[arg_discuss] Software for managing games/events/player communication

[Kim Plowright]

Hello

I'm having a bit of a poke around trying to find useful bits of
software / cloud applications for folk making ARGlike things.

I've had a look back through the list archives which tends to point to:

Scriptwriting / Storyplanning software:

Word / Excel
Celtx  - http://www.celtx.com/
Scrivener -  http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php
Final Draft -  http://www.finaldraft.com/
FiveSprockets -  http://www.fivesprockets.com/fs-portal/
Storyist -  http://storyist.com/index.html
Novamind -  http://www.novamind.com/
Tinderbox -  http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/
With more listed here; http://www.literatureandlatte.com/links.php

Project Management/Coordination Software:-

Basecamp - http://basecamphq.com/

                                           ProjectPier -
http://www.projectpier.org/
CoMindWork -  http://www.comindwork.com/
OpenAtrium -  http://openatrium.com/
Yammer -  https://www.yammer.com/

These are all great for internal team coordination, and for planning
the story, but there's a piece that seems to be missing from this
suite: running the experience.

Broadly, I think this is 'things which help manage communications with
players and time-sensitive cross-platform content rollout.'

The sort of use cases I'm after are:-
- associating a player with a facebook id, twitter id, mobile number,
and being able to track all of their interactions with the game in one
place.
- Smart use of external APIs to publish once to many places, and
aggregate responses centrally
- being able to send an SMS message to multiple players from a central point
- being able to store story content objects centrally, and manage
player progress through those objects: sending the right
email/SMS/tweet at the right time, from the right character
- cue tracking during live events: team notifications, progress
tracking, content release

I suspect that there are tools out there that do this sort of thing,
but I don't know about them (I'm SURE that the social media marketing
crowd use them all the time!). I've used Cover It Live
http://www.coveritlive.com/ to run a live event in the past, for
instance. I'm fairly sure that someone announced they'd created
something like this here on the list, but my email search foo is
failing me.

So - my questions...

- Does anyone know of any products designed specifically for
transmedia/arg/crossplatform/social storytelling?
- Have you experience of using them? Good? Bad? Indifferent? What were
the catches? What did they do well?
- If you've bodged this kind of thing together from existing tools in
the past, what different things have you used?
- Have you used any tools that helped you manage the realworld-online
bridge successfully?

Hopefully this is useful stuff to share on the list, too!