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!

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.

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.

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.

In the end, we had a few false starts, but we came up with a nice site that integrates sensor feeds, Flickr photos, and has the ability to add plants to gardens and so on. It’s a nice example of the sort of thing that’s possible.

We also came up with concepts for an ARG that would bind together all the various elements of Groworld. This was pretty exciting, since the entire point of Groworld was creating an experience that would live both online and in the real world, with information constantly flowing between them. The prospect of making an ARG that would create a story and universe and a real collaborative element was pretty attractive! And so here’s the poster we presented last night:

Also involved in Groworld were the excellent game designers Tale of Tales, responsible for The Path and recently Fatale, and they came up with some very neat 3D worlds that just exuded organic and plant-like ness. Plus there were games-a-plenty, drinks made from urban plants found in Amsterdam, and some interestingly weird plant-ish music!

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.

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).

Grand Theft Auto 4, of all games, offers a good solution. Many missions in GTA4 follow this formula:

1. Get a call from someone who needs criminal work done (e.g. robbing a bank)

2. Drive to pick them up

3. Drive them to their destination (e.g. the bank)

During step 3, your passenger will usually talks your ear off about why they want to rob the bank, what they’re going to do with the money, their beef with someone else (who’ll probably show up to complicate matters) and so on. Now, if this information (aka ‘data dumping’) had been conveyed in between steps 2 and 3 via a cutscene, it would’ve been pretty boring and jarring; and likewise, driving them to their destination in silence might also have been boring.

However, driving and listening at the same time? That’s much more natural and unforced, since you get to enjoy the story while retaining control over the game. GTA4 is not the first game to do this, but it did it particularly well, and it offered a good way to keep the story moving forward while not boring players.

Atmosphere

It’s hardly news to say that good audio can be just as atmospheric and evocative as, well, any other medium. But audio excels in its ability to instantly conjure up the panic in someone’s voice, or the feeling of a busy office, without detracting from someone’s imagination (as video might). In an episodic game like Smokescreen, where we don’t have the benefit of millions of marketing dollars, we need to immerse people in our world straight away, and audio is a brilliant way of doing that.

Audio was used to powerful effect in I Love Bees, where the heart of the story was told through what was effectively a serialised radio drama, and it really demonstrated that ARGs and other online experiences shouldn’t feel shackled to any conventions that dictate realism over entertainment. In Smokescreen, much of the audio comes through phone calls.

Now, the most realistic and coolest way to do this would be to actually call up your phone, and several of Fourth Wall’s games (Eagle Eye: Freefall, 6 Minutes to Midnight, etc) do this. Unfortunately, this is prohibitively expensive for an educational project, particularly in the UK, but it turns out that simulating phone calls through the browser works almost as well in terms of atmosphere (although it does mean we miss out on the very neat possibility of a voice recognition return-path).

We knew that if Smokescreen was going to include audio, it had to be extremely high quality, and so we worked with some of the best in the business, Dirk Maggs and Paul Weir. Dirk and Paul produced much of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy radio series, along with countless other radio productions; they also provided the sound for games including Lego Batman and Pure.

Together with the voice actors, who did a great job in conveying the emotion we needed, the audio in Smokescreen really brings adds to the atmosphere and complements the other media (like text messages and emails) also used in the game.

Real Multimedia

All too often, the term ‘multimedia’ is used for any project that haphazardly throws together audio, images and video. In that regard, you could call almost any website ‘multimedia’, which makes it meaningless.

We believe that a truly multimedia experience is one that combines multiple media to form an original and coherent experience. What’s really exciting is that there is no single correct way to do this; with the internet, we have the ability to mix and merge media to tell stories and provide entertainment in countless ways.

Smokescreen is just one way – it’s not the first, but it’s our contribution, and one that’s seen us take a real step into the possibilities of audio.

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!

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.

But where both approaches fail is that they usually result in very straight-laced and abstract advice, so even if you can convince anyone to read this stuff or watch the videos, it’s questionable whether they learn anything useful or practical. For example, a Bebo video tells you that you’re not anonymous online and can be traced via your IP address, which is all basically true. But what are you supposed to do with this information, other than worry about who might be watching you? There’s no mention of using proxy services, let alone any links to more information.

Another video tells you that everything you post online can be seen by anyone (which isn’t strictly true, but we’ll let it go for now) and ends by saying “Think before you post.” The only thing this video does is scare you. To their credit, some of the Bebo videos do provide practical (Bebo-specific) tips on how to change your privacy settings, but it’s buried deep into the video and says offhandedly ‘You might want to do this to avoid bullying’.

The dangers of abstract advice

There are two dangers in providing overly abstract advice about online privacy.

The first is that most people think “It can never happen to me”, where ‘it’ includes everything from identity theft to bullying to insecure passwords. We’ve all been told many times that our passwords should be long, they shouldn’t be real words or names, and they should include a mixture of numbers and letters – but most people still insist on keeping a single, unsafe password. Why? Because we just don’t think of the serious consequences (e.g. loss of extremely personal data, theft of thousands of pounds, etc). Talking about online privacy in an abstract way doesn’t solve this.

The second danger is that people don’t learn about what practical steps they can take to change their online behaviour. It’s difficult to do this because there are so many different social networks, browsers and tools out there, and they’re always changing. However, you have to make the effort, and if you can at least get people addressing the issue a single time (e.g. changing their privacy settings), they might keep it in mind when they switch sites or browsers.

What’s the solution?

Smokescreen, our new game for Channel 4, addresses both of these dangers. By concentrating on creating a fun game and a compelling story, people engage with our site not just because they want to learn about online security, but because they want to be entertained – and everyone wants to be entertained. It just so happens that players will encounter the real consequences of lax online security through that gameplay, in way that’s woven seamlessly into the story, rather than being shoehorned in.

Of course, you could do a similar thing in a TV show or novel, but where games excel is in their potential for interaction, and their ability to perfectly mimic the online environment. Even a TV show with a great story about online privacy would be hampered by the fact that it couldn’t simulate how social networks actually look and feel – and it certainly couldn’t involve any kind of interaction.

Interaction is incredibly important because it means that players can be directly involved in the gritty details of online security. Need to change your photo privacy settings? We’ll show you how to navigate Facebook’s privacy settings – and then you’ll do it. Concerned about being tracked by IP? We tell you about proxy servers. Mistrustful of information that appears online? You, the player, will be tasked with spreading rumours and lies – and you’ll see how easy it is to do.

Just as there is no better way to teach someone how to play the guitar than actually getting their hands on a guitar, there is no better way to inform and educate people about online security and privacy than through a web-based game.

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.

Replayable

While the 13 missions of Smokescreen are being launched over two months, they are all completely replayable. It doesn’t matter whether you play mission 1 now or in six months time – it’ll still be the same mission, and you won’t have missed a thing. We also allow people to play the missions out of order, so if you want to skip a mission or go back, you can do that.

The benefits of making missions repayable are enormous – you can keep on attracting players for years, rather than confining yourself to a few months. Even now, over a year and a half after the launch of We Tell Stories, we still get thousands of readers every week, and that’s with no marketing or publicity. Given the huge amount of time we spend designing, writing and developing each mission, it’d be incredibly wasteful if we didn’t let people replay the missions.

Making Smokescreen replayable posed a serious technical challenge; it required us to create a way of tracking players’ exact progress through every mission, and to automate every single interaction in the game. Very few ARGs have ever attempted to do this, since it’s not really necessary in short campaigns, but this kind of tracking and automation generates other serious benefits. One of these includes incredibly detailed statistics about how long people spend on different points of the missions, and what they’re finding difficult.

Of course, there are real downsides. The cost of automating the game means we lack the kind of human interaction and serendipity that many players love; we don’t email players individually; we don’t have live events where they can meet actors. Some people consider these things necessary and essential parts of ARGs, and to them, I’d have to concede that Smokescreen is not an ARG – it’s something different.

Single-Player

Smokescreen is an avowedly single-player game. This allows players to proceed at their own pace, so they don’t miss a single part of the game. Everyone gets to be the hero, everyone gets to do all the fun parts of the game (as opposed to watching someone else do them). Still, making Smokescreen single-player was a hard decision to make, since much of the joy of games and ARGs comes from social interaction. Sometimes you don’t care about being the hero, as long as you feel like you’ve helped them.

The problem is that making a repayable ARG-style game that’s also multiplayer is extremely difficult, from both a technical and game-design perspective, and it’s not something we managed here. We’ve made some steps in this direction with our Werewolf 359 experiment, and no doubt we’ll continue on this path.

But for Smokescreen, I know we made the right decision – this is a game that has a very specific goal, and it’s one that’s served by being single-player.

Easier

You need real dedication to play a game where there are no instructions, no feedback, and no hints – never mind any puzzles or codes you might have to solve. Yet that’s what many ARGs are like (including, yes, some of our previous games).

ARGs have gotten away with this because they’re either aimed at people who enjoy solving difficult puzzles (e.g. Perplex City), or fans of a particular movie or TV show who are willing to put up with any amount of difficulty to be a part of the world they love. But this level of difficulty is just not tenable for a game that doesn’t have a ready-made fanbase and isn’t aimed to people who love puzzles.

So, Smokescreen is much easier to play than other ARGs. It has its challenging moments, and there will be some games and puzzles that may need a few plays to beat, but on the whole, it’s pretty straightforward. But I’m not just talking about the difficulty of the game here – I’m talking about the structure that surrounds the game. Say you’re stuck in a game and you can’t figure out what to next; perhaps it’s a really tricky puzzle, or maybe it’s really easy but you’re just overlooking something obvious. What do you do? Usually, you either keep trying until you succeed, or you give up.

There is a third option though – you can look for help. Gamefaqs.com has detailed walkthroughs for hundreds of games, and ARGs usually have player forums where you can get the same thing (I wrote a walkthrough myself for another ARG – it was a rather unwieldy 40,000 words long). These resources will almost always get you through the problem, although it can take a bit of searching and reading – and of course, many people don’t know these resources exist at all.

Smokescreen has an built-in hint system. If you’re ever stuck, you can just click on the ‘Hint’ button, and you’ll find out what you need to do. And if you’ve just forgotten what it is you’re supposed to be doing and don’t want an explicit hint, you can just click on the ‘Objective’ button. Easy.

Nintendo is planning a somewhat similar feature for its new games, called Demo Play. The idea is that if you’re stuck, you can press a button that will simply spirit you past the section you’re having trouble with. Predictably, many purist gamers got very upset about this apparent infantilisation of games. From my point of view – and I suspect, from millions of others who’ve become frustrated with the high difficulty of many games – this is brilliant. There are plenty of games that I’ve enjoyed and poured hours into, only to be forced to give up because they eventually become too difficult. In any case, if you don’t want the help, you don’t need to press the button.

Players are also awarded achievements for completing objectives. Some achievements come naturally as part of playing a mission, and they provide a great reward and encouragement to players; others are much more difficult to attain, and encourage replaying the mission.

A major goal of Smokescreen was to make it as straightforward to play as possible. With a hint and objective system, and the lack of any kind of  registration or instruction screen, we think we’ve made some great strides here.

Faster

I’m always surprised by the number of people I meet who know what an ARG is; I still remember when the term was invented. But I’m not surprised by what most of them go on to say – ‘ARGs sound brilliant, but I don’t have enough time to play them.’ It’s not simply that many ARGs demand hours and weeks of your life, at often inconvenient times. It’s that you are usually given no indication as to what sort of time commitment is required before you begin playing, and so you imagine the worst (e.g. worse than World of Warcraft).

All of the missions in Smokescreen can be completed within 15 minutes. If you’re fast, you finish do them quicker; and if you’re new to games, it’ll take longer, but any given mission will take less time than an short TV show. Once you’ve finished the mission, you’re done – you can proceed on to the next one at your own pace.

So far, so good – but there’s more. A progress bar shows you how far you’ve gotten through the mission, so you can tell if you’re close to the end or not. And each mission is split up into separate tasks, so you can actually leave a mission halfway through and resume it from a checkpoint later on; no tedious retreading. This also means that if you like a particular part of a mission, you can revisit it with ease.

This is not a startling innovation; the ’save’ option has been around in games for decades. It hasn’t been a common feature in ARGs though, probably because it’s technically difficult to implement, but we felt it was well worth the effort in Smokescreen.

Unique

Though Smokescreen has its roots in ARGs, we don’t consider it to be one. It has the approachability that good videogames have (savegames, hints, achievements, etc), combined with the immersion, story, and engagement of a good ARG. Crucially, it simulates the internet. If you want to illustrate the threats, dangers and opportunities of life online, there is no better way than this.

James Grimmelmann, an Associate Professor at New York Law School and a world expert on online security and privacy, said this about Smokescreen:

“An amazing edugame about privacy and security online, presented in the form of overlapping IM windows social network site pages. I can’t begin to list the things it does right. It’s one of the best media literacy projects I’ve ever seen.”

We’re going to write more about some of the design decisions we made for Smokescreen, and a look at some specific missions to show how they work (and there’ll be posts from a whole range of people who created the game, not just me!). We’re also keen on comparing the value of using a game like Smokescreen for education, as opposed to other media such as TV, books, and video games. Watch this space…