MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 2
Last weekend’s Futures of Entertainment conference at MIT took me a few short steps ahead of where the blogosphere’s already chattering. I don’t mean that dismissively: there’s a big difference between slogging through a lot of “the future’s here o noes” blogs, and talking to people in real life and hearing them sum up their passions and ideas. But for all the wild hype and prognostication that tends to crop up at these things, FOE 2 struck me as analytical, and realistic. Not much BS, and lots of good ideas.
I covered two of the panels for Gamasutra. Here are the links and some good pull quotes:
Fan Labor – Raph Koster:
But for all the reasons that web 2.0 companies encourage fan talent and user participation, as Koster observed, they’re not after great content: fundamentally, they want metadata.
He concluded: “They invite the participation so they can measure it. The web is a database. [Users] add to the database. The content is there so we can watch people skittering across it.”
Cult Media (but really, Transmedia Storytelling) - Danny Bilson:
Bilson alluded to a new project he’s designing in Dubai, a theme park that will “data-mine people.”
“I can’t divulge too much,” said Bilson. “But if you wear something on your body that holds everything related to you, and that is persistent … one attraction could be [to turn the visitor into] a character. And it uses technology, it uses motion capture, it uses false reflective surfaces. But the basic concept is if you could take a theme park, a physical space, and everyone could be data-mined, then you could have a live-action MMO.”
Other stuff that caught my ear:
- I’m not particularly interested in how academia and Hollywood relate, but several people praised MIT’s CMS and conferences like this one for bringing show business people together with the people who study them. Heroes’ Jesse Alexander said that he loved the analysis. He even compared it to a kind of therapy.
- When we talk about transmedia properties, it’s easy to cite games, television, websites – but we don’t often talk about toys. Several panelists talked about their fond childhood memories of playing with Star Wars toys, and I’m right there with ‘em: I never reenacted scenes from the movies with those things; I always made up my own characters, stories, and whole worlds. They were a major storytelling tool. That’s great to remember, especially because tie-in toys are usually considered nothing more than cheap little pieces of plastic. (And truth be told, that first Hoth set was crap.)
- At the Advertising and Content panel, I learned a new term: Stylisode. It’s a webisode that’s built around a brand. MTV makes them for Hampton Hills. You can stop vomiting now.
- Yahoo!’s Marc Davis, who spoke on the first panel on Mobile Media, demonstrated TagMaps: it’s a mapping tool that links to photos taken and posted on Flickr. The tags and locations associated with the Flickr photos are displayed on the map, to highlight the places people find the most interesting. You can automate much of the tagging, and as Davis showed us, he could take cameraphone photos out the window of his hotel in Cambridge and upload them via ZoneTag, which automatically tagged where they were taken.
