Stay somewhere classy- try the Fat Cow Motel on for size (Blog Post 6)

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Eight years ago, I spent my evenings working out how to drop an unboiled egg for a metre without breaking it, listening to someone else’s voicemail messages and reading the personals on the Fat Cow Bugle. This was all part of a fun little TV show called Fat Cow Motel, and was my first experience being directly involved with participatory culture. The audience was given lateral thinking puzzles to solve each week, and could receive further clues to the show’s mysteries if they explored the webpages of the fictional town of Fat Cow. I was well and truly sucked in, and even won a t-shirt and key ring- the height of achievement. The show, although mostly forgotten now, was a success for the ABC in multiplatform storytelling with around 20 000 participants playing the game each week.

My enthusiasm for this points not only to my … ahem… ‘quirky’ taste and the fact that I had way too much time on my hands when I was thirteen; but also to one of the most important yet often forgotten facts about convergence, outlined by Jenkins. Convergence requires a participatory culture. It was all very well for the ABC to commission someone to make the enormous 5500 page website, but this would have been a waste of time if no one had wanted to get involved. As Jenkins argues, the tools alone are not enough. Corporations who want to develop multiplatform media content need an interested and active audience. Fat Cow Motel appealed to my slightly weird corner of the world and now, JK Rowling has attracted a much larger and even more active fanbase in the form of her new site Pottermore.  

Watching my potterhead friends spend their time making potions on Pottermore, I sometimes wonder what the attraction is. But the truth is, Pottermore is built around a community. The website would mean nothing to the enormous number of participants if not for the 14 year history of the world of Harry Potter. The hundreds of businesses now trying to take control of Twitter and Facebook need to understand Pottermore's flexible business model and Jenkins’ argument if they are to be successful- the capability of putting media on a bunch of different devices means nothing if you can’t  make it worth our while to become users rather than simply consumers.