The Routledge Companion To Transmedia Studies Routledge Media and Cultural Studies Companions

The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies

Around the globe, people now engage with media content across multiple platforms, following stories, characters, worlds, brands, and other information across a spectrum of media channels. This transmedia phenomenon has led to the burgeoning of transmedia studies in media, cultural studies, and communication departments across the academy. The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies is the ultimate volume for scholars and students interested in comprehending all the various aspects of transmediality. This collection, which gathers together original articles by a global roster of contributors from a variety of disciplines, sets out to contextualize, problematize, and scrutinize the current status and future directions of transmediality, exploring the industries, arts, practices, cultures, and methodologies of studying convergent media across multiple platforms. Matthew Freeman is Reader in Multiplatform Media at Bath Spa University, UK. He is Co-Director of Bath Spa’s Centre for Media Research and acts as REF Champion for the University’s Communication, Culture and Media submission to REF. His research examines cultures of production across the borders of media, industries, cultures, and histories, and he is the author of Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds, Industrial Approaches to Media: A Methodological Gateway to Industry Studies, the co-author of Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (with Carlos A. Scolari and Paolo Bertetti), and the co-editor of Global Convergence Cultures: Transmedia Earth (with William Proctor). Renira Rampazzo Gambarato is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at Jönköping University, School of Education and Communication, Sweden. She is co-editor of the books Exploring Transmedia Journalism in the Digital Age (together with Geane Alzamora) and of Kulturdialoge Brasilien-Deutschland: Design, Film, Literatur, Medien [Cultural Dialogue Brazil-Germany: Design, Film, Literature, Media] (together with Geane Alzamora and Simone Malaguti). Her current research revolves around transmedia storytelling analysis and complexity of transmedia experiences. More broadly, her research interests include Peircean semiotics, digital culture, international and intercultural media studies, media education, film analysis, and the design and analysis of multiplatform experiences.

The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies

Edited by Matthew Freeman and Renira Rampazzo Gambarato

First published 2019 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Matthew Freeman and Renira Rampazzo Gambarato to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-48343-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-05490-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Out of House Publishing

Contents List of Figures List of Tables Notes on Contributors Foreword Henry Jenkins Acknowledgments Introduction: Transmedia Studies—Where Now? Matthew Freeman and Renira Rampazzo Gambarato PART I Industries of Transmediality 1 Transmedia Film: From Embedded Engagement to Embodied Experience Sarah Atkinson 2 Transmedia Documentary: Experience and Participatory Approaches to NonFiction Transmedia Joakim Karlsen 3 Transmedia Television: Flow, Glance, and the BBC Elizabeth Evans 4 Transmedia Telenovelas: The Brazilian Experience Inara Rosas and Hanna Nolasco 5 Transmedia Comics: Seriality, Sequentiality, and the Shifting Economies of Franchise Licensing William Proctor 6 Transmedia Publishing: Three Complementary Cases Alastair Horne 7 Transmedia Games: Aesthetics and Politics of Profitable Play Helen W. Kennedy 8 Transmedia Music: The Values of Music as a Transmedia Asset 5

Paola Brembilla 9 Transmedia Journalism: The Potentialities of Transmedia Dynamics in the News Coverage of Planned Events Renira Rampazzo Gambarato 10 Transmedia Sports: The National Basketball Association, Emojis, and Personalized Participation Ethan Tussey 11 Transmedia Social Platforms: Livestreaming and Transmedia Sports Portia Vann, Axel Bruns, and Stephen Harrington 12 Transmedia Celebrity: The Kardashian Kosmos—Between Family Brand and Individual Storylines Šárka Gmiterková 13 Transmedia Attractions: The Case of Warner Bros. Studio Tour—The Making of Harry Potter Matthew Freeman PART II Arts of Transmediality 14 Transmedia Storytelling: Character, Time, and World—The Case of Battlestar Galactica Mélanie Bourdaa 15 Transmedia World-Building: History, Conception, and Construction Mark J. P. Wolf 16 Transmedia Characters: Additionality and Cohesion in Transfictional Heroes Roberta Pearson 17 Transmedia Genres: Form, Content, and the Centrality of Memory Colin B. Harvey 18 Transmedia Writing: Storyworlds and Participation at the Intersection of Practice and Theory Donna Hancox 19 Transmedia Photography: Implicit Narrative from a Discrete Moment Kevin Moloney

20 Transmedia Indie: Creativity Outside Hollywood Erica Negri PART III Practices of Transmediality 21 Transmedia Adaptation: Revisiting the No-Adaptation Rule Christy Dena 22 Transmedia Developer: Success at Multiplatform Narrative Requires a Journey to the Heart of Story Jeff Gomez 23 Transmedia Production: Embracing Change Robert Pratten 24 Transmedia Commodification: Disneyfication, Magical Objects, and Beauty and the Beast Anna Kérchy 25 Transmedia Franchising: Driving Factors, Storyworld Development, and Creative Process Peter von Stackelberg 26 Transmedia Distribution: From Vertical Integration to Digital Natives Elizabeth Evans 27 Transmedia Branding and Marketing: Concepts and Practices Max Giovagnoli PART IV Cultures of Transmediality 28 Transmedia Archaeology: Narrative Expansions across Media Before the Age of Convergence Paolo Bertetti 29 Transmedia Heritage: Museums and Historic Sites as Present-Day Storytellers Jenny Kidd 30 Transmedia Fandom and Participation: The Nuances and Contours of Fannish Participation Paul Booth 7

31 Transmedia Paratexts: Informational, Commercial, Diegetic, and Auratic Circulation Matt Hills 32 Transmedia Politics: Star Wars and the Ideological Battlegrounds of Popular Franchises Dan Hassler-Forest 33 Transmedia Charity: Constructing the Ethos of the BBC’s Red Nose Day Across Media Matthew Freeman 34 Transmedia Education: Changing the Learning Landscape Lorena Peret Teixeira Tárcia 35 Transmedia Literacy: Rethinking Media Literacy in the New Media Ecology Carlos A. Scolari 36 Transmedia for Social Change: Evolving Approaches to Activism and Representation Donna Hancox 37 Transmedia Identities: From Fan Cultures to Liquid Lives André Jansson and Karin Fast 38 Transmedia Psychology: Creating Compelling and Immersive Experiences Pamela Rutledge 39 Transmedia Religion: From Representations to Propaganda Strategy Marie-Eve Carignan PART V Methodologies of Transmediality 40 A Narratological Approach to Transmedial Storyworlds and Transmedial Universes Jan-Noël Thon 41 An Ontological Approach to Transmedia Worlds Frank Branch and Rebekah Phillips 42 An Experience Approach to Transmedia Fictions Susana Tosca and Lisbeth Klastrup

43 A Design Approach to Transmedia Projects Renira Rampazzo Gambarato 44 A Management Approach to Transmedia Enterprises Ulrike Rohn and Indrek Ibrus 45 A Micro-Budget Approach to Transmedia in Small Nations Kyle Barrett 46 A Genettian Approach to Transmedia (Para)Textuality Raúl Rodríguez Ferrándiz 47 A Semiotic Approach to Transmedia Storytelling Geane Carvalho Alzamora 48 A Mythological Approach to Transmedia Storytelling Nicoleta Popa Blanariu and Dan Popa 49 A Qualitative Network Approach to Transmedia Communication Matthias Berg and Andreas Hepp 50 A Metrics Model for Measuring Transmedia Engagement Eefje Op den Buysch and Hille van der Kaa Afterword: The Present and Future of Transmedia Practices—A Conversation Alison Norrington, Kate Pullinger, Nataly Rios Gioco, and Kate Fitzpatrick Index

Figures 2.1 The webpage displaying the growing tree, with options to participate by signing the petition 2.2 Screenshots of the Dive Moken iPhone application 2.3 The starting pages for the two web stories about the Moken people published on the project’s home page 19.1 “Migrant Mother,” 1936, by Dorothea Lange 19.2 Freytag’s pyramid 19.3 Young football players compete for the catch at a high school football game in the United States 19.4 A tuba player tunes backstage as a violinist passes before a performance with Dutch conductor and violinist Andre Rieu 19.5 Local women push their weight into a pump to collect water in their northern Burkina Faso village 38.1 Flow theory combined with Triune Brain theory provides a useful heuristic to evaluate user experience as an ebb and flow of challenge and emotion that sustains engagement 38.2 Transmedia experiences require effort on the part of the audience to follow the story. Therefore, exit points undermine the commitment to continue and can result in complete loss of audience engagement 41.1 Ontological approach to transmedia works 41.2 Ontology of spousal relationships 41.3 Ontology of narrative change 42.1 A model of transmedial experience 49.1 Berit Haller’s network maps for reciprocal media communication (a) and produced media communication (b) 49.2 Visualization of Berit Haller’s media diary 50.1 The new transmedia metrics model: users interact with the storyworld over a period

Tables 1.1 Theorists have tended to delineate between two types of film-based transmedia 1.2 Transmedia film timeline: mapping the two trajectories of transmedia and their points of convergence 2.1 A comparison of the two approaches to designing non-fiction transmedia in Project Moken 7.1a Transmedia game genealogy 7.1b Transmedia game to transmedia play continuum 7.2 Roger Caillois’ typology of games and play 7.3 From adaptation to experimentation: a table illustrating the characteristics across the transmedia games to transmedia play trajectory 9.1 Concise description of the analytical and operational model regarding transmedia news coverage of planned events 14.1 Transmedia extensions within the Battlestar Galactica universe 16.1 Taxonomy of transfictional characters and worlds 35.1 Literacy, media literacy, and transmedia literacy 38.1 The Triune Brain theory highlights the three pathways of experience processing: lower level processing such as instinct and emotion and higher level, conscious processing that creates directed attention and meaning. Narrative is uniquely able to bridge all three, facilitating immersion and persuasion 43.1 Concise description of the transmedia project design analytical model 50.1 Schematic view of a scene, beat, trigger, and action 50.2 Schematic view of database entry for user Robin

Contributors Geane Carvalho Alzamora is Professor in the Social Communication Department at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. She is researcher of CNPq, Brazil (CNPq Productivity Scholarship, process: 311914/2016) and researcher of Fapemig, Brazil (Process: PPM-00263-15). Her postdoctorate is from Pompeu Fabra University, Spain. She holds a Ph.D. in communication and semiotics from Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil; a MA in communication and semiotics also from Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and a BA in journalism from Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Sarah Atkinson is Head of Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London and co-editor of Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. Sarah has published two books, an edited volume, and numerous articles on the impacts of digital and networked technologies on film and cinema audiences and film production practices. Kyle Barrett is a lecturer at the University of Waikato. His research focuses on microbudget filmmaking and creative practice in various forms. His Ph.D. thesis explored the Scottish film industry in a “post-film” context. He teaches various papers including World Cinema, Studio Production, Film Production, Contemporary Television, and Writing the Web Series. He has been published in Twin Peaks: Essays on the Original Series, Directory of World Cinema: Scotland, AMES Media Journal, European Journal of Communication, and MeCCSA Journal. He is currently involved in various documentary projects in both Scotland and New Zealand. Matthias Berg is a postdoctoral research associate at the ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research, University of Bremen, Germany. He graduated in 2006 from the University of Bremen with an MA in cultural analysis, economy and musicology. Matthias Berg holds a doctoral degree in media and communication studies from the University of Bremen. His doctoral thesis on “Communicative Mobility: Mediated Networking and Work-related Mobility” was awarded the 2016 dissertation prize of the German Communication Association’s Media Sociology Section and of Springer VS. From 2010 until 2015 he has been a research associate in the German Research Foundation’s Priority Program 1505 “Mediatized Worlds” working on “The Communicative Construction of Communitization” together with Andreas Hepp and Cindy Roitsch. Currently, Matthias Berg is pursuing a postdoctoral research project on the mediatization and digitalization of rural areas in Germany. His research interests include communication and media studies, with a focus on the interrelations of communication and mobility, 12

mediatization research and interpersonal communication, as well as media and community-building and media generations. Paolo Bertetti has a Ph.D. in semiotics and psychology of symbolic communication. He teaches “sociology of communication” at the University of Siena, where he is also responsible for the organization of teaching of the master’s degree in business communication. Former secretary and then vice-president of the AISS, the Italian Association of Semiotic Studies, he is on the board of directors of FELS (Federacion Latinoamericana de semiotica). His research interests concern narratology, transmedia storytelling, semiotic theory, semiotics of film, and semiotics of text. He is also interested in the genres and imagery of contemporary popular culture. His books include: ll mito Conan. Identità e metamorfosi di un personaggio seriale tra letteratura, fumetto, cinema e televisione (2011), Il discorso audiovisivo. Teorie e strumenti semiotici (2012; spanish translation: El relato audiovisual. Teorias y hierramentas semioticas, 2015), Lo schermo dell’apparire. La teoria della figuratività nella semiotica generativa (2013). His latest book, Transmedia Archaeology (2014; with C. Scolari and M. Freeman), was published in England by Palgrave Macmillan. Nicoleta Popa Blanariu teaches comparative literature at the Vasile Alecsandri University, in Romania. Her research interests include comparative literature, intercultural studies, intermediality, semiotics, and performance studies. She has published articles in Romanian, French, and English, and books, book chapters, and translations. Paul Booth is Associate Professor at DePaul University. He is the author of Crossing Fandoms (Palgrave 2016), Digital Fandom 2.0 (Peter Lang 2016), Playing Fans (University of Iowa 2015), Game Play (Bloomsbury 2015), Time on TV (Peter Lang 2012), and Digital Fandom (Peter Lang 2010). He has edited Wiley Companion to Fandom (Blackwell 2018), Seeing Fans (Bloomsbury 2016, with Lucy Bennett), Controversies in Digital Ethics (Bloomsbury 2016, with Amber Davisson), and Fan Phenomena: Doctor Who (Intellect 2013). He has published numerous articles on fans, social media, and technology. His research interests include fandom, new technologies and media, popular culture, and cult media. He is currently enjoying a cup of coffee. Mélanie Bourdaa is Associate Professor at the University of Bordeaux Montaigne in communication and information sciences. She analyzes the new television environment and the cultural convergence. She studies particularly American TV series, the phenomenon of fandom in the digital age, and production’s strategies (i.e., transmedia storytelling). She also teaches courses on audience and programming, television and cultures, and transmedia storytelling. Mélanie also ran a MOOC entitled “Understanding Transmedia Storytelling” in France. She coordinated with Benjamin Derhy Kurtz a book entitled The Rise of Transtexts: Challenges and Opportunities (Routledge, 2016). She is the co-manager of 13

the Design and Media Lab (Université Bordeaux Montaigne – IDEX). She is the head of the research program MediaNum (Valorisation of Cultural Heritage via Transmedia Storytelling). Frank Branch is a principal level Information Scientist and Ontologist. In this capacity, he leads all information design and ontology efforts for multibillion dollar commercial information platforms. He has a master’s in library and information science from the University of Washington specializing in knowledge representation, ontology, and data curation in non-traditional domains. In addition, he has published articles on ontology in domain information design and has patents related to the use of ontology for complex curation tasks. With over 20 years of experience designing enterprise scale content and information management solutions for Fortune 500 companies he has used ontological methods, principles, and practices to develop information ecosystems for a diverse set of domains including finance, advertising, online gaming, popular culture, modern media, and education. Paola Brembilla is an adjunct professor in television studies at the Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy. In 2016, she earned her Ph.D. in television studies at the Università di Bologna, with a thesis on the competitive strategies and formal evolutions of American TV series. In 2017, she was a research fellow at the same university, collaborating with the Imperial Fashion Group on a corporate storytelling project. She has extensively studied the economics and logics of entertainment and television industries in the United States: in 2010–2011, she was an exchange student at University of California, Berkeley. In 2014, she was a visiting scholar at University of Wisconsin–Madison. She was a speaker at many international conferences, and a keynote speaker at the 2017 The Art of TV Series conference (Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona). She has authored several publications and a book, Game of Strategy (with Prof. Edoardo Mollona, Giappichelli 2015). Her forthcoming co-edited collection (with Prof. Ilaria A. De Pascalis), Narrative Ecosystems: Reading Contemporary Serial Television Universes, is going to be published by Routledge in 2018. Axel Bruns is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He is the author of Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (2018), Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (2008), and Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (2005), and a co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics (2016), Twitter and Society (2014), A Companion to New Media Dynamics (2012), and Uses of Blogs (2006). His current work focusses on the study of user participation in social media spaces such as Twitter, and its implications for our understanding of the contemporary public sphere, drawing especially on innovative new methods for analyzing “big social data.” His research blog is at http://snurb.info/, and he tweets at @snurb_dot_info. See http://mappingonlinepublics.net/ for more 14

details on his research into social media. Eefje Op den Buysch is the founder of the Transmedia Storytelling Lab at the Fontys Academy for Creative Industries, in Tilburg, Netherlands. At the lab, students learn to design and execute a complete transmedia storytelling project in a six-month minor program. Eefje obtained her master’s degree of science (cum laude) in informatics– human centered multimedia, on the subject of using future scenarios and narratives for the design of a simulated future newsroom. With her knowledge and experience in digital media and information technologies, she led several (research) projects on transmedia, robotics, and online communication. In 2018, Eefje is managing director of Robot Love, an art and technology manifestation that asks if we can learn from robots about love. Marie-Eve Carignan, Ph.D., is a professor of information and public communication at the Université de Sherbrooke. She is co-director of communication, applied communications, and international strategic communications graduate programs. She holds a doctorate in information sciences and communication from the Institut d’études politiques d’Aix-en-Provence and a doctorate in communication from the joint Ph.D. program of the Université de Montréal, the Université du Québec à Montreal, and Concordia University. Prior to that, she worked for more than ten years on many projects in public relations, corporate communication, and management. She focuses her research on cultural industries, media content analysis, journalistic practices and ethics as well as on strategic communication, including public relations, crisis communication, risk, terrorism, and counterterrorism. She is also a researcher at the CHERPA of Sciences Po Aix-en-Provence, an associate member of the Research Laboratory on Audiences of Culture, and a member of the International Network on the Professionalization of the Communicator, which brings together professional researchers and university scholars from France, Belgium, Morocco, the United States, and Canada. Christy Dena wrote a Ph.D. on transmedia practice, wrote the definition of “transmedial fictions” for the The Johns Hopkins Encyclopedia of Digital Textuality, and has been published in journals such as Convergence and ToDiGRA. Dena is a senior lecturer, and has been the Department Coordinator of Games, and National Chair of Games at SAE Creative Media Institute. As a creative professional, Dena has attracted digital writing awards for her original projects, and is a member of the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (Emmys); and an Editorial Board Member of Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Press (ETC). Elizabeth Evans is Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her research examines the social, industrial, and technological factors that shape and are shaped by our experiences of increasingly transmedia screen narratives. Her work covers multiple aspects of television studies, audience studies, media studies, games studies, and transmedia studies, and often 15

involves working with practitioners or audiences on their experiences creating and experiencing screen narratives. She is the author of Transmedia Television: Audiences, New Media and Daily Life (Routledge 2011), the first exploration of how audiences were responding to the transmedia expansion of television. She has published numerous book chapters and articles in journals including Convergence, Critical Studies in Television, The International Journal of Communication Studies, Participations, and Pervasive Ubiquitous Computing. She is currently working on a second monograph, Understanding Transmedia Engagement (forthcoming, Routledge) which explores how practitioners and audiences define, value, and manage “engagement” with screen content. Karin Fast is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies and one of the Geomedia Research Group coordinators, at Karlstad University, Sweden. Her research interests span topics such as (geo-)mediatization, media work, transmediality, and cultural industries (with a particular focus on the music sector). She is editor of Geomedia Studies: Spaces and Mobilities in Mediatized Worlds (Routledge 2018; with A. Jansson, J. Lindell, L. R. Bengtsson, and M. Tesfahuney) and has published her work in journals such as Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, International Journal of Cultural Studies, European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Media Culture and Society. Her Ph.D. dissertation, More Than Meets the Eye: Transmedial Entertainment as a Site of Pleasure, Resistance and Exploitation (2012), dug beneath the surface of one today’s most popular media franchises, Hasbro’s Transformers, to explore industry/fans power-relations. Kate Fitzpatrick is Senior Strategist at e3 Media. She is an experienced digital marketing professional with experience on both agency and client side. With a purely digital background that began in online PR and moved through to client side marketing, her main passion is for strategy and driving through creative ideas with clear and measurable results. Kate has worked across entertainment, youth, publishing, and financial services (both D2C and B2B) and has a strong drive to understand new technologies and their role in multi-platform communication. Matthew Freeman is Reader in Multiplatform Media at Bath Spa University, UK. He is Co-Director of Bath Spa’s The Centre for Media Research and acts as REF Champion for the University’s Communication, Culture and Media submission to REF. His research examines cultures of production across the borders of media, industries, cultures, and histories, and he is the author of Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds, Industrial Approaches to Media: A Methodological Gateway to Industry Studies, the co-author of Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (with Carlos A. Scolari and Paolo Bertetti), and the co-editor of Global Convergence Cultures: Transmedia Earth. Renira Rampazzo Gambarato is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication 16

Studies at Jönköping University, School of Education and Communication, Sweden. She is co-editor of the books Exploring Transmedia Journalism in the Digital Age (together with Geane Alzamora) and of Kulturdialoge Brasilien-Deutschland: Design, Film, Literatur, Medien [Cultural Dialogue Brazil-Germany: Design, Film, Literature, Media] (together with Geane Alzamora and Simone Malaguti). Her current research revolves around transmedia storytelling analysis and complexity of transmedia experiences. More broadly, her research interests include Peircean semiotics, digital culture, international and intercultural media studies, media education, film analysis, and the design and analysis of multiplatform experiences. Max Giovagnoli is the premier transmedia storyteller and producer in Italy. He leads the School of Visual Arts at Istituto Europeo di Design in Rome and he is author of several television series and novels. As a story architect and transmedia architect, he has worked with Disney, Warner Bros., Universal, M2Pictures, and Lucky Red. He has a Ph.D. in narration and imagery, and his essays on transmedia worlds have been published in Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom. He has also given presentations for TEDxTransmedia, Romics and Cartoons on the Bay, and he is considered one of the most important European fan culture experts and authors. See www.maxgiovagnoli.com. Šárka Gmiterková is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Film and Audio Visual Culture, Masaryk University Brno, Czech Republic, where she finishes her thesis on prewar versus postwar Czech film stardom. She regularly presents her research outcomes in Czech Film Studies journal Iluminace, where she also served as guest editor on the topics of local stardom and film acting. Her work was published internationally in Journal of Celebrity Studies, NECSUS, and in the edited volume Popular Cinemas in Central Europe: Film Cultures and Histories. Nataly Rios Goico is a creative consultant at Conducttr. She is an experienced interactive storyteller with a degree in systems engineering and an MA in digital media. She recently led the TSL work on Hacked, the interactive experience on cyber warfare for Al Jazeera. She is a classically trained ballerina and an award-winning photographer. Jeff Gomez, CEO of Starlight Runner, is a leading expert in the fields of brand narrative, storyworld development, creative franchise design, and transmedia storytelling. He specializes in the expansion of entertainment properties, premium brands, and socio-political themes into highly successful multi-platform communications and international campaigns. As a producer accredited by the Producers Guild of America, Jeff also develops the storyworlds of films, TV shows, video games, toys, books, comics, apps, virtual reality projects, and theme park attractions. This deepens engagement and accelerates the development of participative communities, resulting in mass audience approval, brand loyalty, and increased revenues. Jeff’s pop culture work has impacted such blockbuster properties as 17

Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean, James Cameron’s Avatar, Hasbro’s Transformers, Sony Pictures’ Spider-Man and Men in Black, Microsoft’s Halo, and Nickelodeon’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Jeff has also developed highly successful transmedia campaigns and participative brand narratives for Coca-Cola (Happiness Factory), Pepperidge Farm (Goldfish), and Spartan Race. Other current clients include Electronic Arts, Sesame Workshop, Disney Parks & Resorts, and World Vision Canada. Jeff’s proprietary transmedia methods have also been applied to educational and geo-political causes, accelerating positive self-organized social movements and increasing resistance to crime, violence, and corruption. Through applications of his Collective Journey and transmedia population activation models, Jeff has helped optimize communications for large NGOs, and address crises in Mexico, Colombia, Australia, and the Middle East North Africa region. Donna Hancox is a senior lecturer in the School of Creative Practice at Queensland University of Technology. In 2017 she was awarded a Smithsonian Research Fellowship and her research is focused on the role of storytelling in social change and the potential for digital technology to amplify marginalized voices. Stephen Harrington is an associate professor and head of journalism and professional communication at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. He is the coauthor of Politics, Media and Democracy in Australia: Public and Producer Perceptions of the Political Public Sphere (Routledge 2017), sole author of Australian TV News: New Forms, Functions, and Futures (Intellect 2013), and editor of Entertainment Values (Palgrave 2017). Colin B. Harvey is a writer and narrative designer working across multiple media and specializing in digital storytelling, transmedia narrative, world-building, and shared storyworlds. He has previously worked for Sony and for Rebellion Developments on their Sniper Elite franchise, as well as helping develop British company To Play For’s new storytelling platform. As a freelance journalist he has written for the Guardian, Edge, Develop, RetroGamer, and PopMatters, amongst other publications. Aside from games, Harvey’s original short fiction won the first Pulp Idol award, jointly conferred by SFX Magazine and Gollancz Books in 2006. He has written licensed tie-in fiction for franchises such as Doctor Who, Highlander, and Judge Dredd, and comic material for 2000AD and Commando. He also contributed the novella “Dead Kelly” to the collection Journal of the Plague Year, published in 2014 by Abaddon Books. Harvey is the author of the academic book Fantastic Transmedia (Palgrave 2015), an exploration of cross-media storytelling in science fiction and fantasy franchises such as Star Wars, Marvel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Halo, as well as smaller independent projects. He has written and presented extensively on game narrative and transmedia storytelling in a variety of international contexts. His Ph.D., exploring the interrelationship of storytelling and play in video game media using ideas of affect and 18

memory, was conferred in 2009. He is a visiting professor with the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London and a visiting professor with the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. Dan Hassler-Forest works as Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Utrecht University. He has published books and articles on superhero movies, comics, transmedia storytelling, adaptation studies, critical theory, and zombies. His most recent book is Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling. Andreas Hepp is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research, University of Bremen, Germany. His main research areas are media and communication theory, media sociology, mediatization research, datafication of social practices, transnational and transcultural communication, and cross-media research. He is author of numerous books and journal articles. His latest book publications are The Mediated Construction of Reality (Polity Press 2016, with Nick Couldry) and Communicative Figurations (Palgrave 2017, edited with Andreas Breiter and Uwe Hasebrink). Andreas Hepp is involved in the research network “Communicative Figurations” and was co-applicant and PI of the DFG Priority Research Program 1505 “Mediatized Worlds” (2012–2016) and member of the DFG funded Collaborative Research Centre 597 “Transformations of the State,” which ended in 2014. Matt Hills is Professor of Media and Film at the University of Huddersfield, where he is also Co-Director of the Centre for Participatory Culture. Matt is additionally coeditor on the “Transmedia” book series for Amsterdam University Press, and has written six sole-authored monographs, starting with Fan Cultures in 2002 (Routledge) and coming up to date with Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event—Marketing, Merchandising and Mediatizing a Brand Anniversary in 2015 (Palgrave Pivot). He also edited New Dimensions of Doctor Who (I. B. Tauris 2013), and has published more than a hundred book chapters or journal articles on topics such as media fandom and cult film/television. This includes work on transmedia for the open access journal Participations and the 2017 Routledge edited collection, The Rise of Transtexts: Challenges and Opportunities. Amongst other projects, Matt is currently working on a follow-up to his first book for Routledge, entitled Fan Studies. Alastair Horne is a doctoral research student based at Bath Spa University and the British Library, exploring how mobile devices are changing the relationship between author, text, and reader. This research comprises three complementary strands: analysis of mobile fictions written for smartphones and tablets; exploration of author– reader relationships expressed through social media; and the creation of a short mobile audio fiction to be experienced while walking through Brompton Cemetery. He brings to his research considerable experience within the publishing industry, having spent more than a decade working in a variety of roles for Cambridge University Press, on company-wide innovation, audience development through social media, and digital 19

projects in primary education. His published articles include “The Future of Publishing: A Report on Innovation and the Future of the Book” (Media Futures 2011), “The Future’s Live, the Future’s Digital” (Logos 2012), and “Publishing: The Last (and Next?) Five Years” (The Indexer 2017); he has also written on publishing for FutureBook, the London Book Fair, and Publishing Perspectives. Alastair has been a fan of Doctor Who since 1980 and is currently midway through a chronological rewatch of the entire series. Indrek Ibrus is Professor of Media Innovation at Tallinn University (TLU). He is also the head of TLU Center of Excellence in Media Innovation and Digital Culture (MEDIT). His main research areas include media innovation, cross- and transmediality, media production, and policy studies. His main current research projects look at the evolution of audiovisual content metadata standards and the convergence between the audiovisual sector and other sectors such as health care, tourism, and education. He is the editor (together with Carlos A. Scolari) of Crossmedia Innovations: Texts, Markets, Institutions (Peter Lang 2012). Prof. Ibrus received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science and MPhil from the University of Oslo. André Jansson is Professor of Media and Communication Studies and Director of the Geomedia Research Group at Karlstad University, Sweden. His research is oriented toward questions of media use, identity, and power from an interdisciplinary perspective. A main research theme is the relationship between mediatization processes and the production of social space. Jansson’s most recent books include Mediatization and Mobile Lives: A Critical Approach (Routledge 2018), Communications/Media/Geographies (Routledge 2017, with P. C. Adams, J. Cupples, K. Glynn, and S. Moores) and Cosmopolitanism and the Media: Cartographies of Change (Palgrave Macmillan 2015, with M. Christensen). He is also the co-editor of Geomedia Studies: Spaces and Mobilities in Mediatized Worlds (Routledge 2018, with K. Fast, J. Lindell, L. R. Bengtsson, and M. Tesfahuney) and several other books. His work has been published in journals such as Communication Theory, European Journal of Communication, European Journal of Cultural Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of Consumer Culture, New Media & Society, Tourist Studies, and Urban Studies. Jansson obtained his Ph.D. in 2001 at Gothenburg University, Sweden. Henry Jenkins is Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He joined USC from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was Peter de Florez Professor in the Humanities and founder and co-director of the Comparative Media Studies Master’s Program. Best known for Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Jenkins’ most recent books include Participatory Culture in a Networked Society (with danah boyd and Mimi Ito) and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism 20

(with Sangita Shresthova, Liana Gamber-Thompson, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, and Arley Zimmerman). He blogs twice a week at henryjenkins.org. Hille van der Kaa is the editor-in-chief of BN DeStem. Previously, she worked as a professor and research leader for Fontys Hogeschool and Tilburg University. Her research interests are transmedia storytelling, data journalism, robot journalism, and the influence of technology and journalism. She took the lead in an NWO-funded research on building an automated newsroom in the Netherlands. In addition, Van der Kaa worked as a journalist, marketing manager, and transmedia scriptwriter. Joakim Karlsen is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Computer Sciences, Østfold University College where he teaches media production, communication design, and interaction design. He researches emerging media production practices for online- and mobile media platforms, and has recently conducted studies on computational journalism in newsrooms, independent transmedia documentary production, and hackathons organized for media workers to learn more about digital making. From 1994 to 2000 he worked with documentary film and video production as director and editor, and several of the films he has worked on has been screened on national television in Norway. Helen W. Kennedy is Head of the School of Media at the University of Brighton, UK. Her current research interests are feminist interventions into games culture, experience design, and cultural evaluation. She has published widely in game studies and is Principle Investigator in two significant projects—one an international project aimed at the transformation of games (REFIG.ca) and the other a project that puts new immersive technologies in the hands of circus and street artists (https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/xrcircus/). Over the past three years she has been researching experiential cinema, street games, and other innovative and immersive forms as an aspect of the wider ludification of contemporary culture. Anna Kérchy is an associate professor at the English Department of the University of Szeged, Hungary. She holds a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Szeged and a DEA in semiology from Université Paris VII, as well as a Habilitation degree in literature and culture from the University of Debrecen. Her research interests include intermedial cultural representations, the post-semiotics of the embodied subject, interfacings of Victorian and postmodern fantastic imagination, gender studies, women’s art, fairy tales, and children’s/YA literature. She has authored two monographs: Alice in Transmedia Wonderland. Curiouser and Curiouser New Forms of a Children’s Classic (McFarland 2016) and Body-Texts in the Novels of Angela Carter: Writing from a Corporeagraphic Point of View (Mellen 2008). She (co-)edited five essay collections on postmodern reinterpretations of fairy tales, the literary fantastic, the iconology of law and order, the cultural history of Continental European freak shows, posthumanism in fantastic fiction, as well as an EJES special journal issue on feminist interventions into intermedial studies, a Bookbird special journal 21

issue on translating and transmediating children’s literatures and cultures, and an Americana special issue on Interspecies Encounters in Postmillenial Filmic Fantasies. Jenny Kidd is Senior Lecturer in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University. Jenny researches and teaches across the fields of digital media, heritage studies, and the creative economy, and is author of Museums in the New Mediascape: Transmedia, Participation, Ethics (Routledge 2014) and Representation (Routledge 2015). She has published on related themes in (for example) the International Journal of Heritage Studies, Museum and Society, The Journal of Curatorial Studies, and the Museums Journal. Lisbeth Klastrup is an associate professor with the Culture and Communication Research Group at the IT University of Copenhagen. She wrote her Ph.D. thesis on virtual worlds and storytelling (2003). Her research currently centers on the popular and professional uses of social media; mundane memes and transmedial communication. She is co-editor of the International Handbook of Internet Research (with Hunsinger and Allen, Springer 2010). Her most recent book is Sociale Netværksmedier [Social Network Media] (Samfundslitteratur 2016), already widely popular among Danish university students. Kevin Moloney is a transmedia scholar who consults with public and private news organizations on transmedia story design, and has taught transmedia storytelling since 2012. He holds a Ph.D. in technology, media, and society from the interdisciplinary Atlas Institute at the University of Colorado. For 20 years he was a regular contributor to the New York Times covering the Rocky Mountain region. His images appeared on the Times front page 50 times, and on section fronts hundreds more. He has photographed more than 960 stories for the US newspaper of record. Moloney’s work has also appeared in U.S. News & World Report, Fortune, Life, Time, Stern, The Chicago Tribune, The Independent, USA Today, Elle, Marie Claire, Business Week, the Christian Science Monitor, and National Geographic publications. He was one of two journalists selected as inaugural recipients of the Ford Environmental Journalism Fellowship. For 21 years Moloney was a lecturer of photojournalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. In 2008 his students secured for him the Robin F. Garland Education award, given by the National Press Photographers Association in honor of achievement in photojournalism education. His students are winners of World Press, POYi, Best of Photojournalism, Hearst, and CPOY competitions. They have been listed on PDN magazine’s 30 Emerging Photographers lists, and winners of Alicia Patterson, Getty, Inge Morath, and Aftermath Project grants. Moloney also has extensive international journalism training experience having taught photojournalism workshops in Argentina, Chile, the Falkland Islands, Myanmar, and Venezuela. Erica Negri graduated in foreign languages in 2006 and was subsequently awarded with a master’s degree in film production and screenwriting at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy. After working for TV-series production company Lux 22

Vide, in 2008 she joined Cattleya, a leading Italian company in film and TV production as a development coordinator and script editor. In 2012 Erica joined beActive, a film, TV, and transmedia production company, experienced in developing entertainment content across multiple platforms, as development officer. Starting from January 2013 Erica has worked as a freelance story editor, transmedia strategist, and academic lecturer both in Italy and Spain. In 2014 Erica earned her PhD in transmedia storytelling, and her research was published as a book entitled La Rivoluzione Transmediale (ed. Lindau) in 2015. After two years spent as a TV program producer at The Walt Disney Company Italia, in 2016 Erica was hired by SKY Italia, where she currently works as a delegate producer overseeing local and international productions, from script to delivery. Hanna Nolasco is a Brazilian master’s student in media and contemporary culture at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) and holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the same institution (2013). She participated in an academic exchange program with Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, in Paris (France), between 2011 and 2012. She is a member of the research groups Laboratory of Analysis in Telefiction (A-Tevê) and Laboratory of Film Analysis (LAF). Her field of interest is the relationship between music and television, more specifically dealing with music programs and music in telenovelas in Brazil, mainly analyzing Globo Network’s products, for it is the biggest TV broadcaster in the country. She has developed previous studies on Globo’s music programs comprising the period since its creation, in 1965, until 2013. Her current research deals with the role of music in the narrative construction of the telenovela Cheias de Charme [Sparkling Girls]. Alison Norrington is Founder and Creative Director of StoryCentral Ltd., also working across areas such as Brand and Creative Director, Strategist, Talent and Content Development Lead, Creative Franchise Design and Story Architect, Writer, Digital Producer, and Media Lecturer. She works with brands, storytellers, filmmakers, and theme parks, and her clients include Walt Disney Imagineering R&D, FOX International, YouTube, Sundance TV, CBS Interactive, McCann, and Coca Cola. Roberta Pearson is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Nottingham. Among her most recent publications are the co-authored Star Trek and American Television (University of California Press 2014), and the co-edited Many More Lives of the Batman (BFI 2015) and Storytelling in the Media Convergence Age: Exploring Screen Narratives (Palgrave Macmillan 2015). The co-edited collection Contemporary Transatlantic Television Drama is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2018. She is, in total, the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of 14 books, and author or co-author of over 80 journal articles and book chapters; among the last are several articles/chapters on the Sherlock Holmes character. Rebekah Phillips is an information specialist/ISO coordinator, who spends her days managing the information needs of her peers at an international high-tech design and 23

engineering company. Her current position also requires that she manage information for associated Fortune 500 companies. She is passionate about creating information environments that are intuitive and adaptable. Her BS in psychology from Southern Oregon University and MA in library and information science from the University of Washington assist in this ongoing pursuit. By integrating human behavioral tendencies with information management techniques, Rebekah endeavors to make life easier for those seeking information. Her previous work managing the information database of a local retail organization helped hone these skills before moving to the field of technology. Though her career in information management is still young, Rebekah has dedicated herself to research on myriad topics for the last decade. Rebekah has also been published in an academic journal for her work in creating a unique ontological structure. Dan Popa teaches formal languages and automata at the Vasile Alecsandri University, in Romania. His research interests include formal linguistics, interpretation, translators, and compilers. He has a Ph.D. in adaptable modular language construction and is interested in the syntax and semantics of foreign languages. He has built a didactic computer language, which uses national keywords and, as a former game programmer, is interested in storytelling, video games, and multimedia servers. Robert Pratten is CEO and founder of Transmedia Storyteller Ltd, creator of Conducttr—the immersive experience platform. His ambition is to make everyone’s life an adventure. Robert is a thought-leader in transmedia storytelling and author of the book Getting Started in Transmedia Storytelling: A Practical Guide for Beginners. His clients include Kodansha, VISA, British Foreign & Commonwealth Office, UK Ministry of Defence, Al Jazeera, and Canal+. He can be found online as @robpratten. William Proctor is Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture and Communication at Bournemouth University. He has published on various topics including Batman, James Bond, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, and One Direction. At present, William is completing work on his debut single-authored monograph, Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. He is co-editor of Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion and Reception (University of Iowa Press, forthcoming) and The Scandinavian Invasion: Critical Studies in Nordic Noir and Beyond (Peter Lang, forthcoming), both with Richard McCulloch. William is also Director of the World Star Wars Project. Kate Pullinger is a novelist and digital writer. Her most recent work is a ghost story for smartphones that is personalized for every reader. Breathe was commissioned as part of the Ambient Literature research project, in collaboration with Visual Editions and Google Creative Lab Sydney. Her novel for smartphones, Jellybone, was published in 2017. Her novel, The Mistress of Nothing, won Canada’s 2009 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. In 2014, she adapted her collaborative work of digital multimedia, Flight Paths: A Networked Novel (2007), co-created with Chris 24

Joseph, as the novel Landing Gear, which was longlisted for Canada Reads. Also in 2014, she created the digital war memorial, Letter to an Unknown Soldier, with Neil Bartlett; 22,000 members of the public wrote letters to the soldier. Her project Inanimate Alice has also won numerous prizes; 2016 saw the launch of Inanimate Alice: Episode Six—The Last Gas Station as well as a teachers’ edition of the first five episodes, and 2018 will see the launch of a virtual reality episode, Perpetual Nomads. Kate Pullinger is Director of the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries at Bath Spa University where her primary research interest is in practice-based research on the intersection of fiction and technology, and hybrid collaborative digital forms. Raúl Rodríguez Ferrándiz is Full Professor of Semiotics of Mass Communication and Transmedia Production at the University of Alicante, Spain. He has been academic coordinator of the Master of Communication and Creative Industries at the same university. He has published the books Masks of Lying (XXXV International Essay Prize Ciudad de Valencia, 2017; Valencia, Pre-Textos, 2018); The Venal Muse: Production and Consumption of Industrial Culture (International Essay Prize “Miguel Espinosa”, Murcia, Tres Fronteras, 2010) and Apocalypse Show. Intellectuals, TV and End of the Millennium (Madrid, Biblioteca Nueva, 2001). He has coordinated the volume The Controversy on Mass Culture in the Inter-War Period: A Critical Anthology (University of Valencia, 2012) and two monographs dedicated to transmedia storytelling in Cuadernos de Información y Comunicación (2014, with Cristina Peñamarín) and Mediterranean Journal of Communication (2017, with Vanesa Saiz). He has published papers in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Semiotica, International Journal of Communication, and Revista de Occidente. Ulrike Rohn is visiting professor and senior researcher at Tallinn University’s Baltic, Film, Media, Arts and Communication School (BFM) and its Centre of Excellence in Media Innovation and Digital Culture (MEDIT). Dr Rohn is the president of the European Media Management Association (emma), and she is associate editor of the Journal of Media Business Studies. Her research interests include media policy, media branding, media business models, the sharing economy, international media strategies, and the relationship between media and culture. Latter research interests have led to her book publication Cultural Barriers to the Success of Foreign Media Content: Western Media in China, India, and Japan, published by Peter Lang in 2010. In her main current research project, Ulrike studies European audiovisual policy measurements from a small market’s point of view. Ulrike Rohn received her Ph.D. from Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena in Germany. Inara Rosas is a Brazilian Ph.D. candidate in media and contemporary culture at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). Her current research is about the field of screenplay in Brazilian audiovisual productions, especially concerning the trajectory of João Emanuel Carneiro, screenwriter of feature films, TV series and telenovelas. She holds a master’s degree from the institution (2014) with a thesis about narrative 25

strategies in Latin American movies regarding the historical period of dictatorship and that have children as protagonists, and a bachelor’s degree in journalism (2009) at Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB). She is a member of the research groups Laboratory of Analysis in Telefiction (A-Tevê), Laboratory of Film Analysis (LAF), and the research network Iberoamerican Observatory of Television Studies (OBITEL) Brazil/UFBA, researching Latin American cinema and television, concerning narrative, stylistic and reception analysis. Pamela Rutledge, Ph.D., MBA, is Director of the Media Psychology Research Center and a professor of media psychology at Fielding Graduate University, where she is lead faculty for the brand psychology and audience engagement doctoral concentration. Rutledge’s research interests include the persuasive impact of multiplatform storytelling on consumer intention and brand development, meaning construction across social technologies and the motivation driving audience engagement. Rutledge consults on a variety of media projects, bridging the gap between theory and practice by harnessing psychological science to inform creative strategy. Current projects include eliciting actionable communication patterns and narratives from social media data and providing psychological analysis to identify and integrate behavioral triggers in campaign and message strategies. Dr Rutledge speaks and consults internationally and has published both academic and popular work, most recently authoring the text Exploring Positive Psychology: The Science of Happiness and Well-Being. She has written on the social impact of mobile technology in Global Mobile, digital media use in the Handbook of Rehabilitation Psychology, and the implementation of proactive narratives in the social space for the US Department of Defense Anti-Terrorist Series. Rutledge is also a frequent expert source for the mass media on technology use, social impact and popular culture. Carlos A. Scolari has a Ph.D. in applied linguistics and communication languages (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy) and a degree in social communication (Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Argentina). He is Associate Professor at the Department of Communication of the University Pompeu Fabra – Barcelona. He has lectured about digital interfaces, media ecology, transmedia storytelling, and interactive communication in more than 25 European, Latin American, and Asian countries. Most important publications: Hacer Clic (2004), Hipermediaciones. Elementos para una teoría de la comunicación digital interactiva (2008), El fin de los medios masivos. El comienzo de un debate (with M. Carlón, 2009/2014), Crossmedia Innovations (with I. Ibrus, 2012), Narrativas Transmedia (2013), Transmedia Archaeology (with P. Bertetti and M. Freeman, 2014), Ecología de los medios (2015), and Las leyes de la interfaz (2018). He is the Principal Investigator of the Horizon 2020 “Transmedia Literacy” research project (2015–2018) and the Spanish research project “Transalfabetismos” (2015–2018). Peter von Stackelberg has worked professionally as a world-builder, transmedia 26

storyteller, journalist, photographer, 3D computer graphic artist, futurist, and professor. He teaches English, composition, new media storytelling, technology and innovation, project management, and systems thinking, and has worked at Alfred State College of Technology (State University of New York) and Keuka College, both in rural western New York state. Peter is the founder of Jericho Hill Publishing, a small publishing firm specializing in print-on-demand books, e-books, and interactive transmedia fiction and non-fiction. He has worked on a series of webinars about visual storytelling, visual creation of storyworlds, and character creation in partnership with Digital Art Live magazine. He has also served as a world-builder and transmedia storytelling consultant to projects like Trail of the Butterfly, an animated transmedia production developed by HIERROanimación, and Voltas, an animated science fiction project developed by Autobotika. In the 1980s, Peter’s work as an investigative journalist was awarded the Citation of Merit in Public Service Journalism by Canada’s Governor General. Lorena Peret Teixeira Tárcia is Professor in the Department of Social Communication at the University Center of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. She holds a Ph.D. in communication from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil; a MA in education from Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, and a BA in journalism also from Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Jan-Noël Thon is an assistant professor in media studies and digital media culture at the Department of Culture, Film and Media of the University of Nottingham, UK, and a principal investigator in the Collaborative Research Center 923 “Threatened Orders —Societies under Stress” at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Recent books include From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative (co-edited with Daniel Stein, De Gruyter, 2013/2015), Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology (co-edited with Marie-Laure Ryan, University of Nebraska Press, 2014), Game Studies: Aktuelle Ansätze der Computerspielforschung [Game Studies: Current Approaches to Video Game Research] (co-edited with Klaus Sachs-Hombach, von Halem, 2015), Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), Subjectivity across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives (co-edited with Maike Sarah Reinerth, Routledge, 2017), and Comicanalyse: Eine Einführung [Comics Analysis: An Introduction] (co-authored with Stephan Packard, Andreas Rauscher, Véronique Sina, Lukas Wilde, and Janina Wildfeuer, Metzler, forthcoming 2019). Susana Tosca is Associate Professor at the Department of Communication and Arts at Roskilde University, Denmark. Her Ph.D. dissertation, a poetics of hypertext literature, was awarded the summa cum laude distinction in 2001. She has worked for many years on electronic literature, the storytelling potential of computer games, transmediality, and complex reception processes, with a side interest in fan activity and the distributed aesthetic formats of the network era. Her last book is the third 27

edition of Understanding Videogames (Routledge 2016). Ethan Tussey (Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2012) is an assistant professor of film and media at Georgia State University. His book, The Procrastination Economy: The Big Business of Downtime (New York University Press 2018) details the economic and social value of mobile device use in the context of the workplace, the commute, the waiting room, and the living room. His work explores the relationship between the entertainment industry and the digitally empowered public. He has contributed book chapters on creative labor, online sports viewing, connected viewing, and crowdfunding to the anthologies Saturday Night Live and American TV (Indiana University Press 2013), Digital Media Sport: Technology and Power in the Network Society (Routledge 2013), Connected Viewing: Selling, Sharing, and Streaming Media in a Digital Era (Routledge 2013), and Crowdfunding the Future: Media Industries, Ethics, & Digital Society (Peter Lang, 2015) He is also the coordinating editor of In Media Res and the co-founder of the Atlanta Media Project. He teaches classes on television analysis, media industries, and digital media. Portia Vann is a Ph.D. candidate in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology. Her research focuses on digital marketing and communications in the sport industry, as organizations develop transmedia strategies to keep up with changes in the media environment. Specifically, as part of her Ph.D. project she examined how sport organizations create and implement social media strategy at large-scale events, working with digital marketing teams at professional sporting events in Australia. Mark J. P. Wolf is a professor in the Communication Department at Concordia University Wisconsin. His books include Abstracting Reality: Art, Communication, and Cognition in the Digital Age (2000), The Medium of the Video Game (2001), Virtual Morality: Morals, Ethics, and New Media (2003), The Video Game Theory Reader (2003), The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to PlayStation and Beyond (2007), The Video Game Theory Reader 2 (2008), Myst and Riven: The World of the D’ni (2011), Before the Crash: Early Video Game History (2012), the twovolume Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming (2012), Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (2012), The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies (2014), LEGO Studies: Examining the Building Blocks of a Transmedial Phenomenon (2014), Video Games Around the World (2015), the four-volume Video Games and Gaming Cultures (2016), Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology (2017), Video Games FAQ (2017), The World of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (2017), The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds (2017), and The Routledge Companion to Media Technology and Obsolescence (forthcoming 2018). He has been invited to speak in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Second Life; has had work published in a variety of journals and he is on several editorial boards as well. He lives in Wisconsin with his 28

wife Diane and his sons Michael, Christian, and Francis.

Foreword Henry Jenkins

As hard as it may be for younger readers to understand, we did not have action figures when I was growing up in the 1960s. Children had been playacting stories, creating their own costumes and props, for hundreds of years, probably longer. There had been movie tie-in products as long as there has been mass media. But the apparatus of the modern movie franchise was still taking shape and transmedia was not yet a concept that could be applied to what was happening. Action figures embody some of these shifts—a film franchise like Star Wars may release dozens, perhaps hundreds, of action figures over time, which not only represent core characters from the narrative but expand beyond the narrative to flesh out the fictional world (Gray 2010). The best contemporary action figures have costumes that often evoke particular scenes, they have props which suggest their relationship with other elements in the fictional worlds, they have capacities for action which tell us something about how they interact with the other characters (Jenkins 2017a). Action figures are authoring tools which encourage fans to dig deep into the mythology and then go beyond it. Contemporary action figures are bound up with the logic of the transmedia system. Rather than action figures, we had Soakies, a particular brand of bubble bath soap which licensed the likenesses of various media characters (from Hanna Barbera to Disney, from DC to Warner Brothers); we used the plastic containers as toys afterward to create our own stories. We lacked enough characters to flesh out any given fictional world so most of those stories involved crossovers. We had Colorforms—reusable vinyl stickers that could be stuck onto a fixed backdrop and used to stage character interactions. We had Viewmaster slides and board games and stuffed toys. And comic books deployed many of these same characters, but with little or no regard to the source material’s narrative continuity. So, yes, fictions moved across media but the focus was overwhelmingly on characters and rarely—if at all—about extending the narratives or expanding the worlds. We might say that the characters had amnesia since they did not seem to recall where they had been or what they had done before. There are cases, such as Carl Bark’s Duckberg comics, where these other media constructed worlds that were richer than could be found on screen but such examples were few and far between. For the most part, these spin-offs told fans little that they did not already know from the film or television series. Of course, serialization within television was still rare—Zorro comes to mind—with most shows following more episodic structures. And film franchises—Planet of the Apes being the exception— were also not yet common. As I grew older, I did find opportunities to consume works that extended the 30

plotlines, revisited dramatic turning points, developed the subjectivity of secondary characters, deepened our understanding of fictional worlds, imagined characters that crossed over from one fictional world to another, and even explore multiple and contradictory interpretations of established stories. All of these were functions performed by fan fiction (see my discussion of different ways to rewrite a television series in Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Jenkins 1992). Fans understood television programs as serials even when the rest of the world saw them as episodic and their stories often represented extensions that expanded the timeline, explored secondary characters, or explored the fictional world. When I started to encounter works that meet a more contemporary understanding of transmedia storytelling, I read them as professional fan fiction—a term that gets applied with derision by some cultural critics, but I saw it as a compliment, since it implied that the writers of these secondary texts had a much deeper engagement with the storyworld than we had seen before. By the time I became a parent in the early 1980s, more and more media properties —especially for children—were organized into franchises, many of which involved a play with intertextuality, a pattern which Justin Wyatt discussed in High Concept (1994) in terms of “the book, the look, and the hook,” Marsha Kinder wrote about in Playing with Power (1991) as transmedia, and Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio (1991) or Tony Bennett and Marsha Woollacott (1987) explored in terms of the trajectories of popular heroes. All of these are pieces that I taught my students, that shaped how I thought about the media my son consumed, that informed how I and many others read new developments in popular entertainment. By 1999, there was more and more discussion of a shift in the ways that stories were being told, a shift marked by a cover story of Entertainment Weekly that defined 1999 as the “year that changed the movies” (Gordimer 1999). The shift in question indicated the level of innovation and experimentation taking place in genre films (The Matrix, The Blair Witch Project, The Sixth Sense), independent films (Magnolia), and art films (Run Lola Run). Jeff Gordimer began: You can stop waiting for the future of movies. It’s already here. Someday, 1999 will be etched on a microchip as the first real year of 21st-century filmmaking. The year when all the old, boring rules about cinema started to crumble. The year when a new generation of directors—weaned on cyberspace and Cops, Pac-Man and Public Enemy—snatched the flickering torch from the aging rebels of the 1970s. The year when the whole concept of “making a movie” got turned on its head. (Gordimer 1999) Some of it was hype, yet many of the films and filmmakers Gordimer identified are still central to the discussion two decades later. Critics explored what films were learning from computer and video games, embracing nonlinear or multi-perspectival 31

structures. Meanwhile, television narratives were growing ever-more complex, as Jason Mittell (2015) has noted, with more and more integration of storylines across episodes or development of ensemble casts of characters. But, something more was taking place, something many of us recognized but did not yet have the words to describe. Janet Murray (1997) talked about the encyclopaedic dimensions of digital narratives, Will Brooker (2001) discussed narrative “overflow,” Mimi Ito (2005) discussed the “hypersocial” dimensions of Japanese “media mix,” Frank Rose (2008) spoke about “The Art of Immersion,” P. David Marshall (2002) described “intertextual commodities,” and I expanded Kinder’s term, “transmedia,” to describe an emerging model where narratives and fictional worlds, not just characters, were extending across media platforms. By the time we started to write about transmedia storytelling, we were already soaking in it—not unlike the bubble bath from my old Soakies. We were playing catch up, responding to experiments taking place in various corners of the media industries—my chapter in Convergence Culture (Jenkins 2006) focused on The Matrix franchise, but sidebars suggested some other parallel examples such as Haxan’s promotion of The Blair Witch Project, transnational projects as American comics publishers responded to the growing popularity of manga, the Dawson’s Desktop project promoting the CW’s Dawson’s Creek, and “The Beast,” an alternate reality game linked to the release of the film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Here, juxtaposition of cases via sidebars substituted for an effort to develop a more coherent picture of the boundaries of transmedia storytelling. By this point, I had spent the past decade expanding my access to various mediamakers. I had consulted with Brenda Laurel (2001) when she was launching Purple Moon games and a section of her book, Utopian Entrepreneur, reflected her engagement with ideas from Marsha Kinder that I had introduced to her and her staff. I had run a Creative Leaders Program for Electronic Arts which brought me into contact with Neil Young, Will Wright, Danny Bilson, Bing Gordon, and others who were thinking about the ways that games might forge new relationships with Hollywood franchises. I drafted my first explanation of transmedia flying back from an intense meeting in Los Angeles between top games and film industry people. There were already people out there—Jeff Gomez, Mike Monello, Jay Bushman, Sean Stewart, Maureen McHugh, among them—who were trying to develop new models for richer storyworlds and cross-media extensions. McLuhan tells us that media are put out before they are thought out and a lot of people were putting out by the turn of the millennium. While I might never have anticipated the degree to which people across the media industries would embrace Convergence Culture, I wrote my chapter on transmedia storytelling with a strong awareness that I was entering a conversation which would challenge industry, fans, and academia to rethink how they engaged with contemporary entertainment. I refused to read these developments as purely motivated by commercial instincts, having a front-line perspective on the ways that these storytellers talked about the aesthetic potentials of an expanded canvas. Little did I know that transmedia storytelling would be a flag that people would 32

rally behind. Convergence Culture came out in the midst of the Hollywood writers’ strike, which centered around how writers would be compensated for digital content that often extended television series: they saw it as part of the storytelling process and the studios saw it as promotion. Transmedia helped them make a case for the value of their contributions. I have since been told stories that people were passing copies up and down the picket lines and as people went off strike, transmedia production started to become more widespread as language for describing what was going on with Lost, Heroes, and other contemporary television programs. We heard less about 360-degree promotion, the word being pushed by the studios and the networks. Elsewhere, transmedia became language that was taken up by policy-makers, arts funding agencies, and government film bureaus as a way of justifying support for all kinds of digital content. From the start, then, our understanding of transmedia storytelling emerged at the intersection between theory and practice and through exchanges between academics and media-makers. Such exchanges often took place on the margins, through informal channels—face-to-face exchanges at conferences and local meet-ups, podcast interviews, blog posts, even exchanges on social media (such as Brian Clark’s “East Coast-West Coast Distinction”). Even understood in academic terms, it was a space where contributions by graduate students (Geoffrey Long, Ivan Askwith, Christy Dena, Sam Ford, Jeff Watson, among others) were as important as those of more established scholars. Production handbooks exist on our syllabi at the University of Southern California alongside theoretical tomes; our classes often ask students to combine thinking and making. It was an exchange that has become increasingly transnational (taking different shapes depending on whether the media ecology is shaped by commercial or public service logics). As the term has traveled, the concept of transmedia has expanded from an early focus on popular genres to more diverse media (publishing, music, location-based experiences), from entertainment to documentary and journalism, activism and mobilization, education, religion, diplomacy, sports, and branding (Jenkins 2017b). Each step along the way, we have had to both expand and sharpen our understanding of what we mean by transmedia, as critics and theorists raced to keep up with innovative new practices that often defy any simple, rigid or static definition. To me, transmedia was about a set of relationships across media, not a single model for how different media might “collide.” We need lots of different models for the forms that transmedia might take as different creative teams pursue different functions in relation to different stories for different audiences in different national contexts. When my students ask me whether something is or is not transmedia, I usually ask them in what ways it may be useful to read it as transmedia. So, there may be some circumstances where it makes sense to read fan fiction as part of a larger transmedia system while other times, it is important to maintain clear distinctions between canon and fanon, between continuity and multiplicity. I am often surprised when I and others get accused of ignoring the larger history of 33

transmedia practices in our early writing: my chapter in Convergence Culture draws multiple comparisons with earlier media practices. We were preoccupied with trying to figure out what was new about contemporary transmedia stories and with searching for antecedents. But the introduction of a new media ecology shifts how we understood what came before, and in this case, the availability of the concept of transmedia storytelling has sharpened our understanding of earlier media ecologies, changing how we read The Wizard of Oz, Walt Disney, Superman, or the Lone Ranger, to cite a few examples. All of this brings us to the volume you currently hold in your hands. The editors have assembled an international rogue’s gallery of some of the world’s top thinkers about transmedia. I love that attempts to develop a field theory of transmedia have given way to efforts to describe different configurations transmedia might take in different contexts or in the service of different goals. We have examples here from many different national media ecologies. The book explores the value of different theoretical traditions for analyzing examples of transmedia practices, further expanding the conceptual tools with which we conduct our discussions. I welcome the shift from discussing interactivity toward more nuanced consideration of participatory practices, bringing fandom studies more fully into the mix. I am excited to see some productive tensions here between perspectives that are grounded in claims of medium specificity (whether in terms of different media sectors or the contributions different media affordances offer). And it is wonderful to see such rich discussions of transmedia’s contributions beyond the realm of entertainment. These are just a few of the strengths of the current collection, which amply demonstrates the value of an expansive definition of transmedia, as we seek to continually make sense of a period of profound and prolonged media change.

References Bennett, Tony, and Janet Woollacott. 1987. Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero. London: Methuen. Brooker, Will. 2001. “Living on Dawson’s Creek: Teen Viewers, Cultural Convergence, and Television Overflow.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 4 (4): 456–472. Gordimer, Jeff. 1999. “1999: The Year That Changed Movies.” Entertainment Weekly, November 26. Accessed January 4, 2018. http://ew.com/article/1999/11/26/1999-year-changed-movies/. Gray, Jonathan. 2010. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York University Press. Ito, Mizuko. 2005. “Technologies of Childhood Imagination: Yugioh, Media Mixes and Everyday Cultural Production.” In Structures of Participation in Digital Culture, edited by Joe Karaganis and Natalie Jeremijenko, 44–67. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, Henry. 2017a. “Adaptation, Extension, Transmedia.” Film/Literature Quarterly 45 (2). www.salisbury.edu/lfq/_issues/first/adaptation_extension_transmedia.html. Jenkins, Henry. 2017b. “Transmedia Logics and Locations.” In The Rise of Transtexts: Challenges and Opportunities, edited by Benjamin W. L. Derhy Kurtz and Mélanie Bourdaa, 220–240. London: Routledge.

Kinder, Marsha. 1991. Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley: University of California Press. Laurel, Brenda. 2001. Utopian Entrepreneur. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marshall, P. David. 2002. “The New Intertexutal Commodity.” In The New Media Book, edited by Dan Harries, 110–127. London: British Film Institute. Mittell, Jason. 2015. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press. Murray, Janet. 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge: Free Press. Pearson, Roberta E., and William Uricchio (eds.). 1991. The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media. New York: Routledge. Rose, Frank. 2008. The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue and How We Tell Stories. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Wyatt, Justin. 1994. High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Acknowledgments The crafting of this book has been highly important in terms of shaping our current and future thinking about all things transmedia, an area of study that we have both been immersed within for a number of years now. The process of devising, compiling, and editing this volume has allowed us to re-understand what “transmedia” really is, what its overarching and underpinning characteristics are, how it works, where it works, and—perhaps most importantly of all—why we need it. Our hope is that the broad and expansive scope of this book allows for at least some of the deepest meanings and the fullest potentials of transmediality to be imagined, and for that we wholeheartedly thank each and every one of our contributors for their excellent and focused chapters. And an even bigger thank you must go to Henry Jenkins, whose generous support of this project—as is documented in his insightful foreword—is enormously valued.

Introduction Transmedia Studies—Where Now? Matthew Freeman and Renira Rampazzo Gambarato

Let’s start with a question: what is transmedia? Here, we mean this question not as a lead-in to presenting any kind of rudimentary, oft-cited definition, but rather as a genuine question. The transmedia phenomenon has led to the burgeoning of transmedia studies across media, film, television, cultural, and communication studies across the academy, not to mention the wider creative and cultural industries. The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies seeks to be the ultimate publication for scholars and students interested in comprehending all of the various aspects of transmediality, be it in terms of media industries and their platforms, digital and mobile communications, advertising and marketing sectors, audience behaviors and cultural practices, or socio-political forms like media activism, identity, literacy, and education. This collection, which gathers together original articles by a global roster of contributors from a variety of disciplines and industry backgrounds, sets out to contextualize, problematize, and scrutinize the current status and future directions of transmediality, exploring the industries, practices, cultures, arts, and methodologies of studying convergent media content across multiple media platforms. Now is the time to offer this ultimate publication about transmedia studies, given the central yet multifaceted ways in which transmediality has come to materialize in the media landscape. Marsha Kinder (1991) first used the term “transmedia” to describe the multiplatform and multi-modal expansion of media content. Henry Jenkins (2006) reintroduced the term within the context of digital change and “transmedia storytelling” has subsequently seen widespread adoption and interrogation. Jenkins’ (2007) definition of transmedia storytelling as “a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience” has become one of the dominant ways by which the flow of entertainment across media is now understood, especially in a digital and commercial setting where the correlation between transmedia storytelling and the commerce of entertainment has been reinforced in industry. As Heroes creator Tim Kring once asserted, transmedia storytelling is “rather like building your Transformer and putting little rocket ships on the side” (Kushner 2008). By providing audiences with more and more content, it seems, transmediality— an umbrella term most fundamentally describing “the increasingly popular industrial practice of using multiple media technologies to present information … through a 37

range of textual forms” (Evans 2011, 1)—is characteristically understood as a commercial practice, enabling as it does for multiple revenue streams and numerous sites of engagement. Marie-Laure Ryan puts it plainly in her assertion that transmedia storytelling is essentially “a way to get us to consume as many products as possible” (2013, 384). But commercial transmedia storytelling is not the end of the story for transmediality. In fact, Jenkins’ description of transmedia storytelling (of a single narrative that is only truly complete when elements from multiple media forms are brought together into a coherent whole) has arguably rarely materialized in quite the fully integrated, plot-intertwining fashion that Jenkins envisaged. Further, as a mode of practice, transmedia storytelling is still most closely associated with what Benjamin Birkinbine, Rodrigo Gómez, and Janet Wasko refer to as the global media giants —“the huge media conglomerates such as Disney and Time-Warner, [which] take advantage of globalization to expand abroad and diversify” (2017, 15). Outside of the conglomerates, though, transmediality has evolved in other ways, namely into a brand development practice or as a way to support traditional media content through transmedia franchising systems (Johnson 2013), to name its other dominant commercial purposes. But transmediality has equally gained wider relevance as digital screen technologies have multiplied, with the so-called “old media” of film and television now experienced through online transmedia distribution practices (Evans 2015), whereby content becomes integrated with social media and other online platforms. Other terms such as “multiplatform” (Jeffery-Poulter 2003), “crossmedia” (Bechmann Petersen 2006), and “second screening” have joined it (Holt and Sanson 2014), but transmediality remains an important concept for understanding the fundamental shifts that digital media technologies have wrought on the media industries and their audiences. More than this, transmediality has since grown into a distinct subfield of scholarly investigation, one that relates to a range of studies across film, television, social media, gaming, marketing, literature, music, journalism, and beyond. However, the more that transmediality has broadened its definition and its practical use in recent years, the more that it has arguably become something else entirely. Let’s not forget that research has defined transmediality through very different disciplinary lenses, be it in terms of storytelling (Jenkins 2006; Evans 2011; Ryan 2013), marketing (Gray 2010; Grainge and Johnson 2015), journalism (Gambarato and Alzamora 2018), world-building (Wolf 2012); historical culture (Freeman 2016), activism (Scolari, Bertetti, and Freeman 2014), literacy (Scolari 2016), and so on. And these different sets of creative and disciplinary lenses should not be underplayed in our understanding of what transmediality is. Mapping the many faces of transmediality is an important task for researchers, for it hints at its multifaceted formations, functions, values, and roles across the wider media landscape. And yet an almost inevitable consequence of transmediality being approached via so many different disciplinary lenses is that the very definition of transmediality might 38

remain decidedly in flux, meaning different things to different people at different times. In 2011, Brian Clark argued that the potential for transmediality to be (mis)understood as almost everything means that “transmedia,” as term, has possibly outlived its usefulness, insisting that only by refining the definition will scholars secure its long-term viability. Clark, we believe, was absolutely right in his critique, and simply because we live in “a digital media environment … [that] calls for a spread of media” (Brinker 2017, 209), it does not mean that everything is transmedial. Revising, refining, and clarifying our understanding of what does—and therefore what does not—constitute a form of “transmedia” is indeed crucial, both to the future of this avenue of study but more importantly to our collective abilities to make sense of how, why, and when media content flows, expands, and moves across multiple media platforms in particular ways, for particular reasons, and with particular effects. However, we posit that only by embracing the multiplicities and pluralities of transmediality as a cross-disciplinary phenomenon can one fully grasp its prominence. To paraphrase Christy Dena’s point from her chapter in this book, it may well make sense to create a simple definition of transmediality so that people understand and recognize it, but doing so is often at the cost of understanding the complete picture. A diverse and ultimate volume interrogating the status, the breadth, the developments, the themes, and the futures of transmediality is thus a timely opportunity for transmedia scholars to reflect on this subfield’s current status and to explore potential new directions for future research. Importantly, each contributor in this book has conducted leading research into a particular area of transmedia studies or has done widespread transmedia practice across the cultural industries. Together, our contributors thereby offer a unique perspective on the practices, cultures, arts, and methodologies of studying media across multiple platforms. Still, this cross-disciplinary approach based on embracing multiplicities and pluralities raises another notable question. If transmediality indeed means different things, in different parts of the globe (see Freeman and Proctor 2018), to different sets of industries, cultures, arts, and disciplines, then how can one go about classifying such different interpretations and divergent industrial practices as the same phenomenon? Doing this successfully—and responsibly—almost means reunderstanding transmediality, moving far beyond a set of narrow, discipline-specific definitions based on entertainment or storytelling or marketing alone. In effect, it means articulating a more overarching idea of transmediality, albeit one that still addresses the specificity of its workings in different contexts. As Henry Jenkins insists, “this does not mean that transmedia means everything to all people and thus means nothing to anyone. Rather, it means that we need to be precise about what forms of transmedia we are discussing and what claims we are making about them” (2016). This is where the breadth of this book comes in, and it is our embracing of the multiplicities and pluralities of transmediality that also drives the structure of this book. Looking across specific contexts of different industries, cultures, arts, practices, and methodologies of transmediality in turn, we will now use the remainder of this 39

introductory chapter to outline our overarching conceptual interpretation of what transmediality really means, argued in dialogue with the themes and ideas of the subsequent chapters. From there, we also speculate where transmedia studies could go next. And so now we return to our original question, meant with a sense of genuine reflection: what is transmedia?

Industries of Transmediality In her chapter on transmedia television, Elizabeth Evans claims that “these [digital] platforms, and the way they are being utilized by content creators and owners, are contributing to media culture becoming increasingly and inherently transmedial.” Similarly, Carlos A. Scolari argues elsewhere that, as of 2017, we are part of a media landscape where almost all content can in some way, shape or form be considered transmedial, meaning that “soon we will assume that all communication industries will be transmedial—it will be integrated into the DNA of media communication” (2017). Somewhat echoing the earlier sentiments of Clark, then, for Scolari (2017), the prevalence of transmedia across the contemporary media industries means that we no longer need to distinguish transmedia communication from other forms of communication. But transmedia’s prevalence is highly questionable and complex, and it is not particularly accurate to assume that transmediality exists across all creative and cultural industries. Indeed, as digital technologies and mobile devices continue to bring media interfaces into the workings of our daily lives, a salient question to consider is not only what is transmedia, but also where is transmedia? Jenkins’ more recent writings on transmediality have begun to consider ideas of transmedia location, meaning “the context from which transmedia products emerge” (Jenkins 2016). There is thus a question in terms of which industries transmediality is now an active part of, and what specific purposes it holds within and across them. The first section of the book comprises 13 chapters around those industries that we believe represent the most dominant transmedia industries today: Film, Documentary, Television, Telenovelas, Comics, Publishing, Games, Music, Journalism, Sports, Social Platforms, Celebrity, and Attractions. In terms of a focus on industries as a lens through which to better understand what transmediality really is, then, it is evident from this section’s configuration of chapters that transmedia industries necessarily embrace both fictional and non-fictional universes. Renira Rampazzo Gambarato’s chapter on transmedia journalism usefully reiterates the importance of characterizing transmediality as, first, multiple media platforms, second, as content expansion, and third, as audience engagement. The transmedia DNA of these characteristics is intertwined with fictional entertainment, as emphasized in Kinder’s (1991) and Jenkins’ (2003, 2006) original research, as much and as well as it is with non-fiction initiatives, as clearly demonstrated by Freeman’s (2016) historicized approach to transmedia studies previously. Transmedia 40

phenomena, as a common ground, involve the richness of multiplatform media—it is, as Jenkins notes in his foreword, about a set of relationships across media. Particular media platforms can emerge and disappear, can be in vogue or be ostracized, can change and evolve. Nevertheless, we could not have transmedia dynamics without the support of multiple media platforms and the industries that align them together. Furthermore, this section posits that beyond the digital domain, transmediality can and should involve a variety of alternative combinations between both online and offline platforms. The Internet and all digital technologies unequivocally play a crucial role in (1) disseminating transmedia content, (2) making content easily available worldwide, (3) reaching a diversified range of audiences, (4) enabling audience engagement, and (5) contributing to a participatory culture, for instance. But the possibilities to enrich the audience experience via offline activities, live events, and analogue initiatives, are immense because they can dramatically contribute to (1) the feeling of immersion, (2) the sense of belonging, and (3) the emotional response of audiences, as discussed in the afterword of this collection. These immersive emotions and behavioral practices are key to definitions of transmediality, as is demonstrated in Helen W. Kennedy’s chapter on transmedia games, which shows the fruitfulness of applying “play theory” to understandings of transmediality. Looking across industries as diverse as journalism and the celebrity scene, moreover, it is clear that such playable online or offline transmedia strategies can contribute to a growth of these industries, with the proliferation of content across media platforms building both new storyworlds and new job roles. Chapters on transmedia sports, by Ethan Tussey, and transmedia social platforms, by Portia Vann, Axel Bruns, and Stephen Harrington, for example, both reinforce the globalism associated with transmediality, and particularly the idea that transmediality is partly a tool for enhancing the democratization of media content everywhere. And yet part of the future conceptual breakthrough for transmedia scholars must be to better understand how said democratization of content gels with the innate commerce of many transmedia production motives, as is demonstrated by Šárka Gmiterková’s study of the transmedia Kardashian brand and by Matthew Freeman’s look at the Warner Bros. Studio Tour in London as a commercially oriented brand extension of the Harry Potter storyworld. With any example of transmediality, where is the line between expansion-as-commerce and expansion-as-democratization—and if or when does that contradictory line become in any way problematic? Transmediality, in fact, is perhaps best understood as a series of conceptual contradictions, as the chapters in Part I show. Sarah Atkinson, positioning “film [as] arguably the most dominant instantiation of the transmedia storytelling phenomenon,” sees a tension between “the franchise and campaign binary”—that is, between notions of content and promotion—while Joakim Karlsen hints at the importance of conceptualizing transmedia documentary as a blend of fiction and non-fiction, experience and participation, all combined into a single package. Karlsen’s chapter shows the power of transmediality to embody the full potential of participatory media, 41

and yet also points out the innate contradictions that arise when one begins to conceive of non-fiction as something that is itself participatory. Echoing this emphasis on combined tensions, Paola Brembilla explores transmedia music as a set of narrativized and visualized forms of artwork, cross-marketing, and branding. For Brembilla, transmediality is a “streaming of content” afforded by “synergy networks”—a streaming that builds a greater experience for audiences. Importantly, seeing transmediality—most broadly defined—as a stream of content “allows us to account for its versatility and ability to serve several purposes,” thus altogether suggesting that transmediality works to give media content greater “cultural and economic value in the contemporary mediascape.” Conceiving of transmediality as a mode of diversification across the cultural industries makes sense, tying in with William Proctor’s assertion in his chapter that transmedia comic books are often a secondary or alternative platform for films and television series. Such an idea also gives credence to Alastair Horne’s chapter on transmedia publishing, which outlines some of the challenges for transmedia production. Understanding transmediality as diversification also supports Evans’ conception of transmediality as something that is deeply rooted in the past and yet is foregrounded by contemporary media industries as a way to stand content apart in a crowded marketplace. For example, Evans highlights the usefulness of “analogue” theory—academic concepts that originated before the days when “transmedia” was part of the common vernacular—in understanding transmediality in a digital sphere. Evans’ chapter on transmedia television shows how particular media—and particular media industries—are themselves transmedial, and indeed have always been transmedial, in terms of operations, consumption habits, aesthetics, and so on. If media industries have long extended content across platforms, and audiences have long been encouraged to migrate across a stream of content, then transmediality is best understood as a conceptual approach to producing media via multiple delivery channels that each have combined commercial/democratic objectives at heart, itself enabling creative and participatory opportunities for sustained intellectual and emotional engagement. Simultaneously, from an industrial standpoint, transmediality becomes a means of adapting and diversifying media content so to best afford this kind of sustained intellectual and emotional engagement—as in Inara Rosas and Hanna Nolasco’s chapter, which stresses how “lighter plots and shorter narratives” are key to the successful transmedial expansion of telenovelas in Brazil.

Arts of Transmediality Part II of the book includes seven chapters on Transmedia Storytelling, WorldBuilding, Characters, Genres, Writing, Photography, and Indie. Thinking about what the art of transmediality actually looks like, these seven chapters highlight a number of overlapping themes. Interestingly, Erica Negri’s chapter on transmedia indie positions transmediality as a “situation of narrative chaos … [one] that attempts to conciliate 42

narrative forms of digital technologies.” In other words, transmediality is itself a conceptual approach to producing media that is intrinsically messy, born out of messy technological disruptions over time, shaped with often messy objectives at heart, and tailored for messy, fragmentary, hard-to-pin-down audiences. Yet from an artistic standpoint, our contributors’ understandings of what transmediality can be remain more consistent than divergent. For starters, besides the story to be told or the message to be delivered, which are both fundamental to the art of transmediality and transmedia storytelling more specifically, one such consistency concerns the role of world-building as a core concept. As Jenkins has pointed out elsewhere, the principle of world-building is inherent to the transmedia logic: Most forms of transmedia are structured through a process of world-building. The concept of world-building emerged from fantasy and science fiction but has also been applied to documentary or historical fiction. Worlds are systems with many moving parts (in terms of characters, institutions, locations) that can generate multiple stories with multiple protagonists that are connected to each other through their underlying structures. Part of what drives transmedia consumption is the desire to dig deeper into these worlds, to trace their backstories and understand their underlying systems. Fictional texts imagine and design new worlds; documentaries investigate and map existing worlds. (Jenkins 2016) Regardless of how much a given story overlaps with the “primary” world, the varied dimensions, plausibility, richness of details of fictional and non-fictional transmedia worlds are designed and represented to be as important, intriguing, and compelling as its characters and plots. This creative equivalence is a central distinction of the concept of world-building in particular and transmedia stories in general. The essence of world-building is the strategy that best provides audiences with more stories sharing the same characters and world dynamics, but moreover, it offers them different yet equally immersive media experiences and emotional reactions. Moreover, Jenkins’ characterization of transmediality as that which provides the desire to dig deeper also extends to other chapters across this section, albeit sometimes with messier consequences in ways that reinforce Negri’s contextualization of transmediality as chaos. Roberta Pearson’s chapter on transmedia characters, for example, defines the art of transmediality as the creative process of making additions to media texts that cohere—or do not cohere—arguing that “cohesion depends upon points of contact between the addition and the transfiction.” Pearson shows how audiences gain pleasure from seeing those additions cohere or not cohere, thus lending further weight to our earlier claim that transmediality is in essence a system of diversification. However, Donna Hancox’s chapter on transmedia writing suggests that it is so 43

much more than this, painting a picture of the contemporary transmedia landscape as that which “re-imagines the intersection of media, genre and form to present an entirely new approach to writing.” Hancox shows how transmedia fiction is often quite linear in nature, and yet its multifaceted use of multiple platforms affords arguably the best possible mode of storytelling—a mode that is capable of enhancing characterization, emotional and experiential engagement. This idea of transmediality, not as story-building, but as story-enrichment, links to Mélanie Bourdaa’s chapter, which shows how transmedia storytelling opens up new possibilities for articulating fictional time. Altogether, the chapters in Part II indicate that transmediality—from an artistic point of view—is about creating an adventure, one that seeks to transform the world into a story and the story into a storyworld. It is a means of crafting immersion, it seems—and, specifically, offering storytellers creative, pervasive ways to engage audiences emotionally and experientially. Or to put it another way, the art of transmediality is to build experiences across and between the borders where multiple media platforms coalesce—experiences that thrive on connecting, sharing, and responding. As Kate Fitzpatrick, a marketing strategist, discusses in the Afterword, “today, the concept of transmedia itself means creating a journey or experience that uses the most relevant mix of channels and platforms for your intended audience.” Similarly, Natalie Rios Gioco, a transmedia consultant also interviewed in the Afterword, suggests that transmediality is about “delivering information by experiencing”: it is “a system of cause and effect—a distribution of information (cause) that triggers an integrated, expansive response (effect).” Indeed, characterizing transmediality as an experiential mode of engagement and causal relationships between content and people allows us to go beyond seeing it as a messy side-product of the fragmented media landscape, and also goes beyond describing it as a means of “allowing for different engagement depths,” as Kevin Moloney puts it in his chapter on transmedia photography. Going beyond this description, Moloney’s chapter does an excellent job in showing how a photograph—a single media image—is capable of hinting at so much more than it shows, bringing together both actual and imagined narrative moments and spaces that co-exist and extend, in the viewer’s mind, at least, beyond the borders of the photograph itself. Moloney goes on to argue that for producers and critics of transmedia storytelling in any genre, the critical thinking about photographs must not only be how they interact with other media forms used in a project, but how they are also autonomous stories, capable of rich, immersive narrative, fine detail and visual fact presentation. In terms of studying the artistry of transmediality, in other words, it is important that we return, somewhat contradictorily, to a medium-specific approach to studying individual platforms in order to better understand the function of specific platforms in 44

and across the media landscape. There is a danger that comes with describing the convergences of contemporary media—namely, that convergence becomes directly associated with blending all forms of different media together into single sites of (digital) media artifacts. For even amidst a time of apparent technological convergence, mobile and online media, second screening, and so on, it is crucial to remember that different media still operate with largely specific sets of affordances, practices, policies, and consumption habits (Smith 2018). Thus in order to understand the artistic transmedia potentials of comparatively new platforms, such as augmented reality (AR), we first need to understand what AR—as an individual platform with distinct affordances—can actually do. By way of example, elsewhere Freeman (2018) explores the kinds of transmedia interventions represented by Priya’s Shakti, a project that uses comic books, exhibitions, AR and street art to call attention to the struggles faced by women in India. Focusing on the artistic value of AR, Freeman explains how users are encouraged not to escape reality by entering a fictional world, but instead to think differently about reality by traversing the line between real and virtual (2018). James Dalby (2017), echoing these same kinds of important social dimensions, argues elsewhere that the true function of any single piece of transmedia content is not simply to enrich, enhance, or augment its companion pieces, but in fact to give one piece of content (a film, a web series, a comic book, a novel, etc.) a new, previously missing dimension that forever shifts the meaning of that piece of content into something else entirely (Dalby 2017). Transmediality, then, has an important ontological function to play: at its best, it has the power to shape—and to re-shape— how we perceive the media and the world around it.

Practices of Transmediality Part III presents seven chapters focused on Transmedia Adaptation, Developer, Production, Commodification, Franchising, Distribution, and Branding and Marketing. Alongside academic perspectives, this section also features chapters written by renowned transmedia practitioners and pioneers, such as Jeff Gomez (Starlight Runner Entertainment), Robert Pratten (Conducttr), and Max Giovagnoli, all sharing their own experiences and perspectives on critical case studies of transmedia projects led by their companies. As hinted previously, practices of transmediality go beyond traditional media franchises, sequels, or adaptations, leading to “integrated media experiences” (Davidson 2010). In the simplest sense, transmedia integration stands for expansion of content across multiple media and formats typically with some level of audience engagement. Christy Dena’s chapter, however, argues that thinking of transmedia practice as simply the creation of extensions does not fully encapsulate what transmedia creatives do, nor is it the “only valid design choice for multi-platformthinking.” Moving beyond notions of extension-making, then, the chapters in this part emphasize and showcase that there is life outside of commercial understandings of 45

transmedia storytelling, countering the recurrent assumption that transmedia equals marketing. Andrea Phillips (2011) has argued previously that this supposition occurs because of economics: “It’s not that there are more marketing campaigns using transmedia than anyone else; it’s that the marketing campaigns are much, much more visible. Why? Because they have more money to throw around.” Freeman (2016) has demonstrated how advertising is intrinsically connected to the early transmedia initiatives of the twentieth century, but this by no means signifies that practices of transmediality are limited to narrow definitions of advertising, marketing, and branding. Instead, Evans’ chapter on transmedia distribution articulates that transmediality is a set of “logics” that all involve “branching out into new online spaces” in order to re-locate and to re-contextualize content, (re-)acquiring new audiences. More than this, the chapters in this part characterize the practices of transmediality as a careful balance between creativity and strategy, echoing aforementioned ideas that it is essentially a blend of content and promotion, fiction and non-fiction, commerce and democratization, experience and participation. For example, Jeff Gomez shows, via a detailed discussion of how he and his team developed the Pirates of the Caribbean films into a multiplatform adventure, that the practice of building experiences across and between the borders of multiple platforms is in fact less to do with platform, but is rather a dual process of (1) narratological analysis and (2) something that is “discerned in the storyteller.” This balancing act between creativity and strategy is reinforced further in Peter von Stackelberg’s chapter on transmedia franchising, which notes that “commercial pressures will drive the adoption of transmedia [practices] across the various media sectors,” which will in turn “drive the need for new creative approaches.” There is therefore the sense that the practices of transmediality are driven by conceptions of “themed storytelling,” to borrow Alison Norrington’s (2017) term, regardless of industry. Gomez, for instance, stresses the importance of an “essence” when crafting transmedia projects, by which he means a kind of thematic x-factor that runs across all media platforms and links the story to the storyteller in emotional and experiential ways. Robert Pratten, too, uses his chapter on transmedia production to position transmedia projects as “living, breathing worlds” that, by spanning countries, languages, platforms, and time, “more closely imitate real life.” Even Anna Kérchy, whose chapter is rooted in the commerce of transmedia commodification, understands this practice as the making of “adventures to collect” that can yield “amazement results” over time. In that sense, transmedia practices are really about crossing time as much as they are about crossing media, operating as systems of production and distribution that cater for the possibilities of tomorrow as well as for the demands of today. And doing so once again means channeling modes of creativity and strategy simultaneously, as per Max Giovagnoli’s chapter on transmedia branding and marketing, which stresses the different ways via which creativity sits at the heart of all good transmedia 46

campaigns. Giovagnoli points out how the strategic addition of games, events, and online promotions for a given transmedia brand all work together to enhance emotional investment and enjoyment. In effect, chapters on the specifics of Transmedia Production, Transmedia Franchising, Transmedia Branding and Marketing, and so on, all clearly demonstrate that practices of transmediality, while prioritizing different agendas and audiences, are not storytelling, or marketing, or branding, or commodification, at least in isolation. Rather, practices of transmediality are defined precisely by the bringing together of all of these diverse practices into a single, innovative media package. What varies is which of these diverse practices are foregrounded at particular times. Transmediality is a “concert” of practices, as Gomez puts it, “weaving a tapestry of story that surrounds, immerses, and interacts with the audience.”

Cultures of Transmediality The fourth part of the book is dedicated to 12 chapters about Transmedia Archeology, Heritage, Fandom and Participation, Paratexts, Politics, Charity, Education, Literacy, Social Change, Identities, Psychology, and Religion. Cultures of transmediality explore diachronic and synchronic developments in the realm of transmediality within a human-centered approach and perspective. In our quest for understanding and advancing transmedia studies, putting people’s needs in the forefront seems an appropriate way to improve media and communications and reach a more satisfying transmedia experience. Besides the economic advantages that transmedia practices can potentially bring to culture and society, what would be the hearty reason why we would actually need or want transmedia experiences in our lives? We do not necessarily need transmedia dynamics in our lives, but we can definitely take advantage of its techniques and tools to achieve a more meaningful, emotionally connected, and fulfilling media experience. For instance, Marie-Eve Carignan shows in her chapter how notions of transmediality become useful for understanding both the mediatized representation of religion and also the process via which people make sense of a religion. Despite all of the technological advancements in media we are facing, fundamental human needs, instincts, and motivations have not changed radically. As Pamela Rutledge’s chapter on transmedia psychology alludes to, people continue to be driven by social connections, meaningful experiences, and the need to share stories that allow them to be part of something larger than themselves. Transmedia cultures, indeed, are precisely that: experience-centered, technologically augmented conversations, a sharing between storytellers and audiences, between audiences and other audiences, and between online and offline worlds. This is where the concept of “paratext”—i.e., the promos and online materials that “create texts, manage them, and fill them with many of the meanings that we associate with them” (Gray 2010: 6)—becomes particularly useful to understanding transmediality. Matt Hills’ chapter on transmedia paratexts examines this meaning47

making process further, arguing that paratexts “have been repositioned as a new terrain for audience struggles.” And building on aforementioned ideas that transmediality—in its building of immersive, emotional, experiential, and paratextual spaces that closely imitate real life—chapters in this section explore the intrinsic connections between transmediality, culture, and aspects of daily life. This includes Paolo Bertetti’s look at the interlacing of transmedia storytelling and changing historical cultures, and Dan Hassler-Forest’s account of how popular transmedia franchises such as Star Wars are “made meaningful by their specific association with politics.” This same idea of cultural interlacing is reinforced by Jenny Kidd’s examination of how museums and heritage sites are embracing the experiential and participatory possibilities of transmediality in ways that open up rich possibilities for “identity and nation building,” crafting storyworlds of “liminal spaces between known and unknown, past and present, fact and fiction.” André Jansson and Karin Fast, too, suggest that transmediality ultimately describes a media ecology “in which social practices are molded by and negotiated through different media technologies, and interweave with various forms of offline communication.” In turn, Paul Booth articulates this same interweaving of transmedial social practices in his chapter on transmedia fandom and participation as the recalibration of “what narrative ‘is.’” What such a recalibration of narrative looks like might mean thinking of transmediality as a widened arsenal of media platforms that can aid people in achieving a goal, as Donna Hancox explains in her chapter on transmedia for social change. Or it might mean thinking about the experience of a particular set of transmedia content not as a discrete brand or even a story in the traditional sense, but rather as a much more fluid, ephemeral and value-laden transmedia ethos (see also Freeman and Taylor-Ashfield 2018). Matthew Freeman’s chapter on transmedia charity explains how “the concept of ethos is perhaps more useful for characterizing the way audiences navigate transmedia charity projects, with people following beliefs, values, themes, philosophies and meanings (rather than stories) across media.” To understand what transmediality really means, we have to talk about navigation, and in particular the ways in which people move across physical and virtual spheres—and what motivates that process of moving. This means analyzing the behaviors and motivations of a media-crossing audience with much more rigor, an idea for future research that is also reinforced first by Lorena Peret Teixeira Tárcia, whose chapter on transmedia education asserts that “transmedia provides a platform for students to learn how to identify, understand, and engage different audiences in their stories,” and second by Carlos A. Scolari, who theorizes transmedia literacy as “informal learning strategies” that “facilitate the exchange of experiences” for different groups of learners. Once again we are back to emphasizing the multiplicities and pluralities of transmediality, then. André Jansson and Karin Fast argue in their chapter that “identity” should be applied as a theoretical framework for understanding transmediality, given that identity—or identities—act as a “complex and negotiated 48

interface between self and society.” This idea is echoed elsewhere by Michael Humphrey (2017), who argues that memory is an important part of the transmedia space and one that shapes “the spirit of the self.” One potentially important direction for the future of transmedia studies is for scholars to consider the increasing mediatization of life itself, and to better understand what it means to think of our digital lives as complex, intertwining, transmedial experiences.

Methodologies of Transmediality The last part brings the following chapters: A Narratological Approach to Transmedial Storyworlds and Transmedial Universes; An Ontological Approach to Transmedia Worlds; An Experience Approach to Transmedia Fictions; A Design Approach to Transmedia Projects; A Management Approach to Transmedia Enterprises; A MicroBudget Approach to Transmedia in Small Nations; A Genettian Approach to Transmedia (Para)Textuality; A Semiotic Approach to Transmedia Storytelling; A Mythological Approach to Transmedia Storytelling; A Qualitative Network Approach to Transmedia Communication; and A Metrics Model for Measuring Transmedia Engagement. Methodologies for studying transmediality are much needed, especially given the way that transmedia studies involves the analysis of hybrid phenomena. The challenge, as Anne Mette Thorhauge, Kjetil Sandvik, and Tem Frank Andersen (2016, 2) have expressed previously, is that “without grasping the broader media environment in which particular media platforms are part … it [is] difficult to demarcate and frame them as phenomena.” Elsewhere, James Dalby (2017) goes as far as suggesting that applying theory from “non-transmedial contexts” to what are specifically transmedia texts is limited, arguing that “existing theory is not redundant as such, but can and must be reconsidered for transmedia environments.” Dalby’s reasons for such an altogether revisionist view stem from, first, the added sense of immersion that may arise from the vast array of available content within any given transmedia story, and, second, from the way in which the active need to piece this vast array of content together in a way that creates meaning—emotionally and/or experientially— transforms rudimentary notions of “audiences” into “participants” (2017). In response, this section showcases some of the pertinent and original initiatives that aim to fulfil this gap in research methodologies. The discussion revolves around the ontological (things), the epistemological (knowledge), and the phenomenological (experience) parameters involved in transmedia studies. As our authors discuss, these parameters affect the process of ideation, building, and executing transmedia products as well as consuming, interacting, and participating within them. We argue that the process of experience, the act of personally observing, encountering, or undergoing transmedia experiences, is itself key to characterizing transmedia studies at large: a “possible procedure to address the issue of contemporary complexity through a phenomenological approach to the coeval reality” (Ciancia 2015, 133). Frank Branch and Rebekah Phillips, for instance, stress the need to analyze 49

transmedia content as “real things” on account of the socially profound ways via which transmediality intersects with everyday life. This perspective is reinforced in Nicoleta Popa Blanariu and Dan Popa’s chapter, which stresses the “connection between mythical narrative and transmedia storytelling [as being] the performative dimension.” Jan-Noël Thon, meanwhile, outlines a “toolbox” of transmedial narratology that provides a better understanding of how the pieces of transmedia universes operate according to “redundancy, expansion, and modification,” hereby echoing Pearson’s earlier claim that the pleasure of transmediality lies in piecing different elements together. Ascribing a mixed-method approach within transmedia studies thus makes a great deal of sense, combining, for example, “aesthetic/formal analysis with the qualitative investigation of user reception in order to get the full picture of the [transmedia] experience,” as Susana Tosca and Lisbeth Klastrup claim in their chapter. Using both qualitative and quantitative approaches is something that Eefje Op den Buysch and Hille van der Kaa’s chapter on metrics also demonstrates, while Gambarato stresses the value of embracing what she describes in her chapter on design as the “intricate entanglements between all the constituent elements of [super] [sub]systems, that is, the set of components, the environment, and the set of relations.” These intricate entanglements define transmediality, clarifying the need from a research point of view for diverse disciplinary perspectives, such as those underpinning Ulrike Rohn and Indrek Ibrus’ chapter (business and management), Kyle Barrett’s chapter (media industry studies), Geane Carvalho Alzamora’s chapter (semiotics), and Matthias Berg and Andreas Hepp’s chapter (media communications). Berg and Hepp’s chapter, in particular, highlights the methodological process of the transmedia scholar to be one of “networking,” an idea that is also reinforced in Raúl Rodríguez-Ferrándiz’s chapter on transtextuality, which—given the multifaceted, multi-functional and ever-changing nature of transmedia content—stresses the need to “watch over” and “take care” of that content. Our attempt, then, to reflect upon the proposed question what is transmedia? is concluded by recalling Jenkins’ (2016) recent postulation that “transmedia—broadly defined—continues to grow in many different directions as people respond to the challenge and opportunities of communicating systematically across multiple platforms.” Transmedia, as a term, is merely a descriptor, one that requires meaningful application to different scenarios. That is why Jenkins (2016) insisted that transmedia be used as an adjective instead of a noun. Yet while it is clear to see already that this book paints an enormously varied picture of transmediality, when looking across industries, arts, practices, cultures, and methodologies, it seems that understandings of transmediality are indeed more consistent than divergent. Specifically, there is a consistent and clear emphasis on understanding transmediality as experience via technology, and relatedly on the creativity of audiences, particularly in the context of strategically motivated, democratically augmented media. We return to our conceptualization of transmediality as the building of experiences across and between the borders where multiple media platforms 50

coalesce, altogether refining our understanding of this phenomenon as specifically a mode of themed storytelling that, by blending content and promotion, fiction and nonfiction, commerce and democratization, experience and participation, affords immersive, emotional experiences that join up with the social world in dynamic ways. And in doing so, it becomes more than the sum of its parts—weaving through industry, art, practice, and culture. All of the chapters in this book show vividly how important transmediality remains to understanding communication and culture at large, and hint at the importance of defining transmediality in sociological terms—by which we mean the role of transmediality in helping us all to better understand how we navigate culture as well as our everyday lives.

References Bechmann Petersen, Anja. 2006. “Internet and Cross Media Production: Case Studies in Two Major Danish Media Organizations.” Australian Journal of Emerging Technology and Society 4 (2): 94–107. Birkinbine, Benjamin, Rodrigo Gómez, and Janet Wasko (eds.). 2017. Global Media Giants. New York: Routledge. Brinker, Felix. 2017. “Transmedia Storytelling in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Logics of Convergence-Era Popular Seriality.” In Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe, edited by Matt Yockey, 207–233. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ciancia, Mariana. 2015. “Transmedia Design Framework: Design-Oriented Approach to Transmedia Research.” International Journal of Transmedia Literacy 1 (1): 131–145. Accessed January 13, 2018. doi:10.7358/ijtl-2015-001-cian. Clark, Brian. 2011. “Brian Clark on Transmedia Business Models (Part Two).” Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins, November 8. Accessed August 30, 2016. http://henryjenkins.org/2011/11/brian_clarke_on_transmedia_bus.html. Dalby, James. 2017. “Transmedia Audiences: The Modular Body Confirmed.” Paper presented at the Transmedia Earth Conference: Global Convergence Cultures, EAFIT University, October 11–13. Davidson, Drew. 2010. Cross-Media Communications: An Introduction to the Art of Creating Integrated Media Experiences. Pittsburgh: ETC Press. Evans, Elizabeth. 2011. Transmedia Television: Audiences, New Media, and Daily Life. New York: Routledge. Evans, Elizabeth. 2015. “Building Digital Estates: Transmedia Television in Industry and Daily Life.” Paper presented at the ECREA TV in the Age of Transnationalisation and Transmediation Conference, Roehampton University, June 22. Freeman, Matthew. 2016. Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds. New York and London: Routledge. Freeman, Matthew. 2018. “India: Augmented Reality, Transmedia Reality and Priya’s Shakti.” In Global Convergence Cultures: Transmedia Earth, edited by Matthew Freeman and William Proctor, 192–205. New York and London: Routledge. Freeman, Matthew, and William Proctor (eds.). 2018. Global Convergence Cultures: Transmedia Earth. New York and London: Routledge. Freeman, Matthew, and Charlotte Taylor-Ashfield. 2018. “‘I Read Comics from a Feministic Point of View’: Conceptualizing the Transmedia Ethos of the Captain Marvel Fan Community.” Journal of Fandom Studies 5 (3): 317–335. Gambarato, Renira R., and Geane Alzamora (eds.). 2018. Exploring Transmedia Journalism in the Digital Age. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Gray, Jonathan. 2010. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York University Press. Grainge, Paul, and Catherine Johnson. 2015. Promotional Screen Industries. London and New York: Routledge. Holt, Jennifer, and Kevin Sanson. 2014. Connected Viewing: Selling, Streaming, and Sharing Media in the Digital Era. New York and London: Routledge.

Humphrey, Michael. 2017. “The Transmediated Self’s Story: Examining Working Narratives in Social Media Ecosystems.” Paper presented at the Transmedia Earth Conference: Global Convergence Cultures, EAFIT University, October 11–13. Jeffery-Poulter, Stephen. 2003. “Creating and Producing Digital Content across Multiple Platforms.” Journal of Media Practice 3 (3): 155–164. Jenkins, Henry. 2003. “Transmedia Storytelling: Moving Characters from Books to Films to Video-games Can Make Them Stronger and More Compelling.” Technology Review. Accessed January 12, 2018. www.technologyreview.com/biotech/13052. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, Henry. 2007. “Transmedia Storytelling 101.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins, March 22. Accessed October 4, 2017. http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html. Jenkins, Henry. 2016. “Transmedia What?” Immerse, November 15. Accessed January 13, 2018. https://immerse.news/transmedia-what-15edf6b61daa. Johnson, Derek. 2013. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries. New York: New York University Press. Kinder, Marsha. 1991. Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kushner, David. 2008. “Rebel Alliance: How a Small Band of Sci-Fi Geeks Is Leading Hollywood into a New Era.” Fast Company, May 1. Accessed September 21, 2017. www.fastcompany.com/798975/rebelalliance. Norrington, Alison. 2017. “The Present and Future of Transmedia Storytelling.” Paper presented at Transmedia UK: Sector by Sector, Bath Spa University, November 24. Phillips, Andrea. 2011. “Transmedia Is Not Marketing.” Deus Ex Machinatio, January 24. Accessed January 13, 2018. www.deusexmachinatio.com/blog/2011/1/24/transmedia-is-not-marketing.html. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2013. “Transmedial Storytelling and Transfictionality.” Poetics Today 13 (3): 361–388. Scolari, Carlos A. 2016. “Transmedia Literacy: Informal Learning Strategies and Media Skills in the New Ecology of Communication.” Telos 103: 13–23. Scolari, Carlos A. 2017. “Transmedia is Dead: Long Live Transmedia.” Paper presented at the Transmedia Earth Conference: Global Convergence Cultures, EAFIT University, October 11–13. Scolari, Carlos A., Paolo Bertetti, and Matthew Freeman. 2014. Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, Anthony. 2018. Storytelling Industries: Narrative Production in the 21st Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Thorhauge, Anne Mette, Kjetil Sandvik and Tem Frank Andersen. 2016. “Researching Users Across Media.” MedieKultur 32 (60): 1–5. Wolf, Mark J. P. 2012. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. New York: Routledge.

PART I

Industries of Transmediality

1 Transmedia Film From Embedded Engagement to Embodied Experience Sarah Atkinson

Transmedia film is arguably the most dominant instantiation of transmedia storytelling phenomena. One only has to look at the history of transmedia storytelling where film is the primary media, and the key film and cinema-centric studies which have shaped the field of transmedia studies to appreciate its influence. From spin-off merchandise, to theme parks, to fan-made media—the film and cinema industry has led the way in the creation and commercialization of narrativizing the peripheral surrounding materials of film titles. Of course this is not a new concept for the film industry when it comes to film marketing, promotion, and additional revenue generation from peripheral products, as Thomas Elsaesser previously contended: A film, an object we usually consider to be a self-sufficient work, possessing a narrative with its own mode of closure, is being created rather more like a landmine: to scatter on impact across as wide a topographical and semantic field as possible. (Elsaesser 1998, 156) The genealogy of the transmedia storytelling “film” is often traced back to 1999, where two frequently cited examples can be seen to have both formed and in many ways shaped the basis of transmedia studies—defining the principles, practices, and techniques of what has come to be referred to as transmedia (storytelling) (Jenkins 2006). Those films are: The Blair Witch Project (1999) and The Matrix (1999). The theatrical release of The Blair Witch Project was preceded by an extended narrative campaign which at the time was referred to as viral marketing. This included a fake television documentary which was aired on the SciFi channel before the film’s theatrical release, online websites, a comic and “missing” person leaflets distributed at the film festival, all which provided context, back-story and texturing of the fictional mythology of the Blair Witch. Subject to critical acclaim, cultural recognition, and notoriety, the film has also already been the focus of many academic studies. The Matrix universe, meanwhile, spanned a constellation of media platforms, including a trilogy of films, a comic book, the Animatrix series of short films, and computer games including Enter the Matrix. These different media were scattered with clues and 54

links developed by the creators and augmented by the many surrounding fan interpretations of the expansive Matrix universe. In 2006, both of these examples were considered to be exemplars of transmedia storytelling by Jenkins in his chapter “Searching for the Origami Unicorn” (which made reference to the film Blade Runner) and which centralized The Matrix as an exemplar of transmedia storytelling, identifying some of the key tropes and characteristics of the form with a particular focusing on the idea of transmediality as the entertainment form par excellence for the era of collective intelligence. At the time, however, Jenkins did not differentiate between “types” of transmediality, though these examples of The Matrix and The Blair Witch Project set the two distinct trajectories of transmedia film in motion.

Two Transmedia Film Trajectories These trajectories have followed two quite distinct yet frequently converging pathways which have previously been defined by other practitioners and scholars, using various factors: these have included the geographic, intellectual property, and transmedia structures (see Table 1.1). Table 1.1 Theorists have tended to delineate between two types of film-based transmedia Blair Witch Project The Matrix

East Coast West Coast

IP owned by creator IP not owned

Centripetal Centrifugal

As Table 1.1 shows, these different theories can be mapped to the two seminal examples of transmedia film. According to Andrea Phillips, West Coast-style transmedia is “more commonly called Hollywood or franchise transmedia” (2012, 13), which operates at major film-studio level (such as The Matrix), in contrast to “East Coast transmedia,” which Phillips states “tends to be more interactive, and much more web-centric. It overlaps heavily with the traditions of independent film, theater and interactive art. These projects make heavy use of social media, and are often run once over a set period of time rather than persisting forever” (2012, 13–14), thus implicating The Blair Witch Project. Brian Clark’s (2011) definitions, meanwhile, are based on the difference of the treatment of intellectual property (IP) ownership in the geographic-based polarities. For Clark, West Coast “thinks more in terms of franchises … and starts from the perspective that creators won’t own the IP” and East Coast “starts from the perspective that creators own the IP.” Jason Mittell’s centripetal and centrifugal models focus on the structuring of the transmedia universe. He states: “expansionist approach to transmedia, using paratexts to extend the narrative outward into new locales and arenas through an approach we might term ‘centrifugal storytelling’” (Mittell 2014, 264). Here Mittell uses the television series Lost which spread its narrative universe across books, website, online videos, and an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) (but is also clearly applicable to The 55

Matrix model), in comparison to: “the alternate vector, creating transmedia to fold in on itself in a centripetal fashion” (Mittell 2014, 270). Mittell points to the transmedia strategy of television series Breaking Bad which focused on increasing the depth of audience engagement with the key characters through a mobile app, additional webisodes, and a fake advertisement, which are strategies that follow from The Blair Witch Project in its deepening levels of engagement with the mythology and the characters involved. Building on these ideas, I propose my own distinctions between these two pathways that I refer to as franchise and campaign transmedia, but as I will demonstrate through the course of this chapter, these categories are almost always subject to convergence and cross-pollination.

Franchise and Campaign Transmedia In their purest forms, examples that fit into these two categories tend to follow the proscribed characteristics as detailed in Table 1.1—with The Matrix strand representing the franchise model and The Blair Witch Project strand representing the campaign model. Franchise transmedia follows the IP model—licenses are sold to creators to adapt and extend the IP across different platforms. The dictionary definition of franchise is: “An authorization granted by a government or company to an individual or group enabling them to carry out specified commercial activities, for example acting as an agent for a company’s products” (Oxford Dictionaries online 2017). Although the Oxford English Dictionary also recognizes the use of the term franchise as a “general title or concept used for creating or marketing a series of products, typically films or television shows” (Oxford Dictionaries online 2017). There are numerous examples of transmedia franchises where film is the central component (the Marvel Universe, DC Universe, Transformers, Harry Potter) but it is rare for a singular film to be the genesis of a transmedia franchise (with the exception of Star Wars), since these franchises all began life as another media form, i.e., comic book, toy, or novel, and are then adapted into a film. Campaign transmedia film, on the other hand, always originates from the film. The definition of campaign is “an organized course of action to achieve a goal” (Oxford Dictionaries online 2017). The Blair Witch Project (1999) is the pre-eminent exemplar of campaign transmedia. Campaign transmedia is the more frequent type of transmedia practice which prevail in cinema—primarily in routinized marketing techniques for the film, which have used online web-centric, social media extensions. The cult, the independent and the underground of commercial cinema where innovations continue to emerge, transmedial tendrils which reach out to audiences through online social networks when films mutate into other forms and real-world spaces. Table 1.2 shows these parallel trajectories of transmediality, and their points of intersection and blurring which I will now go on to discuss in more detail. 56

Table 1.2 Transmedia film timeline: mapping the two trajectories of transmedia and their points of convergence Year of release

1999

2001

2007

2008

Campaign

Blair Witch Project

Al/“The Beast”

“Why So Serious?”

Cloverfield Prometheus Body/Mind/Change Interstellar VR tie-in

Franchise

Matrix

Mode of interaction

2012

Batman/DC J.J. Ridley Abrams Scott Anthology Alien Frachise Franchise Engaged Embedded Activated Engaged Engaged

2013

2014

David Cronenberg

Embodied engagement

Immersive

Franchise and Campaign Convergence The release of the 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence directed by Steven Spielberg was preceded by a 12-week ARG campaign entitled “The Beast,” which merged some of the characteristics initiated by The Blair Witch Project, using the tools of the web, and The Matrix, utilizing mainstream film distribution tools such as the poster and the trailer, whilst layering real-world engagement in an ARG. The ARG was “seeded” by clues in the film’s posters in spring 2001. One of the credits in the baseline of the poster was a “Sentient Machine Therapist” named Jeanine Salla, an unfamiliar role to those normally seen in a film’s production credits, prompting audiences to search for the name online which revealed Jeanine’s (fictional) home page and blog. Thus began the game experience which, as Andrea Phillips stated, “turned a fire hose of content on its audience” (Phillips 2012, 28). This widespread textual scattering that Philips refers to was characteristic of “The Beast’s” experimental and pioneering nature; textual dispersal logics became more managed, controlled, and predetermined in subsequent campaigns. It was in the “Why So Serious?” promotional campaign for The Dark Knight (2008) that the ARG format evolved sufficiently to cohere a logical narrative pathway in a traditional narrative arc, which led to the events depicted at the start of the feature film. A survey revealed that 63 percent of the respondents saw “viral marketing and the Alternate Reality Game ‘Why So Serious’ as absolutely integral to the film’s narrative” (Brooker 2012, 84). “Why So Serious?” employed a treasure hunt campaign in which a website released the details of over 300 locations of bat graffiti across the globe. Audience members were encouraged to photograph the sites of the graffiti and upload them to the website. For each one that they successfully uploaded, they were rewarded with a frame from the trailer. These engagement techniques represented a blend between the commercial and renegade/underground—tactics associated with campaign transmedia were successfully deployed to promote a franchise-based film, through harnessing social media and web interfaces in new ways. These types of extensive “real-world” 57

campaigns were few and far between; far more common are scaled-down transmedia extensions that are delivered and dispersed via social media platforms.

Transmedia Film and Social Media The rise of social media and digital devices from the mid-2000s onwards has significantly invigorated transmedia activity around film releases, the types and tropes of transmedia film storytelling tactics have become more sophisticated, designed, embedded, and nuanced. An example of this is the additional narrative and textural extensions for the film Prometheus (2012) which were designed specifically for mobile interfaces and viewing. These included a number of YouTube videos, a website of the film character Elizabeth Shaw’s Project Genesis, and another website where audience members engaged as an employee of the fictional Weyland Corporation, as well as synchronized second screen apps to be watched simultaneously with the film (see Atkinson 2014, 84–86). The Prometheus web-based campaign was aligned to the cultural language and expectations of its imagined spectator. In May 2012, the campaign used LinkedIn to target key social media “influencers” inviting them to apply for a vacancy on the Prometheus project. Information taken from the user’s curriculum and profile were used to generate personalized messages. Prometheus represents a coming-of-age of the mainstream ARG/transmedia film campaign, where corporate sanitization becomes an implicit theme within the experience. The viral aesthetics which characterized previous campaigns and their “underground” conspiratorial nature, are replaced in Prometheus by a veneer of corporate logics and aesthetic of officialdom, and the social media mores of the time. Before Prometheus, the theatrical film release of Cloverfield (2008) was preceded by a pre-release online ARG (discussed extensively in Atkinson 2014), where aspects of content were released across YouTube, including fake news videos and various websites of fictional organizations (that are not mentioned in the film), including additional non-film characters. Although both Prometheus and Cloverfield have been assigned to the “campaign” stream as indicated in Table 1.2—both films were part of existing franchises, Prometheus was part of the Alien franchise which originally included Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), Alien 3 (1993) and Alien: Resurrection (1997). Prometheus was positioned as a prequel to the original Alien film, although this was vehemently criticized by fans of the franchise as oblique and unrelated. Cloverfield is part of the J. J Abrams anthology franchise which included the manga Cloverfield/Kishin comic book (2008), the original Cloverfield film and the subsequent Cloverfield Lane (2016). The Cloverfield universe is also referenced outside of this anthology in other aspects of J. J Abrams’ work. The Slusho! drink (a key expositional object and “diegetic portal” in the Cloverfield transmedia) also features in Abrams’ television show Alias and the Targuato logo (a fictional 58

organization of great significance in the Cloverfield universe) appears on a skyscraper within a futuristic San Francisco skyline in a Star Trek Superbowl advert. However, neither Prometheus nor Cloverfield take on the modalities of franchise transmedia as they are described above; rather, they take on the subversive and transgressive characteristics of campaign transmedia. What they also both signal is the maturation of transmedia film form where the recurrence of specific globally translatable genres (sci-fi, horror, and action), and the persistence of a particular set of narrative strategies.

Transmedia Film Strategies A number of strategies have been established and have now become staples in the lexicon of transmedia film—such as companion “apps” and social media extensions which have become a key facet of film marketing campaigns. There is a notable predisposition for certain narrative mechanics and distinctive aesthetics. In Beyond the Screen (Atkinson 2014), I proposed that transmediality in film has taken on a number of different approaches through which to meaningfully create merchandising and other commodified engagement opportunities, as well as to facilitate the spread of content, discourse, and discussion about the film across platforms to both extend audiences and deepen their engagements. These forms that are fictional and perform a narrative function beyond promotion, using what I have previously identified as “diegetic portals” (Atkinson 2014), which are common to both franchise and campaign transmedia. The components of a transmedia film will typically involve one or more of the following strategies: • the extension and enhancement of the world of the film, its textures, themes, and mythology; • the extension of the story and plotlines of the film which such as back-story, prestory, post-story and parallel-story plot extensions; • revealing and rehearsing the narrative structuring of the film in order to guide the audiences’ narrative comprehension.

The Extension and Enhancement of the World of the Film By way of example of this first strategy, the world of District 9 (2009) literally spilled out onto the streets through its physical installations of benches, billboards, posters, and bus-stops designating areas as “human” or “non-human,” which served to extend the mythology and textures of the film. The campaign also incorporated a number of in-film websites. These included d-9.com, which allowed the viewer to elect their species as human or non-human, to then receive subsequent real-time event updates. The in-film company MNU (multinationalunited.com) also had its own website to which Mnuspreadslies.com was the resistance-blog. Mathsfromouterspace.com 59

originated from MNU and included tests which audience members could take in order to qualify for the fictional initiative. Similarly, The Hunger Games (2012) fans were able to register for one of the “districts” (which make up the film’s narrative vista) via the Capitol.pn website (the “pn” domain suffix makes reference to the film’s fictional universe of Panem). Tumblr was also utilized to develop Capitol Couture, showcasing the fashion and costumes of the characters which are one of the defining aesthetics of the film. Thee video-game-oriented site IGN (Imagine Games Network) featured training activities simulations of those that the characters were subjected to in the films.

The Extension of the Story and Plotlines of the Film This narrative tactic is used to communicate elements of the back-story (as was the case with Cloverfield, 2008), pre-story (as demonstrated in The Dark Knight, 2008) and post-story (illustrated by A.I. Artificial Intelligence, 2001). “The Beast” was set in the future-distant year of 2142, and all of the associated websites were dated as such. As Phillips states, “The Beast” works as “a study in the long-term consequences of the events of the film” (2012, 214). It also served to extend the mythology, texture and themes of the film; for example a website entitled Ballederma sold artificial companions similar to those represented in the film. In addition to websites, “The Beast” also involved a number of live events including one where audience members were able to call the Statue of Liberty security number in order to talk to a security guard to save a kidnapped teenager. Phillips describes the feeling of agency that this project induced through communicating with a fictional character as emblematic of the ARG experience (2012, 214). Hence the categorization of the audience experience of “The Beast” as an embedded one (see Table 1.2).

To Reveal and Rehearse the Narrative Structuring of the Film Some campaigns have been used to introduce the complexity of the narrative structure to an audience, and to rehearse them in its navigation and interpretation of the film’s language. Inception (2010), for example, conveys a complex, multi-layered narrative structuring depicting events that are occurring within dreams, and within the dreams of dreams of different characters. The audience is introduced to this complex narrative structure through the mind-crime game which is initially accessed through the “Pasiv Device” website, which was established in the lead-up to the film’s release. It exists at the level of the intradiegesis, in which the manual for the Portable Automated Somnacin IntraVenous (Pasiv) device (the tool by which the operator can enter the dreams of others) can be accessed and interacted with. Produced in the style and language of traditional equipment manuals, the user can browse through various basic monochrome animations which demonstrates its use before being directed to the scene of the crime website, which in turn provided a gaming environment for audience 60

members to further explore the thematic dimensions of the film. Of course, these three modes are all used to market and raise awareness of the films; they all featured as pre-release strategies, which become redundant and unsustained after the point of the film’s release. This is another key distinction between campaign and franchise transmedia—campaigns are time-bound, whereas franchises endure, sustain, and grow over years.

From Embedded Engagement to Embodied Experience It was between 2013 and 2015 that a shift in the logics of transmedia engagement in film and cinema took place—for one, the principles of ARG return—but also in terms of the manifestation of embodied experience. This manifests in three key projects: 1. David Cronenberg: Evolution exhibition, and the accompanying Body/Mind/Change ARG. 2. The recent wave of virtual reality (VR) as a tool for promotion and engagement. 3. The immersive Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back experience by Secret Cinema.

Body/Mind/Change Body/Mind/Change (BMC) was referred to as “a multiplatform Augmented Reality Game.” It was developed to promote and accompany the retrospective exhibition of film director David Cronenberg which was launched at Toronto International Film Festival in autumn 2013, and an accompanying online virtual exhibition. The BMC experience made specific reference and paid homage to the iconographic prop from Cronenberg’s 1999 film, Existenz, that is namely the “POD”—the biologicaltechnological-organic gaming console that was inserted into the “bio-ports” situated in the lower backs of the characters of the players which enables neurological access to the different levels of the game. In the case of BMC, and its inherent nostalgic turn, the POD is reimagined and a new discourse surrounds its existence, reframed for contemporary, digital audiences, using the language and concepts of the present day. The fictional conceit of this project was seeded in a discourse of the real, consistent with the conventions of the ARG, in the online periodical Filmmaker Magazine: Earlier this year, without much fanfare, David Cronenberg quietly licensed the fictional technology and science found within his films Shivers, The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome and eXistenZ for a mind-bending eight-figure sum. While it is common for a film’s IP to make its way into other mediums, such as books, television or games, it is highly unusual for a film’s fictional elements to become actual biotechnology. (Weiler 2013)

Here, there is an embedded reflexive reference to transmedia tropes, in what could be described as a meta-transmedia campaign, which I had previously noted of the “immersive pre-premiere experience” of Hunted, a global espionage television series in which an explicit reference is made to “the 1 per cent.” The campaign centers on a recruitment campaign launched by the in-film firm Byzantium Security, a clandestine intelligence organization. The posters that appeared throughout New York stated, “We’re not for everyone, just the 1 per cent who matter.” This targeted “call to action” presents a self-reflexive acknowledgment to its imagined audience, an allusion to the 1 per cent who will interact with the campaign, and become an integral facet and driving force of its success (Atkinson 2014, 34). The Hunted project is imbued by the signatory gesture of Cronenberg as a direct reference to the fictional device created in the 1999 film Existenz, thereby illuminating a moment of retrospective intertextual cross-pollination. The director himself is centralized in the new fictional POD universe and becomes subject and host to his own fictional creation. The conceptualization as POD as an organic game console was reimaged for 2013 audiences using the name as an acronym of “PERSONAL ON DEMAND,” in which the campaign is focused on a call for human-hosts to volunteer to be implanted with a “sensory learning and data-mining organism.” It is the notions of biosurveillance, content discovery, and mind-share space that are conflated within this 2013 iteration of POD, the audience member eventually received their own unique “POD” generated in response to the questions that they have answered and recipients were encouraged to publish and share photos on social media, which in turn act as marketing devices with which to draw attention to the exhibition. This suggestion of a physiological transgression of the POD (explored in the 1999 film in relation to gaming), is revisited with its re-conception in 2013, through the implication of the extension of the materiality of the cinematic text into the human form. This visceral metaphor of embodiment can be seen to be indicative of the sustained discourses of fear that exists around the technologization of society and the body.

Virtual Reality A further emergent immersive transmedia extension is VR where the world of the film is actualized in three-dimensional space. One of the first VR installations to accompany a feature-film release was the Oculus Rift experience for Interstellar (2014), installed at the AMC Metreon in San Francisco, in November 2014. VR has previously featured in exhibitions relating to film, including for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey VR installation, in which the viewer could explore the circular centrifugal space of Discovery One—the spaceship that features in the film—in 360degree space (at the Stanley Kubrick Dreaming exhibition at Somerset House in summer 2016). We can now see the VR tie-in fast becoming a staple of feature film promotion and exhibition, providing the opportunity to immerse audience members 62

into the fictional universes of films (at least those of particular genres including horror, sci-fi, and action), and also those associated with franchises. Recent franchise-based VR examples include tie-in experiences for Assassin’s Creed (2016) and Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) as well as for John Wick (2014) with a fully realized VR game for the HTC Vive. Other examples include Dunkirk (Save Every Breath) (2017), It: Float (2017), and Blade Runner 2049: Replicant Pursuit (2017), the latter a VR experience that was embedded into a wider transmedia campaign. Indeed, the world of Blade Runner was re-created as part of Comic-Con and a special edition release of Johnnie Walker Director’s Cut whisky is planned as an homage to the original film. These latest transmedia innovations are driven by commercial partnerships which are established to promote new technology platforms alongside associated media content and products—Oculus and Disney being a clear example of such techno-cinematic synergies.

Secret Cinema and Star Wars The third example of contemporary transmedia film concerns Secret Cinema, and in particular its immersive experience for Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) (see Atkinson and Kennedy 2016 and Pett 2016 for in-depth explorations into this particular case study, and for an overview of the work of this organization). This particular production marked a turning point for Secret Cinema—it was its first immersive screening of a franchise-based film, in which the license allegedly took over a year to negotiate with Disney/LucasFilm (Wilson 2015). The experience spanned five months, running from June to September in London and selling 100,000 tickets (each at £75), generating over £7 million at the box office. Upon purchasing a ticket, audience members were invited to join the rebel alliance through an online interface whereby, after a series of questions, they were given one of the following identities: Galactic Explorer, Mercenary, Governor of the Alliance, a member of the Alliance Starfighter Corps or Creative Council. They were encouraged to engage in the in-world communications channel via a themed fictional website, to communicate with other audience members and to purchase costumes and props from the online store ready for their attendance at the immersive screening. On the evening of the screening, audiences were directed to the secret location—a disused printing press which had been transformed into the Earth Cargo Airlines (ECA) terminal building—and were subject to an immersive experience which was five hours in length, culminating in the augmented screening of the film. During the experience, audience members could perambulate through the Mos Eisley themed marketplace, interacting with characters from the film including C-3PO and R2-D2. The Death Star was flown over the audience’s heads and they were delighted by the iconic light sabre battle sequence. Crucially, this example signified a moment of convergence between the dual trajectories of campaign and franchise transmedia, taking on the characteristics of both. 63

More recently, the proposed Star Wars themed-land was announced. The immersive attraction is due to open at the two US Disney parks in 2019 and is said to be based on a never-before-seen planet, a “remote trading port” in the Outer Rim, which is expected to be revealed in the new Star Wars films. It is said that visitors will be assigned identities in a very similar vein to that of the the Secret Cinema experience populated by the smugglers, the bounty hunters, and the rogue adventurers. Whether inspired by the high-profile Secret Cinema Star Wars event of 2015 or not, this attraction signals yet another shift in transmedia engagement strategies toward immersive and embodied experiences.

Conclusion BMC, VR, and Secret Cinema all present examples of “retrospective transmedia expansion,” a common trope in many emergent instances of transmediality which I define as the re-contextualization of a past film in a contemporary milieu. This is reflected in wider cinema release trends, which in 2017 have been particularly reliant on remakes, sequels, and prequels to prior box office and cultural successes. Crucially, these three instances are not forms of adaptation or remediation—they are new narrative extensions which are based on the world of the film but ones which provide re-interpretations, and ones which provide an embedded and embodied experience for the audience member. As with the earlier forms, these three cases still exhibit the same characteristics of transmedia storytelling as defined earlier, thus demonstrating the extent to which these are by and large film-centric strategies. We have seen how BMC extends both the texture of the filmic universe but also the directorial style, while VR extends the cognitive and spatial perception of the storyworld, and Secret Cinema expands the narrative spaces, story-times, and characters of the original. However, these three different vectors of contemporary transmedia film also provide a richly illustrative example of the move toward the experiential, the immersive, and the embodied in transmedia phenomena, which illuminates the wider context of the rise of the experiential and discourses of experience design and the experience economy (Pine and Gilmore 2011). They also all problematize the franchise and campaign binary that has been proposed in this chapter in sophisticated ways. Still, the two trajectories of franchise and campaign in transmedia film do continue to co-exist and intertwine in the contemporary media landscape, ensuring that the transmediality of film continues to evolve, extend, and expand in new ways.

References Atkinson, Sarah. 2014. Beyond the Screen: Emerging Cinema and Engaging Audiences. New York: Bloomsbury. Atkinson, Sarah, and Helen W. Kennedy. 2016. “From Conflict to Revolution: The Secret Aesthetic and Narrative Spatialisation in Immersive Cinema Experience Design.” Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies 13 (1): 252–279.

Brooker, Will. 2012. Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman. London: I. B. Tauris. Clark, Brian. 2011. “Reclaiming Transmedia Storyteller.” Facebook, May 2. Accessed August 14, 2017. www.facebook.com/notes/brian-clark/reclaiming-transmedia-storyteller/10150246236508993. Elsaesser, Thomas. 1998. “Fantasy Island: Dream Logic as Production Logic.” In Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age, edited by Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffman, 150–165. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Mittell, Jason. 2014. “Strategies of Storytelling on Transmedia Television.” In Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Cross-conscious Narratology, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan and Ian Noël-Thon, 253–277. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Oxford Dictionaries online. 2017. “Definition of Campaign.” Accessed November 2, 2011. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/campaign. Pett, Emma. 2016. ‘“Stay Disconnected’: Eventising Star Wars for Transmedia Audiences.” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 13 (1): 152–169. Phillips, Andrea. 2012. A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling: How to Captivate and Engage Audiences Across Multiple Platforms. New York: McGraw-Hill. Pine, B. Joseph, and James H. Gilmore. 2011. The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Weiler, Lance. 2013. “Pod Wants to Know You.” Filmmaker Magazine, April 23. Accessed July 1, 2017. http://filmmakermagazine.com/68303-pod-wants-to-know-you/. Wilson, Benji. 2015. “How Secret Cinema Built The Empire Strikes Back.” Telegraph. June 5. Accessed August 14, 2017. www.telegraph.co.uk/film/star-wars--the-empire-strikes-back/secret-cinema/.

2 Transmedia Documentary Experience and Participatory Approaches to Non-Fiction Transmedia Joakim Karlsen

Siobhan O’Flynn (2012, 143) defines transmedia documentary to be a narrative that is distributed “across more than one platform, it can be participatory or not, can invite audience-generated content or not, tends to be open and evolving, though not always.” She frames making transmedia documentaries first and foremost being about designing user experiences, and identifies how the shift “from film-maker to transmedia producer, curator and collaborator now demands a flexibility and willingness to experiment with the means of communication and a commitment to engage in communication” (O’Flynn 2012, 152). In a later paper, she develops how experience design is human-centered with a holistic model “for studying interaction as a qualitative experience across digital and physical media, with its attention to the possible multiplicities of human involvement” (O’Flynn 2016, 84). It is possible to see how this is in continuity with Henry Jenkins’ (2007) definition of transmedia storytelling as “a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.” An understanding of non-fiction transmedia as being about telling stories across multiple platforms framed as a design activity, has so far been common in the relatively sparse literature on the topic. Renira Rampazzo Gambarato (2013) follows this approach by addressing “essential features of the design process behind transmedia projects” with the aim to “support the analytic needs of transmedia designers and the applied research in the interest of the media industry” (81). Relying on some of the practical guides to making transmedia (Pratten 2015; Hayes 2011; Phillips 2012), and more theoretic treatments of transmedia storytelling in general (Scolari 2009; Saldre and Torop 2012; Dena 2010; Jenkins 2008, 2009b, 2009a), she develops a model for transmedia project design that can be applied to both fiction and non-fiction projects. One aspect she considers when developing the project design model for transmedia storytelling, is what kind of user engagement a transmedia project facilitates for. She claims that this is crucial in transmedia design and summarizes the issue:

An interactive project allows the audience to relate to it somehow, for instance, by pressing a button or control, deciding the path to experiencing it, but not being able to co-create and change the story; a participatory project invites the audience to engage in a way that expresses their creativity in a unique, and surprising manner, allowing them to influence the final result. Participation occurs when the audience can, with respect at least to a certain aspect of the project, influence on the set of components, such as the story. Stories that are mainly interactive can be considered as closed systems, in which the audience can act but cannot interfere with the story. Closed systems presuppose interaction but not participation. Besides the interactivity, open systems allow participation, i.e. the audience can influence the result and change the outcome. (Gambarato 2013, 87) This gives a simplified model of two approaches to audience engagement when designing non-fiction transmedia: (1) interactive projects aimed to give the audience an experience where non-fiction transmedia are designed as closed systems; (2) participatory projects allowing the audience to influence the final result, where nonfiction transmedia are designed as open systems. In their analysis of the Fish Fight non-fiction transmedia project, Gambarato and Medvedev (2015) use distinctions between minimalist and maximalist forms for participation (Carpentier 2016; Carpentier and Dahlgren 2013), where maximalist participation focuses on issues of power, and claim that this is the kind of participation the Fish Fight campaign facilitated for by letting the audience contribute to real policy changes by participating in the project. In the following I will contribute to this discourse by developing these two distinct approaches to non-fiction transmedia design. The first approach, which I label the experience approach, relies on storytelling, experience design, and mainly the making of closed transmedia systems. The second approach, which I label the participatory approach, relies on facilitation, participatory design, and the making of open transmedia systems. I do not claim that any of the approaches are generally better than the other, but that the second approach is useful when designing for maximalist kinds of participation. In support for developing and discussing the approaches further, I will use “Project Moken” (Cheng Munthe-Kaas, Jensen, and Wiik 2013) as a case, where the producers have gradually moved from the experience approach to the participatory approach over the course of six years.

Designing Non-Fiction Transmedia The experience approach is well described in the literature on non-fiction transmedia and it is possible to find guidelines and advice supporting this model (Hayes 2011; Pratten 2015; Phillips 2012). This is an author and story centered approach where experiences are designed, planned, and produced for, in a mostly top-down fashion, in 67

line with how most media productions are done today. Considering examples of nonfiction projects, both interactives and transmedia, as catalogued by the MIT Open Documentary Lab (“Open Documentary Lab at MIT” 2017) and the IDFA film festival (“IDFA Doclab Interactive Canon” 2017), they are mostly of this type. It varies a lot how the audience are engaged by virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), games, performances, installations, and so forth in these projects, but audiences are often given little influence on the final result or the characteristics of the main structure of the experience. They are given the opportunity to participate, but often minimally, by selecting, commenting, sharing, voting, signing petitions, and so forth. Even though experience design, as conceptualized by O’Flynn (2015), could accommodate for more maximalist kinds of participation, for making more open transmedia systems, this quickly threatens to “break” the story and by this challenge the position of the author.

Developing the Participatory Approach The participatory approach for non-fiction transmedia design relies on facilitation, participatory design, and maximalist kinds of audience participation. This is a departure from approaching the design of non-fiction transmedia as designing stories, toward designing platforms that enable members of the audience to influence the final outcome of the project. It is a bottom-up and open approach, not only aiming to let the audience influence the project after it has been “released,” but from the start. Principled participatory design (PD) emphasize how participation should be facilitated for in the design process in order to give all parties a voice (Kensing and Greenbaum 2013) and so that what is made is accountable to the problem that is being addressed (Suchman 2002). The ethos of participatory design can be compared and aligned to the ethos of the participatory documentary movements of the 1970s and 1980s (Tripp 2012) and shares a common rationale. In a recent study, the main challenges involved in designing interactive documentaries, or I-docs, that prioritizes participation before authorship were explored (Green et al. 2017). The researchers criticize many existing interactive documentary projects as having the same “centralized, authorial production structures and tokenistic forms of participation that have characterized traditional, linear documentaries” (Green et al. 2017, 6318), and claim that while they give the users “executionary agency” these projects don’t provide “structural agency” or the “ability to inform the context in which this dialogue occurs, or allow users to initiate their own conversations” (Green et al. 2017). They try to find ways to develop an infrastructure that support “structural participation” and frame this as undertaking “infrastructuring,” using participatory design and meta-design (Fischer 2011; Björgvinsson, Ehn, and Hillgren 2010; Dantec and DiSalvo 2013) to seek “sustainable configurations of creative making, interactive artifacts and design, with different stakeholders, at different times” (Green et al. 2017, 6319). From their case study, they report that facilitating for structural participation in the context of making an I-doc is generally 68

hard to do. This is supported in the literature, where infrastructuring projects are characterized by their ongoingness (Karasti and Baker 2008), the need for continuous facilitation (Löwgren and Reimer 2013), continuous matchmaking (Björgvinsson, Ehn, and Hillgren 2012), scaffolding (DiSalvo et al. 2014), and participation is ensured by openness and flexibility (Löwgren and Reimer 2013), under-design (Fischer and Giaccardi 2006), and generativity (Monteiro et al. 2012). According to Gerhard Fischer and Elisa Giaccardi (2006, 427), meta-design “extends the traditional notion of system design beyond the original development of a system to include a co-adaptive process between users and system, in which the users become co-developers or co-designers.” Systems must be flexible, meaning that they cannot be designed prior to use, they must evolve at “the hand of the users” and “be designed for evolution.” They take care to delineate between design-time, which is future oriented and mostly about planning, and use-time which is situated action. The goal is to allow openness and evolution of the system at use-time, challenging designers to do under design and to focus on designing the “in-between.” An interactive art project that have some of these properties is “The Johnny Cash Project” (Milk 2012), where the users can contribute to the project by painting and submitting single frames to a continuously evolving music video. The video, or the end result of the project, is therefore continuously changing by the hands of the users. However, the project has no way for users to change the structure of the webpage or its functionalities and thereby facilitate for executional rather than structural agency. An example of structural participation in this case would be if the participants could make their own painting tools and share them on the project’s website for others to use. In summary, the participatory approach, as briefly sketched here, gives an indication of what Nico Carpentier (2011) means when claiming that deep or maximalist kinds of audience participation need to be anchored in and protected by strong organizational structures, having less to do with “new” media technologies than the willingness to use the resources needed to facilitate for it, requiring an ongoing and involved process determined by the issue at hand rather than sticking to a preconceived project design.

Case: Project Moken Project Moken aim to tell the story of the Moken sea nomads living in the Mergui archipelago of the coast of Myanmar and Thailand, to help them save their rapidly vanishing culture. The following description is based on an interview with Mette Cheng Munthe-Kaas, the main producer of the project (Cheng Munthe-Kaas 2017), analyses of what the project has made (Cheng Munthe-Kaas, Jensen, and Wiik 2013; Truong 2012; “One Tree Can Save a Culture” 2013; “Hold Your Breath” 2017; “The Ocean as a Place” 2017; Wiik 2014; Saab 2016) and project descriptions from early and late phases of the project (Cheng Munthe-Kaas 2012, 2015). The project illustrates the two main approaches to designing non-fiction transmedia; designing experiences 69

and designing for participation.

Designing Experiences In 2011/2012 the producers were invited by the Norwegian Film Institute (NFI) to create a transmedia project based on their documentary film project about the Moken. At this time, NFI gave non-fiction transmedia increased support (Karlsen 2014, 2016). The project received a grant from NFI where approximately 1 million Norwegian Krones (NOK) (equivalent to US$120,000) was earmarked for producing a webpage, a mobile application, and an online campaign based on the documentary film. The film No Word for Worry (Wiik 2014) follows the Moken protagonist “Hook” in his travels, both to make a living and to find a tree to make a traditional Kabang boat with the help of his father. The narrative relies on the dramaturgy common to many documentary films, of following an individual trying to accomplish a well-defined and articulated goal. In 2016, a “the making of” documentary (Saab 2016) was screened on the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK, giving an impression of how the documentary was produced. In the film, the director starts out saying that he did not want to tell his story about the Moken people, but have them tell their story. However, in the film he relates how he wrote the storyline before shooting the film and how he followed this storyline on location, with adaptions to some unexpected events taking place along the way. We see how he works with the subjects, staging situations in accordance with his script. The main character’s journey, with his main goal of securing an appropriate tree, would probably never have taken place without the facilitation of the film crew. This said, the treatment is respectful to the subjects portrayed in the film, based on the director’s well-developed relationship with them. In 2012, the project released a tree campaign online (“One Tree Can Save a Culture” 2013), petitioning people to sign their name with the name becoming part of a growing 3D rendered tree (Figure 2.1). With the help of an interactive advertising agency, they had a model of a tree made and worked with ways to let the tree visualize the growing community. The idea was to let the branches and leaves mirror how the tree was shared and signed on Facebook. After some changes in the Facebook application programming interface (API) in 2012, this was no longer possible, so they ended up placing names more randomly in the tree. This part of the project, costing around 400,000 NOK (equivalent to US$48,000), a substantial sum in the context of independent documentary filmmaking in Norway, has been used as evidence by other independent filmmakers in Norway for why non-fiction transmedia production is unsustainable. In their view, the sparse resources available to independent documentary film producers are needed to make traditional documentary films, and should not go to professional designers and developers (Karlsen 2014).

Figure 2.1 The webpage displaying the growing tree, with options to participate by signing the petition. Source: “One Tree Can Save a Culture” (2013).

Around the same time, Project Moken released the Dive Moken iPhone app (Truong 2012), where people were challenged to hold their breath while seeing video footage of Hook taking one of his dives. Besides having a simple interface where the user can time herself, the app features an individual score board, options to share the app with others, and links to the other installments of the project; the tree campaign, the YouTube channel, and the project’s webpage (Figure 2.2). The producer told me that the app has had a life of its own in some communities but, as with the tree campaign, the changing Facebook terms of use subverted the ambition to open up for people to compete and challenge each other, by having the scoreboard reflect the results of a subset of Facebook users.

Figure 2.2 Screenshots of the Dive Moken iPhone application. Source: Andy Truong (2012).

The third interactive installment of the project was two stories published on the project webpage (Figure 2.3) (“Hold Your Breath” 2017; “The Ocean as a Place” 2017). “The Ocean as a Place” tells the story of the main challenges to the environment the Moken depend on to uphold their traditional ways. How the government keep them from harvesting from the sea, and how the sea is almost barren because of overfishing and climate change. In addition, it explains what a Kabang boat is, and why this type of boat is central to the Moken culture. “Hold Your Breath” focuses on the Moken’sability to hold their breath for long stretches of time and focus under water, skills that enable them to harvest the food they need to survive. Both webpages rely on horizontal and vertical scrolling and text combined with images with more information available in pop-ups. In “Hold Your Breath” the vertical scrolling is a metaphor for diving and going deeper and in “The Ocean as a Place” the horizontal scrolling is a metaphor for riding a boat on the surface of the ocean (Cheng MuntheKaas 2017). Both pages contain relatively little information, and seem to work more as a way to get people interested in the other installments of the project, than stand-alone web stories. The producers had plans for adding more content to the pages, but ran out of money before being able to do so.

Figure 2.3 The starting pages for the two web stories about the Moken people published on the project’s home page. Source: “The Ocean as a Place” (2017), “Hold Your Breath” (2017).

Designing for Participation When the film had been screened at festivals, in cinemas, and by broadcasters, the transmedia project had run for about two years. Cheng Munthe-Kaas and Wiik were still engaged in the situation of the Moken people and did not end the project. From working with non-fiction transmedia to create attention and engagement around the documentary film, they refocused the project to be about helping the Moken people in any way they could. Cheng Munthe-Kaas (2017) explains this choice: It all started with the goal of making the Moken people known to the world, to bring some light to the issue … Now we take initiatives to help them help themselves … In addition to the M.A.P project [Moken against plastic], which aim to give them the opportunity to stay on the ocean, we have a project aiming to build a Kabang boat, where they will build it themselves and we will provide the necessary funds … But now we have spent so much of our private money on this, something we can’t do, so we have started campaigns to raise money so they can preserve their culture before it is completely gone. Several distinct initiatives have been undertaken in this phase of the project, the main ones being Moken Against Plastic (“Project M.A.P.–Moken Against Plastic” 2015) and Moken News (“Moken News” 2017). “Moken Against Plastic” started off as an Indiegogo campaign (“Back on the Waves–Rescuing the Moken Culture” 2017), with the aim of crowdfunding initiatives to help the Moken people live off the ocean again, by clearing away plastic and provide eco-tourism services to the nascent Myanmar tourist industry. The aim of “Moken News” is to help the Moken people tell their story themselves on social media, with the need to provide training, equipment, and help for them to do this. Being filmmakers, the producers use short films to help the campaigns along, but becoming a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Cheng Munthe73

Kaas (2017) relates these initiatives to the transmedia project: “I feel that we have started an NGO [non-governmental organization], but it stills continues to be a transmedia project because it still lives on these different platforms.” She notes how working with the project has become a lifestyle and something they do in their spare time, after earning a living from other film projects. In summary, it is possible to see how the issues concerning how to save the Moken way of life has led the producer and director to work with Project Moken as an ongoing, contingent, and involved process, becoming a strategy to both represent an issue and to work with solving it. Documentary filmmaking is part of how they do this, but is not prioritized over other means of communication in their initiative to improve the situation for the Moken.

The Relevance of the Two Approaches In the following, to assess the relevance of the two approaches to designing nonfiction transmedia, I will briefly consider how the approaches align with how things are usually done in the world of documentary film production. This is an orientation toward the existing cooperative activities and conventions supporting this world, which restricts what is easy to do and what is not. Here I rely on Howard Becker’s (1984) analysis of art worlds, but also Bill Nichols’ (1991, 2001) classification of documentary modes as historically situated and cooperative practices. Presenting Project Moken as having two distinct approaches is a simplification and hides the fact that the documentary filmmakers behind the project had a participatory approach throughout the project, with an explicit aim of giving the Moken people a voice and with a continuous concern for being accountable to them. However, it seems that the team behind the project took on an experience design approach when aligning their project to the requirements of NFI, their main funder. When designing the project in accordance with “how things are usually done” in the world of independent documentary film production, Project Moken became top-down, closed, and offered minimalist kinds of participation to the audience. The need to secure the funding offered by NFI gave a top-down and planned project model, supporting the need to make a convincing argument about the likelihood that the project was going to attract mass readership and/or artistic recognition at festivals. This implies that the director and producers had to take most creative decisions at the front end of this part of the project. The top-down approach also aligns well with how films are usually made, by setting up a rather hierarchical project model, where practitioners with different skillsets are hired to do specific jobs. In line with this approach, Project Moken outsourced parts of the production to an interactive advertising agency, something that was seen as unproblematic in itself, with the exception of the costs involved. In the later stages of the project, the participatory approach has been followed more clearly and has resulted in initiatives that challenge how things are usually done in the world of independent documentary film. The project has been evolving with the issues 74

most pressing for the Moken people, relying on the director’s close connection and familiarity with the community. What has been made in the project have become a means to empower the Moken people, with little focus on this content reaching a mass audience, or this being recognized as legitimate outcomes by funders, broadcasters, and peers. Project Moken has become a loosely organized NGO, but still in line with what can be characterized as a non-fiction transmedia project. This move toward a bottom-up, evolving, and community-led approach, has required a continuous battle to find resources, with crowdfunding as the main option so far. The limited resources that are mobilized by crowdfunding are used to help the Moken back onto the sea and to provide a tree for a Kabang boat, not primarily to initiate costly film production. Social media is used as the main distribution platform and instead of hiring media professionals to tell the Moken story, the project tries to train the Moken people to tell their story themselves. In Table 2.1 the experience approach is compared with the participative approach, based on how this has been undertaken in Project Moken. Table 2.1 A comparison of the two approaches to designing non-fiction transmedia in Project Moken Aspects of Project Project model The role of the director/producer Securing distribution Securing funding Securing viewers/participation Outcomes Skills and learning

Experience Approach Top-down, planned and hierarchical Storyteller

Participatory Approach Bottom-up and evolving

Early on Early on Masses

Continuous Continuous Communities

Identifiable works of art on multiple platforms Build on existing skills in the media industries

Empowering a community

Facilitator

Aim to give the community the skills needed to become fuller participants

When considering Project Moken as a whole, the two approaches can be seen as relying on and feeding into each other. In the first phase of the project, when the Moken experience was designed and produced, the result benefited from the director’s and producer’s participatory stance in the project, portraying the Moken culture on their terms based on several years of living and working with the Moken. In 2010, a documentary film was produced with funds from the Kon Tiki museum in Oslo, where “Hook” and his brother bring a Kabang boat to Norway, and sail from Stavanger to Oslo, with focus on bridging the traditional boat building cultures of the Moken and the Norwegians. The second and ongoing phase of the project has relied heavily on what was produced in the first phase. The Moken experience, including a featurelength film, an app, a campaign and two interactive web stories, have given a frame of reference and direction for the initiatives taken later.

Conclusion 75

In conclusion, both the experience and participatory approaches to non-fiction transmedia needs to be developed further, and it is important to understand how they can be combined in productive ways. However, the articulation of the participatory approach challenges the existing logic of non-fiction media production to a larger degree than the experience approach. Non-fiction transmedia in general and documentary in particular have the potential to fulfill the ideals of participatory media with audience engagement, especially via participation, but this will require cooperative activities that up until now have been rare in the context of professional non-fiction media production.

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3 Transmedia Television Flow, Glance, and the BBC Elizabeth Evans

Transmedia strategies are becoming an increasingly everyday part of the television industry and televisual experiences. Paul Grainge and Catherine Johnson describe transmedia promotion, for instance, as ever more “commonplace” within television (Grainge and Johnson 2015, 124). Digital technologies including the Internet, laptops, smartphones, and tablets have opened up not only new, transmedial ways of watching television content, but also brought new companies into the sector, challenging the boundaries of what “television” is. However, despite the apparent “newness” of these developments, television and transmediality have a long conceptual and empirical history. In particular, some of the foundational theories of television studies continue to be useful for considering how transmedia logics are applied to television. This chapter will consider two of these theories: Raymond Williams’ model of flow and John Ellis’ “glance theory.” It will explore parallels between the broadcast television phenomena explored through each theory and key characteristics of transmedia television. The final section of this chapter will explore how conceptual linkages between television studies and transmedia studies play out within an institutional context. In particular, it will address how notions of transmediality have been at the heart of television since its inception and have merely become more prominent with the embracing of digital platforms. The focus here will be on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the UK’s leading public service broadcaster, and how the Corporation has in fact operated as “transmedia television” since television broadcasting began.

Television, Transmediality, and Time: Liveness and Flow The first alignment between television and transmediality relates to the importance of time to our understanding of both. Television, especially television broadcasting, is a fundamentally temporal medium. Even as changes such as personal video recorders (PVRs) and video-on-demand (VOD) allow audiences to access television content whenever they choose, the temporal qualities of television persist. Television’s liveness, its ability to broadcast events as they happen, is often held up as both a

defining characteristic of television broadcasting (Gripsrud 1998, 19; Carroll 2003, 268) and as a legitimating factor that elevates it as “worthy” (Levine 2008). Within the context of transmedia television, practices of transmedia storytelling and transmedia marketing have been used to reinforce live viewing in light of PVRs and VOD services that fragment the audience and, crucially, allow them to skip adverts (see Tussey 2014, 206; Evans 2015, 121–122; Grainge and Johnson 2015, 120). However, it is Raymond Williams’ model of television as “flow” that most usefully brings the temporalities of television together with the temporality of transmediality, especially transmedia storytelling. In his model of “flow,” British cultural theorist Williams recounts his experience of US television upon his arrival in Miami after a long transatlantic sea voyage. In a now seminal anecdote, he describes how three different films (one being broadcast in full, the others in the form of trailers) became interspersed with adverts and became one continuous, but incongruous, sequence. As he describes: A crime in San Francisco (the subject of the original film) began to operate in an extraordinary counterpoint not only with the deodorant and cereal commercials but with a romance in Paris and the eruption of a prehistoric monster who laid waste to New York. (2003 [1974], 92) This experience led him to the formulation that: it may be even more important to see the true process [of television] as flow: the replacement of a programme series of timed sequential units by a flow series of differently relates units in which the timing, though real, is undeclared, and in which the real internal organisation is something other than the declared organisation. (2003 [1974], 93) He argues that this flow of related, unrelated, and semi-related content units is a planned part of television’s structure. Television, in essence, becomes a collection of different segments of content that are brought together into a whole larger than any individual segment and guided by an ever-present, though potentially invisible, timebased organizational structure. “Flow” has subsequently become one of the foundational models of television studies, regarded as a defining characteristic of the medium itself (Gripsrud 1998). The organization of television’s flow into a schedule functions as a way to structure its endlessness (Ellis 2000, 130–147) and to frame program content for audiences (Weissman 2017). The rise of digital technologies, especially those that allow audiences greater control over their televisual experiences, have been positioned as challenging the centrality of Williams’ model to television studies (see, for example, Kompare 2006; Mittell 2011). However, scholars such as Catherine Johnson have 80

argued not only for the continued value of understanding flow in terms of television broadcasting (2013) but also of its application to the newer strategies of programming, marketing, and distribution that are emerging around television (2016). Key to flow’s contribution to understanding transmedia television is its highlighting of the blurred boundaries that exist between different kinds of television content and how audiences need to navigate their way through those blurred boundaries. Whereas the organizational structure for Williams’ model is broadcasting, the same concepts can be usefully applied when that organizational structure is transmediality. Most notably, some of the earliest work to consider transmedia television applied the metaphor of flow to their case studies. John Caldwell explores a number of case studies including how events in the television series Homicide: Life on the Streets were extended into online videos and viewers were invited to help solve diegetic crimes (2003). Will Brooker, meanwhile, examined online expansions for teen drama Dawson’s Creek in which viewers were able to uncover additional back-story about the characters and purchase clothing seen on the program. Although neither uses the term “transmedia storytelling” to describe the phenomenon they discuss, their case studies clearly fit the pattern of a narrative deliberately and coherently expanded across different media and as such form examples of nascent digital televisual transmedia storytelling. Notions of flow appear throughout both discussions. For Caldwell, flow operates at the level of an audience who are increasingly moving across different media platforms when he argues that, “programming strategies have shifted from notions of network program ‘flows’ to tactics of audience/user ‘flows’” (2003, 136, original emphasis). For Brooker, it is how content “overflows” the boundaries of television (2004). As both scholars demonstrate, metaphors of the flow model remain relevant to the transmedia expansion of television. We can further develop the alignment between transmediality and televisual flow by considering two key characteristics they both share. Both flow and transmediality are concerned with the creation of coherent audience experiences across different pieces of content. Within Williams’ theory, the structures of broadcasting move audiences from one piece of content to another. This smooth movement—of audiences and of content—becomes key to ensuring audiences can successfully navigate and “flow” across different media. As Catherine Johnson has argued, the content that sits between television episodes (called “junctions”) serve to “bring clarity and order” (2013, 123). Johnson goes on to explore how continuity announcers and idents, those short pieces of content that identify which channel is being watched, mark the points where content changes from program to trailer or adverts and back to program again but also creates coherency through a single brand identity (2013). Within transmedia contexts, overt directions or continuity in authorship and narrative features such as characters serve a similar purpose (Evans 2011a, 28). Instead of keeping the audience watching the same channel, however, the purpose is instead to keep audiences within a transmedia narrative by moving to non-televisual spaces, from the television channel to a website or to even non-audiovisual content. In many ways, by directing audiences 81

away from the television set, onto other screen devices and toward non-televisual forms of content, transmedia television invites audiences to break one flow (that of the television channel) by creating and privileging another (that of the transmedia narrative world). However, both processes actually share the fundamental characteristic of moving audiences between different forms of content in a way that feels coherent and connected. If the first characteristic shared between televisual flow and transmediality explores how audiences are moved away from television content, the second relates to how they are constantly drawn back to television. A frequent use of transmedia content within television is as a bridge between episodes or even seasons of a television series. This particularly occurs in relation to “serial” narratives, in which story arcs are told over a number of weeks with little or no narrative resolution in individual episodes (see Creeber 2004). In addition to “channel flow,” we can therefore also consider “serial flow,” that televisual storyworlds have necessary temporal gaps within them that take viewers away from the storyworld and toward other content. In these cases, transmedia strategies work to reinforce a sense of televisual flow by maintaining audience interest in a particular series through additional, transmedia content (see Evans 2011a, 37) and ultimately directing them back to the next television episode. Transmedia flows direct audiences away from the television set but also back toward it. Notions of time and flow are therefore the first parallel between how television and transmediality can be understood. Both ultimately share a number of characteristics, of working to move audiences in particular ways, of working within expanded, serial narrative formats and of creating an overarching coherent experience. Looking to one of the foundational models of television studies, Williams’ flow, therefore offers one useful way of understanding transmedia strategies.

The Domesticity of Transmedia Television: Mediating the Glance If flow connects television and transmediality through the temporal dimensions of both, the second key conceptual framework examined here connects them through the position of televisual technologies within daily life, especially the home. Television has traditionally been understood as a domestic medium, with a consistent strand of television studies positioning television within the social, spatial, technological, and temporal dynamics of the home (see, for example, Morley 1986; Spigel 1992; Silverstone 1994; Gauntlett and Hill 1999). Of the foundational theories concerning television and the domestic, John Ellis’ theory of the television “glance” is most valuable for exploring the relationship between television and transmediality. Ellis argues that because television is fundamentally a domestic medium, it: does not encourage the same degree of spectator concentration. There is no surrounding darkness, no anonymity of the fellow viewers, no large image, no lack of movement amongst the spectators, no rapt attention. TV is not usually 82

the only thing going on, sometimes it is not even the principal thing. TV is treated casually rather than concentratedly. (Ellis 1982, 128) As a result, he argues, viewers do not “gaze” at the screen as they would do in the cinema, but instead “glance” at the television set as their attention is drawn elsewhere: “the gaze implies a concentration of the spectator’s activity into that of looking, the glance implies that no extraordinary effort if being invested in the activity of looking” (1982, 137). Whilst much work has debated Ellis’ model, arguing instead that television viewing can be focused and attentive (see, for example, Bacon-Smith 1992, 128; Caldwell 1995, 25–27; Brooker 2005; Evans 2011a, 143), the increasingly transmedial nature of the television industry, the content it produces and the context in which it is consumed makes his argument ever more relevant. The connection between Ellis’s glance theory and notions of transmediality emerges when considering the ways in which digital technologies, most notably portable screen devices, have been integrated into the daily practices of both the television industry and television audiences. On the one hand, transmedia distribution strategies mean that television has left the home via portable screen devices. Whilst Anna McCarthy (2001) has identified a history of television in public spaces, the development of portable screen devices has amplified the convergence between television and non-domestic viewing. Television broadcasters have increasingly developed video-on-demand (VOD) strategies that allow access to television content via laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Companies such as Netflix and Amazon now operate as part of the television industry and equally have inherently transmedial approaches to distribution. As a result, television is not just available at home through the television set; it has expanded onto buses and trains, into cafes and waiting rooms. These spaces are perhaps even more distraction-filled than the home, filled with the general public and other calls on our attention such as the end of our journey or the start of an appointment (Evans 2011a, 142–143). Notions of “glance” therefore become key to television’s transmedia expansion outside of the home. On the other hand, the intersection between the television glance and transmediality has also been drawn out by more recent scholarship that considers how digital technologies have been integrated into the home itself. Key to this is the emergence of “second screen” practices. In such practices, portable media devices (usually a smartphone or tablet) are used alongside the television screen to access online material that may or may not be related to televisual content. Companion apps such as those for The X Factor (ITV 2004–) provide gaming opportunities or additional behind the scenes material (see Evans 2015). They therefore function as “transmedia” in a broad sense. In some cases, they may fit patterns of transmedia storytelling, in others they may function more as transmedia marketing or branding, and in others as transmedia distribution. They continue, however, to demonstrate how fundamental transmedia practices have come to be for the television industry and its audiences. In particular, 83

how transmedia strategies facilitate a form of “mediated glance” (Evans 2015, 124). Hye Jin Lee and Mark Andrejevic argue that the second screen environment “has encouraged the [television] industry to examine potential ways to capitalize on people’s propensity to simultaneously watching and browse (or watching and connect/socialize)” (2014, 42). This is often done through the creation of companion apps. These apps are designed to run “live” alongside the broadcast of content ranging from one-hour dramas to reality shows. They facilitate community discussions, include quizzes and puzzles, or provide extra information about the content appearing on the television screen (see also Tussey, 2014). Lee and Andrejevic identify how such strategies serve to reinforce the television industry’s parameters within this more transmedial environment. They argue that second screen companion apps are “designed to fold television viewing into the monitored embrace of a digital enclosure: a commercial surround in which one’s activities are recorded, stored and mined for marketing purposes” (Lee and Andrejevic 2014, 53). For an increasingly transmedial television industry, creating their own spaces within the app culture of smartphones and tablets allows them to marshal, manage, and monitor audience behavior away from the television set. Other scholars, however, present a less ideal alignment between the television industry’s aims to use second screen devices to “enclose” digital behavior and the realities of audience’s second screen behavior. Sheryl Wilson conducted focus groups with audiences around second screen use and found little alignment between such use and television content (2016, 183). Elizabeth Evans, Tim Coughlan, and Vicky Coughlan (2017) equally challenge the framing of second screen activities within the concerted strategies of the television industry. Their aim was to use monitoring technology including cameras an IP (internet protocol) trackers to map the kinds of behaviors implied in Lee and Andrejevic and Tussey’s work, in which companion apps work to enclose television-related transmedia behavior. However, they argue that “what actually emerged was relatively little such behaviour” (Evans, Coughlan, and Coughlan 2017, 8). Instead, they found that second screen activities consisted of “disconnected, ephemeral and forgettable multiplatform experiences” (Evans, Coughlan, and Coughlan 2017, 8). The kinds of experiences that these second screen strategies for television, which extend audience experiences with content transmedially, encourage for their audiences can be usefully understood by returning to Ellis’ glance theory. In particular, Ellis’ model is useful for its recognition that television has always competed for viewer attention. Within a transmedia televisual culture, that competition now not only consists of the mundane activities of domestic life, but also mediated spaces (Evans 2015, 124) that offer more media content on a different device. As such, the emergence of second screen activities is simply an extension of television’s preexisting conditions of use. Just as Ellis frames television as an inherently distracted behavior, multitasking is equally (if not more so) inherently distracted. Dan Hassoun describes second screen activities as “simultaneous media use,” a label that 84

immediately connects them with notions of attention and distraction. He argues that much scholarly attention on converged or transmedia behavior presumes “that users engage with this content one medium at a time” (2012, 273–274). Ideas of transmedia storytelling in which audiences move from one piece of content to another present a similar impression. However, Hassoun instead argues that it is necessary to recognize how “the rise of ‘interactive’ media has only multiplied the potentials for distraction and split attention in various environments” (2012, 274). Transmedia content and distribution strategies such as companion apps allow broadcasters to keep that distraction within spaces that they ultimately control and manage through what can be understood as “mediated glances” (Evans 2015, 124). Just as notions of television’s flow can be applied and adapted to fit the context of transmedia television, so too can an understanding of how television sits, as it always has done, within fragmented and distracted viewer attention. The core ways of understanding broadcast television also offer clear insight into understanding transmedia television.

Case Study: The BBC as Transmedia Television The above discussion demonstrated how transmedia television can be usefully examined within the frameworks already provided by television studies. More broadly, whilst television has undergone significant changes as a result of digital technologies and transmedia strategies, those changes should not be taken as a radical departure from the way television has always functioned. To a certain extent, the television industry has indeed turned to transmedia strategies as a means to respond to perceived changes in audience behavior. Technological developments such as PVRs, online viewing, and portable screen devices have contributed to a shifting of the previously stable ground on which television stood and an undermining of its core distribution technology of broadcasting. However, as the above discussion has indicated, the changes wrought by an increasingly transmedial television culture have equally re-emphasized some of the foundational principles of television as both a media form and as a field of scholarship. The relevance of transmediality to television (and vice versa) becomes even more apparent when looking at a case study of UK public service broadcaster the BBC. Examining the corporation’s history and current strategies demonstrates how television and transmediality have a long, intertwined relationship. The BBC was initially launched as a radio broadcaster in 1922. However, only a year later the Corporation had moved into publishing with listings magazine The Radio Times and within a decade of its founding took responsibility for developing television services and content, becoming the focal point around which early television experiments coalesced (see Aldridge 2012, 70). From its first decade, then, the BBC began acting not as a radio broadcaster, but as a transmedia institution, a strategy that has only continued since the 1930s. The Corporation’s adoption of a text-based television information service, Ceefax, in the early 1970s meant that BBC audiences 85

accessed a combination of audiovisual and text-based materials long before the Internet. The BBC Micro program, an early home computer system, placed it within the computing sector. Throughout its history, BBC programs have been expanded through ancillary markets, merchandise, and early forms of transmedia storytelling (Evans 2011a, 23; Jacobs and Thomas 2017, 12–13). Online services became part of the Corporation’s activities as early as 1994 (see Naylor et al. 2000, 140) and the requirement to develop “digital Britain” was officially integrated into its public service remit from 2006 onwards. As an organization, the BBC has always worked across different media and worked to move audiences between different media, often taking a leading role in helping audiences to embrace new media platforms. It is this process of movement, of not simply producing content on different platforms but structuring audience experience across those different platforms, that demonstrates how the “television” of the BBC has always been transmedial. The BBC’s digital strategies further demonstrate how BBC “television” content is often inherently transmedial. James Bennett, for instance, has explored the Corporation’s coverage of D-Day commemorations in 2004. This coverage was not only transmedial, but originated with the new media team and then expanded onto television (Bennett 2008, 282), undermining any sense of digital platforms simply serving television. The Corporation’s strategies for children’s content has made use of apps such as Go CBBC and CBeebies Storytime to develop safe spaces for extending children’s engagement with television content into gaming spaces. Paul Grainge and Catherine Johnson have explored how the BBC, alongside digital agency Red Bee Media, have employed strategies of transmedia promotion for major natural history series such as Planet Earth Live (Grainge and Johnson 2015, 123–134). From the perspective of transmedia distribution, the BBC iPlayer, which allows viewers to access television and radio content for at least 30 days, has come to represent the gold standard of television catch-up services. Across the corporation’s activities, strategies that blur the boundaries between media forms and that work to move audiences between the television, their computer, and mobile device or between televisual, prosebased, and gaming content are apparent. Two particular examples of such transmedia strategies—the Doctor Who Adventure Games and BBC Three—illuminate both the BBC’s role as transmedia television and the continued relevance of flow and glance to understanding this role. The first example, the Doctor Who Adventure Games, points to how transmedia storytelling serves as a way to craft and manage both televisual and transmedia “flows.” Doctor Who has been one of the BBC’s core transmedia brands. Since its first broadcast in 1963, the series has served as a key case study for the licensed expansion of television content and, more recently, transmedia storytelling and branding (see Perryman 2008; Evans 2011a). Here I shall focus on a collection of video games created alongside the first season featuring the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) in 2010. The games could be downloaded for free via the official Doctor Who webpage. They were positioned as additional episodes of the television series and, although developed 86

by independent games company Sumo Interactive, were written by several members of the television production team. Four games were released in June 2010 with an additional game launched in October 2011 (see Evans 2014). Most notably, the games were framed in relation to the television episodes in a way that served to move audiences between the television set and the computer, and between viewing the episodes and playing a game, but maintained a sense of coherency. The games not only expanded the content of the television series transmedially, giving the audience new adventures featuring the Doctor and his companions, Amy and Rory, but also involved the crafting of an ideal transmedia user flow from the television series to the games. This in turn served as a bridge in the gap between seasons of the television program. The games are placed within the official canon of the series. Victoria Jaye, then Head of Multiplatform Commissioning for the BBC, discussed the games as “very much conceived as part of the TV series as four interactive episodes … it’s still very much of the Doctor Who canon” (Evans 2011b, 111). The official Doctor Who: The Encyclopedia positions each game within the story arc of the corresponding television series (Russell 2011, 400), reinforcing the serial flow of the series as encompassing television and gaming. The transmedia flow of Doctor Who also formed a core part of the BBC’s continuity and marketing strategy. At the end of the final episode of Matt Smith’s first series as the Doctor in 2010, titled “The Pandorica Opens” (tx 26/06/2010), the continuity announcer not only directed audiences to other televisionbased Doctor Who content, but also to a series of books. Immediately afterwards, a trailer ran for the Adventure Games. On the one hand, this moment uses the relationship between components of the television broadcast flow to initiate the audience’s movement onto a different platform and a different form of media content. The transmedia flow of the series was positioned as usurping the broadcast flow of the television channel. On the other hand, the trailer itself explicitly and aesthetically used the notion of transmedia flow. It began with a photographic image of Matt Smith as the Doctor from the television series. That image then mutated and transformed into his videographic likeness from the video game. A visual sense of flow from televisual space to digital space was therefore constructed at the same time as the advertisement worked to encourage the audience’s movement from the television set to the computer. A more recent, and dramatic, strategy enacted by the BBC further demonstrates how intertwined transmediality and television are. In March 2014, the BBC announced that it would be transforming its youth-oriented channel, BBC Three, into an onlineonly channel. The move was framed in terms that spoke to the variety and multiplicity of transmedia content that moving away from the broadcast schedule would allow. Damien Kavanagh, the controller of BBC Three, announced that the new channel would be able to function across different media forms, producing: a range of content which we know young audiences consume and we want to innovate in—short form video, image led storytelling, votes on reactive topics 87

or blog posts from contributors that will make people laugh and think and deliver a richer experience around our content. (Kavanagh 2014) Kavanagh’s reference to audience participation and storytelling through different media forms speaks to models of transmedia storytelling. However, more central to the move were attempts by the BBC to utilize transmedia distribution for the channel by creating content that would live across different media spaces and platforms. The conversion of BBC Three to online-only is, currently, the digital epitome of the BBC as transmedia television. On the one hand, the move places digital platforms such as the Internet on an equal footing with broadcasting. As a consequence, audiences are moved across different media platforms but always within the “enclosure” of the BBC. As it has been throughout its history, the BBC continues to operate transmedially. On the other hand, it also again reiterates the translation of the foundational theories of television studies into transmedia strategies. Although it may seem that becoming an on-demand service removes the relevance of channel flows, Catherine Johnson has argued that such services are not at all divorced from notions of flow (2017). Such a situation is evident in looking at how elements of flow are retained within BBC Three’s home on the iPlayer. Each episode has an individual page that not only allows the viewer to watch that episode but also directs them toward other, related content from BBC Three and the BBC more widely. These hyperlinks function in a similar way to how continuity announcers direct viewers to stay tuned in the junctions after broadcast episodes. At the end of each episode, the following episode in the series is lined up for automatic playback, literally flowing from one episode to the next. Episodes of individual series are still released weekly, reiterating the ebb and flow of serialized television broadcasting. Each of these elements again demonstrate the value in retaining core models of television as the medium becomes more and more transmedial.

Conclusion Television (and television studies) and ideas of transmediality have a closely entwined relationship. Two of the foundational models of television studies offer applicable frameworks for understanding how television functions as transmedia. Raymond Williams’ model of televisual “flow” is relevant for how audiences are moved between the different segments of transmedia content, how they are directed to remain within that content’s parameters. John Ellis’ “glance” theory speaks to how distraction can be kept within spaces owned and controlled by television broadcasters via transmedia strategies. A case study of the BBC, one of the oldest television institutions, further reiterates the intersection between television and transmediality both at an operational level in the practices of television broadcasters, but also at a strategic level through transmedia storytelling or distribution. This chapter has therefore demonstrated how, 88

as the BBC and other broadcasters seek out ways to address perceived changes in audience behavior, they are in fact working within a long tradition of industrial practice that has long seen the scope of television as transmediality.

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4 Transmedia Telenovelas The Brazilian Experience Inara Rosas and Hanna Nolasco

Television language is a fusion of previous expressions of radio, cinema, comics, and other synchronic visual media, such as video clips and computer graphics (Balogh 2005). Television in Brazil was officially inaugurated on September 18, 1950, by TV Tupi, a broadcaster from São Paulo. In its first phase, TV Tupi experimented with this mixture of languages until it was able to develop its own formats and genres. In the 1950s, the teleteatro—a filmed theater—was the main fictional genre on Brazilian television, exploring dramaturgic and literary classics with renowned actors of the national theater. Teledramaturgy in Brazil appeared as soon as television was inaugurated, but the 1970s consolidated telenovela as the great Brazilian television product. So much so that its historical development is intertwined with the very history of the expansion of television in the country. Teledramaturgy became part of the daily life of Brazilians as a product representative of national identity, and telenovelas became the most profitable and popular programs on Brazilian television. Telenovelas began to win international prizes, gain notoriety, and to be exported globally (Hamburger 2005). With high ratings, telenovelas increased the competition among broadcasters, culminating in the leadership of Rede Globo [Globo Network]. In the beginning, telenovelas did not have a stable time slot in the programming grid in Brazil. Globo Network stood out because it was the only broadcaster to maintain a regular teledramaturgy production, since its emergence. It established specific and fixed schedules for telenovelas with a limited number of episodes. On a side note, we highlight that telenovelas use “chapters” as narrative units for they expand the plot to resolve the situations in the future, causing the product to have an exact time to finish (Vieira 2014). Nevertheless, in this chapter, we will refer to these units as episodes, as it is the preferred term in English. Globo Network learned the trade from a more mature group of television professionals, as opposed to other broadcasters that came before. These Brazilian TV producers attended workshops at CBS and NBC in the United States and the broadcaster brought some professionals from the United States and Cuba to work at the TV station for a period. During this period, the construction of a Brazilian

teledramaturgical language began. More than a medium, television started to configure modes of action. The television culture, aligned with the culture of consumption and the power of the image, was the main reference of appeal to audiences in Brazil (Caminha 2010). Consolidated as the country’s main broadcaster since the 1970s, Globo Network remains the leader in production and distribution of telenovelas in Brazil, and its main investment is focused on this kind of product. Its daily programming schedule has specific time slots for telenovelas and news programs that go on air interleaved. Currently, three telenovelas are being produced, occupying time slots from the afternoon until late in the evening. There is also a show in the early afternoon called Vale a Pena Ver de Novo [Worth Seeing Again] that replays successful telenovelas from the past. Globo Network’s regular telenovelas air around 6pm, 7pm, and 9pm, and broadcast from Mondays to Saturdays, each one bringing a different kind of production, according to the specificities of the audience: (1) the 6pm telenovela concentrates most of Globo’s historical productions; (2) the 7pm telenovela brings light and romantic stories, tempered with some humor; and (3) the 9pm telenovela (prime time) has the most investment, prestige, and social repercussion. They are telenovelas for the family in general, stories that focus on everyday life with relevant social issues. Eventually, there is also an 11pm telenovela, that brings topics not suitable for younger audiences, such as violence and sex. Telenovelas have an average of 200 episodes and each one is 50 minutes (Campedelli 1987; Hamburger 2005). Brazilian telenovelas are respected and recognized worldwide, and Globo Network, although not a pioneer and not the only major broadcaster in the history of teledramaturgy, is the one with better know-how to make this type of entertainment product. The narrative form of telenovela is the strongest and most present dramaturgic reference in the life of Brazilian audiences. The most expensive and preferred TV programs in Brazil, they are audience leaders, making thousands of people watch the same story at the same time. Telenovelas launch fashion, induce behaviors, talk about controversies, provide services, and participate in the daily life of the country, playing an important role in the cultural, political, and behavioral life of Brazilian society (Sadek 2008).

Transmedia Content for Brazilian Telenovelas Telenovelas are long serial narratives that have a great sentimental and popular appeal, and a number of production specificities. For instance, the fact that telenovelas are considered an “open work” for the influence of audience feedback on the author’s creative process: “the time difference between an aired episode and a written episode is small, triggering a strong and rapid flow of feedback to the author” (Pallotini 2012, 13). The deep engagement Brazilians have with telenovelas represents a defining aspect that allows and instigates various possibilities of transmedia content development. 92

Within the context of media convergence and second screen phenomena, where the audience watches the show while tweeting and gives their opinion in online discussion forums, media companies seek to expand their reach and connect with other viewers through Internet. “It is the current economic and cultural context—large media conglomerates producing content in a coordinated and participatory manner with audience migratory behavior—that provides a fertile environment for the development of transmedia cultural products” (Lessa 2017, 90). Therefore, combining new forms of communication and digital platforms with a product that naturally engages the public, it would be logical for telenovelas to seek new ways of interacting with the audience, increasing their engagement, narrative complexity, and the value of the product. With transmedia strategies—in its various nuances, for instance, from storytelling to branding—the audience has at its disposal a fictional world composed of a tangle of pieces spread across several media platforms (Lessa 2017). However, the Brazilian television production of serial fiction is different in comparison to transmedia strategies of international productions, especially American TV series, whose products may consist of complex transmedia storytelling, involving web series, comics, short films, and consumer goods. In the case of Brazilian telenovelas, “the intense almost daily broadcast of episodes—except on Sundays—and the excess of plots, subplots and soap opera characters, leave little time and space for the creation of fictional transmedia extensions that are dedicated to narration of new stories” (Lessa 2017, 99–100). Thus, the most frequent transmedia extensions connected to telenovelas are fictional websites—of institutions that only exist within the plot—character’s blogs and social media profiles. There is also the current use of a variety of game applications that promote the immersion at the fictional universe of the telenovelas, allowing the audience to explore details of the characters, situations, costumes, and fictional cities (Souza, Lessa, and Araújo 2013). Regarding transmedia productions, Globo also stands out from other national broadcasters. That is why this chapter brings as a case study one of its telenovelas, Cheias de Charme [Sparkling Girls, 2012], considered a milestone in the transmedia content of the network. Since then, almost all Globo Network telenovelas have had an Internet team, not only to think about the transmedia content, but also for the paratextual content, which includes backstage videos, interviews, episode summaries, episode analysis by the characters, etc. Globo’s experience with transmedia narratives began with small actions. In Viver a Vida [Seize the Day, 2009–2010], a prime-time telenovela, one of the main plots was the story of Luciana, a young model who became quadriplegic after a serious accident. Globo then created Luciana’s personal blog called Sonhos de Luciana [Luciana’s Dreams] in which she talked about the changes in her life, her recovery, the difficulties and overruns. There was also a website called Portal da Superação [Overrun Portal] with testimonials and photos of real people who suffered physical accidents and managed to overcome the situation. Some testimonials were summarized and included 93

in the telenovela. Morde e Assopra [Dinosaurs & Robots, 2011], a 7pm production, marks the beginning of an Internet team for Globo Network telenovelas, as they were starting to use the online sphere as an ally of television shows. This team did not necessarily work within the transmedia aspects of all telenovelas, but expanded the action of Globo in other media, becoming an important asset for the broadcaster. The transmedia content of Dinosaurs & Robots involved Caçadora de Dinossauros [Dinosaur Hunter], a personal blog of a character called Júlia, a paleontologist, in which she shared a little about the adventure of finding fossils around the world. In addition, there was a game application called O Segredo de Naomi [Naomi’s Secret], a mobile application to engage the audience around the secret of a character that would play an important role at the end of the story, reminding the public of facts that took place months earlier in the telenovela (Lessa 2017). At the same year, O Astro [The Illusionist, 2011] engaged in a new experiment on transmedia content for Globo Network: a web series called Sob o Signo de Ferragus [Under the Sign of Ferragus], with seven short online episodes about the past of the male protagonist. In the same year, Cordel Encantado [The Enchanted Tale], a historic and fantasy telenovela, had a character directing a fictional documentary that was available online. The transmedia of the 9pm telenovela Avenida Brasil [Brazil Avenue, 2012] brings a different aspect of this phenomenon. Besides some standard extensions such as the blog Dicas da Monalisa [Monalisa’s Tips], with beauty tips related to the character Monalisa’s beauty parlor, the broadcaster invested on transmedia content that could get the fastest repercussion online, such as GIFs and photomontages. The reception of this content engaged the fans to create their own, which ended up having as much impact as the official content. There were numerous fanpages and fake profiles of characters on Twitter and Facebook and several Tumblrs making GIFs and photomontages, bringing new situations to the plot. After Sparking Girls, Globo Network developed more consistent transmedia strategies for some of the 7pm telenovelas. Totalmente Demais [Total Dreamer, 2015– 2016], developed, beyond the fictional websites, a fashion magazine site and a character’s blog, an unprecedented telenovela prequel and sequel. There was an episode zero with six-minute duration, a prologue where it was possible to know a little about the story and its characters, previously shown on the streaming service Globo Play, and a ten-episode web series called Totalmente Sem Noção Demais [Total Clueless Dreamer], launched on Globo Play the day after the end of Total Dreamer, also considered a spin-off. Haja Coração [Burning Hearts, 2016], the successor 7pm telenovela, traced a similar transmedia path with a cartoon displaying Tito, a dog considered the telenovela’s mascot. It also had an eight-episode web series about the character Teodora, showing her life on an island, while she had disappeared on the main plot. Êta Mundo Bom [The Good Side of Life, 2016], a 6pm telenovela, had as transmedia 94

extensions a radionovela and a web documentary about the Brazilian cinema during the 1940s. Other Brazilian networks are starting to modestly engage in diverse transmedia strategies for its telenovelas. For instance, Record Network created the web radio station Ampola as a transmedia extension for Balacobaco [Tricky Business, 2012– 2013]. At radio Ampola, audiences could interact with the content of the telenovela 24/7 and listen to a selection of songs from the plot. The radio website also offered ways to share content and interact with social media networks. In addition, SBT Network stands out for its series and telenovelas targeting younger audiences, in which some transmedia extensions are implemented. In Carrossel [Carousel, 2012–2013], a Brazilian version of a Mexican telenovela, SBT created a transmedia franchise, containing diverse autonomous products that related textually and/or commercially: the telenovela; two movies that premiered in 2015; Patrulha Salvadora [Salvage Patrol, 2014–2015], a spin-off series; an animated cartoon aired in 2016, also available online; and a musical theater production that is currently active.

Case Study: Cheias de Charme [Sparkling Girls, 2012] Sparkling Girls was a telenovela by Globo aired from April to September 2012. It was written by Izabel de Oliveira and Filipe Miguez, directed by Carlos Araújo, and had 143 episodes. The plot was focused on three housemaids—Maria do Rosário, Maria Aparecida, and Maria da Penha—who had different ages and lifestyles. They met in a police station because of different issues and from there on became good friends. Later in the story, they would become a musical group called Empreguetes, which is a term that plays with the Portuguese word for housemaid—empregada. Sparkling Girls’ relevance in transmedia terms relates to the fact that Globo took a chance with this product, creating many transmedia actions, using mainly the Internet to do so. They had character’s blogs, websites enhancing the narrative, campaigns on Twitter, online music video launches, a book release, and, moreover, the story interacted with other products of the same broadcaster. It was a risky maneuver that paid off, as it contributed to the success of Sparkling Girls, which was the telenovela that had more audiences in four years than any other produced by the same broadcaster and during the same time slot (UOL 2012).

The Video Clips Music was an important aspect within the narrative construction of Sparkling Girls. We argue that Sparkling Girls could be considered a musical telenovela, due to the presence of relevant characteristics of the musical genre, such as musical numbers and music/dance as important elements in the narrative (Grant 2012). Considering this relation, the video clip format was an important asset for the musical and transmedia purposes of this telenovela. The main characters were singers—the group 95

Empreguetes, the villain Chayene, and the “prince of housemaids,” Fabian. There were original songs composed specifically for the characters and two of them turned into video clips: Vida de Empreguete [Life of a Housemaid] and Nosso Brilho [Our Sparkle]. Both songs of Empreguetes became key to the construction of the musical group’s trajectory, delineating the characters’ anonymity first and successful career later. The most important action within Globo’s transmedia strategy within Sparkling Girls was the video clips creation: they were made public online before being aired on television, an unprecedented resource never seen in Brazilian telenovelas. The first one, Vida de Empreguete, had more impact. Within the plot, the protagonists were still anonymous housemaids, who had a reunion at Chayene’s house—Rosário’s employer at the time—in her absence, and decided to parody her and try on her clothes. Rosário, one of the Empreguetes, also played instruments, thereupon having the idea of a song called Vida de Empreguete, about the relationship between bosses and housemaids, their exhausting routine of household tasks, and the constant criticism they suffered. Since the singer’s house had a recording studio, she suggested to record the song and make a music video to save the moment, with the help of their producer friend Kleiton. Since the video was made without the house owner’s consent, and making fun of her as an employer, they decided to keep it to themselves. Here comes a plot twist: another character discovered the video clip’s existence, stole the DVD that contained it, and showed it to Chayene, who decided to take legal action. In this process, the video was accidentally leaked online by the son of one of the singer’s lawyers. Consequently, it went viral, transforming the three anonymous housemaids into music stars. This leaking process was shown in the telenovela in a mysterious way: some of the characters watched the video clip, but not the public. This strategy was central to the transmedia project: when Chayene and her team discovered that the video was online, at the final minutes of this episode (aired on a Saturday), Globo also “leaked” it to its website. The link was shown to the public for a few seconds through a close-up on the screen of a character’s computer. During the final credits, the broadcaster took a more direct approach, writing the message: “Watch the video clip now at www.globo.com/empreguetes.” The video clip was only aired as part of the telenovela in the next episode, on Monday. It was a new strategy for telenovelas in Brazil. This video had over 12 million views, according to Memória Globo (n.d.), thus, the network gave the audience the possibility to access a new and essential content for the development of the narrative on the Internet prior to the TV launch. With the second video clip, Nosso Brilho, the transmedia strategy was similar. Globo also “leaked” this video online at its website few days before being aired on TV. Narratively, it was constructed in a similar matter, with suspense and with the link to the website being shown through a character’s tablet, and later on reinforced at the final credits of the telenovela’s episode. In Sparkling Girls, the transmedia narrative not just expanded the telenovela’s universe to other platforms, but also helped to blur the boundaries between reality and 96

fiction (Lima and Moreira 2012, 12). Therefore, the songs and video clips produced by the telenovela had fan-made versions distributed at video sharing websites such as YouTube, for example, and were played outside the fictional context, just as products made by artists in real life.

Websites: Tom’s Stars and Domestic Worker Nevertheless, Globo Network maintained its usual ways of implementing transmedia extensions, through the character Tom Bastos’ website. He was the manager of all the main artists within the plot and posted information about them online. His website Estrelas do Tom [Tom’s Stars] (Gshow n.d.a) presented each artist, their concert schedule, and shared information with the real fans of the telenovela. In addition, there was exclusive content, such as interviews made with singers and artists who participated in Sparkling Girls. An important part of this website dealt with the contests promoted by Tom Bastos. They stimulated audience participation, and as the website would come up in conversations within the narrative, it opened a space for the contests’ results to be shown at the telenovela. These kind of actions were promoted by Globo to try to control the fan made products, because “Globo acts judicially to restrain at social media networks the circulation of content arising from its programs, which is protected by copyright and intellectual property laws” (Castro 2012, 7). When the manager signed the Empreguetes to his team of artists, he launched the contest Empreguetes da Internet [Internet Empreguetes], asking the fans to send versions and parodies of the video clip Vida de Empreguete. The best ones were posted at the website, with praise and tips from Tom Bastos, and shown to the Empreguetes by this character at the telenovela. Later, there was the Concurso de Passinhos [Dance Steps’ Contest], a children’s funk dance contest referring to one that happened in the narrative. It followed the previous one model with videos from the audience being uploaded to the website and aired on television. Another website that enriched the telenovela’s narrative and had a social agenda was Trabalhador Doméstico [Domestic Worker] (Gshow n.d.b). Since the telenovela’s protagonists were housemaids, one of the main subjects discussed in the plot was the relationship between employers and their employees, abuses committed within this specific work relation, and the housemaid’s legal rights. This website was part of a campaign that the character Penha, another Empreguete, made alongside a team of lawyers to inform this kind of workers of their rights. In the show, she was physically assaulted by Chayene, her boss, who threw a bowl of soup at her face. After Penha’s legal complaint, Chayene was convicted, had to pay a fine and do community service for her crime. Not often are houseworkers more than supporting roles in telenovelas. The authors of Sparkling Girls brought them to the center of the narrative, and even though there were problems with the portrayal of the class—for example, with mainly white 97

women, not corresponding to the reality of a country with severe racial disparity such as Brazil, where poor black people are the majority in this kind of low-paying job—it was interesting nonetheless to see the less privileged social classes as protagonists. With this transmedia extension, the network opened a possibility to inform real houseworkers about their conditions of labor and the importance of working with a formal contract. The main voice of the page was the character Penha presented by means of videos, but there were also written articles.

Campaigns Free Empreguetes and Empreguetes Forever Within the plot, in two occasions, the characters Kleiton, the Empreguete’s producer and friend, and Elano, Penha’s brother, started campaigns that had audience interaction. That was the case of Empreguetes Livres [Free Empreguetes], which was launched at the time of the trio’s prison due to the illegally made video clip. Their fan club fought for their release, protesting outside the prison and through the Internet, with the hashtag #Empregueteslivres. According to Castro (2012), it became a trending topic on Twitter at the time. The other campaign that was promoted at the plot was called Empreguetes para Sempre [Empreguetes Forever] and was set off when the trio decided to split up because of work problems. The characters then created a website that received testimonials of artists and fans from Brazil. Even after the end of the telenovela some fans asked for the return of the group’s activities in real life. The participation of real Brazilian artists within the plot was an important factor to the public’s immersion at the telenovela. Throughout Sparkling Girls, famous singers such as Ivete Sangalo, Alcione and Zezé di Camargo & Luciano, for example, interpreted themselves and interacted with the fictional singers as if they were their real colleagues. At the time of the Empreguetes Forever campaign, multiple artists’ videos were posted at the official telenovela’s website claiming for the return of the trio.

The Most Charming Housemaid in Brazil A Empregada Mais Cheia de Charme do Brasil [The Most Charming Housemaid in Brazil] was a campaign that intertwined Sparkling Girls and another entertainment show from Globo, called Fantástico. This transmedia branding initiative invited the real housemaids in Brazil to send videos showing their artistic aptitudes. The only rules were that the video had to be recorded at their work space, and the participant had to have a formal contract as a housemaid. The prize was to participate in an episode of the telenovela, meeting the actors and being an Empreguete for a day. The videos were shown at Fantástico, and through popular vote, the winner was elected and then called to participate in an episode where she met the Empreguetes and danced with them the hit song Vida de Empreguete.

Book: Cida, the Empreguete, an Intimate Diary The book Cida: A Empreguete, um Diário Íntimo [Cida, the Empreguete, an Intimate Diary] was an extension of the narrative released in 2012, written by Leusa Araújo, who worked as a text researcher in Sparkling Girls. Maria Aparecida (Cida), the youngest Empreguete, had a tragic life story: both her parents died when she was young, so she continued to live at her mother’s employer’s house in exchange for working as a housemaid since her childhood. Introspective and romantic, Cida had a diary, in which she wrote about her life and dreams, in a make-believe conversation with her mother. With the goal of becoming a writer, at the end of the telenovela Cida succeeds and publishes her diary. Just after the end of Sparkling Girls, the book was actually printed, and it remains available for sale all over Brazil. In this book, there is a more thorough construction of Cida’s character with details about her childhood, as well as her pathway to fame, her love life, and her life as a housemaid (Feitosa 2015, 87).

Conclusion Regarding Brazilian telenovelas, broadcasters engaged in this type of content production since the 2000s with the goal to enrich their narratives, in order to try to match international productions. Globo Network, the country’s largest producer, is to this day more dedicated to developing transmedia content for its fictional productions. In the last decade, it was remarked that the transmedia experiences in telenovelas increased in quantity of products, and became even more elaborate, including the participation of specialized consulting teams. There are various possibilities of transmedia creation depending on the type of telenovela, for each one has particularities based on its themes, duration, and time of exhibition. It was observed that Globo Network has the tendency to propose most of its transmedia projects—also the more elaborate ones—as 7pm telenovelas, which have lighter plots and shorter narratives, and which more easily enable the development of transmedia extensions. As for Sparkling Girls, the transmedia strategies were important for its success. According to Bieging (2013), this telenovela reached expressive levels of audience and public participation, standing out in the history of Brazilian teledramaturgy. It was a very successful product, that inspired Globo Network to continue investing in transmedia strategies within their telenovelas, which led, for example, to the transmedia strategies for Total Dreamer, that presented other unparalleled actions. Its successor telenovela, Burning Hearts, had a web series as well, showing that more elaborated content is in vogue regarding transmedia telenovelas in Brazil.

References Balogh, Anna Maria. 2005. Conjunções, Disjunções, Transmutações: Da Literatura ao Cinema e à TV

[Disjunctions, Conjunctions, Transmutations: From Literature to Cinema and TV]. São Paulo: Annablume. Bieging, Patrícia. 2013. “Transmidiação como Ferramenta Estratégica: Cheias de Charme Explora Uma Nova Forma de Fazer Telenovela” [Transmediation as a Strategic Tool: Sparkling Girls Explores A New Way of Making Telenovela]. Revista Novos Olhares 2 (2): 60–71. Accessed August 17, 2017. www.revistas.usp.br/novosolhares/article/view/69828/72488. Caminha, Marina. 2010. “A Teledramaturgia Juvenil Brasileira” [The Brazilian Youth Teledramaturgy]. In História da Televisão no Brasil [History of Television in Brazil], edited by Ana Paula G. Ribeiro, Igor Sacramento, and Marco Roxo, 197–215. São Paulo: Editora Contexto. Campedelli, Sâmia.Y. 1987. A Telenovela [The Telenovela]. São Paulo: Ática. Castro, Gisela. 2012. “Cheia de Charme: A Classe Trabalhadora no Paraíso da Cibercultura” [Sparkling Girl: Working Class in Cyberculture]. Paper presented at the annual meeting of Intercom, Fortaleza, Ceará, September 3–7. Feitosa, Klênnia. 2015. “Narrativa Transmídia e a Expansão do Universo Ficcional: Os Princípios e as Estratégias de Transmidiação da Telenovela Cheias de Charme” [Transmedia Narrative and Fictional Universe Expansion: Sparkling Girls Transmediation Principles and Strategies], Master thesis, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte. Grant, Barry Keith. 2012. The Hollywood Film Musical. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Gshow. n.d.a. “Estrelas do Tom” [Tom’s Stars]. Accessed July 30, 2017. http://gshow.globo.com/novelas/cheias-de-charme/estrelas-do-tom/platb/. Gshow. n.d.b. “Trabalhador Doméstico” [Domestic Worker]. Accessed July 2017, 2017. http://gshow.globo.com/novelas/cheias-de-charme/Trabalhador-Domestico/. Hamburger, Esther. 2005. O Brasil Antenado: A Sociedade da Novela [Tuned Brazil: Telenovela Society]. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar. Lessa, Rodrigo. 2017. “Explorações Conceituais Acerca de Narrativa Transmídia e Ficção Seriada Televisiva” [Conceptual Explorations About Transmedia Narrative and Television Fiction]. In Ficção Televisiva Seriada no Espaço Lusófono [Serial Television Fiction in the Lusophone Space], edited by Isabel F. Cunha, Fernanda Castilho, and Ana Paula Guedes, 87–105. Covilhã: Editora LabCom.IFP. Lima, Cecília, and Diego Moreira. 2012. “Operações do Conceito de Hipertelevisão na Novela Cheias de Charme: A Criação de Universos Transmídias na TV Globo” [The Concept of Hipertelevision in Sparkling Girls: Creation of Transmedia Universes in Globo Network]. Paper presented at the annual meeting of Intercom, Fortaleza, Ceará, September 3–7. Memória Globo. n.d. Acessed August 31, 2017. www.memoriaglobo.globo.com. Pallotini, Renata. 2012. Dramaturgia de Televisão [Television Dramaturgy]. São Paulo: Perspectiva. Sadek, José R. 2008. Telenovela: Um Olhar do Cinema [Telenovela: A Cinema Approach]. São Paulo: Summus. Souza, Maria Carmem J., Rodrigo Lessa, and João Araújo. 2013. “Empresas Produtoras, Projetos Transmídia e Extensões Ficcionais: Notas Para um Panorama Brasileiro” [Networks, Transmedia Projects and Fictional Extensions: A Brazilian Panorama]. In Estratégias de Transmidiação na Ficção Televisiva Brasileira [Transmediation Strategies in Brazilian Fiction Television], edited by Maria Immacolata Vassalo Lopes, 303–344. Porto Alegre: Sulina. UOL. 2012. “Capítulo Final de Cheias de Charme Alcança 32 Pontos no Ibope e Bate Três Antecessoras” [Final Chapter of Sparkling Girls Reaches 32 Ibope Points and Beats Three Predecessors]. Uol TV e Famosos, September 28. Accessed August 28, 2017. http://televisao.uol.com.br/noticias/redacao/2012/09/28/capitulo-final-de-cheias-de-charme-alcanca-32pontos-no-ibope-e-bate-tres-antecessoras.htm Vieira, Marcel. 2014. “Origem do Drama Seriado Contemporâneo” [The Origin of Contemporary Serial Drama]. Paper presented at the annual meeting of Compós, Belém, Pará, May 27–30.

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5 Transmedia Comics Seriality, Sequentiality, and the Shifting Economies of Franchise Licensing William Proctor

Historically, the comic book medium emerged out of the relationship between newspaper comic strips and the popular, much lambasted, pulp tradition of the 1920s, both of which introduced numerous trade characters to the popular imagination, including Tarzan, Popeye, Flash Gordon, and Buck Rogers. These were, however, preceded by Richard Felton Outcault’s The Yellow Kid newspaper strips, often contentiously cited as the first comics in the United States, which developed an emergent transmedia presence in the late-nineteenth century with vaudeville plays, a short film, crossover appearances with Outcault’s Buster Brown character, and a spate of merchandising products, such as gum, postcards, baby clothes, and household appliances. In the United Kingdom, the character Ally Sloper debuted in the pages of satirical magazine Judy in 1867 almost three decades before the first appearance of The Yellow Kid, and grew into “the first comics superstar” (Sabin 2003) and the first recurrent comic character—perhaps the earliest example of what would today be described as transmedia franchising, with a flotilla of texts and associated merchandising products, including music hall and street theater performances, village parades, advertising, film, and anthologies of previously published comic strips. Ally Sloper’s popularity was so enormous and widespread that “it is no exaggeration to say that his visibility in [UK] popular culture would have been comparable to that of any Hollywood blockbuster creation” (Sabin 2003). It was not until the early 1930s, however, that comic books began to serve an active role in the extension, elaboration, and enlargement of imaginary worlds via emergent licensing practices. As Avi Santos explains, it is through licensing that IP [intellectual property] owners are able to extend a property’s reach into almost every area of consumer life without having to invest in manufacturing infrastructure or distribution networks. Licensing agreements typically involve a contract signed between a minimum of two parties, in which licensors give the licensee(s) permission to use the name and/ or image of their intellectual property for a specified purpose, for a limited amount of time, and within 101

agreed-upon geographic and product market boundaries. (2015, 7) From its inception, the comic book medium entered into an intensive dialogic relationship with other new media of the day, including radio, newspapers, television, and film, as well as the kinds of merchandising phenomena usually equated with media conglomeration and convergence in the contemporary moment. Over the decades since, comics of this kind have attracted a lion’s share of critical scorn. As with other “tie in” products, transmedia comic “spin offs” are often pejoratively framed in purely commercial terms, as nothing but “a parasitic industry” leeching off the endeavors of legitimate creative agents and authors (Gaines, quoted in Santos 2015, 8). For much of the history of licensed comics, with few exceptions, these spinoffs “were crafted exclusively by the comic-book producers with only financial coordination with the intellectual property (IP) holders” (Clarke 2013, 27). As Kackman puts it, comics were certainly “not the product of smoothly engineered synergy,” but “a profitable secondary market—a way to extract as much as possible from a popular media figure or text” (2008, 83). Essentially, comics were primarily seen as a valuable ancillary market through elongating the profit potential of popular character brands, such as the Lone Ranger (Santos 2015), the Shadow (Fast and Örnebring 2017), or Conan the Barbarian (Bertetti 2014), to name but a few. According to Henry Jenkins, the licensing system typically generates works that are redundant (allowing no new character background or plot development), watered down (asking the new media to slavishly duplicate experiences better achieved through the old), or riddled with sloppy contradictions (failing to respect the core consistency audiences expect within a franchise) … In reality, audiences want the new work to offer new insights and new experiences. If media companies reward that demand, viewers will feel greater mastery and investment; deny it, and they stomp off in disgust. (2006, 105) To be sure, tie-in comics have certainly bore economic fruit, and it is true that narrative continuity between various iterations was almost non-existent. But here, Jenkins runs the risk of privileging a limited transmedia framework, “a monolithic view of ‘old’ licensing contrasted with ‘new’ coherent and integrated transmedia” (Hills 2012, 412). Jenkins’ perspective is largely anchored to the notion that fan cultures desire and demand tightly orchestrated continuity systems, a phenomenon that did not yet exist in the early licensing era—and would not for several decades, arguably beginning with the development of the Superman mythology at the hands of DC editor, Mort Weisenger, in the 1950s, and the subsequent rise of Marvel in the 1960s. In so doing, Jenkins constructs a homogenously ideal and imaginary fan audience, who will only “stomp off in disgust” if they do not get what they want, 102

disregarding the way in which the relationship between license parties has operated trans-historically. Specifically, it is mainly through licensing partnerships that character brands have been able to develop an accumulation of iterations by soaking up the fluids of transmedial exchange while sustaining its shelf life through multiplication. That said, there have been a series of shifts and modifications in recent years undergirded by greater coordination, integration, and collaboration between license partners, with an emphasis on connecting primary and ancillary units according to principles of transmedia storytelling. Although this model has yet to become institutionally mandated as standard practice—indeed, there are still as many transmedia comics operating according to traditional licensing practices that have been ongoing for the better part of a century as there are experiments with transmedia storytelling, perhaps even more so—we are beginning to see significant maneuvers in this direction. For the rest of this chapter, in fact, I will explore the shifting transmedia economies of franchised licensing as it relates to comic books, specifically the way in which film and television properties have been extended and franchised. To achieve this, the following sections include small case studies centred on licensed comics—mainly, Disney, Star Trek, and Star Wars—and should in no way be viewed as providing a complete account of the history of licensing across almost a century of such practices. Clearly, there is much work to be done by scholars in order to (more) fully historicise the licensing phenomenon which, as with transmedia storytelling (Freeman 2016), did not emerge ex nihilo from the wellspring of convergence and conglomeration in the contemporary moment.

Transmedia Disney Beginning two years after his debut in the animated short Plane Crazy (1928), Disney’s famous brand-mascot, Mickey Mouse, traveled across media to become the star of syndicated newspaper comic strips and played a key role in the economic fortunes of the burgeoning studio (Davis 2017, 56). Walt Disney himself had been keen on creating merchandise based on the anthropomorphic rodent as early as 1929 in order to stimulate “very good publicity” for further adventures on the silver screen—in turn, stimulating the cash nexus (Barrier 2007, 83). As money was especially tight for the studio during the period, Disney orchestrated several licensing deals for the purposes of merchandising products and novelties, but the first contract was borne out of his firm belief that “the character’s regular presence in newspapers [would be] a key promotional strategy for his cinematic efforts” (Davis 2017, 56; see also Santos 2015, 37). So it was that on January 24, 1930, Disney entered into a licensing agreement with King Features Syndicate to begin producing newspaper strips and, soon enough, the zany mouse was featured in numerous daily publications as much as six times a week. Unlike later licensing partnerships, however, the relationship between Disney 103

and King Features was based on production and distribution—the strips themselves were created “in house” and not farmed out to freelance writers and artists by the licensor. In essence, Disney remained responsible for creating its own narrative content. The first story was a loose adaptation of animated short, Plane Crazy, but it was with the follow-up comic, titled Mickey in Death Valley, that the newspaper strips became more than just “cute animal antics and playful punch-lines” (Davis 2017, 56) and offered continuity strips that could last for several months. From January to March 1930, the strips were written by Disney himself and drawn by Ub Iwerks until April of the same year when he began sending plot ideas to animator Floyd Gottfredson, who took over completely the following month. Gottfredson was “given a broad license to freely adapt and expand concepts as he liked” (Booker 2014, 407), and would feature an irreverent brand of comedy, including one story that had Mickey repeatedly try to take his own life—and failing catastrophically each time—because he wrongly believed that he has seen Minnie kiss another mouse (“Without Minnie I might as well end it all!”). It is these kinds of zany escapades that saw Gottfredson’s stories tampered with in later collected volumes (although this has since been redressed with Fantagraphics series of lavish hardback compendiums). Astonishingly, Gottfredson continued to work on Disney comic strips and books for 45 years until 1975, but as with legendary Donald Duck artist, Carl Barks, Gottfredson would not be recognised for his creative efforts during his own lifetime, as artists contributions tended to be uncredited during the period, with only Walt Disney’s authorship serving as sole imprimatur. In recent years, however, Gottfredson has grown to be revered as “the young and unrecognised genius of graphic narrative” and “the definitive creative force” behind the evolution of Mickey Mouse, and indeed other Disney staple characters (Booker 2014, 407). Even in the early days of licensed comics, then, the question of authorship was freighted with paradox, despite Disney’s signatory dominance. Both Gottfredson and Barks were able to invent new characters, some of which would become fully integrated members of the Disney catalogue (the most famous of which being Barks’ Scrooge McDuck); and both Gottfredson and Barks are recognized contemporaneously as creating the “definitive” versions of the Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck characters, respectively. The partnership between Kings Features and Disney would also produce popular adaptations of Disney’s feature films, beginning with the syndication of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on December 12, 1937. Illustrated by Hank Porter and written by Merrill de Marris, the Snow White comic further tested traditional adaptation processes through the extension of key scenes—greatly expanding the role of Prince Charming, for example—and adding story elements not included in the source text (although these additive elements were not produced specifically for the comic strip, but were scenes left on the cutting room floor (see Booker 2014, 409)). It is worth noting that the strip preceded the theatrical release of the film by six weeks and by the time audiences queued up for tickets, they may have already become quite familiar 104

with the story and characters. King Features Syndicate had the option of licensing the Disney comic strips to other partners (which would effectively make them “sub-sub-licensees”) and in doing so, “the acquisition of licenses with newspaper syndicates led to the production of comic books filled with reprinted material” (Duncan and Smith 2014, 198). In 1938, Dell Comics, an offshoot of Dell Publishing that had its genesis in pulp magazines, formed a partnership with Western Printing, who had obtained the license to publish Disney material. In this case, however, rather than reprinting daily newspaper strips in compilation formats, as was de rigueur at the time, Dell Comics started producing original Disney stories in the pages of anthology comic, Four Colour (1938–1968)— which incidentally remains the current record-holder for most “floppies” published in a comic series with 1,354 issues. With Four Colour, Dell would effectively use the publication as a litmus test for Disney characters, much in the same way that DC Comics would in the 1950s with the Showcase anthology. For example, the fourth issue featured Donald Duck, the success of which evinced that the character could be exploited more fully elsewhere—and so it was that eight months later, Dell published the first issue of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories (1940–1962), a title that eventually achieved the highest overall circulation of any comic book series in history (Benton 1993, 158). Disney’s expanding catalogue of trade characters were not only transmedia figures in that sense, but also “transtextual” ones in that they often crossed over from one title to another within the same medium (Scolari, Bertetti, and Freeman 2014, 4). Dell’s success with the so-called “funny animal genre” led to other licensing coups with rival studios, such as Warner Bros. (Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, etc.), and by the early 1950s, the publisher had steadily grown into “the largest publisher of comic books in the world” (Benton 1993, 109), well in advance of DC and Marvel’s industrial domination. At its peak, Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories sold in excess of four million copies per issue, a feat even Superman could not manage during his peak, and, as comic historian Mark Carlson emphasized, Dell’s market-share may only have amounted to 15 percent of titles published, but it controlled almost a third of the total market and had “more million-plus sellers than any other company before or since” (2005). Clearly, then, the early Disney strips and comic books were essential elements of the studio’s early transmedia presence—hardly redundant or solely economically driven, no matter what Walt Disney himself had originally envisioned. As Keith M. Booker explains: Studios were among the earliest to successfully exploit the creative and commercial potential of comic art, constructing wonderful worlds of comedy, fantasy, melodrama and adventure that would eventually produce a legacy of immense popularity, incredible financial success, and seemingly limitless imagination. (2014, 406) 105

As Fredric Wertham’s crusade against comic books gathered steam in the early 1950s, leading to the establishment of institutional watchdog, the Comics Code Authority (CCA), as well as increasing competition from television, sales of comic books began to suffer accordingly. In order to face up to the challenge, comic publishers continued to accumulate licensed holdings to extend and augment film and television based properties. As the domestication of television accelerated in the 1950s and 1960s, the comic book industry responded to the changing cultural landscape, quite ironically, with a spate of licensed material based on popular television series and often associated with, but not limited to, the rising tide of “tele-fantasy” genres (Chapman 2011, 104). Perhaps the most interesting example during this period were comic strips and books based on the science fiction series, Star Trek, to which I now turn.

Television: The Final Frontier In the United States, so-called “TV Comics”—basically, comics based on television properties—had multiplied exponentially by the 1960s. Prime-time series, some of which have since become seminal, such as I Love Lucy, Sergeant Bilko, and Jackie Gleeson and the Honeymooners, extended televisual worlds into comics, keeping the brand alive in the interstices between episodes and during the off-season. In 1962, the partnership between Dell Comics and Western Printing had come to an end, with the latter forming the Gold Key Comic imprint with which it continued to produce licensed material (although not as successfully as Dell). In 1967, one year after its debut on NBC, the Star Trek license was awarded to Gold Key and eventually became a largely faithful interpretation of its parent series. However, the first issues were marred by a lack of collaboration or dialogue between licensor and licensee(s), leading to the production of a comic curiosity. Indeed, the first issues were drawn by Italy-based artist Alberto Giolotti without him actually “ever having seen a single frame of the on-air television program” (Clarke 2013, 27), using publicity shots as his chief guide. In the first issue, titled “The Planet of No Return,” the Enterprise crew battle cannibal plants and giant trees, but this voracious vegetation’s true threat is in the spores that they produce to infect hosts. “Giant trees are trying to germinate us!” exclaims Kirk dramatically. Now, while this may be rather silly, it is in the story’s final moments that perhaps the most unfaithful interpretation of the program’s political bent in the property’s history occurs. To combat the threat, Spock recommends that the Enterprise’s weapons be used to eradicate all life on “that hideous little globe,” an action far removed from the liberal humanistic agenda of Roddenberry’s famous vision. As Darius elaborates on this point: And that’s just what the Enterprise does. It burns the entire planet from orbit, flying around it and around it, killing and killing until it’s exterminated all life. In the Captain’s log that closes out the story, Kirk characterizes the mission as 106

one of “total destruction”. And we’re treated to the image of the Enterprise, firing phasers onto the burning surface, where the sentient trees are on fire, helplessly fleeing the eradication of their entire planet. (Darius 2014, 31, italics in original) Over in the UK, comic books were usually published weekly, as opposed to the US monthly system, and were most often anthology titles wherein multiple stories featured a range of characters and storyworlds, a tradition which continues to this day in titles such as the long-running The Beano or influential science-fiction publication, 2000AD. In the 1950s, the first television-themed anthology comics appeared, such as TV Comic (1951–1984) and TV Fun (1953–1959), but it was in the following decade that the genre boomed with the likes of TV Express (1960–1962), TV Toyland (1966– 1968), TV Tornado (1967–1968) and, most pointedly, TV Century 21 (1965–1971) (Chapman 2011, 104). The latter title, which was soon abbreviated to TV21, was created as a promotional tie-in vehicle for Gerry Anderson’s various “Supermarionation” series (Thunderbirds, Stingray, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, and Joe 90, etc.). Esteemed comic book artist, Frank Bellamy, who had previously worked on Dan Dare for boys’ comic, The Eagle, was recruited to draw the Thunderbirds and Lady Penelope strips before the series had even aired on British television (Chapman 2011, 105). Within its first year, TV21 was selling 600,000 copies per week and also received two further spin offs in Lady Penelope (1966–1968) and Joe 90 Top Secret (1969), the latter of which was merged with TV21 after only 34 issues. Eventually, TV21 opened up its pages to other (Non-Andersen) US and UK television properties, including The Saint, Land of the Giants, and, perhaps the title’s most historically fascinating attribute, the inclusion of a strip based on Star Trek which would have been British readers’ first introduction to the crew of the Starship Enterprise given that the series did not air in the UK until 1969. As with the Gold Key versions, the UK Star Trek comic strips are quite singular, thus again indicating the creative gulf between licensor and licensee during the period, yet the strip “proved to be one of the most vibrant and long-lived strips during a turbulent time for British comics titles” (Porter 2014, 36). The UK strips preceded the series’ airing by six months and resulted in yet another oddity—as with Gold Key, writers and artists tried to adapt and extend Star Trek without even seeing the show. In the British context, Spock was a “central identification character” and was more representative of the British “stiff upper lip” stereotype than the dispassionate Vulcan of the television program. Scotty, meanwhile, was the strip’s action hero, while the most egregious portrayal was Captain Kirk who was framed as inadequate, confused, and often a plain idiot, “the least effective command officer in Starfleet” (Porter 2014, 41). Over the decades since, the Star Trek license has been passed from pillar-to-post: Gold Key (who folded in 1984 having lost their most valuable licenses), Marvel, DC, Malibu Comics, WildStorm, Tokyopop and, most recently, IDW, have all held the 107

license to publish Star Trek comics across half a century and over 1,000 comic books (not to mention manga variations and graphic novels). Yet despite these comics far outweighing television episodes by a considerable margin in quantitative terms, none of these stories are considered to be (official) canonical extensions. In other words, the Star Trek primary text—the canon—is comprised of live-action material only, which, at the time of writing, consists of six television series and thirteen feature films. They are all of a piece. Hence, Star Trek’s armada of transmedia expressions, such as tie-in comics, novels, and even The Animated Series—which included the vocal performances of Shatner, Nimoy, and so forth, excluding Walter Koenig’s Chekov, and featured the return of “classic” series alumni, D. C. Fontana and David Gerrod—are non-canonical augmentations, counter-factual narratives that do not represent the “true” continuity. The “real” Captain Kirk did not ever decimate an entire planet of cannibal plants. This may not have mattered so much in the 1960s given that Star Trek was famously canceled by its third season, but the rise of Trek fandom in the early 1970s, leading to the series’ resurrection as a blockbuster film franchise with The Motion Picture (1979), meant that continuity would become an important feature of imaginary worlds beyond the domain of superhero comics. Indeed, as many scholars have pointed out, serial continuity is one of the most pleasurable aspects associated with world-building for fan audiences (for example, see Reynolds 1992; Kaveney 2008), but, as with Jenkins’ idealized fan community discussed earlier, this should in no way be embraced as a homogenous component of “geek” fan cultures. Put another way, whether or not Star Trek comics are viewed as “redundant” by fans or if “they storm off in disgust” at the disavowal of continuity conventions is another question entirely and beyond the scope of this chapter. It is worth noting, however, that it cannot be the case that all fans feel this way—for if the comics were not economically viable, it stands to reason that they would surely have been discontinued (which is eventually what would happen with comic strips). By the time The Motion Picture re-ignited Star Trek’s fortunes in 1979, another science-fiction property had already emerged that would have a tremendous impact on the cultural landscape, echoing across the decades since. That property was a little independent film written and produced by George Lucas.

Star Wars Comics: From Seriality to Sequentiality In the summer of 1975, the release of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws sent shockwaves through Hollywood, accumulating over 100 million dollars at the box office, and forging the template for the “event film” phenomenon. But it would be George Lucas’ Star Wars that would become harbinger of the blockbuster franchise tradition, with all its attendant toys, action figures, spaceships, and merchandise, which have squeezed maximum profits out of the brand over the past 40 years—indeed, so much more than the films themselves. It would only be a matter of time before transmedia tie-in media 108

would follow suit. In 1977, Marvel obtained the license to publish Star Wars comics for a song, primarily because both Lucas and the head honchos at Twentieth Century Fox strongly believed that the film would tank at the box office, and if their predictions proved to be correct, then associated tie-in products would be the least of it all, especially considering that movie tie-in comics, especially those of a science-fiction bent, were no longer the sellers they once were. It was certainly a risk for Marvel—it had gone from industry savior in the 1960s to a struggling publication house defending against the forces of economic recession and stagnation in the early 1970s (as was its main competitor, DC Comics). Indeed, (then) editor Jim Shooter claims that the acquisition of the Star Wars license actually saved the publisher from bankruptcy (Proctor and Freeman 2016; Booker 2014, 447). On April 12, 1977, the first issue of Marvel’s Star Wars was published, and rapidly ascended the comic book charts almost six weeks prior to the film’s release in theatres. This meant that readers would have already been introduced to a cast of characters, such as Darth Vader, R2-D2, C3P0, and Luke Skywalker (much in the same way that the Snow White daily strip would be the threshold into Disney’s imaginary world for millions of readers, as discussed above). Written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Howard Chaykin, the first six issues of the series adapted Lucas’ Star Wars, although reading it now may be rather discombobulating for those familiar with the film; like the Star Trek comics, Marvel did not have the luxury of seeing the finished product before starting work on the comic, and it certainly shows. The first issue of the comic sold over a million copies and, once the adaptation was completed, Marvel created new stories, new characters, and new mythological elements. Those working on the title, however, were creatively constrained by Lucas, who mandated that they “could use the main characters, but not infringe on the movies’ developments” (Booker 2014, 447). At this point, of course, Star Wars had become perhaps the largest “sleeper hit” in Hollywood history and work had already started on what would become The Empire Strikes Back (1980). The licensing arrangement between Lucasfilm and Marvel lasted for 107 issues, but following release of the final installment, Return of the Jedi (1983), and with no new film in the pipeline, the Star Wars brand entered its interregnum period—also known as “the dark age” in fan communities. In 1989, however, the force would be awakened once again as a new publisher, Dark Horse Comics, acquired the vacant license and the age of the Star Wars Expanded Universe (EU) began in earnest. Founded in 1986, Dark Horse Comics would go on to become the third largest comic book publisher—behind Marvel and DC, of course, both of which have jockeyed for industrial dominance for the best part of six decades—mainly through the acquisition of blockbuster franchise licenses and associated characters, as well as television and video-game properties, which include the likes of: Aliens, Transformers, The Terminator, Indiana Jones, Game of Thrones, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Legend of Zelda, Tomb Raider, and, of course, Star Wars. In 1991, Dark Horse 109

published the first issue in the Star Wars: Dark Empire series that, along with Timothy Zahn’s sequence of sequel novels, catapulted the brand into popular consciousness once again. Between 1991 and 2014, Dark Horse published an armada of expanded universe comics, but, as with Star Trek’s tie-in media, these tales are not considered legitimate entries in the Star Wars canon, a sore point for many a fan reader, with some turning to the cyberspace chat-rooms of Web 1.0 to argue, debate, and deliberate —often quite vehemently—the finer points of canonical law (for more on the so-called “canon wars,” see Brooker 2002, 101–114). As we have seen throughout this chapter, the licensing system had not yet addressed the lack of continuity between various transmedia iterations and may not have mattered so much until later. As with many franchise licenses (if not all), it would be the film series—the primary text—that maintained its canonical hegemony and, should Lucas decide to create new Star Wars films that contradicted expanded universe elements, then they would take precedence and effectively erase them from inclusion altogether. To address such queries about canonicity, Lucasfilm created a hierarchical taxonomy with G-Canon (the “G” standing in for “George”) being the apotheosis of official continuity (although the Ewok films, Caravan of Courage and Battle for Endor, were not granted this status). The Star Wars comics, be they from Marvel or Dark Horse, occupied not even the second tier, which only contained The Clone Wars animated television series (T-Canon), but the third rung (C-Canon). In 2014, the new corporate owners of the Star Wars brand, Disney, committed hyperdiegetic genocide by declaring that the old licensing system was dead and buried, and that, from here on out, all transmedia Star Wars elements, including comics and novels, would be considered canonical, official components of a vast transmedia continuity system. As Matthew Freeman and I (Proctor and Freeman 2016) have theorized elsewhere, this institutional decree represents a fundamental shift in the transmedia economy of Star Wars. Hence, the concept of seriality—most often used to detail the spreadability of imaginary worlds, whether or not such elements fit into a cohesive continuity system—gives way to “sequentiality”: that is, a transmedia economy developed according to the principle of continuity between and across media. From April 2014, Star Wars’ new rulers mandated that the old system be replaced by a flattening of hierarchies and that new comic books (and novels, etc.) would henceforth be legitimately canonical. From a business perspective, this makes a lot of sense, especially considering that the comic license was taken from Dark Horse and awarded again to Marvel, a company that was already within the aegis of Disney. Some fans, however, were less than thrilled at being told that the comics (and novels etc.) that they had spent a long time reading and collecting were officially banished to a netherworld of falsehood and speculation. But it was not simply that these fans were concerned by the exclusion from official canon per se, but that the old EU would be re-branded beneath the “Legends” banner and, more importantly, that there were no plans to continue telling stories in what now effectively amounts to an alternative 110

universe. In 2015, the so-called EU Movement raised funds via Kickstarter to advertise both their displeasure at Lucasfilm and to ask that the “Legends” series be continued. Contra Jenkins, the “old” licensing system matters more to these fans than a newly coordinated transmedia experience whereby everything matters and everything counts. There have, however, been significant maneuvers and modifications in recent years toward a more closely integrated system of interlocking narrative regardless of mediaspecificity, a transmedia storytelling of the kind that Jenkins proposed in Convergence Culture. This in no way suggests that this shift has been adopted by all and sundry, nor that the old system has now been completely overhauled and replaced by the new. The shifts discussed here are continuing at the time of writing and it would perhaps be better to view the contemporary system as a conflict between old and new, not as a binary, but as a spectrum of multiplicity wherein alternative worlds, parallel universes, and counter-factual stories all co-exist with canonical continuity. That is to say that vast franchised narratives possess a range of continuities and several different canonical systems, largely dependent on the choices and positions of each individual reader, and fans are experts in navigating alternative worlds such as these. That said, it largely remains that the primary text, whatever that may be, maintains its power over the array of transmedia satellites orbiting the mothership. In Transmedia Television, M. J. Clarke demonstrates these particular shifts by examining the production contexts relating to the television series Heroes (2006–2010) and 24 (2001–2010), and their respective comic book extensions. What is valuable here is the understanding that the contexts within which transmedia comics are produced might radically differ between license holders. The relationship between Fox and IDW regarding the 24 comics is quite different to that between NBC and Aspen’s Heroes’ extensions, but the principal shifts toward an inclusive dialogue between showrunners and subcontractors shares similarities: What these two ventures have in common is that they both operate via a combination of freelance creative labour and permanent supervision either closely or loosely affiliated with program producers. In the case of Heroes, scripts are drafted by either series writers, staff writing assistants, or freelance writers hired from outside the program staff. Yet, in all these cases, it is the series writers who oversee and determine the content of each issue. (Clarke 2013, 32, my italics) The connective relationship between licensor and licensee—between showrunner and staff writers, on the one hand, and freelance creatives, on the other, serves an important authenticating role and a discursive production of cultural distinction, of “value.” The involvement of production personnel, no matter how closely aligned or not, operates to ratify transmedia “micro-narratives” as legitimate installments of a piece with an overarching “macro-structure” (Ryan 1992, 373). This kind of thinking 111

is illustrated by several transmedia comics that extend television series in canonical directions, usually branded as officially sanctioned continuations, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (subtitled Season Eight though Ten), all of which were either written, co-written, or overseen by Joss Whedon, the ultimate creative authority on all things Buffy-related. The attachment and transposition of television language into comics (the use of “seasons” is telling), as well as the attribution of Whedon’s authorship is indicative of the shift in the transmedia economy of licensed comics. For all intents and purposes, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer “season” comics are “the definitive version of what happens after the television series ends” and are “absolutely canonical in the views of many fans” (Ford and Jenkins 2009, 305). The appending of authorship works to enhance the comic books’ “aura” as authentic rather than illegitimate. However, as we have seen earlier, fans may not simply and wholeheartedly embrace such extensions as legitimately canonical, especially given that the comic series introduces new generic elements into the mythos, such as Buffy being able to fly. Indeed, as Emma Beddows illustrates, fans may follow the adventures of the Scooby Gang across media, but it is less narrative continuity that concerns them than consistency of character, genre, and tone. Yet despite this flattening of hierarchies (theoretically) dissolving the borders between primary/secondary texts, and the evocation of authorship as a method of authentication and branding, the transmedia hierarchy is often re-ascribed and reaffirmed at the institutional level. In other words, the primary text, be it in film or television, retains its status as the imaginary “center,” dislodging the poststructuralist decree that the center does not exist. Consider IDW’s The X-Files: Season Ten comic series, which was deemed as a canonical extension of the television series after over a decade in the cultural wilderness following the program’s cancellation in 2002. The comics were branded as authentic continuations with showrunner Chris Carter’s involvement appending an authorial aura to the project. But when Fox announced that the X-Files was to return to television screens in 2016 with what was described as an “event series,” consisting of six episodes as opposed to a full-length season of 20-plus episodes, the comic books’ status as the canonical “Season Ten” was canceled out and abolished. That is to say that what was once canon can just as easily be revised and re-positioned should the television text call for it, thus demonstrating that the textual, and media, hierarchy retains its primary status (see Proctor 2017).

Conclusion These marked shifts in the transmedia economy of franchise licensing, from seriality to sequentiality, are not yet firmly embedded as institutional practice across the board. As an ancillary market, comic books continue to be valuable assets for extending not only narrative, but also the profit margins of franchise IP holders. For some fans, what counts as canonical— or not—matters a great deal, and it is by appealing to the fannish desire for continuity that the transmedia economy of licensed comic books has 112

been undergirded by a series of modifications in the twenty-first century. As the relationship between producers and licensed subcontractors grows ever closer and more collaborative, the continuities between primary texts and secondary comics will also benefit from closely monitored orchestration in narrative terms (with the proviso that not all fan audiences care that deeply about canonicity, as demonstrated by the Star Wars EU movement, and the enormous success of Dark Horse’s many franchised transmedia comics). Whether or not transmedia storytelling grows into an industry standard by directly appealing to continuity mavens as the pre-eminent factor governing consumption habits and voyages into imaginary worlds, however, remains to be seen.

References Barrier, Michael. 2007. The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. California: University of California Press. Benton, Mike. 1993. The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History. Dallas: Taylor Publishing. Bertetti, Paolo. 2014. “Conan the Barbarian: Transmedia Adventures of a Pulp Hero.” In Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines, edited by Carlos A. Scolari, Paolo Bertetti and Matthew Freeman, 15–38. Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot. Booker, Keith M. (ed.). 2014. Comics Through Time A History of Icons, Idols and Ideas. Santa Barbara: Greenwood. Brooker, Will. 2002. Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans. London: Continuum. Carlson, Mark. 2005. “Funny Business: A History of the Comics Business.” Nostalgia Zine #1. Accessed May 28, 2017. http://archive.li/WyHb. Chapman, James. 2011. British Comics: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion Books. Clarke, M. J. 2013. Transmedia Television: New Trends in Serial Network Production. London: Bloomsbury. Darius, Julian. 2014. “From Casual Galactic Genocide to Self-Referential Canon: Gold Key’s Star Trek and the Evolution of a Franchise.” In New Life and New Civilizations: Exploring Star Trek Comics, edited by Joseph F. Berenato, 23–36. Illinois: Sequart Organization. Davis, Blair. 2017. Movie Comics: Page to Screen/Screen to Page. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Duncan, Randy, and Randy Smith (eds.). 2014. Icons of the American Comic Book: From Captain America to Wonder Woman. Vol. 1. Santa Barbara: Greenwood. Fast, Karin, and Henrik Örnebring. 2017. “Transmedia World-building: The Shadow (1931-present) and Transformers (1984-present).” International Journal of Cultural Studies 20 (6): 636–652. Freeman, Matthew. 2016. Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds. London and New York: Routledge. Hills, Matt. 2012. “Torchwood’s Trans-Transmedia: Media Tie-ins and Brand ‘Fanagement’.” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 9 (2): 409–428. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, Henry, and Sam Ford. 2009. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press. Kackman, Michael. 2008. “Nothing on But Hoppy Badges: Hopalong Cassidy, William Boyd Enterprises and Emergent Media Globalization.” Cinema Journal 47 (4): 76–101. Kaveney, Roz. 2008. Superheroes! Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films. London: I. B. Tauris. Porter, Alan. 2014. “Flaming Nacelles and Giant Snails: The Unique Culture of the British Star Trek Comics, 1969–1973.” In New Life and New Civilizations: Exploring Star Trek Comics, edited by Joseph F. Berenato, 37–51. Illinois: Sequart Organization. Proctor, William. 2017. “Canonicity.” In The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, 236–245. London and New York: Routledge. Proctor, William, and Matthew Freeman. 2016. “The First Step into a Smaller World: The Transmedia Economy of Star Wars.” In Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Anthology, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, 221–243. London and New York: Routledge.

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Reynolds, Richard. 1992. Superheroes: A Modern Mythology. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1992. “The Modes of Narrativity and Their Visual Metaphors.” Style 26 (3): 368–387. Sabin, Roger. 2003. “Ally Sloper: The First Comics Superstar?” Image and Narrative 7. Accessed March 11, 2017. www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/graphicnovel/rogersabin.htm. Santos, Avi. 2015. Selling the Silver Bullet: The Lone Ranger and Transmedia Brand Licensing. Austin: Texas University Press. Scolari, Carlos A., Paolo Bertetti and Matthew Freeman. 2014. Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines. Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot.

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6 Transmedia Publishing Three Complementary Cases Alastair Horne

Much of the critical attention afforded to transmedia has focused upon its twenty-first century digital manifestations, following Henry Jenkins’ (2003) initial association of the phenomenon with our present era of media convergence. Nevertheless, Jenkins (2011) himself has insisted that “historical antecedents for transmedia … predate the rise of networked computing and interactive entertainment,” and Matthew Freeman (2016) has argued for a consciously historicized understanding of the phenomenon in his analysis of the transmedia storyworlds of the early twentieth century. Here, I explore the publishing industry’s participation in transmedia storyworlds across two contrasting periods: our present digital phase, and the analogue era preceding it. I consider three complementary examples, the first two drawn from the past decade, the third an instance of transmedia storytelling spanning more than 50 years. The first, Endgame, was launched specifically as a transmedia storyworld; the second, Harry Potter, began in print before extending into film and digital media; the third, Doctor Who, started life on television before, like its hero, taking on new forms to survive catastrophe. My analysis situates all three within the context of the media practices of their times, exploring the business of transmedia storytelling from a publishing perspective. I derive my definition of “transmedia” principally from the ten points offered by Jenkins in his 2007 blogpost, “Transmedia Storytelling”; by “publishing industry,” I mean that business defined, at least until recently, by the production and distribution of words on pages.

Transmedia Publishing in the Industry’s “First Digital Decade” Any understanding of how publishing has engaged in digital transmedia storytelling must be placed within the context of the industry’s recent history. If we define the ten years since the launch in 2007 of the Kindle and iPhone—the first popular massmarket e-reading device and consumer smartphone, respectively—as the publishing industry’s first “digital decade,” then we see that the period has been characterized by a process of experimentation followed by retrenchment. Early attempts at developing digital content designed specifically to take advantage of the affordances offered by

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mobile electronic devices, such as interactivity and the ability to display multimedia, produced some notable critical and commercial successes, particularly from Faber & Faber. Their iPhone app Malcolm Tucker: The Missing Phone—a transmedia extension of the television satire The Thick of It—was the first app to be nominated for a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award (Richmond 2011), while the digital edition of Eliot’s poem The Waste Land recouped its costs within six weeks of publication (Dredge 2011). More recently, however, mainstream publishers have increasingly turned their backs on digital experimentation to refocus their attention upon their core business of placing words on pages. The difficulties involved in recovering the high costs of developing digital content appear to have been the decisive factor in many such decisions. Developer Touchpress, which collaborated with publishers on several apps including The Waste Land, exited the market in 2015, its Chief Executive Officer asserting that “it’s a challenge to explain to consumers why our apps are worth paying for when the majority of apps are free” (Page 2015). Few publishers now produce content specifically for digital devices, and even ebooks, essentially print works delivered digitally, have experienced declining sales (Tivnan 2016; Publishers Association 2017). The publishing industry’s recent forays into transmediality should therefore be understood against this background of unrewarded experimentation and consequently growing conservatism. Though advocates of transmedia publishing have argued in industry forums that the rising popularity of smartphones and tablets will lead to greater appetite for transmedia stories from readers (Celaya 2011), and that publishers should therefore innovate in such areas (Goerke 2015), they have also frequently acknowledged the challenges that publishers face in developing transmedia franchises —namely, that creating and promoting films and games is significantly more costly than for books, with little chance of success (Ramadge 2016; Celaya 2011). Attempts to resolve these problems have received little interest: production studio Kazap received only 11 pledges of support via crowdfunding site Indiegogo to extend its Transmedia Story Stream platform so that authors could build their own multimedia storyworlds (Snyder 2014a, 2014b).

Endgame Thus, publishers’ attempts at launching new transmedia franchises this past decade have tended to demonstrate the challenges more than the opportunities; the industry press for the period features more high-profile launches than longer-term successes. Endgame, launched in 2014 as an ambitious “innovative omni-platform endeavour” (Digital Book World 2014), by a coalition comprising author James Frey, co-writer Nils Johnson-Shelton, Frey’s media and production company Full Fathom Five, publisher HarperCollins, developers Niantic Labs, and film studio 20th Century Fox, offers an instructive example. Up to a point, this alliance offers a textbook example of 116

the “media consolidation” identified by Jenkins (2007) as a key factor in the economic logic of transmedia publishing. HarperCollins was formed when publishers Collins and Harper & Row were acquired by Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate News Corporation in the late 1980s and then merged. 20th Century Fox is also owned by Murdoch, currently as part of the 21st Century Fox company spun off from News Corporation in 2013. Both author James Frey and his company Full Fathom Five have connections with Murdoch’s properties, the former publishing a novel, Bright Shiny Morning, with HarperCollins, and the latter developing properties with both HarperCollins and Fox (Full Fathom Five n.d.). Only developer Niantic Labs stands entirely outside this example of horizontal integration; at the project’s 2014 launch it was a start-up venture within Google, though it became a separate company the following year. Endgame’s planned components included a trilogy of young adult novels, each accompanied by an interactive puzzle and prize, 15 ebook novellas, an augmented reality app, several YouTube videos, and a series of film adaptations (Digital Book World 2014). Analysis of Goodreads (n.d.) and the HarperCollins website (n.d.) suggests that all three novels and the first nine novellas have been published, to diminishing returns, even given that later installments have been available for less time. The Calling, the first novel, published in 2014, has approximately 13,000 ratings on Goodreads and 2,000 reviews; the third, Rules of the Game, published in late 2016, has garnered only one tenth of that attention in a third of the time—a mere 1,370 ratings and 215 reviews; several of the ebook-only novellas have no reviews and fewer than ten ratings. Of the games, the first comprised a series of puzzles divided between the opening novel and the internet; a prize of $500,000 for anyone solving them all was claimed shortly before the second novel’s launch (Heine 2015). The second game, the augmented reality app, Endgame: Proving Ground, using the platform Niantic had developed for their game Ingress, was apparently abandoned before the release of an invitation-only beta, though footage remains available on a YouTube channel set up to host video content from the original transmedia experience (Ancient Societies 2015). Speculation on the Endgame Reddit community (DoctorLemonPepper 2016) blames the abandonment variously on Niantic’s separation from Google, and the company’s decision to focus on developing the Pokémon Go game instead. Nothing seems to have been heard of the film in the three and a half years since it was announced. One factor, it seems, in the failure of the Endgame franchise to match the success of its most obvious inspiration, Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy, may be its derivativeness. The most popular Goodreads review of The Calling was written several months before the book itself was published, accusing it of being “the victor of the 75th Huge … Rip-off Games!” (Gillian 2014). Its attempt to create a genuinely transmedial experience within a Hunger Games-style storyworld by giving readers the opportunity to engage in similar challenges to those experienced by the novels’ protagonists was principally hamstrung by Niantic’s withdrawal from the project, though. The enormous success of the Pokémon Go game the studio released instead— 117

10,000,000 downloads within its first week (Molina 2016)—demonstrated the huge potential audience for a location-based augmented-reality game allied with the right intellectual property. But without the game’s support, the second novel failed to match the success of the first, whose prize competition helped build a significant media profile; the third received even less interest. The story underlines the importance of the synergies that media conglomerates bring to transmediality: since Niantic Labs was the one part of the coalition neither owned by nor closely connected to Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, it therefore had far less incentive to stay with the project. Without that component, even a publisher the size of HarperCollins, part of the enormous Murdoch media empire, was unable to make a success of its transmedianative franchise.

Pottermore Attempts to launch franchises that are transmedial from conception are relatively new to publishing, which has tended historically to develop such properties either by licensing content from other channels, most commonly film or television (as in the case of Doctor Who), or by extending into other media a property originating in print. The most successful contemporary example of the latter type is Harry Potter. According to the Bloomsbury website, more than 450 million copies of the Potter novels have been sold worldwide (Bloomsbury n.d.); CNBC estimated that the entire franchise was worth $25bn, with book sales, cinema receipts, and toy sales each contributing between $7 and $8bn to the total (Wells and Fahey 2016). While these brand extensions were at first mere adaptations in Jenkins’ (2011) terminology, over the past decade they have developed into genuinely transmedial components: the Pottermore website launched in 2012; the first in a series of film prequels, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, appeared in 2016, adapted from a non-narrative bestiary published in 2001; and the first stage play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, opened in July 2016, its script becoming the best-selling playscript since records began (O’Brien 2016). Of these, perhaps the most interesting element is Pottermore, which is not just an instance of a franchise originating in print extending into digital media, but also an unusual example of an author, rather than a publisher, maintaining control over a franchise originating in print. Crucial to any understanding of the site is the fact that, exceptionally for an author, Rowling retained the rights to publish the digital editions of the Harry Potter novels herself, rather than licensing them to her print publishers (Solon 2011). This, combined with the enormous success of the franchise, and her consequent wealth, placed her in an exceptionally powerful position: she had a phenomenally desirable product, the opportunity to sell it directly to consumers, and the money to make it happen. Pottermorewas therefore created as a means of doing so, serving simultaneously as an online retailer and a transmedia extension of the Potter storyworld, where users were able to read new stories by Rowling and experience a 118

virtual Hogwarts; the transmedia content also acted as marketing materials for the ebooks. This may account for the fact that, as Brummitt (2016, 118–119) notes, the original iteration of the website focused almost exclusively upon Rowling’s original writing, rather than its adaptations. Its adoption of a broader focus from September 2015, promoting content across several aspects of the franchise, follows a decline in ebook sales as initial demand was satisfied, a fall in site turnover partly attributable to the end of a licensing deal with Sony, and the decision to allow ebook retailers to sell the Potter novels directly (McLaughlin 2016). (Previously, retailers could list the ebooks in their stores but had to redirect buyers to Pottermore to complete their purchase; unprecedentedly, the likes of Amazon agreed to do so.) Pottermore, then, is the product of an exceptional combination of circumstances. Publishers, prudently husbanding their resources between multiple brands, cannot justify spending £8m on a website promoting a single property; few even allow consumers to buy ebooks from their own sites, directing them instead to retailer sites to complete their purchases. None can bend Amazon to its will in the way that Rowling did. Though extending a franchise originating in print into other media remains a viable and popular mode of transmedia storytelling, publishers tend not to develop their properties themselves, relying instead upon partnerships with other media organizations. Pottermore’s change of focus post-2015 suggests that even a brand as powerful as Harry Potter struggles to go it alone.

Accidental Transmedia: Publishing and Doctor Who As Freeman (2016) and Jenkins (2011) have both argued, versions or models of transmediality have existed before our present age of digital content and media conglomerates. In this section, I explore the changing role played by publishing within a franchise stretching from the analogue mid-twentieth century to our present digital moment. Doctor Who is often cited as an example of transmedia storytelling: Jenkins (2007), for instance, illustrates that brand extensions may serve various functions by referencing the radio dramas produced by the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) while the programme was off-air. However, much analysis of Doctor Who as transmedia focuses on digital content generated after the show returned to television in 2005: Perryman (2008), for instance, considers the transmedia strategies employed by the BBC in relaunching the programme; Hills (2016) how Doctor Who functions within the Lego Dimensions universe; and Freeman (2016, 198) how online-only episodes such as The Night of the Doctor reinforce hierarchies between old and new media. My interest lies, however, in the long history of published Doctor Who: from the novelizations of on-screen stories beginning in the mid-1960s but mostly produced in the 1970s to 1980s by Target Books, via the original fiction published Virgin and BBC Books during the period between 1989 and 2005 when the programme was mostly offair; and finally, the novels produced alongside the revived, post-2005 series. I shall 119

explore how the relationship between the television series and published Doctor Who novels has developed from Jenkins’ (2007) licensing model of transmediality, where extensions of a story into subsequent media are said to remain subordinate to the original “master text,” into something more complex and organic.

The 1960s: Adaptation The Doctor Who storyworld has encompassed an enormous range of platforms in its 54-year history, including comic strips, books, films, stage plays, audio dramas broadcast on the radio or for sale as CDs and downloads, games, animations, fan-made spin-off films, and several official spin-off television series. Launched in November 1963 as a television series, the program began extending into other media the following year. The first Doctor Who comic strip appeared in TV Comic on November 9, 1964; the first book, a retelling of the second episode of the television program, retitled Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, was published five days later. The following August, the first Doctor Who film appeared, a second reworking of that same Dalek story, and in September the first Doctor Who annual was published, containing the first original prose fiction set within the larger universe. These ventures enjoyed varying levels of success. Doctor Who comic strips have appeared almost uninterruptedly since 1965 in publications including Countdown, TV21, and, since 1979, the various incarnations of the official Doctor Who Magazine; currently, Titan Comics also produces regular comics devoted to the four most recent Doctors. Two further novels appeared in 1966, again reworkings of stories originally seen on screen, but it would be another eight years before a fourth book appeared. A second Doctor Who film, an adaptation of the next television story to feature the Daleks, was also released in 1966, but the option for a third was not taken up by producer Milton Subotsky (Haining 1988, 109). And Doctor Who annuals were published almost every year from 1965 to 1986, resuming publication when the television series returned in 2005. The extent to which these initial forays into other media conform to accepted definitions of “transmedia” varies considerably. Though Christy Dena (Chapter 21, this volume) complicates the notion of a any kind if simple distinction between adaptation and transmedia storytelling in this very volume, on this instance the comic strips and the stories published in the annuals perhaps come closest to Jenkins’ “unified and coordinated entertainment experience” (2007), extending the Doctor Who storyworld through original stories rather than reworkings of televisual adventures, and so diverging from the television version of the universe without explicitly contradicting it. Licensing agreements tend to restrict which characters from the television series feature in these new adventures, and though several television companions make appearances in the TV Comic strip between 1968 and 1971, and alien races the Zarbi, Voord, and Sensorites can all be found in the first Doctor Who annual, generally these media tend to generate their own characters, planets, and 120

adventures. So, for his first three years in comic-strip form, the Doctor is accompanied by his grandchildren John and Gillian, rather than his television companions. Though fitting these stories into the universe established by the television series is not always easy, it is rarely logically impossible. Contrastingly, the first Doctor Who novels and the feature films function rather as parallel or alternate storyworlds, sharing certain aspects with the television series but diverging markedly in others. The stories they tell are broadly the same as those told on television, casting them as adaptations in Jenkins’ (2011) terminology, but there are certain significant differences between versions. For instance, the first novel, Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, retains the Doctor’s televisual companions, teachers Ian and Barbara, and the Doctor’s grand-daughter Susan, but brings them together in a way that contradicts their introduction on television, which had occurred in the story preceding this one; to fit this new introduction, it also changes Ian’s occupation from teacher to scientist. Similarly, the first film changes the relationships between the Doctor’s companions, while the second replaces them entirely. Each time, deliberate effort has been made to ensure that these stories in alternative media are not dependent upon a knowledge of the television series; by reintroducing the main series protagonists in ways that contradict the original series, they set themselves as removed from that series, attempting to create their own selfcontained storyworlds, derivative from but not dependent upon the television series. Their reasons for doing so are closely tied to the nature of media consumption in the 1960s, specifically the absence of video recording equipment from most homes. With very few exceptions—only eight episodes over seven years—episodes of Doctor Who broadcast in the 1960s were seen only once, on their date of transmission; even after repeats became more regular in the 1970s, they would involve only one or two stories per series: approximately eight episodes from a run of around 26. No television story would be made available on video until 1983, and so these episodes were not available and present to fans as they are now; the films and novelizations needed to be capable of standing alone. The three Doctor Who novelizations were less successful than had been hoped, and no more were published until 1973, when a new children’s imprint, Target Books, acquired the rights to publish paperback editions of the 1960s books, and then to produce their own series of adaptations of the television adventures. Seven new novelizations were published the following year, mostly featuring the then current Doctor, Jon Pertwee. Though the titles of several stories were changed to make them more attractive to readers, these were largely faithful renderings of what viewers might have seen on television, with few of the revisions that characterized Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks. Essentially adaptations, according to Jenkins’ (2011) terminology if not Dena’s (Chapter 21, this volume), the novelizations nonetheless make occasional contributions to the television programme: notably, the device that (theoretically) enables the Doctor’s TARDIS to change its appearance to match its surroundings was first identified as the “chameleon circuit” in Terrance 121

Dicks’ 1975 novelization Terror of the Autons, six years before the same name would be used on screen in the fourth Doctor’s final adventure. The Target Books series benefitted from a close relationship with the team behind the television program. Terrance Dicks, who wrote more than 60 of the novelizations and acted as an unofficial series editor (Howe 2007, 19), had served as script editor for the television series between 1968 and 1974. Many of the other books were written by the same writers who had created the original television scripts, who often took the opportunity to flesh out those scripts or to include elements that had not been achievable within the budget of the television show, exemplifying Jenkins’ (2011) acknowledgment that adaptations can be transformative of their originals.

New Adventures in Time and Space In 1989, the BBC cancelled the Doctor Who television series. With Target Books publishing a new novelization most months, and—from 1986—only four new stories being broadcast each year, fewer than 20 stories remained to be adapted by the time the final episode was broadcast. Most of these, moreover, were published within the next 12 months, with financial issues—primarily the low advances paid by Target Books—rendering the others unachievable (Howe 2007, 115). With no more television stories to adapt, then, Virgin Publishing, which had bought Target Books in 1989, obtained a license from the BBC to produce original fiction within the Doctor Who universe. Target Books had already published small amounts of new fiction within the Doctor Who storyworld in the second half of the 1980s, in the form of two novels featuring the Doctor’s companions, Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma, and Harry Sullivan’s War, and adaptations of three unproduced television scripts were also published. Thus, the moment at which the Doctor Who property became more definitively a transmedial storyworld, and the publishing component of that storyworld began to play a more active role within it, came as the result not of the synergistic economics of media consolidation that Jenkins (2007) identifies as a characteristic of contemporary transmedia storytelling. Rather, it resulted from the BBC’s abdication of responsibility for its own intellectual property, and the commercial imperatives of an entirely separate and smaller-scale business, Virgin Books. With the television version of Doctor Who off-air, the published version took the lead. Virgin started publishing its New Adventures series in 1991, a collection ultimately comprising more than 60 novels over six years featuring Sylvester McCoy’s seventh Doctor, the on-screen Doctor at the time of the program’s cancellation, and initially also his companion, Ace. From 1994, the New Adventures were complemented by a second series of novels: 33 Missing Adventures, featuring previous incarnations of the Doctor and his on-screen companions, were published over three years. With the series off-air, the novels were no longer subordinate to the program’s “master text” (Jenkins 2007) and could therefore contribute their own original 122

elements to the Doctor Who universe without fear of contradiction. In some respects, these novels mirror the more established comic strip’s relationship with the Doctor Who universe, free to create its own companions and alien races. Where they diverge from the model established by the comic strip, however, is in their development of the Doctor Who storyworld beyond what had been seen on television: the characters of both the Doctor and Ace are transformed through story arcs that take them far from their television originals. Ace leaves the Doctor to fight Daleks, and returns as a more cynical character, while the depictions of both the Doctor and his home planet Gallifrey developed them considerably beyond what was seen on television. Notably, several of the authors of these new Doctor Who novels were writers connected to the television series: Marc Platt and Ben Aaronovitch had written stories for McCoy’s Doctor, while Andrew Cartmel had been script editor when it was cancelled. Some of the New Adventures implement story arcs that Cartmel had planned for future series of the television show (Parkin 2007, 380), adding weight to the idea that this series of novels acts as the true continuation of the television programme. Other authors had written for the Target series of novelizations, like John Peel and Nigel Robinson. Terrance Dicks, author of the second of the New Adventures novels titled Timewyrm: Exodus, combined both these elements, having written for the television series, served as its script editor for six years, and having written more than 60 novelizations. Many of the writers, though, came from the fan community, as the participatory culture of Doctor Who—embodied in the fan fiction that had been published in magazines such as the Doctor Who Appreciation Society’s The Celestial Toyroom since the 1970s—began to assume a more central and formally authoritative role within the Doctor Who storyworld, prompted at least partly by the difficulty in attracting more established writers due to the low advances offered by Virgin. Timewyrm: Revelation, for instance—Paul Cornell’s first New Adventures novel—had begun life as a piece of fan fiction serialized in the fanzine Queen Bat; Marc Gatiss, Gareth Roberts, and Russell T. Davies were also fans who came to write for the Virgin series of novels. In 1996, Doctor Who returned to television with the pilot episode for a proposed new series that signalled its continuity with the original television version by featuring the regeneration of McCoy’s seventh Doctor into Paul McGann’s eighth incarnation. Though no new television series resulted, the episode nonetheless marked a further shift in the balance of power within the Doctor Who storyworld, as the BBC withdrew Virgin’s license to publish original Doctor Who fiction and began in 1997 to produce its own equivalents to the two Virgin series, using many of the same writers: the Eighth Doctor Adventures featured McGann’s Doctor alongside a range of new companions, while the Past Doctor Adventures, like the Missing Adventures, featured previous incarnations of the Doctor, now including McCoy, mostly alongside their original television companions. Virgin Books, meanwhile, began to publish a new series of adventures based around Bernice Summerfield, a companion they had introduced in the New Adventures series, thus extending the Doctor Who storyworld 123

beyond the BBC’s control. Audio publisher Big Finish then began producing adaptations of the Summerfield stories before obtaining a license from the BBC in 1999 to create its own original audio adventures featuring the Doctor.

Participatory Culture Assumes Control In 2005, Doctor Who returned again to television with a new series instigated by Russell T. Davies, a long-term fan who had written a novel for the Virgin New Adventures series; among his team of writers on the series were fellow New Adventures writers Mark Gatiss and Paul Cornell, Big Finish author and fan Rob Shearman, and Steven Moffat, another fan, who had written a parody episode of the programme, The Curse of Fatal Death, that had appeared as part of the BBC’s programming supporting the Comic Relief charity. Harvey (2015, 24–25) has noted, with reservations, that such movement of writers from spin-off media to the original franchise is relatively uncommon, but this occurrence goes beyond movement between media. Though this was not quite the first time that fans had written for the television version of Doctor Who—18-year-old fan Andrew Smith contributed a story, Full Circle, to the show’s eighteenth season—it did mark the beginning of a period in which the show was run by the very fans who had watched its original episodes and then written their own fictions within its storyworld: the participatory culture of fan fiction had assumed control over the franchise. The new series’ participation in digital forms of transmediality has been addressed elsewhere (Perryman 2008; Hills 2016; Freeman 2016), but its increasing willingness to engage with its print and audio versions in this period is also worthy of analysis. The new series borrows the idea of a “time war,” whose aftermath provided the context for its first few new series before assuming center-stage in the fiftieth anniversary special, from the Eighth Doctor Adventures series, though Davies (2005) has stated that the two wars are not the same. And in an inversion of the practices of the 1960s to 1980s, several television stories from this period are adaptations of works from other media: Cornell’s 2007 television story, Human Nature, featuring David Tennant’s tenth Doctor, was an adaptation of his 1995 New Adventures novel of the same name, featuring McCoy’s seventh; Gareth Roberts’s episodes The Shakespeare Code and The Lodger both rework his comic strips for Doctor Who Magazine, while Rob Shearman’s Dalek draws upon his audio adventure, Jubilee. These adaptations create further problems for anyone attempting to establish a consistent storyworld for Doctor Who across its various media, but they also demonstrate how the publishing component of the Doctor Who franchise has grown from being subordinate to the television program to become a significant creative contributor. For example, the Eighth Doctor and Past Doctor series of novels published by BBC Books were replaced shortly after the series’ return to television by several new ranges of novels featuring the current Doctor at the time of publication and characterized by a close relationship with the television series. There was, however, no resumption of the 124

novelization program, until the announcement in 2017 that adaptations of four stories from the post-2005 era would be published by BBC Books in 2018 (Fullerton 2017). The demand for such books, given that new televised stories are available on streaming services and released for sale on DVD and Blu-ray within months of their television airing, remains to be seen, but their existence lends this narrative a pleasing circularity.

Conclusion These three examples of the publishing industry’s participation in transmedia storyworlds offer contrasting perspectives on the challenges and opportunities for the industry. The decline of the Endgame franchise most pertinently demonstrates the difficulties faced by publishers in attempting to launch their own transmedia franchises: dependence on external partners can prove fatal to even a well-established publisher embedded within a massive media conglomerate. And while the success of Harry Potter shows that the industry is still capable of originating properties that can become massive transmedia franchises, the case of Pottermore reminds us that the development of those properties can prove a challenge beyond the capabilities of the publishers that helped originate them. The long history of Doctor Who, however, in all its contingency and unplanned nature, demonstrates how the contribution made by the publishing industry to a franchise originated elsewhere has proved capable not only of reinvigorating that franchise but even catalysing its development into a more genuinely transmedial storyworld, recalibrating the roles played by its different components and empowering its fans. As such, it may well offer a more positive model for the publishing industry’s future efforts in this sphere.

References Ancient Societies. 2015. “March 28th Live Stream from Pasadena.” YouTube, March 28. Accessed April 14, 2017. www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GP-uPYVv1U&feature=youtu.be&t=45m22s. Bloomsbury. n.d. “J.K. Rowling.” Bloomsbury Publishing. Accessed April 4, 2017. www.bloomsbury.com/author/jk-rowling. Brummitt, Cassie. 2016. “Pottermore: Transmedia Storytelling and Authorship in Harry Potter.” The Midwest Quarterly 58 (1): 112–132. Celaya, Javier. 2011. “Transmedia: A New World of Opportunity for Authors and Publishers.” Publishing Perspectives, December 9. Accessed April 12, 2017. https://publishingperspectives.com/2011/12/transmedia-opportunity-for-authors-and-publishers/. Davies, Russell T. 2005. “Production Notes: The Evasion of Time.” Doctor Who Magazine 356: 66–67. Digital Book World. 2014. “HarperCollins Partners with Digital Book Award-Winning Niantic Labs on New Transmedia Project.” Digital Book World, January 15. Accessed April 14, 2017. www.digitalbookworld.com/2014/harpercollins-partners-with-digital-book-award-winning-niantic-labson-new-transmedia-project/. DoctorLemonPepper. 2016. “What Happened?” Message posted to www.reddit.com/r/Endgame/. Accessed April 14, 2017. Dredge, Stuart. 2011. “The Waste Land iPad App Earns Back its Costs in Six Weeks on the App Store.” Guardian, August 8. Accessed April 12, 2017. www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2011/aug/08/ipad-the-waste-land-app.

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Freeman, Matthew. 2016. Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds. London and New York: Routledge. Full Fathom Five. n.d. “About Us.” Full Fathom Five. Accessed April 1, 2017. http://fullfathomfive.com/about/. Fullerton, Huw. 2017. “Steven Moffat and Russell T Davies are Writing Special Doctor Who Novels.” Radio Times, November 15. Accessed April 11, 2017. www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2017-11-15/doctor-whobooks-steven-moffat-russell-t-davies/. Gillian. 2014. “The Calling.” Goodreads, January 14. Accessed April 13, 2017. www.goodreads.com/review/show/823646871. Goerke, Jerome. 2015. “Publisher or Author? Whose Job Is it to Innovate Anyway?” Publishing Perspectives, August 13. Accessed April 6, 2017. https://publishingperspectives.com/2015/08/publisher-or-authorwhose-job-is-it-to-innovate-anyway/. Goodreads. n.d. “James Frey.” Goodreads. Accessed April 14, 2017. www.goodreads.com/author/show/822.James_Frey. Haining, Peter. 1988. Doctor Who: 25 Glorious Years. Chatham: W. H. Allen. HarperCollins. n.d.. “Discover Author James Frey.” HarperCollins Publishers. Accessed April 16, 2017. www.harpercollins.com/cr-103938/james-frey. Harvey, Colin B. 2015. Fantastic Transmedia: Narrative, Play and Memory across Science Fiction and Fantasy Storyworlds. Basingstoke: Pan Macmillan. Heine, Rachel. 2015. “Global Literary Puzzle Solved, Winner Takes Home 500K in Gold.” Nerdist, October 1. Accessed April 1, 2017. https://nerdist.com/global-literary-puzzle-solved-winner-takes-home-500k-ingold/. Hills, Matt. 2016. “LEGO Dimensions Meets Doctor Who: Transbranding and New Dimensions of Transmedia Storytelling?” Icono 14: 8–29. doi: 10.7195/ri14.v14i1.942. Howe, David J. 2007. The Target Book. Tolworth: Telos. Jenkins, Henry. 2003. “Transmedia Storytelling.” MIT Technology Review, January 15. Accessed April 3, 2017. www.technologyreview.com/s/401760/transmedia-storytelling/. Jenkins, Henry. 2007. “Transmedia Storytelling 101.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, March 21. Accessed April 26, 2017. http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html. Jenkins, Henry. 2011. “Transmedia 202: Further Reflections.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, July 31. Accessed April 14, 2017. http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html. McLaughlin, Marty. 2016. “Harry Potter Digital Arm Loses £6m and Sheds Jobs.” The Scotsman, January 17. Accessed April 12, 2017. www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/harry-potter-digital-arm-loses-6mand-sheds-jobs-1-4003232. Molina, Brett. 2016. “‘Pokémon Go’ Fastest Mobile Game to 10M Downloads.” USA Today, July 20. Accessed April 26, 2017. www.usatoday.com/story/tech/gaming/2016/07/20/pokemon-go-fastest-mobilegame-10m-downloads/87338366/. O’Brien, Keira. 2016. “Cursed Child Racks Up Biggest Single-week Sales Since Deathly Hallows.” The Bookseller, August 9. Accessed April 2, 2017. www.thebookseller.com/news/eighth-harry- potter-bookracks-biggest-single-week-sales-deathly-hallows-371826. Page, Benedicte. 2015. “Touchpress Pivots Business, Selling Education Apps.” The Bookseller, November 10. Accessed April 12, 2017. www.thebookseller.com/news/touchpress-pivots-business-selling-educationapps-316108. Parkin, Lance. 2007. A History: An Unauthorized History of the Doctor Who Universe. 2nd ed. Iowa: Mad Norwegian Press. Perryman, Neil. 2008. “Doctor Who and the Convergence of Media: A Case Study in Transmedia Storytelling.” Convergence 14 (1): 21–39. Publishers Association. 2017. “UK Publishing Has Record Year Up 7% to £4.8bn.” April 26. Accessed April 14, 2017. www.publishers.org.uk/media-centre/news-releases/2017/uk-publishing-has-record-year-up-7to-48bn/. Ramadge, David. 2016. “Turning a Book into a Global Entertainment Franchise.” The Bookseller, May 30. Accessed April 11, 2017. www.thebookseller.com/futurebook/how-turn-book-entertainment-franchise330282. Richmond, Shane. 2011. “Malcolm Tucker iPhone App Nominated for Bafta.” Daily Telegraph, April 27. Accessed April 10, 2017. www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/mobile-phones/8475033/Malcolm-TuckeriPhone-app-nominated-for-Bafta.html. Snyder, Karen. 2014a. “Transmedia Story Stream: Don’t Just Read a Book–Play It!” Bleeding Cool, January

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18. Accessed April 9, 2017. www.bleedingcool.com/2014/01/18/transmedia-story-stream-dont-just-read-abook-play-it/. Snyder, Karen. 2014b. “Hello Transmedia Visionaries.” Indiegogo, February 17. Accessed April 9, 2017. www.indiegogo.com/projects/transmedia-story-stream-don-t-read-a-book-play-it#/updates/all. Solon, Olivia. 2011. “J. K. Rowling’s Pottermore Details Revealed: Harry Potter e-books and More.” Wired, June 23. Accessed April 14, 2017. www.wired.com/2011/06/pottermore-details/. Tivnan, Tom. 2016. “E-book Sales Abate for Big Five.” The Bookseller, January 29. Accessed April 12, 2017. www.thebookseller.com/blogs/e-book-sales-abate-big-five-321245. Wells, Nick and Mark Fahey. 2016. “Harry Potter and the $25 Billion Franchise.” CNBC, June 22. Accessed April 8, 2017. www.cnbc.com/2016/10/13/harry-potter-and-the-25-billion-franchise.html.

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7 Transmedia Games Aesthetics and Politics of Profitable Play Helen W. Kennedy

The chapter presents a detailed examination of what I refer to as the “transmedia game/play continuum” drawing on various examples and case studies of transmedia games from the mainstream to the independent. I apply elements of “play” theory to the study of these transmedia games and revisit the much-debated narratology versus ludology trajectory which shaped the field of games studies as it emerged in 2001/2002. I then expand the notion of the “ludification of culture” and introduce the concept of “ludoaesthetics” as a lens through which transmedia play can be identified and more closely examined.

Transmedia Games The transmedia game object in its most limited sense is a relatively straightforward media adaptation or expansion from film to game, television to game, or book to game, and are most frequently packaged as a platform-based or console-based format. The most dominant form of this instance of the transmedia game are those which are adapted from traditional Hollywood film. Examples of this “brand” of transmedia game would include the AAA franchise-based games of Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Pirates of the Caribbean—games which were all adapted from film-based intellectual property. There are of course those films which have themselves been adapted from computer games (such as Tomb Raider, Silent Hill, Assassin’s Creed, and Resident Evil) where the playable experience is subject to an enhanced narrativization and cinematic rendering, but these are not examples considered within the definition being discussed here. Transmedia games are characterized by an adaptation aesthetic, a process through which the images and characters from the film become playable and/or navigable. The shift in subjectivity from viewer to player is critical to understanding the distinctive nature of transmedia games. The definition and classification of the transmedia game in this sense thus focuses on the extent to which the text (or as we shall see—genre) is repurposed as a form of game or play which allows for a different perspective or level of engagement with the original text. This notion of a transmedia game does not

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necessarily accord with the conventional definition of transmedia storytelling (Jenkins 2006), since in these instances, these games do not necessarily offer their own distinct or unique elements of the storyworld to contribute to a unified whole. In my use of the transmedia definition, I am shifting the focus from the text itself to the manifesting game form or the game mechanic that is being generated for the newly configured audience—the player. The text/story/images and to some extent the places of the film or the novel or the television show become “playable” and potentially navigable (or open to exploration), allowing for a different subjectivity and an alternate mode of engagement. These instances appeal to an expanded market and are clearly functioning within a structure of an expanded commodification of audience pleasures in extended engagement with particular well-loved texts or story worlds. Table 7.1a shows the various instances of transmedia game “objects” that span a commercial/experiential continuum—with the exception of the board game and tabletop games which have their own commercial axis such that on the one hand you have profit driven film/book overlays applied to board game classics such as a Wizard of Oz or Star Wars versions of the traditional Monopoly board game for instance. On the other hand, there are the influential subcultural non-profit Dungeon & Dragons tabletop games. Table 7.1a Transmedia game genealogy Board/table-top games/Dungeons & Dragons, etc.

AAA Web Social console/platform games media adaptations games (most commercial)

Live Action Role Playing Games

Street Alternate Experimental/art games Reality games Games (least commercial)

Table 7.1a is also temporally and genealogically configured—with instances of transmedia games listed in the order (from left to right) in which they have manifested or gained prominence in the cultural domain. For instance, board games pre-date the introduction of computer platform/console games, web-based games pre-date social media games and so on. There are obviously some overlaps here as experimental or art games existed before the advent of computer games within movements such as Fluxus in the 1960s or the earlier dadaist absurdist practices. Here the genealogy is specific to how these forms relate to the production and instantiation of transmedia games or transmedia play. Table 7.1b tracks the game to play continuum and is a useful means to begin to review the game form and player subjectivity that is being produced. The forms on the left are more bound and tightly constrained by the originary textual properties which determine and to some extent fix the character, behavior, and performance, whilst the forms on the right are more likely to engender freer play within a more loosely defined generic structure. Table 7.1b also tracks a shift from textual or narrative specificity which structures the player/participant behavior and interaction to generic conventions which are not attached to a specific text but that are sufficiently well-established as to be very easily evoked (such as the very familiar Zombie trope, the detective genre, the 129

spy thriller, etc.). Table 7.1b Transmedia game to transmedia play continuum AAA Web Social console/platform games media adaptations games (most commercial) (game)

Board/table-top Street Alternate games/Dungeons & games Reality Dragons, etc. Games

Live Action Role Playing Games

Experimental/art games (least commercial) (play)

Analysis of contemporary games has drawn heavily on the insightful typology developed by Roger Caillois which provides a structure within which to highlight the shifts between game-based structures and more playful formats. Caillois’ table also affords an insight in to affective and dispositional elements of play and games (see Table 7.2). Table 7.2 Roger Caillois’ typology of games and play

Paidia Tumult Agitation Immoderate Laughter Kite-flying Solitaire Patience Crossword Puzzles Ludus

Agon (competition) Racing Wrestling Athletics—not regulated

ALEA (chance) Counting-out Rhymes Heads or tails

Boxing, billiards Fencing, checkers, football, chess, contests, sports in general

Betting Roulette Simple, complex and continuing lotteries*

MIMICRY (simulation) Children’s initiations Games of illusion Tag, arms Masks, disguises Theater Spectacles in general

ILINX (vertigo) Children’s whirling Horseback riding Swinging Waltzing Volador Traveling carnivals Skiing Mountain climbing Tightrope walking

NB In each vertical column games are classified in such an order that the paidia element is constantly decreasing while the ludus element is ever increasing. *A simple lottery consists of the one basic drawing. In a complex lottery there are many possible combinations. A continuing lottery is one consisting of two or more stages, the winner of the first stage being granted the opportunity to participate in a second lottery. Source: Caillois (1958, 36).

Transmedia Play Caillois’ (1958, 36) typology helpfully establishes an axis that cuts across all kinds of games and play in the form of Ludus where we see the adherence to strictly enforced structure “calculation, contrivance and subordination to rules,” which for a transmedia game will relate to the extent to which player engagement is fully determined by the narrative world or intellectual property that is being opened up for engagement. Paidia: is the “active, tumultuous, exuberant, spontaneous” (Caillois 1958, 53). 130

What the examples discussed within this chapter indicate is the interdependence that many experiences have on a complex interaction between both elements—the ludic and the paidiac. In the argument for a clear distinction to be made between transmedia games and transmedia play, I am drawing on this attention to the experiential, this foregrounding of the playing subject relation. Clearly there is some cross-over in Table 7.1b—Live Action Role Playing (LARPs) games for instance are the most intensely rule bound of all the play forms to the right of the table in that the rules are very heavily proscribed at the outset. LARPs are an aesthetic form within which the participants engage in a series of activities in the real world but according to the rules established through an elaborate and carefully constructed fictional or historical narrative. Historical reenactments with all their careful precision are one form within the LARPing continuum but LARPs take many guises from fantasy role playing to “dark play” LARPing engaging with sexual forms of role play (fetish, sadomasochism, etc.). Within the tight rules established by the LARP context there is a correspondingly wide arena of playful behavior afforded. However, Table 7.1b provides a good starting point to indicate the types and range of transmedia games that are under consideration here, whilst also understanding the application and nuances between the concepts of “game” and “play.” Another area of complexity is that in the most expanded and commercially successful types of transmedia storytelling, all types of games listed in the table could be included in the universe, for instance you may very well have a form of the Harry Potter or Star Wars or Lord of the Rings game in each of these categories. As I have made clear, the notion of transmedia play relates to the subjective position and experience of the audience member (player). Where Table 7.1a shows the various different transmedia “objects,” and I argue that each object affords a different type, mode, and depth of play, again which move along a spectrum—the most limiting and rule-bound mode of play being at the left-hand side of the spectrum, and the most freely exploratory and experimental modes being experienced by those at the right. At one end of the spectrum, it is the consuming subject that is most dominant and, at the other end, more of an engaged/player subject. The tables also illustrate the nature of the theoretical discourse which has emerged to account for and articulate these instances, most notably a key point of disciplinary wrangling that emerged as the field of game studies was in formation in the period between 2000 and 2004. This came to be known as the “narratological versus ludological” debate. There have been a number of critical studies of this early moment of the evolution of a set of analytical, conceptual, and methodological approaches fit for the specificity of video games. Dovey and Kennedy (2006), among others, have summarized the instances of polarization within this period such that on the one hand there were theorists such as Espen Aarseth (2004) who were dismissive of the narrative element of games as irrelevant to their “gameness” and on the other hand there were theorists such as Janet Murray (2004), Barry Atkins (2003), and Diane Carr 131

(2005) who engaged directly with the distinctive way in which stories were rendered and adapted within games and examined these as not wholly discontinuous with other media engagements and pleasures such as those related to comics, television, and film, for instance. They did so whilst also highlighting the distinctive nature of games as an interactive medium productive of new pleasures and aesthetics and requiring new analytical frameworks, methodologies, and conceptual vocabularies. Carr’s (2005) work on the Matrix is particularly relevant to those studying transmedia games. (See Dovey and Kennedy 2006 for a full exploration of this debate.) Henry Jenkins’ description of game design as “narrative architecture” offered a potentially useful path between these polarities by shifting a focus on games as spatialized narratives which the player explores, enacts, and creates through their gameplay: Game designers don’t simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces. It is no accident, for example, that game design documents have historically been more interested in issues of level design than on plotting or character motivation … When you adapt a film into a game, the process typically involves translating events in the film into environments within the game. (Jenkins 2004) Jenkins’ contribution remains useful when considering the player experience of all the game forms described here. For an insightful discussion that explores the aesthetics of adaptation see Aubrey Anable’s essay which is examines game designers RockStar’s 2005 adaptation of the 1979 film The Warriors in which she examines how “seemingly similar representations of urban disorder take on different meanings in different historical moments as they move from film space to games space and from images to be viewed to images to be played” (2013, 87). Within Table 7.3, the ordering of the game types is different to how they are presented in Tables 7.1a and 7.1b—this time to illustrate a media aesthetic to a ludoaesthetic spectrum—an adaptation to experimentation continuum. From tight rules defined by or related to the originary text or narrative world to much more loosely applied genre conventions and greater freedom of engagement, interpretation and movement. The pleasures in engagement and participation also shift across the trajectory, with the pleasures of participation and engagement with specific well-loved texts, stories, or histories potentially dominating the left-hand side and genre pleasures dominating the right. This is where the notion of transmedia play is introduced since the type and format of game moves beyond a specific platform or console into the geographies and spaces of the material urban landscape. I would argue that is at the far right of the spectrum—within the domain of experimental/art games—that the most novel and innovative approaches to transmedia play have emerged. These approaches have then had a “ripple down” and diluted effect toward the left of the spectrum. Table 7.3 From adaptation to experimentation: a table illustrating the characteristics across the transmedia games to transmedia play trajectory

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Game type

AAA console adaptations

Social media games

Board games

Web games

Illustrative example Subject position in game

Enter the Matrix First or third person character from the game world

GoT – 19 Realms You are the main character

LoTR Play as one of the Hobbits

Inception Main character

Play form

Role play, mimicry

Competitive to collaborative

Alea Agon (chance) Agon, (competition)

Player motivation

Fan/consumer/explorer Fan/consumer/explorer/social Fan— display extending engagement

Location of Domestic space via engagement/consumption console/PC Occasional arcade or social spaces Narrative spatialization Navigable storyworld, levels and maps

Across handheld, mobile, and Domestic computer devices space, social gatherings.

Social/fan

Online/domestic/mobile

Some engagement with the spaces/topologies of the originary text

Space and Spatial navigation key navigation of element of interaction specific story driven spaces key feature Alternative ways of representing a storyworld, profit motivation Durability and sustained engagement

Producer motivation/driver

Promotion and increased profit

Securing ongoing fan engagement with the franchise/narrative world

Temporalities

Sell far beyond release of the original text, serve as promotional material to support further film, television or other media experiences within the narrative brand or “franchise”

Pre- or post-release of iteration within a franchise. Often time-limited

Securing ongoing or pre-release engagement w

Very short duration, timed to support promotional activities

For the purposes of classification and analysis I have proposed six key criteria for assessing where on the continuum the experience lies. These are: • • • • • •

subject position in game play form player motivation/pleasures location of engagement or platform narrative spatialization producer motivation/driver 133

• temporalities. These categories are intended to support a description and analysis of the aesthetics across the transmedia game to transmedia play continuum. As Table 7.3 illustrates, transmedia play innovation has emerged from experimental, politically, socially, or artistically motivated designers such as Blast Theory, Splash and Ripple, Punchdrunk, Jane McGonigal, Ken Eklund, Conducttr, and Slingshot Effect. (With some exceptions, these designers have all created experiences which are not derived or anchored to existing brands but instead they provide experiences that extend audience and player engagements with familiar generic conventions, tastes, tropes, and images.) The Alternate Reality Game (ARG) mechanic, although widely reported, highly publicized, and celebrated is a rarely used technique in transmedia storytelling instances, and limited to a few high-profile cases such as “The Beast” and “Why So Serious?” (see Chapter 1, this volume), and has been arguably deployed in a formulaic way. Rather, the more experimental, experiential, and playful transmedia game instances have been occurring in the lesser-known, fringe artistic practices of a handful of notable organizations and practitioners. But it has been in these spaces where techniques, practices, and principles have been evolved, refined, and defined (and then later adopted and co-opted by the mainstream). Experimentation is often focused on innovative experience design and challenging or politically charged interactions from their audience/players/subjects (Adams, Ericsson, and Lantz 2009). The motivation for the design of the games or play form is rarely purely commercial and often these projects depend upon more uncertain, competitive, and insecure funding. These instances tend to be tightly temporally and spatially bound, with clear rules of engagement, but with freedom to explore the framework. Within the Street Game genre—one of the most critically successful examples in the United Kingdom was Slingshot’s zombie game 2.8hrs later (see Kennedy 2018 for a full analysis) that very loosely applied fictional world/story or narrative. The player navigates through the terrain via a series of vignettes/set pieces with performances through which clues are given. These are not strictly speaking “interactive” as they do not depend upon or respond to the actions of the player as they unfold. In A Machine To See With by Blast Theory, instructions are given to the player via a recording listened to through a mobile phone—again the interaction with the story is very much delivered as if a film direction provided to an actor by a director. It is within instances such as this that the “ludoaesthetic” tendency increases—the notion of ludoaesthetics refers to the extent to which the audience member/player is embodied as a playful subject. These hybrid experiences afford what Giddings and Kennedy (2008) describe as a “recombinatory aesthetic,” an “amplification of affect” through this complex interplay of “tropes, literacies, energies and behaviours.” See also Maria Chatzichristodoulou’s essay on Blast Theory (2015) for an overview of 134

their contribution to innovation within the theater sector. Take Blast Theory’s A Machine To See With (2010): It is a film where you play the lead. You sign up online and hand over your mobile phone number. On the day, you receive an automated call giving you the address you need to go to. Once you arrive on your allotted street corner your phone rings. From there a series of instructions lead you through the city. You are the lead in a heist movie; it’s all about you. As you move from hiding money inside a public lavatory, to meeting up with a partner in crime and onwards to the bank, the tension rises. It’s up to you to deal with the bank robbery and it’s aftermath. The experience lasts slightly less time than a feature-length film. The play/game takes place across your mobile device and across an urban space—for these experiences to work you need the infrastructure of a standard city scape for the unfolding story and actions to make sense. The instructions and directions received through your mobile phone function to transform the space around you in to a navigable and explorable game world. New rules are now in place (you are involved in a heist) and the environment is rendered unfamiliar (for instance, it is not clear who are fellow players or actors) and the affective register shifts dramatically in a number of critical ways. First, as a participant you are required to adopt what is described as the “lusory attitude” (Suits 2005 [1982]); this is the disposition of being at play: a critical subjective stance that enables the participant to enter in to the spirit of the game or experience. Second, the urban sprawl is now potentially fraught with threats and danger in a way relevant to the new reality triggered by the communication being received via the mobile phone. In this process, a participant’s experience of the urban space and the awareness of strangers in that space is heightened, and the fissures between fiction and real life bring you into revealing encounters through a social drama which is … only fully realised once performed. (Pereira Dias 2012) In the case of A Machine To See With, the familiar genre of the “heist” movie is loosely laid over a series of complex instructions and interactions to construct a playful experience that also brings together elements of theatrical performance with game and play forms such as the aleatory in the form of chance encounters, moments of good fortune, the agonistic in terms of moments of playful conflict or competition; as well as elements of mimicry when required to be immersed and act in “role” or loosely defined character; and illinx in the thrilling moments of confusion, vertiginous, and disturbing blurring of boundaries between fictional world and the situated environment. It is the complex combination of the different more rule-bound forms (instruction and direction) with the more playful forms of (role play, improvisation) 135

that position these experiences at the edges of the continuum proposed within this chapter. In Blast Theory’s more recent work, Operation Black Antler, the player participates in an experience that is traverses fictional generic conventions to include allusions to a relationship with timely factual reporting. Drawing on conventions of characterization from detective, noir, psychological thrillers, and conspiracy dramas: Operation Black Antler is an immersive theatre piece that invites you to enter the murky world of undercover surveillance and question the morality of statesanctioned spying. In Operation Black Antler you are given a new identity as part of a small team; you are briefed and then sent into an undercover operation. From a first-hand perspective, you must make decisions and then reflect on the consequences of your decisions. What will you do when the power is in your hands? (Blast Theory 2016) Player subjects are invited to perform a dual subjectivity of undercover agent and radical sympathizer, the briefing provides a very loose framework within which to improvise this performance. Again, there is no specific text that is drawn on or adapted, but a series of familiar genre conventions articulated within a framework that also immerses the participant in a murky world where they must take responsibility for moral, ethical, and legal decision-making. The experience sheds light on surveillance culture, the blurred lines between activism and terrorism, and empowers the player to shape the experience for others and to play a critical role in decision-making regarding the event outcomes.

Conclusion This chapter has proposed a new way to configure and think about play in relation to transmedia games. The analysis of transmedia game and play undertaken here has situated the player behaviors and pleasures as dependent upon a ludic cultural imaginary, in which popular game tropes, affects, and energies underpin and determine the subject’s inhabitation of the required subjectivities produced by these designs. Making stories playable is clearly a resurgent aesthetic form. It brings new aesthetic practices whilst also making new demands on the participant—the adoption of the lusory attitude is required to varying degrees, at the most subtle, audience members/players willingly submit to certain rules of behavior, and at the most extreme they will willingly engage in moments of imaginative performative improvisation. Alongside their commercial and experiential function, transmedia games and transmedia play can be situated within a broader trend toward the ludification of cultural experience and are part of the burgeoning experience economy (Pine and Gilmore 2011)—a trend within which there is a greater demand for and celebration of interactive, playful experiences that extend our engagement with existing or novel 136

cultural forms (see Kennedy’s 2018 analysis of Secret Cinema, for instance). There is clear and widespread evidence for this wider ludification of cultural experience to be seen in the plethora of cultural experiences that are increasingly underpinned by principles of play where there is an underlying assumption of a play or games literate subject that underpins the interaction design and where this experimentation is clearly leading to new genres of experience design across and beyond the transmedia spectrum.

References Aarseth, Espen. 2004. “Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 45–55. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Adams, Matt, Martin Ericsson, and Frank Lantz. 2009. “Art and Politics of Pervasive Games.” In Pervasive Games Theory and Design: Experiences on the Boundary between Life and Play, edited by Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros and Annika Waern, 7–23. Burlington: Morgan Kaufmann. Anable, Aubrey. 2013. “Playing (in) the City: The Warriors and Images of Urban Disorder.” In Game On, Hollywood! Essays on the Intersection of Video Games and Cinema, edited by Gretchen Papazian and Joseph Michael Sommers. Jefferson: McFarland Press. Atkins, Barry. 2003. More Than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Blast Theory. 2010. “A Machine to See With.” Accessed December 20, 2017. www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/a-machine-to-see-with/. Blast Theory. 2016. “Operation Black Antler.” Accessed December 20, 2017. www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/%20operation-black-antler/. Caillois, Roger. 1958. Man, Play Games. Paris: Librarie Gallimard. Carr, Diane. 2005. “The Rules of the Game, the Burden of Narrative: Enter the Matrix.” In The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Reloaded, edited by Stacy Gillis, 36–47. London: Wallflower Press. Chatzichristodoulou, Maria. 2015. “Blast Theory.” In British Theatre Companies: 1995–2014, edited by Liz Tomlin, 231–254. New York: Bloomsbury. Dovey, Jon, and Helen W. Kennedy. 2006. Game Culture: Computer Games as New Media. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Giddings, Seth, and Helen W. Kennedy. 2008. “Little Jesuses and Fuck-off Robots: On Aesthetics, Cybernetics, and Not Being Very Good at Lego Star Wars.” In The Pleasures of Computer Gaming: Essays on Cultural History, Theory and Aesthetics, edited by Melanie Swalwell and Jason Wilson, 13–32. Jefferson and London: McFarland. Jenkins, Henry. 2004. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” Electronic Book Review, July 7. Accessed August 20, 2017. www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/lazzi-fair. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: When Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Kennedy, Helen W. 2018. “Funfear Attractions: The Playful Affects of Carefully Managed Terror in Immersive 28 Days Later Live Experiences.” In Live Cinema: Cultures, Economies, Aesthetics, edited by Sarah Atkinson and Helen W. Kennedy, 167–184. New York: Bloomsbury. Murray, Janet. 2004. “From Game-story to Cyberdrama.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 2–11. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pereira Dias, Marcos. 2012. “A Machine to See With (and Reflect Upon): Interview with Blast Theory Artists Matt Adams and Nick Tandavanitj.” Liminalities 8 (1). Accessed July 12, 2017. http://liminalities.net/81/blast-theory.html. Pine, B. Joseph, and James Gilmore. 2011. The Experience Economy. Boston: Harvard Business. Suits, Bernard. 2005 [1982]. The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. Peterborough: Broadview Press.

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8 Transmedia Music The Values of Music as a Transmedia Asset Paola Brembilla

Faced with the technological, economic, and cultural evolutions of the entertainment world, the music industry has to engage with new business models and consumption habits—suffice it to consider the drop in album sales and the rise of subscription streaming services, such as Spotify. In the meantime, as this book demonstrates, industrial and cultural convergence has opened up new creative and commercial possibilities, allowing single industries to become part of larger networks of synergies that can create value from multiple businesses, outlets, and audiences by spreading one core idea, or concept, across different media. This is most evident in franchises based on audiovisual products, where the characters, along with the storytelling they generate, are the foundation of a transmedia storyworld. However, the music industry too has embraced not only cross-media distribution principles, but also world-building and transmedia storytelling models, mixing and remediating itself with other media languages in order to produce narratives and experiences that are centered on music. Thus, this chapter explores the ways the music industry can generate cultural and economic value through transmedia projects, and seek to assess the role of music in the diverse transmedia storyworlds that these projects generate.

Defining Transmedia Music On April 23, 2016, Beyoncé released her studio album Lemonade. The release was accompanied by a one-hour film aired on US premium channel HBO—which, given its quality brand, therefore framed the project as “prestige” and placed it on a cultural Top Shelf. The film is a “visual album” (a visual representation of a concept album) divided into 11 chapters, one for each song, chronicling its concept: the singer’s discovery of her husband’s (rapper and producer Jay-Z) betrayal, and her road to healing. Between each song and visual segment, the album uses poetry and prose written by Somali poet Warsan Shire, who in turn gained instant popularity at the time of its release. In each chapter, Beyoncé wears dresses and accessories by high-end designers (Enrique Urbana, Roberto Cavalli, Yves Saint Laurent, among others), which also became instantly iconic best-sellers. In live performances on television and

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during the Formation World Tour, Beyoncé adopted the film’s visuals and iconic aesthetics once again, repurposing outfits, atmospheres, and the poetry/prose interludes. Tapping into Beyconcé’s fandom, the so-called Beyhive, the concept of the album triggered a public search to unveil the details of the husband’s adultery, and particularly the name of the woman with whom he cheated on Beyoncé: a case that also oveflowed to the pages of magazines and tabloids, and ultimately boosted, once again, the popularity of the album. On June 30, 2017, Jay-Z released his fourteenth studio album, 4:44, as an exclusive for the Sprint-Tidal partnership (Jay-Z’s own streaming service). Soon after the release, many fans and critics noted that several songs are a response to Beyoncé’s album, as it directly recalls some lines from Lemonade, stirring up interest in the couple’s own narrative once again. This cursory account of the Lemonade case, which is just a fragment of the whole Beyoncé/Jay-Z storyworld, exemplifies how transmedia strategies in the music industry can be diverse, combining old and new models, even within the same project. Here we have the narrativization of music (concept album), the visual representation of a musical concept (visual album), cross-marketing (fashion and literature, along with cross-promotion of two albums), branding (the iconicity and aesthetics of the “Beyoncé brand”), and industry synergies (the music and TV industries, with HBO). The connection of all these elements and strategies, as anticipated, ultimately constructed (and continues to construct) a storyworld based on Beyoncé and Jay-Z characters, functioning as a narrative that fosters fan engagement and social discourse. Considering the bigger picture, transmedia in the music industry can take several, different shapes: a live concert can be experienced at the movies (The Flaming Lips, Justin Bieber, Kanye West); a live tour can turn into a transmedia treasure hunt (Nine Inch Nails); a band can exist in virtual reality only (The Gorillaz). Thus, there is no straightforward definition for “transmedia music.” The whole concept is manifold and layered, and demands an analysis that takes several interweaving perspectives into consideration, connecting commercial and creative standpoints and bringing industrial and cultural relationships and dynamics to the fore. A song, or an album, is not transmedia merely because it can be relocated and consumed via multiple platforms. According to Elizabeth Evans, the concept of transmediality is a key to understanding how new media technologies have inspired new business models, new forms of narrative content and audience engagement, through “the increasigly popular industrial practice of using multiple media technologies to present information concerning a single fictional world through a range of textual forms” (2011, 1). This directly connects to the well-known definition of transmedia storytelling by Henry Jenkins (2006). However, music does not necessarily equal storytelling, fictional worlds, characters, and so forth. Instead, one key requirement for music to be transmedia is that a music project must become a spreadable concept, the matrix of a narrative that unfolds through content streaming which is “innately liquid and multipurposable, one applicable across varied strategy, production and consumption contexts” (Murray 2005, 419). Before exploring how this 139

can happen, let us return to the state of the industry, and pose a crucial question: why should music turn to transmedia production? As briefly mentioned in the introduction, the digital evolution of the media industries has caused market saturation, content abundance, the multiplication of outlets and players, anytime/anywhere modes of consumption, and the free circulation of files through illegal distribution platforms. And following the breakdown of the previous economic monopoly, held for decades by old producers and distributors, the music world needs to evolve its business models accordingly, aiming at competitive strategies that can ultimately bring an added value to their offer—and world-building and storytelling provide precisely this. To understand the perks of these strategies, we turn to the notion of “total entertainment.” According to Paul Grainge: Firstly, it can be seen as an industrial principle, describing the attempt by global media conglomerates to create an expansive entertainment and communication environment in which they have a disproportionate, near total, stake in terms of ownership and control. Secondly, it can be thought of as a particular form or horizon of cultural and textual practice, growing out of the permeable boundaries and newly “immersive” modalities of commercial entertainment media. (2008, 54) Although this argument mainly refers to media franchises (in particular Disney), these two points help understand the logics of transmedia music as well. On the one hand, there is the need to maintain control over the circulation of content and share the risks of high-budget projects through corporate management, synergies, and partnerships. On the other, this fits into a broader trend where content becomes immersive and the experience become a product. On this point, as Frank Rose argues: a new type of narrative is emerging—one that’s told through many media at once in a way that’s nonlinear, that’s participatory and often gamelike, and that’s designed above all to be immersive. This is “deep media”: stories that are not just entertaining, but immersive, taking you deeper than an hour long. (2011, 3) In order for music to be more than a single or an album that is directly sold to consumers, it needs to appeal to the affective economies of cultural life, i.e., to understand the emotional underpinnings of consumer decision-making and to “shape brand reputations, not through an individual transaction, but through the sum total of interactions with the customer—an ongoing process that occurs across a range of different media ‘touch points’” (Jenkins 2006, 62–63). To do this, music needs not only to shift into a concept and its storytelling, it also needs to reinforce the relationship with its audience through immersive, emotional, and long-lasting experiences. As we have seen with the case of Lemonade, the official narrative of the 140

project is carefully crafted so as to generate more narrative through social discourses, tapping directly into participatory culture and those audience members that help generate interest in particular brands (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013, 7). Most importantly, the entire project is designed as a multiplatform narrative, made of several entry points that ultimately construct an immersive environment. However, as mentioned previously, there is no standard model for transmedia music. In the following sections, I identify a handful of cases that highlight this diversity, before providing final remarks on the role of music in transmedia projects.

One Direction: Superstar Brands, Transmedia Narrative, and CounterNarrative A narrative needs characters. And in a way, the music industry has always been in the business of producing “characters,” also known as “superstars.” Namely, stars are collections of meaning, as mediated identities, characters that embody images and personalities; capital, as labor for the industries; and marketing tools, in that their image can be capitalized in terms of a media text promotion (McDonald 2000, 6–13). So effectively, stars are characters around which industries can build a narrative and gain revenues. Although this is not a new phenomenon, with the evolutions and disruption of the media industry this “superstar design” has been further sharpened and enhanced. Peter Tschmuck notes that as major record labels replaced the push strategy with a pull strategy to make changes manageable, they also began to rely increasingly on music concepts, and to turn some performers into “superstar brands,” with very specific music and interpretation styles (2012, 268). When talking about these “superstar brands,” Roy Shuker stresses the importance of recognizing the “commerce mythology” around them, i.e., the constraints placed on the performers by the industry, as well as “the dynamics of the relationship between performers, their record companies and other aspects of the music industry (technology), and their fans” (2001, 116). One example is the Spice Girls, with each one of the girls becoming pervasive public signifiers through their iconic looks and nicknames, a brand image embodied by the “Girl Power” catchphrase, brand-extension and cross-marketing operations (books, TV specials, a film), and countless product endorsements (Shuker 2001, 129). In a way, this too was a kind of transmedia narrative. But what happens to industrially crafted strategies and narratives when, as suggested by Shuker, we take into consideration the fans too, and we add contemporary participatory culture to the mix? The boyband One Direction (1D) is one emblematic case. Notoriously, 1D is a British boy band formed by Simon Cowell in the seventh series of The X Factor (UK), in 2010. After ranking third in the competition, the group signed with Cowell’s label Syco Records and released, since then, five albums. Aside from this first synergy with the TV industry, the promotional activities for the band are not unlike those historically adopted for superstar brands: each member of the group embodies a personality and a set of values, recalled in every public appearance and 141

music video. Around the band and their albums, we have a wide range of ancillary products: music videos, books, films, TV specials, products endorsements, etc. But what is really unique in this case, is how the fandom—namely, the directioners— played an active role in boosting the band’s popularity, sales and in enriching their storyworld. As Mark Duffett (2014) argues, with the Internet and new technologies, fans can now directly analyze, comment, transform, and share again pieces of their idols’ universes, to such an extent that these communities have become a central element of record companies’ marketing strategies. This has resonance with the example of 1D, who in 2015 released their fourth album, Four, containing the song “No Control.” The song quickly became a fan favorite because of its overtly sexual lyrics, which were written by one member of the band—a first for 1D. Initiated by a Tumblr post by a London fan, a group of directioners started the No Control Project, a widespread and coordinated promo campaign to make “No Control” a single. The project involved the creation of posters, covers for the single and a music video; massive downloads of the track on iTunes to drive it up the sales chart; a Facebook-Twitter-Tumblr thunderclap (a syncronized post publication) of 55 million people, to get the song title trending worldwide; fans calling radio stations to play the song, which was ultimately played by 60 stations worldwide in one day, including BBC1. The project received great relevance in the media, was acknowledged by the boyband with public thanks and the song became an unofficial single—and was even included by James Corden in his “Carpool Karaoke” with the boys. The No Control Project is a case of what Patryck Galuszka (2015) calls the “new economy of fandom,” where empowered fan communities use the potential of social media to cooperate with artists, ultimately working as sponsors, co-creators of value, stakeholders, and investors. Although the fans’ primary intention was to shine a light on a “hidden” song that differed from the typical 1D brand, they ended up helping the industry generate revenues. Therefore, the cultural value assigned by the fans to the song actually turned into economic value for the industry. A further explicit case of fans creating cultural value is through Larry Stylinson, and the creation of a counter-narrative. From the months of The X Factor, some attentive directioners noticed special affection between two members of the boyband, Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles. Later on, these fans (that called themeselves the “Larries”) began to collect evidences of a love affair between the two: they uploaded videos on YouTube with their most evident moments of sexual tension and loving looks during public appearances, and they named the couple Larry Stylinson (a mashup of the two full names). The theory peaked in 2011, with Louis Tomlinson’s infamous tweet “Always in my heart @Harry_Styles”—which, in 2017, remains the third most retweeted tweet in history (see Luckerson 2017). Shortly afterwards, Harry and Louis began to be separated in interviews and to avoid one another on stage. Suddenly, the fans had no more material to make their videos and to support their theory. However, this sparked them further, feeding new theories that the couple was 142

forced to stay separated and closeted by the management. Regardless of the truth behind these theories, it is interesting that a counter-narrative soon became canonical for a part of the fandom and that, in spreading across the Internet and even the trade press, it turned into a sort of urban legend. Further, the counter-narrative even contained social outcomes. Beyond fanart and fanfiction, the Larry Stylinson “division” of the fandom became a safe space for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bissexual, transgender, and queer) fans—mostly through Tumblr pages (like http://takemehomefromnarnia.tumblr.com) that act as communities offering moral support to directioners in need, and organizing meetings during the band tour dates. And as for the band, Harry Styles too started to show support for the LGBTQ community in interviews and during tour dates—he, in many cases, waived rainbow flags on stage during 1D’s last tour, the On The Road Again Tour. The Larry Stylinson counter-narrative therefore became more than a byproduct of contemporary participatory culture; as Lisa A. Lewis suggests: “By participating in fandom, fans … enter a domain of cultural activity of their own making which is, potentially, a source of empowerment in struggles against oppressive ideologies and the unsatisfactory circumstances of everyday life” (1992, 3). While in immersive, branded environments, characters and plotlines can be extended and moved to other media to create a more robust world (Rose 2011, 19), the same holds true when these characters are moved to counter-narratives that expand and enrich the canonical storyworld with new, culturally/socially relevant meanings. As 1D are now on a hiatus and band members are pursuing solo carreers, the Larries still live on as a community engaged with support for LGBTQ youths—and producing 1D-themed merchandise for charity. Moreover, on the one hand, the directioners continue to provide an essential source of profit for each single member of the group, as they follow their solo careers. On the other, they keep the 1D storyworld alive through social discourses and active productions, turning the project into a long-term asset that, at some point in the future, could be picked up again by the industry.

Björk’s Biophilia: A Multiplatform Project and Transmedia Experience Donald Norman (2009) defines system-thinking as a key strategy in today’s most succesful companies. System-thinking means selling not just a product, but a set of connected experiences revolving around a core business. In so doing, direct transactions give way to systemic experiences, which generate value through multiple touchpoints and by keeping users inside that system. The iPod is an ideal example: the business is not just about the product itself, but rather the Apple digital ecosystem surrounding it and the way users need to enter that ecosystem to make the product work. The same principle can be applied to the transmedia narratives, or immersive environments, we have seen so far: music is the core product, but the narratives built around it configures environments that keep audiences engaged and loyal. Beyond superstar brands and narratives, there are more practical examples of how 143

an artist can turn a single product, such as a concept album, into a multiplatform project and transmedia experience. One example is Björk’s Biophilia. Released on October 5, 2011, Biophilia is the seventh studio album by the Icelandic artist. More than a concept album, Biophilia has been described as the first “app album,” i.e., a multimedia project that explores the links between music, art, nature, science and technologies. It is in fact a transmedia experience, harmonically connecting and hybridizing heterogeneous languages and media. From a musical perspective, each of the album’s tracks ideally matches the intellectual purpose of the song and combines instruments and softwares. However, in an interview with Wired, Björk stated that she felt the songs could not stand on their own: “People are getting a lot of music for free by pirating it. But they are going to double [the number of] shows because they want a 3D, physical experience” (Burton 2011). The original idea to produce a three-dimensional film to complement the album was later set aside in favor of a mobile application launch. According to the same Wired article, Björk reasoned that, through the app, her audience would have interactive and educational experience at a premium, non-piratable value. For that reason, she turned to Apple: given the project’s high costs, she ensured that the company would promote the app, and that it would find a spotlight within the iTunes Store. Apple therefore created a “super room” page, from which both audio and app versions of the album could be bought. In terms of experience, the app is made of a “mother app” that functions as a constellation, containing ten separate apps, one for each song. They either work as games (e.g., in Virus, the user must protect cells from bacterias, as the song plays in the background) and/or music sequencers visually represented by instruments or natural elements, like piano strings or electrical lines (in Moon, the user can edit the original version of the songs by adjusting the notes). The app gameplay is presented by broadcaster and biologist David Attenborough, and the same introduction opens each date of the Biophilia Tour. The tour also incorporates educational lectures, nature footage and a publicity campaign featuring National Geographic and the scientific journal Nature Medicine. The project design and recording were later documented in the 2013 film When Björk Met Attenborough, and the tour became a concert film, Biophilia Live. In 2014, Biophilia became the first downloadable app in the New York MOMA permanent collection, signaling the album’s official entry into the sphere of “high arts.” Clearly, this case recalls once again the importance of industrial synergies in a transmedia project—suffice it to recall the deal made with Apple. But what is most interesting here is the extension of the artist’s brand and aesthetics to create a transmedia experience. Notably, Björk’s brand is that of an eclectic, transmedia artist (singer, actress, writer, art performer) and it is extensively expressed through interest in nature and her concerns about the environment: she performed at concerts, wrote articles to raise awareness on environmental issues, she founded the Náttúra organization to support icelandic grassroots industries, and promoted it with a single of 144

the same name. As in the cae of the iPod and its essential connection to the Apple ecosystem, the album is not the real product here. Through Björk’s brand, the systemthinking design mentioned at the beginning of this section is implemented to create a whole ecosystem that the user can inhabit and experience, that is based on music, but actually harmonizes sounds and visuals, art and science, digital design and philosophy.

The Get Down: Music and TV Series Throughout the chapter, we have observed transmedia narratives and experiences in which music remains the core product and the starting point of the project. However, music can also be employed as a shared asset with other entertainment industries, one that merges and adds value to other core products. On US television, for instance, musical shows have been very popular for quite sometime, in the form of talent/contest shows (e.g., American Idol), the return of live theater (e.g., FOX’s Grease Live) and, more than anything else, in scripted series. In the latter case, music fits into ecosystemic architectures that often characterize contemporary TV shows, which are designed as ever-expanding storyworlds where single parts can be extracted and adapted to the needs of different media and audiences, each benefiting the other (Innocenti and Pescatore 2012). Such cases take advantage of industrial sinergies by placing music at the center of world-building processes in many ways. Music, both as a narrative and business asset, merges with TV language, to generate transmedia storytelling and transmedia revenues. A useful example is the Disney franchise High School Musical, where music was repurposed into live shows, international spin-offs, a reality contest, a show on ice, video games and so on. Another is ABC’s Glee: the cover song licensed for the show was repurposed in live shows. In these cases, music drove not only the shows’ narratives, but also the transmedia products’ spread, becoming the core of their world-building process. Beginning with these considerations, I focus next on how music factors into the world-buiding process of a TV series by examining the case of Baz Luhrmann’s The Get Down (Netflix, 2016), which allows us to explore the cultural and economic value of transmedia from yet another point of view. Set in the Bronx, New York City, in the late 1970s, the series follow the rise of disco music, hip-hop, and underground cultural trends through the eyes of a group of teenagers, also depicting the wars among gangs and the poverty faced by Bronx communities. In order to do so, The Get Down puts specific musical genres and their cultures at the center of its world-building process, illustrating an extremely accurate coordination of transmedia industries, assets, and creativity. From the industrial standpoint, the series relies on inter-industrial collaborations and brandnames in order to establish its reliable voice and then to reinforce, legitimate, and promote itself. The Get Down’s score was written by Elliott Wheeler, a composer and producer who specializes in unifying different genres and artists, as well as adapting and remixing pre-existing music to the needs of contemporary films and TV. The show features new music, cover versions and several songs from the 1960s and 1970s, and 145

predominantly disco, rhythm and blues (R&B), funk, and soul. Importantly, Baz Luhrmann also taps directly into the real hip-hop community, having worked with technical advisers such as Nelson George and the pioneering hip-hop DJ Grandmaster Flash—who is also portrayed in the series as a key character. Together with the DJ, rap legends Kurtis Blow and Nas hosted a Hip-Hop boot camp to educate the actors. The brand-name of Baz Luhrman plays an important role, too, as it helps to frame the show in the postmodern imaginery of his filmography, in which remixed contemporary music is essential in establishing the mood and aesthetics, and driving the narrative— this is manifested in his musical movies Strictly Ballroom (1992) and Moulin Rouge! (2001). At the level of the text, in the mixture of true facts and heightened invention, music goes beyond its basic scoring fuction to become a storytelling driver. Beyond moving the narrative forward, on a macro-level, The Get Down operates the way original rap music did, by appropriating beats from earlier R&B and disco music. Similarly, on a micro-level, the two protagonists Mylene (a disco star wannabe) and Zeke (a poet and rapper) represent the evolution of two musical genres, as well as links to their respective communities. In fact, the show embraces the genres and cultures of disco and hip-hop, foregrounding their social and cultural value for emerging minorities (see, for instance, Krasnow 1993). By representing the rise of disco and hip-hop as such, The Get Down actually “remediates” them. According to Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (1998), remediation means reform. Simply put, remediation happens when one medium is represented within another and the second medium can improve or reform the former. This relates, therefore, to the notion of appropriation, insofar as it is based on the combination and integration of different media languages, each one enhancing the other. In this case, the language and imagery of two musical genres are appropriated into TV language, reforming it through aesthetic and cultural enrichment and ultimately increasing the overall value of the series.

Conclusion Throughout this chapter, I have referred to core products and core concepts. However, the cases I analyzed demonstrate that although the idea of a transmedia project can be initiated by one industry, it becomes a sort of ecosystem that breaks down hierarchies, blurring the boundaries between the central text (e.g., a music album) and its transmedia extensions. In this sense, transmedia music operations are consistent with the ambivalence of transmedia storyworlds, based on the merging of texts and paratexts, products and by-products, cultural and commercial spaces (Gray 2010). Moreover, these projects also question the hierarchy subtending much scholarly work on music and audiovisual products in which sounds follow image, pointing instead to more systemic perspectives—Timothy Warner (2006), for instance, shows how the reverse holds true in pop videos that work toward an integrative function. As I argued 146

at the beginning of this chapter, in fact, it is essential to examine transmedia music in the light of synergy networks, relationships, and dynamic processes, rather than single products that are simply connected with one another on a cross-media level. Since transmedia implies such concepts as convergence, mergences, and remediation, music should be seen as a transmedia asset on which cultural industries can capitalize in different ways: as a product to aid actual selling, but also/mostly as a means to unfold the plotlines of a storyworld, as the backbone of a transmedia project, as an aesthetic and a language that adds value to an audiovisual production. Combined with the systemic perspective, this view of music as a transmedia asset allows us to account for its versatility and ability to serve several purposes, and to understand better the creation of cultural and economic value in the contemporary mediascape.

References Bolter, Jay D., and Richard Grusin. 1998. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Burton, Charlie. 2011. “In Depth: How Bjork’s ‘Biophilia’ Album Fuses Music With iPad Apps.” Wired, July 26. Accessed July 11, 2017. www.wired.co.uk/article/music-nature-science. Duffett, Mark. 2014. “Introduction.” In Popular Music Fandom. Identities, Roles and Practices, edited by Mark Duffet, 1–15. London and New York: Routledge. Evans, Elizabeth. 2011. Transmedia Television. Audiences, New Media, and Daily Life. New York and London: Routledge. Galuszka, Patryk. 2015. “New Economy of Fandom.” Popular Music and Society 38: 25–43. Grainge, Paul. 2008. Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age. New York and London: Routledge. Gray, Jonathan. 2010. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York University Press. Innocenti, Veronica, and Gulgluielmo Pescatore. 2012. “Information Architecture in Contemporary Television Series.” Journal of Information Architecture 4: 1–2. Accessed July 11, 2017. http://journalofia.org/volume4/issue2/05-pescatore/. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press. Krasnow, Carolyn. 1993. “Fear and Lotahing in the ‘70s: Race, Sexuality and Disco.” Stanford Humanities Review 3: 37–45. Lewis, Lisa A. 1992. “Introduction.” In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, 1–8. London and New York: Routledge. Luckerson, Victor. 2017. “These Are the 10 Most Popular Tweets of All Time.” Time, April 11. Accessed November 17, 2017. http://time.com/4263227/most-popular-tweets/. McDonald, Paul. 2000. The Star System: Hollywood’s Production of Popular Identities. London: Wallflowers. Murray, Sarah. 2005. “Brand Loyalties: Rethinking Content Within Global Corporate Media.” Media, Culture & Society 27: 415–435. Norman, Donald A. 2009. “System Thinking: A Product is More Than the Product.” Interactions 16: 52–54. Rose, Frank. 2011. The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company. Shuker, Roy. 2001. Understanding Popular Music. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Tschmuck, Peter. 2012. Creativity and Innovation in the Music Industry. New York: Springer. Warner, Timothy. 2006. “Narrating Sound: The Pop Video in the Age of the Sampler.” In Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-Existing Music in Film, edited by Phil Powrie and Robynn Stilwell, 167–179. Burlington: Ashgate.

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9 Transmedia Journalism The Potentialities of Transmedia Dynamics in the News Coverage of Planned Events Renira Rampazzo Gambarato

The transmedia storytelling concept was originally conceived in the fiction context (Jenkins 2003, 2006). However, the non-fiction realm embraced the transmedia dynamics as much and as profoundly as the entertainment sphere. Writers, novelists, and historians have long blurred the differentiation between fiction (the world of imagination) and non-fiction (the real world), and terms such as creative nonfiction have emerged (Clark 2001). News stories, however, traditionally are examples of nonfiction in the sense that “journalists should report the truth. Who would deny it? But such a statement does not get us far enough, for it fails to distinguish nonfiction from other forms of expression” (Clark 2001). Non-fiction can make false assertions, fabricate facts, and tell events from a certain perspective. Therefore, although the truth is not the main point in non-fiction, non-fictional stories, such as news, claim to describe reality to a certain extent (Gambarato and Tárcia 2017). Kerrigan and Velikovsky (2016) argue that non-fiction transmedia forms have the same characteristics as fictional transmedia productions. “Non-fiction transmedia draws on the same definitions as fiction transmedia” (2016, 250), and “[n]on-fiction transmedia is an extant and ever-increasing phenomenon” (2016, 255). GifreuCastells, Misek, and Verbruggen (2016) remind us that “[a]udiovisual non-fiction is a vast field containing documentary, journalism, film essays, educational videos, museum exhibitions, scientific films, institutional, industrial or propaganda videos, etc.” In this context, scholars such as Alzamora and Tárcia (2012), Canavilhas (2014), Gambarato and Alzamora (2018), Gambarato and Tárcia (2017), Moloney (2011), Pernisa Jr. (2010), Renó and Flores (2012), and Tellería (2016) have investigated to what extent transmedia storytelling characterizes contemporary journalism, which constructs a narrative that creates various entry points dispersed across multiple media platforms and involves different audience segments. Similar to the transmedia dynamics observed in entertainment, transmedia journalism operates by expanding journalistic narratives on integrated platforms, in which the audience is involved in a committed way, adding and sharing content through digital environments, especially via online social networks. 148

Transmedia journalism, as Dominguez (2012) stated, is an elastic term with a wide variety of theoretical possibilities. For Tellería, transmedia journalism is “a field scarcely explored and with a wide range of possibilities to be implemented and tested” (2016, 71). Thus, this chapter first discusses the current contributions to the conceptualization of transmedia journalism and presents Gambarato and Tárcia’s (2017) analytical and operational model that outlines the main features of transmedia strategies focused on the coverage of planned events in news media. Planned events are temporal occurrences that are usually well schematized and publicized in advance. For instance, the Olympic Games and other major sporting events, such as the FIFA World Cup, are recurring planned events. The relevance of this model is its contribution to overcoming the difficulties of transposing transmedia logic to the journalism realm. The difficulties comprise, for instance, the complexity of the journalism activity in general (Canavilhas 2014), the necessity of designing and planning distinct paths and content to be produced across multiple media (Renó 2014), and issues regarding journalism time-constrained brevity (Moloney 2011).

Transmedia Journalism Scolari, Bertetti, and Freeman posit that “journalists have been producing transmedia storytelling for years, even before the arrival of the World Wide Web” (2014, 4). Since the advent of mass communication, news stories have been reported in diverse media, starting with radio, then television, and followed by next-day newspapers and weekly magazines. Engagement, at that time, occurred through telephone calls or letters to the newsroom. The arrival of the Internet, especially regarding online social networks, enhanced audience engagement through interaction and participation. Nevertheless, Gambarato and Tárcia emphasize that “although various media are present in journalism and journalists employ multiple practices to cover multifaceted media events, not every news production is necessarily transmediatic; thus far, the majority of the content spread across different media platforms is simply repurposed” (2017, 1385). Moreover, Tavares and Mascarenhas ponder that “it is not rare that a news story extends across multiple platforms with mass and post-mass functions. However, this is not enough to call an article as a transmedia narrative” (2013, 200). A crucial aspect to consider in this context is that transmedia storytelling is about expanding, not repeating, content. One of the main approaches to transmedia journalism was proposed by Moloney (2011). He applied Jenkins’ (2009a, 2009b) core principles of transmedia storytelling to journalism. Moloney (2011, 60–92) posits the following as characteristics of transmedia journalism: (1) spreadability (the spread of a story by users’ sharing); (2) drillability (search for more details about the news; official content expansions, including social media networks); (3) continuity and seriality (maintain continuity and exploit the characteristics of each medium; keep the audience’s attention for a longer period); (4) diversity (add other points of view, including those of the public); (5) 149

immersion (generate alternative forms of storytelling for the public to delve deeper into the story); (6) extractability (apply the journalist’s work in everyday life with the public commitment); (7) real world (show all shades of the news, without focusing on simplification); and (8) inspiration to action (pursue intervention by the public in real actions seeking solutions to problems). Looney (2013) describes five ways to build transmedia news features: (1) keep the content unique (instead of repeating information on different media platforms, use different parts of the story to match the strength of each medium and maximize the user experience); (2) provide seamless points of entry (ensure that the media platforms involved in the transmedia news story offer the audience the possibility to engage in a simple manner); (3) partner up (transmedia news are often complex and require the involvement of other professionals and resources); (4) keep it cost-effective (although there are costly projects, this is not the only option because it is also possible to produce transmedia news cheaply, for instance, by introducing social media networks to expand the story); and (5) the story is number one (creative tools may do more harm than help; always put the story first). Pernisa Jr. (2010) proposed an “opened monads model” for use in building transmedia news stories, “in which each medium would be taken as the smallest field in structure and would bind the other, forming a network of contextualized material for the user’s query in various ways” (2010, 8). Furthermore, Canavilhas (2014, 60–64) describes the main characteristics of transmedia journalism as (1) interactivity, (2) hypertextuality, (3) integrated multimodality, and (4) contextualization. Gambarato and Tárcia conclude: In sum, we consider that transmedia journalism, as well as other applications of TS [transmedia storytelling] in fictional and nonfictional realms, is characterized by the involvement of (1) multiple media platforms, (2) content expansion, and (3) audience engagement. Transmedia journalism can take advantage of different media platforms such as television, radio, print media, and, above all, the internet and mobile media to tell deeper stories. Content expansion, as opposed to the repetition of the same message across multiple platforms, is the essence of TS [transmedia storytelling] and, therefore, should be the focal point of transmedia journalism as well. The enrichment of the narrative is facilitated by the extended content. Audience engagement involves mechanisms of interactivity, such as the selection of the elements to be explored, the option to read a text, watch a video, enlarge photographs, access maps, click on hyperlinks, and share information through social networks. Audience engagement deals with participation via, for instance, remixing content and creating original user-generated content. (2017, 1386) The current news media patterns point to 150

the continuous decline of print sales and the access to media by its homepage, mobile first acclaimed strategies, the ever-changing parameters of Social Media that directly affect the access and distribution of media content, the rising of podcasts, personalized news and content, video and add-blocks as well as the unstable ambient of apps. (Tellería 2016, 68) This atmosphere is reflected in transmedia journalism, which is enriched by the current trends of contemporary contributions from immersive journalism (de la Peña et al. 2010), virtual reality (Matney 2017), podcasts (Barnathan 2014), slow journalism (Gambarato 2016), newsgames (Bogost, Ferrari, and Schweizer 2010), graphic journalism (Cute 2016), and comics journalism (Schlichting 2016), among others. In the midst of this reality, “[t]he purpose of a transmedia news story is to inform the readers in the best way possible” (Ford 2007). Transmedia journalism is relevant because of its refreshing approach to information architecture, visualization, and contextualization to foster the integrated transmedia flow of content across multiple media platforms with audience engagement (Tellería 2016).

Analytical and Operational Model of Transmedia News Coverage of Planned Events Gambarato and Tárcia (2017) argue that transmedia storytelling’s role in contemporary journalism relates in particular to the coverage of planned events. “Several studies of transmedia entertainment and transmedia narratives emphasize the planned, strategic aspects of their creation: media companies carefully structuring and portioning the narrative across different media platforms in order to maximize synergistic effects” (Fast and Örnebring 2015, 2). However, there is also the emergent/ad hoc nature of transmedia storytelling in which storyworlds can evolve over time and be created and co-created by professionals and amateurs alike. Therefore, Fast and Örnebring emphasize that transmedia storytelling has “(a) accrued characteristics that are more ad hoc/contingent than planned; and/or (b) contain disjunctions and contradictions that are actually the result of strategic planning decisions (i.e. strategic planning of transmedia worlds is not necessarily focused on creating a seamless, coherent world)” (2015). In this sense, transmedia journalism is the result of “carefully orchestrated company strategies” (2015) combined with ad-hoc aspects of transmedia storyworlds, especially related to the contributions provided via audience engagement (Gambarato, Alzamora, Tárcia, and Jurno 2017). Planned events usually attract large domestic and international audiences, have the potential to integrate audiences in the news making (emergent/ad-hoc aspect), involve a substantial amount of human, technical, and financial resources (planned/strategic aspect), and provide abundant content, protagonists, and various stories. These characteristics constitute a fertile terrain for the development and growth of transmedia 151

news production. The proposed analytical and operational model of transmedia news coverage of planned events (Gambarato and Tárcia 2017) aims to contribute to a clearer understanding of transmedia news production and to foster and improve transmedia journalistic practices. The model addresses the specificities of such multiplatform news productions, clarifying how transmedia features are structured and implemented. The method draws on the transmedia project design model developed by Gambarato (2013) and establishes ten focal topics and subsequent practicable questions, regarding, for instance, news storytelling, media platforms, and audience engagement. The rationale behind the incorporation of characteristics commonly associated with fictional transmedia in transmedia journalism relies on the discussion presented earlier in the chapter about fictional and non-fictional transmedia productions sharing the same core principles and features (Kerrigan and Velikovsky 2016). A concise description of the model is provided in Table 9.1. Table 9.1 Concise description of the analytical and operational model regarding transmedia news coverage of planned events (Gambarato and Tárcia 2017, 1389–1391) Topic 1. Premise and Purpose: The nature of the event, its magnitude, and comprehensiveness influence the journalistic coverage.

Practicable questions What is the planned event agenda? What is its core theme? What is the fundamental purpose of the event? What is the magnitude of the event? Is it a local, regional, or global event? Which areas are involved in the coverage (sports, culture, politics, economics, etc.)? 2. Structure and Context: Which media enterprise is covering the event? The organization of the transmedia journalistic coverage, How big is it? the professionals involved, and the infrastructure What is the available coverage infrastructure available depict how the operations were planned and offered by the event organizers? executed. What is the media enterprise budget for the news coverage of the event? Is the journalistic coverage planned to be transmediatic? How does the coverage end? Do some extensions continue to be active after the event ends? 3. News Storytelling: Primary and Parallel News Stories: The news coverage of the event involves primary and What elements of the news story (who, what, parallel stories. where, when, why, and how) of the event are involved in the coverage? What is the timeframe of the news story? Does the news coverage utilize gaming elements? Does it involve winning or losing? Is it possible to identify intermedial texts in the news stories? 4. World-building: Where is the event set? The storyworld in which the news is placed should be Does the storyworld involve any fictional robust enough to support multiplatform expansions. characteristics? Are different time zones involved in the news coverage? If yes, what are the potential issues related to it and the alternative strategies for each platform?

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What are the regulations and policies related to the journalistic coverage? Is the event big enough to support expansions throughout multiplatform coverage? 5. Characters: Who are the main characters presented by the The characters implicated in the coverage could be coverage? How many? Are they aggregated to the journalists, characters of the news stories per se, coverage a posteriori? sources of information to be reported, and the Who are the primary and secondary sources of audience as collaborators. information regarding the event? What is the approach of these sources? Are the sources official, nonofficial, or both? Can the audience be considered a character as well? 6. Extensions: How many extensions are included in the news News stories meant to spread throughout multiple media coverage? platforms should not simply transpose or repurpose the Are the extensions mere reproductions of the content from one medium to another but expand the same content or genuine expansions of the news, taking advantage of the media platforms news stories across various media? available. Is there a plan to keep the content updated in each extension (for instance, on blogs and social media networks)? Do the extensions have the ability to spread the content and provide the possibility to explore the narrative in-depth? How long does the event last? If the event is overlong, how does the coverage proceed to maintain audience interest throughout the entire period? 7. Media Platforms and Genres: What kind of media platforms (television, radio, In addition to telling news stories with more than one print media, web, mobile) are involved in the medium, transmedia news coverage can embrace news coverage? several journalism styles, such as news articles, Which devices (computer, tablet, mobile phone, reports, and opinions; a number of journalism genres; etc.) are required by the coverage? and different technological devices. Is there a roll-out strategy for launching each coverage extension? If yes, what is the plan for releasing the platforms? Which journalism styles (news articles, reportages, opinions, etc.) are included in the coverage? Which journalistic genres (sports, celebrity, investigative journalism, etc.) are presented by the coverage? 8. Audience and Market: What is the target audience of the coverage? Who Scoping the audience is fundamental for a more is the intended reader/user/viewer/listener? appropriate delivery of the transmedia news coverage. What kind of readers (methodical or scanner; intimate, or detached) does the project attract? Does other journalistic coverage like this exist? Do they succeed in achieving their purpose? What is the coverage business model? Does it involve open platforms, open television channels, cable TV, satellite, pay-per-view, monopoly, etc.? Is the event coverage successful revenue-wise? 9. Engagement: What percentage of the public participates in the The relationship between the story and the people event in loco, and what percentage of the interested in it is an essential aspect of transmedia audience accesses the event via news coverage?

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strategies.

10. Aesthetics: The visual and audio elements contribute to the news coverage and enhance the overall transmedia experience that unfolds across multiple media platforms.

What are the mechanisms of interaction in the transmedia strategy of coverage? Is participation involved in the coverage? If so, how can the reader/user/viewer/listener participate in the open system? Is there user-generated content (UGC) related to the event (parodies, recaps, mashups, fan communities, etc.)? Are there any policies restricting the disclosure of UGC? What activities are available to the audience within social media networks related to the event? Is there a system of rewards and penalties? For example, can the audience have its comments/photos published, can people get rewards for social media activities, and can they have comments blocked/removed? What kinds of visuals (video, photo, infographics, news games, animation, holography, etc.) are used in the coverage? Is the overall look of the coverage realistic or a composed environment (usage of graphism, holography, immersive journalism, augmented reality)? Is it possible to identify specific design styles in the coverage? How does audio work in the coverage? Is there ambient sound, sound effects, music, and so forth?

To briefly illustrate the application of the model for transmedia news coverage of planned events, the case of the Brazilian news coverage of the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics (Gambarato, Alzamora, and Tárcia 2018) is presented. The analysis examines ten features of the transmedia news coverage produced by the Brazilian official broadcaster of Rio Olympics—Globo Network (Rede Globo, in Portuguese): the premise and purpose, structure and context, news storytelling, world-building, characters, extensions, media platforms and genres, audience and market, engagement, and aesthetics. The first feature is the premise and purpose of the coverage. Although the fundamental objects of the coverage were the competitions, the athletes, and their performances, the media also had to be aware of related issues, such as social and political demonstrations and controversies; an ongoing outbreak of the mosquito-borne Zika virus in Brazil; the pollution of Guanabara Bay, whose waters were used for sailing and windsurfing competitions; political instability and economic crises; and the Russian doping scandal and participation restrictions. The second feature is the structure and context. More than 7,000 hours of video and audio coverage were produced and distributed to an audience of six billion people in 220 countries (Long 2016). Globo Network planned the transmedia coverage of the Games, including online streaming, social media networks, mobile applications, and 154

websites. The third feature is news storytelling. The primary stories broadcasted, especially on television, were directly related to the sports events, such as the Olympic competitions, the results, and the stories that portrayed the athletes as heroes. The secondary stories included, for example, the American swimmer Ryan Lochte fabricating a story of being robbed at gunpoint during the Games; two boxers arrested and accused of trying to rape housekeepers; and Patrick Hickey, a top Olympics official, arrested after illegally selling tickets to the Games. The secondary stories enriched the coverage and functioned as crucial elements of content expansion of the transmedia coverage. The fourth feature is world-building. The Summer Olympic Games competitions occurred at venues throughout Rio de Janeiro and were big enough to support expansions across multiple platforms. Globo Group, comprising television, cable television, printed media, and radio, included several of the group’s content platforms in this coverage, creating different concepts for each media platform, a core characteristic of transmedia journalism. The fifth feature is the characters. The coverage focused on several characters, in addition to the array of international athletes, such as Brazilian President Michel Temer (who was loudly booed by Brazilians during the Opening Ceremony) and the Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen (who walked the length of the Maracanã Stadium to the song “Girl from Ipanema” during the Opening Ceremony). The sixth feature is extensions. The coverage had diverse extensions, including mobile applications, Internet live streaming, video-on-demand platforms, and profiles on social media networks. A highlight was the unprecedented partnership between Globo Network and Snapchat, which offered specific content for the feature “Live Stories” on Snapchat with photos and videos recorded behind the scenes of the event by journalists, commentators, and fans. The seventh feature is the media platforms and genres. The media platforms encompassed television, radio, the Internet, printed media, mobile media, and social media. It was noticeable the emphasis on second screen applications and geolocation, as well as the interaction on online social media networks, from the journalistic content offered by the broadcaster. The eighth feature is the audience and market. Regarding the event’s impact, televised broadcasting registered a 40 percent increase in the number of people reached compared to the 2012 London Olympics, and the Globo Network digital platforms registered 6.5 million users (Mermelstein 2016). These numbers show that the transmedia coverage strategy was successful: Globo Network beat audience records and led that segment. The broadcaster’s robust and diversified editorial project reached a varied public. The ninth feature is engagement. Globo Network attained the most engagement of any brand on online social media during the Summer Olympic Games (Soutelo 2016). Overall, the broadcaster’s audience engagement strategy privileged interaction to the 155

detriment of participation. This aspect should be improved in future transmedia coverages. The tenth feature is aesthetics. The aesthetic perspective was characterized by technological innovations, for instance, incorporating virtual and augment reality, holographic projections, and the ultra-high-definition transmission 8K (a horizontal resolution of 7,680 pixels) format during the Opening and Closing Ceremonies. This model was also applied to analyze the transmedia dynamics of similar milieus: Russian news coverage of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games (see Gambarato, Alzamora, and Tárcia 2016) and Brazilian news coverage of the 2014 FIFA World Cup (see Gambarato et al. 2017).

Conclusion Transmedia journalism, as well as transmedia storytelling in general, essentially implies (1) multiple media platforms, (2) content expansion, and (3) audience engagement (Gambarato and Tárcia 2017). One of the fertile terrains for developing and implementing transmedia features in journalism is the coverage of planned events because this kind of media event presents emergent/ad hoc (large audiences and integration of the audiences in the news making) and planned/strategic (human, technical, and financial resources) aspects of transmedia productions. News coverage of planned events can vary, for instance, in terms of the size of the news company involved, the technological and financial resources available, the variety of professionals, and the strategies and goals to be achieved. Noticeably, large broadcasters and media conglomerates (such as Globo Network) are as aware of the transmedia advancements in journalism as independent news professionals and companies (see Gambarato 2016). Transmedia journalism is already a reality that although likely more modest than comprehensive, is growing and improving. “Actually, our brain is transmedia” (Renó 2014, 8). “When we apply transmedia logic to journalistic online content, narratives and storytelling, this process would lead to exciting and engaging genres that are better able to inform citizens” (Tellería 2016, 74). In this scenario, the analytical and operational model of transmedia strategies for the news coverage of planned events presented in this chapter can contribute to this process of growth and improvement in the transmedia journalism realm. Transmedia journalism “covers an interactive content that grows and flows through the different media ecologies and technological environments, adaptable and flexible” (Tellería 2016, 77).

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10 Transmedia Sports The National Basketball Association, Emojis, and Personalized Participation Ethan Tussey

Televised sports leagues, though different in many ways from other media content, are similar to most other popular media brands in that the meaning of the primary text (in this case the games) is influenced by peripheral or paratexts. Robert Brookey and Robert Westerfelhaus’ (2002) work on DVD extras and Jonathan Gray’s (2010) work on a variety of “paratexts” adapted the theories of Gèrard Genette in order to advocate for the consideration of peripheral content when assessing a media text. Not all paratexts are relevant to all studies of a media. Gray argues that for “different people and different communities, at different times, the hierarchy of value will be different” (Brookley and Gray 2017, 102). For transmedia strategies, those paratexts that contribute to the ongoing narratives of sports are the most relevant. Jason Mittel warns not to conflate paratexts with transmedia practices as he defines the former as those that introduce or promote a text and the latter as those “that function as ongoing sites of narrative expansion” (Mittel 2015, 293). Sports leagues generate an enormous amount of paratexts but focusing on sports narratives reveals the transmedia texts. Sports leagues have narratives. These narratives are crafted by television producers, athletes, journalists, and, increasingly, by fans. The crafting of these narratives across multiple platforms is the topic of this chapter. The case study in this chapter centers on the development of the National Basketball Association (NBA) emojis (or NBAmoji) and their partnership with Snap Inc. as a social media tool that extends transmedia authorship to fans of the league. Transmedia sports strategies, like transmedia strategies generally, range from protectionist to inclusive. Suzanne Scott (2010) has written about the ways in which media companies constrain participation with transmedia texts via temporal control and unification of interpretative meaning. While most transmedia content does not give fans full creative freedom and opportunity for collaboration promised in the utopian predictions about transmedia storytelling, certain transmedia efforts, such as the Snap stories discussed in this chapter, offer more flexibility and creative license to fans that want to craft sports narratives.

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Sports Narratives Sports season are narratives in the same way that television seasons are narratives. Sports leagues even create new initiatives to extend their narratives into the off-season to keep their stories in the minds of their fans (Bontemps 2017). Journalists, radio sports talk hosts, and television producers each play a vital role in the maintenance and agenda-setting of sports narratives. Television producers, whether they be the league’s own networks or their broadcasting partners, represent the most official narratives. The rise of digital platforms has been crucial to the extension and depth of these narratives. David Rowe and Brett Hutchins contend that digital media has transformed the “media sport content economy” “from the ‘scarcity’ that was typified by analogue television and radio, and print-based media, to the plentitude that is produced by convergent digital media forms that convert cultural data into material that can be reshaped and freely circulated in ways that are difficult to govern” (2013, 2). For example, social media platforms have offered athletes a larger say in sports narratives. Indeed, digital platforms have given voice to many constituencies that have made sports narratives more complex, shorter, and diverse. Sports leagues use their transmedia strategies to attempt to engage with the digital audience and direct the conversation. A prominent transmedia strategy, especially in sports programming, is through narrative extensions or what Will Brooker (2004) has called “television overflow” in which the narratives on the primary text continue on digital platforms. For sports, overflow spills onto television post-game discussion, highlights, game recaps, analysis, and online commentary. Victoria E. Johnson (2009) argues that sports are particularly suited to digital overflow because games can be so easily dissembled into bite-sized pieces to create ancillary content across transmedia platforms. Leagues and television producers offer this ancillary content following the games and repeatedly throughout the week to channel fans from their television to their mobile devices and desktop computers and back to their televisions for the next game. Research by Gambarato et al. (2017) on the transmedia storytelling efforts by Globo Network during the 2014 FIFA World Cup and by Gambarato, Alzamora, and Tárcia (2016) on the Russian news establishment during the 2014 Winter Olympics, detail the efforts of media networks, governments, advertisers, and sports administrations to unify the coverage of sports events around particular themes. For example, Gambarato et al. explain that the use of official hashtags during the 2014 World Cup was an effort by Globo Network to engage audiences around the narrative theme of “now we all are one” (2017, 287). The media company worked to promote this theme across media platforms to present a unified meaning about the event despite the public protests that surrounded the stadiums. Gambarato et al. (2017) point out that large planned events, like sporting events, are significant transmedia storytelling opportunities that require financial investment and planning by media companies. The goal of these media outlets is to effectively manage the perception of an event by 160

engaging on a variety of platforms, encouraging and filtering audience participation to present a unified meaning of the event. Transmedia storytelling is not limited to the event itself but extends across the days leading up to and following the event. A good example of this strategy was Fox Sports effort to create a digital programming segment dedicated to office workers called Lunch with Benefits (Fox Sports Digital 2009). The initiative was an effort to offer sports programming for sports fans during their lunch hour at their cubicle. Each weekday provided a different web series that provided strategic analysis of the sporting events, previews, humor, and commentary. I have argued that these workplace-focused transmedia efforts represent a “procrastination economy” designed to fill people’s in-between moments with amusing diversions while promoting upcoming games (Tussey 2018). The procrastination economy is not limited to sports programming and has become a prominent strategy for transmedia efforts on mobile devices. Other examples of transmedia content designed for our in-between moments include podcasts, fantasy leagues, and social media content. Sports leagues, broadcasters, and journalists have not only incorporated digital strategies but they have also adapted their narrative practices in response to changing technology. Emphasis has moved away from focusing on recapping the games and providing highlights as fans typically have access to this information instantly on their mobile devices. Instead, there is a premium on unique perspectives and “hot take” commentary that can foster discussion and analyze sports narratives from a variety of perspectives. Fox Sports went so far as to cut back on their editorial staff and “pivot to video” where they could feature their opinionated sports analysts repurposed from television debates on digital platforms (Shaw 2017). Brett Hutchins and Jimmy Sanderson (2017) point out that though there are more platforms for discussing the sports narratives, the stories still begin with the games. The interpretation of these games, and the creation of controversial perspectives have heighted the political heft of sports events. Where once official sports commentary was the domain of the journalist, ex-athlete, and strategy analysts, now pundits debate athlete motivations and the values of sports leagues across transmedia platforms. Through the growing volume of content and attention-seeking strategies, transmedia sports content has achieved some of Henry Jenkins’ original hope for transmedia storytelling, that diffuse content on multiple media platforms could foster diverse meaning making practices (Jenkins 2006). If not diverse, there is at least much more time dedicated to discussing the meaning of sports narratives.

Protective vs Inclusive Transmedia Sports Social Media: The Case of NBAmoji For all the transmedia contributions to sports narratives, the leagues and their television partners still maintain the majority of the control. The events of the game begin on television and the narratives they produce are debated and dissected across 161

media platforms. On television, the sports leagues have talk shows and debate shows discussing the latest stories to come from the games. Written content from newspapers, magazines, and websites fuel the stories and expand their implications. Mobile video options provide highlights and updates about continuing stories in real time to keep consumers up to date. Social media is a place where leagues distribute highlights and promotions for their other content, but it is also the space where fans are most likely to enter into conversation and shape debate. The social media platforms Reddit and Twitter have become important clearinghouses for sports fan feedback and meaning making. The National Basketball Association (NBA) is especially attuned to the daily discussions on these platforms and has even revised rules and policy based on fan opinion (Wojnarowski 2017). Danny Chau of The Ringer argues that certain athletes, such as Lonzo Ball, are elevated in sports narratives because their skill sets and personalities are ideal for “the hyperspecific deep-dives that make the internet a wonderful and terrifying place” (2017). All leagues encourage fan engagement, but some are more willing to engage in the niche interests of their fans while other leagues are more focused on getting fans to join their preferred conversation. For example, Major League Baseball (MLB) is much more protective of their content than other American sports leagues. Officials from the league office strictly monitor social media platforms like YouTube in order to remove any content that is uploaded without authorization (Brisbee 2012). By comparison, the NBA is much laxer in its copyright enforcement, allowing its fans to upload images and mixtapes of the leagues athletes and games. The relaxed policy has given birth to a cottage industry of fan made NBA YouTube channels that contribute to the leagues narratives (Winkie 2016). Ramon Lobato and Julian Thomas (2015) demonstrate how “informal media economies” like these YouTube mix tapes have transformed media industries practices and enabled media content to travel the global unencumbered by commercial efforts to divide the world into separate economic efforts. Informal media economies are often precarious, threatened by the legal actions of rights holders. The NBA’s global ambitions may explain their decision to allow this more inclusive transmedia practice. While sports leagues vary in their rights enforcement strategies, most leagues offer fans some form of digital invitation to engage with their branded content. Fantasy sports leagues are a lucrative platform in which league content, information, and narratives are coopted for the social purposes of its fans. In fantasy sports leagues, fans compete against each other by building rosters of players. The achievements of those players in the official games have dual meaning, as it affects the outcome of the actual games and the fantasy games arranged by groups of competing fans. It is possible that a fan’s knowledge of a player is primarily informed by his/her experience playing fantasy sports rather than watching the actual games. Research on fantasy sports by Billings, Ruihley, and Yang (2016) has found that a fan’s allegiance to their fantasy team can rival their rooting interest in their favorite real team. This fan practice makes viewers more interested in every game instead of just watching the games of their 162

favorite team. More watching means higher television ratings and more subscribers to streaming services offered by sports leagues. Fantasy sports began as a part of the informal media economy but are now worth millions of dollars to sports leagues (Isidore 2015). MLB initially resisted fantasy leagues, eager to charge fans for access to the stats necessary for running a fantasy league (Greenhouse 2008). Since MLB’s plan was rejected by the Supreme Court of the United States of America, sports leagues have embraced fantasy sports and routinely incorporate the narratives of “fantasy value” into their official coverage. Photo-sharing social media platforms are the latest terrain for transmedia strategies. Social media companies like Snapchat and Instagram offer sports leagues an opportunity to reach a mobile audience with updates from live sporting events. Sports leagues try to engage these mobile users by offering the opportunity to upload their own contributions to the story of the sporting event. Snapchat calls this feature, appropriately enough, “stories,” and each of the major American sports leagues have partnered with the social media app to produce stories (Constine 2016). For fans attending the games, a number of filters are connected via geo-tags to the sports venue. Acting as a collection of amateur sports reporters and commentators, sports fans can offer their own images and commentary on the action. The leagues receive the uploaded “snaps” and create a narrative about the game that attempts to capture the feeling of attending the event. Sports stories on Snapchat are extremely formulaic, as anything controversial is typically filtered out of the officially branded feed. Suzanne Scott (2009) argues that rights holders offer these designated playgrounds with officially licensed content as an acknowledgment of the desire of fans to be a part of the meaning-making experience. According to Scott (2009), rights holders “gift” fans a few options for creativity and then filter fan content to select the most palatable options and “regift” this content to the mass audience as a representation of fan engagement. Jimmy Draper (2012) has argued that rights holders use these interactive opportunities as a way to confirm or deny narratives that strengthen their brand strategy. More specifically, Scott (2009) points out that the filtering process has a tendency to favor male fandom over female perspectives. These critiques are more than apt for the official sports league stories offered on Snapchat, but the official story is not the only place where transmedia content is distributed by fans. Snapchat offers peer to peer sharing of “stories” as well as location based “stories.” Additionally, “Snap Map” allows Snapchat users to travel the virtual globe looking for publicly posted images at different locations. A sports fan may not get their snap posted on the official NBA story but their snap would appear at the site of the game for any Snapchat user that wanted an unfiltered view. A similar unfiltered opportunity is available for snaps sent from one user to another or to their network of friends. In these instances, the filters and branding of the sports leagues are at the mercy of the fans and their own creative meaning-making practices. While leagues are invested in the creation of official Snapchat stories, the toolkit offered by Snapchat offers fans an 163

opportunity to make diverse and creative narrative contributions. The NBA, in particular, has led the way in developing more inclusive transmedia offerings through efforts like its licensed emojis. Semiotician Marcel Danesi claims that in the age of the “electronic global village” where people of different national languages and cultures are in frequent contact through online interactions, the emoji code might well be the universal language that can help solve problems of comprehension that international communications have always involved in the past. (2016, vii) It is unlikely that the use of basketball emojis can accomplish that lofty goal, but Danesi’s point about international comprehension is key to understanding why investment in emojis reflects an inclusive transmedia strategy. Emojis offer an openended, though typically limited to positive reactions, menu of expressive images (sometimes called stickers) and animations that can be used by fans in text-based messages. All of the major American sports leagues offer emoji keyboards but the NBA’s is by far the most sophisticated and engaged with its fans. Often with transmedia storytelling, the rights holders license their brand to thirdparty partners to produce these transmedia texts on particular platforms. Derek Johnson (2013) has written about the ways that media companies with long-standing brands rely on the creativity of licensors to provide guidance and expertise in unfamiliar markets. The autonomy, budget, and collaboration that goes into these partnerships reveals just how much effort and consideration sports leagues put into these transmedia texts. The National Football League (NFL), the most lucrative sports league in America, does not license to a third party but instead allows NFL Enterprises to design their emoji keyboard. The result is an emoji keyboard with very few options (only four unique player stickers per team) and very little investment. MLB similarly keeps its emoji keyboard in-house offering stickers and exclusive GIFs from broadcasts. The keyboard has many options and includes iconography that is meaningful to fans and their communications preferences. Still, the decision to keep the digital product in-house and leverage exclusive content reflects the league’s larger digital philosophy. The National Hockey League (NHL) partnered with Molson Beer Company and Swyft Media Inc. to create their emoji keyboard which, according to iTunes App store, offers 64 “Molson Canadian and hockey themed emojis, including one for every NHL team.” It is difficult to say if this emoji keyboard is more about drinking or hockey. The NBA emoji transmedia strategy is the most unlike its competitors and deserves to be considered as a harbinger of the league’s unique approach to fan engagement. The NBA partnered with YinzCam, a technology start-up out of Carnegie Mellon University, to create a series of emojis on different platforms. In its partnership with 164

YinzCam, it updates its emojis regularly, offering animated stickers of players relevant to different NBA narratives. During the 2016 Olympics, the app featured the members of both the US men’s and women’s basketball teams. For the NBA Finals, emojis were created for each of the players on both teams with specific animations that reflected their characters within larger league narratives. For example, Lebron James was given a Crown and the title “King” while a flexing screaming Draymond Green reflected his enforcer persona (Beaumont 2016). These emojis provide NBA fans with illustrations for their conversations with friends. These transmedia tools contribute to the sports narratives constructed by a small circle of friends but they rarely extend to a wider public. The more public facing version of NBA emojis are found in the league’s partnership with Snapchat. The NBA licenses the logos of its teams to provide virtual clothing and poses that can be customized to Snapchat users’ Bitmoji avatars. Bitmojis are personal emojis, animated versions of users that act as an avatar for a person in text chains and in Snapchat photographs. Bitmojis depict the users in dozens of regularly updated responses and actions that reflect common conversation on social media and text chains. Snap Inc purchased Bitmoji in 2016, bringing these animated creations to the photo-based social media platform. Bitmoji was the top downloaded app in five global markets in 2017, which reflects the international appeal of communicating through personalized emoji (Molla 2017). Through the NBA’s Bitmoji transmedia texts, fans have the ability to represent themselves as part of the brand instead of simply integrating the logos and stickers into conversation. Beyond the ability to decorate pictures with licensed emojis, fans can situate their avatars into the game action using Snapchat’s camera options. For users, checking for updates on NBA games via Snap Map, they will find personalized avatars encroaching on the court and contextualizing the game outside of the NBA’s preferred narrative. Elizabeth Evans (2011) identifies narrative, authorship, and temporality as the unified traits of a transmedia text. She argues that an audience is aware of the connections between text and its transmedia siblings because of the way transmedia texts directly engage with these three elements. Traditionally, these elements were guarded by the original storytellers, meaning that authorship and distribution are controlled by the rights holder. Indeed, the official NBA story is this kind of a transmedia text but the NBA’s decision to offer branded bitmojis and site-specific geofilters allows fans to engage with these three elements by producing transmedia narratives alongside the official accounts using the same digital tools and markers of authenticity. Fans are then able to perpetuate or challenge narratives, that they author themselves, and distribute in the same temporal windows of the official account. Certainly, the options for using the branded iconography of the league are limited but a Snapchat user has control of the placement and timing of distribution in ways that are not as limited as the “regifted” official NBA Snap story. The possibilities for creativity and collaboration are far more inclusive than the more protectionist transmedia options offered to fans on other social media platforms. 165

For an example of how Snapchat allows NBA fans to present a diverse sports story consider the jersey retirement ceremony of Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant. The official Snap story produced by the NBA for Snapchat features high-quality images, interviews with players, testimonials from celebrities, and archival footage of Bryant’s career. The message of the short video is celebratory, congratulatory, and family oriented. This video is in stark contrast to the low visual quality of the Snap videos posted by people that attended the game. Some even used the NBA’s branded emojis, filters, and lenses to critique Bryant’s career including his treatment of teammates, his on-court demeanor, and the sexual assault allegations levied against him in 2003. Fans wanting to experience the event on Snapchat would have seen these user-generated videos and critiques of Bryant’s villainy alongside celebrations of his career. The ambiguous story produced by the user-generated stories on Snapchat are much more nuanced than the simplistic celebration offered by the NBA’s official Snap story and most coverage of the event by the mainstream sports press. The audience’s ability to co-opt the hashtag of an event to criticize the main narrative is not unusual. Indeed, Karin Fast and Henrik Örnebring (2015) have argued that emergent fan reactions that contradict or question the rights holder’s narrative choices are a foundational reality of integrating audiences into collaborative storytelling. The NBA’s collaboration of Snapchat seems to invite this emergent contradiction as they enable the audience to combine the cameras on their mobile devices with officially branded iconography of the league to present the events in diverse audiovisual ways. Thus, when a fan wants to see what is going on at a sporting event, they can go to Snapchat and watch as fans use the tools of the NBA to tell their own audiovisual stories.

Conclusion The NBA’s more inclusive transmedia strategy can be partly explained by the characteristics of their core audience and their desire to cater to a global fan base. All sports leagues have dedicated fans, but NBA fans are particularly engaged online. NBA Reddit, NBA Twitter, and the NBA blogosphere are among the most prolific fan communities of the major sports leagues. The NBA allows these online communities to remix their content on these platforms. Digital technology has also offered a glimpse at the players’ lives in unprecedented ways. Each of the major American sports leagues has a social media policy for players but the NBA’s is much less strict than its competitors, which may partially explain why Forbes ranked NBA players as four of the top ten sports Twitter accounts while leaving off any NFL players (DiMoro 2016). The power of the players in the league provides more flexibility and breadth in the stories about the league. The structure of the sport itself, with no helmets or equipment to obscure the players, and comparatively few athletes on the court at the same time, offers access to the players and their personalities in ways that other leagues cannot offer. The NBA encourages this through their creation of transmedia 166

tools for its fans. These tools including emoji keyboards and Snapchat integration emphasize player personas and fan integration into the league’s brands. These factors set them apart from other professional sports leagues. Professional sports leagues have always been in the business of building narratives to bolster ticket sales, merchandising, and broadcast ratings. In the era of digital technology, building narratives requires a transmedia strategy. Some leagues choose to strictly constrain the narratives across their multiplatform efforts. While this may not restrict debate among fans, it certainly restricts the amount and type of branded and licensed content that fans can use to engage these narratives. The NBA, through its development of the NBAmoji app and its partnership with Snap Inc., charts a more inclusive course that provides some opportunities for creativity and collaboration. There are many factors that contribute to the decision to pursue a protective or inclusive transmedia strategy. League support by its most ardent fans may be one of those factors and the power and agency of the league’s players may be another. Whatever the reason, the NBA’s transmedia partnership with Snapchat reflects the democratizing potentials espoused by early theorists of transmedia storytelling practices.

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11 Transmedia Social Platforms Livestreaming and Transmedia Sports Portia Vann, Axel Bruns, and Stephen Harrington

Contemporary social media platforms provide clearly circumscribed media spaces in their own right; we speak of being “on Facebook” or “in the Twittersphere,” for instance. At the same time, however, they are also densely interconnected with other parts of the broader media ecology, and enable rich transmedia experiences and engagement. Since the mass adoption of currently leading social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram in the mid to late 2000s, media producers from many conventional media channels, as well as social media users themselves, have actively pursued the creation and further enhancement of such transmedia relationships. In doing so, they have sometimes worked in unison, and at other times clashed over their vision of what shape an engaging transmedia experience around a shared media text might take, and of which stakeholders might be in control of it. Such transmedia practices have developed around a wide range of media texts, from the news through fiction content to live events. Of particular interest has been the role of social media in “connecting” audiences for live television, “amplifying” their collective voice, and harnessing their input in creative ways (Harrington, Highfield, and Bruns 2013, 405). In this chapter, however, we seek to move beyond a view of social media as a mere complement to the primacy of television, and examine on how transmediatization can produce distinct experiences and provide specific narrative contributions. Of particular note is how these forces collide in productive or challenging ways within the domain of live sports: a leading site of transmedia experiences (Hutchins and Rowe 2012). The liveness of the central text positions the sporting event especially well for further engagement by sporting fans through social media: platforms like Twitter and (to a less extent) Facebook are themselves fast-moving, near-live media spaces, and are therefore well suited to sports fans seeking to follow and/or comment an unfolding sporting event in real time. Further, the lightweight, mobile nature of modern social media clients makes it possible for fans to engage with social media even as they are watching the event on television, via Webstream, or even in the stadium. But this has also encouraged the evolution of sport consumption from limited top-down models in the broadcast era to more open communication models in the digital era, now

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characterized by an abundance of information sources and distribution methods for sporting content (Hutchins and Rowe 2012; Rein, Kotler, and Shields 2006, 42), and this transformation has created a range of—as yet only partially resolved—tensions between the various stakeholders in any one sporting event. In this chapter, we show that niche sports, unencumbered by binding commercial and marketing arrangements, have at times been able to negotiate these tensions more proactively than their far better resourced mainstream counterparts.

The Trouble with Transmedia Sports Frictions between sporting organizations’ corporate interests and fans’ expressions of engagement have become especially evident in the context of large-scale, mainstream sporting events such as the Olympic Games. As television networks incur substantial costs to secure exclusive broadcast rights to the Olympics and similar events, they (as well as the sporting organizations granting those rights) have aggressively employed copyright laws in order to protect these commercial agreements, and to ensure that the content they have licensed is not available through unauthorized distributors (Boyle and Haynes 2009, 38). However, this is exceptionally difficult in digital spaces, as fans and other media outlets now have the ability to share images and video from an event through a multitude of digital platforms. Thus, for sports organizations and television networks, attempting to control the dissemination of content that (potentially) infringes on broadcast rights is almost impossible without taking a heavy-handed approach (Hutchins and Rowe 2012). For example, during the London 2012 Olympics, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) sought to prohibit ticket holders from sharing any images or videos taken at Olympic events on social media (Biggs 2012). Essentially, this meant that fans were not allowed to share personal photos or videos of the Games through their own social media accounts to document their Olympic experience—a restriction that many found understandably aggravating. In response to the backlash from sporting fans, the IOC relaxed these restrictions slightly, allowing event-goers to share images from the Games on social media; however, under current regulations, the IOC still prohibits ticket holders from sharing video content (Canton 2016). Given the multitude of fan content created at such major events, however, neither version of these rules appears particularly enforceable. Similar tensions have also emerged in football, primarily at the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup and in the English Premier League (EPL) (Hutchins and Rowe 2012; Statt 2014; Williams 2014). During the 2014 World Cup, many fans adopted the practice of sharing highlight-style video content on Vine after a goal was scored (Statt 2014). Owned by Twitter, Inc., Vine allowed users to easily create and upload six-second looping videos; many football fans created such content both by recording match events live in the stadium and by capturing replays at home from their television or computer screens. In response to this practice, 170

organizing body FIFA and rights holders ESPN and Univision issued a number of takedown notices, while Vine suspended some of the offending accounts (Statt 2014). Following the Vine experience at the World Cup, the EPL subsequently similarly warned fans not to create and share short match videos online, explaining that the EPL was actively working to “curtail this kind of activity” (cited in Williams 2014). The US-based National Football League (NFL) has extended this approach even further, policing the transmedia activities of ordinary fans as well as of teams and their players. In 2016, it introduced a strict video-sharing policy aimed at protecting the exclusive rights of its broadcast partners: the League prohibited teams from using platforms such as Facebook Live and Periscope to share live content during a game (from kick-off to one hour after the game finishes), creating and sharing any of their own highlights content, or turning any live video content into animated GIFs (Liptak 2016; Rovell 2016). Teams that violate this video-sharing policy face fines of $25,000 for the first offence, $50,000 for the second, and $100,000 for any further violations (Liptak 2016; Rovell 2016). The NFL created the video sharing policy to “maintain control of what is disseminated” by teams on social media (Rovell 2016) and “ensure viewers go through official NFL channels for video content” (Liptak 2016). In other words, in this case the organizing body is protecting rights holders from the unauthorized use of content even by the social media channels operated by teams legitimately participating in the League. While IOC, FIFA, EPL, and NFL put these measures in place to protect their commercial interests and prevent fans (and teams) from distributing content from a venue or an official broadcast, it is hard to see how these organizations would be able to effectively restrict such widespread fan practices. Given the multitude of tools and platforms available to fans to create, share, or repurpose brand content, as well as the sheer number of fans who now engage in sharing content, successful enforcement would require substantial staffing and resources. Further, because of the liveness of sporting events, these crowdsourced alternatives to instant replay videos are likely to be watched mainly within hours or days of the event itself, namely by fans catching up with any sports developments they might have missed at the time. There is therefore also a need for organizations to respond to such possible infringements very rapidly. At the same time, however, such aggressive enforcement of commercial arrangements through blanket content restrictions and drastic retaliatory measures is also indicative of a “brand guardian” mindset (Christodoulides 2009, 141), which is very likely to alienate a fan community that considers itself of equal importance to the official sporting bodies in guarding the integrity of the sporting code (McCarthy et al. 2014, 183).

Transmedia Opportunities for Niche Sports As we have noted, tensions around such spontaneous fan-driven activities, which implicitly seek to enhance the transmediality of live sporting events by accompanying 171

the official, largely commercial live and broadcast media texts of the event with additional crowdsourced coverage, are especially prominent around major sporting events, tournaments, and leagues. This is unsurprising as many of the licensing arrangements governing the coverage and marketing of such events are long-standing and remain rooted in large part in a pre-digital broadcast mindset that positions the television coverage of the event as the undisputed core text, usually also creating distinct licenses for different geographical broadcast territories. This approach is no longer especially well-suited to audiencing practices that are increasingly incorporating alternative forms of live and time-shifted viewing (through broadband and mobile streaming) and assume comparable accessibility regardless of the geographic location of the viewer. Major sporting rights licensors including FIFA and the IOC continue to struggle to adjust their rights-granting approaches to such new audience engagement patterns; by contrast, our research has found that it is often smaller, niche sports that have been able to convert the disadvantage of their lack of established, lucrative broadcast contracts into a comparative advantage by exploring innovative new transmedia sports experience models. Our observations here build especially on a major study of official social media communications activities around a comparatively niche sporting event in 2015: the Netball World Cup (Vann 2017), held in—and won by—Australia. Netball is played in fully professional annual leagues only in Australia and New Zealand, while teams elsewhere in the world are semi-professional or amateur. Even in its heartlands, the sport has traditionally received only limited mainstream media attention—in part this has resulted also from persistent media discrimination due to its status as a sport that is largely played by women only. However, this comparative lack of media interest also results in the potential for a relatively more flexible engagement with fans who seek to generate their own transmedia coverage of the sporting event, as well as a more proactive approach to enhancing the event experience with additional transmedia content produced by the event organizers themselves. The Netball World Cup (NWC) had a limited domestic broadcast partnership with Australian pay-TV provider Foxtel, but no live broadcast arrangements in many other countries participating in the tournament. This arrangement not only freed it from the restrictions experienced by major events including the Olympic Games and FIFA World Cup, but indeed created an intrinsic need to explore approaches to providing at least some basic updates to fans in these otherwise unserved territories. Drawing on its partnership with Foxtel and the support of Twitter Australia, the NWC team therefore drew on the Twitter-owned SnappyTV tool to capture instant video replays from the Fox Sports broadcast stream and distribute them on Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, the NWC team also used Twitter, Inc.’s livestreaming tool Periscope to broadcast some post-match press conferences and other ancillary content from the tournament. Unlike the major sporting events discussed above, the NWC refrained from restricting netball fans from sharing their own coverage; rather, it sought to provide these fans with professionally produced, readily shareable content whose 172

distribution would enhance the visibility and accessibility of the tournament even in the absence of substantial mainstream media coverage. This approach shows an evolution beyond the blanket social media bans issued by FIFA and the IOC, and their media licensees. Mainstream media organizations pay significantly less for the broadcast rights to a niche event, but in turn also gain less power to restrict alternative, transmedia coverage. Ironically, niche sport events can therefore actually benefit from their lower ranking in the sports market: they retain at least some freedom to experiment with new forms of coverage, and to allow their fans to do the same. The NWC’s broadcast partners did still restrict the social media team from creating its own livestreams (via platforms such as Periscope) of the live matches, but they allowed the team to share clips captured directly from the broadcast stream via SnappyTV. Further, the ban on streaming only applied to live games or immediate post-match content, and not to further livestreams designed to enhance fans’ transmedia experience of the event. The central advantage of SnappyTV was its ability to offer accessibility to the event through broadcast-style content, compensate for the lack of easily accessible free-to-air coverage. The NWC team expected that a substantial number of fans would rely on its social media coverage to experience the event, as these fans could not access the event through mainstream media channels; its decision to use SnappyTV meant that fans could access content sourced from the payTV broadcast stream with only minimal time delays. Such short clips of the game could not replace a full broadcast, of course, but still offered fans a connection to the key moments in the Netball World Cup matches, and an opportunity to express their own fandom by sharing and commenting on the clips.

Niche Sports as Trailblazers of Innovation The lack of funding and resources that niche sports commonly experience means that they are unable to fully utilize the technological opportunities available in a thoroughly converged transmedia environment—but it also compels them to find smart, agile, and innovative solutions that deliver benefits even amidst conditions of scarcity. Better established and resourced sporting codes, in turn, may be less agile and innovative due to their being locked into longer-term media partnership arrangements, but are also likely to gradually adapt the novel approaches that have been tried and tested successfully by minor sports. Indeed, in spite of the restrictive, broadcast-centric policies still embraced by some major global sporting events and leagues, there are signs that a shift in the balance between broadcast and digital media has begun to occur. Most centrally, a number of sporting codes are now experimenting much more openly with a variety of approaches to livestreaming their events to an undefined, global audience—a model that previously had been shunned as directly interfering with established territorial broadcast licensing arrangements. As a result, many sports leagues, tournaments, and events have now created their own dedicated web platforms and/or smartphone apps to stream live content. 173

Additionally, a range of livestreaming platforms, including Periscope, Facebook Live, YouTube Live, and embedded livestreaming directly on Twitter (an integration of Periscope into the platform itself), entered the market in 2015 and 2016. In fact, sports-specific livestreaming apps may therefore be a transitional phenomenon to widespread streaming on social media: with such apps, greater barriers of access continue to exist, whereas streaming on social media is more straightforward and often free. Consequently, livestreaming as an embedded transmedia experience on social media platforms is emerging as a legitimate option for sport organizations seeking to broadcast to an international audience. Fully developed, this model would reverse the conventional relationship between the sports broadcast as the central media text, and social media second-screening as an ancillary practice. Here, instead, the social media environment becomes the central platform of sports engagement, within which live and archived streams can be accessed on demand. In its continuing efforts to broaden its appeal to more diverse audiences, Twitter, Inc. has been exploring these possibilities particularly aggressively. The NFL streamed ten games (out of 256) of its 2016 season on Twitter, in addition to live broadcasts on CBS, NBC, and the NFL Network (Stelter 2016). These games did not attract an especially large audience, however, with the initial games attracting some 243,000 viewers, compared to 15.4 million watching the game via simulcast on subscriptionbased services offered by CBS or the NFL Network (Wagner 2016b). Reportedly, sponsors regarded these viewing numbers as underwhelming: one advertising executive revealed that sponsors were “seeing a significant under-delivery from Twitter for our spots … The problem is people aren’t watching full games” (cited in Sloane 2016). This indicates two realities of the broader transmedia sport landscape. First, mainstream sporting organizations are beginning to use digital media platforms to broadcast live content, and fans are watching via these platforms; but second, consumption via television remains dominant for these mainstream sports, in spite of the increasing availability and accessibility of digital streaming options. Nonetheless, Twitter, Inc. has struck similar agreements in the United States to livestream Major League Baseball (one game per week), the National Hockey League (one game per week), and the Professional Golfers’ Association Tour (70 hours of coverage; Collins 2017; Wagner 2016c). Meanwhile, Twitter Australia partnered with the Victoria Racing Club to livestream the nation’s major horse racing event, the Melbourne Cup, as a simulcast with free-to-air television broadcaster Seven and its own streaming platform, PLUS7 (Harley 2016; C-Scott 2016). While horse racing is not typically a mainstream sport, the Melbourne Cup carnival certainly enters a mainstream space. The event attracts mainstream media attention, a significant number of television viewers—1,986,000 in 2016 (Knox 2016)—and substantial commercial sponsorship; Twitter Australia’s involvement is therefore a sign of a broader strategy to showcase sports livestreaming on the platform. Elsewhere, Twitter has also livestreamed content from around the grounds at Wimbledon, featuring interviews, analysis, match replays and highlights segments, but not live match coverage (Wagner 174

2016a). Similarly, the NBA has announced that it would “double the amount of digital content it creates for Twitter … with more in-game highlights, behind-the-scenes shots, footage of player arrivals and livestreams of news conferences and interviews” (Koh 2016). The continued dominance of broadcast television as the medium of choice for leading sports, and the easy accessibility of such broadcasts at least for domestic (as compared to international) audiences, however, means that although such major events might provide useful showcases for new approaches, their audience engagement patterns across different media platforms are unlikely to change dramatically within a short period of time. Rather, niche and minor sports will most probably reap more immediate benefits from these new opportunities: “unlike the major leagues, these sports generally don’t have media rights that include TV broadcasts, nor the big budgets and sponsorship deals” (C-Scott 2016). Indeed, there is historical precedent for media transformation based on technological change creating greater opportunities especially for niche sports. In 1989, for instance, the European cable channel Eurosport was launched to accommodate the increasing amount of sport content acquired by the European Broadcasting Union’s (EBU) member nations (Eurosport 2017b). On their own domestic channels, the national public broadcasters that constitute the EBU did not have the capacity to broadcast all of the sports content for which they had acquired the rights; thus, the pan-European dedicated sport channel of Eurosport was born. The sports broadcast on Eurosport are typically not considered mainstream throughout many countries in Europe. Eurosport’s current broadcasting program includes tennis (Australian Open, US Open), cycling, winter sports (for example alpine skiing, biathlon, and ski jumping), snooker, the FIFA Women’s World Cup, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) European U-19 Championships, motorsports, weightlifting, and even the Australian Football League and US Major League Soccer (Eurosport 2017a). Eurosport’s strategy was to obtain rights to a larger number of less mainstream sports throughout Europe so as to avoid the intense competition with local national broadcasters for rights of mainstream sports (Collins 1998). While the sports included in the channel’s program may only have small audiences in individual countries, across the European market as a whole Eurosport’s broadcast schedule was attractive to advertisers and sponsors. Therefore, its programming schedule provides access to a number of lower-cost, less mainstream sports, made possible due to technological changes that have fostered the globalized distribution of sport content. Social media and digital streaming platforms may present similar opportunities for the distribution of niche sporting content. In a crowded sporting market, sports organizations—especially those representing niche sports—can now turn to new media technologies such as livestreaming on social media to bypass the traditional gatekeepers of sports programming. The confluence of niche sports needing media space, and the new media technologies providing that space, creates the chance for 175

new sports communication models to emerge. While not all niche sport organizations will be willing or able to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by these digital channels, and may instead or in addition continue to pursue the (for now) greater accessibility and reach of mainstream television networks, the growth in livestreaming points to an evolution of transmedia sport experiences as innovative alternative models become more prominent.

Innovation Pressure from Fan Communities Meanwhile, if such opportunities for a reconfiguration of sports coverage are not addressed by the sporting organizations themselves, it is likely that fans—who themselves have access to increasingly powerful devices and platforms for the (unauthorized) live coverage of sporting events—will continue to take matters into their own hands, and exert considerable pressure on sporting bodies to innovate. Unilateral action by fans is especially likely where fans feel that sporting organizations are not acting in the best interests of the sport, are failing to provide adequate coverage of their sporting events, or are making it unreasonably difficult or expensive for fans to access the sports they follow. A well-publicized conflict between boxing fans and Australian pay-TV provider Foxtel provides a timely reminder of the amplified transmedia tensions caused by the increased televisual capacity of social media platforms. On February 4, 2017, Foxtel aired a fight between Australian boxing rivals Anthony Mundine and Danny Green on the pay-per-view channel Main Event. To view the fight, fans needed an existing subscription to Foxtel to access the channel as well as pay an additional A$59.95 to watch the bout (Harris 2017). Given the limited availability of Foxtel in regional and rural areas of Australia, Brisbane-based Foxtel subscriber Darren Sharpe decided to rebroadcast the Foxtel feed of the event via Facebook Live in order to enable his friends in regional areas to watch the fight with him (Brennan and Buttigieg 2017; Harris 2017). The feed went viral well beyond Sharpe’s friends, however: eventually more than 150,000 viewers tuned in to Sharpe’s Facebook Live stream rather than the official broadcast (Harris 2017), presumably in order to avoid the significant access fees charged by Foxtel. Halfway through the broadcast, Foxtel contacted Sharpe and ordered him to terminate the stream, or face legal action. Reports have stated that other fans streaming the event on Facebook Live had their Foxtel services cut off all together (Brennan and Buttigieg 2017). The next day, Foxtel released a statement threatening legal action against all viewers who streamed the event on Facebook Live (Brennan and Buttigieg 2017; Harris 2017). Much as has happened with unauthorized download services for music and movies, such entirely punitive responses by rights holders are unlikely to stop circumventive actions by fans, however. Already, there is a broad range of longestablished sites that—in analogy to torrent sites like The Pirate Bay—provide up-todate lists of current and upcoming unauthorized fan broadcasts of live sports (Bruns 176

2008). The legal prosecution of individual fan re-broadcasters is likely only to drive others engaging in the same practice further underground, rather than to stamp out the practice itself. Much as the use of unauthorized music and movie download and streaming services has gradually declined as authorized services such as Spotify and Netflix became available, so will the fan-led re-broadcasting of sporting events be able to be addressed only as more sensible, official online sports streaming solutions enter the market. Twitter and Facebook Live may have a role to play in this context, but entirely new operators—the Netflix equivalent to Eurosport—might also emerge. Indeed, it is possible that growth in the digital streaming space will not be driven by the usual players in sports broadcasting, but instead by side entrants into the market. In Australia, for example, Internet service providers have made a play for exclusive streaming rights in order to enhance the competitive standing of their services. In late 2015, broadband and mobile network provider Optus announced that it had secured rights to stream the EPL (commencing with the 2016/2017 EPL season) live through both its own app and digital television service, Fetch TV, for the following three years (Siracusa 2015). Until then, Foxtel had held the rights to the EPL in Australia (as the foundation rights holders for the competition), and broadcast the league as part of its pay-TV sports package (Siracusa 2015). Optus’s move to secure exclusive coverage of the EPL in Australia is the first time we have seen an Australian Internet service provider break into traditional television’s monopoly over sports coverage; it is now Optus that is sub-licensing one EPL match per round to free-to-air public broadcaster SBS (Special Broadcasting Service 2016), as well as delayed coverage of 12 matches to Foxtel’s Fox Sports (Bradford 2016). This represents a previously inconceivable shift in the sports media landscape. In a similar situation in Germany, the exclusive domestic rights to the 2017 Men’s Handball World Championship were acquired by a banking company, Deutsche Kreditbank (a longterm commercial partner of Germany’s Handball Bundesliga), from international broadcaster beIN Sports. The bank then streamed the entire event on its website, drawing on YouTube as its technical partner (Krieger 2017).

Conclusion: Toward Live Sports’ Netflix Moment? As more such novel partnership arrangements become available and are trialed in individual events and tournaments, some sports organizations may eventually turn away from conventional television broadcasting altogether and toward what is known as stand-alone or “over-the-top” online broadcast. It remains unlikely, for now, that mainstream sports would take this route, since their lucrative broadcast contracts provide them with a strong incentive to protect the status quo. However, the proportionally more significant role of social media in the communication of niche sports, and the comparative freedom from long-term broadcast and sponsor partnership obligations, may lead to further changes especially in the distribution of niche sports content. While broadcast licensees still fervently guard the content 177

generated from their big-ticket sports programming, they give niche sports more freedom to stream live or near-live content on a variety of social media platforms. In turn, many niche sports organizations cannot rely on mainstream television networks to provide access to their events and competitions, and so they have a pressing incentive to use digital and social media platforms to overcome such challenges. In netball, for instance, niche events such as the Netball Europe U21 Championship and the Australian Men’s and Mixed National Association Championship have already been livestreamed on YouTube, the organizations’ websites, Facebook Live, and the fan-run Website Netball Scoop. Livestreaming of sports on social media and dedicated sites and apps remains in an experimental stage, and no consensus on best practice for digital streaming has yet emerged in the industry. However, with a growing number of attempts by emerging stakeholders, challenging the dominance of mainstream broadcasters, to reconfigure the top-down distribution of live sports content for the transmedia environment, combined with an increasing amount of bottom-up livestreaming by fans and niche sports organizations, the possibility exists for completely new social media-based transmedia sports models to emerge. New approaches to sports broadcasting may prove to be as disruptive as Spotify has been to music listening practices, or as Netflix has been to the consumption of television drama. However, sports come with their own sets of conventions, fan needs, organizational structures, and commercial considerations, and further longitudinal studies are needed to chart the ways in which these elements evolve and rearrange themselves as livestreaming on digital and social media platforms assumes greater importance, and to study the implications of such shifts for the sports media industry.

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12 Transmedia Celebrity The Kardashian Kosmos—Between Family Brand and Individual Storylines Šárka Gmiterková

Successful and widely popular stars have always relied on transmedia functioning. Even in the early 1910s, a general precondition for stardom required that film incarnations matched with widely circulated notions of the off-screen personality of the performer (DeCordova 2001, 98–116). After a decade of disrupting the balance with various scandals concerning morality, sexuality, and substance abuse, revealing hidden facets of the then celebrated personalities (DeCordova 2001, 117–151), the 1930s introduced a carefully orchestrated and vertically integrated system. Central to such scheme was a narrative dispersed across movies, promotion campaigns, and publicity, and which also influenced a portfolio of carefully selected products endorsed by the star. For example, ethnical stars such as Dolores del Rio or Dorothy Lamour rose to fame due to the advent of Technicolor, favoring exotic and colorful locations, supported by the beauty industry promoting the tropical look of sophisticated ethnicity through these women (Bery 2004, 181–197). As a self-made star, Joan Crawford’s image provided a happy ending to many of her films where their narratives did not; Crawford’s frequent self-transformations were secured by her constantly changing wardrobe, thus making the promise of identity reinvention attainable and somewhat tangible (Allen and Gomery 1985, 172–186). As Richard Dyer famously stated in Stars at the end of the 1970s, in order to fully grasp each individual star image, we first have to take into account four different types of material: promotion, films, publicity, and criticism and commentary (Dyer 1998, 60–63). While the first two are usually generated as a part of the deliberate manufacture of a particular image or image context for a particular star (Dyer 1998, 60), the last two escape the direct control of individual personalities. Although we may speculate to what extent gossip, scandals, and leaked stories concerning a star’s private life are stirred up by the famous people themselves, it is only the combination of multiple narratives from various sources that forms the very complex intertext—the star image. As Dyer acknowledged himself, his analysis related to the classical Hollywood system rather than to later or non-American forms of renown, and indeed to cinema rather than television, sports, or fashion (Dyer 1998, 60–63). Subsequent 181

conceptions of stardom did not completely redefine Dyer’s insights, but offered more nuanced takes on post-studio and new media based fame. Such elaboration started with broadening the existing paradigm. In contrast to classical, plastic modes of stardom, requiring a close fit between the typical part and off-screen persona, contemporary modes of stardom are best described as elastic. This adjective points to the continuous re-negotiating of public personality in order to match every new project and the star thus “has to have a wardrobe of identities connected to a product stream” (King 2003, 49). Since the break up of the studio system, stars now navigate their careers themselves, with the assistance of agents, managers, lawyers, and publicists. Therefore, the rather passive sounding term “image” made way for the “persona,” signaling that stars now have to actively engage in the process of shaping their own brand (Shingler 2012, 121–126). No longer contractually tied to a single studio for a long period of time, stars are now choosing their own projects in tune with their preferences and needs and take on various creative positions as producers or directors.

Celebrity Culture However, even the term “persona” did not fully accommodate emerging forms of renown. Instead, celebrity adequately conveyed a turn toward personality, epitomizing previously unprecedented coverage of the private lives of those in the spotlight. While traditional notions of stardom were associated with talent or some sort of performance skills, celebrity fame stems from personal qualities and information circulating in the media. The growth of mass media throughout the twentieth century facilitated the development of the Hollywood star system, but it was the 1990s trend toward technological and industrial convergence that gave celebrity culture an unprecedented boost. With the rise of media conglomeration starting roughly a decade earlier, tying film studios together with publishing, media, and entertainment corporations and other sectors of business, celebrity proved to be a useful way of connecting these crossmedia processes (Turner 2004, 34–41). Treating celebrity not necessarily as a strictly defined category, then, but rather as one of the facets of a successful star’s career, Christine Geraghty’s essay on reexamining stardom stands out as one of the examples when star theory tried to contain the phenomenon. Geraghty presented three categories—that of a performer, professional, and celebrity—based on the level of showcasing performance skills and the amount of publicity coverage devoted to private life. Depending on their career point, stars can “pick up” the appropriate celebrity narrative; for example, after a boxoffice flop they can steer media attention toward their private life and vice versa (Geraghty 2007, 98–110). In spite of this effort in academic circles to conceptually merge “star” with “celebrity,” the boundaries separating these two concepts have persisted. Instead of prioritizing talent, giving the performer a chance to transform again and 182

again for the purpose of various roles, “celebrity” gains value from being an instantly recognizable personality at any time. While “star” seems to be better suited for the purposes of transmedia storytelling as it derives from a succession of different parts embodied in different narratives across media, it tends to highlight the transformative, actorly skills. On the other hand, the narrowly defined celebrity brand can migrate through media and social network landscape faster, easier, and have a greater impact. Surely, a strong undercurrent of cultural hierarchy flows under these star versus celebrity assumptions, with the star’s persona built on agency, skills, and achievements, while the celebrity’s persona is built on a passive lifestyle and accidental forms of fame. As well as the gender dynamics that are associated with these particular discourses (active male star versus glamorous female celebrity), well-known people are usually associated with a particular media context. Back in 1991, Christine Gledhill stated that “the cinema still provides ultimate confirmation of stardom” (Gledhill 1991, xi), with other areas of popular culture accommodating celebrity based renown such as sports, music, or fashion. Commercial television stood out as one of the biggest celebrity manufacturers. In particular, reality television programs epitomized all of the troublesome aspects of this low-brow form of fame, namely its short-term nature and heavy dependence on a single show, whose different facets may lead to various spinoffs, but rarely offer the participants a chance to grow outside of the original entertainment format. As such, these personalities have only limited futures and are an easy target for exploitative and damaging management. Now a decade-running reality television show, Keeping up with the Kardashians (KUWTK) departs from these limiting conceptions. First three and then five featured sisters led by a strong matriarch opened up a distinct territory of celebrity functioning. With Big Brother contestants and The Real Housewives participants they share several attributes, namely fame obsession, unabashed self-exposure, lack of any performing talent, exhibition of wealth, family bonding, and both enviable and pitiful lifestyles. What separates this clan from these short-lived celebrities are their marketing skills and their ability to turn the proverbial 15-minute reality television fame into a fully fledged Kardashian universe. An immensely profitable family brand that is currently estimated at US$450 million net worth is based on the long running show and its various spin-offs. However, only one-sixth (around US$80 million) of their yearly revenues comes from the actual series itself, and the bigger part of their fortune rests on their individual product endorsements, development of other content based on their personal storylines, and pursuing careers outside of the original program (Bruce 2017). Despite heading in various directions—Khloé capitalizing on her bodily transformation, Kylie extending her cosmetic empire, and Kendall staring in various fashion campaigns—the participants must keep in mind that the family is greater than the sum of its parts (Scheiner McClain 2014, 50). Preserving this equilibrium is crucial, otherwise the family business would dissolve, and it is precisely this balancing act that makes the Kardashian empire such a compelling case for transmedia analysis. 183

The World of the Family Celebrity culture is dominated by the flow of stories and range of characters (Turner 2004, 3–4). Various personal narratives intertwine, and new personalities enter into already established storyworlds, thus spreading and modifying them. When Kris Jenner pitched the idea for a show based on the everyday reality of her own family back in 2007, she capitalized on her first husband’s Robert Kardashian’s proximity to O. J. Simpson during the infamous murder trial in the mid-1990s. As one of his lawyers, Kardashian’s name gained pop-culture resonance; the attorney and businessman of Armenian descent passed away in 2003. In its first series, KUWTK thus employed commemorative narratives such as the sisters remembering their father on the anniversary of his death or the youngest, Khloé, struggling with his absence through partying and heavy drinking. In season six, Kris toyed with the idea of changing her surname back to Kardashian and two years ago Khloé and Kim visited Armenia in order to learn more about their origins. On numerous occasions KUWTK featured authentic home video footage of the siblings when they were little, accompanied by their loving father. Suturing the patriarch into the show’s narrative does not simply benefit from Robert Kardashian’s transient fame, but it also enhances the family values of the whole show. Drawing on the notion of transmedial worlds having distinct mythos, topos, and ethos, the family background has been extremely important for the program from its start. Following Klastrup and Tosca’s (2004) logic, mythos provides the Kardashian universe with a basic knowledge concerning a timeline, personalities, and their bonds; the topos grounds the storylines firmly in Los Angeles’ Calabasas district, and the ethos encapsulates values, attitudes, and beliefs that the individual figures convey. Already the original credits present the family posing in front of the camera, with clearly designated roles and hierarchy protruding. For instance, Kris, as a matriarch of the group, bosses everybody around; Khloé, doubting the necessity of the wind machine, profiles herself as the funny one; and Kim, in tight-fitting red dress, usurping the spot at the center of the composition, is the vain star of the whole series. The Los Angeles-based show evenly covers all members of the clan, including Kris and Bruce’s marriage, the growing pains of their youngest offspring, Kendall and Kylie, and the slow disappearance of Robert Jr. However, the most interesting relationships called for their own air time. As Kris Jenner confessed, in 2009 she was losing faith in the show since it got stuck with a string of inconsequential conflicts. Then her daughters started to get married and have children and new storylines entered the frame. After Khloé’s whirlwind marriage to Lamar Odom, E! cable network accommodated a show following the newlyweds for two seasons. The same thing happened after Robert Jr. conceived a child with model, entrepreneur, and former stripper Blac Chyna in 2016, when a series of eight episodes monitored the couple preparing for the birth of their first baby. Other spin-offs did not signal the central romantic narrative directly, but it is 184

obvious that whenever KUWTK left the Los Angeles base in order to visit Miami, New York, or the Hamptons, Kourtney took the spotlight together with her then boyfriend Scott Disick. The oldest Kardashian sister revealed her first pregnancy during the first season finale of Kourtney and Khloé Take Miami and during the 2014 Hamptons summer spin-off announced her third baby. While the original series prominently features dramatic peaks together with mundane, corny, or even explicit details, the spin-offs give us a better understanding of the sisters’ collapsing relationships. Following the season six special finale on Kim’s fairytale wedding to Kris Humphries, resulting in the show’s highest ratings up to date, consisting of 10.5 million viewers (Woodward and Hendin 2015), the fast dissolution of the marriage is addressed in the second season of Kourtney and Kim Take New York. Similarly, Scott and Kourtney’s temporary separation in 2010 makes better sense when watching the second season of the Miami spin-off. Although “the fam” stays at the heart of KUWTK, central relationships have largely dissolved. This is certainly the case for the marriage of Kris to Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner in 2014. Incidentally, multiplatform stories were generated by Bruce’s transformation into Caitlyn, involving a book, docuseries, etc. For almost seven years the program emphasized their parenting skills, communication, and midlife crises and clashes of their conflicting values and lifestyles—all of which helped to ground KUWTK in an ordinary and relatable reality, despite its extraordinary setting and display of wealth. Correspondingly, Kourtney’s bond with Scott and their growing young family also gave the show a relatively stable point in an otherwise hectic universe. After Kim’s very public split from Humphries she took a different turn with her next marriage to the rapper and fashion designer Kanye West. Apart from their spectacular engagement we saw very little of their life together. That is a striking difference from Kourtney’s personal milestones, for example sharing the delivery of her first two children with the viewers. Since West did not wish to participate on the show, Kim diverted the attention to herself, detailing her struggles with getting pregnant, various business activities, and organizing family trips, talks, and celebrations. The family narrative thus underwent a major development as the main relationships, securing the stability and coherence of the world and providing a specific set of conflicts, fell apart. Despite all the ruptures the notion of sisterhood persisted. KUWTK portrays not only a day-to-day experience of this bond, but also ties it up with numerous entrepreneurial activities. The Kardashian ethos dictates that all members should work together or at least support each other’s various business endeavors. Such close, family-based cooperation differs from celebrity product endorsements since the K-labeled merchandise stems directly from the personal stories, physiques, and experiences of the three sisters. Kourtney, Kim, and Khloé collaborated on several products, which evolved around a set of attributes typically associated with them, namely body, beauty, and fashion. In 2011 the sisters launched a “Kardashian Kollection,” a clothing line consisting of signature figure-hugging 185

dresses, underwear, bags, shoes, and jewelry, later expanding into “Kardashian Kurves,” introducing several pairs of jeans modeled upon the sisters’ different body shapes. The trio also developed a make-up line called “Kardashian Khroma” and the sisters branched out into the publishing industry as well, when they co-wrote an autobiography Kardashian Konfidential in 2010, and a year later a fiction book called Dollhouse. As well as these momentary enterprises, which were all depicted on and in the show, the sisters run a chain of DASH stores. The first boutique in Calabasas opened prior to the premiere of the show, subsequently expanding to Miami Beach, New York, and temporarily to the Hamptons. In the first years of airing KUWTK, the mere opening of a new DASH store warranted additional shows, as the first seasons of Miami and New York demonstrate. Moreover, in 2015 the E! network accommodated a program called DASH Dolls, chronicling lives of several Hollywood-based boutique employees. The stores are the only place that provide a tangible Kardashian experience because of their display of pricy fashion items together with KUWTK related souvenirs, thus attracting tourists and fans rather than solvent buyers. Despite the attention, the sisters struggled with generating profits for years and the situation escalated at the start of KUWTK season 13 with Khloé and Kim willing to sell the failing franchise. The rise and possible fall of DASH stores, the flagship of all the sister pact enterprises, may ultimately terminate the era when the trio willingly cooperated on various projects. Such processes threaten to further undermine the family brand, one already jeopardized by divorces, break-ups, and restrained sharing of personal details.

The Individual Storylines The season 11 promo aired in fall 2015, presenting individual women from the Kardashian–Jenner clan posing and strutting in front of a simple black or white background. The days of the raunchy but togetherness-themed opening credits were long gone and the Kardashian universe departed from accentuating the family brand in favor of building individual celebrities. In transmedia vocabulary this can be perceived as a turn away from world-building to prioritizing the singular characters. Characters over world is a valid strategy, but the question remains whether this is suited to a project such as the KUWTK. On one hand such, tactics naturally result from the development in the women’s lives, supported by celebrity culture’s broad inclination toward distinct personalities. On the other hand, such a strategy also contains risks and dangers. As Graeme Turner noted in relation to the music band Spice Girls, their message of “girl power” was more convincing and relevant when performed as a collective manifesto. Despite the members gradually profiling themselves as individuals rather than as parts of the branded ensemble, their solo careers ceased to have a larger impact (Turner 2004, 56–57). With the Kardashian–Jenner female clan similarly spreading in various directions, the central message about prioritizing your 186

relatives as best friends, co-workers, and business partners might well get lost in the process of launching separate projects. The sisters now develop and promote goods, apps, and additional content, which originates in their personal ups and downs as captured on KUWTK. For example, Khloé was for a long time labeled as the funny, yet least attractive, one of all the Kardashian sisters. After the visible toning of her body, Khloé capitalized on her physical transformation with a self-help book Strong Looks Better Naked, followed by a show Revenge Body, where she guided participants during their adoption of a healthier lifestyle. Kris Kardashian’s younger daughters, Kendall and Kylie Jenner, who are in their early twenties, outgrew the closely cooperating sisterly phase quite rapidly. Their collaboration portfolio resembles their older siblings’ ventures into fashion retail (collections for PacSun and Topshop brands) and the publishing industry (the dystopian fiction Rebels: City of Indra). Nevertheless, their conjoint activities seem much more strained as these sisters head in opposing directions. While Kendall continues to move away from reality television entertainment, associating herself with the world of high fashion, Kylie developed her own program for E! network, monitoring her life shared with a group of friends rather than with a family circle. With Kendall being praised by the modeling industry for her natural beauty and her lithe body, Kylie created a vastly different, “sexy siren” persona, supported by surgically enhanced looks and flashy, almost vulgar looks. Despite their differences, the older Kardashian sisters never had to face such contrasting positioning as all of them were labeled as distinctly lower class due to their association with sex tapes, a lack of sophistication and talent, and their frequently displayed sensuous figures. Only time will tell if these individualistic tendencies pose a risk for the Kardashian ethos in terms of the transmedia brand. However, as the falling ratings demonstrate, no amount of drama can replace the once central tight family circle (Knibbs 2017). Since the women’s lives are thoroughly documented and also shared through social media, hardly any plot featured on KUWTK comes as a surprising twist. As BuzzFeed demonstrated, Kourtney’s first pregnancy also marked the first time when the family issues could translate into tabloid headlines (Woodward and Hendin 2015). Since then, the Kardashians have teased the media with snippets of information and saved the actual drama for the show. But as their lives became more and more scrutinized, keeping control over the course of events and their public circulation became almost impossible, with twists and turns revealed weeks or months prior to the show. For example, when Kourtney and Scott broke up during summer 2015, the series featured their separation in mid-November. Although KUWTK cannot compete with tabloids on the grounds of actuality, it does nevertheless offer a more intimate take on the exciting events, lending first-person voiceovers and giving primary access to the women’s emotional and practical reactions to various events.

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Despite the sometimes-unfortunate evolution of the familial ties and a strong nod toward character-based content, one crucial aspect of KUWTK remained unchanged throughout the years. Since the Kardashian universe puts forward female protagonists, it has always attracted hyperfeminine aesthetics and behavior. Beauty and looks are key priorities to the Kardashian women as they spend a lot of time undergoing beautification procedures and make-up and hair-styling sessions in order to meet social expectations concerning an attractive female body. Sexuality is another essential feature, since the sisters have voluptuous, pneumatic bodies with famously rounded buttocks and parade their silhouettes in tight-fitting ensembles. Although Kim continues to be associated with a sex tape and the sisters frequently pose in nude photoshoots, the overall verbal discourse of the show emphasizes conservative values. Kardashian women vocalize traditional gender stereotypes concerning marriage, motherhood, and fidelity, yet they project an overtly sexualized image. Such a close attention paid to female protagonists clearly values their perspective while excludes other storylines. Male characters usually fade in the background, are ignored, or disappear entirely—in short, they just cannot keep up with the Kardashian women. In its first seasons, KUWTK frequently showcased this gender role contravention. While Kris worked on establishing the family business, Bruce was left with traditionally female tasks of caretaking, completing errands, and running the household. The younger male KUWTK participants also clashed with the femaledominated system of governance on numerous occasions. Before Kim and Kris Humphries’ wedding, Khloé reminded the cocky groom that men in the family have no say whatsoever; the program further depicted the athlete clearly not willing to spend his life outside of a conventional male role. Scott and Kourtney’s longtime relationship was riddled with his substance abuse issues and although Kourtney tried to learn from her mother’s mistakes with Bruce, she nevertheless remained firmly in charge of the household. Kris embodies another paradox through her self-coined term “momager,” pointing to her simultaneous position as a mother of the clan and its manager as well. This conflicting status is perfectly encapsulated in one of her statements at the show’s start, commenting on Kim’s leaked erotic video: “As her mother, I wanted to kill her. But as her manager I knew I had a job to do.” Being frequently portrayed as an exploitative fame-monger by the press, Kris is also perceived as a mastermind behind the whole show. While other Kardashian related narratives may have changed through time, that of Kris being in charge of the whole empire did not. As Jenner herself confessed in her 2011 memoir, around the fourth season, when her daughters started to settle down, she carefully orchestrated strategic moves in order to capitalize on the growing ratings numbers (Jenner 2011, 277). The operating business model that Kris came up with consisted of three cornerstones: there is the central successful reality television show, followed by social media nurturing even closer interaction with fans, and finally brand endorsements, which, as I already mentioned, generate most of the Kardashians’ income. 188

At first, the Kardashian-branded products were easily recognized since they all bore double K initials as well as the sisters. Apart from the Kardashian Kollection, Khroma beauty line or the Konfidential biography, other products employed K-speak as well. For example, the Kardashian Kard, an ill-fated project of a prepaid card aimed at teens with rather substantial fees; Kardashian Khaos, a store with KUWTK souvenirs in Las Vegas, which closed in summer 2014, or the Kardazzle face palettes. This strategy is in line with Kris naming all of her daughters a name starting with the letter “K,” thus lending the various goods and projects a more personal touch as well as securing the connection with the celebrity-filled family and embracing them into the already established brand. Currently sold Kardashian-related merchandise has decreased in numbers and also in the outlined K strategy as the family brand made way for rather individualized labels such as KKW beauty, Kylie cosmetics, or Khloé’s jeans and bodysuits company Good American. Despite this evolution, Kris is still viewed as a unifying force behind the franchise. Not only on economic terms, but also through dealing with most of the negative publicity herself—in contrast to her vilified celebrity persona of a greedy, pushy momager, her daughter’s images can appear more authentic and sincere (Leppert 2015, 133–150). It can therefore be argued that through Kris and her active role in creating, managing, and supervising her family’s empire, it also gained a sense of authorship not readily associated with a female reality television participant. Undoubtedly, indeed, Kris’ activities provide the KUWTK brand with qualities belonging to more traditional authorial works—authority, coherence, and legitimacy. Her case undermines existing paradigms on reality television fame with firmly installed hierarchies of the exploiting producers and exploited participants. The self-proclaimed momager complicates these conceptions as she occupies both sides of the spectrum. Jenner’s visible, in-control position and management of her relatives produced not only a cultural narrative about women’s prospects for successfully combining love and family with professional careers, but simultaneously created a unique reality television show, where the participants are not taken advantage of by a third party, but instead benefit from their own transmedial exploitation.

Conclusion The Kardashian–Jenner women nowadays seem to be on top of their game as they conquered the Forbes top earning reality television star list in 2016 (Robehmed 2016). All of the sisters plus their mother further nurture their celebrity status through social media. As Scheiner McClain’s analysis of Kim’s Twitter account demonstrated, her various tweets fall under six different narratives—personal tidbits, lifestyle, promotional pieces, encouraging traffic to her website, and interaction with fans and other celebrities (Scheiner McClain 2014, 78–85). These categories closely resemble those presented in the television show, with one exception being the communication with followers. Social media permits an ostensible link between celebrities and 189

audience members due to the continuous uploading of mundane facts, activities, opinions, or images by the famous personality herself. Thus, the Kardashians engage their fans in various conversations and decision-making processes, ranging from manicure trends, through finding adequate names for pets up to music suggestions. Although the Kardashian–Jenner sisters have massive followings on their social network accounts, with Kylie being the most popular person on Snapchat and Kim featuring in the top 20 for both Twitter and Instagram, it is also the case that without the reality television project on air their power would diminish rapidly. Such is the consensus among many commentators on the phenomenon, who mention Paris Hilton’s step down from global fame after disappearing from reality television. As I have demonstrated in the chapter, then, after a decade of steady growth the Kardashian world is currently struggling with finding the right direction in terms of maintaining a balance between keeping the family brand on track and allowing room for the individual aspirations to grow. The former CEO of E! networks Ted Harbert claimed that doing the show might be obnoxious for the family, but it is precisely the televisual presence that provides a basis for many other products (Bruce 2017). Whether the Kardashian clan will survive another decade of global fame depends on how they negotiate the wider family narrative with individual storylines, and how they handle the complexity of mixing television content that is gradually becoming increasingly personalized in its use of labels and social media features. However, the Kardashian women so far have arguably redefined celebrity television-based fame, particularly when examined through the lens of transmedia studies. What was only a decade ago perceived as a passive, ephemeral status, the Kardashians have stretched into an instantly recognizable, immensely profitable, highly participatory, and longrunning branded celebrity storyworld.

References Allen, Robert C., and Douglas Gomery. 1985. Film History: Theory and Practice. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education. Berry, Sarah. 2004. “Hollywood Exoticism.” In Stars. The Film Reader, edited by Lucy Fischer and Marcia Landy, 181–197. London and New York: Routledge. Bruce, Leslie. 2017. “The Kardashian Decade: How a Sex Tape Led to a Billion-Dollar Brand.” The Hollywood Reporter, August 16. Accessed February 13, 2017. www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/kardashian-decade-how-a-sex-tape-led-a-billion-dollar-brand1029592. DeCordova, Richard. 2001. Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Dyer, Richard. 1998. Stars. London: BFI. Geraghty, Christine. 2007. “Re-examining Stardom: Questions of Texts, Bodies and Performance.” In Stardom and Celebrity. A Reader, edited by Su Holmes and Sean Redmond, 98–110. London, New Delhi, Singapore, and Thousand Oaks: Sage. Gledhill, Christine. 1991. Stardom: Industry of Desire. London and New York: Routledge. Jenner, Kris. 2011. Kris Jenner … And All Things Kardashian. New York: Gallery Books. King, Barry. 2003. “Embodying an Elastic Self: The Parametrics of Contemporary Stardom.” In Contemporary Hollywood Stardom, edited by Thomas Austin and Martin Barker, 45–61. London: Arnold. Klastrup, Lisbeth, and Susana Tosca. 2004. “Transmedial Worlds: Rethinking Cyberworld Design.” Paper

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presented at the International Conference on Cyberwolds, November 18–20. Knibbs, Kate. 2017. “The Dark Decline of Keeping Up With the Kardshians.” The Ringer, May 4. Accessed March 11, 2017. www.theringer.com/2017/5/4/16044794/keeping-up-with-the-kardashians-ratingsseason-13-3aa5b249eee7. Leppert, Alice. 2015. “Mommager of the Brides: Kris Jenner’s Management of Kardashian Romance.” In First Comes Love: Power Couples, Celebrity Kinships and Cultural Politics, edited by Shelley Cobb and Neil Ewen, 133–150. London: Bloomsbury. Robehmed, Natalie. 2016. “Top-Earning Reality Stars 2016: Kardashians, Jenners Combine for 122,5 Million.” Forbes, November 16. Accessed February 12, 2017. www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2016/11/16/top-earning-reality-stars-2016-kardashians-jennerscombine-for-122-5-million/#21b37eb7274d Scheiner McClain, Amanda. 2014. Keeping Up the Kardashian Brand: Celebrity, Materialism and Sexuality. Lanham and Plymouth: Lexington Books. Shingler, Martin. 2012. Star Studies: A Critical Guide. London: BFI and Palgrave Macmillan. Turner, Graeme. 2004. Understanding Celebrity. London, New Delhi, and Thousand Oaks: Sage. Woodward, Ellie, and Rebecca Hendin. 2015. “How the Kardshians Manipulated the Media to Become the Most Famous Family in the World.” BuzzFeed, September 25. Accessed February 8, 2017. www.buzzfeed.com/elliewoodward/how-the-kardashians-manipulated-the-media-to-become-the-most? utm_term=.njZxjqxk1Z#.ko4zxKzAJo.

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13 Transmedia Attractions The Case of Warner Bros. Studio Tour—The Making of Harry Potter Matthew Freeman

The Harry Potter fandom is one of the biggest media fandoms around the world. The Harry Potter book series alone has sold more than 400 million copies worldwide and the first installment of the film series brought in over £600 million worldwide (Calgary Herald 2011). This fan base crosses borders, cultures, and socio-economic settings, providing a perfect opportunity for technology as well as additional platforms and spaces to be used to unite these fans. Not only are the entertainment industries interested in transmedia content, but marketing agencies alongside leisure and tourism developers are focusing their attention on using transmediality as a way of creating and expanding their brand universes. Transmediality provides a unique way of converging their products and brands with the stories and emotions of audiences (Jenkins 2006). It also affords a multiplication of revenue streams across multiple media platforms (Freeman 2016). What, however, is the relationship between transmediality and leisure and tourism-based attraction? Using the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London—The Making of Harry Potter as a case study, this chapter aims to go beyond exploring the more apparent economic reasons for why leisure and tourism-based attractions are readily produced as extensions of media (Grainge 2007) and instead examines how and why this particular Harry Potter attraction takes the form that it does. Specifically, and by drawing on a mixedmethodology based on ethnography and surveys with both visitors and staff, I explore what impact this attraction has on how its promoters encourage engagement with the Harry Potter texts from which it derives, and also how its visitors characterize the functions of this space as a leisure-based extension of the Harry Potter storyworld. The chapter’s claims revolve around theorizations of these perspectives, including the aesthetics and properties of the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London—The Making of Harry Potter as an extension of the storyworld. These comprise immersion, gamification, as well as the ways in which visitors are invited to go “through-thelooking-glass” (or “into-the-scenes”) and “behind-the-curtain” (or “behind-thescenes”). All direct quotes with visitors throughout this chapter are taken from an online survey I completed between the dates of January 31, 2017, and February 15, 192

2017. This survey aimed to capture a range of visitor responses and opinions about Warner Bros. Studio Tour London—The Making of Harry Potter. Respondents were happy to be quoted directly, but requested that they remain anonymous throughout this chapter.

Conceptualizing Leisure and Tourism Spaces as Transmedia Worlds World-building, according to Henry Jenkins, concerns “the process of designing a fictional universe … that is sufficiently detailed to enable many different stories to emerge but coherent enough so that each story feels like it fits with the others” (2006, 335). As has been established in the book’s introduction as well as in other chapters, “to fully experience any fictional storyworld, consumers must assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels … to come away with a richer entertainment experience” (Jenkins 2006, 21). In economic terms, then, transmedia world-building operates on the basis that audiences will gain a richer and fuller understanding of a fictional storyworld by consuming more and more media texts and products that each work to narrate adventures from that storyworld. Building on Jenkins’ emphasis on media texts, Matt Hills considers world-building from the perspective of leisure and tourism. Hills points out that “staging imaginary worlds in physical form has become a significant part of destination tourism, events entertainment and ‘extended’ film exhibition” (2016, 245). In fact, ever since what Michael Saler describes as “earlier resources of popular enchantment, such as street fairs, carnivals, circuses, panoramas, phantasmagorias, magic lantern shows, conjuring acts, and similar amusements” (2012, 45), spaces of leisure and tourism have long operated in close relationship with media production—and indeed as extensions of fictional storyworlds. Throughout both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, theme parks, museums, conventions, galleries, and memorabilia fairs have all emerged as commercially viable extensions of media forms around the world. Such extension spaces have been encapsulated by attractions such as Disneyland. Disney, in fact, was a pioneer of this domain. Paul Grainge has shown how in the 1950s Disney “linked film interests to the development of rides and to associated business concerns in real estate” (2007, 122). Grainge goes on to explain how the history of modern entertainment branding is inextricably linked with the Disney Company and its transition in the 1950s from a studio specializing in cartoon animation to a company whose activities would take place within, and in many ways herald, the postwar integration of leisure markets, connecting movie production to developments in television, tourism, theme parks and consumer merchandise. (2007, 44) However, Disney may have created an all-encompassing consumer environment that 193

Walt Disney himself described as “total merchandising” (Anderson 1994, 134), but how can we characterize the functions of such leisure spaces as a transmedia storyworld? In other words, what exemplifies or underpins the “experience economy” (Hills 2016, 244) of these kinds of leisure and tourism attractions in terms of how they operate as direct extensions of media-based worlds beyond the industrial-economic rationales and related commercial practices such as brand extension? Approaching this question, then, one might posit that in terms of characterizing the type of world-building at work here—or rather the type of world-based experience that is presented to audiences—one concept, in particular, is important: immersion. Hills notes that theme-park-style attractions “involve participating in an immersive performance of a media property, or a repeatable walk-through ‘adventure’ … that relies on audiences ‘being there’ and hence amassing embodied cultural distinction” (2016, 244). In the context of transmedia storyworlds, too, Jenkins defines immersion as “the consumer enter[ing] into the world of the story (e.g. theme parks)” (2009). Later I will examine how this concept of immersion informs the creation and the expansion of the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London—The Making of Harry Potter as a place “grounded in … the real, physical world [but] moved unmistakably not toward realism but toward a more convincing form of fantasy” (Kaufman 2011, 52). But for now it is important to acknowledge that immersion concerns the engagement of audiences between and around media texts—it is simultaneously a paratextual and an all-consuming practice. Media paratexts are of course defined as peripheral—though no less significant—items such as DVDs, promos, and online materials, which for Gray carry important meaning from films and television series beyond the actual texts and across into multiple media forms (2010, 34). Such materials may actively serve to build a given fictional storyworld and steer audiences across media and other artifacts and spaces—spaces that could well include an attraction. All of which is to say, as will be demonstrated shortly, that leisure-based media attractions can operate as both extradiegetic consumer add-ons to media texts and as diegetic re-enactments for the fictional fabric of the storyworld itself. Building on his earlier definition, Jenkins also suggests that transmedia storyworlds are themselves based on a balance between immersion and extractability, claiming that “in immersion, the consumer enters into the world of the story (e.g. theme parks), while in extractability, the fan takes aspects of the story away with them as resources they deploy in the spaces of their everyday life (e.g. items from the gift shop)” (2009). Or to put it another way, transmedia worldbuilding envisions a balance between fantasy and reality, between imaginary and real. But how does this balance between fantasy and reality manifest in the case of the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London—The Making of Harry Potter?

Behind-the-Scenes The Warner Bros. Studio Tour London—The Making of Harry Potter attraction is an enormously successful walking tour attracting around 6,000 visitors per day, and 194

which immerses guests into the world of Harry Potter and of the filmmaking that captured that world on screen. The attraction features authentic sets, costumes, and props that showcase the artistry, technology, skills, and talent that went into producing the world-famous and successful films, created at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden. Opened in 2012 to the public, the Studio Tour frequently expands to offer new exhibitions and experiences—gradually the attraction has increased its sets by including the interiors of Privet Drive, the Muggle house where Harry Potter grew up, and most recently a new exhibition dedicated to Dobby the House Elf was added. Perhaps most simply, the world-building provided by the Warner Bros Studio Tour London—The Making of Harry Potter can be best characterized as a combination of “behind-the-scenes” and “into-the-scenes”—a tension between offering visitors the chance to re-experience the fictional, media-based world of Harry Potter and a wish to learn more about said world extra-diegetically. Such a tension is emphasized in its newspaper promotion: one article, appearing in The Express, accentuated how visitors “enter the magical world of Harry Potter at Warner Bros. Studio Tour London, where you can see the original sets from the films and step aboard the Hogwarts Express train” (2016, 14). Thus there is the promotion of a balance between reality (film sets) and fiction (Hogwarts Express train). Similarly, in an advertisement titled “Experience The World of Harry Potter” published in the Bristol Evening Post, the attraction is described as “featuring Hogwarts in the snow, with sets decorated as they are for festive scenes and behind-the-scenes secrets will be revealed about how filmmakers created fire, snow and ice. Relive the magic through the eyes of the filmmakers who brought the Harry Potter film series to life” (2016, 46). There is indeed the sense of going both “behind-the-curtain” and “through-the-looking-glass” as visitors enter into the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London—The Making of Harry Potter, allowing guests to relish in an immersive imaginary world that abolishes binaries between real and imaginary and which goes right back to Disneyland. However, to what extent has this attraction become an immersive blend of the real and the imaginary, as Jean Baudrillard famously proclaimed? And how so? In other words, how do visitors of the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London—The Making of Harry Potter characterize its function as an extension of the Harry Potter storyworld? In some respects, many visitors have tended to describe the so-called “experience economy” (Hills 2016, 244) of this attraction in terms of its paratextual or extradiegetic relation to the Harry Potter world—in particular, as what one might call a kind of “media museum.” And in characterizing it in this way, there is the sense that some visitors perceive the attraction as somehow less of an all-consuming experience for engaging with the fictional fabric of the Harry Potter world and instead as more of a paratextual experience that exists between the textual entry points of the storyworld. For instance, many visitors commented on how the attraction has “increased [their] respect of the whole film industry.” One fan remarked that “we learned so much about filmmaking and saw amazing props, costumes, sets, models, drawings and more.” Another notes that “it was so cool to see the film sets and really appreciate the 195

thousands of people and artists that make movie magic come to life. You don’t have to be a Potterhead to learn how much work goes into each movie.” This sense of learning how the “magic” of the films was achieved was articulated again and again: The tour itself is a must-do for any Harry Potter fan—you get a behind-thescenes tour like if you were one of the actors on the movie, so exciting! Even if you are not a fan, it is quite impressive to see how they created the movies and all the hard work that goes into it. It is somewhat telling, however, that while such film-industry-related education was seen as interesting by many of the visitors surveyed for this chapter, others used this emphasis as a basis for criticism: “Both my daughter and I are Harry Potter fans so seeing all the artifacts from the movies was great, but we did expect some more action. This was more like a museum rather than a theme park.” Distinguishing the museum from the theme park is an important description, since while the former is associated with history, with education, and with calm, the latter is associated with the present moment, with fun, and with a controlled sense of chaos. In other words, one might argue that there are more apparent parallels between the narrative world of the Harry Potter stories and that of a theme park, which both share characteristics of immediate excitement, adrenaline, drama, and spectacle. The aforementioned visitor responses hint that while the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London —The Making of Harry Potter gives fans the opportunity to “enter into the world of the story” (Jenkins 2009), its lack of what Hills described as a “repeatable walkthrough ‘adventure’” (2016, 244) is perhaps why its visitors signal the attraction as less of a “through-the-looking-glass-type” entrance into the Harry Potter imaginary world and more of a “behind-the-curtain-type” by-product of that imaginary world. One should not assume that educational, museum-like experiences cannot occupy the status of fictional world-building. On the contrary, Jenny Kidd argues that we should think of the contemporary museum as a transmedia text, one that involves forms of interlinked storytelling extending across multiple platforms (2014, 68). Especially relevant to our discussions here is her suggestion that a more artifact-heavy approach to narrative at museums can result in visitors “encountering conflicting versions of events and not expecting them to be reconciled” (2014, 36). In the case of the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London—The Making of Harry Potter, for example, visitors are presented with unique access into the physical detail of the on-screen storyworld—such as the aesthetic function and design rationale of artefacts, backdrops and stylings. Some visitors remarked that the so-called “behind-the-scenes” insights offered here actually changed their understanding of particular scenes and story beats: “It’s amazing and utterly impressive to see the detail that was put into things most people would consider ‘background.’ The richness of seeing Diagon Alley in the ‘flesh’ opened my eyes to just how magical this world really is!” In a very different sense, visitors also regularly commented on the fact that the attraction expanded their 196

engagement with Harry Potter—not always with its imaginary world, perhaps, but certainly with its community of fans around the world: “It was gratifying meeting a young lady from Northern Europe who had stayed up all night to finish the last book so she would be fully prepared to take this tour. We will remain friends.”

Into-the-Scenes The experience economy of the type of world-building on display at the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London—The Making of Harry Potter is thus difficult to characterize. As was argued above, there is certainly the sense that the “behind-the-scenes” label is appropriate to characterizing this attraction, with many visitors indeed emphasizing the “up-close look at props, rooms sets and filmmaking techniques” as the reason to visit. But the industry-based insights into art and design do not tell the whole story. In other important ways, the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London—The Making of Harry Potter exemplifies the ways in which modern museums have come to operate as a “mashup, as a site of active consumption, micro-creation, co-creativity and remix” (Kidd 2014, 117). For Kidd, these changes have been brought about by new digital technologies and convergence culture, which—just as with transmedia—have all worked to empower audiences by giving them the “right to participate” (Jenkins 2006, 23). Scolari, Bertetti, and Freeman conceptualize transmedia production as “Media Industry (Canon) + Collaborative Culture (Fandom) = Transmedia Storytelling” (2014, 3). Scolari et al.’s formula echoes Kidd’s aforementioned claims regarding the makeup of museums in the digital age, altogether suggesting that the role of leisure and tourism-based attractions in shaping and building transmedia storyworlds goes far beyond this chapter’s earlier claims of merely going “behind-the-scenes.” What, then, does it mean for a leisure and tourism attraction to go “into-the-scenes” of imaginary worlds instead? For one thing, Kidd’s proclamations of mashup, active consumption, micro-creation, and remix are certainly important. In this case, active consumption occurs via the visitor’s extraction of purchasable physical artefacts from the storyworld, including the likes of Butterbeer, Gryffindor scarfs, Hogwarts mugs and wands which can be enjoyed “in the spaces of their everyday life” (Jenkins 2009). Micro-creation, too, occurs via photograph opportunities where visitors can dress-up in the full Hogwarts robes and pose against a green-screen that immerses visitors in the storyworld—quite literally, it seems, into the scenes of the story’s fictional world. But Kidd’s idea that the modern museum is a space of mashup and remix is equally significant in terms of how we characterize the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London —The Making of Harry Potter as an expansion of the Harry Potter storyworld. Such ideas of mashup and remix can be argued to underpin the way in which the attraction was talked about in its promotion, which characteristically attempted to inform audiences how to re-engage with the Harry Potter texts, and doing so by promoting the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London—The Making of Harry Potter as a chance to head directly into the fantasy of the world, offering an augmented story experience. 197

And much of this promotion style stems from an attempt to gamify the storyworld. Gamification is the application of elements of game playing—such as point-scoring, competition with fellow players, rules of play, etc.—to other, non-game aspects of activity, most commonly as a way to encourage engagement with a product or service. More than encouraging engagement, the concept of gamification is used throughout the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London—The Making of Harry Potter as a means of both immersing visitors in the fiction of the storyworld and expanding the content of that storyworld. Consider, for example, the way in which the opening of the iconic Forbidden Forest sets was described in an advertisement for the Daily Telegraph: The Forbidden Forest, the mysterious woodland that borders Hogwarts, will be a new attraction for thousands of fans visiting Warner Bros Studio Tour London— The Making of Harry Potter at Leavesden in Herts. In the forest, visitors will come face-to-face with Aragog, the giant spider. (2017, 32) The inclusion of Aragog, an imaginary creature, within the notably real sets of the Forbidden Forest was not only a way to engage visitors in a more spectacle-driven experience akin to the excitement of a theme park, but it was also a strategy that allowed the attraction to extend the narrative adventures of the storyworld across multiple platforms. For in an article published in The Evening Standard, Harry Potter fans were apparently “left mystified by #FollowTheSpiders teasers.” The article read: These are challenging times for arachnophobic Harry Potter fans. Over the weekend, a flurry of posts encouraging fans to “Follow the Spiders” appeared on social media, prompting people to suspect that something new—and eightlegged—will be coming to the expanding Harry Potter franchise soon. (2017, 17) These tweets mostly came from the marketing team based at the Warner Bros Studio Tour London, where on the attraction’s Twitter account there was the mysterious message: “Looking for something? All you need to do is #FollowTheSpiders.” Shortly after, a new Instagram account, called FollowTheSpiders, was set up, seemingly to post a series of images that matched up to make one giant spider face. Further details and images were staggered and timed to coincide with the Celebration of Harry Potter convention in Florida. Altogether, then, social media was used in close dialogue with the film sets constructed for the Warner Bros Studio Tour London as a tool for encouraging the “speed and movement that commonly accompanies digital practices” in the context of a leisure and tourism-based attraction (Kidd 2014, 34). More than that, the integration of a leisure attraction with social media elevated the engagement of visitors into potential game players, enticing fans to participate in a series of tasks and clues that all pointed toward attendance at the Warner Bros Studio Tour London. As one fan remarked on Twitter, “#HPStudioTour is a ride through the 198

Forbidden Forest maybe where Aragon lived.” What’s more, this gamification-led strategy also afforded a highly narrativized expansion of the fictional storyworld in ways that qualifies the attraction as a media platform in the larger transmedia story. Follow The Spiders is in fact a reference to the clue given by Hagrid in J. K. Rowling’s second novel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. In one scene, he tells Ron, Harry and Hermione to “follow the spiders” when the intrepid trio are looking for the monster that lurks in the tunnels underneath Hogwarts Castle. Here, they find Aragog, an enormous spider, or Acromantula, and learn that he is not involved in the Chamber of Secrets, and nor was a teenage Hagrid. All of which is to note that the Warner Bros Studio Tour London thus became part of the very fabric of Harry Potter’s transmedia storytelling, with the attraction contributing to the ongoing process the telling “stories that unfold across multiple platforms, with each medium making distinctive contributions to our understanding of the [story]world” (Jenkins 2006, 336). For as one fan also remarked on Twitter, “I love how this is an expansion of the tour!!”

Conclusion So, what specific and emerging roles do leisure and tourism attractions continue to play in expanding fictional worlds across borders? This chapter has aimed to gain at least partial insight into this question, exploring the changing roles, forms, industrial attitudes, and audience responses to expanding storyworlds and their fictional spaces far beyond the borders of media itself and into the cultural spaces of leisure and tourism attractions. Amid a time of continued digitization as well as the increasing ease of availability of media worlds in the age of convergence culture and its interconnected screens, books, social media platforms, and other web content, the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London—The Making of Harry Potter ultimately paints a relatively complex picture concerning the ways in which we should go about defining the relationship between media production and leisure and tourism attractions. Much like the Disneyland-inspired theme parks that came before it, it is certainly fair to understand the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London—The Making of Harry Potter in primarily economic terms—that is, as a form of “total merchandising” for a franchise now in its twilight years (Anderson 1994, 134). Even so, understanding this attraction as an economic success means characterizing its function as a more artful expansion of a fictional storyworld. And the type of world-building provided by the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London is indeed best described as a careful balance between the physical—i.e., film sets, industry insights, grounded in the real—and the imaginary, i.e., narrativized or gamified elaborations and re-enactments of story and character. Different fans expressed interest and engagement in different ways at different times, sometimes characterizing the attraction as something that works best between the Harry Potter media texts or as one that exists around those texts as a component of 199

the storyworld and its fiction. The “experience economy” (Hills 2016, 244) of the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London thus becomes akin to what Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott defined as “inter-textuality”—that is, the diverse ways in which fictions may exist in the gaps in between their textual exploits, with those “in-between” pieces working to reshape how audiences read texts, adjusting their meaning (1987, 45). Such in-between pieces may refer to publicity, posters, fanzine articles, interviews with stars, promotional stunts, etc., which do more than merely “organise expectations in relation to a particular film,” but instead work to “socially organise the relations between media texts” (Bennett and Woollacott 1987, 45). In their study of the James Bond phenomenon, Bennett and Woollacott explored “the respects in which, in adding to ‘the texts of the Bond’, [the films] contributed to a reorganization of the intertextual relations to which both the films and the novels were read” (1987, 142). Similarly, the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London—The Making of Harry Potter serves an intertextual function, reshaping and expanding how audiences engage with the Harry Potter world by inviting audiences to step outside of its fictionality and to consider its construction. And yet the most positive and enthusiastic responses to the attraction—at least those gained for this chapter—were in relation to its narrativized attempts to immerse visitors in the imaginary via the integration of sets and social media. As can also be described of the very best cases of transmedia world-building, the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London was found to be no more immersive than when it rendered itself somewhat invisible and attempted to take the Harry Potter story and make it bigger. Its contributions to the storyworld operate as a more physical and consumer-led form of intertextuality that simultaneously builds textual connections between stories while allowing those stories to escape textual borders and exist in between them in the form of a Studio Tour, folding paratext into text once and for all.

References

Anderson, Christopher. 1994. Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties. Texas: University of Texas Press. Bennett, Tony, and Janet Woollacott. 1987. Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero. London: Routledge. Calgary Herald. 2011. “JK Rowling’s Harry Potter Series of Books Has Sold More Than 400 Million Copies Worldwide.” September 4. Accessed January 15, 2017. www.calgaryherald.com/entertainment/Rowling+Harry+Potter+series+books+sold+more+than+million+copies+worldwide/5 Daily Telegraph. 2017. “Harry Potter and the Fantastic Flora.” January 28. The Evening Standard. 2017. “Harry Potter Fans Left Mystified by #FollowTheSpiders Teasers.” January 23. The Express. 2016. “Warner Bros. Studio Tour London—The Making of Harry Potter.” September 11. Freeman, Matthew. 2016. Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds. London and New York: Routledge. Grainge, Paul. 2007. Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age. London and New York: Routledge. Gray, Jonathan. 2010. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York University Press. Hills, Matt. 2016. “The Enchantment of Visiting Imaginary Worlds and ‘Being There’: Brand Fandom and the Tertiary World of Media Tourism.” In Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, 244–263. London and New York: Routledge.

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Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, Henry. 2009. “The Revenge of the Origami Unicorn: Seven Principles of Transmedia Storytelling.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins, August 3. Accessed January 10, 2017. http://henryjenkins.org/2009/12/the_revenge_of_the_origami_uni.html. Kaufman, J. B. 2011. “The Heir Apparent.” In Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-Era Hollywood, edited by Daniel Goldmark and Charlie Keil, 51–68. California: University of California Press. Kidd, Jenny. 2014. Museums in the New Mediascape: Transmedia, Participation, Ethics. Farnham: Ashgate. Saler, Michael. 2012. As If: Modern Enchantments and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scolari, Carlos A., Paolo Bertetti, and Matthew Freeman. 2014. Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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PART II

Arts of Transmediality

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14 Transmedia Storytelling Character, Time, and World—The Case of Battlestar Galactica Mélanie Bourdaa

It is claimed that the emergence of new digital technologies (Gillan 2010) alongside the increasing visibility of fan practices merged with traditional media production practices have shaped a culture of convergence (Jenkins 2006). In turn, this culture of convergence has led to new forms of serial media content. At the same time, strategies of transmedia storytelling have increased in television series, in particular, which offer stories that “go beyond the screen” (Peyron 2008, 337) in the form of “augmented storytelling” (Bourdaa 2012), with narrative universes scattered across several media platforms. While the term “transmedia” is not new (Kinder 1991), nor even the practice (Freeman 2016), the convergent media ecosystem of the present day favors the integration of production and narration strategies, thereby lending itself to the workings of transmedia storytelling. This chapter analyzes how transmedia storytelling is used in contemporary television series, assessing how stories expand across different media platforms so to propose a typology of various transmedia storytelling characteristics. Using Battlestar Galactica (henceforth BSG) as a case study, I will identify three categories of transmedia storytelling that are used to structure this chapter: character, temporality, and storyworld, building on the conceptual characteristics previously identified by Evans (2011) and Freeman (2016). The case study’s narrative extensions will be analyzed according to a specific methodology: each extension created around the series will be the object of a study according to a grid of criteria that I created. This grid is made up of three fundamental categories: 1. Importance of the media platform supporting the extension: what affordances? 2. Narration: characters, temporality, atmosphere, tone. 3. Canonical links: essential narrative additions and connection with the series. This method will make it possible to highlight the contributions of each extension, the choices of the platform and more broadly the constitution of the extended universe of the series. A temporal thread can thus be drawn in order to understand at what moment each extension intervenes in the universe. Supporting this analysis, I also conducted 203

interviews with writers from the series, as well as from the comic book issues and the web series in order to unravel the creative processes and understand how ancillary content fits into the BSG storyworld. Table 14.1 lists all of the transmedia extensions within the BSG universe that I categorized using the methodology explained above. For the sake of time, in this chapter I will only give details for specific extensions in order to make or illustrate a point. Table 14.1 Transmedia extensions within the Battlestar Galactica universe Platform TV

Title Battlestar Galactica Battlestar Galactica

Temporality Fall of the Colonies 2nd Cylon War

Narration “Mothership” “Mothership”

Razor

Seasons Mini-series Season 1—Season 4 Season 3

TV Film

Pegasus Trilogy

The Plan

Season 4

Re-interpretation Season 1 —Season 2 1st Cylon War

Time related Transmedia Worldbuilding Time related Transmedia Time related Transmedia Characterbased Transmedia Worldbuilding Worldbuilding Time related Transmedia Time related Transmedia Characterbased Transmedia CharacterBased Transmedia CharacterBased Transmedia Worldbuilding Worldbuilding Characterbased Transmedia

Webisodes BSG: Blood and Chrome The Resistance The Face of the Enemy

Games

Comic Books

Battlestar Galactica The board game Battlestar Galactica Online Cylon War BSG Season Zero BSG Origins (Zarek, Baltar, Adama, Kara and Helo) The Final Five

Before the miniseries Between Season 3 and Season 4 Between Season 4 (1) and Season 4 (2) Season 1—Season 4 Season 4 Before the miniseries Before the miniseries Before the miniseries

Occupation New Caprica Occupation New Caprica and Season 4 Fall of the Colonies After the destruction of the Cylon Resurrection Ship 1st Cylon War Before the fall of the Colonies Between the 1st Cylon war and the fall of the Colonies

Before the miniseries

Before the 1st Cylon War

Six

Before the miniseries

Before the fall of the Colonies

BSG Ghost

Mini-series

The Fall of the Colonies

The Returners

Season 1

2ème guerre Cylon

Pegasus

Season 3

Pegasus Trilogy

Character-based Transmedia: Giving Depth to the Cylons and the 204

Humans BSG tells the story of how Cylons, robots created and enslaved by men, rebelled and committed genocide, with the rest of humankind fleeing on-board Battlestars in search of a new Earth. Characters are central to the plot as viewers discover two factions fighting each other, humans and Cylons. Aaron Smith quoting John Fiske quite rightly says that viewers have strong emotional relationships with television characters because they can understand the characters’ reaction to the problems they encounter. Fiske says that because television characters enter the lives of viewers every week, there is a sense of immediacy and of existence. The characters become familiar faces that return week after week, continuing to exist even when the TV is turned off. (Smith 2009) In this traditional construction of the television series, based on a weekly broadcast, the recurring character becomes a fundamental element of the narration but also of identification for the audience. The character remains the force of fiction, the point of recognition of the universe. In a transmedia scenario, Paolo Bertetti asserts that “the transmedia character is a fictional hero whose adventures are told on several media platforms, each providing details about the character’s life” (Bertetti 2014, 2344). It is interesting to note that even though Jenkins famously set up his definition of transmedia storytelling on the basis of narrative universes that lead to the development of franchises, his first proposal was centered on characters, with Technological Review article titled “Transmedia Storytelling: Moving Characters from Books to Films to Video Games Can Make Them Stronger and More Compelling” (Jenkins 2003). In this article, Jenkins underlines how the transmedia strategy is now deeply rooted in our entertainment culture since “younger consumers have become information hunters and gatherers, taking pleasure in tracking down character backgrounds and plot points and making connections between different texts within the same franchise” (2003). Jenkins’ first attempt at defining transmedia storytelling was in line with the definition provided by Martha Kinder (1991) who, by developing the idea of transmedia superstructures, analyzed how fictional characters move from one medium to another, with audiences following them on their fictional journey. For BSG, Ron D. Moore and David Eick, the showrunners, decided to develop the characters of the series even further and to give them depth and a history with added origins and motivations through the deployment of extensions on other media platforms—mainly comic books and webisodes. In collaboration with Dynamite Entertainment, an American comic book company, NBC Universal, which was broadcasting the series via its subsidiary Syfy, launched a series of comic book issues entitled Origins. Broadly, origins stories can be seen as a specific genre related to

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superhero franchises, mainly those of DC Comics and Marvel. In his analysis of transmedia extensions for television series, Clarke points out that the use of origins stories is influenced by the economic structure of the comic book industry, which continues to produce stories over years and decades … By remaining faithful to the origins (which are frequently modified in their consistency), readers can discover a story without having to navigate in more than 400 numbers of comics. (2013, 54) Similarly, in the case of Origins, the goal of these comic books is to create a “past” for the human characters that appeared in the series. The comic books thus examine five main characters across 11 issues, spread out over a year: William Adama, Zarek, Gaius Baltar, Kara “Starbuck” Thrace, and Karl “Helo” Agathon. These issues are then collected in an eponymous Omnibus. In terms of distribution, the series begins in Media Res and television viewers do not learn a lot of information during the show on who the characters were before the beginning of the show. Importantly, the narrative elements displayed in the comic books reinforce a coherence with the television series and thus prove to be canonical additions to the storyworld, providing additional information to readers and viewers. To offer another example, the comic books focused on providing explanations for the origins of the Robot entities. During season 4 of the television series, some information and answers are given that fans have been waiting for a long time, but the showrunners did not explain these answers in details, leaving “narrative shadows” for the comic books to fill. Published by Dynamite Entertainment in 2009 in parallel to the broadcast of the last episode of the series, a comic book, The Final Five, offers “an interpretation of the history of the last five Cylons.” The title of the comic book as well as the reprise of the Cylon’s vignettes root the comic book in the narrative universe of the series that testifies its canonical belonging. Thus we are not dealing here with an interpretation of BSG history but instead the interpretation of its history. Nigel Barrucci, publishing director at Dynamite Entertainment, highlights the benefits of publishing this kind of transmedia narrative information in the form of comic books: “What comic books can do is amplify the aesthetic effects, lengthen and increase battles, expand universe like never before. Now that the series is over, we can continue to tell stories on this medium” (Brady 2008). Once again, the comic books served as a site for audiences to find Easter Eggs, but also to discover new and important narrative elements that enrich their understanding of the series and the characters. Underpinning such narrative elaboration, the comic book platform itself offers a principle of seriality that echoes the serialized format of BSG. However, producing comic book extensions for the television series that were consistently coherent with said television series came with its own set of creative challenges. As Robert Napton (interview, 2014) explains in interview: 206

We wanted to tell his life (Adama’s life), fill in gaps concerning his past life, his career. We then based our scenario on what was known of him and from there we created new facts to fill in the narrative gaps. Our work was very complex because the comic books were produced in parallel with the broadcast of the series. I remember that I had to add scenes at the last minute because one of the episodes revealed that Adama was commander on another Battlestar, called the Walkyrie. It was new information about the character so I quickly incorporated it into the latest issue of the comic book series. It was an exciting challenge to stay consistent with the series under these conditions. Napton’s testimony about the collaborative process of creating narrative extensions provides us with insights into the high degree of coordination between the various writers of the comic books and the showrunners, but also the concern for narrative coherence within the diegesis. In order to widen its storyworld and to broaden the narrative coherence of the diegesis, BSG also developed webisodes, short episodes specially created for the Internet, and launched online on the official streaming platform of the Syfy channel. Rather than simply offering trailers or promotional advertisements, easing the wait of the fans during the hiatuses between two seasons, the webisodes helped to advance the story. However, “in order not to alienate their traditional viewers, the showrunners ensured that the plot did not constitute an integral part of the series’ narrative arcs, while advancing the intrigue and developing the complexity of the narrative universe of the series” (Door 2008). Following the broadcast of episode 11 of season 4 (“Sometimes a Great Nation”), which ends on a cliff-hanger before the final outcome of the series, a series of ten webisodes was put online, entitled The Face of the Enemy. Written by Jane Espenson, who scripted some of the television episodes, these webisodes focused on developing a character—in particular, Felix Gaeta—who became essential to the plot in the second half of season 4. Echoing the sense of mystery that surrounded the origins of many characters before they were fleshed out in the comic books, the character of Gaeta was similarly enigmatic on television, with viewers knowing very little about him on screen. Thus it was the role of the webisodes to “provide a story about [his] past, explore [his] motivations, and give clues to future plots, all in a short narrative” (Jenkins 2003). For Jane Espenson, the Internet’s natural dissemination power offered new possibilities for extending the universe of BSG. As she explained in interview: “As the series, by definition, focuses on the main characters, we thought that webisodes would be a good opportunity to develop a supporting character” (personal correspondence, 2014). Two clear objectives stand out in Espenson’s description: highlighting the story of a supporting character, and bringing a solution and a closure to a narrative arc that has not really been solved in the series, which in this case is the relationship between Gaeta and Baltar during the Cylon Occupation on New Caprica. From a production point of view, the webisodes were a challenge because of the limitations inherent in the project, the low budget and 207

the few actors and teams involved. However, the webisodes gave the series an incredible online presence. Narratively, The Face of the Enemy resumes the plot nine days after the discovery of a devastated and irradiated Earth. In addition to the character of Gaeta, now missing his left leg, we find Colonel Tigh blind in one eye following the torture he endured on New Caprica, Sharon and Boomer the two Cylon number 8 models, and Lieutenant Hoschi. All of these characters are already prominent in the television series, which again serves to link these webisodes as part of the main BSG canonical narration, with new narrative elements that are only revealed in the webisodes which serve as a reward for the most invested fans. Such new narrative elements include details of the relationship that Gaeta has with Lieutenant Louis Hoschi. There is a sense that webisodes such as this one, produced on a lower budget and targeted toward the core fan base, can also work to re-engage and to please the desires of said fan base. For in the case of the BSG fan base, some fans had wanted Gaeta to be gay for a long time and regularly voiced their opinion on fan forums: “We, the fans of ‘Gaeta is gay’, did not have to suffer the outrage of a heterosexual character, and we finally have something to enjoy, and I am delighted that we have it at this advanced stage of history.”

Time-based Transmedia: Telling the Past, Filling “Negative Spaces” As has been shown, one of the objectives of all transmedia narrative strategies is to fill temporal voids, ellipses, between two episodes, between two seasons or to explain the genesis of the story. There is thus an important sense of temporality to transmedia storytelling (Evans 2011). A web-series called The Resistance was broadcast between season 2 and season 3 on the official website hosted by Syfy. This web-series had three goals: to alleviate the expectations of the fans during the hiatus between two seasons, to introduce the atmosphere and the universe of the series to the (new) users of the site, and to offer an explanation for the resistance movement that takes place on New Caprica during the Cylon Occupation, after they attack the planet in the finale of season 2. The ten webisodes, which last a total of 26 minutes, show how the Resistance is organised on New Caprica and what roles Tyrol, Callie, and Saul will play in it and what repercussions it will have in the television series. However, the scriptwriters took advantage of the online webisode format to develop two other secondary characters, whose actions have far-reaching consequences in the television series. We then chose to tell a complementary story in connection with some supporting characters: Jammer, a member of the technical team lead by Chief Tyrol, became a member of the police militia working with the Cylons on New Caprica. In the episodes of season 3, the reasons for this choice are never really revealed. And we worked on another season 3 character, Duck, who decides to commit suicide bombing at a police award ceremony in the series. 208

(Weedle, interview, 2014) Webisodes serve as a justification for the acts the characters perpetrate on television, notably Duck’s suicide bombing, which had never really been explained except by the fact that he is an active member of the Resistance. These narrative extensions once again work to increase the diegesis of the series by exploring shaded areas and gaps in the narrative arcs. Bradley Thompson, who wrote the web series, confirms this function by detailing the production process of the webisodes he worked on: “Ron and David [Eick] were overseeing the scenarios, asking for changes, and then going to the studio and the channel to give their opinion. Ron then sent back the wish list of the channel with ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘try to think about it’” (Napton 2014). David Weedle, another writer on the web series, compares the screenwriters to a jazz band, led by a maestro, here the showrunner Ron D. Moore. This confirms once again that the transmedia extensions were intended to fit perfectly into the universe of BSG, creating a complete and coherent narrative word linked by clear temporal bridges between platforms. A second strategy linked to time extensions concerns the events that led to the situation described in the television series and the key narrative moments preceding the events that launch the television series. More than a focus on the characters, as was the case with the Origin comic books, these particular time-based narrative additions dwell on eventual explanations, to better explain how the narration came to be. For example, another comic book issue, still published by Dynamite Entertainment and titled The Cylon War, explains in details the first war between the Cylons and the humans before the truce and the return of the Cylons that led to the genocide and the fall of the 12 colonies at the beginning of the series. This story recalls the events that took place before the beginning of the series and which are only evoked in a few episodes through dialogue, adding temporality and continuity to the television series. This important part of the story, effectively leading to the tragic events of BSG, is also told in the first scene of the mini-series via textual vignettes which sum up the situation. This four-part series of comic books functions as a prelude to the television series, and was published during the broadcast of season 4. The aim of this story is to establish a link between the original Galactica and the re-imagined version, showing the evolution of the metallic Cylon lineage and in particular how they were transformed into weapons attacking the humans of the colonies. Eric Nylund, the screenwriter, explains the origins of the project and the interweaving of this series of comic books into the universe of the series: With Joshua Ortega, we condensed a whole war in four issues, the rise and the disintegration of a one of the two civilizations, and the almost complete destruction of the human race … You will see the evolution of the Centurions line described in these pages. It was something we really wanted to show. We show a bit of the second Cylon war, but the main story is why and how the 209

robotic forces created by men become war machines, why and how they rebelled … and how men survived. (Ong, Kean, and Brady 2008) In this vein, Bandon Jerwa, a writer who has worked on several comic book extensions of BSG at Dynamite Entertainment, insists that BSG is a franchise with cross-platform extensions that must be seen as a rich, coherent, and expansive universe: The challenge is not only to write a prelogy but to enrol in a franchise mechanism and making sure that all the pieces of the puzzle match what was done before. All these things are placed in a continuity, and so there is a total synergy. The thing I particularly like about being a comic book screenwriter for Battlestar Galactica is working on describing a giant universe that fits into the even bigger universe of the series. Seriously, I promise you that in two years when a ton of Battlestar Galactica books will be in the hands of readers, they will be rewarded with richness and scriptwriting consistency. (Jerwa 2009) The transmedia extensions Jerwa describes help to reinforce the mythology around the series by creating a prelogy and deploying augmented narrations between key episodes of the series. Of course, there is simultaneously a marketing agenda behind such socalled rewards of richness and consistency, as the channel tries to attract new audiences by multiplying the available platforms. In effect, each platform offers narrative additions complementary to the canon narrative, creating a larger audience by creating an extended universe for BSG.

World-based Transmedia: A Universe in Constant Expansion The final transmedia narrative strategy employed by the makers of BSG, one which ultimately ties into the other two, was to develop an enriched storyworld that continued to grow even after the series had ended, bringing a narrative continuity to fans and viewers on other media platforms. For example, a series of comic books fits into this strategy of multiplication and starts from the well-known principle of “and if … ,” essentially offering the possibility of exploring a kind of alternate universe or at least a parallel one to the series. As Brandon Jerwa pondered for BSG: Ghosts: “And if a squadron of secret agents had also survived Cylon Attack?” For Jason Mittell, this type of extension, which he names the “What if?” extension, aims to “propell the extension beyond the main narrative into parallel universes, highlighting tone, atmosphere, characters, and style, rather than continuing with canonical plots” (Mittell 2012). In this category of transmedia extension, what tends to be privileged is therefore the atmosphere of the series, and not any particular narrative continuity. The aim is to offer readers alternate and parallel stories. BSG: Ghosts is composed of four 210

issues released in 2008 between the first half of season 4 and the second half of season 4 which marks the end of the series. The action begins one day before the attack and the fall of the 12 colonies to continue in a parallel story with new characters. Even if the comic book issues focus on new characters, which will not be found in the television series, the Cylons, the Centurions as well as the humanoid ones, are still in the comic books. They appear from the very first pages of the first issue taking the unanimous decision to attack the colonies simultaneously. As in the television series, human-like Cylons may be sleeper agents infiltrated into the human fleet not aware of their state and then activated at a key moment in the narration. The human squadron consists of six Vipers, two armed Vipers, and one Raptor Ultra designed to carry 12 marines and a crew of two soldiers. They are under the command of Captain Alexander Chen and among their ranked officers are Lieutenant Dozil Pennit, a model Cylon number 2, an infiltrated sleeper agent. The story takes place in a hybrid present in the last pages of the second issue, and is one of survival, relying on the atmosphere of the beginning of the television series. The same themes are dealt with: the enemy is already among us since it is undercover among the crew, and the question of identity or rather how do our experiences transform us is also raised. For author Brando Jerwa, the comic book format presents several interests in this case, especially regarding the extension of a canonical narration into other possible directions that exist on another media platform. He explains: BSG possesses a rich mythology that is more based on characters than on the epic side. It’s certainly epic but I think it’s more a human drama than a fantastic series, and that’s what sets them apart. I am convinced that the end of the series will close the door to the development of the narration beyond this event, and in my opinion this is a good thing. The comic books will definitely have to evolve in order to survive because at some point we will end up exhausting the interest of the readers on the narrative continuity. Projects like Ghosts are definitely a good way to test public reaction to new ideas in a familiar environment. (Brady 2008) In terms of carving a place for Ghosts within the narrative world of BSG, the intentions of NBC and Dynamite Entertainment were twofold: they wanted to revive the public’s interest in the universe and atmosphere of the series, and to give it a whole new scenario, extending the franchise beyond the end of the television series by relying on parallel universes.

Conclusion In her own analysis of the transmedia strategy for BSG, Suzanne Scott (2008, 210) claims that:

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BSG has aimed an unparalleled wealth of fan-oriented content at its audiences and, whether one chooses to view this as a dialogic departure from the producer/consumer binary or merely a tech-savvy marketing ploy, it is an integrated media model that is rapidly gaining popularity. Transmedia storytelling for television series, and Battlestar Galactica is no exception, oscillates between marketing and economic imperatives for the channel, as indicated here by the creation of BSG webisodes between seasons or the producer’s desire to continue the stories of the universe after the series had ended, and indeed the will to augment the storyworld by giving details, information, and depths to the main and supporting characters and hiding Easter Eggs that reward fans for their engagement in the narrative universe. BSG managed to expand its storyworld on numerous media platforms (web series, comic books, interactive games, board games, telefilms) focusing on three core aspects: characters, time, and world-building. Each of these three strategies exemplify approaches to transmedia storytelling at the present time, ensuring that the narration was coherently expanded and augmented and inviting fans to dig deeper into its storyworld, searching for clues. The mere existence of the Battlestar Wiki, created by fans, shows the importance of providing a detailed cartography and mapping of the universe of a given television series so that audiences can work to unravel all its secrets and understand all its mysteries and mythologies.

References Bertetti, Paolo. 2014. “Toward a Typology of Transmedia Characters.” International Journal of Communication 8: 2344–2361. Bourdaa, Mélanie. 2012. “Transmedia Storytelling: Entre Narration Augmentée et Logiques Immersives.” InaGlobal, June 13. Accessed August 27, 2017. www.inaglobal.fr/numerique/article/le-transmedia-entrenarration-augmentee-et-logiques-immersives. Brady, Matt. 2008. “Jerwa: The Ghosts of Battlestar Galactica.” Newsarama, July 15. Accessed August 13, 2017. www.newsarama.com/436-jerwa-the-ghosts-of-battlestar-galactica.html. Clarke, M. J. 2013. Transmedia Television: New Trends in Network Serial Production. London: Continuum Publishing Corporation. Door, Justin. 2008. “Weaving a Story through Webisodes.” In Finding Battlestar Galactica: An Unauthorized Guide, edited by Lynette Porter, David Lavery and Hillary Robson, 251–256. London: Sourcebooks. Espenson, Jane. 2014. Personal correspondance. Evans, Elizabeth. 2011. Transmedia Television: Audiences, New Media and Daily Life. London and New York: Routledge. Freeman Matthew. 2016. Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds. London and New York: Routledge. Gillan, Jennifer. 2010. Television and New Media: Must-Click TV. London and New York: Routledge. Jenkins, Henry. 2003. “Transmedia Storytelling.” MIT Technology Review, January 15. Accessed August 13, 2017. www.technologyreview.com/news/401760/transmedia-storytelling/. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Jerwa, Brandon. 2009. Battlestar Galactica Season Zero, Omnibus vol.1. London: Dynamite Entertainment. Kinder, Marsha. 1991. Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mittell, Jason. 2012. “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television.” MATRIZes 5 (2): 29–51. Napton, Robert. 2014. Personal interview.

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Ong, Pang, Benjamin Kean, and Matt Brady. 2008. “Dynamite’s ‘BSG: Cylon war’ Starts in Jan – First Look.” Newsarama, October 16. Accessed August 11, 2017. www.newsarama.com/1299-dynamite-s-bsg-cylonwar-starts-in-jan-first-look.html. Peyron, David. 2008. “Quand les œuvres deviennent des mondes. Une réflexion sur la culture de genre contemporaine à partir du concept de convergence culturelle.” Réseaux 26: 335–368. Scott, Susan. 2008. “Authorised Resistance: Is Fan Production Frakked?” In Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica, edited by Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall, 210–223. New York: Continuum. Smith, Aaron. 2009. “Transmedia Storytelling in Television 2.0.” Ph.D. diss., Middlebury University. http://sites.middlebury.edu/mediacp/2009/06/17/12-technological-convergence-content-in-a-multimediaworld/. Weedle, David. 2014. Personal interview.

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15 Transmedia World-Building History, Conception, and Construction Mark J. P. Wolf

Much of popular culture today involves world-based franchises, which include works in a wide variety of media and other merchandise. In this sense, imaginary worlds are being used as brands or sub-brands, with easily recognizable elements and designs, images and sounds, and continuing stories that entice consumers to keep returning to their favorite worlds, and spending their money on them—in whatever medium they may appear. An audience’s engagement with a world is different from an engagement with characters or stories alone; a world is a place to be vicariously entered, an object of exploration and speculation, and refuge from the trials and troubles of the world in which we actually live. It is a virtual place to which fans keep returning, more than a story, and something they can often see, hear, and even interact with, depending on the medium used to encounter it. Author J. R. R. Tolkien referred to such an authorcreated world as a “secondary world,” making it distinct from the “Primary World” in which we actually live, since all secondary worlds are, at least initially and in one way or another, patterned after the Primary World (Tolkien 1989). While an imaginary world can appear in a single medium, many of the largest ones being constructed today are transmedial worlds, with world materials, stories, and characters appearing across a range of different media.

The Road to Transmedial Worlds Before the year 1900, imaginary worlds were mainly something encountered in books, and perhaps occasionally in paintings. Some books featured maps, woodcuts, and other kinds of illustrations to describe their worlds; these, in a sense, were the earliest transmedial worlds. By the late 1800s, we find not only a variety of maps, but also series of drawings, and more of them, depicting imaginary worlds. John Tenniel drew 92 drawings for Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871). French author and illustrator Albert Robida drew his own imagery for his futuristic trilogy of books, Le Vingtième Siècle (1883), La Guerre au Vingtième Siècle (1887), and Le Vingtième Siècle. La vie Ělectrique (1890), which showed wild cityscapes, flying cars

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and other vehicles, and fantastic electrical technologies; today, his books are remembered mainly for his images. And L. Frank Baum worked closely with W. W. Denslow to design the pages of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), in which text and image are closely intertwined and designed with each other in mind. The Land of Oz, indeed, which grew substantially as it came to include other imaginary lands from Baum’s books, which he attached to Oz geographically, hoping they would be more likely to find the same popularity the Oz books had found, would also become the first great transmedial world. Baum adapted his Oz characters and stories for films, comics, stage plays, games, and merchandise, not merely adapting his stories, but telling new ones in each medium, resulting in a world spanning multiple media in which the works in each medium contributed something new to the world. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Baum’s success provided an example for other intellectual property owners, who came to understand how popular characters and worlds thriving in one medium could make the jump to others. Newspaper comics could make the jump to animated shorts, and animated characters could likewise appear in comic strips. Novels were being adapted into live-action films, just as they had been adapted into stage plays. For example, Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon started as a comic strip in 1934 and was adapted to three serial films, the 13-chapter Flash Gordon (1936), 15-chapter Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938), and 12-chapter Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940); a 26-episode weekly radio serial, The Amazing Interplanetary Adventures of Flash Gordon (1935); a novel, Flash Gordon in the Caverns of Mongo (1936); and even a ride at the 1939 World’s Fair (see Santo 2015). For some time, transmedial growth followed a pattern; a world or set of characters would find success in its medium of origin, and then get adapted into other media, once success seemed certain. During the 1970s, blockbuster films began to change Hollywood in the 1970s, and Star Wars (1977) demonstrated that an interesting world could find wild success even cast largely with unknowns, and even make more money from merchandising than from box office ticket sales (and this despite Star Wars having record box ticket sales to begin with). The 1970s also saw the rise of the popularity of sequels, perhaps starting with The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather: Part II (1974), the first time a film and its sequel both won a Best Picture Academy Award, although technically, both were from the same novel. As cross-media ownership increased in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, the idea of planning releases in multiple media simultaneously became easier and more practical, and new venues for films, like cable television and videotape, kept films in the public eye longer and gave studios more ways to earn money from their films, as well as merchandising deals. Cable and videotape also encourage sequels, namely by giving audiences more chances to see the first film in a series, in case they had missed it in theaters. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the organization of multiple-media release plans were becoming more common, as entertainment franchises were coordinated for simultaneous releases in various media. For example, the film The Matrix Reloaded 215

(2003) came out the day after the video game Enter the Matrix (2003), and both works had concurrent stories, and used the same actors and actresses (Jenkins 2006). Simultaneous releases became possible due to the success of the original work (or works) that started a successful franchise, as well as advertising plans designed to increase audience anticipation (which did not always succeed). And, instead of being treated as separate stories, the works involved in simultaneous releases taken together usually suggest a single world, one in which multiple stories occurred, and which could be viewed through multiple media windows.

Multiple Windows on the Same World By the second half of the twentieth century, and particularly after the spread of television, many Americans knew most of what they knew about the real world or “Primary World” not through first-hand knowledge, but through mass media. Certainly, the amount and scope of first-hand experience had also increased; car culture and the new interstate system of highways made travel easier, commercial airline travel made international travel affordable, and a series of wars in which Americans were involved, from World War II, to the Korean War, to the Vietnam War, gave many Americans a wide range of first-hand experiences of the world. But films, television, newspapers, and magazines could bring you the world as well, more cheaply and without all the inconveniences of actual travel. Better still, they could take you to places that actual travel could not; not just the moon landing, limited to an elite few, but worlds of the imagination that were beyond anything you could experience in the real world. The ubiquity of second-hand experience of the world gained through media normalized the experience, making the imaginary worlds experienced through multiple media more like the way the real world was experienced through multiple media. For example, anyone who has never been to Mongolia only knows it through second-hand or mediated experiences, which is also the only way one can experience Oz or Middle-earth. And over time, the windows on the worlds, both real and imaginary, grew in size and transparency. Black-and-white film and television gave way to color imagery, and the tiny screens of early television began to grow in size from the 1960s onward. And from the 1970s onward, video games began to offer increasingly complex worlds in which users could interact with objects, and both video games and television shows were produced in high-definition imagery during the 2000s, and some in 4K imagery after that. Interaction and high-resolution imagery create the need for the inclusion of more detail, since audiences can explore a world’s visual elements better than they could previously; video games like Grand Theft Auto V (2013) let players walk around their worlds and examine them closely. As media franchise releases become more coordinated toward simultaneous releases in multiple media venues, then, the worlds they depict are seen through a variety of media windows, having two particular impacts on the worlds observed 216

through them. The first impact is that the multiple perspectives on these worlds together create the illusion of an actual world which is being described and reported in multiple ways; an experience that can become very immersive the more material is produced about a particular world. The more unified and consistently the world is presented, the more it seems like an object viewed through transparent windows which has an existence of its own, rather than something the existence of which is only a virtual one located in the windows themselves. The world of the Star Wars franchise has shown us enough different aspects of its worlds—urban, rural, military, domestic, public, and private—that we feel as though we have a good idea what it would be like to live there. The second impact on the world is the potential for a clash of styles and representations, which will at best be a variety of different interpretations that results from appearing in multiple media venues. Scenes of the world may appear in the form of live-action, hand-drawn illustrations or animations, computer graphics, or even as toy play sets or other merchandise. Even within each of these methods of representation, the stylization of the imagery can vary considerably. For example, in the Star Wars franchise, we have the live-action films, live-action television specials, computer-animated television series (and one feature film), comics books in various drawing styles, video games with varying levels of realism, and other adaptations such as LEGO Star Wars, and several decades’ worth of Star Wars toys and merchandise. Throughout these manifestations and iterations, we find a wide range of stylizations, from the dramatic to the comedic, photorealistic to the abstract, and characters being used in non-canonical material such as television ads, marketing campaigns, and cross-overs with television shows and trans-franchise appearances, such as Luke Skywalker, Chewbacca, C3PO, and R2D2 appearing on The Muppet Show (1976– 1981) in 1980, or more recent appearances with Disney characters after Disney purchased the Star Wars franchise in 2012 (by which time Disney had already owned the Muppets). This clash of difference styles for the same characters and world has the effect of making the windows through which the world is seen potentially less transparent, as attention is called to the differences in representation; or, at the very least, audiences would compare the different depictions found in different windows. But, instead of altogether destroying the consistency of the world, this also has the effect of presenting the world as something that can be interpreted by different artists and other craftspeople; and as an object of multiple interpretations, it becomes similar to the Primary World, but in a different way. Characters like Batman and the Joker, for example, have demonstrated just how much variation is possible in a character’s depiction, while still keeping enough central elements unchanged. The presence of both similarities and differences, then, is one of the great strengths of transmedial worlds.

More of the Same, But Different 217

Imaginary worlds in general, and transmedial imaginary worlds in particular, are very good at balancing the two basic needs of audiences, that of novelty and familiarity. First, there is the balance mentioned above, that every imaginary world has enough content within it similar to our world to make it relatable, while at the same time changing enough world defaults in such a way as to produce novelty, and often a great deal of it. When popular characters or worlds are encountered by an audience, they will often want more, and this is where the balancing act between novelty and familiarity comes in. Early on, sequels were one of the first ways to provide more, wherein characters, and often the world they lived in, would be reused in a new story. This was also an economical move from a world-building perspective, because much of what was needed for the story would already be created. The idea of a series went even further, giving the audience multiple stories with the same characters (and often, world). Transmedial worlds, however, not only give an audience more stories with the same characters and world, but also different media experiences. For example, while an audience may have first encountered a world and its characters by reading about them in a novel, they could next see what they looked like in a film or comic book, and hear what they sounded like in a film or radio play. Each medium provided a distinctly different way of encountering the same material, which means that it was technically not quite the same, as it included different aspects of that material (such as image, sound, and motion). Combined, all of these experiences added to the illusion of a complete world, as described previously. At the same time, however, the requirements of image, sound, and motion meant that, unlike worlds found in books, multiple people would be needed to make the world come about in visible and audible form, requiring collaboration and coordination to keep the world and its design consistent. Thus, transmedial imaginary worlds, unlike those found in books and comic books, almost always require multiple authors or a hierarchy of authors overseen by the originator of the world, without whom the world could not be constructed.

The Construction of Transmedial Worlds Transmedial worlds often begin in a particular medium of origin, in which they are introduced to audiences, and if they find popularity, then they will be given the funding and attention needed for expansion in other media. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that many worlds begin in novels, short stories, or comic books, all of which could be made by a single author, and made without a large financial outlay. Some worlds are introduced to audiences in films, television shows, or video games, but even these will likely also begin as written or drawn descriptions in the form of scripts and storyboards, until they are able to attract the interest of someone to finance them (so in this sense, they, too, are first introduced in written form to a very particular audience, one which has the power to make them in audiovisual form). When mass popularity seems assured, along with the necessary fiscal success for a world’s 218

continuation, then finally can the release into multiple media be planned. Still, depicting a world in multiple media often means shifting assets from one medium to another. Elsewhere, I have suggested the different processes that occur when such shifts are made: description, visualization, auralization, interactivation, and deinteractivation (Wolf 2012, 250–264). Description occurs when something must be described in words; novelizations of films or video games, or even descriptions of sound effects, mean having to articulate enough of the features of the thing being described to evoke it in the reader’s imagination. There are advantages to using description over actually showing something, since one can suggest in the description the emotions experienced by an onlooker; for example, when J. R. R. Tolkien describes Saruman’s voice as: low and melodious, its very sound an enchantment. Those who listened unwarily to that voice could seldom report the words that they heard; and if they did, they wondered, for little power remained in them. Mostly they remembered only that it was a delight to hear the voice speaking, all that it said seemed wise and reasonable. (Tolkien 1994, 452) Instead of merely attempting to reproduce a sense of its actual sound, a large part of Tolkien’s description of Saruman’s voice is the effect that his voice has on those who hear it; thus a description can accomplish what an actor speaking can only attempt to do, which naturally is still only one possible interpretation of what Tolkien intended. Visualization and auralization, meanwhile, both involve taking a written description and turning it into actual, concrete imagery and sound, respectively. As the example of Saruman’s voice demonstrates, this can sometimes be a difficult thing to do. Such a transmedial move involves interpretation, since there are almost always multiple ways that something can be visualized or auralized. The shift from the conceptual (verbal description) to the perceptual (images and sound) forces specificity; it is inevitable that additional detail of some kind will need to be supplied which was not in the original description. On the other hand, providing an audience with imagery and sound gives an author more control over how a world looks and sounds, since it is not left to the imaginative abilities of the individual audience members. This also means that an audience member’s experience of a world will vary less from one person to another, since the visual and sonic material can simply be seen and heard, requiring no imagination on the part of the audience (this can also be seen as a critique, of course, since such authorial control reduces the need for an audience’s imaginative ability). There are also multiple forms of visualization, each of which have different demands when assets are adapted to fit them. Visualizations can be two-dimensional or three-dimensional, with the latter requiring designs to be extended into three dimensions, which involves working out a consistent geometry for the objects in 219

question. Considering time as the fourth dimension, we could even add fourdimensional visualizations which add movement and require animators to decide how something moves and what limitations it may have. Finally, there is the question of representational style, which can range from abstract to photorealistic, and includes caricatures and stylized versions of world assets. For example, due to their transmedial nature, the characters from the aforementioned Star Wars franchise have appeared as live-action characters played by human beings, radio voices, hand-drawn comic book characters, photorealistic computer-generated characters, simplified, stylized computer-generated characters (as in The Clone Wars (2008–2014) television series or in many video games), and even as LEGO minifigures, which appear as both physical objects in LEGO building sets and as digital models in LEGO films and video games. While having multiple visual incarnations of the same characters (or objects) may seem bad for consistency and canonicity, comparisons of these incarnations reveal the distinct and unique combination of elements which identify each character, in much the same way that caricatures can be identified more quickly than photographs of the people on which they are based (Mauro and Kubovy 1992). Transmedial adaptations, then, can result in assets which are more iconic and easier to evoke in the minds of audience members due to the heightened specificity of their designs. Finally, interactivation is the addition of interactivity to a set of assets (for example, when film locations, objects, and characters become used in a video game), whereas deinteractivation is the opposite process, in which interactivity is removed from a set of assets (for example, when a video game is adapted into a movie or novelization). Interactivity is itself something that can appear in multiple media, such as a choose-your-own-adventure book, a film which allows the viewer to choose between narrative pathways, or a video game or website. When something is adapted into an interactive medium, how much it will need to be changed will depend on the kind of interactivity that is present. Interactivity which includes controlling an avatar in the diegetic world and altering the direction of the story is quite different from interactivity which allows a viewer to read various informational screens, bring up details, and explore locations visually without doing so in the context of a game. Likewise, the removal of interactivity usually means that a particular story becomes a fixed series of events, as opposed to the ones chosen by the player. The notion of interactivity also brings up another issue pertaining to the experiencing of transmedial worlds, that of audience participation.

Forms of Audience Participation The audience’s participation in any transmedial world will naturally include integrating materials experienced in different media together into a unified experience, which should not be difficult if consistency is a priority of the world-builders. More direct participation in the world will depend on the role given to the audience, which may range from observer (in worlds in which stories have already been constructed for 220

audiences) to participant (as in single-player video game worlds) to virtual inhabitant (as in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs)), where hundreds of thousands of player-characters interact and determine the direction of events occurring in the world, as opposed to merely experiencing events which are determined ahead of time by an author. The nature of this participation and the kind of experience it creates also varies considerably, ranging from the physical to the virtual, and from the abstract to the representational. Participation could involve the playing of a table-top board game like Forbidden Island (2011), in which the player’s avatar and events are highly abstracted during gameplay. Video games represent everything virtually, in designs from the very abstract (like 1970s arcade games), to highly photorealistic three-dimensional environments. Finally, audiences can physically enter theme park settings, like “Pandora—The World of Avatar” which opened in Disney’s Animal Kingdom in 2017, or “Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge” set to open in Disney Hollywood Studios in 2019, which are both designed to represent the experiencing of an imaginary world through a form of pretend that is similar to that found on the theater stage. In most cases, transmedial worlds are made up of both interactive and noninteractive experiences or works, which are understood to refer to the same world. Typically, the division is clearly understood by audiences, whose expectations largely depend on the medium in which a work appears. For example, an audience’s expectations involving photorealistic imagery are reduced when a video game is encountered, as opposed to the level of realism that an audience expects to find in a live-action film. But does the variety of media increase or decrease the overall immersive intensity for a world? Certainly, a novel like The Lord of the Rings (1954– 1955), can be immersive by itself, whereas even a physical walk-through experience can fail to be immersive if it is badly designed. Having a world present, in some way, in multiple media can enhance the immersive experience by providing a variety of windows through which a world is seen, but it may also underscore its artificiality by depicting its elements in many different styles and by using its imagery on such a wide array of merchandise that the original meanings and emotions attached to the characters are diluted into merely a commercial brand. Villains like Darth Vader may lose some of their menace when encountered on children’s pajamas or as LEGO minifigures. Here, too, however, the actual content of the franchise will partly determine what sort of balance can be had. A franchise like David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, created for an adult audience (and perhaps a particular one at that), has appeared as two live-action television series (or one with a 26-year hiatus), a liveaction feature film, a few books, and a trading card set; but one does not expect to see action figures or cartoons made from it. Whereas a franchise like Pixar’s Toy Story, whose characters are already children’s toys (which even appear themselves as merchandise diegetically within their own world), is more likely to be transformed into cartoons, video games, and a wide array of children’s toys and merchandise, but is not a franchise we are likely to see made into a live-action feature film. 221

Conclusion Transmedial franchises, especially world-based ones, are the direction that much bigbudget entertainment has taken. As has been shown, the building of a transmedial world goes beyond an individual story, medium, or author, and provides the basis, and in many cases even a brand, that audiences can return to multiple times as well as anticipate future releases set in the same worlds. The transmedial nature of these franchises works well with the convergence of media technology, and new audiences’ interest in a franchise can often mean more sales of older works set in the same world. Basing entertainment on an imaginary world is also a sound financial strategy, since works set in a given world can continue to be produced almost indefinitely, beyond what is possible for a single author, actor or director; the world extends beyond all of these. Both the advantages and popularity of this model of entertainment production suggests that transmedial world-building will continue to be the dominant one for some time to come.

References Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Mauro, Robert, and Michael Kubovy. 1992. “Caricature and Face Recognition.” Memory & Cognition 20 (4): 433–440. Santo, Avi. 2015. Selling the Silver Bullet: The Lone Ranger and Transmedia Brand Licensing. Austin: University of Texas Press. Tolkien, J. R. R. 1989. “On Fairy-Stories.” Tree and Leaf. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Tolkien, J. R. R. 1994. The Lord of the Rings (one-volume edition). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Wolf, Mark J. P. 2012. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. London and New York: Routledge.

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16 Transmedia Characters Additionality and Cohesion in Transfictional Heroes Roberta Pearson

Vast and expansive fictional storyworlds built upon an accumulation of multiple texts have existed for millennia; the Greek gods, the Christian God, Robin Hood, and King Arthur are but a few instantiations of humanity’s propensity for the narrative form. For example, Jesus Christ had his textual origins in the four gospels of the New Testament but the character almost immediately spans out across successive periods’ available media, from painting to sculptures to illuminated manuscripts to stained glass windows and eventually to analogue and digital screens. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, interconnected cultural industries such as publishing, newspapers, advertising, and the cinema gave rise to industrially produced storyworlds such as the Wizard of Oz and Tarzan (Freeman 2016). Beginning in the 1980s, the media and industrial convergence of the cultural industries established expansive storyworlds as a dominant narrative form—from Harry Potter to Star Wars to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and beyond. Narratologists and media studies scholars have addressed the narrative and industrial relationships in some expanded storyworlds (see Bertetti 2014; Denson 2011; Doležel 1999; Jenkins 2006; Ryan 2013; Scolari 2009; Thon 2015). However, little consideration has been given to the specific narrative and industrial factors that determine particular producers’ strategies for creating character-based additions which consumers are likely to accept as part of the previously established transmedia storyworld (but see Harvey 2014). This chapter offers some tentative hypotheses concerning producers’ strategies for additionality and cohesion for transfictional characters in different types of fictional storyworlds, using as its case studies Sherlock Holmes, Batman, and Star Trek. But prior to discussing these particular instantiations of the broader narrative form, some definitions first, followed by a taxonomy. Rather than continuing to use the term “storyworld,” the chapter draws upon MarieLaure Ryan’s concept of transfictionality, defined as “the migration of fictional entities across different texts” (2013, 383). Transmedia transfictions are a subset of transfictionality, crossing over two or more media. This chapter concerns factors that may influence the additionality and cohesion of single-medium transfictions as well as multiple-media transfictions, although most contemporary high profile transfictions

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are transmedial, as are my three case studies. Two reasons motivate my use of the term additionality rather than expansion. First, the term addition does not necessarily imply a narratively meaningful expansion—that is, one that enlarges or reworks a transfiction’s previously established settings, events, and characters. Jan-Noël Thon says that “two single works” within a transfiction can be defined, first, by a relation of redundancy, when one is aiming to represent the same elements of a storyworld that the other represents; second, by a relation of expansion, when one is aiming to represent the same storyworld—and the characters within in— that the other represents but adds previously unrepresented elements; and, third, by a relation of modification, when one is aiming to represent elements of the storyworld represented by the other but adds previously unrepresented elements that make it impossible to comprehend what is represented as part of a single, non-contradictory storyworld (Thon 2015, 33). Two adaptations of the same Holmes story add to the transfiction but do not expand it in terms of new events, new settings, or new character details—this is a relationship of redundancy. But additions to the Holmes transfiction may (and frequently do) include new events, settings or character details, as for example in the Granada television series of the 1980s and 1990s starring Jeremy Brett—this is a relationship of expansion. Additions may also (and frequently do) rework previously established events, settings and character details, as for example in Sherlock (BBC, 2010–)—this is a relationship of modification. Additionality refers to all these cases, with expansion a subset of a broader industrial practice. Second, expansion seems implicitly to imply cohesion whereas additionality does not; an addition can have fairly minimal points of contact with the previously established transfiction. Referring to newly added texts as additions rather than by another label such as installments avoids implications of narrative continuity. Speaking of iconic characters such as Holmes and Frankenstein, Shane Denson hypothesizes that these figures “exist as the concatenation of instantiations that evolves, not within a homogeneous diegetic space, but between or across such spaces of narration” (2011, 536). Denson continues: “These characters … carry traces of their previous incarnations into their new worlds, where the strata of their previous lives accrue in a non-linear, non-diegetic manner” (2011, 537). Denson’s traces of previous incarnations are my points of contact—the overlaps with previous texts that identify an addition as part of an established transfiction. Maximum points of contact lead to strong cohesion, while minimal points of contact lead to weak cohesion; the degree of overlap establishes a spectrum between strongly and weakly cohesive transfictions. Ryan’s distinction between logical and imaginative storyworlds speaks to the opposite poles of this spectrum. If a text rewrites an existing narrative, modifying the plot and ascribing different features or destinies to the characters, it creates a new storyworld that overlaps to some extent with the old one. While a given storyworld can be presented through several different texts, these texts must respect the facts of the original text if they are to share its logical storyworld. In 224

an imaginative conception, by contrast, a storyworld consists of named existents and perhaps of an invariant setting (though the setting can be expanded), but the properties of these existents and their destinies may vary from text to text (Ryan and Thon 2014, 5). This chapter discusses those factors that may result in the construction of logical versus imaginative storyworlds and their characters or in my terms, the points of contact between an addition and cumulative previous additions. I propose three different structuring factors, two narrative and one industrial; the first two concern the differences between types of transfictions and the third transfictions’ intellectual property status. The consensus amongst narratologists is that a storyworld consists of settings, events and characters. In some transfictions, strong or weak cohesion results from the points of contact between additions and previously established settings and events (timeline). These are time/place transfictions, such as the world of Star Trek. In other transfictions, strong or weak cohesion arises primarily from points of contact with a previously established character. These are character transfictions such as Batman and Sherlock Holmes. The definition of events and settings is fairly non-contentious, but narratologists have argued for decades about the definition of character (see Chatman 1978; Rimmon-Kenan 1983; Bal 1997, 2011). Let us approach the problem using the Holmes character. Most would agree that character name (Sherlock Holmes or some variant thereof as in Sherlock Hound, the 1980s Japanese animated series) and narrative function (detection) are fundamental elements of a fictional character. In my previous work, I have argued that television characters are composed of a character template composed of six elements; this applies equally well to the transmedial Holmes. The Holmes character’s psychological traits/habitual behaviors would include: intelligent; non-emotional; plays violin; smokes pipe; takes drugs; relentless curiosity; easily bored by lack of action, etc. His physical traits/appearance would be: tall; thin; aquiline nose; deerstalker, etc. His speech patterns and dialogue: “Elementary, my dear Watson” and other characteristic phrases. His interactions with other characters: Watson; landlady Mrs. Hudson; police; Moriarty; brother Mycroft, etc. His environment: Baker Street/London in original texts but setting can vary in additions. And his biography: relatively little in original texts but additions often fill in the backstory. Some of these elements originated in the Conan Doyle stories while others originated in additions that have achieved canonical status, becoming widely accepted as defining elements of the character. For example, Conan Doyle’s Holmes never wears a deerstalker; Sidney Paget, the illustrator for the Strand Magazine, added the iconic headgear. Similarly, Conan Doyle’s Holmes never utters the famous phrase “Elementary, my dear Watson”; various reports attribute these words to actors William Gillette or Basil Rathbone. To use Denson’s formulation, the deerstalker and the phrase are the traces of previous incarnations that the Holmes character frequently carries into his new worlds. But the character template is not coterminous with the character; a Holmes character in a single addition cannot manifest all the potential 225

character elements established in the myriad additions to the transfiction. The particular combination of elements manifested by the Holmes character in a new addition results from the producers selecting suitable elements for the intended audience and omitting unsuitable elements. For example, Sherlock Hound, intended for a child audience, does not reference the detective’s cocaine habit, while Elementary (CBS, 2011–), intended for an adult audience, makes drug addiction a central attribute of the character’s biography. The second narrative factor addresses the ontological status of the transfiction; is it realist or fantastic? Rather than relying on genre theory, I turn to Ryan’s concept of possible worlds. Ryan argues that all fictions entail the creation of possible worlds that are linked to the actual world by an “accessibility relation”—various similarities/dissimilarities of logical principles, physical laws, material causality, geography or history, populations of natural species, stages of technological development, human inventory, and the like (Ryan 2005, 446). The Holmes transfiction is a realist one, strongly linked to the actual world, while Batman and Star Trek are fantastic transfictions, diverging from the actual world in many respects including physical laws, geography, and history. The third factor is an industrial one, revolving around the transfictions’ intellectual property status. The ownership of copyright and trademark enables the proprietors, either individuals or corporations, to augment transfictions with legally authorized additions, to license other individuals or corporations to produce legally authorized additions and to prohibit individuals or corporations from producing non-authorized additions. These are proprietorial transfictions, such as Star Trek and Batman. Other transfictions have no one central holder of the intellectual property (IP); these are nonproprietorial or public domain transfictions such as Sherlock Holmes. As of 2015, Arthur Conan Doyle’s texts have almost all entered into the public domain (with the exception of a few of the later stories in the United States under copyright until 2023), although Doyle’s descendants made no concerted attempt to police the nature of additions even when they owned the IP to all the author’s Holmes texts (see Pearson 2015). Producers of additions such as the BBC’s Sherlock own the copyright and trademark for the new text and, like any other holders of intellectual property, can themselves produce new additions to and both authorize and prohibit new additions by other parties. And now for the promised taxonomy. The two narrative factors, time/place versus character and realist versus fantastic, together with the industrial factor, proprietorial versus public domain, produce eight types of transfictions set out in Table 16.1. Table 16.1 Taxonomy of transfictional characters and worlds Transfiction type Proprietary realist time/place Public domain realist time/place Proprietary fantastic time/place Public domain fantastic time/place

Example The Sopranos, Downtown Abbey, etc. Austen, Dickens Star Trek Greek mythology

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Proprietary realist character Public domain realist character Proprietary fantastic character Public domain fantastic character

James Bond Sherlock Holmes Batman Frankenstein

From now on, this chapter uses the three case studies of Star Trek, Batman, and Sherlock Holmes to consider producers’ strategies for additionality and cohesion in different types of transfictions. First it compares a time/place transfiction (Star Trek) to character transfictions (Holmes and Batman). It then compares a realist character transfiction (Holmes) to a fantastic character transfiction (Batman). It concludes by comparing proprietorial transfictions (Star Trek, Batman) to a public domain transfiction (Holmes), although given the character’s vexed and complicated copyright status, it is more accurate to call the Holmes’ transfiction a semi-proprietorial transfiction that has for several decades operated like a public domain transfiction. Some tentative hypotheses arise from these comparisons that may be more broadly applicable to similar types of transfictions.

Time/Place Transfictions versus Character Transfictions Producers of time/place transfictions create additions through two primary strategies: extending the timeline and establishing new settings. One example is Star Trek: Discovery, a CBS production distributed via its on-demand service, CBS All Access, in 2017. Star Trek: Discovery takes place in the twenty-third century, sitting in the Star Trek transfiction’s timeline after the events of the original series and before the events of The Next Generation, sometime around the events of the sixth Star Trek feature film The Undiscovered Country (Nicholas Meyer, 1991). Previous Star Trek producers have traditionally augmented the transfiction with new settings. The three shows occurring in the twenty-fourth century, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, were set respectively on a starship in the Alpha Quadrant of the Milky Way galaxy, on a space station in the far reaches of the Alpha Quadrant near a wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant, and on a starship in the Delta Quadrant. Producers of character transfictions also extend timelines and create new settings. Sherlock Holmes and Batman can be teenagers, as in Young Sherlock Holmes (Barry Levinson, 1985) or Gotham (Fox Broadcasting, 2014–), or old, as in Mr. Holmes (Bill Condon, 2015) and Frank Miller’s graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns (DC Comics, 1986). Producers can also move the characters to new settings: Sherlock updates the character to twenty-first-century London and Elementary to twenty-firstcentury New York City. DC relocated Batman to nineteenth-century Gotham, in Gotham by Gaslight (1989), the first of its Elsewhere series. But producers of character transfictions can also employ a strategy not so readily available to producers of time/place transfictions—new embodiments of a character. In the rebooted Star Trek film series, Chris Pine plays James T. Kirk, but the actor channels William Shatner, the first Captain Kirk, both in appearance and acting style and will most likely continue to 227

play the role throughout the run of the series. As I was researching this chapter, the sad death of Anton Yelchin, Pavel Chekov in the new Star Trek films, was announced. Should the film series continue, the producers will face the difficult decision of either providing a narrative explanation for the character’s absence or of embodying the character in a new actor. Character transfictions generally do not establish such a strong equivalence between actor and character as to cause such dilemmas. Wikipedia’s undoubtedly incomplete list of the actors who have played Sherlock Holmes in film, television, radio, and on the stage runs to over 90 entries, while five actors have portrayed the Dark Knight in the Warner Bros. films alone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_actors_who_have_played_Sherlock_Holmes). While new Holmes or Batman embodiments may have based elements of their performance on previous embodiments of the Great Detective or the Dark Knight, they do not have to strongly resemble previous embodiments in appearance and acting style. On a side note, proposed and actual reimbodiments have recently generated controversy in fan communities and the media. Will audiences accept a black James Bond, Captain America, or Hermione Granger as having sufficient minimal points of contact with previous embodiments? This raises issues well beyond the scope of this chapter. Hypotheses: 1. Cohesion in time/place transfictions arises primarily from points of contact between additions and the transfiction’s previous events (timeline) and settings. Star Trek additions take place in the timeline established by the television series and feature films and must have a family resemblance to previous settings in terms of physical laws, institutions, aliens, history, technology, and design. But cohesion does not arise primarily from the characters—an addition does not require the presence of Captain Kirk, Captain Picard, Mr. Spock, or any other character as a point of contact with the transfiction. 2. Cohesion in character transfictions arises primarily from points of contact between the character in the addition and the character name, function, and template established by the transfiction.

Realist Character Transfictions versus Fantastic Character Transfictions Are there differences between realist and fantastic character transfictions’ strategies for additionality and cohesion? As noted above, both the Holmes and Batman transfictions move the character to new settings, but Holmes additions seem to require fewer points of contact with the established character template than Batman additions. It is telling that texts that expand the timeline or create new settings for the Dark Knight, such as the television series Gotham and the comic Gotham by Gaslight, point to the established transfiction through the fictional city’s name—Batman and Gotham are coterminous. As the villainous Riddler put it, “When is a man a city? When it’s 228

Batman or when it’s Gotham. I’d take either answer. Batman is this city” (Gaiman 1989; see also Uricchio 2010). Holmes has strong associations with London but is not coterminous with it; a Holmes addition requires neither Baker Street nor London as a point of contact with the character. In Elementary, Holmes relocates from London to New York City but continues to perform his narrative function of detection. By contrast, the Dark Knight could not perform his narrative function of crime fighting in Elementary’s realist metropolis where only the deluded pursue careers as masked vigilantes (see “You’ve Got Me, Who’s Got You?” season 4, episode 17). Holmes, however, can perform his narrative function not only outside of London but even in a fantastic world, as he does in the graphic novel series Victorian Undead or in the animated television series Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century (Scottish Television, 1999–2001). Hypotheses: 1. Specific environments may constitute a more essential element of the character template for fantastic characters than for realist characters. 2. Realist characters can function in fantastic worlds but fantastic characters cannot easily function in realist worlds. 3. As a result, realist character transfictions have more strategies available for additionality and cohesion than fantastic character transfictions.

Proprietorial Transfictions versus Public Domain Transfictions Do additionality and cohesion strategies differ between proprietorial and public domain transfictions? In both cases, producers of additions can use paratexts to signal alignment with the transfiction, one strategy being the paratextual invocation of the author function. However, it should be noted that the creator/author is not necessarily the holder of the transfiction’s intellectual property. During his lifetime, Conan Doyle held undisputed rights to the Holmes’ character, which then descended to his heirs upon his death. By contrast, National Allied Comics, the precursor of DC Comics, held the IP for Batman, not the original writer Bob Kane nor the original illustrator, Bill Finger, while Gene Roddenberry sold the rights to Star Trek at a difficult moment in his career. In keeping with cultural propensities to valorise individual authorship, both proprietorial and public domain transfictions invoke revered original author/creators, not the current producers or intellectual property holders, to achieve cohesion. Additions to the Star Trek and Batman transfictions respectively include the credit lines created by Gene Roddenberry and created by Bob Kane and, as of 2015, the latter also credit Kane’s co-creator Finger (McMillan 2015). Promotional paratexts such as interviews with producers, directors, and stars also invoke the author function. Leora Hadas has demonstrated that Paramount’s promotion for the first Abrams Star Trek film (2009) aimed paratexts mentioning Gene Roddenberry at Star Trek fans, 229

presumably more alert to indices of cohesion than the broader audience (Mac 2014). The Roddenberry name holds such value that Gene’s son, Rod, serves as executive producer on the new CBS series; the motivation for adding another Roddenberry to the credits probably stems from a desire to appeal to the core fan base of Trekkers. Screen additions to the Holmes transfiction frequently include the credit “based upon characters created by Arthur Conan Doyle,” although promotional paratexts do not consistently mention Sir Arthur. For example, Steven Moffat, Sherlock’s showrunner, constantly refers to Conan Doyle’s importance and influence, whereas Guy Ritchie, director of the Warner Bros. Holmes films, and Robert Doherty, Elementary’s showrunner, speak of the author far less frequently. Proprietary transfictions may be more inclined to invoke the author function than are public domain transfictions. Proprietorial transfictions such as Star Trek and Batman have a direct line of descent through intellectual property from the original author(s) (whether or not they originally owned the IP) to the current producers; producers may invoke the author function to implicitly signal the construction of a logical storyworld with multiple points of contact with the established transfiction, thus appealing to the established fan base. By contrast, producers of public domain transfictions may elide the author function to implicitly signal the construction of an imaginary storyworld with relatively few points of contact with the established transfiction, thus appealing to new audiences. Proprietorial transfictions also employ promotional paratexts to define the precise narrative relationships between new additions to a transfiction originating from different producers simultaneously exploiting the same intellectual property. Fox Broadcasting has specified that Gotham, which it produces under license from TimeWarner, will not impinge upon the narrative continuity of the Warner Bros. Batman films. Kevin Reilly, former chairman of Entertainment for the Fox Broadcasting Company, said that, “Warner Brothers manages the entire franchise and its one of their top global franchises of all. So there will be an awareness of both and we’ll have to coordinate when we’re in the market place, but the productions are not piggy-backing off one another” (Cannata-Bowman 2016). Similarly, CBS, which owns the rights to all Star Trek television, must coordinate with Paramount, which owns the rights to any Star Trek films. CBS President Les Moonves announced that the new Star Trek: Discovery television series would not appear until six months after the release of the Paramount film Star Trek Beyond (2016). Said Moonves: “Our deal with [Paramount] is that we had to wait six months after their film is launched so there wouldn’t be a confusion in the marketplace” (Hadas 2017, 53). Producers of public domain transfictions, or even the semi-proprietary-but-acts-like-a-public-domain Holmes transfiction, do not need to engage in such paratextual coordination. Both the Elementary and Sherlock producers received permission from the Conan Doyle Estate to make their programs, but CBS has no need to specify its program’s relationship to the BBC’s program, despite the two companies’ simultaneous exploitation of the same intellectual property. The Holmes transfiction as a whole lacks the industrial 230

convergence and mutual licensing agreements that underpin most contemporary transmedia transfictions—hence its greater resemblance to a public domain transfiction than a proprietorial one. Finally, what of textual strategies for additionality and cohesion? Producers of proprietorial time/place transfictions who own the rights to all previous texts can weave additions together through dense intertextual webs linking back to the transfiction’s established history. The Star Trek transfiction has, for example, used character cross-overs to launch new additions (the original series Doctor McCoy appeared in the first episode of The Next Generation) or to celebrate anniversaries (original series characters appeared in episodes of both Deep Space Nine and Voyager in 1996 to mark the franchise’s thirtieth year). But such flashy narrative machinations are usually reserved for special occasions, the intertextual family resemblance between events and settings otherwise sufficing. By contrast, producers of additions to the Holmes transfiction must rely upon the character as the primary connective tissue. The thousands of additions to the Holmes transfiction that have accumulated since the 1890s have all incorporated character name, function, and minimal elements from the character template to persuade consumers that their story was about Sherlock Holmes. As stated above, each producer selects those elements from the template most appropriate to the intended audience. The Sherlock Holmes character thus manifests extreme divergence: he can be young or old, white or black (as in New Paradigm’s comic Watson & Holmes), live in London, New York, the nineteenth, twenty-first, or twenty-second centuries, and even be transformed from human to canine, as in Sherlock Hound. But the addition must quickly establish connections to the established transfiction through name, narrative function, habitual behaviors, appearance, speech, and sometimes, interactions with other characters and environment. Hypotheses: 1. Proprietary transfictions avail themselves of paratextual strategies for additionality and cohesion to a greater extent than public domain transfictions. 2. Public domain character transfictions exhibit greater reliance upon textual manifestations of cohesion.

Conclusion This chapter has concerned additionality and cohesion in transfictions, arguing that cohesion depends upon points of contact between the addition and the transfiction. However, it has also argued that there is a spectrum between strongly and weakly cohesive transfictions. To conclude, I want to make clear that strong cohesion (maximum points of contact) is not necessarily “better” than weak cohesion (minimal points of contact)—both strategies can attract audiences in an interplay of familiarity and differentiation. Maximum cohesiveness has its uses and pleasures but so does 231

minimal cohesiveness; producers must assess their audience to determine the most successful strategy. For example, the Basil Rathbone and Benedict Cumberbatch Holmes embodiments have a complicated relationship with the canonical deerstalker that frequently serves as a primary signifier of the character. Rathbone reaches for it in The Voice of Terror (John Rawlins, 1941) only to have Watson (Nigel Bruce) remind him of his promise not to wear it. Cumberbatch rejects the proffered headgear in “The Reichenbach Fall” (season 2, episode 3). In both cases, the absent deerstalker indicates the relocation of the character to new settings in the 1940s and the 2010s, the producers quickly differentiating their texts from the original texts and the many additions to the transfiction. Both Elementary and Sherlock establish a relationship of modification to the original texts and the many additions to the transfiction by updating the character to the present. Audience pleasure derives from seeing the character function in this new setting, although Sherlock includes many modified points of contact with the original character template, for example, by having him contemplate a three (nicotine) patch problem rather than a three pipe problem. Elementary audiences derive pleasure from the gender modification that turns John Watson into Joan Watson. Long-lasting and ubiquitous transfictions may benefit as much from weak cohesion as from strong cohesion, purposively omitting or modifying events, settings, and characters as they seek to retain old audiences and attract new ones. And finally, a call for further research. This chapter has used the three case studies of Sherlock Holmes, Batman, and Star Trek to offer some tentative hypotheses concerning additionality and cohesion in character-based transfictions. The case studies were selected partly to represent three types of transfictions from my eighttype taxonomy, but were primarily selected because they are the transfictions I know best both as fan and as scholar. Decades old, or even centuries old, transfictions comprised of hundreds or even thousands of accumulated additions pose a methodological challenge; analysis requires detailed familiarity which can only be individually acquired for a limited number of transfictions. Hence the tentative nature of the hypotheses, which must be confirmed or disproved by collaborative research among scholars well-versed in multiple and different transfictions.

Acknowledgements The core content of this chapter was previously published as Pearson, Roberta. 2017. “Additionality and Cohesion in Transfictional Worlds.” The Velvet Light Trap 79: 113– 119.

References Bal, Mieke. 1997. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bertetti, Paolo. 2014. “Towards a Typology of Transmedia Characters.” International Journal of Communication 8: 1–20.

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Cannata-Bowman, Nick. 2016. “Star Trek: Everything We Know About the New TV Series.” TV Cheat Sheet, May 30. Accessed April 21, 2017. www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/star-trek-everything-we-knowabout-the-new-tv-series.html/4/. Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. New York: Cornell University Press. Denson, Shane. 2011. “Marvel Comics’ Frankenstein: A Case Study in the Media of Serial Figures.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 56 (4): 531–553. Doležel, Lubomir. 1999. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Freeman, Matthew. 2016. Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds. London and New York: Routledge. Gaiman, Neil. 1989. “When Is a Door: The Secret Origin of the Riddler.” Secret Origins Special #1. Hadas, Leora. 2017. “A New Vision: J.J. Abrams, Star Trek and Promotional Authorship.” Cinema Journal 56 (2): 44–66. Harvey, Colin B. 2014. “A Taxonomy of Transmedia Storytelling.” In Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon, 219–228. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Mac, Danny. 2014. “Fox’s Gotham is NOT Connected to the Warner Brothers DC Cinematic Universe.” Comic Book Movie, January 13. Accessed April 21, 2017. www.comicbookmovie.com/fansites/DannyMac/news/?a=92884. McMillan, Graeme. 2015. “DC Entertainment to Give Classic Batman Writer Credit in ‘Gotham’ and ‘Batman v Superman.’” Hollywood Reporter, September 18. Accessed April 21, 2017. www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/dc-entertainment-give-classic-batman-824572. Pearson, Roberta. 2015. “Sherlock Holmes, a De Facto Franchise?” In Popular Media Cultures: Fans, Audiences and Paratexts, edited by Lincoln Geraghty, 186–205. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 1983. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Methuen. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2005. “Possible-Worlds Theory.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan, 446–452. London: Routledge. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2013. “Transmedial Storytelling and Transfictionality.” Poetics Today 34 (3): 361–388. Ryan, Marie-Laure, and Jan-Noël Thon (eds.). 2014. Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology. Nebraska: Nebraska University Press. Scolari, Carlos A. 2009. “Transmedia Storytelling: Implicit Consumers, Narrative Worlds, and Branding in Contemporary Media Production.” International Journal of Communication 3: 586–606. Thon, Jan-Noel. 2015. “Converging Worlds: From Transmedial Storyworlds to Transmedial Universes.” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 7 (2): 21–53. Uricchio, William. 2010. “The Batman’s Gotham City™: Story, Ideology, Performance.” In Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence, edited by Jörn Ahrens and Arno Meteling, 119–132. London: Bloomsbury.

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17 Transmedia Genres Form, Content, and the Centrality of Memory Colin B. Harvey

In this chapter, I explore genre in relation to transmedia storytelling. I look at existing definitions of genre specific to different forms of media, and examine how these definitions can inform an understanding of genre in relation to the operation of storyworlds that spread across multiple media forms. In particular, I look at the dominance of science fiction and fantasy genres within the transmedia sphere, examining potential explanations for why this might be the case. As I will show, recurring tensions around form and content which characterize existing genre theory in a variety of media are rendered more complex still by the inherent nonlinear properties of transmedia networks and the technological components involved in audiences’ manipulation of instances of digital transmedia. A consistent theme to emerge in my analysis concerns memory, both in terms of the generic traits which are remembered from artifact to artifact across different media, but also in terms of the remembered expectations with which audiences encounter and engage with generic artifacts. As I will show, what this suggests, consistent with the views of many genre theorists, is that a purely textual appreciation of genre is not enough, and that genre needs to be understood as part of a much larger network of relations. I will further suggest that this relationship needs to be understood in affective, materialist, and energetic terms, and that associated form and content issues should be framed in this way. Finally, I will conclude by moving on to explore emergent transmedia genres, drawing on Janet Murray’s seminal work on cyberspace narrative to look at the ways in which existing, established genres might be translated into transmedia networks, but also the potential for both subverting genre conventions and creating new genre formations capable of specifically exploiting the unique characteristics of transmedia storyworlds.

Genre Defined Drawing upon Heather Dubrow’s work, scholar of medieval literature Simon Gaunt identifies Aristotle and Plato as the first theorists of genre in the Western culture

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tradition, advancing broad categories for literature that include “comedy, tragedy and epic” (Dubrow 1982, 45–52; Gaunt 2005, 5). In his wide-ranging overview of genre, Daniel Chandler suggests that the term is now widely used in the fields of “rhetoric, literary theory, media theory and more recently linguistics” (1997, 1). Chandler discusses the “family resemblance” approach by which categories are identified as such by their shared traits, but highlights the inherent subjectivity involved in such a process of categorization (1997). A significant point relates to the positioning of a particular genre in relation to other genres, but also in relation to other textual formations and what we might term the wider “network of relations.” John Frow suggests that genre cannot be understood as obtaining merely at the textual level: beyond the text itself is the importance of thinking about the text’s function but also differing audience structures and patterns of reading (2015, 1). He goes on to argue that genre can “almost” be defined as the “relationship between textual structures and the situations that occasion them,” with the caveat that the situation in question has to be very carefully delineated (2015, 14). This network of relations can assume manifold guises. For instance, a further important point Gaunt highlights in relation to Frederic Jameson’s writing on the subject is the ideological basis for genre, and the corresponding way in which specific genres might historically emerge to engage with societal concerns and tensions (2005, 7–8). Indeed, Will Wright in Six Guns and Society, his pivotal structuralist study of the Western, notes the ability of the Western film to adapt itself to changes in American society (1977, 210–211) (an ability this particular genre now seems to have forsaken, despite its preceding longevity).

Form and Content In his account, Gaunt goes on to suggest that the study of genre is dominated by two approaches, one founded around form and the other centered around content. He maintains that Jameson has been most active in exploring the relationship between the two, although Mikhail Bakhtin and Tzvetan Todorov have also discussed the interplay. As Gaunt notes, Jameson characterizes Northrop Frye as primarily articulating a “semantic approach” to the study of genre, while Vladimir Propp opts for a “syntactic approach.” Jameson himself, however, argues that genre is constituted by both syntactic and semantic elements, so that genre can be analyzed using either one of these approaches (Gaunt 2005, 6). The complex relationship between form and content is also articulated in more industry-led approaches to describing transmedia storytelling. In their book Storytelling Across Worlds, Tom Dowd et al. specify 22 categories ranging from “Action” and “Adventure” through “Film noir,” “Romance” and “War,” “Western,” and “YA or young adult” (2013, 57–59). Dowd et al. stress the importance of understanding the ways in which the different platforms involved in transmedia storytelling utilize the “Key Story Elements” of “Story/Theme,” “Plot,” “Characters,” 235

“Setting,” and “Style/Tone” (2013, 48–57). They also, however, note the fluidity of genre categorization among websites like IMDB and Wikipedia, and among other individuals and parties with an interest in placing works into genre groupings, such as film critics and marketing teams (2013, 58). This ambiguity around genre is something Frow also alludes to (2015, 13) and which Brigid Cherry discusses in her analysis of fan definitions of horror films (2007, 214). Indeed, Chandler observes that some approaches to genre theory prefer an approach which utilizes the “psycholinguistic concept of prototypicality,” by which some texts are seen as being more indicative of a genre than others because of the number and type of traits demonstrated by the text in question (1997, 2–3). This approach means that genre categories should be viewed as “fuzzy.” Brian Attebery utilizes the idea of the “fuzzy set” coined by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson to define the fantasy genre, seeing prototypical examples as sitting in the center of a genre definition, with those with ambiguous features sitting at the boundaries of the category (1992, 12). In her analysis of fantasy types, literary critic Farah Mendlesohn refines Attebery’s approach to argue that fantasy should be viewed as multiple fuzzy sets (2008, xvii). The specificity of newer kinds of digital interaction, in which a participant might be asked to manipulate complex, multi-modal interfaces, complicates the form and content discussion of genre still further. Writing in 2001, Mark J. P. Wolf proposed a taxonomy of 42 video games differentiated by kinds of interactivity, but which crucially were intended to be read in conjunction with existing “thematically based genres (like those of film)” (2001, 116–134). In this context, then, most of the Halo games can be viewed as science fiction first-person shooters (FPS), although the Halo Wars spin-off series consists of science fiction real-time strategy games (RTS). In my own work, the importance of identifying media specificity and the role it plays in participant engagement with transmedia storytelling led me to identify “transmedia configuration”—that is to say the processes of manipulation and negotiation by which participants engage with transmedia networks (Harvey 2015, 121–123). This might extend to deciding which element of a transmedia network to engage with—for instance, whether to watch the animated television series Star Wars Rebels or play the console game Star Wars Battlefront—but also the configurative strategies required to engage with a particular element of the transmedia network in question. Clearly the particularity of the narrative experience involved in engaging with a comic or novel is going to be quite different to the kind of engagement involved in manipulating a DVD or video game, in terms of material, energetic and affective relationships. Those transmedia networks which include digital media platforms such as video games explicitly recast Jameson’s dialectic between the semantic and the syntactic in materialist and energetic terms. Yet this is also true of those elements within a transmedia network which are articulated in ways in which the configurative engagement asked of the participant—be they viewer, listener, reader—is altogether 236

less complex. As Emma Beddows notes in her phenomenological study of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, fandom, audience expectation of the particularities of engagement with one medium, such as a television series, may not translate to their engagement with transmedia material articulated in a different medium, such as a comic. The individuals Beddows studied brought their own expectations from the television series and indicated dissatisfaction when other media disrupted their experience by not obeying the same conventions (2012, 149–150).

Genre and Memory Significantly, Gaunt points to Todorov’s observation that genre is “not only an intersection of social and formal properties, but also a fragment of collective memory” (Gaunt 2005, 7). This extends to the expectations an audience possesses prior to engaging with a genre artifact, expectations which are learnt—remembered—from previous engagements. As Stanley Fish observes, “a description of genre … can and should be seen as a prediction of the shape of response” (1980, 95). While some genres have the audience’s affective response factored in—“horror” being a good example, to build upon a point made by John Clute and John Grant (1997, 337)—all genres ought to be understood as experiential, framed by emotional responses such as anticipation and suspense, and more broadly informed by our memories and expectations of preceding generic experiences. There is, of course, a strong element of subjectivity involved, influenced by the extent of the individual’s experience; literary critic Gerard Genette talks about the “narrative competence” of the reader, “arising from practice” which allows he or she to decipher the code of the genre in question (1983, 76–77). The experiential nature of genre is something narratologist Monika Fludernik has discussed in her wider examination of narratology. Fludernik argues that our exposure to the generic conventions associated with written texts is now so profound that they have moved from being consciously negotiated and instead become “cognitive schemata” (2005, 45). While this particular position seems dangerously close to a reassertion of the Cartesian split, the experiential nature of all narrative engagement is difficult to refute without also returning to a dualist position of mind and body. In a transmedial context, however, articulations are both remembered from outside the network in question and within the network. In the case of Star Wars, for instance, the character of C3PO is remembered from the films into other media such as the animated television series The Clone Wars and Rebels, novels, comics and video games. Though C3PO undergoes a transformation as part of this process, becoming stylized in the case of the animated series or represented via words in the case of the novels, he is still fundamentally the same character, which Beddows identifies as a “functional motif” able to “reconcile tonal and aesthetic differences” between different media platforms (Beddows 2012, 149–150). At the same time, and beyond the formal expression of the character of C3PO in 237

the medium in question, however, are the co-existence of the character’s story signification as the specific character of C3PO remembered within a medium but also across other media, and a connected level of generic signification in which C3PO is a robot. The latter signification clearly identifies the text in question as belonging to the genre of science fiction or science fantasy, connecting the text to a wider network of relations and invoking certain expectations while rejecting others.

Dominant Genres At the time of writing, the arena of popular culture is dominated by a large number of high-profile science fiction and fantasy transmedial franchises, or at least franchises demonstrating prototypical characteristics most readily associated with science fiction and fantasy genres (Chandler 1997, 2–3). The films Guardians of the Galaxy (2017), Spiderman: Homecoming (2017), and Black Panther (2017), all set within the Marvel Cinematic Universe and supported by varieties of transmedia expansion, have either been released or are about to be released. The long-running British science fantasy series Doctor Who (1963–present) continues on television, the ur-text of a complex web of transmediality including spin-off television shows, novels, audio plays, comics, web material, and video games. The Assassin’s Creed franchise, originally founded on a series of video games (inspired in turn by the novel Alamut by Vladimir Bartol), has spread to comics, toys, a feature film, and a forthcoming animated television series. The X-Men series owned by Fox and informed by Marvel’s long-running comic series has generated feature films and television series such as Legion and The Gifted, set within the same fictional milieu. The Star Trek franchise, too, which saw its fiftieth anniversary in 2016, continues as both a high profile film series and television series, as well as in multiple other transmedial and licensed guises. In discussing The Matrix film sequels and its supporting transmedia infrastructure, Jenkins famously observes that in order to get the most from these kinds of fictional environments, consumers must become “hunters and gatherers,” seeking out material across media channels, comparing notes and collaborating with fellow fans to maximize the quality of their experience (2008, 20–21). Elsewhere, Jenkins notes that Star Wars fans were amongst the first to engage with new technologies, using merchandising as resources for their web-based fan movies (2006, 144). The fan creativity that has long characterized science fiction and fantasy fandoms and which Jenkins documents in Textual Poachers (1992) and much of his subsequent writing fits naturally—logically, indeed—with the active and creative nature of transmedia storytelling, and which intellectual property (IP) holders increasingly seek to engage with and exploit in terms of community engagement and competitions. Yet a significant other reason for the domination of science fiction and fantasy genres in the arena of transmedia storytelling might lie with the diegetic traits that often characterize these two genres. Such traits might include parallel universes, time travel, or magic, and can provide a means by which inconsistencies and contradictions 238

arising from the nature of the licensing arrangement can be explained away, by either IP holders, fandom, commentators, or a combination of these agents. These traits are particularly the case in the past when transmedia networks were altogether less wellintegrated and were tended to utilize much looser licensing arrangements than is currently the case. A key example is Doctor Who, which has now existed for over 50 years and accrued a highly complex transmedia network. A key aspect of Doctor Who’s diegesis is time travel, and parallel universes also frequently feature, not to mention the sheer scale of the universe the main character is able to explore. Inconsistencies occurring across the wider transmedia storyworld—a key character dying who then reappears in other media without explanation, a similar fate happening to a fictional planet—can then be explained away by the contradictions inherent in the idea of time travel, parallel universes and the scale of time and space, and so remain diegetically consistent. Often these inconsistencies are navigated exclusively by the fan base, but in Doctor Who’s case the television show itself has made increasing efforts to assist in this process. For instance, the recurring villains the Cybermen have been given multiple origins across Doctor Who’s transmedia network, including the television programme itself, comics, and audio. In the 2017 conclusion to the tenth series of the revived, post-2005 version of the program, the main character of the Doctor offers the explanation of “parallel evolution” having occurred to account for these multiple contradicting origin stories. In a comparable vein, the ABC television show Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD (2013– present), set within the same Marvel Cinematic Universe as films including the Iron Man, Captain America, and Guardians of the Galaxy film series and a range of tie-in comics, approaches the possibility of such a diegetic contradiction head-on. Agents of SHIELD is centered around the character of Agent Phil Coulson (played by Clark Gregg), despite the character having perished in The Avengers (2012), which happens chronologically prior to Agents of SHIELD. Coulson’s resurrection becomes an ongoing plot point within the first season of Agents of SHIELD, and is revealed as part of a covert plan by Samuel L. Jackson’s character Nick Fury to use alien DNA to bring Coulson back to life. Where transmedia production occurs in-house, it is possible to ensure synchronicity in terms of the storyworld (this was my own experience working as a Narrative Designer on video games and related transmedia material for the British company Rebellion Developments, as opposed to my prior experience undertaking transmedia media work as the writer of licensed fiction for properties such as Doctor Who and Highlander). In other, generally larger contexts, where material is licensed to external transmedia producers, it is much more challenging to ensure consistency between the various parts of a transmedia network. In the contemporary era, where integrated transmedia networks are considered much more desirable than in the past, IP holders have investigated various methods of ensuring franchises are sufficiently consistent. 239

The Star Wars Story Group, founded after the purchase of Lucasfilm by Disney, is a prominent example of one approach to this problem. Though they may not be overtly articulated in the same way as the Doctor Who and Marvel franchises, fans of other franchises in which time travel, parallel universes and magic routinely feature are able to use similar strategies to explain away inconsistences. Notable examples include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ghostbusters, Highlander, and the Star Trek franchise. Interestingly, such approaches tend not to be evident with regards to the Star Wars saga, which does not feature parallel universes or time travel and which portrays its magic system—the Force—in carefully delimited ways. On deciding to “de-canonize” the vast bulk of the existing Expanded Universe of non-film media following the purchase of Lucasfilm by Disney, the decision was made to re-brand this material under the banner “Legends” (Star Wars.com 2014). Narratively speaking, this approach offers similar advantages to that of parallel universes, arguably awarding the Legends range a mythical status within the broader Star Wars storyworld, akin to the way Greek or Norse myths are positioned in the real world. A further reason for the dominance of science fiction and fantasy in the transmedia sphere might obtain in the world-building characteristics of fantastic genres. Wolf talks extensively about the world-building techniques employed by J. R. R. Tolkien in adumbrating Middle-earth, in the process making the distinction between “Storytelling and World-building” (Wolf 2012, 29–33). Significantly, the novel series The Lord of the Rings and its prequel The Hobbit have lent themselves to multiple adaptations in different media, and most notably in terms of the films directed by Peter Jackson, also provided impetus for manifold kinds of transmedia expansion. However, Dowd et al, while accepting transmedia storytelling is “world-driven,” suggest the importance of understanding the way in which different platforms engage with story elements, also suggesting that “Genres are an example of plot-driven stories” (2013, 57). Of course, the world-building techniques employed by novels are not exclusive to fantasy and science fiction genres. Yet the fact that other genres like romance, thrillers, and war stories operate in recognizable, mimetic settings rather than completely invented ones arguably means there is less necessity for dense world-building. In the context of other media, like the comics published by DC and Marvel, the sheer longevity of the storyworlds in question might explain why these storyworlds have spread transmedially, as well as provided the basis for shared cinematic and televisual storyworlds with their own varying degrees of transmedial engagement. In other words, the intricately described storyworlds which often characterize commercially and critically successful fantasy and science fiction storytelling in one medium might explain why such storyworlds make such good fodder for adaptation and subsequent transmedial expansion. With regard to other media, a related point is that we have arguably reached a point thanks to computer generated imagery whereby believable fantastic worlds can be convincingly built in a variety of audiovisual contexts including film, television, and 240

video games, finally catching up with the evocative and immersive capabilities of the novel. These factors, and the related importance of the ways in which fantastic genres lend themselves to merchandising as well as “spreadable media” (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013), might explain the particular contemporary dominance of the fantastic in the transmedia sphere. It is possible to speculate, however, on which existing largely mono-media genres might make the translation into cross-media forms, and how this translation might occur.

Genre on the Holodeck The inherent nonlinear quality of transmedia storytelling arguably makes it a form of interactive fiction. Generally speaking, participants can elect to engage with transmedia networks in whichever way they choose, deciding whether to watch a film or play the video game or read the comic in the order they decide. This is not to deny that franchises will often push participants toward preferred readings, or at least preferred sequences of reading. Marvel, for instance, often publishes preview comics tied to forthcoming film releases which both enlarge the storyworld of the MCU but also act as cross-media promotion for the film in question. However, there is nothing to stop an MCU fan either engaging or re-engaging with the preview comic having seen the film, illustrating the inherent nonlinear quality of a transmedia network. Writing in Hamlet on the Holodeck (1999), a seminal text exploring the potential of computer-based interactive narrative, Janet Murray suggests ways in which digital storytelling might operate in relation to a range of genres. As well as discussing science fiction and fantasy forms, Murray also identifies more realist forms of drama including soap opera as ripe for enhancement and expansion by digital techniques. In many ways the techniques Murray discusses might be seen as anticipating some of the increasingly ubiquitous approaches adopted by contemporary transmedia producers. For instance, Murray talks about ways in which a show like ER, a hugely popular American television medical drama that ran from 1994 to 2009, might be expanded by digitality. She suggests that specific locations frequently seen in the series could be presented virtually for participants to explore, expanding existing storylines or previewing forthcoming storylines, or providing more background on specific characters (Murray 1999, 255–256). The commercial success of tie-in games related to existing crime and thriller franchises, from CSI to Sherlock Holmes, suggests the potential for detective fiction and its related sub-genres to become increasingly dominant formations within the transmedia sphere. Indeed, the BBC’s Sherlock (2010–present) has been transmedially articulated in multiple ways, from the websites written by fictional characters (including Dr Watson’s blog, which the character is seen writing on screen) to the accompanying app produced by The Project Factory. In the Hollywood context, a television series set in the same storyworld as the John Wick films is also currently in development (Flook 2017). 241

Anticipating Fludernik, Murray suggests that she is versed in how to engage with interactive stories within certain genres by her prior exposure to such genres (1999, 192). Murray observes that she knows she must question each of the suspects in a murder mystery CD-Rom adventure, that she will be expected to “shoot at the bad guys in a Western” and that she knows to “enter the haunted house in a horror story” (1999). Of course, such expectations can clearly afford a short cut for creators and audiences, of particular use in interactive narratives where the participant is also expected to learn how to interact. At the same time, the subversion of the tropes and techniques we expect to find in genre-based stories can clearly enhance the experience, as journalist Steve Rose explores in relation to “post-horror movies” (Rose 2017). In this vein, arguably one of the key strengths of transmedia storytelling lies in its ability to utilize the nonlinear aspects inherent in the form to surprise participants. This is most obviously the case with regard to plotting. For instance, a revelation about a particular character’s motivations might occur in one medium in a transmedia storyworld, only to be set in context by another part of the storyworld in a different medium. The order in which the two elements are engaged with will clearly affect the participant’s understanding. Similarly, the ability to provide unexpected juxtapositions might also afford opportunities to subvert generic expectations, using the formal, nonlinear potential of the transmedia network to exploit audience expectations around content.

Conclusion Memory emerges as a central aspect of genre within the transmedia sphere. When we engage with a cultural artifact positioned in a particular genre, our expectations are conditioned by previous experience of that genre, but also of experience of other genres—in other words a genre is determined as much by why it is not as by what it is. The form and content discussions characteristic of genre theory become more complex in a transmedia context, in which the participant is asked to “configure” their engagement with the transmedia network, and by the specific material and energetic conditions of the network, some or all of which might be articulated through digitality. The dominance of science fiction and fantasy genres in the realm of transmedia storytelling can be attributed to a number of reasons. While arguably these genres attract the kinds of audiences interested in seeking out new material, these genres come with “in-built” solutions to the fuzziness that can arise when storyworlds spread across multiple media forms. Such solutions are not necessarily open to more mimetic, realist genres. The supremacy of fantastical genres might also be attributable to the merchandising power of these kinds of storyworlds (and their appeal to children), but also to the kinds of world-building involved in constructing such storyworlds, and the concomitant pleasures such world-building offers fan bases. However, if audience appetite and commercial imperatives continue to point toward increasingly integrated transmedia storytelling, it may become the case that science 242

fiction and fantasy storyworlds become less prevalent, as the need for the diegetic “sticking plasters” these genres can provide becomes less important. Equally, increasing experimentation with less explored genres amongst independent transmedia producers may result in more mainstream transmedia franchises also seeking to explore such genres. The operation of genre in those transmedia networks that incorporate newer digital media forms is therefore intersected by a technological imperative. In other transmedia contexts, however, the material and energetic expression of the work in question is also vitally important to how the story element is understood, whether it is a comic book, a novel, or audio play. Jameson’s point that genre is constituted by the ongoing dialectic between the semantic and syntactic remains as fundamental to an understanding of how genre operates in transmedia networks as it does to mono-media examples. Equally, genre needs to be understood in affective and experiential terms, as a particular form of narrative framing embedded in subjective and communal remembering.

References Attebery, Brian. 1992. Strategies of Fantasy. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Beddows, Emma. 2012. “Buffy the Transmedia Hero.” Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique 24: 149–150. Chandler, Daniel. 1997. “An Introduction to Genre Theory.” Visual Memory. August 11. Accessed January 5, 2017. http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/intgenre/integenre.pdf. Cherry, Brigid. 2007. “Subcultural Tastes, Genre Boundaries and Fan Canons.” In The Shifting Definitions of Genre, edited by Lincoln Geraghty and Mark Jancovich, 201–215. London: McFarland. Clute, John, and John Grant. 1997. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. London: Orbit. Dowd, Tom, Michael Fry, Michael Niederman, and John Steiff. 2013. Storytelling Across Worlds: Transmedia for Creatives and Producers. Abingdon: Focal Press. Dubrow, Heather. 1982. Genre: The Critical Idiom. London and New York: Methuen. Fish, Stanley. 1980. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. London: Harvard University Press. Flook, Ray. 2017. “John Wick Prequel Series ‘The Continental’ Offers Big Stories, Less Wick.” Bleeding Cool, June 14. Accessed May 12, 2017. www.bleedingcool.com/2017/06/14/john-wick-prequel-seriescontinental-offers-big-stories-less-wick/. Fludernik, Monika. 2005. Towards a Natural Narratology. Abingdon: Routledge. Frow, John. 2015. Genre. Abingdon: Routledge. Gaunt, Simon. 2005. Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Genette, Gerard. 1983. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. New York: Cornell University Press. Harvey, Colin B. 2015. Fantastic Transmedia: Narrative, Play and Memory Across Science Fiction and Fantasy Storyworlds. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. London: Routledge. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, Henry. 2008. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable Media. New York and London: New York University. Mendlesohn, Farah. 2008. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. Murray, Janet H. 1999. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Rose, Steve. 2017. “How Post-Horror Movies Are Taking Over Cinema.” Guardian, July 6. Accessed July 28, 2017. www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jul/06/post-horror-films-scary-movies-ghost-story-it-comes-atnight. Star Wars.com. 2014. “Biggest Star Wars Moments of 2014.” December 23. Accessed January 7, 2017. www.starwars.com/news/biggest-star-wars-moments-of-2014. Wolf, Mark J. P. 2001. “Genre and the Video Game.” In The Medium of the Video Game, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, 116–134. Austin: University of Texas Press. Wolf, Mark J. P. 2012. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. London: Routledge. Wright, Will. 1977. Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western. London: University of California Press.

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18 Transmedia Writing Storyworlds and Participation at the Intersection of Practice and Theory Donna Hancox

As transmedia projects continue to flourish and experiment with different styles and structures so too does our knowledge about the ways in which writing and storytelling function within transmediality. What has become clear from the emerging theory and practice of transmedia storytelling is that existing methodologies—literary theory, narratology, semiotics, film theory, media studies, and so on—all contribute important perspectives to the scholarship and the practice of transmedia storytelling, but that none is sufficient on its own. As such, transmedia storytelling necessarily encompasses a broad range of theoretical, philosophical, and creative approaches and continues to develop in ways that expand our understanding of story and writing. This chapter explores the theory and practice of writing in transmedia storytelling, and the potential it holds as an innovative creative practice to challenge and shift existing views of writing for multiplatform projects. It is not only how the act of writing is transformed for these new kinds of stories that is of interest, but also considerations of authorship and readership for collaborative, participatory narratives. Transmedia writing is more than a practice or a process centered around digital technology; it represents an original way of thinking about and doing the practice of writing that encompasses traditional literary understandings of writing, design thinking, user experience, and collaboration. It can also be understood as a framework or a philosophy in which to consider modes of storytelling and methods of dissemination, and brings together the theory of writing and the practice of writing with considerations of audiences and the embedded qualities of media platforms. In 2004, Hayles stated that “Literary criticism and theory are shot through with unrecognized assumptions specific to print. Only now, as the new medium of electronic textuality vibrantly asserts its presence, are these assumptions clearly coming into view” (67). This awareness of the specific attributes of individual media (film, audio, text, blogs, photographs, email, games, hypertext, for example) and how they work with various forms of storytelling (documentary, fiction, webisodes, advertising, television series) continues to grow and become more sophisticated. Elwell (2013) argues that the distance between the discernible differences between 245

embodied existence and representations of that existence is being diminished through digital mediation and the creation of new kinds of narratives can exploit the possibilities. To truly interrogate the complexity of this media ecology, we must think beyond particular devices and traditional understandings of platforms as distinct and separate entities, and instead embrace a more dynamic and porous description that disrupts the most common definitions of platforms or mediums. Ryan (2016) suggests that a medium is best understood as an “inherently polyvalent term whose meaning involves technological, semiotic and cultural dimensions” (5). This is a useful lens through which to view the form of transmedia storytelling explored in this chapter. In short, this chapter will focus on elements of writing that are necessary for transmedia writing: participation and interactivity, design thinking, and worldbuilding. These features and considerations sit on top of the traditional story elements that all writers work with, and this combination may be seen as a new type of ecology of storytelling in which writing and storytelling tools can be leveraged in different ways for individual projects. The incorporation of design thinking and user experience into the writing process for transmedia storytelling (beyond the previous role of design such as font and typesetting) presents avenues to address these new challenges and offers a contemporary collaborative model of writing. The experimental transmedia project Welcome to Pine Point offers a compelling case study through which to explore these ideas and to consider what might be in store for future writers of transmedia stories. As acknowledged in this book’s Introduction, Henry Jenkins brought the term “transmedia storytelling” into mainstream media studies as a way to describe, rather than define, an approach to storytelling that exploited the growing ubiquity of information and communication technologies and responded to a new generation of audiences. Ever since, scholars and practitioners have grappled with ways of analyzing and critiquing the process, and the products that have resulted. Some of the most influential writing about narrative design in the past five years has been focused on transmedia storytelling, and has addressed the innovations in books, film, and television narratives, with scholars such as Bolter (2014), Linnell (2014), and Punday (2011) offering overviews of the ways in which technology has affected narrative theory and the culture of remediation across platforms. Similarly, Hayles (2004) and Ryan (2005) exemplify of the most challenging and original writing about narrative theory in recent years; they do, however, diverge in interesting ways in their consideration of the inherent uniqueness of different media and how this affects narrative design across them. What is sometimes lost in translation with these conflicting perspectives is that each medium is embedded with nuanced and distinct implications for the nature of the environments they are trying to explain. None of this is necessarily new, the practice of developing narratives across media and forms is “as old as media themselves; think of paintings dramatizing biblical scenes or the iconic nineteenth-century characters such as Frankenstein or Sherlock Holmes whose narrative scope transcends any single 246

medium” (Mittell 2014, 253). This may well be true; however all digital media arrives with new considerations and more importantly, new audiences.

Participation and Interactivity Transmedia writing demands an attention to audience in a way that previous forms of writing have not, and at the foundation of Jenkins’ ongoing theorization of transmediality is that understanding audiences is a major consideration for successful transmedia writing. This makes transmedia storytelling a unique field with fluid borders, and subsequently it has created entirely new forms that may incorporate diverse, hybrid narrative modes and a distinctive role of fans and audiences. By privileging audiences in the writing process, transmedia stories necessarily hold many voices within each project. In Hybrid Stories, Tom Abba states that “new media favour a multiplicity of voices (a digital version of an iteration of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of multivocality)” (2009, 61), and Jenkins (2009) discusses the concept stating “multiplicity allows fans to take pleasure in alternate retellings.” Jenkins adds that “the concept of multiplicity paves the way for us to think about fan fiction and other forms of participatory expression as part of the same transmedia logic” (2013, 170) and acknowledges that transmedia writing requires dynamic innovation rather than conformity and adherence to tradition. Transmedia storytelling and writing represents a unique challenge to combine form and content that re-imagines the accepted elements of writing—character, plot, setting, etc. Anyone who has taught a creative writing class knows that we routinely espouse well-worn, and often useful, statements about rules for writing and the craft of writing. Andrea Phillips claims in A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling that “accepted writing rules include: everything should reveal character, advance plot or support theme. For transmedia, I’d add one more item: adding color to your world” (2012, 77). Phillips goes on to elaborate about what “adding color to your world” might entail, but what becomes evident is that transmedia storytelling is an exercise in open-ended storytelling and writing, in being “boundless where a traditional single medium story is finite” (2012, 79). This boundlessness encourages transmedia stories to strive to be dialogic spaces where, similar to Abba’s assertion of multi-vocality, many voices are present and coexist without needing to privilege one over the other. If the nature of transmedia stories favors multiple voices, then interactivity and participation enable them to be each fully realized and important. However, interactivity and participation are not the same activity or phenomenon consequently differing in their intentions, and subsequently their usefulness for certain projects. Interactivity can mean audiences engaging with the text in multiples ways: navigating the narrative via a range of choices, choosing the order in which to experience the story, making decisions for characters from a series of options are some of the most common forms of interaction. Conversely, participation generally entails audiences contributing to the text by attending real world events, uploading their own stories, re-mixing the text. The two 247

activities can exist in one project but have very different functions. One function, surely, is to keep audiences reading, playing, engaging for the entirety of the story, while the other function is to keep the text alive outside of the boundaries of the project and allowing for diffuse and personal experiences of a text. Carpentier stresses the distance between participation and interaction in relation to digital media projects, whereby participation requires input into decision-making and interaction is associated with sociocommunicative relations (2013, 275). He also presents two modes of participation: in and through the media. It would seem that these are not oppositional avenues of participation, but his definition offers further insight into the multitude of ways in which individuals are able to participate. While participation in the media can be clearly understood as the ability to make decisions about the media products while participation through media opens up another field of the participatory process—namely, in other areas of decision-making, which have more to do with how people can enter public spaces and use media to enter into societal debates, dialogue, and deliberations (2013, 274). As will be discussed later in relation to Welcome to Pine Point, interaction and participation can be very subtle and nuanced, and ideally are a reflection of the aesthetic, philosophy, and world of the narrative.

World-building Detailed and expansive storyworlds are acknowledged as being a crucial element to transmedia storytelling and are evident in the early, commercial examples of transmedia projects. Transmedia writer and theorist Christy Dena says: If you’re playing transmedia bingo, “worldbuilding” scores 10 points and one of those little jelly desserts from the kitchen … There is a reason for this: it is a helpful metaphor for understanding and communicating that a transmedia project involves many stories and media and there is a whole ecology operating. (2012) Transmedia writing is heterogeneous and has a multiplicity of features, however it can be argued that all transmedia writing must involve a narrative universe, or storyworld. Saldre and Torop state that discussions of transmedia storytelling are dominated by a cognitive spatial lexicon, evidenced by metaphors such as environment, landscape, and maps. The confluence of these metaphors necessitates a theoretical distinction between the shape of the narrative being told and the shape of the narrative sites that enable the telling to occur. Dena highlights this idea as a distinction between story structure and story creation, and posits that the unity of the two is a “design problem concerned with the distribution of time and place across different sites that take into account the real world as a vantage point from which the storyworld is viewed” (2009, 263–268). Being able to create an environment that can 248

encompass the variety of experiences and points of view that exist in the real world through different forms of media creates the possibility for the general public to engage and interact with stories in new ways. “A storyworld is not just the spatial setting where a story takes place; it is a complex spatio-temporal totality that undergoes global changes” (Ryan 2016, 13). In her earlier work on storyworlds across media, Marie-Laure Ryan with Thon (2014) claims: the replacement of narrative with storyworld acknowledges the emergence of the concept of “world” not only in narratology but also on the broader cultural scene. Nowadays we have not only multi-modal representations of storyworlds that combine various types of signs and virtual online worlds that wait to be filled with stories by their player citizens but also serial storyworlds that span multiple instalments and transmedial storyworlds that are deployed simultaneously across multiple media platforms, resulting in a media landscape in with creators and fans alike constantly expand, revise and even parody. (1) Building on Ryan’s theoretical claims from a producer’s point of view, Robert Pratten (2011, 70) believes that future storyworlds will have the following characteristics: Pervasive: the story will be built around the audience—connecting with them across devices. Persistent: the story evolves over time, reacting to audience engagement. Participatory: the audience interacts with characters and other audience members. Personalized: the story remembers decisions and conversations and becomes tailored to each. Meanwhile, Mark J. P. Wolf says in his book Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation that “worlds, unlike stories, need not rely on narrative structures, though stories are always dependent on the worlds in which they take place. Worlds extend beyond the stories that occur in them, inviting speculation and exploration through imaginative means” (2012, 32). Importantly, these imaginative means of world-building rest on the shoulders of the audiences, authors, and designers.

Design and Collaboration Consistent technological developments have allowed for more sophisticated locationbased storytelling, enhanced animation, real-time engagement, novel and intuitive predictive narrative generation, and a collapsing of boundaries between books, games, and film, and have resulted in an environment more receptive to experiments with writing, storytelling, and ways of considering interactivity. The early experiments in electronic literature have revealed that storytelling utilizing digital technology and multiple platforms is no longer the product of a singular author working within a 249

model of practice, which pre-dates the computer. Instead what is brought to the fore is the way in which digital artifacts are “designed” and the specific nature of this design process in respect to writing. It is increasingly clear that the futures of stories are collaborative and interactive and require teams of people with divergent skills to move the forms and the practices forward. There is also a focus on the ways in which writing and design intersect to allow for genuinely new modes of creative communication. It prefigures a future where readers and writers are fluent in this new language, just as we are fluent in the current forms of written expression. It is in this context that we can study new audiences, new practices, and the interaction between writers and designers, and in doing so aim to expand upon the limited knowledge in respect to the ways in which this move toward collaborative writing models will create new experiences of reading, innovations in the practice of writing. Hypertext as a form of literature has a long history that pre-dates digital technology but arguably found a new prominence within the World Wide Web. The term hypertext is most clearly defined by Nelson as “non-sequential writing” (1981) and his vision of hypertext is that of a system that “branches and allows choices to the reader” (2), so that the user can move within a hypertext system according to their rationale. Montford (2003) provides a summary of the history of early electronic literature and draws connections to philosophers such as Eco (the open text) and Barthes (pleasure of writing and writerly texts). However, Montford takes a step in his work that sets the trajectory for the following decade, where he theorizes that interactivity as that which needs rules and directs audiences. As writing met and continues to meet the digital age, two very different histories of practice collide, that of literature and that of digital design, or design of the Human Computer Interface. While these may appear on the surface to be unrelated fields of endeavor, they both share a focus on the role of language in the creation of experience, and in the exchange and sharing of knowledge. In the context of transmedia writing, this is most evident in the prevalence of cinematic/televisual experiences over the written word. However, the design of Human Computer Interfaces stands on language and human ability to describe the “new” through forms of rhetoric. In this way new creative products and conceptual frameworks emerge when writers and user experience designers collaborate. Transmedia writing brings with it a range of challenges for the writers, designers, developers, publishers, readers, and the wider industry that will review, describe, recommend, and disseminate these projects. Transmedia stories come into existence as a result of the combined efforts of a team of designers and developers working with the writer or writers and produce. This type of co-creation can be foreign to many writers, and so a number of university writing programs are taking steps to address this by creating formal connections between writing and design. “Aligning writing studies with art and design rather than literature challenges the entrenched perceptions of the field—at least perceptions commonly held by those outside of the field and academia” (Purdy 2014, 613). Marback argues that appealing to the concept of design is a way to solve “wicked problems” in writing studies, particularly for those “teaching writing in 250

digital media,” and design thinking understands and allows for the reality that wicked problems are not just solved once by finding new information, they must be solved over and over again (2009, 399). Arola (2010) explains: Today our students still choose photographs, words, sounds, and hyperlinks (clearly all rhetorical choices) but they choose colours, fonts, and shapes less and less. Instead, the platform, or more specifically the design template, is chosen for them. Those of us engaged with digital rhetoric continue to acknowledge the need to allow students to, in Rea and White’s terms, “experiment with new forms of writing.” (421) Kjartan Müller, further, argues that “in a digital platform an underlying layer defines the design space for the layer above. This design space is defined negatively by the constraints set by the underlying layer and positively by the possible space it creates for design. Design, in this case, is a neutral term that covers hardware architecture, system design and text composition” (2011, 186). Both design and transmedia require a clear intentionality about the purpose of the work and a bringing together of skills for enhanced user experience.

Case Study: Welcome to Pine Point Through video footage, photographs, audio, and text, the creators of Welcome to Pine Point, Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons, present the story of a town that no longer exists. Pine Point was a community planned around an open-cut mine, and when the mine closed down in 1988, the single-industry town also closed. Shoebridge and Simons manage to capture not just the geographical details of the town so that the audience understands its location and unique characteristics; they also capture the social and cultural details of the time and place that turn out to be universal and instantly recognizable even for audiences outside of the United States. The project is designed to resemble a photo album from the 1980s, and using this nostalgic aesthetic they are able to convey a mood and a spirit that is necessary to truly understand the cast of characters who share their experiences of growing up in Pine Point and their feelings about its eventual demolition. The details of the town are the key to the universality of this story and to the connection created with audiences. This is a story not only about place and memory but is also a larger story about the macroeconomics that influence lives and how individual fates are tied to corporate decisions. When a town closes down or loses an influential industry, the everyday stories about the lives affected and the struggle to continue are often lost. The storyworld created in Welcome to Pine Point shows that storyworlds are larger than what is directly shown in the text, larger than the narrative “here” and “now” (Ryan 2016, 4). Welcome to Pine Point reveals what existed before the town died, 251

meaning that audiences can connect with the real lives and dreams that lived and died in that town. I think we just told the story how we thought we could tell it. We think it’s more part memoir for people growing up at that time and feeling things about what memory was to us, what tangible objects meant to us, and how memory gets flaky but interesting and romantic. Sometimes concrete and sometimes evocative. (Macaulay 2012) The first image in Welcome to Pine Point is a crudely drawn video cassette over a black background, which for a certain generation—the generation this story is about— is an immediately recognizable object that brings with it memories. The video cassette represented a new age of home movies, user-generated content, and more accessible home entertainment that exploded in the 1980s, and this one image signals to the audience that this project is firmly rooted in that amateur, home-made tradition (despite the makers being media professionals). What follows is an intriguing mix of sound and image that further locates the audience in the era and emotional landscape of the story in complex ways that utilize a visual and audio language that communicates the small individual stories and the details of life to explore and extrapolate much larger themes of home, belonging, memory, and so on. In these very particular ways, Welcome to Pine Point exemplifies the strengths of transmedia storytelling by allowing each medium to do what it does best, and for the storyworld to be communicated through the relationship between the authors and the audiences. It can be easy to overlook the connections and thoughtfulness embedded in this project that is often either admired or misunderstood. One of the most challenging and original aspects of Welcome to Pine Point is the way that it disrupts widely accepted views about transmedia platforms. Rather than existing across distinct media platforms that audiences need to migrate across, platforms are instead re-defined as modes of storytelling (visual, text, audio, etc.) and forms (documentary, oral history, memoir, photo album) for audiences to then consider the vastly different meanings and traditions in each form, despite all of them existing in one digital site. A common criticism, however, of Welcome to Pine Point is that the narrative is essentially linear, which for some, at least, suggests that the creators have not taken full advantage of the possibilities of transmedia storytelling. When people think of digital interactive media, one of the first things they say is: “It’s going to have multiple entry points, and you can go wherever you want to.” And sure, you can deliver certain kinds of information like that, but it’s not super-great for stories, at least in our experience. (Pitzer 2011) 252

Phillips (2012), further, adds to this argument that nonlinear narratives are not suitable for every transmedia story and also the idea that audiences always experience a narrative in a linear way regardless of where and when they enter the story. Phillips explains: So regardless of how we encounter the pieces of the story our experience is always linear. This has caused Janet Murray to coin the term “multi-sequential” meaning that there are multiple linear sequences the audience can experience. I like this term a lot and often use it but “open storyworld” is a more familiar term which is why I’ve chosen it here. (2012, 30–31) More fundamentally, in his seminal 1964 work Understanding Media, McLuhan deploys the framing metaphor of the human central nervous system, the “electric network that coordinates the various media of our senses” (2012 [1964], 47) to describe the relationship between the message and the medium. McLuhan argues that media technologies are metaphorical extensions of an embodied understanding of stories that allows for multiple ways to convey a story, linked to the capacity of whichever media is being utilized. As Shoebridge states: “We kept a lot of the old handmade book-like things, in keeping with that medium-is-the-message concept. We tried to emphasize what each medium does well” (Pitzer 2011). Transmedia narratives therefore reflect distinct media traditions (film, literature, games, social media, for instance), but also exist at the intersection of these media, particularly in the way “information gets dispersed” across all of them (Jenkins 2011, 955). The label of “interactive documentary” for Welcome to Pine Point is thus quite misleading and displays an unwillingness to embrace broader ideas of platforms, storyworld, interactivity, and linearity that are themselves integral parts of future writing for transmedia storytelling.

Conclusion In fact, Welcome to Pine Point encapsulates so many opportunities and obstacles associated with transmedia storytelling by working deeply with each medium and allowing a strong visual aesthetic to support the writing style and to do some of the heavy lifting of metaphor, lyricism, cadence, etc. that is associated with text dominant stories. It also uses an innovative approach to the role of character and characterization, and the ways in which they are created and shown to audiences. Welcome to Pine Point offers a unique narrative that is both linear and interactive and does not require audiences to solve a mystery or to unlock keys along the way. Instead, it immerses audiences in a human story filled with the emotions, surprises, and banalities of the everyday. More so than many other contemporary transmedia projects, indeed, Welcome to Pine Point illustrates a new understanding of platforms 253

and of writing in a transmedia environment that re-imagines the intersection of media, genre and form to present an entirely new approach to writing that differed dramatically from dominant understandings of transmedia writing. “While stories are transmitted by discourse, which means by text, they remain inscribed in our mind long after the signifiers have vanished from memory. This means that a story is a cognitive rather than a linguistic construct” (Ryan and Thon 2014, 87). Looking forward, then, the understanding that transmedia stories are at least as cognitive and emotional as they are linguistic may well be the indicator of success in capturing, entertaining, and maintaining audiences who are used to existing in a crowded and noisy media ecology.

References Abba, Tom. 2009. “Hybrid Stories: Examining the Future of Transmedia Narrative.” Science Fiction Film and Television 2 (1): 59–75. doi: 10.3828/sfftv.2.1.4. Arola, Kristin L. 2010. “The Design of Web 2.0: The Rise of the Template, the Fall of Design.” Computers and Composition 27 (1): 4–14. Dena, Christy. 2009. “Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World Across Distinct Media and Environments.” Ph.D. diss., University of Sydney. Dena, Christy. 2012. “Some Things I’ve Learned from Transmedia Worldbuilding.” Christy’s Corner of the Universe. Accessed August 12, 2017. www.christydena.com/publications/transmedia-worldbuilding. Elwell, J. Sage. 2013. “The Transmediated Self: Life Between the Digital and the Analogue.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 20 (2): 233–249. doi: 10.1177/1354856513501423. Hayles, Katherine. 2004. “Print is Flat, Code is Deep: The Importance of Media-specific Analysis.” Poetics Today 25 (1): 67–90. doi: 10.1215/03335372-25-1-67. Jenkins, Henry. 2009. “The Revenge of the Origami Unicorn: Seven Principles of Transmedia Storytelling.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. December 12. Accessed February 20, 2017. http://henryjenkins.org/2009/12/the_revenge_of_the_origami_uni.html. Jenkins, Henry. 2011. “Transmedia 202: Further Reflections.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. August 11. Accessed November 2, 2017. http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/dening_transmedia_further_re.html. Jenkins, Henry. 2013. “Theorizing Participatory Intensities: A Conversation about Participation and Politics.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 19 (3): 165–186. Linnell, Sheridan. 2014. Art Psychotherapy and Narrative Therapy: An Account of Practitioner Research. Sharjah: Bentham Science Publishers. Macaulay, Scott. 2012. “The Beauty of ‘Welcome to Pine Point’.” Filmmaking, July 15. Accessed December 11, 2016. http://filmmakermagazine.com/48259-the-beauty-of-welcome-to-pine-point/#.WfNNkGiCxPZ. McLuhan, Marshall. 2012 [1964]. Understanding Media. London: Routledge. Marback, Richard. 2009. “Embracing Wicked Problems: The Turn to Design in Composition Studies.” College Composition and Communication 61 (2): 397–419. Mittell, Jason. 2014. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press. Montfort, Nick. 2013. “Toward a Theory of Interactive Fiction.” December 19. Accessed March 4, 2017. http://nickm.com/if/toward.html. Müller, Kjartan. 2011. “Genre in the Design Space.” Computers and Composition 28 (3): 186–194. Murray, Simone. 2012. The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation. London and New York: Routledge. Nelson, Tim. 1981. Literary Machines. Swarthmore: Self Published. Phillips, Andrea. 2012. A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling: How to Captivate and Engage Audiences Across Multiple Platforms. New York: McGraw-Hill Company. Pitzer, Andrea. 2011. “The Goggles on ‘Welcome to Pine Point’: Digital Narrative Chases Memory and Loss.” Nieman Storyboard, February 4. Accessed July 3, 2017. http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/the-goggles-

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on-welcome-to-pine-point-digital-narrative-chases-memory-and-loss/. Pratten, Robert. 2011. Getting Started in Transmedia Storytelling: A Practical Guide for Beginners. London: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. Punday, Daniel. 2011. Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Purdy, James. 2014. “What Can Design Thinking Offer Writing Studies?” College Composition and Communication 65 (4): 612–641. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2005. “On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology.” In Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality and Disciplinality, edited by Jan Christopher Meister, 1–24. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2016. Narrative Space, Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure, and Jan-Noël Thon. 2014. “Storyworlds Across Media: An Introduction.” In Storyworlds Across Media: Towards a Media-conscious Narratology, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon, 1–24. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Wolf, Mark J. P. 2012. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. New York: Routledge.

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19 Transmedia Photography Implicit Narrative from a Discrete Moment Kevin Moloney

On February 1, 1968, a bullet crashed through the skull of Nguyễn Văn Lém, a Viet Cong operative, in front of Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams and NBC television cameraman Vo Su. Adams’ still photograph, of Vietnamese chief of national police Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing a handcuffed Lém, burns itself into the visual memory of most who have seen it. Its horror is inescapable. The morning after the image was made, it appeared in newspapers around the world, fueling public exhaustion with the apparent quagmire of the Vietnam War. “Saigon, 1968” has become a global icon of a life-wasting conflict (Zelizer 2010, 225–229; Morris 1998, 240–241; Sontag 2003, 59–60). Vo Su’s 16mm movie camera rolled on the same scene and the footage was broadcast to an estimated 20 million people a day after Adams’ photo appeared in print (Bailey and Lichty 1972). Su’s film shows the speed at which the entire situation unfolded. Only nine seconds pass between Loan pushing his way through the arresting soldiers to Lém laying on the street with blood gushing from his head. This is a different horror. Where the still image seems to emphasize premeditated vengeance and anger, the motion footage startles the viewer as a sudden gory outburst. It is Adams’ still image that is remembered by nearly anyone who sees it, however. The 16mm motion footage is rarely remembered. It is that ability to stare in wonderment and horror at the moment of death that makes Adams’ image so memorable to all who see it. By contrast, the speed of action in Su’s film limits our consideration of context and consequence in the moment. It gives only shock and gore. Though Adams’ photograph and Su’s film are visual journalism of the exact same event, the stories they tell unfold in different ways and with different results. “Photographs may be more memorable than moving images because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow” wrote Susan Sontag. “Television is a stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its predecessor. Each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again” (1978, 17–18). Both photographs and moving images demonstrate the divergent strengths of each media form in a transmedia story. If transmedia storytelling is a narrative composed of smaller discrete narratives, or an argument composed of smaller discrete arguments,

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then visual stories are an important piece in the development of a transmedia project. Unlike language-based texts, images communicate quickly and without translation, and they evoke emotional responses of which words often prove incapable (SmithRodden and Ash 2017). This chapter examines still photographs as discrete stories, capable of implying a complex narrative of events though they are only frozen moments sliced from the otherwise unstoppable flow of time.

The Photograph as a Narrative In narrative, a story is traditionally delivered by a narrator relating a series of events that present a lesson to be learned, as in the case of Æsop’s famous fables (1848), or as fantasy and entertainment as in the case of Cervantes’ Don Quixote (2005). A narrator is not required, though, as most modern novels, films, or even the plays of Shakespeare show. How then can a still photograph, an image captured of a single arrested moment, act as a narrative? Narratologist Marie-Laure Ryan (2004) defines a narrative: 1. A narrative text must create a world and populate it with characters and objects. Logically speaking, this condition means that the narrative text is based on propositions asserting the existence of individuals and on propositions ascribing properties to these existents. 2. The world referred to by the text must undergo changes of state that are caused by nonhabitual physical events: either accidents (“happenings”) or deliberate human actions. These changes create a temporal dimension and place the narrative world in the flux of history. 3. The text must allow the reconstruction of an interpretive network of goals, plans, causal relations and psychological motivations around the narrated events. This implicit network gives coherence and intelligibility to the physical events and turns them into a plot (2004, 8–9). In simple terms, a narrative story is built on characters who come into conflict within a setting, and in which is developed a contextual understanding of motives and the effect of the conflict. Though traditionally a story is the work of written or oral language and with a linear timeline, that understanding is too limiting. Ryan also differentiates between media forms that are narratives and those that have narrativity. Texts (or images in this case of this chapter) that are narratives are designed to evoke a script in the mind of the audience—they explicitly direct the reader to observe the characters, setting an order of events through which a story emerges (2004, 9). Of the visual media forms, motion pictures—cinema, video, animation—are the champions of these explicit narratives. Events are usually laid out in order and the viewer follows the narrative arc as designed by the producer. In cases where that order of events is not chronological—the films Pulp Fiction or Memento 257

are excellent examples—viewers still prove quite adept at cognitively reconstructing order from the nonlinear. Vo Su’s film footage of the 1968 Saigon execution, as short and sparse as it is, still walks the viewer through a series of events where two characters come into conflict with a new world order as a result. Still photographs presented in series are equally capable of delivering a linear narrative as events progress from one image to the next. This is seen fully developed in the great photographic essays presented in the picture magazines of the mid-twentieth century. The photo essay is to motion pictures as panel comics are to the animated cartoon. Having narrativity, Ryan describes, is the ability to evoke a narrative script where one may not be intended. Here she includes pictures, music, dance, and life itself as examples of media forms that have narrativity without being narratives (2004). They are implicit rather than explicit. Adams’ still photograph is a frozen pattern on paper or screen, and from that pattern the reader internally reconstructs characters, setting, conflict, and the actions leading up to and down from that climactic moment. Ryan describes “the fullest form of narrativity” as both directing the reader to the structure of the intended story and evoking a deeper experience of story that is not in the text (2004, 9–10). It tells both explicit and implicit stories. Art critic John Berger posited in response to Sontag’s On Photography that one contextualizes a photograph from his or her own memories. The memory, he argued, is a nonlinear system that draws from a complex network. “A radial system has to be constructed around the photograph so that it may be seen in terms that are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dramatic, everyday and historic” (1980, 60–63). On their position in time, he wrote: Photographs are relics of the past, traces of what has happened. If the living take that past upon themselves, if the past becomes an integral part of the process of people making their own history, then all photographs would re-acquire a living context, they would continue to live in time, instead of being arrested moments. It is just possible that photography is the prophecy of a human memory yet to be socially and politically achieved. Such a memory would encompass any image of the past, however tragic, however guilty, within its own continuity. The distinction between the private and the public uses of photography would be transcended. (1980, 57) He added, “In general the better the photograph, the fuller the context that can be created. Such a context replaces the photograph in time—not its own original time for that is impossible—but in narrated time” (1980, 61). A relevant example of this phenomenon is Dorothea Lange’s famous 1936 image of a migrant worker mother and three of her young children made in during the refugee crisis caused by the combined economic collapse of the Great Depression and environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl (Figure 19.1). In the image, Florence Owens 258

Thompson looks off camera with a hand held to her cheek. She appears to be between 30 and 40 years old. An infant lays in her arms and two young children turn away from the camera and behind her shoulders. Her clothes are worn and soiled. The facts are limited in this simple portrait. When one sees this image more than 80 years later, it is contextualized with all one was taught about the Depression and Dust Bowl era, it is compared to similar global circumstances or experiences from lives lived and the rest of the story is assumed. The image is most often read as a portrait of despair. The hand to the cheek symbolizes worry about her economic circumstance and tenuous future. The hidden faces of the older girls imply that they are crying, hungry, and deprived. All of this is a construction, however. Examination of Lange’s few outtakes shows the two girls smiling and giggling just moments before, revealing that the girls are likely hiding their faces in giggly shyness in the famous image. The concern on the mother’s face may be due to her worry about her partner’s late return for dinner, or that a stranger is aiming a large and intimidating camera at her and her children. It is unlikely that she is ruminating on the state of the economy or of her plight in it as is most often assumed from decades distant. It is an icon of an era because complex contextualization of the image makes it so. Right or wrong, its narrative is a construction. Sontag (1978, 23) wrote: The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: “There is the surface. Now think—or rather feel, intuit—what is beyond it, what reality must be like if it looks this way.” Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation and fantasy.

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Figure 19.1 “Migrant Mother,” 1936, by Dorothea Lange.

Though the photograph is not in and of itself a narrative, it does, as Ryan suggests, have narrativity. Through reading of the isolated and frozen moment one contextualizes, emotes, and intuits a fully fleshed narrative from the sparse hints contained therein.

The Photograph on Freytag’s Pyramid A narrative or story is a reporting of connected events commonly understood to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Of the dozens of defined forms stories can take, the drama is among the most compelling. A good drama rivets the viewer to the pending conflicts, the collision of opposing characters, and then the aftermath of their actions. Dramas are lessons, vicarious experiences of the lives of others that amuse, horrify, and teach people about their own lives. Consciousness researcher Owen Flanagan 260

describes that people cast their lives as a story to better understand its series of connected events, from beginning to end. “Evidence strongly suggests that humans in all cultures come to cast their own identity in some sort of narrative form,” he states. “We are inveterate storytellers” (1992, 198). One will find a classic drama in nearly any series of events, intuitively hunting for the narrative arc in its telling. In the nineteenth century, Gustav Freytag (1872; Herman, Jahn, and Ryan 2010) distilled the structure of drama to a triangle organized along the structure of the classical five-act tragedy. Freytag’s pyramid (Figure 19.2) begins at the left base of the triangle with the introduction or exposition of the story. One gets to know the characters and who and where they are. In the rising action, tensions between the protagonist and antagonist rise and the reader anticipates the pending conflict. At the top of the triangle the protagonist achieves the pinnacle of success, conflict erupts, and the characters face turning points and the beginning of declining fortunes. As one reads or watches the story he or she moves on to the falling action where one learns of the consequences of the conflict, of who will suffer and who will rise. The five-act drama then ends with catastrophe or dénouement. Here the story settles into the new normal as viewers understand how the storyworld has irrevocably changed from the actions of the characters and the conflicts they faced. The human species has loved this structure since the dawn of human culture. It attracts attention and holds it through the storytelling, whether on screen, in print, or in games, regardless of genre or purpose.

Figure 19.2 Freytag’s pyramid.

Unlike motion pictures, however, a photograph cannot in and of itself be a fully fleshed narrative. As an isolated moment, the still photograph can only be one point on Freytag’s pyramid or any other narrative structure. In the case of “Saigon, 1968” described above, the reader sees only the absolute climax of the story, the moment at which the two characters come into deadly conflict. In the case of “Migrant Mother, 1936” also described above, the reader sees only the exposition. There, one is 261

introduced to the characters and a tiny bit of their environment. From these isolated points on the triangle, the reader or viewer implies the rest of many possible stories, or from where the characters have come and what brought them into the conflict—as in “Saigon, 1968”—or to where they might be going and what conflicts they will face— as in “Migrant Mother, 1936.” As this author and others (Ranta 2013; Steiner 2004; Kafalenos 2001, 1996; Lessing 1853) argue, the rest of the stories are inventions, created through real-world experiences, what has been learned or known already about the situations they represent, or what may simply and baselessly be presumed. The photograph is an implicit, emergent story. At first blush, this idea of an implicit narrative may seem as a condition only of nonverbal media, such as painting, sculpture, photography, and others that—as isolated discrete pieces rather than a series as in a comic book or photographic essay— do not convey a chain of events over time. These media forms, however, might better be understood as one end of a spectrum in which all storytelling forms contain gaps. Even in the real-time experience of life as a narrative, some elements not directly experienced are implied or assumed as the reader creates an understanding of experience. If real-time experience is one end of a spectrum spread between information-rich stories and sparse stories, then film arguably lies in the middle as a form understood as being a narrative. With a few rare exceptions such as Logistics, a 37-day-long real-time experimental film (Magnusson and Andersson 2012), traditional narrative films construct a chain of events in compressed time, the archetype of which is the montage editing pioneered by Sergei Eisenstein in the 1920s. To compress the time represented in film, a novel, a game, or comic, gaps in the story must be filled by our imaginations or experiential contextualization. As David Bordwell argued, “narration is better understood as the organization of a set of cues for the construction of a story” (1985, 62). Discussing the distinct lack of time passing in a still photograph, Marshall McLuhan (1964, 188) wrote, “It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time.” However, for professional photographers such as this author, who spent 30 years as an international photojournalist, this literal interpretation of photographic communication is simplistic. As a still photograph implies a point on a narrative arc such as Freytag’s pyramid, it also implies the passage of time through several important photographic techniques: frozen action, blurred motion, and layered content.

Action When a reader opens the sports section of any news website, the action of the recent or currently unfolding game is documented with dramatic images of players frozen midair, faces grimacing with athletic strain, sweat beads breaking free from furrowed brows. The classic sports action photograph (Figure 19.3) demonstrates the power of frozen action to communicate drama. Yet footballers do not levitate. People 262

understand their relationship to earthly physics and though the players appear to float in midair, the reader knows this is a slice of a continuum. As such, the actions that lead up to the captured moment and away from it are imagined on a timeline. A brief narrative is reconstructed.

Blurred Motion Humans have a remarkable capacity to reconstruct reality from sparse clues. In the early days of photography, long exposure times resulted in photographs of blurred action as the subject moved too quickly to be captured with acute fidelity. This compromise soon became a tool for photographers to demonstrate speed and motion in their images. A person’s remarkable ability to recognize the human form from unclear 263

details allows these photographs to be read as a demonstration of speed and motion (Figure 19.4). As with frozen action, blurred motion becomes a clue for the reader that time is unfolding in the scene if not in the actual photograph. Again, a brief narrative is reconstructed.

Layered Content The artist’s effort to escape the temporal bonds of the canvas long predate the photographer’s efforts at the same. Medieval and early Renaissance painters often battled the constraints of the still image by incorporating multiple moments from an unfolding story on one canvas, as Wendy Steiner (2004, 161–162) points out in analysis of such works as Benozzo Gozzoli’s The Dance of Salome and the Beheading of St. John the Baptist. A subject may appear multiple times at different points in the work, each appearance representing a different moment in the narrative. Though this is certainly possible to accomplish in photography, its execution requires extensive work either in a controlled scene or in digital post-production. That added labor makes this a rare technique in photography. Photographers are more often drawn to the instantaneous nature of the medium, preferring images captured in a single snap as pioneered by the Eastman Kodak company in the late nineteenth century with its famous slogan “You push the button and we do the rest” (Jaeger 2007, 6). The snapshot ethos of photography never impeded many photographers from the 264

pursuit of a narrative within a single frame, however. Using a technique often described as layering, a street photographer or photojournalist such as this author will simultaneously watch the foreground, middle ground, and background of a scene for individual moments to occur. When captured this layering of moments that each could be good individual photographs provide greater complexity for the reader of the photo. As the reader’s gaze moves from one moment in the photograph to another, those simultaneous moments seem to unfold in series as if they were different points in a process or a narrative arc. In the author’s image above (Figure 19.5), the multiple individual characters are captured at different stages of the process of collecting water from a community pump in Burkina Faso. A man arrives by bicycle for a turn at the pump (left), a woman waits for her turn (right) as another jumps into the air while pumping (center). At rear, another walks away with a fresh load of water. The complete process is represented in a single frame through multiple characters; the time spent by readers examining the image lengthens; and the illusion of time passing is achieved.

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Photographs in the Transmedia Narrative Historically, photographs have most often been used to illustrate a point raised in another media form. This chapter is no exception to that example as the images used here simply repeat visually the points made in the text. To see photographs simply as illustrations is simplistic, however. The photograph is capable of complex and compelling narratives, delivered almost instantaneously to readers. Though the images that accompany this chapter do illustrate points made in the text, they also present their own self-contained narratives that diverge from the core message of the text. They are their own stories. In entertainment transmedia storytelling, the still photograph is a rarely used media form. The core stories of Star Wars or any of a number of Marvel Comics franchises are predominantly told through cinema, video, comics, and games. Still photographs are used more sparingly and may only appear on a child’s lunch box or in promotional materials like movie posters, advertisements, or media reviews of a film. However, these limited uses can still be powerful storytelling tools, pulling fans into the storyworld through strong character development, a hint at a pending turn of plot, or simply a dramatic moment. One notable example is Vanity Fair photographer Annie Leibowitz’ 1999 group portrait of the cast of the HBO drama The Sopranos positioned in an ekphrastic reflection of DaVinci’s The Last Supper (Wolcott and Leibovitz 1999). In the image, character Tony Soprano sits at center in the position of DaVinci’s Jesus. From his right, his genetic family looks on and from his left his crime family. The image is only one of uncountable pop culture references to the famous Renaissance painting (Plumb 2012), all of which use the familiar image and its farreaching cultural implications to connect a current story with it, as drama or satire. In this case, Tony Soprano’s character conflicts and complexities are cast in a disturbing light and motivations of other characters are echoed. The greatest storytelling strength of the image, however, is its shocking irreverence, preparing the reader of the photograph for the drama, brutality, and intrigue of the television series. It is not a simple entry point to the storyworld, but a story in its own right. While still photographs may be relatively rare in transmedia entertainment, they are much more influential in its journalistic or documentary equivalents. In these genres of storytelling, the still photograph performs an important role of visually documenting fleeting moments in circumstances where the reporters must be fleet of foot, where subtlety and a not-intimidating presence may be necessary, or for publications designed for a speedy read, such as newspapers, many magazines. In journalism and documentary storytelling, still photographs also provide the reader with a chance to stare at a moment that may be critical in the cultural, political or societal order, as was Eddie Adams’ image discussed at the beginning of the chapter. One transmedia organization notable for its use of still photographs is the National Geographic Society. Though it started as a scholarly journal, the National Geographic magazine revolutionized the publication of photography early in the twentieth century. 266

By the 1930s, the photographs had supplanted text as the central storytelling form. Photographers working for the society are considered to be among the world’s best, and their images rich with storytelling even when separated from the rest of the publication’s content. In the 1960s, the National Geographic Society began its transformation into a transmedia empire that now publishes content on more than 40 different digital, analogue, and brick-and-mortar media channels (Moloney 2015, 80). Through nearly all of those channels, the still photograph continues to be a central media form, holding central stage in the printed magazines and mobile apps, standing alone in books and gallery displays, and fueling conversation around Society-wide reporting topics such as 2016’s national parks series and 2014’s “The Future of Food” Project. The “Future of Food” published 3,555 still photographs between April and December, 2014, and included both images made by Society professionals and amateurs who contributed their work when invited. Despite its long-running prowess with the finely crafted images that grace its magazine pages, the National Geographic Society also effectively feeds the Instagram social media service with images like those found in the magazine as well as behind-the-scenes looks at the production of the content. Photographers on assignment are now given access to the @NatGeo account to post images from the field as they report their stories. Readers could follow along as if they were in the field, and their excitement for the final story was fueled early. Social network analysis of the “Future of Food” project revealed that the National Geographic Society’s 131 Instagram posts attracted more social interaction and influence than the polished pages of the magazine (Moloney 2015, 89). By comparison, when commercial film producers use Instagram they add to the storyworld with remix and reinterpretation of scenes in the movie, and only rarely with material that is additive to the storyworld. They are platforms for marketing rather than continued storytelling.

Conclusion It is simple to understand that photographs are one of many media forms a producer might use in a transmedia project. One produces transmedia to reach new audiences in multiple ways, reaching people through varying interests, tastes, contexts, learning styles, and allowing for different engagement depths. It is less simple to understand a photograph as more than an illustration of a point made in another form, such as text, lecture, museum or gallery display. The photograph is a self-contained story. It works independently of its companion media forms as much as it complements them. For producers and critics of transmedia storytelling in any genre, the critical thinking about photographs must not only be how they interact with other media forms used in a project, but how they are also autonomous stories, capable of rich, immersive narrative, fine detail, and visual fact presentation. In this chapter the author examined how a still photograph can imply the passage of time even though it may be frozen by a fast shutter or let blur with a slow one. Though 267

it may be only a thin slice of the flow of time, a photograph can occupy any of the points on a narrative structure like Freytag’s pyramid. When its composition becomes skillfully complex, that single photograph may hold many points on the pyramid within its frame. The frozen moment of peak action also informs the reader in ways that other visual media cannot. Eddie Adams’ “Saigon, 1968” forces itself into memory and emotion not only through its socio-political context but because we can stare at its horrifying moment for as long as we can stomach it. Once seen, that image will never let go of the viewer’s memory. It is the climax of a drama that the reader reconstructs with every seeing of the image. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan: It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it allows one to see the invisible, stare at a decisive moment and reconstruct its narrative through both real and imagined experiences.

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Wolcott, James, and Annie Leibovitz. 1999. “The 1999 Hall of Fame.” Vanity Fair, December. Zelizer, Barbie. 2010. About to Die: How News Images Move the Public. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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20 Transmedia Indie Creativity Outside Hollywood Erica Negri

On January 25, 1999, a tiny independent horror film produced and directed by two unknown filmmakers from the University of Central Florida School of Film was presented at Sundance Film Festival. The film, actually a feature, was made to look like a low-budget documentary about three film students who on October 1994 got lost in the woods in Maryland while shooting a documentary about a local legend, intentionally blurring the border between fiction and reality. During the festival, flyers were handed out asking viewers to come forward with any information about the “missing” students who were the protagonists of the film. Produced on a mere US$60,000 budget, the film grossed more than US$140,000,000 in domestic sales, over US$248,639,000 worldwide. That film was The Blair Witch Project, which today is regarded as one of the of first and most groundbreaking transmedia storytelling projects developed outside the mainstream arena. The film managed to create a fictionalized reality, presenting itself as the actual recorded evidence of a ghostly urban legend, exposing the disappearance of three people and then screening it in theaters nationwide. It spread like wildfire by word of mouth and the style of the film was so realistic and visually intriguing that the audience all around the world started to debate over whether the film was a real-life documentary or a work of fiction. To reach this goal, all the textualities in and around the film had to work together to convey the illusion of reality: the locations, the directing, the acting—mostly based on improvisation, the casting, the found footage packaging as well as the tie-ins. It was, of course, the early days of the Internet and Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, the creators of the film, sensed that somewhere in the Internet was the key to reaching viewers in an unprecedented and engaging way. As such, during the summer of 1999 the www.blairwitch.com website was launched, which included fake police reports, “newsreel-style” interviews of the parents, the biography of each of the missing students, a complete mythology of the appearances of the Blair Witch and pictures of the objects found in the woods, such as the camera, the tapes, and the diary of one of the protagonists. Everything looked extremely real and, above all, it was all directly accessible by the audience, who could explore a variety of different

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textualities that went deeper into and expanded the mythology and the storyworld through the web. But what made this particular strategy peculiar in comparison to other marketing approaches of the era was that, since the beginning, the website was not intended as a paratext or a merely promotion-based platform, but rather as a text with a diegetic function, a place where the audience could find content that would carry on the story beyond the end credits of the film. The website was conceived as part of the story itself; it expanded the story of the Blair Witch in astonishing ways considering we were in a pre-social networks and pre-YouTube era. As Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton point out, the website for the film set a mythical yet highly realistic storyworld that created a backdrop against which the film was just one specific artifact. Taken together, the film and the website were constructed to interrelate with each other so that each segment added to the experience of discovering more about this particular mythical storyworld, allowing the audience to become immersed within an active search for information. Adhering to Jenkins’ later theorization of transmedia storytelling (2006), then, both segments added to the experience, but audiences did not have to experience all of the mediated Blair Witch modes in order to appreciate the story (Mathijs and Sexton 2011). What’s more, in the September of the same year, another diegetic expansion was published: the book The Blair Witch Project: A Dossier, which looked like a real police report, with unedited pictures, interviews, and newspaper articles regarding the missing students, treating the premise of the film as a real fact. Several other books and graphic novels followed, artifacts that similarly connected to the backstory of the film and the mythology of the Blair Witch, all of which led to the release of the sequel Blair Witch 2 (2000), a film that was not as successful, and which was most recently followed by the Blair Witch reboot (2016). In effect, even though the Blair Witch intellectual property (IP) gradually became increasingly confined to a franchise logic—not to mention influencing those franchise logics— the creators of the original film clearly had been driven by an innovative idea: that since they were not financially supported by a film studio, a transmedia approach which integrated promotional communication and narrative could be the key to its success and to finding an audience. They opted for an expanded narrative strategy, distributing different textualities on different platforms with the aim of enriching the storyworld, and, importantly, increasing the credibility of the narrative. And that was before “transmedia storytelling” was even theorized or studied. For the purposes of this chapter, it is important to note that such a winning strategy required a very low budget but a high level of control from an authorial perspective; being independent from a major studio was itself key to the filmmakers being able to achieve the goal of creating a story that was far bigger than the film itself and yet consistent in all its components.

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Contextualizing the Independent Approach to Transmedia Storytelling Since the 1990s, the process of digitalization and media convergence has had a strong impact on modes of production, distribution, and reception for narrative content, both at a mainstream and indie level. Phenomena such us the application of transmedia storytelling practices, the hybridization of forms of discourse, the integration of interactive elements within traditionally linear narratives, and the growing importance of world-building as part of the creative process all started to impact different levels of media production and the media industry’s approach to generating new textual forms, namely: • • • • •

Alternate Reality Games (e.g., Perplex City); multiplatform IPs with a high-level of interactivity (e.g., Lost); transmedia film franchises (e.g., The Matrix); video games mixing game and narration (e.g., Assassin’s Creed); independent films using transmediality both as a narrative asset and as a marketing tool (e.g., The Blair Witch Project); • pioneering interactive properties (e.g., Collapsus); • transmedia narratives spanning across several media forms (e.g., Collider). In the light of the intrinsic semiotic variety that defines the post-digital media environment, Jason Mittell points out the necessity to distinguish between an ideal form of balanced transmedia in which no medium or text serves a primary role over the others and where texts form a single narrative, and the most commonly applied model of unbalanced transmedia, characterized by a clearly identifiable core text and a number of peripheral transmedia extensions that might be more or less integrated into the narrative whole, and that expand or further explore the storyworld. Arguably most examples of contemporary transmedia projects fall somewhere on a spectrum between balance and unbalance (Mittell 2015). Echoing Mittell’s sentiments, Christy Dena distinguishes between two main typologies of transmedia objects: the first, called intracompositional transmedia, refers to a collection of mono-media stories that interlace synergistically to build a whole storyworld; this is the case with many mainstream transmedia IPs like Heroes or Lost. The second typology, defined intercompositional transmedia, refers to a single story told through a collection of media and texts. While the first typology generally involves a self-contained story for each medium, meaning that it is not necessary for the audience to go through all of the textualities in order to understand the story, the second typology implies that the story can be fully understood only by consuming all of the texts (Dena 2011). This is what Geoffrey Long calls transfiction: In its purest form, a transmedia franchise engages in transfiction, wherein the first chapter is told in one media type, then leads straight into a second chapter in a second media type, which then cliffhangers straight into a third chapter in a 272

third media type. (Long 2007) Hence, a transfiction, or transmedia narrative, differs from a transmedia franchise owing to three key characteristics. A transfiction is: • retro-active, i.e., a transfiction is thought to be transmedia since the beginning and it is designed accordingly (Davidson 2010); • centripetal, i.e., it is made up of several textualities that are not necessarily expansions of a central main text, such as a film or television show (Mittell 2015); • transcendent, i.e., it is aimed at creating a new unity that transcends the singularity of each text purposely distributed on different platforms (Jenkins 2009).

The Industry Impact on Indie and Mainstream Transmedia Production The emergence of transmedia storytelling as a cultural phenomenon with a variety of objectifications and discourses—spanning transmedia franchises, transfiction, ARG, and so forth—cannot be analyzed without framing such forms within the specific industry contexts that generated them. With that in mind, it is important to note that, since the franchise has become the central paradigm of the contemporary Hollywood film industry, the business logic that has guided the creation and distribution of all media content (significantly called “properties” or IPs) entails huge limitations, mainly because the possibility to experiment and hybridize narrative forms is so closely contingent on an ability to generate multiple sources of income. Paradoxically, the chance to experiment has proven to be greater inside the independent film industry, where less money has come to mean fewer restrictions. In fact, most of today’s Hollywood-produced digital and cross-media outputs appear to be almost exclusively based either on the duplication of the same content on different media assets—through, for example, practices of intertextual adaptation, licensing and the creation of paratextual extensions—and/or the extensive exploitation of the story universe of a particular IP through the production of narrative extensions, spin-offs and reboots, where the ultimate “goal” is always essentially commercial. This model is arguably the case with 90 percent of Hollywood franchises, including Marvel and DC superhero movies and successful action-based IPs such as Fast & Furious, Terminator, Pirates of the Caribbean, Madagascar, and so forth. It is clear that, even within projects that include transmedia storytelling practices, what prevails in Hollywood is the commonplace model of the aforementioned unbalanced transmedia, with a clearly identifiable core text and a number of peripheral transmedia extensions that might be more or less integrated into the narrative whole (Mittell 2015). And thus if it is true that practices of transmedia storytelling are applied mostly within Hollywood franchises as a commerce-driven model, then a claim can certainly 273

be made that those practices are rarely aimed at the creation of proper “transmedia narratives,” but instead occupy the status of forms of “narrative transmediality,” with an arguably “purer” transmedia approach more commonly being applied to marketing and communication (Negri 2015). To explain, this distinction is due to the fact that most production companies and film studios are part of media conglomerates horizontally and vertically integrated, whose objective is the commercial exploitation of the IPs on the largest number of markets. For the IP owners, then, the goal is to increase the profit through diversity, extending the commercial profitability of the franchise and creating strong feelings of identity and ownership in its consumers (Lemke 2004). Hence, the predilection is for practices of cross-media extension and exploitation of the IP brands though licensing deals aimed at the creation of content and products for different media devices and different markets, but without pursuing an integration at a narrative level. Moreover, even when a transmedia storytelling approach is fully implemented within the mainstream, commercial media environment, the studios tend to produce a consolidated canon of “official” texts that in fact tend to discourage or discredit unauthorized expansion or speculation by fans (see Scott 2013). Within such a structured industrial model, transmediality will always presuppose a central text (usually a film or television series), aimed at defining the canon and launching the property, while the other texts will serve the purpose of expanding that nucleus and capitalizing on other markets. The independent film sector, on the other hand, even though it appears to be economically penalized since it does not benefit from the financial security and the communicative force given by a strong distribution partner such as a Hollywood studio, has always appeared to be a more fertile ground for the production of pioneering transmedia projects. This is due to the fact that, as stated before, being outside the studios’ sphere of influence quite often translates into having fewer limitations and constraints, both from an economic (funding, business models, distribution channels) and from a creative point of view. For example, it is within this indie context that in recent years the most innovative transfiction projects have emerged, such as Collapsus, Alpha 0.7, Pandemic 1.0, and Final Punishment, to mention a few. Collapsus is a transmedia project directed by Tommy Pallotta and produced by Submarine Channel, with the Dutch broadcaster VPRO, which combines animation, interactive fiction and documentary. This story follows how the impending energy crisis affects ten young people, while international powers battle with political dissension and a fearful population during transition from Fossil fuel to alternative fuels. Collapsus’ pioneering approach lays in the will to blend different forms of discourse—video blogs, interactive maps, fictional newscasts, live action footage, and animation—with strong elements of interactivity in order to immerse the player in the narrative. The project requires the player to access additional information and interact with the story, making decisions about the storyworld’s energy production at both a 274

national and global scale. Alpha 0.7, meanwhile, is a transmedia narrative that takes shape through various media platforms, composing a multi-tiered structure. Developed as a transmedia property from the outset, Alpha 0.7 describes a transparent society where fear of terror attacks has led to personal freedom being eroded away in the name of homeland security. It asks the question: “What if all that data we share so readily, ends up in the wrong hands? What if it is used against us?” At the heart of the project there was a sixepisode fantasy mini-series aired in 2010 on the German regional channel SWR. At the same time, the story was enriched by an Alternate Reality Game, a radio show called “SWR 2 Jungle,” narrative podcasts and various other forms of content available on the Internet. Pandemic 1.0, by comparison, is a transmedia experience created by Lance Weiler and presented at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011. The goal was to provide a more engaging experience of the storyworld, to test new business models and study the social interactions among the participants involved. Medic Mobile and FreedomLab collaborated on the project by modeling various types of game interactions in the hope of gaining insights into how narrative elements develop in social environments. Pandemic’s immersive experience took off with a short film, which was part of the official selection of the Festival and told the story of two brothers whose mother had been infected by a dangerous virus. The experience continued out of the screening room through a comic, a scavenger hunt happening through various devices, online and offline contents, a website, and a series of tweets. Final Punishment, finally, is an interactive transmedia thriller produced by beActive for OI, the main Brazilian telecom, telling the story of eight detained women imprisoned in a high-security penitentiary in Brazil; when the security system breaks down, they start to be the object of a series of horrible and mysterious murders. Nominated at the International Digital Emmy Awards 2010, Final Punishment consists of an online television series and an Alternate Reality Game that stimulated the participation of the viewers to free the prisoners through several mobile and online content. What is notable about all of these independent productions, besides the higher level of interactivity, is the fact that they are balanced and centripetal transmedia formats, characterized by high integration and consistency among all of the texts, with the aim to create a single narrative. To mark these two distinct approaches, Andrea Phillips talks about the idea of “West Coast transmedia” versus “East Coast transmedia.” West Coast-style transmedia, more commonly known as Hollywood or franchise-based transmedia, consists of multiple big pieces of media: feature films, video games, etc., all of which are grounded in big-business commercial storytelling practices, with the stories in these projects interwoven, but lightly. In this model, each piece of media can be consumed on its own and audiences will still come away with the idea that they were given a complete story. On the other end of the spectrum, East Coast transmedia (and 275

European transmedia) tends to be more interactive and much more web-centric. It thus overlaps heavily with the traditions of independent film, theater, and interactive art. These East Coast projects make heavy use of social media, and often run over a limited period of time rather than persisting forever. The plot in some cases is so tightly woven between different media that you might not fully understand what is going on if you do not actively seek out multiple pieces of the story (Phillips 2012). Another peculiarity of the East Coast approach to transmedia is the search for modes of audience participation, which takes place in three modalities: • through the active exploration of the different texts and content that compose the project, skipping through several media platforms (participation as exploration); • through the interaction with other participants (participation as social interaction); • through the interaction with the narrative itself (participation as world-building).

Beyond Franchise: Collider, an Indie European Transfiction A particularly interesting case study of an independent transfiction that emerged within a European context is Collider, a transmedia property developed and produced by Nuno Bernardo’s Irish-Portuguese company beActive. Collider constitutes an example of a virtuous accommodation of narrative and economic bids within a non-Hollywood multiplatform audiovisual project. As a validation of this fact, it is significant to report that Collider was nominated for several prizes, including a Digital Emmy Award in March 2014. Marketed as “Terminator meets Lost,” Collider is a science-fiction multiplatform project that combines television and web series, mobile games, and online graphic novels available on the App Store and Google Play, which offer exclusive access to both pre-series storylines and the feature film. The narrative world of Collider revolves around six characters, coming from different years and places, who find themselves mysteriously transported to a postapocalyptic future of which they know nothing and in which apparently they are the only humans left alive. Their aim is to find out how they got there, discover what happened to the Earth, and go back in time to save the world; all of this without getting themselves killed by the mysterious creatures that roam outside the hotel in which they woke up. The first point of entry into the Collider storyworld are six online comic books, one devoted to each character within the story, which each cover their backstories before they jump to the future, revealing their past life and their unsolved issues. The subsequent web-series, featuring Peter Ansay, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) scientist, covers the inciting incident of the story, describing his decision to sabotage the Large Hadron Collider after he learns about the dangers of the experiment. This sabotage attempt will result in the creation of the wormhole that will transport the protagonists in time and space. Moreover, Peter’s blog is available on 276

Wattpad.com, an online platform for self-publishing. Next, the mobile game (Collider Code Breaker) is set in the future and allows the player to act like one of the characters, who are trying to reach the Hadron Collider, unlocking doors and finding the right path beneath the city of Geneva. BeActive’s key concern was to make all of these various story elements selfcontained and, at the same time, to make them complementary to each other, like different pieces of the same puzzle, in order to make the full experience much richer. Since the beginning, Collider was conceived as a transmedia narrative combining different texts to create a distributed diegesis that meets the audience where the audience is (on smartphones, tablets, computers, theater) and exploiting the opportunities of immersion and interactivity offered by digital assets in order to generate a loyal fan base deeply involved with the property. The peculiarity of Collider, however, is that it looks like a hybrid between the multiplatform franchise model typical of commercial Hollywood properties and the independent production model, which, as already stated, implies the absence of economic strength and a major promotional or distribution backing. In this case, the implementation of transmedia storytelling practices aimed to create a loyal fan base that progressively engaged with the narrative world and which was encouraged to proceed from one medium to another in search of content, but within a framework that did not allow for direct monetization (the content was available for free online). At the same time, the project aimed to expand its potential audience as much as possible, creating content for different market niches: a comic book reader is not necessarily an app-gamer or a viewer of web series, but those who discover a property within their own niche are more likely to move to a different media platform (one that they might not naturally approach) in order to find more material from the same fictional universe. But unlike most transmedia Hollywood franchises, the narrative structure of Collider was distributed and balanced—that is to say, it lacked a central predominant text defining the canon of the entire narrative world, but that canon was the result of the sum of several texts that worked synergistically to create a single narrative track (or storyline), retraced in its entirety only by moving from one platform to another. In these terms, Collider configured itself as a bona fide example of transfiction. Central to this notion of transfiction is the way in which a given transfictional text is intended to reinforce multiple sets of content by placing them within a larger narrative. This point is confirmed by BeActive’s decision to create unique and original content for each platform utilized, planting specific pieces of information in each on these platforms so that the viewer is naturally inclined to want to explore the other textualities in order to know more about the narrative world. Ironically, however, it should also be observed that, although the film was the text within this narrative world that required the largest production effort and investment, the wider narrative and distributive structure of Collider remained essentially horizontal. That is to say that the various media and content that the project supported 277

were in fact deliberately placed on the same “level.” In fact, Nuno Bernardo’s goal with the project was to create a story universe and then divide that universe in different, but self-contained, pieces and distribute them to each media form, namely in order to connect with the audience and fans on all of the different media that an audience would make use of during an average day. In this way, the story can follow the audience and be there with the audience, whatever they are doing, whether browsing on the Internet, using a mobile phone or just reading a book … So each of the elements of Collider work as stand-alone pieces, but if the audience watch, read and play all of them they will have a better understanding of the world we created and connect at a more engaging level with the characters and the story. (Author interview, 2013) Another specificity of Collider concerns its strong internal consistency on different levels: narrative, authorship, and temporality, which were all arguably much stronger than with many Hollywood-based cross-media IPs. From an authorship point of view, Collider’s internal consistency resulted from the presence of a single creator responsible not only for setting the canon in the central content, but also for developing, producing and distributing all of the extensions. No licensing was involved in the creation of the fictional world. Comics, video games, web series, movies and all forms of content and paratextual materials were developed and produced by the beActive team, under the supervision of Nuno Bernardo, who maintained direct control over each step of the creative process. As Nuno Bernardo puts it, the advantage to develop, produce and distribute a transmedia project independently is that we don’t have to respond to a major studio or financer that, for the fact of having invested capital on the project, has the right to interfere with the strategy planned by the story architect. (Author interview, 2013) In essence, the spirit of transmediality is about collaboration, or at least multiple pieces of content being farmed out across different divisions within a media corporation, with multiple sets of (often competing) authorships at play. Bernando’s point is thus a simple one—that the creative freedom of independent production is arguably better suited to the needs of transmedia storytelling. This degree of internal consistency derived also from the control of the producer over the roll-out plan, which was designed strategically to enhance each specific piece of content within the project at the same time. As mentioned previously, the decision to release first the digital content, which was more interactive and less economically demanding (comics, video games, and web series) and only after the traditional ones (film/television), was highly strategic as it contributed to the gradual creation of a fan 278

base, in anticipation of the theatrical release. All in all, then, Collider stands out from other, more commercial cases of transmedia storytelling on account of a few specificities—namely, a balanced and horizontal structure; an intercompositional configuration; a high consistency on the levels of narrative, authorship, and temporality; the absence of redundant content; the positioning of all texts on the same level (no extensions); and the absence of licensing deals. These particular specificities thus work to differentiate Collider from the traditional Hollywood transmedia IPs, characterizing it as a genuine transmedia narrative, as it does not exploit different media as mere means of distribution for purely promotional content (like in most Hollywood licensing-based franchises), nor does it not conceive of the different textualities that make up the storyworld as extensions of a core text, but instead builds a balanced, non-centrifugal, and intertextual set of media content in which the principles originally postulated by Henry Jenkins (2006) are fully realized.

Conclusion Digitalization and the proliferation of new portable technology has profoundly altered the media landscape, altogether working to produce a context that is characterized by cultural and economic convergences that are reshaping the experiences and textualities of media. This digital shift has also accelerated the challenges faced with researchers working within the fields of traditional semiotic and narratological research, and has done so by calling into question, on the one hand, the cultural and cognitive practices of interaction with the media and reception of media content, and, on the other hand, the value and the semiotic identity of that media content, and the relative narrative structures around them. As Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp point out, we find ourselves in the middle of an era of “narrative chaos,” in which traditional narrative structures prove inadequate to the emergent media forms, while the relationship between these forms and the audience keeps changing. It is in this situation of narrative chaos that experimentations and new approaches to the art of storytelling have started to emerge, in the attempt to conciliate narrative forms and digital technologies (Rieser and Zapp 2002). Transmedia storytelling is one of these attempts. Ideally, all texts involved in a transmedia storytelling process should be put on the same level, nullifying the distinction between texts and paratexts, as well as between central textualities and extensions. However, throughout this chapter I have suggested that the economic and industrial conditions in which Hollywood-based commercial transmedia projects operate unavoidably affects the discursive structure as well as the intertextual nature of those projects—arguably for the worse. In particular, the logic of profit that drives the film and television business, especially in Hollywood, influences the role and use of narrative extensions, leading to them often being treated as part of branding or franchise strategies. This commercialism implies the prevalence of unbalanced 279

transmedia structures characterized by a main item of central content and a number of “lesser” media extensions, which may be more or less integrated into the main narrative. Consequently, the commercial logic guiding the production of such audiovisual content in Hollywood seems to compromise the possibility of creating proper transmedia narratives, as the textualities will never be at the same level, with one medium always being dominant, central, defining the canon and launching the property, with the role of the other items of media content being to merely “expand” that core for primarily commercial reasons. Conversely, the independent film sector arguably presents far fewer restrains on transmedia storytelling practices from a commercial, financial, narrative, and aesthetic point of view, proving a less vitiated environment to study the peculiarities of transmedia narrative forms. It is within this independent context, in fact, that in recent years several pioneering organic transmedia projects have emerged—projects whose structures have resulted in more balanced manifestations of transmedia storytelling, and whose different texts are more diegetically integrated be being placed on the same level as each other. However, these projects, such as those examples explored throughout this chapter—though while more courageous from the point of view of experimentation than many Hollywood projects—are typically weaker in terms of reach and cultural value, which often leads them to fail in their attempts to engage their audience. This “failure” is especially evident if the engagement strategy of such projects implies high interactivity, as was certainly the case for the aforementioned Collider.

References Davidson, Drew. 2010. Cross-media Communications: An Introduction to the Art of Creating Integrated Media Experiences. Pittsburgh: ETC Press. Dena, Christy. 2011. “Do You Have a Big Stick?” In Hand Made High Tech: Essays on the Future of Books and Reading, edited by Simon Groth, 47–50. Brisbane: Institute for the Future of the Book in Australia. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, Henry. 2009. “The Aesthetics of Transmedia: In Response to David Bordwell (Part one).” Confessions of an Aca Fan, September 10. Accessed June 22, 2017. http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2009/09/the_aesthetics_of_transmedia_i.html Lemke, Jay. 2004. “Critical Analysis Across Media: Games, Franchises, and the New Cultural Order.” Paper presented at the First International Conference on CDA, Valencia, May 5–8. Long, Geoffrey. 2007. “Transmedia Storytelling: Business, Aesthetics and Production at the Jim Henson Company.” Master’s thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mathijs, Ernest, and Jamie Sexton. 2011. Cult Cinema. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Mittell, Jason. 2015. Complex Television: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press. Negri, Erica. 2015. La Rivoluzione Transmediale [The Transmedia Revolution]. Turin: Lindau. Phillips, Andrea. 2012. A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling: How to Captivate and Engage Audiences Across Multiple Platforms. New York: McGraw-Hill. Rieser, Martin, and Andrea Zapp. 2002. New Screen Media: Cinema / Art / Narrative. London: BFI Publishing. Scott, Suzanne. 2013. “Who’s Steering the Mothership? The Role of the Fanboy Auteur in Transmedia Storytelling.” In The Participatory Cultures Handbook, edited by Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs

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PART III

Practices of Transmediality

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21 Transmedia Adaptation Revisiting the No-Adaptation Rule Christy Dena

A long-held view by transmedia theorists and practitioners alike is that adaptation is not part of the phenomenon. While there are those that have argued against this exclusion (Dena 2009; Ruppel 2012), and there has been a softening of the arguments (Jenkins 2011, 2017; O’Flynn 2013; Harvey 2015), the no-adaptation approach has helped many identify and understand the area. Given the consensus regarding excluding adaptation, this chapter investigates the underlying assumptions informing the exclusion and looks at the costs involved. What do we miss when we exclude adaptation from transmedia projects, and is there another way we can distinguish transmedia phenomena? We begin this investigation by revisiting the adaptation exclusion arguments.

The Adaptation Exclusion Arguments In 2003, off the back of attending an industry event with Hollywood and games producers, Jenkins shared his manifesto of transmedia storytelling. This beginning piece, not coincidentally, establishes the exclusion of adaptation: We need a new model for co-creation-rather than adaptation-of content that crosses media. The current licensing system typically generates works that are redundant (allowing no new character background or plot development), watered down (asking the new media to slavishly duplicate experiences better achieved through the old), or riddled with sloppy contradictions (failing to respect the core consistency audiences expect within a franchise). These failures account for why sequels and franchises have a bad reputation. Nobody wants to consume a steady diet of second-rate novelizations! (Jenkins 2003) Jenkins continued with these sentiments in 2006 with the release of his popular book, explaining how transmedia storytelling is unlike the current licensing system, which “typically generates works that are redundant” (Jenkins 2006, 105). Any composition that does not make a distinctive and valuable contribution does not offer a “new level 283

of insight and experience” (2006, 105). Indeed, anything that allows “no new character background or plot development” is therefore “redundant” (2006, 105). Redundancy, Jenkins summarized, “burns up fan interest and causes franchises to fail” (2006, 96). After the book, Jenkins continued to argue against adaptation while noting that some considered adaptation transmedia: “for many of us, a simple adaptation may be ‘transmedia’ but it is not ‘transmedia storytelling’ because it is simply re-presenting an existing story rather than expanding and annotating the fictional world” (Jenkins 2009). Jenkins’ MIT student at the time, Geoffrey Long, continued the delineation: “Retelling a story in a different media type is adaptation, while using multiple media types to craft a single story is transmediation” (Long 2007, 22, original emphasis); and Aaron Smith likewise felt the “distinction must be made between transmedia extensions and adaptations” (Smith 2009, 24). In her 2011 book on the topic, Elizabeth Evans likewise corroborates the idea that “[t]ransmedia elements do not involve the telling of the same events on different platforms; they involve the telling of new events from the same storyworld” (Evans 2011, 27, original emphasis). Evans argues there are three key characteristics that, while appear to varying degrees, distinguish transmedia: narrative, authorship, temporality. They represent the “key ways in which texts become transmedia, rather than function as marketing, spin-offs, or adaptations” (2011, 28). Indeed, we see this sentiment with the majority of academic works published in the years that followed. For example, Carlos Alberto Scolari argues that transmedia storytelling “is not just an adaptation from one medium to another” (Scolari 2009, 587). Mélanie Bourdaa notes that [w]hen it comes to narration, transmedia storytelling is richer than crossmedia adaptations since it develops a whole universe instead of only adapting the same storylines to different platforms. Each platform represents a new entry into the universe and not just the same story. (Bourdaa 2013, 205) The view is not for academics only either, it pervades industry texts on the subject too. Jeff Gomez has discouraged the use of direct adaptations with clients, and on his company website describes transmedia as distinguished from: A “cross-platform” or “cross-media” approach to communications was established in the 1960s and ‘70s, when televised content was repurposed for cable or satellite broadcast, or advertisements were repurposed for print, radio and television … Transmedia is a subset of cross-media in that the story itself is distributed across a variety of media. Each piece of the story feels at least somewhat complete and adds to the audience’s concept of the characters and story world. (Starlight Runner 2017) 284

Tom Dowd, in both his books (Dowd et al. 2013; Dowd 2015), says that “in general we do not think of adaptation as a transmedia process because it implies we’re simply taking a story and presenting it in a different medium” (Dowd 2015, 22). Dowd continues, labelling adaptation a “translation process,” that produces a “derivative work” (2015, 22). Andrea Phillips does not go into detail about what transmedia storytelling is. But after citing Jenkins, does briefly state there are three criteria for transmedia storytelling: multiple media, a single unified story or experience, and avoidance of redundancy between media” (Phillips 2012, 15). Howard Houston writes that unlike transmedia, “a multimedia approach would tell a story in a film and then retell the story in a book novelization and then retell the story yet again in a comic book” (Howard 2013). More recently on the influential Film Courage YouTube channel, Houston explains that it is not just a definition, but “the marketplace has been going for new stuff rather than repurposed content” (Howard 2017a). Alternately, Anne Zeiser quotes Jenkins saying “[d]on’t be too hung up on definitions,” and offers the following salve: “If you set aside semantics, then transmedia can be what you want, as long as it tells a broader story across multiple platforms and engages your project’s audiences in that story” (Zeiser 2015, 20). So while Zeiser does not call out adaptation, your work would only qualify if it tells a broader story. An exception includes Nuno Bernardo, who instead goes straight to the different strategic types of transmedia he uses with no qualification of what constitutes this practice or not (Bernardo 2014). Then there is myself, a practitioner-academic, who argues for adaptation in both my academic (Dena 2009) and industry work, which Marc Ruppel also does with his analysis of repetition effects (Ruppel 2012). Practitioner-academic Colin Harvey cites my argument and further interrogates adaptation and transmedia (Harvey 2015), and Siobhan O’Flynn cites my argument in her epilogue to Linda Hutcheon’s book on adaptation (O’Flynn 2013). More on Harvey and O’Flynn’s thoughts shortly. While the influence of Jenkins as an academic and industry advocate for transmedia storytelling is clear, not all of those who reject adaptation are doing so because they are following suit. The majority of academics and practitioners alike (including those who are both, such as Geoffrey Long), feel that adaptation should not be situated as part of the transmedia phenomenon, and not included in practice. Why?

The Functions of Adaptation Exclusion Before interrogating the stated reasoning put forward for academic exclusion (much of which you have been shown in the previous section), we need to address the function of excluding adaptation from transmedia theory and practice. This is because the greater issue informing the need for adaptation exclusion is an uncontested space: we all agree on there being an issue with understanding. There are genuine concerns about understanding and comprehension of what transmedia is, as a literacy, and a 285

theoretically defined phenomenon. This section looks at the pedagogical and differentiation functions of the no-adaptation argument. You may recall from the earlier quotes, that a common refrain of the no-adaptation argument is to distinguish it from marketing, the usual licensing approach, spin-offs, novelizations, etc. This attempt at differentiation is an important one, as it helps people understand why a new theory has been proposed. Transmedia is a particularly difficult phenomenon to highlight, as people have been employing multiple media platforms for the same storyworld for as long as memory permits. Industry has been doing it for a long time, and so too have independents. Further to this, there are existing, well developed theories that may already address the phenomenon with aplomb. It is the task, therefore, of those proposing a new term, a new area of inquiry, to justify its introduction. Jenkins’ approach is to distinguish transmedia from the “‘business as usual’ projects which are not exploring the expanded potential of transmedia, but are simply slapping a transmedia label on the same old franchising practices we’ve seen for decades” (Jenkins 2011). This is a concern for media studies scholars whose object of study is primarily the “intercompositional,” “West Coast,” or “portmanteau” transmedia phenomenon (Dena 2009; Clark 2011; Pratten 2015 respectively), which means looking at the relationships between mono-medium texts. The no-adaptation rule cuts straight to what is unique. Adaptation has always been happening, but continuations across media less so. Sequels and prequels happen within the same media platform, but not as often cross them. These discussions about the nature of what is different about transmedia help progress the field, especially in the context of those producing theories, conferences, and research groups whose titles could be substituted with “new media” without any perceptible difference. Then there is the pedagogical role of the no-adaptation rule. While I include adaptation as part of transmedia practice, I find describing transmedia as “a story starting in one platform and continuing in another” the most efficient way to explain the concept to laypersons. Likewise, in 2016, Jenkins leveraged the known form of a TV series to explain the concept in an online course for the University of New South Wales (UNSW): “So if we think of transmedia as a system where the story is dispersed not across episodes of a television series, but across multiple media platforms, the story is the total information we assemble by going to those various media platforms” (Jenkins 2016). These descriptions help the student, the newcomer, get the basic concept quickly. So we have three important tasks being performed by the no-adaptation rule: highlighting how there is a different way to approach multiplatform practice, distinguishing it from pervasive industry practices; providing media studies a narratological rationale for introducing a new theory to already advanced conversations on related phenomena, specifically differentiating the area from the established field of adaptation studies; and providing an effective shorthand for newcomers to grasp. What I wish to challenge here, perhaps controversially, is the idea 286

of exclusion being so necessary to achieving these goals that the consequences are considered collateral damage, or worse not considered at all. Let us first address the pedagogical or discursive effectiveness of situating transmedia as an extension rather than an adaptation process. It is effective in what it does. But I consider such an approach to be a gateway rhetoric—where we strategically use language and concepts that help people understand it. It is when scholars and practitioners consider gateway rhetoric the conditio sine qua non of transmedia, we have short-term gains with long-term costs. Gateway rhetoric is meant to leverage progressive disclosure, by “separating information into multiple layers, and only presenting layers that are necessary or relevant” (Lidwell, Holden, and Butler 2003, 154). It will not help, for instance, to explain a film to someone and list all the genres and all the different media forms it can take right at the beginning. But when these handy descriptions are taken as representing the limits of truth about a phenomenon, about a practice, then complexity and the reality of use is lost. Take for example the Producer’s Guild of America’s 2010 guidelines updated to recognize a Transmedia Producer (Producers Guild of America 2010). To be accepted in the Guild, one must have worked on a “Transmedia Narrative Project franchise” that consists of “three (or more) narrative storylines existing within the same fictional universe” (Producers Guild of America 2010). With these simple words, producers of two-screen experiences, for example, are excluded. I voiced these concerns and others in a blog post, and posited that I suspect the three-platform was for pedagogical reasons. Gomez, who was key in developing this much-needed credit, wrote back in my blog comments: To respond to your concerns, the minimum of three in terms of both platforms and storylines was indeed designed as a kind of educational tool to distinguish this form from the standard movie/website mentality that had been driving Hollywood marketing for well over a decade. At the same time, I think it’s an easy enough goal to hit for transmedia producers, since very nearly anything can be counted as a third leg on that stool. (Gomez 2010) While the requirement of three is softened with the realization that perhaps any element can be included, the attempt to invoke strategic understanding with an industrial barrier to entry is concerning. Indeed, practitioner Houston Howard instructs in his book: “Remember, to be industry-compliant you need at least three. I have no idea why they ended up deciding on three, but three is the magic PGA [Producers Guild of America] number for whatever reason” (Howard 2017b, 38, original emphasis). Professional membership, funding, partnerships, and education are all affected when pithy rhetoric becomes codified. As Steven Maras, in his discussion about the historical effects of screenwriting norms “can marginalise other understandings or working with film and produce a narrow conception of the 287

possibilities of the medium” (Maras 2009, 4). Jenkins responds in 2011, noting that the amount of platforms is not an issue for him. Instead it is more how scholars are thinking about media platforms and not the relations between them: I have been troubled by writers who want to reduce transmedia to the idea of multiple media platforms without digging more deeply into the logical relations between those media extensions. So, if you are a guild, it matters deeply that you have a definition which determines how many media are deployed, but for me, as a scholar, that is not the key issue that concerns me. As we think about defining transmedia, then, we need to come back to the relations between media and not simply count the number of the media platforms. (Jenkins 2011) Indeed, within the discourse of the transmedia extension arguments is a concern about comprehension and competency. Jenkins implies it when he states that scholars who do not put a media relations provision in, are not understanding what transmedia is. Harvey states that [w]ith at least one notable exception, most transmedia commentators agree … that retelling a story in a different medium involves a distinct set of creative and consumptive processes that are different from telling a new story set in a consistent storyworld but utilising a different medium. (Harvey 2015, 64) The “notable exception” may be the vocal scholars and practitioners like myself, who argue for adaptation inclusion. But this is a misrepresentation of the pro-adaptation argument and reflects the common belief that people who argue for adaptation do not have a transmedia literacy. It is impossible, the thinking goes, to think adaptation is part of the transmedia phenomenon and understand what transmedia is. Dowd softens the view and acknowledges: there may be times when adapting material may involve just one story within a larger intellectual property universe, so we cannot say that adaptation is never a part of transmedia, just that it cannot be the only approach. If it is, then it does not meet the accepted definition of transmedia storytelling. (Dowd 2015, 22–23) It is true that adaptation has been the default mode of multiplatform use (besides repurposing) in film, TV, theater, literature, and beyond. And so if a practitioner employs adaptation, it is likely they do not realize all platforms can be used for different means; and if a transmedia scholar looks just at adaptations over the centuries, they may be inaccurately ascribing a technique. This returns us to the primary function of the no-adaptation rhetoric: to differentiate the phenomenon. 288

Like the rhetorical tactic, the differentiation approach can have a short-term gain for a long-term cost. The cost comes at differentiating a phenomenon through exclusion. Indeed, the easiest way to describe how something is different is to position it as not being the same. This is quite simply a means-end strategy, where a problem state is compared to the goal state, and then the quickest actions are taken to reach the end (Chi, Glaser, and Rees 1982; Larkin et al. 1980). These arguments also often come with an air of supercession: not only are they different, they are better, replacing what has come before. TV is different to radio, it is better because it has images; games are different to TV, they are better because they are interactive; transmedia is different to franchises, it is better because it extends stories. Such instincts are not limited to media industries. Semiotician Yuri Lotman observed such processes: “Every culture begins by dividing the world into ‘its own’ internal space and ‘their’ external space. How this binary division is interpreted depends on the typology of the culture” (Lotman 1990, 131). The focus on differentiation via exclusion happens quite naturally. It is an efficient way to distinguish something and help someone recognize it. It is an approach, however, that may be facilitated when you seek to differentiate via the traits of an object. A textual or object traits approach is first- and second-order design thinking, as distinct from third- and fourth-order thinking, which is exemplified with thinking of activity and systems (Buchanan 1998, 2001). What does it mean when we view a phenomenon as an object with traits? The connection between understanding things (second-order design) and differentiation via exclusion is made clear through a discussion about how this has had detrimental effects in games (Dena 2017a). Game theorist and journalist Dan Golding, for instance, reviewed the history of video game scholarship and found a textual definition of games became the primary approach to understanding what games are for scholars and practitioners alike (Golding 2013). To Golding, this “notion of configurability has had long-standing repercussions across a significant range of videogame scholarship” (2013, 33). Golding argues that the repercussion is that “it carries with it assumptions and preconceptions that emphasize formal and textual processes to the detriment of experiential factors and the act of play” (Golding 2013, 37). Likewise, Brian Upton, ex-Senior Designer at Playstation, has explained that One of the drawbacks of associating games so closely with interactivity is that it biases design away from stillness. It encourages the construction of games that are action-packed, with lots of short-term business for the player to attend to … And it’s hard to think about the deeper meaning of a play experience if your entire attention is required merely to sustain it. (Upton 2015a, 78) Likewise in transmedia, a whole generation of transmedia practitioners, scholars, and students do not understand why adaptation would be employed. They think that not 289

only is it something you should not do if you identify as studying or working in transmedia, but more so that it is something no one should be doing. This is because throughout the no-adaptation arguments are two repeated claims: that adaptations are redundant and simple retellings.

Debunking the Redundancy and Simple Retelling Arguments Jenkins and many others state there is a reason why adaptations should not be used: they are redundant. This has a strategic impact in that “[r]edundancy burns up fan interest and causes franchises to fail” (Jenkins 2006, 96). Unfortunately, despite there being no proof offered that audiences find adaptations redundant, this argument is echoed by many. To refute this claim, consider first the popularity of adaptations. If we look only at the ticket sales of feature films, as they have high cost of production compared to a book or graphic novel, and even many TV shows, this would give us a good idea as to whether an adaptation is of economic value. From 1995 to 2016, the top-grossing movie for each year is from an existing media property (Nash Information Service 2017). Juxtapose this with the stat that between 2005 and 2014, 39 percent of the top movies released were truly original (Follows 2015). So from this we can see that yes, adaptations do make money (people are buying tickets), and they are not just popular because there are no other options for consumers. Indeed, over one-third of feature films are truly original. Interestingly, we have actually seen an increase of “intracompositional,” “East Coast,” “complex portmanteau transmedia” (Dean 1997; Clark 2011; Pratten 2015 respectively) utilizing existing media properties, as exemplified by the 2012 Emmyaward-winning webisode and social media adaptation of Pride and Prejudice: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (LBD). Since LBD, the variously labeled “transmedia literary adaptations” (Lockwood 2017, 5) and “social media fictions and distributed adaptations” (Berryman 2017) have seen over 80 productions adapted from public domain novels and plays (Lockwood 2017, 10). But there is another claim that transmedia adaptations are for new audiences, and so do not qualify as adaptations (there is no redundancy if you are experiencing the work for the first time) (Harvey 2015, 91; Lockwood 2017). The strategy behind this approach would be one of audience acquisition, not retention. So why invoke an existing property if you don’t want fans of that property? Internally it saves ideation time, but in terms of audience strategy it is a way to facilitate the decision-making process for consumers who are engaging in “limited problem solving” (LPS) (Howard 1977, 306). A LPS scenario is when the consumer doesn’t want to expend too much effort in their decision-making, and so the known brand of an existing property assists the process. In other words, the familiar nature of the literary work being adapted provides consumer appeal. But this still doesn’t explain the exclusion of fans. One way we can test whether existing fans are targeted, whether retention is part of the strategy, is through an analysis of fidelity. If these transmedia literary adaptations 290

were for new audiences, then fidelity would be less of an issue. No one would care if they were the same because no one would know. In his analysis of the adaptation changes in LBD, Cameron Cliff notes the reduction of five sisters to three, and what was needed to make the world interactive, but concluded that “the strategy for LBD is undeniably to produce a finite and faithful, if modern, adaptation” (Cliff 2017, 136). Indeed, it would not be prudent to exclude a market, and so instead producers ideally should aim to appeal to existing fans and newcomers, audience retention and acquisition. What of the next reason for not including adaptation in transmedia practices: they are simple retellings? Theorists and practitioners alike have invoked the notion of a “simple retelling” alongside “redundancy” as a way to justify the exclusion of adaptation. As explained previously (Dena 2009), adaptation rarely involves a simple retelling. Adaptation theorist Linda Hutcheon explains how adaptation always involves “interpreting and creating something new,” as creators always need to add and subtract (Hutcheon 2006, 20). Indeed, adaptation theorists are scratching their heads wondering why such an argument was put forward in the first place: “the definition of adaptation as ‘retelling’ seems unnecessarily limiting,” especially as “adaptation and television constantly seek to balance out these two elements [familiarity and novelty]” (Wells-Lassagne 2017, 89–90). Further to this, it is exactly what we don’t understand about adaptation, “the heresies committed by the practice and criticism of adaptation that we learn most about literature and film in relation to each other” (Elliott 2004, 239). The realization that adaptation is rarely retelling has thankfully been recognized by some transmedia theorists (Jenkins 2011; O’Flynn 2013; Harvey 2015), but still pervades texts and discussions. Indeed, a key theme of the adaptation-exclusion reasoning is the unfounded claims, inaccurate framing of what adaptation is, and the denigration of adaptation practices. This is so common, adaptation theorist Eckart Voigts calls this the “evaluative” and “not just” rhetoric of transmedia scholars (Voigts 2017). Transmedia storytelling is not just adaptation, it is something better. “In the vein of Jenkins, transmedia scholars view traditional adaptations as marked by the problematic processes of cross-platform compromise and the clumsy semiotic or textual rearrangements of texts, whereas transmedia story-worlds create a sustained and intensified experience of fictional worlds” (Voigts 2017). This performance of cultural disdain of adaptation, it should be noted, is in the face of countless economically and critically successful adaptations in all media. Finally, the framing of adaptation as an unappealing and non-strategic approach is also contrary to what we know about aesthetic preference. Multiple studies have shown us the pleasures and design benefits of experiencing a work again, such as the “mere exposure effect” and how it engenders a familiarity preference (Zajonc 1968, 2001), how “rereading” is an attempt to capture the experience of the first reading (Călinescu 1993), how with “prototypicality” we have a preference for things that are representative of what we usually engage with (Martindale and Moore 1988), the 291

“dependable pleasure” of reruns (Weispfenning 2003), and the appeal of the “cognitive fluency” familiar works afford us (Reber, Schwarz, and Winkielman 2004).

The Effects of Exclusion The effects of this differentiation via exclusion rhetoric, which often includes derision of what is being excluded, is manifold. The detrimental effects we have seen in games are the culture wars where people assign hierarchical value and identity to different kinds of games, and enact boundary policing as a consequence; that in the face of object or textual traits, the experiential nature of the form is devalued; and practitioners end up biased against techniques that are at times essential for producing good work. Design is contextual. So while it is important to highlight what is unique about a phenomenon, the manner in which one does impacts the cultures being included and excluded. Perhaps it is not necessary to identify a phenomenon through a unique trait? As Upton explains, “interactivity is a thing that games can DO. It is not what games ARE” (Upton 2015b, original emphasis). The expansion of stories across platforms is what transmedia can do, not what it is. Indeed, as I mentioned earlier, I am not alone in my contention that these approaches do more harm than good. Game theorist Espen Aarseth, who wrote a pivotal book differentiating interactivity at a textual level (Aarseth 1997), has now 20 years later released a special statement in Game Studies arguing against this differentiation via exclusion practice: In fact, “game” and “play” are not scientific terms, but vernacular words whose meaning changes over time, and is given by ordinary people through their use of language. To try to fix them is a good intellectual exercise, but not something a researcher will ever be able to do. Nor is it vital for the health of the field, but more likely quite counter-productive, if it could be done. Other fields, from literature and media to planetology and even biology, cannot sufficiently define their central objects either, and they are none the worse for it … The move from computer games to games in general is about inclusion. The affected research communities already overlap, to the extent that it makes no sense to formally exclude them with the “computer” or “digital” label, which never made much historical, scientific, or intellectual sense at all. (Aarseth 2017) It is worth noting that recently too, Jenkins himself recognized the consequences of his differentiation approach: This focus on extension and additive comprehension was originally a way for transmedia theorists to criticize the redundancy that marred so many mindless novelizations of existing media franchises in favor of works that explore new creative possibilities. But the result has been to keep adaptation studies and 292

transmedia studies at arm’s length for more than a decade. (Jenkins 2017) More than studies, the exclusionary qualification has kept transmedia practitioners at arm’s length from adaptation for over a decade. If Douglas Adams or J. K. Rowling tapped on the door of a transmedia consultant, hoping to find out how to best strategize a move into the multiplatform space, we never would have had the pleasure of watching Arthur Dent deal with the bulldozers; or seeing Potter run at the wall at platform 9 and ¾ for the first time. Adaptation would never have been allowed. This is because a transmedia design strategy, according to accepted wisdom, is only effective if it is different to what creatives have previously done. But this boundary policing and constructed knowledge scarcity is the low-hanging fruit of consultant economics, and the antithesis of good design.

Possible Futures of Differentiation, Theory, and Practice So what can we do? We do need a way to discuss transmedia as a unique prospect in both scholarly and practitioner settings. This is what drives the adaptation-exclusion argument, but as we have seen that approach is both unfounded and potentially harmful. Aarseth proposes a “perspective approach” where games are not viewed as an object or an activity, but instead looking at whether a phenomenon is “interesting as ludic” (Aarseth 2017). Perhaps there could be a transmedia perspective? One could still explore traits in this context, but interrogate how they have changed over time and in different contexts. Consider this with the traits Evans has put forward with narrative, authorship, temporality focus (Evans 2011); and Matt Freeman’s diachronic analysis of character-building, world-building, and authorship (Freeman 2017). At present, they exclude adaptation though, but as Jenkins now concedes, “those of us who study transmedia (and fan fiction) and those who study adaptation are asking a related set of questions” (Jenkins 2017). Indeed, as adaptation theorist Wells-Lassagne muses, adaptation can assist with transmedia’s future: [t]ransmedia ensures the coherency of the narrative, which continues outside the source, filling in the gaps of the source text. Ironically, then, for a form whose very nature as adaptation is in question, the transmedia text, in particular, is plagued by the bĕte noire of adaptation, fidelity. (Wells-Lassagne 2017, 92) An interesting work by Marta Boni puts aside allegiances to field definitions, and instead looks at many theories to find which best explains different aspects of the same project (Boni 2013). Harvey does an admirable job of attending to different adaptation theories, to “help further illuminate the question of where transmedia storytelling ends and adaptation begins” (Harvey 2015). But, while a fruitful investigation, this is a less interesting and less helpful task compared to the potentially illuminating task of 293

establishing what degrees of familiarity versus novelty operate best for audiences in what contexts. Industry practitioner Robert Pratten has also championed the experiential aspect of transmedia as being critical to practice: “The problem with the traditional definition is … it describes the production and not the consumption” (Pratten 2015, 2). Pratten continues, “transmedia storytelling is a design philosophy” (2015, 2). The most promising area I have seen that does away with boundary work is that of looking at transmedia through the lens of social science and aesthetic preference, bridging design and audience. Susana Tosca calls it “transmedial desire,” and describes it as “a pulsion common to enthusiastic audiences that are driven to seek more contact with the fictions they love” (Tosca 2016). These include the desire for “experiencing more” (which correlates with transmedia extensions and new insights), “inhabiting our favourite worlds” (which correlates with immersion), and “transforming the transmedial worlds ourselves” (which correlates with participatory practices) (Tosca 2016). I too have made the switch to thinking about design through audience behavior, and have named them the “revealing,” “inhabiting,” “molding” and of course “reliving” drives (Dena 2017b, 2017c). As we have noted, audiences do find adaptations appealing, and part of that attraction is being able to relive the experience. If transmedia creators do not understand that there are many reasons why audiences cross media, then how will they truly understand why extensions work? Indeed, for the past two years I have been teaching these drives to students and industry alike. We discuss when to use what strategy, and I highlight how the revealing drive (extensions) has been underutilized. Here is just one example of an approach that helps with our shared goal of distinguishing the phenomenon while at the same time acknowledging the realities of practice.

Conclusion I began this chapter referring to the not coincidental time Jenkins put forward his noadaptation rule after coming from a frustrating Hollywood and game industry event. The desire to have the phenomenon properly recognized, especially when surrounded by those who refuse to see or understand it, is something we all feel. It makes sense to double-down and create a simple criterion of exclusion, so people understand and recognize what you see. But we do so at the cost of understanding the complete picture. Irrespective of the function of the exclusion, the stated reasons—redundancy and simple retelling—are shown to be false not just because of the technical inaccuracy, or even due to the popularity of adaptation, but also due to the pleasures aesthetic preferences studies have shown us. There are costs to differentiating transmedia via the exclusion of adaptation, as witnessed in games and in transmedia: assigning hierarchical value and identity to 294

artforms and the resultant industrial impact of this; thwarting understanding of the experiential nature of the phenomenon; and being oblivious to the full range of strategic and design decisions available to creatives. Focusing on a particular aspect of practice, in this case extensions, is a worthy and needed field of inquiry. It may be that transmedia can continue to be the name of that particular focus. But to claim it encapsulates what creatives do, and is the only valid design choice for multiplatformthinking, is a misrepresentation of best practice.

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22 Transmedia Developer Success at Multiplatform Narrative Requires a Journey to the Heart of Story Jeff Gomez

There is the initial impression by outsiders, novices, and many of potential corporate clients that the job of a transmedia storyteller is to somehow break apart a sprawling, epic story into smaller pieces, and assign those pieces to various media platforms. The most important storyline? The movie. The big battles, where most of the bad guys can be mowed down with big guns? The video game. The melodramatic prequel? The comic book, of course. But we contend that this level of understanding is the equivalent of how a writer gets the differences between novels, short stories, and, well, comic books. It is one thing to know the broad strokes of how story operates on different media, but it is quite another to be able to craft multiple streams of narrative so that they each remain true expressions of the core creation (the story world as envisioned by its creator), and yet act in concert, weaving a tapestry of story that surrounds, immerses, and interacts with the audience. Such is the job of the transmedia developer. This chapter examines the New York production company Starlight Runner Entertainment’s evolution from experimental transmedia storytellers to professional transmedia developers, focusing on the critical case study of their experience with the Walt Disney Company’s Pirates of the Caribbean. It will reveal aspects of the company’s proprietary process that are rarely described, but have proven to be highly effective over the years. They are the tools that any developer must comprehend and employ during the earliest possible phases of the transmedia production.

The Challenge Disney’s marketing division was faced with an unusual predicament: success. The feature film Pirates of the Caribbean (2003), based on the theme park attraction of the same name, was an unexpected blockbuster hit. But with no division of Disney prepared for the box office windfall, there had been no products developed in-house and no lucrative third-party licensing deals to capitalize on the property. In 2005, with two more films now in pre-production, Disney’s new Chairman and 298

CEO Bob Iger expressed a strong desire for the company to avoid making this mistake a second time. The responsibility fell on Disney Chief Creative Officer Oren Aviv, and Christine Cadena, Senior Vice President Marketing Synergy & Franchise Development to assign and oversee development of Pirates of the Caribbean content across nearly every division of the company. This content, which would include an array of licensed and merchandised products, would become available in tandem with the release of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007). On assessment, however, key Disney executives realized that, although there were now a number of Pirates-related projects in early development, the level of quality, consistency, and content of the products in development were problematic. Challenges included the following: • Ambiguity over the films’ darker and more horrific aspects, and how these gelled with the family-friendly Disney brand. • Existing toys and souvenirs that did not reflect the level of quality, depth, and detail of their counterparts in the films. • Story content that did not convey the characters or storyworld accurately, or placed them wildly out of context—they did not feel like Pirates of the Caribbean. • The addition of myriad fantastical elements that diminished the property with a “kitchen sink fantasy” (anything goes) approach. • Jack Sparrow depicted in a wide variety of ways, at times having him exhibit overtly villainous behavior. • Key art and imagery that reflected the old theme park ride and not the characters and situations depicted in the films. At the time, Senior Vice President Marketing & Business Development Gordon Ho was visiting with Disney Publishing in search of solutions on behalf of Aviv. There he learned about the work that Starlight Runner Entertainment had done for Mattel and the Hot Wheels brand. In 2002, Mattel had commissioned CEO Jeff Gomez and his company Starlight Runner to develop a storyworld based on the die-cast metal cars. Instead of a simple style guide, Gomez had created a “trans-media [sic] bible” fully describing every element of a new Hot Wheels “mythology,” covering everything from driver character, to super-powered cars, to the various science fictional aspects of a race through multiple dimensions. This single Mythology document would then be used by every division of Mattel to create packaging, comic books, video games, promotional tie-ins, an elaborate website, and a computer-animated television series. With Cadena, Ho approached Starlight Runner with the idea of creating a Pirates Mythology, a guidebook that could do the same for Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean.

Linking the Story to the Storyteller

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After securing the assignment, Starlight Runner quickly understood the challenge being faced by Disney. By its nature, Pirates of the Caribbean was a dense, peculiar, convoluted storyworld, with an almost dreamlike sense of logic. On close analysis of the original film and the upcoming scripts, Gomez’s team understood that there was a strange rhyme and reason to the world, but could not immediately grasp how those mechanisms worked, nor how to communicate effective storytelling to others based on these mechanics in order for them to generate transmedia content. For the first time, Starlight Runner would have to request access to some of a franchise’s key creatives to clarify its unique perspective. Here, the team learned their first key lesson, which is applicable to any transmedia developer: if the goal is to create quality content outside of feature films (the franchise’s driving platform), it would be risky or even reckless to guess at what made an established storyworld tick. Recognizing the complexity of the challenge, Aviv and Cadena arranged a series of interviews with the filmmakers and Disney stakeholders—an unusual level of access at the time. But their perspectives were instantly helpful. One recurring stumbling block encountered by the team was the unusual tone of the films. Although a Disney-branded film, Pirates of the Caribbean was scary. The films were full of frightening supernatural beings, edgier violence, and an atmosphere of menace. Some in the company called the films “Disney Dark,” meaning that the tone fell on the higher end of the age-range for the studio’s family fare. Others wondered about whether the films danced over that edge, making it difficult to gauge what kind of ancillary content and licensed product ought to be derived from the films in order to grow the franchise. It became important for Disney Marketing and Starlight Runner to understand what linked the films to the Disney brand; why Pirates was distinctly Disney. Sifting through dozens of pages of interview notes, Gomez stumbled upon a quote attributed to Walt Disney himself: “Doing the impossible is kind of fun.” The quote was meant by the interviewee as a descriptor of the essence of all great stories to come out of the studio, but Gomez saw it as the essence of the Disney company itself. His team also saw it as a descriptor of protagonist Captain Jack Sparrow, and the Pirates films themselves. The term pegged the fact that the films behaved like thrilling theme park dark rides—scary enough to be unsettling at times, but also full of humor, action, and near-miraculous outcomes. The missing link between story and storyteller had been found; its source, the entire company’s founding storyteller. This was instantly approved by all involved. It was a small but vital foundation upon which to build the project and surmount the challenge.

Deriving Storyworld Essence With ubiquitous broadband connectivity still years away, it was decided that Starlight Runner would essentially tour the world in order to examine all of the marketing, in300

house content and consumer products, theme park elements, and licensed products, wherever they were in development or production. It became clear that Pirates of the Caribbean was subject to a vast range of interpretations, much of which widely differed from the films. Some saw Jack Sparrow as an historically accurate pirate: a vicious, violent brigand who might just as soon let an innocent die if it will spare his own skin. Others set the characters to flights of fancy, allowing them to travel through time, ride winged horses, and fire laser guns. Still others avoided the characters and events of the films altogether, choosing to focus on the broader and more cartoony characters and events featured in the Disney theme park ride. The team intuited that fans yearned for narrative and visual continuity. They wanted characters to speak and behave consistently. Differing depictions of a property like Pirates could create confusion, making the characters harder to recognize, ultimately splintering or fracturing a brand that was still in the process of establishing itself. Here, the team learned a second key lesson that is applicable to any transmedia developer: rich transmedia story worlds require a core set of narrative tenets, a system to which various creative stakeholders can adhere in order to generate consistent and persistent content. The challenge here is that Starlight Runner could not be so bold as to assert an opinion on the executives of the Disney company and the producers of the films. Instead, the Pirates narrative, particularly as depicted in the film trilogy, would have to be deconstructed. Essential narrative components would have to be accurately determined and extracted. Starlight Runner calls this the “narrative essence” or “brand essence” of the storyworld. In recent years, various marketing, advertising, and transmedia agencies each have their own definition of the essential factors that make a brand distinct. Gomez chose to adhere to purely narratological elements, in keeping with the assignment, parsing the films for their archetypes, thematic messaging, mythic and cultural resonances (how the films reflect contemporary society at large), and through lines of wish fulfillment (what Starlight Runner calls “aspirational drivers”). Focus of attention would obviously be the character of Jack Sparrow, who was so frequently misunderstood by stakeholders. The Starlight Runner team determined his primary archetype to be the Trickster, backing their findings with research that included Joseph Campbell’s (1949, 1990; Campbell and Moyers 1991) seminal writings on this mythic persona. But while the Trickster provided clues that could help creatives better determine what Jack might and might not do, the team could not yet pin down how Jack Sparrow resonated with the entire universe of Pirates of the Caribbean, nor could they connect how the various Pirates narratives (particularly those in ancillary content, which may not feature the character) could be linked thematically with Captain Jack. In short, a “unified theory” of the Pirates universe was necessary in order for 301

narrative content to genuinely satisfy the audience by “feeling like” a Pirates story. It was not enough for Starlight Runner as transmedia developers to tell the client “that content does not come across as authentically Pirates.” What was necessary was to provide the client with a single central message that was indeed quintessentially Pirates, and then a set of guidelines to help realize that message in narrative form.

The Primal Message Although the Starlight Runner team had successfully untangled the myriad plot threads, backstories, and mythos of the three Pirates of the Caribbean films (the latter two based on shooting scripts and early footage alone), and they had discerned large portions of the story world essence, they had yet to fully “crack the franchise,” as they put it. In his transmedia master class, Jeff Gomez frequently discusses the fact that the most successful storyworlds—fictional universes that have stood the test of time and incarnated themselves across multiple media platforms—most often contain a singular and unique aspirational message. This is “a piece of advice,” he says, “that would improve any individual’s life, and if adopted by all of us, would make the world a better place in which to live.” Gomez calls this the central theme of the storyworld. Its primal message. But what unique advice does cynical, conflicted, romantic Pirates of the Caribbean have to offer? To answer that at first, the Starlight Runner team researched the actual Pirate Code, often referred to in the films as the Code of the Pirate Brethren. Although this research paid off, allowing Starlight Runner to furnish Disney with an actual historically based code, its transactional nature, cynicism, and simplicity was of little use in terms of the primal message. Eventually, the team found themselves back at the booted feet of the Jack Sparrow character. If Jack’s true motivation could be discerned—the events that shaped him, the motivations that drive him, the underpinnings of the humanity that had so charmed audiences, despite his detached and selfish behavior—perhaps an answer could be found. But neither the films, stakeholder interviews, nor any supplementary materials were revealing. Gomez finally asked to speak with Sparrow actor Johnny Depp himself, a request that initially met with understandable resistance. After all, Depp was in the middle of a massive film shoot. After days of wrangling, permission was finally granted, with the caveat that Gomez would have no more than 15 minutes with the actor. As a rule, transmedia developers who must work with visionaries and highly placed stakeholders whose time is precious, need to carefully prepare in order to maximize the effectiveness of brief interviews. Once with Depp, Gomez explained that the path to the heart of all of Pirates of the Caribbean led to a deep and hidden conflict within Jack Sparrow, one that seemed to 302

manifest itself in the unusual choices he made as an actor. “From a character perspective, can you give me any insight into the nature of those choices?” Depp’s response was surprisingly personal. After the birth of his daughter, Depp was determined not to pass down to his own child the anger and negativity that had haunted him since he was a boy. Learning yoga, meditation, and other techniques, he purged himself, reaching a state of serenity. But then, during his tense first few days on the set of Pirates, he had difficulty “finding” the character. One evening, in crisis, Depp gazed into a mirror and asked himself, “How can I balance what is noble in myself with the wildness I need to bring my characters to life?” Depp held up two hands, balancing them like scales, spreading them wide, as if drunkenly walking a tightrope. This was all the Starlight Runner team needed: To achieve a balance within ourselves between nobility and savagery is to reach a state of grace. This primal message worked for Jack, but remarkably it also worked for the entire franchise. Born a poet in the regimented United Kingdom, all Jack Sparrow yearned for was freedom. He found it in the Seven Seas, and survived his journeys in the guise of a ferocious pirate. He would tread a line between the higher aspirations of civilized humanity and the feral lawlessness of the untamed Caribbean, thumbing his nose at both sides, Trickster that he is. At a more cosmic level, this is also the story of the three films: the disciplined, regimented forces of Western Europe sought conquest over the chaotic wilderness of the Caribbean. In their clash, supernatural forces are unleashed, threatening the world. And there is Captain Jack, sailing between them, mocking them, the results of his actions somehow enabling our heroes (Elizabeth and Will Turner) to set things right. Here, the team learned a third key lesson that is applicable to any transmedia developer: the answers to the most trenchant mysteries of a multiplatform story world may not be easily recognized in the content, but can almost certainly be discerned in the storyteller. While great storytellers are under no obligation to spell out the messages and meanings of their narratives to audiences, leaving them the pleasure of making their own interpretations, transmedia developers cannot afford such luxuries. They have to be right, because the correct meaning—primal messages, brand essence—must be infused into all extensions of the story world if the franchise is to feel authentic and continue to achieve success. Fail to do this, and it won’t be long before the franchise loses its way, withers, and dies.

The Guidebook Surveying the wealth of materials assembled by Starlight Runner, Christine Cadena approved the final assembly of the Pirates Mythology, a franchise story bible designed to exhaustively survey the universe of Pirates of the Caribbean. The document would act as a resource for any and all stakeholders, to be parsed out in smaller sections to 303

some, or used in its entirety by others. The Mythology differed from standard Disney style guides in that its focus was on the details of the story world, as opposed to the image and design aesthetics of the property. It differed from the standard Hollywood show bible in terms of how deeply it explored every facet of the world, the entirety of the known history of the Pirates universe, and the story world essence. Further, the Mythology leveraged Starlight Runner’s unique capability to deconstruct and explain the cosmology of fantasy worlds: how myth, magic, and morality applied to Pirates of the Caribbean; the nature of the greater world beyond the series’ Caribbean setting; the origins of various iconic characters and situations many of which were only obliquely alluded to in the films. Initially, however, Starlight Runner received some pushback by a few stakeholders over the document’s inclusion of “abstract,” “metaphysical,” or “academic” passages. They were perceived as dense or difficult to understand, and perhaps unnecessary. Some were concerned that this would paint future screenwriters and filmmakers into a corner, limiting possibilities or curtailing imagination in future installments. Here, the team learned a fourth key lesson that is applicable to any transmedia developer: any story world worthy of standing the test of time, no matter how fantastical, deserves to be taken seriously as a work of depth and integrity. Gomez explained to Disney that there are many stakeholders who need to understand how a universe as seemingly inscrutable as Pirates actually works. If a line of novels, for example, were to be true to the films, guidelines not just about what Jack Sparrow might and might not do, but also about how the franchise universe works, were required. A high-end video game series could generate dozens of hours of content, much of which would be reliant on this kind of information. Cadena ultimately supported the argument, and the sections remained intact. Cadena also favored the term distant mountains, which Gomez borrowed from J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings (1954). Starlight Runner had requested to include in the Mythology a lengthy list of interesting but unexplored story points suggested by the films. The team cited Tolkien’s tendency to seed his Middle-earth stories with bits of lore that both made his creation feel more real, and inspired curiosity and excitement from the reader. Distant Mountains sections would become a staple in Starlight Runner franchise story bibles.

Establishing the Clearinghouse Transmedia development becomes transmedia production at the point at which stakeholders from across divisions and across media channels are provided storyworld guidelines and green-lighted to generate content. In an organization as vast as Disney, there was no previously established process by which to do this easily. A solution was urgently necessary. Historically, like most major Hollywood studios, the Walt Disney Company 304

leveraged its narrative properties in either linear serial fashion (sequels), or by replicating the narrative across different media. The story of The Lion King (1994) was established in a feature film, and would be adapted as story books, comics, video games, theme park attractions, and a Broadway play with each of its major narrative beats replicated intact. The success of the film spawned a series of direct to video sequels. However, there had been no concerted effort to expand and leverage the story world of Lion King with different stories across different media. It would be different for Pirates. With Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End in full production in the fall of 2005, Cadena was facing the challenge of communicating and coordinating logistics across the siloed divisions of the company. Starlight Runner suggested that the conferences could also function as a kind of franchise clearinghouse for story, used to encourage executives to take inspiration from the Pirates Mythology and push for unique, “additive” content that, over time, could eventually shift emphasis from the films’ movie star actors (transient) to the films’ sprawling mythos (timeless). Cadena’s Pirates Task Force took flight, functioning as the heart of the franchise, pumping the Pirates Mythology lifeblood across the company and out to licensees. The clearinghouse also facilitated a streamlined system of approvals, expediting a complex process that involved attorneys, agents, actors, and various levels of executives. This would address some of the hesitation expressed by content creators to include character likenesses or direct references to the films in their storylines. Here, the team learned the fifth and final key lesson that is applicable to any transmedia developer: buy-in is cultivated and reinforced through the validation of all stakeholders and their participation in the development process. While Starlight Runner did not necessarily involve video game licensees in the transmedia development process of the Pirates Mythology, the Mythology did address concerns raised by the interviewed producers of video game and interactive content. They saw their concerns reflected in the document—their language incorporated in Starlight Runner’s presentations—and became convinced that the transmedia approach would facilitate and enhance their work. Starlight Runner found that many stakeholders, particularly marketers and creatives, appreciated the novel fact that they were “helping to tell the story”—in other words, contributing to the official canon of the Pirates universe with content that “mattered.” The Young Jack Sparrow novels from Scholastic Books did not simply convey whimsy about these characters. Instead, they told stories that contributed to the formative years of the character, and did so in a way that was accessible to an audience that might not even be old enough to see the movies.

Conclusion The transmedia development work done for Pirates of the Caribbean resulted in an immediate elevation of quality, consistency, and quantity of franchise extensions. 305

Adherence to the tenets of the Pirates Mythology allowed for Disney to juvenilize the property (children’s comics, the aforementioned Young Jack Sparrow chapter books) without alienating older fans. Interactive projects course-corrected and hewed closer to the look and feel of the storyworld. Toys and action figures were accompanied by bits of lore, giving them a more authentic feel. The theme park ride itself was updated based on inspiration from this work, integrating characters and events from the films and distant mountains to bolster its narrative. Disney was satisfied with these results, retaining Starlight Runner to do similar work for such projects as Disney Fairies and Tron Legacy. Under Bob Iger, the transmedia development approach became infused into the company’s DNA, generating homegrown properties out of such unexpected platforms as the Disney Channel (High School Musical) and ABC television (Lost). Perhaps more importantly, these techniques laid the groundwork for Disney’s handling of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars, two of the most successful transmedia franchises in history. While visionaries such as Kathleen Kennedy (Lucasfilm) and Kevin Feige (Marvel) bought into the transmedia story world concept early on, their efforts would not have been nearly as successful if these processes were unfamiliar to Disney’s corporate hub. The narrative-based, licensing and merchandising extensions of these properties are handled by Disney marketing. In summary, these are the five key lessons Starlight Runner took from its seminal work with Disney as transmedia developers: 1. Remove as much guesswork from your assessment of the source narrative, and instead use narratological analysis to understand the storyworld without personal bias. 2. Transmedia developers must elicit a core set of narrative tenets from the storyworld, a system to which various creative stakeholders can adhere in order to generate consistent and persistent content. 3. The answers to the most trenchant mysteries of a multiplatform storyworld may not be easily recognized in the content, but can almost certainly be discerned in the storyteller. 4. Any storyworld worthy of standing the test of time, no matter how fantastical, deserves to be taken seriously as a work of depth and integrity. 5. Buy-in is cultivated and reinforced through the validation of all stakeholders and their participation in the development process. These lessons have been applied to Starlight Runner’s work on some of the world’s most popular entertainment properties (such as Transformers, Men in Black), but they also have been used on the team’s corporate and brand work (Coca-Cola, Pepperidge Farm), on its work in documentary (In My Lifetime: The Nuclear World) and philanthropy (World Vision), and on its geopolitical and crisis intervention projects.

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References Campbell, Joseph. 1949. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Bollingen Foundation. Campbell, Joseph. 1990. The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on his Life and Work. Novato: New World Library. Campbell, Joseph, and Bill Moyers. 1991. The Power of Myth. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group. Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel. 1954. The Lord of the Rings. London: Allen & Unwin.

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23 Transmedia Production Embracing Change Robert Pratten

It is an uncommonly sunny day in London and my clients are still sleeping in California. The time difference works to our advantage because we have the whole day to work toward the weekly 5pm meeting. My team and I are working on many projects for various clients but, in these pages, I am going to compare and contrast two active projects: a personal finance experience for VISA and a location-based game for Kodansha, one of the world’s largest manga publishers.

About the Team There are seven people in our company—three work in the “back office,” developing the core transmedia engine (Conducttr), and four of us work in the “front office” with clients. My role is typically listed in the proposal as Quality Assurance, but I take an active involvement in the project acting as collaborator, sounding board, connector, risk assessor, and commercial coach. Everybody in our team has multiple roles and multiple skills that combine arts and technology. Everybody uses the Conducttr (n.d.) software and that has been a key recruitment requirement since we have been in operation. On the projects, the core roles are: • Creative technologist: responsible for front-end web development and apps. • Author: an all-encompassing title that means writing the story and developing the game. We do not distinguish between experience development and story writing— they are two sides of the same coin. • Project manager: the person watching the deadlines and the deliverables. • Quality assurance: the person that acts as eyes, ears, heart, and soul for both client and the audience. Video production and graphics work is outsourced to other companies, including on occasion to the client. Our company mission is make everyone’s life an adventure. We do this through our cloud-based transmedia story-game engine, Conducttr, and that is where we focus our resources. 308

About the VISA Project The goal of the VISA project is to help 13–18-year-olds become more financially astute. VISA does a lot of work with communities through its Practical Money Skills initiative and we were commissioned to develop a scenario-based training experience playable online and in classrooms. This is an international project that will play around the world directly from VISA’s website and also re-badged by VISA clients (potentially playable from the client’s website). The project also needs to play in locations without Internet access—a problem for web-based technology. Our solution for this is to allow the project to run on our product Conducttr Local—a high-powered laptop with its own private Internet router. Being able to run on the public Internet and on a private network creates its own problems because URLs (Uniform Resource Locator) to images, videos, audio and such like need to be easily switched depending on where they are hosted. The narrative of the experience is that you play as a wannabe video blogger and must decide which of two media contracts to sign. To make an informed decision, players need to get up to speed with practical financial matters like budgeting, saving, investing, and insuring.

About the Kodansha Project The goal of the project is to connect with fans of the popular manga and anime series Attack on Titan (AoT) and give away a digital code to download a free comic on Comixology. The narrative of the experience is that the convention center for Anime Expo, LA is “inside the wall” and Little Tokyo is “outside the wall.” Consistent with the AoT storyworld, inside the wall is positioned as a training exercise requiring players to find five missing soldiers while outside the wall is a full-on mission to defeat increasing stronger Titans. The outside quest uses a Web application built on our TeamXp application framework (with back-end powered by the Conducttr real-world gaming engine) and requires the player to be in LA and to enable location services on their browser. The inside quest is a more familiar SMS-based (short message service) scavenger hunt. Part of the reason for the switch of channels between quests is expectations of poor WiFi and Internet reception that is typical of most conference venues. While the inside quest requires players to follow a pre-defined path (as discovering each checkpoint reveals a clue to finding the next), the outside quest allows a more free-flowing route with players able to visit Titan hotspots in the order of their choosing.

Project Organization Internally, we use Slack (a cloud-based set of collaboration tools) for team instant messaging, a private Google Drive for shared project files, and software called 309

Teamworks to share project plans and tasks with clients and external partners. We also use Jira (an issue tracking software) for fault reporting and improvement requests and customer service software from the Teamworks guys called Helpdocs for customer care.

Asset Numbering Project assets are rich media content like PDFs, videos, images, and audio files. These are usually made and re-made several times during a project—first in draft and then steadily as improved production versions. There can also be lots of them: a project for our Brazilian partner, Lifelike, has more than 120 video files with each one selected based on the audience’ personal journey. This makes it vitally important to track which assets are which and to be able to easily update and replace them. When working with production partners, it is common that we will use their asset numbering because for us it does not matter too much so long as there is a numbering scheme. On the VISA project however we need an international numbering scheme that will allow us to easily switch between different regional media. This has resulted in a spreadsheet to map between the production company asset numbering and our global numbering. It is not ideal, and it can lead to errors, but it is workable.

Languages During the project definition stage, we identify how many languages the project will need to work with. While both projects are American English only, the VISA project must be capable of localization. We have two mechanisms to allow a project to run in multiple languages—the first uses groups and the second uses arrays. With groups, the player is placed into a language group and whenever content is published, Conducttr takes the right content for that group. In more complicated projects where we are already using a lot of groups to track decisions and other personalizations, we will use arrays and append a language code (from an audience attribute) to a content identification to create a unique index which hence publishes the correct content in the correct language. This again makes the use of asset numbers important.

Design and Other Documents The first design document is the proposal. The proposal contains the creative concept and the commercial constraints. This is what has been agreed with the client and it is what we must deliver. After receiving the client’s go-ahead, the project lead—who could be the Author or Project Manager—sets about creating ideas for how we might deliver what we have promised. A lot of the technical aspects have already been discussed and agreed with 310

the team before the proposal was submitted but there could be some promised functionality that requires new development. New developments of our technology are addressed in our normal line of business and clients do not pay for this, but improvements do need to be scheduled as part of our product development process and migrated from the development system to the production system. This takes coordination across the business. A key to success is simplicity. Complexity creates cost and confusion, and both are to be avoided. Complex projects can also create resistance to change, which is what we want to avoid. There are usually several great ideas that get discarded either because they are too complicated to pitch to the client or to the player or might be longer to fault fix should there be issues after the project goes live.

Right-sizing the Documentation It is very easy to produce too much documentation and pretend that it is productive work. It is important to remember that documentation is a means to an end, it is not an end in itself. The key purpose of documentation is to make sure that everyone who needs to know (or remember) is aware of how a project works or should work and can easily pick up the reigns to take over a project should the original author fall ill or be on vacation. For a project like Kodansha’s, it will only run for several weeks so the amount of documentation needs to be sized for that period. The project manager can easily make sure that there is sufficient cover for the project for that short period and can talk others through the design so that everyone is fully aware. For a project like VISA, however, which will run all year, and which has new feature developments, the documentation is quite significant, and a good attempt is made to keep up with documentation while the project is being implemented. Note that neither project has a “transmedia bible” with character descriptions, factions and such like because it is not deemed necessary: the world of AoT is already well-known and documented elsewhere in comics and fan wikis and the VISA project. A key role for Quality Assurance is to make sure all documentation is up to date and sufficient for business continuity. This also includes comments and labeling inside Conducttr and later, as the project moves into formal testing, change control. Change control is extremely important. This tracks what changes are made, to what, by whom and when. All projects are documented on an internal HelpDocs portal and this provides key information such as Conducttr project number, author, client contact details, traffic profile and launch and end dates. It also describes the mechanics for player registration, activation, and operation.

Key Design Features—Attack on Titan

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Obey the Lore When working with an existing intellectual property, it is important that any narrative does not violate the canon and can only impact the canon with express client permission. For AoT, we had no freedom to add to the canon, so several creative ideas were rejected because of this and we decided to focus more on the game aspects and less on the narrative. For a game, it is important that the mechanics of the game are consistent or analogous to what is known about the storyworld. This is evident here in the different activities given for the two game spaces inside the wall (inside the conference center) and outside the wall (outside the conference center) and in the way that Titans are killed.

Defeating Titans Those familiar with AoT will know that to kill a Titan requires the soldier to slice the back of the neck. In our game, we test the player’s sword skills with increasingly complex swipe patterns against a vanishing fight period. This simple mechanic combined with the minimally frustrating requirement to maintain a sufficient gas supply (the swords are gas-powered) delivers an extremely fun experience. The swiping motion and the gas supply constraint both obey the lore of AoT.

Character Phone Calls A highlight of the SMS experience is several phone calls from the popular AoT character, Mikasa. The calls were recorded by the same actress that is the voice-over artist for the anime which screens on Funimation. This means the voice is familiar to the show’s millions of viewers and when heard directly spoken to YOU via your phone creates an incredible intimacy that is actually quite mind-blowing. From a production perspective, both features are straightforward to implement. We can use a draft audio recording up to the last minute and upload the final production version as soon as it becomes available.

Key Design Features—VISA Finance Game The VISA experience should be classed as a “serious game” or a “learning game” but it is also an “interactive narrative” rather than a financial simulation. Our approach is to immerse the player in a first-person experience in which they play the role of someone making decision as if it were real life rather than a game. Maintaining a first-person perspective throughout an experience is difficult for any game but particularly tricky for games where we must demonstrate learning: there is always a balance to be struck between the immersion and instructional design. Several key design choices in this game that were made to meet the challenges of engagement and teaching the curriculum are: 312

• the use of cut scenes; • the use of an automated personal assistant (i.e., like Alexa or Siri); • the use of embedded mini-quizzes.

Cut Scenes A cut-scene is a video that progresses the story without player interaction. They are usually considered problematic in an interactive experience because they prevent the player interacting. However, they are helpful in the VISA project in advancing the story by taking the player from a subjective point of view to an objective one. That is, the cut-scenes position the player as an observer, a fly on the wall, watching a development in the narrative. They also give us the advantage of expanding beyond the confines of an interactive narrative to deliver a lot of story in an entertaining, minimal effort (on the part of the player) and immediate way. In this experience, they are mainly used for story advancement rather than “teaching.” In fact, we have tried to avoid instruction as much as possible, allowing the player to make their own mistakes and learn by experience.

Personal Assistance In most of our games we will have a “mentor” character that helps the player when times are tough or if we think they might need guidance. In the VISA game, we created MAI—mobile artificial intelligence—as a personal assistant who finds useful information ahead of when you need it. We felt this was essential in a game like this and allows us to implement an approach based on the 4C/ID (Four-Component Instructional Design) model (Van Merriënboer 1997; Van Merriënboer, Kirschner, and Kester 2003; Van Merriënboer and Sweller 2005; Van Merriënboer and Kirschner 2007) for complex learning which aims to reduce the cognitive load on players. The 4C/ID model comprises four core components: • • • •

learning tasks supporting information procedural information part-task practice.

Learning tasks are the core experiences that someone should learn from. In our case, the goal was money management, so tasks included financial planning, investing, buying insurance, buying products, choosing a university course (because this impacts future earnings). Supporting information is provided before the task and is intended to help with decision-making and making sense of the situation. For example, before choosing a university course the players are given information about how likely a certain career is to be replaced by artificial intelligence and how to assess the information universities present on tuition and accommodation fees and grant repayments. In the case of the 313

university decision, information is given in the form of a mini-quiz by a careers chatbot (of which more below). Procedural information was not given in this project for the purpose of money management but sometimes how-to instructions were given on how to use the app. Part-task practice is practice of routine activity that over time will become second nature. This took the form of different but repeated examples of buying products from a fictional store and having to make choices about whether to spend money on discretionary items or not. Going to the simulated bank account was often a requirement to give players familiarity with how debits, credits, and current balance are presented.

Embedded Quizzes MAI is not the only assistance in the game and we make frequent use of in-world chatbot-type personas to guide players through certain financial choices such as choosing a career, buying a product or investing. A chatbot is a program that talks to the player in a conversational style. At the time of writing these are quite commonplace in customer service websites and it was this we sought to mimic. The chatbots allow us to easily present a one-question quiz in amongst their other chatter. Although, in this case, not used directly for assessment, in classroom environments the player choices are shared in real-time with the teacher both as an individual player choice and in aggregate for that class as a pie chart. This can then be used as a class discussion point and hence allows the tutor to expand further or dive deeper into a topic, asking students to reflect further on their decision and its consequences.

Production Workflow Our end-to-end workflow follows a process called the Active Story System (Pratten 2015). Rather than go into its details here, I will cover some top-tips that allow us to be fast and agile.

Premise and Purpose A key requirement for any project is to have a very clearly defined purpose and an equally clearly defined premise: • Why does the client want us to create this experience? • How will this experience add value to the client and to the client’s clients? • What message does the experience need to convey and to whom does it need to convey that message? Everyone on the team must understand this and even though it is the job of the proposal-writer to understand this upfront, it is always worth confirming again at the 314

start of the project. The shorter and simpler that the premise and purpose can be stated, the better. Without locking this down, the project has no direction and no guiding principal by which to determine which ideas are good ones and which should be discarded.

Early Demo Projects with many stakeholders require tollgates and sign-off stages to ensure that we do not go too far in a direction that all stakeholders cannot agree on. It is also true that the closer to finished implementation a project is, the costlier it is to make changes. Our approach to avoiding surprises is to allow stakeholders to see an early demo or prototype and check that everyone is on the same page. While this sounds like a good idea, accomplishing it is harder than one might imagine, and it can produce its own problems. Some ideas, for example, do not sell themselves well in draft form and the team needs to decide how and when to take the gamble that the unfinished, unpolished version is good enough to have the desired effect of communicating our intentions. In our experience, it is best to run the demo with stakeholders watching so that we can answer any questions or misunderstandings immediately rather than just email a link to the demo. Note that this is not supposed to be a play test, it is a progress review.

Prioritization When I first started making films, an experienced producer told me to organize a shoot around the most expensive resource. Sometimes this might be a location, sometimes equipment, sometimes a cast member. I have carried this same thinking into transmedia production where “most expensive” usually translates to “most difficult to change.” In our projects, the costliest changes are often changes to the user interface (UI). Seemingly small requests to “move the logo three pixels to the left” can cause more pain for us than changing a storyline. This is because each change needs to be tested on a range of devices and device modes. This makes it important that the UI is agreed and signed-off early before we get too deep into the implementation of the interactive experience. Because client sign-off on the UI can take a while, we typically use a common or temporary development UI for the team so that we can continue with the project foundations while waiting for the final front-end to be agreed and implemented.

Testing Testing creates its own needs for flexibility and agile changes. With the Attack on Titan project, for example, we initially placed Titans around our office in London and then in San Francisco for client testing and then finally in LA. Thinking about how the project would be tested and tweaked was built into the design so that the experience would be easy to change. Hence, we added the ability easily upload Titan types, swipe patterns, delays, and Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates from a spreadsheet. 315

This made changes very easy to accomplish which would not have been the case if the details were “hard coded” into the project. We also had an “online mode” allowing us to play the game from a comfy seat rather than physically go to a Titan location but licensing restrictions ultimately prevented us from offering this mode to the public. Where we often encounter issues is when the client tests multiple times with different accounts because Conducttr attempts to understand who the person is behind the accounts and will try to merge the audience record—that is, it creates a single representation of that person and attributes them with multiple contact details such as two email addresses, two mobile numbers, and so on. Because Conducttr is trying to orchestrate a single user journey, activity on one email address such as the player choosing “left” instead of “right,” is now known by the second email address because after all it is the same person. Therefore, the client’s attempt to be multiple people for testing is thwarted unless that use contact details are truly exclusive. Another testing issue is the use of caching. We use a content distribution network (CDN) to improve performance around the world and it means that local versions of files are stored locally (known as “caching”) in the network. The player’s browser will also cache local files. During testing, this can be problematic because we can update UI or certain files like images, but testers report no change or no improvement. To overcome this, we can “flush the cache” so that recent files are used and ask the client to use incognito mode on their browser as this mode does not cache files locally.

Resetting and Replaying The ability to replay a computer game is common practice but it is not very common at all in transmedia projects. I am referring here to Alternate Reality Game (ARG)type transmedia projects where content might be published on social media and, having been made public, it is unusual to expect to play through the experience again. We have always had to address this issue because even if the project is not live with a real audience, it does need to be tested and hence reset back to the beginning. For resetting during testing, we use several approaches but the most common is to use multiple private social media test accounts and then, after testing, switch the accounts to the live production accounts. Technically, this is straightforward, but it can be troublesome if the client owns the social media accounts because this requires it to authenticate Conducttr with its account. However, the client representative involved in the project may not be responsible for social media. Another issue is erasing all the personalization history which builds up during a play-through of the experience. Usually during testing it is easiest to generate a new audience record and play “fresh” with no history. But if the experience is replayable, then we need to make it possible at the end of the experience to hit a single kill switch to erase the personalization. Resetting an attribute sounds like it ought to be easy and it is except when that attribute is holding a simulated message feed, references to other 316

team mates and so on. This makes the sequencing of which attributes to reset important too. For the VISA experience, players can choose to play as Alex or Jess and then at the end of the game opt to replay as the other. In true transmedia fashion, each protagonist reveals a different perspective on the world and in this case also on the training scenario, so it is quite beneficial to play through again. Here the issue was how much of the past life should be forgotten because part of the learning might be to compare each subsequent run-through with the previous run-throughs … but if we did this, would it kill the immersion? The solution was to re-publish the final summary email as though it were addressed to the other character, preserving the data and walking the line on in-world versus out-of-world.

Review and Approval A final area to address is that of sharing the final content with the client for approval and sometimes for sign-off by the lawyers. Although the story and experience have been signed off at earlier tollgates, when the time comes to share the final content it is usually easier to ask the client to play through the experience than send them a document to read. Central to the problem of sharing the final content is the nature of interactive multichannel narratives. They are not easily presented in simple Word documents and therefore the challenge remains to find a presentation format that works for the layperson versus the production team. The Conducttr platform currently offers two formats—a “script report” which looks like a movie script and a “table report” which presents the content in a Word-like table. To the untrained eye neither looks very friendly to read and when clients want to make changes or raise questions, while it is helpful to do it in a shared Google doc, transferring the amendments back into the production system (Conducttr) is more time-consuming than I would like.

At the End of the Day The video conference calls over, everyone in Europe packs away their laptop and heads for home while our clients and partners on the West Coast tackle their to-do lists. Tomorrow morning, I will wake at 5am to check my email for links to new cuts of the videos, new image assets, and any questions that came up during the day Pacific Standard Time (PST). There is an hour or two now to chat in real time about any tasks we need to complete before we are on our own again for another day. I set to work on the privacy statement that will accompany the experiences and the opt-in statement needed before player registration. Both will be tweaked by the clients’ commercial teams but this will give them a good start in understanding the information we are collecting and why we need it. 317

The new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (see Information Commissioner’s Office n.d.) has become law as of May 2018, and we have already made changes to the UI to allow for the improved opt-in requirements.

Conclusion For the most part, transmedia production does not look too dissimilar to other singlechannel production processes and that should be reassuring to newcomers because any skills they have in media production or project management are transferrable. Where transmedia usually stands apart is in the additional design documents required for the multi-channel or multi-part integration and particularly the infamous “story bible.” While the bible is often required, I have attempted to explain that they are a means to an end and their size and complexity should be matched to the needs of the project. Transmedia projects lend themselves well to learning environments because they more closely imitate real life than typical eLearning projects and the 4C/ID model which is intended for complex learning tasks is a handy model to use for transmedia learning because it is based on experiential learning and interactive projects should be about experiences. The type of transmedia projects that my team and I create are living, breathing worlds that span countries, languages, platforms and time. We view them as dynamic systems in implementation as well as in operation. This understanding—that change is the only constant—demands that we design from the outset for modifications, tweaks, updates, revisions, and improvements. Transmedia production workflows should be ductile and bend with the winds of change.

References Conducttr. n.d. Accessed March 15, 2017. www.conducttr.com/. Information Commissioner’s Office. n.d. “Overview of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).” Accessed March 11, 2017. https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/data-protection-reform/overview-of-thegdpr/. Pratten, Robert. 2015. Getting Started in Transmedia Storytelling: A Practical Guide for Beginners. 2nd ed. London: CreateSpace. Van Merriënboer, Jeroen J. G. 1997. Training Complex Cognitive Skills: A Four-Component Instructional Design Model for Technical Training. Englewood Cliffs: Educational Technology Publications. Van Merriënboer, Jeroen J. G., and Paul A. Kirschner. 2007. Ten Steps to Complex Learning: A Systematic Approach to Four-component Instructional Design. Mahwah: Erlbaum. Van Merriënboer, Jeroen J. G., and John Sweller. 2005. “Cognitive Load Theory and Complex Learning: Recent Developments and Future Directions.” Educational Psychology Review 17 (2): 147–177. Van Merriënboer, Jeroen J. G., Paul A. Kirschner, and Liesbeth Kester. 2003. “Taking the Load off a Learner’s Mind: Instructional Design for Complex Learning.” Educational Psychologist 38 (1): 5–13.

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24 Transmedia Commodification Disneyfication, Magical Objects, and Beauty and the Beast Anna Kérchy

In spring 2017, coinciding with the release of Disney’s live-action cinematic remake of Beauty and the Beast, a limited-edition budget item offered by Primark stores provoked an authentic fan frenzy. Chip purse, a coin holder in the shape of a cute anthropomorphic tea cup from the movie (according to the plotline, a little boy turned into tableware under a magic spell), sold out within minutes, fueled a bidding war on online auction sites selling for several times its original price, and generated heated discussions on social media platforms. The discussions revolved around proud owners posting photos of the much-sought-after product and others, who could not get hold of it, venting their fury about their dissatisfied consumer demands and the madness dubbed #ChipGate. I wish to argue here that the Chip purse is much more than just a lovable collectible: ironically, as an object that stores money to buy further products with—Primark have expanded its Beauty and Beast line to include homewares, bedding, tea cups and pots, as well as clothing, beauty accessories, and décor knickknacks as “part of the magical range” (Jones 2017)—it can be easily interpreted as an emblem of the fetishist commodification of fantasy that takes place via a transmedia storytelling experience paradigmatic of post-industrialist consumer societies of spectacle. Beauty and the Beast fans queued in front of stores before opening hours to make sure they could take home their tangible memorabilia of magic, but their obsession was not stimulated by any of the original literary source texts penned by French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve in 1740, rewritten and abridged by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in 1756, and published in English in Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book in 1889. Customers were likely just as much unconcerned about the written versions of this animal bridegroom fairy tale, initially designed to prepare aristocratic young girls in eighteenth-century France for arranged marriages by celebrating the transformative powers of love, as they were forgetful about its classic adaptations: Jean Cocteau’s surrealist poetic fantasy film La Belle et la Bête (1946) or Philip Glass’s opera (1994) inspired by it. As attested by the avalanche of Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook hashtags accompanying pictorial evidence of the collectible’s acquisition, including #instadisney, #disnegram, #disnerd, and

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#disneylifestylers, the adoring audience emphatically positioned themselves within the Disney fandom, attributing their enchantment to Disney’s latest film, 2017 computergenerated imagery (CGI) enhanced live action musical romantic fantasy, a remake of Disney’s own 1991 animation, yet another original reiteration of a “tale as old as time.” A film that has grossed over $1.2 billion worldwide, and surpassing the original film, made it into the highest-grossing films of 2017, the tenth highest-grossing film of all time, and the fastest selling family film in the company’s history in the United States (Disney.wikia.com).

Disneyfied Magic Merchandise: Simulating “Capitalist Realist” Reveries for Infantilized Consumers Consumer choices are always manipulated by complex power struggles concerning the authority over narrative meanings and the appropriation of the prestigious label of originality, which hold the stakes of financial profitability. According to postmillennial reception studies (Stephens and McCallum 2000, 160), children nowadays are likely to first encounter literary classics, deprived of the original authors’ names, mediated by popular film industry in the interpretation of media moguls like the Walt Disney Company that claims exclusionary proprietary ownership over stories customized to meet the uniform house-style marked by its brand name. Disney’s formative role of contemporary cultural imaginaries has often been criticized for colonizing individual fantasies homogenized by shallow scopophiliac pleasures of ready-made clichés governed by the ideological and commercial interests of the company. “Disneyfication” has become a household term to denote the company’s notorious adaptation strategy whereby stories are rendered “safe” for juvenile audiences through the removal of undesirable plot elements (themes of sexuality, death, or moral ambiguity), the emphasis on the clear-cut dividing line between good and evil, additions of light entertainment features (Broadway-style music hits, talking animal sidekicks), and reworkings necessary for happily-ever-after endings. Many have problematized the “saccharine finales” for imperceptibly transmitting capitalist, patriarchal, colonialist, and a fundamentally normative “petit bourgeois” ideology, with the aim to maintain the political status quo, discourage social transformation, and most importantly raise a generation of obedient consumers (see Bell, Haas, and Sells 1995; Budd and Kirsch 2005; Giroux and Pollock 2010; Zipes 2011). Certainly, the 2017 Disney adaptation designed for family fun ignored the most troubling underlying central themes which make Beauty and the Beast such a special story: interspecies romance, anxieties about bestial sexuality, female rite of passage initiated by an encounter with terrifying otherness (Warner 1995, 276), patriarchal oppression of woman reduced to a sacrificial object of exchange, or social marginalization of disability remained taboos left off the screen. It was much more important for the company to associate straight away in the very first opening shots the Beast’s enchanted fortress with the Disney logo, the trademark emblem of the 320

Disneyland Magic Kingdom Castle and, hence, extend the movie’s entertainment quality with a “commercial intertext” (Maltby 1998, 27), turning the cinematic fictional reality into an advertising site for an actual touristic spot families can visit to gain an enhanced first-hand interactive experience of living the fairy tale. According to Maltby, the placement of consumer products in high-budget Hollywood movies function “as budgetary instruments but also as a form of capitalist realism” (1998, 27), simulating the veracity of the filmic fantasy by evoking in spectators the real-life referent of the fictional fortress. By connecting on- and offscreen realities, the make-believe realm of Disneyland theme park—postmodern philosopher Baudrillard (1994 [1981]) called a par excellence example of simulacra’s referentless reality abundant in illusory needs propagated by commercial images of a desirable lifestyle—also becomes fantastificated as an authentic locus of magic where all dreams can come true with a little imagination and money to spare. Disneyland offers you an unforgettably vivid experience of the tale: you can meet in person and take selfies with your beloved characters, dine sumptuously at the Red Rose Tavern, or enjoy a comic performance of the love story at the Royal Theatre, even a theme park ride on spellbound tableware awaits you from 2020; and surely you can buy Belle’s ball gown, cute stuffed toy Beasts, or jewelry in the shape of the rose of true love, along with a plethora of other Disney-themed merchandise (with more than 250 products matching the search Beauty and the Beast at disneystore.com from bed sheets to iPhone covers). The Disney Empire strategically indoctrinates children to become insatiable consumers of commodified fantasies, sharing adult appetites for newer and newer releases of collectibles. Youngsters constitute the most lucrative target-market for many businesses today because they integrate three markets in one: (1) current miniconsumers with own funds to spare on items of their choice encouraged by their elders to master consumer skills, money awareness, and economic responsibility at their earliest convenience; (2) future customers cultivated now to build a brand awareness for tomorrow; and (3) influencers who cause many billions of dollars of purchases among their parents (McNeal 1991). Disney’s child-focused advertising is systematically pitched at very young audiences in Saturday morning television commercials and extra features available on kids’ websites, but the company also exploits the generational nostalgia of parents lured back to the delight they took as kids in Disney’s animation that provided the source material for the modernized live action facsimile. Mature viewers prove to be complicit in playing their role in the socio-economic fabric of consumers while embracing the identity of the eternal child (the archetype of the puer eternus), as many grown-up fans’ online self-denominations attest in infantile nicknames like #foreverabigkid or #minniemousemom. The “crossover appeal” (Beckett 2009) to multiple age groups increases commercial success, media attention, critical legitimacy, as well as intergenerational bonding that functions as a stable sedimentation of fandom. However, there is also a false promise of democracy lurking in marketing rhetoric, which address a dual 321

audience with similar slogans: Primark’s women’s line urges adult females “to rival Sleeping Beauty with PJs fit for a queen, or be the belle of the ball in serious fan-girl T-shirts” (Jones 2017) and promotes its kids’ collection by teasing the “moms’ minime-s” to “make their dreams come true as they get ready to be the Belle of the Ball” or “open the pages of the beauty world with an enchanting mix of magical make-up products, fit for little princesses” (Shah 2017). The right bargains hold the promise of opening the gates of Wonderland for style-conscious parents and their offspring who are both the most vulnerable to commercial abuses and, as digital natives, the most complicit in participatory cultural activities.

Transmedia Extension and Market Expansion Disney adopts various strategies to keep its story brands alive: since the 1960s it has been releasing in 25-year intervals the classic animated features either theatrically or on home entertainment platforms, and as old films entered the public domain, devoted attention to the release of live-action remakes, like Maleficent in 2014, Cinderella in 2015, and Beauty and the Beast in 2017. Disney’s illusory status as the authentic teller of the original story has been repeatedly confirmed by the multiple adaptations, interconnecting story versions tailored to different media, as well as remakes of its own products (like 1991 animation Chip, 2017 CGI Chip, and Primark’s Chip merchandise as well as innumerable tie-in products) coupled with commercial intertextual allusions. The critically minded ponder if these remakes are “meant as homages, updates, ‘brand deposit’ reminders of existing franchises, or just high-profile cash grabs?” (Robinson 2017). However, most importantly, these dialogic intertexts also belong to that particular type of postmillennial fantasy world-building Henry Jenkins, one of today’s most influential critics of popular culture, has called “transmedia storytelling” (2006, 2007). Throughout the “transmedia expansion” of fictional realities, integral elements of a make-believe universe “get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience [where] each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story” (Jenkins 2007). “Transmedia extensions” facilitate “additive comprehension,” they make the story more immersive by adding new pieces of information which invite us to revise our understanding of the fictional reality. They might offer insight into characters, motifs, unelaborated plotlines, bridge events, fill in gaps or resolve excesses in the unfolding of the story, flesh out unknown aspects of the imaginary world, add a greater sense of realism and augment fantastic effects, too. Disney’s 2017 film adaptation invested a lot of energy in extending the background stories of characters. The pre-title sequence centers on the original hubris of the proud prince turned Beast. It is noticeable that, in the 1991 animation, his tragic flaw is summed up in a stained-glass-window-style tableau, one can actually visit in Disneyland, as a prominent example of the commercial transmedia extension of the narrative. Beauty and the Beast subplots shed 322

light on unresolved traumas, including the mysterious loss of Belle’s mother; her father never ceases to grieve and refuses to explain to his daughter troubled by his silence; macho villain Gaston’s war veteran past, and his gay sidekick’s hopelessly unrequited love for him; or the enchanted objects/servants tolerance in face of their master’s animalistic temper explained by their remorse felt over not intervening in the moral corruption of the young prince by his tyrant father. These extensions create different points of entry for different audience segments to expand the artwork’s potential market. Prehistories of vulnerability support the psychic involvement of spectators, while the political correctness implied in the Beast’s multiracial staff, the loveable goofy gay figure, and the bookworm feminist warrior Belle targets the liberal-minded millennial generation. The addition of the ultimately cute figure of the little boy magically metamorphosed into a chipped tea-cup holds universal appeal for young and old because of its associations with loveable naughtiness, cosy homeliness, and even British nationalistic pride—all easily commodifiable qualities as attested by the commercial taglines of the related merchandise: you can “fill this little guy [Chip cup] with yum hot chocolate [or a five o’clock tea!] for the ultimate quiet night in” (Jones 2017) or more miraculously “switch to Mrs Potts [Chip’s mom] mode and become mamma of the year! [by purchasing all the Beauty and the Beast goodies]” (Shah 2017). The extensions’ interconnections with one other, the tie-in products they generate, and with the original mastertext(s) stimulate audiences to interact with the story world larger than the single story. The collective transmedial (de)construction of communal knowledge within a networked society that can visualize, digitalize, and commercialize the initially orally circulated fairy-tale cultures is exemplified by subtle gestures like Disney naming Belle’s picturesque village Villeneuve as an homage to the writer of the literary source text. Yet Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s authorial name likely remains imperceptible, unreadable for most of the viewers, overshadowed by spectacular transmedia crossover allusions to the brand name labelling the adaptation: during Belle and Beast’s waltz the letters WD can be seen in the coat of arms design on the floor with reference to Walt Disney, and the lock of the carriage in which Belle is imprisoned is decorated by a hidden Mickey Mouse motif. Transmedia storytelling can segment and disseminate an idea into multiple media installments within one single work: internal monologues encapsulating characters’ background stories are often told in song-and-dance numbers which complement the narrative filmic diegesis with an acoustic affective charge, and turned into new media applications like mobile phone ringtones can be integrated into fans’ daily lives. The proliferation of tie-in products also functions by means of transmedia extensions, frequently allowing for a conjoining of old and new media through a process Bolter and Grusin (2000) call remediation: one can purchase actual print-and-paper specimen from the Beast’s fantastic three-dimensional (3D) CGI-simulated library that Belle falls in love with in the movie. Fictitious titles brought for real include Belle’s Library with a foreword by scriptwriter Linda Woolverton, a collection of inspiring quotes 323

from Belle’s favorite books, her own notes and colorful drawings, as well as an enchanted book called Nevermore featuring in Beauty and the Beast: Lost in a Book that can take readers on time-travel adventures just like the Beast’s magic book does in the 2017 movie (transporting Belle back to a plague-ridden Paris where she can find out about her mother’s past). The recurring festishization of the analogue book format invested with magical qualities—equally articulated in Disney’s 1997 Beauty and the Beast’s Enchanted Christmas animation sequel, in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: Magical Ballroom computer game and girl’s educational software (2000), and Disney’s 2017 live-action 3D CGI Beauty and the Beast movie enhanced by new media technology—neatly demonstrates the transmedial spreading of the same story about the wonders of storytelling, too.

Prosumer Networks: Audience Engagement and/or Ideological Containment? The popularity of a fictive world’s extension into multiple media and “advanced moving image” formats can be explained by the (post)modern narrative condition Matt Hanson calls “screen bleed,” arguing that today’s digital media consumers’ immersion in 3D worlds reflects the need for all-encompassing mythologies multimedially involving contemporary audiences in “interactive online worlds, where each strand of narrative offers a new dimensional layer” (2003, 47). Post-industrialist consumer societies’ hybrid new subjectivities elicited by new media’s interactive potentials have been recently referred to as “prosumers” (Toffler 1980; Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010) or “produsers” (Marshall 2004): compound words made up of the fusion of producer and consumer, to denote the activity of browsing through media contents to make sensible choices that can eventually prove to be transformative of the meanings to be generated. Beauty and the Beast’s new (trans)medial extensions like Snapchat filter applications, Facebook quizzes, or YouTube fan videos allow interpreters to maximalize their engagement with the storyworld through individual choices, additions, and creative retellings. These activities tie in with the sociological concept of McDonaldization (Ritzer 1993), a cost-efficient process for the brand-owner corporations since prosumers work actively and free of charge in producing the services and goods they buy and consume. Prosumers also take part in viral marketing practices like the reproduction of memes which keep the hype alive via digital wordof-mouth tactics, spreading messages consumers cannot resist sharing with friends, who in turn share with more friends, fueling the cycle of exponential growth and reinforcing personal bonding of a community of the initiates. The dissemination of user-generated content on social media network websites or the blogosphere, like sharing Beauty and the Beast related do it yourself (DIY) project hints on Pinterest, uploading data onto Disney Wikipedia, or contributing to the online fan-fiction community’s collective corpus or the organization of live-broadcast flashmobs could be examples for the unpaid labor of enthusiasts. Although prosumers may gain a 324

relative empowerment like Twitter-using conference audiences, whose tweets posted online reach a global group of recipients who witness and respond to messages, which may spiral out of the control of the initial producer of meaning, but with free promotion they still serve its economic interests. Moreover, prosumer networks’ subversiveness is mostly ideologically contained by transmedia commodification practices like online shopping sites’ suggestions to let your friends know about your consumer activities driven by the aim to make the appetite for consumption reach epidemic proportions. The (neo)Marxist critique of capitalist consumer culture is called commodities compensatory fetish objects, which stimulate a constant desiring that can never reach satisfaction. Commodity fetishism masks a primordial lack caused by the disruption of direct interpersonal relationships and an alienating division of labor, whereby “the appearance of goods hides the story of who made them and how they made them, making invisible the economical exploitation and social injustice” (Lury 1996, 41). Zygmunt Bauman (1987) differentiated between two social groups: (1) “the seduced” who are incorporated into consumer culture to make illusory decisions in the market area, and (2) “the repressed” who, devoid of economic and cultural resources, are excluded from the market as subjects objectified to the bureaucratic control organizing the state provision of services. Celia Lury’s (1996) focus on the first group points out that acts of consumption rarely satisfy actual basic needs and are rather meant to express social status, cultural style, or being in the know, and hence, belonging to a group of like-minded consumers for whom products are worthy more for their symbolic value than their market or exchange value. Throughout a commodity aesthetics permeating packaging, promotion, and advertising, merchandise is associated with illusory cultural meanings: the promise of a lifestyle is being sold as “images of romance, exotica, fulfilment, or high life” are associated with mundane consumer goods as soap, washing machines, housewares, cars, or alcoholic beverages (Lury 1996, 42). Just how much commodities hold an “identity value” (Featherstone 1991)—paradoxically selling the promise of the expression of a uniquely individual self with mass-produced, one-size-fits-all consumer goods—is reflected by the compulsive online sharing of news about novel acquisitions: selfies of proud owners with cult products, hashtags expressing consumer identities (#disneyfan), or the publicization of purchases on social media like Facebook profile updates.

From Princess Industrial Complex to Feminism Appropriated for Marketing Purposes Sugary fantasies about upward social mobility and wealth conjoined with the myth of romantic true love constitute the number one bestselling commodity of the “Disney Princess Industry.” As Jack Zipes’ (1995) socio-historical overview of the changing function of folk and fairy tales argued, the oral wonder tale storytelling’s democratic quest for a communal harmony was gradually lost with the medial shift to written and 325

printed tales that the rising Victorian bourgeoisie exploited for the sake of solidifying its social class status through marginalizing the illiterate from the privileged elite of readers to reach a “control over imagination and desire within the symbolic order of Western culture” (19). The contemporary Disney Princess Industry’s “monologue of self-praise of the ruling classes” (24) masked by the illusory promise to “eliminate social and class conflicts forever” (26) with rags-to-riches fantasies seems a logical continuation of this self-establishing gesture of the middle class, constituting the main social corpus of the seduced consumers. According to Helen Pilinovsky (2011), the control of powerless juvenile audience’s, mainly little girls’, consumer tastes is predicated upon the Princess Industrial Complex system, whereby the ideological basis of the persona of the heroine of the commodified fairy tale—deprived of the political criticism and protofeminist concerns of the original contes de fées—is used to reinforce the values of heteronormative, patriarchal, capitalist society and “sell products associated with them, beginning with the tales themselves, and continuing through their trappings and accessories” (19), peaking in the Wedding Industrial Complex with the indoctrinated spectators/consumers’ coming of age. The classist commodification of the HappilyEver-After scenario is perfectly illustrated by the lure of high life voiced in advertisement of Primark’s Beauty and the Beast budget items. “Ladies, upgrade your little ones from princess to queen as they enter the Primark palaces and grab these must-haves. They’ll be ready to rule their kingdom in complete, beautiful style!” (Shah 2017). The intended audience of little girls can become princesses at the price of becoming playthings in the consumer mothers’ hands. Since Belle is one of the original members of the Disney Princess line launched in the early 2000s, the spell of her feminization is hard to break, and the 2017 Disney adaptation’s attempts at feminist revisions remain largely ineffectual. Emma Watson cast as Belle is an ideal representative of postmillennial girl power. Renowned as brave, smart, tomboyish Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series, a United Nations Women’s Goodwill Ambassador, and an activist for the He for She campaign, her public persona matches the rebellious, creative, feminist aspect of Disney’s Belle, who invents a washing machine to have more time for books, teaches a young village girl to read, refuses to marry macho Gaston, wears boots instead of glass slippers, and mocks the Wardrobe’s attempts at dressing her up as a princess. Yet the emphasis on Belle’s persona as “a soul ahead of her time” might just as well function as a marketing strategy to attract wider audiences by means of the commodification of feminism. Ironically, the moral of the original Beauty and the Beast story—never judge by outward appearances, true love looks beyond deceptive surfaces—gets lost in Disney’s classist, lookist version where the romantic central couple meets conventional beauty standards. The leonine Beast is beautifully sublime and never hideous, and in the end he loses all his bestiality to become a clean-shaven human prince charming, while Belle is endlessly radiant and always prepared for a dance— just like the brand related enchanted products, which can come in the most bizarre 326

forms like the “socks that look like stained glass in which you can practice the royal waltz around your bedroom,” or princess lip balms which can grant “chapped smackers a ‘happily ever after’” (Shah 2017).

Neurotic Hedonists The commodification of fantasies of enduring beauty and eternal love are particularly interesting when contrasted with consumer culture’s carpe diem philosophy dictating an accelerated rhythm of purchases driven by an insatiable hunger for novelty. Although consumption is stimulated by a glamorization of a hedonistic lifestyle allegedly made available with new acquisitions, buyers experience a constant dissatisfaction due to the ever-expanding range of goods on sale. Sociologistphilosopher Renata Salecl (2010) located the communal neurosis of advanced postindustrialist capitalist consumer societies in the psychological burden caused by the freedom of choice: the endless series of open options provokes feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and anxiety about possibly making the wrong individual choices, while forgetting about more important collective decisions and our power as politically responsible social thinkers. For Bauman (1987), the simultaneous compulsion and inability to choose results in melancholy, a sense of infinite connectivity while being hooked up to nothing. In more paranoid readings of the pitfalls of the mythicized choice, material obsession emerges as another form of child abuse, comparable to fast food and porn industries (Salecl 2013). The temporal confusion caused by the accelerated consumption of timeless values in the privileged here-and-now of a oneof-a-kind bargain occasion is a side effect of the neurotic experience of the compulsion to choose and buy, abundantly present in Beauty and the Beast commercial campaign with lines like: “Quick! Time is running out, Cogsworth’s hands are ticking, and these beauties won’t be in store forever …” (Jones 2017), “These Beauty and the Beast collectibles are everything. Until the last petal falls, purchase literally everything on this list” (Baardsen 2017). While in the original, true love must blossom before the last petal falls from the enchanted rose, throughout the transmedia commodification of the fairy tale, all goods must be purchased before the stock runs out. The rat race with time is for materialistic rather than idealistic purposes.

The Secret Lives of Things: Enchanted Object or Replaceable Merchandise? The most popular musical hit of the 1991 Disney animation and the 2017 live-action remake was “Be Our Guest,” a song-and-dance number performed by enchanted live tableware and household utensils who invite spectators like Belle, the only human character in the CGI enhanced scene, to embark on interactive participation, to accept the invitation, and fully submerge in the delights of the dinner and the story. The song —written by Howard Elliott Ashman and Alan Menk, and visualized as a grand scale 327

Moulin Rouge cabaret revue vaudeville performance—voices a veritable hymn of consumer culture, addressing customers from the point of view of products, services, and sellers who keep the market going in a confidence trickster fashion with promises of a happily-ever-after, and illusory subservience masking omnipresent omnipotence. This interpretation can be perceived by the following lines of the lyrics: “Be our guest/ Be our guest/ Our command is your request/…/And we’re obsessed/ With your meal/ With your ease/ Yes, indeed, we aim to please/ While the candlelight’s still glowing/ Let us help you/ We’ll keep going.” Magically animated objects in fairy tales have a potential to free things from the functional or fetishist roles assigned to them by consumerism, and act in accordance with the tenets of “thing studies,” or postmillennial object-oriented ontology that attributes to objects a proactive existence, a psychic reality of their own, independent of meanings projected on them by human cognition (Bennett 2010). In Madame de Beaumont’s original version of the Beauty and the Beast tale, magic objects versus commodities play a significant role as narrative engines of the text. A merchant, the father of six siblings, goes bankrupt, so that the family has to move to the country; when he travels back to the city to take care of business affairs, his offsprings ask for gifts; his sons want weapons and horses, his older daughters jewels and the finest dresses; it is only the youngest girl, his dearest child Beauty, who asks him for a single rose, that is not precious because of its market value but its symbolical, aesthetic worth, and erotic-amorous implications. The rose, asked with a touch of Oedipal desire from the father but eventually received from a monster turned prince charming, is a magic object inducing a family drama with fatal transformative consequences. As the emblem of the hope for true love which can break the curse, the rose is the hexed Beast’s most precious object—in Disney, too, an enchantress disguised as a beggar offers the flower in exchange for shelter and when the prince refuses it, transforms him into a beast—so when the father plucks it from his garden as a souvenir for his daughter, it is only fair that the monster asks for the merchant’s most precious belonging in return, hence turning the intended receiver of the gift into a immeasurably valuable gift herself. In Beaumont, the Beast’s magic objects are invested with a romantic emotional charge and a potential of connectivity: the rose represents yearning, a mirror helps Beauty to see what is happening in the Beast’s castle, and a ring allows her to return there in an instant, whereas the magnificent gowns Beast gave Beauty turn into rags at her sisters’ touch and restore their splendor in her hands, reflecting thing studies’ philosophical assumption of objects choosing their owner, relativizing human agency. The castle’s household utensils, the Beast’s enchanted servants, keep their anthropomorphic qualities: they can talk, sing, dance, love, and display a wide range of human emotions from flirtatiousness and humor to anxieties about being trapped in object status, the uncanny state of animate inanimation, and losing their humanity forever (unless the Beast learns to love another and earns her love in return before the last petal falls). In Disney’s 2017 film adaptation, few objects do preserve their enchanting qualities 328

like the clockwork machinery Belle’s father cannot cease craftworking upon since the object (containing a miniature replica of himself painting his wife and daughter) functions as a storehouse of both traumatic and blissful memories, reminding him of his lost spouse via a materialized flashback of a happy past—providing an exciting counterpart to the daughter’s upcoming happily-ever-after. Yet most of the wondrous possibilities promised by the object-oriented ontological view are neutralized due to objects’ predominant use as spectacular devices of stage magic, like in the abovementioned “Be Our Guest,” a tagline of the 2017 film adaptation. The exotic flavor of the French culinary expressions (which sound like fantastic brand names), the rhetorical questions, emphatic repetitions, and direct invocations in the song are poetic devices which clearly resonate with advertisements’ discourse of commodification. “Soup du jour/ Hot hors d’oeuvres/ Why, we only live to serve/ Try the grey stuff, it’s delicious/ Don’t believe me? Ask the dishes”—cry out ecstatically the household utensils and tableware … and fans rush off to Primark to purchase their Chip cup, taste their Grey stuff ice-cream at Disneyland theme park, or compile their Belle menus with the help of online computer games. The “politics of wonder” rooted in traditional fairy tales’ quest for communal harmony and psychologically efficient treatment of collective trauma are transformed into a hegemonically calculated, “commercialized poetics of magic” (Bacchilega 2013, 5), creativity contained via an “idiotic pleasure of consumption” (Žižek 1989) as self-serving prosumers willingly gift themselves with an ever-expanding, beastly selection of beauties.

Conclusion As Karin Beeler and Stan Beeler (2014) argued, postmillennial popular cultural studies, and more specifically screen studies’ scrutinization of participatory culture must pay close attention to how new technological devices radically altered viewing platforms; however, the other most influential factor necessitating new ways of discussing spectatorship proves to be “the youthful segment of the audience” (2014, 1), who have become a significant economic factor in successful productions, a consumer group increasingly independent of parental supervision. Instead of waiting for a family outing to the local cinema, children can watch and rewatch a film on their mini DVD players or play with tablet applications or e-book adaptations of the same film on handheld devices in the comfort of their own rooms (Beeler and Beeler 2014). We can only wonder how this generation of children—digital natives and natural born prosumers with an unprecedented new media literacy—will contribute to the visual narratives of the future following a “digimodernism” Kirby (2009) calls a new cultural paradigm of the twenty-first century. It is to be subject of further investigations how they will reform the art of storytelling they have been trained to understand in terms of a multimodal process involving “dispersed media content” (Jenkins 2006, 3) they can make connections with while seeking out new information about the artwork that can be bypassed throughout creative interactions with special features (like added bonus 329

contents at Disney Movies Online) they might reinvent as they like, once they have learnt to negotiate media transition as “mix of tradition and innovation” (Jenkins and Thorburn 2003). Göran Bolin (2007) pointed out the liberating potential of transmediation technologies: just like the arrival of mechanical movable type printing freed textual components from their authors and introduced the Gutenberg Galaxy era of mass communication, the advent and quick proliferation of digital production, distribution, and reception procedures liberated information from the dependence on any given medium, as the computer has melted several older media into its technology (Jensen in Bolin 2007, 238). According to Bolin, the transmedia commodification of fictional characters can be regarded as a further “liberation of textual components” (2007, 243): throughout market convergence and cultural synergy, media and non-media enterprises coordinate their initiatives for mutual economic benefit and allow cultural items to freely move among different media platforms. As my initial example of ChipGate (and any Primark merchandise using Disney logos or characters) has shown, this crossplatform circulation opens up possibilities of multiple readings which simultaneously hold the potential for creative innovations and comprise a cunning marketing strategy to encourage brand loyalty and addictive consumer behavior by offering an abundance of media content that can be decoded only by purchasing more media technologies. Amazement results from the maze-like experience of ever-expanding, selfdeconsructing transmedia storyscapes which invite audiences to get all the magic yet clearly prevent ultimate satiety by promising newer and newer adventures to collect.

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25 Transmedia Franchising Driving Factors, Storyworld Development, and Creative Process Peter von Stackelberg

Transmedia franchising has grown rapidly in number and sophistication since 2010, when the transmedia revolution began to gain momentum. The pattern of “reboots, remakes, prequels, sequels, adaptations, and shared cinematic universes rule the day” (Burt 2016) as the film industry seeks new creative and business approaches in a rapidly evolving media environment. This changing media environment is driving the development of transmedia franchises, which are likely to absorb more traditional types of media franchises as that evolution continues. Various types of media franchises have been in place since at least the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The emergence of transmedia storytelling in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a result of technological, economic, and social changes during the Second Industrial Revolution. The mass production and promotion of cultural products and new forms of advertising in the early twentieth century supported the development of early transmedia franchises. The emergence of mass audiences during this period went hand in hand “with the alignment of fictions told across platforms” (Freeman 2014, 2263). There are certainly precursors to the mass culture media-franchise phenomenon. In the past, popular children’s films often inspired comic books, or vice versa. Some of these early franchises extended to an adolescent market (e.g. Superman, Spiderman, Batman & Robin). (Lemke 2004, 6) Many early literary, film, and game franchises were focused on a main character. When Sir Arthur Canon Doyle wrote A Study in Scarlet in 1886 and published it the following year, he introduced Sherlock Holmes and created an enduring literary franchise that included multiple books and, later, films and television programs. Other literary franchises based on fictional characters—for example, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot created by Agatha Christie or Nancy Drew written by Carolyn Keene (a pseudonym used by multiple authors who wrote books for the franchise)—emerged during the early to mid-twentieth century. Contemporary writers like James Lee Burke 332

(author of the Dave Robicheaux mystery series), Kathy Reich (creator of a series of mystery novels featuring the character Temperance Brennan), and Daniel Silva (author of a series of action-spy novels) are among those using fictional characters around which they build literary franchises that typically involve multiple novels. Many such literary franchises have been expanded to include films and/or television series. Film franchises like Tarzan, the Lone Ranger, and the Ma and Pa Kettle emerged during Hollywood’s film studio era. Character-based film franchises continue to thrive, with some like James Bond and Jason Bourne, eclipsing the books from which they originated. The emergence of video games in the 1980s led to the development of franchises such as Super Mario and Kong as game producers sought to replicate early successes with follow-up games. An early and notable exception to this character-based structure for media franchises was the world of Oz created by L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. This storyworld was the basis for an early transmedia franchise that included four novels, a theater production, a comic strip, and a mock newspaper. Between 1900 and 1907, Baum created an “expansive, unfolding transmedial storyworld” that stemmed at least in part from Baum’s “apparent aptitude to develop his fictional creations according to the emerging commercial systems of modern advertising” (Freeman 2014, 2366). The 1970s saw the beginning of a shift away from character-based franchises. Star Trek and later Star Wars began to place a greater emphasis on the storyworld. While both of these franchises initially featured a cast of characters that remained largely the same (although, in the case of some Star Trek films, with the same cast of characters replaced with different actors), new characters joined the storyworld in later productions. The shift from character-based to storyworld-based transmedia, at least in the case of Star Wars, was not so much a planned extension of the franchise as an ad hoc process resulting from contingency planning over a period of years. Freeman argues that uncertainty about whether A New Hope, the first of the Star Wars movies, would be a commercial success resulted in the development of Splinter in the Mind’s Eye as a world-building contingency (Freeman 2017, 66–67) that could be used as the basis for a low-budget sequel if the initial Star Wars film was commercially unsuccessful. The importance of storyworld is apparent with the many film franchises that have been created over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Fourteen films in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe franchise grossed more than $4 billion between 2008 and 2016; nine films in the Star Wars franchise grossed $3.7 billion; and six films in The Lord of the Rings franchise grossed more than $1.8 billion (Dirks n.d.). This shift from character-based to storyworld-based franchises also occurred in the video game industry, with characters like Mario and Kong giving way to the increasingly sophisticated storyworlds needed for first-person games like Grand Theft Auto, Halo, and Call of Duty. While the shift to storyworld-based transmedia franchises, the role of strong 333

characters in these franchises continues to be important. C-3PO and R2-D2, the two droids who were the first characters introduced in Star Wars: A New Hope, are important figures in representing and maintaining narrative cohesion and stability across various elements of the Star Wars transmedia franchise (Lomax 2017, 41–42). Other characters in the Star Wars storyworld have been used in novels, comics, and animated series in addition to the various films (Geraghty 2017, 117–118).

Transmedia Franchises versus Traditional Media Franchises The emergence of transmedia franchises is blurring the line between traditional literary, film, and game franchises and franchises that encompass a broad range of media. Media franchises have been defined as a “systemic structure, or network of texts that work together across a variety of platforms under a single unifying brand name, image, or concept to create an imaginary world” (Johnson 2009). Johnson’s definition of “media franchise” is very close to the generally accepted definition of “transmedia.” One definition of transmedia storytelling is that it is a process in which episodes of a story are spread across multiple platforms (Gambarato and Nani 2016). This focus on the narrative design of transmedia storytelling is central to many definitions of “transmedia.” Slota’s definition is similar: “Transmedia storytelling is the distribution of a particular narrative (i.e., the holistic story universe, not to be confused with an individual plot or theme) across multiple delivery channels and technologies” (Slota 2017). A focus on the nature of the commercial aspects of transmedia narratives has also been used to define what they are. Transmedia storytelling is characterized by an often complex network of interrelationships involving license holders and licensees, producers, consumers, and prosumers. Such interactions are further complicated by processes of production, distribution and consumption, and by the relationships across specific media platforms utilized by the franchise or project in question. (Harvey 2013, 115) Robert Pratten notes that many traditional definitions of transmedia storytelling focus on the methods of production, instead of taking an audience-oriented perspective that focuses on the consumption of a narrative. He states that “transmedia storytelling is a design philosophy” that attempts to create synergy between the content of the narrative and an emotional, participatory experience for the audience (Pratten 2015, 2–3). It is important to note, however, that not all transmedia projects are franchises and not all media franchises are transmedia. Transmedia storytelling spans a broad range of storytelling projects, from marketing and advertising campaigns to public service projects that intend to educate, engage, and inspire to cross-platform entertainment projects. The Blair Witch Project, Year Zero, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and many 334

other projects “could all be reasonably called transmedia even though they’re wildly different in structure, content and scope” (Burns 2016). Many early transmedia narratives—Robert Pratten’s Lowlifes; the alternate reality game (ARG) Year Zero based on Nine Inch Nails album of the same name; and Welcome to Pine Point by Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simmons—were single stories delivered across multiple media (i.e., books, graphic novels, film, video, live events, video games, etc.) or, increasingly, on a single platform like a smartphone, tablet, or smart television that presents a single narrative using multiple modes of communication (i.e., text, still images, video, audio, and animation). The term “small-scale transmedia storytelling” has been applied to projects that integrate a short story with a soundtrack and comic to define various facets and perspectives with a larger narrative universe (Slota 2017). This definition of smallscale transmedia storytelling should be broadened to include any project that uses transmedia techniques to tell a single story, not just short stories. Many early transmedia narratives were “small-scale” and current independent transmedia projects also tend to be small-scale. Transmedia franchises, on the other hand, typically consist of multiple fully developed narratives. The term “large-scale transmedia storytelling” has been used for complex, multi-author narrative universes that span films, books, comics, games and —at the highest level—concerts, theme parks, and themed vacations (Slota 2017).

Factors Driving Development of Transmedia Franchises Media and transmedia franchises have gone from being a minor factor in Hollywood to near domination (Nicholson 2016). The emergence of these modern transmedia franchises is the result of several factors, including: • • • •

technological change; proliferation of media channels but declining audiences; commercial considerations; and fan experiences.

Technological Change Technological change has been a key factor driving the development of transmedia franchises for more than a century. The technological changes of the Second Industrial Revolution—a period rapid industrialization in most Western societies that occurred from the 1820s through the 1940s (von Stackelberg 2014)—drove the emergence of mass communication on a scale never seen before. Technologies like photoengraving, commercial lithography, mass-produced newspapers (known as the “penny press”), paperback books, the rotary letterpress, hot metal typesetting machines, and many other print technologies enabled mass production and distribution of shared information on a nationwide scale (American Printing History Association n.d.). 335

Likewise, technological change has helped the emergence of transmedia storytelling and transmedia franchises as we now know them during the Information Age—a period of more than a century between the 1920s and the 2040s, during which radio, television, computers, the Internet, and a myriad of other communications and computing technologies emerged (von Stackelberg 2014). Since the 1960s, wave after wave of change has swept over the publishing, film, and television industries as new information technologies were introduced, disrupting and destroying not just individual companies but entire segments of those industries. The convergence of various modes of communication to single platforms like smartphones, tablets, and smart televisions now makes it technically feasible and commercially viable to deliver high quality text, still images, video, audio, and animation on a single device, eliminating the need for users to hop from one media platform to another.

Proliferation of Content Choices; Declining Audiences In addition to changing the nature of media platforms, the technologies of the Information Age dramatically increased the choices audience have. The number of television channels increased a hundred-fold or more from the limited number of broadcast networks of the 1950s and 1960s to hundreds of cable TV channels in the early twenty-first century. The average American household had access to 206 different television channels in 2016, an increase of more than 50 percent from 2008, but the number of channels actually viewed was stagnant (MarketingCharts.com 2016). The number of books published each year in the United States in 2016 exceeded 1 million, with more than 750,000 of them being self-published. This is a dramatic increase from the roughly 400,000 books published in 2007 (Piersanti 2016). While the number of books available increased dramatically, book industry sales have fallen or been flat since 2007 (Piersanti 2016). The film industry is also experiencing declining audiences. The number of tickets sold to films shown in theaters in the United States and Canada has declined from more than 1.5 billion in 2002 to 1.2 billion in 2017 (TheNumbers.com 2017). The number of movies given wide release by the six major studios—Warner Brothers, Walt Disney, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, and Universal—has dropped from 110 in 1995 to 79 in 2017, while the total movie releases for other studios only increased from 28 in 1995 to 47 in 2017 (an overall decline of 12 films per year) (TheNumbers.com 2017). These trends are driving the television, book, and film industries to look for new ways to attract and hold audiences, with transmedia franchises becoming a primary focus.

Commercial Considerations Commercial considerations are a key driver of transmedia franchise development. The 336

use of modern advertising, licensing, and cross-sector industry partnerships has characterized transmedia practices over time (Freeman 2017, 62). Many funding bodies require transmedia strategies to expand a production across multiple platforms (Burns 2016). The globalization of entertainment is driving the creation of large entertainment franchises. Lynda Obst, author of a book on the film industry’s “sequel mania” is quoted in the Financial Times as saying: You can’t make movies the same way internationally as you do in the U.S. You can’t pay for television advertising in every city in the world, so you become dependent on pre-awareness of the movie. The more the international audience is familiar with a title, the more they look forward to seeing it again. In Hollywood, familiarity breeds success, not contempt. (Garrahan 2014) Accompanying the emergence of transmedia franchises has been the inclusion of many different stakeholders who are dependent on the profitability of the franchises they work within (Freeman 2017, 64). The development of long-term transmedia franchises is seen as one way to bring a measure of stability to a film industry which has become dependent on periodic big returns from a small number of blockbuster films. The Walt Disney Company has recognized the importance of transmedia franchises by embedding Transmedia Producers in all their franchise teams—building on a model of franchise development that has expanded to incredible profit in recent years (Burns 2016). Transmedia franchising has extended the commercial lifespan of many entertainment products. “DVD release, TV broadcast, internet streaming, and transmedia franchisation of [intellectual property] have extended the afterlife of films into infinity” (Nicholson 2016).

Fan Experiences As noted earlier, the proliferation of media channels and content has resulted in a crowded market for information and entertainment products. “The growing diverse competition is a big reason that sequels and franchises dominate the box office; it’s enough that it’s a struggle drawing audiences to theaters without the trouble of persuading them that original content is worth their while” (Nicholson 2016). The same challenges of drawing audiences face book authors and publishers, creators of graphic novels, and practitioners working with other forms of media. Until recently, the goal of developing [media] franchises was usually monetization through repurposing, whereas the concept of transmedia storytelling focuses primarily on the (more costly) expansion of the story itself. The question that then remains is—will consumers be satisfied with repurposed content (franchise development), or will they demand more (transmedia)? 337

(Weitbrecht 2011) From a business perspective, consumers’ familiarity with a creator, her cast of characters, and a known storyworld can be a significant benefit of a media and transmedia franchise when competing in a crowded marketplace. The proliferation of content and the number of channels available for content distribution has made discoverability a significant challenge for all media products, whether they are films, television programs, books, or some other form of media. The development of a loyal base of fans for a transmedia franchise can help mitigate the challenges of discoverability by creating both a recurring source of revenue and opportunities to use fans’ personal and social media connections to promote the franchise. “By having multiple connections on a personal level with audiences/consumers as part of the transmedia franchise, a company can begin to structure itself around those relationships” (Evo News 2017). The audience experience created by transmedia franchises that span multiple media and extend over long periods of time far exceed encounters with unfranchised print and broadcast media (Lemke 2004). In a competitive media environment, this highquality audience experience is a significant advantage for a transmedia franchise by creating a “strong sense of ownership and identification with them and with their points of view” (Lemke 2004, 4).

Transmedia Franchises and Storyworlds The development of strong contemporary transmedia franchises requires the creation of sophisticated storyworlds; without expansive storyworlds, transmedia franchises would be much more limited in scope. The creation of sophisticated imaginary worlds has been central to some of the greatest epic fantasy and science fiction stories ever written (von Stackelberg and McDowell 2015). While the process of world-building— the creation of imaginary worlds with coherent geographic, social, cultural, and other features—has a long history, it is reaching new levels of sophistication in twenty-firstcentury science fiction. A storyworld is a cognitive construct that consists of recurring elements, among them, characters, significant objects, settings (Ryan and Thon 2014, 129). Rich storyworlds—the “universes” within which stories are set—provide detailed contextual rules-sets that develop a larger reality that extends beyond a single story, while potentially providing a deeper understanding of the underlying systems that drive these worlds (von Stackelberg and McDowell 2015). As noted previously, early media franchises tended to be character-based, with a single character—usually the protagonist—typically carrying the franchise. Storyworld-based franchises were less common although some, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth and Frank Herbert’s Arrakis, developed as the desert planet in Dune, have existed since at least the early to mid-twentieth century. When Star Trek debuted in 1966, the television series was more character-based than it was storyworld-based. 338

However, as the Trekkers cult phenomenon around Star Trek grew, an extensive storyworld was developed as much by fans as by the franchise owners and licensees. While Star Trek’s initial development as a storyworld-based transmedia franchise may have been largely unplanned (given that the original series was unceremoniously cancelled after its third season only to return stronger than ever because of fan pressure), storyworlds are now vitally important aspect of franchise development. Learning from success like Pirates of the Caribbean, Disney Fairies, Tron Legacy, and others, Disney put storyworlds first in its decision making. It’s heavily invested in purchasing or expanding rights in existing storyworlds, Pixar’s intellectual properties, Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (Burns 2016) Developing, maintaining, and growing a healthy storyworld is essential to keeping a narrative franchise commercially viable. For example, what made Star Wars so influential was the existence of an entire world that characters—and the fans who followed them—could have adventures in (Rose 2011). Gomez (2017) states the development of effective large-scale transmedia franchises requires extensive preparation of the storyworld and its underlying mythos. This can require a substantial investment in what is in essence a massive blueprint, not just a stack of manuscripts or screenplays. A well-developed storyworld should help the creators of individual stories understand how things work in that particular universe. It needs to have its internal logic and that logic must be applied consistently across all of the products in the transmedia franchise. “Great fictional worlds provide not just a source of characters, settings, and events that writers can draw from; they provide powerful messages in ways that help audiences realize those messages in their individual lives” (Gomez 2017). Careful development of the storyworld must be central to the creative efforts of a transmedia franchise, Gomez (2017) argues.

Transmedia Franchises and the Creative Process The emergence of transmedia franchises has made possible “widespread creativity through the collaborative creation and collective consumption of narrative worlds” (Ciancia 2015, 131). This perspective that the development of transmedia franchises fosters collaborative and collective creativity is a broad generalization that speaks to the possibilities but to which there are many notable exceptions. For example, the relationship between Star Wars creator George Lucas, co-creators, and fans was at times contentious as Lucas fought to maintain creative control over many aspects of the franchise (Lomax 2017). The role of the lone author, creative teams, and even fans in the creation of content for transmedia franchises involves a delicate balancing act. Solitary can provide a strong vision and a unified voice at critical points in the early development of a 339

franchise. As a transmedia franchise grows, however, the creative processes will be significantly different from the processes used to create an individual book, graphic novel, television program, film, or video game. Even a small-scale transmedia project can easily require far more skills than any one author, illustrator, or screenwriter can muster. The rapid evolution of digital media technology makes transmedia storytelling a viable option for many small projects. Professional and prosumer hardware and software provides sophisticated, low-cost tools for the production of transmedia stories (von Stackelberg and Eira Jones 2014, 59). While the cost of sophisticated media technologies has dropped rapidly, the development of the many skills needed to use these tools in the service of effective transmedia storytelling and franchise development is still a significant barrier. Finding good storytellers that can meet the needs of transmedia storytelling, particularly with large-scale franchises, is essential for the development of transmedia franchises, posits transmedia expert Jeff Gomez in interview to Andersen (2010). Gomez states unequivocally that good storytellers are relatively rare and we should cherish them, but stewards—people who fundamentally understand the vision behind the narrative and the characters and can make sure that vision is adhered to—are also essential as a transmedia franchise grows (Andersen 2010). Talented writers, illustrators, cinematographers, directors, and other creative personal are in relatively short supply. Individuals who are skilled in multiple areas— for example, writing, visual design, game development, and ebook publishing—are even more scarce. As Gomez notes, “it takes a different creative skill set to devise a massive fictional universe than it does to write a screenplay” (Gomez 2017). What you need are [transmedia] writers who know how to create sprawling, massive storyworlds from whose strengths conventional screenwriters can mine great individual (smaller) stories. Shared universe writers’ rooms require experts in long-form storytelling, storyworld and universe design, game design, and mythology. (Gomez 2017) In addition, Gomez (2017) mentions that a major skill required for creators of a transmedia franchise is a working knowledge of epic storytelling. Classic epic storytelling is about how an entire people must grapple with their morals, values, and afflictions, in order to gain a distinct and extraordinary identity. They are about the birth of entire cultures, and how they aspire for shared and common fulfillment. (Gomez 2017) The many stories that emerge from a shared storyworld do not need to answer all of the questions at the core of that universe, but they do need to present mysteries in a grand and passionate way “that your audience will drive themselves crazy trying to 340

answer” (Gomez 2017). The interactive nature of transmedia storytelling will require creators working within a franchise to accommodate the needs and interests of their audience in ways that different from more traditional media franchises. Transmedia designers will have to manage their relationship with fans and be prepared to modify or alter stories in response to audience interests and focus (Evo News 2017). The participation of fans in the creation of content—i.e., fan fiction—has occurred with numerous transmedia franchises. A number of transmedia franchises, Iron Sky and The Cosmonaut among them, have taken fan participation to a new level through the use of crowdfunding of pre-production and production costs (Ciancia 2015, 138). The extent of the control transmedia franchise creators or owners have over their storyworlds is a complex exercise of balancing the need to engage and build a fan base by allowing those fans to use the storyworld for the creation of their own content while continuing to maintain control over both the canon of the storyworld and legal ownership of the franchise’s intellectual property (Lindsay 2014, 61–62). The growth of transmedia franchises has prompted numerous concerns that they will kill creativity and originality in storytelling. “(W)hen George Lucas introduced us to the Star Wars universe, it also opened the doors to sequels and franchises, blotting out drama and original content” (Nicholson 2016). While creativity and originality can suffer as a result of massive transmedia franchises, that has more to do with the individuals working on a franchise than nature of media and transmedia franchises themselves. Transmedia design, whether an individual project or an entire transmedia franchise, requires the development of a business model, narrative context, and media structure (Ciancia 2015, 140–141). A more comprehensive framework for a transmedia project identifies ten points that work equally well for small-scale transmedia projects and sprawling large-scale transmedia franchises. The ten points creators must address are premise and purpose of the transmedia franchise; the narrative the franchise will tell; the storyworld the franchise will encompass; the characters who will inhabit the franchise’s storyworld; extensions to the franchise’s overall narrative; media platforms and genres the franchise will use; audience and market for the franchise; how the franchise will engage its fans; the overall structure of the franchise; and the aesthetics that contribute to the overall cohesiveness of the franchise (Gambarato 2013, 90–95). Von Stackelberg proposes an approach to transmedia narrative design that can be applied to either individual transmedia projects or to a series of projects across a transmedia franchise. He identifies three key design phases (von Stackelberg 2011, 115–116): • engagement design, which focus on the users’ cognitive engagement with and participation in the narrative; • narrative design, which focuses on the story elements of the transmedia narrative; and 341

• interaction design, which focuses on how users interact with the narrative’s interface and navigate through the narrative. Four levels of design tasks are identified—project, storyworld, story, and scene/sequence (von Stackelberg 2011, 161–281). Two of these levels—project and storyworld—are particularly relevant to the development of transmedia franchises. Within these levels, the tasks identified correspond closely with the ten-point framework proposed by Gambarato (2013).

Conclusion As technological change and consumers tastes change, traditional approaches to storytelling will continue to rapidly evolve. The emergence of the transmedia franchise is a key element of that evolution. While media franchises are not new, the crossmedia nature of transmedia franchises means they will differ substantially from the literary, film, video game, and other media franchises that preceded them. Commercial pressures will drive the adoption of transmedia franchises across the various media sectors, resulting in the integration of a variety of media platforms to an extent not seen in the past. This shift to transmedia franchises will in turn, drive the need for new creative approaches that mean authors, illustrators, filmmakers, and others will need to become skilled in a number of areas and be able to work effectively in crossdisciplinary teams. As with most technology-driven change, the shift to transmedia franchises will present significant challenges to those working in various forms of media. It means the traditional divisions between the film, television, book publishing, and video game industries will continue to be erased. It will also mean that some organizations will not survive as they fail to make the transition to a world in which transmedia franchises are dominant. For those who can adapt, however, the growth of transmedia franchises will open new commercial and creative opportunities.

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26 Transmedia Distribution From Vertical Integration to Digital Natives Elizabeth Evans

Distribution has historically been an often-overlooked part of media scholarship, with a greater amount of attention being paid to processes of production, reception, and occasionally exhibition. However, there is a growing recognition, especially within media industries research, that distribution is not only a vital component of media operations, but also a rich site for the exploration of how industrial and political structures shape our experiences of media content. Denise Mann, for instance, argues that “[d]istribution, the ability to provide audiences with access to content, is at the very heart of the entertainment industries” (Mann 2014a, 18). Alisa Perren demonstrates the centrality of distribution through her description of the work that media distributors do: Distribution companies have been labeled as “middlemen” and their employees as “intermediaries” responsible for ensuring that media find an audience. Yet distributors handle a large variety of different tasks. Overviews of the media industries typically identify the following as the primary emphases of distributors: assembling financing, procuring and/or licensing rights for projects for various platforms (e.g., iTunes, Netflix) or markets (e.g., Japanese theatrical, Latin American satellite television), managing the in flow and out flow of income from various corporate partners, designing release schedules and marketing strategies to establish and sustain audience awareness, and building and managing libraries. (Perren 2013, 166) Distribution therefore focuses on when, how, and where audiences are provided with access to content within a global and increasingly technologically dispersed marketplace. Perren goes on to argue that the changes wrought by digital technologies (those same technologies that have facilitated a burst of transmedia logics) have placed a spotlight on the key area of concern when thinking about distribution: “the ways that content moves through space (flows) and time (windowing)” (Perren 2013, 167). In taking Perren’s definition of distribution, the connections to notions of transmediality become clear. Transmedia logics are also about the ways in which content moves 345

through space and time. The various ways in which transmediality manifests that are explored in this volume are fundamentally tied to practices of distribution. Transmedia storytelling or marketing, for instance, rely on distribution strategies that carefully spread content across different media platforms and spaces. The temporality of transmedia content (whether deliberately strategized or emerging more organically) is equally key to creating transmedia experiences. Transmediality is inherently about distribution. Transmedia distribution can, to a certain extent, be defined as the placing of media or content on multiple different distribution platforms. A “television episode,” for instance, may appear via broadcast, DVD/Blu-ray, streamed via a VOD service, or downloaded via a digital retail store; it may be experienced on a television set, laptop or computer, tablet or mobile phone. At the same time, though, critical thinking around transmediality has also sidelined certain ideas of distribution, especially the idea that the same content may be available on multiple platforms. Henry Jenkins, for instance, labels the same content on different platforms as “cross-platform,” as there is “no opportunity here for additive comprehension, no real reason for the same consumer to visit these various hubs to learn anything new” (Jenkins 2016). Placing the same content on different platforms is clearly not the same as placing different pieces of a storyworld, brand, performance, or similar on different platforms. Importantly, transmedia distribution does not equal transmedia storytelling. However, in terms of how cultural content is increasingly experienced, the fact that content is not just available via one distribution outlet still has important consequences for understanding processes of transmediality. From the perspective of the audience, the connection between platform proliferation and transmedia experiences becomes clear and any understanding of transmediality as a lived experience by audiences and as a strategic approach by the media or cultural industries must embrace the full consequences of transmedia distribution. This includes the idea that experiencing a transmedia televisual experience like Doctor Who may involve never turning the television set on because its episodes are available via video on demand (VOD) services on a laptop or tablet. Similarly, experiencing the full transmedia version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (comprising film, web videos, video games, and comics) may never involve going to the cinema, watching the television set or even reading a comic or graphic novel made out of paper. What is crucial here is that we are not talking about adaptation (a possible source for the uneasiness of considering such phenomenon as transmedia). This is not content being adapted from one form to another. This is a piece of content being explicitly placed on multiple platforms either consecutively or simultaneously, opening up ever more ways in which both content and audiences can move transmedially. This chapter will consider the proliferation of (primarily digital) platforms that have reshaped the nature of media distribution in the twenty-first century and in turn acted as the foundations of contemporary transmedia strategies. These platforms, and the way they are being utilized by content creators and owners, are contributing to 346

media culture becoming increasingly and inherently transmedial. As audiences, we no longer experience media within rigid platform-defined ways; the choices of distribution methods available to us means that we can move across and between different media platforms in ways of our choosing, turning even single media texts into transmedia experiences. Michael Curtin, Jennifer Holt, and Kevin Sanson identify these shifts as a “distribution revolution,” one that acts as “the latest iteration of an ongoing tension between the diverse desires of audiences for cheap and easy access and the twentieth-century business models that sought to manage media flows and audience consumption” (Curtin, Holt, and Sanson 2014, 6–7). In order to streamline the discussion, the focus will mainly be on the United States (US) and United Kingdom (UK) services relating to film and television content, however consideration will also be made of the gaming and publishing sectors where appropriate. Despite this focus, many of the issues raised by transmedia distribution and discussed below function as useful starting points in their application to other media locales and sectors.

Mapping Transmedia Distribution In Transmedia Television, I posited the notion of distribution as being a key part of transmediality by exploring how digital technologies were positioned as alternatives to the television set (Evans 2011, 40). At that point, in the early 2010s, the television industry was beginning to develop transmedia distribution strategies along a set of key categories. The Internet had created opportunities for audiences to become distributors of copyrighted content more easily, something that caused much consternation within the media industries (see also Lobato 2012, 96). On the one hand, the industry responded through legal attempts to shut down such sites that provided access to copyrighted content and public statements on how much piracy cost the creative economy (see, for example, Lodderhose 2014). At the same time, however, they began to develop their own distribution strategies in order to colonise the spaces of online media piracy. A key categorization for these early services, therefore, was the relationships between different stakeholders and the comparative legality or legitimacy of each platform. Such categorizations are particularly important given what Ramon Lobato calls the “‘grey’ services that sit somewhere in between legal online movie rental/download-to-own services … and the more proudly piratical peer-to-peer networks” (2012, 96). Nascent official platforms such as broadcaster catch-up services sat alongside “guerilla networks” such as peer-to-peer downloading services and collaborations both within the industry and with external third parties. The rapid expansion of digital platforms requires this model to be reconsidered in order to map the distribution networks that sit underneath contemporary transmedia strategies and the consequences of these networks for how we can understand transmedia culture. It is possible to categorise the increasingly transmedial nature of the media industries in multiple ways. The legality of services remains a key factor in 347

distinguishing the myriad of ways in which audiences can access content (see Crisp 2015), however other factors have also emerged. Business models form a key point of differentiation with subscription-funded video on demand (SVOD) and advertisingfunded video on demand (AVOD) acting as the dominant two categories. Similarly, the type of access offered varies, with some services offering permanent access (“ownership”) and others only temporary access (rental or catch-up services). However, as distribution is ultimately about the pathways in which content creators provide audiences with access to their content, I will focus here on industrial ownership. Much has changed over the past decade and three new trends are emerging that shape transmedia distribution within the media industries: new forms of vertical integration and conglomeration, collaborations, and the emergence of digitally native providers.

New Forms of Vertical Integration and Conglomeration The first trend speaks to the re-emergence and strengthening of organisational structures that characterized Hollywood in the twentieth century: vertical integration and conglomeration. Vertical integration describes how film studios in the 1930s and 1940s owned the entire production, distribution and exhibition pipeline. In 1948, a US Supreme Court ruling against Paramount Studios required the film studios to sell the cinemas that they owned, ending the period of vertical integration. The period after the Paramount Decree not only saw the breaking up of the studios’ monopolies over film production, distribution and exhibition but eventually the emergence of newer media and distribution options in television, home entertainment (VHS, DVD and then Bluray), and the Internet. During the 1980s the US-based media industries shifted to a different, horizontal, form of integration as film studios and television broadcasters were increasingly bought by large multi-national corporations through processes of conglomeration. This process was not confined to film and television, as these growing media empires also sought to expand into music, gaming, publishing, and leisure spaces. The result has been six major, global corporations (Comcast, Disney, Vivendi, Time Warner, 21st Century Fox, and CBS) that maintain control over the vast majority of US media production and that operate across individual media sectors. Although mainly examined in terms of the US media industries, the global nature of these conglomerates impacts on sectors outside of the United States, for instance in Fox’s involvement in satellite television across Europe and Asia via Sky Plc. To return to transmedia distribution, both vertical integration and conglomeration are concerned with securing access over multiple different connection points between audiences and content. In essence, they are both about consolidating power over distribution networks, be those networks medium specific or sitting across multiple media sectors. It is within this context that recent transmedia distribution strategies continue the traditions of vertical integration and conglomeration. The historically well-established film studios and television broadcasters, for instance, have 348

increasingly developed or bought VOD services in order to control online access points to their content. Film studio-owned VOD services such as Flixster (co-owned by Comcast/NBCUniversal and Time Warner) and Disney Life both keep ownership of online access channels in house. In the UK, the television-oriented VOD landscape remains dominated by the major broadcasters, most notably the BBC with its iPlayer service, but also the ITV Hub, Channel 4’s All 4, and Sky’s Sky Go and Now TV. These services expand the broadcasters’ distribution networks away from television broadcasting and involve the creation of large libraries of content that can be accessed when audiences choose (see Evans and McDonald 2014). Within the video game sector, both Sony and Microsoft have developed online stores (PlayStation Store and Xbox One Games) that not only keep control of content distribution but also tie that distribution to their proprietary consoles. In comics, Disney-owned Marvel have created Marvel Unlimited Comics, a subscription app where customers can download digital copies of Marvel comics. Just as vertical integration offered the film studios of classical Hollywood consolidated power over their entire product chain (from production, through distribution to exhibition), contemporary transmedia distribution strategies do the same. Established media industries organizations have used transmedia distribution strategies to maintain control over how, where, and when their audiences access content.

Intra-Industry Collaborations The second category of transmedia distribution is closely related to notions of vertical integration and conglomeration but is defined through deliberate collaboration between content creators and owners. Such services have primarily emerged within the film and TV sectors. The most publically visible are US streaming service Hulu (coowned by Disney, Fox, NBCUniversal, Warner Bros) and Ultraviolet, a collaboration between 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros, Paramount, Sony Picture, Lionsgate, and the BBC, which allows consumers to access digital versions of the DVDs they purchase. Other forms of collaboration also emerge, however, for instance in ownership of streaming service Flixster (NBCUniversal/Comcast and Time Warner) and Britbox (a collaboration between UK broadcasters the BBC and ITV to distribute their content in the United States). Such collaborations are most common within the film and television industries, but a 2017 collaboration between video game streaming site Twitch and games developer Blizzard (Bryant 2017) suggests that such collaborations are not exclusively film or television oriented. These services demonstrate attempts by the established film and television industry to build greater capacity through collaborative distribution and investment in new platforms. By pooling content together, it becomes possible to both share development and marketing costs for a new service and offer a larger, and more attractive, library of content to audiences. In many ways, this acts as an extension of the strategies discussed above in terms of vertical integration and conglomeration, but with media corporations entering into partnerships 349

(rather than purchasing deals) to acquire distribution outlets. This then gives them both an outlet for their own content and a means to generating financial return on the distribution of content produced by other studios or broadcasters.

Digitally Native Global Players If the previous two trends have been about the established media industries consolidating their power during a period of technological change, it is also necessary to recognise how the scope of the industry itself has been shifting. As a number of scholarly collections have explored, the media industries have undergone an intense period of challenge and change in response to the development of digital distribution platforms, especially in the United States (see, for example, Mann 2014a; Holt and Sanson 2014; Lotz 2017). Most notably, digitally native companies have emerged and begun operating as distributors of content and, as a result, offer a challenge to the historically dominant studios, broadcasters, and publishers. While the emergence of digital platforms and technologies capable of displaying media content has offered audiences more choice about how, where and when they access content, they also have greater choice over who they access that content from (and who they pay—or do not pay) for it. Not only have distribution strategies changed, but who the distributors are has also changed. There has been a long history of illegitimate media distribution, stretching back to the pirating of 35mm films and continuing through (see, for example, Lobato 2012; McDonald 2007; Crisp 2015). More recently the boundaries of legitimate distribution have dramatically changed as digitally native companies, some whose primary business is decidedly un-media related have begun operating as media distributors. The most well-known of these services are Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, and Apple’s iTunes and Apple TV, but we can also consider other services such as Steam (video games), Comixology (comic books), and Google Books within the same category. All emerge from companies with a primary focus on the digital economy (online shopping, Internet searches, computing) and so can, to a certain extent, be considered digitally native. They therefore offer new distribution channels for the established media industry players, but also mean significant competition for those players. This sense of competition is also increasingly shifting to production. The major global VOD services, Netflix, Amazon, and Apple TV, have all evolved from being acquisition only spaces to commissioning and producing their own content (Ullin 2014, 369–371). On a side note, it is relevant to consider that this pattern is not exclusive to VOD spaces, with digital television channels in the UK and US also beginning to move from repeats of bought-in programs to original production. In an alternative (though currently unique) model, the BBC has sought to re-position its youth-oriented channel BBC Three as a digitally native space by ceasing broadcast transmission and producing original content for initial release via the iPlayer. In addition, Denise Mann, for example, has described the emergence of YouTube-based 350

channels, or multi-channel networks (MCNs) as allowing the development of “grassroots creativity” (Mann 2014b). By initially focusing on distribution as a strategy, these companies have been able to establish themselves as key media institutions and develop an audience base before the heavy investment required for producing original content. Ultimately, the emergence of digitally native players has not only shaken up the parameters of transmedia distribution but also demonstrated how distribution can be understood as a key precursor strategy for content production.

Breaking and Reforming the Bottleneck: Understanding Transmedia Distribution The proliferation of distribution avenues evident in the above categories demonstrates how audiences have multiple options for accessing content and how increasingly our experiences of media culture inherently involve moving across different platforms and technologies. Media culture is ever more defined by that movement and, consequently, is becoming ever more defined by notions of transmediality. This has had two interconnected consequences for our understanding of the media industries and how the underlying structures of the industry shape the experiences of audiences. The first consequence is a loosening of the oligopoly over how audiences access content that had previously been defined by the major film and broadcast companies that were established in the first half of the twentieth century. In discussing the US television industry of the late 1990s, Timothy Todreas identified the “distribution bottleneck,” which he described as “the stranglehold that stations and cable operators have had in the television business. Ownership of the bottleneck allowed the distributors of video to capture most of the profits available to the industry” (1999, 9; see also Evans 2011, 41–42). For Todreas, the web offered the potential for that bottleneck to be broken: “if creators merely want a presence on the Web, all they have to do is hire designers and programmers in order to build their own sites” (1999, 100). Todreas was writing in the closing years of the twentieth century, just as the infrastructure companies behind the Internet were beginning to develop its capacity to delivery high-bandwidth content such as audiovisual material. Since then, the expansion of the Internet’s capabilities has been exponential and whilst Todreas’s prediction has come true to a certain extent, the distribution bottleneck has not completely broken. Whilst it is now easier to launch content without the backing of a major studio, broadcaster, or publisher, a small number of companies remain the dominant providers of media content. That number may have expanded to include new players such as Netflix and Amazon but any loosening of the distribution bottleneck has occurred only within certain parameters. As Denise Mann notes, the development of transmedia storytelling through formats such as alternate reality games has reinforced established hierarchies, arguing that “[l]ess well-funded and well-known digital creators find themselves shut out by Hollywood’s institutionalized gatekeepers because their work lacks clear-cut paths to monetization or ignores copyright 351

restrictions” (Mann 2014a, 4–5). As Jean Burgess and Joshua Green have argued, even YouTube (the bastion of user-generated content) has a “double function as both a ‘topdown’ platform for distribution of popular culture and a ‘bottom-up’ platform for vernacular creativity” (2009, 6). Although the options for accessing content may continue to multiply, the dominance of established players and certain digitally native newcomers remains strong. Instead, the distribution bottleneck has broken in a slightly different way, one that relates to the increasingly globalized strategies prioritised by the new, digitally native content distributers. This is the second consequence of transmedia distribution. Whereas non-digital media have traditionally had nationally specific boundaries, digital media have merged with a more fundamentally global outlook. Such a merger is complex, however. On the one hand, the adherence to national boundaries has persisted, with geo-locking technologies allowing web-based services to limit access based on where a user is located. On the other hand, the global reach and outlook of VOD services, especially digitally native services, have opened up the scale at which content can be rolled out globally. Television is a good example here as broadcasters are often bound by national borders. Although BBC broadcast signals do reach across the border to the Republic of Ireland or across the English Channel to northern Europe, they are primarily bound to the British Isles in terms of target market, customer base, and government policy. This territorial protectionism extends to the BBC’s own online spaces, with the iPlayer only available in the UK. BBC content in non-BBC owned online spaces, however, has a much more global reach. BBC content can be accessed via Netflix globally, with short clips also available via the Corporation’s YouTube channels. Sam Ward, for example, has argued that Netflix in the UK opened up a space for US content that had been unable to find a broadcast home such as Breaking Bad and “has presented itself explicitly as an importer of content” (Ward 2016, 310). A similar situation has also occurred in the opposite direction, with Netflix in the US becoming a home for content from around the world, most notably non-English language television series that have not traditionally been found on US broadcast television such as 3% from Brazil and Nobel from Norway. Todreas’s vision of any producer being able to use the Internet to get their content to audiences has therefore, to a certain extent, happened, with user-generated content platforms such as YouTube. However, at the same time the distribution bottleneck has been broken in a slightly different way, instead around the kind (and origin) of professionally produced content audiences can now access.

Transmedia as Distribution Logic: A Case Study of “Carpool Karaoke” Many of the issues at stake in transmedia distribution can be seen through the example of The Late Late Show with James Corden (CBS, 2015–), and its distribution strategy for the “Carpool Karaoke” segment. US late night chat shows offer a ready-made example of content that can be re-packaged for transmedia and “spreadability” 352

purposes. The division of such programs into short sections of semi-discrete content (monologue, short sketches, and interviews with individual guests) immediately creates YouTube-ready short videos. As Myles McNutt has argued in reference to The Late Late Show’s “Carpool Karaoke” section: Rather than functioning as a “late night snack” from the show, then, “Carpool Karaoke” registers as its own standalone series, with each “episode” featuring a clear beginning (Corden picking up, or beginning his conversation with, the artist), middle (the interview and performance elements), and end (typically, either Corden thanking his guest or, in some cases, a sketch element arriving at Corden’s studio). (McNutt 2017, 582) Treating each segment as a coherent, self-contained unit of content allows for flexibility in distribution strategies that can exploit transmedia opportunities. By releasing segments online in advance of the program’s broadcast (McNutt 2017, 579), such videos naturally provide marketing opportunities. This becomes more important for content that airs in the post-11pm “shoulder” period of the US television broadcast schedule, when viewers must be encouraged to stay up and watch rather than going to sleep (Ellis 2002, 132). By releasing further segments post-broadcast, the program’s content almost automatically turns into additional marketing material for audiences who either miss the broadcasted airing, or choose not to watch it. In the case of “Carpool Karaoke,” the success of such a transmedia distribution strategy also opened up both the originating program and the segment to a global audience. McNutt argues that the VOD framing of “Carpool Karaoke” in particular has encouraged a break from its broadcast origins. He argues that Notably absent, however, is any reference to the show and its linear broadcast, which are not included in the end tag—“next time,” in this case, is understood to be on YouTube, shifting away from YouTube as a promotional space to YouTube as the primary space of engagement for the “Carpool Karaoke” audience. (McNutt 2017, 583) The separating out of this particular segment indicates the transmedia and global transformation of “Carpool Karaoke,” but at the same time that transformation has remained bound up with a similar transformation for its Late Late Show origins as well. The global success of “Carpool Karaoke” on YouTube has led to new distribution deals for The Late Late Show in non-US territories, including those without the traditions of daily late-night comedy talk shows. In Germany, commercial free-to-air broadcaster RTL bought the broadcast rights and began airing un-dubbed episodes one day after their US airing. In the UK, Sky (who were already invested in Corden’s star persona through his hosting of its comedy-sports quiz A League of Their 353

Own, 2010–) acquired rights to the program in mid-2016. Ironically, those rights were limited to its VOD service Sky Go, with only a Carpool Karaoke Special on its broadcast Sky One channel (tx. 19/07/2016, plus three episodes filmed in London 9/6/2017-11/06/2017). What was broadcast content in the US was transformed into VOD-only content in the UK. In perhaps a clearer example of the inextricable link between content production and distribution within the transmedia turn, the transmedially distributed segment then became its own piece of full-length digitallynative content, when rights to a “Carpool Karaoke” series were bought not by a television broadcaster but by on-demand provider Apple TV.

Conclusion The international and transmedia journey of “Carpool Karaoke” thus demonstrates many of the characteristics of transmedia distribution and the consequences of transmedia distribution strategies on the way we can understand the media industries and their practice. It involves a well-established media company (CBS) branching out into new online spaces in order to promote traditional television content and capture online audiences. This then created a greater global reach for the content, including in countries where CBS has no established broadcast base, further widening the content’s audience through distribution channels that are already global. This in turn consolidated CBS’s position by allowing them to create very traditional transnational sales deals with local broadcasters. The segment’s (so far) final transformation into a standalone program highlights both the collaborations that are beginning to form between the old and new distribution channels (CBS and Apple) and the strategy for platforms that had previously focused solely on acquisition of content produced elsewhere into original production. As “Carpool Karaoke” makes clear, the emergence of transmedia logics is reshaping the media landscape, and distribution sits at the very heart of that process.

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27 Transmedia Branding and Marketing Concepts and Practices Max Gi

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