This is a guest post by Rob Hinchcliffe, a community
strategist at TH_NK. He blogs
Type "transmedia" into Google and it will make a couple of
suggestions about what word should come next. The first suggestion
is "training" (which is a whole other article); and the second is
"storytelling". In its infinite wisdom Google knows that the words
transmedia and storytelling are as currently inseparable as "popup"
and "restaurant". As day must follow night, so narrative must
This shouldn't be too much of a surprise, after all the people
who produce our popular media are very used to creating structured,
finite artefacts that are given to the world pre-packaged. In one
way or another they tell stories and they do their best to ensure
those stories remain constant, consistent and relatively confined.
So it stands to reason that when the people who produce our TV
programs, films, books and video games set out to create a
transmedia experience to accompany those properties, they should
approach the job using the processes and tools they are familiar
with. They sketch out a narrative, there are story arcs, there are
emotional beats, crescendos, a timetable to which content is drip
fed at specific times, and the audience is instructed, guided, and
directed along the route.
To date the most common format for these kinds of multiplatform
projects has been the alternate reality game (ARG), from seminal
campaigns for The Blair Witch Project and A.I.
right through to more recent examples such as Dexter and The Dark Knight.
What's so appealing about ARGs is that they can be planned to the
smallest detail well in advance, every eventuality can be mapped
and locked down, and there's not a lot of room for the audience to
wander off track and do something unexpected.
There are some other factors that make ARGs the default go-to
transmedia format. There's an assumption that audiences who come
for a story will only stay for more story, that any narrative
should be accompanied by another, supporting narrative; and that
deeper insight can only be delivered and digested in a storytelling
format. That's why ARGs are often engineered to be exposition
factories, pumping out backstory to placate this apparent desire we
all have for more mythos.
So what's the problem here? Well, despite much recent
evangelising about transmedia storytelling as a revolutionary and
innovative progression, too often these digital manifestations
become scheduled, passive, on-rails experiences for the user. A
place where clues are always "scavenged for" where messages must
always be hidden, and where "immersive" usually means something
scarily close to Live Action Role Playing.
Crucially, these campaigns are not communal or community-driven.
The clue's in the name: storytelling. If you're only telling
stories instead of helping create them, then that's the first sign
that something might be wrong.
So what happens if you ignore the accepted formula of story +
more story = better story, and instead aim for something else? At
TH_NK we've been starting to experiment with treating the "more"
element of a story and its metacontent, asking ourselves what
information exists within a story about that story, and the ways it
can be exposed and shared, as opposed to just layering more and
more narrative on top of what already exists.
When you start doing this, interesting things happen. The
restriction of the "no more story" rule forces you to think in a
way that widens things beyond simply handing down another
pre-packaged chapter and instead gives you the option to create a
framework within which your audience can participate in
constructing a wider narrative using the assets you've already
given them. And what we've also found is that veering away from
fiction inevitably results in a move towards the reality that the
audience inhabits. Even the most fantastical tales contain elements
that are very relevant and personal to those who consume them, and
digging down to those rich thematic seams can really result in some
surprising and exciting results.
The web excels at democratising creation. It does not want to
simply be another channel, another delivery system. It wants to be
a toolbox, a sandbox and a toybox all rolled into one. So when we
think about transmedia and multiplatform, we should also be talking
about transexperience and multicontributor. We need to stop
creating more closed narratives and finite tales, and instead
concentrate on fragmenting the stories we already have into a
million pieces and sparking the imaginations of our audiences so
they want to put them back together in the way that feels right to