Most people who keep abreast of technology are aware of augmented reality. That’s technologies that look like this:

This stuff is really cool. I mean, it’s incredibly useful to be able to get directions in this fashion, and it’s also incredibly neat to imagine the possibilities. Someday, will I walk out of a movie about alien invasion, hold up my phone, and through its viewscreen see the real world overlaid with aliens invading? Probably. I wouldn’t be surprised!

Augmented reality, though, is about much more than just holding up a phone and looking “through” its screen. Producers of ARGs - alternate reality games - have long understood what augmented reality really is. It’s what happens when you look around you and see your everyday world transformed. When you’re playing an ARG, your understanding of the world shifts. No longer are you simply standing at the bus stop, getting tacos from a lunch truck, or admiring a famous landmark; now you are looking for clues that may be hidden anywhere, reading secret meanings into the passersby, searching public advertisements to see if any of them were placed by a particular company. The world around you has become the site of a story - and it’s done so without any technological intervention.

Movies can do this, too, without even the effort of creating an augmented reality game. I live in Boston, and many movies are set there - Good Will Hunting, for example. One of the biggest tourist destinations is the ”Cheers pub.” People want to go there and feel, for a moment, like they’re in the place where “everybody knows your name.” Conversely, I couldn’t enjoy the movie Legally Blonde when I rewatched it, because a great deal of it is set in a beauty shop near Harvard University. I live near Harvard, and there aren’t any beauty shops that are anything like that fictional one. Oh, sure, it’s supposed to be a comedy, suspension of disbelief, etc etc - but I secretly wanted to walk around my neighborhood and pretend that I was Elle Woods, and the moment I realized that my Harvard wasn’t the same as Legally Blonde’s Harvard, the spell was broken.

As a concept, augmented reality is about much more than just technology. Technology can play a great part in it. The “New York Nearest Subway” app is a wonderful idea, and there’s a place for it and apps like it in entertainment. But we must never forget the real affordances of geography - the real possibilities of the real world, augmented only by our own minds, our own imaginations.

In the computer industry, people use the term platform agnostic. If a piece of software is platform agnostic, it can run on any kind of computer - a Mac, a PC, a Linux box.

I like to use the term “platform agnostic” too, but when I use it, I mean something a little different. The root of “agnostic” is Greek, αγνώσις. It literally means “without knowledge.” So, someone who’s religiously agnostic asserts that they don’t know if God exists.

When I say that I’m “platform agnostic,” it doesn’t mean that I don’t know about platforms. I know about a lot of platforms. I know about various operating systems; I know about Facebook and Twitter; I know about old media, like television, printed books, and movies. I believe platforms are important. That’s the entire premise of media studies - and I’m writing a master’s thesis in media studies right now!

What I mean when I say that I’m platform agnostic is that I don’t care what platform you use to tell a good story. The important thing is that it’s a good story.

This is a very basic principle, but it’s one that’s easy to get away from. In my last post, I talked about how my best friend and I would pretend to be dragons when we were kids. We came up with all kinds of elaborate things as we played, things that I now call “transmedia extensions.”

But here’s the thing. Without a good story, we wouldn’t have wanted to come up with all those transmedia extensions. When a kid suggests playing some kind of boring make-believe, what happens? The other kids don’t want to play. And that’s exactly what happens if you’re not starting with a good story as a grown-up. If people don’t care about your story, they’re just - not going to play.

So when I say that stories are platform agnostic, I mean that a great story can be told using any medium, on any platform, and that it will succeed in connecting to its audience however it’s told. If you’re telling a boring story, though? Not even the coolest new doohickey, social media site, or spreadable webisode blitz will save it.

When I was a little kid, my best friend and I had some imaginary friends. Their names were Ferdinand and Isabella (hers and mine, respectively) and they were tiny dragons, just up to our knees. I don’t remember what hers looked like, but mine was lime green and hot pink, and I have a vivid sense-memory of imagining how it would be to cuddle a dragon.

We’d play with Ferdy and Izzy, as we called them, constantly. Whenever we built forts out of our parents’ furniture, they were dragon caverns. We’d tell each other stories about them. We drew elaborate maps of where they lived, and if we’d had access to video cameras, I’m sure we would have tried to make home movies about them. When we went to school and were asked to do writing assignments, we wrote about Ferdy and Izzy. There was no part of our lives that they didn’t touch.

When my best friend and I sat down and told each other stories about our imaginary dragons, we were just doing what came naturally - imagining, dreaming, hoping. It was just as natural for us to get up from the couch and go do something to extend that story into the real world: “Okay, you build a couch fort. I’ll draw the map. Then we’ll record a song that Ferdy and Izzy like to sing on the tape-recorder. And then let’s watch a movie about dragons!”

In the end, that’s basically what transmedia storytelling is about. It’s about letting a story get its tendrils into every part of your life, and it’s about suspension of disbelief. My best friend and I didn’t really believe that we had invisible dragons named Ferdinand and Isabella. We knew that they were just made-up imaginary friends. But we wanted so badly to believe! It was such a cool idea! And when we drew a map, or when we pretended we were feeding part of our lunches to our dragons, or when we watched a movie with special-effects dragons that looked photorealistic - the story-world drew a little closer to our world. We could suspend our disbelief a little more. We could almost feel the warmth of the dragons’ bodies next to our own, could almost feel the puff of their smoky breath against our hands.

It’s hard to recapture that feeling as an adult. It’s really difficult for me - for anyone, I’d imagine - to drop my inhibitions and really believe in a story-world. But when I begin to see pieces of the world everywhere - then I begin to believe. When I watch a television show, and read a comic about it, and then discover that the characters are actually carrying on a conversation on a social network - that they’ll respond to my comments! - I begin to believe. When I see ads that belong to the story-world, ads for True Blood or for Oceanic Airlines, I do a double-take. I think, is there really an Oceanic Airlines? When I receive a business card from Stark Enterprises, and I fill out a job application to work with Iron Man, and I actually get a call back - then I’m hooked. Then I’m in deep.

And that’s not just true for me, either. After all - you played make-believe, too, didn’t you? So you’ve already had the prototypical transmedia experience. You already know that once you believe in something with all your heart, you’ll remember it forever.

Great video done by NML!

Lately I keep getting into arguments in which I defend larpers.

To understand why one would get into such an argument, you have to understand what a larper is. LARP stands for Live Action Role Play. Larpers, then, are grown adults who get dressed up in elaborate costumes, arm themselves with boffers and Nerf guns and tennis balls, and go running around pretending to be someone else for a day, play-fighting and play-acting and generally making asses of themselves as far as “normal” people are concerned. In the Geek Hierarchy, larpers are pretty close to the bottom.

So I keep getting into these arguments. People make a joke about larpers (“I cast Magic Missile into the darkness!”) and I feel compelled to respond. My point is simple. Don’t you wish that, just for one moment, you could enjoy something as earnestly as larpers do? Don’t you remember what it was like, when you were a little child, to play cops & robbers, or to sit down to a tea party with your friends and stuffed animals, and to really completely give yourself over to that sense of play?

Isn’t that how you feel when you watch a really great movie? Aren’t you suddenly transported back in time, to when your mother or father told you stories, and you just wanted to live forever in that story world? When you stopped critiquing, stopped thinking like a grown-up, and just took it all in?

That’s alchemy. That’s the moment when lead turns into gold.

Next time: telling stories & making believe - childhood play as the prototypical transmedia experience.

Here we are at FOE4, and Henry Jenkins has just gave his keynote about Transmedia Storytelling Principles. Amazing.

For our clients and those of you who have seen our speeches/workshops, this we are about to show is not new. But after seeing Henry's principles we wanted to share one of our Patron Saints, the most important: Scheherazade (in the US) or Sherazade (in Brazil), from the Arabian Nights.

For us, she was one of the first storytellers to make a hyperlinked story that really got all the transmedia principles (above). And she is one of the reasons of why our motto is "Transmedia Storytelling since 3000 B.C.":

• Drillability
  Every story Scheherazade went deeper and deeper. She created an entire universe around the rabbit holes she created in her text. For example, in Aladdin's story - she dug into the story of the magic carpet, explaining why it was magic.
• Continuity vs. Multiplicity
  The great majority of the Arabian Nights had stories that had continuity between each other... and 1001 nights, 1001 stories, certainly provides multiplicity!
• Immersion/Extractability
  The sheer immersiveness of Scheherazade's stories were what made the Sultan fall in love with her (and give up on killing her). Many of the stories became extracts and parallel plots.
• World Building
  By breathing life into Arabian mythology & legends, Scheherazade built that immersive world, that world where you can drill down deeply and explore broadly. And she references specific historical people - building the world out further and connecting it up to reality.
• Seriality
  Come on. There's 1001 nights. If that isn't serial, I don't know what is!
• Subjectivity
  Look at the titles of the stories in the 1001 nights: they're all referring to specific people. All these characters, all these perspectives - all these different understandings of a shared story-world!
• Performance
  Scheherezade's storytelling isn't written. It's a complete performance - and it saves her life and thousands of others...
  

We received tons of emails from friends all over the world sending greetings about the Olympics in Rio. Thank you all. This is a big win and the start of a very interesting approach on sports, media and citizenship. More to come....

Photo sent by David Charles!

Vídeo-entrevista para o jornal Propaganda e Marketing sobre nossa empresa e a aliança que montamos com a AgênciaClick. Muito bom dividir a tela com o Abel Reis!

Busy, busy, busy. But no excuse at all: everybody complaining of our blog absence. And they are right. The origin of our company is this blog. So we must not neglect it.

The recent two months were very, very intense for our company. We started our official roadshow in Brazil and US and also kept on participating on big events here and abroad. In Brazil we were part of Descolagem and NBC 09. On both we had amazing people sharing the campfire or attending the same event: Geoffrey Long, Ivan Askwith and Joshua Green. All from MIT.

The next posts will update on the recent developments, articles and events.

The show below is something like a business show on CNBC, but in Brazil. Globonews is the channel and Mundo S.A. the name of the show. Great to be together with Excalibur, Star Wars and the three pigs. :)

Our video interview for the Lions Daily website. Lions Daily is the official news source of the Festival. The questions were great. We talked about Shakespeare, Borges, buckets, mothership etc...