Page 195 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2015195over the world, could view the performance by registering at a Google hangout or by following the feed on Elastic Future’s site or by chatting to the characters on Twitter.The Teatreneu Club in Barcelona, where comic actors perform, has made a different but noless effective use of technology by inventing pay-per-laugh.57 A tablet installed in eachseat before the performance, using technology developed at the MIT, measures the level of amusement of each spectator by calculating how many times they laugh. Every laugh out loud costs 0.30 euros up a maximum of 24 euros; after that laughter is free. This initiative has not only succeeded in greatly boosting attendance figures, but the average price of tickets has also increased. It might be thought that it is a bril- liant marketing action, but it is not. Technology adds totally new elements to the audience’s experience and relationship with the actors.GamesIt is worth ending with a quick survey of the videogame industry, a growing sector (with overall revenues of approximately 100 billion dollars, according to Gartner) that is character- ised by:• a significant increase in games for mobiles and dedicated consoles (which are the main channel), that is, the presence of a wide- spread, powerful and non-costly distributed network;• the most extreme interaction possible to allow the player to turn into the characters;• wide use of stories to make the context immersive, so that players become involved in the stories and are part of them;• sophisticated work to make the players dependent;• the inclusion of aspects of real life (especially related to the “dark side”) so that the context is extremely lifelike (the inclusion of paid sex in a popular game such a GTA5, for exam- ple, has triggered considerable controversy.Aside from the merit of an industry that has a system of demand and supply and highly specific investment and distribution logics that differ from those of the media industry, it is appropriate to highlight the influence it has had and can still have on the content and storytelling industry:• streaming is a model that has also become widespread in the music and video market and is now also finding its way into other types of content (books);• the pursuit of storytelling resources for creating immersion and dependence in users, which is very evident in television seriesand genre literature, in the combination of narrative elements and the dynamics of play, sophisticated forms.These aspects are important, because whereas the media industry is recording an overall fall in revenues derived from traditional business models and a tendency towards free content models, an industry that knows how to use stories to increase its size and profits can consti- tute a highly useful model.Marco Ferrario