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Playing Towards A Unified Theory of Alternate Reality Entertainment Fundraising Whilst Blowing Up Stuffed Poodles

Here’s a little glimpse into the LOVELAND studio as we prototype some ideas for season 2. I’ve started creating a tiny environment on the floor so we can do some Augmented Reality camera tests. Basically that means a web cam in the corner of the room looking down where a streaming video image like this:

Can become a graphically layered image like this:

While I was setting things up I couldn’t help but imagine a little story taking place on the map. I started brainstorming with studiomate Joe Kraus about a sort of choose your own adventure game driven by micro-payments. The concept we came up with was that Inchy and (new character) Inchette are driving from Detroit to Canada. The first leg of their trip is 101 inches long, from one wall to another down the taped path in the pic above. It costs $1 to move them each inch, every 20 inches there’s a planned encounter (or “story point”), and there’s a menu of actions that people can choose from ($5 bottle rocket, $6 cat attack, $10 earth quake, etc etc). As people purchase actions, they’re acted out, recorded, and posted as quickly as possible, and credited to the buyer right in the video.

While we were all brainstorming I drew out these sketches:

And from them the next day I very very quickly made this video as a down and dirty illustration (with, yes, an exploding evil killer poodle):

Oh Canada! A LOVELAND mixed-reality choose your own adventure game prototype from Jerry Paffendorf on Vimeo.

Now what gets me really excited about this is that I can see the bones of something I’ve started calling Entertainment Fundraising. Say you have a sales goal or something you need to raise money for. Let’s use a LOVELAND example and say you need to raise $5,000 to build out an awesome community garden farm thinger in the city (technical term). Through an entertainment fundraising lens, you could chop that goal into subsections and wrap it in an entertaining narrative and online visualization. Every dollar coming in drives something in the story (so even a small amount has an immediate impact — you put a quarter in the machine, something cool happens, and you clearly leave your mark), and there are epical story points along the way where significant things happen (say, every 1,000 unlocks an engaging cut-scene that really makes you want to get to the next one to see what happens). So something like a video game that’s part real and part unreal, that makes the thing you’re raising money for more interesting to a wider audience with collectively wider pockets that will fuel the development of a project, and make it that much more magical.

We’ve already been stumbling around this idea with Plymouth. Expect to see more of it coming out of the LOVELAND factory…