Transmedia: What Was The Point, Again?
Last night I was so fried and tired that I didn’t want to play games. I didn’t want to watch TV. I just read books. Well, okay – I read a comic book, Bill Willingham’s Fables. But that put me in the mood to look at Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen, which has been living on my bedstand for a couple years now. I read “Travels With The Snow Queen,” and had a great moment of kizmit. Fables is Willingham’s story of a collection of well-known fairy tale characters – Snow White, the Big Bad Wolf – who get exiled from their homelands and wind up in modern New York City. He spins some great stories from this conceit, and Kelly Link has repurposed some fairy tales herself to great effect. “Travels With the Snow Queen” uses Kay and The Snow Queen, who also show up in Fables, in very different forms. (At least, I think it’s the same Kay – I don’t know the original, just the repurposed versions.)
It got me thinking about an interest of mine, transmedia storytelling – where in theory, you can take the same characters and same worlds and spin them into many new media and properties. Inspired by the recent CES, Leigh Alexander has written convincing essays for and against media convergence. This got me wondering why I was so fascinated by media convergence and transmedia storytelling last year. I tried to make that the focus of my Pitchfork column, to near-universal crickets – turns out the idea of an ARG about peak oil ain’t as exciting as I thought it would be – but at heart, I think I was dealing with something a little more basic: I like pop culture in all its forms; I like to mash ‘em all up in my head; transmedia storytelling seemed to offer a nice little formal structure where everything could hang out.
But transmedia storytelling has problems. First and foremost, it is massively hard to pull off. As Jessica Price recently reminded me, a transmedia story is one where the same narrative thread continues across many platforms. In the scrappy world of alternate reality gaming, this is no big deal: by definition, ARGs don’t have a single platform. They take place in graveyards, cocktail napkins, websites, your cell phone, and wherever else someone can think to stick them.
But let’s say you make a movie, and you want to add a game, a comic, a web comic, and whatever else – and you want them to contribute to your original story. The movie should stand on its own, but the other stuff should make lights flash in the fans’ eyes – “Okay, I get who that tertiary character is! I get why everyone looked upset when they heard so-and-so’s name!” You want to coordinate the creative teams behind all these properties, and you want someone to keep paying the bills so it all works out. You don’t want your toys or your novelizations to feel like cash-ins: you want them to add something. You want everything to share a common creative vision, with room for all the brilliant comics writers and game developers and who-the-hell-knows-what that you bring into the property to lend their own spark and drag along their own fan bases. You want an empire, and you want it to be coherent.
Well, what you’re really saying you want is pretty damn next to impossible.
A few properties tried it. You’ve got Heroes. You’ve got The Matrix - although I doubt much of that stuff holds up to critical scrutiny. You’ve got Star Wars – but even there, the vision of George Lucas has a unique power, and presides over an increasingly decentralized and silly empire, where new comic spin-offs and toys either rehash old templates or go off in silly directions. I mean, c’mon, three and a half of the six films that mark the core of the franchise aren’t even very good.
And you’ve got the problem of money. Money’s always a problem, right? In this case, it’s a problem because the teams behind transmedia efforts often sit in the marketing department, not creative; they’re often stymied by legal; and they’re asking for so much money that money considerations outweigh practically anything else. TV shows jump the shark because TV shows end when they stop making money, and not when they stop being good.
Money causes many other problems, but here’s another one: how you deal with the fans. The battle between the creators and the fans is well-trodden ground. Harry Potter fans saw their fan web sites shut down by Warner Bros. Corporations lash out at fan fic. Henry Jenkins and the crew at MIT have argued against this kind of stupidity. But at the same time, the people who study fan fiction inherently treat it as something that the “fans” make – and they often imply that the fans and the creators are practically living on different planets. Fan fic is treated as a cute kind of folklore, interesting and provocative in its own way, but not something you would pay for or put in front of a critic. The fans sometimes become the talent, but only by sneaking their way into the castle. The rest of the time, they’re the serfs. Hollywood makes something: they pay for it and choke it down.
The point is, transmedia storytelling on this scale demands a kind of centralized vision that’s nearly impossible to pull off, and that is highly likely to denigrate the fans, the creators, the works, and everything else that gets within spitting distance of it. If most movies are expensive and likely to fail, transmedia properties are a thousand times riskier. In fact, personally I can only think of one that really worked for me: the Buffy comic that picked up the television series. And half of that series has kind of sucked too.
When I was covering the transmedia beat last year, I don’t think that finding a way to pull off The Matrix or to get marketing and legal to work together was really what got me worked up. Instead, I’m interested in something decentralized. And when you look at that, you go from seeing a handful of successful case studies, to seeing millions of them.
Bill Willingham’s Fables has many advantages over The Matrix. He doesn’t owe anyone money for his characters: they’re all in the public domain, and he can do whatever he wants with them, using the associations or casting them aside as he wants. James Joyce got the same boost when he took the story of Ulysses. Kelly Link might’ve run a few more risks when she wrote “The Girl Detective” – isn’t Nancy Drew under copyright? – but she never said the name Nancy Drew, and that kept her in the clear. Also, she put her work under creative commons, so anyone else can repurpose and reinterpret and rework it as they wished.
Of course, I’ve gone from talking about a specific practice of transmedia storytelling to the ancient practice of taking past stories and retelling them. We all know how that works. We all know that it often works very well. And even when someone crosses the line into riffing on a copyrighted property, well – it’s easier to beg forgiveness (or work under the radar) than to ask permission. Remember those marketing and legal people I mentioned above.
This is an old practice – but we may not understand it well in the modern context. How do these archetypes and myths work in the era of media convergence? How are ideas infecting one another in the world outside the legally-enforced hierarchy of people asking permission to write fan fic? Instead of focusing on the rich empire-builders like George Lucas or J. K. Rowlings, and on the flip side, staring down at the losers who write dirty fan fic or paint pictures of video game characters masturbating, let’s look at the indie creators – the people like Bill Willingham, or Kelly Link, or the people who are smaller, making their work in many media and finding new fun house mirrors in which to distort old properties? Are people working any differently? Is it the same stuff on a new screen?
And it’s not just public domain stuff. Seeing Alien and Predator in the same film, or watching someone mess with Mickey Mouse, or watching Marvel superheroes team up with DC superheroes, is massively fun. And often, it’s massively possible. But these are one-off’s and fuck-you’s. Some of the best transmedia properties are the most transgressive ones – the ones where characters don’t belong together, or don’t behave the way they should, or never got permission to hang out in the first place. And to speak as a critic again? If you took all the subversive, free-thinking stuff that never got licensed, and compared it to all the stuff that made it through marketing and legal, and jumped through all the hoops, a la Matrix or Heroes - well, the unfettered stuff is obviously much better; I just don’t know by how many orders of magnitude.
I know that transmedia storytelling is a newer, hipper idea. And the practice of helping corporations figure out how to make it work seems challenging and lucrative. But I guess after everything I saw in the past year, it doesn’t interest me as much as the same old creative repurposing that people have been doing all along – and seeing how they’re doing it lately.
EDIT: Per Jessica’s comment, changed “The point is, transmedia storytelling” to read “The point is, transmedia storytelling on this scale … .”
And don’t miss Jessica’s expert opinion on what can make a transmedia project work.
Well, ouch.
“The point is, transmedia storytelling demands a kind of centralized vision that’s nearly impossible to pull off, and that is highly likely to denigrate the fans, the creators, the works, and everything else that gets within spitting distance of it.”
You mention Heroes and the Matrix, which I think are properties that got halfway there.
But what about Nine Inch Nails (I think Trent Reznor will come and beat you up if you say Year Zero was “marketing”)? What about Perplex City, while it was running?
Don’t get me wrong: it’s a hell of a lot easier to do wrong than it is to do right, but I can point to a lot of examples, large and small, that I think do anything but “denigrate everything…that gets within spitting distance of [them].” When it works, I’d say it does exactly the opposite.
Jessica Price
January 17, 2008 at 11:07 pm
I think more agile folks will have better luck at transmedia storytelling. The bigger the property the less likely of cross media sucess, because there’s so much money involved and this brings more cooks to the kitchen.
When it comes to public domain mash ups, I highly suggest looking at Lost Girls and League of Gentlemen. When I read the first Fable collection I couldn’t help thinging I was reading a poor man’s Alan Moore.
Gus
January 18, 2008 at 1:09 am
Jessica, that’s a good point – and I think Gus corrected the argument in his own comment. Agile, decentralized and smaller-scale projects – like ARGs, which are inherently transmedia, or the NiN thing, where Reznor and 42 seemed fairly simpatico – had a better chance of success and a better understanding of the audience than the larger-scale canon-building. I hedged my statement and marked the update.
I dig League of Gentlemen, and haven’t read Lost Girls yet. I agree that Willingham ain’t Alan Moore, but btw, I didn’t like the first Fables collection either – it came off as a big “so what?” But the story gets much better in the next book, and by the third I was hooked.
savetherobot
January 18, 2008 at 8:42 am
Yeah, I agree that when the team doing the property gets too large, the good storytelling goes away. Heroes 360 to me has always felt like it was designed by a committee — probably because it was. It’s like a movie: if you have a single director’s vision (or that of a director and a small group of united creatives — writers and cinematographers) you can get something like LOTR or Pan’s Labyrinth. If too many other people start interfering, you get the Da Vinci Code.
Oh wait. That actually explains most of the crap I’ve seen in the theater.
The other problem I see with a lot of the big properties that are doing it these days is that they’re doing transmedia just for the sake of doing transmedia.
Not every story makes sense to do in a transmedia format — in fact, 90% of them probably don’t, which is why I wince a bit when I hear some media guy on NPR saying that if you’re a television show and not doing an ARG, you’re behind the curve. Then, even assuming that they have a story that lends itself well to a transmedia treatment, often their choice of medium seems to be Because We Can Use This, rather than because this particular piece of the story is better told through a different medium than some other part of it. I can’t count the number of times I’ve gotten an email from a character, or visited a website, and thought, “Um, this is pointless.” If the central medium is the character’s blog, anything outside of that should be outside for a really good reason. Finally, any work you ask the audience to do has to pay off for them proportionately. Solving puzzles is fun for its own sake, but that actually doesn’t matter unless all you’re doing is a puzzle trail. If you’re telling a story, it’s still work, and it has to feel worth it. This goes to the macro scale as well: if you’re doing transmedia shared-world fiction, it needs to both stand on its own as a story AND give you new insight into the world that feels vital.
In the same way virtual worlds aren’t cool just because they’re virtual (you have to be able to do something that matters to you there that you can’t do in real life), transmedia isn’t cool just because it’s transmedia. A transmedia story works when it gives you something you can’t get out of a single-medium, non-interactive story. If reading the book without being able to interact with any of the characters, without being able to dig into the mystery and figure out stuff they don’t know, and without working together with other people to change the course of the story is just as satisfying an experience, than breaking up the story and telling it through different media is probably going to be more tiring than fun.
So, for it to work, you probably need:
1. A small creative team at the helm, who retains control over the final form of the project;
2. A good story that lends itself to a transmedia treatment (in most cases, a story that would be hard to tell in a more linear format like a movie or book);
3. Use of different media decided by when there’s a compelling story reason to use a different medium; and
4. Effort on the part of the audience to go beyond the central medium is rewarded proportionately, with new discoveries that are highly relevant and essential-feeling to the story, rather than just being additional information.
That’s a lot to have to get right, and there’s no good formula for most of it. It’s largely a question of “feel” (but then I suppose that applies to all art).
Most people are going to do it wrong, but then again, 90% of the novels and games and movies out there aren’t very good, either.
The difference is that you have to invest a lot more effort in a transmedia game or story than you do in a movie or book or game before you realize it wasn’t worth your time. So it’s one of those things like “bad drama is boring; bad comedy is painful.” In this case, bad single-medium entertainment is boring; bad transmedia entertainment, or even mediocre transmedia entertainment, is exhausting.
The upside is that when it works, you get an experience you simply cannot get anywhere else. Looking at smaller games for a moment: participants in Eldritch Errors, a Lovecraft-based ARG, just spent the weekend in a spooky cabin, as the heroes of their own professionally produced story. You can’t get that immersiveness from a book or a video game or a movie.
Jessica Price
January 18, 2008 at 10:39 am
I’m with you on the transmedia cynicism.
No, I have nothing more constructive to add than that.
Darius K.
January 18, 2008 at 12:26 pm
This is only referring to commercial endeavors, but let’s face it… you have to consider the main reason transmedia has such a buzz: It’s cheaper to market existing IPs than launch new ones. Hence, transmedia! Take that movie, turn it into an ARG, a game, book, comic, etc., and we lower marketing costs for each! And they all provide marketing for each other!
steve
January 18, 2008 at 1:10 pm
This is all way over my head except for one thing: yay, Kelly Link!
Agatha Christ-Almighty
January 19, 2008 at 12:43 am
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the need for more compulsory licensing in music — not just for covers, but for all reasonable sampling as well. Not sure if it’s possible to do something similar in fiction, but I’d almost prefer to see us err on the side of giving too much away. I don’t think it’s healthy that Lucas and Rowling have so much control over their own creations.
Granting that you shouldn’t be allowed to simply burn off copies of Star Wars and market them as your own, I’m not sure that the characters, situations, etc. need to be the author’s exclusive domain. Of course the studios and publishing companies wouldn’t like that, because it would imply that merchandising also wouldn’t be under exclusive license. But I’m not convinced that wouldn’t ultimately be better — they’d have to sell merchandise based on quality and that elusive property, “authenticity.” If absolutely necessary, there could be a grace period of, say, five to ten years, like there is on medical patents, for the original producers to make their money, and then compulsory licensing after that. Something, anything, to break this mold of “I made this cultural icon, so I and my heirs own it forever.” Where would we be, for example, if the Doyle estate still “owned” Sherlock Holmes? Or if some media company still owned Dracula? These things have to enter the popular stock at some point.
Seth
January 21, 2008 at 8:17 pm
Ha-ha — well, there you go — I should read before I post. Turns out Doyle’s estate does still own Holmes, and at one point they sued Star Trek for using him. Which is exactly what I’m saying — this character is over 100 years old, for crying out loud!
Seth
January 21, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Hey, Doyle worked REALLY hard on those Holmes books, and his great-great-great-great-grandchildren DESERVE to be compensated for that effort.
iseekell
January 22, 2008 at 2:04 pm