Hey guys, first off, great panel today. It has my mind churning.

I posted a longer set of thoughts on my blog, but I am going to post the main thoughts as follows since my goal here isn’t to steal Web traffic or move the discussion.

What I want to talk about is gaming and news context, because it was the big takeaway I got from this discussion. My mind was already starting to turn as I came to SXSW thanks to my use of Foursquare, but after sitting in on a great panel about transmedia storytelling I was over the edge. Harris mentioned game mechanics in the presentation of news, and Thompson riffed on that a bit by talking about ways we can let users “level up” (like Super Mario Bros …. appealing to my generation!) as they go through the news and context process.

Thompson later talked about the idea of a journalist on a “hero’s quest,” where they take a big idea topic and set about trying to solve it. My mind was already teeming at that point. He might have been thinking Lord of the Rings, but I was already going Legend of Zelda.

I’ve covered some of this before on my blog as it relates to Foursquare, and some of the ideas come from my colleague Bob Britten. But the essence is this: My generation, in particular, is conditioned toward gaming that is centered on collecting things. It’s a reason why Foursquare is genius. Badges and mayorships are trivial status symbols in the larger user network, but they mean something to the users. And it keeps us coming back. Farmville is kind of an idiotic game in terms of sheer gameplay, but there’s a reason why they passed 80 million users last month. It isn’t the desire to plant sugar beets. Imagine if newspapers in the U.S. had an audience of that size that was this loyal.

This is why I don’t buy the “I don’t have time for the news” excuse people give in surveys. If news execs take that at face value then they deserve their fate. The audience is telling them they’d rather plow their fake farm than read the news. And I don’t blame the audience for this, really. A contextless news environment is partially to blame.

So, gaming. I sat in on a few video gaming sessions at SXSWi and was struck by how attuned programmers are toward what it takes to keep the user’s attention. The session I attended on transmedia stories (“The 10-Minute Transmedia Experience”) was the one that broke down the walls in my mind. Transmedia, in a nutshell, incorporates a multiplatform searching game into an overall narrative that helps tell the story. They walked us through a neat example that started with a “trip down the rabbit hole” at a Web site the speakers had designed. From there we had clues to call a number, which took us to another Web site, then YouTube video, then had us search Google and email the answer to a problem to an email address set up by the storyteller. It was interesting trying to figure out the clues and solve the problems.

This is the kind of stuff they do in marketing, and the speakers cited promotions such as the campaign for The Dark Knight as an example. About 15 minutes in, Sanden Totten of Minnesota Public Radio asked the question I’d been queueing to ask: Has this been done in journalism? The speakers’ answer was no, but they thought it would work well. The hashtag discussion on Twitter blew up from there, and the journalism folks in the room caught fire (we exchanged cards afterward as well). Clearly the pot had been stirred.

Which brings me back to the excellent panel and discussion that happened today with Thompson, Harris, and Rosen. I’m not proposing that we make transmedia the centerpiece of any work toward context, but I think it could be a piece of this and certainly is a worthy area for experimentation.

The way I envision it is to create some sort of social gaming experience that fills in the gaps. Want to fill the audience in on why health care costs so much? Why not an audience scavenger hunt that takes them through insurance companies, doctors, service providers, employers who pay premiums, and such? Or why not a Farmville type of game run in a hospital where users have to try and actually bend the cost curve themselves lest they go bankrupt, a situation that allows them to experiment with different health care systems so they can see the cause and effect of the choices we make as a society (in terms of patient coverage, costs, profits, etc? If Mafia Wars on Facebook can take off, surely this could.

And how do they make these choices along the way? With blasts of information, ideally pulled from well reported news stories, that the user can actually apply to the situation in a way that increases both recall and understanding.

So that’s where I am, and I realize that was a long post with some halfway-developed ideas. This is really the first time I’ve put down some synthesized thoughts about what I’ve been pondering here in Austin. But the gist of what I’m trying to say here is that I’m getting the sense that journalism is thinking about the idea of “story” way too narrowly. The missing link here is context. Transmedia is made for this type of storytelling mode.