Category: Creative Practice & Strategy

I’d like to just take a moment and share with you what it is like being in industry and academia. This post is actually in response to Monique’s comment yesterday:

Hi Christy,

Ah the terming debate… sigh.

Now, what Monique is referring to is my recent rantings about terminology on this blog. I highlight it because it may just be indicative of many of my industry readers. I find it interesting because I also have academic readers who I’m sure “sigh” at my posts about marketing and my lack of theoretical debate. You see, I work in industry and academia and both of them speak different languages.

Industry isn’t concerned with discussions about terms or antecedents. If a term is introduced or claimed (eg: ‘mobisodes’ or ‘360’) it is to draw attention to the person or company touting it. A term helps create a product that can be exchanged for monetary value. They’re focused on the present, but more so the future. Industry is interested in the latest and next trend. It is about being economically viable, and that means products are marketed as being the first. Industry rarely refers to its predecessors and always claims it is the future. Industry is never unsure, it champions definitive cause-and-effect solutions only.

Academia is concerned with how the present and past shapes the present and, at times, the future. Academia looks at phenomena in the present and wants to find its heritage. It presumes there is never a first. Terms are introduced to delineate the object of study from other things. They describe a specificity. A term can be exchanged for monetary value (it is an IP business), but the aim is to draw attention to the object it describes rather than the person describing it. Terms represent theories, ways of seeing things. When discussing a way of seeing a thing, an academic has to know the conversation that has been going on for decades about it. It is always referring to its predecessors. Academia is always unsure, it champions sound inquiry only.

It is hoped that with these sweeping generalisations I have communicated the conflict of interest of I have when writing for this blog. I have purposely made this blog as accessible as possible but I am not a neutral reporter of projects. I am an academic and creator, who has opinions and a way of seeing things. This means that I’ll talk about things that won’t interest all of you all of the time. I have hardly any theoretical debate on this blog (because of plagiarism concerns) but I will be including more as I move into the final stages of my PhD land. I may be moving my theory stuff to another blog but that won’t be for a while. In the meantime, you’ll just have to grin and bear it. Or start your own blog that discusses things in an industry- or academia-only manner. But please, be aware that this is a shared space. So, academics and industry people, be tolerant of each other. And for those of you that are both…we can share war stories some time.

Tejpaul Bhatia, the founder of Tej Media Networks & senior manager of international business strategy for ESPN New Media, was recently interviewed on Kevin Roberts site SISOMO about “multi-platform storytelling”.

Multi-platform story-telling requires story-teller’s to think on multiple levels and in multiple dimensions. The audience is no longer in one place and no longer on a single device for a scheduled period of time.  These additional layers and moving parts require quite a bit of effort on the story-teller’s part.  The story-teller is no longer just a writer.  She is a writer, a producer, an architect, a metadata specialist, a marketing exec, a business person, and a user experience professional.

Hey, now that sounds good. But then Tejpaul answers a question about whether formats will change with multiplatform delivery (“‘delivery?” I ask myself and then read on):

Continue reading ““Multi-Platform Storytelling” according to Tejpaul Bhatia“

Recently, a top Hollywood special effects company — Digital Domain — announced that they will be investing 25 million into making “creating a video game that matches the quality of a feature film”. Well, as you can imagine, the gaming community found this claim pretty insulting. Well respected game designer Clint Hocking rants at his blog. He is understandably miffed by the implication that games are not up to the quality of feature films and then tries to unpack the often quoted claim that the line between games and movies is blurring:

[W]hat the hell does it mean ‘the line between videogames and movies in blurring’?

Do they think that 10 years from now I won’t be sure whether I just watched a movie or played a game? Again, I have to make some assumptions about what they mean to have this kind of crap make any sense at all… I can only assume they mean ‘the production methodologies and business models are increasingly similar and it is becoming more and more practical to look at doing feature film development and game development simultaneously as part of a multi-media production that increases efficiency’. In other words, they mean convergence in the purest business sense.

Beyond the battle of the rhetoric, there is also the question of whether filmmakers are actually able to create videogames. This is touched on in the original LATimes article:

“It’s going to be very difficult” for Digital Domain, said Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities. “The skill set of a game maker is very different from the skill set of a graphic artist.”

Nonetheless, company executives say they have a competitive advantage: a network of A-list directors that includes David Fincher (“Fight Club”), Rob Cohen (“The Fast and the Furious”) and, of course, Bay, whose latest movie, “Transformers,” is one of the summer’s most anticipated releases.

Most film-based games are developed through third parties, and filmmakers often have little or no creative control. By contrast, Digital would let filmmakers direct their own games.

Now what we see here is an example of the difference between tie-ins of the past and a writing transliteracy . In the past, ‘worlds’ or ‘brands’ were extended across media platforms by third-parties. They were not creatively controlled by the original creator and they were not intended to be part of the primary narrative experience. Now creators are wanting to have creative control (either by doing it themselves or specially commissioning people) and they are making each extension and important part of the primary narrative.

I can completely understand, therefore, this drive towards wanting to be involved in the game making process. Hey, I try and learn as much as I can about lots of different artforms. But what I don’t like is an attitude that filmmakers will learn what they need pretty quickly without any game designers help. By gosh, there are some absolutely brilliant game designers out there. I would be really impressed if I saw top game designers working with top film makers (and there have been). But the catch is: they would both have to be interested in learning a bit about the other artform. If someone wipes off an entire genre saying that there is no skill in it, it is sure a sign that they have only a superficial knowledge of the form. The truth is, what I’m really looking forward to is not seeing more top mono-media, mono-artform practitioners reskilling, but seeing those naturally transliterate creating transmedia/multi-platfor/cross-media/… artforms. They are the ones we should be pumping the big bucks to.