Smokescreen, our game about online safety and privacy for Channel 4 Education, has been nominated as a finalist in the Games category for South by Southwest 2010 (SXSW)! We’re enormously proud of our team who worked so hard to create the game, and it’s great to see the game recognised. We’re also particularly pleased that we were placed in the Games category – like a lot of entrants, we applied for several different categories, but we’ve always felt that Smokescreen was a real innovation in games.

Last year, We Tell Stories won the Best Experimental Project and Best of Show at SXSW, so we’re very happy that our work will be featured at this year’s awards as well – which means we have to get working on our entry for 2011!

You hear companies throw around the word ‘passion’ a lot these day. They might be ‘passionate’ about providing great fast-food, or ‘passionate’ about good customer service. Statistically, it’s unlikely that they can all be truly passionate, simply because passion is a rare quality, and it’s not something you can merely conjure up at the press of key.

A person with a passion – whether that’s for music or beekeeping or sailing – isn’t just interested in what they do. It’s not just a hobby. It’s something they must do, something that they think about whether they try to or not. They might have plenty of other interests and hobbies, but they always come back to their passion because they have a drive for it that, ultimately, defies any reason.

But passion on its own isn’t enough; in order to create something lasting and meaningful, it needs to be combined with perseverence. It’s this combination that provides the energy and the stamina for a writer to keep trying, despite rejection after rejection, or a musician to continue practicing, for weeks and months and years. And it’s this combination that we’re looking for now, because Six to Start is growing.

We’re looking for a full-time lead developer who shares out passion for games and storytelling. We want someone who can help us create amazing experiences, both for our clients and for our own original projects. We currently focus on browser-based games and the iPhone, but we’re always eager to work on whatever platform or media that allows us to create the most powerful and most popular experiences.

And we realise that the type of person we’re looking for will be full of their own ideas for games and projects and experiments. We want to help you make those games, because we don’t care about where the ideas for our games come from – we just want to make them a reality.

That’s the really important part – and here’s the standard information:

Our ideal candidate would be:

• Passionate about creating browser-based and iPhone games with great storytelling and world-building
• Eager to build a team and to lead the development effort
• Smart about creating tools that can be used across multiple games
• Interested in working on range of projects including agency work and original games
• Happy to liaise with creative designers and clients, and serve as the technical architect for projects
• Eager to foster a robust development process

Skills

• A wide breadth of development experience; you understand both back-end and front-end development and are comfortable with looking after live, deployed projects
• Solid and expert development skills; able to create prototypes quickly and turn into working games. In other words, you’re a quick learner
• Languages: PHP, CSS/HTML, Java, Python, Perl, C/C++, Javascript
• Relational database design, setup, & optimization (MySQL)
• System administration skills in Unix, Windows, and Mac (desirable)

Compensation

Compensation is dependant on experience, but will be a combination of salary and equity.  We offer a relaxed dress code, plenty of tea and biscuits, and a Group SIPP for employee pensions.

Contact

If you’re interested or want more information, please contact us at joinus@sixtostart.com.

Well. We’re more or less done on Smokescreen now, Adrian having had a de-brief with Alice over at Channel 4 this week. The site is now out of beta, with lots of nice improvements and fixes (along with an optional swear-word filter for our friends in the US and at schools!). We’ll be writing up a full post-mortem of everything we learned during development and its live run in the future, but for now, it’s time to enter it for lots of awards…

Lots of interesting conversations. Some very nice chats with the Greenwich Games Mafia–Duncan Gough and Alexis Kennedy–albeit separately, but with tremendous crossover in the area of storytelling in games. Oh, and lots of looking and pointing at this diagram, from Prospect magazine:

Speaking of Prospect magazine, they also covered Adrian and Philip’s rather awesome Hivemind Challenge.

On the inside, we’re talking lots about the structural problems faced by the Big Ad Agencies and how sometimes what they’re measuring can be working against their long-term interests, as well as those of their clients. Suffice to say that some of our best friends work in agencies, and that we’ve had some very positive experiences as well as those that are less positive.

In other news, Misfits is going like gangbusters. Have you been watching it? It’s on E4, and if this were conventional TV-land, you’d be out of luck, because next Thursday at 10pm, the final episode of series one is being aired. Fortunately, you don’t live in conventional TV-land, you live in land-of-the-also-Internet, which means you can catch up with the entire series on 4OD. We’re really excited about Misfits – it’s a great show, and we’ve been able to do some wonderful things with the characters and the show’s presence in terms of taking it out and off the television screen (or your monitor, if you’re watching on 4OD). To that end, you’ve got one week left to follow Simon, Nathan and Kelly on Twitter…

We’re also kicking off work on a few more development projects, so that’s got our excitement up. Up so much, in fact, that we don’t yet have inconspicuous codenames for them yet, unlike Berg.

Also: more planning. More, sketching, discussion around the kinds of games that we’ll be building next year, along with the perennial attempts to answer the inevitable “Why don’t you just ‘do a Zynga’?” question.

Over the last year, we’ve been working with the guys at FoAM as part of a project called Groworld, which had its first public showing last night. Groworld contains many elements, from games to artwork to food to actual gardens, and it’s all about promoting the “vegetal state of mind.” Not, of course, in the passive sense, but as a way of getting people to reconnect with the idea of slow growth, plants and food.

An environmentally friendly PC at the Groworld Bazaar (not sure about how you water it though!)

We were responsible for two elements – the ‘Gardener’s Web’, and concepts for a Groworld ARG. The Gardener’s Web was envisaged as a way for people to keep track of their plants and gardens online, through a combination of sensors and manual input. There was some inspiring stuff out there, like the plant that Twitters, and so we set to designing it.

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We’ve been working for the past three months on a super-duper top-secret hush hush project which has just gone live today: the Misfits Online Experience. We’re incredibly excited about the show: E4 have a great track record for fantastic drama, and we’ve been big fans of Clerkenwell Film’s work.

I think you’ll like what we’ve put together: a place on E4 to pull together and present information about and behind and around the show in a playful way, plus some games. Read more about the Misfits Online Experience at our case study page, which will be updated as the project rolls out over the next few weeks.

by Adrian and Dan Hon

2010 is going to be a big year for Six to Start – we have a lot of really exciting projects in the pipeline, and they’re some of the coolest and most important ideas we’ve come across. Watch this space!

Since we launched We Tell Stories, we’ve been known for reinventing and championing the written word online, particularly for stories. This doesn’t mean that we disdain other modes of telling stories online – instead, our belief is that any medium, whether it’s words or audio or video, must be tailored to the web in order to provide a really strong and original experience.

With Smokescreen, we’ve added audio to our storytelling palette. Most missions involve some kind of voice acting and sound effects, and in many missions, all dialogue with the user is performed over phone calls (such as Too Much Information, Fake, and Skiving Off). Clearly this is very neat, but other than that, why did we do it?

There are two big reasons: attention and atmosphere.

Attention

Much has been made of our ability to multitask in this brave new digital world; we can play games and instant message friends and talk on the phone and watch TV, all at the same time, and all you need is a laptop. The problem is that it’s not at all clear whether any of that information is being processed properly, so it may not be a good idea to make an experience that requires a massive amount of multitasking, especially if you’re expecting people to actually pay attention to the information (e.g. during a drama or an educational game).

One solution is to make a ’singletasking’ experience – just have single type of media being displayed at any given time (e.g. video, words, platform game). This is fine until you realise that people are very easily distracted, and the moment that your game or story slows down, even just for a second, their attention will start wandering and they’ll either get bored and stop processing the story, or get bored and do something else. Either result is not desirable.

The attention problem is especially important for ARGs, since they often rely heavily on world-building and deep stories. Most ARGs have involved watching a lot of videos or reading a lot of text (usually blog posts), interspersed with the occasional puzzle. Regardless of the quality of the video or text, switching back and forth between different media is frequently jarring and not really a great way to engage someone in a coherent story (the experience reminds me of the ill-named and in my opinion ill-designed ‘vook’ experiment).

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Smokescreen

There’s been a slight hiatus here while I’ve been on holiday, but in the meantime it’s been all go for the Smokescreen team. While I was away, Adrian wrote two behind-the-scenes posts about some of our design process which are really worth reading:

• Why Smokescreen is the Best Game Ever* (*for what it’s trying to achieve) talks about how we tweaked the ARG formula from what we learned through Perplex City, as well as some of the design decisions we made.
• Smokescreen: Why Interaction Matters talks about the why – why the subject matter we’re tackling has been approached through a game

Against all of that, we started to get the first rounds of press for Smokescreen. Here’s some:

• BoingBoing, Smokescreen privacy game uses fun missions to show kids how data on social services can be used against them: “Smokescreen is a privacy game for kids, it runs them through a series of clever online missions that serve to explain how information disclosed on social sites like Facebook can come back and bite you in the ass”
• Wired, Game neatly sidesteps social networking horrors: “I played through the first few [missions] last night, and there’s a distinct possibility I’ll be eagerly awaiting the rest of them as they go live, because although I’m about ten years older than their target audience, it’s so incredibly well made that I want to play it anyway… …And I recommend you do. The live feed of ‘Tweetr’ posts during the nightclub scene is awesome.”
• … and Jay is Games’ review of Smokescreen, where our current score is 4.5/5: “…Through all the different messages and recordings, you really start to get into your character. Any game that makes me feel like a character on Degrassi is worth a shot….”

87 Cool Things

I found out about this at Picnic, but Google Creative Labs presented 87 Cool Things at Advertising Week recently, and We Tell Stories is right there on slide 57!

Parents, politicians, researchers and educators – they all recognise that online privacy is important, and that plenty of people (not just teens) need and want to know more.

Several bodies have been publishing advice about online privacy; there’s the Information Commissioner’s Office, Get Safe Online, WebWise, the police’s Think U Know, and Bebo’s online safety microsite. This advice isn’t just online either – my Student Loans Company letters came with ICO leaflets.

This advice comes in different styles and designs (some good, some bad), but one thing in common is how they present their advice: it’s either text or videos.

Text or Video?

The great thing about text is that you can be extremely clear about what you’re talking about, and it’s comparatively cheap to produce. This means that the quality and density of information in sites like Think U Know (e.g. on social networks) is fairly good. The problem is that a page full of text – even if it’s surrounded by pretty graphics – is not an enticing prospect for most people. It’s not clear who would want to read it, other than the extremely motivated.

On the other hand, videos are much easier and far less demanding for most people to consume, and they’re the favoured option of Bebo’s microsite. But video fails where text succeeds, in the quality and density of information – it’s difficult to address the details and subtleties of online privacy without making a boring or long video. Videos can also be hard to quickly scan or check for precise details.

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* for what it’s trying to achieve

When we began planning Smokescreen back in late 2007, alternate reality games (ARGs) were high on our minds. We’d just finished developing Perplex City, a ‘classic’ ARG that used websites, blogs, emails, podcasts, puzzle cards and live events to tell a story to hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

Perplex City ran for a record 18 months, ending in 2007, and its players were incredibly engaged in the game to the point of flying around the world, writing books, and networking thousands of computers together. It was this engagement that attracted Channel 4 to the possibilities of creating an ARG-like game for education.

The Formula

There have been plenty of other successful ARGs, including The Beast, I Love Bees, and the Lost Experience, and most of them follow a similar formula: they run live for 2-3 months, they’re avowedly social and multiplayer, and they require a relatively high level of commitment in order to participate fully.

This formula works well for games that promote a product or TV show launch, since you naturally want attention to be focused into a narrow period of time, and there’s not a whole lot of point (in terms of product sales, at least) in having someone play a game two years after the product has launched. It also works well for ARGs that can piggyback off a large advertising campaign or a well-known brand, since you’ll start with a larger base of fans who’ll happily commit enough time to play (and we’ve benefitted from this ourselves in some of our games).

Smokescreen is not promoting a product or show – its goal is to illustrate the threats, dangers and opportunities of life online (something that teens are genuinely concerned about), and its lessons will be as applicable in three years time as they are now. We’re not constrained by a narrow product-launch window, but we also don’t have the kind of advertising support that other games might have.

With all this in mind, we went out to design a game that was optimised for that goal and for our circumstances. Very quickly, some major changes in the formula became apparent.

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Smokescreen

It’s been over two years in the making, over fifty (fifty!) people have been involved in producing it, and now it’s finally out: Smokescreen, formerly known by its not-so-secret codename ‘Ministry’, soft-launched yesterday.

Adrian will be writing a lot more about Smokescreen over the next few weeks, but in the meantime, check out the first two missions at www.smokescreengame.com.

On Television

I’ve been at MGEITF – the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival, Thursday through Sunday, so it’s been a working weekend for me. It was my first time at a big TV event – it’s a bit like SXSW for the TV industry, but I still haven’t been to something like any of the MIPs.

One of the things I was asked by someone – straight after the TV’s Got Talent event, hosted by Ant Or Dec with Louis Walsh, Amanda Holden and Jimmy Carr on the judging panel – was whether there were as many in-jokes and insularity in any of the “tech” conferences. Absolutely there are: SXSW’s equivalent to TV’s Got Talent is Anil Dash rocking an improvisational PowerPoint poking fun at TechCrunch and lolcats.

I was on a panel that Matt Locke put together called How to Make Money Online, admirably chaired by Emily Bell. The thing that frustrated me was that the attitude of the television industry is that no one’s making money online, when that’s demonstrably not the case: games are just one area that’s making shedloads of money online. It’s another question whether short or long-form linear video is making, or is going to make money online, though, and whether it’s making money (never mind enough of it) directly from its audience a la iTunes, or through advertising. What really interests me about going to conferences like MGEITF is the chance to meet great creative talent – like Steven Moffat, Russell T Davies, David Simon, Toby Whithouse and Paul Cornell – and persuade them that the internet, not just the web, can let them create far beyond linear video.

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Smokescreen, our game for Channel 4 Education, launches next week. Check out the trailer below:

As ever, we’re another week closer to the launch of Smokescreen this week. Adrian and his team (which, if you’re just counting people in the office, includes Andrew, Claire, Kass, Paul, Marc, Meg, Dom and Lisa) are cracking on; this Tuesday was another regular milestone, with a sprint demo to Alice and the Education team at Channel 4. Oh, and when she’s not busy working on Smokescreen, one of our writers moonlights under the name Tricity Vogue, and some of us are off to see her in Vauxhall this week.

Alongside me and Adrian, Lisa rounds out our management team – she’s head of projects and operations, and mainly working on making sure that Smokescreen is delivered as smoothly as possible to Channel 4. This week, we’ve had another one of our planning meetings with Paul Sturrock. Some of the best advice that we’ve had from our non-exec board members was that between the three of us, we need to make sure that we set aside (and use) time both for the more “boring” management tasks of keeping the company running smoothly, but also that we spend time regularly talking about where we’re heading, and if that’s the right direction or not.

As ever, I have a couple of business development meetings this week, but they’re gradually being pushed aside due to the E4 project I’m working on – of which more news later, hopefully next week. While I’m not throwing creative direction at the E4 project, it’s being wonderfully managed by Kim, assisted by Robin and Roopali, while Phil beavers away on the engineering side, Dean makes headway on our user experience and Jo pops in now and then to drop a creative hand grenade.

The big news this week is the announcement that Adrian and I have made it into 2009’s Broadcast Hot Shots listing, and we’re in some fantastic company. It’s also again brought something we’ve been discussing in strategy meetings into focus for us: for all that Adrian and I are recognised, what can sometimes be forgotten by the outside world is that it’s for work that Six to Start as a company has accomplished, and Six to Start is far more than just me and Adrian. It’s also not scaleable, either, not when all of our clients or partners wants either Adrian or me working on a project, so it’s being looked at carefully when we plan the kinds of hires we want to make, and how we want to grow the company.

At the same time, it’s great exposure: I’m up in Edinburgh for MGEITF – the Media Guardian Edinburgh TV Festival – this week and am speaking on a panel on Friday afternoon, How to Make Money Online. It’s the first time we’ve gone to such a big TV industry event; most of the other conferences we’ve been to so far have been more cross-media focussed, like b.tween or Picnic, or primarily web-focussed, like SXSW Interactive.

Inspired by our friends over at Schulze & Webb (who will be S&W no longer, it appears), we’re aiming to make more use of our painfully neglected blog to keep you up to date on what we’re doing.

In typical startup mode, we’ve been perpetually refining, redrafting and recasting our strategy. It’s been difficult – the work that we’re doing crosses so many areas–entertainment, broadcasting, distribution, publishing, gaming–that, recession or not, are undergoing dramatic upheaval and shift, but it’s because of that shift that we’re excited: there’s a hell of a lot of opportunity for disruption.

The latest version of our business plan, or, in 37 Signals parlance, the latest guess, is aimed at taking us from where we are now to where we want to be in three years time. It’s clear that there’s a way for us to do this in an organic growth fashion – we’ve more or less sustainably grown from three full time employees to eight over the last two years – but we’re also aware that we could be achieving a lot more. Paul Sturrock, in his role as Consultant Exec-In-Residence at Nesta, has been helping us out over the last couple of months, meeting with us roughly every week to help us through this process.

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Our next big game, Smokescreen, is launching next month, but you can check out the beta right now by visiting the site and getting an invitation. We’ve been working on the game since the start of the year (and thinking about it for even longer), so we’re really looking forward to seeing what people think of it. There’s already been some great reaction from people like The Escapist and YPulse, and when the rest of the 13 missions are released, we think there’ll be even more to talk about.

• Smokescreen: Where Paranoia Meets Entertainment (The Escapist)
• YPulse Youth Website Profile: Smokescreen (YPulse)
• Making Games More Than an Afterthought (The Escapist)

We’ll also be talking more about the inspiration behind Smokescreen, and the many design decisions we made during production. It’s a very different type of game – sometimes it feels like an ARG, sometimes it feels like a console game, sometimes it feels like interactive fiction – and our aim has been to mix the best elements of them all into a game that’s incredibly immersive, accessible, rewarding and deep.

Anyway, enough from me – you’ll be able to judge for yourself in just three weeks when the (very varied) missions starting coming out!