Deep Media

Absolut Silverpoint: Marketing that takes over your life, not your computer screen

When Advertising Week happened a couple of weeks ago, I joined a discussion about Absolut Silverpoint, a marketing campaign that ran in London for 14 days last April. Silverpoint was noteworthy because it was an app, not an ad. It didn't take over your computer screen unbidden; you had to download it. It was the kind of marketing people actually want to experience, as opposed to the kind they go out of their way to avoid. It was immersive, not intrusive. As Brand Republic put it, "Absolut's Silverpoint app has taken over our lives." Which makes it a sort of model for what marketing has to do in the future. 

---

On Thursday, October 15, Afdhel Aziz, brand director at the idea incubator Absolut Labs in the US, will join Paul Woolmington and me as a special guest at our seminar in Digital Storytelling Strategy. For more information, please visit the Columbia University School of the Arts or Columbia Business School Executive Education. 

---

How did it work? It started off as a simple iPhone game you could download from the Apple Store. As you played it, it morphed into a story—a mystery story about a woman named Chloe who has gone missing. New bits of story were unlocked as you moved up through the levels in the game. Finally it morphed into a live theatrical experience staged by Punchdrunk, the company behind Sleep No More, the immersive theater production that's been running in New York for more than four years now. 

'Nightmare High': The BAFTA-winning game that gets you through your worst day of school—ever

We all have our bad days — but some bad days are way worse than others. And it's hard to get worse than a first day at school that goes totally, horribly, mind-bendingly wrong. So how do you put such an experience behind you? That's the question that provoked Nightmare High, an online game for pre-teens that recently took home an interactive children's award from BAFTA, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

Sheffield Doc/Fest: When games and stories collide

Last June, when I was giving the opening keynote at the Crossover Summit at Sheffield Doc/Fest, I was asked to talk about the relationship between games and stories. It's a meaty topic: If stories in the digital age are becoming participatory (alternate reality games like 42 Entertainment's Year Zero with Trent Reznor, or the "response" videos from Wieden+Kennedy's "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" campaign for Old Spice), then almost by definition they would be turning gamelike as well. 

What Richard Wagner can teach us about storytelling in the Internet age

The games blogger at the Guardian, Keith Stuart, posted an essay recently that started out like a broadside against the whole idea of telling stories across multiple media platforms. "Most big video game releases now come with tie-in books, comics and even movies," the subhead declared provocatively. "But is this really about extending the story or is it just marketing?" Things seemed to go downhill from there: 

It has become routine now. A few weeks after the announcement of any big new game release, there will be another thrilling revelation: a tie-in comic book series, a novel, a made-for-TV movie. . . . Of course, much of the excitement revolves around the marketing potential of the linear tie-in: every new story platform is an advert.

This used to be called merchandising, but now we must use the term "transmedia storytelling". Nowadays, developers are aiming to produce narratives so compelling that they transcend platform limitations; a high-tech realisation of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk concept.

The legacy of 'TRON: Legacy': theme parks, ARGs, and the ever-shifting art of immersion

A ScreenBurn presentation at SXSW Interactive, "The Art of Immersion: TRON" takes place at 5 PM Sunday in Room 12AB at the Austin Convention Center.

Decades before anyone thought to create an alternate reality game, Walt Disney invented the theme park. Disneyland and its successors—Walt Disney World, Universal Studios Hollywood, and their clones—were conceived as narrative architecture, purpose-built to provide an immersive entertainment experience. Nowadays, you don't need to walk through Sleeping Beauty's Castle or go on Jurassic Park: The Ride to find yourself in a real-life simulation of a fictional narrative. But the theme-park experience still appeals to plenty of people, as the lines at Disneyland attest.

Can 'Heavy Rain' live up to its grand intent?

From the moment of its introduction at E3 2006, Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain promised an experience games have never truly managed: Narrative at the fore, with gameplay built around a story rather than a story that’s wedged into the gameplay. Now that it’s out, it’s clear that Quantic Dream CEO David Cage has man­aged to harness the participatory nature of games to create some emotionally jarring scenes. Yet even so, Heavy Rain’s illusion of choice and consequence will not hold up for a seasoned gamer.

The story provides some tense and sometimes frightening moments. I agonized over two de­cisions that were required of me, going so far as to pause the game and ask friends and family what the best decision would be. Some action scenes almost make you feel like your life is actually in danger. And while video game morality is usually just a masquerade—choices that seem moral are really more about raising your “good” or “evil” stats—some of Heavy Rain’s choices offer real moral dilemmas. At the game’s best, these choices can considerably alter your experience. And the changes can be so seamless, you probably won't notice that the game could have played out in numerous different ways.

 

'The emotion engine': A conversation with Peter Molyneux at SXSW Interactive

 

Peter Molyneux, the creative force behind the Fable series and the seminal god game Populous, recently said he'd gotten hate mail from people who couldn't bear the excruciating choice that confronts them near the end of Fable II: Who will they sacrifice—thousands of people, or their dog? But then, Molyneux's ability to strike a nerve is near-legendary. It's not just his commitment to narrative and emotional involvement. It's the delight he seems to take in putting people in situations that show who they really are—sometimes uncomfortably so. 

Ubisoft's 'Avatar, The Game': Are they building a world, or marketing a movie?

Ubisoft, developers of Avatar: The Game, are fond of saying that the world of Pandora can be experienced through both their game and James Cameron’s movie. This ability to explore a fictional universe in multiple media and through multiple storylines has been the goal of many failed efforts, most notably Enter The Matrix. So it was up to the team at Ubisoft Montreal, makers of Assassin’s Creed II and Prince of Persia, to assuage the doubts of skeptics and live up to the promises made in their developer diaries. Unfortunately, Avatar: The Game offers all too little insight into Avatar the universe.

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 '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.