six to start

Adrian’s got a great post on his blog about some of the process we went through creating the last story in the current We Tell Stories series, The (Former) General In His Labyrinth:

I love all the stories in We Tell Stories, but I do have favourites. Back when we were planning the six week schedule for the stories, we decided to structure it like an album - start with a bang, and end with a bang.

The first story was The 21 Steps by Charles Cumming. It was the most visually striking of all six stories, using the Google Maps engine, and we knew that it would generate quite a bit of buzz among the tech crowd, so it seemed like a natural choice to open with. It certainly paid off - The 21 Steps has now been read over 150,000 times, which is more than all of Charles Cumming’s book sales put together. I believe he told BBC Radio Scotland that he was now better known for The 21 Steps than his books, which I don’t think is an overstatement. [read more]

We’ve had some fantastic coverage for the work we’re doing with Penguin Books for We Tell Stories. Here’s a quick, brief roundup of some blog entries and articles from everything that’s out there that have caught our eye:

Contagious Magazine - Penguin Tells Stories

Another week, another cool ARG-type story to report on, this latest from perma-cool publishing house Penguin.

The company has teamed up with Six To Start, newly formed by the creators of ongoing ARG Perplex City Dan and Adrian Hon, to launch a project that encourages six top authors to explore how the interactivity, connectivity and immediacy of the internet can enhance and evolve storytelling. Readers who can answer six questions about the stories are in with a shout of winning themselves the entire library of Penguin Classics – that’s 1300 titles (or 25 feet of shelf-space). [more]

Wired - Perplex City Creators Spin New Thriller

Alternate reality game-maker Six to Start, whose co-founders helped create the popular ARG Perplex City, has a new project that’s just as mysterious: The 21 Steps, a thriller that uses Google Maps, of all things, as its storytelling medium.

The 21 Steps tells the story of Rick, a man with a checkered past who finds himself mixed up with a dangerous organization that wants him to smuggle a mysterious vial into Scotland. A blue line traces Rick’s path across satellite images from Google Maps as you work your way through the story by clicking on location markers. [more]

Google Lat-Long Blog - How do you read a map?

Well, on a new Penguin Publishing site, you read it like a book. The text of select stories is literally displayed on maps. The site promises “Six authors. Six stories. Six weeks.” The first is a short story by Charles Cumming entitled “21 Steps,” inspired by the John Buchan novel The 39 Steps. And you can read chapters, snippets, and dialogue on a map of London. The interactive map guides you through the protagonist’s travels, revealing the next chapter of the story as you–and she–reach the destination. Visualizing the connection of the story to its physical setting expands the reader’s perspective and makes the story more palpably real. [more]

News.com - Interactive game mixes classic novels with Web 2.0 mashups

The alternate-reality game genre has a new friend, and a new format, thanks to Penguin Books, the famous British publishing house.

On Tuesday, Penguin and startup Six to Start launched their new ARG, We Tell Stories, a new-style game that its creators say is a hybrid of traditional story-telling, Web 2.0-style mashups, interactive games and classic novels. [more]

USA Today - Tell me a different story

What happens when you mix classic literature, modern writers and alternate reality games? You get We Tell Stories by venerable publisher Penguin. The site mashes up all those ingredients for a six-week experiment in digital fiction. Game designers Six to Start and six top authors re-tell six classic stories over the course of six weeks with one goal: to blend the ‘immediacy, connectivity and interactivity’ of the Net into a new form of storytelling. As the site says, ‘These stories could not have been written 200, 20 or even 2 years ago.’

[more]

Gamasutra - Q&A: Perplex City Creators Craft ‘We Tell Stories’

The milieu of digital games has been significantly extended by the Alternate Reality Game, which was pioneered by titles such as Majestic and The Beast, and uses puzzles and clues hidden in webpages and even real-life to entice readers.

UK ARG startup Six To Start, founded by Dan and Adrian Hon - previously at Mind Candy, where they developed the collectible card-based Perplex City, described as “the world’s first commercially successful ARG” - is now embarking on its first projects as a new company.

[more]

We’re always on the lookout for interesting clients to work with. Do you have a story to tell? Let us know.

We’re really excited to announce the launch of We Tell Stories - an exercise in digital writing that we’ve created in partnership with Penguin Books.

We Tell Stories is Six to Start’s first public project, and it’s something we’re incredibly proud of - we’re also glad to be working with Penguin on this project, who’ve been incredibly helpful and about as good a partner as you could expect - Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher at Penguin jumped into the project with great gusto, and talked a little about the reasons why the project’s interesting to Penguin at a panel at SXSW - you can find notes at Clickable Culture and at New Media Buzz.

We’re producing six stories in total, and releasing one a week - this week’s is The 21 Steps, a thriller written by Charles Cumming and set in Google Maps, and each story will have a different method of presentation.

There’s also a prize draw this week in which you can win signed copies of Charles Cumming’s latest books - just visit http://www.wetellstories.co.uk/prizedraw to enter.

If you see a rabbit somewhere on our website, who knows where it might take you…

Here’s some coverage around the web that we’ll be keeping up to date:

• Gamasutra: Q&A: Perplex City Creators Craft ‘We Tell Stories’
• PSFK: We Tell Stories - Literature Meets Gaming
• Jeremy on the Penguin Blog trailing the project: Stories and Games

Here’s the press release in full:

Penguin UK is today launching its most ambitious digital writing project to date. In collaboration with fêted alternate reality game designers Six to Start Penguin has challenged some of its top authors to create new forms of story – designed specially for the internet.

Over six weeks writers including Booker-shortlisted Mohsin Hamid, popular teen fiction author Kevin Brooks, prize-winning Naomi Alderman and bestselling thriller author Nicci French will be pushing the envelope and creating tales that take full advantage of the immediacy, connectivity and interactivity that is now possible. These stories could not have been written 200, 20 or even 2 years ago. We Tell Stories begins with Charles Cumming’s Google Maps adventure. ‘He was the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time’. Now you can follow his adventures across the nation and across the world, step by step.

But somewhere on the internet is a seventh story, a mysterious tale involving a vaguely familiar girl called Alice. Readers who follow this story will discover clues that will shape Alice’s journey and help her on her way. These clues will appear online and in the real world and will drive readers to the other six stories where they will have the chance to win some wonderful prizes, including The Penguin Complete Classics Library, over £13,000 worth of the greatest books ever written.

Expectation is already high – the gaming community has been awaiting the first project from SixtoStart and the next digital publishing initiative from Penguin whose last project, the wikinovel (http://amillionpenguins.com) generated 85,000 unique visitors in five weeks, arriving at a rate of 10 per second at one point. We Tell Stories will be widely promoted, through traditional and new media channels and will be a significant event in publishing, gaming and new media communities.

We Tell Stories will create new fiction and offer a unique, immersive and innovative experience to readers everywhere.

For more information contact Jeremy Ettinghausen at Penguin Books or Adrian Hon at SixtoStart

Safely arrived at Austin after the journey from hell (thank you, weather patterns, for disrupting flights out of Dallas Fort Worth), so just a quick reminder that I’m now on two panels:

• Cross-Media Cross-Pollination: Mashing Up Video Games and ARGs with Tony Walsh of Phantom Compass and Dee Cooke at 3:30pm on Saturday 8th March at room 8; and
• Stories, Games and Your Brand with Rachel Clarke, Jeremy Ettinghausen, Roo Reynolds and Dan Heaf, at 2:00pm on Sunday 9th March at room 8.

I’m also on Twitter as danhon, but you’ll have to add me to find out what I’m up to.

Adrian Hon is one of the world’s leading alternate reality game designers and the Chief Creative Officer at Six to Start. Previously, Adrian was Director of Play at Mind Candy, where he designed and produced Perplex City, the world’s first commercially successful ARG. Adrian is also the founder of the innovative Let’s Change the Game competition, set up in collaboration with Cancer Research UK, the world’s largest independent cancer research charity.

Before becoming a games designer, Adrian studied neuroscience at Cambridge University and Oxford University, spent two weeks in a Mars simulation habitat in the Utah desert, and created a NASA award-winning Astrobiology educational website. Adrian also writes a weblog at mssv.net, and favours the Pyro when it comes to Team Fortress 2.

Mink ette joined Six to Start in January as Production Assistant or Assistant Producer depending on who she is talking to. Before this she had several interesting escapades, some of which involved making ARGs with the mysterious Coney, being a scenographer and ‘Mask Mistress’ for Punchdrunk and invading the London Underground with her site-specific live-action radio-play.

In her spare time she attempts to design street games and helps organise the Hide and Seek Pervasive Games Festival.

Mink may or may not be fictional.

Here’s James, one of our game designers:

James Wallis jumped at the chance to join Six to Start, since ARGs are one of the few areas of games design, or for that matter media, he’s not worked in yet. James is the former founder and director of Hogshead Publishing, where among other things he set up the journal of game design and criticism Interactive Fantasy, and won an Origins Award for his work on Nobilis. He’s been a TV presenter, managing editor of Bizarre magazine, a Sunday Times journalist, a movie publicist, and has written thirteen books. His card-game Once Upon a Time (Atlas/Trident, 1995) has sold a quarter of a million copies, and his rather silly RPG The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen has been published by MIT Press. Yes, that MIT Press.

At Six to Start he designs games, keeps a Sauron-like eye on product quality, holds the office high-score for Rez, and doesn’t update his blog (www.spaaace.com/cope) on company time.

Not really. It’s our Mac Pro workgroup server, running OS X Server 10.5.2. We’ve had quite a bit of fun with it, if by fun you mean “something involving two 802.11n draft wireless routers getting up and falling down, DHCP shenanigans, being confused about Standard and Workgroup servers, learning about Open Directory in, quite frankly, a bass-ackward way, but ultimately quite impressed at the level of integration”.

Ben and I have spent the most time out of everyone playing with it, so here’s the bits we liked:

• The “Standard” server, with the quite ludicrously easy to use Server Preferences
• Time Machine backups to a server AFP volume. Nice!

And here’s the bits we didn’t:

• The “Workgroup” and “Advanced” servers which are so far removed from the Standard server that you actually have to sit down and read the manual(s) to work out what to do.
• The obsessive hold OS X has to the Directory Server, so much so that Ben’s Macbook Pro won’t allow logins unless it’s in the office (not much use on a laptop!)

Now, we know OS X Server is a Powerful Tool and Not a Toy, but really, it looks quite lickable and, for a few minutes, does a good job of pretending to be (relatively) easy to administer. We’re not sure that the problems we’re having (multiple 10.5.2 clients not being able to find, well, anything over Bonjour when using 802.11n) are related to the server or just 802.11n being quite crap in draft. It’s hard to diagnose without changing everyone over to being a wired client, which just isn’t particularly fun at all. It’s getting to the point where we’re going to have to Get Someone In to have a poke at it, because although it’s quite working, it’s not yet working perfectly, and for things like setting up VPN access (so someone can tunnel in and use RDP to a VMWare XP image - the only explanation I’m going to give there is “Sage Line 50″) we’d much rather someone who knew what they were doing were, well, doing it.

Ben Burry joined Six to Start in December of 2007 as a Senior Developer after fueling his interest in gaming and interactive narratives at Mind Candy. He spends a good deal of his time elbows-deep in code, explaining why it would be nice just once to not push the boundaries of what’s possible and discussing technical issues with Moishe.

Beautiful Katamari for the 360 arrived yesterday in advance of its street date. There are some irritating niggles: there’s no autosave after every level, and for a console that’s got (for most people) a spanking hard drive attached to it, it really does take a while to save and load games. A surprisingly long time, in fact: one that makes you feel as if the game’s crashed.

On the other hand, with a big enough screen, and sitting close enough to it (read: too close), it’s possible to get very quickly seasick and headachey, which is the main impression I walked (nay, stumbled) away with after about half an hour’s worth of play. Everyone else managed to have more fun with it, though, but we were disappointed that there didn’t appear to be a quickstart for split-screen co-op/versus play.

Oh well. Time to find a chipped PS2…

We celebrated Kass’s birthday this week, but we haven’t really properly introduced her to anyone yet. Here she is:

Kass Schmitt joined Six to Start in February 2008 after nearly fiveyears at the BBC doing things like nursing Celebdaq, engineering elusive pop sensation Jamie Kane and rescuing Leeds from forecasts of 188°C at the Weather Centre. Kass is a technical project manager at Six to Start which means that she spends most of her time figuring out how to deliver amazing things on time and under budget or, when no one’s looking, reminiscing about life on the high seas. Kass can currently be found at her desk practicing knots.

Kass, our new technical project manager, joined Six to Start earlier this month from the Beeb, where she was a senior developer at the Weather Centre, but more interestingly to us, used to work at Interactive Drama and Entertainment - where she was a senior software engineer on Jamie Kane. That’s fantastic for us, because if there’s one thing we (I mean Adrian) like to do, it’s force our engineers to accomplish at least seven hitherto impossible things on an even more impossible timeline before breakfast, and having a cracking TPM is one part of making that happen.

Anyway, it was Kass’s birthday this week, and you have no idea how hard it is trying to find a birthday cake this close to Mother’s Day.

PSFK introduced The Purple List earlier this month. In their own words:

At PSFK, we’re trying to find more ways to spread inspiration to help companies change to make things better. One way is to help them find the right people in the right place for the right job.

Introducing The Purple List - a network of 100 of our trusted contacts. The Purple List is a community of trends and innovation professionals who can help you with projects big and small, full time or ad-hoc.

There’s no longer a need to find inspiration from the other side of the world by hiring a big local agency - simply contact a member of The Purple List.

One of the first projects we helped PSFK out on was having Amanda and Christine bring over a couple of representatives from Apple - Harriet DeVoy, Creative Director for Apple Europe, and Danika Cleary Lasuzk, one of Apple Graphic Design Planners over to our new offices so we could talk a little about what we do, ARGs, big games, and how fantastic the iPhone could be as an ARG platform (and we’re not the only ones to think so, either - GigaOm thinks Perplex City would’ve been fantastic on the iPhone). For all that Apple do, though, they’re tremendously conservative in their communications (not for want of people like Harriet and Danika trying, though) but it was a great opportunity being able to get them excited about the ways in which gaming and ARGs in particular help connect brands with audiences.

We’re really, really proud to have been invited to join PSFK’s Purple List European network - we’re in tremendous company and it’s great recognition from PSFK to be part of their network. Thanks, Piers!

I’m speaking at SXSW Interactive this year on a panel co-organised by myself and Rachel Clarke - Stories, Games and Your Brand. The esteemed Roo Reynolds and Jeremy Ettinghausen (who’s leading the Penguin Books side of a project we’re doing) will be joining us, and we’ll be covering such diverse topics as:

• advertising and gaming
• soap operas
• virtual worlds
• storytelling and engaging experiences
• brands engaging in entertainment
• gaming versus advergaming

and a whole host more.

As Rachel points out, we’re a very English panel (it’s like an invasion), so here are some suggestions for why you might want to come along:

• no one can resist that English accent, never mind four of them
• we’re scheduled against Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook
• all the cool kids have moved on from Facebook already
• we’re making an amusing bet about how many times we can not mention Facebook seeing as we’re scheduled against Facebook. Facebook.

It’ll be fun - come see us - Sunday March 9, 2pm, Room 8.

We’re really excited about a project we’ve been working on for the last couple of months with Jeremy Ettinghausen and Sam Binnie over at Penguin.

Story, alongside gameplay, is at the heart of what we do, which is why teaming up with a publisher with such rich history and commitment to storytelling has been a great opportunity for us, and an opportunity to do something a little different from what we normally do. We’re conscious that the only prior example of our work has been Perplex City, which is markedly different from the projects we’re working on now.

While Perplex City was very game and puzzle heavy - or at least games and puzzles had equal weight to the story we produced, our work with Penguin is all about telling a great story and exploring new ways of telling those stories, ways that wouldn’t be possible without the internet. This doesn’t mean there’s going to be no gameplay in the Pengrin project…

There’s not a lot more that we can say at the moment, apart from give you a glimpse of part of our planning process:

We’re launching in March, so if you’d like to know when everything goes live, please sign up.

Update: Some people think we’re working with Eric Harshbarger on this project. Sorry, but we’re not. Eric’s fantastic and while we thoroughly enjoyed working with him at Mind Candy, we’re not currently working with him on anything. We do look forward to having the chance to work with him in the future, though (Hi, Eric!).