In build-up to the release of his much anticipated new novel, Under the Dome, Stephen King’s UK publishers Hodder & Stoughton have launched what they’re calling “the biggest ever game of literary hide-and-seek.” For the game, fans across the UK are enlisted to help both hide and find the 5,196 excerpts that makes up the 335,114 word novel both online and in the real world. The found pieces are then posted to Stephenking.co.uk, where people can take a crack at piecing all the parts together.
While the initial description of the project reminded me of Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg’s Implementation — a novel that was distributed across the globe on a series of stickers that was then reassembled online — the commercial promotional focus of the Stephen King effort seems to have elements intended to control and curb certain types of participation even as it hopes to incite fan engagement and interactivity.
Promoting Participation
The project has two main activity sets — the hiding/seeking of the story pieces and the actual piecing together of the story once pieces have been found. The “hide-and-seek” portion is well-scaffolded for participation with forums, twitter feeds, facebook groups, and all the other social media implements to bring participants together to create and solve clues, as well as discuss the novel snippets they find. It works because, in addition to a prize to the most ingenious hider and prolific finder, the process itself is an incentive for participation. The game activity is based in what fans already desire — getting glimpses of a highly anticipated work — and therefore rewards and encourages with more than just a prize.
Exercising Control
The second part of the activity, however, is intruiging. While the site suggests that the ultimate goal is to “piece [the excerpts] all together and discover Stephen King’s new masterpiece,” participation at the level of content assembly isn’t supported structurally within the project. The web interface is not designed to actually facilitate piecing together the excerpts. When you click begin, random excerpts enter the screen on floating semi-translucent panels that move around, turn, spin, and overlap, making reading them difficult. It’s unclear whether what you see on screen is all the excerpts that have been found thus far, or merely a random selection. My assumption would be the latter, since this kind of interface would be completely impossible to navigate with more than a handful of text pieces at a time. When you go to save any work you’ve done in piecing parts together, the page generates a link where you can view your saved work. However, when you follow the link, you no longer have access to the excerpts you have not yet used, so that you can’t add to the work you’ve saved.
More than making it difficult for individual participants, this part of the game also doesn’t include any easy way to share and collaborate with others. This seems like an effort to curb collective intelligence behaviors that would likely lead to effectively piecing together the novel in the short time before its release. Moreover, most of the pieces start and stop mid-sentence, which strongly emphasizes that there is a correct order, and deters more inventive or unconventional assemblies of the content. Additionally, without the ability to share and collaborate, the social aspect of fan activity is minimized, which significantly lowers the incentive to try and actually put together the novel.
These control mechanisms built into the structure of the game make sense when you consider that the publishing house has a vested interest in discouraging fans from actually being able to piece together and share online a complete or close to complete version of the novel, since they want to move printed units. There’s little that’s interesting about breaking the novel into pieces on the narrative level, since the structure of the game itself doesn’t leave room for the participatory involvement in shaping the content itself, as we see in ARGs, hypertext novels, and other forms of non-linear or distributed storytelling. Which, in the end, doesn’t come as a surprise. After all, the goal here is to sell a novel, not innovate the novelistic form.
This week, I seem to be reading heavily on a theme of interactivity — gone both good and bad — in narrative construction.
- There’s been some talk lately about the lawsuit again Toyota over their “prank” campaign, much of which has been fairly negative. I would love to see any examples of the emails people received, or the opt-in statement that they apparently agreed to to get a better sense of the level of transparency that was practiced.
- I wonder too if this particular effort was meant to create a sense of intimacy between the brand and its consumers, given the feeling expressed by Toyota CEO that their decline is the result of the brand becoming “too big and distant from its customers.” On a side note, it is somewhat amusing/telling that the justification all these articles cite for assuming the campaign character was real is the existence of a myspace page.
- A quick write-up in AdAge Mediaworks about branded, short-form content on the web, focusing on HBO Imagine. While I haven’t had a chance to explore the HBO project in-depth, the description of “Rashamon meets Choose Your Own Adventure” reminded me of the structure of early hypertext novels.
- That led me to revisit the article “Just Tell Me When to Stop: Hypertext and the Displacement of Closure,” from the collection The End of Books or Books Without End: Reading Interactive Narratives by Jane Yellowlees Douglas. The article analyzes several pieces of hypertext fiction, including the classic Afternoon by Michael Joyce, focusing on the question of closure in narratives that don’t have set orders.
- Speaking of hypertext and lack of order, a colleague of mine from CMS who is currently at Duke sent me this from Postmodern Culture. I find it equal parts intriguing and incomprehensible.
- On an even more (more?) egg-heady front, I’ve come by a cache of readings on biopolitics and political economy, courtesy of another colleague of mine. I’m starting out with Robert Mitchell’s “The Laws of Mo(o)re: waste, biovalue, and information ecologies,” chapter 3 from his 2006 book with Cathy Waldby Tissue economies: blood, organs, and cell lines in late capitalism
A recent article in Ad Age Mediaworks discusses the success of more “conventional” shows like the new NCIS spin-off, NCIS:LA, noting that broadcast networks are shying away from “clever, unique concepts that drive buzz and conversation” and opting for clones of successful programs as a safer bet for ratings. One part of the article caught my eye in particular. CBS-entertainment president Nina Tassler explains in the article that “Because ‘NCIS’ has such a loyal following, you really have to respect the viewer and stay very close to the original brand,” which makes sense.
What makes less sense to me, however, is that respecting the viewer and the original brand meant “Taking the cookie-cutter route,” at least at first, though there will eventually be “some degree of originality and creative choice-making,” presumably once the spin-off has cemented its own following.
The Lure of Industry Lore
This me thinking back to the discussion on “industry lore” at the kick-off plenary panel at Media in Transition 6 last year, where the panelists discussed the prevalence of executive decisions based on what the industry makes broad presumptions about what their audiences want without thoughtful consideration as to why. Knowing who is watching what doesn’t give enough information for insight as to what people are watching for and why. Without that, all you know is that X number of people — sometimes of a certain type — like something. This is what leads to the “cookie-cutter” logic — you don’t know why they like something or what specifically they like, so your best bet is to duplicate the entire thing.
All of this speaks not to a lack of imagination on the part of producers, or a lack of taste on the part of audiences. It speaks to the growing insufficiency in how we measure and analyze audience engagement. Ratings and demographic data are important, but they’re not enough to understand the ever-changing, ever-fluid audience formations that we are witness to. Moreover, they inspire industry lore — that women watch soap operas, men watch pro-wrestling, ethnic and racial minorities watch programming featuring ethnic and racial minorities, etc — and shut out potentially rich new audience markets that can’t be anticipated. This is something I realized in my research on East Asian television fans online, when I asked why it was that while network offerings such as AZN struggled and eventually failed, the fan-driven distributors online were flourishing. While the answers are considerably more complex, deep at the heart of it was this: fan-driven circulation catered to the audiences that existed, while industry efforts catered to an audience that they imagined should exist.
Audiences in the new media landscape audiences are more participatory, interacting and forming communities with one another, which in turn makes them unimaginable in two key ways:
Audience Fragmentation, Fluidity, and Diversity
First, they are increasingly impossible to define along any single vector of identity. Demographic information such as gender, class, race, and so forth are still relevant, but we cannot let them limit our interpretation of the audience from the outset. As Sonia Livingstone points out, “[i]n the new media environment, it seems that people increasingly engage with content more than forms or channels – favourite bands, soap operas or football teams” (2004: 81), so that communities are formed around shared tastes rather than social determinations, resulting in groups with diverse backgrounds and motivations.
In short, knowing who your audience is doesn’t tell you who they are as an audience member. We take on different identities as participants in different activities. This is why I continue to emphasize the need to think about audienceship instead of audiences, about what viewers do and how they engage, rather than whether they’re a 45-year-old suburban housewife.
Audience Visibility
Second, the activities of audiences and fans online are now so radically visible that we no longer have to imagine them. We no longer have to guess at why people watch things and what they watch for based on quantitative data. We have access to rich reserve of qualitative information with just a few clicks. The audience may be, as Livingstone puts it, a “moving target,” but at least it’s a target that we can now see and track in ways we couldn’t previously.
These concepts apply strongly to brands as well, where it is similarly not only important to know who your consumers are, but how they use your brands, and what your brands communicate to and for them. Brands and media properties, like technologies, are tools and resources of communication. As such, we must understand not only who uses what, but the methods and motivations for use.
Of course, taking the time to understand audiences and consumers in this way. It is of course both easier and safer to just reproduce a working model. But we shouldn’t act as if there are no other options.
Levi’s recently launched a new ARG-style scavenger hunt to promote deeper involvement with their brand mythology. The story centers around the last will and testament of Grayson Ozias IV, a fabled friend of Nathan Strauss who disappeared mysteriously into the wilderness with $100,000, which in turn is the grand prize for the game.
While the game and story themselves seem like a fairly straight-forward multi-platform scavenger hunt — a three-tiered system of challenges, quizzes, and puzzles that will eventually identify 100 finalists that will compete for the grand prize — the nature of the grand prize caught my eye. While it’s certainly not the first of it’s kind of offer a large cash reward as an incentive to participate (Mind Candy’s Perplex City memorably offered 100,000GBP to their winner) , the Levi’s campaign does represent a rising trend in contest-focused efforts.
It’s unclear this early in the game whether the Levi’s campaign intends to play out like transmedia experience, or if it intends to be a more traditional scavenger hunt with a decorative narrative shell. What is clear is that they’re hoping to leverage the type of collective action and deep engagement by “pulling out a page of the ARG book,” as Levi’s director of digital marketing Megan O’Connor put it to Brandweek, but also seeking to “keep it a little less complicated.”
Making things “less complicated” often means at the level of narrative, which in turn suggest that it will be centered around the contest structure. Which makes me wonder how a contest-driven format that focuses on a clear (and singular) winner deals with engaging the type of collective intelligence and participatory action we’ve come to associate with ARGs. Especially if they’re “trying to keep it a little less complicated” as O’Connor claims. ARGs, after all, are not about games or puzzles, per se. The games and puzzles are the vehicle to drive forward the larger collective storytelling experience, which is what stimulates the robust levels of engagement, even for those who don’t receive anything tangible in return for their participation. Therefore, by reducing complexity, they run the danger of also reducing the points of access and the types of incentives available for participation to the cash prize. And if that were to happen, what incentive do people have for sharing information and clues and otherwise engaging with one another to move the story forward?
Certainly and many ARGs have had some sort of special (often secret) prize for who those who stuck it out to the end. But on the whole, ARGs, though considered to be games, aren’t competition-driven, which is what allows for the pervasive collaboration that serves as both the heart and the engine. So how might we see participation reconfigured when the whole process is oriented towards an end goal that can only be claimed by one person, rather than the collective storytelling experience? What does it mean for the social ties formed within the process?
My recent white paper at C3 focuses on the negotiation between types of social value/worth and economic exchanges, and I can’t help but think of it now and wonder the campaign will still generate the sort of engagement it envisions, given the changes in social relations that come with the introduction of monetary value. As ARGs become more and more common in promotional campaigns (last summer, in the wake of Dark Knight, it felt like a movie couldn’t premier without an accompanying ARG), the question of how to negotiate the space been social worth and economic value becomes increasingly pressing. Advertising may very well be able to generate the same amount of attention, whatever their tactics, but must still consider how different game-play and reward structures affect the nature of the engagement produced.
[In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve worked with Levi’s previously, but was not at all involved in this particular campaign.]
I’ve been having a my strangely under-productive week, which I blame the sudden cold for, so this post will be relatively short. But hopefully, this amazing photo makes up for it:
- The above image comes from Boston.com‘s photo essay China Celebrates 60 Years, documenting the 60th Anniversary celebrations of communist rule in China. I’ll spare everyone the diasporic musings, and say only that this collection of images was a source of immense, and conflicted, wonder. And also that one of my own childhood photos features me in a tutu, toting a toy machine gun. Just sayin’.
- A couple of pieces from the Chronicle of Higher Education, first a study indicating that free electronic copies don’t hurt print sales of (crazily overpriced) textbooks, and another piece that breaks down the war between libraries and the ubiquity of online search.
- Apparently I’m all about numbers and figures this week, so also an article from the New York Times about slowing rates of decline in global ad sales, which breaks it down by type and geographical region. Not earth-shattering, but notable.
- My MIT C3 Colleague Grant McCracken has an interesting post on the gift economy, about his recent experience at one of Pip Coburn’s lunches, comparing exchange in the good exchanges (as in goods, not exchanges that are good) to those in gift exchanges and the kinds of values and expectations they bring.
- In Media Res this week is all about Zombies! Braaaaaaaaains.
I typically don’t post such not-remotely-developed thoughts, but questions of the “transmedia audience” and how it is related to fan production have been prodding at me and part of me thinks that it may be worthwhile to at least verbalizing the question, if not offering any actual answers.
The comments in my last post on transmedia and the multiplicity principle made me realize that though I posed the question of why some types of stories — namely genre fiction — seemed to lend themselves to transmedia development, one of the implicit hypotheses was that they don’t. Or, rather, it’s not only that genre stories lend themselves to transmedia, but that genre audiences are highly receptive to it.
The multiplicity principle isn’t merely dependent on an archive of shared meaning between multiple texts — it’s relies on a sophisticated audience who has developed a strong knowledge of these multiple texts. In short, multiplicity is dependent on fannish behavior.
Transmedia creators seem to understand this instinctively. Take, for example, the Purefold project which not only develops content based on audience input through the FriendFeed group, but also licenses all the content under Creative Commons for participants to further develop and remix the work. Based off themes from Bladerunner, Purefold aims to let brands and fans alike have an equal go at asserting their ideas into the stories. It should prove to be an interesting test case on transmedia audience relations, but also brings a key question to the fore: what is the relationship between fan production and transmedia?
Or, perhaps more to the point, might we consider fan production a form of transmedia?
Fans production such as fan fiction or fanvids have long been developing stories across multiple platforms, forms, and genres. Projects like Purefold seem to be a way to acknowledge what fans have always known: that stories don’t have to be part of an official canon to influence how we encounter them, especially now that the new media landscape is making the boundaries between audience and producer increasingly fuzzy. Transmedia is about decentering stories, destabilizing the authorial power of any single text or narrative tributary. Fans have been collaborating and building out their favorite story worlds in this way for decades, through fiction, vidding, meta, role playing and cosplay.
So much of how we talk about transmedia centers around production, but so much of what makes transmedia what it is happens through new practices of reception and participation. Given that, I guess my question is: what does a transmedia audienceship look like? How is transmedia shaping how audiences form and interact, how they identify themselves and their cultural stakes? And conversely, how are the increasingly visible and explicit narrative interventions on the part of audiences shaping how we think about the way stories are told as they move across platforms, cultural spaces, borders of all manner?
One of my biggest complaints about the blog-o-sphere is that the trade-off of being able to write more casually and toss out ideas that are just beginning to brew is that there sometimes isn’t enough attention paid to citation/reference/attribution. This isn’t so much a problem of credit where credit is due (though that can also be a problem at times). The problem is that it makes it robs us of a valuable research tool: namely, getting a big list of what people you’re reading are themselves reading.
I don’t make a ton of direct references, so adding a list of citations to my posts Grant McCracken style won’t be of much help. Instead I thought I’d start doing a weekly round-up of some highlights from what I’m reading, since I tend to read pretty widely across a number of different fields, all of which influences my thinking directly or indirectly one way or another.
- Wharton Business School announced new research that challenges Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory (Download full pdf at the bottom of the article). Their data-bolstered work looks at the limitations in how the long tail defines “hit” and “niche” products only in absolute terms (ie, top 10) rather than relative metrics (top 10%). An interesting read overall, and I’m always all about talking about ambiguities in definitions.
- Henry Jenkins has a piece in the Huffington Post this week about The Future of TV where he talks about post-network television, transmedia, and the role of social media in the consumption of TV content. Anyone familiar with Henry’s work will have heard him talk about many of the examples he mentions elsewhere, but the article is a good, quick rundown of some of the key points and cases that recur in his presentations. (I have to admit, seeing “my students at University of Southern California” instead of “my students at MIT” was momentarily jarring.)
- In a similar TV/Fans/Participatory Media vein is Jason Mittell’s study of Lostpedia in the current issues of Transformative Works and Cultures. I’m had mixed feelings in the past about that journal for fandom-related reasons, but there’s been interesting work being published (and more importantly, made openly accessible).
- Following a couple of interesting new transmedia cases: Flash Forward and Dragons v Robots.
- On the transmedia front, I’ve been reading a lot things scattered here and there. Gunther Sonnenfeld has a piece on transmedia as marketing strategy. I have to admit that I would’ve like more depth and specific discussion given the length of the piece, but overall it makes for a decent primer for those new to the concept. Even better though is that it led me to former MIT CMS/C3 alum Ivan Askwith’s not-so-recent-but-highly-relevant resource list post on transmedia and advertising cases and research. Tons of great links and case descriptions that runs down all the greatest hits as well as a few lesser known examples and perspectives. And finally, there’s some great discussion going on between Scott Walker and Erek Tinker in the comments of my last post.
A couple of things that I’d read before but recently revisited that are worth a mention:
- Susan Fournier and Lara Lee’s great article in the Harvard Business Review on Getting Brand Communities Right lays out some key principles about community behaviors, motivations, and organizational structures in a really clear, smart, market-relevant way. Absolutely required reading for anyone thinking about brands and community courting, online and off.
- Television Melodrama (links directly to pdf, requires MIT certificate to access), the article by Prof. David Thorburn that inspired my post on Transmedia and multiplicity is definitely worth reading. Don’t let the “melodrama” deter you — this article has proven really fruitful in shaping my thinking on many things that don’t fall under the heading of television melodrama. For those without MIT access, it can also be found in the collection Television: The Critical View
Offline, I’m hitting up a few books I’ve been meaning to get around to:
- On the academic front, I’m finally cracking Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism by Miryam Sas, in hopes that some older examples of transnational/transcultural movement of expressive forms and genres will shape some of my further research in the online circulation of content.
- Also started reading Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, the first in the Takeshi Kovacs novels, and really my first foray into Sci-Fi/Genre fiction.
With FOE this year being heavily transmedia-centric, I’ve been thinking (and reading) a lot lately about transmedia — about what there is to say now that we’re past the phase of describing what it is and moving into thinking more deeply about what it does and how.
A recent interview at Narrative Design Exploratorium with Starlight Runner CEO (and past FOE panelist) Jeff Gomez got me thinking about the relationship of transmedia to “genre fiction,” or stories written with distinct formal conventions such as mystery, horror, sci-fi/fantasty, and romance.
In the interview, Jeff maintains that
“You don’t need a science fiction or fantasy story to spark up a transmedia narrative. Our main criteria at Starlight Runner is that the story, brand or message lends itself to a rich world, real or imagined. The world needs to have a past and future, it must be populated with engaging characters, and there has to be something about it that makes us want to be a part of it . . . you can easily take a soap opera scenario, a high school scenario, the building of a new model of car or home and blast away”
While I wholeheartedly agree that no specific genre is required for that transmedia spark, it does seem that transmedia efforts tend to skew towards Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and other stories that follow certain genre conventions. Similarly, as evidenced by the way the “cult media” panel at FOE 2 veered quickly into a transmedia discussion, genre fiction seems to have an affinity for transmedia as well.
comics archetype times table by Jacob Borshard
Transmedia and the Multiplicity Principle
Jeff’s comment about soap operas and high school scenarios being just as easy to extend into transmedia points to one possible explanation — what television scholar David Thorburn calls the multiplicity principle of tv melodrama, where the audience’s familiarity with the thematic or character conventions of a genre can help fill in and add nuance. Rather than flatten characters into stereotypes, however, the multiplicity principle in fact allow for deeper and more complex developments because they give these stories the freedom to render characters and themese more suggestively rather than spelling everything out.
As Thorburn explains:
“The familiar character-types and situations thus become more suggestive and less imprisoning. There is no pretense that a given character has been wholly ‘explained’ by the plot, and the formula has the liberating effect of creating a premise or base on which the actor is free to build”
Or, as in the case of transmedia narratives, it gives the audience a rich base to generates deeper curiousity and an exploratory instinct, which drives them to develop and expand the story further outside of the initial point of contact with the narrative.
Transmedia as Intertext
Through this multiplicity, genre fiction has the freedom to create rich, nuanced characters and themes that are still broadly rendered enough to leave room for the audience to speculate, contribute, and pursue the story further. This is one possible reason for the overlap between genre fiction lends and transmedia, since further pursuit of the story is precisely what leads people to engage with narrative expansions elsewhere. In other words, both genre fiction such as sci-fi or melodrama and transmedia narratives require the existence of multiple texts and stories, as well as open invitations to curious, sophisticated audiences built into the narrative structure.
Perhaps then one of the deep affordances of transmedia stories is that they operate just not as a collection of texts, but as an intertext, a text that is produced within the interaction between multiple texts. This is part of what differentiates transmedia, media that moves across and between forms and platforms, from static multimedia nodes. Transmedia isn’t just about multiple stories or versions, but about creating a rich in-between space, an archive of shared meaning in-between different parts of the story. In short, a universe.
As the summer winds down, it’s time again to start gearing up for the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3)’s annual Futures of Entertainment Conference. This November 20th and 21st will be the 4th installment of our biggest and most public event, featuring key thinkers from across industry and academia, hashing it out on a range of pressing topics about our shifting media landscape and where it’s headed (and why, and how, and what we can do when we get there).
This time around, we’re cycling back to a featured topic from our first ever Futures of Entertainment (and a much-beloved subject of C3 in general): Transmedia.
Since our first conference in 2006, transmedia has gone from an emerging form to an industry buzzword. The term and the form have both inspired significant developments, expansions, and confusion. Given that, we decided to devote an entire day to discussing various aspects beyond simply defining it. He hope both to dig deep into the nuts and bolts of how to build and sustain transmedia experiences as well as pull up and reexamine some of the larger implications of the form, how it has changed and grown, and what it’s value is now and in the future.
Our second day will cover other topics that are part of the Consortium’s core interests, such as fan activism, new media business models, and the ever-changing relationship between platforms, communities, users, consumers, producers, and brands.
Be sure to check out the official website for updates and details, and follow as at Futuresof on twitter.
For those who haven’t had the opportunity to join us before, be sure to check out videos, liveblogs, and panel descriptions from the previous years: FOE1, FOE2, FOE3 and at the C3 Blog.
This was originally going to be a globalization/delight post, but then I realized that the thing I was going to write about was in fact a great example of a key point from my recent post on Youtube Vloggers as brand ambassadors about how fans are your best intermediaries and translators.
Take, for instance, this amazing post doing side-by-side screencap comparisons of the Japanese drama Hana Yori Dango and the popular US show Gossip Girl:
Title image from Mojo Kingdom's Hana Yori Dango/Gossip Girl post
The entire post consists of dozen of these comparisons (by my rough estimate, totaling some 200+ meticulously captured stills), paired with incisive, witty commentary explaining just how these shows are similar.
What is striking is that the basic plotting, structures, themes, and characterizations in the two shows are not really that similar at all, once you get past the fact that both are about a troupe of obscenely wealthy, good-looking young people doing a lot of improbable things and sometimes attending — but not so much actually learning anything at — their elite private schools. But a fan of both shows is able to pick out the minute (and totally absurd) specifics — like the mean girls’ headband proclivities, shoe-related food drama, the fact that both shows have a psycho girl who likes to roofie people — to the deeper discourses that resonate between both shows that wouldn’t been picked up by casual viewing. Not only that, this particular fan engaged in an incredibly time-consuming and labor-intensive feat in order to share of of this in an effort to recruit more fans.
There’s a good chance that Gossip Girl producers would never have known about Hana Yori Dango fans, let alone anticipated them as potential fans for their own show. The same goes for the producers of Hana Yori Dango. But a quick glance at the comments show a number fans of one show vowing to start watching the other. In other words, because this particular fan understood both the shows and their audiences and the nature of how they engaged as fans, she was able to scaffold interest across the two groups by appropriating and reframing content from the shows.
The lesson learned here is a fairly simple one: give you fans the tools — access to content to remix and reuse — and they will help grow and spread your property into communities and audiences that you had never anticipated.