Long-rumored, GE reached a final agreement to purchase Vivendi's 20% of the company late yesterday. The deal is yet to be formalized, but is said to be worth $5.8 billion, giving GE total ownership of the media giant that will, in turn, allow them to sell a controlling interest of 51% to cable company Comcast with a view to gradually phase out all ownership over eight years. That deal is rumored to be possible within the next two weeks (although, as the LA Times points out, anti-trust regulation and oversight could last over a year before the deal takes effect).

Comcast has been in negotiations to buy NBC-Uni for over six months, and last month both Comcast and GE reached an agreement on a value of approximately $30 billion for the company. It's believed that Comcast's main interest in the company isn't ailing broadcast network NBC, nor movie studio Universal or the companies' theme parks, but its cable channels, which include USA Network and Syfy, and offer a reach of around 45 million customers.

Comcast's takeover of NBC-Universal bucks a trend for companies spinning multiple interests into multiple smaller companies (See Time-Warner's divesting itself of its cable division earlier this year and about to do the same to AOL), but it fulfills the company's long-held desire to become high-level content providers; the company made a (failed) takeover bid for Disney in 2004. Now that it looks certain that their corporate dream is about to come true, the next question is what they're going to do with all of their new toys.

GE buys out Vivendi stake in NBC Uni [Hollywood Reporter]

The Future for Interactive Storytelling was founded by three members of MIT’s Media Lab: V. Michael Bove Jr., who studies object-based media and interactive television, Cynthia Breazeal, who works in personal robotics and human-robot interaction, and Ramesh Raskar, who cultivates new technologies in imaging, display, and performance capture. Together, they are looking at how storytelling is changing and what it is capable of in a world of advanced technologies and community interactions:

According to a release from the newly-formed group:

By applying leading-edge technologies to make stories more interactive, improvisational and social, researchers will seek to transform audiences into active participants in the storytelling process, bridging the real and virtual worlds, and allowing everyone to make their own unique stories with user-generated content on the Web. Center research will also focus on ways to revolutionize imaging and display technologies, including developing next-generation cameras and programmable studios, making movie production more versatile and economic.

Part of the lab’s work will involve creating more effective robotic actors and improved blending of human and animated movement in motion capture, but at the core of the project is finding new ways for stories to become living, changing products of human interaction. Says Bove:

Imagine what people could do in storytelling if our rooms and our furniture and our cars and our shoes and everything else we interacted with could be collecting information as in a diary and we could play that all back and use that as part of creating stories.

The Center’s work will not be merely theoretical. MIT is partnering with Plymouth Rock Studios, which is planning to build a 14-soundstage complex in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 2010. The studio is looking to produce traditional story-based productions, which it hopes will come out of MIT’s research.

[MIT and The New York Times]

We had grown sick of all the ARG marketing schemes for movies like The Dark Knight, which try to drum up fan support and brand recognition for forthcoming franchises with semi-mysterious websites and phone numbers and instructions on where to buy a cake that has an iPhone in it. Profoundly uncreative, the Batman ARG had done little more than inspire a lot of people to wear Joker makeup. While other ARGs are more fun and thought-provoking, we felt that in general ARG-making had become so bland that you could practically never tell what the games were about. They're little more than walk-in ads.

So we schemed, and said to ourselves, "Well what if we came up with an ARG that was so generic that people would think it was related to practically every movie coming out next year?" Seemed like a sure win — people would see the ARG and start guessing "Oh it's for GI Joe," or "It's for Watchmen." But we wanted our super-generic ARG to be a commentary on the super-generic nature of ARGs too, which is a rather tall order.

You Are Being Deceived was carefully crafted to seem as if it could be about Watchmen, G.I. Joe, or Heroes. Well, carefully crafted might be too strong a phrase — perhaps "slapped together in a caffeine-induced frenzy" would be more accurate. We put together the basic ingredients of every generic ARG: a "personal blog" written by somebody who has gotten into a huge conspiracy they don't understand and is telling you all about it; a corporate website from the conspiracy-manufacturing company (why do all ARGs include fake corporations?), and a phone number you can call (listed on the blog) to get more clues about the conspiracy.

We even invented a back story about how an evil corporation is controlling superheroes and the populace via a chemically-enhanced television signal. On the You Are Being Deceived blog, you'll see the main character, code-named Sheep Snake, who discovers that all her paranoid theories about chemtrails are nothing compared to the mind-control plot hatched by her employer Elegiac International. Using superheroes (like, say, the ones in Heroes or Watchmen), they're selling this thing called RapidEnhance that's already being used on soldiers (like, say, the ones in G.I. Joe). When Sheep Snake discovers the plot, then gets a FedEx package with her friend's severed arm in it, she goes on the run with a plan to stop Elegiac from turning the whole world into TV-watching, mind-controlled drones.

So why didn't anybody call Sheep Snake's voice mail, or send us e-mails, or even look at our ARG? You can claim it's because the ARG was lame, and that wouldn't be entirely inaccurate. But was it really lamer than the Batman ARG, which was just a website with a few messages telling people to dress up like the Joker to see some footage?

What's more likely is that nobody saw our ARG because we didn't have tens of thousands of dollars to promote it. We printed out 1000 postcards, and thought we'd just hand them out to people — even if only a few saw it, they might blog about it and it could spread via word-of-mouth. We even enlisted the extremely non-devious-looking Gina Trapani from Lifehacker to hand out our cards so nobody would guess it was the io9 crew behind it. She tried handing them out in the Expo, and was promptly kicked out for handing out postcards without having a booth. Without a ton of cash to pay for giant signs, a booth, or to hire people to hand out millions of cards outside the Convention Center, there was no way we could get our ARG started. We wound up handing the cards out surreptitiously, but mostly we left them out on the "freebies" table where they disappeared (but to where?).

Ah, you say with a cynical smile, you are so naive. Did you really think you puny creatures with your 1000 cheap postcards printed with a URL could put even a tiny dent in the promotional juggernaut that is Comic-Con? The simple answer is yes, we really did. I think that's partly because we'd actually fallen for the ARG hype, despite the fact that we'd criticized it and should have known better. We imagined that ARGs really could be kind of grassroots and DiY, and that people would want to go to a cool URL like YouAreBeingDeceived. We thought our snarky little ARG might stir up some shit. But we deceived ourselves.

ARGs are not grassroots. They are not about community, or word-of-mouth. They really are about saturating the market with brands in order to generate interest in something, just the way old-fashioned advertising is. I don't mean to disparage the cleverness of ARGs — a lot of them are terrifically fun. But the ARGs that get noticed at a media event like Comic-Con are always going to be the ones with lots of resources behind them. To create a "grassroots feeling," you need to have a top-down corporation with wads of cash. So when you play an ARG associated with a commercial property, you are in some sense being deceived. You're being made to feel as if you've discovered something, as if you're part of a community spontaneously coming together to play at something, when in fact you've been targeted by an extremely well-funded marketing campaign.

Or maybe it's a plot by Elegiac International to control your minds and corrupt your heroes. Yeah, I like that version of the story better.

According to the Times:

The network has expanded its audience, especially among women, chiefly by stretching the definition of science fiction . . . It is not just "Star Trek" or "Star Wars" that would fit the definition. Superheroes, Indiana Jones and even the baseball fantasy movie "Field of Dreams" would all be considered part of the genre as defined by Sci Fi's programmers . . . The network has drawn more women by making subtle tweaks to marketing and programming. In marketing materials for "Battlestar Galactica," for example, there are no spaceships, and the story lines try to create more of a balance between action and emotion. . . .

"There were a lot of misperceptions that Sci Fi was for men, that it was for young men and that it was for geeky young men," said Bonnie Hammer, the president of NBC Universal Cable Entertainment, which oversees Sci Fi. "We had to broaden the channel to change the misconceptions of the genre."

One of the shows that did this was Steven Spielberg's "Taken," a miniseries shown for two weeks in 2002 that dominated those nights in the ratings. While the series "literally put Sci Fi on the map," Ms. Hammer said, it also exemplified the network's notion of the genre with its main characters as human beings living on earth, not aliens on some far-off planet.

Sorry, but this kind of wacky logic says a lot more about people's misperceptions of science fiction than it does about science fiction itself. It's true that there's been a stereotype that science fiction is for men, just as there's a stereotype that science itself is for men. And those stereotypes are wrong.

If there's something keeping women away from enjoying science fiction, it's not spaceships. It's not "aliens on some far-off planet." It's the fact that people on our very own planet keep telling us that women aren't supposed to like science fiction. It's a self-confirming prophesy, because the more that scifi creators are told this, the more they imagine that their audience is all boys. So they write rich, believable male characters and boring, cookie-cutter lady characters. They organize conventions with panels devoted to shit like "the hottest women of science fiction" and nothing devoted to female heroes — or the kinds of hotties that straight women might want to see (i.e., men).

Women who do love science fiction see all this going down, and they are ashamed to admit that they like science fiction. I'm not saying this happens to all of us, but many women wind up assuming that there's something wrong with them for liking SF. After all, everybody keeps telling them that SF is for boys, and the only reason why women would like it is if the definition of SF is "expanded" to include magic and romance. (Nothing against magic and romance, mind you — it's just not typical of SF.)

And on top of all this load of crap, women who like SF sometimes get the impression that men don't really want them to like it. After all, if men really wanted women to hang out and talk to them about SF, those men wouldn't write exclusively about male characters and make jokes about how the fun thing to do at SF cons is hire hookers (haw haw haw).

Luckily, it would appear that most people interested in SF do consider women to be part of the genre at this point. Battlestar Galactica is a perfect example of the kind of SF that appeals to women and men equally because the show offers both male and female characters in positions of power (and positions of yuck). Women are gobbling this show up without shame not because ads eschew pictures of spaceships (WTF), but because there are cool women characters in it. Women love Joss Whedon shows like Firefly for the same reason.

And you know what? Women love tons of science fiction, regardless of how many boys are main characters, because they like good stories as much as the next guy. They just might be ashamed to admit they like SF because they don't want people to give them the old "you don't exist" speech. Or, worse, give them the old hairy-eyeball that really means "there is something wrong with you."

So if the SciFi Channel is really concerned about courting women — which it really doesn't have to be, since tons of women watch it — then maybe they should consider airing more shows about women. In space. On other planets. Fighting monsters. And maybe they should consider acting like it's NORMAL for women to like stories about aliens ripping people's faces off. Instead of behaving as if they've discovered fucking faster-than-light travel because they noticed that tons of women enjoy SF, create SF, write about SF, and goddamn live and breathe the stuff. Hell, I'm heading to an ENTIRE CON devoted to women and science fiction on Friday.

Next time somebody tells you that women don't like science fiction, just send them to io9. Our phasers are not set to stun.

At SciFi Channel, Universe is Expanding [New York Times]

As a whole these stories are far more inventive than most science fiction you see on TV or at the movies nowadays. I'm not here to bash all SF film and TV... but it seems there's an inventiveness, a vitality, in written SF that you don't see as much in TV and movies.

Unfortunately, that wild creation is long gone from written science fiction as well, says classic SF author Norman Spinrad:

Norman Spinrad in the SFWA Forum sees SF writers as becoming more conservative as their audience decreases. They are writing tired space operas and tedious technophilic "hard SF," retro science fiction for the graying, fannish core readership, rather than trying to reach out to the rest of the world.

In other words, the same thing ails science fiction in both books and movies/TV: an obsessive audience of aging fans, who prefer lovingly described toys and rehashed science fantasy plots to anything new. The solution isn't a different medium, but a bigger and/or smarter audience. Image by Annahiltunen.

Written Science Fiction [Balancing Frogs]
Reflections on science fiction, writing and the publishing business [Twin Cities Daily Planet]