Doing the rounds on the interwebs: thisman.org. The site shows a man ‘hundreds of people’ see in their dreams. This is gold, this is the kind of stuff people want to hear about, want to believe and a lot of them even WILL.

But it’s a viral. How do we know? Actually a pretty basic thing gave it away: the domain is registered by Italian marketing agency Guerriglia Marketing. What frustrates me is that this is against some basic stuff. It even sounds too trivial to even be worth mentioning:

don’t register a domain that will be the base of mystery with your agency’s email.

A lot of people will argue with me, will say most people won’t take the effort. Well, sorry but you’re wrong: someone is bound to check this and, trust me, even A LOT will. By putting something like this together, you’re approaching a species that lives and breathes on the net. They will find out and they’ll start spreading the news (they know how to). This will take away all the magic you are creating, the story will lose it’s mystery and doubt and will become worthless for a big part of an important part of your audience: the ambassadors that will be spreading the word.

This isn’t about this being a viral, people don’t mind that. People love a good story and this specific case is the seed of a brilliant one. This is exactly what people are looking for. But if you take away the thrill of the hunt by doing this, what is left?

One thing I will agree on: some people will look until they find out, no matter how much effort you’re putting into keeping it hidden. And I agree, it’s pretty hard to do something like that on the internet without someone finding out eventually. But the key word here is ‘eventually’. When people are already into the story, it won’t matter that much when it comes out during the ride. Because they’re already participating, you’ve got their attention and the willingness to experience what you have in store. But not from step 1, that’s suicide for this kind of project.

A place where people can tell the story about their first love. Whether it’s in audio, video or just plain text, everyone’s invited to share it with the world.

Rather than allowing people to comment on the stories, the creators choose to put up a system where you can express the feeling it invoked. The “best loves” section hence contains a list of stories the people behind the project think worth a spot. Of course, filters are in place to get the ones you want. You can send in your own story here.

This project is produced by a group of student journalists in an interactive design class at the Medill School of Journalism.

The year is 2019. Human kind is facing extinction by 2042 if we don’t act now.

That is what the new game by IFTF (The Institute Of The Future), Superstruct, is all about.

They like to describe it as follows:

Superstruct is the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. By playing the game, you’ll help us chronicle the world of 2019–and imagine how we might solve the problems we’ll face. Because this is about more than just envisioning the future. It’s about making the future, inventing new ways to organize the human race and augment our collective human potential.

Join up and create yourself in the future, as you see yourself in 2019. This future you will have to focus on the superthreaths to mankind: Ravenous, Quarantine, Outlaw, Planet, Power Struggle and Generation Exile. After checking out the introduction movie for each superthreat it’s time to act.

For explaining how the game is played, I once again turn to the FAQ:

Superstruct is played on forums, blogs, videos, wikis, and other familiar online spaces. We show you the world as it might look in 2019. You show us what it’s like to live there. Bring what you know and who you know, and we’ll all figure out how to make 2019 a world we want to live in.

Sounds like a very interesting project of what collaborative storytelling could bring. Those interested in playing the game should start over here. Better hurry up though, the game started the 6th of October and ends the 17th of November. At the end of the game, people over at IFTF (under the name of The Ten Year Forecast team) will start gathering everything the players generated and prepare an official Superstruct Report.

Can’t wait to see that one! But let’s play first, shall we ;)

Penguin Books teamed up with the ARG-wizards from Six To Start to build a 6-week trip to digital and modern storytelling under the name "We Tell Stories". This is about as good as it can get if you ask me :D

They asked six authors to create a story by using new technology. As an example, the first story is made entirely by using Google Maps. The next one, running as you read this, is using blogs and twitter to bring a story in real-time. The site will bring a new story like that every week for six weeks in total.

But there’s more. And I’m not only talking about the weekly prizedraw (UK only) or the competition. No, there is a 7th story. A story about a girl you know that is known for getting lost. I think you know who they’re talking about. To get you started on this one, check the main page and look for something, or rather someone to follow. Someone she followed as well, back in the day.

You can find loads more (and better) at this Flickr Group.

The first trailer (and the other one) bring us to the general site of the game.

If you want to catch up and play along, you can find all the info here. Me likes :)

Quite a fun concept so far: You read a tale but in the meanwhile you are playing some short, little puzzles to get along. Not that hard, but enough fun to keep you going and following the story. In short: Alice is lost and you, the reader/main character appear to be the chosen one to find her. Get on board I’d say, the best is yet to come!

You can call this a success. The latest numbers she had told us there were 7.300 players, which isn’t bad for being the pioneer project it was in Flanders/Belgium. Lode, who I ran in to on Barcamp Brussels, told me 5.000 people played the endgame. Not bad, and these players already knew the outcome of the story before it was broadcasted. I mean, they knew who the murderer of Emma’s father is (which was the big question after all), but they still had to see the show to know the exact ending of course. Actual figures tell us there were 3.000 unique endgame players and 8.500 registered players in total. The site of a href=”http://www.nvantenne.be/”>NV Antenne, one of the main sites in the game, was visited by 50.000 unique visitors, generating over 2 million pageviews. What do you do with this kind of community? One of the challenges was to get this group together and keep it that way. Fortunately for the production crew, this issue was solved for a big part by the rise of the Emma forum, started by the players themselves. The crew kept a watchful eye and communicated openly with the group.
Tine has been looking for a while to give viewers more control over fiction on television:

Ideally, the viewer could control how the story goes. But fiction costs a lot of money, so creating and shooting every possible scenario is impossible.

But with Emma Online they proved that you can get the audience involved for a lot less money. Because the budget wasn’t that big: you can compare it with what was needed if they would’ve added one more episode to the series. And that budget was enough to get a lot of reactions, even very emotional ones.

If you look at some of the comments on the blogs and the forum, you can compare it with children looking at a puppet show: they start screaming the second the wolf appears behind Little Red Riding Hood.

But how about the target audience? By following what happened online, I thought you had 2 groups, very different from each other. The one consisting of very young viewers and the other notably older, whose television set is fixed on the Flemish public broadcast channel. Tine agreed that there was a “zone” of people that don’t watch television, but that they did pick them up as well via this online game. These people are on the net and came in contact with Emma through the net and started downloading and watching the series. Because, indeed, every episode could be downloaded freely, which turned out to be a brilliant move. And this is where the VRT worked on a very unique way: the game brought extra viewers to the series, which is very different from, for example, Heroes, who plugged the “extended experience” in the series by showing an URL on a business card. Of course the series itself hinted to what was going on on the internet, like when Birsen posted a movie of Veli and Emir on her Myspace.

The game worked with two gears. With every puzzle, you had to look for it first. This gave some satisfaction for the die-hards, but on the other side you had a big group of players that wanted to take it easy. They didn’t want to spend a lot of time looking for everything, and just wanted to play the puzzles. That why, after a few days, hints were set up to make it easier for those players to find the puzzles. The crew had to do some balancing exercises here about whether stuff was to easy or to difficult. The advantage was that the balance they found worked for the players.

Tine was going to try to go on holiday now. It was going to feel like rehab to her, because the experience worked very addicting. I told her I was quite jealous of her having had the opportunity to work on such a project. I’ll never forget her response though:

And you should be!

At Eurogamer we can read:

“‘Iris’ is a spiral campaign designed to take gamers on an incredible journey through the Halo Universe,” a spokesperson for Microsoft told us. “Led by an ‘unknown’ hand, users will discover bits of previously unknown information about the Halos, the Flood, the Forerunners, and the true origins behind the Halo trilogy.”

A spiral campaign? Now that’s a new one. And they mean it! What we’ve got so far:Here you can find a mail that has been sent to an xbox mailing list. In cities like London a group was spotted handing out leaflets containing the message “we are not alone”. Hell, the game already made a “victim“.

I wanted to link to a countdown, but it already reached zero. So, have fun.