Project Canvas Development Diary
Citrus Suite & Onteca
Diary 2
We scheduled the first meeting with our BBC contact, Marc Goodchild, Head of Children's Interactive, during the first week of May. Our discussions revolved around two main topics: Audience Issues and Choosing Content.
Audience Issues: We would have to consider that users of Interactive TV invest more of their attention in the lives of their favourite characters than in the game playing environment itself. Marc suggested that the game needed to be positioned with an elite group of fans totally dedicated to the TV series we chose to develop. For this target audience the reward of the game would be the kind of 'social currency' they could gain by being up-to-date with the show, and any snippets of insider information they might receive.
Alternate Reality Games allow the user to jump platforms between TV channels, the game and any other interactive content they have selected. As developers, we would have to bear in mind that people who play games for free tend to be more fickle in their choices and may display less patience than their fee-paying counterparts. Players would need to see immediate rewards and benefits of playing a game if they were to be totally immersed in the action.
Choosing Content: We considered different types of intellectual property at the BBC that we could possibly bolt a game onto, narrowing the field down to two series to which Marc felt we could have gained access: EastEnders, and Tracey Beaker.
Whilst the benefits of taking on a huge brand such as EastEnders may seem alluring in terms of exposure it could generate, it would be extremely unlikely that our contribution could have any impact on the storyline or shooting of the series. Further debate led us to the conclusion that the internal politics of dealing with such a well-known brand could potentially restrict our creative freedom, despite access to a huge archive of footage stored since the series' inception. With this in mind, a sense of self-censorship influenced our ideas relating to the series, which revolved around creating a historical game, focusing on key events of the show from the last 25 years.
These ideas seemed to be somewhat lacking when we considered working on Tracey Beaker, a children's show that operates within it's own distinct universe, with its own rules of engagement and obviously a much more open-minded audience. Being a kid's show, the potential for enticing potential game players remained high, but being a smaller brand, the show implied less problems in terms of accessing cast, crew and set, should this be required, for development purposes.
After further deliberations, Tracey Beaker became our target brand, our discussion with Marc proved invaluable in determining the future direction of our project. After we reached our conclusions, one of our designers, Daniel Rouse, was tasked with researching Tracey Beaker and brainstorming some initial points of discussion for Team Citrus to thrash out before our next meeting with Marc. During the coming weeks, a draft proposal would start to take shape.
Julian Stone
Citrus Suite
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