Critical Approaches to Culture + Media

Innovative Content Development in New Media has some of the following characteristics (This is by no means a comprehensive list.): _______________ Imaginative storytelling (Breaking the rules and building new ones) _______________ Not derivative (but can be a copy—mush — experimental cinema and music as models) _______________ Aware of aesthetics, form and feel (Use OF Technology — Not Used by Technology) _______________ Creating new knowledge and information (Play in every sense of the word.) _______________ Aware of collage, montage and other techniques of bricolage (Stories can make the impossible real — photo-realism is a dead end) _______________ Talent (Learning and Education and Research) _______________ Decentralized modes of information gathering, exchange and distribution (Open Source) _______________ Interactivity (Video games create the illusion of interactivity — interactive game play should be about a complete transformation of the game by the player — interactivity becomes creativity) _______________ Bring body movement into the video game storytelling equation (Hands are not enough — Wii) _______________ Link popular culture, games, books, magazines, fans, television and the web into content development (Specialized studios need cultural analysts and ethnographers as much as they need creators) _______________ Work with audiences not against them (Fan movements, fansites, fan literature) _______________ Assume that trends will shift as quickly as they are recognized — old style marketing will not work (Time is compressed but that does not mean that clip stories will last — marketing becomes discovering stories as well as creating them) _______________ Non-linearity, complexity and chaos are at the center of digital content creation _______________ Simulations are only as effective as the stories that underly them — Algorithms are culture _______________ Telepresence and visualization need haptics and vice versa (Dreams are the Royal Road into Storytelling) _______________ Narrowcast not broadcast (P2P will become C2C)