Sculpting Foucauldian power in Game of Thrones as a transmedia project: a systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis

Abstract

This study analyses the textual, visual and interactional modes employed in creating and representing Daenerys Targaryen in both Home Box Office TV show Game of Thrones and mobile game Reigns: Game of Thrones as a transmedia project to guide users’ construal of the notion of embodied power. The authors examine the structural, functional and semiotic elements that the two media orchestrate to represent how power is attained, developed and relinquished. The results indicate that the two texts/media put forward two different kinds of power (relations) and levels of users’ interactivity. The TV show employs a more linear and developmental conception of power characterizing Daenerys as a transferrable object of power while the game underlines a more dispersed and pervasive notion of power to decentre absolute power. The show deploys immersive cinematic representations/visual spectacle, converging/diverging serial narration that goes beyond the opulent mise-en-scène and complex scenes to attract users’ attention. As for the game, it deploys intellectual and emotional interactivity, choice and coherence that allow users to experience the story, mechanics and environment as users identify with Daenerys. While the show introduces a host of socipolitical tools to maintain longer reign as different forms of governmentality, the game characterizes disciplinary power where subjects/users are offered training opportunities under the designer’s gaze to internalize a series of procedures and sociopolitical tactics. The findings reiterate Foucault’s notion of power as a system of relations, a capillary power that circulates and subjectifies, whilst subjects/users are spaces where subtractive and productive power are wielded, enacted and/or resisted. Each medium deploys its semiotic-specific resources to create meaning differently. While the TV show relies heavily on visual resources and narrative techniques to make meaning, the game mobilizes certain verbo-visual and interactive resources to make meaning. With the growing attention given to transmedia projects as a social practice with social meanings, this article claims to offer critical implications for social semioticians, film creators and game designers through a systematic analytical framework with a special focus on visual meanings.