Rules of play

What is it?

“Viral Sockpuppets” is a character driven crowd-sourced collaborative story-making, played within the YouTube community.

Objective:

To network YouTubers together and create a free flowing fun story that challenges players to push their creativity to new depths and encourages the growth of  each players YouTube channel. Each character is playing for the role of protagonist, by attempting to come up with the most interesting response video for the current narrative.

How to begin:

• Create a “Sockpuppet” character for you to participate in the story with.
• Create a “Public Profile Page” on Facebook that will serve as a fan page and a character data sheet.
• Take several photographs of your character and post them to your public Facebook page.
• Create an account on YouTube and begin a channel. If you already have an existing YouTube account you may use it.
• Create a web-series that plays within the archetypes of the YouTuber community. This will allow you to begin your series quickly, while communicating to the community with an already established vocabulary. (Feel free to experiment with the formats, but once your series is created, its important to keep your character consistent for the development of the story.)
• Complete the Viral Sockpuppets application.

How to play:

• The narrative is already in progress. You must subscribe to each “official” Viral Sockpuppets Press channel and catch up on the narrative by watching the V. S. P. News Brief’s.
• Create episodes of your own web-series which will establish your character as part of the YouTube community and think  about how your story fits together with the other players.
• Every other week the protagonist will post a 3 to 5-minute long video that contains some sort of dilemma.
• Immediately the players will begin to create response videos that will explain (in their own creative way) how to resolve the dilemma. (The response videos should be no longer then 1 to 2-minutes in length, any videos that are longer may not be included into the news brief)
• At the end of the week, the Viral Sockpuppets Press will release a news brief, which will link the audience to each response video, and request them to visit the “moderator” panel on the V.S.P. YouTube channel and vote for their favorite narrative idea.
• On the Friday following the news brief, the votes will be counted and the protagonist will create a new “dilemma” video that pursues the winning narrative idea.
• The player with the winning video response will receive a point.
• This “call and response” will repeat, organically developing the narrative until a player wins 2 points.
• The first player to win 2 points, will win control of the protagonist. The current protagonist will create a collaborative video with the winning player, resolving the current narrative and beginning a new one featuring the new protagonist.
• The narrative play will continue until all of the YouTubers on the internet have become part of the experience.