Should I Cornrow My Beard? and Other Questions at the End of 2006

This will be my last blogpost of 2006. By agreement with my family, I am going to take next week off, spending as little time online as humanly possible, and relaxing after the end of a term which has included at least 16 talks outside my home institution (and quite a few inside) as well as a period of six months during which I have made more than 165 blog posts. I think I have earned a short break. But have no fear, I will be back ready and rearing for conversation by early next year. I've already lined up some great interviews and have some cool topics in mind. There will also be some cool new announcements from the Comparative Media Studies community. Never a dull moment around here. I want to use this last post to provide a few updates and announcements -- especially concerning the podcasts of our events --- and then share a few thoughts about my recent venture into Teen Second Life thanks to the help of Barry Joseph and the other fine folks at Global Kids. (And I promise to answer or at least explain the title question by the end of this post).

CMS Announcements

We now have all but one of the webcasts of the Future of Entertainment conference up on line. That last one should be up soon.

We promised a while back that we would have a webcast version of Jesper Juul's talk, "Half-Real: A Video Game in the Hands of a Player" and that podcast went up earlier today. We are experimenting here -- and in the Futures of Entertainment content -- with video podcasting. All feedback on these efforts would be welcome.

I wanted to flag an upcoming event. For the past eight years, the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program has worked with Sony Imageworks and various local games companies to produce a workshop on Transforming Traditional Media Content into Nonlinear and Interactive Formats. The course, in the MIT context, runs intensively for five days during a week in January. I run this workshop in collaboration with Sande Scoredos from Sony Imageworks. This year, we will be assisted by Ravi Purushotma, the technological advisor to the Education Arcade.

The dates for this year's event will be Jan. 29-Feb.2.

Our students include undergraduate students from MIT and Wellesley College, graduate students, visiting scholars, staff, and other members of the MIT Community. While we offer a limited amount of academic credit for participating in the program, most of our students opt to do it purely on a volunteer basis. We also would welcome outside participants. If you are interested in joining us, contact me at henry3@mit.edu. More details will be coming early next year.

Now About the Beard.

From the start, my beard seemed to be the object of fascination and speculation among the teens at Second Life. Barry Joseph told me about this interest following my participation in the MacArthur Foundation's announcement event earlier this term. And it was one of the reasons why I wanted my own avatar so I could enter Second Life and interact with these youth. One of them wanted to know how long it took me to grow my beard. In truth, that's not an easy question to answer. I have had a beard since I left the University of Iowa to start my PhD work at the University of Wisconsin. This means I have not shaved it off completely in almost 20 years. We have watched it grow from black to salt and pepper to grey over that time. Yet, since hair continually replaces itself, it is hard to know how long I have been growing the particular beard follicles which are currently attached to my face.

At one time, we even jokingly discussed making my beard available for distribution on Second Life, though so far this hasn't happened. Part of the issue is to figure out which beard length might be most popular -- the tightly trimmed Henry beard at the start of the term or the long and shaggy one by the end when my schedule has kept me from getting to a barbershop for a trim.

Last Wedsday night, I made my live public appearance on the Global Kids island in Teen Second Life to talk about games, learning, and popular culture. I wasn't surprised when one of the first questions I got asked was when and if I would have my beard put up in cornrows. It is an interesting question -- and one I am pondering deeply as I enter into the Holiday season. So, here's the heart of my response: I welcome any and all attempts to digitally doctor photographs of my beard. I especially throw this out as a challenge to teens in Second Life. If you want to use Photoshop to cornrow a picture of my beard or if you want to fix the beard on my avatar to have a funkier do, then it's fair game. And I promise to share the results here on the blog early next year. Think of it as a technical challenge: how to cornrow Henry's Beard.

My students have long tested their skills against the iconic quality of my persona --dressing up in Henry's costumes (complete with "suspenders of disbelief"), using Barbie Fashion Designer to put me in drag, doing graffiti on photographs of my bald head. So I welcome anyone from Teen Second Life to do their stuff!

How's this for the perfect narcissistic scenario: Last Saturday, I tried out my new avatar for the first time by beaming myself onto a desert corner of the Global Kids Island. I was going to stay for just a minute, try to work through some of the control mechanisms, make sure the connection works. There was no one else in the entire world that I saw on the screen. And then, out of nowhere, someone walks up and says "Are you really Henry Jenkins?" It turns out to be Mariel, a teenaged girl from Mexico City, who has been using some of her work for a school assignment. So, here we are: only two people in the whole world on a Saturday afternoon and one of them turns out to be a fan! It's probably the only time in my life that I hit 100% market recognition! It turns out that Mariel, who introduced me at the event on Wedsday, and asked really probing and intellectually sophisticated questions, is one of the closest readers of my work I've met in some time.

People have asked me why I wanted an avatar for my appearance on Second Life. This goes back to the meaning of the word, Avatar, which is a metaphor which has gotten lost as the word has taken on such common usage. Here's what Wikipedia tells us:

In Hindu philosophy, an avatar, avatara or avataram (Sanskrit: अवतार, IAST: avatāra), most commonly refers to the incarnation (bodily manifestation) of a higher being (deva), or the Supreme Being (God) onto planet Earth. The Sanskrit word avatāra- literally means "descent" (avatarati) and usually implies a deliberate descent into lower realms of existence for special purposes. The term is used primarily in Hinduism, for incarnations of Vishnu whom many Hindus worship as God.

I remind us of this meaning half-ironically. I don't mean to imply that I am somehow a divine being taking earthly form. Rather, I mean to critique what happens when adult speak to youth much of the time. I felt vaguely uncomfortable at the MacArthur event because we -- the panelists -- were speaking from another order of representation (cinematically) in a world occupied by virtual beings. I wanted to get down to the same level (socially, representationally) with the community I was talking with. I think this is a real issue. Too often, adults talk about kids, maybe even speak to youth, but they don't talk with them. And becoming an avatar seemed like the best way to signal my desire to speak on the same level with my audience. Anyway, it made sense to me.

The whole experience was amazing. I will let you listen to the actual exchange which has been recorded and put on line if you wish. There's also a really wonderful video of highlights of the event which is now in circulation on YouTube. Frankly, I come off sounding much more coherent in the video than I did at the time. There was something truly overwhelming about the whole experience.

For one thing, I really am a newbie and so moving around in that body -- and indeed, remembering to keep moving -- was a challenge for me. At one point, I accidentally flew up, planted myself on the top of a sign suspended over the event, and couldn't figure out how to get down. I've had embarrassing experiences speaking before but none like that. At another point, I just slumped over in my chair because I didn't remember to keep poking at my avatar. There's a high learning curve here and doing your learning in public eye can be awkward. My students are talking about creating an animation sequence which has my characteristic hand gestures. Nobody has ever seen me speak for long without gesticulating wildly. I've got a ways to go before I blend fully and comfortably into my avatar but I was really taken with the sense of presence I felt interacting with all of the people attending the event from remote locations.

I kept getting distracted by the sheer array of avatars in attendance -- characters from anime, dancing Pandas in Ninja costumes, a monster from Will Wright's Spore... At one point I made a reference to the struggles City of Heroes had with Marvel over the fact that players might use their character design tools to create a knockoff of the Incredible Hulk and then looked out a moment later to find someone in the audience had turned themselves into the Hulk. And I was blown away by the fact that my avatar has much better moves on the dance floor than I've ever managed to master. He's one cool dude and I am, well, not. So, all in all, it was an amazing experience but I was not at my most articulate as one thing or another distracted me mid-sentence.

Thanks to everyone who made it possible and to everyone who turned out to enjoy the show. I hope to have more chances to interact in Second Life in the coming year.

And to all of you who have read and contributed to the blog this year, thanks -- and best wishes on the holiday season.

The Independent Games Movement (Part Five): Interview with Eric Zimmerman

A while back, I ran a series of interviews with Manifesto Games's Greg Costikyan (Part One, Part Two) and Indiecade's Stephanie Barish (Part One, Part Two) talking about the current efforts to spark an independent games movement. Both of them offered some unique perspectives about what independent games are, why they matter, how they fit within the current games culture, and what steps need to be taken to promote more experimentation and innovation in game design. I plan to continue this series from time to time with other interviews which showcase innovators, experimentors, and entrepreneurs who are helping to build the independent games movement. Eric Zimmerman was the person who introduced me to the concept of an independent game some years ago and his work for GameLab consistently embodies for me the experimental mindset I associate with this particular category of cultural production. I run into Zimmerman four or five times a year at various conferences and consistently find him an engaging personality and a lively thinker. As long as I have known him, Zimmerman is someone who has consistently pushed us to broaden our definition of what games can do and who has proceeded to prototype, build, and market games that expand our conception of this still emerging medium. Eric Zimmerman would rank high on anyone's list of the top game theorists -- Rules of Play remains probably the best book written to date about game design and is rapidly emerging as perhaps the most widely taught text in the emerging field of games studies. What gives his ideas about game design such credability is the ways he has put them into action, working with his smart team of fellow designers, through projects like Arcadia, Diner Dash, Loop, Blix, and Sisyfight 2000, among other Game Lab titles. Every Gamelab game has a point -- as we discuss here -- an underlying theoretical question which drives the design process. Each one contributes something vital to our understanding of the medium as well as illustrating that there are a whole lot more different kinds of play and fun that the marketing department of Electronic Arts might care to imagine. The GameLab titles are the best case I can imagine for the value of producing and distributing games outside of the major studios. I will be running this interview over the next two days. The first part deals mostly with the issue of independent games and with the ways GameLab approaches its business. The second part digs deeper into the Game Designer project which Zimmerman is developing with Katie Salen and James Paul Gee -- which promises to be a significant part of the new Digital Learning and Youth project recently launched by the McArthur Foundation.

You have been a longtime advocate of the independent games movement. How do you

define independent games and what do they bring to games culture?

The idea of "independent games" is a slippery but important concept. I think there are a number of ways to consider what they are - I like to use the notion of independent film as a way of thinking through what indie games might be.

On the one hand, it's possible to think about independent film as something which is small-scale in terms of scope of production - a homemade film project on a shoestring budget, as opposed to a major studio release. Related to this is another definition of independent film, which refers to the ways that a movie is funded and distributed - perhaps funded through an arts grant, and distributed via festivals, instead of more mainstream means. Lastly, an independent film might be seen as something which questions the conventions of mainstream cinema through its form or content - from avant-garde experiments to political documentary.

There are other ways of conceiving of independent cinema as well, but these three (production, business, & design) help describe some of the challenges of creating independent games. The game industry is a cultural field that is currently dominated by large-scale games that cost $10 to $20 million or more to create, games that are funded by large corporations, distributed through the bottlenecks of retail, and are largely genre-generic titles. At Gamelab (a company I founded in 2000 with Peter Lee), we try and address these questions, making small-scale experimental games that are still commercially viable.

To me it is less important to define exactly what independent games are and instead figure out how to create innovative games that expand the boundaries of digital games, a form of culture that is only a few decades old and still has vast spaces for experimentation and invention.

What do you see as the major factors enabling or hindering the emergence of the

independent games movement at the present time?

We are more or less stuck in the middle.

It is certainly possible to create new kinds of games through traditional big-money funding and major studio production - Will Wright and his very large team at Maxis are doing some fantastic work along those lines. On the other hand, there are plenty of players and amateur designers creating levels and mods, and games as a form are great at engendering this kind of productive fan culture.

But at my company Gamelab we've chosen a middle route. For our purposes, as a studio with a staff of 35, we need to figure out how to make independent games that are in the middle between huge retail titles and freeware fan culture and still be commercially viable. To solve this problem, we've been attacking it from all the angles I mentioned in my response to the first question - how to keep games small but something that will still generate revenue; how to get these games funded and distributed; and how to explore new kinds of content, aesthetics, and gameplay.

There aren't any easy answers. For example, some look to the business model of downloadable games. [Sometimes called "casual games" - although I personally despise that term, as what musician would say that she creates "casual music"?!] The model of downloadable games seems promising - at first. It allows smaller games to be distributed to a very large audience over the internet. However, the major game portals are surprisingly conservative about what they will put up on their sites. And as a whole, downloadable games are generally quite generic and often shameless clones of other games - hardly a burgeoning sector full of gameplay innovation and cultural insight. Right now there aren't any perfect contexts for independent games.

On your website, you suggest that project-based funding may be a key economic

model for the independent games movement. Explain. What does this mean and how

does it change the way games get made?

Well, at least it sounds good on paper!

Generally, a game development company like Gamelab does not have the money to pay for its own games to be created. The most traditional route for finding this money would be for us to work with a publisher, who funds our games, and then also markets and distributes them. Because of the nature of most game publishing contracts, it is difficult for developers to earn healthy royalties from this kind of deal, even if a game is successful.

Another possibility would be getting venture capital investment, in which individuals or organizations invest in the company, and then own a piece of it. The hope of the investors is that the company will go public (which is unlikely for a game developer) or be purchased by a large publisher or other company (somewhat more likely). We have resisted this scenario so far because our independence is important to us - becoming the kept studio of a large publisher would curtail the kind of experiments we want to explore.

So working with Ruth Charny, an independent film producer, we cooked up a third option, which is project-based financing, a funding model borrowed from the film industry. In project-based financing, investors invest only in one project, or possibly a slate of projects, rather than in Gamelab as a whole. They earn back their money (and hopefully some profits) directly from the revenue the games generate. Gamelab in this scenario is acting like the publisher, marketing and distributing the games.

We have gotten three downloadable games funded in this manner, each with a different partner. We are working with NYC-based animation studio Curious Pictures to create Out of Your Mind, a game about little creatures inside everyone's heads; an individual investor funded a game called Work, a parody of office life; and we partnered with LEGO to create an original, somewhat psychedelic game called LEGO Fever.

Luckily, the process of distributing downloadable games is much easier than distributing them through retail, so it is something that Gamelab can manage on its own - although we will also be working with partners to get the games on cell phones and in retail boxes. It has been difficult to find project-based investors, however. My feeling is that in 10 or 15 years, when there are enough wealthy people that believe games are an important cultural form, we'll see a boom in independent games. Right now, however, the people that invest in independent film aren't gamers and don't see the glamour or importance of games.

We recently participated in an online forum discussing whether games are art.

You offered an interesting response, distinguishing between design and art.

What do you see as the value of understanding games as a field of design? Why

do you resist the concept that games might be considered art?

Henry, Henry, Henry...! I don't resist the concept that games might be considered art. I resist the naïve way that most game developers themselves conceive of the concept of "Art." I recently attended a think tank-style weekend gathering that included many amazing game developers. As we discussed the future of game design, a common note in the conversations was a lamentation of the eternal, oppositional relationship between art and commerce.

Even a little study of art history reveals that for the past 500 years (at least!), the creation of culture has been intimately intertwined with economics. Although today's game developers work with cutting-edge technologies, they cling to a pre-Modern, Romantic idea of cultural production, one that I believe hampers the creation of games that are more relevant to our contemporary times. Games don't have to be self-contained Renaissance windows into coherent narrative universes. In fact, play is always already self-referential and metacommunicative (referencing Gregory Bateson).

For me "design" (instead of "Art") is a way of thinking about game creation that sidesteps these thorny issues. Design in my mind is associated with problem solving rather than with the expression of the artist's inner life. It is also a mode of cultural production that acknowledges the importance of integrated research and an iterative, playtesting-based process. The naïve version of "Art" too often implies a solitary visionary being internally inspired, something at odds with a healthy game development process.

But ultimately the distinction between art and design is more of a tactical one for me than a definitional one. I want to see game developers creating games that can speak to our times, and I don't think that will happen as easily when they are operating from outmoded cultural models.

Most of your games seem to emerge, in part, from your group's interest in experimenting with the basic building blocks of games. Walk us through some of the thinking behind your most recent games --Plantasia and Egg vs. Chicken. What ideas drove this design process?

I'll do even better and talk about a couple of games that we are about to launch - Arcadia Remix and Out of Your Mind (a game I mentioned earlier). You are definitely right that often our design focus at Gamelab has to do with investigating the "core mechanic" of a game - the repeated action that forms the heart of the interactivity. That's in part due to the fact that because of the downloadable business model, we make small-scale games that need to "hook" players with an addictive play mechanic.

Arcadia Remix , published by VH-1, is a redesign of a small game we did a few years ago, Arcadia. (Henry, I believe you've actually written about Arcadia.) Arcadia Remix is made up a series of tiny, very simple games that are all played at the same time. The mini-games are incredibly straightforward - actually bordering on boring - but playing several of them simultaneously becomes quickly challenging. The play emerges as the player manages her own attention to the different games, with strange, syncopated rhythms evolving from the overlapping play patterns. It's also an interesting game because the mini-games are all parodies of classic Atari-era games, and so we're appropriating our own history as the cultural and formal building blocks for the experience.

Out of Your Mind is a somewhat perverse and silly game in which the player works in a brain spa, removing nasty little creatures called Nega-Tics that live in our minds and cause bad behavior. In this case, the gameplay involves drawing lines with the mouse to spear the creatures and remove "brain gunk" by looping around sections of the playfield. The interaction consists of making quick and elegant gestures with the mouse, as the player's cursor swoops and loops through the space. Again, this kind of play pattern is something we haven't seen in other games.

There are many ways to innovate on the level of game experience. Often, game developers try to create new kinds of stories, content, and aesthetics for their games. In addition to these vectors for innovation, we try at Gamelab to invent new ways to play, which means focusing on new kinds of play mechanics, game logics, and interactions. Both of the games I mentioned will be available for play by the end of January.

The Independent Games Movement (Part Six): An Interview with Eric Zimmerman (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first of a two part interview with Eric Zimmerman, game theorist, designer, and teacher, during which he spoke at length about his vision for the Independent Games movement and the ways that his company, Game Lab, has developed distinctive and original content. Today, I shift the focus onto some of the public service aspects of Zimmerman's work, especially in his efforts to promote games literacy. Across the term, I have been sharing with you some news about the MacArthur Foundation's 50 million dollar commitment to exploring youth and digital learning. Our own Project NML is part of this effort as was the white paper I published on the social skills and cultural competencies young people need to participate meaningfully in the new media landscape. Another dimension of this effort is the Game Designer Project, which Zimmerman is developing in collaboration with Katie Salens and James Paul Gee. I got a chance to see some early prototypes of this project at the Serious Game Summit in Washington DC earlier this term and was blown away by the wit and imagination, not to mention the pedagogical sophistication, which is informing its design. As Zimmerman discusses below, this is an attempt to use the game platform as a vehicle to teach students about the design process. The goal is not to turn young people into game designers but rather to use the design process to help them to think critically about games as a mode of experience.

In a recent interview on this blog, Greg Costikyan commented, "Consider Eric Zimmerman. He's found a viable niche doing casual games, and his company, Gamelab, does some excellent ones. But Eric is a -gamer- at heart, and while I imagine he's happy enough developing games for an audience (middle-aged women) that prizes games of types very different from those he himself loves, I'm sure he'd much prefer to be developing games of greater cultural significance and intellectual merit. In other words, if he could make as much money doing a game that appeals to people who have a passion for games, rather than for those who view them as light entertainment, I'm sure he'd be happy to. But he also has a payroll to make, and there's demonstrable money in casual games, and indie games are pretty much unproven as a market." Do you agree or disagree with that description of the context within which you work?

God bless Greg Costikyan (and I mean that in the secular, idiomatic sense).

Greg is half right. While Gamelab strives to have every game we make be in some way innovative, I believe we are just scratching the surface of the tip of the iceberg in terms of the kinds of games that could be made. So of course I would love to be doing more radically experimental and unusual work, in terms of gameplay and interaction, narrative and cultural content, contexts for play, audio and visual aesthetics, etc. In this sense, yes Greg, I'd like to be doing more than I am. But when I look around at all of the game companies out there, I'm very happy with what we are doing at Gamelab and I don't think there is another place I'd rather be.

But I certainly wouldn't frame these issues as Greg does. For example, I wouldn't describe the work I want to do as my own personal desire to make games that I want to play. As a designer, I like solving design problems, which doesn't merely mean making games that are fun for me. And even if it did, the intrinsically collaborative nature of game development means that a game is the product of many people's desires, not just those of a single author.

Greg is also certainly over-generalizing the online game audience. Online games include far more than the "middle aged woman" stereotype he invokes. I'd much rather be making games for the Internet, as the players there are vastly more diverse than for consoles and PC retail games. I can say with confidence that the two games I described in my response to the last question, Arcadia Remix and Out of Your Mind, are not designed just for middle-aged women.

Lastly, I would hesitate to set up an opposition between running a business and "creativity," something implied in Greg's quote. Part of what we are doing at Gamelab is not just engaging with design questions, but engaging with questions of funding and producing and distributing our work as well. And Greg's company Manifesto Games is certainly doing this too. The fact that there are still so many unanswered questions about games - in terms of design, culture, business, etc - is what makes it so exciting to be working in the game industry right now.

Tell us something about the Game Designer project. You hope to help young people develop an understanding of the game design process. Why? What do you see as the benefit of everyday people understanding games on this level?

Game Designer is a project funded by a MacArthur Foundation grant in partnership with Jim Gee's research group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Game Designer will let junior high and high school students learn about game design by creating and modifying simple games. However, the point of the project is not to train future game designers. It is to engender media literacy.

Our position is that there is an emerging form of media literacy that we sometimes call "Gaming Literacy." Gaming Literacy has to do with information management, understanding complex systems, social networks, a critical design process, and creativity with digital technology. Increasingly, this new form of literacy will be crucial in the workplace and in our social and civic lives. The process of game design, which combines mathematics and logic, storytelling and aesthetics, writing and communication, systems and analytic thinking, among other elements, is one of the best ways of engaging with this form of literacy.

Katie Salen here at Gamelab is leading the Game Designer project design and working directly with our academic partners, who are focusing on research, pedagogy, testing, and assessment. Game Designer is not an open-ended prototyping tool like GameMaker - it is a guided, scaffolded experience that teaches game design concepts. So it is important that the instructional components of the project are really well-tuned. Right now there is nothing like Game Designer out there - and from kids' reaction to our prototype testing, it may be a very popular application.

One obvious analogy might be to Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, which translates the theory of comics into a graphic novel format. What do you gain by exploring the mechanics of game design through a game as opposed to a book

like, say, Rules of Play?

I hadn't thought of that analogy, but I like it! Thanks for the generous comparison.

Game Designer in some ways is an extension of Rules of Play, in which Katie Salen and I tried to establish a set of concepts for the practice and theory of game design. But that textbook is really designed for a university classroom - a very different audience and a very different instructional context than Game Designer!

One of the reasons why Game Designer needs to be embodied as a game creation application, rather than just as a book, is because one of our emphases in the project is on the process of game design. Interacting with Game Designer won't be just about making games in and of themselves, but will involve sharing them online, having friends playtest your games, as well as writing critical reviews of your games and of others' games. We want to borrow some elements from the practice of game design, because this process also embodies the kind of literacy we want to teach.

You announced at the Serious Games Summit the launch of a new nonprofit entity. Explain how this group will be related to Gamelab and what its goals will be?

We're still in the process of forming the nonprofit, so I can't say too much just yet. But the organization, called The Gamelab Institute of Play, is dedicated to the idea that playing, understanding, and creating games is an important learning experience. Rather than focusing on "serious games," the Institute of Play consists of programs and experiences that turn players into designers, letting them learn about and create games both on and off the computer. A close relationship between the new organization and the commercial game studio Gamelab, will also allow for new kinds of collaborations across the for-profit and not-for-profit divide. We're pretty excited about the Institute of Play! Expect to hear more about it this Spring.

There has been a lot of debate this summer about the value of games criticism and whether the field needs strong and recognized critics who might cultivate the audience for more innovative games. What do you, as a game designer, see as the role of the game critic?

Sorry to hear I missed that debate! Where and when did it happen?

I certainly agree that there is a role for game criticism, as one piece in the puzzle of growing what games are and what they might be. Education and the scholarly study of games is another piece. As are many of the design and business issues I have mentioned here. In many ways, the role of the critic binds all of these diverse elements together. The critic needs to have some kind of scholarly background, although she isn't necessarily writing for an academic audience. The critic has an educational function, although he isn't a formal instructor. And the critic needs to understand the design and business of games, even though the critic isn't selling or creating them.

Critics serve many roles for those of us working in the industry. We're usually too busy to be reading everything out there, so critics are important sources of information about what is happening. Critics also reflect audience opinion, giving us a sense of what our fans might be thinking. They also of course help generate audience opinion, giving us a way to reach our players. At their best, critics can raise issues and concerns about what, how, and why we are making games that we in the myopic industry might not ourselves see.

Props to the critics.

Sampling the Polish Comics Scene

According to Tim Pilcher and Brad Brook's The Essential Guide to World Comics, "Of all the countries in the former Eastern Bloc, Poland has perhaps the largest comics scene -- you could almost call it an industry." My host and translator, Miroslaw Filiciak , took me to several comics shops on my visit -- the largest of which was located in the railroad terminal at the center of the city, a location which reflects the connection in many people's minds between comics (and other forms of popular fiction) and railroad transportation. This picture was taken of me reading some of the local product outside the train station in front of some murals (covered with graffiti) that suggest several of the other graphic arts traditions in Poland.

And here's a somewhat more traditional form of graphic arts -- some remarkable murals painted on the fronts of buildings in the old section of Warsaw. This one is signed and dated in the mid-1950s.

(By the way, thanks to Cynthia Jenkins for all of the great pictures of Warsaw I have been running over the past few entries).

Pilcher and Brooks tell us, "As in most countries, comics in Poland have been looked down upon as trash for subnormal people and slow children. Much of this attitude was created by the communist regime, which on one hand dismissed comics as imperialist garbage and on the other used them for propaganda amongst children and adolescents. During these years, such morally edifying comics like Kapitan Kloss, Kapitan Zbik, and the still published Tytus Romek I A Tomek had their salad days." Kapitan Kloss and Kapitan Zbik were among those works of Communist era popular culture whose loss was being lamented by nostalgia buffs at the Kultura 2.0 conference.

After the collapse of communist, independent comics emerged to fill a gap left by the end of state subsidized publishing of comics. In some cases, these new companies simply reprinted comics from abroad -- including the pulpy Prince Valiant inspired Thorgal series which happened to have been co-created by a Polish comics artist, Grzegorz Rosinski. Rosinski was the star of the Polish comic market (he prepared some of the best books of the Kapitan Zbik series) and wanted to cooperate with publishers on the other side of the iron curtain, but after the fifth part of Thorgal the martial law began in 1981 and there was no more possibility for postal cooperation. So he moved to Belgium where the author of the series lived. As a result, Thorgal is the Polish comic best known in the west.

This image suggests the larger than life heroics and blood and thunder fights that characterize the Thorgal series as a whole. Thorgal continues to be enormously popular if its high visibility not only in the comics shops but also the bookstores across Warsaw are any indication. It commands almost as much shelf space in the comics shop we visited as the entire output of DC comics.

This page comes from a graphic telling of the adventures of Janosik, who has been compared to Robin Hood (Text by Tadeusz Kwiatkowski and illustrations by Jerzy Skarzynski, 1972). The comic is an adaptation of a popular television series about the folk hero. Jerzy Skarzynski has been a member of the artistic elite of Poland and the most known theatre's stage designer -- given the work a reputation in both high art and popular culture circles.

Here's what one website tells us about this traditional Polish folk hero:

Juro (George) Janosik was a robber, who with a group of friends, plundered, robbed, and burned the houses of the rich. And was said to operate on those on both sides of the Tatra Mountains, Polish and Slovak, and hide out in the forests at the foot of the Tatra mountains. However, according to legend he never harmed the poor in any way; on the contrary, he gave them money and gifts. Hence, the story circulated that Janosik robbed the rich to feed the poor, and the comparison with Robin Hood. Folk tales present Janosik as a hero who had supernatural powers; a magical resistance to arrows, bullets and wounds achieved with the help of a herb he carried in his pocket, an ability to move from one place to another quicker than any other human being; and was able to leave the impression of his palm in a slab of stone.

To my western eye, this graphic style -- including the intense use of color shading -- owes something to the American horror and adventure comics produced by E.C. in the 1950s -- especially the work of B. Krigstein. Here, Janosik does battle with a bear, using only his belt, an image that recalls Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett as much as it does Robin Hood.

Another popular early comics series in Poland, Janusz Christa's Kajko i Kokosz, has been compared to the Asterik books from France. It was so successful at its peak in the 1970s and 1980s that it ran to 20 volumes and has since been adopted into both films and video games.

As one might expect, given the country's history of ideological ferment and turmoil, many of the independent comics are deeply political in their content -- though the subject matter may range from student protest movements, as in the case of Ryszard Dabrowski's Likwidator & Zeielona Gwardia which reminds me a bit of Manuel "Spain" Rodriguez's Trashman, a key icon of the American underground comics movement.

to gender politics, as in the case of Agata "Endo" Nowicka's inventive and stylistically diverse Projekt:czlowiek, an autobiographical comic dealing with a young woman's pregnancy and the breakup with the child's father. The book mixes and matches stylistic elements with wild abandon but in the process gains the immediacy one associates with the best cultural projects of third wave feminist world wide.

The haunting Achtung Zelig! (Krzyszlof Gawronkiewicz and Krystian Rosenberg) uses surrealistic images -- including the metaphor of the rounding up and slaughter of kittens -- to depict the Nazi occupation of Poland during World War II. One can not help but compare its use of animal imagery to Art Spigelman's Maus which offered a much less sympathetic depiction of the relationship between the Poles and the Jews during this period. The Kultura Gniewu publishing house is currently preparing a book which pairs artists and writers from Poland and Israel on stories that comment on their shared historical experiences.

Some of the books deploy images one might associate with the Socialist Realist art of the Stalinist era and deploys it either to comment on contemporary political issues, as in the case of this page from ComX, an important underground comicbook...

Or these images from Poznanski 1956 Czerwiec (Maciej Jasinski, Jacek Michalski, Witold Tkaczyk, Wiktor Zwikiewicz) which depict an uprising against the Soviets through images which might have come from Soviet poster art or juxtapositions which recall the work of Sergei Eisenstein.

At the same time, we can see signs of Polish appropriation and transformation of images from American popular culture, ranging from the use of hip hop iconography in Adoptuj Rapera (Pierweza Paracirafowa and Gra Komiksowa), a work which is also designed to function as a choose your own adventure style game....

Or the use of superhero characters (borrowed liberally from both DC and Marvel, a sure sign that they didn't get permission) in Piotr Drzewicki's "Good Morning U.S.A." (which was reprinted in Komiks: Anthologia Komiksu Polskiego (edited by Najlepsi Mtodzi Rysownicy).

The Komicks anthology which features work by younger Polish artists includes an exciting array of visual styles and techniques, suggesting that Polish comics, like their counterparts in Western Europe, are understood at least in part within an avant garde context. There are wild experiments in color, as in these images from Marek Adamik's Weronika Sama W Domu....

or in Piotr Kowalski's "Niebezpieczne Zwiazki" which captures the excitement of the Polish rock scene.

There are stories which show strong gothic influences, such as this work by Aleksandra Czubek...

or in Rafal Szlapa's "Spotkanie"....

Or there may be surrealist influences as in this panel from Andrzej Janicki's "Przypadek Rajmunda K"....

On the other end of the spectrum altogether, there can be lyrical painted images, such as Piotr Kania's "On Obraz i Ona"...

Each of these images give us a glimpse into the artistic traditions shaping contemporary Polish comics. Some people I spoke with on the trip were surprised that I was bringing back comics in a language that I can not read. I will admit at times to frustration in wanting to know more about these books, but the pictures are so evocative that they communicate a great deal about Polish culture. (Not that I wouldn't welcome any Polish readers who wanted to send us a translation of the texts contained in these images). I always try to collect comics when I visit other countries and by this point, I have a pretty far ranging collection, but this is one of the best hauls of comics I have ever brought back from a trip to a foreign culture.

Niech zyje polski komiks!

My Adventures in Poland (Part Three)

On the second day of my trip, I went over and spoke at a conference on internet research hosted by the Warsaw School of Social Psychology, built inside an old factory, in what was described to me as the "dodgy" side of the Vistula River. The river divides the city into two parts: historically more working class people lived on the west bank. This area, however, is now undergoing gentrification and the university itself was a modern, inviting facility. I will have less to share about this conference because it was mostly conducted in Polish without translation facilities and so I was not able to really engage with the other presenters as much as at the Kultura 2.0 event. I did hear a really interesting presentation on a phenomenon called Couchsurfing, where people use social networking tools to arrange to stay in people's homes as they travel around the world. The presenter discussed it in terms of the interplay of virtual and physical spaces and the different kinds of sociality that each enables. Later that night, we ended up going out with a group of students to a typically European drinking hole, Sklad Butelek. I spent much of the evening talking with Alek

Tarkowski, who is the primary person in Poland organizing and promoting the Creative Commons movement.

The Polish Reggae Scene?

One of the most interesting aspect of his conversation, however, centered around the emergence of a Reggae movement in Poland. Keep in mind: There are almost no Jamaicans living in Poland. This is not a case of emigrant populations porting music to another part of the world. Poland is an incredibly homogeneous country with very limited immigrant populations and clearly, there are no cultural reasons for Jamaicans to want to relocate to this part of the world. Reggae emerged here because it served Polish interests and reflected Polish tastes and thus it has taken some distinctly Polish shapes.

I shared some of the music I brought back with Generoso Fierro, who works in the CMS offices. For more than a decade, he has hosted Generoso's Bovine Ska and Rocksteady which airs every Tuesday from midnight to 2AM (EST) on 88.1FM WMBR Cambridge and can be found online. His show focuses on the beginnings of Jamaica's music

industry (1955-1970) from the earliest recordings of mento (sometimes referred to as

Jamaican calypso) through Jamaican R & B,ska, rocksteady and the rise of reggae. Here's his insights into the Polish reggae phenomenon:

I have found that Jamaican music truly appeals to any culture that is in a dire economic position. In the case of England there was the effect of children of post WW2 Jamaican immigrants who were brought to England due to the labor shortage, living in depressed neighborhoods with white London youth turning them onto Jamaican rhythms during the Mod and Skinhead movements of the late 1960s..The whole merger of punk and reggae (i.e The Clash covering Jamaican music) happened due to a London DJ named Don Letts who, due to the small amount of punk records available at the time, would spin reggae before live punk rocks shows. But in the case of Mexico, which has a huge Jamaican music community, this seemed to have spawned from radio broadcasts from California during the Jamaican revival in the early 1990s. Several of the revival bands that formed in Mexico told me in interviews that California radio really turned them onto the sound.

A group called Izrael was the first to introduce the sound into Poland in 193. Some members of Izrael heard a few songs and were so fascinated that they started to produce music in this style (at least as they understood it). I gather there's a good deal of reinvention going on here given how limited their initial exposure to the music was. The name created confusion in Poland with some people assuming this was a Christian Rock group. Indeed, my hosts shared with me stories of older people storming out of the concert, confused and angry, having hoped for a more conventional religious experience.

Generoso added, having heard some of this music:

Rastafarianism which is what alot of the Izrael record expounds (based on titles of songs and style) really wouldn't mix with Polish Catholicism so I understand their confusion. There are American "Jamaican" bands like "The Israelites" that actually are born-again Christian. They keep the Jamaican patois accents but side-step the mentioning of Hellie Selassie or Rastafari. The Izrael record is quite sincere in it's production and sound. On the compilation disc you gave me what I find great is the variance in style from what is dancehall to dub to modern ska sounding tracks. During one barrage of Polish dancehall toasting (singing over the rhythm) the occasional Jamaican patois word like "Samfi" or "Ganja" that get's thrown in which is almost too bizarre to the ear.

Much of the growth of the community has taken place online. There is apparently one store in Warsaw which sells only Reggae and its variations. Many Polish groups send their masters to the west Indies in order to get them cut onto Vinyl by Jamaican recording companies and then shipped back so they have the particular sound they want.

As the sound was introduced into Poland, and as Polish youth started to respond to its cultural politics, Reggae spread. There emerged at least one store in Warsaw devoted entirely to the sell of Reggae albums, which has become the headquarters of the local culture. And there is a very active internet community which helps direct fans to clubs where various groups are performing and educate them about the music. A recent album, Polski Ogien, showcased the younger artists who have emerged in Izrael's wake, and included a surprising array of different sounds and rhythms.

What had attracted my interest in the club had been a song I heard on the radio which was collaboration between Twinkle Brothers (a Reggae roots group well known in the west) with Trebunie Tutki (a traditional Polish highlands group): they had discovered a similar rhythm pattern in their music. This was an amazing cut and I am told the rest of the album is this good, but I couldn't find it in the two record shops I was able to visit.

This was one of the major signs I saw of the ways globalization was impacting Polish culture -- a fascinating story of cultural appropriation and transmission. (Where is George Lipsitz when you need him?)

Here's another: a Chinese restaurant has opened in the old section of Warsaw.

When I spoke to people there about the internet, it was clear that the local political leadership and news media has stirred up some anxiety about the erosion of the distinctive qualities of Polish culture in the face of the globalizing force of the World Wide Web. It was a question I asked about often as I spoke to people there. And it is certainly the case that they have extensive exposure to American and British television, films, and comics. Yet, it is also the case that there was probably more local content for sale in the comics shops (more on this tomorrow) than I see traveling in most other parts of the world.

The Global Marketplace

Another site of globalization is the vast flee market which has sprung up along the outskirts of what was once the national Soccer Stadium. I have frankly never seen anything like it in terms of scale -- it spreads out below you in all directions.

The merchants came here from across the old Soviet empire -- Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusian, Latvians, and Lithuanians -- and from parts of Asia -- especially from Vietnam. Most of what we saw were knockoffs of goods which we could buy for only slightly more in the western world -- there was just lots and lots of it. I, however, purchased good quality Russian fur hats for my son and myself. Growing up in the cold war era, I had a fascination for those hats which were a central icon of my imagination of what Communists look like.

And I am told if you wander deeply enough in there you can buy anything you want -- legal or illegal -- if you just know where to look. There were certainly plenty of signs there of the illegal trade in pirated dvds, cds, and software and only the thinnest efforts to cover it over, often with totally transparent sheets of plastic and a few stray items, whenever word goes out that the police may be paying them a visit.

Trying to head off the spread of piracy, Polish media importers have struck deals with local magazine publishers so that one can buy cheap legal copies of many recent releases bundled in with the periodical, much the way our magazines used to come with AOL discs (clearly a less desirable trinket) stuffed inside. My hosts suggested that this practice has become so widespread that Poles would be reluctant to buy a magazine which didn't come bundled with some media content. These legal dvds circulate without any of the extras -- to get these, you have to buy the full package.

A Walk Through Oldtown

We also walked through the restored Oldtown section of Warsaw, which, on this particular afternoon, was full of street performers of all kinds. I was particularly taken by this traditionally dressed organ grinder who was playing Polish folk songs -- in part because of my fascination with pre-20th century forms of popular culture.

And of course, as the holiday season approaches, Christmas decorations were everywhere -- some traditional

some a bit more eye catching like this scene of Santa Clause trying to break into the second floor of a shop.

(I was struck by how widespread the American iconography of Santa was here -- which is, as most of you know, really an invention of the advertising firm handling the Coca Cola account in the 1920s and 1930s rather than the Gwiadorz or Star Carriers, wandering mummers, who were once a central part of Polish Christmas traditions). As a western observer, I would note ways, however, that the iconography of Santa was a little off, as in this display in front of a department store, where Santa's bag bears Red Stars (Is this a nod to the Communist past, the star carriers, or just a confusion about cultural iconography?)

Sorry, Bruce, There Are No Dead Media...

On my last morning in Warsaw, I was waiting for my wife to extract some cash from the bank machine and looked up to see a sign for what looks to be a fascinating attraction. There seems to be a fully functioning Fotoplastikon.

Unfortunately, this being a Catholic country, it was exactly open on a Sunday morning, so I suspect I will have to catch it on my next trip. But a little Google-searching got me to the English language of the establishment's web site which explains:

The viewer for three-dimensional pictures, known as the Photo­plasticon, was invented in Germany in the second half of the 19th century. The new invention soon became popular, enabling everyone to visit the most distant parts of the world, at a reasonable cost, without having to undertake an expensive and risky journey. The three-dimensional pictures produced by a special dual-lens camera provided an amazing illusion of reality. Thus, the Age of Steam, offered the average citizen the possibility of enjoying virtual tourism without the usual restrictions of time and space. Photo­plasticons (known as Kaiser­panorama in Germany) appeared in every corner of the world. By the turn of the century they already numbered about 250 in the whole of Europe. However in time, the Brothers Lumière in Paris introduced their cinema of „living pictures" -- an appealing invention which soon displaced the Photo­plasticons. Gradually, the strange, impractical Photo­plasticon drums were forgotten

.

I am posting this here so that others who share my fascination with what Bruce Sterling calls "Dead Media" might learn about this site and visit it should they ever find themselves in Warsaw.

Next Time: Polish Comics

My Adventures in Poland (Part Two)

The first thing you need to understand about Warsaw is that the city still has not recovered from its traumatic past. Almost every Pole I met during my visit, at one time or another, apologized to us about the state of their city. Warsaw was once one of the great cosmopolitan cities of Europe but it was devastated during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 -- a two month period during which the Poles actively resisted German occupation with the result that by some estimates 85 percent of the city was destroyed and more than 250,000 civilian lives were taken. (These estimates come from Wikipedia). The German occupation was followed by decades of Soviet dominance during which the old buildings were replaced by newer buildings in the Stalinist tradition. Only in recent decades have the Poles regained control over their city and been able to exert their own influence on its architecture again. And as a result, the Poles are often deeply apologetic about a city that they variously described as "ugly" and "dirty" and "without cultural identity." There are constant comparisons made to Krakow, which is described as an older, more sophisticated, more culturally rich city (though we never actually got out of Warsaw on this trip and found this city had its own charms and attractions.)

Some of the older sections of the city have been rebuilt -- including some of the fortifications whose origins can be traced back to the early 14th century.

The Palace of Culture Meets Kultura 2.0

My primary talk on this trip was at a conference called Kultura 2.0 which was held inside the Palace of Culture -- a gift from Joseph Stalin to the people of Poland -- which remains perhaps the most controversial buildings in the city. At 30 stories, it is also still the tallest building in the city and can be seen from almost every corner of Warsaw. Some Poles believe the building should be destroyed, seeing it as a painful reminder of the Soviet occupation of their country. Others embrace the building for its architectural distinction and the vast cultural complex of theatres, auditoriums, and museums which it houses.

There was something paradoxical about hosting a conference themed around the transformative power of new media technologies (i.e. the digital revolution) inside a building so strongly associated with the centralizing power of the Communist State, an irony noted by a number of the speakers. (I could not resist comparing Nicholas Negroponte's predictions in Being Digital that mass media as we know it would collapse under its own weight in the face of personalized media to the old Marxist rhetoric about "the withering of the State." Neither prediction has or seems likely to come to pass anytime in my lifetime.) The conference organizers had brought together a very interesting mix of key players in the Polish context (more about this in a minute) as well as some leading thinkers about digital media from across Europe and the United States (me). I found the audience tremendously hungry for new ideas and perspectives.

There was some skepticism expressed in the questions about some of my utopian ideas about where all of this may be going (as well there should be). I had spoken at some length about Second Life as an illustration of participatory culture, the collaborationist relations of producers and consumers, and the bringing together of multiple levels of media production (a la Benkler's Wealth of Networks) into one shared environment. Several people in the audience, however, were deeply concerned about the implications of a single company -- even one as benign as Linden Labs -- providing this kind of shared context for business, education, foundation, journalism, activists, sexual minorities, and artists to interact.

Wouldn't the business impose some degree of censorship and regulation on what goes on within this new multiverse? This is a legitimate concern -- though perhaps premature -- yet it is not clear that a state sponsored version of Second Life would provide any greater protection for the creative and political rights of its citizens, a point which landed perhaps more heavily than I intended speaking in the center of a monument to Stalinism. But, it seems to sum up some of the tensions which Poland itself faces as it sheds its Communist past and embraces both democracy and capitalism (the old headquarters of the Communist Party has ironically enough been transformed into the stock exchange.)

Treasuring My Translation

For me, a highlight of the first day was getting to meet my translators -- Malgorzata Bernatowicz and Miroslaw Filiciak -- and holding in my hands the very first foreign translation of my work -- Kultura Konwergencji:zderzenie starych i nowych mediow. The translators and publisher had worked incredibly hard to get the book ready for print and distribution in time for my visit to the country and participation at the conference. Indeed, their turnaround was significantly faster than the book received from its American publisher (not that I am complaining on that front).

There is something so curious about holding this text which is yours and yet not yours: I can recognize, even without reading Polish, the structure of the argument with occasional names popping off the page and thus providing me some landmarks for figuring out where we are in the text. There are surprisingly many cognates or near cognates between Polish and English (despite very different linguistic origins) which also help me to spot specific passages. And yet, it is odd to not be able to read your own book.

I also am not quite used to speaking through translation. The auditorium was equipped for multiple language real time translation and there were translators in a booth high above the stage who I could watch as I spoke trying to figure out how to turn my own mangled, fast-paced, and highly colloquial English into proper Polish. There were odd moments when those listening in English laughed and then a few seconds later there would be a somewhat more muted round of laughter from the Polish listeners. Most of the questions came in English, though some had to be translated from Polish: my sense was the translation must have been excellent because there were few real obstacles to communication at these moments of more direct interaction and the people asking questions seemed to have a good understanding of my core claims and arguments.

The Witcher: Transmedia Storytelling and Global Culture

A highlight of the morning's festivities was a rare public appearance by popular fiction writer Andrzej Sapkowski to honor the 20th anniversary of the first publication of The Witcher, which has become a landmark work in the history of modern Polish popular culture. The Witcher is already a powerful example of transmedia storytelling, existing across films, television,magazine short stories, novels, comics, and games, and is also already an international phenomenon ( translated into Czech, Slovak, German, Russian, Lithuanian, French and Spanish). The first English translation of the material does not appear until 2007.

The Witcher, as I understand it from what I heard at the conference and what I have pieced together via a Wikipedia entry, are an elite group of highly trained monster killers. The series protagonist, Geralt, is one of the most skilled of the witchers and the series deals with his various battles against the forces of evil. The witchers are sterile mutants with supernatural abilities and have learned to suppress their feelings through their training. The series is deeply immersed in traditional Polish culture and Eastern European mythology but it also includes original contributions by the highly imaginative author.

The Witcher universe was first introduced in a series of short stories primarily published in Nowa Fantastyka. As Sapkowski explained during the public conversation, Polish publishers were, at that time, reprinting fantasy works from England, including the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, which were tremendously popular in Poland, but had been resistant to the idea of original fantasy fiction by Polish authors, convinced that it would not interest their readers. Sapowski's work helped to break open the market for Polish produced fantasy and horror fiction. The short stories led to a series of five novels which are known casually as The Witcher series and officially as Blood of the Elves. These stories and novels were, in turn, adopted and expanded into a comic book series (1993-1995), a feature film (2001) and a 13 episode television serial (2002).

Sapowski was frank in the conversation about his dissatisfaction with the results of some of these adaptations, acknowledging that his decisions were shaped in part by commercial motives but suggesting that he needed to trust collaborators who knew these other media better than he did.

The series, however, is about to receive a major face-lift with the world wide release next year of a Witcher computer game, produced by a Polish company, CD Projekt RED. (There was already a live action role playing game based on the series released in 2001). The English translations of the stories are intended to coincide with the release of the game and several people at the conference commented on what it would mean that the game was the vehicle for introducing the 20-year-old stories to the English speaking world. And in Poland, a new comic book series was being prepared to build upon the revival of interest in The Witcher which the games release is likely to generate.

I had heard nothing about the game before the conference but a quick Google search on my return shows a large number of screenshots circulating in the English language media, an official homepage which offers English translations of its content, and some signs of growing fan interest in the franchise (including amateur translated versions of the television series circulating informally in the United States, at least according to Wikipedia). Their hope is that the game may open the way for other Polish popular media to gain broader circulation in Western Europe and the United States.

Critics who have seen the game so far describe it as beautifully executed with a strong sense of atmosphere. The Witcher game seems well situated to combine familiar genre elements with a fair amount of local color. Michal Madej from the company producing the game noted a number of distinctly Polish elements -- from the traditional garb and weapons associated with the Polish highlanders to the use of the old Slavic alphabet in ruins and puzzles, ruins of old Teutonic architecture and ships, and the use of demons drawn from the national mythology. As he explained, "it's own culture, our myths we are showing through this game." Many in the west already associate Eastern Europe with a strong tradition of horror narratives and this would seem to be the right genre to use to attract interest elsewhere in the world. We might add The Witcher to the growing list of projects we've discussed in this blog which seek to assert national culture through computer and video games.

Listening to Sapkowski, a surprisingly modest and down to earth fellow given his high visibility within his national context, gave me some glimpse into fan culture in Poland. As in the United States, most of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers got their start doing amateur writing -- i.e. fan fiction -- before seeking their first professional publications. Sapkowski, accordingly, welcomes fan participation within his world, describing fan fiction as a demonstration that his work has value and as a sign that it still generates interest in the marketplace. He says that he cracks down only on the commercial appropriation of his work and actively encourages fan expansions. Indeed, though I can't decipher much on his official homepage, it is clear that there's a space devoted to fan fiction about The Witcher, an acknowledgement that is not generally matched by western writers in the genre. In typically modest fashion, he moved from suggesting how proud he was to see his work generate this kind of grassroots response to the earthy comment that fan fiction was like "mushrooms" and "you know what mushrooms grow on." He expressed hope that as the Witcher franchise expands even further into the English speaking world, his fans will play important roles in offering informed criticism which will educate the new readers about its mythology and history.

We Want Capitan Zbik Back!

The morning sessions on The Witcher as a transmedia franchise culminated in a panel discussion of the state of Polish popular culture and its chances to enter the international marketplace. Though there were many specific references here which went untranslated, the core of the discussion dealt with some of the challenges of displacing the kinds of popular culture which were produced under Communism with the kinds being driven by the marketplace in the new Poland. Sapowski noted, for example, the paradox that the science fiction works of Stanislaw Lem were produced under the Socialist State and read with great interests by a public who saw them as veiled critiques of communism; these same stories have been neglected and even actively disdained in a capitalist economy. Lem (Solaris) still has some fans among the panelists but most of the younger participants had little interest in his works.

Many of the panelists expressed deep nostalgia for the classic cartoon and action-adventure series of their youth, produced under communism and therefore prohibited distribution today. The Ministry of Culture expressed concern that contemporary youth should not be exposed to the propaganda elements of these series but the panelists felt that most Poles would read past these and were simply interested in encounters with familiar characters and beloved stories which were still a vital part of their cultural memory. When you think about how central everything from Breakfast Cereal logos to old toys have been to Baby Boomers in other parts of the world, one can understand the emotional implications of this erasure of the natural popular culture legacy. The panelists were arguing that the state should license the re-release of this old content and then take the money to fund media literacy efforts.

I asked my translator, Miroslaw Filiciak, who moderated this session, to share with me some more perspectives on this issue:

Our government looks reluctantly on the communism times' popculture, still very

popular in Poland, although perceived totally funnily by the new generation, which can't

remember the times before the fall of communism. It's ironic, because we have a lot of

advertisements and new media products, i.e. comic books remakes, based on communist

brands, but some originals stay closed at the archive of Polish Television. The

situation is nonsense, because young people are not taking the vision of history in this

films as seriously as politicians do.

Another problem in our discussion was the question about government funding for

culture. In Poland - which is as you know probably the most pro American country in

Europe - many people believe the state's culture protection is the relic of the past and

we should not waste our taxes for such an uncertain investment as culture. I.e.

Sapkowski said that he (contrary to Lem) didn't need any support for his success. But

younger panelists - as Wojciech Orlinski and Mariusz Czubaj, the publicists of Polish

opinion-making press - gave examples of other European countries - especially France -

where culture is not only the element of the national pride, but also great business.

Thanks to Miroslaw Filiciak,Polskie Wydawnictwo Audiowizualne, Edwin Bendyk, and everyone else who facilitated my visit and aided in getting the translated edition of my book in front of the Polish people.

My Adventures in Poland (Part One)

Malgorzata Bernatowicz and Miroslaw Filiciak are the two people who translated Convergence Culture into Polish as Kultura Konwergencji:zderzenie starych i nowych mediow. This picture was taken when they were showing me around the old section of Warsaw. The building in the background is the Namiestnikowski Palace, where the President of Poland lives.

What follows are some highlights from the introduction I wrote for the Polish edition of the book. I have focused here primarily on some thoughts I shared with my new Polish readers about the global context within which the issues discussed in the book are operating. The original plan was to have a chapter focused entirely around globalization be part of Convergence Culture. Much of that material ended up being included as the "Pop Cosmopolitanism" essay in Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers, or developed through the sidebars in the book at the Animatrix and about anime fansubbing. But here, I tried to bring a few strands of my thoughts about global media change together.

Next time, I will offer more observations on digital and popular culture in Poland.

Welcome to Convergence Culture.

For those of you keeping score, The dotcom era has ended. The age of Social Networks and Mobile Media has emerged from its ashes. Blogging is thriving. Podcasting is on the rise. Everywhere you look the people are taking media in their own hands, speaking back to mass media, forming their own on-line communities, learning to think, work, and process culture in new ways.

We are no longer talking about a digital revolution, which envisioned new media displacing the old. We are now talking about media convergence, where old and new media interact in ever more complex ways, where every story, brand, sound, image, and relationship will play itself out across the maximum number of media channels and platforms.

We are no longer talking about interactive media technologies; we are talking about participatory culture. Talk to advertisers, media producers, network executives, game designers, fans, gamers and bloggers and they will all tell you that the consumer is gaining new visibility and new cultural influence in this emerging culture. This is at the heart of what some American observers are calling Web 2.0. Some of them are embracing this change with enormous excitement, others with great fear, none of them claim to fully understand what is going to happen next. The terms of our participation in this new convergence culture are very much under debate, being shaped by governmental policies and court decisions but also by choices being made both in corporate boardrooms and in teenager's bedrooms.

New media are being put out by technology companies and they are being redefined on the fly by various groups of consumers. Companies are trying to get ahead of the game by empowering their lead users, by allowing key fans and consumers to test their products before they even reach the market, and building on their insights to create a better mousetrap, build a better game, or produce a better television show. Media networks are trying new strategies to grab the attention of their viewers and insure longer term loyalty to their properties. As they do

so, viewers are every level are demanding the right to help shape the production and circulation of media content.

Sites like YouTube have emerged as meeting places between all kinds of different subcultures, fan communities, and participatory cultures, places where commercial and amateur media circulates side by side. They are producing their own stars and they are also turning out to be places where consumers re-evaluate network content, calling attention to moments on television which might otherwise have passed by without much comment. Online worlds, such as Second Life, are thriving based almost entirely on what people are calling consumer-generated content (though to reduce what happens there to content or describe the participants in these worlds simply as consumers is to grossly simplify what is taking place)....

Morover, these changes are occuring on a global level, impacting each country differently according to their own national cultures and traditions, but being felt around the world. There's a reason why they call it the World Wide Web. It is not simply that American media products are flowing into international markets -- this is scarcely news. More profound is the degree to which cultural goods from other parts of the world -- at the moment, especially from Asia -- are flowing into the American market at a rate so fast that it is breaking through the protective membrane constructed by American major media companies to block access to international competitors.

More and more American young people are embracing what I call pop cosmopolitanism -- seeking an escape from the paroachialism of their own cultures by embracing cultural materials from around the world. There is an ironic juxtaposition between an American government which acts more and more in unilateral terms and a younger American population which is embracing global media. I recently spoke to an American teenager who described this particular JPop group as her "favorite band in the whole wide world." Anyone who is the parent of an adolescent knows that's the way teenage girls have always talked. But this time, as I listened to her enthusiasm for a band which had no label and no distributor in the west, I thought she might be telling the truth. She had searched the world for a group that spoke to her and found it through networking with kids in Japan who shared her interests in anime, manga, and cosplay.

It isn't just that American youth are consuming more international media:they are also taking advantage of a network culture to engage on a regular basis with youth from around the world who share their common interests. I am struck by the story of Heather Lawver in the Harry Potter chapter of my book. When Warner Brothers first sought to shut down certain fan websites around their newly acquired franchise, they sent cease and desist letters to young people in parts of the world which would have once seemed very distant from their base. Yet, as Heather tells us, the word got back to their American fans almost instantly because they already participated in a global fan network. More recently, I watched fans of the American science fiction series, Stargate, mobilize fans to news of the series cancilation worldwide in just a few days time. They now understand television operating within a global framework, rallying fans in many different countries to put pressure on their local networks where the show is still thriving and using that economic clout to push the American producers to continue to generate new content.

In some ways, new media technologies are making more visible the kinds of cultural links that immigrants have long maintained back to their mother country. I see this pattern with my own students who have come to the United States for an education but still listen to radio stations, read newspapers, share music, and talk about fan cultures from back home. The web now serves the functions that ethnic grocery stores and community centers have long played in immigrant communities with one exception. The content is flowing from one community to another as people mix and match cultural materials with others from radically different backgrounds. I live in a dormatory at MIT and I have seen first hand the ways that media sharing is opening up students to new kinds of culture from around the world.

So, I have to confess that I wrote this book very much from an American perspective. My expertise is in American media and popular culture, though it is increasingly clear that one can no longer understand American media outside of a global context. I have never been to Poland and know only very little about your country. I hope to change this but for the moment, I can claim no particular expertise about the media changes that are impacting your corner of the planet. That said, I suspect much of what I write about here will sound familiar to anyone deeply immersed in popular media in any part of the world. Many of these same franchises are known in Poland -- either through American imports or through localization of larger multinational properties.

There are differences created as a result of different economic structures -- the difference between commercial and state run media production systems, for example, result in different opportunities and restrictions on participation. Some cultures have strong traditions of open debate and democratic citizenship; others have historically placed greater restrictions on what the public could see or say, but all of them are being rocked by a media culture which is more open and more participatory than anyone would have imagined a few decades ago. As the rate of internet access increases in countries around the world, they are one by one confronting some of the cultural, legal, economic, and educational challenges Convergence Culture records.

I am certain that there are new and innovative uses of media that have emerged among youth subcultures and fan communities in your country which are not yet known in our part of the world. But the key phrase here is "not yet known." As media flows more and more rapidly and fluidly across once rigid national borders, innovation on the grassroots level may still have a global impact. Throw a pebble in one part of the ocean and the ripples will eventually wash up

on every shore.

In the book's closing passages, I return to the issue of who gets to participate in the kind of robust participatory culture I am describing and who gets left out of the kinds of knowledge communities we are discussing. My own work has turned increasingly towards interest in media literacy as I am working with American foundations and educational institutions to identify the core social skills and cultural competencies young people need to acquire in order to fully participate in convergence culture. In doing so, I hope to shift the conversation beyond talk of the digital divide which is so often defined purely in terms of technical access and onto the participation gap which is concerned with the skills and opportunities needed for young people to actively engage with the affordances of the new media landscape....

This is certainly not a uniquely American problem. Each country is facing these difficulties on their own terms, on their own time table, in their own way, and on their own terrain, yet all of us are struggling with how to insure that the increased power and knowledge being generated by emerging technologies and cultural practice can be spread across the population as a whole. My hope is that this book will help people to better understand the implications of this participation gap both in terms of their own national cultures and in a more global context.

Webcasts of Futures of Entertainment Conference Now Online

Many of you have asked over the past month whether we were going to be webcasting the Futures of Entertainment conference panels. We had hoped to be able to stream these live through Second Life and ran into surprising legal obstacles in doing so. We have had to strong with the technical challenges of mixing this footage -- shot on multiple cameras, digitize it, and index it so that you could get much easier access to the material you want to hear. Keep in mind that we ran two and a half hour long sessions at the conference. Keep in mind as well that getting this material up required permission from each of the companies represented on the program. Special thanks goes to Rik Eberhardt, CMS's resourceful and hardworking technologist in residence, and to Joshua Green, the research manager for the Convergence Culture Consortium for their herculian efforts to make sure you guys had access to this content. We also want to thank the sponsors of the Convergence Culture Consortium for their continued support of our efforts to understand the changes that are occuring in our media landscape and to bring that understanding to a larger public -- MTV Networks, Turner Broadcasting, GSD&M, Fidelity, and Yahoo.

Posted so far are:

My opening remarks on the first day

The panel on Television Futures.

The panel on User-Generated Content.

The panel on Transmedia Storytelling

Josh Green's opening comments on the second day of the conference.

The panel on Fan Cultures

The panel on virtual worlds

I am going to be updating these links over the next few days as the material becomes available so book mark this post for your one-stop shopping needs.

There's so much material here that might be relevent to regular readers of this blog that it is hard to know where to start. Our students produced some very good summaries of key ideas from each session, more or less in real time, during the event:

Opening Comments by Henry Jenkins (that's me!)

Television Futures

User-Generated Content

Transmedia Properties

Joshua Green's Opening Remarks for Day 2

Fan Cultures

Not the Real World Anymore

Given our recent discussions here, I would especially flag for you:

the discussions of transmedia storytelling which involved DC comics Paul Levitz, Big Spaceship's Michael Lebowitz, and [ICE]3 Studios's Alex Chisholm. There was lots here about Lost, Heroes, and superhero comics, all popular topics here.

the discussion of fan culture which involved Warner Brothers' Diane Nelson (who plays a prominant role in the Harry Potter chapter of Convergence Culture), Cartoon Network's Molly Chase, and social network research danah boyd.

But you won't want to miss Flickr's Caterina Flake's views on user-generated content, Ji Lee on the controversial Bubble Project, a lively discussion of virtual worlds with representatives from Second Life, Multiverse, and MTV's Lagoona Beach project, and some challenging comments from C3 advisor Josh Green on the metaphors driving the marketing of mobile technologies. And much much more.

For a list of blogger responses to the conference, check here.

Jesse Walker covered the event in depth in an article published in Reason magazine's online edition.

Spellcast offered special coverage of the event, including behind the scenes interviews with some of the folks who attended.

And here's the coverage of the event which was issued by the MIT News Office.

People keep asking me whether there will be a Futures of Entertainment 2 conference -- and the answer is we don't know for sure but we are definitely considering it given the enormous success of this event. If we do decide, readers of this blog will be among the very first to know.

Odds and Ends

It's Awards Season... Many of you are already starting to second guess which films are going to be nominated for Academy Awards. The past few days we are starting to see the major film critic's organization weigh in on the best films of the year -- so far, they are all over the map with no strong consensus behind any particular title. But my own focus is on the Edublog awards. As it happens, two of my projects this year got nominated. The white paper we wrote for MacArthur and which we serialized here on the blog is being considered for Best Research Paper 2006. And the public conversation which I did with danah boyd about MySpace and the DOPA act is being considered for Most Influential Post, Resource or Presentation 2006. Thanks for everyone out there who nominated me -- I am flattered!

Here's how the awards are described:

As the reality and potential of distributed learning and distributed learner identities and communities are increasingly acknowledged, articulated and understood education moves further towards facilitating truly learner-centered and learned driven environments. A lot has changed in the world of educational technology since this time last year. The continuing rise and mainstreaming of easy to use network-as-platform applications, and increasing access to affordable online speed and space, have seen the continued expansion of users of all ages creating and communicating online. Learners and educators still however face difficult issues around network restrictions, around data protection and ownership, and around commercial protectionism. This year has also seen a marked increase in hostility towards social networking sites in the US, demonstrating a widespread lack of appreciation of the informal and formal educational value of user-centered applications. The Edublog awards are more relevant than ever in this climate - a space for us to refocus the debate surrounding young peoples use of technology as irresponsible, dangerous or illegal, and look at the positive, powerful and transformative work which continues to be demonstrated.

Voting amongst the finalists will continue through December 14 with the winners announced on December 15. There are nominees in ten different categories representing a really interesting catalog of some of the most interesting writing online this year concerning youth and digital media. Many of my readers who are concerned with media literacy will find the nomination page a useful resource for further reading and reflection.

That's Transmedia Entertainment!

Paul Levitz, the President of DC Comics, shares some speculations about the future of comics in a fascinating interview with Newsarama.com. Levitz references his participation in the Futures of Entertainment conference and continues some of his thinking about comic's relationship to transmedia entertainment. Levitz thinks deeply about the comic's medium and clearly prepared himself thoroughly for his role at our conference, making a series of very thoughtful comments.

Here's what he said about the experience:

NRAMA: Thinking about the larger picture of the management of the characters and properties, are comics leading the charge in charting new territory? While there are

older properties and those that are as, if not more popular, like Mickey Mouse, but

Mickey Mouse hasn't had continuity or a line of stories that stretch back nearly 70

years.

PL: I was at a seminar at M.I.T. a couple of weeks ago on the futures of entertainment. The panel I was on was titled "Transmedia" which they defined as moving creative ideas from one medium to another. The professor who was running the conference made a similar point - how come comics have been doing all of this? What is special and peculiar about comics? He made the point in terms of superheroes, and I argued back that I felt it was really true about all comics.

I think there are a few characteristics that are relevant. One, by the nature of what comics are, we've generally had to create open- ended stories. Think of the differences between Batman and The Fugitive. Although the founding tragedy might be as tragic, the character of Batman was designed to go on to a seemingly infinite number of adventures.He wasn't restricted to just taking place in a certain narrowcast, or a certain narrow geography. Many of the great comics characters, not just the superheroes, were built with fairly complicated and interesting fictional worlds around them. Uncle Scrooge - for example.

There's also an interesting argument to be made, and I'm not sure if it's right, but McLuhan raised the issue that the less well-defined a character was initially, the more the reader or views has to interpolate into it, and therefore was not stuck in a specific image that they would measure against. Comics, with their rather raw visual structure, work very powerfully into that argument, that is to say that when you're introduced to Batman as a drawn character, you're able to more easily transform your vision between Adam West, Michael Keaton, Christian Bale and the different approaches those take, as well as the different visual styles that are developed over time. Compare that to a character you fell in love with because a particular actor was playing him or her in a particular role. That's not a well-researched issue, and there are arguments to be had about it, I'm sure, but there's something in there somewhere.

So I think we've had some natural opportunities available to us because of all of this. We also have the advantage in some comic characters, including Superman and Batman, that for them to succeed from early on, they had to open themselves to different creative talents. That's a very important issue in this world of Transmedia. If you've got something that is being guided uniformly by one great creative mind - which can yield terrific creative results - it's harder to make the jump to multiple other media, because the thing is so intimately reliant on the idea that one person so closely "gets" or sees...or understands.

So, for better or for worse, from early on, it was sort of battle- proven that Superman and Batman were ideas that multiple writers and multiple artists could get into and do good, creative work with.

As I suggested here in some of the outtakes from Convergence Culture, comics have a special relationship to convergence -- indeed, comics have been transmedia from their inception. Today, Buster Brown is best known as a brand of children's shoes but the character spanned across comic strips, Broadway musicals, and a range of other commodities at the turn of the century -- one of the first comic strip characters to make a significant impact on the public. In the first few years of his history, Superman moved from comic books to comic strips, radio shows, live action film serials, and animated short subjects, with each of these media making distinct contributions to the evolution of his mythology. Many historians argue that the character would not have had the same impact on our culture if he had not been so well designed to play out across such a broad range of media platforms. Levitz makes a good case here that it is not just the superheroes but a range of other serialized comic characters (including Uncle Scrooge) have also enjoyed extensive transmedia careers.

Today's No Prize goes to CMS graduate student Geoff Long for spotting this interview and calling it to my attention.

Speaking of Japanese School Girls...

We have been lucky enough to have a distinguished scholar of Japanese manga and popular culture, Sharon Kinsella, teaching in the Foreign Languages and Literature Program at MIT this term. Kinsella, the author of Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society, spoke at the last CMS colloquium of the term, sharing some of her work in progress, Girls and the Male Imagination: Fantasy of Rejuvenation in Contemporary Japan. Her talk, "Girls as Energy: Fantasies of Social Rejuvenation," might have been called "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Japanese School Girls But Were Afraid to Ask," crisscrossing between different media and across political discourse and popular culture, to argue about the ways that the schoolgirl becomes a figure of desire, dread, and fantasy identification among adult males in that society. Her talk included some interesting insights on texts which will be known to many of my readers, including Spirited Away, Battle Royale, and Sailor Moon, but also a broad range of b-movies and soft-core porn titles which helped me to read these cult classics through some new lens. The podcast version of this talk has just gone up on the CMS homepage and is recommended to anyone interested in Japanese popular culture.

While you are at it, you might also be interested in checking out some of the other programming on anime and other forms of Japanese popular culture which my colleague, Ian Condry, has put together through his Cool Japan program. For example, here's the transcript of a fascinating session he hosted on Violence and Desire in Japanese Culture: Anime Capitalism. Podcast of this and other Cool Japan events can be found at the Anime Pulse website.

Sharon Kinsella will be repeating her talk on Japanese school girls at Harvard University through an event being hosted by the Cool Japan program. Here are the details:

Prof. Sharon Kinsella's talk

"Men Imagining a Girl Revolution"

will be held

THURSDAY, December 14

4-6pm

William James Hall, Room 1550

Harvard University

My Mii -- Oh My!

Alice J. Robison, who just finished her doctorate working with James Paul Gee at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been working this year as a post-doc in the Comparative Media Studies Program. This term, she has taught a course for us on games criticism and next term, she will be offering a course on new media literacies. When she's not teaching in the program or contributing to our various games and new media literacy initiatives, she has been spending time playing with her new Wii. I am still among the uninitiated among the ways of the Wii, despite being very enthusiastic about the concept of the new interface. As I understand it, the Wii ships with an avatar creation tool and players can build their own distinctive anime style characters known as Mii.

Here's what Wikipedia tells us:

In certain games (including Wii Sports, WarioWare: Smooth Moves, Wii Play, and The Sims Wii), each player's caricature will serve as the character he or she controls in game play. Miis can interact with other Wii users by showing up on their Wii consoles through the WiiConnect24 feature or by talking with other Miis created by Wii owners all over the world. This feature is called Mii Parade. Early-created Miis as well as those encountered in Mii Parades may show up as spectators in some games. Miis can be stored on controllers and taken to other consoles. The controller can hold up to a maximum amount of 10 Miis.

Inspired in part by the Second Life Avatar which I featured here the other week, Alice has created a Mii in the likeness of, well, me. You might call him a mini-me/mii. The pun's just keep coming folks. Here's what it looks like:

Thanks, Alice. (I am told that she has also built Mii for some other prominent games scholars. Maybe some day we can create a collector set of leading media theorists which graduate students can pit against each other. It will certainly result in my much lively seminars.)

How Transmedia Storytelling Begat Transmedia Planning... (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first of a two part series examining the emergence of a new discourse about transmedia branding, inspired in part by the discussion of transmedia storytelling in Convergence Culture. Obviously, I am following these developments with great personal interest. I wrote this summary of the debates for the newsletter of our Convergence Culture Consortium. The (Burger) King Is Content

Yacob's post has generated a range of other responses across the blogosphere. Here's some of the advantages which Jason Oke of the Toronto based Leo Burnett agency sees in the transmedia model:

I think it addresses those two weaknesses of media-neutral planning: ignoring that different media are better at different things, and that people are social beings. And by putting a brand community in the middle, it also forces us to think about whether we are in fact making brands and communications which are interesting enough for a community to form, and for people to want to talk about our communications.... [We] have talked about the power of complexity in

communication - that people generally find complex, nuanced, layered things more interesting than simple straightforward things. But when we talk about this stuff, we still usually talk about people processing it individually - so each one person is rewarded for spending more time or if they see it again. But what if we looked at it through the lens of a brand community? Each different layer or detail could appeal to a different group of people, who could compare stories, and thus continually be getting new perspectives on the same thing....

"The idea of brand communities solves one issue that we sometimes run into when attempting to create complex and layered communications - the pushback that we shouldn't put details that everyone (or at least most people) won't or can't get. This is often combined with research findings that indeed, "most people didn't get this reference you were trying to make." This kind of thinking dumbs down communication into the lowest common denominator. But with the brand community model, that ceases to apply - as long as someone, somewhere will get

it, then lots of details and references can work. Whoever notices it will likely tell others about it, because the fact that they figured something out reinforces their ego, status and self-image, and because the tools to widely spread that knowledge are now readily available. So instead of talking down to everybody, we can talk up to everybody, by giving many different groups

something that makes them feel intelligent for getting a subtle reference. And we give them a reason to have multiple conversations about the brand.

Oke's version moves us even further away from the idea that transmedia centers only on narrative and instead focuses on this notion of layering. Oke discusses for example a particular Burger King spot which circulates on YouTube:

On the surface, it's a jingle about the new Tendercrisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch chicken sandwich. But you might also notice that the guy singing the song is Darius Rucker from 90's band (and pop culture trivia item) Hootie & the Blowfish. Or that the jingle itself is based on the old hobo ballad and Burl Ives classic "Big Rock Candy Mountain." Or that it was directed by iconic photographer David LaChapelle with all kinds of sexual imagery, both hetero and homo. Or that model and TV host Brooke Burke makes a cameo at the end (she's often used in BK ads). But you probably wouldn't notice all of those things, and in fact I'd be surprised if the same people who know who David LaChapelle is are also into turn-of-the century hobo ballads (I'm guessing those circles don't tend to overlap much). But more to the point, not getting some or all of the references doesn't detract from the main brand message (there's a new

chicken sandwich), because each bit also stands on its own. By having lots of detail, though, it gives fans of the brand something to notice and talk about and deconstruct. So you might have missed some of the details but someone else can point them out, and this gives you a deeper appreciation of it, and completes your picture of the whole a bit more.

Oke seems to be describing something close to what game designer Neal Young describes in Convergence Culture as "additive comprehension." Young uses the example of the "origami unicorn" featured in the director's cut version of Bladerunner, a detail which led many to speculate that Deckard, the protagonist, may be a replicant. At the Futures of Entertainment conference, Alex Chisholm provided another example of additive comprehension drawn from one of the Heroes comics tie-ins, where the information that Hiro's grandfather survive Hiroshima adds new significance to both his name and to his response to the challenge of saving the world from what appears to be a threat of nuclear destruction.

Additive comprehension is a key aspect of transmedia entertainment/branding since it allows some viewers to have a richer experience (depending on what they know or which other media they have consumed) without in any way diminishing the experience of someone who only encounters the story on a single media platform. In this case, the same advertisement may support multiple interpretations depending on what kind of knowledge consumers bring to the encounter. If one can convey to the readers that there are secrets there to be uncovered, you can potentially motivate more conversation and engagement as online discussion forums rally to mutually decode the layered content.

Is Transmedia Branding Redundant?

Not everyone has embraced this idea of transmedia branding, though. In a post called "Transmedia Planning My Arse," Giles Rhys Jones argues that transmedia branding simply represents an expansion of the existing 360 branding model: there is still a need for redundancy in the messaging if the branding efforts are to be successful. Citing the Art of the Heist example, Jones suggests, that each element "surely required multiple channel exposure for full impact, rather than each channel living in its own right." I would argue that redundancy is an essential aspect of the transmedia experience. If every element were truly

autonomous, one would have no way to recognize the distinctive contributions of each medium to the media mix strategy. Indeed, much must remain the same across media for people to feel the strong sense of connection between the different installments and for communities to feel like the parts will add up to a meaningful whole if they work together to map the larger fictional universe. What we still need to explore -- whether we are talking about entertainment content or brands -- is the ballance between redundancy and originality, between familiarity and difference.

Will transmedia branding make a lasting contribution to contemporary marketing theory? It's too early to say. As an author, I am delighted to see some of my ideas are generating such discussion. As someone interested in marketing my own intellectual property, these discussions are themselves a kind of transmedia branding: after all, the more people talk about my book, the more people are likely to buy it. I don't have to control the conversation to

benefit from their interest in my product. The key is to produce something that both pulls people together and gives them something to do. In that regard, the book may have had greater impact on the discussions of branding because I didn't fill in all of the links between branding and transmedia entertainment, leaving the blogosphere something to puzzle through together.

How Transmedia Storytelling Begat Transmedia Planning... (Part One)

Cynthia and I are just back from Poland as of tonight. I hope to share some impressions of the trip as soon as I am able. In the meantime, the following post was written for the newsletter we send to C3 partners. When you write a book, you usually have no idea which ideas will get picked up or by which communities. That's part of the fun of sending your brain children out in the world. Today, I want to explore a case in point -- the ways that the idea of transmedia narrative in my new book, Convergence Culture, has started to evolve into a concept of transmedia planning as it has been taken up by bloggers interested in branding.

Convergence Culture itself deals with transmedia storytelling as an emerging

form of entertainment but never really addresses its application to branding. The chapter on transmedia storytelling immediately follows the book's discussion of American Idol, brand communities, affective economics, and product placement so the connection of ideas was there to be found but I did not myself put all of the pieces together.

The Further Adventures of Mr. Clean

Even before the book appeared in print, though, C3 researcher Grant McCracken published a series of blog posts exploring what my approach to transmedia might contribute to current thinking about brands:

In the old world of marketing, there wasn't much transmediation to speak of. Corporations made products, and informed the advertising agency, who in turn informed the consumer... The meanings went straight down a single shute. They did not run on several tracks.

McCracken focuses primarily on one aspect of the transmedia experience -- providing backstory. He questioned whether most brands have a sufficiently detailed backstory to generate the kind of consumer interest that give rise to fan communities around entertainment franchises:

For Mr. Clean there was no back story, no alternative endings, no competing interpretation. There was in fact no narrative to speak of. I think some consumers surmised that Mr. Clean was an uncorked genie, a creature out of Shahraza released from the lamp/bottle to put his magic at the disposal of the homemaker. In this case, the brand was actually removing meaning from the icon, not supplementing or multiplying this meaning.

Yet in a subsequent post, McCracken shows how easy it would be to flesh out the backstory of a seemingly empty icon:

It's not so hard to imagine Mr. Clean in more fully realized narrative terms: child of an orphanage in a French colony in North Africa (circa 1890), early childhood spend as a runner in a souk (market), taken in as a servant by a family of French nationals who holiday in Morocco and eventually he joins the household even when it is "at home" in France. In the late spring of 1907, "Gerard" is travelling back to Morocco to help to set up the summer home when (mon dieu!) he is kidnapped by pirates. Gerard sails for some years as a pirate and this allows him to built up a small store of wealth, and to return, eventually, to the souk where he buys a stock of carpets and a stall, marries his childhood sweetheart, and begins to raise a little batch of runners all his own. It is on one of his trips to replenish his supply of carpets that...

Would such a backstory enhance the brand experience? Perhaps. Especially if people find themselves wanting to find out more about this remarkable character and his many exotic adventures, if consumers seek more touch points with the brand, if they generate their own narratives about Gerard. Personally I am waiting to see the Mr. Clean/Jolly Green Giant slash genre emerge!

There have been good examples of tapping interest in characters to prolong our engagement. I am thinking of the Folger's Coffee campaign with Anthony Head, who went on to play Giles on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Here a story unfolded across a number of commercial installments -- following a fairly simple genre -- the romantic comedy. Could you imagine extending that outward into some kind of epistelary fiction? A series of love letters between the two in print or on the web, which come complete with coffee stains? Perhaps even some kind of game where the goal is help true love win out and good coffee taste find an appreciating consumer?

Yet, there is also a danger in too much specificity. We might start by pondering whether renaming Mr. Clean Gerard increases our engagement with the character or simply closes off a range of other possible associations. The most effective use of transmedia branding so far may be the BMW campaign, "The Hire," which unfolded first on the web (in the hands of some of the world's greatest filmmakers) and more recently in the comics (in the hands of some pretty damn gifted comics creators). Despite all of the screen time he enjoys, the central protagonist -- the driver -- receives very little characterization, allowing him to move fluidly across genres and across media platforms. He is more an observer figure than a protagonist: the goals of the guest stars set the terms for each new installment. One can encounter the episodes in any order, but there may be less motivation to try to find links across them.

Transmedia vs. Media Neutral

The relationship between transmedia entertainment and branding resurfaced recently in a much discussed post by Faris Yacob from the London-based Naked Communications group. Yacob embraces transmedia branding in contrast to what he sees as the media neutral approach that shapes much current thinking about branding:

The model that has held the industry's collective imagination for the last few years has been media neutral planning. In essence, this is the belief that we should develop a single organising thought that iterates itself across any touchpoint - this was a reaction against previous models of integration that were often simply the dilution of a televisual creative idea across other channels that it wasn't necessarily suited to...The important point is that there is one idea being expressed in different ways. This is believed to be more effective as there are multiple encodings of the same idea, which reinforces the impact on the consumer.

Now then, let's think about transmedia planning. In this model, there would be an evolving non-linear brand narrative. Different channels could be used to communicate different, self-contained elements of the brand narrative that build to create an larger brand world. Consumers then pull different parts of the story together themselves. The beauty of this is that it is designed to generate brand communities, in the same way that The Matrix generates knowledge communities, as consumers come together to share elements of the narrative. It

has a word of mouth driver built in.

While McCracken's use of my transmedia concept emphasized back story, Yacob's version stresses world building and the social activity of consumers. His primary example turns out to be the alternative reality game, The Art of the Heist. It's worth recalling that I do discuss The Beast and I Love Bees in the context of my discussion of transmedia storytelling. Indeed, at the heart of my concept of transmedia is the distinction between cultural attractors -- works that draw like minded individuals together to form a community -- and cultural activators -- works that give these communities something to do. In a subsequent interview, Yacob fleshes out even more his idea about the role of the consumer in the process of transmedia branding:

I think consumers can handle more than a single core idea. In fact, I think in an age where increasingly consumers control the media the consume, and we can no longer simply interrupt, entertain for 25 seconds and then sell them something, then we have to offer them more than a core idea well told.

It's not about individuals responding to the whole world - it's about whether a community will adopt it. And groups naturally spring up around stories that have rich worlds to explore, discuss and share.

The industry seems obsessed by engagement at the moment - building / offering brand engagement. But from a person, or communities, point of view - why should they engage with brands unless there is some value in the engagement?

Consciously or unconsciously, Yacob is linkig my notion of transmedia entertainment with arguments about complexity in contemporary popular narrative made by Steven Johnson in his book, Everything Bad is Good For You, or C3 researcher Jason Mittell in his work on contemporary television narative. I see the kinds of complexity that Johnson and Mittell discuss as closely linked to the emergence of knowledge communities (or as Pierre Levy might call it, collective intelligence): a group of people, pooling their knowledge, working together, can process much greater complexity (indeed, demands much greater complexity) than an individual watching television alone in their living room. Transmedia entertainment simply pushes that search for complexity to the next level, spreading the information across multiple media platforms and thus providing an incentive for what Mimi Ito calls "hypersociality." The more people get absorbed into putting together these scattered bits of information, the more invested they are in the brand/fan narrative.

In a film franchise, what fuels this interest may be a story -- or more precisely, a fictional world rich enough to support a range of possible stories. But, one can imagine other structures of information generating similar interest -- we can't really call what motivates the Survivor spoilers I discuss earlier in Convergence Culture a story per se. One can imagine, for example, a trivia contest of some kind creating sufficient interest that people seek out information from multiple choices and pool data with others in their core community.

Building Soaps as Long-Term Brands: A Diatribe on Laura's Return on General Hospital

By: Sam Ford This is the third of a three-part series about my look at the world of soaps while Henry is in Poland this week. This builds off the piece I posted here two days ago about legacy characters in soap operas. As with the other two, this piece originally appeared on the C3 blog last night. For more of the C3 team's commentary on various aspects of "convergence culture," be sure to stop by our blog or subscribe to our RSS feed.

Back on Nov. 8, I wrote about legacy characters in soaps, basing much of my writing about the short-term reuniting of Luke and Laura on General Hospital the iconic couple of days gone by in the soaps industry, going back to a time when soaps carried many more viewers. The post raised spirited debate, even drawing in the former head writer of the top-rated American soap opera, Kay Alden, who is also an advisor on my thesis project.

My intent now is to start with the comments generated from that last post to move into examining the limited success of the Luke and Laura reuniting and what the industry can learn from it and hopefully not misinterpret. The show re-inventing the Luke and Laura wedding did a 2.9, above the usual average for the show but below what some projected might be possible to reach. And, what's worse for some people, the ratings were back down to a 2.6 average for the show, still putting it atop some of its competition but not resulting in any major sustained growth. However, the reunion did post the highest rating in the history of cable network SoapNet, and it generated quite a bit of publicity.

Kay Alden wrote about how unique thinking about using older characters/viewers to help "reinvent the soap opera viewing audience" was a fascinating way to think about audience-building that the genre had not thought about. "The idea of actively rejecting the consistent concern with more and more youth, and instead reaching out for the multigenerational audience is one that we would be wise to explore and, frankly, exploit."

Alden writes, "No one in my experience has said, let's bring back this old person as a means of drawing old viewers back to the show and getting them re-involved, because these old viewers might be the key to drawing in new viewers from their own families, and helping to re-establish the tradition of soap opera viewing as a family affair, passed down from mothers to daughters to their daughters."

To recap my original points from the first post:

Longevity. Soaps should celebrate what they have on their side, and one of those things is a deep history with a talented ensemble roster, many of whom have been around for years.

The WWE. I pointed to WWE's 24/7 On Demand product which makes episodes available for the archives and also markets historical footage through DVDs, etc., as proof that fans can often care about the pasts of their dramas and the character history of various characters.

Legacy Characters. I argue that legacy characters are a way to tie the current soaps products with the past of those shows and to draw in former viewers, envisioning a way to have familiar faces appear from time to time to show back up and pull them back in. I also point out that you don't have to have all the characters featured be the same age of the target viewers, as people are often interested in stories about characters older/younger than them as well.

Demographics. The problem with older viewers is that they aren't the target demographic. But most people only start watching soaps through a social relationship, whether it be a friend or spouse or parent or grandparent. So, while older viewers may not be beneficial in and of themselves for people who are looking too narrowly at a certain age demographic, they become increasingly important when the economic model shifts and they are considered grassroots marketers for the show.

The Prodigal viewers. I argue that soaps need to concentrate first and foremost on how to get the people watching their show now to love it so much they will spread the word to people who used to watch to come back. This takes time. I wrote, "And what's going to attract these fans back into the fold? Two things: first, familiar faces; and, second, good writing when they get there. I am not arguing at all that you don't need amazing new characters and dazzling young stars because you need something to get these viewers hooked on a new generation, but you have to use the old generation to do that. " However, "the problem is that this type of growth is slow growth...It's not a week or a month fix. And you have to have quality writing when fans get there and younger characters that are compelling and who interact with these legacy characters in ways that gets fans hooked on them as well." So my argument that the most important marketing tool of all is good, long-term, consistent storytelling.

General Hospital

Kay writes in depth about her responses from the way Luke and Laura still capture some of the power of soaps but wonders "can it bring in new, younger viewers?" She writes:

Thus, viewers who tune in again for the nostalgia value of Luke and Laura, will witness several things: they will get their nostalgia from the many flashbacks to the Luke and Laura romance that GH will undoubtedly play; viewers will also see what the characters are like now, today, 25 years later, as this story of undying love is rejuvenated; and finally, these old viewers may well find themselves drawn into the stories of the newer characters--the "children of" stories, as well as becoming involved with newer, very powerful characters like Sonny, Alexis, Carly, Jax, who have become more the mainstay of the show, but who would be new to viewers from long ago. In short, it seems to me that General Hospital has the potential to hit it out of the park with the return of Genie Francis and all that this could mean at this time.

Now that the return (and Laura) has come and gone, it appears that it caused a blip in the map, a short-term increase, but nothing major and nothing sustained. It seems that some viewer reaction was largely that it was great to see her but that viewers knew it was short-term from the start and that it was too ephemeral to have great impact. For instance, in one online commentary site--"Snark Weighs In"--the author writes, "In many ways, the situation mirrored the viewers real-life relationship with GH. Luke entered into this ludicrous situation knowing his time with Laura would be short--and so did we. [ . . . ] Luke and Laura's re-wedding, the centerpiece of ABC's promotional campaign, was nothing more than an anti-climactic attempt to ride the coattails of the most famous wedding in TV history. It was the least interesting part of Gene Francis' return." (The author is referring, by the way, to the drug that temporarily pulled Laura out of her catatonic state, much as happened recently with John Larroquette's character on House.)

Other fans weighed in over at Soap Central, debating a wide variety of reasons why fans didn't tune back in--largely talking about flaws in the current way soaps tell stories and the fact that many viewers wouldn't return because they both knew it was short-term and didn't want to see it poorly executed. The same discussions took place at the TV Guide Community. And I would propose another suggestion--that many people simply never heard about it nor was it done long-term enough for them to develop investment in returning to the show.

Inflated Expectations

Toni Fitzgerald with Media Life Magazine wrote about the power of this storyline back in October, when the first numbers came through surrounding Laura's return. She wrote, "That in a nutshell is what's been happening on ABC's "General Hospital," and it's driving big ratings increases. The return of Genie Francis, the actress who plays Laura, for the first time since 2002 helped the show regain the No. 1 slot in daytime among women 18-49 for the first time in six months" and went on to predict more of the same. The problem is not that the event wasn't successful but just that such a short-term jump in numbers was just not enough to get a significant number of people involved in the product once again.

This takes me back to August, when I wrote in response to all the critics after the opening weekend of Snakes on a Plane did $15 million. Even our own Henry Jenkins said he was eating crow at this "low" number. At the time I wrote, "The problem is that people fell prey to their own hyperbole and expected a campy B-movie to become a blockbuster, which I don't think it was ever designed to be. " And I feel the same way in this instance.

In the comments section of that original post in November, I wrote in response to Kay's comments that "the return of Laura for a limited time is one small incident. I am not predicting it will change the industry or anything of the sort, as one smart decision doesn't turn everything around. I just think that a whole lot of these types of decisions is the way to go and a change in the way the industry thinks overall." Instead, I advocated both grounding long-term and older characters more solidly in stories and create a budgeting shift that would allow for continued short-term returns from various characters from each show's history throughout the year, so that using legacy characters becomes established with fans as a long-term strategy rather than a one-time gimmick.

A History of Quick-Fixes

Soaps have been trying to fix the ratings problems for a while--say 20 years now or so. As cable channels proliferated and choices grew exponentially, soaps slowly lost viewership. The response was to try and appeal directly to the target demographic by drawing them in a variety of ways...to think about how to increase numbers by next week. And all these quick-fixes, even if they led to some momentary jumps in ratings from time-to-time over the years, have seen an overall trend of sliding numbers.

Some quick-fixes have been colorful. My favorites have been with Passions, the only show to not be around in the more "glorious" periods and that has survived by drawing in younger viewers and by parodying the genre in various ways. They've had an animated sequence and a Bollywood episode. Guiding Light surprised everyone with a comic book/superhero crossover, although readers and viewers seemed to fill it was lacking in execution Meanwhile, Days of Our Lives is seeking out interactivity by allowing viewers to name the baby of a prominent character. There have also been interesting promotional campaigns, such as the dance videos promoting As the World Turns and the ATWT/Tyson Chicken commercials. And yet another interesting project from SoapNet is a fantasy soaps competition, modeled after fantasy football.

Some of these were intended for varying degrees of short-term promotion, but the overall trajectory of the genre has been quick-fixes. This happens in storyline form as well, with natural disaster stories or plot-driven suspenseful moments that may draw new people in for a week but gives them little to want to stick around for.

I find Laura as another quick-fix, except this time they are using history. My argument about utilizing history is not about for some short-term gains but rather as a change in approach and in practices, in attitude. Bringing Laura back for a few weeks, as an isolated incident, is not an example of a long-term approach to building an audience back. That's not to criticize the storyline but rather to explain why it did not lead to this miraculous turnaround soaps seem to continue seeking. These are all placebos. There's no secret--just good storytelling. And soaps need to realize this and start building for the future before they slowly use up even more of the cultural cache they've built up. No one in the industry wants to see the End of DAYS.

The era of quick-fixes needs to end for the genre to survive, and networks and producers alike have to think about these shows as long-time brands rather than just weekly programming. The question needs to be how shows can tell good stories now that will lead to increased viewership in two years and do everything within that time to improve the storytelling, make shows more inclusive of the whole case, embrace the history, and empower grassroots marketers to draw more viewers back in. That takes a lot of time and a long-term vision, though.

Building Momentum

Let me reiterate--the problem with the long-term approach is that it takes a long time to get results. Sustainable growth, as any city planner will tell you as well, is not just adding new populations in droves. In the soaps industry, that seems to be unlikely to happen in the first place and--if it does--hotshotting only leads to a one-time bump. That's why the approach over the past 20 years may have led to momentary spikes as soaps steal audiences from each other and temporarily draw viewers back in, but a lack of long-term planning and looking at the show as a brand rather than a week-by-week product has led to a steady decline, caused largely by a number of new choices but exacerbated by this lack of long-term vision and miscalculation of the power of the audience and the material.

What soaps need to do is develop this consistent direction and then have the confidence to pull it off. Short-term returns by old characters are just another form of hot-shotting, although particularly more interesting than a slasher storyline.

Look at the pro wrestling world once again for a parallel. Fans of wrestling remember well the 5.5-year "Monday Night War" between Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Federation and Ted Turner's World Championship Wrestling, in competing shows on Monday nights. When Nitro debuted against incumbent RAW in September 1995, it quickly took over the ratings by presenting a better show. However, after eight or nine months winning the ratings in a row, WCW got complacent and stale. WWF improved its product to the point that, by mid-1997, it was clearly among hardcore fans considered the better show. It was clear that WWF had the momentum on its side.

However, even as that momentum was slowly building, WCW was still winning the ratings battle every week. In fact, it wasn't until mid-1998 that WWF broke what was, by then, an 83-week wining streak for WCW. The key was that the show had to get better almost a full year before it reflected in the ratings. If WWF had shifted its focus anytime during that year, their subsequent unparalleled popularity in the late 1990s and early part of this decade would have never happened. If they had gone for short-time fixes and hotshotting at some point along the way, they would have destroyed what they were building up.

The key was in giving time for word-of-mouth to spread. They started putting on a better show, but people were more dedicated to Nitro. Yet, word slowly started to pass that WWF was putting on the better program week-by-week. Fan advocacy are your best chance of permanently gaining new viewers, but that relationship has to build organically, needing a long-term plan rather than a quick turnaround. Soaps could learn a lot from the wrestling world's lesson (and the wrestling world could do some good at looking back at their own history).

Fans Hold the Secret to Success

Even if some researchers want to claim that watching soaps makes you stupid, fans have often proven to be more savvy than they are given credit for. Some fan forums are known for having intriguing discussions about their shows online. Look, for instance, at how fans discuss product placement in relation to the genre's future, such as here and here. (On a tangential note, see soaps' use of embedded public service announcements as an interesting aside to product placement in the genre.)

And modern technologies dictate that there is a shrinking distance from producer to consumer. This interactivity and the personalities of other fans become an important part of the viewing experience for many people, especially as they often become fans of other fans themselves. In other words, your most ardent fans who act as historians and resources and commentators and critics to the rest of the fan community have quite a following of their own, and shows would benefit most from interacting with and bolstering those activities rather than hiding from them or minimizing their importance by ignoring that rich history.

So, while some people will decry the use of history as useless for building audiences, this short-term return of a character does not mean that history has no place on shows or that my larger arguments are wrong. Just a good story and a long-term plan that allows for multigenerational storytelling, and these shows may be able to slowly build an audience from their diaspora.

Oakdale Confidential: Secrets Revealed: How the Book's Reprint Is an Even More Striking Example of Transmedia Storytelling (with a Tangent about Bad Twin at Intermission)

By: Sam Ford In the second of my three-part series on writing about how convergence culture is changing one of television's oldest genres--the soap opera--I am focusing on the printing of a transmedia book based on the soap opera As the World Turns. I originally wrote this for the C3 blog on Nov. 25. See yesterday's post for a little bit of an explanation of my background from Henry.

Oakdale Confidential has now entered its first reprinting stage, and just as the writers wove the initial printing of the book into storylines for the soap opera As the World Turns, the reprint is becoming perhaps an even greater catalyst for events happening on the show. The book--which sat at #3 on the New York Times bestseller list for two weeks in a row and made it as high as number five on Amazon's seller list--is being reprinted with the addition of a new story by author Katie Peretti, a character on the show, who reveals a major town secret in the book now that she has decided to publicly acknowledge her authorship of the book. In a chance to get revenge on her ex-husband for what she sees as ruining her current marriage, she writes what would--in the real world--be sure libel in accusing that ex-husband and his girlfriend of stealing expensive jewels, an accusation that is, in fact, true.

Following the ups and downs of this book's release, both its major success as a transmedia experiment and also its pointing at some of the troubles with creating this type of text and its subsequent instructions on future projects of this sort, has been worth following throughout 2006. Unfortunately, because of what I perceive as a bias that marginalizes certain types of content even as its popularity should rank it as mainstream, the successes of Oakdale Confidential have not been that well covered or examined. I am going to attempt to trace that history a little bit here.

Last December, I wrote about this limiting approach to marginalizing certain types of content, particularly the two types of American entertainment I study most--soap operas and pro wrestling. Both were among the earliest of television staples and both have proven to be immensely popular throughout the past several decades, yet neither are regularly understood or reported on by those supposedly covering "the entertainment industry." Wrestling and soaps are both only covered by their own press, and it is clear when the occasional feature is done on either most of the time that the "mainstream" entertainment press either have a complete lack of understanding of the genre and/or a disdain for the genre that clouds their coverage. That's largely not because there are no journalists who are fans of wrestling or soaps but rather that's the only stories that have the likelihood of getting run. (The reverse is the glowing and too positive stories in which the journalist is so surprised by discovering the popularity of one of these entertainments that they don't give a nuanced account at all.)

At the time, I wrote, "Considering many of the ideas people now celebrate as complex television came from soap opera, and considering how much of an innovator WWE has been in transmedia storytelling and many other aspects of media convergence, it just makes me wonder how many other extremely popular and profitable areas of popular culture are ignored by most mainstream journalists."

The plans for Oakdale Confidential were announced in early 2006. Back in February, I first asked what Oakdale Confidential would be. The announcement of a novel that would in some way be related to the show directed a lot of speculation from fans as to who or what would be the driving force behind this book. At the time, I wrote, "Whatever the case--this is another step in the right direction, if done well. How can a novel become a piece of transmedia? If done well, the television plot will in some way hinge on the contents of the book, so that the television show promotes the book but also requires viewers to read the book to understand the full implications of the impact the book has on the residents of Oakdale. The show has been very tight-lipped about what Oakdale Confidential is, and Amazon's page on the book has next to no information about the contents...Which makes all of the fans all the more determined to find out what's going on. There's great potential here for an interesting experiment in transmedia storytelling."

The book was a major success, as mentioned previously. In April, after the book had been released, I wrote, "What makes the book most intriguing is that viewers are looking through the text and examining shows carefully to get clues as to who authored it. There are several factual discrepancies in the book from what we have actually seen on screen that are illuminating for close watchers of ATWT, and my thoughts on the message board look into those parts of the text that stray from the 'truth' we've seen on the screen in detail to get a better sense of who might be the author and why they may have either gotten facts wrong or deliberately chosen to omit certain things in their rendering of the story."

The television writers and the book's author did not sync perfectly with each other, and it's important to realize that the book was written by someone with the company but not on the writing team of the show and that there was not substantial collaboration between the two creative forces. That hindered the quality of the project, and I would argue both that there were major factual inaccuracies that hindered the enjoyment of the book for longtime fans and also that there was not enough coordination between the book's author and the writers of the show to really make for greatly compelling television. But, because it had not been done on the show previously, this type of experiment was intriguing, and it was instructive as to what does and doesn't work for future transmedia projects and also a cautious tipping of the toes in the water that--to me, anyway--proved that there is substantial market interest in this type of project that will hopefully lead to a better coordinated and more earnest attempt the second time around.

This was my sentiments at the time as well, when I wrote, "While the experiment shows how much more coordination is needed between the real author of the book and the television writing team to really exploit all the possibilities of taking the story from one medium to the other, the one thing that Oakdale Confidential has demonstrated quite powerfully is that such an attempt at transmedia storytelling is becoming more and more profitable and that viewers are eager to join into a deep transmedia experience. I am hoping that the experiment not only shows the people at ATWT that this was a good idea but also what to do better the next time around."

I was intrigued by comments from Alina Adams, the book's actual author. She and I have corresponded on several occasions, but she also kept a blog running for a while after the book's publication about Oakdale Confidential. She wrote responses to various criticisms from the fan community of her work, explaining that "Oakdale's characters simply have too much past history for it all to be compressed into a novel. As a result, it was decided that any past events which were not relevant to the plot at hand wouldn't be included." While that makes sense, fans were not happy that it was used to change the relationship of characters in their pasts, to gloss over inaccuracies in people's families (including the complete exclusion of one of the children of a main character in the book), etc. Fans didn't buy this line of argument, but it was great to see her blog entries as a place these discussions played out. She also explained that "some of the "mistakes" in the book are deliberate," reflecting the desired world of the author rather than the reality. Again, I hope the fan response to some of these factual inaccuracies provided a blueprint to the creators for similar projects in the future, but Alina's comments are a great case study for anyone interested in transmedia, and--what's better--the comments were made publicly available for fans. (Also, see her post about the difficulties of writing about the physical attributes of characters when she is really referring to the actors.)

While I do sympathize with various fan complaints, the book was well-received as an experiment and encouraged. Yet I never saw that much about its success in the mainstream press. There were snippets here and there and a sidebar, but one would think that a show having a book that was an artifact from on-the-air storylines would be major discussion. And it was. Shortly thereafter. About Lost.

Bad Twin was not a replica experiment, as it's tie-ins to the actual show was more subtle, but it was very similar. And it got tons more publicity. Bad Twin had a better overall Amazon performance, from what I could gather, but the data I found never ranked it on the New York Times list's top 10 (I did find a reference to it making 14, and it may have made even higher). While I couldn't find direct comparisons between the two in overall numbers, suffice to say that both were a major success.

Yet, when the New York Times gave its review for Bad Twin, the ignoring of Oakdale Confidential was evident. As I mentioned, the soaps book did get a sidebar. But, despite having appeared higher on the list than Bad Twin ever did, Bad Twin was the one to get a full book review in the Times, a review that began, "Novels by unidentified authors have made the best-seller lists, as has at least one said to have been written by a soap opera character. But this may be the first time that a book by a nonexistent writer who is thought to have died in a plane crash has cracked the charts."

I'm not a betting man, but I would say that, had Bad Twin came first, if Oakdale Confidential had been mentioned at all, it would have almost been referenced as being derivative of the Lost book.

I'm very supportive of Bad Twin as well, but I wish both books had simply been more consistent stories and that both were most intricately woven into storylines from the shows. But these were experiments. And I'm hoping the success of the re-release of Oakdale Confidential will not just lead to even more ignoring of the book's success. This time around, the writers have done an even better job of weaving the release into the storylines, as Lucinda--the publisher--has hounded Katie on several fronts about getting her copy out, and the pressure of the book's release has played an important part in major decisions made by the character. Her notes about her sleeping with her ex-husband are used as pre-writing for the insert of the book in its re-release, as well as a way for her to sort through feelings about her one night stand, and her husband discovers about the affair when he's trying to print off her pages for Lucinda, who demands to have them immediately since the book needs to go to press and Katie has been dragging the deadline.

The discovery causes Mike to move out and Katie, in her frustration, to write a scathing extra chapter about her ex-husband, which she tries to stop from going to press, but too late. Since that time, we've seen characters around the mall where the book is being sold (and a couple of too obvious decisions to purchase it). On the whole, though, the promotion has been much more integrated into the show in a believable and compelling way this time around.

The press for the rerelease has had one major flaw--making some viewers think of it as a sequel rather than the same book with a few new things inserted in. That is somewhat the show's fault, as I have seen it referred to as a "sequel," although the storyline on the show and the book's description clearly indicates it is a reprinting of the original story with a few new additions.

As of today, the re-release is ranked #625 on Amazon, while the original version is still holding at #3,751. Both editions are hardcover.

Meanwhile, the hardcover edition of Bad Twin ranks #5,335, while the paperback is #6,275. And a large print hardcover edition is #1,381,487.

The point is that both are doing well in the long tail, and ATWT has had particular success in making the re-release once again part of storylines, despite being acknowledged as the same book. I'm still hoping that both will be models for the two shows to try something even more successful from a narrative perspective in the future now that the economic model is proven to have potential, and also that other shows will look at these successes when thinking of transmedia extensions in the future.

Alina has some great recent posts about how transmedia projects are implemented as well. One recent post highlights how a subtext from the book she wrote a year ago, about Katie's underlying interest in her former husband who wasn't even on the show again at the time that Alina was working on the book, has now been identified as fans as proof from back then that Katie was still in love with Simon and that this affair had been coming all along. This was serendipitous, but it demonstrates how transmedia can be deliberately programmed to provide these subtle connections for viewers.

And, as with character Luke Snyder's blog earlier this year, these types of projects allow viewers to see what characters on the show are reading and reacting to. (In Luke's case, with that "coming out" storyline, it interested me to see new fans who came to the show through that story in particular, without necessarily having a background in watching. But, what drove their viewing was a social network built around watching, through an online gay community.)

Read Alina's posts about the difficulties of trying to coordinate the release of Katie's writing on Amazon's Web site and the book to coincide with when things are done on the daily show itself.

And here are a few links to my take on transmedia projects being attempted by other shows, such as the Passions tabloid and the Guiding Light tabloid-style Web site that is worked into the show.

Also, see my previous notes about the Guiding Light podcasting process, Passions streaming on NBC's site and available on iTunes, and All My Children podcasts.

Legacy Characters and Rich History: How Soap Operas Must Capitalize on Their History (and Pay Attention to the Lessons of the WWE)

Sam Ford is the backbone of the Convergence Culture Consortium blog. Week in and week out, he pulls together some of the most important developments in the entertainment and media sector and offers his own insightful analysis of how they connect to the larger trends we have been researching for our clients. For those of you whose interests were perked by the conversations in and around the Futures of Entertainment conference, the C3 blog is a great place to go to learn more about user-generated content, fan and brand communities, transmedia storytelling, and so forth. There's much more there than I can possibly cover in this blog. I go for depth; Sam goes for breath--though, at his best, he achieves both.

Ford is a masters student in the Comparative Media Studies program who came to us with lots of experience as a small town journalist writing for his local newspaper in Western Kentucky. Ford wrote his undergraduate thesis about professional wrestling as a transmedia and fan phenomenon and is going to be teaching a class on the topic this spring. He is doing his thesis work trying to map some ways that soap operas in general and As The World Turns in particular can exploit aspects of convergence culture to broaden their market and to better satisfy the demands of their hardcore viewers. Like many of our students, he is using blogging to create some public discussion around his thesis ideas. In this case, he has posted a series of lengthy pieces on the C3 site which explore the ways soaps are going transmedia and interacting with their fan communities. I have asked Sam if we can reproduce these posts here in hopes that he may garner insights from my readers on his project.

Sam, by the way, has been nice enough to take over the management of this blog for the next few days while Cynthia and I have gone to Poland for the public debut of the Polish language edition of Convergence Culture -- my first translation. I will be speaking at a conference on the future of culture in Warsaw and will share some of my impressions when I get back.

Now, to turn it over to Sam:

By: Sam Ford

I originally wrote this piece over at the C3 blog at the beginning of November. Since that time, the episode that drove my initial writing has aired, and its success (or lack thereof) has driven a response that will be on the C3 site and will be cross-posted here on Friday. Also, Friday's post will pick up a variety of conversations that began in the comments section on the original post on the C3 blog which involved former Young and the Restless head writer Kay Alden and longtime soaps viewer and critic Lynn Liccardo, who are both serving as my thesis advisors (along with Henry and William Uricchio).

Luke and Laura have me thinking about soap operas and legacy characters and the importance of recognizing histories on shows that are fortunate enough to have a wealth of former content to draw from.

A lot of long-standing television forms have not completely grasped the idea that one of the most important selling tools they have is exactly what sets them apart from the more ephemeral primetime fare: longevity.

In this category, I'm talking about any type of program with deep archives but particularly thinking of daytime serial drama, the soap operas; professional wrestling; some long-standing news shows or features on other networks, anything that has been on the air for years, without an end in sight. These programs are special, with formats that have built within viewers the sense that, even if the program hits a down time, that its longevity and format will cause it to be around for years to come.

That's why I've made the argument with both pro wrestling programming and soap operas over the years that you can't really apply the term "jump the shark" to these shows because they have jumped the shark and back so many times over the past few decades. As the World Turns and Guiding Light have both been on the air every weekday and all year long for more than 50 years now, making PGP a brand renowned for longevity. And World Wrestling Entertainment's roots stretch back to 1963 as a regional broadcast, giving WWE a longstanding viewership history that few other primetime shows can match, other than news programs.

Yet, traditionally anyway, these shows only give a cursory glance to their history, instead relying on bragging about their history only in ambiguous terms from time-to-time.

WWE Finding the Right Direction with Legacy Content

Vince McMahon completely ignored wrestling history for a long time, and it made some degree of business sense when it came to the history of his competitors. He was trying to establish the WWE as the only wrestling history that matters. Now that he's pretty well won the game, though, now that he has established his wrestling empire as the owner of the country's primary wrestling brand, Vince has started to give more than just a passing glance at the wrestling archives.

Enter WWE 24/7 On Demand, which I've written about before. At the time, I wrote:

The point of all this? WWE has been able to draw on nostalgia in a way that appeals to a very concentrated group of fans, those who care enough about professional wrestling to throw down a few bucks a month to watch old pro wrestling programming, tape archives that were otherwise just sitting in a closet somewhere. It's an example of Chris Anderson's Long Tail, in that products like these can be profitable just by finding a fan base. Although the initial costs of digitizing and mapping out these tape libraries may put the product in the red, the long-term sustainability of this niche product should eventually turn a profit, especially considering that the footage can also be used for DVD releases, etc. (The company has found this out, especially with releasing multiple-disc sets of various wrestling personalities.)

And, the WWE has been able to pull in some fans who don't even watch the current product regularly but who love to see the wrestling of yesteryear. In fact, there are some people who are hostile against the company, who do not like Vince McMahon, but are willing to pay him for this archive, to remember wrestling from the regional era before what they see as his corrupting influence came through and changed pro wrestling.

On the other hand, soap operas don't really seem to "get it," as Vince would say. And it's not like Vince always has but rather that he has slowly come around to ways of educating current fans to care about wrestling history and then to promote that wrestling history with the 24/7 product, DVD releases, etc., in order to eventually make money off that content that was just collecting dust otherwise.

The Lesson for Soap Operas

The same needs to take place with soap operas. While every other television industry seems to make its name off target marketing and niche audiences when it comes to demographics, soap operas are the opposite. Almost everyone I know my age, male and female, who watch soaps do so because they started watching them with a relative growing up. In fact, almost everyone I know period started watching soaps this way. When the audience started falling off, soaps began to dumb down the shows' histories more and more, ignoring the past and worrying about losing viewers with such stuff. New characters with little history on the show started being the major focus, and veterans are lucky to make it on the screen a handful of times a month now on many shows.

Why? Soaps are losing their 18-49 female target demographic, and they are trying to appeal to them directly. But they don't understand the value of transgenerational marketing when it comes to soaps, and they've spent the last decade looking for a quick-fix for the target demographic when I believe they would have been better served focusing on improving creative and utilizing their history more effectively. Shows should bolster their longterm viewers' numbers and letting them act as their proselytizers for younger soap fans. In other words, if you hadn't lost grandma and mom, you would have been able to keep grandson or granddaughter.

Legacy Characters

How do you remedy that, though? Legacy characters. Acknowledging the history. Not only could soaps find more and more ways to make money off the show's archives (when you bring back a legacy character, release online content or DVDs that highlight the history of that characters, their interaction with others who are currently on the show, etc.), but they can also draw back in the prodigal sons and daughters who have drifted from the show by returning some familiar faces.

There has been a lot of talk in the soap fan communities and the industry in the past year about legacy characters and how their return can generate buzz for shows once again. A lot of these legacy characters are out of the demographic that the show is trying to reach, but...gasp...viewers seem to sometimes be interested in characters that aren't necessarily the same age as them, and--when it comes to the large families on most soap operas--these characters are woven into storylines of several generations of other characters on the show, leading to a show that is supposed to be multigenerational in its storylines in order to appeal to multiple generations of viewers.

Ed Martin with Media Village wrote about the return of Laura from the famed Luke and Laura couple on General Hospital and what it means to the show. Martin writes, "Francis' return as one of the most popular characters to ever emerge in daytime drama is worth noting because it calls attention (at a time when much attention is needed) to the enduring power not simply of daytime soap operas but to that of serialized programming overall and to broadcast television itself. Consider the enduring popularity of her character, Laura. This month marks the 25th anniversary of Laura's now-legendary wedding to Luke in a two-part 1981 episode that drew 30 million-plus viewers, still the record-holder for a daytime drama audience."

Later, he points out that this "is what a well-written, well-acted soap opera can do, a point well worth making at a time when most soap operas are fighting for their lives, the victims of repetitive writing, industry indifference, escalating competition from other media and, I am convinced, flawed audience measurement."

Martin shares an anecdote about younger viewers been involved with the storylines of older characters, saying, "Significantly, Alexis is not an ingénue. She's a middle-aged woman. And yet, young viewers remain heavily invested in her storylines. There's another industry perception smashed to bits. But that's a column for another day."

Nice to know that there's someone out there who agrees with me that soaps break the myth of niche demographics and that applying that rubric to soaps has been a driving force in diminishing the soaps audience.

Bringing Back the Prodigal Viewers

But what can shows do about it? Well...it seems fairly obvious, yet I'm afraid that it won't to most of the marketing folks. People like nostalgia. And the only way soaps are going to build their audience back up is first to get a great number of those people who have watched at some point in their lives back into the fold. And, gasp, the majority of those people need not be in the target demographic. I'm talking about getting grandmas and middle-aged mothers and fathers back into the show, so they can get back to work as your grassroots marketers to the younger generations.

And what's going to attract these fans back into the fold? Two things: first, familiar faces; and, second, good writing when they get there. I am not arguing at all that you don't need amazing new characters and dazzling young stars because you need something to get these viewers hooked on a new generation, but you have to use the old generation to do that. First, start by putting the veterans on the show more often, integrating them into storylines. A show like As the World Turns has a cast of Kim and Bob Hughes, Tom and Margo Hughes, Susan Stewart, Emma Snyder, Lucinda Walsh, etc., all characters who still have a lot to give and actors who are still able to carry scenes. I'm not saying that the shows have been completely inept at featuring them, but they haven't been great.

Don't be afraid to put Tom and Margo on the screen. Have young swindler Henry Coleman enter into an illicit affair with the older Lucinda Walsh, throwing the whole town off-balance. And so on. Bite the bullet and bring back Dr. John Dixon, a face many identified with ATWT for so many years. Sure, he's old, but that means that several generations of viewers will recognize him. Bring back some old favorites like Andy Dixon or Kirk Anderson...whatever happened to him, anyway? Dead or alive? After all, we found out that a smaller number of fans can nevertheless react very passionately when rumors start circulating that a longtime, yet neglected, character may be booted off the show--as was the case with rumors that Tom would be killed off on ATWT last year--and my post about the fan reaction generated more discussion than almost any post we've had on the C3 blog. Similarly, fans responded passionately about longtime character Hal Munson and his portrayer, Benjamin Hendrickson, after Hendrickson committed suicide earlier this year--the reaction shows both that fans care immensely about these longtime characters and felt a need to express their sympathy becuase they had grown close to the character over the years, and the actor's performances. And also look at how Ellen Dolan, who portrays Margo on ATWT, went directly to the fans to plead the case for better use of her character on the show (and her character has appeared more often in recent months, although that may just be a coincidence).

Then, by encouraging fans to promote the current storylines of these characters or one of their returns, by taking advantage and empowering the show's grassroots marketers, some of those old fans will come back into the fold. If they like what they see, they'll bring more back into the fold with them. And that leads to even more grassroots marketers. Then, they may start getting younger viewers tuning back in.

The problem is that this type of growth is slow growth...It's not a week or a month fix. And you have to have quality writing when fans get there and younger characters that are compelling and who interact with these legacy characters in ways that gets fans hooked on them as well. One of the major problems is that a lot of writers currently with shows don't even know the shows' deep histories, since soap writers switch from show to show so often, it seems. But these shows need to get it together and take advantage of their greatest asset: their own histories.

The Best Marketing: Good and Consistent Storytelling

As I said, though, shows have to get good, and stay better for a while, before they can regain an audience. Word-of-mouth takes time. This type of approach needs a long-term commitment from the production companies and the network. The problem, though, is that trying one immediate fix after another in the soap industry for more than a decade now has led to continued decline in the numbers. If they had started this process a decade ago and focused on long-term growth, we might not be in the shape that so many creative direction changes and quick fixes have led to by this point.

In the end, the best marketing for a show is good quality. Soaps have the advantage of feeling permanent, and longstanding shows are probably not going to go off-the-air anytime soon. If shows start now with a more long-term approach to growth, incorporating the idea of taking greater advantage of the archives and bringing back legacy characters and empowering proselytizing among fans and the other ideas laid out here, then there may be a turnaround in numbers. But it's going to take a big shift in thinking from the current demographic-driven, short-term thinking that has guided the industry.

For those who are interested further in these ideas, feel free to contact me directly or read some of my previous posts on the soaps industry and pro wrestling industry at the C3 site. I'm teaching a class on pro wrestling and its cultural history here at MIT next semester, and my thesis research is on the current state of the soap opera industry and how using new technologies and the new relationships with fans can transform the genre and the industry in the 21st Century.

Thanks to Todd Cunningham with MTV Networks for bringing the return of Luke and Laura to my attention.

The Magic of Back-Story: Further Reflections on the Mainstreaming of Fan Culture

The airing last Monday of the Heroes episode, "Six Months Ago," seems an appropriate occasion to reflect upon the centrality of back story in fan friendly television -- and by extension to explore a bit more fully some of the gender dimensions of the mainstreaming of fan culture. I first wrote about Heroes last summer when I got a chance to watch an advanced copy of the series pilot and I fell hard. Heroes has turned out to be one of the most successful new television series to debut this year and is, if the comments posted here on Pimp My Show, certainly a favorite among readers of the blog. For those not watching the series, "Six Months Ago" takes place, as the title indicates, six months before the events in the pilot episode. Hiro, salary man by day, Otaku by night, "Superhiro" in his spare time, travels back in time six months to try to stop the death of the woman fans have been calling "Google Girl," a hash house waitress with a phenomenal capacity to absorb and deploy information. Time travel plots are cool enough -- I've always been a sucker for them -- but in this case, the series used turning back the clock to dump a massive amount of really interesting, character-focused back-story on the viewers. Half way through the episode, I turned to my wife and mumbled, "the magic of back story."

SPOILER WARNING FOR THOSE WHO AREN'T CAUGHT UP ON HEROES

Just setting a story six months earlier already opens up all kinds of great insights into the characters. We find out, for example, a great deal about Nikki, her relationship with her apparently abusive father, the death of her sister, and through this, for the first time, we get some real clues into what is motivating the doppelganger which emerges and takes possession of her body during moments of key stress. We learn a great deal about the accident that crippled Nathan's wife and the context in which it occurred, including more information about the death of Nathan and Peter's mob-tied father, the rise of Nathan's political career, the reasons why he is being blackmailed, and the circumstances under which he first discovered his capacity to fly. In the case of Claire, we learned a great deal more about her relations with her father and how she discovered her capacity for instant regeneration. Along the way, we finally met Skylar; we encounter Chandra Suresh, Mohinder's father, and learn more about his work in New York City, and much much more.

END OF SPOILERS

It is hard to imagine an episode offering more "answers" to the character enigmas that had been introduced across the series to date or opening up more new questions in such a short period of time. At the same time, it was clear that the series had been structured from the pilot forward to prepare us for the information rush that comes of having all of this back-story dumped on us in such a short period of time.

How simple the device is! Let's turn back the clock six months and show you how everyone got into their current situations. In theory, we could keep turning back the clock again and again and find out even more about what made these characters into the people they are today. Yet, the series is structured so this is the crucial time period for so many of these characters. I am reminded of the thrill I felt as a gamer the first time I encountered a game which allowed one to move right to left as well as left to right across the scroll: in effect, all the game had done was start us in the middle screen, but suddenly, one had the feeling of a more immersive world, of the ability to travel in any direction. The lesson here is obvious: start your story in the middle and work in both directions at once.

Heroes is not the first television series to try this trick: there's a great episode at the start of the third season of The Shield which took us back only a few days before the pilot episode of the series but again, showed how a memorable chain of events started and gave us new insights into the relationships between the core characters.

Back-story is a key aspect of the storyteller's toolkit in any medium but television until very recently was reluctant to play around too much with back-story because it was assumed that audiences would not carry much information about the characters around with them. Episodes needed to be self contained. It had to be possible to watch them in any order. The episode as a result had to end more or less in the same place where it began. It could deploy very little in terms of outside knowledge or program history less it confuse, frustrate, or leave behind more casual viewers.

Yet, fans, as a community, set themselves up as the protectors and promoters of back story. They wanted to pull together every scrap of information they could find about these characters and where they came from -- every long lost friend who showed up for one episode, every passing reference to former girl friends or what happened when they were at the Academy or... Indeed, this was a primary function of fan fiction from its earliest days -- fleshing out the implicit back story of these characters, filling in the "missing scenes".

Serialization was also part of the fan aesthetic from before the beginning. In Textual Poachers, I describe Star Trek fans as turning space opera into soap opera -- by which I meant both a focus on the emotional lives of characters (still unusual in many forms of science fiction) and a desire to create a serial structure even around series that were composed of relatively self contained and isolated episodes. But men and women were assumed early on to have a different relationship to serialization and to have different degrees of investment in back story.

Here, for example, is a passage from an essay I wrote about Twin Peaks fans in the late 1980s at a time when internet fandom was perceived as primarily a masculine space:

The female Star Trek fans focus their interest on the elaboration of paradigmatic relationships, reading plot actions as shedding light on character psychology and motivations. The largely male fans in the Twin Peaks computer group essentially reversed this process, focusing on moments of character interaction as clues that might help to resolve plot questions. The male fans' fascination with solving the mystery justified their intense scrutiny and speculation about father-daughter relations, sexual scandals, psychological and emotional problems, and romantic entanglements. Sherry Turkle suggests that the Hacker culture's focus on technological complexity and formal virtuosity stands in stark contrast to the group's discomfort regarding the ambiguities and unpredictability of personal relations. Here, Twin Peaks complex mixture of soap opera and mystery provided the alt.tv.twinpeaks participants a space to examine the confusions of human interactions by translating them into technical problems requiring decoding.

In Textual Poachers, written a decade and a half ago, I discussed the ways that networks regarded women as "surplus viewers" of action-adventure series that were primarily targeted at men and suggested that women had to work harder, had to write around the edges of the episodes, because most of what interested them was marginalized in the actual unfolding of these series. Looking at Heroes suggests just how much progress has been made to transform television into a more fan friendly medium. Minimally, one has to say that Heroes is one of a growing number of action-adventure series which factor in the tastes and interests of its female fan following from its conception. Like Smallville and Lois and Clark, two previous favorites among female television fans, the series uses the superhero genre as a starting point but remains far more interested in character reactions and motivations than in plot actions. Male fans have sometimes expressed frustration with the slow unfolding of plot which has characterized Heroes so far, yet its rhythms owes a lot to the soap opera tradition: we are watching these characters discover their powers and trying to make sense of how they impact their lives rather than watching them deploy their powers in defense of truth, justice, and the American way. We are examining how possessing special abilities impacts their marriages, their friendships, their relations with siblings, their personal turmoil, their unresolved feelings towards their parents, and their popularity in high school, all classic issues in more melodramatic forms of television and all basic building blocks of fan fiction.

We can read this one of two ways: the series is giving fans that much more to play around with when they sit down to write or the series is generating its own fan fiction foreclosing space that was once part of the fan imagination. How we respond to this depends very much on whether we are invested in fandom as a taste culture which wants to reshape the content of American television (in which case fans today are getting more of the kind of television they have historically wanted to watch) or as a subversive activity (in which case the willingness of the companies to give us more of what we want is potentially co-opting, encouraging us to work within rather than outside its systems of production and distribution). I fear sometimes that a decade plus of cultural studies writing about audience resistance may lead us astray, making us forget that resistance is a survival mechanism while the real goal is surely to transform the contents of our culture.

If we understand fandom as a taste culture, we can see plenty of signs that female fan tastes are reshaping popular television. To continue with the idea of back-story, consider a highly successful series like Lost. Lost, as I have suggested here before, would seem to offer a range of different kinds of viewing pleasures -- some focused backwards in terms of fleshing out character back-story (a central concern of every episode), some focused forward in terms of watching the unfolding relations between these characters on the island (still well within the territory of melodrama), and some focused on solving the various puzzles (which may be the most classically masculine aspect of its content, though keep in mind how many women like to solve puzzles or read mystery novels and you will be hard press to dismiss this simply as aimed at fanboys.) So, Lost balances devices once thought to appeal primarily to female viewers with those once classically assumed to appeal to men. You can read Lost against the earlier quote about how Twin Peaks allowed male fans to show an issue in character relations by turning them into clues towards a puzzle they wanted to solve. Or consider how much more central relationships (and the companion's role) are on the new Doctor Who compared to where that series was a decade ago.

And of course, all of this is to hold onto a gender division of fan interpretive practices as it was understood more than a decade ago rather than to revise it to reflect some pretty significant shifts in audience behavior over that period of time. Television isn't the only thing that is changing. As these once marginal aspects of action adventure series are making it onto the screen more and more, then male viewers of these series are discovering that they like them and are themselves demanding more of this kind of thing. There are dramatic increases in the number of women playing computer games or reading comics. And the online world is bringing together once separate fan communities and creating a common space where they sometimes fight like demons and sometimes pool knowledge, combining their different interests and reading practices for a common cause.

Laura wants to argue that gender is as present in Convergence Culture as it was in Textual Poachers but remains unmarked because the masculine is the norm in our culture. I've spent a fair chunk of time pondering this argument over the weekend. To some degree, I buy that, but on other levels, I don't. Working through the book, women are very central to the Survivor spoiling community which depends heavily upon skills at social networking (and curiously, much of the fan fiction there has been written by men including Mario Lanza who figures strongly in that chapter) and which values the different expertise that different kinds of people bring to the table; the culture around American Idol is probably disproportionately female and women are clearly a primary target audience for that series; the culture around The Matrix is probably classically masculine but does include some women; the Star Wars chapter talks explicitly about the gender divide between male filmmakers and female vidders but it says less about the fact that Star Wars Galaxies attracted a higher than average number of women into a multiplayer game world; and of course, the Harry Potter chapter is very much about the traditional world of female fan writing, although one hat now includes a higher number of male participants than a decade ago. Each of these chapters, then, represents an interesting case study of the different kinds of gender balances which emerge within different kinds of fan communities and activities. I don't think we can reduce this simply to women having to adopt masculine norms in order to participate in these more public fan cultures, though I wouldn't argue that some of this does occur. So, as aca-fen, we probably need to spend more time thinking about which spaces within fan culture do remain gender segregated at the present time and why or for that matter, what has allowed some forms of fan activity to achieve a greater degree of gender balance.

And, yes, as we suggested last week, we need to closely examine what television is providing us as fans and whether its fantasies really do align with our own. We need to be attentive to those aspects of fan culture which prove challenging for the media producers to assimilate. Slash usually gets cited as a prime example here, but keep in mind that Joss Whedon found a way to introduce a queer relationship for Willow within Buffy, that Xena was able to include more and more "subtext" scenes which winked at their slash viewers, or that a growing number of American television series do now include explicitly gay characters, so I don't think it is impossible to imagine slash being incorporated even more into the explicit content of the series.

We can argue that commercial producers are adopting the wrong premises or deploying the wrong models as they court female consumers, but we have to read such projects as the new games focused on Desperate Housewives or the virtual world for Laguna Beach as projects which were explicitly launched with the goal of extending the experience of female fans. We also might read projects, such as blogs and journals in character (from Dawson's Desktop to Hiro's blog) or the comics produced around Heroes, to be attempts to expand back-story and character motivations, precisely the kinds of changes in narrative structures that female fans would have been begging for a decade plus ago.

Let's be clear: I am not arguing that there aren't gender issues to be studied in and between fan cultures, simply that we need to adopt more complicated terms for talking about them than the tools we had when fan studies first emerged. I am hoping that the current generation of fan theorists (inside and outside the academy) can lead the way towards a more sophisticated account of the role gender plays in the mainstreaming of fan culture. I am sure we will all be talking about this issue more here in the future.

Games as National Culture: An Interview With Chris Kohler (Part Two)

On Friday, I ran the first part of a two part interview with Chris Kohler, author of Power Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life and now the editor of Wired's games blog Game|Life. I hope by now I have convinced you that this book is worth a read. Kohler has been very generous with his time and his thoughts responding to my question in the midst of an explosion of new stories about the launch of the new platforms and their impact on game culture. And his answers have been consistently illuminating about the relationship between the Japanese games industry and the American marketplace. Without further fanfare, let's get into the conversation: You quote game designer Keiichi Yano as saying "video games were the big can opener" which allowed other Japanese cultural materials to enter the American market. Explain. What connection do you see between the popularity of Japanese games and the growth of anime and manga in the American market? Why do you think Americans were receptive to Japanese games at a time when they seemed closed to other Japanese media content?

People love that quote. Yano-san is almost as good as coming up with awesome soundbites as he is at designing addictive games.

Let's look at the availability of Japanese cultural materials in the US in the early eighties. It wasn't much. Frederick Schodt had just published his book Manga! Manga!, detailing the immensity of the comics culture in Japan at the time, but if you read that book it only serves to illustrate just how little impact Japanese comics were at that point making on the American comic market -- Schodt actually had to translate and print some examples of manga at the back of his book just so his readers could actually experience what he was talking about.

In 1984, Hayao Miyazaki's first original feature film Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind hit it big at the Japanese box office, and Akira Toriyama, already known for his comedy manga Dr. Slump, started the first Dragon Ball series. Both of these men would eventually become internationally celebrated, but at the time that it was actually created, their work was completely unknown outside Japan. Of course, some hardcore comics fans followed the Japanese scene, but it wasn't mainstream. Same with film; the deeply involved fans knew of Kurosawa et al, but that was where it ended.

But by 1984, there were Japanese cultural products that had made huge inroads into worldwide markets. Space Invaders. Pac-Man. Donkey Kong. Many of the most popular, biggest-grossing arcade games of the "golden age" were from Japanese designers. This is not to say that there were not plenty of great American arcade games at the time as well. Indeed, had the video game industry gone entirely smoothly for America it is probable that things would have developed quite differently.

But what actually happened was that the bottom fell out of the American game market in 1984. Atari, under new management, scrapped all of its video game products. Most smaller game developers went out of business altogether. Retailers stopped buying games because they'd been so badly burned when the bubble burst. And that was that.

Until a year later, when Nintendo decided that the game console they were currently selling by the truckload in Japan, called Famicom, could succeed in the US if they pushed hard enough. Long story short, buoyed by games like Miyamoto's Super Mario Bros., it did. Suddenly, there was a huge demand for video games again in the US -- and practically no American game development houses ready to provide content. In came Nintendo's Japanese licensees like Konami, Capcom, and Namco, all ready to start selling their games in the US.

Thanks to the better visuals of the NES, Japanese games were beginning to look and sound (and read, in the case of story-based games) more like manga and anime. Some were even based directly off of anime and manga, even if the connection couldn't have been made clear to the US audience (a Dragon Ball game was released for the NES, called Dragon Power, long before the show hit US airwaves). And sometimes the games had a very strong resemblance to anime -- look at the detailed cinematic scenes in games like Ninja Gaiden.

Even when the games themselves didn't reflect it, millions of American kids were being exposed to Japanese cartoon styles through the peripheral material such as instruction manuals, Nintendo Power magazine, and strategy guides, most of which used the original Japanese artwork and story translations throughout. Sometimes they actually printed manga in the magazine, too, which no doubt was the first exposure to the form for literally millions of American kids.

So when manga and anime did start making their way to the US in translation beginning around the early nineties, the Nintendo generation found something familiar about the style and the stories.

Cultural critic Koichi Iwabuchi uses the term, "de-odorization" to describe the ways that distinctly Japanese qualities get filtered out as cultural goods enter the western market. Yet, in recent years, the Japanese quality of these games has been foregrounded by marketing and actively embraced by gamers. What factors have contributed to these changes?

When Power-Up was published I couldn't help feel like my timing was incredibly awful. When I started work on the thesis that would become the book, Japanese games were still unquestionably the best in the world. By the time it was published the situation was very different -- Western development houses had finally gotten their acts together, on the whole, and were producing games of unimpeachable quality. Games that were selling very strongly here in the US.

But two years later, in the fullness of time, it seems to me that... well, that my timing was still bad, but for a different reason. Because as you note we're now seeing "Japaneseness" being used to sell games. And not only games: publishers of manga don't really need to go through great lengths anymore to "Americanize" their products, in part because US retailers are becoming more "Japanized," willing and able to stock thousands of novel-sized paperback anthologies of manga, and pack their shelves to bursting with DVD box sets.

Manga readers have gotten used to reading from right to left, in the Japanese fashion, so there's not even a need to "flip" the artwork anymore. In fact, in most cases they don't even retouch the sound effects; they leave them in Japanese. What's going on here is that the consumers are so much more educated about the product and specific in what they want that the publishers no longer have to tweak the product and push it to the mainstream.

Similarly, it's no longer a surprise that there are innovative, quirky, funny games coming from Japan. In fact, there are so many gamers that expect this now that labeling your game as a quirky funny Japanese title can be an excellent marketing tactic. There's an audience out there looking for the next Japanese cult hit (a "cult" in name only at this point, comprised as it is of millions of vocal, active, obsessed fans with lots of disposable income).

Just recently, Nippon Ichi Software, a Japanese publisher of role-playing and strategy games that are drenched in manga-styled characters and outrageous, off-the-wall stories, opened an American branch. Their business plan hinges entirely on selling the "Japaneseness" of their products, and they're doing quite well at it.

At one time, the most distinctly Japanese games never made it into the American market. What can you tell us about the criteria which shape the import of Japanese games into the west? What game genres still remain outside our market?

As I mentioned earlier, these criteria are constantly changing. Generally, things are moving in a more expansive direction. At one time, role-playing games in general were considered to be almost completely unsuitable for the US market. Now, I wouldn't be surprised to find that some of them had sold more copies in the US than in Japan.

I can certainly name plenty of genres that would not currently be considered suitable for the US market. But these days, you'd probably be able to find an exception for every single case. Probably the most notorious genre would be what are usually referred to here as "dating games". In Japan the fans would call them ren'ai or "romance" games while detractors would label them "gal-get games." They're predominantly two-dimensional games where you have your pick of a selection of women and attempt to say and do the right things to fall in love with one of them.

Mostly, these are for men, but there are also some for women -- some of which feature female protagonists, and some of which are gay male romance stories. They range from innocent high school puppy love stories to the explicitly pornographic.

But if you know where to look, you can find these games in English at places like jlist.com. So it wouldn't be entirely correct to say that these games simply aren't available. It's true that they are only available for personal computers, and not for standalone TV game consoles like PlayStation 2, but I wouldn't bet money that they won't eventually be.

In fact, it is tough to put my finger on any one genre that has made zero penetration in the US. There are plenty of games in Japan that simulate horse racing. Not the experience of being a jockey. I mean the experience of betting on horse racing. And yet, Sega has one of those machines available to US arcade owners (although I'm not sure how many are biting).

Games based on pachinko machines are big sellers in Japan. Mostly this is because pachinko is essentially the closest thing the country has to legalized gambling, but because it's a game of skill, you can in fact learn to beat the machines. So these games -- and the elaborate, lifesized controllers that go along with them -- are invaluable, because they teach you to play the game without risking any money.

So maybe that's the one genre that absolutely, one hundred percent wouldn't fly here. (And now that I've said that, expect a pachinko game to be released for Nintendo DS within a year.)

I have to ask you about Katamari Damacy, a game which came out after the completion of your book. Does it represent another landmark in the history of the western world's relationship to Japanese games? What other recent Japanese games would command attention in an updated edition of your book?

Yes, I think that Katamari Damacy was a real wake-the-hell-up point for the American game industry. Especially for Namco (now Bandai Namco), the publisher. Here's my personal Katamari story. A friend of mine, a voracious import gamer, had gotten the game after its Japanese release and was so astounded by it that I was convinced to get it myself. I was in love.

So along comes the 2004 Electronics Entertainment Expo, and Namco's booth. At that point, although they were in part playing to their strengths as a Japanese publisher with games like Taiko Drum Master and the anime-styled RPG Tales of Symphonia, they were also attempting to expand out with titles developed in the US, aimed at mainstream American audiences. Most prominently, these included the shooter Dead to Rights II (terrible) and the urban racing game Street Racing Syndicate (garbage).

Meanwhile, at the back corner of their booth, hidden, unannounced, untranslated, unpromoted except for a black-and-white sign that looked as if someone had made it using a word processor earlier that morning, was Katamari Damacy. And boy howdy if there wasn't a huge line stretching out away from the tiny cluster of demo machines.

So when I went back into the conference room to discuss what I'd just seen with Namco's media relations representatives, I said, "To be honest, the best thing you guys have right now is Katamari Damacy." And they got this look of half-disbelief on their faces, and said, "Yeah... we... we think that one's going to do really well," but in a tone of voice that suggested that they were only just coming to grips with this realization. The game shipped that fall, with a bare minimum of marketing dollars, and sold out instantly. I think as a series Katamari has sold more units internationally than domestically.

What other games would merit inclusion in a revised Power-Up? Certainly I would tell the story of Ouendan and Elite Beat Agents, for the reasons described earlier and also as a lesson in making your game hardware region-free. One of the main reasons that Ouendan took off like it did in foreign markets is because any Nintendo DS system can play any game, regardless of the country in which it was released. This has not historically been the case with game systems, which are usually locked to the region in which they are sold.

In fact, I think it was a huge mistake by Nintendo to make the new Wii system region-locked. They say that they did it because television standards differ between Europe and the US, but that doesn't explain why the US and Japan -- both on NTSC standard -- aren't considered to be one "region" under that logic.

This is a mistake on their part because Wii, much like DS, will no doubt play host to a variety of unique, original, innovative Japanese games. And the best way to tell whether these games would work in the US is to allow American import game players, who are usually very vocal and influential opinion-makers, easy access to the games.

On that note, I'd probably also use a new version of the book to complain about even more ways that video games are still treated as a second-class medium -- even by the very publishers of those games! Any fan of Kurosawa would be absolutely disgusted if Criterion's re-release of Seven Samurai were only issued with an English audio track. Luckily, Criterion would never think of doing such a thing. Why, then, does Final Fantasy XII not get the same respect?

If it's the case that there's just not enough room on the DVD to hold both language tracks, then there's not much to be done about that. But PlayStation 3's Blu-Ray discs will hold up to 50 gigabytes of data; more than enough for dual language options on anything and everything that comes from Japan. So if Final Fantasy XIII is released without the original language track, gamers can raise a very legitimate complaint.

What do you see as the most important lessons the American games industry learned from its Japanese competitors? What did Japanese game companies learn from their American counterparts?

We're back to my awful timing. When I started researching the book the thought pattern among people serious about game design was that Japanese games were simply better made, on the whole, than Western ones. Certainly, the editors of the popular and authoritative magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly were on my side. In their January 2002 issue they voted for their top 100 games of all time. 93 of the games on that list were made in Japan.

But now the tide has changed. If EGM's editors were to do another Top 100 list, it would be very different. What American developers learned, on the whole, was the value of taking their time. Well, actually it wasn't the developers who learned it so much as game publishers. Miyamoto's personal genius meant a lot, but it's just as important that he was given what would have been considered a luxurious amount of time to create his games. Meanwhile, American publishers seemed on the whole to be concerned with securing a hot product license, then getting the game out the door on as short a schedule as humanly possible.

I think at this point everyone sees the benefit of giving developers the time and money that they need to really polish up a game and make it as good as it can be. Sadly, it still doesn't happen in all cases. And American publishers still seem amazingly risk-averse; if a game proposal doesn't involve something immediately marketable they don't want to hear about it, in most cases. So although America is getting much better at making quality games that Americans love, Japan is still the innovation leader.

Which is funny, as it's the reverse of what has historically been true about America and Japan in terms of technology; typically it's generalized that American pioneering spirit fosters invention whereas Japan's diligent work ethic and obsession with miniaturization leads them to be particularly skilled at improving the designs of existing things (see: radio, television, video game hardware). Whereas with video games it is sometimes the other way around. One of this holiday season's biggest games in the US is Guitar Hero. Gameplay-wise, it's nearly identical to a Japanese game called Guitar Freaks, but with a few refinements that make it more fun.

Who deserves more praise: the innovators, or the ones who put on the polish that made it more palatable? It's a question we'll continue to wrestle with as this amazing medium continues to develop.