by Dean Orion
I’ll be the first to admit that Balloon Odyssey is a pretty unusual narrative driven in a most unusual way, but like all the games in the Living Landscapes installation, it’s a remarkably satisfying experience, one that I’m proud to say has run every single day, 365 days a year, since it was installed on July 4, 2007.
Transmedia Storytelling
Before the proliferation of the Internet in the mid-1990s, entertainment properties pretty much stayed in their own neat little boxes. The only consistent crossover we saw were plays, novels, and other written materials turned into movies, and movies eventually migrating to television. But for well over a decade now, we’ve seen an explosion of two-way migration between all sorts of original properties, from comic books and graphic novels, to video games, to movies, to television, to the web. We’ve seen interactive marketing campaigns of all different types, using all different technologies, pitching all different kinds of products. And we’ve seen the emergence of casual online and mobile games that are not only available on both platforms, but are able to be viewed and played on each, within the course of the experience (for example, you can make a move in Words With Friends, either on your phone or on your computer through Facebook, and the game tracks your progress on both devices).
All this cross-pollination of creative content has also given birth to a new form of narrative called transmedia storytelling in which a fictional universe is created that allows for a story to be told across multiple mediums simultaneously.
What’s exciting about the transmedia movement is that stories are now being developed that are intended to be delivered across different mediums from the initial conception of the idea, not just as a way to take advantage of a secondary market. When you add to that the speed of technology advancement and the openness of younger generations to consume entertainment in new and different ways, it’s not hard to imagine a world in which these kinds of platforms could become extremely popular.
Recently a very forward-thinking company hired me to write an animated television pilot that would also lay the foundation for what I thought was a very smart transmedia strategy. The challenge was to write the pilot in the traditional way, using a four-act structure that allows the resulting twenty-two-minute episode to have multiple commercial breaks while having each act be somewhat self-contained so that it could potentially be viewed online as a five-minute webisode. In addition, each script had to contain at least one set piece that could serve as the framework for a casual online game. In other words, we had to create a story that could stand on its own, be broken into four stand-alone parts, and have at least one scene with a clearly exploitable gaming element. There would also be a social networking component built into the website, merchandising, sponsorship opportunities, and the potential to create a full-length feature film based on the property.
This strategy not only gave the producers the option of delivering the linear content either online or on television, it also carved out space for original stories to be delivered via interactive games, opening up the possibility of allowing the larger narrative to unfold and expand simultaneously across the mediums.
This new paradigm is one of the most exciting developments in entertainment to come along in many years, especially for writers with the interactive gene. Only time will tell how this kind of narrative will be received, and what formats will eventually take hold and break into the popular culture, but make no mistake, transmedia storytelling is coming soon to a cell phone, iPad, and computer near you!
Story as a Living Three-Dimensional Experience
Finally, I think it’s only appropriate to conclude our little adventure by sharing with you my own vision of a future storytelling medium that I think has very exciting potential. I like to call it:
Story as a Living Three-Dimensional Experience.
Using the advanced processing power we will begin to see in all the new devices in the next few years (computers, smartphones, tablets, and computerized televisions), I see us being able to create photorealistic worlds that can be navigated in much the same way you navigate a video game. But this isn’t a game I’m talking about. It’s a story you essentially step into and experience voyeuristically.
Imagine a live HD video feed that allows you to move through space as if you are the camera. You have the ability to go anywhere within this world—walk down the street, go to the park, go into retail stores, enter private offices, apartments, bedrooms, basements…anywhere. As you do, you encounter various characters playing out various scenes. You then have the ability to follow these characters and watch their stories unfold. In fact, you have the ability to experience every character and every location the world provides. When you return to certain locations at a later time, you see new beats of the story that you hadn’t seen before. All these beats build on one another, forming an interconnected narrative that is revealed scene by scene based on what you have previously experienced—a narrative that starts to make more and more sense the more you explore and the more time you spend in the world.
Instead of being a passive linear experience that you sit back and watch, you actively seek the story out and watch it unfold all around you by essentially living inside it. It’s an active, non-linear experience in which you choose to receive the various facets of the story in the order you want.
Creating such an experience would be similar to writing a television show with a large ensemble cast, where many storylines exist in parallel and intersect at various points along the overall arc of the larger narrative. And like television, these stories can continue in perpetuity, for as long as you (the creator) want them to. The difference is, once you launch this new type of “show,” you would not be restricted to writing episodes in self-contained thirty- or sixty-minute units. Instead, you would simply begin to add more scenes to whichever storylines you wish, whenever you wish, creating a living three-dimensional experience that continues to expand and grow in different directions.
The technological framework on which this system would be built would also allow you to track the parts of your world where your audience is spending the most time, as well as enable you to communicate with them directly. In this way, you and your writing staff could concentrate and expand upon the storylines where you’re getting the most enthusiastic response.
This is the kind of revolutionary storytelling that interactive technology gives us. Now it’s up to us, as writers, to take advantage of this monumental opportunity and create the defining entertainment mediums of the future.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fresh out of the wonderful academic cocoon of Bates College in 1986, Dean Orion began his career as a professional writer by crafting copy for a local ad agency in his native Long Island by day and hopping trains to The Lee Strasberg Creative Center in New York City, where his first play, Weekend In My Mind, was produced by night.
After moving to Los Angeles in 1988 to attend The American Film Institute, briefly working for CBS Productions, and successfully mounting another of his plays, A Comedy Of Eros at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, Dean soon discovered that the long and very eclectic winding road of his career was only just beginning.
With the sale of Maelstrom in 1995, an original graphical adventure game purchased by special effects company Digital Domain, Dean suddenly found himself telling stories in remarkably new ways. Since then he has written, designed, produced, and directed an extensive and wide array of interactive content for CD-ROM, DVD, online, and console games.
Dean’s interactive credits include such console titles as Van Helsing and Mission Impossible: Operation Surma; massively multiplayer online games, Guild Wars and Aion; Nintendo DS and Wii titles iCarly and The Penguins Of Madagascar; as well as numerous casual online games for Hollywood marketing campaigns, including such notable tent poles as The X-Files, Men In Black, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Mission To Mars, and Independence Day, just to name a few.
Managing this split personality between writing traditional linear and n
on-linear interactive content has never been easy, but Dean has always found a way to do both, writing freelance episodes of such television shows as The Invisible Man for Syfy, Thought Crimes for USA Network, and Jackie Chan Adventures for WB Kids. Recently, Dean wrote the American pilot for the internationally acclaimed animated television series Ben and Izzy for Rubicon Studios, and penned Newburgh and I Am An American Soldier, two short films for The National Museum of The United States Army.
Dean’s unique background has also led him into the world of themed entertainment, where he has worked for many years as a writer, show producer, and creative director for Walt Disney Imagineering. Among the high-profile projects that he has helped create for WDI are Virtual Jungle Cruise, which opened at the DisneyQuest arcade in Orlando, Florida, in 1998; Soarin’–Living Landscapes, a large-scale interactive gaming system that opened at Epcot Center in 2007; and The Magic Playfloor, an interactive floor installed on Disney Cruise Line’s new Dream and Fantasy cruise ships, which launched in 2011 and 2012, respectively.
A member of the Writers Guild of America, Dean has sat on the guild’s New Media Caucus steering committee and has been a featured speaker at several guild-sponsored events, including panels for the 2006 Game Developers Conference in San Jose, California, and the Writers Guild Foundation in 2008.
To contact Dean and learn more about The Writer Gene online community for writers please visit www.thewritergene.com.