Making Transmedia Real
For years, game companies and movie studios have been trying to find a way to fuse the worlds of movies and high-end games. Yes, I’m talking about the loaded — and sometimes derided — term “transmedia.” We’re getting closer. The quality of storytelling in games is on the upswing and the cinematic visuals and voice acting (think Grand Theft Auto V and Beyond: Two Souls) is arguably as good as any mid-budget feature film. Even so, we’ve yet to have a gaming experience that really helps catapult it to the next level.
The Oculus Rift could change that. While wearing it, my mind wandered to the Hunger Games franchise. How cool would a Hunger Games-themed game in a VR world be? A multiplayer survivor death bowl? I’m in. Moreover, it might even benefit the film industry if some of its extensive CGI assets were repurposed into a game or 3D world.
“[CGI and effects teams] spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours creating intricate 3D sets and worlds for a film and after it’s over, those assets are useless,” Joe Chen, the product lead at OculusVR, the company behind the Oculus Rift, pointed out before I got my demo. “We offer a pretty interesting medium to have a second take at those assets,” he says, speaking of the non-game potential of the Rift.
“I think that’s why games are leading with usage of VR, at least for us,” says Aaron Davies, OculusVR’s director of developer relations. “It’s not that games is the only right answer, but it’s more about the fact that the interactive nature of games and the fact that we have 3D space as a firm concept within games lends itself well to a lot of other usage models.”