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focus on interactive
surfing for soap
Imagine a world where your favourite soap characters e-mailed you to ask for your opinions about their love life, challenged you to gamble or involved you in a murder mystery. Seems far fetched? On the internet it’s a reality. Ceri Thomas reports.
Founded three years ago by Tim Wright and Rob Bevan (formerly of NoHo Digital, where they worked on the BAFTA- award winning MindGym), XPT’s first project was a site called Online Caroline.
A drama centred around a mock webcam set up in the house of twentysomething girl- about-town Caroline, it allowed users to follow her lovelife, prob- lems with her boss and slowly emerging doubts about her boyfriend’s sanity via daily online updates.
But that wasn’t all. Caroline reg- ularly emailed for chats, asked questions about your life (the answers cropped up in her com- ments) and even encouraged users to call her answering machine.
“The webcam phenomena was just starting up.” says Wright. “There was a very famous one called Jenny Cam, which was basically this student who’d set up a webcam and you could go and see what she was doing... which was generally sleeping under a duvet, as I understand it. There was a growing trend of people setting them up and let- ting people watch their boring normal lives.
“We thought ‘Wouldn’t it be good to have a webcam where something actually happens, but didn’t destroy that illusion of walk- ing into somebody’s house’”.
Combining that with an awareness of the growing impor- tance of e-mail especially among
women (“There weren’t a lot of women on the internet when we started, but they were increasing- ly using email...”) they hit upon the idea of Online Caroline.
Successfully giving the impres- sion that you could actually influ- ence the events of the drama (Caroline’s requests for help and advice so convinced users that she was real that when an episode showed her flat being burgled two people called the police to report it), Caroline was a cult success.
Online Caroline went on to win the BAFTA award for Interactivity in 2000. But by then XPT already had their next proj- ect, Mount Kristos, underway.
“When we made Online Caroline, one of the things that took us by surprise was the response we got via e-mail and through people’s comments in the forums,” says Wright.
“People started to create their own stories about their rela- tionship with Caroline and they started spoofing each other about whether they’d seen her or not, making up stories about their own lives.
“It was incredibly entertain- ing and creative work by the audience. So what we wanted to do with Mount Kristos was create a holiday space where other people could see and share this activity.
“What we were trying with the community side of Mount Kristos was to let people create their
own identities. They could give themselves a false name - a holi- day head, we called it - a description of the music they liked and their favourite drink and they could buddy up with other people and leave mes- sages either for group consump- tion or for other people they’d met on holiday.
“Then there’s also a story going on on the island about people disappearing - a sort of comedy murder mystery - which is the Caroline-style narrative engagement. And then we slight- ly over-egged the pudding by adding a game element which let you play very simple little games with other people to earn string, which was the currency on the island...”
Set on a Mediterranean holi- day island, Mount Kristos was populated with 14 fake charac- ters - including the host Kristos - plus the various characters creat- ed by the users. It has a very vocal and loyal following, even though it never quite achieved the popularity of Online Caroline.
“The reason, I think, is that (a) it’s a hybrid. People who like games go to gaming sights and people who like community go to community sights so a hybrid site kind of falls between two stools And (b) it’s a larger commitment than Caroline in terms of time because it’s meant to be more engrossing, and I think it does require a slightly higher level of computer literacy,” says Wright.
What’s next after Mount Kristos for XPT? There is a sequel to Online Caroline in development. “The plan is to get it out in the autumn, but it’s absolutely sub- ject to funding,” says Wright.
“The main thrust of our devel- opment work is looking at mobiles and PDAs as a means of deliver- ing Caroline - the whole idea of a pocket Caroline that you can take around with you on a little handheld device is immediately quite powerful.”
XPT also have an entirely new project that they plan to unveil at interactive content marketplace Milia in February. “We’re going to try and create an action movie run by a fake online banking sys- tem,” laughs Wright.
“Through your activity with your credits and the way that you speculate and trade with other people, you’ll be funding this rov- ing agent who’s trying to get round the globe and chase the bad guys.
“Based on how much money you raise for him you get to see a different story. The main charac- ter is called Mike Stone, so the working title at the moment is Get Stoned...”
Remedy For Payne
F
innish game development company, Remedy Entertainment, was founded
Photos above: Scenes from Online Caroline and Mount Kristos’ home page; opposite page top left: PC game, Max Payne
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in 1995. Two years later they began work on a game called Max Payne. Described by the BAFTA judges as “The Matrix meets Dirty Harry” this New York- set tale of cops, mobsters and revenge not only bagged the award for Best PC Game in last year’s Interactive Awards, it also went on to become one of the best selling games in the world...
Q. Tell us about Remedy?
Petri Jarvilehto, Max Payne project leader: “We started out as a small garage company with a headcount below 10. By ‘99 we’d grown into the current