Multiplatform writer Hannah Wood and Jo Reid, Creative Director of Studio residents Calvium, came to the Studio to tell us about their experience of developing the occult-themed alternate reality game (ARG) Zoetrap for the StoryWorld conference. StoryWorld is the world's first transmedia entertainment symposium that took place over the Halloween weekend earlier this year. Hannah and the team at Calvium worked closely together to produce the game using online app development toolkit AppFurnace and a team of willing collaborators extended the experience to include a real world crime scene in a hotel room, custom tarot cards, hidden QR codes and a live event.

Zoetrap is a three-day long ARG designed to be played on location and via smartphone over the course of the conference in San Francisco. A native storytelling project inspired by Alcatraz Island and the paranormal, it tells the story of Oliver Drew an inventor who comes to StoryWorld to discuss his plans to harness the spirit world as a medium for transmedia projects and then disappears under mysterious circumstances on the first day of the event. Gradually we discover that he has become obsessed with an infamous serial killer who trapped souls in an old zoetrope and Oliver himself may now be implicated in a gruesome murder.

Drawing upon the format of the massively successful Malcolm Tucker app, the Zoetrap app simulates the possession of the player's phone by the ghost of Oliver's lost phone, replicating content such as text messages to reveal the games backstory and then disseminating pieces of narrative and clues via voice messages, video clips and Twitter feeds as time goes on. The player is encouraged to become involved as a "paranormal investigator", finding out what has happened to Oliver and ultimately standing in judgement over his spiritual transgressions.

The game was designed by a team of thirteen people from Spirit Level Productions, a group of writers and artists interested in working on transmedia projects (led by Hannah), alongside the team at Calvium, produce bespoke apps for a variety of clients. Hannah became aware of Calvium's AppFurnace toolkit whilst taking a course at CYFLE, the training company for the creative media industries in Wales, which Jo visited to give a talk about the product's launch.

The teams met again in Bristol for a brainstorming session where they discussed the creative possibilities of producing an ARG experience and the technical challenges that developing the app would present. The biggest hurdle that the developers found they had to clear was to find a way of storing all of the story content in the app from the outset and to then synchronise the triggering of events within the app with the activity of the users attending meetings and events at the conference, accommodating for the fact that users would not always have the app running. They came up with the flexible solution of using Twitter feeds with specific hashtags to remotely unlock in-game events such as the receipt of pre-recorded phone calls, thus allowing the production team to control the availability of clues and letting users access the activated content in their own time.

The other prominent trials facing the project were the lack of budget, time and resources, as well as the absence of any official endorsement by the conference itself, which meant that the team would also have to consider how to market the game and get attendees engaged with the story. They managed to crowdsource $730 towards the project online using IndieGoGo and produced all of the content for the app within two weeks: including video footage of Oliver and secondary character Prisoner L, voicemail messages from Oliver's girlfriend Eva and an unsettling "message received" sound effect that was used to signal the appearance of new content.

The time constraints placed upon the team did, however, create problems in other areas: particularly around the development of their social media and marketing campaigns. The team created a website for Oliver that lists his previous paranormal inventions and started a Twitter account for him through which they would get in contact with other transmedia producers, discussing his occult ideas to help establish the real-world setting of the game amongst potential users. However, Hannah felt that this process was rushed and not maintained consistently enough for the character and premise to be fully developed or to engage many people in the plot.

Planning in advance how to market the game whilst at StoryWorld was also problematic. For the first day of the event, the team used their friend's room at the conference to recreate the room in which Oliver had disappeared and they had produced a flyer in the form of a fake newspaper article about the mysterious happening, encouraging people to visit the room. However, the flyer had to be printed before the team arrived at the conference and they did not have the number of the room available to them at the time of writing, so this presented an obstruction to potential players becoming readily engaged with the game. On top of this, the team found that some attendees were unenthusiastic about getting involved in the game at first, despite being at an event about transmedia experiences of the kind Zoetrap was offering. Programmed events, networking, pitching and presenting drew delegate’s focus and created some challenges to gain momentum and interest in a playful, durational, fringe offering.

Fortunately the team found it became much easier to get people interested in the story later in the day and by communicating with players via the Twitter feed of the character Eva, they eventually managed to get around fifty of the four hundred delegates to investigate the room. The team observed that the room was the most immersive part of the game for players, as it brought out their playful, inquisitive qualities and inspired a lot more of them to download the app as a result.  

Unfortunately the team had not anticipated the amount of Android phone users that would be in attendance, having only made the app available on the iPhone app store, so for the second day they decided to upload all of the game content to the Zoetrap website in parallel with its release inside the app. Hannah told us that she felt the game was perhaps too app-dependent overall and that she would have liked to have spent more time developing the other aspects of the experience.

A pair of bespoke tarot cards featuring Oliver Drew in the role of The Hanged Man were created for the game, with QR codes on their reverse sides that would lead players to content and clues. The second card, given to the participants in envelopes at the start of the second day of the conference, was to direct them to the nearby location of Union Square, where an audio recording communicating an important part of the narrative would be triggered. However, due to the subtlety of the differences in design between the cards, many users thought that this was the same tarot card that they had previously encountered and so did not scan it.

An even bigger problem facing the production team was that, having not been able to test the app on-location prior to launching the game, they could not get the site-responsive content activation to work in Union Square and had to resort to attaching another QR code to a bench so that the players who did make it to the Square could unlock the recording.

Despite the days challenges there was some good news for the team, as a Twitter user by the name of @rowan72, an ARG expert with seven years experience of involvement in transmedia gaming, had started to become involved with the game. Although not present at the conference, @rowan72's  investment in exploring the various facets of Zoetrap's story as a superplayer began to help open up the game for other users and her interactions with the characters and delegates helped the team to really bring the project to life on the third day.   

@rowan72 unlocked the final clues of the game early on and the team decided to shift the focus of their communications onto her, releasing more content and improvising Twitter performances in tandem with her, which allowed them to fill out the story in much greater depth. She then published a walkthrough for Zoetrap, which provided a breakthrough in terms of publicity for the project, allowing the game to reach the online ARG fan community at large.

The final event of the game took place in a local bar, where players gathered amongst actors and the production team to pass judgement on Oliver for the crimes he had committed in pursuit of occult powers and that eventually led to his disappearance. The event was produced with budget constraints, but alternate endings had been thought through by the writers and the players were given influence over how the story would end, providing a final level of engagement.

In conclusion, Hannah told us that the important things she learnt from the experience of producing Zoetrap were that ARG experiences need to be layered so that users can connect to the game at different levels of involvement, providing simple interactive hooks to capture as many participants as possible and to initiate a personal engagement with the player wherever viable. Although there were many things that they would do differently in retrospect and under more favourable circumstances, the team were pleased with the final result and the praise they received from @rowan72 as a veteran ARG player.

The Spirit Level team are currently creating a documentary about the development of the project and putting together an updated archival version, as well as pursuing similar work. Their website is: www.spiritlevelproductions.com

Lunchtime Talks are an ongoing series of presentations and discussions by Studio residents and associates. They take place at 13:00 on Fridays and are free and open to everybody who’s interested in what we do. For the full programme of talks, please visit: http://www.pmstudio.co.uk/events