University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

From worldbuilding to worldblending: transmedia rhetoric, identification, and immersion in storyworlds

(USC Thesis Other)

From worldbuilding to worldblending: transmedia rhetoric, identification, and immersion in storyworlds

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content

From Worldbuilding to Worldblending:

Transmedia Rhetoric, Identification, and Immersion in Storyworlds

by

Francesca Marie Smith

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
COMMUNICATION

May 2021

Copyright 2021 Francesca Marie Smith
ii
Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I owe Henry Jenkins for the insight, inspiration, and example that
helped make this work a reality. Many of us writing in transmedia scholarship (and other fields)
are naturally indebted to his academic contributions; I have, however, been the privileged
beneficiary of so much more—wisdom, encouragement, guidance, and support, along with wit
and warmth that have made him an incomparable mentor and a pleasure to know. It’s been years
since I’ve truly looked at the full essay (for those interested, check Henry’s introduction to John
Fiske’s Understanding Popular Culture), but I still hold tightly to the phrase “critical
utopianism” when I consider what Henry has given me. He used this language in describing
Fiske, his own mentor, but to me it is a beautiful summation of the model Henry himself has
provided me, and that to which I aspire.
My academic career at USC has provided an embarrassment of riches beyond Henry, of
course, and Randy Lake represents another highly influential figure to whom I am grateful. I
found myself taking class after class with Randy over the years, and yet I know there is still so
much more I have to learn from him. Both his remarkable intellect and remarkable spirit have
been instrumental in fueling this ongoing work.
The third member of my committee, Tara McPherson, is likewise deserving of special
thanks. Although we spent less time working together directly, she nonetheless provided a
sizeable dose of valuable insight each time we met. Her remarks were typically rich with an
abundance of new ideas and perspectives to explore, and I will look forward to revisiting and
mining the rewards of her suggestions well into the future.
iii
I have gained so much, personally and professionally, from my instructors and colleagues
at USC that I am hard pressed to do it justice here. Tom Hollihan, Alex McDowell, Mary
Lawlor, Tom Goodnight, Larry Gross, Stephen O’Leary, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Alison Trope, Doe
Mayer, and Dan Durbin have been particularly influential through their classes, conversations,
and support over the years. (Outside of USC, I can think of several additional scholars who were
particularly gracious with me: Michael Hyde, Cheree Carlson, Roberta Pearson, and Carlos
Scolari.) My cohort—and others in Annenberg’s PhD program—have, of course, been
indescribable companions. I am, further, so appreciative of Amanda Ford, along with Anne
Marie Campian, for their endless helpfulness but also their endless kindness.
Perhaps the single most influential component of my experience at USC was the
Annenberg Innovation Lab. Jon Taplin, Erin Reilly, and Geoff Long in particular elevated my
thinking, my sense of self, and my professional trajectory time and again. I would be a far
different (and, I suspect, lesser) person without them. The rest of the team, including Rachelle,
Aninoy, and Justin, also played important roles in making the Lab so special. Sophie Madej,
however, merits separate thanks for her truly incredible work making things happen, but also for
her warm friendship through the years.
Thanks to the Lab, I met any number of wonderful, inspirational, vibrant people (and had
so many indescribable and impactful experiences, like the events hosted by Future of
StoryTelling). I am grateful for what each has added to my life. Yet one of those people, in
particular, was particularly life changing to me: Flint Dille. Flint has taught me so much about
storytelling, about transmedia design, and any number of other things. And he, too, took me
under his wing and introduced me to so many individuals and ideas and opportunities that shaped
so much of who I am today. Some of those people include John Hanke, inspirational in his career
iv
and his ethics, as well as John Nee, whose generosity seems to radiate through the lives of nearly
everyone who has the pleasure of meeting him. Relatedly, Scott Easley, Mike Zyda, and Marc
Spraragen, along with others on our team, made for a particularly wonderful environment in
which to think through, experiment with, and mold new approaches to storytelling and audience
experience.
The professional identity that each of these experiences brought to life became a
wonderful sort of magnet, drawing me towards other colleagues and projects that continued to
feed both my creative and academic understandings of media, narrative, and experience (not to
mention my understanding of myself). In this category are, again, probably more friends and
collaborators than I can readily remember, but as a start, I can thank Diana Williams, Sander
Schwartz, Bernie Su, Hanson Hosein, Josh Wexler, Scott Faye, John du Pre Gauntt, David
Weiss, and Frank Spaeth, as well as all those who joined us in our work.
In terms of more specific acknowledgements, in addition to what is cited in the work,
there are several individuals who provided me with helpful information, perspective, or sources
that appear in this dissertation. These include John Lammi (who introduced me to the concept of
individuation), Trevor Satterfield (along with Ben), Canon Hamlin, and Jackson Bird. I am also
grateful to sources on Reddit and contributors of Wikipedia that assisted me in various ways. It is
all too likely that this list has omitted certain sources or represents a mistaken recollection (just
as the text itself undoubtedly has its share of unintentional omissions or mistakes); I apologize
for any such oversight.
Though the content of this dissertation can be traced most obviously back to these
academic and professional influences, it is worth recognizing too the ways in which its
completion is also tied to other sources of support. Particularly as health concerns became more
v
prominent during this process, I relied on the expertise, treatment, and bolstering provided by a
wide-ranging group of professionals and peers; I wish to recognize in particular the care offered
by Rebecca, Lisa, and Megan in helping me navigate these issues. I also have been fortunate in
knowing a handful of people in particular who, by now, have outgrown the categories of
“academic friends” or “industry friends” to become, more simply, “dear friends.” In some cases,
it is difficult to point to specific ways in which they have influenced my work; at the same time,
their influence is clearly everywhere. I have to begin with Kep, who deserves all credit for my
even entering Annenberg’s PhD program in the first place, and has continued to be pretty much
the most wonderful source of support anyone could hope for, in an academic or a friend.
Cynthia, too, has been a rock for nearly my entire time at USC, giving me so much in so many
ways that I would hardly know where to start in thanking her. The enduring friendship I have
found in Kyle has meant so much to me—in and out of the storyworlds we have had the pleasure
of exploring together. And finally, Jillian has become such a cherished friend, particularly during
the writing of this dissertation, that I’m not quite sure how I could have managed without her
steady supply of caring, humor, and insight; she is in so many ways a role model, both in her
professional and personal conduct.
I am thankful to my family for the support they have shown throughout this process, and
for all the ways they helped make possible the person I am today. I owe particular gratitude to
my mother, who first connected me to the Harry Potter storyworld so many years ago: I hope
that, in this dissertation, you find a rewarding treatment of how much it has meant to me.
It seems appropriate to close with the one person who, for this project in particular, has
had perhaps the broadest influence on my work: Brent V. Friedman. Look more closely at the
most meaningful relationships, experiences, and opportunities I have cited here, and chances are
vi
you’ll unearth his involvement in nearly all of them. His brilliance in terms of story, design, and
most other things has been so vivid and ever present through the years that my thinking in this
dissertation cannot help but reflect it in large and small ways. I have made specific reference in
my writing to certain of his contributions; others, including his remarkably apt questions and the
thinking they provoke, are left implicit. More specifically, I will recognize here that a number of
my observations on the theme park and mobile game are due to the rich conversations he and I
shared about our experiences (experiences that, in certain cases, I also shared with friends and
family; I thank them, too, for their perhaps unwitting role in my fieldwork). Yet perhaps the most
valuable thing he has given me is, in fact, the same thing so many of the friends and colleagues
acknowledged here have provided: a vision—to use a word of particular meaning to Brent—of
who I could be, and one that surpasses the potential I would otherwise allot myself. What I am
most grateful for, then, is the energy each of these people has poured into my own individuation,
my own motivation for traversal, the building of my own story and world. I hope that what
follows does it justice.

vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... ii
List of Figures ................................................................................................................................. ix
Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... xi
Chapter 1: Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1
Transmedia Scholarship .......................................................................................... 4
Rhetoric’s Fit in Transmedia Scholarship ............................................................. 11
Dramatistic Tools for the Analysis of Storyworlds ............................................... 21
Objects of Inquiry .................................................................................................. 27
Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 34
Chapter 2: WizardingWorld.com .................................................................................................. 36
Individuation .......................................................................................................... 41
Communal Memory ............................................................................................... 62
Motivation for Traversal ........................................................................................ 71
Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 85
Chapter 3: Universal Studios Hollywood’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter ............................. 96
Individuation .......................................................................................................... 98
Communal Memory ............................................................................................. 111
Motivation for Traversal ...................................................................................... 123
Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 133
Chapter 4: Harry Potter: Wizards Unite ...................................................................................... 142
Individuation ........................................................................................................ 148
Communal Memory ............................................................................................. 156
viii
Motivation for Traversal ...................................................................................... 167
Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 175
Chapter 5: Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 186
Further Considerations ........................................................................................ 192
Future Work ......................................................................................................... 198
Notes ............................................................................................................................................ 201
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 218

ix
List of Figures
Chapter 2
Figure 1 .................................................................................................................. 91
Figure 2 .................................................................................................................. 92
Figure 3 .................................................................................................................. 93
Figure 4 .................................................................................................................. 94
Figure 5 .................................................................................................................. 94
Figure 6 .................................................................................................................. 95
Figure 7 .................................................................................................................. 95
Chapter 3
Figure 1 ................................................................................................................ 135
Figure 2 ................................................................................................................ 136
Figure 3 ................................................................................................................ 137
Figure 4 ................................................................................................................ 138
Figure 5 ................................................................................................................ 139
Figure 6 ................................................................................................................ 140
Figure 7 ................................................................................................................ 141
Chapter 4
Figure 1 ................................................................................................................ 177
Figure 2 ................................................................................................................ 178
Figure 3 ................................................................................................................ 179
Figure 4 ................................................................................................................ 180
Figure 5 ................................................................................................................ 181
x
Figure 6 ................................................................................................................ 182
Figure 7 ................................................................................................................ 183
Figure 8 ................................................................................................................ 184
Figure 9 ................................................................................................................ 185

xi
Abstract

This study proposes a model of transmedia rhetoric to critically consider how symbols (including
language) and structure function in storyworlds. Using tools from Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic
theory, the framework developed here focuses on how identification, alongside consubstantiality,
mystification, and form, manifests in three major dynamics: individuation, communal memory,
and motivation for traversal. Together, I contend, these mechanisms can exemplify a specific
definition of immersion, based on how the texts speak to, situate, motivate, and reward
audiences. Similarly, as they accrete and carry meaning across texts, these dynamics cultivate
what I am calling a transmedia substrate, which helps us define and locate the synergy attributed
to such textual networks. To establish the model in this project, I analyze examples from the
Wizarding World built up by J.K. Rowling and collaborators around the Harry Potter and
Fantastic Beasts series. The three particular case studies I explore are the Wizarding World’s
website (formerly Pottermore), its Los Angeles theme park (Universal Studios Hollywood’s
Wizarding World of Harry Potter), and the location-based mobile game Harry Potter: Wizards
Unite. By sampling across a spectrum of mediums and materialities, my aim is to root this
framework in the commonalities of storyworld texts while also accounting for their differences.
Finally, I suggest how these dynamics represent not just a process of worldbuilding, but also one
of worldblending, with intentional interplay between the texts and the audience’s lived reality
outside of the storyworld. As such, it calls for ethical considerations that connect us neatly back
to Burke’s grander hope for all such critical and intellectual endeavors—to adjust his language
slightly, our work becomes oriented towards the purification of magic.

1
Chapter 1
Introduction

All told, throughout the History (the Changing Story) of Acceptances and
Rejections there broods the fantastic Maybe of the transformations (the restless
“transvaluations of values,” i.e., “perspectives”) that have to do with the two
modes of departure from the state of nature made possible (“inevitable”?) by our
peculiarly human medium of expression, identification, communication.

Kenneth Burke
1

Young Kenneth Burke, the story goes, was a very sickly child.
2
Apocryphal or not, the
legend avers that the boy was so ill as to be bedridden, his only companions a dictionary and a
Bible. Yet out of these circumstances emerged what would later be dubbed “a mind that cannot
stop exploding,”
3
(Kostelanetz), keenly aware of the raw power possessed by each of these books
(and, importantly, their relationship to one another). Over the years, as Burke—no longer
confined to his bed or these texts—began to hone his understanding of humankind and its
operations, he wove an intricate web of philosophy and criticism that encapsulated the most
basic building blocks of our psychology, yet also traced them to their logical conclusion in the
most sweeping ideologies of culture. And true to his roots, he cited our linguistic, symbolic
capabilities—as housed in the dictionary—as the mechanism by which we achieved all that made
us human, along with all that we believed and understood of ourselves, the world, and how to
behave within it—as housed in the Bible for much of humanity, especially leading up to the early
twentieth century in which Burke began formulating his ideas. It is the “symbolic tinkering”
4
by
which we move through life, aligning ourselves and one another this way and that, constantly
adjusting our worlds by adjusting the meanings we attribute to its constituent pieces. These
adjustments, for Burke, are rhetoric, whether self-directed or intentionally instigated by others.
5

2
And their intrinsic, tectonic movement in a sense represents the hope of humanity: “the fantastic
Maybe” in which we imagine and, ultimately, evolve.
Some decades later, the world looks fairly different from that which Burke surveyed.
Stuck on twenty-first-century bedrest, young Kenneth would likely be equipped with a
smartphone, a laptop, perhaps even a gaming system. He’d have no need for a dictionary, thanks
to Google, and if he were in line with contemporary cultural trends, even the Bible would be
questionable. Indeed, even outside the discourse of moral panic, there is an argument to be made
that a more representative text for our contemporary scene would be a comic book, or at least a
novel, his “fantastic Maybe” nestled among Marvel’s Fantastic Four or J.K. Rowling’s
Fantastic Beasts. Yet in many ways, these microcosms, these “subcreations” (per Tolkien, in
contrast to divine “creation”),
6
are an appropriate fit for the fragmentation of postmodernity,
7

micromythologies acting in much the same way as the mythologies of ancient eras.
My point in drawing the connection between the grander narratives that have structured
human experience and the media franchises that seem to have at least partially replaced them is
not to argue for the importance of such popular culture, nor to draw conclusions about its
capacity to shape our existence. Other work in communication, cultural studies, and media
studies, including scholarship focused directly on the subject of transmedia storytelling, has by
now thoroughly established such assumptions. Rather, I wish to suggest instead that, especially
as these subcreations grow ever more complex, we might be well served to analyze them using
the tools that have been so carefully developed to understand the broader workings of Creation
(or, more appropriately, the human culture that gave rise to such media). Burke’s model in
particular is already quite comfortable moving between the “real” (say, politics) and the fictions
that, famously, he characterized as “equipment for living.”
8
What is to be gained, I contend, from
3
a consideration of storyworlds as worlds first and foremost is powerful: teasing out the parallels
for human meaning, motivation, and action—everything that animates our lives outside the
texts—within those alternative, fictional environments. If Burke managed to find and understand
the beating heart of humanity, could he not find it again once we have slipped into the parallel
universe of our stories?
As a complement to an understanding of entertainment as “suspension,” a linguistic
interpretation of “entertain” meaning “to hold between Heaven and Earth,”
9
I propose a
rhetorical consideration of storyworlds that more effectively captures their vibrant, constitutive,
propulsive properties—the ways that, as part of an ever-active human experience, they move us
time and again between Heaven and Earth. For a scholar of rhetoric, or the function and strategic
use of symbols (like language), the allure of such worlds is both multifaceted and undeniable.
The implicit and inherent expectation of ongoing traversal between linked transmedia texts
creates a depth and nuance to the relationship between media, creator, and audience, and the
array of mediums pieced together symphonically in a well-built storyworld offers tantalizing
opportunities to investigate and juxtapose a wide range of rhetorical mechanisms.
10
Yet more to
the point, I contend that a rhetorical approach likewise holds appeal as a part of transmedia
scholarship. Both as a cultural phenomenon and a subject of scholarly inquiry, we have seen over
the past 15 years in particular a notable “rise of transtexts,” to borrow Derhy Kurtz and
Bourdaa’s phrasing. Focusing our attention on the more academically oriented segment of this
thinking, we can fairly readily equip ourselves with a set of core definitions, presumptions, foci,
and deliberations, setting the stage for a consideration of how the current work, in adopting a
Burkean rhetorical approach, might make a contribution to such study.

4
Transmedia Scholarship

In tracing the history of academic interest in this area, scholars (including Wolf, pp. 7–8,
as well as Freeman and Gambarato, p. 1) locate the origination of “transmedia” as a term with
Marsha Kinder in 1991, though the “widespread adoption and interrogation” of the related term
“transmedia storytelling” is more squarely attributed to Henry Jenkins.
11
Some authors (such as
Horne and Long) point to the 2003 publication that showed some of Jenkins’s early formulations
on the subject, though it received more thorough treatment in his 2006 book Convergence
Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
12
and became distilled into perhaps its most concise
form in a 2007 post on his blog called “Transmedia Storytelling 101.” This primer is particularly
valuable not only for its neatly encapsulated definition of transmedia storytelling, but also for the
way it enumerates the constituent parts of his thinking, including what is distinctive about
transmedia properties and what cultural factors make it particularly viable and resonant in the
twenty-first century. We can use the single-sentence version of “Transmedia Storytelling 101”—
that “transmedia storytelling represents 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”—as a foundation, upon which we can add the various
details, clarifications, and rewordings that Jenkins and others have developed throughout the
literature.
Some years after his “Transmedia Storytelling 101,” Jenkins offered “Transmedia 202:
Further Reflections” as a way of responding to the ongoing evolution of (and questions
concerning) the concept. In clarifying his own stance, Jenkins reinforces a number of criteria for
“transmedia storytelling” that were embedded in his earlier writings, which both point up what is
5
of particular interest in such texts while also placing helpful boundaries around what cultural
texts might be included in this category. “For me,” he says, “a work needs to combine radical
intertextuality” (or meaningful interplay with other affiliated texts) “and multimodality” (or a
mixture of different media forms)
13
“for the purposes of additive comprehension” (or the ability
of an individual text to fundamentally alter audiences’ understandings of a storyworld and, thus,
other texts within it)
14
“to be a transmedia story.”
A particularly evocative shorthand from Jenkins’s Convergence Culture also leads us to
another way of thinking about transmedia stories: as “a narrative so large that it cannot be
contained within a single medium.”
15
Later in the book, in describing how “artists create
compelling environments that cannot be fully explored or exhausted within a single work or even
a single medium,” he invokes an understanding of story as simply an extraction from some far
more expansive storyworld.
16
Shifting to Mark J. P. Wolf’s terminology, these discrete
narratives, bound to some particular medium, only represent a partial view of a storyworld, and
the media that house such narratives merely “windows through which the world is seen.”
17
Yet
“more and more,” Jenkins says, “storytelling has become the art of world building,” and thus—
for such stories—there is some broader entity external to any one specific text, within which it is
situated, and any number of other texts with which it is now in conversation.
18
This represents an
exponential explosion in scope: beyond the expectation that a narrative simply be appealing on
its own terms, it now needs to be carefully positioned in relation to all the other (potential)
narratives occupying its world, expanding upon them in a way that makes sense and is enjoyable
to the audience.
19
Moreover, this places scholarship on transmedia storytelling in conversation
with the closely related field of study interested in such “subcreated,” “secondary,” “diegetic,”
6
“constructed” or “imaginary worlds,” to replicate the list of ways Wolf has collected to refer to
such entities.
20

Although it is a somewhat arbitrary exercise, and one that could certainly be contested, I
will propose that a valuable distinction between the study of transmedia storytelling and the
study of the world whose stories are being told might be one of strategy and design—not the
design of the storyworld itself, which seems appropriate as a matter of interest to those studying
such worlds, but rather the design of an audience’s tour through it. Under this framework, a
study focused on transmedia storytelling would not prioritize an ethnography of the world’s
denizens so much as one of its visitors. It would pull the camera back so that it takes into
account, with increasing degrees of interest, not only “the world itself,” and those “stories set in
the world,” and also “the windows through which the world is seen,”
21
but moreover, as Jenkins
reminds us, “the relations between” each of these windows (and, I would add, the audience’s
experience as it moves between them).
22

Drawing attention to the experience of the audience leads us towards the final two,
related characteristics of transmedia storytelling I wish to include in our core definition of the
concept. One is the relationship between transmedia storytelling and the idea of a game. By this,
I do not in fact mean those games that are part of a transmedia storyworld, such as the
videogames Jenkins discusses in Convergence Culture or the mobile game that I myself will
analyze at some length in this work, but rather the larger, metaphorical game between creators
and audience members, one of cat and mouse.
23
I use this as a way to capture that strategic
element described above and also to connect us to, for example, conversations about Alternate
Reality Games or ARGs,
24
as well as Long’s framing of transmedia creation in terms of design
principles that are set up to encourage “play.” This device of a “game” adds a bit more
7
specificity to what, for example, Derhy Kurtz and Bourdaa (but see also Freeman and
Gambarato) mandate as the “engaged audience” that ought to be part and parcel of a transmedia
property.
25
It connotes not only the coy “courtship,” to use Burke’s word, through which a
storyworld is made alluring to a potential visitor, but also some version of those “informational
hunters and gatherers” Jenkins describes as the paradigmatic audience for transmedia
storyworlds.
26
The last part of our definition is a corollary to this idea of a game, suggesting what
is motivating—and rewarding—its players: the “encyclopedic” nature of such storyworlds, and
the tantalizing prospect that their content might, with enough effort (and perhaps skill), “be . . .
mastered.”
27
Jenkins situates these terms in the context of Umberto Eco’s requirements for “a
cult artifact” but applies them more generally as a way to explain the particular appeal of
transmedia storyworlds, describing how “world-building encourages an encyclopedic impulse in
both readers and writers.”
28
Another angle of this dynamic is offered by Ed Sanchez—one of the
people behind a noteworthy transmedia storytelling success story, The Blair Witch Project: he
explained it in terms of a “web of information that is laid out in a way that keeps people
interested and keeps people working for it.”
29
To hear him tell it, the thrill of the chase adds a
distinct layer of appeal and, thus, investment on the part of the audience: “If people have to work
for something they devote more time to it. And they give it more emotional value.”
30
Of course,
even though audiences may enjoy this pursuit, it is important to recognize the mirage-like quality
of their goal (and how that may in fact fuel their efforts), for in Jenkins’s words, “we are drawn
to master what can be known about a world which always expands beyond our grasp.”
31

To neatly summarize the definition we have constructed, then, “transmedia storytelling
represents 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
8
experience”; “to be a transmedia story,” “a work needs to combine radical intertextuality and
multimodality for the purposes of additive comprehension”; such stories involve some amount of
“world building” (Convergence Culture p. 114), and so their study likewise involves “the world
itself,” those “stories set in the world,” and also “the windows through which the world is seen,”
yet its most distinctive area of inquiry focuses on “the relations between” each of these windows
and, to some extent, what the process of connecting those views might feel like from an
audience’s perspective; and to facilitate these experiences, there is necessarily some degree of
strategy on the part of the creators, lending itself to a game-like relationship with “engaged
audiences” who are motivated by “an encyclopedic impulse” to continually explore, understand,
and work “to master what can be known about a world which always extends beyond our
grasp.”
32

Of course, the overall process of defining, contextualizing, applying, and testing the
limits of this concept has not been quite so neat. There has been the to-be-expected back-and-
forth as different scholars and fields have taken up this concept with enthusiasm, some adjusting
or interpreting or adapting or stretching the concept so that it is more applicable to their own
interests or arguments,
33
others attempting to police its boundaries and preserve its specificity in
an almost dogmatic fashion.
34
As such, transmedia storytelling has been characterized as both
decidedly new, of the moment, and in fact only possible because of the contemporary
mechanisms of business and technology Jenkins laid out in Convergence Culture,
35
whereas
others, including Jenkins, Freeman, and Scolari, have reminded us that transmedia storytelling,
and certainly worldbuilding (Wolf), have been part of the fabric of humanity since the earliest
civilizations for which we have a record.
36
Similarly, part of the argument articulated by
Freeman and Gambarato is that there is a tendency to claim that, especially in the current
9
moment, “almost all content can in some way, shape or form be considered transmedial”
(referencing Scolari in 2017), though this broadening of the term also risks its dilution.
37
(Here,
they point to Clark, who suggested in 2011, a mere five years after the publication of
Convergence Culture, “that ‘transmedia,’ as term, has possibly outlived its usefulness.”)
38

Finally, in addition to “transmedia is old/new” and “transmedia is all things / one very specific
thing,” there is a third axis along which the definition has been stretched: that of whether the
boundaries we draw around transmedia projects should solely represent the strategic efforts of a
specific authorial body—Jenkins’s “unified and coordinated entertainment experience”—or
whether they ought include the associated, non-canonical, adaptational, and fan-authored texts
inspired by, responding to, and expanding the meanings of some initial artifact.
39

I present this characterization of the field both to help situate my own perspective on
these issues, taking seriously Jenkins’s 2016 call “to be precise about what forms of transmedia
we are discussing and what claims we are making about them” cited by Freeman and Gambarato,
and to establish what any new contributions to the field of transmedia scholarship, including my
own, might helpfully account for in its theory and method.
40
To the first end, I believe there is of
course validity to all of these perspectives and, accordingly, value in adopting these various
formulations of “transmedia” for various discussions while adopting Jenkins’s precision as an
antidote to the threat of complete conceptual dilution. More concretely, I would suggest both
explicit acknowledgment of where any particular study positions itself on the axes I have
described here, as I will do below, and explicit recognition that certain definitions of
“transmedia” lie closer to the original, narrow, or paradigmatic descriptions that started many of
these discussions. To the extent we privilege such descriptions, we do so not because they are
“Jenkinsian” and therefore superior, but rather because they are most typical, distinct, and
10
illustrative of the concept—they are, in a sense, concentrated examples of the form. This does
not mean, however, that they need to be the only examples of transmedia artifacts that are
discussed; it merely means that they become the reference point against which we might
compare any number of texts. Indeed, I believe there is value in recognizing the close
relationships, as well as the distinctions between, the texts that lie along various points on these
axes. It is thus worthwhile to consider how, for example, historical transmedia texts are both
similar to and different from contemporary storyworld franchises, just as it is worthwhile to
consider what nonfictional transmedia projects have in common with, and how they differ from,
those generated by entertainment industries.
Centering our work around paradigmatic definitions while still respecting and embracing
variations thereof in fact represents an important moment in the life cycle of transmedia
storytelling as an area of study. In short, Jenkins’s recognition of the phenomenon in the early
2000s captured what was then a “new model for entertainment franchises” that was in the
process of taking the world by storm; it is now quite comfortably established as an expectation
on the part of creators and audiences, and one that genuinely fulfills a natural human desire.
41
It
did something important, drawing scholarly attention to the cultural mechanisms at play and the
narrative ramifications of industrial and technological developments, while also helping us to
better appreciate the subtlety and power of what might otherwise be dismissed as a gimmick or,
as one 2003 author (Fiona Morrow) cited by Jenkins put it, “souped-up flimflam.”
42
Certainly,
there was good reason why the concept was taken up with such fervor. Even though some of its
“buzziness” in scholarship and industry may now have worn off, the dynamics of transmedia
storytelling are still very much relevant, the delineations made by Jenkins still very much
valuable. Yet to a degree, the risk is now that transmedia approaches are now so commonplace,
11
so thoroughly woven into our thinking about the modern world and its media, that a discussion
of “transmedia” anything feels almost redundant, almost too mundane, almost too obvious. I in
fact agree with both Jenkins and Clark in their warnings against “the potential for transmediality
to be (mis)understood as almost everything,” to use Freeman and Gambarato’s description of
Clark’s 2011 stance.
43
I think it is a fair incorporation of their arguments to suggest that our
salvation will lie in our ability to articulate and capture what is unique about transmedia practices
while also recognizing their universality. Given this, I suggest that a consideration of rhetorical
theory and method has exceptional potential in providing the precision Jenkins asks for as well
as the flexibility the field now merits. At this point, then, we can evaluate both the
appropriateness and the helpfulness of such an approach.

Rhetoric’s Fit in Transmedia Scholarship

The appropriateness of introducing yet another theoretical framework into the study of
transmedia texts needs only minimal discussion, given how heterogeneous this body of work
already is and its inherent connection to so many different other academic traditions (in addition
to non-academic communities, including industry producers and fans). Freeman and Gambarato,
while contending “transmediality has . . . grown into a distinct subfield of scholarly
investigation,” then go on to list over a dozen areas of academic interest to which it “relates”
(meaning, where its scholars are housed, the assumptions and literatures they draw upon, and the
methods they use).
44
Wolf, in establishing his approach to studying storyworlds, provides a
similar list helping to situate “media studies” (itself “relatively new as a field”)—his list, in fact,
already includes rhetoric.
45
Wolf acknowledges the “interdisciplinary” nature of such scholarship
12
in much the same way as Derhy Kurtz and Bourdaa advocate for a “multidisciplinary approach,”
one that I would suggest is even more warranted by how comparatively recently transmedia
scholarship has become codified as such.
46
Freeman and Gambarato interpret this sprawling
array of scholarly affiliations as an indication of the subject’s importance, but moreover, it lends
itself to a degree of complexity that, per Christy Dena (as Freeman and Gambarato position her
chapter in their book), might bring us closer to the truth of what a transmedia text is and does.
47

It is fitting, in fact, that the study of transmedia storytelling would make use of the exact same
sort of “synergy”—with multiple perspectives feeding off one another, and feeding into an
ultimately more meaningful and valuable end result—so associated with transmedia
storytelling;
48
in this way, the object of study acts as an argument for its own theoretical
approach.
Rhetoric, even more than “transmedia,” has been alternately shrunk, stretched, and sliced
up over the course of millennia, to the point where it can arguably mean any number of things,
depending on the particular framework applied. In its most particular sense, it can be equated
with persuasion (often oratorical). Yet “persuasion” itself is not such a simple term; it is almost
inherently loaded, for one thing, with issues of morality. As such, the proper scope of rhetorical
study can easily expand past pragmatic questions of efficacy to wider cultural concerns over, for
better and worse, the indoctrination made possible through rhetoric. The formulation of rhetoric
that I have found most conceptually valuable comes from Stephen O’Leary,
49
who proposed an
elegant Venn diagram of Aristotelian theory in which Rhetoric may be placed at the intersection
between Ethics, Poetics, and Politics. Thus, O’Leary broke down the constituent concerns of
rhetoric neatly: through ethics, a philosophical concern with substance and ideas of “the Good”
using a criterion of value; through politics, a functional concern with influence using a criterion
13
of effectiveness; and through poetics, a formal concern with art using a criterion of beauty. At its
best, then, the study of rhetoric accounts for what exactly is being communicated, how, and the
larger implications thereof.
In and of itself, rhetoric seems to be flexible enough to account for many of the questions
raised under the broadest definitions of “transmedia,” and indeed may be particularly valuable in
providing a lingua franca for what Geoffrey Long helpfully calls “‘transmedia’ as a kind of
meta-medium” (thus uniting otherwise discrete studies of individual mediums).
50
However, there
is another convenient opening for our insertion of rhetoric into discussions of transmedia texts:
the “transmedia _____” structure Jenkins provides in “Transmedia Storytelling 202” as a way to
more effectively recognize while also distinguishing the many directions in which the term
would otherwise be pulled. This syntactic solution is predicated on the observation that
“transmedia” should “be used as an adjective instead of a noun.”
51
Although this does create
some linguistic frustration, given the temptation to abbreviate Jenkins’s “transmedia storytelling”
simply to “transmedia,” other scholars have suggested “transmediality” (Freeman and
Gambarato’s preferred term) as well as “transtexts” (the noun used by Derhy Kurtz and Bourdaa,
though their meaning is highly specific and different from mine: “the literal abbreviation for
‘transmedia storytelling and fan-produced texts,’” citing Derhy Kurtz 2014).
52
Adopting this rule
does have the advantage of forcing a more thoughtful use of “transmedia,” in its adjectival form,
in a way that is always attached to some other noun, whether that be “storytelling,” “texts,” or
something more specific. As such, Jenkins provides a helpful list of potential “logics” to which
“transmedia” might be profitably applied: in addition to “storytelling,” he suggests “branding,”
“performance,” “ritual,” “play,” “activism,” and “spectacle” could all be appended to
“transmedia” as a way of achieving that needed precision discussed previously while still
14
allowing productive dialogue to occur.
53
Under this system, it seems fairly reasonable to simply
advocate for “transmedia rhetoric” as my contribution with little need for further discussion.
At risk of disparaging any other such “transmedia logics,” however, I will indulge in an
argument here for why in particular “transmedia rhetoric” might be considered an especially
useful logic—standing out as in some ways foundational or even primary among this larger set
of nouns.
54
Indeed, the boldest version of this claim might assert that “rhetoric,” even more than
“storytelling,” taps into the beating heart of these worlds, as I have suggested. It gives us the
tools and language to elegantly account for the strategic and persuasive ways audiences are
compelled to move through such worlds, along with the process of enculturation that nurtures a
fandom in ways not so different from how ancient Greek and Roman orators shaped and inspired
the populace, while still, I would argue, permitting discussion of the “affordances” of each
constituent piece of media.
55
Although it does require us to move deftly back and forth between
two realities—consideration of the storyworld itself and the audience’s experience of it—as we
apply our tools, there is nonetheless an appeal, especially for those worlds that in their
persistence and complexity are moving ever closer to verisimilitude, in applying the same
analytical concepts as we would for any more “real” objects of study. Lastly, in terms of its
philosophical commitments, rhetoric has much to recommend it, naturally incorporating
questions of morality and power. Of course, with this provocation I have no interest in
supplanting “transmedia storytelling” or, really, any other term. I do, however, wish to advocate
for the ability of rhetorical analysis in general, and my work here in particular, to home in on
what is distinctive and impactful about transmedia storyworlds.
To speak more concretely, there are four specific attributes of a rhetorical approach, and
particularly of Kenneth Burke’s “dramatistic criticism” as synthesized masterfully by Campbell
15
and Burkholder, that can benefit our understanding of transmedia storytelling.
56
The first is its
inherent interest in strategy and, to use the word that undergirds much of Burke’s contribution to
rhetoric, “motive.” This perspective acknowledges, first and foremost, that transmedia properties
are by their nature predicated both fiscally and narratively on the premise that audiences will do
something, that they will follow narrative threads both in their consumption and their
conceptualization; rhetoric allows us to foreground the creative strategies that encourage and
reward such activity. Second, rhetorical analysis has an interest in specific use of symbols
(including words), including their connotations and effect; such study complements work like
that of Long and the textual analysis Jenkins demonstrated when looking at The Matrix as a
storyworld in Convergence Culture, but I would argue that rhetoric encourages an even finer
degree of detail yet also a wider scope of implication. Third, rhetoric explicitly recognizes the
importance of form and, more importantly, its function(s) as invitation, enticement, and engine
powering audiences’ movement through a storyworld.
57
This mechanism helps us make the jump
from the properties of a text or world to that end result, discussed above, of some engaged
audience—form, in essence, becomes one particular vehicle for this engagement. Fourth and
finally, dramatism considers the relationship between creator and audience, as facilitated through
the rhetorical text, as a type of courtship. The value of this metaphor will evince itself more and
more clearly as we explore it more fully, but in brief, it acknowledges how storyworlds speak to,
draw on, reify, and constitute certain characteristics located in their audiences; how this
connection ultimately manifests in those sorts of long-term relationships an audience member
might maintain with various storyworlds; and how throughout this process there is a degree of
what Burke calls “mystification” or (oft-strategic) obscuration. It is fitting that, for Burke, such
mystification is quite naturally tied not only to a sense of romance, but also to a sense of magic.
58

16
To be fair in my assessment of rhetoric’s value to the study of transmedia texts, an
important caveat is required at this point, acknowledging a shortcoming for which I will seek to
compensate, to at least some degree, in my concluding observations. As has been at issue
through much of this discussion so far, the decision to privilege either breadth or depth
necessarily entails a tradeoff, a giving up of some level of analytical insight. It is certainly a
noble attempt to find a balance between these goals, but it is not always reasonable to achieve
within a single work without sacrificing clarity, detail, or completeness. As such, for all its
capacity to dissect, contextualize, interpret, and evaluate some piece of communication, the study
of rhetoric deals in what such communication could do, the almost hypothetically bound
discussion of what potentialities are fixed within the text itself, with less of a focus on or
obligation to follow through on what, according to its audience, it in fact does.
59
This is not to
say, of course, that scholars of rhetoric are uninterested in real people and the real effects that our
language has upon them; of course, if we accept O’Leary’s positioning, rhetoric is in fact deeply
tied to questions of both Ethics and Politics, values and power. Yet Brummett, linking his
perspective to Burke’s in a collection of work on Steampunk texts, lays out the focus and
commitments of such analysis thusly: “Texts in popular culture have a rhetorical impact on
audiences, the potential for which may be discovered through textual analysis. This theoretical
grounding, developed in several works”—here, Brummett cites two of Burke’s writings as well
as one of his own—“sees the text as primary in the rhetorical transaction and as able to generate
meanings, based on the discursive, semantic possibilities within their constituent signs, that
affect how people think about and perceive the world.”
60
Regardless of the particulars of a case
study or medium, he concludes, “we approach texts as primary in creating the possibilities for
rhetorical effects, possibilities that are then inflected by audience and context.” As will become
17
increasingly relevant throughout my work here, there is a real danger in such an approach of a
chasm of naïveté separating these “possibilities” from realities—in no way indicting Brummett
or his colleagues, but rather acknowledging in my own case that we must temper any tendency
towards enthusiasm with at least some recognition of a text’s actual aftermath. In this sense,
nestling a rhetorical analysis within the context of transmedia storytelling links it more tightly to
fields such as fan studies, which provides this critical recognition of the audience (and, for that
matter, the interest in contexts of production demonstrated by Jenkins and others working in and
around transmedia studies; consider Derhy Kurtz and Bourdaa, or Freeman and Gambarato, for
evidence).
Two other relatively brief, almost definitional clarifications are of use at this point, to
more fully situate the role of rhetorical criticism in adding valuable insight to the study of
transmedia storyworlds. These are concepts that are often attached to “transmedia storytelling,”
at times without particular definition; they are understood almost intuitively, it seems, as a way
to express those more ambiguous or visceral attributes of a transmedia experience. Rhetorical
analysis, however, may give us the language and tools to more effectively capture both
dynamics—those of immersion and synergy.
Immersion is asserted as a characteristic and result of transmedia storyworlds by, for
example, Derhy Kurtz and Bourdaa; Freeman and Gambarato describe “transmediality” as “a
means of crafting immersion,” and it shows up twice in Jenkins’s “Transmedia Storytelling 101,”
too.
61
Unsurprisingly, Frank Rose’s book on The Art of Immersion does spend more time
explaining, exemplifying, and analyzing immersiveness in a text or storyworld, offering the
straightforward definition of “immersive” as “meaning that you can . . . drill down as deeply as
you like about anything you care to.”
62
This seems to be a fair distillation of various other
18
properties and conceptualizations referred to throughout relevant literatures, particularly if we
combine it with Rose’s additional suggestion that immersion is tied to both “nonlinear” as well
as “hyperlinking” qualities.
63
Murray’s definition of immersion, however, comes closer to
capturing that “emotional and experiential engagement” to which Freeman and Gambarato
point.
64
Connecting “immersion” to Victor Turner and the “liminal,” or “mythopoetic
experiences . . . somewhere between the world of ordinary experience and the world of the
sacred,” Murray describes “the immersive trance” thus: “When a storyteller captures our
attention and induces a deep state of absorption, we are in a threshold state, filled with real
sensations and emotions for imaginary objects.”
65
Her longer definition is worth replicating here,
as well:
The experience of being transported to an elaborately simulated place is pleasurable in
itself, regardless of the fantasy content. We refer to this experience as immersion.
Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being
submerged in water. We seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive
experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of
being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air, that
takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus. We enjoy the movement
out of our familiar world, the feeling of alertness that comes from being in this new place,
and the delight that comes from learning to move within it. Immersion can entail a mere
flooding of the mind with sensation, the overflow of sensory stimulation experienced in
the televisor parlor in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Many people listen to music in this
way, as a pleasurable drowning of the verbal parts of the brain. But in a participatory
medium, immersion implies learning to swim, to do the things that the new environment
makes possible.
66

Both Murray and Rose tack back and forth between the psychological effect of immersion and
the technological means for facilitating it—as Rose says, “People have always wanted to in some
way inhabit the stories that move them. The only real variable is whether technology gives them
that opportunity.”
67
Certainly, both Rose and Murray have particular interest in the technological
mechanisms of immersion. In this work, I combine this recognition of medium (both digital and
19
analog) with a consideration of those symbolic components that, in tandem with their media,
contribute to this greater sense of, per Rose, inhabiting a storyworld.
The second clarification, and the last reference point to which I wish to anchor my project
is similarly ambiguous, similarly felt yet resistant to codification, and therefore represents similar
potential in terms of what a rhetorical analysis has to offer: the idea of transmedia synergy. I
have cited above various places in which such synergy has been contended as a characteristic of
transmedia storytelling. But how, precisely, can we point to such synergy? If the outcome of a
transmedia experience is “more than the sum of its parts,” where does that additional value lie?
One answer to these questions, I would suggest, inheres in the audience’s persistent relationship
to the storyworld that travels with them from text to text, accreting investment and meaning (as
per the “additive comprehension” described earlier) while also connecting that audience more
and more tightly (via immersion) to that world. It is in part Jenkins’s “relations between . . .
media extensions,” (“Transmedia Storytelling 202”), and it is in part what Freeman and
Gambarato describe as Jeff Gomez’s ideas surrounding “an ‘essence’” or “thematic x-factor that
runs across all media platforms and links the story to the storyteller in emotional and experiential
ways” (leaning here again on what becomes almost a catch-all phrase for this otherwise
indescribable synergy);
68
Brent V. Friedman uses the term “connective tissue” in a similar way.
Yet to shift the analogy, I am somewhat less looking at the “relations between” specific texts, in
the way Jenkins maps references and narrative continuities linking specific moments in films,
games, and other texts of The Matrix’s storyworld (though I will engage in similar types of
analysis), and more at what I would describe as the substrate or aether of a transmedia world—
the environment in which transmedia worlds thrive, make sense, and sustain life in the form of
audience interest and occupation.
69
This substrate may be established, nurtured, or drawn upon in
20
different ways in different texts, and may both depend on and give rise to some of the unique
narrative contributions of a specific text, yet it may also foster and refer to a more generalized
sense of community and familiarity with the world as a whole. As such, it is deeply tied to both
the audience’s sense of connection to the texts and their journey in actively traversing the
storyworld, processes that are captured and understood with particular efficacy by the dramatistic
tools I employ in this project.
Given the strategic, symbolic, formal, and relational nuances of transmedia storyworlds,
their study, as I have sought to lay out here, is well suited to dramatistic criticism, and it is my
position in this project that such an approach is both appropriate and valuable as a way to enrich
transmedia scholarship. In particular, my work here is a direct response to Freeman and
Gambarato’s assessment that “methodologies for studying transmediality are much needed,
especially given the way that transmedia studies involves the analysis of hybrid phenomena.”
70

The tools of rhetorical analysis can help tease apart the mechanisms of transmedia storytelling,
both those that appear within individual texts and those that connect them to one another. Its
philosophical commitments are, in large part, well suited to acknowledging the industrial factors
behind such franchises and also retaining a concern for their audiences, even as it focuses its
attention on how such motives (to use Burke’s favored term) and their potential effects are
embodied in specific symbolic and textual choices. And in terms of Freeman and Gambarato’s
concern for “hybrid phenomena,” the flexibility and universality of a dramatistic approach,
dealing as it does with the most basic building blocks of human communication, renders it well
equipped to take on, and helpfully link, the range of transmedia subject matter. My particular
argument here is that we can utilize the tools of Kenneth Burke’s dramatism to better understand
the symbolic strategies that help effect immersion and synergy within transmedia storyworlds—
21
or, more simply, the ways such worlds speak to, situate, motivate, and reward their audiences.
With this, our next step will be to look more closely at the specific Burkean tools to be
employed, and how they can fit together into a methodology suited for addressing questions of
transmedia scholarship.

Dramatistic Tools for the Analysis of Storyworlds

Engaging with an academic community that had largely “exiled” rhetoric, thus dissolving
its explanatory power by dispersing its analytical capacities across any number of other
disciplines, Burke undertook a massive project in the reclamation of rhetoric.
71
As such, not only
did he restore a more comprehensive scope of rhetorical theory, he also proposed a framework
that would allow it to be even more deeply universal, applicable to essentially the full range of
human experience.
72
For Burke, the human capacity for symbolizing, for naming, considering,
and communicating about the world and ourselves, is fundamental—yet, as he clarifies, the
advantages of this ability are balanced by the ultimately influential (and inherently imperfect)
ways that symbols, such as words, capture and convey meaning.
73
In this sense, language is not
some transparent or disinterested vehicle of information, but rather “a screen separating us from”
any sort of objective truth (while also, of course “a link” to that same truth). “Even if any given
terminology is a reflection of reality,” Burke contends, “by its very nature as a terminology it
must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality.”
74

Thus his primary interest, and the foundation of any Burkean criticism, lies in the workings and
potential ramifications of particular use of symbols.
75

22
Despite its name, dramatism is not focused in particular on fictional or dramatic works
(though it is appropriately applied as such, as seen in Burke’s own writings), nor, as Campbell
and Burkholder helpfully clarify, does it seek to analyze some particular event as though it were
a drama. Rather, it takes as its starting point that all human communication, in characterizing
such events, necessarily presents them in dramatistic terms privileging certain perspectives or
emphasizing certain causalities—it is, in short, this mixture of reflecting, selecting, and
deflecting reality present in the “talk about human action.”
76
Burke’s dramatistic pentad is one
aspect of his theoretical contribution that is particularly well suited to understanding, for
example, the persuasive efforts of lawyers in a trial (as Campbell and Burkholder demonstrate, or
political discourse, as it “can be used to illuminate the meaning or motive in a rhetorical work.”
77

Yet the “philosophy of rhetoric” underlying Burke’s approach also recognizes the ambiguity of
human communication, the range of intentionality involved (as evidenced even in Campbell and
Burkholder’s “meaning or motive”), and thus the inaccuracy of limiting our focus to
“persuasion” as such.
78
Instead, he expands the scope of discussion through his use of the term
“identification”:
The key term for the old rhetoric was “persuasion” and its stress was upon deliberate
design. The key term for the “new” rhetoric would be “identification,” which can include
a partially “unconscious” factor in appeal.
79

With this move, Burke captures a spectrum of human cognition and communication, ranging
from paradigmatic persuasive efforts to those constitutive processes by which we establish our
sense of self, right down to the most basic ways we attach names to objects or ideas; it expands
“beyond the traditional bounds of rhetoric” while “showing how a rhetorical motive is often
present where it is not usually recognized, or thought to belong.”
80
It includes both solitary
experiences of identification and those that occur through interaction.
81
Put most simply, Burke’s
“identification” accounts for and connects the various ways we would naturally use the word:
23
identifying someone or one thing linguistically, identifying ourselves as or with some broader
group or cause, but also identifying with some particular other communicator, creating a shared
space of communion and agreement.
This flexibility makes Burkean dramatism of particular value in the context of transmedia
storyworlds. It allows us to discuss the ways that audiences might derive particular meaning
from a text, or might be motivated to move between texts in a transmedia storyworld, in ways
that are not necessarily dependent on intentional choices made by creators (while still allowing
for the possibility that they are). The concept of “identification” moving fluidly between a more
informative, referential function and its role in constituting one’s sense of self and alignment
with others also makes it powerful for our purposes, pointing up the connections between how
information is organized or doled out in a transmedia storyworld and what that leads the
audience to understand about themselves and their relationship to such a world. This conceptual
flexibility also renders it slippery, however, so in the interest of crystallizing these ideas into a
more specific framework that can be applied for the purposes of my analysis, I will preview here
three transmedia dynamics, all rooted in identificatory processes.
The first of these dynamics is, generally speaking, the ability of the audience to shape
their own unique identity in conversation with the characters, groups, or other resources of a
storyworld—a version of what Burke describes as “one’s ways of seeing one’s reflection in the
social mirror.”
82
This meshes neatly with, for example, John Fiske’s description of the “semiotic
productivity” audiences engage in.
83
Fiske summarizes work indicating how audiences of
popular culture do not simply consume media artifacts, but in fact make use of them, through
“the selection of texts or stars that offer fans opportunities to make meanings of their social
identities and social experiences that are self-interested and functional.”
84
Moreover, Fiske cites
24
Bourdieu’s assessment of this dynamic as a distinguishing characteristic of popular culture (in
contrast to “the culture . . . of the dominant”).
85
Jones’s work, making use of Bourdieu and his
concept of habitus in a somewhat different way than Fiske does, illustrates how even the process
of characters within a storyworld determining their own identities and group alignments “model
myriad ways to form narrative identity for readers.”
86
Whether taking place inside a fiction or
between the text and the audience, then, storyworlds involve processes of identification that
allow for “individuation,” or “becoming one’s own self” (as per Jung, 1953–71), and it is this
idea of individuation I wish to use in encapsulating this first dynamic of identification.
87

The second dynamic that stems from identification is the sort of familiarity or belonging
an audience might feel—and the symbolic elements that would give rise to and encourage such a
feeling. Following Dickinson’s lead, I connect this version of “identity” to “memory,” and
particularly how a storyworld can establish and then refer to its own canonical history in a way
that rewards audiences who share those memories.
88
In one sense, this is a manifestation of
Burke’s “consubstantiality,” which Campbell and Burkholder summarize as a “body of shared
experience,” breaking down the word itself in a way that lends itself to a helpful visual: “([con =
with] + [sub = under] + [stance = to stand]), meaning sharing ground, having a common basis
(Rhetoric of Motives 20–23)”; “identification,” as a “symbolic process,” represents the way in
which “that commonality is recognized and acknowledged.”
89
Yet what I also mean in describing
this dynamic draws on the “abbreviation” Burke (referencing Horne Tooke) calls “a typical
resource of language.”
90
While this is always true to some extent—Burke gives examples of how
the names we give to people, actions, and works of art inherently bundle together any number of
details—I suggest that in the case of storyworlds it can operate in a more strategic and identity-
affirming fashion, as a sort of litmus test, secret message, or inside joke. What I am calling
25
communal memory
91
transforms these abbreviations into currency, invoking a version of what
Burke describes as “mystification.”
92

If we think of mystification as a sort of smoke-and-mirrors effect, the ambivalent
ambiguity that naturally (or purposefully) arises from the imperfection of identification, it leads
us to a consideration of the third Burkean dynamic that is relevant for our investigation of
transmedia texts: what it is that motivates and rewards audience movement through a storyworld.
Such a dynamic is described from various angles in any number of scholarly and creative
sources. Partially, it is about “mystery,” often in terms of “the deliberate withholding of
information” from the audience that, in the words of J. J. Abrams in 2007, produces “infinite
potential.”
93
Partially, it is about a storyworld creating openings to provoke the possibility of new
stories or understandings, what Jenkins (“Transmedia Storytelling 101”) refers to in terms of
“gaps and excesses,” or the ways storyworlds “introduce potential plots which can not be fully
told or extra details which hint at more than can be revealed.”
94
Partially, too, it is about the
richness of detail that creates the verisimilitude and the justification necessary for a believable,
immersive storyworld: the “Distant Horizons” that, for Brent V. Friedman and those he worked
with at Electronic Arts, make up “the First Pillar” of “a Universe Worthy of Devotion.”
95
And
partially, it is about sating audiences’ cravings for additional content, or their search for
completion.
96
As I describe them in this work, these functions are tied tightly to acts of
identification, mystification, and consubstantiality; however, to fully understand the dynamic of
what I am calling the motivation for traversal driving audiences across transmedia storyworlds, it
is valuable at this stage to incorporate a dramatistic understanding of form.
97
Burke sees form as
a way of speaking to and harnessing audiences’ “psychology,” specifically by “the creation of an
appetite in the mind of the auditor, and the adequate satisfying of that appetite.”
98
“A work has
26
form,” Burke says, “in so far as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be
gratified by the sequence.”
99
Burke recognizes that such gratification is not always instant, and
that it “at times involves a temporary set of frustrations, but in the end these frustrations prove to
be simply a more involved kind of satisfaction, and furthermore serve to make the satisfaction of
fulfilment more intense.”
100
Importantly, Campbell and Burkholder explain that, with a Burkean
lens, “form or structure has an appeal all its own,” and that part of that appeal is dependent on its
involvement of the audience—the act of “engaging us in the completion of its form,” suggesting
one sense of that engaged audience presumed in transmedia storytelling.
101
Even Burke,
however, acknowledges the insatiability of audiences in following these formal appeals: “Yet
this satisfaction in turn becomes an allurement, an itch for further developments.”
102
Thus, for
our purposes, considering the ways that a storyworld establishes certain enticing potentialities—
and then, in certain cases, realizes them, often through additional texts—can be treated as a
matter of form;
103
the way such “allurements” are mystified and situated within a larger pool of
(consubstantial) communal memory is what I am calling a storyworld’s motivation for
traversal.
104

With these concepts in hand, we can now summarize our discussion with a brief
overview of what, in the context of transmedia storyworlds, a dramatistic analysis might
entail.
105
Most centrally, such an undertaking would look closely at symbols, including words, as
a way in to understanding what a text is doing.
106
It would consider the identifications, the
linguistic choices that denote and connote certain things (to the exclusion of others), and how
those identifications create consubstantiality or a linkage of commonality between entities—
including members of its audience. It would consider ways that mystification obscures some
degree of this identification (and whether that grants an advantage or disadvantage to any
27
particular party). Finally, it would consider how those symbols participate in “an arousing and
fulfillment of desires,” creating structural motivation for audiences’ psychological and
emotional engagement with a text.
107
For my purposes, I would distill these investigations into
issues of individuation, whereby an audience member establishes a self of self distinct from
others; communal memory, whereby the consubstantiality of a storyworld’s history creates a
sense of belonging (but may also be placed behind a tollgate, with identificatory shorthand being
used as a way to grant entrance); and motivation for traversal, whereby the formal suggestions in
a storyworld provoke an audience to continually test its boundaries—with mystification playing
a role as the actual limits of the storyworld remain unclear. This construction of a method
suggests we are prepared now to consider a specific object of study and how such
methodological tools can be applied to its exploration.

Objects of Inquiry

Despite the seemingly reasonable fit between rhetorical theory and the study of
transmedia storyworlds,
108
the specific connection of Kenneth Burke’s theory to transmedia
storytelling represents relatively untrodden ground,
109
suggesting that this study is academically
well positioned to make a noteworthy contribution. As a way to both test the fruitfulness of
dramatistic analysis in the context of transmedia storytelling while also cultivating insight about
one exemplary storyworld, what follows will investigate the Wizarding World, the franchise
established by J.K. Rowling that includes the books, films, and other related texts centered on
Harry Potter as well as the newer Fantastic Beasts stories, along with a handful of other more
general texts set in that narrative world. It feels unnecessary to argue at any great length for the
28
relevance of the Wizarding World (although evidence to that end is ample),
110
other than to note
that its rampant popularity has both been fueled by and accordingly continued to fuel narrative
phenomena that make it of particular interest to us—as Rose says, “the Harry Potter series is set
in a richly imagined fictional universe that has proved deeply, almost compulsively engaging,”
suggesting not only a degree of complexity and robustness that will make it a worthwhile
candidate for study, but also a degree of impactfulness that indicate its rhetorical efficacy.
111
In
combination, these factors lend themselves to the conclusion that a dramatistic study of the
Wizarding World will provide both an appropriate test of the theory’s value in the context of
transmedia storyworlds and, likely, evidence of particularly artful transmedia rhetoric.
To more deeply explore the range of rhetorical mechanisms manifested in varied
mediums, the Wizarding World case studies I have selected—its website, which has subsumed
the original Pottermore site; its Los Angeles theme park location, the Wizarding World of Harry
Potter at Universal Studios Hollywood; and its location-based mobile game, Harry Potter:
Wizards Unite—represent “a variety of alternative combinations between both online and offline
platforms” that I believe reflect some of the more intriguing (and highly produced) texts in the
franchise, important both for their uniqueness and for their role as models that other properties
may well aim to emulate.
112
In some ways, they represent a narrow and paradigmatic
understanding of transmedia storytelling, demanding little departure from Jenkins’s original
formulations—the texts are all carefully designed instantiations of a contemporary, industrially
produced, fictional storyworld, all authorized parts of a franchise machine.
113
They do, however,
pose some concern to those who would cling tightly to Jenkins’s initial constraint on transmedia
texts “ideally” providing “unique contributions” to the narrative world; although there are indeed
unique narrative components to each of these texts, in many ways such content feels incidental, a
29
lightweight wrapper around (or excuse for) a recapitulation of what has already been established
in canon.
114
These are hardly “mother ship” texts, but are more properly orbiting or docked at it,
clearly subordinate to the central narratives of the books and films.
115
Yet to begin with, given
Jenkins’s own thoughtful progression away from such a hardline stance,
116
I am less concerned
with any conceptual dogmatism that would dismiss the potential value of these case studies, as
widely divergent mediums in conversation with one another, in favor of quite literally idealistic
definitional rigidity, and I would venture to say that Jenkins’s interest in “relations between
media” would grant at least some validity to such a prioritization.
117
More importantly, however,
part of what I find of particular rhetorical interest in these texts is their capacity to nurture a
transmedia substrate of common identification, of a shared repository of canonical memory that
is validated and valued, of dynamics that are in fact aided by the texts’ more reflective position
in the storyworld.
118
Thus, these texts, each of which foregrounds a celebration of canonical
history and audience memory even as they include some amount of canonical “extension,”
represent an important functionality of transmedia storyworlds.
119

Though I will discuss my case studies in greater detail during the course of my analysis,
it is valuable at this point to consider briefly previous work, focused on similar questions and
similar texts, that can serve as models and points of contrast for this project.
First, we can look to Larkin’s use of Burkean identification and consubstantiality in
assessing the rhetorical power of a website, specifically the Go Red for Women Movement’s site
intended to supplement a larger transmedia campaign around women’s heart health.
120
Larkin’s
work is oriented towards a somewhat more technically focused audience, and thus analyzes the
site in terms of “information design,” “user experience,” “navigation,” “accessibility,” and
similar concerns. Likewise, the evidence she offers in support of her larger assessments about
30
consubstantiality is often in terms of technical details involving, for example, “the site’s
hierarchical structure” or decisions involving the layout of graphical and textual content. Despite
employing a perhaps different vocabulary from many other transmedia or rhetorical studies,
however, her design acumen is a decided asset in dissecting the site’s effectiveness, pointing to
specific “barriers to consubstantiality” and exemplifying the role of professional empath that
takes seriously the audience’s point of view, their needs, and the “design choices” that either
meet those needs or fall short.
121
Furthermore, her work here provides an excellent contrast to a
website that is part of a fiction-based transmedia franchise like the Wizarding World. In fact, her
criticism’s underlying presumption that the purpose of the site is to provide clarity and
information (entirely appropriate given, as she puts it “stakes” that “are especially high since
inaccurate or incorrect information can result in physical and/or psychological harm that can be
very costly, both literally and figuratively”) leads to a recognition of how, for the Wizarding
World site, the creators’ intention may in fact be quite different. Although both sites rely on a
form of consubstantiality, or a shared “identification between the user and the organization,” the
Wizarding World uses that consubstantiality as currency, as part of the game-like relationship
discussed above, in which Larkin’s “barriers” might in fact be tollgates for us, the confusion and
frustration she predicts closer to Burke’s “mystification” and “temporary set of frustrations” that
give rise to “a more involved kind of satisfaction,”
122
and her “shared goal of ensuring that site
users find the Web content they need” replaced by one of activating and rewarding communal
memory.
Second, in seeking a model for our second case study—the Wizarding World of Harry
Potter theme park—I would turn our discussion to the work of Greg Dickinson considering the
rhetorical contours of physical sites (such as a downtown district or U.S. suburbs).
123
His
31
exploration of Old Pasadena, in particular, has been inspiring in its conceptual and analytical
insight, and indeed, many of his arguments are applicable not only to the artificial village of
Hogsmeade at Universal Studios Hollywood, but also to the situatedness of the mobile gameplay
in Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, as players traverse their own physical environments guided by
the digital game and make linkages between them.
124
For our present purposes, however, I will
highlight a number of ways in which his thinking and scholarly practice has set the stage for my
work here. This first is, generally, his theoretical interlocking of “memory, space, identity and
rhetoric, wherein stylistic, often architectural, devices elicit memory to argue for and secure
personal identity.”
125
Further, he recognizes both the materiality and symbolicity of locations like
Hogsmeade, the importance of their tangibility and phenomenology alongside their references
and implicit arguments, and (here citing Blair, Dickinson, and Ott, 2011) makes the case that
such “landscapes . . . are ‘meaningful, legible, partisan, and consequential.’”
126
Having provided
us with theoretical justification for this case study in the context of rhetoric and identity, his
work also articulates in a more precise fashion what this rhetorical identity construction looks
like. To begin with, he is careful to note that identity is not imposed on audiences, but rather is
positioned as a set of resources audiences might draw upon in the establishment and performance
of their individual identity—a performance that, he reminds us, is also part of a “constant project
of consumption.”
127
This pairing is particularly relevant in considering such a decidedly
commercial site as that of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park, in which branded
goods, and perhaps also the opportunity “to see and be seen,” are of primary importance.
128
If
“identity, in this formulation, is the creative performance of memory,”
129
it is both an
individuated one and one that draws on and establishes community,
130
or “individuals’ sense of
themselves within a larger cultural network.”
131
This represents the tension between Burke’s “I”
32
and “corporate we’s” that, especially given the distinct community (and communities) inscribed
around audiences of the Harry Potter texts, again sheds light on how the theme park might be
directly fostering this relationship to a specific (commodity) community through the rhetorical
use of memory.
132
Dickinson’s recognition of “nostalgia” helps capture not only the emotional
unease that motivates this construction of a reassuring identity, but also the concomitant relief
from and attachment to whatever resources help them do so, and thus explains the visceral appeal
a place like the Wizarding World of Harry Potter might hold for its visitors.
133
His work provides
valuable treatments of mnemonics in the context of rhetoric, which provides additional support
around the framework I introduce in Chapter 2 as a taxonomy of motivation for traversal; he also
directly acknowledges the referential nature of such memory activation as “intertextual,”
describing “memory places” as “those sites where the cites necessary for the invention of the self
are located” and thus tying his work nicely to a deliberately intertextual operation such as a
transmedia franchise.
134
Lastly, in methodological terms, he provides both arguments and an
example to follow: in his more recent writing, he advocates eloquently for an approach similar to
that which I took in exploring the theme park, prioritizing “the critic’s own embodied
engagement with rhetoric,” and in his earlier work he models an analytical perspective that
scrutinizes “inscriptions, signs and legends” while also considering more subtle, ambiguous, or
broad cultural references, inspiring a similar degree of zooming in and out with my own
scholarly lens.
135

Third and finally, Chess has provided a model for how we might approach a location-
based mobile game such as Harry Potter: Wizards Unite by analyzing its predecessor, Ingress.
136

Just as the Wizarding World mobile game departs from the model of Ingress, so too will our
project necessarily deviate from Chess’s, if for no other reason than to adapt to the different
33
contours of our case study. In some ways, both our artifacts are similar in that they are
fundamentally transmedia in nature, dependent on a set of some other texts for their narrative
value (although, true to the expectations of Jenkins’s original definitions of transmedia
storytelling, both games do also stand on their own as enjoyable experiences
137
). In other ways,
while Ingress might represent a more paradigmatic Jenkinsian network of well-balanced
transmedia texts, the “mother ship” relationship between Harry Potter: Wizards Unite and the
canonical texts lend themselves to a very different narrative proposition. Players coming to
Ingress were following a live narrative developing before their very eyes (and, depending on
when they joined the game, perhaps even a story that had what was still in essence breaking
news); players of Harry Potter: Wizards Unite were in all likelihood longtime fans, and thus their
relationship to the storyworld was already built upon the presumption of history, lending itself
naturally to a sense of retrospection in contrast to one that was prioritizing discovery. Yet despite
the differences in franchises, transmedia balance, and resultant analytical themes, Chess’s
approach nonetheless represents the general method I have undertaken. Situating her study in the
context of rhetoric, ARGs, and transmedia storyworlds, Chess derives her arguments about the
relationships between regionalism and globalism throughout Ingress by considering both what
players do in the game (describing the game’s mechanics, or how the game is played, and the
technologies it uses) and the larger narrative that supports it (which, in the case of Ingress, may
be located outside the mobile game itself in, for example, books or online content). This mixture
of what we might roughly characterize as phenomenology (or, following Larkin, user
experience) and narrative analysis in a way parallels Dickinson’s combination of material and
symbolic considerations, and I would contend it is both appropriate and necessary as a way to
34
understand the rhetorical implications of a game asking its players to perform certain actions as
explained and justified by narrative.
These models have raised valuable theoretical issues and demonstrated the viability of
my case studies, but they have also suggested largely compatible methods that in each case
consider the nuances of the medium, functional and connotative ramifications of specific “design
choices” (a phrase that appears in Larkin but also Jenkins’s “Transmedia Storytelling 202”), and,
broadly, the hypothesized audience experience of the text, whether that be “user experience” for
Larkin or “embodied engagement with rhetoric” for Dickinson. This is aligned not only with the
work I have done here but also with the larger understandings of both rhetoric and transmedia
scholarship. It seems, then, that we have both foundation and justification in place, and are thus
prepared to conclude this introductory portion of our endeavor.
138

Conclusion

The analysis I undertake in this dissertation demonstrates how symbolic components of
the Wizarding World franchise lend themselves to a rhetorical transmedia substrate, a sort of
through line that situates, validates, and motivates audiences using what Kenneth Burke
describes as identification (as well as the mystification that goes along with it) and the intrinsic
properties of form. Identification and form work together in establishing this substrate, and in
this project I will point to three dynamics that rely on both to varying degrees: individuation
(which primarily occurs through identification), communal memory (which creates identification
through form), and motivation for traversal (which primarily occurs through form, though
identification and mystification are necessary). In considering a range of case studies,
35
encompassing digital and physical, with varying purposes (in the broadest strokes, a repository
of information, an attraction, and a game), I illustrate the variety of ways these dynamics might
play out across a storyworld—and thus, the consistency or commonality of a substrate. Finally, I
suggest this substrate and the mechanisms contributing to it might helpfully be thought of as
concrete manifestations of the immersion and synergy associated with transmedia storyworlds.
The remainder of this dissertation will be divided in order to focus separately on each case study,
but with the common themes I have previewed here running throughout each, with varying
degrees of explanation or emphasis as appropriate. As we begin to apply this framework more
directly to our object of study, the final contribution promised by this dissertation will emerge: a
recognition of how transmedia storyworlds might move between worldbuilding and a model that
might more accurately be called worldblending, or the strategic interplay between fiction and
one’s lived reality outside a storyworld. A concluding chapter to synthesize the outcomes of this
work, but also to venture observations beyond the scope of our main analysis, will follow.
36
Chapter 2
WizardingWorld.com

In 2011, with the cultural legacy of Harry Potter already firmly established, J.K. Rowling
found herself “in a position to give you”—her “wonderful, diverse and loyal readership”—
“something unique”: a website then called Pottermore.
139
As the name playfully implies, it was a
source for more of the Potter storyworld that had attracted such a remarkable following,
introduced at a particularly advantageous moment in the franchise’s timeline. With the site’s
launch, Rowling recognized that the initial promise of the canon had reached its culmination
thanks to the completion of the main Harry Potter storyline in novel and cinematic forms. The
problem, of course, was that this left the fans who had been by her side for over a decade looking
for something new (and at risk of abandoning the fandom); Pottermore offered one solution. Of
course, Pottermore was also positioned as a way to attract newcomers to the franchise in a novel
way (thus taking the idea of more in a demographic direction), and Rowling hinted that “fans of
any age,” including those of “the digital generation,” were welcome “to share, participate in, and
rediscover the stories.” It represented, then, an important business move, as well as a substantial
investment (according to Horne, eight million pounds, an amount that could not feasibly be
allocated for any other “website promoting a single property”).
140

Pottermore’s inducement to old and new fans alike was threefold, a neatly balanced
mixture of transmedia immersion, expansion, and commerce.
141
First, it would provide “a virtual
Hogwarts” in which each visitor was positioned as a student and could take part in things like
brewing potions and casting spells in duels with other fans.
142
Second, it offered a spigot of
“exclusive new writing from J.K. Rowling.”
143
Third, it was then “the exclusive place to
37
purchase digital audiobooks and, for the first time, e-books of the Harry Potter series.”
144
The
site would later call itself “the digital heart of J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World.”
145
We might
consider a different metaphor: the site was, strategically speaking, a powerful tool for the
ongoing cultivation of the storyworld and audience Rowling had nurtured to that point.
Horne’s concise summary of Pottermore as a case study emphasizes that its value is not
in its representativeness, but rather its exceptionalism. It demonstrates important truths not only
about the confluence of factors that made it possible, but also the ongoing challenges it would
contend with, despite its remarkable advantages. To begin with, Pottermore was set up for
success thanks to the ace up Rowling’s sleeve: the “exclusive” access to the Harry Potter texts in
digital form she was able to promise visitors. Horne, citing Solon from 2011, explains that
because “Rowling retained the rights to publish the digital editions of the Harry Potter novels
herself, rather than licensing them to her print publishers” (a move that, to clarify, is “unusual” in
that domain), she was equipped with “a phenomenally desirable product, the opportunity to sell it
directly to consumers, and the money to make it happen,” thanks to “the enormous success of the
franchise, and her consequent wealth.”
146
Given this, there is a sense in which all Pottermore
needed to be was a digital storefront, allowing Rowling to bypass the giants of online retail
(including Amazon) and reap the rewards of doing so.
147
Yet from a worldbuilding and
transmedia perspective, Pottermore took advantage of the opportunity to follow through on its
promise of more. Even as it expanded access to preexisting canon, it offered a fascinating
mechanism for the audience to enter the storyworld in a fundamentally different way—it created
a space for them there. At the same time, it set up a way to continually add to the world Rowling
had established, enriching it with details here and there and ultimately, in conjunction with
38
projects like the Fantastic Beasts films and the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child play, pushing
its boundaries ever outward.
From the outset, the site was introduced with a coy premise that those who were admitted
entrance into Pottermore must, themselves, be “magical”: “early access” was metered out
through a 7-day campaign (beginning on July 31, 2011) in which “The Magical Quill,” which
“detects the birth of magical children,” would help determine which fans would be first to join
the community.
148
(Of course, part of this process involved answering canon-based questions,
providing a more practical filtering mechanism that also presaged the litmus tests of communal
memory that would persist throughout the years). A trailer video for the website indicates some
of the offerings available to those who did gain access: interactive ways of revisiting the scenes
and events from the series but, more interestingly for our purposes, a way to identify oneself as a
Hogwarts student through the assignment of a Hogwarts house and the accumulation of points on
their behalf.
149
There was also a fairly strong community component, with users (who each, at
that point, had usernames) able to build their network of “friends” and, drawing from other
documentation found in the site’s archived version, the potential to post in House-specific
forums and “showcase your own Potter-related creativity.”
150
Lastly, with a metaphor that will
be particularly appropriate throughout the course of our analysis, the site promised valuable
treasures to be “unlocked”: “exclusive revelations” and “insights” thanks to each “brand new
contribution” written (as the single window reminds us three separate times) “by J.K.
Rowling.”
151
This dual emphasis on both authenticity and novelty has remained prominent
throughout the years, likely more so than any other function of the site.
Horne traces the site’s evolution and cites its eventual “change of focus” as evidence
“that even a brand as powerful as Harry Potter struggles” to remain viable based solely on
39
Pottermore’s initial premise and promise.
152
The primary shift to which Horne refers is the site’s
“adoption of a broader focus from September 2015, promoting content across several aspects of
the franchise.” Though I am less quick to imply this is a sign of failure as opposed to a fairly
reasonable adjustment to the changing nature of the franchise, it is helpful that Horne cites some
of the business realities that may have been at play: “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).” A
cursory comparison of the site’s incarnations in 2011, 2016, 2020, and 2021 suggests a number
of noteworthy changes, including the near-total loss of the “virtual Hogwarts” and its associated
sense of community, a far more constrained opportunity for fan contributions (in contrast to the
early encouragement of “Potter-related creativity”), a shift from Sony’s prominent branding to
that of Warner Bros., a version of the site (now seemingly scrapped) suggesting that Newt
Scamander—the hero of the Fantastic Beasts stories—was equally as relevant as Harry Potter
himself, and, perhaps most disappointing from an autoethnographic perspective, the
repositioning of the site as the home of “Harry Potter Fan Club” with its option for a “Gold”-
level “subscription” available for “$74.99 per year.”
153
Particularly in contrast to the all-caps
promise in 2011 that the site “is FREE to join and use,” it is understandable yet nonetheless
uncomfortable to see such an indication of the storyworld’s profit motive laid bare.
154
A starker
comparison might be drawn between the characterization J.K. Rowling offered in her audio
greeting to the site in 2016 and the language that now appears in the site’s footer: whereas
Rowling envisioned the site as her “magical corner of the internet” and “a place where you can
unleash your imagination, and allow it to lead you on adventures,” it is today simply in the
40
business of “delivering the latest news and official products from the Wizarding World and our
partners.”
155

One of the more wholesale changes to the site came in 2019 when, as per an
announcement dated October 1 of that year, Pottermore officially became
WizardingWorld.com.
156
The explanation offered was that “the Wizarding World has expanded”
(which we might read to mean that the site needed to place equal emphasis on its newer stories
that did not feature Harry Potter) and, accordingly, “the new online home of Harry Potter and
Fantastic Beasts” had been developed by “the team that brought you Pottermore, along with
some new friends too” (which we might read to mean that there are new business partnerships in
place that have shifted control of the site and, perhaps, its business goals). The site’s current
footer carries similar explanations, albeit more concisely, and clarifies that “Wizarding World
Digital” is “a partnership between Warner Bros. and Pottermore.” The article promised that this
change also represented an increase and improvement in the site’s offerings, with an in-world
characterization that, as we will see, conveniently foreshadows our own analysis of the
storyworld’s ongoing growth: “It’s like a more polished, shiny version of The Burrow... we’ve
magically added a few extra floors to our house and thrown in some Extension Charms, brought
over the content you know and love from Pottermore.com, and added some new, enhanced
experiences.”
Aside from the newly introduced confusion between the wizarding world (storyworld),
Wizarding World (franchise), and WizardingWorld.com (website), this change does little to
diminish our analysis, as in what follows I focus largely on rhetorical mechanisms that have
remained consistent throughout the life of the website.
157
As it currently exists, the site is divided
into a number of sections: a user’s main profile page once logged in, and then a navigational
41
banner with links for “News & Features,” “Quizzes,” “J.K. Rowling Archive,” “Discover”
(which includes “Books,” “Films,” “Portkey Games,” “On Stage,” and “Experiences”), “Starting
Harry Potter,” “Hogwarts Sorting,” “Fan Club,” “Pins,” and “Shop.” Much of what I discuss
below will focus on this profile and the Hogwarts Sorting that informs it, Features and Quizzes,
and the sometimes-murky relationship between these presumably summarizing materials and the
canonical expansion of the articles contained in the J.K. Rowling Archive. From the data of the
site, we can tease out our first evidence of the transmedia rhetoric laid out in the previous
chapter: individuation, communal memory, and motivation for traversal.

Individuation

The most noteworthy thing Pottermore and, now, the Wizarding World sites have done is
to explicitly recognize each visitor not just as a part of the storyworld, but as a specific part, with
specific personality traits and characteristics. These specificities are connected to the canon and
its mythos yet deliberately representative of that individual’s particular preferences, proclivities,
and values as they identify them—their distinctive psychological makeup, or what makes them
“them.” They are not just a member of the wizarding world, nor are they even just a Hogwarts
student: They are a Slytherin, or a Hufflepuff, or a Gryffindor, or a Ravenclaw; they have a
certain kind of wand, made of a certain kind of wood and of a certain length; and they have a
Patronus that, when summoned, takes on a certain shape. What’s more, these distinguishing
features are meaningful, and perform important functions, in terms of the audience community
but also on an individual scale. Certainly they have a sort of organizing role in that they can
differentiate one member of the audience from the next, and they create certain affinities or
42
allegiances between audience members who share certain qualities (or between audience
members and the canonical characters who have these same qualities). Yet they also have
independently valuable meaning as to who a given individual is, what they care about, the kind
of person they are and the kind of future that lies before them.
As we consider individuation throughout the Wizarding World franchise, it is worth our
while to linger particularly on this case study, taking the time to establish both the theory (in
terms of Burkean identification) and the nuanced processes by which the site manifests this
dynamic. It is, in some ways, the most thorough official process of individuation that any of our
texts demonstrate. For certain fans, it may lay the groundwork for the transmedia substrate that
they carry with them to other texts, including the theme park and the mobile game—the identity
established on the website reiterated in each of these other settings. Simply by virtue of its place
in our project, it will also call for a more extended explanation of certain conceptual details. Yet
throughout this discussion, it will be important to bear in mind that, although the site offers a
centralized, authorized, and polished mechanism for identification and individuation, it is
certainly not the only such mechanism. Indeed, we would do well to remain aware of the site’s
frequent imposition of identity, the Faustian bargain it has made in exercising its seemingly
magical authority while potentially pushing aside visitors’ preexisting or conflicting desires for
identification. This dilemma will be addressed at length in our concluding chapter. At this stage,
however, we will focus most directly on how the site functions as transmedia rhetoric for a more
generalized public, and the potential that inheres within it for those who are less likely to know
just who, in the Wizarding World, they might be.
158

The way the site currently exists today, visitors are encouraged to define themselves by
an increasing number of variables moving them closer to uniqueness. It is a process of
43
identification, or creating bonds and meaning around commonalities: visitors are given a
selection of rhetorical resources from which to choose, and they actively identify themselves
with certain of those resources to the exclusion of certain others. Importantly, this identification
is bidirectional, for as visitors choose their preferences or affiliations, the site interprets them and
returns a label accordingly. The sum total of those identificatory choices for any one visitor is a
congealed “Wizarding World” self: a Hufflepuff, or someone who uses a redwood wand, with
which the visitor can further identify. But the effects of this identification involve two
complementary, opposing forces, courtesy of the division that, for Burke, is part and parcel of
identification: Just as the visitor is now unified with other Hufflepuffs and, more broadly, other
fans of Harry Potter, that same visitor is also individuated as different from a large swath of
those other fans, in a way that ostensibly both represents and respects their true nature. This is
worldblending in fine form, conscientiously incorporating who someone is outside the
storyworld into, and through, the world’s symbolic framework.
Although certainly the vibrant fan practices, such as cosplay and fanfic, that have existed
for many years have always left room for fans to present “themselves-in-a-world,” crafting an
identity and affiliations that draw on a storyworld’s narrative resources while also foregrounding
a deeply personal sense of self, the way that the Wizarding World has codified, enabled, and
encouraged these practices for the entirety of their fanbase—without requiring much in the way
of individual initiative or creativity—is striking. It is, in a sense, enlightened; it is, more
realistically, taking ownership of the relationship between the audience and the text and, for
better or worse, channeling it through official mechanisms. It exerts control even as it offers the
gift to which Rowling referred. It is, nonetheless, a gift that merits attention as a strategic way of
44
establishing a transmedia substrate, as well as creating one particular type of immersion by
explicitly placing the audience within the storyworld.
Tapping into and facilitating a process of individuation is a particularly powerful move
on the part of the Wizarding World, particularly in the case of young audience members who are
already naturally in the process of figuring out who they are (and will eagerly accept help and
validation along the way). Individuation, as a psychological concept, refers to the essential
construction of one’s own identity as distinct from others.
159
Colman cites this concise
explanation from Jung (1953–71):
Individuation means becoming a single, homogeneous being, and, in so far as
“individuality” embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it also
implies becoming one’s own self. We could therefore translate individuation as “coming
to selfhood” or “self-actualization” (Collected Works, 7, paragraph 266)
Importantly, as Colman describes it, this “wholeness” is made up not simply of “personal”
qualities, but also of cultural resources “shared by all people” and “manifest in . . . fairy tales,
myths, religions, and other cultural phenomena.”
160
In short, our selves are both original and
patchwork, unique to us yet also pieced together from the symbolic touchpoints of meaning that
surround us. Colman also notes that, “in neo-Freudian theory, . . . Erich Fromm (1900–80) used
the term slightly differently to denote the gradual attainment by a growing child of awareness of
being a particular, individual person.” (It seems charmingly fitting, too, that Colman not only
attaches the term to Jung, Fromm, and Schopenhauer, he further observes “it has been traced
back to 16th-century alchemy.”) Combining these meanings into a brief synthesis, we might
consider individuation as an appreciation of self, an in fact alchemical transformation of cultural
resources, experiences, and insights into a uniquely valuable individual.
We can better understand the importance of individuation as part of the audience
relationship by contrasting it with other, similar strategies. It may be tempting to conflate this
45
individuation with more common practices such as customization and personalization—after all,
don’t they all refer to a recognition of a fan’s individuality, their identity and their experiences?
Although it is true that these terms are closely related, it would be a mistake to discount the
constitutive, psychological value of individuation by equating it with far milder processes of
individualization. Even within the Wizarding World, we can point to instances of the latter: In
describing the virtues of the Harry Potter New York store, for example, the Wizarding World
website touts that its merchandise includes “customisable items, such as Hogwarts house robes
that can be personalised with your names.”
161
For my purposes, I propose a more nuanced
distinction between customizing, meaning the ability for one to select certain possible variations
(such as one’s name or a preferred color), and personalizing, meaning a modified object that in
some way is meant to reflect or recognize one’s specific experiences. Harry Potter: Wizards
Unite offers helpful examples of both in the user’s “Ministry ID.” A user might decorate their
player photo with any number of digital costume pieces (like wigs, robes, or accessories), along
with other images and symbols indicative of the wizarding world; I would consider this
customizability. However, the ID also indicates things like the player’s level and badges
representing particular events or accomplishments in which the player has taken part; it is this
memorializing of individual experience that I would call personalizing. Both customizing and
personalizing are ways of modifying some object to reflect a person’s sense of self, whether in
terms of their preferences or their actions. In many cases, the distinction may be unimportant.
What I find far more important is the difference in kind, not simply degree, between these
reflective individualizations and the constitutive individuation the Wizarding World offers as it
helps its fans establish their identities—through a deliberate set of collaborative processes that
naturally include Burkean identification, yet also (appropriately enough) his mystification.
46
For our purposes, the most expedient demonstration of the Wizarding World’s process of
individuation can be found in the short video summarizing the mobile app version of the site,
which includes their “beautifully reimagined Sorting Ceremony”; I have included here some of
the still screenshots that accompany this video in Google Play (Figures 1, 2, and 3).
162
The
results of these individuation procedures are manifested in one’s profile page on the website
(sometimes called the “Wizarding Passport”), selections of which are also shown below (Figures
4, 5, and 6).
163
There are arguably now 5 such individuation mechanisms that are part of the
Wizarding World: the Sorting Ceremony, the “wand ceremony,” the “Patronus experience,” the
“Favourites” segment of the profile, and the selection of a “Hogwarts pet.”
Of these, the Sorting Ceremony is emphasized most heavily as an enticement—at the top
of the main page of the wizardingworld.com website (as it exists at the time of this writing), in
the preview content for the app on Google Play, in the hashtags used on the YouTube video
introducing the app, and as the first listed benefit of the joining the Harry Potter Fan Club at the
free level, for example.
164
Notably, a version of this Sorting appears in the site’s introductory
video (so it seems to have been present at least as far back as 2012), and the site suggested in
2019, at its transition to WizardingWorld.com, that it has been central to the Pottermore
experience: “Please do not worry,” it begins the section of the article dedicated to “A reimagined
sorting ceremony.”
165
It assures the reader, “We’re not going to prise your beloved Hogwarts
houses away from you!” and confirms that, while it will have “a beautiful new design,” this will
be only a metaphorical coat of paint on the experience. The Sorting Ceremony replicates one of
the key moments in a Hogwarts student’s life, as captured in the books and films: the
determination, made by a magical, talking hat, of their inner character and, thus, which of the
four Hogwarts houses they should become part of. Those whose key characteristic is bravery, for
47
example, are placed in Gryffindor, while those who are more intellectual in nature would be
sorted into Ravenclaw.
There is an understandable appeal in offering this initiation to audience members who
wish to feel that they, too, are a part of the wizarding world; hence, in lieu of a magical hat, the
Wizarding World has included a more interactive process by which site and app users can be
assessed, validated, and sorted. The previously cited video and screenshots offer a glimpse of
this ceremony, with some of the questions that ostensibly help the Sorting Hat make its
determination about which house a given person belongs in—choosing between “Dusk” and
“Dawn,” selecting from what appear to be seven different magical creatures such as “Ghosts”
and “Vampires,” and indicating a preference for “the wide, sunny, grassy lane” or “the narrow,
dark, lantern-lit alley.” The “extra-special interactive” version in the mobile app, “which uses
AR technology,” offers an additional layer of worldblending, in this case quite literally
overlaying elements of the storyworld atop the user’s lived reality by making it appear (using
their device’s camera) as though the Sorting Hat itself is in fact sitting on top of their head.
166

After all questions have been answered, the Sorting Hat (or, more generally, the Wizarding
World) makes its determination: You are, inarguably and nonnegotiably, a Gryffindor,
Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, or Slytherin. Again, the app’s AR offers an opportunity to celebrate this
information with a photo of the user surrounded by the color, name, and iconography of their
house. Importantly, once a particular user account has completed the Sorting Ceremony, wand
ceremony, or Patronus experience, it is not possible to repeat them or try again. The word of the
Wizarding World is law, and all decisions are final.
This is not to say, however, that the Wizarding World has removed all agency from the
process. From a rhetorical standpoint, the Wizarding World Sorting Ceremony is even more
48
intriguing than the fictional version Rowling initially depicted, for it combines an active and in
fact interactive process of Burkean identification with his mystification. To borrow language
from O’Leary, in his treatment of Hans Blumenberg’s writing on the production and cultural
effect of myth, the Wizarding World’s determination is the product of “inspired oracular
discourse” from the Hat.
167
Users are not free to determine for themselves which house they feel
best suited for; still, the Hat’s proclamation is only made based on the input of users’ selections.
Canonically, the Sorting Hat seems to admit substantially less direct involvement on the part of a
Hogwarts student, and there is a pervasive sense of “oracular and authoritative” processes
determining much within the wizarding world, beyond the limits of human influence.
168

(Consider, for example, the rule that is reiterated on the current front page of the Wizarding
World site, as it introduces its “Wand Ceremony”: “The wand chooses the wizard!”) One might
be inclined to categorize this magic much as Burke does—as mystification, or the ways in which
meaning (and in some cases, mechanisms of power, control, or social ordering) is obscured.
169

Yet paired with the question-and-answer process of the Wizarding World Sorting Ceremony, this
mystification is tempered with a far more active process of identification, of a user recognizing
certain symbols or scenarios as appealing to them and reflective of their inner nature. Their
selections are then, of course, subject to a hidden algorithmic process—the technological
equivalent of divine wisdom. These dual processes, collaboration and proclamation, in a sense
offers a middle ground capturing advantages of both: a sense of audience agency and presumably
accurate mapping of one’s assigned identity to their preexisting sense of self, yet also the
affirmation, authority, and magic that goes along with myth (as per O’Leary and Blumenberg) as
well as mystification (as per Burke).
49
Mystification is a complex term, related inextricably to identification for Burke. Simply,
the nature of rhetoric and persuasion is to bridge two distinct entities through some common
bond, or identification. More specifically, identification can be thought of as a sort of matching,
whether in linking abstract concepts to particular symbols or creating a bond between two
entities when one recognizes a shared goal, sentiment, or value in that which is communicated by
another. Of course, such matching is never absolute, the alignment never total. For Burke (RoM),
then, there is a natural and intrinsic relationship between that process of identification and some
residual sense of mystification (whether in the form of “strangeness,” “mystique,” or, more
worryingly, “language . . . used to deceive”).
170
He describes communication as a form of
courtship that is inherently imperfect in its translation from the abstract to the concrete, but also
as it moves from one being to another, necessarily dissimilar being (or between different classes
of beings). Whether intentional or not, these translations “are concealments” (inasmuch as they
can never perfectly represent some unspoken idea or sentiment) yet also “enigmas of a revealing
sort” (inasmuch as, once given form, any particular symbol tends to connote a range of others
that can ultimately add meaning).
171

Two other related characteristics are relevant to our discussion. First, such identification
(and its resulting mystification) is the process by which we move away from a preverbal
“infancy” in which ideas exist in a pure state that, for Burke, we can intuit yet not perfectly pin
down with language or other symbols; thus the act of “expression, as persuasion, seeks to escape
from infancy by breaking down the oneness of an intuition into several terms, or voices.”
172
As
intimated above, of course, this process is by its nature imperfect, with “a convergence of
unexpressed elements” lurking just beyond whatever was in fact produced. It is this imperfect
translation that, Burke claims, creates “mystery”—it is the knowledge that there is more we do
50
not know, more to the story than what we’ve been told or can ourselves say. This sense of
mystery and mystification, then, is pervasive throughout the human condition, not only bound up
in issues of Marxist class relations but equally in the thrilling intrigue of courtship. However,
Burke also refers quite literally to “magic” as a cultural phenomenon and a manifestation of such
mystification, specifically citing its function “as a persuasion that promotes cooperation in
primitive tribes.” This understanding of mystification both as a progression out of infancy and as
the mechanism that produces a cultural sense of magic make it even more fitting for our analysis,
given our focus on individuation in magical terms.
To concretize Burke’s high-level philosophical arguments, I suggest we consider the
hidden process by which the Sorting Hat and the Wizarding World absorb a user’s preferences
and transmute them into Hogwarts house membership as a strategic act of mystification. Thus,
the knowledge, criteria, and formula that make up the inner workings of the digital Sorting Hat
are obscured from the user in the service of creating an “enigma,” to borrow Burke’s word (p.
174), that, in theory, audiences will happily accept.
173
Of course, this mystification may not have
the same political implications of Marxist class divisions, yet it still represents and reifies a
distinct barrier between two classes of communicators—the worldbuilders and its visitors, or the
creators and the fans. In the best-case scenario, this functions more like Burke’s courtship, where
the unknown qualities of the symbolism (how exactly the Sorting Hat arrives at its decision)
create a kind of intrigue, along with the awe-inspiring magic that lends itself to Burke’s tribal
cooperation—not to mention EA’s “Universe Worthy of Devotion.” All this occurs as a way to
offer a label that makes sense of and puts boundaries around the ineffable “who am I” of an
audience member’s metaphorical infancy; as Burke says, “it defines by partisanship, by de-
termination.”
174
In short, then, the concepts affiliated with Burkean identification—both
51
mystification and the infancy that precedes it—add further detail to our understanding of how
exactly the Wizarding World attempts to shape a sense of self for each of its fans, in so doing
linking them more tightly to the storyworld while also fostering some sense of personal
enlightenment.
What, then, are the effects of this newly defined sense of self? Beyond any (speculated)
psychological ramifications, the identification of one’s Hogwarts house does spill out into the
rest of their experience with the Harry Potter storyworld in some more visible ways. For one
thing, users are identified by their house, along with their name, in the Harry Potter Fan Club,
meaning that whatever image or sentiment they are sharing is (in a sense, literally) colored by the
indicator that, beyond simply being “Angela” or “Terry,” they are “Angela, Gryffindor” and
“Terry, Hufflepuff.”
175
When visiting Universal Studios Hollywood’s Wizarding World of Harry
Potter, a performer might ask if any of the audience members are from a given house, prompting
an ad hoc community creation as, from amongst a group of strangers, others cheer to indicate
their shared membership and, thus, shared identity. And in the Harry Potter: Wizards Unite
mobile game, users are asked to indicate their house affiliation. This repeated invocation of
identity is, in short, part of a transmedia substrate linking the storyworld’s experiences.
Far and away the most widespread and visible result of learning one’s house membership,
however, is in the form of newly relevant merchandise opportunities. Audience members are
encouraged, at every turn, to demonstrate “#HousePride” with relevant commodities.
176
This is
true at the Wizarding World’s brick and mortar outposts, of course, such as at Universal Studios
Hollywood’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter, or the site of the Harry Potter and the Cursed
Child play, where visitors can select house-specific versions of the various items for sale. The
site’s offerings and rhetoric operate accordingly. The site’s new Pin Seeking section, for
52
example, highlights sets of pins for each house, representing the particular attributes, characters,
or items most indicative of each. The site further announces brand partnerships with companies
like K-Swiss and Build-A-Bear, ensuring that everything from a fan’s tennis shoes to their teddy
bears will correspond to their house identity. Subtle encouragement on the site not only suggests
that there is fannish pleasure (along with pride) in representing one’s house (“We love flaunting
our Hogwarts house in all sorts of ways,” on the article discussing house-aligned teddy bears),
but also reminds visitors that such a move helps tell the rest of the world exactly what kind of a
person they are (“Different houses mean different personalities,” before introducing the variety
of shoe patterns that, it is implied, might map onto the nuances of one’s personality more
effectively than a generic style could).
177

Beyond the personal satisfaction of finding “a shoe sole-mate,” then, there are social
functions to such trappings, too, in positioning oneself as like one group and unlike others.
178

Both in canon and occasionally throughout the audience experience, there is some degree of
competition between the houses (in world, the site reminds us, “there’s one competition at
Hogwarts that really gets the house spirit going, and that’s the Quidditch House Cup,” and
Universal’s Wizarding World shows the accumulation of each house’s points in striking physical
form; out of world, the Wizarding World app shows poll results according to how the different
houses have responded).
179
Of course, as the Wizarding World draws boundaries around these
subcommunities, it is also unifying (we might say “communifying”) for those within each house.
This sense of community—or, more accurately, communities—was more apparent, and
encouraged, in at least one early incarnation of Pottermore, which alludes to a message board
feature where users could post that was specific to each “house common room” on the site; there
is also reference to “House Points” that were once part of the site.
180

53
Even as these opportunities for house community-building on the site itself have arguably
waned, there nonetheless appears to be value, even if manufactured through commodities, in
closely identifying with and representing oneself in terms of a house-specific subcommunity.
Particularly in the case of apparel meant to refer to each house’s Quidditch team, there is an
undeniable parallel with the tendency of fans to affiliate themselves with a favorite sports team—
a basketball fan would be unlikely to sport a generic “NBA” jersey, but would gladly emulate
their favorite player, or sport the colors and designs of their favorite team.
181
Yet I would argue
that the consumerist drive in the case of house merchandise may be even stronger than the pull
towards products emblazoned with the logo of a favorite sports team; in the case of a Hogwarts
house, one’s affiliation makes a clear statement about one’s self and values. As the site reminds
us, house membership is equated to and contingent upon the possession of specific personality
traits: If you are a Gryffindor, it follows that “you’re a brave Gryffindor,” just as being a
Slytherin means you are in fact “an ambitious Slytherin.”
182
In this way, “house pride” means far
more than “team pride” or even “school spirit.” Rather than indicating the things you enjoy or
how you spend your time, your Hufflepuff sneakers make a far more personal statement about
who you are.
While the social functions, merchandise options, and connections across different parts of
the franchise are certainly most pronounced when it comes to house affiliation, the additional
layers of individuation offered by the Wizarding World only strengthen its identity-building
potential, as it sculpts finer and finer details into the representation of self that the Wizarding
World presents to each site user. As we move beyond the mere four possible categorizations of
house membership, the possible combinations of identities multiply, and the rarity of any one
user’s particular amalgam increases accordingly. Even just participating in the wand ceremony
54
introduces four new variables—wand wood, core, length, and flexibility—and based on a
cursory review of Rowling’s article on the subject, the first alone seems to have 38 options.
183
(A
definitive and upfront statement about the site’s calculations, however, would threaten its
mystification.) A visitor who further goes on to learn their Patronus would have an even finer-
grained understanding of who they are; although the selection of a Hogwarts pet seems to be
available only to users of the mobile app, it represents yet another layer.
Both within the main canonical texts and as part of the ancillary Wizarding World
material, there exists fairly extensive assessment of and speculation on what certain in-world
identifications reveal or even presage about an individual. The variable of wand woods gives an
excellent example of this, with Rowling herself penning an extensive treatise on the subject—
presented, however, as though it was written by Garrick Ollivander, the main wandmaker
character in the series.
184
Rowling, via Ollivander, provides paragraph-length descriptions of the
aforementioned 38 types of wood used in making wands. Sprinkled throughout are observations
related to the plant of origin and various historically held beliefs about certain woods (including
several anecdotes related to Ollivander’s own ancestors). Yet the writeup also includes detailed
suggestions as to the personality type best suited to each wood (from those “of clear moral
vision” to those exhibiting “(usually unwarranted) insecurity”), along with here and there
observations about the wand user’s likely fate (longevity for bearers of pine wands, for example,
versus “nobility” leading to an equally noble demise, historically true for those using cypress
though less applicable in the modern era). There are also recommendations for how to extract the
best performance from one’s wand; the entry for sycamore, for example, has a particularly
amusing suggestion that if one spends too much time focused on “mundane activities” rather
than consistently seeking out “new experience,” they may become “disconcerted to find their
55
trusty wand bursting into flame in their hand as they ask it, one more time, to fetch their
slippers.” I cannot speak to how directly these suggestions might respond to certain tendencies
suggested by one’s wand ceremony answers—in other words, if there is any degree to which
Rowling and the Wizarding World intend for these summaries to have actual value as
psychological counsel. Nonetheless, it remains true that a site user would reasonably be inclined
to treat it as such, based on both in-world and out-of-world truths that the wand one winds up
with is directly reflective of one’s inner character (whether that has been assessed by a
wandmaker and, of course, the wand itself, or by the website).
The example of wand interpretation is additionally helpful because it allows us to
contrast canonical meanings with insights that are more community-focused in nature, thanks to
a different article that merges Rowling’s wandlore with Wizarding World user data. For
example, although the page—clearly marked as “Written by The Wizarding World Team,” and
thus speaking outside of Rowling’s voice—offers a bullet-pointed version of Rowling’s
paragraph about sycamore wands, it also tells us that it is the “most popular,” based on its data,
“from those who have discovered their wands through WizardingWorld.com (and previously on
Pottermore).”
185
The page includes more detailed rankings of which wand woods and wood–core
combinations are seen most frequently among Wizarding World users, all of which perform an
interesting dual function in terms of intracommunity relationships: on the one hand, finding
one’s own wand type among those that are seen most frequently creates a bond of commonality
between fans; on the other, there is the opportunity to read a certain specialness into membership
amongst the “rarest” types. This page makes another rhetorical move in linking wand cores to
characters in canon, and speaking autoethnographically, there is an undeniable emotional swell
to having not only “the rarest core type of our Wizarding World fans, and in the wizarding world
56
itself” (a telling grammatical distinction), but also that which is shared by Harry and Lord
Voldemort. The personal relevance of the storyworld crops up again and again, through the
subtle compliments (who wouldn’t feel pride at learning they are among those “who have a
vision beyond the ordinary” and “personalities with hidden depths”?) and advice (to, for
example, not exhibit “laziness,” nor be “narrow-minded and intolerant”) that are presented as
specifically and meaningfully directed towards each individual reader.
The Wizarding World’s interaction with the audience ego takes a more interesting turn in
the case of the Patronus experience, and the accompanying piece from Rowling that helps shed
light on the assignments.
186
To start with, the fact that each user of the Wizarding World is given
a Patronus automatically elevates them to a status of rarity and power within the storyworld,
according to Rowling, since “the majority of witches and wizards are unable to produce
Patronuses and to do so is generally considered a mark of superior magical ability.” She further
aligns the site’s users with other canonically important figures, noting “those able to produce
corporeal Patronuses were often elected to high office within the Wizengamot and Ministry of
Magic.” (In what we might read as a telling nod to Rowling’s own experience with mental
health, she additionally suggests “some witches and wizards may be unable to produce a
Patronus at all until they have undergone some kind of psychic shock,” subtly validating those
who may feel their personal journeys have been particularly challenging.)
Yet beyond this exceptionalizing framing, Rowling and the Wizarding World also
champion the mundane through their Patronus rhetoric, tempering audience expectations and
explaining how what might be seen as a disappointment is, in fact, an attribute. One might
reasonably assume that a user would naturally wish to have a particularly impressive, rare, or
amazing Patronus, perhaps one of those “magical creatures such as dragons, Thestrals and
57
phoenixes,” or at the very least “a Patronus that takes the form of their favorite animal.” Yet
Rowling is quick to clarify that, “while a rare and magical Patronus undoubtedly reflects an
unusual personality, it does not follow that it is more powerful, or will enjoy greater success at
defending its caster.” She subtly redirects the impulse towards specialness by severing the
natural link between rare and impressive specimens and those that are valuable and powerful:
“Never forget, though, that one of the most famous Patronuses of all time was a lowly mouse,
which belonged to a legendary young wizard called Illyius, who used it to hold off an attack
from an army of Dementors single-handedly.” As for a user who might not have been assigned a
favorite (or even familiar) animal as a Patronus, Rowling even warns, in a quote from a magical
scholar character, that having one’s preferred animal as a Patronus is in fact “an indicator of
obsession or eccentricity” and represents a distinct shortcoming.
Speaking for myself, Rowling’s writings assuage my disappointment in being told my
Patronus is a “brown hare,” but I find it more important to recognize that Rowling is responsible
for that disappointment to begin with.
187
The website could just as easily have populated its pool
of potential Patronuses with only the most desirable options, including those “magical creatures”
she cites or at least ones that seem slightly more formidable than a lesser-known bunny rabbit.
However, just as it is a strategic choice to uplift the mundane identity, it is a strategic choice to
assign a mundane identity in the first place. From a storyworld perspective, it may be that
assigning something comparatively unimpressive to someone already identified as among the
most impressive creates a valuable sense of balance or even approachability. Yet I also suspect
that such a move may have been designed to empower those who may feel that their actual lot in
life, the mundane identity assigned to them by fate, is similarly unimpressive. By touting the
58
value of “a lowly mouse,” Rowling is encouraging her audience to be proud of their own
mousehood, should they see themselves in that way.
The Wizarding World includes a noteworthy departure from its primary method of
identification with its “Favourites” section. This portion of the website profile is the only one
that is fully and transparently self-selected. Such an opening for less-constrained audience
agency illustrates an underlying dilemma for these official caretakers of the storyworld. For
certain fans, such as those described by Bird and discussed in our concluding chapter, such a
move does not go nearly far enough in honoring audiences’ abilities to claim their own
affiliations and mark their own identities, most notably in terms of preexisting house
memberships.
188
Yet, to draw on the rhetorical language we have been using, such a
straightforward dialogue also loses the coy magic that arises, for Burke, from some degree of
hierarchy and a related mystification. Adopting a different metaphor, and invoking the well-
known scene from The Wizard of Oz, it feels a bit like pulling the curtain back and revealing the
comparatively unimpressive non-wizard working the controls. This section is perhaps best
understood, and evaluated, as a compromise: abandoning the oracular, authoritative, and
mystified alchemical process described above in favor of giving fans the microphone, allowing
them full control over the levers and the resultant display. While it may still be a case of too little
too late for fans already bruised from being corralled into an unfamiliar and unwanted house, it
nonetheless represents an interesting opportunity for site visitors, already assisted in their
individuation, to now speak for themselves more directly. A brief examination of Figure 7
reveals several telling choices.
To begin with, it is this section of the site that is most explicitly intended to codify and
represent the user’s identity for the sake of others: The button leading to the Favourites selection
59
screen calls on users not simply to “Choose,” but to “Choose & Share,” and the sample images
scattered around it suggest that the outcome of this selection process will be a conveniently
mobile-screen-sized image, intended for social media or messaging (a goal that is reiterated on
clicking the button, with text clarifying, “you can only have three [Favourites] to share at the
end”). Assuming users do choose to share and, naturally, compare their resulting graphic with
others, there again are opportunities for complementary intracommunity social forces of bonding
over shared items and distinguishing oneself with those that are different, especially ones that
may be less common or particularly telling in terms of their identity connotations (for if one
chooses to associate oneself with Lord Voldemort, it sends a very different message than
aligning oneself with Harry or one of his friends). It is also worth noting that, despite allowing
for three selections, the final result will list four: The user’s house assignment, with its associated
color and symbology, will make up the background and first item listed. Additionally, the
language used to introduce the user’s selections is telling—not “I like,” “My favourites are,” or
“I’m a fan of,” but the simple and bold proclamation that “I am.”
189
This choice is in fact
grammatically awkward in the sense that it leads to constructions like “I am Gryffindor Harry
Accio & Chocolate frogs” (though the lack of commas can be forgiven due to the layout). Why,
then, would such a seemingly high-profile and carefully designed arm of the powerhouse Harry
Potter franchise opt for “I am . . . Chocolate frogs” if not to subtly reinforce extreme
identification between the user’s self (“I am”) and some specific part(s) of the storyworld
(“Gryffindor” and “Harry,” which we might expect, yet also “Accio,” a spell to call some object
towards the caster, and “Chocolate frogs,” a type of animated wizarding world treat). Finally, the
extensive options available for a user to choose from represent a range of memorial depth, a
variable that will become increasingly important as our analysis continues. For now, we can
60
simply note that choosing more obscure Favourites such as “Cuthbert Binns” and “Snallygaster”
offers users the chance to distinguish themselves in a different way, showcasing the extent of
their wizarding world knowledge.
At this point, it is relevant to return to some of the more practical issues motivating these
strategic choices—in short, the value the Wizarding World derives in exchange for offering these
resources to its audience. Despite the far-ranging use of fans’ house differentiation as grounds
for merchandise opportunities, there are few equivalents in terms of wands or Patronuses. In fact,
the physical wands available on the online store do not even match the types listed on the site;
neither do those at Universal Studios Hollywood (with far fewer options, including one that isn’t
in Rowling’s article, and at least in the case of the hawthorn wand, notably divergent
descriptions).
190
It seems likely that, given the sheer number of wand types available, this degree
of customized merchandising simply isn’t worthwhile. Nonetheless, the exercise of indicating
one’s preferences is certainly not without value for the franchise (and, more generally, the
various Warner-affiliated entities that would have access to that information). In fact, that
granularity of user data might be considered invaluable in terms of shaping future creative,
logistical, and product-related decisions. Substantial user interest in, say, Sirius Black over
Hagrid might inform which character-centric ride is included at the Universal Studios theme
parks, just as it might motivate increased production of Sirius Black costumes and figurines or
guide Rowling’s decisions about where to focus the next prequel. It is a sobering reminder that,
in exchange for whatever powerful personal and social benefits audiences may derive from
apparently magical offerings like the Wizarding Passport, there is often a more disconcerting
form of mystification that may obscure the advantages being gained by those involved with the
franchise.
61
To summarize, the Wizarding World’s rhetorical resources offer a powerful opportunity
for audience individuation through processes of mutual identification (both active selection on
the part of the user and what we have described as oracular Burkean mystification on the part of
the storyworld), which helps to recognize, explain, and affirm each user at a personal level while
also inviting them into and connecting them more tightly to the storyworld. Even the language
that appears in the footer of the Wizarding World’s pages evokes this sense of worldblending,
bridging one’s real-world and storyworld selves: “Join the Fan Club and bring your traits with
you,” it encourages, as though the unique contours of one’s personality are welcome in and even
prized by this community.
191
Yet a perhaps-playful reading of other word choices on the site
reminds us that, beyond simple validation, this process of individuation does promise something
along the lines of personal revelation, insight, or even evolution—the button on the home page
leading one to the Fan Club and its Sorting Ceremony beckons users with “Get Sorted Now,”
and considering the colloquial British use of “getting sorted” to mean figuring things out and
arranging one’s plans, the double meaning of “getting oneself s/Sorted” is particularly evocative.
Importantly, the identification that takes place on the Wizarding World site does have the
capacity to organize subcommunities even as it aids individuation, drawing an array of
overlapping boundaries that can be either quite large, as in the case of house assignment, or quite
small, as when it brings together users of a particularly rare wand. Over time, it seems the site
and its app have increased the opportunities for fans to individuate (adding, for example, the
ability to have a certain Hogwarts pet) while minimizing its promotion of subcommunities (such
as the aforementioned “house common room”). Yet this does not mean that the Wizarding
World’s overall community has lain fallow, with emphasis on the individual to the exclusion of
62
what is shared. Indeed, the celebration and nurturing of consubstantial, or communal, memory
may in fact make up the bulk of the site, and it is to these strategies we turn our attention next.

Communal Memory

As a fandom arises around a given cultural text, particularly a fictional storyworld, the
practices and dynamics of audiences can be helpfully characterized by the different ways in
which they frequently rely on, refer to, and build up communal memory. To be clear, as an
official mouthpiece of canon, a site like the Wizarding World may not recognize or facilitate all
the myriad ways fans might relate to (and challenge, and take ownership of) canon.
192
But in
considering the site as a project of transmedia rhetoric, carefully designed to cultivate specific
relationships to its franchise, we can nonetheless begin to map a number of strands connecting
the various texts of the Wizarding World. This larger mesh of culture and meaning, culled from
canon and carried through various texts, is another important part of the transmedia substrate. It
is a foundational continuity that creates both synergy and immersion as audiences move through
the storyworld.
Thus, communal memory is the ground out of which meaning can emerge, including the
identification described above—being a Slytherin, for example, is far less meaningful without
the shared memories of Slytherin characters like Draco Malfoy and everything they stood for
throughout the series. In this regard, the Wizarding World leans heavily on communal memory
for its relevance at the most basic level. Beyond this, though, communal memory offers the raw
material for bonding, for deliberation and analysis, for competition and the establishment of
social standing.
193
Moreover, as visitors are encouraged to sift through their own memories and
63
find some to be vague and incomplete, others wondrous and treasured, there is a continual pull
back to the storyworld, to the audience community and the source material itself—leading us
eventually to our last dynamic, motivation for traversal.
It is unsurprising, then, that the Wizarding World treats communal memory as its stock in
trade. Although an overview of the “Features” section indicates that the site does devote some of
its resources to advertising (such as articles on the Wizarding World LEGO sets), craft and
project ideas (“Learn how to make a cardboard Basilisk”), and some “behind-the-scenes”
explanations, it seems the bulk of these Features are closer to what Freeman distinguishes as
“into-the-scenes” offerings drawing readers back into favorite moments from canonical texts—
or, for our purposes, it may be less “into-the-scenes” and perhaps more “back-in-the-seats.” I
suggest that there are three particularly noteworthy functions this memory-oriented content
performs for the Wizarding World and its audience: reminiscing and opining, testing and
comparing, and historical education.
Much as members of some club, class, or other organization would naturally find
pleasure in swapping stories about the so-called “good old days,” a sizeable amount of the
Wizarding World’s articles are devoted to these sorts of reminiscences. Typically, they seem to
be grouped around some sort of lightweight, subjective assessment or categorization: “The
funniest ten moments of Quidditch commentary” and “The worst Hogwarts punishments:
ranked” are two examples from amidst the many articles included as Features on the site—a
rough estimate as of this writing suggests nearly 900. On occasion, these assessments are
presented more forcefully, taking the shape of arguments, as in the series of 17 articles “In
defence of” some character (or, in one case, a subject taught at Hogwarts—“Divination”) that the
64
Wizarding World community might be expected to dislike, based on their roles in canonical
texts.
These articles provide community-building value regardless of whether a given reader
agrees or disagrees with the assessments presented—and indeed, the mixture of articles
presuming a common sentiment (“The Harry Potter parties we ALL wanted to go to”), predicting
dissent (“In defence of”), or even speaking directly to a subset of the readership (“Harry Potter
moments that mean even more when you become a parent”) lay the groundwork for the shifting
identifications that vivify a community. As has been outlined previously, the “de-termination” of
Burkean identification creates boundaries that, with a single stroke, strengthen bonds of those
who are united on one side even as it creates division from those who are not. To a degree,
individuation also plays a role here, as the subtle (or not-so-subtle) rhetorical presumption of
agreement challenges visitors to compare each assessment against their own memories and
opinions. Should one decide that, in fact, their version of “The worst Hogwarts punishments:
ranked” differs from that on the site, the Wizarding World’s larger goals of encouraging
community discussion and involvement (and a revisitation of canon) have still been met, the
visitor reifying their own individuation in the process.
A striking amount of articles do more than simply weigh in on what was, however;
instead, they venture into the more imaginative space of what might have been. As a whole,
these musings and daydreams lend themselves to an amusing-but-apt categorization: subjunctive
subjectivity. In linguistic terms, the subjunctive mood (little used in English outside of phrases
like, “I wish I were”) lends itself to hypotheticals and wishes—the subjectivity arises from the
personal opinions that shape these “what ifs,” such as “Aurors we wish we could sit down and
have a Butterbeer with.” In truth, the presumption of commonality does appear with these
65
subjunctive articles, too: “Spells all Muggles wish existed in real life,” for example, though I
would suggest that this presumption does not in fact undermine the inherent subjectivity of the
opinions presented. Similarly, by their nature, the five articles including the phrase “what if” are
likely to provide educated guesses that are, nonetheless, subjective in nature when compared to
the authoritative, ostensibly objective truths of the Rowling articles. Other linguistic clues to this
subjunctive mood include “could” (appearing around a dozen times) and “wish” (18, as of this
writing). It may be that, numerically speaking, these flights of fancy are comparatively rare
among Features, but nonetheless their presence is telling, as they reflect a typically unauthorized
tendency of fan communities to explore the possibilities of disrupting canon, bending the rules,
and playing out alternatives, here placed in what we are reminded at the bottom of every page is
an “official” setting. Secondly, these subjunctive exercises take on particular relevance for our
purposes when they venture more aggressively into worldblending, or creating bridges between
the audience’s fictional and phenomenological realities. This seems to largely reflect audience
members’ desire to enter the storyworld themselves (as when they “wish we could sit down and
have a Butterbeer with” certain characters), though elsewhere we see a consideration of what
would happen if the characters entered the audience’s lived reality (“What jobs would Harry
Potter characters have in the real world?”). To me, one of the more intriguing cases of
worldblending appears in the series of “Why you should fall in love with a
(Ravenclaw/Gryffindor/Slytherin/Hufflepuff)” articles simply because it seems to, at least
playfully, move this worldblending out of the hypothetical realm and instead take seriously the
identification of house membership as an actual part of the nonfictive world.
The camaraderie of reminiscing and opining is replaced by a more competitive challenge
in the “Quizzes” section of the site, which—as one might imagine—creates an environment in
66
which visitors can test their knowledge of the storyworld. Although there are substantially fewer
Quizzes (what seemed to be approximately 122 at a recent count) than there are Features, the
Wizarding World has added new content to this section at a fairly brisk clip (given that there
were something like half that amount around nine months prior). Slipping into an
autoethnographic assessment once more, I can attest that these Quizzes provide a healthy
challenge that balances affirming the audience ego with inciting revisitation of canon via
reminders of all that has been forgotten (or missed). Even the “Easy” content demands not only
familiarity with the canon, but also attention to detail—such as whether “Professor
Dumbledore’s spectacles are rectangular.”
194

Interestingly enough, the Quizzes offer little in the way of comparing one’s results to
others. One might reasonably expect a simple link, or the usual array of “Share on...” social
media buttons, included on Feature pages, allowing users to more readily follow up on the
above-cited Quiz’s suggestion to “share the glory with your friends” (assuming, that is, that
one’s results are adequately glorious).
195
Similarly, one might reasonably expect some version of
what is shown in the mobile app, breaking down score results according to users’ Hogwarts
houses. Yet the website’s Quizzes are, in their design, a decidedly solitary experience, with no
sense of how one’s standings might position them amongst others in the Wizarding World. I
would suggest, then, that as a supplement to the Quizzes, the Wizarding World “Favourites”—
especially given the site’s far heavier emphasis on sharing here—may instead perform some of
this comparative and competitive function in terms of communal memory. Specifically, the sense
of community fostered by mutual recollection is activated by the selection of a familiar name
(“Harry” or “Hedwig,” for example), yet the selection of more obscure options (“Grawp” or the
67
aforementioned “Snallygaster”) throws down more of a fan gauntlet, challenging others to
remember while at the same time indicating the extensiveness of one’s own memories.
Balancing these more reflective behaviors of reminiscence and testing, the Wizarding
World also offers avenues for strengthening one’s grasp of these communal memories,
reiterating and in some cases introducing new nuances of in-world history. At times, these appear
to be more straightforward reviews of canon, allowing visitors to extract additional value from
the texts that may have been overlooked, underappreciated, or simply faded from memory, as the
article title “Everything you may have forgotten from the Deathly Hallows epilogue” suggests.
The titles of other articles, with less in the way of the explicit assessment or evaluative language
noted earlier, instead offer collections of canonical moments, instances related by some theme
(the clearest example being the article covering “5 times eggs were significant in Harry Potter”),
though even these summaries tend to include some degree of subjectivity (“All the times Molly
Weasley was scarier than a Norwegian Ridgeback,” comparing a main character’s mother to a
type of dragon).
The issue of historical education on the Wizarding World site is not, however, as clear-
cut as one might imagine. In part, this seems to be a natural result of the site’s wide-ranging
scope, promising essentially something for everyone at the top of the Features page: It is
positioned as being “for beginners, for novices, for Harry Potter superfans going 20 years-
strong.” As such, it is saddled with somewhat contradictory requirements. “For beginners” and
“for novices” (the distinction between which is unclear), the site must be approachable, offering
rudimentary information and clear signposts for finding out more. At the same time, it must also
be appealing to those who have greater familiarity with the canon—a group that, as we will see
play out in our examination of Universal’s Wizarding World theme park, may be better served
68
by subtle and nonchalant references to the storyworld that all at once presume, test, respect, and
reward that familiarity. These members of the audience (regardless of whether they would think
of themselves as “Harry Potter superfans”) are likely to also be eager for, or at the very least
more receptive to, additional details or new insights about the storyworld. Yet those same details
and insights may well be at best irrelevant or at worst confusing to the Wizarding World’s other
audiences. The article on “5 friendship lessons we learned from Dobby the house-elf” includes
specific examples of how challenging it is to balance the needs and desires of these audiences:
196

by speaking to those who have completed the series, the article spoils a fairly sizeable plot twist
as well as one particularly heartbreaking event, which would be understandably frustrating for
those “beginners” and “novices” who hadn’t yet come across these moments. However, these
moves pay off for those who can feel a sense of community in phrases like “we all know that . . .
” and who may well up with tears at the reminder of that one particular tragedy—just before the
article concludes with “Now if you’ll excuse us, we’re off to have a little cry.”
197
This is,
unquestionably, a bonding experience (heightened by emotion) of the sort that is valuable in
perpetuating a fandom or, more generally, an audience community, even, it seems, at the risk of
alienating the newcomers who grow that community.
This illustration of audience heterogeneity (and the competing needs of various subsets)
helps us appreciate, then, the artful way in which the first article—that is to say, what seems to
be the oldest—on the site’s current Features page attempts to balance canonical introduction and
summary with enticements for longtime fans.
198
The article, “The 6 best-loved ghosts (and one
poltergeist) at Hogwarts,” was “originally published on Pottermore” and is dated August 22,
2015. As promised, it lists seven characters from the Harry Potter canon, some of which are
likely to be better remembered than others, though all may be at least somewhat familiar. For
69
each, the article provides a brief description, often situating the character in terms of specific
canonical events: We are told of Helena Ravenclaw that, “charmed but unaware of his intentions,
she helped Tom Riddle find the diadem (it became one of his Horcruxes). She regretted that
later, and helped Harry in his quest to find and destroy it.” Nearly all of the characters or
noteworthy objects mentioned in these descriptions link to relevant Wizarding World articles—
24 links in total throughout the page—and even those characters one would expect familiarity
with, such as Harry Potter, are introduced with their full name and accompanying link.
“Hogwarts” is similarly linked, as the second word of the article, and Helena Ravenclaw’s
summary includes links for “Ravenclaw ghost,” “Diadem,” “Rowena Ravenclaw,” “Tom
Riddle,” and “Horcruxes” (“Harry” and “Hogwarts” having been taken care of with previous
links). Finally, each summary includes an addendum specifying the historical cause of death that
led to each becoming a ghost (or poltergeist)—the section on “The Fat Friar,” for example,
includes “How he died: Execution, at the hands of his fellow churchman, who apparently didn’t
appreciate him using magic to cure the pox.” In this particular article, no specific books are
named, although in-world touchpoints like “the Battle of Hogwarts” and “the Chamber of
Secrets” subtly orient more familiar readers; however, the voice is not fully in-world, given that
“J.K. Rowling herself” is mentioned. Finally, the section on Moaning Myrtle is punctuated with
a brief clip from one of the films that introduces the character.
These few selections illustrate the seamless and dextrous way Pottermore’s authors move
from addressing one group of readers to another, and performing multiple rhetorical functions—
or, more accurately, moved. This article is clearly a vestige of the site’s earlier incarnation, with
links meant to help situate unfamiliar visitors now broken. We will consider this evolution in
terms of the site’s expectations of its audience again in discussing the site’s motivation for
70
traversal, but for now, let us consider for a moment the way the article was clearly developed and
intended to function (and largely still does). It neatly collects and summarizes thematically
related information, a helpful introduction or refresher for newer fans with additional
information made available to buttress important references as needed, but placed in the form of
hyperlinks that do not disrupt the concision and fluidity of information for those who are not in
need of additional context.
199
Its inclusion of the film clip is illustrative, while offering fans who
have seen it before the opportunity to reminisce and, thanks to the images and text placed at the
conclusion of the video, directing both old and new fans to purchase (or rent, or stream) the
film(s) and their soundtrack(s). Yet the causes of death included for each character give me
pause as a reader fairly well-versed in the canon—is this information new? The site has already
established its status as an authorized source of “exclusive new writing from J.K. Rowling” as
cited previously, which tends to be identified as such (either in the separate “J.K. Rowling
Archive” section of the site or trumpeted specifically within the article). It is precisely this
ambiguity that I find rhetorically powerful, raising the possibility that this is, in fact, a
transmedia extension or, at the very least, a part of the canon that the reader has simply forgotten
and is thus available for (re)discovery. Without actual citations of where in the source material
these events took place, the website sets up a coy sort of challenge to one’s fan knowledge; it is,
in its way, a different form of mystification that blurs the boundaries between a review of canon
and an expansion of it. Finally, the voice of this particular article makes no distinction between
events that played out in canon (more of the “remember when this happened” type of approach
seen elsewhere) and events that preceded it, presenting all with a generally equal sense and
language of “history.” This sort of agnostic, detached, encyclopedia-entry approach serves to
71
level the playing field of communal memory, speaking in a singular voice to the uninitiated as
well as the initiated with, it seems, something to teach them both.
Particularly in terms of its Features, the Wizarding World site is part scrapbook, part op-
ed section, part encyclopedia, yet I would suggest another metaphor derived from the site itself:
it is a repository filled with “secret passageways and hiding places,” akin to the rabbit holes that
often characterize alternate-reality games and transmedia franchises but here making equal use of
(literal) links connecting one in-world idea to another, other “secret passageways” revealing new
parts of the storyworld known only to the select few who have found them, and “hiding places”
where one may unearth otherwise-forgotten treasures from the storehouses of canonical
memory.
200
The rhetorical celebration and reification of communal memory make sense,
particularly as the Wizarding World seeks to continually stoke the flames of what Freeman
considers “a franchise now in its twilight years.”
201
Yet the Wizarding World is not solely a
reflective enterprise—it is generative, as well, cultivating and feeding its audience with a stream
of new canonical content (perhaps seeking to challenge, or at least complicate, Freeman’s
assessment, showing that there is still much beauty to be found in crepuscular moments). In our
final section, we will look more closely at this generative capacity alongside the reflective one,
building on the ambiguities and mystifications already encountered by which the boundaries of
communal memory are blurred, tested, and stretched.

Motivation for Traversal

When emphasizing the Wizarding World’s aim in terms of “worldcultivating” rather than
purely “worldbuilding,” “worldblending,” or even “immersion”—other terms which are certainly
72
applicable—my intention was to capture the combination of nurturing what has already been
established while also encouraging its growth. In this, there is a sense of maturity that is past the
developmental stage implied by worldbuilding, a growth not quite addressed by worldblending,
and a sense of movement not fully indicated by immersion (at least not by the word’s immediate
connotations). From the perspective of creator and audience alike, it is a mixture of the reflective
and generative capacities we have already begun to identify, a tension between looking inward
and looking outward, revisiting and refining our relationships to what has come before while
curiously exploring what is to come next. In serving these dual purposes, the Wizarding World is
designed to motivate movement—both figurative traversing as well as the literal following of the
website’s links—through the past and the future of the franchise, guiding visitors step by step
from one fragment of storyworld history to the next. Some of these fragments will be familiar,
others new; indeed, the ambiguity and sense of potential that accompanies this intermingling of
old and new is part of its appeal. Whether the goal is to expand one’s memory and knowledge or
to discover new narrative seeds planted by Rowling, I contend that the engine that powers the
audience’s movement through the Wizarding World is the same: a formal motivation for
traversal that leads a user ever onward through the site and, thus, through the storyworld.
As a framework for our analysis, we can adapt a metaphor drawn from the Roman canons
of rhetoric, specifically in the discussion of memory found in the ancient text of Rhetorica ad
Herennium and helpfully summarized in a contemporary fashion by Frakt.
202
The metaphor is
that of a “memory palace,” and it suggests that, to effectively store and then retrieve materials in
one’s memory (such, for example, the various points one wishes to make in an oration), a
speaker can imagine a particularly evocative and symbolic scene attached to some particular
location (or “loci”). Importantly, if these locations lend themselves naturally to some sort of
73
ordering (as in the various rooms one would pass through in a palace or, more modestly, their
home), the speaker can likewise pass cleanly from one thought to the next in a predetermined
order. As Frakt details, this approach has been validated through scientific assessment and
profitably applied by “memory athletes” to perform impressive feats. Yet its intended goal of
memorization is not necessarily applicable in the case of storyworld audiences (nor particularly
plausible, given their inherently unbounded nature.
203
Instead, all I wish to borrow here is the
evocative treatment of the mind as a palace, with distinct memories housed in individual rooms
yet connected through doorways and corridors the mind continually moves through.
I suggest this metaphor not only because it has a particular appropriateness in the context
of the Universal Studios theme park discussed later, but because further consideration and
application of this imagery has revealed its remarkable value in delineating the various types of
“memory doors” found in the Wizarding World, as well as the ambiguity that surrounds each
door’s status—whether it is locked or merely closed, whether the visitor already possesses the
key, and how one might metaphorically pick the lock. Of course, just as everyone’s mind and
memory is unique, every visitor to the Wizarding World will have their own version of the
“memory palace” that may be populated with many of the same communal memories, but the
doors that may be open for one person may appear closed or locked to another who does not yet
have access to, or has simply forgotten, a particular part of the storyworld’s history. This, then, is
Burke’s consubstantiality as described in our first chapter: some mutual “ground” of information,
with the temptation of additional knowledge that might be added to this territory.
204
Examples
from the site help illustrate multiple different door states a visitor might encounter: open, closed,
and locked with several possibilities for how to gain access.
74
Much of the communal memory we have described falls under the category of open
doors—underexplained references or links that need not be followed for an audience member to
recognize and revisit the memory. “5 friendship lessons we learned from Dobby the house-elf”
offers an excellent starting point precisely because it helps us distinguish between the spoilers
discussed above and the doorways of connected memories.
205
By simply stating the details of the
in-world tragedy mentioned above, the site populated the article’s room with that memory,
among others. It presumed those gathered in the room had already seen the surprise and might
appreciate the chance to admire it again, perhaps even discuss it, but it need not be kept behind a
closed door any longer. In contrast, the article refers to a far less momentous event twice without
offering elaboration: It first makes mention of “the cake incedent [sic],” with an almost “wink-
wink-nudge-nudge” tone that establishes a bond between those who can interpret this clue. This,
then, would be a door that, for many site visitors, would be open, allowing them to pass through
and recollect the appropriate scene from canon—indeed, with a layer of Burkean mystification
rendering the mention just oblique, just coy enough to feel rewarding to those who can decipher
it. The second reference suggests a variation, perhaps a door with a peephole: “the
aforementioned cake-dropping.” Now, given this blurry glimpse of what the memory entails, a
reader might say, “Oh yes, I have been in this room before!” while turning the knob and entering.
Yet for others, the scene might be unfamiliar, the door remaining steadfastly closed.
In this extended metaphor, doors are generally opened through exposure to canon, but as
would be expected in a large transmedia franchise that contains overlaps and adaptations aplenty,
there are multiple ways to deal with these sorts of closed doors. These passageways to different
parts of in-world history are not particularly blocked off—they have been made public and are
part of canon—but a given audience member may have to do just a bit of work to gain access. In
75
some cases, that work may mean revisiting canon (or, as suggested above, merely a little jog to
one’s memory might be enough for a door’s latch to give). In other cases, it might mean simply
reading a summary, and it seems as though the site’s “Pottermore” incarnation readily integrated
precisely such opportunities. Thus, a reader of “Why you should fall in love with a Gryffindor”
(“Originally published on Pottermore”) who comes across the first sentence and finds themself
befuddled by the mention of some “Harry Potter” character could in theory follow the helpfully
included link to learn, ostensibly, enough about Harry Potter to understand.
206
(This door might
even be considered to have a fairly extensive plaque on the outside, given that the site clarifies
Harry’s additional monikers: “The Chosen One, aka The Boy Who Lived,” though it also adds
“and all that” as though expecting its readers are quite bored by now of having encountered that
information so many times already.) As indicated earlier, however, the Wizarding World’s
renovations seems to have jammed any number of door handles; clicking said link results only in
a very kind error page saying, “Oh dear. Are you lost?”
207
Other links on the same page
responded similarly, suggesting that perhaps in its transition to the Wizarding World, the
community has outgrown the need for such helpmates planted throughout its Features (yet not
quite gotten around to cleaning up the remnants of its youth, given that the article still appears to
have 37 of these links). Instead, the Wizarding World seems to have changed their approach to
how they assist visitors in making sense of unfamiliar references to canon. The site now offers a
separate “Starting Harry Potter hub” that “is here to guide you on your first journey,” with
articles such as “Harry Potter Who’s Who: Harry, Ron & Hermione.”
208
Regardless of the
particulars, however, the motivation for traversal still operates in much the same way: indicating
the presence of some doorway to an in-world memory that, if closed, calls on the visitor to find
some way of opening it. The difference lies in how (or how much) the site tries to help.
76
I wish to make a distinction here between the closed doors of the Wizarding World’s
memory palace and those that are more appropriately considered locked: doors that represent
some enticing, unexplored segment of the storyworld that has not previously been made
accessible in canon.
209
One particular Wizarding World example—a character named Silvanus
Kettleburn—illustrates beautifully the different forms and implications of such doors. Kettleburn
appears in several different places on the Wizarding World site, with varying degrees of
prominence and elaboration. For example, the article described previously that summarizes
relevant information about Wizarding World wands, including not only “wandlore” itself
(Rowling’s voice) but also community-oriented tidbits (“The Wizarding World Team” voice) on
“most common” and “rarest” types, lists several “wizarding world characters who share this
core” for the three possible types of wand core.
210
The names are all quite recognizable to those
who have a passing familiarity with the canon: “Unicorn hair” lists “Ron Weasley, Neville
Longbottom, Cedric Diggory,” and “Dragon heartstring” cites “Hermione Granger, Bellatrix
Lestrange, Viktor Krum.” Yet under “Phoenix feather,” we see this odd mixture: “Harry Potter,
Lord Voldemort, Silvanus Kettleburn.”
This last entry would be enough to give many readers pause, as recognized by a Feature
called “Into the Pensieve: Do you remember Silvanus Kettleburn?”
211
At the start of the article
Kettleburn is introduced as one of the “lesser-known characters in the wizarding world,” and it
warns, “you may need to take a second look at your memories to remember reading about him.”
The rest of the article is quite candid about the obscurity of the character, noting “we have to
admit – we didn’t actually meet him [in canon]!” The article likewise closes with the reasonable
question of “Why might we have forgotten him?” and answers, “You’d be forgiven for forgetting
about Silvanus Kettleburn” (as though this were something requiring forgiveness), and tells us he
77
is “mentioned in the Harry Potter books only twice.” Here, we can start distinguishing the
different types of doors that might lead one to Kettleburn’s room in the memory palace. For
those (presumably few) readers whose doors to Kettleburn are wide open, the site offers
approbation: “knowledge of this fearless Care of Magical Creatures [sic] is certainly something
to show off about.” For most of us, I would suggest, the door is closed, but a reminder early in
the article is enough to open it: “Dumbledore mentioned him in his start-of-term speech in Harry
Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: ‘I am sorry to tell you that Professor Kettleburn, our Care of
Magical Creatures teacher, retired at the end of last year in order to enjoy more time with his
remaining limbs.’” This, then, would be one of the two canonical references we know exist to
Kettleburn, meaning another door remains closed to all but those who remember or are willing to
sift through canon to open it—an implicit challenge to and reward for those with particularly
extensive stores of communal memory. Indeed, it feels too relevant to be a coincidence that the
first sentence under “Why did he matter?” reads, “Professor Kettleburn had a fearless and
encyclopaedic knowledge . . . .” The implication that fans’ own “encyclopaedic knowledge”
likewise “matters” seems like a convenient, if not deliberate, parallel.
Yet if the article helps us enter a room in the Wizarding World memory palace dedicated
to Silvanus Kettleburn, it is simply a foyer, the first of several adjoined rooms in this wing. As
the article almost sheepishly admits the relative irrelevance of the character as we have known
him (“You’re probably thinking that this is going to be a very short article if all we know is that
Silvanus Kettleburn retired and had some nasty run-ins with magical creatures.”), it also
recognizes that surely there is more to be known about Kettleburn—locked doors, up until this
point. Here is where the article makes its contribution: It has delivered us the key to open such a
door and learn a bit more of the storyworld’s history, thanks to “some information on the
78
Hogwarts teacher, shared with us by J.K. Rowling herself.” Though the site itself may no longer
present this new information explicitly as being “unlocked” (as it did in the early video cited
previously), the term remains both applicable and, in the context of our memory palace,
evocative.
212
Passing through this newly unlocked door reveals a new room filled with treasures:
scattered details of Kettleburn’s time at Hogwarts (both as teacher and student) and afterwards,
including his own small contribution to “the Battle of Hogwarts” that is well known to those who
follow canon. With this article, then, the memory palace has grown, thanks to sanctioned,
canonical expansion.
From the outset, when we are told that “this article continues our Into the Pensieve
series,” the Wizarding World makes use of a particularly striking tool from the storyworld to
represent the value of communal memories, particularly those that are dustier than others. As the
website reminds us, the punningly named Pensieve was a device used by Professor Dumbledore
to reanimate stored memories (literally pulled from his head and made tangible, silvery liquid
housed in vials) for the benefit of himself and others. “Just like Dumbledore collected memories
to share with Harry,” the site seemed to intend for this series of articles to explicitly add to the
palace of communal Wizarding World memory.
As we might expect, even this new addition to the palace is still connected to any number
of other wings, sometimes through explicitly linked doors and in other cases through something
more akin to the “secret passageways and hiding places of Hogwarts” mentioned above. The
article includes a far more modest number of links than others discussed here—a mere two, both
of which are also made more obvious (“if you’d like to find out more about it, here’s an article
for you”) in comparison to the more understated links Pottermore included as part of its prose.
Other references point fans towards different segments of the franchise with varying degrees of
79
subtlety. A comment about “Bob Ogden” might motivate a fan to visit the sole other “Into the
Pensieve” article available, which is dedicated to Ogden, even though there is no link to do so
readily. Mention of how Kettleburn’s teaching career “no doubt inspired many a young witch or
wizard to continue studying beasts – maybe even to become Magizoologists” does not raise a
question to be answered, per se, but its connotations might more idly inspire readers to revisit the
Magizoology of Newt Scamander in the Fantastic Beasts arm of Rowling’s franchise (the latest
metaphorical dawn following Potter’s “twilight,” as Freeman called it), or it might bring to mind
Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, in which players can choose to be Magizoologists themselves. And
the effusive commentary on how “Silvanus retired to Hogsmeade, and we can understand why –
imagine being able to visit the Three Broomsticks and Zonko’s Joke Shop every day?” takes on
an additional persuasive layer when we consider that the two establishments mentioned have in
fact been reproduced in the version of Hogsmeade found at the Universal Studios Hollywood’s
Wizarding World of Harry Potter, ready and waiting for the reader’s own “visit” and purchases.
(Indeed, “being able to visit . . . every day” is a dream one could easily make real if they were to
purchase one of the theme park’s passes.) Our metaphor does not account perfectly for this last
case, but we might even consider this as a sort of Dutch door, where fans can certainly have a
full view of happy times at the Three Broomsticks and Zonko’s but, should they wish to in fact
participate, they need to drop a coin (or several) into a slot to unlock the door’s bottom half and
enter the room themselves.
Lest this reading sound cynical, we must recognize that of course the site has a directive
to at least partially offset some of its stunning costs by stimulating franchise interest and,
ultimately, sales. Thus, it is perhaps unsurprising that one of the page’s links offers more
information on an in-world play, “The Fountain of Fair Fortune”—which happens to be available
80
in an additional book Rowling has authored.
213
To its credit, the article on Kettleburn does not
link users to the more sales-oriented page about the book, but rather to a fairly thorough
summary of what the book contains and its relevance in canon.
214
That said, even this in-world
treatment mentions, in its second-to-last paragraph, that the book happens to be newly available
“for the first time in audio, in support of J.K. Rowling’s charity Lumos,” with links for purchase.
Legal constraints regarding the site’s plausibly-minor visitors do seem to stem its more blatant
advertising. Links to the Wizarding World storefront, for example, are attended by a pop-up
message warning users, “You’re headed to the shop, which has stuff for sale if you’re an adult
fan or parent/guardian” with the options to “Continue” or “Cancel.” Yet more implicit planting
of consumerist urges seem both allowed and to be expected. Given this, the discovery of a
planned book including Kettleburn is perhaps unsurprising, but it does give one pause in
considering whether there were particular ulterior motives behind his newly expanded quarters in
the palace.
Here, though, our story becomes interesting. Promise of this new book is fairly well
buried, as a brief mention in response to Question 5 on a very early Quiz (“The Back to
Hogwarts Quiz: Hard,” from 2016, and second-to-last on the page of Quizzes): “Read about
Professor Kettleburn’s experience with an Ashwinder in Pottermore Presents: Short Stories from
Hogwarts of Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists.”
215
(The link suggests an alternate subtitle:
“Short Stories from Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies.”) Yet this link, like
others from Pottermore, is broken, and the book itself is not listed on the Wizarding World’s
page of canonical texts. To stretch our metaphor once more, we have been handed a damaged
key for the locked door of Kettleburn’s exploits. Yet given this situation, what is the role of the
audience imagination in, perhaps not picking that lock (which would imply unauthorized access
81
to an authorized canonical location), but maybe tunneling to try to find another route through?
How might we apply this logic to some of Rowling’s other door-riddled hallways, such as the
article on “Ministers for Magic”?
216
This particular page offers a few lines of text about 35
different characters who have held the in-world office of “Minister for Magic,” dating back to
1707 and ending in the “present” (although the article states it was “originally published on
Pottermore on Aug 10th 2015,” and also does not seem to include the in-world future of Harry
Potter and the Cursed Child). At least four of the characters listed were active during the time
period encompassed by the bulk of canon and so might have reasonably well-appointed rooms in
a reader’s memory palace, but what of the remaining 31? These characters and the events hinted
at in their descriptions are doors that are practically bursting open with tantalizing history behind
them—much like, in fact, the interactive door at Universal Studios Hollywood’s Hogsmeade
that, when visitors use a special wand to cast the unlocking spell, uses sound, motion, and light
to promise a dragon just on the other side. And if we are to believe Rowling and her site,
“pottermore.com is”—or at least was in 2016—“dedicated to unlocking the power of
imagination.”
217
Given the site’s conspicuous lack of fan voices in its latest incarnation, it seems
fair to ask: Whose imagination?
Of course, for any of these underexplained references, it is entirely possible (especially if
the site is now less inclined to offer convenient hyperlinks at every opportunity in its articles)
that somewhere there exists additional information that populates these palatial rooms. Take, for
example, the mention in the “Ministers for Magic” article of “Hector Fawley,” active from 1925
through 1939. For me, the name immediately calls to mind Grim Fawley, a main character in
Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, though no other memories are readily available. I am left with
questions: Is there a relationship between these two? (Other familiar last names, like “Parkinson”
82
and “Diggory,” suggest similar genealogical threads.) If I revisited or spent more time with
Wizards Unite, might I be able to connect these memories? Reading the entry makes clear that
Fawley’s tenure was during the reign of Gellert Grindelwald, the main villain of the Fantastic
Beasts franchise. The films have thus far focused on the United States parallel to Britain’s
Ministry of Magic, MACUSA, so we may not have met or heard reference to the acting Minister.
However, is there more information to be mined from a return to canon? At what point do we
know if this door is locked, but with the promise of an eventual key, or simply closed to us until
we find the right portion of the canon to allow us to open it? At what point is the fan
“imagination” allowed to do the “unlocking” the site once promised, without risk of conflict with
canonical truth?
218

This final question is somewhat unfair—of course, neither Rowling nor her site can
“allow” anyone’s imagination to do anything, and it seems quite likely that all involved would
encourage readers’ imaginative flights of fancy about, for example, who Hector Fawley was.
Such idle ponderings, or even the creation of one’s own texts, need not compete with that same
fan’s eventual purchase of, for example, a publication of Fawley’s journal, written by Rowling.
Just like in reality, a visitor to the Wizarding World who encounters a closed door may not
immediately know whether the door is locked or simply shut, and thus whether it can be opened
using resources they already have (such as canonical texts, including other areas of the website)
or whether it needs a key, and if such a key (such as a new piece of canon, either provided by the
site or available for purchase) even exists. Without knowing for certain what options are
available to them, they may well choose to imagine what lies beyond the door, just as they may
also choose to examine their other available resources to try to open it in a more official capacity.
83
Regardless of how intentional this ambiguity is, it is nonetheless strategic—it is this
ambiguity, this mystification surrounding the true extent of canon, and the true boundaries of the
memory palace’s walls, that give the storyworld its tantalizing uncertainty, and the audience its
motivation for traversal. It is the proliferation of doors, many locked, some closed, just enough
open, that encourage one to keep exploring, with the promise that some of these doors will reveal
new treasures, and others may eventually be opened with the help of some key. To take some
liberty with the metaphor of “Distant Horizons” discussed in our introductory chapter, this
narrative sprawl creates a storyworld that ultimately stretches out farther than the eye can see (or,
for Jenkins as also cited in Chapter 1, “expands beyond our grasp”), so that the fan is compelled
to travel in order to see it all. Rowling’s single sentence about Silvanus Kettleburn in Harry
Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is her version of Lucas’s passing reference to “the Clone
Wars”: itself a tiny nugget, a narrative seed, that has the potential to grow into, for Lucas, an
entire set of new stories (and for Rowling, presumably, at least one as-yet-unrealized book, along
with the website article).
219

Perhaps the most compelling evidence for the intentionality of this ambiguity is the site’s
conspicuous lack of a search function; despite the promisingly map-like image on the Wizarding
World’s main “Starting Harry Potter” page, Rowling and her compatriots have chosen to keep
any figurative map of their memory palace close to the vest.
220
This position may, too, be
supported by Rowling’s vocal dissent against the proposed “Harry Potter Lexicon” book, in a
court case from 2008.
221
Admittedly, the issue is thorny, and I am loath to attribute motive to
Rowling unfairly; in her testimony, she indicated her own intention to produce “an encyclopedia
she had been planning to create since 1998, the profits of which – possibly millions of dollars –
she had planned to donate to a British charity.” Coverage from The New York Times avers that
84
“much of her testimony focused on her contention that the guide was not very good,” though in
addition to “errors” she also decried its “‘pilfering’”—in fact, “she had flown to New York from
her Edinburgh home for the occasion, she testified, because she felt so strongly about someone
else turning 17 years of her labor on the Harry Potter series into an encyclopedia.” It is
reasonable for Rowling to fight for control of her palace. It is reasonable, too, for her to be the
one to generate the brochures and hire the tour guides, to oversee design of the map and ensure
that the wings still under construction are not made available to visitors prematurely. What is
more surprising, in conjunction with her objections to an outside party providing a map, is her
own lack of similarly encyclopedic project a decade later.
Returning to Burke, this perpetual fog around the borders of her canon serves precisely as
the mystification of courtship—that enigmatic allure that is not maliciously manipulative, but
rather leaves room for audience participation as well as authorial expansion. Mystification is the
imperfection of identification, whether intentional or incidental. When Harry Potter fans find
themselves uncertain of who, exactly, Silvanus Kettleburn is, or where they might (have) come
across him, their identification is limited; questions arise. The uncertainty created, even if
momentary, is what affords a sense of pride as well as communal solidarity for the fan who “gets
it,” as it were, at the same time as it motivates the fan who might not to discover something new,
which is in and of itself its own reward.
222
The surreptitious litmus test offered to a visitor—
whether they understand the secret code—simultaneously challenges and respects their
membership as part of the audience community. It might provide them the pleasure of rising to
meet that challenge, too; yet even for those members of the audience who cannot immediately
make sense of a passing remark, there is still an appeal to the challenge of discovering something
new for a storyworld in which they are invested. If audiences are now “information hunters and
85
gatherers,” per Jenkins as discussed in our introductory chapter, this is the thrill of the chase.
And with the mystification around the doors the Wizarding World leaves shut, every visitor is
placed in the position to potentially discover something new.
This, then, is the Wizarding World’s motivation for traversal. It is the strategic value in
treating its “old” content as potentially “new” (for those who had forgotten Kettleburn and his
ilk) while, just often enough, offering something that truly is new. It is the sating of audience’s
consumptive impulses, whether directing them to new expansions of the storyworld or
redirecting them back inward towards renewed appreciation of the older canon. Perhaps most
simply, it is the pleasurable confusion in an article like “Everything you need to know about The
Tales of Beedle the Bard,” not knowing whence, precisely, the quotations are drawn, just as it is
the ellipses at the end of each tale’s summary (“Their journey to the fountain isn’t quite as
simple as they thought...”) enticing the reader as to what comes next.
223
It is the mystification
surrounding what might be left to discover, and how such Burkean magic inspires the reader to
continue on.

Conclusion

There is value, I suggest, in considering the nature of media creation as the transaction it
is: if the intention is to take the audience’s time, focus, and (to quote Rowling in the courtroom)
“their or their parents’ hard-earned cash,” what, precisely, is being given in return?
224
The
question holds true in the case of Burke’s courtship, as well; we would expect any good long-
term relationship to be mutually beneficial. At times, it may be enough to simply offer a good
product—a thought-provoking book, an enjoyable film. Yet one of the consequences of the
86
increasing democratization of professional publication and distribution, along with increasing
competition among streaming services and other platforms, has been the proliferation of media
options available to the consumer (a dynamic that is different from, yet undeniably related to,
Jenkins’s “convergence culture”).
225
This has in turn called for increasing ingenuity, novelty, and
persuasiveness in securing audience attention. Such a proposition is, at least in some ways, made
more challenging for a franchise that, as Freeman has pointed out, has already delivered on its
initial canonical promise, with its steady trickle of new content seeming comparatively
underwhelming (a subjective assessment, but one supported by the vastly disproportionate
attention given to the Fantastic Beasts subfranchise, as well as Harry Potter and the Cursed
Child, on the Wizarding World itself).
The case study of the Wizarding World website, then, is a closer look at how “the best-
selling book series in history” has turned its formidable resources towards this challenge of
keeping the audience flame alive.
226
Horne reminds us that Rowling was “in an exceptionally
powerful position” when it came to the development of Pottermore; similarly, I would add, it has
allowed her to be a remarkably attentive relationship partner, strategic yet also generous in the
gifts she gives her audience.
227
This may indeed be an unusual and nonrepresentative example of
worldcultivating, then—what Horne calls “the product of an exceptional combination of
circumstances”—yet it is at the same time a sort of master class, a best-case scenario, and an
example of how some of the most successful contemporary creative minds, with all imaginable
resources at their disposal, would design a transmedia rhetoric.
228

The three dynamics we have traced here—individuation, communal memory, and
motivation for traversal—represent a strategic approach to giving Wizarding World visitors
something they find valuable. The complex individuation that is facilitated by the site is perhaps
87
most impressive, particularly in contrast to, on the one hand, affinity based-approaches found in
other franchises (most simply, selling costumes or other merchandise encouraging role-play of
preexisting canonical characters; alternatively, “BuzzFeed”-style quizzes mapping fans onto
those characters) or, on the other hand, placing the onus entirely on the fan to devise their own
(unauthorized) in-world identity. The Wizarding World’s attempt to instead invite the fan into
the storyworld in a sanctioned, yet still meaningful, way is worthy of extended consideration—as
a sweeping appeal to the majority of its audience, it may indeed have been a magical example of
worldblending, even as its oracular approach infringed on other fans’ desire for self-expression,
self-identification, and agency.
229
From a rhetorical perspective, the site evinces respect for and
interest in audience members’ uniqueness—as long as it is filtered, that is, through the site’s
symbolic mechanisms. The encouragement on each of the site’s pages to “bring your traits with
you” is asking only for raw materials, unwilling to consider already-developed identities formed
outside its system. Still, for those visitors who have an interest in what the Wizarding World has
to offer them in terms of such development, the site does provide an impressive experience. Its
individuating mechanisms serve as resources for those who buy in to better understand and
articulate their selves using the constituents of Rowling’s storyworld. Users are not treated as
being like some Hogwarts student; they are each honored as a Hogwarts student in their own
right. Certainly, the site (and franchise as a whole) takes this individuation seriously, from the
House-specific flag that persists at the top of each page for a logged-in user to the Ministry ID in
Harry Potter: Wizards Unite—of course, the more obvious reinforcement of “#HousePride”
being found in the endless merchandise options made available to these newly christened
Gryffindors, Ravenclaws, Hufflepuffs, and Slytherins. Presumably, though, the example works
in both directions: The individuation is promoted heavily by the site as a way to support sales of
88
merchandise, yet it seems likely the strategy has been pursued due to the interest audiences have
demonstrated (officially or otherwise) in such personal delineations. If the remarkable extent of
house-specific merchandise is not a reliable enough indicator of the success with which this
individuation has been met, the site itself gives us some idea of how eagerly fans have taken up
the opportunity to “Get Sorted”: in 2019, the site reported, “Millions of you, all over the world,
have discovered your Hogwarts house over the years.”
230

Yet as important as it is to distinguish the individual audience members, the site just as
readily pulls its audience back together through communal reminiscence, in a way that presumes,
tests, and validates visitors’ stores of canonical memory. This celebration of communal memory
(or consubstantiality) is carried out fairly explicitly on the Wizarding World site, giving us a
valuable point of comparison as we consider our additional case studies in which similar
mechanisms are at play but operating more subtly. Finally, the site manages the predictable
tension between rewarding those in the know without alienating the uninitiated, although this
strategy seems to have changed throughout the years—from interspersing relevant links
throughout its prose to offering a separate environment for those getting up to speed.
Lest the franchise be accused of resting on its laurels, the motivation for traversal that
characterizes the Wizarding World’s design ensures there is a dynamicity, an encouragement of
movement, a tilling of the soil that keeps fans—enjoyably—guessing as to the limits of canon.
The site guides its visitors back through the “secret passageways and hiding places” that run
throughout already-published materials, while also suggesting new seeds of narrative and, at
times, fleshing out these expansions more fully. It is, in short, a vast and sprawling memory
palace not unlike Hogwarts itself, with its moving staircases—or are those just broken links?—
and seemingly endless corridors to explore.
89
Particularly given the magical underpinnings of the storyworld, it is fitting that so many
of these rhetorical strategies are carried out with a fair degree of Burkean mystification. It is
mystification that elevates the Sorting Ceremony from a simple process of choosing a favorite
“team” affiliation, as it were, into a far more impressive and oracular proclamation of one’s true
self. The questions are just abstract enough, and the process by which the conclusion is reached
is hidden behind just enough smoke and mirrors, to create this sense of “magic,” and the feeling
that somehow the Sorting Hat (or, more generally, the storyworld) understands you even better
than you understand yourself. Mystification again comes into play as communal memories are
passed back and forth via truncated references, inside jokes, and other strategic incompletion
designed to reward, and foster a sense of community around, those who can fill in the blanks.
Lastly, mystification blurs the boundaries of canon through the mixture of memories to which a
given audience member has ready access, memories that require more effort to retrieve, and
unfamiliar in-world history that, in fact, represents something new to be consumed. In each case,
identification remains profitably imperfect: there is just enough disconnect between the bare-
bones truth (the algorithm of the Sorting Ceremony, the fully explained references, the divide
between knowable and unknowable history) and what is presented to the audience to create
enigmatic appeal.
Just as Rowling may make use of the Wizarding World site to introduce the narrative
seeds that will come to fruition throughout the rest of the franchise, the ideas laid out in this
chapter will likewise take new shape as we carry them forward into our remaining case studies.
In some ways, the individuating identification discussed here is housed in its most complete form
on the website (and thus merited greater focus in this chapter), yet as we consider both Universal
Studios Hollywood’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter and the Harry Potter: Wizards Unite
90
mobile game, we will see how this balance between individual and community plays out in
different ways. The stores of communal memory that are more explicitly archived on the website
are drawn on in more subtle ways in the theme park and game. Finally, the franchise’s
motivation for traversal is necessarily complicated in settings that, without being framed as a
source of new canonical narrative, instead adopts a subtler combination of narrative seeds and
revisitation of original canon (while deftly sidestepping any questions of how its content might
affect the storyworld permanently). In each case, however, we can see these strategic forms of
identification—appropriately mystified—at work to draw audiences more deeply into the
storyworld, reward their presence there, and then encourage their movement therein.
91

Figure 1: Wizarding World app image from Google Play
92

Figure 2: Wizarding World app image from Google Play
93

Figure 3: Wizarding World app image from Google Play
94

Figure 4: The initial view of the user’s profile

Figure 5: User’s wand information

95

Figure 6: User’s Patronus information

Figure 7: Initial “Favourites” view
96
Chapter 3
Universal Studios Hollywood’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter

As you make your way through Universal Studios Hollywood and approach the
Wizarding World of Harry Potter, you will be greeted by a towering entryway demarcating the
magical land as a clearly distinct section of the theme park. Certainly, as you pass under the
grand arches and see the Hogwarts Express conductor posing for photos, or the various robed
staff members assisting visitors with interactive spellcasting activities, it is clear that you are in a
space intended for observation, consumption, and touristic participation. Yet what I find more
intriguing about this space are the many ways in which it subverts expectations of tourist-
friendly openness and explanation, instead opting for strategic nonchalance in which its elements
of intrigue are left unmarked, unexplained, and oddly unavailable. Locked storefronts suggest
shopkeepers, products, and sales that are not open for your viewing pleasure; the timetable for
the train indicates locales one cannot visit. Visitors are positioned not as outsiders who are being
treated to a tour, but rather as insiders who are simply expected to know and understand, for
example, why the wreckage of an old Ford Anglia rests alongside a path—there is no plaque here
to offer an explanation for the uninitiated. And finally, when those visitors do step inside a shop
to take home a souvenir of this strange place, they are not merely offered trinkets advertising the
name of the village or the famous wizarding school perched nearby. While some such generic
items can be found, guests also face row upon row of memorabilia indicating allegiance to one of
the four Hogwarts houses, each one characterized by its own personality traits (e.g., the “Wise”
Ravenclaws). They are not expected to take home proof of visiting a tourist destination so much
97
as they are expected to collect items affirming and announcing who they are and where, in this
world, they fit.
In short, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter may acknowledge here and there that its
guests are Muggles—non-wizarding humans—but the space nonetheless treats them as part of
their Wizarding World. It presumes that individuals entering the theme park already have a body
of knowledge, informed opinions, and affiliations, and offers experiences and merchandise that
honor this pre-existing history.
231
In part, this lends itself to a sense of authenticity and
verisimilitude. Yet such presumption also serves other purposes. For one thing, it acts as a coy
mystification, a secret language of shorthand that tests and rewards visitors’ memories and
meanings. And at the same time, such veiled and uncertain references tease the possibility of
even more meanings, undiscovered stories or ones that have just been forgotten, the chance that
some of these doors are not, in fact, locked. It plays with the boundaries of what its audience
knows (or could be expected to know), and thus draws them in even more powerfully. The
environment is not immersive simply by virtue of its faux landscape of trees painted on the side
of a nearby building to distract visitors from the bustling metropolis of Los Angeles that
surrounds them. The immersion is created, rather, by this sense of in some way belonging, of
understanding, and yet believing there is still more to discover.
We can explain these rhetorical mechanisms in terms of the framework we have already
established: The theme park experience draws upon and reinforces a transmedia substrate of
identity and identification through individuation (in the form of affiliation), communal memory
(in the form of underexplained references to the world’s history), and motivation for traversal (in
the form of details of authenticity that suggest a full-sized Wizarding World sprawling far past
the true boundaries of canon). All three of these dynamics are augmented, in fact only really
98
made possible, by the site’s transmedia nature: the theme park is able to draw on other texts for
much of its meaning (while also including what seem to be unique details and opportunities for
interaction), but housing that meaning in texts external to the park allows for the mystification,
the coded nature, and the ambiguity of the park’s references. Thus, the formal division of
reference and referent creates a Burkean appetite, as introduced in Chapter 1.
232
Visitors are
either gratified by completing the form with their own knowledge, or motivated to traverse the
storyworld until they can.
The materiality of the theme park offers both continuity and contrast with how these
dynamics manifested in the Wizarding World website. Here, individuation is far more
commodified and less explicit, the references to communal memory are often subtle visual nods
rather than written remarks indicative of camaraderie. The substrate is invoked environmentally,
but it is still present, active, feeding into and reinforced by the experience. The world is made
richer, more detailed, and more real, yet part of its magic is that it also becomes more
inhabitable, fluidly building out the world and blending the audience-turned-denizen into it.
These larger operations, however, can be best illustrated by looking more closely at the small-
scale functioning of individuation, communal memory, and motivation for traversal throughout
the park.

Individuation

Recalling the digital identity-building of the Wizarding World website, the individuation
and identification made possible at Universal’s Wizarding World represents a somewhat
different set of opportunities to inhabit the storyworld, not only in terms of embodiment (and, in
99
many cases, commodification) but also agency. To better capture this distinction, we can at this
point introduce a new set of terms. As we have discussed it thus far, the individualized
identification offered by the Wizarding World has largely been what I am calling reflective
identity, a more diagnostic identity that is often assigned by some authority based on an inherent
truth residing within an individual. This identity thus reflects some indelible, even deterministic
reality about a person, their values, their predispositions and proclivities, and (much like gender
or ethnic identity) may carry with it the baggage of expectations and presuppositions along with
the community of others so identified. We can position reflective identity in contrast to
something we might think of as associative identity, in which a fully agentive individual chooses
to align themselves with a person, political party, cause, brand, or other entity because they feel
their values and preferences are matched in some way—linguistically, this is the subject
identifying with or as some designation as opposed to being identified with or as, for example, a
particular type of wand. In the case of the Wizarding World, there is a complicated question
about whether these two types of identities are further distinguished by whether they are imposed
by the storyworld (through, for example, the website’s “ceremonies”) or self-selected by the
audience, an issue that will be teased apart more fully in our concluding chapter. For our
purposes now, however, I would not be so quick to conflate “reflective” with “imposed” and
“associative” with “chosen,” especially in the context of the theme park where such imposition is
less manifest. Instead, I would emphasize the distinction in terms of immanence and affiliation.
Both types of identity can include some degree of determinism and some degree of choice, but in
broad strokes, it is helpful for our purposes to be able to distinguish between an identity that in
some way reveals or codifies an intrinsic characteristic (and is thus reflective), and an identity
that is selected because it matches that already-identified, already-labeled inner self (associating
100
that self with others). Crudely, the first is tied to the developmental process of individuation; the
second simply deploys and reinforces that individuation.
I emphasize this distinction because, to me, it limns the mechanisms by which the
Wizarding World franchise actively carves out space for its audience members within the
storyworld itself, and it allows us to more readily discuss what is different about Harry Potter
fandom (or, more specifically, the relationship between the fandom and its corporate caretakers)
in contrast to so many others. Any text can provide “aspirational heroes” that serve as fodder for
associative identification, and indeed such characters are necessary for a “Universe Worthy of
Devotion.”
233
But the Wizarding World’s affiliations, and its merchandise, are not limited to
Harry, Ron, Hermione, or any other canonical characters. Rather, the Wizarding World’s
identification encourages the reflective process, affiliating oneself with larger philosophical
alignments and personality traits through, for example, its houses and wands.
234
This contrast
becomes especially important when we consider the particulars of the Universal Studios site,
which not only can be read against other commercial sites (like Disneyland) characterized by
ubiquitous merchandising, but also creates opportunities for fans to more fully embody their
Wizarding World identities with their attire and accessories, juxtaposed against other members
of the Harry Potter community—or, more fittingly, communities. Thus, whereas the Wizarding
World website provides an example of the multiaxial ways in which a fan can build a (reflective)
Harry Potter identity and thus position themself within the storyworld, the physical Wizarding
World raises more specific issues of identity embodiment, carrying through this emphasis on
reflective identities while also allowing for greater agency in self-determining such an identity.
It is striking to see how many visitors in and around the Wizarding World are wearing
some sort of official or unofficial Harry Potter merchandise; what borders on shocking is how
101
little of this merchandise represents any of the series’ many characters. Indeed, only a portion of
these items even position the wearer as an audience member, on the other side of the fourth wall.
Instead, the apparel and accessories frequently transform (or is it transfigure?) their wearers into
members of the Wizarding World in their own right, not into an approximation of some other,
known inhabitant. Specifically, one commonly sees visitors clad in house-specific wizarding
robes, rather than fans cosplaying as, for example, Hermione and Ron. Anecdotally, I can only
recall one small child—with drawn-on Harry Potter glasses—adopting the identity of a
preexisting character.
235
Given the richness of cosplay culture and the multitude of iconic
characters to choose from within the franchise, this initial observation offers a hint as to what
makes the Wizarding World distinct: fans are encouraged to, in short, cosplay as their wizarding
selves, not as some other Rowling-created character.
This trend is mirrored by (and, indeed, partially caused by) the range of merchandise
made available at Universal Studios and Universal CityWalk. In general, as a colleague who
worked for Warner Bros. explained to me, it is no accident that these items tend towards the
reflective rather than the associative. Dan Romanelli, who founded the consumer products
division of Warner Bros., developed a remarkably insightful strategy to bolster the storyworld’s
immersion through its merchandising: rather than celebrate the brand, Warner Bros. would sell
products that celebrated the world. Thus, it is rare to find official merchandise emblazoned with
the Harry Potter logo; instead, one would be much more likely to find the Hogwarts crest or
Ministry of Magic insignia. This approach reifies the Wizarding World’s overall strategy of
inviting its fans to occupy the storyworld, not just observe it.
Accordingly, the various stores in Universal Studios and its Wizarding World, as well as
the adjacent CityWalk, feature shelf after shelf of house-specific gear of every sort imaginable.
102
One could, for example, wear a scarf striped in red and gold to represent their support of
Gryffindor house, or jot down their ideas in a yellow notebook debossed with the Hufflepuff
crest (or, in theory, both, though it is a testament to how mutually exclusive these identities seem
to be that no examples of such multi-house representation come to mind based on what I have
observed at the park).
236
One could even adopt a more specific role for their wizarding self by
wearing a shirt declaring them to be, for example, the “Gryffindor Quidditch Team Captain.” For
the most part, fans are not encouraged to be Harry Potter so much as they are invited to live like
Harry does, enjoying a Chocolate Frog and showing their school or house spirit. Indeed,
character-specific apparel is primarily contained to one small corner of the park, Gladrags’
Wizardwear, where Snape’s robes, Hermione’s Yule Ball gown, and the Weasley sweaters Harry
and Ron received for Christmas can be found alongside the more generic wizarding robes for
each house.
237
Elsewhere, the offerings are overall decidedly decoupled from any individual
character.
There is, however, a notable (and complex) exception to this rule in the case of wands.
Replicas of the wands used by quite a few of the franchise’s characters can be found at several
locations throughout Universal Studios (Figure 5); incidentally, those at Ollivanders Wand Shop
(Figure 6) are wrapped in a more believably in-world display, but their inclusion as items for sale
nonetheless represent a fairly clear departure from narrative immersion, since one would not
expect the famed wandcrafter to replicate any of the unique wands already attached to another
wizard. This, then, seems to be a minor concession made to those fans who truly do wish to show
a more associative identity, affiliating themselves with a specific character rather than some
more general philosophical stance or value (such as, for example, the value of intellect
championed by the Ravenclaw shirt with the text “Wise”).
103
On the opposite side of Ollivanders, however, one finds box upon box of wands for sale
that, rather than being associated with any specific character, instead represent different types of
wand wood and, with it, the personality traits of the witch or wizard who might use it. Indeed,
ornate displays even lay out the different types of wands available, inviting visitors to determine
which one might best complement their natural inclinations (Figure 7). Consider, for example,
the description of a “Holly” wand: “Wood from Holly trees has magical healing properties and is
thought to repel evil. Holly people make good leaders and thoughtful, loving and effective
counselors. Holly people should use their understanding of the dark, hidden side of humanity to
guide others in their time of need.” Selecting from amongst these wands rather than choosing
that of a beloved character might demand more time and introspection from its visitors, in
particular because these wand types do not correspond to the wands assigned by the Wizarding
World website. Instead, a visitor must give careful thought to the multiple varieties of wands
available, determining not only what kind of person they naturally are, but also the kind of
person they want to be. In this way, we are reminded, are reflective identities also constitutive
ones.
I contend that this second type of wand, those that are largely independent of any obvious
linkages to canonical characters, is clearly rhetorically privileged at Universal’s Wizarding
World, reinforcing the sense that visitors should enter the world and make use of the park’s
resources to support a reflective identity more than an associative one. It is true that character-
specific wands, which in this case lend themselves to associative identification more than
reflective, are available in more locations throughout the Universal property. However, at
Ollivanders, the in-world authority on all things wand related, it is the wands that support one’s
inner self, and facilitate reflective identification, that are given special emphasis in two key
104
ways. First, these are the wands that take center stage (almost literally) during the intimate wand-
selecting performance that visitors may attend before entering the wand shop. During this
performance, an Ollivanders staff member selects one visitor to work with, testing out various
wands to find the one that will best enable his or her magical abilities. In one such interaction,
the staff member even seemed to explicitly call out the use of a character-specific wand by
saying it “looks very familiar” and the visitor must be “borrowing it from another student”; the
performer continued with a light admonition that it was important to “get you fitted for your
own” because one would “never get such good results with another wizard’s wand.” This
rhetoric clearly discourages the use of replica wands in favor of one that more accurately
represents the visitor-as-inhabitant; accordingly, after a brief exchange, the Ollivanders expert
determined that the young visitor was best suited for a Holly wand, proclaiming, “You’re very
protective of your loved ones” and this “fierce loyalty will be much admired by your friends.” It
is noteworthy that this evaluation complements, but does not replicate, the interpretation of Holly
wands cited above, suggesting that, much like astrology, there is deep nuance to wand lore.
The second privilege granted to the more reflective wands is more starkly pragmatic in
nature: Only these wands are available with the interactive feature that enables them to activate
the animatronic and audio installations scattered throughout Hogsmeade. Quite literally, the
message being sent is that one cannot perform magic if one is merely copying some other witch
or wizard’s identity; only the wand that is appropriately matched to you as an individual will
unlock your potential. This is powerful reification, rhetorically and experientially, of the idea that
each fan has a place in the Wizarding World, as an individuated inhabitant and active participant
rather than just an observer.
105
I believe it was Ariel Rodriguez, the yoga instructor responsible for a Harry Potter-
themed “Room of Requirement” class, who raised a provocative question about the uniqueness
of the Harry Potter fandom: What is different about the Harry Potter houses in contrast to, say,
the Sith or the Jedi in Star Wars? Indeed, one sees Rebel and Imperial insignia frequently
(perhaps even more than one sees, for example, Yoda or Darth Vader), each indicating an
allegiance that could easily reveal something about the fan’s core belief system as well as their
favorite characters.
238
This is a fair point, and I in no way mean to diminish the identity-
representing capacity of all fandoms and fannish behavior. Yet I nonetheless feel the Wizarding
World’s nuanced degree of individuation, above and beyond more basic affiliation, merits our
recognition. It goes beyond simple binaries, it provides official mechanisms of assignment and
affiliation, it attaches these affiliations to explicit values or characteristics, and then encourages
the ongoing embodiment and performance of these affiliations across transmedia texts.
239

In other words, the sheer multitude of ways in which the Wizarding World offers its fans
in-world identity options and then continually refers to and bolsters these identities is
noteworthy. Though the label now seems to be used less prominently, the metaphor of the
Wizarding World Passport (attached to audience members’ online Wizarding World accounts,
and including their various affiliations) is powerful: these reflective identifications authorize the
audience to inhabit the storyworld, whether digitally or physically, not simply watch from behind
glass. Here, the franchise’s savvy merchandising requirement further dissolves the fourth wall,
and the division between fan and member of a storyworld: while one can easily find toys,
costumes, and other items celebrating individual Star Wars characters, the toys and costumes of
Universal’s Wizarding World shifts the balance towards performances of fandom that adopt the
perspective of being inside the world rather than being in the theater seats. Moreover, the
106
individuation of the Wizarding World complexifies more straightforward categories of good and
evil. For Star Wars, affiliations are largely divided along this binary, and identifying with the
Empire or Darth Vader is a narratively subversive act in a canon where that side will always lose.
In contrast, the Wizarding World offers a range of identities to its fans, all of which have the
opportunity to be heroic (since there is a comparative dearth of official resources at the theme
park to celebrate Voldemort or the Death Eaters). Even the much-maligned Slytherin house is
given a place in the Wizarding World, a development that clearly ran contrary to even the park
designers’ understandings of fandom.
240
Furthermore, as it repeatedly encourages fans to affiliate
themselves with a house and then—recalling Dickinson as discussed in our introductory
chapter—perform that affiliation through merchandise, the Wizarding World makes “a Slytherin
student” a viable character within the world, privileged in its theme park far more than a specific
Slytherin like Draco Malfoy.
This idea of student-as-character is seen explicitly in Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, when
players are just as, if not more, likely to interact with “Ravenclaw Student” as they are “Luna
Lovegood,” but a similar phenomenon is also visible at the theme park. Certainly, the named
characters are present on both rides (with specially recorded videos of nearly all major original
castmembers as part of the Forbidden Journey, and Hagrid providing voiceover accompaniment
to Flight of the Hippogriff). However, unlike the costumed performers in other regions of the
park representing specific characters from specific films or franchises, the performers in the
Wizarding World depict unnamed (but, importantly, school- and house-affiliated) students. Thus,
there are no performers in the Triwizard showcase playing Viktor Krum and Fleur Delacour;
instead, they are playing Durmstrang and Beauxbatons students. The Frog Choir is made up of
two Gryffindors, a Ravenclaw, a Hufflepuff, and a show-stealing Slytherin, but visitors won’t
107
find Harry, Ron, or Hermione walking through Hogsmeade. I suggest that these unnamed-but-
individual characters act as part model and part proxy, subtly suggesting that the visitors
themselves—who, if they are wearing house robes, may be nearly indistinguishable from the
performers on the stage, apart from the choreography and harmonizing—are similarly valid
characters inhabiting the Wizarding World.
Particularly as it operates in concert with the Wizarding World website, the Wizards
Unite mobile game, and the dispersed sites of Harry Potter merchandising, Universal’s
Wizarding World is part of a strategic rhetoric that emphasizes inclusion over simple affinity,
inviting fans to adopt and perform a uniquely personal identity that reflects some aspect of their
“real world” selves, but clothes it (oftentimes literally) in the symbolism of the Wizarding
World. It is in this distinction that I see the value in the term “worldblending” as separate from
“worldbuilding.” Although worldbuilding may certainly employ, for example, models like EA’s
“Universe Worthy of Devotion” or Geoffrey Long’s “transmedia aesthetics” to develop the
undergirding philosophical structures necessary for audience affiliation, worldblending goes a
step further in acknowledging and honoring audience’s lives outside the franchise, then
purposefully and meaningfully incorporating those lives into the imaginary world.
241
This
strategy offers an officially sanctioned place for audiences within the world in a way that can be
meaningful for these newly anointed inhabitants, savvy for the franchise stakeholders, and a
valuable provocation for academics. As will be explored more thoroughly in the conclusion,
however, the potential wresting of identity determination and agency away from fans is not
without issue. Moreover, canonical representations of a range of identities will always be crucial,
as Jenkins and Campbell have pointed out, and I do not wish to imply, naïvely, that “socially
marginalized audiences . . . should be satisfied with” this second-tier, self-directed form of
108
inclusion “and should not worry too much about their lack of representation within the media
itself.”
242
It is not, and should not be, enough. Such efforts must be matched by consistent
political positionings and storyworld rhetoric, areas where the Wizarding World has quite
notably fallen short—another topic for our concluding chapter. Nevertheless, the inclusion of
fans within the storyworld in an authorized fashion brings a franchise at least somewhat closer to
true inclusivity than one that relegates the matter of representation almost entirely to fan
production, which may be celebrated in scholarship yet not achieve nearly the visibility nor the
legitimacy of official representations. Thus, in lieu of a main character in the Harry Potter books
or films who uses an assistive mobility device, it is heartening to imagine a visitor to the park
using a wheelchair while also being treated as part of the world, clad in its trappings and setting
cauldrons bubbling with a flick of a wand.
As Long has pointed out, we might think about the integration of audience and world
bidirectionally, such that texts “set up opportunities for the audiences to put themselves into the
storyworlds, and, by extension, to bring that storyworld back out into their own lives.”
243
In the
Wizarding World, the explicit and embodied affiliations lend themselves to particularly strong
alignments, identification that permeates the audience more fully. I would suggest that this
proclivity may also spark more ready absorption and application of the values and philosophies
embraced in the films (perhaps even more so when that identity has been authoritatively assigned
by, for example, the Sorting Hat). These potential ramifications become especially intriguing
when considering something like the Harry Potter Alliance, a group that has already
demonstrated the power of translating the storyworld’s values into activism. Instead of asking,
however, “What would Harry Potter do?”—which requires both the ability to empathically
predict a character’s behavior as well as the choice to affiliate oneself with that character—a fan
109
might simply ask, “What does a Gryffindor do?” The difference between the two questions
represents two important shifts. First, a fan would already have adopted the identity of a
Gryffindor (either based on their own self-reflection or because it had been assigned in a
diagnostic fashion), and thus would not need to engage in the additional steps of playing out a
character’s probable stance and then choosing to emulate that character. Second, the linguistic
move from the conditional tense to the present represents a shift from the hypothetical to the
definitional; the values of a Gryffindor have already been articulated, and if one is a member of
the Gryffindor category, it is a fairly simple syllogistic undertaking to identify what values
should be applied. Taken together, these moves support a rhetorical identity that is deeply,
authentically personal, rather than role play of a character distanced from one’s lived reality.
This aspect of worldblending takes the fandom from a clearcut space of pretending into the more
phenomenological place of who one is and how one acts. And it is here, in the blending of
worlds, we can locate the potential for especially rich immersion, viscerally moving experiences,
and deep connection between fan and text.
We have discussed individuation at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park in
terms of immersion, performance, and consumption, as well as the difference between
identification that reflects some inner self and that which is based on affiliation with some pre-
existing character. To connect this treatment more fully to our larger framework and project, we
can close with a more focused examination of how this individuation functions as part of the
Wizarding World’s larger transmedia network, and thus how it interfaces with the transmedia
substrate connecting them. Certainly, as we will see shortly, much of the theme park’s meaning
is dependent on an understanding of and investment in canonical texts. Yet thinking specifically
about the process of individuation, the park’s dependency on other texts is less straightforward.
110
There is an argument that, at least for casual fans, the theme park’s invocation of visitor-as-
inhabitant functions most effectively in tandem with the digital Wizarding World’s Sorting
Ceremony, equipping visitors with a pre-existing understanding of who they are before they are
thrust onto the metaphorical stage (or into the stores). Yet there is no clear call to action at the
theme park that would motivate a visitor to follow that path, nor is there any alternative way to
be sorted on site. From our design perspective, it is surprising that the theme park’s creators felt
no need to guide visitors explicitly towards this important complement to the theme park
experience; from our academic perspective, it makes more sense that they would not need to.
The confidence that enables this presumption—that visitors will already know their houses—
reveals the pervasiveness of the world’s individuation. Even if fans have not been sorted by the
Wizarding World, the books and films provide such clear outlines for the four houses, almost a
rhetorical architecture, that it strongly encourages fans to sort and be sorted outside of any
official mechanism for doing so. Once again, the tension between fans’ ownership of the sorting
process and the Wizarding World’s imposition of identification is a topic to be faced more fully
in our final chapter. At this point, however, we can simply recognize that the theme park
operates with a presumption that, somehow, audiences arrive presorted—and rather than
dismissing as poor design the severance of the theme park from the official Sorting Ceremony,
we might be encouraged by the greater agency it permits in terms of self-individuating, self-
identification.
244
And regardless of which medium or text motivates the selection of an identity
marker, Universal’s Wizarding World offers numerous possibilities for fans to adopt and display
their identity, as a part of the storyworld. Indeed, we might even consider, in this sense, how the
audience body functions as a medium, incorporated into the franchise’s transmedia strategy.

111
Communal Memory

The materiality of memory at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park adds a
layer of complication not present in our other case studies. For the Wizarding World website,
with its prioritization of words as its mode of choice, there is a degree of explicitness, of
unambiguity, to even its abbreviated or mystified references.
245
At the theme park, the use of
language is far more constrained, with minimal signage and voiceover narration. Instead, visual
details, architecture, and experience are responsible for conveying a great deal of the park’s
meaning, but in the process create far more ambiguity around particular references to communal
memory. This is not to say, however, that the experience suffers for this lack of verbiage—on the
contrary, its access to the full human sensorium creates an incomparable sort of immersion that
taps into and contributes to communal memory in ways that words cannot.
246

One way of understanding the ambiguity of the location is by considering the
intertextuality that Dickinson traces in his study of Old Pasadena.
247
In that environment, certain
evocations are generic in nature, as in “a nostalgia for the exotic and a nostalgia for home” as
“encoded . . . by the landscape’s architectural style.” Other references may be more concrete and
particular, as in his example of the Tanner Marketplace illustrating the way “inscriptions, signs,
and legends” can “serve as introductions and instructions for reading the landscape.” For
Dickinson, these uses of text are important for their capacity “to dispel whatever semiotic
ambiguity may reside in the buildings themselves.” Yet the Wizarding World largely eschews
any such handholding. Here, I would argue they have the advantage of dual intertextuality
working in their favor. In a general sense, the architecture and atmosphere of the theme park can
draw on a “nostalgia” of fantasy in much the same way Dickinson’s Pasadena invokes “home”
112
and “the exotic,” making it palatable enough for visitors who cannot otherwise identify particular
shops or items. The intertextuality is with a larger body of cultural knowledge and meanings.
This in and of itself is a rhetorical use of memory. Yet when a rhetoric of memory is deployed as
part of a transmedia franchise, in which the creators can predict and shape specific cultural texts
to which their audiences are referring, this intertextuality can become more controlled and
strategic. Specifically, in addition to recalling certain events and evoking certain emotions,
rhetorical memory in a transmedia setting can also act as a sort of secret code, in which a given
artifact or reference may be glossed over by an uninitiated audience member, yet hold additional
meaning and pleasure for someone who gets the in-joke, so to speak. And it is a currency, in
which audience understanding secures passage to that shared space of consubstantiality, the pool
of communal memory.
Universal’s Wizarding World is rife with these subtle references to characters and events
from the Harry Potter books and films, all of which serve to create a sort of encoded scene that
rewards transmedia knowledge. A simple way to illustrate this point is by walking through the
Wizarding World’s Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride, one of two rides in the Potter-
themed section of Universal and arguably its centerpiece. It is worth observing, to begin with,
that the castle itself is not explicitly labeled; to those with even modest familiarity with the
franchise, it is clearly Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, but to the uninitiated it
could be any sort of castle, perhaps housing a king or an evil ogre. Piecing together context clues
from the line experience and the ride itself, one could gather a basic overview of key narrative
elements, particularly if one is routed through Dumbledore’s office and takes the time to listen to
the headmaster’s brief introduction. Even without his orientation, however, a rider could
reasonably conclude that this place is a school, that they are joining a group of friends in cutting
113
class, that this place and its inhabitants are decidedly magical, and that they are very nearly
escaping some sort of threat from a dragon, a spider, some sort of tree, and strange wraith-like
creatures. The voiceover narrative during the ride even names some of these elements (“Watch
out for the Whomping Willow!” “Dementors!”). As with any good transmedia text (at least in
Jenkins’s formulation), the ride is narratively complete on its own.
However, with familiarity of the books and films, a rider’s experience is both more
sensical and more meaningful. Once the rider boards their vehicle, Hermione’s voice informs
them that they’ll be travelling by means of “Floo.” This word would be at best meaningless to
the uninitiated, and at worst misinterpreted as, for example, “flue.” Yet those who have read the
books would likely recognize her reference to the magical powder that allows witches and
wizards to travel to different fireplaces. Then, the short video of swirling green light that
accompanies the vehicle’s movement could then serve as a delightful addendum to their
understanding of the process, with a materiality and perspective they may not have acquired
from watching it on a screen or reading about it in a book. More subtly, whereas an uninitiated
rider might simply appreciate the generically spooky nature of a dungeon-type set with
crumbling snake statues, a rider versed in the franchise might recognize it as the Chamber of
Secrets, after Harry and Ginny Weasley’s confrontation with the spirit of a young Voldemort.
Finally, an understanding of the Harry Potter lore would grant higher stakes to the dementors’
impending attack, as one might be recalling the horrific depictions of what happens when a
dementor attacks. While any rider might feel some relief when, after “Expecto Patronum!” plays
in the vehicle’s speakers, a spectral creature seems to chase the dementors away, riders who are
familiar with the franchise would more fully understand what had taken place.
114
What I wish to illustrate here is not simply that the ride contains references that fans
would come to the experience already understanding, but rather that the theme park designers
chose not to include additional information that would bring unfamiliar riders up to speed. They
have largely avoided Dickinson’s “inscriptions, signs, and legends”—or, rather, are playing on
the alternate meaning of “legend.” Instead of choosing the explicitly explicatory framework of a
museum, the designers in most cases adopt the implicit, presumptive framework of a community
space, where the meaning of artifacts and experiences resides in the (presumed) cultural memory
of the visitors, not in a placard or a tour guide’s explanation. The designers thus artfully provide
the bare minimum of context and explanation to create narrative coherence, but leave the
narrative color and detail as a sort of “Easter egg” or, more precisely, a transmedia reward. Thus,
for example, one could easily imagine a parent who had not read the books walking past the set
piece seen in Figure 3 and admiring it (or dismissing it) as nothing more than an authentic-
looking part of a medieval castle, while the child accompanying them lights up in recognition of
the Mirror of Erised where Harry saw his parents in the very first book (and Dumbledore made a
pact with Gellert Grindelwald in the second Fantastic Beasts film). Even the inscription at the
top of the mirror, which could easily be dismissed as Latin or perhaps Old English, reveals a
hidden message to those who know to read it backwards.
It is my contention that this additional, encoded layer of meaning is pleasurable for those
who possess the key. Importantly, though, it is pleasurable not simply because of the value of the
content itself; it is pleasurable because of the exclusivity of the content, and because the
additional knowledge and skill required to decipher it reflect positively on the person doing the
deciphering. It is a test, and those who pass are granted the self-satisfaction of having done so.
Indeed, though it may not be as explicit as the “Quizzes” of the Wizarding World website, I
115
would argue that its subtlety, its nonchalance, is part of its appeal. It is not a direct challenge, but
rather a hidden reward. Put another way, it is tacit validation that the visitor is a member of a
somehow exclusive club, more informed than their peers and privy to insider information. Their
identification of the reference is, at the same time, their identification with the storyworld and its
audience. Granted, the “club” of those who have seen a Harry Potter film is not exactly what we
might normally consider “exclusive,” but I suggest that the rhetorical nod to visitors’
membership in such a club—by simply dropping references with no pandering explanation—
nonetheless works to reify some sense of community (drawing the boundary between those who
know and others who do not), along with a sense of approbation for its members.
An alternate analysis of the choice to include these “insider” references in Universal’s
Wizarding World shifts our focus from the game-like qualities of this mystification and toward
its verisimilitude. The theme park’s casual dialogue and unidentified set pieces, eschewing any
explanations of relevant backstory or unfamiliar terminology, position Hogsmeade as a real
village and Hogwarts as a real school in contrast to, say, a tourist attraction or a museum with its
ubiquitous descriptive placards. Psychologically, this would seem to create a similar effect to
that identified above: visitors are, again, made to feel as though they are part of a community,
invited in a familiar way to experience the sights and sounds without being treated as an outsider.
Following this line of reasoning, however, the community being invoked in this case is not just
the community of Harry Potter fans, but in fact the community of magical beings who would
naturally visit Hogsmeade. Muggles, as a rule, are not present in wizarding locales like
Hogsmeade or Hogwarts, and although there are a handful of scattered moments in the
Wizarding World experience that do call attention to visitors’ status as Muggles (for example,
Draco’s taunt in the Forbidden Journey that refers to riders as Harry’s “Muggle friends”), I
116
would contend that the nonverbal rhetoric that refuses to identify or explain serves as a powerful
argument, playing on suspension of disbelief, that the visitor belongs.
Regardless of whether the community invoked is that of fans in the know or witches and
wizards who naturally inhabit such a space, what I find most fascinating about this phenomenon
is that the designers of Universal’s Wizarding World are willing to pursue this tack to the
exclusion and potential befuddlement of those who don’t “get” the references. This semantic
fallout was illustrated for me during one visit to the park with a companion—less versed in the
books and films—who was caught off guard by a visit to the restrooms, where an audio track
plays giggling, coquettish snippets from Moaning Myrtle, the ghost of a young woman who
inhabits one of the boys’ bathrooms at Hogwarts.
248
In my experience, the audio is too loud to be
ignored yet difficult to understand, creating a decidedly confusing experience for those who
might not know or remember that a young woman speaking to them in the men’s restroom makes
complete sense in the Wizarding World. Although this confusion may not be particularly
distressing (and one might appreciate the surprise in the same way they appreciate a jump scare),
it nonetheless veers again towards a different version of the mixture of “fascination” and
“frustration” Jenkins and Campbell described: here, the frustration is not that of a fan whose
desires are unmet, but rather that of an outsider who has been excluded from fannish (or, at least,
communal) knowledge.
249
Just as the first form of frustration might motivate fan production, the
latter might indeed motivate a return to canonical texts to better understand the lost references
(or at the very least, it might inspire an inquiry made to a staff member or fellow visitor).
Regardless, it is worth noting that, for the theme park’s designers, this gamble—toying with the
potential exclusion of the uninitiated—is worth making. Frustration in a transmedia world can be
117
a valuable tradeoff, as the frustrating object either incites exploration in newly recruited
outsiders, rewards knowledge in those who are already part of the audience community, or both.
The last example I wish to highlight here offers an opportunity to follow several threads
of Harry Potter’s transmedia tapestry. As part of the extended waiting area for Harry Potter and
the Forbidden Journey, in an outdoor portion that abuts the Wizarding World’s main walkway,
the line is wound around the carcass of a crashed Ford Anglia. Those who have a passing
familiarity with the films might readily recognize the vehicle; those who have only read the
books might have a little more difficulty identifying the vehicle as a Ford Anglia, a model that
would likely be unfamiliar to many readers, but a recollection of the relevant passage from the
text would likely spark identification of the vehicle and its meaning with relatively little effort. In
both the film and the book, the car enters the scene when Ron Weasley picks Harry up in his
father’s flying Ford Anglia on their way to Hogwarts for the start of their second year. The two
are attacked by the school’s Whomping Willow on arrival, leading to the Anglia’s unfortunate
demise. Of course, none of this information is provided alongside the vehicular debris at the
Wizarding World, again creating the opportunity for insider recognition and outsider frustration.
However, in addition to the canonical texts and films, there are other transmedia avenues
that offer less informed visitors a chance to further contextualize and make meaning of the
unmarked wreckage, three in particular of interest here. The first is a simple intratextual
reference, in which another bit of information from the theme park itself sheds light on and can
be read against the crashed car: a seasonal projection show for the franchise’s annual “Back to
Hogwarts” event depicts a still-functioning Anglia flying up to the castle. Although this text
offers little insight as to the car’s passengers or the specific circumstances that led to it being
used, it does indicate that the car was once airborne and, presumably, used as a means of
118
approaching Hogwarts, likely around the start of a new school year. A visitor who otherwise did
not know the backstory surrounding the car might thus come away from “Back to Hogwarts”
with an incomplete or even inaccurate understanding of its story, but piecing together these
multiple and unique references to canonical history nonetheless provides more satisfying
understanding, and even a microcosm of the “insider reference” phenomenon that others
experience when connecting unmarked reference points to the source material.
The second transmedia illumination available to visitors is also intratextual in nature, but
spans different sections of the Universal Studios theme park, in so doing crossing layers of in-
world and behind-the-scenes narratives.
250
Outside of the Wizarding World region of Universal,
a less demolished Ford Anglia is on display, accompanied by a small sign identifying it as part of
the film (Figure 4). To begin with, this artifact-with-description acts in much the same way as the
projection show described above: it provides a minimal bit of context that would allow a park
visitor to recognize and identify the unmarked Anglia in the Wizarding World. In addition, this
sign breaks the fourth wall, so to speak, calling attention to the produced franchise texts rather
than the storyworld’s history. Most importantly for our purposes, however, these twin sites at
Universal Studios are fraternal, not identical, and their differences illustrate the rhetorical frame
operating powerfully, yet implicitly, in the Wizarding World. Whereas the explained Anglia in
Figure 4 employs the frame of a monument or museum, explicitly drawing attention to itself as
an object of import but also identifying and contextualizing it for the visitor, the unexplained
Anglia situated in the Wizarding World effects the implicit frame of the community, where
artifacts simply exist in situ and knowledge of their value and meaning is expected to be already
understood or transmitted culturally. All of this is to say that the frame of the community
119
presumes cultural, communal memory; the monumental frame, in contrast, acts to create such
memory.
The third way in which visitors unfamiliar with the origins of the wrecked Anglia might
gain insight as to its meaning is more truly intertextual (and transmedial), in that it draws from
the Wizards Unite mobile game in perhaps unintentionally synergistic ways.
251
Certain sites or
objects in the physical world appear in Wizards Unite as inns, greenhouses, or challenge
locations where players can perform various tasks. Many or all of these sites were presumably
drawn from the collection of locations cultivated from user submissions and database
information for Niantic’s earlier game Ingress, initially developed as a Google project (and, as
described in our first chapter here, analyzed by Chess). Accordingly, the Wizards Unite locations
that are found within the physical space of Universal’s Wizarding World may well predate that
particular Niantic game, and thus were not created or included with specific transmedia intent—
in other words, users were likely not submitting these Harry Potter–themed locations, photos,
and descriptions to a Harry Potter–oriented database for Harry Potter fans to have a Harry Potter
experience. Indeed, such intentional transmediality on the part of players seems impossible given
the apparent absence of a method within the Wizards Unite interface to submit in-game
locations, such as the system that Ingress included. Furthermore, based on the relatively informal
nature of the location descriptions, we can conclude with some confidence that they were in fact
submitted by end users and not included as official in-game locations (those “sponsor” sites such
as retail partners that have much more polished location information in the game). It seems, then,
that the existence of these Wizarding World sites within Wizards Unite was serendipitous,
although Niantic’s choice to include these particular sites may, of course, have been more
intentional. Nonetheless, this informal transmedia linkage allows Wizards Unite (by way of
120
Ingress) to in fact annotate sites such as that of the crashed Anglia, identifying them more fully
and explaining their meaning. In a sense, this inverts the presumption and unspokenness of
communal memory by instead imposing a digital version of a monument placard or museum
frame, itself generated by the community.
252

To return to our initial argument, the Ford Anglia wreckage in the Wizarding World
offers an example of the many reference points sprinkled throughout the park that call on and
reward transmedial memory, or the presumed memories that constitute a community—saying, in
short, “We don’t need to explain this to you; you’re one of us.” This is the tollgated
consubstantiality, the payoff for identificatory abbreviation, shorthand, and mystification.
Although it might not contribute to immersion in the most direct understanding of the term, I
would contend that it is still valuable for us to consider this rhetoric as an immersion of
belonging. It reinforces those parts of the transmedia substrate that house the audience’s long-
term relationship with a storyworld, validating their investment in it. The example of the Anglia
additionally allowed us to investigate other avenues for sensemaking in the case of an unknown
reference point, drawing on other semantic resources in the park as well as, conveniently, in the
sort of mobile tour guide offered by Wizards Unite. This illustrates the complex and sprawling
nature of transmedia sensemaking, but also gives us new language to think through the issues
Jenkins describes of “redundancy” as a way to distinguish between concepts of franchising and
transmedia storytelling: in these cases, redundancy offers a shortcut to the consubstantiality of
communal memory.
253

More broadly, this case study helps nuance our conceptualization of transmedia
relationships in several ways, adding a different version of “synergy” distinct from “additive
comprehension” as discussed in our introductory chapter. In the context of transmedia
121
storytelling, the theme park does little in the way of creating new and unique content as part of
the storyworld, but it does provide compelling evidence in favor of the argument Christy Dena
has championed, about the value provided by these adaptational texts that goes beyond their
narrative contributions (cited in Jenkins’s “Transmedia Storytelling 202”). Certainly, the
materiality of the experience, the taste of the Butterbeer or the jolting physicality of the rides,
offer something that simply cannot be conveyed by the pages of a book. This is less “additive
comprehension” in the purely cognitive sense, but more in the phenomenological sense; the
memory file I now draw on when reading about a character enjoying Butterbeer is now far more
detailed, the evocation far more visceral. Yet beyond this, there is a synergy located in the
psychological reward of an audience formulating their own linkages between texts. In part, this is
what Janet Murray (as cited by Jenkins) described in 1999 in terms of “the navigational viewer
who takes pleasure in following the connections between different parts of the story and in
discovering multiple arrangements of the same material.”
254
In part, however, this is the value of
consubstantiality and identification in the face of mystification: It is the pleasure of solving the
mystery, understanding the reference, being in the know. When an audience member comes
across a reference that is locked to some, but they themself possess the key to make sense of it, I
would argue that the metaphorical unlocking, that act of bridging one text to another, creates
pleasure above and beyond the sum total of each individual text. It is the incompleteness of
reference points that makes this unlocking possible, and thus the synergy of transmedia.
The final theoretical aspect to summarize here is the value of frustration, a point that
leads us directly back to Burke’s arguments on “frustrations” that in fact lead to “the satisfaction
of fulfilment”—one that, he notes, is “more intense” because of its indirect and delayed
gratification.
255
The Wizarding World theme park makes a strategic choice to leave un- or
122
underexplained references scattered throughout the site, to forego a museum frame in favor of
this game-like obfuscation. This seems like a potentially risky proposition, especially in a tourist
site that may well draw in visitors with minimal storyworld knowledge who are there simply
because they have a ticket to Universal Studios Hollywood that includes the Wizarding World of
Harry Potter in the price of admission. The theme park’s design plays with the threat of
frustrating such unfamiliar fans, with little opportunity inside the park itself to provide Burke’s
fulfilment. Yet the choice to privilege a communal frame, that plays up Dickinson’s ambiguity,
is clearly an appropriate one. For the uninitiated, the references are subtle enough, pleasant
enough, and close enough to generic understandings to be nondisruptive.
256
But for those who
are familiar, these same references recognize, reify, and reward their consubstantiality. Visitors
can comfortably extract meaning where they are able and gloss over places where they cannot.
The park is an artful example of this balance.
Our discussion here has illustrated nicely the coexistence of the individual and the
community, moving from the heterogeneity promoted by individuation towards the homogeneity
(or at least consubstantiality and identification) of communal memory. The creation of a familiar,
communal site has another advantage, however: a verisimilitude that fuels traversal. Unlike the
more touristic environment we might find in other parts of Universal, the Wizarding World’s
aggressive realism and surfeit of Easter eggs promises meaning and narrative extension around
every corner. It is to this dynamic we turn our attention next.

123
Motivation for Traversal

The mystification of boundaries that motivate ongoing exploration takes on,
unsurprisingly, a more material form at the Wizarding World theme park; here, the “locked
doors” of the Wizarding World website are made real and tangible. More generally, however, it
is worthwhile to consider the depth of Rose’s immersion, which focuses on the ever-expanding
content behind such doors, alongside a verisimilitude, a degree of detail in this immersion that
complements its depth. This verisimilitude is closer to Long’s “negative space” or the “Distant
Horizons” described by Friedman: because the world has a history, because there are remnants
(what Harry Potter: Wizards Unite quite literally calls “Traces”) of real-yet-unidentified
inhabitants and activities at every turn, and because some of these stories are in fact
transmedially accessible, the audience is led to believe that, perhaps, they all are. Accordingly,
we can consider first those details of authenticity that make the Wizarding World, as encountered
at Universal Studios Hollywood, feel real, before exploring more fully how part of that
authenticity resides in the seeds of plausible transmedia narratives, the “infinite potential” of
which J. J. Abrams spoke.
257

The sheer physical immersiveness of the park is perhaps its most striking feature, that
sense of being thoroughly dropped into an utterly other reality described by Murray. Regardless
of whether each detail is transmedially meaningful or familiar to the visitor, there is a
completeness and artistry to the set dressing that is impressive, not to mention visually appealing.
Part of the appeal, however, is the abundance of those details that create the sense of a truly
functional, lived-in environment, a magical equivalent of George Lucas’s “Used Future”
aesthetic that made Star Wars such a compelling vision of science fiction.
258
Indeed, the
124
Wizarding World only offers two theme park rides; much of the area’s draw, I would suggest, is
instead atmospheric, as visitors are surrounded by the architecture, artifacts, and overall
ambience of the Harry Potter storyworld. The value in this detailed environment is not simply
due to their transmedial authenticity, per se—in other words, replicating every set piece and prop
from the feature films, or buildings and objects described in the books. In fact, as I have
indicated, I believe that the Wizarding World offers an aesthetically enjoyable experience
regardless of whether one has ever cracked open one of Rowling’s books or taken in any of the
films.
259
Instead, what I mean to emphasize here by “authenticity” is a realism: These worlds
include all the details that one might expect from an actual, operating world, even ones that
might not be strictly necessary, relevant, explained, or recognizable to a fan of the storyworld.
We can recognize several features of design and decor that help accomplish two goals:
making the world feel realistic while also making it feel distinct or in some way special. The
realism of the place is buttressed by careful attention to detail all the way up through the rafters,
where one might find animatronic owls near the Owl Post, or various baskets and other storage
items suspended under the ceiling near Hagrid’s hut. (I have even heard that, at least at some
point, visitors could send mail from the Owl Post that would bear a postcode for Hogsmeade
Village.) The buildings lining the main road in Hogsmeade all have street numbers, just like any
other road in any other village. In the second category, we might consider the various ways in
which guests are made to feel as if, once they enter the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, they
are no longer in Universal Studios, and indeed no longer even in Los Angeles. Instead, the
buildings of the Wizarding World are permanently covered in snow (which can admittedly feel a
bit awkward in the Los Angeles heat). As mentioned, one of the few non-Wizarding World walls
that can be seen from this section of the park has been painted to look like a forest extending off
125
into the distance. The conductor of the Hogwarts Express and the leader of the Frog Choir both
speak in British accents, though other staff members do not. Those staff do, however, all have
themed apparel and even water bottles that look as though they belong in a fantasy film—
notably, different outfits for different sections of the Wizarding World, adding to the feeling that
it is an expansive land with diverse occupations and populations. Even the crates storing mugs
for the cold Butterbeer vended in the streets look appropriately “set designed.”
While the dynamic of communal memory depends on details that are “authentic” in a
transmedial sense (for example, the wands for sale matching the wands seen in the films), I wish
to focus on those seemingly “meaningless” details that meet two criteria: they are not in fact
representing some known narrative point from other texts in the storyworld, at least not one that
is immediately obvious or accessible, nor is their immediate relevance explained. These are
the—sometimes literal—locked doors discussed in our last chapter, those unfulfilled promises of
form, Burke’s “arousing . . . of desires” without necessarily offering “fulfillment.”
260
Here, both
the materiality of the site and the eschewal of a museum frame lead to a particularly pronounced
version of this narrative enticement (and frustration): there is something far more maddening, I
would suggest, about a physical door that refuses to budge (yet lets you peek through a window)
than a website where only certain of the remarks include hyperlinks.
This leads us to our first illustration of such tantalizingly incomplete narrative seeds: the
locked storefronts of Hogsmeade, which might offer interactive window displays (featuring
cauldrons, musical instruments, or Quidditch equipment) but do not allow entry or investigation.
Consider, for example, one shop intriguingly called “The Magic Neep.” This simple example
performs a powerful rhetorical act by indicating that there are other characters and artifacts that
populate this world, yet leaving any potential explanations or narratives attached to such people
126
in a fog of ambiguity. To an extent, “The Magic Neep” is promising as Long’s “negative space,”
creating “narrative playgrounds” that can pave the way for audience or industry expansion.
261

But part of this dynamic emerges, for me, autoethnographically, as I find myself racking my
brain to remember any sort of canonical details about the shop. Here, we are well served by
Jenkins’s reminder of “a world which always expands beyond our grasp.”
262
Such a reference
takes advantage of its position at the very borders of (my) communal memory, unclear as to
whether it exists as part of canon or is yet to be revealed. Thus, traversal is not only motivated in
an outward direction, pushing the edges of the storyworld farther and farther; it also provokes a
return inward, scouring our maps for unexplored or forgotten portions of canonical territory.
These effects are multiplied in our second example: the timetable for the Hogwarts
Express train (Figure 1). Again, to my memory, the train only featured in the books and films as
it traveled between Platform Nine and Three-Quarters at London’s Kings Cross Station and
Hogwarts itself. At Universal’s Wizarding World, however, a detailed poster suggests that the
train in fact stops at numerous other locales. If the schedule is to be believed, it raises questions
about, for example, the wizarding communities of Oxford or Boston, unexplored in main canon
but presumably robust enough to merit a stop on a train that, to our knowledge, is reserved
exclusively for those with magical inclinations. Other stops listed on the schedule refer to cities
unknown to me, immediately raising the question of whether they are settlements like
Hogsmeade that are closed off to the Muggle world and, if so, what magical events might have
taken place there. Aside from the more crass (yet relevant) interpretation of these questions
motivating additional book or movie sales, I would suggest in a more general sense that
motivating a return to visitors’ memories of canon, encouraging them to reflect on and review
127
the stories they know, revives and strengthens their connection to the storyworld. It is
mystification layered atop verisimilitude that fosters immersion.
The final example I wish to highlight is a clipboard mounted in Ollivanders Wand Shop
(Figure 2). Though it might be considered a subtle, even unimportant inclusion in the richly
populated Wizarding World sets, I argue its subtlety is in fact what grants it unique power, and
thus merits our particular attention. The clipboard is not highlighted in any real way; it is
hanging off a nail near one of the shop’s exits—not, for example, placed in the holding area
where visitors wait to enter the Ollivanders experience, nor left in prominent view on a
countertop or table. It is not framed, labeled, or lit in any way to indicate particular importance; it
is, however, positioned in such a way to allow close inspection, should one choose. Upon such
inspection, one would find ornate handwriting, filling a number of rectangular sections with neat
rows indicating what might be inventory lists and business arrangements, punctuated here and
there with names and dates. One name, marked with extensive flourishes, reads “B. Franklin.”
Particularly in the context of other popular culture texts in which the American historical figure
Benjamin Franklin has already been entangled with the mystical, the mysterious, and the
supernatural, it is hard not to immediately wonder whether this antique document is linking the
very same Benjamin Franklin to this storied British wand shop. Even without making such a
connection, the dates identifiable on the document (such as one that appears to be “4. April.
1759”) inspire questions of what might have been going on in the wizarding world so long ago,
given that the major canonical texts rarely go back beyond the past century or so. Finally, to
adopt a more pragmatic, industry-oriented viewpoint, we know that such an item was not simply
generated in the course of business, nor was it stumbled upon in some archive; it took resources
for the team behind the theme park to design and produce this object, and it likely required
128
approval as an acceptable (if minor) addition to canon. Given that, it naturally seems to have a
certain narrative validity and heft behind it, raising additional questions as to its meaning and the
designers’ intent in including it.
The power of such an item is, I contend, in its mystery. It does not immediately map onto
known parts of the storyworld (for example, the character wands located just a few feet away in
Ollivanders), but instead what—as per EA’s “Universe Worthy of Devotion” model—we might
consider “seeds of lore,” hinting at narrative potentialities. Some of the writing is inscrutable, in
some places because it seems to be overly cramped or deteriorated, in others because it may be in
a different language altogether (French, perhaps). Yet just enough is legible (“most obedient
Humble servant,” a portion that seems to read “proves that Independance [sic]”) to entice the
imagination. Borrowing Dickinson’s framework of examining a site at different observational
“speeds,” we might identify three pleasures or values associated with such an object.
263
The
casual glance offers aesthetic satisfaction in the elegance of the lettering, the craftsmanship of
the set decoration, and the buttressing of realism (that this is a real—or at least realistic—shop
that uses things like clipboards to take things like notes about inventory), in a way that goes
above and beyond the material provided in canon. A more curious inspection not only provides
these pleasures, but also sparks the imagination with questions, and even possible answers, about
what new lore is suggested by the object, what new corners of the storyworld and its timeline are
unveiled and illuminated by it. Finally, an investigative gaze, perhaps motivated by the
“encyclopedic impulse” discussed in our opening chapter, might inspire a fan to return to
Rowling’s main texts, fan-generated compendia, or official archives like the Wizarding World
website (née Pottermore), poring over any and all in-world historical references for clues to help
decode or bolster the clipboard’s meaning.
129
These various forms of interplay with other canonical texts may struggle to meet stricter
interpretations of “transmedia storytelling” or “additive comprehension,” but are quite at home
with discussions of communal memory and mystification. Few would argue, I suspect, that the
site provides an impressive experience of immersion that is accessible to all. It is masterfully
crafted, appealing to the senses (with John Williams’s memorable score playing softly
throughout the area, and an array of temptations for the palate at the Three Broomsticks pub and
Honeyduke’s sweet shop), and it draws on generally well-known genres with its bricolage of
vaguely historical, British, magical fantasy themes and aesthetics. The main ride’s simple
narrative of visiting the castle, sneaking off on a dangerous adventure with a group of friends,
and arriving back safely seems satisfying enough, and communicated clearly enough, to
transcend knowledge of the franchise. But the framework of identification and consubstantiality,
whether visitors are fulfilled or frustrated in their attempts to make sense of a given reference,
gives us the language to better explain these variable levels of access and audience pleasure. For
those who are fans of the Harry Potter stories, even casually, there is a magic in being able to see
the characters, places, and activities one has seen on the page or screen come to life in a tangible,
three-dimensional way that can be inspected, touched, and interacted with. These sentiments are
only strengthened by the sense that one has been included as part of the world, treated with a
subtle familiarity and granted access to the locations and activities reserved for the magical
few.
264
And if we attach these additive pleasures to our understanding of the synergistic
transmedia substrate, it offers compelling support for Christy Dena’s reclamation of “adaptation”
within our conceptualization of transmedia texts (as Jenkins concurs).
265
In fact, its mixture of
adaptation, communal memory, and mystification is what makes it a noteworthy example of
what Jenkins poses as a significant challenge in the design of transmedia texts: “the delicate
130
balance between creating stories which make sense to first time viewers and building in elements
which enhance the experience of people reading across multiple media.”
266

The motivation for traversal I have described, however, illustrates the ambiguity that can
surround the connections between (possible) transmedia texts, the gap between Long’s “negative
space” (in which a story has been suggested but not yet told) and Jenkins’s “unique contribution”
(in which new extensions of canon are made explicitly available). Where does something like
“The Magic Neep” fit? Or the unfamiliar locations on the Hogwarts Express timetable? It is
possible that it is currently negative space. It is also possible that these are rabbit holes guiding
me to some other text, possibly an article on the Wizarding World site, that has extended the
storyworld. It is likewise possible that they are references to communal memory, and I simply
lacked the currency to unlock those tollgates. But especially given the lack of museum frame at
the theme park, and the website’s conspicuous resistance to any structured navigation, searching,
or indexing, there is no clear way for a visitor to know.
267
As an umbrella term, “motivation for
traversal” helps capture the range of audience pleasures that attach themselves to various points
along this spectrum from unfulfilled to fully realized narrative promises—and, indeed, the
pleasure that is attached to the very ambiguity itself.
What is particularly instructive about the ambiguously referential details at the Wizarding
World theme park is how fluidly they adapt to this range of audience pleasures, depending on the
level of knowledge a visitor brings with them to the park. It is an elegant array of invitations to
different emotional and behavioral engagements—ones that are, importantly, supported by the
rest of Rowling’s Wizarding World, yet not dependent upon them. A brief example I observed in
the theme park, coupled with a bit of intellectual role play as to its motivations and possible
outcomes, is illustrative. What I noticed was fleeting: a young visitor, waiting in the holding area
131
before the interactive wand ceremony at Ollivanders, investigating the surroundings and
attempting to pry open one of the books positioned as a set piece. Though this moment seems
simple enough, and certainly could be dismissed as mere childhood curiosity, I suggest it is
actually quite telling as to the world Rowling and her cocreators have designed.
Of course, not all visitors sought to inspect the pages of the book, reminding us that many
would not feel the need, and indeed might not have even noticed the opportunity to do so. Such
visitors would nonetheless have a relatively complete experience; they simply represent a
different standpoint and different set of impulses, reminding us that transmedia worldbuilding
offers value across a spectrum of observational paces. Yet the youth noticed the opportunity, and
made the attempt. Such an action rests on the presumption that the book could be openable, and
could offer some additional tidbit about the storyworld. Though there is relatively little within
the theme park that is interactive in this way (other than the electronic wand experiences), I
would still contend that inclusions such as the timetable, the clipboard, and any number of other
props and set pieces encourage and reward the visitor’s attention to detail, justifying this
presumption, and establishing the appetite for further investigation.
The youngster’s efforts seemed more or less in vain. Yet in shutting down further
discovery in this particular site, the theme park opens the door to continued exploration in other
canonical texts or even in one’s own imagination; a combination of Abrams’s “mystery box,”
Long’s “narrative playgrounds,” and Jenkins’s “relations between media.”
268
Here, again, we see
a twist on Jenkins’s “fascination” and “frustration”: trigger fascination by opening a door
offering a glimpse of something new, then shut that door frustratingly swiftly. At this point, a
visitor might move on with (presumably mild) disappointment; they might return to the original
books, films, or ancillary materials to find out more about, for example, any words they’d been
132
able to see, such as the book’s title; they might daydream for a moment or two as to what the
unseen pages might have included; they might discuss these possibilities with their friends,
family members, or park workers; and they might even choose to generate their own fan
productions extrapolating on its meanings.
269
Of these options, a return to source materials is
arguably the most ideal response in terms of the franchise’s stakeholders, but all represent
varying types of engagement, and accordingly represent varying types of audience members. A
single object with the power to tap into each of those different levels of interest seems
pragmatically valuable, and rhetorically rich.
270
It is strategically opaque, its power stemming
from its inaccessibility, and thus the flexibility it grants the audience in choosing how to respond.
It is, in short, Burkean mystification and its capacity for magic.
It is worth noting that part of why this detailed verisimilitude works so well is because of
the vast and rich source material Rowling, along with her colleagues, has generated. They make
the ambiguity between transmedial reference and as-yet-unfulfilled narrative seed viable; a
visitor can plausibly believe that any one of these details is representative of a full-sized
narrative tree found in some other text. Both literally and figuratively, some of the Wizarding
World’s doors open; others remain locked. Yet I would argue that it is the mix between familiar
and unfamiliar details that makes the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios so
uniquely enchanting. Indeed, the interplay between the two seems to be at the heart of
transmedia design, rewarding audiences’ pre-existing relationships with a world while also
expanding its horizons.

133
Conclusion

Bringing together the multiple threads of the foregoing pages, we might summarize the
value of Universal’s Wizarding World thusly: just as Burke would predict, its rhetorical success
lies in the blurred boundaries of consubstantiality, the securing of a common ground through
familiar (generic or transmedial references) yet the formal promise of more to be discovered.
One form of its identification appears as individuation, celebrating the visitor’s consubstantiality
with only a part of the larger wizarding world. It is in this selectivity, this contrast between
different houses and wands, that the world recognizes and honors visitors as special, and as
heterogeneous. A second layer of identification, representing both the multiple and “concentric”
affiliations one might have, taps into the tollgated consubstantiality of communal memory
through strategically subtle, obscured references.
271
Yet the mystification around the edges of
communal memory lends itself to one version of what Burke so beautifully called “the fantastic
Maybe” in the passage cited at the very start of our project here. It is fantastic in its allowance of
fantasy, its imagining of what might be, the “infinite potential” that for Abrams is so precious, so
beautiful in its unknowability, that he cannot bear to look inside his “mystery box.” It is this
power that motivation for traversal relies upon, the understanding that even if not all formally
introduced appetites are sated within a text, the audience will be motivated in imagination or
consumption to complete the form nonetheless.
Particularly given the materiality of the site, the theme park offers an opportunity not
only for multiple meanings of immersion, but also for multiple understandings of community. In
drawing on communal knowledge while additionally providing the artifacts and architecture of a
privileged, magical community, the park invokes both the sense of a wizarding community and
134
an audience community. This conflation is a helpful example of worldblending on top of
worldbuilding, although—as considered in Chapter 5—any conceptualization of “community” in
terms of the audience is fraught by larger politics outside the texts themselves.
These strategies are embodied and enacted uniquely at Universal’s Wizarding World
because it is a contained, controlled, designed space, dedicated to the Harry Potter community,
that offers specific opportunities for shaping physical space and performing identity on and with
the body. In the foregoing chapter, we explored a digital site that, while still being strategically
developed and thematically focused, did not allow for the same sorts of physicality in terms of a
spatial environment and symbolic performances of identity. In our final case study, we shift to a
mobile game that abounds in physicality, yet is interspersed with the real world in a way that
makes contained, controlled, designed experience much more complicated. In short, the case
studies have been distinguished by two (crude) variables: the contained, designed nature of the
experience, and its physicality. As we explore one final combination of these variables, we can
begin to draw conclusions about the commonality of the Wizarding World’s transmedia rhetoric,
the different shapes its dynamics might take, and how immersion can operate in the midst of a
competing reality.
135
Figure 1: The Hogwarts Express timetable
136
Figure 2: A note on the wall at Ollivanders Wand Shop
137

Figure 3: The Mirror of Erised inside Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey
138

Figure 4: The identified Ford Anglia, explanatory signage visible on the right
139

Figure 5: Character-specific wands

140

Figure 6: The display of characters’ wands at Ollivanders
141

Figure 7: Wand wood descriptions at Ollivanders

142
Chapter 4
Harry Potter: Wizards Unite

Narratively, technologically, and culturally, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite represents an
interesting case. Narratively, it occupies a potentially uneasy position: an authorized text that is
technically canonical, but seems to lack the weight of a book, film, or even a play like Harry
Potter and the Cursed Child to carve out large and meaningful swaths of the storyworld.
Technologically, it makes use of the ubiquity of mobile phones and the granularity of mapping
(and tracking) technologies to interweave a location-agnostic narrative into a location-specific
environment. And culturally, it reflects a discomfort with the gravitational pull of screen-based
experiences (like televisions or more traditional gaming) to the extent that such texts detract from
audiences’ engagement with the rest of reality—a conscientious move towards worldblending as
a way to reclaim the physical with the help of the virtual.
272
From an industry perspective, too,
the game represents one solution to the question of how content creators can offer tangibly
immersive experiences that are accessible to a massive audience—in short, how you can scale a
theme park so any fan can have one right in their own backyard. The solution of an AR game in
contrast to, for example, the VR or escape room experiences that address a similar challenge
poses a number of advantages (cost, ease of access), yet also raises a significant question: does
the disconnect between a fictional, narrative, digital world and the mundane, material reality
surrounding a user add to or detract from the experience? Does worldblending, in this sense,
work?
273
Or is the clash too jarring, dissolving the immersion?
Understanding “immersion” the way we have throughout this project, in terms of
individuation (acknowledging the subject within the world), communal memory (rewarding their
143
membership in that world’s community), and the motivation for traversal (encouraging ongoing
exploration of the storyworld), gives us language to talk about the ways in which this
worldblending is indeed successful. Moreover, comparing the mobile game against our other two
case studies allows for nuance in how we think about physicality and materiality, teasing apart a
distinction between “space” and “place.”
274
In short, the game takes advantage of a
phenomenological power invoked by asking its players to traverse space for the benefit of the
storyworld. At the same time, any slippage between the identifiable places in the real world and
the fictional ones mapped on top of them is papered over with a rhetorical device: that the player
is simply undercover, privy to a reality that others are not. These strategies work not simply
because of worldbuilding, but because of worldblending and the transmedia substrate.
At this point, a somewhat more fine-grained depiction of the gameplay experience is
helpful. Wizards Unite is a mobile phone app that, similar to Pokémon GO, is a location-based
game. The clear inclusion of Wizarding World and Harry Potter logos and trademarks renders it
an obviously official part of the transmedia experience; however, beyond the initial loading of
the app, much of this branding disappears in favor of in-world names and iconography. Thus, the
vast majority of the interface and the experience are presented as official communiques from the
Ministry of Magic to a distributed community of supporters, not messages from Warner Bros.
Entertainment, Inc. to a distributed community of fans. Interestingly enough, the call to action
from the Ministry revolves around the Statute of Secrecy, asking players to help respond to a
magical crisis spread across the globe that threatens to reveal the truth about the wizarding
community to Muggles. The narrative surrounding this ongoing crisis, known as “The Calamity”
and purportedly perpetuated by a disgruntled wizard named Grim Fawley, is delivered in the app
through dialogue boxes directed toward the player from such well-known characters as Harry,
144
Ron, and Hermione—all adult versions of the canonical characters, now working in Ministry
roles—as well as other Ministry employees who are unfamiliar, such as Constance Pickering.
In order to uphold the Statute of Secrecy and protect the wizarding world from unwanted
exposure, players in Wizards Unite are asked to carry out a number of tasks on an ongoing basis,
with regular events that call for more specific types of engagement within a set period in
exchange for unique or enhanced rewards.
275
Importantly, these tasks tend to require the player
to travel throughout the physical world in order to find the resources and carry out the
interactions needed. Much as in the Niantic predecessors Ingress and Pokémon GO, the main
interface for the game is a slightly cartoonish map display corresponding to the physical world
that is actually around the player at that moment, featuring (unnamed) streets and an enrobed,
behatted avatar representing the player at their current location. Depending on where the player
is in the world, any number of other locations on the map may be populated with, for example,
tiny three-dimensional Inns, Greenhouses, Fortresses, Ingredients for Potions, Water, items
called Portkey Portmanteaus that look like small pentagonal chests, or, most commonly, symbols
representing things like Hogwarts and the Dark Arts. Inns, Greenhouses, and Fortresses are all
tied to some sort of real-world location (presumably drawn from the original Ingress database or
retail partnerships with companies like AT&T). Due to Ingress’s initial criteria for location
submissions, these locations tend to include public art or some other site of historical and/or
cultural significance; indeed, historical placards like those described by Dickinson are commonly
seen in the game.
276
Ingredients, Portkey Portmanteaus, and symbols (which represent what are
called “Foundables” in the game) are not tied to specific sites, but rather pop up willy-nilly on
the map; in contrast to Inns, Greenhouses, and Fortresses, players also do not need to be
particularly close to these items on the map in order to interact with them. (Figure 1)
145
The most ubiquitous interactions in the game, I would contend, are with Foundables,
categorized into groups such as “Legends of Hogwarts,” “Magical Games and Sports,” and
“Dark Arts.” In the narrative of the game, each such Foundable represents a creature or object
that at some point was important in a witch or wizard’s life. Thus, well-known characters from
the series, such as Sirius Black or Nymphadora Tonks, might appear, but more generic characters
(“Ravenclaw Student”) and objects (“Gobstone Set”) might also be present. These Foundables
are under attack from some sort of Confoundable, often a menacing creature like a snake or
goblin, or the less personified threat of a storm or fire charm. In order to protect the Foundable
and return it to its rightful place in wizarding memory, players must cast spells from the Harry
Potter storyworld, such as “Aguamenti” or “Expecto Patronum,” by drawing the appropriate
symbol on their device screen (Figure 2). Depending on a number of factors, the spell may or
may not be successful. Solving these Foundable “Traces” will reward players with points as well
as records of the Foundables that get added to their personal log or “Registry.”
Casting the spells needed to engage with these Traces requires Spell Energy, which can
be gathered by visiting Inns. Spell Energy can sometimes also be harvested at Greenhouses, but
the main emphasis of a Greenhouse is the Ingredients it provides. Players who have collected
Ingredient seeds and Water can also grow specific Ingredients at a Greenhouse and, by casting
spells, increase its yield. When the Ingredients are done growing, any nearby players will see
them spring up on their map and are free to collect them. These Ingredients are used to brew
Potions; different Potions provide different benefits, such as stronger spells or increased
experience points (“Wizarding XP”) gained, and they also require different Ingredients—and
often different amounts of time—in order to produce them. In addition to Inns and Greenhouses,
the last type of fixed-location in-game experience is the Fortress. Fortresses house Wizarding
146
Challenges, more difficult battles with enemies that can fight back. Fortresses also provide the
opportunity for social play, as any other players in the vicinity can help take down the enemies
you face, and can also augment your abilities in various ways. Successful completion of a
Wizarding Challenge results in unique rewards, as well. Finally, as players travel between these
Traces, Inns, Greenhouses, and Fortresses, the steps they take are counted towards the unlocking
of Portkey Portmanteaus—one might require one kilometer of travel, three kilometers, or more.
When the Portkey Portmanteau is unlocked, it allows the player to step inside a lightweight
virtual reality recreation of a location from the storyworld, like Hagrid’s hut, Dolores
Umbridge’s office, or Borgin and Burke’s Dark Arts shop.
Progressing in the game occurs along a number of different axes. The primary metric of
progression is the player level, which increases at set intervals of Wizarding XP. However, the
player’s profile (called their “Ministry ID”) also displays a number of badges to indicate more
specific accomplishments, like participation in certain events or milestones such as number of
potions brewed. The Ministry ID also has the option for users to include a photograph of
themselves overlaid with any number of items from the franchise (much like a Snapchat filter),
such as house-specific gear or the hairstyle of a well-known character; some of these options are
locked until a player completes a certain task or purchases the item, thus rendering it another
form of progression. Finally, a certain category of resources including Scrolls and Spell Books
allows players to, bit by bit, increase their abilities in any number of ways (for example,
increasing the amount of health reserves they have in Wizarding Challenges) by learning new
skills. A player can determine what sort of attributes they’d like to cultivate by choosing to be a
Magizoologist, a Professor, or an Auror.
147
Players can gain additional bonuses each day they play the game, including a bonus
simply for opening the app, but also daily tasks like visiting Inns and returning Foundables.
Trailing its initial launch, a feature was later added to the game to allow players to collect Gifts
from Inns, Greenhouses, and Wizarding Challenges, and then send those Gifts on to in-game
friends. As with many mobile games, there are in-app purchases available to expedite progress in
essentially every way, from speeding up the brewing of Potions to stockpiling Spell Energy
without needing to visit Inns. Should a player not wish to translate real-world money into in-
game currency, however, there is an extensive and viable gameplay experience with no
microtransactions, subscriptions, or ad viewing needed, beyond the scattered “Sponsor” locations
tied to partners such as AT&T.
Even this cursory overview of the game suggests mechanics and rhetoric of interest to our
overall study. Harry Potter: Wizards Unite is in some ways our most direct example of
worldblending, although its dependency on and connection to other texts reminds us that the
world was built before the audience was integrated into it. Particularly in relation to our
foregoing analyses, however, this case also helps us think through a more directed performance
of identity within the storyworld, embodied and literally mapped onto physical action. This
individuated, personal identification is again complemented by an even more explicit invocation
of communal memory and canonical history. Finally, in both its chronological departure from the
gravitational pull of canon and its requirement of literal movement, it illustrates different aspects
of the storyworld’s motivation for traversal. We return now to our final application of the three
transmedia dynamics we have discussed, considering here how embodiment, narrative, and place
affect their functioning.

148
Individuation

In its narrative and mechanics, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite provides unique recognition
of the individual audience member, their characteristics, and their experiences as part of the
Wizarding World. Some of these techniques are akin to the way this dynamic played out in our
other two case studies, yet the particular opportunities of a game lead to fundamentally different,
compelling ways to tie the player to the world. After recognizing the way the mobile game
acknowledges the transmedia substrate and the reflective identity a player may be bringing with
them from other experiences, I propose here three particularized forms of individuation that
appear throughout the gameplay: a functional individuation (in which one’s abilities and social
role in the game is affected by the alignments one chooses), an embodiment (in which the
physicality of the game’s requirements lends phenomenological weight to one’s performance of
identity), and a narrative positioning (in which a player proxy character helps cement the user’s
relationship to the larger wizarding world).
First, there is a transmedia connection between Wizards Unite and the rest of the
storyworld in that players are invited to add their house and wand details to their Ministry ID.
From my experience, despite sharing login information with the Wizarding World website
through the Wizarding Passport, it seems as though the mobile game still asks which house and
wand you would like to identify you—an interesting design detail. Though we might consider
this a missed opportunity for transmedial integration, it might also be interpreted as a strategic
opening for greater audience agency, particularly given the backlash against the Wizarding
World’s imposition of house membership we will cite more fully in our next chapter. It is also
interesting to note that these identity markers in no way affect the gameplay or game experience,
149
beyond appearing as cosmetic identifiers on the player profile—one could easily imagine, for
example, extra points being awarded for recovering Foundables related to one’s house, or
different wand characteristics offering slight boosts to various player stats or abilities. There are
additional cosmetic options in the camera function of the game, where a player can take photos
of themself adorned with any number of house-specific gear; here, though, players are similarly
not rewarded or limited in any way by their house selection, and can instead choose to use (or
unlock) any and all house paraphernalia. Overall, Wizards Unite seems to take a light hand when
it comes to drawing boundaries around house or wand identification. It does offer certain
information about wand characteristics that appears to be a condensed form of that found on the
website, though all wand variables are self-selected, creating yet another opportunity for
identification—indeed, an audience member could even wind up with three different types of
wands based on their experiences of each of our three case study texts. Thus, the game offers the
opportunity for acknowledgement of a transmedia substrate and, accordingly, continuity in
identity, but leaves that continuity (or lack thereof) in the hands of the user. The game itself stops
short of designing any such continuity into its code (through, for example, the mandatory linking
of a house assigned on the Wizarding World website to one’s house in the game), as well as any
real ramifications for these identity choices.
Instead, Wizards Unite focuses heavily on its own unique avenue for individuation: a
player’s Profession. This form of individuation is far more reminiscent of the “character classes”
Long describes, drawing on the design of role-playing games (or RPGs).
277
In addition to the
basic choice between three Professions, player progression is marked by ongoing decisions about
how to allot one’s resources to gain varying abilities or advantages within that profession—the
“talent tree” system seen in World of Warcraft. At any time, players may change their
150
specialization in the game. Their decisions have appreciable impact on their gameplay
experience, but most noticeably affects the role they play in Wizarding Challenges, and thus
becomes strategically important when multiple players are participating together. As one of the
few parts of the game that involves social interplay, it is particularly intriguing that one’s
individuation is converted directly into a unique social advantage in Wizarding Challenges, as
other players who have chosen different Professions may suddenly be appreciative of, for
example, the healing skills a different Profession is contributing.
This unique individuation offers us an interesting thought experiment in strengthening the
transmedia substrate and taking advantage of transmedia synergies more fully. As it is, one’s
Wizards Unite identity can exist independently from the rest of one’s Wizarding World
experience (with, for example, separate house and wand selections and a Profession only
officially recognized within the game), in a dynamic that could offer refreshing freedom to a
player who wishes to occupy multiple roles in the Harry Potter storyworld. Yet with greater
emphasis on continuity and communication between different factions of transmedia production,
the franchise might choose to, for example, carry one’s Profession identity into other Wizarding
World experiences (adding it to the Wizarding Passport, as a starting point). It might offer
related merchandise (perhaps costumes or props focused not on a Magizoologist like Newt
Scamander, but a generic Magizoologist a player can literally flesh out). It might even treat the
Profession as a narrative seed for new texts about, for example, the training one goes through as
an Auror, given the history implied by the role. But there are more sophisticated opportunities
here, too. Indeed, to the degree that there is canonical precedent for tailoring one’s experience at
Hogwarts (or, presumably, any other wizarding academy) based on one’s career goals, so a
particularly advanced transmedia experience might recognize that a Wizards Unite player intends
151
to become an Auror and, when they visit Universal’s Hogwarts as a student, personalized
commentary from the characters might suggest they brush up on their Defense Against the Dark
Arts studies in order to get the N.E.W.T.s required by the Ministry’s Department of Magical Law
Enforcement. Technologically, we are not so far away from such possibilities—the Wizarding
Passport could quite easily transform into a physical manifestation like the MagicBands Disney
introduced some time ago, or it could simply make use of visitors’ cell phones to transmit
information at the theme park or other controlled environments.
278
Industrially, such integration
also seems plausible given the trends of consolidation Jenkins cited as part of Convergence
Culture well over a decade ago. Particularly within a company like Disney that exercises
extensive control over every imaginable outlet for media production, the prospect of a persistent
and narratively meaningful storyworld identity is intriguing. True, a company remembering, for
example, how a fan performed at The VOID’s Star Wars experience and greeting them
accordingly when they visit a Disney theme park several states away might awkwardly place a
spotlight on the amount of data these companies gather and store, and just how far-reaching their
knowledge actually is. However, it is also worth considering whether this seamless continuity
might also create a deeper, even more magical experience of immersion.
There is another question of continuity to consider, however: the continuity between
one’s in-world identity and their identity in the other arenas of their lives. If the overlaps
between a player’s multiple in-world identities are frustratingly murky, the relationship between
one’s “real” and “wizarding” selves is equally as complicated. In some ways, players are
encouraged to make their Wizarding World self distinct—for example, by selecting a username
that, for privacy and security reasons, does not reflect their legal name.
279
Yet there is a great
deal of flexibility in terms of how closely players’ in-game Ministry ID photo coincides with
152
their more standard visage, ranging from an unaltered snapshot from their device’s camera to a
heavily accessorized and obscured composite image featuring clothing, hairstyles, and masks
from the storyworld. This flexibility also, incidentally, allows for fluidity between reflective and
associative identification, as one can readily adopt the trappings of a favorite character as easily
as they can construct their own unique representation.
Ultimately, however, the worldblending of Harry Potter: Wizards Unite is fundamentally
constrained (and quite reasonably, given the franchise’s appeal to younger consumers) in the
limits the game places on users’ ability to communicate. In contrast to Ingress, Wizards Unite
offers no capacity for in-game chat, precluding the ability of the player to inject their own
rhetoric into the experience. Despite this narrow and muted form of socialization, however, the
game includes specific tasks mandating that players add or interact with a certain number of in-
game contacts. Certainly this is a savvy mechanism to increase the playerbase, but creates
complications in terms of actual social relationships. As these demands crop up, players may
have already exhausted their supply of “real-life” friends they might convert into players, and are
thus forced to turn to social networks like Reddit to exchange information with similarly
desperate players. Yet now the relationship has been established in a different, out-of-game
environment, and especially if such an interaction takes place on a platform like Facebook that is
so tightly connected to one’s “actual” life, worldblending is taken to a different level. Now, one’s
in-game self is blended with their posting history, perhaps family photos, and any number of
other personal details. From one angle, forcing players to tap into other social relationships for
the sake of the game is a threat to immersion—if thought of as a bubble. Yet if we think of
immersion as integration into one’s lived reality, this mechanic accomplishes that by
encouraging the stretching of the storyworld experience past the boundaries of the game.
153
Even for those in-game relationships that do not rely on conversation or content from
other platforms, there is one more creative interpretation of worldblending we might consider,
such that—within the constraints of the game—players nonetheless have the chance to inject
their own experiences and realities. This possibility comes from the way that the game’s gifting
mechanic is not just a function of currency, but also one of identification. Gifts cannot be
purchased; they must be acquired through gameplay. Accordingly, each gift is associated with
the particular real-world site at which the player secured it, and annotated with the location’s
name, city, and photograph. When such a gift is sent, the recipient is likewise able to see this
information about its place of origin, and thus understand that the sender of the gift was in fact
physically at that site. Strangely, even this minimal communication carries meaning, identifying
some small truth about who the sender is and what they have done. In my case, I gave careful
thought to whom I might send a gift from a particularly prestigious location—announcing, for
example, that I had been to the theatre to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Other gifts
deemed too close to my home would be reserved for players I especially trusted, while those who
shared gifts from my city would inspire a camaraderie through this consubstantiality. Crude as it
may be, the gifting mechanic represents a surprising form of identification, in which the places
one travels transmits a story, however ambiguous, about who they are.
This example has raised two issues in particular: the embodied physicality of one’s game
experience and, therefore, identity; and the consubstantiality players might feel with others in the
game. Embodiment occurs when the player performs a physical task on behalf of digital rhetoric.
The game has become translated into the player’s body, and through their actions they further
translate their environment into one laden with in-world meaning. In one sense, this is
identification in that the player’s in-world and out-of-world selves are now fully consubstantial,
154
literally moving as a single entity. In another sense, this material experience inscribes the
storyworld’s meanings more indelibly into the mind of the player, as they connect symbols to
locations and narrativized actions to physical movements—an augmenting of memory creation
that dates back to the ancient Roman “memory palace” techniques discussed in Chapter 2.
Although this theoretical assertion is harder to prove, I would suggest there is also a
psychological sleight-of-hand that occurs when, by performing substantive tasks in the service of
a game, audiences naturally become more invested, and identify more strongly with it.
280
The
most basic mechanics of the game urge players to physically traverse space, asking more of them
than, arguably, other types of mobile or console games. Of course, this might be a chicken-or-
egg question: players may feel invested in a game as a result of spending time and effort
(perhaps as a way to justify this expenditure), or players may be more likely to spend time and
effort when already invested in a game. Regardless, if we are willing to consider a relationship
between immersion and the physical performance of identity, a location-based game that is
dependent on such performances represents a shortcut to that immersion.
Embodiment also helps explain the bidirectionality of worldblending—as Long put it,
“opportunities . . . to bring that storyworld back out into their own lives.”
281
Wizards Unite, like
many games, attempts to influence player behavior by enticing them to perform specific tasks at
specific times, but these requests become far more impactful when they entail travel to specific
locations, too. It is difficult to be successful at Wizards Unite—independently of spending real-
world money on in-app purchases—without adjusting one’s physical behavior in deference to its
digital demands, above and beyond the behavioral changes one might expect from other games.
These behavioral changes, much like the unique costumes one might don when visiting
Universal’s Wizarding World, represent what we can think of as the other side of worldblending,
155
in which a digital or fictional world not only makes reference to and builds on mundane reality
but also in fact visibly alters it. Its effects ripple out of its own sphere into the so-called “real
world.” Another variable to consider is the comparative ephemerality of these changes. Whereas
a visit to Universal Studios may change one’s appearance and activities for a day or two, a
committed Wizards Unite player might regularly alter their behavior for months on end. In fact,
the effects of their additional outdoor movement could reasonably change their physical fitness,
as well—which would be, in fact, a welcome outcome in the eyes of John Hanke.
282
A player’s
embodied self has thus been marked by the storyworld in ways that carry over into their
experiences outside that world.
283

In terms of consubstantiality, one final component of the game illustrates perhaps the
clearest, most strategic way such identification is encouraged: appropriately enough, with a
character named Constance, who is positioned in the game narrative as a proxy for the player.
Such empathetic identification is different from how I have considered associative identity,
where a fan might choose an in-world character they particularly admire out of a number of lead
characters (the “aspirational heroes” of a “Universe Worthy of Devotion”). Instead, Constance
seems to act and speak as the player might, were they themselves granted dialogue and
externalized emotions. In other words, the game (like many games and, indeed, texts such as
books and films) does not directly allow for the player to have any narrative agency such as
choosing paths in a branching narrative, selecting dialogue responses from prewritten options, or
even interacting directly with characters as one might in immersive theatre. The player does still
have in-world presence inasmuch as characters address the player directly, but the player is not
given a way to respond. Instead, the character of Constance Pickering (“Junior Undersecretary,
Ministry of Magic”) stands in for a silent player, asking the questions and expressing the
156
emotions the player cannot. For example, although Harry and Hermione might at times address
the player by their in-world name, other interchanges have Constance asking the other characters
to explain certain parts of the narrative and gameplay (as when she inquires of Harry, “So a
strategic use of Runestones might actually allow you to recover certain specific Foundables?”).
In other interactions, Constance exults in a way one might expect of any franchise fan, clearly in
awe of the main characters’ celebrity status. (An example of this is seen in Figure 3.) The use of
Constance as a proxy for the player offers an additional avenue for identification, separate from
the reflective identity we have discussed, not truly associative, disembodied and detached from
physical experience, yet offering an avenue into the storyworld. This empathetic identity clearly
stakes out a place for the player to stand within the narrative and in relationship to canon. In fact,
the role that Constance and the player are given is one that subtly builds on their position as
audience members or fans through the consistent invocation of communal memory.

Communal Memory

Memory plays an important part in the Wizards Unite mobile game, not simply because
the experience taps into presumed reserves of audience knowledge, but because the importance
of storyworld memory is woven throughout the game’s raison d’être as it is presented to the
player. Specifically, Foundables represent important memories held by some witch or wizard; the
risk is that these memories (or, in some cases, physical versions of it) will be discovered by an
outsider and, further, ripped permanently from the minds of those who held them. Thus, the task
at hand is to return the memory (or physical version) to the community member or location
where it rightfully belongs. Given this, the game represents a rich case study for us to examine
157
the function of memory in the Wizarding World from a variety of angles, including the way
memory can operate as a privileged commodity that defines the boundaries of a community but
also the varied ways memories might be annotated to different ends, as well as how memory fits
into transmedia storytelling more broadly.
To begin with, Wizards Unite makes use of memory as a way to delineate, validate, and
constitute a community both implicitly (with regards to the out-of-world audience community)
and explicitly (with regards to the in-world wizarding community), and conflating the two
creates an interesting version of consubstantiality. Implicitly, the game operates much in the way
that Universal’s Wizarding World does, in that an uninitiated player can still engage with and
appreciate some unknown reference, but those who are familiar with canon will likely have a
deeper emotional response to, for example, a dementor threatening Sirius Black or Newt
Scamander struggling with an executioner. Indeed, recognition may bolster the meaning and
reward associated with less-charged Foundables, as well, such as a favorite character (perhaps
Luna Lovegood) or point in canonical history (the Hogwarts Yule Ball during the Triwizard
Tournament). In addition to those scenes, people, creatures, and objects that hold a particular
importance in the source material, though, there are many others that may be of only passing
interest to an audience member—for example, Canary Creme or House of Exploding Snap
Cards—or, indeed, not recognizable at all (an unnamed Ministry of Magic Administrator).
Again, these mundane, generic, or ambiguous references operate like they do in the theme park
to both increase the world’s verisimilitude through its details, but also to motivate traversal back
through canon (as I, for example, struggle to place a canonical memory of a fire-breathing
chicken).
158
Regardless of how familiar an audience member may be with one of the game’s
Foundable memories, however, the narrative of Wizards Unite makes clear that the memories are
of value to (a fictitious) someone, and they are particularly of value to the extent that they are
kept from certain other someones. In other words, the role of the player is to explicitly police the
boundaries of who may be privy to in-world memories, reifying the value of those memories as
the property of “Those Who Know” (or “Those Who May Know”). In fact, it is suggested that if
ordinary Muggles were to come across this knowledge, it would be devastating to the wizarding
world as we know it. The game’s very loading screen is branded with “REPELLO
MUGGLETUM”—even for those not fluent in Latin, the message is clear. (Figure 4) Of course,
as the game finishes loading and presents the player with access to its map, locations, and
objects, the implicit message is that they have been granted passage, the spell mandating “no
Muggles allowed beyond this point” inapplicable to them. This drawing of community lines,
positioning of the player within those lines, and plea for the player’s support in maintaining the
sanctity of communal memory all work together to subtly and playfully represent the “secret
society” of audience/wizard community invoked in the previous chapter.
The line between the (actual) audience community and the (fictional) wizarding one—the
difference between the Wizarding World and the wizarding world—is pleasurably blurred in
Wizards Unite. The experience flits deftly between memories that a fan might be expected to
share and other memories that may, in fact, represent transmedia extensions, known only to those
in the world and offering enticing narrative seeds to those outside it. How the game manages
these varying degrees of communal knowledge is best illuminated by a discussion of annotation
or, to reengage with the analysis from our last chapter, a more explicit museum frame within the
game’s interface that explains and contextualizes in-world memories. I divide the references
159
made by Wizards Unite into four categories, each representing a different relationship with the
player.
The first type of reference in Wizards Unite—one that I consider rare—is the
unannotated, unmarked reference to canon. For example, one of the locations a player can
explore via a Portkey Portmanteau is Hagrid’s hut; another is Dolores Umbridge’s office. To my
knowledge, there is no place within the game environment itself that labels these locations, but a
player might draw on context clues or familiarity with the films to identify them. In this case,
this knowledge does not grant the player any particular advantage, and the locations are (much as
in Universal’s Wizarding World) aesthetically pleasing without one knowing what else has taken
place there; the additional information a player retrieves from communal memory simply adds an
additional layer of meaning and, I would argue, the concomitant pleasures of recognition and
self-satisfaction.
284
Other references may seem slightly more confusing to a player who is
unfamiliar with the lore, such as the transformation of a Boggart from a terrifying spider into one
wearing roller skates (or from an intimidating Professor Snape into Snape wearing an elaborate,
feminine hat). In general, however, these Easter eggs are much like those at Universal Studios in
that they do not exclude uninitiated audience members, but they do reward fans who hold
reserves of communal memory.
The second, closely related category of references are those that are annotated, but the
annotations hold deeper meaning if one reads them against canon—in short, one meaning is
offered explicitly by the game, but those who are equipped with additional information from
communal memory benefit from additive comprehension. Take, for example, the identifying
subheadings that introduce the player to Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley, and Harry Potter
himself. For a player with absolutely no prior familiarity with the franchise (admittedly difficult
160
to imagine), they might only make sense of these characters based on the information provided
by the game: Hermione is “Senior Minister, Ministry of Magic,” Ron is “Proprietor, Weasley’s
Wizarding Wheezes,” and Harry Potter is “Auror, Department of Magical Law Enforcement.”
However, when read against years of communal memory that followed these three characters
from their first year at Hogwarts until the epic “Battle of Hogwarts,” these taglines operate more
like a miniature “Where Are They Now?”. Admittedly, the information may not be necessarily
new to readers who, for example, saw what was to become of our heroes at the end of Harry
Potter and the Deathly Hallows, or followed their adventures in Harry Potter and the Cursed
Child. Similarly, the game itself does reveal snippets of history that offer uninitiated players a
greater understanding of whom these characters were prior to the now of the game. Nonetheless,
the emotional engagement is different when one reads the game-provided annotation with an
understanding of what came before, rather than one who accepts the technically accurate, if
historically incomplete annotation as their starting point for making meaning. Simply put, for a
fan, these characters are old friends and their current titles serve as updates the player can
celebrate, knowing what it took to get there. Rather than a simple lack of annotation, then, this is
annotation that offers meaning to both longtime audiences and the uninitiated, but the
contextualization of that meaning varies between the groups. With the unannotated references
described above, some things (like Hagrid’s hut) can only be precisely identified if one
recognizes them, but otherwise hold little in-world meaning; for these partially annotate
references, some things (like Hermione’s new title) simply make more or a different kind of
sense when one is equipped with communal memory.
A third categorization of annotation is that which is aligned with (or we might say
redundant with) source material. In particular, the game enters each Foundable a player
161
successfully returns into a Ministry of Magic Registry, which includes a snippet of text about the
item in question. (See Figure 5) This official description reads much like a placard at a museum,
and thus would seem to be an example of the museum frame discussed earlier. However, as it
appears in Wizards Unite, the museum frame does not necessarily position the audience as an
outsider, presumed to be lacking in communal knowledge and thus requiring the annotation. A
number of factors work together to instead make the Registry entries a comfortable part of the
transmedia world, rather than a threat to one’s fannish bona fides. To begin with, the Registry
descriptions are relatively hidden in the interface; one could imagine a player never even coming
across one. This can be contrasted against, for example, a museum piece where the placard is
prominently displayed, and it would be difficult to approach the item on display without being
intercepted by text. In this way, the Registry entries are perhaps more like the references found in
the book accompanying a museum exhibit, available for the truly curious who seek them out.
Second, the Registry makes a sort of sense as an in-world construct. Of course the Ministry of
Magic, bureaucratic behemoth that it is (and one currently run by renowned perfectionist
Hermione Granger), would seek to thoroughly catalog all parts of the Calamity they are in the
midst of battling. These records are plausibly made available for, say, younger or foreign
members of the wizarding world who would not necessarily be expected to recall, for example, a
young Ginny Weasley. In addition, the Registry being positioned as part of the world, rather than
a device breaking the fourth wall to help out a clueless player, seems somehow less
condescending—here, Ginny Weasley is not “Ron’s younger sister who plays a major role in
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” but instead is profiled in terms of her biography:
“The only daughter of Arthur and Molly Weasley, the talented Ginny emerged from the long
162
shadows of her brothers to play as both Chaser and occasionally Seeker for the Gryffindor
Quidditch team.”
It is the fourth category of annotation, however, that most powerfully renders the
Registry as a valuable transmedia asset rather than a simple primer: annotations that diverge
from source materials or the player’s readily accessible memories. Whether these are truly
“negative space,” narrative seeds not yet brought to fruition, or simply files from canonical
archive too dust-covered to recognize, these references operate to motivate traversal. They might
motivate Pierre Lévy’s “collective intelligence” (a 1997 term Jenkins has applied to transmedia
consumption behaviors) as players share notes with fellow audience members; they might
motivate John Fiske’s productivity within players’ own minds or taking on material shape; they
might motivate a return to canon as, a Burkean appetite stimulated, players seek the satisfaction
of completing the reference.
285
Take, for example, the Canary Creme Foundable seen in Figure 5.
As can be seen in the screen capture, Registry entries indicate the person or place each
Foundable is “returned to” upon the player’s successful recovery. In this case, the Canary Creme
has been “returned to” someone named “Elsie Barrett.” The character is not immediately
identifiable to me, and thus activates one or all of the responses I have indicated as possible
routes of traversal. As another example, there is a Foundable called “Music Box” that features a
small troll in traditional ballerina attire. Although this is a believable part of the storyworld, it is
not one that holds particular value to me; if it ever held a place in my communal memory, it was
easily forgotten. Yet within the game’s narrative, this music box represents something important:
the criterion for becoming a Foundable is, explicitly, the high value attached to the object by
wizarding world denizens (See Figure 6). We are led to wonder, then, for whom is this music
box important? At minimum, we are given the clue that this particular Foundable is to be
163
returned to Romilda Vane. Even if a player recognizes this character, it is likely new information
that Ms. Vane has some deep attachment to a music box with a balletic troll. Much as in
Universal’s Wizarding World, the game offers no further explanation as to her story and her
connection to the Registry item, thus motivating varying types of traversal to break through the
mist occluding these corners of the storyworld.
This coy mystification at the boundaries of communal memory is not relegated to names
buried several screens deep in a Registry entry. Indeed, the game’s narrative includes the in-
world characters in these musings, attempting to draw links between memories (or texts). Our
player proxy, Constance Pickering, both demonstrates her communal memory (informing or
reminding the audience in the process) and acknowledges the effort required in excavating other
references: “Sirius Black was a former inmate of Azkaban -- could this be a continuation of the
previous strain of Foundables we observed recently? He was distantly related to the Malfoys by
marriage... but he also opposed everything they stood for.” A similar statement reveals, perhaps
empathetically, her own uncertainty in pinpointing these memories: “If I’m not mistaken, this
umbrella stand was kept by the Black family in their home at 12 Grimmauld Place. The Blacks
were also pure-blood with questionable ideals... is that the connection to the Malfoys?” Harry
engages in a nearly identical exercise: “If I’m not mistaken, Madam Bones wasn’t a member of
the Order of the Phoenix. Odd that she would show up here... she did die fighting Voldemort.
Maybe that’s the connection?” The question is asked of the player, as though their own resources
of communal memory make them just as capable of answering.
This variety of annotation styles elegantly accounts for a range of relationships between
the player and the history of the storyworld: presuming (and rewarding) canonical knowledge,
explicitly reiterating this communal memory in a way that is narratively justified without being
164
condescending, and provoking uncertainty around the edges of the storyworld. Taken as a whole,
they seem to offer something for everyone, as it were, validating long-time fans and providing
them with something new without utterly alienating those less familiar with the storyworld’s
intricacies. There is enough consubstantial ground on which to stand, yet a mystified suggestion
of new territory to explore.
Zooming out from the specific presentation of historical references, however, the game
illustrates a more broadly reverential relationship to canon and memory that is instructive in
terms of transmedia storytelling—somewhere beyond worldbuilding, closer to a “worldtending,”
or carefully maintaining that which has been developed. Both Wizards Unite and the play Harry
Potter and the Cursed Child occupy an interesting space in the largely single-authored Harry
Potter storyworld: though both are official texts ostensibly sanctioned by J.K. Rowling, both feel
somehow tentative in their storytelling, commenting or building on the core mythology without
assertively driving it forward. Despite these two texts occurring in a sort of “post-mothership”
timeline, when Harry and his friends are adults, both exhibit a gravitational pull back towards the
canonical past in their narratives. The plot of the Cursed Child play, like that of the mobile game,
takes place in the period when Harry and Hermione both work at the Ministry; it is now their
children who are attending Hogwarts. However, the bulk of the play brings the characters back to
various moments already known to audiences as part of canon, playing with the particularly
fannish pleasures of “what if” that tweak certain variables in a known scene or present it from an
alternate point of view. In this way, it operates almost as an homage to communal memory rather
than a new contribution to the corpus. Similarly, although Wizards Unite has its own
contemporary plot featuring new witches and wizards, the crux of their drama revolves around
the known past. Certainly, this phenomenon has its practical reasons (for example, being able to
165
reuse a library of already-generated, already-approved material, and avoiding the complications
of getting major new canonical extensions approved by an author who exercises particularly tight
control over their storyworld).
However minimal their narrative contributions may seem, however, a rhetorical
assessment reminds us that these texts may still be performing valuable work in stoking audience
relationships to the storyworld. Much like the pleasures that differentiate adaptation and
extension, there are different pleasures associated with reflecting on a canon as opposed to
building it ever outwards. For Burke, this is the difference between information and eloquence,
the transmission of knowledge contrasted against the satisfaction of form.
286
And given the
multidirectionality of the “traversal” I have thus far advocated, our conceptual framework
accounts for and values the way texts motivate movement not so much into uncharted canonical
territory, but rather back towards the comforts of home.
287

Both texts offer particularly interesting love letters to the communal history of the
Wizarding World by, at their core, pleading with audiences to preserve the canonical history they
know and love. In Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, this plea is made implicitly through the
course of a narrative that questions a pain point in canonical history, but then reveals how the
story in fact should have played out that way. Wizards Unite more explicitly asks its players to
restore canonical memories in the form of Foundables, lest they be lost. Indeed, the game’s
rhetoric around the preciousness of memory is fairly explicit. (Figure 7) In the process, players
are invited to engage with canon without disrupting it, a pleasant middle ground in which they
can observe various parts of the storyworld they love, but also be included as participants within
that world. Much like Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, players are invited to revisit a
variety of characters, creatures, and moments from canonical history, performing some
166
narratively small role that would not noticeably change the storyworld as they know it. And in
both cases, fans are warmly welcomed into the world (in the theme park, identified explicitly as
Harry’s “friends” and addressed in familiar tones by the characters); not only do the characters in
Wizards Unite seem desperate for the player’s help, a number of the Foundables will even
express a small gesture of gratitude towards the fourth wall after the player has saved them from
their harrowing encounter with a Confoundable.
In the case of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child as well as Wizards Unite, features like
the Time Turner and Foundable memories solve the problem of how to re-enter a timeline that
canon has already closed, allowing audiences one more chance to see and visit with characters
who are otherwise gone (or at least older). Despite the recognition in Rose’s writing for
audiences hungering for “more,” this dynamic suggests there is also a craving for “more of the
same.”
288
This coincides, too, with Burke’s argument for the repeatability of the pleasures of
form—that knowing how the story will end in fact adds to the anticipatory pleasures of taking
the trip once again. A cynical view might position this as opportunistic media producers milking
new dollars and audience engagement out of halfheartedly recycled content; a more generous
analysis would consider it an example of how communal memory may have value in a
transmedia world.
Wizards Unite makes use of multiple narrative and interface elements that seem to show
great deference to the storyworld that has come before it, taking seriously the tasks of
worldbuilding, worldblending, and worldtending all at the same time. It invokes a secret
community and reinforces the player’s privileged position as a member; it offers a number of
ways to honor, reiterate, and extend audience knowledge; and it provides an opportunity to
(re)visit the people, times, and places that might be particularly near and dear to a player’s heart.
167
Although we have already considered ways that these references to communal memory motivate
traversal of the storyworld, it seems justified to devote our continued discussion to the more
material way such traversal plays out. Thus, our next section will consider an important dilemma
for a worldblending enterprise: navigating the conflict between competing worlds.

Motivation for Traversal

In contrast to traditional video games, which can carve out a virtual landscape without
requiring attendant physical movement, and theme parks, which carefully construct and shape
physical reality, games like Wizards Unite must find a way to utilize the resources of a pre-
existing world—Dickinson’s “spatial topoi”—in the service of their own narrative meaning.
289

The game asks users not simply to traverse metaphorical storyworld space, but to traverse literal
physical space. Yet in doing so, players unavoidably come into contact with places that already
have (Muggle) meaning. At first glance, such conflict seems an obvious threat to immersion, a
deliberate smashing of the first, second, third, and fourth walls (and the protection they
provide).
290
Yet clearly the Wizarding World has either deemed this threat irrelevant, determined
the potential rewards outweigh the threat, or decided that, rather than threatening immersion,
such techniques in fact enhance it. There is likely some validity to each perspective. What I
propose here is that we consider more directly what potential advantages literal traversal might
offer. Then, we can assess the narrative justifications for this mechanic. Finally, we can make
use of Burke’s inextricable pairing of identification and division to entertain the idea that, by
placing the storyworld in direct conflict with mundane reality, the mobile game manages to reify
immersion through consubstantiality.
168
Given the pragmatic challenges associated with developing a game that takes its players
into the real world, in contrast to the plethora of mobile and console games that quite
successfully draw players into a virtual world instead, we might reasonably raise the question of
why Niantic (and Warner Bros.) chose the central mechanic they did. At the most basic level, it
is understandable that Niantic would seek to replicate the historic, groundbreaking success of
Pokémon GO by translating another storyworld into a map-based mobile game; for the Harry
Potter rightsholders, too, there would of course be an appeal in attaching themselves to such a
product. (To be sure, the franchise also need not put all its eggs in this proverbial basket, as other
games can be and have been developed for more traditional platforms.) Users would likewise by
then have become familiarized with the style of gameplay due to Pokémon GO, and would likely
also be eager for the far more complex mechanics offered by Wizards Unite. At a more
hypothetical level, we can posit a philosophical appeal aligned not only with John Hanke’s
agenda but with a more general cultural pushback rippling through society, suspicious of the
thrall exerted by screens and social networks. And similarly, players may feel good about
working in a bit of exercise and fresh air alongside their entertainment; in the age of
multitasking, this is yet another opportunity for hyperefficiency.
291

Despite the reasonable arguments in favor of such location-based gameplay, however, the
game’s narrative as presented to the player only minimally supports such a choice. There is,
generally, the idea that Muggles might stumble across any of these wizarding world materials
now scattered everywhere, and thus there is an urgency for this distributed network of players to,
in essence, clean up the mess. There is also, of course, a substantial amount of leeway we might
grant any storyteller, that “suspension of disbelief” that Janet Murray argues is more aptly
characterized as “the active creation of belief.”
292
I must recognize too that there may be subtle
169
narrative threads in the game’s dialogue that I simply have not come across, or have forgotten.
Yet in comparing Wizards Unite to Ingress and considering how the game might have dealt with
this disconnect, we can better appreciate the subtle ways in which they have taken advantage of
the divide to (at least implicitly) strengthen players’ identification with the Wizarding World. It
is an important conflict through which we can test more fully the precepts of immersion, as
contradictory interpretations of the concept would judge the game in accordingly opposite ways.
Ingress had the benefit of being designed in such a way that the narrative and mobile
game complemented each other, without the deferential “mother ship” relationship imposed on
Wizards Unite as it joined a decidedly well-established franchise. This elegant parallelism meant
that, in Ingress, there was clear in-world reasoning as to why players needed to use the app (it
allowed them to recognize and interact with a certain kind of transdimensional energy), why they
would be visiting these particular locations (they reflected locations where such energy had
naturally clustered either in response to or as the cause of whatever physical place was there),
and why their gameplay was not in defiance of reality, but rather woven artfully throughout it. It
was, at its heart, far more ARG than straightforward mobile game, with plausible explanations
for the app’s existence as part of the real world and plausible roles the players were taking on
through their in-game behaviors.
In contrast, Wizards Unite spends little time justifying, for example, why the user’s
device might have magical properties; its existence is instead ignored. There is little explanation
why Inns, Greenhouses, or Fortresses are attached to specific locations in physical space.
Instead, the game’s interface explicitly recognizes both the Muggle and Wizards Unite meanings
at each such site, with photos and sometimes thorough descriptions in the game that underscore
the physical reality. (Figure 8) Although the statue shown in Figure 8 may suggest connection to
170
some storyworld, it seems decidedly in conflict with that of the Wizarding World, an uphill
battle for Murray’s “active creation of belief.” It seems that the game might have been well
served, in this case, to rely on a conflation of space with place. Put simply, a space may be any
three-dimensional chunk of reality (physical or virtual), but when meaning is attached to it, it
becomes a place. Had Wizards Unite simply treated the physical world as mere space,
privileging only its virtually assigned meaning in acknowledging any given place, it might have
softened the jarring disconnect between the game’s magical places and the pre-existing real-
world places to which they are mapped. Indeed, this is largely the approach it takes for the
placement of Foundables, Ingredients, and certain other items: they are distributed in space, but
the game only recognizes their place in terms of in-game meaning.
293
Thus, I might find a dragon
liver placed at the same location occupied in the real world by a restaurant, sign, or some other
site with meaning. For the purposes of the game, any such meaning becomes irrelevant and
ignored. So why, then, at Inns, Fortresses, and Greenhouses, are the pre-existing places
recognized, included, annotated, even visually represented within the game’s interface? Why
take the chance of puncturing the immersive bubble with the awkward juxtaposition of worlds?
Under a model of pure worldbuilding, the design decisions made by Niantic and Warner
Bros. may seem inadvisable; looked at as worldblending, it makes sense on a number of levels.
For one thing, it represents an important ethical agenda: given the nature of Niantic’s other
products and the database they have been built upon, and particularly John Hanke’s larger
mission of using his work in the service of connecting players more deeply to their environment,
it makes sense that Wizards Unite would follow in the footsteps of its predecessors by annotating
real-world locations with oft-overlooked or unknown meanings and history. It is a sort of
educational value add, one might say, that allows developers, funders, and players to tout a sort
171
of moral advantage in an industry that is often criticized for being both mindless and predatory.
The “information” button providing access to any additional textual information is subtle,
offering up context only to those who are looking for it. Incidentally, this sort of optional
museum frame makes an interesting rhetorical move, too: in this case the player is positioned
less as an outsider to the wizarding world and, amusingly, more as a tourist in the Muggle one. In
this sense, we might even interpret a museum frame as reinforcing narrative immersion by
otherizing the player’s competing reality.
A more conjectural explanation is that, by attaching the intangible place in a virtual world
to a physical landmark—literally, something that marks the land—the experience is granted a
concomitant “realness,” a phenomenological weight. It may be that there is a value in anchoring
one world to the other, if nothing else giving players a concrete goal to identify and aim for
rather than being buried in their phone as they navigate to an arbitrary spot on a map—thus, I
might walk to the nearby park, rather than just walking to the nearby Fortress. From a theoretical
perspective, we might muse on this as a sort of borrowed tangibility, or a strategic rhetorical
choice in which the sheer materiality of an object is more important than any competing or
disjointed meanings that may be attached to it.
The analysis I find most interesting, though, is that identifying both Muggle and
wizarding places occupying a single space is an extension of the “secret code” we saw at play in
Universal’s Wizarding World, and its rhetorical power is thus increased, not diminished, by the
contrast of the two worlds. The game acknowledges that most people might simply see a statue
or a plaque, but the player is equipped with a special tool and privileged access to see the site’s
additional, magical potential. Though it is not explicitly invoked (an arguably missed
opportunity) there is a compelling narrative precedent within the Wizarding World texts that
172
supports such an interpretation. Consider, for example, the secret entrance to Diagon Alley that
required tapping a brick wall in a precise sequence, the headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix
(12 Grimmauld Place) that magically stretched into existence and then vanished to protect its
inhabitants from discovery, the Parisian statue that provided access to a hidden wizarding world
locale in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, or even the disguised entrances to the
Ministry of Magic located in an unassuming phone booth and a public restroom. The implicit
extension of a larger transmedia truth—that wizarding reality is hidden in plain sight, unnoticed
amidst Muggle reality—is rather striking. And given the rhetoric woven throughout Wizards
Unite emphasizing how important it is that what we might consider “normal people” not find out
about the magical community, the fact that the player is both allowed to see and entrusted to
protect this world makes it clear that they are, in fact, special.
With this move, Wizards Unite moves closer to the ARG model of transmedia
storytelling that leans into the schism between the mundane and the fantastic, that takes over the
real world and leverages its quotidian resources as a way to strengthen its own immersion. It
represents what I consider the magic of “the second look,” suggesting there are additional layers
of meaning residing in everyday places and objects that yield additional rewards (quite literally,
in the case of Wizards Unite) for those with the knowledge or skill to access them. In one sense,
it dilutes the narrative concentration of a storyworld, adulterating it with reality. In another sense,
it extends the storyworld indefinitely by infiltrating the entirety of an audience’s existence.
Yet Burke’s understanding of identification provides a slightly different explanation for
why such rhetoric ought be read as immersion: by recognizing (and subordinating) physical
reality, the game in fact sharpens its line in the sand, making it clear what the game world is by
contrasting it against what it is not. Wizards Unite’s Greenhouse interface illustrates this
173
particularly neatly. (Figure 9) This particular Greenhouse is associated with the large mural wall
located on one of the buildings at the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank; though the image changes
over time, the game has included a picture of one such mural as a way to represent the site. In the
app, however, we literally see the mural as filtered through the glass of the Greenhouse, and thus
through the lens of the wizarding world. The implied message is not always made so obvious by
the interface, but here the metaphor is beautifully straightforward: that world is outside, other,
not ours.
294
Where we are is someplace different. For Burke, no matter how tightly
interconnected and seemingly indistinguishable some artifact(s) might be, the power of symbol
rests in its capacity “to divide speculatively the empirically indivisible.”
295
Accordingly, the
power of humankind in wielding such symbols rests in identification, “in choosing ‘where to
draw the line’” that links those on one side at the same time as it divides them from those on the
other. By juxtaposing the “normal” and the “special” meanings of a place within the app,
Wizards Unite subtly reinforces this distinction between the two worlds, and the player’s
privileged identity in being able to traverse both.
We can close our discussion of how traversing the physical world functions to reinforce
the fictive one with two final illustrations of how the game’s mechanics draw boundaries
between competing realities. The first is the game’s (largely optional) implementation of more
paradigmatic augmented reality, in which the device’s camera captures an image or live feed of
the actual environment while the game overlays virtual content atop it. Any one of the
Foundables a player encounters, then, can appear in the app as though the creature or object were
actually in the space around the player (I recall a wizard occupying a café with me; I might also
find, for example, a pixie hovering above the sidewalk or a fire-breathing chicken terrorizing a
strip mall). To a degree, this use of augmented reality (AR) is a way of fulfilling Hanke’s interest
174
in grounding the mobile experience in the physical world a player is occupying, ensuring that
both are given a presence on the digital screen. More simply, there is an amusing novelty to the
feature, with plenty of opportunity to stage and share especially ridiculous scenes. In terms of a
larger transmedia rhetoric, however, such augmented reality suggests two intriguing truths. One
is that, rather than drawing a player out of their mundane reality into the fantastical one, the
game seeks to blend the two, thus making them feel as though the magical one can in fact coexist
with everything they know. The second is that, through this “magic window” type of AR, players
are given the ability to see what others do not, manifesting their consubstantiality with others in
their special community.
296

The final metaphor by which Wizards Unite situates its storyworld is through a “portal”
relationship, where its Portkeys open up passageways a player must physically enter in order to
access some alternate wizarding place.
297
After a player has traveled the required distance to
unlock a Portkey, they can place it in an AR “magic window” screen such that it opens up an
oval window offering a peek at some known locale in the Harry Potter storyworld. Players then
must move physically towards and through this virtual portal; when the game has determined this
movement has been successfully accomplished, it converts the view on their screen to a 360-
degree view of the magical location wherever they point it. Although of course they can see,
hear, smell, feel, or potentially even taste the real world all around their phone, the screen itself
has now excluded that reality in favor of the magical one. This is a more narrow understanding
of immersion, I would argue, but one that is simply an alternate implementation of the same
transmedia rhetoric we have been tracking: the wizarding world is nested within the very reality
players are used to, and they have been granted a certain privilege in accessing it. There is thus
175
both a consistency to the game’s overall argument and a diversity in the way it expresses this
message.
In addition to the now-familiar metaphorical traversal of the storyworld through
references to communal memory, Wizards Unite as a case study introduces a more material
understanding of traversal, while also placing the storyworld in conversation with competing
realities. The game manages to turn this competition to its advantage, however, highlighting
division in the service of Burkean identification. Rather than simply papering over
inconsistencies in the audience’s experience, implicit invocation of the Wizarding World
narrative has the capacity to explain these inconsistencies as proof of the audience’s specialness.
If one part of immersion is consubstantiality, or the audience’s belonging in a community with
specialized knowledge and insight, the game’s provision of access to such privileged
information—the creatures and events others cannot see—is immersive. Wizards Unite thus
suggests a comfortable paradox of worldblending: by welcoming in the competing messages of
other rhetorics, a storyworld can make use of them as Dickinson’s topoi, resources to be co-
opted in the service of a more robust immersion.

Conclusion

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite represents a multilayered understanding of immersion, one
that confronts material challenges directly and, through worldblending, uses competing meanings
as topoi for its own ends. It additionally evinces a continuation of the rhetorical threads we have
seen throughout the Wizarding World, linking to existing individuation that is part of a
transmedia substrate while creating further nuance through new lines of personalization.
176
Throughout, it advances narrative in a canonically deferential way, referring consistently back to
communal memory in ways that more deeply inscribe consubstantiality—identification in terms
of what knowledge is shared. Combined, these dynamics carve out a distinct place for the player
within the storyworld’s secret society.
Particularly when viewed alongside the online Wizarding World and the theme park
version of the world found at Universal Studios, Wizards Unite suggests that immersion may not
necessarily require the erasure of competing realities, but rather the strategic integration of
personalities, locations, and tangible experiences that reinforce the phenomenological reality of a
storyworld. The game makes use of physical space to ground and embody its rhetoric. So too is
the performance of an in-world identity made material, carried out in and through the “real”
world. The miles one logs in service of the Ministry of Magic cannot help but instill a deeper
investment to that cause, identification drilled into the player through repeated action.
Narratively, as well, the game plays with parallels between in-world and out-of-world selves: it
cherishes, recapitulates, and shares communal memory that is as important for an audience
member as it is for a member of the wizarding world. Such strategies allow for a more
comprehensive identification, and a loop of reinforcement in which rhetoric invites the behavior
that grants additional validation to the rhetoric. What remains now is to assess what these
learnings mean for our understandings of transmedia storyworlds, as scholars and audiences but
also as designers and producers of such rhetoric. Along the way, we can adopt more fully an
evaluative stance that treats these worlds, following Burke, as “equipment for living,” taking
seriously their capacity to inspire, include, motivate, and shape its audiences inside and outside
their stories.
177

Figure 1: Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, showing the map interface with player, Greenhouses,
Inns, a Fortress, Traces, an Ingredient, Water, and a dialog box.
178

Figure 2: Casting a spell to dismiss a Confoundable
179

Figure 3: Constance Pickering as proxy for the player
180

Figure 4: The game’s loading screen
181

Figure 5: Registry entry details
182

Figure 6: Narrative explanation of Foundables
183

Figure 7: The game’s valuation of memory
184

Figure 8: In-game description of site
185

Figure 9: A Wizards Unite Greenhouse

186
Chapter 5
Conclusion

In this dissertation, my purpose has been to advocate for the value of a rhetorical
understanding of transmedia storyworlds. By applying dramatistic concepts to a range of case
studies within the Wizarding World, I have sketched out an initial framework of transmedia
rhetoric that homes in on textual properties that invite psychological responses—a mutual,
identificatory process that establishes meaning and inspires action within an audience. More
philosophically, I have sought to use the tools that Kenneth Burke has provided to understand
humanity as a way to more analytically appreciate the structure, value and, bluntly, magic that
vivifies our strategically designed microcosms. Doing so is, for me, not just an amoral exercise
in cataloguing phenomena but rather, following scholars like Dickinson and Burke himself, part
of a larger critical enterprise in recognizing, responding to, making use of, and improving upon
these texts.
298
It is a project of understanding how storyworlds operate in the interest of
improving our relationships with them.
To those ends, what has this project yielded thus far? We can begin with a recognition of
our underlying principle, the commonality in Burke’s rhetoric and, accordingly, in our
transmedia rhetoric: identification as the fundamental mechanism by which texts provide
resources (information, narratives, perspectives, arguments, what have you) and audiences move
to assimilate or organize that knowledge. Remember that for Burke, the interplay between the
author of a message and its audience can range from strategic manipulation to the innocuous
appreciation of art.
299
Likewise, this understanding of identification recognizes the spectrum of
audience agency, choosing in certain cases how to position themselves, what identifiers they will
187
attach themselves to, what knowledge or beliefs they will incorporate into their lives.
Identification thus becomes the basic tool of transmedia rhetoric, such that we can point to
specific opportunities within a text for an audience to adjust their understandings of self, story, or
world.
Moving from the abstraction of this definition into the specificity of how it functions, we
have split the concept of identification into three transmedia dynamics, all of which are
exemplified across the Wizarding World. The first of these is individuation. In contrast to the
sense of “identification” we might initially associate with audiences and popular culture—in
which a reader or viewer organically feels an affinity with some character or situation in the
text—individuation banks more on the inextricable Burkean relationship between identification
and division. To be (like) one thing is largely meaningful to that extent that it entails being
(unlike) something else, and accordingly, individuation is a means of singling out what is special
in terms of what is different.
300
For the Wizarding World, this means assertively organizing its
visitors in terms of meaningful personality characteristics, providing an official system for
interpreting and assigning those identities, and then carrying that distinction throughout the
franchise. Through increasingly granular identifications and divisions, the Wizarding World aims
to reflect, consolidate, and express deep internal truths about its constituents. It is not just an
operation of translating the audience into the symbology of the storyworld, but rather offering
the symbology of the storyworld as a way for audiences to better understand themselves.
The second dynamic, of communal memory, depends on the consubstantiality of Burkean
identification, or a common “ground” of meaning and knowledge.
301
What we share is what is
consubstantial to us. That gives it power in defining community, which can therefore be
converted into a test validating membership in such a community—if you share this knowledge,
188
we share this ground of consubstantiality. Especially in the case of transmedia storyworlds, each
member of the audience will understandably know different things.
302
For strategic purposes,
too, there is no particular advantage to aggressively excluding those who might not
understand.
303
Yet through lightly veiled or coded references to canonical history and other texts
within the storyworld, a transmedia rhetoric can subtly reward audiences for the knowledge they
do have, the degree of their consubstantiality. This understanding of consubstantiality is very
different from that invoked by Larkin, in which complete and straightforward coincidence of
knowledge is the goal. Here, the playful coyness of Burkean mystification might be added to our
discussion as a way to explain how a strategic shorthand, an abbreviated identification of events
or characters, is in fact preferable as a way for audiences to earn their consubstantiality.
Throughout the Wizarding World texts we have discussed, verbal and material choices have
worked to achieve the balance necessary for approachable-yet-enjoyable texts in a transmedia
storyworld.
304

Third and finally, the activity, the movement, the pull and the drive that animates
audience movement through a storyworld has been understood as motivation for traversal. In a
sense, our three dynamics build upon one another—understanding identification and division
helps make the consubstantiality of communal memory make sense, and understanding the
amoeba-like nature of consubstantiality already suggests ways that audiences might be inclined
to expand the borders of what they know (or at least defend those borders by reiterating
knowledge). Mystification plays a role here, too, in blurring the edges of what can or should be
known at all. Another Burkean concept, however, more directly explains the urge, the hunger,
and the satiety that characterize audiences’ ongoing consumption of a storyworld’s narratives:
the intrinsic appeal of form. At this point we must recognize a notable departure from Burke’s
189
original intent, which is why I have only loosely indebted this dynamic to the Burkean concept
of form. For Burke, the appeal of new information is distinct from and in fact directly opposed to
the appeal of eloquence in form.
305
While audiences crave the completion of a form, this does not
mean the same thing as craving completeness of knowledge. Yet in the case of transmedia
storytelling, the two often seem inextricable: whether the information needed is new or already
known, the hints and allusions sprinkled throughout transmedia texts cannot help but invoke a
similar desire to see the reference through, to make sense where sense can be made. The desire to
see a narrative seed brought to fruition is, to my mind, psychologically of a piece with the desire
to see a thematic or stylistic thread carried to its logical conclusion. Moreover, we can be
allowed some latitude in extending Burke’s 20th-century assessments into the markedly different
“convergence culture” and the transmedia norms to which it has given rise. Finally, in evaluating
(and largely collapsing) the relationship between information and eloquence or form, we also
gain the advantage of accounting for the multiple directions in which an audience might traverse
a text: outward, to acquire new knowledge, yet also inward, to reiterate and appreciate that which
has already been discovered. Again, our case studies illustrated this encouragement of movement
and understanding throughout the Wizarding World as it projected endless possible linkages,
some canonical dead ends (though not necessarily imaginative ones) and others viable
connections to other texts and stories.
Taken as a whole, I submit these three dynamics as possible defining characteristics of
immersion. Just as I do not intend for this to be a comprehensive summary of all possible
transmedia dynamics, I would not suggest that this is the only helpful way to think of immersion.
Yet I do think it provides a helpful degree of specificity as well as an indication of how this
immersion is achieved (or at least, how a text can set itself up to be immersive). I have observed
190
a readiness to assert the immersive properties of storyworlds (in scholarship as discussed, but
also in industry and more common parlance) in a way that relies on the term’s face value or
intuitive evocations. In many cases, this is appropriate enough—I in no way disagree that such
worlds are immersive, and we can be reasonably confident that different parties agree in a
general enough way on what the word means. However, I do have some discomfort around the
way the word seems used interchangeably to mean a property of technology (something like a
VR headset or a theme park fully blocking out competing sensory input) as opposed to a property
of psychology.
306
Even when we agree that the power of immersion rests in a user’s mental
engagement rather than their physical constraint, definitions like Murray’s and Rose’s suggest
fairly different interpretations of what that engagement looks like. I am also unsure that many of
the experiences commonly called “immersive” would stand up to the expectations established by
either of their definitions. As a first step towards considering immersion as an end state with
multiple possible rhetorical paths leading towards it, then, I propose our three dynamics as three
such paths: a sense of self-in-storyworld, investment in (and continual cultivation of) some
particular body of knowledge, and an impetus for exploration and revisitation.
Throughout this dissertation, I have also suggested another framework that might be used
to achieve immersion: in contrast to the worldbuilding that largely (and temporarily) replaces an
audience’s reality, a worldblending that meaningfully integrates it. Again, this is not by any
means a requirement for immersion or transmedia storyworlds, nor is it necessarily superior in
any way. The Wizarding World has, I would contend, made artful use of both worldbuilding and
worldblending, especially as it has shifted its emphasis from the past tense of canon to the
present tense of its audience and moved into a period of worldcultivating. Worldblending has the
capacity to address potential competition between realities head-on, co-opting (or honoring)
191
them rather than attempting to override them. It makes use of spatial and material topoi, per
Dickinson, but also the pre-existing identities of its audiences, turning reality and audience both
into transmedia extensions. There can be something uniquely exciting about provoking this
altered perspective on familiar things, and there is also the potential to create more meaningful
experiences that are inherently tied more tightly to audiences’ lived realities. Worldblending
more explicitly invokes the bidirectionality that is implicitly part of worldbuilding: the ability of
audiences to shuttle meaning from their everyday existence into a storyworld and likewise
shuttle storyworld meaning into the rest of their lives.
307
Finally, this language helps us recognize
the relationships between ARGs and transmedia texts and speak more concretely about the
mechanics that may well be used in both.
308
Worldblending describes what ARGs necessarily do
(make use of non-fictive resources as the foundation for its added fictive meanings), while also
explaining what transmedia storyworlds may do at times.
Lastly, as a similar contribution to speak more concretely about the synergy that
characterizes transmedia storyworlds, I propose the value in considering transmedia substrates.
Again, I recognize that in many cases intuitive understandings of synergy are sufficient, while
also seeing academic and practical value in considering specific rhetorical mechanisms and
manifestations. Throughout this work, I would suggest, three such mechanisms are clear, even if
interconnected: the self-identity and commitments an audience brings to a text based on previous
encounters with the storyworld; their pre-existing investment in, relationships to, and
understandings of characters, events, or philosophical positions in that world; and the catalogue
of reference points available, back to which new texts might link. For each of these, the fact that
they have been established outside a given text and are then revitalized grants them additional
value, a combination of their historical weight (meaning that beliefs or emotions already held
192
may feel more robust when activated anew) and the energy the audience contributes in retrieving
and connecting these intertextual points.
309
The idea of a transmedia substrate thus gives us a
location and language for the supposedly “extra” value made possible in a synergistic
relationship.
This brief summary of concepts developed through this dissertation is intended as an
abbreviated synthesis of scholarly contributions but, more importantly, an initial blueprint for
further work in transmedia rhetoric. In that spirit, we can now turn our attention more directly to
what else ought to be considered, not only in assessing our conclusions in the current work but
also in guiding future projects.

Further Considerations

In our introductory chapter, I acknowledged how a rhetorical perspective grants us, to
some extent, the luxury of focusing our attention on meanings or potential meanings located
within texts themselves. This does not, however, authorize the privilege of ignoring the actual
ramifications of such texts, particularly when there exist such compelling accounts of those
results. Despite all that the Wizarding World might have done well in laying out its transmedia
storyworld, there are a number of considerations that ought give us pause in any academic,
professional, or cultural conversation about its value.
The first of these is the inherent conflict between official transmedia design and organic
audience response.
310
Certain of the advantages described here have only been made possible by
the phenomenal budgets, authority, and distribution capacity of Rowling and Warner Bros.
Outside of pragmatic factors, there is also the rhetorical issue of mystification: especially in the
193
case of the Sorting Ceremony, it is precisely the distance created between the user and the
creator that gives rise to a feeling of “magic.” Uncertainty around how exactly the algorithm
works, having a (powerful) external voice declare some Truth about me—these factors were
directly responsible for my reactions, for the impression it made on me and the almost reverence
with which I was willing to treat it. To me, the experience had value in the same way the
denizens of Oz placed value (and faith) in their wizard, in a way they could not had they seen
him frantically working his setup behind the curtain. Yet the exact features that made the Sorting
Ceremony impactful for me and, presumably, others were the exact features that made it at best
unappealing and at worst threatening to other visitors. Jackson Bird writes in his memoir, Sorted,
about the upset caused by Pottermore’s Sorting Ceremony to the degree that it threatened fans’
own, pre-existing determinations of their house identities.
311
Bird cites “countless quizzes
online,” but also “personal reflection,” as tools fans had already made use of in converting the
Wizarding World’s symbology into their own individuated identities. Fans had no need for
Pottermore, yet the authorial weight of Rowling’s hand in the online ceremony caused distress
over how to handle a potential disconnect between her determination and what they thought they
knew to be true. The same mystification that for me was magical was, for others, a source of
anxiety, leading to fans comparing notes or, in Bird’s case, signing up to take the ceremony over
and over, trying to eliminate whatever of its fog they could. Bird also points to the literal
investment fans had in items, even body art, declaring their pre-Pottermore house identity;
what’s more, these fans had deep community ties bound up with their houses.
312
I spoke with
Flourish Klink, one of the Harry Potter fans Henry Jenkins interviewed for Convergence Culture,
and though even at that point the ongoing “Potter war” over intellectual property revealed a
marked disconnect between Warner Bros. and their audience, it is disturbing to see how that
194
trajectory has continued.
313
For one thing, remaining unaware of demographic preferences is
simply bad business, a shortcoming demonstrated by, as Flourish relayed, the theme park’s utter
unpreparedness for the comparative popularity of Slytherin items. A common theme throughout
fan commentary is their willingness to actively overlook or forgive mistakes on the part of the
franchise, chalking up a great deal to cultural obstacles or financial necessities. Yet surely it
seems that, in this case at least, the magic of the Sorting Ceremony could have been preserved
for those who would appreciate it while also allowing for a self-serve magic option. Would such
deference to fans’ agency really have diluted the Wizarding World’s transmedia rhetoric, or in
fact strengthened it through worldblending?
This early evidence of fan exclusion is far more unsettling in the context of Rowling’s
personal rhetoric, which has driven a far more painful wedge between certain of her audience
members and the storyworld they would otherwise occupy. Without rehashing the contours of
Rowlings’ opinions, we can recognize the complications that occur with an author’s public
statements of political views not only run contrary to the meanings audiences have derived from
their writings, but also specifically target populations who had cultivated deep, powerful,
urgently necessary affinities with their storyworld. In the case of Harry Potter, it had been a
remarkable and important resource for many—one summarized the experience as, “It feels like a
coming home to myself.”
314
The storyworld had been a respite, “a safe place,” particularly for
those who were able to map their own marginalized identities onto metaphors found in the books
(which time and again denounced the intolerance launched at those of supposedly lesser
ancestry, misunderstood species, and even Harry himself, forced to hide away in a closet).
315

There is only so much an audience can be asked to willfully ignore, only so much hope that can
be salvaged from a text so aggressively “soiled.”
316
Certainly there are many stories to be
195
recognized in illustrating the depths of this issue, most centrally those of trans and nonbinary
fans who have been so directly hurt by Rowling’s stance. Yet in undercutting the energy,
meaning, and care poured into a storyworld by some of its most ardent fans, Rowling risks
decimating the overall cultural value of Harry Potter, with any number of casualties in that
process. One perhaps unexpected example of the text’s importance struck me in particular: a
palliative care pediatric oncologist who cited Harry Potter as “the one text that he can talk to
parents who are about to lose their children, and children who are dying, about, together.”
317
It is
a rhetorical tragedy that something that once held such power could be so devastated by post-hoc
politicization.
Taken together, these two instances of the clash between Rowling and her fans suggest a
number of lessons for us. The first is a recognition of the existence, and in some cases necessity,
of a division between the franchise and its community. This may be a survival strategy for
audiences, but it lends itself to a parallel academic decision to be made: how much, for any given
text, to prioritize official rhetoric over that of the audience.
318
In the case of the W/wizarding
W/world, it may well be that unofficial texts evince important elements of transmedia rhetoric
and substrates, whether those be similar to or notably distinct from, or superior to, what we have
analyzed here. Flourish, while acknowledging the need for and value of Pottermore, nonetheless
had the sense that the site, as “an enclosing of the commons,” also offered a substantially diluted
version of the experiences fans had already developed. Thus, Rowling’s “virtual Hogwarts”
(Horne) ought be assessed in conversation with, for example, “Virtual Hogwarts,” or any number
of other non-Rowling projects that were working towards similar goals as (and, it would seem,
predated) Pottermore.
319
The second lesson to be learned here is the need to temper any
enthusiasm towards the Wizarding World’s artful nurturing of its audience community,
196
recognizing that such rhetorical resources are limited by external political realities undermining
their inclusivity. No matter how magical and personal the franchise’s identity-building resources
are, they cannot overcome other rhetoric that, for people like Flourish, “made it clear that, to her,
there was specifically no place for me in her world. Me as a human being.” Yet as our third
lesson, we can more explicitly consider worldblending in political terms, as a counterbalance
against the limitations of one authorial viewpoint with the intentional inclusion of audiences’
preexisting identities, values, commitments, and perhaps even politics. Barring that, however,
our fourth lesson urges a more thoughtful approach to industrial rhetoric that, at minimum, seeks
to avoid direct conflict with the audience’s own rhetoric. The Wizarding World’s Wand
Ceremony offers an interesting point of comparison. Flourish suggests there may have been far
less friction in the fan community around official wand assignments, in part because of the
greater ambiguity around wand meanings, but also because there were far fewer stakes attached
to fans’ already-held beliefs about their own identification. On the one hand, focusing official
efforts on such a second-tier layer of in-world identity would feel like an odd sort of consolation
prize when, clearly, house membership is far more meaningful to its audience. Yet the example
does suggest that franchises might do well to be aware of where their rhetorical offerings might
be bumping up against fan activity, create openings for fans to more effectively import their
already established identities, and reserve their more aggressive campaigns for comparatively
unclaimed territory. This is not to say that franchises should feel held hostage to fans having
staked early claims, but it is a savvier way of treating the long-term relationship between
audience and storyworld as a more respectful courtship.
The last consideration I will raise here is my concern over the amount of data that is
necessarily and incidentally collected in the service of “magic.”
320
This (often willing) sacrifice
197
of privacy in the name of enhanced experience is laid out particularly elegantly in WIRED,
where Cliff Kuang cites not only the explicit “magic” of Disney World but also the subtler magic
of “context-aware technology” such as Google’s synergistic linkage of data from users’
locations, searches, and communications to provide a startling degree of convenience.
321
Yet,
Kuang’s point is that such convenience has rapidly become not startling, but rather expected. As
this interconnectivity (and the data mining that powers it) becomes a more comfortable part of
our daily activities, users are less and less likely to question the acceptability of such practices,
and what other purposes their data might be used for. This is the dystopian half of the utopian
frictionlessness promised at sites like Disney World. Kuang notes that theme parks have been
“granted permission to explore services that might seem invasive anywhere else,” and to an
extent that’s fair: I am not particularly worried about what companies might infer from my ride
prioritization, nor even my Wizarding World Patronus. What does worry me, however, is that the
aggressively friendly and safe façade of such intellectual properties makes it all too easy to
forget how freely and widely such data can spread. The pathways become even shorter in the
case of certain technologies and business relationships, such as Oculus and Facebook; as argued
by Monroe, we should be paying very close attention to the growing ability of a company that
has already gorged itself on users’ information to have even greater access to their most deeply
personal data.
322
This, then, smacks of a worryingly predatory magic. There are no easy answers
here, given the very real desire for such experiences, and the requirements of making them
happen. However, especially when recognizing the rhetorical advantages to individuation, as
well as location-based and site-specific texts that might make use of similarly individualized
data, we would do well to balance this with recognition of the plausible risks involved. As Burke
198
reminds us throughout his work, mystification is a property of magic and courtship, but also one
of hierarchy and power.
323

These, then, are the primary caveats to my work here. In addition to the discussion and
analysis merited by these considerations, there are of course countless other opportunities to
enrich our thinking on the topics I have raised throughout this dissertation. I will close, then, by
suggesting a few broad paths for future work on transmedia rhetoric, some directly continuing
the project I have begun here, some representing alternative or complementary routes.

Future Work

This project has been one of defining and testing precepts of a transmedia rhetoric, using
as its input various texts from the Wizarding World. Although of course many conclusions may
be drawn about the Wizarding World in the process of understanding and illustrating its
rhetorical operations, my focus was far more on its functionality than on the particulars of its
content. As such, I have disregarded questions of ideology and messaging that, of course, should
be of interest to any rhetorician, and is certainly the purview of other projects positioned more
unambiguously as “Potter studies.”
324
It is my hope that my framework here can be of use in
such scholarship, whether focused on the Wizarding World or other storyworlds. If nothing else,
however, future development of a model of transmedia rhetoric should likely be in conversation
with work contributing more specific insight into the subject matter under investigation.
In a similar fashion, particularly as we look at the manifestation of transmedia rhetoric
in different environments, there are any number of literatures that could be drawn in to help
clarify the nuances of individual mediums or components. Although the project of a truly
199
transmedia rhetoric will always return to more universal properties of such rhetoric as it
necessarily crosses diverse media, it would nonetheless be well informed by, for example,
conflicting or complementary expectations within different mediums. It must be conversant, if
not fluent, in its constituent languages before it can propose an effective lingua franca. In this
study alone, we would benefit from additional integration of scholarship on web design, theme
parks, and games. More generally, work on worldbuilding may shed light on the structural nature
of the worlds themselves that may clarify how a rhetoric animates audiences’ journey through
them, particularly in terms of the resources it may use and the goals it seeks to accomplish.
One further hope for future growth in this area immediately threatens a tradeoff between
breadth and depth, at least as undertaken in any one project (or perhaps by any one author), yet
the ideal for which I would aim is a polyvocalic criticism, much in the way both Jenkins and
Rose have accomplished, that considers the perspectives of audiences and creators alongside
what is embodied in the text itself. The field of fan studies has made important strides in
recognizing and advocating for audiences.
325
I do not mean to suggest somehow that there are
helpless and downtrodden giants of mass media now in need of their own advocacy work (nor,
for that matter, would I characterize fans as helpless and downtrodden, though we can still
recognize their comparative marginalization and imbalances of power). That said, particularly in
the interest of critiquing and improving rhetoric, it is imperative to take into account the legacies,
expectations, perspectives, and requirements shaping the production of media. Moreover, models
for superior rhetoric cannot truly be valuable unless they are also viable, which calls for a
sympathetic and allied critic. Without the voice of the audience, we are on unsteady ground in
claiming any changes that ought be made. Without the voice of industry—as well as its ear—we
are unlikely to realize them.
200
And so we can end much as we began: with Burke. The larger aim of Burke’s enterprise
is summarized in a phrase that to him was so critical, he wrote it on the wall above his library
window: “ad bellum purificandum,” explained in A Grammar of Motives as “Towards the
Purification of War.”
326
Michael Halloran and Scott Wible, in analyzing this expression, remind
us that for Burke, war was all too visible, real and visceral, living through the early 20th century
and seeing firsthand the widespread devastation of war in its impure form. His alternative was
rooted in intellectualism, converting physical conflict into symbolic ones, and in tolerance
through concerted attempts to understand the other. Indeed, his goal was deeply democratic in
nature, with language from Burke himself (in an edited piece released in 2007) that hints at the
exact social dynamics Jenkins was tracking in Convergence Culture: “a pyramidal social
structure,” true, but at least one “in which people think of themselves as participants.”
327
Thames
has further dissected “ad bellum purificandum” in linguistic terms, excavating an alternative
reading that replaces “war” with “the beautiful.”
328
Such an interpretation inspires, for me, a
related mission statement: Towards the Purification of Magic. Surely, we need not strive to
dispel all the mystery in the world, the fascinations of courtship. Surely, by the very nature of
human interaction, the vulnerability required to be positively moved by one another necessarily
leaves us open to more negative manipulation, and we would not give up the former merely to
protect ourselves from the latter. Our moral obligation, then, is to understand this magic as best
we can, preserving what is beautiful about it while steering it away from the threats posed by
imbalances of power. It is to embrace the joy, the inspiration, and the immersion our storyworlds
have to offer, while engaged in a continual project of refining our approach in developing,
assessing, and participating in them.

201
Notes

1
Burke, Attitudes, 416.
2
I credit John M. Kephart, III, with relaying this tale to me.
3
Kostelanetz, “About Kenneth Burke.” As Kostelanetz notes on page 24, he is using language
from Howard Nemerov.
4
Burke, Attitudes, 179. I use the term somewhat loosely here.
5
Burke, “Rhetoric—Old and New,” 203.
6
Wolf, “Introduction,” 6.
7
Dickinson, “Memories for Sale.”
8
Burke, Philosophy, 293, 304.
9
This definition was offered by Sasha Anawalt in conversation with Joe Rohde.
10
Freeman and Gambarato, “Introduction,” 9, includes a similar characterization, citing Jeff
Gomez: “Transmediality is a ‘concert’ of practices.”
11
Freeman and Gambarato, “Introduction,” 1. See also Wolf, “Introduction,” 7–11.
12
See Jenkins, “Origami Unicorn,” 95–96 for his definition of “transmedia storytelling.”
13
Jenkins points us to Kress; see Bezemer, “Key Concepts.”
14
See Jenkins in both “Transmedia Storytelling 202” and “Origami Unicorn” (especially p. 123)
where he attributes this idea to “Neil Young, the man in charge of the Lord of the Rings franchise
for EA”—that is, the major video game company Electronic Arts (quotation describing Young
taken from “Origami Unicorn,” 107).
15
Jenkins, “Origami Unicorn,” 95.
16
Jenkins, “Origami Unicorn,” 114.
17
Wolf, “Introduction,” 7.
18
Jenkins, “Origami Unicorn,” 114.
19
See in particular Jenkins’s 6th point in “Transmedia Storytelling 101.”
20
Wolf, “Introduction,” 13.
21
Wolf, “Introduction,” 7.
22
Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 202.”
23
Just as Long describes the “meta-medium” on p. 140 of “Creating Worlds,” this might be a
“meta-game.”
24
This responds to a question Jenkins raises explicitly in “Transmedia Storytelling 202.”
25
Derhy Kurtz and Bourdaa, “Transtexts”; Freeman and Gambarato, “Introduction.”
26
For Burke, see particularly Rhetoric of Motives, xiv, 177. For Jenkins, see “Origami Unicorn,”
129, as well as “Transmedia Storytelling,” “Transmedia Storytelling 101,” and “Transmedia
Storytelling 202.”
27
Jenkins, “Origami Unicorn,” 97. Jenkins cites both Umberto Eco and Janet Murray in
establishing this idea; see also 116 (as well as “Transmedia Storytelling 101”).
28
Jenkins, “Origami Unicorn,” 97; Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 101.”
29
Quoted from a June 2003 interview in Jenkins, “Origami Unicorn,” 103.
30
See Note 28. Sanchez’s comments corroborate my understanding of Brent V. Friedman’s
assessment of players in ARG-type mobile games, in which the physical tasks being asked of
users increases their “investment” in the experience (loosely quoted from personal discussion).
31
Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 101.”
32
See, in order, Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 101”; Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling
202”; Jenkins, “Origami Unicorn,” 114, followed by Wolf, “Introduction,” 7, and Jenkins,
202

“Transmedia Storytelling 202”; Derhy Kurtz and Bourdaa, “Transtexts,” followed by Jenkins,
“Transmedia Storytelling 101.” See also previous notes to clarify individual citations.
33
I am thinking of the fitting parallel here with Jenkins’s observation in “Origami Unicorn,” 127,
that “there has to be a breaking point beyond which franchises cannot be stretched, subplots can’t
be added, secondary characters can’t be identified, and references can’t be fully realized. We just
don’t know where it is yet.” Indeed, at this point it seems that nearly every word of Jenkins’s
core definition has been challenged or negotiated in some way.
34
See Jenkins, “Adaptation, Extension, Transmedia,” for a treatment of one such issue.
35
See Derhy Kurtz and Bourdaa, “Transtexts,” for a version of this argument, recognizing “three
mutations: a technological one, a narrative one, and a participatory one” on p. 1 that lay the
groundwork for “the rise of transtexts” referred to in their book’s title.
36
See, for example, Jenkins, “Origami Unicorn,” 119, for his recognition of medieval transmedia
practices around the Bible; reference to Freeman, 2016, is made in Freeman and Gambarato,
“Introduction”; I believe it was the 2014 International Communication Association conference in
Seattle, Washington, where I saw Scolari speak of his work on Don Quixote as a transmedia
property; on worldbuilding, see Wolf, “Introduction.”
37
Freeman and Gambarato, “Introduction,” 3.
38
Freeman and Gambarato, “Introduction,” 2.
39
Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 101.” Jenkins, “Adaptation, Extension, Transmedia” and
Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 202,” both provide helpful discussion and language to more
profitably include and distinguish work that may not naturally meet the constraints of his original
definition. This broader perspective I refer to here represents the position taken by, for example,
Derhy Kurtz and Bourdaa (encapsulated in their term “transtexts.”) and as Jenkins cites in
“Adaptation, Extension, Transmedia,” elegantly presented by Derecho (drawing on Derrida) as
“archontic literature.” There is a fourth variable pointed to by Freeman and Gambarato,
“Introduction,” as well as by Derhy Kurtz and Bourdaa, “Transtexts,” attributed to Jenkins: that
of geographically and culturally based variations in transmedia texts, but I am less inclined to
include this as a contested axis in the overall understanding of “transmedia” as a concept.
40
Freeman and Gambarato, “Introduction,” 3.
41
Jenkins, “Origami Unicorn,” 97. For the latter half of my argument here, see Rose, Immersion,
82, 173, and Jenkins, “Origami Unicorn,” 106.
42
Jenkins, “Origami Unicorn,” 104.
43
Freeman and Gambarato, “Introduction,” 2.
44
Freeman and Gambarato, “Introduction,” 2.
45
Wolf, “Introduction,” 6.
46
Wolf, “Introduction,” 6; Derhy Kurtz and Bourdaa, “Transtexts,” 5.
47
Freeman and Gambarato, “Introduction,” 2.
48
See, for example, Jenkins, “Origami Unicorn,” 104, linking Ivan Askwith to “synergistic
storytelling,” but also Freeman and Gambarato, “Introduction,” 4, linking Paola Brembilla to
“synergy networks,” and their additional comment on p. 11 about “transmediality” as “more than
the some of its parts.”
49
I am drawing directly from notes I took based on a lecture from O’Leary in 2011 (an August
25 class at USC Annenberg). My translation of the diagram largely preserves the terminology I
recorded, while converting it into prose and modifying its arrangement very slightly.
50
Long, “Creating Worlds,” 140.
203

51
This argument is best attributed to our colleague Geoffrey Long. However, Jenkins discusses
the same issue with somewhat less of a grammatical emphasis in “Transmedia Storytelling 202,”
and Freeman and Gambarato, “Introduction,” 10, also cite Jenkins in 2016 on this point; it is
their language I quote here.
52
Derhy Kurtz and Bourdaa, “Transtexts,” 4.
53
Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 202.”
54
Burke would likely call it “prior to” these others; see his Rhetoric of Motives, 176.
55
On “affordances,” see Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 202,” who links this word to Gunther
Kress, as well as Long, “Creating Worlds,” who on p. 146 connects it to “Don Norman’s
affordances in product design.”
56
Campbell and Burkholder, “Dramatistic Criticism.”
57
See also Jones, “Identification,” 90.
58
See, for example, Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 179.
59
Jones, “Identification,” 90, suggests such work does in fact consider “indicators of effect on an
audience,” but this is far from Jenkins’s or Rose’s inclusion of audience interviews, for example,
or Freeman’s combination of “ethnography and surveys” (as per Freeman, “Transmedia
Attractions,” 124).
60
Brummett, “Editor’s Introduction,” x.
61
Freeman and Gambarato, “Introduction,” 6. Jenkins uses versions of the term in Convergence
Culture as well, most notably in “Why Heather Can Write.”
62
Rose, Immersion, 3.
63
Rose, Immersion, 2; he uses all three qualities in, more generally, describing the internet.
64
Some version of this phrase occurs throughout Freeman and Gambarato, “Introduction.”
65
Murray, “Immersion,” 99n4, found on pp. 291–292.
66
Murray, “Immersion,” 98–99.
67
Rose, Immersion, 88; he also quotes “Anthony Zuiker, creator of the CSI franchise,” with
almost identical sentiments (see pp. 189–190).
68
Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 202”; Freeman and Gambarato, “Introduction,” 7–8.
69
It is helpful to distinguish this from the “underlying structures,” to which Jenkins, 2016, cited
in Freeman and Gambarato, “Introduction,” 5, refers; I do not here mean the culture of the
storyworld, which is a topic for worldbuilding, nor even really the culture of the fandom, which
is a topic for fan studies, but rather the enculturation of the audience as a traveler through a
storyworld. As a further aside, this description is in some ways an homage to a lecture I attended
as part of my orientation when studying abroad years ago—we were encouraged to see ourselves
not as “tourists,” but as “travelers,” and I find the distinction valuable here as well.
70
Freeman and Gambarato, “Introduction,” 9.
71
Burke, “Rhetoric—Old and New,” 203.
72
As one example of his “universal” characterization, where he uses this word in particular, see
Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 22.
73
Burke, Language, 3–9. For the following sentence’s quotation, see p. 5.
74
Burke, Language, 45.
75
Again, I credit Campbell and Burkholder, “Dramatistic Criticism,” for their valuable summary
of Burke’s work, and for providing guidance to certain relevant segments of his work.
76
Campbell and Burkholder, “Dramatistic Criticism,” 94.
204

77
Campbell and Burkholder, “Dramatistic Criticism,” 94. For an example of a pentadic analysis
of political rhetoric, see Smith and Hollihan, “Tucson Massacre.”
78
The term “philosophy of rhetoric” can be found in Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, xv. On
“persuasion” more generally, consider that book as well as his “Rhetoric—Old and New.”
79
Burke, “Rhetoric—Old and New,” 203.
80
Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, xiii.
81
See Burke, “Rhetoric—Old and New,” 203: “‘Identification’ at its simplest is also a deliberate
device, as when the politician seeks to identify himself with his audience. In this respect, its
equivalents are plentiful in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. But identification can also be an end, as when
people earnestly yearn to identify themselves with some group or other. Here they are not
necessarily being acted upon by a conscious external agent, but may be acting upon themselves
to this end.” Additionally, see Burke, Language, 301: “The concept of Identification begins in a
problem of this sort: Aristotle’s Rhetoric centers in the speaker’s explicit designs with regard to
the confronting of an audience. But there are also ways in which we spontaneously, intuitively,
even unconsciously persuade ourselves.”
82
Burke, Philosophy, 227.
83
Fiske, “Cultural Economy,” 37.
84
Fiske, “Cultural Economy,” 35.
85
Fiske, “Cultural Economy,” 35.
86
Jones, “Identification,” 107.
87
Cited in Colman, “Individuation.”
88
Most specifically, see Dickinson, “Memories for Sale.” For me, the paradigmatic
representation of this is found in that mixture of relief, pride, and self-satisfaction evinced by
Steve Rogers, Captain America, when he exclaimed in the first Avengers film, “I understood that
reference!”
89
Campbell and Burkholder, “Dramatistic Criticism,” 94. See also Larkin, “Dispelling Myths.”
90
Burke, Language, 7–8.
91
Contrast against Dickinson, “Memories for Sale,” 5.
92
See Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 174–180 in particular.
93
These quotations are from Rose, Immersion, 151, writing about J. J. Abrams’s 2007 TED Talk
in which Abrams discussed “mystery” as “the catalyst for imagination,” citing “his lifelong
infatuation with Tannen’s Magic Mystery Box” and everything the toy stands for in his mind:
Quoting Abrams, “It represents infinite potential. It represents hope. It represents possibility.”
Long, “Creating Worlds,” 149, refers to “negative space” in terms of “mysteries worthy of the
audience’s time and imagination.” In a related twist on the idea, Jenkins, “Origami Unicorn,”
99–100, details the purposeful opacity employed by the Wachowskis in communicating with
audiences about The Matrix storyworld, and how they “have positioned themselves as oracles—
hidden from view most of the time, surfacing only to offer cryptic comments, refusing direct
answers, and speaking with a single voice.”
94
Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 101.” Jenkins includes a related discussion of “gaps” and
“excesses” in “Origami Unicorn,” see 103–104, but also pp. 98–99 for another instance of “gaps
and excesses”; his 2003 “Transmedia Storytelling” article describes similar processes in terms of
how a transmedia text can “plant seeds for future plot development.” Long, “Creating Worlds,”
147–148, in his discussion of “negative space” and “narrative playgrounds,” provides a thorough
treatment of this idea as well. Long includes both the acknowledgement that any such “gaps”
205

might be explored by “audiences, other storytellers, or even the storytellers themselves at a later
date” and the illustrative example of “the Clone Wars” as a part of the broader Star Wars
narrative, which grew from a brief mention during one scene of A New Hope into a far larger
assortment of “subfranchises” (an example also relayed by Brent V. Friedman, who was one of
the writers for the Clone Wars television show). This interest in “gaps” is additionally evinced by
Friedman’s use of the term “elliptical” in describing what he thinks of as “a designed ‘gap’ in the
storytelling” (as per personal communication.) He says, “That can either come in the midst of a
narrative where the story deliberately does not answer a question the viewer is meant to have,
with the intent to pay off later, possibly in another chapter or episode, in a non-linear way. Or it
can come at the end of a narrative with a cliffhanger, again meant to lead the viewer to what feels
like a dramatic resolution... only to leave them hanging, wanting more.” A version of this also
comes from Fiske, “Cultural Economy,” 42 (but see also 47), who describes the importance of
what otherwise might be dismissed as shortcomings of popular culture: “Fan texts, then, have to
be ‘producerly’ (Fiske 1987, 1989a), in that they have to be open, to contain gaps, irresolutions,
contradictions, which both allow and invite fan productivity.”
95
Friedman has presented a version of these ideas in partnership with me in the past; I cite here,
with slight edits to formatting, presentation materials he has shared with me as well as personal
communication. The “Universe Worthy of Devotion” framework came out of a larger initiative,
around 2005 to 2007, with EA— “The team codified some comparative analysis of other IPs,”
Friedman says, and “specifically those with an actual fictional ‘universe’” (his presentation
includes references to Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, and Halo). The result
of this project was “Six Pillars” meant to capture the commonalities and thus the necessary
ingredients of such storyworlds, of which “Distant Horizons” is the first. He describes “Distant
Horizons” as iconic locations, institutions, conflicts, or other parts of the storyworld “seeded
with lore” and something that “promotes exploration” by establishing “both the turbulent past
and present stakes.” Long, “Creating Worlds,” 147 (see also 149), describes similar elements as
part of “negative space,” indicating such foundational mythology has value in “deepening the
sense of scope of the world.”
96
A particularly beautiful formulation of this idea is included by Rose at the start of his book,
from Brad Kessler’s 2009 Goat Song—it shares certain sentiments in common with Friedman’s
interest in “elliptical” techniques, but also suggests the more innate drive that such strategies tap
into: “How much does our following words across a page engage the old neural pathways, and
recapitulate the need to follow game and find . . . the food?” This also brings to mind Jenkins’s
“hunters and gatherers,” of course, but there are also related threads in Convergence Culture’s
treatment of Pierre Lévy (see Jenkins, “Origami Unicorn,” 95, on “depth” and, citing Lévy,
1997, how necessary it is “to prevent closure” in order to prolong the experience) as well as its
invocation of Janet Murray’s “encyclopedic capacity” (see Jenkins, “Origami Unicorn,” 116) and
the associated motivation to “seek information beyond the limits of the individual story.” Rose,
Immersion, centers his understanding of “immersion” on similar ideas, but also cites examples of
such insatiability on p. 82 and p. 173. I would also add to this his discussion on pp. 175–177 of
what is in essence gamification, tapping into audiences’ instinctual motivations for, as an
example, “collecting things”—quoting Rajat Paharia, Rose reports that “people hate having holes
in sets” and “they’ll do anything to complete them.” The same completionist instinct, I would
argue, plays a role in this discussion of their ongoing motivations for consumption in a
transmedia storyworld.
206

97
Campbell and Burkholder, “Dramatistic Criticism,” 96–97.
98
Burke, Counter-Statement, 31.
99
Burke, Counter-Statement, 124.
100
Burke, Counter-Statement, 31.
101
Campbell and Burkholder, “Dramatistic Criticism,” 97.
102
Burke, Counter-Statement, 30.
103
This application of Burke’s form might be somewhat controversial in that it is largely
dependent on the strategic release of “information,” as cited earlier in Rose, which is part of what
Burke protested as the opposite of formal “eloquence,” (see in particular Burke, Counter-
Statement, 37, as well as 40–41) and he disparages the overly simplistic use of “suspense” (p.
36). It is also unlikely that Burke was considering at length the sorts of “relations between . . .
media extensions” we have cited Jenkins as emphasizing. Especially if we take seriously Fiske’s
arguments advocating for the underappreciated qualities of popular culture, along with Jenkins’s
arguments about large-scale cultural developments (I would point most specifically to
Convergence Culture), and if we consider the very different time in which Burke was writing—
the first copyright date listed for Counter-Statement is 1931—I am comfortable encouraging a
posthumous revision of Burke’s thinking to better reflect contemporary culture.
104
“Traversal” is a particularly valuable word due to its multiple meanings. In the New Oxford
American Dictionary, we get not only “travel across or through,” but also “extend across or
through,” as well as “consider or discuss the whole extent of (a subject).” We thus get some
evocation of audience movement, the construction of story or meaning, and the cognitive or
social reflection upon it.
105
For a more general version of this, Campbell and Burkholder, “Dramatistic Criticism,” 92,
offers a helpful starting point: “Dramatistic criticism shifts attention to style or language
(symbols); to motives understood as meanings and to links between motives, meanings, and
ideology or views of the world; and to structure as form with an appeal all its own.” Their
influence should be clear in my own summary here. I have, of course, chosen not to include other
concepts that could certainly be part of dramatistic analysis.
106
See Jones, “Identification,” for an example of this applied to a fictional storyworld, looking at
Harry Potter texts, and see specifically p. 90 for a similar construction of my point here:
“‘Rhetoric’ is the persuasion, identification, or invitation a text does to and with an audience.”
107
Burke, Counter-Statement, 124.
108
See Brummett, “Editor’s Introduction,” x, on the appropriateness of rhetoric for “texts in
popular culture,” but also the extensive list provided by Jones, “Identification,” 91, in support of
“linking rhetoric with fiction, particularly the rhetoric of myth and narrative.” Jones cites Booth
(1983) in particular.
109
For a near-exception, see Jones, “Identification,” who uses Burkean identification in
studying, most particularly, the first Harry Potter book, but in this focus it does not consider
much of the transmedia nature of the franchise.
110
Jones, “Identification,” 89; Freeman, “Transmedia Attractions,” 124; Horne, “Transmedia
Publishing,” 64.
111
Rose, Immersion, 95.
112
Freeman and Gambarato, “Introduction,” 4.
113
And thus not fully meeting the more inclusive definition of “transtexts” called for by Derhy
Kurtz and Bourdaa, which would expand beyond such notions of authorization.
207

114
See, for example, “Transmedia Storytelling 101.”
115
See Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 202,” but also Derhy Kurtz and Bourdaa, “Transtexts,”
2.
116
See Jenkins, “Adaptation, Extension, Transmedia,” but also his “Transmedia Storytelling
202,” which cites Christy Dena’s argument to this end.
117
Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 202.”
118
I am grateful in particular for my experience guest lecturing on the subject of transmedia
storytelling for USC’s Global Storytelling class, where the students, given the exercise of
workshopping possible transmedia extensions, would often gravitate towards projects that were
more of this nature—immersive, certainly, but less clearly narrative extensions. In speaking with
them, I realized the importance, for me, in being able to honor such parts of a transmedia
storyworld, without dismissing them out of hand on definitional grounds; I am reminded, too,
that some of the most emotionally striking and resonant experiences I have had have been at, for
example, the Discovery Times Square Marvel Avengers S.T.A.T.I.O.N. (see, for example,
Midtown Comics’ coverage of this at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPAn34uH5SY).
119
On “extension,” see Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 202” but also “Adaptation, Extension,
Transmedia.”
120
Unless otherwise noted, all references are to Larkin, “Dispelling Myths,” which does not
show page numbers.
121
“Professional empath” is a phrase I have used elsewhere, somewhat playfully, in describing
my own work and its particular interest in user experience. I would add here that this perspective
can be helpfully applied to rhetorical work, as well, even when specific audience research is not
undertaken—while being wary, of course, of presuming too much insight into any actual user’s
experience.
122
To clarify, these few ideas are from Burke as discussed previously; see Note 100.
123
Dickinson, “Memories for Sale” and “Introduction.”
124
Dickinson, “Memories for Sale.”
125
Dickinson, “Memories for Sale,” 4.
126
Dickinson, “Introduction,” 5.
127
Dickinson, “Memories for Sale,” 5.
128
Dickinson, “Memories for Sale,” 16.
129
Dickinson, “Memories for Sale,” 5.
130
Or, for Dickinson, “Introduction,” 4, rhetorically active sites “address the deeply felt need for
a value-driven, publicly expressed form of community.”
131
Dickinson, “Memories for Sale,” 3.
132
Burke, Attitudes, 264.
133
Dickinson, “Introduction,” 7: “Nostalgia and, more broadly, memory, becomes not only a
desire for a lost object but also is itself an object of desire.”
134
On mnemonics, see Dickinson, “Memories for Sale,” 2, and Dickinson, “Introduction,” 6, in
particular. “Intertextual” appears throughout Dickinson, “Memories for Sale”; see p. 21 for the
remaining language quoted here.
135
Dickinson, “Introduction,” 11; Dickinson, “Memories for Sale,” 7.
136
Chess, “Augmented Regionalism.”
137
Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling” as well as his 6th point in “Transmedia Storytelling 101”
and p. 96 of “Origami Unicorn.”
208

138
With this more complete blueprint of my project now laid out, it is appropriate at this stage to
address its contributions relative to those of my colleague, Geoffrey Long, who has taken up
similar issues to mine in his work on “transmedia aesthetics.” For example, he writes of
“symbols of affiliation” and cites examples from the Harry Potter storyworld (including its
houses, the Sorting Ceremony that determines house membership, and the paraphernalia
representing them) that I, too, will focus on in much of my analysis. His arguments about the
game-like relationship between the world and its audience, the positioning of audience members
as parts of the fictional environment (see particularly pp. 144–146 in his “Creating Worlds”),
and—most prominently—his discussion of “negative space” are all closely aligned with my
work. Certain of these approaches, observations, and examples are unsurprising, even expected,
in their overlap given that our work developed in parallel and, to a degree, in conversation; I
think it is fair to say that he and I have similar commitments, interests, and environments all
influencing our work. That said, we also have differences in our academic genealogy, and thus
make use of different concepts and find different nuances. It is nonetheless a valuable exercise to
list some of the major distinctions of my project here: the incorporation of rhetoric, first and
foremost, brings with it a different set of commitments and tools, most notably Burke’s
dramatism and identification; the multiple media manifestations I consider in depth add
definition through their contrastive materiality and mediums; the conceptualization of the
substrate captures not only commonality and identity but also the provocation of movement; and
the use of Burke opens up a complex understanding of identity that considers the tension
between individuation and consubstantiality (perhaps closer to what, for example, Jones details).
The sustained focus on the case studies I take up here also allows more fine-grained observations
on, for example, the combination of assigned and self-selected identity, the franchise’s multiple
avenues leading towards individuation, the use of identification as currency with communal
memory, the verisimilitude that supports such metaphorical commodification of knowledge, and
the deliberate conflation of the known and unknown through mystification.
139
Throughout this analysis, I rely on a variety of sources related to what is now called the
Wizarding World website (www.wizardingworld.com). Some earlier pages, primarily those from
the site’s pottermore.com days, I have accessed with the help of the Internet Archive. Both for
contemporary and archived pages, I will provide direct URLs in notes to support any specific
references, with the exception of content (namely related to “Favourites”) that cannot be directly
linked. Unless otherwise cited, references in this paragraph come from a video that was
apparently linked in an early version of the Pottermore home page, and can be found at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYs1d3jAdG0. Finally, on Harry Potter’s cultural legacy, I
refer specifically to Jones, “Identification,” 89, who not only offers a helpful summary of
Rowling’s success, but also the apt characterization that “the Harry Potter franchise is a cultural
juggernaut.”
140
Horne, “Transmedia Publishing,” 65.
141
See, in general, Horne, “Transmedia Publishing.”
142
Quote from Horne, “Transmedia Publishing,” 65; characterization of site from Internet
Archive resources (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYs1d3jAdG0 in particular).
143
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMypbhXzci8.
144
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYs1d3jAdG0.
145
https://web.archive.org/web/20160309231715/https://www.pottermore.com/about/us.
209

146
Horne, “Transmedia Publishing,” 64. Horne includes a citation of Solon in 2011 with the first
segment quoted here.
147
Horne, “Transmedia Publishing,” 65.
148
See most particularly
https://web.archive.org/web/20110731125814/http://www.pottermore.com/, but also
https://web.archive.org/web/20120414080532/http://www.pottermore.com/.
149
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMypbhXzci8.
150
See most specifically https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMypbhXzci8,
https://web.archive.org/web/20110923144151/http://insider.pottermore.com/, and
https://web.archive.org/web/20110924071027/http://www.pottermore.com/en/about,
respectively.
151
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMypbhXzci8 (0:34 in particular).
152
This and all Horne quotations in this paragraph from Horne, “Transmedia Publishing,” 65.
153
https://www.wizardingworld.com/harry-potter-fan-club.
154
https://web.archive.org/web/20110730195444/http://www.pottermore.com/en/help.
155
https://web.archive.org/web/20160319025549/https://www.pottermore.com/.
156
https://www.wizardingworld.com/news/a-new-wizarding-world-website. All quotes this
paragraph can be found on this page.
157
In this chapter, I largely use “Wizarding World” and “WizardingWorld.com” interchangeably
and prefer “Wizarding World” for readability, but I do use “wizarding world,” in lowercase,
intentionally to refer to the in-world community of magical persons.
158
Although my position does not seem to fully align with my understanding of his argument, I
draw here on Joe Rohde’s use of “the innocent eye” as a way to distinguish how experiences are
developed for such a generalized public in favor of one that might cater more specifically to fans.
Here I rely on his class discussion as included in the bibliography.
159
Colman, “Individuation.” All quotations this paragraph taken from this source unless
otherwise indicated.
160
Colman, “Collective Unconscious,” for the latter three quotations here.
161
https://www.wizardingworld.com/news/new-hpny-online-store.
162
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRsmefRoAjU. Quotation from image seen in Figure 2.
163
Following Larkin’s lead, we might acknowledge briefly several of the more technical details
of the site’s layout: its foregrounding of the user’s name, ostensibly one tied to their “real”
identity; the remarkable amount of empty background that surrounds each identificatory
announcement (along with minimal, large text) underscoring its magnitude; in general, the
impressively stylized and artistic presentation of the information.
164
On this last point see, for example, https://www.wizardingworld.com/harry-potter-fan-club or
https://my.wizardingworld.com/register/age-gate.
165
Video dated to March 28, 2012, per
https://web.archive.org/web/20120412160843/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMypbhXzci8
. Webpage cited above.
166
https://www.wizardingworld.com/features/enchanted-keys-guide-for-wizarding-world-app.
See Figure 1.
167
O’Leary, “Apocalyptic Rhetoric,” 386.
168
O’Leary, “Apocalyptic Rhetoric,” 387. Of course, beyond the storyworld’s magical forces,
the Wizarding World also invokes the authority of Rowling, as the site emphasized in 2019 that
210

its aesthetic changes to this Sorting Ceremony did not come at the cost of “J.K. Rowling’s
original questions from Pottermore.com”; https://www.wizardingworld.com/news/a-new-
wizarding-world-website.
169
See, for example, Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 179.
170
Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 177–179.
171
Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 176.
172
Citations this paragraph Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 174–179.
173
Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 174. But consider, as a counterpoint, reports from Bird,
“Daring,” 94, and the larger discussion in Chapter 5 here about audiences who are not so quick
to embrace such an enigma, instead seeking to understand or challenge its mystified process.
174
Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 176.
175
https://www.wizardingworld.com/harry-potter-fan-club.
176
Figure 3 and https://www.wizardingworld.com/news/a-new-wizarding-world-website.
177
https://www.wizardingworld.com/news/build-a-bear-workshop-launches-wizarding-world-
inspired-range; https://www.wizardingworld.com/news/hp-kswiss-back-to-hogwarts-footwear-
collection-launch.
178
https://www.wizardingworld.com/news/hp-kswiss-back-to-hogwarts-footwear-collection-
launch.
179
https://www.wizardingworld.com/news/hp-kswiss-back-to-hogwarts-footwear-collection-
launch; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRsmefRoAjU (see 0:21); see also Jones,
“Identification.”
180
https://web.archive.org/web/20110923144151/http://insider.pottermore.com/;
https://web.archive.org/web/20110916054415if_/http://www.pottermore.com/en-
us/terms#galleons.
181
See also Long, “Creating Worlds,” 144.
182
https://www.wizardingworld.com/news/hp-kswiss-back-to-hogwarts-footwear-collection-
launch.
183
https://www.wizardingworld.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/wand-woods.
184
https://www.wizardingworld.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/wand-woods.
185
https://www.wizardingworld.com/features/what-does-your-wand-mean.
186
https://www.wizardingworld.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/patronus-charm, this paragraph and
next.
187
See Figure 6.
188
Bird, “Daring,” 94.
189
Particularly in comparison to the past tense of the now-shuttered canon, as represented by
communal memory, the use of the present tense (in addition to being the most sensical
conjugation here) makes an intriguing implicit suggestion: that canon is historical, but the
fandom represents the current, vibrant instantiation of the storyworld.
190
See Figure 7 in the next chapter.
191
Such an assessment becomes tragically ironic given Rowling’s decidedly anti-inclusionary
political positioning, as became clear in 2020. This contradiction, too, will be part of our
discussion in the concluding chapter.
192
This is, accordingly, the narrow understanding of “transmedia” that is, quite reasonably,
challenged by Derhy Kurtz and Bourdaa. The field of fan studies likewise can offer important
perspectives on how to treat cultural texts as more than simply what the producers say they are.
211

193
As a preview of our Chapter 4 analysis, we might consider these as “topoi”; see Dickinson,
“Introduction,” 2.
194
https://www.wizardingworld.com/quiz/back-to-hogwarts-quiz-easy.
195
https://www.wizardingworld.com/quiz/back-to-hogwarts-quiz-easy.
196
See the 6th point in Jenkins’s “Transmedia Storytelling 101” on this “delicate balance.”
197
https://www.wizardingworld.com/features/5-friendship-lessons-we-learned-from-dobby-the-
house-elf.
198
https://www.wizardingworld.com/features/the-best-loved-hogwarts-ghosts.
199
Though this operates similarly in some ways to the tangential references to “negative space”
described by Long, particularly in considering how they might “disrupt the narrative flow,” these
references are more appropriately “positive space” that simply is not fully recapitulated. See
Long, “Creating Worlds,” 147.
200
https://www.wizardingworld.com/features/secret-passageways-and-hiding-places-
infographic. On “rabbit hole,” consider Jenkins, “Origami Unicorn,” 124. Also, I would draw
attention to the characterization of the site as encyclopedia not only in terms of our introductory
chapter but, further, as something to bear in mind when we outline a related controversy later in
this chapter.
201
Freeman, “Transmedia Attractions,” 129.
202
Frakt, “Ancient and Proven.” See also Dickinson, “Memories for Sale,” 2, and
“Introduction,” 2–3, 6.
203
Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 101,” his 3rd point in particular.
204
See Note 89 and context for exact quote.
205
https://www.wizardingworld.com/features/5-friendship-lessons-we-learned-from-dobby-the-
house-elf.
206
https://www.wizardingworld.com/features/why-you-should-fall-in-love-with-a-gryffindor.
207
https://www.wizardingworld.com/features/harry-potter.
208
https://www.wizardingworld.com/collections/starting-harry-potter.
209
This is closer to Long’s “negative space” (see his “Creating Worlds” as cited previously).
210
https://www.wizardingworld.com/features/what-does-your-wand-mean.
211
https://www.wizardingworld.com/features/into-the-pensieve-silvanus-kettleburn. Unless
otherwise clarified, quotes in the next several paragraphs refer to this article.
212
On this previous citation, refer to Note 151.
213
https://www.wizardingworld.com/discover/books/tales-of-beedle-the-bard.
214
https://www.wizardingworld.com/features/web-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-
tales-of-beedle-the-bard.
215
https://www.wizardingworld.com/quiz/back-to-hogwarts-quiz-hard. The non-functional link
it includes, in slightly abbreviated form here, is
https://gbp.shop.pottermore.com/collections/coming-
soon/products/short_stories_from_hogwarts_of_heroism_hardship_and_dangerous_hobbies_com
ing_soon_english.
216
https://www.wizardingworld.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/ministers-for-magic.
217
https://web.archive.org/web/20160309231715/https://www.pottermore.com/about/us.
218
See Long, “Creating Worlds,” 147–148, for a helpful discussion of this issue.
219
See Note 94.
212

220
See Larkin, “Dispelling Myths,” on the relationship between search capabilities and
consubstantiality. For “Starting Harry Potter” image, see
https://www.wizardingworld.com/collections/starting-harry-potter.
221
See Hartocollis, “Rowling Testifies.” The quotations that follow are from this source.
222
See Jenkins, “Origami Unicorn,” 93–95.
223
https://www.wizardingworld.com/features/web-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-
tales-of-beedle-the-bard. See also Note 94 on “elliptical,” from Friedman.
224
Hartocollis, “Rowling Testifies.” I have made a similar point about the “transactional” nature
of such entertainment in, for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg_4wj0e730.
225
See Smith, “New Screens,” 51.
226
https://www.wizardingworld.com/discover/books.
227
Horne, “Transmedia Publishing,” 64. Indeed, in 2011, Pottermore even described itself as
“J.K. Rowling’s thank you to Harry Potter fans”
(https://web.archive.org/web/20110730195444/http://www.pottermore.com/en/help). This
interpretation should not, however, discount the value she continues to derive from audiences’
ongoing involvement with the franchise.
228
Horne, “Transmedia Publishing,” 65.
229
See more in the concluding chapter, though I will cite here my discussion with Flourish Klink
in helping me best understand this dilemma.
230
https://www.wizardingworld.com/news/web-a-newly-reimagined-sorting-ceremony-is-
coming.
231
On “affiliations,” Geoffrey Long’s similar discussion in “Creating Worlds,” 144–145, must
be recognized.
232
See Note 98 and related discussion.
233
See Note 95. “Aspirational Heroes” is another of the “Pillars” of a “Universe Worthy of
Devotion.”
234
See again Long, “Creating Worlds,” primarily 144–146. Of course, audiences might also
choose their houses based on their affinity with a particular character or characters, making it
more of an associative identity move.
235
At risk of overextrapolating from that particular instance, we might consider whether the
decision to display an associative identity was driven by parents (rather than an individual
expressing themself) or was indicative of a pre-individuated self, not quite old enough to have
solidified the personality traits that would lend themselves to a clear, proud, meaningful
affiliation with a house or wand.
236
This is true to Burke’s contention that identification’s necessary counterpart is “division.”
See, for example, Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 22.
237
It is intriguing to consider, however, whether even these items might plausibly exist within
the storyworld, given that Harry, Ron, and Hermione are largely seen as celebrities in the later
parts of the canonical timeline, and thus admiring witches and wizards might well wish to
emulate these legendary heroes.
238
See most specifically Long, “Creating Worlds,” 145–146, but Murray, “Immersion,” 98 (see
also her Note 2 on p. 291) discusses the same example, citing Jenkins, 1996.
239
On “binaries,” however, see Jones, “Identification,” who in fact does examine the storyworld
in terms of three specific binaries.
213

240
Klink; I am also grateful to Cynthia Wang for discussing this positioning of Slytherin with
me.
241
Long, “Creating Worlds.”
242
Jenkins with Campbell, “Queers and Star Trek,” 111.
243
Long, “Creating Worlds,” 145.
244
Of course, recall that—per Jenkins, see Note 137 here—transmedia texts should be
consumable independently from others in the franchise; accordingly, if we consider the
themepark to be a transmedia text, visitors may well choose their house-specific merchandise
absent any context from the books, films, or Wizarding World website, instead selecting a
favorite color or beloved animal, just as they might choose a wand simply because of how it
looks.
245
On “mode,” see Kress in Bezemer, “Key Concepts.”
246
Dickinson, “Introduction,” 11.
247
Dickinson, “Memories for Sale.” Although “nostalgia,” “home,” and “the exotic” appear
throughout his essay, the remaining quotations here can be found on pp. 7–13.
248
The audio is also present in the women’s bathrooms at Universal.
249
Jenkins with Campbell, “Queers and Star Trek,” 111.
250
For more on a mixture of “into-the-scenes” alongside “behind-the-scenes,” to use his
language, see Freeman, “Transmedia Attractions.”
251
I am following Wolf, “Introduction,” see particularly p. 3, in the use of this alternate
adjective, “transmedial,” which I find helpful in avoiding some of the linguistic confusion
referred to in Chapter 1.
252
There is an additional layer of transmediality here in that the game features an (unidentified)
image of a Ford Anglia in one of its warning messages. For an uninitiated player to fully identify
that reference, they might benefit from reading the description of the wreckage found in the
theme park, which they would need to physically visit to access. In this case, the game and the
theme park feed information back and forth between each other in clarifying communal memory,
all outside the main texts of canon. We might also briefly note that basic trivia regarding the
Anglia is also included in “The Back to Hogwarts Quiz: Easy” on the Wizarding World website
(https://www.wizardingworld.com/quiz/back-to-hogwarts-quiz-easy).
253
Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 202.”
254
Jenkins, “Origami Unicorn,” 119.
255
Burke, Counter-Statement, 31, see also 124.
256
See Long, “Creating Worlds,” 147, for his discussion of the risk of disruption.
257
Refer to Notes 95 and 93, respectively.
258
I here make use of Brent V. Friedman’s description of “Used Future,” which is also included
in his “Universe Worthy of Devotion” material.
259
See also Rohde’s class discussion.
260
Burke, Counter-Statement, 124.
261
Long, “Creating Worlds,” 147–148.
262
Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 101.”
263
Dickinson, “Memories for Sale,” see p. 11 in particular; note that he is also relying on
Meaghan Morris, 1988, for the idea of “the glance.”
264
This exclusivity is made more explicit in the Harry Potter: Wizards Unite mobile game’s
emphasis on the “Statute of Secrecy,” the central principle of the wizarding world that is meant
214

to prevent any knowledge of magic from reaching Muggles. For more on this sharp divide that
the theme park strategically erases, see Jones, “Identification.”
265
Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 202” and “Adaptation, Extension, Transmedia.”
266
Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 101.”
267
See Larkin, “Dispelling Myths.”
268
On “mystery box,” see Note 93.
269
These latter three responses represent Fiske’s “semiotic,” “enunciative,” and “textual
productivity”; see Fiske, “Cultural Economy,” 37–42.
270
What’s more, designing such an artifact requires some careful thought, but only the lightest
touch of actual content development—indeed, I would even contend that its subtlety is an
advantage, preventing visitors motivated by Jenkins’s “encyclopedic impulse” from feeling
overwhelmed or compelled to soak in vast amounts of new mythology, while also protecting
uninitiated or less ardent fans from feeling confused or intimidated.
271
Burke, Philosophy, 307.
272
Dave, “‘Pokemon Go’ Maker.”
273
It is worth noting the similarity between the language of “worldblending” and the way
Niantic describes their business at the start of their Privacy Policy: “We are Niantic. We provide
real-world augmented reality platforms, designed to enable you to interact in shared worlds,
seamlessly blended with the real world.” https://nianticlabs.com/privacy/.
274
This differentiation came up for me in the context of my work in location-based experience
design, in particular with Brent V. Friedman and Artifact Technologies and, to my recollection,
discussion with Crystal Clarity at Artifact.
275
I am capturing a snapshot of gameplay as it existed in late 2019 and early 2020, prior to the
COVID-19 pandemic.
276
I draw here on my knowledge not only as an Ingress player, but also from working with the
team. See also Chess, “Augmented Regionalism.”
277
Long, “Creating Worlds,” 145.
278
Kuang, “Disney’s $1 Billion Bet.” See also https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/faq/bands-
cards/understanding-magic-band/.
279
It is telling, however, that I have rarely seen in-game monikers that look like standard
wizarding or Muggle names; players are not role-playing as witches and wizards so much as they
are simply playing a game.
280
In part, as evidence for this, I am drawing on reports from Brent V. Friedman of player
responses to a similar location-based mobile experience he and Artifact Technologies
implemented at a string of fan conventions, including San Diego Comic-Con. The materiality of
the game experience shifted players’ perceptions of things like in-game advertising, which (in
part due to their purposeful relevance) were interpreted as “rewards” associated with their
physical effort, rather than impositions or manipulations attached to their entertainment.
281
Long, “Creating Worlds,” 145.
282
Dave, “‘Pokemon Go’ Creator.”
283
All of these considerations are complicated by modifications to the game in response to the
COVID-19 pandemic, where the requirements for physical movement seem to be curtailed by the
introduction of the “Knight Bus” feature. (My colleague and fellow player Marc Spraragen has
reported in personal communication on how viable the game has remained, given this
adjustment.) An additional complication is posed by the earlier introduction of an optional
215

“Adventure Mode” feature that changes the way Wizards Unite (and Pokémon GO) tracks player
movement. Prior to the introduction of Adventure Mode, players had to have the app open and
active in order to receive credit towards unlocking Portkey Portmanteaus, thus limiting
opportunities for players to concurrently engage in other activities. With Adventure Mode,
players can earn credit towards their Portkeys whenever they are moving in physical space with
their phone without needing to be in the game itself. This splicing of gameplay and other activity
raises an interesting dilemma: on the one hand, it minimizes the demand to remain fully
immersed in the game environment in order to make progress, while on the other hand, it
exemplifies worldblending by integrating in-world and out-of-world tasks. The outstanding
theoretical question then becomes which experience, if either, is more conducive to
identification.
284
The Ford Anglia appears in this text, too, without annotation, as part of a warning message
about not playing the game while driving.
285
See Jenkins’s treatment of Lévy in “Origami Unicorn,” most specifically p. 95; Fiske,
“Cultural Economy.”
286
See Note 103.
287
See Dickinson, “Memories for Sale” and “Introduction,” on the rhetorical importance of
“home.”
288
See Note 96.
289
See Dickinson, “Introduction,” 2–3; Dickinson explains that “topoi,” which for him are best
thought of as both rhetorical and material, “serve as foundational inventional materials enabling
and structuring—without determining—action.” Thus his project treats “suburbs as late modern
spatial topoi,” which “offer rhetorical resources out of which people can build their lives.”
290
See Murray, “Immersion,” 101, on the “risk” inherent in such worldblending, the threat it
poses to the storyworld experience: “draining it of its delicious otherness.”
291
We could even make the argument that this is another version of worldblending, in which a
player’s goals and pleasures independent from the narrative experience are served in the same
move. Indeed, the dopamine rewards of in-game successes may be an added incentive for an
otherwise unpleasant task (such as exercising), or simply an added benefit to an errand one might
have already been planning; in either case, the game has served not just to be valuable in its own
right, but to enhance some other segment of the player’s reality.
292
Murray, “Immersion,” 110; she credits Coleridge with the initial phrase.
293
The game “Zombies, Run!” adopts a similar approach.
294
This ties neatly to the discussion in Jones, “Identification,” of a “Muggle/wizard binary.”
295
Burke, Grammar, 415, for these quotations and the one immediately following.
296
I am grateful to Alex McDowell and his team at USC’s World Building Media Lab for
helping me understand and think through this technology.
297
Not to be confused, however, with Ingress’s Portals.
298
For Dickinson, see his “Introduction,” 12–13; he cites Brummett, 1984, in particular.
299
See particularly Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, xiv.
300
See Burke, Grammar, 414–415.
301
Campbell and Burkholder, “Dramatistic Criticism,” 93, for “sharing ground.”
302
Jenkins, “Origami Unicorn.”
303
Rohde makes a similar point in his class discussion.
216

304
On “balance,” see Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 101,” point 6; Rohde describes the issue
of approachability from a different perspective in his class discussion.
305
See Note 103.
306
See my comments in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg_4wj0e730.
307
Long, “Creating Worlds,” 145–146.
308
A response to Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 202.”
309
See Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 57–58. I regret that I cannot remember which teacher(s) of
rhetorical theory in my academic career made the point that this latter value, that which is added
by the audience, is in fact what grants Aristotelian enthymemes greater rhetorical power in
contrast to syllogisms. Enthymemes, in leaving out the fully elaborated logic of a syllogism,
leaves space for the auditor to instead fill in what is missing, and this act of participation
strengthens the persuasiveness of, and buy-in to, the argument.
310
In making sense of this relationship, I am especially grateful not only to Henry Jenkins but
specifically to Flourish Klink and Jackson Bird, who both helpfully provided contextualization
and insight. Much of my summary here relies on conversation with Flourish and an episode of
the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text in which Jackson appears (see “Owl Post
Edition”).
311
Bird, “Daring,” 94.
312
Flourish spoke more generally of how fans “had gotten very invested in their perception of
what, you know, the houses were and felt strongly about what house they belonged to.”
313
Jenkins, “Why Heather Can Write”; see also Rose, Immersion, 95–96.
314
“Owl Post Edition,” 41:04.
315
“Owl Post Edition,” specifically 2:02. For the parenthetical, see Jenkins, “Why Heather Can
Write,” 197, and Bird, “‘Harry Potter’ Helped Me Come Out as Trans.” Consider also Hope,
“J.K. Rowling Got It Wrong.”
316
“Owl Post Edition,” in general but particularly 43:30.
317
“Owl Post Edition,” 32:28.
318
This is, as mentioned, the purpose of Derhy Kurtz and Bourdaa in advocating for the concept
of “transtexts.”
319
I cite first Horne, “Transmedia Publishing,” 65, and second, Jenkins, “Why Heather Can
Write,” 184, 194. https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Harry_Potter_fan_websites
suggests there are at least 7 alternative “Sorting Hats” to be found online; these also seem to
support Flourish’s description of the more robust sociality of these environments in comparison
to the Wizarding World and Pottermore. “Why Heather Can Write” offers additional examples.
320
Smith, “New Screens”; Università di Bologna, “Location Tracking Apps.”
321
Kuang, “Disney’s $1 Billion Bet.”
322
Monroe, “Oculus Quest.”
323
For one example, see Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 176–180.
324
See Wise, Review of Wizards vs. Muggles, for more on one such collection (and from whom
I quote the term), which includes an analysis I have cited throughout: Jones, “Identification.”
325
For examples I have already made use of here, consider Fiske, “Cultural Economy,” and
Jenkins with Campbell, “Queers and Star Trek.”
326
For anecdote and photos (and analysis in next sentence), see Zappen, Halloran, and Wible,
“Some Notes.” Burke’s definition is in his Grammar, 319.
327
Zappen, who edited the article, cites it in Zappen, Halloran, and Wible, “Some Notes.”
217

328
Thames, “Meaning.”
218
Bibliography
Bird, Jackson. “Daring, Nerve, and Chivalry.” Chap. 14 in Sorted: Growing Up, Coming Out,
and Finding My Place (A Transgender Memoir). New York: Tiller, 2019. EBSCOhost.
Bird, Jackson. “‘Harry Potter’ Helped Me Come Out as Trans, But J.K. Rowling Disappointed
Me.” New York Times, December 21, 2019.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/21/opinion/jk-rowling-twitter-trans.html.
Brummett, Barry. “Editor’s Introduction: The Rhetoric of Steampunk.” In Clockwork Rhetoric:
The Language and Style of Steampunk, edited by Barry Brummett. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Bezemer, Jeff. “Key Concepts in Multimodality.” MODE, February 16, 2012.
https://mode.ioe.ac.uk/2012/02/16/video-resource-key-concepts-in-multimodality/.
Burke, Kenneth. Attitudes Toward History. 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1984.
———. Counter-Statement. California edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.
———. A Grammar of Motives. California edition. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1969.
———. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1968.
———. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. 3rd ed. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1973.
———. A Rhetoric of Motives. California edition. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1969.
219
———. “Rhetoric—Old and New.” The Journal of General Education 5, no. 3 (April 1951):
202–209. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27795349.
Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, and Thomas R. Burkholder. “Dramatistic Criticism.” In Critiques of
Contemporary Rhetoric, 92–97. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.
Chess, Shira. “Augmented Regionalism: Ingress as Geomediated Gaming Narrative.”
Information, Communication & Society 17, no. 9 (2014): 1105–1117.
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2014.881903.
Colman, Andrew M. “Collective Unconscious.” A Dictionary of Psychology. 4th ed. Oxford
University Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1093/acref/9780199657681.001.0001.
Colman, Andrew M. “Individuation.” A Dictionary of Psychology. 4th ed. Oxford University
Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1093/acref/9780199657681.001.0001.
Dave, Paresh. “‘Pokemon Go’ Maker Dreams of Video Games Played on Contact Lenses.” Los
Angeles Times, August 3, 2016. https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-
pokemon-go-john-hanke-20160803-snap-story.html.
Derhy Kurtz, Benjamin W.L., and Mélanie Bourdaa. “The World Is Changing ... and Transtexts
Are Rising.” Introduction in The Rise of Transtexts: Challenges and Opportunities,
edited by Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz and Mélanie Bourdaa. New York: Routledge,
2016. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315671741.
Dickinson, Greg. “Introduction: Rhetorical Constructions of the Good Life.” In Suburban
Dreams: Imagining and Building the Good Life. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central.
220
Dickinson, Greg. “Memories for Sale: Nostalgia and the Construction of Identity in Old
Pasadena.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83, no. 1 (February 1997): 1–27.
https://doi.org/10.1080/00335639709384169.
Fiske, John. “The Cultural Economy of Fandom.” Chap. 2 in The Adoring Audience: Fan
Culture and Popular Media, edited by Lisa A. Lewis. London: Routledge, 1992.
ProQuest Ebook Central.
Frakt, Austin. “An Ancient and Proven Way to Improve Memory.” New York Times, March 24,
2016. Gale Health and Wellness.
Freeman, Matthew. “Transmedia Attractions: The Case of Warner Bros. Studio Tour—The
Making of Harry Potter.” Chap. 13 The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies,
edited by Matthew Freeman and Renira Rampazzo Gambarato, 124–130. New York:
Routledge, 2018. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351054904.
Freeman, Matthew, and Renira Rampazzo Gambarato. “Introduction: Transmedia Studies—
Where Now?” In The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies, edited by Matthew
Freeman and Renira Rampazzo Gambarato. New York: Routledge, 2018.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351054904.
Hartocollis, Anemona. “Rowling Testifies against Lexicon Author.” New York Times, April 15,
2008. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/nyregion/15rowling.html.
Hope, Allison. “J.K. Rowling Got It Wrong.” Opinion. CNN, December 20, 2019.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/20/opinions/jk-rowling-wrong-about-being-transgender-
hope/index.html.

221
Horne, Alastair. “Transmedia Publishing: Three Complementary Cases.” Chap. 6 in The
Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies, edited by Matthew Freeman and Renira
Rampazzo Gambarato, 62–71. New York: Routledge, 2018.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351054904.
Jenkins, Henry. “Adaptation, Extension, Transmedia.” Literature/Film Quarterly 45, no. 2
(Spring 2017).
https://lfq.salisbury.edu/_issues/first/adaptation_extension_transmedia.html.
———. “Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling.” Chap. 3
in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York
University Press, 2006. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.05936.
———. “Transmedia Storytelling.” MIT Technology Review, January 15, 2003.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2003/01/15/234540/transmedia-storytelling/.
———. “Transmedia Storytelling 101.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, March 21, 2007.
http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html.
———. “Transmedia 202: Further Reflections.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, July 31, 2011.
http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html.
———. “Why Heather Can Write: Media Literacy and the Harry Potter Wars.” Chap. 5 in
Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York
University Press, 2006. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.05936.
Jenkins, Henry, with John Campbell. “‘Out of the Closet and into the Universe’: Queers and Star
Trek.” Chap. 4 in Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory
Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
222
Jones, Hilary A. “‘I’m a Wizard Too!’: Identification and Habitus.” In Wizards vs. Muggles:
Essays on Identity and the Harry Potter Universe, edited by Christopher E. Bell, 89–109.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016.
Kuang, Cliff. “Disney’s $1 Billion Bet on a Magical Wristband.” WIRED, March 10, 2015.
https://www.wired.com/2015/03/disney-magicband/.
Kostelanetz, Richard. “About Kenneth Burke: A Mind That Cannot Stop Exploding,”
New York Times, March 15, 1981. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Larkin, Antoinette. “Dispelling Myths, Motivating Action: Rhetorical Complexities and
Information Challenges in the Heart Healthy Advocacy Website, Go Red For Women.”
Article 32 in SIGDOC ’15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual International Conference on
the Design of Communication. Association for Computing Machinery: 2015.
https://doi.org/10.1145/2775441.2775467.
Long, Geoffrey. “Creating Worlds in Which to Play: Using Transmedia Aesthetics to Grow
Stories into Storyworlds.” Chap. 8 in The Rise of Transtexts: Challenges and
Opportunities, edited by Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz and Mélanie Bourdaa. New York:
Routledge, 2016. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315671741.
Monroe, Shane R. “Oculus Quest: Forced Facebook Integration — No Big Deal or Class Action
Suit?” Medium, January 7, 2020. https://darkuni.medium.com/oculus-quest-forced-
facebook-integration-no-big-deal-or-class-action-suit-16a06b418975.
Murray, Janet H. “Immersion.” Chap. 4 in Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in
Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. First published 1997 by Free Press (New
York).
223
O’Leary, Stephen. “A Dramatistic Theory of Apocalyptic Rhetoric.” Quarterly Journal of
Speech 79 (1993): 385–426. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335639309384044.
“Owl Post Edition: J.K. Rowling and Transphobia with Jackson Bird.” Harry Potter and the
Sacred Text. Podcast.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2veeM7bPfQVrqS0xux9Unl?si=rY-
RygF5SwWwvWmjEsKGOw.
Rohde, Joseph. Class discussion with Sasha Anawalt and Henry Jenkins, University of Southern
California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, January 27, 2021,
Zoom recording, 2:08:31.
Rose, Frank. The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood,
Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. See
“Introduction”; “Prologue”; chap. 4, “Control”; chap. 7, “The Hive Mind and the Mystery
Box”; and chap. 8, “Television: The Game.”
Smith, Francesca Marie. “The New Screens.” In The Edison Project, USC Annenberg Innovation
Lab, 49–65. University of Southern California, 2016. https://www.annenberglab.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/05/Edison-Project-Book.pdf.
Smith, Francesca Marie, and Thomas A. Hollihan. “‘Out of Chaos Breathes Creation’: Human
Agency, Mental Illness, and Conservative Arguments Locating Responsibility for the
Tucson Massacre.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 17, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 585–618.
Thames, Richard H. “The Meaning of the Motivorum’s Motto: ‘Ad bellum purificandum’ to
‘Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.” Kenneth Burke Journal 8, no. 1 (Spring
2012). https://www.kbjournal.org/thames_motivorum_motto. “Abstract” through
“Purificandum I”.
224
Università di Bologna. “Location Tracking Apps and Privacy Implications.” EurekAlert!
February 19, 2021. https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-02/udb-lta021921.php.
Wise, Dennis Wilson. Review of Wizards vs. Muggles: Essays on Identity and the Harry Potter
Universe, edited by Christopher E. Bell. Mythlore 35, no. 1 (Fall-Winter 2016). Gale
Academic OneFile.
Wolf, Mark J. P. “Introduction.” In Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of
Subcreation. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Transmedia aesthetics: narrative design for vast storyworlds

PDF

Rhetorical strategies in contemporary responses to science and modernity: legitimizing religion in human origins and climate change controversies

PDF

Inventing immersive journalism: embodiment, realism and presence in nonfiction

PDF

Sacred places in transition: congregation and deliberation in 3 Los Angeles churches

PDF

Virtual worlds as contact zones: development, localization, and intergroup communication in MMORPGs

PDF

George H. W. Bush and the new world order: on stasis, the just war & rhetorical legacy—“a world in disarray”?

PDF

Collectivizing justice: transmedia memory practices, participatory witnessing, and feminist space building in Nicaragua

PDF

Infrastructures of the imagination: building new worlds in media, art, & design

PDF

The virtual big sister: television and technology in girls' media

PDF

Viral selves: Cellphones, selfies and the self-fashioning subject in contemporary India

PDF

Video camera technology in the digital age: Industry standards and the culture of videography

PDF

Game recognize game: performative archives and alternate reality games

PDF

Hierarchical planning in security games: a game theoretic approach to strategic, tactical and operational decision making

PDF

Whose quality is it? Transnational TV flows and power in the global TV market

PDF

Computational modeling of behavioral attributes in conversational dyadic interactions

PDF

Staying ahead of the digital tsunami: strategy, innovation and change in public media organizations

PDF

MATCH CUT: the making of professional screenwriters and a (counter)storytelling movement in film school

PDF

Wicked problems, difficult solutions, and unintended consequences: strengthening efficacy to enhance access to affordable drugs

PDF

Driving change: copyright, car modding, and the right to repair in the digital age

PDF

The popularizing and politicizing of queer media images in Taiwan: 1997 to the present

Asset Metadata

Creator Smith, Francesca Marie (author)

Core Title From worldbuilding to worldblending: transmedia rhetoric, identification, and immersion in storyworlds

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 04/05/2021

Defense Date 03/15/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag dramatism,franchise,Harry Potter,mobile game,OAI-PMH Harvest,rhetoric,theme park,transmedia storytelling,website,Wizarding World

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Jenkins, Henry (committee chair), Lake, Randall (committee member), McPherson, Tara (committee member)

Creator Email francesca.smith@usc.edu,francescamariesmith@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-436268

Unique identifier UC11668085

Identifier etd-SmithFranc-9396.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-436268 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-SmithFranc-9396.pdf

Dmrecord 436268

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Smith, Francesca Marie

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA