Activation Elements! What's That?

So, you’re on your journey to create the next breakout, broad commercial franchise. Star Wars, Batman, Harry Potter, Marvel, move over big guys cause here I come! Maybe your aspirations aren’t quite that lofty but you certainly want your story to drive active audience engagement and fandom.

So, let’s talk about whether you’re really building a story and world that will become a franchise. For starters, tell me about the activation elements you’re including throughout your story’s worldbuilding. It’s critical to have lots of them and to place and use them well. What is an activation element, you ask?

An activation element is: an item (prop, creature, vehicle, structure, costume, etc...) that after the audience experiences your primary narrative, inspires them to engage in a format or product where they can use their agency on the element and directly experience part of your story for themselves.

To be clear, characters are at the top of the list for driving a commercial franchise. I'm not going to cover those in this post as there are aspects of the character discussion that are not shared with the "things" that also drive commercial success.

After seeing Star Wars, I very much wanted to own and swing a lightsaber, either as a toy, collectible, or as a powerful item in a video game. ?The Batmobile and utility belt; Harry Potter wands, robes and potions; the hundreds of Pokemon; there are countless examples that are marvelously rich and varied. Net/net, the stuff I want to use.

Cool is good, but not the only thing: Yes, these Items are inventive and cool. There is a certain art to designing never-before-seen elements. Though powerful, coolness itself is not enough to ensure that the audience will be drawn to want to experience the items and places themselves. To understand how to infuse your worldbuilding with franchise power we need to pull back to see the foundational meaning of the story.

Give back to the meaning: All good storytelling is built on understanding what the meaning of your story is and aligning all the parts of the narrative to reflect, exercise, and reinforce the meaning. Characters, places, and things all fall under this rule.? Not only is this key in avoiding dilution of your story by spending time on anything that isn’t aligned, but it is also what makes the activation elements meaningful. A light saber is aligned with the meaning of Star Wars (one will vs free will) in the strongest possible way. It is a demonstrable item for focusing your will and it is a metaphor for the mastering of the mystic art of the force. To own one says something about you, the fan.

That brings us to two more aspects of crafting powerful activation items. The item’s placement in the story and real-vs-imagined reproducibility.

Reproducibility: If I’m a big fan of Batman, I can wield a Batarang or any of the items in the utility belt when I play, cosplay, game, or collect. If the story and character I am a fan of involves conjuring spells and ethereal magic, I’m far less able to reproduce those items and ideas unless I’m in a video game. This makes the commercial activation of your IP smaller in scale.

Returning to our lovely light saber you get the best of both worlds. The mysticism of the force and fighting with light, and the play reproducibility of a saber. What this says is that it is worth looking at how you are enabling the audience to use their agency and asking the question: “Can I world build in such a way that maximizes reproducibility?”

Be close to the journey: Now let’s examine placement of activation items. There is a basic rule when it comes to powerful and/or cool things in your story. Your hero must never win because of his or her stuff. Their triumph must come from within and the journey they must travel to bravery and mastery. That being said, really cool stuff can absolutely be part of the equation when used to demonstrate that mastery, or even acting as a threshold they must achieve to use the item, place, or idea. The closer those elements are to the journey and the triumph, the more powerful they will be as activation items to your fans.

Overbuild: Lastly, it is worth repeating (as I’ve included this concept multiple times in other posts and talks). Liberally place inventive and intriguing ideas throughout your worldbuilding even if the story is not going to directly use them as a prop. If the ideas are still aligned with the meaning, when your audience becomes committed fans, they will want to explore much deeper into the world. Tease them, give them glimpses that draw them in to explore their own role in your world and to find other activation elements that become conceptual easter eggs for the community as well as items and places they want to do things in and with.

As always, there is a lot more to the art of crafting a story that has powerful activations elements. I hope this top line flyover of the basics was of interest.

Cheers, Kevin