Tracking Transmedia

A few weeks back, my neighbour’s 8 year old son spent almost over an hour carefully spelling out ‘Minecraft’ in foot and half high multi-coloured letters on the sidewalk in front of his and mine. When I asked him why he liked the game, he said: ‘It’s entertaining…. And it’s really good for spatial stuff and building things.’ His eyes lit up and he started describing all the things he’d built, the CN Tower, a castle, and various objects from volcanos to dynamite. Later this week he’s going to show me what he’s made and I can’t wait.

 

Minecraft is huge – an online game sandbox that allows anyone to build pretty much anything, developed by Markus ‘Notch’ Persson. Not only was Notch awarded the BAFTA Special Award in March 2012 for ‘significant contribution to a sector,’ Minecraft is now the best selling XBox Live Arcade game ever, with over 2 million games sold. So when a friend’s 14 year old son, Alex, told me he spent a ton of time playing in online versions of The Hunger Games built in Minecraft, I ever curious, immediately asked if he would show me...

Orhan Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, opened his “Museum of Innocence” in Istanbul on Saturday.