Cross-Media Entertainment

Just a few hours ago, the Lost ARG began in the UK. My inbox is full with the details of the phone number (this is how the game starts: during an ad break a phone number is shown) and the related sites. But, the Lost ARG doesn’t officially commence in Australia until the 6th May, and the 3rd of May in the US. This just shows how stupid local broadcasters are, or, how international launches cannot happen through TV. We have global film launches where people turn up to the cinema at midnight to watch a film at the same time as audiences on the other side of the planet. It seems an internet launch—the actual screening of something—is the direction we’ll need to go in this networked world. Don’t they realise that fans and players congregate according to their interests and skills, not according to their country! But back to the very exciting LOST ARG!

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I’ve been to a few cross-media talks over the past couple of years, and read alot on the subject obviously. I’m finding that I hear the same comments over and over again at conferences and seminars. People are still just discovering the area and they enter it through one angle and then are surprised that there are other industries, other approaches, other issues. This is one reason why terminology is an issue in this field—you’re dealing with terminology from all the different art forms (film, TV, Internet and so on), different industries, IT, Advertising, Entertainment, Academia and so on. Cross-media is a term, along with others, that can refer to changes in content, technology, marketing, audiences and business. So, I’ve put together a quick chart that I feel outlines some of the key concerns of each of these areas. Rather than using well-known terms that are not industry-agnostic, I’ve tried to employ neutral ones where possible, so that anyone from any point of entry can understand it. I’m posting it online because I want your feedback. Does this chart make sense to you or do I need to redescribe? What have I missed? How should the categories change?

The Cross-Media Chart:

Cross-Media Content, Technology, Marketing, Audiences and Business

Just right-click to download it Click on the thumbnail and then download that image (it isn’t readable in the browser). Give me your feedback and I’ll redo it and put a proper one online for everyone to use! 

Note: this chart is not an overview of all the changes that are taking place in entertainment and media; UGC, interactivity, convergence and so on are not included because they are not strictly a cross-media concern. Cross-media does, however, solve alot of general entertainment problems! But that is another chart…

Yep, my first podcast interview is with Chris Crawford, the inventor of the first commercially available (soon) interactive storytelling engine—Storytron; and of course, a game design vetran. I was very sick with the flu when I interviewed him so I have a blocked nose and I giggle a bit too much! But, I think you’ll find his views interesting. The podcast is the first for my other blog: Writer Response Theory, so the post is over there. Enjoy!

iMedia Connection & Variety’s Integrate ‘06 was held on April 12 and now there are some articles and ppts from the talks online at iMediaConnection.

Integrate ‘06 is the second annual summit that brings together top marketing executives from major entertainment companies to explore the challenges and opportunities in creating integrated marketing programs to reach today’s entertainment consumer. 

Jodi Harris gives a round-up in her article. Brad Berens wrote an article, outlining Five Reasons to Market Your Movie Online:

1. Online Movie Ads Work
2. It’s Where Consumers Are
3. It’s Where They Look
4. TV is Losing It’s Effectiveness
5. Consumers Want Integration

The ppt of his talk is available online. It has tons of stats on marketing & US film & TV viewing figures compared with DVD buying etc.

Vince Broady looked at How to Leverage CGC in his ppt. The presentation covers the findings of  the GameSpot/Starcom MediaVest Group Youth Study, and has some excellent stats on The Office campaign that I cannot duplicate here until I have permission.

Heidi Dickert and Warner Bros.’ Abe Recio discusses their research on film-goers using mobiles, Mobile as a Marketing Research Tool, in their ppt.

There is also a ppt online of Susan Fogelson’s talk, Creative Showcase: Integrated Marketing.

I forgot to tell you about a paper I’ll be delivering at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference: Internet Research 7.0: Internet Convergences in Brisbane late September this year. The paper is titled: How the Internet is Holding the Centre of the Narrative Universe, and the abstract is online.

The Internet is an undisputedly influential force in changes to the way entertainment is conceived, produced, distributed, experienced and critiqued. With the proliferation of technology we have a wide range of production devices and distribution models that, along with cultural and inter-disciplinary cross-fertilisation, inspire media-specific poetics and genre hybrids. To name a few that have emerged within new media arts alone: advertainment, email fiction, interactive comics, mobile art, hypertext fiction, wikifiction, botfiction and blog fiction. Conglomerate media ownership and franchise management encourages the shifting of audiences across platforms, within a branded universe. Years of television programming, competitive industry, networked markets and indie-publishing has facilitated episodic aesthetics and distribution. In the age of cross-media production, stories are no-longer delivered at a single-point in time; they are remediated, adapted, serialised, appropriated and distributed across media. Cross-media entertainment encompasses a range of genres that include pervasive gaming, franchises, alternate reality games, transmedia storytelling, mobisodes, episodic gaming, extendable reality games, tie-ins and so on.

The relationships between these “texts”, between components of a storyworld, are not addressed in the notions of intertextuality, hypertextuality, dialogism and heteroglossia, assemblage, intermedia, open work and relational aesthetics. These works are emerging forms with poetic and cultural ramifications theorised by researchers in media studies, literary theory and semiotics: “second-shift aesthetics” (Caldwell), “digitextuality” (Everett), “transmedia storytelling” (Jenkins), “entertainment supersystem” (Kinder), “transmedial worlds” (Klastrup and Tosca), “inter-media world franchises” (Lemke), “new intertextual commodity” (Marshall), “neo-baroque aesthetics” (Ndalianis), “distributed narratives” (Walker), “networked narrative environments” (Zapp).

Sympathetic to Richard Wagner’s “gesamtkunstwerk” (“total work of art”) these works are viewed through the romantic lens of Ionian Enchantment (Holton), universality (Andrews) and consilience (Wilson): they are reframed as polysystems within which a variety of clusters of entertainment forms co-exist and inter-relate. This is a somewhat turbulent narrative universe of original, commissioned, sanctioned and unsanctioned producers; long-form, short and micro narratives; linear, interactive, generated and emergent narratives; push and pull content; mono- and multi-modal media; fixed, mobile, converged, networked technology; public, private, mass, remote, virtual and personalised address; traditional, hybrid and emerging genres; literary, popular, marketing, anarchic and pedagogical rhetorics; fiction, nonfiction and alternate realities; real, virtual and augmented realities. How do audiences navigate such a dynamic narrative universe? The Internet.

This paper argues that the Internet is the binding agent of cross-media entertainment. A narrator with all the answers, a signpost to the everything, the Internet acts as site-map of continually updating components of a cross-media universe and its meta content. Rather than the artwork being the source of all information about a storyworld, the Internet acts as a neutral mediator of the various instantiations. Through a content analysis of cross-media productions and consideration of audience usage of media, an overview of the various functions the Internet currently plays, and could play are proposed. 

Well, I’ve finally done it. I’ve moved all info about myself to a single location, my company website: Star of Dena. It was getting a bit too ridiculous updating my details in so many locations, AND I wanted to practice what I preach. I’ve created a pivot point, a page that lists all the websites within the Star of Dena Universe! That way, you get to know everything i’m doing all over cyberspace. I’ve popped in a couple of pics of my self with my new spectacles! I only need them to read for long periods, but I think they make me look serious, so I put them in.

I gave a talk last week on Finding and Attracting Audiences to film & TV producers at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School Centre for Screen Business, Melbourne. I was briefed to give a talk on how producers can make themselves findable, basically, how producers advertise to reach through the noise. I chose to select examples of what film & TV producers have been doing the last few months, proven techniques that have indeed made them findable and attract audiences. I chose creative, in-story examples as much as possible. I don’t consider myself a marketer, but I do look at every aspect of cross-media production and advertising is part of it. AND, in the age of “branded entertainment”, “Madison & Vine” (Scott Donaton) and so on, there really isn’t much difference between good shows and good advertising. I also look very closely at what advertisers have learnt. And there is a good reason for that: advertisers know how to motivate a person to act. The entertainment industry is new to active audiences, but marketers are not. Whereas storytellers, artists, know how to move a person emotionally, they know how to create whole worlds with a few words or brush strokes. Anyway, rant over, a pdf of the talk is now online.

I co-wrote an academic paper with Jeremy Douglass and Mark Marino (my WRT co-horts over in California): Benchmark Fiction: A Framework for Comparative New Media Studies. The paper was delivered at the premier academic new media arts event: Digital Arts & Culture (DAC) in Copenhagen last December by Jeremy. We basically put forward a theory of how new media texts can be created and analysed using the IT industry technique of benchmarking, creatively. A pdf of that talk is now online too. BTW: I have transferred my PhD from the University of Melbourne to the University of Sydney, now that I moved!

Enjoy! And of course, let me know any examples you could add, or things you would like to know more about.

Earlier this month, PayPal launched PayPal Mobile (only available in Canada, US & the UK..grrrr). The service connects your phone to your PayPal account, making you able to purchase from your phone. Advertisements on posters, on websites, in magazines with the icon of Txt2Buy prompt you to enter a code and SMS it to PayPal. Whammo, you’ve got it and it will be delivered to you immediately. So, when you’re walking down the street, and you see a CD advertised, you can satisfy that on-demand urge and buy it immediately. So now, you can buy things immediately online and immediately on the street. We’re getting further and further away from the bricks and mortar… 

Another thing you can do is Txt2Give. By texting WATER you can donate to Unicef, other codes you can donate to Amnesty International and so on. Or you can transfer money to someone immediately. No fees apply, just your normal SMS cost.

Outside of PayPal is another service in Australia: mCode. This system provides the same code number prompt, but sending it triggers details to be sent to you. So, once you’ve registered with them, if you see a poster advertising an event you’d like to see, all you have to do is text the code. An email will be sent to you, outlining all the dates, times & avenues for buying tickets etc. In the spirit of PayPal, I’ve called this Txt2Know.

All of these services make sense, because everyone carries their phones with them all the time. I’m interested in creative uses of this system too. What if I read a story that asks me to Txt2Be…text to be closer to a character or the storyworld. I love the use of words as commands, to have ramifications in the real world.

I’ve just watched a video of a virtual event for the third time. I found it so exciting and interesting, but some of you may find this response upsetting. You see, the event was not consensual. In World of Warcraft (WoW), a guild, Illidan, was holding an in-game memorial service for a member who had passed away in real life. The members of the guild were paying their respects, and videod the service to give to the family of the deceased. Then something happened. Another guild, Serenity-Now, attacked them. The funeral attendees avatars are seen strewn over the snow. They made of the video of the event too, to recruit new members to their PvP (player versus player) guild. You can watch a video at Google, download it there, and a hi-res torrent is available (but that is a different edit). Nate’s post at Terra Nova provides links to some fascinating online discussions and their are some interesting comments there too. 

I’m sure I’d be very upset if I was part of the funeral event, but as an observer I’m fascinated. It is interesting, to me, that the drama is because of a mix of the real & virtual world. If it was a realworld attack on a real world funeral, we’d react differently (though some are equally outraged at this event). And if the funeral was virtual then this event wouldn’t have so much tension. The whole idea of representation in the arts is at question here. We’ve been hammering on the idea of audience becoming active, of the reader becoming a user, of the co-creation of the text, of participatory arts. Well, it is happening. We now have the ability to participate in the creation of works and we are the event. The problem now is, how can we delineate between fictional behaviour and real world behaviour?

Okay, in the virtual world those players are not actually killing the other players in real life, they are killing their virtual representations. So, there is one delineation there. But it can still hurt. Someone can smash my favourite picture. The picture represents some memory I have, but it is just a representation. But it still hurts. Intention is the difference. Did the Serenity-Now players intend to hurt the other guild in RL? No. They intended to represent hurting them though… At what point have I crossed the line? Each avatar is a person, it is not a hollow puppet (besides the bots!). Many of these games, including alternate reality ones, are tettering on the edge. At present, we’re still covered in the muck of scripted entertainment. If we’re given a role suddenly, we say the lines we think we should say, as we’ve seen a million times before. But those words are quickly becoming stale, that echo will get fainter.

For decades, academics, artist, philosophers, anyone, has been championing the freeing of the individual. Power to the audience! Let there be a two-way interaction. Let’s destroy the tyrrany of the text. Let’s free people to have a voice and stop being help down by a dominant force. Well, maybe it was in place for a reason…

In Wired recently Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, commented on the need for a metaverse (a term apparently coined by Neal Stephenson—though I cannot imagine it never being uttered until 1992), a unified platform in which all our avatars can roam freely between the various virtual worlds. He argues:

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