Universe Creation 101

Tracey Swedlow’s site, [itvt], has an interesting whitepaper on the history of enhanced television (a big area in the cross-media matrix): 2000: Interactive Enhanced Television: A Historical and Critical Perspective. It is described as follows:

The outline this paper takes beyond introduction begins with an overview of market forces and important changes that occured over the last year until the time of writing, the promise of the medium, lingering questions about whether ITV will amount to a real industry, and other questions about privacy, targeted advertising, and the integrity of content in this environment. The next section deals with how ITV elements can appear on the screen, the types of content and applications that will exist in this environment, the latest technologies, and a short inquiry into how ITV will pay for itself. The next section presents the origins of ITV through a historical evaluation. The following section provides a breakdown of currently available solutions and general interactive television terms. In the final section, we present important issues, such as privacy and “open” vs. “forced” access, which currently remain unresolved. At the very end, we include a few observations from professionals in the field concerning remaining challenges and risks.

I have psoted about this paper before, but it is worth knowing about, including Tracey’s very informative email newsletter.

I’ve been looking at the extras provided on DVDs for a while. They are good examples of how a storyworld is elaborated in another text. A couple I’d like to mention, for their unique and intriguing elaborations are:

Punch Drunk Love, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002

The Incredibles, directed by Brad Bird, 2004

In the later, Incredibles, the film has a scene in which the mother rings up to find out how the babysitter is going with her baby son. The mother hears lots of messages and screaming on the phone but does not know what happens. In the DVD extras is a short animated film: Jack-Jack Attacks. The short film is the POV of the babysitter. Besides being hilarious, it is an excellent example of how the narrative landscape burst over the edges of a single-text.

The former, Punch Drunk Love, experiments with a narrative elaboration too, but in a slightly different manner. The DVD provides an extra that is a short film. At first it seems like the short film is an edited down version of the film; but then it becomes clear that they are scenes from the film that are shot from slightly different angles. This is another POV, literally.

Two interesting examples of narrative elaboration across texts. Let me know of any you think of.

A model that I look at closely for my developing list of design elements for cross-media stories is that of ARGs (alternate reality games). There are two books on the subject and recently, an interview with ‘puppet-masters’ Elan Lee and Sean Stewart at Cultural Gutter.

Gosney, J. (2005) Beyond Reality: a Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming, Thomson Course Technology PTR, Boston, MA.

Szulborski, D. (2005) This Is Not A Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming (2nd Digital Edition), Lulu.

Munroe, J. (2005) ‘The Sociable Horde’, The Cultural Gutter, [Online]

I’m looking at a few different models to use for inspiration in the creation of my cross-media model. One of them is military systems. The Future Combat System is a “joint (across all the military services) networked (connected via advanced communications) system of systems (one large system made up of 18 individual systems, the network, and most importantly, the Soldier)”. It has four ‘building blocks’: the System-of-Systems Common Operating Environment (SOSCOE); Battle Command (BC) Software; communications and computers (CC); and intelligence, reconnaissance and survelliance (ISR) systems. I view a cross-media work (a franchise, enhanced television, reality tv, ARG and so on) as a system, indeed, a polysystem. There are some interesting correlations:

The Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) network allows the FCS Family-of-Systems (FoS) to operate as a cohesive system-of-systems where the whole of its capabilities is greater than the sum of its parts.

Check out the videos on website, you will not believe that it is a serious site and not a game (I wonder who they’re marketing to?). It is getting harder to tell the difference between America’s Army and the actual army.

TNT has launced a “micro-site” for the US TV series Wanted. On the site is an inteactive comic which is probably the most interesting I have seen in a while. It has fixed elements (content that cannot be changed) and little games that are part of the comics story. The mediation of the player experience through the mutable and fixed elements was quite good. There is a mini-game, for example, where you can fly the helicopter the characters in the comic are hanging on to. After completing that element you turn the page to a cell with a character congratulating the other for making it on the helicopter: which functions as a congratulation to the player as well. It has been created by Studiocom.

From Adverblog.

On the topic of enhanced television, I’ve been reading a paper on websites and TV shows: Cross-Media Use in Electronic Media: The Role of Cable Television Web Sites in Cable Television Network Branding and Viewership. The paper, in the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, decribes the finding of a study: that younger Internet users are more likely to use television websites than older Internet users; and that the usage of the websites “positively predicts viewer loyalty, subscriber loyalty, and to a lesser extent, new subscriber attraction for cable networks” (620). Lots of good statistics in this paper about enhanced television usage and its role in branding. Another couple of papers I’m reading from the journal:

Dutta-Bergman, M.J. (2004) ‘Complementarity in Consumption of News Types Across Traditional and New Media’ in Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Vol. 48, 1, pp:41-60

Lang, A., M. Shin, S.D. Bradley, Z. Wang, S. Lee and D. Potter (2005) ‘Wait! Don’t Turn That Dial! More Excitement to Come! The Effects of Story Length and Production Pacing in Local Television News on Channel Changing Behavior and Information Processing in a Free Choice Environment’ in Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Vol. 49, 1, pp:3-22

And the first one I cited:
Ha, L. and S.M. Chan-Olmsted (2004) ‘Cross-Media Use in Electronic Media: The Role of Cable Television Web Sites in Cable Television Network Branding and Viewership’ in Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Vol. 49, 4, pp:620-645

I’ve been working on a bot for my cross-media story The Villager Girl and the Teenbot. I’ve also been keen to work on my polymorphic works project page. So, I decided to merge the two together. I now have ‘Tobias’ describing my project, research and creative work. Check it out and let me know of any browser problems (you’ll need flash and your sound up). Enjoy!

It has been awhile between posts so I thought I’d update you with what I’ve been up to. I had the extreme luck to be able to attend and introduce speakers at the 12th International Thinking Conference. I spent a few days listening to Edward de Bono, Paul Davies, David Perkins, Guy Claxton, Art Costa and many other extraordinary thinkers. My head is brimming with ideas for all aspects of my life, some of which are:

I’m teaching 2 subjects this semester. One is a subject I’ve taken over and redesigned. It is [New] Media [Arts] Theory at School of Design, Swinburne TAFE. I’ll be linking to the subject website from here soon. They’ll be lots of interesting papers and works I think readers of this blog will enjoy. I’m also teaching [New] Media Criticism at the School of Creative Arts, University of Melbourne. I’ll be teaching hypertext, narrative and botfiction for this one too. With both courses I’ve been asked to teach cross-media storytelling, which I will be doing with delight. I’ve also been invited to teach cross-media storytelling at Kingston University n London next year — which I look forward to doing!!

Ezra Silman is the emerging filmmaker I’m priviledged to be mentoring as part of the High Achieving Secondary School Student Mentorship scheme at the University of Melbourne. We’re investigating narrative techniques to promote suspense. An amazing discovery is…

I’ve also been invited to be a guest speaker at the Deakin Unversity Guest Speaker Series. They want me to come in and discuss my creative work and research! Wohoo! I’ll be doing that early next year — when I’ve got more time and have a ‘completed’ work to show. The short-story (which is a cross-media work) will, incidently, be read out by me at the Talk Fiction Colloquium as part the Melbourne Writer’s Festival next month.

I’m also a research assistant on 2 grant-funded projects at the University of Melbourne. One is researching immersion and light and the other is investigating the use of augmented-reality in education. Yummy stuff!

I’ve also been commissioned, by RealTime, to write a long article on new media artists conducting postgraduate study. The article should be out next month, issue #68.

I’ve also been asked to conduct a cross-media analysis of a work — which is very exciting and interesting. But, because it is for a commercial company I cannot post about it! There is another job I’m doing too, which I won’t tell about…not because it is top secret, but because it is not as interesting. I’m training academics on using the newly implemented Learning Management System (subject websites, forums, online learning etc). This strenghens my training skills but more interestingly for me, helps me develop my theories on how cross-media storytelling principles can assist academics in designing the delivery of their course.

I’ll be posting about some more cross-media and narrative researchers soon, as well as providing a sketch of cross-media design principles. I’m getting a bit sick of holding my ideas back in the name of keeping them for my ‘precious’ PhD. I think it is time to share the ideas, so they get out there, help others, get feedback, and then get even better. This move was helped by my contemplation over Kathy Hansen’s post on her new blog: A Storied Career.

But anyway, I think that is it for now. I’ll end with a quote from Edward de Bono (one of the thinkers I’ll be posting about soon too, here and at WRT). The quote has helped me to clarify why I want to provide a model for the analysis AND design of cross-media works:

You can analyse the past but you have to design the future.

See you somewhere inbetween.