In every business, there is a Holy Grail. Cars? The 100 mpg vehicle. Energy? Cold fusion. Pharmaceuticals? An anti-baldness pill. Banking? They’re doing well enough without, thank you. In the entertainment world, this Holy Grail is the crossover intellectual property: A single concept that spawns profitable franchises in the film, television, video game, comic book, and fiction worlds. The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that the Syfy network and Trion Games (Rift)are embarking on that grand quest to create a total artwork for the 21st century: A crossover television series and MMORPG, tentatively titled One World. The big question is, will users invest in a new intellectual property just because it promises to be the universal world?
As with all business, media generation is about money. Intellectual properties cost money, and are generally a pretty poor investment, but promise vast profits if they succeed (see Star Wars). By expanding the brand to all of these mediums, the industry generates maximum profit from a single idea, garnering attention from television junkies, film-heads, and video game…use your imagination. Media critic and beard enthusiast Henry Jenkins calls this gesamtkunstwerk “trans-media,” in that it transcends a given medium.
The problem with trans-media, though, is that there is no clear way to make it actually function. Media companies drool over Trekkies and their constant cash flow, but they have never been able to intentionally replicate the effect. Perhaps most telling is the premier fan-culture object of the last decade, World of Warcraft. While calling WoW a failure would be ridiculous ($1 billion revenue last year), Blizzard Entertainment has failed to expand the game’s intellectual property into other mediums. Books have been fairly successful, but, despite twelve million guaranteed fans, the WoW movie and television series remain non-starters. Similarly, the Wachowskis attempted to broaden the medium of their film series The Matrix into video gaming, introducing an MMO and an ambitious action game, but both ultimately failed.
While attempts to artificially create a trans-media object have generally failed, Trion and Syfy seem to have a clever and ambitious plan for their game/TV show. The television show would follow the adventures of a couple of citizens of a larger world, which is controlled by the gamers. Major game events would affect the background story of the TV show. This sort of interactivity is definitely exciting, but raises quite a few issues: On what time-scale would these events affect the show? Users might not be interested in seeing a game event take place in the show six months afterwards. Similarly, would these events actually be unique, or would they be mere “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” style decisions, though on a grander scale? Ultimately, how are these two mediums with two distinct time-frames going to cross over, and will this hybridity live up to user expectations?
Without a doubt, Trion and Syfy’s effort is exciting and ambitious. We all expect to see interactive media experiences become more widespread and effective in the future. However, efforts to produce organic fan interaction with an intellectual property from without could ultimately create a Frankenstein’s monster, a zombie that mimics fan behavior, without actual fan participation. See: NBC’s The Cape.