I was whiling away Saturday morning at the beach when a very plugged-in friend told me he had a game I had to try. It was overcast, the surf was borderline homicidal and the first of two seal carcasses had already washed ashore, needless to say a Nintendo DS was looking like a pretty good distraction.
The game is called Scribblenauts and was easily one of my most enjoyable gaming experiences. The basic concept sounds incredibly audacious, your character (Warren? Garret? Newton? I forget the exact name) solves puzzles using anything you can think of. That's right, literally any (non-copyrighted) noun that comes to mind.
I was glued to the screen. High tide would have claimed me if the damn battery didn't give out. For a Scrabble addict and OED OCD case this game was like something out of science fiction. Say a puzzle requires Warren (or Garret or Newton, I really need to look this up) to fall a tree. You can give him an Ax. But com'on. What about a rocket launcher? Maybe a beaver. Or better yet a beaver with a rocket launcher. Tree felled.
About the time I was providing a birthday boy with a sjambok in order to break open a pinata, I got to thinking, if a generation is growing up with this kind of open ended entertainment, what sort of content expectations do they bring to the table?
It seems to be a given that these days your magazine is expected to spill beyond the page and onto the web. Does your writer keep a blog? Is there any related A/V content to the story? User generated content was a hot publishing buzzword recently, and anything from polls to first-person narratives definitely promotes reader engagement (hopefully on a scale beyond that users immediate family).
I can't help thinking of one of cable's most popular shows, The Colbert Report. Last year, I spoke with the executive producer, Allison Silverman. I was impressed by the way The Report reached out to its audience, Silverman talked about how the show discovered fans were pretty web savvy, and then "started a conversation" with video contests.
"I'm continually amazed at how funny fans of our show are. And they are really, really generous with their time and their humor. It's been tremendously surprising and just really gratifying to see how Colbert has taken off with the web. I can’t entirely explain it, but again and again we’re fortunate enough to have that base."
Of course in hindsight, it would seem obvious that a portion of the fan base of one of the funniest shows on TV would themselves be funny. But Silverman could never have predicted how excited fans of the show would be to create content. When DCP redesigned the San Francisco Giants team magazine, reader engagement and user generated content were on the top of my list as far as ways to start this conversation.
With games like Scribblenauts and now with shows like the Colbert Report audiences are expecting content to be more interactive than ever. In the days of Google and Wikipedia, information is cheap. But good conversation is still priceless.
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