Required Course Reading  ART OF IMMERSION 

Frank Rose 

What we’re witnessing is the emergence of a new form of narrative that’s native to the Internet. Told through many media at once in a nonlinear fashion, these new narratives encourage us not merely to watch but to participate, often engaging us in the same way that games do. This is “deep media”: stories that are not just entertaining but immersive, that take you deeper than an hour-long TV drama or a two-hour movie or a 30-second spot will permit.

From this point forward, professional storytellers of every persuasion—people in movies, in television, in video games, and in marketing—will need to function in a world in which distinctions that were clear throughout the past century are becoming increasingly blurred:

The blurring of author and audience: Whose story is it?

The blurring of story and game: How do you engage with it?

The blurring of entertainment and marketing: What function does it serve?

The blurring of fiction and reality: Where does one end and the other begin?

In THE ART OF IMMERSION, longtime Wired contributing editor Frank Rose talks to the people who are reshaping media for a two-way world—people like Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse (Lost), James Cameron (Avatar), Will Wright (The Sims), and dozens of others whose ideas are changing how we play, how we communicate, and how we think. —-> READ MORE