Most would agree that most media is blending and even merging.
While there were once clear, bright lines between books, TV shows, video games, podcasts and other media, now these seem to be blending and the lines are increasingly opaque.
This trend seems to be accelerating, and after reading two New York Times articles, “‘Minecraft: The Island’ Blurs the Line Between Fiction and Gaming,” and “How to Make a Movie Out of Anything — Even a Mindless Phone Game” I’m convinced this acceleration may be becoming exponential. Just to whet your appetite:
From “‘Minecraft: The Island’ Blurs the Line Between Fiction and Gaming:”
The protagonist of Max Brooks’s new fantasy novel doesn’t have a name, a gender or even normal human appendages. Instead of hands, the narrator has clumsy, flesh-toned cubes, just one more weird feature of the strange and unsettling world where the story unfolds, where everything — the sun, clouds, cows, mushrooms, watermelons — is composed of squares.
For the uninitiated, the setting may seem bizarre and disorienting, but Mr. Brooks isn’t writing for novices or lay readers. He’s writing for a very particular tribe: die-hard devotees of the video game Minecraft.
From “How to Make a Movie Out of Anything — Even a Mindless Phone Game:”
The trend toward intellectual property.-¬based movies has been profound. In 1996, of the top 20 grossing films, nine were live-¬action movies based on wholly original screenplays. In 2016, just one of the top 20 grossing movies, ‘‘La La Land,’’ fit that bill. Just about everything else was part of the Marvel universe or the DC Comics universe or the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ universe or the ‘‘Star Wars’’ universe or the ‘‘Star Trek’’ universe or the fifth Jason Bourne film or the third ‘‘Kung Fu Panda’’ or a super-¬high-¬tech remake of ‘‘Jungle Book.’’ Just outside the top 20, there was a remake of ‘‘Ghostbusters’’ and yet another version of ‘‘Tarzan.’’
