Fandom-Ready: Creating Fiction in the Age of Fan Consumption

[Music] hello my name is julian quijano and this is fandom ready first of all before starting i need to point out as you may have realized by now that english is not my first language so expect some mistakes i hope you can excuse me if you have any question feel free to ask it in the in the chat i'm the creative director at beautiful glitch we're in the studio in sunny barcelona in spain you can follow us in instagram and twitter there's a handle in there and we are the creators of monster pro mercer prom is a multiplayer narrative adventure with latency mechanics and particular mechanics and it's more than a game it's a franchise as we have a content dlc called second term and a sequel we recently released called monster camp and we are planning more sequels to go but today we are talking more than just video games we are talking about fandoms so we want to show your funnel which is

wonderful um you can see here and not only that we want to show you some numbers that we believe they are tied to to having a fandom because often we hear that it's better to have a fan and than just a consumer and we agree but we also think it is important for the purpose of this dog to show some numbers that we believe are tied in some ways to having funds i'm not just a an audience stuff like a very high conversion rate on our products that goes to show the loyalty of our fans to to the fiction um high average in kickstarter campaigns as goes to show that people is very willing to pay more than just the price of the game because they are very invested in in the game uh and even social media where we have uh more than 50 000 followers both on twitter and instagram having more than 1 million likes in instagram in 2019 and this is not to to tour on horn it's for two reasons that

i'm showing you this for once oh sorry um for once it's just in case that you don't know monster prom or beautiful glitch i think it's important to show you our credentials because you are here listening to what we are giving about fandoms and what not and so i think some of these numbers and these pictures goes to show that indeed we have a fiction ourselves that has grow its own wonderful big fandom and also it goes to show the value of a fandom since we are spending now half an hour on what effectively is uh a series of tricks and advice on how to turn your fiction into fertile grounds for a fandom to grow um because this is what this talk is about is what over the years thanks to monster plum and observation on our and other fandoms um insights we have come up we have come up

with and on on how we believe that aside of of course making crafting a great product um you can do to let's say increase the chances for a fandom to grow around the creation you are working in so before going into the specific insights i want to to talk a bit about oh sorry here i want to talk a bit about the process of becoming a fan i'm sure all of us are fans of different phantoms and so i want you to think on the process because it will be useful in in here later so we start as strangers strangers in the sense that we don't we know nothing about the depiction then we receive a first impact right someone talks to us about the depiction or we see something in somewhere and then we go into mere

consumption we read a book play a game watch the episode of a tv show maybe we we have some interest after that and we discuss it a bit with friends or even leave a review maybe even we decided to consume more of the main products like watch more episodes of the tv show play more games of the franchise within more books of the series and maybe our interest keeps growing so no we are not just only discussing now we are defending the fiction now we are even recommending it to other people and slowly you can see how as a consumer you are starting to have more and more value for the creator because you for once you are of course consuming more products but you are also even helping the creator in spreading the word and getting more more consumers and then we go into the deeper levels which i think what comes next depends a lot on who you are as a fan and it goes to show that there's many ways of interacting with a fandom

maybe you go into full immersion and you observe all the information out there about the fiction like wikis and theories maybe you want to consume more products other than the main ones so you are now not only playing games on the franchise but you i don't know you about a body pillow case maybe you go into socialization meaning that you become an active participant in social circles around the fandom and you meet new acquaintances and even friends maybe you want to create and so depending what the craft you like you drop an art write fanfics do cosplay um make memes craft theories whatever speaks to you or maybe you do a number of things it's whatever suits you as a fan again um and this is a process again i think we all know but i think it's interesting to now flip it and think uh how it goes for the creator and for the benefit of this talk and to

more easily convey the points and insights we have come up with i would establish three different parts with three different goals for once as a creator we need to create a enticing first byte like this means to make the shallow levels uh of your fiction very accessible and appealing so a stranger will uh feel you know enticed to to that first interaction with your fiction then you'll have uh the goal of of achieving a smooth transition from bite to binge this means that create the different levels uh and parts of your fiction in a way that yeah you you get that first pie but then before you realize you get the second bite the third bite and then suddenly you are in directly sorry you are actually binging and then when you are

binging on the deep levels i think there's also a goal which is managing for people to deep to binge from the heart and what this means uh to us is that people that are on the deep levels are not just spending a lot of time and that's it with their fiction but they are also starting to connect in deeper levels of values identity emotions so they truly connect with your fiction so basically all these uh builds on the idea and the notion that right now most fictions and i recommend uh yours if you can make it so it goes this way are actually multi-layered multi-layer in the sense that there's many layers of consumption available and are accessible for someone that wants to go go in it casually and deep levels for for the person that wants to become a fan and and i say before checking specific tricks that

sorry one second it's good for you for a creator to to ask oneself if you if the creation has opportunities for all these multi-layer levels of consumption these mean many things uh like for instance some questions that you could ask yourself as a creator of a game are you building not only a great game but good spaces for debate like a discord server are you this is maybe them but are you do you have at least one character that's that's very easy to cosplay so people that's maybe not a very you know skilled in cosplay can still feel comfortable cosplaying one character do are you cutting sorry caring for your community community spaces so your fandom is an enjoyable place uh to find to meet new people that loves the same fiction than you

are you the theme is open for sonas like monster prom has more sarsonas is that the theme you have chosen open for this kind of content do you have mysteries that will lead people into many theories and of course you don't need to fish for all of these each fiction is different but i think it's useful to spend some time reflecting on if you have opportunities for this like open your fiction to this type of multi-layer consumption but enough of that so provided these three goals did come up with um a number of insights advice tricks to to manage uh to achieve these three goals and we found like eight to ten but of course because we have only uh 30 minutes today we will focus on one trick or one inside per level let's start with the first one which is getting that first bite so

this is ways to get a stranger to have a first interior interaction with your fandom we found three potential ways of maximizing the the chances of this happening which are exploring theme trends offering a big first choice a first big choice uh or having a high pitch and now we are focusing on the second one offering a first big choice so this idea is based on a market all the marketing trick or at least that's how i learned about that when i was studying advertising and sorry it's based on the idea of when you are creating something and you want to market it to an audience it's very important to frame the perception of that audience this is easier understood if we put an example let's say that we are now trying to sell

soda instead of making a game or creating whatever so you can ask people do you want to drink soda yes or no but the thing is 50 of those options are not for interest we don't want people choosing i don't want to drink soda so the idea is to override that question and go into a different question that first big choice that kind of throws people into already thinking in terms of drinking soda for instance it would be like uh which soda speaks to you uh sweet strawberry soda exotic papaya soda or super cool blue flavor whatever that is and and you can see the idea is is to override the drinks drink soda yes no and get people just wondering okay which one i would drink that this is not like a magic trick that will everyone drinking soda but it has an effect it's let's say it helps you to make your audience people to

go past that first wall of disinterest and actually check what this stuff is about and this which feels very specific and soda-centric right now and that basically means sorry it's basically present in many fictions too like for instance the thing on some popular ones is like harry potter which instead of telling you do you like harry potter yes or no when you when you do you want to read it uh sorry it um it directly says in which house would you be slithering with a ramen cloud or hufflepuff and again instead of thinking i am interested in harry potter or even if you know you are not interested you feel a bit enticed to check which one is yours right or even with video games like i myself have haven't never played fire emblem nor i have an interest on it i'm sorry not sorry but

to which their own i think they say in english and the thing is uh recently they released three houses which was very popular and it did the same thing basically also with houses and i need to actually work because instead of saying pass i don't i don't want to play any fire emblem or i don't want even to check what fire emblem is about they got me checking the houses because i wanted to know which houses i would choose and again no magic trick i didn't end up playing the fire emblem but it's the first time in my life that i actually care enough to check about the game and that's a huge first step that we are trying to achieve as creators so the power of a first big choice give me one second i will summon it up this way which is um human beings are often um

like they tend sorry human beings tend to organize information in categories and groups because that makes makes the information more easily digestible they terrible uh and so this creates shortcuts and make easier to understand complex structures like the fiction you are trying to sell for instance and and so we are also like appealed and attracted to this kind of informational categories we are like when we see them we we want to to decode them right so there's a power in that in master problem there's no houses or teams but we have the characters you need to choose between six love interest and so we did this into a lesser degree but the six characters have clear school tropes they have clear monster types and they are even minus one are super clearly coated with colors that are very um present in the

character design so you have the red demon who's a bad boy the green gorgon who's a mean girl the blue ghost who's a party animal or the purple vampire who's a hipster and so now that we have understood this the ques the next question would be like can this become more powerful and i think yes with what i call sexy themes and this is a funny way of saying universal and recognizable categories or symbols and as we can see here one example there is like zodiac just if you are like wondering uh this zodiac thirst i said nothing about this talk specifically but but just as an example so i can show you that we're not sharing all we are not only sharing this information but we applied ourselves this is like some concept we have been toying around around the idea of a sexy thing which is zodiac signs and i will show you some concepts concepts sorry while i'm explaining this

so these sexy themes are stuff like zodiac signs but also elements planets deadly scenes major arcana you can think of probably of many universal categories that people easily recognize and you can also think on many fictions that use that like sailor moon with the planets homestuck and sainseilla with the zodiac signs avatar with the elements and again it has the power of this first big choice but also is so freaking recognizable and universal and even sometimes people have one of these symbols assigned or they previously chose which one they really like that you can even go further into overriding the first disinterest that people maybe even want to check theirs like i'm a capricorn and then i tend to

check the capricorn characters when the characters are coded with the zodiac signs it's again the power of this first big choice but it's not only about offering a first big choice or using universal and recognize recognizable themes that work as categories but also you need to of course translate these universal categories symbols etc into something that feels years part of your fiction and again of course you are not this is not something that you need to do but these are like advice insights and i i i would say that it's worth checking if this makes sense with your fiction but if so i i think it helps so uh yeah making it yours and the goal here i think is when you create these categories this first big choice it's good if the options have distinctive uh visual distinction

and a clarity of tropes you need to to make the choice very distinct from each other so people feel even more pushed like subconsciously into into choosing one that speaks to them because in the nsl it's a lot a lot sorry it's a lot about that about or or tendency to to seek a sense of belonging even if it means belonging to one group house category character in a fiction and our sense of identity and and how we are continuously defining ourselves and looking for ways of defining ourselves and so we carry these symbols for instance in a way that has some strange and intriguing power like like again the zodiac signs i myself i'm a capricorn and and i'm i don't believe in astrology but i can't read the sign in a strange way because it's a sign

that was assigned to me at birth and and i had built some connection and so there's there's at least an intriguing power to that and i think fictions can benefit from using it so to sum it up sexy themes are universally unrecognizable they appeal to a sense of identity and they need to define oneself and they throw a complete stranger into checking the fiction and doing a whole die within it it's building yummy choices that lead into a strong sense of belonging and identity um and again overriding that first part turning getting that first bike yeah so let's move on to the next part um the immersion so the smooth transition from bite range and these are insights on many degrees of depth from the buy to the bench for instance like twisting the trope is something that

in my opinion is closer closer to the bite and the one we are checking now which is the power of the relatable is closer to the beach what's that about let's think for a moment on a tv show it's a space bounty hunters right you have the first episode and it starts with a brow so you can see all of these characters like striking to cool fighting uh it's selling the the action of the tv show and that's all cool but i think it's even cooler when a tv show does something different like you went some minutes and the actual show starts with them a bit before that so you have them ordering food at a intergalactic pool for dinner puff poof restaurant whatever or dinner and so you can see them like what they are there how they eat what they drink or even them having a menial conversation about about anything and i believe there's a power in that

actually this that i i'm describing is very similar to the first scene of reservoir dogs where you have a fantastic characters in the sense that they're not your every man but criminals in this case and you have them eating at a dinner and discussing about if i remember correctly the tipping system in the united states and it was a great choice i think because it painted you the characters in a very clear way but also in a way that was relatable in the sense that they were doing something that even if there were criminals or space pirates could as they will be in this tv show they still felt close um and there's a power on making stuff relatable i think it's obvious on how it grounds your fiction in what can be recognized and and seen as something close to us so i think there's there's um a value in mixing the fantastic and the mundane the fantastic is also good

like of course you can create something that's completely mundane and that's completely fine but many fictions benefit i think from having fantastic setups some people ask us like why monster primer monsters because they're like comedic exaggerations of myself and my friends when we were on our twenties most of the characters not miranda i don't know any person like miranda luckily i guess um but the thing is we chose to make the monsters for no good reason other than monsters are cool and they're popular and so yeah there's value in in a fantastic setup and nothing against miranda but at least as a real person i think is at least one i would want to be close to the character is is funny but so we know that there's value in the fantastic but also it's good to space

them on their need people want to see this fantastic here no matter how epic your story is people connect with and care for what's humane for what's relatable and so i think you need to put that into your fiction no matter what and another good example we talked before and i think it's it talks about another value of his is harry potter then because many people even if they didn't care that much about harry potter and the ones that care of course did um has wondered what if i was in hogwarts right and because hogwarts aside of being a magic school was a school and that's something we can't relate to and that let us do something very important for a fiction to make people do which is projection i think it's very good that your fiction manages to to make the the audience project themselves into the fiction's world

and that's thanks to having sorry details parts of the fiction or a big part that's mundane that's something that we can relate to so you want your fiction to be enough fantastic so you want to imagine yourself in there but enough mundane so you can imagine yourself in there right there's a couple easy challenges tricks that can like help you brainstorm ideas for this it doesn't need to be your next game or creation but at least something you can bring brainstorm for one two hours to practice this mixing the mundane with fantastic and is working on uh on a very popular formula which is mixing a fantastic thing with a mundane setup and the most popular one that we have been to we have syntax exhaustion sorry is a school for whatever fantastic we have harry potter and the magicians

squirrels for wizards we have my hero academia school for superheroes we have the daily class school for assassins and we can go on um so i challenge yourself spend one hour brainstorming an idea that's for instance something that changed the there's something fantastic a school for i don't know let's say for deities so you can make it the schoolies for a specific pantheon like greek gods or many pantheons and every click in the school is a different pantheon or maybe a different type of date is like eldritch deities and you get a way weirder fiction or maybe you can do the opposite and i challenge you to change the the mundane setup and you have for instance a company that's like grey boring offices but what they do is creating new worlds like you know they are like creators of words but in a grey office um or you have a law office for superheroes and all the law issues they have but it's not about

the superheroes it's it's about the lawyers the fiction or you have a pr agency for gods uh that are trying to get a bigger following and you follow the the work in the pr agency try to do it like try to brainstorm this for one hour or two so next let's go into the last part the truth um so this is this is again about about building true connection with uh your audience with your fans compile on values on emotions on identity and we have found two ways uh two things that you can care of around these which is voices and values and shift dynamics and i'm guessing that in the chat people will be asking for shift dynamics mainly but is the other one it's poison values as we're checking today um so for the voices it's very simple it's about you need to flash your

characters out this is so obvious and and yet i fail to see it in many fictions i consume like really fleshing the characters out and following all the steps to make them feel real as a main goal we will check some of the steps we follow on mortzer prom some are tied to insights we haven't seen today but are pretty self-explanatory for instance tropes like we identified and chose recognizable tropes for characters monster types which are tropes on themselves school tropes and don't try to reinvent the wheel of course you will disrupt these these strokes a bit um but you also want to keep stuff so these are the pillars for your characters you want to find themes like semantic territories that you will use for the characters narratives you want to build some depth you want to spend some time asking the right questions what's the upbringing of the characters who are their family what's their backstories why they are they are the way they are

let's not just make them one way but let's try to understand how they come to be that way and details this seems more like not important but it is because we are built not only in our big deep stories but also in our little details um and this like build a rapport with the audience and also gives the characters a lot of texture which is super good so think of little details spend some time and i sometimes fail to see this and characters on popular fictions spend some times creating uh details that give texture to the characters and finally values which is very important too because we all have values and if your characters need to feel real they should have to like the specific ways in which they understand the world that surrounds them right um and the main goal i think is to to get

a variety of voices that feel real and unique and different um that help people to project and to identify with and i want to speak for a minute on the idea of of telling this variety of showing this variety of voices and telling these uh diverse stories and sometimes people worry because they think that telling diverse stories is a bit um too specific and it can be niche and i don't think so because yes of course some of these stories may feel niche but there's two things to keep in mind for once no matter how niche or specific a story is i think there's still dashes of the universal in in many specific stories there's values and situations and experiences we can all understand and relate to like the finding our own truth or getting our voice heard and so you can build specific stories looking into the also into the universal

details that can help other people to relate with those stories and as of course there will be still parts of the specific experience of a character that maybe people can't relate to that easily but there's no issue with that i think there's a richness in in listening to stories that are far from ours and learning from experiences that diverge from ours and there's risk to that i don't think so if we can connect with the story of a space pirate and i can assure you my experience is far from being a space pirate i can probably connect with other many stories so be be calm don't don't worry i think there's no risk in telling these diverse stories so here we are again now to sum up is cakes bites binges and all in between this is a different metaphor the idea of doing like focus on the first splash uh ways to draw attention powerfully focus on the dive and the ways to invite to go people deeper focus on the true death on how to

connect on deeper levels of emotions values and identity uh we have seen some examples and that leads us to the conclusions and i would love to tell you that i found like a super cool conclusive sentence you know like all those school talks that say something and you say like whoa that's super like like a big truth but i didn't find anything like that and i'm sorry and i hope you can excuse me and i said even if it's not so cool and unsure that the main idea here is that you need to understand there's value in having not just an audience but a fandom so build your creations with the concept of fun consumption in mind making them multi-layer and caring for every layer you need draw people's attention hook them deeper and keep them in low thanks