Who Pays for the Future?

Prehistory of convergence
In 1983, a two-billion dollar company was killed by aliens. Superman had worked it over, but it was E.T. that landed the final blow, and it was ugly. I escaped the most of the carnage, and the remains were buried in concrete in New Mexico. For those of you who are old enough to remember, the company was called Atari-and what killed it was a sort of Dr. Frankenstein attempt at what we now call convergence. The company was owned by Warner and it was run by a band of executives from a bunch of consumer product companies. None of them had a computer on his desk. They had the simple belief that a great license equaled a great video game.

The Atari corporation paid very little attention to designing computer games, a medium profoundly different from films or comic books. And so no one, apart from a few lonely programmers who actually built the games, was looking at the requirements for good interactivity or play patterns or design principles. There was no market research on what players liked in games. When it was determined that a movie was a hit with the target audience-and yes, that was fourteen year-old boys-a license to produce a game based on the movie was acquired by the company, and the task was lobbed at a programmer who was typically given about three months to write the code.

Now, at that same time, hordes of Harvard MBAs began churning out business plans, and transplants from middle management and aerospace drew up elaborate production schedules, and P&G vets happily began marketing and advertising campaigns. Great commercials were produced. But no one, except the programmers, was in the business of creating great video games. And so, Atari published some really bad products-and lo, the customers did rise up and smite them. And so began the great video game darkness of 1984 that lasted until 1987 or thereabouts-and a wiser industry emerged, but only a little wiser.

Repurposing
Repurposing is inefficient. The Children's Television Workshop, for example, never came up to speed on producing computer games based on their TV properties. And Disney arrived very late at success in the game business, given the strength of its creative and the breadth of its market. And now, even though the formula of Disney games is good, and the execution is good, that formula has a limited lifespan. Learning Books found this out the hard way. Carmen Santiago, a creature of the computer game industry, did get her own TV show. And Powerrangers, X-Men, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had moderately successful transmedia lives as well. Sailor Moon didn't do so well. Facing an uphill battle of both culture and gender, she didn't make a very good game property.

In these cases, it's worth noting that it's always clear what is the root property and what is the spin-off. And now the world eagerly awaits Laura Croft's leap to the silver screen. Wildly popular Oscar-winner Angelina Jolie will play the title role, and the film is being directed by Simon West who also gave us Con Air and The General's Daughter, and so it may be an interesting, if not great movie, but still one obviously based on a video game.

Seamless
My point, and I do have one, is that convergence thus far has consisted, in the world of content, of repurposing. Repurposing content from film to TV, TV to film, video game to film, TV to web, video game to web, doll to web (and therein lies some pretty ugly pink stuff), radio to web, etc. In a post-convergence world, this will be an even less efficient way to do things then it is right now. In a moment, I'm going to offer what I think are some good content creation guidelines for this brave new world, but first, I have to plague you with one more analysis of just what post-convergence means.

Convergence
The Internet is eating the radio. Media One says so, and it's true. Don Norman reports that companies such as Higherwire will soon let you listen to Bartok radio in your car, even if you're in Chicago instead of Budapest, and it will plug in local information during the commercial breaks. In fact, Higherwire already lets you choose from around 3000 Internet radio stations and inserts local advertising. Kerbango, another company that Don advises, has produced an Internet radio device that actually looks like a radio, fifties retro design, with real knobs. Now, this isn't convergence-this is ingestion. The recording industry is deeply afraid, and appropriately so, that a similar fate awaits the music CD business.

However, the web is not ingesting TV, and TV is not eating the Internet. Here's what WebTV has to say about interactive television: "Interactive TV merges the Internet and television so that you can participate in new ways with your favorite shows. You can play along with and match wits with contestants on "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy." Vote in a live poll while watching "Judge Judy." Receive up-to-the-minute coverage on NBC nightly news, and get sports stats and chat live with other fans-all from the comfort of your couch."

Now, how many teenagers do you know that would want to chat on the Internet from the living room couch? How many people would rather watch "Star Trek" on a 12-inch monitor instead of a 60-inch projection TV? The situated contexts of television and the web are too different from one another for the two to merge. Rather, I think we have web-enabled TV for such character-improving uses as WebTV described for us in their blurb-and we will have video-enabled web for activities that are more about communication or interaction-intensive or which require greater privacy. These two things are different, and they will remain so. Likewise, cellular phones will not ingest the Internet. Browsers that try to wrestle standard web content on tiny phone screens will not work very well. Again, it is not only the disparity of display size and quality, but it's the situated context that's too different to merge. In other words, we're not experiencing convergence in the sense of media-we are experiencing a Diaspora of displays and devices that address finer and finer distinctions and situated contexts. So in this sense, things are not imploding-they're exploding with pagers, and radios, and phones, and movies, and TV, and e-mail, and games and websites-which are all distinct, formal containers that receive and transmit content from professional authors, fan communities, and regular folks. Now, through Internet protocol, content of some sort will be transmitted to and from every conceivable device and people will be free to choose a device, form, and structure of an experience with content tailored to the particular situated context.

I think you've heard this about fifty times in this conference; we probably all agree on it. My point is that the convergence here is at the level of Internet protocol. The collision is the unnatural forced mating of media, like the web and television. And I'm using those adjectives in a very intentional way; monstrosities emerge, from my perspective, when we think about convergence and not accommodating situated contexts. The opportunity here is to figure out how to design core content that can be shaped for diverse devices and contexts, all delivered through IP protocol. As they say on Vulcan, "Infinite diversity in infinite combinations."

Entertainment as content
So, how must professional content creators change their thinking? The rest of my talk is going to completely neglect technical, business, instructional, and informational content. I'm going to limit myself to the class of content we call entertainment. We typically think of this sort of content as dramatic, narrative, or fictive, and we see it in movies, TV shows, and games. Now one thing that doesn't change post-convergence is the need to identify and understand the audiences and the contexts that you're going to be addressing. As Christopher Ireland (Cheskin Research) has pointed out many times, if anything, we need deeper awareness of both global and local aspects of culture because they have so much to do with how we define situated contexts. But beyond market awareness, if you're in the business of designing core content for entertainment in this brave new world, then here are some things I think you need to do. Let's call them Laurel's Laws of Content Creation.

Laurel's Laws of Content Creation

1. Think transmedia
This means that we have to give up the old idea of a root property in a given medium like film and repurposing it or spinning it off to create secondary properties in other media. We need to think transmedia from the beginning of the content creation process. Now, traditional authoring is formal-that is, you think first of the form: TV, novel, game or film, for example. And it's the form that guides the selection and arrangement of materials. New authoring is material in nature-that is, it places the emphasis on developing materials that can be selected and arranged to produce many different forms.

2. Creating environments
What we're creating when we create core content is environments, not stories. We're creating environments that will support many stories, characters, and play patterns. The environment must contain places that are well envisioned and it must obey consistent physical laws. The principal kinds of beings that live in the environment need to be described. In the beginning, there is a world.

3. Narrative as constitution
The foundational narrative of a piece of core content can be a myth, or a set of stories, or a history, or a chronology. My husband, Rob Tau, puts it this way: "Narratives are the constitutions of new worlds." And there has to be a procedure for amending the constitution that's sufficiently difficult to enact so that change occurs only deliberately and occasionally. So even core content authors should not exercise the divine right of kings. Henry Jenkins in his book Textual Poachers gives a great example of how the creators of Beauty and the Beast acted like kings and completely screwed their property beyond recognition. In some ways the foundational narrative that I'm talking about resembles the Bible in a TV series, but it also should facilitate the contributions of fan communities in the evolution of a world. And so far, "Star Trek" is the only example of this dynamic that I've seen that's worked really well-although Paramount has kicked and screamed the entire way as fans have kept their property alive and vibrant through accretions to it that generally respect the canonical "Star Trek" universe.

4. Ritual spaces
Provide for rituals in the world that you create. Ritual is a kind of social form in which a designed narrative can unfold harmoniously and simultaneously within the larger context of an interactive environment in which most of the action is improvisational. So there are little pockets of things going on in our post-convergence world that may be showing up in radio or television or film or cartoons or other media that are amenable to linear form. But the majority of activity that's going on now in relation to your content is going to be improvisational in terms of on-line gaming, chats, commerce, and other activities related to the world. So in your constitution you need to provide some ritual spaces where it's natural for linear narratives and ordered behaviors to occur. It's not only to support linear structures; it's also to support something quite like life.

5. Community formation
Encourage community formation. That means creating communities and social conditions that encourage people to talk to each other and relate to each other around the property. In other words, your fans need to be enabled and encouraged to communicate and interact with each other in every way that's possible. This includes e-commerce. This includes the sale of EverQuest characters. And if you don't like the fact that people are buying and selling them on e-Bay, then for heaven's sake make your own auction site-but never, ever stomp on your fans. It's stupid. Thank you.

6. Co-creation of content
Audiences need to be able to be the authors of stories and back -stories that can be published in various media types-again, "Star Trek" is the prime example. And these contributions are the roots and shoots of living content: that's how we know it's alive! If they're supported well, then the larger audience will naturally respect the cannon or the foundational narrative. And they'll be much less likely to hack or vandalize the world, since hacking and vandalism typically arise from the frustration of the impulse to co-create. It's out natural desire as fans, as Harry Jenkins describes so eloquently, to appropriate content and reshape it so that it contains personal meaning.

7. Personal identity
Support the creation of personal identity within the realm of core content. The participation of audiences in your world is essential to its success, so beyond supporting their participation as a passive audience or as a fan, or as an author even, you should anticipate that some of your fans, at least, will want to become characters in a role-playing, improvisational nature of the world, perhaps even in collaboration with professional actors who play key roles. And so in that context, people want to create characters that function in the same way as personal identity in real life, whether or not it corresponds.

Who pays?
So this brings us to the economic question: who pays for all this wonderful development work? Believe me, I've spent thirty years trying to figure that one out. Today, content production is under-funded and under siege from faltering revenue models of advertising and transactions. Now convergence is many things-it's media, and form, and style, and content, and technology-but it's also economics. And from television to the web, the unsatisfying economic models underlying today's media are even less likely to be successful post-convergence.

Business innovation is as important as technological innovation. I think we're facing a crisis in content. Who will make it? How will it be paid for? And what will it be worth in the new media world? For about five years now it's been a losing proposition for most content creators to sell anything to television because advertising no longer pays the costs of production. TV companies insist on a piece of merchandising revenue from the content creator in order to even put a show on the air. And as channels multiply, the situation is only going to get worse. On the web, we're seeing steady and alarmingly declining click-through rates on ads, and only a small handful of dotcoms are moving into the black on the basis of transaction fees. So who will pay for content? Who will invest in content-creating companies?

Well if cable companies are the ones selling the IP streams to various device-driven markets, then doesn't it make sense that cable companies should be supporting the creation of content? Judging from the investments they're making, not enough, and not yet. If access to good content is the main reason people buy devices, then shouldn't device-makers pay some of the freight for content creation? Well, not enough and not yet. Not yet, but soon-because chat and e-mail make a pretty thin soup. And sooner or later the public is going to notice that content-real, juicy content-is something that they were rather fond of.

One of the things that I've learned about teens through working at Cheskin Research is that they're fundamentally suspicious of marketing; they loathe it when people surreptitiously try to get them to buy something. They spot it in a heartbeat and they hate it like homework. Soon, I think, that view will prevail throughout society. Now, another thing we know about people is that they will pay for things that have value to them. So wouldn't it be nice, finally, if content were paid for by people who wanted to experience it, and play with it, and use it as a use it as a scaffolding for their own creative activities instead of us all having to lay down and submit to the endless barrage of advertising, or the endless driving to market by companies who want our transaction dollars? Wouldn't it be nice if we could pay for value? Well, I think that that condition is not only desirable, it's inevitable. And I think that the way it's going to happen is that the folks who sell the razors are going to figure out that they have to start investing in making blades.