Cross-Media + Transmedia Entertainment

“A blank page is God’s way of showing you how hard it is to be God.”
– Anonymous

I mentioned The Venice Project here early last month, a mysterious online TV platform that is in beta. Well, now they’ve changed their name and have announced a major partnership with Viacom:

Today we’re announcing a major partnership with Viacom. Which will bring programming and lots of channels from Viacom’s key brands and properties available on Joost on our imminent launch.

MTV will offer popular shows, both past and present, including Laguna Beach, Beavis & Butthead, Real World, Punk’d and My Super Sweet Sixteen, while COMEDY CENTRAL will feature episodes from Stella, CCP’s and Freak Show. Nickelodeon, CMT: Country Music Television, MTV2, Logo, Spike TV, mtvU, and Gametrailers.com will also provide content.  VH1’s offerings will include episodes of Flavor of Love, Surreal Life, and I Love New York. BET’s Networks’ offerings will include some of its biggest shows, including Beef, DMX: Soul of a Man, Comic View and recent smash hit American Gangster.  Also, Paramount Pictures, Paramount Vantage and Paramount Classics will be providing full-length feature films from its catalog of classics and recent releases.

And here is some more info about what is does:

Joost will allow users to have free access to thousands of programs and channels not readily available on the Web. Through Joost, viewers can watch programming from many of Viacom’s brands on their computers through a customizable platform with advanced television viewing features such as links that lead to more information or related websites based on the content; and a variety of plug-in applications, such as instant messaging, message boards, and news tickers.

Currently available in limited beta, Joost combines the best of TV and the best of the Internet by offering viewers a unique, TV-like experience enhanced with the choice, control and flexibility of Web 2.0. Joost is the first online, global TV distribution platform, bringing together advertisers, content owners and viewers in an interactive, community-driven environment. Joost can be accessed with a broadband Internet connection and offers broadcast-quality content to viewers for free.

They’ve opened up their Beta again, so anyone can apply. One of the things that I really like about this project is that it is providing TV content globally. This is so needed and will facilitate alot more well designed ’extended experiences’. The problem at present is the many extended experiences (alternate reality games, enhanced TV sites, web quests, treasure hunts etc) are accessible globally, but the property they are extending usually isn’t. Now, there are ways to work around that legally, illegally and half-legally (don’t ask me for details, just trust me on that one), but due to licensing restrictions, most are controlled. Some creators of these extended experiences design them well and some don’t. I’ll talk about one that doesn’t in my next post…

Check out: https://www.joost.com/
 

Because there are so many different terms out there describing the same thing, and many that don’t but are employed by others to do so anyway, I decided to bundle the greatest hits together in this one title:

cross/trans/multi-platform/media storytelling/entertainment

Although they each mean different things to different people, the fact is they share a common trait in being an explanatory entry-point to the same idea. I really don’t mind which people use…we can get down to the specifics in specific environments….but as bundle banner I think it does a good job of bonding (or confusing) us all.

Wohoo! It is here! The International Game Developers Association Alternate Reality Game Special Interest Group Whitepaper ( * whew * ) has been released! Here is Adam Martin’s announcement from the ARG SIG listserv:

After eight months of hard work and hundreds of revisions I’m delighted to announce that the 2006 ARG SIG Whitepaper is now available for download from the ARG SIG website ().

A huge thank-you to all the poeple who’ve helped make this happen. I’m very proud of the final paper, and even more so for the fact that everyone’s time and expertise was freely given. This is a great achievement, and since we came up with the idea at the 2006 GDC Group Gathering our volunteers have: had a new baby, been hospitalized, and created and edited literally hundreds of different revisions. It’s a tremendous achievement.

There’s a contributors list at the start of the paper, but once again here’s the people you should thank:

- Bryan Alexander, Director of research, National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE)
- Nova Barlow, Research Manager, Themis Group / Playerbase Solutions
- Tom Chatfield, Editorial Assistant, Prospect Magazine
- Christy Dena, Cross-Media Entertainment Researcher, School of Letters, Arts and Media; University of Sydney
- Andrea Phillips, ARG Writer, Mind Candy
- Brooke Thompson, Cross Media Entertainment Consultant

Here it is: http://igda.org/arg/whitepaper.html

Enjoy!

[Late Note: I've just been flicking through the whitepaper and there are some errors in there that somehow made it to the final draft. That happens. But one of note is that 'Cross Media Entertainment' is credited with creating Jamie Kane. BBCi did Jamie Kane.]

Apologies for the late notice, but there has been an amazing week of events happening in Second Life. The New Media Consortium has been holding a 12 day Impact of Digital Media Symposium. The pic you see is an event I attended last night for the MacArthur Foundation press conference in to announce their $50 million investments to support programs in digital media (Building the Field of Digital Media and Learning). What was great is that they televised us in SL to the screens in the press conference as well, and took questions from us. Here is a post at NMC on the event. There are lots of pics of the event here, including many of Anya (the blonde) and a few with me in them (the black-haired chick with pink bows). hehe. Anyway, on Oct 20th at 7am (US time) Slate Night Magazine (the SL arts and entertainment magazine I write for) is having a special session. Here is the run-down from i-Anya’s blog:

* The Avatar as Communication – Dr Angela Thomas, Sydney University (Anya Ixchel, editor of Slatenight)

* Fashion parade: Fashioning the Avatar (showcasing the range of unique identities in SL)

* Remediation of the Art Space in SL – Christy Dena, Sydney University (Lythe Witte, writer for Slatenight)

* Music in Second Life: Panel Discussion and Live Music – with Silas Scarborough, ZeroOne Paz, Mel Cheeky, Cybster Curtis and Billy Thunders (Cletis Carr)

* Future Perfect: Projections forward to an even better world – Dell Wilberg (creative designer of Slatenight)

* Engaging the Disengaged: Using SL to Revitalize the Undergraduate Classroom – Danielle Mirliss and Heidi Trotta, Seton Hall University, NY (Danielle Damone and Heidi TeeCee, writers for Slatenight)

If you have Second Life downloaded already, and are a member of the NMC guests group (to access the NMC sim you need to be a guest of the group), here is the SLURL.

For a list of ongoing posts about the many other symposium events (including a talk with Howard Rheingold!), check the NMC Observer.  

The full schedule of the events is here. Oct 21st has Howard Rheingold!! Hope to ’see’ you inworld! IM me if you’re having trouble figuring out how to get there.

This sound file was passed onto me by a colleague (Kronos you legend) in SecondLife. It’s for all the teachers out there (who have, of course, all been students)… [mp3]

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.