Deep Media

How Trans Is Your Media? (Part 2)

If last Wednesday’s program at Future of Television East offered a taste of the deep media future, this past weekend’s Futures of Entertainment 4 at MIT was a full-on banquet. Convened as in the past by Henry Jenkins, who recently left MIT for a deservedly big-deal professorship at USC’s Annenberg School, the two-day conference was an immersive discussion of the prospect that entertainment will no longer be restricted to a single medium—that stories will increasingly be told in multiple formats and engage the audience in a more or less active fashion. In other words, precisely what my book is about. The proceedings inspired a flood of thoughts, some of which I've actually managed to jot down.

The Fallacy of Newness

In his opening keynote, Henry sought to put the subject in historical context. “The focus on newness may mislead us," he said. This bears repeating. People on all sides of the debate about where media is headed seem to assume that what’s now is the way it always was, and what’s new is some kind of radical departure. This is a crippling form of myopia. 

Henry cited multiple examples of transmedia storytelling that long predate the Internet—from Felix the Cat, the early cartoon figure who still adorns a 1920s car dealership near the USC campus, to The Wizard of Oz, which was told not just in a book and the Judy Garland movie but in many other books, a stage musical that included a product placement for Budweiser beer, and a lecture series in which L. Frank Baum, the author, gave a slide-show tour of Oz. Oh, and don't forget the Bible, which for centuries was taught through sermons and stained-glass windows. 

How Trans Is Your Media? (Part 1)

The “deep media” approach to storytelling is clearly gaining momentum. At last year’s Future of Television East conference in New York, the focus was largely on streaming TV services such as Hulu—a good idea and a terrific implementation, but not what you’d call revolutionary. This year the focus was on more profound aspects of TV/Internet convergence: breadth, depth, and interactivity. On Wednesday afternoon I led a discussion called “How to Create Successful Transmedia Franchises” in which executives from rival cable networks outlined plans to present narratives simultaneously on TV and in other media—comics, Web video, online games. This was followed by a “Reinventing Advertising” panel in which executives from ESPN, Cablevision, and Google traded thoughts on such issues as addressability. But it was only when Robert Tercek, president of digital media at the Oprah Winfrey Network, gave his talk on “Televolution” that the central dilemma facing the television industry was starkly and fully expressed: How to make the leap from one-way broadcasting to two-way communication. 

Things got off to a slightly rocky start when I compared the current state of affairs to my first exposure to convergent storytelling: a 1996 Fortune assignment to visit the set of Homicide, where operatives from NBC Interactive were interviewing cast members in character about the job of crime-fighting in Baltimore. "We're peeing in our pants every day,” one of the Interactive folks told me, a tad melodramatically perhaps. "It's just like the ’40s, when television was starting out live." To which one panelist, Syfy president Dave Howe, retorted that he has yet to wet himself once. Okay, point taken: Television has made tremendous strides since the mid-’90s. But it still has a ways to go, as the rest of the afternoon made clear. 

The BioShock Conundrum: Gamers Can Pull, But Will Hollywood Push?

When Take Two Interactive lifted the embargo on previews of BioShock 2 last week, gamers discovered a major twist to the storyline. The teaser trailer and ad campaign for the sequel had focused heavily on an invincible cyborg known as the Big Sister as your new nemesis, stalking you as you traverse the underwater city of Rapture ten years after the demise of of its founder, Andrew Ryan. Now we learn that this idea has been scrapped because, as senior producer Melissa Miller explained, the development team at 2K Marin felt that fighting and never defeating the Big Sister time and time again would not provide the satisfaction gamers got from their encounters with the Big Daddies in BioShock. 

Instead, players will find multiple Big Sisters to fight and defeat throughout the game. Replacing the Big Sister as Rapture's new mastermind is Dr. Sophia Lamb, a clinical psychiatrist turned altruistic despot who believes that every one of our actions should contribute to the greater good. The change offers a good example of how storyline has to be subservient to gameplay. This has big implications, not just for the followup to the best-selling game but for the movie that’s in the works as well.