PM PST. You can get to the chat through ARGNet chat, just enter your nickname and select stfeline for the channel. For those familiar with IRC just head on over to irc.chat-solutions.org and join #stfeline.
With the action of Book Three finally concluded, the first order of business is to give my deepest and warmest thanks to the tremendous team that brought it to life. This time, that list of thanks is extraordinarily long, but a few people deserve particular kudos -- notably the awesome story direction and experience design provided by Brooke Thompson and Jan Libby, and the amazingly flexible and unflinching production logistics of Robert Wood. There's so much more to talk about, of course, but it is time for this outstanding cast and crew of Book Three to take their bow: there will be plenty of time of additional meta discussions during the hiatus before the inevitible Book Four.)
"Eldritch Errors: Red Moon Rising" (January 2008 - December 2008):
J.D. Ashcraft (GMD Studios, producer) /prop development
Nova Barlow (actor) / nightmare confessor
Toby Barlow (actor) / himself
Oded Burger (actor) / NYC Forsythe henchman
Alexander Calhoun (actor) / nightmare confessor
Chris Campbell (GMD Studios, developer & artist) / web, art & prop development
Brian Clark (GMD Studios, creator/producer/writer) / story, Peter Severn, Arthur Lydney, nightmare confessor
Ron Cohen (actor) / Exu
Dee Cook (actor) / nightmare confessor
Andrew Cowan (GMD Studios, technical lead) / web & server programming
David Crouse / nightmare confessor
Ian Cyr (actor) / nightmare confessor
Wendy DeLaney (actor) / Dr. Elizabeth Riley
Nicko Demeter (actor) / Sacramento Forsythe representative
Miguel Drake-Mclaughlin (videographer) / Bryce hotel sequences
Mike Ferraro (GMD Studios, assistant producer) / props, locations & logistics
"g3k" (actor) / nightmare confessor
Chad Haefele (actor) / nightmare confessor
Pamela Hedden (actor) / Mrs. Compton
Lenore Henry (actor) / nightmare confessor
Jeff Himmelman (actor) / Spukhafte Fernwirkung
Tammy Kearns (GMD Studios, producer) / logistics
Marie Lamb (actor) / nightmare confessor
Jonny Leahan (GMD Studios, producer & actor) / "The Sculptor," event production
Jan Libby (director/producer/writer) / story, Dr. Elizabeth Riley
Lou (LouMac) Maccarone (actor) / nightmare confessor
Gary Millus (actor) / Bryce Drogher
Brian Murphy / nightmare confessor
Caroline Murphy-Himmelman (actress) / B.A. Saint-Feline
Ron Nickell (actor) / satellite photo mule
Andrea Phillips (actor) / nightmare confessor
Mark Rabinowitz (writer) / Eddie Pope
"Rekidk" (actor) / nightmare confessor
Jim Rhoades (GMD Studios, developer & artist) / web, art, video & audio development
Mark Sanders (actor) / Arthur Lydney
Jamie Simo (actor) / nightmare confessor
Kimberley Tibbert (actor) / nightmare confessor
Brooke Thompson (creator/producer/writer) / story, B.A. Saint-Feline, Sploit and the dreamers, web & art development
Jen Waite (actor) / nightmare confessor
Krystyn Wells (actor) / nightmare confessor
Dee Winter (actor) / Dreamer Dee, nightmare confessor
Robert Wood (GMD Studios, assistant producer & actor) / logistics, Sploit, "Gatekeeper," nightmare confessor
Long time, no schmeldritch ... how the hell are you supposed to tell when we're being quiet on purpose and when it means something is kicking, you ask? When I feel compelled to get a quick laundry list out of details out, I guess. Bad puppetmaster!
Some of you might have heard that the lovely offices of GMD Studios were burgled during the summer -- who'd have thought having walls of glass were a security risk! Most notably, they stole a number of computers (including the one with the list of people to send Book 2 coins too, so we're going to need your help to recollect that information.) Most bizarrely, they stole all the extra Book 1 coins laying around the various rooms -- I can only imagine their disappointment when they tried to pawn them. A pox of crickets on their households!
Even more important, though, is a bit of pre-announcement on the Eldritch 3 Reboot. One of my goals for the Eldritch universe was always to have a structure flexible enough that we could have "guest puppetmasters" conduct entire Books in the sequence, much the way guest directors might helm an episode of an established television series. In this case, that means the best I'll be able to credit myself on this Book is as "series creator" or maybe "executive producer". Who's helming it then, you ask?
Brooke Thompson and Jan Libby. Boy are you guys in for a (trick or) treat. See you in the intermission ...
I'm in the doghouse, and I deserve to be. I'm not sure I'll make the dog collar a permanent fashion accessory (we're pretty casual around here for such elaborate bling), but it is appropriate in the short term. When clients ask me why I'm wearing a dog collar with a tag labeled "Providence," I'll explain to them that some really important people wanted to remind me that my clients are taking me away from what I'm supposed to be doing.
One day, I'll tell you the story about how the Poet snagged the Puppetmaster, the Sculptor and the Cultist up into a mad scientist project, all while Sploit got sucked into some kind of psychological testing project. Lesson: even a deep team bench can be devestated by the realities of people chasing a living (the flip side being, of course, it is so much easier if someone is paying you a wage and telling you it is your job.)
Solutions: an even deeper team bench and a recontemplation of what it means to provision them. Armchair quarterbacking yourself mid-recovery is gauche, though, and I'm already in the Lovecraftian doghouse. Why bring a knife to a rocket propelled grenade launcher fight?
Your outpouring of friendly support is amazing, and has barely felt like stalking at all! I'm humbled by it and don't take any of you for granted. I've missed you too. The pre-production wheels are already in motion of making sure we earned that support, although the proof will be in the pudding.
In Book One, we asked you to show us your creativity. For Book Two, we want to encourage something a bit more in the spirit of H.P. Lovecraft -- we want you to tap the Eldritch storyteller in you and share it with everyone else. As storytellers we believe we can use anything under the Sun to tell our story, and so we believe you can too. No messy self-addressed envelopes this time around, just a quick email to inquiry at this blog's domain with a link to where we can enjoy your EE creation and the address where we should send your participatory commemoration. Those of you who have already been telling stories can count yourself a step ahead of crowd.
We've got a mystery to share with you, too. We don't want to show you the back yet, even though there isn't anything on the back you haven't already experienced. Sometimes, though, what you choose to focus on from a Book makes a detail suddenly more significant. We owe it to you let that discovery come first from inside the narrative rather than from a commemoration of it. You'll have an opportunity early in Book 3 to clarify your understanding of something you already know, and when that happens what's on the back will seem more natural and less like a reveal.
Explaining what Eldritch Errors is presents challenges, both for those of us crafting the experience and for the participants involved in it. It is similar to a number of things: you can talk about how it is both like and unlike an alternate reality game, or how it is both like and unlike live action roleplaying games. Each of those labels works on some level for setting your expectations on the kinds of experiences you might have participating in Eldritch Errors, but they might also suggest things that aren't as true.
Describing what Eldritch Errors is should frankly be the job of the other site; I'm cheating if I have to do it here. However, there is no client whose ultimate needs must drive this production, so the intentions of what we hope to craft stem from the experiments that we want to explore, not from a marketing need. Eldritch Errors didn't appear from a vacuum; it is the continuation of past experiments that also shed a light on the kinds of experiences participants have already had ... and what you might expect from Eldritch Errors in the future.
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.
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:
- 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.
- The diversion of storylines should be intense but brief, in terms of the overall length of the Book.
- Each of the potential divergent strands should feel equally exciting even if they are different.
- The Scream, a shared experience, is the climax, not the live event (which isn't a shared experience.)
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.