One of the most thought-provoking conversations I’ve ever had was with an executive at Marvel Comics. I was writing an article about Marvel’s ongoing comeback, which was most visible at the box office. But the executive was recounting how the turnaround started happening earlier, as the company began to accept the transition of superhero comic books in the US away from newsstands and towards bookstores. As the exec explained, when comic books were largely sold in drugstores and on newsstands, writers and artists approached their stories with an eye to ensuring their customers return in 30 days: a splash page to hook them and a cliffhanger to bring them back. Any successful comic book’s narrative would just go on and on and on.
Some time after the comic boom in the late ’80s and bust in the early ’90s, it became clear that there was a growing appetite among both avid and occasional comic book readers for collected volumes of various issues. The challenge was that the absence of standard lengths for story arcs made it difficult to figure out the appropriate place to start and end a collection. So DC and Marvel began encouraging their writers to pen four- and six-issue story arcs for their ongoing superhero books, with almost no arcs to exceed 12 issues. The result? Increased sales of trade paperbacks and hardcover collections, and story structure that had more in common with episodic television than with daytime soap operas or telenovelas.
That discussion got me thinking about a similar evolution in US TV. In other parts of the world, short seasons of six, eight or 13 episodes are common, but here, the goal for decades for television producers was to get their shows into syndication, where the ‘real money’ would be made. The target number was to produce at least 100 episodes, which meant upwards of 20 shows per season. And because the producers could not guarantee that the syndicator would air the shows in the order in which they were originally aired, TV writers generally had to stay away from multi-episode arcs. The ultimate example of this intersection of creativity and distribution requirements was Law & Order, where the criminals were caught and convicted in a single hour, with little of the recurring characters’ personal lives to get in the way.
Contrast that with HBO, a paid subscription channel. From the perspective of HBO’s executives, they just needed to give their customers one excellent reason to subscribe. Without the restrictions of broadcast TV or basic cable, they could ratchet up the nudity, violence and profanity. In the absence of syndication, its writers were free to develop shows with complex characters and season-long arcs. The rise of DVD box sets gave HBO an additional revenue stream that didn’t require it to compromise its creative freedom.
As the success of alternative business models gives rise to new creative approaches, it’s often accompanied by audience fragmentation. Established companies like to bemoan audience fragmentation because it often means that their own market is eroding in the process. But as consumers, this also makes it more likely that our specific, niche tastes can be satisfied in an era of 500 cable channels – to say nothing of millions of online videos – than in the age of the big three US networks. Compare this to the ongoing criticism of theatrical distribution in the US, where the box office split among studios and exhibitors (as much as 90 per cent goes to the studios in the first week, but that percentage steadily decreases over time) encourages studios to devote the bulk of their financing to making the kinds of movies that will pack audiences in on opening weekends before turning up on DVD in three to six months. In other words, the types of films teenagers will rush to see.
Videogames are, at present, undergoing a similarly dramatic transformation. The spread of online distribution to both at-home and mobile environments makes it possible to play games anywhere. Moore’s Law is putting increasingly powerful chips in televisions, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players and mobile phones. An entirely new class of devices, tablets, is on the rise. Communal gaming is returning, thanks to the plastic instruments of Guitar Hero and Rock Band, the Wii Remote, and Kinect and Move. And there is increased acceptance in western markets of alternative business models like ad-supported games and microtransactions.
This fragmentation makes it challenging for entrenched competitors to figure out which horses to bet on, which in turn accounts for some of the layoffs and closures taking place across the industry. But it also creates new opportunities for developers and publishers who can focus their nascent ventures on the new audiences that are sprouting left and right. I can’t say for certain what the other side of this transformation will look like. But I do know that one day, we’ll look back at this moment in time and be shocked that we were once limited to a handful of platforms and genres.
N’Gai Croal is a writer and videogame design consultant. You can follow him online at ncroal.tumblr.com, or read and follow all N'Gai's columns on his topic page.