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them through play on their own game consoles or in collaboration/competition with
their friends. At least partially in response to the success of Skylanders, Disney has
recently released “Disney Infi nity” 14 —a game using the entire Disney catalog of
intellectual property that combines digitally augmented physical toys with a large
virtual toybox that is reminiscent of Minecraft or Little Big Planet.
Imagine a serialized story with a weekly release schedule. Every Sunday after-
noon a new model is released and immediately pushed out to the printers of all
subscribers. This model might be an action fi gure of a major character in the story
or a piece needed to solve a secret puzzle at the end of the previous week's episode.
This is a black box: you don't know what the model will look like until it is printed.
Subscribers get preferred access to the models, while nonsubscribers have to wait
for (or pirate) their copies later. Having the model gives you additional capabilities
needed to succeed in the next level of the digital game, and the models are cool toys
in their own right. On Monday the week's new episode is broadcast, both as a televi-
sion show and as a new playable component of a digital game. This new episode
incorporates Sunday's printed item in some meaningful way, providing the sub-
scriber with a tangible piece of the narrative world that is also a key to deeper levels
of the narrative and the game play.
In this situation, the 3D printer and its objects become part of a broader set of
interlocking narratives and interactions. It becomes another channel for communi-
cating information about the story, as well as a means of rewarding and reinforcing
players in the game. Storytellers might use this to build suspense by releasing a
mysterious artifact or create surprise by delivering an innocuous seeming object that
takes on narrative signifi cance later. Storytellers can foreshadow important moments
or create a series of interlocking objects that slowly interconnect to reveal additional
narrative information over the course of a season.
A fi nal element that we'd like to consider in this section is the role that expres-
siveness plays in this context, specifi cally the ability to customize physical objects
to the particular user's preferences. Now let's imagine a version of the above system
where you download an action fi gure and it has a face that you designed, or is wear-
ing an outfi t that you selected, or is even a miniature version of yourself as a char-
acter in the story. Or perhaps your participation in this system allows you to craft a
profi le of your own preferences. Personalization means that you can participate in a
shared media experience, but that your participation refl ects something about you.
So perhaps you and all of your friends have subscribed to the same story, but each
of you receives an object that is slightly different and tailored to your preferences.
These scenarios begin to explore the possibilities of 3D printing and home
fabrication for purposes beyond the utilitarian. Our next set of scenarios consider
some of the ways that these technologies could become intrusive and problematic in
the future.
14 https://infi nity.disney.com
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