Geoffrey Long
Transmedia Storytelling World Building Media Lab The World in a Single Cell Spaceship Earth 2050 Spaceship Earth 2050
Dry City Project Tesseract Annenberg Innovation Lab Tangible Storytelling Augmented Storytelling
Winklebeans Playful Thinking C3 GAMBIT  

The primary focus of my research is the future, or futures, of storytelling. The breadth of this research is reflected by the different places you can put the emphasis on the key syllables in that phrase.

I research the future of storytelling, as I explore what new stories emerge as primary components of our culture, what we called cultural touchstones back at Microsoft. What makes a particular story or storyworld like Star Wars or The Avengers resonate with mass audiences? How do they change over time? How can storyworlds be designed to have significant cultural impact – and be conscious of the "with great power comes great responsibility" aspect of pop culture?

I also research the future of storytelling, exploring how new media are created and refined, how the affordances of multiple media evolve and change, and how new kinds of storytelling are enabled by such new platforms. I especially focus on the fields of worldbuilding and comparative media studies, as I believe that as all media become increasingly digital the term 'transmedia' will yield to just media, with disparate story components like books and movies and TV shows and so on being connected on the backend with intelligent systems, and the experience changing as that system learns more about what resonates the most with each individual audience member.

Perhaps most importantly, I research the future of storytelling as I focus on emerging best practices by storytellers working in cutting-edge platforms and environments like those mentioned above, the business models they use to not just survive but thrive making the kinds of work they love, and work with the next generation of storytellers and worldbuilders to set them up to succeed in that future.