Transmedia Story Research Articles

Transmedia, Translation and Adaptation: Parallel Universes or Complex System?

This article explores the relationship between transmedia narratives, translation, and adaptation, and exposes why one can be lead to believe that these disciplines have very little in common. It first gives a definition of complexity and transmedia narratives, and explains the difference between transmedia, crossmedia, and multimedia. It then describes the types of transmedia projects proposed by Christy Dena (2011, n.p.) and illustrates them with the examples of two cult series’ narrative universes, that is, Twin Peaks and Skam. Transmedia stories, which spread on multiple platforms and involve audience participation, are considered by transmedia theorists to be part of story worlds (story universes, or “storyverses”). Yet, most of these narratives can be considered as adaptations, or as multimodal, intersemiotic translations. Despite the evident relationship between translation, adaptation and transmedia, adaptation is reduced to a mere media transfer, and translation is mostly referred to as an interlinguistic operation in recent academic conversations around transmedia and participatory culture. This article examines how the emergence of transmedia narratives illuminates the fact that adaptation and translation must step into the study of contemporary transmedial landscape, and how transmedia, translation and adaptation could gain from it.

"Legendy Polskie Allegro" jako narracja transmedialna

The first short films from the Allegro Polish Legends series attracted great popularity. Further productions were created on the wave of this trend – short films, audiobooks and music videos. A feature film was also announced. The Legends are a unique narrative in Polish popular culture, not only because of the circumstances of its creation, but also the manner of its execution, distribution and the subject matter. In the article, I analyse this popular series, judging whether it can be considered a transmedia narrative. Firstly, I reflect on concepts such as an entertainment supersystem, a universe, a narrative and a transmedia story. Secondly, I relate these concepts to The Legends in an attempt to ascertain their applicability in an analysis of the series. I also reflect on the current situation of the franchise, as well as its potential and development prospects.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Podręczna w dyskursie medialnym o prawach kobiet

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. The handmaid in the media discourse about women’s rightsThe handmaid is the protagonist of a transmedia story begun with Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel about Gilead, a regime in which women are deprived of their rights. The handmaids are a unique group — they are fertile, a rarity in a country plagued by infertility. The women, treated as objects, are allocated as surrogates to childless couples from the most privileged class. The image of the handmaid became popular thanks to a new generation television series produced for the Hulu platform, and subsequently begun to be used in the fight for women’s rights. In the first part of the article the author analyses the handmaids and their place in the dystopian narrative and in the second — the way in which they are used in the social discourse about women’s rights. In this the author focuses on performative campaigns, corporate social responsibility and links between the characters and the #metoo campaign.

‘You Were all the World Like a Beach to me’. The Use of Second Person Address to Create Multiple Storyworlds in Literary Video Games: ‘Dear Esther’, a Case Study.

This paper focuses on the problematic overlapping uses of ‘you’ within the video game Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2012) and how this gives rise to an uneasy and personalised experience rather than a fixed canonical reading. Dear Esther is a Walking Simulator and this type of video game is concerned with telling a story and not the conventional binary win or lose outcome of many other video games. The simple game mechanics reliant upon the player moving around a simulated space in order to learn the story means that a literary analysis is better suited to understanding the transmedia story worlds. Literary fiction uses multiple varieties of second person address to create story worlds, Walking Simulators encourage players to actively identify themselves not with but as the main story protagonist, and the use of second person address largely drives this identification.

Opowieść transmedialna jako przykład kreacyjnych możliwości fandomu

Jakub Czopek, Opowieść transmedialna jako przykład kreacyjnych możliwości fandomu [Transmedia story as an example of creative possibilities of fandom]. Interdyscyplinarne Konteksty Pedagogiki Specjalnej, nr 23, Poznań 2018. Pp. 191-202. Adam Mickiewicz University Press. ISSN 2300-391X. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14746/ikps.2018.23.11
 The subject of the article is the creative activity of fan communities (fandom), with particular emphasis on the transmedia storytelling, i.e. the story told simultaneously within various media. The development of the Internet in the Web 2.0 formula has opened a number of possibilities for the creation of fandoms centered around a particular series, movies, books or games. The main manifestations of the activity of these groups can be reduced on the one hand to analyzing and commenting on a given text of culture, and on the other hand, to develop it, by adding new stories, often using other medium than the one originally used.

A communication model for non-fiction interactive digital narratives: A study of cultural heritage websites

AbstractInteractive digital narrative (IDN) is an umbrella term used to encompass the various formats of digital narrative such as hypertext fiction, transmedia stories, and video games. The study of IDNs transverses the disciplines of narratology, game studies, and media studies. The main question this article addresses is how does the digital medium affect narrative in cultural heritage websites? This question is examined by proposing a new communication model that considers the role of digital media — the Creator-ProduserTransaction Model — and adapting existing “tools” of narrative analysis into a “narratological toolkit” for the study of non-fiction IDNs. The transaction between creators andprodusersand how an IDN narratological toolkit can be applied are exemplified through the analysis of three cultural heritage websites:Open Monuments (“Otwarte Zabytki”),Belgian Refugees of 1914–1919, andStorymap.

“Does it Come with a Spear?” Commodity Activism, Plastic Representation, and Transmedia Story Strategies in Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Destiny

“Does it Come with a Spear?” Commodity Activism, Plastic Representation, and Transmedia Story Strategies in Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Destiny

Inmersión, redes sociales y narrativa transmedia: la modalidad de recepción inclusiva

En el presente artículo, sostengo que las redes sociales se convierten en el sitio principal de 
 un nuevo conjunto de relaciones entre la ficción y la realidad en la narración transmedia al permitir la interacción entre los personajes (en el mundo ficticio) y los interactores (en el mundo real). Estas relaciones subyacen a un nuevo modo de recepción, que propongo llamar el modo de recepción inclusivo. A diferencia del modo de recepción “inmersivo”, cuyo objetivo final es sustituir una realidad por otra alterando la realidad del interactor y sumergiéndolos en un mundo ficticio completamente diferente, el objetivo principal del modo de recepción “inclusivo” es posibilitar el coexistencia simultánea de dos mundos (los de la realidad cotidiana del interactor y del mundo ficticio que consumen) y conectarlos utilizando las redes sociales como interfaz.

Transmedia Theory’s Author Discourse and Its Limitations

Transmedia Theory’s Author Discourse and Its Limitations

Towards an Ordinary Transmedia Use: A French Speaker’s Transmedia Use of Worlds in <em>Game of Thrones</em> MMORPG and Series

Towards an Ordinary Transmedia Use: A French Speaker’s Transmedia Use of Worlds in <em>Game of Thrones</em> MMORPG and Series

From One Medium to the Next: How Comic Books Create Richer Storylines

From One Medium to the Next: How Comic Books Create Richer Storylines

Introducing the Robo–Raconteur Artificial Writer Or

This article invites readers to participate in a survey on computational creativity. It asks: (a) Can computers be creative? and (b) Can algorithmic computational creativity teach us about human creativity? The standard definition of creativity is adopted. The article is in two parts. Part One introduces a new interactive artificial–writer computer program, an Excel workbook containing six functional sub–modules, namely: 1) A Top 20 RoI Movie Pitch Combiner; 2) A Bottom 20 RoI Movie Pitch Element Combiner; 3) A Random Movie Pitcher; 4) A Movie Pitch Selector which judges, scores, and ranks generated pitches in evolutionary survival tournaments; 5) An Ironic Character Generator; and finally, 6) A Random Transmedia Story Universe Pitch Generator. Readers are invited to play–test The Robo–Raconteur and complete a short (5–minute) online survey: Was the artificial writer creative? Part Two explains the Evolutionary Systems Theory of Creativity that underpins the software.

Transmedia Storytelling as an Educational Strategy

This paper proposes the use of transmedia storytelling in an educational context. Transmedia stories are perceived as opportunities to create a new learning scenario that allows for the development of innovative student-centred educational practices, and the implementation of collaborative strategies that ultimately meet the 21st-century students' needs. Through the discussion of a transmedia learning project targeted to English as Second Language students, this paper attempts to provide insight on how learning activities and strategies can be embedded in the digital narrative and experience layers of a storyworld.

Transmedia Story Telling and Alternate Reality Games in Museums – Promising Novelties or Unsuitable Gimmicks?

Alternate Reality Games try to combine the real and the virtual world by interactive Transmedia Story Telling/Transmedia Narrative taking place in real-time and evolve according to the participants’ responses. Traditionally, there is only online information on an exhibition in the real museum world or a completely virtual “exhibition” on the screen only. Alternate Reality Narratives (ARN) shift between the two realities. Since 2008 several projects have been launched in museums. Before the appearance of a virtual cyber world, it could be said that our lives took place in three different realities: the primary real everyday one, the secondary fictitious one recombining elements (mainly physically) from the former (for instance in a museum), and the secondary personal recombining elements (intellectually or physically) from the two others. We constantly move between those realities. If we consider that the real and fictitious realities are both physical (things, people) and that the personal reality is virtual, we could, by adding the cyber reality, create a dichotomy physical/virtual. Alternate Reality Narratives use our permanent and very often unconscious shift between the two realities to augment the museum experience. We discuss the title question in a museological context including theoretical considerations as well as practical aspects.

Playing with Time in Digital Fiction

The exceptional quality of digital fictions lies in their inherently dynamic nature, how they may be flexibly programmed to generate new content and alter the already existing contents. This adds a new temporal level, compared to traditional fictions. Digital games, especially, incorporate aspects of simulation and narration in their structure. As interactive and dynamic media form, games are specifically temporal in nature. They offer us the flexibility and preciseness of digital simulations, with the potential of psychologically engaging narrative qualities, which together open up a whole new field of experimenting with temporally dynamic media. Much of the new media fictions partake in a wider transmedia story worlds with temporal implications of their own. In this article the temporal dimension of the digital fictions the Braid (by Jonathan Blow, 2008) and the Spore (by Will Wright for Maxis, 2008) are discussed. We will focus on how these digital fictions, employing aspects of simulation, play and narration, highlight the idea of time as resource.

Transmedia Storytelling in Education

Transmedia Storytelling is process where integral elements of a fiction are systematically broadened through a number of distribution channels in order to create a coordinated form of entertainment. With each new medium accessible to the mass users has caused the change of storytelling. Transmedia stories are based not on individual characters or specific plots but rather complex fictional worlds which can sustain multiple interrelated characters and their stories. Using transmedia in classroom becomes still more and more popular in schools. It makes students to be more engaged into the topic. I would like to present the definition of transmedia and show its implementation and point that there are other styles of teaching which can be more effective.

Building self-brand connections: Exploring brand stories through a transmedia perspective

Consumers interpret their experiences with brands via narrative processing; thus the brand story has emerged as a major marketing construct. Transmedia storytelling occurs when the story elements are dispersed across multiple media, each making a unique contribution to the whole. As brand stories can create connections between the consumer and the brand, delivering transmedia brand stories may strengthen the bond, leading to positive attitudes, more entry points and higher purchase intent. Past research on brand stories has not addressed the types of brand stories that consumers know and desire to hear, and the media in which they prefer to find these stories. The present research answers these questions and positions the findings in the context of creating transmedia stories. Qualitative interviews revealed that consumers know and wish to hear stories about the brand’s history, product reliability, philanthropy and users’ personal stories. Other findings indicate that consumers with stronger brand connections prefer stories focused on the brand’s experiential value and will access this through interactive media. Consumers with weaker brand attachments prefer stories about the utilitarian dimensions of the brand, told through more traditional media. Practical recommendations focus on creating consumer-brand connections through different types of stories and media.

Seriality and Transmediality in the Fan Multiverse: Flexible and Multiple Narrative Structures in Fan Fiction, Art, and Vids

This article explores new forms of serial structure found in transmedia story worlds, with particular attention to the innovations of amateur transmedia works. Although the term transmedia has most often been associated only with corporate media at the center, taking amateur works as the paradigmatic example produces new insights into the affordances of digital technology, beyond the industry’s limitations, namely how transmedia creativity can function in the absence of the need to remain marketable, to maintain a coherent brand, and to work within a corporate family of conglomerated media companies. This study thereby focuses on fan fiction, art, and “vids”, a form of remix video collage, to demonstrate how contemporary amateur production interacts with professional content, but also produces its own type of complex narration through unique forms, aesthetics, and story structures, likewise encouraging alternate reception practices as a result. This article identifies at least three types of transmedial seriality elucidated by studying amateur fan media. First, fan works emphasize the increasingly complex nature of seriality in all transmedia and the way in which serial effects do not vanish, but increasingly depend upon the viewer’s choices. Secondly, fan works create their own kind of flexible and multiple serial effects wherein meaning does not depend on consuming a specific sequence of narratives, but instead upon reading any collection of narratives within larger cycles or tropes to assemble a sense of flowing norms, genres, and preferences. Finally, fan works also uniquely analyze and reconfigure the serial effects of tropes found not only across the transmedia components of individual stories, but also across the breadth of popular culture. By remixing and reimagining repeated structures of representation, fan works often call attention to latent forms of seriality within popular culture as a collective whole.

Beyond the text: Producing cross- and transmedia fiction in Flanders

In the age of convergence, the American television industry is turning to the production of media content that can be accessed through a range of platforms. In this study, we research to which degree this is also true for the European case of Flanders, investigating the elements that are part of contemporary television texts on the one hand, and the production process of these expanded television texts on the other. Production analyses of four Flemish fiction series show that cross- and transmedia applications are rather limited, especially on commercial television. Most of the programme extensions are situated within traditional media and are purely commercial extensions. Based on analysis of in-depth interviews with producers of each case, the article concludes that transmedia extensions are not integrated in the production process because of budgetary restrictions and a widespread disbelief in the benefits of transmedia stories.