You are Entertainment
March 03, 2008
The Next Issue is a new monthly magazine from The Future Department, looking at, well, the future and that:
Our aim is not to report on past events – or just talk about the future – but to play a proactive role in developing new solutions and approaches, through an ongoing conversation with the creative and business communities we serve, making intellectual and personal connections across all creative disciplines.
I wrote an article for the first issue on the future of entertainment:
Increasingly immersive entertainment will be demanded, played out in spaces both virtual and real, validating and rewarding experiencers for their involvement. Entertainment that is constrained to single iterations will make way for properties that develop their own imagined realities. Retinal projection allows for immersive realities to be overlaid on meatspace in real time. Not so much Second Life, as Reality 2.0.
Elements of one narrative world will blend with others as entertainment ideas are remixed, creating recombinant narrative hybrids, evolving new forms from the old. Why restrict your experience set to one set of myths, when all are accessible?
Other entertainments will simply be your friends' lives; content and communication blur; people spend time consuming the reality TV of their real friends, who broadcast a continuous stream of personal content to their networks. And ultimately, user experiences narratives will become entertainment themselves.
You can download a pdf of the first issue, featuring contributions from Russell, John, and a host of other interesting people, here.