Cross-Media Entertainment

The latest iTV newsletter: Tracey Swedlow’s Interactive TV Today has an interview with Andy Wilson, Head of BBC Intertactive TV Training, part of the BBC New Media Courses. The course discussed, Interactive TV, is described on their website:

This course gives an overview of the digital multi-channel environment, the platforms and technologies being used and the range of interactive programmes and services currently available. The day will be a mix of discussion, viewing and creative exercises.

The interview gave me some insights into how the BBC is approaching cross-media design. They give participants an overview of the different types of platforms available, ‘the technology, the number of users–the quirks of the various systems’. They discuss the various strengths and weaknesses of each platform. Then they discuss the various categories of iTV:

For example, we explain the BBC’s definitions of 24/7 and enhanced TV, and we give them examples of each–for example, a multistream service and a play-along quiz.

It should be noted that just about every company or producer is coming up with its own terms to describe different types of cross-media content. Xenophile Media, for instance, have introduced the term ‘Extendable Reality’ to describe the linking between serial television drama and Alternate Reality Gaming. It is understandable that companies would do this — I do this too — since we’re trying to differentiate between types or to explain the concept in the name. I don’t know how audiences fair though. How many know what interactive TV is and isn’t? The next stage of the course covers ‘remote controls’:

The delegates, as a group, decide upon how a navigational structure should work, how people entering a service should move around that service: what buttons they should press to perform certain functions. This is a cross-platform exercise.

But then we give them a range of remote controls for different platforms, and they have to work out which keys do what. The exercise is about understanding how the functionality of the remote is linked through to actions on the screen. This introduces the design principles for cross-platform environments, specifically when you’re talking about remotes, as you’re going to have to write different instructions for each platform, since they have different keys. If you’re going to select something on one platform, you might have to press the button that says “select.” On another platform, you might have to press the button that says “OK.” And on a third one, you might have to press a button that hasn’t even got a name. This part of the course helps the delegates to understand that they need to think about all the boxes and remote controls that are available to viewers at home, as the piece of equipment that they might have at home will be different to their neighbors’, and the numbers and flavors of set-top boxes and remotes are growing everyday.

This is good. The intricacies of material navigation is essential knowledge to have. But what about the step before the actualisation of navigation: preparing the user to act? What about making the navigation diegetic (part of the storyworld)? How interaction is plausible in the storyworld? I also think that planning the points-of-entry for the audience (which medium or mode and when) and the various paths they can take is an essential part of effective cross-media design. I guess at this stage alot of this is intuitive for the designers, or not considered at all. Either way, these considerations need to be publicised.

They then give an overview of the different programs one uses in the design of these works (eg: Photoshop). I went to a talk about Game Design for Education recently and one of the speakers said that most of the game design work is in Excel. I think that shocked some of the keen young gamers in the room!

The next stage is building ’service maps’:

[W]e do a brainstorm about enhancing a service, and explain how we build
service maps.

[itvt]: What are service maps?

Wilson: They’re a bit like a navigation map for a Web site. At the BBC we build service maps in order to understand how a service will work. We give the delegates some regular, linear television programs, we give them outlines of the programs and let them watch a short example of them, and ask them to come up with enhancements to those programs, based around various constraints. This session really helps to “concrete in” the topics that have been covered during the day. That would usually be the last exercise of the day.

I guess this approach is a good step for those practitioners coming from a mono-media perspective, but it perpetuates the idea that other platforms augment. Augmenting, or elaborating, is one of many cross-platform relations. It is the most basic, after remediation or content.

And here is the summary:

We teach people to design cross-platform and to learn to understand the constraints of the systems they’re designing for–to think about how they can design
something that can work across multiple types of middleware. It’s about thinking intelligently but creatively across as many platforms as you’re going to be operating on, rather than concentrating on a specific platform. Obviously, we give attendees a lot of detailed information about specific platforms–on what their respective palettes are and on what types of graphics work best on them. But, ultimately, we try to focus on getting them to think about designing the best service for a television brand, and not to get bogged down in just learning about a particular platform.

Interesting and helpful approach by BBC to teaching iTV. But this, like every workshop, seminar and conference I’ve studied remotely or attended is grossly wanting. The details of cross-media design just aren’t really being discussed. It is difficult to impart knowledge about an area that requires a paradigm shift in a short period of time, but more could be offered. Why isn’t it? Is it because people don’t know? [Most of them don’t!] Is it because they don’t want to share their treasured knowledge? [I’d be surprised if so.] Is it because the people training are not necessarily the best practitioners? [Possible.] Is it because the best practitioners are not necessarily the best teachers? [Possible.] Is it because the people sent to give talks are not the people who really made the decisions? [Sometimes.] Is it because no one person contains all the knowledge about how cross-media projects work? [Yes.]

P.S. I’ve just finished the orientation of a multi-platform ‘jam’ with industry professionals. Rather than give talks about methods, this approach is to facilitate a think-tank competition. I’ll give a report soon on this.

Swedlow, T. (2005) [itvt] Issue 6.04 - Feature: Murdoch, Miliband Launch Volunteering App, Interview: BBC ITV Training-Andy Wilson, 27th May, 2005.

I’ve just discovered that Jay Lemke, a semiotician, has cast his eye on transmedia. Very cool. He terms this area ‘inter-media world franchises’ and looks to the usual suspects: Harry Potter, The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, America’s Army, Disney, Manga, Star Trek and so on.

My aim here is first to identify the phenomenon of the distributed franchise as a new kind of inter-medium with significant ideological potential. Second, to argue that some of its features, such as immersive alternative worlds and identification through online fan or player communities, as well as its ability to continue to re-present itself to us in many guises, in many sites, and across extended periods of time, may make it a more powerful medium for shaping people’s views of what is natural in the social world than prior media. And finally, to ask what extensions of CDA, conceptually and in terms of research practices, will be needed to enable us to assess the affordances, effects, and dangers of this new inter-medium and its messages.

I want to argue that the ability of the franchises to extend the experience of engagement with their worlds across space and time is a key feature for their potential ideological influence.

Lemke provides a curious distinction though, with the separation of franchises according to game genres.

It is important at this point to distinguish among the various genres of computer games in relation to gameworld franchises. To some extent these genres are blurring today as hybrids attempt to maximize appeal to players, but there are certain principles at work in the genre divisions that are relevant to this analysis.

Lemke mentions some genres: RPGs, FSPs, sports-playing games. I think it is not so helpful to categorise franchises according to genres, but Lemke’s argument is about the ideological function of franchises. Lemke then traces a line between games and globalisation, discussing how games are sold as ‘cultural products’:

I am making these loose connections to the globalization of capitalist-commercial culture because of the familiar argument that the increasing scale of commercial production and the drive to maximize profits in global markets favors the creation of more culturally uniform markets. To sell LOTR or Final Fantasy in global-scale markets, you need the power to create demand for what are essentially cultural products (in the sense that desire for these products arises mainly from the need to define and express culturally-significant identities).

Lemke makes the interesting point that the ‘virtual-world franchises are also engaged in this project of re-creating stratified global market-cultures’.

Some big, exciting quotes for the cross-media researchers out there:

there is a new global cultural order in the making
…
I believe that the most interesting new phenomena in terms of how ideological effects are carried by semiotic media arise in the new inter-media world-franchises, and this is where I am focusing my own efforts to develop research techniques and theoretical conceptualizations to more effectively analyze inter-discursivity across products, media, and markets.
…
Not only do we not have adequate models of semiotic effects and inter-discursivity for each of these media individually, but many of the discursive and ideological effects of interest in inter-media franchises depend on inter-relations among presentations in coordinated, multiple semiotic media.

Lemke also makes some interesting comments on how these works will be approached. I found this interesting because I am currently working on a taxonomy of polymorphic narratives.

Accordingly, the precise subdivisions of the market for, say, films and those for videogames or fantasy novels may well not be the same. In fact, part of my thesis here is that through the work of the franchises capital is trying to make them become the same. What I expect will be seen in an empirical analysis is the construction, in franchise products and across franchise products, of various imposed principles for categorization, such as those defined in Bernstein’s more abstract view of classification systems (Bernstein, 1981), playing upon and seeking to reinforce those which are already naturalized from the prior history of Western capitalist cultures. In all these cases, I expect to see an interplay between efforts to homogenize the market by conflating categories or principles of classification and efforts to maintain or reformulate the differentiation and hierarchization of the market/culture.

To end, Lemke proposes some ideas for extending Critical Discourse Analysis. The first is a ‘cross-media analysis of inter-discursivity, which builds on Halliday’s meta-functional principles for language and on my interpretation of Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia’:

[W]e need to ask which groups of people identify with which media artifacts and qualities (types of music, types of art, types of videogames; visual styles, musical styles, gameplay styles), and then discover what principles are at work for differentiating and hierarchizing these groups that can be discerned from the affordances of the media artifacts themselves.

The approach he outlines is dubbed ‘a “multiplicative model” of multi-media meaning effects (Lemke, 1998), because it assumes that meaning effects are not simply additive, but “multiply” insofar as the meaning potential, or set of possible meanings from each component multiplies that from each other component, creating in principle a vast combinatorial space of meaning possibilities.’
The second strategy is to ‘look for instances of cross-modal subversion of consistent meaning effects’. In other words, how ‘no two semiotic resource systems are capable of producing exactly the same meaning potential in a text or artifact’.

The third and final strategy is that of ‘”traversal” analysis’. This approach analyses how meanings are gathered across ‘institutions’ and how contradictions are discovered.

The ideal approach is to combine multi-site ethnography with critical discourse analysis of the texts and media encountered by subjects in the course of their life-traversals (this would of course need to include interviews to assess subjects’ interpretations of each text/product and also across sites and texts). This approach is however quite difficult in practice because of the need to coordinate two levels of data collection and two levels of analysis: one on the timescale of short encounters with media, and the other on the timescale of lived days and weeks, many orders of magnitude greater.

He he he. There are some of us that are working on making this happen!
Lemke ends with this:

I hope that this sketch of phenomena, issues, and strategies for research goes some way toward formulating a research agenda for the extension of the project of critical discourse analysis to an important class of new media and potential new sites of ideological effects.

Come on down researchers! The more the merrier! I’ve added Lemke to my Researcher Page on my Polymorphic Narrative site.

Lemke, J. (2004) ‘Critical Analysis across Media: Games, Franchises, and the New Cultural Order’ presented at First International Conference on Critical Discourse Analysis, Valencia, published by Jay Lemke’s Personal Webpage [Online] Available at: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke/papers/Franchises/Valencia-CDA-Franchises.htm

I’ve mentioned the number website that is an extension of the TV series Lost, but there are a whole lot more that have been put out by the producers of the show. This series has been screened in many countries:

Australia - Channel 7
Austria - Pilot premiered October 6, 2004 on pay channel Premiere
Canada - A special two-hour premiere (Pilots Parts 1 and 2 back-to-back) aired on Saturday, October 2 at 8 p.m. ET, 2004 on CTV.
France - a lot of interest shown from this country (4 french websites about “Lost”). So expected showing sometime.
Germany - Pilot premiered October 6, 2004 on pay channel Premiere
Hong Kong - AXN ASIA TV
New Zealand - Pilot aired on 2nd Feb, 2005 on TV2
Phillippines - AXN ASIA TV
South Korea - expected showing on some TV channel here since Jin & Sun are both Korean and speak Korean in the pilot.
Thailand - AXN ASIA TV
U.K. - Pilot airs 2005? on Channel 4
US - Part 1 of pilot aired Sept 22nd, 2004 on ABC
[Source: Lost Survivors]

Recently the Oceanic Airlines website delivered what is called ‘Easter Eggs’ — surprises hidden in the webpages. You’ll notice there is some text behind sections of the front webpage. You can reveal the hidden text by checking the code or scrolling over the page. There is also a hidden image in the same area that is a picture of a page of the TV show script. The scene description gives details about the monster. On the seating chart page there is also a nifty thing to do: key in the numbers (4, 8,15,16,23,42) and you’ll get a viewing of the trailer for the next season. Once you view that you’ll be rewarded with another surprise: another site.

There is also a primary site, Lost Links, that has links to just about anything to do with the show — in-game and not. My favourite sites are those that provide access to items that bring me closer to the storyworld — for example, close ups of the maps used by the characters in the show. The discussion forums, of which there are many, are not that interesting for me. I want to figure out stuff myself and I find them full of spoilers.

A seminar will be held in Virginia late June this year on ‘Cross-Media Teams: Strategic Thinking for a Multi-Platform World’.

This seminar brings together senior executives from both Web and traditional operations to tackle the challenges and rewards of multi-platform media and interdepartmental cooperation. Participants boost teamwork while getting the core knowledge and strategies required to build lasting multi-platform news operations.

Of the intended results listed the following are of interest to me:

* Alignment of online and offline strategies and workflows to maximize the impact and reach of news and information initiatives on all platforms
* Creation of a cohesive, multimedia vision to integrate strategies and workflow of all available delivery channels

It seems that the areas of advertising and journalism are the earliest to jump into understanding cross-media. This is due to both being highly reliant on market force. Franchise creators are also keen to understand the area, as well as iTV developers. I just wonder why there isn’t more interest in the creative and academic realms? Perhaps because the use of cross-media implies lots of $$ and corporate backing and so is considered either out-of-reach or not Art. If anything, the lack of consideration of the area is an indication of a lack of understanding of how audiences are experiencing works. Obviously not many creators and Narratologists have their ear to the ground.

A prestigious Art prize in Australia, the Archibald Prize, is having its conventional feathers rustled by a cross-media artist: TonyJohansen.com. Johansen, who has his domain name as his signature in the competition, has created a ‘triptych’…in four parts. To add to the hypertextual reworking on his name is the name of the entry: GoFigure.net.au. The first three parts of the work are in the gallery space — ‘a self-portrait in acrylic, a portrait of the portrait hanging on a wall, and a digital image of the painting’ (source). The fourth part is online. The site shows other pics of the self-portraits, the making of the portraits, unused images, description of the project and so on. Just like all the other works I’ve mentioned over the last couple of years on this blog the work is cross-media and exhibits the following traits: public production, alternate and possible paths, elaboration, interaction, self-reflexive and so on.

Great to see. This gives me inspiration to send my stuff out to places that I presume wouldn’t take it. Perhaps cross-media works are such a novelty they could be accepted.

Thanks to Drew for passing this on to me.

A television soap in the US has flirted outrageously with cross-media by producing a novel. The novel is written by a character in the TV series and is referred to and launched in the series! I love this.

The book, The Killing Club, is brought out by Hyperion Books. Marcie Walsh, a character in the series is even credited on the publisher website, alongside real life author Michael Malone. Apparently in the TV series, One Life to Live, Marice refers to her past and how it would make a good novel. She then goes on to launch the book on the series. You can read an excerpt of the novel online.

They even describe ways in which the relationship between the book and the Tv series can be discussed in a book club.

There are 2 other works mentioned in the NYTimes article, one of which is Stephen King’s Rose Red TV series and a diary in the series.

I’ll be adding these to my preferred cross-media works list.

A ‘Summit of the Future Report’ by the Club of Amsterdam was released recently [pdf].
But, to Monique De Haas’ horror I’m sure they just don’t address all the issues. I guess how can they really? Here are some of the highlights:
They talk about how young people are on the Internet rather than watching TV. Therefore, they say, ‘[b]roadcasters are looking for new ways to grab their audi-
ence and “immerse” them in the way that computer and console games do. That leads to increased demand for interactivity – getting audiences to lean forward.’ (p.96)
I love that: ‘lean forward’.
They also discussed ‘interactivity’:

· Broadcasters like interactivity. The red button is appears more and more frequently. There is evidence to show that people like to vote. For instance, in the UK :
· Olympics - 10 million viewers accessed the service.
· Wimbledon last year - 4.2 million Sky viewers accessed the service.
· Test the Nation (actually a Dutch format from BNN) – I million
· Big Brother – 700,00- viewers paid 25p for enhanced NTL/Telewest service. (p.100)

And another point about the effect of technology on creation:

All this new technology is certainly having an effect on content and style of new programmes seen on TV:
· TV drama moving further away from strict realism to incorporate games and interactive styles (e.g. Green Wing).
· Sports (Olympics, Wimbledon) offer more alternative pathways through experience.
· Reality Shows (Big Brother) dependent on voting
· News channels mimic “Windows” approach of the Internet. (p.101)

They do mention ‘cross-media’ near the end:

There need to be platforms where professionals from all walks of life can think “out of the box” and where general concepts can be discussed in various scenarios. The Club of Amsterdam plays an important role, not only for the discussion of present day challenges but primarily for the cross-media future that is just beginning to dawn. (p.171)

Monique, they needed you!

On April 27 a TimeWarner press release:

Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. (TBS, Inc.), a Time Warner company, today unveiled GameTap, a first-of-its-kind broadband entertainment network that offers games-on-demand plus original programming via a broadband connected PC.

Game Tap will not only be an outlet for post-retail games but it will progress the life of what Klastrup and Tosca term ‘transmedial worlds’ (see my polymorphic narrative site for further details). See how Andrew T. Heller, president of domestic distribution for TBS, Inc. describes the process:

With GameTap, we are bringing to games what we brought to cable television: compelling, branded environments where beloved properties live on.

It is great to see more ‘distributed art’ being commissioned and called for in exhibitions and collections. It shows an awareness of a hugely emerging area of production. But I can’t quite get my head around this one:

dLux media arts (who do great stuff mind you) is called for works for d>Art.05 with the theme of ‘distributed arts’. It is described as follows:

Under the sub-title “Distributed Art” d>Art.O5 will both present art forms that have an inherently distributed nature (web art, mobile phone art) and investigate new methods for distribution of digital art. (podcasting, BitTorrent, Bluetooth).

There are 3 categories that one can enter through:
- d>Art.O5 Screen: Open to Australian citizens or permanent residents only
- d>Art.O5 Sound: Open to Australian and International artists
- d>Art.O5 Web: Open to Australian and International artists

So, it seems they’re referring to the distribution of a work not a work that is distributed over many texts or mediums. They’re half there.

I find this aspect of my creative works incredibly frustrating. I work with print and online channels and cannot find a journal that would happily like a work that is neither and both. I haven’t asked any journals yet but I’m researching potential avenues of publication. On the one hand I need to get work published in a ‘recognised’ literary journal to assist in my academic career and grant applications, and on the other hand I need new media ‘publications’ for the same reasons. My work straddles both areas quite overtly. Who wants to play with a mutant eh?

For the 50th Anniversary Press event the Disneyland® Resort is offering a podcast.

Michael W. Geoghegan plays host for this sneak peek at the biggest celebration in Disney history, including interviews, stories and other exciting events direct from the Disneyland® Resort on May 3, 4 & 5, 2005.

This just seems a bit weird to me.

From: Micro Persuasion