Although this initially started out as a page on ARGs (alternate reality games), it has expanded out to cover transmedia as well. The term transmedia is loaded with meaning and quick contentious will many people as it has become a buzz word in a lot of industries. Basically, I’ll define it as the presentation of narrative across many different media types. This is more about how the affordances of the media can be used to present narrative than how it can be used for marketing. There is now doubt that marketing is driving a lot of the hype around the concept of transmedia but despite this, there are a lot of interesting things going on in the space.
ARGs
Alternative reality gaming is a new perspective on narrative that takes a story and divides it into layers of media. Some of these layers look familiar as video, audio and text. Some of them look different, wrapped up and hidden in puzzles and technology that force the reader to actively engage in the dialogue of the story. Rather than laying back and watching the story unfold, these narratives require the participant to lean forward and become part of that narrative. All of these elements are created on the stage of a self contained world that is constructed to overlap with the real world.
An ARG begins with the discovery of rabbit holes. The goal of a rabbit hole is to engage the curiosity of the participant and there are often many different rabbit holes that can draw them into the story. Rabbit holes can come in the form of websites, digital files, live actors, phone calls or physical media that is released to a community.
Once the story has begun, it is an ongoing interplay between the participants and the puppet-master. The puppet-master is a role taken by the person, or persons, controlling the entire ARG. They feed out information and monitor the participants to ensure that the story is unraveling in an engaging and comprehensible manner.
As the puppet-master releases elements of the story to the community, the pieces of the story are interpreted and assembled in forums and discussion groups. The puppet-master carefully watches these forums, looking for directions in the narrative that can be tweaked, even adding in new storylines that may enrich the experience. As the ARG develops they actively try to blur the line between fiction and reality. They open up a dialogue between the story world and the real world, offering an opportunity for one to impact the other.
Roles
There is a lot of ambiguity about the roles or job titles in Transmedia. Considering how new Transmedia is in the entertainment, art, marketing and advertising world there aren’t going to be a lot of traditional org charts. These are some perspectives on how those roles might be defined.
