[arg_discuss] Software for managing games/events/playercommunication

[Christy Dena]

Hello Kim,

There are a few projects in development for what you're talking about, and
some proprietary technologies that are licensed out. I've been keeping a
list, and Jeff Watson has too, here:
http://www.christydena.com/online-essays/cross-media-management-technologies
/.

Best,
Christy


-----Original Message-----
From: arg_discuss-bounces at igda.org [mailto:arg_discuss-bounces at igda.org] On
Behalf Of Kim Plowright
Sent: Monday, 8 November 2010 02:19
To: IGDA ARG Sig
Subject: [arg_discuss] Software for managing
games/events/playercommunication

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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