Rovio Mobile was a small Finnish game developer company that was on the edge of bankruptcy in 2009. They created the mobile game Angry Birds to try to survive, betting on the growing iPhone app market. The game became a huge success, with over 100 million downloads and becoming the best selling game in the Apple Store. The game was simple - players used a slingshot to destroy structures by throwing birds. It was easy to play in short bursts. This success was possible due to the rise of internet platforms that allowed peer-to-peer sharing of content and games. People have also engaged in piracy and illegal sharing of copyrighted content, making it harder for media companies to sustain traditional business models.

1. The case of Rovio Mobile, a small finnish game developer company is quite astonishing. In
2009, the company was the edge of bankrupt and their managers decided to bet their last
chances to survive on creating a game application for the growing IPhone applications
market. They came up with a simple idea. An intuitive game where the player has to destroy
different kinds of constructions by throwing small birds with a sling. Two years after, it is the
best seller ever in the Apple Store, just hitting 100 millions downloads. There isn’t properly a
narrative. It shows a simple struggle between heroes and opponents. Nothing special indeed.
What was really captive to the audience was the easiness of playing and its accessibility, the
fact that you could play it while in a line or during a coffee break. The levels are short enough
and the format immediately understandable.

2. This has been possible thanks to the rise of big Internet aggregators, search engines and
social websites allowing peer to peer interactions. Media companies have tried to cop with the
shift in the demand from physical to digital goods moving their resources to the creation and
sustainability of online businesses. People, in the meanwhile, have made that shift even
harder for media companies with activities like piracy, illegal downloading and not-authorized
editings of copyrighted materials. The same word audience isn’t anymore correct to define
what isn’t anymore an undistinguished mass of people. Here, it’s more correct to talk about an
heterogenous group of users prosuming content. Stories can now circulate also outside the
traditional boundaries previously defined, through the direct involvement of common people
being, on a small scale, little media outlet.

3. The last example is set in a commercial context, where the concept of transmedia storytelling
has been adopted to strengthen the brand and engage potential and actual customers on a
deeper level. A particularly common tool is to create an alternate reality game, an interactive
narrative that uses the real world as a platform, involving multiple media and game elements,
to tell a story that may be actually affected by participants’ ideas and actions.
For example, the alternate reality game created by Audi in 2005, called “The Art of the Heist”,
consisted in a spy story built around the launch of the A3, the new company’s compact car. It
started with a staged car theft at a New York City dealership, the night before the dealership’s
annual car show. The morning after, people who had been invited found on the dealership’s
entrance the traditional police “crime scene” yellow tape and a sign saying that the show had
been cancelled following the theft of an unreleased car. From there on, from April 1 to June
29, a series of featured live events, fictional websites and enigmatic tv commercials, the
campaign had been arising people’s curiosity, with, according to Audi, 500,000 active
participants.
Although, it is still a practice whose economic returns aren’t easy to be estimated, more and
more companies are developing their own ARB, alternate reality branding.

4. Unlike before, instead of repacking a narrative text from one medium to another, it is now
possible to flexibly stretch a single text into multiple media. This is also the core
assumption defining the concept of “Transmedia Storytelling”, “a process where narrative
elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple channels in order to
create a unified and coordinated entertainment experience”.
As a primary characterization, it may be useful to say what transmedia is not. It is neither a
process of adaptation from one medium to another, as we have seen traditionally with
books becoming movies, nor a process of repurposing, when the same story is expanded
in different media without adding any original elements to the main narrative. A transmedia
project could be designed from scratch or be implemented on the fly. Early practitioners
and experts like Jeff Gomez and Robert Pratten suggest that the earlier a project is
conceived and designed to be a transmedia experience, the highest the probabilities that
the project could be a success. This because the transmedia agency or producer is called
to directly manage a lot of story information and timely coordinate different groups of
contributors working in different companies from different industries. A fundamental value
to preserve is “coherence” within the different story-lines that, as a puzzle, have to fit
consistently in the overall picture. This overall picture is mainly conceived as a world, a
story world where related narratives happen.

5. The media-landscape was dominated by the established practices of content selection,
packaging and delivery, typical of the analog world, where form imposed its rules over
content’s consumption. Stories, besides those directly experienced by individuals in their
restrict social circles, were almost exclusively a product offered by media companies to an
audience.
The evolution of Internet from a network of computers to a network of people has changed the
scenario, as you may see on the next page.

6. During this master of science, I focused particularly on media and their evolution. With
Professoressa Dubini I had the opportunity to see and study phenomenona like digitization
and convergence. With this final work, following the precious directions of professor Edward
Rozzo, I wanted to investigate how an old practice like that of storytelling can adapt and
renew itself in the new, as I defined, cross-platform landscape.
While attending an exchange program at a Film School in Texas, I discovered what has
become the anchor point of my research trajectory: the concept of transmedia storytelling. I
approached it trying to understand what is a transmedial story, what are its basic features and
how its life cycle develops from authorial conceptualization to audience’s exposure.
In this work, however, this concept is both an arriving and a starting point.
Looking backward, it is the highest expression of a profitable synergy between contents and
media, where contemporary narratives enjoy the potentialities provided by recent
technologies.
Looking forward, it represents a new tool to create more and more immersive entertainment
and brand experiences, where people can become direct participants within the proposed
fictional world.

7. Hence, the concept of author in a transmedial context is shifting more and more towards
terms like “curators”, “story architects” or “experience designers”, people looking for the
creation of story worlds rather than a linear stream of events.
A story world is that fantasy space the user, the viewer, the player would hopefully like to dig
into. To realize that, a transmedia producer should know at least few techniques. First, he
should be able to create multiple points of entry in different media, as well as multiple points
of entry in the narrative, plotting its story in a way that make catching-up with the missed parts
easy and practical. A transmedia franchise, is usually relying on a primary platform from
where it starts and on which the main story lines happen. In the meanwhile, parallel or
peripheral narratives take place. So, a good story designer shouldn’t forget to place
“migratory cues” in every narrative, indicators that reveal that there is something more
somewhere else. He should also place, for the hardcore fans, specific rabbit-holes, parts of
the story where a real geek can spend hours of his time just to discover additional secondary
information. Finally, “the distant mountains”, a term coined by Tolkien when speaking about
the magic worlds he created, are those area of the narrative where facts and situations are
only mentioned, sparking off the audience’s imagination on what exactly could have
happened. They are functional because they place the narrative horizon a little bit further.
If story world could be also a little bit undefined, asking to be filled with users’ mind, what for a
core transmedia project must be absolutely well planned and managed is media timing. It is
the moment where media make their appearance and give their contribution to the franchise.

8. What transmedia storytelling as a whole seems to me is that it works as a compelling point of
exchange where a part, story-producers and brands, give away some control on the authoring
and directing of proprietary elements while allowing users and consumers to enter their
creative worlds, having some degrees of influence on them and, hopefully, come to the point
where they immerse into them. Immersion means the elimination of the basic distinction
between the subject and the object, the person and the content of the medium. In the new
cross-platform landscapes, where we are almost always and everywhere exposed to at least
one medium, immersion can be omnipresent. In my opinion, this could represent an issue
putting at risk the most valuable critical resource we have at disposal when facing content:
interpretation. On the basis of the multidisciplinary considerations developed in the first part of
my work and, after an overview of how this cross-platform landscape is continuously
expanding while questioning its own functionalities, may I suggest to update the famous
sentence “the medium is the message” into “the messages transcend the media”.

9. Here we have an hypothetical transmedia story taking place across multiple media. In this case we are talking about one of
the major movie studios in Hollywood wanting to create a transmedia experience around a series of three movies forming a
trilogy.
To raise interest in the first movie, the company starts a promotional campaign both airing theatrical trailers on television and
creating a fan group on Facebook. The film comes out and, during the usual previews before the film starts, a contest
challenges audience to answer some questions in the movie website, about an unsolved mystery in the story. Here, once
answered to some questions, it is mentioned that the real answer to the mystery will be revealed in an upcoming comic. If
people buy that comics magazine, they may discover that, behind that mystery, there is more than what they could expected,
a very intricate conspiracy. In the last page of the comic there is a code that, if texted to a specific number, allows readers to
receive a text directly from a character who has some hot information. Some days later, who has arrived till this step,
receives an other text with a date, a time and place. Those are the coordinates of a public speech given by that character,
revealing other information about the conspiracy. Official and un-official videos of the event are then posted both on youtube
and the main website. Contextually, this character starts tweeting regularly and his followers grow day after day. This led to
the event of the second movie, who can be easily viewed just having seen the prequel but that could be far deeply enjoyed
once you have taken part to all the other experiences. Between the second and the third movies, a Tv show series connect to
the third part of the franchise, while exploring a particular side-narrative in a console-game. As we have seen, we could have
many experience layers. It is up to any person to decide how much deeper he wants to go into the story.
Here we had an example of a story able to spread across so many media. Realistically, such a design could only be planned
and implemented by a company with a big budget and a very good network of properties and partnerships. But transmedia
could also be approached by smaller players once they realize to have a product strong enough in one media to try to extend
its brand across others.

10. On this success, after having released special editions with additional thematic levels,
Rovio has recently decided to make the Angry Birds world interact with other brands.
Since a couple of weeks, it hosts Bing search engine as the tool some characters use
to move in the fictional space, but, more remarkably, has signed a partnerships with
20th Century Fox’s animation movie Rio. 10 days ago, Rovio released a new version
called “Angry Birds Rio” set in the same fictional world where the movie is placed. We
may say that Angry Birds is at the moment “hosting” a transmedia project, but I don’t
exclude that in a near future, as one of his officers recently said, the finnish company is
going to produce its own movie and making it interact with a new version of the game.

11. Moreover, Web 2.0., together with phenomena like convergence and digitization, has offered
a unique possibility to make the outputs of different media coexist within the same platform
space.
With the diffusion of broadband Internet, wi-fi and third generation mobile connections, the
extremely content rich web universe can now spread on different platforms, such as smart-
phones, tablets, Internet televisions and game consoles, creating what in my title I defined as
“the new cross-platform landscape”.