There is more competition than ever in this space, with some truly exceptional products, so to be recognised in the ‘Best Non-Fiction App’ category is a real honour. The awards night kicked off New York’s Digital Book World conference which, through showcasing some of the best in digital publishing and thinking, was proof (if any were needed) that publishing’s best days are ahead.

This accolade joins last year’s commendation in the FutureBook Innovation Awards and, hot off the press, being voted Best Coffee Table Book App (iOS) in the 2011 Best App Ever Awards.

Download The Magic of Reality for iPad.

Read in depth the production process behind The Magic of Reality for iPad.

The wonderful people at Tate liked one of our ideas a lot, namely turning the history of modern art into a (slightly bonkers) platform game, and as of RIGHT NOW we’re delighted to announce that Race Against Time is available in iOS App Stores worldwide. Hurrah!

You play as a wily chameleon, travelling through the history of modern art in order to defeat evil Dr Greyscale’s plan to remove all the colour from the world. As you race through time from 1890 back to the present day, the background, platforms and enemies change to reflect major art movements and works from the last 121 years of modern art. And if you play the game AT the Tate you can activate ‘turbo mode’, supercharging your jump and unlocking a mighty tongue-attack for zapping baddies.

Our unfairly talented in-house post-production team have also created a bespoke soundtrack for the game, giving each decade a stylistic variant of a main theme using instruments and processing appropriate to the particular era. Phew.

It’s also free, so you don’t have to spend any monet (sorry). It will work beautifully on all iDevices running up-to-date software, but particularly shines on 4th gen iPhone and iPod Touch (retina display).

If you’re in the UK, download Race Against Time here.

Good luck!

Do you want to make the next web, not the last one, in a place that would genuinely value you?

The sexy HTML5 application we just launched for Last FM is about as close as we get to building “web sites” — that is, not very close at all. We’re looking for people that understand this perspective, and to help us build beautiful user-centred content systems, applications and services which make rich media work the way it needs to in the 21st Century.

If you think you could do even better than these, we’d REALLY like to talk to you:

www.last.fm/discover
www.nightmarehigh.com

We need more fantastic web developer-engineer-programmers, who cross all and every client-side technical discipline. If you’re iconoclastic, mellow, have super-powers, care about standards-based technologies and are ideally interested in how rich media / content and connected screens work together we’re interested.

Here’s the litany:

Excellent knowledge of:
HTML
CSS(2/3)
Javascript
jQuery

Prefer experience with:
Asynchronous web applications
Ajax
JSON
Working with back-end devs/MCV frameworks (Python/Django or similar)
Templates

You don’t have to be perfect at all of this — but a desire to be.

NO AGENCIES. If you pimp us CSD’s after this, we’ll blacklist you.

Drop Michelle Feuerlicht a line (our exec producer in the digital department)

Here’s the trailer with that mesmerising Benedict Cumberbatch voice again:

“A Ken Loach Soap-Opera, Improvised by Robots.”

We’ve launched our next project for Channel 4 Education. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a decade, but it has taken some serious planetary alignment to make real. And because of the the brains making it, it’s way better than I ever thought possible. So we’re pretty excited.

We’re telling stories—primarily on linear video—using a video game engine (The Sims™ 3).  It’s a tale of four housemates and their ups and downs; their ambitions and their dreams.

So, machinima, right?

Wrong.

Machinima sees people using game engines as cinema soundstages. You write the script, you make a storyboard showing how every shot will be positioned, you position the actors and cameras and you keep shooting until you’ve got the footage you need. It’s using game characters as puppets, mastered by humans.

We are doing something completely different. Something fitting the driving spirit Will Wright built into his pioneering simulation games—emergence.

There’s no plot in a simulation game; or rather, no pre-planned story. Instead, dramatic gameplay emerges from the complex interactions between the algorithmic expressions of personalities, ambitions, and human foibles. It’s how life works. The game we’re using to tell stories is a version of life tuned to create simulated drama.

A game designer of sensitivity and talent—like Robin Burkinshaw—can carefully sculpt characters and situations and let them run, interpreting their actions in a beautiful and human way. This is what he did in the extraordinarily moving Alice and Kev (the story of two homeless people in a video game) and we’re delighted he’s doing the same on our new project.

Our project is nothing less than the first ever drama improvised by robots.

We’ve cast our characters carefully, given them very detailed character notes, ambitions and motivations and created a dramatic context. Now we’ll let them live their parts for six weeks. It’s more like Ken Loach directing virtual actors.

In keeping with the emergent nature of the drama we are also exploring a Darwinian approach to storytelling. From the same starting point every day we can run different versions of reality on different machines, each of which will mutate in different ways. The one showing the best adaptation to our dramatic needs is deemed most fit to become tomorrow’s starting point—although we sadly won’t be doing that this time round!

It’s whole new way of telling stories and we’ve had to invent many new methods of production for a different kind of drama; there are elements of ‘constructed reality’ and observational documentary as well as a sensitivity to the affordances of software as a collaborative partner. There are entirely different job positions we’re filling and some interesting technical hurdles to surmount (for example, we’ll need over 130TB of storage space at the project’s peak — which is a lot).

For the script-writing part of the project, we’ve drawn inspiration from The Magic Roundabout. When the BBC bought Serge Danot’s series back in the 1960′s they realised too late they had only bought the pictures—not the scripts. So Eric Thompson looked at the pictures and made up new ones. We have the advantage of Robin being the world’s best “AI Whisperer,” who will be interpreting our characters actions. This way we can make sure what goes to the final edit and the script will be fantastic drama—even though the plot lines are emergent. It worked beautifully in the pilot anyway! [edit: it's working beautifully in the real thing — check the link below!]

The final, glorious, piece here is that the project has a positive payload: mindfulness. The series was created as part of our continuing work exploring teaching techniques of resilience for teens.

The SuperMes forms a part of our SuperMe content system for Channel 4 education, commissioned by Jo Twist. Inspired by Alice and Kev by Robin Burkinshaw, it was devised by myself (Paul Bennun) and Jo Roach. Sean Coleman is producing the series and Ian Sharpe from Somethin’ Else is the exec.

Find out more at at http://facebook.com/playsuperme

We’re delighted to have worked with Richard Dawkins on the creation of the iPad of version of his new book, “The Magic of Reality,” which features the artwork of Dave McKean. The book is about how incredible the universe is, and why we don’t need to reach for superstition to be awed or to understand our place in it.

The book contains some beautiful myths (illustrated by Dave McKean) which show how our species has explained the ‘hard-to-explain’ over the ages, from Nigerian creation myths to Greek myths about the Milky Way. These are contrasted with The Science in all its glory.

Now: there are plenty of different takes on “how to do the digital book” out there.

These range from the simple portable ePub file—leaving the choice of reader up to the technically proficient user—to the walled garden book simulators such as Kindle or the iBook Store, complete with skeuomorphic page-turning animations. There are also a few generic interactive publishing platforms, and some bespoke software that attempts to take advantage of the affordances of our devices. The most well-known of these are the iPad apps of Alice in Wonderland or Steven Fry’s “The Fry Chronicles.”

We took a fairly fundamental design-led approach to crack our version of the digital book. No surprises: based on the needs of potential users, the specific content of the book and actually understanding what a book is; how it works. That latter was the most interesting part of the project … we have many ideas awaiting their moment. More on that later.

Going back to the fundamental nature of the book led us to blaze our own trail completely, departing from anything we’ve seen. We’ve developed a platform that—we believe—is beautiful and affords more than a tree-based tome, but nevertheless remains true to the nature of printed text.

An author uses words to make things happen in your head. That’s a book. Distract from this and no matter what else you may have, no matter how cool it is, it is less than a book. We knew readability, attractive layout and aesthetic design were fundamentally important before we started.

Now: pages. The corollary of a staying true the nature of the book is taking appropriate advantage of the affordances of the iPad. It’s not made of paper. It doesn’t have pages, but a window on content with a very specific aspect ratio and resolution. Not having pages means we don’t have to chop our content up into a stack of content of equal size. Instead we projected a roll of seamless content behind the screen, which the reader can swipe to reveal new views. We chose to delimit our roll into columns of arbitrary size, each bounded with inertial ratchet point which can frame and reframe the text, retaining legibility and providing great scope for a graphic designer to play with.

Our source material—The Magic of Reality—always wanted to be more than flat text. It wanted to make myths come alive visually via Dave McKean’s drawn, painted and collaged images, memes that (by default) have pushed buttons of mystery and attraction in the human mind since the dawn of language. The book also wanted to make the magic of science incandesce in the reader’s mind through exploration and exciting our natural curiosity. This called for two very different treatments (which I’ll mention below).

For the myths we wanted to create a simple graphical style that provided a style analogous to paper pop-up books. These provide agency to the reader the same as the page-based interface of a book: there’s an analogue relationship between the turn of the page and the state of whatever is popping-up. It’s satisfying and it’s physical. We wanted the same satisfying sense of a new “page” being completed by the agency of the reader, and we fly in images on rails; images of arbitrary shape which make a completed and harmonious picture on a fully revealed view. Images can then gently animate, or animate then loop, stoking the imagination in a gentle way before they lose their focus and the reader starts to read. No hunt-and-peck for interactive gimmicks. We’ve also implemented layers, which move at different speeds and provide a pleasing sense of depth as they come into view.

The science is science. Proper science, simply and accurately illustrated either by static image or by one of a few truly interactive models; breed frogs with long legs, fire cannonballs into orbit, split light up into its constituent colours.

The difference in approach with the myths is absolute and vital to the way our book functions; the myths are stories and no more. Our job is to tell them as well as we can. The science is true, and to understand it better the reader may play with it, with his or her own hands. Our job is to make something understood; the magic of reality should do its own job, start the reader on a journey of imagination more exciting or wonderful as the myths.

A final thanks to Sophie and Dan from Random House, for being fantastic partners on the project, and obviously to Richard Dawkins for his crucial collaborative input into the project.

Nightmare high is a new kind of game for Channel 4.

There’s always plenty of digital chatter about development of new formats for a new media landscape and the progress of 360 commissioning—but few people who engage in that conversation have the opportunity to work on ambitious projects that move beyond the limitations of brand-owners’ vision and some broadcasters’ risk-averse behaviour. The vision of the commissioning team over at Channel 4 coupled with the company-wide support of Somethin’ Else has allowed me to launch some wonderful products over the last three years, but Nightmare High builds on all of those to be the one I’m most proud of.

Working across brilliantly cutting-edge projects like Routes, SuperMe and E4′s Misfits I was able to gain invaluable experience which all helped to make Nightmare High a cohesive multimedia game which is fun to play but most importantly one that strikes the balance between education and entertainment in a way that resonates with tweens. An 11-year-old can’t play this game without laughing out loud but they also can’t fail to miss the core learning: big changes are exciting and scary, and there are things you can do to make them easier and to develop into a more resilient young person.

Nightmare High is a story-based web game. You, the player, just joined a new school and on your first day everything has gone terribly, horribly wrong. You’ve got no mates, you screw up in class, you sit in the wrong seat and by lunchtime even your sister is blanking you. Worse still, your pathetic meltdown in Expressive Arts ends up on YouTube.  At the end of your first day you find yourself sucked into a comic-book unreality where everything is upside-down and back-to-front. Reality has imploded and it’s your fault.

And so you enter a fantasy school full of zombie teachers, skyrockets and a terrifying darkness that creeps ever closer to your classroom. The only safe place is the infamous Secret Toilet: where there is a never-ending supply of bogroll and you don’t have to fear somebody peeping over the top of the cubicle. Your job is to fix up reality with the help of your sidekick, D’Mentor, and get home in time for tea. As you explore the school you stumble across various celebrities: in the basement, in the bike sheds and cooking up jam lasagna in the canteen; as they share memories of their school days your score improves, your friendships improve and you begin to understand more about how people really work underneath the labels (bully, popular, geek and so on) and how to make good friends.

The story is told with many different devices and media, and those were selected to work for the audience and story, and obviously with one eye on the budget. Dramatic video, minigames, applications which reflect the players real life skills, celebrity videos and comic strips all feature. It was a challenge to make an hour of fictional gameplay on the budget of a couple of TV programmes. After all, if this were a TV drama it would have cost millions, so our approach had to be adaptive. The system design incorporates collectibles which relate directly to the learning, known as your FIXT score — Friendship, Independence, X-Ray and Transformation. Those collectibles relate very directly to resilience learnings more commonly known to academics as support networks, personal agency, reflection and adaptability.

The drama was confined to the real world (a multi-location epilogue and prologue, and studio-based shorts which feature your friend D’Mentor). Without the option of an animated 3D interface to navigate the school we opted for a static clickable illustration for the main interface (quick to load, easy to use) which slowly fills up with content. We also used interactive comic strips to sew together pieces of narrative, which have already proved very popular among the young game testers.

What I’m most proud of is the seamless movement through multiple content types as players navigate through the thirteen episodes. Nothing feels forced, not the ‘type’ of content and certainly not the educational content. The learning is integrated into the scripts and the fabric of the interface. Your transition journey is part of your story as communicated by your in-game friends, and players are given the option to explore that as much or as little as they like.

As with SuperMe before it, the critical decisions that formed this project came from our work with schools in the project definition phase. Taking a story-based approach, choosing a fantastical and silly world and exposing the reasons why kids label each other so quickly were all inspired by the work that Tassos Stevens of Coney led with our six partner schools. By spending so much time focussed on our potential players we got the chance to talk to educators and experts working in the area of transition and it became clear that now more than ever teachers need this kind of resource, as transition-focussed support staff become harder to provide in-school. We were able to take initiatives that were being used in schools and write those into our game (for example, D’Mentor was inspired by the buddy system which many secondary schools use for incoming students). In addition we embedded core resilience strategies, like getting the players to write a letter back to themselves in order to accurately reflect on what they’d learned by playing. The great thing about this is that we’re also able to use that real advice for incoming players and make it part of the story.

So we really hope you enjoy the game, and that you play it to the end. We welcome and invite feedback — send it here. Finally, I’d like to thank a few people without whom the team wouldn’t have had the opportunity to make such a great piece of work: Alice Taylor, Matt Locke, Jo Twist & Gemma Brady at (or previously at) Channel Four, Poppy Nash at the University of York, Sam Hawkins at Bancrofts School, Paul Bennun at Somethin’ Else and all of our brilliant game testers. And of course hats off to a team who went the extra mile at every step. Thank you!

Nightmare High lives at www.nightmarehigh.com

The game is designed to help 10-13 year olds as they move up to big school, and with life transitions in general.  Unfortunately for the players the game starts seconds before reality explodes and they end up in the worst type of big school imaginable. Their mission is to fix reality by playing through fourteen episodes of brilliant chaos, with the help of some fanciful friends and terrifying teachers (thanks to @neillieb and Neil Richards, the script and story-writers).

Directed and Executive Produced by Jo “The” Roach, the character design and illustration style was conceived by Ben Steers at Fiasco Design, and further developed by Playerthree. The game launches in September 2011, just in time for the new school year.

__________

We’re lucky to be working with a broadcaster on a cool storytelling project.

Together with our other interactive and storytelling projects for brands and broadcasters, we know we’ll be looking for producers in the near future and would be keen to hear from people who may want to join our team, at both a senior and junior level.

You’ll have a combination of skills:

—experience of storytelling in the widest sense (particularly on interactive platforms)

—a high level of technical literacy

—detailed knowledge of the murky innards of social networking platforms and insight into how people use them,

—an editor’s eye for detail

Better news: Because Linkem was inspired by a 2010 research paper about the psychology of happiness, you don’t need to feel guilty about playing it for hours, and hours, and hours…

Best news: thanks to the lovely folks at Channel 4 It’s FREE if you’re in the UK, and is even free for a limited time if you’re in the rest of the world (after which it’ll go up to $1.99 in the US), so there’s no excuse not to grab it now.

Download Linkem UK

Download Linkem rest-of-the-world

Linkem was commissioned by Channel 4 Education and developed by Preloaded in collaboration with Somethin’ Else and Coney.

(Bonus news: An Android version will go live in August but, until then, you can still play the original Linkem online)