854 research outputs found

    Playing with the dead:transmedia narratives and the Walking Dead games

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    This chapter discusses the theory and practice of transmedia narratives within the storyworld created by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard’s comics series The Walking Dead. It examines key aspects from the comics series and AMC’s adaptive television franchise to consider how both have been utilized and adapted for games. Particular focus will be paid to Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead, Gamagio’s The Walking Dead Assault and Terminal Reality’s The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct. The chapter explains the core concepts of transmedia narratives as they relate to The Walking Dead, places the games in the context of both the comics and television franchise, examines the significance of commercial and grassroot extensions and considers the role gaming and interactive narratives have within rich storyworlds. In examining The Walking Dead as a transmedia property, the authors demonstrate how vast narratives are adopted, modified and transformed in contemporary popular culture

    Transmedia Worldbuilding and Mashup Mythology in Penny Dreadful

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    By focusing on the merged and interfigural nature of the characters and mythology in the Penny Dreadful transmedia world, this article seeks to demonstrate that transmedia characters are essential to transmedia worlds; they are anchors from which plots and mythology develop and expand. This is contrary to what is proposed by, for instance, Susana Tosca and Lisbeth Klastrup in earlier versions of their transmedial world theory, where character in their own formulation were “subsumed under the category of mythos” (Tosca & Klastrup 2020, 37). Instead, this article argues for the opposite scenario, that the construction of mythology in Penny Dreadful’s transmedia world is intricately tied to specific mythic plot structures, defining character conflicts, character narrators, and to serialized character development as well as character elaboration across media

    Lost in a Transmedia Storytelling Franchise: Rethinking Transmedia Engagement

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    In the age of media convergence, transmedia storytelling - the distribution of story elements across multiple media platforms in the service of crafting an overarching narrative - is increasingly prevalent. This dissertation examines transmedia engagement through a focus on Lost's transmedia storytelling franchise and a confluence of technological, industrial, and cultural shifts, including the advent of podcast technologies, the rise of alternate reality game storytelling, and increasing producer-audience communication. Taken together, these transformations create new terrain on which normative understandings of producer-text-audience relationships are continually challenged, reconfigured, and even reinforced. This dissertation views these relationships through the concept of "viewsing" (Harries, 2002) - a hybrid form of engagement encouraged by transmedia storytelling franchises in which the qualities of "viewing" and "computer use" merge. Although viewsing provides an important conceptual framework, previous scholarship stops short of applying to concept to the producer-audience and audience-audience relationships. Using a thematic analysis methodology, this study examines the fan cultures surrounding two podcasts dedicated to Lost - The Official Lost Podcast and The Transmission - and expands the concept of viewsing to include text-audience interactivity, producer-audience participatory storytelling, and audience-audience collaboration and antagonism. It concludes that transmedia storytelling franchises encourage viewsing - interactive, participatory, and communicative multi-platform engagement

    American Cities in Post- Apocalyptic Science Fiction

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    Visions of the American city in post-apocalyptic ruin permeate literary and popular fiction, across print, visual, audio and digital media. American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction explores the prevalence of these representations in American culture, drawing from a wide range of primary and critical works from the early-twentieth century to today. Beginning with science fiction in literary magazines, before taking in radio dramas, film, video games and expansive transmedia franchises, Robert Yeates argues that post-apocalyptic representations of the American city are uniquely suited for explorations of contemporary urban issues. Examining how the post-apocalyptic American city has been repeatedly adapted and repurposed to new and developing media over the last century, this book reveals that the content and form of such texts work together to create vivid and immersive fictional spaces in ways that would otherwise not be possible. Chapters present media-specific analyses of these texts, situating them within their historical contexts and the broader history of representations of urban ruins in American fiction. Original in its scope and cross-media approach, American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction both illuminates little-studied texts and provides provocative new readings of familiar works such as Blade Runner and The Walking Dead, placing them within the larger historical context of imaginings of the American city in ruins

    American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction

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    Visions of the American city in post-apocalyptic ruin permeate literary and popular fiction, across print, visual, audio and digital media. American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction explores the prevalence of these representations in American culture, drawing from a wide range of primary and critical works from the early-twentieth century to today. Beginning with science fiction in literary magazines, before taking in radio dramas, film, video games and expansive transmedia franchises, Robert Yeates argues that post-apocalyptic representations of the American city are uniquely suited for explorations of contemporary urban issues. Examining how the post-apocalyptic American city has been repeatedly adapted and repurposed to new and developing media over the last century, this book reveals that the content and form of such texts work together to create vivid and immersive fictional spaces in ways that would otherwise not be possible. Chapters present media-specific analyses of these texts, situating them within their historical contexts and the broader history of representations of urban ruins in American fiction. Original in its scope and cross-media approach, American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction both illuminates little-studied texts and provides provocative new readings of familiar works such as Blade Runner and The Walking Dead, placing them within the larger historical context of imaginings of the American city in ruins

    Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling

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    The collection places Star Wars at the center of those studies’ projects by examining video games, novels and novelizations, comics, advertising practices, television shows, franchising models, aesthetic and economic decisions, fandom and cultural responses, and other aspects of Star Wars and its world-building in their multiple contexts of production, distribution, and reception. In emphasizing that Star Wars is both a media franchise and a transmedia storyworld, Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling demonstrates the ways in which transmedia storytelling and the industrial logic of media franchising have developed in concert over the past four decades, as multinational corporations have become the central means for subsidizing, profiting from, and selling modes of immersive storyworlds to global audiences. By taking this dual approach, the book focuses on the interconnected nature of corporate production, fan consumption, and transmedia world-building. As such, this collection grapples with the historical, cultural, aesthetic, and political-economic implications of the relationship between media franchising and transmedia storytelling as they are seen at work in the world’s most profitable transmedia franchise

    Invoking the holy trilogy: star wars in the Askewniverse

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