Recently I went to a weekend workshop on transmedia. That’s the new term for multi-media, I guess. It means that you use several different media to let people experience a story. You might have a website, your fictional characters might be active on Facebook and Twitter, maybe you send out text messages, there could be some related live events and so on. The idea is to make stories interactive. Physicallyi interactive, I mean. To my mind, reading already is interactive.
One thing I discovered is that nobody knows how to do this very well yet. There have been loads of interesting experiments and some have garnered a fairly big following, but most are quirky and small-scale and wobbly.We're still looking for the Wright Brothers.
Actually, I worked on a big project along these lines 12 years ago. I was story editor and there were two other writers working with me and the director and the producer. This was in Switzerland and we had agreements for cooperation with a prime-time TV show, a national newspaper, and the main phone company. The core was going to be a weekly TV show but we also had plans for clever live events, websites, people would get text messages telling them where to go for clues to the mystery, etc. It was really fun.
Our project was a thriller in which someone seemed to be hacking into the TV station, the newspaper, leaving weird manifestos in public places, etc. At first it wasn’t going to be clear whether this was a benign person or an evil one.
We were going full speed ahead.
Then 9/11 happened.
All the stuff that was going to be entertaining suddenly was exactly the kind of thing people now were scared of.
End of project. We were all out of a job and the production company struggled to recover from the sudden hit to its cash flow.
Listening to the speakers at the workshop it was clear that things haven’t actually advanced much. Yes, now the technology is more sophisticated (smart phones, iPads, Facebook, etc.) but what has to be driving the technology is a story so compelling and the interaction opportunities so entertaining or rewarding that we will want to give them our already scarce time and attention.
A lot of the examples that came up were, frankly, things that I don’t want to do.
“You can read a novel on an iPad and click on a video of the location where the action takes place!”
If I’m reading, I don’t WANT to look at a video of the location where the action takes place. I want to image it. I want the writer to write well enough that I imagine it without even knowing I’m imagining it. (Non-fiction is a different matter.)
"You can read a mystery that features a puzzle you have to solve before you're allowed to continue reading!"
Are you trying to make my life more complicated? If I want to play a game, I'll play a game. If I want to read, I'll read.
“You can interact with other people reading the same book! You can instantly chat with them!”
I don’t want to chat with anybody before I finish the book. If I love the book I’ll chat about it with friends. I’ll recommend they read it, too. Maybe I’ll buy them a copy.
By the way, I fully accept that these reactions may be a function of having grown up as a reader of books. It could be that the only way to get many of today's and tomorrow's kids to read is to make it a game. If they read ten pages of "To Kill a Mockingbird" they get to play a round of "Angry Birds."
Despite my reservations, I do find transmedia fascinating. At the moment it seems like a bunch of technologies looking for a purpose, but the person who figures out how to use it to serve the story instead of the other way around will add a great new dimension to storytelling…and will make a lot of money.
