How do you captivate and engage today’s audiences? It’s simple, use multiple platforms says award-winning transmedia writer, game designer and author, Andrea Phillips. If you cannot wait for the podcast her new book, A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling provides a fantastic introduction. 
Transmedia Storytelling is a story experience both for and with an audience that unfolds over several media channels. It is a hot topic that is hitting marketing, branding and entertainment in the last few years, and I think will be the basis for many of the training games of the future. Andrea is next week’s podcast guest, and this is an excerpt from the conversation.
Joe:
I tried to explain Transmedia Storytelling to a couple of people before the podcast, to get some feedback. The definition, I used was it’s like an electronic soap box. There’s a story, it can be a story in itself ?? so it can be entertaining, and you can watch the individual show ?? but it goes on.
Is that fair to say that, or am I limiting it somehow?
Andrea:
No, I think it’s fair to say that, and I think one of the first things that you have to realize when you start making Transmedia, is that any given story is by definition a partial truth. I’m talking about fiction as if it a true thing here, but bear with me for a minute.
Any story is the product of a bunch of choices.
There are always going to be things that happened before the story that you probably haven’t included because maybe they’re boring. There are always things that are going to happen after the story, that you’re probably not including because it’s either boring, or it’s anticlimactic. And there are going to be things that happen during the course of the story that you’re not putting on stage or on camera or on the page, because it’s disruptive to the flow of your story, it’s not relevant at the moment, it just doesn’t work for one reason for another.
You’re choosing in the storytelling process. You’re choosing what to focus on, and what not to focus on. Sometimes those things would make for a better, deeper, richer story if you did include them ?? but you can’t, because you only have 90 minutes for your film, or you only have 100,000 words for your novel.
One of the great opportunities in Transmedia is to take stuff that could make your story better and richer, but doesn’t fit?? what happens before and after, the stuff that happens offstage and make that happen, make it real.
This is part of a series of blog posts outlined in A Lean Service Design Approach to Gaming your Training.
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