Today’s travelers want flexibility and conditions they can adapt to their own interests. They want to get a feel for their destination without waiting in long lines, and they do this by reading stories that places have to offer. They often learn about their destination before setting off on their journey, through the tales millions of people tell when they write reviews of their traveling experiences. Travelers like to hear stories and they like to tell them, too.

Technology is very useful for many travelers. There are more and more advanced tools that help people identify locations and get more contextual information. So, technology can help make traveling a better, more engaging experience. The latest generation of travelers uses entertaining tools to explore.

For these reasons (and just because we like to play games), we’ve created whaiwhai.

Whaiwhai is a game that helps people explore places.

Playing whaiwhai means going on an adventure: you have to look for clues to uncover mysteries, by solving one enigma at a time, one at each location on your itinerary. So the game is a pretext to learn about the original aspects of each place you visit and about all the stories surrounding it. Any place, city or museum can become a playing field for a treasure hunt. The whaiwhai stories, which map out various cities, have become a book collection.

“A place is a place when it exists in our mind, whenever there’s a story to tell about it, a plan to build it, an image that distinguishes it, music to remember it by, or a movie that celebrates it.” – Giulio Mozzi

On June 8th, 2009, Italy’s President Giorgio Napolitano officially awarded the WHAIWHAI format the National Prize for Innovation in the tourism category. Receiving this prestigious annual award is a sign that we’ve made a real breakthrough.

The web series has now become an alternative production model to traditional TV dramas and movies, and has been attracting an increasing number of viewers thanks to bold choices and a lean formula. Alternate reality games have now become refined, precise promotional and marketing tools: they have generated articles, academic research, blog posts and entire web sites of hardcore fans. From our perspective, though, these kinds of games are in territory that hasn’t been completely discovered yet; it’s a genre of games that’s still full of potential new uses.

Frammenti shows how serial fiction can coexist with the alternate reality game concept to produce an original experience, where the line between fiction and reality disappears. Watching Fragments is like watching an episode of “24”, only to find out that Jack Bauer needs your help to accomplish his mission. Anything around you – your neighbors, your favorite web site, anything – could be part of the answer or part of the conspiracy. Each episode of Frammenti (there are 12 in all) is packed with clues, hints and unsolved mysteries that lead players into a storybook universe that spans both inside and outside the web. Blogs, Internet sites, phone numbers, books, bios and addresses: think about it, the world is full of little bits and pieces. These bits and pieces suddenly become mysteries and enigmas when you play Frammenti.

The Frammenti web site lets players interact with both the characters and the plot, and players can even join up to form clans to solve the enigmas together and move the story along.

Frammenti, a co-production of LOG607 and Shado, will hit the airwaves on Current Italia and on SKY starting Thursday, October 22nd.

The narrative and the plot are the raw materials that players use to craft their own story-games. LiveNovel is the rough sketch of a story, providing a canvas of possibilities that players draw on in order to create a full novel. Players become the real authors of the story because what they do and what they look for (and what they decide not to do or look for) determines how the novel fleshes out. The LiveNovel stories are layered, providing different levels of depth to the reading.

The narrative context involves many different forms: objects, findings, places on a map, notes players have jotted down about their experiences, Internet searches, etc. This is why LiveNovel doesn’t look like a conventional novel. Instead, players find something more like a kit that contains an incomplete story, the tools needed to do searches, and blank spaces to piece all the fragments back together as they experience LiveNovel.

LiveNovel is a detection game that draws inspiration from classic storylines – a mission to accomplish, a city to save, a killer to track down or a last-second escape. Players immerse themselves in these scenarios as the heroes, and fulfill an adventure within the story. The LiveNovel outline can be refashioned each time with different stories and different details; in this way, it is a tool that can be adapted to a variety of communication needs and desires.