The advent of streaming platforms and their widespread diffusion has brought with it a myriad of interesting innovations in the realm of home entertainment: pop culture and its social legacy, halfway between nostalgia and the need to find new stimuli to enjoy stories capable of captivating us, have benefited from it thanks to a universal language capable of speaking to anyone, children, teenagers, and adults.
The concept of Crossmedia Project has, for some years now, become the new frontier of entertainment for the users who enjoy it, and a pot of gold to draw from for creatives, entrepreneurs, and companies that own IPs (intellectual properties) beloved by the public in all their forms.
E indeed, we are precisely talking about different forms: cross-media by definition means connecting two or more means of communication to one another, so that they “speak” the same language through different but complementary tools.
In the video game sphere, the issue becomes more specific because we are talking about a main title that, branching out into multiple media of a different nature from the original one, creates new narrative lines that draw from the reference world.
In simple terms, think of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where characters and films set in the same superhero universe tell a shared story connected by threads and plotlines that converge. Or, as Lisa Burgess, head of children’s and teens’ projects at Netflix, reminds us, IPs like Peppa Pig, The Elecric State, Squid Game and the visionary Black Mirror, «are even more effective crossovers when it comes to kids, a very different audience from adults». This is because while an adult might distinguish the game from the TV series or the film, becoming passionate about only one of these media, the same is not true for children and teens, who are much more inclined to discover, to want to step outside the comfort zone of the cartoon with their favorite heroine to move on to the video game in which they can find and play as her, thanks to storytelling that aims for immersion, the keyword of modern video games.
Through television series, special comic books, feature films and, indeed, video game products released on consoles, mobile phones and even streaming platforms, the storytelling process intersects (cross-media, in fact) with others, allowing new users to explore and use new access points through which to enjoy the work, while “old” fans still have the chance to remain in the familiar world with the video game they played and loved, even expanding its universe (and therefore the interest).
Prima ho citato The Electric State, the Netflix film that sees a handful of humans dealing with artificial intelligences and rebellious robots in search of freedom: within the film a fictional video game is mentioned in which the player takes on the pixel version of the protagonist robot, a title that Netflix promptly developed and can be downloaded from the platform to be played on mobile phones.
Cinema and video games have been in conversation for as long as anyone can remember, ever since the first clumsy attempts at integrated productions (Super Mario Bros in the 90s, for example), but in recent years cross-media projects have been structured with long-term plans: think of Arcane and League of Legends, Halo, or the ever-popular Lara Croft, with films, TV series, and titles developed specifically for mobile in the Tomb Raider universe.
Not by chance did I coin the term Media Multiverse, where video games are now included with far fewer of the prejudices that prevailed in the past, exploiting infinite possibilities that we are, finally, beginning to discover.
