Ben 10 La bataille finale, un ARG pour les 6-12 ans
Par Olivier Godest • 2 Sep, 2010 • Catégorie: Events, News, Production and events, Transmedias storytellingPour ceux qui ne connaissent pas Ben 10, ce jeune héros est un personnage bien connu des jeunes téléspectateurs de Cartoon Network, une chaîne payante disponible sur Canalsat.
J’ai découvert ce matin sur le site de la société faberNovel, que celle-ci organisait un Alternate Reality Game à destination des 6-12 ans, autour de l’univers de ce personnage. Je me suis donc bien évidemment empressé d’aller faire un tour sur la plateforme de jeu développé pour l’occasion.
Tout commence avec une introduction vidéo, le héros apparaît et explique très clairement à l’internaute pourquoi il est ici : le pire ennemi de Ben a pour objectif de venir conquérir la Terre et il compte désormais sur nous pour l’aider à repousser cette attaque. Classique mais efficace !
On s’inscrit dès lors en créant une page profil avec un avatar et l’on accède à la première mission : un petit jeu en flash où l’on doit détruire des vaisseaux ennemis avec la souris. Principe de ranking (qui est le meilleur joueur ?), de badges/médailles, le tout permettant de débloquer de nouveaux niveaux et de progresser dans l’aventure.
Pour reprendre les mots de faberNovel, l’objectif de cette opération est “d’augmenter la noriété de Ben 10 auprès de sa cible, de l’associer clairement à Cartoon Network, de créer un événement ayant un écho sur le marché B to B et d’augmenter les revenus licences en intégrant un point de vente GSS à l’évément“.
Au cours de 10 missions étalées sur 1 mois et demi, les enfants devront rejoindre la « Human Force » pour :
• enquêter sur l’invasion d’un magasin Toys’R’Us par des aliens
• appeler Ben sur son téléphone mobile pour savoir où le rejoindre
• interroger des personnages de la série à travers leur blog et leur profil facebook
• prouver leur dextérité dans des mini-jeux flash
• percer les secrets cachés des héros de la série
• etc.
“Pour renforcer le lien entre Cartoon Network et Ben 10, une mission met en scène la directrice de la chaine, expliquant dans une conférence de presse comment l’antenne de Cartoon Network a été piratée pour diffuser une fausse mission à la Human Force.”
Intitulé “Ben 10 – La bataille finale”, cet ARG semble donc intéressant à suivre, prochaine étape le 08 septembre avec, a priori, la révélation d’un nouveau jeu en ligne.
Power to the Pixel’s groundbreaking Pixel Market will take place on 13 and 14 October 2010 in London.
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Other concepts are used to define this phenomenon, but to my knowledge, they only render its meaning partially. Some therefore talk about intermediality, such as Stefanelli and Maigret for example. They analyze the growing link between some television series such as Lost and Heroes and comic books as a proof of the growing intermediality of the cultural industry. For them, like for Jenkins, even though this process was born in some sub-cultural branches of mass media, it’s becoming stronger every day.
Every story has an effect on its audience. An audience listens, and suddenly, its mental universe is reconfigured, and by ricochet, its action on the world is modified.
The fist element is that the producers of content, the cultural industries and even the authors facilitate the link between media, between systems. They do this by creating content rich in references, trans-textual, inspired by the narration methods, the themes and the form of other media, and often approaching their creations as a whole, a multimedia world. The strongest example of that is The Matrix, which wasn’t conceived as a film but as a transmedia fantasy world, filled with historical references of the genre and where the videogame brings as many elements to the story as the films, the comic book series or the short animated films that followed. This sub-phenomenon of multimedia content conceived that way from the start is what Jenkins calls “world making”. The context of the content’s production is therefore quite specific and will influence that of the reception.
Many works, particularly from Hollywood, are full of references, inspired by narrative styles, themes and characters from other media. These crossed references go beyond the film, book or TV series and become a world, a semantic universe, which we called the metaverse in a previous post.
The conception of a transmedia story first begins with the story, a good story. But there’s not only the story, there’s the universe, there’s the way that the story will be developed through time and in the media, “controlled” by the creator or not.
September 27th 2009 was the airdate of the first episode of Heroes’ season 4. But Heroes is much more than a simple TV series. According to Jesse Alexander, its executive producer, as well as the producer of Alias and Lost: “Heroes was always conceived as a transmedia concept. This series is an integral part of the transmedia landscape and the scriptwriting techniques used are very close to that of videogames.”
The concept of Heroes was initiated by its creator Tim Kring, who knew and succeeded in freely developing his ideas without any constraint on NBC’s behalf. The network gave into his enthusiasm, which was shared by his whole team. Heroes is written by a team of about 12 scriptwriters, it’s a real collective creation, each story, each episode, is written collaboratively. However, each character is developed by a defined author for several episodes and finalized in an iterative way. According to Heroes’ executive producers, this way of working is much more efficient for a series, than having one author for each episode, where each one would follow the bible of the series’ creator. This also allows for a lot of reactivity, which is very practical to avoid pitfalls that a “traditional” team often takes very long to overcome.
The first support workshop for the 5 winners of the transmedia call for projects took place on November 4th. The participants were the five winning projects, intervening experts invited by the TM lab, early transmedia-philes (producers, scriptwriters, TV channels, web agencies,…who already attended the barcamp), eager to learn more and bring their support to the projects.
Le butinage – literally “pollen-gathering” – we mentioned in our last post is probably akin to the phenomenon of “cultural eclecticism”. And cultural eclecticism may be considered the French version of the phenomenon referred to in North American analyses as “omnivorism”. Richard Peterson, to whom we owe what were probably the first important analyses of the phenomenon, uses omnivorism to describe the transition from highbrow snobbery, based on the glorification of the arts and disdain for popular entertainment, to a cultural capital that appears more and more like an aptitude for appreciating the different aesthetics of a wide range of cultural forms, encompassing not only the arts, but also a whole panoply of popular and folkloric expressions. In France, it was the analyses of Olivier Donnat’s survey of French cultural practices (the results of the last wave of surveys should be out shortly) that underscored, from the early 1990s, this trend towards the hybridization of discrete cultural domains. The concept describes practices in which various forms of interpenetration are observable between certain contents that are highly legitimized in the “dominant” cultural circles and others that as a rule are not.
Of course, it’s a joy ride! Let’s be grateful to HBO for the creativity of its teams.
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Above all, being a producer means serving as a jack of all trades who knows how to keep creative energy flowing between denizens of very different worlds: artists, financiers, jurists, technicians, communicators, and plenty of others. To take this complex machinery at the very core of the content industry and make it work, a producer has to connect up wires that were not initially made to meet.
E. Coleman: These days, kids love what “grown-ups” consume. They’re always flicking. They’re attached to content, not channel. Television remains their medium of choice, followed by videogames and the Internet. They have a very rigid activity structure during the day (get up, go to school, eat, homework, fun…) and often, limited leisure time (parental intervention), but a very “free” media consumption (across all media). On the Internet, they’re very present on social networks such as MSN or Facebook. What can that mean for the creation of Transmedia programs? What kind of presence can social networks have in the audiovisual creation? 
Everyone knows Lost and its heroes, the modern-day Robinsons, marooned on an island. What is less well known is that JJ Abrams developed a whole transmedia concept around the TV series.
In the middle ages, man thought that the earth was flat. The discovery of perspective marks the beginning of the Renaissance, the beginning of modernity: man knows that the earth is round and he has adopted a point of view. He observes the world. Later, man went to the moon, he saw the earth from the sky, he discovered that there wasn’t just the world of man but a global universe to which man belongs. Long after the industrial revolution and Taylorism, new technologies have started to create new uses; Apple and Nokia were the first to put man at the center of technology. “User centric” type experiences and living labs multiplied. The technology evolved. Businesses started selling more and more services. Google then thought of not selling services but of offering new types of services for free, creating added value on which the business can make a profit. The 2.0 economy was born.
In just two years Power to the Pixel’s Cross-Media Film Forum has become the leading event in the film industry calendar for creators to connect with key digital innovators: pioneers who are developing new models of storytelling, film financing and film distribution across multiple platforms. The event opens this year’s London Film Festival from 14-16 October 2009 at BFI, Southbank.
One of the first examples of transmedia was the simultaneously real and virtual Matrix universe of the Wachowski brothers. Everyone remembers the three movies, but there have been printed and Web comics as well, short films, Animatrix, a video game and a massively multiplayer online game.
