[Dive #149] RTFKT's Animus Activation
⏯ Interactive experiences are coming
🥚 RTFKT’s Eggsperience 🥚
Amongst all the exciting news from the Web3 space, RTFKT held an event that preceded their Animus Eggdrop claim tomorrow.
The 2-part Eggsperience was held on Twitch and involved community interaction in unique ways.
TLDR on the Eggdrop and Eggsperience:
RTFKT has been teasing eggs for a while, and the time has finally come for RTFKT CloneX holders to claim them. 1 Clone = 1 Egg.
The Eggdrop event was prefaced with a 2-day Eggsperience event mentioned above.
Egg claiming window will begin tomorrow and will be open until early 2023.
The eggs hint at additional creatures or characters and potential gamification (elements, hatching, leveling up).
So what actually made this activation unique besides the fact that RTFKT continues to cement their VFX and animation crown in Web3?
I hopped into the Eggsperience event yesterday and today and was impressed. For anyone that wants to watch the experiences in their entirety, you can find them on RTFKT’s Twitch channel:
Eggsperience Countdown (24 hours, but you can watch 10 seconds of it and get the point)
Eggsperience Part 1 (~30 min)
Eggsperience Part 2 (~30 min)
Great, so we’re livestreaming a RTFKT movie or something?
Sorta…but the twist here is that it’s interactive.
We’ll get into how RTFKT did that in a bit, but let’s think through interactive experiences that exist today.
Netflix
The streaming giant has been experimenting with interactive media for several years at this point. My first and only experience with this was with Netflix’s first interactive movie for adults, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.
The thriller drama allowed viewers to make a series of decisions for the characters, leading to a variety of endings.
I’ll admit, I’m a wuss when it comes to horror and suspense (to clarify this movie is not horror) so I was hiding behind a pillow at certain points 😂. It’s pathetic, I know.
Netflix has created many more interactive specials since, leaning towards casual content like trivia and kid-friendly content.
Disneyland
I’ve only been to Disneyland once despite living in LA for 7 years, and the one time I went wasn’t even when I lived in LA! Sad…
Anyway, one of the rides I enjoyed was Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters. Riders were whisked around spaceships and shot down Zurg aliens. At the end of the ride, Space Rangers received scores based on their performance, riding the high of the literal ride.
Games with Twitch integrations
Twitch has created richer interactive experiences for streamers to engage with their audiences over the years, and one of the ways for this is through game integrations.
These games add a new dimension for viewers to participate and interact with the streamer. In 7 Days to Die there are numerous commands. Streamers can unlock interactions the audience can use as they progress through the game or have all of them available from the start. Additional settings help balance the gameplay and interactions that might otherwise give the viewers too much control over the streamer’s experience.
Here’s a sample:
With this brief and non-comprehensive overview of interactive experiences, this this brings us back to the…
RTFKT Eggsperience Part 1
For those that arrived at the Twitch stream early, there was an egg timer. Pretty punny in a literal and figurative sense if you catch it 😉.
The egg timer stream was live for 24 hours before the Part 1 of the event started.
As always, sassy commentary was in full force 😆
As the timer expired, the Egg Timer stream concluded and a new countdown stream began. Fortunately, this was a much shorter 15-minute timer.
Did you notice the command to type “!protect”? The audience sure did.
Wrong command buddy lol.
FINALLY, the Eggsperience began and the ‘Anim AI’ narrator set the stage.
Throughout the experience, the Animi (plural Animus, similar to Alumni and Alumnus) story was told to provide the viewers more context. The eggs are under attack by an imminent threat and have to be saved!
Viewers typed in commands to prompt story progression. In the shot below, viewers had to type !override to fill the progression bar to continue.
I’m assuming the bars were filled up by total volume of commands or the total number of unique viewers typing the command. Slow mode was turned on for chat so I imagine the intent was focused on the latter while the former helped to speed up progression if there wasn’t enough chat interaction from unique viewers.
One of the puzzles had 3 command options (!reset, !NONONO, !GoAway) , with one of them being an incorrect option. Whether it was due to cluelessness or trolling as a joke, users filled the !reset bar and had to restart the puzzle. (You can see this from minute 16 to 20 🤦♂️)
The rest of the Eggsperience was relatively straightforward and a ship was sent out to intercept the extraterrestrial threat.
RTFKT Eggsperience Part 2
The RTFKT community was left excited and curious about what Part 2 would hold, along with a better understanding with how the interaction mechanics worked.
The viewers warmed up with an easy task opening a familiar door from Part 1:
This Eggsperience focused more on the Eggs, hinting at features like unique elements of the eggs
One particular puzzle caught my eye…
Not sure how viewers got to the answer, but the ones that got it correct got a shoutout 👀
After the passcode was entered correctly, the exodus of the eggs began and the screen faded to black, leading to the Egg claim announcement!
Why is this notable?
Thanks for the play-by-play TPan, what gives?!
Storytelling is becoming enriched with experiences and audience (community) involvement. In Web3, community has been a driving force and will continue to push the next generation of companies and brands in creativity and innovation.
This experience RTFKT has introduced will be a tactic I believe more brands (Web3 or otherwise) will add to their toolbox. The nice thing about it is modularity of the experience when you break it down:
Guidance: Is it choose your own adventure? Is it guided? How so? How much?
Platform: Is the experience hosted on a native platform or 3rd party? Will it depend on the experience itself?
Audience Participation: How does the audience participate? How does participation impact the experience?
Participation Type: Is the experience single player or multiplayer? How does a multiplayer experience impact the overall experience for the brand, creator, or community itself?
Creator/Brand Engagement: Does the creator interact with the audience in the experience itself?
Replicable? Scalable?: Can this experience be evergreen? Can it happen concurrently across multiple instances?
When we compare the examples I presented, it looks something like this. Note that this doesn’t include emerging metaverses and worlds like Roblox, Minecraft, Sandbox, and what Otherside might become.
It will be interesting to see how these types of interactive experiences evolve over time. They’re going to get more immersive, incorporate more multiplayer mechanics, and involve communities in ways we haven’t thought of yet. 🎢
See you tomorrow!
Dropping fire as usual TPan.