The Goat of Hypermediacy
Oat the Goat is a project that was funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Education and was a project designed to be a part of their Bullying Free NZ Week in May of 2018. The New Zealand Ministry of Health describes it as “Oat the Goat is an interactive, online storybook, which aims to teach children about empathy, acceptance, and tolerance.” The “Online story book” features our protagonist Oat, who is on a quest to reach the top of the mountain. On his journey, he meets a variety of characters, Amos, a big mossy creature, a group of sheep which act as the bullies, and a green glow worm. The music in the piece is recorded by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra alongside traditional Māori instruments. The message of the story is quite clear, that we should not bully one another and our protagonist Oat stands as the living embodiment of that symbol, however, looking deeper at the intent of this piece it is clear to see that the goal is to use digital media and the multiple mediums that it provides to reach out to the maximum number of people, and the piece is a clear reflection of that.
For beginners, the website is designed to be viewed on any platform, your phone, your tablet, or your computer. I first opened it on my computer and then later tried it out on my phone and found that it was designed to be viewed in landscape mode and would not allow you to view it in portrait. The first thing that the piece asks you when you open it is if you would prefer it to be in Maori or English, it then asks how would you like to experience the story, giving you the options of reading the story yourself, having the story be read to you or the option of watching. It is a very hypermediacy approach and not what you are expecting when you are told that it is an online storybook. Being curious I went to the options menu and found that there is a pdf download that is an online storybook version of this narrative but interestingly enough, it is not presented as one of the options when first opening the site. There are multiple ways to experience the narrative, “reading” allows you to progress through the website with click prompts on the website and without a narrator to read you the text. The “Read to me” option is the click prompts with the narration. Last but not least, the “Watch” medium has no click prompts and is much more similar to Young-hae Chang’s Traveling to Utopia, in that it has a set pace that it progresses. The feature that each of these mediums share is the Chapters function, the narrative is divided up between loading screens at each chapter that feels more like a video game loading you into a new level than a storybook. They all feature the interactive points in the story like Amos and the little glow worm. At these points, the story gives you the options of picking how you would like to react to the situation, putting yourself in Oat the goat’s shoes (or hooves I suppose) this is very reminiscent of a video game or one of Netflix’s latest releases Bandersnatch, which was inspired by picking your own adventure books. Oat the goat is also distinctively Māori, the areas that Oat the goat travels are distinctively resembling New Zealand, and the narration is done in an accent from the region, the dialogue or subtitles also resemble this having slang from New Zealand culture.
I think that is at the core of what is going on in this website or “online storybook” as its creators describe it. Oat the Goat is not simply a website or a storybook in an online form, it is much more than that. It features aspects of the book with its chapters, it features characteristics of film and animation, and video games. Oat the Goat is sort of a conglomeration of writing technologies referencing Jay Bolter. Oat the goat is a masterclass in remediation, it takes things from multiple sources like subtitles, chapters, and loading screens and combines them all in one piece. The function is that it is a sort of piece that works like a swiss army knife, in this time of short attention spans, especially in children whom this piece targets, Oat the Goat comes along and offers the kid who enjoys video games things like the loading screens and the interactive options, for the child who likes to read it does away with the voice-overs. With the power that new digital media provides, Oat the Goat is able to expand its audience using these multiple mediums and therefore expand the reach of its message about the troubles of bullying. I think it is best described by Bolter at the end of chapter two when he describes this concept of the “Gesamtkunstwerk”, this sort of elaborate hypermediacy that combines things like painting, audio, video, photography, graphic design, and many other things. What makes this important is that Oat the Goat can take powerful narrative tools from multiple mediums, and by doing this it can surpass them in their effectiveness in reaching a large audience.
Oat the Goat shows that this concept that McCluhan created of “the medium being the message” has some merit to it. By the creator ensuring that the medium would work on the phone, on the desktop, for those interested in video games, or those interested in books, the creator allows for his story to be expansive and accessible. Without digital media, Oat the Goat would not be the same, if it were simply just a book or a pdf online it would not have the same message nor the same effectiveness or reach. Because it is a Gesamtkunstwerk it surpasses the writing technologies that predate it. It is interesting to think how a short little children’s story can have so much depth to it and really be eight stories in one due to the variety of mediums and languages that it plays with.
