Will Renny Reports on: Across Transmedia from Power to the Pixel: The Cross Media Forum. Oct. 2010 (still worth the read!)

One of the really fascinating keynote presentations of the day for me was Michel Reilhac’s The Game-ification of Life. Michel, who is currently Executive Director of ARTE France Cinema and Director of Film Acquisitions for ARTE France, has been involved in producing, directing and writing films since 1998. His talk wasn’t about film making though. Michel instead spoke about how games and the notion of ‘play’ have recently emerged as models to incentivise engagement, learning and social change.

Michel posited the idea that games have contaminated reality, now more so than ever. Contamination sounds a little OCD, but I think the premise of infiltration works. As if gaming is leeching into the system, below the radar. Michel went further to suggest that the ‘As if’ scenario within a fantasy game structure, is now becoming an ‘As is’ scenario in reality. By this I think he meant that the mechanisms of gaming are being folded into the real; the lived, physical world. A game structure can now be used to wrap around other things in order to make them more attractive as well become an integral form of interoperability – between ourselves and the world around us, as well as with the people we engage with.

Michel maintained that the reason games are beginning to proliferate into our daily lives is down to two factors: Social networks and geo-localisation. Both of these factors you should note are down to technology making it possible for us to connect on the move, and across multiple types of networks. So it’s about our improving ability to connect, that and the fact that games are more fun, as Michel says, than reality. Once connected, we can now have ‘fun’. We can now play.

The concept of play really resonated with me as something that is not only integral to how we learn (Michel made this point too) but also something that needs to be comprehended when considering what makes transmedia storytelling different to more traditional one to one or one to many forms of storytelling.

via jawbone.tv

Read the full post on jawbone.tv - excellent article!

Posted via email from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales