I’ve been thinking of how to engage more of a participant’s senses as they read printed content. I’d really like to figure out a way to go beyond the standard tricks or video clips and animated text.

If you are not familiar with the term, a music cue is the use of sound, usually musical, to signal a performer to “carry out an action or deliver a line.” However, the practice has evolved quite a bit. We frequently hear certain types of music to introduce a moment or event in a movie. Such a modern musical cue might be a deep thumbing tone for the villain or a quick jaunty tune for the jester.

In the golden age of sitcoms the use of stings became common. Strings are a certain bit of music used on a regular basis to signal the entry of  a character or the end of a scene. Sometimes particular stings are used to identify people or types of events.

There was one big reason why musical stings became popular. They made viewers more aware of what was going on in a show without necessarily looking at the TV. You could be eating dinner or washing dishes and when a certain tone played, you’d know to look up and pay full attention to the screen.

Image via Wikipedia

Of course, it was no coincidence that a sting would occur right before a dramatic climax or end of the scene. In other words, right before the advertisements.

In the early days of internet media, advertisements exploited our tendency to pay attention when a particular sound played. Mostly these were pop-up ads. This was a horrible idea for many reason, it couldn’t be turned off. It was annoying. The sounds were tied to advertisements and there was really no other sound on the internet, or even your computer, and participants quickly stopped being fooled.

Since that greedy misstep, no has really tried to integrate sound into our browsing experience again. I wonder, if The New York Times had started playing sounds first, would we be using an internet with an ecosystem of sound?

So what options are open to us now?

Well, quite a few. We’d want to make it clear what was going on so that people could mute a site before it started playing, but we could still bring music into the browser.

Video games have played with adaptive music for years now. With adaptive code, music can change beat and tone automatically when certain events occur.

Perhaps pages could include some soft, low-key, background music that flourishes or goes into double-time when the user hits a trigger? Another alternative might simply be a few stings played when users mouse-over a link. The sound would alert them to important elements on a page.

Sound could be triggered by:

• mouse-overs
• scrolling to a certain place on a page
• clicking through a pagination link
• timers
• focusing on a window
• other types of interaction, like highlighting.
• key shortcuts

I imagine any site that implemented this would have some sort of standard controls in a small floating div alongside articles. It’s very important that it be optional and that participants have full control over volume and whether or not music is playing. It would be really cool if participants could decide the genre of music as well.

I’d love to give it a try on this site, but I don’t know how to implement it. I’ll give it a try if anyone else can figure it out though.

Trying to reach out to the sound part of our brain would be a great way to increase attention and engagement. I think it is worth a try at least. Let’s bring a bit of music to our online reading.

Can you think of any other ways to incorporate more sound into our browsing experience?

Preview image via.

Related posts:

1. Story arcs beyond TV [Thinking]
2. Old vs New Media – Creative Commons, Wikipeidia and Post Scraping – What is Grand Theft Content?
3. Remix Project [Assignment]

Building a better story doesn’t require you working in the story itself. Sometimes, the universe around your narrative can offer all sorts of opportunities for greater scope and better engagement.

Image via Wikipedia

Of the three artifact types, I believe that narrative-parallel artifacts are the most common. They’re easy to create and deploy and they are the closest transmedia storytelling comes to easy franchising of a narrative. That is not to say that a well crafted narrative-parallel artifact is easy to create, the best are complex and deep narratives in and of themselves and used by prestigious authors, including Shakespeare.

A narrative-parallel artifact is narrative fragment that runs external to your main narrative but still relates to it. It can be accessible to your characters, but does not have to be in their reach. Essentially it is an artifact that runs parallel to your main narrative thread.

Why use narrative-parallel artifacts?

This specific type of artifact comes with a host of advantages for creators. It allows you to influence the readers’ perception without forcing characters into obvious foreshadowing, authors can create implications and pass judgement calls outside of the main narrative and without disrupting the reliability of the narrative voice.

Parallel artifacts also allow you to build a world around your narrative without forcing excessive exposition on your readers. It can also work to construct and reinforce a certain mood within a narrative.

Where have narrative-parallel artifacts been used?

Once again, I’ve assembled a list of both general and specific narrative-parallel artifacts in action to provide context.

Video games

There are a number of different implementations of narrative-parallel artifacts in video games. The two most common are in-game TV and book chapters.

Two prominent examples of effective in-game video use are Max Payne and Alan Wake. Here are two videos:

The first is from Max Payne. This is one of two compilations of one of the in-game TV shows that played on televisions left on throughout the game. The player could walk right past them, skipping most of the content, or choose to stay and watch them play out over a brief period. You can watch the first few minutes show two different executions of the technique.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The second video is from Alan Wake, where most of the TVs in the game play a very short episode of Night Springs, a story based on the inspirations for the game, Twin Peaks and The Twilight Zone. Players interacted with these videos in much the same way.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In Max Payne the videos sometimes foreshadows symbols or narrative elements that will appear later. Sometimes the videos just help set the creepy and sort of over the top mood. For Alan Wake, the videos provide all that and, sometimes, explain some of the more complex underlying concepts of the narrative.

The other narrative-parallel artifacts frequently found in video games are books. The best executed in-narrative books are found in Deus Ex. They both compounded emotion during the game and create greater depth. Sometimes they act as foreshadowing and at other times they provide background information for the narrative. In either case, they are also optional.

Comics

I could probably find a number of examples within comics, which are famously self-referencing and recursive. However, I’ll start and stop with the most prominent.

Reading a comic inside a comic

Watchmen uses many narrative artifacts between its two covers. In fact I could probably write a post just on Watchmen‘s artifact use. The most prominent and persistent of these artifacts is The Black Freighter. A comic within the narrative that provides subtext and depth to Alan Moore’s world, one that lacks morals and ethical direction. Moore used the horrifying text of The Black Freighter to help illustrate the apparent hopeless, heartless and self-destructive world of his characters. As revelations unfolded within the story, parallel revelations were occurring for and around the main characters.

In fact, the series of asides which contained The Black Freighter, independent from the characters, could be considered an artifact itself. The asides placed between chapters are also a form of narrative-parallel artifact.

Journalism

In journalism the most common implementation of narrative-parallel artifacts is the sidebar. I’m referring to a box to the side or otherwise separated from the story that contains information relevant to understanding the story, but not necessarily in the story.

In TV journalism the lower-third is a common location for narrative-parallel content.

Shakespeare

While there are earlier appearances  of the story within a story, the most popular in modern culture is Hamlet. The Danish prince crafts his own play within Shakespeare’s play, creating a narrative-parallel artifact that illuminates the character’s thinking and provides a significant plot point.

This blog

While I’ve done the occasional sidebar, I’d have to say that my most common usage of narrative-parallel artifacts is in the pink-highlight asides that are  throughout my posts.

Besides allowing me to address you in a different voice than use in most of my posts, the tooltips create opportunities for additive, but not required, information that can help you expand your understanding or find a chuckle.

Building your universe with narrative-parallel artifacts

The best place to start is to understand that your narrative does not live in isolation. Even if it just fell out of your head on to a piece of paper this very moment your story has background, context, a past and a future. If you can gain a better grasp on the universe of your narrative you’ll find opportunities for narrative-parallel artifacts will pop up frequently.

This is especially useful the more interactive your medium is. Narrative-parallel artifacts thrive on giving your participants a choice, so that they can take part in the slow construction of your universe.

Later: Narrative-additive artifacts.

Before: Building structures inside of your story with narrative-centric artifacts.

Related articles

• The Game Narrative Triangle [Design] (kotaku.com)
• Building structures inside of your story [Narrative Artifacts: 2 of 4] (hacktext.com)
• Artifacts: building dimension into your narrative [Narrative Artifacts: 1 of 4] (hacktext.com)
• What is a text and how do I hack it? (hacktext.com)
• Let’s Discuss Alan Wake Episode Two – Now [Game Club] (kotaku.com)

Related posts:

1. Artifacts: building dimension into your narrative [Narrative Artifacts: 1 of 4]
2. Building structures inside of your story [Narrative Artifacts: 2 of 4]
3. Catch up on Narrative Artifacts

Sometimes it is valuable to have something inside of a story that both the characters and participants can manipulate. Building an artifact that intersects with your main narrative thread is more common than you might think and very useful.

The first narrative artifact-type I’d like to deal with are narrative-centric artifacts. These are narrative fragments that are internal to a story. Essentially it is a piece of the story within the story, one that both the characters internal to the story and the participants external to the story can interact with. I’ve identified them in a number of works and formats and they are essential to enriching your text.

Why use narrative-centric artifacts?

Image via ImageShack

The most prominent reason to use a narrative-centric artifact is to increase engagement of participants in the narrative. When the user interacts with an artifact together with the characters it deepens the universe and the characters.

Depending on the artifact, it may even lend a physical aspect to your universe, by giving your users something of your world that they can hold in their hands.

Where have narrative-centric artifacts been used?

I’ve put together a list of both general and specific examples of narrative-centric artifacts and how they are used to give this a little context. Hopefully it will also help build a better understanding of how to use narrative artifacts in your own work.

Video Games:

Perhaps the most common and easiest to explain narrative-centric artifact is the cloth map. In-game, your character and others would presumably have some sort of map to help them find their way around. By giving your audience a physical map that they too can consult with, it makes it feel like this universe matters enough to be mapped out with.

That solidity of cloth maps implies a whole spectrum of other elements: explorers, cartographers, illustrators, unexplored areas, and places beyond the map. Very effective.

General Entertainment:

TV, video games and movies all make use of physical tie-ins. While action figures don’t count, the existence of weapons from a narrative is fairly commonplace. Once again, this is all about deepening the world for participants. With this in mind, the closer to real the weapon is, the more effective an artifact.

TV shows, especially the USA Network’s shows, also do promotion through various media formats, most notably blogs, done in the voices of their characters. They were one of the first to allow participants to receive texts from in-narrative personalities. Character-audience participation that doesn’t break the fourth wall is often a narrative-centric artifact.

Journalism:

I found it surprisingly difficult to tie down examples of narrative-centric artifacts in journalism. I know they exist and have seen them, but I just cannot find them at the moment. I suppose data journalism is a good example, when the same data is known by the subjects of a piece and is available to the readers.

Perhaps the highest profile case of narrative-centric artifacts in journalism is WikiLeaks. This is a major case in which the primary topic of many reports is a document or documents that are available as easily to the reader as the reporter. For journalism, since you are already dealing in reality, narrative-centric artifacts help engage and educate readers while giving rise to a more intelligent discussion.

In some cases, infographics may also qualify.

Web-comics:

There may be other ways that web-comic creators use narrative-centric artifacts than Twitter but, from what I’ve seen, none are more effective. Participants follow characters’ Twitter accounts in droves. Two excellent examples are the casts of the Dresden Codak and Questionable Content (QC). In both cases the creators of the comics build mini-narratives into their characters’ Twitter streams, including interactions with other characters from the same universe.

Overall, in-character twittering seems to effectively increase draw (short-format narratives that exist continually inside the universe of the primary narrative allow for more frequent participation) and engagement. Besides increasing the web-comics’ reality, the tweets are also effective promotion, allowing fans to readily and frequently promote content through re-tweets.

Also, people just seem to really like following fictional characters on Twitter.

This blog:

Honestly, I don’t really use narrative-centric artifacts on this blog because I rarely deal in characters, fiction or factual. Except myself. I could argue that my Amps are narrative-centric since they present an artifact (someone else’s article) and my discussion around it.

Styled text and headers are also types of narrative-centric artifacts, in that they intersect with my narrative and are used by both participants and the author/character. However, they don’t really enlarge my content, so while they are great SEO, they are poor artifacts. I wonder how to enhance them to be more effective? Ideas?

Depending on how central linked content is to a post, links might also present narrative-centric artifacts. This is one of the reasons I really like playing with Apture. It doesn’t always work, but when it does it allows me to embed a fragment of other sites inside my own. I think that’s probably the closest to narrative-centric artifacts that I have on this blog.

Building your universe with narrative-centric artifacts:

Besides the various examples here the most common and easily executed way to place narrative-centric artifacts in a universe is through fictional documentation. Maps are the most common example, but creators can easily go beyond that. Video games and transmedia experiences commonly provide descriptions of ships, weapon specifications and other fictional texts that come from the story and with which both the participants and the characters interact.

Later: Narrative-parallel artifacts.

Before: What are narrative artifacts?

Related articles

• Artifacts: building dimension into your narrative [Narrative Artifacts: 1 of 4] (hacktext.com)
• What is a text and how do I hack it? (hacktext.com)
• Narrative Medicine and Blood Pressure (33charts.com)
• Thought police? Darpa wants to know how stories influence human mind, actions (networkworld.com)

Related posts:

1. Artifacts: building dimension into your narrative [Narrative Artifacts: 1 of 4]
2. Expanding your narrative with parallels [Narrative Artifacts: 3 of 4]
3. Catch up on Narrative Artifacts

It’s time to consider the other ways your stories can engage readers. Narrative artifacts allow you to build dimension into the universe of your story and are universally applicable. From journalism to video games, artifacts are key to pulling in and keeping your audience.

Narrative artifacts are the things that surround and add to universe of your narrative. In many ways they are one of the most important elements of a transmedia experience.

Definition:

A narrative artifact is a self-contained narrative fragment of a storyline that is separate, related or parallel to the central narrative.

It is often the first step in building the sense of a greater universe around a central story or character and comes in three formats:

1. Narrative-centric: A narrative fragment internal to a story, one that both users and characters can interact with meaningfully. A good example is a map of the continent the characters are on. Though it is within your central narrative thread, its very existence suggests a larger universe outside of the character’s perceptions.
   
   This is an artifact that intersects with your main narrative thread.

2. Narrative-parallel: A narrative fragment that runs outside of the story but still relates to it. This is often in a format that may or may not be accessible to characters of the story but is accessible to the reader. While it exists in the universe of your story it is not directly part of the narrative thread. A good example is a chapter from a book about something relating to, but not of the story, one that does not involve the primary characters.
   
   This is an artifact that runs parallel to your main narrative thread.

3. Narrative-additive: A narrative fragment completely external to the story. It is not accessible to the characters of the narrative, nor are they aware of it. A good example is an epigraph. It may be part of the same universe of the story, perhaps even involving some of the same characters, but it is not part of the actual story. It does not necessarily directly relate to the narrative either.
   
   This is an artifact that adds depth to your narrative thread without being part of it.

I intend to go into greater depth on each of these types of narrative artifacts, how they were used in the past and how they could be used in the future. Each narrative artifact type will get its own post in the series. Stay tuned!

Related posts:

1. Building structures inside of your story [Narrative Artifacts: 2 of 4]
2. Expanding your narrative with parallels [Narrative Artifacts: 3 of 4]
3. Catch up on Narrative Artifacts

Android tablet publications will need a very different mindset then those published on the iPad. Google’s OS is on the rise and it requires more open functionality.

The iPad is currently in the spotlight, especially with the concept of device-specific publications, but it won’t stay there forever. As of last year Android became the top-selling smartphone OS, finally overtaking Symbian. On the tablet front, Google has yet to release their format-friendly OS Honeycomb, but that didn’t stop Android tablets from grabbing 22% of the market share.

Keep in mind the primary device is the overpriced Galaxy Tab which, despite many flaws, shipped 2 million units.  Imagine what will happen when Android finally turns over a tablet-ready OS? I’m betting that any iPad-specific publications, magazines, newspapers or other applications will either launch Android editions or be left behind.

Android publications will need a very different mindset then I’ve seen so far in the iPad. I’ve mainly been playing with aggregation-publications NewsMix and FlipBoard and if they’re any example of what magazines are doing (or the new News Corp iPad-only publication) there is just so much more opportunity on an Android device.

The main difference is that the iPad and its applications expect a very passive user. What I’ve seen is that few applications have truly decent sharing functionality. NewsMix allows you to share with Twitter and Facebook, but doesn’t give you a lot of power to decide what you’ve got to choose from. FlipBoard allows greater customization of sources but is useless for sharing stuff on anything but the network it originated on.

My experience on my Android phone is entirely different. I regularly share content on multiple services, no matter where it originated from and sometimes even build content around what I read. I frequently interact with other apps on my phone, sometimes passing content from one to the other. This hits at the heart of what will be the most difficult thing for publication developers as they adapt to Android, as well as the key to success.

The iPad is a closed device and applications on it take their cue from the OS. iPad applications are self-contained, closed off, little islands of developer-determined functionality. Any sharing goes on in the application and using the functionality built into the application, for better or worse.

This just won’t fly on an Android tablet.

Publishers are no doubt loathe to allow other applications to touch their valued content but without that functionality they’re missing out on what using an Android phone is all about.

What interactivity makes a quality Android tablet publication?

Paragraph-by-paragraph linking: The online reading experience is all about sharing. Unfortunately long-format articles can make that difficult, especially when they are formated differently on a tablet then on the web. If it allows the user to link to specific sentences, it just makes it easier to create links via short-form social networks.

Rich integrated multimedia experiences: Implementation of video and audio mid-content on the iPad always feels… off. Android, complete with Flash-friendly software, will allow people to better integrate their active media into the story. I can think of clicking on pictures that go video, fancy drop downs, more interesting menus, etc…

Every app, a platform: This will be especially difficult for publications with paywalls, but allowing users to look at articles in their browser or otherwise treat the article like they could in a browser. Give them the ability to pull content into other applications and use it.

Making use of the menu: Unlike on an iPad, Android apps have access to a pop-up menu with options customizable by the developer. I can imagine some of the Main Stream Media publishers trying to close off any meaningful options here, but there’s a lot that could be done. Quick links to sections, changing readability settings, leaving audio and video comments, sharing and tagging. There is a lot of cool functionality that the Android menu allows, it would be a shame not to take advantage.

What functionality do you think should be part of all Android tablet publications?

Related articles

• As Android Tablets Arrives, iPad’s Marketshare Shrinks From 95% To 77% (cultofmac.com)
• Can Honeycomb Tip the Scale for Android Tablets? (pcworld.com)
• Android Captures 22% Of The Tablet Market As iPad Slips (thenextweb.com)
• Android steals tablet market share from Apple’s iPad (venturebeat.com)

Related posts:

1. Read Like Me

How can we use order and placement within a multimedia package or interactive story to enrich the narrative?

I’ve been reading through Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics on and off these last few months and it strikes me just how important this book is to anyone dealing with multimedia, not just comic artists or aficionados. When you think about it, in many ways comics were multimedia before anyone else was. They took an unusual step in completely combining images and words to create unique narratives that spoke in both media with one voice.

In comics, you can’t take any media out and still have a complete story. A comic without the words or without the artwork is not really a comic and may not even be a story. Even without words, there is still a narrative drawing everything together. The same can’t be said for most implementations of multimedia now. Many people who create narratives online do so with separate media in separate places, or create text with audio or video that doesn’t add to the narrative or does so in a way unassociated with the space it is in.

All this is confused even more by the web, with hypertexts and social media it would be relatively easy to have someone destroy the intended sequence for a user.

The question is, in what way can we use sequence to imbue our linked multimedia with narrative, instead of sitting along side it.

Get rid of sidebars?

Sidebars have been a standard practice in print media for a long time and in many sites it seems that the practice has carried over. The sidebar holds related but not integrated content for a narrative. Sometimes it may hold a summery for bored readers. But this practice ignores the possibilities of the web.

• Content can be embedded inside of text with tooltips.
• Rolling over text can reveal hidden elements.
• Separate sequences of text and imagery can be integrated to enrich narrative. But go beyond slideshows, show the sequence, push interaction.

Image via Wikipedia

Match beats

There are often different multimedia sequences which share beats with other media related to the narrative. By beats, I mean places where moments in the narrative line up between two media, for example photo and sound. This is why Soundslides is so attractive, it allows you to tell richer stories by combining photos and audio then you would be able to do with those two media sitting separate on the same page.

‘Here sequence is ridiculously important, the sequence of audio clips and photos can be matched up to create a rich story. One that is easy to digest and quite attractive.

• Narrating video with voiceovers
• Put navigation elements next to related content (tagging).
• Integrate related social searches (like Twitter) inline with an article.

Move beyond the paragraph

Image via Wikipedia

With the advent of easy typography on the web, considering how your text looks within the body of a website is key. The paragraph itself is a form of punctuation. However, we need to think beyond just the two+ sentence paragraph and into methods that take advantage of all the ways we can manipulate type today. The form and accepted format of the paragraph is something that comes from how we write by hand and is further formalized by the technology behind the printing press. However, the popularity of something like Twitter shows that this is not always the way we think anymore.

Placement of paragraphs, sentences or words can have a unique effect as well, imagine spreading out elements of a story in a way that shows emotion or meaning. We could deform letters or display them one at a time. We can even use words as playing cards. Why should we limit our storytelling to paragraph format?

• Spread and sequence sentences or paragraphs. Many people work on screens that are far wider than a book page. Why not spread out you sentences on one line or consider other formats?
• Place standard text within non-standard places. You can use floating divs or JavaScript to write on top of pictures or even on top of videos. With JavaScript or perhaps HTML5, you’d be able to animate it. Gives a new meaning to ‘voice’ over, huh?
• What about a cloud format? Letting concepts float up and hover around?

Consider left to right, than break it

McCloud notes how we read from left to right and how that changes how we read, what blanks our mind fills in, and where our eyes go next. (I wonder how things change where the society’s primary language goes in the opposite direction.)

What does this mean for web design? Should we throw out the concept of right-side sidebars or the sidebar-content-sidebar format? I’m not sure. I’d love to see some statistics on that if you have them. But what it does mean is that we have an opportunity to direct navigation in an order, not just as the presentation of options. It also means that we can reward users at the right side of a page by presenting them with something a little unusual, a new kind of punctuation.

But if we understand that the eye works this way, we can play with it, exploit it. With subtle strokes we could force it along a path. We could even defy the standard format and give multiple options. Instead of a buffet of every single area on a website, what about a limited menu, or a path that implies a narrative through the design.

• Can website navigation tell a story?
• Create a set of paths through your story or website using links or anchors. What if the selection of one path results in the exclusion of some options, what sort of narrowing down can be done?
• Embed artifacts in your site. Things that enrich the narrative of a site through consumption.

What’s next?

There is a lot to consider here. This doesn’t even get into real interactive options and the idea of narrative web design is something that has been banging away in my head for a while and I feel needs some serious expanding in the future.

However, It is important to start thinking right now about how sequences of events, media or even color can change how an online narrative is consumed.

Related posts:

1. Artifacts: building dimension into your narrative [Narrative Artifacts: 1 of 4]
2. The Android tablet is on the rise, so let’s think beyond the iPad magazine
3. The Browser Future of Interactive Fiction

The blog io9 has an excellent post up about what to do and not to do with Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and it takes a look at some past successes.

I’m a fan of the concept of ARGs and, although it comes down against ARGs, I found this article fascinating.

No related posts.

I remember when the USA Channel did little more than shows about angels. Yet, in a relatively short time frame, the channel has transformed itself into a network with a number of excellent, well-known and well-received shows. At the core of this transformation has been their “characters welcome” brand. The reason that USA’s brand is so strong, and only becoming stronger, is because they understand the importance of transmedia storytelling.

This is strongly reflected in their channel, which stakes it’s shows not on plot, type or location, but on their central characters. Though many other networks would soon follow, USA was the first to have transmedia characters in their shows. At USA you can (among many other things) straighten up rooms with Monk (from Monk), play detective games with the cast of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, read blogs by Shawn from Psych, and get text messages from the characters in The 4400 which reveal plot elements. This is part of an excellent transmedia strategy that spreads across all the network’s properties.

You can see the focus on transmedia character building in the launch of USA’s new show In Plain Sight, a show about bringing people in to the witness protection program. The network has already launched the show’s website in which you can “get a witness to protect” according to the network’s advertising and find out more about each of the characters. The advertising too is notable in that, unlike many pilots, they focus on the characters. The character focus is so strong that they almost exclude the plot from these ads. We see a number of witnesses that the main character of In Plain Sight will presumably have to protect over the course of the series, however the focus is on the main character, what her problems are, what her accomplishments are, how she feels, what her identity is, and what her relationships are. Even before the series had a launch date, the USA network made sure that we knew who the protagonist was in preparation for extending her over multiple media.

It is notable how strongly the characters are promoted on USA, while other companies might promote the world as opposed to the characters. The reason for this is simple, these characters live right next to us, along with USA’s (real-life) characters of the month, in the real world. This idea is reinforced by instances in which the characters break the fourth wall, the most notable being the promotion of USA’s purchase of Law and Order: CI. In the ad, the main characters of CI notice (right under the severed hand) the USA logo on the corner of the screen, one of them going so far as to reach out and try and touch it. The message is that despite being boxed inside the screen, these characters exist outside of their TV shows.

The most interesting reflection of this strategy has been the character mash-ups. These mash-ups (a type of transmedia that Chris Dahlen seems to be a fan of) are a great deal of fun and are built to reward TV viewers who watch the network and characters, not just the shows. In these ads various characters from each of the shows meet up with each other. Monk is thrilled to meet The 4400 who had to live in a clean room, Psych‘s fake psychic Shawn brushes past the real psychic Johnny from The Dead Zone, and in the latest ad, Detective Goren drives up from his New York police department (from CI) welcomes Mary, the protagonist of In Plain Sight, to the network with a pie.

It’s very interesting to see how a successful convergence strategy plays out on TV, and how it slowly gets picked up by the other (larger) networks.

Oh, and I’m sort of looking forward to In Plain Sight, it looks good.

Related posts:

1. No Gods, No Kings… No Men? The Player Character in BioShock
2. Player Character Characters
3. Grimm Just Can’t Make Me Care [Reasoned Reviews]