In thinking about how Tron works as Transmedia, I wonder if part of the deflation is because we’ve over-hyped the term “transmedia”. Transmedia isn’t instant success. It isn’t “building another Star Wars or Marvel” and if it is, it’s not doing that in the sense of what a casual viewer thinks of as “Star Wars” or “Marvel”. 

In fact, I think there’s a couple good lessons to poke around in here. The truth is that understanding where Tron: Legacy fits into Tron as transmedia requires us to not only get the big picture, but also the small picture.

So let’s take a look at what it’s really analogous to: The Star Wars Expanded Universe… which is to say, Star Wars novels.

If you haven’t read a Star Wars novel, I suggest you pick one up now so you know what you’re really getting yourself into. Sure, they sell a lot of books - they’ve been averaging ten new titles a year for the last few years. But these are not epic stories, and in some cases, they’re kinda terribly written. If you’ve ever seen a Star Wars novel-reading fan knock a Twilight book… well, let’s just say that in general, those guys shouldn’t be calling to much attention to themselves.

The allure of Star Wars novels is that they illuminate bits and pieces of backstory, adding to a fan’s encyclopedia knowledge of the characters. It’s akin to the satisfaction of reading someone’s diary to understand history more accurately, and it’s not really for everyone. However, good or bad, this does two things: it sets the stage for future films, and the facts contained in the story slip into the hive mind of the fandom through the communication of other fans. If you’re a Star Wars fan who has only seen the films (but participates in the community), you still probably have an idea of who Starkiller is from fans who read the novels or played the video games. 

Tron: Legacy’s position as a film is to set the stage for other films, which is why the story can’t be an epic. It may well have worked better as a book - and quite frankly ten books as good as Tron: Legacy would probably have done a better job of driving demand for a film with less risk involved (but then of course the challenge would be getting the audience up to speed on those books before a film). But it doesn’t make it a bad story or not a story at all. It’s just a thinner story; well-told but lacking in character development. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Transmedia is about telling the story well, not limiting yourself to the epic.

Just got back from Tron: Legacy, and the movie is a well-told chase story that shines a flashlight on the crevices of a storyworld. It’s pretty terrific, and in terms of launching a franchise (which this movie specifically does, and the original did not), it’s extremely well-crafted and holds its ambition firmly in check, which is smart considering they’re familiarizing the majority of the audience with the rules of the world.

Having seen the film, I would definitely watch a sequel. Disney, Kosinki, and Gomez accomplished everything they set out to do with this film….

Well… everything except market the film in a way that prepared the core audience to see it. And by core audience, I’m counting not only actual fans of the original film, but mostly a lot of people (and you know who you are) who went to see the movie primarily because it was about the kind of things they like, and targeting them demographically. The movie “hailed” you, to borrow a little bit from Lacan, but the marketing failed to understand that hailing is the result of meconnaissance (misrecognition), and that once hailed, it has to build a new relationship with you based on reality, not on mystery and allure.

As far as the marketing was concerned, it performed the correct ritual to get butts in seats; the dance of the seven veils went okay and you’re responding as anticipated. Thing is though, you don’t, generally speaking, fall in love with a hooker. It’s meant to be wham bam thank you ma’am. To offer and deliver no strings attached satisfaction. And to discover, once you’ve gone back to your room, that you don’t have a hooker at all, but a real person - a terrific person - a person you’d very much enjoy taking for a cup of coffee in other circumstances…. that requires a complete adjustment. And not everyone is going to adjust quickly enough to appreciate it or respond optimally. Most of us go with our gut, which is to be let down and feel a little bit used or betrayed. Marketing, quite frankly, is generally not good at anticipating emotional attachment or understanding how or why it works.

But I think Tron can still recover from the negativity as a franchise, especially as it looks like its going to do at least passably well at the box office. So, I advise people to go back and see the film again - appreciate what it is, and not what the marketing campaign tried to make it out to be, and it’ll be like watching an entirely different movie. 

And hopefully, we (and Tron) can take a few lessons away from this about marketing fan-driven movies:

1) Be human - you can’t fear familiarity or act like mystery is magical. Don’t shut down the elements that people connect with emotionally in a marketing campaign because you’re trying to surprise them. Keep the actual twist a secret if there is one. Don’t keep things that aren’t twists secret for the sake of acting like it’s a twist. 

2) If you actually have a pretty tight plot, don’t let your marketing campaign rely primarily on visuals. If you don’t believe there’s a story, very few other people will.

3) Enable spontaneous meaning production. The Tron campaign shut down a lot of the behavior paths that fans traditionally take with regards to a loved sequel, and much of that had to do with a desire to reveal the mythology in the film or video game or graphic novel, which came out so late in the campaign that it destroyed the ability of its paratext to assimilate into the public consciousness. The campaign had a fairly unrealistic perception of how information travels, and that made it difficult for the genuine relationship that the filmmakers were trying to build with the fans to actually come to fruition.

Crossing my fingers for the rest of the weekend… :)

I have a deep suspicion that Kristeva’s semiotic is the flip side of Barthes’ hermeneutic code- while we use hermeneutic codes to analyze and measure what is happening in a transmedia story - to identify the narrative threads leading from medium to medium - we use the Kristevian semiotic (by which I mean the non-symbolic) as part of the practice of creating hermeneutic codes. Or at least, we should.

Why? Because if we symbolize the answer to the question rather than indicating its presence semiotically, we have effectively abbreviated it and contained it within the existing narrative.

And I think there’s a fundamental difference in our human connection to the encyclopedia recreated from abbreviation and the narrative springing from questions.

If you’re interested in transmedia, you’re probably at least peripherally interested in how Marvel’s decided to create the storyworld for the films coming out of Marvel Studios, and its associated 9,000 characters.

BUT. If you’re concerned with the question of structuring a transmedia property, it might be even more useful to look back at Transmedia’s nearest literary cousin… La comedie humaine, by Honore de Balzac, consisting of 95 interwoven novels/novellas, plus another 48 unfinished works (some of which exist only as titles). If you’re looking for a story that has over 2,000 characters, written over a period of 20 years, Balzac’s your guy.

I’m going to be investigating the structure further in coming posts.

This phrase is infamous in Hollywood: “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.”

The punchline’s outdated, but the sentiment isn’t - everyone hates an entertainer with a message. No one thinks actors should get involved in politics (unless they’re Reagan and you’re a Republican).

I hate message movies, myself, so I sympathize. I have been known to throw candy at the screen. It’s so clunky and ham-fisted that the artist ends up preaching to the choir, which doesn’t really achieve what they’re looking for.

Which doesn’t mean that sending a message can’t be done. It just has to be done right. 

I’m thinking about it now because there’s the possibility I’ll be working on a project with a message - where success could well be measured by social change. 

My idea on messages in general is that you should never position a message as the logical conclusion of other information. It’s strikingly ineffective. The message should always be in the premise, because most people will attempt to argue the conclusion. If your message is in the premise, most people will unwittingly accept the premise in order to argue against the conclusion. It takes a well-trained philosopher to argue a premise - there aren’t generally so many of them hanging around that they’ll bother with you, and if you should happen to be so unlucky, there’s always the general dislike of the well-educated to fall back upon.

Since I touched on this the other day, I figured it’s only fair to run through a quick definition (at least the one I use and vigorously defend in meeting all other transmedia types).

My view of transmedia is that it’s a way of identifying a specific style of narrative construction. To borrow from Geoffrey Long, good transmedia both raises questions and answers questions raised by other stories in that storyworld. It’s porous. There are bits and pieces extending outward and colliding into each other to create new narratives (though another narrative doesn’t have to be present for it to “always already” BE transmedia).

I also think that there are multiple entry points, that transmedia must be nonlinear in its story collection, to really qualify. This, to me, is the difference between transmedia and serial media.

So - it gets really complicated in playing around with whether an ARG is transmedia. Here’s my convoluted answer. An ARG can be transmedia, but doesn’t qualify merely based on its use of multiple platforms. It also has to have a story that reaches outwards from itself. So, an ARG can be transmedia in the same sense that a novel can be.

Of course, some people, when they say ARG, only mean alternate reality spread across multiple platforms, which, if they’re all telling different stories, is transmedia.

I tend to insist on the importance of containment - a transmedia element is the length, depth, and breadth of a single story, whether that’s an ARG or a website or a TV show. If you have to go hunting because you’re unsatisfied with the story - it’s not yet concluded - rather than because you’re engaged with the world, I tend to think of that as only a small part of one transmedia element.

It was raining slightly today, and I was thinking about what it means to sense another human behind an artistic work.  It’s strange. It’s something that I know comes across in my work (when I’m not railroaded by committee), but it’s difficult to point to its lack or failure and construct an explanation of language failure. But we can definitely ALL sense it! I would challenge almost anyone to take something akin to a Turing test on Twitter - see which feeds are defined as either “not really that person” or “marketing spam” or “run by committee” - all of which are ways of saying there’s no humanity in them - and I would bet that another person would identify them in the same way. There’s something a bit off in how the language is put together, it feels flat, or distant, or uncaring, even when it attempts to feel intimate, close, and to possess depth. Strange how it fails to work.

Especially when humanity creates a better response rate. Humanity is a language distinction that we all read as valuable. It’s a nearly effortless remaking of a social media campaign, to get it to read as “human” rather than machine.

It occurred to me that this all comes down to that ever-popular theoretical literature topic of debate: play. Play is what we’ve named this sense that something else is human. Play is a performative activity. We can be human and fail to exhibit play, but it’s rare to find play in non-human objects, except those that were created by humans and designed for play. One can pick up a stick and create play that resides in it, but it doesn’t occur until first ideated by a human.

I view working with play to be similar to a row of children with puddles during a rainstorm. There are those that try not to get wet, who guard their puddle, who make mud pies, who watch insects get swept away, who stick their fingers into the puddle to see how dirty it is. And then there’s my people, the type that pull on their boots and splash through everyone elses’ puddles until we’re all wet and muddy, hooting and hollering, determined to splash until there’s no water left. I guess you could say that my working identification of play as a signifier of humanity is the idea that everyone can sense play because the language gets all over them. Like mud.

If I were asked for some simple test by which we might hope to know a

work of art when we saw one I should suggest something like this:

EVERY WORK OF ART SHOWS THAT IT WAS MADE BY A HUMAN BEING FOR A HUMAN BEING. - W. R. Lethaby

To successfully execute transmedia stories, we have to understand

transmedia as a movement that consists of both a collection of mediums

through which stories are told as well as a design aesthetic.  Both

are equally important in creating stories that truly resonate with the

audience, and to execute the collection without the aesthetic

discredits the entire movement.

Transmedia is, at its core, a response to the standardization of

franchise entertainment products in a variety of fields. Rather than

emerging organically from the original story-world, they’re churned

out with poor attention to quality and to the truth of the overarching

narrative. We should face reality: convergence culture hasn’t emerged

simply because we interact with culture through a number of devices.

It has emerged because IP owners have discovered it’s easier and

extremely lucrative to sell a single story/world across multiple

mediums than it is to sell multiple stories through multiple mediums.

The emergent transmedia movement is a reaction to the perception that

they’re executing this concept poorly and without any semblance of

method or true understanding. If we look closely at transmedia

aesthetics, they’re strikingly similar to the aesthetics displayed by

the Arts and Crafts movement, and deeply related to the same social

machinery - which, not uncoincidentally, are designed to promote both

quality control and a healthy craftsman/artist class.

To sum the Arts and Crafts movement’s basic principles, it was a style

of holistic thinking that focused on quality materials, portrayed

truth and a unity with nature, and considered ornamentation to be less

important than solid, honest construction.  Looking at how it was

applied to architecture, particularly in America, we see that most

frequently, a design firm would design a house, as well as all of the

furniture and implements inside the house, which were then executed by

skilled craftsmen.

To break down this analogy alone, we see a similar structure in the

transmedia world, in which a transmedia producer designs a storyworld

as well as the narratives contained wherein, which are then executed

by skilled filmmakers, video game designers, authors, etc. It is their

honest labor and desire to impart truth that lends transmedia its

power. Inauthentic portrayals are rarely met with success, or even

critical applause.

The social machinery that went along with this Arts and Crafts

aesthetic was part and parcel with its ability to deliver well-made

goods: philosophically, practitioners of the movement considered it a

bad policy to allow “bidding” for craftwork, leading to an inferior

and exponentially less valuable execution. Instead, they considered

prices to be set and hired the best craftsman available, rationalizing

that this would create a system in which good craftsmen are always in

demand, while poor craftsmen are forced to improve or find another

line of work, as opposed to a bidding system in which the worst

craftsman was able to offer work at a significantly lower fee.

Our instinctive objection to this borderline socialist concept is that

to pay more than one has to creates a system similar to England’s

bourgeois experience of the Arts and Crafts movement, in which only

the wealthy are able to afford these products. But in the digital age,

entertainment reproduction costs are so small they’re nearly

non-existent. Craftsmen that produce ideas - or materials that can be

transmitted as a mere series of ones and zeroes - are exponentially

valuable to a production leveraged by a globalized corporation. It’s

common sense that it is cheaper to pay for the best than to suffer the

misconstruction of a poor craftsman. (And this, let me suggest in a

quick aside, means that transmedia may yet leverage America’s last

strong suit - imagination and imaginary products - as a tremendous

amount of craftspeople are developed, to recover the middle class

without requiring apparatus external to ordinary capitalism.)

Thus we circle back to the fundamental problem of identifying the

transmedia aesthetic. What is it? How does it smell… taste… sound?

Again, we find the answer by looking at its nearest relative, the Arts

and Crafts movement. First and foremost in transmedia, we should

always find a preoccupation with portraying truth.  It is not content

with mere sketches of humanity or pure fantasy; transmedia stories

emerge continually seeking to shed further light and depth on our

human condition, to make characters seem more true and real, even when

based on imaginary events or circumstances. To cite an example of art

criticism by John Ruskin, who provided much of the philosophical

inspiration of the Arts and Crafts movement, clouds should be

presented as real clouds might exist in that landscape at that time,

not stolen from another time or place or created in such a way as

could transparently never exist.

Secondly, transmedia thinks holistically. It does not develop

episodically or serially, but organically through the use of

hermeneutic codes that suggest the beyond without revealing it.

Thirdly, it places a premium on human connection; stories are meant to

work like a Vulcan mind meld in that they feel created by an actual

human being and feel meant to be consumed by an actual human being,

not an illusory one.

Lastly, the product created should feel solid, honest, and high

quality in every execution. There is no use creating a well-made film

if the marketing campaign is poor, or in creating a factory standard

film in the same storyworld as an excellent video game.

It is in observing the transmedia aesthetic that the recent demand for

transmedia makes the most sense; these are the most basic elements of

the entertainment that has touched us over the years - and yet these

are the elements that are lost when we begin to think of our

entertainment as a factory process that only requires us each to

repeat a small, insignificant movement without requiring our

understanding or care of the overall process.

One of the ideas that we frequently find people rejecting is the idea that one can be more or less of a fan over time. If we look at how fandom actually works, however, we discover that it is in fact an extremely fluid designation, and that placing a stranglehold on content has consequences for fans… and those consequences roughly differ based on how involved a fan is before they lose steady access to content.

Individual fans are always either becoming stronger, more active fans, or they’re losing interest. There’s no balanced point of stasis at which they always remain. It’s possible for them to go back and forth to some extent, but once a certain line is crossed, an individual fan doesn’t return.

This can have major repercussions if it’s a trend that is echoed by a large number of individual fans, particularly those who are most active.

Pathological

These fans have developed a severe information addiction regarding the franchise. They slowly lose the ability to express themselves intelligently, and give themselves over to the fandom completely. They annoy other fans tremendously and the public finds them worthy of mockery.

Nazi

These fans refuse to allow for difference of opinion on the franchise, in or out of the fandom. They argue rabidly and without feeling obliged to make sense or moderate their extremism. They scare fans and non-fans alike.

Hater

A Hater feels the need to relentlessly call fans stupid on the basis of the source material’s lack of critical acclaim.

Anti-Fan

An Anti-Fan feels the need to subvert fan communities and go to war over certain fan behaviors and the details of the canon. Contrary to a Hater, an Anti-fan knows the fandom is a fair amount of detail, and will dissect “what’s wrong with” the fandom at great length, some going as far as to create anti-fan encyclopedias.

“In It For the Lulz”

These people can be fans or anti-fans, but their primary goal is to mock the fandom. They derive great joy from a good joke or prank, and even more from obscenely photoshopped animated gifs.

Fan Artists

Most fan artists specialize in a certain field: original art, tracings, original videos, parodies, mashups, photo montages, or photo manips. They sometimes coincide with tributists or vendors, in which case their art type is more unusual.  Fan artists most often operate in the “gift economy,” and their art is presented as a gift for a fan community to respond to.

Roleplayer

A role-player dedicates their time to publically socializing as a particular character.

Cosplayer

A cosplayer makes and wears character costumes, most often to conventions or cosplay-related events.  They may stay in character, simply be dressed up, or project an alt-version of the character.

LARPer

A Live Action Role Player both dresses in costume and acts out events with other LARPers. They are generally not positioned as characters in a franchise (and many are unassociated with any franchise at all), but they sometimes set their events in a franchise world or a world inspired by a franchise.

Religious Fans

These fans create a “religion” surrounding the object of their fandom, and will wage a “holy war” against anyone who defiles it. They often have set behaviors, and catalogue a philosophy based on the franchise. It has its roots in role-playing, but “religious fans” are playing as themselves simply in the world of the franchise.

True Fans

A “True Fan” feels that the only acceptable way of expressing their loyalty is to purchase, view, or participate in every canon extension of a franchise. This can lead them to be angry or cynical when the number of products spirals out of control, because they can’t fully express themselves.  It can also create a demand for small runs of super-premium products and groups of products in consumable sizes.

Screamers

Screamers are fans who feel no shame in violating the distance between themselves and the object of their fandom. While on the one hand, they tend to consume products that are body-focused (what they can touch on a regular basis), they also will travel to filming locations (during and after the filming). And yes, they tend to scream in the presence of the actors.

Tributist

Tributists make or buy products in homage to the franchise. The items they buy aren’t necessarily official or even more than marginally related. They also don’t care about the ultimate possession of what they buy – tributists are frequently behind fan campaigns to send products through the mail in support of a beloved show. When tributists make products, they may be for personal use, but since their process can verge on obsessive, they frequently create a mass quantity and sell them as well. The key difference from a normal vendor is their handmade quality and the fact that their passion for the franchise tends to be filtered through their already-existing artistic skills.

Campers

These fans seek to extend the fan community into a real world experience, and camp out before significant events in order to attend. This kind of ad hoc community generally comes together infrequently, but is frequently the “face” of a particular fandom to mainstream media.

Traveler

Travelers seek out original filming locations and settings in order to have the closest thing to a real world experience of the franchise.

Conventioneer

Fans found at conventions often have a wide variety of interests and participatory behaviors, but are more focused on casual collecting/achievement than campers. While campers are intent on a sole event and have relatively less entertainment, conventioneers tend to be over stimulated and sometimes overwhelmed.

Collector

Collectors are obsessive hoarders who have fetishized products to an extreme degree. This can be the result of a need to consume or realize every last drop of story, but it can also be the result of fan hierarchy and a need to signal their fandom as sufficiently vigorous.

Vendor

Vendors are an evolution of collectors.  At some point, their skill at collecting levels up, and they no longer consider every piece of merchandise to be necessary.  Becoming a vendor allows them to continue collecting, satisfying their need to compulsively buy products, but they no longer need to retain anything. Some vendors use their status as a method of limiting their permanent purchases to (as well as gaining access to) extremely rare items.

WRITERS

Blogger

A fan blogger serves as a tastemaker, hyper-aggregator, and interpreter for a large number of other fans in their section of the fan community. While they don’t define how fans respond, they do set the terms of their responses. A fan can either agree or disagree in conversation with a blogger; by framing a particular move or moment in a positive light, particularly when it might otherwise have gone unnoticed, a blogger tells fans what to care about if they’re going to care.

Rumor-Monger

A fan interested primarily in news and content from a particular franchise, without regard to its authenticity, impact, or worth, participates in fandom via the relish of the new. Their social value is determined through steady access to novelty, which they make a point of passing on while simultaneously using it as currency. These are the type of people that need to post “FIRST!”

Fan Community

A fan that primarily participates via discussion forums and by reading blogs and news articles is one element in a fan community. Fan communities generally require moderators to keep topics interesting and new content (provided either internally by the fandom or externally by the franchise) to remain active.

Cyber Rioter

These fans are the authenticity/fan control police. They prefer stories to be told the way they want them to be told, (whether that’s exactly as in the source material or avoiding what they consider to be problematic in the source material or simply giving less attention to characters they deem annoying) and they’re capable of garnering a lot of attention and influence if fed improperly.  They will mount cyber-campaigns against what they love if they feel it is being handled carelessly at any point.

Encyclopedist

These fans dedicate their time to reforming the story non-linearly, broken up by topic and character, for the purposes of educating their fellow fans and providing a resource for lively debate. They commonly serve as an easy entry point for new fans, and as a source of canon maintenance.

Shipper

These fans are emotionally invested in a certain relationship, and spend their time fighting other shippers who promote a different relationship and gathering “evidence” to share that supports their specific “read” of two characters/actors as in a relationship. They’re especially drawn to soap operatic plots that swing back and forth between together and broken up, as it perpetuates their need to define a relationship.

Fan Ficc’r

These fans write and read fan fiction.  They can be allied with a certain set of shippers by imagining the unseen details of a relationship, invested in fully realizing the world of the original story, or aspiring writers writing from prompts.

Slash Writer

These fans write a specific type of shipper-allied fiction, depicting two male characters in a romantic relationship.

This is a first draft, so I’m up for criticism and comments that will be helpful to the revision process.

Types of Fans – A Full Taxonomy

While no person is limited to only one role among the ones listed here (which really only scratch the surface of “types”), there are definitely certain behaviors and reactions involved in the performative of these various identities, and understanding that can change how we understand creating a strategic approach to communicating with fans.

CASUAL

Lite Fan

A Lite Fan likes a franchise, but doesn’t particularly concern themselves with the details. They are interested in casual consumption of the material, but segregate their fandom from their social life to some degree.

Geek

A geek is a kind of “social fan.” They consider various fandoms to be part of their social structure, necessitating at least a passing familiarity with each.  They pass along materials – particularly to more hardcore fans, but their main use for franchises is as objects of language and as “passcodes” indicating social acceptability.

Fanboy

Fanboys are characterized by a general interest in new content relating to various fandoms, with particular attention to franchises who are considered to be advancing storytelling, or are based on comics, or popular science fiction stories, as well as a general interest in both camp and the evolution of horror. Because their interests are so vast, there tends to be a reliance on tastemakers to hyper-aggregate content. Fanboys tend to be positive about films, even if they suspect they’ll be bad, and rationalize afterwards how they went wrong. For a fanboy, no franchise is so far gone that it can never be redeemed, though they view egregious violators with suspicion.

Fangirl

Fangirls are characterized by their primary experience of fandom as a social, rather than as a personal phenomenon. It’s rare to find a fangirl without a community or social support group that validates and celebrates a particular fandom (that may eventually lead to the discovery of new fandoms as a group).  As a result, food celebration is a largely fangirl activity (though not exclusive to female-only groups).  Because so many franchises are male-focused, fangirls also tend to be more critically thoughtful about the politics in stories. 

Today I’m obsessed with the idea of a taxonomy of fans.

See, you know, it seems like common sense to discuss fans in terms of types, ‘specially if you’re going to market to said fans. You know, basic stuff, like the differences between “fanboy” and “fan ficcer” or maybe “shipper”. They’re different people, they behave in different ways, they have different (sometimes overlapping) social circles, etc. On a micro-level, their language and initiation rituals are pretty different.

So it blows me away, time and time again, how people like to refer to “the fans” as one monolithic entity. It makes me crazier when they assume the fans will show up whether or not they’ve marketed the movie well (or even made a good movie). What works for one fan doesn’t work for another, and you’ve got to tease out a lot of different connections - which many fans will have different patterns of, especially if they fall into multiple types - to be really really effective.

This is the point at which people usually begin to tell me I’m too invested in fandom, or too obsessed with details, some version of “well, it doesn’t pay to pay attention”. These must be the same people that didn’t care if they got a D, so long as they passed.

Further, it’s probably important to understand the lifecycle of a fan from initial enthusiasm to burned-out cynicism, and how we can affect that lifecycle. Of course, sometimes I feel like I’m speaking to rainforest clear-cutters about the lifecycle of a new kind of frog.

Ooooo, too many people have asked me these kinds of questions in the last week. You can always tell, because I get moody. Anyways, back to work. I’m going to try to doodle some pics on taxonomy and life cycle. I’m pretty sure I can get away with posting the shitty things I draw before a designer makes a decent version. Maybe I’ll scan and post tomorrow.