As gaming takes a central role in the rise of transmedia content, a team of writers is using DC Comics superheroes to demonstrate the benefits of direct interplay between a TV series and a video game.
Last month, Digiday covered the launch of “DC Heroes United,” a cartoon series featuring classic DC characters such as Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. The show, which kicked off on Nov. 20, allows fans to vote on the outcomes of the narrative by playing a parallel mobile game, which is itself part of the framing narrative of the series. It’s the most direct connection between a television series and video game yet — and thanks to the show’s use of popular DC characters, hundreds of thousands of viewers have already tuned in across streaming platforms such as Tubi and YouTube.
So far, five of the series’ 16 planned episodes have come out. After the release of the first two episodes, Digiday spoke to the creative team behind the series to learn more about how they factored gamers’ decisions and preferences into the series’ narrative in real time. This is the transmedia story of “DC Heroes United.”
“DC Heroes United” was the brainchild of Genvid, a company that had previously created similar transmedia television series such as “Silent Hill: Ascension,” an adaptation of the video game franchise “Silent Hill” that won a Creative Arts Emmy Award earlier this year. With “DC Heroes United,” Genvid is taking a swing at its most prominent adaptation yet, and it took almost four years for the show to see the light of day after the company initially pitched the idea to DC.
One way Genvid managed to get DC Comics on board for the project was by drawing comparisons to DC’s past experimentations with transmedia content, such as the infamous “Death in the Family” event, a comic book storyline in which readers could vote on the fate of the popular character Robin, Batman’s sidekick.
Jacob Navok, CEO of Genvid: “When we pitched them this close to four years ago, it was ‘imagine “Death in the Family,”’ but, like, the entire story.”
Matthew Ball, “DC Heroes United” executive producer: “We are trying to pioneer a new format, and that means that we are all working together to figure out how we would adapt IP, and then articulating that to the IP license holder, working with them and their team. For ‘DC Heroes United,” coming primarily from a team that wrote in comics or series, we had some consultations with live action individuals. It’s a lot of working together to communicate our workings and hypotheses.”
Stephan Bugaj, Genvid Chief Creative Officer and “DCHU” showrunner: “The reason we thought DC would be great for an interactive streaming series was, if you’re a comic book fan, you’ve obviously heard all these arguments where people were like, ‘If only the writer had done this in the comic, the story would have been cooler.’ DC, in particular, had done the death of Robin, where they put it to the audience. So we both believed in the idea of taking those water cooler conversations and bringing them into the experience directly.”
To ensure that fans would react positively to “DC Heroes United’s” take on the DC universe, Genvid enlisted a team of experienced comic writers including Gail Simone, Josh Fialkov and Brian Buccellato. This writing team spent two years coming up with the overarching narrative and character concepts, then handed them to the creative group at Genvid to figure out the specifics of the transmedia narrative, although writers such as Buccellato have remained involved with the story after handing off the concepts.
For lead writer Buccellato, a well-known DC Comics creative who cut his teeth writing popular series such as “The Flash” and “Injustice,” the idea of writing a TV series with a parallel and interrelated mobile game was a new and exciting idea.
Brian Buccellato, DC Comics and “DC Heroes United” writer: “As a writer who has been told that he’s ruined characters and people’s lives — ‘I’ll never read Flash again because of what you did’ — it’s really great to sort of put the onus back on the user and the fan, so now they can be responsible when things don’t go their way. So, I think that’s probably the most fun idea that crossed my mind when this was pitched to me.”
Navok: “We said to them, ‘start with a world where we’re at the dawn of superheroes,’ because we need to give the audience agency, and you can’t give them agency if these characters already know who they are. And then, from there, we brought in narrative design. Narrative design is helmed by our internal team, which consists of ex-Telltale [game development studio] people.”
Martin Montgomery, Genvid creative director and “DCHU” writer: “One of the key differences between a TV writers’ room and something that is interactive, especially on the game side, is that it’s a team sport. It’s not just, OK, the writers go do their thing, and then they’re done. It’s a constant, iterative thing, where maybe us writers come up with something, and then we pitch that to Stephan and say, ‘how would this work as an interactive thing?’ So you get that iterative loop that you would in game design, but it happens around the story and narrative design.”
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Connecting game and show
In addition to influencing the narrative of the “DC Heroes United” series, the mobile game itself is actually part of the fictional universe. Clips of the game appear in the show, with a framing narrative explaining that it represents a combat simulation that members of the series’ eponymous superhero team use to hone their skills.
While the game’s placement inside the show is more of a cameo than a genuine plot device, it highlights the unprecedented transmedia approach of “DC Heroes United.” The creators of the show and game envision a future in which fans of both continue to engage with them separately once the narrative has wrapped up; for now, however, many of the game’s users appear to be playing specifically to influence the show’s narrative, at least according to chatter on social platforms such as Reddit and Twitter.
Chris Schroyer, Genvid creative director and “DCHU” writer: “It feels like passing a baton back and forth between two primary disciplines: traditional linear writing and game design or interactive design. Whenever somebody is holding onto that baton for maybe a little too long, that’s when we’re like, ‘this is starting to feel like too much of a gaming experience,’ or ‘this is too linear.’ It’s good to have those two forces keeping each other in check.”
Bugaj: “Gamers will always try to find the ‘win state.’ So, if they think that the ‘good’ conditions are the win state, they will flock to them, whereas if you made a game that was called ‘Be Evil,’ they’d be like, ‘I’m going to choose every evil point, because that must be the win state.”
Montgomery: “If you look at an open world game, like ‘Tears of the Kingdom,’ the latest big [Legend of] Zelda game, you have so much freedom, and you get fun stories out of that due to the emergent gameplay. For this, we’re telling it within the framework of a linear narrative, so there’s lots of rules about what makes a satisfying story. The trick is, how do you give your audience a lot of agency so that they feel like they’re getting something really exciting, but not so much agency that they end up guiding themselves into a corner?”
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Shepherding the narrative
Thus far, the narrative outcomes determined by “DC Heroes United” players have included interpersonal character details, such as whether Superman reveals his secret identity, or the victor of a fight between Superman and Wonder Woman. As the narrative progresses, however, the writers plan to allow players of the game to decide on more impactful events in the narrative. For example, players will ultimately make the call on whether the show’s version of the usually-evil character Lex Luthor decides to become a superhero or supervillain in “DCHU.”
An interesting aspect of the show’s fluid narrative is that, at the end of each episode, viewers are shown what the alternative outcomes would have been for the decisions that they ultimately did not choose. This helps inform players’ decision-making for future episodes.
Ball: “There is an understandable skepticism from some audience members around any ‘Choose Your Own Adventure,’ because they believe it’s all preset rails. Yes, we have some broad strokes, but I will tell you there are major scenes that have not even been storyboarded yet, let alone animated, let alone have voice recordings. We have holds with talent who do not yet know when they will be in the studio, least of all what they will be acting out. A lot of that is yet to come.”
Schroyer: “We have this trinity of characters who are super good people, who do good things usually or most of the time — but how good things get done matters to them as individuals. So that’s where some of the interpersonal tensions between these characters can exist and flourish and provide us an awesome environment to tell some really cool stories.”
Buccellato: “From the very beginning, we have not a blank-slate Lex, but we never said he’s morally ambiguous. He’s somebody who has a noble cause in his own mind, and a lot of resources, so he’s really not much different from Batman, except the doesn’t have the sort of haunted backstory, right? So, that was one of the big selling points: you get to decide. Is Lex going to end up being a villain, or is he going to be in the Justice League?
