I got an email in my inbox a while ago asking the titular question. It’s been haunting me ever since.
The underlying premise to the question is that transmedia reached a peak in or around the year 2012, and ever since then, new conversations, resources, and works have been increasingly hard to come by. It’s hard to dispute that. ARGfest as a professional conference isn’t a going concern anymore, nor is StoryWorld. TEDx Transmedia has pivoted to dealing with a variety of topics involving futurism and philosophy.
“Transmedia” as I once knew it was, as Brian Clark would have said, an art scene encompassing a particular group of creators doing some things in common, largely springing up around the space that used to be alternate reality games: Clark himself, of course, but also the folks at Campfire and Stitch Media; the crew of FortyTwo Entertainment, later turned Fourth Wall Studios; the filmmaker Lance Weiler and his myriad projects; Steve Peters and No Mimes Media. Transmedia has included documentarians, experimental theater designers, web video creators, musicians, authors, and more.
And it still does… kinda.
It’s true you don’t hear a lot about transmedia as such anymore, in the same way that you rarely heard about hot new alternate reality games as such after about 2008. So did we move on to a shiny new buzzword? Nah. Did we all cut our hair and get real day jobs? Not all of us, no. So what happened, exactly?
Basically that indie art scene that started with alternate reality games is… well, it’s over. We had our fun, and now we’ve more or less gone our separate ways.
Diaspora
This by no means is equivalent to “transmedia is dead,” so let me just stop you. There are still strong standard-bearers talking about transmedia in so many words. A quick look at the Twitter hashtag right now shows me participation from long-time experts like Jeff Gomez of Starlight Runner, Simon Staffans, and Gary Hayes.
For a lot of the rest of us, we’ve spread our transmedia-like tentacles into a lot of distinct and separate industries and arts in the interest of building longer-term careers and businesses.
Registering
to see the pop-up VR version of Westworld involves interacting with uncanny actors playing robots,
while the Discover Westworld site puts you in the shoes of a visitor to the imaginary theme park.
(Image courtesy of HBO.)A lot of the air and energy that used to be invested in transmedia has moved to virtual reality, with Campfire making award-winning experiences for the likes of Westworld. Fourth Wall’s Sean Stewart works with Magic Leap, now, a Florida company that my money is on to be the next big thing. (And if you’re from Magic Leap… email me. Seriously. I want to work with you so bad it’s like acid running through my veins.)
There’s also a thriving if small web film subgenre, continuing through companies like Astronauts Wanted. Experiential theater is going strong; Third Rail and Punchdrunk are making intense, transformative pieces. And locational theatrical experiences like Accomplice are still running, too.
In fact, the short but high-touch experience is where most of the action is these days. It’s no accident that the room escape game began to boom right around the time transmedia-the-buzzword began its decline. Now room escapes are just about as widespread as the family restaurant chain of your choice. It’s easy to see why: they use a lot of the same compelling ARG formula of experience + narrative + puzzles, and you can charge admission. I’ve done a little room escape work myself, and I’d enjoy doing a lot more — it’s a very rewarding format.
And finally, some of us have taken our know-how in-house at places like, say, Disney Imagineering. Some of us are dedicated indie game developers now, or writers, or authors. And some of us have kinda dropped out of sight entirely. I don’t want to name and shame, not least because I’m sure I look like one of ‘em.
Not to say that there’s nothing left of that community — because of course there is, though the nature and tone of it has shifted along with the media landscape.
The primo sources of conversation and information right now are the StoryForward podcasts and meetups. ARGN is still a going concern. The Future of Storytelling conference is a brilliant way to explore the intersection of narrative and technology… if you can afford the ticket price (and I wish I could). The core of creators that coalesced around that word “transmedia,” though, has gradually decentralized. There’s not one place you can go to find out what’s happening in transmedia, or if anything is happening at all.
The Business Model Problem
At the end of the day it’s not down to any one cause, but a lot of them working in conjunction: artists need to eat, transmedia as such lost its novelty, social media turned into a raging river where once it was a mere firehose, and media companies have become a lot more parsimonious than in our heyday about digital. These factors all contributed to making the ground transmedia grew in less and less fertile.
But really, it’s mostly down to money. We never really cracked a business model for social media storytelling where the social media bits paid their own way in terms of ROI. That meant a lot of transmedia creators like me were reliant on sponsors and marketing work to pay the rent. But as social media has transformed, it’s become harder to grab attention in the flood of free content out there, much harder to get press coverage for methods of storytelling that we’ve maybe seen before, and old funding sources are shyer about spending money on stuff when they’re not sure if it’ll work. “It’s on the web” doesn’t sound like an automatic Cannes Lion anymore. Innovative things don’t stay innovative for very long.
Outside of the marketing arena, more than one company has sought investment to try to build out original content on a transmedia-driven philosophy. Those companies have by and large folded, often due to an internal lack of clarity about whether they were primarily trying to build platforms or content.
In a way, though, room escape games are the ultimate answer to what happened to transmedia. So are mystery box services. So are single-user VR experiences. They don’t just solve the business model problem; they also solve the real-time problem, the friction problem, and the late-joiner problem. It turns out that if you want to tell stories embedded in the real world, the best technology is no technology. A real key and a real lock you can hold in your hands (or the illusions of them) are a billion times more immersive than any old character on Twitter.
The Future
So does this mean transmedia is over? Nah. The genie is out of the bottle and can never be returned to it. Techniques for social storytelling, immersive narrative, and interaction have all come a long way; we can’t forget what we’ve learned, and we apply that knowledge everywhere we go. Even ARGs still happen, and they can still be amazing, artful, and new.
And the future is always being born. There are probably a dozen other things going on right now that I don’t even know about, because they’re taking place in communities and under names that aren’t “transmedia.” I am dead sure a new, vivid, incredible art scene is happening right now with a group of starry-eyed creators who just want to make amazing things. I can’t wait to see what they have in store for us, whether I’m invited to the party or not.
Read responses to this piece
Transmedia What? by Henry Jenkins
Transmedia Teen by Christy Dena
The Trouble with Nonfiction Transmedia by Sue Ding
In Praise of Bad Games, Bad Theater by Alex Fleetwood
Whatever Happened to the “T” Word? by Liz Rosenthal
An Evolution in Storytelling and Impact by Lance Weiler
The Storyteller, the Fixer by Ramona Pringle
Transmedia: Art Forms Created in Real Time by Caitlin Burns
This piece was originally published on Deus Ex Machinatio. You can also find Andrea on Twitter at @andrhia.
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