Transmedia Examples

Transmedia storytelling is a technique of telling a single story or story experiences across different media outlets.  It is a relatively new experience.  Here are some examples:

American 2049 is a Facebook Game created by the Human Rights Organization Breakthrough in the hopes of advancing the human rights.  It is the first Facebook game to integrate the social networking platform with multiple resrouces including historical artifacts, real life events as well as clues.  In the game, the user is an agent of the Council on American Heritage sent to capture a fugitive Ken Asaba.  

Homeland Guantanamo is an on-line game designed to expose users to the realities of the US Detention Center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  In the game the user is an immigrant detention center as an undercover journalist.  The interactive experience brings attention to the harsh, inhumane conditions being faced yearly by nearly 300,000 people in immigrant detention as a result of unfair Department of Homeland Security (DHS) policies.  Users will engage with real stories of pregnant women being forced to give birth in shackles, HIV+ people being denied medication, teenagers being separated from their families, and war veterans being placed in solitary confinement for challenging abuse.

It Gets Better is a web site started in 2010 by author Dan Savage and his partner Terry Miller to help young people who face harassment.  After hearing of a number of students who took their own lives after being bullied in school, they created a site where people could people could put their own user-creatred videos.  Those videos have been viewed more than 50 million times and include messages from famous folks such as Barack Obama and Adam Lambert.  

Play with the sites in class today and tweet about one of them.