WHAT IS TRANSMEDIA?
Massiverse sees transmedia as a three-dimensional model of integrated narrative, engagement and business. It is important to understand a story can easily be told across platforms, but leveraging each platform for its unique strength and relative business opportunity is even more important.
Narrative Strategy: Storytelling across platforms is not simply about making storylines, plots and characters that live in different places. Story A plus Story B should not neatly fit together like puzzle pieces. Stories must be designed to allow a participant, whether they be reading, watching, or playing to place themselves in the middle of these ideas, to create opinions and questions. This is the basis of user-integrated narrative perspective.
Engagement: Each platform, be it a book, a console game, an iPad, a TV or a toy, has a very different engagement process and potential. Understanding what constitutes an appropriate and rewarding experience on each of these platforms for a specific target audience is quite difficult. Still harder is creating reciprocal engagement strategies that move a participant back and forth between platforms. This is the basis of true cross-platform engagement.
Business Model: What business is successful if it cannot generate revenue? Applying the philosophy that each component of the environment must generate revenue allows a business decision to be made about the relative value of the investment in a certain platform. This is an important concept in design as well, as typically a non-revenue generating component is not invested in and therefore is not of equal value to the business or the participant.