Transcriber: Yuzhou Yang Reviewer: Tatjana Jevdjic
Have you ever dreamt
you had the power of magical flight?
As a child I was exposed
to two very beautiful and extensive mythologies.
I grew up immersed in the classical myths of ancient Greece,
and the dreamtime of the Australian aboriginal people.
So I developed an addiction
for grand, interconnected narratives
that involved magical flight and time travel.
I was inspired by these stories of gods, heroes and spirits,
facing and conquering terrifying monsters,
travelling across the landscape, singing the world into existence.
My childhood was one long road trip through antiquity.
So these stories were passed down to me orally
in the very sacred places where the stories took place.
Here I am having a family picnic on Mount Olympus,
where the Greek gods lived – Well, they weren't actually real,
but for me as a child, they felt so close and so alive.
So I learnt from a very young age the importance
of being able to elegantly blur fiction with reality.
Mythology is important.
Every culture has their myths to dream and live by.
Every culture has this.
So beyond entertainment and spectacle
the function of myth is to teach us to cope with loss.
But what I loved most about myth
is that it prevented me from thinking in a linear way,
and an ideological shift took place for me,
from the contained and finite story
with a very distinctive beginning, middle and end
to infinitely expanding story worlds,
that force you to see the inter-connectedness of everything.
So with a childhood of being addicted to these infinite worlds,
you can imagine my delight when jumping forward 25 years in time
and I've landed at this job at the BBC,
where I'm given responsibility for commissioning transmedia
for the BBC's most iconic show: Dr Who.
As a child when I watched Dr Who, I found it really scary,
I used to watch behind the sofa.
And occasionally I still have to avert my gaze;
the monsters still terrify me.
That's because the essence of Dr Who
has stayed constant across its 48-year history.
It's the longest running science fiction series ever created
and its longevity is due to the fact that it's more than just sci-fi:
it's an anthology show.
It crosses all genres from drama to horror to comedy
and it's created to thrill the child in all of us.
And of course, who doesn't want to take a magical time ride
to save the world as indeed the Doctor does in every episode.
Who is the Doctor?
He's a Time lord who travels back and forth in time
in a police box Time Machine,
tiny on the outside, massive on the inside, called the Tardis.
The first time I visited the Dr Who's setting in Wales,
it was definitely a career highlight.
There I was in the Tardis with the Doctor's sonic screwdriver,
amazing,
such is the magical sway of the story.
I knew I was on a set
but at that moment, once again, fiction and reality blurred
and I thought to myself,
"How fantastic would it be to give all Dr Who fans
this experience of not just watching the show,
but being able to step into this deep mythological space for themselves.
What if you could actually be the Doctor and save the Universe?"
So this is the motive that led us to design
the Dr Who adventure games.
In 2010 the BBC created 17 episodes of Dr Who.
13 TV episodes and 4 extra episodes that were actually games,
3 hours of extra game play within each.
This has been, I think, a very unique moment
in television and transmedia history
to finally have this type of seamless TV transmedia story world integration.
One of my favourite moments
was when I took the game's designers to the Tardis
to collaborate with the show's team.
Charles, the game writer, asked,
"What's that door over there?",
and they replied, "That's your door. Take it, use it
do what you like with it,
take the Doctor to places that we can't take him on the telly".
So, in that moment, after years of working across the silos,
traditional media organisations,
desperately trying to get people to understand
how transmedia couldn't reach their stories,
In that moment we'd finally achieved, what we thought was impossible,
to get into the very DNA of a production
and create stories and characters on par with the rest of the franchise.
With these games we've managed to future-proof the audience
for the new generation of kids,
but also to give the die-hard fans
the ability to step into a Time Machine.
I know I've been gushing in a very Dr Who geeky manner right now
about this show. It's an occupational hazard!
But, I think all the most amazing and effective transmedia
is born out of connecting with your inner fan.
Without the feverish passion of a fan, you can't deliver the best experience.
You've got to tap into the collective unconscious,
the muse, the universe, whatever you want to call this unlimited energy
that is the origin of all grand narratives.
I tried to get to this non-verbal place.
At the core of the story, where I'm not thinking but feeling.
It's like learning a new language.
Once you start dreaming in a language,
you know you've finally mastered it.
As story-tellers we need to we need to tap into mythology
to reach into this collective unconscious
and tell the stories that matter,
the stories that help people deal with the secret pains of life,
that no one is immune to
the things we all have to face at some point of love and loss,
and love and loss,
this never-ending dance of life.
It's in the most recent episode of Dr Who:
the Doctor is lamenting his impending death,
for even Time lords can't avoid this very real pain.
We can use transmedia to try ideas out in a game space
before the real world
to understand consequences,
to connect with each other through magic travels through time and space.
Magical mythologies are an essential tool
to helping people through the cycle of life.
It's the perfect way to ease people
through beginnings, endings and transitions
in a way that leads to actual change in their life.
At the beginning of my life,
my mother told me stories
to help me cope with the years ahead of me;
of the Greek gods and how they dealt with life's traumas.
At the end of her life,
I told her stories that helped her confront her last days with courage.
What if we could comfort, inspire and encourage each other with transmedia?
What if we could take that Dr Who approach,
that successful recipe of 48 years of entertaining,
and find a unique way
to add a magical layer onto our very real world stories?
(Applause)