Well, not quite ‘death’ but an indefinite hiatus. I’m powering down this blog for a few reasons, one of which is my desire to finish my PhD. I’ve tried for the last year and a half to do PhD writing and work and this blog, but found the mindsets are somewhat incompatable. I’ve decided therefore to close this blog down. I don’t know if I’ll bring it up again and if I do when, or whether I’ll start another one. But I do know that I have thoroughly enjoyed blogging here these past few years. I have especially enjoyed meeting many of you because of the blog, and seeing ‘cross-media’ (etc) projects become ubiquitous. Thankfully, the area has alot more people looking at it now, from alot of different perspectives. Here are some blogs that will keep you informed:

• Networked Performance: research blog that posts about emerging network-enabled practice;
• You can read and listen to news about alternate reality games and just about any online extension of a film, TV or book property on the ARGNet blog and ARG Netcast (podcast);
• Henry Jenkins personal blog and the Convergence Culture Consortium blog has lots of goodies from a media studies perspective about ‘transmedia storytelling’ and ‘convergence culture’ in general;
• DeMontfort University share their investigations into what they term ’Transliteracy’ at their PART blog;
• Jeff Gomez, the CEO of Starlight Runner and longtime practitioner of ‘trans-media’ projects, is now blogging regularly about his insights and experience over at the Producers Guild of America blog;
• Monique de Haas blogs about ‘crossmedia communication’ occasionally;
• Tony Walsh posts semi-regularly on alternate reality games;
• Valentina Rao blogs about crossmedia games and anything related to that at Games Across Media, and will hopefully be starting her PhD on the subject soon;
• Johnathan Gray, Derek Johnson and Ivan Askwith are blogging about everything around TV and film at The Extratextuals;
• Crossmedia Dialog is a group blog that post regularly on crossmedia in Amsterdam and worldwide;
• Faris Yakob, Adam Crowe blog about ‘transmedia planning’ and other changes to the marketing industry;
• Jak Boumans posts every single day about stuff happening in the Netherlands and worldwide at Buziaulane; 
• Max Giovognoli runs everything to do with cross-media in Italy;
• MobileCrossMedia is a blog that looks at the different ways mobile phones can network with different devices and the real world;
• If you don’t already get it, the Convergence Newsletter has regular interesting newsletters about convergence in journalism and has been my favourite newsletter for the past few years;

I don’t plan to be blogging here about events or publications I’m involved in, instead I’ll pop them on my bio site. But for now, here are some events I’m involved with, in the not-too-distant-future:

• I’ll be on the ‘expert panel’ with Mark McCrindle and Tim Flattery at Mitchell Communications Group ‘s launch of ‘While You Weren’t Watching’, a documentary on changes to branded entertainment etc in which I was interviewed. The launch is private but the documentary will be put online I believe in Nov; 
• I have my own panel on ‘Designing, Experiencing and Analysing Games in the Age of Integration’, and I am a panelist in Darren Toft’s panel on ‘What Happened to New Media Art?’ at the Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment in Dec;
• I’ll be on the panel on ‘Cyber-Born Film’ at Megan Spencer’s Destination Festival (or DestFest) in Dec;
• In Jan 08, I’ll be a guest lecturer again for Sue Thomas and Kate Pullinger’s Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media, De Montfort University, UK;
• In Feb 08, my essay on ‘Tiering in Alternate Reality Games’ will be published in the special issue of Convergence edited by Henry Jenkins and Mark Deuze.

For now though, I will continue to be online in a different way. I’ve started a podcast, a podcast where I’ll interview talented people working in this area. My ‘birth’ podcast is a bit awkward, but the second is a great one: an interview with Stitch Media’s Evan Jones. At the site, I also provide sneak preview information about Stitch Media’s latest project.

That is it for me here, thankyou all for sharing this time with me. I’ll see you on the other side of my PhD.

Check it out: www.ChristyDena.com  

Check it out: www.UniverseCreation101.com

The full paper is online [PDF] and detail about the book this paper is a part of.

You can’t add to the game universe or expand on the story told in the game with “lost chapters” or back story or anything like that.

And then they end the list of rules by saying:

If you do any of these things, you can expect to hear from Microsoft’s lawyers who will tell you that you have to stop distributing your Items right away.

There’s still a way to do some of these things we’ve excluded, but you have to contact us for a commercial license. Thanks, and have fun!

* Shaking my head in disbelief *

Check out: http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/developer/rules.htm

Moderator: Alice Taylor VP Digital Content, BBC
Panel Organiser: Dan Hon COO, Mind Candy

Dan Hon COO, Mind Candy
Brian Clark Founder/CEO, GMD Studios/IndieWire
Evan Jones Creative Dir/Producer, Stitch Media
Brooke Thompson Giant Mice
Alice Taylor VP Digital Content, BBC 

ARGs & ROI

Man2: [A]dvertisers have typically been interested in reach: how many millions of people will see this. Now they’re starting to realize that the quality of the engagement and the quality of that interaction with the brand have a lot more impact than just the sheer number of people you reach.

So where a television advert might, in the best-case scenario, give you 30 seconds of attention, an ARG will produce session lengths that are 30 minutes or longer and heavy repeat visitation, for all the same reasons that people tune into an episodic television series.

Forensic Storytelling & Community

Brian: [W]hat we’re doing is trying to give the audience something to do, rather than just read. The simplest thing that you can do is take your narrative and break it into a thousand pieces and hide them all over the place. Then the audience has to become an active researcher. It’s like CSI, it’s forensic storytelling, where the audience is actually assembling that, and thus feels ownership over it.

Part of that is, “I know something you don’t know.” But it is also, “I know something you don’t know, and now I’m going to share it with you.” Rather than, “I know something you don’t know, and now I’m going to keep it secret.”

Realtime Writing

Brian: At ARG fest, your brother called it, “Just in time content creation,” which I thought was a wonderfully nice way to describe the feeling of chaos and terror that actually accompanies.

Dan: It’s panic. It’s writing copy, at three in the morning that really should’ve been up about 15 minutes ago. But the great thing about that is that it shows interactivity. This is really user center players into design.

We watch what the players are doing all the time. This is what you guys get with the Metacortex and with the other ARG. You watch what the players are doing. You watch what they like. You watch what doesn’t works and what works. And you constantly are adapting to it.

Brian: More specifically as a story writer, every ARG that we’ve done, we ended up rewriting it significantly half-way after it went public. Often, because the audience comes up with better writing than we came up with. They start thinking, “Oh, that guy’s going to turn on us.” And you think, wow! That’s a good idea to let that guy turn on him. You get all in a room and you start going, OK, what if that guy wasn’t the villain? What if this guy was the villain? How would we change the story from here on out?

That’s something you don’t get except maybe in the editing room of a film where you’ve already shot everything and you’re trying to piece the story together. But here you have the chance to let the audience tell you what they really want to see next.

ARG Demographics & Tiering

Dan: For us it’s interesting because the way we stretched it that first season, there were so many facets to it, so the audience that we had were following the strict story side was very different from the people who were playing the other side of our business which is the puzzle side, the straight puzzle side. 

[...]

Dan: It’s hard to say. What we do know is that there was a much higher proportion of women who were following the story than we would have expected otherwise. And that for the strict casual game side, for the puzzle card solving side, we had a very large age skew. So we were going from 10 years old up to about 80. So that was very much the casual gaming market, as opposed to, at the moment, the traditional audience we see for an ARG, which is slightly more hard-core. 

[...]

Brian: But I think that phenomenon of having a lot of women as players and developers in the community comes from the fact that most ARG models aren’t competitive gaming, they’re collaborative gaming, so the whole audience is solving things together. I think that’s one of the things that makes it appeal more to women than, say, a first-person shooter, that’s much more adrenaline-junkie competitive.

Accessibility & ARGs

Evan: I think one of the things that’s moving forward is the talk – and I’ve heard a lot of talk about making it into a more mainstream experience. I am interested to see all the different models that take it in that direction.

I think there may be certain games that are played at a hardcore level and certain ones that are played at a mainstream level, or ones that separate the community into different levels of play, and all sorts of different models that will allow people who… 

Seriality & ARGs

Brian: In a way, I think the number of people actually in the scene is greatly dwarfed by the number of people watching the scene and trying to figure out where this can go next. So we’re definitely in a, like, infancy phase in terms of what other people in these other communities as they grab this model and twist it into something else.

Dan: Definitely. So, one of the things that we’ve learned from “Perplex City” is that it’s terribly to hard to get into a game that’s two years long and then you’re about a year and a half in. It’s pretty much impossible.

So we’ve been looking at lots of other media. We’ve been looking at television because that’s a very easy comparison to make. We like to say, “Well, what is it that ‘LOST’…” Well, maybe “LOST” isn’t such a good example…

“So, what is it that ‘24′ does? What do television shows do to help you catch up halfway through a season, or three-quarters of the way through a season?”

I think we’re going to see a shift, and this is something we’re going to be trying out towards.

So I think we are going to see a shift. This is something we are going to be trying out towards much more episodic gaming. There is a shift towards that in the gaming industry in general, what with Half Life.

Alice: Yeah.

Evan: Sam & Max. Yeah.

Dan: So, there will be shift towards episodic gaming. Gaming will probably happen in more bite size chunks to make it more accessible to people, instead of having an episode in an instance of game play where you don’t know how long it is going to last. I think what we’ll see is, probably companies coming out saying this is probably going to only last two to six weeks. So you know it’s not going to completely take over your life.

Alice: So, it has a start and an end date, like a television series.

Dan: It has an end date. You know that you can come in. You can just catch-up. You can just play this episode. And that’s all that you’ll have to do. You can just dip into it.

Evan: It’s been an issue I’ve been bring up is that, with well established media like, for instance, books, they have this really tactile way of giving you the information of this is going to be this long, or that long, or something. And at the moment, we’re still working on that. It’s when you get involved in a rabbit hole. You don’t really know where you’re going…

Another item they talked about was Linda Stones’s notion of “continual partial attention”. I’ll be addressing this in a separate post. In the meantime, check out the full transcript.

[youtube QBusjqW7wRA]


Now, in an effort to demythologise what ‘transmedia’ and ‘cross-media’ etc is, I’ll take the opportunity to unpack the relations between the segments presented in this video:

• Segment 1: Superman cartoon = 2D animation probably circa 1940s which is an ADAPTATION of comic books introduced in 1938 (although there may be some TRANSMEDIA expansions of the storyline);
• Segment 2: Superman movie = live action ADAPTATION of segment 1. At quick glance, the adaptation occurs on a few levels: 1) Medial (2D to live action); 2) Cultural (storyline alteration for contemporary audiences);
• Segment 3: The Simpsons cartoon = 2D INTERTEXTUAL relation (Genette) where the cartoon alludes to the Superman storyworld, also a ‘metaform’ (Johnson);
• Segment 4: The Simpsons videogame = 3D ADAPTATION of The Simpsons 2D cartoon;
• Segment 5: The Simpsons real life version & The Simpsons original cartoon = MASHUP/REMIX/INTERTEXTUAL relation (quoting) of original 2D cartoon and fan live-action APPROPRIATION/ADAPTATION/HOMAGE (source);
• Segment 6: The Matrix title sequence & The Simpsons original cartoon = INTERTEXTUAL relation (quoting) of The Matrix feature film within The Simpsons original 2D cartoon;
• Segment 7: The Matrix Lego animation = fan live-action APPROPRIATION/ADAPTATION/HOMAGE/PARODY of The Matrix live-action feature film;
• Segment 8: The Matrix feature film = excerpt from live action feature film (that is what it looks like);
• Segment 9: The Matrix videogame = INTERTEXTUAL relation (quoting) of 3D videogame ADAPTATION of The Matrix feature film within iPod interface REMEDIATION (transparency relation – Bolter & Grusin).

So, from this little analysis we can see that there the media relations exhibited are those that have been present for decades. From what I can tell, there is only one that is only one example of a weak form of expansion of a storyworld: the parody. I bring up the point of expansion because that is the contemporary understanding of ‘transmedia’, as popularised by Henry Jenkins. Jenkins’s definition of ‘transmedia storytelling’:

A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. In the ideal form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best—so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics; its world might be explored through game play or experienced as an amusement park attraction. Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained so you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game and vice-versa. (Convergence Culture, 139)

Transmedia storytelling, in Jenkins sense, refers to the expansion of a storyworld, with each unit being self-contained. This is actually just one type of transmedia expansion of four (4) top-level ones that I have identified. But the point about expansion is there. That is why I baulked at the video being described as ‘TransMedia’. Now, ‘cross-media’ is a term that has been around for a long time. It has many meanings to different parts of industry, different industries and different academics. I employ ‘cross-media’ to be an umbrella term that describes all inter-textual relations in a multi-platform environment: repurposing (remediation), adaptation and transmedia expansions (and more).

I find it interesting that ‘transmedia’ and ‘cross-media’ are often employed to described intertextual relations that have been present for a while. One of the reasons is that some people enter the notion of intertextual relations through these forms and so label them according to what they have just found out. Another reason is a fetish for the new. To label an intertextual activity according to notions that have been around for a very long time negates the excitement and uniqueness of it. With this analysis we can see that the activities listed in the video are not new in terms of the intertextual relations. What is new, however, is the range of media and artforms that we can employ for adaptations; the ways digital technologies enables easier appropriation of forms & the broadcasting of them; the growing preference for these forms and they way ‘official’ producers are engaging in these behaviours as well…

One thing is clear from this video though: people really do love seeing fictional worlds persist in every media platform and arts type, irrespective of the creator.

See Sandra’s post at Hitwise

But I want to mention too, the closing keynote of NMC’s Symposium was Howard Rheingold! You can listen to the podcast here.