(reposted from personal journal by request)
When working on a big project and trying to come up with cool ways to draw people into your created world, it’s sometimes hard to guess which line to straddle in how much and how fast you disperse your information. You want to make sure any early adopter fans are in on it soon enough that they feel their specialness, but you don’t want to escalate so quickly that you run out of entertaining content too soon or overload yourself.
On the one hand, when you’ve been cooking a big project for a while and it’s time to start manifesting the results, it’s very easy to want to spill everything all at once. “And here’s this cool thing I did, and this one, and this too, and ooh shinyoverhere!” But while you might hook in some people with the elegance or intricacy of your scaffolding, for most people you’ll catch their interest with the thing itself first. Peeling back the draping comes later.
On the other hand, it’s also difficult to get an outside perspective on how subtle or obvious to be when scattering project references that you hope people will put together to find your baby. Something that looks incredibly obvious to you, the people working on a project for the last n months, might not have such readily apparent connections to those encountering the ideas for the first time.
Part of the fun of creating little tidbits for people to find and geek over is watching their reactions as they encounter and interact with your work. For the creators, it can diminish the fun slightly to make carefully balanced hints and clever approaches only to have to go back and slap a big neon blinking glowing pointing finger sign all over those efforts. The reaction enjoyed by someone watching someone else find an in-character email isn’t at all the same when the first person has to ask “so, didja get that email?” (And in that example, you might not even know whether there was a tech trip-up that caused the email in question to not be delivered, or whether it was caught by a diligent spam filter on alert for unrecognizable origins.)
However, if you’re trying something new, and especially in the early stages, sometimes you have to do a little more hand-holding than you might otherwise be inclined to do. This doesn’t mean swing the pendulum all the way into showing everything you’re doing all at once, but does mean that you have to be willing to launch with a simpler and more obvious approach if your well-crafted more devious plans fall short of your goals.
I’m not sure whether these will be of interest to anyone else, but they’re some of the thoughts flowing through my mind as I attempt to patiently wait for people to start noticing our little venture. It’d be nice if I did more posts like these; I should consider that thought.
9 responses so far ↓
1 skzb // Oct 6, 2008 at 3:16 pm
I’ve noticed the same sorts of problems in writing. How do you walk the line between giving the reader so much information he feels you’re treating him like an idiot, and so little that he has no clue what’s going on?
For doing it with an entire project, I have no idea. I imagine a year from now we’ll have a lot better idea of what we should have done or not done. :-)
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3 Jennifer Evans // Oct 6, 2008 at 3:43 pm
It’s so tricky!!!
If you give away too much, they’ll twig too fast, and if you give away not enough, they’ll never get it. I suppose multiple small hints all over the place would be the way to go.
You don’t want to make it easy… but if you lay out hints, and make it fairly clear that to learn more they’ll have to do some searching, when they finally find it all, they’ll feel very gratified and have a boost to their personal self esteem (look at me, I’m so smart, I figured it out.)
I bet that if it works, it would be like writing a thriller or mystery novel: that ‘ah ha’ moment in the reader or audience must be like getting very high, or very… juiced.
And now, the wait. Wait for them to find it. Because once they do, they’ll spread the fun of it all over the place. Which reminds me of something, but I’ll follow up on that in another forum. :D
4 Gailmom // Oct 6, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Always interested to hear your thoughts on creative process….thank you for sharing. :D
5 kit // Oct 7, 2008 at 12:23 am
I had a great time talking to Siun about it tonight, who as you know is one of the first to join the twitter feed. Her reactions were rewarding in telling me we’re getting some of it right — she told me about seeing the invite to join a strange feed, and looking into it, not really understanding what it was, but being intrigued. She told me the project is already encouraging her to consider the idea of play (including roleplay) again, and she is eager to explore deeper into the little world we’ve created through this mysterious little entry point.
The question remains — how do we ensure as many people as possible can have that experience?
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7 Andrew Plotkin // Oct 8, 2008 at 8:42 pm
The lesson of the ARGs is that people, working together, will find *everything*. I really wouldn’t worry about that.
That’s not the same as saying that the maximum number of people will get involved. Your reader/contributor community may wind up being voracious, but hard for newcomers to push into. (I didn’t get into any of the well-known ARGs on day one, and I always wound up looking at them as an outsider, feeling like I could never possibly catch up. This is even true of collaborative RPGs like Nocturne Alley, where the only audience involvement is reading posts and discussing them.)
My first hint of your big-whatever-it-is was this very blog post, which I first saw this afternoon. I immediately did some Googling, and found your AE2008 presentation. That had a big pointer to a web site (yes I’m intentionally being nonspecific here) and I (plus friends) were able to follow it out from there to find the Twitter feed.
So, there: I feel like I have Found It. Of course I have no idea whether I’ve found *all* of it (who says there’s only one Twitter feed?) Plus, I spent several minutes staring at the “gfire music” web site, trying to decide if it was something real or an ARG element! (”ATX” is not *obviously* a real-world locale, to us East Coasters…)
(My further bloggery on this subject — which is spoilery for all the URLs I found — is up at http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2008/10/alternate-reality-fiction.html . Do I get “first outside blog post about the project”? :)
8 Jerry Abbott // Oct 25, 2008 at 7:53 pm
I’m a reader of fantasy, and I agree with Jennifer Evans that hints “all over the place” is the way to go. However, it’s important to avoid contradictions, unless they can be explained as “honest mistakes” made by Good Characters who have incomplete information, or as “lies” told by Bad Characters who hope to deceive the good guys. Decoys and false leads are acceptable, up to a point, as long as there’s a reason for them that works in context of the story.
However, STEVE, there’s something I’d like to know about who was and who wasn’t at Deathgate Falls when Zerika either “leaped into history” or “made her descent.”
In Taltos, Morrolan said that he was there, helping to fend off a bunch of bandits.
But in Viscount, Morrolan was somewhere else at the time (either at or enroute to his ancestral estate). Tazendra was the sorceress at Deathgate falls, in the company of Piro and some others. We have Parfi’s word on the matter.
One of them, however, isn’t telling us the truth. Which of them is correct?
9 skzb // Oct 25, 2008 at 7:55 pm
Jerry @ 8: When Iorich comes out (I’m guessing about a year), if you read carefully, you’ll probably have your answer.
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