Written very much from a traditional perspective. He does acknowledge the gigantic problems the film industry is facing, but he still tries to find a way out from the inside instead of from ground zero.

183-194
He basically just mentions that new business models are needed, but doesn’t give any advice.

187
“Ironically, it has been academic and journalistic work, research and non-film practitioners who have offered fresh thinking and added to the critical debate about the Internet and new business models.”

211
Out of the various theatrical windows, he says, only 2 will survive:

1. Theatrical release
2. Video-on-demand via the Internet

1
“Anthropologists tell us that storytelling is central to human existence. That it’s common to every known culture. That it involves a symbiotic exchange between teller and listener – an exchange we learn to negotiate in infancy. Just as the brain detects patterns in the visual forms of nature – a face, a figure, a flower – and in sound, so too it detects patterns in information. Stories are recognizable patterns, and in those patterns we find meaning. We use stories to make sense of our world and to share that understanding with others. They are the signal within the noise.”

2
“Every new medium has given rise to a new form of narrative.”

3
Definition deep media:
“Under its [the Net's] influence, a new type of narrative is emerging – one that’s told through many media at once in a way that’s nonlinear, that’s participatory and often gamelike, and that’s designed above all to be immersive. This is “deep media”: stories that are not just entertaining, but immersive, taking you deeper than an hour-long TV drama or a two-hour movie or a 30-second spot will permit. This new mode of storytelling is transforming not just entertainment (the stories that are offered to us for enjoyment) but also advertising (the stories marketers tell us about their products) and autobiography (the stories we tell about ourselves).”

8
“We can see the outlines of a new art form, but its grammar is as tenuous and elusive as the grammar of cinema a century ago.”

21
“At the end of the meeting [with Jordan Weisman], [Kathleen] Kennedy called the head of marketing at Warner Bros., which was making the picture [A.I.]. As Weisman recalls it, she made an announcement: ‘I’m sending Jordan over. I want you to write him a very big check. And don’t ask what it’s for.’
‘It’s good to be kind,’ Weisman remarked when the call was over.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it is.’”

27
Trent Reznor’s Year Zero entarch was “‘the world’s most elaborate album cover,’ he said, ‘using the media of today.’”

32
“Where earlier forms of literature had been expected to hew to history, myth, or legend, novels were judged by their ‘truth to individual experience,’ as the critic Ian Watt put it.” (Watt, Ian; 1957; The Rise of the Novel)

43
“At expos like Comic Ichi and Super Comic City, thousands of amateurs sell slickly produced, self-published manga in which well-known characters express forbidden desires and otherwise behave in clear violation of intellectual property laws. Yet commercial publishers show no inclination to send out their copyright attorneys and shut the markets down. Instead they’ve learned to look the other way, because thy know that the fervor these fan-created manga generate can only lead to increased sales for everyone.”

67
“McDonald’s, Coca-Cola – these were the deals the people at Fox could understand. The Ubisoft game was not.”

68-75
He describes the difference between Star Wars set up as a franchise and entarch – and how it became more entarch-like in the late eighties (72-73). Essentially, in the beginning everybody who owned a piece of the franchise did whatever they wanted – novel ghost written by somebody in the name of Lucas; Marvel created Jaxxon, a giant rabbit as an homage to Bugs Bunny (68); Luke Skywalker getting affectionate with twin sister Princess Leia (71) – while later Lucas took control and a bible was created.
-> It’s still not entarch (weak glue), but getting closer.

69
Star Wars movies generated USD 4 bn box office income. The franchise as a whole USD 15 bn.

73
“In addition to not contradicting the movies or each other, the new stories had to adhere to the core precepts of Star Wars: the struggle between good and evil, the role of mysticism and spirituality, the focus on family relationships, mythic depth beneath an apparently simple story. Working with a team of in-house editors, [Howard] Roffman set the story arcs and decided, in consultation with Lucas, whether major characters would live or die.”
-> Two EAs!

74
“In Star Wars, a Holocron is a repository of mystical Jedi knowledge. In real life, it’s a FileMaker database that [Leland] Chee maintains as Lucasfilm’s ultimate internal reference. Chee’s Holocron contains more than 30,000 entries coded for levels of canonicity, with the highest level – “G” for George – standing as the word of God.”
-> Entarch Bible with George as EA!

75
“Somewhere along the way, Lucas himself has been left behind. In December 2008, when Del Rey published The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia – a three-volume, 1,224-page boxed set – Roffman gave it to him and joked that he probably didn’t know 60 percent of what was in there. Lucas may have created Star Wars, but even he had to admit to Roffman that the fans own it now [figuratively].

87
“there’s nothing inherent in humans that makes them want to be passive consumers of entertainment, or of the advertising that pays for it.”

90
“Inevitably, serialization changed the structure of stories. Dickens fashioned tales with cliff-hanger endings to keep readers coming back [...]. More significant, however, was the way he improvised in response to his readers’ reactions.”

98
“The entire motion picture industry was essentially a real estate operation, with mass-produced entertainment the come-on.” So cinemas were where the money was. Nonetheless the majors sold them off after Paramount.

111
“When people say the Internet is wreaking havoc on existing media businesses, they’re really pointing to two things: this ever-growing cascade of information, and the emergence of hyperlinks as a means of dealing with it. On a planet that even in 2002 produced a new Library of Congress print collection every 57 seconds, most information is never going to command the premium it once did. But links to the right information can be extremely valuable – especially to companies tht know how to use those links to their advantage.”
-> ‘glue’ !!!

112f
“This is why, when books [NEXT PAGE] threatened to make us stupid 2,400 years ago [Socrates "complained that books encourage forgetfulness" 112], we responded not by abandoning books but by redefining “stupid.” I suspect we’ll do the same with Google.”

127
“‘Characters were becoming something companies would place great value in, because they knew people would follow. It was a precursor to the story arc.’” Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft Game Studios.

137
“I think of traditional linear storytelling as a roller coaster and games as a dirt bike.” Will Wright.

141
“The best stories lead to the widest variety of play, and the best play leads to the most story. I think they’re two sides of the same coin.” Will Wright.

142
“This suggests, the authors wrote, ‘that readers understand a story by simulating the events in the story world and updating their simulation when features of that world change.’” Speer, Nicole K. et al; 2009; Reading Stories Activates Neural Representations of Visual and Motor Experiences.
-> Consumers literally live in/experience a story – a bit like the mirror neuron.

177
“‘NBC is paying people fake money to do real work,’ he marveled, ‘and MasterCard paid NBC real money to give away fake money.’” Rajat Paharia, founder of Bunchball.

233
“as individuals we’re more connected than ever, and yet as a market we’re atomized. As goes the mass market, so go mass media, spelling chaos for the media industry itself and for the advertisers that rely on it to reach consumers.”

237
“And when consumers are enlisted to tell the story, it’s seen less as advertising than as peer recommendation.”

250
“[...] people don’t want to watch toilet paper give them a 30-second narrative – not when they could be watching real entertainment from real entertainment producers.”
-> He says advertising does not have to be storytelling at all.

274
“Any narrative that has gamelike aspects – which is to say, any story that invites you into its world – can make an appeal to your foraging instincts.”
-> If you conceive an entertainment world, play has to be part of it.

277
“[Japanese players] have no problem playing the bad guy, because they’re used to the idea that fantasy can be divorced from reality. (Hence such otaku fixations as lolicon and tentacle porn.) Others, Americans in particular, take a more moralistic approach.”

318
“‘It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it.’” Quotes Philip K. Dick ~ How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later.

195
“The history of cultural industries is littered with successful incumbents who, failing to see or respond to dramatic shifts in their competitive landscapes, were replaced by newcomers. In essence, cultural industries showcase how one dominant logic – the means and practices for achieving desired goals (Bacharach, Bamberger, & Sonnenstuhl, 1996; Prahalad & Bettis, 1986) - is replaced by another dominant logic. For example, early technology firms, which dominated the film industry from 1895 to 1911, dismissed the importance of films containing stories and stars, only to be replaced by content firms that focused on stories and stars and attracted larger audiences (Jones, 2001).”

195f
“In short, dominant players were unable to see the value of resources and alternative strategies that newer entrants brought into the industry and how these resources and strategies shifted the basis of competitive advantage.”

196
“Why is it that dominant players are unable to see and adapt to shifts in their environments, opening the door for new players who eventually replace them? Manage- rial attention is a scarce resource (Ocasio, 1997), creating competitive blindspots or judgmental mistakes (Zajac & Bazerman, 1991), when attention is restricted to existing competitors and practices. Two conditions are likely to focus incumbents’ managerial attention on existing resources and practices: intense rivalry among dominant firms and shared career backgrounds of top decision makers.”

“The more similar the dominant players’ backgrounds, the more likely they are to interact in industry forums, build overlapping social networks, and develop taken-for-granted rules of competition, creating an industry macroculture that may be maladaptive (Abrahamson & Fombrun, 1994). When tacit rules are shared among dominant players, alternatives are neither seen nor imagined (Scott, 1995).”

199f
“Because immigrants did not share a common language (the three largest immigrant groups came from Germany, Russia, and Italy), they needed an easily understandable form of story telling, which is a narrative.”

202
“Technology entrepreneurs did not at- tend sufficiently to content entrepreneurs until they competed head to head as producers, moving into greater resource similarity (Chen, 1996).”

“When entrepreneurs and top decision makers restrict their focus of attention to either technology or content, this provides an opportunity for smaller or newer competitors to exploit this restricted focus of attention. Ironically, the bit player among the content firms was Warner Brothers, who by developing sound technology in 1927 revolutionized and consolidated its place in the film industry.”

“In today’s media environment, technology and content are finding new ways in which they may live off of and extend one another, requiring that top decision makers attend to both technology and content.“

First time he mentions transmedia storytelling, afaik.

93
Definition-transmedia storytelling:
“Media convergence also encourages transmedia storytelling, the development of content across multiple channels. As producers more fully exploit organic convergence, storytellers will use each channel to communicate different kinds and levels of narrative information, using each medium to do what it does best.”

Very wise: he doesn’t even get into a religious discussion. He says straight away, that what he writes about is true for all religions and myths at the same time.

Numbers in brackets: pages in pdf.

xxi
“It is the purpose of the present book to uncover some of the truths disguised for us under the figures of religion and mythol­ogy by bringing together a multitude of not-too-difficult exam­ples and letting the ancient meaning become apparent of itself. The old teachers knew what they were saying. Once we have learned to read again their symbolic language, it requires no more than the talent of an anthologist to let their teaching be heard. But first we must learn the grammar of the symbols, and as a key to this mystery I know of no better modern tool than psychoanalysis.”

3
“It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.”

13f
“He had converted a public event to personal gain, whereas the whole sense of his investi­ture as king had been that he was no longer a mere private person.”

14
“By the sacri­lege of the refusal of the rite, however, the individual [e.g. King Minos] cut himself as a unit off from the larger unit of the whole community: and so the One was broken into the many, and these then battled each other—each out for himself—and could be governed only by force.”

15
“The hero is the man of self-achieved submission.” -> See On The Waterfront, maybe it wasn’t religious after all?

“As Professor Arnold J. Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of the laws of the rise and disintegration of civilizations, schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorat­ing elements. Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.”
-> He talks about Nietzsche’s and Schumpeter’s creative destruction!

16
“In a word: the first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside”

18
“Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind.”

“The [Australian Aranda] word altjira means: (a) a dream, (b) ancestor, beings who appear in the dream, (c) a story (Rôheim, The Eternal Ones of the Dream, pp. 210-211).”

30 (28)
“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

35 (33)
“As we soon shall see, whether presented in the vast, almost oceanic images of the Orient, in the vigorous narratives of the Greeks, or in the majestic legends of the Bible, the adventure of the hero normally follows the pattern of the nuclear unit above de­ scribed: a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return.”

37f (35)
“The composite hero of the monomyth is a personage of exceptional gifts. Frequently he is honored by his society, frequently unrecognized or disdained. He and/or the world in which he finds himself suffers from a symbolical deficiency. In fairy tales this may be as slight as the lack of a certain golden ring, whereas in apocalyptic vision the physical and spiritual life of the whole earth can be represented as fallen, or on the point of falling, into ruin.
Typically, the hero of the fairy tale achieves a domestic, microcosmic triumph, and the hero of myth a world-historical, macrocosmic triumph. Whereas the former—the youngest or despised child who becomes the master of extraordinary powers—prevails over his personal oppressors, the latter brings back from his ad­ venture the means for the regeneration of his society as a whole.”
-> He distinguished two essential stories: fairytale and myth.

39
“The cosmogonic cycle is presented with astonishing consistency in the sacred writings of all the continents, and it gives to the adventure of the hero a new and interesting turn; for now it appears that the perilous journey was a labor not of attainment but of reattainment, not discovery but rediscovery. The godly powers sought and dangerously won are revealed to have been within the heart of the hero all the time. He is “the king’s son” who has come to know who he is and therewith has entered into the exercise of his proper power – “God’s son,” who has learned to know how much that title means. From this point of view the hero is symbolical of that divine creative and redemptive image which is hidden within us all, only waiting to be known and rendered into life.”

40 (37)
“The effect of the successful adventure of the hero is the unlocking and release again of the flow of life into the body of the world. The miracle of this flow may be represented in physical terms as a circulation of food substance, dynamically as a streaming of energy, or spiritually as a manifestation of grace.”

44 (41)
“The World Navel, then, is ubiquitous. And since it is the source of all existence, it yields the world’s plenitude of both good and evil.”
-> God is in everything, in every blade of grass.

Some good quotes, but I don’t like the general lines and reasoning of the book.

Check out good Foreword by Jennings Bryant.

4f
Definition-entertainment:
“The word entertainment has a Latin root meaning “to hold the attention of,” or “agreeably diverting.” Over the years it has come to refer to a constructed product designed to stimulate a mass audience in an agreeable way in exchange for money. Entertainment can be a live or mediated experience that has been intentionally created, capitalized, promoted, maintained, and evolved. In other words, entertainment is created on purpose by someone for someone else. Entertainment is easily located, accessed, and consumed. And of course, entertainment is also attractive, stimulating, sensory, emotional, social, and moral to a mass audience.
And it is a business with specific components, as explained here. Entertainment may exist as a product, service, or experience. Entertainment products can be tickets to live performances and events; or they can be mediated programs and films that we receive in print or electronically. Television and movies are industries completely dedicated to creating entertainment as a product.
The travel and hospitality industries offer services to tourists and visitors; venues also offer services to audiences of sports, attractions, and activities. Services are designed to make entertainment pleasant for its consumers and audiences. What makes entertainment different than products and services is its experiential component. Unlike products and services, experiences are perishable—they last only as long as we are participating or watching—and intangible—they are of the moment and have ever-changing content.”
-> Even a book is an experience.

6
“As a capitalist product, entertainment is developed to make money—there is always a bottom line to consider.”

“Entertainment is not [...] art, although it may aspire to and attain the level of art at times”

“Entertainment’s four constituents are producers who understand the process of putting products together, creationists who are actively involved in creating a particular product, promoters who sell the products, and consumers who pay for entertainment’s many products, services, and experiences.”
-> Good intentions, but I don’t like this at all.

8
“Although the leisure triad [recreation, entertainment, amusement] is used in some industry categorization, a better way to view the entertainment industry is as being content-based. Entertainment content comes to audiences in three distinct ways: as live performance (theater, musical concerts), as media (movies and TV), and as interactive experiences (recreation, amusement parks, travel, and gaming). In this text, the term experience characterizes all forms of entertainment content.”

15
“We can experience entertainment in four ways—passively absorbing [passive entertainment], educational learning [educational entertainment], complete engagement [escapist entertainment], and esthetic appreciation [esthetic entertainment].”

16
“As a scarce resource, attention is the most sought-after commodity of entertainment marketers.”
-> There’s a logical problem here: economists see resources on the production side, not on the consumption side. Here, the producer would have to pay the consumer for his attention. Doesn’t make sense.

17
“If something is boring, we don’t pay attention to it. Entertainment captures attention. As a result, an attention economy is also an entertainment economy.”
-> Logic again. There are also other ways to capture attention. If you’re hungry, food captures your attention. If you’re broke, money does. Etc. This is not the way to prove we’re living in an entertainment economy!

26
“Marketing is the means by which the whole culture is searched for potential meanings that can be changed by entertainment into paid-for experiences.”
-> WHAT?

80
“Interesting experiences or information are often designed to make us think but, with entertaining experiences, a more significant emphasis seems to be placed on making us feel. And, to make us feel, entertainers create drama.”

“Drama is the driving force of many forms of entertainment. Genres such as suspense, tragedy, comedy, and mystery are typically considered to be specialized forms of drama. Although dramatic genres are traditionally associated with books, films, TV programs, and live performances, elements of drama can be found in most forms of entertainment, from video games and sporting events to music and dancing. Thus, it might be argued that good entertainment hinges on good drama.”

82
“”To fully explore any issue, an author has to examine all possible solutions to that issue and make an argument to prove to an audience that the author’s way is best. If you leave out a part of that argument or diverge from the point, your story will have plot holes or inconsistencies. Once you have covered every angle in your argument, you’ve mapped all the ways an audience might look at that problem and, therefore, all the ways anyone might look at that problem. In short, you have created a map of the mind’s problem solving process.”
When a story fully develops this model of the mind, they call it a Grand Argument Story because it addresses the problem from all sides. Characters, plot, and theme are outlined as essential elements of the “story mind.”
He quotes from Melanie Phillips and Chris Huntley ~ Dramatica.

Lots of definitions of play, immersion, ludology, narratology, etc.

1
“Regardless of which name we ultimately choose to apply, Alternate Reality Gaming is a rapidly emerging game genre and is one of the first true art and entertainment forms developed from and exclusively for the Internet.” It is not exclusively for the Internet, and he knows that: he mentions real life events, etc. later on.

47f
‘To be completely faithful to the TINAG philosophy, a game’s beginning (or launch, as they are commonly referred to) should be unannounced, although not all ARGs have followed this procedure and have still been successful.”
He is too prescriptive. ARGs are evolving. He published this in 2005, only 4 years after The Beast. How can there even be any categories or rules. Even in 2010 it is still Wild West out there. There is no such thing as a TINAG philosophy. Even the inventors of ARGs think they should never have invented TINAG. It is not a rule that people have to follow. It was an idea, and not the best one at that. And there are no shoulds in ARGs. Nobody knows enough to tell other people what they should do. Doing this would stifle creativity and evolution way too early!
He knows all this (see p. 191), I think, just has an inaccurate writing style.

66f
From Meadows, Mark Stephen ~ Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative
“Meadows: What was the interaction between the authors – you guys – and the readers, or players? Was there an instance when you didn’t know what the outcome would be but had to keep writing anyway?
[Elan] Lee: Oh, definitely. There was one puzzle where there was no answer. We had no idea how it was going to resolve. There was an artificial character that thrived on nightmares and was born in a psychological institute that had become so addicted to nightmares, it was looking for what scared people the most. See, it had to generate more nightmares to feed itself. We opened up the doors to the players and wrote out a distress call: “Help me” came from a character that the players liked who Loki had overwhelmed, but we didn’t know what the response would be. We wanted to leave it to the players to come up with something creative. They wanted to find a way to trap Loki and put out bait and destroy him, so they all got together – thousands of people – and they made a dream database and put all of their own nightmares into this database (it was beautiful to see them all work together like that), so we directed Loki toward the site and there he died. We created the animation sequence of Loki living though one line of everyone’s nightmare and phrased it in a way that read from everyone’s paragraph, but it was a single series of a total, truly nightmarish experience.
Meadows: That’s a pretty unique form of authorship that gives a lot of control to readers.
Lee: Oh yeah. The players felt totally in control and totally powerful, so the game was changing the story based on their specific writing.”

71-92
“Chapter 6: ARG Pre-History”
Lots of precursors.
Categorises Ong’s Hat: Incunabula as the first ARG.

100
The Beast’s alleged budged was USD 1,000,000.
The same goes for I Love Bees’ budget.

105-117
History of Majestic.
Most details I have found so far.

112
“[...] EA [...] announced it would be offering a retail CD-ROM version of the game in November 2001, containing the introduction and the first four episodes for $39.99.” So it was not a flatrate fee for the online experience, but a last attempt to repackage what already existed.

191
“Currently, this whole genre is really still in its infancy. I liken where things are now with television in the early 1950s.”

342-377
Self-promotional EA called Errant Memories. Made for ARG newbies to read through and understand what an ARG is.

32
Definition-story:
“In books and film – what I call “static media” – the author creates a product in a fixed physical form that is later viewed by an audience. The author creates the work in relative isolation from the reader, and the reader views it without direct contact with the author. In the formalist view of theorists like Tzvetan Todorov and Gérard Genette, there are two parts to this work: story and discourse (Martin 1986, 100–102). A story is the imaginary sequence of events involving the characters and the setting. It is a mental construct within the imagination of a person, i.e. a picture in the mind’s eye of what is happening. A discourse is the expression of that story: words and images which attempt to represent the events. The story begins in the mind of the author, and is then expressed into a discourse which is contained in the medium. By viewing this medium, the reader then forms a mental construct of that story within her own mind.”

17:54
Definition-story arc:
“analogous to chapter in a novel” -> so in his terminology arcs cannot overlap? -> Not my understanding of story arcs.

Story Arcs

19:48
They started off with influencable stories that branched out, were complicated, and depended on how the audience interacted with them. Later on the stories became much more linear, because these a easier to play. “Leave the story to us… but we’ll still change it anyway.” (slide text) if the audience likes a character, for example -> not player-directed but player-influenced story.

20:16
People like seeing new websites/content.

ARGs require new skill sets -> everything has to happen faster -> storytellers work under a constant deadline -> they’re not used to that, have to adapt

30:48
Mind Candy didn’t create a storyworld bible, but the audience created a Wiki and a Google Maps mashup that became the de facto bible!

44
Definition-intertextuality:
Laurent Jenny characterises intertextuality in the following way: “it introduces a new way of reading which destroys the linearity of the text. Each intertextual reference is the occasion for an alternative: either one continues reading, taking it only as a segment like any other, integrated into the syntagmatic structure of the text, or else one turns to the source text, carrying out a sort of intellectual anamnesis where the intertextual reference appears like a paradigmatic element that has been displaced, deriving from a forgotten structure.”