Mez Breeze is one of the leading innovators in the fields of experimental storytelling and virtual reality literature. Her work has heralded new ways of making and collaborating for creators, and her ethos and politics demonstrate ethical practices for all creative practitioners.  In 2019 Mez was awarded the Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award to honour her decades of experimental work in the field of electronic literature. The Writing Platform is thrilled to celebrate this accolade with an interview about her practice, influences and identity and the cryptic nature of her virtual global presence.

Your work straddles a number of forms and fields, do you consider yourself primarily a writer? Or a storyteller or digital artist? Or all of these things?

My work does absolutely stretch across [and through, and in-between] a diverse range of fields and forms, with my practice continuing to be a type of massive sandbox experiment. In relation to whether I consider myself primarily a writer, I tend to [mostly] think of myself as a “creative” [even with the awful hipsterish/advert-like baggage that the term “creative” comes with nowadays], like a type of digital tinkerer. At the moment I’m basically a combination of digital artist/writer/storyteller, electronic literature creator, games developer/designer, VR sculptor, and Mezangelle-crafter, so it’s difficult to pin down an exact term that encompasses all I do, and how I do it: mostly because of the need to constantly explore + experiment + play + learn + problem solve [ie curiosity is my bff].

It’s been an interesting past two, three years in relation to what I’ve been creating with Spatial Computing tech [Virtual Reality and more broadly XR (Extended Reality)] and how this impacts how I view, and label, what I do. In 2017 + 2018, after coming to the difficult realisation that I needed to examine how [and with whom] I was making funded creative work[s], I began seriously shifting my creative focus back to skills related to the plastic arts, skills that I hadn’t properly used for over 20 years. This was also an attempt to swivel away from what I’d become known for creating/writing, choosing instead to pivot towards the unknown [something I have a history of doing when creatively constrained or pigeonholed]. It was at this time too – after getting up the courage to prioritise professional standards and behaviours [especially regarding one digitally-born series I was involved with, in regards to behaviour considered acceptable by other leads of the team] – I moved away from a more traditional business-centric perspective and shifted back to creativity for creativity’s sake by forging connections with a group of incredibly motivated, generous, and positive XR Artists. Encountering such a diverse, considerate and talented crew was like a breath of fresh air, and meeting them has been such a motivator to continue crafting 3D and VR models that I’ve since incorporated into my digital writing projects. To put this in context, I’m not officially a sculptor or 3D artist [though I was trained in the visual arts in the early 1990’s], so launching into this area was a tad daunting, but I’m loving the challenge, the sense of community [and common decency], the comradery, the constant learning processes involved, and how I’m able to fold all this into new digital literature and storytelling. 

What is your approach to technology in relation to story? Is your aim a coming together of form and content? Is technology a creative tool for storytelling or the foundation for the story?

The technology I employ when creating stories I do consider [first and foremost] a tool. It’s a method of forging [and/or serendipitously breaking, playing, prodding, testing, reformulating, poking, and reforging] creative output [both form and content]. In terms of using tech to tell [or form] a story, my aims are [and this is where experimentation + play + learning raise their heads] dependent on my overall goals. If the goals are to create a story with a definitive structure and outcome [say where there’s a team involved, or if a project has commercial intent], then my aims are *very* different to a project where I can be more expressively elastic. There’s a fine line between producing open-ended and freeform tech experiments with no critical assessment and experimentation for its own sake coupled with being rigorous about the quality of the final output. It’s a fine balance, and it’s often hard to achieve.

Are there affordances in technology that allow you to write/create in ways that are more impactful for audiences?

There are certain aspects of technology that I’ve enjoyed molding and contorting into various states over the years, and a byproduct of this is that [fortunately] audiences do seem to resonate with the results. Often I’ll take a punt on various technologies [like the Vive Pro VR rig, Vive trackers or haptic feedback gloves] that I hope will shape my creativity in interesting [and unexpected] ways, which I’ll then assimilate into projects that hopefully make sense to an audience. I became interested in the idea of using technology to craft works that an audience would find impactful when, in 1994 [or 1993?] I was first exposed to the work of the Australian Cyberfeminist Collective VNS Matrix. Their mix of feminism, text/image merging and virtual engagement intrigued me, as at the time I was creating mixed-media installations involving painting, computer text and computer hardware. I first dove into the Internet in 1994 using Telnet/Unix to explore avatar use, identity-play and interactive fiction: it was here that ease-of-dispersal and temporality were incredibly important for both the production and the absorption of such works [often the audience were the creators, and vice versa]. Mezangelle had its roots here, initially evolving from immersion in email exchanges, computer programming languages and chat-oriented software [ie y-talk, webchat, and IRC]. 

Mezangelle is highly conceptual and fuses traditional language conventions, image and text, programming code, social commentary, and online communique´ – it’s been intriguing [and occasionally irritating] niche audiences now for over two decades. I’ve gradually been integrating Mezangelle into more expansive projects for a while now, including complex narrative game environments and projects like my 2018/2019 Virtual Reality Microstory Series V[R]ignettes.

What projects have inspired you?

Are natural ecosystems a project? If yes [or even if no], I draw intense and constant inspiration from them, from closely observing all types of wildlife [crimson + eastern rosellas! blue-tongued lizards!] including pollinators [blue banded bees! caper white butterflies!] in the permaculture setup I have here on Gundungurra land, to microclimate-crafting – I get such frissonic ideas when fostering [and reflecting within] these environments. Also, inspiration strikes in the most ephemeral of places, and for the most part what inspires me aren’t creative works as such, but if pushed to picked some inspirational projects they’d be: Surge by Arjan van Meerten, Firebird – La Péri by Innerspace, Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson, World of Warcraft by Blizzard Entertainment, Ænima by TOOL, 1984 by George Orwell, The Cells by Louise Bourgeois,  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and The Endless Forest by Tale of Tales.

What technologies and/or platforms are you excited about currently, and what do you see coming down the line?

I’m tingle-excited about accessible, responsible and affordable spatial storytelling tech and associated platforms, and am currently using such tech to create works like the collaborative XR Story Series V[R]erses. What I’m less excited about is the use of XR tech to promote project/platform siloing [think: privacy concerns related to Facebook-owned Oculus products and the many questions over the retention of Oculus generated data, transparency regarding how this data is used – including sensitive metrics to do with body/haptic monitoring and voice recording – and who they allow to access it]. This concern part-explains my shift in 2017/2018 to using XR platforms in a different way, with projects like V[R]erses, A Place Called Ormalcy and V[R]ignettes created specifically to be experienced variably across a wide range of devices, computers, and platforms. Unfortunately, a lesson the death of Flash has taught us is that VR may unfortunately be headed along this same route, where certain hardware and distribution channels become more and more restricted and siloed [think: Google recently binning the VR Daydream headset and switching its new gen Pixel phones to AR, Samsung pulling the plug on GearVR, and Facebook producing a range of tetherless headsets that could lock users into a Terms-of-Service-loaded surveillance nightmare]. In 2017 I saw this shift coming and pivoted to make sure at least some of the VR-centric projects I was producing had access concerns right at the forefront [as well as only using VR hardware and software that didn’t/doesn’t perpetuate this – goodbye Oculus headsets and apps!]. As a result, I decided to try to create works that audiences can experience in WebVR [browser-based] environments that are openly optimised for mobile devices, desktop computers, and VR headsets. It’s incredibly important to me that tech such as AR and VR doesn’t just become a vehicle for the privileged, where only those who can afford to experience such walled-off, high-end works [and indeed, produce such projects] become the standard or default. After coproducing high-end works for quite a few years, it really did open my eyes to how such projects can perpetuate inequality and exclusivity – the opposite of what I want my work to convey.

What I see coming down the line can be summed up by this quote I gave earlier this year [with a liberal dollop of AI and neural networks/ DeepFakery utilisations thrown in]: “I suspect that VR as an industry definition is probably going to be subsumed into the category of XR [Extended Reality] or SR or SC [Spatial Reality/Spatial Computing] as those seem to be the broader industry terms scrabbling for purchase at the moment. From my POV it’s been really interesting to see another tech hype curve go into what I term “Peak and Trough Syndrome”, just as has happened with AR – you have industry types predicting that VR and AR will be the next big thing, only to have actual functional constraints [such as comfortability, tetherless gear making a less-than-definitive-dent in the overall market, lack of robust blockbuster VR content production and audience uptake, platform wars/fragmentation, monetisation dilemmas, etc] all affecting mainstream adoption rates. I am keenly following how VR social spaces and VR arcades will fare over the next few years, as well as the swerve away from VR/AR/MR as the next massive tech trend to such tech being viewed and conceptualised as an integrative social service and/or “virtual beings” vehicle [especially when combined with AI, like with 3Lateral’s acquisition by Epic, Magic Leap’s Mica or VR Story Studio Fable’s relaunch with digital human AI/VR agents as their focus].”

Your work has a philosophical and political dimension: do artists have a responsibility to respond to the current state of the world?

Abso-fecking-lutely! Artists shouldn’t just have a responsibility to creatively respond to the current state of the world, they should also have a responsibility [as does everyone] to attempt to create beneficial change. From my own section of the globe, I’m constantly trying to effect relevant social critique/change with what I create [and how I create it]. Two recent[ish] projects from the past few years in which I’ve tried to convey a sense of this social commentary/responsibility are the Virtual Reality YA Adventure Perpetual Nomads, and the dystopian VR story A Place Called Ormalcy. Perpetual Nomads [or PN] is an Australian-Canadian Coproduction that’s part of the long-running Inanimate Alice digital story franchise. In PN, a VR Experience, you play as Alice where [SPOILER ALERT] you navigate creepy scenarios like finding yourself on the pointy end of a harassment stick, engaging in social app-based tug-o-wars, and attempting to cope with your phone battery running crazily low just when you really need it. But underlying all of these everyday challenges lies a more sinister one – you’ll have to play it to find out what it is, but let’s just say as writer, narrative designer and creative director of the project I wanted to ensure the message it conveys concerning privacy, surveillance, and greenwashed corporate corruption isn’t designed to be subtle [a hint: if you do dive into this work, do make sure to play PN right through to the end, past the credits].

Like PN, A Place Called Ormalcy is a work that also has social commentary at its centre. It has multiple ways of being experienced, read, and viewed – the audience can choose to experience it as a simple text-based dystopian story [with a profound warning for western democractic functioning], as a 3D set of tableaus with text annotations, or in a full-blown VR arena where they are able to teleport around within each chapter. With works like PN and A Place Called Ormalcy, there’s massive potential to get under an audience’s skin, and to construct experiences that challenge prevailing orthodoxies. What I tried to do with A Place Called Ormalcy in particular was slip under a user’s radar by offering up a child-like allegory that could be read/experienced as simplistic, but that also has deadly serious social commentary at its core.

You have an international reputation despite the fact that you do not travel for work and usually appear at conferences via Skype or other remote meeting platforms. Can you tell us a bit about how you manage this aspect of your life?

In the early 1990s, I was exposed to two life changing infonuggets. The first was learning about VNS Matrix [as I talked about above], and the second was learning about [and starting to implement] the sustainability system “permanent [agri]culture”, or permaculture as it’s more commonly known, alongside discovering eco-pioneers like David Suzuki and Bill Mollison. Encountering VNS Matrix then led me to collaboratively producing interactive fictions + games + experimental output with people has diverse as University of Melbourne students to Palo Alto engineers to Swedish computer geeks in the 90’s, and it taught me that identity could be used in this [then] new frontier-like space to subvert and collapse associated prevailing biases to do with gender, race, and age. This then linked to the realisation that [back then] such digital/virtual spaces could help alleviate certain prejudices + biases associated with gender labelling in patriarchally-infused fields. To some extent this stuck, and fed into the formulation of a growing plan to reduce my everyday effect on the burgeoning climate emergency [yup, it was even a thing even back in the 1990’s, though the phrase “climate change” wasn’t nearly as buzzworthy then as it is today] by deciding to devote myself to creating and maintaining working permaculture systems [and monitor, while actively reducing, my carbon impact] where caring for the environment was/is of utmost concern. I live [with] this concern on a daily basis, and have accordingly molded my everyday life around it. This decision was made in tandem with continuing to dismantle traditional constraints placed on women and minorities [in creative and technological spheres] through remote participation. The fact that embodying a digital, rather than physical, presence could help solve various issues like these absolutely influenced, and continues to influence, how I manage all aspects of my life. There’s also another secret-squirrel reason why I mostly choose digital participation at conferences and events, but this is part of a special longitudinal project that will be revealed in good time – some select few know about this, but that’s where the knowledge will stay just for now [and heh, could I *be* more cryptic?].

Lastly, what are the advantages and disadvantages of being a working artist located in Australia?

Advantages: the isolation. Disadvantages: the isolation.

Website links:

Main Site: mezbreezedesign.com

Patreon Site: patreon.com/mezbreeze

Twitter: twitter.com/MezBreezeDesign

Way back in the wilds of the year 2008, artist-extraordinaire James Morgan and I engaged in an animated discussion about Augmented and Virtual Reality. At that time James and I were collaborators-in-crime in the Third Faction Collective, a group of digital artists intent on constructing game interventions in Massively Multiplayer Online Spaces. During this discussion, I pitched to James an idea to establish an online space devoted to all things Synthetic Reality based (my umbrella term for Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality). This space, called Augmentology 101, intrigued James to the point where a decision was made to sponsor it through the Ars Virtua Foundation and CADRE Laboratory for New Media. What followed was an amazing exploration into the creative potentials of Synthetic Reality – what’s now known as XR (Extended Reality) – and how it might manifest within the realm of electronic literature.  

It’s now been 10 years since the initialisation of the Augmentology 101 project. During this decade, there’s been a major upswing in VR and AR production and development, with impactful XR content such as Firebird – La Péri (a 2016 English/Chinese/French multilingual VR Experience) and Queerskins VR (2018) being standout examples.

Screenshot from the 2016 Multilingual Virtual Reality Project “Firebird – La Peri”

My own attempts at merging digital literature into developing XR fields have been multiple and varied, originating in delving into VR in the 1990’s when VRML was the shiny new thing. Surprisingly enough, the creative and technical challenges that VR creators faced back then are similar to those we face today: high performance requirements, mainstream adoption hurdles (see: Gartner Hype Cycle), and monetisation dilemmas are all relevant. Likewise, skillsets required by VR content creators in the mid 1990’s again parallel XR creators of today, including developing a deep knowledge of spatial storytelling logistics; emotional intelligence; and the ability to formulate story experiences that take into account various hardware and platform limitations such as field of view constraints, tethered headsets restricting natural movements, and hardware specific limitations like the screen-door effect.

In terms of XR projects I’ve produced in the last decade, a brief selection includes conceiving of and co-developing the 2013 anti-surveillance AR game #PRISOM, and in 2015 mapping out with Andy Campbell the (now unfinished) PC/VR project Square Ebony that was to be filled with: “…movement/imagery like huge ‘Panic Room’ landscaped letters…a force field of green…branches intertwined…tangles being text…[that] revolves around an entity…this entity is slowly reconfiguring itself…at the top of a hill/mountain/plateau surrounded by brackish water” (notes from Square Ebony Project Meeting and Documentation, Breeze and Campbell, March 10th 2015). In 2016 I lectured as part of the “Future Possible: Beyond the Screen” Series which centred on how VR can transform creative practice, and which also included a live VR performance walkthrough using one of my Tilt Brush created works. In 2017 I keynoted at the Electronic Literature Conference with a VR performance presented both live at the Conference and simultaneously in Virtual Reality.

“Layering the New real: Tracking the Self in Disembodied [Un] Virtual Spaces” Keynote

Press Image for “Our Cupidity Coda”: VR Literature

Thorough participation in a high-end VR based experience like Perpetual Nomads hinges entirely on immersion, which is triggered initially through the audience having to don gear that firstly reduces their ability to engage in their actual physical space in standard ways (their vision and hearing being “co-opted” into a VR space). The leap of faith the audience needs to make to establish a valid and willing suspension of disbelief (as Samuel Coleridge so aptly phrased it) is already set in motion by the fact a user is entirely aware from the moment they slip on a VR Headset that their body is in essence hijacked by the experience (haptically, kinetically), as opposed to a more removed projection into a story space via more traditional forms (think book reading, movies, tv). Such body co-opting might lead a user to disengage from the VR experience from the very beginning which will reduce the likelihood of true immersion: alternatively, they may readily fall headlong into the experience with an absolute sense of engagement and wonder (the preferred option as a VR content creator!) if the work has been precisely crafted.

For the most part, XR projects such as those mentioned above currently exist only in the mainstream margins, with a majority of experiences requiring costly high-end VR rigs and expensive desktop computers that demand audiences experience the works in their optimal state. To counteract this selective catering to the exorbitant end of the XR market, in early 2018 I had the idea to create a VR Experience that would reduce the mandatory use of high-end tech. This project would instead cater directly to a range of audiences by crafting a work that could be experienced across a far larger (and much more accessible) range of lower-end tech. This VR Literature work is called A Place Called Ormalcy.

Title Image from the “A Place Called Ormalcy” Press Kit

A Place Called Ormalcy is digital literature designed for, and developed in, Virtual Reality. It was constructed using the Virtual Reality Application MasterpieceVR to craft the 3D models, with each chapter (made up of 3D models, text, and audio components) then combined and hosted via the Sketchfab platform. It’s comprised of a text-based story made up of seven short Chapters which are housed in 3D/Virtual Reality environments. It can be accessed via a wide range (crucial in terms of its social commentary aspect) of mobile devices, desktop PCs and both low-end and high-end Virtual Reality hardware. Audiences using the cheapest type of VR equipment (such as Cardboard headsets) are able to access complete versions of this VR literature experience, as are users of any net connected mobile device with a WebVR-enabled browser.

The story of A Place Called Ormalcy (warning: spoilery parts ahead) unfolds through a series of snapshots of the life of Mr Ormal, a happy-go-lucky law-abiding chap who resides in the aesthetically cartoonish world of Ormalcy. Ormalcy exists in an alternative universe complete with its own idiosyncratic language patterns. The storyworld initially presents as a Utopia full of innocent “claymationesque” contented creatures and happy citizens. As the story plays out, however, it soon becomes apparent that in actuality, this VR Experience allegorically traces the makings of a dystopic society, and how such fascist principles can arise in the most benevolent of places. This VR Literature work has social commentary at its very core, commenting directly on and about the rise of current totalitarian trajectories and the contemporary malaise, confusion and accompanying acclimatization patterns.

“A Place Called Ormalcy” Chapter Progression

A Place Called Ormalcy uses a combination of WebVR, 3D, VR, text and audio assets in ways that mirror a slow dystopian creep. In the desktop and mobile versions, each chapter becomes progressively visually cloistered, with dark fog and grainy distortions increasing to finally create a type of gun-barrelled claustrophobic effect. This combines with a gradual leaching of the intense colours found in the free-flowing organic imagery of the initial Chapters which results in a startlingly stripped back, fuzzy palette and model constructions: vibrancy gradually bleaches out to stark black, white and greys. Correspondingly, the 3D tableaus and audio tracks likewise alter from an initial complexity – Mr Ormal begins his story journey waving directly to the audience in “Chapter Wonne” in a bright and blooming space – which incrementally shifts towards the dramatically minimal in the final “Chapter Severn” where Mr Ormal transforms into (…spoiler alert here…) something vastly other.

In the VR version of A Place Called Ormalcy, additional effects mark the dystopic “boiling frog” dilemma that Mr Ormal faces. Each VR tableau subtly increases in size and scale as the Chapters progress, with the audience finding themselves in the climatic Chapter in a looming monochromatic set surrounded by huge windowless block-shaped buildings devoid of detail – except multiple, and menacing, “88” shaped logos (and the awfully transfigured Mr Ormal). In the VR version, the text becomes increasingly difficult to navigate, with the audience having to teleport, twist and turn in the VR Environment to read each annotation, echoing the “fake news” proclamations of our contemporary Western world where it is becoming increasingly difficult to access truth over relentless propaganda.

Although A Place Called Ormalcy may seemingly convey a message of hopelessness or helplessness, the ending does contain clues that all is not lost in this particular dystopian scenario – the final soundtrack offers hope, with protestors chanting and proclaiming resistance as key. Just as VR Literature can work to extend the creation of accessible electronic literature beyond the text-centric to truly encapsulate the haptic and the spatially-oriented, A Place Called Ormalcy illustrates how XR projects can act as relevant social commentary at a time when it is sorely needed. I look forward to continuing to promote, create, and experiment with stretching the limits of VR and AR while producing XR projects that are openly accessible, as well as socially relevant.

Warning: the following contains potentially crucial, but mostly lukewarm, spoilers for the film “Jupiter Ascending”. Consider yourself notified.

My first critical thought on viewing the latest Wachowski filmsprawl actually wasn’t one. And by stating this, I’m not intending any smartarse obscuration, though I am aware that even using that term “filmsprawl” could firmly place me in that very territory. Instead, my initial reflections about the film centred on how simultaneously expansive and reductionistic it appeared. The film seemed tailor-made to appeal to an audience well versed in contemporary game aesthetics, an audience to which interactive entertainment conventions are de rigueur.

My primary take on Jupiter Ascending differs distinctly (but not wildly) from other perspectives I’ve encountered – and by others I’m referencing peers and friends as opposed to goldstar reviewers, as I’ve made sure to read less than zero blurbs keen to theoretically carve up the movie into its non-gestalt parts. Most mentions I’ve encountered peg Jupiter Ascending as a clumsy but original (to use a cognitively-velcro-worthy-term) “hot mess” of a film.

Others view the movie as a type of wayward space opera, a CGI-fest of hodgepodge philosophy clunkily melded with awkward-but-gorgeously-Michael-Bay-like-derision-worthy-screencandy. When James Dominguez informed me (prior to watching said movie) that: “…apparently it’s terrible in a very entertaining way”, I believed him. When my Cinema-Going Companion (CGC) asked me (post-viewing) whether I would be keen to watch Jupiter Ascending again, I replied that yes, I would: he speedily said he would not (he had also indulged in brief microsleeps during one of the lengthy action sequences). CGC’s critique of the movie hinged on the fact he thought it was trying to do too much at once, and that he just couldn’t get excited about such overblown sequences – hence the microsleeps. I, on the other hand, did indeed find the film straight-up enjoyable.

The considerable reviewer vitriol surrounding the film’s release highlights the film’s skewing of traditional filmic conventions. Stock standard monomythic story requirements are employed in a traditional sense in the film, but these are somewhat counterbalanced by a fantastical emphasis on game-emulation aesthetics. In my view, action sequences like those found in contemporary movies like Jupiter Ascending directly emulate game mechanics that are relevant to a large chunk of contemporary viewers. Such invocation of interactive based mimicry (think: apps, games) transposed into a passive medium (film) isn’t new – think on the preponderance of game-to-film adaptations – but is becoming increasingly relevant in contemporary media.

In Jupiter Ascending, the nature of class privilege and the insidious nature of social stratification, otherness-classifying, socioeconomic determinism, the grab for immortality, consumerism/greed, industrialisation and the military-industrial-technological-complex in general are all plot-and-theme threaded. Want some heavy holistic allegory and steampunkish-laden visuals thrown into the mix? Done. How about some reincarnation amnesia and fantastical genetic cross-species warnings as well? You got it.

The fantastical elements in Jupiter Ascending present as bricolage. Such variables also act to illustrate just how such a movie might reshape established indicators of what makes a film great (or even watchable). Instead of free-falling into harsh reviewing mode, maybe audiences could instead learn that such fantastical elements are ripe for what I term “functional mapping”. Functional mapping describes the disjunctive process when prior cognitive associations are made elastic in order to overwrite previously hardbaked/templated cognitions. When Caine first shows off how his gravity-mod boots work, there’s the potential for a viewer to undergo a type of believability disconnect: a disturbance-twinge in the Willing-Suspense-of-Disbelief force, if you will (*cough*).

The boots and their functional aspects – such as Caine speeding off looking very much like he’s ghost-skating/rollerblading – seems jarring at first, as do his eventually reinstated wings as evidenced in the movie’s dénouement. This jarring comes from strong prior association-sets present in our canon heavy entertainment. When seeing a character perform actions that many audience members strongly associate with quantifiable behaviours, our belief might just waver: when asked to map new imaginings over such a prior-based associations, some viewers may find this incredibly difficult. When bees are used to replace a more standard take on ecological symbolism (think: the far more palatable convention of using bird or butterfly murmurations), many may think this absurd, as stretching believability boundaries a tad too far.

To those raised on cultural settings based off gamification and karma whoring, where positive (and vicarious) reinforcement sits easily alongside intense visual diets comprised of cinematics, machinima, supercuts and cutscenes interspersed with intense fps-action bursts, the Jupiter Ascending action sequences and computer generated graphic bombardment present as very normal. So too, does the requirement of functional mapping, where transmedia-based characterisation and Storyworld construction easily rewrite such mono-channelled associations.

In a typical Studio-backed movie, mainstream story structures allows for certain elements, including ye olde girl-meet-boy, boy-loses-girl, boy-regains-girl yawn to effect our Willing Suspension of Disbelief. When this structure is toyed with, or heavily modded in substantial ways, confused audiences can be left hypercritically picking at the result in an attempt to cobble together a meaning curve predicated heavily on the known, rather than making the cognitive leap to another (emergent) meaning-creation paradigm. And although I empathize with the urge to overanalyse in order to establish quality markers, this seems to be a somewhat futile exercise in today’s media platforms. Shouldn’t we instead alter canonistically-predicated criteria in order to establish relevancy/quality as directed by changing methods of entertainment creation?