The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories

Ian Schafer, the agency’s CEO, told AMC execs they shouldn’t attempt to shut down something that was generating so much free publicity. “Sometimes the best thing to do in a situation like this is nothing,” Schafer told me later. “But that takes a lot of self-control.” Within 24 hours the accounts were back up, with AMC’s tacit blessing but little i

IN A COMMAND-AND-CONTROL WORLD, we know who’s telling the story; it’s the author. But digital media have created an authorship crisis. Once the audience is free to step out into the fiction and start directing events, the entire edifice of twentieth-century mass media begins to crumble.

It started with the videocassette recorder. In 1975, when Sony introduced the notion of “time shift,”

Crucially, Why So Serious? was nonlinear. Like hypertext—text that has embedded within it links to other texts, an essential feature of the Web—it could lead you along different paths. Links can carry you deeper and deeper into a story, revealing levels of detail that would be impossible to convey in a single, two-hour movie.

response,

But with the arrival of the Internet, fan fiction could no longer be ignored. After an initial period of hesitation, Lucasfilm adopted an embrace-and-encircle strategy.

Cameron, Landau maintained, had a better idea of how movies and games could work together. By creating the movie and the game in tandem, he hoped to have a game that would explore elements of the story the movie could not. He also wanted a home for some of those extra creatures he was coming up with.

Ad people (they’re not just men anymore) begin to realize they need to stop preaching to consumers and start listening to them. That’s what “sense and respond” means—a dialogue.

We know this much: people want to be immersed. They want to get involved in a story, to carve out a role for themselves, to make it their own.