It is hard to think of better examples of Play Factor application than deep media products. You know them. TV shows like Lost, The Office, Battlestar Galactica, Gossip Girl. Movies like The Blair Witch Project, Matrix, A.I., Batman – The Dark Knight and Watchmen. Book series like The Da Vinci Code, The 39 Clues, music artists like Trent Reznor or the band Radiohead. And games. Oh, come on, they had to be there too, right? You can start with the Alternate REality Games and now wich some big titles like Halo and Dead Space. But it doesn’t stop here. If you just stop to look at Deep Focus and 42 Entertainment projects for a few seconds you will see the possibilities emerging.

They are everywhere, as the South by Southwest Conference can show us. And they use all the possibilities of the Play Factor. They try to engage the audience in various ways. They even are capable of engaging different demographics in the same fictional universe through different channels. But more importantly, they make people interact, play the products and with the products.

But, please, there is a difference between a product that is adapted for more than one media and a real deep media experience. Gone With the Wind the book became Gone With the Wind, the movie. Great. We are talking about a TV show like Lost. It has a mythology that transpires to the real world and make it’s audience enjoy it at various levels of complexity. Being complex, naturally chalenging it’s audience in subtle and sometimes in very direct ways, the show becomes more than a show, and the game, and the books, and the websites. The Play Factor is obvious here.