Let’s go beyond Print++

I just read “Books in the age of the iPad” by Craig Mod. It is a brief manifesto on how to think about targeting print as a medium as everything goes digital. I was struck by the following really provocative quote:

In printed books, the two-page spread was our canvas. It’s easy to think similarly about the iPad. Let’s not.

Brilliant writing, love the punch. Anyway, this dovetails with my call to budding entrepreneurs at the University of Maryland the other day — the iPad offers (at least) two paths for innovators:

  • application development
  • content development

The first wave of content created for the iPad is likely to imitate the two-page spreads of magazines, interspersed with video, audio, links to stories as sidebars, etc. The various mockups done for Sports Illustrated, WIRED, and (my favorite) the concept by Bonnier all follow this trend. It’s basically just print++ … i.e., a bigger better print experience, or print taken to the next level.

But what Craig Mod is pointing out is that this thinking is short-sighted. He doesn’t offer thoughts on what other forms are possible, but that doesn’t take away from his message, which is effectively hey, all of you story-tellers out there, here’s an opportunity to take story-telling somewhere it’s never been before.

The machinima wave I think is a precursor to what will happen. A CPU-based story-telling platform can offer much that is completely — completely — unavailable in any other medium including print, audio, video/movies, and even live multimedia. In particular, it offers a rich/multimedia, immersive, interactive (gesture-based on tablets), animated environment — the interactive part being the key. Machinima is what happens when you lower the barrier to entry for animated story telling … but it is still one-way content, i.e. the flow is from creator to consumer. Imagine what can happen when you put the consumer into the creative loop.

Already, we see that many first-person video games have effectively become stories, interactive movies. In addition, a significant number of game players are using the game medium for either communication (hanging out with friends in the virtual on-line space) or for simple exploration (the Myst titles and their offshoots, for example … people often just walked through the worlds without solving the puzzles). The implication is that not everyone wants a challenge; many just want the immersive environment. It is not a huge leap to see a market for what is effectively a game but which contains no game, just the story.

So, with that in mind, sharpen your pencils and OpenGL skills. There are stories to be told.