Questions from Transmedia Presentation

Thanks everyone for an interesting class today. As promised, here are our questions from our presentation:

1. Do consumers want to make these connections or is this construct embraced only by die-hard fans who simply can’t get enough? How commercially successful are the strands of transmedia storytelling if they are consumed by only fan cults? Or does their existence encourage a deeper consumption among the ordinary fan of the source media?

2. What are the pitfalls of transmedia storytelling? Does it tarnish or weaken the brand with multiple creative strands spread out across multiple platforms? Does convergence insist on multi-platform engagement for the consumer to get the whole story?

3. What are your own stories that you feel could benefit from a transmedia treatment?

4. If you have your own project on transmedia, what would be your educational platforms? Will you write your own story? Will you rewrite a classic narratives like the “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries”? Or would you rather rewrite popular narratives like “The Hunger Games” for educational purposes?

Transmedia Storytelling Summary – Mark Terry

The Transmedia Multiplatform Convergent Resource Kit website is a bit of a mouthful but it is well-named as a one-stop shop for all things related to transmedia storytelling. Supported by the Canada Media Fund and created by digital artists Anthea Foyer and Siobhan O’Flynn, the website provides a variety of tools and links to resources for those engaged in creating transmedia projects or for those studying it.
The website is comprised of several sections that cover different aspects of transmedia project development, production, and research. Specifically, the website provides these categories: Case Studies, Co-Production, Glossary, Resources, Collaboration and Creative Commons.
For the purpose of this summary, I will examine not all, but many of these sections as they apply to our course and the presentation to be given on Wednesday.
CREATIVE COMMONS:
Under the Creative Commons section, Dr. O’Flynn and Foyer make available their own work for other artists to use and incorporate in their own projects by providing a non-commercial “ShareAlike Creative Commons” license. The founders of the site describe their commons this way:
“Original materials created by Dr. Siobhan O’Flynn and Anthea Foyer are released under a NonCommercial ShareAlike Creative Commons license to be shared, remixed and expanded non‐commercially, as long as you credit the TMC Resource Kit, the creator(s) of the materials, Anthea Foyer or Dr. Siobhan O’Flynn, and license your new creations under the identical terms.”
They go on to say that the new artist using their work will have their own IP and agree to make the new work available in the website’s commons under the same license for other artists to use as well. This is a great example of creative collaboration and trans-participation among artists working in a non-commercial environment.
COLLABORATION:
In this section, a slide show is presented that tackles what is perhaps the greatest challenge of working together in various platforms of a transmedia project: working harmoniously with different professional and creative partners. A filmmaker is very different in vision, approach, and professional acumen than a comic book artist, a novelist, a playwright and so on. Each has different skills sets, even schedules and work flows, and finding a way to work together towards a common deadline and under common themes and creative consistencies can be difficult.
In addition to transmedia storytelling, the process of development and production is trans-professional. While all artists and producers of content in a transmedia project work together from the start, the ultimate method of collaboration comes when the project is actually consumed by its audiences, according to Nathan Anderson, an Australian transmedia producer and COO and Executive Producer of Start VR.
“It’s a fundamental shift in thinking,” he writes in the TMC website. “You have to understand that release means the market is one of the first steps you should be thinking about as opposed to one of the final steps as it is for traditional media.” (“Collaboration”, TMC Website, Slide 4).
RESOURCES:
This section is perhaps the most valuable part of the website for the transmedia artist and producer. It provides a wealth of professional, academic, financial and informational resources covering most of the ground before, during and after project creation. Links to festivals, conferences and events provide places where the transmedia artist can exhibit their work as well as network with other artists and learn more about their craft. Crowdfunding techniques and advice are provided to help the artist raise the funds to produce their project. Links to resources provided by the Canada Media Fund (CMF) also assist the artist in finding funding on a government level. It also provides reports on current trends from the CMF to keep the artist current on transmedia technology, themes and practices. For those of you who may have missed it last week, here is my interview with CMF Communications Director, Maurice Boucher, about these new trends.
The section has too much to cover in this summary, but the sub-section I will focus on during my presentation will be How to Write a Transmedia Production Bible by Gary Hayes. The bible is a crucial element of any successful transmedia project as it ensures consistencies in character, settings, ecologies that audience members will come to expect. For example, if the hero of a piece never kills the bad guy in the film version of the story, like Batman, Superman or Daredevil, he must maintain this ideal in the video game or the comic book. Audiences will lose their devotion to characters, in particular, and the story, in general, when they feel they have been betrayed or “lied to” creatively. I will be discussing in class a transmedia production bible I created for Universal/MCA in 2003 that demonstrates this.
CASE STUDIES:
One of the best ways of familiarizing yourself with transmedia storytelling is to see what kind of projects have been created and how well they “crossed over” to other media. The website provides several examples of projects in this regard, in particular, Inanimate Alice, a transmedia project designed to serve as an educational tool rather than an entertainment vehicle. Erni will be discussing this in our presentation in more detail.
The name of the website – the Transmedia Multiplatform Convergent Resource Kit – contains the three words that are often used interchangeably, but are actually different from each other despite being intimately related to each other.
Transmedia means going “across” various media in the storytelling process. Versions of the same stories or new strands of the story (“spin-offs” to use a television term) present themselves in diverse media. Multiplatform describes the various media in which transmedia stories may appear, but the definition of platform extends beyond that which is generally considered digital in transmedia. These additional platforms include theatre, song, books and graphic novels, for example. Convergence is also a term that needs a specific definition. In his book, Convergent Culture, transmedia expert Henry Jenkins provides this definition for convergence: “The flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation (both creative and business) between multiple media industries, and the migratory behaviour of media audiences. (Jenkins, Convergent Culture, 2). I would add that there is an element of creative integration among the platforms where the storylines are inter-related more than simply related as narratives intersect or converge.
We will have the pleasure of having one of the founders of the website in class with us to discuss the website and her transmedia work, Dr. Siobhan O’Flynn. The co-founder of the site, Anthea Foyer, was kind enough to join our class as well, and in true transmedia form, she will be joining us in the form of a video interview I conducted over the weekend. You can screen it ahead of class at this link.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Anderson, Nathan, “Working Collaboratively with a Different Type of Profession”, TMCResourceKit.com. Accessed October 30, 2016.
Boucher, Maurice, “Mark Terry Reporting from Cannes”, YouTube.com. Accessed October 30, 2016.
Foyer, Anthea. “Interview with Anthea Foyer”, YouTube.com. Accessed October 30, 2016.
Hayes, Gary, “How to Write a Production Bible”, TMCResourceKit.com. Accessed October 30, 2016.
Jenkins, Henry, Convergent Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2006.

Transmedia Is the New Black: “Media That Matters” Conference Explores the Future of Storytelling

“Telling stories across platforms seems a perfect way to create impact. So why hasn’t the documentary community fully adopted it?”

http://www.documentary.org/magazine/transmedia-new-black-media-matters-conference-explores-future-storytelling

Transmedia Storytelling in Education

Transmedia in Education

Transmedia in many ways is the future of our global communication. Transmedia as multiplatform media enables us to interact, experience and participate in digital stories. Interaction and participation through multiplatform media avail us to immerse within the digital world. Through media convergences like transmedia, we embrace the sense of future with questions, such as: What kind of world will we engage with and live within the future? How will technology treat us? How will we reveal the world through technology? And how will our future generation learn to learn?

In the context of education, teachers give their efforts to engage with students via the use of exciting and empowering media. It is essential for the students to engage, participate and create their own ways to learn. Just like media that evolves and develops over time, teaching and learning evolves as well. Therefore, it has become an avid intention for teachers to create fun and exciting classroom environments, avoid boredom and engage students with participation and creativity. The fact that traditional model of learning is struggling to meet the learners’ readiness and willingness to learn; it forces the teachers to look at new models in the learning process. This urge is reasonable as Fuller said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something; build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete” (Fleming, 371).

For that purpose, transmedia storytelling offers digital stories for students to engage in, participate and create their own learning process in fun, rich and fruitful ways by providing stories, games, activities, and self-reflections. Furthermore, Jenkins also states that “The best transmedia storytelling serves four key functions. It extends the timeline, maps the world, explores secondary characters, and engages the audience” (Jenkins, 2006). Consequently, the use of transmedia storytelling has become very essential in the classroom. It would also be affecting the urges of the teacher to modify, enhance and empower their curriculum and teaching approaches through transmedia projects. Also, creating a transmedia learning world is the ideal goal for teachers in schools in North America. In addition, Fleming assures the importance of Transmedia Learning World with the argument that creating a Transmedia Learning World means engaging with the capabilities of ubiquitous technologies, real-life experiences, and learner-focused pedagogies, making for profoundly productive and powerful learning experiences (Fleming, 371).

Furthermore, Transmedia Learning World (TLW) emphasizes the essential aspects of Literacy skills in the process of transmedia learning. Literacy skills in transmedia projects will allow learners to be able to identify transmedia navigation that will embody the ability to follow the movement of the stories and information across multiple modalities (Jenkins, 2009). A good example for enhancing the literacy media skills is Inanimate Alice, a very rich, fruitful and empowering transmedia storytelling for teachers and students to engage with, participate and experience digital literacy.

Inanimate Alice is a game simulated story, which is still ongoing (till now there have been 6 episodes). It tells a story about a girl who wants to become a game designer. She moved to different places and has her imaginary digital friend, Brad. This project has received high acclaim and awards because of its unique concept and rich literacy skills. It certainly helps the reader/learner navigate the contents, but it also provides learners a chance to create content and also engage emotionally within some topics in some episodes.

In short, Inanimate Alice is one of the trendsetters of educational transmedia, whereas it empowers teachers and learners through several literacy skills; multimodal literacy, problem-solving literacy, cultural literacy and social-emotional literacy.

Additional Notes: Jenkins (2009) through his book, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21^st Century, divided media literacy skills, which are:

1.       Play: The capacity to experiment with the surroundings as a form of problem-solving.

2.       Simulation: the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes.

3.      Performance: the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery.

4.      Appropriation: the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content.

5.      Multitasking: the ability to scan the environment and shift focus onto salient details.

6.      Distributed cognition: the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities.

7.      Collective intelligence: the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal.

8.      Judgment: the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources.

9.      Transmedia navigation: the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities.

10.   Networking: the ability to search for, synthesize and disseminate information.

11.    Negotiation: the ability to travel across diverse communities discerning and respecting multiple perspectives and grasping and following alternative norms.

Bibliography

Abba, Tom. “Hybrid Stories: Examining the Future of Transmedia Narrative.” Science Fiction Film and Television, 2009: 59-75.

Alper, Meryl, and Rebecca Herr-Stephenson. “Transmedia Play: Literacy Across Media.” Journal of Media Literacy Education 5, no. 2 (2013): 366-369.

Dudacek, Oto. “Transmedia Storytelling in Education.” Procedia (Social and Behavioral Sciences), 2015: 694-696.

Fleming, Laura. “Expanding Learning Opportunities with Transmedia Practices: Inanimate Alice as an Exemplar.” Journal of Media Literacy Education, 20113: 370-377.

Harvey, Colin B. Fantastic Transmedia: Narrative, Play and Memory Across Science Fiction and Fantasy Storyworlds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Jenkins, Henry. Confronting the Challenges of the Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2009.

Phillips, Andrea. A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling: How to Captivate and Engage Audiences Across Multiple Platforms. McGraw-Hill, 2012.

Raybourn, Elaine M. “A new paradigm for serious games: Transmedia learning for more effective training and education.” Journal of Computational Science, 2014: 471-481.

Rodrigues, Patrícia, and José Bidarra. “Transmedia Storytelling and the Creation of a Converging Space of Educational Practices.” International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning 9, no. 6 (2014).

Sangalang, Angeline, Jessie M. Quintero Johnson, and Kate E. Ciancio. “Exploring Audience Involvement with an Interactive Narrative: Implications for Incorporating Transmedia Storytelling into Entertainment- Education Campaigns.” Critical Arts, 2013: 127-146.

transmedia class!

Hi everyone – Siobhan O’Flynn will be visiting our class this coming week. here are some readings she suggests. If you have a chance to read at least one before Wednesday, that would be great!

Begin forwarded message:

From: siobhan o’flynn
Subject: Re: guest lecture?
Date: October 28, 2016 at 10:30:29 AM EDT
To: caitlin

HI Caitlin,

I do have 3 readings to suggest:

http://interactive.usc.edu/blog-old/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Jenkins_Narrative_Architecture.pdf (I’m sure class will know this)

http://gamestudies.org/0701/articles/simons

http://www.iep.utm.edu/aris-poe/

Tags: admin, guest lecture, readings, transmedia

A.I. Art

Hi all!

I thought I’d share this PBS Idea video that I was reminded of during some of our discussions on Wednesday.
It discusses whether art making is strictly a human endeavour or if machines can be creative.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbd4NX95Ysc

“Has a Black Mirror episode predicted the future of video games?”

“The latest Black Mirror series from Charlie Brooker presents, despite its transition to Netflix, another unsettling collection of future shock nightmares drawn from consumer technology and social media trends. The second episode, Playtest, has an American tourist lured to a British game development studio to test a new augmented-reality horror game that engages directly with each player’s brain via a biorobotic implant. The AI program mines the character’s darkest fears and manifests them into the real-world as photorealistic graphics. Inevitably, terror and mental breakdown follow.

The idea of a video game that can analyse a player’s personality and change accordingly may seem like the stuff of outlandish sci-fi to some Black Mirror viewers.

But it isn’t. This could well be where game design is heading.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/26/black-mirror-episode-playtest-predicted-future-video-games-augmented-reality

Tags: artificial intelligence

Mobile Nation

Thanks Mark for the link , it looks like I can access only 17 pages , can you please suggest a way to get it all?

Mobile Nation

Hi Everyone! For those looking for the book, Mobile Nation, I found a copy of it you can download for free on Academia.edu. You can get it here: https://www.academia.edu/1517461/Mobile_Nation_Creating_Methodologies_for_Mobile_Platforms

“How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design” by Katherine Isbister (2016)

Katherine Isbister, author of “How Games Move Us: Emotion By Design” (2016), argues that games have the capacity to create empathy in the user. Virtual experiences like video games, and VR, employ technology and interaction design to simulate or replicate experiences of the real. VR and gaming both have many useful applications, though – as Isbister would argue – we are perhaps still in the early stages of understanding the full range of potential uses that games and VR have for teaching, learning, bonding, and to facilitate social change. However, as Isbister argues, the transformative power of social frameworks for play can lead to increased personal growth and connection.

Isbister’s research examines how games create emotion, and she is particularly concerned with how movement-based games use design to create emotion and connection. She asks what do games contribute? How do they move us, and why? Isbister argues that not enough has been done to interrogate games, or to formulate gaming literacy, asserting not only that we take games for granted, but that a language for gaming literacy and criticism is valuable and necessary (xvi). She argues that a Renaissance in gaming is occuring, and the cultural conversation needs to catch up (xvii); she asserts that we need a critical language for gaming literacy, because “games can actually play a powerful role in creating empathy and other strong, positive emotional experiences” (xvii).

Isbister identifies two qualities of games that differentiate games from other media: choice, and flow (xviii). The aspect of choice is a factor that allows players to make meaningful decisions that influence the outcome of the game (2). Actions with consequences are built into games, providing choices that unlock potential for new gaming experiences. The opportunity to make meaningful choices activates the areas of the brain associated with motivation and reward (3); it allows for the state of “flow” that psychology researcher Mihaly Csikzentmilhalyi identified as “a pleasurable, optimal performance state” found in games (4). For Isbister, flow theory helps to provide understanding for the emotional capacity and power of games (5). To achieve optimal flow, game designers employ highly crafted strategies and techniques to create intimacy which facilitates social emotion and connection. Social emotion is primarily established via three design innovations: avatars, non-player characters, and character customization (1-2).

Avatars are a visual projection of one’s character established as an onscreen protagonist and performed by the user. As a design element they ground a player’s identification in the role play, offering action possibilities at multiple psychological levels (11-12). Avatar characters are projected on four different levels: visceral, cognitive, social, and fantasy (11), and may be constructed in the first-person, or third-person view. As with the formal properties of cinema and other visual arts, the first-person point of view allows a deeper level of immersion in the avatar experience. The addition of non-player characters in the game provide support, resistance and add character, while also facilitating social experience beyond “para-social” feelings (20). Meanwhile, character customization also encourages emotional identification and connection in the gamer, as characters and environments can be fully customized and personalized (32).

Designers furthermore employ techniques to bridge distance and establish intimacy, including: “parasocial interaction” – the formation of powerful attachments to characters cultivated through strategic design (7); “grounded cognition” – the area of psychology that describes the cognitive process that occurs when we see a social experience and our brains believe that a real social experience is occurring (8); and “game mechanics” – actions that a player can take that changes the game state (10). These elements combine to create complicity in the gamer. As Brenda Brathwaite Romero (creator of Train) has stated, “the power of a game lies in its ability to bring us close to the subject. There is no other medium that has this power” (10).

Isbister argues: “At the root of the emotional power of games lies the fact that games are comprised of choices with consequences” (40). Players make their own choices and experience their consequences, and game designers have unique powers to evoke emotions typically not accessed in other media (40-41). While avatars allow us to experience the game, non-player characters allow us to interact in the game in meaningful, emotional ways, and customization options encourage player projection and emotional attachment (41). We then respond to social cues as if they are real. These conditions result in deep awareness and agency in the game experience, which facilitates an increased awareness of responsibility, and furthermore increased awareness of the complexity of oneself, in relation to others (41). In addition to these design factors, multiplayer games provide further opportunities for emotional connection, aided by the fact that the majority of games played are with others rather than played alone (43). Isbister identifies three “building blocks” that designers of social digital games use to evoke rich emotional responses in players. These are: coordinated action, role-play, and the development of social situations, for as Isbister asserts, the process of overcoming challenging situations is deeply satisfying and bonding experience for us all (45). As she states, opportunities for coordinated action “leads to greater feelings of connectedness, mutual liking, and rapport” (45); “when people play together, the game transforms into real social interaction” (52).

“Taking on a virtual self in a multiplayer setting brings the gaze and expectations of other players to bear on a player’s adopted in-game identity. When I perform another self in the presence of other people, all of us are engaged in actual real-time social interaction taking place through the lens of this playacting. At the same time, we are also immersed in our own role performance viscerally and cognitively. This opens up the possibility for powerful emotional experiences that arise out of a co-performance of roles while engaging in rich, genuine shared experiences” (Isbister, 52-53).

In multiplayer games, designers act as social engineers to create social situations (63). Building on her argument for increased literacy in game design, Isbister asserts that “players can become highly engaged, even transformed, when they inhabit avatars and interact in social gameplay, however artificial and fantastic their digital “virtual” surroundings may be. Game designers are, in effect, molding our social milieu and the way we build ties with one another, as well as shaping how we see ourselves” (70). In addition, games provide contexts for “forming real and meaningful relationships through role-play,” and can become a part of a person’s lasting identity (70). This capacity signifies the transformative power of gaming which, as Isbister argues, all other mediums lack (71).

For Isbister, digital game designers and developers are now at the forefront of new innovations in bodily engagement (73). Her own research seeks to understand how movement itself impacts game players (75). She specifically examines how player emotions differ in movement-based play vs controller-based play (79). Emotional contagion based on body movements provides two advantages, as those watching will share the emotions being demonstrated physically; while avatars and NPCs create feelings in players (79), potentially triggering strong social and emotional experiences (89). However, Isbister notes, the mutual gaze is required for enhanced bonding and mutual good feeling, and it specifically arises from coordinated physical activity: “the more players look at each other, the better results they achieve in coordination and the stronger the lingering positive social effects” (96). Therefore, adding movement strengthens a player’s identification with a character by leveraging physical enactment (102), as our bodies dramatically shape our emotional experience (107).

Networked media provides the element of “ubiquitous connection” which “has dramatically changed how we communicate with one another on a day-to-day basis, shaping how we understand community and copresence. […] Game developers have interwoven networked communication and the sense of copresence it creates deep in the experiences that they offer players today” (109). Social bonding, therefore, is tied to self-reliance in challenging environments, while shared online experiences encourage personal growth in players and deepen players’ connection to one another, illustrating game designers’ capacity to design “supportive environments for emotional and social growth” (118). This fact alone should garner a higher level of respect for game designers as architects of collective play for community building (122), Isbister argues, especially when embedded in social frameworks for collective action (123).