“Transmedia” Translated: Defining a term you’ll hear more of in the coming months

What will storytelling look like in future decades?

Ken Eklund’s “World Without Oil,” may give us a window. The project built a massive, original narrative by posing a provocative question to an online community: What would happen if we ran out of oil today?

Hundreds of intrigued participants responded with text, images and video, creating an immersive, cross-platform story that grew more textured as new prompts (”what will $4/gal gas do to your finances?”) garnered further additions each week.

The end result is a kind of citizen journalism of the near-future, an activism that forces users to engage in concrete terms with an abstract (yet realistic) eventuality.

This was one example in the emerging field of “Transmedia Storytelling” — the organizing concept behind the fourth Futures of Entertainment conference at MIT last weekend.

For Henry Jenkins, the conference’s organizer and author of Convergence Culture (NYU Press, 2006), Transmedia describes a new approach to telling stories given:

1. The growth of “participatory” media, like blogs
2. An explosion of new devices that allow you to both consume and produce media socially
3. The persistence of “Old Media”

“Transmedia Storytelling,” then, spreads a unified fiction across these old and new media, where each medium plays a part in unfolding the tale. It expands a story between the digital and the physical, the premium and the free, the creative and the passive.

Other, and perhaps more developed cases are the recent “Alternate Reality Games” agencies have created for a whole range of media. WhySoSerious.com, an extension of The Dark Knight, allowed people to get privileged information about the film, flesh out its back story, and win prizes by collectively contributing to online puzzles, playing online games, or documenting real-world activities.

Similar kinds of Transmedia extravaganzas have accompanied campaigns for video games like Halo 2 (I Love Bees), and albums like Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero.

Granted, as these Alternate Reality Game instances reveal, Transmedia has often targeted the ultra-geeky. Indeed, the relentless expansion of the Star Wars universe may be a canonical Transmedia storytelling example, where video games, fan fictions, films, novels and blogs all work to produce a rich and sustained narrative.

Yet the booming production of these types of deep, participatory fictions suggest that they’ll soon break free from the cloisters of nerd-dom.

World Without Oil, for instance suggests a new terrain of Transmedia storytelling that appeals to a creative community of non dorks, using politics as a locus.

Of course, with such new approaches come new problematics:

Because it requires elements of user participation, Transmedia confuses the distinction between author and reader. On the continuum ranging from total authorial control to complete audience control over the course of a story, where is the best place to set the dial for a given project?

Moreover, as these techniques become more sophisticated, what does it mean when the marketing campaign for a movie becomes more compelling than the movie itself?

We can easily imagine an entertainment industry of the future oriented around story nodes, in which a film shown to a small audience at a makeshift video theater in someone’s basement might play only a small role in an overall narrative arc. Is this suggestive of a cultural world in which there is no seam between the advertising and entertainment? Is this as nefarious as it sounds?

Perhaps most germane for TrendWatch: Can these techniques be employed by goods and services brands?

Fullsix’s own participatory show for Sprite (shameless plug), Green Eyed World may hint at this, as does 42 Entertainment’s Alternate Reality Game Vanishing Point for Microsoft.

Are there more compelling examples of this? Is what’s termed Transmedia indeed central to the ‘future of entertainment’?

Last weekend a motley assortment of tweedy academics, game designers, jargon-slinging marketeers, artists, and communications gurus, collected in Cambridge, MA for the fourth “Futures of Entertainment” conference at MIT. Over the next few days, I’ll aim to unpack a few of the more interesting ideas that came up during two days of panel discussions.