So last week I attended the second annual StoryWorld Conference.  I was unable to attend the inaugural event in San Francisco the year before, but I heard so many glowing reviews that attending the followup was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.  And I could not have asked for a better experience.  Held at the Loews Hotel here in Hollywood, …

Recently, some internet marketer friends of mine who also happen to be big fans of my web series “Fury of Solace” came to me with an interesting marketing idea for the series.  They’d had a great deal of experience using e-mail autoresponders for  traditional marketing, selling products, and they thought “Fury of Solace” lent itself to using autoresponders to simply …

I started dabbling in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games as far back as Ultima Online in 1997, but no MMORPG captured my imagination like “Star Wars: Galaxies.”  Admittedly, it was less the gameplay and more the story world that drew me in: I’d been a dyed-in-the-wool Star Wars fan since my parents took me to see “Return of the Jedi” …

This week, I’m going to talk about another transmedia property I had the privilege to take part in, an experimental web series called “Bxx: Haunted,” helmed by Daniel Knauf, creator of HBO’s “Carnivale.”  For a time, after “Carnivale’s” untimely cancellation, Dan and his son Charlie wrote the “Iron Man” comic for Marvel.  It was because of that (and my three-year …

First off, I apologize for not releasing this new entry on Wednesday: That night I appeared on a panel co-sponsored by Social Media Week and the IAWTV called Merging Social Media and Online Storytelling, and that distracted me from releasing our regularly-scheduled blog. For those who want to check it out after the fact, you can watch the entire panel …

Historically, ARG’s were an important part of how we chose to tell the Fury of Solace story, and I wanted that to continue into our new cycle.  But said new cycle was much more expansive and complicated than anything we’d produced prior, which didn’t leave ample time or resources to mount ARG experiences as ambitious as what we’d tried at …

When we released the bulk of our initial “Fury of Solace” material, back in 2008-2009, fans were very actively interacting with the characters on Twitter, and that was an important part of the unfolding story.  I actually managed to keep the Twitter accounts active for a decent amount of time after we had stopped releasing new material,  but as our …

I’m devoting this week’s entry to an L.A.-based ARG that just wrapped up this past Sunday, the Miracle Mile Paradox.  The experience was produced by Transmedia L.A., a local group that hosts monthly meetups and ad hoc events to bring together Los Angeles-based transmedia enthusiasts.  If you’re in L.A. and you’re into this stuff, I strongly suggest you sign up …

A big part of the immersive transmedia experience for “Fury of Solace” has revolved around creating a social media presence for our characters, to give our fans the chance to interact directly with the characters.  Now, obviously, there are certain media properties that simply don’t lend themselves to this.  Period pieces set in the distant past or the far future, …

Retcon is a comic book term, short for retroactive continuity.  It grew out of the fact that the stories of certain iconic comic characters were told over an incredibly protracted period of time, 60 or 70 years in some cases, without the characters getting appreciably older in the process.   In much the same way that classical mythology was re-appropriated and …