After the interest generated in my last post about clothing label/ARG company edoc Laundry, I contacted the company to see what they had to say about their novel approach to playing with fabric. Spokeswoman Connie Sung kindly put me through to co-founder and interaction director Elan Lee, who answered all of my pressing questions about games, fabric and branding.
What is edoc Laundry? edoc laundry is the world's first interactive apparel line. Each garment in the edoc range has a secret hidden in the graphics, stitching, ink, or fabric that, when deciphered, can be entered into a website to unlock a fragment of a murder mystery.
What was the magical moment when you arrived at the idea? The three founding members of the company are Shane Small, me, and Dawne Weisman. The idea grew out of the combination of our talents and experiences. Jordan Weisman, Dawne's husband, and I pioneered what's now called Alternate Reality Games back in 2001 with a project we did for Steven Spielberg's movie, AI. We learned a lot about what we call deconstructed narratives, where you tell a story by taking it all apart and challenging the audience to put it all back together again. Shane's background is in fashion design and marketing in South Africa and he and Dawne were working together at Wizkids Games when the three of us started brainstorming about how fashion has always really been a communications medium. The magic moment really came when we decided to push clothes even farther into the realm of story telling.
Do you align yourselves more closely with artists or game-makers? We are primarily a clothing company. Ultimately, if the clothes don't look and feel great, we've failed. We love the secret codes and the hidden story, but they're really just frosting on the cake (or gravy on the meat, depending on which meal is closer as you read this...and yes, dessert counts as a meal.) Each garment in the line is of the highest possible quality. Double layered fabrics, custom embroidery, wrap-around prints, foiling, and unique finishes make every item in our line something we'd each be proud to wear even if the shirts were not each a key to saving an innocent young woman from a crazed murderer, hell-bent on destroying everything good and pure in his wake.
How will you stop power-players from purchasing all of the clothing and winning the game? We stay up nights worrying about the terrible scenario in which customers who normally make very modest investments in games or fashion, get so engaged with our product and narrative that they feel compelled to run out and empty the edoc inventories of their local retailers forcing us to create more garments, and continue our company. So far the only solution we've come up with is biting our nails and mentally plotting their demise. (We'll keep you posted on how that goes.)
How much planning goes into something like this? We've been in pre-production for about a year. The first shirts hit store shelves this month.
What eventualities have you all planned for? Global Thermal Nuclear War. We've dug a bunker large enough to accommodate all our employees except one. We've found this to be an excellent way to increase employee motivation and productivity. Also, we're hoping to be around for a few more seasons as our story is structured much like a TV show. Each season, when we release a new line of clothing, we also release a new season of our story. At the end of each season our main story arc comes to a conclusion, but will also introduce a few cliff hangers to keep you coming back for the next installment. (it's like HBO on your shirt!)
How much control have you allowed yourselves to give over to the players? We've set up several online forums for the players to directly participate with and influence the story. These forums blend seamlessly into the fiction, and are themselves scattered with clues to solving the mystery. As players use the forums to contribute to the fiction, we will adopt and incorporate the best bits and tweak our story in accordance with the creativity of the community.
Why clothing? We believe strongly that clothing is a key communication tool in our culture. What we wear can say more about who we are than a biography stapled to our foreheads. (I dare you to prove me wrong.) We wanted to see if we could squeeze that communication channel a bit harder to get more out of the tube. No one has ever used clothing to tell a story, and we felt the overwhelming urge to step up.
What's the endgame? If all goes well, there doesn't have to be one. It's true that, like a good TV show, each narrative arc will come to a satisfying conclusion at the end of each season, but we hope to be able to keep making clothes and finding creative ways to tell our story indefinitely.
What role will ARGs play in the entertainment spaces of the future? ARGs are just in their infancy. I've been building ARGs for six years now, and I still don't quite know what they are or where they're going. We have a lovely idea of what the movie version of our story looks like, but it feels like we're still building the movie screen, and trying to figure out how big it should be, what color works best, and whether or not to make it tasty when licked. We think we can tell a story through clothing. If that works, a lot of people are going to have to start rethinking about the definition of a tee shirt.
