What is digital play? Are Moms and Dads looking for a more meaningful form of connected play to share with their kids?
Who is connecting analog and digital play using transmedia storytelling methods?
Talking Katsuma Moshi Monster
"More than half of children own a toy based on a virtual world."-Dubit Research
Kids registering to play in virtual worlds has increased from 179m in 2009 to 320m in Q2 2011. Virtual worlds engage kids in connected play through connected toys and community building which in turn fuels purchases of virtual goods and connected toys. That's quite a profitable transmedia loop.
KZero calls this the golden triangle.
“Today’s kids are platform agnostic and don’t care where their
favourite stories and characters come from. It used to be the case that
books or TV shows launched characters and toys, but now online
entertainment is proving just as important.” -Peter Robinson, head of Dubit research
Do publishers have a transmedia strategy for connecting their merchandise to paper & digital books?
You don't have to be Stardoll, Moshi Monsters or Legos to enhance the user experience & increase immersion through great connected storytelling.
Some companies are creating connected play through apps or what is known as "AppCessories."
I'm looking back at the conferences I attended last year and compiling notes about the presentations and comments that made me think or inspired me.
My #1 takeaway from the Storyworld Conference & Expo held in San Francisco, November 1, 2011 was from Jeff Gomez, CEO Starlight Runner Entertainment. No surprise there. The first time I listened to Jeff talk about transmedia I was mesmerized by his personal honesty and generosity.
His presentation at Storyworld was equally inspiring for the same reasons. This dude rocks.
I've worked in children's publishing for over 20 years so I was particularly interested in what he had to say about transmedia and publishing.
Excerpt from the Jeff Gomez Keynote: "World Building and Mythology".
"One of the problems that I’m seeing, especially in publishing
endeavors as publishing moves towards the multi-platform or transmedia
model, is that it’s decided somehow that the author is gonna go off and
write a book, and then everybody else is gonna do the transmedia, and
they don’t talk to each other much. There’s this disparity: “Well what does this have to do with that? How’s this laying the foundation for that?”
Some projects are doing this well, but a lot of them unfold as if
they’re two completely different experiences. The author, I believe,
needs to be a participant in the grand design. Authors need to join with
good producers, or editors with transmedia training, and a great
support team on both the production and marketing sides in order to make
it all gel.
Finally, we need an architecture for dialog. If you are doing
something on multiple platforms that does not include a basis for
communication back and forth, you’re doing yourself a disservice.
Believe me, I’ve worked with the big studios, and this scares some of
them. They don’t want to talk to people and it’s really frustrating. A
lot of dollars, and a lot of good will, and a lot of franchise longevity
is sacrificed, because they’re not looking into the eyes of the people
experiencing their story. We need to do this, we need to go where they
are, and reach out and dialog with them.
The age of broadcasting, these past hundred to one hundred-fifty years, is coming to an end. It’s no longer about be me saying, shut up and listen to my story for a half hour or hour or two hours in a movie theater or the length of a song or CD.
That’s over…it’s over.Now, if you don’t give them at least a way to
“like” you, you’re done for, because you’re refusing to give your
audience validation. You’re not including them, and we are seeing a
generation coming to power very shortly that won’t live without that
feeling of being included, of being given the option to participate. As
much as some broadcasters want to, as much as they’re hoping to be able
to, they’ll never put that genie back in the bottle. So you’ve got to
build that architecture into or around your narrative, and be open to
it.
It could be as simple as a Facebook page, but I’m promoting richer
and more complex ways for us to interact with one another in communal
storytelling. I think this is going to be one of the next great
frontiers in the conception and generation of our mythologies: the
technique of taking from our audience, and in subtle or overt ways,
weaving their will and their desire and their creativity into the
narrative, weave them into the mythology."-Jeff Gomez, CEO, Starlight Runner Entertainment The full speech is published here on Simon Pulman's blog, Transmythology.
Another favorite Jeff Gomez presentation from Tools Of Change 2010: "Storyworlds: The New Transmedia Business Paradigm"
10. More publishing companies will form in-house transmedia groups.
In April 2011, Random House launched Random House Worlds,
a transmedia partnership with Los Angeles-based gaming software company
THQ. Increasingly, publishing companies are looking at the intellectual
property they own as extendable across more media platforms.
“All publishing companies will either have a transmedia group
in-house or build that type of partnership with experts in the
transmedia field,” said Reilly. - Jeremy Greenfield, @JDGsaid
