The march toward launching "Sleepy Hollow, 1998" hit an important milestone last week: we have a finished video. And we’ve got a target launch date - not one so firm that I feel comfortable sharing it yet. But soon. So sign up for more information and don’t forget to tell Kickstarter you want to know as soon as it goes live.

And there’s a new project on the horizon, one that I (surprise, surprise) can’t talk about yet. But I’m very excited about it, and once the ink’s dry on the paperwork I’ll have more to share.

In the meantime, I’ve got room in my schedule for a few more projects. So if you’ve got a need for a writer, narrative designer, IP strategy consultant or jack-of-all-transmedia-trades, give me a shout. Operators are standing by. Especially if you’ve got some kind of tech or platform that you know could be used for telling stories but aren’t sure exactly how.

Cuckoo Canon-ball

In most disciplines, the idea of a “canon” is ground ripe for argument and controversy. Who gets to decide what's in and what's out? Canons can be constraining, oppressive. They're always being subverted, reinforced, enlarged, disrupted. And this isn’t just an academic pastime; what are arguments about award shows like the Oscars and Emmys about, if not proxy battles for people who care about a form to passionately advocate for what should be recognized and included in the ranks of the "great works."

Canons provoke so much argument, it feels at times like having one is more trouble than its worth. But most of those debates center around forms and formats that have been around for centuries, even millennia. The picture is very different when you look at emerging formats.

Interactive and immersive storytelling has no accepted canon. Sure, you can get a bunch of individual lists, and maybe there's overlap on some of them. But there are precious few history books, surveys, or retrospectives of what came before. This can partially be explained by how ephemeral the work can be, built on ever-evolving platforms by companies who are more focused on what the next thing is than preserving what came before. We often say that more people will see the case study video that ever experienced the work itself.

But the theater is ephemeral. That hasn’t prevented work to preserve theater history (I know, I took two semesters of “History of the Theater” in college.) But this isn’t just a question of legacy, of anointing works as "great" and giving ego-boosts to creators. There's a much more vital and foundational issue at stake.

When I was in film school, I was the T.A. for the History of the Cinema class. And while there were variations from semester to semester, the core viewing list stayed mostly the same: "The Great Train Robbery," "Birth of a Nation," "The General," "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," "Battleship Potemkin," etc.

Maybe watching all these old movies was painful -- and a lot of them are. But it provided a strong foundation to why film works the way it does, a record of decisions, discoveries, conflicts, evolutions, and reinventions that led from "A Trip To The Moon" all the way to "Project Hail Mary."

The canon of motion pictures is fairly static. And while there are always exceptions and edge cases, it's fairly easy to delineate what qualifies as a motion picture and what doesn't.

This is not the case for interactive. Firstly, we can't even agree on what any of our definitional words mean. What qualifies something as "interactive"? Where is the dividing line between "immersive" and "non-immersive." Everyone has their own definitions, of course, and it often comes down to personal POV. When I was on the Peabody Awards Interactive Board of Jurors, we spent hours and days and months and years on these questions, and there's no easy answer.

But awards are not even the real reason why this question is so important. It's not really about the past, it's about the future.

Because there is no accepted canon for interactive and immersive work, people who are drawn to the field often have no idea of what came before. Sometimes that's a positive, in that they're not constrained by the past. But more often than not it's a major impediment - for the makers and the form itself. New creators have no opportunity to learn the lessons of previous works, and are often doomed to make the same mistakes.

To take one of my hobbyhorses: “This Is Not A Game” is a foundational design principle of ARGs. One might say it is a hallmark of the form. Except it doesn’t work. Or at least, it works once; audience members who return for new ARGs often have diminishing returns once the novelty wears of. “This Is Not A Game” keeps the format stunted, only available to a niche audience. Those of us who came up through the early years of ARGs learned this lesson very quickly. Yet there’s no mechanism to pass this learning down, other than jeremiads (like this one.)

Another example: over the years I’ve lost count of the number of meetings I’ve had for potential projects that have gone like this:

People seem to need to learn this lesson themselves. Over and over again.

First!

Back in the days of The Good Captain, I met a few other folks who were experimenting with twitter as a platform for storytelling. Over the next few years, every so often some new entry would announce itself as "The First Twitter Novel." We'd have alaugh and send congratulatory messages saying, “Welcome! Come on it, the water’s fine!”

The truth is that nobody achieves anything alone; even a Garage Kubrick is working with forms and formats that other people have pioneered, treading on territories that others have walked before, even if they don't know about them.

It’s a great marketing hook to say that a project is the first of its kind. But often, that’s all it is - just marketing. And when you’re working in new and emerging formats, it's always nice to have an easily understood hook has an understandable draw to it.

But if you’re going to do it, accuracy is important. For example, whenever I’m asked to talk about the Emmy we won for The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, I use the same specific line: that we were “the first YouTube series to win a Primetime Emmy.” Because (AFAIK) the first YouTube series to win an Emmy of any kind was the Fine Brothers’ "Kids React," which won a Daytime Emmy the year before. There can be a lot of stolen valor in the entertainment business, and I don’t want to contribute to it.

Sometimes, erasing who came before is cynical and opportunistic. But more often than not, it’s a function of simply not knowing. Of not having that canon to look back on, to build on top of.

The current explosive wave of immersive theater in the U.S. can be traced back to the colossal success of Sleep No More. But for many of us who got caught up in that wave, it was a surprise to learn about Tamara, the 1981 play that used a lot of the same dynamics. I only heard about it by talking to someone who remembered seeing it when it first came out.

Shortly after I first posted about “Sleepy Hollow, 1998,” I got an excited message from Guy Gadney, who shared with me the work of Dennis Wheatley, a crime writer who wrote several books where the audience was furnished with the evidence and asked to solve the crime themselves — in the 1930s!

I’d never even heard of Dennis Wheatley before. But you can bet I bought one of those on eBay and I’m eagerly awaiting its arrival. What I’ve seen so far has already begun to influence my thinking about future storyletter projects.

Viral

It happens again and again, for those of us who work in "new media" - we think we're inventing something totally new, only to discover that someone had the idea before and made something you never even saw.

Another example: we think of viral marketing as a recent invention and something intricately tied to the internet. Rubbish. Do you wanna know who invented viral marketing?

In 1809, a notice appeared in a New York newspaper about the disappearance of an elderly historian named Diedrich Knickerbocker.

Over the ensuing weeks, there were more updates on the “Knickerbocker disappearance”...

...leading to the revelation that his landlord had discovered, among Mr. Knickerbocker’s discarded effects, a manuscript; if the historian didn’t pay his back rent, the landlord would have no choice but to publish his book to recoup what was owed.

Soon thereafter, Diedrich Knickerbocker's book appeared on New York bookshelves and became an instant hit.

Diedrich Knickerbocker was never seen again. Because he never actually existed. But he’d served his purpose: the Knickerbocker hoax/viral marketing stunt created demand for the first book published by a 25-year old lawyer who was writing stories at night: Washington Irving. The success of “A History of New York,” let Irving turn to writing full-time. A decade later he would write Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

Although really, it’s entirely possible that Irving got the idea from some pamphleteer writing fictional stories pretending to be real. Again, being first is overrated.

Diedrich Knickerbocker makes an appearance in “Sleepy Hollow, 1998.” He remains an older man, and a historian of the early American period. He is also the person that Ichabod writes his letters to, and the animating reason for the letters — Ichabod’s attempts to get his elderly friend to use email have met with little success.

Headcanons

If we were to attempt to build a canon for interactive and immersive work, and I got a vote, I'd certainly but The Beast on the list, along with Sleep No More and the gone-to-soon Galactic Starcruiser.

If you were asked to nominate something for a canon like this, what would you choose? It could be for any variant of interactive, any flavor of immersive you want. What would you put on the list, and why? What lessons would you want future creators to take from it.

In the meantime, I will patiently wait for the forthcoming book on the history (and future) of immersive being written by Adrian Hon. And continue to hope somebody takes it upon themselves to write a history of ARGs.