I think there’s definitely some risk in creating a story that’s spread across a combination of different platforms and mediums. It seems like the main danger is creating a story that is diluted and over-complicated by an ineffective segmentation of its narrative. Through the production of ‘The Barlow Enquiry’ I’ve begun to understand how one may go about creating a…
[WATCH]: ‘Overwatch Short|Recall’
I kind of dropped the ball on my ‘weekly’ story-sharing posts, but I’m here now to share one last ‘story-of-the-week’. Overwatch is Blizzard’s latest game, and before I talk about the relevance of the embedded video I’d just like to point out that it was released at EXACTLY the wrong time – right in the middle of final assessments. wtf Blizzard.…
Story Lab [part 20]: Writing as Atticus
I’ve unofficially taken on the role of ‘being Atticus’. Once I’d written out his first few ‘Investigation Updates’ we decided that it’d be best if I just continued to focus on all of Atticus’ future blog & Facebook updates (for the sake of continuity and a consistent writing style). Writing Atticus’ ‘Investigation Updates’ quickly became my most complex role in the…
Story Lab [part 19]: Interactivity, Agency & Player Objectives
One of the main aspects of our project is the ‘Player Objectives’ system, and it’s probably the one that we’ve experimented with and adjusted the most. As our understanding of the project developed, the objectives system continuously evolved, and we’ve only recently decided how the objectives will function within the final product. Instead of creating a complex network of objectives,…
Story Lab [part 18]: Platforming
Controlling the scope of this project is something that we definitely have to keep focusing on. With only a few weeks to go, I think it’s really important to ensure that we don’t become flooded with content to produce and platforms to manage. We recently decided that it could be worthwhile reducing The Barlow Enquiry’s social media presence for the…
Story Lab [part 17]: Player Objectives
Recently I’ve been working on figuring out the interactive aspects of our project. Over the weekend I realised that while we’d been talking a lot about the audience experience, we hadn’t really asked ourselves: ‘what are we going to give the audience to do?’. The interactive component to our project is definitely key – and so i started brainstorming ideas…
Story Lab [part 16]: Refinement & Re-evaluation
This week we spent a lot of time refining our ideas and discussing many of the problems that we had begun to see popping up within our initial concepts. In our Wednesday session, we began to gain a better sense of what needed ‘fixing’ through a process of asking questions and identifying gaps in our planning and writing. While this…
Story Lab [part 15]: Structure & Design
We’ve recently been working on the structure and design of The Barlow Enquiry – sorting out the features of the Blog and the ways through which we plan to tell our story. Bec and I have been trying to organise the Blog’s features in order to provide both a streamlined and player-friendly experience. We’ve begun working on developing the ‘flow’…
Story Lab [part 14]: the PITCH feedback
It was great to receive feedback and suggestions from Ben and Leena after we gave our pitch for ‘The Barlow Enquiry’. Before the pitch session there were still aspects of our project which we weren’t sure about, however after hearing Ben and Leena’s thoughts I feel like we’re ready to fill in the gaps and keep developing our interactive narrative. I don’t think…
Story Lab [part 13]: Project B3 – Initial Reflection
Our transmedia project, ‘The Barlow Enquiry’ is an interactive transmedia story which will utilise elements of the ARG (Alternate Reality Game) platform to engage and involve audiences in a detailed crime-mystery narrative. Our story follows Atticus Barlow, a man in his 20s who discovers that one of his great ancestors was murdered and that his killer was never found. Atticus becomes…