trendpreneur

I like The Big Bang Theory, identify closely with the characters and setting, and have even lived with real physicists (oh my) so can attest to its truth in various ways. So it was remarkably cool to stumble across @sheldoncooper and friends tweeting about their lives, entirely in-character and entirely well done. I also recently saw that the paragon of schoolboy charm Molesworth had found his way on to the platform (chiz chiz).

This tickles all my spidey-senses about ARGs, improv, the blurring of fiction and reality, and how easy it is to be someone else on the Internet. Still, if toasters and plants and ovens can tweet, why not characters? It’s just a new tool in the arsenal of mixed-media marketing, of sucking people into your world, be it via a miniseries or games or interactive fiction. Old-school (ha!) ARGs tended to have a blog as the main point of contact between the protagonist/’eyes’ of the story, and the audience, precisely because blogs were easy to concoct. Taking that on to social networks is an obvious step, and content-experiments like Dinner_Guest are emerging to challenge what we think is real.

Keeping up a Twitter account in-character probably isn’t too hard in and of itself, but when viewed as part of a larger story — such as an ARG or other interactive fiction arc — I imagine it must be pretty exhausting. It’s basically constant improvisation; to truly seem real, you need to tweet like a real person, which means you can’t just tweet from 9 to 9.30 AM and have that done for the day. I think there’s some crossover here, as well, with brand identity and trust, and maintaining a ‘face’ to a corporate, and co-tweeting consistently… Where does the real user begin and the brand stop? Where do the fictional character’s tastes start reflecting the author’s?

I’m unsurprised to see there’s already been attempts at a Twitter ARG, but this platform has such potential for the form that’s as yet unrealised; there’s this wonderful ready, willing, participatory audience who are aware of each other without any need to set up forums or wikis. Oh yes, there’s definitely oodles of possibility here. I can’t wait to see what happens with it.

I’ve been wrestling with Python all day, so what better excuse than a digression into gaming (again). World of Warcraft’s second expansion is out tonight, so I suppose I’m just putting my WoW Insider hat on a bit early…

Speaking to someone recently about MMOs, he admitted that the fantasy and sci-fi theming of most popular games put him off. “If only it were a bit more realistic…”

My instant counter was that, despite the fantasy setting, a game like WoW is realistic in many ways. At a very basic level, once you’re immersed in the game and playing with a lot of other people, the elves/dwarves/orcs/dragons setting becomes mostly inconsequential. Conversation in-game is mostly about the real world, there are countless nods to popular culture in the game itself, and skills such as guild management, auctioneering and finances are remarkably applicable outside of Azeroth.
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Timo Arnall just gave a really interesting presentation covering many of the issues that surround designing for the web in the world. Online content is increasingly reaching into our lives, whether via iPhone perma-connectivity or twitter SMS spam, yet the ways in which we interact with the web are still restricted. Not only by technology — for example, GPS and GPRS coverage varies by location — but by attention. Like their desktop-chained counterparts, small devices still require 100% of our focus.

Some of the aims behind the ubiquitous web movement are to get people engaging with the world differently — for example creating a ‘network of things’ where everyday objects are connected in new ways with digital content and information. This ranges from RFID stamps to barcodes, but one of the more promising examples given was that of Urban Seeder, where users create individual codes in the forms of beautiful patterns, and ‘plant’ them (including wearing them!).
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