♔ INCORPORATING GAME MECHANICS INTO TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING

Gamification is the use of game-thinking and game mechanics in order to engage users, improve and enhance the user engagement, experience, ROI, data quality, timeliness, and learning.  Early examples of gamification are based on giving reward points to people who share experiences on location-based platforms such as Facebook's "Place" feature, Foursquare, and Gowalla. Some of the techniques include achievement "badges" or “levels”, leaderboards, a progress bar or any other visual meter to indicate how close people are to completing a task, virtual currency systems for awarding, redeeming, trading, gifting, and otherwise exchanging points challenges between users embedding small casual games within other activities. 

Transmedia storytelling is the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies, and is not to be confused with traditional sequels or adaptations.  From a production standpoint, it involves creating unique content that engages an audience using various techniques to permeate their daily lives.  In order to achieve this engagement, stories need to developed across multiple forms of media in order to deliver unique (co-dependent) pieces of content in each channel.  Importantly, these pieces of content are linked together (overtly or subtly) in narrative synchronization with each other.  Transmedia storytelling most importantly uses different medias (at what they are best at) to each tell only one part of a larger interrelated narrative.

 Integrating Game Mechanics into Your Story

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