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

[Necole Duncan]

We (Pistolsniffer Industries <http://pistolsniffer.com/>) have used Ning for
all of our games, and it accomplishes most of what you’ve mentioned. If you
would like to take a look at how we use it, we have a game running now for
which we’ve set up a network.

Here is the main website for the game. It leads to the Ning network and a
YouTube channel:

http://larp-hard.com/

Ning is a great way to keep all of the most important information needed for
game play in one place. We use the discussion boards to issue player
challenges, which adds to the game element of the story. LARP Hard is a
murder mystery. Sophia the Soft was killed during a LARP festival when a
mechanical dragon head fell on her. The other LARP Hard founders decided to
expand the group after her death, so the network was created. Players
discovered through a Sticky
Itchers<http://www.youtube.com/user/StickyItchers>video that the death
was not an accident, and they must interact with the
characters (mostly through the Ning, which also has a private messaging
function) to discover which one of the founders did it.

Jane McGonigal’s most recent game, Urgent Evoke<http://www.urgentevoke.com/>,
also used Ning as the center of the game. It’s customizable, so by the time
they were done with it only those familiar with the platform would really
know it for a Ning network. It works very well for a game in which player
interaction is important. It allows them to easily share their own thoughts
and creations with each other and with the characters in the game. One of
the problems we’ve had with the forums is that players don’t always post
their interactions, which excludes the other players from that part of the
experience. However, Ning makes all communication except private messages
available to anyone on the network.

The only problem I see with using Ning is that it is possible that the most
casual lurkers, the largest section of the target audience, might not join
the network. The content of the network is not visible unless a player signs
up, and that might discourage some people.

Hope that helps!

Necole Duncan

On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 10:18 AM, Kim Plowright <kim at mildlydiverting.com>wrote:


> 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!

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