Excerts from  Paper by Tom Abba on Hybrid Stories Examining the future of transmedia narrative

www.dcrc.org.uk/publications/hybrid stories

In my veiw this is an important essay identifying many of the issues within transmendial narrative. I will not attempt to capture its essnse in this blog , but I must say I will be returning to it again and agin as I push forward on my joureny into the dark heart of the transmedial narractive. . I have included a number of early excerts from the piece and the questions it has raised for me about my own SEER project.

In his review of Southland Tales (Kelly Germany/US/France 2006), The Guardian’s John Patterson argues that its ....really, in all of our minds these days narratives are not confined to the medium they were born in; they are part of the larger collage that we all construct from the fragments of everything we watch, read, hear and surf.

In an ARG, the narrative reality of these source storyworlds is taken as genuine, and website material and real-world interactions combine with filmed media to produce a form that responds to player interaction,
becoming, when employed successfully, both an adjunct to the original and a multimedia narrative experience in its own right.

Nicknamed The Beast by its creators, the first recognisable ARG was conceived as a promotional tool for A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. It drew upward of 10,000 players from around the world into a mystery set in the film’s fictional future. Websites presented the story, a participatory narrative comprised of scripted elements, email messages, video clips and puzzles.

Q. Am I being to narrow in the scope of the Seer!

While The Beast appears relatively immature by today’s standards, its technical elements forecast much of what followed in the field. Set fifty years afterthe events of Spielberg’s film, it presented a murder mystery within an sf setting,drawing on the tropes of film noir thrillers and other recognisable film forms in order to produce a consistent world environment. Players interacted with characters, emailing and telephoning remote locations and unknown addresses in order to uncover the truth of an unsolved, and unnoticed, murder. At the end of the game’s twelve-week run4 the players had discovered thirty websites central to the unfolding plotline, and had cracked puzzles and mysteries whose solutions required them to draw on knowledge as varied as binary software encryption and the tablature specific to lute music.

Q Should I be telling the story of an earlier SEER somewhere? Is the scope of this project beyond the bounds of an MA do I need to divide this work into slices , with the ultimate presentation of this project forming the heart of a PHD?

The next ARG tied to the release of a major movie was Metacortechs, which drew on the fictional universe of the Matrix trilogy and played out during October and November 2003......While the word-of-mouth power of Metacortechs was rooted in its players’ knowledge of the universe of The Matrix trilogy, its characters had no knowledge that their reality was a fiction and, indeed, were engaged in their first steps toward uncovering that knowledge. This positioning of the reader with regard to the narrative object is peculiar to an interactive, participatory form.

Q. This is the position of the characters in the SEER , therore by design and or accidnet I am following this accepted rules within Transmedial narrative.!

Q.Has the Seer like the Matrix become a decentralised narrative structure? is this another rule of transmedial narrative.

Are these narrative decisions that I have made by choice or does the medium demand them. Is it true of all transmedial narrative or is it simlpy true of transmedial narrative that is ARG!