Transmedia London 4

Transmedia London - Joe Lidster

On Thursday night I went along to the first Transmedia London of 2012, held in the rarefied surroundings of BAFTA. There were massive gold faces everywhere.

It was a good evening with a good variety of speakers speaking from different perspectives. Here are a few of the notes I scribbled…

Patrick O’Luanaigh

Patrick (@patrickol) is the CEO of nDreams, who I knew as the makers of Lewis Hamilton: Secret Life. They’ve done plenty more besides.

He spoke about their upcoming ‘Project Grid’, which will mix live events, social games and traditional games – cherry-picking what they see as the best elements of each.

He wasn’t keen on the term ‘ARG’ and had some general frustrations with the form – not least an all-too-common tendency not to promote them in order to maintain the pretence that it’s all real.

In the Q&A, Patrick was asked about the Double Fine Kickstarter project that had launched that day. He said he could see his studio going down the same route at some point and talked up the community angle of the thing. He said he liked how social media lets people get in touch with him directly – previously he had felt a bit distant from his games’ players, with all comms going through a marketing department.

A couple of other things he spoke about:

Alex Macmillan & Matt Wieteska

Alex and Matt work at Six to Start. They’re working on Zombies, Run which will be a combined game, story and fitness app.

It was funded via Kickstarter and, until that afternoon, it had been the most successful game on that platform. They had some good insights about that, actually:

  • The community input had been helpful. For instance, a helicopter pilot didn’t want to be annoyed with the game he’d helped to fund, so he sent them instructions for how to refer to helicopters
  • They talked up the benefits of a cunning reward scheme. One of the things they’d offered was the chance to contribute zombie noises to the game. The alternative was to pay for those to be recorded.

During Q&A-time, someone raised the idea of backers on Kickstarter helping to promote the game and increase visibility on the app store, which seems like a good ancillary benefit.

There was also lots of interesting stuff about the process and mechanics of building the game but nothing I could usefully describe here.

Joe Lidster

Joe (@joelidster) is a writer who, amongst other things, has created fictional websites for Doctor Who and Sherlock.

Although he apologised for his lack of web savvy, he served as a good counterpoint to the rest of us. It was also interesting to hear from a specialist rather than someone who turns their hand to a bit of everything.

I did wonder how easy it is for someone to write fictional blogs if they don’t write real ones. However, he’s catering for a very general audience – maybe the trick is to make these things look as that audience might expect them to look.

All told, it was a splendid evening. It was also good to bump into Alyson and Henry (who are currently working on the Apollo 11 app) and Lloyd Davis too.

Published by Chris Unitt

I work at One Further, doing digital projects with cultural organisations. Follow @ChrisUnitt or find me on LinkedIn.