Excellent Post: Kieran Fitzgerald: Queries and Hopes for the Future of Storytelling

Excerpt:

"...Hollywood storytellers like Guillermo del Toro, director of Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth, are equally committed to bringing us thrills once reserved for the crew of the Starship Enterprise. Del Toro describes his creative workshop in Los Angeles, Miranda as "an imaginarium where we are free to explore the practical possibilities of transmedia without compartmentalizing the artistic process." No doubt the pool of international talent at Miranda will be putting forth novel, if not extraordinary, works in the coming years. For digital age storytellers, the future glimmers and beckons like a modern-day promise of California gold. If you're aiming for big industry storytelling, and if del Toro's instincts are right, you're going to want to learn advertising, filmmaking, writing, composing, animation, television, new media, old media, mass media, transmedia, and trans-Siberian media or the wave of well-equipped gold-diggers is going to leave you in the proverbial dust.

The rush, of course, has been brewing for decades. Computer games. Videogames. Roll-playing. Interactive fiction. All the industries once a touch too nerdy to take over are now very much in the process of taking over. In 2005, worldwide videogame industry revenues surpassed worldwide film revenues for the first time and never looked back. Movie box offices worldwide took in $31.8 billion dollars in 2010. Video games made $60 billion, and are projected to hit $90 billion by 2015. This is not to say that 'film is dead' -- on the contrary, box office receipts in the U.S. reached an all time high in 2010. Only that it is old. Old like printed books old. The majority of people worldwide who want to entertain themselves now want immediate, real-time authorship over the form and content of their entertainment. In other words, interactivity gaineth.

I find the word dangerously misleading -- interactive. It suggests, for one, that the way we have encountered stories until now has been passive, and that by taking a physically active role in the story's telling we are getting a higher level of stimulation. Anyone who has read Moby Dick and played Mario Kart knows that this is patently untrue. You may not prefer Moby Dick to Mario Kart, but I'll wager there are a few more areas of your frontal cortex lighting up over Melville's prose than during your laps with Yoshi around Rainbow Road...."

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