News and Blogs by No Mimes Media (and friends)

Let’s study, with objectivity and curiosity,
the mutation phenomenon of forms and values in the current world.
Let’s be conscious of the fact that although tomorrow’s world
does not have any chance to become more fair than any other,
it owns a chance that is linked to the destiny of the current art [...]
that of embodying, in their works some forms of new beauty,
which will be able to arise only from the meet of all the techniques.
(Francastel 1956, 274)
Translation by Regina Célia Pinto, emailed to the empyre mailing list,
Jan 2, 2004.

This is the epigraph that begins Christy Dena’s PhD thesis, available online. Christy is one the sharpest, most thoughtful, and yet still accessible thinkers on transmedia out there. I will be pouring over this document in the next few months. I am sure it will make me see things I hadn’t seen before.

I suspect that if you want to enter the discussion of transmedia, this is going to be a seminal text.

I get on a fair number of airplanes. (I hate it. Carbon footprint the size of Rhode Island, and growing.) Most of the time, we all observe the etiquette of plane flight, which is that each person is enclosed in their own private bubble of space, and the only interaction between me and my seatmates usually involves guerrilla warfare over who get s the armrest. (Person in the middle. Hands down. Just my opinion.) Occasionally someone will engage me in conversation, and what they usually do is ask me, ‘What do you do?’

If ARGs/transmedia entertainment/whatever-we-are-calling-ourselves-today was a mass entertainment, I could just say, I write for transmedia. As it is, my family isn’t even really sure what I do. On airplanes I usually default to ‘marketing.’ Because given the way the work I do is funded, it’s mostly true.

But we have not broken out in a visible way to people. We haven’t had our Birth of a Nation. Our hit single. We’re not even yet ‘that things that kids do that I don’t understand’ which was what video games were for a long time. The question is, will we ever be? Read more

How then, to create an interactive experience that is also scripted? There are a couple of answers to that.

Of all of the aspects of making a transmedia project, writing is the most flexible. The place where the audience is most likely to affect the story is in websites and in email responses. This can range from referring to something that the audience has emailed to a character, or left as a message on an answering machine (more likely the former than the latter, because it is a lot easier and takes a lot less time to scan 300 emails for content than to listen to 300 voice mails, and these projects are usually run by a very small crew) to actually using audience speculation as a plot detail. During The Beast, two different graphic production guys working on two unrelated websites picked stock photos of the same woman to use on the site. The audience noticed the mistake.

On the email thread where they posted about the mistake, they eventually came up with a reason. The character, who worked for a research company called Donutech, had moonlighted by selling her likeness to a company that made androids. The idea was such a good one that the people creating the experience (called puppetmasters by the audience) incorporated it into the story. They put something in (I don’t remember if it was an email or what it was) that dramatized the scenario worked out by the audience.

Unfortunately, if the audience corrects a mistake, they don’t know about the effect they’ve had on the story until after the story is over when the creators tell them. It’s an odd interaction that doesn’t feel interactive.

Interaction, promised by computers and the internet, isn’t really very sophisticated yet. Anyone who has ever suffered through a dialogue tree in a video game knows that. (Video games are developing conventions to avoid conversations between the player and npcs, specifically because of this.) Phone and text parsers make mistakes, the way spell checkers make mistakes. Language is slippery, flexible, difficult. Programming is advancing but Eliza doesn’t really feel human yet.

The ideal is the holodeck, of course. An artificial intelligence that responds to the audience, changing the plot, running the characters, making the story adapt to actions.

In the interim, we transmedia creators are all waiting for widespread augmented reality. We are looking forward to a time when we can tag the world, and leave a trail of messages that you can see, written on walls, in subways, on sidewalks, when looking through your phone.

And we are trying to create our breakthrough, our Grand Theft Auto or Gone With the Wind.

Why transmedia? Why not watch a movie? Or read a book? Because video games have taught a whole generation that it is possible for the audience—in this case, the player—to interact with the story. The interaction is extensive in video games. Without it, there is no experience.

But the story is also pretty limited. Video game interaction is repetitive, limited, and often tangential to the story. For many players, story interrupts the game, just go online and read about any video game that doesn’t allow the audience to skip the cut scenes. It’s the experience, the shooting, the driving, the changing the radio station, the exploring, that engages the audience most.

Interactivity is a double edged sword. We don’t put video games on TV because watching them is, frankly, boring as hell. Doing them, despite their often repetitive nature—shoot that, now shoot that, now shoot that—is fun. Read more

Conventions are essential to transmedia work. Stories that have shapes familiar to the audience. The damsel in distress. The disappearing person. The murder mystery. Transmedia is also establishing conventions for itself.

Many of the conventions of transmedia are borrowed. And many of them are rather old conventions that have fallen out of popular use. Transmedia is a new, naive medium, and so it makes fresh some existing conventions that have become clichéd or technologically obsolete. Read more

As I said in Part 1, because the artform takes stories and shatters them into pieces, it’s a lot easier for the audience to put the story back together if it’s a kind of story they recognize. If it’s, in other words, a conventional narrative. So, say, detective mysteries tend to make pretty decent transmedia stories. In print stories, I like to break conventions, use less well understood conventions, and generally fart around. In transmedia, I’ve had to learn that I can make the character as complex as I want, but the structure of the narrative better be pretty simple.

The funny thing about transmedia storytelling is that for all it’s reliance on conventions, the artform itself doesn’t yet have many established conventions. And the ones that it has are probably conventions that will fall away as audiences learn the artform and as technology gets better. Read more

Human beings construct narrative. It’s what we do. We impose meaning and cause and effect on events. We say, this happened and then because of or it, that happened. We do it even when it’s not true—which is how places like Vegas stay in business. If you’re flipping a coin, and it comes up heads nine times in a row, what are the odds on the tenth toss? 50-50. Statistics are not narrative. Read more

(Maureen McHugh)

This is part one of a six part post based on a talk I gave at Duke University. Check back on Wednesdays for subsequent posts.

I write transmedia. Or crossmedia. Or ARGs. As transmedia/crossmedia/ARG producers, we take narratives and spread them in pieces across multiple platforms. We tell part of the story as a movie, part as a website, part as an email.

This creates a number of storytelling constraints.

• First, most things on the internet need to be short. Read more

It’s funny, but stories on the internet often evoke stronger emotions than stories on television and movies. That’s not to say movies and TV don’t make people feel. Field of Dreams probably made more men cry than all the funerals the year it was released. It’s my sense that people feel that interacting with a character—by email or phone, for example—makes it all feel more real. I never thought much about it, just accepted it as fact. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. I think that it’s true that interaction plays a big part. But I also think that in twenty years, the effect will have worn off.

No Mimes was at a joint conference between USC and UCLA at University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts in March. The conference, called Transmedia Hollywood, was a long and interesting day. Many smart people. The thing that we do, tell distributed stories on multiple platforms using interactivity, has a bunch of names, transmedia being one of them. There are lots of long discussions about what we do, what the essential components of the artform are, and whether or not it is an artform, all of which are pretty interesting.

But I’m not going to talk about that because I think it’s an impossible question. Read more