This is a long overdue post about my adventures at Wyrd Con 2 in 2011.

If any of this sounds interesting, be sure to contact Lauren Scime (lauren at witchfactory dot com) about running a LARP, organizing a workshop, or speaking on a panel at Tri Wryd this June!

I had the pleasure of slipping down to Costa Mesa, CA for part of Wyrd Con 2 on June 10th and 11th, 2011. It was my first time at a convention focused on live action role-playing (LARP), and while there was plenty of LARPing to be had, to say Wyrd Con was just an annual LARP convention is a grave disservice. Wyrd Con is much more than what you typically think of when you hear “LARP.”

In addition to a spectrum of widely varying LARPs, attendees also got to enjoy:

• panels
• workshops
• film screenings
• a dedicated space for merchandise

I was humbled to be asked to co-moderate the “Interactive Storytelling” panel with Kirsten Carthew, and I was a panelist on the “Transmedia and LARP” panel moderated by Angelique Toschi and featuring Lauren Scime, Alistair Jeffs, and Bret Shefter (all members of Transmedia L.A.).

I also checked out a few workshops on making original costume/clothing, crafting weapons for boffing combat, and even basic boffing techniques (not as sexy as it sounds but a lot more fun than you think).

The highlight for me was running the “Spirits of Kita-mura” LARP, an experience set in Runes of Gallidon (a shared world of fiction, art, and more, with its own history and mythos).

It was the first LARP I had ever designed, and my LARPing experience was (at that time) limited to traditional table-top role-playing in the form of D&D. I was nervous about a great many things.

Had I designed enjoyable/playable characters? Was the conceit of the LARP too simplistic? Had I designed the overall experience to be too complex? Would I have enough players to effect a satisfying experience for everyone? Had I crafted the short story setup and character backgrounds in a way that would encourage the best possible narrative ending?

Compounding my concerns was the fact that I purposely used Wyrd Con as a chance to try an experiment. Most LARPs are stand-alone experiences, where the story begins and ends in the LARP itself. In most cases, there are no story elements or experiences for players available before or after the LARP. This makes it somewhat easier for designers, since they are operating within concrete boundaries and are focused only on what happens within the LARP experience itself.

I wanted to see if I could have the LARP begin well before Wyrd Con and continue after the convention was over by using a persistent world setting as the backdrop for the LARP and having the story start before Wyrd Con and continue after the LARP.

So I wrote a short story set in Gallidon and published it on the Runes of Gallidon website. The story introduced some of the main characters and lead up to the opening of the LARP, attempting to make the narrative transition for players a bit more seamless.

The “Spirits of Kita-mura” LARP allowed players to collaboratively and improvisationally tell the next part of the story, which they did wonderfully. Based on the feedback, the players seemed to really enjoy themselves, which was a huge relief.

The next task is for me to take all of the content from the LARP and bring the narrative full-circle back to the Gallidon site.

This “bookend” approach proved to be the most challenging aspect to designing the LARP, as I constantly asked myself not just, “will this be fun for the players?” but also, “if I design it this way, will I be able to easily bring it back into the Gallidon world to close the narrative loop?” Indeed, it’s months later, and I still haven’t decided how to bring the story full-circle. Fictionalize the LARP (if so, how much gets included and how much “extra” story do I add)? Edit the audio and post it? Now that the LARP is behind me, I’m reconsidering some of my earlier ideas.

However, I did put together a quick video of highlights from the little bit of time I was at Wyrd Con:

And as preparation gets underway for Tri-Wyrd later this year, anyone who missed Wyrd Con 2 has another chance to check out a bunch of different LARPs, panels, and workshops, as well as meet some very cool and creative folks!

“How I spent my weekend”

I spent last weekend producing a LARP experience for the Steampunk Symposium, a steampunk-themed convention held on the Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA. My contribution ended up being a lot of narrative work and experience design, plus a minor role as an NPC (David Bainbridge of Sotheby’s).

The Queen Mary

For details of the LARP, Lauren Scime (who played one of the lead NPCs) has provided a great summary of the LARP, Angelique Toschi published a lovely collection of photos, and April Arrglington (Transmedia L.A.’s Content Curation Director) provided more coverage of the event.

This was my second time behind the design table of a LARP (the first was a Runes of Gallidon-based LARP I ran for Wyrd Con 2), and it was unique in a couple of ways.

First, it was layered on top of the Steampunk Symposium, so we tried to create intersections between our LARP and the overall theme of the convention, which was that Victoria II, Queen of Steam, was taking her annual birthday celebration cruise. I wanted to make sure anyone playing in our LARP could easily carry the story with them into other LARPs being run at the convention without disrupting the other experiences. This meant crafting our LARP and its NPCs to be coherent even when its participants stepped outside the LARP to pursue other activities (e.g., shopping at the dealer’s area, attending performances, dancing at the masquerade ball, etc.). The upside of this was that players and NPCs could also recruit new players for our NPC and do so totally in character.

For me, the coolest part of our LARP was having the Queen of Steam herself, accompanied by her entire entourage, knight two of the players in the LARP for services deemed worthy of the crown’s attention. The icing on the cake was then having one of the knighted players play “Happy Birthday” for the Queen via his musical hat (a hat with a music box that would “play” strips of hole-punched paper, much like a player piano).

Player showing Queen of Steam his musical hat

Playing "Happy Birthday" for the Queen of Steam

This kind of unplanned, serendipitous encounter is a perfect example of why LARPing can be so rewarding.That player would likely never have had the chance to play his tribute to the Queen in character (she was only available for limited times during the convention, and most of that was filled with pre-scheduled obligations), and being able to show of his creativity in character was simply a fabulous way to wrap up the LARP.

The second difference between this LARP and my Runes of Gallidon one is that this LARP spanned three days, which included three set/scheduled events plus activities for players to pursue in-between the events if they liked. Instead of trying to fill a two-hour timeslot, we had to fill multiple-hour time slots Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday, plus string them together in a way that allowed us to accordion the rollout of the story based on how fast (or slowly) players were moving through it.

Lastly, I was working with a team of creatives instead of going solo. We had a diverse group of talent to draw from, and roles were assigned based on skillset, interest, and availability: producing or procuring props, handling social media components, playing NPC characters, writing the story, designing the experience, etc. This allowed us to do some pretty cool things a one-person show could never have achieved. A bonus was that many of the team members I already knew through Transmedia L.A.: Aaron Vanek, Lauren Scime, Phil Gable, and Angelique Toschi.

As I suspected, working on this LARP was almost entirely a different experience from the Runes of Gallidon one, but it was just as rewarding.

Aside from having a blast, I learned first-hand some of the challenges (and solutions!) to designing a multi-day, multi-event experience that ran parallel and intersected with another persistent experience. I’m still getting my head around LARPs, but I’m finding them to be great sandboxes for playing with narrative, testing design ideas, and exploring the possibilities of collaborative, improvisational storytelling. And what I’m learning from LARPs is influencing my ideas about telling stories in other formats and mediums.

Stripped down, LARPs can be fairly short (less than a half-hour), they don’t require props of any kind, and you can focus just on story if you have limited time/resources. If you’re at all interested in playing with story, I highly recommend trying your hand at designing a LARP if you have the time!

before reading my response below, and be sure to check out

Carrie Young’s expanded thoughts on the topic!

Earlier this year at the StoryWorld Conference, Andrea Phillips approached me and proclaimed, “You know, I really, really, really hate the term, ‘value co-creation!’” It was not the first time a female had approached me unsolicited and delivered a scathing remark, but it was the first time anyone had directly attacked this phrase.

A phrase I’ve taken to use a lot in the last two years (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

I know Andrea and her work. I like her, and I respect her creative instincts. Hearing her trash a term I’ve embraced and promoted for two years was a bit of a shock. Bruised my ego a bit, even. Why did she hate the phrase so much?

I replied, “Well, you know, I’m really, really, really going to keep using it, but I’d love to know why you think I shouldn’t!”

We had a quick chat about our different opinions on the term but ran out of time. Then I suggested we take the conversation to the streets (and by streets, I mean the Interwebz), as I thought it would actually be a constructive experience worth sharing with others. Might even encourage other creatives to weigh in.

As I told Andrea, I’m working with the best models and vocabulary I can, and I’ve spent a long time searching for the just the right phrase and just the right words (as proof of how far I’ve come I submit the following abandoned phrases: “renewable entertainment properties,” “collaborative property model,” and “evergreen entertainment models”). I don’t claim “value co-creation” is ideal in every case, but it’s the best I’ve come across so far.

Andrea was kind enough to take up my challenge, and she wrote an eloquent, thoughtful post about her objections to the term.

I still disagree with her conclusions, but she raises valid points about the issues surrounding frameworks where fans, UGC, and money mix. In fact, I acknowledged this thorny situation in a post earlier this year at Shared Story Worlds.

So where, precisely, do we disagree?

Andrea’s post takes aim at two things. The first is the phrase, “value co-creation,” and the second is the question of whether you can allow fans to profit from their UGC without creating an unpleasant community culture.

First, the phrase.

Andrea says value co-creation “glosses over what it actually is, and worse…misleadingly implies an equitable balance of power where there is none.” She suggests either of the following as better alternatives:

• Fan-curated profit-sharing
• Creator-curated audience collaboration

I disagree that the first option accurately describes what I mean when I say “value co-creation,” as it implies fans are doing all of the curation, which is not the case. Furthermore, it explicitly includes the phrase profit-sharing, which is not a requirement for all value co-creation scenarios (some do not involve money changing hands or are non-commercial – see my post here).

I reject the second one because it’s clunky and not much more accurate. As I read it, “creator-curated audience collaboration” doesn’t explain the role the creative has, and it doesn’t differentiate whether the audience is collaborating together or with the creative. Besides, others have been using value co-creation for a while (C.K. Prahalad wrote an entire book on the topic), and it nicely conveys what I mean when I use the term. I could have called it “super awesome audience play time” and defined it how I preferred, but I thought it best to build on an existing term.

As for value co-creation implying an equitable balance of power, well, that’s Andrea’s opinion, not an objective fact.

“Co” doesn’t mean or imply “equal.” Together, jointly, mutually – yes. But it doesn’t imply equal (if it did, why would we need the word “coequal?”).

I still don’t see a compelling case to abandon “value co-creation,” though Andrea is making me aware that I maybe haven’t done a good job of defining the phrase.

Fans are perfectly capable and willing of co-creating value. They already have the power to do so, and they exercise it every day. Each fanfic story, each fan art piece on Deviantart.com, each mashup, video, etc. based on someone else’s IP *is* value co-creation, whether the intellectual property (IP) owners acknowledges it or not.

Said actions do not, however, translate to commercial rights (ever had your YouTube-hosted video remix taken down via a DMCA notice?).

I see the concept of value co-creation as recognition that fans can create things of value based on others’ IP. The shared story world model I advocate builds a bridge between fans and IP owners, with value co-creation being a cornerstone of that model. It acknowledges the critical role fans play in commercial entertainment, and it offers a non-traditional way for fans to contribute to commercial entertainment (by recognizing certain UGC as official/canonical work and/or monetarily compensating fans for their UGC).

But we can quibble over terminology ad nauseum. Vocabulary alone is rarely the final stumbling block, and it isn’t Andrea’s underlying contention.

Andrea’s post reveals her true concern to be this: introducing a framework where fans can make money from someone else’s commercial IP and where the IP owner retains full commercial control over the IP will automatically result in an “unpleasant community culture” that becomes “toxic to the fan culture overall” (the implication being this kind of culture will have a fatal effect on the success of the IP).

Andrea then offers two solutions to avoid this situation: (1) never invite fans to contribute, but if you do select UGC for inclusion, do not pay fans for it; and (2) remove the IP owner as commercial gatekeeper (essentially stripping the owner of all rights to limit others’ commercial exploitation of the IP).

I agree with Andrea that these two options would limit what she calls “a community of freelancers all doing spec work in direct competition with one another.”

I disagree with her view that value co-creation models where fans are paid for their work (i.e., commercial shared story worlds) automatically create a toxic community which will necessarily lead to the failure of the IP.

Could it happen? Sure, just ask the people behind Fanlib’s spectacular demise. It’s sooooo easy to screw over your fanbase and reap the rewards of eternal derision and mistrust. So easy.

But not inevitable.

The kind of train wreck Andrea warns about isn’t a foregone conclusion due to some inherent flaw in the value co-creation concept for commercial shared story worlds. I just haven’t seen that to be the case. In fact, with the exception of Fanlib, I haven’t seen a fractured fan community destroy a value co-creation entertainment IP (and Fanlib’s failure is arguably a result of their disrespectful and tasteless handling of their target audience).

Andrea applauds the co-creation concept but hates the idea of seeing it fail due to terminology. I fear failure, too, though I suspect it takes a very different form.

Failure of value co-creation in a shared story world model is more likely to be a result of poor execution (mediocre storytelling, bad world design, ineffective marketing, missing legal components, etc.) or inappropriate community outreach. To paraphrase Whitman, “fandom is large, fandom contains multitudes.” Creatives should, indeed, tread lightly when dealing with large multitudes.

I guess my glasses are a bit rosier than Andrea’s when it comes to value co-creation and shared story worlds. I see shared story worlds surfacing in increasing frequency over the next few years, and no single phrase or injection of money into the mix is going to stem this tide. My optimism is buoyed by new projects like Angry Robot Books’ Worldbuilder project, where fans will be compensated for their creations.

How did the fans react to this news? Well, if the comments are any indication, the fans find the concept anything but toxic.

And notice how Angry Robot doesn’t mention shared story worlds or value co-creation? They don’t label it at all, actually. Just like when a new ARG is launched, it’s not plastered or marketed as an ARG? The people playing in these spaces don’t care that the rabbit hole they fell in to is an ARG any more than fans care about whether their favorite transmedia property is explicitly marketed as a “transmedia” experience. They just want to have fun.

We can have the internal debate over value co-creation just like we’ve been having for transmedia (and hasn’t that turned out wonderfully?), but our efforts really ought to be channeled towards creating cool, fun experiences for audiences. I doubt Andrea would disagree on that point.

So, yeah, I’m damn optimistic on value co-creation and shared story worlds. Color this typing monkey very optimistic, indeed.

The culprit for my discontent?

An increasing dismissal of audience contributions (i.e., user-generated content) to commercial entertainment as unfit for inclusion in professional entertainment experiences. The most common argument I hear against including UGC in any entertainment property fail is, “UGC is awful,” which reduces the value of UGC to a single vector: the subjective metric of “quality.”

At best, this single litmus test of value confuses UGC with other forms of participation (e.g., collaborative storytelling). At worst, this narrow view summarily dismisses UGC and the other benefits its offers.

I’ve already explored why collaborative storytelling is completely different from participatory storytelling and collaborative worldbuilding, so this short post is going to focus on the issue of the quality of UGC.

Here’s the single take-away: if you’re inviting audiences to participate with the sole expectation that you’ll get professional-level, high-quality content, then you are completely misunderstanding the larger reasons and logic behind participatory entertainment (for the record, that is not the same as saying that all UGC is non-professional or poor quality).

The bigger value inherent in audience participation is the different kind of connection this kind of participation encourages. Importantly, the demographic subset of consumers most likely to create UGC based on your commercial entertainment property are (wait for it)…also the most passionate about that property.

As was mentioned recently at a Transmedia L.A. meetup by the guest speaker, “your competitor in entertainment is porn.” In other words, fans of your entertainment property have chosen to spend their finite money and time buying and consuming your media. Instead of going out to dinner. Instead of sleeping. Instead of playing with their kids. Instead of having sex.

So before you summarily dismiss UGC as having no business in your entertainment business, I would suggest you turn the situation around and ask yourself why you’re ignoring your biggest fans. Why you aren’t actively finding ways for them to connect with you. Why you can’t see the value in inviting them to share a story, build a world, and have a conversation with you.

Now if your answer is, “because I don’t want to,” then great. That’s an honest answer – a good answer – and I have no issues with that at all. The one objection I can’t and won’t accept is, “UGC sucks,” because it misses the true value audience participation offers.

Still, the exercise of bringing together some of the things I’ve discussed in isolation about SSWs was extremely helpful, and I was humbled by the reaction of the audience and the great questions they posed. If I can make the time, perhaps I’ll do what a few of them suggested and write a book…!

In addition to the presentation, I handed out copies of the design questions to help people follow along and perhaps even make notes. Below is the presentation and a link to download the .pdf of design questions.

http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2011/co-creating-value-with-audiences-%E2%80%93-7th-son-obsidian/

Series history:

Co-Creating Value with Customers (first article)

http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2011/co-creating-value-with-customers/

I’ll be taking the plunge and running my first LARP experience (set in Runes of Gallidon, of course!), as well as speaking at a panel on the 11th about transmedia.

And as if that wasn’t enough, I’ll also have the pleasure of attending Wyrd Con with several members of the Transmedia L.A. Meetup.

If you’re at all interested in LARPing, storytelling, or improvisation, I encourage you to check out Wyrd Con. And if you’re interested in the Gallidon LARP, there are still characters available!

http://turnstylenews.com/2011/04/14/shared-story-worlds-scott-walker-artist-series-podcast/

This interview could have easily gone on for hours – so much to cover, between transmedia, fandom, shared worlds, religion, education, the ‘Transmedia, Hollywood 2′ conference, etc.

Plus, Noah’s got some cool creative ideas of his own (which he couldn’t talk about yet), and I’m looking forward to seeing his projects (some will be shared worlds, too!) get launched.