The cinema of 21st Century is going to be produced and consumed a lot like online multiplayer video games. The stars of this new medium will be the most prolific participants. The directors and writers will be the game designers and systems architects. The experience will be ubiquitous, with the movie theater itself augmenting a range of other mediums. And while the theaters will look the same, the audience will be busy watching and playing with handheld devices while moving pictures and sounds fill the room.

Current event documentaries like The Corporation, F911, Outfoxed, and Control Room are particularly mundane in their current form. Two hours of silence and we walk out like zombies, barely remembering a handful of the topics, people, or events we became curious about. Some of us defend or attack the film's talking points. Others let the film wash away. But the whole point of these films is to teach or inform or persuade. Yet we walk away with almost nothing! How do we continue the dialogue? How do we talk back?

The cinema (and the filmmaker) needs to deliver a much richer contextual experience in order to succeed. And we the audience need ways to annotate, link, and bookmark as we watch, and ways to share this info with each other once we leave the theater.

In the meantime, gaming is adopting TV techniques and themes, pulling us away from the set and delivering us from isolation into shared online experiences. The trend is towards choice and control, participation and productive consumption, and shared competitive connecting experiences. The linear broadcast one-to-many egomaniacal punditry of traditional media and entertainment has left the industry ripe for disruption. And it's only a matter of time until investor attention and capital starts hucking personal, peer, and participatory media and entertainment startups at that low-hanging fruit.

A few games are out that demonstrate the shotgun marriages going on between TV and gaming. Greg Costikyan writes that Enlight Software's "Restaurant Empire gives you a good sense of managing a restaurant. You hire and fire staff, construct a menu, place tables, decor, and kitchen equipment, and open the doors. Over the course of a day, people wander in and order. As is typical in games of this type, each customer's desires, wants, and reactions are tracked in detail, and you can click on any guest to see what he or she is thinking about (often, about the rudeness of staff or delays in their order). You can also see what peoples' main complaints are, general level of satisfaction, and so on. You try to increase the popularity of your restaurant by upgrading the menu and decor (as profits permit), adding new recipes and deleting less popular ones, learning about businesses that can provide premium ingredients, and so on."

Kuma Reality Games' builds re-creations of reality and current events. Their online gaming service Kuma\War uses 'extensive research from news and intelligence sources including the Associated Press, Department of Defense, and expert analysis from a decorated team of military advisors (giving) consumers a "boots on the ground" point of view. Players experience intense 3D re-creations of real battles that are taking place today in military hotspots such as Fallujah, Samarra and Baghdad's Sadr City.' Kuma just launched their 'Stories From the Front' contest for Kuma\War. "The goal of the contest is 'to find the most compelling real battle story from a U.S. soldier. Kuma will then use their advanced game tool set to re-create one of these important personal experiences and share it with the American public. The winner and three buddies will appear in the playable episode as 3D game characters, and in the broadband video new show which accompanies every Kuma\War episode. Keith Halper, CEO of Kuma Reality Games, says "It's our intention to create an interactive record of this war, and gaining the personal involvement of soldiers who participated is essential... It is our hope that the Kuma\War experience will impart a deeper understanding and respect for the service and sacrifice of our fellow citizens in uniform. It is, as we've been told by returning servicemen, as close to being there as most people will ever -- or will ever want to -- get."

Take a look at Bruce Sterling Woodcock's analysis of Massive Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG) Subscription Growth. The overall size of the market is growing, but individual games themselves start to slow down, and eventually games cannibalize subscribers from each other. But games that are as entertaining as television, yet more social and personalized (and perhaps even more informing) will eat away at TV's market share. Already, the most successful MMOGs have between 200,000 and 500,000 subscribers- numbers any startup cable TV net would be ecstatic about. There are huge opportunities in store for media games. Companies will start to approach game production with more of a TV programming perspective (rather than a hit-driven model). Complimentary networks of games will create channels of attention for consumers, and cannibalization will be more like watching different programs within a single network (or within a suite of channels owned by the same corporation).

And with audience attention comes advertising and advergaming. Massive Incorporated raised $5.5 million in a second round of financing last week. From their PR, "Massive's video game advertising network aggregates the gaming audience across multiple game publishers and titles and provides simultaneous delivery of advertising across this audience or to targeted demographic niches within it. Massive anticipates the ability to serve dynamic advertising on about 10 titles when its network is launched in October, and about 40 titles by the end of 2005, when its audience of 18-34 year old males will rival Monday Night Football."

More models are emerging. And you have to wonder how Nielsen Media and VNU are going to deal with them. Ian Bogost, CEO of Persuasive Games and founder/editor of watercoolergames.org, describes three different models for advergaming- where consumers 'play' the experience of the brand. From StreamingMediaIQ, by Nettie Hartsock: 1) In game product placement, 2) online games placed on a consumer product Web site, and 3) commissioned games built specifically around a brand/product. Yet Massive's approach is the one most like Google's- Massive will understand the audience's intent and be able to deliver contextually relevant ads that feel like information, tips, and friendly 'heads-ups' to players and audiences.

Media production is still in the industrial age, and current usage of IT in both film and television has just further cemented dependence on linear processes. The razor blades and sticky tape style of editing is done on desktop computers. The sweatshop of animators is now a render farm. Instead of film we have digital tapes (and even a few hard drives). Great. But it's all still linear. Single-skilled people doing isolated production tasks. Assembly line content creation. Just like it's been for years.

Media publishers of all types are going to need to start making soft content: content that can be automatically upgraded and updated, content that can be integrated with other media, and customized to provide audiences with non-linear contextually relevant social and communicative personalized experiences. Audiences media consumption needs and wants are evolving rapidly, yet media production hasn't really changed much. There's talk of PVR adoption and video phones, but are we really going to want to watch regular old content?

Gaming is soft content. And there are financial, technical, and creative lessons to be learned. The demand for soft content is exploding and gaming is exploiting lessons learned from the TV industry while TV is just fading away. When it comes to film and video, consumer demand is going to eclipse the production capacity of every existing business. Millions of channels means billions of hours of media a day. It's time to deploy creative systems that utilize decentralized production tools and production techniques in order to help organizations and individuals create 10-100 times the content for the same amount of time and money as is currently spent. There's hell of a lot to do to get media production into the information age. And the first company to get there isn't going to be one anyone's heard of. So let's get started.