“The Art of Immersion” by Frank Rose

May 12th, 2012 § 1 comment § permalink

The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories by Frank Rose

Read: 4/21/12

Rating: 5/5

My Highlights & Notes:

“Games are about engaging with the most entertaining thing on the planet, which is other people.” ~ Jordan Weisman – p.17

“If ever the Story of any private Man’s Adventures in the World were worth making Pvblick, and were acceptable when Publish’d, the Editor of this Account thinks this will be so… The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it…; and as such he thinks, without farther Compliment to the World, he does them a great Service in the Publication.” introduction to Robinson Crusoe in the first edition. p.32

“Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art in comparison is near, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing, and emasculate,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a few months later in response. Life is true; art is a construct. But Defoe was writing long before this particular type of construct became accepted as art. So never mind that every story is by definition a fiction of some sort – what Defoe was saying in his preface was, This is not a novel. - p.33

They weren’t building a game; they were building an experience that was capable of, as he [Elan Lee] put it, “transforming your life into an entertainment venue.” p.34

Interesting points about new mediums trying to mask their new powers by acting like old mediums. p.36-37

[William] Gibson calls cyberspace: “A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, recording.” p.38

…one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web… Passion. Obsession. A yearning to immerse oneself in stories that transpire in a fictional universe. The desire to experience that universe through as many different media as possible. A need to extend and embrace that universe by telling new stories within it. ~ quoting from an essay by William Gibson p.40

Talks about James Cameron creating a full world for Avatar, including hiring Paul Frommer – a linguist from USC – to build a language for Pandora. p.48

“I think the role of this type of film should be to create a kind of fractal-like complexity,” he [James Cameron] went on. “The casual viewer can enjoy it without having to drill down to the secondary and tertiary levels of detail. But for a real fan, you go in an order of magnitude and, boom! There’s a whole set of new patterns. You can step in in powers of 10 as many times as you want, and it still holds up. But you don’t need to know all that stuff to enjoy it – it’s just there if you want it. To me, that’s the best science fiction.” p.49

Entertainment gets defined as “escapism” by Jon Landau – I disagree. I don’t think people are always trying to escape from their boring lives. p.54

“The best stories in video games are the stories the player tells himself,” said Yannis Mallet. “In French we say ‘son propre film’ – the movie in his head.” p.57

“I like the way they think,” [James Cameron] said, still talking about the Marines. “The way they think is, they’re not doing it because it’s easy. They’re doing it because it’s hard. They’re doing it because you can’t.” p.64

… the audience for Star Wars, as for other deep media sagas, takes the form of an inverted pyramid. At the top are the hundreds of millions of people who’ve seen a couple of the movies and know Star Wars as a cultural icon. Just below them are the millions who respond to the story in different media – gamers who play the games, readers who love the books, collectors who obsess over the toys. And at the point of the pyramid are the otaku – the hundreds of thousands of superfans who are most deeply connected to the saga, who contribute to the online forums and belong to the official Hyperspace fan club and help construct the Wookieepedia, the fan-built knowledge base for true Star Wars otaku. p.74

- If the costs of production have fallen massively since the original Star Wars and creators can sell directly to fans or superfans, why are we waiting on studios? You could build an entire digital world through crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding – to a niche market and still make money.

Who controls a story – its creator or its fans? p.75

- We need to invite creatives to build these universes around a common framework. Set up the premise and then see where the creative process takes us.

… there’s nothing inherent in humans that makes them want to be passive consumers of entertainment, or of the advertising that pays for it. The couch potato era, seemingly so significant at the time, turns out to be less an era than a blip – and a blip based on faulty assumptions at that. p.87

People don’t passively ingest a marketing message, or any type of message. They greet it with an emotional response, usually unconscious, that can vary wildly depending on their own experiences and predispositions. They don’t just imbibe a story; they imbue it with meaning. Which means that perceptions of a brand aren’t simply created by marketers; they’re “co-created,” in the words of Gerald Zaltman of Harvard Business School, by marketers and consumers together. p.88

“For me, the deeper aspect is model building,” Will Wright continued. “We’re always building models of the world around us to help us predict what’s going to happen, and play is one of the primary ways in which we build these models. I think storytelling lives alongside play as another mechanism for building models.” p.141

Mystery, [J.J. Abrams] went on to say, is the catalyst for imagination. p.151

“Foraging,” because that’s what looking for information is like. And “sensemaking,” because the need to make sense of the show is why you need to go foraging in the first place. p.153

Great quote from William Gibson’s 2003 novel Pattern Recognition. p.163

Interesting company named Bunchball mentioned. p.176

“Each of us is part of the giant network that we call society,” writes Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a network theorist at Northeastern University in Boston. “Our world is small because society is a very dense web.” p.204

Stripped of all the apparatus of advanced civilization and pecuniary gain – stripped of Hollywood and television and publishing – storytelling is a simple act of sharing. We share information. We share experience. Sometimes we overshare. But why do we share at all?… Because life is a constantly functioning information exchange. p.204

Interesting research by Brian Boyd of the University of Auckland – mentions his book On the Origin of Stories. p.204

The most obvious thing we get is status: telling a story, (almost) any story, gives us an opportunity to claim the attention of people around us. So we compete to tell stories, to fill in the details of other people’s stories, to offer out own comment. And we get a payoff in the form of an ego boost. p.205

It’s interesting this “ego boost” idea seems to be true, it’s strange that the impact on the audience and what they gain seems to hardly ever be talked about.

Talking again about how the brain fires off in similar ways when we watch someone do something – almost as if we’re doing it ourselves. p.208-209

Poignant anecdote about John Moe on twitter. p.216

As Brian Boyd writes:
Signals that evolve through competition tend to be costly, as arms races develop between insistent senders and resistant receivers. Messages become louder, longer, more repetitive, massively redundant, like the roars of red deer stags or Superbowl advertisers. Signals user for cooperative purposes, by contrast – “conspiratorial whispers” – will be energetically cheap and informationally rich.
It’s not enough to just break through the clutter, in other words. And rarely is it worth the effort required to smash through the filter. You need to disarm the filter – and the best way to do that, the most economical and efficient way, is to signal that your signal is nonthreatening. p.236

It’s like Alex Bogusky said: this generation knows you’re trying to sell them something, and you know they know, so let’s drop the pretense and make the whole exercise as much fun as possible. p.240

Cool story about Nick Haley. He did a homemade iPod ad to the song “Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex” by Cansei de Ser Sexy – “My music is where I’d like you to touch.” p.240

By subtly directing brand perceptions while encouraging the consumer to help create those perceptions, Howard maintained, the marketer can help the brand and the consumer to, in effect, become one. “You can’t rely on ads,” she said. “A brand becomes relevant by infusing itself directly into the culture“… “Advertising used to interrupt life’s programming. Now advertising is the programming. And if you’re actually being marketed to successfully, you have no idea.” p.242

Jeff Gomez is big on myth. “We see ourselves as stewards,” he said. In too many cases – Star Wars being an obvious exception – the producers of a movie or a television show or a video game haven’t plumbed their story deeply enough even to identify its message, much less whatever underlying myth it may embody. “So the message changes and the audience becomes frustrated,” he went on. “It’s our job to figure it out. And to do that [you have to find] the core of the story. “That means immersing ourselves in it and figuring out what makes it timeless and relevant. There’s an aha! moment that’s very specific to each property. It’s the moment when I’ve found the true emotional connection.” p.245-246

Wow! Gomez’s group – Starlight Runner – produces a huge 150 page book to develop the “story worlds”… from a platform-neutral perspective… so robust as to furnish hundreds of hours of content. p.246

“Do people like storytelling?” asked Nick Law, R/GA’s chief creative officer for North America, when I saw him at the agency’s New York headquarters. “Of course people like storytelling. But given the choice, they’re probably going to go to HBO.” p.249-250

[TV ads now]… it’s a ballooning of entertainment at the expense of information. It’s a poor man’s Hollywood.” But what civilians actually want, he argued, is information. p.251

Cool chart about system thinkers. p.253

…dopamine has less to do with pleasure itself than with the drive to seek pleasure. p.262

“Addictive drugs hijack the natural reward system,” he continues, “and what we showed was that video games hijack it as well.” At the same time, the experiment also connected gaming to another behavior – one seemingly quite different, yet equally connected with the role of dopamine in the brain’s reward circuitry: learning.
“Learning and addiction are very tightly bound together.” p.264

Fascinating brain science. p.266

“If you measure dopamine while an animal is searching, it’s very high,” LeDoux said later, over lunch at a lower Manhattan cafe. “But when they find something and consume it, dopamine doesn’t register. It’s more in the seeking than in the attainment of the goal.” If anticipation is so often sweeter than success, dopamine would seem to be the reason why. p.268-269

Scientist at Concordia University hypothesized that dopamine servers to heighten the brain’s focus in response to uncertainty, possibly in an attempt to learn how to predict the reward. p.271

This emotional system… makes animals intensely interested in exploring their world and leads them to become excited when they are about to get what they desire. It eventually allows animals to find and eagerly anticipate the things they need for survival, including, of course, food, water, warmth, and their ultimate evolutionary survival need, sex. In other words, when fully aroused, it helps fill the mind with interest and motivates organisms to move… in search of the things they need, crave, and desire. p.272 block quote from Jaak Panksepp

 

 

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