The Revolution in Transmedia Storytelling through Place by Donna Hancox

Author:Donna Hancox [Hancox, Donna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367222383
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2021-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

Storyworlds

The most influential and sophisticated writing about storyworlds and how they intersect or interact with media, society and audiences comes from Marie-Laure Ryan. Before outlining and exploring Ryan’s work on storyworlds, it is useful to discuss why her work represents more complex ways of thinking than much of the industry or fan-dominated conversations about worldbuilding and participation as a goal rather than an outcome.

Ryan sets out to interrogate the nature of storyworlds by first seeking to understand and explicate the media in transmedia storytelling. In her 2016 article ‘Transmedia Narratology and Transmedia Storytelling’, Ryan asks what is the narrative potential of media and the modalities that they encode; how can the narrative affordances of a given medium be emulated in another medium; and what is it that the narratives of a certain medium can do that others cannot. These may seem like the same types of considerations that emerge in world-building discussions, however, worldbuilding considerations are primarily about the practicalities of worldbuilding and how to ensure audiences will become involved in the world. Storyworld considerations such as those posed by Ryan are concerned with the role of power and culture in media, and importantly how they used and recognised by audiences. In some ways, this might be seen as the difference between the sociological and political approaches to participation discussed earlier. Although they are not mutually exclusive, discussions in transmedia storytelling often fall between commercial or cultural/community concerns or aspirations.

Most media studies tend to view a medium as a channel of communication or entertainment. This view of a medium as simply a channel of transmission has been criticised by Walter Ong (1982) for setting up media as a series of passive pipelines to send and receive information. This is obviously overly simplistic the viewing of a medium as a communication method has informed so much of what Ryan (2016b) calls the ‘industry discourse’ around transmedia. Mediums are viewed as distinct modes of communication, virtually unrelated to each other until the transmedia creator designs ways to connect them via audiences. The decision to use particular media is generally made with a kind of grim pragmatism: how to attract the largest audience; how to offset the cost of an expensive mothership project; where are the audiences we want and how might we set up the next project in this project? While these are all reasonable considerations and necessary to create viable projects, what they don’t include are serious approaches to the affordances of media and how they might be explored for both social and creative impact. Which media is best for the story I want to tell, what kind of story is best for the media I create it?

If content is deliberately distributed among many media, this opens the question of the relation between the elements of the system. This relation can be conceived in two ways: in one model, the part fit together into a whole, and this whole is more than the sum of its parts. If that whole is

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